RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/html/chicago-violence-16058.html

Last Sunday, a 59-year-old woman on the West Side of Chicago was killed by a would-be carjacker. The felon walked up to the driver’s side of the car, which was being driven by a 71-year-old man, and pulled his gun. The senior citizen refused to surrender the vehicle and kept driving. The would-be carjacker opened fire at the car, striking the woman in the head and killing her.

The night before, on the South Side, a Chicago officer killed a 37-year-old man whom the officer’s patrol partners had observed behaving in a manner suggesting that he was carrying a gun. The officers tried to question Harith Augustus, and he appeared to pull something from his wallet, according to police body-camera footage, possibly his firearms owner-identification card. One officer tried to grab Augustus (the police report said that he became combative), but he pulled away and ran into the street, where he appeared to reach for the gun holstered on his right hip. One of the officers opened fire and killed him. Augustus’s gun was recovered at the scene.

True to script, the officer-involved shooting sparked violent street anarchy on Saturday night, instigated by Black Lives Matter, the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and other anti-cop activist groups. Protesters threw rocks and bottles, some filled with urine, at officers. Four officers were injured. Chants included “How do you spell racist? CPD [Chicago Police Department],” and “Murderers.” Protests have continued, drawing intense local media and political attention. “This department is racist . . . and we’re tired of it,” said one of the organizers.

There were no protests against the taking of the carjacking victim’s life. Carjackings have nearly tripled in Chicago since 2015, averaging two per day in 2017 and close to that in 2018. In August 2016, officers tried to pull over a car involved in an earlier carjacking; someone inside the car opened fire and hit one of the officers in the face. The shooter was on parole for attempted armed robbery. In January 2017, a teen carjacker ambushed a 34-year-old mother in an alleyway where she had been parking her car. His initial blow to her head with his gun was so severe that it temporarily blinded her. “Quit trying to kick back, you white bitch,” the assailant said as he pistol-whipped her. Before the attack, the mother had noticed a van suspiciously idling in the alleyway, but decided to continue about her business, likely second-guessing herself about “racial profiling.” In March 2017, a man with a gun forced a 24-year-old woman into the trunk of her car and raced it around the South Side until crashing into a tree. In August 2017, a 28-year-old entrepreneur and student was fatally shot in his car when he refused to hand it over to the carjacker. In November 2017, a pair of thugs accosted an 88-year-old man and stole his Lincoln at gunpoint. They almost immediately crashed into a semitrailer truck and retaining wall; one of the two felons died in the crash.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/07/18/dems_big_lie_about_kavanaugh_137554.html

Democrats are so desperate to torpedo Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court that they’re resorting to scare tactics, telling Americans that his confirmation would put 130 million people at risk of losing their health insurance.

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., says Democrats can sink Kavanaugh by showing how his appointment will lead to a court majority that “repeals ACA with its protections for pre-existing conditions.” It’s demagoguery. And it’s working, as demagoguery too often does.

Senator Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a frequent Trump opponent, is already moaning that the SCOTUS appointment will determine if “West Virginians with pre-existing conditions will lose their health care.”

Not true. Even if the Supreme Court does strike down the Affordable Care Act someday, the era of insurance companies turning down applicants with health problems is over. Across the country, Republican and Democratic state lawmakers agree on that. They are busy devising smarter ways to protect people with pre-existing conditions and keep insurance affordable, with or without Obamacare. Not one of these plans throws people with health problems under the bus. Democrats’ rhetoric about losing coverage for pre-existing conditions is hysteria.

Even so, Democratic fearmongers have a shot at derailing Kavanaugh; they only need one Republican defection. With Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., absent due to brain cancer, Republicans have a razor-thin 50-49 Senate majority.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-district-judges-try-to-run-the-country-1531868155

When a federal district court in Texas issued a nationwide injunction in 2015 that halted the implementation of President Obama’s amnesty program for illegal-alien parents of U.S. citizens, many on the political right cheered. Two years later, when a federal district court in Maryland issued a nationwide injunction that blocked President Trump’s efforts to place restrictions on transgender people serving in the military, it was the left’s turn to celebrate.

