RUTHFULLY YOURS

A pro-choice voter in New Hampshire had a question for John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, who was making the rounds as a presidential candidate: Would he “respect” Roe v. Wade even though he is a pro-lifer? Kasich answered, “Obviously, it’s the law of the land now, and we live with the law of the land.”

Whether he knew it or not, Kasich had wandered into a debate over the courts, one in which some of the other presidential candidates are also participants. Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, has denounced “judicial tyranny.” When five justices ruled that the Constitution requires governments to recognize same-sex marriage, he scoffed that the Supreme Court was not “the Supreme Being.”

It’s an often-heated debate. Huckabee’s side says that the courts have established a “judicial supremacy” at odds with the actual constitutional design; the other side says that people like Huckabee are threatening the rule of law. Both sides have some reasonable points, and both could profit from conducting the debate at a lower level of abstraction.

As the administrative state distorts America’s constitutional architecture, Clarence Thomas becomes America’s indispensable constitutionalist. Now in his 25th year on the Supreme Court, he is urging the judicial branch to limit the legislative branch’s practice of delegating its power to the executive branch.

In four opinions in 112 days between March 9 and June 29, Thomas indicted the increasing incoherence of the Court’s separation-of-powers jurisprudence. This subject is central to today’s argument between constitutionalists and progressives. The former favor and the latter oppose holding Congress to its responsibilities and restricting executive discretion.

“The Constitution,” Thomas notes, “does not vest the federal government with an undifferentiated ‘governmental power.’” It vests three distinguishable types of power in three different branches. The Court, Thomas says, has the “judicial duty” to enforce the Vesting Clauses as absolute and exclusive by policing the branches’ boundaries.

A Chicago police officer has been charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager who was wielding a knife and who had PCP in his system. Chicago authorities apparently went to some trouble to sweep the case under the rug: A $5 million settlement to his family already had been approved; the officer wasn’t charged until nearly a year after the fact; a police-camera video of the shooting was suppressed for more than a year, until an FOIA lawsuit forced its release.

Chicago is a city under impeccably progressive governance. Its mayor is Rahm Emanuel, former right hand to President Barack Obama. So in response to the shooting of a young black hooligan by a police officer in one of the nation’s most corrupt cities and the dodgy handling of that by the city’s Democratic mayor, we have a thousand protesters harassing shoppers and blocking retailers’ entrances down on the Magnificent Mile, wherein is found Neiman Marcus and Cartier.

It takes a special kind of nose to detect the connection between Cartier shoppers, police shootings of young black criminals elsewhere in Chicago, and the municipal maladministration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, but such a nose has the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who can sniff out a payday with the reliability of a French hog hunting truffles. Our friends in the community-organizing racket — whether from Chicago’s South Side or the campus of Yale — are a remarkably consistent bunch: Whatever the real or perceived social problem, the answer is the same: Write a very large check that eventually will make its way into the pockets of such people and organizations as those that organize these protests.

In his 1954 book entitled Today’s Isms: Communism, Fascism, Socialism, Capitalism, Dr. William Ebenstein cogently describes the various “isms” that continue to convulse the world

As personal liberty is eroded in this country and Americans are uninformed about the “violence and terror of totalitarian communism and fascism,” a reflection of Ebenstein’s ideas is very much warranted.

When countering whether fascism is a threat to democratic nations, Ebenstein maintains that “the danger in a democracy like the United States is not outright fascism … but the insidious and unnoticed corroding of democratic habits[.]” Consider the burgeoning growth of intolerance against dissenting ideas that permeates so many American universities.

Ebenstein maintains that “the danger of not recognizing this pre-fascist attitude is that, should it become full fledged fascism (as it well might in an economic depression or in some other disaster of the sort that periodically shakes men’s faith in democracy) recognition of it as a threat may come too late for those whose earlier judgment was too lenient.” That so many people cannot see the inherent danger of a Bernie Sanders is disturbing. Matthew Vadum has written:

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/11/28/colin-flaherty-on-dont-make-the-black-kids-angry-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Colin Flaherty, the author of the best-seller, White Girl Bleed A Lot, and the author of the new book, ‘Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry’: The hoax of black victimization and those who enable it. [See Colin discuss White Girl Bleed A Lot on The Glazov Gang HERE].

He came on the show to discuss ‘Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry’.

Don’t miss it!

After decades of failure, maybe government should get out of the business of giving dietary advice.

With the release of the eighth edition of the U.S. government’s Dietary Guidelines expected by year’s end, it seems reasonable to consider—with the “obesity plague” upon us and Americans arguably less healthy than ever before—whether the guidelines are to be trusted and even whether they have done more harm than good.

Many Americans have lost trust in the science behind the guidelines since they seem to change dramatically every five years. In February, for example, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee declared that certain fats and eggs are no longer the enemy and that cholesterol is “not considered a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.” This, after decades of advising Americans to “watch their cholesterol.”

