RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Democrat felon voting express train in Virginia hit a sharp curve on Monday when Republican lawmakers went to the state’s highest court to derail it.

Constitutional attorney Charles J. Cooper’s law firm filed a lawsuit on behalf of Republican leaders in the Virginia legislature asking the state Supreme Court to block 206,000 felons from voting in November.

The lawsuit Howell v. McAuliffe states that Democrat Gov. Terry McAuliffe abused the separation of powers in an April 22 executive order that gives a blanket restoration to convicts who’ve completed their sentences.

McAuliffe is countermanding longtime policy, in which Virginia’s governors have restored voting rights by individual cases, the suit states. The felons who received the blanket amnesty include inmates convicted of rape, murder, and other major offenses.

It’s worth noting that McAuliffe, who served as a fundraiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton, ignored the fact that his two predecessors, Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Bob McDonnell, both attempted blanket amnesty for some felons but abided by opinions from state attorneys general ruling this out as unconstitutional.

The current hyper-partisan attorney general, Democrat Mark Herring, who refused to defend the state’s constitutional marriage amendment, has no such qualms, which is why the GOP leaders resorted to the lawsuit.

The lid may finally blow off the Fast and Furious cover-up by the Obama administration, as a federal judge ordered the release of thousands of emails showing how then-attorney general Eric Holder obstructed, stonewalled, and misdirected congressional investigators looking into the program.

People in the Nixon administration went to jail for less.

New York Post:

“The documents reveal how senior Justice Department officials — including Attorney General Holder — intensely followed and managed an effort to carefully limit and obstruct the information produced to Congress,” he asserted.

They also indict Holder deputy Lanny Breuer, an old Clinton hand, who had to step down in 2013 after falsely denying authorizing Fast and Furious.

Their efforts to impede investigations included:

Devising strategies to redact or otherwise withhold relevant information;
Manipulating media coverage to control fallout;
Scapegoating the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) for the scandal.

For instance, a June 2011 e-mail discusses withholding ATF lab reports from Congress, and a July 2011 e-mail details senior Justice officials agreeing to “stay away from a representation that we’ll fully cooperate.”

The top official at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs indicated that the agency should not use the time that veterans wait for medical care as a metric of success because Disney does not measure wait times for theme park rides.

The Washington Examiner first reported that VA Secretary Robert McDonald made the comments during a breakfast meeting with journalists on Monday, more than two years after the agency faced national scrutiny when staffers were found concealing veterans’ wait times using secret lists.VA Secretary Likens Veterans’ Waits to Ride Waits at Disney

“When you go to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? Or what’s important? What’s important is, what’s your satisfaction with the experience?” McDonald said during the Christian Science Monitor event on Monday. “And what I would like to move to, eventually, is that kind of measure.”

McDonald was tapped by President Obama to lead the agency after Eric Shinseki resigned from his post as VA secretary following the wait list scandal in 2014. Dozens of veterans are believed to have died waiting for care at the Phoenix VA hospital system, from where the secret wait lists first emerged.VA Secretary Likens Veterans’ Waits to Ride Waits at Disney

Wait times at the VA have endured renewed scrutiny after reports have shown persisting problems at agency hospitals despite efforts to improve veterans’ care. A Government Accountability Office report released last month found that the VA lacks sufficient oversight to ensure that veterans receive timely care.

The renowned eighteenth century French writer Voltaire is remembered for many of his observations. Among them is: “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.”

Indeed, questions are indispensable to us as we go about our daily lives.

Think about it. We greet each other by asking variations of the question, “How are you?” This is true of virtually all societies and in all languages. When strangers seek entry into our homes we ask variations of, “Who’s there?” and “What do you want?”

Discussions, whether at work or in social situations, are centered around the give and take of questions and answers.

While there may well be an infinite number of questions that can be asked, all questions ultimately seek the answers to six fundamental questions—no matter what the subject is: Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How?

