RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/07/

Capping off a week where Senate Democrats embarrassed themselves at what should have been the semi-serious vetting of a Supreme Court justice, along comes our foot-stomping former president to remind Americans of who, ultimately, is responsible for infantilizing national politics.

While lecturing college students assembled in an auditorium in central Illinois—the adopted home state he rarely visits—Barack Obama engaged in the type of vacuous, preening, pretentious, and meaningless soliloquy that once upon a time was accepted as thoughtful political discourse. But it was a temper tantrum disguised as a sermon. He might as well as gone on stage in Champaign and said, “Trump is a big fat meanie!”

Listening to Obama speak is the auditory equivalent of eating cotton candy. It looks sweet and pretty at first, and momentarily it tickles your tongue with the first taste. But it quickly dissolves in your mouth, leaving behind an odd aftertaste. Your hunger isn’t satisfied; you kick yourself for wasting the calories, and you move on to the carnival hot dog. (Yes, these metaphors are intentional.)

Friday’s speech was yet another reminder of why Donald Trump won in 2016: Voters rejected Barack Obama as much as they rejected Hillary Clinton. After a decade of binging on this skilled politician’s oratory cocktail of empty platitudes, self-puffery, and finger-wagging scoldings, we were burned out. Americans started to notice that the soaring rhetoric did not match the accomplishments. There was a creeping sense the same man who once promised his vision was “not red states or blue states, just the United States” had done more damage to the body politic than any other president in recent memory.

And he wasn’t even a good tactician for his own side. In fact, while this political mastermind was in the Oval Office, his party lost more than 1,000 seats to Republicans across the country.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-adds-201000-jobs-as-wage-growth-accelerates-to-nine-year-high-2018-09-07

They have not been this low since 1969 rsk

The numbers: The United States created 201,000 new jobs in August, keeping the unemployment rate at an 18-year low and generating the fastest increase in worker pay since the end of the Great Recession.

Economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast a 200,000 increase in new nonfarm jobs.

The unemployment rate, meanwhile, was unchanged at 3.9%, the Labor Department said Friday.

The increase in hiring in August was another solid gain that reflects broad strength in an economy that accelerated in the spring and showed little sign of slowing down toward the end of summer.

Read: Don’t believe stats showing zero gains for workers, Trump White House says

The biggest news in the August employment report was a sharp increase in pay.

The average wage paid to American workers rose by 10 cents to $27.16 an hour. What’s more, the yearly rate of pay increases climbed to 2.9% from 2.7%, marking the highest level since June 2009.

What happened: White-collar professional firms filled 53,000 positions, bringing the total created over the past 12 months to more than half a million. These are the fastest growing jobs in the country.

Health-care providers hired 33,000 people, transport firms added 20,000 jobs and construction companies hired 23,000 workers.

Employment fell by 3,000 in manufacturing, the first decline in 13 months. U.S. tariffs and a scarcity of skilled laborers may finally be taking their toll.

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.