RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/23/iihan-omars-rise-demonstrates-whats-twisted-identity-politics/

In the few short weeks she has represented Minnesota’s fifth district in the U.S. Congress, Democrat IIhan Omar has become a controversial figure. She smeared Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) over baseless accusations, garnered national recognition for wearing a hijab in Congress, and has already been placed in a leadership position on the Foreign Affairs Committee.

This inexperienced congresswoman has created a stir despite accomplishing little so far, and her win demonstrates the epitome of identity politics. A close look at her election and subsequent quick rise to fame exemplifies the cautions that accompany such a mistake.
Who is IIhan Omar?

Omar, 36, became an overnight sensation in Minnesota when she became the first Somali-American to serve in the state legislature. After one term, the fellow Muslim set her sights on former Rep. Keith Ellison’s congressional seat. The fifth district is in urban Minneapolis, where Somali-Americans number in the tens of thousands.

Ellison, himself renowned for long ties with anti-Semitism, has been somewhat of a mentor for Omar. Asking voters to replace him with her meant little practical political change in the district. Ellison won nearly 69 percent of votes cast during his 2016 race. In 2018, Omar won about 78 percent of votes, although in Ellison’s race there was an Independent and in Omar’s race there was not.

It’s easier to understand Omar’s ideology when one understands just how similar she is to Ellison. While he is far better known nationally than she is, she is no less liberal.
Ilhan Omar’s Record on the Issues Is Weak

At a candidate forum in August, Omar was asked to clarify her position on the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, sanctions movement. She said, “I believe right now with the BDS movement, it’s not helpful in getting that two-state solution.” After she was elected, however, Omar said she did support BDS.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-making-of-kamala-harris-11548202145

California Senator Kamala Harris dove into the race for President on Monday, as everyone who knows her expected. Though she’s been a Senator for only two years, the victories by Barack Obama and Donald Trump have shown that ambition beats national experience as a qualification to get to the White House, if not necessarily to succeed as President.

“I love my country and this is a moment in time where I feel a sense of responsibility to fight for who we are,” Ms. Harris declared on Good Morning America. So professes every Democratic aspirant #metoo. Though a longtime member of the Democratic elite, the 54-year-old seems ready to run as a progressive populist.

In her new memoir “The Truths We Hold,” Ms. Harris reminisces about her “close-knit neighborhood of working families who were focused on doing a good job, paying the bills, and being there for one another.” Her Indian grandmother, she notes, was a “skilled community organizer” who took in domestic violence victims and educated women about contraception.

But as progressives like to say, Ms. Harris grew up privileged. Her Indian-born mother was a breast cancer researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and her Jamaican father was a Stanford economist. Amid the Democratic obsession with identity politics, Ms. Harris’s biracial background will be a selling point.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/426464-how-the-clinton-machine-flooded-the-fbi-with-trump-russia-dirt-until

When at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That’s what Hillary Clinton’s machine did in 2016, eventually getting the FBI to bite on an uncorroborated narrative that Donald Trump and Russia were trying to hijack the presidential election.

Between July and October 2016, Clinton-connected lawyers, emissaries and apologists made more than a half-dozen overtures to U.S. officials, each tapping a political connection to get suspect evidence into FBI counterintelligence agents’ hands, according to internal documents and testimonies I reviewed and interviews I conducted.

In each situation, the overture was uninvited. And as the election drew closer, the point of contact moved higher up the FBI chain.

It was, as one of my own FBI sources called it, a “classic case of information saturation” designed to inject political opposition research into a counterintelligence machinery that should have suspected a political dirty trick was underway.

Ex-FBI general counsel James Baker, one of the more senior bureau executives to be targeted, gave a memorable answer when congressional investigators asked how attorney Michael Sussmann from the Perkins Coie law firm, which represented the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party, came to personally deliver him dirt on Trump.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ocasio-cortez-tlaib-added-to-oversight-committee-before-cohen-hearing/

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) added a trio of progressive freshmen lawmakers to the powerful House Oversight and Reform Committee, which plans on investigating the executive branch in a number of areas.

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) are joining the panel as Pelosi pitched the addition of “outstanding members” on “critical committees, where their fresh vision and powerful voices will be critical.”

Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) noted that the committee is “the primary investigative body in Congress, and we will address the issues that affect the American people every day while we root out waste, fraud, and abuse.”

“The American people voted for accountability and transparency this past election, and I’m eager to work in a bipartisan manner on behalf of all of our constituents to deliver on these goals,” he said. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/teddy_roosevelt_schools_nancy_pelosi_on_being_american.html

In April 1894, Theodore Roosevelt, who later became the 26th president of the United States, cogently and with amazing prescience wrote about true patriotism and loyalty to America. To read his words is to understand what is happening to our country.

In the latest encounter with balkanized groups in America, at a March for Life event, Catholic students were beset by a number of people. The vitriol was evident, proving that the latter do not, as Roosevelt stated, “wish to be broadly American and national[.]” This unabated “unwholesome parochial spirit” comes “at the expense of the great nation.” It is clear that this “provincial patriotism” or “inability to take a view of broad adhesion to the whole nation” is the first step to the unraveling of a nation.

Roosevelt noted that the “patriotism of the village … is bad, but the lack of all patriotism is even worse.” He worried that “in the future, patriotism will be regarded not as a virtue at all, but merely as a mental stage in the journey toward a state of feeling when our patriotism will include the whole human race and all the world.”

This is no longer a prediction, but a reality as progressives demand that we eliminate any national pride. Vicious beatings on people who don hats that read “Make America Great Again” bare the stark truth that the left wants to dismantle America’s exceptional values. Then there is the International Court of Justice, or World Court, which ruled on an Iranian request to order Washington to suspend U.S. sanctions against Tehran. In the sports arena, football players who benefit from the largesse of America kneel when the anthem is played as they allege problems but offer no solutions. Clearly, “home” and “country” no longer mean much to these men who throw footballs for a living.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/democrats_real_and_fake.html

Democrats live in a morality play in which Republicans are the Bad people led by the evil wizard, President Trump. Liberals are mesmerized by this fantasy of America divided into good versus evil, with themselves starring as the heroes. They can’t seem to get enough of it. They love the plotline, that minorities are threatened with being ‘erased’ by microaggressions, that the globe is being destroyed by poisonous CO2, that American democracy is threatened by the would-be dictator and Russian collaborator, President Trump, and his hordes of drooling idiots and Nazi wannabes.

Democrats on the ramparts are fighting for all that is kind and fair. They want to end masculinity, to make women and nonbinary people safe. They want to end capitalism, because, as Pelosi said this January, you cannot have democracy if you have rich people. They want open borders, because whiteness is racist. They want to add two hundred million new Americans, and fast, because that is only kind.

These new Americans will be the right colors (not white), and always vote Democratic, ushering in a new millennium of Democrat rule. The evil monsters will be silenced and cast out of all important professions, social media, and the Thanksgiving table.

It’s hard to believe regular Americans — and that includes blacks and Hispanics — want this destructive nonsense and I don’t believe it. The key to Democrat loyalty is a single, very powerful emotion: Republicans are not like us.

The not like us may be based on race, or for white Democrats, on group identity. Their team has all the decent, smart people in the country. Who would switch to the evil, stupid team? Who would consider their ideas? Who would hire them? Who would talk to them?

The Democrat formula of success with minorities is very simple, very human. It is this: “They don’t like you. Vote for me.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/kamala-harris-the-democrats-dishonest-authoritarian-candidate

When you look at the Senate Democrats who have announced their presidential campaigns so far, you notice that each one has a theme. For example, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has made her career about reform of the financial industry. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has made hers about preventing workplace sexual harassment. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who has all but announced his candidacy with his tour of Iowa, has made his campaign about what Democrats still have to offer the working class.

But what about Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., who announced her candidacy on Monday?

Look only at her two years in the Senate and two relevant data points pop up. First, there’s her recent attempt, along with Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, to apply an anti-Catholic religious test to a judicial nominee because he belonged to the Knights of Columbus. This was too much even for her fellow Democrats to bear — not a single one objected to a resolution that implicitly rebuked Harris and Hirono for their behavior.

The second relevant point is Harris’ conduct during the Justice Brett Kavanaugh hearings. No, not the contentious second round of Kavanaugh hearings involving sexual misconduct allegations, but the relatively placid first round in early September. During that process, Harris insinuated, through a line of questioning, that Kavanaugh had held a highly improper conversation about the Russia investigation with someone at the law firm President Trump had hired. After casting this slanderous aspersion, Harris then knowingly lied to journalists in order to prejudice public opinion against Kavanaugh’s nomination. She falsely assured reporters that she had “good reason” and “reliable” evidence that Kavanaugh had indeed discussed the Russia investigation with lawyers at Trump’s firm.

https://pjmedia.com/election/6-reasons-to-oppose-nanny-state-tyrant-kamala-harris-in-2020/

A track record of using state power to silence the opposition.

On Monday, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) announced her candidacy for president in 2020. Harris wouldn’t just be the first black woman president, she would also use the full power of her office to silence conservatives — or anyone who disagrees with her and her powerful allies. She has a track record of weaponizing the law against her opponents and refusing to defend the people’s will in court.

Despite her claims to stand for “truth, justice, decency, equality, freedom, and democracy,” she has betrayed many of those values in these six concrete episodes.
1. David Daleiden.

In 2014, David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released a slew of undercover sting videos showing Planned Parenthood staff admitting to selling aborted baby body parts for profit, with one even joking about buying a Lamborghini with the profits. Planned Parenthood hired the firm Fusion GPS, now notorious for assembling the Trump-Russia dossier, to obscure the facts and suggest the videos were deceptively edited.

Kamala Harris, who has received at least $81,000 from Planned Parenthood, was serving as California’s attorney general at the time. In 2016, her office searched Daleiden’s home, seizing his video footage and preparing a legal case against him.

In 2017, Harris’s successor, Xavier Becerra (another politician bankrolled by Planned Parenthood), filed 15 felony charges against CMP and Daleiden.

Peter Breen, special counsel at the Thomas More Society, briefed PJ Media on the ongoing case last July. He argued that Daleiden’s filming was taken in “entirely public places.”

“I could point you to undercover investigations that are being shown on the evening news in Los Angeles. Under the standard they are applying to David, those would be felonies,” the lawyer argued. “The other reporters are being lauded for their brave investigative techniques, but David is being prosecuted.”

“I would say this is an abuse of the criminal process,” Breen told PJ Media.

Pro-choice law professors have defended Daleiden’s right to engage in undercover journalism. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/a_democratic_presidential_candidate_says_both_sides_to_blame_for_shutdown_impasse.html

Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is an unconventional Democrat. She deployed to Iraq with the Hawaii National Guard in 2005 and then promptly came out against American interventionism in the Middle East. She met with Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad. She joined Republicans in calling on President Obama to identify “radical Islam” as a major threat and refers to herself as a “hawk” on terrorism. She supported Bernie Sanders for president in 2016.

At one time, she was considered a “rising star” on the Democratic left. But while she is an economic progressive, her approach to foreign policy has angered the left.

She recently apologized for previous “anti-LGBTQ” statements, proving that on some issues, she is a very conventional Democrat. Now, having announced her intention to run for the Democratic nomination for president, she appears willing to stake out positions in opposition to her party.

Yesterday, she said that both sides are to blame for the shutdown logjam.

Politico:

“The problem here is that this issue, like so many others in Washington, are being relegated to partisan politics,” she said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“Where if a Republican is putting forward a proposal, Democrats are going to shoot it down. If Democrats are putting forward a proposal, Republicans are going to shoot it down, really thinking about which party can call a win on this issue.”