RUTHFULLY YOURS

You’ve probably never heard of Sebring, Ohio. Despite tainted water, which the EPA knew about for months before the public did, shipments of water bottles for the angry residents, two EPA employees being put on leave, and all the other elements of a scandal, it was missing something.

Sebring is 98% white. Ohio governor John Kasich is a Republican, but currently favored by the media. So talk of Sebring being the next Flint remained just that.

St. Joseph, Louisiana might have been the other “next Flint,” but before long Louisiana had elected a Democratic governor. St Joe’s is mostly black and there are no Republicans in sight to blame for its water crisis. Plenty of villages, towns and cities have tainted water. The cause is usually local, but the media is only interested if it has the right victims and the right villain for its manufactured drama.

The closest counterpart to the media’s wildly dishonest coverage of Flint’s water troubles was its Katrina reporting. Even though New Orleans had an incompetent Democratic mayor, who would be sent to jail, and a Democratic governor, all the blame was directed at the Republican president. The crisis coverage was filled with hyperbolic exaggeration in which Brian Williams’ own lies garnered no attention. New Orleans was a post-apocalyptic hell on earth where the residents had devolved to cannibalism. All because of Bush. The Flint coverage is the old Katrina coverage with Snyder swapped out for Bush.

If Romney had won the last election, Flint would be his fault. But with Democrats in the White House and in Flint, the media chose the lone Republican in the middle. It had no interest in asking questions about the EPA’s slow response to the crisis or in investigating local Flint politicians.

These included Councilman Wantwaz Davis, a convicted killer, whom the media celebrated as the hero of the Flint crisis, while dismissing his time in jail for murder. Davis was expert at getting media attention by playing up his background and denouncing the tainted water as “genocide”.

Zakia Nasrin was a promising student growing up in a pleasant suburb of Columbus, Ohio, after arriving here with her family in 2000 from Bangladesh. She graduated high school as valedictorian. She later enrolled at Ohio State University in a pre-med program after marrying Jaffrey Khan, who grew up in a tony neighborhood in Silicon Valley.

In May 2014, Zakia, Jaffrey, and Zakia’s younger brother Rasel Raihan traveled to the capital city of the Islamic State: Raqqa, Syria. According to U.S. intelligence officials, Rasel was killed there.

That’s the story related in a report published by NBC News yesterday on documents obtained from an ISIS defector showing registration forms of would-be fighters looking to join the group. The registration forms included 15 Americans; two were Jaffrey and Rasel.

This report raises several alarming issues.

According to NBC News, Jaffrey and Rasel were already known as extremists by the FBI after an informant’s tip. Suspicions were further raised when Jaffrey and Zakia claimed to have “lost” their passports while in Kenya. Rasel admitted to friends that he had been interviewed by the FBI. The report also claims that they were indeed on the terror watch list.

This is a recurring problem I’ve repeatedly identified here at PJ Media as “known wolf” terrorism: again and again, individuals who engage in terrorism or join terrorist groups are already known to law enforcement and national security agencies.

Why were these individuals allowed to slip into Syria? CONTINUE AT SITE

The directive on bathroom facilities for transgender students, sent last Friday by the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education to every public school district in the country, is not the first time the Obama Administration has swept American institutions under its administrative control.

In April 2011 Education, backed by Justice, sent every institution of higher learning what has come to be known in academia as the “Dear Colleague” letter. They don’t mean that in a friendly way. That 19-page letter described how the feds wanted every college and university to comply with the Administration’s expanding definition of Title IX requirements on sexual harassment. The letter wasn’t a law or even a regulation. It was described as “guidance.” As the nation’s public schools learned Friday, this gives “guidance” new meaning.
That meaning is that the Obama Administration intends to obliterate what is left of federalism, the principle that states retain powers not delegated to the national government. How else can one interpret Friday’s “guidance” on bathrooms, locker rooms and sports teams to public grade schools and high schools, long considered a symbol of local control?

The Administration’s letter to its “colleagues” in the nation’s public schools brings to mind Little Red Riding Hood, standing innocently before the large, smiling figure in granny clothes, except for the disconcertingly big, sharp teeth. The Obama teeth emerge on page two of the Education Department’s letter: “As a condition of receiving Federal funds . . .” Yes, unless the schools “treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for the purposes of Title IX,” the school district may lose federal funds. CONTINUE AT SITE

Support for, or opposition to, mass immigration is apparently a class issue, not an ethnic or racial issue. Elites more often support lenient immigration policies; the general public typically opposes them.

At the top of the list are Mexico’s elites. Illegal immigration results in an estimated $25 billion sent back in remittances to Mexico each year. The Mexican government worries more about remittances, the country’s No. 1 source of foreign exchange, than it does about its low-paid citizens who are in the U.S., scrimping to send money back home. Remittances also excuse the Mexican government from restructuring the economy or budgeting for anti-poverty programs.

Mexico sees the U.S. the way 19th-century elites in this country saw the American frontier: as a valuable escape hatch for the discontented and unhappy, who could flee rather than stay home and demand long-needed changes.

