RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2022/11/us-midterms-on-the-road/

EXCERPT

“Simply put, the Democrats have nothing better to offer than fear, which they have been serving in heaped helpings for months.”

American politics can plumb some bizarre depths even at the best of times and just now, six days before the midterm elections that will determine control of House and Senate, there is something in the air only those word-stacking Germans might be able to capture in contiguous syllables. Fear, yes indeed, on the part of Democrats, who need lose only six lower house seats to see Ms Pelosi replaced as Speaker. For Republicans, riding high on polls that suggest seats might turn from blue to red in record numbers, the big challenge is to maintain with straight faces that the outcome remains in doubt and only a massive turnout of the party faithful on November 8 can guarantee victory.

In the House, that a ‘red wave’ will crash down on Democrats is beyond dispute. Where goes the Senate is somewhat less certain, allowing for the impact of early voting and the usual chicanery involving vote harvesting, cemeteries, old folks’ homes and, a new wrinkle as of 2020, mail-out ballots. Pennsylvanians, who will decide one of the four key battleground states, began voting as long ago as mid-September and by the time the Senate contenders met for the their one and only debate last week more than a million ballots were already waiting to be counted. Those early votes will likely favour Democrats, most originating with the political machines of the big cities, where Democrat administrations oversee both the canvassing, the tallying and, that old Tammany Hall term, the “ward heeling“. That said, the GOP needs to pick up only one Senate seat to gain an absolute legislative majority, which the bookies reckon easily doable.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bidens-rhetoric-is-a-threat-to-the-republic/

“That kind of rhetoric is typical, but under Obama and Biden, it’s been backed up by arrests, investigations, surveillance, raids, imprisonment, censorship and the whole banana republic gamut.”

The only good thing about this speech is that it didn’t have a color scheme out of V for Vendetta and didn’t feature Marines in the background. Whoever runs these things at least learned from that attempt at looking like Biden was about to declare martial law, suspend habeas corpus and make everyone read Gender Queer and How To Be An Anti-Racist at gunpoint in a gulag.

The bad news is no one cared about that speech except conservatives. They care even less about this one.

With the countdown underway, voters have made it clear that they care about the economy and crime. Anyone who finds the “threat to democracy” routine persuasive is already a solid blue voter and ActBlue donor who probably showed up for at least one D.C. protest.

This isn’t just pandering to the base, it’s pandering to the Elizabeth Warren base.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/weekend-soldier-of-allah-anniversary/

The U.S. Army plans to rename Fort Hood, Texas, a 214,968-acre base “ideal for multifaceted training and testing of military units and troops.” The name change does not alter reality of a terrorist attack that marks an anniversary three days before the midterm election.

At Fort Hood on November 5, 2009, U.S. Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan murdered 13 unarmed American soldiers and support personnel and wounded more than 40 others. The massacre marked a failure of political and military leadership, but there was more to it.

The Fort Hood massacre was also the worst failure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation since 9/11, which the FBI also failed to stop. The attack could have been easily prevented, long before Hasan, an ally of the Taliban, claimed so many American lives.

Born in 1970 to Muslim immigrants, Nidal graduated from Virginia Tech and in 2003 completed psychiatry training at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. Hasan served his residency at Walter Reed Medical Center, where instructors cited his “pattern of poor judgement and lack of professionalism.”

As Lessons from Fort Hood notes, during his residency and post-residency fellowship, Hasan demonstrated evidence of violent extremism and wrote papers defending Osama bin Laden. Two officers described Hasan as a “ticking time bomb,” but the Army promoted the “soldier of Allah,” as Hasan described himself,  and considered him competent to counsel soldiers returning from combat.

On December 17, 2008, Hasan visited the website of radical Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, the al Qaeda leader who endorsed deadly violence as religious duty. Hasan sent a message to al-Awlaki and another on January 1, 2009. The messages were acquired by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in the San Diego Field Office. In early January of 2009, the emails were sent to the Washington Field Office (WFO) and FBI headquarters.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/04/even-biden-thinks-the-economy-is-going-to-crash-next-year/

David Strom at Hot Air noticed something in the Democrats’ campaign messaging as the midterm elections draw near. Namely, the emergence of a talking point about how if Republicans win control of Congress they will “crash the economy.” There’s only one reason to say this. Democrats know they’ve set the economy on course to crash and they’re hoping to blame Republicans when it does.

