RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/are_you_feeling_safer_yet.html

A liberal relative of mine said of Biden’s victory that she was overwhelmed with relief.  But she is not likely to experience the life of calm and safety she anticipates with the Democrat party having won the presidency, the Senate, and the House, not to mention control at all levels of the state she lives in: California.

To illustrate the point about safety, take New York City.  A New York Post editorial quotes New York City police commissioner Dermot Shea: “We have made staggering numbers of gun arrests, taking guns off the streets from felons, but when you look, three days later, four days later, those individuals are back on the street committing more gun violence.”

The editorial continues by saying that years of often ill conceived criminal justice reform has set up a revolving door that frees even repeat offenders almost instantly.  And “[w]orse, because everyone knows the perp will be back in the neighborhood again — and the no-bail law lets the defense know right away who has talked — witnesses are ever-harder to come by.”

Well, that’s in one Democrat-run state.  What about California?  According to Hotair.com: “Through a series of measures starting back in 2014, the state of California has made it increasingly easy for people to commit property theft and get away with it[.] … Even in cases where they do manage to catch somebody stealing, it’s too often not worth the trouble of taking them down to the station because they’ll just be released immediately without bail anyway.”  One result of this is that California businesses are shutting down for good.

This is the kind of thing that conservatives should print up and carry around with them for throw-down challenges against leftists.

I’ve long admired Rep Dan Crenshaw (R. Tex.) for the knack he has to clearly state conservative principles – and his willingness to speak out constantly about those principles. One of Trump’s problems was his inability to articulate principles. His practical instincts were good but he – along with way too many Republican politicians – allowed Democrats to win the war of words. On Friday, Crenshaw again used gift in this area with a Twitter thread that lists 22 core conservative principles that we need to fight for in this lunatic Democrat era.

Crenshaw went down in my estimation last month when he attacked Trump over the events at Capitol Hill (an attack at odds with the facts) and when he pushed back against ousting Liz Cheney from her leadership position in the House after she voted in favor of impeaching President Trump. Both of those stands looked remarkably like pandering to the Bush crowd and the Democrats. I strongly disagreed with them then and I still do now.

On Friday, though, Crenshaw published a Twitter thread (which I’m presenting below as a straight text list) that deserves respect. In it, he simply and clearly articulates principles that are the antithesis of the madness the Biden administration and the rest of the Democrat party crew are imposing on our nation:

The Conservative Guide to the Culture Wars (in no particular order):

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-equality-lost-to-equity-11613155938?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

EXCERPTS

“Yet Mr. Steele also sees “more and more blacks” pushing back against “the tribalism of race” as it collides with the “reality of freedom.” He views the Black Lives Matter movement as a desperate attempt to salvage tribalism. For all his indignation, Mr. Steele foresees a better future. “Millions of black individuals, living their lives as individuals, will take us beyond tribes and into true American citizenship. Many blacks are thriving already. Their children will do even better.”

Mr. Steele, 75, is a longstanding conservative commentator on race in America and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. We speak over Zoom a week after President Biden signed an Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity, intended to address “entrenched disparities in our laws and public policies, and in our public and private institutions.” In his remarks at the signing, Mr. Biden seemed to suggest that his is a project aimed at reshaping American governance. “We need to make the issue of racial equity not just an issue for any one department of government,” the president said. “It has to be the business of the whole of government.”

I can almost hear Mr. Steele growl in his study in Monterey, Calif., as I read these words aloud. “This equity is a term that has no meaning,” he says, “but it’s one that gives blacks power and leverage in American life. We can throw it around at any time, and wherever it lands, it carries this stigma that somebody’s a bigot.” Its message is that there’s “inequality that needs to be addressed, to be paid off. So if you hear me using the word ‘equity,’ I’m shaking you down.”

Equity in this “new sense,” Mr. Steele says, can be understood only as “a strategy.” The president is promising to “fix America morally, and aligning himself with the strategy of black people to gain power by focusing on victimization. He’s saying, ‘America must tackle that problem and create programs that help minorities achieve equity’—whatever that may be.”

The idea of equality has been eclipsed, Mr. Steele says, in part because “it was a little too specific” and bore the baggage of the old civil-rights movement. “We fought for equality 60 years ago,” he says. It was a struggle that brought his black father and white mother together. (They married in 1944. All of her siblings abandoned her, “and never came back.”) “We won the civil-rights legislation in the ’60s,” Mr. Steele says, “and the term ‘equality’ is exhausted now. And it’s lost much of its mystique—because you can measure it.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/impeachment_snoozer_what_kind_of_trial_is_this.html

For Democrats, their impeachment and trial of President Trump is a bust.

