RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/bidens-war-against-wealthy-exposes-him-jason-d-hill/

Some criminals who steal other people’s money to finance their own private lifestyle, or those of the public, often move by stealth and subterfuge. They deploy moralistic language via rhetorical obfuscation. By the time they work over our moral conscience, we grant them the benefit of the doubt because we believe, in some perverse way, that the criminal had a coercive right to what he was taking away from us.

Joe Biden is such thief. He has stated outright that it is time for the richest Americans to pay their fair share of taxes. He has not exactly identified by what means and by what right it is your or anyone else’s fair share of what someone else has earned. But it does not matter. Like all financial appropriators, private or public, one is expected to accept an appropriator’s assertion as the legitimate basis of a claim, or, in this case, an outright mandate.

The appeal to moral conscience is mawkishly sentimental. Biden intends to finance a country’s badly-needed faltering infrastructure and welfare spending totaling about $4tn. The various packages under these $1.8tn American Families Plan and $2tn infrastructure plans would provide funds for childcare and free pre-school education facilities, along with humongous programs to rebuild the country’s transport system and public-sector housing. They all are a part of a systemic effort to effect action on what Biden perceives as the climate crisis. The plan would also allocate $200bn for free universal preschool education, and $109bn for free community college education—regardless of income for two years.

This is to be paid for by making corporate America and the wealthiest 1% pay just their fair share, Biden repeated, as he spoke at a community college on Monday, May 3, in Norfolk, Virginia.

Astute readers will realize the move towards socialism by stealth here.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/the-biden-dojs-targeting-of-rudy-giuliani-could-backfire-spectacularly/?utm_source=

“President Biden is incorrigible. With his ample record of not knowing when to leave well enough alone, he probably doesn’t know better. Merrick Garland is supposed to know better.”

One would have hoped the new AG would have the good sense to steer away from score-settling prosecutions that are apt to blow up in the president’s face.

 ‘D on’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.” If nothing else, former President Barack Obama is a shrewd man. Hence, this evergreen assessment of his vice president, after years of close observation. It is most manifest in Joe Biden’s ineffable glibness. Beneath it, the now-president can’t quite conceal the uncomfortable awareness that, though he somehow manages Magoo-like to land on his feet, he has always been in over his head. And he knows that you know.

If you get that, you’ll understand the latest Ukraine kerfuffle.

Yes, I know, the press says it’s all about Rudy. We’ll get to that part. At bottom, though, the story is about two other men. The first is Biden — specifically, his unique capacity to turn good fortune into farce. The second is Attorney General Merrick Garland.

It was too much to expect that Garland’s seasoned moderation would counterbalance the woke warriors of his Department of Social Justice. The president’s grandiose hallucinations aside, the Biden administration is not the New Deal reincarnate. It is not going to move epic progressive legislation across the finish line. If it’s going to appease its restive left flank, it will have to sic federal prosecutors on police departments, high-school locker rooms, and the Little Sisters of the Poor. We get that. But one would have hoped that AG Garland would have the good sense to steer the administration away from patently politicized, score-settling prosecutions that are apt to blow up in the president’s face.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/president-joe-sanders-11620340410?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The White House this week proposed to strip drug companies of their vaccine patents, an act hailed by adulators as “moral leadership.” It’s better seen as the encapsulation of the Biden presidency—a case study in fictional narratives, executive overreach, recklessness, and kowtowing to the left.

The biopharmaceutical industry in under a year accomplished a modern miracle—designing a breakthrough vaccine to counter Covid-19; engineering a ground-up production process; and climbing a logistical Everest. It was a triumph of innovation, investment and capitalism, a moment that deserves to be celebrated.

Instead, the Biden administration supports a proposal in the World Trade Organization that would “waive” the intellectual-property rights of the companies that accomplished this feat, giving away their technology to every drugmaker in the world. Put another way, Mr. Biden is freely handing American invention to China—the country that routinely steals it, and whose Wuhan lab might have been the source of the virus.

