RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://click1.srnemail.com/ViewMessage.do;jsessionid=60866FAC807674FA7EDBB338DE9

The story notes they are “all among people who traveled to the city at the center of the outbreak” (Washington Times).  Some are urging Trump to declare a formal public health emergency (ABC News).  China’s death toll is at 80 and the disease is spreading to other parts of the country (NY Times).  From Hugh Hewitt: “According to the CDC, it’s likely that there will be more cases reported in the U.S. in the coming days and weeks, likely including person-to-person spread.” So don’t tell people on what flights/airports through infected patients traveled and times? (Twitter).  Orange County, California has a confirmed case (OC Health Info).  From former Senator Jim Talent: It’s been apparent for years that a global biological pandemic is the biggest single threat, other than a strategic nuclear war, to the health and economy of the United States. The pandemic could occur naturally, or it could be the product of a terrorist attack or even a laboratory accident. One of the worst-case scenarios involves a virus that is contagious through the air, which has a potentially deadly effect, and for which no vaccine or therapeutic can quickly be developed (National Review).  Why hospitals aren’t ready for this (WSJ). 

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/26/target-trump-forever/

The Left has shown that the collusion exoneration last year by the heralded Robert Mueller investigation—all 22-months, the “dream team,” and $34 million of it—meant absolutely nothing.

Nor did it matter that Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz found no justification of “collusion” in the Steele dossier to justify the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants it issued to spy on Carter Page.

Both the Mueller and Horowitz investigations confirmed that even the partisan and warped FBI “Crossfire Hurricane” intrigues could find no Russian-Trump collusion.

And yet the House impeachment managers cannot finish a sentence without exclaiming “Russian collusion,” as if it has now transmogrified into some exotic foundational myth.

Remember, no sooner had Mueller found no collusion between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Kremlin and no actionable obstruction than the progressives narrative was recalibrated into Ukrainian quid pro quo—albeit after brief detours in “Recession!” and “Racism!”

Yet it is now as if neither Mueller nor Horowitz ever existed, as if we have forgotten the thousands of hours of investigation that found no Russian collusion, but indeed discovered the systematic warping of the FISA court by allegations of such falsities. As if to prove that the Mueller investigation was never biased, Andrew Weissmann now appears on MSNBC as a legal analyst to continue what he once did for Mueller, in the manner of the post-Russian “collusion” careers of Andrew McCabe, James Comey, and James Clapper.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/he-is-a-dictator-11580075066?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Rep. Jerrold Nadler rarely disappoints, and the always over-the-top impeachment manager came through again Friday as he summed up the Democratic case to remove President Trump from office: “This is a determination by President Trump that he wants to be all powerful. He does not have to respect the Congress—he does not have to respect the representatives of the people. Only his will goes. He is a dictator. This must not stand. That is another reason he must be moved from office.”

Let’s count the ways in which Mr. Trump is “all powerful.” Does he control elections? His party lost two governorships in 2017, the House and a net six governorships in 2018, and another governorship and the Virginia Legislature in 2019.

How about the courts? Mr. Trump’s policies were subject to some 40 national judicial injunctions in its first 32 months, compared to 20 for the Obama Administration in eight years. Mr. Trump often wins on appeal, but until he does his policy agenda has been blocked in the courts. Mr. Trump has not defied a judicial order.

Does he control or censor the press? Nearly every major media outlet spent two years promoting a false story of his collusion with Russia. The press overwhelmingly supports impeachment and opposes his agenda. His plea to change the libel laws has gone nowhere.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/end-impeachment-circus-bruce-thornton/

Not since Caligula enrolled his horse Incitatus in the Roman Senate has a deliberative chamber of a great power seen such a display of undignified triviality and dishonest sophistry as the case for impeachment that the House Democrats delivered last week. Over and over the same flimsy arguments we’ve already heard for months were repeated, with all the same question-begging accusations gleaned from second- and third-hand office gossip, and the same fake “high crimes and misdemeanors” fabricated by the desperate Dems. Time for the Senate to restore its dignity, put an end to this taxpayer-funded political circus, and get back to doing its job.

The House Dems’ argument boils down to criminalizing the President’s Article 2 powers into made-up crimes like “abuse of power for corrupt purposes” and “obstruction of Congress.” Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a mundane example of the President conducting foreign policy in straightforward style, is an “abuse of power,” because he brought up the hinky behavior of the Bidens supposedly in order to benefit himself politically.

This sophistry is transparently specious. Ukraine’s government is notoriously corrupt, and our president was right to ask for some help in getting at the truth of the evidence that Ukrainians had been involved in meddling with the 2016 election, and that a U.S. vice-president had used his power to benefit a son who, with no record of expertise and experience, nonetheless was being paid $50K a month by a sketchy Ukrainian company. For Trump not to mention it just because Biden was running for office would have been a ridiculous application of the Caesar’s Wife standard, and made running for office a convenient defense against scrutiny.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/rep_rashida_tlaib_retweets_an_unsourced_story_accusing_jews_of_child_murder.html

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who occupies a position at the heart of American politics, blithely retweeted an unsourced, unproven, and untrue claim that Jews living in Beit Hanina kidnapped and executed a seven-year-old boy. This is a  modern version of the medieval blood libel against the Jews.

