RUTHFULLY YOURS

Remember when, in early 2011, in the wake of the massacre that wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed 6 others, President Obama called “for a New Era of Civility in U.S. Politics”?

The scene inside McKale Memorial Arena was a mix of grief and celebration, where a capacity crowd of 14,000 gathered beneath championship banners for the University of Arizona Wildcats. The service, which was televised nationally on the major broadcast and cable news networks, gave the president an opportunity — and burden — to lead the nation in mourning during prime time.

Aides said Mr. Obama wrote much of the speech himself late Tuesday night at the White House. Laden with religion nuance, the speech seemed as though Mr. Obama was striking a preacher’s tone with a politician’s reverb.

That was when blame was being heaped on Sarah Palin for issuing a map with targets on congressional districts that were believed to be possible wins for the GOP. There mere visual metaphor of a target was an outrageous incitement, according to the theory of the moment, because clearly insane people like the perp, Jared Loughner, could be so suggestible.

That was before the Left began its campaign to incite an assassination attempt on President Trump. The campaign has encompassed publicity-seeking entertainers as well as the ostensible guardians of high cultures, such as Shakespeare in the Park.

Mick Mulvaney lets the senator’s attacks convince Democrats to restructure the CFPB.

If Elizabeth Warren’s Wall Street Journal piece “Republicans Remain Silent as Mulvaney’s CFPB Ducks Oversight” had run three days later, readers would have thought it was an April Fools’ Day joke about the famously two-headed government agency.

Most Americans had not heard of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last Thanksgiving when its first director, Richard Cordray, resigned and proclaimed Warren acolyte Leandra English acting director, prompting President Trump to appoint cabinet member Mick Mulvaney to the same post. Senator Warren has not laughed much in the four months since a judge backed the president’s choice.

It was no wonder the public tuned out the CFPB narrative that Democrats have repeated since they controlled Congress and the White House and passed the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which created the bureau. The plot never changes — before Cordray’s resignation, Republicans opposed the bureau because it kept the financial industry honest; now they restrain the CFPB so businesses can cheat consumers.

Facts never get in the way of the banal narrative. In February, Patrick Rucker of Reuters reported that, according to unnamed sources, after Equifax disclosed its historic data breach on September 7, 2017, Cordray “authorized an investigation that month” and that acting director Mulvaney had “not ordered “subpoenas against Equifax or sought sworn testimony from executives, routine steps when launching a full-scale probe.” The “exclusive” was hardly news. The Dodd-Frank Act forbids the Federal Trade Commission and the CFPB from conducting independent inquiries into the same matter. Cordray may have authorized an investigation of the Equifax data breach, but the FTC ended up conducting the full-scale probe.

Cordray and Warren, who helped draft the law, surely recognized Rucker’s sleight-of-hand. Nevertheless, the senator tweeted, “Another middle finger from @MickMulvaneyOMB to consumers: he’s killed the @CFPB’s probe into the #EquifaxBreach.” Cordray, while campaigning for Ohio governor, wrote in the Washington Post that “the administration has . . . halted the investigation of Equifax,” with a link to the Reuters article as proof there had been something for Mulvaney to halt.

WASHINGTON – Former Democratic National Committee Interim Chairwoman Donna Brazile urged African-Americans to stop “giving up” their votes to Democrats without demanding an “agenda” from the party that “matches their needs,” describing their political power as “enormous.”

Brazile said she had to stand up to her own party and say “hell no” after its leaders told her to “shut up.”

“We have to stop giving up our votes. I have done just about everything in the Democratic Party but run for office – everything that they have asked me to do. I have done it. I have registered millions of people in my lifetime. I have knocked on so many doors that I cannot even see the black of my own knuckles. I have carried their water,” Brazile said during her keynote address at the Stateswomen for Justice Luncheon last week, which was organized by Trice Edney Communications.

“I have put their platform within my heart to support. I have championed their issues. And when it came time for me to say what I believed was important, they said ‘shut up, Donna’ and I said ‘hell no, I am not shutting up,’” she added.

Brazile was critical of Democrats such as President Obama and former DNC chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) in her book Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House, which was released in November.

“We had three Democratic parties: the party of Barack Obama, the party of Hillary Clinton, and this weak little vestige of a party led by [Wasserman Schultz] that was doing a very poor job getting people who were not president elected,” Brazile wrote in the book.

“[Obama] left it in debt. Hillary bailed it out so that she could control it, and Debbie went along with all of this because she liked the power and perks of being a chair but not the responsibilities,” Brazile also wrote. “As I saw it, these three titanic egos – Barack, Hillary, and Debbie – had stripped the party to a shell for their own purposes.” CONTINUE AT SITE

My letterbox is increasingly stuffed with requests from candidates for donations. It goes something like this:

Dear Ruth, As you know blah, blah, blah….security blah,blah,blah, Israel, blah, blah blah, energy blah,blah, blah, values blah blah blah. Send money…..

Well, I have a nonpartisan rule of thumb…..If J Street, the assisted suicide organization for Israel, supports any candidate, I do not send a nickel.

The following Senators who are running for re-election have been endorsed by J Street:

Dianne Feinstein D. California

Chris Murphy D. Connecticut…the NUTmeg state

Angus King I- Maine

Sherrod Brown D…Ohio

Sheldon Whitehouse D. Rhode Island

Tim Kaine D-Virginia (Hillary’s running mate in 2016)

Maria Cantwell D- Washington

The Senate debated on Tuesday a resolution introduced by Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders that would require the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Yemen.

The surprising support the resolution won from 44 U.S. Senators handed a big win to Iran, which is engaged in a hot war with Saudi Arabia on the Arabian Peninsula. And it was a huge slap in the face to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who was meeting with President Trump in the White House as the Senate debated the motion on the floor.

It also showed the extreme damage recent scandals involving NSA snooping and political bias at the FBI have done to the credibility of the United States government, which lobbied heavily against the resolution.

Let there be no doubt: the only reason the United States has any interest in the civil war that has been raging in Yemen since 2012 is because of the Iranian regime support for the Houthi rebels.

The Houthis have fired Iranian-supplied missiles at the Saudi capital, Riyadh. They have targeted civilian airports, as well as royal palaces. As I wrote earlier this year, imagine for an instant if a hostile regional power were to stir up a civil war in Mexico or Canada, with the ultimate aim of destabilizing the U.S.?

For that is the unabashed goal of the Iranian regime: destabilize Saudi Arabia, which Tehran sees as the main check on its effort to dominate the Persian Gulf, control the free flow of oil, and establish its land bridge through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to Israel’s borders.

Sometimes you wonder at the intelligence of members of Congress. Seriously.

Rep. Lee got a +7 from the Arab American Association for her anti-Israel bias…..rsk
A fundraising email from the Democratic National Committee today featured a member of the Congressional Black Caucus vowing that the country could not go back to the days of segregated schools and lunch counters.

The subject line of the email is Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) saying, “I boycotted Trump’s inauguration. Here’s why.”

Lee also skipped the State of the Union address in January, citing an “all-out assault on our democracy” being waged by President Trump from “relentless attacks on the press to outrageous statements that undermine the intelligence community and the Russia investigation, and repeated threats to our judicial system.” She also said his recent at the time comment calling El Salvador, Haiti and African nations “shithole countries” was “racist and further demonstrates a lack of respect for the office of the presidency.”

In the new DNC mailer, Lee said she skipped the inauguration because she “could not in good conscience celebrate an incoming president who had normalized the most extreme fringes of the Republican Party.”

“After riding racism and fear to the White House, Trump is now pushing policies that harm people of color, immigrants, and working people. For many of us, his presidency represents an attack on our very existence,” she said. “But we cannot afford to give up hope. There is far too much at stake for us to retreat from this fight.”

After the email asked for donations to aid Democrats’ midterm election campaigns, Lee said that “the rising tide of hate is a reality we must continue to grapple with — even at the highest levels of our government.”

