RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/18/christopher-steele-product-of-corrupt-fbi/

Just as the special counsel’s investigation into the origins of Crossfire Hurricane—the FBI counterintelligence probe launched in the summer of 2016 to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—is showing signs of life, one of the central figures in the hoax is attempting to burnish his sullied image.

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos has produced a documentary featuring Christopher Steele, the man responsible for the so-called dossier bearing his name. “Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier,” streamed on Hulu Monday night; promotional clips hinted that, far from a hard-hitting interview exposing Steele for the charlatan he is, Stephanopoulos gave Steele a chance to spin his story ahead of possible new indictments related to John Durham’s inquiry into the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax. 

Rather than depict Steele accurately, Stephanopoulos and ABC News social media interns repeatedly describe Steele as an “ex-British spy” or “former intelligence officer” even though Steele left MI6, the UKs version of the CIA, in 2009 to start a consulting business. (That same year, Steele presented a report on Russia to President Obama.) Steele’s now-discredited dossier, which Stephanopoulos tries to portray as “raw intelligence,” was the basis not just for the entire Russian collusion hoax but also served as key evidence to support four illicit FISA applications to obtain warrants to spy on Donald Trump and his associates.

Stephanopoulos’ goal, of course, is to convince uninformed viewers—in other words, most of Stephanopoulos’ audience on any given day—that Steele was working in an official national security capacity instead of as a Democratic political operative paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to dig up dirt on Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential race.

But Steele, many folks forget, also had another funder in 2016: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. An often overlooked fact about Steele is that at the same time he was being paid by the Clinton campaign and DNC, he also was being paid by the FBI as a “confidential human source,” otherwise known as an “informant.”

Without James Comey’s FBI, there would be no Steele dossier and no Russian collusion hoax. And Christopher Steele is the most glaring example of the slimy relationship between the FBI, partisan operatives, and the American news media.

Steele began working with the FBI shortly after forming his consulting business, Orbis Business Intelligence, in 2010. In addition to his work on the FIFA corruption investigation, Steele routinely passed along information to the FBI on Russian oligarchs. According to a lengthy report issued in December 2019 by Michael Horowitz, inspector general of the Justice Department, the FBI completed necessary paperwork in 2013 to authorize Steele as a confidential human source.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/christopher-steele-the-russia-collusion-hoaxer-regrets-nothing/

The former British spy who helped create the fake Trump/Russia-collusion narrative stands by his work.

I f Donald Trump . . . scratch that . . . if any Republican operative had produced a fictitious oppo file on the life of Joe Biden that: (a) crammed in every rumor and conspiracy theory he could find, leaving just enough truth to make it plausible; (b) went to gullible or willing political and journalistic allies in an effort to mislead the public and undermine trust in the presidential election; (c) was used to plunge the nation into years of hysterical paranoia regarding Russian interference; and (d) was then sent to law-enforcement agencies as a way to help launch a cascade of useless investigations, from special-counsel probes to congressional inquiries, all of which ended up producing exactly zero indictments related to “collusion” . . . that person would be treated like Lin Wood or Alex Jones — or worse.

But some ratf***ers are more successful than others. And one of the architects of the swindle, retired British spy Christopher Steele, is now “stepping out of the shadows.” He’s the subject of a Hulu documentary and an interview with former Clinton operative George Stephanopoulos (now with ABC News), in which he discusses the infamous “Steele dossier.” But this designation gives what is ultimately a fabricated oppo-research file, paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, an unearned le Carré flourish.

The former spy says he stands by “the work we did, the sources that we had, and the professionalism which we applied to it.” Most consequentially, the dossier created the “collusion” claim, contending that Trump, who did himself no favors constantly praising Putin, and his campaign had “accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-tax-target-not-superrich-income-capital-gains-estate-11634659197?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The Biden administration is trying to sell its Build Back Better agenda by demonizing the superwealthy, but that’s just the sales pitch. The actual product is a tax bill sent mostly elsewhere, to the already highly taxed “working rich.”

The litany of the supposed tax crimes committed by tech founders and private-equity billionaires is long and well-known: “They pay less than their secretaries do!” They spend money borrowed against their shares, leaving most of their wealth untouched and untaxed until death. Their children inherit those shares, kicking in the step-up in basis, and their massive capital gains are then blasted into the loophole ether, leaving their heirs to pay “only” the 40% estate tax, some of which perhaps they can avoid. Private-equity billionaires do much of the same stuff and also get to use the famous carried-interest loophole. By trading their labor for shares in risky enterprises, the lucky—or very good—ones pay capital gains, not ordinary income, rates on these gains. And all these miscreants are, of course, supposedly hiding tons of untaxed wealth offshore, likely aiming to become Bond villains.

