RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/trump-regulation-cuts-saved-taxpayers/

When businesses have to worry about complying with too many rules, it makes it much harder for them to operate.

President Trump’s decision to do away with a number of federal regulations has saved taxpayers $1.3 billion this year, according to the American Action Forum.

That $1.3 billion number is actually double the goal that Trump had set for these savings, according to the Washington Times. Casey Mulligan, chief economist at Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, told the newspaper that the reason the figure wound up being double the administration’s goal was because Barack Obama’s administration had actually far underestimated just how much its regulations were costing Americans.

“President Trump is not getting rid of all regulations by any means,” Mulligan said. “But some of the most problematic ones, he’s getting rid of them.”

When Trump became president, one of the first things he did was issue Executive Order 13771, which demanded that federal agencies repeal two existing regulations for every new one created. This has resulted in agencies eliminating 22 regulations for every new rule by the end of the 2017 calendar year, according to the Wheaton Business Journal. The Journal also reports that the White House estimates that the lifetime savings due to those rollbacks will be around $8.1 billion.

You might not like everything that President Trump says or does (I know I don’t), but you really have to agree that this is one area where he deserves credit. After all, extensive regulations are bad for the economy. When businesses have to worry about complying with too many rules, it makes it much harder for them to operate — and it makes it harder for entrepreneurs to open a new business from scratch. A more relaxed regulatory environment, on the other hand, makes it easier for existing business and makes it simpler for someone with an idea for a start-up to be able to make that idea a reality without having to worry about so much red tape. Having more businesses leads to there being more jobs available, which is obviously a positive thing for any economy. What’s more, since complying with regulations can be so costly, having fewer of them also gives businesses the opportunity to pay their workers higher wages than they would otherwise be able to pay.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271291/worst-ex-president-derby-bruce-thornton

Jimmy Carter must be pleased. He got to surrender his “worst postwar president crown” to Barack Obama, and now with Obama’s recent return to public appearances, Jimmy is hopeful that his award for “worst postwar ex-president” will soon be gone as well. The real question for the rest of us is whether Obama will help or hurt the Dems in November.

Carter and Obama are competing in the same category: reactive presidents. In 1976 Carter seemed the antidote to the scandal-plagued Nixon years. The church-going peanut farmer from Georgia appeared to be the principled outsider who could cleanse the stains of Vietnam and Watergate. No matter that Vietnam’s escalation had been a Democrat show, or that Nixon had drawn down U.S. troops in Vietnam from nearly half a million in 1969 to 27,000 in 1972. Or that Watergate, as Conrad Black described the Europeans’ bemused reaction, was “a pious exercise in Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy covering the crucifixion of a capable and successful president,” one confected and peddled by the Nixon-hating media. As democracies are wont to do, the electorate swung from a good president perceived to be bad, to a bad president perceived (at first) to be good.

Carter didn’t take long to show Americans that their reactive votes were a mistake. Carter was a knee-jerk moralizing internationalist who accepted the lie that America’s “recent mistakes,” as he said in his inaugural address, were the font of all the global disorder. Hence “principled” behavior by mere force of example would defuse conflicts and end human rights abuses. Disarmament, arms control agreements, the “disintegration” of the CIA, as Henry Kissinger put it, and the promotion of human rights would convert our inveterate rivals and enemies into friends and liberal democrats. As Carter said in his memoirs, “Demonstrations of American idealism” and “moral principles” should be the “foundations” of American power.

The consequences, of course, was the amoral Soviet Union’s global rampage, and Carter’s befuddled and timid response to the Iranian hostage crisis, which jump-started today’s neo-jihadist terrorism. His arrogant, misplaced piety, and his sermons about a “crisis of confidence” and an “inordinate fear of communism” disgusted many Americans. They knew that American confidence depended on vigorous action and patriotic pride, not homilies about our sins. Ronald Reagan was their answer, and a revived economy and a dismantled Soviet Union was the result.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271370/exposing-deep-state-plotters-matthew-vadum

President Trump’s sweeping order this week directing intelligence agencies to declassify documents from the more than 18-month-old investigation related to the Left’s electoral collusion conspiracy theory involving Trump and Russia may shed light on what really happened in the 2016 election.

In an interview with Hill.TV yesterday, the president said he ordered the mass declassification to show the public that the FBI investigation of the conspiracy theory began as a “hoax.” Exposing it could be one of the “crowning achievements” of his presidency, he said.

“What we’ve done is a great service to the country, really,” he said. “I hope to be able to call this, along with tax cuts and regulation and all the things I’ve done… in its own way this might be the most important thing because this was corrupt.”

Trump criticized how the FBI handled the Russia probe, accusing it of misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, and of spying on his campaign.

“They know this is one of the great scandals in the history of our country because basically what they did is, they used [former Trump campaign aide] Carter Page, who nobody even knew, who I feel very badly for, I think he’s been treated very badly. They used Carter Page as a foil in order to surveil a candidate for the presidency of the United States.”

“It’s a hoax, beyond a witch hunt,” Trump said.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schumers-fbi-ploy-1537313532

Democrats have succeeded in delaying a vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination until the Senate holds a public hearing with him and his accuser scheduled for Monday, but they’re still not happy. Now they don’t even want to hold that hearing until the FBI investigates the alleged sexual assault that happened when the two were in high school.

“The FBI conducted a background check on Judge Kavanaugh before these allegations were known,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Monday on the Senate floor. “It is now the FBI’s responsibility to investigate these claims, update the analysis to Judge Kavanaugh’s background, and report back to the Senate.”

Other Democrats have picked up the same chant since Senator Dianne Feinstein announced last week that she had forwarded to the FBI a letter that accuser Christine Ford had written to her. Both Senators know this isn’t the role that the FBI plays in nominations, and their demand shows that their real motive here is further delay.

The FBI doesn’t conduct criminal investigations into nominees, especially not into an alleged incident that would not have been a violation of a federal statute. State law would be at issue. That’s why the FBI responded to Ms. Feinstein’s statement last week by saying it had no plans to conduct a criminal probe and merely added Ms. Ford’s letter to Judge Kavanaugh’s background file.

The purpose of a background check is to interview people about the character and qualifications of a nominee. The FBI makes no judgments about the veracity of the people it interviews, and its role isn’t to issue a judgment about the nominee. The FBI simply compiles information that is then submitted to the White House.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dianne-feinstein-brett-kavanaugh-assault-accusation-veracity/

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California conceded Tuesday that she can’t attest to the veracity of Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were in high school.

“[Ford] is a woman that has been, I think, profoundly impacted. On this . . . I can’t say that everything is truthful. I don’t know,” Feinstein told reporters on Capitol Hill when asked if she believed the allegation.

Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, has been maligned by her Republican colleagues for failing to disclose the sexual-harassment accusation after initially being made aware of it via a letter from Ford in July.

Asked why she did not make her Judiciary Committee colleagues aware of the allegation at the beginning of Kavanaugh’s vetting process, Feinstein hesitated before citing Ford’s desire to remain anonymous.

“I don’t know; I’ll have to look back and see,” Feinstein told reporters before entering the Senate chamber, according to the New York Times. “The answer is that she asked that it be confidential,” she said upon exiting the chamber.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-democrat-accusations-not-enough-evidence/

If they get away with this, the only decent people in politics will be decent progressives.

Judge Robert Bork used to tell a prescient and darkly humorous story about watching Clarence Thomas’s Senate confirmation hearings — etched in pre-hashtag history as the “Thomas–Hill hearings,” in homage to Anita Hill’s role as the Left’s heroic accuser.

At the time, Thomas was a judge of the same eminent D.C. Circuit federal appeals court on which Bork had served. As he viewed Thomas’s “high-tech lynching” in horror, Bork recalled, a friend of his, the iconic Irving Kristol, approached and asked him what was happening.

“The end of civilization,” the judge sadly quipped.

“Of course it is,” Kristol deadpanned. “But it’ll take a long time. Meanwhile, it’s still possible to live well.”

It was a poignant story coming from Bork. A scholar of great breadth, the late judge was a man from another time: a patriot who’d enlisted in the Marines at 17 during World War II and been called back to duty when the Korean War broke out, even as he embarked on a legendary life in the law. In 1987, four years before the Thomas–Hill hearings, the slide from civilization he so lamented — the slouch toward Gomorrah — had started when he himself was mugged by Senate Democrats. This libelous character assassination, derailing Bork’s nomination by President Reagan to the Supreme Court, had been led by Ted Kennedy.

Democrats and Women

Back in 1969, Senator Kennedy had recklessly caused the death of a young woman, not his wife, by driving her off a rickety bridge on Chappaquiddick Island as they sped away from a booze-soaked bacchanal. Kennedy managed to save himself by swimming to safety. He then abandoned the scene for hours, failing to alert police and rescue workers while Mary Jo Kopechne, submerged in the car, eventually drowned.

Ms. Kopechne did not live to see “Me Too.” That “movement,” in which the Left is front and center, was not forged until long after leftists had raised the notoriously lecherous Kennedy to “Lion of the Senate” status. Indeed, it was not forged until 20 years after Democrats, prominently including women’s-rights advocates, closed ranks around President Bill Clinton, Kennedy’s equally lascivious political ally.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-sexual-assault-accusation-eleventh-hour-ambush/

Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation has, like that of Clarence Thomas before him, been thrown into chaos with an eleventh-hour allegation of sexual misconduct. Christine Blasey Ford, now a California professor of psychology, told the Washington Post over the weekend that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a high-school party in the 1980s. According to Ford, Kavanaugh and his Georgetown Prep classmate Mark Judge, both drunk, threw her in a room before Kavanaugh tried to take her clothes off and force himself on her. She says she escaped, hid in a bathroom, and left the party. He strenuously denies the allegation, as does Judge.

