RUTHFULLY YOURS

Former Vice President Al Gore, a leading proponent of anti-global warming advocacy, met with President-elect Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka for what he described as “an extremely interesting conversation” at Trump Tower on Monday.

Via NBC News:

Gore, who campaigned for Hillary Clinton, declined to say what exactly he and Trump spoke about during the meeting. But he said he met with both the president-elect and Ivanka Trump, who reportedly wants to make climate change one of her signature issues.

“I had a lengthy and very productive session with the president-elect. It was a sincere search for areas of common ground… I found it an extremely interesting conversation, and to be continued, and I’m just going to leave it at that,” Gore told reporters after the meeting.

The meeting came just days after a source said Ivanka was interested in making climate change one of her signature issues.
Donald Trump’s Post-Election Climate Stance

Trump, however, has been skeptical of climate change, calling it a “hoax” and tweeting in 2012 that global warming was “created” by the Chinese.

They’re coming for Senator Sessions. The Alabama Senator, soon to be Attorney General, has been denounced by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which bills its poison pen letter as coming from “civil and human rights organizations.” Just don’t ask which ones.

The “civil rights” organizations include the AFL-CIO, which had just denounced its own “ugly history of racism” last year, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, whose leaders have at times defended and excused the anti-Semitic and racist Islamic terror of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the National Council of La Raza, whose name means “The Race” and reflects its racialist agenda.

A thuggish union that concedes its own ugliness and two racist groups, one of which defends Islamic terrorists, are the worst possible people to pass any kind of judgment on Senator Sessions.

But it gets worse.

There’s the Center for Responsible Lending, funded by the Sandlers, who helped cause the economic crisis by peddling subprime mortgages. Lending doesn’t get more responsible than that. And there’s also the National Lawyers Guild, which started life as a Communist front group and arguably continues as such, praising North Korea’s “free healthcare and education systems.” Move over Cuba, North Korea has even more shovel-ready free health care for the oppressed comrades of the working class.

I don’t know why the Conference couldn’t manage to get Al Qaeda to sign on to their letter against Sessions. Maybe Osama bin Laden’s iPhone can’t get any bars at the bottom of the Arabian Sea.

But this motley crew of racists, traitors and terrorists has issued its ruling and found that, “Senator Sessions is the wrong person to serve as the U.S. Attorney General.”

The right person is Vladimir Lenin. Unfortunately he’s dead and not qualified to practice law.

You would think that the “144 undersigned organizations” representing billions in wealth and untold amounts of power and influence, could manage a more coherent smear campaign. Instead the letter rehashes the same old discredited smears. Senator Sessions’ joke about the KKK smoking pot is described as “speaking favorably about the Ku Klux Klan” even while admitting that “he was helpful in the Center’s successful effort to sue and bankrupt the Ku Klux.”

Sessions is accused of undermining “voting rights” by prosecuting the “voting rights activists” who were caught mailing hundreds of absentee ballots. These “voter suppression tactics targeting African Americans” came in response to complaints of fraud by African-American officials like Perry County Commissioner Reese Billingslea and John Kennard, Alabama’s first black tax assessor, who said, “The only reason these people are hollering racism now is because they are in trouble for breaking the law.”

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Sunday delivered a symbolic victory to the environmental left by denying a permit to complete the 1,200-mile Dakota Access oil pipeline. The political obstruction illustrates why it’s so hard to build anything in America these days.

Construction is almost complete on the Dakota Access, which aims to transport a half million barrels of oil each day from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota to Illinois for delivery to refiners on the East and Gulf coasts. About 99% of the pipeline doesn’t require federal permitting because it traverses private lands. But the Corps must sign off on an easement to drill under Lake Oahe that dams the Missouri River.

After an exhaustive consultation with Native American tribes, the Corps in July issued an environmental assessment of “no significant impact.” Construction is unlikely to harm tribal totems because the Dakota Access would parallel an existing gas pipeline. The route has been modified 140 times in North Dakota to avoid upsetting sacred cultural resources.

After largely refusing to engage in the Corps’s review, the Standing Rock Sioux sued. A federal court in September rejected the tribe’s claims, only to be overruled by the Obama Administration, which ordered a temporary suspension to work around Lake Oahe. Although the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in October refused to enjoin construction on the pipeline, the Corps has maintained its administrative injunction.

