RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18009/dershowitz-temple-emanu-el

[T]his is exactly how McCarthyism worked back in the 1950s. The institutions that banned people accused of being communists did not necessarily believe the accusations or think that they justified the ban, but they feared being tainted even by false accusations. So, they went along with the ban, just to be safe.

When I was first falsely accused of having had sex with Virginia Roberts Giuffre in Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, his island and other specified locations, I stated categorically that I have documentary records that conclusively prove I could not have been in those locations during the relevant time periods. I produced cell-phone records, American Express charges, travel documents, recorded TV appearances, teaching schedules, calendars, court appearances and other documents that persuaded Giuffre’s own lawyers that it was “not possible” for her account to be true, and that—in her lawyer’s own words—she was “wrong … simply wrong” in accusing me.

We later found several “smoking gun” emails that proved she never met me or even heard of me. She had to be told by a journalist friend that I was a famous lawyer and that my name “was a good name for your [book] pitch,” even though there was “no proof” I had done anything wrong. Giuffre then followed the journalist’s advice and included my name in her book manuscript, but as a person she had seen, but never met, and certainly never had any relations with.

She told her best friend that she didn’t want to accuse me but “felt pressure” from her lawyers to do so. She also told her best friend’s husband that she never had sex with me. I have recordings confirming this.

We learned that at the same time Giuffre publicly accused me, her lawyers privately accused Wexner of nearly identical sexual misconduct and demanded a meeting to resolve her “claims” against him. Both Wexner’s wife and lawyer told me it was a “shakedown” (the word is recorded on a tape). It seems obvious that I was being used as a stalking horse to send the unmistakable message to Wexner that if he didn’t want to happen to him what happened to me—namely, a very public accusation—there are ways of resolving the matter.

When employment records proved she was 17, which is above the age of consent in New York and other states, she admitted she had been “mistaken.” She also admitted that she was “mistaken” when she said she had dinner with Al and Tipper Gore on Epstein’s island.

[H]er own lawyer has said on TV that based on his 11-year investigation, he does not believe that “any high-profile people” had sex with Giuffre. All of these high-profile people have categorically denied her accusations.

If her own lawyers don’t believe her sworn accusation—and they have said they do not—how can others credit them? That is probably why the U.S. Attorney’s office that indicted Epstein and Maxwell deliberately omitted Giuffre as a witness.

Nobody who has seen the evidence believes Giuffre, yet Temple Emanu-El nonetheless canceled me.

I offered to speak on how to combat these dangers [anti-Zionism and anti-Jewish attitudes in universities and among the hard left], but [t]he synagogue preferred to hear from Peter Beinart, who advocates the end of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and who supports boycotts against Israelis. At the same time that I was canceled, Beinart received a substantial speaker’s fee from the synagogue to make his case against Israel.

Silence is not the option in the face of unjustified McCarthyite censorship by a synagogue that claims to be a house of study, open-mindedness and Jewish values of dialogue and dissent. So, I will not quietly accept temple Emanu-El’s hypocrisy and cowardice. Nor should you.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/07/congressional-report-details-inhumane-conditions-of-january-6-inmates/

A new report published by U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) office details “atrocious,” “cramped,” and “inhumane” conditions at the Washington, D.C., jail where January 6 defendants are being held ahead of trial. The congressional delegation had been turned away by jail officials in July and again initially in November, before they were given access.

The report, “Unusually Cruel,” was released by Greene’s office on Tuesday. It recounts a three-and-a-half-hour tour on November 4 of two Washington, D.C. jails by Greene along with Rep. Louie Gohmert and members of their staff. The purpose of the visit, according to the report, was to inspect the conditions of jails, “specifically the treatment of inmates held in the [Central Treatment Facility] in relation to the events of January 6, 2001.”

According to Greene’s office, “cells in the January 6 wing of the CTF were extremely small, composed of a single toilet, sink, and a small bed cot. The walls of the rooms had residue of human feces, bodily fluids, blood, dirt, and mold. The community showers were recently scrubbed of black mold—some of which remained. The interior walls of the common area were also freshly painted.”

“According to the inmates,” the report continues, “the U.S. Marshals had recently visited the area just days before, which caused a flurry of activity by guards to clean up the January 6 area while the U.S. Marshals were inspecting another area.”

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in October held D.C. Department of Corrections Director Quincy Booth and warden Wanda Patten in contempt and ordered the Justice Department to investigate the CTF for possible civil rights violations after jail officials failed to provide treatment for a January 6 defendant in need of surgery. A November 2 report by the U.S. Marshals Service concluded the CTF failed to meet “minimum standards of confinement” and determined 400 inmates should be transferred to a different facility in Pennsylvania.

