RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/former_navy_seal_eddie_gallaghers_powerful_insights_and_future_purpose.html

He’s gone from being the victim of a whisper campaign and an abusive prosecution to becoming an advocate for others unjustly accused.

In 2018, Navy SEAL Chief Eddie Gallagher was arrested for alleged war crimes, brutally tried in the court of public opinion, and ultimately vindicated. Unwittingly, Chief Gallagher found himself one of the first victims of an increasingly woke military. I had the pleasure of speaking with Gallagher to learn what he thinks is going on. I also learned about the Pipe Hitter Foundation, a constitutionally important organization Gallagher created to protect people in the service and first responders who find themselves railroaded.

Before the interview, I read excerpts for his book, The Man in the Arena: From Fighting ISIS to Fighting for My Freedom. The chapter entitled “Mean Girls,” gripped me. Gallagher describes how a small crew of junior members in his platoon, dissatisfied with the demands he made on them, and angry that he had called them out on their poor performance, decided to destroy him. This dovetailed with my belief that leftism has used classic toxic femininity — emotionalism, viciousness, backstabbing, and passive-aggression – to remake society.

Chief Gallagher defies lay expectations about SEALS because he doesn’t vibrate with energy or project a deafening personal amplitude. He’s low-key and unassuming. His record says he’s a man of action; his demeanor says he’s a thoughtful man.

I opened by asking Gallagher whether these “mean girls” represented the newer generation of young people entering the service. No, Gallagher said. First, though, he agreed that “There has been a movement in this country…where it was ‘everyone needs to be in touch with their emotions; everybody needs to accept people for the way they’re feeling,’ and this and that.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/09/the-more-abuse-democrats-heap-on-the-gop-the-more-benefits-they-accrue/

Like the battered wife who inexplicably returns to her abuser, Senate Republicans are recklessly reappearing to provide Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats a crucial win on infrastructure spending even while Biden and company continue to attack the GOP for every ill under the sun.

After more than 6 months of “take-it-or-leave-it” one-party rule by Biden, Pelosi and Schumer, their thinnest of majorities has produced not one single bipartisan advancement for America, but more than enough failure as it has appeared to finally run-aground. 

Biden’s approval numbers are falling fast as inflation caused by too much government spending has the nation on the jitters.  The southern border is a dumpster fire and everything this administration touches reveals dangerous incompetence.  For the first time since the Obama/Biden years more Americans think the country is moving in the wrong direction and they are clearly right. 

Yet, Biden’s standing is the high water mark among his clan.  Kamala Harris recently registered the lowest approval rating for a VP in more than 60 years as evidence of infighting between the White House and EEOB betrays a tragic insecurity about this administration’s future. 

Congressional approval is even more desperate and Chuck Schumer is slashing about for a path to advance this big government agenda — for which he has no mandate — as his electoral clock winds down to the midterms which everyone recognizes as a likely rout for the current ruling Democrats.

And still, these Democrats can count on Senate Republicans to bail them out.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anti-semitism-yair-lapid-israel-bdsm-ben-and-jerrys-marxism-palestine-bigotry-11628447206

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid startled the Conference Against Antisemitism in Jerusalem last month by redefining the term: “The anti-Semites weren’t only in the Budapest ghetto,” he said. They were also “the slave traders,” the Hutus who committed genocide in Rwanda, “those Muslims who have killed more than 20 million fellow Muslims in the past decade,” and “those who beat young LGBT people to death.”

It was, Mr. Lapid explained, a political appeal. “We need allies,” he said. “Anti-Semitism is racism, so let’s talk to all those who oppose racism. . . . Anti-Semitism is hatred of outsiders, so let’s recruit anyone who was ever an outsider and tell them—this is your fight too.”

Five days later, Ben & Jerry’s, a division of Unilever and a self-styled champion of progressive values, demonstrated Mr. Lapid’s naiveté by announcing that it will pull out of Israel because selling its ice cream in the “Occupied Palestinian Territory”—the loaded Arab term—was “inconsistent with our values.” The Arab League had launched the original pan-Arab boycott of Israel in 1945, defining any Jewish presence in Palestine as an occupation of Arab territory. That boycott would have done far greater damage had the U.S. not intervened to thwart it, which it did because Israel’s destruction was inconsistent with American values.

But America has changed. At the end of the 20th century, a home-grown boycott, divestment and sanctions movement became an American arm of the war against Israel, uniting a self-defined progressive coalition on the side of Arab-Muslim rejectionism. Anuradha Mittal, Ben & Jerry’s chairman and a supporter of BDS, is the initiator of today’s boycott of Israel, a country whose creation she once called a “catastrophe.” She knows that blaming Israel undermines its legitimacy, causing not only economic but political and diplomatic harm.

2 Chicago police officers shot, 1 killed; 3 in custody By Chuck Goudie and Maher Kawash
https://abc7chicago.com/2-cpd-officers-shot-1-killed-in-west-englewood-shooting–/10938393/

Female Chicago cop, 29, shot dead during traffic stop armed confrontation – two months after giving birth to her child
Ella French, 29, was fatally shot during a traffic stop Saturday
She had just returned from maternity leave and leaves behind a two-month-old  
Her male colleague is ‘fighting for his very life,’ a police spokesman said
The pair were fired upon after a vehicle carrying two men and a woman had been pulled over in the South Side of Chicago
Two suspects have been arrested and a weapon seized; a third is on the run 
The officer is the first to be shot and killed in the city since December 2018 
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9873491/Female-Chicago-police-officer-killed.html
Chicago surpasses 460 shooting incidents in July: police
The new figures bring the year-to-date totals to 1,973 shooting incidents and 2,471 shooting victims, compared to 1,779 incidents and 2,217 victims in 2020 By Lucas Manfredi

https://www.foxnews.com/us/chicago-surpasses-460-shooting-incidents-in-july-police

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/criminal-justice-reformers-chose-the-wrong-slogan/ar-AAN4qze

After George Floyd’s murder, when sweeping criminal-justice reforms seemed more possible than ever, many Black Lives Matter activists and their allies settled on a rallying cry: “Defund the Police.”

