RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/opinion/liberals-survive-progressivism.html

It’s been nearly 30 years since then-Gov. Bill Clinton took a break from the campaign trail to oversee the execution of death-row inmate Ricky Ray Rector. Morally, it may have been repugnant to kill a man so mentally handicapped by a failed suicide attempt that he set aside the pecan pie of his last meal because he was “saving it for later.”

Politically, it was essential.

By the early 1990s the American left had spent a generation earning a soft-on-crime image in an era of growing lawlessness. In 1988, Mike Dukakis secured the Democrats’ third landslide loss thanks in no small part to his stalwart opposition to the death penalty. Four years later, it was difficult to imagine any Democrat reaching the White House without a literal blood sacrifice to the gods of law and order.

Now Democrats seem intent on reviving that reputation. In Waukesha, Wis., six people were killed and at least 60 injured when Darrell Brooks drove his Ford Escape through a Christmas parade, according to the police. Brooks already had a lengthy rap sheet and had reportedly run over a woman with the same S.U.V. early this month. But, as The Times reported, he had been “quickly freed from jail on bond after prosecutors requested what they now say was an inappropriately low bail.”

What happened in Waukesha on Sunday is among the consequences of easy bail. And bail reform — that is, reducing or eliminating cash bail for a variety of offenses — has been a cause of the left for years.

Then there is California, which in 2014 classified possession of hard drugs for personal use and the theft of up to $950 of goods as misdemeanor offenses. In the Bay Area, the results have been stark: San Francisco’s overdose deaths rose to 81 per 100,000 people in 2020 from 19 per 100,000 people in 2014.

In the meantime, shoplifting has become endemic, brazen and increasingly well organized, culminating in mobs of looters ransacking stores and terrifying customers in the Bay Area last week. Local shops are closing, neighborhoods are decaying, encampments of drug addicts have proliferated, and streets are befouled by human excrement — a set of failures Michael Shellenberger calls in his thoroughly researched and convincing new book, “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities,” “the breakdown of civilization on America’s West Coast.”

As for the rest of the country: Can anyone seriously say that Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia or New York has been improved in recent years under progressive leadership? Why did rates of homelessness register their biggest jumps between 2007 and 2020 in left-leaning states like New York, California and Massachusetts — and their biggest decreases in right-leaning ones like Florida, Texas and Georgia?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2021/11/23/the-lefts-vigilantes-n1535953

Who would have thought that “across state lines” would have replaced “Donald Trump” as the Left’s favorite epithet? But whatever fans the flames, right? Anything to get the latest rounds of arson, looting and violence up and running. There’s a country to be destroyed, you know.

If you watched Ken Burns’ The Civil War, which originally aired what seems like a hundred years ago, you may recognize the name Shelby Foote. He was a Civil War historian who made frequent appearances during the series. He was very knowledgeable and his books are enjoyable to read. Like C.S. Lewis, Foote has a way of crafting a sentence that keeps you hooked and somehow is pleasing to the eye. Of course, given Foote’s southern origin, many critics automatically label him a Confederate apologist, without taking the time to see the nuance in Foote’s books. Foote tried to tell both sides of a story. And history can be messy and does not always favor the side in which we are interested. But then again, nuance is all but lost in the 21st century.

In the book Confederates in the Attic, author Tony Horowitz sat down with Foote for an interview and the subject of the Confederate flag came up. Foote commented:

“Freedom Riders were a pretty weird-looking group to Southerners,” Foote said. “The men had odd haircuts and strange baggy clothes and seemed to associate with people with an intimacy that we didn’t allow. So the so-called right-thinking people of the South said, ‘They’re sending their riffraff down here. Let our riffraff take care of them.’ Then they sat back while the good ol’ boys in the pickup trucks took care of it, under the Confederate banner. That’s when right-thinking people should have stepped in and said, ‘Don’t use that banner, that’s not what it stands for.’ But they didn’t. So now it’s a symbol of evil to a great many people, and I understand that.”

And so it goes. The “right-thinking” people of the Left would never sully their hands in dealing with their enemies directly. Even if they do not explicitly encourage burning car dealerships, looting stores, attacking police stations or beating up unsuspecting people on the street, they know that their rhetoric inspires and encourages it. They know that they have an army of angry, under-educated or willfully uneducated group of people, highly vulnerable to the power of suggestion — people who will burn down a city while Leftist leaders and media mavens gather at the Kennedy Center or the Met Gala to sip champagne as their colleagues and errand-runners try to convince us that a building engulfed in flames is a sign of a peaceful protest.

People who they hate are being attacked by people they care nothing about. Just like their enemies, their foot soldiers are inconsequential and expendable. And if a neighborhood has to lose small businesses or a supermarket, drug store, or for that matter lives, so be it. After all, the goal is just, right?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/11/22/i-hope-you-die-the-murderous-isis-jihadi-from-new-york-city-you-heard-nothing-about-n1535561

Ali Saleh, 28, was born and raised in the Jamaica, Queens neighborhood of New York City, in idyllic circumstances: according to court documents, he came “from a loving home, surrounded by parents and siblings, and was both educated and employed.” Yet despite the fact that we are constantly told that ignorance and deprivation cause terrorism, Saleh’s enviable upbringing didn’t prevent him from turning to the dark side. Wednesday, he was sentenced to thirty years in prison after pleading guilty to aiding the Islamic State (ISIS). He gives every indication of being as hardcore an adherent as the jihad terror organization ever had. And one question that no one seems to be asking is: Where did he get these ideas in Queens?

In addition to the 30 years for aiding ISIS, Saleh was also sentenced Wednesday to eight years and four months in prison for assaulting a federal correctional officer. According to the Justice Department, “on July 13, 2018, at approximately 12:35 p.m., while a senior correctional officer was retrieving trash through an access slot of Saleh’s cell, Saleh reached through the slot and slashed the officer with an improvised knife, lacerating the officer’s right forearm and damaging the officer’s radial nerve.  Saleh smiled at the officer and said, ‘I hope you die.’” Charming guy.

That was after Saleh amassed a long record of support for the world’s most brutal and murderous jihad terror group. Matthew G. Olsen, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division, stated that “Saleh made numerous attempts to travel overseas to join ISIS, and when those efforts failed, attempted to assist others in joining the terrorist organization.”

Saleh made his loyalties abundantly clear. On July 10, 2014, he wrote online: “We are going to see a lot of be headings [sic] of American soldiers and I want front row seats.” Then on August 25, 2014, he declared: “I’m ready to die for the Caliphate, prison is nothing.” Three days later, he added: “Lets [sic] be clear the Muslims in the khilafah [caliphate] need help, the one who is capable to go over and help the Muslims must go and help.” He also wrote: “I’m ready to die for the Caliphate, prison is nothing.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/the_womens_march_beclowns_itself_with_an_almost_unbelievable_tweet.html

Leftism is unsustainable. It’s unsustainable economically, although nations must be destroyed before that fundamental truth emerges. Leftist revolutions also invariably eat their own. America is now witnessing that cannibalism and we can only hope the mutually assured destruction of leftism occurs before it succeeds in wrecking America. Today’s Exhibit A showing leftist cannibalism is a perfectly wonderful tweet from the Women’s March organization apologizing for offending people with the average dollar amount of its donations.

The Women’s March emerged after Trump was accused of “grabbing women by the [vulgarism].” I listened to the entire recorded conversation, and it was clear that Trump wasn’t saying he engaged in that conduct. Instead, he was making the point that, if you’re rich and famous, you can get away with anything. I’ve always imagined that, had the bus ride during which he was recorded not ended then, he would have added, “At least, that’s what Bill Clinton told me.”

In any event, an enterprising leftist made herself a symbolic little pink hat and put the pattern online. And so, the vulgarity of the Women’s March was born. Within a short time, because this was a leftist organization, the anti-Semites came to the fore, dimming the group’s luster.

Still, the organization continues to exist and, as is true for all political organizations, it’s constantly sending emails to people begging for money. In this case, the email apparently informed recipients that they didn’t need to send a lot of money. Really, any amount would do. But just as a guide, the average amount that supporters sent was $14.92.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/granholms_and_bidens_energy_clown_show_.html

Reassuring worried Americans that there will be enough oil for the Thanksgiving holidays, yesterday President Joseph Biden (D) informed a concerned citizenry of plans to release 50,000,000 barrels of oil from the emergency Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an effort to bring down high gas prices. 

Wow!  Fifty million barrels of oil!  That’s a lot of oil isn’t it, Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm?  That should take care of America’s energy needs for quite a while right?   “How many barrels of oil does the U.S. consume per day?,” a reporter commonsensically asked. “I don’t have that number in front of me. I’m sorry,” Granholm replied.

Tech challenged, non-Department of Energy Secretary me managed to get the answer in front of me in less than five seconds, conveniently from Granholm’s own Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration’s site, discovering

In 2020, the United States consumed an average of about 18.19 million barrels of petroleum per day, or a total of about 6.66 billion barrels of petroleum.

Oh.  But…but…that means the extra 50,000,000 barrels is only about 2 1/2 days’ worth of extra petroleum — long enough to transport people to and from their Thanksgiving celebration, heat residences for the holiday and to cook all the extra and special holiday foods.  Then what?  How can that literal drop in the empty bucket from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve bring down gas prices, up 60% since last year?

Energy Secretary Granholm could not be reached for comment as the numbers were not in front of her.