RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/11/reversal_of_fortune_for_the_democrats.html

Only a few weeks ago the #NeverTrump folks were moaning that any other Republican could have beaten Hillary Clinton, and now the Clinton supporters must be wondering if another Democrat could have beaten Donald Trump.

I was an early antagonist, but when Trump was the last man standing among a batch of senators, governors, a former congressman, a neurosurgeon, and a clever and gifted businesswoman, I made the decision to support him.

He won and he is the candidate, and may win despite an unprecedented barrage of ridicule, smear and bias from the media and the unconscionable Republicans who enabled Hillary Clinton by bailing from what they perceived to be a sinking ship.

The Republicans may be right and possibly another candidate would have bettered Hillary Clinton. The initial Comey report gave her a pass and her misdeeds were airbrushed by the media, obsessed with Trump’s vulgarity and accusations against him.

Now the tide has turned with a reopened investigation by the FBI. Even the biased media are taking note of the ethical and moral bankruptcy of Hillary Clinton, and bashing Comey cannot clear her reputation. Now the polls are trending against her. How could this happen just days away from a major election? Hillary was the odds-on favorite and her coronation was set.

The Democrat primaries were a joke. Hillary Clinton needed a tip from Donna Brazile to beat Bernie Sanders? Apparently, the hacked emails from John Podesta included a message from Ms. Brazile on the day before a CNN-sponsored Democratic primary debate in Flint, Mich., in March. It reads: “One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash.”

This disclosure must be giving both women hives.

But, now the question is which Democrat could have won against Trump?

Let’s start with early contenders. Lincoln Chafee, a political tranny from Rhode Island who was for “Prosperity Through Peace”; Larry Lessing (who?); Martin O’Malley, Governor of Maryland whose impressive campaign slogan was “Stand Against Hate”; and former Senator James Webb a decorated veteran and political maverick.

They were all trounced early in the primaries.

It’s hard to generalize about Hillary Clinton’s email situation except that she tried to afford herself an extraordinary privilege as a high-ranking official, and then caused for herself exactly the problems (and worse) that she presumably was trying to avoid.

It’s the White House Travel Office, the Rose Law Firm billing records, the Seth Ward option (don’t ask), the health-care task force, etc., all over again.

Mrs. Clinton is a screw-up. And when a trait takes such trouble to announce itself, note must be taken.

Complicating the legal question, of course, is the fact that she didn’t exactly hide her behavior. The State Department knew she was conducting business on a private server. Her boss, the president, exchanged emails with her via what was self-evidently a private email account.

All this being so, many Americans probably would have been happy to see the difficulties bypassed by Mrs. Clinton simply returning all her emails and devices intact to the State Department. This she did not do. In response to reasonable and unavoidable questions about whether her arrangement and subsequent actions violated the law, the Obama administration had no choice but to launch a criminal investigation.

Now a simple home truth is that Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Loretta Lynch, from day one, were hardly indifferent, objective observers of the process. They did not want Mrs. Clinton charged.

In our imperfect world, most will understand the dilemma before FBI Director James Comey: Would it be more damaging for the country, FBI and personal reputation to actively intervene in the election by indicting Mrs. Clinton or to passively intervene in the election by giving her a pass?

A non-act is somehow easier to pass off than an act. Yet events of the last few days point to the absurdity of him clearing Mrs. Clinton when he still hadn’t seen 33,000 pieces of evidence. By definition, unless the FBI is full of remarkably unsuspicious cops, the emails that Mrs. Clinton and her aides deleted would seem the ones most likely to contain evidence of improper activity.

Mr. Comey perhaps failed also to foresee how the server issue would become entangled with the WikiLeaks theft of Clinton Foundation emails, contributing to a rather more multidimensional view of the back-scratching and buck-raking world the Clinton entourage inhabited. CONTINUE AT SITE

When the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn was founded in 1973, it had a worthy mission: to make healthy and affordable food available to everyone who wanted it. But recently, the Coop appears to have lost its way. In April, it suspended four loyal, long-time members for a whole year – three of them members from the Coop’s inception. The reason? Allegedly, the four disrupted a Coop meeting. But in reality, they were singled out from among hundreds of Coop members who vociferously objected to a hateful and bigoted anti-Israel presentation at a Coop meeting, which was aimed at getting the Coop to boycott an Israeli company called SodaStream.

This wasn’t the first time that an anti-Israel boycott was proposed at the Coop; the membership had already considered and soundly rejected one in 2012. But the Israel-bashers were persistent, this time displaying inflammatory anti-Israel photos at a Coop general meeting. The photos weren’t verified, they had no context, and the boycott proponents did not even establish their connection to SodaStream. Members at the meeting reported that not only was Israel viciously attacked; Jews were, too, with outrageous and incendiary comments like “Jews are aggressive toward black children.”

