RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2019/10/four-stages-never-trump-republicans-daniel-greenfield/

There are four stages of Never Trumper Republicans, much like the four stages of grief, and the most pivotal of these is the open letter to lefties.

James Comey did one of those. As did Jennifer Rubin. Also, I believe Max Boot. And innumerable other quislings. Now Tom Nichols has one.

We don’t agree about everything; still, we get along pretty well, you and I, centered around the daily understanding that Donald Trump is a dire threat to the United States. That’s why I’ve been comfortable in my public commitment to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, come hell or high water. You’ve mostly responded to this by…

Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? I feel like you’re not doing your part here.

We take our walks together and we discuss the importance of getting rid of Donald Trump. And yet, when we both leave for work in the morning, it feels like only one of us is really, truly serious about that.

Here we go.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/rashida_and_the_law.html

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/rashida_and_the_law.html

Rashida opens mouth, inserts foot.

It seems that the charming and attractive Rashida Talib is still running off at the mouth about arresting people, specifically administration officials who refuse to respond to the House’s “impeachment” subpoenas.

According to Rashida:

“There have been actual serious conversations about what the logistics would look like… if we did have to force someone through a court order to come before the Congressional committee… she said. “This is pretty uncharted territory for many of us and even for Congress.”

Of course there have been. Leftists yearn for police powers, for the ability to reach out and punish anyone they see, with a ferocity unknown to normal human beings. That was true during the French Revolution, and will be true of the Ganymede revolt of 2250.

There’s only one problem, as I see it. To arrest somebody, you have to be able to appeal to authority, and there’s no authority involved here. An impeachment process has not be formally begun, therefore, the House has absolutely no grounds for subpoenaing anybody. It’s quite similar to all the jabber about “obstruction of justice” surrounding the Mueller Report. If there’s no crime, there’s no obstruction. You’d figure an institution packed full of lawyers would have some grasp of actual law.

Rashida opens mouth, inserts foot.

It seems that the charming and attractive Rashida Talib is still running off at the mouth about arresting people, specifically administration officials who refuse to respond to the House’s “impeachment” subpoenas.

According to Rashida:

“There have been actual serious conversations about what the logistics would look like… if we did have to force someone through a court order to come before the Congressional committee… she said. “This is pretty uncharted territory for many of us and even for Congress.”

Of course there have been. Leftists yearn for police powers, for the ability to reach out and punish anyone they see, with a ferocity unknown to normal human beings. That was true during the French Revolution, and will be true of the Ganymede revolt of 2250.

There’s only one problem, as I see it. To arrest somebody, you have to be able to appeal to authority, and there’s no authority involved here. An impeachment process has not be formally begun, therefore, the House has absolutely no grounds for subpoenaing anybody. It’s quite similar to all the jabber about “obstruction of justice” surrounding the Mueller Report. If there’s no crime, there’s no obstruction. You’d figure an institution packed full of lawyers would have some grasp of actual law.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Accusations fly furiously around corridors of power in Washington and in newsrooms across the country. Neighbor no longer speaks to neighbor; children are distanced from their parents; colleges promote ideologies rather than encourage debate. Doctors tell us we have become stressed due to harsh and unrelenting political attacks. Serious debate is ignored, yet issues remain: What kind of government do we want? A state whose tentacles reach deep into our lives, or one based on self-rule that values individual independence? Should we tilt toward socialism or rely on free-market capitalism?

For almost a century, the nation has moved away from small government and citizen representatives, toward big government and professional politicians, bureaucrats and administrators – toward a “deep state,” defined by Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal, as “consisting of career civil servants who have growing power in the administrative state but work in the shadows.” Both political parties have perpetuated this trend. Even under Reagan, for example, Washington bureaucracy continued to grow, albeit at a slower pace. But the Left has always been more aggressive. Think of FDR and the New Deal, LBJ and the Great Society and Barack Obama “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

As to when and where it began – the trust-busting policies of regulatory reformers in the late 19th Century, the appointment of J. Edgar Hoover as director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924, or the Alphabet Agencies of Franklin Roosevelt’s thirteen-year reign – is less important than recognition that an unfortunate consequence has been the expanding influence and power of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats and administrators. It has been cozy, tacit arrangements that allowed both political parties to accommodate their special interests. It has permitted political and personal loyalty to germinate and expand within agencies – loyalty toward those who encourage the growth of their responsibilities and treachery toward those who challenge their positions.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/10/14/lgbtq_town_hall_showcased_democratic_extremism_141484.html

Last week the Equality Town Hall held by my network, CNN, plainly revealed the radicalism that drives the Democratic Party today. In stark terms, candidates and audience members advocated for wholesale government-compelled social engineering to comport with their liberal secular-humanist agenda. Such proposals contravene foundational protections of our Constitution and also imperil Democrats’ electoral prospects for 2020.

