RUTHFULLY YOURS

One reason for the emergence of outsider Donald Trump is the old outrage that elites seldom experience the consequences of their own ideologically driven agendas.

Hypocrisy, when coupled with sanctimoniousness, grates people like few other human transgressions: Barack Obama opposing charter schools for the inner city as he puts his own children in Washington’s toniest prep schools, or Bay Area greens suing to stop contracted irrigation water from Sierra reservoirs, even as they count on the Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy project to deliver crystal-clear mountain water to their San Francisco taps.

The American progressive elite relies on its influence, education, money, and cultural privilege to exempt itself from the bad schools, unassimilated immigrant communities, dangerous neighborhoods, crime waves, and general impoverishment that are so often the logical consequences of its own policies — consequences for others, that is. Abstract idealism on behalf of the distant is a powerful psychological narcotic that allows caring progressives to dull the guilt they feel about their own privilege and riches.

Nowhere is this paradox truer than in California, a dysfunctional natural paradise in which a group of coastal and governing magnificoes virtue-signal from the world’s most exclusive and beautiful enclaves. The state is currently experiencing another perfect storm of increased crime, decreased incarceration, still ongoing illegal immigration, and record poverty. All that is energized by a strapped middle class that is still fleeing the overregulated and overtaxed state, while the arriving poor take their places in hopes of generous entitlements, jobs servicing the elite, and government employment.

Pebble Beach or La Jolla is as far from Madera or Mendota as Mars is from Earth. The elite coastal strip appreciates California’s bifurcated two-class reality, at least in the way that the lords of the Middle Ages treasured their era’s fossilized divisions. Manoralism ensured that peasants remained obedient, dependent, and useful serfs; meanwhile, the masters praised their supposedly enlightened feudal system even as they sought exemptions for their sins from the medieval Church. And without a middle class, the masters had no fear that uncouth others would want their own scaled-down versions of castles and moats.

Go to a U-Haul trailer franchise in the state. The rental-trailer-return rates of going into California are a fraction of those going out. Surely never in civilization’s history have so many been so willing to leave a natural paradise.

from 2012 http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2012/01/15/the-sad-story-of-judith-clark-ron-radosh-oh-puleez-see-note/

THE SAD STORY OF JUDITH CLARK: RON RADOSH…..OH PULEEZ!….SEE NOTE | RUTHFULLY YOURS

THIS “DAMNEDSEL” IN DISTRESS IS NO ONE TO CAPTURE MY COMPASSION. SHE GOT GOOD TRAINING FROM THE PLO IN LEBANON….

READ:http://www.iwp.edu/news_publications/detail/impediments-to-effective-counterintelligence-and-counterterrorism

“The clearest example of this is the Brink’s robbery on October 20, 1981, in which three people were murdered. Remnants of 1970s terrorist groups, the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, and the Republic of New Africa, banded together as the May 19th Communist Organization and attempted to rob a Brink’s truck in order to finance an expansion of their activities. In early 1979, more than two years before the murders, this terrorist group issued a document called Principles of Unity of the May 19th Communist Organization. The document pledged support to terrorists in the United States, South Africa, and Puerto Rico, as well as to terrorists in the Middle East.This was not enough to alert the FBI. Nor was the fact that Judy Clark, a member of the group, had attended an international conference organized by the PLO in Lebanon in September 1981, shortly before the abortive terrorist “expropriation.” Five hundred supporters of the PLO and other international terrorist groups were in attendance. Clark remained in Lebanon with the PLO for a time after the conference.”

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has decided to commute the sentence of a domestic terrorist, Judith Alice Clark, who willingly participated in a bloody robbery that led to the deaths of a security guard and two police officers. Clark, who pleaded not guilty, but was convicted of felony murder, had been sentenced to such a long prison term that she had no real hope for parole during her lifetime – until now. Cuomo’s decision to commute Clark’s sentence will not immediately result in her release, but the steep reduction in her sentence will make her eligible for parole early this year. The loved ones of the three men killed during the robbery and getaway in which Clark took an active part will have to continue to experience their hellish losses for as long as they live. Unless all the family members of the slain are ready to forgive what the self-proclaimed “revolutionary” and “freedom fighter” did, and they do not object to Clark’s release on parole, she should continue to experience her own hell in jail for as long as she lives.

