RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mccaskills-intimidation-game-1532646222

If you’ve tuned in to this year’s midterms, chances are you know about that hot Senate race in Missouri: McCaskill vs. Humphreys. Oh, wait.

Democrat Claire McCaskill is indeed facing a tough re-election, trying for a third term. She’s had a particularly rough week, after the Kansas City Star reported that businesses tied to her husband had been awarded $131 million in federal contracts since she took office in 2007. Her putative opponent is the constitutional conservative Josh Hawley, the current attorney general and the strong favorite to win the GOP primary on Aug. 7.

Team McCaskill is already employing the Democratic Party’s go-to tactic this midterm: character assassination. There’s not much else. The economy is humming, the party’s centrist and liberal wings are fighting, and the drumbeat of impending Trump doom isn’t finding much accompaniment. So in Missouri as elsewhere, candidates are reverting to personal attacks. But the McCaskill forces are piling on a guy who isn’t even running.

Indeed, they are attacking a private citizen and donor, David Humphreys. Back in March, Chuck Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC began plowing millions into attacks on the businessman, who donated to Mr. Hawley’s campaign for attorney general. The pattern is the same: An ad makes a malicious accusation against Mr. Humphreys, then sidles over to tar Mr. Hawley with guilt by association. Just how invested are they in this strategy? Since airing their first spot, 70% of Democratic ads—amounting to $4.7 million—have been focused on Mr. Humphreys.

Ms. McCaskill’s pickle is that the GOP has upped its recruitment game. Her only prior re-election bid in 2012 had her face off against Todd Akin, who self-immolated after his blundering comments on abortion and rape. Mr. Hawley—a savvier, younger man and squeaky clean—hasn’t provided a similar opening. A native Missourian and onetime U.S. Supreme Court law clerk, he arrived on the political scene only in 2016, becoming the Show Me State’s first Republican attorney general in 24 years.

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/howie_carr/2018/07/howie_carr_liz_warren_to_join_tribe_of_losers

Psst: Mitt Romney was the Governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007…..rsk

One thing the Democrats can do to assure Donald Trump’s re-election in 2020: Nominate somebody from Massachusetts. Virginia used to be called the Mother of Presidents. Massachusetts is the Mother of Presidential Losers.

I mention this today in the wake of a sycophantic, fawning cover story in New York magazine declaring that the fake Indian, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, is now “the de facto leader of the Democratic party.”

To which Trump has got to be saying, Dirty Harry-like, “Go ahead, make my day.”

What is it with the national Democrats’ fascination with Massachusetts?

Look at the record: Ted Kennedy, Mike Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, John Kerry. Fool me once shame on you, fool me four times, five times … what’s up with that?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/kirsten_gillibrand_tacks_hard_left_for_2020_to_compensate_for_excessive_whiteness.html

New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has a problem. She wants to be the Democratic nominee for President in 2020. But she’s white.

Not only is Gillibrand white, but she’s extremely white. She’s so white that even Hillary Clinton looks almost Hispanic by comparison.

That’s not an asset in a competitive Democratic primary. It used to be that being a woman was sufficiently virtuous. No longer. Gillibrand has to compete against candidates from other identity groups. Cory Booker is a minority, Kamala Harris is a minority, and even though Elizabeth Warren isn’t a minority, she does play one on TV.

So Gillibrand is tacking hard left to compensate. She was formerly a moderately conservative Democratic congresswoman from upstate New York, until she was appointed to a vacant Senate Seat by the then-governor, David Paterson, a blind black adulterous former cocaine user whose resume full of multiple identity group memberships dazzled New Yorkers throughout the state.

Gillibrand, who used to brag about keeping a gun under her bed and advocated deporting illegal aliens and making English the official language of America, now sings to a very different tune. When she got elected to the Senate she saw she got a lot of media attention when she repeatedly told her “fat shaming story”, her claim that then Senator Daniel Inouye allegedly told her “Don’t lose too much weight now. I like my girls chubby!”

After that, Gillibrand latched on to every offense, real and perceived, against women in the non-Islamic world to attract the attention of the media. And it worked, for a while, to raise her profile.

But as the status of women as a virtue group has declined, and the status of minority and other identity groups have risen in the Democratic Party, Gillibrand has had to up her game.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mccaskill-and-the-swamp-1532467234

Who says newspapers are dying? The Trump newsprint tariffs aren’t helping, but daily journalism appears to be alive and well at the Kansas City Star, which performs a public service today in illuminating a lucrative area of the Beltway swamp. Specifically, the Star details the rising income from federally-subsidized investments enjoyed by the spouse of a U.S. senator.

“Businesses tied to U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill’s husband have been awarded more than $131 million in federal subsidies since the Missouri Democrat took office in 2007,” reports the Star.

The newspaper details the surge in income for Ms. McCaskill’s husband, Joseph Shepard, as a result of his investments in government-backed housing projects. According to the Star:

In 2006, the year before McCaskill entered the Senate, her husband’s personal income from those investments was between $1,608 and $16,731, according to the senator’s financial disclosure forms.

In 2017, five years into McCaskill’s second term, Shepard personally earned between $365,374 and $1,118,158 from investments in housing projects that received federal subsidies, the disclosure forms show. Disclosure forms only provide ranges of income.

There’s no evidence that McCaskill played any part in directing federal funds to businesses affiliated with her husband.

The senator’s campaign tells the Star that she has nothing to do with her husband’s investments and the paper notes that he was investing in affordable-housing projects long before he met the senator, whom he married in 2002.But lately Mr. Shepard seems to have become much better at selecting such investments. According to the newspaper:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/07/24/dont_underestimate_the_socialist_surge_on_the_left_137601.html

A Democratic “blue wave” may or may not be able to overcome the Republicans’ majority and structural advantages in the 2018 midterm elections. But the bigger story that’s brewing is the dramatic and nationwide leftward shift of the Democratic Party. The socialist surge has potential to reshape not just the party but American politics for generations to come.

Democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory over 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in a New York primary was the most significant political upset since Tea Party Republican Dave Brat defeated then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in 2014. Her victory wasn’t an isolated incident. Democratic-socialist candidates also scored wins in Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives and, in 2017, in Virginia’s House of Delegates.

Meanwhile, in California, the Democratic state party executive committee decided to endorse progressive stalwart Kevin de Leon over Dianne Feinstein. (Feinstein won the open primary, but in California the top two finishers, even if members of the same party, run against each other in the general election.) Feinstein has major advantages in the November face-off (name ID and fundraising) and will likely prevail. But when Dianne Feinstein is deemed too conservative for the Democratic Party a major shift is underway.

The Democratic socialists hoped to start a new chapter in their crusade with a rally last week in the heart of America: The event took place in Wichita, Kansas. For Kansas’s conservatives, the rally was the political equivalent of “Red Dawn.” The Bernie Sanders liberation army, under the leadership of General Ocasio-Cortez, parachuted into the heart of Koch country (Wichita is the headquarters of Koch Industries) to pick a fight and make a point. Ocasio-Cortez said they chose the location to prove that “an honest, grassroots, lobbyist-free movement for working-class Americans can work anywhere.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270776/ocasio-cortez-capitalism-wont-always-exist-matthew-vadum

Democrat giant-slayer and soon-to-be Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came close to saying she supports abolishing the free enterprise system and the precious economic freedoms on which it is based that have made America wealthy beyond its founders’ wildest dreams.

The so-called democratic socialist Ocasio-Cortez whom DNC Chairman Tom Perez hails as “the future of our party,” breezily dismissed the current strength of the U.S. economy, claiming unemployment is low only because Americans are working two jobs.

Capitalism is a fleeting phenomenon, she told PBS in an astounding display of historical ignorance that would no doubt endear her to anti-American conspiracy theorist Naomi Klein.

I do think that right now, when we have this no-holds-barred Wild West hypercapitalism, what that means is profit at any cost. Capitalism has not always existed in the world, and it will not always exist in the world. When this country started, we did not operate on a capitalist economy.

Asked if democratic socialism, the system to which Ocasio-Cortez claims allegiance, “calls for an end to capitalism,” the candidate said:

“Ultimately, we are marching towards progress on this issue. I do think that we are going to see an evolution in our economic system of an unprecedented degree, and it’s hard to say what direction that that takes … ”

The interviewer interjected: “It sounds like you are skeptical that capitalism is going to continue to be the right answer.”

“Yeah, I think it’s, um, I think it’s, I think it’s at least a question,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I think it’s absolutely a question.”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/07/16/ocasio-cortezs-factually-challenged-position-on-israel-is-embarrassing/

How can someone know so little about a topic yet be so passionate about it? That’s what I kept asking myself while re-watching a clip of media darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discussing Gaza and Israel.

