RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/senator-whitehouses-opening-salvo-at-barrett-hearing-dems-obamacare-diatribe/

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) is among the most insufferable hacks on Capitol Hill. It was he, recall, who suggested that energy companies should be sued under the federal racketeering laws for purportedly being “deniers” of climate change. He was also the laboring oar among a handful of Senate Democrats on an unhinged court amicus brief in a recent Supreme Court Second Amendment case, extortionately threatening that the Court could be “restructured” — translation: subjected to ruinous partisan court packing — if the justices continued what the senator portrayed as its Trump-era conservative drift.

So it comes as no surprise that Whitehouse’s opening statement in the confirmation hearing on Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court was an absurd attack along lines I have previously described: Republicans are supposedly desperate to get Barrett on the Court so she can be the deciding vote to invalidate the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) in toto, including its guarantee of coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Whitehouse’s diatribe was aimed less at Judge Barrett than at Senator John Cornyn (R., Texas.), a supporter of the district judge in Texas (a Bush-43 appointee), whose ruling is at the center of the case now before the Supreme Court.

There is no chance that the justices are going to invalidate the ACA. I doubt a single one would vote to do that. I repeat what I wrote about this nonsense two weeks ago:

The notion that Judge Barrett, or for that matter the other Trump appointees to the Supreme Court, are on the warpath against the Affordable Care Act is laughable. The ACA issue is being contorted into a convenient political talking point in the stretch-run of a presidential campaign because President Trump, foolishly and reportedly against the advice of Attorney General Barr, has supported a weak legal challenge to the law. The case is California v. Texas, and the justices are scheduled to hear arguments about it on November 10.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-judge-barrett-did-not-criticize-the-affordable-care-act/?utm_source=

Democrats are continuing their disingenuous strategy of framing Judge Amy Coney Barrett as President Trump’s stealth weapon, being rushed onto the Supreme Court by Republicans in order to kill Obamacare in a case the Court is scheduled to hear arguments in on November 10 (see my earlier post). In this vein, Senator Chris Coons (D., Del.) posits that Barrett has publicly criticized the Affordable Care Act. 

This is false.

As a judge, Barrett has not ruled on Obamacare. As a scholar, she has taken the firm position that a judge’s important but modest role is to say what the law is, not to formulate public policy. The best prediction of her position on legislation, therefore, is that its policy direction is for Congress to decide; the judge’s narrow role is to ensure that enacted law complies with constitutional requirements, regardless of its political or ideological bent. That, for what it’s worth is why I’ve predicted (see the earlier post) that neither Judge Barrett nor any of the eight justices currently sitting on the Court (including its four conservatives, two appointed by President Trump) would vote to invalidate Obamacare.

Senator Coons is apparently referring to an article – actually, a book review, “Countering the Majoritarian Difficulty” – that Judge Barrett, as a Notre Dame Law School professor, wrote for a scholarly publication of the University of Minnesota Law School in 2017. The article was not specifically about Obamacare. Instead, it arose out of a roundtable discussion in which several academics discussed Our Republican Constitution, an excellent, provocative book by Randy Barnett, a superb law professor at Georgetown.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/10/end-columbus-day-end-america-daniel-greenfield/

I originally wrote this in 2010, when the issue wasn’t even on the radar for conservatives. A decade later, the culture war has arrived with a vengeance.  And here’s a version of that original article from 2014.

Columbus may have outfoxed the Spanish court and his rivals, but he is falling victim to the court of political correctness. The explorer who discovered America has become controversial because the very idea of America has become controversial.

Columbus Day parades are met with protests and some have been minimized or eliminated.

In Seattle, Columbus Day became Indigenous People’s Day, which sounds like a Marxist terrorist group’s holiday.

While no American state has followed Venezuela’s lead in renaming it Día de la Resistencia Indígena, or Day of Indigenous Resistance, which actually is a Marxist terrorist group’s holiday, the whole notion of celebrating the discovery of America has come to be seen as somehow shameful and worst of all, politically incorrect

Anti-Columbus Day protests are mounted by La Raza, whose members, despite their indigenous posturing, are actually mostly descended from Spanish colonists, but who know that most American liberals are too confused to rationally frame an objection to a protest by any minority group.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/nancy-pelosis-obsession

On Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced legislation to create what would be called the “Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office.” The bill, written by one of Pelosi’s fellow Democrats, Rep. Jamie Raskin, would provide for the implementation of the 25th Amendment to remove a president deemed too incapacitated to carry out his or her responsibilities.

