RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/10/28/amy_klobuchar_you_are_the_worst.html

Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Racket News.

Minnesota Senator and Hindenburg presidential candidacy Amy Klobuchar sent a letter (h/t ReclaimTheNet.org) to Jeff Bezos demanding that he enjoin Alexa from citing “unvetted sources,” specifically Substack and Rumble. No hell is hot enough for this person.

Referring to a Washington Post story complaining that Alexa cited Substack, she wrote: “When asked about the 2020 presidential election, it appears that some answers were provided by contributors instead of verified news sources.”

Amy Klobuchar is the absolute fave of the national media consensus. They love her so much, they speak in italics. “Oh, my God. She’s great. And funny, too!” gushed a cameraman to me in Winterset, Iowa, birthplace of John Wayne, four years ago. He was standing astride an AMY AMY AMY banner in a diner packed with press admirers, who are legion, everywhere. The “funny” legend came courtesy mostly of one joke she repeated everywhere she went, over and over, clinging to the one time Donald Trump bothered to mention her, tweeting about her looking like a “Snow woman.” Funny Amy’s retort?

“I wonder how your hair would fare in a blizzard,” she’d say, in a nasal voice, laugh-snorting at her own joke. In my time following her I heard the joke about five times. By the last I was ready to drive a railroad spike through my foot.

National press tried endlessly to sell the public on “funny” Amy, always emphasizing her geographic origin, as if she were the media’s running mate. The New York Times, in an interview over “dumplings” in which Klobuchar talked about how she thinks about “her own humor and power,” described her act as a “clean, ‘aw, shucks’ approach that conveys her own background as a Midwesterner.” The paper noted: Klobuchar could remember many times when people laughed at her jokes! “She laughs easily… and can recall dozens of her successful zingers.”

NPR did a segment on how “Amy Klobuchar Turns To Humor To Distinguish Herself Among Candidates,” with Mary Louise Kelly abasing herself with the intro, “In the 24-person Democratic presidential field, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has distinguished herself as a comedian.” U.S. News and World Report went with, “How Amy Klobuchar’s Humor Sets Her Apart,” and claimed her ability to “savagely deploy a zinger” would be a “critical element in taking on Donald Trump” (!). Barack Obama gushed that Al Franken was now Minnesota’s “second-funniest Senator,” while the hometown Minnesota Post went with “Amy Klobuchar is Hilarious,” adding — this is real — the following deck:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Amy Klobuchar can legislate, but can she tell a joke? The answer is a resounding “yes” — as in bring-down-the-house, my-stomach-hurts-from-laughing, “yes.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/law-enforcement-must-act-against-antisemitism-fueled-violence-and-intimidation/

Charlie’s post on the rising tide of antisemitism, as well as the indifference (and worse) to it in the media and on American college campuses, should be required reading. Until perusing it, I had missed the sleight of hand in the New York Times’ coverage of the appalling incident Wednesday at the Cooper Union, where Jewish students were barricaded in a library to protect themselves from a pro-Palestinian mob (many of them, as ever, young white radical leftists). Here’s the part of the Times’ report that stopped me in my tracks:

The tensions inflamed by the Israel-Hamas war that have roiled university campuses in the United States spilled into the Cooper Union in New York on Wednesday, with pro-Palestinian protesters pounding on one side of locked library doors and Jewish students on the other. [Emphasis added.]

In his superb news post on this incident, our reporter Zach Kessel includes the relevant video clip (from a post on X/Twitter by Jake Novak). Have a look at it.

I’ll wait — the clip is just six seconds long.

Now, if you just read the report in the Times, you would naturally assume that there was a locked door separating the pro-Palestinian “protesters” and the Jewish students, with both groups pounding on it. But that’s not what happened. The mob pounded on the door. The Jewish students were, as the Times states, “on the other [“side of the locked library doors”]. But they were not pounding. They were huddled and undoubtedly frightened that the mob was going to break through.

How long do you figure the Gray Lady’s reporters and editors agonized over how to frame the story so that it was literally accurate but still utterly mendacious — the “both-sides garbage” that Charlie aptly describes.