After dramatically defeating Democratic Caucus Chair Joe Crowley, there was a rush to proclaim the young, dynamic socialist Ocasio-Cortez the future of the Democratic Party. Well, if she portends the future, then it’s worth taking her words seriously. Even if we overlook the fact that Ocasio-Cortez’s self-identified ideology has led to more suffering and death than any other in history, her propensity to embrace positions she knows absolutely nothing about is, well, curious.

This week on the new “Firing Line” on PBS — a program claiming to be a reboot of the famous debate show, where William Buckley once politely dismantled his guests’ weak arguments — Ocasio-Cortez was asked about Israel. A few months ago, she claimed that Israel Defense Forces was mass murdering civilians, and that Democrats should not silent on the crimes of Israel anymore.

Ocasio-Cortez: Well, yes, but I also think that what people are starting to see in the occupation of Palestine is just an increasing crisis of humanitarian conditions and that to me is just where I tend to come from on this issue.

Margaret Hoover: You use the term the “occupation of Palestine,” what did you mean by that?

Ocasio-Cortez: Oh, I think, what I meant is that the settlements that are increasing in some of these areas and places where Palestinians are experiencing difficulty in access to housing and homes.

Hoover: Do you think you can expand on that?

Ocasio-Cortez: Yeah I think … [laughing] I am not the expert on geo-politics on this issue. You now, for me, I’m a firm believer in finding a two-state solution in this issue. And I’m happy to sit down with leaders on both of these… for me, I just look at things through a human rights lens, and I may not use the right words– I know this is a very intense issue.

Hoover nods and smiles through Ocasio-Cortez’s string of barely coherent platitudes, without challenging her in any genuine way.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/alexandria_ocasiocortez_is_one_very_lowinformation_voter_on_israel_and_palestine.html

Twenty-eight-year-old socialist sensation Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t all that, you know, ummm, up on the news.

Good thing she never met Bill Buckley, because on PBS’s current version of his old show, Firing Line with Margaret Hoover, she came out looking like an idiot.

Daily Wire’s Ryan Saavedra spotted the embarrassing exchange, writing:

New York socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attacked Israel in a recent interview on PBS’s “Firing Line,” calling them the occupiers of Palestine and later admitting that she has no idea what she is talking about regarding Israel.

Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks came in response to a question from host Margaret Hoover, who asked her to explain comments she made about Israel after she attacked them for defending themselves against an attack from Hamas terrorists.

Ocasio-Cortez, who called the shooting a “massacre,” said that she thinks that Israel has the right to “exist,” adding, “but I also think that what people are starting to see, at least, in the occupation of Palestine, is just an increasing crisis of humanitarian condition. And that, to me, is just where I tend to come from on this issue.”

It got worse when she got asked what she thought was going on, until the point where the Boston University graduate with the economics degree said she isn’t an “geopolitical expert.”

A couple of conclusions can be drawn from this.

One: She’s just like most typical Millennials in that she doesn’t know anything at all about the news, having come from a generation that never read newspapers. Her “umms” and “duhs” and hesitations make that embarrassingly clear.

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/adriana_cohen/2018/07/cohen_sen_warren_forgets_all_about_democrats_influencing_the?utm_

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted this gem yesterday: “DOJ’s criminal charges provide hard evidence that Russian intel agents attacked America to boost their favorite candidates, undermine others, and influence our elections. @realDonaldTrump, cancel your ridiculous Putin summit and get your butt on a plane back to the United States.”

Good try.

Of course Liz conveniently forgets her CNN interview with Jake Tapper last November in which she said the DNC rigged the primary against Bernie Sanders.

She forgets the arrangement former DNC acting Chair Donna Brazile outlined in her book recounting the 2016 election, saying the DNC allowed the Clinton campaign to commandeer its finances, giving its preferred candidate control of the party long before Democrat voters chose their nominee.

Didn’t that undermine a legitimate presidential candidate — Bernie Sanders — and unfairly influence an election?

Of course it did but hypocritical liberals would rather keep screaming Russia, Russia, Russia and keep an unproven “collusion” narrative alive in an effort to derail the Trump administration instead of shining a spotlight on its own corrupt practices.

In an effort to distract from the damning Peter Strzok congressional testimony Thursday, the DOJ announced a dozen indictments of Russian nationals they say hacked into Hillary Clinton’s campaign to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

Before you swallow these new allegations, consider that this is the same DOJ whose FBI under former Director James Comey’s watch didn’t bother to obtain the Democratic National Committee’s server and do its own independent forensic analysis.