RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=1d2351192c

At the Manhattan Contrarian family dinner table the other day, the subject of conversation turned to this question: Should we be optimistic about the future of the United States? Good and valid points were made on both sides of the issue. But the most important point weighed for the side of optimism. That point was that, of all the countries in the world, the United States is the place where the people — rather than the government — really run the country. Here, more than anyplace else, people can pursue their own initiatives and dreams without the government having the ability to obstruct and stymie private efforts, and force resources into pathways chosen by elite government functionaries.

Why does this matter? It’s not complicated. From the perspective of aggregate economic performance, the simple answer is that a trial-and-error process with hundreds of millions of participants will come up with much better and more numerous solutions to human problems than the small number of the very smartest people with government authority can ever come up with. From the perspective of the individual, the answer is that the only worthwhile life to lead is the life of freedom, where you make your own choices and take responsibility for your own success or failure.

As Exhibit A of how personal freedom and autonomy from the government leads to better economic performance, consider the fracking revolution. At the time of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008, U.S. crude oil production had been dropping for decades, and had reached the level of barely 5 million barrels per day. President Obama had drunk the climate Kool Aid, and he and his administration made it a priority to keep oil production as low as possible in order, they thought, to “save the planet.”. They blocked drilling on federal lands, ceased granting offshore oil leases, refused permits for pipelines, issued negative environmental reviews, and otherwise did everything in their power to obstruct and stymie any and all new oil production and/or transmission. Yet by the time Obama left office in January 2017, U.S. crude oil production had soared to around 9 million barrels per day. The fact is that a presidential administration, under existing law, simply did not have the power to stop private actors from carrying the fracking revolution forward. (U.S. crude oil production has since further increased under the more energy-friendly Trump administration to 12.2 million barrels per day as of June 2019.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-a-brawler-for-democracy-11564175760

His partisan opponents and those who believe Donald Trump unfit can still try to remove or at least defame him with allegations that he sought to obstruct Robert Mueller’s investigation even if the investigation found no underlying crime.

That’s part of the political game but context is required. If a statement by John Dowd, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, to reporter Byron York is an accurate reflection of reality, then it reflects well on Mr. Mueller. Of his conversations with the special counsel, Mr. Dowd said: “Bob was a big boy about the political side of it. He understood the president had to address the politics of [the collusion investigation]. . . . People were pounding him about this thing every day, both privately and publicly, and he had to take [Mueller] on.”

Politicians, by the time they’ve asked millions for their money, their time, their support and their votes, are obliged to do just about anything to win. Once elected, they have an even bigger responsibility to defend their power and ability to govern. Ask any president: This, and not governing, is what they spend much of their time doing. And one thing you can say about President Trump: This most unlikely and in some ways weakest of presidents has brawled his way to victory over the most concerted delegitimization campaign any president has ever faced.

He was under attack from day one from partisan and media enemies who promoted the Russia collusion theory without especially caring whether it was true. He had every reason to wonder (and still does) whether he was getting a fair shake from the FBI and intelligence agencies. He has good reason to wonder, especially after Mr. Mueller revealed himself this week to be largely a figurehead in his own inquiry, whether the investigation was dragged out for two years in hopes of inducing him to commit obstruction crimes in place of the nonexistent collusion crimes. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.theepochtimes.com/why-i-am-not-celebrating-the-mueller-hearings_3016865.html

I am certainly no stranger to the far end of a limb, but this time, I am really out there. I watched the Mueller hearings and despaired. I saw the Original Sin of Trump-Russia — “Russia hacked the DNC,” shaped by time and “messaging” into “Russian interference in 2016 on behalf on Donald Trump” — enter the record, accepted and even regurgitated by the GOP.

But Mueller gave a foggy performance! He never even read his own report! Impeachment is dead! The response by the estimable Mollie Hemingway typifies conservative satisfaction.

I rubbed my eyes, tried to smile, but it didn’t work. I still felt snookered and betrayed by Republicans who inexplicably failed to take the kill shot and win a victory for the country by exposing the whole rotten Deep State conspiracy, enabled and amplified by the MSM, to concoct a tale of a massive Russian cyber-strike on our democracy supposedly designed to prevent Hillary Clinton from being elected. This Big Lie has not only delegitimized Trump’s presidency now and forever, it simultaneously aligns Trump supporters — American patriots — with our adversaries in the Kremlin. Believe me, this will come back and haunt us all when Commissars Schiff, Tlaib, Brennan and the rest of the Party get real power.

Why did no Republican want to pull the pin on Russian hacking? I went back to a June 2017 op-ed I wrote by the same name: “Pulling the Pin on Russian Hacking.” Change the names around and it could run this morning.

About those Comey hearings.

Not one US senator asked former FBI Director James Comey to account for the sinister fact that the source of the explosive determination that “Russia hacked the DNC” computer system is a DNC contractor, not the FBI.

Not one US Senator asked why Comey’s FBI deferred to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s DNC when the DNC refused to permit FBI forensics specialists to examine the DNC computer system; or why the FBI was never able to examine John Podesta’s personal devices, either. Not one member of the Senate Intelligence Committe inquired as to why the DNC servers have not, after all of this time, ever been re-examined by the FBI; or whether it is just possible that this same DNC contractor putting forward the DNC/Russian hacking charge might have destroyed the DNC computer system.

 http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22987/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-the-2019-2020-equality

  http://goudsmit.pundicity.com  http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

The 116th Congress 2019-2020 Equality Act is a Democrat bill prohibiting discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity in multiple areas including public accommodations and facilities, education, federal funding, employment, housing, credit, and the jury system. Sounds great – what’s the problem?

The Equality Act “updates” the definitions of three terms: sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity, and “expands” the categories of public accommodations. On May 17, 2019 H.R. 5: Equality Act passed the Democrat controlled House with unanimous support from Democrats plus eight Republican votes. Next, it goes to the Republican controlled Senate for consideration. Why the partisan split?

The Equality Act seeks to amend and expand the expressly recognized “non-discrimination” categories in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act was designed to provide equal protection under the law to African Americans and to women in 20th century America making it illegal to discriminate against them based on race, ethnicity, or gender. In 1964 the word “gender” was specifically understood to mean male or female in the biological, chromosomal, colloquial sense of the word. In the 21st century the leftist Democrat party is selling sameness as equality and feelings as facts – they are not the same.

Even the name Equality Act is part of the deception. The name evokes compassion in the casual observer, but there is nothing equal about the Equality Act, it is a colossal humanitarian hoax that redefines maleness and femaleness with the words “gender identity.” This is how it works.

No longer satisfied with laws prohibiting discrimination based on gender, the radical left has taken aim at the biological definition of maleness and femaleness making it a subjective matter of opinion rather than an objective matter of chromosomes. Gender identity is not the same as gender. Why is this important?

Facts are not feelings. Facts support the objective reality that is the foundation of biological science, laws, and ordered liberty. Feelings support the subjective reality of political science, the arts, and psychology. We can have feelings about facts, but feelings cannot change facts in a society of ordered liberty. The danger of confusing objective and subjective reality is discussed at length in “The Humanitarian Hoax of Multiple Realities.”

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Those of us of a certain age were brought up in a time when spiteful words were common, unpleasant to endure, but not “harmful.” In those long-past days, if we came home in tears we were told to ignore what words may have hurt our pride or our sensibilities. Today, “harmful” words create victims, especially if directed at women, people of color, gays or those of the Muslim faith, and are deemed “harmful;” perpetrators must be punished. This attitude is prevalent in educational institutions, the media, the entertainment industry and among progressive politicians. The prohibition of uncomfortable remarks and dissenting opinions is reminiscent of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. It brings to mind a letter from E.B. White written to the New York Herald Tribune in 1947. The Tribune had defended the movie industry for requiring its employees to state their political beliefs: “…I can only assume that your editorial writer, in a hurry to get home for Thanksgiving, tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.” We are at the same point today, only now it is the Left doing the blacklisting, not the Right. 

This is not to suggest that words cannot have effect. They can and they do. We find solace in words from the Bible, beauty in poetry from Keats and Shelley, and meaning in writings from Shakespeare to Hemingway. “The pen is mightier than the sword” is a metonymic adage coined by the English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839. In speeches, Thomas Paine rallied Americans for independence. Adolph Hitler used the power of his voice to incite hatred of Jews, while Churchill’s speeches held a nation together as it fought alone against the tyranny of Nazism for over a year. Saul Alinsky was a master wordsmith. In his 1971 Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, a book that influenced Barack Obama as a community organizer in the early 1990s and later as a politician, Alinsky emphasized that ridicule was man’s most effective weapon. Political rallies are used to gin up enthusiasm. But just as we should ignore the words used in political rallies for those we support, we should not take seriously those used in rallies for those we oppose.