Lawyers who are examining witnesses in court are cautioned to never ask questions that they don’t already know the answers to.

To question authority is to challenge authority—this is the underlying principle of democracies, namely that citizens have the right to challenge their leaders by questioning their qualifications, and their decisions and actions, and consequently hold them accountable.

It is certainly indisputable that many of our politicians from both parties need to be challenged and made accountable!

The educational process in which teachers administer innumerable exams to students and use Socratic methods to help students learn and expand their knowledge and understanding continues to be a set of time-tested instructional techniques. The questions may take the form of multiple choice or essays, but no matter the format of the exam, the process is not unlike the way that the escape artist Harry Houdini managed to unshackle himself and escape from various locked restraints. Reportedly Harry taught himself how to regurgitate keys he had swallowed before being shackled. He then used those keys to open the locks.

The second officer to be tried in the Baltimore prosecutions arising out of Freddie Gray’s death in April 2015 has been acquitted in a bench trial.

The case against the officer, Edward Nero, was among the most inane brought by the incompetent, race-baiting prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby. As we’ve previously recounted, Gray died after suffering a severe spinal injury while in custody in a police van. Back in December, the first officer to be tried, William G. Porter, got a mistrial after a hung jury and is to be retried later this year.

Gray, a 25-year-old African-American man with a police record involving drug charges and minor crimes, was apprehended while acting suspiciously during a police crackdown in a high-crime area of Baltimore. Upon making eye contact with an officer he fled, leading police to chase and stop him, and to find a knife on his person. He was thus arrested. When placed in the van, Gray was wildly uncooperative with police, who did not belt him into his seat.

The medical examiner eventually concluded that police had no intent to harm Gray, and that the deceased would not have sustained his severe injury had he remained in the prone position in which police attempted to place him.Prosecutors reportedly concealed from the defense at Porter’s trial not only that Gray was found to be under the influence of narcotics at the time of his arrest, but also that he had claimed prior back injuries in the weeks prior to his death. Yet Mosby proceeded to charge six police officers, notwithstanding that a competent homicide investigation was not close to being completed. In a demagogic speech announcing the charges, she claimed she was responding to mob cries of “no justice, no peace.”

Mosby’s office has floated the notion that police lacked probable cause to arrest Gray and, therefore (the dangerously incorrect theory goes), that his arrest amounted to unlawful imprisonment.

For what it’s worth, I believe there was probable cause to arrest Gray. Probable cause is a non-technical assessment of the totality of the circumstances as they would be judged by an experienced police officer. Someone in a high-crime area who runs away as if he has just committed a crime upon seeing a police officer has engaged in suspicious behavior justifying an investigative stop; if, upon the frisk that routinely occurs during such a stop, the suspect is found to have a weapon that is illegal under municipal law (as lawyers for the police officers have contended this knife was), that is sufficient cause to make an arrest.

Nevertheless, even if we concede for argument’s sake that the facts of Gray’s arrest may not have risen to probable cause, the law allows the police to make a good-faith mistake of law without being guilty of the crime of false imprisonment.

The media loves to go to places like Birmingham, Newark or Flint and then try to indict us for our “apathy” and for not caring about how badly the people live. But the Democrats they keep electing are why they live that way.

Here’s what’s happening in Birmingham.

Birmingham City Council President Johnathan Austin, fresh from winning re-election to the council’s highest office, this week ordered that all four members of the council who voted against him must move out of their offices at City Hall, and into other spaces on the corridor.

But at least two council members – Kim Rafferty and Valerie Abbott – balked.

“I respectfully decline the reassignment of my office and staff,” Rafferty wrote to Austin Wednesday.

Abbott wrote that she will “not cooperate.”

And all of a sudden duly elected council members were squatters. In their own offices

This morning Council Administrator Cheryl Kidd, on orders from Austin, began the process of having the council members moved out. Kidd sought Public Works employees to physically clear out the offices so Austin supporters Sheila Tyson and Lashunda Scales could move into the spaces deemed more prestigious. Councilmen Jay Roberson and William Parker also were asked move, meaning that all council members would have to move, whether they wanted to or not.

