RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/colin-kaepernick-nike-ad-democrats-midterm-message/

Nike has set a political trap for Democrats ahead of November’s midterm elections, and the party’s candidates are walking right into it.

The Democrats’ winning midterm campaign message would seem simple enough: Trump is bad and must be opposed. Yet at the moment the party risks being associated with a somewhat less attractive message: The American flag is bad and must be opposed.

Last week, left-wing Democrat Ayanna Pressley ousted long-term incumbent Michael Capuano from the John F. Kennedy/Tip O’Neill House seat in the Democratic primary while praising the NFL anti-flag protests, which her opponent called “wrong.” Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke says — in Texas! — that there is “nothing more American” than kneeling for the national anthem. The judicious center-left New York Times columnist David Leonhardt notes in his daily newsletter that “the anthem is a trap for Democrats.”

That Nike rolled out Colin Kaepernick as its new spokesman not only knocked a couple of billion dollars off the value of the company, it also amounts to an in-kind campaign contribution to the Republican party. The Left and its base of activists, pundits, and (increasingly) woke capitalists simply can’t let this issue go, much less acknowledge that its flag-dissing is conceptually flawed. Demonizing a huge population based on stereotypes derived from the actions of a few of its members is exactly the kind of anti-American impulse that liberals once stood so valiantly against.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/09/10/maxine_waters_impeachment_impeachment_impeachment_impeachment_im_gonna_get_him.html

The California Congresswoman spoke about impeaching President Trump while accepting an award from the Stonewall Young Democrats on Saturday in Los Angeles.

She said she was upset by California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein apologizing to Brett Kavanaugh for the disrespectful protests which interrupted his confirmation hearings, saying: “We don’t ask permission to protest. We protest.”
The crowd seemed to love everything she was saying, cheering and clapping frequently.

“When we understand that we have to make America hear us and see us, and understand that we all have something to say,” Waters said, recalling the time she told supporters to confront Republicans in restaurants, gas stations, and restaurants.

“There are those who said we lacked civility when I got up and talked about the President’s Cabinet, and I said if you see them anywhere, if you see them at a restaurant, if you see them in a department store, even at a gasoline station, just tell them you’re not welcome here or anywhere,” she said to wild cheers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/09/under-trump-jobs-boom-has-finally-reached-blue-collar-workers-will-it-last/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9eec4aebe000

Blue-collar jobs are growing at their fastest rate in more than 30 years, helping fuel a hiring boom in many small towns and rural areas that are strong supporters of President Trump ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Jobs in goods-producing industries — mining, construction and manufacturing — grew 3.3 percent in the year preceding July, the best rate since 1984, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Blue-collar jobs, long a small and shrinking part of the U.S. economy, are now growing at a faster clip than those in the nation’s much larger service economy. Many factors collided to produce the blue-collar boom. Some are linked to short-term boom-and-bust cycles, but others may endure.

The rapid hiring in blue-collar sectors is delivering benefits to areas that turned out heavily for Trump in the 2016 election, according to the Brookings Institution, a shift from earlier in this expansion, when large and midsize cities experienced most of the gains.

The biggest drivers of the blue-collar hiring surge are the rebound in oil prices, the need to rebuild after disasters such as Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, and rising demand generated by a growing economy.

“I could work from sunup to sundown seven days a week,” said Steve Klebenow, 30, who owns and operates Gallatin Valley Welding in Churchill, Mont., a town of fewer than 900 people that had only two roads, one of them dirt, when he was growing up.

As wealthy families from California, Oregon and Washington flood into the area looking for mountain views and a lower cost of living, the region is transforming, and Klebenow is helping to build it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/09/10/obama_comes_out_of_retirement_with_same_tired_message_138026.html

The Democrat establishment beckoned, and former President Obama appeared.

After months of desperate entreaties, highlighted by a summer New York magazine cover story titled “Barack Obama, Where Are You?,” Obama returned on Friday with a longwinded speech at the University of Illinois. It featured his greatest hits of identity politics, income redistribution, and tax-spend-and-regulate leftism.

