RUTHFULLY YOURS

This is hilarious but the best last year was in The New York Post cover with a picture of Hillary Clinton “Deleter of the Free World”….rsk

“…….Even better, it is factual. And almost inevitably, it’s about a “Florida man.”

Here it is, from NBC News:

Lawyer’s Pants Catch Fire During Florida Arson Trial

It seemed like a set up to a tired joke: A lawyer’s pants caught on fire in court.

But on Wednesday, it was Stephen Gutierrez’s reality when the Florida defense attorney’s pants began smoking during an arson trial, Eleventh Circuit Court Public Relations Director Eunice Sigler confirmed to NBC News Thursday.

Gutierrez, 28, was in the in the Miami-Dade county courtroom defending 49-year-old Claudy Charles, who was accused of setting his car alight.

But During his closing argument, Gutierrez began to feel heat coming from his pocket where he had several electric cigarette batteries, he told NBC News in an email.

As Gutierrez argued Charles’ car had merely spontaneously combusted, the lawyer’s pants seemed to do the same.

Witnesses in the courtroom told the Miami Herald the moment was “surreal,” as Gutierrez rushed out of the courtroom while smoke billowed from his pocket.

Gutierrez said as the heat intensified, he hurried into the bathroom where he tossed the battery in water. He was able to return to the courtroom with a singed pocket.

Because the defense argument was that the car spontaneously combusted, there is reason for suspicion among everyone but children that this was a set-up intended to make the point quite visibly to jurors. Lawyer Gutierez, of course, adamantly denies it.

I don’t really care. I just love the headline, probably because I write headlines on a daily basis and draw inspiration and amusement from the best of them.

In March 1993, Janet Reno began her tenure as President Bill Clinton’s attorney general by summarily firing United States attorneys for 93 of the 94 federal districts (one, Michael Chertoff, was retained in New Jersey, at the request of Democratic Senator Bill Bradley). That is more than twice as many as Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions fired on Friday.

Indeed, there were only 46 Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys left for Sessions to relieve because Obama appointees fully understood that this is the way things work. Many of them had already moved on, in the expectation that the president elected in November would replace them — an expectation that became a virtual certainty once it was clear that this change of administrations would be a change of parties, and visions.

It is frequently observed that, to be legitimate, law enforcement must operate independently of politics. It is an oversimplification, coupled with a misunderstanding of politics in its non-pejorative sense.

Of course the conduct of investigations, prosecutions, and their consequent judicial proceedings must be immune from partisanship. It would be intolerable for people to be targeted for, or insulated from, criminal law enforcement based on their political connections. Law enforcement, however, is about more than handling individual cases. It is about making overarching policy choices.

Resources are finite. Administrations must choose how many assets to dedicate to counterterrorism, immigration enforcement, health-care fraud, organized crime, and so on. Should the feds focus on the importation of illegal narcotics and their distribution by interstate criminal syndicates? Or should prosecutors and agents team up with state agencies to tackle street-level trafficking? Are the civil-rights laws an enforcement measure to protect fundamental liberties? Or are they a social-justice tool for transforming nationwide policing practices?

These policy choices are the stuff of politics. They often weigh heavily in presidential campaigns and elections. Law-and-order issues intimately affect people’s lives. When presidents make promises about them, they must expect to be held accountable.

U.S. attorneys are the instruments through which the president exercises his policy discretion. That is why they are political appointees. They do not have power of their own. Under our Constitution, all executive power is reposed in the president alone. Every officer of the executive branch is thus a delegate. The U.S. attorney exercises the president’s power and can be removed at the president’s will.

If you’re not an American millennial or university professor, you might be confused by the concept of “intersectionality.” First coined in 1989 by race theorist Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, it has become a left-wing buzzword to define the lumping together of all self-described “oppressed” groups under a single umbrella.

According to proponents of this radical fad — which amounts to an elimination of independent critical thought — not only must a person toe a particular ideological line, but he may never slip, even accidentally, into the realm of nuance or distinction. Someone who supports gay marriage, for example, has to oppose Israeli policy, advocate for government-funded abortions and believe that the free market is evil and climate change is man-made.

Though intersectionality has been around since long before anyone other than a handful of academics had heard of it, it has gradually been infecting political discourse in the United States for decades. Given a huge boost during the Obama years, it moved from obscurity to fame — particularly on campus — to such an extent that it is bandied around by students who would be hard put to spell it. Spending more time on the quad waving placards than in the classroom will do that. And it gives new meaning to the adage, taken from Thomas Gray’s 1742 “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” that ignorance is bliss.

