RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/01/15/impeachment_and_the_fight_over_the_deep_state_142152.html

Why is official Washington so determined to rid itself of Donald Trump? The usual answers focus on the country’s ideological divisions, now calcified in the parties, and Trump’s polarizing personality. Democrats of all stripes truly loathe him. All true, but those are only part of the answer. 

There is a deeper reason that helps explain both the origins of the impeachment articles and the larger movement to remove Trump. The key is that Trump not only ran against Washington’s entrenched power, he is actually delivering on that promise. Nothing is more dangerous to the Beltway’s power and profits, to its most powerful actors and the foot soldiers behind them. Those endangered interests are the essential backdrop to the House impeachment and Senate trial. 

Trump not only ran against the capital’s lobbyists, lawyers, and bureaucrats, he has avoided capture by them since taking office. Instead of making his peace with traditional Republican constituencies, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, he has shut them out. He pays little attention to familiar Republican think tanks. Instead of deferring to state party leaders, he stepped into the primaries, backed his own candidates (often underdogs), and showed it was fatal for Republicans to oppose him. Back in Washington, the Democrats shut out Trump, deciding from the outset to block as many of his Cabinet and judicial appointments as they could. The result is that Trump firmly controls his own party and is uniformly opposed by Democrats, who are otherwise fractured by ideology and age. 

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

In California, America’s limousine liberals are at it again, demanding that the rapacious California legislature step in and manage corporations lest anyone within the corporation become too rich. Leading the charge is Walt Disney’s great niece.

Abigail Disney is a child of incredible privilege because she is the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney and great niece of Walt Disney, the two men whose genius combined to create The Walt Disney Company. Abigail, a degree jockey, went to all the right schools, by which we really mean all the leftist schools: Yale, Stanford, and Columbia.

As an adult, Abigail has taught English, written about the celebration of violence in American fiction, and produced and directed a handful of documentary films. She is purely leftist in her politics and is, of course, hostile to Israel.

Although Abigail claims to have given away $70 million since she gained control of her inheritance in 1981, she is still estimated to be worth $120 million. In other words, she still has a lot left to give away.

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

In the 1970s, San Francisco, as was true for most major American cities, had gotten very shabby. While tourists still flocked to the neighborhood directly north of Market Street, where they could find Union Square, fancy stores, and upscale hotels, those who crossed Market Street and headed south found themselves in a four-block-square area of unpleasant squalor. There were always a handful of drunken men sleeping it off in the doorways of decrepit buildings and the sidewalks stank of urine.

By the end of the 1970s, San Francisco began a massive plan to revitalize that area. It tore down the decayed buildings and, in their place, built the Moscone Conference Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Gardens, and the Metreon theater and shopping center. It was all beautiful and inviting. People loved coming to trade shows and conferences in San Francisco, and families happily took their children to the museum, the garden, the skating rink, and the movie theaters.

Things aren’t like that anymore. While it was once just the South of Market region that was icky because of a few sleeping (or rambunctious) drunks, some stinky pee, and some shabby buildings, tourists are discovering that San Francisco’s entire downtown is inundated with hundreds of scary homeless people, mounds of fecal matter, thousands of discarded needles, and clusters of tents and shopping carts.

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

The past few years have disabused us of any notion that the American Congress is a solemn place, filled with statesmanlike, or at least decent, people working for the betterment of America and Americans. To those few who still clung to that outdated idea, the House Democrats’ behavior when sending the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate shows that Congress is no longer a serious institution.

People of a certain age remember a time when drunkenness was played for laughs. In the family-friendly show Bewitched, a running gag had a chronically drunk man invariably see Samantha practice magic — and, of course, no one believed him. Foster Brooks’ imitation of a drunk was also a perennial favorite in the 1960s and early 1970s:

Lately, it’s easy to suspect that the Democrat party has its own version of Foster Brooks. Don’t pay too much attention to what Nancy Pelosi is saying in this short video; just focus on her delivery:

This is not a well woman, and that’s true whether what bedevils her is a biological ailment or something else.

And then there was her word soup:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/trump-impeachment-postpone-senate-trial-until-house-finishes-investigation/

Letting House Democrats string the process along is not fair to Trump, the Senate, or the people.

Two things happened simultaneously on Wednesday: (a) The House of Representatives transmitted to the Senate two articles of impeachment approved on straight partisan lines a month ago, and (b) the House’s impeachment inquiry — yes, it’s still very much alive — highlighted new, relevant evidence it has turned up about the activities in Ukraine of President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Giuliani’s associates.

The Democrats’ strategy is coming clear.

The House provided the Senate with two half-baked impeachment articles. House Democrats rushed through the investigation, forgoing salient witnesses and evidence, because of the political calendar. The charges are weak and the inquiry was needlessly short-circuited, so Democrats have continued investigating the premature allegations. Now they are publicly disclosing newly acquired evidence, with the promise of more to come. Transparently, their goal is to pressure the Senate not merely to conduct a trial but to complete the investigation that the House failed to complete — calling witnesses and gathering evidence, as if a trial were nothing more than an extension of an open-ended grand-jury probe.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans should not let them get away with it. No trial court would allow itself to be whipsawed this way. A federal judge would tell prosecutors to go back to the grand jury, finish the investigation, and come back to the trial court when they have a case ready to be tried, not investigated.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/dem-six-pack-serves-flop-lloyd-billingsley/

Most viewers were watching President Trump hold forth in Milwaukee but the run-up to Tuesday’s CNN Democrat debate in Des Moines features some stories of interest. Cory Booker had recently dropped up, so some Democrats were lamenting that all the candidates were white, a condition beyond their control. And as word had it, things were going to get tough on stage.

