RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/460550-states-launch-antitrust-investigation-into-google

A coalition of 50 attorneys general will be investigating Google for potential violations of antitrust law, a step that could potentially lead to a broad legal challenge to the company’s market dominance.

The investigation, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine (D), was announced on the steps of the Supreme Court building Monday afternoon after months of rumors about states seeking to turn up the pressure on Silicon Valley. 

The probe will focus on Google’s dominance in the online search and advertising markets.

“We have 50 attorneys general from across the nation who are involved in this investigation that we’re leading from Texas,” said Paxton. “This is a company that dominates all aspects of advertising on the internet and searching on the internet as they dominate the buyers’ side, the sellers’ side, the auction side and even the video side with YouTube,” he said of Google.

“This investigation is not a lawsuit — this is an investigation to determine the facts, and right now we’re looking at advertising,” Paxton added. “But the facts will lead to where the facts lead.”

Paxton and Racine were joined at the announcement by attorneys general from Alaska, South Dakota, Indiana, Arkansas, Utah, Florida, Missouri, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana and Nebraska.

The coalition includes 48 states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. California and Alabama are the only two states not to join the investigation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/all-in-the-comey-family/

Baker, Page, Priestap, and Strzok are toadies who aided Comey’s efforts to turn an election and kneecap a presidency.

B y his own admission, the recently fired FBI director James Comey leaked at least four memos of private presidential conversations — at least one of them containing some classified secret material — variously to his lawyers and through liaisons to the press. In both phone calls and personal meetings, Comey never gave any hint to the president he served that he intended to leave a written record of the conversations for what turned out to be his own selfish agenda.

Comey said his intent by leaking his versions of these conversations was to force a brouhaha that would in turn prompt Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel. That gambit worked to perfection when, shortly after Comey’s scripted media leaks, Robert Mueller, his predecessor, former FBI director, and longtime friend, was appointed special counsel, apparently to do what the now fired James Comey could not.

Mueller immediately put together a left-wing “dream team” of “all stars” — Clinton supporters, Clinton donors, and former attorneys of Clinton interests. As we can now conclude from his often clueless congressional testimony, Mueller himself essentially outsourced control of the investigation’s direction to Andrew Weissman, another strong Clinton partisan and Trump opponent.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/peace-talks-taliban-terrorists-camp-david/

They remain aggressive foes determined to strike at America. They must be killed or captured, not invited to negotiations.

‘The Taliban, per se, is not our enemy.” Thus spoke Joe Biden, Obama-administration vice president and resident foreign-affairs solon. It was 2011 and the administration was rationalizing its desperation to negotiate its way out of Afghanistan, where we then had about 30,000 troops (more than three times the current deployment). It was nothing new. Hamid Karzai, president of the fledgling Afghan government propped up by the Bush administration after the Taliban’s ouster, had been seeking negotiations for years . . . only to be spurned by the Taliban.

Of course, the Taliban did not get to weigh in on Biden’s babble. If they had, they would surely have said bluntly what they have demonstrated blatantly for 20 years: They are absolutely our enemy, not just per se but in aeternum.

If, as he stated in a Saturday Twitter thread, President Trump actually was planning to host Taliban leaders at Camp David this past weekend for what he and the administration describe as “peace talks,” that boggles the mind.

The Taliban terrorists do not wish to hold “peace talks” with us. As shown by the humiliating negotiations that the Trump administration’s emissary has been conducting in Qatar, the Taliban wish, at best, to chat about the terms of our surrender — i.e., about how willing they may be to let the president’s determination to withdraw our troops look like an honorable armistice rather than a case of our being chased out of their country. Allowing their leaders into our country — into Camp David for an audience with the president — would be every bit as outrageous as President Obama’s release of five Taliban commanders from Guantanamo Bay (in exchange for deserter Bowe Bergdahl, no less). It would be every bit as outrageous as the Obama administration’s issuance of a visa to Hani Nour Eldin — a member of an Egyptian terrorist organization that, like the Taliban, conspires with al-Qaeda to kill Americans — so he could come to Washington for talks about post-Mubarak Cairo.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/illinois-paid-millions-in-medicaid-for-people-who-are-already-dead/

The proof is in the pudding, as they say. In other words, if you want to see the “competency” and “efficiency” of leftists at work, look to Illinois. Among a myriad of state-wide problems created by leftist ideology, a new report from the U.S. Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General uncovered that Illinois spent at least $4.6 million between 2015 and 2017 on people who are already dead.

Those uninitiated in the utter lack of competency among leftists may wonder how this could ever happen. How does the state spend money on dead people? Well, ABC 20 out of Springfield, Ill., explains it this way:

Here’s how it works: managed care organizations provide health care to Medicaid patients in exchange for monthly “capitation” payments from the state. “This means they pay a specific amount at a regular interval for that person, depending on their age, gender, and disease states,” Petersburg Pharmacy owner Dave Bagot said. “And what happened was they continued making these payments for these folks after they had passed away.”

ABC 20’s article makes the obvious point that “Some believe now other areas of Illinois Medicaid need to be looked into.”

https://nypost.com/2019/09/07/robert-mueller-helped-saudi-arabia-cover-up-its-role-in-9-11-attacks-suit/

After a lengthy investigation, special counsel Robert Mueller charged Russia made “multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election” and said the incursion “deserves the attention of every American.”

But former FBI investigators say their old boss didn’t feel the same concern when they uncovered multiple, systemic efforts by the Saudi government to assist the hijackers in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks — a far more consequential, to say nothing of deadly, foreign influence operation on America.

