RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/01/ii-tipp-poll-just-42-now-think-biden-is-mentally-sharp/

Concerns about President Joe Biden’s mental abilities have gone mainstream.

Although the press has largely overlooked Biden’s gaffes, his disastrous performance at a decidedly friendly CNN townhall prompted the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that Biden’s “frequent public confusion about the major issues of the day is a reason for the growing public concern.”

Even the notoriously partisan “Saturday Night Live” has started to use Biden’s mental acuity as a punchline. One of the show’s characters has quipped about how “insiders are also saying that, during meetings, President Biden repeatedly uses the f-word in conversation. More concerning, the f-word he keeps using is ‘forget.’”

Biden’s critics have long pointed to increased verbal gaffes, along with his advanced age (he turns 79 later this month) as problems. But the mainstream press has largely ignored signs of mental decline.

The latest I&I/TIPP poll shows that, despite this, the perception of Biden’s cognitive descent has become widespread.

The poll tried to gauge the public’s perceptions of Biden on several measures, including mental abilities, by asking a random sampling of adults to “indicate your level of agreement or disagreement with the following descriptions of President Joe Biden.” Among the choices given were “mentally sharp,” “energetic,” and “a good communicator.”

The results are not good for Biden.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/29/turns-out-alexander-vindman-is-the-dopey-hack-we-all-thought-he-was/

Alexander Vindman, the retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who helped plot the botched impeachment of former President Donald Trump in what amounted to a failed coup attempt, thinks Tucker Carlson should be “censured” for saying things Vindman doesn’t like about the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

In a tweet Thursday responding to a trailer Carlson posted for his new documentary, “Patriot Purge,” Vindman asked, idiotically, “How is this different than yelling fire in a crowded theater? Carlson is attempting to incite a riotous mob. He should be censured. I’d like to hear the arguments for/against this being protected speech.”

Well since you asked, the argument for Carlson’s documentary being protected speech is right there in the Bill of Rights, on the first page, where it says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. That includes reporting and commentary that some people, even disgraced former Army officers who try to remove duly elected presidents, disagree with.

It’s embarrassing for Vindman that this needs to be spelled out for him, but “protected speech” under the First Amendment includes pretty much everything except a handful of specific situations, none of which remotely have to do with Carlson’s documentary.

For example, you can’t call for imminent lawless action (or incitement). You also can’t issue what’s called a “true threat,” which the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 defined as “those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.” Fighting words is another, quite limited category of unprotected speech that’s restricted to face-to-face interactions meant to provoke a violent reaction from the person being addressed. Not covered in any of these categories is, say, political reporting and commentary that Vindman doesn’t like.

Vindman, the man who broke the chain of command and illegally leaked the contents of a phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to a “whistleblower” in order to jump-start the Ukraine impeachment circus, is also confused about what “yelling fire in a crowded theater” means. People like Vindman always invoke the fire-in-a-crowded-theater line every time they want to justify censorship, and every time they reveal their bone-crushing ignorance.

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/january-6-insurrection-hoax/

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on September 20, 2021, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on “Critical American Elections.”

Notwithstanding all the hysterical rhetoric surrounding the events of January 6, 2021, two critical things stand out. The first is that what happened was much more hoax than insurrection. In fact, in my judgment, it wasn’t an insurrection at all.

An “insurrection,” as the dictionary will tell you, is a violent uprising against a government or other established authority. Unlike the violent riots that swept the country in the summer of 2020—riots that caused some $2 billion in property damage and claimed more than 20 lives—the January 6 protest at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. lasted a few hours, caused minimal damage, and the only person directly killed was an unarmed female Trump supporter who was shot by a Capitol Police officer. It was, as Tucker Carlson said shortly after the event, a political protest that “got out of hand.”

At the rally preceding the events in question, Donald Trump had suggested that people march to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically”—these were his exact words—in order to make their voices heard. He did not incite a riot; he stirred up a crowd. Was that, given the circumstances, imprudent? Probably. Was it an effort to overthrow the government? Hardly.

I know this is not the narrative that we have all been instructed to parrot. Indeed, to listen to the establishment media and our political masters, the January 6 protest was a dire threat to the very fabric of our nation: the worst assault on “our democracy” since 9/11, since Pearl Harbor, and even—according to Joe Biden last April—since the Civil War! 

Note that phrase “our democracy”: Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and various talking heads have repeated it ad nauseam. But you do not need an advanced degree in hermeneutics to understand that what they mean by “our democracy” is their oligarchy. Similarly, when Pelosi talks about “the people’s house,” she doesn’t mean a house that welcomes riff-raff like you and me.

