RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thespectator.com/politics/its-time-for-president-biden-to-robert-f-kennedy-jr-secret-service-protection/

Presidential candidates don’t normally receive Secret Service protection until the summer before the election. But these are not normal times. They are dangerous ones — for candidates, elected officials and federal judges. When candidates face lethal threats, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did last week, it’s time to give them protection.

The decision is up to President Biden. If he orders the Secret Service to protect Kennedy, it’s done. If not, not. And “not” is Biden’s current decision. It’s a dangerous, mean-spirited political calculation. Political? Yes, surrounding Kennedy with a Secret Service detail elevates his status as a serious candidate. That doesn’t help Biden’s own candidacy.

The president’s willingness to leave a political opponent in danger ranks right up there with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to withhold protection from Supreme Court justices, who were being intimidated and threatened at their homes. Garland’s failure ignored a clear-cut statute and a concrete danger to federal jurists.

You don’t have to favor those justices or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to demand our government do its best to ensure their safety. The government has that general responsibility for all citizens, but the responsibility is much greater when those citizens are running for office, serving as elected officials or sitting as judges. The responsibility is acute when the threat is tangible.

For both Kennedy and the Supreme Court justices, the lethal threat is not imaginary. In the justices’ case, a man traveled across state lines with guns, ammunition, duct tape and zip ties, intending to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh and perhaps others on the High Court. He told the arresting officers he had purchased the gun to kill Kavanaugh.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/another-month-set-aside-for-politicized-history/

Last week began yet another month set aside for celebrating the history of victims of  “systemic racism,” “white supremacy,” slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, to name a few of the historic crimes perpetrated by “whites.” What started as a correction of historical writing vitiated by partiality and prejudice, today has degenerated into rank politicization that provides leverage to some political factions––mostly progressive Democrat clients–– at the cost of historical truth.

The first problem with “Hispanic Heritage Month” is the name. The only meaningful definition of that imprecise word “Hispanic” is something like “Hispanophone,” those who speak Spanish. Such a category includes nearly half a billion people comprising a vast diversity of ethnicities, nations, religions, customs, cultures, mores, cuisines, folkways, and histories. So which of those thousands and thousands of “heritages” will we be celebrating all month?

We can be sure that the lion’s share of these “heritages” will be Mexican. There’s a good reason for that: until recently, most of the legal or illegal immigrants have come from Mexico. The American Southwest, after all, was conquered and settled by Spaniards, and became part of Mexico after the 1821 revolution. This history, including the Mexican War of 1846-48 which ended with Mexico ceding the Southwest to the U.S., is part of American history, and should be taught as such, warts and all.

But in fact, what is generally taught from grade school to university is a politicized history that serves the leftist, Howard Zinn melodrama of racist “white” Euro-American invaders and colonizers who destroyed the indigenous peoples and their idyllic cultures in order to monetize their stolen lands with oppressive capitalists and their Christian flunkeys.

Every Columbus Day, for example, we are regaled with such simplistic, often cartoonish narratives that leave out all the complexities and nuances of real history. Typical of this ahistorical mentality is the “Wanted Poster” promulgated in 1992 by a South American indigenous organization, which lists Columbus’s crimes as “grand theft, genocide, racism, initiating the destruction of a culture, rape, torture, and instigating the big lie.”

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/fetterman-dress-code-fail-begs-question-americas-steep-decline

Democrat John Fetterman is not just a prime example of arrested development; he is a symbol of the dumbing down of standards and expectations that is undermining our great nation.

Fetterman, the overgrown man/child elected to the senate last year, is mainly known for wearing hoodies and gym shorts, a look that he thinks is cool and which also serves as a middle finger to the establishment. The Pennsylvania legislator is so uncomfortable wearing the normal garb of successful people occupying important roles in our society – a suit and tie, for instance – that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has relaxed the senate’s dress code, apparently to accommodate this slovenly member of that august body.

Historically, there was no written dress code of the Senate; all members were adults, and they did not need to be told that respect for the institution required them to dress as such. No longer.

The elimination of the senate’s dress code is the least of our problems. Much more worrisome for our country is that the same lowering of standards is taking place everywhere, often in the name of “equity” or “racial justice.”  

Educators across the nation are ditching tests and grades, prompted by declining performance and self-serving teachers’ unions complicit in that decline. In Portland, Oregon, authorities are considering new “equitable grading practices,” which would no longer penalize kids who cheat or who skip their homework, because “historical data shows racial disparities in students’ pass/fail rate.” The new approach is meant to be more “fair.” Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.   

Degrading traditional assessments does not help the kid who gets away with cheating and falls into life-long bad habits or who may need extra help in the classroom. It certainly does not help children who behave and who work hard; they deserve recognition and reward.  

