RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-10-14-the-more-public-money-spen

San Francisco is the latest American city to try to solve the problem of “homelessness” by throwing more and yet more taxpayer cash at it. Should we check in on how it’s going?

You may recall that I last visited the issue of homelessness in San Francisco about a year ago, October 2018, in a post titled “The Morality Of Our Progressive Elite.” At that time, the number of “homeless” in San Francisco was estimated at about 7000, but there was an initiative on the November 2018 ballot, known as Proposition C, calling for a new payroll tax on large employers in San Francisco, intended to raise some $300 million per year to solve this homelessness problem once and for all. On October 25, 2018, one Marc Benioff, co-CEO of Salesforce, had an op-ed in the New York Times supporting Proposition C. My post noted that Benioff was only too happy to advocate that others should be forced to spend hundreds of millions on this project through a new tax, while he himself offered to put up none of his own personal fortune, estimated at $6 billion, for the purpose.

So where are we now, a year later? The payroll tax initiative passed last November with 61% of the vote, and the new tax started getting collected. Opponents then brought litigation that has prevented the spending of the money so far. (The opponents’ claim — that a special tax like this requires a two-thirds majority — was rejected by a trial-level court in July; but appeals are ongoing.)

https://www.steynonline.com/9785/a-cure-worse-than-the-disease

“As we see in the UK, Canada, Europe and elsewhere, a permanent state power is ever more comfortable suppressing the possibility of political change. But in America the active partnership between the most lavish and secretive agencies on the planet and the Democrat-media complex is a threat of an entirely different order. Matt Taibbi understands that America can survive a “bad president”, but that it cannot survive the normalization of the Comey-Brennan-Clapper-McCabe rogue state.”

Happy Thanksgiving to our Canadian readers, Happy Columbus Day to our American readers, Happy First Day of Sukkot to our Jewish readers. We would wish our Ukrainian readers a Happy Defender of Ukraine Day, but we’re worried it might be the annual celebration of Hunter Biden’s latest oligarch-kissing sinecures.

~Matt Taibbi is a man of the left, but he is an iconoclastic one and The Washington Post’s recent attempt to #MeToo him has probably made him more so. He’s also a much better writer than most lefties, hobbled as they are by the Downton-Abbey-for-progressives rules of identity politics. Ten years ago, I was very admiring of his evisceration of The New York Times’ beloved comic figure Thomas Friedman:

Friedman frequently uses a rhetorical technique that goes something like this: ‘I was in Dubai with the general counsel of BP last year, watching 500 Balinese textile workers get on a train, when suddenly I said to myself, “We need better headlights for our tri-plane.”‘ And off he goes.

Indeed Taibbi can do Friedman rather better than the original:

After Thomas Friedman correlates (on the back of a napkin) freedom and the price of oil, Mr Taibbi correlates, rather more plausibly, happiness and the size of Valerie Bertinelli’s ass (with accompanying graph).

A lot of us were content to do low comedy a decade back. But these are ever more fevered times and Matt Taibbi has written a sobering piece after three years of what he calls “a permanent coup”. The nub of his argument:

My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/14/no-james-comey-america-doesnt-want-your-help/

With so little to unite Americans on the Left and Right, our shared rejection of further assistance from the former FBI director just might be the salve the country needs.

America is a dangerously divided nation. Democrats, unable to accept the results of a presidential election three years ago, would now undo the constitutional expression of American voters by pushing a half-cocked impeachment inquiry. Democratic presidential candidates offer outlandish ideas such as free healthcare to illegal immigrants and subsidized gender reassignment surgery for inmates while Democratic voters fret their field of candidates is too old, too left-wing, and too sluggish to oust Donald Trump in 2020.

Republicans want the House of Representatives back, especially after witnessing the Democrats’ nonstop assault on the president. They also are impatiently awaiting the outcome of multiple investigations into how the Obama Administration weaponized the most powerful government agencies in the world to sabotage Trump’s campaign and destabilize his presidency. (Don’t miss my review of Ball of Collusion, the excellent book by Andrew McCarthy.)

But despite our deep partisan differences and, at times, raging animus toward our political foes, there is one thing on which nearly all Americans can agree:

No, James Comey, we don’t need your help.