On October 20, 1981, Clark joined members of the violent radical group known as the Weather Underground, who robbed a Brink’s armored truck in Nanuet, New York. Clark, who did not pull the trigger herself, was the driver of one of the getaway cars. Her partners in crime killed a Brinks guard, Peter Paige, in the course of the robbery. They also killed the two police officers, Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady, who had attempted to stop the getaway vehicles on the highway. Clark was captured after she crashed one of the getaway vehicles. Just before her arrest, according to the 2008 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denying Clark’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, “police saw Clark reach for a nine-millimeter pistol on the floor of the car.”

A major figure in the “most transparent administration in history” just told the biggiest lie of the last decade.

Valerie Jarrett said in an interview on CNN that President Obama “hasn’t had a scandal and he hasn’t done something to embarrass himself” during his 8 years in the White House.

New York Post:

The aide, also a close friend of Obama and his wife, Michelle, credited the first couple with being good people and getting good results.

“That’s because that’s who he is — that’s who they are — and I think that’s what really resonates with the American people,” Jarrett said.

Critics of the Obama administration said Jarrett was trying to rewrite history.

“This is delusional,” said Tom Fitton, president of the government watchdog group Judicial Watch, which has filed numerous lawsuits to illuminate many of the Obama administration’s shortcomings.

“The Obama administration has a scandal rap sheet longer than my arm. Between just the IRS abuses, Benghazi, and the Hillary Clinton scandals, this administration was even more corrupt than Nixon’s,” Fitton concluded.

A partial list of some of the more notable scandals should serve to make a liar out of Jarrett:

Operation Fast and Furious. …
Benghazi. …
The IRS targeted conservative organizations. …
The DOJ seized Associated Press phone records as well as phone and email records from Fox News reporter James Rosen. …
The NSA conducted mass surveillance against American citizens without a warrant.
Ransom paid to Iran for our navy hostages
Clinton’s email scandal
The EPA’s poisoning of several rivers in Colorado as a result of a toxic waste accident
The scandal involving out of control partying by Secret Service agents

Judging by video evidence, the participants in the violent mall brawls over the Christmas weekend were overwhelmingly black teens, though white teens were also involved. The media have assiduously ignored this fact, of course, as they have for previous violent flash mob episodes. That disproportion has significance for the next administration’s school-discipline policies, however. If Donald Trump wants to make schools safe again, he must rescind the Obama administration’s diktats regarding classroom discipline, which are based on a fantasy version of reality that is having serious real-world consequences.

The Obama Justice and Education Departments have strong-armed schools across the country to all but eliminate the suspension and expulsion of insubordinate students. The reason? Because black students are disciplined at higher rates than whites. According to Washington bureaucrats, such disproportionate suspensions can mean only one thing: teachers and administrators are racist. The Obama administration rejects the proposition that black students are more likely to assault teachers or fight with other students in class. The so-called “school to prison” pipeline is a function of bias, not of behavior, they say.

This week’s mall violence, which injured several police and security officers, is just the latest piece of evidence for how counterfactual that credo is. A routine complaint in police-community meetings in minority areas is that large groups of teens are fighting on corners. Residents of the South Bronx’s 41st Precinct complained repeatedly to the precinct commander in a June 2015 meeting about such street disorder. “There’s too much fighting,” one woman said. “There was more than 100 kids the other day; they beat on a girl about 14 years old.” In April 2016, a 17-year-old girl in Coney Island, Brooklyn, Ta’Jae Warner, tried to protect her brother from a group of girls gathered outside her apartment building who were threatening to kill him; one of the group knocked her unconscious. She died four days later. At a meeting in the 23rd Precinct in East Harlem in 2015, residents asked why the police hadn’t stopped a recent stampede of youth down Third Avenue. In April 2012, a group of teens stomped a gang rival to death in a Bronx housing project.

