RUTHFULLY YOURS

In what was surely the most sickening display of presidential demagoguery in the history of the United States, President Obama wept – wept – crocodile tears in a calculated effort to gain the support of the ignorant, the clueless, and the stupid while announcing multiple violations of the Bill of Rights yesterday.

Obama’s speech alternated between effeminate weeping, pleading, and sanctimonious, holier-than-thou indignation as he presented a litany of falsehoods, straw man arguments, and outright lies as justification for his plan to strip the American public of constitutionally enumerated rights:

The “Gun Show Loophole” Lie: There is no “gun show loophole.” Contrary to leftist mythology, criminals and terrorists don’t skirt existing laws and purchase crateloads of guns at gun shows. Probably 95% or more of the vendors at gun shows are licensed dealers, who have to abide by the same federal regulations as they do in brick-and-mortar stores. Individual sellers who make an occasional sale are exempt from dealer regulations. Has Obama ever been to an actual gun show? The problem is not that there are too many individual sellers, but too few – dealers often charge inflated prices, while the individual offering a great deal because he needs a few bucks quick is a rarity.

Obama’s real plan is to ultimately ban all private sales (including between family members) so that a paper trail exists on as many firearms as possible to facilitate government confiscation.

The “Internet Gun Sales” Lie: Criminals do not buy guns on the internet. It is literally impossible to buy guns direct on the internet and have them shipped to your house. Even James Comey, director of the FBI, was ignorant of this fact when testifying before Congress recently. Like gun shows, 95% or more of the guns advertised on the internet are advertised by licensed dealers who must comply with federal law. Any transaction between private individuals that crosses state lines must be performed by a licensed dealer in the buyer’s state. Under existing law, the internet can be used only to advertise guns, not supply them directly to a non-dealer.
The “Background Check” Lie: The Constitution does not actually use the phrase “innocent until proven guilty”; that concept is articulated by the Fifth Amendment, which says that the government shall not deprive citizens of “life, liberty, or property” without “due process of law” – meaning that the burden of proof always rests with the government before one’s rights can be suspended. Background checks on gun buyers, which have been in effect for 20 years, are a violation of the Due Process Clause because they require the individual to get clearance from the government before he exercises his Second Amendment rights. Can you imagine government requiring a background check before you vote? Before you publish a newspaper article? Before you preach a sermon? Before you hire a lawyer? Of course not. The leftist emphasis on background checks is merely a foot-in-the-door enabling the government to steadily expand the criterion by which it may preemptively suspend your rights. This is precisely the danger posed by Obama’s plan to conscript physicians into agents of the government for the purpose of entering your medical diagnoses into the background check system.

Congress returns to work this week, and for once those words shouldn’t trigger a panic attack. As early as Wednesday the House will vote to send a bill repealing most of ObamaCare to President Obama, and this may become a consequential moment, assuming Republicans are prepared to make an argument.

Some on the left and right are dismissing the move as pointless because Mr. Obama will veto the measure, and of course he will, but repeal has never before reached his desk. Since the GOP won the House in 2010, Senate Democrats have filibustered health-care improvements and shielded the President, and their obstruction has continued even after they were reduced to a minority.
Republicans are now using the special “reconciliation” procedure that allows a budget bill to pass with a simple majority—which can only be used once a year—to get around Harry Reid’s bone yard. Kvetchers on the right who say the Congress never does anything should be pleased, unless their griping was merely for political show.

This achievement is all the more notable for traveling through the regular channels of constitutional government, without Armageddon-style confrontations or blowing up century-old Senate rules, as some activists have demanded. The bill passed through patient, unglamorous legislative work, with House and Senate Republicans working together to make policy advances instead of degenerating into infighting and recriminations as usual.

Prior to World War II the U.S. Department of Labor was charged with enforcing and administering our immigration laws. It was understood that flooding the U.S. labor pool with foreign workers would force American workers to compete with those foreign workers who would be willing to work for much lower wages. This would depress wages and cost many Americans their jobs.

The enforcement of our immigration laws played an important role in creating America’s unusually large and upwardly mobile middle class, which in turn, gave rise to “The American Dream.”

The authority for the enforcement and administration of our immigration laws was shifted to the Department of Justice during the Second World War when concerns shifted to enemy spies and saboteurs entering the United States.

For our enemies, going behind the “enemy lines” meant the borders of the United States whether they existed along our northern or southern borders, along our tens of thousands of miles of meandering coastline or even by entering the United States through international airports.

