RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/american_history_2022_the_establishment_versus_the_american_people.html

For those wondering about my absence from these pages, I’m on vacation. The theme of this trip is the American Revolution and, by the time I return home in 10 days, I’ll have visited some of the most storied places in Revolutionary America, from historical towns to Founders’ homes to important battlefields. Because the leftist encroachment on Jefferson’s and Madison’s homes (Monticello and Montpelier, respectively) has been in the news lately, I thought I’d share some impressions with you about three places: Colonial Williamsburg, Yorktown, and Mount Vernon. At all those sites, the American spirit is intact.

Colonial Williamsburg is the meticulously restored one-time capital of the Colony of Virginia as it existed in the mid-18th century. Hundreds of employees wear historically accurate dress, speak in 18th-century terms, and provide insights into life in a southern colony on the eve of the Revolution. Visitors can see historically accurate representations of functioning blacksmiths, shoemakers, milliners, wigmakers, silversmiths, apothecaries, and so much more. I highly recommend it.

I was last in Williamsburg in 2015 and, aside from a few newly restored buildings, the biggest change was the obsessive and obsequious references to “enslaved people.” Some of it was historically appropriate; some was transparent white guilt and virtue signaling.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/liz-cheney-self-appointed-moral-center-gop/

I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to write about Liz Cheney again. After she was crushed by the Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman last week in the Wyoming GOP primary, I figured the self-obsessed crusader would retreat to her boudoir to dress up in top hats once worn by Abraham Lincoln while guzzling a brand of whiskey favored by Ulysses S. Grant, both of whom she invoked in her petulent non-concession concession speech.

But Cheney is not quite done making a spectacle of herself. A couple of weeks ago, the Trump-deranged congresswoman sniffed that she would find it “very difficult” to support Ron DeSantis because he had aligned himself with Donald Trump. That remark garnered some portion of the contempt it deserved, but it was nothing to her latest foray on to the public stage.

In an interview with This Week a few days ago, Cheney extended her interdiction. It turns out that it’s not only Ron DeSantis who fails to pass muster with la Cheney. Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley also fail to get the Cheney nihil obstat. All three, she said, have “made themselves unfit for future office” by supporting Trump. Why? In an emergency, break glass and haul out a tautology. “Either you fundamentally believe in and support our constitutional structure, or you don’t,” she said, casting Messrs. DeSantis, Cruz and Hawley into the “don’t” corner.

I think that judgment would come as a surprise to all three men, all of whom just happen to be considered 2024 presidential prospects. But who cares what they think? Cheney has spoken! Indeed, according to her, not only do they not believe in the our constitutional structure,” they “fundamentally threaten” the American constitutional dispensation. Breathtaking, isn’t it?

But why stop with DeSantis, Cruz and Hawley? Donald Trump garnered more that 70 million votes in the 2020 election. In almost every poll, he far outpaces all GOP rivals. If supporting Trump makes one “unfit for office,” then there are not many Republicans whose fitness Liz Cheney could endorse.

There is one candidate who would fill the bill, however. That would be [drum roll please…] Liz Cheney. According to her, she is supremely fit for the office, hence her teasing remarks about launching a presidential bid. Alas, it will likely not be as a Republican that Liz Cheney runs, if she runs. And if she is concerned about keeping the Bad Orange Man out of office, she would be well advised to rethink her plans altogether. According to a YouGov poll, were she to run as an independent, she would take more support from Biden than from Trump.

The whole spectacle of Liz Cheney’s meltdown is, to employ a favorite Trump epithet, “sad!” Like Nancy Pelosi, Cheney keeps talking about “our democracy” (translation: their prerogative) and pretends that she is the arbiter of who is and who is not a reputable upholder of the Constitution.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/can-anyone-sue-over-bidens-student-loan-lawlessness/?utm_source=

It’s not clear, and the answer might be no.

The Biden administration is using a flatly absurd legal argument to justify forgiving student debt, something even Democrats thought was only a power of Congress not that long ago.

Even the Department of Education thought it was only a power of Congress not that long ago. On January 12, 2021, the department’s office of general counsel published a legal opinion that cited Congress’s power of the purse under the Constitution and said, “The Secretary does not have statutory authority to provide blanket or mass cancellation, compromise, discharge, or forgiveness of student loan principal balances, and/or materially modify the repayment amounts or terms thereof, whether due to the COVID-19 pandemic or for any other reason.”

