RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.steynonline.com/11078/the-indispensable-man

It is with profound sadness that we announce the death of Rush Limbaugh, a giant of American broadcasting, a uniquely talented performer, and a hugely generous man to whom I owe almost everything.

Rush died this morning, after a year-long struggle with lung cancer. I was scheduled to guest-host today’s show. Instead, as you can hear, his beloved Kathryn will be introducing a special program put together by the EIB team to celebrate a great man’s life and legacy. It’s a hard thing to do – compressing a glorious third-of-a-century into three hours – but Snerdley, Kraig, Mike, Allie and everyone else I’ve worked with there for so many years will do their best.

Usually, in this line of work, if you’re lucky, you get a moment – a year or two when you’re the in-thing – and you hope to hold enough of that moment as it slowly fades away to keep you going till retirement. Rush did something unprecedented in the history of TV and radio. Commercial broadcasting began in the United States in 1920: The Rush Limbaugh Show came along two-thirds of a century later, became the Number One program very quickly, and has stayed at the top all the way to today – for a third of the entire history of the medium. And throughout all those decades Rush and his show stayed exactly the same: a forensic breakdown of the day’s news, punctuated by musical parodies, satirical sketches, and Rush’s own optimism and good humor, even through this last terrible year.

The comedy is what his many enemies and half his own side missed: Rush took politics seriously but not solemnly. In the early years of the war on terror, he introduced an Afghan version of himself “with talent on loan from Allah” and sold Club Gitmo merchandise for those seeking a tropical retreat from jihad. When Brokeback Mountain was in the news, the show ran trailers for Return to Saddle-Sore Canyon: “It’s John McCain and Lindsey Graham as you’ve always wanted to see them!” Which, in my case at least, is true.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/16/another-deadly-decision-by-cuomo-ventilators/

Hailed as a hero for months due to his theatrical handling of the crisis, Cuomo now is under long-delayed but well-deserved scrutiny for his incompetence and apparent cover-up of nursing home data.

The first political dogfight surrounding COVID-19 occurred last spring between President Trump and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. At issue: the nation’s ventilator supply.

Alarmed by inaccurate scientific models warning the United States lacked a sufficient stockpile, Cuomo blamed the president for the alleged dearth of breathing machines. “I operate on the data and on the numbers and on the science,” Cuomo boasted March 27, as his state was under siege from the virus. “And every projection I have, from multiple sources, and these are worldwide health experts, say that we have to be prepared for an apex of . . . 40,000 ICU beds with ventilators.”

The president disputed Cuomo’s exaggerated demand. “I think their estimates are high,” Trump said in the duo’s escalating war of words.

Cuomo for weeks fixated on the need for more ventilators. Claiming a lack of ventilators was his “most significant challenge,” Cuomo’s state health department authorized the conversion of BiPAP machines into ventilators; New York, Cuomo warned on April 2, would run out of the machines within a week. He signed an executive order to seize ventilators from private hospitals and redistribute them to overwhelmed facilities. 

“Am I willing to (do this) to save a couple of hundred lives? You’re damn right I am,” Cuomo preened.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/in_milwaukee_biden_dropped_two_giant_lies.html

In 1860, Americans elected Honest Abe Lincoln. In 2020, Americans theoretically elected one of the most prodigious and infamous liars in modern American history. Joe Biden has a sterling reputation for routine dishonesty. He’s plagiarized, slandered, and prevaricated his way through 48 years of politics, before which he was a known plagiarist as a student. During a CNN town hall in Wisconsin, Biden went into dishonesty overdrive, spewing two major lies.

I wrote here about Biden’s most recent lie. During the debate in Georgia alone, Biden lied to or misled Americans another 33 times. In 2008, McCain’s campaign was able to identify Biden’s 14 major lies during the vice-presidential debate. Then there are the self-aggrandizing lies Biden tells whenever he gets a mic in his face.

And of course, there are the lies and plagiarism that got Biden kicked out of the 1988 presidential race (as well as a bonus lie about the Civil Rights Movement). If Diogenes had ever run into Biden, he would have tossed his lamp into the nearest gutter, gone to a bar, and drunk himself to death out of sheer despair.

Tuesday was an especially rich day for Biden lies, because CNN hosted a “town hall” for him in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In that supportive environment, Biden was able to get away with two blatant lies.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/jason-d-hill-video-what-do-white-americans-owe-frontpagemagcom/

This video is brought to you by a Freedom Center-Glazov Gang collaboration on a new exclusive webinar series, Teach-Ins for the Twenty-First Century. Join us as some of the leading thinkers and pundits on the scene today discuss key issues related to the coronavirus pandemic and its ongoing implications, confronting the Left, the jihad terror threat, and much, much more. And make sure to ask your own questions of our experts.