In the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 the responsibility for the enforcement of our immigration laws was shifted from the Department of Justice to the newly created Department of Homeland Security- once again reaffirming the nexus between immigration and national security. However, under DHS the enforcement of our immigration laws was hobbled by splitting the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) into several unwieldy components and blending those components with other agencies.

Wiping away tears that eluded him when he spoke about the jihadist massacres in Paris and San Bernardino, President Obama condemned congressional inaction in the face of gun violence during remarks he delivered from the East Room of the White House on Tuesday morning. The president vowed to fill in the void through executive action. The most egregious of these measures is a wholesale re-writing of the definition of what constitutes a “seller” in order to extend the reach of federal government control over all gun owners. Obama listed this as his top priority action, ahead of what he described as “smart and effective enforcement of gun safety laws that are already on the books.”

Enforcing the laws already on the books is the responsibility of the executive branch. Making new laws or changing existing laws is the responsibility of the legislative branch.

Apparently, President Obama has learned nothing from the Supreme Court’s reversal of his unconstitutional recess appointments and the judicial stay issued against his unconstitutional immigration amnesty executive orders. Obama gave little comfort to skeptics when he claimed in his White House remarks that “I believe in the Second Amendment. It’s there written on the paper.”

The proble

As part of his effort to reduce gun violence, President Obama issued an executive order today that makes it easier to prohibit a small group of the most seriously mentally ill from owning firearms and provides $500 million in additional mental-health funding. The order’s mental-illness–focused gun-control provisions are smart and narrowly tailored to affect only the most seriously ill individuals. But its additional funding won’t go where it could make a difference.

The mental-health industry teaches the public­ that, as President Obama put it, ‘the mentally ill are not more violent than others.’ But that platitude does not apply to the most seriously ill when they are allowed to go untreated. Eighteen percent of the population has some form of “mental-health issue” and is not violent. But 4 percent of the population has serious mental illness, which, left untreated, causes them to be more violent than others. While gun violence is rare, and mass violence by the seriously ill is even rarer, no one outside the NRA and the politically correct mental-health industry believes the seriously mentally ill should have access to weapons.

Tick, tick, tick…the highly suspicious deal that gave Bill Clinton’s billionaire buddy Jeffrey Epstein a slap on the wrist for paying underage girls for sex may finally be subjected to pubic scrutiny and even overturned, bringing with it the possibility of bargaining against real punishment in exchange for testimony against a bigger fish. This development is thanks to a court filing on the last day of 2015 that received only limited local publicity. More on that in a moment.

Shockingly, the deal that handed out token punishment to the statutory rapist has been hidden from the public and from the victims themselves:

Federal prosecutors in Florida intentionally kept underage victims of billionaire perv Jeffrey Epstein in the dark about his plea deal, newly unsealed court papers reveal.

The documents also show prosecutors wanted to keep the extent of Epstein’s alleged sex crimes away from a judge reviewing the deal.

“I will include our standard language regarding resolving all criminal liability and I will mention ‘co-conspirators,’ but I would prefer not to highlight for the judge all of the other crimes and all of the other persons that we could charge,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Marie Villafana wrote to one Epstein lawyer in September 2007.

Another email shows she agreed to stop sending notifications about the non-prosecution deal to 34 underage girls Epstein allegedly sexually preyed upon after his lawyers complained.

New York is now home to seven of the 100 tallest buildings in the world. The current building campaign will produce five more.

The flurry of high-rise tower construction now under way in New York will bring about a quantum leap in density, one that will forever change our urban environment. The city is now home to seven of the 100 tallest buildings in the world. The current building campaign will produce five more. They are a reminder that towers have become the dominant building type in most major cities around the world, increasing congestion as they accumulate.

These developments raise fundamental questions: How crowded should or can cities get? What should be driving tower design, be it residential, commercial or mixed use? Are our current planning and zoning regulations adequate in guiding this growth, in mitigating the impact of density? Or do we need new tools for a new era of mega-scale construction? Finally, towers create fundamental questions about the nature and character of the public realm.

Neither the prevailing tower designs nor current planning practice world-wide are able to cope with the new reality. The quality of life within towers is wanting. We still treat them, at best, as sculpture, and at worst, as utilitarian vertical extrusions of space. Many towers are designed from the outside in— elegant forms with decorative skins, hermetically sealed from the outside world. If instead they were designed as living, organic environments—with considerations of orientation, views, light and the capability to connect to the outdoors, creating terraces, gardens and solariums—tower designs would be dramatically transformed. The work space must also be rethought. Natural ventilation, diversity of workspaces and a connection to the exterior are all qualities that would help overcome the oppression of scale and crowding.