RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274220/civil-rights-movement-and-stolen-valor-bruce-thornton

After the recent Democrats’ presidential primary debate, California Senator Kamala Harris was the media’s consensus winner. It’s early days yet, but Harris is shaping up to be the Democrats’ favorite for defeating the hated Donald Trump and returning to the glory days of Barack Obama’s presidency. This makes sense, as Harris most closely duplicates the persona, tactics, and policies of the progressive messiah.

Harris’s moment came when she chastised and befuddled the now-fading frontrunner, Joe Biden. Biden’s mortal sin in this age of the “woke” Inquisition was his opposition in the Seventies to forced busing of schoolchildren, usually black, to achieve the integration of schools. Her clever use of her own personal experience in Berkeley, with a maudlin evocation of herself as a “little girl,” was pure demagoguery against which the slow-witted Biden had no response.

It didn’t matter to the media that Harris’s claim that she participated in the desegregation of Berkeley’s “public schools” was misleading. Berkeley’s one high school was already de facto integrated, and its three junior highs were desegregated in 1964, when Harris was three. Harris participated in the desegregation of the elementary schools. Also left unsaid was the fact that affluent,  progressive Berkeley had little of the violence that marked other cities.

But Harris brought up her personal experience in order to exploit the connection of busing with racist violence of the sort that took place in Boston in 1976, as represented by the iconic, Pulitzer-Prize-winning photograph of a white teenager using a flag-pole flying Old Glory to seemingly spear a black attorney. Though the assailant missed the attorney, and whites were injured and killed in retaliation, the striking photograph and busing in general became another historic example of endemic white racism. This was the point of Harris’s reference to her own experience, to give these connotations of “busing” some pathos by referring to herself as “a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools,” and whom Joe Biden wanted to deny pedagogical equal opportunity.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kentucky-democrat-amy-mcgrath-announces-2020-challenge-to-mcconnell/

Kentucky Democrat Amy McGrath on Tuesday announced that she will run to unseat Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell in 2020.

The former Marine fighter pilot and mother of three, who lost her 2018 bid to defeat Republican representative Andy Barr, made her announcement in a video message posted to Twitter.

McGrath says in the video that she wrote a letter when she was 13 to McConnell, her senator, telling him she wanted to fly fighter jets in combat.

“He never wrote back,” McGrath says in the video. “I’ve often wondered, how many other people did Mitch McConnell never take the time to write back or even think about.”

“Everything that’s wrong with Washington had to start somewhere — it started with him,” she wrote in an accompanying tweet.

McGrath argued that “the things that Kentuckians voted for Trump for are not being done” thanks to McConnell, who she explained has blocked legislation his constituents supported, such as measures that would have lowered drug pricing.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nancy-pelosi-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-clash-over-reach-of-progressives-influence/

House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) clashed over the weekend with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) after making dismissive remarks about the influence of Ocasio-Cortez and other young progressives in the caucus.

“All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world,” Pelosi told the New York Times. “But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”

Pelosi, 79, was referring to Ocasio-Cortez, 29, and Representatives Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. The four freshman members, nicknamed “the Squad,” voted against the $4.6 billion emergency-disaster-aid bill signed into law last month, or “our bill,” as Pelosi called it. The bill included funding for more resources to address the increasing flow of migrants over the southern border, and the four congresswomen said it did not contain strong enough protections for migrant children.

Ocasio-Cortez did not appear to appreciate the speaker’s comments and responded with a few choice words on her Twitter account, which has 4.7 million followers.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-hope-presidential-candidates-and-the-emperors-new-clothes/

Today’s hot rumor is that Representative Eric Swalwell — the trying-too-hard, gun-confiscation-promoting, nuclear-strike-on-Americans endorsing, Biden-death-speculating white man who’s running to increase diversity —  will quit the presidential race today.

But Tom Steyer, the billionaire who financed a campaign calling for Trump’s impeachment, is reportedly jumping in. To paraphrase Andy Warhol, in the future, everyone will run for the Democratic presidential nomination for 15 minutes.

