RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/real-wages-are-rising-1536359667

Most headlines from Friday’s August jobs report concerned the 2.9% increase in wages over the last 12 months, the healthiest raise in some time. That figure was probably overstated due to a weak August 2017 falling off the 12-month comparison, but other data are showing that wages after inflation are finally rising as you’d expect in a tight labor market.

The August numbers reinforced the tightening trend. The unemployment rate stayed at 3.9%, and the rate for black Americans fell to a record low 6.3%; a year earlier the rate for blacks was 7.6%. The number of employed Americans fell, but much of that is explained by students returning to school. The same applies to the August dip in the labor participation rate. Overall the August snapshot shows a labor market in excellent shape, with nearly everyone who wants a job able to get one.

Which brings us to the wages debate. The economists who presided over the historically slow wage growth of the Obama years have been arguing that the Trump-era economic growth spurt is no big deal because wages after inflation aren’t rising. Their evidence is the average hourly earning increase, which at 2.7% in July wasn’t much above recent inflation that through July was 2.9%.

https://www.steynonline.com/8781/odd-couples-of-the-obituaries-page

~John McCain exasperated conservatives, but he had his moments. I recounted one such during the 2008 campaign, when Hillary called for public funding for the Woodstock museum:

If you’re under 70 and have no idea what “Woodstock” is or why it would require its own museum, ask your grandpa. But McCain began by saying he was sure Mrs. Clinton was right and that it was a major “cultural and pharmaceutical event.”

Which is a cute line. And McCain wasn’t done yet: “I wasn’t there,” he said of the 1969 music festival. “I was tied up at the time.”

And the crowd roared its approval. It’s not just a joke, though it’s a pretty good one. It’s not merely a way of reminding folks you’ve stood up to torture and you can shrug it off with almost 007-cool insouciance. But it also tells Republican voters that, when Sen. Clinton offers up some cobwebbed boomer piety, you know a piñata when you see one, and you’re gonna clobber it.

And that’s the music a lot of Republican voters want to hear. For a certain percentage of voters, McCain is tonally a conservative, and that trumps the fact that a lot of his policies are profoundly unconservative. He won New Hampshire because if you stuck him in plaid he’d be a passable Beltway impersonation of the crusty, cranky, ornery Granite Stater. The facts are secondary that, on campaign finance, illegal immigration, Big Pharma and global warming, the notorious “maverick’s” mavericity (maverickiness? maverectomy?) always boils down to something indistinguishable from the Democrat position.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271272/elizabeth-warren-calls-trump-coup-daniel-greenfield

“Great Spirit Bless the Deep State, it is your humble daughter, Elizabeth of Harvard and the Pow Wow Chow Cookbook who speaks.”

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, seizing on an explosive op-ed from an anonymous administration official, said Thursday that it’s time to use constitutional powers to remove President Donald Trump office if top officials don’t think he can do the job.

“If senior administration officials think the President of the United States is not able to do his job, then they should invoke the 25th Amendment,” Warren told CNN. “The Constitution provides for a procedure whenever the Vice President and senior officials think the President can’t do his job. It does not provide that senior officials go around the President — take documents off his desk, write anonymous op-eds … Everyone of these officials have sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States. It’s time for them to do their job.”

That’s actually the opposite of how the Constitution works. It does not provide a mechanism for removing a president if some officials don’t like him. That’s not what the 25th Amendment is for. It provides a clear process for when a president is incapacitated, say after a shooting, and was an artifact of the JFK assassination.

What Warren is proposing is a coup.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/zina-bash-hand-signal-lef-wing-theory-stupid/

How does the Zina Bash hand-signal theory make any sense at all?

It’s not easy to set a new standard for stupid in 2018, but a few left-wingers on Twitter managed it during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings.

They claimed to have seen one of Judge Kavanaugh’s former law clerks, Zina Bash, making a white-power symbol while sitting behind him at the opening session of the hearings.

Less discerning viewers wouldn’t have noticed the alleged signal at all, or if they had, would have easily mistaken it for Bash’s hand at rest in something like a gesture of OK.

It was declared “a national outrage” by a #resistance tweeter who has 200,000 followers, and the activist and author Amy Siskind said the supposed gesture alone should disqualify Kavanaugh (she deleted the tweet but still suspected that Bash’s hand represented something nefarious).

It’s not clear how the hand-signal theory was supposed to make sense. Why, if Judge Kavanaugh is a stealth white-power candidate, would someone on his side go out of her way to advertise that fact on national TV?

On the other hand, if Judge Kavanaugh is a brazen white-power candidate, why does a supporter have to rely on such a subtle gesture to signal his true colors?

Who was the audience for the gesture? A racist underground initiated in a series of secret symbols and handshakes that would be activated to lend its full support for Kavanaugh?