The idea that such street behavior does not have a classroom counterpart is ludicrous. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same age. The lack of socialization that produces such a vast disparity in murder rates, as well as less lethal street violence, inevitably will show up in classroom behavior. Teens who react to a perceived insult on social media by trying to shoot the offender are not likely to restrain themselves in the classroom if they feel “disrespected” by a teacher or fellow students. Interviews with teachers confirm the proposition that children from communities with high rates of family breakdown bring vast amounts of disruptive anger to school, especially girls. It is no surprise that several of the Christmas riots began with fights between girls. School officials in urban areas across the country set up security corridors manned by police officers at school dismissal times to avoid gang shootings. And yet, the Obama administration would have us believe that in the classroom, black students are no more likely to disrupt order than white students. Equally preposterous is the claim that teachers and administrators are bigots. There is no more liberal a profession than teaching; education schools are one long indoctrination in white-privilege theory. And yet when these social-justice warriors get in the classroom, according to the Obama civil rights lawyers, they start wielding invidious double standards in discipline.

President Obama plans a farewell speech next week in Chicago, and perhaps he’ll notice that while he’s been in Washington his hometown has become the nation’s murder capital and largest gang war zone. Worth reflecting on is the city’s upswell in violence last year that followed political protests against law enforcement and a pullback in policing.

The Chicago Police Department reported 762 homicides in 2016, the most in two decades and more than in the cities of New York and Los Angeles combined. The 57% increase was the biggest spike in 60 years. Shootings jumped 46% to 3,550, with most occurring in poor and minority neighborhoods on the South and West sides. Police have blamed gang activity, as most victims had previously been identified for their gang ties or past arrests.

But gangs aren’t new, and another culprit is an increase in caution among police who have come under widespread political attack. Street demonstrations followed the November 2015 release of a video capturing the killing of 17-year old Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times by a white officer. The officer will stand trial for first-degree murder while police remain under investigation by the Justice Department.

The American Civil Liberties Union has also targeted Chicago police, and the department in August 2015 agreed to track investigatory stops and pat-downs to avert a lawsuit. Officers must submit detailed two-page reports for each stop, which a former federal judge and ACLU review for bias.

Former Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy told CBS’s “60 Minutes” this weekend that the increase in paperwork has taken time away from proactive policing and made officers more reluctant to stop suspicious individuals. According to CBS, the number of stops declined from 49,257 in August 2015 to 8,859 a year later while arrests fell by a third to 6,900. While current Superintendent Eddie Johnson denied that police were retreating, he noted at a press conference this weekend that anger at police has “emboldened” criminals. He also blamed lax enforcement of Chicago’s strict antigun laws.

All of this suggests that the demonization of cops has contributed to Chicago’s surge of violence, with the principal victims being young minorities, many of them innocent bystanders. Perhaps the President could include an elegy for these black lives in his farewell.

Victor David Hanson: Thank you very much for having me. I thought I would talk about the mythologies of the election if I could. But before we go, I know you all have had this experience. People have come up to you and said, “Did you have any idea that Trump could win?” Now, everybody lies and said, of course I did. I thought he would be even, but I wasn’t sure. But I had these conversations a lot with Bruce Thornton, and we’d always come to the same conclusion. I don’t know, but there’s something strange out there going on.

And what I meant by that was, when I would walk across the Hoover Institution grounds, anybody who I thought would be voting for Donald Trump would do this. And anybody who wanted to be labeled the maverick, brave, independent scholar, the “go-to” person for the Washington Post, would say, “I’m for Hillary.” And I thought this is really an accurate barometer of what people are thinking, and so I said to my wife Jennifer, “You know every time we have somebody on the farm or we talk to a guy on a tractor, if he speaks English” — and these are all Mexican-American people — “he’s for Trump.” Can’t believe it. People who are not for Trump don’t speak English. And she said, well I have a class with 40 people and there are 38 Hispanics. I said well ask them. You don’t have tenure, but be careful how you ask them. Do it this way: is there anybody in their right mind that would vote for Trump? Seventeen people held their hand up in front of people, and then you saw the statistics that he had two to three points higher minority representation among minority communities than did Romney or McCain. And it was just striking.