“Let’s not forget that Donald Trump led the birther movement to question the legitimacy of Barack Obama — our first African-American president. Instead of rejecting Trump’s racist attacks, the Republican Party threw their support behind him,” she said. “Trump also sent a clear signal to white supremacists that it was time to ‘take their country back.'”

“We will not go back to the days where I could not enroll in a public school unless it was segregated,” said Lee, a 71-year-old Texas native. “The days when my dad, a World War II and Korean War veteran, was denied entry at restaurants due to the color of his skin. The days when my mother was refused the opportunity to buy a house because African-Americans weren’t allowed to purchase homes.” CONTINUE AT SITE

WASHINGTON – Filmmaker Michael Moore urged Democratic voters to remember that they are voting for the impeachment of President Trump in the upcoming midterm elections.

“I am optimistic. I have a thread of optimism still in me. I believe we will, in November, see a tsunami of people coming to the polls and after that I hope you, both of you, and the other senators, do their job,” Moore said during a town hall on “Inequality in America: The Rise of Oligarchy and Collapse of the Middle Class” organized by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) this evening.

“We have a Democrat running in my district in Michigan right now to unseat the Republican,” he added. “I went to hear him speak and the first words out of his mouth were, after he said he was for single-payer healthcare and all these other good things, and that he was an Iraq veteran, he said, I want you to know that in this election you are not electing a member of the House of Representatives. You are electing the jury for the impeachment of Donald J. Trump. Never forget that over these next few months.”

Moore urged the Democratic Party to also provide its “vision” to the voters rather than impeach Trump and go back to the day before he took office.

“If we just get rid of Trump and we just go back to the day before Trump, how are things then, Sen. Warren and Sen. Sanders, with our healthcare, with our job situation, with poverty? I don’t want to go back to that day. We’ve got to move forward and we have to provide that vision and provide that leadership to make that happen,” he said.

Moore said America’s capitalist economic system is not fair.

“These films I make are about a country that’s economic system is unfair, it’s unjust and it’s not Democratic,” he said. “You cannot call this a democracy if the democracy means we just get to go vote, but with the economy if we have no say in this then it’s not a true democracy.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Tuesday’s narrow win by Democrat Conor Lamb in a special congressional election in Pennsylvania has thrilled Democrats eager to believe that the entire country has finally seen the error of its ways and is about to remove the interloper Donald J. Trump, if not from power then at least from moral authority in the White House. This, they crow, is yet more proof of the “blue wave” that surely is coming in the fall, when the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition retakes the House of Representatives, re-installs Nancy Pelosi as speaker, and effects the Progressive Restoration in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016.

Chastened Republicans, meanwhile, are expected finally to bow to the inevitable and hang their heads in shame, while accepting the natural overlordship of their Democrat betters and returning to their Vichycon places at the table, collaborating whenever possible and putting up only token resistance when not.

Not so fast. It’s always dangerous to draw national conclusions from local elections, which House races are by definition.

First, the district was holding a special election to replace Republican Tim Murphy, who resigned last October after the news broke that he had encouraged his lover in an extramarital affair to abort a pregnancy, which turned out to be a phantom. Of course, for a Democrat, this would have been no problem at all, since the modern Democratic Party considers a “woman’s right to choose” to be right up there with “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Forget honey traps: Murphy was caught in a hypocrisy trap, so he had to go.

Second, Democrats in the district have a registration advantage of some 70,000 voters, but many of those are “conservative” and it went hard for Trump in 2016. Outside observers (i.e., Democrat media shills and the krack kadres of GOP kampaign konsultants) at first expected the seat to stay red. But then the Republican bonzes took a look at the polls, and promptly bailed on candidate Rick Saccone, writing him off as lost.

Third, the district is about to be renamed and reshaped in the wake of a Pennsylvania Supreme Court order to redraw its boundaries. Gerrymandering, it seems, is a high crime and misdemeanor when elected Republicans do it, but when unelected Democrats do it, it serves the cause of social justice and is thus OK.