The list is a mix of things critics are right about (the step-up in basis is hard to defend except perhaps as a bulwark against overly high estate-tax rates), that are arguable (carried interest) and that are nonsense (that wealthy Americans hide much of their money offshore untaxed).

Under the actual proposal, capital-gains rates would go up, but the step-up rule to avoid them at death would remain. Carried-interest treatment is only slightly altered and current proposals seem to make this advantage even more exclusive to private equity and venture capital. The Internal Revenue Service would get more money for enforcement, but this would be directed, as usual, mostly against easier targets than the superrich. The IRS likely knows that there are few hidden hoards of American-owned offshore wealth. While few Americans were named in the so-called Pandora Papers, which revealed the shady offshore holdings of many prominent foreign politicians, they are nevertheless tacitly being used to justify raising taxes right here in the 50 states.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/two-expert-failures-and-their-consequences-bruce-thornton/

The most consequential change in the history of our political order has been the shift from a Democratic Republic to a Technocratic Oligarchy. In the former, the Federal government is limited, and its powers checked and balanced by the Bill of Rights, Congress, the Supreme Court, and the sovereignty powers of the states. In the latter, power is expanded and concentrated in the Federal government and executive agencies staffed by “experts” whose knowledge and judgement are supposedly superior to the practical wisdom, common sense, unalienable rights, and traditional self-government of the sovereign people and their representatives.

After nearly a century of the ever-expanding concentration and reach of federal power, with the Biden administration we have reached the inflection point where that power is becoming the very tyranny the Founders sought to prevent. What else do you call it when, to advance the interests of a partisan faction, the National School Boards Association,  the Attorney General marshals the FBI, along with several other federal agencies, to investigate parents who are exercising their Constitutional rights to question and demand accountability from locally elected state school boards that lie beyond the Constitutional authority of the federal government?

This transformation from Republic to technocracy has been going on for over a century.

Early in progressivism’s rise there were explicit calls for technocratic control housed in the executive branch’s bureaus and agencies. Professor Woodrow Wilson in 1887 counseled the country to “open for the public a bureau of skilled, economical administration” comprising the “hundreds who are wise” empowered to guide the thousands of American citizens who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.”

Progressives like Herbert Croly in 1909 argued that to achieve this rule by experts “does demand an increased amount of centralized action and responsibility,” which in turn requires, Croly continued, that we “discard the strong, almost dominant tendency to regard the existing Constitution with superstitious awe, and to shrink with horror from modifying it in even the smallest detail”––even though when Croly wrote, there had already been 18 Amendments “modifying” the Constitution. And Walter Lippman in 1914 linked the argument for technocracy to professional training in the “human sciences,” for “the great triumph of modern psychology is its growing capacity for penetrating to the desires that govern men’s thoughts.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/20/is-the-u-s-up-to-chinas-challenge/

News that China has launched a hypersonic missile capable of carrying a nuclear payload around the Earth should be both a wake-up call and a call to action for America. Unfortunately, the current administration and the military it leads are woefully inadequate to the task.

The response from the Biden White House to the news that the Chinese now have a seriously threatening weapon that could vaporize American cities would have been laughable if it weren’t so frightening in its absurd naivete.

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, responding to a Financial Times report that the Chinese “launch in August of nuclear-capable rocket that circled the globe took U.S. intelligence by surprise,” said flippantly the administration “welcomes stiff competition.”

Welcomes stiff competition. That sounds like something the satirical but eerily accurate Babylon Bee would concoct, And yet, there it is.

A far more accurate response came from Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who called the missile shot a “wake-up call for the United States and our allies.” It was, he said, a “Sputnik moment.”

Now the question isn’t whether the U.S. will still keep its commitment to protecting Taiwan from a Chinese attack. The really big question now is whether the White House will keep its constitutional duty to protect the U.S.

The media are already debating this “new Cold War” with China, and rightly so.

After decades of pretending China might be a friendly ally in the world, we’ve now seen the Tiger’s real stripes. Led by Xi Jinping, Beijing has moved sharply leftward to reclaim its communist legacy, breaking its Hong Kong treaty, cracking down on dissent and religious belief, creating a dystopian omnipresent online surveillance state, crushing private businesses, and engaging in what looks from afar like genocide against the Muslim Uighurs.