RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/29/condemning-reverend-al-sharpton/

The text of this resolution, sponsored by Joe Scarborough, was introduced 03/08/2000.

Whereas the Congress strongly rejects the racist and incendiary actions of the Reverend Al Sharpton;

Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton has referred to members of the Jewish faith as “bloodsucking [J]ews”, and “Jew bastards”;

Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton has referred to members of the Jewish faith as “white interlopers” and “diamond merchants”;

Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton was found guilty of defamation by a jury in a New York court arising from the false accusation that former Assistant District Attorney Steven Pagones, who is white, raped and assaulted a fifteen year-old black girl;

Whereas, to this day, the Reverend Al Sharpton has refused to accept responsibility and expresses no regret for defaming Mr. Pagones;

Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton’s vicious verbal anti-Semitic attacks directed at members of the Jewish faith, and in particular, a Jewish landlord, arising from a simple landlord-tenant dispute with a black tenant, incited widespread violence, riots, and the murder of five innocent people;

Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton’s fierce demagoguery incited violence, riots, and murder in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, following the accidental death of a black pedestrian child hit by the motorcade of Orthodox Rabbi Menachem Schneerson;

Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton led a protest in the Crown Heights neighborhood and marched next to a protester with a sign that read, “The White Man is the Devil”;

Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton has insulted members of the Jewish faith by challenging Jews to violence and stating to Jews to “pin down” their yarmulkes; and

Whereas the Reverend Al Sharpton has practiced the politics of racial division and made inflammatory remarks against whites by characterizing the death
of Amadou Diallo as a “racially motivated police `assassination”:

Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That the Congress–

(1) condemns the practices of the Reverend Al Sharpton, which seek to divide Americans on the basis of race, ethnicity, and religion;

(2) expresses its outrage over the violence that has resulted due to the Reverend Al Sharpton’s incendiary words and actions; and

(3) fervently urges elected officials and public servants, who have condoned and legitimized the Reverend Al Sharpton’s incendiary words and actions, to publicly denounce and condemn such racist and anti-Semitic views.

(Hat tip @ReaganBattalion)

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/29/trumps-attack-on-baltimore-doesnt-go-far-enough/

Say what you want about President Trump’s Twitter habits, he has a way of suddenly bringing an issue to the surface that people have long known about, but never wanted to confront. The only problem with his latest tweetstorm about Baltimore is that he hasn’t gone far enough.

On Friday, Trump attacked Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, who had been complaining about conditions at the border, by saying “his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous.” Trump called it “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”

He’s right about the rats. Last year, the pest-control service Orkin rated Baltimore as one of the “rattiest cities,“ behind Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.

Naturally, Trump’s tweets are being labeled as racist. Never mind that Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders was saying far worse things about the city a few years ago, when he said that when you go to west Baltimore you “would think you were in a Third World country.” 

Trump, meanwhile, extended his attack to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home town of San Francisco. 

He should widen his lens even further. 

Take a look at the eight other cities that beat Baltimore on Orkin’s rattiest cities list. What do they all have in common? We’ll, let’s see:

Chicago hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1931. Philadelphia last saw a Republican mayor in 1952, Detroit in 1962. San Francisco has been Democrat-controlled since 1964. Washington, D.C., has never had a Republican mayor.

In Los Angeles, Democrats have run the city in all but eight of the past 58 years, in New York, it’s eight in the past 74 (not counting John Lindsay, who switched parties while in office). Cleveland’s been run by Democrats in all but 16 of the past 78 years.

https://nypost.com/2019/07/28/trump-is-right-about-baltimore-and-the-democrats-know-it/

“The operative rule in politics these days seems to be that any criticism of a non-white politician from anywhere to their right is, by definition, a racist attack. Nothing Trump said pertained in any way to Elijah Cummings’s skin color or ethnicity, only to his failure as a legislator and political leader to do anything to improve his district. The real question is: Is he right?”

