RUTHFULLY YOURS

Every board game has rules. Every card game has rules. Every athletic competition has rules. Every election has rules. Every society has rules. WHY?

Rules establish the object of the game and provide the organizing principle for fair play – rules establish what is and what is not acceptable conduct in the game. You have to take turns, you cannot look at someone else’s cards, you cannot challenge or dispute the referee, you cannot vote twice – and there are penalties for not following the rules in every game. If you don’t play by the rules in a game you either lose on points or are disqualified.

Let’s examine the sport of wrestling and begin with the overview of wrestling rules provided by West Virginia Wrestling: http://www.wvmat.com/overview.htm

The object of traditional wrestling is to pin your opponent on his back. When you pin your opponent, the match is over and you are the winner. If nobody gets pinned, the winner is the wrestler who has scored the most points during the match.

The rules of traditional wrestling identify holds that are acceptable and holds that are not acceptable during the match. “No holds barred” means there are absolutely no restrictions or limits on the holds used to pin your opponent.

Laws are the rules of society and like any game there are penalties for not following the rules – but what happens when the rules are abandoned and a no holds barred mentality dominates the game in politics?

President Donald Trump thought he entered a traditional match of presidential election politics when he descended the escalator at Trump Towers. Instead he found himself fighting in a professional no holds barred kayfabe wrestling match against the entire Washington establishment of swamp creatures colluding in a sinister effort to pin him down. The 2016 presidential campaign, election, and aftermath are a professional political wrestling match with the corrupt mainstream media hired as the kayfabe referee.

Kayfabe is professional wrestling’s suspension of disbelief that presents fake staged events as genuine competitions. In professional wrestling the referee’s on-stage kayfabe purpose is to convince the spectators they are watching a legitimate traditional match. In reality the referee and the wrestlers are participating in the staged spectacle of a scripted match with a pre-determined outcome. The referee and the wrestlers are actors who maintain kayfabe by playing their parts and never breaking character.

There are five ways to score points in a wrestling match and the swamp creatures have tried them all:

1) Takedown – (2 points) You score two points for taking your opponent down to the mat and controlling him/her.

Hillary attempted the takedown maneuver with her frontal attack on Donald Trump accusing him of being a misogynist. Amplifying her accusations with the infamous Billy Bush tape leaked intentionally just before the election, Hillary hoped to end the match by securing the women’s vote. Instead of pinning Donald Trump the tape ended the career of Billy Bush and exposed Hillary’s complicity in the real life misogyny, womanizing, and exploitation of women by her unfaithful husband Bill Clinton. No takedown.

2) Escape – (1 point) You score one point for getting away or getting to a neutral position when your opponent has you down on the mat.

Hillary tried the escape maneuver by accusing Donald Trump of being dangerously inexperienced. With the dexterity of a counter-puncher candidate Trump laughed in derision and asked the American public how the many years of “experience” of the career politicians in Washington had benefited anyone but the politicians themselves? Candidate Trump pointed out the unseemly corruption of the Clinton family – Hillary’s pay-for-play scheming while Secretary of State and the corrupt Clinton Foundation that only distributed a fraction of the monies they collected. Trump escaped.

3) Reversal – (2 points) You score two points when your opponent has you down on the mat and you come from underneath and gain control of your opponent.

Hillary thought she had Donald Trump on the mat when she romanticized the inclusiveness of Obama’s open border policies and support for illegal immigrants. She criticized Trump as a racist and an Islamophobe. Hillary campaigned around the country saying that real Americans needed to be with HER to be inclusive and accepting.

Donald Trump pointed out that open borders are designed to flood America with illegal immigrants who will vote illegally for their Democratic Party benefactors. He said the open border policy is a Trojan horse that will bring masses of immigrants from Islamic countries with cultural norms hostile to America and facilitate the social chaos necessary for the destruction of American democracy – the overarching goal of Hillary and her leftist Democratic Party. Candidate Donald Trump made a strong case for LEGAL immigration. After all, he married two legal immigrants. The distinction between illegal and legal immigration that Hillary tried to blur was clarified by candidate Trump and he accomplished a reversal.

“Clinton Fixer” James Comey was DOJ chief prosecutor in Marc Rich pardon case.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – As Special Counsel Robert Mueller convenes a grand jury to investigate the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign, it is important to recall that Mueller made the decision in 2005 to close a FBI grand jury investigation that was convened by the FBI in the 2001 investigation into former President Bill Clinton’s decision to pardon fugitive financier Marc Rich.

Also interesting is the role former FBI Director James Comey played in the decision to end the Marc Rich grand jury without a recommendation of prosecution.

From 1987 to 1993, Comey, working in the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, served as the DOJ prosecutor who oversawthe prosecution of Marc Rich, the billionaire oil trader convicted of tax fraud and trading with Iran during the embassy hostage crisis.

But in 2001, when Bill Clinton decided on his last day in office to pardon Marc Rich, Comey oversaw the criminal investigation, but decided there was no wrongdoing on Bill Clinton’s part, “despite public outcry over the evidence that Rich’s ex-wife had donated to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign.”

That Mueller and Comey were both considered to be “Clinton Fixers” during the Marc Rich case bears merit given the case the grand jury was investigating, namely that there was clear suspicion Denise Rich, the ex-wife of Marc Rich, had bribed the Clintons to obtain the pardon.

The Marc Rich pardon scandal

In the aftermath of leaving the White House, Clinton’s reputation was not only racked by the sexual scandals, but in one of his parting acts, just hours before George W. Bush took the oath of office, Clinton on Jan. 20, 2001, gave a pardon to the swashbuckling oil trader and notorious tax evader Marc Rich.

Rich had fled to Switzerland to escape indictment in the United States for tax evasion and illegally trading with Iran while American embassy personnel were still being held hostage in Tehran, among other criminal charges.

The Marc Rich scandal involved Denise Joy Eisenberg, a songwriter for Aretha Franklin and Patti LaBelle, who Rich married in 1996 and divorced in 1998.

In 1998, Denise Rich helped bundle a $450,000 contribution to what was then known as the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation to help fund the building of the Clinton presidential library.

According to the Washington Post, the contributions were made in three payments, from July 1998 to May 2000, at the urging of her friend Beth Dozoretz, then well known as a major Democratic Party fundraiser.

The Washington Post further reported that Denise Rich’s attorney, Carol Bruce, told a House Government Reform Committee that held a hearing on the Marc Rich pardon in February 2001 that her client gave an enormous sum of money” to the Clinton library fund, but the amount and timing of the gifts were not disclosed.

The principal function of a federal grand jury is to investigate a suspected crime with an eye toward returning an indictment — a formal accusation of felony misconduct. In the alternative, a grand jury may file a “no true bill,” a formal finding that the prosecutor failed to show probable cause that the subject of the investigation committed a crime.

Sometimes, however, to vote yea or nay on a proposed indictment is not the grand jury’s only option. In certain situations, federal law authorizes a grand jury to file a report detailing its findings, even if criminal charges are not forthcoming. One such situation involves investigations of public officials. Instead of returning an indictment, a grand jury may issue a report that recommends an official’s removal from office.

These columns have lamented the Justice Department’s assignment of a prosecutor to investigate the president without specifying a crime or the factual basis for a criminal investigation. We’ve also observed that no indictable crime is required to trigger impeachment proceedings. Neither, we now note, is a provable crime a prerequisite for the issuance of a grand-jury report.

Thus, the question arises: Is Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s impaneling of a new grand jury in Washington step one in the impeachment of President Donald Trump?

By statute (Section 3333 of Title 18, U.S. Code), a grand jury’s report may address (my italics):

noncriminal misconduct, malfeasance, or misfeasance in office involving organized criminal activity by an appointed public officer or employee as the basis for a recommendation of removal or disciplinary action.

While the statute literally applies only to an appointed public officer, there is little doubt that a court would permit the issuance of a grand-jury report regarding an elected public officer, too. After all, such a report’s recommendation of removal from office would not be binding — a president may be removed only by the Constitution’s impeachment process. And the report’s disclosure of any public officeholder’s conduct would be deemed in the public interest: There is some academic debate about whether a president may be indicted while in office, so the grand-jury report might stand as the only public accounting of an official’s alleged misconduct.

The U.S. Attorney’s Manual, which guides Justice Department procedures, elaborates that the statute’s phrase “‘organized criminal activity’ should be interpreted as being much broader than ‘organized crime.’” It includes “any criminal activity collectively undertaken.” That could mean any conspiracy or any fraudulent scheme involving two or more people.

Note, moreover, that the law does not say that the public official must personally be guilty of criminal activity. Remember, we’re talking here about a situation in which the grand jury has concluded there is not enough evidence to charge the public official with a crime. What the statute says is that, to trigger a report, there must be (a) criminal activity committed by some group of people, and (b) “noncriminal misconduct, malfeasance, or misfeasance” committed by the public official that somehow relates to the criminal activity.

The U.S. economy is hitting a sweet spot seldom seen in past expansions, posting in July a record 82nd straight month of job creation and an unemployment rate at a 16-year low, despite slow growth in output.

Economic growth has been stuck stubbornly near a 2% annual rate, the weakest expansion in output since World War II. But by a range of measures the economy is pushing into new territory, including record stock-price highs, improving consumer confidence and rising corporate profits. Even wages, though rising slowly, are advancing at a healthy pace when adjusted for exceptionally low inflation.

The latest evidence was a Labor Department report Friday that showed U.S. employers added 209,000 jobs to payrolls in July and the unemployment rate fell to 4.3%. With the July increase in hiring, the record stretch of monthly hiring is equivalent to six years and 10 months, almost three years longer than the second-best streak, from 1986 to 1990.

Expansions tend to get tripped up by boiling excesses, like a housing bubble in the 2000s, a tech bubble in the 1990s and inflation in the early 1980s. But this economy appears to have some more room to run as it enters its ninth year.

Other parts of the global economy, including Europe and China, are contributing after stumbles in recent years, adding to global growth that is spilling back to the U.S.

“Compared to six months ago, the global economic outlook has certainly shifted in a positive direction,” said John Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo. In the U.S., “there are more jobs, and better jobs, and that’s a confidence builder.”

Hiring accelerated this summer after a spring slowdown, keeping job growth in line with last year’s pace despite expectations among some economists that hiring would cool this year.

Other economic markers are flashing green. The stock market is at records, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average topping 22000 this week. Low unemployment and modest inflation have stoked consumer confidence to the highest levels since 2000, and that could slowly be translating into more consumer spending, which accelerated in the second quarter.

That points to an economy set to outperform the long but sluggish expansion’s 2.1% average annual growth rate through June.

“This is not a 2% economy,” said Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley. “If you look at the domestic economy, it’s much stronger.” CONTINUE AT SITE