RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/manchin-opposes-dem-bill-prohibiting-transgender-discrimination/

I don’t really get the hoopla about genderalization, but I do admire Joe Manchin who broke with the herd to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh which ensured his nomination….rsk

Senator Joe Manchin (D., W.V.) announced Monday that he will not support the recently introduced Equality Act as it is currently written, breaking from the rest of his caucus in arguing that the legislation, which would prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation, will be too difficult to implement.

Senate Democrats on Wednesday re-introduced the bill, which was first introduced in 1974 and would prohibit employers, landlords, school administrators, and others from discriminating against transgender and homosexual Americans. In a statement, Manchin said that he would be open to supporting the bill with some unspecified changes, but could not support it as it stands now.

“I strongly support equality for all people and do not tolerate discrimination of any kind,” the statement read. “No one should be afraid of losing their job or losing their housing because of their sexual orientation. After speaking with local education officials in West Virginia, I am not convinced that the Equality Act as written provides sufficient guidance to the local officials who will be responsible for implementing it, particularly with respect to students transitioning between genders in public schools. I will continue working with the sponsors of the bill to build broad bipartisan support and find a viable path forward for these critical protections so that I can vote in support of this bill.”

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/beto-orourke-raises-staggering-6-1-million-after-announcing-2020-run/

Beto O’Rourke, the latest Democrat to jump into the packed 2020 presidential primary field, has raised a staggering $6.1 million in the first 24 hours of his presidential campaign, joining a list of fellow record fundraisers. The O’Rourke campaign said that the candidate received online contributions from “every state and territory in the nation.”

“In just 24 hours, Americans across this country came together to prove that it is possible to run a true grassroots campaign for president — a campaign by all of us for all of us that answers not to the PACs, corporations and special interests but to the people,” said O’Rourke in a statement on Monday.

The fundraising milestone comes after O’Rourke formally kicked off his campaign on Thursday with an online video, telling supporters that he plans to travel the country and “listen to those who I seek to serve, to understand from your perspective how we can best meet these challenges.”

“At this moment of maximum peril and maximum potential let’s show ourselves and those who will succeed us in this great country just who we are and what we can do.”

Americans Have Spoken: Ocasio-Cortez Loses It After Unfavorability Rating Buries Her
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xoz39GXp6_o

Ex-AOC Aide Comes Forward & Confirms Terrifying Plan for America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n_kH8X1wA8

Ilhan Omar Just Got Massive Bad News from Back Home
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syLQFYMDqak

Did Rep. Ilhan Omar Commit Immigration Fraud?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7zw1gx9Uc4

Jewish Rabbi: Nancy Pelosi ‘Failed Us’ in Condemning Antisemitism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkTDPgMa1AI

The Ilhan Omar controversy: what do young American Jews think?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2QjSGHrw4k

https://pjmedia.com/trending/stop-calling-her-aoc/
The new Democratic congresswoman does not deserve the stature that the acronym conveys.
As Michael Connelly’s bristly no-nonsense detective Harry Bosch says in The Black Echo, fed up to the gills with the infinite cascade of public acronyms for every conceivable police file, unit, task force, and department, acronyms give a sense of “eliteness,” of special authority, to the routine and humdrum business of professional practice and institutional procedure.

Obviously, ciphers, abbreviations, and alphabetical contractions facilitate ordinary communication. They operate as a form of shorthand to convey messages without bogging down in wordy prolongations that may lose the thread of an argument or send our interlocutors to sleep. As such, they perform a necessary function. Thus we are comfortable using alphabetical elisions for institutions, offices, programs and titles like FBI, CIA, DoJ, NATO, the UN, KFC, SNL, NYT, WSJ, NBC, CEO, and so on, or phrasal compressions like ASAP, AWOL, aka, TLC, LOL, WTF, IMO, ad infinitum.

The same applies to individuals, especially to names of famous people—e.g., MLK—or of presidents who may, or may not, have earned the sobriquet, for example: FDR, JFK, LBJ or GWB (the latter tinseled by the nickname “Dubya). This makes sense since they are referred to in political discourse with relative frequency.

An article in Slate for June 11, 2012, ruminates on the growing ubiquity of “the three-initial formulation,” which it sees as generic forms of compression trimmed for newspaper convenience. But as the article also suggests, there is more to it. Lyndon Baines Johnson understood the power of the triple initial; as Robert Caro reports in The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Johnson said, “What I want is for them to start thinking of me in terms of initials.” This is understandable. Three initials are a reputation enhancer.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-may-blow-it-in-2020-11552848202

In their fever to dispense with President Trump immediately, Democrats are losing sight of what Marxists called the “objective conditions” in the country and the fundamentals of presidential politics. Unless they take care, they will forfeit their chance to regain the White House in 2020 and could return congressional control to Republicans as well.

Begin with the objective conditions. The first is continuing public disenchantment with political, media, financial and cultural establishments. It is this disenchantment that brought Mr. Trump to the White House in the first place and, additionally, almost brought Sen. Bernie Sanders, not even a Democrat, the Democratic presidential nomination.

