RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/07/bidens-terrible-legacy-a-tsunami-of-growth-killing-regulations/

On Joe Biden’s first day in office, he signed a raft of executive orders, one of which we said was “almost entirely overlooked but could easily end up having the biggest impact.”

Turns out we were right.

The executive order – “Modernizing Regulatory Review” – would, we predicted, “unleash the regulatory state with a ferocity never before seen in this country.”

With this one executive order, Biden shows that he’s intent on giving regulators carte blanche to impose massive new rules on businesses and households, on virtually anything and everything they do, regardless of costs. There’s little else Biden has done so far that will have as wide-ranging an impact.

As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Clyde Wayne Crews explains, that order “undermined the crucial watchdog mission of the White House Office of Management and Budget,” which had served as a check on the administrative state. “The federal government’s sole watchdog … has been transformed into a cheerleader for regulation.”

The CEI publishes the definitive guide to federal regulation each year, called “10,000 Commandments.”

Last week, the Federal Register, which is the repository of Washington’s rules and regulations, provided the latest evidence that Biden let regulators off the chain.

The 2024 Federal Register weighed in at 107,262 pages – the most in history and a 45% increase from Biden’s first year in office.

Last year, alone, Biden finalized 3,248 rules, of which 343 were deemed “significant,” meaning they added more than $200 million in compliance costs.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/3278083/trump-sentencing-bs-conclusion-to-bs-hush-money-case/

This Friday, though, Trump will have to put aside his work to attend, either in person or virtually, his sentencing in the Manhattan criminal prosecution in which he was convicted of falsifying business records. The case, brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, was widely viewed as the weakest of the four criminal cases brought against Trump by elected Democratic prosecutors and the Biden administration. For one thing, the charges, questionable as they were, were misdemeanors, past the statute of limitations, which Bragg inflated into felonies by alleging that Trump falsified records in a plot to steal the 2016 presidential election, which Bragg did not have the authority to police.

Even anti-Trump commentators were baffled by the case. “When Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg first brought charges against Donald Trump in March 2023, the legal theory behind the indictment remained remarkably unclear,” Quinta Jurecic, an editor of the journal Lawfare, from the liberal Brookings Institution, wrote last April. “Now, a year later, with the trial finally underway … the charges against Trump still have an oddly inchoate quality.” To add to Trump’s problems, the case was presided over by Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan, who, in 2020, violated New York’s rules of judicial conduct to make a small donation to the Biden campaign.

Nevertheless, as the other cases against Trump fell by the wayside — the two federal prosecutions brought by special counsel Jack Smith were bogged down in litigation, and the Georgia case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was sunk by prosecutorial misconduct — the Bragg case stayed on track. Anti-Trumpers came to support the case because they saw it as the only chance to get Trump before the 2024 election. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21274/trump-canada-panama-canal-greenland

Trump is once again being true to his America-First convictions.
[Trump’s] question to Trudeau was pointed, and remains unanswered: “So your country can’t survive unless it’s ripping off the U.S. to the tune of $100 billion?”
Trump explained that the Panama Canal “was given to Panama and to the people of Panama, but it has provisions, you gotta treat us fairly and they haven’t treated us fairly.”
There’s the bottom line: if the United States doesn’t control the Panama Canal and Greenland, China or Russia likely will, and the consequences could be severe both for the American economy and for national security.
President-elect Donald Trump recently said that the Panama Canal should once again come under American control, and that the US should buy Greenland from Denmark. If the United States doesn’t control the Panama Canal and Greenland, China or Russia likely will, and the consequences could be severe both for the American economy and for national security. Pictured: An aerial view of ships passing the Pedro Miguel locks in the Panama Canal, in May 2023. (Photo by iStock/Getty Images)

First, President-elect Donald Trump tweaked Canada’s far-left Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about becoming governor of the 51st state of the United States of America. Then he said that the Panama Canal should once again come under American control. Make that the 52nd state. And now, are you ready for a 53rd state? Last month, Trump renewed a call he made during his first term: that the United States should buy Greenland from Denmark. Could the man possibly be serious?