Russiagate prober Robert Mueller testified yesterday on Capitol Hill for a total of five hours. Or perhaps he testified twice, which would be a reasonable assumption in the light of two diametrically opposed accounts of his performance.

Were you to invest faith in the report of ABC Washington bureau veteran Zoe Daniels, the Russiagate inquisitor’s turn at the microphone was a creditable performance. Here’s a little taste of how she saw the quizzing:

Democrats spent weeks practising for that exact scenario and strategically loaded their questions with all the phrases they needed.

# Cedric Richmond: “So, it’s fair to say the President tried to protect himself by asking staff to falsify records relevant to an ongoing investigation?”

# Hakeem Jeffries: “Donald Trump told [former White House counsel] Don McGahn that Mueller has to go. True?”

# Mike Quigley: Do any of Trump’s quotes about Wikileaks disturb you?

Mr Mueller answered in the affirmative for all those questions (and added “problematic is an understatement” for the last one). Democrats, surely, cheered internally.

So Mueller acquitted himself with aplomb? Not according to The Federalist‘s David Harsanyi, whose column touches on a number of matters concerning bias and prosecutorial incuriosity that somehow escaped Ms Daniels’ notice. Harsanyi writes:

[Mueller was asked] if he could cite a single example besides Donald Trump where the DOJ “determined that an investigated person was not exonerated because their innocence was not conclusively determined.” Mueller responded: “I cannot, but this is a unique situation.”

After lecturing everyone about how justice must be meted out equally to all Americans, we now hear that rules are malleable if we’re talking about Donald Trump. As [was] also pointed out, Trump should not be above the law, but he should not be below it, either.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/the-economy-father-of-us-all/Good times immunize a president and make his over-the-top domestic enemies look irrelevant.

Each week we are warned of a recession. And each week the economic news “unexpectedly” and “surprisingly” improves or stays steady — in ways well aside from the staples of continued near-record-low peacetime unemployment (3.8 percent), near-record-low minority unemployment, booming annualized GDP (3.1 percent), and a record-high stock market.

In June, retail sales increased for the fourth straight month. The rate of Hispanic home ownership continues to increase. A quarter-million new jobs were created in June, with strong growth in construction and manufacturing. Record oil and gas production seems only to keep increasing. Strong wage growth of 3.4 percent continues.

The point is not so much “It’s the economy, stupid,” but rather that the economy is the font of all contemporary politics, and it adjudicates the parameters of presidential prerogatives.

In the standoff between the “Squad” and Donald Trump, near-record peacetime unemployment in general and in particular historic-low minority unemployment argue against the idea that Trump is racist.

Polls suggest that Donald Trump may well win a greater share of the minority vote than moderates John McCain and Mitt Romney — largely because of a raise in middle-class wages in a tight labor market, and new leverage of entry-level workers over labor-hungry employers. Do working-class blacks and Hispanics suffer then from false consciousness, and do they need tutorials from progressive grandees so they won’t be so incorrect as to appreciate having more jobs at better pay?  Racists do not craft economic policies that empower African Americans far more so than those promoted by the first African-American president.

https://www.steynonline.com/9565/speaking-ill-of-the-ted

This weekend we were busy marking the demi-centennial of Apollo 11’s moon landing with some thoughts on The Lost Frontier and some appropriately lunar music. But 1969’s giant leap for mankind coincided with one almighty flying leap for a very different kind of man: with his usual exquisite timing, Senator Edward Kennedy chose the day before Messrs Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin reached the Sea of Tranquility to drive Mary Jo Kopechne into a pond of tranquility, at least until he came flying off that bridge. And, by the time America was paying attention, Teddy had been fitted with his neck brace and the minders had everything under control.

Last year there was, very belatedly, a fine feature film about Chappaquiddick, which I reviewed here, and which contains a dialogue exchange taken almost verbatim from a ten-year-old column of mine:

As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

‘Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.’

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than ‘betrayed’ him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let’s face it, he doesn’t have Ted’s tremendous legislative legacy, does he?

