RUTHFULLY YOURS

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) said the Black Lives Matter movement “must understand” the way of peace and nonviolence.

Lewis, one of the “Big Six” civil rights leaders, said many young people are using his series of March books on the Civil Rights Movement as a guide.

“I think many of the young people all over America, high school students, college students and even elementary school students, are reading the book and they are able to associate the story, my story, my involvement in the Civil Rights Movement with what is happening in America today,” Lewis told PJM at the National Press Club Book Fair in Washington. “It is teaching people the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence and this young man, [co-author] Andrew Aydin, had the idea that we should do this book.”

Lewis provided his assessment of how the Civil Rights Movement compares with the Black Lives Matter movement of today.

“When we first got involved, before we had gone on the sit-in of the freedom ride, before the March on Washington or March from Selma, we studied the way of peace, the way of life, the way of nonviolence and we accepted nonviolence as a way of life, as a way of living. So the young people involved in the Black Lives Matter movement must understand, and many of these people are reading this book and using it as a guide,” Lewis said.

With Congress stuck among the contradictory demands of labor, business and talk-radio restrictionists, neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama has been able to move the needle on immigration reform. Meanwhile, as the economy gathers steam, states face a tight labor market at all skill levels.

There might be a way forward, if Congress enacts legislation to give states standing waivers or permission to craft their own guest-worker programs. It sounds radical, but several states, red and blue, have already been trying to do this.

California, New Mexico and Kansas have passed resolutions or drafted legislation to issue guest-worker visas to undocumented aliens. Three pending bills in Texas would let state employers hire foreign workers from abroad on temporary work visas. Utah’s conservative legislature overwhelmingly approved legislation in 2011 to let undocumented workers obtain a two-year visa. But Utah’s program has been postponed, because immigration is a federal function and states would need federal waivers. President Obama has stonewalled Utah’s waiver request.

One way to release states from the partisan whims of administrations would be for Congress to erect a statutory architecture under which states could implement their own guest-worker programs. Canada has done this through its highly successful Provincial Nominee Program.

Despite losing his battle to officially close the controversial detention center that he promised the leftists would be one of his first acts when he was elected to office in 2008, President Barack Obama stepped back from his threat to veto a bill after seeing it pass in the House of Representatives with some Democrats joining the Republicans. However, the President’s news media friends downplayed the vote and it outcome not for Obama but for their “cause,” according to police officers opposed to the propect of bringing Gitmo detainees to the U.S.

Obama has ended up signing a defense bill into law just before the Thanksgiving holiday with little fanfare and even littler media coverage. The bill appropriates $607 billion in defense spending and includes stipulations that would make very difficult to close the military prison — located at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — that houses some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists.
Guantanamo is the small piece of Cuba in which U.S. Marines and Naval personnel maintain a military base. With Obama’s recent concessions to communist Cuba’s rulers, Fidel and Raoul Castro, there has been talk that the U.S. may remove its military from that Caribbean island and turn over Guantanamo Bay back the Castro brothers.

How dangerous: Just as the U.S. faces the most diverse threats in its history, the American intelligence community is forced to operate under some of the most restrictive and bureaucratically ambiguous intelligence-gathering policies since its inception more than 60 years ago.

Nothing reflects these self-imposed restrictions better than Presidential Policy Directive 28. President Obama signed PPD-28 nearly two years ago in a knee-jerk reaction to the release of classified intelligence information by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and the data-collection methods revealed by the theft.

Among its many flaws, PPD-28 requires that, when collecting intelligence on foreign threats, U.S. operatives “must take into account (that) all persons should be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their nationality or wherever they may reside and that all persons have legitimate privacy interests.” This feel-good provision puts a serious crimp in foreign signals-intelligence collection.

The ambiguous language also naïvely extends to non-Americans unnecessary and undefined “privacy” rights. In what way does this make the U.S. safer?

FOR A GREAT GUIDE TO THE SUPREMES AND THE CONSTITUTION….READ:

The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution:By Gerald Walpin

They’re on a “rampage,” writes Gerald Walpin, one of the country’s top litigators, in his astonishing new book, The Supreme Court Vs. The Constitution.

And it takes just five of them to lay waste to the rights of 300 million Americans.

A mostly bare majority of justices of the United States Supreme Court, the only judicial body enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, have spent recent decades reversing, revoking and rescinding the fundamental guarantees of that sacred document to the people of America.

They’ve freed thousands of murderers, rewritten sound and time-tested laws, crippled religious liberty, enabled the spread of pornography and immorality. They have ignored the letter and spirit of the Constitution and its amendments in grabbing power that rightfully belongs to the Executive and Legislative branches, the states − and, ultimately, the people.

Gerald Walpin, who prosecuted criminals and pursued crooked bureaucrats as a federal Inspector General nominated by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and, many years before, as a top prosecutor for the Department Of Justice in New York, dramatically sets out the deliberate push by a bare majority of Supreme Court justices to usurp the role of our country’s elected lawmakers and executives.

The justices time and again seize the rightful authority of those we elect to represent us, and with unchallengeable arrogance undermine the “inalienable rights” that long have made the United States the world’s brightest beacon of freedom, democracy, and personal security.

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: