RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/24/the-irs-opened-its-investigation-into-reporter-matt-taibbis-taxes-on-christmas-eve-the-same-day-he-dropped-twitter-files-9/

In a letter to IRS Director Daniel Werfel Wednesday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) revealed that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) opened a case targeting independent journalist Matt Taibbi on Christmas Eve 2022, coinciding with Taibbi’s Twitter Files reporting on the intelligence community’s collusion with multiple tech platforms. The IRS, according to recently obtained documents, then produced a dossier on Taibbi that included information such as his voter registration records, whether he possessed a hunting or fishing license, and whether he had a concealed weapons permit.

The “case” has since been resolved, and the documents confirm that not only did Taibbi not owe the IRS any back taxes, the IRS owed him a “substantial refund.”

The House Judiciary Committee has been investigating the circumstances surrounding the IRS’s visit to Taibbi’s house on March 9, 2023, the same day he testified before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

The IRS on May 6 produced some documents responsive to the Committee’s March 27 request for information regarding an IRS agent’s suspiciously timed visit to Taibbi’s home.  These documents “raise more questions than they answer,” Jordan wrote in his letter to Werfel.

The IRS asserted to the Committee that it sent a letter to Mr. Taibbi on October 24, 2019—nine days after Mr. Taibbi filed his 2018 tax return—asking Mr. Taibbi to verify his return because it met identity theft criteria and could not be processed until he confirmed. The IRS alleged that it sent a second letter to Mr. Taibbi on March 23, 2020. However, according to Mr. Taibbi, neither he nor his accountant received either of these letters or any other notification that there was an issue with his 2018 tax return—that is, until the IRS conducted a field visit at Mr. Taibbi’s home three years later. The IRS also failed to produce these purported letters to the Committee.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/24/the-left-has-pushed-the-envelope/

The Left is waging a full-fledged cultural revolution against traditional America. And the Maoist results are often as absurd as they are terrifying.

Special-counsel John Durham just issued his final report on wrongdoing within the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Justice. 

The summary confirms that our premier investigatory and intelligence agencies interfered in the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. 

Directors and high-ranking FBI officials lied under oath. They misled Congress. They altered court documents and deceived federal judges. 

The FBI hired a foreign national to gather dirt on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign—while he was being paid by the rival Hillary Clinton campaign.

The FBI contracted Twitter to suppress news stories. It kept the Hunter Biden laptop under wraps, even as former intelligence officials flat out lied it was likely “Russian disinformation.” That was a blatant effort to aid the 2020 Biden campaign.

The IRS just conceded whistleblowers were correct and the agency fired its entire multiyear audit team responsible for investigating Hunter Biden’s purported tax irregularities. 

The agency claimed it was ordered to do so by the Department of Justice, headed by Biden’s appointee Merrick Garland.

California is facing a crushing $32 billion deficit. Yet it flirts with an $800 billion-dollar “reparations” payout to the state’s black residents. 

No one has any idea where the money for that would come from. No one can define who would qualify. No one can explain why a state that never allowed slavery eight generations ago now owes selected Californians billions of dollars it does not have. 

One of the reparations board leaders asserts blacks might be willing to accept an “installment” plan of payments.

The NAACP just issued a “travel alert” advising blacks not to visit Florida. The announcement was timed to draw negative attention to conservative Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ announcement of a presidential bid. 

Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis—all outside Florida—have the highest black murder rates in the nation. 

Florida in contrast, with a black population of 3.3 million, has the second largest number of black businesses in the nation. The chairman of the NAACP’s board of directors is himself a Florida resident! 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/what_to_do_and_why_it_matters.html

Among the sharp-witted reader comments that come my way, some clonk me on the head with reasonable gripes that take a couple of forms: (1) sure, Shurk, the country is a mess, but what precisely are we going to do about it?  Or more despondently: (2) Given how awful everything is, how could anything we do possibly matter?

I would like to address the second question first by stating emphatically: what you do matters tremendously.  Your efforts influence others in ways you may never know.

As but a single illustration of this truth, consider this message from a young woman that was reposted to a comment thread at The Conservative Treehouse:

My heart goes out to the men and women who have been awake for years if not decades.  I cannot imagine the frustration and hopelessness you must have felt when you were literally watching the world burn with no one to talk to.  We’re here now and we are awake.  Sorry we’re late.

