RUTHFULLY YOURS

FBI Director James Comey has again defied the official White House line on policing and the Black Lives Matter movement. The “narrative that policing is biased and violent and unfair” is resulting in “more dead young black men,” Mr. Comey warned in an Oct. 16 address to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in San Diego. That narrative, he added, also “threatens the future of policing.”

Mr. Comey has spoken out before. In October 2015, after he observed that rising violent crime was likely the result of officers backing off proactive policing, President Obama obliquely accused the FBI director of “cherry-pick[ing] data” and “feed[ing] political agendas.”

But as much as Mr. Obama has tried to dismiss the violent crime increase that began after the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the data are clear.

Last year’s 12% increase in homicides reported to the FBI is the largest one-year homicide increase in nearly half a century. The primary victims have been black. An additional 900 black males were killed last year compared with the previous year, resulting in a homicide victimization rate that is now nine times greater for black males than for white males, according to a Guardian study. The brutality of these killings can be shocking. Over the weekend of Sept. 16, a 15-year-old boy in Chicago was burned alive in a dumpster.

More police are being killed this year too. Gun murders of police officers are up 47% nationally through Oct. 21, compared with the same period the previous year. In Chicago gun assaults on officers are up 100%. In New York City attacks on officers are up 23%. In the last two weeks, four California officers have been deliberately murdered.

Gangbanger John Felix prepared for his lethal attack on two Palm Springs officers on Oct. 8 by setting a trap and ambushing them as they stood outside his door. Two days earlier, parolee Trenton Trevon Lovell shot Los Angeles Sheriff’s Sgt. Steve Owen in the face as he investigated a burglary call. Lovell then stood over Sgt. Owen and fired four additional rounds into his body. A planned assassination of two officers on coffee break in Vallejo, Calif., on Oct. 17 failed only when the assault rifle used in the attack jammed. In Indianapolis on Oct. 13, police headquarters were sprayed with bullets by a car that then fled, echoing a similar attack on Oct. 4 against the same police station.

American citizens are in for a double whammy of speech restrictions, and even of censorship. The Federal Election Commission (FEC), and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) want to ratchet up the pressures on freedom of speech.

Two independent news blogs have bravely reported developments in this realm when they stand a chance of being “lawfully” obliterated by the government: The Daily Signal, and Accuracy in Media.

On the one hand, the FEC is a government agency that should not even exist. But it was pushed and encouraged by Theodore Roosevelt, a Progressive, and so the initial legislation was introduced and passed by Congress, on the premise that regulating Big Business was the natural thing to do (re the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 of 1890, and other Federal regulations)

As early as 1905, Theodore Roosevelt asserted the need for campaign finance reform and called for legislation to ban corporate contributions for political purposes. In response, the United States Congress enacted the Tillman Act of 1907, named for its sponsor Senator Benjamin Tillman, banning corporate contributions. Further regulation followed in the Federal Corrupt Practices Act enacted in 1910, and subsequent amendments in 1910 and 1925, the Hatch Act, the Smith-Connally Act of 1943, and the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. These Acts sought to regulate corporate and union spending in campaigns for federal office, and mandated public disclosure of campaign donors.

But the urge to regulate corporate contributions during political campaigns can be dated to the immediate post-Civil War period.

Although attempts to regulate campaign finance by legislation date back to 1867, the modern era of “campaign finance reform” in the United States begins with the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971 and, more importantly, 1974 amendments to that Act. The 1971 FECA required candidates to disclose sources of campaign contributions and campaign expenditures. The 1974 Amendments essentially rewrote the Act from top to bottom. The 1974 Amendments placed statutory limits on contributions by individuals for the first time, and created the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as an independent enforcement agency. It provided for broad new disclosure requirements, and limited the amounts that candidates could spend on their campaigns, or that citizens could spend separate from candidate campaigns to promote their political views.

Fred Lucas in The Daily Signal article of October 20th writes:

Books, movies, satellite radio shows, and streaming video about real-life politics aren’t protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press, some government officials argue.

The Federal Election Commission hasn’t proposed banning books or movies, but in a 3-3 vote last month along party lines, the six-member panel left the regulatory option on the table.

Thanks to e-pal Louis L……

My life has been getting harder and, at times, lonelier, but I want to thank those of you who are brave enough to still associate with me regardless of what I have become. The following is a recap of my current identity by many friends and family members.

