RUTHFULLY YOURS

New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, was elected with 73 percent of the vote, and on November 7 he’ll probably be reelected in a comparable landslide. On September 12 he faced token opposition in the Democratic primary, to be followed by token opposition in the general election. (Staten Island assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis is the GOP’s sacrificial lamb, while celebrity private detective Bo Dietl is running as an independent.)

Employment is up. Crime is down. The New York City economy and Wall Street are in bloom. In the grumbliest city in America, New Yorkers have little to kvetch about, except the trains, which, everyone knows, aren’t run out of City Hall. Yet in a fiercely progressive city, the progressive mayor’s approval rating hovers around 50 percent and has been underwater for much of his first term. In a City Hall that still rings with echoes of the footsteps of outsized personalities — Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Bloomberg — de Blasio barely makes a sound. No one credits him with engineering New York’s current state of ease. When the history of the period is written, he’ll be a footnote to the two-decade revolution that was the Giuliani–Bloomberg period. He’s a six-foot-five-inch dwarf.

Why doesn’t New York love Bill de Blasio?

It’s a question that preoccupies the mayor as he coasts to his second (and final, given term limits) stint in City Hall. “You’d assume they’d be having parades out in the streets,” he tells New York magazine.

Actually, New Yorkers are having parades out in the streets, such as the Puerto Rican Day parade, in which de Blasio marched behind a convicted terrorist, Oscar López Rivera, to whom the parade initially planned to give a place of honor. De Blasio initially said he would march behind López Rivera but then, after major sponsors, Governor Andrew Cuomo, and his own police commissioner dropped out, told reporters he had quietly been campaigning behind the scenes to get López Rivera dropped, calling the FALN separatist movement Rivera co-founded “mistaken from the beginning, because it used violence in the context of a democratic society, and that is not acceptable to me.” Then, after López Rivera announced he would not accept a ceremonial honor but would march at the head of the parade anyway, de Blasio joined him, albeit keeping his distance a few blocks behind.

That was pure de Blasio — allying himself with the most vicious and extreme elements of the Left, bumbling in an attempt to get himself out of a jam of his own creation, and coming off comically foolhardy and inept. The mayor whose big college experience was a trip to work for the Sandinistas in 1988, who toured the Soviet Union in 1983 and later honeymooned in Cuba, would love to turn New York into New Stalingrad. But he can’t figure out how to do it. So he settles for fuming about the ills of private property, luxury housing, and income inequality. The more he does so, the more he resembles background static in New York’s glorious cacophony — irritating but irrelevant.

“A wallflower. There is no sense of alpha male about him,” wrote Vanity Fair’s Bryan Burrough. This was in a sympathetic profile.

“He just didn’t have the stars lined up,” Al Sharpton, another fan, told the New York Times, as though already looking back on the man who becomes a lame duck on January 2.

In a Politico list of 18 hot mayors, de Blasio wasn’t even mentioned. The Times reported that he is such a nonentity that he has to wear a nametag at national conferences, even gatherings of mayors. The tallest man in most any room is somehow the most pathetic one in it, the Empire State gelding. Among his best-known and least New Yorky traits is a penchant for oversleeping, rendering him late to, for instance, a memorial service for victims of a plane crash and three different events on one St. Patrick’s Day, including a reception at Gracie Mansion — “his own house,” noted the Times with exasperated italics. Exhausted from his morning workouts, he has a habit of following up with naps in his office. The city that never sleeps has a narcoleptic chief.

It’s official.

Senator John McCain won’t vote for ObamaCare repeal. He won’t vote for any health care bill that isn’t “bipartisan.” And any bipartisan bill will be ObamaCare plus something even worse.

If McCain won’t vote for a health care bill that isn’t bipartisan, he won’t vote for ObamaCare repeal.

Period.

That’s information that voters could have used when Senator McCain was running for reelection last year on a platform of repealing ObamaCare.

Back then, McCain’s first TV ad took a shot at ObamaCare. A TV ad declared, “John McCain is leading the fight to stop ObamaCare.”

It was right up there with his even more infamous 2010, “Complete the danged fence” ad.

“Obamacare is anything but affordable,” one press release denounced a bill that was “rammed through Congress”. And yet, McCain is now satisfied to keep it in place until Republicans agree to whatever Dem version of ObamaCare they ram through next. Call it McCainCare. It would be only too fitting.

What does McCainCare look like? It’s what happens when ObamaCare fails.

In Arizona, it means vanishing options and sharp rate hikes. It means one provider to a county. Or less. It means a disaster so bad that last September, McCain was touting a bill to protect Arizonans from the collapse of ObamaCare. But who will protect Arizonans from McCainCare? Not Senator McCain.

McCainCare is a stalemate over ObamaCare. Without the mandate, the collapse will come even quicker. Since McCain won’t vote for a non-Dem ObamaCare bill, that means either Democrats and the left-wing of the GOP will gather together enough votes for Son of ObamaCare. Or there will be McCainCare.

McCainCare will trap millions of Americans in a failing system even as Republicans get the blame. Son of ObamaCare, which could still just as easily be dubbed McCainCare, will restart the process again with a new failing system that will turn over the health care market, eliminate the health insurance that millions of Americans had been relying on, and then go on to fail and trap them in the rubble.

Again.

It’s about time for commonsense conservatives to speak up in a spoiled rich kid culture, where every politically correct commissar is a spoiled rich kid.

Patriotism is love of country, but the Left hates people who love their country. Especially if that country is America.

If you express noisy love for Castro’s Cuba, liberals have no problem with you. But if you love Amerika… no.

Self-esteem is love of self. It has pros and cons. You can have too much or too little, and after the liberal education establishment decided to disconnect self-esteem from actual achievement, chances are that you now have way too much. You’ve lost one of the great truths of real life, and as a result of your narcissism you will have to suffer, or make other people suffer, or both. We have seen a president of the United States with too much self-esteem, and a recent Democratic candidate who lost an election and still can’t figure out why. Their self-esteem is disconnected from their actual virtues, skills, and achievements.

The social psychologist Roy Baumeister has spent many years studying people with high and low self-esteem, and he writes in the journal Psychological Science.

“People high in self-esteem claim to be more likable and attractive, to have better relationships, and to make better impressions on others than people with low self-esteem, but objective measures disconfirm most of these beliefs. Narcissists are charming at first but tend to alienate others eventually. Self-esteem has not been shown to predict the quality or duration of relationships.”

If you’re as young as some of the F*K Amerika! athletes who are taking knees while getting million-dollar salaries today, chance are that you were a “self-esteem kid.” That is, your teachers didn’t care what you actually achieved in academic classes, because they believed (wrongly, as always), that self-esteem was a good thing by itself. Sane and rational cultures know better than that.

In reality-based cultures self-esteem is earned. It doesn’t come free with harebrained liberal fantasies. When self-esteem is earned, we learn how to take pride in our achievements, and to feel shame or guilt when we get things wrong. With luck, our teachers also encourage us to keep trying when we inevitably fail the first couple of times. Failure is no big deal, but giving up is.

Mass murderers often seem to feel no guilt at all. The Nazis at the Nuremburg war crimes trials are shown in news photos laughing it up. Stalinists these days are celebrated by NYT obits, and, not surprisingly, liberals are refinding their inner Stalinists again. Which is why “Antifas” in black and red Nazi-era colors look and act like sociopaths, with no capacity for guilt or shame.

POTUS Donald Trump is encouraging American sports fans to walk out, or stay away when their favorite, spoiled rich-kid athletes do their F-U gesture during our National Anthem.

It’s about time for common sense conservatives to speak up in a spoiled rich kid culture, where every politically-correct commissar is a spoiled rich kid.

The collective impulse to tear down statues and rename buildings to meet modern sensibilities is growing stronger by the day. Earlier this month a statue of Christopher Columbus in New York’s Central Park was vandalized with graffiti that read “hate will not be tolerated” and a creepy warning that “#somethingscoming.” The following day, protesters gathered at the city’s Columbus Circle to demand that a statue of the explorer there, which stands atop a 76-foot column, be removed.

Foes of Columbus, including Melissa Mark-Viverito, speaker of New York’s City Council, say the explorer’s likeness is offensive to oppressed peoples. “There obviously has been ongoing dialogue and debate in the Caribbean—particularly in Puerto Rico, where I’m from,” Ms. Mark-Viverito said last month, knocking Columbus for the “oppression and everything he brought with him.”

