RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272696/republicans-preemptive-cringe-bruce-thornton

Recently two events occurred that illustrate the Republican bad habit of ceding to progressives a whole set of questionable assumptions. Whether out of sincere but misguided belief or fear of political cost, this anxious and cringing validation of progressive ideas and the double-standards that follow empowers the Democrats and weakens the GOP.

The most egregious example was the speed at which many nominal conservatives chastised the Kentucky parochial school students who were attacked by an illiberal and racist outfit called the Black Hebrew Israelites, and by an American Indian “activist,” “tribal elder,” and “Vietnam vet” (the last a patent lie and a case of stolen valor). The anti-Trump media, as expected, without waiting for more information savaged the kids for embodying the worst traits of “white supremacism,” “toxic masculinity,” and “racial privilege.” One CNN Minister of Propaganda delighted in pointed out one kid’s “punchable face.” This was the same young man who stoically endured a deranged grown-up banging a drum in his face while the Black Hebrews rained down vile epithets on him.

The left’s reaction should surprise no one familiar with its disregard for fact and equal justice, and its penchant for bullying the weak. More disgusting were the equally precipitate and bullying comments from some on the right. The NeverTrumpers at National Review beclowned themselves with their usual moral preening and preemptive cringing. One editorial subaltern tweeted of the students, “they might as well have just spit on the cross and got it over with.” At least the putative conservatives had the decency to be embarrassed, apologizing and removing their tweets and articles.

Those gestures, however, don’t explain the initial impulse to attack, before all the facts were in, sixteen-year-old Catholic kids attending the March for Life rally against abortion, a cohort likely to become readers of National Review. Given that the bell of the attackers’ calumny cannot be unrung, it smacks of opportunism to apologize now, when the pundits never should have hastened to condemn the kids on such scant and subjective evidence in the first place.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/whos-afraid-of-howard-schultz-11548893911

The way progressives are denouncing Howard Schultz, you’d think he is Donald Trump’s first cousin. The former Starbucks CEO said Sunday he might run for President as an independent in 2020, and Democrats have since been shrieking like teenagers at a horror movie. They seem to fear a policy debate, which is exactly why a Schultz candidacy could be good for the country, including Democrats.

Senator Elizabeth Warren wasted no time on Twitter deriding “billionaires who think they can buy the presidency to keep the system rigged for themselves while opportunity slips away for everyone else.” The Democratic pundit class, which means nearly every pundit, rushed to say Mr. Schultz should stick to grande cappucinos and leave politics to the professionals who . . . lost to Mr. Trump.

They’re trying to bully Mr. Schultz out of running, but along the way they’re making the case for why he should. Take economics, where Ms. Warren, Sen. Kamala Harris and other Democrats wants Americans to shut up and jump on their bullet train to Bernie Sanders’ utopia. On policy Mr. Schultz is closer to a John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton Democrat.

He grew up in the projects in Brooklyn, worked in sales at Xerox and built his global coffee company from next to nothing. “I thought that was the American dream, the aspiration of America,” he said this week. “You’re going to criticize me for being successful when in my company over the last 30 years, the only company in America that gave comprehensive health insurance, equity in the form of stock options, and free college tuition?”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/kamala-harris-health-care-plan-elimination/

Kamala Harris has a big idea for your health-care plan: elimination.

The early contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination are working feverishly to out-radical each other. Senator Elizabeth Warren has come out with a confiscatory wealth tax that in practice proved too oppressive for Sweden and Denmark, both of which abolished theirs years ago. Harris, not wanting to be outflanked on her left, has now called for the abolition of private health insurance, a proposal that would go well beyond even the practice in single-payer systems such as those of the United Kingdom and Canada.

CNN’s Jake Tapper asked her whether under her “Medicare for All” proposal people would be permitted to keep their insurance if they like it. Harris, unlike Barack Obama, offered no such concession. Instead, she offered this: “Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.”

Move on to what?

Harris argued that under her system patients would be liberated from having third parties “give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require.” That has not, to say the least, been the experience under government-monopoly health-care systems in real-world practice. In reality, those systems are characterized by bureaucracy, delays, and seemingly arbitrary decisions enforced by the state. There is plenty to criticize about the U.S. health-insurance and health-care businesses, which remain much in need of reform, but the evidence of history strongly suggests that the imposition of a new federal bureaucracy is not the most convenient means of reducing paperwork and delay.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/272722/stacey-abrams-odd-choice-deliver-state-union-daniel-greenfield

After the disastrous response to Trump’s wall speech, it’s understandable that the Dems don’t want to bring Schumer and Pelosi back to counter President Trump’s State of the Union address. And a lot of their top talent is pondering running in 2020.

So they can’t play favorites.

But Stacey Abrams has also been flirting with running, she’s a campaign loser and she’s a terrible public speaker. The Dems could have picked Hakeem Jeffries, or any one of a dozen other Dems in the national or state leadership who aren’t thinking of running.

And who would actually leave viewers with a positive impression.

