RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

Leftists craved the thought of violence occurring at Monday’s Second Amendment in Richmond, Virginia, while Second Amendment supporters were concerned that groups such as Antifa would use false flag operations to make trouble. Fortunately, as Fox News reported, “A gun-rights rally in Richmond that brought thousands of people from across the country to protest a push by Virginia Democrats for comprehensive gun control ended peacefully without any major incidents.”

The rally exposed deep faultlines in America when it comes to guns. On the conservative side, gun rights activists note that the first shots the American revolutionaries fired, on April 19, 1775, were to prevent the British from acting on orders to seize and destroy arms and munitions hidden in Lexington and Concord. From the start, America has been about the people’s right to keep and bear arms.

After the Americans had routed the British, the Founding Fathers remained focused on the fact that the only defense against a tyrannical government is the People. To minimize the risk that could arise from a federal government with a standing army, James Madison, writing in Federalist #46, spoke of the best bulwark against a tyrannical government’s troops:

To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands . . . fighting for their common liberties. . . . It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/19/progressive-petards/

Since at least 2016, CNN has mostly ceased being a news agency, but that hasn’t stopped it from being an active participant in #TheResistance. The network is so caught up in the fervor of this movement that many of its guests and regular hosts have been fired, reprimanded, or apologized for threats to the president or general obscene references (e.g., Reza Aslan, the late Anthony Bourdain, Kathy Griffin).

Many of its marquee reporters have resigned, were fired, or reassigned for fake-news bias (e.g., Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Haris), or came under fire for false reporting (Jim Sciutto, Marshall Cohen, and Carl Bernstein) or have had to offer retractions and/or apologies (Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper, and Brian Rokus.)

Its anchors have apologized for obscenity (Anderson Cooper) or simply making up false statements (Chris Cuomo), while analysts have been caught in a number of contradictions about their own role in on-going scandals (James Clapper).

The common denominator has been the new journalistic ethos that aborting the Trump presidency justifies any means necessary to achieve such noble ends. Throughout CNN’s descent into parody, progressives still smiled at the usefulness of CNN for the larger project of delegitimizing the Trump presidency. Few understood the Thucydidean concept that once nihilists destroy norms and protocols of ethical behavior for perceived short-term advantage, they usually rue the loss when they themselves become victims of their own biased zealotry and are in dire need of the civilizational help they recently ruined.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/womens-march-goes-hundreds-thousands-hundreds-daniel-greenfield/

Three years ago, the Women’s March brought a million anti-Trump protesters to Washington D.C.

This year, 25,000 people signed up online. That was unrealistically optimistic because organizers had only obtained a permit for up to 10,000 protesters. And they only ended up with thousands.

Impeachment should have encouraged a bigger turnout, but the snowflakes couldn’t handle the snow.

The first person quoted in D.C.’s WUSA9 report explained that she couldn’t come because, “it’s supposed to be really cold and snowy and that is definitely a factor for me.”

There were few pink hats among those who did show up and a lot of black and brown winter gear. Among the few march attendees to wear pink was a bedraggled dog in a pink halter, pinks slacks, white socks and Mary Janes, while her owner waved a sign reading, “Public Cervix Announcement.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/trump-impeachment-trial-charges-lack-indictable-offense/

Something is missing from the charges against Trump: An impeachable offense.

Thought experiment No. 1: Suppose Bob Mueller’s probe actually proves that Donald Trump is under Vladimir Putin’s thumb. Fill in the rest of the blanks with your favorite corruption fantasy: The Kremlin has video of the mogul-turned-president debauching himself in a Moscow hotel; the Kremlin has a bulging file of real-estate transfers through which Trump laundered racketeering proceeds for Putin’s favored mobsters and oligarchs; or Trump is recorded cutting a deal to drop Obama-era sanctions against Putin’s regime if Russian spies hack Democratic accounts.

Thought experiment No. 2: Adam Schiff is not a demagogue. (Remember, this is fantasy.) At the very first televised hearing, when he alleged that President Trump told Ukrainian president Zelensky, “I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent . . . lots of it,” Schiff was not defrauding the public. Instead, impeachment’s Inspector Clouseau can actually prove that Trump was asking a foreign government to manufacture out of whole cloth evidence that Vice President Biden and his son were cashing in on the former’s political influence (as opposed to asking that Ukraine look into an arrangement so objectively sleazy that the Obama administration itself agitated over what to do about it).

What do these two scenarios have in common, besides being fictional? Answer: If either of them were real, we’d already be talking about President Pence’s upcoming State of the Union address.

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

In a court of law, a party on the receiving end of civil or criminal charges can move to dismiss those charges if he can prove that the charges do not state a case for which relief can be granted. This argument can be made either on the ground that the law does not recognize the claimed cause of action or criminal charge, or that the facts stated in the opening papers fail to meet the requirements for such a cause of action or criminal charge. The president’s opening papers show that his attorneys will argue that the Articles of Impeachment fail under both of these metrics.