That choice was a disaster. The slogan—shorthand for cutting spending on law enforcement and redirecting it toward social services, or, for more radical proponents, moving toward eventual police abolition—is a political liability, largely due to justified fears that, if implemented, it would lead to many more murders, assaults, and other violent crimes, disproportionately harming victims in America’s most marginalized communities. Yet even as the Democratic Party abandons the slogan, the activist left still clings to it, as if oblivious to its opportunity cost: Namely, the public is open to any number of potential improvements to American policing, but no politically viable reform is getting anywhere near the attention of “defunding.”

Before the public sours on criminal-justice reform more broadly—as it may amid rising fears about crime and disorder in cities—a new focus and rallying cry are needed. And given the spike in homicides that has afflicted the United States during the pandemic, disproportionately killing Black people, there’s an especially strong case for this overdue slogan: Solve All Murders. Precisely because Black lives matter, people who take Black lives shouldn’t get away with it.

The Murder Accountability Project, a nonprofit watchdog group that tracks unsolved murders, found in 2019 that “declining homicide clearance rates for African-American victims accounted for all of the nation’s alarming decline in law enforcement’s ability to clear murders through the arrest of criminal offenders.” In Chicago, the public-radio station WBEZ’s analysis of 19 months of murder-investigation records showed that “when the victim was white, 47% of the cases were solved … For Hispanics, the rate was about 33%. When the victim was African American, it was less than 22%.” Another study in Indianapolis found the same kind of disparities.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/08/08/where-is-your-god-now-portland-cops-do-nothing-as-antifa-attacks-prayer-event-led-by-persecuted-christian-pastor-n1467987

If you wondered what it looked like when Nazi brown shirts went after the churches in Germany, wonder no more: It probably looked like Portland on Saturday, when black bloc-outfitted antifa thugs burst into a waterfront prayer event featuring persecuted Canadian Pastor Artur Pawlowski. The antifa members sprayed those gathered, including toddlers, with chemicals and lobbed IEDs.

“Where is your God, now?” taunted one of the attackers.

Antifa has attacked at least one church before. Antifa members organized their violent attack via Twitter and other social media platforms. They later gloated on Twitter that they had stolen the Christian group’s food and water.

Portland police watched as antifa bear-sprayed parents and their kids, lobbed “flash bombs” into the sparse crowd, and reportedly threw the group’s sound equipment into the Willamette River. This being Portland, police didn’t arrest antifa members for polluting the river, much less attacking people.

Portland’s police bureau has been defunded by at least $15 million and there’s been a mass exodus of officers retiring or going to places where the rule of law is observed.

As a result of antifa and BLM attacks on (the defunded) police, Portland is now awash in violent crime and on course to break records for shootings.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“There’s a way you political folks have of coming round and round a plain right thing.”

                                                                                                                                Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

                                                                                                                                Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852

It is not that I am without concerns, for everything that happens today is a ‘crisis.’ We live on a planet that has been around for 4.5 billion years. Over that time, it has been warm enough in Connecticut, where I live, to host dinosaurs and cold enough to place it under thirty feet of ice. By the time of the last ice age, man had been around for tens of thousands of years. He adapted. Yet today’s changing climate is said to present an existential challenge for the planet. “Woke” governments and large businesses demand diversity, equity and inclusion, but what they really mean are uniformity, unjustness and exclusion. Universities, once places for inquiring minds, have become venues for intellectual conformity. In sports, men, as transgender women, compete against biological women. Merit has fallen victim to social equity. What gives? The United States was founded on principles of personal liberty and the rule of law, derived from the Enlightenment. Should we let what has taken 250 years to create devolve into darkness?

We should not. We need to lighten up. The political atmosphere has become nasty. In an essay (“Old Glory, new anger”) in the August issue of The Spectator, Peter Wood wrote: “There is the wrathfulness of the political left, stemming from visceral hatred of Trump and his supporters.” As for the Right, he noted: “Their complaint lies far deeper as they see the purposeful destruction of American values by an elite that bullies and derides them.”  Friends and family members are no longer able to air political differences without one being called a racist and the other a toady. If we are to survive as a free, decent and independent people, composed of myriad races, religions and nationalities, political leaders, the media and universities must promote tolerance and mutual respect. To achieve this, they must encourage traditional American values, like family formations and public schools that teach. They must reaffirm the values of common sense, responsibility, hard work, merit and reintroduce civility and humor.

The political spectrum is linear, with autocracy at one end and anarchy at the other. Understanding that, we should know where on that line our own political philosophies lie. Fundamentally, our differences are simple. Progressives believe equitable progress is best achieved with more government involvement. Conservatives believe in what Margaret Thatcher said in Gdansk in 1988: “Economic freedom and personal freedom go hand in hand.” The first depends on the ability of a few hundred senior bureaucrats. The second relies on millions of people making millions of decisions. There are gradations of belief. A few extremists are clustered at either end, believing in either the benevolence of autocracy or the benignity of anarchy. Mainstream media would have us bunched (along with them) at extremes – the “woke” on one end and “deplorables” at the other. Most of us, however, lie within a few degrees of the center. But anger divides us, and communication is difficult.