All their their pious — “democracy is an extremely rare and fragile and precarious and transitory thing” flapdoodle — and hopes for a grande finale Getting Trump … isn’t drawing an audience. It’s a dud. A re-run. And almost nobody’s watching.

Voice of America, citing Nielsen, noted how bad it was, citing the House-side 3-million viewer fiasco:

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Senate’s impeachment trial of President Donald Trump couldn’t have higher stakes, but as an historic two-week-long televised event, it has been something of a ratings bust.

The third impeachment trial in the history of the United States Senate hasn’t come close to toppling viewership records, according to the Nielsen rating agency.

So far, the live coverage of President Trump’s Senate impeachment hearings has garnered fewer television viewers than the audiences that tuned in to see other historic congressional hearings, including appearances by James Comey, Brett Kavanaugh, Michael Cohen and Robert Mueller.

The Senate trial isn’t much better. Day one drew 12 million viewers, with the bulk concentrated on left-wing CNN and MSNBC. Fox News roped in just 1.4 million. 

In contrast, James Comey in 2017 drew 19.5 million viewers. Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 packed in 21 million. A non-entity, Michael Cohen, in 2019 got 13.8 million watchers.

These guys? 12 million at best. For sure it’s a bust. Even Joe Biden is trying to distance himself from this bloviating crap, claiming: “I have a job.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/cuomos-grim-reaping/

Andrew Cuomo successfully covered up more than 5,000 deaths tied to nursing homes.

T wo weeks ago, a Democratic attorney general of New York who had enjoyed Andrew Cuomo’s backing released a tentative preliminary report that gingerly suggested the actual death toll from COVID-19 in the state’s nursing homes was “approximately 50 percent” higher than Cuomo’s numbers had all led us to believe.

Experienced Cuomo watchers scoffed: Despite being labeled a “bombshell” in the media, the AG report was obviously soft-pedaling the reality. Attorney General Letitia James is well aware of the potential hazards of incurring Cuomo’s wrath and seemed to be at pains to make the report as bland as possible. It sampled only 10 percent of state nursing homes.

The actual numbers keep rising, and now the estimated death toll from COVID in nursing homes is 62 percent higher than Cuomo was claiming just last month. Cuomo’s disastrous March 25, 2020, order that nursing homes must accept COVID-infected individuals, which was not rescinded until May 10, may have been the single worst policy blunder made by any American official during the pandemic.Making matters worse, Cuomo has worked furiously to cover up the facts for nearly a year. His own aide, Melissa DeRosa, acknowledged as much in a call to state Democratic lawmakers in which she blatantly admitted hiding the truth for fear of political repercussions. “We froze” out of fear that the truth would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors, DeRosa said in the call, whose details were reported by the New York Post, one of the few news outlets that has declined to put on a cheerleader skirt and shake its pom-poms at every Cuomo press conference.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-icons-of-the-left-collapse/

On the menu today: You would have to look far and wide to find a person more celebrated by progressives and most of the national media in 2020 than Andrew Cuomo. You would have to look far and wide to find a political group more celebrated by progressives and like-minded media in 2020 than the Lincoln Project. And you would have to look far and wide to find a place more celebrated by progressives and like-minded media in 2020 than California. And in the last 24 hours, all three fell from their high pedestals and landed with a hard “thud.”

New York State Admits Cover-up of Virus Deaths among Nursing-Home Residents

If you have been reading National Review for the past year, you have known that Andrew Cuomo was an egomaniacal, blustering, bullying charlatan who made catastrophic errors in judgment but whose reputation was protected by CNN’s prime-time programming and national media who desperately needed a heroic Democratic figure to contrast against President Trump. Over the past eleven months, you read about various details of the contrast between the grand illusion of Cuomo and reality from David Harsanyi, Pradheep Shanker, Kyle Smith, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Mairead McArdle, Zach Evans, Tobias Hoonhout, Brittany Bernstein, The Editors, a bunch of others I’m forgetting, and, ahem, me, multiple times. I would argue no other national publication did more to showcase how New York State’s government kept failing its citizens, with deadly consequences, during this pandemic.

