RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/ivy-love-getty-wedding-and-the-california-machine

While San Francisco public school students have been instructed to wear masks between bites at lunch, Ivy Love Getty, heiress to the Getty Oil fortune, celebrated her nuptials last weekend in a flurry of sparsely masked gatherings with the San Francisco political machine, fading celebrities, and some stray European royalty. The ceremony, officiated by House speaker Nancy Pelosi, was held at City Hall. Vogue writes that “San Francisco’s City Hall is designed to inspire awe—a symbol of the city’s power and resilience . . . with its white marble detailing and soaring dome that looms more than 300 feet overhead,” but adds that the ceremony felt intimate and personal.

Do tell. City Hall is located in the Tenderloin neighborhood, ground zero of the city’s drug and homelessness crises. Ordinarily, the awe-inspiring symbol of rebirth is surrounded by syringes, excrement, and half-alive bodies. November 6, however, was no ordinary day. Police diverted traffic while red carpets covered the stairs. Vogue attests that the party proceeded as planned. No amount of human misery can ruin the matrimony of the local petroleum princess, certainly not the kind of misery that the political machine allows to persist right under its nose.

I’ve been waiting for two months to receive a new shower door for the bathroom I’ve been renovating, but the Gettys don’t have supply-chain problems. Ivy wore at least a half-dozen gowns during the various gatherings—Alexander McQueen, Emanuel Ungaro, John Galliano—and two pairs of Louboutins on her wedding day: one for the ceremony and another for the reception. The reception was held at the Getty mansion, which was adorned with, Vogue informs, “a museum-quality collection of European antiques, Venetian paintings, French textiles, and Russian chandeliers, . . . gold-framed Impressionist paintings,” and a rose garden. Honored by such guests as Gavin Newsom (his last public appearance before a mysterious sabbatical), Kamala Harris, Justin Bieber, and the princess of Greece, a girl has to do her best.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/12/the-cdc-cant-prove-a-single-instance-of-a-naturally-immune-individual-spreading-covid/

In response to a law firm’s query, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was unable to provide a single instance in which an unvaccinated person who’d previously had COVID-19 became reinfected with and transmitted the virus to someone else. The CDC said it does not collect such data, even though the medical freedom of millions of Americans hang in the balance.

A record 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in September, many of them pushed out of the workforce by the unnecessary vaccine mandates.

Attorney Aaron Siri wrote on Substack that his firm Siri & Glimstad LLP obtained this information via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded by Del Bigtree dedicated to “investigating the safety of medical procedures, pharmaceutical drugs, and vaccines while educating the public of their right to ‘informed consent.’”

Siri found it incredible that the CDC was not collecting this information.

You would assume that if the CDC was going to crush the civil and individual rights of those with natural immunity by having them expelled from school, fired from their jobs, separated from the military, and worse, the CDC would have proof of at least one instance of an unvaccinated, naturally immune individual transmitting the COVID-19 virus to another individual. If you thought this, you would be wrong.

“The CDC’s incredible response is that it does not have a single document reflecting that this has ever occurred. Not one,” Siri wrote.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/12/the-royalist-left/

The Left lives in an upside-down world of its own creation. Yet in our pluralistic republic, it is entitled to its delusions. The problem is these delusions are not enough. Their misery demands company.

Whether their largely undereducated and overly indoctrinated masses know it, the Left crawled out of the anti-Enlightenment, reactionary ooze of French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideological cesspool. Stated simply, the Left’s goal is to rule as an enlightened vanguard under the direction of a “legislator” to impose a new civil religion and other diktats upon Americans and drag them back into an idealized state of nature composed of “noble savages” no longer constrained by the corrupting influences of civilization. It is why the Left’s use of a vehicle called the “Democratic Party” is so deeply, bitterly ironic. For the Left’s tactics and aims are anything but democratic. 

Of course, the Left’s tactics and aims don’t fit on a bumper sticker and, regardless, many leftists wouldn’t be caught dead in an internal combustion-propelled vehicle. Further, as recent election results in Virginia and New Jersey suggest, when the Left’s tactics and aims are imposed through public policy they prove ineffective and, to no rational person’s surprise, unpopular. But this is why the Left spends so much time and money crafting “narratives”—i.e., lies—to obfuscate their unpopularity. Sometimes they are successful, other times not; but the Left’s narratives and disinformation should be easily exposed when one remembers the upside-down nature of their delusions.

The Left are the modern royalists. They believe themselves among those of our fellow citizens who would benefit from an authoritarian regime and the status quo; and as such they are diametrically opposed to the core principles of the American Revolution—a populist uprising, if ever there was one.

Prior to the American Revolution, all sovereignty was vested in the king or queen; and the people were subjects of the crown, possessing only those rights allowed by the sovereign or the parliament (using the crown’s delegated sovereign power). To put it succinctly, the governing paradigm was the king or queen at the top and the people on the bottom.

After the American Revolution, all sovereignty was vested in the American people, individually and collectively. Each American’s individual rights were understood to be from God, not the government—the latter established to protect these inalienable rights and serve only through and with the consent of the citizenry, who were largely to be self-governing. The new, revolutionary paradigm inverted the pyramidal governing paradigm: now, the people were at the top and the government was on the bottom. This is the populist, principled foundation of American exceptionalism.

