RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/483090-roger-stones-sentence-how-the-judge-will-really-decide-to-lock-him-up

Attorney General Bill Barr is undoubtedly right: The president’s ill-tempered tweets about pending criminal cases undermine the Justice Department’s mission. The rule of law depends not only on the reality but also the perception that prosecutorial decisions are driven by legal requirements and evidence, not political considerations.

For now, though, let’s table that and focus on what is actually at issue in the matter of Roger Stone’s sentencing.

The fact is, it was well within the legitimate power of the attorney general to countermand the Stone prosecutors’ submission to the court — i.e., to substitute a recommendation that the court impose a stiff but reasonable prison sentence on Stone, in place of the prosecutors’ suggestion of an excessive term.

More to the point, what we are witnessing in the media-Democrat commentariat is a manufactured controversy, reminiscent of their mau-mauing the president’s Ukraine indiscretion into an impeachable offense. Hence, the unhinged calls for Barr’s impeachment. The judge, not the Department of Justice (DOJ), will determine Stone’s sentence. The shrieking over DOJ’s Stone sentencing memos, topped by the theatrical resignation of the four prosecutors (who now want to be seen as stalwarts against politicized law enforcement after they conducted a patently politicized prosecution), is much ado about nothing.

Contrary to the misimpression so studiously peddled, Barr has not taken action that effectively slashes Stone’s potential sentence. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I have provided a broad overview of the controversy over the DOJ’s pre-sentencing submissions in the Stone case. Nevertheless, because the facts are a bit complicated and involve some legal esoterica, a simple point is being obscured: The only thing at issue in the two memoranda filed with the court by the DOJ is a non-binding recommendation about the sentence. It has no legal effect on the term that the judge will impose when Stone ultimately is sentenced, which currently is scheduled to happen on Feb. 20.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-progressi

A newly minted district attorney for a major American city vows to establish an immigration unit. At first blush, that would seem entirely normal for a prosecutor’s office. Immigration laws require enforcement, and prosecutors are in the law-enforcement business.

But no—the new San Francisco DA actually has in mind an immigration defense unit. He wants to assign a staff of prosecutors to protect undocumented aliens—those who are either illegal and thus deportable to begin with, or for whom a criminal conviction could result in loss of lawful status and thus eventual deportation. The unit’s enforcement target would be not the law violators but the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who enforce federal laws, along with any local police and corrections officials who have the temerity to assist ICE in that endeavor. The prosecutors’ mission, in the words of their new boss, would be to “stand up to Trump on immigration”—the president having made signature issues of border security and the stepped-up deportation of aliens who flout the laws.

That kind of immigration unit is not something you’d expect to find in a district attorney’s office. But of course, neither would you expect, upon this new DA’s election, a victory party marked by ear-splitting chants of “F*ck POA!” The POA is the Police Officers Association.

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/roots-partisan-divide/?utm_campaign=imprimis&amp%3Butm_source=housefile&

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on January 28, 2020, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation lecture series.
American society today is divided by party and by ideology in a way it has perhaps not been since the Civil War. I have just published a book that, among other things, suggests why this is. It is called The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. It runs from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the election of Donald J. Trump. You can get a good idea of the drift of the narrative from its chapter titles: 1963, Race, Sex, War, Debt, Diversity, Winners, and Losers.
I can end part of the suspense right now—Democrats are the winners. Their party won the 1960s—they gained money, power, and prestige. The GOP is the party of the people who lost those things.
One of the strands of this story involves the Vietnam War. The antiquated way the Army was mustered in the 1960s wound up creating a class system. What I’m referring to here is the so-called student deferment. In the old days, university-level education was rare. At the start of the First World War, only one in 30 American men was in a college or university, so student deferments were not culturally significant. By the time of Vietnam, almost half of American men were in a college or university, and student deferment remained in effect until well into the war. So if you were rich enough to study art history, you went to Woodstock and made love. If you worked in a garage, you went to Da Nang and made war. This produced a class division that many of the college-educated mistook for a moral division, particularly once we lost the war. The rich saw themselves as having avoided service in Vietnam not because they were more privileged or—heaven forbid—less brave, but because they were more decent.
Another strand of the story involves women. Today, there are two cultures of American womanhood—the culture of married women and the culture of single women. If you poll them on political issues, they tend to differ diametrically. It was feminism that produced this rupture. For women during the Kennedy administration, by contrast, there was one culture of femininity, and it united women from cradle to grave: Ninety percent of married women and 87 percent of unmarried women believed there was such a thing as “women’s intuition.” Only 16 percent of married women and only 15 percent of unmarried women thought it was excusable in some circumstances to have an extramarital affair. Ninety-nine percent of women, when asked the ideal age for marriage, said it was sometime before age 27. None answered “never.”
But it is a third strand of the story, running all the way down to our day, that is most important for explaining our partisan polarization. It concerns how the civil rights laws of the 1960s, and particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, divided the country. They did so by giving birth to what was, in effect, a second constitution, which would eventually cause Americans to peel off into two different and incompatible constitutional cultures. This became obvious only over time. It happened so slowly that many people did not notice.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/02/14/americas-growing-approval-of-socialism-is-a-rejection-of-freedom/

