RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pete-buttigieg-and-the-most-convenient-narrative/

Jim Treacher asks when Mike Pence has ever had a quarrel with Pete Buttigieg, pointing out that the vice president has never said anything negative about the South Bend mayor.

The “quarrel” between Pence and Buttigieg more or less begins and ends with Pence’s decision to support and sign the Religious Freedom Restoration Act back in 2015, which allowed individuals and companies to cite their religious beliefs and significant burdens upon those beliefs in legal proceedings. Opponents such as Buttigieg charged that the law would allow discrimination against gays and lesbians. The law was broadly popular; it passed the Indiana Senate 40 to 10 and the Indiana House 63-31. After Pence signed it into law, opponents vehemently denounced the law as “state-sanctioned discrimination.” Several large companies, sports leagues, and nonprofit institutions threatened to boycott the state. After about a week, Indiana lawmakers enacted an amendment that clarified that the RFRA could not be cited in certain discrimination cases.

In today’s Morning Jolt, I went through Buttigieg’s autobiography and noted that he describes his relationship with the then-governor as “complicated,” but that complication is mostly disagreeing on the RFRA. Buttigieg can never muster any examples of Pence being rude, hostile, or hateful, or ever making an issue out of Buttigieg’s sexual orientation, but the mayor laments “the complications of being openly gay in Mike Pence’s Indiana.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/beto_orourke_wants_farmers_to_hand_over_their_fair_share_of_crops_to_stop_global_warming.html

Socialism with a boyish and syrupy face

Campaigning for president in Iowa, Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke thinks farmers need to do their “fair share” to combat global warming, handing over some of their crops to save the Earth.Kid you not.  According to Breitbart News:Democrat 2020 presidential candidate Robert “Beto” O’Rourke proposed Friday in Iowa that the U.S. “allow” farmers to give up their “fair share” of crops to fight climate change.O’Rourke stood aloft as he proclaimed his message at a rally in Marshalltown, Iowa Friday:If we allow farmers to earn a profit in what they grow, if we allow them to contribute their fair share in combatting Climate Change by growing cover crops, allowing the technologies that invest in precision tilling and farming, capturing more of that carbon out of the air is another way in which they can make a profit.  Keep those farms together, pass them on to the next generation, and allow them to provide us our food and national security, our independence from the rest of the world, our ability to provide for the rest of the world.Where does he get the idea that farmers’ land and crops are “his” land and crops, to be used by the state as he deems fit?  That’s called a tax hike in ordinary terms, and state expropriation if you look at it closely enough.  Hugo Chávez used to think Venezuelan farmers’ land and crops were “his” land and crops once upon a time, too, and we all know how well that worked out.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eric-swalwell-2020-california-congressman-tells-stephen-colbert-hes-running-for-president/

California Rep. Eric Swalwell, one of President Trump’s most outspoken critics in Congress, announced he is seeking the presidential nomination in what is shaping up to be the largest Democratic primary field in U.S. history.

The 38-year-old San Francisco area lawmaker announced his presidential campaign during an appearance on “The Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert” airing Monday night on CBS.

“I’ve already done a lot, but I can do more,” he said in a clip released by the show. “I’ve been in Congress for six years. I’ve defended our country from the Intelligence Committee while Democracy has been on the ropes.”

Swalwell enters a crowded race for president with more than a dozen candidates seeking to capture the Democratic nomination and thwart Mr. Trump’s reelection bid next year. To date, 17 other Democrats have declared their candidacy for president or launched presidential exploratory committees, including Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren; Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan; Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard; Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke; and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/04/09/evaluating_the_2020_democratic_primary_field_139997.html

Assessing the Democratic presidential primary at this point is a nearly impossible task. With around 15 serious candidates who have declared or formed an exploratory committee, and with another handful seriously looking at joining the race, the slate is very much in flux. Like the Republican primary in 2016, small changes in the polling position of candidates can translate to a large change in their position relative to one another, which in turn incentivizes rising candidates to stay in. So rather than, say, power-ranking the candidates – how does one really decide how to rank John Hickenlooper versus Jay Inslee? – I will look at them through the lens of “buy” versus “sell,” based upon the RCP Poll Average.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/why-are-2020-democrats-embracing-slavery-reparations/
Today, Senator Cory Booker, one of the many Democrats running for president, announced legislation that would “form a commission to recommend reparations for slavery.” According to Booker, “This bill is a way of addressing head-on the persistence of racism, white supremacy, and implicit racial bias in our country. It will bring together the best minds to study the issue and propose solutions that will finally begin to right the economic scales of past harms and make sure we are a country where all dignity and humanity is affirmed.”

Spoiler alert, Senator Booker: It won’t solve any problems. It won’t satisfy anyone. What exactly do proponents of slavery reparations believe that they will do that affirmative action policies in education, employment, awarding of government contracts, etc., etc. couldn’t? If the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land (despite his radicalism and lack of qualifications) wasn’t proof that we, as a nation, have moved far beyond the days of slavery, then what will? A check? For how much? Will we finally be able to put an end to affirmative action policies? Of course not, that’s not the point.