If those fifty words don’t give you a bit of a jolt, check yourself for a pulse.  The moment we stop believing that our actions can make a difference in this world is the moment we thank our enemies for having dug the six-foot hole up ahead.  When we refuse to surrender and force our enemies to keep digging, then the only question that matters is this: who will get tired first?  

Even when you feel alone, there are people watching and wondering whether you will hold the line.  Some of those people are even carrying shovels.  But over time, your resilience changes minds.  Diggers throw down their tools to join sides with the people who refuse to go away.  It is an enduring certainty that all movements for great change begin with a smattering of strong-willed truth-tellers who seed the ground with inspiration before a harvest of raw courage sweeps the land.  Nobody can keep you from being that seed.  Perseverance is its own reward.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/john-brennan-enemy-of-the-people/

The just-released Durham report confirmed that the FBI not only failed to corroborate the Steele dossier, Hillary Clinton’s oppo-doc against former President Donald Trump, but it regularly ignored existing, sometimes dispositive, evidence to keep the investigation alive. Some officials were credulous. Others were devious. But no one “stole” our democracy — other than perhaps intelligence officials and the journalists who helped feed the collective hysteria over Russia.

John Brennan, Hamas-loving authoritarian and partisan propagandist, almost surely knew it was a con from the start. Yet he spent four years on television sounding like a deranged subreddit commenter. Even after privately admitting he knew there was no collusion, Brennan kept lying and using his credentials to mislead the public.

From John Durham’s report:

“CIA Director John Brennan and Deputy Director David Cohen were interviewed by the Office and were asked about their knowledge of any actual evidence of members of the Trump campaign conspiring or colluding with Russian officials. When Brennan was provided with an overview of the origins of the Attorney General’s Review after Special Counsel Mueller finding a lack of evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian authorities, Brennan offered that ‘they found no conspiracy.’”

As Durham points out, even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered his report, and after Brennan admitted no one found a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign, the former head of the CIA went on air with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, another all-star election “denier,” and claimed that he “suspected there was more” to collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian President Vladimir Putin than Mueller had let on.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fake-history-and-redistributing-wealth/

Calls for reparations payments for the descendants of slaves and colonized peoples, the “latest obsession of the radical left,” as The Hill puts it, are currently growing, as is the tab. For example, San Francisco is proposing paying $5 million to each black resident, along with a guaranteed income of $97,000 for 250 years, and a home for a dollar. California is proposing cash payments of up to $1.2 million at a cost of $800 billion–three times the state’s annual budget. Not to be left out of the bidding, the Feds are asking for $14 trillion. But sponsor Rep. Cori Bush claims that is nowhere near the $97 trillion owed to blacks for slavery and Jim Crow.

This combination of obsession and grift also has infected England. On the eve of his coronation, Charles III was served a statement from the “commonwealth indigenous leaders.” They called on the new king “to acknowledge the horrific impacts on and legacy of genocide and colonization,” and to “redistribute the wealth that underpins the crown back to the peoples from whom it was stolen.” Given the extent and duration of the British Empire, that tab will no doubt be astronomical.

The rationale for this prohibitively expensive largess is a crude, Orwellian politicized history of the sort the left is famous for. The current proposals are unlikely to happen, but they are nonetheless racist and divisive, a testimony to how badly we are teaching history and civics––despite how dangerous to the public weal such neglect can be.

In practical terms, these schemes have numerous problems. How will eligibility be determined? Will state and federal governments investigate the genealogy of every American to determine if their ancestors were slave-owners? And what about the multiple millions of descendants of immigrants, including ethnic Africans, who came after the Civil War? Just in California there are more than 15 million ethnic Hispanics guiltless of American slavery and Jim Crow segregation.

