RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-consumer-confidence-rose-in-september-1537885594?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=pop&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Consumer confidence hit an 18-year high in September, a positive indicator for spending going into the holiday shopping season, as robust job growth and a strong economic outlook bolstered Americans’ expectations for the future.

The Conference Board, a private research group, said Tuesday its index of consumer confidence rose to 138.4, up from 134.7 in August—the highest level since September 2000, which represented the late stages of the 1990s technology boom. An index reading of 100 represents how households saw the economy in 1985.

The report came on the heels of a separate University of Michigan survey that said sentiment jumped in early September to the second-highest level since 2004—behind only the reading in March of this year.

Economists have voiced concerns about trade and tariffs as risks to economic growth over the next 12 months. For consumers, however, the issue isn’t registering.

“We are kind of in a little bit of a Goldilocks moment in the economy. I think things are really strong for the consumer,” said David Jaffe, chief executive of Ascena Retail Group Inc., during an earnings call this week. The company, one of the largest women’s clothing retailers with brands like Dressbarn and Ann Taylor, reported its first positive quarter of overall comparable-stores sales growth in more than three years Monday.

“The tariffs, while it’s not going to impact apparel very much, haven’t really hit yet. We’ve seen unemployment go down. What we’re seeing, I think, is maybe a little bit of a rebound due to a lack of shopping for apparel over the last couple of years,” Mr. Jaffe said.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sen-feinstein-clean-up-your-mess-1537915772?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=pop&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Republicans and others who live in California and are appalled by the Senate’s Brett Kavanaugh spectacle at least can do something about it. In November, they can hold their noses and pull the lever for Dianne Feinstein’s ultraliberal challenger and thereby send the state’s four-term Senate doyenne down to landslide defeat.

Mrs. Feinstein’s ending an otherwise a long and creditable career in humiliation and ignominy would be justice not only because of her culpable role in the Kavanaugh travesty. It would be poetic for her to finish under a real and recent cloud given actions that have cast a cloud over Judge Kavanaugh because of unprovable, last-minute claims about how he may have behaved in his teens.

Mrs. Feinstein could learn something from the New York Times in its own debunking of the latest ill-sourced Kavanaugh allegation, in which the paper says it contacted dozens of potential witnesses and found none who would verify a complaint floated Sunday in backhanded fashion by the New Yorker magazine.

Lesson: You don’t need the FBI. Private investigators are available. Opposition researchers can be hired—just not the Fusion GPS kind, who specialize in producing anonymous, unsubstantiated slurs rather than checking them out.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/25/anti-kavanaugh-mob-chases-sen-ted-cruz-wife-restaurant/

A mob of people calling themselves democratic socialists, LGBT activists, anarchists, anti-fascists, and anti-racists descended upon Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife while they were out to dinner last night. They chanted “We believe survivors,” surrounded the Cruzes, blocked their exit, and screamed in their faces, show videos of the altercation. Cruz can be heard saying “Let my wife through.”

The hecklers also shouted “[Cruz’s Senate opponent] Beto is way hotter than you, dude.” After the Cruzes exited through an side door, protesters can be heard shouting “Ted Cruz and Brett Kavanaugh are best friends!” and “Cancel Kavanaugh for women’s rights!”

“This is a message to Ted Cruz, Bret Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, and the rest of the racist, sexist, transphobic, and homophobic right-wing scum,” wrote Smash Racism DC in a statement taking responsibility for the harassment. “You are not safe. We will find you. We will expose you. We will take from you the peace you have taken from so many others.”

The incident appears to begin with a woman walking up to the Cruzes in the restaurant, calling herself a constituent and victim of sexual assault, and demanding to know how Cruz plans to vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. “Do you believe survivors, sir?” she demands, as her mob chants “We believe survivors” in the background.Democrats are charging, based purely on hazy and uncorroborated claims of alcohol-fueled sexual encounters nearly 40 years ago, that Kavanaugh is a vicious pervert. Cruz sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee that is slated to receive testimony Thursday from one woman making such accusations. But her legal team has already caused the testimony to be rescheduled six times. Such testimony would put Christine Blasey Ford under oath and liable to perjury charges.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/408250-rosenstein-guided-by-politics-not-a-pursuit-of-justice

The New York Times’s blockbuster report that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein broached the subject of seeking President Trump’s ouster cannot be separated from his appointment of a special counsel.

From the start of the Trump administration, politics has overwhelmed law enforcement. It was the political uproar stoked by the May 9, 2017, firing of FBI Director James Comey that induced Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel, Robert Mueller, to investigate President Trump. There was insufficient basis in law to do this. But that turned out to be of no more moment than the complete absence of any basis to remove the president under the 25th Amendment, the harebrained proposal the Times reports Rosenstein was floating at exactly the same time.

To be clear, the special counsel regulations require the existence of a factual basis for a criminal investigation — a crime — before a prosecutor is assigned. Moreover, a special counsel, who by regulation is recruited from outside the government, is not supposed to be assigned absent a Department of Justice (DOJ) conflict of interest so profound that the department is ethically barred from investigating the crime in question.

Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein could satisfy neither of these conditions. To this day, he has never specified a crime the president is suspected of committing. And there is no conflict; Mueller not only recruited prosecutors from the Justice Department, he has transitioned the two Russia indictments he’s brought to Justice Department components.

Both of these actions would be improper if there were an actual conflict. But, of course, there isn’t one because, again, Rosenstein has not specified a crime. It is the crime allegedly committed by a president that creates a conflict for the president’s Justice Department and calls for an outside prosecutor.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/kavanaugh-nomination-battle-like-orwells-1984/

Truth, due process, evidence, rights of the accused: All are swept aside in pursuit of the progressive agenda.

George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is no longer fiction. We are living it right now.

Google techies planned to massage Internet searches to emphasize correct thinking. A member of the so-called deep state, in an anonymous op-ed, brags that its “resistance” is undermining an elected president. The FBI, CIA, DOJ, and NSC were all weaponized in 2016 to ensure that the proper president would be elected — the choice adjudicated by properly progressive ideology. Wearing a wire is now redefined as simply flipping on an iPhone and recording your boss, boy- or girlfriend, or co-workers.

But never has the reality that we are living in a surreal age been clearer than during the strange cycles of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

In Orwell’s world of 1984 Oceania, there is no longer a sense of due process, free inquiry, rules of evidence and cross examination, much less a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Instead, regimented ideology — the supremacy of state power to control all aspects of one’s life to enforce a fossilized idea of mandated quality — warps everything from the use of language to private life.

Oceania’s Rules

Senator Diane Feinstein and the other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee had long sought to destroy the Brett Kavanaugh nomination. Much of their paradoxical furor over his nomination arises from the boomeranging of their own past political blunders, such as when Democrats ended the filibuster on judicial nominations, in 2013. They also canonized the so-called 1992 Biden Rule, which holds that the Senate should not consider confirming the Supreme Court nomination of a lame-duck president (e.g., George H. W. Bush) in an election year.