RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-champion-of-constitutional-safeguards-1531189515

Days before President Trump announced his choice of Judge Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, Senate Democrats had vowed to oppose any nominee. Backed by an activist-fueled propaganda machine, they now will unleash relentless personal attacks—on Judge Kavanaugh’s Catholic faith, his “elitist” Yale degrees, his service in the George W. Bush administration.

As with the attacks last year on Justice Neil Gorsuch, they should be unavailing. Over Judge Kavanaugh’s 12 years on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, he has developed an impressive record as a legal thinker and a champion of the Constitution’s structural safeguards against overweening government.

Typical is a 2008 dissent in which Judge Kavanaugh concluded that the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board was unconstitutionally structured because it improperly insulated the agency from political accountability. The opinion was a tour de force of historical exposition and originalist methodology—that is, interpreting the Constitution’s text as it was originally understood. The Supreme Court ultimately agreed, adopting the reasoning of Judge Kavanaugh’s dissent.

Yet he is equally wary of unbridled executive authority, as a 2013 case shows. When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission declined to proceed with licensing the proposed waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., which the agency appeared to oppose on policy grounds, he wrote: “The President may not decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibition simply because of policy objections.”

In articles and speeches as well as formal opinions, Judge Kavanaugh has been a leading critic of Chevron deference, the courts’ practice of giving agencies free rein to interpret their own statutory authority. In a 2016 law-review article, he wrote that Chevron encourages the executive branch “to be extremely aggressive in seeking to squeeze its policy goals into ill-fitting statutory authorizations and restraints,” cutting Congress out of the picture. “The American rule of law, as I see it, depends on neutral, impartial judges who say what the law is.”CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12629/un-poverty-united-states

You may be aware that the UN actually has an official definition of “extreme poverty,” which is “liv[ing]… on less than $1.90 per person per day.” $1.90 per day would come to just under $700 per year.

An April 2018 study by John Early for the Cato Institute found that counting the $1.2 trillion of annual redistributions toward the income of the recipients — a sum often misleadingly excluded from poverty statistics — reduces the official poverty level in the U.S. from 12.7% all the way down to about 2%. And the remaining 2% would be people who for some reason had not sought out the benefits.

In other words, the U.S. distributes to its low-income residents resources beyond their income equal to an additional 40 times per person the amount officially deemed by the UN to constitute “extreme poverty.”

Is the United Nations a group of people of good faith, joining together in the effort to help bring peace and justice and economic development to the world? Or is it a group of haters of freedom and capitalism engaged primarily in spewing ignorance, malice or both toward the United States? For a clue, you might take a look at the “Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights on his mission to the United States of America,” recently issued by the UN’s so-called Human Rights Council.

Yes, this is the same Human Rights Council from which the U.S. just announced its withdrawal. It is also the same Human Rights Council that includes among its members China, Cuba, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela — with ambassadors who think that the best use of their time and resources is to criticize the economic and human rights record of the U.S.

https://amgreatness.com
Twelve days ago, Justice Anthony Kennedy stepped down and Monday night the pick to replace him was in. President Trump named D.C. Appeals Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh, 53, for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. The president sought a candidate who would “do what the law requires” and “apply the Constitution as written.”

That is also what Trump supporters are looking for, and why Democrats opposed Trump’s whole list. For Democrats, the Supreme Court is a robed politburo that gives them what they fail to win through the electoral process. Even before the announcement of Kavanaugh, who clerked for Anthony Kennedy, they were turning up the volume to eleven. The battle to confirm Kavanaugh is certain to be fierce, so all age groups, Millennials in particular, might profit from a review of the Democrats’ grand inquisitors of the past.

Ohio Democrat Senator Howard Metzenbaum, a veteran of Communist Party fronts such as the National Lawyers Guild, took the lead against black conservative Clarence Thomas in 1991. Metzenbaum thought he was intellectually superior to the Bush nominee, but Thomas, a Yale man like Kavanaugh, made him look a fool. It was likely Metzenbaum who leaked Anita Hill’s fake story, and the Democrat pushed hard on the sexual harassment allegations.

When black businessman John Doggett testified in favor of Thomas, Metzenbaum charged that Doggett was also guilty of sexual harassment. White liberal Joe Biden also attacked on that front.

“From my standpoint as a black American,” Thomas said, “as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270684/former-blm-activist-exposes-lefts-exploitation-matthew-vadum

The Left is using blacks and the compromised Black Lives Matter movement to launch a violent civil war in the United States, according to a popular viral video by a former Black Lives Matter activist.

The video has been receiving a great deal of attention from conservatives because it gives voice to concerns and anxieties expressed by Trump supporters in this time of escalating hostility and physical violence against those who support the Trump administration.

The speaker in the video dated Oct. 4 gives his name as Chaziel (pronounced Cha-zee-ell) Sunz and says he is “not a big Trump fan.” It is unclear if that is his real name or what his current connection to BLM is. What Sunz says should be taken with a grain of salt. At times in his video, he ventures off into vague conspiracy-theorizing about the Rothschilds and the Las Vegas massacre last Oct. 1.

