RUTHFULLY YOURS

Despite public outcry, new federal data shows that 2014 and 2015 were peak years for shipments of surplus military gear to local police departments across America.

This week our organization released the study, OpenTheBooks Snapshot Report – The Militarization of Local Police Departments, that quantified the transfer of 1.5 million weapons-related items from the Department of Defense (DoD) to federal, state and local law enforcement since 2006. New federal records show police agencies in Florida, Texas, California, Tennessee and Arizona led the nation in procuring surplus military-weaponry from the DoD over the last 10 years.

We found a federally-sponsored ‘gun show’ that never ends: small town police are armed with M16 and M14 rifles, night-vision googles, bayonets and armored trucks; junior colleges and county sheriffs procured mine-resistant vehicles (MRVs); even local park districts and forest preserves stocked up on military-style equipment.
The 1033 Program created by the National Defense Authorization Act (1997) authorized the transfer of excess military equipment to civilian law enforcement.

The 1033 Program created by the National Defense Authorization Act (1997) authorized the transfer of excess military equipment to civilian law enforcement.

In total, our new data reveals $2.2 billion worth of military gear including helicopters and airplanes, armored trucks and cars, tens of thousands of M16 and M14 rifles, thousands of bayonets, mine detectors and many other types of weaponry.

Thousands of units of government across America received military equipment. Using our mapping technology, citizens can quickly search the military ‘gun lockers’ of your local government: park districts, forest preserves, hometown police departments, junior colleges, universities, county sheriffs, natural resource and public safety departments, state police – and Homeland Security, Interior and the Justice Department – across any ZIP code.

In a terse submission to the federal district court in Washington, D.C., the Obama Justice Department has announced that it will not seek the death penalty against Ahmed Abu Khatallah. He is the only terrorist charged in the Benghazi massacre of September 11, 2012, in which U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other American officials were killed in an attack carried out by dozens of jihadists.

Government lawyers provided no explanation for this decision. If you are wondering whether politics played a role in it, you have good reason to be suspicious.

On the face of it, Khatallah is a textbook case for capital punishment. The Benghazi indictment alleges that he willfully and maliciously caused the death of Americans in a terrorist attack that he helped coordinate. The facts of his offense check several of the “aggravating factor” boxes in federal death-penalty law. There is, moreover, a national-security component, inherent not only in the Benghazi atrocity itself but in the perverse incentive that the government’s failure to seek an available death sentence would create for others considering mass-murder attacks against American installations overseas.

In addition, terrorists imprisoned by the United States after being prosecuted for successful attacks against America become iconic figures in the jihad. As long as they live, they can and do inspire more attacks, recruitment, and fundraising.

Thus, legal and national-security considerations militate in favor of seeking capital punishment. Remember, Mr. Stevens was the first U.S. ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979. An attack on our ambassador and on sovereign American facilities abroad is an act of war against the United States. Since national security is the core responsibility of the federal government, there can be no federal offense more worthy of capital treatment.

We are talking about the Obama administration, though, so there are always political considerations. And when it comes to Benghazi, they always take precedence.

A criminal trial is an opportunity for a defendant to challenge the government’s version of events. It is not like a press conference or a congressional hearing, at which administration officials can get away with spin and stonewalling. Presided over by an independent judiciary applying rigorous rules of due process, criminal trials arm highly capable defense lawyers with copious discovery of the government’s files and legal avenues to demand further disclosures. And because of the life-and-death stakes of death-penalty litigation, federal law gives no one more ample opportunity to test the government’s story than a death-penalty defendant.

In a 2–1 panel ruling in mid April, a federal appellate court decided (or at least seemed to think that it decided) that G.G., a girl who identifies herself as male, has a legal right to use the boys’ restrooms at her high school in rural Gloucester County, Va. In so doing, the panel’s majority, consisting of two appointees of President Obama, kowtowed to the Obama administration’s radical claim that federal law requires any college or school that receives federal funding to make its single-sex restrooms, locker rooms, showers, housing, and sports teams available to “transgender students consistent with their gender identity.”

Never has a more brazen and aggressive bureaucratic misreading of federal law encountered a more craven and confused judicial reception.

