RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/democratic-presidental-candidates-big-government-proposals/

‘Free’ health care for all, including illegal aliens, will cost trillions.

When it comes to health care, the Democratic presidential candidates offer the same cure: Big Government. Their chief prescriptions are almost stereotypically statist. Their “remedies” include destruction of private property, huge tax hikes, and “freebies” — even to people who break into this country. This would be underwritten by the Democrats’ go-to source for funding their zany schemes: the beleaguered American taxpayer.

Decrying White House efforts to scuttle Obamacare, Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist, Vt.) said at the June 27 Democratic debate in Miami: “President Trump, you’re not standing up for working families when you try to throw 32 million people off the health care that they have.”

What chutzpah.

As Medicare for All’s chief sponsor, Sanders would terminate, with extreme prejudice, the private health plans of roughly 180 million Americans — nearly six times as many cancellations as Sanders claims Trump wants.

“I’m with Bernie on Medicare for All,” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts chirped in her debate. Bill de Blasio, New York City’s breathtakingly inept mayor, gleefully concurred. California senator Kamala Harris raised her hand when NBC’s Lester Holt asked, “Who here would abolish their private health insurance in favor of a government-run plan?” She later reversed herself and said that she misheard the question. Regardless, she is a Senate co-sponsor of Sanders’s bill, as are New Jersey’s Cory Booker and New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, also White House wannabes.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/10/street-smarts-in-the-white-house/

President Trump went to an Ivy League school, but he came out still talking like a New Yorker, with his street smarts intact. What does it mean to have street smarts? It’s knowledge of how to spot trouble coming, how to cope with mean bastards, and thrive. It is knowledge gained from gritty life, which gives you “a bank of courage to depend on when you are tested.” Your knowledge is based in your life experience, not conventional wisdom or academic notions, so it is actually real.

Street smarts combines common sense, self-preservation, and assertiveness. Think President Trump.

The person with street smarts has a great bullshit detector. You know how to deal with bullies and cheats, whether they be elite media or political opponents. As Willie Dixon put it, “You can’t mess with the messer, the messer’s gonna mess with you.”

Trump’s success dominating his dirty-dealing opponents has amazed and dumbfounded Democrats and the old GOP alike. They don’t understand his strengths. Like a martial arts master, Trump doesn’t absorb his enemies’ attacks. He transforms their assaults into his own energy to win.

President Trump’s street smarts go way beyond dealing with enemies. It is the key to how he carved his own successful path in life, and in the White House. The key to street smarts is noticing life as it is and dealing with it. In high falutin’ psychology terms, it is reality testing, the highest order of brain functioning.

Reality testing is essential to good judgment and effectiveness in life. It means dealing with the world as it is, not as you want it to be, nor as you fear it to be. No socialism, no global warming, no free lunch.

Good judgment requires facing things as they are. Democrats lack it almost entirely. President Trump has it in excess. Reality testing is a rare gift. It is called common sense, but it is not common.

This is why President Trump has managed to accomplish so much that was deemed impossible in the two difficult areas of the economy and foreign affairs. He pays no attention to the received truths of other people. He looks simply and without equivocation at what’s in front of him. Like any builder, President Trump has his two feet solidly on the ground at all times.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274269/democrat-who-let-jeffrey-epstein-get-away-daniel-greenfield

The Florida prosecutor who allowed Jeffrey Epstein to get away with the abuse of children is a very popular guy in Palm Beach.

The YWCA of Palm Beach County (“eliminating racism, empowering women”) offers the Barry Krischer Humanitarian Award and the Domestic Violence Council has a Barry Krischer scholarship.

Last year, the ADL honored Krischer with its Jurisprudence Award.

The Florida Bar had honored Kirscher with a lifetime achievement award and he’s still listed as a member in good standing. Even Jeb Bush had bestowed a Peace at Home award on the prosecutor.

Krischer sits on the Criminal Justice Commission and offers training to law enforcement, court personnel and child welfare providers on dealing with crimes of sexual violence. His bio states that he remains active in “child welfare issues” through his work with the Department of Children and Families.

The former Palm Beach County State Attorney had made national news three times during his career. Once when he went after Rush Limbaugh, then after Ann Coulter, two Republicans, and when, after being handed the case of Epstein, a co-founder of the Clinton Global Initiative, he gave him a pass.

Barry Krischer is a Democrat. Jeffrey Epstein is a billionaire donor to Democrats.

As Chief Prosecutor, Krischer had made his reputation with a zero-tolerance policy of prosecuting juveniles as adults. But after Epstein had abused underage girls, Krischer, according to the detective on the case, ignored police efforts to charge him with four counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor and instead the billionaire abuser was indicted only on a minor charge of solicitation of prostitution.

http://politicalmavens.com/

Stimulated by the reports of federal prosecutors probing the nefarious activities of Jeffrey Epstein, I googled “online sites with nude girls” and was surprised to see that 874 million such sites are available to us. When I added “teenage” to the request, the number jumped to 1, 470,000,000 – it’s hard to say that number and much worse to believe. “Sexy pictures of children” fetches a mere 185 million sites, all of which are perfectly legal to look at. The only thing that’s against the law in our state is printing, downloading or stashing them. One would hope that faced with the enormity of underage sex trafficking online, our legislators would be hounding NY State for new legislation that would stop this public epidemic at its source. Yet the legislation currently being considered in Albany has to do with decriminalizing prostitution so that sex workers get more respectability as well as better compensation for their work.

But the internet is not the only purveyor of sexual activity – it’s all over the cable tv. channels, even those without warnings concerning appropriateness for certain viewers. We seem to be swimming through a flood of interest and concern with all types of sex – LGBTQ, gender fluidity, drag queens, women who join cults such as Nexium where other women turn them into sex slaves and they are forcibly tied to a table nude to be branded by their owner’s initials in their pubic areas. All of this is reported in great detail in our newspaper of record – not in some salacious magazine for aficionados of perversion.

According to a study funded by the Justice Department in 2016, 21,000 underage children are part of the national sex trade, over 21 % of all people trafficked for sex. An astounding fact is that human trafficking is the fastest growing organized crime activity in the U.S. earning circa 32 billion dollars a year. 70 % of these transactions take place online and most of them involve women. When was the last time you read an article in the New York Times about attempts by #MeToo to call attention to this growing tragedy. When did you last read about efforts by the FBI, the Justice Department, Congress or the Media to give this their full attention instead of pursuing solitary billionaire targets who represent less than 1% of this scourge.

https://spectator.us/jeffrey-epstein-lolita-express-unequal-justice/

Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest on federal charges of sex trafficking minors has all the features of a tabloid extravaganza: money, sex, power, and serious crimes. No one deserves the notoriety more. The billionaire financier was already convicted of similar crimes in 2008 and received a very light sentence. Epstein’s plea bargain ended the earlier investigation before any of his friends were implicated. That won’t happen again. The floodlights are on this one.

In 2008, the prosecution negotiated the plea deal while it kept victims in the dark. The underage girls Epstein exploited were not notified in advance about the agreement or allowed to object. A federal judge recently ruled the case was mishandled and the victims should have been heard.

The old case resonates today, not only because the new charges echo the old ones but because the US attorney in charge then, Alex Acosta, is now secretary of labor. The unusual deal had to be approved in Washington, though it is still unclear which Department of Justice officials gave it the green light or why. We’ll undoubtedly learn more about the old case as the new one unfolds.

One thing is certain about the new charges. They will not proceed quietly through the courts, away from inquiring eyes. This time, they are front-page news. The DoJ has already devoted serious attention to them, and they won’t be interested in a backroom deal. The press will be interested, too. The more big names and juicy details, the better.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/08/the-white-supremacist-bogeyman/

They are everywhere.

I am talking, of course, about white supremacists. The news media, Democrats, and NeverTrump Republicans would have us believe the country is under siege by a sinister cabal of Americans who want to return to the days of Jim Crow, or better yet, the era of slavery. Since the election of Donald Trump, white supremacists, we are warned, occupy the White House and control the Republican Party.

The signs are everywhere.

A MAGA hat is the new white hood. A common hand signal for “OK” actually is a way to send a message of solidarity to other white supremacists. So is drinking a glass of milk. Or owning a dog. Or selling an athletic shoe embossed with an American flag designed by Betsy Ross.

Public schools can now access a “toolkit” with lots of advice about how to combat the “rise” in white nationalism. (It is important to note that the terms “alt-right,” “white nationalist,” and “Nazi” are interchangeable with white supremacist.) Last March, Facebook announced “a ban on praise, support and representation of white nationalism and white separatism” and will offer its own kind of virtual intervention by “connecting people who search for terms associated with white supremacy to resources focused on helping people leave behind hate groups.”

White supremacists have an entire cable channel—Fox News—populated by white supremacists such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham who use coded language and dog whistles and whatnot to provoke their fellow klansmen. Don’t believe me? Well, certainly you will believe Representative Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), brother of Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro, who flatly called Ingraham a “white supremacist” on Twitter last week after she compared the conditions at a migrant detention center to U.S. military facilities.

You can’t escape them. 

These fanatics have been spotted at the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and within the friendly confines of Wrigley Field. Restaurant owners are urged to banish them from their eateries while other Americans bravely confront these wannabe George Wallaces at barbecue joints in the nation’s capital. Trump-supporting knitters are censored on a popular website because, according to Ravelry, any “support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/08/govt

Friday’s jobs report showed that the economy created 224,000 new jobs, yet the unemployment rate edged up to 3.7%.

Both are welcome news. The unemployment rate went up because 158,000 rejoined the labor market. These are people who previously didn’t have a job and weren’t looking for one.

The labor market is tight enough that people who’d given up on work are getting lured back into the job market. And they’re finding work.

As of June, there were 5.6 million more people with jobs than when President Trump took office — despite claims by prominent economists that the economy was already at full employment when he was sworn in.

The healthy labor market has resulted in something even more important yet little noticed: A sharp trend away from dependency on federal welfare and other benefits.

Take a look at the numbers:

Food Stamps. The Department of Agriculture reports that April enrollment in food stamps — which is officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — was down more than 308,000.

So far this year, SNAP enrollment has declined by nearly 1.2 million. And since Trump took office, the number of people collecting food stamps has plunged by more than 6.7 million.

Enrollment is now lower than it’s been since August 2009.

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/fact-check-antifa-is-for-angry-white-fascists/

Babylon Bee and Christian Daily Reporter founder Adam Ford tweeted, “Portland Antifa mugshots have been released and I’m sure you’ll agree that the lack of diversity is extremely problematic.”

So problematic. TMZ has more diversity in their collection of mugshots from New Hampshire’s North Country. You’ll find a better cross-section of intersectionality on Martha Stewart’s mailing list. Or maybe these are just everyone’s headshots from a recent casting call for a reboot of “Fargo.”

After sending journalist Andy Ngo to an overnight hospital stay for a brain-bleed last week for the crime of reporting while Asian (or was his crime being gay?), Antifa thugs took their audacity to new lows over the weekend. In more Portland street violence last week, the Rose City Antifa account blamed John Blum for getting in the way of their fists and clubs.

Valerie Richardson reported:

“Oregon III% member John Blum rushed into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters swinging a metal baton at them … the protesters defended themselves,” tweeted Always Antifascist, the Rose City Antifa account.

Mr. Blum insisted that’s not the way it happened. He said he was trying to help a friend who was under siege as well as protect himself after being sprayed by mace. He suffered bruises, a cut over his eye and a gash to his head that required four staples at the emergency room, while his attackers appeared to escape unscathed.

Or as Blum put it in an interview, “The whole reason we do this is because in my opinion, they’re trying to stop us from doing this. Why do they have a right to stop people from doing what they feel is right? To be able to express themselves?”

https://quillette.com/category/features/

The Seattle Times recently reported that an epidemic of hate crimes is taking place in the Emerald City. According to the newspaper, more than 500 bias incidents were reported to Seattle police in 2018 alone, and this figure represents “an increase of nearly 400 percent since 2012.” However, this widely circulated claim is, at the very least, misleading. An examination of the Seattle data indicates that fewer than 40 actual criminal cases resulting from real, serious hate incidents were successfully prosecuted between 2012 and 2017. This provides an excellent case study of how media coverage of flash-point issues such as hate crime can—whether intentionally or not—sensationalize and exaggerate the urgency of social problems.

In the Times piece, headlined “Reported Hate Crimes and Incidents up Nearly 400% in Seattle Since 2012,” reporter Daniel Beekman suggests that the problem continues to get worse, estimating that since 2017 alone, hate cases have jumped 25 percent. He also reports that “community organizations say hate crimes are a serious issue,” and cites sources claiming that “more support from the city” is needed to battle hate crime. Beekman’s tone is relatively measured. But others have delivered more alarmist takes, creating fear that minority residents may be swept up in an “epidemic” of hate.

A look through the data that has been made available from Seattle’s office of the City Auditor reveals that there is little basis for panic. First, most of the situations contained in the 500-plus documented incidents for 2018 turned out not to be hate crimes at all. Out of 521 confrontations or other incidents reported to the police at some point during the year, 181 (35 percent) were deemed insufficiently serious to qualify as crimes of any kind. Another 215 (41 percent) turned out to involve some minor element of bias (i.e., an ethnic slur used during a fight), but did not rise to the definition of hate crime. Only 125, or 24 percent, qualified as potential hate crimes—i.e., alleged “criminal incidents directly motivated by bias.” For purposes of comparison: There are 745,000 people living in Seattle, and 3.5-million in the metro area.