RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-police-heroism-in-compton/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Last Friday, when we marked the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, one thing that did not get enough attention was the sacrifice of the police, firefighters, and other first responders, hundreds of whom were killed that day. First responders is an apt term for them. They are the people who show up. They knowingly charge into the dangers from which most of us flee.

Then on Saturday came the atrocious attempted murder of two Los Angeles County deputy sheriffs in Compton, by an assassin who is still at large. Once again, what is striking is the heroism of the police. It is awesome to see, but it is routine heroism if, like me, you’ve spent lots of time around cops.

One of the deputies who was shot was Claudia Apolinar, a 31-year-old former librarian, the mother of a six-year-old boy and on the job for a year, saved her 24-year-old partner (who has not been publicly identified at this time). Deputy Apolinar had been shot in the jaw area and the upper torso, and was bleeding profusely. Yet, she had the presence of mind, and the courage under circumstances where she could not be sure the attack was over, to lend medical aid — apparently including application of a tourniquet to her fellow deputy.

What do we see on the other side of the equation? A sneak attack on two law-enforcement officers who were simply protecting a community rife with anti-police hostility. More of those precious “peaceful protesters” blocking the entrance to the nearby hospital to make it difficult for ambulances to get through, with some of the “peaceful protesters” chanting, “We hope they die!” And other locals celebrating the deadly ambush of police.

Pure evil.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/california-forest-fires-taxes-homelessness-same-old-fall-problems/#slide-1

Tech titans and Bay Area Bourbons grow rich, the middle class flees, forests burn.

F all is almost here in California. So we know the annual script.

A few ostracized voices will again warn in vain of the need to remove millions of dead trees withered from the 2013–14 drought and subsequent infestations, clean up tinderbox hillsides, and beef up the fire services. They will all be ignored as right-wing nuts or worse.Environmentalists will sneer that the new forestry sees fires as medicinal and natural, and global warming as inevitable because of “climate deniers.”

Late-summer fires will then consume our foothills, mountains, and forests. Long-dead trees from the drought will explode and send their pitch bombs to shower the forest with flames.

Lives, livelihoods, homes, and cabins will be lost — the lamentable collateral damage of our green future. Billions of dollars will go up in smoke. The billowing haze and ash will cloud and pollute the state for weeks if not months. Tens of thousands will be evacuated and their lives disrupted — and those are the lucky.

California’s deer-in-the headlight progressive officials will blame “climate change” for the conflagrations. The accompanying power brownouts, tardy responses, and official blame-gaming will follow as a prelude for still more solar-panel farms and still less forest management.

There could be a long answer to explain why California for years abandoned dead drought- and insect-stricken trees — over some 60 million of these withered, towering time bombs in their coastal and Sierra forests — to rot. But the short of it was that the kindling and tinderboxes were seen as perfect green mulch for flora and fauna.

https://nypost.com/2020/09/14/new-evidence-makes-hunter-bidens-business-deals-reek-worse-than-ever/

Foreign entities looking to influence American politics sometimes devise lucrative commercial deals involving a politician’s family. While the deals can, and do, ensnare politicians of all stripes, those involving the Biden family are particularly troubling: The transactions implicate US national security.

While Joe Biden served as vice president, his son Hunter received offers from foreign governments and oligarchs in areas where he had little or no expertise. That his foreign partners included a rival state, Communist China, makes these arrangements particularly brazen, even by Washington’s swampy standards.

Newly released Secret Service travel records for Hunter paint a clearer picture of how extensive these efforts were. The documents, reviewed by Judicial Watch, show that between 2009 and 2014, Hunter made 411 trips across 29 countries. While some of those trips were perhaps leisure and others related to his volunteer work for the World Food Program, many of them appear to be connected to deals that he or his associates either secured or sought with foreign governments and oligarchs.

For example, Hunter visited China five times between 2009 and 2014. Most notoriously, he traveled with his father aboard Air Force Two in December 2013 as part of an official visit with Chinese officials. Ten days after their return to Washington, Hunter and his associates partnered with the state-owned Bank of China to formally establish BHR, a new, first-of-its-kind fund aimed at making investments outside China through the newly established Shanghai Free Trade Zone.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/heather-mac-donald-protesters-demand-cops-let-themselves-be-stabbed-or-shot

If the nation’s police officers walked off the job today, it would be hard to blame them. Sunday’s anti-cop riots in Lancaster, Pa., have made the current de facto rules of engagement clear:

Officers may never defend themselves against lethal force if their attacker is a minority. They should simply accept being shot or stabbed as penance for their alleged racism.

