RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/knives-out-a-glorious-wrestlemania-of-a-democratic-debate/

Early on, political consultant Mike Murphy labeled the debate “a six way tornado of long-repressed rage, fear and desperation.” For Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and maybe even Joe Biden, the end is near. A lot of these candidates, who would be allies under different circumstances, now can barely stand to be on the same stage with one another.

The non-Bloomberg candidates contend that the former mayor is trying to buy the presidency, and they detest him for waltzing in late and rocketing up to top-tier status by throwing around hundreds of millions of dollars in ads. Within the first ten minutes, everyone had thrown a hard metaphorical punch on him and seemed to gang up on him with glee.

Tonight we saw that Mike Bloomberg the presidential candidate is way less impressive than Mike Bloomberg the advertising campaign. He’s regretful and embarrassed by the way stop-and-frisk turned out. His lawsuits and NDAs were just some jokes that went wrong. He promises to release his tax returns in a few weeks, and everyone has to understand because he’s too wealthy to use Turbo Tax.

Warren just tore Bloomberg apart on his former female employees who can’t talk about their disputes with him because of nondisclosure agreements. Bloomberg looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights, utterly unprepared for this, other than to insist that he had many female employees over the years and most of them hadn’t sued him or contended that he created a hostile working environment. Biden got in a good shot: “If people who signed NDA’s want to come forward, just say ‘yes they can.’” When Joe Biden is verbally body-slamming you over treatment of women, you’ve made a critical error.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/2/19/21144763/nevada-democratic-debate-highlights-warren-bloomberg

But it was Warren who landed the biggest blow, with a clever bit of misdirection:

I’d like to talk about who we’re running against. A billionaire who calls women “fat broads and horse-faced lesbians.”

At the Democratic debate in Las Vegas, Nevada, Mike Bloomberg took a lot of heat, Elizabeth Warren looked feisty, and Bernie Sanders started to get the frontrunner treatment from his competitors.

Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, was the target early and often for the other Democratic candidates; they attacked him for his billions of dollars in wealth, the sexual harassment allegations he’s faced, and his record as mayor, particularly his continuation of the stop-and-frisk policy that disproportionately affected nonwhite New Yorkers. Warren was his most relentless foil, going after him again and again on a range of subjects. Sanders faced plenty of scrutiny, too, from his opponents and from the debate moderators, befitting his status as the tentative frontrunner with voting finally underway.

With three days before the Nevada caucuses, Wednesday night’s debate performance was pivotal for several candidates. With votes already cast in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders has established himself as the early frontrunner, but the race still seems very volatile.

Pete Buttigieg narrowly won Iowa and finished a strong second in New Hampshire, but he might struggle as the primary moves to more diverse states. After dismal showings in the first two states, Joe Biden is still betting he can turn his campaign around in Nevada and then South Carolina before having a big Super Tuesday on March 3. Warren and Amy Klobuchar have done enough to keep their campaigns afloat, but they need to break through soon to make a serious run at the party’s nomination.

https://pjmedia.com/election/south-bend-residents-have-a-message-for-america-dont-election-pete-buttigieg/

South Bend, Ind., is a grimy industrial city of 100,000 people located on the St. Joseph River. It’s known for being the “home” of  Notre Dame University — which isn’t really true since Notre Dame is technically located in Notre Dame, Indiana.

But South Bend, whose second claim to fame is the Studebaker National Museum downtown, is the home of Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. The highly ambitious Buttigieg is seeking the presidency despite serving two terms as mayor of a small city.

A job that most would see as entry-level employment in politics as a stepping stone to the presidency? That’s sort of like a burger flipper applying for the CEO position at McDonald’s.

There are many South Bend residents who wonder about that too.

New York Post:

When residents of this city’s impoverished West Side reflect on Pete Buttigieg’s two terms as mayor, a few things come to mind:

A spike in violent crime, development that largely ignored the African American community and how their only well-lit street is the one that leads to Notre Dame University.

So how, they wonder, can Buttigieg possibly be trusted to run the country?

“If he’s the next president, I fear for our country. He couldn’t run our city. How can he run the United States?,” said Michelle Burger, 42, a stay-at-home mom who lives in South Bend’s impoverished and predominantly black West Side.

Much has been made of Mayor Pete’s trouble with “people of color.” There appears to be something to that criticism as economic development during Buttigieg’s tenure in office seems to have been lagging in the black community.

Another West Side resident, Cornish Miller, 62, said of Buttigieg, “Rating him 1 to 10, I’d give him a 2.”

“Buttigieg talked about all the improvements he made, but he hardly made a dent,” said Miller, who works for a military supply company.

“The West Side is the most neglected part of town. The street I live on is the only street around here that has lights. That’s because we’re a gateway to Notre Dame.”

Young, articulate, attractive — and gay. Is that why Democrats are taking this guy seriously? To go from being a mayor of a city with at $350 million budget to running a country with a $5 trillion budget would seem to be a leap too far.

But he’s a Democrat and he’s gay so he’s got that going for him.

Taking credit for the work of others is part of politics but Buttigieg appears to have taken the concept a bit too far.

But Indiana Republican Party Chairman Kyle Hupfer countered that while Buttigieg “certainly had a few economic development wins,” he actually had “little, if anything, to do with that.”

“I found it ironic that when he announced his presidential run, he did it in front of Studebaker Building 84, which had sat vacant since 1963,” Hupfer said.

“But it was $3.5 million from then-Gov. Mike Pence’s Regional Cities Initiative that made that project go.”

Hupfer said increased employment in the area covering South Bend — where the unemployment rate dropped from 9.3 percent in 2012 to 3.6 percent in 2018 — was largely a function of “statewide economic strength under Republican leadership.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/revolutionary-bernie-sanders/

Bernie Sanders leads the race for the Democratic nomination.

He may become America’s first self-described “democratic socialist” president.What does that mean?

Today, when Sanders talks about socialism, he says: “I’m not looking at Cuba. I’m looking at countries like Denmark and Sweden.”

But Denmark and Sweden are not socialist. Denmark’s prime minister even came to America to refute Sanders’ claims, pointing out that “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy.”

Both Denmark and Sweden do give citizens government-run health care and have bigger welfare programs than America has. However,  recently, they’ve moved away from socialism. Because their socialist policies killed economic growth, they cut regulations and ended government control of many industries.

Sanders probably doesn’t know that. He, like many young people, just loves the idea of socialism.

For my new video this week, Stossel TV producer Maxim Lott went through hours of Sanders’ old speeches. What he found reveals a lot about what Sanders believes.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/02/study-shoots-down-voter-suppression-myth-daniel-greenfield/

A crucial part of the Dem narrative is that the Republicans have spent decades engaged in a vast conspiracy to suppress the votes of minorities. Dem judges routinely shut down voter ID requirements, claiming that they represent a voter suppression plot. When Democrats lose, they routinely blame voter suppression. Stacey Abrams has virtually locked in a V.P. slot with that line.

Meanwhile a new study shoots down this particular political myth. 

Only 8 percent of nonvoters said they don’t vote because they don’t have the time to get to the polls — fourth on the list of reasons they cited. Only 5 percent of nonvoters said they don’t vote because they aren’t registered.

In other words, people who value voting, will vote. Those who don’t, don’t.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/will-american-jews-vote-american-jeremy-corbyn-ari-lieberman/

In December, British citizens overwhelmingly rejected the Marxist ideology of Britain’s Labor Party boss, Jeremy Corbyn, and sent him and his Momentum movement packing. It was Labor’s worst showing since before World War II. Among the concerns looming in the minds of the voters were Corbyn’s explicit antisemitism and his honeymoon with known radical terrorist elements like the Muslim Brotherhood’s Raed Saleh, Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams and convicted IRA operatives Linda Quigley and Gerry MacLochlainn. Polls conducted prior to the election showed that at least 40 percent of British Jewry considered emigrating had Corbyn won and an astonishing 80 percent of Britain’s Jews as well as all of Britain’s leading Jewish newspapers from across the political spectrum saw Corbyn as an existential threat.

Across the Atlantic, American Jews are facing a similar threat with the emergence of Senator Bernie Sanders as a possible frontrunner. Sanders came in first in the New Hampshire primary and remains nearly tied with Pete Buttigieg in the delegate count. Though it is far from certain that he will be the Democratic nominee, the self-proclaimed socialist, who is on record professing admiration for dictatorial regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, China and the former Soviet Union, has a fairly good shot at reaching the requisite delegate count. According to a Morning Consult poll conducted after the New Hampshire primary, the “woke” senator is the first choice for 29 percent of Democratic primary voters, which places him 10 points ahead of his more moderate and dimwitted rival, Joe Biden. FiveThirtyEight gives Sanders a one-in-three chance of securing the nomination outright though the website believes that there’s a greater chance of a brokered convention.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/the_price_of_crazy_alexandria_ocasiocortez_yelps_for_help_against_12_primary_challengers.html

Why would a candidate who has more money than all her rivals put together be issuing urgent appeals across the country for funds to her campaign?

That’s what we see now with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who’s sending out pleas for money from her supporters across the country, to ward off as many as 13 primary challengers.

From CNBC, here’s one:

WASHINGTON — Former CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera added her name Tuesday to the list of candidates hoping to deny Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a second term. 

Caruso-Cabrera, who worked for the financial news network for more than 20 years, is challenging Ocasio-Cortez in the Democratic primary June 23 for New York’s 14th District. She filed her candidacy with the Federal Election Commission on Monday, becoming Ocasio-Cortez’s fifth Democratic challenger and 12th overall to file with the FEC. 

“I am the daughter and granddaughter of working-class Italian and Cuban immigrants,” Caruso-Cabrera told CNBC in a statement. “I am so lucky to have had such a wonderful career, and I want everybody to have the opportunity that I’ve had. That’s why I’m running.”

It’s weird stuff for a candidate who has so much money — $5 million–plus in the bank, against her next-challenger’s $800,000 or so, and the collective group of challengers having just $2 million at most among themselves.  According to a Politico report last month:

Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign received more than 325,000 contributions from more than 185,000 individual donors in 2019. Her fundraising in the final quarter of the year is a dramatic increase compared to the total raised for her entire first election campaign in 2018, which came in at $2.1 million.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/michael-bloomberg-is-a-condescending-jerk/

T he hunt is on for offensive clips of Michael Bloomberg talking off the cuff, and over the weekend a new one circulated. In the version passed around, Bloomberg nonchalantly tells his Oxford audience that he could teach anyone how to farm — “even people in this room”: “It’s a process; you dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.” He adds that modern “information economy” jobs require more “gray matter.”

The denunciations came quickly and furiously, many of them pointing out that farming these days is a pretty high-tech endeavor. There are three things to know about this episode.

First, the version of the clip that went around left out important context. Bloomberg was very explicitly not talking about modern farmers, but rather about “the agrarian society” that “lasted 3,000 years” before the industrial era, which lasted 300. His point was that the modern economy does not create good, reliable jobs for low-skilled workers the way that past economies did. You can see the full discussion starting around 41:30 here (though the actual query that prompted Bloomberg’s rambling answer starts at 37:30):

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/stacey-abrams-says-shes-open-to-joining-dem-ticket-as-veep-after-vowing-not-to-run-for-second-place/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_

Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic gubernatorial candidate for Georgia who called out alleged voter suppression during her election, said Monday that she “would be honored” to be the vice presidential candidate on the 2020 Democratic ticket.

“It would be doing a disservice to every woman of color, every woman of ambition, every child who wants to think beyond their known space for me to say no or to pretend, ‘Oh, no, I don’t want it,’” Abrams said on ABC’s “The View.” “Of course I want it. Of course I want to serve America. Of course I want to be a patriot and do this work.”

Abrams shot to notoriety in 2018 when she ran in Georgia to become the country’s first black female governor. She lost the election by 1.4 percentage points to her Republican opponent, Georgia’s secretary of state at the time, Brian Kemp, who enforced one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country while he was running against Abrams. Abrams has refused to concede the election ever since, alleging that Kemp engaged in voter suppression.

Abrams’s openness to accepting a vice presidential nomination comes after she signaled last year she would only run as a presidential candidate.

“You don’t run for second place,” she said in a previous appearance on “The View” in March.