Pelosi, of course, led the Democratic effort to impeach and remove President Trump 11 months ago. For his part, Raskin has wanted to remove Trump from the get-go. He introduced a 25th Amendment bill in 2017, the first year of Trump’s presidency. He also took part in a Democratic effort on Jan. 6, 2017, before Trump was sworn in, to block the certification of votes for Trump in the Electoral College. On Dec. 6, 2017, Raskin joined 57 other House Democrats to vote to impeach Trump on the basis of the president’s statements about Colin Kaepernick and the NFL, among other things. Raskin was one of the original impeachers and, of course, enthusiastically supported impeachment when Pelosi took it up in 2019.

Now, Pelosi and Raskin claim their new 25th Amendment bill has nothing, nothing at all, to do with Trump. “This is not about President Trump,” Pelosi said at a news conference Friday. “He will face the judgment of the voters, but he shows the need for us to create a process for future presidents.”

Pelosi conceded that the bill, if it were to become law, would apply to the president who will be elected next month. That could, of course, be Trump. It could also be Democrat Joe Biden. But it seems doubtful that Pelosi and Raskin, Democrats who have pursued Trump relentlessly, would have taken the time, 24 days before the election, to introduce this bill if they felt absolutely, positively, 100% sure that Trump would not be reelected. So perhaps it would be wise to apply the famous “it’s not about the money” aphorism to Friday’s news conference: When someone says it’s not about Trump — it’s about Trump.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/in_defense_of_columbus_day.html

On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas and changed the course of world history forever.  In honor of this historic event, Columbus Day is observed in the United States, Latin America, Spain, and Italy.  In more recent years, however, there’s been increasing opposition to Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  According to the left’s narrative, the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World marked the beginning of one of the largest genocides in human history.  But was it really?

It’s true that many American Indians died after the Europeans discovered the Americas.  However, the vast majority of the native population, some 75 to 95 percent, were killed by Old World diseases to which they had no immunity.  While no less a tragedy, it does not constitute a genocide.  A genocide requires a calculated, deliberate intent to exterminate a whole group of people.  The Europeans were unaware that the natives didn’t have immunity to Old World diseases, let alone how infectious diseases even worked.  Germ theory was not fully developed and accepted until the latter half of the nineteenth century.  It should also be noted that in the United States, at least, there was never a government policy for extermination.  On the contrary, you don’t set up reservations and inoculate the people you are trying to exterminate.

https://worldisraelnews.com/opinion-aoc-is-an-anti-semite-its-time-to-say-it/

Last week’s revelation puts the nail in the coffin of Ocasio-Cortez’s anti-Semitism.

The Democrats’ new guard bodes ill for Jews and Israel.

The latest slight was reported last week. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has rebuffed meetings with local New York Jewish groups. At least one has been trying to arrange a sit-down with her for the last two years.

Neither the Jewish Community Relations Council, which represents 50 local Jewish groups, nor the New York Board of Rabbis has managed to pin down the freshman congresswoman.

There’s little doubt it’s because both are pro-Israel.

There’s nothing extremist about these two groups, in case there’s an AOC supporter out there looking for excuses. There’s plenty extremist about AOC, though.

As a member of The Squad, the four congresswomen of the apocalypse, AOC has largely dodged the anti-Semitic label so justifiably slapped onto two of its other members – Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). We can’t imagine why. The evidence keeps piling up.

Most recently, Ocasio-Cortez dropped out of a memorial for late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. In late July, she praised the support of at least 10 anti-Semitic groups for a congressional letter she spearheaded calling for conditioning aid to Israel on its abandonment of its sovereignty plan in parts of Judea and Samaria.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/10/the-cultural-roots-of-conservatism/

Here in mid-October, we are at or even just past the apogee of that “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” John Keats celebrated in “To Autumn.” Harvests are arriving everywhere. The “maturing sun” has conspired “to load and bless / With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; / To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, / And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.”

Which brings me to the word “cultural.” I remember the first time I noticed the legend “cultural instructions” on the brochure that accompanied some seedlings. “How quaint,” I thought, as I pursued the advisory: this much water and that much sun, certain tips about fertilizer, soil, and drainage. Planting one sort of flower nearby keeps the bugs away but proximity to another sort makes bad things happen. Young shoots might need stakes, and watch out for beetles, weeds, and unseasonable frosts . . . 

The more I pondered it, the less quaint and the more profound those cultural instructions seemed. I suppose I had once known that the word “culture” comes from the capacious Latin verb colo, which means everything from “live, dwell, inhabit,” to “observe a religious rite”—whence our word “cult”—to  “care, tend, nurture,” and “promote the growth or advancement of.” I never thought much about it. 

I should have done. There is a lot of wisdom in etymology. The noun cultūra (which derives from colo) means first of all “the tilling or cultivation of land” and “the care or cultivation of plants.” But it, too, has ambitious tentacles: there’s the bit about religious rites again and also “well groomed,” and “chic, polished, sophisticated.” 

