RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/laurence-silberman-dead-judge-circuit-court-obamacare-arms-public-service-robb-11664726000?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The most famous judges in American history are those who make it to the Supreme Court, but that doesn’t mean they are the most consequential. One of the latter is Judge Laurence Silberman, who died Sunday, a few days short of his 87th birthday.

Judge Silberman had one of the great careers in the law and public service. Appointed by Ronald Reagan, he spent some 36 years on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, hearing cases even after taking senior status and up to the time of his sudden illness.

His most consequential opinions include Parker v. D.C. (2007), which found that the Second Amendment was an individual right to bear arms and not merely for a militia. Silberman’s opinion examined the history of gun practices in common law and the American founding, which served as the basis for Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion in the landmark ruling in D.C. v. Heller (2008).

He was also ahead of his time in 1988 (In re Sealed Case), when he held that the independent counsel statute violated the Constitution’s Appointments Clause. The Supreme Court ruled the other way in the dreadful Morrison v. Olson decision. But Judge Silberman’s view was echoed in Scalia’s famous Morrison dissent that would surely prevail with today’s Justices if the counsel statute hadn’t lapsed after Ken Starr’s investigation of Bill Clinton.

https://www.nysun.com/article/is-the-liberal-press-prepping-to-oust-joe-biden

Something strange is happening at the New York Times. In a rare break with the Gray Lady’s see-no-evil reporting about the failing Joe Biden, the paper published the other day a lengthy article concerning an astonishing lapse by the president.

It happened at a White House event, where Mr. Biden called out “Representative Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” He apparently forgot that Jackie Walorski, Republican of Indiana, had died in August.

Not only did the Times describe the embarrassing senior moment, the paper also reported on the questions asked later at the daily press briefing, when White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre refused to acknowledge the president had flaked out.

The back-and-forth with reporters was ridiculous. Ms. Jean-Pierre argued that Mr. Biden was not confused, but simply had the deceased congressperson “top of mind” and called out to her, even though he had acknowledged her death weeks earlier.

The back-and-forth confirmed the lengths to which the White House will go to pretend that the president is hunky-dory. Few were shocked by such fakery; the surprise was that the Times, staunch ally of Democrats and Mr. Biden, covered the story at all.

After all, when Mr. Biden appeared to get confused this past summer and shake hands with “thin air,” a stumble that attracted 2 million views on Youtube and widespread coverage elsewhere, the Times ignored the story, as it has many others.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/courage-strength-optimism/democrats-must-not-replicate-europes-energy-disaster

In the Alpine nation of Austria , where I currently live, residents are receiving the euro equivalent of $490 as a ” climate and anti-inflation ” bonus.

This will be a godsend for those struggling with rocketing European energy prices and sustained inflation . Other European nations are doing the same, as well as more than a dozen U.S. states. But doling out millions of dollars without increased economic production will likely do more to ratchet up inflation than minimize it. The Federal Reserve admitted as much in July. It certainly won’t expedite the end of the energy crisis.

What “anti-inflation” payouts represent, then, are failed energy policies. European coal plants are being fired up after years offline. LNG terminal projects in Finland and Italy are being greenlit to speed up imports. Germany’s last three nuclear power plants, set to be decommissioned this year, are receiving a second life as politicians concede the errors of the zero-carbon narrative. In the last decade, German leaders heralded the shutdown of nuclear, subsidies for solar and wind, and imports of wood pellets from southern U.S. forests as “renewable” energy. They fired up dormant coal facilities to fill the gap while Russian natural gas became the primary means of energy.

It was a sweet deal upended only by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which was followed by international condemnation and energy sanctions. With Nord Stream pipelines out of the picture ( sabotaged by whom, we may never know ), German politicians are left championing coal and absconding their distaste for nuclear energy.

