RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/undercover-prosecutor-merchan-helps-bragg-lawlessly-stress-cohens-guilty-plea/?utm_source=

The judge in Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial has stacked the deck against the former president.

Editor’s Note: This is the first of two columns on how Judge Juan Merchan has allowed prosecutors from Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office to prove a federal campaign-finance crime against former president Donald Trump by relying on blatantly inadmissible evidence — the guilty pleas of Michael Cohen and a non-prosecution agreement David Pecker struck with the Justice Department. The second column will appear tomorrow.

How far out on a limb is Judge Juan Merchan willing to go to help Manhattan’s elected progressive Democratic district attorney, Alvin Bragg, convict former president Donald Trump based on inadmissible evidence?

Very far.

As I’ll discuss in this column and a second one tomorrow, the inadmissible evidence in question consists of (a) guilty pleas by Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to two Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) felonies in a case brought against him by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York (SDNY); and (b) a non-prosecution agreement that former American Media Inc. CEO David Pecker — Trump’s longtime friend, who controlled the National Enquirer — entered into with the Justice Department because he feared being indicted under FECA. (Relatedly, AMI agreed to pay a fine to the FEC.)

To avoid too much redundancy, let’s focus on Cohen’s guilty pleas, which trigger the same legal objections as the non-prosecution agreement and the fine. The two pleas relate to non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that Cohen helped obtain for Trump’s benefit during the 2016 presidential campaign in connection with two women — Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels — who claimed to have had extramarital affairs with Trump in 2006. McDougal, a former Playboy model, was paid $150,000 by the National Enquirer, pursuant to an arrangement Cohen, then a lawyer for Trump and the Trump Organization, made with Pecker. Subsequently, when Pecker balked at paying Stormy Daniels (a porn star whose real name is Stephanie Clifford), Cohen paid for that NDA himself — only after, he claims, Trump promised that he’d be reimbursed, which he was in monthly installments in 2017.

We have been over why the guilty pleas are worthless (see, e.g., here and here). In my opinion, as a former SDNY prosecutor who worked there for nearly 20 years — and was a supervisor there for over a decade — they are worthless as evidence. But you needn’t agree with me on that because it is incontestable that they are worthless — or at least should be — as a matter of law.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/can-americans-still-mourn-as-americans

Only a nation can mourn its dead. There is always the abstract reverence for sacrifice, the human awe that acts of valor inspire; that is universal. But to mourn takes something greater. You can admire the Dying Gaul, or Horatius at the bridge; you can only grieve for your countrymen.

This may be, in part, why it took more than a century for Memorial Day to take shape in this country. America was a nation born in war—unlike almost any in history before it—yet the early devotions to its fallen sons were mostly the private remembrances of soldiers’ organizations. A generation of relative peace followed, with fewer than 3,000 battle deaths between 1815 and 1861.

Then came civil war, when secession put the question of the American nation to a mortal test. Recent interpretations left and right have centered slavery at the expense of Union, the principle that Lincoln and other Northern leaders claimed as their motivation: that the American nation was bound by ties of law, of history, of purpose that could not be broken. Ultimately, more than 360,000 Northern men and boys died for that proposition—nearly twenty times as many Americans as had died in all theaters of conflict since 1775.

The war had settled the question: this was one nation. Yet that nation had also been transformed, in no small part because so many thousands of its sons had shed their blood. And so their sacrifice became a central object of the American civil religion: in Lincoln’s famous homage to the fallen men at Gettysburg, in the highly visible practices of the Grand Army of the Republic, and especially in the observance of Decoration Day, when the graves of the war dead would be adorned with flowers, flags, and other objects of patriotic reverence. The remembrance of their sacrifice served doubly to remind the mourners of the cause for which they fought, as a visible illustration of the price by which the Union—the American nation—had been preserved.

This was not the whole story, though. Beside those many Union dead, some 258,000 Americans had fallen in service to the South. Their families and communities would honor them, of course. But what was the nation to do about them?

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/3016509/free-speech-is-in-dire-shape/

The following are the prepared remarks of Jay Bhattacharya upon receiving the 2024 Bradley Prize, an award to “honor scholars and practitioners whose accomplishments reflect The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation’s mission to restore, strengthen, and protect the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism.”

Thank you! I am so grateful to be honored by the Bradley Foundation today. I am especially thankful
because, in my view, this award is not just to honor me but to acknowledge so many brilliant scientists,
politicians, public servants, teachers, lawyers, firefighters, small business owners, CEOs, and people
from every walk of life who risked their jobs, their reputations, or their family bliss to oppose COVID-19
tyranny. I dedicate this award to each of them.

It’s not hard to see that our pandemic response failed. Official counts attribute more than a million
deaths to COVID in the United States and almost seven million worldwide. By early 2022, about 95% of
Americans had contracted COVID despite the harsh countermeasures in most states, including
confinement of broad populations, business closures, cessation of religious and other gatherings,
school closures, and widespread violation of fundamental civil liberties. Very clearly, these measures
failed to protect Americans from COVID.

Many powerful scientific bureaucrats justified these policies with the idea that all scientists agreed that
the lockdowns would work to suppress or even eliminate the virus. This was known false by spring 2020. For instance, the Swedish experiment with keeping schools open in spring 2020 was a
tremendous success. Lockdowns are inherently leaky because human societies, human health, and
human well-being require physical proximity. It is unhealthy to treat our fellow human beings primarily
as biohazards.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/tyranny_by_any_other_name_still_stinks.html

Tyranny takes hold when good people are lulled into inaction.  Those of us who mind our own business and prefer government to leave us alone are particularly prone to falling into this trap.  Because we have no use for government, we hope government will have no use for us.  So we are silent while evil grows far from our homes.  We tend to our basic comforts and ignore evil as it nears.  And, eventually, we even collaborate with evil in order to avoid making a public scene.  In an effort to “get by” without causing too many waves, tyranny’s waves grow bigger and stronger until they crash upon our homes.  By then, it is too late to batten down the hatches.  Evil has already broken through our doors.

I had hoped that we would have more time.  That must be the common sentiment shared by every generation grappling with what comes next.  I had hoped that the sheer destruction of the twentieth century would be enough to buy us many more decades of relative peace.  Regrettably, two world wars and a nuclear-tipped Cold War did nothing to temper governments’ lust for power or their financial backers’ lust for wealth.  WWI’s clash of empires should have discouraged the growth of trigger-happy alliances and endless conquest.  The evil unleashed by WWII’s totalitarian regimes should have discouraged the growth of centralized institutions and vast, unaccountable, “just following orders” bureaucracies.  Instead, military alliances, central banks, international governing bodies, administrative Leviathans, and trade organizations have accumulated more power today than at any other time in history.  The twenty-first century is the century of empire-building and totalitarianism, and unless ordinary people rein in the excesses of their own governments, the mass destruction that follows will make the first two world wars look like measly hors d’oeuvres.

Can it be done?  Can global bloodshed be averted?  Can Western nations be saved before they devolve into hotbeds of revolution and civil war?  Or do the mounting conflicts all around us signify that we are already too late?  The answers to those questions depend, in part, on whether regular citizens sufficiently resist being used as cannon fodder in the years ahead and whether global leaders sufficiently fear losing everything they now have.  Had the great monarchies of Europe understood that WWI would facilitate their demise, perhaps they would have been more hesitant to allow a tangled web of military alliances to decide their fate.  Chasing honor and glory led European nobles straight to their graves.  Had Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo known that they would die shamefully, perhaps their thirst for empire could have been quenched.  Lord Acton’s famous observation deserves a corollary: those who seek absolute power must be destroyed absolutely.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/25/joe-biden-angry-warrior/

Last weekend, President Biden spoke at the graduation ceremony at Morehouse College, an all-male, historically black college, aggressively attacking his Republican opponents and decrying what he sees as pervasive, overt, and violent ongoing racism in American society. “What,” Biden asked rhetorically, “is democracy if black men are being killed in the street? What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leave black communities behind? What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot?” Finally, he intoned, “And most of all, what does it mean, as we’ve heard before, to be a black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?”

The speech has been the subject of much discussion, particularly among Republicans, most of whom have bemoaned the President’s purposeful victimization of young black men for political purposes. Rather than tell them the truth, rather than encourage them to be great and to dedicate their lives to fixing the problems that exist in the nation, he encouraged them to wallow in their misery and to blame others for their problems.

Certainly, there is considerable truth in this criticism. And certainly, Biden should be chided for playing into an ideology that thrives on resentment and jealousy. Still, the substance of the President’s comments is quite probably less important in the grand scheme of things than the tenor in which they were delivered.

A week before his speech at Morehouse, President Biden and his campaign team released a video addressing the Trump campaign’s demand for head-to-head debates. “Make my day, pal,” Biden challenges Trump as he declares that he beat the former president twice in their previous campaign and will gladly do so this time too.

Here again, critics rightly noted that the substance of the video was questionable at best. “6 jump cuts in 11 seconds,” conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller noted. Biden is so bad at this that he can’t even read his cue cards in a studio. How is he going to do an entire debate, much less two? He’s not up to his actual job, much less to running a grueling campaign in addition.

This is another fair point, to be sure, but one that still misses the bigger picture—Biden’s tone.

Joe Biden—or at least the Joe Biden the public is allowed to see these days—is angry. He sounds like he wants to fight Trump. He yells at the young men at Morehouse on one of the most joyful and special days of their lives. He’s rough and gruff and thoroughly displeased with everyone and everything. And if he’s not careful, it’s going to cost him the election.