On Wednesday this week, both intersectionality and blissful ignorance were on full display ahead of and during the International Women’s Strike. Ostensibly a cross-country happening for females to show the men who share their bedrooms and boardrooms what a day would be like in the absence of their (our) enormous contributions, the event was actually a mass whine-fest, organized by a Palestinian terrorist and a handful of other extremist feminists whose real goal was to attack the new U.S. president and the State of Israel.

Judging by the lack of aerial photographs illustrating the kind of crowds that had gathered after inauguration day, the public statement fell flat. Most women were too busy earning an honest living and tending to their children to waste a day on a demonstration that has no meaning in a country like America, where women are at liberty to do as they choose and please.

The truly oppressed women of the world would have been raped, stoned, tortured or executed for daring to whisper what their counterparts in the United States shout from the rooftops of Washington and New York. Indeed, had convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh or Palestinian-American, pro-Shariah and polygamy apologist Linda Sarsour — organizers of this week’s event — genuinely cared about their sisters, they would have been calling out the Palestinian Authority, not Israel, for its human rights violations and abuse of women.

But facts are of little interest to the intersectionalists; what matters to them is ideology — the kind they are able to express, promote and legislate in the land of the free and the brave that they love to denounce.

This is not to say that intersectionality enables smooth sailing for its adherents who — as my son says — long ago saw political correctness in their rear-view mirrors. On the contrary, they regularly run into snags when two or more of the ingredients in their witches’ cauldron clash.

Chelsea Clinton is not fascinating. But the repeated insistence that Chelsea Clinton is fascinating . . . is actually rather fascinating. It’s like a giant social experiment, in which everyone who has spent decades building connections to the Clinton political dynasty attempts to make the world see the president’s daughter as someone she isn’t.

Witness the recent insistence that we’re seeing a new side of Chelsea Clinton . . . because she’s tweeting a lot of critical things about President Trump. This is not particularly unusual behavior for a Democrat with a Twitter account. Yet Politico declares that she “lets loose on Twitter” with “a spicy, sarcastic online personality.” CNN concurs that “Chelsea Clinton embraces her Twitter sass.”

Almost every time the younger Clinton opens her mouth, it is treated as inherently newsworthy. Neontaster notices that The Hill has tweeted about her 70 times since the beginning of the year.

Why is Chelsea Clinton news? She’s the scion of America’s most famous Democratic dynasty, sure, but her own accomplishments in public life are meager. When can we stop pretending that hers is a voice worth listening to?

In fact, she’s pretty much the worst possible person to be speaking on behalf of Democrats right now. At a time when one of the preeminent problems in American life is a sense of declining economic opportunity and social mobility, she’s the living embodiment of inherited privilege.

After a few years of attempting to work in consulting and at hedge funds, she concluded she “couldn’t care about money on a fundamental level.” Then, with no experience in television journalism, she had her people call up the networks and set up a bidding war for her services as a correspondent. She made $600,000 per year for part-time work at NBC, generating what the Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik called “a handful of reports that no self-respecting affiliate in a top 20 market would air.”

She was named an “assistant vice provost” at NYU at age 30. She was picked to give the keynote address at South by Southwest, and honored as one of Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year.” Now she makes $1,083 per minute speaking to public universities. And almost everything she does is decreed to be extraordinary by a pliant, pro-Clinton media. The New York Times even interviewed her about her favorite books.

American infrastructure has barely maintained a below-standard grade of “D+” over the last four years, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.

In its “Infrastructure Report Card” issued every four years, the engineering group forecast that it would cost about $4.590 trillion over the next decade to bring the country’s roads, bridges, public schools and ports up to a safe, functioning level, about $2.064 trillion more than what governments and the private sector are ready to spend.

The association, based in Reston, Va., called for infrastructure investment to increase from the current level of about 2.5% of U.S. gross domestic product to 3.5% by 2025.
“When it comes to your infrastructure you should be worried,” said Norma Jean Mattei, 2017 president of ASCE. “President Trump is onto something as he calls for a new program of national rebuilding.”
President Donald Trump has promised to increase infrastructure investment partly as a way to spur job growth. In his recent address to Congress, Mr. Trump said he would propose legislation aimed at generating a $1 trillion investment in U.S. infrastructure, financed through both public and private capital.

Aging infrastructure continues to create problems for communities around the country, from lead pipes contaminating the water supply in Flint, Mich., to U.S. ports struggling to handle larger volumes and a recent crisis at the Oroville Dam in northern California, where heavy rains almost caused a spillway to give way and about 200,000 people had to be evacuated.

The association’s infrastructure team looked at 16 infrastructure categories and found some areas grew worse in the last four years while other areas improved slightly. CONTINUE AT SITE