RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Contrary to the MSM pack’s pitch of the week, there is no “disarray” inside Donald Trump’s transition team, no “Stalinesque” purges, and most certainly no successful insinuation of “adults” (Deep State operatives) into the list of early major appointees. They are all excellent.
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions as Trump’s attorney general, Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo as his chief of the CIA, and retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn as the national security adviser will be loyal team players who share the incoming President’s vision of America’s future in general, and her true geostrategic interests in particular. The discredited MSM’s hysterics notwithstanding, the former two will be duly confirmed by the GOP controlled Senate. (Flynn needs no confirmation.)

Sessions (69)—the first Senator to support Trump last February—said he was honored to “enthusiastically embrace President-elect Trump’s vision for ‘one America,’ and his commitment to equal justice under law.” To Sessions this will mean no amnesty, no “dreamers,” no “sanctuaries,” and no exceptions. He knows that illegal aliens have no constitutional rights, and he will act upon that knowledge. After that Jihadist’s gay club slaughter in Orlando last June he pointed out—en passant—that more than 90% of recent Muslim immigrants are on food stamps and almost 70% on cash welfare. A good man. He has “sparked controversy” indeed, but only within the devastated ruins of the Duopoly. He will breezily sail through the nomination process (and forget his alleged “racist remarks”): Even Ted Cruz (a rumored rival for the post) called his nomination “great news for all of us who revere the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Mike Pompeo, top-of-the-class West Point valedictorian and a Harvard Law School graduate, was a beneficiary of the Tea Party 2010 midterm blitz. He is skeptical of the Iran nuclear deal (a minor flaw) who knows the score on the September 2011 Benghazi affair (a major insight into the Deep State’s self-defeating shenanigans). Pompeo will not fine-tune intelligence analysis to conform with the Beltway “foreign policy community” imperial consensus. He will let the pros do their job: Had they been able to do so in 2002-2003, there would have been no Iraq disaster. He is, of course, another “troubling” and “controversial” choice as far as the losers are concerned, but that does not matter any longer. He will be confirmed.

(JTA) — Eric Greitens, a former Navy SEAL whose seven military awards include the Bronze Star, has become the first Jewish governor of Missouri.

Greitens, 42, a Republican, also is a former Rhodes scholar and the founder of The Mission Continues, a nonprofit that helps veterans integrate themselves back into their communities through volunteer work.

On Tuesday, Greitens — who emphasized he would rid the state capital, Jefferson City, of “bad ethics” — defeated Democrat Chris Koster with 51 percent of the vote. His opponent, the state’s attorney general, received 45 percent.

“Tonight, we did more than win an election; we restored power to the people and we took our state back!” Greitens told supporters at a hotel in Chesterfield, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

A former Democrat, Greitens positioned himself as a conservative who wasn’t a “career politician.” It was his first run for office.

“I became a conservative because I believe that caring for people means more than just spending taxpayer money; it means delivering results,” he wrote in an opinion piece for Fox News in July 2015.

Greitens, a Purple Heart recipient, served in Iraq from 2003 to 2007. His fourth book, “Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life” — a collection of inspirational letters to a fellow Navy SEAL struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder — was published in March 2015.

Donald Trump’s election is above all else a rebellion of the voters against identity politics enforced by political correctness, and it opens the way to a new politics of moderate levels of immigration, patriotic assimilation, and, in foreign policy, the defense of U.S. sovereignty. In the past few months, Trump put together a winning electoral coalition that stressed the unity and common interests of all Americans across the full spectrum of policy, from immigration to diplomacy.

Because of Trump’s electoral success, this combination of policies rooted in the national interest and patriotism has suddenly begun to sound like common sense. That was not so only yesterday, when political correctness made it hard even to examine such ideas as “multiculturalism.” In February, David Gelernter stated that the “havoc” that political correctness “has wreaked for 40 years [has been made] worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it.” Indeed, he noted, “only Trump has the common sense to mention the elephant in the room. Naturally he is winning.” Defeating political correctness — or, in positive terms, expanding real freedom of speech — made it possible to raise other issues that worried the voters but that a bland bipartisan consensus pushed to the sidelines.

Once that happened, it became clear that the room was simply packed with elephants: multiculturalism, diversity, bilingualism, identity politics, political correctness itself, and much more, extending to the wilder shores of gender politics. All of these were involved in the progressive project of “fundamentally transforming” America. All of them acquired corporate and establishment support almost magically. But the major driver of this project was mass immigration without assimilation. Since the fight over the Gang of Eight immigration bill in 2013, patriotic and populist opposition to amnesty and to increases in low-skilled immigration has intensified. But Republicans in general, and presidential candidates in particular, were late to the party. Except for Senator Jeff Sessions, who led the fight in Congress, and Donald Trump, who did so in the primaries, professional Republicans at all levels — donors, consultants, candidates, and incumbents — were bullied away from raising the issue, for fear of being thought unrespectable. Even some conservatives felt the same.

And then Trump’s bold grasp of the immigration issue propelled him to the GOP’s presidential nomination. Though other issues are important here, no other single one explains his rise as clearly or as simply. So conservatives had (and have) to deal with it.

In its relatively brief life, American conservatism has been built on three groups: economic conservatives (fiscal restraint, limited government); social conservatives (faith, family values); and national conservatives (immigration, law and order, the social fabric — i.e., national cohesion as well as national security). All of these factions are the grandchildren of the early years of National Review: Hayekian libertarians, Kirkian traditionalists, and Burnhamite nationalists concerned at times with national strategy, at others with combating national decay. All are key to it.