President Trump blistered Representative Elijah Cummings on Twitter, calling out the chairman of the House Oversight committee for raising the hue and cry over conditions on the Mexican border, “when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA.” Trump went on to describe Cummings’s West Baltimore constituency as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”

Predictably, the Left—including most of cable news—rushed to condemn Trump as a racist. Speaker Nancy Pelosi — whose father was once mayor of Baltimore — called Cummings “a beloved leader in Baltimore, and deeply valued colleague. We all reject racist attacks against him and support his steadfast leadership.” Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted, “Donald Trump’s tweets are ugly and racist.” Beto O’Rourke called him “the most openly racist president we’ve had in modern history.” Senator Bernie Sanders chimed in, too.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/portlands-antifa-impunity-11564348707

Portland, Ore., thinks of itself as a tolerant progressive city. Yet four weeks after a left-wing mob severely beat journalist Andy Ngo, there have been no arrests or charges for the assault.

Mr. Ngo was battered on June 29 as he reported on dueling protests. One demonstration included the far-right Proud Boys, and the counterprotest featured leftist groups associated with the extremist Antifa movement. Mr. Ngo has been a critic of Antifa’s militant tactics and its failure to disavow violence and vandalism, and that made him a target. Video footage shows Mr. Ngo being punched and kicked by people in black attire including hoodies and face masks, Antifa’s preferred uniform.

Mr. Ngo was hospitalized for his injuries, which included a brain bleed. A month later he’s still experiencing complications. Mr. Ngo says he sometimes has trouble finishing sentences or remembering common words, and he’s shown symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He’s undergoing neurophysical and speech therapy, including for a cognitive communication deficit.

The assault “was brief, but it did end up being really traumatic,” he says. Mr. Ngo adds that far-left activists also spread his home address online, and he has continued to receive threats.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/the-olc-guidance-against-indicting-a-sitting-president/

After Mueller, it is worth another look at its role in the report and its fallout.

T his is Part Two of a two-part series. In Part One, we took a look at the OLC guidance that bars the indictment of a sitting president. (The OLC is the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.) In particular, we looked at (a) how, in investigating President Trump for purported obstruction, special counsel Robert Mueller’s staff distorted the guidance into a prohibition against even considering whether an offense occurred; and (b) the futile hope of congressional Democrats, during Wednesday’s hearings, that Mueller would contradict his final report on this point.

In Part Two, we explore why Mueller’s staff of very able lawyers, many of them activist Democrats, twisted the OLC guidance. (Spoiler: Their priority was to get their evidence to Congress, intact and as quickly as possible, in hopes of fueling an impeachment drive, or at least damaging Trump politically.) We also analyze how attorney general Bill Barr deftly dealt with the Mueller staff’s gamesmanship.

As we observed at the end of Part One, Mueller’s report makes the whopper of the claim that prosecutors construed to OLC guidance to forbid them to make a charging decision on obstruction because they were trying to protect President Trump.

How’s that?

Well, Justice Department protocols prohibit prosecutors from prejudicing suspects by publicizing the evidence against them unless and until they are formally charged. The idea is that the government must refrain from speaking until it files an indictment. For at that point, the person becomes an “accused” under the Constitution, vested with all the due process guarantees our law provides: assistance of counsel, confrontation of witnesses, subpoena power — the full array of rights to challenge the government’s indictment.

https://www.steynonline.com/columns-essays
Not sure it’s possible to tally up how many times special counsel Robert Mueller claimed he couldn’t say, wouldn’t say or simply didn’t know during his testimony yesterday before congress. Odd that a guy who’s supposedly been looking under every rock and behind every door for evidence of Russian collusion now sees everything as “outside of my purview.”

Front and center during the testimony, in particular during Republican congressman Jim Jordan’s questioning of Mueller, was the role of Maltese “professor” Joseph Mifsud, who disappeared from public view in 2017. Of course, Mueller couldn’t get into it.

Mifsud’s part in all this is also central to what happened to George Papadopoulos, whom Mark interviewed earlier this year.

Given the renewed relevance of the Papadopoulos affair, we’re also making the transcript of Part 1 of the interview available below to all our readers.

Transcript:

Mark: Hey welcome along and my guest today is the author of the book, Deep State Target, the subtitle’s worth reading too: How I got caught in the crosshairs of the plot to bring down President Trump.

And if you watch a lot of the media, read a lot of the big mainstream newspapers you’ll be thinking “Hey that’s crazy talk.” And what makes this book such a great read is because most of us would think that was just crazy talk until the slow dawning realization that we’re in the middle of a terrible setup.

