RUTHFULLY YOURS

President-elect Donald Trump expressed skepticism over reports that Russia hacked the U.S. election. It is well-known that Russia — and China, and various of our friends and allies — spend a lot of time and effort trying to access American military and industrial secrets, as the U.S. does theirs. But in the case of altering the election, Trump’s skepticism appears warranted.

How did we get here?

An attempted hack into Georgia’s voter registration database was traced back to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), according to The Wall Street Journal last month. It was a criminal act and possibly an attempt to interfere in an election. Even worse, DHS appears to have outsourced the hacking activity. One might think the breach of a state voter registration system by the Federal government would be a big story. But it was quickly replaced by the Obama administration’s claims about Russian cyber attacks on American political institutions. The FBI and DHS (yes, that DHS) then produced the Joint Analysis Report under the seal of its National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center.

It should be noted that the report was prepared without input from the National Security Agency (NSA), Cyber Command, the Pentagon, or the CIA. Wonder why? The answer most likely is that they declined to endorse a report that fails to deliver proof and makes accusations unsupported by evidence. If a college student turned this report in as a research paper, he would flunk the course.

The report claims to provide an analysis of the “tools and infrastructure” used by the Russian intelligence services to “exploit networks and endpoints associated with the U.S. election” as well as a “range of U.S. government, political and private sector entities.” The report calls this “malicious cyber activity” and aggregates it under the code name Grizzly Steppe.

The notion of “malicious activity” is scary and meaningless. If information is stolen, it is theft; it is a crime. But the report cannot demonstrate theft, or even describe the activity any of the identified organizations actually engaged in, so it uses non-legal “term of art.” But grizzlies from the steppe sound pretty malicious.

Equally problematic is that the report cannot tie any of the “known” Russian-located hacking activities directly to the Russian intelligence services in respect to the hack of the email systems of the Democratic National Committee or personal email accounts, such as those of Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, to name a few of the leading targets. There is plenty of notional information that the Russian intelligence services have used private entities to carry out hacking against various Western targets. And there is some important proof that on a number of occasions the Russians have carried out sophisticated cyber attacks against foreign countries. The cases that are clear-cut include Estonia, Georgia, and Ukraine, and there are surely others. But in direct attacks like those (hitting everything from power plants, banks, government agencies, military organizations, air defense systems, and communications), it does not appear that the Russians used third parties. Rather, those attacks were launched mostly by the Russian military.

Among President Obama’s ironic legacies will be how frequently this former teacher of constitutional law has been called out by the federal courts for his aggressive abuse of executive power.

The latest rebuke came on the last day of 2016 in federal court in Texas. Judge Reed O’Connor sided with eight states and three private health-care providers that sued to block a new Health and Human Services rule. This rule defines the Affordable Care Act’s prohibitions against sex discrimination in a way that plaintiffs say will force doctors, hospitals and insurers that take federal funds to cover or perform abortions and gender-transition procedures even when this runs against their best medical judgment or religious beliefs.

The HHS rule rests on a bureaucratic redefinition of sexual discrimination and the deliberate dropping of religious protections Congress included in Title IX. As Judge O’Connor noted, the Title IX prohibitions against sex discrimination passed by Congress “unambiguously” referred to the biological distinction between men and women. The HHS redefinition, he found, deserved no deference because it was not grounded in “a valid grant of authority from Congress.”

The other part of this injunction had to do with the claims by the religious plaintiffs—including a Catholic hospital system and a Christian society of doctors—that the rule violated their rights. Under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the government can infringe on religious exercise—but only where it has a compelling interest. Even when it does have a compelling interest, it has to choose the least restrictive way of pursuing it.

Judge O’Connor conceded that a preliminary injunction is “an extraordinary and drastic remedy, not to be granted routinely.” But he noted that Congress had not granted HHS the authority to redefine sex discrimination the way it had, and that the religious plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits.

In sum, another federal court has found the Obama Administration guilty of imposing its policy choices by fiat rather than doing the hard work of democracy and persuading the elected representatives of the American people. Donald Trump, please take note.

The 115th Congress flopped into Washington on Tuesday with House Republicans proposing and then dropping marginal changes to an internal ethics office. The reversal is an unforced political error, but the GOP is right that the investigative body has the power to destroy reputations without due process.

By the way, Paul Ryan was re-elected Speaker Tuesday with one GOP defection, while Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi lost four Democrats. But that news was dwarfed as the House considered rules for the new Congress, and Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte offered an amendment to restructure the Office of Congressional Ethics.

The office is composed of political grandees, often former Members, and it has no prosecutorial power. But it conducts investigations into Members or staffers and makes recommendations to the House Ethics Committee. The proposal limited what information can be released to the public and barred the committee from having a press secretary. Also banned: anonymous tips.

Mr. Ryan and other House leaders opposed the rule as badly timed. But the rank and file adopted the idea Monday night anyway, only to dump it on Tuesday after denunciations from the Democratic-media complex. The left rounded up callers to deluge Republican switchboards for “gutting” the outfit. Donald Trump couldn’t resist piling on with a pair of tweets: “With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it may be, their number one act and priority.”

The reality is that the office is at best redundant and perhaps worse. Democrats created the office in 2008 to deflect attention from a crush of corruption scandals, including charges against at least three Members. The left is pitching the place as an essential institution of self-government, but the Senate manages to function without a similar office.

As it is, the ethics office is a roving investigator that can publish reports with details that may not be accurate and can damage a reputation with little or no proof of guilt. Evidence of wrongdoing in travel, campaign finances and other matters can be handled by the House Ethics Committee, and if necessary law-enforcement agencies. Both are politically accountable, unlike the independent office.

Anonymous complaints are especially insidious, as subjects of an investigation may not know who is accusing them—and the accuser may never have to press his case. Nixing the communications director is also worthy: A press secretary is nothing but a designated leaker. The office is a great tool for government “watchdog” groups that are progressives posing as transparency enthusiasts, which renders the proceedings even less fair. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Huffington Post’s headline, Minneapolis Jewish Community Defends Rep. Keith Ellison against Anti-Semitism allegations, indicated that Ellison (D-Minn) was making his bid to head the Democrat National Committee. But are such allegations against Ellison implausible?

Consider that the Democrat Party has been sloping further to the left for some time, relying on a voter base that has been under-informed, spoiled, weakened, and entitled. The ugly result is a nation divided by political party, race, financial success, gender and religion, a society consumed with bigotry and disorder. Therefore, it is not inconceivable that an anti-Semite could take the stage from which liberals abandoned their traditional values of Judaism and Christianity in favor of the creed of multiculturalism and its deceptive liturgy of peace and ecumenism.

Enter ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood that has been diligently marketing a false similarity between the so-called “three great Abrahamic faiths.” Jewish congregations, guided by leaders unaware of the unalterable nature of Islamic dictates and their incompatibility with western values, welcome the interfaith programs, hoping for a dialogue of peace with the Islamic world.

The rabbis are irresponsibly under-informed about Islam’s resolve to dominate the entire world – through violence when in the majority and by deception when not. They are either oblivious or unwilling to acknowledge the history of Islam and, specifically, Jewish history under Islam, and its current bloody manifestation across the globe; therefore, they are unqualified to so advise their congregations. They are the blind leading the blind, both doomed to blunder.

If the rabbis have ever heard of BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) or of the Jewish students who must defend themselves across our campuses, they remain silent. Neither do they deliberate the doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” The invading Muslim migrants who behead and rape the host populations, create no-go zones, and generate a fear that prevents the innocent from wearing religious symbols are also off the table. I speak from experience; I have attended such events.

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.