RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-burdens-of-berniecare-11557091123

Bernie Sanders sells Medicare for All as a simple idea: “You will have a card which has Medicare on it, you’ll go to any doctor that you want, you’ll go to any hospital that you want.” So the Congressional Budget Office provided a public service last week by describing, albeit in thick and cautious bureaucratese, what it would really take to float BernieCare.

Democrats asked CBO to lay out some parameters of how to set up single-payer, hoping to elude analysis of any one bill in Congress. The latter would carry political accountability—and a price tag. Instead CBO walks through “key design components and considerations” in a report that aims to bore and deploys the word “could” 209 times.

Yet even this limited analysis is instructive about the “major undertaking” of single payer, as CBO puts it in hilarious understatement. CBO acknowledges, for example, that a transition that includes moving 160 million people from employer-sponsored coverage to single payer would be “complicated, challenging, and potentially disruptive” to health care and the economy. You don’t say.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/may/5/amy-klobuchar-credits-obama-not-trump-booming-econ/

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota Democrat, refused Sunday to credit President Trump for the booming economy, insisting that former President Barack Obama deserves a pat on the back after Friday’s jobs report showed the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years.

The Democratic presidential primary contender pointed to American workers, businesses and Mr. Obama when asked about the sunny economic figures, including rising wages, 260,000 new jobs, and a 3.6 percent unemployment rate, the lowest since 1969.

“You know what I’m thinking about, I’m thinking about when we were in that downturn, and President Obama came into office and he had to deal with that with the Congress to try to one, right the financial industry, and two, and get us on the road to recovery,” Ms. Klobuchar said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“I remember that the Republicans were giving him grief when he took any credit for that,” she added. “So I think that we have had policies in place starting with President Obama that have aided that recovery.”

Her response came after CNN host Jake Tapper asked, “Unemployment is the lowest it’s been since I was nine months old. You’re really not going to give President Trump any credit for that in terms of his tax cuts, his deregulation, or anything he’s done?”

https://nypost.com/2019/05/04/ticket-prices-plunge-for-bill-and-hillary-clintons-speaking-tour/

Tickets to the latest stop on Bill and Hillary Clinton’s speaking tour were going for as little as $20 on the secondary market as their 13-city adventure continued to struggle to find an audience.

The best seats in the house at Seattle’s WaMu Theater on Friday could be had for $829, a steep 54% drop from the $1,785 that the former first couple fetched when the tour was announced in early November.

But organizers soon had to slash listed prices and even offer discount ducats through Groupon to boost sales.

The official prices for Friday’s appearance ranged from $66.50 to $519, the Seattle Times reported.

“I really believe that we are in a crisis, a constitutional crisis,” Hillary Clinton opined during the 90-minute performance, presented as an interview of her and her husband by actor Bradley Whitford. “This is a test for our country.”

“These people, they don’t believe the same set of rules apply to them that apply to everyone else,” Bill Clinton said of the Trump administration.

https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2019-05-03/2020-democrats-begin-to-joust-while-joe-biden-stays-focused-on-trump

The opening months of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary have largely been an amicable, well-mannered affair.

There are sudden signs that’s about to change.

This week, several candidates tossed brushback pitches against rivals, with most of the heat being directed at Joe Biden, whose newly minted front-running candidacy appeared to open the door to a more contentious phase of the campaign.

“The Democratic race began in earnest last week,” says Simon Rosenberg, founder of the New Democrat Network think tank. “And Biden’s surge is likely to cause other candidates to start going after him.”

Both Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts served up policy contrasts with the former vice president, pointing out past positions he took that they believe are out of sync with today’s Democratic Party.

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey swiped at Sanders for advocating for voting rights for the incarcerated. And Jay Inslee, the Washington governor who is making climate change the centerpiece of his longshot bid, took aim at Beto O’Rourke’s commitment to a plan to solve the problem.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/05/02/obama-era_spying_is_now_a_political_risk_for_biden_140226.html

It’s been a very good week for Joe Biden. The former senator and vice president is the clear frontrunner in a crowded Democratic field for 2020. His poll ratings and campaign fundraising surged after he announced his presidential run last week.

One of Biden’s biggest assets is his close association with Barack Obama. He may not have the former president’s endorsement yet (Biden says, unconvincingly, that he didn’t want it), but Joe knows how popular Obama still is and how much his candidacy benefits from that reflected glow. Expect him to talk a lot about the Obama-Biden years.

Anything that undermines the 44th president’s legacy hurts all Democrats, and Biden most of all. That’s the danger posed by Attorney General Bill Barr’s commitment to investigate how the massive, prolonged investigation into “Trump-Russia collusion” began, whether it was conducted properly, and how information from it was illegally leaked to the media.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/01/a-tribe-of-her-own/

“Today’s Democratic oligarchs have the perfect disguise. With their “protecting the little guy” posture, they appear to be on the side of lower classes when they are really protecting and extending their own privileges. Student loan forgiveness is just the latest example in a long chain of hypocrisy and deception.”

As presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren continues to find her people among the Democratic Party base, the senior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts has been slinging government proposals like arrows at the battle of Little BigHorn.

Yet with her recent plan to forgive tens of billions in student loans and make college free, the former Harvard professor serves a tribe that may adopt her. And though her candidacy may soon be seeking a burial ground, her proposal likely will live on as it resonates with many tribes within the Democratic base.

Warren proposed student loan forgiveness for anyone up to $50,000 in student debt. On a sliding scale for high earners, the proposal applies to anyone making under $250,000 a year. As it stands, Warren’s plan can work with loans taken out for any type of degree—even if you only took out a few extra loans to get your MBA at Yale.

Warren insists that those who stand to benefit from this proposal are the working class, minorities, and middle-class people. This gets much harder to believe when you break down who actually goes to college and who goes into debt while going to college.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/hey_mazie_hirono_who_do_you_work_for.html

“Additionally, Mazie, in this country we don’t just “believe women,” we believe evidence.  As an attorney, you should know that, and if you don’t know the basics, then perhaps you are not fit to serve.  Men do not need to “shut up!” as you audaciously advised.  In this country we all have a voice. ”

Hey Mazie Hirono! Who do you work for? Who is pulling your strings? Surely, it’s not the people of Hawaii or the rest of the country.

Your father left the family when you were very young, and your mom managed to bring you and your two siblings to Hawaii. She supported the family by working long hours to put a roof over your head and food on the table. In spite, of your meager surroundings, you managed to get yourself a fine education at the University of Hawaii and prestigious Georgetown Law School.

One would expect gratitude for the opportunity this country offered you, but instead you shamefully and ungratefully had the gall to state to your staff that “people are getting screwed in this country every single second, minute, hour of the day.” So, the country that took you in, housed you, fed you, clothed you, and educated you is a country that “screws” everyone every second of every day? Doesn’t look like you were screwed, but it does look like you are the one who is screwing the good people of this country.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/30/ilhan-omars-collusion-islamists-acceptable/

Freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has distinguished herself with often offensive, outrageous, and unpatriotic rhetoric. One week she invokes classic anti-Jewish tropes. The next she trivializes the September 11 jihadist attacks. Another it is unearthed that she espouses morally relativistic if not overtly anti-American views about U.S. soldiers, the very ones who fought to defend civilians in her native Somalia to boot.

Omar’s penchant for provoking millions of Americans with odious words has masked the related, equally if not more troubling, elements of her associations, ideology, and background.

Consider Omar’s Meeting with Turkey’s President

Consider, for example, the revelation, largely unnoticed outside of conservative media, that as a Minnesota Assemblywoman Omar had a closed-press meeting in fall 2017 with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to a curiously now-deleted article from the local Somalian-language periodical in her district, the Tusmo Times, she and the Islamist authoritarian president met during his U.N. General Assembly visit to New York.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/27/its-not-trump-derangement-syndrome/

The Democrats’ behavior after 2016 is not mass delusion or mass hysteria or Trump Derangement Syndrome, or any of the other psychobabble explanations that dominate our political commentary. My first career was as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and I am not impressed with spraying around clinical terms as a substitute for looking at what is in front of us. Trump Derangement Syndrome is a colorful description for political behavior. It is not an analysis of what causes it.

Under Barack Obama, ordinary Democrats became enamored of the narrative that they were the Good People, hence entitled to crush anyone in their way, because everything they do is in the service of social justice.

The derangement we are facing is not Orange Man Bad; it is America Bad.

The Democrats don’t believe in our two-party system anymore. They utterly reject American civic norms of treating the president with a modicum of respect and cooperation. They don’t want to alternate presidential power every four or eight years. They think theirs is the only party that deserves to be elected.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/26/biden-launches-his-campaign-on-a-toxic-slander/

Former Vice President Joe Biden hooked his entire campaign launch this week on the hoax that President Trump called white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia “fine people.” “Charlottesville” is the first word out of Biden’s mouth, what he calls the defining moment for his campaign and for the country.

Biden’s presidential message is directly in line with Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” smear. Its main effect will be to energize Trump supporters. Biden can try to ride race-baiting to the White House, as his old boss did in 2012, but Biden is not the man to do it. Leading with the Charlottesville lie is a pathetic attempt to overcome the disability of being a white man in a Democrat party obsessed with skin color.

Biden can’t hide that he’s white by attacking President Trump as a racist. And he can’t use Charlottesville to define his campaign, because Charlottesville is a lie.

Did President Trump defend the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville and call them “very fine people.” No. This is not even ambiguous. It is as clear as two plus two. Watch the video of President Trump’s August 15, 2017 press conference yourself. Read the transcript. Biden’s video will go down as one of the most dishonest campaign launches in American political history.