RUTHFULLY YOURS

Kids own their bodies, and must give consent before hugs and kisses from Grandma. That’s an argument from Scary Mommy:

Teaching children about consent is crucial, so why do some parents still insist their kids hug and kiss relatives even if they don’t want to? As consent and bodily autonomy become a bigger conversation, there are those speaking out about how we need to give children agency over their own bodies — even if it means turning down hugs from grandma and grandpa.

The piece shares this meme found on social media:

Author Valerie Williams expounds:

…how many of us grew up with our parents insisting we accept hugs and kisses from grandmas, grandpas, aunts and uncles with zero regard for our feelings on the subject? I remember being anxious at big family events as a kid knowing how many of our distant relatives would expect to touch me. I recall being nervous of how they smelled or how their beard stubble felt — and the persistent feeling that I simply didn’t want to be touched.

That’s why it’s so crucial that we recognize the validity of those instincts in even the youngest kids. They may not be able to articulate the reason for their discomfort with physical affection, but we need to honor it in order to make good on our lessons of consent. How can we tell our kids that their bodies are their own and then remove that very agency because Aunt Betty wants to give them a kiss? The lesson needs to be that it’s up to them every time — no exceptions.

Except it’s not up to them. From where does this notion of a child’s consent arise? A child’s entire life proceeds without his consent, and often in direct contradiction to his expressed will. That’s a defining aspect of childhood. Aside from physical characteristics, the ability to live by consent is the very thing which distinguishes adults from children. The whole point of parenting is to substitute the guardian’s judgment for the child’s, to override consent on a regular basis.

Even before taking the oath of office, Donald Trump has achieved the impossible—driving liberals to the original text of the Constitution. This strange new respect for the Founders will only last until the President-elect nominates a new Supreme Court Justice, and too bad it arrives as an assault on the Electoral College to elect someone other than Mr. Trump.

This organized political campaign is being conducted in the name of Alexander Hamilton, and not merely because of the Broadway musical. In Federalist No. 68, Hamilton wrote that the Electoral College “affords a moral certainty, that the office of president will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

Progressives are invoking this line to claim Mr. Trump lacks such qualifications. And they are calling on those they call the “Hamilton electors” to vote for Hillary Clinton or somebody else when they meet on Dec. 19. The immediate goal is to peel away 37 from Mr. Trump’s 306-vote majority and deny him 270 votes.

This gambit is being promoted by supposedly lucid Members of Congress, liberal columnists, left-leaning constitutional scholars and Hollywood celebrities. OK, maybe the last group is not-so-lucid, but remnants of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign are also on board. GOP electors report being bombarded with tens of thousands of emails and phone calls.

There is an originalist constitutional case that the electors are supposed to act as an deliberative body who can exercise their own “discernment,” as Hamilton put it. They could vote for anyone they choose.

But the Electoral College as the framers conceived it was never meant to be independent of the popular will. The framers had tremendous respect for the judgment of the people, and the electors aren’t supposed to be de novo second guessers. There have been 150 faithless electors in U.S. history, and only nine since World War II.

The historical record suggests that discernment was meant to be triggered only in exceptional circumstances when new information about a President-elect’s “qualifications” unknown to voters emerged after the general election. Nobody can claim that Americans didn’t understand the nature of Donald J. Trump when they voted.

There have been no revelations. The Russian hacking only divulged material about Mrs. Clinton and the conduct of her staff, not Mr. Trump’s fitness. Some Hamilton renegades claim a vote for Mrs. Clinton is legitimate because she won the popular vote, but everybody knew the electoral rules in advance.

American Jews account for a shockingly disproportionate number of hate crime victims, according to 2015 FBI statistics. The Bureau defines a hate crime as “an offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or gender identity.”

The FBI reported that of the 1,244 reported victims of hate crimes last year, 664, or 53.4%, were Jewish. By comparison, there were 257 victims of anti-Muslim hate crimes, or 20.7% of the total figure.

Indeed, in 2015 there were more Jewish victims of hate crimes in the U.S. then all of the other victims of religious groups combined

Yet, this conclusion is not reflected in U.S. news media coverage—or popular perception—of hate crime victims. Mark Perry, a scholar at the Washington D.C.-based think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), noted:

“According to a Google news search for the term ‘hate crimes’ along with the name of each of those three groups [Muslims, Blacks and Jews], there are 164,000 results for ‘hate crimes’+black, 134,000 results for ‘hate crimes’ + Muslims and only 36,400 results for ‘hate crimes’+Jews.”

“Based on news reports,” Perry stated, “you would think that blacks were 4.5 times more likely than Jews to be victim of a hate crime and that Muslims were almost 4 times more likely than Jews to be a hate crime victim.” However, “adjusting for the population size of each group (42.75 million blacks, 5.7 million Jews and 3.3 million Muslims), the hate crime victimization rates last year per 100,000 population were 11.6 for Jews, 7.8 for Muslims and 4.1 for blacks… . Therefore, American Jews were nearly three times more likely than blacks to be a victim of a hate crime last year, and 1.5 times more likely than a Muslim to be a hate crime victim.”

