RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/convicted-terrorist-susan-rosenberg-raising-funds-lloyd-billingsley/

“There’s no way you can do any homework on Black Lives Matter and not see that it’s a Marxist political organization,” and the move to substitute a “black” nation anthem was “a communist political move.”  That was sports journalist Jason Whitlock in an interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News this week, when more obscure information about BLM emerged.

Convicted terrorist Susan Rosenberg (pictured above) is vice chair of Thousand Currents, a California-based charity that handles fundraising for Black Lives Matter. Rosenberg is a veteran of the May 19 Communist Organization that carried out a bombings in the early 1980s to counter President Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign. Rosenberg landed on the FBI most wanted list and was arrested with stolen explosives in 1984.

The terrorist drew 58 years but served only 16 because in 2001 President Bill Clinton commuted Rosenberg’s sentence. Since 2016, Rosenberg has been involved with Black Lives Matter, now openly recognized as a Marxist organization making communist political moves. One of those moves, supported by prominent Democrats is to defund the police, but BLM Philadelphia boss YahNé Ndgo is taking that to a new level. “One of the things that we are demanding over five years is the complete abolition,” she told Fox News Tuesday. “We don’t want to see any police in our community.”

Black Lives Matter has made a hero of Joanne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur) who murdered a New Jersey state trooper, escaped prison and fled to Cuba. As Atlanta and Chicago confirm, murder is becoming more common in communities where Black Lives Matter operates, and the abolition of police would make it more so. As it happens, in Communist doctrine and practice, murder is necessary for social progress.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-loser-pelosis-house-11594336504?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The Supreme Court on Thursday punted in two cases concerning subpoenas for President Trump’s financial records, sending them back to lower courts to resolve a host of legal questions. Yet if the cases had no clear winner, one of the rulings did produce an outright loser: Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s overzealous House.

Since the moment Mrs. Pelosi retook the gavel in January 2019, she’s operated as if her institution is the only branch in town, with limitless power. Within days of the 2018 election, an unnamed House Democrat bragged that the incoming majority was loading a “subpoena cannon,” aimed at more than 80 different areas of Trump investigation. The president’s tax returns, his firing of former FBI Director James Comey, his discussions with foreign leaders, security clearances, the Trump family business, Stormy Daniels, the reassignment of executive branch employees, the Mueller report. Ad nauseam.

No one disputes the House has oversight authority. But courts have always made clear that this power must be firmly tethered to a “legislative purpose.” Prior Congresses at least attempted to hew to the spirit of that phrase. Mrs. Pelosi’s committee chairmen—driven by fury over the Trump presidency—embarked on an extended fishing expedition. In doing so, they exposed how easy it is to abuse the legislative-purpose doctrine.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-danger-of-denigrating-americas-founding-fkers-opinion-634565

The fifth season of the hit HBO comedy series Veep opens with the fictional US president, Selina Meyer – played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus – panicking about the electoral tie of the previous day, which could result in her not being able to remain in the Oval Office for a second term.

Aptly titled “The Morning After,” the premier episode of the season highlights what happens in America when a candidate wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College. Addressing the nation, Meyer insists that she is in “barefaced awe of the majesty of our democratic system,” while also saying that the “electoral college is a somewhat arcane institution that many scholars say we should do away with.”

Talk about prescience.

The episode aired on April 24, 2016, nearly seven months before the election in which Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump beat his Democratic Party rival, Hillary Clinton, by garnering an electoral college majority – even though she had won the popular vote. Unlike Clinton, however, the protagonist of Veep ultimately obtained the electoral college coup that she needed to keep her coveted seat in the White House.

But before it was clear to Meyer that this was the case, she told her staffers sardonically that she had forgotten in her speech to “thank the voters for making our country look like a high-school Spanish

She added bitterly, “Didn’t those founding f**kers ever hear of an odd number?”

https://spectator.us/trump-mount-rushmore-1619-statues-speech/

Ahead of Independence Day last week, CNN went live to their correspondent Leyla Santiago. Here is how she described the upcoming celebrations: ‘Kicking off the Independence Day weekend, President Trump will be at Mount Rushmore, where he’ll be standing in front of a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native Americans.’ She went on to report that the President was expected to focus on efforts to ‘Quote “Tear down our country’s history”.’ And where might the President have acquired such an idea?

Even a few years ago it would have been unthinkable for a major network like CNN to have described Mount Rushmore in such nakedly hostile terms. America still had its agreed-upon holy sites, people and ideas – revered as unifying points of the nation’s past and necessary for any conceivable future.

Not anymore. Today every element of the American past is up for grabs, and the intensity of the campaign may well provide the likeliest means for Donald Trump to remain in the White House.

It is stunning to watch, this unweaving of a nation. While going on for decades, the latest orgy of iconoclasm has seen crowds assail statues of the Founding Fathers with equal ferocity to that aimed at Confederates. A statue of George Washington pulled down in Portland, Oregon had ‘genocidal colonist’ spray-painted on it. A statue of Thomas Jefferson, pulled down outside a high school bearing his name, was graffitied with ‘slave owner’, as well as the name of George Floyd.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/506562-in-rueful-praise-of-elena-kagan-the-little-sisters-ruling

I wish she were on my side.

Conservatives ruefully jest that, while John Roberts may hold the lofty title of Chief Justice, he’s really just another seat on the Kagan Court. In Wednesday’s much-anticipated ruling on a religious liberty challenge to the ObamaCare contraceptive mandate, Justice Elena Kagan again demonstrated that she is not just the Supreme Court’s center of gravity. She is its master tactician.

