RUTHFULLY YOURS

Barletta is very pro-Israel for which he gets a -3 from the Arab American Institute…..rsk

It’s not an invasion, but for some in Hazleton, Pa., it feels like one. The northern Pennsylvania town is the home of Republican congressman Lou Barletta, whose 2018 campaign for Senate against incumbent Bob Casey has just begun. Barletta, the polished Italian American, looks the ambitious type in both style and CV: He served as mayor of Hazleton from 1998 to 2010 and ran for Congress thrice over that span. He finally won in 2010 and has been the representative for Pennsylvania’s eleventh district — which stretches from Luzerne County all the way down to Carlisle — ever since. But while some ambitious politicians are determined to leave their towns behind and enter the world of Washington, what animates Barletta is something quite different. Barletta is concerned about what, apparently, plagues his hometown and the rest of his beloved state: illegal immigration.

“They get it,” Barletta tells National Review. “Pennsylvanians understand that illegal immigration depresses wages, puts their jobs at risk, makes it harder at schools or to receive care from hospitals. They understand what it means.” In Barletta’s telling, it carries a mortal risk, too. In 2015, at a panel discussion hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies, he asked: “How many innocent people need to be murdered before we stop the [soft] policies dealing with illegal immigration?” Politically speaking, whether illegal immigration is the chief problem facing Pennsylvanians is less important than whether Pennsylvanians think it is. The question, in other words, is whether Barletta understands the Pennsylvanian mind. That, he certainly does.

Pennsylvania is a big state. The Commonwealth, as inhabitants call it with faint pride, is large enough to have a hinterland. Agriculture is a key business.

It’s also an old one. Entire industries have been born, grown, shrunk, died, and been reclaimed by the forest. One of them is coal, and Hazleton, an old coal town, has gone the way coal towns do. The veins of anthracite running through central and eastern Pennsylvania, and their proximity to ports across the eastern seaboard, caused European immigrants to migrate there during the 19th century. But as Simon Bronner, a professor at Penn State Harrisburg and the founding director of the Center for Pennsylvania Culture Studies, tells National Review, economic progress in the early 20th century “displaced the coal towns and deindustrialized much of the state.” And while western Pennsylvania replaced anthracite with bituminous, and then replaced coal with steel, the central and eastern parts of the state struggled to find a new mainstay industry once their mining days were done.

In their heyday, these coal towns were diverse in the 19th-century fashion, full of Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Dutch, and Irish immigrants. Their churches — Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox — still dominate local architecture. Standing on the main drag in Ashland, which curves elegantly down a mountainside with houses lining the edge, one gets a sense of the past. Traditions die hard here: In the winter holidays, families still make “boilo,” a concoction of steeped fruit and Lithuanian spirits. Outsiders gawk at the bags of coal that remain for sale outside convenience stores.

But mining is now strictly a niche business in what some have christened “Coal Cracker” country, and with economic dislocation come social consequences. There are tourist attractions focusing on the old days, but things are changing. With the end of mining, “Mexican and Puerto Rican immigrants,” Bronner says, entered the state “for work in agriculture, construction, or services. At the same time, young descendants of the European immigrants left for faraway colleges. This migration helped these towns,” Bronner insists. “But there’s definitely a view that things are not what they were. There’s a reaction that these people are taking away jobs that were there previously. Families that had immigrated in the late 19th century don’t want to relocate, but they suddenly faced social change.”

A few years ago, Eric Greitens was a Democrat—not that you’d know it from his first eight months as the hard-charging Republican governor of Missouri. A Rhodes scholar and former Navy SEAL, Mr. Greitens has pursued an unexpectedly muscular conservative agenda, enacting free-market reforms and gleefully going toe-to-toe with unions. While the GOP in Washington seems bent on squandering its legislative and executive power, Mr. Greitens, 43, illustrates how Republicans in many states are intent on making the most of theirs.

A day after taking office in January, Mr. Greitens signed an executive order to freeze pending state regulations. It also required agencies to review rules already on the books to ensure not only that they are “essential to the health, safety, or welfare of Missouri residents” but that they pass a cost-benefit test. In July he assented to a law overriding St. Louis’s $10-an-hour minimum wage. “This increase in the minimum wage might read pretty on paper, but it doesn’t work in practice,” he said at the time. “Government imposes an arbitrary wage, and small businesses either have to cut people’s hours or let them go.”

Mr. Greitens’s most contentious actions have challenged union power. His Democratic predecessor, Gov. Jay Nixon, repeatedly vetoed right-to-work legislation, under which workers can’t be forced to join a union as a condition of employment. Mr. Greitens signed a right-to-work bill within a month of his inauguration.