Other questions abound. Will foreign-born blacks or their descendants be eligible? How about mixed-race Americans? Will the payments be means-tested? Or will the programs rely on “systemic racism” rhetorical sleight-of-hand to avoid these complications? In that view, given that all blacks have suffered,  and given that all so-called “white people,” no matter how poor, are born with “white privilege,” all people of pallor should pay. And since tax-revenues will be used to fund the payments, all ethnicities, with their own histories of oppression and injustice, will have to pay their fellow citizens who never suffered slavery.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/24/160-plus-retired-military-brass-urge-congress-to-root-out-dods-poisonous-diversity-and-equity-programs/

More than 160 retired generals and admirals recently signed a letter calling on Congress to remove so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs from the Department of Defense and remove funding for such programs from the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

“As our Nation faces looming threats from ‘foreign’ adversaries/enemies, our military is under assault from a culture war stemming from ‘domestic’ ideologically inspired political policies and practices. … Our military must be laser focused on one mission — readiness, undiminished by the culture war engulfing our country,” Flag Officers 4 America wrote in the letter addressed to Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Armed Services Subcommittee Chairman Mike Rogers, and Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Ken Calvert.

The signatories — which included former National Security Advisor John Poindexter, Medal of Honor recipient Maj. Gen. James E. Livingston, and former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Gerald Boykin — expressed concern about how divisive and discriminatory DEI policies affect national security. So-called “equity,” they wrote, “sounds benign, but in practice it lowers standards. While equality provides equal opportunities, equity’s goal is equal outcomes.”

The officers argued that equal opportunity and meritocracy provide the greatest foundation for both equality and national defense, while the cultural Marxism promoted by DEI policies is a domestic threat to our national security.

“To achieve equal outcomes using identity group characteristics, standards must be lowered to accommodate the desired equity outcomes. Lower standards reduce performance where even slight differences in capability impact readiness and can determine war fighting mission success or failure,” they wrote. Furthermore, obsession with identity causes “friction and distrust in the ranks, damaging unit cohesion, teamwork and unity of effort, further degrading readiness.”

Instead of DEI, the signatories advocated for a return to longstanding meritocratic military recruitment standards, pointing to a long history of true inclusivity and diversity that accompanied those standards.

“Service Members (SMs) were judged not by the color of their skin but by their character, duty performance, and potential,” the officers explained. “Meritocracy, coupled with equal opportunity, created conditions for all to advance and excel, which stimulates healthy competition, thereby raising standards.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/24/many-of-our-elected-officials-are-unfit-to-serve-medical-problems-are-sometimes-the-cause/

Two U.S. senators recently became incapacitated – John Fetterman, D-Pa., with severe depression that required a months-long hospitalization, and whose outcome is uncertain; and Dianne Feinstein, D-Ca., who had a shingles infection that developed into encephalitis, from which she has not fully recovered. (And at age 89, she is unlikely to.) Marked by inflammation and swelling of the brain, post-shingles encephalitis can leave patients with lasting memory or language problems, sleep disorders, bouts of confusion, mood disorders, headaches and difficulty walking.

Feinstein was absent from Washington and unable to fulfill her political responsibilities for months, leaving me and other Californians without half our Senate representation. She has returned to Washington but is confused and seemingly bewildered, even denying her protracted absence. The New York Times described Feinstein’s return this way on May 18: “The grim tableau of her re-emergence on Capitol Hill laid bare a bleak reality known to virtually everyone who has come into contact with her in recent days: She was far from ready to return to work when she did, and she is now struggling to function.”

This isn’t the first time that such situations have arisen, of course. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., was sufficiently forthright to reveal in 2007 that he had been diagnosed with frontotemporal lobar degeneration – an inexorably progressive, incurable disease characterized by the wasting away of the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. Because of the behavioral changes and dementia that accompany this condition, Domenici announced that he would not seek reelection the following year.

I had great sympathy for Domenici, but should the people of New Mexico have been represented for another year by a senator who admitted to suffering from progressive dementia? I believe he should have resigned at the time his illness was diagnosed.

https://dianebederman.com/is-america-a-christian-country/

Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Green are two of many Conservatives who talk about America as a Christian country. Is that correct?

How will that sit with people like President Donald Trump? Will President Trump’s family feel welcome in that country? His daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren are Orthodox Jews. How could they promote a Christian country?  How could President Trump?

I fear if Conservatives start promoting America as a Christian country, they will be undermining the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. They could divide Conservatives over religion and provide Democrats with a sledge hammer. Is that what the Republicans want?

Dividing America on religious lines is exactly what the Founding Fathers wanted to prevent. They intentionally stated America would be a secular country. Period. They had experienced living in countries that had a stated religion and had gone to wars over religion.