The mayor’s office, which has authority over Public Works and other city workers – including the locksmith – instructed employees to disregard the order.

Austin has his own history of trouble with the law.

Birmingham City Council President Johnathan Austin was arrested on a DUI charge in Mountain Brook, authorities confirmed.

The arrest happened Dec. 19, 2014 but was not made public until today. Mountain Brook police officials said all arrest reports are furnished to the media upon request, and no one requested the report until today.

Birmingham is doing well under this type of management.

With his March 25 Facebook post, CAIR’s Dawud Walid cemented his position as a preacher of hate and radicalism. He has already become known to many Muslims as an extreme figure, who bullies anyone who disagrees with him, maligns dissidents, harasses gay Muslims, and foments anti-American sentiments.

It is beyond denial to ignore the fact that Muslims such as Walid are leading radicalizers of American Muslims, and their efforts are dedicated to pushing vulnerable Muslims away from integration and reform against Islamist movements.

Dawud Walid is the longtime executive director of Michigan’s chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). His Twitter profile currently bills him as a “human rights advocate and political blogger,” and his blog sells him as an imam who lectures on topics such as how to maintain your manners when dealing with hostile people (the irony of this will soon become abundantly clear), and how to address the very real problem of anti-Black racism within the Muslim community.

To anyone less familiar with Walid’s persona — especially online — he could easily appear to be a champion of civil rights, a man before his time in terms of addressing intra-community problems as well as hostilities between Muslims and non-Muslims. A more comprehensive review of his activities — or even just a cursory review of his commentary on one of the days he has chosen to lash out at anyone with whom he disagrees — reveals a more sinister, even cruel, man. Further, his true aim seems not to be civil discourse and community cohesion, but rather the furtherance of a particularly malignant, vicious strain of political Islam.

I have seen Walid demean, bully, and slander other Muslims for years. He has actively worked to silence discussion of critical issues, by working to shut down screenings of Honor Diaries, a film addressing the mistreatment of women in the name of “honor” culture; instigating online hate campaigns and witch hunts against dissidents — women in particular — and pushing Muslims to ostracize those with whom he disagrees. While this behavior has been abhorrent and has brought significant distress and even potential danger to those he has targeted, the broader public has paid little mind.

His most recent tirade on social media, however, may — and should — wake the public up to his real agenda.

On March 25 of this year, Walid took to social media to talk about the Easter holiday, and how he believes Muslims should treat Christians on this day. Rather than using the opportunity to offer best wishes to Christians and condemn the slaughter of Christians by ISIS, Walid urged Muslims not to “encourage infidels” by wishing Christians a “Happy Easter.” His comments were at best hateful, at worst incitement. His is the kind of thinking that leads to attacks such as the one against Christians in Pakistan over Easter, or when the Pakistani Taliban blew up a crowd of mostly women and children of Ahmadi Muslims, or when Asad Shah, stabbed 30 times, was assassinated recently in his store in Glasgow, Scotland, for wishing Christians a Happy Easter.

Obama has asserted, by pure fiat, on no legal, medical, scientific, or commonsense grounds whatsoever, that he can dictate how children use school bathrooms around the country. This is an obnoxious and dangerous abuse of federal power, and it looks suspicious. What is Obama’s motivation?

Adults may not remember the deep shame and embarrassment children often feel, as early as age four, around toilet training. Sibling rivalry can get pretty intense. Being called a “poopy kid” by your brother or sister might look pretty harmless to parents, but young children can experience it as a sink-through-the-floor feeling of overwhelming shame. Getting bowel control is a learning process, and losing bowel control feels like a world-shaking catastrophe to a young child.

Bathrooms are built for privacy because they are surrounded by fear and shame, even after a hundred years of “progressive” theories. Childhood shame around potty training occurs long before the even bigger ups and downs of puberty, another enormously sensitive time “down there.”

