RUTHFULLY YOURS

As you may have heard, or even watched (that’s ok, don’t be embarrassed, many people did) the bash President Donald J. Trump (R) specially wrapped into a self-love-fest known as the Academy Awards simpered for four hours Sunday night. Attired in outfits that cost more than a month’s salary for the average citizen — and that’s just the men — while surrounded and protected by guards (some even with guns) and other protective barriers, (sort of like uhm, walls) several of the presenters, the winners, and the host, Jimmy Kimmel, threw in digs at the president while proclaiming their own superiority and love. Yeah, that smugness will pack the 48% of the people who voted for Trump into the theaters.

Even an aging Warren Beatty, who did more than grab his you-know-what (I can’t really tell you as this is a blog suitable for family reading) in his prime, did manage to squeeze in a few cliches of love and peace and getting along with everyone which proved handy when he mistakenly announced the wrong winner of the best film at the finale. And so, quite suitably, the messy program ended as it began. And the lo-o-o-ng in-between wasn’t much better.
Of course the foreigners, (or should I say non-citizens?) got into the self-righteous act. Graciously nominated for best foreign language film, the nominees released a puffy, self-righteous statement two days before the big event, knocking the host country, the U.S., while

condemning “the climate of fanaticism and nationalism” in the U.S. and other countries.

They dedicated the Oscar, no matter which film wins, to those working toward unity.

They directors symbolically rejected the borders that define their category’s nominees, saying, “We believe there is no best country, best gender, best religion or best color. We want this award to stand as a symbol of the unity between nations and the freedom of the arts.”

The statement does not name President Trump but points in his direction, referring to an unhealthy climate stoked by parts of the population, “including leading politicians.” (snip)

On Friday, Farhadi joined with the other directors — Martin Zandvliet, Land of Mine (Denmark); Hannes Holm, A Man Called Ove (Sweden); Maren Ade, Toni Erdmann (Germany) and Marin Butler and Bentley Dean, Tanna (Australia) — to decry division and dedicate themselves to using the power of film to bring people together.

The statement opens with a condemnation of the political mood: “On behalf of all nominees, we would like to express our unanimous and emphatic disapproval of the climate of fanaticism and nationalism we see today in the U.S. and in so many other countries, in parts of the population and, most unfortunately of all, among leading politicians.”

The directors then spoke against division by gender, race, religion and other categories.

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump’s first budget will seek a sizable increase in military funding but won’t make changes to the largest future drivers of government spending: Social Security and Medicare.

Work to prepare the president’s first budget proposal, expected to be released in mid-March, ramped up last week following the Feb. 16 confirmation of Mick Mulvaney as director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The White House plans to send federal agencies their proposed budget allocations on Monday, a person familiar with the matter said. Mr. Trump will preview some of the budget priorities in his speech to Congress on Tuesday and release a budget outline in mid-March after gathering information from federal agencies.

The budget outline due next month will include only targets for discretionary spending programs and not any new proposals on taxes or mandatory spending programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, said John Czwartacki, a White House budget office spokesman. The decision to defer the release of part of the budget blueprint is due in part to the delay in Mr. Mulvaney’s confirmation, he said, and those additional proposals will be included in Mr. Trump’s full budget submission later this year.

“It would be premature for us to comment or anyone to report on the specifics of this internal discussion before its publication,” said Mr. Czwartacki.

The president’s budget proposal marks the opening of the monthslong process to set funding levels for the following year. Spending bills originate with Congress and need 60 votes to clear procedural hurdles in the Senate.

In his address to Congress, Mr. Trump also is expected to emphasize two of his top legislative priorities: simplifying the tax code and dismantling the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with something else, White House officials said Sunday.

Speaking Sunday on Fox News, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the budget outline won’t include any changes to entitlement spending programs. “We are not touching those now. So don’t expect to see that as part of this budget,” he said.

Mr. Mnuchin, in an interview last week, said an increase in military spending “is an important priority, and I think it’s likely that you’ll see that reflected in the president’s budget.”

By pushing for more military funding and taking entitlement spending changes off the table, the Trump administration also would need to propose funding cuts for nondefense programs to avoid sending deficits much higher.

Mr. Trump, for example, is expected to seek cuts at the Environmental Protection Agency and in other areas of domestic spending.

Congressional Republicans have said they would look to Mr. Trump’s speech for hints about the first budget proposal his administration will send to Capitol Hill, expected in mid-March. CONTINUE AT SITE

Well, that was nuts, even for Hollywood.

Let’s be clear: the Oscars were already a fairly ridiculous exercise. A cathedral of glamour and ego, the movie industry’s annual awards conclave is a bloated exercise of hype and self-satisfaction that takes as long to complete as the second year of medical school. This is, of course, why we watch it. An Oscars ceremony that isn’t too long, inane and occasionally infuriating—that’s not a proper Oscars, buddy!

And yet, what happened late Sunday in Los Angeles redefined the already high standard for absurdity at the Academy Awards. An event that once gave us a Rob Lowe duet with Snow White, as well as Telly Savalas,Pat Morita and Dom DeLuise singing “Fugue For Tinhorns” from “Guys & Dolls,” now has its signature moment of insanity: “Bonnie & Clyde” compatriots Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway erroneously awarding Best Picture to “La La Land”— rather than the actual winner, “Moonlight.”

I’ve watched the sequence on replay several times now and, to be honest, it’s way too bizarre to be infuriating. It appeared that Mr. Beatty and Ms. Dunaway were somehow in possession of an incorrect envelope, containing not the Best Picture winner, but the Best Actress, which had just been awarded to Emma Stone of “La La Land.” Opening the crimson envelope, 79-year-old Mr. Beatty seemed baffled, pausing briefly before handing it off to Ms. Dunaway, who announced “La La Land” as the winner.

The most painful thing, really, is that mistake wasn’t recognized immediately. Where was the production team? Already tucking into steaks at Musso & Frank? Even Steve Harvey botching the prize for Miss Universe 2015—the previous gold standard for bungled awards show finales—was faster to repair the damage of a winner incorrectly named.

Instead, the poor “La La Land” producers, cast and crew are allowed to ascend the stage, deliver speeches and experience the weightless feeling of capturing moviemaking’s greatest honor. Think about this for a second: They really thought they had won. Everyone had thought they had won. With 14 nominations, the film was a heavy favorite; a Best Picture win was utterly plausible.

They’re close to wrapping up their acceptance speeches before an anxious-looking production person in headgear starts barreling around the stage, looking like a guy who forgot his iPad on an airplane.

Except he’s Lucy, about to rip the football away from Charlie Brown. CONTINUE AT SITE

Last Sunday Chelsea Clinton, usually such a reticent public figure, took to Times Square with her 2-year-old daughter, Charlotte, to march in the Muslim solidarity rally.

“Thank you to all who organized #IAmAMuslimToo today — Charlotte’s 1st protest rally. #NoBanNoWallNoRaids,” she tweeted.

Chelsea’s also promoting her new, co-authored book “Governing Global Health,” with a soft-focus Q&A in the Sunday New York Times and an eight-city tour in April. It’s a more high-profile push than the one for her last, a 2015 YA book called “It’s Your World,” which focused on low-key school visits — exercising, perhaps, an abundance of caution during her mother’s presidential campaign.

This was, for decades, the Clinton strategy: Say as little as possible, avoid unforced errors. While stumping for her mother in 2008, Chelsea took it to new levels, refusing to answer this question: “Do you think your dad would be a good ‘first man’ in the White House?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t talk to the press and that applies to you, unfortunately,” Chelsea said. “Even though I think you’re cute.”

The interrogator? A 9-year-old “kid reporter” from Scholastic News.

If Chelsea’s new online persona seems surprising — she’s come alive on Twitter, prolific and politicized — party observers say it shouldn’t be. In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s devastating electoral loss, it seems Chelsea Clinton, historically boring and opinion-free, is mulling a run for high office.

Though her spokesperson denies it, signs point elsewhere.

“The super-aggressive tweets are a way to create a constituency around her,” says veteran political consultant Hank Sheinkopf. “Particularly in New York, where people don’t like Donald Trump.”

‘It bothers the s—t out of me that everyone thinks she’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.’

Last November, Page Six reported that Chelsea was being groomed for a Congressional run. The Clintons “will not give up,” a source said. “Chelsea would be the next extension of the Clinton brand.”

That’s the problem. Putting aside America’s exhaustion with dynastic politics, Chelsea herself, as a potential candidate, comes loaded with Clintonian baggage: the greed, the entitlement, and her mother’s greatest flaw — an inability to connect with common people.

No sooner had Robert M. Gill received his get-out-of-jail-free card than he was back at it again. One of a record 1,715 felons to have their lengthy jail sentences commuted by President Barack Obama, Gill celebrated his dumb luck — sudden release from his life-imprisonment term for a major narcotics-trafficking conviction — by attempting to sell two pounds of cocaine. He was captured by Texas police after a violent collision at the end of a high-speed chase.

Having inevitably done the crime, he’ll now probably do the time that should never have been interrupted. Obama justified the release of Gill and hundreds of hardened criminals on the laughable fiction that the federal penitentiaries overflow with “non-violent drug offenders.” You’re supposed to imagine jails teeming with sad-sack Millennials nabbed while toking on a joint behind the local Starbucks. Actually, it is settled law that guns are “tools of the trade” of drug dealing (which is why the cases typically feature evidence of weaponry — and often separate charges for deploying weapons in protection of the lucrative cash business). A quick perusal down the long list of Obama commutations, which includes several gun crimes along with drug offenses, puts the lie to the convict-as-victim storyline. Heather Mac Donald is right: “Prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending.”

In Obama world, there was an exception to this wisdom. The just-departed administration was just as anxious to send innocent business executives to jail as it was to spring actual criminals back onto our streets.

The vehicle for this perversion of justice is known as the “responsible corporate officer” doctrine. The Supreme Court, which created it, may soon have the chance to revisit and bury it. The Justice Department, now under the direction of Attorney General Jeff Sessions rather than Obama’s anti-corporate zealots, should provide the shovel.

It is a bedrock principle of the criminal law that there may not be liability for a bad act in the absence of bad intent — mens rea. In fact, this is the principle that FBI director James Comey was purporting to defend — not very convincingly — when the Obama Justice Department strained to avoid indicting Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information. The requirement of mens rea for criminal liability does not mean absent-minded wrongdoers are off the hook for the damage they cause, not by a long shot. We have a very elaborate civil-justice system to address just such harms. It is not unusual for civil judgments to run into the tens of millions of dollars. If the suffering caused by a corporation is significant, civil lawsuits, including lawsuits brought by the Justice Department and government regulatory agencies, can put the company out of business.

But this is not enough for the anti-capitalist Left, for whom there is no justice but “social justice” — a morality play in which minority men are imprisoned owing solely to systemic racism while greedy executives go unscathed despite exploiting the masses for profit. For every violent crime, there is an excuse; for every business-related accident, there must be a scalp.

Last year we experienced a rather spirited presidential election season. It was probably the fiercest of my lifetime. But we should not be troubled by heated political campaigns. They are the occasional episodes that mark a healthy democracy.

In one respect, however, the 2016 election campaign was quite troubling. We saw two of our most important legal institutions—the Supreme Court and the Justice Department—bend in the political winds.

Years ago, I gave a speech in which I tried to explain why some justices moved, over time, to a more activist posture, less restrained or principled—in other words, result-oriented. A major factor was the influence of the press. Hence the “Greenhouse effect,” referring to Linda Greenhouse, who covered the justices for the New York Times. The Supreme Court press is increasingly dominated by lawyer-journalists who reflect the change in the composition of law-school faculties, which are now almost uniformly left-activist. That political flavor was recently demonstrated by the stunningly uniform opposition at law schools to the nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general.

Since the press’s orientation is sympathetic to activist results, which I think it is safe to say are largely on the left, it is not surprising that the Greenhouse effect is more demonstrable vis-à-vis Republican appointees. And the effect has been particularly strong on Washington neophytes—judicial appointees who had not served in prior Republican administrations and therefore had not yet experienced the attacks of the mainstream press. The neophytes had not yet grown the thicker skin that Republican officials in the executive branch necessarily develop. Compare, for instance, Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor,Anthony Kennedy and David Souter with William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia,Clarence Thomas,John Roberts and Samuel Alito. The latter five had served in Republican administrations, but none of the former had.

A few minutes past noon, on February 26, 1993, as a senior editor in a major centrist publishing house was berating me for proposing a book on the Islamic Proselytization of America, the deafening noise of screaming ambulances, firetrucks and police cars rushing downtown and news of a large explosion at the World Trade Center, cut short our lunch. As he departed, the editor forcefully stated: “I will never publish anything as preposterous and far-fetched as this! How dare you even suggest such a topic? Muslims, like all other immigrants, come to America to enjoy the American dream, not to terrorize it.” This was early in the political correctness trend.

The editor and all witnessed that day that not all Muslim immigrants come here with peaceful intentions. Americans have also found out that some Muslim communities sheltered, supported and condoned vocal proponents of jihad against the U.S. and its infidels. Expressing concern about it even then was at best frowned upon, and more often loudly condemned.

Omar Abdel-Rahman, aka the “Blind Sheik” who died in an American prison last week, was a Muslim who hated America and everything it stands for, for a long time and made no secret of it. The spiritual leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood’s spin-off Jama’a Islamiya, he adhered to the radical interpretation of Islam as was preached in the 13th Century by the Syrian Sufi Ibn Taymiyah, and more recently by Egyptian Muslim Brother, Sayyid Qutb. Rahman praised Muslim terrorists, preached for terror and issued fatwas, calling on “Muslims everywhere [in the West] to dismember their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, provoke their corporations, destroy their embassies, attack their interests, sink their ships…. Shoot down their planes, [and] kill them on land, at sea, and in the air. Kill them wherever you find them. He incited to attack Americans and Jews everywhere, and instigated the murder of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981, Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York, in 1990, and influenced many other Islamic terrorist attacks here and abroad. Nonetheless, he was allowed to enter the U.S., and in 1991 his “religious work” awarded him a permanent residency in the U.S.

The Blind Sheik enjoyed the unique American right to free expression to advance his call for jihad against the country that sheltered him and called on his flowers to take up “urban terrorism” everywhere, especially in the U.S., Egypt, and Israel. He influenced the radical Islamic network that was responsible for the 1,200 pounds of homemade car-bomb that exploded in the garage under the World Trade Center, killing six, wounding 1,024 others and causing billions of dollars in damages. A few months later he was arrested and three years later was charged and convicted of plotting “a day of terror for the United States – assassinations and synchronized bombings of the U.N. headquarters, a major federal government facility in Manhattan and tunnels and a bridge linking New York City and New Jersey.”