There are a lot of reasons why no-hopers jump in, but a big one is the fact that the vast majority of elected officials and wealthy people live in a bubble, where they are surrounded by brown-nosers who tell them their ideas are brilliant and constantly tell them things like, “Of course the American people are yearning for inspiring leadership like yours, sir.”

The moment you become an elected official, people start to look at you a little differently. Occasionally you’ll encounter protesters or an angry crowd at your town hall, but by and large, people usually seem happy to see you — particularly people who come into your office in government. Many of the people you encounter ask for favors or describe problems in their community and hope you are the one who can fix them. Often you are indeed a person who can help them — whether it’s getting the town zoning board to move a little faster or get that pothole filled, or help enact that legislative change your company has been hoping for, or even just get one of those nifty U.S. Capitol flags. You also become a valuable friend and a potentially dangerous enemy. Until you’re out of office and can no longer use the levers of government to help friends and punish foes, it’s best to avoid irking you too much.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/impeachment-obsessed-environmentalist-billionaire-tom-steyer-considering-2020-run/

Tom Steyer, the hedge fund billionaire who emerged as the biggest individual donor in American politics and launched a campaign demanding President Donald Trump’s impeachment, is reconsidering his decision not to run for president in 2020. Sources confirmed the 2020 consideration to The Atlantic and The Washington Post.

“You never know with Tom until he actually pulls the trigger, but he’s telling a lot of people he works with and trusts that he’s going to do it,” one of the Democrats with knowledge of Steyer’s plans told The Post. “He wants in.”

Last week in San Francisco, the billionaire told staffers at Need to Impeach and NextGen America — two organizations he funds — that he is launching a 2020 campaign and that he intends to make the formal announcement on Tuesday, The Atlantic reported.

Steyer has changed his mind before, however. In January, he told his people to expect a presidential run. He even took a trip to Iowa for the launch, only to reverse course at the last minute. Instead of starting a 2020 race, he hosted a Townhall for Need to Impeach, which has 8 million members and has become the largest liberal activist group in the country.

Steyer has emerged as one of the biggest single donors in American politics over the last decade. In 2013, he founded the NextGen Climate super PAC (now called NextGen America), which contributed about $74 million to Democratic causes in the 2014 midterms, making Steyer the single biggest individual donor in American politics that a year. The group also spent $96 million in 2016 and nearly $61 million in the 2018 midterms.

According to The Post’s Robert Costa, Steyer may already have a campaign manager lined up. Heather Hargreaves, a Democratic field organizer who worked on President Obama’s 2008 campaign and currently executive director of NextGen America, is expected the manage the campaign, according to Costa’s sources.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/stupid_polling_propaganda_tricks_continue.html

They’re at it again.

Politico’s Playbook presents poll results showing that the 5 leading Democrats in their presidential field all beat Trump. Only a generic “socialist” fails to beat him… but even the socialist ties the president.

But Richard Baehr examines to poll’s internals and writes:

Note that they list the results for all voters.  That means including adults who are not registered.   Pollsters rarely even show these numbers.  Using registered voters, Trump does much better.  Among likely voters, better still.

So why does Politico highlight all adults?

I can’t imagine why….

Maybe the Government of Qatar knows?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/the_amazing_deflatable_buttigieg.html

A scenario unfolded last week that has become boringly predictable.  Bad guy does bad things.  Good guy with authority shows up to stop him.  Bad guy attacks good guy with weapon.  Good guy shoots bad guy.  Bad guy’s “community” allege good guy is racist.  Craven politician holds town hall meeting.  Craven politician gets shouted down by angry mob.  Craven politician folds like wet paper to angry mob’s demands.  Craven politician appoints special prosecutor to investigate good guy, who determines good guy was justified in shooting the bad guy.  Angry mob insists the “system” is rigged against them.  Bad guy’s kindergarten graduation picture circulates Internet.  Bad guy’s relatives give interview explaining how much bad guy had always dreamed of being an astronaut.  Media salivates all over itself.  Other good guys question the sanity of risking their lives to stop bad guys.  Less good guys volunteer to do so.  Crime increases.  Angry mob blames the “system” for neglecting rising crime.  Meanwhile, another bad guy does bad things.  Good guy with authority shows up to stop him.  Rinse.  Repeat.