Read the entire report below.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/08/clueless-joe-biden-cant-grasp-any-of-the-crises-hes-created/

Has any administration been caught off guard on so many fronts as the Biden administration?

It was shocked by the Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan. It was surprised by the surge in energy costs, the spike in inflation, and the depth of the supply chain crises. It hadn’t planned on a massive flood of illegal immigrants. It didn’t think COVID would still be around. It expected job growth and the economy to be stronger than it is. It didn’t foresee the sharp rise in crime.

Judson Berger of National Review Online had it right when he quipped that “the Biden administration sure is ‘surprised’ a lot.”

Just yesterday, the head of President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, Cecilia Rouse, admitted that the White House didn’t expect a prolonged supply chain crisis. The administration “just didn’t fully appreciate that the supply system, the supply chain, wouldn’t be able to process through the elevated demand for durable goods,” she said.

These are just the surprises that team Biden has publicly admitted to.

What’s even more troubling is that Biden’s policies are (at least partly) to blame for every one of these crises. Worse still is the fact that Biden and his Keystone Cops cabinet are clueless about how to deal with any of them.

Take the nation’s ongoing supply chain crisis. Today, the Los Angeles ports are as clogged as they were before Biden announced his “solution.” The Marine Exchange of Southern California reports a backlog of 94 container ships as of Tuesday – right about where it was before Biden stepped in.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/de-blasio-vaccine-mandate-looks-unlawful-shots-covid-19-private-employees-new-york-bill-11638916746?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio this week announced that all private-sector employees in the city will be required to be vaccinated against Covid-19 by the end of the month. The mayor calls his plan “Key to New York,” and its function is to lock hundreds of thousands of residents out.

The constitutionality of Mr. de Blasio’s mandate will turn primarily on Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), in which the Supreme Court upheld a smallpox vaccination law. The justices held that state governments have the power to exercise “self-defense” against infectious disease on behalf of the community, so long as the measures were “reasonable” and not “arbitrary.” But Mr. de Blasio’s measure goes far beyond the holding or reasoning of the precedent, to say nothing of the past century of constitutional doctrine.

Jacobson involved smallpox, which before its eradication was one of the most fearsome diseases known to man. It killed 30% of those infected. It disproportionately affected children and commonly left them disfigured by lesions. Covid-19 is serious, but it’s in a different league.

The town of Cambridge imposed a one-time fine of $5 (equivalent of roughly $160 today) on those who refused vaccination. The details of Mr. de Blasio’s scheme haven’t been announced—he promises “guidance” next week. But if it resembles President Biden’s federal mandates, it will impose mounting, ruinous fines. It isn’t the mild inducement the court upheld in Jacobson—it is pure coercion.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/12/20/classical-music-without-quotas/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

I recently left the Metropolitan Opera in New York after a performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. A friend who was with me had never seen the work before and suddenly blurted out how amazing it is that anybody could view such an art form as elitist or somehow difficult to access. True, it was past midnight, and we had started this journey through Wagner’s lightest work at around 6 p.m. In other words it was only around twice the length of the average Hollywood film these days. Yet opera has a reputation for elitism that cinema does not — which is strange, because, as my friend noticed, everything about the work we had just seen was not just egalitarian but wildly so.

The mastersingers themselves, you will recall, are all members of various trade guilds. The art of song-making is revered in the town of Nuremberg, but equally revered are the trades from which the masters come. Hans Sachs is a cobbler and is admired by all for his hard work and mastery of shoemaking as much as for his mastery of songwriting. Equally admired are the bakers, the tailors, and all other craftsmen. In Wagner’s Nuremberg, everybody who masters his trade is revered.

It was a moving thing to hear, this reflection on the simple egalitarian nature of Meistersinger. Because opera lovers today — like all lovers of classical music — are to some extent made to feel as though we’re guilty of something. In the English-speaking countries, most politicians and other public figures will actively avoid mentioning whether they like classical music. Those of us who are less shy about our love of these works have been made to feel that we are the problem. The fact that other attendees at this particular performance of Meistersinger included a pretty good cross section of age groups and other demographics could do nothing to dull this particular apprehension: the sense that we who enjoy going to concert halls and opera houses have in some way become an embarrassment to the venues that tolerate us.