But just because Sunz isn’t eloquent, that doesn’t mean he is wrong. In his remarkable video, he is speaking truth to power. He needs to be listened to.

Well-informed conservatives won’t learn much they didn’t already know by watching the video, but Sunz still performs a valuable service by reminding us how the Left uses blacks as cannon fodder in their unending quest for so-called social justice.

Whatever his misgivings about conservatives, Sunz warns fellow blacks that trusting leftists could get them killed.

“However you feel about the Right, they are straightforward. The people on the Left are lying to you and trying to get you to do their dirty work and get slaughtered.”

Black Lives Matter was infiltrated and compromised almost three years ago, Sunz explains.

was sentenced yesterday to life in prison with the chance of parole for the murder of an Afghan civilian.
I have wonderful Independence Day News to report from Beverly Perlson of Band of Mothers.

Beverly writes in with a July 3, 2018 update on Sgt. Derrick Miller, whose story readers of this website will be all too familiar with:

Sgt Miller’s mother, Renee Myers, received the phone call she’s been waiting for! Derrick called his mother today and let her know he received a letter from the Army that his sentence is reduced to 20 years (from a life sentence!!!) and he is eligible for parole immediately!

A parole packet must be completed and submitted, but for this brave Soldier, there is FINALLY a light at the end of this dark tunnel and there is no doubt, he is going home! I hope and pray very soon.

To all of you wonderful, caring Patriots out there who wrote letters and made calls on Derrick’s behalf, God Bless Everyone Of You, and THANK YOU! YOU all never let Derrick be forgotten. YOU fought for him, as he fought for us! YOUR efforts made a difference in this Soldier’s life!

Again, my deepest gratitude to Congressman Babin and Congressman Gohmert! In the meetings we had with you, you promised to help Derrick and our Soldiers and YOU kept your promise. In my book, you will forever be regarded as the “Soldier’s Congressmen” and I hope your ears are burning, because this military daughter, sister and mother will never stop singing your praises. I will never be able to thank you enough for your compassion and the hope you instilled in Derrick’s parent’s heart that day we met with you. I honestly knew when we left your offices that something good was FINALLY going to happen for Derrick. THANK YOU BOTH! And Congressmen Babin, please thank your lovely wife!

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/supreme-court-unlikely-to-overturn-roe-v-wade/Roe probably won’t be overturned because it probably won’t come up; Casey is the center of abortion law nowadays.

It was my honor to befriend Judge Robert Bork in the last years of his life. Not surprisingly, I don’t find much amusement in the cesspool that judicial-confirmation politics has become since his name became a synonym for slander in 1987 — a debacle that changed history for the worse in more ways than the woodenly whimsical Anthony Kennedy’s assumption of what should have been the Bork seat.

Still, I admit to chuckling over the musings of Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a “moderate” Republican in the Kennedy mold. With the justice announcing his retirement after 30 years on the Court, a confirmation battle royale is shaping up over his successor, whom President Trump is expected to nominate on Monday. On cue, Senator Collins has let it be known that she would look askance at any nominee who has “demonstrated hostility [towards] and an eagerness to overturn Roe v. Wade.”

Go ahead and Roe, Roe, Roe your boat, Senator. Thanks to Justice Kennedy, we’ve actually been living in a Casey world — as in Planned Parenthood v. Casey — for the past quarter century. For good and for ill. “Don’t you dare touch Roe” is the political hyperbole of Democrats and their fellow travelers. It is not a serious legal position — as if serious legal positions had anything to do with confirmation politics.

Here is reality: Casey’s refinement of the right judicially manufactured in Roe granted expansive and expanding room to regulate abortion. The validity of those regulations, not the core holding of Roe, is what dominates abortion litigation nowadays. It is unlikely that cases will present a need to grapple with Roe, it is even less likely that Roe will be overturned, and even if this highly unlikely event were to come to pass, it would not render abortion illegal. Instead, abortion would once again be a question for the states, the vast majority of which would guarantee some degree of access to abortion. We are not going to move into a post-Roe era, but even if we did, no woman who could obtain an abortion today would be unable to get one post-Roe.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-the-fbi-come-clean-1530833315

In the trench war between congressional Republicans and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, we have arrived at a crucial battle. A House resolution sets Friday as the deadline for the Justice Department to come clean on the beginning of its investigation into the Trump campaign. We’ll find out if the FBI has been lying to the public.

That is, if the department complies. It has flouted so many subpoenas, and played so many games with redactions and deadlines, that the entire House GOP united last week to vote for the resolution demanding submission to Congress’s requests for documents. The vote was an order but also a warning—that this is the last chance to comply, and the next step will be to hold officials in contempt. It is a measure of the stakes that even that threat doesn’t guarantee cooperation.

At issue is the FBI’s “origin story,” in which it claims its full-fledged investigation into a presidential campaign was conducted, as it were, by the book. According to this narrative, the FBI did not launch its probe until July 31, 2016, only after Australia tipped it to a conversation junior Trump aide George Papadopoulos had with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in the spring of 2016 in London. Only after this formal commencement of a counterintelligence probe—Crossfire Hurricane—did the FBI begin to target U.S. citizens with spying, wiretapping and other tools usually reserved for foreign infiltrators. Or so the story goes.