Obama tried to rewrite history, claiming that his administration “returned the economy to healthy growth and initiated the longest streak of job creation on record,” “covered another 20 million Americans with health insurance,” and “cut our deficits by more than half, partly by making sure that people like me, who have been given such amazing opportunities by this country, pay our fair share of taxes to help folks coming up behind me.”

Reality check: Obama presided over the slowest economic recovery in American history, with the unemployment rate not falling back below 8 percent for good until his second term. While in office, the economy never hit 3 percent annual growth — the first president never to meet that threshold since Herbert Hoover.

Somewhere between most and virtually all of the new insured population came through the Obamacare provision to dramatically expand Medicaid — a deeply flawed program — to able bodied adults well above the poverty line.

Obama doubled the size of the national debt over his time in office. And the only reason why the deficit was cut was because Congressional Republicans valiantly opposed his spendthrift policy proposals. To top it off, he raised taxes, which — by taking money out of the private economy — did the opposite of helping “folks coming up behind.”

Even more galling than his revisionist history is his attempt to take credit for the current economy, which is the hottest in a generation. “When you hear how great the economy’s doing right now,” he protested, “let’s just remember when this recovery started. I mean, I’m glad it’s continued, but when you hear about this economic miracle that’s been going on, when the job numbers come out, monthly job numbers, suddenly Republicans are saying it’s a miracle. I have to kind of remind them, actually, those job numbers are the same as they were in 2015 and 2016.”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/09/the-circus-of

The resistance to Donald Trump was warring on all fronts last week.

Democratic senators vied with pop-up protestors in the U.S. Senate gallery to disrupt and, if possible, to derail the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. U.S. SenatorCory Booker (D-N.J.) played Spartacus, but could not even get the script right as he claimed to be bravely releasing classified information that was already declassified. I cannot remember another example of a senator who wanted to break the law but could not figure out how to do it.

Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), former Harvard Law Professor who still insists she is of Native American heritage, called for the president to be removed by invoking the 25th Amendment. Apparently fabricating an ethnic identity is sane, and getting out of the Iran deal or the Paris Climate Accord is insanity and grounds for removal.

Barack Obama decided that ex-presidents should attack current presidents, and thereby reminded the country why Trump was elected. The author of the Russian “reset”and the hot-mic collusionary offer criticized Trump for being soft on Putin. The president who never achieved annualized 3 percent GDP growth (and is the first president since 1933 who can claim this “distinction”) also claimed Trump’s roaring economy was due to Obama-era policies (e.g., raising taxes, Obamacare, more regulations, and “you didn’t build that” commentaries). Fresh from trashing his successor in a funeral speech, the ever audacious Obama called for more decorum.

Bruce Ohr, once number four at the Department of Justice, and whose wife was working with Christopher Steele on the Fusion GPS file (a fact he has never disclosed willingly), now more or less has made a mockery of the FBI narrative of when, why, and how it began surveilling American citizens and infiltrating the Trump campaign. Ohr apparently has testified that well before the election, and well before the application of FISA warrants, he was working with the FBI, the already discredited Christopher Steele, and a Russian oligarch either to smear candidate Trump, or to facilitate the entry into the United States of a once barred and questionable Russian grandee, or both.

Nike hired NFL renegade Colin Kaepernick to peddle its sports products. For all its billion-dollar market research, it apparently did not know what Donald Trump’s animal cunning had almost immediately surmised: a majority of Americans do not appreciate the pampered multimillionaire Kaepernick sanctioning violence against the police by wearing “pig” socks, or mocking the National Anthem by taking a knee. Nike could just as well have hired Bowe Bergdahl to push its sneakers.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271268/senator-booker-quotes-violent-racist-who-urged-daniel-greenfield

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing was the beginning of the Democrat 2020 primaries, and the winner was the Senate Democrat who yelled the worst possible thing.