Such controversy is nothing new. U.S. Dietary Guidelines were first released by the Agriculture Department and the Department of Health and Human Services in 1980. One nutrition expert at the time, Edward “Pete” Ahrens, a groundbreaking researcher on fat and cholesterol metabolism, called the guidelines “a nutritional experiment with the American public as subjects . . . treating them like a homogeneous group of Sprague-Dawley rats.”

Obama recently decided to effectively suspend enforcement of immigration law and unilaterally legalize huge numbers of illegal aliens. But one of his minions is sending around letters threatening states who refuse to accept his army of Syrian migrants, at least 13% of which poll as supporting ISIS. That means out of his first 10,000 Syrians, over a thousand would be ISIS supporters.

States are required to provide “assistance and services … to refugees without regard to race, religion, nationality, sex or political position” according to the Refugee Act of 1980, the letter points out.

“States may not deny ORR-funded benefits and services to refugees based on a refugee’s country of origin or religious affiliation,” the letter states. “Accordingly, states may not deny ORR-funded benefits and services to Syrian refugees.” States that do not comply with these terms are subject to “enforcement action, including suspension or termination.”

According to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination based on race or origin is against the law in all programs that receive federally-funded assistance, the letter adds.

Of course immigration policy precisely discriminates against immigrants based on their country of origin or religious affiliation, since the latter is used to determine quotas, while the former is used to verify claims of religious persecution.

Obama is claiming that the Civil Rights Act applies to immigration policy at the State level, but not the Federal level.

This is a new level of lawlessness even for Obama.

A popular meme on some sites is that the Statue of Liberty was “originally a Muslim woman”. Like a lot of viral memes, this is a myth.

The a grain of truth to the story is that the meme picked up on the interesting historical footnote that one of the earlier projects of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was a large woman holding up a torch and symbolizing Egypt’s progress. The giant statue would have been titled, “Egypt or Progress Carrying the Light to Asia”.

Since Egypt’s ruler had no money, the project went nowhere.

Bartholdi at the time was somewhat obsessed with Ancient Egypt. It was ancient Egypt that interested him rather than Islam. The statue was meant to celebrate Egyptian civilization rather than Islam.

In any case the idea that “Egypt” became the Statue of Liberty is a myth. How do we know that?

Here’s what Bartholdi had to say about it, “At that time my Statue of Liberty did not exist, even in my imagination, and the only resemblance between the drawing that I submitted to the Khedive and the statue now in New York’s beautiful harbor is that both held a light aloft. Now how is a sculptor to make a statue which is to serve the purpose of a lighthouse without making it hold the light in the air?”

“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia . . . could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.” — Abraham Lincoln

The winning streak enjoyed by campus activists this fall was violently interrupted by the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. Some activists were sufficiently annoyed by their ejection from the limelight that they took to Twitter to complain under the hashtag “F***Paris.”

The most obvious irony stemmed from the fact that some of the same protesters who griped about media coverage of their antics — even declaring First Amendment-free zones — suddenly whined when the cameras turned to bloodshed in the heart of Europe.

But there’s a deeper irony. In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, fueled by a cynical media strategy directed by the president himself, the national conversation turned quickly from Barack Obama’s foreign-policy failures to the bigotry and insensitivity of the Republican party. There’s no denying that Donald Trump made this an easy pivot for the Beltway Brahmins. But left unnoticed in the clamor is the dismaying disconnect between the conversation elite liberals want to have and the one being pushed by their left-wing shock troops on the ground.

The jihad waged by radical Islam rips at France from within. The two mass-murder attacks this year that finally induced President Francois Hollande to concede a state of war are only what we see.

Unbound by any First Amendment, the French government exerts pressure on the media to suppress bad news. We do not hear much about the steady thrum of insurrection in the banlieues: the thousands of torched automobiles, the violence against police and other agents of the state, the pressure in Islamic enclaves to ignore the sovereignty of the Republic and conform to the rule of sharia.

What happens in France happens in Belgium. It happens in Sweden where much of Malmo, the third largest city, is controlled by Muslim immigrant gangs — emergency medical personnel attacked routinely enough that they will not respond to calls without police protection, and the police in turn unwilling to enter without back-up. Not long ago in Britain, a soldier was killed and nearly beheaded in broad daylight by jihadists known to the intelligence services; dozens of sharia courts now operate throughout the country, even as Muslim activists demand more accommodations. And it was in Germany, which green-lighted Europe’s ongoing influx of Muslim migrants, that Turkey’s Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan proclaimed that pressuring Muslims to assimilate in their new Western countries is “a crime against humanity.”

So how many of us look across the ocean at Europe and say, “Yeah, let’s bring some of that here”?

None of us with any sense. Alas, “bring it here” is the order of the day in Washington, under the control of leftists bent on fundamentally transforming America (Muslims in America overwhelmingly support Democrats) and the progressive-lite GOP, which fears the “Islamophobia” smear nearly as much as the “racist” smear.