RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/trump-impeachment-fallout-unpredictable/

‘I hate the people who hate him.’

Impeachment is shaping up as unpredictably explosive, but not in the way imagined.

There are lots of things that we do know about the present impeachment of Donald Trump — and we know that there are even more areas that remain unknown.

Quietly, the approval ratings of Trump have been rising to pre-impeachment levels and are nearing a RealClearPolitics average of 45. Support for impeaching Trump and/or removing him is not increasing as the House Democrats expected. It is essentially static, or slowly eroding, depending on how polls phrase such questions.

Apparently, an exhausted public did not see “Ukrainian” impeachment as a one-off national crisis akin to the Nixon inquiry and the Clinton impeachment and trial that merited national attention. The impeachment vote instead is being confirmed in the public mind as part of a now boring three-year impeachment psychodrama (from impeachment 1.0, the Logan Act, the emoluments clause, the 25th Amendment, and Michael Avenatti/Stormy Daniels comedies to Robert Mueller’s “dream team” and “all-stars”). The progressive logic of the current jump-the-shark monotony is to become even more monotonous, the way that a driller leans ever harder on his dull and chipping bit as his bore becomes static.

The Democrats believed that all of these efforts would be like small cuts, each one perhaps minor but all combining to bleed Trump out. But now we know, given polling data and the strong Trump economy, that the long odyssey to impeachment has had almost no effect on Trump’s popularity, other than losing him 3–4 points for a few weeks as periodic media “bombshells” went off.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/30/the-religious-bigotry-of-n

The mockumentary that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” featured many sidesplitting moments; host Chuck Todd and other Democratic activists disguised as journalists spent an hour solemnly discussing the “assault on the truth” inflicted by Donald Trump and his “cult-like” followers.

The very same propagandists responsible for spreading fake news and conspiracy theories about collusion between Team Trump and the Russians proceeded to scold the president, his advisors, and conservatives for allegedly spreading fake news and conspiracy theories. It was hilarious.

The executive editor of the Washington Post, the news organization that has published thousands of stories pushing the Russian collusion hoax, lamented: “[W]e live in an environment where people are able to spread crazy conspiracy theories and absolute falsehoods and lies.”

The executive editor of the New York Times, a news organization also responsible for publishing thousands of articles pushing the Russian collusion hoax, concurred. “I think our newsrooms have been sort of rebuilt to do this, is to very aggressively sort out fact from fiction and to very aggressively work to make sure that people trust us and understand that that’s our job,” Dean Baquet explained.

The program should take a place alongside “Spinal Tap” and “Best in Show” as one of the best parodies ever produced.

https://www.city-journal.org/new-york-violent-crime-surge

As we approach 2020, disaster looms over public safety in New York. A surge in violent crimes has shocked the public, from the midnight slaughter of four street sleepers by a mentally ill homeless drug addict; to the late-afternoon murder of a Barnard student, apparently by three young teenagers; to a spate of anti-Semitic attacks, climaxing in the Harlem arrest of a man who chopped his way with a machete into the upstate home of a Monsey rabbi celebrating the penultimate night of Hanukkah. 

Grafton Thomas, perpetrator of the Monsey attack, fled to New York City and was almost immediately apprehended. His car’s license plate number had been reported and, after he crossed the George Washington Bridge, the NYPD’s automated “license-plate reader” system registered his presence. He was arrested within 15 minutes of entering the city.

But if New York’s city council has its way, surveillance tools like the LPR will be rendered less effective, if not useless. The Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act enjoys the support of Speaker Corey Johnson and the co-sponsorship of most of the city council, which held a long-awaited hearing on the bill only two weeks ago. In the name of “transparency,” the POST Act would require the NYPD to disclose and publish the details of how such technology works. A council report complains that “if a license plate of a passing car matches a ‘plate of interest,’ the system sends an alert. Advocates believe that these license plate readers raise privacy concerns because every license plate is scanned.” The NYPD has warned that the POST Act would create “a one-stop shopping guide” for criminals to evade scrutiny.

