RUTHFULLY YOURS

On February 3,  the Iowa Caucus starts campaign season, followed by a primary in New Hampshire on the 11th, Nevada caucuses on the 22nd (D) and 25th (R), and the South Carolina primary (D) on the the 29th.

The March 3 primaries will determine which Democrat wins the presidential nomination and which legislators are running in the following states in both parties.

Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia and Democrats Abroad(D)

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/03/dont-buy-the-myth-of-the-moderate-democrat/

Watching a passel of Democrats in the Motor City struggle to differentiate themselves recalled my move years ago from politics to New York PR.

I was a bit confused about nomenclature in my new profession and turned to a grizzled veteran. What, I asked him, is the difference among public relations, marketing communications, advertising and the then-hot new concept of strategic communications?

“Not a (expletive deleted) thing,” he grunted. “It’s all selling soap.”

Putting aside the theatrics of Biden Bashfest II Wednesday, the faux showdowns on the first night opened a new going-forward narrative of differences among the “moderates” and “progressives.” The Wall Street Journal opined on “the sharpest ideological differences in decades.”

Don’t buy it.

Every Democrat on the stage was selling the same thing: Bigger Government. 

Let’s zero in on key domestic issues covered in the three-hour midsummer night’s nightmare, shall we?

Health care was supposedly a differentiator, with alleged middle-of-the-roaders fixing to pour cold water on Elizabeth Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’ $32 trillion Medicare for All dream.

Former Maryland Congressman John Delaney managed to squeeze in his money line — “real solutions, not impossible promises” — on four separate occasions, and called Medicare for All “extreme.” But he also shoehorned in the phrase “universal” in conjunction with health care four times, proposing “a universal health care system to give everyone basic health care for free.” That’s telling ‘em, congressman.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/the_appalling_misguided_mindset_of_the_nevertrumpers.html

The ever-disappointing, Trump-hating  Bret Stephens has disappointed his former fans again.  He hates the President but admits the Democrat party is off the rails.  Indeed, it is.   In his most recent column, he mis-states Trump’s tweet re: the “send them back” controversy.  Trump merely suggested they go back – – to Somalia, Detroit, the Bronx and Boston, fix things then tell him how to fix the nation.  It was not a racist tweet in any sense of the word any more than his stating the truth about Baltimore was racist.  Skin color never enters Trump’s mind, actions, or accomplishments.  He is a colorblind person.  

He was right about the anti-Americanism of the lamentable “squad” and he is right about the obvious deterioration of Democrat-run cities that have been unaddressed for decades because to speak the truth aloud is instantly deemed racist.  That is how our politics have been for decades, and it escalated over the eight years of the Obama race-baiting years.   Obama set race relations back and he did it on purpose.  It was all by design, meant to promote a surge of identity politics — and it worked.

Stephens is like many people today who think their hatred of Trump is validated because of what they think they know about his character and his past.  They feel self-righteous for objecting to his every move because he was, at various times of his life, a womanizer and a savvy businessman.  What has that to do with how he has run his administration?  Absolutely nothing.  Had our media been as disrespectful of many previous presidents as they are of Trump, the young of those years would have been equally outraged.  Woodrow Wilson, whom Rahm Emmanuel just praised as a heroic progressive the other day, was an avowed racist.  LBJ was as well.  Emmanuel touted the Great Society as a success, but it was an abject failure.  Its “War on Poverty” was a disaster of catastrophic proportions; it destroyed black families in particular. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-iraq-memories-11564786933

Foreign policy was barely discussed at the Democratic presidential debates this week, and not in a good way when it was. The main point seemed to be to stop “endless war,” which sounds like Donald Trump as a candidate in 2016.

That includes Joe Biden, who as a former Vice President and veteran of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee should know better. Yet when criticized about his 2002 vote for the Iraq war, Mr. Biden had a memory lapse.

“I did make a bad judgment, trusting the President [George W. Bush] saying he was only doing this to get inspectors in and get the U.N. to agree to put inspectors in,” Mr. Biden said. “From the moment ‘shock and awe’ started, from that moment I was opposed to the effort, and I was outspoken as much as anyone at all in the Congress and the Administration.”

Mr. Biden forgets that he was also a loud critic of Saddam Hussein, had been so for many years, and also worried that the dictator might have weapons of mass destruction. Everyone knew that the vote in 2002 was about authorizing a potential military intervention.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/fired-google-engineer-fears-company-will-try-and-influence-2020-election-they-really-want-trump-to-lose

A former Google engineer who claims he has been blacklisted by the tech giant says he believes the company will try to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

“They really want Trump to lose in 2020. That’s their agenda,” Kevin Cernekee said Friday on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

“They have very biased people running every level of the company,” Cernekee continued. “They have quite a bit of control over the political process. That’s something we should really worry about.”

“They really want Trump to lose in 2020. That’s their agenda. They have very biased people running every level of the company.”