The anti-Semitic blood libel has a long history, going back to at least the 1st century A.D., when the Jewish historian Josephus rebutted a claim that Antiochus Epiphanes found a Greek man in the temple in Jerusalem being fattened for sacrifice. A thousand years later, a Byzantine document again accused Jews of kidnapping a stranger every seven years to serve as a human sacrifice in the Temple at Jerusalem.

By the 12th century, the blood libel had firmly taken in England hold after Jews were accused of ritually sacrificing William of Norwich, a young boy found stabbed in the woods. After that, until the Jews were expelled from England in 1290, Jews were routinely accused of executing children and using their blood in rituals, especially when making matzo for Passover. The Jews were then slaughtered in pogroms. The libel migrated to Europe with the same deadly consequences for Jews.

The great irony of the blood libel, of course, is that one of the central stories in the Hebrew Bible is the Binding of Isaac, in which God ends human sacrifice. The Ten Commandments, the foundation of Western morality, forbid murder. The Jewish laws governing kosher cooking even forbid using blood when cooking.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-left-is-one-huge-internet-troll/

As conservative writers for online magazines are all too well aware, their leftist adversaries are not interested in serious debate or mannerly conversation. Civility is not the left’s strong suit. Tactics vary along a spectrum of readily predictable talking points, false assertions, vituperation and obscenity, the stock in trade of those who have come to be known as trolls. Who and what is a troll?

Originally, trolls were unsightly folklore creatures dwelling in caves, forests, and, as in the famous folk tale, under bridges. Unlike their doppelgängers in the Disney film, they were not sweet and innocent powder-blue creatures resembling the Smurfs and the Na’vi, but gnarled and revolting specimens of indiscriminate voracity. Distinctly hostile and governed by an appetite for human flesh, they became the source of the contemporary internet troll.

The modern troll is the digital form of the contract killer. He lives in the shadows; is prone to using an alias behind which he hides; has no known street address or postal code; is often paid for his services by some powerful figure whose public presence may be known—say, a bloviating multi-billionaire with a highly dubious personal history who manages to evade the law; has no conscience and is not very intelligent but is as cunning as he is unscrupulous—in short, the internet troll is a coward who “kills” in the dark. He is motivated by envy and resentment and has neither self-respect nor moral fiber. He is devoid of productive talents and lacks the ability to make a success of his life. He is, in the current idiom, a loser.

Or course, not every troll is a hired gun. Some like to devour their prey as self-elected vigilantes who need not bother with the labor of constructing a convincing counter-argument—that, after all, takes real work. But in either case, they are the gremlins of the internet world, sniping away at the legitimate participants in the cultural debate or infesting the Twittersphere, often under the cloak of anonymity and the camouflage of fake accounts. They are not part of the conversation but the dregs of the hermeneutic exchange.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/donald_trumps_america_a_vast_improvement.html

“We are making America stronger, prouder, and greater than ever before.”

—President Donald J. Trump

No president in the history of the United States has achieved as much in his first three years in his first term in office as has President Donald Trump.  Meanwhile, no president in the history of America has been subjected to such incessant vile and unjustified attacks as has President Trump.  Why?  Because he believes in American exceptionalism, not globalism.

“Make America Great Again.”  Just a slogan, the people of failure shout back.  The Obama/Biden team had failed us for eight years in every aspect of our lives. To the leftists, failure is not only normal; it is expected.

The list of failures for the previous administration is so long and glaring that I hardly need to repeat all of them here.  Under the previous administration, once well paid manufacturing jobs had disappeared and were relocated to other countries.  President Trump managed to reverse this trend and brought back many manufacturing jobs.  Before President Trump at the helm, huge swaths of this nation from northern New York to the great states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and many others, previously vibrant manufacturing regions, looked like ghost towns, but now they have come back, and people are optimistic about the future of this country.

During a PBS town hall, Obama referenced Trump’s promise to bring back jobs to the United States when talking about manufacturing.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/the_tape_of_trump_seeking_to_dismiss_amb_yovanovitch_is_a_nothing_burger.html

Democrats are excited that a tape has emerged in which Trump can be heard saying that he wants to have Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch fired, for they see it as more impeachment fodder. The tape, however, as is the case with so many things that excite Democrats, is actually nothing special.

It’s not clear how someone recorded a tape of a private dinner party on April 30, 2018, at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. That itself ought to be a scandal. It’s also not clear how ABC got a copy of the tape, another scandal.

Among the attendees were Trump, Giuliani, Lev Parnas, and Igor Fruman. Trump has disclaimed knowing Parnas, describing him as a groupie. Assuming that Trump is speaking the truth about Parnas (who now accuses Trump of all sorts of heinous behavior), he means that he was aware of Parnas, but that Parnas was such a meaningless, peripheral individual he made no impression on a man who routinely sees, speaks with, and even dines with thousands of people a year.

At the dinner, Trump apparently learned for the first time that Amb. Marie Yovanovitch, an Obama holdover, had been bad-mouthing him to the Ukrainians:

Parnas appears to say: “The biggest problem there, I think where we need to start is we gotta get rid of the ambassador. She’s still left over from the Clinton administration,” Parnas can be heard telling Trump. “She’s basically walking around telling everybody ‘Wait, he’s gonna get impeached, just wait.” (Yovanovitch actually had served in the State Department since the Reagan administration.)