The move is in keeping with the administration’s refusal to acknowledge the history of the vaccine achievement. Team Biden continues its willful disregard of Operation Warp Speed, in part because it is too petty to give credit to any person, company or initiative connected to the Trump administration.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-vaccine-ip-debacle-11620341686?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

We’ve already criticized President Biden’s bewildering decision Wednesday to endorse a patent waiver for Covid vaccines and therapies. But upon more reflection this may be the single worst presidential economic decision since Nixon’s wage-and-price controls.

In one fell swoop he has destroyed tens of billions of dollars in U.S. intellectual property, set a destructive precedent that will reduce pharmaceutical investment, and surrendered America’s advantage in biotech, a key growth industry of the future. Handed an American triumph of innovation and a great soft-power opportunity, Mr. Biden throws it all away.

***

India and South Africa have been pushing to suspend patents at the World Trade Organization for months. They claim that waiving IP protections for Covid vaccines and therapies is necessary to expand global access, but their motivation is patently self-interested.

Both are large producers of generic drugs, though they have less expertise and capacity to make complex biologics like mRNA vaccines. They want to force Western pharmaceutical companies to hand over IP free of charge so they can produce and export vaccines and therapies for profit. Their strategy has been to shame Western leaders into surrendering with the help of Democrats in the U.S.

But suspending IP isn’t necessary to expand supply and will impede safe vaccine production. The global vaccine supply is already increasing rapidly thanks to licensing agreements the vaccine makers have made with manufacturers around the world.

Pfizer and BioNTech this week said they aimed to deliver three billion doses this year, up from last summer’s 1.2 billion estimate. Moderna increased its supply forecast for this year to between 800 million and a billion from 600 million. AstraZeneca says it has built a supply network with 25 manufacturing organizations in 15 countries to produce three billion doses this year.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/we-live-in-the-era-of-the-new-conformists_3805525.html?utm_source=partner

In his latest piece, the estimable Victor Davis Hanson asks the rhetorical question “Are Americans Becoming Sovietized?”

Without a doubt. And a key reason behind this, I have been thinking for a long time, is that the left and the semi-left, progressives and liberals, masses of them in our country from the corporate world to the media to the academy to entertainment, are the New Conformists.

Well, not completely new, but conformists beyond doubt. Hardly ever an original thought among them.

They are like the “Triplets” song from Vincente Minelli’s classical musical “The Band Wagon.” (“We do everything alike, we look alike, we dress alike. We walk alike, we talk alike.”)

With this mindset, becoming “Sovietized” scarcely takes an effort. You don’t have to learn a word of Russian beyond “nyet.”

Back in the Fifties, conservatives were accused of being the “organization men” or the “men in the grey flannel suit,” but these days it’s the other way around.

No one is more predictable, more conformist, than the so-called “woke.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/05/06/new-earmarks-costing-taxpayers-10-billion-proposed-by-324-members-of-congress–is-there-wasteful-spending/?sh=275a772c5a93

Pork is back on the table in Congress. Critics say that bringing back earmarks was the equivalent of bringing back Swine Flu.

This week, the U.S. House posted online 3,309 earmarks proposed by 324 members of Congress. The taxpayer cost of these new projects amounted to $9.7 billion.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com mapped each earmark by congressional district. Just click a pin (member district) and scroll down to see the earmarks rendered in the chart beneath the map.

The list was compiled from member websites where they were required to post their appropriation and infrastructure earmarks. There were 220 Democrats and 104 Republicans who embraced the “member directed spending.”

Review the rankings of all 324 members requesting earmarks here. Since 2011, Congress banned earmarks because of systemic corruption. Recently both parties decided to resurrect the practice.

Democrats requested 2,338 earmarks for $4.94 billion. Republicans requested 971 earmarks for $4.7 billion. Six of the top eight members requesting the most earmarks and 14 of the top 25 were Republicans.