But judging by the state’s evolving criminal-justice landscape, empowering criminals seems like the goal.  New York State is preparing to roll out sweeping criminal-justice reforms that will prevent police and the courts from detaining people arrested and charged with serious offenses. The new rules on bail remove judicial discretion from a remarkably wide array of charges. No one charged with a misdemeanor, for example, can be held on bail, regardless of his criminal history, gang affiliation, or evident disposition for committing more crimes. Misdemeanors in New York include assault in the third degree, causing “physical injury to another person by means of a deadly weapon or a dangerous instrument,” and reckless endangerment in the first degree, when, “evincing a depraved indifference to human life,” someone “recklessly engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to another person.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/attacks-jews-nyc-and-media-double-standards-danusha-v-goska/

December 26, 2019, the day after Christmas, those Americans who emerged from their holiday celebrations to check world headlines were in for a shock. Police reported several attacks on Jews in New York. Americans don’t think of their largest city, a world center of finance and the arts, a cosmopolitan capital where one can enjoy cuisine from any continent at any hour of the day or night, as a place where Jews are unsafe on the streets. New York is the city of Seinfeld, of Woody Allen and three-time mayor Michael Bloomberg. Former Mayor David Dinkins famously called New York a “gorgeous mosaic” of diverse peoples. But in fact, these Christmas-and-Hanukkah-week attacks were part of a trend. As bad as they were, worse was yet to come. On Saturday, December 28, Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg and his guests celebrated the closing nights of Hanukkah in Monsey, a suburb north of Manhattan. An intruder burst into the home and stabbed five people.

Recent attacks on Jews in New York City typically involve unprovoked punching, cursing, and hurling of objects ranging from soft drinks to large and potentially deadly stones. Victims range from children to the elderly, and include mothers accompanied by their babies. Attackers sometimes yell anti-Semitic comments.

Videos reveal that attackers are frequently black. In one startling video from November 4, 2018, a group of young African Americans congregate outside a Brooklyn synagogue, talk among themselves, hurl a pole through the synagogue window, and then run away. In another attack, a Jewish man is walking down the sidewalk when what appears to be a black youth runs up behind him and punches him hard in the head, nearly knocking him over. In a March, 2019 assault, an apparently healthy, young man kicks a toddler’s stroller being pushed by the child’s mother. Attacks are not always violent. In one videotaped confrontation, a black woman screamed verbal abuse at a Jewish man on the New York City subway.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/soros-war-against-jews-daniel-greenfield/

When George Soros hit middle age, he began seeing a shrink.

The ruthless financier’s problem was that he was burdened with an “oversized” sense of shame over a “guilty secret”. That guilty shameful secret which sent Soros to a psychoanalyst was “Jewishness”.

Soros’ Jewish problem was generational. He grew up in, in his own words, a “Jewish, anti-Semitic home”

He had adopted his father Tivadar’s worldview, that God was a human invention. It was Tivadar who forged and sold documents to Jews trying to escape the Holocaust, charging “wealthy clients”, as he put it, “whatever the market would bear”. And it was Tidavar who found his teenage son a place with a Hungarian fascist official who was confiscating Jewish property.

In his biography, Tivadar later described the trip to confiscate Jewish property as a move by the “kind-hearted” Nazi collaborator to “cheer the unhappy lad up” where after a dose of watching the persecution of Jews, “he quickly regained his spirits”. Soros would later describe this, a period that most Jews remember as a time of utter horror, as “the most exciting time of my life” or an “adventure”.

Tivadar’s amorality thoroughly infected his son. In an infamous 60 Minutes interview, which the Soros network and his media allies have worked hard to spin, Soros coolly agreed that he had “helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.” Then denied any feelings of guilt. “It’s just like in the markets — that if I weren’t there — of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would,” he observed.

It echoed his response to allegations of hurting the British economy. “When you speculate in the financial markets, you are free of most of the moral concerns that confront an ordinary businessman.”