RUTHFULLY YOURS

Two days after Cuban dictator Fidel Castro bit the dust, Black Lives Matter memorialized him, and the reasons for it are not pretty. Castro killed thousands of his own people, imprisoned many more, caused 1 million refugees to flee to the United States, and even canceled Christmas. But Black Lives Matter celebrated him — because he provided a refuge for cop killers.

“Although no leader is without their flaws, we must push back against the rhetoric of the right and come to the defense of El Comandante,” reads the declaration, published by the “Black Lives Matter” account on Medium.com. While the movement has no single leader, this Medium account attempts to speak for it, and it has 12.6 K followers. Moreover, the sentiments expressed in this article echo the Marxist demands of the Movement for Black Lives, which speaks for a broad coalition of groups in the movement.

The key lesson Black Lives Matter learned from Castro? “Revolution is continuous and is won first in the hearts and minds of the people and is continually shaped and reshaped by the collective,” the article declared. “No single revolutionary ever wins or even begins the revolution. The revolution begins only when the whole is fully bought in and committed to it. And it is never over.”

Yes, Black Lives Matter said this of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people. If any “revolutionary” least exemplified the idea that “no single revolutionary ever wins or even begins the revolution,” it is Fidel Castro. Or rather, it would be, if Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot hadn’t set records even Castro couldn’t beat.

The exact number of Cubans killed by the Castro regime remains unknown, but estimates range from 2,000 to 33,000, with a mid range of 15,000 — in a country of only 7 million people. In per capita terms, that is the equivalent of 680,000 executions in the United States (with its population of 318 million). That’s the entire population of Denver or Seattle.

But that’s just mass murder — don’t forget political prisoners! The Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation received over 7,188 reports of arbitrary detentions from January through August of 2014. According to PolitiFact, there are at least 97 known current political prisoners. These prisons are overcrowded and unhygienic, with prisoners forced to work 12-hour days, Human Rights Watch reported. Inmates have no effective complaint mechanism to seek redress.

Four staff at the Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs resigned after maggots were found in the wound of a Vietnam veteran who died in October. Another VA staff member insisted that the maggots did not cause his death.

Raymie Parker identified the man as his father, 73-year-old Owen Reese Peterson. “During the 21 days I was there … I pled with the medical staff, the senior medical staff, to increase his meds so his bandages could be changed,” Parker told the Tulsa World. “I was met with a stonewall for much of that time.”

Executive Director Myles Deering explained the maggots were discovered while Peterson was alive, but did not cause his death. Rather, the man came into the VA hospital with an infection and died “as a result of the sepsis,” complications from that infection. Nevertheless, Deering must have hated saying the words, “He did not succumb as a result of the parasites.”

That there were any parasites involved is a disgrace, and the staff members who resigned must have known it.

Shane Faulkner, a spokesman for the agency, announced that a physician’s assistant and three nurses “chose to resign before the termination process began.” This followed an investigation once the agency reported the incident to the Oklahoma Department of Health. The VA also submitted a report to the district attorney to see if charges are warranted.

The willing resignation of VA staff is surprising, since “there’s not an ability to fire individuals who aren’t doing their job,” said Cody McGregor, a retired Army sniper and national outreach director at Concerned Veterans for America (CVA). Sharon Helman, former head of the VA in Phoenix, AZ, was one of the first people fired after the VA reform law passed in 2014, but she has been able to sue for her job back, and seems to have won a legal victory.

The case of Owen Reese Peterson underscores the need for real accountability at the VA.

You can tell the regulation beat has reached critical political mass when even the folks at Politico are pushing it on the home page. “Obama’s agencies push flurry of ‘midnight’ actions,” the political website reported recently, adding that Republicans are preparing to block or repeal as many as of these and previous rules as possible.

This effort is going to be a political brawl—not least due to resistance from the bureaucracies in the executive branch and perhaps even some political appointees who go native quickly. If Donald Trump wants the deregulation effort to succeed—and it’s essential to promoting faster growth—he and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus could take a lesson from the Reagan era and appoint a political SWAT team to direct it from the White House.

The temptation will be to leave it to Congress or the office of regulatory affairs at the White House budget office. But the director of that office might not be confirmed for months, even as appointees in the departments find excuses not to move against Obama rules. Those appointees may want to keep their new political power or they might fear the media backlash, which will often be fierce.

The Reagan White House met this challenge by setting up a special task force to run regulatory policy for the first months of 1981. It was led by then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, with a big assist from his general counsel Boyden Gray. Key staff included such policy legends as Jim Miller, who later ran the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and White House budget office; Frank Blake, who would go on to run Home Depot; Jim Tozzi, who would become the ranking career official in the White House regulatory shop; Tim Muris, who ran the FTC under George W. Bush; and Jeffrey Eisenach, now with the American Enterprise Institute.

It’s not too much to say this task force ran much of the government for six months as the new appointees found their sea legs. In one famous February 1981 incident, the general counsels of agencies were called to the White House to review executive order 12291 on regulation. The counsels began to cross out huge chunks until they got to the end and discovered that Ronald Reagan had already signed it. The task force was so successful that Democrats John Dingell and Al Gore hauled some of them up to Capitol Hill for a public scolding.

Democrats also made the director of regulatory affairs subject to Senate confirmation for the first time, so they could haze nominees about opposing new rules. It’s no accident that Reagan was the only recent President to restrain the regulatory state. Neither Bush Administration had any comparable success, and George W. Bush set new records for pages in the Federal Register until President Obama took the crown.

I would like to persuade Betsy McCaughey to run for office. Would she not make a great NYC ‘s first woman mayor?????rsk
The battle lines are forming over Donald Trump’s anticipated Supreme Court nominee. A conservative advocacy group is running TV ads urging Trump to appoint a justice in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia. New Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer fires back that Democrats will try to block any nominee who isn’t “mainstream.”

Trouble is, anybody who disputes the Democrats’ left-wing definition of the Constitution as a malleable “living” document is outside their mainstream.

Meanwhile, pro-choice groups are panicked about losing abortion “rights.” For now, it’s much ado about nothing. No matter whom Trump appoints this time, there are already five pro-choice justices on the court, counting Justice Anthony Kennedy. It would take a second Trump appointment to tilt the court the other way.

During the campaign, Trump pledged to appoint justices who would uphold “the Constitution as it was meant to be.” Trump’s victory suggests the public agrees.

Even so, Schumer and fellow Democrats are spoiling for a fight. In part, it’s revenge for the Republicans’ refusal to consider even holding hearings on Obama’s last high-court nominee, Merrick Garland. Will the Democrats’ tough talk lead to anything? Unlikely. Ten Senate Democrats in states Trump won are facing tough re-election races in 2018. Count on some of them to help push Trump’s pick over the 60-vote threshold to defeat Democratic obstruction attempts.

Trump’s first addition to the court will have a major impact on labor-union issues, voting procedures, the death penalty, executive power and religious freedom.

On the separation of church and state, stay tuned for Trinity Lutheran Church v. Pauley. The justices delayed the case while Scalia’s seat was vacant to avoid a likely 4-4 tie.

The case: Missouri awards grants to help schools make their playgrounds safer with soft, rubber paving. But Missouri nixed a grant to a Lutheran-affiliated preschool. The school sued, saying its children deserve the same safety enhancements as children in secular schools.

Trump’s new justice will shift the court to allow religious institutions and the faithful to be treated equally with everyone else. Yes, the Constitution bars favoring a particular religion, but that shouldn’t require government to discriminate against religion.

We’ve all seen these kinds of games. The team gets pushed around all over the gridiron . . . but it wins anyway. The opposing squad marches up and down the field with apparent ease, piling up yardage, chewing up clock. But each time, something goes wrong at the critical moment: here a fumble near the goal line, there a tipped pass intercepted and returned for a touchdown. At the end of the game, you stare at the stat sheet in disbelief: Your guys have been outgained by a whopping 150 yards, the other team has held the ball almost 40 minutes out of 60. Yet, somehow, you won, 10–3.

