RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17307/jury-trial-mob-violence

Oliver Wendell Holmes correctly pointed out: due process simply cannot be achieved for any defendant in the presence of hostile crowds ready for violence if a verdict of not guilty is rendered.

The ACLU, if the shoe were on the other foot, would be demanding a new trial — if the defendant were black, and white crowds were demanding a conviction or else. But the ACLU is no longer a neutral civil liberties organization. It has become a partisan claque that espoused due process for “me but not for thee.” Real civil libertarians, who demand due process for all, including guilty police officers, must now take over where the ACLU has left off.

Whether guilty or not, Chauvin must be given a new trial at which the jury is sequestered, as it should have been from the beginning of this one. As an alternate juror candidly acknowledged, she had “mixed feelings” about jury duty, because of concerns about “disappointing” either side and the possibility of “rioting.” There is no reason to believe that the unsequestered jurors who actually decided the fate of Chauvin were oblivious to this concern.

The appellate courts should use this case to establish a clear rule that jurors must always be sequestered in racially charged cases where outsiders are threatening violence in the event of a not guilty or reduced verdict…. In the absence of sequestration, the legitimate protests of the outsiders may well deny the defendant his equally legitimate right to a fair trial. That is unacceptable under the Constitution.

“I very seriously doubt if the petitioner … has had due process of law … because of the trial taking place in the presence of a hostile demonstration and seemingly dangerous crowd, thought by the presiding Judge to be ready for violence unless a verdict of guilty was rendered.”

No, this is not your author complaining about the lack of due process in the trial of Derek Chauvin in 2021. It Is the great Oliver Wendell Holmes describing the trial of Leo Frank, a Jew convicted of murder in 1913 and eventually lynched by a mob that included prominent officials, after the governor commuted Frank’s sentence from death to life imprisonment.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/kamala_once_again_displays_signs_of_a_weird_personality_disorder.html

There’s something off about Kamala Harris. And no, I’m not talking about her hard-left political beliefs, the lies she tells, or her endless reinventing herself for political advancement. In that regard, she’s just another leftist politician. What’s bizarre about Kamala is her inappropriate laughter about things that ought to inspire solemnity.

What makes laughter inappropriate? It’s inappropriate when you’re speaking to a crowd and you’re the only one who laughs. Of course, that can also happen to a bad comedian, but there’s no indication in the clip below that Kamala was trying to tell a joke.

Instead, Kamala is talking about the massive economic disruption thanks to the lockdown that the Democrats hammered into America. In that context, she meant to say that 2 million women had been driven out of the workforce, misspoke by saying “people,” corrected herself by saying “women people,” and then giggled inanely. See for yourself:

That’s a sociopathic response to people’s suffering. But we needn’t do an amateur armchair diagnosis to point to the problems with Kamala’s giggle.

It’s entirely possible that she gave a nervous giggle because she made a mistake. However, that would be equally inappropriate. This is a woman who is literally one heartbeat away from leading what is still (although barely) the most powerful nation in the world. Golda Meir didn’t giggle nervously because she misspoke. Neither did Margaret Thatcher. Insecure little girls giggle; not leaders of men and women.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/dems_are_out_to_destroy_a_chauvin_defense_witnesss_life_and_reputation.html

George Floyd had a lethal dose of fentanyl in his body. His post-mortem blood oxygen level was a robust 98%, despite significant heart disease. He was complaining that he couldn’t breathe long before the police, following a violent struggle, got him to the ground in the Minneapolis-approved position for excited delirium. Accurate, previously unseen footage showed that Officer Chauvin’s knee was on Floyd’s shoulders, not his neck. Oh, and an alternate juror said that she was afraid the mob would go after her for a non-guilty verdict. On these and other facts, the prosecution got a guilty verdict. Armed with it, the Democrats are now working to destroy a former medical who dared to testify in Chauvin’s favor.

Here’s the story according to the Daily Mail:

A former medical examiner who served as a witness in Derek Chauvin‘s murder trial will have 17 years’ worth of his in-custody death reports independently reviewed after he testified that the cop was not responsible for George Floyd‘s death, officials have announced.   

Dr. David Fowler, Maryland’s chief medical examiner from 2002 to 2019, was a key defense witness for Chauvin, who was convicted Tuesday of murder and manslaughter for kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes last May. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/what-the-media-didnt-tell-you-about-the-chauvin-case/

George Floyd should not have died, but the case does not stand as a totem of systemic racism either. Here are the facts.

I f you did not watch the Derek Chauvin trial, but only heard the inflammatory comments spewing out of the White House and the media-Democrat complex, there are things about it you would never know. And you’d be apt to believe the claims that American law enforcement is systemically racist. I watched the trial day in and day out, so let me cut you in on a few basic facts.

Not a shred of evidence was introduced at the trial that Derek Chauvin is a racist. None. There was nothing in the weeks of testimony that even hinted at such a thing. The prosecutors who aggressively urged the jury to convict Chauvin of murder never intimated that racism played any role in the crimes. They convincingly argued that he was a bad cop, not a racist cop.