Robert Francis O’Rourke continued his steady philosophical assault upon the Bill of Rights. Apparently, O’Rourke is no longer content to merely eviscerate the Second Amendment with his plan to confiscate tens of millions of firearms from law-abiding citizens. Like most leftists who disrespect the Second Amendment, he also promotes hollowing out the First Amendment as well. CNN’s Don Lemon asked if religious institutions should “lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage.” The candidate answered in the affirmative, stating, “There can be no benefit, no reward, no tax break for anyone, or any institution … that denies the full human rights, and the full civil rights of every single one of us.”

In a sense, O’Rourke did America a favor by stating plainly the true goal of social liberal activists: to bring private groups into full compliance with their postmodernist precepts, by compulsion if necessary. The practical application of such extremism would clearly bankrupt mosques, Catholic schools, and faith-based charitable service organizations across our land. But such destruction is not a side effect but rather the very goal of this fascistic statism.

Consider the perversion of the inverse policy: What if traditional conservatives had tried to revoke the tax-exempt status of pro-gay-marriage mainline Protestant churches before our laws totally changed the millennia-old definition of marriage? Liberals would have rightly condemned such an encroachment, and the courts would have surely protected the rights of progressive churches to privately define marriage according to their beliefs. After all, our government should have no more say in determining a faith’s doctrinal beliefs on marriage than it does regarding baptism or bar/bat mitzvahs.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup

I’ve lived through a few coups. They’re insane, random, and terrifying, like watching sports, except your political future depends on the score.

The kickoff begins when a key official decides to buck the executive. From that moment, government becomes a high-speed head-counting exercise. Who’s got the power plant, the airport, the police in the capital? How many department chiefs are answering their phones? Who’s writing tonight’s newscast?

When the KGB in 1991 tried to reassume control of the crumbling Soviet Union by placing Mikhail Gorbachev under arrest and attempting to seize Moscow, logistics ruled. Boris Yeltsin’s crew drove to the Russian White House in ordinary cars, beating KGB coup plotters who were trying to reach the seat of Russian government in armored vehicles. A key moment came when one of Yeltsin’s men, Alexander Rutskoi – who two years later would himself lead a coup against Yeltsin – prevailed upon a Major in a tank unit to defy KGB orders and turn on the “criminals.”

We have long been spared this madness in America. Our head-counting ceremony was Election Day. We did it once every four years.

That’s all over, in the Trump era.

On Thursday, news broke that two businessmen said to have “peddled supposedly explosive information about corruption involving Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden” were arrested at Dulles airport on “campaign finance violations.” The two figures are alleged to be bagmen bearing “dirt” on Democrats, solicited by Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/impeachment-process-political-not-legal/

It’s a political process, not a legal one — and the political climate is anything but static.

What is impeachment for? Seems like a simple question. Constitutionally speaking, it also appears to have a simple answer: to cite and remove from power a president guilty of wrongdoing.

Aye, there’s the rub. What sort of wrongdoing warrants removal from power?

I’d wager that the flames of impeachment were stoked more this week by President Trump’s foreign policy than they have been by any purported impeachable offense his opponents have conjured up over the last three years. By redeploying a few dozen American troops in Syria, the president acceded to a Turkish invasion of territory occupied by the Kurds. Ostensibly, that has nothing to do with the impeachment frenzy over Ukraine, whose government Democrats accuse the president of pressuring to dig up dirt on a political rival. But Turkey’s aggression could crack the president’s impeachment firewall.

There is rage over Trump’s decision. It is rage over a policy choice, not over high crimes and misdemeanors. Only the most blindly angry can doubt the lawfulness of the commander-in-chief’s movement of U.S. soldiers, even though it rendered inevitable the Turks’ rout of the Kurds.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/06/somalis_have_changed_minneapolis.html

Somalis have Changed Minneapolis=By Sunny Lohman

Everyone not lying to themselves predicted when the federal government under Bill Clinton – aided and abetted by Lutheran Social Services, Catholic Charities and World Relief Minnesota — plopped 30,000 Somalis down into the midst of the kind, virtue-signaling, eager-to-help Midwesterners of Minneapolis (of which I am one) that it would lead to some grave consequences for our community.

Now, due to continuing refugee placements as well as chain migration there are an estimated 80,000 Somalis living in the Twin Cities metro area, or more like 79,000 if you subtract those who’ve left the country to join terrorist organizations like ISIS.

Anyhoo, here’s a week Minneapolitans had with their Somali neighbors last month:

On Wednesday, May 15th a couple of University students were attacked on campus at the East Bank Train station by two Somali thugs. It was an attempted robbery that the guys rebuffed sustaining injuries that required a hospital visit.

On Thursday, May 16th two Somalis burned down the pavilion at Lake Calhoun [or Lake Bde Maka Ska if you’re a virtue signaler) an eating and hanging out meeting place in the heart of the city enjoyed by generations of Americans around the prettiest city lake you’ve ever seen. This is in the most expensive neighborhood in Minneapolis.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/11/crazy-and-woke-on-the-western-front-of-progressive-insanity/

There are alternatives to destroying our cities and suburbs in order to feed profits to investors and power to corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, but they will require a realignment that allows conservatives and liberals to join together to demand quick, decisive, cost-effective action.

