RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-2020-election-what-happened-a-political-scientists-memorandum/

As a citizen who is also a political scientist, I have tried to do due diligence to assess what happened in the recent election. Who won what and at what level and what does it mean? And what about the charges of vote fraud? People keep asking me what I think, and I decided to write down the conclusions I have reached to date and on what grounds. Because charges of vote fraud have called the outcome of the presidential election into question, I have paid particular attention to them.

This memorandum is not written to persuade. It merely records my findings and reflections. Few people are really open to persuasion in any case—not just on political subjects but on any subject about which they care and on which they have adopted certain views. Diehard partisans for a certain outlook will refuse to have their beliefs questioned, and so will many others. They will be no less dismissive of a document challenging their opinions if it is full of footnotes and appendixes. Such a document will, indeed, make them resist it even more. As for the relatively few people who are truly open-minded, they will not find another person’s observations dispositive. They will, as they should, want to consider the evidence on a contested matter for themselves.

I hope that I am not deceiving myself when I say that I have not reached my conclusions regarding the 2020 election because of partisanship. I am a close student of politics, but have never belonged to a political party. If I have a bias, I suppose it is that of one who is largely alienated from both of the American parties and who believes that both of the presidential candidates in 2020 have major flaws.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/04/losing-would-be-a-fitting-coda-for-the-feckless-gop-senate/

It should surprise no one that the Republican Senate—the most inept collection of politicians in recent memory—will end the Trump era in a state of disarray, discord, and dysfunction.

What Americans have witnessed over the past four years, as I’ve written several times, is a textbook example of political power squandered. Republican senators, rather than maximize the unexpected gift of a Republican White House, Senate, and House of Representatives to advance long-promised “conservative” policies, wasted the opportunity while giving political cover to both the corrupt president who preceded Donald Trump and the one who will succeed him.

The first half of Trump’s presidency was sabotaged by a special counsel investigation into Russian collusion, an imaginary crime that Senate Republicans knew was a farce from the start, yet defended anyway. While Robert Mueller’s partisan probe obscured the real scandal—the unprecedented abuse of the country’s law enforcement and surveillance apparatus to target a rival presidential candidate and then incoming president—Republicans in charge of powerful Senate committees did little more than write stern letters and make empty threats on cable news shows in a failed attempt to “get to the bottom” of Russiagate.

Investigations into the Biden family’s overseas racket were slow-walked; Republicans refused to compel Hunter Biden to testify in the president’s impeachment trial, an event that would have torpedoed Biden’s candidacy and elevated a surefire loser such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket.

A once-in-a-generation chance to purge the Beltway of fossilized institutionalists was bypassed. Ditto for major reforms of immigration law, foreign affairs, trade agreements, federal regulations, and climate change activism. The president almost single-handedly retooled failed national policies through executive orders or administrative decree; in most cases, especially related to U.S. military presence abroad, Senate Republicans thwarted rather than aided the Trump Administration.

“Conservative” achievements over the past four years belong solely to the president and his team, not to congressional Republicans.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-at-stake-in-georgia-11609540879?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

What’s the difference in policy between a Senate run by Chuck Schumer with 50 Democrats and one run by Mitch McConnell with 51 or 52 Republicans? That’s the question that matters for the next two years, so it’s worth explaining the stakes with realistic specificity in Tuesday’s Georgia Senate runoffs.

Start with control of committees, which would shift markedly leftward. Republicans would lose their ability to investigate issues like FBI abuse and Hunter Biden’s China dealings. A GOP Senate is likely to approve most of Mr. Biden’s cabinet picks, but Democrats would whisk through even controversial nominees like Neera Tanden at the White House budget office or Xavier Becerra at HHS. There would be no check on judicial nominees.

Democratic chairmen would include Bernie Sanders, who would try to gut the Pentagon at the Budget Committee. Sherrod Brown at Banking and Elizabeth Warren on the financial institutions subcommittee would try to change rules to steer lending and capital to their priorities and punish lending to fossil-fuel companies.

Ron Wyden, who would run the tax-writing Finance Committee, wants to tax gains in capital assets each year even if they aren’t sold. The Judiciary Committee would go to Dick Durbin, who after having deposed Dianne Feinstein would target conservative nonprofits and think tanks for political attack.

https://www.tuskerdaily.com/rep-elect-ritchie-torres-a-progressive-democrat-rips-aocs-israel-hating-squad/

Ritchie Torres may be a progressive Democrat, but he won’t be signing up with AOC and her band of mental midget misfits which Nancy Pelosi nicknamed the ‘Squad’.

Ritchie Torres, is going to Washington next month to represent the South Bronx in Congress.

But despite his being a Bernie Sanders loving Progressive Democrat, he says you won’t see him paling around with Democratic Socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib anytime soon.

Torres,32, cited his strong support for Israel as a primary distinction between ‘the Squad’ and true progressives like himself.

“I came to observe that there are activists who have a visceral hatred for Israel as though it were the root of all evil.

The act of singling out Israel as BDS [the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement] has done is the definition of discrimination.”

Torres, who has served on the New York City Council since 2013, says he was moved by trips to Israel in 2015 and 2017.