Tucker Carlson showed video of Sanders’ staffers warning of violence if Bernie did not get the nomination. And if he was elected, we would need re-education campaigns so people would not be “Nazis.”

The prevailing story was Elizabeth Warren’s charge that Bernie Sanders claimed a woman could not be president. Sanders claimed he never said it, and the debate kicked off on who would be the best commander in chief.

Bernie Sanders claimed he had opposed military and foreign policy blunders such as Iraq, Vietnam and Afghanistan. The Vermont socialist seemed unconcerned about actual enemies the nation was now facing.

Joe Biden said he would compare his record compare to anyone on this stage, but came up short on specifics. It was a mistake, he said, to give the president authority to go to war.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar wanted good health care and education for the troops. And she would get the nation back into the Iran deal from which President Trump had withdrawn.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/south-dakota-state-rep-proposes-bill-to-criminalize-gender-transition-surgeries-on-children/

South Dakota State Representative Fred Deutsch introduced a bill Tuesday to prosecute medical professionals who attempt to transition children struggling with gender dysphoria, the latest state-level effort to prevent physicians from performing irreversible sex-change surgeries on minors.

The “Vulnerable Child Protection Act” is not Deutsch’s first attempt to limit transgender influence on children. He sponsored a 2016 bill that sought to limit the bathrooms and locker rooms that South Dakota’s transgender students can use, which passed the state legislature, but was vetoed by then-Governor Dennis Daugaard.

In recent months, and with the high-profile custody battle in Texas over James Younger’s potential transition, several states have introduced similar bills, which are intended to punish doctors and healthcare providers who attempt to transition children. Alaska, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, and South Carolina have all seen similar efforts at the state level.

“Every child in South Dakota should be protected from dangerous drugs and procedures,” Deutsch said in a statement emailed to National Review. “The solution for children’s identification with the opposite sex isn’t to poison their bodies with mega-doses of the wrong hormones, to chemically or surgically castrate and sterilize them, or to remove healthy breasts and reproductive organs. The solution is compassionate care, and that doesn’t include catastrophically and irreversibly altering their bodies.”

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

A formal blessing for the Space Force “official” Bible resulted in a squeal of outrage from a man who has dedicated his life to making sure that America’s troops, who are mostly Christian, have no easy access to God.

When the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution, 85% of the American population did not belong to the Church of England. Were they in England, they would have had to pay to support the Anglican church and would have been barred from universities or government employment. Things were easier in the colonies, with the hold the Church of England had over the population varying from one colony to the next. 

It was in this context that the Founders included in the First Amendment the language stating that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion….” The Founders were not banning religion from America or even from government. They were saying only that Congress could not set up a state church and demand that people belong to it or suffer the consequences.

This mandate did not affect the Founders’ belief that God and morality were inextricably intertwined with a free, functioning country. After all, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, to the extent that all people have inherent rights, they are inherent because a divine Creator endowed us with those rights. John Adams believed that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

And then there’s Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He is a fanatically anti-Christian atheist who has been on a crusade for years now to purge religion entirely from the United States Military. To Mikey, Christians in the military are a “well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces.”

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

California was once called “the Golden State.” It has a mellow climate, its agricultural industry was “the fruit basket of America,” San Francisco was “the City that knew how,” Los Angeles was the “City of Dreams,” and the Sierra mountain range, one of the most beautiful in the world, was a summer and winter pleasure paradise. That’s the California in which I grew up.

The current California isn’t quite so nice. The climate is still lovely, but the agricultural industry has been struggling because of environmental concerns over the Delta Smelt, a small fish.

Regularly occurring droughts, which are part of California’s natural cycle, are proving devastating, mostly because California has refused to upgrade its water system in the last 60 years, even as the population almost doubled. The new plan is to limit people to 55 gallons a day, which gives them a choice on many days between cleaning their clothes or cleaning themselves.

Punishing taxes and regulations routinely drive businesses (aka employers) out of the state.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/14/john-boltons-testimony-would-not-be-the-smoking-gun-democrats-need/

You have to give credit to congressional Democrats for one thing: They are an extremely hopeful bunch. After years of Russia investigations aimed at toppling Donald Trump, they came away with what Grandmother would have called “bupkis.” But, not daunted, they quickly latched onto a whistleblower report about a phone call with Ukraine, and launched an up tempo effort, one last-ditch attempt to take the president down.

The result of this exertion did include a vote to impeach Trump, but did not attract a single GOP vote. This is also almost certain to the result in the senate trial as well. But wait! Now former National Security Adviser John Bolton has agreed to testify if called, and the Democrats are racing toward Lucy again, confident this time she won’t move the football.

The excitement from Democrats comes from the fact that Bolton in the past few months has sent a few mysterious tweets and said through lawyers that he does have information that did not come up in impeachment. Bolton may well have new information, but the idea that he is going walk into the Senate chamber if subpoenaed with a smoking gun is pure wish casting.

The crux of the dispute between Democrats and Republicans over the Trump administration’s action to delay funding to Ukraine is not over whether it happened, but whether the president was acting within his authority. It is almost inconceivable that Bolton could provide any evidence that would change that basic dynamic.