RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/back-to-school-no-excuses-11599088867?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Democrats have been saying for weeks that parents don’t want to send their kids back to school. They must have figured out this is false, judging by Joe Biden’s speech Wednesday blaming President Trump for the failure of some public schools to reopen.

“Let me be clear: if President Trump and his administration had done their jobs, America’s schools would be open,” the Democratic nominee said. “Instead, America’s families are paying the price for his failures.” So President Trump is to blame for not eradicating the virus, which no country has managed to do.

The main obstacle to reopening schools isn’t the virus. It’s the teachers’ unions. The virus has been under control in New York City for months, yet the teachers union this week threatened a strike unless classroom instruction was delayed. Mayor Bill de Blasio naturally surrendered, though state law prohibits teachers from striking.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/meet-the-travel-act/

Joining President Trump in Kenosha yesterday was Attorney General Barr, who did not mince words about mounting an aggressive federal response to the violence roiling the country. The AG asserted that “radicals” are crossing state lines and “carrying out, planning a coordinated attack on law enforcement, on public property, and on private property. And that can’t be tolerated.”

It is thus worth making a few observations about the Travel Act.

The Travel Act is codified as a crime in the anti-racketeering chapter of the federal criminal code, specifically, in Section 1952. It has been a staple of organized crime cases since the 1980s. As a prosecutor, I charged it more times than I could hope to remember.

In essence, the Travel Act makes it a crime to travel across state lines, or otherwise to use facilities in interstate commerce (e.g., the U.S. mail and electronic communications devices), to commit acts of violence, or otherwise to promote “unlawful activity” (which Section 1952 broadly defines — a definition that explicitly includes arson and extortion). There is a broad range of penalties. If the offense involves carrying out violent activity, there is a potential 20-year prison sentence; if death results, a defendant can be sentenced to “any term of years or for life.”

The Travel Act is very attractive to federal prosecutors for three reasons.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/charts_compare_covid_deaths_in_countries_that_used_hydroxychloroquine_early_and_those_that_didnt.html

Monday, the Family Foundation of Virginia reported that the State health commissioner, Dr. Norman Oliver, intends to use his emergency powers to force every Virginian to receive a COVID-19 vaccine when one becomes available. 

Virginia’s Gov. Northam (survivor of his infamous blackface scandal) has taken no official policy position so far.  However, the Democrat-controlled Legislature has killed at least three Republican bills that would have offered a way for someone with a sincere religious objection to be exempt from any COVID-19 vaccine mandate.  The most recent casualty, H.B. 5082, “would’ve ensured that Virginia didn’t mandate a COVID-19 vaccine if it is derived from human fetal tissue, changes the RNA or DNA of a person, or was not first tested on laboratory animals before being tested on humans.”  These actions triggered a “March against Mandates” in Richmond on September 2 by Virginia Freedom Keepers.

But wait — there’s more politics brewing.  Yesterday’s Richmond Times-Dispatch published a letter from a former FDA medical officer.  He agrees that using convalescent blood plasma from patients who developed antibodies works, and he cited its many successes dating back to the 1918 flu pandemic.  However, he claims that the number of people tested this time was “far out of proportion to the number needed for safety analyses.”   He also objects that authorities in the FDA and Donald Trump made overly optimistic claims that it could result in a 35% reduction in mortality and said this type of politics undermines the FDA’s credibility. 

https://pjmedia.com/columns/dennis-prager/2020/09/01/the-lockdown-has-gone-from-a-mistake-to-a-crime-n871865

Four months ago, I wrote a column titled “The Worldwide Lockdown May Be the Greatest Mistake in History.” I explained that “‘mistake’ and ‘evil’ are not synonyms. The lockdown is a mistake; the Holocaust, slavery, communism, fascism, etc., were evils. Massive mistakes are made by arrogant fools; massive evils are committed by evil people.”

Regarding the economic catastrophe in America and around the world — especially among the world’s poor who are dependent upon America and other first-world countries for their income through exports and tourism — I wrote, “It is panic and hysteria, not the coronavirus, that created this catastrophe.”

Unfortunately, I was right.

The world should have followed Sweden’s example. That country never locked down and has even kept children under 16 in school the entire time. As Reuters reported on July 15, the number of Swedish children between 1 and 19 years of age who have died of COVID-19 is zero. And the percentage of children who contracted the illness was the exact same in Sweden as it was in Finland, which locked down its schools.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/09/01/open-season-on-police-as-st-louis-cop-killed-and-2-chicago-officers-wounded-n873794

“Black Lives Matter has ginned up so much fear and outrage against the police — most of it false and defamatory — that there are more and more officers going to work every morning wondering if they’ll make it home safely that night.”

A 19-year-old man, Jeffon Williams, was arrested and is facing several charges for shooting and wounding two Chicago police officers during a traffic stop.

Criminal Court Judge John F. Lyke Jr. said Williams showed “utter disregard for any person, any human being.” He set bail at $10 million, but Williams will not be released because he violated the terms of previous bonds.

And in St. Louis, a 29-year-old officer, Tamarris Bohannon, was murdered and another was wounded after responding to a shooting call. Details are still emerging, but it appears the gunman set a trap for the officers. The suspect, 43-year-old Thomas Kinworthy, was wanted for sexual assault in Florida. He entered a home and then barricaded himself inside and shot at officers from a second-story window.

Bohannon was the eighth St. Louis police officer shot since June.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/michael-flynn-case-dc-circuit-rules-against-mandamus-case/

Judge Sullivan should dismiss the Flynn case.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who listened to the oral argument (or, ahem, read the coverage of it here at National Review) that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has denied Michael Flynn’s petition for a writ of mandamus against District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan. General Flynn, President Trump’s original national-security adviser, was seeking to persuade the appellate court to order Judge Sullivan to dismiss the case against him on the Justice Department’s motion.

The ruling by the en banc court (i.e., consideration by all ten active Circuit judges who were not recused from the case) was 8–2. As predicted here, a strong majority of the court — whose Democratic appointees easily outnumber their Republican counterparts — lined up against two dissenting Republican appointees. In May, those dissenters, Judges Neomi Rao and Karen L. Henderson, had formed the majority of a three-judge Circuit panel that initially ruled in Flynn’s favor. The panel ruling was vacated when the full Circuit decided to hear the case.

Flynn pled guilty in 2017 to a false-statements charge brought by the Mueller investigation. He subsequently hired new counsel and moved for dismissal of the case based on alleged misconduct by the FBI in the investigation, and by the prosecutors in the court proceedings. Attorney General Bill Barr appointed a Justice Department prosecutor (St. Louis U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen) to review the case, and the review turned up several investigative improprieties. The Justice Department determined that there had been no underlying basis to investigate Flynn (i.e., there was insufficient predicate to investigate him as a criminal suspect or as a clandestine agent of Russia). From this premise, DOJ reasoned that none of the allegedly false statements Flynn made to FBI agents were material to a matter under investigation — an essential element of a false-statements offense. Prosecutors thus moved to dismiss the case, under Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/its-almost-as-though-they-dont-want-it-to-end-trump-contrasts-restoration-of-order-in-kenosha-with-prolonged-rioting-in-other-cities/

President Trump on Tuesday contrasted the swift restoration of order in Kenosha, Wis. with the ongoing riots in Portland, and suggested that elected officials in Oregon have allowed the disturbances to continue for political reasons.

Trump spoke at a press conference in Kenosha, where he announced a package of $42 million in funds to state law enforcement. The conference was attended by local business owners whose property was destroyed in the riots, as well as local and federal government officials including Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) and Attorney General William Barr.

“I really came today to thank law enforcement. What you’ve done has been incredible. It’s really inspiring because you see [demonstrations] happening all over and it just never seems to end,” Trump said. “And it never seems to end because, it’s almost as though they don’t want it to end. Because you ended it really fast.”

The Kenosha riots were quelled by Thursday, after Trump and Wisconsin governor Tony Evers agreed to deploy over 1,000 National Guardsmen and 200 federal law enforcement officers to the city. Additionally, Senator Johnson said that sheriff’s departments from over 40 different counties in the state sent representatives to help maintain order.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/the-democrats-are-whitewashing-leftist-violence/

Once the hysteria devolved into violence, it caught up to Democrats in the polls. Now they’re just attempting to whitewash history.

I t took only one week for the legacy media to go from gaslighting the nation about leftist violence to begging Joe Biden to distance himself from it.

“Joe Biden condemns violence in Portland and challenges President Trump to do the same” reads a ridiculous CNN headline about the presidential nominee’s speech in Pennsylvania yesterday.The trouble with Biden’s contention, and the thrust of the CNN article, is that the former vice president blamed Donald Trump, “white nationalists” and “white supremacists,” not Antifa or Black Lives Matter, which have perpetrated most of the carnage we see in American cities. I’m sorry, it’s leftists who are chanting “death to America” in Oakland, not MAGA-hatted shock troops.

Moreover, Trump and Republicans have been condemning violence for months. They were pilloried for it. It wasn’t that long ago that Senator Tom Cotton wrote an op-ed in the New York Times suggesting Trump send National Guard troops to quell riots. The entire condemnation of Cotton was predicated on the notion that he wanted to deploy the military to crush peaceful “protesters.”

Perhaps the reality of the situation escaped the attention of many media figures who for months were diligently downplaying the existence of the looting, rioting, arson, statue-toppling, and murder. Perhaps these reporters and pundits fooled themselves into believing that Marxist Antifa “protesters” were really akin to the G.I.s landing in Normandy to stop the Nazis.

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/08/hands-up.html

A group of young Black Lives Matters protesters (mostly white) harassed several white diners in Washington, DC, on Monday night for not raising their fists in “solidarity” with BLM. As you can see, here and here and here, several diners raised their hands. But one woman refuses to submit to the mob that surrounds her while yelling at her. There was another woman in a blue sweater, but the exchanges between them and the protestors are inaudible, as it is with the first woman.

Had I been there I would have given them an Italian salute, and shouted back, “BLM is evil. You want trouble? All you get from me is the finger. Come and get it, thugs!”

I see no difference between the raised hands and the disgusting sight of whites kneeling in collective guilt and deference to blacks in Houston (there are several videos of other pleadings from around the country of white shame and forgiveness on the Internet, too many to cite here).  Paying obedience or symbolic agreement and support to thugs who threaten your life is not a guarantee of one’s life. It is not a guarantee of anything. It is nihilism, and destruction for the sake of destruction.

At another restaurant, In another instance a black woman berates a couple having an outside dinner for not raising their hands in support of BLM.

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/09/blm-mafia.html

One term the BLM has deserved is that it is in the extortion racket.

Definition of extortion

1: the act or practice of extorting especially money or other propertyespecially : the offense committed by an official engaging in such practice

2: something extorted especially : a gross overcharge

Extortion legal definition of extortion

Under the Common Law, “…extortion is a misdemeanor consisting of an unlawful taking of money by a government officer. It is an oppressive misuse of the power with which the law clothes a public officer. Most jurisdictions have statutes governing extortion that broaden the common-law definition.”

A better description is (for once) offered by Wkileaks:

Extortion – Wikipedia

“Extortion (also called shakedown, and, in a legal sense incorrectly, exaction) is obtaining benefit through coercion. In most jurisdictions it is likely to constitute a criminal offense; the bulk of this article deals with such cases. Robbery is the simplest form of extortion.”

Why limit the practice of extortion to government? but exclude BLM? After all,   Extortion is the act of extorting —using violence, threats, intimidation, or pressure from one’s authority to force someone to hand over money (or something else of value) or do something they don’t want to do. There are instances of BLM demanding “protection” money from businesses and promising not to destroy or loot them them. The description here certainly fits the actions of BLM (working with Antififa),  and BLM’s extortion racket is nationwide (from Louisville to Seattle, to the Fortune 500.