Describing Republicans as a threat to democracy hasn’t swayed voters, and not for lack of trying. President Biden gave a speech on Wednesday once again accusing Republicans of this crime. His party has only lost support despite two years of pushing this line.

Democrats also thought the Dobbs ruling might swing voters in their favor, apparently because they thought pro-abortion fanatics represent the general public.

Nothing seems to be effective these days at scaring voters into voting for Democrats. Not when inflation is running rampant, the border is in chaos, crime is up, and schools are pushing transgender radicalism on children.

What Democrats can’t run on is the economy. Or maybe they can?

At a recent event, President Biden warned that:

“The Republican leadership in Congress has made it clear they will crash the economy next year by threatening the full faith and credit of the United States for the first time in our history, putting the United States in default unless — unless we yield to their demand to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-11-2-some-thoughts-on-affirmative-action

The Supreme Court arguments in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action cases took place on Monday. I listened to some substantial portion, although it was not possible for me to listen to the whole thing (some 5 hours in total). From what I heard, I agree with most commenters that affirmative action in the form currently practiced throughout academia is not likely to survive.

Affirmative action is one of those issues on which the opinions of our intellectual elites diverge almost completely from the opinions of normal people. In a piece on Tuesday (November 1) discussing the likely outcome of the Harvard/UNC case, the New York Times took note of the broad public opposition to affirmative action in college admissions, even extending to heavily Democratic constituencies:

[A] majority of Americans oppose the policy. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults said in March that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions, a Pew Research Center survey found. . . . Even in liberal states, most voters do not support affirmative action. In 2020, about 57 percent of Californians rejected an amendment to the state’s Constitution that would have let government and public institutions, including public universities, adopt affirmative-action policies.

According to the cited Pew survey, even majorities of blacks and Hispanics oppose affirmative action in college admissions:

A majority of Black, Hispanic and Asian respondents opposed the consideration of race or ethnicity.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/02/the-left-were-the-mad-scientists-we-were-their-lab-rats/

As the midterms approach, one way of looking at America’s current disaster is that we, the American people, were lab rats. And since 2021, the Left were the mad scientists, eager to try out their crackpot leftist experiments on us. 

The result is that the housing market is tottering on the verge of collapse. 

As interest rates soar, our $31 trillion national debt crowds out everything else in the budget. 

Inflation roars at a rate of 8-9 percent per annum, higher than at any time in 40 years. Yet the prices of the stuff of life—food, fuel, shelter, energy—are far steeper still than the official rate. 

No one is safe from thugs anymore—whether a commuter on a New York subway or the Pelosis in Pacific Heights.

The country reportedly has a 25-day supply of diesel fuel—the energy source that runs the nation. Meanwhile, we keep draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of oil—a commodity we have in abundance but refuse to produce fully.

We never fixed the supply-chain crisis of last year, and so still face shortages of key consumer goods. 

The labor participation rate is at an all-time low—given fat government COVID subsidies, the Siren-song appeal of staying home after the lockdowns, fear of COVID, and millions of workers with long COVID.

The post-Kabul Pentagon is quiet about the depletion of its critical stocks of weaponry. We have sent billions of dollars’ worth in howitzer shells, javelin missiles, and Hilmar rocket launchers to Ukraine without replenishing our own arsenals. The Army’s recruitment rate is off 50 percent this year.

Our broken Navy is ossifying as China expands its fleet in expectation of absorbing Taiwan. 

When we look to the president for an accounting for these madcap experiments, we get nothing. In the last few weeks, Joe Biden has lied that gas was $5 a gallon when he took office when it was half that. 

https://victorhanson.com/how-the-projectionist-game-is-played-part-one-racist/

Almost anything or anyone the Left opposes is smeared as racist or a racist. And the rules are made only by the Left.

