RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/census-citizenship-question

Just as the Supreme Court considers whether the Trump administration can add a question about citizenship to the 2020 Census, a New York Times report has intensified the redistricting battle. The Times profiles the late Thomas B. Hofeller, a Republican strategist, who, before he died last summer, was called the “Michelangelo of gerrymandering.” According to the report, Hofeller’s estranged daughter discovered hard drives that revealed his influential role in adding the citizenship question to next year’s census.

The files prove, the Times concludes, that “the Trump Administration added the question to the 2020 census to advance Republican Party interests”—specifically, to gerrymander congressional districts favoring the GOP. The Times editorial board added that “the trove of documents . . . makes it hard to see the Trump administration’s efforts to include a citizenship questions . . . as anything but a partisan power grab.” And a Times opinion writer even questioned the Supreme Court’s “legitimacy” if it rules in favor of the administration.

The citizenship question would inevitably discourage noncitizens from responding to the Census, resulting in their absence from the national head count. Their exclusion would affect the drawing of congressional districts, a process constitutionally based on total population, not the number of citizens. Hofeller undoubtedly studied the political implications of counting citizens only: documents submitted to the Court show that his idea dates to 2015. He promoted his proposal to Trump’s transition team, arguing that the added question would ensure enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jun/2/since-mueller-didnt-explicitly-condemn-trump-democ/

“In the aforementioned book, “The Red Thread,” Ms. West gives chapter and verse on the main characters in the now-obvious cabal to overturn the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Brennan’s admission of voting for the Communist Party ticket in 1976 came during a Sept. 16, 2016, panel discussion at “The Summit on Increasing Diversity in the Intelligence Community” hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year-long fishing expedition found no evidence of the Trump campaign colluding with Russians. So why is Mr. Mueller now hinting that Mr. Trump is somehow guilty after all?

Maybe it’s because the media, which had heaped praise on him, now see him as a sellout or loser. Or maybe it’s because he wants to distract from a glaring fact: He never addressed the real scandal, which is the Obama administration’s flagrant abuse of the FBI and intelligence agencies to damage a presidential campaign and then, failing that, to destroy a sitting president.

Since the “Russia collusion” scandal dominated the news every day, Mr. Mueller may have helped Democrats take the House in 2018. You’d think they’d be grateful. But, since he did not outright nail Mr. Trump, Mr. Mueller’s star has fallen.

For his part, former FBI Director James Comey has been outed as a squirrely partisan who used his office to target Mr. Trump and allowed Hillary Clinton to skate away from actionable offenses connected with her unsecured email server. Her people wiped evidence-bearing computers and used hammers on cellphones? What’s the big deal?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/why_rep_james_clyburn_just_walked_back_his_prediction_of_impeachment.html
“Do Dems really want to start impeachment against Trump, given the prospect that Obama/Biden/Hillary (and perhaps others in the Obama administration) engaged in what would clearly be impeachable offenses?”

Nancy Pelosi, desperately trying to hold onto her speakership in the face of the Trump-haters (nearly all from safe districts) demanding impeachment, must have been furious at her second-highest-ranking member yesterday saying it’s only a matter of time until President Trump is impeached.  Pelosi knows that if impeachment proceeds, the freshmen Democrats in the House who provided the Democrat majority that made her speaker, most of them elected in swing districts, will face a tough re-election bid.  She would revert back to minority leader in a GOP-run House that could enable a re-elected President Trump to advance his legislative agenda when voters react negatively to what would be an impeachment fiasco.

Rep. James Clyburn is the majority whip in the House of Representatives, second only to Majority Leader Steny Hoyer as an aide to Pelosi.  And yesterday he lobbed what amounts to a stink bomb at Pelosi’s dream of returning as speaker.  Clyburn acknowledged that the public does not yet support impeachment:

Clyburn, who serves as the Democratic whip, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that his party’s leadership is waiting to open an impeachment inquiry until there is broader public support for for [sic] the move, but effectively guaranteed that the president would be impeached at some point.

“We think we have to bring the public along. We’re not particularly interested in the Senate,” Clyburn said, pushing back on Tapper’s suggestion that Democrats might wait to impeach until there is support for the move among Senate Republicans. “We think if we efficiently and effectively educate the public, then we will have done our jobs and we can move on an impeachment vote and it will stand and maybe it will be what needs to be done to incentivize the Senate to act.”

“But it sounds like you’re — you think that the president will be impeached, or at least proceedings will begin in the House at some point, but just not right now?” Tapper went on to ask.

“Yes, exactly what I feel,” Clyburn responded.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/aoc-everybody-should-live-in-a-place-like-my-luxury-apartment-building-or-something/

The great thing about socialism is that it meets everybody’s needs and solves everybody’s problems, as long as it’s never, ever put into practice. As long as you’re just talking, socialism is great. Who doesn’t like a good fairy tale?