Hosted by Anni Cyrus, producer of The Glazov Gang and Founder of Live Up To Freedom.

This new webinar features Dr. Jason D. Hill, a professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Dr. Hill focuses on What Do White Americans Owe Black People?, analyzing how The reparations movement is unethical and an inverse form of racism.

Don’t miss it!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/what-dems-prospects-are-without-donald-trump-bruce-thornton/

Like last year’s Congress, the new 116th failed ignominiously to get Donald Trump convicted of their impeachment charge. Some federal court investigations into Trump’s businesses are still ongoing, but it’s likely, though not certain, that Trump will become less and less useful for distracting voters from the Democrats’ sharp turn to the left both on domestic and foreign policy.

If the Dems fail to hold on to power as they did in 2016, history will have a lot of suspects to investigate in order to explain their inability to attract voters without the bogey of Donald Trump and a fortuitous pandemic. But if they succeed, then we will have turned a dangerous corner on the road to dismantling the Constitution’s structure of ordered liberty and unalienable rights.

Start with Biden himself. We can pass over his obvious cognitive impairments and endless gaffes. He overcame those campaign-ending deficits because the party, with a compliant media, marketed him as an old-school centrist who could neutralize the toxic socialist Bernie Sanders.  Upon election he indulged the dull clichés “working together,” “healing the wounds,” and “no blue America, no red America.” But the House negated that rhetoric with an even more preposterous article of impeachment that charged the president with “insurrection,” based mainly on creatively editing the footage of his speech at the Ellipse, and taking literally a “fight” metaphor that Trump’s lawyers used video clips to showed numerous Democrats repeatedly using over the past four years.

So much for “healing.” But worse has been Biden’s flurry of executive orders that make down- payments on the Green New Deal disaster dear to the party’s socialist wing. On foreign policy, he has stacked his administration with old retreads from the “rules-based” global order that has failed serially since World War II, and which blew the opportunity presented when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991. This means returning to the creaking global diplomacy institutions that favor summits, conferences, photo-ops and empty threats. Hence Biden is undoing the necessary corrections made by Trump in order to make it clear to our rivals and allies alike that the U.S. is putting our own national security and interest ahead of the mythic “new world order.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/black_lives_matter_leader_openly_supporters_the_israel_haters.html

One of the constants with leftism is anti-Semitism.  Before Israel’s existence, the anti-Semites associated Jews with using capitalism to secretly control the world.  After Israel came into being, the socialists added a new sin: Israel was a colonial occupying power.  It should therefore come as no surprise that activist groups associated with the increasingly socialist Democrat party are anti-Semitic Israel-haters.  A few years ago, the Women’s March become openly anti-Semitic now, a leader in the Black Lives Matter movement is doing the same.

Hatred for the Jews is nothing new.  In pagan times, they were hated for refusing to bow down to the pagan gods.  During pre-Enlightenment Christianity, they were hated for their role in convicting Christ, for refusing to recognize His divinity, and for the fact that a handful of them were moneylenders.  This last was because Catholic Church officials selectively criminalized the sin of usury among Christians while tolerating it among Jews, leading to jealousy among the Christian faithful when Jews accumulated wealth in ways forbidden to Christians.

With socialism, a new hatred for Jews developed.  Christianity had gone by the wayside.  However, the Marxist obsession with capital meant that the Jews’ age-old association with capital made them a target for leftist hatred.  Additionally, Karl Marx, a self-loathing Jew (his father converted to Christianity for business reasons when Marx was a child), spouted anti-Semitic venom that would have made Hitler proud.

Speaking of Hitler, it’s important to remember that his hatred for Jews was also a byproduct of his socialism.  After all, he was the leader of the National Socialist Party.  It was leftist hatred for Jews that justified slaughtering six million Jews, most of them desperately poor, merely poor, working-class, or middle-class.

With Israel’s emergence, the left got a new reason to hate Jews: now they’re accused of being colonial occupiers, stealing land from the indigenous Arabs.  This version of events is a historic lie.  Jews are the region’s indigenous people with the Arabs coming in as recent interlopers.  Truth, however, has never stopped leftists.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortneyobrien/2021/02/16/turley-one-of-raskins-claims-about-trump-was-breathtaking-and-chilling-n2584741

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley followed last week’s impeachment trial against former President Trump very closely. Turley was the only witness called by Republicans to participate in the first trial against Trump in 2019, when the president faced charges after discussing the Bidens and corruption on a phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky. At the time, Turley explained that “impeachment has to be based on proof, not presumptions.”

Turley found several more glaring holes in the Democrats’ arguments last week as they tried to convict him on inciting an insurrection. One argument in particular Turley found to be “breathtaking” and “chilling” – when lead impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (MD) suggested that Trump was guilty because he refused to show up and testify. 

