RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/breaking-mike-pence-cancels-new-hampshire-trip-to-return-to-d-c-reason-unclear/

Late Tuesday morning, Air Force 2 altered its flight path, returning Vice President Mike Pence to Washington, D.C. and taking him away from his scheduled meeting in Salem, New Hampshire. Rumors swirl as to the reason for this sudden change, but sources have said it does not involve Pence’s health.

“Crowd leaving the Granite Recovery Center in Salem, NH where [Pence] was supposed to participate in a round table and speak to audience of 200. Just told Air Force 2 was turned around due to an emergency and the Vice President is now headed back to DC,” NBC 10’s Alison King tweeted shortly after 11 a.m. Eastern.

King added that she was “just told it is not an ’emergency’ (1st word used) that the [vice president] is sent back to DC. Now being told it is a ‘diversion.’. No explanation yet of what that means.”

BS White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor shared an official denial that the change had anything to do with the health of the president or vice president.

There is an outside chance the schedule shift might have something to do with New Hampshire’s Pease Air National Guard Base going on lockdown at about 1122 a.m. Possible shots were reportedly heard on the base, and the incident is being treated as an active shooter scenario.

The base is a 39-minute drive away from Salem.

Update 1:17 p.m.:

Now officials are saying Pence never left Washington, D.C.

“The [Vice President] never left Washington, DC. There was no ’emergency callback.’ Something came up that required the VP to stay in DC. We’ll reschedule NH shortly,” Farah tweeted.

If Pence never left D.C., where did the original story come from? If he did leave, why would officials try to cover that up?

Update 1:22 p.m.:

Reports are saying the Pease shooter scare has nothing to do with Pence’s travel plans.

Update 1:41 p.m.

In remarks to Reuters, Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, also said the plane never left.

“The vice president was called back to the White House but there’s no cause for alarm and we’ll reschedule the trip soon,” Short said.

Short said Pence’s plane never actually left Washington.   STAY TUNED

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-healthy-tax-break-11562021565

By the left’s account you’d think the Trump Administration’s only ambition on health care is to rip insurance from the poor and sick. So note that a Health and Human Services rule finalized last month represents a dramatic expansion in health-care choices for those who may have limited insurance options.

The Trump Administration finished regulations expanding health reimbursement arrangements, often known as HRAs. The arrangements will allow an employer to give a worker tax-exempt dollars to buy a health-insurance plan in the individual market. Such arrangements have existed in some form since the early 2000s, but the Obama Administration used the Affordable Care Act to limit them.

The practical effect of the new rule is to extend the tax advantage for employer health care to individuals who purchase their own insurance. This would help to rectify an injustice in the tax code, which favors employer insurance. The better route economically would be to nix the employer tax exclusion, but Republicans in 2017 couldn’t even agree to nibble at the tax preference as part of doomed bills repealing and replacing ObamaCare. Alas.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/austin-goes-from-harmlessly-weird-to-dangerously-stupid-by-legalizing-camping-on-city-streets/

Austin has long been the weird, liberal capital of Texas. The rest of Texas just sort of shrugs and puts up with it. Austin is quirky. Austin is odd. Austin lives in its own little world. Austin is also home to some of the best live music joints anywhere and you have to work pretty hard to find a bad restaurant in the city, so it’s not without its charms. The joke about Austin is that it’s nice because it’s so close to Texas (its the capital, a deep blue dot surrounded by a vast red sea). Austin is like that oddball cousin we all have. He’s there. He picks his nose and argues with light posts. But he’s nice and basically no threat to anyone, so whaddyagonnado?

Well, Texas’ weird cousin just became a threat to itself and others.

On June 20, the Austin city council passed what has to be one of the dumbest, most nonsensical ordinances since the city’s last idiotic, nonsensical ordinance (they pass a lot of ‘em, bless their hearts).

The city council made it perfectly legal to camp out on the city’s public spaces and sidewalks, under bridges and overpasses and, well, everywhere all over town – except, notably, parks and Austin City Hall.

