RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/

“Trump’s critics say that his claims about a deep state are the result of his paranoid delusions. But after what the country has witnessed over the past three years, and now the bragging by State Department officials bent on getting Trump out of Washington, it’s the denial of the deep state that is delusional.”

Two news stories published over the weekend had the same message. The State Department was out to get President Donald Trump after suffering years of “frustration.” At least these denizens of the deep state are being honest.

Politico’s 2,000-word story – titled “The Revenge of the State Department” – begins by reporting on the fact “current and former Foreign Service officers have defied Trump administration orders and trudged to Capitol Hill to testify before House committees investigating whether to impeach the president.”

These officials, the story says, are “furious,” “terrified,” “incredulous,” “disappointed,” “fed up,” “livid,” with a “deep well of resentment,” in an “unbearable” situation.

Some of them, Politico reports, are using the hearings as a “platform to air long-held grievances over Trump.”

And their colleagues are “hailing them as heroes.”

What, exactly, are these career State Department bureaucrats angry about?

They’re mad that several of them “were demoted or sidelined following attacks by the conservative media.”

They complain about what they see as Trump’s “dangerous brand of diplomatic malpractice.”

They’re upset that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo didn’t publicly support Marie Yavonovitch after Trump removed her from her post as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and that Pompeo “is willing to sell out the department to keep favor with Trump.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/20/why-do-they-hate-him-so/

Democrats, NeverTrump Republicans, left-liberal celebrities, journalists, and academics all revile Donald Trump because he is trying and often succeeding to restore a conservative America at a time when his opponents thought that the mere idea was not just impossible but unhinged.

Joe Biden claims he wants to take Trump behind the gym and beat him up.

Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) jokes that she would like to go into an elevator with him and see Trump never come out alive. Robert De Niro has exhausted the ways in which he dreams of punching Trump out and the intonations in which he yells to audiences, “F—k Trump!”

The humanists and social justice warriors of Hollywood, from Madonna to Johnny Depp, cannot agree whether their elected president should be beheaded, blown up, stabbed, shot, or incinerated. All the Democratic would-be presidential nominees agree that Trump is the worst something-or-other in history—from human being to mere president.

Former subordinates like Anthony Scaramucci, Omarosa, and Michael Cohen insist that he is a racist, a sexist, a crook, a bully, or mentally deranged—and they all support their firsthand appraisals on the basis they eagerly worked for him and were unceremoniously fired by him.

The so-called deep state detests him. An anonymous op-ed writer in the September 5, 2018 New York Times bragged about the bureaucracy’s successful efforts to ignore Trump’s legal mandates—a sort of more methodical version of the comical Rosenstein-McCabe attempt to stage a palace coup and remove Trump, or the Democrats efforts to invoke the 25th Amendment and declare Trump crazy, bolstered by an array of Ivy League psychiatrists who had neither met nor examined him.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/barbara-streisand-tweets-cartoon-of-bloody-impaled-donald-trump/

Fake political violence is back in style this week after last week’s outrage over the Kingsman meme where fake violence made everyone angry. This week, Barbara Streisand has joined Tom Arnold and certain CNN employees by wishing for Donald Trump’s death and sharing her sick fantasies about it.

The cartoon Streisand shared on Twitter depicts the president impaled and bleeding on the heel of Nancy Pelosi’s shoe. Absolutely no one on the left is condemning it, nor is anyone at CNN demanding that Nancy Pelosi condemn it. Let us all remember, for a moment, the outrage that the left experienced over Kingsman meme, which the president did not make or share. The upset was so ridiculous, the White House had to respond.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/19/what-the-framers-knew-that-hillary-doesnt/

Beneath Clinton’s feud with Tulsi Gabbard and the Democrats’ impeachment efforts is a vital lesson about political corruption and the value of constitutional government.

Hillary Clinton was in the news this week for her odd feud with 2020 presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic member of Congress from Hawaii. Clinton accused Gabbard of being a “Russian asset” who is being groomed by the Kremlin to defect from the Democratic Party and run as a third-party candidate. The two-time presidential candidate claims Gabbard would then fulfill the same spoiler role as Green Party candidate Jill Stein did in 2016, diverting votes from the Democratic nominee. This, Clinton explained, would help President Trump’s reelection.

There is no evidence to support Clinton’s completely fanciful charge, and Gabbard has said she will not run as a third-party candidate. (It’s a strange feud, too, in the sense that Clinton isn’t a candidate and Gabbard is polling at roughly 1 percent.) Indeed, Clinton’s hackneyed Russian fantasy was of a piece with the baseless claim that President Trump had colluded with Russia to secure his 2016 election victory.

Democrats have claimed over and over that Trump has some sort of mental illness, but a far stronger case could be made that it is Clinton who is clinically delusional. She remains unable to understand that she failed to gain an Electoral College majority because she was the less talented candidate and because of her obvious use of her governmental position corruptly to increase her and her family’s wealth.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/19/who-the-hell-do-they-think-they-are/

“If we ask what they have done for us that we should have confidence in them, we realize that these people have lost every war they have waged since 1945. Accommodating themselves to our corrupt ruling class, they have been happy enough to wage endless no-win wars which have killed as many Americans as did World War I. The current military dictionary has no entry for “victory.”

With William McRaven’s call to oust President Trump—maybe through impeachment, maybe through a coup—the military officer class joins the establishment in claiming a right to rule, regardless of the outcome of elections.

Retired Admiral William McRaven devoted the bulk of a New York Times op-ed to appropriating for himself the moral and hence political authority of generations of soldiers and sailors (pointedly, especially the female ones) who have sacrificed for America, for “the good and the right.” Then he gratuitously stated—citing no specifics, as if everyone already knows—that “President Trump seems to believe that all these qualities are unimportant or show weakness.”

McRaven concludes, “it is time for a new person in the Oval Office—Republican, Democrat or independent—the sooner, the better.” At the very least, McRaven called for impeachment ahead of an election, or perhaps for a coup, and pretended to do so on the military’s behalf. In fact, his was just one more voice from an establishment that has squandered the public’s trust, senses that it can no longer win elections honestly, and is pulling out all the stops.

It pretends to be trying to take down Donald Trump. In fact, it is trying to do something much bigger: Invalidate the votes of the “deplorables” who oppose them.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/state-department-says-nearly-600-security-violations-in-clinton-email-review/

They took their own sweet time about it, but the State Department’s internal investigation into the Hillary Clinton email imbroglio has finally been completed. As you might expect, it was pretty much of a whitewash. The only eyebrow raising news coming from the release is the number of blatant security violations by Clinton and 38 other State Department employees.

Daily Caller:

State Department investigators probing Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state discovered nearly 600 security incidents that violated agency policy, according to a report the Daily Caller News Foundation obtained.

The investigation, conducted by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, found 38 individuals were culpable for 91 security violations. Another 497 violations were found, but no individuals were found culpable in those incidents.

The investigation concluded Sept. 6, and the report was issued Sept. 13.

No criminal charges, no action whatsoever. It’s like the violations never happened.

Big surprise, huh?

Hillary fared a lot better than others who have mishandled classified information.

https://www.city-journal.org/frick-collection-expansion

Current architectural-alteration plans for the Frick Collection on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—which appear likely to clear their final regulatory hurdle at the end of this month—will cause considerable harm to the finest house museum in the United States. This is particularly unfortunate because the Frick’s superb classical architecture is integral to the experience of its magnificent art collection, consisting largely of Old Master paintings by the likes of Veronese, Rembrandt, van Dyck, and Fragonard.

As part of an expansion of its facilities, which include the 11-floor Frick Art Reference Library building in the northeast corner of its property, the Frick proposes to do away with its Music Room, a fine circular chamber that opens off the building’s Garden Court. Both the room and the court were designed by John Russell Pope in the 1930s. The Frick also proposes to gut the Reception Hall designed by John Barrington Bayley four decades later and to surmount Bayley’s beautiful pavilion housing the hall with a low and recessed—but thoroughly inappropriate—window wall. A new raised roof will make space for a second story on top of the pavilion, where a museum shop will be located, while Pope’s Music Room will be replaced by a special exhibition gallery, rectangular in plan. “Stripped classical” doesn’t do justice to the proposed gallery and new reception hall, which will also replace the Bayley pavilion’s bookshop, lodged behind the existing hall. “Anorexic classical” is more like it. With their dull, blank white walls, these spaces will be as cold as ice, and utterly discordant with the Frick’s architectural character.