In recent years national injunctions have somehow become all the rage, even though it’s not clear they are constitutional. Traditionally, an injunction requires the parties in a case—and only those individuals—to continue or cease particular actions. What makes national injunctions distinct and controversial is that they apply to people who are not parties in the case. And state attorneys general now regularly use them as political cudgels to thwart the implementation of federal policy not just in their respective states, but everywhere.

The Trump administration, for example, has tried to withhold funding from “sanctuary” cities that refuse to assist the federal government with immigration enforcement. After Chicago sued, a federal judge in the Northern District of Illinois not only issued an injunction but said it applied to other cities all over the country, which are not parties in the case.

The issue here is not the wisdom or silliness of a given federal policy. The bigger concerns are the scope of lower-court judges’ authority and the integrity of the judicial process. Under the Constitution, lower courts are empowered to decide cases for particular parties, not for the whole nation. In his concurrence last month in Trump v. Hawaii, the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the administration’s travel ban, Justice Clarence Thomas expresses skepticism that district courts have the authority to issue national injunctions and urges his colleagues to address this judicial adventurism sooner rather than later.

“These injunctions are beginning to take a toll on the federal court system—preventing legal questions from percolating through the federal courts, encouraging forum shopping and making every case a national emergency for the courts and for the Executive Branch,” Justice Thomas writes. “If their popularity continues, this Court must address their legality.” The same concern is echoed by a growing number of legal scholars, who worry that the national-injunction trend will result in the Supreme Court reviewing hastily considered lower court rulings that never had the chance to work their way up the system.

In testimony last year before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Samuel Bray, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, explained that the Supreme Court justices typically wait until there’s a split at the circuit-court level before they decide to hear a case. National injunctions, he said, force the high court “to decide cases faster, with less evidence, with fewer contrary opinions—a recipe for bad judicial decisionmaking.”

As usual, both political parties helped pave the way in getting to this point. Republican state attorneys general obtained nationwide injunctions to stop various Obama administration initiatives. Under President Trump, Democratic attorneys general are using the same playbook. If you’re looking for someone to blame, says Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston, try Congress. “Nationwide injunctions didn’t start with Obama and they didn’t start with Trump. They’ve been around for a while,” Mr. Blackman told me in an interview. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/18/intelligence-community-has-made

Nations require intelligence to see their way through the dark alleys of international relations. For that reason, and above all in the modern era, they build up intelligence services to maintain up-to-the-moment awareness of initiatives and tendencies in states that can bear on their interests.

Ultimately, however, the intelligence of the head of state must marry the intelligence provided by his lieutenants in order to act prudently in the world. But act he must, with or without intelligence. The measure of prudence will be far more difficult to attain without reliable intelligence. And the magnitude of the difficulty increases exponentially when the nation so afflicted is a giant among nations, the most powerful of all.

The effect of the soft coup attempt by U.S. intelligence officers has been to leave President Trump blinded in the world.

Why should anyone be surprised when the president displays lack of confidence in agencies that have demonstrated the most vigorous and calculated attempts to destroy him and thwart his attempts to govern? The entire possibility of success for the soft coup attempt depends upon blinding him. The deliberate timing of the announcement of the latest Mueller indictments served only to confirm the propriety of President Trump’s diffidence.

But where does that leave the president, and more importantly, the United States? Here we begin to unpack the measure of Trump’s judgment.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/bad_day_for_president_trump_but_worse_day_for_his_critics.html

Let’s be honest, it was not a good press conference for President Trump. As my friend Barry Casselman said, it “was simply and inexcusably a blunder.”

I was not expecting President Trump to yell at Putin on the world stage. However, he could have expressed himself differently.

It was not the end of the world as we know it. The sky and the stars are not falling. Finally, let’s give this meeting a few months and see what comes out of it.

At the same time, his critics always end up throwing President Trump a lifesaver, as Liz Peek wrote:

Trump’s critics responded with customary vitriol and excess, attacking the president in such extreme terms that his supporters only dig in even deeper.

Democrats and never-Trumpers cannot help themselves; over the past two years, the public has grown weary of the non-stop, five-alarm fires, and they have tuned out.

Trump’s critics fail the most basic of tests. You can’t cry wolf over and over again without making a fool out of yourself.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/17/the-collusion-of-lawyers-is-finally-collapsing/

Colluding, like canoodling, is all the rage. Robert Mueller, like a dog chasing his tail, has been trying for more than a year to find evidence that President Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin and the Russians to cook the 2016 election, which fate, providence, fortune and destiny decreed properly belonged to Hillary Clinton.

So far as anyone beyond his circle of thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyers know, Mr. Mueller has not come up with anything more than a few indictments of second- and third-tier aides, helpers, hangers-on, and lawyers that a nice girl would not take home to meet the folks.

Now The New York Times reports that the FBI colluded with the Australian ambassador to the United States, of all unlikely people, to find something to lend credence to the Russian collusion. Maybe, the FBI calculated, collusion could be catching. Mr. Mueller has demonstrated that he is not afraid to venture into the tall weeds in pursuit of Trump villainy (if any).

“Within hours of opening an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia in the summer of 2016,” The New York Times reported this week in a dispatch both exhaustive and exhausting, “the FBI dispatched a

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/17/tell-us-again-why-we-need-a

We needed a special counsel for this?

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Friday announced federal charges against another gang of Russian operatives who allegedly stole some emails from some Democrats in 2016 and posted them on the internet. The Rooskie conspirators will never see the inside of a U.S. courtroom; no American was involved in the criminal conduct; there is no evidence that the online chicanery influenced a single vote in the 2016 presidential election.

As the media and politicians predictably flipped out—“ZOMG, America was attacked!”—most journalists overlooked a key point: Rosenstein transferred the case from the special counsel’s office back to the Justice Department’s National Security Division. So even though Special Counsel Robert Mueller signed the 11-count indictment, the Justice Department will take it from here.

Let’s break this down, shall we? Rosenstein appoints Mueller. Mueller conducts an investigation (that has already been completed by Congress) into a dozen Russian intelligence officers who allegedly breached the computer systems of a few political organizations. Mueller signs the indictments. Rosenstein—not Mueller—announces the charges and fields questions from the media (Mueller is again nowhere in sight.) Rosenstein transfers responsibility for the prosecution from the special counsel back to the DOJ.

Oh, and by the way, none of it has to do with Mueller’s original marching orders, which are to find “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/anti-defamation-league-anti-trump-anti-semitism/How a Democratic operative led the venerable hate-monitoring group off a partisan cliff.

The moment President Trump concluded his announcement of the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Anti-Defamation League fired off a tweet. In it, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tore into Kavanaugh as lacking the “independence and fair treatment for all that is necessary to merit a seat on the nation’s highest court.”

The tweet teased a press release that obliquely demanded that the Senate reject the nomination. The timing made it clear that there would be no questions or deliberative process before the venerable group, which for more than century has played the role of both defender of the Jewish community against anti-Semitism and monitor of hate crimes, made up its mind about Kavanaugh. Considering that the ADL was quicker to publicly oppose the nomination than were some members of the Democratic caucus who were certain “no” votes on the appointment, the group’s haste showed that it had planned to oppose anyone nominated by Trump.

It is no surprise that many liberal groups — including some that are all-in on what some on the left are treating as an apocalyptic fight for the future of the High Court — are reflexively opposed to anyone Trump may nominate. But the ADL’s presence in the ranks of those who are supplying the organizational muscle for the resistance to Trump might come as a surprise to those who haven’t been paying much attention to the group in recent years. Though it spent its first century of existence being careful to avoid getting labeled as a partisan outfit, in the three years since the ADL’s longtime national director Abe Foxman retired, Greenblatt has steadily pushed the group farther to the left and, in so doing, more or less destroyed its reputation as being above politics. After the ADL has repeatedly involved itself in partisan controversies, it is impossible to pretend that Greenblatt’s vision of the group isn’t fundamentally that of a Democratic-party auxiliary that is increasingly overshadowing and marginalizing its still-vital role as the nation’s guardian against anti-Semitism.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/supreme-court-whatever-advances-progressive-causes-is-sacrosanct/What is sacrosanct? Whatever advances progressive causes.