Maybe not. The left’s propaganda arm, also known as the mainstream media, loves to portray Trump and his supporters as angry, bitter, ignorant people lashing out against the people who know better what’s good for them. Trump has never gotten credit for his sense of humor, despite the fact that he is easily the funniest man to occupy the White House since Ronald Reagan, and may even surpass the Gipper.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/03/why-europe-and-america-need-each-other/

European elites are greeting the incoming Trump administration with something less than enthusiasm. The UK has sent an ambassador to Washington with a well-expressed disdain for the returning US president. Le Monde, a French publication not known for its pro-American sympathies, called Trump’s election ‘the nail in [the] coffin’ for the US as a ‘democratic model’ for the world. The Guardian, predictably, has called for Europeans to fight to preserve the continent’s welfare and climate regime.

Some seem to think that Trump’s return is the spur Europe needs to finally stand on its own two feet. But they need to recognise, as was the case during the Second World War and the Cold War, that only a strong alliance between Europe and the US offers any hope of resisting the rise of an authoritarian bloc, this time grouped around China.

There are hopeful signs. Since the start of the Ukraine conflict, ties between Europe, Canada and the US have been strengthened. There is some promise in an incipient alliance between North America and India, Japan and Australia. But Europe cannot expect the US to bear the strategic burden itself.

Trump’s insistence that Europe rearm makes sense at a time when the continent is facing immediate threats, most immediately in the Red Sea and Ukraine. Today, almost all European countries outside the UK, Greece and the Baltic states do not spend more than two per cent of their GDP on defence, while the US spends roughly 3.5 per cent.

Although there is an isolationist tendency among MAGA activists, most US voters are in favour of expanding America’s ‘global presence’. In a reinvigorated alliance, Europe has much to offer in terms of production and expertise, particularly given the sad state of the US military industry, as evidenced by shortages of materials to send to allies like Ukraine, Taiwan or Israel.

A similar imperative exists in the economic sphere. Europeans have long prided themselves on producing a stronger, more equitable economy than the military-oriented Americans. Two decades ago, one could legitimately see Europe as a determinative third force in the world economy. This is no longer the case. It’s basically a choice between China and the US.

Europeans might once have hoped that the euro could replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. But after last decade’s euro crisis, and with serious economic problems hitting the likes of France, this now looks like a fantasy. The dollar, despite attempts by China and some developing countries to supplant it, still accounts for close to 60 per cent of all foreign currency reserves and almost 90 per cent of all foreign exchange transactions.

Trump’s tariff threats may seem irrational and self-destructive. But the end of unrestrained free trade, without some sense of reciprocity, has long seemed inevitable. It has died amid a trade regime that helped cause the loss of over 3.7million jobs in the US alone. Living standards across the deindustrialising West have worsened, particularly for the middle class, while Europe has endured a decade of stagnation.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/05/the-hydra-of-government-how-the-global-engagement-center-lives-on-through-rebranding/

If you visit the State Department’s website for the Global Engagement Center, you will read that “The Global Engagement Center closed on December 23, 2024.”

Not really.

As has been often observed, the nearest thing to immortality this side of the pearly gates is a government initiative. I have noted in this space and elsewhere that the innocuous-sounding “Global Engagement Center” was actually (in Vivek Ramaswamy’s accurate summary) a “key node of the censorship industrial complex.” According to its mission statement, the GEC was supposed to be focused on “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.” I thoughtfully added the italics to the word “foreign.”

The point is that the GEC—like the State Department as a whole (like, indeed, the CIA and the rest of the alphabet soup that makes up our “intelligence” services tout court)—is supposed to be focused outward: on foreign threats. Thanks in part to reporting by people like Matt Taibbi, we know that much of our government has been weaponized against the American people, at least against those of whom the regime disapproves. On issues ranging from COVID to Hunter Biden’s laptop, Taibbi has shown that “every corner of government”—“the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD,  . . . even the CIA”—has leaned on virtually all social and traditional media companies to toe the approved government line. The GEC has played a small but not insignificant role in this clandestine effort to monitor opinion and suppress entities and individuals emitting “Wrongthink” (what George Orwell called “Crimethink”).

Item: Because the GEC could not operate against Americans directly, it did so indirectly by funding entities like the British-based Global Disinformation Index, which compiled a list of publications and individuals that said things the regime did not like. That list was consulted by advertisers wary of winding up on the wrong side of the government. The Washington Examiner made the list. So did RealClearPolitics, Reason, The New York Post, Blaze Media, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the American Conservative, Newsmax, and many conservative entities. Result? Millions of dollars of ad revenue dried up, imperiling the future of those outlets.

