RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/andrew-cuomos-outrageous-budget-deal/

New York’s Democratic governor has given his blessing to a package laden with billions in new taxes and spending.

The leaders of the state of New York just voted themselves a huge pay raise. Andrew Cuomo is about to become the highest-paid governor in the country with a $250,0000 salary. His lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, will get a bump to $220,000, meaning she’ll be better compensated than the governor of California, who is stuck at $202,000. Members of the state Senate and Assembly will see raises from $79,500 to $110,000 in January and to $130,000 in 2021. Not bad for a part-time job.

It’s all part of the orgy of spending that Cuomo just approved in the Empire State’s annual budget, which was passed in the wee hours of Sunday morning after the usual bonanza of craziness. The state’s already-extravagant spending just jumped to $175.6 billion in 2019–2020. That’s a “double whopper with extra cheese,” in the words of City Journal contributing editor Bob McManus, a 13 percent increase (in real, inflation-adjusted dollars) from 2010–2011, when the state’s population was less than 1 percent smaller than it is now.

New York state spends more than twice as much per capita as Florida, and that’s excluding the gargantuan additional spending of New York City, which is on track to outspend Florida this year on its own. If you, like nearly half of the state’s residents, live in New York City, your state and municipal governments are spending more than $13,000 a head annually. Even California isn’t so loose with its purse strings.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/maxine-waters-jussie-smollett-charges-dropped-correct/

Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) claimed over the weekend that Cook County prosecutors did the “correct thing” by dropping the charges pending against Empire actor Jussie Smollett after a grand jury indicted him for staging a hate crime.

“It’s the correct thing that the charges were dropped,” Waters told Extra in a Sunday interview. “First of all, we probably will never know all of the details. We’ve heard a lot of information. No one was hurt — that is, physically, killed, shot — he never committed a crime before, he forfeited the bail, and it’s this kind of situation where they close the case all over the country every day. I have learned this isn’t unusual.”

Cook County state’s attorney Kimberly Foxx announced Tuesday that she had dropped disorderly-conduct charges against Smollett due to his history of community service and the nature of the crime.

“After reviewing all of the facts and circumstances of the case, including Mr. Smollett’s volunteer service in the community and agreement to forfeit his bond to the City of Chicago, we believe this outcome is a just disposition and appropriate resolution to this case,” a statement from Foxx’s office said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-census/trump-declares-u-s-census-meaningless-without-citizenship-question-idUSKCN1RD2DS

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday injected himself into one of the most consequential cases of the current Supreme Court term, saying the nation’s 2020 census would be “meaningless” without adding a citizenship question to the questionnaire.
The comment on Twitter came ahead of an expected Supreme Court ruling by the end of June on whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’ decision to add the citizenship question violated federal law.

“Can you believe that the Radical Left Democrats want to do our new and very important Census Report without the all important Citizenship Question,” Trump tweeted. “Report would be meaningless and a waste of the $Billions (ridiculous) that it costs to put together!”

Trump’s critics have accused the White House of encouraging an undercount by dissuading Hispanics and other immigrants from participating in the census, disproportionately affecting Democratic-leaning states and municipalities.

Many states, cities and civil rights groups have gone to court over the citizenship question, which is among a series of White House policies signaling tighter control over immigration.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-taxing-the-rich-isnt-enough-11554159829

Democrats now control New York’s entire state government, and on Sunday Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed off on a $175.5 billion budget he described as “probably the broadest, most sweeping state plan that we have done.” He certainly spares no taxpayer.Mr. Cuomo brags about limiting increases in operating-fund spending to a modest 2%. But in February Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli noted that Mr. Cuomo’s numbers are “a less meaningful gauge of spending levels and trends,” given how the Governor has repeatedly shifted spending off-budget, adjusted the timing of disbursements, and used other sleights of hand.

Mr. DiNapoli puts the increase at nearly 4%, double the inflation rate. Spending on Medicaid and health-care will rise 3.6% to a total of $19.6 billion. Florida had 1.75 million more residents than New York last year, but its total budget was $88.7 billion.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/obamacare-replacement-republican-party/

President Trump has tasked three Republican senators with coming up with a replacement for Obamacare if courts strike it down. It’s a prudent contingency plan. Republicans should, for that matter, advance their own health-care plan even if the lawsuit fails — as it is highly likely to do, in part because it lacks legal merit.

Republican senators are not notably eager to take up this assignment; their leader Mitch McConnell has suggested that the Senate will wait for the White House and the Democrats to reach a deal before it tackles health care. Republican strategists say the senators are right: Why put forward a plan and open Republicans to attack over it, when the party can concentrate instead on making the case against Democratic proposals to kick Americans off their health insurance and move toward a government monopoly? Why should Republicans reprise the experience of 2017–18, when they bled public support while trying to pass a health-care bill, spent the next election on the defensive on the issue, and then lost dozens of House seats?

A flaw in this cynical calculation is that Republicans cannot prevent Democrats from attacking them over health care by abandoning the issue; if that strategy worked, the 2018 elections would have gone very differently. Most of the Republicans who will be running for office in 2020 have already gone on record wanting to replace Obamacare. The Republican administration is urging its abolition in court. Democrats already have enough warrant to accuse Republicans of seeking to eliminate a health law on which many millions of Americans rely. Republicans can choose whether to respond to that attack by pointing to their own plan, or by letting Democrats devise a caricatured conservative plan to tie to them.

