RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.hoover.org/research/simple-economics-behind-californias-governor-recall-election

For the last three years, my Hoover colleague Bill Whalen and I have been writing weekly in this space about California policies and politics. During this time, I have become painfully aware of how life is quickly deteriorating for many California families, including those running small and medium-sized businesses, and this deterioration reflects a decline in the quality and accountability of state and local governance.

Just how bad is it? California ranks 49th for the cost and ease of doing business, its unemployment rate is only surpassed by Nevada (California is 49th in the country) it ranks 40th in taxes and in K–12 public school quality, it ranks 49th in housing affordability, it ranks 48th in economic freedom, and it ranks 49th in road quality, which costs California drivers an extra $2,500 annually in higher insurance premiums and car repairs.

Need more stats about California’s devolution?

Drought occurs every three years, yet there have been no major water infrastructure investments since the 1970s.
Businesses are leaving the state at twice the rate as recent years.
Crime rates have increased by one-third.
More than one out of three Californians lives in poverty or near poverty.
An “affordable” apartment unit can cost over $1 million to build.
Despite high salaries, only one in five Silicon Valley households can afford the median-priced home.
Nearly 30 percent of American’s homeless are in California.
The unemployment department paid over $30 billion in fraudulent benefits while delaying legitimate payments for months.
Failure to manage forests has led to wildfires that create carbon emissions equivalent to that of an extra 10 million cars on the road annually over the last decade.
Just three categories—Health and Human Services, K­–12 public schools, and the prison system—eat up two-thirds of the state’s budget.
In public schools, 80 percent or more of Hispanic and Black students are not proficient in mathematics.
State and local government workers earn more than twice as much (including retirement contributions) as private-sector workers.
San Francisco, where 2 million hypodermic needles are left each year on city sidewalks, has 50 percent more drug addicts than high school students.

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/as-united-nations-gather-in-new-york-covid-may/91657/

As heads of state, foreign ministers, ambassadors and members of their entourage gather on the banks of Turtle Bay, let’s pray next week’s opening of the United Nations General Assembly doesn’t become a Covid super spreader.

After last year, when the annual gabfest, known as UNGA for short, was conducted virtually due to pandemic fears, next week’s event will be attended in person by luminaries from most of the world’s countries.

Last month the American mission to the world body sent a letter urging all countries to send a pre-recorded message rather than come to New York. Most, possibly including President Biden, ignored that request. Although the White House is yet to publish Mr. Biden’s schedule for next week, most at Turtle bay believe he’ll attend UNGA in person.

Meanwhile, your local New York watering hole, where the barkeep is required by the city to card all patrons for proof of vaccination but, in what Assemblyman Mark Levine says could “expose them, and NYC, to serious risk,” next week’s visiting dignitaries and their posse are not required to show such documentation. Instead, according to UN officials, they’re encouraged to be vaccinated before arrival.

Oops. As is traditional, next week’s first scheduled national speaker is Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonero — the world’s most outspoken opponent of Covid vaccination. He already contracted the virus and remains adamant that no one, including him, receives the shot.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/14/milleys-alleged-secret-calls-to-china-are-just-another-reason-americans-believe-the-system-is-rigged/

The Washington Post published extremely serious allegations against Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley yesterday, although of course the paper tried to make the centerpiece of the story former President Donald Trump’s erratic behavior.

From WaPo:

Fearful of Donald Trump’s actions in his final weeks as president, the United States’ top military officer twice called his Chinese counterpart to assure him that the two nations would not go to war, a senior defense official said Tuesday after the conversations were described in excerpts from a forthcoming book.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army that the United States would not strike. One call took place on Oct. 30, 2020, four days before the election that defeated Trump. The second call was on Jan. 8, 2021, just two days after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of the outgoing chief executive.

Milley went so far as to promise Li that he would warn his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack, according to the book ‘Peril,’ written by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

The story here, however, is not Trump, no matter how much the corrupt corporate media would have it be so. The story is that a military leader defied civilian control over the direction of America’s foreign policy, and did so through secret talks with our chief adversary on the global stage.

Under every president, we hear about “[name] derangement syndrome”; there was Bush Derangement Syndrome, and Obama Derangement Syndrome. But only Trump Derangement Syndrome seems to have led the ostensible upholders of “norms” and “democracy” to treat as no big deal actual violations of democracy’s most sacred norms in the service of thwarting Donald Trump.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/14/the-foul-stench-of-george-w-bush-and-americas-ruling-class/

As with so many other aspects of our time, we seem destined to suffer the most trite and underwhelming imitations of things that once were great or at least impressive. Exhibit A would be the great war advocate, George W. Bush. Can there be a more perfect synthesis of the last 20 years of disappointing American politics than this man? He exemplifies everything—unaware, unashamed, unapologetic—that the American ruling class has become. NeverTrumpers and neocons yearn for a return to the days of measured, steady Bush leadership. We are told constantly now that he is kind, polite, well-bred: a politician from a more dignified tradition of public servants than those of late. But of course, in reality he is none of these things.

The everlasting incompetence and mesmerizing self-delusion on display at his recent 9/11 remarks make that clear.

What kind of a person stands on the very spot where heroic, valiant Americans perished in a tragic last-ditch effort to save a symbol of their ruling class—either the Capitol or the White House, no one knows for certain—and dares to offer criticism of the American people? What kind of cretin could possibly stir himself to lecture the public while standing on the very spot where common, average, everyday people sacrificed themselves to save members of the elite? 

Does any thinking person for a moment believe, were the shoe on the other foot, that a plane load of Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas, highjacked and heading straight for Dollywood with the intention of killing as many ordinary Americans as possible, would rise up and sacrifice themselves to save us?

This historic blunder would be enough for an average underperforming president, but George W. Bush is no average underperformer. These words were delivered not only on the occasion of the common man’s selfless sacrifice par excellence, but also hot on the heels of our ruling class’ greatest military blunder and most embarrassing episode in perhaps our entire national history. The idea that George W. Bush would have the audacity to do anything other than demur the opportunity to speak on 9/11, just weeks after the total failure of our entire engagement in the Middle East, is astonishing.

Instead of heaping praise on this small group of valiant Flight 93 Americans, and humbly asking their forgiveness for his errant and misguided attempts to avenge them, including the embarrassing foreign adventurism undertaken in their name, Bush instead searched the American landscape for a recent, festering wound to scratch . . . and broke it wide open. Why? Why did he feel the need to do this? 

Alluding to the events on January 6, 2021, Bush lectured ordinary Americans—some of them the very people who felt compelled to answer his call to defend America 20 years ago at Ground Zero—on what he considers to be their latent propensity to act like the terrorists he and his fellow negligent elites allowed to murder nearly 3,000 of us. One can believe that the misguided and foolish rioting of January 6 was profoundly wrong, and still feel in one’s bones how inappropriate and small Bush was to profane the remembrance of our heroes with his tedious little lecture.

That extra step to insult is truly breathtaking. This great failure of a wartime president alluded to the chaotic milling about and general parading through the Capitol by a bunch of nincompoops (who neither brought weapons nor used them) and compared it to heinous crimes of murderous zealots. He likened people who essentially walked into the Capitol building and then back out again while harboring incorrect political sentiments to those who slaughtered as many innocents as they possibly could using hijacked commercial jets which they transformed into great flying bombs of incinerating fuel. American citizens behaving badly should not be compared, under any circumstances, to the people who pulverized, at terrific speed, airplanes full of innocents into some of our most iconic and important buildings, instantly killing themselves and everyone onboard in a final nihilistic act of rage and impotent fury. 

The sheer violence to common decency, statesmanship, and self-awareness that George W. Bush, a man I voted for twice, achieved with his 9/11 speech is, I confess, difficult to comprehend.