American employers in a number of industries — construction, manufacturing, hospitality, and others — have long favored illegal immigration. Low-wage labor cuts costs: The larger the pool of undocumented immigrants, the less pressure to raise wages. That was why Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers in the 1970s occasionally patrolled the southern border in its vigilante-style “illegals campaign” to keep out undocumented immigrants while opposing guest-worker programs.

Moreover, the additional social expense associated with millions of undocumented workers — in rising health-care, legal, education, and law-enforcement costs — is usually picked up by the public taxpayer, not by employers.

Ethnic elites also favor lax immigration policies. For all the caricatures of the old melting pot, millions of legal immigrants still rapidly assimilate, integrate, and intermarry. Often within two generations of arrival, they blend indistinguishably into the general population and drop their hyphenated and accented nomenclature. But when immigration is mostly illegal, in great numbers, and without ethnic diversity, assimilation stalls. Instead, a near-permanent pool of undocumented migrants offers a political opportunity for activists to provide them with collective representation.

We’re living in the enlightened future so we know that applying the death penalty to the Muslim murderers of Americans is a form of outmoded barbarism. All right-thinking people know that it should be reserved for…

1. Critics of the administration

2. Women who don’t want men using the ladies room

3. Republicans in general

Not the mastermind of the murder of an American ambassador.

The Justice Department will not seek the death penalty against the Libyan militant charged in the Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans, federal officials have announced.

Ahmed Abu Khattala has been awaiting trial in federal court in Washington in connection with the September 2012 violence at a diplomatic compound in Benghazi that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.

His attorneys had been imploring the Justice Department to remove the death penalty as a possibility if Khattala is ultimately convicted at trial.

On Tuesday, the department revealed its decision in a court filing that provided no explanation.

Charlie Brown used to run a fortified crack house in South Providence. Surveillance cameras kept an eye out for cops and a steel-reinforced door was built to keep them out. Brown had been dealing drugs for at least nine years. He had two previous drug convictions dating back to his twenties. His drug money was used to buy real estate, renovating and renting out the houses that he wasn’t using to sell drugs.

Despite all that, Brown’s lawyers tried to suggest that he lacked the “mental capacity” to understand his criminal case and suffered from lead poisoning. Mental capacity, often blamed on lead poisoning, is to modern criminal defense attorneys what phony claims of insanity used to be decades earlier.

But it didn’t work. Brown stayed in jail. Until Obama commuted his sentence.

Providence police Lt. Thomas Verdi had said, “These three defendants are notorious in Providence. This sends a message — that these individuals who are dealing drugs and involved in violent crimes will be apprehended and face serious, serious prison sentences — not locally, but in the federal system.”

He would have had better luck locally because Brown will be out next year. And he’ll be far from alone.

Artrez Nyroby Seymour was part of The Organization, a group of crack dealers in Chicago Heights that modeled their operation after the movie New Jack City. The Organization operated outside an elementary school whose children were never allowed out to play out of fear of its drug dealers.

Six months ago, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issued a subpoena demanding that Exxon Mobil turn over records concerning its research on climate change. In March, Mr. Schneiderman took the predictable next step, announcing that a coalition of attorneys general will hold fossil fuel companies accountable. “The First Amendment, ladies and gentlemen, does not give you the right to commit fraud,” he said.

The threat to scientific inquiry and political speech is obvious. Not so widely recognized is the underlying violation of due process. Start with the fact that Mr. Schneiderman and the other attorneys general have relied, as their opening move, on a nonjudicial subpoena to force the disclosure of information.

Traditionally, federal and state governments could demand testimony, papers or other information in only very limited ways. A legislative committee could call witnesses and insist that they appear and testify. But an attorney general who wanted to rifle through a private company’s filing cabinet had to get a warrant signed by a judge based on probable cause, or had to ask a court overseeing a grand jury to issue a subpoena.

Otherwise the attorney general had to wait until he brought civil or criminal charges, and in a criminal case he could get only a very limited version of discovery. As the founding generation knew from experience, government demands for papers could be dangerous.

Much has changed over the past century. When civil discovery of evidence, now a common process, evolved in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some states, for the sake of convenience, allowed subpoenas for such purposes to be signed not by judges, but by clerks, and then even by parties in cases. The subpoena power thus began to drift out of the hands of the judiciary. CONTINUE AT SITE

Despite public outcry, new federal data shows that 2014 and 2015 were peak years for shipments of surplus military gear to local police departments across America.

This week our organization released the study, OpenTheBooks Snapshot Report – The Militarization of Local Police Departments, that quantified the transfer of 1.5 million weapons-related items from the Department of Defense (DoD) to federal, state and local law enforcement since 2006. New federal records show police agencies in Florida, Texas, California, Tennessee and Arizona led the nation in procuring surplus military-weaponry from the DoD over the last 10 years.

We found a federally-sponsored ‘gun show’ that never ends: small town police are armed with M16 and M14 rifles, night-vision googles, bayonets and armored trucks; junior colleges and county sheriffs procured mine-resistant vehicles (MRVs); even local park districts and forest preserves stocked up on military-style equipment.
The 1033 Program created by the National Defense Authorization Act (1997) authorized the transfer of excess military equipment to civilian law enforcement.