The four suspended Coop members were no doubt passionate and vocal about their objection to this anti-Israel boycott effort, and they had good reason to be: A boycott of Israeli products such as SodaStream would violate New York State law and could subject the Coop to liability.

New York’s Human Rights Law prohibits boycotts based on national origin, among several other protected categories. The law doesn’t require evidence of a formal boycott campaign; it’s enough if there’s a pattern of conduct that commercially disadvantages members of a protected class, which describes the anti-Israel vendetta at the Coop.The four suspended Coop members were no doubt passionate and vocal about their objection to this anti-Israel boycott effort, and they had good reason to be: A boycott of Israeli products such as SodaStream would violate New York State law and could subject the Coop to liability.

Camp owners were shocked by the comparison of Jewish campers emulating IDF exercises with Hamas terrorist training camps.http://www.jewishpress.com/news/us-news/ny/now-they-are-going-after-jewish-summer-camps/2016/11/02/

Camp Mesorah is a co-educational Modern Orthodox sleep-over camp sprawling across more than 100 acres in New York State’s Catskill Mountains. The camp focuses on sports, Torah, Jewish unity and love for Medinat Yisrael. Some people can’t stand that last part – especially any suggestion that the Israeli Defense Forces should be respected and emulated.

Why? Because the IDF, you know, is a military force and if Jewish campers in upstate New York emulate IDF troops while engaging in team-building and obstacle courses, that really is akin to glorifying torture and violence. In fact, “it’s like the Hamas camps.” At least that’s what some non-affiliated busybodies are claiming.

It’s absurd, but that’s how some Israel-denigrators – even Jewish ones – play the game. Even when it comes to attacking a team-building summer activity for Jewish campers.

Founded in 1990, Mesorah hosts approximatly 800 campers throughout the summers, starting from rising fourth graders through the tenth grade. Nearly one hundred of those Mesorahans come from Israel, and the camp has strong Zionist roots. Campers are encouraged to learn about and learn to love Israel, and making Aliyah is viewed as a positive aspiration. As Joseph Stansky, Mesorah’s co-owner, told the JewishPress.com on Tuesday, “many campers have IDF t-shirts and sweatshirts which they bought at novelty shops on Ben Yehudah [Street in Jerusalem].”

A brief visit to the camp’s website reveals hockey rinks and basketball courts, baseball diamonds and tennis courts, a lake for boating, and two shuls, a kollel, learning gazebos and a library. The owners have brought the camp into the digital age with a section on the website for parents and other family members to regularly see pictures and videos of the campers. There are also promotional videos for interested families.

The promotional videos are rolled out one at a time over the course of the post-summer year, in anticipation of the next summer’s season. One video rolled out just after the Jewish holidays this year focused on the camp’s “IDF-Paintball Program,” which shows campers in camouflage gear engaged in an intensive (by American Jewish camp standards) obstacle and team building course. Many of the campers are wearing their IDF t-shirts.

White House: Comey Not ‘Intentionally Trying to Influence’ Election By Bridget Johnson

“And that is a posture that I won’t change and it is a posture that speaks to the kind of institutional responsibilities that are investigated — that are vested here in the White House, which is preserving the independence and integrity of independent investigations conducted by the Department of Justice,” he said.

Earnest said he didn’t “have any independent knowledge of how those decisions were made” or what factors were considered to release information about a new path of investigation since “all the way back to July when Director Comey announced the results of the investigation and spoke at length to the public about his decision not to prosecute Secretary Clinton.”

“Included in that news conference were some rather harsh condemnations of the way that Secretary Clinton handled that situation,” he noted. “Director Comey also testified before Congress at some length, on camera, under oath, and — about the investigation, and some of that testimony provided fodder to Secretary Clinton’s critics.”

The press secretary said he would “neither defend nor criticize what Director Comey has decided to communicate to the public about this investigation.”

“What I will say is that the Department of Justice in our democracy is given expansive authority to conduct investigations.”

Earnest added it’s “important in the mind of the president that those authorities are tempered by an adherence to longstanding tradition and practice and norms that limit public discussion of facts that are collected in the context of those investigations.”

In the ever more astounding Clinton email striptease, which has now hooked up with the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal, a player who deserves a lot more mention than he’s been getting is President Barack Obama. True, it was Hillary Clinton, not Obama, who squirreled away State Department business on a private server, and then brought us the contortionist performance of denials, deletions, evasions and professed ignorance that “(C)” on a State Department document stands for “classified.” It is Clinton’s longtime top aide, Huma Abedin, who has some explaining to do about how emails pertinent to the Clinton server saga arrived on the computer of her now-estranged husband, Weiner, who is currently under FBI investigation for allegedly sending sexually suggestive messages to a teenage girl.