Funding for the GEC was in the original 1500-page obscenity that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson had the temerity to bring to his colleagues as a “continuing resolution” last month. That monstrosity instantly drew some portion of the contempt and ridicule it deserved, not least from Elon Musk, whose fingers got a workout on the platform formerly known as Twitter. A 120-page, slimmed-down version of the bill was hastily cobbled together minus the GEC funding and other objectionable features (a raise for the legislators, for example). That passed, and so a putative “government shutdown” was avoided.

There was modified joy over this seeming victory. The fact that funding for the GEC was cut was one of the principal goads to celebration. Here at last was proof that a bad government activity could actually be zeroed out. No money, no activity.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/06/conspiracies-too-awful-to-imagine/

Over the decade of Donald Trump’s political career, the left—as exemplified by Democratic politicos, the media, academics, the Washington military hierarchy, and the permeant bureaucratic state—illustrated a level of furor, venom, and near madness unprecedented in modern American history.

Yet stranger still about such visceral, indeed lunatic hatred, despite Trump’s eccentricities and lack of a traditional political resume, his administration between 2017-21 was successful by traditional economic, military, security, and diplomatic standards. It was certainly not characterized by weaponizing the DOJ, Pentagon, CIA, or FBI, get-even vendettas, the use of lawfare, corruption, optional wars, open borders, hyperinflation, or a war on the environment—as predicted and alleged. Nevertheless, the idea of Trump as president justified to the left the greatest assault on our civil liberties, justice system, and free expression in modern history.

Indeed, at times the frenzy has ranged the gamut of an unprecedented two impeachments, a first Senate impeachment trial of a private citizen ex-president, and a coordinated effort to deplatform the major Republican presidential candidate from state ballots.

But at other times, the efforts were more sinister—and conspiratorial—to the point that the attempt to destroy the purported threat of candidate, president, and two-time candidate Trump apparently justified any means necessary.

In retrospect, what is the legacy of these unmatched efforts? They have established precedents, if ever again followed, will destroy the republic as we have known it.

1. “Russian collusion.” There was never any evidence that a 2016 Trump candidacy sought to “steal” the election through the intervention of the Putin Russian government. But a paranoid Clinton campaign, through the deliberate paywalls and agency of the DNC, Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS consulting firm, hired a retread ex-British spy, Christopher Steele—who was also FBI Director James Comey’s paid informant—to fabricate a “dossier” of invented scandals and salacious sex detail to smear Trump and ensure his defeat.

That effort required sowing the dossier throughout the government, partnering with traditional and social media, warping the FISA courts, forging an FBI-submitted document, and ambushing and destroying the National Security Advisor designate Gen. Michael Flynn.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/06/will-we-make-it-until-jan-20/

Joe Biden’s first 46 months in the White House were an exercise in political vandalism, the effects of which the world will be dealing with for years. But it wasn’t enough for him. He’s accelerated his offensive on his way out. Inauguration Day can’t arrive soon enough.

The candidate who ran in 2020 on restoring dignity to the office of the president is a small and petty man. This is not a revelation but a fact known since he “served” in the U.S. Senate and was especially evident when ran for president the first time, nearly four decades ago, dropping out after he could no longer cover his serial lies, blatant plagiarism and the vicious side of his personality.

So it’s not in the least surprising that he would try to burn down the world around him as he moves toward the door. Following is a brief glimpse of Biden’s efforts to handicap the next president and add needless hassles and costs to the lives of everyday Americans.

Energy

An executive order designed to permanently ban new offshore oil and gas development along some yet undetermined coastlines is expected to be issued soon. The decree will be difficult for Donald Trump to reverse, as it “is rooted in a 72-year-old law that gives the White House wide discretion to permanently protect US waters from oil and gas leasing without explicitly empowering presidents to revoke the designations,” Bloomberg reports. 

It’s a red-hot poker in the eye of Trump, whose agenda includes U.S. energy dominance, and average Americans, whose wallets will be adversely affected by higher energy prices.

Biden is also “attempting to implement last-minute restrictions on oil and gas drilling,” says Fox News, pursuing a “20-year ban on oil and gas leases in 264,000 acres of Nevada’s Ruby Mountains.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/biden-commutes-prison-death-sentences-garland

With their recent commutation of death sentences for federal prisoners, President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland are leaving office not in a blaze of glory but under a cloud of shame.

