RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://americanmind.org/essays/scholarly-debate-is-dead/

A little opinion article I published in Newsweek last week raising questions about Senator Kamala Harris’s eligibility for the office of Vice President has created quite a firestorm of controversy. For nearly 20 years—based on extensive scholarly research and long before Senator Harris was tapped to be former Vice President Joe Biden’s running mate—I have been questioning whether the current generally-accepted view of the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause is correct. I have published numerous articles about the subject, both scholarly and popular, asking whether it is right to interpret the amendment as meaning that anyone born on U.S. soil is automatically a citizen no matter the circumstances. I have testified about the matter several times before Congress and state legislative bodies, in a wide range of contexts.

I first raised the issue publicly in a brief that former Attorney General Edwin Meese III and I submitted to the Supreme Court back in 2003 in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi. Hamdi was an unlawful combatant in the Taliban who was treated as a citizen because he had been born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana while his father was in the United States on a temporary work visa.

I addressed similar or in some cases identical questions about citizenship in general, and natural-born citizenship in particular (and hence, about eligibility for the offices of president and vice-president) when Senator John McCain was a nominee for President, when Governor Mitt Romney was a nominee for President, when Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were candidates for President, and when Governor Nikki Haley’s name was floated as a possible nominee for Vice President.

Herut Mourns The Loss Of Pro-Israel Activist Leader Helen Freedman

For Immediate Release  

Herut North America and World Herut mourn the loss of pro-Israel activist leader Helen Freedman Z”L the longtime executive director of the New York based Americans For A Safe Israel (AFSI) organization.

“The need for the ideas of the great Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky has perhaps never been greater in the US in the last 50 years than now,” said Karma Feinstein Cohen, the Executive Director of Herut North America. “And we will be forever thankful for the over two decades of work Helen Freedman put into making sure that there was a public Manhattan memorial for Jabotinsky each year presided over by the wonderful leadership of the late Herbert Zweibon, of AFSI, and the late David Krakow, of the Nordau Circle, the Jabotinsky Order. Helen brought amazing speakers to New York each year for the memorial and throughout the year.”

Karma Feinstein Cohen is a World Zionist Organization (WZO) representative on the Board of Directors of the “Council to Perpetuate the Memory of Ze’ev Jabotinsky” in the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel.

“Recently when Helen had AFSI join the American Zionist Movement as an affiliated organization, as the leader of a longtime constituent member of AZM, I was overjoyed,” said Feinstein Cohen. “AFSI’s commitment to Jabotinsky’s ideals is a cornerstone of its foundation and the Jabotinsky voice has always needed more representation in the various leadership organizations within the American Jewish community.”

“It is hard to forget Helen Freedman’s protests against the Wye River summit in 1998 when Benjamin Netanyahu did so much to appease Yasser Arafat and Helen’s equally strong, principled stand against the Israeli “disengagement” from Gaza,” said Moshe Phillips, the National Director of Herut North America. “Helen, I am sure, would have been just as outspoken in her criticism of Netanyahu halting the plans to assume sovereignty over Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as part of this new UAE agreement.”

“Helen Freedman was committed to the Jewish families in Judea and Samaria,” continued Phillips. “Whether it was Helen’s letters to the editor, tours to Israel, frequent street protests with hand-printed signs and her other trademarked activism, she never stopped showing her concern for Israelis in the heartland of Israel. It was my unique pleasure to serve on the board of directors of Americans For A Safe Israel with Helen and watch her at work. Recently AFSI updated its website and logo and Helen was there every step of the way. Helen was AFSI’s longest serving executive director. She held the position for nearly half of its 50 year existence and we pray to see the organization flourish in her memory.”

“To Helen’s family, loved ones, and comrades, we say: May Hashem console you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem,” said Karma Feinstein Cohen. “Helen will be missed and will be remembered.”

Herut is an international grassroots movement for Zionist pride and education and is dedicated to the ideals of pre-World War Two Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky. More information about Herut can be found at www.HerutNA.org

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/the-bannon-indictment/

If there are convictions, the potential penalties are severe.

NR’s Zachary Evans has reported on the Justice Department’s indictment of former Trump campaign manager and White House adviser Steve Bannon, along with three codefendants — Brian Kolfage, an Air Force vet who became a triple-amputee serving in the Iraq War; Andrew Badolato, a longtime Bannon associate; and Timothy Shea, who helped Kolfage establish “We Build the Wall,” the campaign said to be at the center of the alleged fraud scheme.