It has been like this for years, with bureaucrats of the musical world and maestros increasingly bemoaning the whiteness and the elderliness of their audiences. Any reasonable person would have long ago made his peace with certain facts of artistic life. There are some art forms that you appreciate as a child, some that you learn to appreciate as you grow older. The retired have more time and disposable income than the young do, and there is nothing wrong in itself with the elderly enjoying particular pleasures or forming the backbone of particular audiences. Throw in as many access opportunities as possible (one reason some of us got into the art form), subsidize tickets, or give free tickets to the young, and you’ve done most of what you can do, other than encourage schools to actually teach music properly. But that is beyond the remit of the orchestral venues themselves.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/06/the-demonization-of-rosanne-boyland-begins/

Yet another lie animating the phony narrative about the events at the Capitol complex on January 6 is about to be exposed: the falsehood that Rosanne Boyland, a Trump supporter from Georgia, died of an accidental drug overdose that day.

As American Greatness has reported for months, incriminating video footage and firsthand witness accounts instead support numerous allegations that D.C. Metro and Capitol police contributed to, if they did not directly cause, Boyland’s death in the late afternoon of January 6. 

Boyland’s family reportedly has hired an attorney to investigate the circumstances of her death at the age of 34; the D.C Medical Examiner’s Office issued a report in April disclosing the cause of death of four Trump supporters who died on January 6 during what the coroner called “an unprecedented incident of civil insurrection.” It determined Boyland had succumbed to “acute amphetamine intoxication.”

But it’s increasingly obvious that the ruling is untrue. (The same D.C. Medical Examiner’s office intentionally delayed the results of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick’s autopsy; even after confirming Sicknick had died of a stroke caused by blood clots, the coroner nonetheless insisted the chaos at the Capitol protest “played a role in his condition.”)

With the potential release of three hours of security camera footage that recorded exactly what happened inside the lower west terrace tunnel—the location where Boyland died—on January 6, law enforcement officials could face fierce public scrutiny for their behavior that day. It’s only a slice of the 14,000 hours of surveillance video captured by the Capitol Police department’s closed-circuit television system that Joe Biden’s Justice Department is hiding under protective orders, deemed “highly sensitive” government material.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/decline-and-fall-kamala-harris-daniel-greenfield/

The end of the Obama era renewed the civil war between the Democrat establishment and the Socialist insurgents. Hillary Clinton, the establishment woman whose loss to Obama had inaugurated 8 years of insurgent rule, faced down a new challenge from the Sanders nsurgency.

The next round of the fight in 2020 was a virtual draw with black voters choosing Biden and white lefties backing Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The Biden administration was a compromise between both wings of the party. Its senior members are establishment while many of their juniors are Warren allies or linked to the Congressional Black Caucus.

Biden was a useful compromise candidate because his age and mental condition made him a “one-and-done” politician whose administration would take the hit by implementing radical policies and coping with the political fallout from the pandemic and runaway inflation.

Except that Biden, who keeps promising to run again, doesn’t seem to know it.

The only member of his administration who is even more clueless than Joe is Kamala. The compromise that put her in the White House was the most misguided one of them all.

Biden had promised the Congressional Black Caucus a black female veep. The CBC wanted one of its own, particularly Rep. Karen Bass, but considering her Castro sympathies and general leftist radicalism, that would have meant writing off Florida and the rest of America.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/so_much_for_the_tragedy_of_the_treadmill_delayed_in_supply_chain_crisis__fda_warns_of_100_vital_drug_shortages.html

Over at the White House, the ongoing supply chain fiasco, which has left dozens of cargo ships stranded near West Coast ports awaiting offloads, is considered something of a joke.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki came under fire on Tuesday after joking that it’s a “tragedy” some people may have to wait longer for their treadmill to arrive amid the supply-chain crisis that has disrupted global economies.

“The tragedy of the treadmill delayed,” Ms. Psaki laughed when pressed about the supply-chain crisis during her daily press briefing.

Well, now we’re learning what’s really going on here from JustTheNews:

More than 100 pharmaceutical drugs are facing supply chain shortages, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ira-gershwin-george-gershwin-great-american-songbook-porgy-and-bess-11638816267?mod=opinion_reviews_pos2

Lennon & McCartney. Rodgers & Hammerstein. Gilbert & Sullivan. Creative collaboration in songwriting comes in many shapes. None was more singular than that of composer George Gershwin and lyricist Ira, his older brother. Their mutual trust, respect and love made them deeply compatible creators. Ira’s words and George’s music melded into hundreds of sparkling songs, such as “The Man I Love” and “Embraceable You.”

Ira penned clever, virtuosic lyrics for their pieces. Falling in love was one of his favorite subjects, as in this stanza combining wit, whimsy and sentiment:

In time the Rockies may crumble,

Gibraltar may tumble

(They’re only made of clay),

But—our love is here to stay.

Although one of America’s pre-eminent lyricists, Ira has been overshadowed by George’s brilliance, fame and effervescent persona. George lapped up the limelight; Ira shunned it.