My guest today is the man who was at the center of that setup, George Papadopoulos. George is an ex-convict; he’s actually served time in jail for a phony baloney non-crime, the crime of misremembering to the FBI, which in fact should not exist as any crime at all. When they can’t get you on anything they get you on misremembering and as a result George went to jail for a fortnight but he got two days off for good behavior so he was out in 12 days and we are thrilled to have him with us.

George I’d like to ask you because basically it’s because of your involvement with the Trump campaign that all this happened to you and you were very unusual because you were working at a Washington think tank and you saw Donald Trump come down that escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 and unlike a lot a swamp dwellers you were pro-Trump from that first appearance, correct?

https://housely.com/dangerous-neighborhoods-baltimore/

10 of the Most Dangerous Neighborhoods in Baltimore
Orangeville.
Cherry Hill. …
Greenmount East. …
Greater Rosemont. …
Madison-Eastend. …
Berea. …
Grove Park. …
West Baltimore. Topping the list is the West Baltimore neighborhood. …

This is what Cummings an unrelenting “impeachnick” said on July 24 about the President after the Mueller meeting in Congress:

Cummings:

CUMMINGS: I first wanted to applaud Chairman Nadler and–who heads our judiciary committee and certainly our chairman of intelligence committee for what they did today and their committees. What they did was paint a picture for America.

One of the most chilling things that I have noticed that–that I’ve witnessed is when a member of–former member of our committee, Mr. Amash, a Republican, went to his town hall meeting and got a round of applause in a Republican district after he had said that he felt that the president should be impeached. But that wasn’t the thing that got me. What really got me was when a lady at the end of the–the town hall meeting said I didn’t know that there was anything negative in the Mueller report about President Trump. That says a lot.

And to her credit, our Speaker made it clear that we needed to paint a picture for America for they could–so that they could fully understand what is going on. This is a critical moment in–and our country’s history. Don’t–don’t be fooled. And it is a moment which people will be talking about and reading about 3, 400, 500 years from now. And they are going to ask the question what did you do when we had a president who–who knew the rules and knew that our founding fathers had done a great job of creating a constitution and had put in all the guardrails but never anticipated that we would have a president that would just throw away the guardrails.

And that’s why what happened today is so critical. It was a giant step in making sure that the American people were–got a picture of all of this and hopefully will look towards the future and say we’re not going to have this. Both Mr. Nadler and Mr. Schiff said something that’s very critical. This isn’t normal.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/resistance-inc/Why impeachment isn’t going away.

Trump supporters are right to feel vindication after Robert Mueller’s testimony before Congress. At times the special counsel seemed unfamiliar with the contents of his own report. He came across as aloof and confused and often unable to answer both Democratic and Republican questions to the lawmakers’ satisfaction. The same media figures that began the day saying Mueller’s appearance might be the game changer ended up calling it a flop. “Democrats now have one option to end Trump’s presidency,” read the headline of Dan Balz’s analysis in the Washington Post. “The 2020 election.” Trump, as always, put it more memorably: “truth is a force of nature!”

The real truth is Mueller’s testimony was never going to interrupt preexisting trends. Support for impeachment has been stable for a year at around 40 percent in the Fox News poll of registered voters. Fox asks, “Do you think President Trump should be impeached and removed from office, or not?” In June 2018, 39 percent of respondents answered yes. Last week, 42 percent said the same. Opposition to impeachment has hovered around 50 percent during all this time. When the most recent Fox News poll asked if Mueller’s testimony might cause voters to change how they felt about Trump, only 8 percent said there was a strong chance of that happening. Forty-nine percent said not at all.

Views of President Trump are cast iron. Mueller might have overturned this equilibrium by offering new evidence incriminating Trump or by saying definitively that Trump obstructed justice. He did neither. Nor was he going to. It was clear from his May press conference that Mueller did not want to appear before Congress and that he had said all he was willing to say in his report. The negotiations over his testimony that stretched into midsummer, the sudden delay of his testimony by a week, and the addition of his chief of staff as counsel further indicated his reluctance as well as his lack of assurance before the cameras. The presence on the committee of Republicans hostile to Mueller’s investigation and to his findings meant that the hearing would not be entirely favorable to Democrats. Sure enough, Mueller’s performance was a disappointment.