1) Right to Left. The majority of post-war Republican Supreme Court nominees, who were initially perceived as conservative, turned liberal on the bench (Harry Blackmun, William Brennan, David Souter, John Paul Stevens, Earl Warren), or went from right-wing to center-right or centrist (Warren Burger, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts). Perhaps the pressures of approval from the liberal social and political culture of Washington, D.C., becomes finally overwhelming. Or justices sense that the liberal media and historians will praise and memorialize a “maverick” who “grows,” “matures,” or “evolves,” while dismissing a “recalcitrant,” “hard-core,” or “reactionary” justice who remains a strict constructionist. A conservative president perhaps realizes that he will get more praise from the Left than blame from the Right when his malleable nominee bolts and become progressive. The ongoing liberal political reassessments of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in part came from their nominations of Justices Kennedy, O’Connor, and Souter. Or perhaps as we age we all tire a bit and cave to popular pressures and prefer “to just get along” in our sunset years. Controlling the culture — and the threat of ostracism from it — is a powerful tool in massaging political ideology.

2) Never Left to Right. In contrast, few Democratic nominees become centrist or conservative. To do so would be to suffer something like the “Dershowitz effect” that brands independent-thinking liberal legal scholars, such as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who remain progressive but honor the law, as veritable traitors and pariahs. Most Democratic justices arrived at the Court either from the academic world, the bureaucratic state, or private legal practice — all overwhelmingly liberal environments. They certainly realize that university appearances, favorable media coverage, and legacy and historical memorialization all hinge on remaining liberal or intensifying their liberal fides. Moreover, vote against Second Amendment rights, and no right-wing zealot is going to corner you at a D.C. bistro. But vote against Roe v. Wade and be prepared to have enraged leftists camped on your Chevy Chase lawn yelling “traitor!” and “fascist!”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/trump-putin-meetings-unnecessary/The United States should have contacts with Russia, but the president should not be holding summit meetings with a despot.

Prior to President Trump’s dismal performance at Monday’s meeting with Russian despot Vladimir Putin, I expressed bafflement over his longstanding insistence that we need to have good relations with Moscow. This has never made sense to me. We have often done quite well, thank you very much, while having a strained modus vivendi with Moscow, even when it was the seat of a much more important power than today’s Russia.

It is not possible to have good relations with a thug regime unless one is willing to overlook and effectively ratify its thug behavior. Yet the widely perceived “need” to have good relations with Russia leads seamlessly to a second wrongheaded notion: It was appropriate, indeed essential, for the two leaders to meet at a ceremonial summit.

There is no need, nor is it desirable, for the president of the United States to give the dictator of the Kremlin the kind of prestigious spectacle Putin got in Helsinki. When I’ve made this point, as recently as Monday night in a panel on The Story, Martha MacCallum’s Fox News program, I’ve gotten pushback that, I respectfully suggest, misses the point.

The counterargument, premised on the fact that it is important for the United States and Russia to have dialogue, maintains that this dialogue must be conducted at the chief-executive-to-chief-executive level. There is, after all, a long history of such meetings, tracing back to FDR’s recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933 (only after, I would note, years of antagonistic relations following the October Revolution).

To be clear, I did not and do not take the position that the United States should not have contacts with Russia in areas of mutual concern, or that it should not defuse tensions lest they escalate into unnecessary confrontations between the world’s two dominant nuclear powers. But these communications channels have long existed. They range from diplomatic, military, intelligence, and even law-enforcement contacts all the way up to occasional phone calls between the heads of state, and even the odd sidelines conferral between leaders at this or that multilateral conference.