It is true that especially in the event the lawsuit fails, no conservative health-care plan has a chance of passage through a Democratic House. There is not much chance even that a conservative plan can serve as the basis for a bipartisan compromise. Note, however, that it was considerations much like these that kept Republicans from settling on a health-care plan during the Obama administration: They did not want to take responsibility for legislation they had no way to enact. The consequence was that when they had the power to enact legislation, they were unready to do it. They had built no consensus among Republican politicians or voters.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/01/papadopoulos-hints-conversation-launched-trump-russia-probe-fbi-setup/

The recently released transcript of George Papadopoulos’s congressional testimony reveals a significant fact: Papadopoulos’s introduction to Joseph Mifsud—the source of the “Russia has Hillary’s emails” tip that purportedly prompted the FBI to launch an investigation into the Trump campaign—was arranged mere days after Papadopoulos announced he was joining the Trump campaign.

Saturday evening, Papadopoulos rocked Twitter with claims that “a woman in London, who was the FBI’s legal attaché in the U.K.” encouraged him “to meet Joseph Mifsud in Rome in March 2016.” These new revelations raise fresh concerns that, with the approval of the FBI, foreign governments were meddling in the 2016 election.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/31/the-tables-turn-in-russian-collusion-hunt/

The irony of the entire Russian collusion hoax is that accusers who cried the loudest about leaking, collusion, lying, and obstruction are themselves soon very likely to be accused of just those crimes.

Now that Robert Mueller’s 674-day, $30 million investigation is over and has failed to find the original goal of its mandate—evidence of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government to sway the 2016 election—and now that thousands of once-sealed government documents will likely be released in unredacted form, those who eagerly assumed the role of the hunters may become the hunted, due to their own zealous violation of the nation’s trust and its laws.

Take Lying
Former FBI Director James Comey’s testimonies cannot be reconciled with those of his own deputy director Andrew McCabe. He falsely testified that the Steele dossier was not the main basis for obtaining FISA court warrants. On at least 245 occasions, Comey swore under oath that he either did not know, or could not remember, when asked direct questions about his conduct at the FBI. He likely lied when he testified that he did not conclude his assessment of the Clinton illegal email use before he had even interviewed Clinton, an assertion contradicted by his own written report. I guess his credo and modus operandi are reflected in the subtitle of his recent autobiography A Higher Loyalty: “Truth, Lies, and Leadership.”

Andrew McCabe currently is under criminal referral for lying to federal investigators about leaking to the media. He and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein each have accused each other of not telling the whole truth about their shared caper of trying to force President Trump out of office by invoking the 25th Amendment.

https://www.steynonline.com/9255/deep-state-dumpster-fire

For two years, the prefatory “Russia” has been intended to give the word “investigation” more heft, to make it seem as if there was something more than let’s-get-Trump-on-anything. But even the unlimited resources of a wretchedly corrupt federal justice system couldn’t keep that going without something more than Michael Cohen’s taxi medallions (only in America) and a few Russian troll farms, one of whom has amusingly decided to push back in court against Mueller and his showboating cronies.

Other than that, there are, as I said almost two years ago, no Russians in the Russia investigation – and what foreign “interference” with the 2016 election there was from Russia seems to have been amateur and minimal, unless you count MI6 spook Christopher Steele working his Moscow Rolodex on behalf of Hillary Clinton and her Deep State allies. There was, however, extensive domestic interference with the election, in that at the behest of the sitting administration the most powerful figures in the permanent bureaucracy set to work on a sophisticated surveillance operation against its political opposition: “Republics” in the Americas have been invariably prefaced by the qualifier “banana”; it just took Washington a little longer to sign up.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/03/31/the_hate_crimes_of_jussie_smollett_139915.htmlBy Carl M. Cannon – RCP Staff
March 31, 2019

Let’s be clear: A hate crime did take place in Chicago. It’s an ongoing crime, too.

Yes, a hoax occurred — more like two or three hoaxes — but deliberately stoked racial animosity can’t be washed away with the forfeiture of a $10,000 bond, a few hours of dubious “community service,” or the sealing of public records in a criminal case. If history has taught us anything, it’s that hate tends to fester, especially when aided by fraud and abetted by government.

The latest chapter in America’s dispiriting culture wars began Jan. 22, when television actor Jussie Smollett reported receiving a letter with homophobic and racial invective, accompanied by a nasty threat: “You will die, black fag.” The letter also included a stick figure hanging from a tree and a white powdery substance. As its author knew, ever since the 2001 deadly anthrax letter attacks, sending such powder through the mail to a famous and politically active person would result in first-responders in hazmat suits, which is what happened.

Yet this reaction wasn’t enough to satisfy Jussie Smollett. When the white powder turned out not to be anthrax spores but crushed acetaminophen tablets, the incident attracted little attention, even in Chicago. This apparently irked Smollett.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mueller-and-the-obama-accounting-11553534271

The Mueller report confirms that the Obama administration, without evidence, turned the surveillance powers of the federal government against the presidential campaign of the party out of power. This historic abuse of executive authority was either approved by President Barack Obama or it was not. It’s time for Mr. Obama, who oddly receives few mentions in stories about his government’s spying on associates of the 2016 Trump campaign, to say what he knew and did not know about the targeting of his party’s opponents.

If he was briefed, for example, on plans by the Justice Department to seek wiretaps on Trump campaign associates, it’s hard to believe Mr. Obama would not have been highly interested in the matter. Going all the way back to his campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, Mr. Obama had aggressively advocated for preventing federal abuse of surveillance powers.