I just alluded to Ashli Babbitt, the unarmed supporter of Donald Trump who was shot and killed on January 6. Her fate brings me to the second critical thing to understand about the January 6 insurrection hoax. Namely, that it was not a stand-alone event. 

On the contrary, what happened that afternoon, and what happened afterwards, is only intelligible when seen as a chapter in the long-running effort to discredit and, ultimately, to dispose of Donald Trump—as well as what Hillary Clinton might call the “deplorable” populist sentiment that brought Trump to power. 

In other words, to understand the January 6 insurrection hoax, you also have to understand that other long-running hoax, the Russia collusion hoax. The story of that hoax begins back in 2015, when the resources of the federal government were first mobilized to spy on the Trump campaign, to frame various people close to Trump, and eventually to launch a full-throated criminal investigation of the Trump administration. 

From before Trump took office, the Russia collusion hoax was used as a pretext to create a parallel administration shadowing the elected administration. Remember the Steele dossier, the fantastical document confected by the “well-regarded” former British spy Christopher Steele? We know now that it was the only relevant predicate for ordering FISA warrants to spy on Carter Page and other American citizens. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/10/28/doh_biden_146641.html

So much has gone wrong so quickly, it’s hard to remember we are only nine months into Joe Biden’s presidency. Less than one-third of the country now thinks America is “on the right track,” according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. That’s a dramatic deterioration since last spring, and a disturbing one, not only for the Biden and his party but for the country. Three developments are driving this collapse in confidence.

First, Biden is pursuing a self-proclaimed strategy to “transform” America despite his campaign promises to bring the country together, stress bipartisanship, and restore comity and normality. That’s not what he’s done. He’s tried to force big, progressive changes, a strategy that was bound to be divisive since he didn’t campaign on that platform or win a congressional mandate to pursue it. Second, all Biden’s major policies so far have failed — some spectacularly. He can point to no major triumphs to offset them. Third, Biden himself has been unable to mount an effective, coherent defense of his administration and its priorities.

The cumulative result is a sharp decline in public approval, especially among independents. Biden won the White House because he carried their votes, or perhaps because Donald Trump lost them. Now, with Trump gone and Biden standing alone, only one in four independents approve of the job he’s doing in the Oval Office.

Instead of heeding those red flags, the Biden administration is plowing ahead, undeterred, as the disasters mount. What the public sees are rising prices, bottlenecked supply chains, an open Southern border, and a bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan. They see a wobbly president who seems overwhelmed by a sea of troubles.

The immigration failures were evident from the start and have gotten progressively worse. The problems began on the campaign trail, when Biden and Kamala Harris contrasted their “humane” approach to illegal immigration to Donald Trump’s wall of resistance. Potential migrants in Central America, the Caribbean, and South America heard that message as “Y’all come.” So did the human smugglers who would transport them, as well as drugs and gang members, across the border. Once the new administration took over, it confirmed this new approach, ending construction of the border wall (including sections already contracted and paid for but not yet built) and discarding Trump’s policy requiring migrants to stay in Mexico while applying for asylum.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/is_jill_biden_asking_about_a_process_for_removing_kamala_harris.html

It’s been known for awhile that the honeymoon between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris has pretty much congealed.

In August, Kamala Harris was reportedly asking about how to get rid of failing old Joe:

Jack Posobiec:  Hearing K discussed the 25th amendment for the first time – Aug. 16.

SEE HERE.

Jill Biden asking if there is a process for removing the Vice President.

CLICK HERE.

If the report is true, that’s some White House they’ve got there over in the Biden administration. Not only is Biden struggling to hold his badly split Democrat Congress together to pass his signature porkulus infrastructure and reconciliation bill with progressives reportedly in a rage, he’s also beset by infighting in his own White House, with the two main players trying to get rid of one another. Call it the White House of the long knives. As a lagniappe, we already know that Harris and Jill Biden can’t stand each other.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/scranton-joe-bogus-biden-inauthentic-presidency/

During the 2020 election, Joe Biden positioned himself as the Democrat who could win the working class from President Donald Trump. “Joe from Scranton,” as the media affectionately calls him, was bringing normalcy back to the White House.

I wrote last September that this characterization of the Syracuse law grad and lifelong politician was a sham: “Biden has built his career on being dishonest to working-class Americans,” I warned.

Ten months into his presidency, and this has proven true. Trump may love a good show  —”stay tuned!” — but it is Joe Biden who oversees the most inauthentic administration, one that is shockingly divorced from the lives of everyday Americans.