In Mr. Trump’s case, voters knew he was boorish, narcissistic, a business and financial freewheeler, a womanizer, and largely ignorant of governance and public policy. His election was wholly about disillusion with the alternatives. His former personal lawyer was no doubt right in asserting that Mr. Trump never expected to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate but ran simply to burnish his brand. Similar populist disenchantment, by the way, is plaguing establishment politicians in the U.K., France, Germany and elsewhere.

The other objective conditions—the two most important in a national general election—are those relating to national security and the economy. Ordinary voters see that Mr. Trump has destroyed the ISIS caliphate in the Middle East, has plans for phased withdrawals of American forces from Syria and Afghanistan, has challenged Russia and Iran, and is making an effort to denuclearize North Korea. They also see him attempting to confront China for its dishonest trading practices.

They may not support his Mexican wall as first proposed, but they recognize the need for border security. They also support American citizenship for immigrants who proceed lawfully. They puzzle that Democrats, rather than focusing on means to legalization, instead are attacking Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol as child torturers. They do not see or comprehend the damage Mr. Trump has done to multilateralism, alliances, carefully built international institutions, or thoughtful internal policy-making processes. They see only the externals.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/16/the-left-abandons-

Just after midnight, on June 5, 1968, Jerusalem born-Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan murdered U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Kennedy had won the California Democratic Party presidential primary earlier that evening.

Like his brother, President John F. Kennedy, RFK repeatedly had expressed admiration and sympathy for the small Jewish state struggling against an Arab economic boycott, war, and terrorism, including in a recent prominent synagogue address.

Repeating “Kennedy Must Die,” Sirhan purposefully committed the first modern act of Arab terrorism on U.S. soil on the first anniversary of Israel’s miraculous victory in the Six Day War of 1967, when a sovereign Israel liberated Jerusalem for the first time in 2,000 years.

Remarkably, 50 years later, six of the seven U.S. Senators who are declared candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination recently voted against the anti-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions bill in the Senate, and remain mute about a rapidly rising tide of anti-Semitic rhetoric and anti-Israel views among progressives and radicals in their party.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/16/jimmy-fallons-beto-orourke-is-an-overzealous-lightweight/

“Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon did his job well on Thursday, rolling out an impression of Beto O’Rourke that accurately captured his manic flailings and limited credentials.The sketch was a direct parody of O’Rourke’s announcement video, although Fallon’s surprisingly keen mockery of his subject’s wild and incessant gesticulations barely amounts to an exaggeration. They really were that ridiculous.

At times, the impression felt soft (“I’m like if your friend’s hot dad had the energy of a golden retriever”), but Fallon brought it home with jabs about whippets in 7-11 parking lots, virtue-signaling Instagram polls, and a biting final line: “Are there more experienced candidates out there with clearer policy ideas? Sure,” his Beto concedes with a clueless smile.The effect is an early depiction of O’Rourke as a lightweight, and a completely overzealous one at that.

If Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is the new brand of the Democrat Party, let’s unwrap the claims she uses in order to attract a new audience.  Many years ago Jeffrey Schrank wrote “The Language of Advertising Claims” and it is fascinating to apply these claims to this new face of the Democrats. Schrank asserts that many people are “notorious believers in their immunity to advertising” because they believe that “advertising is childish, dumb, a bunch of lies, and influences only the vast hordes of the less sophisticated.” 

He then goes on to elucidate different persuasive ways that advertisers use to lure in the consumer.

If these claims can be applied to Ocasio and her ilk, perhaps the American voter, particularly the millennial, will be able to see through the bilge that Ocasio regurgitates.

One of the most widely used advertising methods is the use of “invisible” or “weasel” words.  A weasel word “is aptly named after the egg eating habits of weasels.”  A weasel will suck out the inside of an egg and then turn the egg over so when the mother bird returns to the nest and continues to sit on her egg, she does not realize that there is nothing growing anymore.  Thus, “weasel” words or claims appear at first to be substantial but “disintegrate into hollow meaninglessness” upon analysis. 

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/14/beto-orourke-ultimate-limousine-liberal-gen-xer-announces-prez/

Late last night, failed Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke confirmed to El Paso’s KTSM that he’s seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. This morning, he added a video to the mix, and Twitter exploded with furry jokes and fanfare (the way politics should be?).

This is all on the coattails of an obnoxiously fawning Vanity Fair profile that basically portrayed O’Rourke as the dream Gen Xer, heaping praise on his “floor-to-ceiling bookshelf [that] contains a section for rock memoirs (Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, a favorite) and a stack of LPs (the Clash, Nina Simone)” before showing off his intellectual side: a “sizable collection of presidential biographies, including Robert Caro’s work on Lyndon B. Johnson.”

If the Dylan-LBJ mix wasn’t enough for you, Vanity Fair also waxed poetic about O’Rourke’s age: “Whereas Obama is from the tail end of the baby boom, Beto O’Rourke is quintessentially Generation X, weaned on Star Wars and punk rock and priding himself on authenticity over showmanship and a healthy skepticism of the mainstream.”

In other words, 2020 contender Beto is getting a heavy lift from the media. Expect this to continue throughout the election, unfortunately. Of course, perhaps his candor and coolness is a double-edged sword — a selling point that makes profiles of him oh-so-colorful that media ilk just can’t resist churning them out, and a cringey furtherance of limousine liberal stereotypes that make him far too mockable on Twitter.