RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/american-synagogue-under-siege-heres-how-fight-frontpagemagcom/

In an outrage to the Jewish community, it has apparently become acceptable for people to picket synagogue services, and accuse the Jews inside of murder, imperialism, and the very acts of genocide visited upon them by the Nazis.

The members of Beth Israel Congregation in Ann Arbor, Michigan, endure the vile taunts of protesters holding signs reading “Resist Jewish Power,” “Jewish Power Corrupts,” “No More Holocaust Movies,” “Boycott Israel,” “Stop U.S. Aid to Israel,” and “End the Palestinian Holocaust” every Shabbat. What’s more, this unconscionable behavior has not just been the weekly norm recently, but every single Shabbat (Saturday) since 2003.

“They portray themselves as kindly types who bring their detractors tea and wish them a nice day, while they espouse Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic global conspiracy theories… And their hate fails to alarm some progressive leaders who would be rightfully shouting from the rooftops if this were a mosque,” Beth Israel’s rabbi, Nadav Caine, told Ryan Stanton of Michigan Live.

The local protest group in question, Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends, is led by Henry Hirskovitz: “We’re not there because they’re Jews. We’re there because they’re Jewish Zionists,” he told the same reporter. Hirskovitz, apparently a former congregant who fell out with the temple due to political differences, leads an organization whose website proudly features a picture of a woman holding a sign saying, “Zionists Picnic While Palestinians Starve. The World is Watching.” This is Jewish anti-Semitism at its purest.

https://spectator.us/ever-know-russiagate-truth-biden/

Writing in mid-October, anno domini 2020, it is sobering to speculate that when the results of a certain upcoming political contest are finally decided, an item that has captivated the public’s attention for nearly four years might be about to evaporate without trace. I refer, of course, to that great long-running entertainment, the Trump-Russia Collusion Delusion.

As I write, the latest morceaux are the revelations from John Ratcliffe, the newly installed Director of National Intelligence, to the effect that Russian intelligence believed that Hillary Clinton had approved a plan ‘to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services’ during the 2016 presidential campaign. Why? Typical campaign dirty tricks, in part. But then there was also the bulletin, sent from the CIA to Peter Strzok, disgraced lovebird and then head of the FBI’s counterespionage section, minuting ‘Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server’.

The watercress around those revelations were some heavily redacted handwritten notes by John Brennan regarding a meeting with President Obama, former FBI head James Comey and national security adviser Susan Rice about Hillary’s Russian dressing.

What was the recipe for that dressing? Take one washed-up former MI6 spy, Christopher Steele. Pay him through a complicated cutout to dig up, or at least make up, dirt about Donald Trump and ‘the Russians’. Include allegations of financial shenanigans, but for hot sauce include micturating Russian prostitutes hopping up and down on a hotel bed in Moscow in front of Donald Trump. Get your main ingredients from a suspected Russian spy named Igor Danchenko, formerly of the Brookings Institution. Bake until golden brown and then leak this steaming pile of opposition research, covertly bought and paid for by Hillary’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee as intelligence ‘findings’ rather than what they were: unbridled, malicious fabrication used as ‘evidence’ for several FISA warrants against Carter Page, a US citizen whose surveillance provided a back door into the Trump campaign.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/521637-hunter-bidens-laptop-a-russian-trick

If the stakes were not high, it would be a laugh-riot to listen to people who relied on the Steele dossier in an Intelligence Community assessment, and in four sworn FISA warrant applications, going on now about the Biden laptop being a “Russian disinformation” hoax.

But let’s be serious about authenticity for a second.

In a court of law, even in a criminal case where a person’s liberty is at stake, there is a presumption in favor of admitting relevant evidence as long as it appears to be what the proponent represents it to be.

That is, the evidence is put before the jury. Lingering questions about its provenance go to the weight of the evidence — meaning, how much, if any, importance we should ascribe to it. They do not result in the suppression of the evidence.

The most salient consideration in analyzing the authenticity of an item is the item itself. 

I do not mean to dismiss such circumstances as the biases of the source of the evidence, the chain of custody, the opportunities there have been to tamper with it, and any indication that it has been tampered with in some way. To be sure, all of these indicators can be significant. In some situations, they can be so significant that the proffered item should be given no probative weight.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/18/the-unapologetic-bias-of-the-american-left/

Today’s Left sees their efforts bending in a preordained historical arc that ends with ultimate progressive justice—and retributions.

Some yearn for the ancient monopolistic days of network news, the adolescent years of public radio and TV, and the still reputable New York Times—when once upon a time the Left at least tried to mask their progressivism in sober and judicious liberal façades. 