Cicero’s Cultivation of the Soul

It was Cicero, in a famous passage of the Tusculan Disputations, who gave currency to the metaphor of culture as a specifically intellectual pursuit. “Just as a field, however good the ground, cannot be productive without cultivation,” Cicero wrote, “so the soul cannot be productive without education.” Philosophy, he said, is a sort of “cultura animi,” a cultivation of the mind or spirit: “it pulls out vices by the roots,” he said, “makes souls fit for the reception of seed,” and sows in order to bring forth “the richest fruit.” 

http://Cancel culture reaches working-class America.

From the organized campaign vilifying Harry Potter author JK Rowling for standing up for women’s actual biological experience to decades of Democrat attempts to paint Republicans as every type of bigot; cancel culture, the totalitarian leftist movement to destroy those with whom they disagree, isn’t just international or national. In Bayonne, NJ, it’s local. Making matters worse in the following chain of deplorable events is the fact that the online mob driving it, safe behind blocked phone numbers, closed social media groups (magnifying the worst impulses of already bad agents), and anonymous emails, has targeted local businesses already on life support due to COVID-19 and the resultant economic restrictions. The decomposing cherry on this putrid pie is both the silence from the only people with anything to gain from fueling the hate and the rotten stink of a possible coverup. 

Our story begins with Michael Shatravka, a Bayonne resident with a checkered teenage and young adult past who, after a literally bone-shattering motorcycle accident, made the decision to do better. Shatravka, stuck in physical therapy for over a year, chose not to hate the world for his past bad decisions. After relearning how to walk and talk, Shatravka entered the world of acting for three years and then created his own videography and photography company as well as obtaining his real-estate license. Along the way, he met and married the love of his life and decided he didn’t like the direction in which Bayonne’s public schools were heading because they were, according to his observation, leaving too many kids behind who might fall into the same bad decisions he himself almost succumbed to.

Shatravka’s business life, his entrepreneurial and community minded can-do attitude, and the business life of Buon Appetito, the charming old-world style Italian restaurant on Bayonne’s main drag, came under fire late this September. Shatravka, through his videography and editing business, was contracted by the community eatery to make a commercial. Little did Buon Appetito (beloved by so much of Bayonne for their tasty and large portions) or Shatravka know that the mere existence of his 2020 virgin Board of Education run would set the brave soldiers of the couch-potato keyboard brigade on their cancel culture crusade. Locked in their sights were two targets — Shatravka’s videography business and Buon Appetito, whose ownership may not have even know of Shatravka’s BoE run and who may not even share his perspective. For Shatravka and other businesses like Buon Appetito, the only thing that matters is having a vibrant home town where people can agree or disagree over good food and enjoy each other’s company.

Not so for Bayonne’s cancel culture crusaders who began calling, emailing, and posting on social media to boycott Buon Appetito unless the eatery disavowed all connections for Shatravka and withdrew the commercial his business made them. The message was sent – associate with anyone on the Make Bayonne Great Again ticket, the slate of three BoE candidates including Shatravka and one of the two main municipal Board of Education slates, even in ways that has nothing to do with the BoE election, or people, possibly from Bayonne Mayor Jimmy Davis’s political camp would come after your businesses.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/10/07/great-barrington-declaration-solution-endless-covid-lockdowns-15074

The proposal in the Declaration is certainly worth considering. If I was a policymaker, I would investigate how to implement it. As COVID cases spike in Europe, which once had the coronavirus under control, it’s becoming clear that our current on-again, off-again approach to containment isn’t working as intended. It may be time to try something new. 

Let’s be honest. As we approach late autumn and then winter in the northern hemisphere, nobody knows what’s going to happen. We may see another surge in coronavirus cases, or we may not. We may see flu season exacerbate the effects of COVID, or we may not. We just don’t know.

Making the situation worse is that this uncertainty is absolutely killing the economy. Go downtown in any major American city. It’s a ghost town. We can’t live like this indefinitely. Is there some other approach that we can take as a society to minimize the harm of COVID while maximizing productivity and happiness? A group of successful and respected infectious disease experts says yes, and they have written a statement that they have called the Great Barrington Declaration.

The authors refer to their approach as “Focused Protection,” the gist of which is “to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.” Not that this really matters (because public health policy shouldn’t be a popularity contest), but more than 10,000 scientists and medical practitioners have signed it.

Are the authors right? I certainly think so. Back in May, we reported on a Swedish epidemiologist who believed that lockdowns did nothing other than delay the inevitable; i.e., they simply push new infections down the timeline. Therefore, while lockdowns can be useful to avoid overwhelming hospital bed capacity, they may not lower the overall number of cases. In other words, we’re destroying the economy while essentially accomplishing nothing.