And the regressive, royalist Left cannot stand it.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/the_doj_and_fbi_have_combined_to_destroy_project_veritas.html

Project Veritas uses hidden camera techniques to expose corruption, dishonesty, anarchy, and totalitarian impulses in American institutions. Given the times in which we live, that means Project Veritas is usually exposing leftists and their organizations. It’s almost certainly not a coincidence, then, that the FBI engaged in a series of early-morning raids against Project Veritas employees and its founder, James O’Keefe, ostensibly because, a year ago, they possessed, but refused to use (and gave to law enforcement), a diary that we now know belonged to Joe Biden’s pathetic, drug-addicted daughter, Ashley.

It’s even less of a coincidence that the New York Times immediately knew about the raids and later published Project Veritas’s confidential correspondence with its attorneys. What we’re witnessing is a political hit job that would be completely at home in any penny-ante, third-world, tin pot tyranny—in other words, welcome to Biden’s America.

The story starts with Ashley Biden, a Biden child almost as pathetic as Hunter. Like her brother, she has had drug problems, including an arrest for marijuana possession (although, big surprise, the charges were dropped) and a video purportedly showing her using cocaine at a party.

Over a year ago, the louche Ashley ended up in a drug rehabilitation center and reported that her diary was stolen while she was there. Tipsters approached Project Veritas, claiming to have a copy of the diary which, they said, Ashley had abandoned or forgotten when she left the clinic. Unable to determine whether the diary was even real, Project Veritas tried to give it to Ashley’s attorney, who refused it. Project Veritas then gave it to law enforcement. It never published the diary.

Eventually, the National File released the document. It made a bit of a splash because the diary refers to Ashley’s belief that she was sexually abused as a child, talks about inappropriate showers with Daddy Joe, and discusses drug abuse, marital affairs, and more. It’s the pathetic document of a damaged person raised by a sleazy parent.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/the_5th_circuits_brilliant_opinion_staying_oshas_vaccine_mandate.html

Despite (or perhaps because of) a long career spent reading judicial decisions, I really hate reading cases. A stellar exception arose on Friday, when the Fifth Circuit issued its decision in BST Holdings, L.L.C. et al. v. OSHA, reaffirming the initial stay it granted when multiple entities and individuals challenged OSHA’s recently issued vaccine mandate. In one brutal paragraph after another, the Court rips apart the mandate, citing law, facts, OSHA precedent, and even a Ron Klain tweet. It’s a tour de force that makes it unlikely that any halfway honest court can or would resuscitate the mandate or that either OSHA or even Congress could try again.

There are a few dates you should know: In June 2020, when fear about COVID was at a peak, OSHA “reasonably determined” that an emergency temporary standard (“ETS”) was unnecessary. Over a year later, on September 9, 2021, Biden announced that he was going to impose a national vaccine mandate. That same day, Ron Klain retweeted a Stephanie Ruhle tweet stating that the vaccine “is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.” Finally, almost two months later, on November 5, OSHA finally got around to promulgating the ETS.

And there are two facts you need to know: Congress created OSHA

[T]o assure Americans ‘safe and healthful working conditions and to preserve our human resources.’ … It was not—and likely could not be, under the Commerce Clause and nondelegation doctrine—intended to authorize a workplace safety administration in the deep recesses of the federal bureaucracy to make sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the profoundest of ways. [p. 6, citations and footnote omitted.]

OSHA’s authority regarding issuing an ETS is also extremely narrow, requiring a grave danger from exposure to hazardous substances, toxic agents, or new hazards, all of which require urgent intervention. ETSs are “‘an ‘unusual response’ to ‘exceptional circumstances.’”  (p. 8, citations omitted.) The legal standard is that this “extraordinary power” must be “delicately exercised” and only in “limited situations.” (Ibid.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-congressional-hypocrisy-caucus-11636755206?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

The effort by congressional Democrats to shield themselves and their wealthy donors from tax hikes while inflicting them on the middle class appears to be more successful than previously reported. Even the left-leaning Tax Policy Center is blowing the whistle on this egregious gap between Democratic rhetoric and legislative reality.

As for rhetoric, this week in Baltimore the President continued making the claim he’s been making since he was a mere presidential candidate about his “Build Back Better” plan:

Nobody is going to — nobody is going to pay more — if you make less than 400 grand, you’re not going to pay anything more in taxes at all. Period. Guaranteed.

Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center shares the outfit’s new estimate of a House draft of the plan:

Taking into account all major tax provisions, roughly 20 percent to 30 percent of middle-income households would pay more in taxes in 2022.

So much for a Biden guarantee. But there appears to be good news in the House draft for wealthy people who live in blue states—an increase to $80,000 from $10,000 in the amount of state and local taxes (SALT) that filers can deduct on their federal tax returns. Democrats are trying to sell this change as a benefit to the middle class, but the Tax Policy Center is among the many who aren’t buying it:

Despite what its promoters say, raising the cap to $80,000 would provide almost no benefit for middle-income households. It would reduce their 2021 taxes by an average of only $20. Even those making between $175,00 and $250,000 would get a tax cut of just over $400 or about 0.2 percent of after-tax income. By contrast, the higher SALT cap would boost after-tax incomes by 1.2 percent for those making between about $370,000 and $870,000 (the 95th to 99th percentile).