During a 75-minute interview at the governor’s mansion, Mr. Greitens explains that his inspiration came from another Midwestern state. “I read Mitch Daniels’s book, ‘Keeping the Republic,’ several times” before running for office, he says. The former Indiana governor’s 2011 paean to fiscal discipline and personal responsibility provided an example, as did the right-to-work law Mr. Daniels signed in 2012. “Look at the data,” Mr. Greitens says. “Indiana became a right-to-work state, and today Indiana has more private-sector union members than before . . . because it was good for the economy.”

Not surprisingly, the unions don’t share that view. They formed a group called We Are Missouri, which last month turned in more than 300,000 signatures—only about 100,000 were required—to force a referendum on right to work. If Missouri’s secretary of state certifies the names, right to work will go before voters in 2018—and the law will remain on hold until then. The tactic has succeeded before: In 2011 a referendum campaign styled We Are Ohio defeated Gov. John Kasich’s collective-bargaining reforms for public employees.

Mr. Greitens launched another salvo at the unions in May. He signed a law banning so-called project labor agreements, which require that all workers hired under a given government contract be paid union wages. In a move calculated for confrontation, Mr. Greitens invited Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker —whose 2011 collective-bargaining reforms stuck, unlike Mr. Kasich’s—to attend a bill-signing ceremony in a St. Louis suburb. The unions and their Democratic allies got the message. “Eric Greitens is rubbing salt in the wounds of working families by celebrating another attack on their paychecks,” said Missouri’s Democratic chairman, Stephen Webber.Mr. Greitens is unruffled by the criticism. “I think that you’ve got to take action that actually helps people,” he says. “We know that we’re always going to get criticized and we recognize that there are certain liberal media institutions in the state of Missouri that will always see whatever we do in the worst possible light.” But the economic data, he insists, tell a different story: “Since I’ve been in office, Missouri has been outpacing the nation in job growth. Missouri has moved up nine places in the ranking of best states to do business. We’ve got more jobs in Missouri than ever before.” CONTINUE AT SITE

One of the most prominent clichés that passes for wisdom among the GOP Establishment and conservative intellectual elite is that the Republican Party is the party of Abraham Lincoln. But Donald Trump, as we are told ad nauseam, is doing his best to sever the electric cord that ties the Republican Party to Lincoln’s political principles. https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/07/party-lincoln-no/

Former U.S. Senator John Danforth wrote recently in the Washington Post that the Republican Party is “the party of Abraham Lincoln.” “Now comes Trump,” Danforth argued, “who is exactly what Republicans are not, who is exactly what we have opposed in our 160-year history.” Mona Charen, a contributor to National Review who now apparently enjoys echoing the Left, claims, “The Republican party under Donald Trump has regressed from the party of Lincoln to the party of Lee.”

The glaring problem with this overheated analysis is that it has been quite some time since the GOP was, in any discernable way, the party of Lincoln. And Trump had nothing whatsoever to do with it. In fact, Trump is trying to drag the party back kicking and screaming to its Lincolnian roots.

An obvious example of the modern GOP’s dismissal of Lincoln’s politics is the free trade absolutism it has embraced. While theoretically sound, in practice this slavish devotion to free trade has hollowed out the middle class and benefited hedge fund managers and other professional elites who stand unequally to gain from our knowledge-based economy.

Lincoln, by contrast, was for high protective tariffs throughout his career. For instance, after his election to Congress in 1847, Lincoln noted that the

abandonment of the protective policy by the American Government, must result in the increase of both useless labour, and idleness; and so, in proportion, must produce want and ruin among our people.

In his support of tariffs and other measures designed to help Americans citizens over those of other countries, Lincoln was well within the mainstream of the American political tradition. From Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 “Report on Manufactures,” which outlined the nation’s first industrial policy to support America’s burgeoning manufacturing sector, to Ronald Reagan’s imposition of a 100 percent tariff on certain Japanese electronics in 1987, tariffs have served as a traditional tool of American statecraft.

Lincoln understood that an American isn’t simply what the philosopher Roger Scruton has termed a homo economicus—an individual “who acts always to maximize his own utility.” Instead, Americans are members of families, churches, communities, and their nation, whose good includes but ultimately transcends economic considerations.

Lincoln also wouldn’t recognize the Republican Party’s foreign policy of the past few decades. Republicans are largely beholden to a neoconservative foreign policy whereby the United States spends its blood and treasure on making the rest of the world safe for democracy, while very often neglecting our own. In practice, this has translated into nation building abroad. To overstate for the sake of clarity, the question before GOP hawks is which countries we should invade next—not whether it is just to think in such terms in the first place.

Lincoln would have been appalled at such a foreign policy. In early 1852, he helped draft a resolution praising Lajos Kossuth and the Hungarian revolutionaries of 1848, which contained principles diametrically opposite of those the modern Republican Party has adopted.

While the resolution states the right of the people of Hungary to “throw off” their “existing form of government,” it makes it clear that “it is the duty of our government to neither foment, nor assist, such revolutions in other governments.” Yet Lincoln and the drafting committee did not see any probable violation of our “own cherished principles of non-intervention” should the United States be called upon to help fend off an intervention of any other foreign power into Hungary’s affairs, should prudence allow for such a response.

Newly available data is casting doubt on the integrity of the presidential election in New Hampshire in 2016, which Hillary Clinton won by just over 2,700 votes.

Over 6,000 voters in New Hampshire had used same-day voter registration procedures to register and vote simultaneously for president. The current New Hampshire speaker of the House, Shawn Jasper, sought and obtained data about what happened to these 6,000 “new” New Hampshire voters who showed up on Election Day.

It seems the overwhelming majority of them can no longer be found in New Hampshire.

Of those 6,000, only 1,014 have ever obtained New Hampshire driver’s licenses. Of the 5,526 voters who never obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license, a mere three percent have registered a vehicle in New Hampshire.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation received information that 70 percent of the same-day registrants used out-of-state photo ID to vote in the 2016 presidential election in New Hampshire and to utilize same-day registration.

Gov. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, also defeated incumbent U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte by only 1,017 votes.

These new data illustrate the problem with same-day registration laws: they prevent the ability to verify residency prior to the election — and in a close election, that can make a difference.

As John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky pointed out in their book Who’s Counting, same-day registration fraud won Al Franken his Senate seat, and that extra Democratic seat then gave the country Obamacare.

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 brand: Tough. Capable. Experienced. Ready. A fighter.

Who freaks out when a man stands behind her for a few seconds.

That last detail about Hillary’s personality didn’t emerge until the world was treated to excerpts from her forthcoming memoir What Happened, in which Clinton makes yet another effort to cast herself as the victim of structural sexism. She writes that when Donald Trump wandered up behind her during the second debate, in St. Louis, she thought, “This is not OK. . . . Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces.”

You can almost hear the theme from Halloween as Clinton continues with her unnerving tale: “It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled. It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching, well, what would you do? Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, ‘Back up you creep, get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women but you can’t intimidate me, so back up.’”

Wait — months later, that’s her big comeback, her esprit d’escalier? More like colère d’escalier.

Picking up this anecdote — treating a sliver of a wisp of a crumb as though it’s a boulder with which to crush feminism’s enemies — diehard Clinton defender Jill Filipovic wonders, ludicrously, in the New York Times whether the incident was the game-changer of 2016. She speculates that a “different split-second choice could have changed the course of world history,” suggesting that if either Clinton or the debate’s moderators had made a big fuss about Trump’s violation of her personal space, Hillary would have won the election.

That Clinton didn’t react simply neutralized the moment, though. If anything, it hurt Trump a bit by making him look a little weird. If Clinton had responded angrily, she would have looked unhinged and everything else about the evening would have been forgotten. On her better days, Mrs. Clinton has a Nurse Ratched streak, and she would hardly have done herself any favors by coming across as touchy and dyspeptic. As for the moderators, Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz, they declined to intervene on Clinton’s behalf not because they are secretly knights of the International Brotherhood of Sexism but because they thought moderators should remain neutral. Or because, less charitably, they didn’t want to make it too obvious that they were on Clinton’s side.

Clinton and Filipovic make a mistake familiar to anyone who tries to slog through feminist thinking. Both see no options except for a) lashing out angrily and b) cursing their feminine fate while suffering in silence. As political analysts, they have remarkably short memories: Neither seems to recall that the same issue arose in the very same building as the Trump–Clinton clash — the Field House at Washington University in St. Louis — in another presidential debate, on October 17, 2000.

https://bluedogcaucus-costa.house.gov/members

The Blue Dog Coalition is an official caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives comprised of 18 fiscally-responsible Democrats, who are leading the way to find commonsense solutions. They represent the center of the political spectrum, appealing to the mainstream values of the American public. The Blue Dogs are dedicated to pursuing fiscally-responsible policies, ensuring a strong national defense for our country, and transcending party lines to get things done for the American people.
Rep. Adam Schiff California District 28th left the coalition which recommends it immediately….rsk

As House and Senate Democrats press forward with their quest to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency by any means necessary, they are simultaneously focused on finding someone in their ranks who could be an effective presidential candidate for their own party in 2020. Fifty-three-year-old Kamala Harris, who served as the Attorney General of California from 2011-16 and then filled the vacant U.S. Senate seat that had been occupied for a quarter-century by Barbara Boxer, is someone whom they will undoubtedly look at very closely. To be sure, Harris possesses all the qualifications necessary to be a Democratic leader, insofar as she is a far leftist in the mold of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — but without the baggage of Obama’s extensive ties to domestic terrorists, anti-Semites, and America-hating Marxists, or of Hillary’s status as a money-grubbing thief who feloniously violated the Espionage Act more times than anyone can count.

Consider, for instance, Harris’s stance on immigration. In December 2012, during her tenure as California’s Attorney General, she issued a memo informing all the executives of law-enforcement agencies statewide that they could “make their own decisions about whether to fulfill” Immigration & Customs Enforcement detainers, which are temporary holds that federal immigration authorities place on municipal prisoners who are suspected of being eligible for deportation.

After an illegal alien named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez — a convicted felon who had been deported from the United States on five separate occasions — was released from prison in April 2015 and subsequently murdered a 32-year-old San Francisco woman named Kathryn Steinle, Harris backed up the city sheriff’s decision to release Lopez-Sanchez without first calling immigration authorities.

During Harris’s Senate run in 2016, her campaign website stated that “everyone should have access to public education, public health, and public safety regardless of their immigration status”; that Harris, if elected, would “fight for comprehensive immigration reform that creates a fair pathway to citizenship” for America’s “11 million undocumented immigrants”; that she would “protect President Obama’s immigration executive actions,” which shielded several million illegals from deportation; and that the U.S. had a duty to “responsibly resettle refugees” from Syria and other war-torn, terrorism-infested nations around the world.

But then again, America’s national security has never been high on Kamala Harris’s list of priorities. In September 2015, for instance, she spoke out in support of the nuclear deal that the Obama administration had negotiated with the government of Iran — an agreement that allowed the Islamist regime in Tehran to enrich uranium, build advanced centrifuges, purchase ballistic missiles, fund terrorism, and be guaranteed of having a near-zero breakout time to the development of a nuclear bomb approximately a decade down the road. But by Harris’s reckoning, the accord represented “the best available option for blocking Iran from developing nuclear weapons capability and to avoid potentially disastrous military conflict in the Middle East.”

In 2015 as well, Harris launched an investigation of journalist/anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, who had recently made headlines by releasing undercover videos demonstrating that Planned Parenthood routinely violated federal law by collecting and selling fetal tissue and body parts. As National Review reports: “The basis for investigating Daleiden was his appearing to have used a fake California driver’s license to hide his identity from Planned Parenthood, and the suspicion that he violated Planned Parenthood’s privacy. Those trivial allegations were enough for Harris to have eleven police officers raid Daleiden’s house, confiscate his computers and hard drives, some private documents, and all the yet-unreleased Planned Parenthood footage Daleiden had shot over two years. When Daleiden called his lawyer, Harris’s raiders tried to confiscate his phone too.”

Chuck Schumer has been much remarked upon, even praised in many quarters, for stating the obvious — that Hillary Clinton should stop blaming the sun, moon, and stars, and, of course, Russia for her demise and look to herself for her failure to win the presidency. She was a wretched candidate with no obvious reason for running. Indeed, the WikiLeaks from her campaign operatives are rife with emails searching for some justification for her candidacy other than gender.

The New York senator is clearly correct in his criticism but he has a larger unacknowledged problem that is ultimately far more serious: Hillary’s loss didn’t occur entirely due to her own ineptitude. She is not alone. Her party has no useful programs anymore. As Gertrude said of Oakland, there’s no there there. All they have is Trump bashing and, with the help of their media pals, that’s all they do — and the country knows it.

Yes, as we also all know, the Republicans have their issues, to put it mildly. For a party controlling practically everything, they are remarkably inept and self-destructive, but at least, beneath it all, they have the potential to come together and move forward. (Who knows if they will?) For the Democrats it is another matter. They are hamstrung on all sides.

On the left, they have the Bernie Sanders contingent. At first glance, these people are stuck in 1968, but in truth, they are stuck in (roughly) 1932 or is it 1867? (The publication of Das Kapital.) Bernie’s ideas are ye olde and moribund. He doesn’t even seem to understand (or admit) that the Europeans — whose version of socialism he continually touts — have been deserting that system right and left for years, going more free market than the USA currently is, particularly in the area of corporate taxes.

Bernie is Margaret Thatcher’s admonition about socialism eventually running out of other people’s money writ large. Sure, some young people are seduced by his seemingly idealistic palaver (actually it’s the reverse) but if he — or a younger clone — does run in 2020, one word will spell disaster for them: Venezuela. All socialist roads sooner or later point that way or to something even worse — the Soviet Union, China, etc. It doesn’t take a genius to point that out, nor to demonstrate the catastrophic deficits his proposals engender. (Hillary, scared of alienating his supporters, was terrible at this.) And the young people who vote — those concerned about jobs, not the sad Social Justice Warriors who have, unwittingly, already given up on life — will react accordingly.