Who knows, and who cares? For an element of the Left, the Trump era has been an open invitation to lose their minds, one they have gladly accepted for fun and profit, since there are few things said about the president that can be too extreme or irrational to find an audience.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-character-assassination-by-democrats/

There are honorable ways to oppose a nominee with whom you disagree. Kavanaugh’s Democratic critics have chosen to go the dishonorable route, instead.

There is certainly an honorable way to oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. It’s simple. A progressive senator can simply declare that he or she does not agree with Kavanaugh’s judicial philosophy, explain why, and vote against him. There is no constitutional rule that declares a senator must vote for every qualified Supreme Court nominee.

There’s also an honorable way to investigate Kavanaugh’s fitness for the bench, regardless of his judicial philosophy. A judge at any level — much less the Supreme Court — should exhibit a basic and enduring commitment to honesty and integrity. So, yes, scrutinize his record. Diligently investigate his background. If a serious character issue emerges, expose it.

But it’s low and dishonorable to skip the principled opposition and simply smear a good man, engaging in cheap character assassination as Judge Kavanaugh’s Democratic opponents have this week.

For those keeping score at home, millions of Americans have now been exposed to false and ridiculous claims that Kavanaugh is a slippery perjurer who surrounds himself with racists and a cold, dark soul who deliberately snubbed a murdered child’s father.

The latter two claims date back to the first day of his hearing, when the online Left erupted with claims that former Kavanaugh clerk Zina Bash had flashed a white-power symbol during the hearing. It turns out that Bash is a Mexican-American immigrant with a Jewish father, a descendant of Holocaust survivors. So, no, she’s not a white nationalist.

The same day, activists claimed that Kavanaugh actively refused to shake Fred Guttenberg’s hand. Guttenberg is the father of a student murdered in February’s Parkland, Fla. school shooting, and he approached Kavanaugh in the scrum following a break in the hearing. Just as Guttenberg, a complete stranger to Kavanaugh, stuck out his hand, security arrived and ushered Kavanaugh away. This was then cravenly spun into an outrage by the progressive Internet.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271264/times-op-ed-definitive-proof-nevertrump-moral-bruce-thornton

The New York Times’s just published an anonymous op-ed from a “senior official” in the Trump administration. This self-righteous combination of clichéd anti-Trump tropes and arrogant moral preening puts the QED on the proof of the NeverTrumpers’ moral idiocy.

The stalest complaints involve Trump’s personality and style, although the only difference between Trump and, say, Lyndon Johnson is that Johnson with the help of the media knew that most of his vulgarisms and epithets would never be made public until he left office. And he wasn’t monitored 24/7 by a barrage of reports and images from internet news and blogs, hundreds of cable channels, and social media.

As for crudity and vulgarity, if you insurgent White House employees want vulgarity, just look around you. We are saturated with a culture of vulgarity, self-promotion, and crude sexualization. At least Trump hasn’t besmirched the White House with Clinton-style sexual antics, or like Obama brought foul-mouthed rappers who celebrate the murder of judges to socialize in the White House. But to Anonymous, the worst of Trump’s affronts is that he, with the help of deplorable uppity citizens, has “allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.” This charge bespeaks an ignorance of the Constitution and its founders’ understanding of human nature. Given the variety and volume of colliding “passions and interests,” “civility” was a luxury. More important was protecting political freedom by preventing factions from joining forces to increase their power.

The catalogue of Trump’s shortcomings are stale, subjective epithets from nearly two-years of Trump-hating screeds, without any awareness that in terms of actions, progressives like Barack Obama have been much worse. For example, the brave anonymous resister says Trump’s behavior is “detrimental to the health of our republic.” Exactly how have excessive Tweeting, braggadocio, or insults of rivals done more damage to the Constitution’s separation of powers than Obama’s politicizing of the IRS, the EPA, two AGs, the Department of Education, the FBI, and the DOJ?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cory-booker-and-democratic-norms-1536276103

When he was mayor of Newark, Booker was considered to be the light at the end of the Lincoln Tunnel….now he’s just another political hack….rsk

Democrats have been acting out at Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, but Cory Booker is distinguishing himself in a crowded field. The New Jersey Senator released confidential documents in what he admitted was a violation of Senate rules, and his distortions need correcting.

Questioning Judge Kavanaugh on Wednesday evening, Mr. Booker referred to an email the judge sent while in George W. Bush’s White House counsel’s office. Republican Mike Lee interjected that Judge Kavanaugh didn’t have a copy of the email, which was marked confidential. The papers are shielded from the public under the Presidential Records Act, but Mr. Bush has allowed Senators and staff to read them.