In Lancaster, an officer responded to a domestic violence call at a residence where a man had stabbed four people last year. As the officer approached the house, a female escaped out the front door. A man – the suspect from the previous slashings – then emerged and ran at the officer, brandishing a knife over his head. The officer shot him, as the officer was by all appearances legally authorized to do, to stop the threat of deadly force. Twenty-seven-year-old Ricardo Munoz died from the officer’s gunfire.

The response from the “community,” after this summer of lethal cop hatred, was predictable. Rioters pelted Lancaster cops with bricks, glass bottles, and sharp projectiles ripped from road barricades. They smashed the windows of police cruisers, the downtown police precinct, the post office, cafés, and stores. They torched a dumpster dragged from another part of the city. They pulled street signs and bike racks out of sidewalks to use against the police.

Such anarchy, with its photogenic arson, is just the latest chapter in the violence that is now routinely directed at officers during ordinary law enforcement activities, as well as during riots.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/14/the-billionaire-backers-of-the-insurrection/

The mostly behind-the-scenes attempt between Election Day and Inauguration Day to prevent Donald Trump from taking office the first time will go public in 2020.

As I reported last week, a cabal of Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans are plotting a post-election civil war of sorts to make sure Joe Biden assumes the presidency even if Donald Trump legitimately wins. “It’s insurrection,” President Trump said on Fox News last week when asked about the widely-circulated plan. “We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that.”

Let’s hope. A document released last month by the Transition Integrity Project, a headfake name to give the depraved group the appearance of decency, is a shocking battle plan that would plunge the country into more chaos. The same agitators on the Left and NeverTrump Right who’ve stoked nonstop political upheaval over the past four years will exploit our current instability to throw the election to the Democrats. 

But this is more than the far-fetched hallucinations of political outcasts. The mayhem they’ve been war-gaming will be heavily funded by a number of Trump-hating billionaires, and those people have no intention of losing out on their investment.

The mostly behind-the-scenes attempt between Election Day and Inauguration Day to prevent Donald Trump from taking office the first time—one that miraculously failed despite help from the media and the most powerful government agencies in the world—will go public in 2020. And instead of help from James Comey, Jim Clapper, or John Brennan, the 2020 version will be bolstered by the likes of George Soros, Tom Steyer, Pierre Omidyar, a member of the Rupert Murdoch family, and Big Tech titans among others.

One of the co-founders of the Transition Integrity Project is Rosa Brooks. The Georgetown law professor and Obama Administration alum is a former counsel and board member for the Open Society Foundation, created in 1993 by George Soros. The foundation is a massive donor to hundreds of left-wing causes around the world; in July, Open Society Foundation announced a five-year, $150 million investment in “racial justice” groups including Black Lives Matter. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16503/black-lives-matter-appraisals

“While it might not be popular to say in the wake of the recent social disorder, the true plight of black people has little or nothing to do with the police or what has been called ‘systemic racism.’ Instead, we need to look at the responsibilities of those running our big cities.” — Walter E. Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University.

“Democratic-controlled cities have the poorest-quality public education despite their large, and growing, school budgets. Consider Baltimore…. It’s the same story of academic disaster in other cities run by Democrats. — Walter E. Williams.

“Our families have fallen to pieces: 75% of all black children are born out of wedlock, without a father. I don’t care how many social programs you have. You’re not going to overcome that. That’s where we, as black Americans, have to begin to take our fate back into our own hands and move it — stop crying racism.” — Shelby Steele, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution.

“But there also comes a time when he must stop thinking of himself as a victim by acknowledging that… his fate is always in his own hands. One of the more pernicious corruptions of post-1960s liberalism is that it undermined the spirit of self-help and individual responsibility in precisely the people it sought to uplift.” — Shelby Steele.

“Please don’t allow yourself to be manipulated to believe that you’re a victim and that somebody else is causing all of your problems. The person who has the most to do with what happens to you is you. It doesn’t mean there aren’t any problems in life, but your success or failure in life depends on how you react to those problems.” — Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon, currently the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

“The policies you [the Democratic Party] have implemented have been the figurative knees on the necks of my people for centuries. And it is because of you and your failed leadership that many of us still can’t breathe today.” — Damani Bryant Felder, political commentator.