I was born white, which makes me not only a racist, but a “privileged” racist.

I am a fiscal and moral conservative, which makes me a fascist.

I am heterosexual, which makes me a homophobe.

I am non-union, which makes me a traitor to the working class and an ally of big business.

I am Jewish, which makes me an infidel.

I’m a patriot who believes in the Constitution and owning a gun, which makes me a radical right wing nut job.

I am older than 66 and retired, which makes me a useless old person.

I read, observe, and reason, so I doubt and vet much that the media, current administration, presidential candidates, and assorted inbox entries tell me, which makes me paranoid and delusional.

I am proud of my heritages and my inclusive American culture, which make me a xenophobe.

I value my safety and that of my family; therefore I appreciate the police and the legal system, which makes me an illiberal obstructionist.

I believe in hard work, fair play, and fair compensation according to each individual’s merits, which makes me a cold-hearted, slimy capitalist.

I acquired with immense gratitude a good education using student loans, Pell Grants, and a merit grant which makes me an underachieving outcast.

I believe in the defense and protection of my homeland with defined borders, which makes me a regressive, anti-social, militaristic hawk.

I believe people who look like women should use “women’s” bathrooms & lockers and men who look like men use “men” ones, which makes me morally and ethically depraved, backward, and worse than Islamic terrorists.

I must be irredeemably deplorable, which makes me a Trump supporter.

Summary: The terrorist-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) claims to be America’s largest civil rights organization for Muslims. But its agenda has more to do with the Islamization of America than with protecting Muslims from civil rights abuses.

Capital Research Center last examined the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its aggressive, jihad terrorism-whitewashing Islamists in the August 2005Organization Trends. CAIR statements and actions in recent years show that this organization, which sprang out of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, has in no way changed its radical spots—a fact that ought to call into question its continuing respectability in media and politics.

The basics

Information about CAIR’s revenue sources is surprisingly difficult to come by. IRS filings reveal donations to CAIR by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors ($30,000 since 2008), Silicon Valley Community Foundation ($90,000 since 2008), and Tides Foundation ($5,000 since 2002). CAIR is actually registered as CAIR Foundation Inc., a public charity recognized under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. That entity reported a budget of $2,632,410 in 2014 and gross receipts of $2,355,032. It also claims to have had 28 employees in 2014 and 40 volunteers. Many of CAIR’s state and local chapters are separately incorporated as nonprofits.

CAIR was founded in 1994 by Nihad Awad, Omar Ahmad, and Rafeeq Jaber. The three men were linked to the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which was established by senior Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook and created to serve as Hamas’ public relations and recruitment arm in the United States. CAIR opened an office in Washington, D.C., by using a $5,000 grant from the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), a charity that the Bush administration closed down in 2001 for collecting money “to support the Hamas terror organization.”

CAIR’s ties to terrorists are recognized on Capitol Hill. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has said, “CAIR is unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its associations with groups that are suspect.” Before leaving Congress in 2013, Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) said, “Groups like CAIR have a proven record of senior officials being indicted and either imprisoned or deported from the United States.”

Ghassan Elashi, a co-founder of Texas CAIR, was convicted in 2005 of terrorism-related offenses and sentenced to almost seven years imprisonment. CAIR civil rights director Randall Todd Royer was given 20 years for federal weapons and explosives convictions in 2004. Bassem Khafagi, a community affairs director at CAIR, was convicted in 2003 on bank and visa fraud charges and shipped back to Egypt. Rabih Haddad, a fundraiser for CAIR’s chapter in Ann Arbor, Mich., was detained in 2001 for overstaying his visa. Authorities found a firearm and considerable ammunition in his home. He served 19 months in prison and was then deported to Lebanon in 2003. CAIR board member Abdurahman Alamoudi was sentenced to 23 years imprisonment for directing at least $1 million to al-Qaeda. (See Foundation Watch, December 2015.)

“Contending that American Muslims are the victims of wholesale repression, CAIR has provided sensitivity training to police departments across the United States, instructing law officers in the art of dealing with Muslims respectfully,” according to DiscoverTheNetworks. The estate of 9/11 victim John O’Neill Sr., a senior FBI counter-terrorism agent, filed a lawsuit claiming that CAIR’s goal “is to create as much self-doubt, hesitation, fear of name-calling, and litigation within police department and intelligence agencies as possible so as to render such authorities ineffective in pursuing international and domestic terrorist entities.”