“If you decline this invitation, we reserve any and all rights, including the right to establish at trial that your refusal to testify supports a strong adverse inference regarding your actions (and inaction) on January 6, 2021,” Rep. Raskin wrote to Trump, essentially arguing that the former president needed to testify or his silence equals guilt.

On his blog, Turley explained that Raskin was misleading senators because Trump’s decision is not unprecedented:

“Presidents have historically not testified at impeachment trials.  One reason is that, until now, only sitting presidents have been impeached and presidents balked at the prospect of being examined as head of the Executive Branch by the Legislative Branch. Moreover, it was likely viewed as undignified and frankly too risky.  Indeed, most defense attorneys routinely discourage their clients from testifying in actual criminal cases because the risks outweigh any benefits. Finally, Trump is arguing that this trial is unconstitutional and thus he would be even less likely to depart from tradition and appear as a witness.”

Turley said that Raskin’s statement “conflicts with one of the most precious and revered principles in American law that a refusal to testify should not be used against an accused party.”

https://spectator.org/desantis-florida-covid/

At the end of January I watched a video message from the commissioners of the suburban Philadelphia county where my wife and I reside. According to them, it may take Pennsylvania up to a year to administer COVID vaccinations to all persons over the age of 65. We oldsters (my wife and I are 76) were told to register with the county and prepare for a long wait.

This information decided the issue of whether or not we should take up residence in Florida for the remaining winter months. Not only would the weather be more congenial, according to our Florida friends, but our chances of receiving the COVID vaccine in a timely manner also would increase exponentially.

And, in fact, within 11 days of our arrival in Florida, we received our first jabs of the Moderna vaccine and will receive our second doses in mid-March. We are now among the 2,355,792 persons who have been vaccinated in Florida as of February 13, 2021.

The comparison between Florida’s efficient handling of COVID vaccinations, under the leadership of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, and that of Pennsylvania, under Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf, could not be more telling. And the favorable comparisons don’t end there.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/15/the-vast-bipartisan-pretense-of-trumps-demise/

The vast bipartisan pretense that the Trump era is over continued through the universally predicted ignominy of the second impeachment of him. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whose misfired brainwave the impeachment was, intruded upon a press conference of the House managers, and harangued the audience for nearly 15 minutes with her theory that Donald Trump is an evil and disgraced man who attempted the violent overthrow of the United States government, that his acquittal was really a conviction, and that the Republicans who declined to remove him from an office he no longer holds were “cowards” who sought public office because they weren’t qualified to do anything else. 

The real problem the Trump-haters have is that the Trump phenomenon is alive and well. Not only is it lurking everywhere in the country; not only has the maniacal Democratic and NeverTrump coalition’s effort to legitimize the results of the November presidential election failed to convince anyone except themselves; this fatuous impeachment exercise is the end of the fervent five-year Democratic media effort to make the defamation of Donald Trump a substitute for all other government and politics. That ship has not sailed; it has sunk.

Trump failed to assemble the proper team on the ground to identify voting irregularities as they occurred, taking videos of them, and arranging believable witnesses and a formidable legal case already developed when the much-predicted ballot harvesting and helicopter mass vote-drops in the middle of election-night flipped the Electoral College by turning the results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (at the least). 

Of course, Trump did not, as he claimed, win the popular vote and the Democrats did not steal millions of votes. It remains one of the mysteries of this formidable and talented man that he commits such needless mistakes and carries his famous “constructive hyperbole” to such self-damaging extremes. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/02/pelosi-wants-911-type-commission-investigate-why-daniel-greenfield/

The Democrats want to extend their military occupation of Washington D.C. into the fall and Speaker Pelosi has called for “an outside, independent 9/11-type Commission” to investigate the Capitol riot.

Or as Pelosi puts it, “To protect our security, our security, our security, our next step will be to establish an outside, independent 9/11-type Commission to “investigate and report on the facts and causes relating to the January 6, 2021 domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex… and relating to the interference with the peaceful transfer of power, including facts and causes relating to the preparedness and response of the United States Capitol Police and other Federal, State, and local law enforcement in the National Capitol Region.””

Security, security, security!

The preparedness and response of the Capitol Police rests with Congress. The Capitol Police are under the authority of Congress. So Pelosi can investigate herself to her little heart’s content.

The Capitol Police, as I wrote in my article, The Capitol Hill Riot Was Pelosi’s Fault, Not Trump’s, had more than enough manpower.

The Capitol Police have over 2,000 sworn officers. A police force dedicated to protecting Capitol Hill has more personnel in its service than the police forces of most of the country.

Congress’ private cops are the 19th largest police force in the country. It’s a larger force than the police forces of Atlanta, Baltimore, Denver, or Milwaukee with a massive $460 million budget.

It’s the only legislative federal force in the country that is answerable exclusively to Congress.

And then she can investigate why she failed to call for the National Guard.