America has a history of creating infrastructure milestones that have led to significant prosperity and national advantages. Dating back to the advent of the transcontinental railroad and moving forward through the Rural Electrification Act, the Interstate Highway System to the deployment of the ARPANET, these milestones have created competitive advantages that continue to this day.
During the 1950s and 1960s, our nation was transformed by explosive growth in our nation’s public infrastructure ecosystem. That ecosystem allowed America to prosper by bridging communities and creating regional pockets of innovation. Coupled with the Space Race with the Soviet Union, the 20th-century infrastructure ecosystem helped make America a technological superpower.

The Muslim teen who claimed three drunks taunted her as a “terrorist” on a Manhattan subway train now admits she lied to cops — and was arrested on Wednesday.

Yasmin Seweid, 18, is charged with obstructing governmental administration and filing a false report, according to a high-ranking police source.

Both charges are misdemeanors punishable by up to a year in jail.

Seweid, who lives in Nassau County, had claimed the hateful drunks shouted, “Trump! Trump!” and called her a “terrorist” as they tried to steal her headscarf. “Go back to your country!” she said they shouted during the supposed Dec. 1 attack.

But when cops tried to confirm her story by checking surveillance video, they determined that her story didn’t add ups

Hate-crimes investigators called the Baruch College business major in on Wednesday to work on another sketch of her “attackers,” and confronted her with the inconsistencies, another source said.

That’s when she cracked, admitting she had been out late drinking with friends and made up the attack story to distract her angry father, sources said.

Seweid had been having problems with her strict-Muslim Egyptian family in North New Hyde Park because she is becoming “westernized,” one source said. Those problems were aggravated when they learned she was dating a Catholic, the source said.

Seweid was released without bail early Thursday morning after her arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court.
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Yasmin Seweid leaving court.Photo: Steven Hirsch

She left with her father and escorted by court officers.

A young man threw a dark jacket over her head — with her once-long hair shorn by a buzz cut — and then helped her into a black SUV before they drove off.

Neither Seweid nor her Legal Aid attorney, Benjamin J. West, would comment, and she did not speak inside the courtroom either.

For a couple of years Obama and the U.S. Census Bureau have been working on adding to the 2020 census a new ethnic group, or “racial category.” This new addition to the conga-line of victims of white hegemony is called “Mena,” comprising people from the Middle East and North Africa, which includes very culturally diverse peoples from Berbers to Israelis, Arabs to Persians. All sorts of soothing rationales have been put forth for this move, such as helping government and scholars “understand more about trends in health, employment and education,” as USA Today put it. But in reality the change would create even more clients for what radio hosts Larry Elder calls “Victicrats,” the Democrat Party and identity politics hustlers who gain political power and influence by claiming to champion the “people of color” victimized by “white privilege” and racial oppression.

The White House is frank about how altering the census would make this happen: impacting how the Voting Rights Act is enforced and Congressional districts are drawn; creating affirmative action plans and monitoring discrimination in housing, bank lending, and education; and identifying new recipients of government largess. That is, targeting those who would be inclined to vote Democrat once they are the beneficiaries of more government patronage. In addition, since most of these people identify as “white” on the current census, giving them a different option would support the Democrats’ narrative of a demographic shift that is reducing whites to a minority, and that will create The Coming Democrat Majority, as John Judis and Ruy Teixera called it in their 2004 book. Removing some 10 million “Menas” from the white category would confirm that thesis and comfort those still grieving over Donald Trump’s electoral refutation of that hypothesis.

More broadly, this scheme to alter the census reveals just how incoherent and corrupt are our ethnic and racial identity politics. Take the category “Hispanic.” It ignores the diversity of class, religion, culture, and language that separates these groups and create their identities. It asserts that a Mixtec Indian from Oaxaca, who speaks Mixtec instead of Spanish, supposedly shares an identity with a third-generation Mexican-American from California, who speaks English instead of Spanish. Such a broad term is meaningless, collapsing together Caucasians, blacks, Indians, mestizos, and mulattos who happen to have Spanish surnames.

The same is true of all the other racial categories. “Black” could mean an American descendant of slaves, or a mulatto born of a white woman and a Kenyan, or an immigrant from countries as different from one another as Nigeria and Trinidad. It ignores regional, class, and educational differences among American blacks, predicating their “blackness” solely on skin color and the assertion that they are all victims of endemic white racism. “Asian” is equally ridiculous, for it bases identity merely on inhabiting the same vast continent. It’s amazing that the people who fervently worship at the altar of diversity endorse crude racial categories that are left over from the “scientific racism” of early 20th century progressives, and that erase the incredible diversity of human cultures and individuals.

The media keep hyping the Democrats’ desperate rationalizations for blowing an election they thought was in the bag. Voting-machine tampering, a treacherous James Comey, internet “fake news,” FOX News on every bar and pool hall television set, “deplorable” racist dunces in fly-over country, and now the Rooskies have the Dems and their NeverTrump Republican fellow travelers in a never-ending hysterical tizzy.

