RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-9-21-does-elizabeth-warren-even-u

A few days ago I had a post evaluating Elizabeth Warren as a candidate for President. Needless to say, the evaluation wasn’t very favorable. But that post touched only lightly on a subject that Warren has sought to make a centerpiece of her campaign, namely political corruption. I thought that that subject deserved a post of its own.

First, some background. If you have been reading Manhattan Contrarian long enough, you know my view that government is inherently corrupt. The government consists of human beings, and it’s just part of human nature that people will act in ways to help those who somehow further the financial and career interests of the government officials. As one example among many of my posts on this subject, here is one from August 2016 covering the Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation had collected some $2 billion in donations in the period 2001 to 2015, supposedly for charitable works. During most of that period, Hillary Clinton had been either running for President or serving as Secretary of State. A large percentage of the $2 billion came from people or governments with some major interest before the U.S. government or State Department. My post covers various government favors granted to certain of the donors. Meanwhile, tens of millions of dollars from the $2 billion went to support the personal lifestyles of the Clintons and/or the employment of potential Clinton campaign staff. Nobody was ever prosecuted, and in any event it’s not clear what the crime would have been. My comment:

You need to recognize that government spending of money and allocation of the resources of society is inherently corrupt. Government spending will always preferentially go to those who have curried the favor and greased the palms of the relevant government functionaries. There is no conceivable collection of anti-bribery laws, or campaign finance laws, that can improve this situation other than a little at the margins. The only significant improvement can come from shrinking the government and letting the private sector expand.

The best we can hope for is a situation where the government allocates a relatively small portion of the resources of society, leaving people with relatively little incentive to engage in corrupt manipulation of government favors. But as long as there is government, there will be an irreducible minimum of inherent corruption.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/warren-tops-biden-in-latest-iowa-poll/

Senator Elizabeth Warren surged into the lead past Joe Biden in the latest Des Moines Register poll. Warren was the first choice of 22% of Iowa Democrats while Biden was close behind with 20%. Bernie Sanders faded to third place with 11%.

“This is the first major shakeup” in what had been a fairly steady race, said J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., which conducted the poll. “It’s the first time we’ve had someone other than Joe Biden at the top of the leader board.”

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg follows the three leaders as the favorite of 9% of poll respondents. U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris of California is at 6%. U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Cory Booker of New Jersey are at 3%.

Polling at 2% are U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, businessman Tom Steyer and entrepreneur Andrew Yang.

Eight others are polling at 1% or less.

Warren’s surge coincides with worrying questions arising about Biden’s age and acuity. The former vice president has made several embarrassing gaffes in recent weeks and many in the press are openly speculating about his fitness for office.

But the race is far from over.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/09/democrat_censured_for_voting_with_trump_19_of_the_time_bipartisanship_is_dead.html

One of the more interesting news items this week was the revelation that Arizona Democrats were considering a censure vote against Senator Kyrsten Sinema for being too pro-Trump. 

Apparently, voting against the president 81% of the time constitutes being a raging right-wing reprobate in today’s liberal hive mind.

It is worth noting that the most anti-Obama senator in his last year in office was Richard Shelby, who voted against President Barack Obama 63.9% of the time.  That made the most anti-Obama senator far friendlier to the Democrat president than a Democrat who is being threatened with censure for her apostasy. 

Shelby supported Obama almost 40% of the time.  On average, Senate Republicans opposed Obama’s position less than half the time in 2016.  Bipartisanship was very much alive and well.

Sinema is not even close to being a moderate, unless you define moderation against how far to the left the Democratic Party has swung.  Sinema’s sin is voting for David Bernhardt for secretary of the interior, a name unlikely familiar to 99% of Americans.  She also voted for William Barr for attorney general and opposes the Democrats’ “net neutrality” internet scheme.

But, in today’s resistance-minded Democrat party, any sign of compromise is treated as a cardinal sin. 

https://www.walkawaycampaign.com/
#WalkAway movement urges disgruntled Democrats to leave the party behind.

The #WalkAway Campaign is a true grassroots movement, founded by former liberal, Brandon Straka on May 26th, 2018. The #WalkAway Campaign encourages and supports those on the Left to walk
away from the divisive tenets endorsed and mandated by the Democratic Party of today. We are
walking away from the lies, the false narratives, the fake news, the race-baiting, the victim narrative,
the violence, the vandalism, the vitriol. We are walking away from a party driven by hate. We are
walking toward patriotism and a new, unified America! We are the future of this great nation!

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/greys-anatomy-star-isaiah-washington-opens-up-about-decision-to-leave-the-democratic-party?fbclid=IwAR3iyUzTyXZSXdy6GOt_4-MydFqTz6d2ugUsOshfRIQVYcfILqCflMelo0I

On Fox Nation’s latest episode of “Nuff Said,” “Grey’s Anatomy” star Isaiah Washington opened up about his decision to leave the Democratic Party, and the reaction he got from the Hollywood community after publicly declaring his support for the #WalkAway movement.

“Walking away is… a sacrifice,” Washington said. “There’s a risk and there’s a penalty for it but you have to walk away when it matters…and the reason I chose to walk away from the Democratic party…is that something doesn’t feel right.”Washington, who once played Dr. Preston Burke in the hit TV series, said he was never asked about his politics during his two-year career on the show, and that his political activism developed recently after he attended a celebration at the White House commemorating Trump’s support of the First Step Act.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/good-riddance-bill-de-blasio/

De Blasio ended his presidential campaign today. Maybe now he’ll actually do his day job.

Bill de Blasio ended his presidential campaign today. If you’ve forgotten which candidate he was, he was the tall, abrasive one who didn’t make the third debate and who in the previous one kept trying to take shots at other candidates and interrupt the moderators. He’s also the mayor of New York City.

By the standards of modern American politicians, de Blasio is a really bad one, even when you put the ideological disagreements aside. He’s effectively abandoned his day job during his presidential campaign, spending a mere seven hours — less than one full workday — at City Hall during the month he launched his bid for the White House. He rarely meets with his own city commissioners.

Both as mayor and presidential candidate, de Blasio is always moving on to the next big and exceptionally impractical proposal — Ban steel and glass skyscrapers! Eliminate the gifted and talented programs from public schools! — while other, bigger problems on his constituents’ minds fester.

The city’s public housing is overrun with rats, leaks, mold, and lead paint. The number of homeless students hit a new record. The city’s bus system is the slowest in the nation, and he steers millions to poorly performing school bus companies. (The one area where you probably shouldn’t blame the mayor is the condition of the city’s subways, which are actually run by the state of New York, not the city. Blame governor Andrew Cuomo for your late trains.) His relationship with the city police started bad and got worse.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/the_walls_finally_may_be_closing_in_on_ilhan_omar.html

There is ample reason to suspect that Rep. Ilhan Omar has committed multiple frauds.  Scott Johnson of Powerline, a retired attorney, has been covering the freshman House member ever since her run for the Minnesota state Legislature, and has been among the most active investigators of suspicions that she committed immigration fraud by legally marrying her brother in order to get him into the United States.  Yesterday, he wrote about the genesis of his suspicions:

A few days after I started writing about Ilhan Omar on Power Line in August 2016 — after she had won the primary for the DFL state legislative endorsement — I was contacted by a source who agreed to discuss his knowledge of Omar’s family with me. At our meeting he told me that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi — Omar’s legal husband, so to speak, as of that date — was Omar’s brother and that she had married him for fraudulent purposes. 

And Omar herself entered the United States under an assumed identity:

My source told me that Omar and another member or two of the Elmi family had entered the United States as fraudulent members of the Omar family. That would go some way to explain why Omar lacks any acknowledged relative with the name Omar.

Now a tweet that she deleted two days ago is providing corroboration for those suspicions.  Shaikh Tawhidi, the Imam of Peace, called attention to the deletion:

Imam Mohamad Tawhidi

✔ @Imamofpeace
Ilhan Omar has just deleted this tweet from 2013 that proves her father is Nur Said, which makes her Ilhan Nur Said (surnames are the fathers names in most Muslim/MENA countries), and that Ahmed Nur Said, who she married, is in fact her brother.  CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kamala-harris-presidential-campaign-struggling-california-polls/

Since the early days of this presidential primary cycle, there’s been a quiet but intriguing narrative that Kamala Harris was a much stronger candidate than her national polling might suggest. The gist is that while most years, California is just an ATM for Democratic presidential candidates, this cycle the Golden State will vote on Super Tuesday, March 3. The whole process is so much earlier than usual that absentee and early primary ballots will be mailed out the day of the Iowa caucuses.

California has 495 delegates to the Democratic convention, and they are awarded proportionally — almost a tenth of the total 4535 hard delegates. The pro-Harris theory is that while everybody else is scrambling over a share of Iowa’s 49 delegates or New Hampshire’s 33 delegates, Harris can set herself up to win big in her home state and walk away with, say, 250 or so delegates just out of California, setting herself up to be the frontrunner after Super Tuesday.

It’s an intriguing theory, but history is full of candidates who thought they could make their big move after Iowa and New Hampshire and found themselves sputtering on fumes by the time their preferred primary rolled around. In Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 campaign, Florida was supposed to be the firewall, but winning tends to beget more winning, and losing tends to beget more losing. It’s really difficult to become the nominee if you don’t win Iowa or New Hampshire. The only Democrat who’s done it is Bill Clinton in 1992, and that was an oddity because Senator Tom Harkin was a home-state candidate in Iowa (so most observers discounted it), and Clinton was the “comeback kid” who finished second in New Hampshire that year. (Some might also argue that Hillary Clinton’s win in Iowa last cycle was so close it shouldn’t even count.)

https://pjmedia.com/trending/hillary-clinton-stacey-abrams-should-be-governor-of-georgia/

Back in October 2016, when everybody was telling us that Hillary Clinton couldn’t lose, Donald Trump said: “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election… if I win.” And the Democrats all lost their minds. How un-American! What an outrage!

In response to Trump’s quip, Clinton gravely intoned: “Donald Trump refused to say that he’d respect the results of this election.That’s a direct threat to our democracy.”

But a funny thing happens when a politician experiences the most crushing electoral loss in living memory: All that $#!+ goes right out the window. Respecting the results of an election is no longer required, and rejecting the results is no longer a threat to our democracy. Forget all about that crap, because there’s a new party line.

Here’s Hilldog today, giving the keynote address at something called In Defense of American Democracy. Apparently, defending democracy now involves directly threatening it:

“We saw what happened in Georgia where Stacey Abrams should be governor of that state”