An avuncular Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Jim Lehrer, or Abe Rosenthal at least went through the motions of reporting news that was awkward or even embarrassing to the Left. Their agenda was 1960s-vintage Great Society liberalism, seen as the natural evolution from the New Deal and post-war internationalism. Edward R. Murrow, the ACLU of old, and Free Speech Movement at Berkeley—these were their liberal referents. Those days are gone.

Yet even during the Obama years, when studies showed the president had received the most slanted media honeymoon in news history, overt media bias was, at least, as hotly denied as it intensified. There were still a few ossified, quarter-hearted efforts now and then to mention the IRS scandal, the surveillance of Associated Press reporters, the various scandals embroiling the Veterans Administration, General Service Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Secret Service. But even that thin pretense is over now, too.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/17/the-biden-emails-prove-impeachment-was-a-sham/

Remember January? I know it feels like several lifetimes ago, the before times of life as we used to know it. But think back to the biggest story of those chilly days. It wasn’t the Chinese virus slowly spreading to our shores or the Democratic presidential primary. No, it was the impeachment of the president of the United States. This week’s bombshell New York Post story on Hunter Biden now shows what many of us suspected: The impeachment was a ridiculous sham.

The basis for the impeachment, for those whose recollections are understandably shaky, was that President Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to launch investigations into the energy company Burisma for the purely political purpose of hurting Joe Biden. Central to that allegation was the argument that Trump and the United States had no legitimate interest in seeing Burisma investigated. If the trove of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop are accurate, and they have not been disputed, then this argument falls to pieces.

Pam Bondi, working for the Trump defense team, said this back during the national ordeal about the Democratic House managers’ constant attempts to call allegations against the Bidens “baseless”:

In their trial memorandum, the House managers describe this as baseless. Now, why did they say that? Why did they invoke Biden or Burisma over 400 times? The reason they needed to do that is because they’re here saying that the president must be impeached and removed from office for raising a concern. And that’s why we have to talk about this today. They say ‘sham.’ They say ‘baseless.’ They say this because if it’s OK for someone to say, ‘Hey, you know what? Maybe there’s something here worth raising,’ then their case crumbles.

https://dianebederman.com/restitution-reparations-and-sins-of-the-fathers/

Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin. (Deut 24: 16)

Deuteronomy refers to human justice as administered in a court of law. How can mere mortals decide the extent to which one person’s crime was induced by the influence of others? Clearly the judicial process must limit itself to the observable facts. The person who committed the crime is guilty. Those who may have shaped his character are not.

The guilt of previous generations would not be attached to them.

So how did we devolve into blaming the people of today, for the sins of their fathers, and then suggest reparations from generations far removed from the event?

A movement supporting reparations as a way to make amends for the atrocities of slavery and to reduce the persistent wealth gap is gaining momentum. One hundred and forty-two members of Congress support H.R. 40, the bill to study reparations. William Darity, professor of public policy at Duke University  and his wife, Kirsten Mullen, made the most comprehensive case for a reparations program in their latest book “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.” They argue a meaningful program to eliminate the existing Black-White wealth gap requires an allocation of between $10 trillion and $12 trillion, or about $800,000 to each eligible Black household.

https://freebeacon.com/columns/the-scalia-family/

The lasting influence of the legendary Supreme Court justice

‘Enough to field a baseball team.” That was the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s response when asked how many children he had. And he and his wife Maureen’s nine children have themselves parented, as of this week, 40 grandchildren. How big is the Scalia family? So big that, at the moment, it would not be allowed to hold an in-person gathering in the justice’s home state of New Jersey.

Even that count might not be accurate. Watching Judge Amy Coney Barrett testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, I couldn’t help thinking that the Scalia family is larger than the individuals directly related to him. In both her September 26 remarks at the White House and her October 12 opening statement to the committee, Barrett spoke of the influence Scalia had on her life and identified herself with his approach to the law. “His judicial philosophy was straightforward: A judge must apply the law as written, not as the judge wishes it were,” Barrett told the senators. “Sometimes that approach meant reaching results that he did not like. But as he put it in one of his best-known opinions, that is what it means to say we have a government of laws, not men.”

Whether it was for the students he taught, or the clerks he hired, or the lawyers he mentored, or the readers of his work, Scalia modeled a form of jurisprudence rooted in the text of the Constitution and in the American political tradition. His approach came to be called “originalism” (in matters of constitutional interpretation) and “textualism” (in matters of statutory interpretation). But his legacy is far greater than these contributions to legal terminology and methodology. What this son of an Italian immigrant accomplished was nothing less than a revolution in the law — and the promulgation of a distinctly American conservatism that is needed now more than ever.