RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/israel-replaced-with-palestine-on-rashida-tlaibs-office-map/

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a newly-minted Muslim congresswoman now infamous for calling President Donald Trump a “motherf**ker,” supports Palestine over Israel and now has a world map where Israel has been re-marked as “Palestine” with a sticky note.

Tlaib has not responded to multiple requests for comment on whether or not she approved the alteration and what it might mean. She has, however, celebrated with Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour, who has urged Muslims not to “humanize” Israelis.

“Someone has already made a slight alteration to the map that hangs in Rashida Tlaib’s new congressional office,” BuzzFeed reporter Hannah Allam tweeted Thursday, showing the map with a sticky note reading “Palestine.”

While the note was clearly intended as a replacement for the name of the Jewish state, it includes an arrow that points just barely north of Cairo, the capital of Egypt.

According to reports, Tlaib herself may not have posted the note. BuzzFeed’s Allam reported that a comedian in the crowd put up the sticky note, and Forward identified him as Palestinian-American comedian Mo Amer. Amer did not respond to PJ Media’s request for comment as to whether or not he had Tlaib’s permission.

Whether or not the sticky note remains, and whether or not Amer got permission, Tlaib opposes the two-state solution that would allow both Israel and Palestine to have separate governments. Instead, she supports a one-state solution with Palestine essentially subsuming Israel. She has also advocated for the withdrawal of all U.S. funds from the Jewish state.

She framed this withdrawal of funds as preventing “American foreign aid” from being “used to violate the human rights of people of any race, nation, or ethnicity.”

In fact, her support for the one-state solution is a minor scandal, since her early support for a two-state solution gained her the endorsement of J Street, a pro-Israel organization. She changed her position shortly after winning the Democratic primary, and faced no Republican opponent last November. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/dems_debut_their_clown_show_strategy_for_the_216th_congress.html

Now that voters have handed them control of the House of Representatives, Democrats are forced to reveal who they are to the national electorate, and it ain’t pretty. The party has more than its share of bizarre eccentrics, able to win a local election in a deep blue district, and they are feeling their oats. They thrive on media attention, which they get because they are colorful and young and say radical things that excite progressive journalists.

But money and power remain in the hands of the gerontocracy branch of the party, headed by Nancy Pelosi, the shrewd power player who learned her craft at the knee of the political boss of Baltimore, her father, Tommy D’Alesandro, who knew a few things about money, power, and deal-making.

Her first speech as speaker of the House this term feigned stately grace (calling the Capitol a “temple of democracy,” for instance) and bipartisanship fairly effectively, and she brought her grandkids to the podium at one point. However, her disturbing quirks as a public speaker were all too evident, even as she read her prepared speech.

Listen to the bizarre giggles she cannot repress as she is being applauded.

Anger and downright hatred for the sitting president of the United States powers most of the 40 newly elected members of the House Democratic Caucus, along with many veterans, including “Mad Max” Maxine Waters, slated to become chair of the House Financial Services Committee and very publicly committed to impeachment. Pelosi is shrewd enough to realize that impeachment without a smoking gun would be a disaster for Democrats, but that won’t stop the Trump-haters, who believe they have momentum and support of the party’s faithful. Eleven-term veteran Congressman Brad Sherman, of Ventura County, California, has already introduced articles of impeachment, and that’s just the beginning of the ordeal Pelosi will have trying to rein her crazies.

https://freebeacon.com/columns/the-coming-democratic-disillusion/

On Thursday, after eight years in the minority, Nancy Pelosi returned to power as speaker of the House of Representatives. Her party controls 235 seats to the Republicans’ 199. One contest, in North Carolina, has yet to be decided. The Democratic majority is a couple seats larger than the one Pelosi led more than a decade ago. Back then a Republican resided in the White House as well. By the seventh year of his presidency, when some 100 U.S soldiers were killed in Iraq every month and gas on average cost $2.80 per gallon, George W. Bush was about as popular as Donald Trump is today. And in 2007, as we all remember, Pelosi’s Democrats set about enacting universal health care and ending the war in Iraq.

Fooled you! Actually, the victories of the 110th Congress were much more modest: a minimum wage increase, lobbying reform, and a ban of incandescent light bulbs. Health care had to wait for a subsequent Congress and a Democratic president. So did withdrawal from Iraq—though retreat didn’t work out as planned, and America returned, in much smaller numbers, in 2014. The history of Nancy Pelosi’s tenure as speaker is a reminder of the limitations and tenuousness of political victories (and defeats).

I suspect Pelosi is aware of this lesson. I doubt her caucus is. More than a quarter of them are freshmen, many are young, and two are self-avowed democratic socialists. They are inclined to believe history began when Barack Obama entered Mile High Stadium in Denver. It’s an impression encouraged by cable news, which spent the run up to Pelosi’s investiture celebrating the youth, diversity, and ambition of the House Democratic freshmen. And yet, for all the talk of Alison Spanberger and the “Badass Caucus,” of how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib “aren’t going to take no for an answer,” of grand plans for a Green New Deal and Medicare for All, there remains the inescapable reality of power. Democrats don’t really have it. Indeed, they have even less than the last time Pelosi became speaker.

Yes, they can fire their subpoena cannon at the White House. They can interrogate cabinet officials, subpoena Jared and Ivanka, leak scoops to reporters, maybe force a cabinet official or two to resign, if any are left. When Mueller delivers his findings, they could begin impeachment proceedings. But impeachment, like progressive legislation, won’t get far. A decade ago the House could pass bills and hope that Harry Reid would persuade his Democratic Senate majority to support them. All Pelosi had to worry about was President Bush’s veto. Now, Pelosi has to deal with Mitch McConnell’s Republican Senate even before her policies reach Donald Trump.

She’s in the same situation as John Boehner, who became speaker after the Tea Party election in 2010. No one envied Boehner.

The main product of the Tea Party Congress (2011-2013) was frustration. Votes to repeal Obamacare went nowhere. Negotiations over a rise in the debt ceiling produced a fiscal sequester that hardly anyone liked. Through it all, Boehner faced sniping from within his party by newcomers short on experience but long on ideological zeal. It so wore him down that he resigned his post in 2015. His replacement’s tenure was even briefer.