RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/obamacares-red-state-trap-1540853774

Many readers no doubt take comfort in living thousands of miles away from the tax and spending misadventures of Illinois or Connecticut. But fair warning: One of the worst deals in state spending is coming to a red state near you, and that’s expanding Medicaid to adult men above the poverty line.

With the polls closed and new players in the House and Senate elected, join Paul Gigot, Kimberley Strassel, and Opinion columnists and contributors for our marquee Opinion Live event on Thursday, November 8, in New York. Space is limited, sign up here.

On Nov. 6 four states will consider ballot initiatives on expanding Medicaid: Nebraska, Utah, Idaho and Montana, the last of which would extend an expansion that is set to expire. More than 30 states have expanded the entitlement as part of the Affordable Care Act. The Republican failure to repeal the law ensured that this number would grow, and Governors of both parties are always eager to draw more money from Washington.

Proponents are working to make sure voters don’t know, but this is not about poor mothers and babies, who are covered by traditional Medicaid. Same for the disabled. Expansion extends the benefit to prime-age adults without children up to 138% of the poverty line. The feds pay more than 90% of the cost for the new beneficiaries, versus about half the tab in Nebraska for the truly vulnerable (closer to 70% in Idaho, Montana and Utah).

The perversity of spending more on childless men than pregnant women is reason enough to reject expansion, but there are others. Every state that has expanded Medicaid has blown the budget by spending more money on more people. The cost overruns are more than double on average.

https://www.steynonline.com/8954/finding-wisdom-as-the-branches-shrivel

Yesterday I was in Newton, Massachusetts, to speak to Christians and Jews United for Israel. At the end of the speech I was presented with a shofar, although, after all the yakking, my embouchure was too tuckered to make much noise with it. I’m happy to report that it made it back to New Hampshire in better shape than the didgeridoo did from Perth.

It was, obviously, a somewhat somber gathering, held in the wake of the worst slaughter of Jews in American history – at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. If your grip on scripture is a little wobbly, that name is from Proverbs. In the King James version:

Happy is the man that findeth wisdom… She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy is every one that retaineth her.

As I said to the audience in Newton, we live in a time when man can find wisdom – almost the entirety of human knowledge – on a pocket-sized device he carries around with him all day. In theory, the tree of life should be spreading its branches broad and embracing over ever more of humanity. Instead, in the Age of Digital Wisdom, too many retreat into dark corners sealed off from any wider enlightenment.

In a world of hermetically sealed ideological ghettos, it is a melancholy fact that Islam, the secular polytechnic left and the subterranean skinhead right all meet at what Laura Rosen Cohen calls Jew-Hate Junction. Granted that, it was still disturbing to see American Jews rationalize mass murder by a fellow American on the following grounds:

And a word to my fellow American Jews: This president makes this possible. Here. Where you live. I hope the embassy move over there, where you don’t live was worth it.

So the “root cause” was “the embassy move”. That’s Julia Ioffe of GQ magazine. I was asked a question about it in Newton yesterday, and replied that this kind of thinking reminded me of a passage by Anthony Hope – one I quoted in my introduction to The Mark Steyn Club’s serialization of The Prisoner of Zenda, from a more obscure fancy of his on earlier events in Ruritania:

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/armed-father-stops-shooter-at-birmingham-mcdonalds/

An armed man stopped a potential mass shooting at a Birmingham, Ala. McDonalds Saturday afternoon.

The unidentified man was leaving the restaurant with his two sons as a masked gunman entered and began firing. The father drew his pistol and returned fire, killing the gunman, but not before he and one of his teenage sons were shot.

The father and son sustained non-life threatening injuries in the shoot out, according to police.

Markus Washington, a McDonald’s employee on duty Saturday, told WBRC-TV that he locked himself in a freezer when the shooting began and was unaware one of his customers had engaged the shooter.

“I’m feeling grateful,” he told the station. “Wrapping my head around it all, I was just wishing someone would come wake me up from this nightmare.”

“All we hear is like different gunfire, so in my mind, I’m imagining everybody is dead. He’s looking for us,” he added.

Washington said he was thankful the man who confronted the gunman was armed.

“He’s my hero. Because I can only imagine how it would’ve went if he wasn’t armed. We might not be here having this interview,” Washington said.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/shots-fired-into-gop-campaign-office-in-florida/

At least four shots were fired into a Republican campaign satellite office in Volusia County, Fla. on Sunday, police announced after a campaign volunteer reported the shooting Monday morning.