Ms. Mark-Viverito might want to take a closer look. Puerto Rico celebrates Columbus not once but twice each year: on the federal holiday in October and again on Nov. 19, or Día del Descubrimiento (Discovery Day), which commemorates Columbus’s arrival in Puerto Rico during his second trans-Atlantic voyage.

While folks on the mainland wring their hands over whether to take monuments to Columbus down, Puerto Rico is putting them up. Last year the city of Arecibo inaugurated a Columbus monument taller than the Statue of Liberty. The 350-foot statue, a gift to the U.S. from sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, was rejected by New York, Boston, Miami, Cleveland, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and—maybe the biggest insult—Columbus, Ohio.

Columbus was born in Italy, but he sailed under the Spanish crown. Without Columbus and the Spanish colonization of the Western Hemisphere that followed, Latinos as a people would not exist.

Latin Americans have, thus, long celebrated the day that Columbus landed in the New World as Día de la Raza, or Day of the Race. The word “raza” isn’t meant in a Darwinian or bigoted sense. It refers to what the Mexican thinker José Vasconcelos called the “cosmic race” that incorporates people of all skin colors and physical characteristics in a culture that includes Spanish, native and African traditions. Día de la Raza is a universal celebration of a people and a world made possible because of the courage of Christopher Columbus. By honoring the explorer, Latin Americans honor their own place in the world and proclaim that they, as much as any other people, built the societies of the Western Hemisphere. CONTINUE AT SITE

Earlier today, the entire Pittsburgh Steelers team showed their disrespect to the American flag, the American people, and those serving in the military by boycotting the national anthem before their game against the Chicago Bears. It was a sickening display of misplaced arrogance by multimillionaires who have forgotten that they owe everything they have — those marvelous mansions, those awesome cars, those millions in their bank accounts — to their country.

Thankfully, however, there was one Steeler who didn’t submit to peer pressure but who stood tall for his anthem and flag.

Of course, being a U.S. Army captain, an Army Ranger, and a Bronze Star recipient who served not one, not two, but three tours of duty in Afghanistan, Villanueva actually understands what it means to represent and honor that flag. The spoiled brats who call themselves his “teammates” and who make themselves believe that they’re doing something useful when they’re insulting the entire country because Trump tweeted something they disagree with can learn a lot from him. This is what a real man looks like. Watch and learn.

The Status of the American Military and Readiness Concerns

In its latest report, The New York Analysis of Policy and Government describes the attenuated strength of the American military as well as present day challenges to U.S. national security.

Editor-in-chief, attorney and radio host, Frank Vernuccio, details the impact of an underfunded military that has suffered from extensive budget cuts over the past eight years and how this has created a crisis of significant proportions, vastly underreported by the American media.

Here are a list of critical problems/issues that could hamper America’s ability to fight the multifarious threats it currently faces:

America is no longer a technological leader. Russia and China have equivalent military technology and, in some cases, more leading-edge technology outpacing U.S. advancements.
America’s nuclear superiority was eliminated by Obama’s New START treaty with Russia. While the U.S. reduced its nuclear stockpile as per the “agreement,” Moscow violated the terms of the treaty and continued to perform testing and develop new capabilities.

Note: The nuclear capability of secretive states such as Russia and China cannot be verified. It has been calculated that U.S. estimates of Chinese stockpiles could be off by a factor of 10. The capabilities of Russia and China’s clients, North Korea and Iran, is a potential massive atomic threat to America and its allies.

3. During the Cold War, Russia and China were adversaries; they are now allies.

4. Russia has aggressively moved into Eastern Europe and Latin America and has engaged in an extensive arms build-up in the Arctic. China has expanded its influence in the South and East China Seas.

5. The U.S. now lacks the industrial base to rapidly build new ships, planes and tanks and is increasingly more reliant on foreign sources for necessary materials. The use of foreign components and raw materials can lead to supply disruptions and potential sabotage.

6. Due to changes made by the Obama administration, training levels have been reduced that impair U.S. battle readiness, even reducing the deployability of pilots.

7. Hezbollah, ISIS and Al Qaeda operate in the western hemisphere and poorly protected borders have allowed sleeper cells to penetrate the U.S.

8. The increased threat of infrastructure sabotage and cyber espionage have been inadequately addressed by the U.S. government.

