RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/from_george_zimmerman_to_kyle_rittenhouse_a_decade_of_woke_misrule.html

Ten years ago this coming February, George Zimmermann shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on a rainy night in Sanford, Florida. Without intending, Zimmerman triggered a dark new phase in the history of progressive America.

Beginning with the Sacco and Vanzetti case in the 1920s, the left lied to conceal the guilt of the guilty. Yes, Virginia, those two bad boys were guilty. Upton Sinclair, who “proved” their innocence in his epic novel Boston, knew they were guilty. “My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe,” Sinclair confided to a friend, “I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book.”

Unlike Sinclair, most of the “useful idiots” on the left did not need to be threatened to stay in line. For the next century, their self-righteousness led them to weep for a pantheon of martyrs from the Rosenbergs to Leonard Peltier to Mumia Abu-Jamal to Kenosha’s own Jacob Blake, all of them purported victims of American injustice.

With the dawn of the social media era, however, the newly minted “progressives” made a conscious turn to the sinister. No longer content to conceal the guilt of the guilty, they lied now to conceal the innocence of the innocent. As Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse learned the hard way, Atticus Finch is dead. The woke have thrown in with the jailhouse mob. Mockingbirds beware.

With a few exceptions, however, technology has betrayed its leftist creators. Rittenhouse would have had no chance for justice were it not for the ubiquitous cell phone cameras. Had video captured the shooting of Martin, Zimmerman would not have been arrested.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-biden-bill-at-least-4-6-trillion-congressional-budget-office-score-congress-democrats-11637275848?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Congressional Budget Office on Thursday released its “official” cost estimates for the House tax and entitlement bill, but don’t believe it. The CBO gnomes aren’t lying about a 10-year deficit estimate of $367 billion. They’re obliged to score the bill under rules that Democrats have rigged with multiple tricks that disguise the real cost by trillions of dollars.

Democrats phase out the biggest programs in the bill while paying for them with 10 years of tax increases. They phase-in other programs and off-load costs to the states. The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates the House bill would cost nearly $4.6 trillion over 10 years if temporary provisions are made permanent, as most will be.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) pegs the cost at $4.9 trillion if temporary tax credits and programs are made permanent through 2031. This would add $1.5 trillion to deficits over the next five years without additional tax offsets. Let’s take a tour of this budget deception.

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• Enhanced child allowances ($3,600 for children under age 6 and $3,000 up to age 17). This is the bill’s most expensive provision at about $130 billion a year, which is why Democrats limit it to one year. Does anyone doubt they’ll extend it in the future?

They may get help from Republicans, who won’t want to be attacked for raising taxes on families. CRFB says making the allowances permanent would cost $1.13 trillion. Based on current law, it would cost $1.5 trillion since the $2,000 tax credit from the 2017 GOP tax reform is set to drop back to $1,000 after 2025. So that’s nearly $1.4 trillion in hidden costs alone.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbis-raid-on-james-okeefe-project-veritas-department-of-justice-merrick-garland-11637091882?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Attorney General Merrick Garland still refuses to retract the memo he sent last month instructing the Department of Justice to scrutinize parents protesting at local school board meetings. Now his department may have committed another civil-liberties abuse with its raid on Project Veritas leader James O’Keefe.

Project Veritas is a right-wing media organization known for going undercover inside progressive institutions and using its findings to embarrass them. Early morning a week ago Saturday, FBI agents raided Mr. O’Keefe’s New York apartment, handcuffed him in the hallway and seized two cell phones. He has not been charged with a crime.

The subject of the investigation is apparently a diary believed to belong to President Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden. Project Veritas says it was given the diary by two individuals last year and chose not to publish it because its authenticity couldn’t be verified, then handed it over to law enforcement. The diary was later published by an obscure website.

It’s settled law that it’s not a crime for journalists to publish information that was obtained unlawfully. If it was a crime, most of America’s largest news organizations would be criminal enterprises. Project Veritas says the people who gave the group the diary said it was not stolen. How the diary was obtained, and how it came to be published by a different website, is still murky.

Yet the search warrant says Justice is investigating “possession of stolen goods” and related offenses, suggesting Project Veritas or its employees may be targets. Imagine if the Trump Administration raided New York Times editors’ homes after the publication of the President’s tax records—or even for an investigation into documents they did not ultimately publish.

Nothing that invasive ever happened. But partly in response to the furor over the Trump Administration’s supposed threat to press freedom, Mr. Garland published guidelines in July narrowing Justice’s ability to seize information from reporters. The policy said Justice “will no longer use compulsory legal process” against journalists “acting within the scope of newsgathering activities.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/19/the-white-houses-hammer-and-sickle/

Thursday’s Senate confirmation hearing on Saule Omarova, President Joe Biden’s choice to be comptroller of the currency, confirmed that she is the wrong person for the job. Flags the color of those that once were raised over Moscow were flying throughout the three-hour session.

Omarova is a professor of regulation of financial institutions, banking law, international finance, and corporate finance at Cornell. As comptroller of the currency, she would ensure that the “federal banking system operates in a safe and sound manner.”

The White House says she “​​is eminently qualified and was nominated for this role because of her lifetime of work,” and is “a leading academic” in her field. 

Her critics, however, see someone whose policy positions are far out of step with a market economy.

Britain’s Daily Mail has labeled her “​​Biden’s new comrade.” Townhall’s Katie Pavlich says Omarova is a “Communist” who “wants all bank accounts to be controlled by the Fed.” South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott said during Thursday’s hearing that “I cannot think of a nominee more poorly suited to be the comptroller of the currency based solely on your public positions, statements and the weight of your writings than you are.”

The Kazakhstan-born Omarova, educated at Moscow State University, where she had a Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship, which “recently disappeared from her resume,” and also at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University, has described herself as a “free-market idealist.” She swears she knows “that Soviet-style communism doesn’t work.”

“I’ve lived through it. That system was deeply flawed. It’s dead.”

Yet she envisions the creation of “National Investment Authority,” which would bypass Congress and use public and private resources to fund “vital infrastructure and the real economy.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/17/america-at-the-intersection-of-woke-and-incompetent/

We may have never had such a poisonous combination of partisanship and incompetence at the highest levels of government as we do today.

For as long as most of us have been alive, there have been declarations that America’s best days are behind us and that we are in a slow, steady decline. Against this backdrop, there is a growing sentiment that our present leadership in Washington is something altogether different, and worse. 

We are still getting familiar levels of government waste and inefficiency, but along with those come seemingly unprecedented levels of radicalism and incompetence. This noxious combination was on full display with the recent Senate testimony of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. 

Washington is filthy with dogmatic bureaucrats, but Mayorkas stands out. He is willing to parrot the most absurd and provably false statements, such as his repeated insistence that the border is closed. When called before Congress, he defends this administration’s indefensible border policies with shameless diversions and obfuscation. 

At the heart of this administration’s border policy is a zealous adherence to far-Left ideology that flies in the face of common sense and traditional American principles. When Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked if the border is more under control now than during the Trump years, Mayorkas replied, “We have more control [of the border] that is consistent with our values as a nation.” 

This was a reference to the White House’s favorite talking point that Trump was “cruel” by instituting a zero-tolerance policy that temporarily separated parents from their children. But in its attempt to be all things anti-Trump at the border, this administration has empowered ruthless human trafficking cartels, enabled greater quantities of fentanyl and other illicit drugs to be brought into the country, and allowed untold numbers of children to be sexually assaulted as they are stockpiled into overcrowded detention centers. Isn’t that cruel? In what way is any of that consistent with our values as a nation?