This account, relayed by the New York Times in December 2017, has proved highly convenient for the FBI. The Australian “government” connection allowed the bureau to infuse the meaningless Papadopoulos conversation with significance, justifying the probe. The origin story suggested the FBI had followed procedure. Mostly, it countered the growing suspicion that the bureau had been snooping on a presidential campaign on the basis of truly disreputable info—a dossier of salacious information compiled by an opposition research firm working for the rival campaign. CONTINUE AT SITE

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3757/Terror-Excitement-It-Goes-with-the

A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal published a short interview dating back to 2011 with convicted Communist agent Morton Sobell, now 101 years old. As a member of the Rosenberg spy ring in the 1940s, Sobell passed US ballistic missile secrets to the USSR — secrets, the paper reminds readers fleetingly, that were “used against America in both Korea and Vietnam.”

Just to de-antisepticize things, “America” translates into grandfathers, fathers, husbands, brothers and sons who were sent to fight communists on the brutal battlefields of Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, after other communists had “occupied” our own government in the 1930s — the early Deep State — and managed to help Stalin seize massive territories in Europe and Asia in the 1940s. Unbelievably, we still believe that the free world, and not just another totalitarian death machine (USSR), really won World War II.

This long-hidden history couldn’t be more relevant today. Without seeing the continuity of subversion over the previous century, it’s hard to appreciate what is unfolding as the Deep State today, triggered by Trump, panics and exposes itself. This is why “court historian” efforts to enage in Soviet-style disinformation against fuller accountings are so darn incriminating.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270657/epas-scott-pruitt-fallen-american-hero-matthew-vadum

Radical environmentalists claimed a Trump cabinet member’s scalp yesterday as they forced out a great American patriot, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, under a cloud of largely invented ethics scandals.

Nothing Pruitt did in office was unforgivable. Nothing he did was even particularly bad.

Pruitt, previously attorney general of Oklahoma from January 2011 to February 2017, was the victim of a sustained, well-funded leftist assault aimed at crippling him and removing him from office. It succeeded. The Left, emboldened by its success, will now use this blueprint again and again against Trump administration officials. Pruitt’s expected successor, EPA’s second-in-command, former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, will feel the Left’s wrath soon enough.

President Trump had reportedly grown weary of the unending stream of bad publicity Pruitt brought with him.

“I have accepted the resignation of Scott Pruitt as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency[,]” the president tweeted perfunctorily Thursday at 3:37 p.m. “Within the Agency Scott has done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this.”

The official line is that Pruitt didn’t want to be a distraction. This may be true but it doesn’t excuse the lack of resources put into defending him.

Consistently the voice of reason, Fox News contributor and Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway, said the massively funded “Boot Pruitt” campaign by green groups was “very effective.”

Hemingway is right.

Boot Pruitt was apparently created by admitted communist and 9/11 truther Van Jones, a so-called social entrepreneur who is extremely adept at generating the illusion of grassroots activity in furtherance of his radical goals. The campaign was slick leftist astroturf manufactured by pressure groups beholden to George Soros and Tom Steyer.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270656/mueller-expands-witch-hunt

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is planning to expand his witch hunt. According to a Bloomberg News report, he is “tapping additional Justice Department resources for help with new legal battles as his year-old investigation of Russian interference with the 2016 election continues to expand.” He already has 17 prosecutors on his staff, many of whom have clear anti-Trump biases. From the investigation’s start in May 2017 through March of this year, Mr. Mueller’s own office has spent $7.7 million, on top of the $9 million spent by permanent Department of Justice units involved in the investigation.

Mr. Mueller evidently wants to absorb some of the career prosecutors from the offices of U.S. attorneys and from Justice Department headquarters into his own operation or to outsource some of his work to them. Either way, instead of finishing his investigation “the hell up because this country is being torn apart,” as Republican Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina told Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein during a June 28 hearing, Mr. Mueller is busy growing his empire. The Justice Department has “reportedly budgeted $10 million for Mueller’s team to spend in the next fiscal year, which begins in October,” Time Magazine reported.

The Mueller probe is over a year old. The Special Counsel’s office has shown nothing to the taxpayers funding its operation that it has made any real progress in fulfilling its original mandate to uncover evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. The most significant indictment to date, the one against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is a ridiculous sideshow involving accusations that have nothing to do with the Trump campaign. While Judge T.S. Ellis III, of the Eastern District of Virginia, denied Mr. Manafort’s motion to dismiss an indictment against him on the grounds that Special Counsel Mueller had exceeded his authority, the judge questioned the objectivity of the whole Mueller enterprise. Judge Ellis expressed concern about “the danger unleashed when political disagreements are transformed into partisan prosecutions.” The judge further warned, “To provide a special counsel with a large budget and to tell him or her to find crimes allows a special counsel to pursue his or her targets without the usual time and budget constraints facing ordinary prosecutors, encouraging substantial elements of the public to conclude that the special counsel is being deployed as a political weapon.”