RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-gift-hillary-clinton-needs-for-her-75th-birthday/

“The best gift Hilary Clinton could give herself — and the rest of us — on her 75th birthday would be to remove herself from public life.”

Today is Hillary Clinton’s 75th birthday, as Luther noted. Earlier this week, the former first lady, U.S. senator, secretary of state, and current not-president celebrated with “about 100 of her top donors and longtime supporters at the St. Regis in New York to talk about her future,” Teddy Schleifer of Puck reported. No, she won’t be running for anything. But she is thinking about her legacy. So “she has been pitching donors on a new philanthropic entity called the Hillary Rodham Clinton Leadership Project,” according to Schleifer. He continues:

The new Clinton initiative will both highlight what Clinton has already done, particularly for women around the world, and serve as a new home for Clinton to talk about her own philanthropic work going forward—on democracy, global health and leadership development.

So Hillary spent her birthday figuring out how to profit from the same brand-driven, elite-level arbitrage that she and her husband have depended on ever since the end of his presidency. (And before that presidency’s end.) Points for consistency, I guess. What certain people and institutions see in Hillary, so much so that they continue to pointlessly reward and elevate her — as a paragon of “leadership!” — well after her political utility has expired, is beyond me.

When it seemed likely that she would become president, all those donations to the “Clinton Global Initiative” — since dried up — at least made a crude political sense, even as they were the quintessence of modern elite corruption. A President Hillary — just typing the words suffices to make one shudder, especially this close to Halloween — would be someone you’d want to have exchanged favors with. But failed-candidate Hillary? The one who spends her days stewing about the past and engaging in the same kind of election denialism she condemns when it comes from the other side? What’s the point?

Indeed, the best present Hilary Clinton could give herself on her 75th birthday would be to remove herself from public life. She should spend her remaining years in pleasant quietude, being with her grandchildren, going on walks, and tinkering with powered-exoskeleton builds. Her retirement would double as a welcome gift for the rest of us.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/26/the-switcheroos-of-the-two-parties/

Our two parties have both changed, and that explains why one will win, and one lose in the midterm elections.

The old Democrats have faded away after being overwhelmed by radicals and socialists.

Moderates who once embraced Bill Clinton’s opportunistic “third way” are now either irrelevant or nonexistent.

Once considered too wacky and socialist to be taken seriously, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the performance-art “squad,” the radicals of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and her hard progressive wing are today’s Democratic Party kingpins.

The alienating radicals of Antifa and Black Lives Matter often serve as the new party’s shock troops on the streets. They opportunistically appear to push the party to embrace no-bail laws, defunding the police, and the destruction of the fossil fuel industry. 

Since none of those positions poll even close to 50 percent with the public, the Democrats routinely either slur their opponents as racists, nativists, and climate denialists or obsess on another Trump psychodrama distraction from the Russia collusion hoax to the Mar-a-Lago raid.

What “blue dog” centrists are left in the Democratic Party either keep mum or, like Tulsi Gabbard, flee in disgust. 

Donald Trump also recalibrated the Republican Party and helped to turn it into a nationalist-populist movement that would rather win rudely than lose politely. The MAGA agenda pushed Jacksonian deterrence rather than unpopular nation-building abroad. It finally focused on fair rather than just free trade.  Republicans now unite in demanding only legal immigration and promoting domestic investment rather than globalist outsourcing and offshoring. 

In response, many of the old Bush-Romney country-club wing left in disgust. Others licked their wounds as fanatical NeverTrump something or others. 

Both parties have also been radically changed by additional issues of class, race, and wealth. 

Compare the income profiles of voters, whether by ZIP codes or congressional districts. A once lunch-bucket carrying, union member Democratic Party has become the enclave of three key constituencies. 

First, there is the subsidized and often inner-city poor. 

Second, the meat of the party, is the upscale, bicoastal professional and suburban credentialed classes. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/26/the-economy-will-never-prosper-under-biden-heres-why/

Voters who think that putting Republicans in control of the House and Senate will make a big difference for the economy are in for a rude awakening. President Joe Biden has unleashed the regulatory Leviathan. Lawmakers will be hard-pressed to stop the damage.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) just this morning released its hugely valuable report called “10,000 Commandments,” which is a compendium of the regulatory state. In it, CEI Vice President for Policy Clyde Wayne Crews lays out the terrible truth about Biden’s regulatory zeal.

The first thing you have to understand about federal regulation is how massive it already is, with compliance costs that total more than $1.9 trillion a year.  

That’s bigger than Canada’s entire GDP. It’s bigger, in fact, than all but seven nations in the world. It works out to almost $15,000 per household.

And it is growing at a ferocious pace. From 1995 to last year, regulators issued a total of 114,821 new rules.

The cost of complying with this mountain of mandates is on top of the $6.3 trillion the feds spent this year, which means the true cost of government equals roughly a third of the nation’s economy.

Some Republican presidents have tried to whittle this down, but Democratic administrations always come into office well prepared to reinvigorate regulators.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-gatekeepers-woke-michael-lind

“On or around December 1910, human character changed,” wrote Virginia Woolf. Between 2010 and 2012, American culture changed. Within a few years, what had been obscure concepts in politicized university departments like gender studies and ethnic studies became orthodoxy not only in the academy, media, and the nonprofit sector, but also in the boardrooms of national and global corporations, banks, and in professional associations like the American Bar and Medical associations.

In 2010, if you had said that unisex bathrooms in public schools were necessary to accommodate nonbinary students, hardly anyone, even among progressives, would have known what you were talking about. Then in 2016 the Obama Education Department suddenly threatened to cut off federal funding to K-12 schools that did not allow students suffering from gender dysphoria to use bathrooms reserved for the opposite sex. The Obama Justice Department threatened to sue North Carolina for passing a law requiring people to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates. By the time it rescinded the law, HB 2, in 2017, the state of North Carolina had lost billions of dollars thanks to simultaneous boycotts by the National Basketball Association, the National College Athletic Association, Deutsche Bank, PayPal, and other corporations and financial institutions.

In isolation, the transgender controversy might have been viewed as a strange aftershock of the gay rights movement, which achieved its much more moderate goals of civil and marriage equality for gay men and lesbian women by the first decade of the 21st century. But the imposition of transgender ideology through economic compulsion by the federal government and major private sector institutions was only the beginning. It was followed by the march through the institutions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) based on “critical race theory” (CRT), a sectarian ideology that holds that all whites and “white-adjacent” Asian Americans, no matter how poor and powerless, are “privileged,” while all Black and Hispanic Americans, no matter how rich and powerful, are “marginalized” members of “underserved communities.”

By the 2020s, at one university after another, applicants for faculty positions were required to submit “DEI statements,” listing the ways that they would personally advance this particular ideology through their work as teachers and researchers. Campus commissars were appointed to ensure that faculty reading lists and guest speaker panels had the appropriate race and gender makeup. In corporations, banks, universities, and government agencies, the relatively anodyne “diversity training” of the late 20th century, designed to minimize the possibility of racial or sexual discrimination lawsuits, gave way to DEI trainings. The goal of such exercises was not to promulgate knowledge of specific anti-discrimination rules and procedures, but to engage staff in Maoist-style struggle sessions designed to break down the personalities and identities of non-Hispanic white Americans and Asian Americans through confession of “microaggressions” and “racial privilege.”

https://victorhanson.com/january-6th-versus-the-durham-revelations-part-one/

There are now two concurrent Washington, D.C.-area dramas.

One is the last gasp of the politically motivated January 6th Committee hearings.

The proceedings have been restarted to coincide with the final stretch of the midterms and to give Rep. Lynn Cheney a last appearance of political legitimacy, before in defeat she loses public attention.

She will be soon orphaned from her current leftwing aficionados who (only) temporarily appreciate her useful idiocy. And her former conservative loyalists see her apostasy as self-obsessed narcissism and teeth-gnashing for naively betting on the complete and lasting disgrace of Donald Trump, the supposedly successful, bipartisan “healing” administration of Joe Biden, and the “return of sanity” of the Republican Party to presentable and nobly losing Washington-centric Romneyism and McCainism. She lost in a landslide in Wyoming, but had she been running for a national office, she would have lost any such effort by a comparable margin.

For all its pathetic virtue signaling, the committee could never get around the fact that Speaker Pelosi, by vetoing Republican appointees, had turned the proceedings into a Soviet-style show trial.