This is obviously a serious charge, but the evidence so far provided leaves us with grave doubts. She tells the Post she kept it a secret for years, meaning there is no contemporaneous evidence to support her account. She is unable to say exactly where or when the party was held, only that she believes it happened in the summer of 1982 somewhere in Montgomery County. She can’t recall how she got home afterward and her lawyer now says there was a fifth guest at the party who was not counted in Ford’s initial account. With so many missing details, her claims are impossible to independently evaluate.

That Ford’s memory of something that supposedly happened 36 years ago is fuzzy does not, in itself, disprove her story. But the stakes are high enough to require corroborating evidence. As our David French points out, the only evidence she has marshaled so far reveals a contradiction. Ford says she told her therapist about the incident in 2012, and she provided the Post with portions of her therapist’s notes. Though they describe an attempted rape, they do not name Kavanaugh or Judge, instead referring to four perpetrators “from an elitist boys’ school” who went on to high-ranking positions in D.C. Ford attributes the discrepancy to an error on her therapist’s part, and her husband says her description of the incident has remained consistent since 2012. Suffice it to say this is far from dispositive proof.

https://spectator.us/2018/09/christine-blasey-ford-democrats-kavanaugh/

The difficulty in trying to assess the behaviour of Democrats these days is thinking sufficiently low. When I wrote about Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in these virtual pages a couple of weeks ago, I predicted grandstanding from Cory ‘Spartacus’ Booker and Kamala Harris. I did not think low enough to suspect that the Democrats would help orchestrate a series of embarrassing outbursts from the NeverKavanaugh Left, but so it happened.

Nor did I expect the Democrats to orchestrate a last-minute allegation of sexual abuse dating from 35 years ago when Kavanaugh was 17 and in high school. As all the world now knows, that happened too.

Christine Blasey Ford, a leftie psychology prof at Palo Alto University, claims that Kavanaugh and a high school friend, both drunk, accosted her at a party and dragged her into a bedroom. Kavanaugh, she claims in a Washington Post interview, ‘pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers.’ She tried to scream, but, she said, Kavanaugh ‘put his hand over her mouth.’

When Kavanaugh’s friend (since identified as the writer Mark Judge) jumped onto the bed, they all tumbled off and she made her escape.

Ford appears to be a delicate plant. She claims that the alleged incident ‘derailed’ her life for ‘four or five years,’ contributing to ‘anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms,’ and made it impossible for her to have ‘healthy relationships with men.’

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/407153-time-for-sunshine-on-trump-russia-investigation

Democrats are squawking about President Trump’s order to release the material used by the FBI and the Justice Department to initiate the investigation of his campaign. These minority committee chairs, soon likely to be in the majority, claim it’s unfair, an abuse of power, one-sided.

Since when have these “Guardians of Our Republic” ever been against the release of more information from our government? Obviously, only when such release might put a dent in the Russia cloud that they have deliberately perpetuated regardless of the drip, drip, drip of evidence implicating high-ranking FBI, CIA and Justice officials in wrongdoing.

This investigation of the Trump campaign, his administration, family and associates has gone on for more than two years without any serious evidence supporting the Russia-Trump collusion theory. And, increasingly, it looks like there never was any real evidence to support the launching of the largest investigation of an administration in history. It’s the only known investigation ever by an outgoing party of the incoming officials of the other party. It was whipped up by opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, former British spy Christopher Steele and partisans in the Obama administration, creating a vast echo chamber with information that was never substantiated in any material way and, on the face of it, was preposterous. (No one ever offered Trump campaign adviser Carter Page $19 billion for anything.)

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271310/new-color-censorship-splc-daniel-greenfield

Reprinted from Amgreatness.com.

Color of Change, a radical leftist group campaigning to censor conservatives and right-leaning groups, exploited the 2015 Charleston church shooting to go after the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The Freedom Center’s investigations had exposed Color of Change, but the leftist group’s campaign to silence the Center briefly succeeded last month.

“Bloodmoney,” Color of Change’s smear campaign, seeks to shut down the fundraising abilities of conservative organizations by pressuring credit card companies and payment processors to deny access to conservative groups blacklisted by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Color of Change falsely accuses all of these groups of promoting violence and white supremacy.

Two weeks ago, the group’s pressure campaign successfully misled Mastercard into refusing to process donations for the Freedom Center, until an outcry forced the company to change course. Though the battle may have been won, Color of Change’s censorship campaign continues.

Color of Change’s “Bloodmoney” campaign is a blood libel. The effort falsely links conservative organizations targeted by the SPLC—including some run by African-Americans and Jews—to the Charleston church shooting and the violence in Charlottesville. The leftist group founded by CNN’s Van Jones and funded by George Soros is out to censor conservative organizations by choking off their fundraising.Color of Change’s blood libel accuses credit card companies and payment processors of taking “blood money” and financing “violence” and of complicity in “white supremacist murders” if they process donations for conservative organizations, including the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

“Financial service companies doing business with white supremacists are profiting from hate,” the campaign alleges.

The truth behind the blood libel is that Color of Change is a racialist partisan group trying to cut off financial services to mainstream conservative groups using shameless lies.