RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/michael-bloomberg-is-a-condescending-jerk/

T he hunt is on for offensive clips of Michael Bloomberg talking off the cuff, and over the weekend a new one circulated. In the version passed around, Bloomberg nonchalantly tells his Oxford audience that he could teach anyone how to farm — “even people in this room”: “It’s a process; you dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.” He adds that modern “information economy” jobs require more “gray matter.”

The denunciations came quickly and furiously, many of them pointing out that farming these days is a pretty high-tech endeavor. There are three things to know about this episode.

First, the version of the clip that went around left out important context. Bloomberg was very explicitly not talking about modern farmers, but rather about “the agrarian society” that “lasted 3,000 years” before the industrial era, which lasted 300. His point was that the modern economy does not create good, reliable jobs for low-skilled workers the way that past economies did. You can see the full discussion starting around 41:30 here (though the actual query that prompted Bloomberg’s rambling answer starts at 37:30):

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/stacey-abrams-says-shes-open-to-joining-dem-ticket-as-veep-after-vowing-not-to-run-for-second-place/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_

Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic gubernatorial candidate for Georgia who called out alleged voter suppression during her election, said Monday that she “would be honored” to be the vice presidential candidate on the 2020 Democratic ticket.

“It would be doing a disservice to every woman of color, every woman of ambition, every child who wants to think beyond their known space for me to say no or to pretend, ‘Oh, no, I don’t want it,’” Abrams said on ABC’s “The View.” “Of course I want it. Of course I want to serve America. Of course I want to be a patriot and do this work.”

Abrams shot to notoriety in 2018 when she ran in Georgia to become the country’s first black female governor. She lost the election by 1.4 percentage points to her Republican opponent, Georgia’s secretary of state at the time, Brian Kemp, who enforced one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country while he was running against Abrams. Abrams has refused to concede the election ever since, alleging that Kemp engaged in voter suppression.

Abrams’s openness to accepting a vice presidential nomination comes after she signaled last year she would only run as a presidential candidate.

“You don’t run for second place,” she said in a previous appearance on “The View” in March.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-bernie-nomination-could-destroy-the-left-11581962615?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Bernie Sanders’s emergence as the Democratic presidential front-runner is an amazing accomplishment for a socialist. But what if he wins the nomination and loses to Donald Trump ?

Mr. Trump will be a formidable adversary. He’s an incumbent. He presides over a strong stock market and low unemployment, a rare period of mutual satisfaction on Wall Street and Main Street. He’s effectively unopposed for his party’s nomination and has a talent for getting under his opponents’ skin. And thanks to Democratic overreach, he can get away with almost anything. What are they going to do, impeach him again?

Progressives believe Mr. Sanders has the best chance of winning in November. So do some Republicans. “I think Sanders beats Trump,” Tony Fabrizio, the president’s pollster, said in 2017 about the previous year’s election. “I think Sanders would have had the ability to reach a lot of the less than college-educated, low-income white voters.” The president himself told reporters recently that he would “rather run against Bloomberg than Bernie Sanders.”

The business wing of the GOP is sanguine. “The overwhelming consensus on Wall Street these days is that should Sanders wind up as the Democratic nominee—sliding past a handful of moderates also at the top of the field—he would get demolished by President Donald Trump in the general election,” observes Politico’s Ben White. They thought Mr. Trump didn’t stand a chance either.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/02/17/despite-what-youve-heard-bloomberg-is-no-centrist/

Michael Bloomberg has been blanketing the airwaves with ads that tout his up-by-his-bootstraps success, his can-do attitude, his supposed ability to unite the country. “Mike can get it done,” the ads declare, without indicating what “it” is.

Bloomberg’s spending spree has not only been translating into a rise in the polls, it’s cementing his claim to be a centrist, at least among pundits. Even on the right, that’s how he’s being described.

The New York Post’s Michael Goodwin called him “the great centrist hope for Democrats to defeat Trump.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan opined recently that “Biden’s collapse created a vacuum in the center, and the former mayor has the money and will to fill it.”

Has anyone calling Bloomberg a centrist bothered to look at his campaign website, rather than just listen to his campaign ads?

On issue after issue, Bloomberg is as radical, or slightly less so, than socialist Bernie Sanders. In fact, on taxes, health care, the environment, gun control, there is little light between the two.

Here’s a rundown.

https://pjmedia.com/election/klobuchar-tacks-left-on-immigration-in-nevada-looking-for-hispanic-support/

Something almost magical happens when relatively moderate Democrats begin to run for president. They forget how to be moderate and become flaming left-wingers.

“Moderate” Democrat Joe Biden once opposed busing kids halfway across his tiny state of Delaware to go to school. Now, despite almost everyone else opposing busing to achieve racial “equality,” he supports it.

“Moderate” Michael Bloomberg was once a law and order mayor of New York. Now, he’s apologizing for being so effective.

Then there’s “moderate” Senator Amy Klobuchar who once cast a vote to make English the “official” language of the United States. Now, she talks up her love of “diversity.”

In Klobuchar’s case, her maverick campaign has hit the wall. It’s a racial and ethnic wall that she’s never had to deal with as a politician before, being from the mostly white state of Minnesota and achieving some success in mostly white Iowa and New Hampshire.

But this is a whole new ballgame in Nevada, where Hispanics and blacks make up a significant part of the Democratic electorate. So, she has to find a way to bury her past embarrassing votes that weren’t left-wing enough and claim allegiance to the “true faith” of Democratic politics: pandering to voters based on the color of their skin.

