RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/with_medieval_conditions_in_california_gov_newsom_looks_back_to_the_old_poor_laws.html

California was once called “the Golden State.” It has a mellow climate, its agricultural industry was “the fruit basket of America,” San Francisco was “the City that knew how,” Los Angeles was the “City of Dreams,” and the Sierra mountain range, one of the most beautiful in the world, was a summer and winter pleasure paradise. That’s the California in which I grew up.

The current California isn’t quite so nice. The climate is still lovely, but the agricultural industry has been struggling because of environmental concerns over the Delta Smelt, a small fish.

Regularly occurring droughts, which are part of California’s natural cycle, are proving devastating, mostly because California has refused to upgrade its water system in the last 60 years, even as the population almost doubled. The new plan is to limit people to 55 gallons a day, which gives them a choice on many days between cleaning their clothes or cleaning themselves.

Punishing taxes and regulations routinely drive businesses (aka employers) out of the state.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/14/john-boltons-testimony-would-not-be-the-smoking-gun-democrats-need/

You have to give credit to congressional Democrats for one thing: They are an extremely hopeful bunch. After years of Russia investigations aimed at toppling Donald Trump, they came away with what Grandmother would have called “bupkis.” But, not daunted, they quickly latched onto a whistleblower report about a phone call with Ukraine, and launched an up tempo effort, one last-ditch attempt to take the president down.

The result of this exertion did include a vote to impeach Trump, but did not attract a single GOP vote. This is also almost certain to the result in the senate trial as well. But wait! Now former National Security Adviser John Bolton has agreed to testify if called, and the Democrats are racing toward Lucy again, confident this time she won’t move the football.

The excitement from Democrats comes from the fact that Bolton in the past few months has sent a few mysterious tweets and said through lawyers that he does have information that did not come up in impeachment. Bolton may well have new information, but the idea that he is going walk into the Senate chamber if subpoenaed with a smoking gun is pure wish casting.

The crux of the dispute between Democrats and Republicans over the Trump administration’s action to delay funding to Ukraine is not over whether it happened, but whether the president was acting within his authority. It is almost inconceivable that Bolton could provide any evidence that would change that basic dynamic.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/new-post-trump-consti
The new normal: Impeachment as a routine partisan tool, endless investigations, lying under oath with impunity, surveillance of political enemies, zero accountability …

T he Left sees Donald Trump’s comportment, rallies, and tweets as a new low in presidential behavior that justifies extraordinary countermeasures. But Trump’s personal characteristics are idiosyncratic and may or may not become institutionalized by subsequent presidents. And it is not as if liberal icons such as FDR, LBJ, JFK, and Bill Clinton suddenly became saintly in office.

What is far scarier is the reaction to Trump, in both the constitutional and political sense. What follows are likely the new norms for the next generation of presidents, and they will probably be equally applied to Democrats who implemented them in the Trump era.

1) Private presidential phone calls with foreign leaders will be leaked and printed in the major media. The point will be not so much to air breaking news as to embarrass the president or to use such disclosures to stymie his foreign policy. Those who leak such information will be canonized as part of a “resistance.” Prominent officials in government will publish anonymous op-eds in the New York Times bragging about how they are daily undermining a new president’s administration.

2) Impeachment is now a casual affair. It requires no report of illegal or unethical behavior by a special counsel or special prosecutor. It will not be bipartisan but solely the action of the opposition party in the House when it is in the majority.

Public support will not matter. Much less will it be needed. Impeachment will be applied equally to a first- or second-term presidency. And it will become useful in a reelection year to help drive down an incumbent’s popularity.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/13/unequal-fates-a-real-obama-era-whistleblower-vs-the-trump-whistleblower/

As the Trump impeachment drama continues to unfold on Capitol Hill, the so-called whistleblower in that case enjoys hero-martyr status on the Left and in the news media. Lt. General Michael Flynn has enjoyed no such treatment.

The whistleblower, speaking to internal investigators, pulled no punches in his assessment of the government’s mishandling of the war in Afghanistan.

“As intelligence makes its way up higher, it gets consolidated and really watered down, it gets politicized,” he explained. “It gets politicized because once policymakers get their hands on it . . . they put their twist on it. The policy decisions and the operational decisions, I don’t think matched what the intelligence was saying.”

The 33-year decorated Army officer—with a lengthy career in military intelligence and service in both Afghanistan and Iraq—blasted the “rosy” scenarios promoted by top officials, including the White House, that contradicted what was actually happening on the ground.

“This sense that we are doing great permeates all the way up to the top,” he continued. “As a senior intel officer for many years, my assessments were not good. [I] said it was not at all going well. Never. We are basically fighting the wrong way. We are participating in conflict, we are not really here to win.”

http://acdemocracy.org/

Senator Tom Cotton ((R-AR), important speech on the Alarming Rise of Anti-Semitic Attacks — And How to Stop Them, on the floor of the U.S. Senate on January 8, should be read by all. 
 
The Senator’s warning should have been praised in the headlines of all major media outlets in the U.S., and Israel. But it was mentioned only in a few Jewish and Israeli newspapers, mostly Left-leaning. Though the Senator did not mention George Soros, the headline of the Israeli Left-leaning daily – and New York Times’ partner, Haaretz – screamed: “Sen. Tom Cotton accuses Soros-funded think tank of fostering antisemitism,” implying – as they, and most other progressive radical-Left outlets who act as Soros’s bandogs – that anyone critical of any of many Soros initiatives, is an anti-Semite. 
 
What did Sen. Cotton say to anger Haaretz?  
 
“Anti-Semitism is the ancient hatred, but today it can appear in new disguises. It festers on Internet message boards and social media,” said the Senator. He then had the Chutzpa pointing out that anti-Semitism, “festers in so-called Washington think tanks like the Quincy Institute, [emphasis added] an isolationist blame-America-first money pit for so-called “scholars” who’ve written that American foreign policy could be fixed if only it were rid of the malign influence of Jewish money.” 
 
The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft was founded and funded last year by Charles Koch and George Soros. Koch, the isolationist libertarian billionaire, funder of mostly ultra-right causes critical of U.S. foreign policy, is known, like Soros, for sponsoring academicians and events denouncing alleged Israeli influence in Washington. Koach, who isn’t Jewish, did not make it to Haaretz’s headline. 

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/13/ben-rhodes-attacks-trump-to-obscure-obamas-complicity-in-irans-forever-war/

Despite Rhodes’ propaganda, America is in a far stronger position to deal with Iran’s provocations under Trump than at any time since Obama entered office.

Peevish Obama national security official Ben Rhodes of “we can tell journalists anything and they’ll believe it” fame recently published an editorial in The Atlantic ripping the president’s recent dealings with Iran. Rhodes’ ripostes flow from the president’s game-changing retaliatory strike on the Obama administration partner — and leading terrorist of the leading terror force of the world’s leading terror regime — Qassem Soleimani.

Rhodes’ Atlantic retorts to Trump’s foreign policy have been as mendacious as his tweets are manic.

As he did with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Rhodes is again working to manipulate the press — who, in his words, “literally know nothing” — by farcically contrasting the Obama Iran policy with the Trump one. The media seems a willing partner, what with the wake-like atmosphere it has created over a genocidal jihadist’s demise, and the irresponsible war hysteria it has ginned up.

In spite of Rhodes’ cynicism, disingenuousness, and demonstrable Trump hatred, his arguments demand countering, since he and his minions lead the Democrats’ progressive foreign policy wing.

The Iran Deal Strengthened the Mullahs

Rhodes’ first major contention is that the Iran nuclear deal rolled back its program, and Iran was complying with it. Both elements of this argument are at best highly misleading. To make the case, Rhodes commits sins of omission and commission about the deal, its context, and purpose.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/12/remembering-the-farming-way/

We need to pause sometimes and remember who these dinosaurs were and what they have contributed. For a while longer, a few are still with us, a sort of collective keyhole through which we can look back into a now unremembered American past, whose codes and mores we simply abandoned—and to our great and present loss.

Almost all the pragmatic agricultural wisdom that my grandparents taught me has long ago been superseded by technology. I don’t anymore calibrate, as I once did when farming in the 1980s, the trajectory of an incoming late summer storm by watching the patterns of nesting birds, or the shifting directions and feel of the wind, or the calendar date or the phases of the moon. Instead, I go online and consult radar photos of storms far out at sea. Meteorology is mostly an exact science now.

Even the agrarian’s socio-scientific arts of observation that I learned from my family are seldom employed in my farming anymore. Back in the day, when a local farmer’s wife died, I was told things like, “Elmer will go pretty soon, too. His color isn’t good and he’s not used to living without her”—and tragically the neighbor usually died within months. Now I guess I would ask Elmer whether his blood tests came back OK, and the sort of blood pressure medicine he takes. I don’t think we believe that superficial facial color supersedes lab work. Farmers did because in an age of limited technology they saw people as plants, and knew that the look and color of a tree or vine—in comparison to others in the orchard or vineyard—was a sign of their viability.

I grew up with an entire local network of clubs and get-togethers, and ferried my grandparents to periodic meetings of the Walnut Improvement Club, Eastern Star, the Odd Fellows, Masons, the Grange, and Sun-Maid growers. They exchanged gossip, of course, but also vital folk and empirical information on irrigation, fertilizers, and machines.