German energy policy, known as Energiewende, was already acknowledged as a failure. Swapping domestic nuclear power for Vladimir Putin’s gas meant Germans could boast about the 35% renewable energy mix to global praise. But that Faustian bargain has left German leaders scrambling for energy alternatives from Western liberal democracies and Arab dictatorships to fill Russia’s void. Such a glaring failure should give pause to the green ambitions of America’s political class. Instead, the Democratic Party has chosen the same trodden path.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/01/time-to-outlaw-counting-by-race/

Speaking recently in South Korea, Kamala Harris, the vice president of the United States, publicly celebrated America’s “strong alliance” with “the Republic of North Korea.” Apparently Kim Jong-un thought that was as funny as I did, because the chubby dictator responded by firing off some missiles just as Madam Vice President was packing her bags. People don’t like it when Kim starts firing missiles because you never know what sort of payload they may carry or where they might land.

Madam Vice President is made of stern stuff, though. She shrugged off both her exhibition of bone-crushing ignorance and the modern world’s equivalent of minatory saber-rattling. Indeed, back home, she heard that Hurricane Ian had flattened large swaths of Southwest Florida, destroying the homes and businesses of untold thousands. There she was, publicly declaring that the Biden Administration would be doling out aid to victims “based on equity,” directing funds first and foremost to “communities of color.” 

You can’t make it up, but then you don’t have to. Bidenland does all the heavy lifting. 

Recently, we were told that the government (i.e., the taxpayers) will be footing the bill for billions upon billions of dollars in student loan debt. The following week, after someone figured out how expensive it would all be and the lawyers began salivating over the obvious illegality of the scheme, the administration began quietly walking back the plan to make Peter, who paid off his student loans, also pay for Paul’s.

It’s sometimes hard to keep up to date on all the wonderful things happening in our country, partly because the administration has been aggressively partnering with various media companies to censor news they don’t like, which is more and more of it. Just Friday, it was reported that some 20 conservative media sites—including the New York Post, Just the News, Fox News, the Washington Examiner, the Washington Times, the Epoch Times, and Breitbart—were flagged as peddling “disinformation,” i.e., stories that the administration did not like regarding the 2020 presidential election. Particular individuals, all of them conservative, were also flagged as having disseminated “disinformation.”

https://victorhanson.com/thoughts-on-the-cultural-revolution-in-our-midst-part-three/

Investigators will hone in on what transpired under the last four FBI directors: McCabe (lied four times to federal investigators and oversaw fake FISA warrants); Comey (leaked confidential memos of private presidential conversations, feigned amnesia 245 times while under oath before a congressional committee, and used the FBI as an extension of the Clinton campaign’s smear efforts); Mueller (absurdly under oath claimed that he knew nothing of the Steele dossier and Fusion GPS, both synonymous with lying and both jumpstarted his own investigations); and Wray (oversaw the Virginia school board meetings surveillance, the Trump home raid, the leg irons on Peter Navarro, the performance-art nocturnal wake-up of James O’Keefe, and the cell phone grabs of former Trump advisors).

The party that formerly railed about the “military-industrial complex” now finds the Pentagon’s chain of command the most efficient way of mandating woke indoctrination, politicizing the armed forces, and weeding out the politically suspect.

The army may be 50 percent short of its annual recruitment targets (we wonder why?), the public may express historical negative appraisals of Pentagon efficacy (in a recent poll only 45 percent voiced real confidence in the U.S. military), the Pentagon diversity/equity/inclusion czar may spout racist diatribes, the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs may be hunting the white-rage unicorn while overseeing the worst military disaster of the last 50 years in Afghanistan, the retired 4-star cohort may routinely and with arrogance violate Article 88 of their own Uniform Code of Military Justice, but no matter: we are told it is diverse and uses the right pronouns. That fact is surely worth a $15 billion carrier or two, or deters the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and leaves the Iranians terrified. The pride flag in Kabul was worth a division?