The reason progressive extremism persists in America today is because progressives either are making money by embracing progressive policies, or because progressives are not living on the front lines of progressive insanity.

It is hard to imagine a place that would have an electorate any more progressive than Venice Beach. Located on the shores of West Los Angeles in California’s 33rd Congressional District, Venice Beach is represented by Democrat Ted Lieu, who was reelected in 2018 with 70 percent of the vote. But a revolution is brewing in Venice Beach, because Venice Beach is on the front lines of progressive insanity.

Thanks to progressive ideology as expressed in laws and court rulings, in California today you cannot arrest and hold vagrants for petty theft or possession of hard drugs; you cannot move them out of public spaces unless you can provide them with free and “permanent supportive housing;” you cannot commit demonstrably insane people to asylums; and publicly funded shelters must offer food and urgent care without any preconditions whatsoever.

The Streets of Venice Beach Are An Open Sewer

Testimonials from residents of Venice Beach provide ample evidence of what happens when you impose these progressive policies on an urban area bordered on the west by some of the most inviting beaches and agreeable weather in the world. An estimated 1,200 homeless people have set up permanent encampments in this three square mile beach town. They almost never use actual toilets.

According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, the average human produces one pound of feces per day. Simple math therefore tells us that every week, the homeless population deposits more than four tons of feces into the gutters and onto the sidewalks, driveways, and lawns of Venice Beach residents, where they are dutifully hosed into the sewers and eventually make their way into the ocean.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/whistleblowers-and-the-real-deep-state-11570832622

House Democrats are plowing ahead with an impeachment effort inspired by accusations from an anonymous “whistleblower.” The lawmakers may allow the witness to testify anonymously, sources who themselves remained anonymous told the Washington Post this week. It’s as if the whole effort is designed to confirm President Trump’s complaint that the “deep state” is determined to sabotage his presidency.

By “deep state,” Mr. Trump seems to mean any current or former federal employee who works to undermine him. I find that definition too broad, and it misses an important distinction. Officials like James Comey and John Brennan, respectively former directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, were appointed by politicians and are subject to some public scrutiny and political accountability.

The “deep state”—if we are to use the term—is better defined as consisting of career civil servants, who have growing power in the administrative state but work in the shadows. As government grows, so do the challenges of supervising a bureaucracy swelling in both size and power. Emboldened by employment rules that make it all but impossible to fire career employees, this internal civil “resistance” has proved willing to take ever more outrageous actions against the president and his policies, using the tools of both traditional and social media.

Government-employed resisters received a call to action within weeks of the new administration. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates became acting attorney general on Mr. Trump’s inauguration and Loretta Lynch’s resignation. A week later, the president signed an executive order restricting travel from seven Middle Eastern and African countries. Ms. Yates instructed Justice Department lawyers not to defend the order in court on the grounds that she was not convinced it was “consistent” with the department’s “responsibilities” or even “lawful.” She decreed: “For as long as I am Acting Attorney General, the Department of Justice will not present arguments in defense of the Executive Order.”

Mr. Trump fired her that day, but he shouldn’t have had to. Her obligation was to defend the executive order, or to resign if she felt she couldn’t. Nobody elected Sally Yates.  CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/trump_comes_out_swinging.html

As he did Thursday night in Minnesota, President Trump came out swinging in Lake Charles, Louisiana on Friday.

“The Democrats’ policies are crazy, their politicians are corrupt, their candidates are terrible, and they know they can’t win on election day, so they’re pursuing an illegal, invalid, and unconstitutional bullsh*t impeachment.”

The President was ostensibly in town to support two Republican candidates running in a typically oddball Louisiana gubernatorial election featuring Republicans U.S. Rep. Ralph Abraham and businessman Eddie Rispone against incumbent Democrat John Bel Edwards. But in truth it was Donald Trump vs. the political establishment, the media, and the Deep State.

“This is the witch hunt,” Trump said. “They’ve been trying to stop us for three years with a lot of crap.”

“All of our nation’s gains are put at risk by a rage-filled Democrat party that has gone completely insane. The Democrats are fighting to restore the wretched political class that… surrendered our sovereignty, flooded our cities with drugs and crimes and bogged us down in one foreign war after another.”

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had been raked over the coals on Thursday. Last night it was Nancy Pelosi’s turn.

“I used to think she loved the country. She hates the country. Nancy Pelosi hates the United States of America, because she wouldn’t be doing this.”

Joe Biden, not to forget Hunter, also came in for a beating: “Can you imagine if Don Jr. or Eric Trump, or if our beautiful Ivanka… if they walked out with $1.5 billion? They would be saying, ‘Where’s the nearest cell?’”