RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/congresswoman-valerie-plame-11590792699?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

New Mexico’s primary is on Tuesday, and of seven Democrats vying for the open House seat in Santa Fe, Valerie Plame is “considered one of the favorites,” reports the Albuquerque Journal. Ms. Plame’s campaign has spent twice as much as her nearest rival, according to data from Open Secrets.

Ms. Plame is trying to get to Congress by leveraging the notoriety of the 2003 scandal that turned her into a household name, fictionalized in a 2010 movie starring Naomi Watts. Ms. Plame’s campaign has reported out-of-state donations from Hollywood types, such as $2,000 from a Naomi Watts who’s listed in campaign-finance records as an actor from Beverly Hills, Calif.

But Ms. Plame’s campaign has bent the truth of the scandal, starting last fall in a high-octane introduction video. “I was an undercover CIA operative,” she narrated, while hot-rodding a car in the desert. “Then Dick Cheney’s chief of staff took revenge against my husband and leaked my identity. His name? Scooter Libby. Guess who pardoned him last year?” Cut to footage of President Trump, pumping a fist in satisfaction.

This is political pulp fiction. The public record shows that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was not responsible for outing Ms. Plame. The journalist who put her CIA connection into print, Bob Novak, later said the information came from Richard Armitage, then Deputy Secretary of State. A Washington Post fact-checker gave Ms. Plame’s video three disapproving Pinocchios.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/amy-klobuchar-takes-a-big-hit/

The former prosecutor faces scrutiny over decisions not to prosecute police officers in Minneapolis.

As Minneapolis burned this week, so too did Amy Klobuchar’s prospects of becoming Joe Biden’s running mate.

Just six weeks ago, Klobuchar looked like the frontrunner in the 2020 Democratic veepstakes, but the Minnesota senator happens to be the former top prosecutor in Hennepin County, home to Minneapolis, and she is facing an increasing amount of scrutiny over her record of not prosecuting several police officers facing allegations of excessive force.

“Amy Klobuchar didn’t prosecute officer at center of George Floyd’s death after previous conduct complaints,” reads the headline at The Week. The police officer seen kneeling on Floyd’s neck was involved in the killing of another suspect who allegedly pulled a gun. The final decision not to prosecute was made after Klobuchar left the job, but as the Washington Post reported in March, Klobuchar “declined to bring charges in more than two dozen cases in which people were killed in encounters with police.”

Assume for the sake of argument that the facts in each case vindicate Klobuchar’s decision not to prosecute. Can Biden really pick her if she’s seen as turning a blind eye to police brutality, even if that view is unfair?

David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report goes so far as to say that “Amy Klobuchar is off the list now” to be Biden’s running mate. It’s not clear her odds are nil, but they have taken a huge hit.

Who benefits? Kamala Harris is the odds-on favorite on the betting and prediction websites, but the firestorm in Minnesota threatens to engulf her VP prospects as well.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/21/the-delusional-premises-of-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/

Welcome to yet another example of the nexus between climate change alarmism and a socialist redistribution agenda fueled by racial resentment. That may be old news to those of us paying attention, but thanks to birdbrained stooges like U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) the blatant race-baiting rhetoric is being turned up a notch.

And why not? If you’re a socialist, or a globalist, there is only upside to tagging nations of European heritage with guilt for the problems facing their “communities of color,” or the problems in the rest of the non-European world. It would be far too painful to consider the alternative explanation, which is that socialism, in all of its antecedents and derivatives, is the primary cause of the societal afflictions that plague “people of color” both in America and abroad.

Deconstructing Ocasio-Cortez’s convoluted logic isn’t hard intellectually, but the implications are hard indeed, at least for anyone who shares her delusional worldview.

Her arguments rest on three premises that build upon one another, and all of them are easily shattered by hard facts. Those premises are: 1) White racism is pervasive and explains income inequality; 2) climate change is an ongoing catastrophe that primarily harms “people of color”; 3) and socialism is the solution.

https://pjmedia.com/election/tyler-o-neil/2020/05/28/amy-klobuchar-declined

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), one of the women on presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s vice-presidential shortlist, refused to prosecute an excessive force case against the police officer who appears to have killed black man George Floyd, the man at the center of the latest Black Lives Matter controversy.

On Monday night, Derek Chauvin, a 19-year veteran of the Minneapolis police department, knelt on 46-year-old Floyd’s neck for nine minutes as the black man pleaded for his life. Floyd died after the encounter. Video of the encounter went viral on Tuesday, and the police department fired Chauvin Tuesday.

Yet Chauvin saw at least 10 conduct complaints during his 19-year tenure before his firing, and Klobuchar — then the Hennepin County attorney — declined to press charges against Chauvin in 2006. Chauvin was one of six officers involved in the shooting death of Wayne Reyes, who stabbed his girlfriend and a friend before fleeing. Police chased him and shot him, claiming he had pulled a shotgun on them. She did not prosecute the case, which went to a grand jury that declined to charge the officers with wrongdoing in 2008, according to The Guardian.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fear-vs-hope-election-11590605085?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

“EXCERPTS”

Have Donald Trump and Joe Biden already made their most important campaign decisions? An influential political analyst argues that the results of the 2020 presidential election will now be determined by events largely outside of their control.

“Each candidate seems to have settled on a strategy. The President, for his part, is spending a lot of time in toss-up states. The Journal’s Catherine Lucey reports:

On Wednesday, the president heads to Florida, his fourth battleground-state destination in four weeks, where he will witness the launch of the private SpaceX rocket, manned by NASA astronauts. While his megarallies are on hold, Mr. Trump’s incumbency affords him the ability to hit the road in his official capacity, in contrast with likely Democratic rival Joe Biden, who made his first foray out in public Monday but didn’t leave his home state of Delaware.

Meanwhile even as a campaign shut-in, Mr. Biden is trying to get young leftists enthused about his candidacy. He’s planning to expand his proposal to replace American energy sources. The Journal’s Eliza Collins reports:

So far Mr. Biden has proposed a $1.7 trillion climate plan over a decade. During the Democratic primary, Mr. Sanders, who dropped out of the race in April, proposed more than nine times that amount of spending over the same period.

“As for 2020, Mr. Rasmussen writes in the Deseret News that the election “will once again be decided by public reaction to the key issue of the day. For this election season, that issue is how successfully American society reopens in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. If in November voters are more optimistic than today, the president will be reelected. If not, he will be defeated”. Adds Mr. Rasmussen:

While both sides are still fumbling for a final answer — and the dynamics are clearly different from state-to-state — a broad campaign theme has emerged. Republicans want to focus on reopening society more quickly while Democrats are resisting and prefer a much slower approach. A related sub-theme has emerged with Republicans placing more trust in voters to make their own decisions while Democrats place more trust in government officials to establish rules for reopening.
Now that the political teams have chosen sides, real world events will decide the outcome of Election 2020.

https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-offered-position-as-staff-writer-at-the-babylon-bee

The Bible tells us to work smarter, not harder. Or, better yet, don’t work at all if you can help it. You can look it up. It’s in the Proverbs somewhere.

That’s why we’re announcing today that we will simply be republishing everything Joe Biden says word for word rather than spending a lot of time and effort writing satire.

We at The Babylon Bee realized we were spending all this time trying to satirize Joe Biden when, frankly, he just can’t be satirized. He’s doing all the hard work for us with statements like “You ain’t black!” and, of gun violence, that “150 million people have been killed since 2007.” 

Every day is a real grind when we arrive at the sprawling Babylon Bee headquarters, settle in on our throne of Chick-fil-A sandwiches, and boot up the ol’ PC to check what Biden said over the past 24 hours. We’re tired of trying to out-parody things like “I got hairy legs that turn blonde in the sun and the kids used to reach in the pool and rub my leg down and watch the hair come back up again” and “Corn Pop was a bad dude.”

Like, what do you do with that? Seriously. Go ahead. Try to satirize it. Anything you do just doesn’t have that perfect mix of absurdity and reality that makes satire work so effective at communicating truth. So we’re throwing in the towel.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank Joe Biden for being such a great satirical performance artist. You’re the real hero, Joe. The people really need comedy in a time like this, and you’re doing a great job. Keep it up!

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/dems_rebranding_their_plan_to_steal_the_election.html

Apparently “voting by mail” is not working well for Democrats in their focus group testing, as they push for changes that will make stealing the 2020 election easier.  Pretty much everyone has received mail destined for other people, so using the United States Postal Service as the brand name hinge for the scheme doesn’t test well.  There are too many associations with long lines, mistakes, delays, and the sort of results that come from a gigantic unionized federal bureaucracy.

Appearing last night in the safe environment of MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell show, where no uncomfortable questions would ever be raised, Nancy Pelosi rolled out the re-branding.  From now on, it will be called “voting at home.”  The entire three-and-a-half minute segment, with other verbal legerdemain, is below:

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/05/27/from-speech-to-consumer-choice-democrats-believe-everything-must-be-policed/

Reading a weekend story in Campus Reform helped us see more clearly what we’ve been witnessing for decades. The political left is driven by an urge to supervise every aspect of our lives. It’s a corrosive impulse that shouldn’t be accepted anywhere in a free nation, let alone practiced. The backlash needs to begin now. If not, our liberty will eventually be overrun.

The story is from Michigan State University, which published an article claiming that video conferencing is full of “unconscious bias.” In it, MSU social science professor Amy Bonomi says:

Unconscious bias includes using language, symbolism and nonverbal cues that reinforce normative social identities with respect to gender, race, sexual preference, and socioeconomic status. For example, when the virtual background of a Zoom meeting attendee has pictures of his or her wedding, it unintentionally reinforces the idea that marriage is most fitting between opposite sexes.

In other words, when left alone, managers and coworkers will say things or show things that the speech police — who exist to ensure that only one side controls the narrative — don’t approve of.

Nothing in recent times illustrates the left’s inclination to control as does its response to the coronavirus pandemic. The Democrats want to keep people and businesses locked down while Republicans, with some exceptions, want to free people and unleash commerce.

https://pjmedia.com/election/megan-fox/2020/05/26/dem-economist-predicts-most-explosive-recovery-ever-democrats-predictably-horrified-n428514

Democrats have finally admitted that economic recovery for the American people means defeat for them. They would rather watch us suffer so they can beat Donald Trump. Politico published an article called “The General Election Scenario That Democrats Are Dreading,” which confirms what we’ve all been suspecting: the longer the lockdown continues and Americans are out of work, the happier Democrats are.

What kind of people root for economic ruin over recovery? Democrats.

Jason Furman, a Harvard professor and economist who worked for Barack Obama, gave a presentation in April to a group of bipartisan officials about the coming economic recovery. Democrats on the call were reportedly terrified.

“We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country,” he said.

The former cabinet secretaries and Federal Reserve chairs in the Zoom boxes were confused, though some of the Republicans may have been newly relieved and some of the Democrats suddenly concerned.

“Everyone looked puzzled and thought I had misspoken,” Furman said in an interview. Instead of forecasting a prolonged depression-level economic catastrophe, Furman laid out a detailed case for why the months preceding the November election could offer Trump the chance to brag — truthfully — about the most explosive monthly employment numbers and GDP growth ever.