RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/chicago_is_what_happens_when_a_culture_loses_its_moral_grounding.html

Chicago’s Loop encompasses the city’s central business district, which is also the second-largest commercial business district in America (or so Wikipedia tells me), filled with restaurants, offices, retail stores, hotels, and historic attractions. It lies at the heart of Cook County, the same county that elected Kim Foxx, the Soros-designated district attorney who doesn’t believe in prosecuting crime. When you couple Foxx’s aversion to enforcing the law with generations of people who have grown up without any moral grounding, you get a weekend in the loop complete with beatings, a shooting, and general misbehavior.

CWB Chicago reported on the madness Saturday night in the Loop:

A 15-year-old was shot, a CTA bus driver was beaten, and about 20 juveniles were taken into custody as a “large group incident” unfolded in the Loop on Saturday evening, according to police and initial information from sources.

[snip]

Among the more serious incidents: A CTA bus driver was beaten on the 100 block of North Michigan when he stopped his vehicle to inspect it for damage after he heard a loud noise around 8:50 p.m., according to a CPD statement.

As he examined the bus, a male and female began to push him and then punched him repeatedly before running away, police said. An ambulance took the 49-year-old driver to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in fair condition with bruises to his face and body.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/demonizing_kyle_rittenhouse.html

On November 19, Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges in the shootings of Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber, and Gaige Grosskreutz in Kenosha, WI.  His defense established that the teenager was acting in self-defense; the prosecution was unable to prove otherwise.  Even media outlets not aligned with the conservative view were constrained to observe that among the “undisputed facts” of the case are that Rosenbaum chased and later advanced on Rittenhouse when he stood his ground; that Huber hit him with a skateboard and lunged for his rifle; and that Grosskreutz pointed a handgun at him.

Yet, the young man continues to be vilified.  Students for Socialism, an avowedly Marxist-Leninist student club at Arizona State University (ASU), is rallying to deny Rittenhouse “further admission” to the university. (He is no longer enrolled there, though he had taken an online course in nursing earlier.) In its petitions, the group describes him as a “racist killer” and says that “even with a not-guilty verdict from a flawed justice system — Kyle Rittenhouse is still guilty in the eyes of the people.”

Similarly, an opinion piece describes him as a “young armed vigilante killing unarmed protesters.” It says he was “given a pass” for “roaming the streets of Kenosha with an AR-15.” House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler has threatened a Department of Justice investigation against Rittenhouse for interference in a protest protected by the First Amendment.  It’s amazing how the Left quotes the very Constitution it has been abusing and tearing up when it suits its purpose.

It doesn’t matter to Nadler and others like him that many at the Antifa/BLM-organized Kenosha protest in August 2020 were armed with guns, chains, and bats. Nor does it matter to them that Rosenbaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz had criminal records.  The protesters rampaged through downtown looting and torching properties, and attacking those who tried to stop them.  Despite claims of ‘wokeness’, they did not spare black-owned businesses and homes. During the mayhem, local police and the mayor stood by as rioters set fire to the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, used baseball bats to smash street lights and cars, assaulted a business owner, and pointed a gun at a Fox News reporter. There were no police or National Guardsmen to be seen.  The governor had clearly failed the state.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/irs-data-proves-trump-tax-cuts-benefited-middle-working-class-americans-most/ar-AARsJrs?li=BBnb7Kz

President Biden and congressional Democrats’ Build Back Better (BBB) Act is now in the hands of the Senate. That legislative body’s 50-50 partisan split will undoubtedly make the bill’s passage difficult.

In order for BBB to become law, Democratic Senate leadership will need to convince moderates such as Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) that the legislation’s $2.4 trillion price tag can be offset by expanding the IRS and its enforcement efforts while imposing substantial tax reform measures.

Congressional Democrats have argued that one of the best ways to pay for the legislation is to raise taxes on wealthy households, which, according to many on the left, have benefited disproportionately and unfairly from the 2017 tax reform law passed by Republicans and signed by former President Trump. The latest data, however, proves that this claim is pure mythology.

Income data published by the IRS clearly show that on average all income brackets benefited substantially from the Republicans’ tax reform law, with the biggest beneficiaries being working and middle-income filers, not the top 1 percent, as so many Democrats have argued.

A careful analysis of the IRS tax data, one that includes the effects of tax credits and other reforms to the tax code, shows that filers with an adjusted gross income (AGI) of $15,000 to $50,000 enjoyed an average tax cut of 16 percent to 26 percent in 2018, the first year Republicans’ Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went into effect and the most recent year for which data is available.

Filers who earned $50,000 to $100,000 received a tax break of about 15 percent to 17 percent, and those earning $100,000 to $500,000 in adjusted gross income saw their personal income taxes cut by around 11 percent to 13 percent.

By comparison, no income group with an AGI of at least $500,000 received an average tax cut exceeding 9 percent, and the average tax cut for brackets starting at $1 million was less than 6 percent. (For more detailed data, see my table published here.)

That means most middle-income and working-class earners enjoyed a tax cut that was at least double the size of tax cuts received by households earning $1 million or more.

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/584323-epidemic-of-smash-and-grab-crime-is-definitely-man-made

Crime is raging across the country, from violent attacks to brazen shoplifting to mob “smash and grab” attacks. The White House this week had a simple answer for the cause of this rising lawlessness: It was not “defund the police” efforts, or more restrictive policies for police and prosecutors. It was the familiar scourge cited in debates ranging from infrastructure to supply chains to tax increases — the pandemic.

The pandemic now seems to have reached the mythic levels of gods who once were blamed for everything that went wrong in life. Africans had Anansi the Spider, while the Norse had the trickster Loki. Both were known to assume different identities to wreak disorder or steal precious things.

For politicians, it is useful to have a lurking Loki to explain that social problems are not really of their making, the result of their failures. The Loki factor was evident in the press conference this week when Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked about the rising lawlessness seen in major cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles: “Does the president still think that crime is up because of the pandemic?” White House press secretary Jen Psaki replied that “many people have conveyed that.”

Doocy persisted: “So when a huge group of criminals organizes themselves and they want to go loot a store — a CVS, a Nordstrom, a Home Depot until the shelves are clean — do you think that’s because of the pandemic?” Psaki replied: “I think a root cause in a lot of communities is the pandemic, yes.”

That damned Loki.

Whole stores have been ransacked by gangs, and the crime is sweeping large and small businesses alike. At the same time, shoplifting has reached such high levels in cities like San Francisco that stores like Walgreens are closing up due to the losses.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/russia-hoax-whitewash-era-begins-2.php

The Clinton presidential campaign’s fabrication of the Russia hoax is the dirtiest trick in American political history. Beginning with Glenn Simpson/Fusion GPS and the Perkins Coie law firm, it enlisted co-conspirators in the Obama Department of Justice, the FBI, and the mainstream media. The principals are not only still at large, they have achieved high office, wealth, riches, and Pulitzer Prizes. They will never be brought to justice. They won’t even break a sweat.

We were never meant to be clued in. As the veil of the fraud was pierced by Rep. Devin Nunes and others including, most recently, John Durham, we now have a good handle on the con. It is almost unbelievable. It is also an inexhaustibly rich subject.

Matt Taibbi took up the role of the mainstream media at his TK News site in “The Russiagate Whitewash Era Begins” (mostly behind his subscription paywall, but also available in the form of a YouTube video and podcast).

To Taibbi’s assessment we can now add Aaron Maté’s RCP column “Five Trump-Russia ‘Collusion’ Corrections We Need From the Media Now — Just for Starters.” In addition to citing a few of the egregiously ludicrous stories that we paused over at the time, the column takes a look back at some of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Russia hoax journalism of the New York Times and the Washington Post:

In this article, RealClearInvestigations has collected five instances of stories containing false or misleading claims, and thereby due for retraction or correction, that were either among the Post and Times’ Pulitzer-winning entries, or other work of reporters who shared that prize. Significantly, this analysis is not based on newly discovered information, but documents and other material long in the public domain. Remarkably, some of the material that should spark corrections has instead been held up by the Post and Times as vindication of their work.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/to-deny-the-lab-leak-covid-theory?token=e

That COVID-19 infected humanity due to a zoonotic leap from a “wet market” in Wuhan — rather than a leak from a lab in the same Chinese city — was declared unquestionable truth at the start of the pandemic. For a full year, anyone dissenting from this narrative was deemed so irresponsible that they were banned from large social media platforms, accused of spreading “disinformation.” No debate about COVID’s origins was permitted. It had been settled by The Science™. Every rational person who believed in science, by definition, immediately accepted at the start of the pandemic that COVID made a natural leap from bats or pangolins; that it may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan which just so happens to gather, study and manipulate novel coronaviruses in bats was officially declared a deranged conspiracy theory.

The reason this consensus was so quickly consecrated was that a group of more than two dozen scientists published a letter in the prestigious science journal Lancet in February, 2020 — while very little was known about SARS-CoV-2 — didactically declaring “that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The possibility that COVID leaked from the Wuhan lab was dismissed as a “conspiracy theory,” the by-product of “rumours and misinformation” which, they strongly implied, was an unfair and possibly racist attack on “the science and health professionals of China.”

https://www.aol.com/news/colorado-supermarket-shooting-suspect-incompetent-204105432-094803629.html

DENVER (AP) — A judge ruled Friday that a man charged with killing 10 people at a Colorado supermarket earlier this year is mentally incompetent to stand trial and ordered him to be treated at the state mental hospital to see if he can be made well enough to face prosecution.

Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 22, is accused of opening fire at a busy King Soopers in the college town of Boulder in March, killing a police officer, shoppers and several store employees. 

Four doctors have now determined that Alissa is not mentally competent to participate in court proceedings, and he has “deteriorated” over the past couple of months while in jail, District Attorney Michael Dougherty said. Given the consensus, Dougherty requested that Judge Ingrid Bakke send Alissa to the state mental hospital in hopes that medication and treatment will enable him to become competent under the law — able to understand legal proceedings and work with his lawyers to defend himself.

Dougherty did not disclose why the experts determined Alissa is not competent, and the report explaining the evaluation’s finding is not available to the public, only to the lawyers and judge. Alissa’s attorney, Kathryn Herold, said Friday her client has a “serious” mental illness but did not provide details. She also agreed he should be sent to the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo.