RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/the-end-of-a-scam/

Biden was never a wonderful guy, and definitely not the savior of democracy, no matter what his media supporters said.

How appropriate that the Biden presidency is ending with an act of self-dealing that he and his allies insisted, with great righteousness, would never happen.

Joe Biden was always a scam, and his pardon of his son Hunter Biden is just the latest evidence.

No one should have believed Biden’s flagrant lie that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter for his tax and gun crimes and other potential wrongdoing.

The president has a long record of dishonesty, about his own biography (which blew up his first presidential campaign in 1988) and especially about the family influence-peddling business that was at the root of Hunter’s tax evasion — the president’s son wouldn’t have had any money to evade taxes on if it weren’t for all the foreign largesse.

Every politician ends up shading the truth somewhere along the line, and it was going to be awkward for President Biden to admit that he might pardon his son. When asked about the possibility, though, the president could have said “No comment” or “I’m not going to discuss a hypothetical.”

Instead, he flatly denied it, and his allies wove his denial into a narrative about Biden’s abiding commitment to our system of justice. He was “a president living the rule of law” (MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann) and “a true American who believes in democracy and the way the system is supposed to work” (Joy Behar of The View). Etc., etc.

Now Biden has made all the people who issued these stirring testimonials look like naïfs and hacks.

Their mistake was attributing any grandeur to Joe Biden. He has made a long, undistinguished career of being a middling politician from a small Democratic state and had just enough staying power to become president when he was already a has-been.

In sizing up Biden and Trump, the Democrat’s media supporters could have paraphrased the famous bumper sticker from a 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election featuring two unpalatable choices: “Vote for the unimpressive hack — it’s important.”

Instead, they felt compelled to create an illusory Biden, an epic figure whose amazing personal qualities made him an indispensable buttress of our institutions and norms.

Biden was puffed up into a world-historical figure who had saved American democracy by winning one election against Donald Trump, who, of course, simply came right back to win another against Biden’s chosen successor, Kamala Harris.

https://jonathanturley.org/2024/12/02/liar-in-chief-president-biden-cloaks-his-legacy-in-infamy-with-the-hunter-biden-pardon/

President Joe Biden’s decision to use his presidential powers to pardon his own son will be a decision that lives in infamy in presidential politics. It is not just that the President used his constitutional powers to benefit his family. It is because the action culminates years of lying to the public about his knowledge and intentions in the influence-peddling scandal surrounding his family. Even among past scandals in the abuse of the pardon power, Biden has done lasting damage not just to his legacy but his office.

Despite its noble origins and purpose, the pardon power historically has not been a pristine power used by past presidents. As I have previously written, it was used to benefit the political cronies of past presidents. President Warren Harding was even accused of selling pardons, including to mob enforcer Ignacio Lupo, known as “Lupo the Wolf.” Former president William Clinton waited for the final days of his presidency to pardon his own brother as well as a major democratic donor.

In 2023, I wrote that Biden might follow this same pattern and pardon his son as a lame-duck president. The column suggested that Biden might withdraw as a candidate for office and then take the action as a father: “The pardon-and-apology approach might appeal to Biden not only as an effort to convert vice into virtue but to justify his withdrawal from the election as a selfless act.”

In the 2020 election and throughout his presidential term, Biden repeatedly lied to the American public with an ease and impunity that shocked even many political veterans in Washington. He was repeatedly asked if he knew about Hunter’s foreign dealings, including millions in alleged deals with Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese, and other clients. President Biden lied and denied such knowledge. As I detailed in my testimony in the Biden impeachment hearing, he had repeated discussions of these dealings. He is even on tape discussing news stories on the dealings.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/05/drain-the-swamp-for-the-economic-benefits/

There’s not much Donald Trump could ever do as president that will generate more resistance and hatred than bleeding the fetid capital swamp. It’s arguable that there’s nothing he could ever do as president that would be better for the republic.

Trump’s decision to make administration appointments from figures who are outside of the establishment adds to the loathing that so many in the political-media establishment already directed toward him. Various grifters, vipers and unprincipled schemers from both parties have spent their adult lives seeking seats of power, comfort and endless tenure in the capital. To see the secretarial positions, directorships, administrator posts and bureaucratic jobs that they have for years lusted after filled by outsiders makes them angry. No one should feel sorry for them, though. They are a drag on both our civic health and our economy.