That was Senator Cory Booker.

Unlike some Senate Dems, Booker didn’t just confine his attack to Brett Kavanaugh, a mild-mannered man widely beloved by both the Democrats and Republicans who worked with him, he went for broke.

The Founding Fathers were racist geniuses, Booker insisted. Their constitution was flawed. Originalism, interpreting the Constitution as it was written, rather than whatever social justice activist the Dems had managed to plant on the bench, is going to be racist and sexist, because its authors were deplorables.

“Native Americans were referred to as savages, women weren’t referred to at all, African Americans were referred to as fractions of human beings. As one civil-rights activist used to say ‘constitutu, constitu, I can only say three-fifths of the word,’” Booker bloviated.

Who is this “civil rights activist”? A violent racist who had called Adolf Hitler “the greatest white man”.

You can see why Booker might have hesitated a bit when using him to bolster his claim that the Founding Fathers of this country were flawed racist sexist men. Even though, unlike Booker’s civil rights hero, they didn’t admire Hitler or call for the mass murder of Jews.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271285/serena-williams-pathetic-meltdown-and-victimhood-matthew-vadum

Left-wingers say no criticism of tennis player Serena Williams should be allowed for her high-profile meltdown Saturday at the 2018 women’s U.S. Open final because she is a double-minority – female and black – and should therefore be immune to criticism.

National Organization for Women (NOW) President Toni Van Pelt launched into a fact-free rant.

“In what was a blatantly racist and sexist move, tennis umpire Carlos Ramos unfairly penalized Serena Williams in an abhorrent display of male dominance and discrimination. This would not have happened if Serena Williams was a man,” she said. “She would have been cheered and chided for ‘gamesmanship.’ Male tennis stars are reminding us that they have ‘done much worse’ and have not been penalized.”

Washington Post screed writer Sally Jenkins cried sexism, whining that a male tennis official “took what began as a minor infraction and turned it into one of the nastiest and most emotional controversies in the history of tennis, all because he couldn’t take a woman speaking sharply to him.”

Ignoring the facts at hand, former tennis player Billie Jean King moaned about the unfairness of it all.

“When a woman is emotional, she’s ‘hysterical’ and she’s penalized for it,” King tweeted. “When a man does the same, he’s ‘outspoken’ and there are no repercussions. Thank you, Serena Williams, for calling out this double standard. More voices are needed to do the same.”

Williams tried to cast herself as Susan B. Anthony.

https://spectator.us/2018/09/serena-williams-hillary-clinton/

No one expected Naomi Osaka to win the US Open yesterday. Everyone favoured her opponent. The crowd was solidly with Serena Williams, as were the bookies. But the 20-year-old Japanese-Haitian, who became the first player representing Japan to win a Grand Slam, prevailed against all the odds.

Victory, however, was bittersweet. The crowd booed her. The announcers were in shock. ‘Perhaps it’s not the finish we were looking for today,’ said one prominent commentator, adding ‘This mama is a role model and respected by all.’ Muted kudos at best for Naomi.

‘It’s not fair,’ wailed Hillary Williams, after the umpire issued a warning when her coach was caught signalling her from the stand. Under questioning after the game, the coach admitted that he had done so but said the penalty was hypocritical: ‘Everybody does it,’ he said.

After smashing her racket onto the court, another violation for which the umpire docked her a point, Serena Clinton accused the judges of stealing the match from her. ‘Apologise,’ she screamed at the umpire. ‘You are the liar. You owe me an apology.’ ‘You will never, ever, ever be on another court of mine as long as you live.’

‘Men have said much worse without penalty,’ said the establishment’s choice after the umpire docked her a game for the verbal abuse. ‘They get away with it because they are men.’

