RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

The book reviewed, Great Society by Amity Schlaes, is a timely history of what happens when hopes and expectations exceed capabilities. It is especially timely now when Socialism and the “Green New Deal” are being pushed on the American people by a progressive left that has become distanced from the average American.

By the time John Kennedy became President, The Depression was a distant memory and World War II had been over for over fifteen years. Americans were prospering. Theys felt good about themselves. They were admired by friends and feared by enemies. But, as happens once prosperity becomes common, people don’t seem to care or understand the role capitalism plays in eliminating poverty and making lives comfortable and happy. They don’t understand that nothing moves in straight lines – GDP growth, stock market performance, human emotions, or views of liberty. In the 1960s, the compounded rate for the Dow Jones Industrial Averages (DJIA) was 4.9% – all in the first half of the decade – and in the ensuing decade, the DJIA lost eight percent. What happened in the ‘60s, and its effect on subsequent decades, is the subject of this well-researched history of the period from the summer of 1960 to the summer of 1972. 

On January 20, 1961, a 43-year-old John F. Kennedy became the youngest U.S. President since Theodore Roosevelt. In his inaugural he focused on the Country’s strength and the meaning of freedom: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” Americans were confident. In May of that same year, Kennedy announced a goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Yet the Cold War persisted, poverty had not been vanquished and civil rights were not equally shared. Convinced of a need to stop the spread of Communism got us entangled in Vietnam. Concern for those living in penury led to the War on Poverty. Disquiet about equality and fairness were behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A decade that began on a high note, exemplified in Kennedy’s inaugural, ended with Nixon taking the nation off the gold standard on August 15, 1971. The years between witnessed a growth in national debt, a declining Dollar, student riots, and the assassination of a President, a civil rights leader and a U.S. Senator and Presidential candidate.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cuomo-memoir-blames-republicans-right-wing-media-for-nursing-home-coronavirus-controversy/

New York governor Andrew Cuomo in his new memoir blames conservatives and right-wing media for the controversy over coronavirus outbreaks in the state’s nursing homes.

Around 6,700 nursing home residents in New York were known to have died of COVID-19. However, if a nursing home resident dies in a hospital, the state does not record that casualty as a “nursing home” death.

This has led to speculation that coronavirus deaths among New York nursing home residents is higher than reported. A June analysis by the Empire Center, an Albany-based think tank, found that it was more likely that 10,000 nursing home residents had died of COVID-19 up to that time.

Critics have charged that New York’s outbreak was worsened by a March 25 executive order, signed by Governor Cuomo and approved by New York health commissioner Howard Zucker, requiring nursing homes to readmit residents even if they were infected with coronavirus. Cuomo has repeatedly dismissed concerns about the executive order.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/who_will_have_written_obamas_new_book_not_obama.html

When the first half of Barack Obama’s long overdue memoir, Promised Land, is published on November 17, I expect to receive calls like the one I received in the spring of 2011.  That call came from a fellow named Michael Cohen.  I did not recognize the name at the time.  Nor did I know how Cohen got my cell number.  He explained that he was the attorney for Donald Trump — I did recognize that name — and he wanted to know what I knew about Barack Obama’s origins.

Ever since I first started questioning the authorship of Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, I would occasionally get calls like this from people of a higher pay grade than mine.  Having followed the birth certificate issue only from a distance, I recommended instead that Trump focus on the authorship question.  As I explained to Cohen, although Obama claimed to have written both his books by himself, he definitely had help, much of it from terrorist turned educator Bill Ayers.  This I deduced from my literary forensic work in the summer and fall of 2008.

Mainstream biographer Christopher Andersen confirmed Ayers’s involvement in his Obama-friendly 2009 book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage.  Andersen’s sources in Obama’s Hyde Park neighborhood told him that Obama found himself deeply in debt and “hopelessly blocked.”  At “Michelle’s urging,” Obama “sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.”

What attracted the Obamas were “Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer” as evident in his 1993 book To Teach.  Noting that Obama had already taped interviews with many of his relatives, both African and American, Andersen elaborates, “These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers.”  Ayers himself took credit for Dreams on multiple occasions, usually, but not always, with a wink and a nod.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/how-socialism-will-trash-your-life-mark-tapson/

Socialism is all the rage among young Americans these days. Not the kind of socialism that has never worked anywhere in history. Not the kind that drove Venezuela from South America’s most prosperous economy into a failed state in a mere two decades. Not the kind that wreaked essentially the same havoc upon once-thriving Cuba. Not those real-world examples, but the new-and-improved, democratic socialism, which, as MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle recently assured viewers, is “a lot different” from those other forms of socialism.

Those young Americans who are enamored of such icons of democratic socialism as lifelong communist Sen. Bernie Sanders and economics-challenged, radical Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez desperately need to read Paul H. Rubin’s short but vital book A Student’s Guide to Socialism: How It Will Trash Your Lives, a joint publication of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Bombardier Books, an imprint of Post Hill Press.

As the title indicates, the book is aimed at young readers and is thus a quick, easy read, tailored to their tragically short attention spans and tenuous grasp of economics. Its purpose is not simply to rehash abstract, theoretical points of contrast between socialism and capitalism, but to explain to those uninformed (or misinformed) young people exactly how socialism would impact them and affect their future if it were actually to be adopted here in the United States, as polls indicate an alarming percentage of young people would prefer. Put simply, it answers the question, “What will my life be like if I live under socialism?”

Mr. Rubin is Emeritus Dobbs Professor of Economics at Emory University and a former economic advisor in D.C., including for the Reagan administration as Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. The author of a dozen books and dozens of Wall St. Journal op-eds, Rubin not only knows whereof he speaks but knows how to communicate economic ideas in clear, jargon-free, unbiased language – a skill that eludes most academics and economists. In A Student’s Guide to Socialism, Rubin shrewdly chose not to speak down to, or talk over the heads of, the audience who most needs to absorb his message that life under socialism will not be the egalitarian utopia its adherents fantasize. On the contrary, as the book’s own subtitle bluntly tells readers, “it will trash your lives.”