RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nyc-to-pay-3-3-million-to-family-of-teen-who-languished-at-rikers-island-11548371523?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=3

New York City will pay $3.3 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of the teenager who spent three years at the Rikers Island jail complex after being accused of stealing a backpack, becoming a symbol of dysfunction in the criminal-justice system.

In 2010, 16-year-old Kalief Browder, originally from the Bronx, was arrested and held at Rikers on $3,000 bail. He spent time in solitary confinement and returned to court dozens of times. In 2013, the charges were dismissed. After his release, Mr. Browder died by suicide in 2015 at the age of 22.

“Kalief Browder’s story helped inspire numerous reforms to the justice system to prevent this tragedy from ever happening again, including an end to punitive segregation for young people on Rikers Island,” a spokesman for the New York City Law Department said on Thursday. “We hope that this settlement and our continuing reforms help bring some measure of closure to the Browder family.”

The city didn’t acknowledge wrongdoing in the settlement.

“This was a fair and reasonable settlement,” said lawyer Sanford Rubenstein, who represents Mr. Browder’s estate.

The $3.3 million settlement includes attorney fees and expenses. A surrogate judge will determine how the money is distributed among Mr. Browder’s family members.

https://www.city-journal.org/bail-reform

Last September, as part of a national push for criminal-justice reform, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, a charitable organization, announced a plan to pay the bail of every woman and minor held in New York City’s jails. According to the group, run by Kerry Kennedy, the slain senator’s daughter, “access to justice depends on whether you can afford bail. The majority of people incarcerated in the notoriously violent Rikers Island are behind bars for the crime of being too poor.”

This is a favorite theme of the reformers, but most Rikers inmates are accused of serious crimes. Around 11.4 percent of the population is there for murder, attempted murder, or manslaughter; 20 percent are in for robbery or burglary; and another 25 percent face charges involving weapons, felony assault, sale of drugs, or rape or other sexual offenses. New York’s jails are not crowded with people whose only crime was jumping a subway turnstile or smoking weed; the average number of people held in Rikers on a given day for fare-beating is two, and for pot possession, one. And “the majority” of Rikers inmates are behind bars because they’re serving out a sentence, are ineligible for bail because of outstanding warrants, or are awaiting trial for a serious crime—not because they can’t afford bail. Even the majority of women and juveniles at Rikers, the target of the Kennedy group’s efforts, are ineligible for bail.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-americans-confidence-in-nations-world-image-grows/

58 percent of respondents in a Gallup poll of American adults released Monday said they believe the U.S. is seen “very favorably” or “somewhat favorably” by the rest of the world — a three-point increase from last year’s survey, and the highest percentage recorded by the poll since 2003.

About 80 percent of Republicans and 36 percent of Democrats said the country is seen favorably by the rest of the world, and neither number represented much change from last year. But the number of independents who said the same jumped eight points.

Despite the broad confidence in America’s image, only a small percentage of respondents, 31 percent, said the current president is respected by foreign leaders.

Respondents’ confidence in how other countries see the U.S. appears to be separate from confidence in the Trump administration, whose controversial foreign-policy decisions have sometimes been criticized on both sides of the aisle. It also appears to be separate from their confidence in the nation’s position on the global stage, with which 53 percent of them expressed dissatisfaction.

https://spectator.org/jonah-goldbergs-answer-

EXCERPT”Why does opposing Trump mean that one must be nasty to Trump’s more respected and erudite defenders? What purpose is there, for example, in trying to destroy Victor Davis Hansen? When Trump gets out of office (and it will happen, if not by the glorious swan dive of impeachment or by rotting away his dotage in prison as the Never Trump wing hope), how will attempting to destroy someone personally influence the post-Trump party? What place will the most vociferous anti-Trumpers have once they’ve alienated everyone with whom they disagree?Many members of Trump’s base are disappointed in the Wall funding and building, a point the Never Trumpers find endlessly mirthful.

Yet, do any of the Never Trump crew give a rat’s fanny about the Wall? Most use the policy to poke fun at Trump’s forlorn and most devoted followers. Their language around the Wall has been nigh unto open-borders blather (to own Trump). But is that policy position conservative? Libertarian, maybe. Reaganite? Not really.

Ninety percent of the GOP support Donald Trump. They’re happy, for once, to have someone respond to the media and not allow their worldview to be the butt of every joke, and that be the last word. The feeling among these folks, though, is that the conservative thought leaders, NRO and Weekly Standard writers among them, of the center-right coalition laughed along with Obama when he made fun of bitter-clingers and tea baggers. These True Cons™ agreed with Hillary that those people are deplorable.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/time-for-action-chase-bank-denies-service-to-conservatives/

It’s hard to imagine how conservatives could be even more complacent than they actually are about what’s being done to this country.The schools our children are taught in are almost universally run by liberals who hate everything we stand for, but we don’t demand that our representatives pull funding from state schools that behave that way.Hollywood has become vocally, over-the-top hostile to Christians and conservatives, but we go see the movies anyway.

We still buy the papers and watch the cable news shows of networks that talk about us like we’re Nazis because we don’t agree with their liberal worldview.More recently, increasingly monopolistic social media companies that have an inordinate amount of control over who gets heard and who doesn’t have started actively targeting conservatives and we just shrug or spout platitudes.
CONTINUE AT SITE

https://theweek.com/articles/824999/mueller-joke 

Excerpts:
“From the very beginning, the special counsel investigation has been a string of anecdotes, compound adjectives (“Russia-linked”), and vanquished dreams in search of a conspiracy. The only crimes of which Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, and the rest have been accused are ones that were alleged to have been committed either well before or long after the 2016 election; in many cases, indeed, they were said to have occurred during the course of the investigation itself — process crimes. None of the charges in question were about colluding with Russia. The only one that has even directly involved the presidential election was a violation of federal campaign finance law.

“The findings of the special counsel, if they are ever in fact released to the public in full, are likely to be insignificant. The investigation itself, however, has been one of the most consequential events in recent American history. It has forced the Democratic Party to change its position on Russia from “The ’80s called” to clamors for a new Cold War. It has led hard-news television reporters to make comments about anodyne diplomatic proceedings that would have done the John Birch Society proud during the height of McCarthyism. It has led otherwise sensible adults to attempt to make arguments about the supposedly sacrosanct nature of the American election system that they will, I hope, find embarrassing in just a few years. It has prevented the duly elected president of the United States from doing his job, poorly or otherwise.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/russia-collusion-democrats-republicans-foreign-policy-history/

D.C. has been delusional about the Kremlin since the 1990s.When the “collusion” music stopped, was Donald Trump the guy left without a chair?If the latest reporting is accurate, we’ll find out soon enough. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is said to be wrapping up his probe. His final report could be submitted to Attorney General William Barr in a matter of days.

Did Trump and his presidential campaign “collude with Russia” in the sense of conspiring to commit cyberespionage? That is, were they complicit in Russian intelligence’s hacking attacks on Democratic-party email accounts? There has been no indication that Mueller has such evidence. That is significant because Mueller is a prosecutor. Notwithstanding the irregular counterintelligence framework of the special counsel’s appointment, the principal job of a prosecutor is to determine whether crimes were committed. Espionage conspiracy is the collusion crime that launched the investigation.

Of course, as we’ve repeatedly observed, not all “collusion” is criminally conspiratorial — even if some of it involves dirty politics or is otherwise unsavory. It is easy to evaluate crime: A person is either guilty or not guilty of conduct Congress has criminalized; if the proof is there, he should be convicted. But when behavior is not criminal, yet we are being urged to condemn it because it was undertaken with a particular country, shouldn’t we evaluate how our government has regarded that country?When it comes to “collusion with Russia,” there was an awful lot of that going on in the Bipartisan Beltway throughout the quarter century before Trump launched his White House bid.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/21/t

Justice, we are told, is blind. Our top law enforcement officials repeatedly remind us of their integrity and their heroism; the men and women of the FBI are dedicated public servants who take on bad guys around the world at great sacrifice, and do so without bowing to stress or political pressure.

Only evidence and a commitment to the impartial execution of our laws drive them to protect our country each and every day.Undoubtedly this is true for rank-and-file FBI agents who face unimaginable danger and investigate the most despicable lowlifes who walk among us. By and large, people in law enforcement maintain a higher degree of purpose, patriotism, and yes, steeliness, than your average professional.But impartiality and temperance evidently have not been the defining traits of the top brass at the FBI in recent years. Rather than administering blind justice, James Comey and company seemed instead to consider political affiliations, electoral outcomes, and media coverage over a preponderance of fact and evidence.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schiffting-to-phase-2-of-collusion-11550794762

There’s been no more reliable regurgitator of fantastical Trump-Russia collusion theories than Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff. So when the House Intelligence Committee chairman sits down to describe a “new phase” of the Trump investigation, pay attention. These are the fever swamps into which we will descend after Robert Mueller’s probe.

The collusionists need a “new phase” as signs grow that the special counsel won’t help realize their reveries of a Donald Trump takedown. They had said Mr. Mueller would provide all the answers. Now that it seems they won’t like his answers, Democrats and media insist that any report will likely prove “anticlimactic” and “inconclusive.” “This is merely the end of Chapter 1,” said Renato Mariotti, a CNN legal “analyst.”Mr. Schiff turned this week to a dependable scribe—the Washington Post’s David Ignatius—to lay out the next chapter of the penny dreadful. Mr. Ignatius was the original conduit for the leak about former national security adviser Mike Flynn’s conversations with a Russian ambassador, and the far-fetched claims that Mr. Flynn had violated the Logan Act of 1799.

Mr. Schiff has now dictated to Mr. Ignatius a whole new collusion theory. Forget Carter Page, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos—whoever. The real Trump-Russia canoodling rests in “Trump’s finances.” The future president was “doing business with Russia” and “seeking Kremlin help.”So, no apologies. No acknowledgment that Mr. Schiff & Co. for years have pushed fake stories that accused innocent men and women of being Russian agents. No relieved hope that the country might finally put this behind us. Just a smooth transition—using Russia as a hook—into Mr. Trump’s finances.

Mueller who?What’s mind-boggling is that reporters would continue to take Mr. Schiff seriously, given his extraordinary record of incorrect and misleading pronouncements. This is the man who, on March 22, 2017, helped launch full-blown hysteria when he said on “Meet the Press” that his committee already had the goods on Trump-Russia collusion.CONTINUE AT SITE