RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/01/rosenstein-and-wray-squirm

Rod Rosenstein and Christopher Wray went up to Capitol Hill on Thursday to tell the House Intelligence Committee that neither one of them had noticed anything wrong with Robert Mueller’s special probe or with the anti-Trump bias of its staff.

No matter what Congress and the public had read in the massive inspector general’s report recently, they wanted everyone to know that the deputy attorney general and the FBI director had the Bureau under control now, and that Rosenstein had Wray and Mueller under control, too. Everything is fine. Nothing to see here. Couldn’t Congress just leave them alone? Here were two men metaphorically standing outside their houses now burnt to the ground, and asking the firemen inside for coffee. Should we pity them or lock them up as madmen?

Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) pointed out that Rosenstein had conflicts everywhere you turned. How could he oversee the Mueller probe when he had written the memo to President Trump recommending former FBI Director James Comey be fired in the first place? If reports were true that Mueller was investigating the president for “obstruction” related to firing Comey, then hadn’t Rosenstein set up a loop to investigate himself? Wasn’t he the origin point of the whole mess?

“Congressman, I can assure you that if it were appropriate for me to recuse, I would be more than happy to do so,” Rosenstein said. “But it’s my responsibility to do it.” Apparently, he felt comfortable being the responsible party for the whole mess. That air of supreme confidence would not last long.

Then Rosenstein assured Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), “There is no one more committed to rooting out abuse and misconduct than I. We look to find any credible evidence, and we give it to Chairman Nunes.” That was a soothing answer, except for the fact it was untrue. Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has told the world repeatedly that Rosenstein is obstructing his investigation. Nunes had even appeared on Sean Hannity’s show to tell the public that his staff felt threatened by Rosenstein.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21337/nationalism-is-not-a-dirty-word
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com
http://lindagoudsmit.com

When did American nationalism become a dirty word? Under Obama of course! Obama’s leftist war against America is a war against American nationalism. America emerged from WWII as the most powerful economic nation on earth and invincible militarily. Enemies of the United States domestically and internationally would need a different strategy to defeat her.

Aesop’s 6th century B.C. fable “The Four Oxen and the Lion” offers that strategy.

“A lion used to prowl about a field in which four oxen used to dwell. Many a time he tried to attack them; but whenever he came near they turned their tails to one another, so that whichever way he approached them he was met by the horns of one of them. At last, however, they fell a-quarrelling among themselves, and each went off to pasture alone in a separate corner of the field. Then the Lion attacked them one by one and soon made an end of all four. United we stand, divided we fall.”

American nationalism is the common denominator that unifies America which is why the war against America specifically targets American nationalism. Obama’s leftist strategy is one of creating divisiveness within America because divided we fall. This is how it works.

The great conflict in the world today is between nationalism and internationalism. Nationalism supports the national sovereignty of independent countries trading fairly in the global marketplace. Internationalism supports globalism – a globalized one world nation, one world economy, one world language, one world currency, one world flag, one world educational curriculum, one world police force, one world army, and most significantly one world government.

The New World Order of one world government is deceitfully marketed by globalist elites as the universal system for social justice and income equality. The problem, of course, is that the “New” World Order is a return to the very old world feudal system of masters and slaves. There is nothing new about a binary socio-political system having the few elite rulers at the top of the social pyramid and the enslaved masses at the base. Obama’s leftist lemmings are useful idiots participating in their own destruction and do not realize they will end up as slaves in the new world order.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/no_lib_outrage_for_andrew_tahmooressi.html

It depends on whose ox is being gored, the saying goes, or maybe it depends on whose border is being crossed for those now outraged over U.S. border policy were silent when Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi, a decorated U.S. Marine Corps veteran suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), languished in a Mexican prison in 2014 for the crime of making a wrong turn and wandering into Mexico with legal U.S. firearms in his vehicle.

Tahmooressi, a 25-year-old combat veteran, was jailed in late March 2014, after he missed a freeway exit near San Ysidro, Calif. and drove into Tijuana. The active U.S. Marine reservist, who served two combat tours in Afghanistan, was moving to San Diego to be close to his treatment center for his PTSD at the time of his arrest.

In his trunk, Mexican authorities found three guns legally owned in the United States. Tahmooressi was incarcerated in La Mesa Prison in Tijuana. After Mexican authorities said he allegedly attempted to escape and suffered a self-inflicted stab wound, he was at one point placed in a jail infirmary with his arms and legs restrained. That April, Tahmooressi even attempted to take his own life.

If you want to consider the alleged harshness of U.S. immigration policy, consider Mexico’s treatment of Tahmoressi and the callous indifference of President Obama to his plight, as Obama was really putting illegal alien children in cages after separating them from their families:

We tolerate armed incursions by Mexican authorities and a flood of unaccompanied minors and other illegal aliens but are quite content to let a Marine with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder who made a wrong turn on his way to San Diego twist in the breeze of the Mexican judicial system.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/06/donald-trump-best-west/

Opposed by Democrats, the media and a nefarious cabal of high government officials, this most unlikely president has implemented precisely what he had promised on the stump. Despite the Deep State’s worst efforts to bring him down, his record far exceeds even that of the great Ronald Reagan.

Australia is fortunate indeed that Donald Trump is US President, just as we have been fortunate that we have always been so close to the world’s most powerful nation — first Great Britain, then the United States of America. It is crucial to Australia that the US continue in her powerful role of preserving, protecting and defending Western civilisation based, as it is, on Judeo-Christian values.

Sadly, under the Obama administration, American influence had been allowed to wane, her armed forces under-resourced, action against ISIS circumvented by bureaucratic intervention and those powers most hostile to the West, Iran and North Korea, appeased. Meanwhile, the administration condoned the undermining of the family and traditional values by encouraging undemocratic judicial activism, the high point of which remains the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v Wade inventing a constitutional ‘right’ to abortion.

This was done by interpreting the Constitution as a ‘living document’—in other words, the Constitution means whatever the judges say it means. As the late and great Justice Antonin Scalia maintained, the only proper interpretation must be that the Constitution means what it meant to a reasonable person at the time it was adopted. This is the originalist interpretation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/media-bias-annapolis-shooting/

The shooter’s identity had not even been released when many prominent voices on the left began blaming Trump for the attack.

If you’re at all normal, which is to say not hysterically progressive, your reaction to initial reports of a horrific newsroom shooting in Annapolis, Md., was probably to assume it was the act of a disgruntled ex-employee. That is, after all, the usual back story to workplace massacres. Or your mind might have turned to other common motivators for such acts — psychosis, unrequited male affection. If you’re conversant with local newspapering specifically, you might have considered the special worry that accompanies this job: the danger of one of your readers being enraged by your coverage of a micro-feud involving zoning permits or construction detours or school-board composition or some other niche matter in which passions run inversely proportional to historical importance.

On the #Resist left, though, a faction increasingly prone to put emotions before reason, indeed to mistake the former for the latter, the immediate response was: This is on President Trump. Trump is up to his wrists in blood. Hasn’t Trump been railing at the press this week and for three solid years since he first announced his presidential candidacy? Did he not dub the media the “enemy of the people” on Monday night in South Carolina?

The shooter’s identity had not even been released when many prominent voices on the left began blaming Trump for either directly or indirectly inspiring the attack. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten tweeted, “The demonization of the press leading to a shooting of the Press . . . Just horrible!!!!” Feminist writer Lauren Duca said on the same medium, “The shooting . . . cannot reasonably be separated from the President’s mission to villainize [sic] the press.” Reuters editor Rob Cox wrote, “This is what happens when @RealDonaldTrump calls journalists the enemy of the people. Blood is on your hands, Mr. President.” The Wire mastermind David Simon, a longtime Maryland newspaperman, tweeted at the president, “Blood today in an American newsroom. Aren’t you proud, you vile, fascist son of a bitch,” adding later that “Trump’s direct language was to blame.” Leftist commentators Jessica Valenti and Shaun King expressed similar sentiments. (Trump’s “enemy of the people” crack Monday was such a glancing aside that Chris Cillizza of CNN didn’t even include it in his exhaustive retrospective piece, “The 55 most over-the-top lines from Donald Trump’s South Carolina Speech.” Nor did the New York Times writeup of the rally mention it.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court-nomination-fight-would-provide-political-lessons/

The fight to confirm Barrett would contain edifying political lessons.

The mental relief that one will never again have to read an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy is enough to satisfy for weeks. Just be glad for this, I’m telling myself. We never have to hear this man explain that his job is to “impose order on a disordered reality.” In an America of 300 million people, the likelihood of finding a new justice with Kennedy’s self-regard is near zero. After all, Donald Trump is unlikely to appoint himself.

But we must refuse the natural complacency that should settle on a normal and well-adjusted people who have survived the rule of Anthony Kennedy. We must press ahead. To do so, Donald Trump should appoint Amy Coney Barrett to the highest court in the land.

There are many good and fine people rumored to be on President Trump’s short list of candidates for the Supreme Court, including Amul Thapar and Senator Mike Lee. But Barrett’s qualifications match them all.

And her appointment, in particular, has several political advantages. Millions of Republicans held their noses and voted for Trump because they felt it was necessary to protect the liberty to practice their faith. The fight over Barrett’s confirmation would almost certainly build trust between President Trump and social conservatives. It would energize Republicans ahead of the midterm elections.

The facts of Barrett’s life — that she is a mother of seven children, and that when she speaks about her Catholic faith, she speaks about God as if she really believes in His existence — will provoke nasty and bigoted statements from Democratic senators and liberal media personalities. Again.

https://spectator.org/the-collapse-of-the-never-trump-conservatives/?utm
They’ll always have Twitter and MSNBC.

With the installation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and a yet-to-be-named reliable replacement for the unreliable Anthony Kennedy, Donald Trump will have confirmed himself as the most consequential conservative president of the modern era (or a close second to Reagan if you’re nostalgic). This will be complete vindication for Trump supporters, which means it’s really the end for the so-called Never Trump conservatives. Of course, there have been so many humiliating defeats for that crowd that we are spoiled for choice. What was your favorite blunder, or blown prediction, which marked their ignominious end?

For some, it must have been in March when Bill Kristol, longtime editor of the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard, showed up in New Hampshire telling people he would run against President Trump in 2020. Or in April when the conservative website RedState was taken over and purged of writers who were “insufficiently supportive” of the president. Some go back to October 2017 when a Twitter spat broke out between Stephen Hayes and Brit Hume of Fox News over the Weekly Standard’s anti-Trumpeditorials. With the death last week of Charles Krauthammer, the revered neocon commentator and prominent Trump skeptic, the eclipse of the neocon intellectuals is complete.

One thing’s for sure: it wasn’t really a war so much as a rout. The Never Trump intellectual crowd has no momentum and no popular following these days. Consider the trajectory of their would-be leader Kristol, who appears to be indulging in a personal fantasy by putting himself forward as a candidate, as his rapport with GOP voters includes trying to run Evan McMullin in Utah to throw the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton. When that stunt failed, Kristol personally insulted the pro-Trump writer Michael Anton for his influential essay “The Flight 93 election.” Then Kristol’s commentator gig with Fox was not renewed, and he was soon accusing Tucker Carlson of “ethno-nationalism” and “racism.” Overshadowing all of these breaks was Kristol’s personal history of being the conservative’s answer to Bob Shrum, a political “pro” who was always very wrong about politics.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/anthony-kennedy-15994.html

For conservatives, the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court’s longest-serving justice, offers an opportunity not seen in generations. If President Trump nominates, and the Senate confirms, a principled textualist and originalist—as he did with Justice Neil Gorsuch, a home-run appointment—the Supreme Court will have a solidly conservative majority for the foreseeable future.

Approaching his 82nd birthday, Kennedy has served on the Court more than 30 years—one of only 15 justices to reach that milestone. He has left his mark in many ways, in no small part because he has served as a “swing” justice between the Court’s conservative and liberal factions for much of his career, essentially holding the fate of the nation’s highest law in his hands.

Conservatives upset with certain results at the Court tend to focus on those areas where Kennedy leaned left—which were often civil rights cases involving groups traditionally facing societal discrimination. Kennedy will probably be best remembered for authoring each of the Court’s major opinions expanding constitutional rights for gay and lesbian Americans (Romer v. Evans (1996), Lawrence v. Texas (2003), United States v. Windsor (2013), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015)). In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), Kennedy also teamed with fellow GOP-appointed justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter to write a joint opinion that preserved the basic abortion-rights holding of Roe v. Wade (1973). And he ultimately wrote the opinion that preserved much of higher education’s race-based affirmative-action apparatus (Fisher v. Texas, 2016)—even though he had argued against such programs for most of his judicial career, including in his withering dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003).

But it would be a mistake to focus on these civil-rights decisions to the exclusion of Kennedy’s broader, and fundamentally conservative, jurisprudence. Along with his fellow Reagan-appointed Westerners Sandra Day O’Connor and William Rehnquist (named chief justice by Reagan), he was a fairly reliable vote for constitutional federalism, prodding the Court back toward the Founders’ structural limits on Congress. Kennedy, unlike Chief Justice John Roberts, was ready to strike down Obamacare’s individual mandate on federalist grounds in NFIB v. Sebelius (2011).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12615/replacing-justice-kennedy-what-kind

They [potential nominees to the Supreme Court] should be asked about the criteria they apply in determining whether to be bound by past decisions.

As the late Justice Antonin Scalia frequently pointed out, his oath of office required him to apply the Constitution, not the decisions of his predecessors on the bench, if those past decisions were wrong.

The second position is that Roe v. Wade was wrong when decided but it has been the law for 45 years, and the nation has come to rely on it as governing law. Accordingly, it should not be overruled, but nor should it be expanded. This is the most likely position that a successful nominee might take.

The two key words in assessing the President’s nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy are stare decisis. This ancient Latin phrase, which means let the decision stand, represents a conservative approach to judging: that precedent imposes constraints on judicial innovation. Put another way, that judicial innovation should be balanced against the need to maintain stability in our legal system. But like most legal terms, stare decisis can easily be manipulated to benefit both conservatives and liberals. Traditionally it has been conservatives who have embraced stare decisis, allowing the dead hand of the law to constrain the living constitution. But liberals, too, embrace the concept when they seek to preserve old precedents that are important to them.

Today, liberals want to use stare decisis to preserve Roe v. Wade, gay marriage and other iconic liberal decisions of the past. Many conservatives would like to see these decision overruled. When the President interviews potential nominees, and when the Senate advises and consents on the nomination, these nominees will be questioned about their positions on important cases of the past and their likely votes in the future. They will decline to be specific claiming the need for judicial independence. But one area of legitimate inquiry will be their institutional views regarding stare decisis.