RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“Impeachment is a distraction to a people who must decide what sort of country they want – Socialism, with its costs in dollars and lost freedoms, or free market capitalism, which offers the social and economic escalator of opportunity that takes people up and down. For all of our sakes, I hope they choose the latter.”

The American journalist and satirist H.L. Mencken once wrote: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the people alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” And the granddaddy of all hobgoblins is impeachment, at least here in the fourth quarter of 2019, a year from a presidential election that will see the most vilified President we have ever had run against one of the most far-left leaning candidates ever nominated. “Fasten your seat belts; it’s going to be a bumpy night,” said Bette Davis in the 1951 movie “It’s All About Eve.”  For us Americans, it will be a bumpy year.

Cynicism fills the air. Politicians live by scruples known only to themselves. Their concern is their own welfare and that of their party. Their goal is power. That end justifies whatever means or processes are felt necessary to achieve it. Yet, they wrap themselves in cloaks of righteous indignation. “Every member should support allowing the American people to hear the facts for themselves…this is nothing less than our democracy.” Stirring but hypocritical words spoken by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as she allowed Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to conduct impeachment hearings – hearings held in secret, where Republicans were not allowed to call witnesses and to which Mr. Trump’s lawyers were banned from attending. Schiff and the media have made much of diplomats fired, like the former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Do they forget that elections have consequences? Foreign policy is the responsibility of the President and changing ambassadors is expected and common.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/11/

‘I assume force feeding children socialist nostrums and climate change has been going on for decades under the radar. Many are grown and have become teachers, university lecturers, broadcasters and journalists. But, even if true, this explanation is deficient. Why did teachers become bolshies? Mine weren’t.”

Eccentrics and extremists have always been around. Whether they rise to prominence depends upon them having a large audience. Adolf Hitler and Sir Oswald Mosley shared an extreme form of aggressive nationalism. One took off, the other didn’t. The nineteen-thirties Germans were nationalists to their boot heels. The nineteen-thirties Britons mixed their more sensible nationalism with large doses of common sense and scepticism. It’s the quality of the populace and their cultural norms that count in the end result.

Islamic fanatics threaten, as Churchill put it, because of the “the fanatical frenzy [and] fearful fatalistic apathy” which Islam inculcates. It is easy to whip up significant numbers into mobs, for example, as we saw across the world, including in Australia for goodness sake, when that poorly made 14-minute video surfaced in 2012 of Mohammed’s life. Obama, Hillary and Susan Rice were deceptive, it didn’t cause the attack on America’s embassy in Benghazi, but it did create worldwide riots and mayhem perpetrated by mobs of Muslim dolts.

Theses dolts weren’t born that way. Islam has made them dolts and we have to live on the same planet with legions of them. Insufferable.

Global warming has also given a platform to extremists and eccentrics. In normal times people like Tim Flannery, Roger Hallam, Al Gore, the aging David Attenborough and the callow Greta Thunberg would be given the same regard as ranters at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. But these are not normal times. Superstition has gripped large sections of the population who have put aside their common sense in order to accept scientistic codswallop. We have twelve years to save the planet? Really, and Elizabeth Warren is a Cherokee Indian because her papa had high cheek bones.

Something is going on that stretches beyond the global warming hoax. We are living in dangerous times. The aforementioned Pocahontas is the favourite among bookies to be the Democratic candidate for president. Here are just some (just some) of her mad policies. And this is not a spoof.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/05/morning-greatness-not-running-for-gop-reelection-get-off-the-impeachment-committees/

If you aren’t running for reelection, you need to be removed from any House “impeachment” adjacent committee

There are numerous members of the House sitting on the committees involved in the Democrats’ “impeachment” tribunal who are not running for reelection. They need to go. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy must send in reinforcements and move these congressmen somewhere else. He needs to send a message that the voters will be represented in this clown show assault on Trump and the best way to do that is to show the Democrats/resistance media and the public that the politicians in this process will be accountable for their actions by the voters who put them into power.

Let take a walk down memory lane. The House Democrats signed a secret Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the House Oversight Committee under the late Elijah Cummings and Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) and the batty Maxine Waters of the Financial Services Committee. There may be other Democrat committee chairs involved in some agreement, we don’t know because it’s secret. According to an official with knowledge of the MOU arrangement :“We’d describe (the MOUs) as an agreement to conspire and coordinate their efforts to attack and investigate POTUS. This is not how committee’s normally operate. Dems aren’t interested in legislating. Only attacking POTUS.” This description checks out. If you are not running for relection and you sit on these committees, it’s time to pack your bags. McCarthy needs to man up and send in the clean up team to fill these spots.