The indictment unsealed today elucidates that a great deal of investigative scutwork went into this case, chiefly by the U.S. postal inspectors and prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. Indeed, the investigation was plainly in gear last autumn: The indictment says that in October 2019, the defendants were tipped off by a financial institution that they were under investigation. The wire-fraud and money-laundering charges were a long time coming, and the postal inspectors appear to have meticulously traced the proceeds through numerous bank accounts, real-estate parcels, and at least one vehicle. These are itemized in the indictment’s forfeiture allegations, which are in addition to the significant imprisonment and staggering fines that could result in the event of convictions.

Our 40-page report details how tens of billions of taxpayer dollars went out the door in the last 30-days of the 2019 fiscal year.
Inside our oversight report, you’ll find:

$457 million spent on furniture (even though, today, 75-percent of the federal workforce is telecommuting and not in the office)
$456 million spent on public relations (PR), despite the 5,000 PR officers employed within government agencies
$50 million on seafood, like $40 million on catfish and mahi mahi and $4.6 million on lobster and crab
$3.7 million on games, toys, and musical instruments including pianos, flutes, and French horns

You’ll also find spending on guns and ammunition at the following agencies: Education, Veterans Affairs, and Human & Human Services. 

OpenTheBooks auditors even found $100,000 spent on desserts, like donuts ($43,000), cake mix ($36,000) and pecan pie ($10,000). 

All of the details can be found in our report here.

https://nypost.com/2020/08/19/portland-businesses-fleeing-downtown-ov

Large companies are fleeing offices in downtown Portland — because nightly Black Lives Matter riots are making the heart of the Oregon city a no-go area, according to a report.

“Businesses are leaving,” Andrew Hoan, president and CEO of the Portland Business Alliance (PBA), told KATU.

“The financial consequences to the downtown corridor are a running calculation that is almost impossible to wrap your mind around,” he said — with one company already saying the riots have cost $20 million in damage and lost business.

“You have blocks and blocks of plywood. You have graffiti. You have an accumulation of damages that are unrepaired, an ongoing perception that coming downtown is not a safe place,” Hoan said.

“We need to start to turn the corner now, so that this sort of irreparable damage does not last,” the business leader said.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/chicago-descends-anarchy-jason-d-hill/

Last week in Chicago saw the most major of American cities in the Midwest descend into chaos and mayhem as looters and rioters took to the city’s downtown streets and unleashed a reign of destruction and nihilistic terror. Acting under the pretenses of social justice, and outrage at police brutality against blacks, anarchists and Black Lives Matter supporters reveal a desire not to peacefully protest whatever reasonable grievances they think they might have, but rather to destroy principles of civility, property rights and the First Amendment. And, of course, they also clearly wish to unload their absolute unfiltered hatred of law enforcement.

More than 100 people were arrested between Sunday night and Monday morning after an overnight spate of violence that seems to have begun with a 20-year-old man who, unprovoked, opened fire at police officers. Thirteen officers were injured in displays of violence around the city. Police Superintendent David Brown on Monday described the incident not as peaceful protests, but as incidents of pure criminality.

On Monday evening, the looters, rioters and anarchists again struck the wealthy section of downtown Chicago’s Gold Coast region, looting and destroying designer stores including Ralph Lauren, Jimmy Choo, and Geneva Seal. U-Haul trucks were seen waiting on the sides of roads to deposit the burglarized property from the city’s prime real estate area. 

A Black Lives Matter Chicago organizer said Monday that the mobs who vandalized and looted downtown businesses the night before did nothing wrong, calling it “reparations” for Black suffering.

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-white-house-prepared-for-a-pandemic-11597792593

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo launched the Democrats’ broadside against the Trump administration’s Covid-19 response. “Our current federal government is dysfunctional and incompetent,” he told virtual conventioneers Monday in a recorded speech. “It couldn’t fight off the virus. In fact, it didn’t even see it coming.”

The report was produced by the Council of Economic Advisers at the behest of the National Security Council’s biodefense team. It detailed the large health and economic losses that could happen from flu pandemic in the U.S. The report discussed how the lack of private market incentives had led to underinvestment in developing and using innovative technologies that can quickly produce vaccines for a new virus.

Influenza vaccines have primarily been manufactured in chicken eggs for the past 70 years. The process is too slow to produce a new vaccine for a novel, unexpected virus and impairs the vaccines’ efficacy against the flu. Public-private partnerships created under a 2006 statute led to the development of newer, faster manufacturing techniques. But these vaccines are more expensive and haven’t been widely adopted.

The main issue is that vaccine developers aren’t rewarded for innovation. Their research-and-development and investment costs for improved vaccines are recovered only through sales that occur in the unlikely event that a pandemic occurs—there have only been four flu pandemics the past 100 years—even though vaccine innovation provides benefits from risk-reduction before any pandemic. Vaccines have insurance value today that provides protection against possible future damage, regardless of whether a pandemic occurs. That means the social return from innovative vaccines is greater than their private return to developers.