The plans have some positive aspects. It will be wonderful for visitors to climb the original mansion’s grand staircase to the second floor, where Pope converted family quarters into museum offices. These will now be used for the exhibition of small paintings, drawings, and works of decorative art. And the Frick has long emphasized its need for a larger auditorium, better conservation facilities, and better accommodations for school groups. But to degrade the existing house museum would be a terrible mistake.

In 1912, Pittsburgh steel magnate Henry Clay Frick retained Thomas Hastings, whose New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue had just been completed, to design a home extending from 70th Street to 71st Street and facing Central Park. The Paris-trained Hastings was one of the nation’s foremost exponent of French classicism, the museum’s dominant architectural idiom. The home Hastings designed for Frick was a low-slung mansion built of Indiana limestone whose porte-cochère entrance was set back from 70th Street. The mansion’s exquisitely detailed gallery—100 feet long and 35 feet wide, with walls covered in dark green silk velvet and crowned by a segmental glass vault—fronted on 71st Street.

It has consequences that threaten liberty.

We have a serious governance problem.

Our system is based on separation of powers, because liberty depends on preventing any component of the state from accumulating too much authority — that’s how tyrants are born. For the system to work, the components have to be able to check each other: The federal and state governments must respect their separate spheres, and the branches of the federal government must be able to rein in a branch that oversteps its authority.

The steady federal encroachment on state authority has created an imbalance that probably cannot be rolled back. I want to focus on the collapse of inter-branch checks in the federal government.

This was the issue I dealt with in Faithless Execution. The thesis was that the Framers feared an agglomeration of power in the presidency they were creating, so they endowed Congress with significant checks on the executive. The ultimate one was impeachment. But this was supposed to be reserved for truly abominable misconduct. Though Madison concluded that impeachment was “indispensable” in light of the damage a rogue president could do, it also came with its own set of problems. Not least, impeachment might give Congress too much power over the executive. It might be invoked out of partisan mischief, rather than serious maladministration. Consequently, impeachment was made to be really hard to do.

The Framers were sophisticated men, who saw themselves as both students and victims of executive power run amok (as about two minutes’ perusal of the Declaration of Independence elucidates). They understood that governance would involve tussles between the political branches and episodes of overreach — whether out of incompetence, malevolence, or urgency — for which the extraordinary impeachment remedy would be gross overkill. Routine disputes involving the propensities of both the legislature and the executive to act outside their authorities would be handled by lesser remedies. Congress, most importantly, was given the power of the purse and significant power over executive agencies (to create them, to limit their authority, and, in the Senate’s case, to approve their leaders).

My argument in Faithless Execution was that this system has broken down, with no repairs on the horizon. The Framers naturally thought congressional control of the executive budget would obviate the need to resort to impeachment. Lawmakers could defund dubious executive initiatives and withhold funds necessary to carry out the president’s priorities; this would pressure the executive branch to comply with statutes as well as congressional demands for information and policy modification. The ultimate question of a president’s fitness would be left to the sovereign — the American people, exercising the franchise.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2019/10/16/ever-wonder-about-the

How is 97 percent of Congress able to get re-elected each year even though only 17 percent of the American people believe our representatives are doing a good job?

It’s called an incumbent protection system. Taxpayers have a right to know how it works.

Recently, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com, mashed up the federal checkbook with the congressional campaign donor database (source: OpenSecrets.org). We found powerful members of Congress soliciting campaign donations from federal contractors based in their districts.

We followed the money and found a culture of conflict-of-interest. The confluence of federal money, campaign cash, private employment, investments, prestigious committee appointments, political power, nepotism, and other conflicts are a fact pattern.

Furthermore, members of Congress own investment stock in, are employed by, and receive retirement pensions from federal contractors to whom they direct billions of taxpayer dollars.

Moreover, members sponsor legislation that affects these contractors. The contractor’s lobbyists then advocate for the legislation that helps the member and the contractor. Oftentimes, the contractor’s lobbyist also donates campaign cash to the member.

Here are five case examples detailing the conflict-of-interest among five powerful members of Congress: