RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.us/democrats-find-religion/

Now for some bracing honesty from the Democratic National Committee. In a new, unanimously adopted resolution, Democrats have declared that ‘the religiously unaffiliated demographic represents the largest religious group within the Democratic party, growing from 19 percent in 2007 to one in three today’ (emphasis added). Advocates for truth in political advertising should rejoice. The so-called ‘secular’ left has finally abandoned the canard that its views and policies are purely ‘neutral,’ or the products of inarguable empiricism. According to the resolution, the religiously unaffiliated and the nonreligious (labels used interchangeably) are, instead, members of a new faith community. This may be the first time that the Democratic party, or any official organ of the American left, has forthrightly declared the true objective of its modern politics: the promotion and enshrinement of a new religion.

With this declaration, Democrats are taking seriously their current, favorite term, ‘wokeness’ – the religious resonance of which is unavoidable. For them, to be woke is to be awakened to new knowledge, to be freed from one’s old, ignorant ways and to share in life-changing revelation. Thus, the Democrats’ woke resolution – a concise, one-page distillation of the modern, American left worldview – reads as a confessional, creedal document. It speaks of ‘values’: ‘religiously unaffiliated Americans overwhelmingly share the Democratic party’s values.’ It speaks of ostracism and suffering for beliefs: ‘the nonreligious have often been subjected to unfair bias and exclusion in American society.’ And, it articulates the essential, core aims of the creed by praising the religiously unaffiliated as ‘advocates for rational public policy based on sound social science and universal humanistic values.’

The resolution embodies what Charles Taylor, a scholar of secularism, terms ‘the independent ethic.’ According to Taylor, in establishing an independent ethic, a group will ‘deduce certain exceptionless norms’ and ‘abstract from…deeper or higher beliefs altogether for purposes of a political morality.’ And, as Taylor explains, when there ‘are real live atheists in the society…they will live an independent ethic not as some thought experiment, but as the basis of their moral lives.’ In this way, an apparently nonreligious or even overtly anti-religious creed can assume the character of what is actually religious fundamentalism.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-9-4-the-competition-over-how-to

It was back on June 4 that I posed the eternal question, “Will The Democratic Candidates Ever Notice That The Climate Change Thing Is Over?” That post noted that the Democratic candidates for President had begun a kind of bidding war over who could put forth the most extreme proposal to shackle the American economy in the name of climate salvatio n, while at the same time “out in the rest of the world” they were “laugh[ing] at this spectacle.” Among the data points cited in that post were that China was seeking reductions in the price of coal in order to spur consumption of electricity, and that in Australia a national election had just been lost by the party that made a principal issue out of its opposition to a huge new coal mine in Queensland.

In the three months since early June, things have only gotten sillier.

The Statistical Review of World Energy 2019 from the BP oil company came out. A summary of it in Forbes on June 28 noted: “Coal consumption in most of the developing world continues to grow. Asia Pacific increased consumption [in 2018] by the most overall, but its 2.5% growth rate lagged Africa’s (+3.9%) and Central and South America (+3.7%).”

The annual Google billionaires’ climate summit was held in Sicily at the beginning of August. From euronews: “114 private jets flew into the Italian Verdura Resort, according to the Italian press, and many of the elite guest list arrived in multi-million pound yachts. With stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Barack Obama and Prince Harry in attendance, reports Jim Dobson at Forbes, they were hardly going to be hitch-hiking. . . .”

With the Australian election won by pro-development forces, the giant ($16.5 billion) Carmichael/Adani coal mine project in Queensland resumed its march toward final regulatory approval.

In late August former President Barack Obama plunked down just under $15 million for a beachfront mansion in Martha’s Vineyard, maybe 10 feet above mean high tide, revealing just what the ex-Pres really thinks of his own rhetoric about impending climate-induced sea-level rise.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/04/cowardly-congress-wont-condemn-the-anti-semitic-bds-movement/

Why is it that almost every time the Left accuses the Right of some misbehavior or attitude, it’s actually something the Left is guilty of doing or being?

Take, for example, the regular accusations that Donald Trump is an anti-Semite. Forget the fact that his son-in-law is Jewish and his daughter has converted to Judaism. Those are minor inconveniences in the propaganda war against Trump. It truly does feel like the Left has a spaghetti approach at times: throw anything and everything up against the wall in hopes enough people are foolish and uncritical enough to accept whatever appears to stick.

Anti-Semitism is rampant on the Left. In all seriousness, people should be asking why Democratic leaders hate Israel and the Jewish people so much. They’ve embraced and nurtured anti-Semitism in the form of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement targeting Israel.

Democrats argue that the controversy surrounding the BDS movement is really more a debate over policy differences. Not so. The BDS movement is insidiously anti-Semitic, seeking to deny the right of self-determination and sovereignty to Israel. It is nothing short of economic war against the only Jewish nation-state in the world.

Founders and supporters of BDS claim they are all about freedom and equality. They are nothing of the sort: their ultimate goal is to annihilate and remove Israel from the map and they have been hoping that the world wouldn’t notice until it was too late.

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

Catalina Lauf is 26 years old and running for Congress in Illinois, hoping to unseat a Democrat incumbent and push aside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the youngest woman ever to be elected to Congress.  Kyle S. Reyes of Law Enforcement Today writes:

She’s a young Latina. She’s from Illinois.  She’s running for Congress.  And she’s the polar opposite of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

She’s conservative. She’s smart.  She’s gorgeous.  She supports law enforcement.  She actually loves America.  Her idol is Ronald Reagan.  And she’s not afraid to ruffle feathers.

Photo via Law Enforcement Today.

Her name is Catalina Lauf, and she’s 26-years-old.  Her goal is to steal a Democratic-held seat outside Chicago.

Ms. Lauf announced her bid for the GOP primary in the 14th Congressional District of Illinois, a GOP-leaning district covering a swath of western suburbs of Chicago.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/most-accurate-2016-poll-shows-biden-warren-sanders-beating-trump/

Most Accurate 2016 Poll Shows Biden, Warren, Sanders Beating TrumpBy Mairead McArdle

The poll that most closely predicted the outcome of the 2016 presidential election shows Joe Biden and several other Democratic candidates beating President Trump in a 2020 general-election matchup.

Biden would beat Trump by twelve points in a general election, garnering 54 percent support to Trump’s 42 percent, according to the September IBD/TIPP poll. Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Kamala Harris of California also lead Trump by three to four points, close to within the margin of error.

Among voters who lean Democratic, Warren currently has 24 percent support, up from 17 percent last month, according to the poll. Biden meanwhile slipped two points from August to 28 percent among the same voters. Support for Sanders remained level at 12 percent, keeping him in third place. Harris saw her support drop this month from 11 percent to 6 percent. South Bend, Ind. mayor Pete Buttigieg and New Jersey senator Cory Booker trailed them, polling at 5 percent and 4 percent respectively.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/thinkprogress-smears-dan-crenshaw-on-universal-background-checks/

Dan Crenshaw has every right to oppose a ‘universal background check’ bill.

At ThinkProgress, Josh Israel miscasts Dan Crenshaw’s argument against the “universal background check” bill that the House of Representatives passed earlier this year (and which Crenshaw opposed):

“With universal background checks, I wouldn’t be able to let my friends borrow my handgun when they travel alone like this. We would make felons out of people just for defending themselves,” he tweeted.

It is unclear why Crenshaw does not believe his friends could pass background checks to get their own weapons or to borrow his. If they are convicted felons who are not allowed to possess weapons, it would seem important for Crenshaw or other friends to know that before arming them.

Israel’s reading of Crenshaw’s tweet is based upon a misunderstanding of the bill (H.R. 8) that Crenshaw opposes. Under current federal law, Crenshaw is allowed to loan, gift, or sell a gun to any adult within his home state of Texas, provided he believes that that adult is permitted to own one. If H.R. 8 were signed into law, this would change. Specifically, H.R. 8 would prevent Crenshaw from selling a gun to anybody without the buyer undergoing a background check; it would limit his ability to gift or loan a gun to recipients within his own family; and it would narrow the circumstances in which he could effect a “temporary transfer” dramatically, to those in which the temporary transferee feared “imminent death or great bodily harm.” Because he has read H.R. 8, Crenshaw knows this, and he knows, therefore, that if H.R. 8 were to become law it would prevent him from loaning his friends guns per se — not because his friends are unable to pass a background check, but because there would be no such thing as loaning a friend a gun.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-marquette-poll-trump-trails-biden-by-nine-points-in-wisconsin-but-ties-warren-and-harris/

According to the latest Marquette Law School poll of registered voters in Wisconsin, Joe Biden leads Donald Trump 51 percent to 42 percent, while Elizabeth Warren and Trump are tied at 45 percent. Trump is also tied with Kamala Harris at 44 percent, while Bernie Sanders narrowly leads Trump 48 percent to 44 percent.

The Marquette survey is another data point backing up the argument that Biden is actually more electable than his Democratic rivals. He leads Trump by 9.4 points in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, while Warren leads Trump by 3.6 points in the RCP average and Harris leads by 3.0. 

In 2016, of course, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1 points, but lost the Electoral College because 78,000 voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan gave Trump the edge.

Trump can afford to let Pennsylvania and Michigan flip in 2020, but he would still win the Electoral College 270 to 268 if he holds Wisconsin and the rest of the 2016 map stays the same. 

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Wisconsin remains a strong contender to be the “tipping-point” state in the Electoral College in 2020, and Biden will likely be touting the fact that the “gold-standard” pollster in Wisconsin shows him with a big lead, while his rivals would make the race a toss-up. 

Biden’s rivals can counter by pointing out that at this point in the 2016 presidential race (when Trump had been running in the GOP primary for less than three months) Marquette showed Hillary Clinton leading Trump 51 percent to 35 percent.