The police did not hunt down George Floyd. They did not randomly happen upon him. They did not make a discriminatory choice to hassle him. Instead, the police responded to a citizen complaint from a local market, Cup Foods, based on a report by a young black cashier that Floyd had passed him a patently counterfeit $20 bill.

The young cashier considered not telling his manager about what Floyd had done. But then, under the Cup Foods rules, the $20 would have come out of his own pocket, which wouldn’t have been right.

Still, the police were not called right away. A complaint was lodged only after Cup Foods employees (including the young cashier) pleaded with Floyd, not once but twice, to return to the store and settle the matter. Floyd, who was parked across the street in the company of his suspected drug-dealer companion, was obviously high on drugs and uncooperative — to the extent he was responsive at all — in replying to the employees’ pleas.

Chauvin was a late arriver to the police interaction with Floyd. The first two cops on the scene were rookies: Alex Kueng, a young African-American officer who had joined the Minneapolis Police Department with the aspiration of helping make it more diverse and empathetic, and his partner, Thomas Lane — who, like Chauvin, is white, a fact that had no bearing on the case (i.e., there’s no evidence that Lane is a racist, either).

Floyd did not merely pass a counterfeit $20 bill. He was obviously under the influence of narcotics while seated behind the steering wheel of a Mercedes-Benz SUV. And he was obviously the driver; in the back seat of the SUV was Shawanda Hill, an old friend who testified that Floyd had offered to drive her home.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/04/19/why-illinois-is-in-trouble–122258-public-employees-earned-100000-costing-taxpayers-158-billion-despite-pandemic/?sh=61a9b5b77f

Illinois public employees and retirees with $100,000+ paychecks grew from 109,881 (2019) to an all-time high of 122,258 in 2020 – costing taxpayers $15.8 billion.

Congressional “bailouts” made it possible. The recent $1.9 trillion American Rescue Act provided an additional $13.5 billion to Illinois state and local governments. (Look up your hometown here — $350 billion flowed to states and 30,000 communities.)

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com compiled the list of six-figure earners from Freedom of Information Act requests.

Barbers at State Corrections trimmed off $115,000; janitors at the State Toll Highway Authority cleaned up $123,000; bus drivers in Chicago made $174,000; line workers on the Chicago Transit Authority earned $222,278; community college presidents made $418,677; university doctors earned up to $2 million; and 171 small town managers out-earned the Illinois governor ($181,670).

Our interactive mapping tool allows users to quickly review the 122,258 public employees and retirees across Illinois making more than $100,000 (by ZIP code). Just click a pin and scroll down to see the results in your neighborhood rendered in the chart beneath the map.

Auditing the largest pay and pension systems in Illinois:

Public schools (40,000) – Last year, nearly 24,500 educators earned a six-figure salary while more than 15,500 retirees received six-figure pensions. Most Illinois schools were not back to fulltime, in-person instruction as of March 2021.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-an-outrage-from-the-fbi

On June 14, 2017, a team of Republican lawmakers went to an athletic field in Alexandria, Virginia to practice for the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity. As they worked out, a man armed with a semi-automatic rifle and pistol approached and opened fire. Representative Steve Scalise, the House Republican whip, was gravely wounded. A lobbyist was also seriously hurt, and a congressional aide and Capitol Police officer were wounded, as well.

The shooter, James Hodgkinson of Belleville, Illinois, was an active Bernie Sanders supporter who hated Republicans and particularly hated then-President Donald Trump. “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.,” Hodgkinson posted on his Facebook page. He thought of himself as part of the Resistance. He joined Facebook groups like “Terminate The Republican Party” and “Join The Resistance Worldwide!!”

Hodgkinson came to the Washington area in 2017, living out of a van parked in Alexandria. He brought his guns and developed a plan to attack Republicans. He went to the baseball field with a list of several GOP members of Congress in his pocket, along with physical descriptions of some of them. Before the attack, he asked Republican Representative Jeff Duncan, who was leaving practice early, whether the players on the field were Republicans or Democrats. Duncan said it was the Republican team. A short time later, Hodgkinson opened fire. After a rampage of nearly ten minutes, he was killed by Capitol Police and Alexandria Police.

The attack was a clear act of violent, politically-motivated domestic terrorism. There was simply no doubt about that. And yet last week, Republican Representative Brad Wenstrup, who had been at the practice, revealed that the FBI concluded Hodgkinson was simply trying to commit “suicide by cop.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/the_squads_newest_member.html

Jamaal Bowman — the House’s newest anti-Semite.

Jamaal Bowman, M.C., has been my congressman since January 3 of this year.  He defeated Eliot Engel,  my previous member of Congress for 32 years, in a Democrat primary context.  Engel was ousted from Congress having reached the pinnacle of his 16-term tenure: chairmanship of the House Committee on International Relations.  As chairman of this committee, Engel was reliably pro-Israel — in a congressional district with a significant number of Jewish constituents.