And now we get the cherry on top, as the New York Post reports that the state government deliberately hid the figures on the number of nursing-home residents killed by the coronavirus, because they didn’t want the U.S. Department of Justice investigating them:

Governor Cuomo’s top aide privately apologized to Democratic lawmakers for withholding the state’s nursing-home death toll from COVID-19 — telling them “we froze” out of fear the true numbers would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors, The Post has learned.

The stunning admission of a cover-up was made by Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August because “right around the same time, [then-President Donald Trump] turns this into a giant political football,” according to an audio recording of the two-hour-plus meeting.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/congress/trump-defense-impeachment-political-vengeance

Former President Donald Trump’s defense lawyer Michael van der Veen started his defense at Friday’s Senate impeachment trial arguing Democrats objected to Trump’s 2016 election win and engaged in their own behavior aimed at incitement.

“The article of impeachment now before the Senate is an unjust and blatantly unconstitutional act of political vengeance,” van der Veen told Republicans and Democrats gathered for the fourth day of Trump’s impeachment trial.

After days of dramatic video footage Democratic impeachment managers presented to show the severity of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by pro-Trump protesters, the defense team played their own montage that showed prominent Democrats making incendiary comments.

President Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sens. John Tester and Cory Booker, and Rep. Maxine Waters, were among the Democrats the defense team portrayed on video making arguably inflammatory statements about Trump and in support of the violent and deadly social justice protests last summer.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/02/12/the-persecution-of-gina-carano/

“This is why the Gina Carano story matters. It points to the ruthlessness with which the new elites will police dissenting thought, punish heretics, and remind everyone who is in charge of policing the parameters of acceptable thought in the 21st century — us.”

It’s official: only liberals are allowed to talk shit about the Holocaust. That’s the take-home message of the Gina Carano scandal. For here we have a right-wing woman being shamed and sacked for doing what luvvies and leftish types have been doing for years: comparing the early 21st century to Nazi Germany.

The double standards are mind-blowing. Carano has been dumped by Disney, from her starring role in the Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian, for suggesting that the political hatreds of the 2020s echo the nastiness of the Holocaust era. In an ill-advised Instagram story, she compared the flak that right-wingers like her get with the contempt visited upon Jews in 1930s Germany. ‘Hating someone for their political views’ is not that different to when the Nazis turned on Jewish people, she said.

This is really dumb, of course. It is a classic example of a problem spiked has written about many times: Holocaust Relativism. This is when people plunder the past suffering of Jews in search of metaphors with which they might describe and condemn something they don’t like about today.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/impeachment-blunder-author-tweet-introduced-trial-says-it-was

he author of a tweet introduced by Democrats at the Senate impeachment trial said Thursday her statement “we are bringing the Calvary” was a clear reference to a prayer vigil organized by churchgoers supporting Trump and not a call for military-like violence at the Capitol riot as portrayed by Rep. Eric Swalwell.

Jennifer Lynn Lawrence also said she believes the California Democrat and House impeachment manager falsified her tweet, adding a blue check mark to the version he introduced at the trial suggesting she was a verified Twitter user with more clout when in fact her Twitter account never had a blue check and has never been verified.

“I noticed when they put my tweet on the screen that all of a sudden my tweet had a blue checkmark next to it,” she said during an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “… This way, if he entered that into congressional testimony, it’s a verified account, and it has, it could be applicable in law. Secondly, he wanted to show that my Twitter account had more gravitas than it actually did. He wanted to show that the president was trying to use me to bring in the cavalry.”

A check of Lawrence’s Twitter account shows she does not have a blue check verification. Swalwell’s version of her tweet introduced at the trial did.

Swalwell’s office did not immediately return a call Thursday seeking reaction.

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/impeaching-the-voters/91418/

At the heart of the case against President Trump levied this week by House prosecutors lies the violence itself — what it looked like up close, inside the Capitol. Video conveyed the intensity, danger, coarseness of language, and scent of blood that seethed through the vast premises. The House used shocking footage never before seen by the public, making clear that things were far worse than Americans had so far appreciated. Powerful.

Then again, too, if this footage was able to shock the nation four weeks after January 6, why must one assume that President Trump himself grasped what was happening at the time of the events? He was more than a mile away. He had expressed confidence that everyone at his rally would be marching to the Capitol building to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” Then he’d returned to the White House.

The House would have the Senate believe that Mr. Trump was apprised, during a phone call with Senator Tuberville, of how dangerous the situation had become. By the senator’s own account, though, it was a glancing exchange in which the Alabaman informed the President that Vice President Pence had just been rushed from the chamber. Did the President, did anyone, fully grasp then what the House disclosed this week?