Ben Shapiro has previously noted that just the question of how reparations would be implemented is in itself something proponents of reparations can’t answer with unity. So, it’s safe to say that reparations would not be a cure-all to right the wrongs of the past and put slavery behind us once and for all, but just another wealth redistribution program that would precede another, and another, and another to solve something that, in the eyes of those pushing for it, will never actually be fixed to satisfaction.

Of course, my real question is not what Booker thinks reparations will accomplish (since we all know they won’t accomplish anything) but why this is becoming a litmus test for 2020 Democrats. Most of the 2020 Democrats who attended Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention in New York City last week expressed support for the commission Booker’s legislation aims to create. This kind of thing may play well to African-American Democrats, but opposition to slavery reparations has been strong and consistent over the years, with roughly 7 in 10 Americans opposing them. With such strong opposition to reparations, supporting them is clearly not a winning message in the 2020 general election.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-will-democrats-explain-south-bend-11554759834

Some readers thought it unfair last week when this column described potential Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg as “a small-city mayor with a middling record.” This assessment may have been too kind to the media’s favorite millennial. Regardless, it appears that the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is almost ready to announce a 2020 run.

The South Bend Tribune reports today:

Mayor Pete Buttigieg could make his exploratory presidential campaign official sometime after 12 p.m. Sunday outside his campaign headquarters, his campaign announced Monday.

In a one-minute fundraising video he emailed Thursday to prospective donors, Buttigieg said he would make an announcement on Sunday April 14 and invited supporters to attend or watch it via livestream. Campaign officials had not yet announced a specific time and place for the event.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/all-bernies-socialists-11554763031

Socialism is cool again, and Bernie Sanders wants to reassure voters that there’s nothing to worry about. “I think what we have to do, and I will be doing it, is to do a better job maybe in explaining what we mean by socialism—democratic socialism,” Mr. Sanders said last month. He has also said that conservatives portray his brand of socialism “as authoritarianism and communism and Venezuela, and that’s nonsense.”
***

We wish that were true. But we’ve been reading the work of Bernie’s senior political advisers, and their words deserve more attention. Take speechwriter David Sirota, who joined the Sanders campaign in March, though he had been attacking the Vermont Senator’s Democratic opponents on Twitter for months.

Mr. Sirota wrote an op-ed for Salon in 2013 titled “Hugo Chávez’s Economic Miracle.” Mr. Sirota conceded, Chávez “was no saint” and “amassed a troubling record when it came to protecting human rights and basic democratic freedoms.” Those pesky disclaimers aside, Mr. Sirota suggested that there’s plenty to learn from Chávez.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/08/howard-schultz-needs-issue-run/

Howard Schultz needs an issue. The former Starbucks CEO who spent most of his career amping up Americans on burnt coffee wants to now be their president. But why? In a town hall on Fox News last week, he couldn’t quite answer that question. He takes a “pox on both your houses” approach to the Trumpian GOP and the Democrats he says have wandered too far left. But so far, his candidacy seems to be based on little more than being the other choice.

In some ways, Schultz feels like the missing Democrat. He says, “I’m a centrist, I’ve been a lifelong Democrat, but the Democratic Party left me, I didn’t leave them.” He supports funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement, opposes Medicare for all, and dares to utter the phrase “safe, legal, and rare,” regarding abortion. As the Democratic nominee for president, he would be formidable, but he is not choosing to join that race that resembles nothing so much as a bunch of 1950s teenagers cramming into a telephone booth.

Instead, Schultz is chasing the white whale of American politics: trying to win the presidency as a third-party candidate. This never works, and it’s easy to see why. By granting executive authority to a single person, the Constitution compels the left and the right to form binary parties. This is because to fracture your own party hands enormous power to those you oppose. Schultz likely understands that he is almost certainly not going to win the 2020 election. So what is he doing?

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/08/entirely-relevant-ask-whether-elected-representatives-believe-sharia/

When I was in graduate school many years ago, I dated a Lebanese Muslim who wasn’t particularly devout. However, despite his secular, sophisticated upbringing—he grew up in a pricey neighborhood in Beirut and attended a Swiss boarding high school—he still struggled with my criticisms about Muslim countries’ treatment of women. When I once referred to clitoridectomies as a Muslim practice, he became positively apoplectic that I viewed the procedure as a Muslim norm. After all, no one in his family had undergone such a procedure.

But I persisted. As an earnest young feminist, I couldn’t help but want to have a conversation about the political and personal oppression of women in Muslim countries, an oppression quite often manifested in violence. I needed to know that it mattered to him and that he recognized it as a social ill that needed rectifying.

He would counter these observations by pointing out that his uncle, who was doing his residency at a local Philadelphia hospital, treated battered women all the time. Battered women here, battered women in the Middle East. What was the difference?