As the head of the FBI at the time, they say Mueller was not nearly as interested in investigating that espionage conspiracy, which also involved foreign intelligence officers. Far from it, the record shows he covered up evidence pointing back to the Saudi Embassy and Riyadh — and may have even misled Congress about what he knew.

9/11 victims agree. “He was the master when it came to covering up the kingdom’s role in 9/11,” said survivor Sharon Premoli, who was pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center 18 years ago.

“In October of 2001, Mueller shut down the government’s investigation after only three weeks, and then took part in the Bush [administration’s] campaign to block, obfuscate and generally stop anything about Saudi Arabia from being released,” added Premoli, now a plaintiff in the 9/11 lawsuit against Saudi Arabia.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/07/lies-the-left-tells-about-guns/

Congress reconvenes this week after a summer fraught with multiple mass shootings. Reportedly, legislation implementing tighter gun control is on the table, with rumored support by some in the White House. The rhetoric surrounding guns continues to escalate.

Here’s the thing about guns. The Constitution—that handy little document—guarantees our rights to them, and that guarantee is a profound reflection of the nature and character of our freedoms. As Ben Domenech of The Federalist wrote recently, “the right to bear arms is not about hunting.” Rather:

It is a natural right of the deepest significance to the relationship between the citizen and the state. It is in the Constitution because the men who defeated the greatest empire in the world wanted us to be able to defend our freedom.

The simple fact that we have a right to own guns doesn’t mean individuals must own them, use them, or even like them. But what it does mean is that people advocating further regulation of firearms at least should have a baseline understanding of how firearms actually work, as well as the current statutory environment that regulates their purchase, handling, and use.

Unfortunately, the current rhetoric coming from Democrats betrays a deep misunderstanding about all of those things.

Here are some of the worst offenses.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/corporate-america-wants-to-be-woke/

The politicization of firms is a double-edged sword.

Time was, CEOs of mighty enterprises shied away from politics, especially hot-button social and cultural issues. They focused instead on the bottom line. They maximized shareholder value by delivering goods and services to customers. Some businessmen still operate by this principle. In doing so they provide not only for their employees and CEOs and board members but also for the institutions — pensions, individual retirement plans, index funds, hospitals, philanthropies — that have invested in their companies.

That is no longer enough for many of America’s richest and most powerful. Suddenly, corporate America has a conscience. Every week brings new examples of CEOs intervening in political, cultural, and social debate. In every instance, the prominent spokesmen for American business situate themselves comfortably on the left side of the political spectrum. Shareholder capitalism finds itself under attack. Not just from socialism but also from woke capitalism.

These outbursts are not just virtue signaling. Nor is the left-wing tilt of corporate America merely a response to the “rising American electorate” of Millennial, Gen Z, and minority consumers. What is taking place is not a business story but a political one. What is known as “stakeholder capitalism” is another means by which elites circumvent democratic accountability.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/students-debunk-study-showing-226-percent-rise-hate-crimes-following-trump-rallies/

A study purporting to show area hate crimes tended to spike following Trump rallies, which went viral earlier this year, is fatally flawed in its methodology, according to a new analysis by two economics P.h.D. students at Harvard University.

The study, which found a 226 percent increase in white-nationalist propaganda and hate crimes in counties that hosted Trump campaign rallies, failed to account for political campaigns’ preference for hosting rallies in highly populated areas that naturally tend to experience more hate crimes, according to the analysis conducted by Harvard P.h.D. candidates Matthew Lilley and Brian Wheaton.

Lilley and Wheaton were able to replicate the initial study’s findings with respect to Trump rallies, but found an even greater increase in hate crimes in counties that hosted Clinton campaign rallies during the same period.

Once the researchers controlled for population size, the effect of Trump rallies on hate crimes became “statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/red-flag-laws-should-mandate-treatment-not-just-gun-confiscation/

To seriously tackle the problem of mass shootings, we must get serious about tackling the problem of severe mental illness.

In the wake of recent mass shootings by Americans alleged to be mentally ill, President Trump has called for a national red-flag law that would preclude certain mentally ill individuals from owning or buying firearms. It’s a good idea, but for the seriously mentally ill, red-flag laws should also trigger treatment, not just gun confiscation.

It makes no sense to let people who are known to be seriously mentally ill and believed to be dangerous go without treatment, even if they have had their weapons taken away. It’s not compassionate. And it can be dangerous.

Forty percent of the seriously mentally ill have anosognosia, meaning they are unaware they are ill. Because they are unaware they are ill, they sometimes refuse treatment. Many become homeless, arrested, incarcerated, and needlessly hospitalized. Some, responding to their delusions, resort to violence that doesn’t involve guns. All of these outcomes could be avoided if they received treatment.

The red-flag law previously proposed by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), the Extreme Risk Protection Order Act of 2019, which is now being taken up by Senators Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), Joe Manchin (D., W.V.), and others, should be amended to provide a path to treatment for those who are identified as being too mentally ill to own guns.

New York provides a roadmap for how to do this. In 2013, it passed the New York SAFE Act. Among other provisions, the law required therapists to report to the county mental-health director the names of mentally ill people under their care who they believe to be dangerous and to possess guns. It then charged the county mental-health director with investigating the therapists’ reports and, if appropriate, instructing law enforcement to seize the guns from the individuals in question and enter their names into the federal NICS database, which would preclude them from making gun purchases. It further allowed for an appeals process through which the mental-health director’s determination could be challenged.