But it is Obama who presides over the administration whence came this mudslide of wayward emails, classified information, pay-for-play opportunities and a Justice Department that has itself become part of the scandal. And it is at the president’s desk that the buck — or the mudslide — is supposed to stop.

It was Obama who tapped Hillary to be secretary of State. It was Obama’s administration that apparently shrugged off at the time Clinton’s extensive use of a private server (though Obama himself was among those who corresponded with her on her private account). It was Obama’s administration that allowed Hillary and Bill Clinton to spin the tangled web of connections between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.

It is Obama who presides over an administration that failed to police a setup in which — as FBI Director James B. Comey finally told the press this July — Clinton or her colleagues “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” As we now know, Clinton used her personal domain extensively while traveling abroad, and according to Comey, the FBI assesses “it is possible that hostile actors gained access.”

On all these fronts, the Clinton email saga is yet another of Obama’s legacies, along with the unaffordable Affordable Care Act, and an Iran nuclear deal that paves Iran’s way to the bomb. And what, precisely, does this Clinton-email legacy help to enshrine in America’s political culture? There are plenty of big things in play here: a self-interested disregard at high levels for matters of national security; the reek of crony favors; the subordination of rule of law to an amorphous official narrative, with corrosive effects on the American system of justice.

But if we look for a bottom line, it’s a code ruinous to the foundations of the American republic, and neatly summed up by George Orwell more than 70 years ago, toward the end of Animal Farm: “Some animals are more equal than others.”

Take, as one of the most glaring aspects of this tale, the administration’s approach to the handling of classified information. Let us specify that even in a free society, there is some information that for reasons such as national security must be kept secret. But the temptation for any administration is to exploit that authority to impose and enforce secrecy in service not of the American people, but of the political agenda or self-interest of those in charge.

Obama took office in 2009 promising to run the most transparent administration ever. Instead, he has run an administration so secretive that in 2013 the Committee to Protect Journalists released a report on “The Obama Administration and the Press,” documenting a Washington climate in which “government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press.” Why? Because “those suspected of discussing with reporters anything the government has classified as secret are subject to investigation, including lie-detector tests and scrutiny of their telephone and email records.” Among 30 veteran journalists interviewed in Washington for this CPJ report, not one could recall any precedent rivaling the aggressive nature of “the administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information.”

Exhibit A in this Obama administration campaign to control information is the case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a former contractor with the State Department, who, in the face of a possible 15-year sentence had he been convicted at trial, pled guilty in 2014 to leaking classified information to Fox News reporter James Rosen, and was sentenced to 13 months in prison.

The Stephen Kim case dated back to 2009, Obama’s first year in office. That spring, North Korea carried out its second nuclear test, as well as a ballistic missile test. On June 11, 2009, Rosen published an article describing how the CIA, based on information from “sources inside North Korea,” expected North Korea might respond to a Security Council resolution condemning its actions. CONTINUE AT SITE

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are October Lucy Ma “Anne of Green Gables” 1908

The election, Mosul, Yemen, Hurricane Matthew, Bob Dylan, Chicago Cubs, Tom Haydn. They all made news in October. Apart from the Cubs and Bob Dillon, most of the news (as is so often the case) was bad. In the case of the election, it was dispiriting. On a happier note, October is leaf season in New England. This year, at least in my part of Connecticut, it was vibrant. The DEEP (Department of Energy and Environmental Protection), which publishes every year “The ten best places to see fall foliage in Connecticut,” did not this year include Essex, Lyme or Old Lyme among their recommendations. Not to take anything away from other parts of the State, but it is hard to beat the contrast between the blue of the Connecticut River and the green of evergreens that line its bank, with the golds and reds of our color guard – Oaks, Maples, Beeches, Hickories, Sumacs and Birches.

The October “surprise” was the bombshell emanating from a letter FBI Director James Comey sent, after first alerting the Department of Justice, to senior members of Congress. In the letter he asserted that, after submitting a laptop that belonged to Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin to metadata analysis, his only choice was to re-open the e-mail case against Hillary Clinton. While Democrats rose up in alarm, they have no one to blame but themselves. Mrs. Clinton chose to use a private e-mail account and server. She chose to lie about its use and chose to cover-up what she had done. She had e-mails destroyed. Her husband met covertly with Attorney General, Loretta Lynch. The Administration went along with her shenanigans, as did the Democrat establishment. These revelations not only expose Clinton corruption and the immorality of the Administration and the Justice Department, they could well determine the outcome of the election. Regardless, this “surprise” is symptomatic of an awful election year. If Hillary wins and the data shows she is indictable, what happens? If she loses and the data exonerates her, what happens?