In 1972, Congress enacted the federal law known as Title IX. Title IX provides generally that no school that receives federal funding — a category that includes public grade schools and high schools as well as nearly all colleges, public or private — may “discriminat[e]” “on the basis of sex.” Everyone understood from the beginning, and the Obama administration still agrees, that Title IX allows schools to have single-sex restrooms, locker rooms, and showers. A regulation dating from 1975 says exactly that — a school “may provide separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex” — and goes on to specify only that “such facilities provided for students of one sex shall be comparable to such facilities provided for students of the other sex” (emphasis added).

Pushing the transgender agenda through the entire alphabet of the federal bureaucracy has been a high priority for the administration in President Obama’s second term. So it was that in January 2015 an obscure functionary named James A. Ferg-Cadima, in his temporary capacity as acting deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Education, signed his name to a letter and sent that letter to G.G. (and to various transgender activists). In his letter, Ferg-Cadima made two cursory legal claims on behalf of the department. First, he declared that Title IX’s ban on discrimination on the basis of sex includes a ban on discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Second, he asserted that schools that provide “sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, shower facilities, housing, athletic teams, and single-sex classes” must “treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.”

RELATED: The Obama Administration Provokes a War against North Carolina

Ponder for a moment some examples of what Ferg-Cadima’s second claim means for schools that receive federal funding. A young man who says his gender identity is female must be offered a college dormitory room with roommates who are women (irrespective of the wishes of those roommates). An athlete who is biologically male in all respects must be allowed to compete for a position on a women’s sports team if he identifies himself as female. A first-grade girl who thinks she’s a boy can use the boys’ bathroom. And, yes, high-school boys who say they’re transgender girls may use the girls’ locker rooms and showers on the same terms, and at the same time, as the girls do — and vice versa, of course, for girls who say they’re transgender boys.

The ugly truth about Flint is that it was run into the ground by Democrats. And Democrats have predictably ranted about Governor Snyder because he is conveniently enough a Republican. Meanwhile here’s what the Democratic mayor was getting up to.

Mayor Karen Weaver has been an outspoken advocate for the people of Flint during the city’s water crisis, but she is now facing tough questions about what happened to some of the money sent to aid the city’s recovery. The money was supposed to help families impacted by the water crisis, but a former Flint city administrator claims she was fired when she reported Mayor Weaver may be redirecting the charitable cash for her own political gain.

Former city administrator Natasha Henderson claims she was fired after reporting Mayor Karen Weaver may have been telling staff to direct water crisis donations to her own personal funds.

Henderson filed a federal lawsuit Monday, May 9, in Detroit U.S. District Court, claiming she was fired from her position after asking the city attorney’s office to investigate claims Weaver may have been telling city staff and volunteers to send potential water crisis donors to her own personal account, rather than the official fund managed by the Community Foundation of Greater Flint.

The lawsuit claims Weaver’s executive assistant Maxine Murray reported around Feb. 9 to Henderson that “she feared going to jail” after Weaver instructed her and a city volunteer to direct donations from the Community Foundation of Greater Flint’s Safe Water/Safe Home Fund to a different fund, named “Karenabout Flint.”

Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes confirmed what FrontPage Magazine has been saying all along. President Obama and senior members of his administration sold his nuclear deal with Iran, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with a pack of lies.

Rhodes was an aspiring fiction writer, who fulfilled his aspirations for make-believe as a senior member of the Obama administration. In a profile of Rhodes, written by New York Times reporter David Samuels and appearing in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Samuels recounted Rhodes’ tall tales concerning how the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program came about. The article’s title, by the way, is “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru.”

The Obama administration, led by Rhodes, spun the tale that it had to take advantage of the opportunity suddenly created for commencing negotiations with Iran when Hassan Rouhani, a so-called “moderate,” was elected as Iran’s president. According to Rhodes’ concocted narrative of the negotiations, the administration determined that the time had finally arrived, with Rouhani having replaced hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to enter into serious negotiations. This narrative of when and how the negotiations began, David Samuels wrote, “was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal.”

The Obama administration wanted to give the false impression that it was adeptly exploiting a schism between the so-called “moderate” faction in Iran that had taken over the presidency and the hardliners whom had taken a beating in the presidential election. They painted Rouhani as a “moderate” leader with real power, whom could serve as an effective counterweight to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and the hardliners surrounding him.

As Leon Panetta, Obama’s former CIA chief and Secretary of Defense, explained to the New York Times reporter, the intelligence agency did not consider there to be a divide between so-called “moderates” and hardliners in any meaningful sense. “There was not much question that the Quds Force and the supreme leader ran that country with a strong arm,” Panetta was quoted as saying.

In truth, Obama was so intent on reaching a deal with Iran at any price that senior members of his administration had started serious discussions with Iranian hardliners a year before Rouhani’s election. “Obama’s closest advisers always understood him to be eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency,” David Samuels concluded after speaking with key members of the administration including Rhodes, whom were part of Obama’s inner circle.

Man, Ben Rhodes had an excellent weekend. The 38-year-old Mets’ fan who serves as President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications got to watch the press tear itself apart in rabid confusion, which proves one of his essential points—the U.S. media is a pile of dung.

After a New York Times Magazine profile of Rhodes hit newsstands Saturday night—it was posted on the Times website Thursday—the media split: The article was a hit job by author David Samuels, a crypto-neocon sent by the Mossad who opposed the Iranian nuclear deal from the outset. Or it was a gross puff piece by David Samuels, a Brooklyn liberal who was in the bag for Rhodes even before he was gifted with a box of M&M’s with the presidential seal.

Lots of people don’t know why the administration let Rhodes pull back the curtain. Because the White House won the Iran Deal is why. They wanted to take a victory lap. Obama campaigned as the anti-Iraq candidate. Bush lied and got us into a stupid war, the White House would invariably argue. And yes, as president Obama lied to sell the Iran deal—BUT to keep America out of a stupid war with Iran. Do you want American passion and innovation tied down in a severely damaged part of the world like the Middle East for the next hundred years? This is how a very large number of New York Times readers understood the piece. And as Rhodes knew, it’s how virtually everyone outside of media circles in Washington and New York would read the article.

Lots of media people can’t figure out why Rhodes spoke to Samuels, of all people. As evidence of Samuels’ pre-existing hostility to the White House, some in the Twitter-sphere posted a video of a panel at Hudson Institute I hosted where Samuels appeared with Matthew Kroenig and Michael Doran, both of whom, like me, are outspoken critics of the deal. Samuels wasn’t there to discuss the deal as such. I invited him because because I know him, and because he writes stuff I like. He said yes and maybe regrets it now, or not.

He’s not part of what Ben Rhodes calls the blob and his boss calls the Washington, D.C. foreign policy establishment. I know him from New York, when I edited the Village Voice Literary Supplement. He was a Brooklyn neighbor, and a baseball fan, and we still hung out even though our political views were often not in synch. I read his 2008 New Yorker article about a truck driver who built a nuclear bomb—a story that highlights the difference between nuclear knowledge, which is easy to come by, and the industrial infrastructure to support the manufacture of nuclear weapons, which is very difficult and costly to build and maintain. For instance, as Samuels told me over the phone for a Weekly Standard article, he said he has the blueprint to make a nuclear bomb in his desk at home—thankfully, no one has given him tens of billions of dollars to build the infrastructure that would allow him to proliferate.

The state of North Carolina and the federal government are now in a state of declared legal war. On Wednesday afternoon, the Obama administration sent a letter to North Carolina governor Pat McCrory demanding that the state “not comply with or enforce H.B. 2,” its so-called transgender bathroom law. According to the letter, a state requirement that people use the bathrooms reserved for their biological sex violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Department of Justice gave the state until today, May 9, to assure the federal government that men can use women’s restrooms and showers in state facilities.

Today, the state answered the Department of Justice — with a lawsuit. In its complaint, filed in federal court, North Carolina accuses the DOJ of engaging in a “baseless and blatant overreach,” an “attempt to rewrite long-established federal civil rights laws in a manner that is wholly inconsistent with the intent of Congress and disregards decades of statutory interpretation by the courts.” Simply put, Title VII does not establish “transgender status” as a protected class, and any effort to do so by executive fiat violates the law.

Then the DOJ escalated again. At an afternoon news conference, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced a “significant law enforcement” action — its own lawsuit. At the same time, Lynch indicated that the DOJ retained the authority to federal funding to key state entities, issuing a not-so-veiled threat of dramatic action before the courts issue a definitive ruling. At the same time, she preposterously compared the act of preserving bathrooms for people of the same sex to, of course, “Jim Crow” and hearkened back to the days of segregated water fountains.

As a Western revolutionary, Obama has been relentless in his efforts over the last seven years to use all the machinery and influence of government, whether illegally (Since 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously ruled 13 times that Obama’s actions have been unconstitutional) or legally, to fundamentally transform America into the neo-Marxist democracy he and his father have long dreamed about.