Jamaal Bowman is no Eliot Engel,  As if to make this perfectly clear, he has signed up as sponsor of H.R. 2407, an anti-Israel measure introduced by Rep. Betty McCollum, (DFL, Minn.).

Who are the other sponsors of this anti-Israel measure, intended, apparently, at undoing the progress toward Middle East peace of the Abraham Accords midwifed by the Trump administration?  Why,  Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, and the other members of the notorious “Squad,” of course.  And now comes Jamaal Bowman, to be the first male Squad member.

H.R. 2407 takes for granted Israel’s “abuse” of Palestinian children living under its military detention and calls for denying aid to the Jewish State.  H.R. 2407 includes language that could have been taken from the most one-sided and biased anti-Israel resolutions to be adopted by the U.N. General Assembly of years past.

It is said that McCollum’s anti-Semitic measure — and let’s call H.R. 2407 for the anti-Jewish mindset it reflects — has little chance of passing.  No?  Is it not possible  that the Democrat Party is moving towards the mindset of that Pharaoh of Exodus who knew not Joseph, and proceeded to decree the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt – including the drowning of male babies?

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/04/biden-vs-american-history.php

The Biden administration is seeking to institutionalize critical race theory in American education. Thus, on Monday Biden’s Education Department promulgated a proposed rule on American History and Civics Education. The rule “proposes two priorities for the American History and Civics Education programs, including the Presidential and Congressional Academies for American History and Civics(Academies) and National Activities programs….” More broadly, it shows the direction the administration will go as it influences primary and secondary education.

That direction is basically anti-American. It seeks to inculcate a distorted version of American history in our children:

The Department recognizes that COVID-19—with its disproportionate impact on communities of color—and the ongoing national reckoning with systemic racism have highlighted the urgency of improving racial equity throughout our society, including in our education system. As Executive Order 13985 states: “Our country faces converging economic, health, and climate crises that have exposed and exacerbated inequities, while a historic movement for justice has highlighted the unbearable human costs of systemic racism. Our Nation deserves an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda that matches the scale of the opportunities and challenges that we face.”
***
For example, there is growing acknowledgement of the importance of including, in the teaching and learning of our country’s history, both the consequences of slavery, and the significant contributions of Black Americans to our society. This acknowledgement is reflected, for example, in the New York Times’ landmark “1619 Project” and in the resources of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History.[2]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/maxine-waterss-long-history-of-reckless-rhetoric-11619213954?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

“If Rep. Waters continues to get away with her unhinged rants, it may only be a matter of time before she is responsible for a tragedy. Then Auntie Maxine will have no one to blame but herself.”

The Ku Klux Klan was in Huntington Beach, Calif., on April 12, holding a “White Lives Matter” rally. It was a 37-minute drive away from the Hawthorne district office of Rep. Maxine Waters. “ Auntie Maxine ” (as the Democrat calls herself) declined to confront the Klan. But she flew all the way to Minneapolis last weekend to coach protesters awaiting the outcome of the Derek Chauvin trial.

“I hope we get a verdict that says guilty, guilty, guilty,” Ms. Waters said. “And if we don’t . . . we’ve got to stay on the street. We have to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational.”

The 82-year-old lawmaker has been notorious for such incendiary language since she was first elected to Congress in 1990. She called the 1992 riots that followed the acquittal of the Los Angeles police officers who were filmed beating Rodney King an “insurrection.” She meant it as a term of approbation. Sixty-three people died during the L.A. riots, but Ms. Waters declared that she wouldn’t tell her constituents “to go inside, to be peaceful, that they have to accept the verdict.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/stop-demonizing-the-columbus-police-officer/

All around us, we’re starting to see consequences of reckless policy decisions, warnings unheeded, and objections dismissed.

President Biden didn’t plan for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to have more than 172,000 “enforcement encounters” on the U.S.-Mexican border in March, but announcing he was undoing his predecessor’s “xenophobic” policies helped make it happen.
President Biden didn’t set out to have the single-biggest one-month jump in the consumer price index in a decade, with food and energy costs leading the way. But maybe the federal government’s decision to pump so much borrowed money into the economy is indeed fueling inflation, as some economists warned.
After word leaked that President Biden hoped to double capital-gains taxes for those making more than $1 million per year, markets tumbled fast yesterday, and analysts at Goldman Sachs calculate that if the market reaction to this potential capital-gains tax hike is like the last one, the rich will sell off about $178 billion in stocks.
I’m not completely convinced that we’re seeing a dramatic decrease in vaccine demand yet, but if we are, maybe the decision to halt the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine over eight cases of blood clots out of 7 million doses administered added to public wariness. Particularly if the FDA is going to say, after nearly a two-week halt, “Never mind, this vaccine is safe, just have doctors be on the lookout for blood clots.”

Actions have consequences, often including unintended consequences, which is why we should act carefully and deliberately, and pause to recalibrate often. You can consider that capital-C “Conservatism,” small-c conservatism, or just hard-learned life wisdom.