In regard to the latter, the damage is more extensive that most would ever guess. A research paper updated during the first year of Trump’s initial term that measured the “cost per regulator” in the bureaucracy reached some appalling yet unsurprising conclusions about Washington’s impact on the private sector. According to the authors, “one regulator costs the U.S. economy the equivalent of 138 private-sector jobs per year.”

Here are a few more choice findings from the paper.

“Each $1 million change in the regulatory budget is associated with a change of about four regulator jobs.”
“A 10% cut in the regulatory budget results in a loss of 21,756 regulatory jobs.”
That same cut “provides for an additional $1.2 trillion in GDP annually over the five-year window, or $244 billion annually.”
“Each regulator costs the U.S. economy $11 million annually.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-lies-of-joe-biden-and-his-lying-enablers/

Joe Biden promised, emphatically, at least six times—all pre-election—that he would not pardon his son Hunter Biden.

His media lapdogs loudly resonated those boasts.

They claimed at the time Biden was a historic, Sir Thomas More-like protector of jurisprudence, morality, and our Constitution—sacrificing even his son on the altar of the “the rule of law”.

All again shameful lies.

These now disgraced talking heads have no more apologized than they did when they championed their “51 intelligence authorities” scam, who swore Hunter’s laptop was a product of Russian chicanery.

(No one has been more slavishly and obsequiously wrong about all the Biden pardon lies than the notorious Andrew Weissmann of the failed Mueller witch-hunt “dream team”.)

Anyone who knew the long, sordid history of Joe Biden (e.g., how he defamed the truck driver who was not culpable in his first wife’s fatal crash or was caught lying about his entire college career, and plagiarized his 1988 campaign speech), knew he was lying when he made these serial promises.

His letter excusing his pardon was worse than the lie itself.

Biden essentially pardoned himself by exempting all of Hunter’s crimes since 2014, in which Hunter had enriched the Biden crime family cartel due to ‘the big guy’s’ opportune calls and appearances with foreign crooks.

Joe knew that only a silenced Hunter would save the Biden syndicate after January 20, 2025.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-wrong-side-of-history/

The Left is a religious movement. Its manic enthusiasms are fueled by the conviction that it can and will save the world. But what happens if the world does not want to be saved by the Left?

That is the dilemma of the 2024 election for believers in the ‘right side of history’.

In 2000 and 2016 leftists resorted to conspiracy theories to explain not only to us but to themselves why they did not really lose, but the 2024 election was a landslide in which not only the electoral college, but the popular vote, not only straight white men, but the entire spectrum of the electorate rejected not just Joe Biden, but his black female girl power ringer

When the Left lost the working class, it blamed the loss on racism. The factory workers and coal miners, the proletariat on whom generations of leftists had pinned their hopes for a national regeneration, were cast out for their whiteness. Henceforth, minorities would be the standard bearers for transforming the national culture and inheriting power at the dawn of the new age.

Now that virtually every minority group except black women has turned on them, what’s left?

Apart from the essays explaining why black women and ‘trans kids’ are the only virtuous minorities still out there (often written by straight white men) there isn’t a backup plan.

The problem was built into the leftist paradigm which seeks to identify and elevate oppressed groups, but the more those groups are elevated, the less need they have for the Left, and the more likely they are to object when their former patrons start wrecking all their achievements.

Everyone has something to lose and those with the most to lose are not the children of the rich trashing the system, but those near the bottom who are the most vulnerable to social chaos.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/04/the-winning-has-already-begun/

Under normal circumstances, it takes a year or two before a president can have an impact on the economy or world affairs. But Donald Trump won’t be president for almost two months, and already we are feeling the effects of his election.

Consumers are more confident, manufacturers more optimistic, investors more bullish. Canada is promising to toughen up its border controls. Ukraine is talking about how to end its nearly three-year-long war. There’s a ceasefire in the Middle East.

Heck, even Trump’s favorability rating broke through 50%, a rarity since he first announced his candidacy in 2015.