The 1033 Program created by the National Defense Authorization Act (1997) authorized the transfer of excess military equipment to civilian law enforcement.

In total, our new data reveals $2.2 billion worth of military gear including helicopters and airplanes, armored trucks and cars, tens of thousands of M16 and M14 rifles, thousands of bayonets, mine detectors and many other types of weaponry.

Thousands of units of government across America received military equipment. Using our mapping technology, citizens can quickly search the military ‘gun lockers’ of your local government: park districts, forest preserves, hometown police departments, junior colleges, universities, county sheriffs, natural resource and public safety departments, state police – and Homeland Security, Interior and the Justice Department – across any ZIP code.

In a terse submission to the federal district court in Washington, D.C., the Obama Justice Department has announced that it will not seek the death penalty against Ahmed Abu Khatallah. He is the only terrorist charged in the Benghazi massacre of September 11, 2012, in which U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other American officials were killed in an attack carried out by dozens of jihadists.

Government lawyers provided no explanation for this decision. If you are wondering whether politics played a role in it, you have good reason to be suspicious.

On the face of it, Khatallah is a textbook case for capital punishment. The Benghazi indictment alleges that he willfully and maliciously caused the death of Americans in a terrorist attack that he helped coordinate. The facts of his offense check several of the “aggravating factor” boxes in federal death-penalty law. There is, moreover, a national-security component, inherent not only in the Benghazi atrocity itself but in the perverse incentive that the government’s failure to seek an available death sentence would create for others considering mass-murder attacks against American installations overseas.

In addition, terrorists imprisoned by the United States after being prosecuted for successful attacks against America become iconic figures in the jihad. As long as they live, they can and do inspire more attacks, recruitment, and fundraising.

Thus, legal and national-security considerations militate in favor of seeking capital punishment. Remember, Mr. Stevens was the first U.S. ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979. An attack on our ambassador and on sovereign American facilities abroad is an act of war against the United States. Since national security is the core responsibility of the federal government, there can be no federal offense more worthy of capital treatment.

We are talking about the Obama administration, though, so there are always political considerations. And when it comes to Benghazi, they always take precedence.

A criminal trial is an opportunity for a defendant to challenge the government’s version of events. It is not like a press conference or a congressional hearing, at which administration officials can get away with spin and stonewalling. Presided over by an independent judiciary applying rigorous rules of due process, criminal trials arm highly capable defense lawyers with copious discovery of the government’s files and legal avenues to demand further disclosures. And because of the life-and-death stakes of death-penalty litigation, federal law gives no one more ample opportunity to test the government’s story than a death-penalty defendant.

In a 2–1 panel ruling in mid April, a federal appellate court decided (or at least seemed to think that it decided) that G.G., a girl who identifies herself as male, has a legal right to use the boys’ restrooms at her high school in rural Gloucester County, Va. In so doing, the panel’s majority, consisting of two appointees of President Obama, kowtowed to the Obama administration’s radical claim that federal law requires any college or school that receives federal funding to make its single-sex restrooms, locker rooms, showers, housing, and sports teams available to “transgender students consistent with their gender identity.”

Never has a more brazen and aggressive bureaucratic misreading of federal law encountered a more craven and confused judicial reception.

In 1972, Congress enacted the federal law known as Title IX. Title IX provides generally that no school that receives federal funding — a category that includes public grade schools and high schools as well as nearly all colleges, public or private — may “discriminat[e]” “on the basis of sex.” Everyone understood from the beginning, and the Obama administration still agrees, that Title IX allows schools to have single-sex restrooms, locker rooms, and showers. A regulation dating from 1975 says exactly that — a school “may provide separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex” — and goes on to specify only that “such facilities provided for students of one sex shall be comparable to such facilities provided for students of the other sex” (emphasis added).

Pushing the transgender agenda through the entire alphabet of the federal bureaucracy has been a high priority for the administration in President Obama’s second term. So it was that in January 2015 an obscure functionary named James A. Ferg-Cadima, in his temporary capacity as acting deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Education, signed his name to a letter and sent that letter to G.G. (and to various transgender activists). In his letter, Ferg-Cadima made two cursory legal claims on behalf of the department. First, he declared that Title IX’s ban on discrimination on the basis of sex includes a ban on discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Second, he asserted that schools that provide “sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, athletic teams, and single-sex classes” must “treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.”

RELATED: The Obama Administration Provokes a War against North Carolina

Ponder for a moment some examples of what Ferg-Cadima’s second claim means for schools that receive federal funding. A young man who says his gender identity is female must be offered a college dormitory room with roommates who are women (irrespective of the wishes of those roommates). An athlete who is biologically male in all respects must be allowed to compete for a position on a women’s sports team if he identifies himself as female. A first-grade girl who thinks she’s a boy can use the boys’ bathroom. And, yes, high-school boys who say they’re transgender girls may use the girls’ locker rooms and showers on the same terms, and at the same time, as the girls do — and vice versa, of course, for girls who say they’re transgender boys.