But now, as if by magic, even though the laws are all the same, the office of general counsel has found legal authority for the secretary of education to go it alone. The legal opinion this time around cites the HEROES Act, which was passed after 9/11, and claims that the emergency powers given to the secretary under that law “could be used to effectuate a program of targeted loan cancellation directed at addressing the financial harms of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Never mind that the 2021 opinion specifically considered the HEROES Act and found its provisions too narrow for blanket cancellation. Never mind that student-loan recipients have already benefited tremendously from a repayment pause of over two years due to the pandemic. Never mind that the unemployment rate is currently at 2 percent for college graduates, and financial harms from the pandemic are mostly a thing of the past.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-unmaking-of-american-history-american-historical-association-james-sweet-presentism-activism-1619-project-academics-professors-11661532876?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Academic historians are losing their sense of the past. In his August column for the American Historical Association’s journal, Perspectives on History, James H. Sweet warned that academic history has become so “presentist” that it is losing touch with its subject, the world before yesterday. Mr. Sweet, who is the association’s president and teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, observed that the “allure of political relevance” is drawing students away from pre-1800 history and toward “contemporary social justice issues” such as “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism.” When historians become activists, he wrote, the past becomes “an evidentiary grab bag to articulate their political positions.”

Mr. Sweet knows his audience, so he did his best to appease the crocodile of political correctness. He denounced Justice Clarence Thomas for a gun-rights decision that “cherry-picks historical data” and criticized Justice Samuel Alito for taking the word “history” in vain 67 times in his Dobbs abortion opinion. But Mr. Sweet also pointed out that Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “1619 Project” isn’t accurate history, and that “bad history,” however good it makes us feel, yields bad politics. “If history is only those stories from the past that confirm current political positions, all manner of political hacks can claim historical expertise.”

History’s armies of nonacademic readers will find this obvious and undeniable. Mr. Sweet’s academic peers, however, tore him to pieces on Twitter, accusing him of sexism, racism, gratuitous maleness and excessive whiteness.

“Gaslight. Gatekeep. Goatee,” said Laura Miller of Brandeis University, detecting patriarchal privilege written on Mr. Sweet’s chin. Benjamin Siegel of Boston University, who thinks his politically correct profession is “leveraged towards racist ideologies,” called the essay “malpractice.” Dan Royles of Florida International University accused Mr. Sweet of “logical incoherence,” which is academic-speak for “idiot.” Kathryn Wilson of Georgia State detected an even more heinous error, “misrepresentation of how contemporary social justice concerns inform theory and methodology.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mar-a-lago-affidavit-is-that-all-there-is-donald-trump-fbi-justice-department-merrick-garland-11661547313?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

A federal judge on Friday released a heavily redacted version of the FBI affidavit used to justify the search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, and we can’t help but wonder is that it? This is why agents descended on a former President’s residence like they would a mob boss?

It’s possible the redactions in the 38-page document release contain some undisclosed bombshell. But given the contours of what the affidavit and attachments reveal, this really does seem to boil down to a fight over the handling of classified documents. The affidavit’s long introduction and other unredacted paragraphs all point to concern by the FBI and the National Archives with the documents Mr. Trump retained at Mar-a-Lago and his lack of cooperation in not returning all that the feds wanted.

A separate filing making the case for the redactions, also released Friday, focused on the need for witness and agent protection from being publicly identified. That filing also contains no suggestion of any greater charges or a larger investigation than the dispute over his handling of the documents.

As always with Mr. Trump, he seems to have been his own worst enemy in this dispute. He and his staff appear to have been sloppy, even cavalier, in storing the documents. Classified records found in boxes were mixed in with “newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, miscellaneous print-outs, notes,” and presidential correspondence, the affidavit says. This fanned suspicion that important documents were still floating around the house, where bad actors hanging around the Mar-a-Lago resort might pilfer them.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/biden-robs-peter-to-get-pauls-vote/

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can count on Paul’s vote. That political axiom is the crux of Joe Biden’s decision to forgive vast quantities of student loan debt. He needs Peter’s and Patricia’s votes, and he is bribing them with taxpayer money. Taxpayers know it is not a costless gesture. Their backlash is likely to overwhelm any potential gains.

The problems begin with the program’s cost and inflationary impact. Spending another $300 to $900 billion, the estimated cost, raises consumer demand without increasing supply. Since the program is not funded by tax increases, it will be paid for by printing money. The inflationary consequences are predictable.

Democrats wave away these costs by noting, correctly, that loan forgiveness doesn’t start until next year and won’t happen all at once. Still, the program underscores the most consistent element of the Democrats’ domestic agenda. They are determined to spend, spend, spend. Voters correctly link that spending to inflation and to their own declining standard of living. They see inflation as a tax on everyone, and they know wages have not risen enough to offset that tax. Reminding everyone that inflation is linked to excessive federal spending is not smart politics. But that’s exactly what Biden’s loan forgiveness does.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-8-25-the-governments-most-audacious-lawless-act-yet-and-a-potential-response

Every day it gets harder to keep up with the accelerating lawlessness of the Biden Administration. The basic strategy is, just do whatever the left wants, using all the vast powers and resources of the federal government, and dare anyone to try to stop you. To mention just a few recent examples, one day it’s a multi-trillion-dollar transformation of the energy economy without Congressional authorization (perhaps slowed down by the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA); the next day it’s holding meetings to pressure tech giants like Twitter and Facebook to censor the speech of political opponents; next it’s weaponizing the Justice Department and FBI to investigate and prosecute the leading political adversary on the flimsiest of pretexts. Additional examples could fill tomes.