Let’s look at the evidence:

The RealClearMarkets/TIPP Economic Optimism Index jumped 13.4% in November to 53.2, the highest in more than three years. Anything over 50 indicates a positive for optimism, and this is the first time the index has been positive since September 2021

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/12/03/kamala-harris-shocking-candidate-but-democrats-ignore/

The reckoning they face is urgent. By 2028, they won’t have their biggest asset: Donald Trump

Losing parties always search for explanations. When they lose big – when they lose the White House and both houses of Congress – that search becomes a full-scale reckoning. What went wrong for Democrats? How can they correct it?

Those questions aren’t lacking for answers. The problem is sorting out the ones that really matter.

The easiest answer – and surely part of the explanation – is “we need a better candidate”. Kamala Harris was truly dreadful. But that only raises another question: how did the Democrats end up with such a clunker?

The mainstream media did their best to cover for her, less because they liked Harris and more because they hated Donald Trump. That’s why they ignored her obvious defects for some six weeks after party leaders ditched Joe Biden and anointed Harris as his replacement. She was hoisted aloft by fawning journalists and broadcasters. When their hot air was finally exhausted, Kamala crashed. Even spending $1.5 billion and saturating the airways with slick commercials wasn’t enough to persuade centrist, independent voters.

Harris was sunk by several problems. The first, and most fundamental, is that she was the second-ranking official in an unpopular administration. She was inextricably bound to its failures. When almost 80 per cent of voters say that the country is “on the wrong track”, the burden is almost insurmountable. 

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Here we are in early December, almost a quarter of the way through the 21st Century. Growing up in the mid-part of the 20th Century, I thought I was living in the future. The 19th Century – the past – was ever-present in grandparents, great aunts and uncles, and older neighbors. The “future,” foretold in books like The Time Machine, Brave New World, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 and movies like The War of the Worlds and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, provided fanciful entertainment, but hardly accurate predictions.

But the world does move on, and change is one constant we can count on.  Politically things change. The Party of Lincoln lost the black vote. The Party of segregation became the party of civil rights. Today we are going through another political change, as the Party of the working class is becoming the Party of elites, and of those dependent on government, and the mindless woke. And the Party of Lincoln, the Party of opportunity, is beginning once again to make inroads among the nation’s minorities.

Mr. Trump’s victory on November 5th may have marked the end of identity politics as we know it. Economic class, the election showed, mattered more than ethnicity, race or gender. Identity politics is based on the natural tendency for people of a specific race, ethnicity, gender, cultural, or religious group to band together, in friendship and to rectify past injustices. But that tendency has been employed and advantaged by politicians who, with the assistance of allies in the media, have divided people into oppressors and oppressed. Identity politics has led to an absence of focus on issues more relevant to individuals.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/vast-invisible-power/

As the name implies, the Supreme Court of the United States is the nation’s highest judicial body and Chief Justice John Roberts is the highest ranking judge. Behind the scenes in recent years, a secret court has usurped SCOTUS and a person outside of that body became the most powerful judge. If that seems a stretch, consider James Boasberg, Chief Judge for the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

The San Francisco native moved to Washington as a child when his father accepted a position in the Office of Economic Opportunity, which administered many of President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” programs. So Boasberg fils is something of a “Great Society” diaper baby. The Yale law alum rose through the ranks and in 2011 president Obama, the composite character formerly known as Barry Soetoro, appointed Boasberg to the DC District Court.

In 2014, Chief Justice John Roberts tapped Boasberg for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, better known as the FISA court, established in 1978 during the administration of Jimmy Carter as part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. From January 2020 to May 2021, Boasberg served as that court’s presiding judge, a powerful position with important distinctions. The FISA court operates in secret, no advocates for the accused are present, and only the government’s arguments are considered. This is basically a deep state star chamber, but there’s more to it.

Unlike Supreme Court justices, the presiding FISA judge is not subject to confirmation by the U.S. Senate. That invites a look Boasberg’s treatment of Kevin Clinesmith, Assistant General Counsel in the National Security and Cyber Law Branch of the FBI’s Office of General Counsel. Clinesmith was assigned to the case of Carter Page, an American citizen and U.S. Navy veteran who worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and had also served as an asset for the CIA. Clinesmith altered an email to show that Page was not a CIA asset, subjecting the American citizen to surveillance under FISA.