A previous series revealed the anti-American agenda of Black Lives Matter, which, under the guise of fighting racism, seeks to transform the United States into a communist dystopia. BLM’s leaders openly admit that they want to abolish the nuclear family, police, prisons and capitalism. BLM leaders have threatened to “burn down the system” if their demands are not met.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/congressmen-and-women-hamas-joe-kaufman/

As Progressives continue to make the vilification of Israel a core issue for the Democratic Party, members of Congress continue to line up to embrace the hate. On Tuesday, September 15th, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) will be sponsoring an online virtual advocacy event (‘Palestine Advocacy Days’) featuring at least five US Representatives. But this is not just an exercise in demanding “Palestinian rights” or supporting the toxic BDS calls for boycotting Israel. AMP is rooted in Hamas, and its leadership does not shy away from its roots, so having numerous Congressmen and women involved in this type of event is beyond outrageous.

Created in 2006. AMP was the byproduct of now-defunct groups that made up the US Palestine Committee, a terror umbrella organization led by then-global head of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. As such, the group celebrates violence against Israelis. During its January 2018 ‘JERUSALEM IS A RED LINE’ rally, AMP repeatedly led chants of “Long live Intifada” – Intifada meaning Palestinian violent uprising. AMP’s Chairman, Hatem Bazian, who also founded Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), notoriously called for an American intifada, at an April 2004 rally in San Francisco. Citing uprisings in “Palestine” and Iraq, he asked, “How come we don’t have an intifada in this country?”

One AMP board member, Salah Sarsour, allegedly had involvement with Hamas, itself. According to a December 1998 Israeli Police memo, Salah’s brother Jamil Sarsour, in the course of an interview, claimed that Salah was involved with Hamas and did fundraising for Hamas via the Palestine Committee’s Holy Land Foundation (HLF). Jamil also claimed that Salah had plotted an attack on Israel, as revenge for the September 1998 killing of Salah’s friends – Hamas military wing Qassam Brigades leaders and brothers, Imad and Adel Awadallah – by Israeli soldiers. Previously, Salah had spent eight months in a Ramallah prison.

AMP is a part of the US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO). Sitting on the board of USCMO is Mazen Mokhtar, a former US-based administrator for qoqaz.net, a now-defunct al-Qaeda recruitment/financing site. Mokhtar, who has spoken at AMP events, has called Hamas acts “heroic” and suicide bombings “an effective method of attacking the enemy.” Also on the board is Siraj Wahhaj, a Brooklyn, New York imam who was cited by the US government as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Wahhaj has been linked to the bomb maker of the attack, Clement Rodney Hampton-El, and has praised the spiritual leader of the attack, Omar Abdel Rahman.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-rules-pennsylvania-governors-shutdown-orders-unconstitutional_

A federal judge has struck down Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s CCP virus restrictions that required people to stay at home, put limits on gatherings, and ordered “non-life-sustaining” businesses to stay shut down.

U.S. District Judge William Stickman IV on Sept. 14 sided with plaintiffs that included drive-in movie theaters, hair salons, farmers markets, and several GOP officials who sued as individuals. Butler, Greene, Fayette, and Washington counties were also listed as plaintiffs.

Stickman’s judgment stipulates that “the congregate gathering limits imposed by defendants’ mitigation orders violate the right of assembly enshrined in the First Amendment,” the “stay-at-home and business closure components of defendants’ orders violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” and “the business closure components of Defendants’ orders violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The judge, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, argued that the actions taken by Wolf and Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Rachel Levine, who are both Democrats, “were undertaken with the good intention of addressing a public health emergency,” but that “even in an emergency, the authority of government is not unfettered.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cotton-announces-bill-to-revoke-chinas-most-favored-nation-status/

Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) announced Monday that he is introducing legislation to repeal permanent most favored nation trade status, a designation that guarantees equal trading opportunity among a nation’s trade partners.

In an appearance on Fox & Friends, Cotton criticized China’s status as a most favored nation, and said he would introduce legislation this week that would require the president and congress to reassess the status each year.

Under Cotton’s new legislation if China were to “shoot missiles at our ships in the Western Pacific” or crack down on Hong Kong as it has done this year, “then we would be able to say each year we are not going to renew most favored nation status for China,” he said. 

The senator also blasted Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for his decades of support of increased trade opportunities with the Chinese Communist Party.

“This week is the twentieth anniversary of Joe Biden voting to give permanent most favored nation status to China,” he said. “Just think about that — most favored nation status to a communist country.”

He said the status had “supercharged the loss of American manufacturing jobs” and criticized the former vice president for defending it last week during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.