The now revolutionary party that always preached about the sanctity of the radical, activist Warren Supreme Court, now wages war on individual justices.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/merrick_garlands_targeting_of_conservatives_reveals_a_bullet_dodged.html

“Hindsight is 20-20”, is an adage applied most often to hard lessons learned in retrospect, but rarely to occasions of great fortune. In the case of Merrick Garland, what we witness now of his yet short tenure as U.S. Attorney General speaks volumes in miniature about the damage of which he is capable, if given the life tenure of a Supreme Court Justice.

The career of a politician is long remembered, often either for the glory of a single greatest achievement, or as gored through by a single gravest failure. Forgotten politicians usually have failed to distinguish themselves, either for uncommon courage, or unchecked corruption.  Still others are neither remembered nor forgotten but rather come and go unseen, distinguished in no other way than by the irony that even in the most common of controversies, their apparent absence of conviction and of appetite for deliberation, produces in them no more refined legislative action than a grossly belched up vote of, “present.”

U.S. Senate Minority Leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, may rightly be accused at times of resembling each of these types. He has spent much of his considerable political career and capital, especially most recently under a hostile Senate majority, walking a tightrope situated six inches off the ground and over fluffy pillows, yet feigning for his constituent cameras, as if having championed such dizzying depths and breadths dwarfed only by those of the Grand Canyon. Or at least of Mt. Rushmore, where upon its noble face he undoubtedly mentally has chiseled his own countenance countless times, lost as it were, in the kind of self-exultant extasy common to mirror musings.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/30/the-lefts-suicidal-pact-with-silicon-valley/

The British comedian Jack Dee was the target of last week’s Two Minute Hate. The online left pointed its bony finger of judgement at the famously dour funnyman and accused him of the sin of bigotry. He’s far right, they screeched. He sides with fascists. Yet another cis white hetero dude spraying his prejudice everywhere. What offence did Mr Dee commit to attract such florid denunciations? He defended freedom of speech against the arbitrary power of unaccountable corporations.

Yes, in the 21st century it is ‘far right’ to believe in freedom and it is left-wing to insist that billionaires none of us ever elected should be the moral arbiters of public debate. We are well and truly through the looking glass.

Mr Dee’s fascistic offence was to take the side of the Free Speech Union when it was locked out of its accounts by PayPal on the utterly spurious grounds that it engaged in ‘misinformation’. The Daily Sceptic, the website set up by the FSU’s founder Toby Young, was similarly defunded by PayPal’s thoughtpolice. UsForThem, a campaign group that raises essential critical questions about Covid lockdowns and their impact on the young, was also frozen out by PayPal. All were physically prevented from accessing the thousands of pounds that citizens have donated to them. This was an extreme and authoritarian intervention into the democratic life of the United Kingdom by a multi-billion dollar corporation headquartered in San Jose. It is mindblowing that anyone, least of all those who call themselves left, could support such imperial interference by a section of the capitalist class into public discussion.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/29/time-to-investigate-the-fbis-sketchy-chs-program/

To the surprise of no one paying attention, the Department of Justice recently acknowledged the use of several FBI informants in its investigation of the Oath Keepers, an alleged militia group tied to the events of January 6. 

Prosecutors last week asked for a protective order to conceal from jurors information about confidential human sources (CHS) expected to testify during the seditious conspiracy trial of five members of the Oath Keepers; jury selection is now underway. Not only does the government want to prevent defense attorneys from asking personal questions that could reveal the informants’ identities but prosecutors don’t want the sources to publicly disclose any involvement in past or pending criminal investigations or details of “the FBI’s CHS program and the training and methods used by the FBI as part of their undercover operations.”

That request, of course, is to protect the bureau, not informants, in what appears to be just another corrupt, political, and unaccountable section of the FBI. 

For example, court filings in Special Counsel John Durham’s probe into Russiagate just revealed that Igor Danchenko, a subsource for the infamous Steele dossier now facing perjury charges, was hired by the FBI in March 2017 as an informant to shield the agency from questions about the dossier’s credibility in the early stages of the scandal. “[The] bureau put him on its payroll as a confidential human source, or CHS, making him part of the bureau’s untouchable ‘sources and methods’ sanctum and thereby protecting him and any documents referencing him from congressional and other outside scrutiny,” investigative reporter Paul Sperry wrote this week.

The FBI-hatched plot to “kidnap” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer involved numerous informants working out of multiple FBI field offices. At trial, informants and agents confessed the rules were broken in the process of engineering the caper; violations included sharing a bed with a target, suggesting “overt acts” to produce incriminating evidence, and initiating the lead informant into a fake militia to advance the plot. Another longtime informant—a convicted felon many times over—committed at least two crimes while working the Whitmer fednapping ruse and was accused by the government of acting as a “double agent.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/anti-trump-legal-expert-reveals-real-motives-in-mar-a-lago-case-its-a-dynamite-story_4754384.html?utm_source=epochHG&utm_campaign=rcp

It’s with regret and some trepidation that I take issue on a legal matter with someone whom I like and respect as much as I do Andy McCarthy, the prominent legal affairs commentator and contributor to many publications, websites, and television programs. But like many other intelligent and otherwise convivial people I know, he’s unfortunately incapable of speaking or writing rationally about Donald Trump.

McCarthy has a particularly baneful influence on the discussion of Trump-related issues because he naturally brings to it the gravitas of his legal expertise and apparently authoritative articulation. But this is the same McCarthy who wrote to me five years ago that he had taken a “deep dive” into a lot of confidential material and concluded that Trump was guilty of serious misdeeds in his relations with the Russians.

And, as with other intelligent and otherwise likable people partly propelled through each day by an almost pathological hatred of the former president, when the Russian argument evaporated without a trace, not a word of remorse, embarrassment, or even inferable acknowledgment of a mistake followed. It was briskly on to the next conjuration of Trumpian outrages and delicts.

On the National Review website on Sept. 24, McCarthy fired the most unrigorous and imprecisely directed broadside that I have seen from him on this subject. He wrote that Trump was obviously guilty of an indictable offense in the document controversy that led to the FBI’s ransacking of his Palm Beach home.

It wasn’t precisely stated what offense he committed, but it seemed to be willful noncompliance with a subpoena requiring the production of certain documents that had been wrongfully removed and about which the former president was allegedly trying to clear himself from such a charge by a defense imputed to him by McCarthy of determining in his own mind that the relevant material was declassified because he wished it so and in accordance with a doctrine of automatic declassification of certain matters that he had promulgated among his staff but of which staff members were, according to McCarthy, unaware.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-orders-fbi-to-produce-information-from-seth-richs-laptop_4763994.html?utm_source=

The FBI must produce information from Seth Rich’s laptop computer to a Texas man, a federal judge ruled on Sept. 29.

The bureau improperly withheld the information from Brian Huddleston, the Texas man, according to a 53-page ruling from U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant.

Rich was a Democratic National Committee staffer who was murdered around 4:20 a.m. in July 2016 in Washington. Officials have claimed the killing was done as part of a botched robbery.

The FBI has acknowledged it has files from Rich’s computer but tried withholding them from Huddleston, citing a portion of federal law that enables agencies to withhold information that would be a clear invasion of privacy interests when the interests are not outweighed by the public interest.

The bureau said that Rich’s family members have a privacy interest in preventing the release of the information that outweighs the public interest, but Mazzant, an Obama appointee, rejected the argument.

“The Court is not persuaded by the FBI’s argument that Seth Rich’s survivors have a privacy interest in withholding the entirety of the information contained on Seth Rich’s laptop,” he said.

“Pointedly, the FBI cites to no case law for the proposition that survivors of the deceased have a privacy interest in information related to the deceased’s favorite music or relationship history,” he added.

Previous rulings in other cases have found that loved ones of dead people have a substantial privacy interest in preventing the disclosure of autopsies, death scene photographs, and other materials from a person’s final moments. Those rulings don’t apply to this case, Mazzant said.

He ordered the FBI to produce the information to Huddleston within 14 days.