RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/476299-trump-enters-2020-on-a-bull-market-high

President Trump is entering 2020 on a Wall Street high, boasting strong stock market numbers that he hopes will buoy his political prospects entering a reelection year.

Tuesday marks the final day of trading for 2019, and both the S&P 500 and Dow Jones indices are poised to finish the year with significant gains. The Dow is up about 22 percent from a year ago, and the S&P is up just over 28 percent in that span as of the closing bell on Monday.

Analysts said that some of 2019’s stock market gains are a rebound from a decline in stock prices at the end of the year but that the stock market is still ending 2019 at a level above 2018’s peak and there haven’t been any major corrections this year.

“It was a great year, as far as market performance is concerned,” said Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst for S&P Dow Jones Indices.

The Washington Post reported Saturday that the Dow Jones gains in Trump’s time in office so far lag the gains in the same time periods of Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s administrations, but they exceed gains made during other recent presidencies. The rise in the Clinton era coincided with a tech boom, while the rise in the Obama years came after a financial crisis that saw markets hitting a low point at the beginning of his administration.

Trump claimed during a recent trip to London for a NATO gathering that he doesn’t pay attention to the stock market and prefers to watch job numbers. But the president’s Twitter feed indicates otherwise.

He has tweeted a dozen times in December alone about the state of the stock market, touting each new record high in an effort to connect the boost in numbers to his time in office.

“New Stock Market high!” Trump tweeted Dec. 16. “I will never get bored of telling you that — and we will never get tired of winning!”

https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2020/01/01/the-dangers-of-elite-groupthink-n2558749

The Washington Post recently published a surprising indictment of MSNBC host, Stanford graduate and Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow.

Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote that Maddow deliberately misled her audience by claiming the now-discredited Steele dossier was largely verifiable — even at a time when there was plenty of evidence that it was mostly bogus.

At the very time Maddow was reassuring viewers that Christopher Steele was believable, populist talk radio and the much-criticized Fox News Channel were insisting that most of Steele’s allegations simply could not be true. Maddow was wrong. Her less degreed critics proved to be right.

In 2018, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), and the committee’s then-ranking minority member, Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), each issued contrasting reports of the committee’s investigation into allegations of collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign team and the misbehavior of federal agencies.

Schiff’s memo was widely praised by the media. Nunes’ report was condemned as rank and partisan.

Many in the media went further. They contrasted Harvard Law graduate Schiff with rural central Californian Nunes to help explain why the clever Schiff got to the bottom of collusion and the “former dairy farmer” Nunes was “way over his head” and had “no idea what’s going on.”

Recently, the nonpartisan inspector general of the Department of Justice, Michael Horowitz, found widespread wrongdoing at the DOJ and FBI. He confirmed the key findings in the Nunes memo about the Steele dossier and its pernicious role in the FISA application seeking a warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

In contrast, much of what the once-praised Schiff had claimed to be true was proven wrong by Horowitz — from Schiff’s insistence that the FBI verified the Steele dossier to his assertion that the Department of Justice did not rely chiefly on the dossier for its warrant application.

When special counsel Robert Mueller formed an investigatory team, he stocked it with young, progressive Washington insiders, many with blue-chip degrees and resumes.

The media swooned. Washington journalists became giddy over the prospect of a “dream team” of such “all-stars” who would demolish the supposedly far less impressively credentialed Trump legal team.

We were assured by a snobbish Vox that “Special counsel Robert Mueller’s legal team is full of pros. Trump’s team makes typos.”

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0120/shapiro010120.php3

In October 2018, during Sabbath morning services, a white supremacist attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, murdering 11 people and wounding another six. In April 2019, in the middle of Passover, a white supremacist attacked the Chabad of Poway synagogue, murdering one person and seriously wounding another three. Both incidents started absolutely necessary conversations about the prevalence and nature of the white supremacist threat to Jews across the country.

Four people were murdered at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City by self-described Black Hebrew Israelites just weeks ago; five people were stabbed at a Hanukkah celebration in Monsey, New York; this week alone, New York police are investigating at least nine anti-Semitic attacks. 

The upsurge of violence against Jews in New York in particular has finally prompted commentary from Democratic politicians ranging from New York Mayor Bill De Blasio, who just weeks ago expressed shock at anti-Semitism reaching “the doorstep of New York City”; to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who expressed puzzlement at the attacks, noting broadly: “This is an intolerant time in our country. We see anger; we see hatred exploding.”

This isn’t new. Back in 2018, The New York Times admitted there was a massive spike in anti-Semitic attacks in the city — and even acknowledged that the newspaper of record had failed to cover that surging anti-Semitism because “it refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy.” But that has always been true of anti-Semitism. It’s possible, as The Times should recognize, to walk and chew gum at the same time in covering anti-Semitism.