RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/20/did-bidens-trove-of-classified-docs-jeopardize-u-s-national-security-ii-tipp-poll/

Recent revelations that President Joe Biden kept classified government documents at his two namesake think tanks, his Delaware home and even his garage have largely been treated with a yawn by big media. But average Americans are paying attention and worry that Biden’s careless stewardship of classified documents endangers U.S. national security, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

In our national online I&I/TIPP Poll of 1,358 adults, taken from Feb. 1-3, we asked Americans two questions, the first being: “How closely are you following the story about classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as Vice President found at his former office and home?”

As it turns out, Americans are paying pretty close attention to the story. Among those responding to the I&I/TIPP Poll, which has a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points, 60% said they were “closely” following the developments.

Among those following closely, 26% said they were following “very closely,” versus 34% who said “somewhat closely.”

Meanwhile, just 36% of Americans said they were not following the news closely, with 22% saying they were following it “not very closely” and only 13% saying “not at all closely.”

So it’s definitely a topic in the public eye.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19430/joyce-kilmer

Amidst the unrelenting stories of carnage, corruption and incompetence comes a reminder there is good news if you look long enough to find it.

And it should come as no surprise that this reminder comes from Brooklyn.

Generations ago, the New York City Department of Parks took a triangular piece of park property along Kings Highway in Midwood and renamed it “Sgt. Joyce Kilmer Square.” It lies along a historic Indian trail that became a major thoroughfare for European settlers traveling between rural communities called Flatbush, Gravesend, and New Utrecht.

In time, New York City would acquire the parcel as the arrival of the automobile required the realignment of many Brooklyn streets, resulting in this modest triangle. It was dedicated as parkland in 1934, and named “Sergeant Joyce Kilmer Square” in 1935.

Today it is lined with benches shaded by large oak trees, with a flagpole along East 12th Street. It is a respite for local neighbors seeking a moment’s relief from the challenges of the day.

It is a modest tribute to a giant of an American – and he likely would have had it no other way.

Kilmer was born in New Jersey before the start of the 20th Century and educated at Rutgers University and Columbia University, from where he earned his degree. Kilmer married and had four children. After teaching Latin for a year at Morristown High School in New Jersey, Kilmer began his career in 1909 as a dictionary editor with Funk & Wagnall’s Company. In 1912, he served as the Literary Editor of The Churchman, an Anglican newspaper, also contributing freelance articles and poems to several other publications. On the eve of World War I, he joined the staff of the New York Times and subsequently converted to Catholicism.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/16/judge-tim-kellys-court-of-contempt/

Following an armed FBI raid with SWAT vehicles that terrorized his neighborhood and pregnant wife, Zachary Rehl was arrested in March 2021 for his involvement in the events of January 6. A Philadelphia judge ordered Rehl, a member of the Proud Boys, to be released from custody pending trial.

But Joe Biden’s Justice Department immediately asked a D.C. federal judge to keep Rehl in jail indefinitely even though he was not accused of committing a violent crime. Claiming Rehl “abetted” the destruction of government property—“a federal crime of terrorism,” prosecutors wrote—the government argued that no condition of release could keep the community safe from Rehl, a former Marine with no criminal history.

Enter D.C. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly.

“The Court finds that the nature and circumstances of the offenses weigh in favor of detention,” Kelly wrote in his July 2021 order. “[Although] there is no evidence Rehl carried or used a weapon that day, or laid his hands on anyone in a violent manner, he said and did things that are highly troubling.”

After spending two years in jail not convicted of any crime, Rehl is currently on trial in Kelly’s courtroom along with four other Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy—an indictment filed a year after their initial charges. Kelly has kept all five defendants behind bars awaiting trial, repeatedly denying all subsequent motions for release while at the same time granting one delay after another.

Kelly, naturally, is invested in justifying his cruel decision to incarcerate innocent men (yes, the country’s jurisprudence still assumes the presumption of innocence) for two years. Which only partially explains why he is running roughshod over the rights of the defendants.

Appointed to the bench by President Trump in 2017, Kelly spent 10 years working for the Justice Department including the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, which prosecutes every January 6 case. He won an award from the FBI’s Washington Field Office, the very same office investigating every January 6 case. This is the sort of professional incestuousness Trump supporters from flyover country confront in the nation’s capital.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/02/constant_government_lies_spark_resistance_movements.html

In the digital public square of social media, I have seen a noticeable uptick in biting memes and political cartoons calling out the U.S. government for its constant lies.  In one example, a cyber-billboard screams, “I don’t know if I’m being distracted by vaccine deaths so I don’t notice inflation, or if inflation is the distraction to Ukraine money laundering, or if Ukraine is a distraction for rampant pedophilia, or if pedos are distracting me from election fraud.” 

 Clearly, that was produced before the great balloon scare gripped the nation.  Ah, but no sooner had China Joe proven once again how unsecured our open borders are by allowing a Chinese surveillance balloon to float above the continent’s nuclear silos than I ran into a cartoon divided into four squares in which the same man was being hypnotized — first by a dangling coronavirus in 2020, then an mRNA “vaccine” shot in 2021, then a Ukraine flag in 2022, and finally an extraterrestrial spaceship in 2023.  Well done, meme masters and internet freethinkers!  Actually, corrupt Senator Harry Reid had started to play the UFO card a decade ago, so perhaps this cycle is just starting up once again.  Uff da.

If you want to know what’s really going on within a society, you don’t run to the national newspapers or interview people with titles.  You get out and talk to the people nobody else would dare seek.  In the Internet Age, you look at what’s being said by ordinary people on unremarkable chatrooms whose opinions are routinely overlooked.  What I see today is a bubbling movement of frustration and anger that is as acidic as anything I’ve come across.  Americans are furiously mad — but noticeably not in despair.  People are not throwing their hands up in desperation; they’re venting their rage at a corrupt system of government that has gotten out of control.  They’re not hiding in the shadows, whispering in hushed tones; they’re screaming at the top of their lungs, just daring the Big Tech censors to blot out their (un)free speech.  They’re not allowing the State’s “politically correct” priests and purveyors of officially sanctioned disinformation to shame them into silence; they’re laughing in the spin doctors’ faces and calling out the government’s mass propaganda for what it is.  That’s refreshing!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/war-is-about-more-than-big-battalions/

Napoleon famously said that “morale is to the physical as three is to one.” More troops and bigger guns don’t necessarily guarantee victory, as Napoleon himself demonstrated. The post-revolutionary French army took on the wealthy great powers of Europe and with the exception of England, inflicted on them defeat after defeat, dominating most of continental Europe from 1804-14. History is full of other conflicts and battles in which the motivations for fighting trumped the greater numbers of the foe. Indeed, the West only exists because twice, in 490 and 480 B.C., the free Greeks defeated the massive, servile armies of the autocratic Persian Empire, preserving the ideals of political freedom and equality.

What people are willing to fight, kill, and die for, then, is three times more significant than the materiel with which they wage war. This means that our culture’s fashionable self-loathing––its “oikophobia,” as the late philosopher Roger Scruton called the hatred of one’s country, its institutions, its history, and much of its people evident in our universities, media, entertainment, and even military establishment––is so dangerous that not only does it erode morale, it signals to our foes that for all our economic and military power, significant numbers of citizens will not risk their lives to defend their country from those who wish to supplant it.

Given this long history showing that the foundational beliefs people fight for is itself a force-multiplier, it’s puzzling to read this paragraph from Brookings Institute Senior Fellow Robert Kagan’s long essay in the Wall Street Journal. After summarizing the 20th Century history of aggressors underestimating the power of the U.S., Kagan writes:

“Are Americans as a people up to a major confrontation with another great power, whether in immediate conflict or a protracted Cold War-like struggle? It would be dangerous for a potential adversary to assume they are not. Whatever condition the American political system may be in, it is not appreciably worse than it was during the 1930s. That, too, was a deeply polarized America, including on the question of whether to intervene in the world’s conflicts. But once the U.S. found itself at war, dissent all but disappeared. If ever there could be a cure for American political polarization, a conflict with China would be it.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/sen-fetterman-was-not-qualified-to-serve-his-doctor-and-staff-lied-about-it/

After hospitalizing him for what staff suspected might have been another stroke, Senator John Fetterman has now been hospitalized with “clinical depression”. This comes after the New York Times reported that the newly elected senator had trouble understanding what people were saying and was trying to avoid interactions.

And it’s a safe bet that we’re being told less than half the story.

Fetterman is not qualified to serve. He can’t do his job or any job. He needs extensive medical care and he’s not able to carry out his responsibilities. Whether or not he was aware of that depends on his mental capacity.

Contrary to Nikki Haley’s recent dumb quip, voters are allowed to elect unqualified people, including shambling wrecks, but Fetterman’s doctor and his staffers, not to mention his wife, would have been aware of his real condition and they lied about it to get through an election. Having lied their way this far, the star of Bernie’s Weekend broke down. That comes as no surprise after Fetterman’s debate performance.

Democrats just pushed out Sen. Dianne Feinstein, she showed up to work every day, and maybe she didn’t remember which votes she had cast or who her colleagues were, but she’s still more functional than Fetterman.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/who-killed-philip-haney-the-mystery-continues/

February 21 will mark three years since Philip Haney, 66, was “found deceased” in Amador County, California, killed by a gunshot to the chest. The victim was not the typical Sierra foothills resident.

Philip Haney was the author of  See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad, first published in 2016. The DHS whistleblower also authored Frontpage articles, “Deobond Attacks in San Bernardino, Sri Lanka,” “The Terrorist Ties that Bind,” and “The Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America’s Ominous Post-Election Statement.” The expert on Islamic jihad had been punished for doing his job at a high level. This is the man found deceased in Amador County.

In Haney’s RV, the sheriff found numerous thumb drives, a laptop computer, and other materials. Sheriff Martin Ryan turned these over to the FBI, which did not reveal what the devices contained, and the bureau remained silent on the case through 2021. Last year, the Amador County sheriff’s office told Frontpage there was “no new news” about Haney and that the case was closed. A month later, in March, 2022, more than two years after Haney was found deceased, the case was proclaimed a suicide.

Claims that Haney killed himself had appeared from the start, but were steadfastly denied by Haney’s friends, family and members of Congress. In March of 2020, Rep. Steve King said, “I don’t believe that Phil Haney committed suicide.” Rep. Louis Gohmert told reporters “I’d been concerned about his safety, with all the information he knew and people who could’ve gotten in trouble.”  If the case had been pursued as a homicide, potential suspects would have been easy to find.

Philip Haney worked as a field agricultural entomologist in the Middle East, where he began studying Arabic and the Quran. With that background, the UC Riverside alum seemed a good fit for the Department of Homeland Security, but it didn’t turn out that way.

In “DHS ordered me to scrub records of Muslims with terror ties,” published in The Hill on May 5, 2016, Haney said DHS had ordered him “to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS).”

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/02/florida-vs-new-york.php

As states increasingly segregate into red and blue, California, New York, Texas and Florida are the heavyweight contenders. (Although, don’t forget poor Illinois.) A year ago I had the good fortune to hear Governor Ron DeSantis give a speech to a Minnesota group in Naples, Florida. DeSantis said something that I thought couldn’t possibly be correct: that Florida has more people than New York, with a state budget only half as large. Afterward, I looked it up, and it was true. No wonder DeSantis romped to an overwhelming re-election!

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal editorial board compared “New York vs. Florida, by the Numbers.” The comparison tells us pretty much everything we need to know about the relative merit of conservative and left-wing governance:

Take a look at the nearby chart comparing some key indicators of governance in a pair of states that not long ago were about the same size—New York and Florida. As recently as 2013 the two states had similar populations, but so many people have moved to the Sunshine State that it’s now roughly 2.6 million people larger.

Here are the numbers. Read them and weep, if you are a liberal. Click to enlarge:

We see the same thing across the country. Red states are succeeding, blue states are failing. What is hard to understand is why so many blue state liberals don’t understand that their states are dying. Politicians, I get: decline is always a relatively slow process, so they calculate that they will be gone before their states finally circle the drain. But what about the people who live in blue states, who don’t intend to flee to more successful locations, and who will be left holding the bag? I can only assume that they are not familiar with the data.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ohio-residents-erupt-town-hall-wheres-pete-buttigieg

Voicing their concerns at a town hall on Wednesday night, Ohio residents impacted by this month’s toxic train derailment asked where Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was.

“Where’s Pete Buttigieg? Where’s he at?” one man asked Mayor Trent Conaway.

“I don’t know. Your guess is as good as me,” the mayor replied. 

He told attendees that Tuesday was the first time he had “heard anything from the White House.”

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan is on the ground in East Palestine on Thursday to discuss the agency’s efforts leading on the environmental response, a spokesperson for the Transportation Department told Fox News Digital in an email.