And nobody loves talking as much as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez loves talking. If words were deeds, she’d already be the most accomplished politician in the 21st Century. Here she is talking about how her recent move into a luxury apartment building in D.C. has taught her that, um… everybody should live in a luxury apartment building? I think that’s what she’s saying? Here, see if you can decipher this stream of syllables:

“So I move into this building, and it’s marketed as a ‘luxury’ building in D.C. Right? I’m keeping it 100% with you all… It’s an efficient building, it’s clean, it has public space, it has a rooftop garden (y’all watching my Instagram), it has all of these things. It has clean air, it has clean water. And I think about this and I’m like, ‘Hm, this is what a luxury building is like, right?’…”
“What we have been taught that is a luxury should not be a luxury… We can live in buildings that are non-for-profit, or tenant-owned. There are so many ways we can slice this and we can structure it in a way where all people have the right to a dignified home.”  CONTINUE AT SITE

https://freebeacon.com/columns/making-sense-of-the-new-american-right/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

I like to start my classes on conservative intellectual history by distinguishing between three groups. There is the Republican Party, with its millions of adherents and spectrum of opinion from very conservative, somewhat conservative, moderate, and yes, liberal. There is the conservative movement, the constellation of single-issue nonprofits that sprung up in the 1970s—gun rights, pro-life, taxpayer, right to work—and continue to influence elected officials. Finally, there is the conservative intellectual movement: writers, scholars, and wonks whose journalistic and political work deals mainly with ideas and, if we’re lucky, their translation into public policy.

It’s a common mistake to conflate these groups. The Republican Party is a vast coalition that both predates and possibly will post-date the conservative movement. That movement has had mixed success in moving the party to the right, partly because of cynicism and corruption but also because politicians must, at the end of the day, take into account the shifting and often contradictory views of their constituents. The conservative intellectual movement exercises the least power of all. You could fit its members into a convention hall or, more likely, a cruise ship.

Ideas matter. But the relation of ideas to political action is difficult to measure and often haphazard. The line between shaping a politician’s rhetoric and decisions and merely reflecting them is awfully fuzzy. The conservative intellectual movement, in addition to generating excellent writing, has had seven real-world applications since its formation after the Second World War: originalism and supply side economics in the 1970s; welfare reform and crime policy in the 1980s and ’90s; educational choice and reform over the last two decades; James Burnham’s anti-Communist strategies that found expression in the Reagan Doctrine; and the counterinsurgency plan known as the “surge” that prevented the defeat of American forces in the second Iraq war. There have been other successes, for sure, but also plenty of setbacks. What’s important to remember is that liberals as well as Republicans, conservative activists, and conservative intellectuals contested every single one of these policies.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14330/bernie-sanders-iran

The important point is what war one talks about, when, where and against which adversaries. The bland assertion “I oppose war against X or Y” is a sign of intellectual laziness if not of moral bankruptcy.

Senator Bernie Sanders never tells us which side he would have supported: Saddam Hussein or a majority of the Iraqi people? One may justly infer that he is opposed to wars only where the US is fighting real or imagined enemies.

Sanders is wrong in pretending that Iraq was a “disaster”. Since 2003, Iraq has gone through many ordeals, paying a heavy price. And yet, today no one could deny that most Iraqis enjoy freedoms they never thought possible under the dictatorship.

“No war with Iran!” The shop-worn slogan, in circulation for four decades, is back in vogue as self-styled peaceniks in the West seek a fig-leaf to hide their shameless support for a regime rejected by its people. In Britain, the neo-Marxists who control the Labour Party bandy the slogan around on airwaves and meetings of militants. In France, the pro-Putin “France Unbowed” outfit led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon makes similar noises. And in the US, we have Senator Bernie Sanders, currently the front-runner to become the Democrat Party’s nominee in the next presidential election, donning the mantle of supreme peacemaker, in effect offering himself as a human shield for the Islamic Republic.

“Recently I’ve been criticized … because of my opposition to war,” Sanders says in a video message. “So let me be very clear: I make no apologies to anybody, that when I was a young man before I was elected to anything, I opposed the war in Vietnam. And I know what that war did to my generation.”

He adds “I’m going to do everything that I can to prevent a war with Iran because if you think the war in Iraq was a disaster, my guess is that war in Iran would be even worse.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/30/calling-out-anti-semitism-isnt-islamophobic/

Calling Out Anti-Semitism Isn’t ‘Islamophobic’ By Kyle Shideler

Virginia State Delegate Ibraheem Samirah is the poster child for a new crop of Democratic politicians. He’s young, charismatic, and very progressive, with a history of activism that began in his student days on the campuses of Boston University and American University. Samirah has spent his brief time as a Virginia delegate hawking a “Green New Deal” for Virginia in the Washington Post.

But Samirah also has a history of shockingly antisemitic and virulently anti-Israel statements and troubling associations, and he doesn’t take kindly to those who point it out.

A story by Mikhael Smits in the Washington Free Beacon detailed Samirah’s long-running association with the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions group formed out of the Hamas-linked Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP). Samirah’s ties are both historic—including his father’s time as Chairman of the IAP and role as a Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood spokesman—and ongoing. He received funds from AMP donors in his delegate campaign this year, and spoke at AMP’s 2018 national convention.

Smits’ piece builds upon reporting during the February 2019 special election that highlighted Samirah’s anti-Semitic Facebook posts, which were condemned by both Republicans and Democrats but didn’t prevent him from winning the race by a comfortable margin.

Samirah responded to the new wave of criticism by tweeting an unsourced list of “statistics” claiming large numbers of Republicans, and a significant minority of Americans generally, hate or fear Muslims involved in politics.

Samirah also labeled his critics “Far-Right,” even though the “Far-Right” of Samirah’s imagination would seem to encapsulate the entire Virginia Republican Party, which responded to the Free Beacon report by labeling Samirah’s behavior “rabid anti-Semitism.”