When Rich and I recorded the podcast this morning, I repeated an argument I made on X/Twitter yesterday (here): It’s not good enough for government officials (such as President Biden) to rhetorically condemn the shocking incidents of antisemitism-fueled intimidation and violence. The federal and state governments have civil-rights laws on the books that empower them to prosecute. I discussed one of them on the podcast, Section 241 of the federal penal code, which states in pertinent part:

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States . . . they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

The statute has been held constitutional because there is no free-speech right to threaten and intimidate people out of the enjoyment of their basic rights. That kind of incitement, that type of extortionate and intimidating speech, is an inextricable part of mob violence — such that Section 241 provides for potential death-penalty charges or a sentence of life-imprisonment if death results from the threatening conduct, as it sometimes does.

It is atrocious in the United States of America in 2023 that Jewish people are made to live in fear and be intimidated out of enjoying the basic rights we all take for granted — to walk the public streets, move about school and attend classes, attend religious services, wear clothing that signals their adherence to their faith, and so on.

https://www.thefp.com/p/tgif-it-got-worse?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Campus has fallen: Normally TGIF feels like whack-a-mole, in a fun way. The truly crazy things that the left and right do are rare enough, and we can visit them, laugh, and move along to the weekend. These days? It feels like walking through the aftermath of an earthquake. That’s especially true when it comes to American college campuses, which are now just smoking piles of rubble. Like, here’s where the library used to be and oh my god, we’ve lost the entire field of sociology. Which we have. Read on:

Nearly 2,000 sociologists signed a letter that Israel was committing “genocide” and anything Hamas does is justified by the “context.” The University of California, Berkeley Ethnic Studies Faculty Council released a statement condemning anyone who describes what Hamas did as “terrorism,” which is offensive. The student leader of a Wellesley residential house wrote to the entire dorm she oversees: “We firmly believe that there should be no space, no consideration, and no support for Zionism within the Wellesley College community.” Harvard launched a task force to help ensure the pro-Hamas protesters feel safe and can get jobs while also berating any Jews they might find. At George Washington University, students projected onto the side of the school library: GLORY TO OUR MARTYRS and FREE PALESTINE FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA. At Stanford, students are asking the school to pay for round-trip tickets for Muslim students to visit home: “Full round trip covered by University upon the signing of a ceasefire for students to visit their family and friends and grieve properly.” (Okay, fine, that one’s funny; just think of the Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine president calmly trying to explain preferred pronouns to a jihadi upon arrival. On second thought: TGIF will personally sponsor any queer activist who wants to fly to Iran. Honestly, I’m curious what would happen.)

At Cooper Union, pro-Hamas protesters chased a clutch of Jewish students into the library. Video from inside shows the young Jews standing, frightened, as the protesters pound on the doors. What exactly would they have done if they got in? Librarians reportedly offered to hide the students in the attic. The joke writes itself. 

The protesters trying to ram through those doors to beat up the Jewish students might even be up for some extra credit. Professors are starting to offer it to anyone who joins a pro-Hamas protest. 

Here’s Berkeley professor Victoria Huynh: “Hi everyone, We’re offering a field trip and/or extra credit opportunity: (1) Students can attend the national student walkout tomorrow against the settler-colonial occupation of Gaza (info attached below) OR (2) Students can watch a short documentary on Palestine and call/email your local California representative using this linktree. Doing so will either count as a field trip or an extra 5 points on the field trip category of your grade.” First of all: Who talks to college students about “field trips?” Anyway, UCLA professors are also offering extra credit for students who go to pro-Hamas rallies. 

And after graduation, the future that awaits these students trying to ram through the doors also looks golden: here are some of the hundreds of academic job postings for roles in various normal-sounding departments that say they’re only looking for people who want to push for “decolonization.”

Sensing the vibes weren’t right, Columbia postponed its annual Giving Day, which usually raises tens of millions for the school. It’s really hard to shake down Jewish alumni when your faculty and students are also trying to do a pogrom. The list of donors who are pulling their gifts keeps growing: the latest is billionaire Leon Cooperman, who declared on television: “I think these kids at the colleges have shit for brains.”

