RUTHFULLY YOURS

Vermont Democrats have something else to celebrate besides the creation and failure of the first statewide socialized medicine system in America. Recovering from that glorious triumph, Vermont Democrats have elected their first Muslim state party chairman.

The lucky fellow is Faisal Gill who called his victory a rebuke of President Trump. “To have a Muslim and immigrant to be the state party chair sends a really strong message to Trump and his type of politics that this is not where the country is at.”

Gill’s election doesn’t send much of a message about where America is at. But it certainly sends a message about where the Democrats are at.

Back when Gill was playing a Republican, courtesy of Grover Norquist, left-wing media outlets like Salon were willing to report on his troubling Islamist ties. But Faisal Gil has been reborn as a supporter of Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison. The left has become a warm and moist safe space for Islamists. The Salon article which Gill blamed for many of his problems would be nearly inconceivable today. Could anyone really imagine a leftist publication today describing the Muslim Brotherhood as a terror nexus?

But did Faisal Gill really go from Norquist Republican to Sanders Democrat? Did he shift from believing in free enterprise to embracing Socialism? Or did Gill always hold to an overriding ideology in whose shadow the distinction between Capitalism and Socialism becomes pointless infidel quibbling?

When revelations first emerged that Faisal Gill had been under FBI surveillance, he blamed Islamophobia. When Snowden’s enemy espionage operation exposed national security documents which were published by left-wing terror apologist Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept, a site whose former writer is now charged with some of the terroristic bomb threats aimed at Jewish centers, Gill’s email appeared on a list of alleged terrorist suspects and supporters, including Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al-Awlaki.

Glenn Greenwald had claimed that the Al Qaeda leader’s only crimes were “speak[ing] effectively to the Muslim world about violence that the U.S. commits in [Yemen] and the responsibility of Muslims to stand up to this violence.” Examples of this could include Anwar Al-Awlaki quotes such as, “Jihad against America is binding upon myself, just as it is binding on every other able Muslim”, “Don’t consult with anybody in killing the Americans, fighting the devil doesn’t require consultation” and “We will implement the rule of Allah on earth by the tip of the sword.”

President Trump released a proposed budget on Thursday with increases in defense spending and large cuts to numerous domestic agencies and programs. According to CNN, the budget slashes:

… non-defense spending at the State Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency and [includes] the wholesale elimination of other federal programs.

This is fantastic news.

Here are the department cuts proposed by Trump:

• Health and Human Services, the department responsible for implementing Obamacare and its proposed repeal, would face a $12.6 billion cut — a 16.2% decrease
• Environmental Protection Agency: $2.6 billion, or 31.4%
• State Department: $11 billion, or 28.7%
• Labor Department: $2.5 billion, or 20.7%
• Agriculture Department: $5 billion, or 20.7%
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: $1 billion, a 16.3% cut
• Cuts National Institutes of Health spending by $5.8 billion, a nearly 20% cut. Also overhauls NIH to focus on “highest priority” efforts and eliminates the Fogarty International Center.
• Other double-digit cuts include Commerce at 15.7%; Education at 13.5%; Housing and Urban Development at 13.2%; Transportation at 12.7%; and Interior at 11.7%.

Here are the proposed program cuts:

• Eliminates the USDA Water and Wastewater loan and grant program, a reduction of $498 million
• Cuts $250 million by zeroing out National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration grants and programs that support coastal and marine management, research and education
• Reduces or eliminates 20 programs within the Department of Education, including Striving Readers, Teacher Quality Partnership and Impact Aid support payments for federal property and international education programs
• Cuts FEMA state and local grant funding by $667 million, including the Pre-Disaster Mitigation Grant Program and Homeland Security Grant Program
• Eliminates funds for Section 4 Capacity Building for Community Development and Affordable Housing
• Ceases payments to the United Nations’ climate change programs for the Green Climate Fund and precursor funds
• Scales back funding for the World Bank and other international development banks by $650 million over three years
• Cuts federal subsidies to Amtrak and eliminates support for Amtrak’s long-distance services.

Maybe I missed something but I’ve been assuming for the last half-dozen years or so, probably a lot longer, that every word I spoke into a cellphone, every text and email I wrote, every letter I typed in my Internet-connected computers and, more recently, every utterance I made in front of the Amazon Alexa on my desk were being recorded somewhere. And if someone or some organization seriously wanted to find them, if they could wangle permission or even if not, they would be able to get all or most of it. My life, good and bad, is up there in the cloud somewhere, every last word and digit.

Isn’t that true of all of us?

Then why wouldn’t that be true of Donald Trump?

Was he somehow able to escape the sweeping purview of the NSA, CIA, FSB, MI5, MOSSAD, MSS (China), BND (Germany), DGSE (France), SISMI (Italy), VAJA (Iran), BUREAU 121 (North Korea), etc., etc, not to mention a world of non-state actors who took a programming course somewhere and, these days, the refrigerator or the dimmer switch in the guest room, the oh-so-modern Internet of Things.

