RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/james-clapper-conspiracy-theorist-russiagate/

Last week, the New York Times decided that now might be a good time, amid the cacophony of war abroad and soaring inflation at home, to come clean about the Hunter Biden laptop story.

On March 16, the Times published a report on the junior Biden’s messy tax affairs in which, a full twenty-four paragraphs in, they acknowledged the authenticity of the emails and files contained on the now-infamous laptop. It is worth recalling that when the New York Post first reported on the laptop and its tawdry contents — which included, among other things, indications of kickback schemes and influence-peddling involving Hunter and his father — fifty-one former high ranking members of the US intelligence community published a letter dismissing the story as having “the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Twitter and Facebook, essentially acting as surrogates for the Biden campaign, also banned the dissemination of the Post report in the run-up to the 2020 election.

Most of the fifty-one signatories of that letter, which included former CIA directors Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden and John Brennan, had no comment when reached by the Post last week. But one of the most prominent signatories, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, told the Post there would be no apology coming from him: “Yes, I stand by the statement made AT THE TIME, and would call attention to its 5th paragraph. I think sounding such a cautionary note AT THE TIME was appropriate.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/kentanji_brown_jacksons_anticonstitutional_prochild_predator_views.html

Today was the second day of hearings on the nomination of Kentanji Brown Jackson, a person Joe Biden nominated to the Supreme Court because she’s a leftist Black woman. It revealed that she is anti-constitutional, anti-White, and has a weird fondness for child sex predators.

Democrats’ statements today boiled down to three things: (1) We are so excited that you’re a Black female. (2) Republicans are racist for daring to inquire into your credentials and views. (3) Regarding those racist questions, we would never treat a Supreme Court nominee as disrespectfully as the Republicans are treating you. (Their disgraceful treatment of Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Comey Barrett, Clarence Thomas, and Robert Bork has been memory-holed.)

The real focus was on Jackson’s disturbing views about child sexual predators, the Constitution, and race. Her answers revealed that she’s either very dumb or very dishonest.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R. Mo.) already tweeted out last week Jackson’s history of demanding and imposing lesser sentences and other punishments for people convicted of pedophilia or child pornography. His questions focused on an 18-year-old man facing ten years in prison to whom she gave a three-month sentence. The man possessed hardcore stuff:

Videos included those showing a 12-year-old male committing a sexual act, about which Hawley said. “I’m not gonna I’m not gonna read exactly what it was,” because of the graphic nature of the content. There was another video showing an 8 year old “committing a sexual act,” and still others, showing 11-year-olds, the rape of children by adult males, and “very lengthy and include numerous images, numerous views, sometimes collages, sometimes multiple victims, you see the act and progress, the government goes on to describe some of the masochistic images,” Hawley said.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/22/the-coming-disaster/

Nations change course slowly, like giant ocean liners. True disasters take a long time to unfold. If you think things look terrible now, you’re not using your imagination. The Biden Administration has only been in power for a little over a year. They got their crowbar in the door early with COVID, but we’ve barely tasted what the professional political class has in store for us.

Imagine gas at $10 a gallon, or $15. Imagine food staples so scarce you have to buy them with a ration card (displayed in a government-mandated phone app that tracks your family’s consumption). Imagine a new pandemic with a pathogen much deadlier than COVID, that actually kills a substantial number of the people it infects. Imagine an infrastructure attack that erases peoples’ bank accounts. Imagine a real, global war.

I’ve already written in support of Ukraine here, and I have been warning about the danger of a Russia-China alliance for a long time. But something about this Ukraine business rubs me the wrong way: All the people who updated their profile pictures with vaccination status to posture and to shame their friends have now updated their profile pictures again with Ukrainian flags. The mainstream media is in lockstep support. We’re bombarded with ridiculous stories about the “Ghost of Kiev” and Ukrainian farmers dismantling Russian tank columns. Last Friday, former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush visited a Ukrainian church together to lay flowers.

Something is definitely wrong here.