The N-word is utterly racist. Yet it continues and obviously gains currency when rappers and comedians use it promiscuously on the assumptions that leftists and blacks cannot be racist when using a racist word.

Cultural appropriation is said to be racist. So, blonds who have cornrows in their hair in racist fashion culturally appropriate the black experience.

But MSNBC anchor Joy Reid is not a cultural appropriator when she dies her blond as if she is a Scandinavian Valkyrie? White wannabe rappers are cultural appropriators, but not so black opera singers? Is the rule asymmetry? That those who smear others on racial grounds are exempt from their own racial smears or hypocrisies?

These rules of leftwing racism are so opaque and contradictory that almost everyone falls afoul of them.

It is not racist to demand Asian students have 450 points higher on standardized tests than blacks to enter Harvard and other Ivy League schools; it is racist to suggest that it is racist to use skin color to so discriminate. It is racist of course to pick the race of your future dorm roommate unless you are non-white and so is he/she.

We are told that the MAGA Republicans are racists. But from whom do such charges emanate? Joe Biden?

Did Biden not fabricate the racist corn pop sagas? Was not he the one who called a senior aide “my boy”? I remember Biden half-praising Obama as the first articulate black presidential candidate. He claimed donut shops were the sole domain of Indian Americans. Did not Biden talk down to black professionals that Mitt Romney would put them back in chains, as if an accomplished audience had ever been itself enslaved or would allow that to happen without Joe Biden’s help?

https://www.nysun.com/article/bidens-flim-flam-windfall-profits-tax

“Dumb and Dumber” is a 1994 comedy; today it could describe a tragedy … Joe Biden’s energy policy. His latest gambit is to call for a windfall profits tax on oil companies, accusing them of “war profiteering.” He says the large earnings being raked in by oil giants like Exxon and Chevron “are not because of doing something new or innovative.” Instead, Biden said, “Their profits are a windfall of war…”

To be clear, Mr. Biden has no idea whether oil producers are doing anything innovative. While he has met with the leaders of numerous industries and Big Labor groups, he has childishly refused to meet with oil industry executives. I’m pretty sure he has never visited a drilling site or offshore production platform, where advanced American technology — the best in the world — is on display. 

If he talked with industry executives, they might point out that energy is cyclical; the price of oil rises with demand, unless supply goes up more. They might remind him that Exxon lost $22 billion in 2020 because prices fell during the pandemic; naturally Exxon didn’t receive a government handout to compensate them for that gigantic loss. Why should the firm be penalized when prices go back up?

The president is flailing, desperate to haul out something — anything — to show voters he’s acting to lower gasoline prices. But this is utter flim-flam. Only Congress can impose a windfall profits tax on energy companies, a proposal that would land well with liberal Democrats but is likely to find zero support among Republicans. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/03/could-our-politics-be-even-more-childish/

Turn on the television, listen to the radio, or take a stroll through the internet. Democrats and their media confederates are busy dishing out the nonsense in helpings large enough to choke a giant. Either they are intentionally trying to deceive, or they are extraordinarily puerile. Or both.

There are no other possibilities.

To listen to the Democrats as they go begging for votes, to consume the tripe that their helpers in the press are putting out, one would think the Republicans are fascist white supremacists who will kill democracy while setting up themselves in a permanent position of unchallengeable power.

Says Keisha Lance Bottoms, a presidential senior adviser and former Atlanta mayor: “This MAGA Republican agenda is an effort to disrupt our democracy. So, whether it be through November and beyond November, I think it will always be important to call out any effort there is to destroy – essentially, destroy the United States of America.”

The president himself said over the summer that “those of you who love this country, Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans, we must be stronger, more determined and more committed to saving America than the MAGA Republicans are to destroying America.”

Last week, Joe Biden’s former boss urged voters “to elect good people up and down the ballot,” because “across the country, some of the folks who tried to undermine our democracy are running for offices that will oversee the next election. And if they win, there’s no telling what might happen.”