That bit turns up in the movie:

Joan Vennochi’s words are put in Ted’s mouth: He says defensively that all men are flawed – ‘Moses had a temper, Peter betrayed Jesus.’ And my cheap riposte – ‘Moses didn’t leave a girl at the bottom of the Red Sea’ – is given to the outraged Joe Gargan, already on his way out, supplanted by better, colder, harder fixers. When the guy gets out and leaves the girl at the bottom of the sea, it offends the natural order: Joe is telling him he’s not a man.

He wasn’t – and nor were those who went along with it. I have rarely been more disgusted by the public discourse of a free society than by the obsequies that attended Kennedy’s passing a decade ago. Yet, even so, I would not have bothered re-posting the column below were it not for the fact that they’re still doing it. On this fiftieth anniversary, the Associated Press, purveyors of unreadable J-school sludge to America’s dying monodailies, are still reflexively playing oleaginous courtiers to a dynasty that no longer exists. In a country that now vaporizes careers for an infelicitous tweet, Ted Kennedy killed a woman and dared us to call him on it. Thanks to the likes of the Associated Press, America failed that test:

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/bennelong-papers/2019/07/crying-racism-free-kick/

As someone with Aboriginal ancestry, I feel compelled to discuss the allegations of racism that have been dominating the media of late, with AFL star and all-round nice guy Adam Goodes at the centre of the storm. First, I don’t see him as the major reason for the furore. Neither do I believe racism is the cause, though some would have you believe it is. Rather, several factors have converged to sustain a story that, by rights, should have died quickly: a manipulative media and the insatiable hunger for attention that characterise what I call the ‘race bloodhounds’ who are always eager to catch the whiff of any and all perceived ‘racism’.

Professional ‘blactivists’ delight for reasons that will be discussed later in this article in talking about the assumed racism directed at Aborigines. All who dare challenge the absurd notion that Australia is racist to the core are themselves accused of being racist or, as I know from personal experience, branded a sell-out, an Uncle Tom or a coconut (brown on the outside, white underneath). So, if you are a blactivist or race bloodhound, don’t bother reading any further. The same psychology that lets you see racism where there is none dictates that, regardless of the argument presented, you will walk away even more convinced of your core position, which can be summarised thus: any criticism of, or disagreement with, any Aborigine for any reason represents a clear and irrefutable example of racism. It is a sad reaction, but a predictable one: that which does not start with reason will not end by reason.

Much of the controversy has been the product of media manipulation, rather than of Adam’s own doing. I do not believe Adam has been milking this fiasco; indeed, it is obvious he has been deeply upset by it. But some media outlets certainly have been playing it up, and very much at his expense. Consider the booing, which is a hallmark of bog-standard mob mentality, not necessarily of racism. However, some have found it very convenient to respond with the truism “there is no place for racism on or off the field”. Few would disagree with that, but where is the evidence that the crowd’s booing was prompted by an inherent dislike of Adam based purely on his racial identity?

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/22/cant-we-all-just-get-along/

Get along? Apparently no—at least until after 2020. Two examples summarize why.

“We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice,” said U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), one-quarter of “the squad” sowing havoc among Democrats in the House. “ We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice.”

Of the Republican Party, MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes said the other day: “It must be peacefully, nonviolently, politically destroyed with love, compassion and determination, but utterly confronted and destroyed. That is the only way to break the coalition apart… Not by prying off this or that interest. They are in too deep. They have shamed themselves too much. The heart of the thing must be ripped out. The darkness must be banished.”

In other words, the new progressive message is that we all must vote monolithically and predicated on our superficial appearance, religion, or sexual orientation. And the Trump base must be destroyed, though annihilated with “love” and “compassion.”

Love It—Or What Actually?
All are presently shocked that Donald Trump would dare suggest that if anyone did not like the United States, then perhaps he or she might, of their own volition, consider leaving the country.

Trump apparently was directing his ire exclusively at particular first-generation congresswomen and suggesting that their anti-American furor logically might lead such unhappy U.S. citizens to consider voluntary deportation.

Perhaps no politician should ever advise American citizens with whom he disagrees to leave the country. But Trump did not suggest mandatory departures—in the manner that Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) had wanted Trump supporter and immigrant Sebastian Gorka deported.