No one was injured in the shooting, which broke the front windows and displaced drywall inside the office, South Daytona police captain Mark Cheatham told the Orlando Sentinel. There were no eyewitnesses, but police are seeking surveillance footage to try and determine who is responsible.

The incident comes after a gunman murdered eleven congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday morning. The assailant, who eventually surrendered to police, reportedly yelled “all Jews must die” during the attack. A number of prominent Democratic lawmakers and wealthy liberal donors were also targeted by mail bombs last week. Police have identified a middle-aged Florida man and outspoken Trump supporter as the attacker.

President Trump — whose rhetoric has been blamed for the attacks by many in the media, as well as Democratic lawmakers — called the spate of violence “despicable” in a statement last Wednesday.

“In these times we have to unify,” he said. “We have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/

And still people are downplaying the seriousness of anti-Semitism. Even now. Even following the worst attack on Jews in American history. Even after the slaughter of 11 mostly elderly Jews at a bris, the celebration of the birth of a child, at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

This time they are diminishing the scale and depth of anti-Semitism by pointing the finger of blame for the Pittsburgh massacre at President Donald Trump. No sooner had Robert Bowers allegedly executed his act of racist mass murder than anti-Trump commentators were describing it as the bloody offspring of Trump’s supposedly white-nationalist worldview and his divisive rhetoric.

This slaughter was the ‘inevitable result’ of ‘Trump’s vile nationalism’, said the Nation. Inevitable. ‘Trump didn’t pull the trigger on Jews in Pittsburgh, but he certainly prepped the shooter’, says a writer for Haaretz. Hateful violence like this is a consequence of Trump’s rhetoric, says British columnist Mehdi Hasan: ‘He preaches hate. He incites violence. He inspires attacks.’

This rush to blame Trump for a massacre of Jews is not only profoundly cynical, where the militarisation of anti-Semitism is pounced upon to the cheap, low end of scoring points against a politician people don’t like.

It also has the effect of whitewashing the true horror of anti-Semitism in the 21st-century West. It is in itself a form of apologism for the new anti-Semitism to the extent that it dehistoricises and depoliticises it by presenting it as little more than a function of the new right-wing populism.

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001803.html

GQ writer Julia Ioffe was one of several prominent left-wing journalists to blame Donald Trump and/or Benjamin Netanyahu for the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre within minutes of it happening on Saturday.

In a tweet dismissed by others as “repulsive,” Ioffe appeared to claimed that the fault for the actions of the neo-Nazi in Pittsburgh lay with Jews (a majority) who supported the move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

BLAMING TRUMP

[Note by Tom Gross]

Predictably, many journalists rushed to blame Donald Trump for the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.

“Trump didn’t pull the trigger on Jews in Pittsburgh, but he certainly prepped the shooter,” ran the Haaretz headline of a piece by the former editor of the American magazine Foreign Policy.

Similar accusations were made in publications including The Atlantic, The Forward, The New Republic and The Washington Post – and they were made before the bodies of the murdered Jews, which included a 97-year-old woman, had even been removed from the floor of the synagogue where they were executed.

I attach two pieces below from writers that beg to differ (both are subscribers to this list).

Brendan O’Neill, the editor in chief of Spiked, writes:

Bowers’ own social-media output suggests he was more influenced by the shared left / right / Islamist conspiracy theory about Jewish power than he was by Trump’s divisive commentary. He was critical of Trump, on the basis that the president was granting Jews too much influence and presence in the US. This, worryingly, is now a mainstream view. You see it in Guardian cartoons showing Israeli leaders puppeteering Western politicians. You hear it in leftish panic about an all-powerful Israel Lobby. You see it in Press TV headlines about the US being ‘completely under the thumb’ of Zionists. Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the UK Labour Party, worked for Press TV. For years.

Jonathan S. Tobin, the editor on chief of the Jewish News Syndicate writes:

For some, the only real culprit here is US President Donald Trump. … but Bowers was a critic of Trump, specifically because of his sympathy with Jews, the presence of many Jews in key administration posts and his support for Israel, which exceeds that of all of his recent predecessors. He viewed Trump as an ally of Jews – not someone who had encouraged him to attack them…