The Washington Post and the New York Times, ad agencies for the Democrat Party, “report” that an anonymous intelligence officer told some Senators that the “consensus view” of the CIA is that the Russians hacked the DNC emails in order to give Trump an advantage in the election. Rational people will wait for more conclusive evidence than an assertion by an anonymous leaker of classified material. But determining the Russians hacked the DNC is easier than factually establishing their motives. If the CIA really has evidence that proves Russia’s intent to benefit Trump, it should publicize it and let us make up our own minds.

We should also note that the FBI doesn’t agree with the CIA, asserting that no such definitive evidence exists. California Congressman Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee agrees. “There’s a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that’s it,” Nunes has said. And isn’t it curious that progressives who for nearly half a century have routinely demonized the CIA as a “rogue elephant rampaging out of control,” in the words of Democrat Senator Frank Church in the seventies, now find the agency the epitome of reliability and truth?

This Russia-hacked-our-emails excuse, however, is particularly preposterous and tin-eared. Does Hillary Clinton really want to bring up computer hacking? She violated the law by passing classified materials over an unsecured server, which almost certainly was hacked by several foreign governments, including Russia. Now she wants us to believe that hacking the email chatter of her staffers and dirty-tricks henchmen is more serious and damaging to our national security than what the Russians probably got off her server?

But the Russians interfered in the election! Democracy is at risk! This is the “political equivalent of 9/11!” the Huffington Post screeches.

The left’s latest target is a Chanukah party where it will be protesting Muslims on behalf of Muslims.

If you’re confused, imagine how confused they are.

The Azerbaijani embassy of a secular Muslim country is co-hosting a Chanukah party with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. But the Azerbaijani embassy had made the political faux pas of obtaining space at the Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C.

Outside the usual anti-Israel contingent of the anti-Jewish left, If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace, will be screaming hate. Meanwhile some more organized left-wing Jewish groups, the Union for Reform Judaism, Women of Reform Judaism, the National Council of Jewish Women, along with the anti-Israel activists of Ameinu and Peace Now, not to mention HIAS, which can’t wait to bring the synagogue bombers of tomorrow to America today, are boycotting a Muslim party to protest in favor of Muslims.

Some are demanding that Trump speak out in favor of Muslims before they’ll attend the Muslim party. If they were any more mixed up, they would be tying their shoelaces to someone else’s shoes.

The Workmen’s Circle, which was last relevant when Bundists were helping the Communist butchers of the USSR hunt down Rabbis and religious Jews for the gulags, announced that it was boycotting an event hosted by a Muslim country because Trump is anti-Muslim.

When it comes to Trump, a militant atheist organization is now more Muslim than the Muslims.

Azerbaijan is not the first Muslim country to hold an event at the Trump International Hotel. It won’t be the last. Why does the National Council of Jewish Women seem more outraged about being in a hotel with Trump’s name on it than actual Muslims? Who made the Union for Reform Judaism their Imam?

But when leftists weren’t accusing Trump of being anti-Muslim, they were outraged that the Trump International Hotel was accommodating Muslim countries such as Bahrain and Azerbaijan because, like every single Muslim country on the planet, they have human rights issues. If you don’t have relations with Muslim countries that violate human rights, you can’t have relations with any Muslim countries.

Was the problem that Trump was anti-Muslim or that he was taking money from Muslims?

The deranged left couldn’t decide. Numerous contradictory letters blasted Trump for being anti-Muslim and for doing business with the Muslims of Azerbaijan. A weary Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, asked, “Do you think the president-elect knows who rents rooms for two hours?”

Trump may not, but a left that has lost its mind over Trump most certainly does.

To make the outrage even more ridiculous, the Azerbaijani embassy only picked the Trump International Hotel because of its proximity to the White House so that some of the same left-wing leaders boycotting the party could attend Obama’s Chanukah party and their party on the same night.

Jill Stein’s recount efforts in Michigan have uncovered what looks like systemic election fraud in Detroit, where roughly 95% of the votes cast were cast for Hillary Clinton. Sixty percent of precincts in Wayne County had to be disqualified from the statewide recount because of “irregularities.” According to Fox News judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano, those irregularities look “organized” and “government involved.”

County records prepared at the request of The Detroit News after ballot irregularities were discovered revealed that 37 percent of Detroit precincts registered more votes than voters during the election.

Detailed reports from the office of Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett show optical scanners at 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, or 37 percent, tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books. Voting irregularities in Detroit have spurred plans for an audit by Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson’s office, Elections Director Chris Thomas said Monday.

The Detroit precincts are among those that couldn’t be counted during a statewide presidential recount that began last week and ended Friday following a decision by the Michigan Supreme Court.

Democrat Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly prevailed in Detroit and Wayne County. But Republican President-elect Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes or 47.5 percent to 47.3 percent.

Overall, state records show 10.6 percent of the precincts in the 22 counties that began the retabulation process couldn’t be recounted because of state law that bars recounts for unbalanced precincts or ones with broken seals.

The problems were the worst in Detroit, where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60 percent. And two-thirds of those precincts had too many votes.

“There’s always going to be small problems to some degree, but we didn’t expect the degree of problem we saw in Detroit. This isn’t normal,” said Krista Haroutunian, chairwoman of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers.