RUTHFULLY YOURS

The FBI admits the Left’s electoral collusion conspiracy theory is unsubstantiated but still refuses to distance itself from the discredited Russia propaganda dossier Democrats paid Fusion GPS to create to undermine President Trump’s candidacy.

Testifying behind closed doors in Congress the week before Christmas, embattled FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe reportedly “declined to criticize the dossier’s 35 pages of salacious and criminal charges against Donald Trump and his aides, but he said it remains largely unverified, according to a source familiar with ongoing congressional inquiries.”

According to the Washington Times, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is broadening the scope of its investigation into the collusion theory. The panel is looking at who funded the dossier and whether it was used by the FBI. It is also examining recent misconduct inside the Justice Department and the FBI, as well as the Obama administration’s unmasking of Americans caught up in foreigner-surveillance.

As for McCabe, his entanglement in Democrat politics has had President Trump crying foul. McCabe has said he will retire from the FBI in the spring. He served as acting director of the FBI from May 9 when President Trump fired then-director James Comey until Aug. 2 when new director Christopher Wray took over. While serving as acting FBI director, McCabe was involved in the email investigation.

McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, was a Democratic candidate in 2015 for the Virginia State Senate. Her campaign received nearly $675,000 in donations from the Virginia Democratic Party and Common Good VA, a political action committee of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), a slippery longtime Clinton flunky. Mr. McCabe failed to recuse himself from the Hillary Clinton email probe until Nov. 1, 2016, which was four days after Comey, then the FBI director, announced the agency had reopened the investigation into the emails after finding new data on computer hard drives belonging to former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), the now-imprisoned sex-offender husband of Hillary’s top lieutenant, Huma Abedin. It was also eight days after the ties between Mrs. McCabe and McAuliffe became public knowledge.

It’s that time of the year when media outlets write up the people and trends who defined the year while ignoring the man who redefined it.

2017 was the year that the United States of America got up off its knees. It was the year that we stopped following the world and started leading it. It was the year that our booming economy accomplished the impossible. It was the year that we became a great nation again.

And one man is responsible for that.

President Trump promised to make America great again. And every day, it’s happening. Factory workers and small businessmen, farmers and ranchers, soldiers and police officers are waking up to a renewed America. Time chose a social justice hashtag as its ‘Thing of the Year’. We’re choosing the man who turned the country around as our “Man of the Year”.

When President Trump promised 4% economic growth, the media herded together economists to prove it couldn’t happen. CNN surveyed 11 economists and Bloomberg asked 80 economists. They agreed it was impossible. 2% growth was the best that we could hope for. And we would have to get used to that.

And then the GDP growth estimate for the fourth quarter of 2017 approached 4%.

Americans are realizing that maybe we don’t have to just get used to dividing up the last torn shreds of a failing economy between leftist crony billionaires and their officially entitled victim groups.

Maybe we can do better.

The S&P 500 Index has gone up 20% this year and the Dow is up 25%. Holiday shopping season sales are up almost 5% over last year. Consumer confidence is at a 17-year high. The unemployment rate is at a 17-year low. The manufacturing industry just had its best month of job gains for the year.

All of this isn’t just a matter of dollars and cents. It’s the knowledge that things are getting better. You can’t fake it. The media spent eight years promising a recovery that no one believed in. Obama announced that the recovery had happened more times than he ended the Iraq War. And just like the end of the war, it never happened. It’s happening now because people are living a better future.

Call it… making America great again. Not for government officials, but for ordinary Americans.

Obama made life great for government bureaucrats. In the era of hope and steal, the bedroom communities of Washington D.C. became the wealthiest counties in the country. Americans lost their jobs, veterans lost their lives and the government bureaucracy grew fat on their misery.

President Trump is on the hunt for a 2018 issue—a strong follow-up to his tax-cut victory that will motivate voters and gain bipartisan support. Democrats are pushing for an infrastructure bill, inviting the president to spend with them. House GOP leaders are mulling entitlement reform—a noble goal, if unlikely in a midterm cycle.

Fortunately for the president, there’s a better idea out there that’s already a Trump theme. It’s also a sure winner with the public, so Republicans ought to be able to pressure Democrats to join.

Let 2018 be the year of civil-service reform—a root-and-branch overhaul of the government itself. Call it Operation Drain the Swamp.

When Candidate Trump first referred to “the swamp,” he was talking about the bog of Beltway lobbyists and “establishment” politicians. But President Trump’s first year in office has revealed that the real swamp is the unchecked power of those who actually run Washington: the two million members of the federal bureaucracy. That civil-servant corps was turbocharged by the Obama administration’s rule-making binge, and it now has more power—and more media enablers—than ever. We live in an administrative state, run by a left-leaning, self-interested governing class that is actively hostile to any president with a deregulatory or reform agenda.

It’s Lois Lerner, the IRS official who used her powers to silence conservative nonprofits. It’s the “anonymous” officials who leak national-security secrets daily. It’s the General Services Administration officials who turned over Trump transition emails to Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the absence of a warrant. It’s the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Leandra English, who tried to stage an agency coup. It’s the EPA’s “Scientific Integrity Official” who has taken it upon herself to investigate whether Scott Pruitt is fit to serve in the office to which he was duly appointed. It’s the thousands of staffers across the federal government who continue to pump out reports on global warming and banking regulations that undermine administration policy.

More broadly, it is a federal workforce whose pay and benefits are completely out of whack with the private sector. A 2011 American Enterprise Institute study found federal employees receive wages 14% higher than what similar workers in the private sector earn. Factor in benefits and the compensation premium leaps to 61%. Nice, huh?

These huge payouts are the result of automatic increases, bonuses, seniority rules and gold-plated pensions that are all but extinct in the private sector. The federal workforce is also shielded by rules that make it practically impossible to fire or discipline bad employees, to relocate talent, or to reassign duties. These protections embolden bureaucrats to violate rules. Why was Ms. Lerner allowed to retire with full benefits? Because denying them would have cost far more—and required years of effort. CONTINUE AT SITE

Cop critics who assiduously ignored the 20 percent increase in the national homicide rate over the previous two years have suddenly become enthusiastic purveyors of crime statistics. Fueling their newfound interest in crime data is the announcement that the New York City homicide rate is at a near-60-year low. That homicide drop shows that proactive policing is irrelevant to crime levels, say these policing skeptics. The New York Police Department’s reported-stop activity plummeted earlier in this decade as a result of a groundless trilogy of racial-profiling lawsuits against the department. Yet crime in New York ultimately continued its downward trajectory. Therefore, proactive policing like pedestrian stops is unnecessary, these cop critics say.

Their arguments are specious.

New York City’s formerly high-crime neighborhoods have experienced a stunning degree of gentrification over the last 15 years, thanks to the proactive-policing-induced conquest of crime. It is that gentrification which is now helping fuel the ongoing crime drop. Urban hipsters are flocking to areas that once were the purview of drug dealers and pimps, trailing in their wake legitimate commerce and street life, which further attracts law-abiding activity and residents in a virtuous cycle of increasing public safety. The degree of demographic change is startling. In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, for example, the number of white residents rose 1,235 percent from 2000 to 2015, while the black population decreased by 17 percent, reports City Lab. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, the number of whites rose 610 percent over that same decade and a half; the black population was down 22 percent. Central Harlem’s white population rose 846 percent; the black share dropped 10 percent. In 2000, whites were about three-quarters of the black population in Brownsville-Ocean Hill; by 2015, there were twice as many whites as blacks. In 2000, whites were one-third of the black population in Crown Heights North and Prospect Heights; now they exceed the black population by 20,000. The Brooklyn Navy Yards has now been declared the next cool place to be by the tech industry. Business owners are moving their residences as well as their enterprises to the area.

This demographic transformation has enormous implications for crime. A black New Yorker is 50 times more likely to commit a shooting than a white New Yorker, according to perpetrator identifications provided to the police by witnesses to, and victims of, those shootings. Those victims are overwhelmingly minority themselves. When the racial balance of a neighborhood changes radically, given those crime disparities, its violent-crime rate will as well. (This racial crime disparity reflects the breakdown of the black family and the high percentage of black males — upwards of 80 percent in some neighborhoods — being raised by single mothers.)

Patagonian Toothfish, the rejected ugly, oily, bottom dwelling toothy fish was rebranded Chilean Sea Bass and became an expensive delicacy for gullible millennials.

So it is with Socialism, a rejected, ugly, oily, bottom dwelling ideology that enriched the elite and enslaved the masses was rebranded Social Democracy and became a rallying cry for naive 21st century millennials.

It is often useful to look backward to move forward so let’s review. Karl Marx, author of The Communist Manifesto, stated unequivocally, “Democracy is the road to socialism.” Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Russian Communist Party, affirmed, “The goal of socialism is communism.” Social democracy began in the late 19th early 20th century as a political ideology advocating an evolutionary and peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism using established political processes to effect the transition rather than the revolutionary processes of Marxism.

The Socialist Party of America had been unable to field a successful presidential candidate for decades so in 1972 the Socialist Party of America officially rebranded itself and changed its name to Social Democrats, USA. “The name ‘Socialist’ was replaced by ‘Social Democrats’ because many Americans associated the word ‘socialism’ with Soviet Communism.” Anyone familiar with Marx and Lenin correctly associated the two which is why rebranding was necessary to eliminate its negative image and conceal its identity.

The thing about rebranding is that it does not change the product itself – only the name changes and its psychological associations.

Rebranding Toothfish as Chilean Sea Bass was a successful marketing strategy designed to sell a rejected fish in the food industry. Similarly, rebranding the Socialist Party of America as Social Democrats was a successful marketing strategy designed to sell a rejected ideology in the political sphere. Both were highly successful.

The democratic socialism currently embraced by the left-wing radicals that dominate the Democrat Party in America has embraced identity politics to increase its membership with inclusive promises of “social justice and income equality.” These slogan promises disguise the reality of socialism because, like the Patagonian Toothfish, changing its name does not change what socialism is.