And how she must be chortling, while the Trump administration celebrates as if the 7-2 majority decision were not just a win but a rout in favor of the Constitution’s guarantee of free religious exercise. Justice Kagan knows better. If you scratch beneath the surface, religious liberty is actually losing, albeit in slow motion. Thanks to Kagan’s strategy, there are lots of innings left to play, and her team is much better suited to the long game.

When the hangover ends, conservatives will remember Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania as the case in which the court choked. Don’t be deceived by the 7-2 vote, in which the court’s putative conservative bloc of five justices was joined by Kagan and her fellow progressive, Justice Stephen Breyer. This seven-justice majority agreed only on a narrow holding, confined to a technical matter of statutory construction regarding the so-called Affordable Care Act (ACA, or ObamaCare). 

That was not a vindication of liberty. On the core question, there were no more than four justices, and maybe just three, supportive of free exercise of religion. That’s why it’s a mirage of victory in what eventually will be a desert of defeat.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/supreme-courts-rulings-on-trump-subpoenas-ho-hum/

A New York prosecutor may pursue the president’s financial information. Congress, though, must relitigate its case in lower courts.

The Supreme Court’s decisions Thursday on two separate cases involving subpoenas for the president’s personal financial information are legal defeats for the presidency. Politically, they are a win for Donald Trump.

Both opinions were authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and were ostensibly resounding 7–2 defeats for the president’s position. But there’s less here than meets the eye.

The State Grand Jury Subpoena One case involves a subpoena issued by a New York state grand jury conducting a criminal  investigation led by the office of Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan district attorney. That investigation is believed to be focused, at least in part, on the payment of hush money to women who claim to have had liaisons with Donald Trump about a decade before he became president, including how the reimbursement for those payments was allegedly booked by the Trump real-estate organization. The subpoena, issued to Trump’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars, is believed to be sweeping, seeking voluminous financial information (including tax-return information), over a number of years.

The Court’s ruling against the president is emphatic. It was expected that the president would lose. This seemed obvious during the oral argument, when the Court focused intently on the fact that, while the president was making a broad immunity claim, he was not arguing that he had immunity from being investigated; just that he had immunity from complying with subpoenas — indeed, subpoenas addressed to a third-party agent of his, not to the president himself.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-cited-their-study-so-they-disavowed-it-11594250254?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a peer-reviewed journal that claims to publish “only the highest quality scientific research.” Now, the authors of a 2019 PNAS article are disowning their research simply because I cited it.

Psychologists Joseph Cesario of Michigan State and David Johnson of the University of Maryland analyzed 917 fatal police shootings of civilians from 2015 to test whether the race of the officer or the civilian predicted fatal police shootings. Neither did. Once “race specific rates of violent crime” are taken into account, the authors found, there are no disparities among those fatally shot by the police. These findings accord with decades of research showing that civilian behavior is the greatest influence on police behavior.

In September 2019, I cited the article’s finding in congressional testimony. I also referred to it in a City Journal article, in which I noted that two Princeton political scientists, Dean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo, had challenged the study design. Messrs. Cesario and Johnson stood by their findings. Even under the study design proposed by Messrs. Knox and Mummolo, they wrote, there is again “no significant evidence of anti-black disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by the police.”

My June 3 Journal op-ed quoted the PNAS article’s conclusion verbatim. It set off a firestorm at Michigan State. The university’s Graduate Employees Union pressured the MSU press office to apologize for the “harm it caused” by mentioning my article in a newsletter. The union targeted physicist Steve Hsu, who had approved funding for Mr. Cesario’s research. MSU sacked Mr. Hsu from his administrative position. PNAS editorialized that Messrs. Cesario and Johnson had “poorly framed” their article—the one that got through the journal’s three levels of editorial and peer review.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/cultural-revolutions-start-year-zero/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

E very cultural revolution starts at year zero, whether explicitly or implicitly. The French Revolution recalibrated the calendar to begin anew, and the genocidal Pol Pot declared his own Cambodian revolutionary ascension as the beginning of time.

Somewhere after May 25, 2020, the death of George Floyd, while in police custody, sparked demonstrations, protests, and riots. And they in turn ushered in a new revolutionary moment. Or at least we were told that — in part by Black Lives Matter, in part by Antifa, in part by terrified enablers in the corporate world, the new Democratic Party, the military, the universities, and the media.

What was uniquely different about this cultural revolution was how willing and quickly the entire progressive establishment — elected officials, celebrities, media, universities, foundations, retired military — was either on the side of the revolution or saw it as useful in aborting the Trump presidency, or was terrified it would be targeted and so wished to appease the Jacobins.

This reborn America was to end all of the old that had come before and supposedly pay penance for George Floyd’s death and, by symbolic extension, America’s inherent evil since 1619. As in all cultural revolutions, the protestors claimed at first at that they wanted only to erase supposedly reactionary elements: Confederate statues, movies such as Gone with the Wind, some hurtful cartoons, and a few cranky conservative professors and what not.

But soon such recalibration steam rolled, fueled by acquiescence, fright, and timidity. Drunk with ego and power, it moved on to attack almost anything connected with the past or present of the United States itself.

Soon statues of General Grant, and presidents including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson were either toppled or defaced. The message was that their crimes were being white and privileged — in the way that today’s white and privileged should meet a similar fate. Or, as the marchers, who tried to storm Beverly Hills, put it: “Eat the Rich.” They were met by tear gas, and not a single retired general double-downed on his outrage at law enforcement for using tear gas against civilians. Did the BLM idea of cannibalizing the billionaires include LeBron James, Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey, and likely soon-to-be billionaire Barack Obama?