Even in higher ed the push for “equity” is lowering the bar. The Metropolitan State University of Denver no longer requires that students use “Standard American English (SAE)” because it is “a social construct that privileges white communities and maintains social and racial hierarchies.” 

https://pjmedia.com/columns/john-stossel/2023/09/21/emergency-spending-n1728659

Did you survive the budget cuts from the last debt ceiling fight?

President Joe Biden called them “draconian,” while Republicans praised the deal’s “historic reductions in spending.”

But both parties conned us, as my new video explains.

What they call “cuts” were just a reduction in their planned spending increase. Instead of raising spending by 7.8%, they increased it by “only” 3.9%. Only politicians get to call an increase a cut.

Biden praised the deal, saying, “We’re cutting spending and bringing the deficits down at the same time!”

But they didn’t.

Now they’re using tricks to spend even more.

“Call it an emergency — done,” says Cato Institute budget specialist Romina Boccia. “Spend the money on whatever you want.”

Boccia reports how the Senate is moving to increase spending beyond the agreed-upon caps simply by calling it “emergency” spending.

“They gave $296 million to NASA for ’emergency infrastructure.’ What’s ’emergency infrastructure?’” I ask.

“That’s not really a thing,” she replies. “It’s just a way to plus up the NASA budget … a huge slush fund.”

“How do they justify this?” 

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/09/21/the-morning-briefing-the-democrat-j6-insurrection-hoax-keeps-getting-worse-n1728630

The exact moment when the Democrats ramped up their efforts to turn the United States of America into a Third World banana republic may be difficult to pinpoint, but we know it happened around the time that they decided that January 6, 2021, would be their new holiest of holy days. Oh, they can pretend to be horrified about what they say went on that day, be we know that they privately chuckle at how they’ve been able to turn their false J6 narrative into a weapon to destroy their political opponents.

The formation of the J6 House Soviet Select Committee on Daddy Issues saw the Democrats fully embrace kangaroo court justice and ever since then they’ve just been rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

With their ultra-slim majority in the House, Republicans have at least been able to slowly uncover information that the Democrats would have preferred to stay buried had they remained in charge.

We keep finding out the Trump-hating FBI may have been a little more, um, active than was first thought. Matt has some of the latest on that:

There’s a lot about the riot that Democrats simply don’t want us to know, and when we’ve managed to learn a few things that are, shall we say, not good for the preferred narrative, they get dismissed as conspiracy theories.

Some of the lingering questions about the riot are how many FBI agents and informants were embedded amongst the demonstrators and what role they played in instigating the violence. It’s long been suspected that there were several feds involved, but the true number may be much larger than we thought. In fact, according to a report from the New York Post, there were so many paid informants in the crowd that the House Judiciary Committee literally “lost track” of them and had to perform an audit to determine how many were there.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/21/democrats-discover-a-new-threat-to-democracy-the-u-s-constitution/

We’ve been cataloging how the left has taken to labeling every candidate it doesn’t like and every policy it opposes a “threat to democracy.” But even we were surprised to see the U.S. Constitution itself added to the list of these threats.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell said over the weekend that: “The Constitution has some profoundly anti-democratic, which is to say anti-democracy components, like the Electoral College and the two senators per state, for example.”

Mind you, this aired on Sept. 15, just two days before Constitution Day, which this year marked the 236th anniversary of its signing.

O’Donnell was talking to Jamelle Bouie, a New York Timers columnist, who after nodding his head in agreement with O’Donnell, added that “I think we’ve witnessed over the last couple years especially with the attempt to overturn the election, the ways that the constitution, its rules, can actually be used against what Americans think identify as a Democracy.”

Bouie (and others on the left) has been singing this song for a while. Last year, at a conference sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania’s Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy (named after NBC News’ chief foreign affairs correspondent), Bouie said “The threat to U.S. democracy is coming from inside the house. The Constitution itself is the problem.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/merrick-garland-special-counsel-david-weiss-hunter-biden-6377c505?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Shortly before the Trump Administration left office, Attorney General William Barr declined Republican calls to appoint a special counsel for Hunter Biden. We agreed with him. As we warned, a special counsel can bury a case in secret for years, and an AG can duck questions by saying that’s the special counsel’s job.

Merrick Garland essentially made that point for us on Wednesday. In contentious testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, President Biden’s Attorney General wouldn’t even say whether he talked to U.S. Attorney-turned-special counsel David Weiss about Hunter’s case.

The answers Republicans seek, Mr. Garland suggested, will be addressed “in the public report that will be transmitted to the Congress.” Given that a special counsel’s report typically comes at the end of an investigation, that means that Congress and the American people aren’t likely to get these answers before the 2024 election.

Mr. Garland portrayed himself as independent of both the White House and the details of Mr. Weiss’s investigation. But he didn’t have to ask President Biden what he wanted. In May the President publicly signaled to prosecutors that there should be no indictments when he told MSNBC “my son has done nothing wrong.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/09/communism_fascism_globalism__whats_the_difference.html

Monarchy: A system of government where supreme power is vested in a single genetic lineage — a dictatorship passed through family inheritance.