His most recent stunt to this end is to use North Carolina’s “bathroom” law or House Bill 2 as a springboard for the U.S. Justice Department to issue a sweeping dictate in the name of social fairness and civil rights. House Bill 2, which requires individuals to use the public bathrooms and showers that correspond to their birth sex, was drafted and passed in order to negate an unconstitutional Charlotte city ordinance that forced different sexes to share public accommodations.

What’s most ominous about Obama’s latest maneuver is that the letter sent by the Justice Department to North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory stakes out a position for the federal government that would apply to every business in America, as well as all universities and colleges that receive federal funds, that are subject to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

According to Gov. McCrory, the demand letter (read the letter here) sent to top North Carolina officials should be understood as follows:

One thing the nation has to realize is this is no longer just a North Carolina issue. This order, this letter by the Justice Department, is saying that every company in the United States of America that has more than 15 employees are going to have to abide by the federal government’s regulations on bathrooms. So now the federal government is going to tell almost every private sector company in the United States who can or cannot come into their bathrooms, restrooms, their shower facilities for their employees. And they’re also telling every university in the United States of America — it’s not just North Carolina — they’re now telling every university that accepts federal funding that boys who may think they’re a girl can go into a locker room or a restroom or shower facility.

Barack Obama and his militant Justice Department don’t care at all about individuals confused or rebellious about their gender. As with all revolutionary activity, the goal is to seize upon crisis in order to further the aggrandizement of the State, and its control over every competing area of society.

Obama’s response to North Carolina is a classic Leftist maneuver of setting up a straw man, or transgender in this case, to ensure and continue to expand federal power over the states. From a revolutionary perspective, states with their 10th Amendment constitutional sovereignty are antithetical to the long-term objective of an international socialist system.

It is critical now for states to recognize their pivotal constitutional power and determine to use every available resource to counter, correct and ultimately crush the Left’s war against the Constitution and 10th Amendment. Recall the efforts made by the revolutionary Left to force a Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage and tear down state marriage laws. Their attack on North Carolina is no different in both tactic and objective.

North Carolina has rightly refused to submit to the politically correct federal bully challenging its common sense law, HB 2, which says restrooms should be limited to people with the appropriate plumbing, and that crossdressers sharing the facilities with your daughter, wife, and daughter is not a good, or safe idea.

North Carolina has filed a lawsuit challenging the Department of Justice’s ultimatum demanding that the state cease and desist enforcement of that law. As NBC News reported:

It was the state’s response to the US Justice Department, which last week gave Gov. Pat McCrory until the end of the day Monday to respond to a letter that said the law violates federal civil rights statutes.

Monday’s lawsuit called the Justice Department’s legal position “a baseless and blatant overreach” and a radical reinterpretation of federal laws, especially the Civil Rights Act’s ban on sex discrimination.

“Transgender status is not a protected class,” under the law, the suit said, and if the Justice Department believes it should be, it should ask Congress to change the law.

Of course, reinterpretation of the law and bypassing Congress is nothing new for this administration, which seems to think that saying that only biological females may use the ladies room is equivalent to having “whites only” drinking fountains. This is. of course, nonsense. Rosa Parks made history by sitting in front of the bus. She did not try to use the men’s room at the bus station.

Being black is something you cannot change. Discriminating on that basis is wrong and perniciously evil. But saying a man’s civil right’s are being violated because he self-identifies as a woman and needs to use the lady’s facilities is nonsense based on politically correct psychobabble. Sorry, dude, if you feel you are trapped in the wrong body, deal with it. But you already have a restroom designed just for you.

You are not being denied equal access to a public accommodation. Having the wrong body, if that is to be believed, does not entitle you to use the wrong restroom. It was never the intent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to allow boys to use the little girls room. It is also dangerous, allowing any creep to put on make-op and a dress and follow your daughter, sister, or wife into the restroom.

This was the same sort of nonsense that led the Supreme Court to ignore both federalism and state laws to say gay marriage was a civil right as much as interracial marriage was. But being black is something one cannot change and allowing blacks and whites to marry did not change the state, culturally, and historically sanctioned institution of marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

Transgender restrooms change everything. Amazingly, the right to privacy championed by liberals has been jettisoned by liberals who see nothing wrong or dangerous in the concept. Kimberly Ross, writing for RedState, notes the slippery slope this puts society on: