RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/thank-you-mr-president-john-perazzo/

As America says goodbye to President Trump, Democrats are doing what they do best: pushing forward, to the very last moment, with their four-year crusade to discredit, smear, and punish one of history’s truly great presidents. Having never given Mr. Trump so much as a moment of respite from their relentless torrent of defamatory lies, they have firmly secured their place in history as the pettiest, most lawless tyrants ever to defile our nation’s political landscape. Thus, it remains for the many millions of Americans who, with sober hearts and minds, are able to discern the monumental good that this president has done for the United States, to lay bare the magnitude of his accomplishments. Toward that end, let us examine his remarkable record.    

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/19/dont-call-bidens-plan-stimulus-its-just-another-keynesian-fantasy/

Joe Biden’s promised stimulus is meant to boost an economy devastated by the Democrats’ national shutdown by handing out more checks and imposing a $15 national minimum wage. Sorry, it won’t work.

“We must act now, and we must act decisively,” Biden said.

Sounds good, but do we really? What he and Congress have proposed is an incoherent mess that will do the precise opposite of what he says it will. Even worse, it’s premised on the long-discredited idea that the government can stimulate the economy by spending more.

From false premises come bad policies that will hurt many low-income people and possibly end the Trump recovery now under way. And, make no mistake, Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan unveiled late last week contained a panoply of bad policies.

In a recent piece, the Foundation for Economic Education listed the bill’s main provisions:

An additional $1,400 in “stimulus” checks sent to most Americans, raising the recently passed $600 payouts to $2,000.
Renewal and increase of the expanded unemployment benefits that extend payouts to many new classes of workers through September 2021. Biden’s proposal would add $400 a week in federal payouts on top of existing state-level benefits.
Expansion of the child tax credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit.
An increase in food stamp benefits.
A nationwide $15 minimum wage.
Extension of the federal government’s eviction moratorium.
$350 billion for local, state, and tribal governments.
$160 billion for vaccine distribution and other COVID-19 health measures.
Paid leave for millions of workers, much of which would be funded by taxpayers.

“It is $1.9 trillion, and it’s basically the Bernie Sanders wish list of spending on massive blue state bailouts,” including “$100 billion for schools, even though schools have been shut down for the last year,” said former Trump economic adviser Steve Moore.

https://spectator.org/capitol-riot-fuhgeddaboudism/

“People forever mired in an imaginary future when they redeem humanity through the power of their ideas naturally do not possess the time for the very real past in which the power of their ideas looted an immigrant’s American Dream, murdered a retired elderly African American policeman guarding a friend’s property, and torched businesses already burned by lockdowns — and then called it “social justice.” This happened. This happened recently. Should we all pretend it didn’t? And should people not bothered by any of that deliver gaslighting moral lectures about whataboutism to all the normal people horrified by all of it?”

“This was all orchestrated by this president who gave them their marching orders,” Al Sharpton told MSNBC viewers this week about the Unquiet Riot on Capitol Hill. Neither Freddy nor the seven customers who stayed in his “fashion mart” after closing were available for comment.

Inciting a riot does not serve as a prerequisite for gaining on-air employment at MSNBC. But it’s not a disqualifier.

Fuhgeddaboudism demands that we collectively erase context and develop amnesia for not only history but for what happened every night last summer.

Sharpton, who announced, “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business,” before an armed man shot customers in Freddy’s Fashion Mart and torched it with people still inside in 1995, knows something about incitement (and mucking up facts, as the African American owners, not Freddy, aimed to move a black-owned record store).

“If the Jews want to get it on,” Sharpton said days before the Crown Heights Riots that led to Yankel Rosenbaum’s 1991 death, “tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” At the funeral of the black child hit by a car in a Jewish funeral procession that set off the riots, Sharpton further inflamed matters by referring to Jews as “diamond dealers” (a remark more temperate than the “Hitler Did Not Do the Job” banner displayed at the memorial service).

Any invocation of double standards regarding the Capitol Hill riot elicits calls of whataboutism, kind of a tu quoque for people who flunked Latin, from the New York Times and other redoubts of fuhgeddaboudism. This latter phenomenon seems the more relevant to the current situation. Fuhgeddaboudism, a kind of Jedi Mind Trick for people who did not watch Star Wars, demands that we collectively erase context and develop amnesia for not only history but for what happened every night last summer.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/01/enough-with-the-outrage.php

Like pretty much all conservatives, I have consistently criticized riots and other forms of political violence for many years. That includes yesterday’s Washington, D.C. riot. You can’t say the same about liberals, however. Until yesterday, one might have thought that liberals consider rioting and other forms of political violence to be as American as apple pie.

You could write a book in support of that proposition, but for now let’s cite just a few examples. Do you remember when President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017? Leftist Democrats rioted in Washington that day. That riot was arguably worse, more violent and more destructive, than what happened in D.C. yesterday. The liberal rioters destroyed stores, set vehicles on fire and battled with the police. Six police officers were wounded. Here is a video reminder:

I don’t recall a single Democratic office-holder denouncing the Democrats’ Inauguration Day riot, and the Associated Press came perilously close to praising the rioters.

Over the ensuing four years, Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioted countless times, bringing devastation to cities like Portland, Seattle, Kenosha and Minneapolis. Did any Democrats denounce these riots? Not that I remember. Many Democrats endorsed them, or seemed to do so. Kamala Harris, for example, said about the riots in June:

They’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-calls-amazon-jobs-scam-jason-d-hill/

Americans spoke loud and clear when Bernie Sanders and his brand of socialism were defeated in the Democratic primaries. They said no to socialism and all that was promised with it. Socialism is just not in our political DNA, Americans pointed out. Even those who voted for Joe Biden thought they were electing a liberal centrist; someone closer to near-fiscal conservatives, rather than rapacious, wealth-appropriating socialists. They might be wrong. But I think that they rejected socialism when they voted against Bernie Sanders.

Yet here is that naïve activist masquerading as a politician, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, making a crass and abrasive demand for socialism by attacking a symbol of the free market: Amazon. Last week, AOC came out in a series of incendiary attacks against Amazon, accusing the company of providing sham jobs for workers because it left them homeless. In a series of tweets on Twitter, AOC referenced a Bloomberg News article which reported that more than 4,000 Amazon employees are on food stamps.

AOC immediately tweeted: “A Job that leaves you homeless & on food stamps isn’t a job. It’s a scam.” She further went on to state that Amazon’s jobs are a “scam” because they’re not creating financial security for workers.

Mixing categories in a way that first year students of logic would not, AOC went on to state: “This is why “Amazon jobs” aren’t it & we should instead focus our public investments + incentives on small businesses, public infrastructure, & worker cooperatives that actually support dignified life.”