Hats off to Marc Rowan and everyone who has finally realized that the only response here is to stop funding the Ivy Intifada. Write to tips@thefp.com if you know of more. And to college students reading this: campus has fallen, you’re on your own, good luck!

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-wests-monster-within?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Many in Britain and the west have been looking aghast at a monster within that has reared up and bared its fangs. They have suddenly realised that they are staring at a civilisational crisis.

After the October 7 Hamas pogrom, with the barbaric slaughter of 1,400 men, women and children in southern Israel and the kidnapping into Gaza of more than 220 souls, decent people in the west have been horrified by the massive displays of jubilant bloodlust on the streets of London, New York, Sydney and elsewhere.

They have suddenly realised that there are thousands of their citizens who support Hamas and who call genocide against the Jews “resistance”.

Every day has brought fresh signs of an anti-Jewish psychopathy within their own societies. Countless thousands don’t appear to recognise that Jewish victims of genocidal attack are entitled to human sympathy.

In Britain and America, young people have been tearing down posters bearing pictures of  some of the kidnapped Israeli children.

Over the tannoy on a London Tube train, a driver led a chant of “Free Palestine” among cheering passengers on their way to demonstrate against an Israel that is being targeted by genocidal attack.

At George Washington University in Washington, D.C., messages including “Glory to Our Martyrs,” “Divestment from Zionist Genocide Now” and “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea” were projected for two hours on to the side of a library building.

Police and other authorities have been struggling to protect Jews from the rampant antisemitism that is now brazen, open and ubiquitous.

At Cooper Union College in New York, security officers had to lock Jewish students in the school library against threats from pro-Hamas students, eventually using tunnels to smuggle them out.

In Australia, where a mob chanted “Gas the Jews” in front of the Sydney Opera House, the police advised the Jewish community to “stay home” for their own safety.

In Germany, there have been mass arrests of pro-Hamas demonstrators. In France, President Emanuel Macron is threatening to deport Muslim demonstrators with dual nationality.

Those who are shocked and appalled by this savage support for Hamas observe that it is mainly coming from Muslim fellow-citizens but is also echoed by western “liberals”.

Even though Hamas is committing war crimes by using Gazan civilians as human shields, western “progressives” are accusing Israel of war crimes. Even though Israel has been warning Gazan civilians to flee for their own safety as required by international law, Israel is being accused of breaking international law.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4279277-joe-biden-fights-the-fed/

That’s the takeaway from the most recent report on the economy, showing that the third quarter grew more rapidly than expected in spite of rising interest rates. One reason is obvious: the president and his Democrat allies continue to pump up government spending, boosting growth, even as the Federal Reserve says a slowdown may be necessary to tame inflation “sustainably.”    

Investors are not happy. Stocks are nearing correction territory, down roughly 10 percent from the highs of the summer. There are concerns that interest rate cuts, which might propel another earnings surge and another market rally, are not likely any time soon. 

Simply put, soaring government spending has put the economy on a sugar high.  

In the third quarter, total real GDP grew 2.9 percent year-over-year; federal outlays accelerated, growing 5.5 percent over the year-earlier quarter. It was the largest jump since the height of the pandemic, when Congress and the Trump administration threw everything possible into the economy to stave off a deep recession. It worked; the U.S. experienced a very sharp downdraft when the government decreed that businesses had to shut down, but then it bounced back quickly, thanks to enormous government stimulus spending.  

What has gone so very wrong under President Biden is that federal and local government spending is still growing dramatically, even though the crisis has passed. Some of the increase in the most recent quarter stemmed from national defense spending, reflecting the war in Ukraine, which climbed 4.9 percent year-to-year in real terms. But more consequential was a 6.3 percent boost in nondefense spending. State and local government spending expanded 3.9 percent.  

None of this is surprising. Joe Biden has a singular approach to every issue: spend more money, even as inflation eats away at real incomes.  

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12681617/What-irony-deranged-defence-Hamas-campuses-West-fuelling-counter-revolution-finally-loosen-stranglehold-wokeism.html

Has wokeism jumped the shark? In other words, have the radical Leftists who for years have exercised increasing power in our universities finally gone too far?

