RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-navy-choice-1488317240

President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Navy, investor Philip Bilden, withdrew Sunday over difficulties separating himself from his business interests. This follows the withdrawal of Army nominee Vincent Viola, but the Navy job carries particular significance because the new Administration has promised a major naval buildup.

The last great U.S. Navy Secretary was John Lehman, who used a background in finance and a natural talent for bureaucratic warfare to enact Ronald Reagan’s vision of a 600-ship Navy and help drive the Soviet Union to exhaustion. Today, as the Navy and its industry contractors try to halt a string of acquisitions snafus involving aircraft carriers, surface combatants and fighter aircraft, a veteran businessman such as former Ford CEO Alan Mulally would be a strong choice.

The more obvious pick is former Congressman Randy Forbes. As chair of the House Armed Services subcommittees on readiness and seapower from 2011 through last year, he warned that the Navy is undersized and ill-equipped to address security challenges such as China’s emergence as a rival in the Pacific. Mr. Forbes helped conceive the goal of a 350-ship Navy embraced by Mr. Trump—today’s fleet is 273 deployable ships—and last year he led his House committee in passing a $20.6 billion shipbuilding budget, the largest since the Reagan-Lehman era.

Our sources say Mr. Forbes has backers at the White House, but Pentagon chief Jim Mattis may prefer a nonpolitician. Mr. Mattis shouldn’t hire anyone who doesn’t have his confidence, but many former politicians have served ably as service secretaries. Mr. Forbes has a record of subordinating political considerations to strategic ones, as when he backed the deployment of more U.S. Navy assets to Asia that otherwise could have been based in his home state of Virginia.

Reversing the U.S. Navy’s decline is an urgent strategic priority. A smart service secretary who can navigate the Pentagon bureaucracy and Congressional opponents will be an asset to Mr. Trump, and the country, in pursuing the 350-ship goal. CONTINUE AT SITE

Turns out the last full quarter of the Obama economy was just as lousy as we thought. This morning the government reported that GDP grew at the same sluggish 1.9% rate in the fourth quarter as previously estimated. Business investment was even worse than expected, and this news comes on the heels of Monday’s disappointing report on durable goods orders for January. This raises the hope that at least we won’t have to hear any more about the allegedly beautiful economy that President Obama has bequeathed to his successor. But it underlines the need for President Trump to show tonight that he’s going to deliver on his promises of economic growth.

Markets have been on a tear since Election Night, with the Dow up nearly 14% through Tuesday’s close. This is based on Mr. Trump’s promises to reduce the burden of taxes and rules imposed by Washington. For years prior to his election, markets were rising thanks in large part to historically low interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve. But investors and businesspeople didn’t really believe Washington could manufacture prosperity. So big companies borrowed at low rates and then used the money to buy other companies or buy back their own stock or just sat on cash instead of investing in new equipment. This lack of investment meant we never got the productivity gains that make us all richer. Mr. Trump has made business operators more optimistic but it’s not clear he’s yet changed their behavior.

When he addresses a Joint Session of Congress tonight, job creators need to see Mr. Trump’s best-ever reality show—a plan to move from the unreality of Washington economic management to a real market where stocks rise because of robust growth in sales and profits. CONTINUE AT SITE

The call from the Left is to “resist” a “Fascist America,” which is supposedly the direction the United States is taking under President Trump. Among other things, leftists regularly accuse President Trump and members of his administration of anti-Semitism. Yet one of the leaders of the “resistance” movement, and a co-organizer of the next women’s protest on March 8th is Rasmea Yousef Odeh, a convicted Palestinian terrorist. Odeh had participated in bombings in Israel nearly 50 years ago, one of which resulted in the killing of two Israeli students. Now she is advocating militant resistance in the streets of the United States. For Palestinians, “resistance” is often used as a rationalization for acts of terrorism. Odeh has not explicitly advocated the use of violence – at least not yet. However, Odeh and her co-organizers have called for the March 8th protest to include blocking roads, bridges, and squares. We have seen such uncivil acts of disobedience lead to violence in the past.

Odeh has joined with several other militants as co-authors of a manifesto for a new, more radical form of feminism. Odeh’s co-authors include Angela Davis, who supported the Black Panthers and was a former leader of the Communist Party USA, and Tithi Bhattacharya, a Maoist supporter. The manifesto heralded what its authors called an international “anti-capitalist” feminist movement that is “at once anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-heterosexist and anti-neoliberal.” So-called “lean-in” or “other variants of corporate feminism” are not “feminism for the 99%,” according to the manifesto’s co-authors.

Move over, Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. Leftists have found new radical feminist heroines to embrace. According to Workers’ World, “Progressive women in the U.S. eagerly responded to the call. Posted on womenstrikeus.org is the strike platform: ‘In a spirit of solidarity and internationalism, in the United States, March 8 will be a day of action organized by and for women who have been marginalized and silenced by decades of neoliberalism directed toward working women, women of color, Native women, disabled women, immigrant women, Muslim women, lesbian, queer and trans women. … [We are organizing] resistance not just against Trump and his misogynist policies, but also against the conditions that produced Trump, namely the decades-long economic inequality, racial and sexual violence, and imperial wars abroad.’” In other words, a whole potpourri of favorite leftwing causes.

