RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/18/is-u-s-headed-toward-socialism-majority-says-yes-ii-tipp-poll/

In recent years, government in the U.S. has never been bigger, in terms of both spending and its power over individuals and the economy. Some have begun to openly wonder: Is the U.S. evolving into a socialist-style economy? And is that what Americans want? The latest I&I/TIPP Poll has answers.

Over the last three years, due to the COVID pandemic, government spending at all levels averaged just over 44% of GDP, the highest since World War II, when much of the economy was essentially socialized in order to boost war spending.

Today, a majority of Americans agree that the sudden, rapid growth from COVID-related spending and burgeoning top-down control over the domestic economy to address climate change have put U.S. on a path toward socialism.

This comes out of the latest I&I/TIPP Poll of 1,356 Americans across the country, taken online from Jan. 4-6. In it, we asked respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with the following simple statement: “The U.S. is evolving into a big government socialist state.”

The shocking answer: By 51% to 31%, Americans agreed the U.S. is moving toward socialism. Among the remainder, 18% said they were “unsure.” The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points.

Further broken down, of those who agreed, 20% said they did so “strongly,” while 31% said they agreed “somewhat.” For those who disagreed, just 15% disagreed strongly, while 16% said they “somewhat” disagreed.

While usually such politically sensitive questions show wide differences among the different political affiliations, that’s not exactly the case here.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/the-consumer-product-safety-commission-is-out-of-control/

The agency that floated a gas-stove ban is also harassing the maker of a child-care product, while its ex-chair argues it should be able to regulate guns.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) made headlines last week for entertaining the idea of a ban on gas-powered stoves, before quickly backtracking amid a fierce public outcry. Though that was a particularly notable instance of the CPSC’s attempted administrative overreach, it was not the only one.

The CPSC is currently in the process of harassing a small-business owner whose product has been used safely by thousands of people since 2009. Leachco, an Oklahoma-based firm founded by Jamie and Clyde Leach, manufactures the Podster, a lounge pillow for infants. The pillow has sides that cup babies to keep them in place. Over 180,000 have been sold since the product first came to market.

In 2015, a day-care worker broke state law and the day-care center’s rules by leaving an infant unattended in a Podster for over an hour and a half. In 2018, two parents accidentally smothered their baby in bed while co-sleeping. Both those infants tragically died.

The CPSC is using those cases to warn consumers to “immediately stop using the Podster.” Both babies were in a Podster when they died, but anyone with common sense can see that the negligence of adults, not the safety of the product, was the likely culprit. Those are the only two infant deaths the CPSC cites as being associated with the Podster, which has otherwise been used safely by thousands of parents.

The CPSC’s administrative proceedings against Leachco acknowledge that in those two instances, adults were using the product improperly. It says, “The Podster is not and has never been advertised by [Leachco] as a sleep product” and that “the Podster contains warnings that the product should not be used for sleep and that adult supervision is always required.” Nonetheless, the CPSC says that “it is foreseeable that caregivers will use the Podster without supervision.”

If an agency can ban any product that, even with proper warnings, could possibly be misused by two people, then no product is safe.

The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian public-interest-law firm, is representing Leachco before the CPSC and has brought a separate federal suit against the agency, challenging the constitutionality of the action. Attorney Oliver Dunford told NR, “We think this kind of claim should be before a court of law, not an agency.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/16/hunter-biden-fighting-in-court-to-bar-his-4-year-old-love-child-from-using-his-surname/

Scandal-plagued Hunter Biden is resisting a motion in court to allow his 4-year-old daughter to use his surname, arguing that it is in her best interest not to share his family’s name.

According to the New York Post, Lunden Roberts made the request on December 27 amid an ongoing paternity case in Independence, Ark, where Biden is fighting to lower his child-support payments for his illegitimate daughter Navy Joan Roberts.

On Dec. 27, Roberts, 31, asked Circuit Court Judge Holly Meyer to allow Navy to take the Biden name, claiming it would benefit their daughter because it is “now synonymous with being well educated, successful, financially acute and politically powerful.” Roberts also argued that the Biden name would open up opportunities for the girl “just like it has for other members of the Biden family.”

In a court filing on January 6, Biden’s lawyer argued in response that his surname would rob the child of a “peaceful existence” because it has become a lightning rod for criticism. He told the judge that his daughter should decide for herself once “the disparagement of the Biden name is not at its height.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/16/new-body-worn-camera-footage-from-j6-supports-calls-for-release-of-all-video/

Body-worn camera footage obtained by American Greatness of a D.C. Metropolitan police officer on duty on January 6, 2021, shows the chaos unfolding in real-time that day and how law enforcement’s response to the protest led to rising tension and deadly violence.

Officer Terrence Craig, an 11-year veteran of the force, testified last week in the criminal trial of Richard Barnett, the Arkansas man notoriously photographed with his feet on a desk in then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office on January 6, 2021. Nearly two-and-a-half hours of video was captured by Craig’s body-worn camera, providing an uninterrupted and shocking view of what happened inside and outside the building. 

Never-before-seen interactions with police and protesters bolster demands by House Republicans to release all surveillance video recorded by Capitol security cameras on January 6.

Craig’s video starts with a group of D.C. Metro and Capitol Police advancing toward the west side of the building at 2:30 p.m. The first physical breach occurred about 15 minutes beforehand; Capitol police had used “nonlethal” munitions such as flashbangs, pepper balls, and tear gas on the crowd assembled outside on Capitol grounds for roughly an hour—the first time in department history that officers were ordered to use such dangerous crowd control devices on political protesters.

D.C. police were ordered to dress in full riot gear, including gas masks, face shields, gloves, and ballistic vests. Under cross-examination by Joseph McBride, one of Barnett’s defense attorneys, Craig admitted the officers were “fully geared up” before taking their positions.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/reining-in-government-spending-lets-get-real/

Behind the refusal of the House Republican Party’s so-called freedom caucus to vote for Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is the caucus’s skepticism that he will actually “rein in government spending.” I’ve never quite understood why all Republicans do not belong to the Freedom Caucus. If the Republican Party supports low taxes, light regulations and strong national security, why is a Freedom Caucus even necessary?

Here’s the problem. In 1900, government at all three levels — local, state and federal — taxed Americans at about 9% of their earnings. Now, it is over 32%. As former President Ronald Reagan said: “Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

The federal budget devotes about half of its spending to the so-called entitlement programs: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare. Next is income security, which includes general retirement and disability insurance; federal employee retirement, disability and military retirement; unemployment compensation; housing assistance; nutrition assistance; foster care; Supplemental Security Income; and the earned income and child tax credits. They are followed, in decreasing order, by national security and interest on the debt. Combined, these programs consume almost all federal spending — courtesy of dollars collected from taxpayers or through borrowing that ultimately must be paid back by taxpayers or through printing. This leaves a small percentage of the federal budget for so-called discretionary spending.

As to the “entitlement” portion, even Democrats over the years called the spending “unsustainable.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/17/biden-wants-it-both-ways-on-covid-but-either-way-taxpayers-get-screwed/

Last week, the Biden administration once again extended the COVID public health emergency, the 12th time it’s been extended in the past three years. Just weeks before, however, team Biden told the Supreme Court that there is no COVID emergency, and there hasn’t been one since last April.

Why the two diametrically opposed positions? Simple. Extending the public health emergency declaration lets Joe Biden keep millions of recipients on Medicaid and continue his student loan bailout. Claiming that COVID isn’t an emergency will open the floodgates to illegal immigrants.

Notice the connective tissue? It’s about expanding government dependency – for health care, for college aid, or for illegals getting on welfare. Who loses? You. And anyone else who pays taxes.

On Jan. 11, Biden Health and Human Service Secretary Xavier Becerra announced that “as a result of the continued consequences of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic,” he was renewing the public health emergency declaration because “a public health emergency exists and has existed since Jan. 27, 2020, nationwide.”

This isn’t about public health. It’s about government welfare.

As the Mercatus Center’s Liam Sigaud and Markus Bjoerkheim explained recently, one of the many COVID relief bills rushed through Congress “substantially increased the proportion of Medicaid costs that the federal government covers and barred states that receive the funding from checking enrollees’ eligibility or removing the ineligible from Medicaid rolls.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19315/destroying-american-democracy

Just last week it was revealed that the FBI again withheld pertinent information from the American public, for past two months, until after the November 8, 2022 federal election.

The combination of a politically weaponized Intelligence Community, operating hand-in-hand with organizations that are main gateways for information to millions of Americans, is a serious threat to American democracy and the integrity of our elections.

Let us just briefly look at the steep slope of lying, deceit and corruption that has seeped into the leadership of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Having… false information — some of which the FBI actually altered — in the public domain was evidently intended to damage Trump.

Today we know that the “Russia hoax” was a lie…. the information in the “Steele dossier” was false — and the FBI had known it was from the start.

For almost two years, the authenticity of the material found on Hunter Biden’s laptop was questioned. Today, its authenticity has been verified; the information is real and damning. As summarized by the New York Post: “Yes that letter from the Dirty 51 had all the classic earmarks of a disinformation operation, all right – one designed to ensure Joe Biden won the presidency. And it was essentially a CIA operation, considering 43 of the 51 signatories were former CIA.”

One final example of the Intelligence Community involving itself in domestic politics comes from the recent release of the Twitter files…. Tweet #17 states, “executives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content.” Finally, the FBI paid Twitter $3.5 million reportedly to “handle requests from the bureau.”

The FBI, DHS and the ODNI had literally had set up shop at Twitter.

Can our government, law enforcement, and the Intelligence Community still be trusted?

Have those federal government agencies literally weaponized law enforcement and intelligence against political opponents in the U.S.?

Has more than one solitary person — former FBI attorney Kevin Clinemith, for altering an email — been held accountable for these egregious abuses of power?

Who authorized the cozy relationship between law enforcement, the intelligence community with twitter?

Who in these government agencies reviewed and approved of the output and decisions coming from these joint efforts?

Who has the records, notes and decisions that emanated from these groups?

It is clear that our law enforcement community needs to be investigated, but most importantly we need to investigate how our Intelligence Community has evolved from having literally a non-existent relationship with speech in America to being inside the room determining what speech is allowed.

There… needs to be a significant investigation by an outside, non-government group to understand how far this massive government overreach into free speech and election manipulation went. Clearly the government has been influencing what we get to see and hear. It needs to stop — now — before our democracy is destroyed.

Over the last few years, there has been much written about the destruction of American democracy. Frequently the threat has been of alleged interference in U.S. elections by Russia, China or other state actors. Government agencies, the name of election integrity, were assigned to identify and disrupt these foreign intrusions. As more and more information is revealed about these agencies, it seems that America’s Intelligence Community participated in these activities domestically, and in a way that poses a grave threat to both election integrity and American democracy.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/14/little-joes-corvette/

What if it had been a VW Bug? Or a Kia? I mean, what if Joe Biden’s garage, in addition to housing classified documents, was sporting something other and less sexy than his snazzy 1967 Corvette? What then? 

Joe himself seems to have set great store by his classic car. It’s the thing he mentions most frequently and most passionately when asked about the cardboard boxes stacked behind it, some of which contained secret U.S. government provender dating from his time as Barack Obama’s vice president. “It’s not like the documents were just strewn about,” Joe protested (I paraphrase to save the White House occupant embarrassment). “My Corvette is in there. The garage door has a lock on it.”

Well, OK, then. 

Nothing to see here, what? Time to move on? (I thought about using a period there, but I think we can all agree that a question mark with a twist of valley-girl upspeak pleading is more appropriate.)

It’s been amusing to absorb the commentary on this latest Top-Secret-Special-Compartmentalized-Nuclear-Coded-Eyes-Only fiasco. “Some of our country’s most sensitive 411,” blah, blah, blah. It was CBS News that first broke the story of Joe and his adventures with classified docs that he shouldn’t have had in his possession. Just last week the world discovered that the Washington office of the “Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement” [!], a Chinese-funded “dark-money nightmare,” had a cache of secret stuff. Then we learned about the garage sale, no Corvettes included, wheeze. And then, just a few days ago, the world woke up to, wouldn’t you know it, yet more classified docs stashed away somewhere among Joe’s collection of aviators in his Delaware home. As I write, Biden’s lawyers (nota bene, not the FBI) have found five more pages of classified material in the library at Biden’s home. Who knows where else he has the forbidden docs stashed?

When the SWAT teams of the FBI swooped down on Mar-a-Lago in August, packing plenty of heat, regulation shades, and those nifty jackets with “FBI” in super big letters just to let everyone know how important they are, they did find some secret stuff in folders marked “Classified.” They also found more that 1,600 newspaper clippings filed away there, not to mention various passports belonging to the Trump family (a flight risk, Virginia?) and who-knows-what in Melania’s lingerie drawer. 

Opinions vary about the seriousness of Trump’s tort. I have to say that I thought the whole thing was faintly absurd, not to say malodorously politicized. Experts disagree about this, but I am with those who point out that, as president, Trump could declassify anything he wanted to. He says he did. Others disagree. 

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3812679-white-house-under-pressure-to-explain-why-it-didnt-reveal-documents-discovery-earlier/

The White House is under mounting pressure to explain why the discovery of classified Biden documents was not immediately revealed to the public, with critics openly questioning if there was an intentional effort to keep the first find quiet in the lead up to the midterm elections.

The first batch of documents were first discovered on Nov. 2, which was just six days away from the election. But the White House did not disclose the findings until after they were reported by CBS News earlier this week. 

“That’s your version of the case,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said when asked on Friday if not revealing the discovery when it happened was to protect the president from political damage.

“I’ve been very clear here and I’ve answered that question multiple times, in different versions, in the last couple of days. Look, I want to very clear: There’s a process here, we are going to respect that process,” she added, responding “no” when asked if staff were involved in crafting a strategy as to when the disclosure should be made.

A second batch of classified documents was found in a storage space in the garage of Biden’s Wilmington, Del., residence on Dec. 20, and another one-page document was discovered among stored materials in an adjacent room this week. The search of Biden’s residence was completed on Wednesday.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Robert Hur as special counsel to investigate the discovery of classified documents on Thursday, following the announcement of additional documents found at Biden’s Wilmington residence. He also said he was notified in real time when the White House found the documents.

“The timing of the revelation of the document discovery is indeed curious,” said former Rep. Chris Carney (D-Pa.), a longtime Biden ally and former intelligence officer. “President Biden must be accountable and accept responsibility for this awkward episode. The most important thing here is not preventing political embarrassment, it’s protecting our nation’s security.”

https://thespectator.com/topic/double-standard-for-the-biden-documents-trump-hillary/

President Biden said Tuesday he was “surprised” to learn that in November his lawyers had found classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank. No doubt he was equally shocked when more classified docs turned up in his Delaware home.

Yet the tone of the mainstream media seems to be that boys will be boys. Since Biden is being so cooperative with authorities after being caught red-handed, maybe this has nothing in common with Donald Trump’s cache of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Or Hillary’s cache on her private e-mail server. Could there be a double-standard?

Biden had some/several/a bunch of classified documents while Trump had hundreds so that’s different. Yes, on Sesame Street four is bigger than three, but with classified documents it is not a meaningful difference. The law is clear: each document is a violation, and there are no discounts for having under a certain number. One classified document is enough to seek an indictment. But let’s not forget about Hillary Clinton, who was allowed not only to carry over 33,000 subpoenaed documents in the form of emails out of secure spaces on her server, but to delete them. Imagine if Biden reported that he and his team had simply deleted whatever they had found, never mind whether Trump had had a bonfire.

Biden’s documents were safe inside a locked closet. Classification law is extremely clear as to how documents must be stored, specifying, for example, how many minutes a safe is expected to withstand an attempt to cut it open. In the case of the Secure Compartmentalized Information (SCI) level of docs that Biden, Trump, and Hillary held, details are written into law and regulation as to what type of room, with what type of door, they are to be stored in. “Closet” does not fit the definition, whether it is at Biden’s place, Mar-a-Lago or Hillary’s home.

Nobody saw the documents. Maybe it wasn’t to standard, but they were kept under lock and key. No blood, no foul. Really? The reason all those laws and regulations regarding classified material exist is to safeguard them absolutely, so arguing whether the cleaning crew would have had access to them does not cover it. Marines guard these documents 24/7 in the equivalent of a bank vault deep inside the White House. With Hillary, an unclassified, insecure, out-of-the-box email server connected to the internet meant any hacker with moderate skills, including those assigned to attack her official trips to China and Russia, presumably had full access.

Biden’s documents were just old briefing notes, nothing so important. If the documents were labeled Top Secret or SCI when they were created, then that was their classification, no matter what we think of the contents today. The law is clear that arguing the level of classification after getting caught is not a viable defense strategy, and retroactive declassification is not an option. “The documents were not important even though they were classified” is not any better.