RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump spent a busy weekend meeting potential cabinet picks, including such admirable school reformers as Michelle Rhee and Betsy DeVos and longtime economic opportunity crusader Bob Woodson. We hope amid all the other decisions that someone is also moving fast to name a replacement for Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court.

Apart from the national-security and Treasury jobs, the next Justice may be the most important to move on quickly. While Mr. Trump won’t be inaugurated until Jan. 20, the new Congress convenes in the first week of January. With the continuity from the current to the new Senate, the GOP-led Judiciary Committee could begin vetting Mr. Trump’s nominee as soon as it gets the name. A vote could take place soon after the President-elect is sworn in and can formally submit the nomination.

While the Supreme Court can function with eight Justices, there’s good reason Mr. Trump should want a ninth Justice soon. Numerous cases challenging the Obama Administration’s dubious rule-makings are moving through the federal courts, which President Obama has moved sharply left over eight years.

The circuit courts of appeal might be inclined to rubber stamp those regulations, which means they would become law in those circuits unless the Supreme Court takes the cases. A 4-4 High Court ruling means the lower-court decision stands. Knowing a new Supreme Court is ready for review could give some lower-court judges pause before they issue rulings likely to be overturned.

An early nomination could also get ahead of the game if Mr. Trump’s choice runs into confirmation trouble. The political left will throw everything it has to defeat the next nominee, and the GOP’s Senate majority will only be 51 or 52 (the race in Louisiana will be decided next month in a runoff). Mr. Trump released a list of 21 potential nominees during the campaign (we’d add appellate judges Jeff Sutton and Brett Kavanaugh to the list), and the White House ought to have them vetted and ready to take off like planes at O’Hare.

“We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to,” said President Obama recently in Pittsburgh. “There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world,” he continued. “The answer is obviously not censorship, but it’s creating places where people can say ‘this is reliable’ and I’m still able to argue safely about facts and what we should do about it.”

This is vintage Obama in its dishonesty. If we call it “curating,” suggests Mr. Obama, then it is not censorship.

But it is dishonest in a way that has characterized Mr. Obama’s utterances since the first days of his presidency. It is dishonesty that no honest, halfway intelligent person would be fooled by. It is so transparent as to be almost childish. But it is not intended to persuade the honest, intelligent person. Mr. Obama is the first president who was able to dispense with appealing to the honest, intelligent American.

Mr. Obama’s, and Mrs. Clinton’s, contempt for the truth, and the degree to which their constituents are indifferent to their dishonesty-and to their many other transgressions against morality and the rule of law-suggests a degree of public and private corruption that we could not have imagined a generation ago. Remember “Bush lied, people died.” The reason that refrain was as effective as it was-even though it was itself a lie-was that Mr. Bush’s constituents took morality in their leaders seriously.

And it was only one lie that Mr. Bush’s opponents alleged. One would be hard-pressed to count the number of lies Mr. Obama has told since he took office. But the Bush incident exemplifies the reality that in the hands of the Left today, morality is nothing more than a weapon to be used against their opponents, precisely because their opponents take it seriously.

The Left have never had much use for what most of us consider morality. Rationality, honesty, industriousness, self-reliance, thrift, reliability, sobriety, sexual restraint, good manners, an ability to defer gratification and to engage in long-range planning, reverence for those who merit it-these are all values objectively necessary to making the most of life on this earth. But they are also what are commonly called “bourgeois,” or middle class values, values long disparaged and sneered at by the Left, for whom the middle class represents the height of narrow-minded conventionality. It now appears that Democratic voters no longer require such moral virtues of their leaders.

Incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) says he’s backing a Minnesota congressman to lead the Democratic National Committee for a simple reason: because Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) likes him.

Schumer, in an interview Friday, said he’s supporting a bid by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) to run the DNC because he comes with the support of Sanders, a key liberal voice in the Senate who also earned a spot this past week on Schumer’s new 10-senator leadership team.

Schumer is set to become the first New Yorker and first Jewish man to serve as a Senate leader and has been a staunch defender of Israel throughout his four decades in public service. But Ellison has been an outspoken critic of Israel and its relationship with Palestinians in the past.

Earlier in his career, Ellison apologized for or withdrew a number of controversial statements, including likening former president George W. Bush’s consolidation of power after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks to the rise of Adolf Hitler, to defending the leader of the Nation of Islam, to labeling his own 2012 reelection opponent a “lowlife scumbag.”

[Keith Ellison would be a bold pick for DNC chair — and a controversial one]

Some of those moves would seem to put him at odds with Schumer, his strong support for Israel and the strong support he enjoys from Jewish voters across New York.

“I’m not worried about the Israel stuff even though he and I disagree,” Schumer said Friday when asked about Ellison’s past statements.

So your candidate lost. You have a right to be upset, frustrated and angry, but you also have an obligation to be respectful to others and to the will of the American people. Intellectual hypocrisy continues every day on campuses, where opinions that are not the norm are vilified or silenced.

Imagine if you treated people of different races as you treat people with different opinions. There would be a tremendous outcry! But somehow it is fine to discriminate against those with different views.