For some time, however, Republicans have been concerned that the Senate will not allow the equivalent of a motion to dismiss. Instead, they’ve fretted that the Senate will give credibility to the fatally flawed Articles of Impeachment by allowing a full evidentiary trial. Even assuming Trump were to prevail in the impeachment proceedings, his opponents would still argue that the claims were valid enough to merit a full hearing.

https://www.thepostmillennial.com/if-you-ask-siri-who-the-president-of-isreal-is-she-

“Hey Siri, wtf?” That’s the question that started floating around the Twittersphere Saturday evening.

Numerous people discovered that if you asked your iPhone who the president of Israel is, it would respond with a highly problematic answer: Reuvin Rivlin is the “President of the Zionist occupation state.”

The New York Post‘s Karol Markowicz tried, and got the same answer:

Sky News’ Rita Panahi had the same result over in Australia:

Rita Panahi
✔@RitaPanahiThis is real. Wtaf @Apple

Pretty worrying that the biggest tech company in the world can be hacked by antisemites or perhaps it’s an inside job.

The Post Millennial asked anti-Semitism expert and former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind for comment and he said, “Apple has serious explaining to do. Not only do they have to remove and replace this nasty politicized result, they have to deal with how such a result was ever published. We want answers.”

The Post Millennial reached out to Apple but has not heard back by the time of publication.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/16/another-dud-in-the-string-of-bombshells/

Among the many important initiatives of this website has been holding the competition for the Award for “Stupidest Litigation in the Country.” Nominees for the coveted Award have included the group of lawsuits brought by various cities and counties against major oil companies, seeking to hold those companies liable for prospective physical damage from things like sea level rise, alleged to result from fossil fuel emissions; and the lawsuit brought by New York’s Attorney General against Exxon claiming that Exxon defrauded its own investors by downplaying the risks of climate change to its business. Yet to many readers, the very first nominee for the Stupidest Litigation Award has always been the clear leading contender to win it. That nomination, made in December 2017, went to the litigation titled Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana v. United States. This is the case where a group of adolescents in the Pacific Northwest have sought an injunction to require the federal government to decree an end to all use of fossil fuels, in order to “save the planet.” Really, it’s hard to top that one for Stupid.

But just because a particular litigation is the leading contender for the Stupidest Litigation Award does not mean that no judge will grant victory to the plaintiffs. After all, the whole idea behind each of these Stupid Litigations is to offer some judge a thinly-veiled rationale to become a hero in the progressive movement by taking self-government away from the people and turning control over to the bureaucrats and experts. Which is why it is significant that yesterday, a three-judge panel of the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Juliana case dismissed. Moreover, the nature of the dismissal is such that the case as a practical matter is unlikely to come back. The only remaining recourses for the plaintiffs are to the full Ninth Circuit (known as an en banc rehearing), and/or to the U.S. Supreme Court. Neither is likely to change this result.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/16/another-dud-in-the-string-of-bombshells/

You have to pity the bombshell-shocked American citizen trying to take seriously all the “shocking,” “stunning” and “bombshell” news coming out of Washington these days.

It is a little maddening — though mostly amusing — watching Rachel Maddow and the breathless news wags on MSNBC and CNN contorting themselves during interviews with greasy “witnesses” to supposedly nefarious behavior in Ukraine as to why exactly what they are claiming is so important and damning.

Or, “bombshell!,” as they like to say. And, certainly, “impeachable!”

HINT: If it takes exhaustive and complicated explanations to pinpoint precisely why something is a “bombshell,” then it is not a “bombshell.” That is the point of a “bombshell.” It is so powerful that it does not need to come wrapped in complicated explanations.

But there is no rabbit hole these people will not venture down in pursuit of President Trump. There is no zany conspiracy theory they will not gulp down to keep the party going. And there is no arcane strip of federal code from centuries gone by that they won’t dust off to construct their rickety case for impeachment.

ust ask Rep. Adam B. Schiff, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chairman and a newly ordained impeachment manager. He got thoroughly snookered by a couple of gonzo radio goofs pretending to be Ukrainians with naked pictures of Mr. Trump.

Of course, the raunchy pervert happily went along — anything to get his grubby little hands on nudie pictures of Mr. Trump. It really is astonishing that these people are taken seriously anywhere outside the peep-show booths that used to populate Times Square.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/18/democratic-candidates-are-sorry-for-all-the-wrong-things/

We’d like to see candidates expressing dismay about the ways that government malfeasance or indifference threatens Americans’ health and safety every day. If they don’t, we should make them sorry on election day.

When presidential candidate Joe Biden began a campaign tour with the slogan, “No Malarkey” (a seeming oxymoron for a politician), the rallying cry was contradicted by his many apologies for past actions and positions. Had he fashioned his expedition as a “No Apologies” tour, he doubtless would have done far more to solidify his position as the most electable Democrat.

But he is not alone in lamenting past positions, actions, or inaction. One could imagine the consternation from Michael Bloomberg’s natural constituency when he felt the need to apologize for his support of “stop, question, and frisk” in New York City. Had Bloomberg simply said he should have made sure the policy was not taken to an extreme, as apparently was the case, he not only could have been truthful, but also avoided alienating those who recognized the positive impact the policy had in his city.

This presidential campaign has raised apologizing to a new art form. Much of it is no more than pandering. A simple explanation that one’s views have “evolved” would, we think, be far more effective. Instead, the pandering has spurred the legions of woke social justice warriors to even greater extremes of political correctness, harassment, and suppression of free speech.