I dare to hope so. The recent disgraceful responses to the attacks on Israel that we have seen — from American university campuses to the streets of London and Sydney — have dramatically increased awareness that something is rotten in the state of higher education in the English-speaking world.

Some of us have been battling against the ideological takeover of academia for close to a decade. Each year, we have been getting better organised. But we have struggled to convince people in the real world just how bad things are.

The past three weeks may finally have changed that.

The expression ‘jump the shark’ was coined in 1977 when the scriptwriters of long-running comedy series Happy Days — into their fifth series and getting short of ideas — tried to pep up the storyline by having the main character, Fonzie, preposterously jump over a shark while on water-skis.

‘It is only now people outside academia are noticing – The campus Left’s response to the attacks of October 7 was equally far-fetched and over-the-top — but immeasurably more offensive’

The campus Left’s response to the attacks of October 7 was equally far-fetched and over-the-top — but immeasurably more offensive.

Let’s remind ourselves what happened three weeks ago. Two Gaza-based terrorist groups inspired by Islamist ideology, committed to the destruction of the state of Israel and backed by at least one government, staged a trailer for a second Holocaust. In their savagery, they exceeded even the horrors perpetrated by the Russian butchers of Bucha in Ukraine.

https://www.jns.org/rewarding-hostage-taking-and-terrorism-only-brings-more-of-the-same/

All caring and loving people are delighted that 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz and 79-year-old Nurit Cooper have been released by their Hamas captures. Their grandchildren, in particular, must be thrilled to see their grandmothers again. Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s negotiations to release American hostages, no matter how well-intentioned, only makes it more likely that Yocheved’s and Nurit’s grandchildren will be either murdered or taken hostage in the future.

Hamas, in close consultation with their paymasters Iran, is not releasing the elderly hostages for nothing. They are getting something in return. We are not yet certain what the quid pro quo is. But we do know that Israel’s ground invasion has not yet begun. We also know that the United States is not pressuring Qatar to turnover Hamas leaders like Ismail Haniyeh who are living in five-star hotels in Doha. To the contrary, Qatar is being publicly thanked by the White House for its role in facilitating the negotiations.

We can expect the slow drip of one or two American hostages being released every week or so. We should expect that most, if not all, will be the elderly or infirm. This puts Israel in a difficult position. If Jerusalem attacks while the negotiations are ongoing, it runs the risk of being blamed for the deaths of Americans if Hamas murders them, as they surely will. “If only Israel showed restraint,” her critics will say.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/biden_and_islamophobia.html

I was hoping against hope that Joe Biden would totally and irrevocably expose the evil of radical Islam in speaking of the dastardly Hamas attacks.

But once he asserted that “we must also, without equivocation, denounce Islamophobia” in bis October 2020 speech to the nation, it was patently clear that he had fallen into the clutches of those who would demand utter capitulation to Islamists and thus destroy free speech, and independent thinking.

Islamists would assert that “Islamophobia is “an allegedly irrational fear of losing life or liberty to Islamic rule merely because the laws, sacred texts, and traditional practices of Islam demand the submission of culture, politics, religion and social expression. But, in the real world, it is a product of rational observation.”

After all “[a]n ideology that has as its stated goal to put the entire world under its eternal rule, by force if necessary, and to kill those who stand in its way, criticize it or leave it, is genuinely dangerous. Having some healthy doses of fear and skepticism of such a force is perfectly rational.”

As thereligionofpeace.com explains that:

To obscure the fact that the same problems and reactions follow Islam into every country, no matter how tolerant, a word has been invented to suppress any assessment or criticism of Islam. 

Consider that Hinduism is different in almost every way from every other major world religion, but no one is accused of having Hinduphobia. 

In fact, Islam is the only religion that requires a pretend word to protect against critical inquiry.  The sole purpose of ‘Islamophobia’ is to conflate ideological truth with anti-Muslim bigotry.  The irony is that of all religions, the tenets of Islam are the least tolerant and most hostile toward the others.

https://justthenews.com/government/congress/johnson-begins-house-speakership-focus-debt-inflation-and-border-catastrophe#google_vignette

Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., the newly elected Speaker of the House of Representatives kicked off his leadership role on Wednesday with a commitment to establish a fiscal commission dedicated to rolling back excessive government spending as a way to reduce inflation. He also called on the Senate and White House to stop ignoring the “catastrophe” at the southern border.

Johnson described the nation’s rising $33 trillion national debt as the greatest threat to national security and connected it to the level of inflation that America’s families have been grappling with the last few years.

“The greatest threat to our national security is our nation’s debt and while we’ve been sitting in this room – that’s right – the debt has crossed almost $33.6 trillion and in time it’s going to take me to deliver this speech, we will go up $20 million in debt. It’s unsustainable,” Johnson said on the House floor to a standing ovation from Republicans and a handful of Democrats seated in the chamber.

“We have to get the country back on track. We know this isn’t going to be an easy task and tough decisions will have to be made but the consequences if we don’t act now are unbearable. We have a duty to the American people to explain this to them so they understand it well and we’re going to establish a bipartisan debt commission to begin working on this crisis immediately,” he added after formally taking the gavel.

At this point, Congress has until Nov. 17 to pass a federal budget to avoid a government shutdown. The White House and congressional leaders will soon be negotiating on an agreed upon level of federal spending, which will be the first major test of Johnson’s speakership.

Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., a member of the House Budget Committee, told Just the News on Wednesday that the GOP-led House might pass a temporary spending bill or “Continuing Resolution” through January.

“I don’t like CRs. I definitely don’t like omnibuses being crammed, you know, during the Thanksgiving or the Christmas holidays has got to end,” he said. “But he’ll [Johnson] have some leeway on that. He’s talking about January and we’ll see what the overall numbers look like and then go from there.”

The House has been working on passing single subject appropriations bills to fund each cabinet agency separately, which conservatives argue is a way to reduce wasteful spending. The House lost time in that process given that votes were frozen while the GOP conference searched for a speaker after McCarthy’s ousting. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/department-of-justice-congress-spying-jason-foster-empower-oversight-f2d6235e?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Justice Department’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation is the fiasco that keeps on giving, and look no further than this week’s revelations of abuse of power. The latest news is that Justice snooped on the Congressional investigators who dared to conduct oversight of its snooping on the 2016 Trump campaign.

Numerous current and former congressional staffers have learned that Justice subpoenaed their personal phone and email records in 2017, likely under the pretext of a leak investigation. The targets included Republican and Democratic staffers in the Senate and House.

***

They join staffers and Members of the House Intelligence Committee, who over the past two years said they were notified by Google or

Apple

that Justice seized their data. By our count, executive-branch prosecutors have now been caught fishing through the records of more than a dozen employees of the congressional branch. DOJ’s inspector general is probing the matter.

Last week Google notified Jason Foster, Sen. Chuck Grassley’s former chief investigative counsel on the Judiciary Committee, that Justice sought and received Mr. Foster’s personal records. In a subsequent Freedom of Information Act request to Justice, Mr. Foster’s nonprofit, Empower Oversight, lays out the scope of Justice’s search.

The FOIA letter to Justice says Google received a federal subpoena on Sept. 12, 2017, for records related to a Foster family telephone number, as well as other accounts that are redacted but that Empower Oversight believes belonged to other staffers.

“For each of the listed telephone and email accounts, the subpoena compelled Google to release customer or subscriber information, as well as subscribers’ names, addresses, local and long distance telephone connection records, text message logs, records of session times and durations, length of service and types of service utilized for the period from December 1, 2016 to May 1, 2017,” says the letter. DOJ wanted to know Mr. Foster’s sources and methods.

Recall what was going on at that time. The Washington Post in 2017 reported on a wiretapped phone call between incoming Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak—an egregious leak of classified information. The Senate Judiciary Committee sought answers from DOJ about the Flynn probe and the leak.

DOJ provided few answers to Congress, though in an effort to justify its snooping it revealed that it also had a surveillance warrant against former Trump aide Carter Page. Details of that classified Page warrant soon leaked to the press, via stories that sought to bolster the FBI’s narrative of Trump-Russia collusion.

At the time DOJ was essentially run by career officials, after then Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from Trump-Russia questions, while former FBI Director James Comey had been fired that May.