But now we have what could well be the most audacious lawless act yet. I’m talking about the plan to “cancel” some hundreds of billions of dollars of student loans, announced by President Biden on Wednesday August 24.

With this one, they’re barely pretending to have a legal basis. Supposedly, according to the Department of Education’s legal memo, it’s the 2001 HEROES Act, 20 USC Section 1098bb(a)(1) and (2)(A), passed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, giving the Secretary of Education authority to “waive or modify” provisions of student financial assistance programs at times of “national emergency”; combined with the current Covid-19 “national emergency,” just extended by Biden past the upcoming election. Does this fool anyone? It’s the most naked possible vote buying, in the run-up to the mid-terms. The cynical political calculation is that the Democratic Party base of upscale young college grads will show their gratitude for the $10,000 or $20,000 handouts with their votes, while the blue collar workers who never took out student loans will not perceive how they are getting hosed. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court will likely strike this down under the Major Questions Doctrine when the issue finally gets there, but by that time this election (and probably the next one) will be long over. Maybe a Democratic Congress can even pack the Court by then.

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3615803-next-up-bidens-energy-crisis/

We’ve had Biden’s inflation and Biden’s recession; now we face Biden’s energy crisis. It didn’t have to be this way.

Twenty million Americans are behind on their utility bills, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association.

Who is surprised? Even as real wages tumbled 3.6 percent over the past year, electricity prices increased 16 percent, squeezing consumers. Unhappily, things are about to get worse.

Natural gas, used to create power and to heat almost half of America’s homes, is trading at prices nearly double those of last year, and the winter heating season promises to bring even higher prices.

The price of natural gas today is the highest since 2008, before the fracking revolution unleashed almost unlimited gas deposits trapped in tight formations that were previously inaccessible.

Why should the United States suffer a giant increase in costs if we have so much gas? In part, because President Biden pledged this year to double our exports of liquified natural gas (LNG), which means less natural gas available to American consumers.

Biden made that grand gesture to help our allies, who are increasingly cut off from Russian oil and gas because of the war in Ukraine. But he made that promise to send more U.S. natural gas overseas even though the price was already soaring and inventories were low.

But barring an adverse court ruling, young Americans with student debt are now set to receive a five-figure handout. And everyone else is set to pay for it.

https://www.city-journal.org/biden-cancellation-of-student-debt-indefensible

After months of will-he-or-won’t-he suspense, President Biden has announced his executive actions on student debt. The administration plans to cancel up to $10,000 for borrowers currently earning up to $125,000 annually ($250,000 for married couples)—with the maximum forgiveness doubled for the students who, based on their parents’ finances, received Pell Grants when they attended college. Biden will also extend the pause on payments “for one final time” through the end of the year and allow those with undergraduate loans to cap their payments at 5 percent of their discretionary income, as opposed to 10 percent under current policy. Because the “cancellation” is really a transfer, the combined changes will cost taxpayers something like $500 billion—about $1,500 for every person in the United States.

Forgiving student debt may be a savvy way for Biden to appeal to young, left-leaning voters, but it’s indefensible as policy. Beyond the baseline question of whether the government should ever wipe out the willfully assumed debts of a preferred class of Americans at the expense of everyone else, the program is a poorly targeted use of taxpayer funds, rewards the dysfunctions of the higher-ed sector, and is likely illegal.

Yes, the limits placed on the program make it less of a bonanza for the upper-middle class than it could have been. The largest debt loads are typically held by those with advanced, not just undergraduate, degrees, so blanket forgiveness would have been a massive windfall for young lawyers. But the $125,000 income threshold doesn’t come close to targeting the most sympathetic cases: those who were preyed upon by low-quality colleges, often didn’t even earn a degree, and wound up working at the proverbial Starbucks. The median earnings for a U.S. female working full-time and year-round were about $50,000 in 2020; for a male, the number was roughly $60,000. Yet the White House set its cutoff for five-figure handouts at more than twice those amounts—and, citing numbers prepared by its own Department of Education, boasts that 87 percent of the debt relief announced yesterday will go to those earning less than $75,000 in individual income. Even that would be an odd threshold for taxpayer largesse, as it’s above the 2020 median household income and more than triple the 2022 Federal Poverty Level for a family of three. But rest assured: “only” about $65 billion will go to individuals earning even more than that by themselves, at a cost of $200 per U.S. resident.