Picking Abrams is meant to boost her comeback campaign, but at the cost of the Dem brand.

I know the pre-written media headlines about Abrams “destroying” Trump with lines carefully scripted for her by guys who charge you $50K just to hear them sneeze will be given added spice by the identity politics here, and the consultants have told the Dems that getting black women out to vote is the key to victory, but she’s still a terrible choice.

But at least she probably isn’t running in 2020. It’s hard to find a Dem who isn’t.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272641/diverse-conformity-2020-democrats-daniel-greenfield

Never has the Democrat presidential field been more diverse in race, gender, religion and orientation, and less diverse intellectually. The 2020 primary field stumbled out into the streets of Iowa throwing clumsy identity politics punches at each other’s diverse faces. Soon the media was full of stories about how Bernie Sanders was a sexist pig, Kamala Harris spent all her time throwing the book at black men, and Tulsi Gabbard is a homophobe. And that’s just the warm up act. Give it a week and every candidate will be accusing his, her and its opponents of being bigger bigots than the biggest bigot in Biggotsville.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s entry into the 2020 race shone a light on the dismal conformity of the field, but not because she’s Hindu or part Samoan. Senator Kamala Harris was raised by her Tamil Indian mother in Canada and attended a Hindu temple as a child. But Harris has tried to mold her campaign into the generic cookie cutter African-American politician, dubiously laying claim to generations of history and struggle that her family was never heir to by announcing her run on MLK Day in Oakland.

And then rushing off to Iowa, which is about as far away as you can get from Oakland, because she wasn’t really trying to convince black people of her authenticity, but white progressives in Iowa City.

Cultural diversity is commonplace in the 2020 field. But all that diversity just makes for a poignant opening speech before politicians like Harris conform their brands to the lowest common Dem denominator. Harris falsely claimed to have attended a desegregated school and is using the civil rights struggle as the background for her presidential campaign because in a tribal party, white guilt and black bloc votes are safer bets than her actual background with her Tamil mother and Jamaican father.

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2019/01/islam-in-congress.html

One grows jaded from reading — indeed, weary of – all the bad news one finds on the Internet or which cascades into one’s email. More knife attacks in the U.K., more rapes in Swedenand Germany, Islamic butchery in Morocco and Pakistan and Nigeria, of Islamic slaughters everywhere. And news of Western countries folding, ever so slightly, to the invasion and inroads of Islam.

Except for a few reality- centered souls – Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Amil Imani, Katie Hopkins, and a scant paucity of other individuals – with access to the reading public , few other writers and thinkers and prominent persons will risk a blanket, public condemnation of Islam. This is especially true of members of Congress. To stand up and point fingers at Islam would invite charges of racism and attempts at suppressing freedom of speech, oppression of a “minority,” even though Islam is gaining the status of a “protected” minority here (creeping Sharia), as it enjoys in the U.K. and on Continental Europe. I can’t think of any politician with the moral or mental backbone to unapologetically cite Islam’s totalitarian, fascist nature and its 14 centuries of bloodshed, conquest, and destruction.

Congress has been Islamisized. No one there dares stand up and say, “Islam is evil and is not ‘peaceful.” Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, is friendly to the Muslimis, and has appointed them to powerful, influential committees, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib to the Financial Services Committee, and Omar to the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Voters (or illegal voters) elected them to office as representatives of their districts in the House of Representatives: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14th district), Ilhan Omar (Minnesota-5thdistrict), and Rashida Harbi Tlaib (Michigan – 13th district). Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not a Muslim, but she is the newspaperman’s photogenic dream. She an agenda pal with Tliab and Omar. They all oppose, in varying degrees of vehemence, President Donald Trump, with the rest of the House.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/2020-democrats-progressive-profligacy/

The field has moved so far left it’s about to fall off the political charts.

By almost any traditional measure, President Trump should be extremely vulnerable in 2020. Although the president often brags about his victory in 2016, it is important to recall that a shift of just 107,000 votes in three states would have changed the outcome. That was less than 0.09 percent of all votes cast — and this when Trump was running against one of the most unpopular presidential candidates of all time. Since his victory he has done virtually nothing to expand his support beyond his loyal base. His approval rating hovers somewhere between low and dismal. A significant majority of Americans feel the country is on the wrong track.

Given this terrain, Democrats can be said to have just one job for 2020: Don’t be crazy. And they are failing at it.

Conventional wisdom says that the Democrats offer no agenda other than opposition to Trump and various forms of identity politics. If that were true, it might actually be good enough to win. Hardly a day goes by without Trump alienating a new swath of the electorate. As the midterms showed, he remains popular in deep red states, but Democrats can make big gains in swing districts simply by not being Trump.

And while character and culture will be a big part of the upcoming campaign, elections are also about policy. Maybe not about the nitty-gritty details of 25-page white papers, but about the broad strokes of where candidates want to take the country. And unfortunately for them, the Democratic contenders are not offering an attractive policy vision.

It’s an agenda not just for big government, but for gigantic, enormous, jumbo, super-colossal government. In fact, the rapidly growing Democratic field has collectively moved so far to the left that it is about to fall off the edge of the political charts.

Consider that in 2016, Bernie Sanders was an outlier with his call for a $32 trillion government-run single-payer health-care system, a $15 minimum wage, free college, and guaranteed jobs for everyone. Today, those are positions held by every major Democratic candidate. Were Hillary to run again today, she would be considered far too moderate for today’s Democratic party. And that’s saying something.

And that’s just the start. The “free” goodies keep on coming: universal preschool, rent subsidies, expanded retirement benefits, and, of course, a Green New Deal. Details are sparse, and plans vary from candidate to candidate, but we are talking price tags that easily exceed $50 trillion over the next ten years.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/progressive-politics-abolish-ice-tax-increases-free-college/

Abolishing ICE, offering ‘free’ college to all, raising taxes to 70 percent: Will the somnolent GOP take notice?

The old Democratic party championed the working classes, wanted secure borders to protect middle-class union wage earners, and focused generous federal entitlement help on the citizen poor. Civil rights were defined as equality of opportunity for all.

That party is long dead. An updated Hubert Humphrey or even Bill Clinton would not recognize any of the present “Democrats.”

Even the old wing of elite liberals is mostly long gone, with its talk of legal immigration only, opposition to censorship, pro-Israel foreign policy, let-it-hang-out Sixties indulgence, and free speech.

It was superseded by grim progressives who are not so much interested in a square, new, or fair deal for the middle classes, as an entirely different deal that redefines everything from the Bill of Rights and the very way we elect presidents and senators to an embrace of identity politics as its first principle.

Indeed, we are currently witnessing a quite strange series of North Korean–like reeducation confessionals, from repenting erstwhile liberals and now presidential hopefuls such as Joe Biden, Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, and Kirsten Gillibrand. They and other would-be candidates parade before show cameras to apologize for their prior incorrect heresies, including their erstwhile support for drug laws, tough sentencing, and border enforcement.

The subtext of these charades is that 28-year-old socialist Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (who won her Democratic primary with 15,897 votes and with that victory an assured congressional seat in a gerrymandered Democratic district) is the new Robespierre — warning that the earth as we know it will end in twelve years, ICE must be disbanded, all student debt abolished, wealth taxes levied, and Medicare provided for all. And her political guillotine awaits any progressive with lingering stains of the Ancien Régime.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/illegal-abolish-ice-gillibrand-grapples-past-conservative-immigration-views-n961806

After announcing a White House bid amid a historic government shutdown over President Donald Trump’s demands for a border wall, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., spent her first week on the 2020 stump explaining and expressing regret over her own hard-line immigration views a decade ago.

“I did not think about suffering in other people’s lives,” she said last Sunday in an interview on CNN. “I realized that things I had said were wrong. I was not caring about others.”

In an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow days earlier, she said her past views were not “driven from my heart. I was callous to the suffering of families that want to be together.”

It’s perhaps an unavoidable reckoning for a seasoned politician in a party that’s moved rapidly to the left during the last decade. But as electability emerges as a central issue on the campaign trail, Democrats are increasingly willing to say they were wrong.

Gillibrand isn’t the only one reconciling past views. Ahead of a potential bid, former Vice President Joe Biden said that his past criminal justice stances haven’t always “been right.” Not long after announcing that she was exploring her own 2020 campaign, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, apologized for her past views on LGBT rights.

And it’s no surprise Gillibrand’s once-conservative stance on immigration is raising eyebrows a decade later: They sound nothing like her current views, like her recent call to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/28/opinions/kamala-harris-big-challenge-axelrod/index.html

This is major, because David Axelrod is the man who groomed Barack Obama from obscurity to the White House in four years….rsk

Kamala Harris has a theory of the case about the Democratic presidential nominating process. If she’s right, she could well be standing on a debate platform with Donald Trump in 2020.
Plainly, her announcement and effective rollout on Martin Luther King Jr. Day wasn’t a casual scheduling decision. Nor was her decision to visit South Carolina even before her highly produced kickoff rally Sunday in Oakland, California.
While not explicitly capitalizing on her status as the only woman of color in the race, the symbolic timing of her declaration and the nature of these events were impossible to ignore.
Too little attention has been paid to the way the nominating process unfolds, first in mostly white Iowa and New Hampshire but then moving quickly to more diverse states where African-Americans play a much larger role.

Hillary Clinton was able to shake off Bernie Sanders in 2016 primarily because of her advantage among black voters. That same edge helped Barack Obama prevail over Clinton in 2008.

African-American voters are a strong part of the Democratic base. And under party rules, congressional districts with overwhelming Democratic performance receive additional delegates, multiplying the value of black support.
Harris’ challenge is to be a top finisher in the early states that traditionally narrow the field, to get to those contests that start with the crucial South Carolina primary, where she may have a decided advantage. She’ll be in Iowa tonight for a CNN Town Hall hosted by Jake Tapper. (It airs at 10 pm on CNN.)
There are many reasons to believe Harris could break through.