There are 15 GOPers in the House who have tapped out of 2020.  Here is a list of representatives who are candidates for redeployment to the House Underwater Basket Weaving Committee:

Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) is on the Armed Services, Natural Resources committees
Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Georgia) is on the Budget, Transportation and Rules committees
Rep. Paul Mitchell (R-Michigan) is on the Armed Services, Transportation committees
Rep. Susan Brooks (R-Indiana) is on the Energy and Commerce committee
Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) is on the Energy and Commerce, Science committees
Rep. Martha Roby (R-Alabama) is on the Judiciary, Appropriations committees
Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas) is on the Intelligence Committee (HPSCI), Armed Services, Agriculture committees
Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) is on the Intelligence Committee (HPSCI)
Rep. Kenny Marchant (R-Texas) is on the Ethics, Joint Economic, Ways and Means committees
Rep. John Shimkus (R-Texas) Energy and Commerce committee
Rep. Bill Flores (T-Texas) Budget, Energy/Commerce committees
Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) Judiciary, Foreign Affairs committees
Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) Armed Services committee
Rep. Francis Rooney (R-Florida) Foreign Affairs, Education committees
Rep. Greg Walden (R-Oregon) Energy/Commerce committee

Let’s go, McCarthy. It’s the right thing to do.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/04/barack

To illustrate what sort of zealots now own the Democratic Party, realize that Barack Obama probably wouldn’t be the nominee if he were running for president. It’s a scathing commentary on the left.

It became obvious when, in this age of wokeness, the former president criticized today’s cancel culture, in which the outrage mob turns anyone who holds an unapproved opinion into an instant social and political outcast. Ostracism replaces discussion. There is no debate, the airing of differing opinions is not allowed.

“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff,” Obama said last week at an Obama Foundation event, “you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids. And share certain things with you.”

Columnist Mollie Hemingway noted on Fox News that Obama’s “message does not play well in the Democratic primary,” as “the excitement is definitely with the wing of the party that does not want to be open or tolerant to a wide swath of voters.”

Granted, Obama was warning his party comrades about taking things too far, that their fanaticism will hurt them in elections. Yet one callow fellow writing in the NYT suggested Obama holds the same “regressive views” of older Americans who “stubbornly reject progress and refuse to show compassion.” Published comments largely went against the writer, who also caught a fair amount of criticism on his twitter account. But there were enough comments in the Times to show just how militant the left has become:

“I’m the same age as Obama, but he has clearly been influenced by right-wing propaganda and I suggest he should get away from the Wall Street enablers he has surrounded himself with and start talking to people instead of lecturing them.”
“He became a coward and now he wants others to follow his lead under the guise of some counterfeit ‘maturity.’”
“Shame on Obama for his obtuseness.”
“Obama is a pedantic scold. But he only seems to scold young people and people of color. Mr. Audacity of Hope showed no audacity at all when it came to punishing the crooked bankers.”
“I voted for that semi-empty suit and never stopped regretting it. Aside from half a medical insurance system named after him, he puttered and putted through eight years of impotence and irrelevance.”
“The biggest disappointment in my lifetime is Obama’s failure. He had the FDR moment in the palm of his hands and what did he do? Sold us all out and he’s every bit as responsible for Trump as is the DNC and the duplicitous meritocracy who sold our soul to the devil.”
“Thank you for this, Mr. Owens. … Work(ing) across the isle is nonsense when the Republican Party is founded on racist policies. The Dems aren’t much better, but maybe The Squad can get something done.”
“If fewer boomers ‘overlooked’ Donald Trump’s corruption, bigotry and narcissism — because he had lots of money and threw good parties — and instead ‘cancelled’ him, maybe we wouldn’t be stuck with this sorry excuse of a human being as our president.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/why_will_no_democrat_pull_the_plug_on_schiff_.html

One would think that by now  that there would be one or two sentient Democrats who realize the terrible damage that Adam Schiff is doing to their party.  But, with the possible exception of the two Democrats who voted against Pelosi’s stupid “impeachment resolution,” Reps. Jeff Drew and Collin Peterson, they all seem to be captive to Nancy Pelosi’s and Adam Schiff’s pathological moonbattery.  Not one other of them has the courage to stand up for what is right and true; that Trump committed no impeachable crimes, not even close.  He’s the most transparent, most investigated president in U.S. history.  The Democrats all know this!  They know Trump is not guilty of any offense, let alone one that is impeachable.  They surely know that Schiff is certifiably insane and yet they stand by and let him make fools of their party.  They stand by and let him conduct his anti-democratic Star Chamber that is running roughshod over the Constitution.  And they all know that what he is doing is wrong, very, very wrong.  If this were being done to one of theirs, they would be screaming from the rooftops of their luxurious D.C. abodes. 