Sexuality is an enormous psychic force, not some parlor game. Sexual politics has reshaped generations of young people in Western schools, and from there sexual politics has swept the culture. You can see the results with your own eyes.

Liberals have a long, long history of trivializing the emotional tempests of childhood and adolescence via the myth of “progressive parenting.”

But human biology wins that battle every single time they try to fiddle with the facts of life.

Wise parents just don’t interfere with a child’s turbulent emotional growth; nature is much, much wiser than we are. We can protect children by giving them privacy and emotional support when they ask for it. The growing child is the only judge of what feels comfortable during the most vulnerable years. Leave it to nature. CONTINUE AT SITE

Federal bureaucrats announced earlier this year that they plan to upend the way Medicare Part B pays for drugs. The goal? To save money by getting doctors to alter their treatment choices. That’s bad medicine, flawed economics and destructive public policy—and Congress should pass legislation to stop this ill-conceived experiment.

Medicare plays a crucial role in the lives of more than 55 million Americans. It is the only way some seniors can get access to the drugs that keep them alive. The new policy from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will jeopardize this access by inserting the government between doctors and patients in an unprecedented way.

The idea is to use financial incentives to push doctors to make “value-based care” decisions and prescribe cheaper treatments. Unfortunately, modern-day medicine isn’t as black and white as the administration seems to think. Take cancer care, my specialty. There are very few instances when the substitution of a less expensive cancer drug is appropriate or safe for patients. After all, there is a reason the newer, more advanced drugs—such as those that helped former President Jimmy Carter put his cancer into remission—are considered groundbreaking.

Moreover, it’s hard for doctors to accurately assess what bureaucrats deem to be “valuable,” because no details have been published. How will the government determine if patients can receive drugs or what prices are acceptable? We don’t know. But we are still being asked to allow the experiment to move forward. Don’t worry, bureaucrats say, the government will get things right and won’t leave cancer patients fighting for access to treatment.

More than 300 cancer clinics have closed over the past decade, as Medicare has shrunk payments for cancer care, according to the Community Oncology Alliance. CONTINUE AT SITE

The constitutional challenge to President Obama’s executive action on immigration keeps getting more remarkable. A federal judge has now exposed how the Justice Department systematically deceived lower courts about the Administration’s conduct, and he has imposed unprecedented legal measures to attempt to sterilize this ethics rot.

On Thursday District Judge Andrew Hanen of Texas found that Obama Administration lawyers committed misconduct that he called “intentional, serious and material.” In 2015 he issued an injunction—now in front of the Supreme Court—blocking Mr. Obama’s 2014 order that rewrote immigration law to award legal status and federal and state benefits to nearly five million aliens.

When 26 states sued to block the order in December 2014, Justice repeatedly assured Judge Hanen that the Department of Homeland Security would not start processing applications until February 2015 at the earliest. Two weeks after the injunction came down, in March, Justice was forced to admit that DHS had already granted or renewed more than 100,000 permits.

Justice has also conceded in legal filings that all its lawyers knew all along that the DHS program was underway, despite what they said in briefs and hearings. One DOJ lawyer told Judge Hanen that “I really would not expect anything between now and the date of the hearing.” As the judge notes, “How the government can categorize the granting of over 100,000 applications as not being ‘anything’ is beyond comprehension.”

Justice’s only explanation is that its lawyers either “lost focus on the fact” or “the fact receded in memory or awareness”—the fact here being realities that the DOJ was required to disclose to the court. The states weren’t able to make certain arguments or seek certain legal remedies because the program supposedly hadn’t been implemented, leaving them in a weaker legal position.

More to the point, an attorney’s first and most basic judicial obligation is to tell the truth. Judge Hanen concludes that the misrepresentations “were made in bad faith” and “it is hard to imagine a more serious, more calculated plan of unethical conduct.” Many a lawyer has been disbarred for less. CONTINUE AT SITE