Many of the earliest pilgrims who settled the “New England” of America in early 17th century were Puritan refugees escaping religious persecutions in Europe.

These Puritans viewed their emigration from England as a virtual re-enactment of the Jewish exodus from Egypt. To them, England was Egypt, the king was Pharaoh, the Atlantic Ocean was the Red Sea, America was the Land of Israel, and the Indians were the ancient Canaanites. They were the new Israelites, entering into a new covenant with God in a new Promised Land.

Thanksgiving—first celebrated in 1621, a year after the Mayflower landed—was initially conceived as a day parallel to the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur; it was to be a day of fasting, introspection, prayer and gratitude.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-wants-blame-debt-crisis-group-cant-avoid-economic-incompetence

President Biden says Republicans want to tank the debt-ceiling talks because they know a default would bring down the economy and hurt his re-election bid. He is wrong, for three reasons: 

The economy is already barreling towards recession, regardless of the debt-limit debate;

Biden’s re-election hopes are dim, independent of the economic outlook;
Biden has it backwards. He knows a recession looms, thanks to his reckless spending, and hopes to pin it on the GOP. Hence, the scary talk from Treasury Secretary Yellen about the catastrophic impact of default.

Biden is being dishonest with the American people. When the Conference Board puts the odds of a recession over the next 12 months at 99%, a position the pre-dates the debt ceiling debate, you can bet a downturn is coming.  

President Joe Biden is trying to lay the debt-crisis blame on Republicans, despite his own big-spending decisions.

After assuming the Oval Office, President Joe Biden and his Democrat colleagues blew out trillions of dollars in unnecessary spending (long past the COVID-19 emergency), igniting an overheated economy and rampant inflation. Fed Chair Jay Powell let the embers smolder far too long, worried that raising interest rates might cost him his reappointment bid. Finally, in March 2022, he initiated one of the most aggressive rate hiking cycles in our country’s history. 

Changes in monetary policy impact the economy with a 12- to 18-month lag; we are now seeing the fall-out from 10 rate increases. Generally, interest-rate sensitive industries like housing are hit first and, sure enough, housing starts and permits are now down substantially from last year.  

In addition to housing, jacking up interest rates has led to the failures of three large U.S. banks, which has cast a shadow over credit. Solvent banks are lending more cautiously, anxious about unrealized losses on their balance sheets and deposit outflows. That slows economic growth. 

Another fallout from rapid interest rate hikes is that stock and bond markets sold off sharply last year. The S&P 500 was down nearly 20% and the bond market suffered one of the worst years ever. Financial losses impact consumer sentiment, which has tumbled, and also spending. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/obama_torpedoed_us_relations_with_russia__to_perpetuate_lies_about_trump_durham_report_found.html

In late 2016, Obama was angry.

Oh, not about the election of Donald Trump, of course, if his public statements were any indication.

He was supposedly angry, so angry, at Russia and its supposed interference in our 2016 election that he got out his pen and phone and expelled 35 Russian diplomats. 

Here is what the New York Times reported:

WASHINGTON — President Obama struck back at Russia on Thursday for its efforts to influence the 2016 election, ejecting 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives from the United States and imposing sanctions on Russia’s two leading intelligence services.

The administration also penalized four top officers of one of those services, the powerful military intelligence unit known as the G.R.U.

Intelligence agencies have concluded that the G.R.U. ordered the attacks on the Democratic National Committee and other political organizations, with the approval of the Kremlin, and ultimately enabled the publication of the emails it harvested to benefit Donald J. Trump’s campaign.

The Hill reported that it was quite an array of sanctions at the time:

The measures include a slate of economic sanctions, diplomatic censure, and public “naming and shaming.” The president also hinted at possible covert cyber measures but did not provide details. 

The president also announced that the State Department will expel 35 Russian intelligence operatives and shutter two Russian compounds, in Maryland and New York, used by Russia for intelligence purposes. 

The Times added:

Taken together, the sweeping actions announced by the White House, the Treasury, the State Department and intelligence agencies on Thursday amount to the strongest American response yet to a state-sponsored cyberattack. They also appeared intended to box in President-elect Trump, who will now have to decide whether to lift the sanctions on Russian intelligence agencies when he takes office next month.

Obama even amended his own executive order to extend his powers to sanction, with travel bans and asset freezes on some Russian officials.