9. Underfunded NATO nations do not represent a stalwart bulwark against the Russian-Chinese-North Korean-Iranian axis.

10. The U.S. faces the very real threat of an EMP attack of catastrophic proportions. Such an attack may not necessarily trigger our warning systems. Other nations have hardened their grids while the U.S. has done little to prepare for the devastation of a strike that could potentially take out the electrical grid and eliminate critical infrastructure including water, electricity, telephones, computer networks, heating, air conditioning, transportation, manufacturing and banking.

11. The U.S. no longer has a military capable of covering multiple military contingencies simultaneously.

12. A great deal of American taxpayer funded research and development has been stolen by espionage by America’s enemies, particularly China.

13. It is unclear if the U.S has adequate defenses against asymmetric warfare conducted by insurgency and terrorist movements utilizing bioweapons, cyber instruments and precision-strike capabilities that could result in large-scale violence and disruption.

For more information, read the full New York Analysis of Policy and Government report below.

Janet Levy,

One of the most outrageous abuses of the Obama presidency was a scheme by which fines for corporate misbehavior by the biggest Wall Street banks were channeled into the hands of radical leftist groups that are now vehemently opposing the policies of President Trump. We are talking hundreds of millions of dollars that ought to have gone to the federal treasury, but instead became a slush fund for the left.

Paul Sperry explains in the New York Post:

Wall Street might be shocked to learn it is helping bankroll the anti-Trump “resistance” movement that’s aggressively fighting policies it favors — including corporate tax cuts and the repeal of Obama-era banking and health-care regulations.

The Obama administration’s massive shakedown of Big Banks over the mortgage crisis included unprecedented back-door funding for dozens of Democratic activist groups who were not even victims of the crisis.

At least three liberal nonprofit organizations the Justice Department approved to receive funds from multibillion-dollar mortgage settlements were instrumental in killing the ObamaCare repeal bill and are now lobbying against GOP tax reform, as well as efforts to rein in illegal immigration.

An estimated $640 million has been diverted into what critics say is an improper, if not unconstitutional, “slush fund” fed from government settlements with JPMorgan Chase and Co., Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp., according to congressional sources.

The payola is potentially earmarked for third-party interest groups approved by the Justice Department and HUD without requiring any proof of how the funds will be spent. Many of the recipients so far are radical leftist organizations who solicited the settlement cash from the administration even though they were not parties to the lawsuits, records show.

This should never have happened, and conservatives (including AT) were aghast at the time. Imagine if President Trump were to try to funnel fines for corporate misbehavior to the NRA or the Family Research Council. The din of complaints from every MSM outlet in the country would endanger our national hearing. Sperry lists three radical left groups that are conducting anti-Trump activities that are funded by money belonging to taxpayers.

THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF LA RAZA

The Hispanic-rights group strenuously protested the Republican-led “skinny” repeal of the Affordable Care Act after receiving at least $1.5 million from the Obama regime’s bank settlement funds, congressional researchers say.

The notoriously radical organization, which advocates on behalf of illegal immigrants, argued the Trump proposal would have a “harmful impact” on the Hispanic community, including stripping potentially “8 million Latinos” of medical coverage.

Note that this group, originally funded by the Ford Foundation, has recently rebranded itself, because people started realizing that an explicitly race-based advocacy organization looks bad in a race-obsessed leftist universe. Now, they are transitioning to the brand of Unidos.

A third deadline has now passed for the FBI and Justice Department to give the House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed documents related to the Trump dossier. And for a third time, the bureau has not produced the material.

The dossier is a collection of what former FBI Director James Comey called “salacious and unverified” allegations of collusion between Russia and Trump campaign figures in the 2016 campaign. The Russia allegations were compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, who was commissioned by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which is thought to have been paid for the work by wealthy supporters of Hillary Clinton. The FBI reportedly considered taking over the dossier project in the fall of 2016, when the campaign was at its height, leading Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley to say the dossier matter raised “questions about the FBI’s independence from politics.”

Both Grassley and the House Intelligence Committee have been interested in learning if the FBI ever used the “salacious and unverified” dossier as a basis for requesting surveillance on anyone in the Trump circle. Those questions only intensified this week with reports that the FBI wiretapped Trump associate and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort during the transition period.

Four weeks ago, on Aug. 24, the House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed the FBI and Justice Department, seeking all internal FBI reports “incorporating, relying on, or referring to” information provided by Steele, his sources, or Fusion GPS. The committee also asked for documents on any FBI or Justice “efforts to corroborate, validate, or evaluate” Steele’s information. And the subpoena sought any surveillance applications that included any information or were based on any information, provided by Steele.

Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes originally set a Sept. 1 deadline for production of the dossier documents. The FBI did not comply. Nunes then extended the deadline to Sept. 14. The FBI did not comply. Then Nunes extended the deadline again, to Sept. 22. Now, again, the FBI has not complied.

It is not unusual for deadlines to be extended. It is not unusual for feet to be dragged. But at some point, there will have to be a resolution to this standoff. A congressional subpoena is not something a government agency can ignore forever.

But it seems likely that the dispute will eventually rise to a higher level. Nunes is a committee chairman, but he does not speak for the entire House. In addition, he has been weakened by Democratic accusations that he leaked classified information — a matter that seems stuck in the Ethics Committee. Given that, if Nunes is to prevail in the subpoena affair, it seems likely he would have to have the support of Speaker Paul Ryan. If the speaker stands behind Nunes’ efforts, the subpoena will have more weight and be more difficult for the FBI and Justice to defy. If on the other hand, Ryan does not stand behind the chairman, the FBI and Justice might be emboldened to delay forever. (A spokesman for Ryan did not immediately answer phone and email inquiries.)

There’s a lot at stake. Nunes is currently traveling in the Middle East, so it is not clear what the next step will be, or when it will happen. But so far, the FBI and the Justice Department do not appear to be in the mood to comply with the subpoena.

Valerie Plame Wilson, the former CIA agent at the center of a Bush administration faux scandal about the Iraq war that made her a cause célèbre for liberals, tweeted a virulent anti-Semitic article Thursday morning titled, “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars”, that calls for Jews to be labeled on TV like a “warning label on a bottle of rat poison.”

Valerie Plame, image via Twitter avatar.

The article is allegedly about stopping the perceived drive to war with Iran over its nuclear program, but it actually the latest update to the ‘blame the Jews’ bigotry found in the dark corners of the hard left and hard right. The article includes the names of several Jewish political writers and activists.

America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars https://t.co/oUH7b0QPMt

— Valerie Plame Wilson (@ValeriePlame) September 21, 2017

Here’s a screen grab of the tweet in case of deletion:

The anti-Jewish article was written by Philip Giraldi and published by The Unz Review.

Excerpts:

I spoke recently at a conference on America’s war party where afterwards an elderly gentleman came up to me and asked, “Why doesn’t anyone ever speak honestly about the six-hundred-pound gorilla in the room? Nobody has mentioned Israel in this conference and we all know it’s American Jews with all their money and power who are supporting every war in the Middle East for Netanyahu? Shouldn’t we start calling them out and not letting them get away with it?”

It was a question combined with a comment that I have heard many times before and my answer is always the same: any organization that aspires to be heard on foreign policy knows that to touch the live wire of Israel and American Jews guarantees a quick trip to obscurity. Jewish groups and deep pocket individual donors not only control the politicians, they own and run the media and entertainment industries, meaning that no one will hear about or from the offending party ever again. They are particularly sensitive on the issue of so-called “dual loyalty,” particularly as the expression itself is a bit of a sham since it is pretty clear that some of them only have real loyalty to Israel.

…matter. A recent article in the New Yorker on stopping the impending war with Iran strangely suggests that the current generation “Iran hawks” might be a force of moderation regarding policy options given the lessons learned from Iraq. The article cites as hardliners on Iran David Frum, Max Boot, Bill Kristol and Bret Stephens.

…And I would add a few more names, Mark Dubowitz, Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum; John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine; Elliot Abrams of the Council on Foreign Relations; Meyrav Wurmser of the Middle East Media Research Institute; Kimberly Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War; and Frederick Kagan, Danielle Pletka and David Wurmser of the American Enterprise Institute. And you can also throw into the hopper entire organizations like The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Hudson Institute. And yep, they’re all Jewish, plus most of them would self-describe as neo-conservatives. And I might add that only one of the named individuals has ever served in any branch of the American military – David Wurmser was once in the Navy reserve. These individuals largely constitute a cabal of sanctimonious chairborne warriors who prefer to do the heavy thinking while they let others do the fighting and dying.

So it is safe to say that much of the agitation to do something about Iran comes from Israel and from American Jews…