In February 2009, just after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, Newsweek declared on its cover “We Are All Socialists Now.” More than a decade later, socialism has taken over the Democratic Party, and has a strong hold on young Americans. It’s gone mainstream in a nation founded on principles opposite the tenets of socialism.

Seven in 10 millennials say they would vote for a socialist candidate, while 64% of Generation Z told pollsters last year it is “somewhat/extremely likely” they’d vote for a socialist, according to a YouGov-Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation poll taken last fall.

Among Democrats of all ages, socialism is held in high esteem. Seven in 10 (again) said last spring socialism is “a good thing,” marking a disturbing shift. The year before, only 57% of Democrats held the same opinion of socialism.

Cultural critic Camille Paglia has said that young Americans lean toward socialism because they are ignorant of history. So maybe they just don’t understand what socialism is. To them, it’s an avuncular white-haired guy yelling about concentrations of wealth, which they’ve been led to believe is an evil that must be broken by the state, and too many choices in deodorant; a frail but angry-for-some-reason woman promising to cancel the debt on their student loans who says she has a plan to fix all economic and societal ills; and a young, photogenic New York congresswoman with a tippy-top coolness factor who they think speaks for them.

Socialism, though, is coercion by the state, “a boot,” said George Orwell, “stamping on the human face forever.” It requires the exclusion of freedom, operates by command, requires reluctant participants to yield to its plans. Socialism “cannot co-exist with individual rights,” its solidarity “is enforced at gunpoint,” its notions of equality and fairness ensured by squads that will ultimately “show up with truncheons.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/unindicted-co-conspirator-93-wtc-bombing-coming-joe-kaufman/

On February 26, 1993, a truck bomb exploded under the North Tower of the World Trade Center killing six people and injuring over a thousand others. The bomb was meant to collapse the building and, if successful, would have taken the lives of thousands, as we later witnessed during 9/11. On February 22, 2020, just days shy of the 27th anniversary of the ’93 bombing, one of the named unindicted co-conspirators of the attack, Brooklyn imam Siraj Wahhaj, will be the main speaker at the South Florida annual banquet for ICNA Relief. Besides its sorrowful anniversary, this shameful event is a reminder, as well, that radical Islam is thriving in America and that Florida is a hotbed of Islamist activity.

Siraj Wahhaj is the imam of the At-Taqwa Mosque, located in Brooklyn, New York, and the President of the Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA). In 1995, along with Osama bin Laden and bin Laden’s mentor, Abdullah Azzam, Wahhaj was named by the US government as an “unindicted co-conspirator” for a federal trial dealing with the 1993 World Trade Center (WTC) bombing. Wahhaj had been linked to the bomb-maker of the attack, Clement Rodney Hampton-El, and during the trial, he was a character witness for the spiritual leader of the attack, the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, whom Wahhaj has openly praised.

Wahhaj recently made the news, when his son, two daughters, son-in-law and daughter-in-law were arrested on charges of abusing children at an alleged terrorist training compound in New Mexico. According to Reuters, “Eleven children ranging from 1 to 15 years of age were found ragged and starving.” Another child and grandson of Wahhaj, 3-year-old Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj, was found dead at the compound, after his reported abduction by Wahhaj’s son, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, from the Atlanta, Georgia home of the child’s mother. According to prosecutors, the children were being trained at the compound to commit school shootings.

This month, Wahhaj will be the keynote speaker at the 2020 annual banquet for ICNA Relief, taking place at the Marriott Coral Springs Hotel and Convention Center. The location has become a go-to venue for radical Muslim events, as the Hamas-related Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) just held their annual banquet there, this past October.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/attorney_general_bill_barr_rebukes_trumps_tweets_about_roger_stone.html

Trump’s spokesman responds by saying that Trump has the same right as any other citizen to comment on a miscarriage of justice.

It’s hard to tell whether the apparent tension between President Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr is real or is a way to create the appearance of some separation between Barr and Trump on the subject of Roger Stone. The facts are straightforward, but still open to interpretation.

Bob Mueller and his bad boys went after Roger Stone with a level of ferocity far in excess of any wrongdoing Stone had allegedly committed. Although Stone is a non-violent, first-time offender who allegedly committed a crime that is the norm in Washington D.C. (lying to Congress, something that James Clapper, for example, did with impunity), Mueller’s team arranged for a pre-dawn SWAT style raid on Stone to arrest him, complete with a conveniently present CNN team; a multi-pronged indictment; a jury foreman who openly despised Trump and everyone around him; and a shopped judge who loathes Trump too.

At the end of the day, Mueller’s prosecutors got Stone convicted on seven counts, including lying to Congress, obstructing an official proceeding, and witness tampering (that is, threats to a potential witness who found Stone’s angry fulminations laughable). Then, the Mueller gang went in for the kill, demanding that Mueller, who is now 67, be sentenced to seven to nine years in prison. This excessive demand can only stem from malevolence and the need to send a warning to Trump associates, akin to the mafia promising a few broken kneecaps for people who don’t play along.

Immediately after the prosecutors made their sentencing demand, Trump tweeted out that the sentencing request was corrupt and evil, as well as taking swipes at the judge and the prosecutors:

At roughly the same time, the Justice Department intervened to ask the court not to consider the specific request for seven to ten years. Instead, it gave the judge more leeway by recommending only an unspecified term as the judge saw fit. Democrats predictably exploded, accusing Trump of interfering with justice.

Florida Man Attacks Trump Supporters With … a Cane Sword
By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/trending/florida-man-attacks-trump-supporters-with-a-cane-sword/

Peaceful Florida citizens holding Trump signs were minding their own business in Dunnellon, Fla., last Thursday when a man rushed at them with a cane sword.

Police arrested 49-year-old James L. Whitehurst II and charged him with 10 counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and one count of disorderly conduct, the Ocala Star Banner reported.

Victims reportedly told police that Whitehurst had approached them during their peaceful assembly with what was described as a cane sword. The assailant allegedly pointed the sword in their faces and made threatening statements, holding the blade 6 inches from their faces.

Whitehurst confessed to having removed the sword from its holder and pointing it at the Trump supporters. He told police he meant no harm by the threatening action.

New Hampshire Man Assaults Pro-Trump Teenager at Polling Site, Leaving Him ‘Traumatized’
By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/trending/new-hampshire-man-assaults-pro-trump-teenager-at-polling-site-leaving-him-traumatized/

A New Hampshire man was arrested Thursday afternoon “after allegedly assaulting a 15-year-old Trump supporter and two adults at a polling site during the state’s first-in-the-nation primary earlier this week,” Fox News exclusively reports. The teen’s mother told Fox News that the assault left her son “traumatized.”

Patrick Bradley, 34, of Windham, N.H., was charged with simple assault and disorderly conduct.

Bradley reportedly got in the face of the teenage boy who was wearing a red MAGA hat and volunteering at the local high school, which was a polling place for the New Hampshire primary.

The boy’s mother described the incident involving her son in an interview with Fox News. “My son stayed home from school on Tuesday for a doctor’s appointment and we drove by the high school to go vote. When we got there, we saw Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle, and my son was over the moon,” she said. “My son is the most patriotic kid you’d ever meet in your life.”

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/298592/the-russia-scare

When a poorly designed app thwarted the tallying of results in last week’s Iowa Democratic caucus, it was only a matter of time before somebody blamed the chaos on Russian machinations. That somebody was Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on FBI oversight on Feb. 5. Lee told FBI Director Christopher Wray: “I hope that the Iowa Democrats will ask for an FBI investigation on the app. I believe that Russia has been engaged in and interfering with a number of our elections …”

The United States today is in the midst of a full-blown moral panic, which without exaggeration can be called the “Russia Scare.” After Al Gore won the popular vote but lost in the electoral college to George W. Bush in 2000, he and the Democratic Party did not spend years claiming that the election was stolen by American traitors working with a foreign power. But that is exactly the claim that Hillary Clinton and most Democratic leaders have made since Donald Trump’s electoral college victory in 2016. The assertion that Trump is an illegitimate president who was installed thanks to Russian interference has been the underlying theme behind the Mueller investigation and the subsequent impeachment of Trump by the Democrats in the House.

According to the Russia Scare narrative that is accepted by many if not most Democrats today, Vladimir Putin’s Russian regime altered the outcome of the 2016 election in one or more ways. That Russian trolls and hackers engaged in online mischief in 2016 is a fact. What has not been established is that their activities changed or suppressed a single vote in the 2016 election.

Russia, it is claimed, hacked Democratic National Committee files and released damaging emails to the news media that showed the Clinton campaign working with the DNC to rig the 2016 Democratic primary against Clinton’s opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders. As a result, many angry former Sanders supporters either refused to vote for Clinton in the general election or cast a protest vote for third-party candidate Jill Stein, thus depriving the Democrats of the White House.