Tensions have escalated between local law enforcement and protesters, who have signaled an intent to defy Corps orders to disband before Dec. 5. North Dakota winters are cold, and a charitable reading of the Corps’s political mediation is that the Administration is trying to allow squatters to save face so that they can disperse before imperiling their own safety.

Keith Ellison (or Keith E. Hakim, or Keith X. Ellison, or Keith Muhammad, etc.) is campaigning for office. Not for the safe House seat he holds, but for the leadership of the Democratic party, a job until recently held by the hilariously incompetent and boundlessly vapid Debbie Wasserman Schultz (who was forced to resign — “resign” here meaning “transfer formally to the Clinton campaign” — when she was exposed conniving to stack the presidential primary elections against Senator Bernie Sanders (S., Portlandia)), who was temporarily replaced by Donna Brazile, who was exposed leaking debate questions to the Clinton campaign, a violation of trust for which she remains adamantly impenitent.

Republicans should take a minute to simply enjoy all this before getting on to the serious business at hand. If they cannot have Debbie Wasserman Schultz organizing opposition to them, former Farrakhan fanboy Keith Ellison of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party is a great second choice.

Ellison is the first Muslim elected to the House, and he complains that the recent spate of criticism directed at him is rooted in — ridiculous word — Islamophobia. But there is a bit more to it than that.

Ellison has long been a vocal defender of the so-called Nation of Islam, the bow-tie gang founded by Elijah Muhammad whose relationship to orthodox Islam is approximately that of a UFO cult to the Anglican communion. The NOI and its charismatic leader, the former calypso musician Louis Farrakhan, is an explicitly racist organization, holding as a matter of doctrine that the white race is the result of a doomed mad-science experiment conducted by the biblical Jacob while he was living on the isle of Patmos. Farrakhan is a true religious entrepreneur who has attempted to graft L. Ron Hubbard’s fanciful “Dianetics” onto his own cracked version of Islam, but he has mostly relied on a very old and reliable tradition: Jew-hating.

Farrakhan’s history of vicious anti-Semitism was already well established when Ellison was helping him organize the Million Man March. The Democratic representative says that he rejects anti-Semitism, but he has a long history of sticking up for Jew-hating weirdos, and not only Farrakhan. When Kwame Ture — you may remember him as Stokely Carmichael — claimed that Jews had collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust as a pretext for establishing the state of Israel, Ellison was there to defend him from criticism. When the head of a Minneapolis political group declared that the allegations of anti-Semitism against Farrakhan were made up and insisted that the real problem is racist Jews, Ellison said: “She is correct.” He is a defender of the terrorist Sara Jane Olson and the murderer Assata Shakur and the Islamic terrorist Sami al-Arian. He is a longtime admirer of the murderous dictator Fidel Castro.

Two days after Cuban dictator Fidel Castro bit the dust, Black Lives Matter memorialized him, and the reasons for it are not pretty. Castro killed thousands of his own people, imprisoned many more, caused 1 million refugees to flee to the United States, and even canceled Christmas. But Black Lives Matter celebrated him — because he provided a refuge for cop killers.

“Although no leader is without their flaws, we must push back against the rhetoric of the right and come to the defense of El Comandante,” reads the declaration, published by the “Black Lives Matter” account on Medium.com. While the movement has no single leader, this Medium account attempts to speak for it, and it has 12.6 K followers. Moreover, the sentiments expressed in this article echo the Marxist demands of the Movement for Black Lives, which speaks for a broad coalition of groups in the movement.

The key lesson Black Lives Matter learned from Castro? “Revolution is continuous and is won first in the hearts and minds of the people and is continually shaped and reshaped by the collective,” the article declared. “No single revolutionary ever wins or even begins the revolution. The revolution begins only when the whole is fully bought in and committed to it. And it is never over.”

Yes, Black Lives Matter said this of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people. If any “revolutionary” least exemplified the idea that “no single revolutionary ever wins or even begins the revolution,” it is Fidel Castro. Or rather, it would be, if Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot hadn’t set records even Castro couldn’t beat.