Now, let’s be clear. A win is a win. It’s totally legit, and no one can take it away from you. And while not an every-Sunday occurrence, such contests happen often enough that they can’t be thought of as flukes. Could you say the winning team got outplayed? Maybe. It is equally fair, though, to say that at crunch time, when it got down to the game’s handful of decisive plays, the losing team came up small. For long stretches of the contest, it looked like they were in total control. But it was the plodding kind of control: uneasy, uninspiring, and, in the end, unable to get it done. The losers can talk all they want about piling up yardage, but everyone knows the rules — the game is won on points, not yards.

That is the kind of game Donald Trump just won over Hillary Clinton. For Democrats to belittle the outcome as illegitimate is absurd.

For one thing, it is laughably dishonest. Take the Electoral College. As experience teaches, social-justice warriors hale from the heads-we-win-tails-you-lose school. They don’t care how they win, just that they win. It was hardly out of the realm of possibility that Trump would secure a plurality of the 135 million or so votes cast, but that a few hundred thousand Clinton votes would flip a few battleground states, giving her the decisive Electoral College majority. Had that happened, you know as sure as you’re reading this that you’d have been hearing paeans to John Madison from the direct-democracy crowd — notwithstanding that, where the Constitution is concerned, Democrats tend to be strict destructionists.

Plus, Mrs. Clinton didn’t win a majority. Had she managed to prevail in the Electoral College, she would have been a president that most of the country voted against. As her husband can tell her, having won twice without ever capturing 50 percent of the vote, legitimacy does not hinge on raw vote totals. That is why, with just 43 percent of the vote in 1992, Bill Clinton garnered 370 electoral votes, significantly more than Donald Trump’s 306.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1237

Organizations that, in recent years, have received direct funding and assistance from George Soros and his Open Society Foundations (OSF) include the following. (Comprehensive profiles of each are available in the “Groups” section of DiscoverTheNetworks.org):

Advancement Project: This organization works to organize “communities of color” into politically cohesive units while disseminating its leftist worldviews and values as broadly as possible by way of a sophisticated communications department.
Air America Radio: Now defunct, this was a self-identified “liberal” radio network.
Al-Haq: This NGO produces highly politicized reports, papers, books, and legal analyses regarding alleged Israeli human-rights abuses committed against Palestinians.
All of Us or None: This organization seeks to change voting laws — which vary from state to state — so as to allow ex-inmates, parolees, and even current inmates to cast their ballots in political elections.
Alliance for Justice: Best known for its activism vis a vis the appointment of federal judges, this group consistently depicts Republican judicial nominees as “extremists.”
America Coming Together: Soros played a major role in creating this group, whose purpose was to coordinate and organize pro-Democrat voter-mobilization programs.
America Votes: Soros also played a major role in creating this group, whose get-out-the-vote campaigns targeted likely Democratic voters.
America’s Voice: This open-borders group seeks to promote “comprehensive” immigration reform that includes a robust agenda in favor of amnesty for illegal aliens.
American Bar Association Commission on Immigration Policy: This organization “opposes laws that require employers and persons providing education, health care, or other social services to verify citizenship or immigration status.”
American Bridge 21st Century: This Super PAC conducts opposition research designed to help Democratic political candidates defeat their Republican foes.
American Civil Liberties Union: This group opposes virtually all post-9/11 national security measures enacted by the U.S. government. It supports open borders, has rushed to the defense of suspected terrorists and their abettors, and appointed former New Left terrorist Bernardine Dohrn to its Advisory Board.
American Constitution Society for Law and Policy: This Washington, DC-based think tank seeks to move American jurisprudence to the left by recruiting, indoctrinating, and mobilizing young law students, helping them acquire positions of power. It also provides leftist Democrats with a bully pulpit from which to denounce their political adversaries.
American Family Voices: This group creates and coordinates media campaigns charging Republicans with wrongdoing.
American Federation of Teachers: After longtime AFT President Albert Shanker died in in 1997, he was succeeded by Sandra Feldman, who slowly “re-branded” the union, allying it with some of the most powerful left-wing elements of the New Labor Movement. When Feldman died in 2004, Edward McElroy took her place, followed by Randi Weingarten in 2008. All of them kept the union on the leftward course it had adopted in its post-Shanker period.