Did it ever occur to you that this may be why people voted for Trump? That it might not have been the â€racist proclivities of the U.S. or the dangerous nationalism of the people, but that it was people who tell them not to think or speak the way they do.

Trump won, and he did not overthrow the government or kill people to silence them. He won in the standard fashion by gettinng 270 votes in the Electoral College. As I said, you have a right to be upset, but what we have on our hands now is an embarrassment.

And this does not lie only with the undergrads. Universities themselves are making all types of provisions to coddle those who have been traumatized by the will of the American people. At Harvard, the Introduction to Economics midterm was made optional; the reason provided was that the election results came in too late, but we all know it would have been mandatory if Clinton had won by 10 p.m., as expected.

If the faculty was worried about students not getting enough sleep the night before the exam, then the exam should have been scheduled for a different day. A note to all faculty: If you did not know, the election is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. It was going to go one way or the other, and the undergrads and faculty should have known that and been prepared for any result. The Economics Department’s decision to make the midterm optional has set a bad precedent. Does this mean that whenever someone is upset, he/she can opt out of taking an exam? If you had the hubris to make the midterm the day after the election, you should have stuck with your decision instead of capitulating to the hysteria of the Flowers.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground.

The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

JUST FOR THE RECORD: This is where Mike Pompeo stands on Israel

Withhold UN funding until voluntary and program-specific. (Aug 2011)
Rated -5 by AAI, indicating an anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record(May 2012)
Oppose Arms Treaty that limits gun trade to Israel & Taiwan. (Nov 2012)
President-elect Donald Trump said Friday he will nominate Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which would place the former Army officer and five-year member of Congress at the helm of the spy agency that has been heavily involved in global counterterrorism operations since the 2001 terror attacks.

Name: Mike Pompeo Age: 52Education: U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Harvard Law School

Background: After graduating from West Point, Mr. Pompeo served as a cavalry officer “patrolling the Iron Curtain” before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he served with the 2nd Squadron, 7th Cavalry in the Fourth Infantry Division, according to the biography on his congressional website. He went to Harvard after he left active duty, later returning home to Kansas to run two small businesses before he was elected to the House in 2010 as part of the tea-party wave. He is a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, and he was a member of the special committee investigating the 2012 attacks on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

Outlook: Mr. Pompeo would take the reins of the CIA as Mr. Trump said on the campaign trail he wanted to bring back the practice of harsh interrogation methods including waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse,” as well as refilling the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with prisoners.
Those views have prompted some concern among former military officers and intelligence officials. The current CIA director, John Brennan, in 2014 publicly distanced the agency from its use of the controversial interrogation techniques after a scathing Senate report found them to be ineffective.

While in Congress, Mr. Pompeo emerged as a staunch critic of the Obama administration’s pursuit of an agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. After Republicans failed to scuttle the deal, Mr. Pompeo became active in the push to hold Iran to account for noncompliance and repeatedly has pledged to work to undo the deal. At the CIA, he would have more access to secret information about Iran’s activities since the deal took effect earlier this year. CONTINUE AT SITE

The term “alt-right,” which nobody had heard of until the unexpected emergence and rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election campaign, has become all the rage, literally and figuratively. Indeed, it is now the angry go-to explanation in every analysis of the Republican candidate’s ostensibly miraculous victory on November 8. And it is the key buzzword of the fever-pitched brouhaha surrounding Trump’s appointment of Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon as his chief strategist.

One the main arguments against Bannon — at times a self-described promoter of the alt-right message — is that he, like the neo-Nazi Trump-supporting trolls on Twitter, is an anti-Semite. Though this is patent nonsense, as the evidence raised to prove it is flimsy at best, it is one of those labels that enables both liberals and anti-Trump conservatives to kill two birds with one stone: Bannon and the man who elevated him to a highly important and coveted post.

The intellectual pitfall for mainstream conservatives here is plain. Whatever their position on Bannon, they are aware that Trump’s stunning victory not only in the race for the Oval Office, but in that of both houses of Congress — cannot be attributed to a fringe group of right-wingers with no formal homogeneous ideology. Within this loose category are white supremacists who hate Jews, blacks, gays and any member of the Right who has a nuanced view of everything from immigration to abortion. But these are a tiny minority in America as a whole, and played less of a role in the election of Trump than they and their detractors would love to imagine.

Others who are lumped into that label are people — like myself — who consider the decline of American power to be a danger both domestically and internationally, and desperately wanted the new style of Democrats — those who radicalized the party of Scoop Jackson into oblivion — out of office. We are right-wingers who believe in individual enterprise and ideological freedom. We believe that the federal government should not be dictating the rules of personal moral engagement or funding our choices. We want academia to be a place for the advanced study of humankind in all its facets and history — a space for the education and maturation of each new generation of young adults who will be faced with the often unpleasant task of making their way in the world with nothing but a set of tools in their satchel to give them a sense of their otherwise good fortune to be doing this in the United States, and not in Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela or Mexico, to name but a few examples.