— Kevin Cernekee, former Google employee

Cenekee was fired in June 2018 after Google told him he was terminated for misuse of the company’s equipment, including its software system for remote access. However, Cernekee, who describes himself as a whistleblower, maintains he was terminated for his outspoken conservative views.

“They have quite a bit of control over the political process. That’s something we should really worry about.” 

— Kevin Cernekee, former Google employee

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-8-2-are-any-of-the-democratic-can

Perhaps President Trump is not particularly your cup of tea, and you are thinking that you might consider as an alternative supporting one or another of the Democratic contenders for the presidency. If so, here is an important question to consider: Is any one of these people not completely crazy?

To start with, I’m willing to grant that the bar for selecting a candidate to support for President is of necessity a low one. A person matching your idea of the perfect candidate simply does not exist in the real world; and even if such a person did exist, he or she would not make it past the first week of the campaign. Working strongly against the potential for even any half-way decent candidate is the fact that everybody who throws a hat into this ring is almost by definition a self-centered ego-maniac. Plus, every one of them deeply believes that each word they utter, no matter how ridiculous, is a pearl of God’s wisdom. And then, by the time you get to the general election, you will only have two options left to choose from. It goes without saying that both will be very deeply flawed.

But “deeply flawed” is not nearly the same as “completely crazy.” Surely, we can find some among the Democratic candidates who can pass the “not completely crazy” test.

Well, good luck trying. To evaluate the question of whether any of these people are not completely crazy, I’m going to look today at what they have said recently — mostly in the debates — about the federal government’s appropriate role with respect to “climate.”

As background, readers here know that I do not think much of what passes for the “science” of human-caused climate change, including such obvious flaws as the refusal of advocates to articulate their contentions in the form of a falsifiable hypothesis, the failure to attempt to articulate and refute appropriate null hypotheses, and also the alteration of data by advocates in order to create an apparently strong warming trend that did not exist in the data as originally officially reported. (See, for example: as to lack of a falsifiable hypothesis, “Things Keep Getting Worse For The Fake ‘Science’ Of Human-Caused Global Warming,” July 12; as to failure to articulate or refute appropriate null hypotheses, “You Don’t Need To Be A Scientist To Know That The Global Warming Alarm ‘Science’ Is Fake,” July 15; and as to alteration of data to try to make it fit the narrative, my now-23-part series “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.”)

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/02/democrats

As is their well-practiced custom, the Democratic presidential candidates continue to screech about stagnant wages, and an economy that doesn’t work for everyone.

We’re not saying they’re lying. Let’s just say the truth is out there and they’re missing it.

In the first set of debates, New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker said that he was seeing “every single day that this economy is not working for average Americans.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat, groused about “an economy that does great for those with money and isn’t doing great for everyone else.”

Tuesday night, the first evening of the second round of debates, Ohio Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan complained that union members’ “wages have been stagnating.” The following evening, Julian Castro, secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Obama, was quite sure that “the idea that America is doing just fine is wrong.” 

It’s a familiar beef. Not long ago, Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders claimed that “for the last 45 years the average American today has not seen a nickel more in real wages than he or she got 45 years ago.” More recently, Warren has lamented “a generation of stagnant wages.”

Even President Trump has brought up “decades of flat wages.”

The numbers don’t seem to back the narrative, though. Factcheck.org, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, has shown that after falling for about 20 years, wages have been climbing since the mid-1990s.

Not all agree that the measurement used by Factcheck.org is the best way to determine if we’re better off than we were in previous decades. So forget for one moment the data and think about what today’s wages can bring compared to wages in the 1960s and 1970s.

https://freebeacon.com/politics/california-removes-arrest-reports-from-kamala-years/

A redesign of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation website will make it harder for voters to inspect Sen. Kamala Harris’s controversial record as the state’s top cop.

The department removed public access to a number of reports on incarceration in the state, including when presidential candidate Kamala Harris (D.) was California’s attorney general. Twice a year, the CDCR releases information about the number of new individuals incarcerated in the California prison system as part of its “Offender Data Points” series. These reports provide important information on demographics, sentence length, offense type, and other figures relevant to criminal justice and incarceration.

Until recently, these reports were publicly available at the CDCR’s website. A search using archive.org’s Wayback Machine reveals that as of April 25, 2019—the most recent indexed date—ODP reports were available dating back to the spring of 2009. As of August 2019, the same web page now serves only a single ODP report, the one for Spring 2019. The pre-2019 reports have been removed.

The changes matter in part because the reports contain information about Harris’s entire time as state A.G., 2011 to 2017. Harris has taken fire from multiple opponents for her “tough on crime” record as California’s top cop, an image that she has tried to shed as a far-left senator and presidential candidate.

One particularly brutal attack came Wednesday night when Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D., Hi.) laid into Harris for her record on criminal justice. Gabbard cited a Washington Free Beacon analysis — based in part on the ODP reports — that found that more than 1,500 Californians were sent to prison for marijuana-related offenses while Harris was attorney general.