Associated Press:

Campaigning in Las Vegas, the three-term Minnesota senator said Friday that she has changed her stance since voting for an English-language amendment in 2007 and has “taken a strong position against” it. She also blasted President Donald Trump for using immigrants as “wedges” and said as president she would work with Republicans to achieve comprehensive immigration reform.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/amy_klobuchar_wants_to_abandon_english_as_americas_official_language.html

For Democrats frightened by either an openly socialist candidate or an untested man whom blacks dislike, the seemingly “reasonable” choices are an ex-Republican, sexist, anti-Second Amendment, micro-managing despot — and Amy Klobuchar, the meanest Senator in Washington. It’s time to remember that Klobuchar has no fixed principles but will, instead, do whatever it takes to advance herself in the Democrat Party.

On Friday, Klobuchar’s latest opportunistic move was to announce at a campaign event in Las Vegas that English should not be America’s official language, even though she voted for a Senate bill that would have made English the official language. She now says that she has “taken a strong position against” the English language in America, although she cannot seem to explain her past vote. One can certainly explain her current turnabout, though, despite her efforts to keep her various immigration positions opaque:

Her policy shift comes a week before the caucuses are set to take place in a state with a large Latino population and an area where Klobuchar has about 10 percent support.

Klobuchar has flip-flopped on immigration policies, once supporting projects like a wall and E-Verify to ban employers from hiring illegal aliens back in 2006.

The Minnesota senator has also been open about supporting amnesty but has hidden her support for exporting college graduate-level jobs overseas.

This conduct is typical Klobuchar. The PowerLine blog, which is headquartered in Minnesota, has been reporting on Klobuchar for years, revealing a calculating progressive who uses “Minnesota nice” as a way to avoid being tagged for the controversial and often inconsistent stands she takes.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/hilarity_results_when_bloomberg_floats_hillary_clinton_as_his_running_mate.html

Although Bloomberg quickly backed away from Hillary, the proposal was worth it just to see the responses people had to the idea.

It was a Drudge Report headline calculated to shock: “Exclusive: Bloomberg Considers Hillary Running Mate. The underlying story, at CNBC, stated that the Drudge Report itself was claiming that a source close to Mike Bloomberg’s campaign had stated that Bloomberg was considering asking Hillary Clinton to serve as his running mate. The reason given was that internal polling said that the two of them together would be a dynamic duo.

The story was met with incredulity and much hilarity (if you’ll pardon the pun). The idea that Hillary Clinton would play second fiddle to anyone was hard to fathom. Moreover, given Hillary’s grating personality, the collapse of all her initiatives during her stint as Secretary of State, her habit of enriching herself at the country’s expense, and her failed candidacy, it was hard to imagine why anyone would want her on the ballot.

Twitter, the repository of clever one-liners, had a wonderful time imagining what a Bloomberg/Hillary pairing would look like and the effect it would have on Trump’s campaign:

Perhaps because of the negative response, the Bloomberg campaign quickly “downplayed,” but did not deny, the idea:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/bloombergs_money_sowing_the_seeds_of_destruction_of_the_democrat_party.html

Right before our eyes, a mega-billionaire is buying the presidential nomination of a political party, and oddly enough, it is the party that decries inequality of wealth and whose leading lights debate taxing billionaires out of existence.

This will not end well for the Democrats.  Bloomberg is luring the party’s elites into visibly betraying the principles most of its rank-and-file hold dear and identifying themselves as sellouts who can be bought by sheer force of lucre. A bitter split will be hard to avoid.

Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal gets right to the point in his headline” “Bloomberg buys the Democratic elite.” It is not the rank and file getting rich off of Bloomberg, but rather the ostensible leadership class, and therein lie the seeds of destruction for the party that purports to be about the common man, woman, and nonbinary individual.

He’s distorting the incentives of activists, officials and campaign fixers who suddenly are thinking less about a presidential victory and more about the Bloomberg gravy train.

Jenkins cites these examples of leaders betraying their people and their principles:

When a recording leaked of Mr. Bloomberg defending stop-and-frisk in New York, Andre Fields of the liberal voting-rights group Fair Fight Action rushed out a tweet hitting him as a “true terrorist” but promptly deleted it. Fair Fight Action had received $5 million in funding from Mr. Bloomberg.

amgreatness.com/2020/02/14/the-fail-of-the-left-idealism-without-realism/

“The ends justify the means” (“TEJTM”) is a platitude that has been used throughout history to rationalize the pursuit of both laudable and iniquitous goals, more often the latter than the former.

The events leading up to “national socialism” in Germany and communism in the Soviet Union, for example, illustrate how utopian visions can give rise to evil empires. An individual’s quest to obtain and retain power can become an end in itself that leads to horrific consequences, as exemplified by such notables as Josef Stalin, Bashar al-Assad, and Mao Zedong. Even in religion-inspired campaigns, such as the Crusades, the Inquisition, and ISIS, original benevolent intentions can become obscured.

Sadly, we are seeing TEJTM appear all too frequently in today’s America. With the presence of social media and a compliant mass media complex, things that may be praiseworthy goals are giving rise to proposed or actual policies that are far from benign or realistic in their application.

This country is being culturally riven from any plausible ideal of “social justice” because, too often, its implementation has become an ideological winners-versus-losers exercise.

A stark example is New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s crusade to balance racial and ethnic representation in the city’s elite special high schools. He proposes to substitute social engineering for what is now a test-based, racially blind merit system. If disavowing merit is the cure, it is far worse than the disease, because America has achieved its preeminence based mainly on rewarding merit.

There are many other examples, which go far beyond New York, of supposed social justice trampling merit in school admissions, including at elite universities. And there are countless examples of the goal of social justice being perverted and used arbitrarily to advantage one group over others—for example, citizens being denied state benefits, or at least being carefully scrutinized, while illegal residents find doors open for them. Another example is proposed reparations that are to be paid to people with little or no connection to slavery by people with no responsibility for that sordid history.