Mr. Booker complained that an email with the subject line “racial profiling” shouldn’t have been withheld. “This wasn’t personal information. There’s no national security issue whatsoever,” he intoned. “The fact that we’re not allowing these emails out, as we have asked, as I have asked,” is evidence that “the system is rigged.” On Thursday Mr. Booker released the documents to TV fanfare and dared Republicans to punish him for it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-anonymous-resistance-1536276239

One consequence of having such a polarizing and personally flawed man as President is the degree to which his opponents justify their own destructive excess in response. An example is Cory Booker consciously violating Senate rules Thursday in an attempt to deny Brett Kavanaugh a Supreme Court seat. (See nearby.) Another is the decision by a “senior official” to publish an op-ed in the New York Times describing the internal government “resistance” to Donald Trump.

Let’s stipulate that publishing an article with an anonymous byline is sometimes worth doing, and we have done it ourselves. In 1991 we shielded the name of a woman who was raped amid the debate over publishing the names of victims. We have published op-eds protecting the identities of writers who could face arrest or worse at the hands of dictators or terrorists, while informing readers that the author was using a pseudonym.

We don’t recall offering anonymity to someone in government or American politics, though perhaps we have and we can’t say we would never do so. It would depend on the circumstances. The op-ed in this case doesn’t meet those standards, not least because it isn’t news. The fact that senior Administration officials have been trying to block Mr. Trump’s uninformed policy impulses, and mute his self-destructive anger and narcissism, has been reported hundreds of times.

Using funerals for political purposes has a long, but not distinguished, tradition. In 44 B.C. eulogist Mark Antony claimed to Roman mourners that he came to bury Caesar. But his speech created a frenzy and ended up ensuring a death warrant for the once “honorable” Brutus.

In contrast, aside from the commemoration of the deceased, Americans mostly have seen funerals as solemn reminders of how frail and transitory life is for all of us, and how our shared fates should unite even the bitterest of enemies.

Sixteen years ago, on the eve of the 2002 midterm election, and at a time when the United States was beginning to divide over the Afghanistan intervention and a looming Iraq war, Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) tragically died in a plane crash.

Wellstone’s Minnesota funeral was meant to be a commemoration of a life of public servant well lived. But the funeral service was soon hijacked by partisan speakers and ended up a loud and often grating political pep rally.

The message to mourners of all beliefs and persuasions was to translate their grief into votes for progressive candidates like Wellstone. Popular discontent over news of the politicalized funeral may well have explained why, two weeks later, the in-power Republicans actually picked up seats in George W. Bush’s first midterm election.

At the recent eight-hour, televised funeral of iconic singer Aretha Franklin, many of the speakers such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson turned the event into a political wake—calling for everything from increased voter registration to tighter standards on drinking water.

Activist and professor Michael Eric Dyson embarrassed himself with adolescent hits against President Donald Trump: “You lugubrious leach, you dopey doppelganger of deceit and deviance, you lethal liar, you dimwitted dictator, you foolish fascist.”

On the next day, the televised state funeral for Sen. John McCain likewise soon became just as political.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/kamala-harris-harasses-kavanaugh-on-robert-mueller-charlottesville-white-supremacist-terms/

On Tuesday, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of speaking with President Trump’s lawyer’s law firm about the Robert Mueller investigation. She did so without evidence, and while refusing to provide a list of lawyers at the firm. After this, the senator jumped down Kavanaugh’s throat with a question about the white nationalist riots in Charlottesville last year.

“Judge, have you ever discussed Special Counsel Mueller or his investigation with anyone?” Harris asked. After the nominee responded that he had, the senator asked, “Have you discussed it with anyone at Kasowitz, Benson, and Torres, the law firm founded by Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s personal lawyer? Be sure about your answer, sir.”

Kavanaugh, perplexed, could not remember if he knew anyone at that law firm. “Is there a person you’re talking about?” The senator responded, “I’m asking you a very direct question, yes or no.”

“I’m not sure, I need to know anyone who works at that law firm,” the nominee explained. As the senator continued to push him, he said, “I’m just trying to think, do I know anyone at that firm.” Kamala Harris cut him off, saying, “That’s not my question.”

“I would like to know the person you’re thinking of,” Kavanaugh said. “I think you’re thinking of someone and you don’t want to tell us,” Harris countered. Can she read his mind?!

“Who did you have a conversation with?” Kamala Harris asked, acting as though the nominee’s perplexed face revealed his complicity.

At this point, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) chimed in with a point of order, explaining that Washington, D.C. is full of law firms, that law firms are full of people, and it is not reasonable for Harris to assume Kavanaugh automatically knows everyone who works at this one specific law firm. He joked, “They’re like rabbits, they form new firms.” CONTINUE AT SITE