RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosi-pitches-a-blue-state-bailout-11585697310?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held up last week’s coronavirus relief bill with demands related to corporate diversity, carbon emissions and election reform. But Democrats are far from finished using the crisis to try to force through partisan priorities they couldn’t pass in normal times. Mrs. Pelosi is now hinting the price for further economic relief may include expanding a regressive tax deduction for high-earners in states run by Democrats.

On Monday Mrs. Pelosi told the New York Times she wanted Congress to “retroactively undo SALT.” In the 2017 tax reform, Republicans limited the state and local tax deduction to $10,000. That raised federal tax revenue mostly from high-tax parts of states like California, New York and New Jersey and helped pay for the rate cuts on corporate, small business and individual incomes. According to the Tax Foundation, the cap raised almost $33 billion in 2018 from those earning more than $1 million per year and had little impact for those earning less than $100,000.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/chicken-little-obama-frets-about-trumps-climate-denial-amid-coronavirus-pandemic/

On Tuesday, former President Barack Obama ripped into President Donald Trump’s decision to loosen environmental standards, comparing “climate denial” to the original skepticism officials expressed at reports of the coronavirus pandemic. Yes, in the midst of a pandemic that is choking the economic life out of this country, Obama focused on climate change.

Obama shared an article from The Los Angeles Times entitled, “Trump rolls back biggest U.S. effort to combat climate change.” The article details Trump’s move to loosen fuel efficiency standards as the oil and gas industry struggles with extremely low prices amid an oil price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia. This oil war has hit companies particularly hard during the coronavirus crisis. Obama instituted the higher standards in 2012 and he likely sees this move as a blow to his legacy.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/03/dems-need-coronavirus-herovictim-and-it-isnt-biden-daniel-greenfield/

While Biden is lurking in the Bidenbunker, emerging occasionally to spot his shadow, spout some forgettable talking points, and then vanish back into the bunker, the Democrats need someone who is an actual elected official to pit against President Trump.

That’s occasionally been Governor Andrew Cuomo, unfortunately he’s a white male, and then there’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who at least isn’t a man. 

As the coronavirus spreads, the Democrats might have a few more options, but they are basically stuck with a governor (and if things get desperate, mayor or two) to use as a counterweight against Trump. 

Cuomo and Whitmer, despite being headline acts in the media circus, are not exactly leading the war effort. Cuomo’s big gimmick thus far was claiming to be making hand sanitizer. The provenance of the hand sanitizer continues to be up for debate. 

Mainly, Cuomo has managed to build up his brand with combative press conference that don’t actually accomplish anything.

https://newswithviews.com/what-is-wrong-with-biden-jill-biden-that-is/

Millions of times a day not only across the United States but the entire world––women taking care of their husbands, doing everything possible to protect them from harm or hurt.

No doubt, that was Jill Biden’s intention when she married the senator from Delaware in 1977, and raised not only the daughter they had together, but his young sons, Beau and Hunter, after the senator’s first wife and baby daughter were killed in a horrific car accident in 1972.

As the years elapsed, Senator Biden became Vice President Biden––for eight years––and the power couple Jill and Joe gained worldwide fame and huge wealth.

But before that, Jill juggled raising their three children with earning a doctoral degree in education and then teaching for years in a psychiatric hospital where her students were emotionally disturbed children and adolescents.

Surely, in both her education and clinical work, she was aware of, sensitive to, knowledgeable about––and protective of––the students whose limitations rendered them incapable of higher function.Surely she became capable of detecting, even diagnosing, thought and speech disorders, dissociative thinking, and incoherent ramblings.

The following examples are sad to witness and once again raise the very serious question: What is wrong with Jill Biden?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/biden-accused-sexual-assault-joseph-klein/

Former Vice President Joe Biden admitted back in December 2018 that “I am a gaffe machine.” That’s a gross understatement, to say the least. The Democrat establishment and the mainstream media continue to treat Biden’s endless stream of gaffes as just harmless patter from good old Uncle Joe. His supporters make excuses for Biden’s obvious mental decline and lash out at anyone who expresses concerns about his fitness to take on the rigors of the presidency. Now, however, they are circling the wagons after a story recently emerged that Joe Biden allegedly committed sexual assault against a former staffer, Tara Reade, when Biden was a vigorous 50 year-old senator. The Biden campaign has denied the allegation, claiming “these accusations are false.” Other women had come forward previously to report inappropriate touching by Biden. But Ms. Reade’s allegation shines a much harsher light on Biden’s possible predatory sexual behavior against one or more females on his staff.

Joe Biden is a self-professed champion of women who has supported the #MeToo movement’s presumption of guilt against the accused. “For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally,” Biden said during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearing, “you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time.” Now Biden himself stands accused of sexually assaulting Tara Reade in 1993. “He said ‘come on man, I heard you liked me,'” Ms. Reade told an interviewer. “I couldn’t believe it was happening. It was surreal.” According to Ms. Reade, Biden kissed her without her consent, proceeded to push her up against a wall, and used his fingers to penetrate her. Afterwards, Ms. Reade said, “He took his finger. He just like pointed at me and said you’re nothing to me.” There presumably were no witnesses to the alleged assault, although Ms. Reade’s brother and friend recall her contemporaneous account of the incident.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/28/trumps-approval-is-spiking-and-the-left-cant-stand-it/

Over the past two weeks, President Trump’s overall approval rating and specifically approval of his handling of the Chinese virus have been spiking. You would think that most people would view this as good thing, I mean, in the middle of a crisis, having faith in leadership is better than not having faith in leadership, right? For many on the left, though, these numbers are cause for consternation.

Here’s a not particularly sane response from supposed one-time conservative Ana Navarro:

Ana Navarro-Cárdenas ✔ @ananavarro

“Who are these 51% of Americans who approve of the way this lying, narcissistic, science-denying, petty, partisan, infantile, intellectual wasteland, lame excuse for a President with the vocabulary of a 4 year-old (apologies to 4 year-olds), is mishandling this crisis? Really. https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1243651278560989184 …”

There are plenty more examples, but suffice it to say, to those for whom hating Trump has become the passion of a lifetime, the president’s relative popularity is infuriating. It is also confounding to them, and it’s worth thinking about why.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-house-democrats-coronavirus-extortion-gambit-backfires/?utm_source=

The House’s voice vote passing the Senate’s version of the $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill puts the final nail in the coffin of House Democrats’ deeply misguided effort to pass their own version of the bill, an effort that delayed the badly needed relief package by days. Taking a cue from Majority Whip James Clyburn’s argument that “This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision,” the 1,119-page House bill was larded with progressive policy priorities on topics with little or no connection to the pandemic: carbon emissions, corporate board diversity, federally imposed rules for early voting and voter registration, collective bargaining, a minimum wage hike, a Postal Service bailout, student loan forgiveness, permanent changes to Medicaid and Obamacare, minority-owned credit unions, funding for the arts, and many, many more.

Anyone who has followed Washington politics for any period of time knows that the habit of sticking unrelated goodies into big, must-pass bills is both longstanding and bipartisan. Every bill of this nature, especially one so massive and sprawling, will have a little gift here for some policy agenda, a payoff there for a favored constituency, and a giveaway, or several, for important donors. But what was striking here was the sheer piggishness of the grab. The House Democrats’ bill read less like an appropriation than like an entire presidential campaign platform, wedged into a bill that was supposed to pass a Senate and White House controlled by the opposite party. The point of cramming favors into a bill like this is to ensure passage of the favor, not sink the bill. And sink it did, like the soldiers of Hernán Cortés who drowned fleeing Tenochtitlan because they had loaded their armor with gold looted from its treasury.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/03/26/cuomo_rising_biden_wandering_

The coronavirus pandemic has thrown the nation’s health, economy, and presidential election up in the air. Until the virus struck and the nation shut down, President Trump was a strong favorite to win a second term. The betting markets put his odds at close to 60%. 

Those odds are about even now, and changing by the day. They depend on how well Trump and his aides handle the health crisis, the economic reopening, and the massive dislocations workers and firms will suffer. Right now, the public approves of what Trump is doing. But today’s polls matter far less than what the public thinks after the crisis subsides. 

Older models of election forecasting, developed and tested over the years, tell us it is very hard for a president to win reelection during a recession. And one is now likely this summer, economists say. 

But those old election models may prove irrelevant this year. This shutdown and its economic impact are truly unprecedented, and swing voters understand that. It is clear even to media outlets that openly loathe the president — The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and CNN, for example — that no administration could have avoided this shutdown. It was caused by devastating foreign shocks, beginning with the outbreak of the virus in a wet market in Wuhan, China. The virus was transmitted by travelers from China and then travelers from Europe who had been infected by those from China. The Chinese Communist Party is directly responsible for this crisis, not because its leaders wanted to spread an infection but because they wanted to keep it secret to preserve their domestic control. 

Still, the Trump administration will be held accountable for how it handles the crisis, and rightly so. Was it swift and competent? How did it manage the economic reboot, which must begin before the contagion is gone? If there is a second wave of infections because we threw open the doors too soon, decision-makers will face the fury. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/where-is-joe-bidens-leadership-11585091731?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Amid the coronavirus lockdown, Joe Biden is now running a digital front-porch campaign. In a video streamed from his home in Delaware on Monday, Mr. Biden said he would focus on “what we should do to get this response fixed.”

The remarks that followed weren’t encouraging. He characterized the Senate’s coronavirus relief bill as “a plan that let big corporations off the hook,” and “a $500 billion slush fund for corporations, with almost no conditions.” This rhetoric about slush funds is straight from the antibusiness left.

Does Mr. Biden not understand the problem that companies are facing? They have to figure out how to remain solvent until the health crisis ends, otherwise nobody will be left to turn the lights back on. Under Nancy Pelosi’s coronavirus bill, companies that take federal aid would be put under a permanent $15 minimum wage. Adding such strings to emergency funding will make businesses reluctant to accept the relief, even if they really need it.

Mr. Biden went on to insist that “Social Security checks need to be boosted now” and “student debt should be forgiven for now.” He had more details in a Sunday tweet, saying that any coronavirus relief legislation “should forgive a minimum of $10,000/person of federal student loans, as proposed by Senator Warren and colleagues.”