The crowd stayed with her, as did the commentators. Writing for the Independent, Jonathan Liew contended that ‘the fundamental divide here is between those for whom this is no more than a simple issue of rule enforcement, and those for whom this is part of something much larger: of who gets to make the rules and who has to live with them, of wider injustices that originated long before Hillary ever picked up a racquet, and will endure long after she has put it down for the last time.’ The ‘sanctity of the rules,’ he said, ‘has always struck me as faintly suspicious. . . . [A]nd they’re never as objective as they look.’

What’s the legal basis for his special-counsel investigation? We have a right to know.

For precisely what federal crimes is the president of the United States under investigation by a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department?

It is intolerable that, after more than two years of digging — the 16-month Mueller probe having been preceded by the blatantly suspect labors of the Obama Justice Department and FBI — we still do not have an answer to that simple question.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein owes us an answer.

To my mind, he has owed us an answer from the beginning, meaning when he appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller on May 17, 2017. The regulations under which he made the appointment require (a) a factual basis for believing that a federal crime worthy of investigation or prosecution has been committed; (b) a conflict of interest so significant that the Justice Department is unable to investigate this suspected crime in the normal course; and (c) an articulation of the factual basis for the criminal investigation — i.e., the investigation of specified federal crimes — which shapes the boundaries of the special counsel’s jurisdiction.

This last provision is designed to prevent a special counsel’s investigation from becoming a fishing expedition — or what President Trump calls a “witch hunt,” what DAG Rosenstein more diplomatically disclaims as an “unguided missile,” and what Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, invoking Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s secret-police chief, pans as the warped dictum, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” In our country, the crime triggers the assignment of a prosecutor, not the other way around.

Trump Makes It Hard to Defend Trump
Sound reasons undergird the regulations. If a Democrat were in the White House, we would know them by heart at this point. Republicans once knew them well, too. That was before Donald Trump’s character flaws had them shrugging their shoulders, resigned that he deserves to be investigated whether he committed a crime or not.

Yet, the rationale for the regulations relates to the presidency, not to the man or woman who happens to occupy the office at a particular time. It is too debilitating to the governance of the United States, to the pursuit of America’s interests in the world, for us to permit imposing on the presidency the heavy burdens of defending against a criminal investigation unless there is significant evidence that the president has committed a serious crime.

As illustrated by this week’s hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats are too Trump-deranged in this moment to recognize their interest in avoiding a prosecutor’s cloud over future Democratic administrations. (Of course, they probably calculate that no Democratic attorney general would appoint a special counsel, no matter the evidence, and that the media would compliantly play along.) It is therefore up to Republicans to respond to the damage being done to the office. This can be hard to do.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/08/

Few things could be more embarrassing than giving Barack Obama a prize for “ethics in government,” as the University of Illinois did on Friday. One is reminded of the Nobel Peace Prize given to Yasser Arafat for graciously accepting a base for his terrorist organization in the middle of Judea and Samaria.

The media has made a great deal of Donald Trump’s personal moral failings and fabrications. The funny thing is, his exaggerations and braggadocio don’t affect our lives. But when Barack Obama told us that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” knowing full well that this was untrue, he defrauded every American. And when he and his staff knowingly misinformed the media about the nature of the Iran Deal, he made every American (and every Middle Easterner) less safe.

Obama told his audience in Champaign-Urbana: “Just a glance at recent headlines should tell you that this moment really is different. The stakes really are higher. The consequences of any of us sitting on the sidelines are more dire.”

Which headlines does he mean? Surely he is not discussing getting North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un to the negotiating table for the first time to discuss denuclearization. Obama could not be referring to the growing demonstrations and efforts to topple the Iranian dictatorship in the wake of President Trump’s withdrawal from the “deal” which propped up that barbaric regime. And one could only hope that he was not discussing Ambassador Nikki Haley taking the chair of the United Nations Security Council, as she confronts and rejects the same U.N. bigotry that the Obama Administration permitted to fester unabated.

No, it is far more probable that he was discussing subjects which he mentioned elsewhere in his address: Trump successes for which he would claim credit, and problems Obama cultivated for which he would blame his successor.