Okay, only the first half of this scenario has happened so far, but who wants to bet against the second half playing out as predicted?  In this specific biopunk performance, the role of the craven politician who succumbed to the mob of his own creation was none other than America’s Aww Shucks Mayor, Pete Buttigieg.  In his charming hometown of South Bend, Indiana, a white police officer shot a black car burglar Eric Logan who, ignoring the officer’s verbal instructions to halt, came at him with a knife.  In a move he now certainly regrets, Buttigieg took a break from his presidential campaign to return to South Bend to chaperone a grotesque orgy of racist invective, during which was made evident that his constituents have determined the officer’s guilt solely based on his skin color (as well as Logan’s innocence, for the same reason).  There was zero interest in factual evidence, and even less in the presumption of innocence.  Not one to get hung up on such trivialities, Buttigieg made clear from his more passionate ripostes that his sole interest was placating the mob.  Everyone, it’s all my fault.  I might as well have pulled the trigger myself.  I’ll try to do better.  I’m calling in everyone from DOJ to Scotland Yard to come investigate.  The Stasi?  Yeah, I can call them too.  Your wish is my command, but please just stop yelling at me.  (I paraphrase, but that was basically the gist).  From the opening gambit he allowed the inmates to run the asylum, and with every panicked concession he gave, the circling sharks simply grew more frenzied at the scent of blood.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/07/03/dems_want_to_insure_illegals_dont_care_about_vets_and_middle_class_140698.html

It’s official. Democratic Party Chair Tom Perez confirms the Party fully endorses free health care for illegal immigrants. That puts illegals ahead of veterans struggling to qualify for civilian care, middle-class working stiffs priced out of Obamacare and baby boomers facing the likelihood of Medicare cuts.

At last Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate, all 10 candidates on the stage flung up their hands when asked whether they’d cover illegal aliens.

Not one of the debate moderators went on to ask the obvious: How much will it cost, and who will pay for it? Why spoil a Kumbaya moment?

The costs would be huge. According to Pew Foundation researchers, there were 10.5 million illegals in the nation in 2017. In 2018, Yale University and MIT demographers estimated there are double.

If the entire illegal population were enrolled in Medicaid, the tab would range from a whopping $84 billion a year (10.5 million times $8,015 per person Medicaid cost) to more than double that, $176 billion. But that estimate needs to be pared to reflect the millions of illegals who work and already get insurance through an employer. Covering uninsured illegals is likely to cost $40 billion to $80 billion a year.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/buttigieg-proposes-national-service-program-to-fight-climate-change-addiction/

Southbend, Ind. mayor Pete Buttigieg on Wednesday proposed the creation of new voluntary-service programs to combat climate change and increasing rates of mental-health issues, among other objectives.

The plan, released by Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, calls for the recruitment of 250,000 young people in the coming years with a possible expansion to 1 million by 2026. It would expand programs such as AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps, while also creating new programs, to fight climate change, treat mental illness, and reduce rates of addiction.

Buttigieg has emphasized the power of national service throughout his upstart bid for the Democratic nomination, returning often to his service as a Naval Reserve officer in Afghanistan during stump speeches and interviews.

“At a moment when our social fabric is being torn apart, where people increasingly only hear voices that are like their own, it’s a really important time to build social capital through giving people opportunities to work in service in ways that are also going to deliver value to the country,” Buttigieg told the New York Times . “I also think you shouldn’t have to go to war to have that experience.”

A spokeswoman for the campaign said the program would cost $20 billion over ten years.