The exact number of Cubans killed by the Castro regime remains unknown, but estimates range from 2,000 to 33,000, with a mid range of 15,000 — in a country of only 7 million people. In per capita terms, that is the equivalent of 680,000 executions in the United States (with its population of 318 million). That’s the entire population of Denver or Seattle.

But that’s just mass murder — don’t forget political prisoners! The Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation received over 7,188 reports of arbitrary detentions from January through August of 2014. According to PolitiFact, there are at least 97 known current political prisoners. These prisons are overcrowded and unhygienic, with prisoners forced to work 12-hour days, Human Rights Watch reported. Inmates have no effective complaint mechanism to seek redress.

Four staff at the Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs resigned after maggots were found in the wound of a Vietnam veteran who died in October. Another VA staff member insisted that the maggots did not cause his death.

Raymie Parker identified the man as his father, 73-year-old Owen Reese Peterson. “During the 21 days I was there … I pled with the medical staff, the senior medical staff, to increase his meds so his bandages could be changed,” Parker told the Tulsa World. “I was met with a stonewall for much of that time.”

Executive Director Myles Deering explained the maggots were discovered while Peterson was alive, but did not cause his death. Rather, the man came into the VA hospital with an infection and died “as a result of the sepsis,” complications from that infection. Nevertheless, Deering must have hated saying the words, “He did not succumb as a result of the parasites.”

That there were any parasites involved is a disgrace, and the staff members who resigned must have known it.

Shane Faulkner, a spokesman for the agency, announced that a physician’s assistant and three nurses “chose to resign before the termination process began.” This followed an investigation once the agency reported the incident to the Oklahoma Department of Health. The VA also submitted a report to the district attorney to see if charges are warranted.

The willing resignation of VA staff is surprising, since “there’s not an ability to fire individuals who aren’t doing their job,” said Cody McGregor, a retired Army sniper and national outreach director at Concerned Veterans for America (CVA). Sharon Helman, former head of the VA in Phoenix, AZ, was one of the first people fired after the VA reform law passed in 2014, but she has been able to sue for her job back, and seems to have won a legal victory.

The case of Owen Reese Peterson underscores the need for real accountability at the VA.

You can tell the regulation beat has reached critical political mass when even the folks at Politico are pushing it on the home page. “Obama’s agencies push flurry of ‘midnight’ actions,” the political website reported recently, adding that Republicans are preparing to block or repeal as many as of these and previous rules as possible.

This effort is going to be a political brawl—not least due to resistance from the bureaucracies in the executive branch and perhaps even some political appointees who go native quickly. If Donald Trump wants the deregulation effort to succeed—and it’s essential to promoting faster growth—he and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus could take a lesson from the Reagan era and appoint a political SWAT team to direct it from the White House.

The temptation will be to leave it to Congress or the office of regulatory affairs at the White House budget office. But the director of that office might not be confirmed for months, even as appointees in the departments find excuses not to move against Obama rules. Those appointees may want to keep their new political power or they might fear the media backlash, which will often be fierce.

The Reagan White House met this challenge by setting up a special task force to run regulatory policy for the first months of 1981. It was led by then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, with a big assist from his general counsel Boyden Gray. Key staff included such policy legends as Jim Miller, who later ran the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and White House budget office; Frank Blake, who would go on to run Home Depot; Jim Tozzi, who would become the ranking career official in the White House regulatory shop; Tim Muris, who ran the FTC under George W. Bush; and Jeffrey Eisenach, now with the American Enterprise Institute.

It’s not too much to say this task force ran much of the government for six months as the new appointees found their sea legs. In one famous February 1981 incident, the general counsels of agencies were called to the White House to review executive order 12291 on regulation. The counsels began to cross out huge chunks until they got to the end and discovered that Ronald Reagan had already signed it. The task force was so successful that Democrats John Dingell and Al Gore hauled some of them up to Capitol Hill for a public scolding.

Democrats also made the director of regulatory affairs subject to Senate confirmation for the first time, so they could haze nominees about opposing new rules. It’s no accident that Reagan was the only recent President to restrain the regulatory state. Neither Bush Administration had any comparable success, and George W. Bush set new records for pages in the Federal Register until President Obama took the crown.