The country is currently facing a massive breakdown in the global supply chain, leading to shortages of goods and increased prices for consumers. My local grocery store boasted large gaps on food shelves Thursday morning. A friend of mine was unable to buy a simple coffee from Starbucks. Others have stumbled across even worse examples of the burgeoning crisis.

Inflation and shortages are no joke for working class families, who spend a larger percentage of their paycheck trying to keep their pantries stocked. The White House’s response, however, has been to deflect from how to fix the breakdown and instead mock Americans who are concerned that Santa may not be stuffing himself down the chimney this Christmas.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki snarked during a briefing this week that the supply chain chaos can be summed up by “the tragedy of the treadmill that’s delayed.” Chief of staff Ron Klain asserted on Twitter that inflation and shortages are “high class problems.” Psaki previously insisted that families aren’t comparing the cost of goods to pre-pandemic prices, saying, “We all understand the American people are not looking at cost-to-cost comparisons from this year to two years ago; they’re looking at cost-to-cost comparisons to their checkbooks from eight months ago or 12 months ago.” She made a patently false claim that gas prices are “well in line” with recent decades.

Then there was the defensiveness with which the administration responded to backlash over transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg taking two months of “paternity leave” with his newly adopted children while ports are backed up with shipping containers. Those who rightfully pointed out that Buttigieg either should have come back to work early or that the White House should have installed a temporary replacement were accused of not supporting paid parental leave or of being homophobic.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/anthony-fauci-nih-congress-gain-function-jail/

Anyone wishing to appreciate the nature of our two-tier society needs only to contrast the fate of St Anthony Fauci with that, say, of General Mike Flynn or any of the dozens of political prisoners who are, many of them, being held without charge in appalling conditions in a Washington, D.C. prison even as I write.

Fauci has been a carbuncle on the countenance of American life at least since he help spread the myth of heterosexual transmission of AIDS in the 1980s. The new Chinese flu was custom made for his brand of panic-mongering and totalitarian posturing.

Just a few weeks ago, he was saying that it was “too early” to say whether we would be allowed to gather for Christmas. We’ve known for some time now that he was involved with, and paid with taxpayer money for, “gain of function” research at the Wuhan virology lab where the novel coronavirus that has caused such upheaval was developed.

Yes, that’s right. Fauci was paid by your tax dollars to help weaponize a virus that he then went on to exploit as a means to enhance his lugubrious celebrity.

He lied, under oath, about his role in his testimony before Congress, most pointedly in his heated exchanges with Senator Rand Paul this last summer.

Now we have Dr Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, publicly challenging Fauci, charging that he is guilty of spreading “misinformation” about taxpayer funding of Fauci’s “gain of function” research at the Chinese virology laboratory.

Of course, “misinformation” in this case is just a polysyllabic synonym for lying — and besides wasn’t it Jen Psaki herself wanted people to be punished for spreading “misinformation”?

Yes, but she didn’t mean people like Fauci, who is on team A and is therefore exempt from public obloquy, not to mention federal prosecution.

https://victorhanson.com/the-ironies-of-the-rioting-youth-of-2020/

By August 2020, the protests, demonstrations, riots, looting, and arson that followed from the national outrage over the killing of George Floyd had spread to most of America’s cities. But the furor over Floyd’s death was not the only catalyst of the protests. The previously instituted national quarantine—roughly from March 20 through September—had emasculated the U.S. economy. 

Unemployment claims, in a prior economy of 3.5 percent near record low unemployment, now soared to 31,491,627 Americans out of work. The annual budget saw over $4 trillion in additional debt. Those who bore the greatest brunt were not coastal elites, but the recovering and once stagnant areas of the nation’s interior and inner cities. 

Forty percent of Americans making less than $40,000 were believed to have lost their jobs. But even the lockdown was not the only catalyst for the rioting. There were also more existential foundations of the hysteria. Many of those inner-city youth rioting and demonstrating, for all the political rhetoric, were suffering from a 21 percent unemployment rate during the quarantine, nearly three times higher than the rate of college graduates. Half those under 50 had lost their jobs, were furloughed or suffered pay cuts. 

Some of the urban single youth of all races, the foot soldiers of the more organized BLM and Antifa brigades—who were not mere opportunistic looters and rioters—were mired in tuition debt to acquire what were often nonmarketable degrees. They often added insult to injury by finding themselves nevertheless working in low-wage jobs. That paradox required the architects of Antifa and other purveyors of violence apparently to retreat to Marxist exegeses to explain their own lack of upward mobility and society’s culpability for not appreciating fully their woke genius and potentials. So veritable mass imprisonment within one’s homes, followed by an economic tsunami were the fuel for public rioting, should any spark, such as the killing of George Floyd, ignite the prior combustible fumes in our midst.