Communism: A system of government in which the State plans and controls the economy and a single, authoritarian party holds power — a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Fascism: A system of government marked by the centralization of authority under a dictator in which an economy is subject to stringent governmental controls and political opposition is violently suppressed.

Globalism: A system of government marked by the elimination of national sovereignty and the centralization of authority within international organizations such as the United Nations, World Health Organization, and World Economic Forum — all run by a small group of wealthy elites.

Monarchy, communism, fascism, globalism — what’s the difference?  At the end of the day, we are talking about a system of government in which centralized power belongs to a small group of elites who use their control over economic, military, and intelligence-collecting institutions to rule over everyone else.  Whether it is a government run by Mussolini, a king, the self-described “proletariat,” or an international cabal of central banks and corporations — it is a dictatorship all the same.

Let’s not pretend that raw “democracy” is significantly different.  As early-twentieth-century sociologist Robert Michels laid out in his treatise, “Political Parties,” an “iron law of oligarchy” guarantees that a small group of elites eventually rise to “rule over” any form of democratic organization.  Representative democracy, Michels argued, is a “facade” that legitimizes the continuing “rule” of some elite class. 

Administrators, bureaucrats, and political leaders love to talk about “democracy” because doing so buttresses their pretense that the people are actually in control.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  It is the “ruling class” that hoards power, and the more any elite member speaks of “democracy,” the more certain you can be that the elites are actively betraying the overall will of the people.  No matter how much this hurts, remember, you asked for it — because this is a “democracy”!

Note that a member of the “ruling class” or one of its controlled institutions (such as Wikipedia) could easily use the above paragraphs to vilify “populism.”  Think about the doublespeak tightrope that the “ruling class” now walks:

Democracy: A system of political government controlled by the common people.

Populism: Political ideas and policies that are supported by the common people.

https://spectator.org/what-we-must-believe-to-believe-biden-is-innocent/

It’s hardly a surprise that the corporate media have rushed to the defense of President Biden pursuant to the impeachment inquiry announced last week by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. More surprising is the absurdity of the arguments they offer on his behalf. For years, his denials notwithstanding, Biden knew his son ran an international enterprise whose only real service was selling access to the Vice President of the United States to foreign entities who hoped to procure favorable policy decisions from the Obama administration. This operation generated at least $20 million that was doled out to nine Biden family members, yet we are asked to believe that the “Big Guy” didn’t get a cut.

This situation is, to coin a phrase, worse than Watergate.

CNN, for example, insists there is no evidence that he “personally received any money.” The network’s fact-checkers evidently need to see a cancelled check made out to “Joe Biden” by an Oligarch who has helpfully written “bribe” on the memo line. The public is more sophisticated. A significant plurality of voters believe that Biden has accepted bribes. A recent Yahoo/YouGov survey asked this question (48F): “Do you believe that Hunter Biden funneled millions of dollars to his father in a long-running scheme to help Joe Biden profit off of his position?” Fully 45 percent of registered voters answered, “Yes.” These aren’t “MAGA extremists.” Indeed, 41 percent of Independents answered, “Yes.”

Moreover, they have many sound reasons for doubting the President’s veracity and suspecting him of engaging in impeachable offences. On August 24, House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) released a list of 16 instances of Biden lying to the American people about his knowledge of his family’s influence peddling schemes. Last week, Chairman Comer released an additional list of evidence showing that Joe Biden’s involvement in these illegal schemes was anything but passive.

https://thespectator.com/topic/the-biden-crime-family-is-our-own-reality-tv-mafia-show/

I have been meaning to weigh in on [cue scary music] Special Counsel David Weiss’s sham indictment of Hunter Biden on felony gun charges for a few days. I am glad I waited. 

It’s not that I have changed my mind about the indictments, or company man Weiss. Everyone knows he is on the job as an interior decorator, whose primary task is to produce window dressing for the Department of Injustice so that its two-tier deployment of police power is not too obvious to the casual onlooker.

Weiss has supposedly been investigating Hunter Biden for the last five years. Wouldn’t you know it, the statute of limitation on many of the tax charges is passing by like that herd of cows outside your train window even as I write.  

Biden fils might have gotten away with the kit, cat and caboodle had not District Judge Maryellen Noreika noticed how fishy Weiss’s original glucose-saturated plea bargain really was. “What, this deal calls for immunity from all criminal charges now and forever, so help you crack?” Yep. And no jail for the forgetful laptop owner either. You can bet your .38-caliber Colt Cobra Special Gauleiter Garland’s myrmidons would not try to sneak something like that past a judge on your behalf.  

No sooner was Weiss’s three-count indictment announced than alert (i.e., non-lackey) commentators savaged it as the Potemkin-village piece of theater it is.