The clemencies seem like a culmination to a long record of dereliction and misjudgment. Biden and Garland spent the last few years lamenting the death toll of Americans killed by fentanyl, with overdoses and the accompanying violence of drug dealing resulting in more than 100,000 deaths per year, according to the administration’s own threat assessment. Meantime, Biden left the nation’s southern border wide open, allowing drug traffickers easy passage to bring more fentanyl into the United States. For his part, the attorney general issued his infamous Garland Memo, telling federal prosecutors not to impose mandatory minimum sentences on fentanyl traffickers (and other drug dealers) unless the dealers met a byzantine list of requirements for prior violence, leadership roles, and criminal history, conditions virtually impossible to prove for shadowy drug couriers operating outside the United States.

The president had repeatedly stated that he would not pardon his son Hunter Biden, even as the younger Biden was convicted at trial of firearms offenses and then pled guilty to tax offenses. President Biden claimed the moral high ground, allegedly respecting the rule of law. Then Donald Trump won the election. With tallying of the election returns barely completed, Biden did an abrupt about-face, pardoning his son as sentencing proceedings loomed. The president did not merely pardon Hunter for the two federal cases in which he already had been convicted but for any conduct going back to 2014—a postdated, decade-long get-out-of-jail-free card designed to shield Hunter from some unsavory financial transactions that might have implicated the “big guy,” a term that government whistleblowers claim refers to the president himself.

And this was just a prelude. Supported by Garland’s Department of Justice, Biden then commuted the prison sentences of nearly 1,500 convicted federal criminals, the largest such grant ever given by an American president. Biden touted the historical nature of his action, claiming that the criminals affected had demonstrated “a strong commitment to making their communities safer.” But Biden and Garland must not have been paying close attention to whom they were granting their favors, as they managed to include a commutation for corrupt former judge Michael Conahan. Conahan was one of the infamous “kids-for-cash” judges in Pennsylvania who sentenced juveniles to prison in exchange for millions of dollars in kickbacks, a scheme that affected more than 2,500 children and involved the suicide of at least one young man.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/now-the-hard-work-begins/

The Christmas and New Year festivities have been joyous for us Americans who have suffered through the four years of incompetence and malignity inflicted upon us by the previous administration, the most dysfunctional since at least World War II. Both at home and abroad, a Democrat party hijacked by the left-over left defied nature and nature’s God with policies and programs astonishing for their gross violations of reality and morality, not to mention common sense and the laws of science.

But as we rejoice over our deliverance, and look hopefully to January 20, we should gird our loins and steel ourselves for the fight to come, starting with whatever feckless policies that lame-duck Biden’s puppeteers manage to get passed. The damage to our culture and Constitutional order has deep roots, and has poisoned our institutions and culture both openly and so insidiously that even those who know better still tolerate or endorse the same policies that have weakened our Republic.

Most of us can catalogue the examples of Democrat malfeasance. Take the “renewable energy” and “net-zero carbon” grift that has disrupted our economy and fed inflation in a nation blessed with huge reserves of oil and natural gas, enough to make us energy self-sufficient. But no, the Lefty Dems have been addled by the scientifically dicey “global warming” hypothesis tarted up with lurid apocalyptic panic and promiscuous scientism, all greased by corporate subsidies and tax incentives that have befouled the free market, and created a huge moral hazard for the future. At the same time, an already existing, actually “clean and renewable energy”––nuclear power–– has been put on the shelf and starved of funding, while billions are squandered on intermittent solar and wind energy that enriches China.

Another Dem failure to “follow the science” is the transgender fad preying on neurotic children and teens. Science tells us that mammals are either males and females that together procreate, yet doctors presumably trained scientifically are openly poisoning children with puberty blockers and cross-hormone treatments, then move on to irreversible surgeries that leave their victims mutilated for life. Whether through greed or misplaced “compassion,” doctors are blatantly violating their Hippocratic Oath that in the original Greek requires physicians not just to do no harm, but to benefit their patients.

Nor should we forget the Uniparty’s feckless economic policies that print, borrow, tax, spend, and redistribute trillions of dollars to political clients. Or what Rudyard Kipling called “Robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul,” and Churchill dubbed “Government of the dole-drawers, by the dole-drawers, and for the dole-drawers.” The unscientific mitigation policies and spending sprees during the Covid pandemic damaged millions of people, and flooded the economy with more money chasing fewer goods, the eternal formula for inflation.