So what explains the cowardly reticence of the rest of the party?  Trump derangement?  Perhaps.  They all certainly suffer from that disorder.  Conservatives loathed what Obama did to the nation over his eight years in office. We did not engender the violence the left promotes such as that of Black Lives Matter or Antifa.  No one on the right hired thugs to foment chaos as the left did on the day of Trump’s inauguration and so many times since.  That brand of vicious intolerance is all on the left.  It is who they are, what they do.  They are proud of their contempt for those with whom they disagree.  They believe it proves their superiority, but it only proves that they are narrow-minded, discriminatory and contemptuous of millions of their fellow Americans.  To be a Democrat in Congress at this moment in time means that one is dismissive of our Constitution, despite their constant professed reverence for it, and willing to do everything in their power to overturn the results of the 2016 election.  They do so at their peril.  Americans are not nearly as ignorant and/or unengaged as they assume.  They are not fooled by the Democrats’ obsessive mission to remove Trump from office because a majority of Americans, the Americans they loathe, love him and are grateful for his America First agenda.  Unlike Obama, this president loves this country; Obama did everything in his power to diminish us and he succeeded wildly.  He wasted billions for a fake stimulus to his donors, more than a billion in cash to the terrorist nation of Iran, broken promises all around.  He was a foreign policy disaster.  Trump now has to try to clean up the mess. 

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-11-2-annals-of-presidential-election

Here in the U.S., our tradition has long been that we accept the results of our elections, and in particular our presidential elections. The machinery of a presidential election is run by the state governments, not the federal government, which means that the incumbent President and his party have very limited ability to manipulate the result. There is little to no doubt about who actually won under the established rules. Losing candidates concede on election night, or maybe, in the case of an extremely close election, a few days later. The losing side becomes a loyal opposition, free to express its disagreement with everything the winner does in office, but never contesting the right of the winner to exercise the powers of the office.

At least that was the way it worked for the first 57 presidential elections. The search for an exception only proves the truth of the proposition. Yes, there were those who called Bush 43 “illegitimate” after the very close result in 2000; but I don’t recall any systematic defiance of his authority by the bureaucracy, let alone constant attempts to find some pretext to initiate impeachment. And yes, there were three prior attempts to impeach a President. But all of those involved much more the question of whether identifiable violations of law rose to the level of “impeachable,” rather than our current situation of a desperate search for something, anything to get rid of the guy whose real sin is that he really did win the election. (Of the previous impeachments, the closest to pretextual was that of Andrew Johnson for violation of the Tenure of Office Act; however, note that Johnson did violate a specific statute, and moreover had not himself been elected President, but had succeeded to the office by the death of Lincoln.)

Anyway, that was then. Now, places like the New York Times and the Washington Post declare to be heroes the bureaucrats who defy any and all directions of the duly-elected President and who search for any grounds they can take to the press or to Congress to undermine the President’s authority and get him removed. In simple terms, elections only count when our side wins.

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/j-streets-foul-formula/2019/11/03/

When it was founded some ten years ago, J Street claimed to be a “pro-Israel and pro-peace” organization. That was taken to mean partnering with the mainstream Israeli political left to build support in Washington for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.

Since then J Street has morphed into an anti-Israel mutant. The organization spends its time and money besmirching Israel, smearing AIPAC and other leading American Jewish organizations, boosting President Obama’s dangerous deal with Iran (and now trying to bring it back), and supporting political candidates for whom BDS is a badge of honor.

Its campus arm, J Street U, has become a primary vehicle for conveying the most poisonous messages about Israel to students, acting to block student participation in Birthright, and actively campaigning against support for Israel at American universities.

J Street also believes that it has the “moral responsibility” to get America to force Israel to change its policies on the Palestinian issue. Why? Because J Street knows what’s best for Israel. It knows better even than the Israeli political left – which generally doesn’t share J Street’s radical positions on unilateral withdrawals and mass settlement eradication.

J Street knows how to bring peace to the Mideast: Israel needs to be pressured. As if Israel is the party unwilling to compromise. As if Israel hasn’t already offered the Palestinians at Oslo, Camp David, Taba and Annapolis just about everything they want of post-67 Israel. As if the Palestinians have compromised on their demands one wit since the great handshake on the White House lawn. As if the Palestinians are currently willing to enter peace talks with Israel unconditionally.

Nevertheless, it is Israel that needs to be pressured and shamed, say the J Street moral oracles.

Of course, this is the same J Street that supported the anti-Israel UN Goldstone Report, supported the illegal Palestinian bid for unilateral statehood recognition at the UN, and supported talks with Hamas but not military action against it.

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/europe-goes-right-as-democrats-try-their-failed/90894/

“Yes, Europe’s left is trying new things: The Dutch, for one, want to shorten the workweek to four days to raise productivity. These ideas are yet to be tested. But if America’s contenders want to beat President Trump next year, they better develop new ideas of their own — or at least reexamine their stalest, oldest European ones. Like, you know, the Europeans are doing.”

As America’s Democratic presidential candidates promote programs borrowed from Europe’s traditional left, Europeans are increasingly pushing back against them.

Following an election last Sunday in Germany’s Thuringia state, members of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party accused the chancellor (in power since 2005) of dragging the party too far leftward, blaming her for the loss to the far-right Alternative for Germany party. A top contender for the Christian Democratic leadership, Friedrich Merz, called on Frau Merkel to resign now, rather than wait for 2021, when she plans to retire.

In the European Parliament election in May, France’s National Rally party handsomely beat President Macron’s centrist faction. Formerly known as the National Front, the current right-most French party is dominated by Marine Le Pen, whose father and party founder, Jean-Marie, was a Holocaust denier. Now Madame Le Pen’s party concentrates on conservatism and retail politics, and its increasingly seen as a formidable challenger to Monsieur Macron, whose poll numbers, despite a recent uptick, remain low.

In Poland, Hungary and Italy, to name a few, politicians of various right-wing parties are now in power, while anti-leftists, including some ugly and racist ones, are on the rise. Meanwhile, in Canada, another perceived utopia among progressives, a former golden boy, Prime Minister Trudeau, is striving to stay in power after his Liberal party suffered parliamentary seat losses in the October 21 election.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ending-wars/

“”It’s a very complicated war over there,” says Paul. “They’re four or five different countries involved in it. The people who live there know better. We can’t know enough about these problems. And unless you want to put 100,000 troops in there and fight Assad, Russia, Turkey … we ought to rethink whether we should get involved in these wars to begin with.”

Four years ago, the media were talking about a “Libertarian Moment.”

I had high hopes!

Sen. Rand Paul ran for president, promising to “take our country back from special interests.” But his campaign never took off.

He “shouldn’t even be on the stage,” said Donald Trump at a Republican presidential debate.

Paul quit his presidential campaign after doing poorly in Iowa.

In my new video, Paul reflects on that, saying, “Either the people aren’t ready or perhaps the people in the Republican primary aren’t ready.”

But Paul says, “We may be winning the hearts and minds of people who aren’t in Washington.”

Really?

The current deficit is a record $984 billion, and since Trump was elected, federal spending rose half a trillion dollars.

But Paul says progress has been made, in that Trump has introduced some market competition in health care, cut taxes, cut regulations, appointed better judges and promises to get us out of foreign wars. Paul tweeted that Trump is “the first president to understand what is our national interest.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/

“Don’t get me wrong, as I am all in favour of taxing the well-heeled. But soaking the rich, as the Left forever advocates, will see investment stall, capital stock run down, progress go into reverse and poverty increase. Welcome to your socialist paradise: an equality of impoverishment for all.”

Line up any bunch of political lefties anywhere and their key to delivering free stuff is taxing the rich. This applies to all of the Democrat presidential candidates in the USA. In addition to confiscatory income taxes, Pocahontas (aka Elizabeth Warren) wants to impose a wealth tax, in the style of French socialist economist Thomas Piketty.

Apparently, those rich people are selfishly keeping goodies from us ninety-five percenters. This is the grievous money delusion (GMD) which seduces callow minds. It can only be compared to the grievous warming delusion (GWD) which has swept away reason among so many in recent years. It is perhaps no coincidence that those particularly susceptible to GMD succumb to GWD.

It is also disappointing that economists, worthy of the name, in other words, excluding sad lefties like Paul Krugman and his ilk, hardly ever explain the position clearly. They generally go to the point that high taxes undermine incentive. They do to an extent. But only to an extent.

There was an instructive survey of Ford Motor company workers in the late Sixties I think it was. They were asked whether they thought their fellow workers would likely work less overtime if taxes were increased. Something like ninety percent said yes. They were then asked whether they personally would work less overtime. Something like ninety percent said no.

The real argument against confiscatory taxes is not to do with incentive, it is to do with the with the driving force of successful capitalist economies. That driving force is capital investment fuelled by saving and augmented by invention. Saving some of what is produced and using it to sustain life while things are built like, factories and machines, which help make more goodies, cheaper goodies, better goodies and new (previously unthought of) goodies.