RUTHFULLY YOURS

If Congress votes it down this winter, then the next President will be able to renegotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership with the same fast-track authority that Congress gave Obama.

In his October 24 speech in Jacksonville, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump discussed the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the trade pact which President Obama just finished negotiating. Trump asked a key question of the Republicans in Congress: “Why can’t they put it off until I become elected?”

If Congress votes it down this winter, then the next President will be able to renegotiate the deal with the same fast-track authority that Congress gave Obama. Trump says that if he renegotiates: “Believe me, it will not be that deal, believe me.”

From a speech by Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James B. Comey at the University of Chicago Law School, Oct. 23:

Part of being clear-eyed about reality requires all of us to stare—and stare hard—at what is happening in this country this year. And to ask ourselves what’s going on.

Because something deeply disturbing is happening all across America. I have spoken of 2014 in this speech because something has changed in 2015. Far more people are being killed in America’s cities this year than in many years. And let’s be clear: far more people of color are being killed in America’s cities this year. And it’s not the cops doing the killing.

We are right to focus on violent encounters between law enforcement and civilians. Those incidents can teach all of us to be better. But something much bigger is happening. Most of America’s 50 largest cities have seen an increase in homicides and shootings this year, and many of them have seen a huge increase. These are cities with little in common except being American cities—places like Chicago, Tampa, Minneapolis, Sacramento, Orlando, Cleveland, and Dallas.

On October 24, 2015, the Obama administration condemned “over-testing” in schools. It called for a cap on testing, limiting it to two percent of a child’s class time. It called on Congress to enact this cap and on teachers to “step back and make tests less onerous and more purposeful.” This accompanied the release of a study by the Council of the Great City Schools.

In a smooth move, the Obama administration called on Congress to fix a problem that had been foisted on the people without the consent of Congress—namely the national Common Core standards, even as the widely hated name was scrupulously avoided. The Obama administration also told teachers to fix tests that they had not devised and were forced to administer.

In an even smoother move, the New York Times summed up the blame this way:

The administration’s move seemed a reckoning on a two-decade push that began during the Bush administration and intensified under President Obama. Programs with aspirational names — No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top — were responding to swelling agreement among Democrats and Republicans that higher expectations and accountability could lift the performance of American students. . . . .”

NYPD Officer Randolph Holder was shot and killed last week. But the bullet that murdered him had been fired years ago. And it was the Democrats of the New York State government that took the shot.

The trigger had been pulled in 2009 when New York lawmakers passed drug crime “reforms” that targeted mandatory minimum sentences, a particular obsession of the pro-crime lobby, and allowed drug offenders to bypass jail.

Governor Paterson, who had used cocaine and whose close associate was a former drug dealer whose scandal would play a role in the governor’s downfall, claimed that sentencing reform would “Give judges the discretion to divert non-violent drug addicted individuals to treatment alternatives that are far more successful than prison.”

Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith, New York’s first black Temporary President of the Senate, who would later be busted by the FBI on corruption charges, promised that the reforms would “Reverse years of ineffective criminal laws.”

The House Oversight & Government Reform Committee led by Chairman Jason Chaffetz introduced on Tuesday a resolution to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, accusing him of making “false statements” under oath, failing to comply with a lawful subpoena, and overseeing the destruction of documents that were being sought under a congressional subpoena.

The move comes less than a week after the Justice Department issued a report finding no criminal behavior in the IRS’s decision to target conservative groups for improper scrutiny. The DOJ investigation was led by a career Justice Department lawyer in the Civil Rights Division who happened to be a “maxed-out” Obama campaign donor.

Via Fox News:

“Commissioner Koskinen violated the public trust,” Chaffetz said in a statement Tuesday. “He failed to comply with a congressionally issued subpoena, documents were destroyed on his watch, and the public was consistently misled.

“Impeachment is the appropriate tool to restore public confidence in the IRS and to protect the institutional interests of Congress.”

“Nam homo proponit, sed Deus disponit,” wrote the medieval cleric Thomas a Kempis. “For man proposes, but God disposes.”

The observation that human intent, however well conceived and deftly pursued, is commonly frustrated, does not require the invoking of God. One can, for example, comprehend the frustrating agent as fate, fortune or simply the exigencies of worldly existence.

But the founders of our republic considered the particular circumstance of people’s aspirations and intent being frustrated by the heavy hand of government, and in addressing this phenomenon they clearly attached importance to invoking God.

In the Declaration of Independence, they assert, of course, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” They further assert that the proper role of government, indeed the raison d’etre of government, is to secure these God-given rights.

Seventy years ago, on Oct. 27, 1945, New York City was the site of the most spectacular homefront display of American military might the nation had ever seen. Navy Day was in effect a monumental victory lap, coming seven weeks after the signing of the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay aboard the USS Missouri.

Now the “Big Mo” and other stars and supporting players from the Pacific Fleet had come home. Along a six-mile stretch of the Hudson River, 47 warships gathered—battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, submarines and submarine chasers.

President Truman was there. So was I. About 3.5 million people crowded along Manhattan’s West Side, with another 1.5 million viewing from New Jersey, according to press reports. Joining the USS Missouri, with its 16-inch turret guns bristling from its 56,000-ton frame, were the USS New York (an older battle wagon) and the USS Enterprise, the only aircraft carrier that had been active from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day.

At midafternoon, President Truman boarded a destroyer for a two-hour review of the assembled firepower. Twenty-one-gun salutes boomed from many of the vessels. Overhead, 1,200 Hellcat and Corsair fighters, Avenger torpedo planes and Helldiver bombers circled in 12-mile ovals. For half-hour spells on two successive nights the ships turned on their 24-inch and 36-inch searchlights, sending brilliant blue-white beams, with millions in candle power, flashing across the sky and illuminating the city’s skyscrapers. No fireworks display could compare.