Rasmea Yousef Odeh is particularly beloved in Muslim and leftwing circles. “She’s an icon, actually, across the country amongst Arab and Muslim organizations, around civil liberties organizations, among women’s empowerment organizations,” said Hatem Abudayyeh, a member of Chicago’s Arab-American community where Odeh was active as an organizer.

Angela Davis participated in an event in 2015 with Odeh, co-organized by the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter, entitled “Freedom Beyond Occupation & Incarceration – An Afternoon with Angela Davis and Rasmea Odeh.” According to a report in Ebony, “Davis and Odeh discussed the importance of Black-Palestinian solidarity, political imprisonment in the US and Israel, as well as the need for the abolition of prisons and ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/02/guess_which_important_person_got_the_middle_finger_at_fashion_week.html

Apparently, it is Fashion Week, and Julie Tong relates that “Italian favorites from Gucci to Prada filled their collections with opulent color, excess, and maximalist style. While at Versace, powerful words like ‘unity,’ ‘courage,’ and ‘love’ were emblazoned on hats and sleeves and more.”

And, of course, “we can’t forget New York Fashion Week’s highly anticipated Raf Simons runway debut at Calvin Klein or the plethora of body-positive movements and political statements that took center stage on the runways.”

Those “political statements” included constant rebukes of President Trump in the Ashish shirt that nods to Trump’s comments in a leaked Access Hollywood tape, in which he boasted that a rich celebrity can “grab” enthusiastic women enamored of his wealth and status.

Then there was Prabal Gurung, whose shirt read “3 Million,” referencing “the number by which Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, despite President Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.”

Not to be outdone, “[d]esigners Ramon Martin and Ryan Lobo pose with models from their show wearing Women’s March and Planned Parenthood T-shirts. On the runway, models wore Planned Parenthood pins.”

But I thought I would save the best for last: “aside from all the memorable moments and prettiest dresses, we want to make sure you are equally caught up on all the best shoes spotted on the catwalk thus far.”

One of the “best shoes” on display is called the “Jesus Printed Knee-High Boots, Jeremy Scott, Fall/Winter 2017.”

Would the fashion world depict the picture of Mohammad on a pair of boots? Would they make a statement about the lack of color worn by women in the Muslim world, whose native costumes have all but disappeared as they suffer under the lash of sharia law and dress codes?

Will the Christian world erupt with furious rage and start burning things? Or was I confusing that rage with visual depictions of another religion’s icon?

Just asking.

Jesus Printed Knee-High Boots, Jeremy Scott Fall/Winter 2017 Photo: ImaxTree

About 100 headstones at a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia have been knocked over, police said on Sunday, in the latest apparent vandalism incident at a Jewish burial ground in the United States.

A Mount Carmel Cemetery visitor called police on Sunday morning to say the gravestones of three of his relatives had been toppled, police said in a statement. Officers found about 100 others knocked down. The incident apparently took place after dark on Saturday, police said.

ABC television affiliate WPVI said the damage was widespread and footage showed rows of headstones knocked down.

We variously read that Trump should be impeached, removed, neutralized — or worse. But until he is, are his appointments, executive orders, and impending legislative agenda equally abhorrent?

General acclamation followed the Trump appointments of retired Generals H. R. McMaster as national-security adviser, James Mattis as defense secretary, and John Kelly to head Homeland Security. The brief celebration of Trump’s selections was almost as loud as the otherwise daily denunciations of Trump himself. Trump’s equally inspired decisions, such as the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and Jeff Sessions as attorney general, presented the same ironies.

Most of these and other fine appointments came amid a near historic pushback against Trump, mostly over what he has said rather than what he’s done. But again, do the appointments create a dilemma for his existential critics who have gone beyond the traditional media audit of a public official and instead descended into calls for his removal — or worse? Indeed, removal chic is now widespread, as even conservatives ponder impeachment, invoking the 25th Amendment for mental unfitness, while the more radical (here and abroad and both Right and Left) either abstractly or concretely ponder a coup or some other road to his demise.

How do his opponents square such excellent appointments with Trump himself? Even bad people can occasionally do good?

Are his Cabinet secretaries patriotically (as I believe) serving their president, even if prepared at times to nudge him away from what they might feel are occasional unwise detours? Appointees of the caliber of a Mattis, McMaster, or Kelly do not go to work for any president with the likelihood of becoming undercover actors — undercutting his authority, or posing to the press that they are the moral superior to their boss, or leaking information to massage favorable accounts of their superior savvy or morality at the president’s expense. No, they serve the president because they want their country to prosper and think that it can if their commander in chief (whose agendas for the most part they share) is successful.

Or do critics argue that such fine men and women are “selling out” by putting careers before principled resistance to a president who will supposedly usher in unprecedented disasters? So far, even the most vehement Trump censors have not faulted these fine appointees for supposedly being soiled by association with Trump, whom they have otherwise accused, in varying degrees, of partaking of fascism, Stalinism, and Hitlerism.

Again, the point is, How do critics square the circle of damning Trump as singularly unfit while simultaneously praising his inspired appointees, who, if they were to adopt a similar mindset, would never set foot in a Trump White House? How does someone so unqualified still manage to listen to advice or follow his own instincts to appoint so many willing, gifted public servants — at a time, we are told, when nearly the entire diplomatic and security establishment in Washington refuses to work for such a reprobate?

The same disconnect holds true for Trump’s executive orders. Except for the rocky rollout of the temporary ban on immigration — since rectified and reformulated — his executive orders seem inspired and likely to restore the rule of law, curb endless and burdensome new regulations, address revolving-door ethics, enhance the economy, halt federal bloat, promote energy production, and create jobs. Without the Trump victory, the Paul Ryan agenda — radical tax reform and deregulation — that has been comatose for a decade would never have become viable. So, is the position of the conservative rejectionists something like the following: “I detest Trump because even his positive agendas are spoiled by his sponsorship?”

The liberal left has teamed up with extremist and violent Islamists in its next salvo against newly-inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump.

The liberal left has teamed up with extremist and violent Islamists in its next salvo against newly-inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump.

On March 8, International Women’s Day, a follow-up event to the January 21 Women’s March on Washington, will be staged.

One of the co-authors of the “militant” manifesto behind the nationwide event is convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Yousef Odeh.

Odeh was convicted in Israel in 1970 for being involved in two fatal bombings. Odeh spent 10 years in jail before she was released in a prisoner exchange in 1980.

She moved to the U.S. by omitting her terror conviction on her immigration papers and served as the associate director of the Arab American Action Network in Chicago and later as an ObamaCare navigator. In 2014, she was convicted in the U.S. for concealing her past and thus illegally obtaining U.S. citizenship.

After claiming she forgot about her conviction and imprisonment in Israel due to post traumatic stress disorder, she was awarded a new trial which is currently pending.

The women’s event manifesto, printed as an open letter in The Guardian, calls for “striking, marching, blocking roads, bridges, and squares, abstaining from domestic, care and sex work” and “boycotting” pro-Trump businesses.

All women are requested to wear red in solidarity for a day of “anti-capitalist feminism.”

Here’s the left’s next great idea for bringing down President Trump: another women’s march. Which means another public instance of Trump haters shouting slogans to one another and mistaking it for constructive politics. What progressives need to defeat Trump is outreach, but all they have is outrage.

On March 8, organizers seem to be aiming for a different vibe than the librarians-in-pussy-hats element that made the first women’s march after Trump’s inauguration so adorable.

Instead of milling around Washington, organizers have in mind a “general strike” called the Day without a Woman. In a manifesto published in The Guardian on Feb. 6, the brains behind the movement are calling for a “new wave of militant feminist struggle.” That’s right: militant, not peaceful.

The document was co-authored by, among others, Rasmea Yousef Odeh, a convicted terrorist.

Odeh, a Palestinian, was convicted in Israel in 1970 for her part in two terrorist bombings, one of which killed two students while they were shopping for groceries. She spent 10 years in prison for her crimes. She then managed to become a US citizen in 2004 by lying about her past (great detective work, INS: Next time, use Google) but was subsequently convicted, in 2014, of immigration fraud for the falsehoods.

However, she won the right to a new trial (set for this spring) by claiming she had been suffering from PTSD at the time she lied on her application. Oh, and in her time as a citizen, she worked for a while as an ObamaCare navigator. You can see why she’s a hero to the left.

Rasmea Yousef Odeh spent 10 years in prison for her part in two terrorist bombings AP

Another co-author, Angela Davis, is a Stalinist professor and longtime supporter of the Black Panthers. Davis is best known for being acquitted in a 1972 trial after three guns she bought were used in a courtroom shootout that resulted in the death of a judge. She celebrated by going to Cuba.

A third co-author, Tithi Bhattacharya, praised Maoism in an essay for the International Socialist Review, noting that Maoists are “on the terrorist list of the US State Department, Canada, and the European Union,” which she called an indication that “Maoists are back in the news and by all accounts they are fighting against all the right people.” You know you’re dealing with extremism when someone admits to hating Canada.

The International Women’s Strike is meant to be a grassroots affair, with womensmarch.com promising more information about how to participate in local protests across the US. Women around the country are being urged to walk off their jobs and join a demonstration near them.

Angela Davis Getty Images

According to The Guardian piece, women should spend their day “blocking roads, bridges, and squares, abstaining from domestic, care and sex work” and “boycotting” pro-Trump businesses. Also every woman is supposed to wear red in solidarity.