Angela Merkel wasn’t. Russian Ambassador Kislyak, a nuclear scientist, apparently wasn’t. Nor were, as opéra bouffe, the executives of Sony Pictures whose emails were rifled by the North Koreans.

Let’s be honest, we’re all under surveillance all the time and must rely, from all evidence, not on the laws supposedly protecting us, but, like Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, on the “kindness of strangers” for our privacy. (Let’s hope our peccadilloes are too minor to attract anyone’s attention — at least for now.)

In the end, it’s not a question of were we surveilled, it’s a question of who reveals the contents of that surveillance to whom, and when and why.

That is why, you will excuse me, but I look on the bipartisan conclusions of the congressional intelligence committees — that Trump was not, in that hoary term, “wiretapped” — with a jaundiced eye. In the narrowest sense, maybe not. In the larger sense, of course.

What concerns me — what should concern all of us if we are interested in living a free, independent life — is who leaked the various surveillances that did or did not take place. Those people MUST be punished. (We’ll leave aside for the moment the extent these leaks were enabled by Obama through his last-minute decree that information could be shared among 17 intelligence agencies.) The leaks seem to come in two forms.

The first we could call the “Leak Direct” (or in Shakespearean terms the “Lie Direct”). A prime example is the intercepted phone call between Mike Flynn and Ambassador Kislyak that ultimately resulted in Flynn losing his position as national security adviser in record time. Flynn was a private American citizen at the time of the call and should, according to law, never have had his identity revealed. That didn’t stop the leaker who, it seems, was also not afraid of the serious felony conviction that could come from his or her actions. So far that was a good bet. CONTINUE AT SITE

Angry, violent progressives, driven by nonstop Trump-hatred emanating from mainstream and leftist media, apparently feel impunity in acting out their fury. Apparently it is open season on conservatives, at least in progressive bastions such as the wealthy Marin County town of Tiburon.

In a story originally broken by Bay Area media blogger Rich Lieberman:

Syndicated radio talker (heard here on KSFO) Michael Savage was violently confronted and physically attacked by an unknown assailant last night (Tuesday) in a Marin County restaurant.

Savage was with his dog, “Teddy”, and finishing up dinner at Servino Restaurant in Tiburon, CA (north of San Francisco) when the unnamed assailant charged up to Savage and began yelling, “Hey Weiner”, making fun of Savage’s legal last name. The attacker then kicked the poodle out of the way so he could get to Michael and then grabbed Savage and threw him to the ground, according to an eyewitness who watched the attack along with several restaurant patrons.

Savage was not seriously hurt and his dog is OK but the incident left him bloodied and shaken.

The two major Bay Area newspapers, The San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury-News, both reported the incident as “Savage claims…” and labeled him with such terms as “firebrand” and “fierce,” indirectly offering a rationale for attacking him. The incident took place in public, and there were witnesses and quite possibly CCTV recordings. The facts will be clarified because Savage’s attorney, Daniel Horowitz, is on the case, and he is a fierce and skillful advocate for his clients. I would never wish to face him as opposing counsel in a legal matter, and I would be delighted to have him on my side.

Recently, I was sent this piece about Robert David Steele who was a former Marine Corps infantry officer and then a spy for the CIA. At his own site, he claims to be “the Chief Enabling Officer CeO [sic] of Earth Intelligence Network, devoted to teaching holistic analytics, true cost economics and open source everything engineering.” Thus, “his ideas would enable the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals — first within the USA and then globally [.]”

This is code for doing away with capitalism. After all, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism. She stated that “[t]his is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

Here is a sampling of the Declaration of the Sustainable Development mandate

We envisage a world of universal respect for human rights and human dignity, the rule of law, justice, equality and non-discrimination; of respect for race, ethnicity and cultural diversity; and of equal opportunity permitting the full realization of human potential and contributing to shared prosperity.

Isn’t this already the foundation of American ideas and ideals?

To do this, Steele “proposed to Donald Trump that he close all 1,000 US military bases overseas and stop subsidizing military arms purchases by dictators and Israel.”

And this is when my antennae start to stir.

Notice the connection between dictators and Israel — Israel is the only true democracy in the Middle East, but Steele deliberately chooses to single it out. This is what the United Nations does on a regular basis and should be the first clue to Steele’s anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic bent.

The Sustainable Agenda continues with the following:

We reaffirm the outcomes of all major UN conferences and summits which have laid a solid foundation for sustainable development and have helped to shape the new Agenda. These include the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development; the World Summit on Sustainable Development [etc.]

Climate change is always part of this scenario; thus, “[c]limate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time and its adverse impacts undermine the ability of all countries to achieve sustainable development.”