The other thing that I think has happened in this election, unfortunately, is — I know I’m not quite unbiased — is that we’ve lost friends and family, relationships. I know that I thought I knew people at the National Review. I’ve been writing there for 14 years, and then I would read things, and I could not believe it. It wasn’t that I disagreed with them or they disagreed with me, it was the level of venom and condescension. I would pick up the Wall Street Journal and read Bret Stephens. I talked to George Will and I could not believe it. And then I talked to people in my family, and the same thing.

But there was one commonality that you may have experienced. That the people who were voting for Hillary or not voting wanted to provoke something. So every time I would see my brother or other brother, they wanted to talk about it. They wanted to put you on the spot. At Hoover when I saw somebody, they wanted to say, “How dare you.” Nobody in this room went up to somebody who they’ve known for a long time and say, “How dare you vote for Hillary.” They may have thought that, but –and it’s thematic of this whole election that Trump’s rallies were supposedly violent, rigged, we know now, by the DNC, and now we see the real violence in the post election. So there were all these bizarre emotions.

One of the things, one other statement before I go into mythologies: This had a lot to do with class. I know people said, “Well how can Trump be a populist. He’s a billionaire.” But he was a billionaire in a way that offended the sensibilities of the coastal corridors. Maybe it was the orange hair or skin or the queen’s accent or his personal tastes and appetites, but whatever it was, people of the elite did not like him for class reasons because he would talk to conservatives and you would look at his agenda and it was pretty conservative, and they’d say, “Well, he doesn’t believe it” or “he was a Democrat.” But they applied a different standard to him that was inexplicable other than they had a class disdain for what he represented.

I thought something was going wrong when I would go up to Palo Alto. I had this unique experience in my life where I live in the second poorest county in the United States, southern Tulare Fresno County, and then I work in one of the most affluent in Stanford-Palo Alto-Menlo Park, and it’s two different worlds. And people up there were convinced that Trump would not only lose but lose in a landslide, and then people out in the foothills of California really thought that he might win in California. I would ride a bike in the month of Michigan, in the month of September in Michigan. I was teaching at Hillsdale. Everybody had a Trump sign, and you would stop and talk to them, and they were just certain he was going to win. I thought this doesn’t make sense. And so I think a lot of you were not as surprised as we otherwise should have been. Because after all, he had no money comparatively speaking. He did not have a ground game. He did not have opposition research. He did not have bundlers. He did not have celebrity endorsements. He did not have establishment. He did not have the media. He had everybody against him. So they say, “Well Hillary won the popular vote.” Yeah, but it’s astounding that he was even close because he had nothing in conventional terms for him other than a message that resonated.

One of the big mythologies of the election was it’s unusual we’ve never had anything this vulgar, this crude in American history. By the standards of American election it was pretty tame. In 1824 basically John Quincy Adams stole the election from Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson got it back in 1828, but if you go back and look at what they called one another. Jackson was supposedly an assassin, a bigamist, his wife was a prostitute supposedly. It reminded me of the Athenian democratic elections and politics where Demosthenes stands up in the De Corona and says, “My opponent, Aeschines, I will not mention the fact that his mother ran a house of prostitution from a cemetery.”

George McGovern called Richard Nixon 12 times in public a Nazi in the 1972 election. 1944, right in the middle of the battles in the Pacific at Leyte Gulf, Franklin Roosevelt said of Thomas Dewey we don’t fight Nazism and fascism overseas just to turn it over to the same people here in the United States. Think of that.

The last time we have seen a Republican fight was Lee Atwater in the ’88 Bush election. Last time somebody wanted to win rather than to lose nobly, and when he got done with Michael Dukakis, he was a wimp and a tank, he had polluted Boston Harbor and he let Willie Horton out thousands of times over again. And that was the last time Republicans said that they were going to do that, and then they stopped so that John McCain wanted to lose nobly like old Ajax, I suppose. Never mentioned Reverend Wright, Jeremiah Wright. You get the impression had Trump run in 2008 we would have never heard the end of Reverend Wright. Had he run in 2012 he would have jumped out and grabbed Candy Crowley’s, I hope, microphone, and he would have reacted.

And I’m mentioning that because that was very important. People you talk to said I’m tired of losing. For people who are wealthy and have connections and influence, losing nobly is an option. But for people at the end of things, a worker out of a job, or somebody who can’t afford to get his teeth fixed, losing is bad. They don’t want to lose. And as one person said to me, if he’s going to lose at least I like him to screw things up. And I think what he meant was we got a Samson now and he’s got his arms around the Philistine pillar, and if he loses, he’s going to tear down the whole damn temple with him. Like that Apple commercial where you run and throw the ball and chain into the screen and smash it. That was a sense of anger that people had over Trump.

As he prepares to leave office in three weeks, President Obama is still trying to shape his legacy. On Dec. 20 the White House announced the withdrawal of millions of acres of Atlantic and Arctic territory from petroleum development. This week Mr. Obama proclaimed 1.35 million acres in Utah and 300,000 acres in Nevada to be new national monuments. But all the soon-to-be ex-president will prove is the fleeting nature of executive power.

These actions, like many others he has taken, are vulnerable to reversal by President-elect Trump. In our constitutional system, no policy can long endure without the cooperation of both the executive and legislative branches. Under Article I of the Constitution, only Congress can enact domestic statutes with any degree of permanence. And because of the Constitution’s separation of powers, no policy will survive for long without securing and retaining a consensus beyond a simple majority.

As president, Mr. Trump can easily reverse the most unwarranted and costly regulations issued in the last few months. Under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), a simple majority of each house may expeditiously disapprove such regulations, so long as the president signs the bill. A CRA disapproval would have the added virtue of automatically prohibiting any future, “substantially similar” rule without congressional action.

Mr. Trump can clear the way for Congress by halting all current rule-makings and ordering agencies to stop enforcing rules enacted in the last two years (or longer). After their defense of the administration’s refusal to enforce the immigration laws, liberals would have no legitimate grounds to oppose Mr. Trump’s temporary enforcement halt.

Mr. Obama’s unilateral actions, by executive order, proclamation or memoranda, are even more vulnerable. The courts have declared some void, including the immigration deportation orders. Mr. Trump can simply order the Justice Department to acquiesce in those decisions and save the public the trouble of litigating others. Mr. Obama taunted his political adversaries that if he didn’t get what he wanted from Congress, he would use his “pen” and “phone.” Those tools also work in reverse. CONTINUE AT SITE

Among the Republican priorities in 2017 should be dismantling a culture of bureaucratic control at the Food and Drug Administration that poisons innovation and costs lives. Here’s an idea: Update part of the approval process that was patient zero for distorting data on a drug for Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

We’ve reported on the drama over eteplirsen, which FDA approved in September and is now marketed as Exondys 51 by Sarepta Therapeutics. Midlevel bureaucrats have since disparaged the therapy in public, and some insurers are denying coverage. Much of the confusion results from an April show trial known as an advisory committee meeting. A process that is supposed to provide independent advice to the FDA instead became a venue to mislead a panel of nonexperts—and the public—about the drug’s efficacy.

Advisory committees exist so FDA can solicit expert counsel, but the agency stacks panels with allies whose career currency is prestige and government funding. Such committees usually vote the way FDA wants—and then the agency tends to follow the recommendation. On eteplirsen, the panel voted 6-7 against accelerated approval after a critical FDA review, which was later overruled by agency management in a rare exception amid unusual public scrutiny.

The 13-member committee that checked out eteplirsen included: a psychiatrist, a stroke doctor and several others with no experience in Duchenne. The agency seldom invites true experts because anyone who has ever talked to a drug company is deemed financially conflicted. In rare diseases like Duchenne, that problem is more pronounced because the pool of experts can be so limited.

Yet meet Caleb Alexander, chairman of the committee. Dr. Alexander invited speakers at the meeting to state organizations they represent. He read this statement at least a dozen times but neglected to mention his own conflict of interest: Dr. Alexander has received a large FDA grant, information that is available online. The conceit is that folks like Dr. Alexander are less motivated by pecuniary interests than someone who has consulted for a company. Dr. Alexander voted against approval.