RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2023/01/03/new_york_lawmakers_silent_on_crime_migrants_give_themselves_29_raise_872723.html

The New York State Senate and Assembly recently returned to Albany for a special session, not to rethink the “bail reform” that allows violent criminals to be released immediately after getting arrested, or to do something about the migrant crisis that is seeing thousands of illegal immigrants overwhelm New York City.

No, they ended their session then reconvened for a special session to give themselves a 29% raise, from $110,000 to $142,000, making them the highest paid state lawmakers in the country, The New York Post reported.

The Senate voted 32-23 in favor of the raise, and the Assembly later approved it 81-52, with opposition mostly from Republicans. With a veto-proof supermajority, however, it doesn’t matter how Republicans nor Gov. Kathy Hochul feel about the raise.

Hochul initially tried to tie the proposed pay raise to lawmakers passing tougher bail rules for people charged with violent felonies, domestic offenses, and hate crimes. But she changed her tune once Sen. John Mannion (D-Syracuse) won reelection following a recount of his tight race with Republican Rebecca Shiroff.

Mannion’s return to another term makes the Democrats’ veto-proof supermajorities in both the Senate and Assembly even stronger, so Republicans have nowhere near any power in Albany. Why negotiate a pay raise?

The pay hike comes after lawmakers got a 38% raise in 2018 from $79,500. That was after they got another 38% raise in 1998 when their salaries rose from $57,500 a year.

One Democrat, an outgoing state senator who lost reelection, broke ranks to vote against the raises.

“Inflation has hit everyone, and legislators increasing their pay at a time when people are feeling the pain of economic pressure doesn’t feel right,” Sen. Elijah Reichlin-Melnick (D-Nanuet) said, The Post reported. “If this were the right thing to do, we could have handled it during the regular session.”

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

https://americanmind.org/salvo/desantis-goes-to-war/

And rightly so.

On election night, I was half-watching Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s victory remarks when something quite extraordinary and encouraging caught my attention. DeSantis evoked Churchill’s “fighting on the beaches” speech, in which Churchill stirred the resolve and patriotism of the British people in anticipation of the invasion of their homeland by the Nazis. DeSantis, of course, was not warning against Nazism: he was warning against wokeism, which he was implicitly equating with Nazism. I had never heard a national political figure treat wokeism with such (deserved) gravity.

Before rephrasing Churchill, DeSantis said:

States and cities governed by leftist politicians have seen crime skyrocket. They’ve seen their taxpayers abused, they’ve seen medical authoritarianism imposed, and they’ve seen American principles discarded. The woke agenda has caused millions of Americans to leave these jurisdictions for greener pastures.

People do not uproot themselves and leave the rhythms of home “for light and transient causes.” These people are not coming to Florida just for the weather. They are fleeing the woke regime of blue America—an abusive, lawless, totalitarian regime which is waging war against American principles and the American way of life.

DeSantis continued:

Now, this great exodus of Americans, for those folks, Florida, for so many of them, has served as the promised land. We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We have protected the rights of parents. We have respected our taxpayers, and we reject woke ideology. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.

In evoking Churchill’s speech, DeSantis lets us know that the woke regime is bearing down on America. In the urgent cadences of war, DeSantis tells us that America will not survive unless she defeats the woke regime. He believes this regime is so evil and powerful that he can, without bathos, compare it to the Nazi regime.

Some Unsolicited Advice

DeSantis has made a good start. He has told us that we are at war with a deadly regime, the woke regime. You cannot win a war unless you know you are in one.

But at some point soon, he must go further. He must show a voting majority of Americans that wokeism is the challenge of our generation, as Nazism was the challenge of the WWII generation and Communism for two generations thereafter.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/02/the-baleful-cargo-of-woke-diversity-worship/

What do all our notable fabricators—George Santos, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama—have in common? 

Well, quite like the Ward ChurchilIs or Rachel Dolezals of the world, one way or another, they lied about their identities. Or they sought fraudulent ways of suggesting their ancestries were marginalized. Or they had claims on being victims on the theory their constructed personas brought career advantages. 

George Santos claimed, apparently in search of a victimized status, that he was an “American Jew” and a “Latino Jew,” and a descendent of Holocaust survivors. 

Joe Biden lied that he went to “shul” as well as that he grew up in a veritable Puerto Rican household and just happened to attend a black college as well as being an honorary Greek.

Elizabeth Warren ended up a laughingstock for claiming her high cheekbones were proof of her Native-American ancestry—a lie she rode all the way to being the “first” Native-American professor on the Harvard Law school faculty. 

Somehow the half-white, prep-schooled Barry Soetoro, who had taken his Indonesian stepfather’s last name, rebooted in the university back to Barack Obama. The latter oddly did not catch his literary agent “misidentifying” him in a book promo as being born in Africa. And only as president, did we learn his “autobiographical” memoir was mostly a concoction.

This fixation with constructing identities is one of the great pathologies of our woke era.

When we obsess in neo-Confederate style on race, ethnicity, or religion as the defining element of who we are, and we do this to leverage political advantage, then we set off a chain-reaction of Yugoslavian- or Lebanese-style tribalism. Like nuclear proliferation, once one group goes tribal, then all others will strain to find their own deterrent tribal identity.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

When sixteen, with a new license in my wallet, I took my father for a drive. He cautioned me about driving too fast. I replied, “My reflexes are faster than yours.” “Yes,” he responded, “but you lack judgment.” His words were wise, while mine, which may have retained a scintilla of truth, were foolish.

Having good judgement means having the ability to see things from all sides, the ability to make a choice based on logic, experience, reason, and good sense. Good judgement is related to wisdom, which can be defined as having insight, understanding, perception, and common sense. Mimicking Einstein’s words in the rubric above, the four sources of wisdom, according to the Book of Proverbs, are: observation and experience, instruction based on experience, learning from mistakes, and revelation. The latter refers to the fact that the Bible teaches us that God is the ultimate source of wisdom.

But today wisdom has yielded to wokeness, which is defined as the state of being aware of social problems: racism, inequality, sustainability, and injustice. Everyone agrees that racism and injustice should be combatted wherever found. We all agree that equality before the law is critical to a democracy, and that equal opportunities should be offered to all. But we are not equal in abilities or aspiration, so outcomes will never be equal. In his new book, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategies, Henry Kissinger wrote of “the natural inequalities of endowments,” which should be harnessed “for the public good.” Individually, we should play to our strengths, be they academic, athletic, mechanical, or artistic. We should strive to do what we are best at: teaching, building homes, playing the Cello, investing, or plumbing. It is what makes a strong community. And while we should agree that care for the environment is a sacred trust, it would be foolish to let the quest for sustainability destroy our capitalist system, which has raised living standards, reduced poverty, and made life more bearable for the world’s poorest. We can and should do both.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/stealth_jihad_is_alive_and_well_.html

Thirteen years ago, the Center for Security Policy Press published Shariah: The Threat to America, Report of Team BII.  They pointed out that “[t]he most important entity promoting Islamic supremacism, shariah, and the caliphate… is the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), or in Arabic, the Ikhwan.” 

Moreover, “The MB defined this form of warfare as ‘civilization jihad’ in its strategic document for North America [.]”

The “Movement” is a ‘settlement’ process to establish itself inside the United States and, once rooted, to undertake a ‘grand jihad’ characterized as a ‘civilization jihadist’ mission that is likewise led by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Specifically, the document explained that the civilization jihadist process involves a ‘grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated [.]

Known as “stealth jihad” it is meant to “employ whatever tactics are most expedient… and take control of the political authority.” [emphasis mine].

Despite this warning, rather than go full force to root out this campaign, U.S. national intelligence, law enforcement, and security leadership hid the Islamic origins of jihadist terrorism from the public.  In fact, for years, “senior Pentagon commanders have labored to define the threat out of existence.”

So it should be no surprise that “The Muslim vote may have helped secure Democratic Party control of the Senate.”  Consequently, the Red-Green Alliance is in full force.

In 2018, Trevor Loudon explained “how Muslims intent on fundamentally transforming America have achieved an ominous beachhead in Minnesota, thanks in large measure to that state’s long-dominant radical left.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/attacking-reparations-from-the-left/

The push for reparations may be upon us once again. While outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi voted last year for a bill that would create a commission to study the issue, incoming Democrat House leader Hakeem Jeffries is far more energized about it, being one of the bill’s earliest supporters and having testified at a related congressional hearing that white reconciliation has “a long way to go” and that reparations will help the country “march[] to a more perfect union.”

Meanwhile, according to the press release of a reparations symposium held a couple weeks back—an insiders’ event attended by the bill’s lead sponsor Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee as well as CNN Legal Analyst Areva Martin, among 60 others—there is a “tremendous number of local reparations initiatives that are springing up nationally.” Topping the day of talks was likely last week’s recommendation from California’s reparations task force to pay out to black slave descendants in the state a total of $569 billion or $223,200 apiece. Following that news, New York Democrats announced they will be pushing for something similar.

My, has the left changed. According to the “old school” World Socialist Website (WSW), reparations for black slavery has the odor of a “financial” and “political scam”; one utilized by the uber-cynical Democratic Party to divide the working class in order to win corporate support and electoral gain. While hard socialists, WSW are pre-woke leftists, and their critiques of the performative, racial politics of today’s Democrats is about as biting as anything conservatives can produce. They do deserve attention.