When we see the real establishment out in such force, it should set alarm bells off in our brains: We may not understand the nature of the lie, yet. But we can be certain they are lying to us.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ketanji-brown-jackson-likes-america-supreme-court-confirmation-hearings-senate-11647986765?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

“The fact that we had come that far,” she said, “was, to me, a testament to the hope and the promise of this country, the greatness of America, that in one generation—one generation—we could go from racially segregated schools in Florida, to have me sitting here as the first Floridian ever to be nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson faced hours of questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, and she held up fine, though Supreme Court confirmation hearings are now akin to the Circumlocution Olympics. We’d still like to hear her speak candidly about how she thinks judges ought to interpret the Constitution.

But it was heartening to hear Judge Jackson affirm the promise of America. Too many on the left seem to think the U.S. is structurally, irredeemably flawed. President Biden has joined this narrative with his focus on “systemic racism” and “equity” in place of “equality.” Judge Jackson might or might not agree with the ideal of colorblindness, to say nothing of her views on specific controversies like the one involving Harvard’s admissions policies.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/03/23/first-they-came-for-our-cars/

A pair of principles that drive the political left – never letting a crisis go to waste, and using prior acts of government-imposed restraints to gradually but methodically steal liberty – is taking the U.S. down a path that, if traveled too far, goes in only one direction. We trust that Western nation voters will reverse the trend before it’s too late. But first they have to recognize how the country is being manipulated.

If government authorities can shut down an economy and rob Americans of their freedom with lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates over a virus, then they can, and will, do the same for a crisis, either real or manufactured, in the future. This was a common warning over the last two years that was of course considered misinformation, disinformation, and just plain nonsense by what has become known as the laptop class.

Yet everything about it is true.

So is the charge that the hacks on the political left, making use of operative Rahm Emanuel’s dictum that “​​you never let a serious crisis go to waste” because “it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before,” are masters of exploiting unpleasant circumstances to further their agenda.

Today we have a couple of crises that have been rolled into one: the coronavirus pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Together, they have produced a proposal that requires people to surrender more of their freedom.

The International Energy Agency has introduced a 10-point plan “to ease strains and price pain” brought on by low oil supply due to the war in Ukraine. The Paris-based organization that is reliably on the left, as it isn’t explicitly right-wing, suggests “Car-free Sundays in cities,” “Alternate private car access to roads in large cities,” and “​reinforcement” of “the adoption of electric and more efficient vehicles.”

https://www.city-journal.org/how-to-respond-to-russias-ukraine-war

Charles Péguy, the Catholic poet and philosopher, once said that there was no moral complexity in a war. The bad guys were the ones doing the bombing and the good guys were the ones being bombed. That sentiment overlooks just wars in which innocent people tragically suffer and die in the course of lives being saved and humane values being preserved, but the war in Ukraine fits Péguy’s formulation. Russian president Vladimir Putin is visiting unimaginable evil upon an innocent population. The complexity lies in the American response.

Much of the analysis has been so focused on the rapidly changing news that it is often simplistic. It is true, as some proponents of a no-fly zone argue, that American and Soviet pilots engaged each other in the air during the Korean War without causing a nuclear conflict. But it is also true that only the United States possessed planes capable of long-range delivery of nuclear bombs; the Soviet Union did not develop that capacity until after the Korean War was over. It is true that a humiliating defeat or setback in Ukraine might lead to Putin’s overthrow, but few have raised the possibility that such a coup could install a more malign leader. In a situation that has launched a thousand speculations, it is vital to take the broadest possible historical and cultural view.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-jackson-hearings-so-far-are-a-rout-for-progressive-pieties/

I have no illusions about the fact that Democratic-appointed judges are almost invariably likely to all vote the same way, at least on big cases. So, my hopes for Ketanji Brown Jackson departing from the party line on the bench are slim. Even with that in mind, however, this hearing so far has been a thoroughgoing rout for progressive theories of law and politics. Jackson has repeatedly embraced interpreting the Constitution according to its original public meaning. More:

She affirmed that “the Supreme Court has established that the right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right” (although that doesn’t commit her to adhere to that view herself).
Asked by Chuck Grassley about Justice Stephen Breyer’s tendency to cite international law as a source for interpreting the Constitution, Jackson said that she respectfully disagreed with her former boss, and that international law should not be used to determine the meaning of the Constitution.
Asked to name a justice whose philosophy resembles her own, she could have named Breyer, but she didn’t, and declined to name one, instead pointing to her own record.
She has continued to speak movingly about the cops in her family and the role of, and need for, police.
She talked about how her experience growing up was “completely different” from her parents’ attendance of segregated schools, and she cited “how far we have come” as a sign of “the greatness of America.”
She agreed with Lindsey Graham that radical Islamist groups are still at war with us, and that the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001 (AUMF) is still in effect.
Asked by Dianne Feinstein about “super-precedent” status for Roe v. Wade, she simply discussed the normal standards for stare decisis and declined to apply any sort of elevated status for Roe. Asked by John Cornyn, she said that she had never heard of a judge describing a case as a “super-precedent.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnists/2022/03/22/ketanji-brown-jackson-amy-coney-barrett/7113216001/

The lack of clarity around Ketanji Brown Jackson’s judicial philosophy will be a key question as her Supreme Court confirmation hearings unfold.

The famous “gonzo journalist” Hunter S. Thompson once said, “Politics is the art of controlling your environment.” The confirmation hearing of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is about to vividly show what Thompson meant. Less than two years after the abusive treatment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Senate is holding a hearing that is dramatically different in the treatment of the Supreme Court nominee and the issues considered relevant to her confirmation.

For those with memories going back to 2020, there have been striking differences in how the news media haved covered Jackson’s nomination in recent weeks. When Barrett was nominated, the media ran unrelenting attacks on her and her background. Nothing was viewed as out of bounds, from her religion to her personal life to fabricated theories of prior assurances on pending cases.

From the start of the Jackson hearing, this is clearly different in both optics and approaches. Barrett was surrounded by pictures of people relying on the Affordable Care Act, a framing to portray Barrett as threatening the very lives of sick people. It was all part of an absurd claim (fostered by liberal legal experts) that Barrett was appointed to kill the ACA.

I objected at the time that senators were radically misconstruing the pending case and that Barrett was more likely to vote to preserve the ACA. (Barrett ultimately voted to preserve the act, as expected.)

https://spectatorworld.com/life/lia-thomas-compassion-swimming-transgender-upenn/

Reka Gyorgy showed commendable courage this weekend for finally speaking out against the National College Athletic Association’s rules regarding trans competitors. The Virginia Tech swimmer and Olympian was bumped out of a finals spot in the 500 free due to transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas’s participation.

In a letter posted to her Instagram account, Gyorgy wrote, “It feels like that final spot was taken away from me because of the NCAA’s decision to let someone who is not a biological female compete… [Thursday] is the result of the NCAA and their lack of interest in protecting their athletes.”

Gyorgy is one of the first NCAA female swimmers to speak publicly about the negative impact Thomas’s participation in the sport has on women. She deserves massive credit for putting her name to her views while others cower in fear of being called transphobic. But even Gyorgy couched her criticism of the NCAA’s rules with an entire paragraph expressing that she “respects” and “fully stands” with Thomas.

https://www.thepostemail.com/2022/03/22/joe-bidens-lust/

“ANTI-SEMITISM ON STEROIDS”

(March 22, 2022)—Let’s dispense with the Mt. Everest of words that have been written to rationalize Joe Biden & Company’s passion––indeed, lust––to put nuclear weapons in the hands of the fanatical mullahs in the terrorist-run state of Iran.

To be sure, the powers-in-power––more accurately those who are pulling their strings––have been busy creating distractions like Covid-19, the corrupt investigation into the January 6th so-called insurrection, and the strange “war” between Russia and Ukraine. But while Biden & Co. rally against Vladimir Putin, the U.S. continues to buy millions of dollars a day of Russian oil, in essence helping to finance the war against Ukraine, and Biden continues to count on ole Vlad to broker the new Iran deal with U.S. negotiators in Vienna.

Looking back, it is more than fishy that on his first day in office, according to Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit, “Joe Biden killed off 42,100 jobs in America by ending construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline,” and not long after “waived sanctions on Russia’s gas pipeline to Germany.”

Clearly, this was to set the stage for the Biden regime to actualize their real goal, their mission, their obsession–––finally, finally, finally to get rid of the arch nemesis of all of them: Israel, with the bonus being half of all the Jews on earth.