RUTHFULLY YOURS

PBS personality Tavis Smiley stopped by Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a private “Hidden Ivy” with a modest $45K tuition and was asked about whether slavery might make a comeback.

“Mr. Smiley, do you believe that given the crisis state of our democracy, we black folk could ever find ourselves enslaved again?” a student at this elite institution asked the millionaire.

Smiley assured readers of Time Magazine, the flagship product of a multi-billion dollar corporation headquartered near the World Trade Center, that slavery could very well make a comeback.

Why? What possible reason did Tavis Smiley have for anticipating the return of not merely Jim Crow, but cotton plantations and chains? Because the Senate has yet to act on Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. The South will rise again… because a judicial nominee’s confirmation was delayed. It’s the sort of thing Senate Democrats used to think was good clean fun.

One of the victims of their judicial delaying tactics was Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a sharecropper’s daughter, who was blocked for years. Judge Garland, unlike Judge Brown, is white. Why does blocking him from tilting the Supreme Court further to the left represent the return of slavery?

Merrick Garland, a man whom Tavis Smiley, like the rest of the left, couldn’t have been bothered to sneeze at a few years ago, is now suddenly the litmus test for the return of slavery. It’s not about Garland. It’s about Obama. And, more specifically, it’s about the insecurity and guilt of the Smileys.

The curious characteristic of this current wave of angry activism is the privileged nature of the activists.

Consider Colin Kaepernick with his $114 million salary standing up to oppression, the $150 million social justice activism of Black Lives Matter, Yale students shrieking themselves silly over Halloween costumes and a dialogue between a millionaire PBS host and a student at a prestigious college over whether slavery might be coming back. These people are not oppressed by grinding poverty, deprivation of civil rights or any other plausible metrics of discrimination. They are oppressed by their privilege.

A federal audit has discovered that up to 10,000 California National Guard enlistees received improper bonuses at the time of their recruitment and now the government wants the vets to pay the bonsues back.

The bonuses were meant to spur recruitment a decade ago when Guard enlistments were lagging. But the money was only supposed to go to recruits who signed up for “high demand” positions. Thousands received the bonuses anyway.

CBS Los Angeles:

“The way to fix it if the law needs to be changed,” says McVey, “that’s what elected officials are for. They should fix the problem not lay it off on what in fact are turning into the victims.”

The money was given to the soldiers upfront, similar to an athlete getting a signing bonus.

According to the LA Time, the bonus money was supposed to be limited to soldiers who were taken on high-demand assignments.

A federal investigation uncovered thousands of bonuses and studentloan payments that were given to California Guard soldiers who didn’t qualify under the high-demand assignment criteria.

Fajardo also spoke to retired US Army Chief Warrant Officer Warren Finch who also served in the Guard.

A decade ago, the California National Guard offered thousands of soldiers large bonuses to reenlist and go to war. After investigations discovered fraud and mismanagement involving those payments, the Pentagon is demanding the money back, making veterans pay for the government’s mistakes.

Nearly 10,000 soldiers — many of whom served in multiple combat tours — have been ordered to repay large enlistment bonuses (of $15,000 or more), the Los Angeles Times reported. Worse, if the veterans refuse, the Pentagon uses interest charges, wage garnishments, and tax liens to recoup the money.

“I feel totally betrayed,” Susan Haley, a 26-year veteran and former Army master sergeant who deployed to Afghanistan in 2008, told the Los Angeles Times.

Haley comes from a family of heroes: her husband also served, and her eldest son lost a leg in Afghanistan while serving as a medic. Haley said she sends the Pentagon $650 every month, a quarter of her family’s income, just to pay the $20,500 in bonuses which was given to her improperly, in exchange for her six-year reenlistment. Haley said she fears her family may have to sell their house to repay the bonuses.

“They’ll get their money, but I want those years back,” she declared.

“It’s egregious that veterans who sacrificed their lives for this country are being asked to retroactively pay the price for sloppy government miscalculations,” Mark Lucas, executive director at Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) and a 13-year veteran of the Iowa Army National Guard, told PJ Media. “The California Guard is showing no remorse as it yanks the rug out from under the very heroes it once asked to serve.”

Lucas said that he was not surprised at the bureaucratic mix-up, but that does not make it any better. “This is par for the course from a bureaucratic Pentagon that wastes billions of dollars each year on failed projects and mismanaged funds,” he said. “American veterans and taxpayers alike deserve better from the agency entrusted with over half of our national federal budget each year.”

The enlistment bonuses came at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the Pentagon aimed to bulk up forces. Investigations from that time period determined that a lack of oversight allowed widespread fraud and mismanagement by California Guard officials under pressure to meet their enlistment goals. In other words, the government told officials they needed to hire a certain number of soldiers, and they fudged the numbers in order to bribe more veterans to reenlist.

During that time, the Pentagon started offering the most generous incentives in history to retain soldiers. It also began paying the money up front, like signing bonuses in the private sector.

In 2010, a federal investigation found that thousands of bonuses and student loan payments were given to California Guard soldiers who did not qualify for them, or whose applications had paperwork errors, according to the Times.

FBI Director James Comey has again defied the official White House line on policing and the Black Lives Matter movement. The “narrative that policing is biased and violent and unfair” is resulting in “more dead young black men,” Mr. Comey warned in an Oct. 16 address to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in San Diego. That narrative, he added, also “threatens the future of policing.”

Mr. Comey has spoken out before. In October 2015, after he observed that rising violent crime was likely the result of officers backing off proactive policing, President Obama obliquely accused the FBI director of “cherry-pick[ing] data” and “feed[ing] political agendas.”

But as much as Mr. Obama has tried to dismiss the violent crime increase that began after the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the data are clear.

Last year’s 12% increase in homicides reported to the FBI is the largest one-year homicide increase in nearly half a century. The primary victims have been black. An additional 900 black males were killed last year compared with the previous year, resulting in a homicide victimization rate that is now nine times greater for black males than for white males, according to a Guardian study. The brutality of these killings can be shocking. Over the weekend of Sept. 16, a 15-year-old boy in Chicago was burned alive in a dumpster.

More police are being killed this year too. Gun murders of police officers are up 47% nationally through Oct. 21, compared with the same period the previous year. In Chicago gun assaults on officers are up 100%. In New York City attacks on officers are up 23%. In the last two weeks, four California officers have been deliberately murdered.

Gangbanger John Felix prepared for his lethal attack on two Palm Springs officers on Oct. 8 by setting a trap and ambushing them as they stood outside his door. Two days earlier, parolee Trenton Trevon Lovell shot Los Angeles Sheriff’s Sgt. Steve Owen in the face as he investigated a burglary call. Lovell then stood over Sgt. Owen and fired four additional rounds into his body. A planned assassination of two officers on coffee break in Vallejo, Calif., on Oct. 17 failed only when the assault rifle used in the attack jammed. In Indianapolis on Oct. 13, police headquarters were sprayed with bullets by a car that then fled, echoing a similar attack on Oct. 4 against the same police station.

American citizens are in for a double whammy of speech restrictions, and even of censorship. The Federal Election Commission (FEC), and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) want to ratchet up the pressures on freedom of speech.

Two independent news blogs have bravely reported developments in this realm when they stand a chance of being “lawfully” obliterated by the government: The Daily Signal, and Accuracy in Media.

On the one hand, the FEC is a government agency that should not even exist. But it was pushed and encouraged by Theodore Roosevelt, a Progressive, and so the initial legislation was introduced and passed by Congress, on the premise that regulating Big Business was the natural thing to do (re the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 of 1890, and other Federal regulations)

As early as 1905, Theodore Roosevelt asserted the need for campaign finance reform and called for legislation to ban corporate contributions for political purposes. In response, the United States Congress enacted the Tillman Act of 1907, named for its sponsor Senator Benjamin Tillman, banning corporate contributions. Further regulation followed in the Federal Corrupt Practices Act enacted in 1910, and subsequent amendments in 1910 and 1925, the Hatch Act, the Smith-Connally Act of 1943, and the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. These Acts sought to regulate corporate and union spending in campaigns for federal office, and mandated public disclosure of campaign donors.

But the urge to regulate corporate contributions during political campaigns can be dated to the immediate post-Civil War period.

Although attempts to regulate campaign finance by legislation date back to 1867, the modern era of “campaign finance reform” in the United States begins with the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971 and, more importantly, 1974 amendments to that Act. The 1971 FECA required candidates to disclose sources of campaign contributions and campaign expenditures. The 1974 Amendments essentially rewrote the Act from top to bottom. The 1974 Amendments placed statutory limits on contributions by individuals for the first time, and created the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as an independent enforcement agency. It provided for broad new disclosure requirements, and limited the amounts that candidates could spend on their campaigns, or that citizens could spend separate from candidate campaigns to promote their political views.

Fred Lucas in The Daily Signal article of October 20th writes:

Books, movies, satellite radio shows, and streaming video about real-life politics aren’t protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press, some government officials argue.

The Federal Election Commission hasn’t proposed banning books or movies, but in a 3-3 vote last month along party lines, the six-member panel left the regulatory option on the table.

Thanks to e-pal Louis L……

My life has been getting harder and, at times, lonelier, but I want to thank those of you who are brave enough to still associate with me regardless of what I have become. The following is a recap of my current identity by many friends and family members.

I was born white, which makes me not only a racist, but a “privileged” racist.

I am a fiscal and moral conservative, which makes me a fascist.

I am heterosexual, which makes me a homophobe.

I am non-union, which makes me a traitor to the working class and an ally of big business.

I am Jewish, which makes me an infidel.

I’m a patriot who believes in the Constitution and owning a gun, which makes me a radical right wing nut job.

I am older than 66 and retired, which makes me a useless old person.

I read, observe, and reason, so I doubt and vet much that the media, current administration, presidential candidates, and assorted inbox entries tell me, which makes me paranoid and delusional.

I am proud of my heritages and my inclusive American culture, which make me a xenophobe.

I value my safety and that of my family; therefore I appreciate the police and the legal system, which makes me an illiberal obstructionist.

I believe in hard work, fair play, and fair compensation according to each individual’s merits, which makes me a cold-hearted, slimy capitalist.

I acquired with immense gratitude a good education using student loans, Pell Grants, and a merit grant which makes me an underachieving outcast.

I believe in the defense and protection of my homeland with defined borders, which makes me a regressive, anti-social, militaristic hawk.

I believe people who look like women should use “women’s” bathrooms & lockers and men who look like men use “men” ones, which makes me morally and ethically depraved, backward, and worse than Islamic terrorists.

I must be irredeemably deplorable, which makes me a Trump supporter.