That’s right. The city council exempted themselves from seeing homeless campouts — let’s call them Adlervilles, after the esteemed Mayor Steve Adler — on their own front porch. Mayor Adler and his cohort deemed city hall camping out of bounds. But you, owner of the local cookie store or overtaxed home, will get to see and step over and around all manner of things right out in your yard 24-7 now. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/01/heres-republicans-ask-robert-mueller-testifies/

When Democrats heard last week that Robert Mueller would testify before the House judiciary and oversight committees on July 17, they were as giddy as a 72-year-old Jerry Nadler waiting to question Hope Hicks. But unless committee Republicans botch the hearing—something entirely possible—the left’s strategy of placing Mueller center stage in their continued attempts to underdo the results of the 2016 presidential election will backfire bigly.

Why? For the simple reason that Mueller’s 400-plus page report presented the worst the special counsel could muster against Trump, so any new revelations will play to the president’s advantage.

So, what should Republicans do to make the most of Mueller’s appearance, both politically and from an oversight perspective? Two things: (1) Leave the political grandstanding to the Democrats and (2) Ask the right questions.

While it might be tempting for Republicans on the Hill to speechify on the left’s continuing witch hunt or condemn the Democrats for wasting the committee’s time on a political stunt, the members on the right side of the aisle would be better served by approaching the hearings seriously. Republican committee members should let Trump score political points via Twitter and resist the urge to pose the “Sir, are you incompetent, or a political hack?” questions they may feel the special counsel deserves. Instead, conservatives should use their limited time to hit five key themes.

Mueller Found No Russia Collusion

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/30/the-anti-trump-circus/

We are now in the fourth year of an anti-Trump mania, and about reaching the point of caricature.

The Left should have learned something after the failed celebrity appeal to undermine the Electoral College, the initial articles of impeachment, the empty invocations of the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, and the 25th Amendment, the 22-month, $35 million Mueller investigation deflation, the periodical silly “bombshell” announcements of perennially wrong and comical Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the pathetic palace coup attempt of Andrew McCabe, the assassination chic from the likes of Madonna, Snoop Dogg, or Kathy Griffin, or the deification of the slimy prophet Michael Avenatti.

Not at all. An entire new cast of carnival characters has arrived on the scene to take up where the now imploded Left off. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) has replaced Schiff in the unhinged congressional investigative limelight. In his latest hearing, Nadler obtusely insisted on addressing former Trump White House aide Hope Hicks as “Ms. Lewandowski.” Even Democrats were puzzled—given that Nadler’s supposed “slip of the tongue” was repeated three times until Hicks finally corrected him.

Even in the age of gender transitioning and speech reduced to Twitter-like grunts, sane people still do not confuse the four-syllable name of the male Lewandowski as some sort of homophone for the one syllable name of the female Hicks.

Was Nadler in tawdry fashion then trying repeatedly to traffic in stale and unfounded rumors that the married Lewandowski had had an affair with Hicks? In the age of #MeToo was the enlightened feminist Nadler implying that Hicks was somehow the sexually compromised tool of the former controversial Trump aide? Or was he so unhinged in his hatred of the president to the point of conflating his make-believe enemies into some sort of composite delusionary specter? Did a Republican committee member ever repeatedly address witness Lisa Page as “Ms. Strzok”? That “slip of the tongue” or “confusing”of two one-syllable names at least would have been fueled by a real and substantiated affair.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274178/antifa-thugs-brutalize-journalist-andy-ngo-matthew-vadum

Independent journalist Andy Ngo, known for documenting Antifa’s violence, was himself assaulted by members of the radical leftist group June 29 in Portland, Oregon.

The Quillette editor and photojournalist suffered a brain hemorrhage that required him to stay in a hospital overnight, Quillette reports.

The day before the assault, Ngo tweeted his anxieties about covering the June 29 demonstration.

“I am nervous about tomorrow’s Portland Antifa rally. They’re promising ‘physical confrontation’ & have singled me out to be assaulted. I went on Tucker Carlson last year to explain why I think they’re doing this: They’re seeking meaning through violence.”

According to Quillette, “[t]he scene was captured by local reporter Jim Ryan, whose video can be accessed at the link below.”

Quillette offered a warning to potential viewers of the video:

We caution readers that it is an unsettling spectacle—by which we mean not only the violence itself, but the unconstrained glee this pack of mostly young men exhibit as they brutalize a journalist whom they’d spent months demonizing on social media, and whom they’d explicitly singled out for attack.

The attack on Ngo is yet another reminder that the totalitarianism-loving domestic terrorists of Antifa, who call themselves anti-fascist activists, are the real fascists in today’s America because, among other things, they use violent tactics pioneered by the real-live fascist storm-troopers of Weimar Germany, the Sturmabteilung (SA). These Antifa goons opposed the Nazis but eagerly copied their tactics, using their fists to shut down political opponents and break up meetings and rallies. Some Antifa today even dress like Nazis, wearing black and red, the anarchist colors which traditionally have also been used by Nazis.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-lie-of-portlands-anti-fa/

There was a time when “anti-fascist” meant what it said. People who opposed fascism called themselves “anti-fascists.” But then the term slipped. The definition of “fascist” became hazy from over-use and so the term “anti-fascist” also began to move. This might seem to be a theoretical matter. But it is one that ends up encouraging and condoning horrific scenes like those in the center of Portland on Saturday.

For some time, self-described “anti-fascists,” or Antifa, have been finding spurious and imaginary reasons for demonstrating in the city. Though these are less like demonstrations than carnivals of civil disobedience, violence and intimidation. One of the very few journalists to have taken an interest in the repeated shutting down of the city center by these groups has been the young journalist Andy Ngo. Despite the police apparently regularly handing over the city to Antifa to do what they want, there has been relatively little coverage of this whole story in the mainstream press. And despite being repeatedly hounded and intimidated by anti-fa, on Saturday Ngo once again went to cover events in Portland.

This time, Antifa went even further than they have before, with several of their number assaulting Ngo, stealing his equipment, and repeatedly smashing his face with weapons and projectiles. It appears that the Portland police once again stood by and allowed this to happen.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/antifa-fascists/

George Orwell, writing in 1944:

[W]hen we apply the term ‘Fascism’ to Germany or Japan or Mussolini’s Italy, we know broadly what we mean. It is in internal politics that this word has lost the last vestige of meaning. For if you examine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist during the past ten years…

A copious list then follows.

Orwell:

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.

But:

Even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

And the way that penultimate sentence could apply to the vicious assault on journalist Andy Ngo is all too obvious.

In the course of a fine post earlier today on this Corner, Douglas Murray observed:

There was a time when “anti-fascist” meant what it said. People who opposed fascism called themselves “anti-fascists.” But then the term slipped. The definition of “fascist” became hazy from over-use and so the term “anti-fascist” also began to move.

Orwell would agree.

But then Douglas goes on to write this:

Second, anyone in any doubt over who the fascists and the anti-fascists are today should watch the footage of Ngo being attacked. Might the fascists be the thugs who wear face masks in the middle of the day in an American city and carry out mob assaults on journalists?

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jun/29/andy-ngo-beaten-up-by-antifa-activists-at-portland/

An Oregon photojournalist who covers Portland’s frequently violent protest scene was taken to the hospital Saturday after being attacked by black-masked antifa activists.

Andy Ngo, an editor at the online platform Quillette, said he was struck on the head and face “multiple times” by antifa protesters, who also threw objects and a milkshake at him as he tried to walk away.

The attack, recorded in part by the Oregonian and posted on Twitter, came during Saturday’s Rose City Antifa counter-protest against a rally held by the far-right group Proud Boys in downtown Portland.

Mr. Ngo had bloody cuts and bruises on his face, and his hair and shirt were covered with milkshake, as shown in a video he posted on Twitter shortly after the assault.

“I just got beat up by the crowd — no police at all — in the middle of the street,” Mr. Ngo said in the post. “And they stole my GoPro. And they punched me several times in my face and head, and I’m bleeding.”

Mr. Ngo, a right-leaning journalist who regularly films Portland’s protest activity, has written for the Wall Street Journal, National Review, RealClearPolitics and other publications.

Before the protest, Rose City Antifa had singled out Mr. Ngo in an online post promoting the “Community Self Defense Against Proud Boy Attack,” calling him a “[l]ocal far-right Islamophobic journalist.”

Video posts of Saturday’s clash showed a few dozen right-wing activists holding a rally while hundreds of counter-protesters marched in the street amid a heavy police presence.