RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

My parents had a book of cartoons titled, Who’s in Charge Here? Written in 1943, it is a compilation of cartoons by George Price (1901-1995) who had started drawing for The New Yorker in 1929 and continued doing so into his 80s. While Herblock’s cartoon was aimed at President Carter, the message could be directed at today’s White House. As last Saturday’s lead editorial in The Wall Street Journal put it: “…all Presidents stumble in speech. But Mr. Biden’s frequent public confusion about the major issues of the day is a reason for the growing public concern.” If Mr. Biden is mentally unfit, who is in charge?

Mr. Biden’s incoherence and mental lapses should concern us. Roger Kimball, the American art critic and conservative social commentator recently posed a rhetorical question: “Is it more worrisome that Joe Biden might not be in charge, or that he actually is in charge?” The White House website states that the power of the Executive Branch is vested in the President of the United States. Including members of the armed forces, the Branch employs more than four million Americans, more than any private company, and a number that exceeds the population of the United States when George Washington became our first President. (In total, according to the Brookings Institute, the federal government employs nine million.) The White House website reads: “The President is both head of state and head of government of the United States of America, and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.” It is arguably the most powerful position in the world. The American people deserve to know who is in charge. 

It does not appear to be Joe Biden whose political reputation extends back over fifty years. During last year’s campaign, he ran as the moderate alternative to Senator’s Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. He promised, like his predecessor Warren Harding 100 years earlier, a return to “normalcy.” However, his support of Critical Race Theory and gender-neutral pronouns, and his recent proposals for a “Green New Deal,” universal basic income, a wealth tax and a five trillion-dollar budget satisfy the most radical Progressives in Congress. They remind us of Barack Obama’s pledge in late October 2008 in Columbia, Missouri, shortly before his election: “…we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” While Mr. Obama later walked back those comments, they preordained Mr. Biden’s intent to “transform” our culture, schools and economy.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/irrationality-and-the-covid-vaccine?token=e

In my Times (£) column this week, I wrote about the dangerous irrationality of those  implacably opposed to the Covid-19 vaccine.

I wrote that while some concerns about the Covid vaccine were understandable — due to the acceleration of the normal testing regimen, or concerns about civil liberties if vaccination is made a condition of someone’s job or entry into a venue — there had been a significant loss of rationality and any sense of proportion. 

You can go online and find people with scientific qualifications saying in terms that the state is actually trying to poison people with the Covid vaccine. But there’s no evidence whatever for this fantastic and paranoid claim. Many who assume that a doctoral or professorial handle confers intellectual authority tend automatically to believe such claims. Under serious and informed scrutiny, however, they fall apart.

Vaccination always involves a balance of harms. But all the available and reputable evidence indicates that the harms resulting from this vaccine are rare and vastly outweighed by its benefits.

It’s claimed, for example, that tens of thousands are suffering serious vaccine side effects. But this is based on statistics showing merely the number of those who subsequently died of other ailments; it doesn’t prove cause and effect. It’s claimed the vaccine may affect women’s fertility; there’s no evidence for that. And so on and on. 

Yet anti-vaxers in Britain have even been abusing and intimidating children at their school gates over taking the vaccine. Such an unhinged set of fears is coming from both ends of the political spectrum. 

Elements on the right have latched onto every single government response to the pandemic to claim a world-wide conspiracy to enslave and poison people, involving globalists, paedophiles, the “deep state,” Jewish financiers — and Bill Gates working with all of the above to control the world through microchips. 

However, vaccine hostility has long roots in liberal “back to nature” movements too which for decades have used homeopathy, eaten only organic food and shunned all vaccinations for their children. The belief that “Big Pharma” drug companies were evil was previously a left-wing mantra. And now, as reported in the Observer, vaccine hostility is associated with the “wellness” industry and alternative lifestyles including ayurvedic healing, meditation and something called “conspirituality”. This turns out to be the intersection of yoga, juice cleanses, New Age thinking and online theories about secret groups controlling the universe.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17893/parents-catch-on

Now, in America, self-described “progressives” of any number of different stripes continue to aggressively label and attack as criminals and domestic terrorists any person or group dissenting from their radical agenda. Therefore, the NSBA and others of their ilk have few qualms about calling parents exercising their right to confront smug educrats at public hearings “domestic terrorists.” What is truly alarming is that these opponents of the First Amendment appear to have backing from the Biden White House.

Using the FBI to police local school board meetings is a disturbing example of federal overreach. It would also be nothing new for the FBI. It is very easy to imagine what the Justice Department’s “additional efforts” could include — as we have already seen — surveillance, subpoenas, infiltration, questioning, intimidation, entrapment, enlisting informants, rifling through emails and financial records, the full panoply of investigative methods usually reserved for organized crime mobsters or genuine threats to national security.

The White House may soon regret going down the road of diverting the FBI from more important law enforcement issues to harass parents. Sagging White House approval ratings; an explosive national murder rate; the highest inflation rate in 10 years, the highest gas prices in seven years; and 4.3 million Americans leaving the workforce this past August — not to mention the Chinese Communist Party’s hypersonic missiles and exponentiating global “lily pads” from which to project military power — may help focus the Biden administration on other issues besides school board meetings.

Inserting federal law enforcement into local school matters further makes the case for systematic reforms of the politicized FBI and the Justice Department. The next Congress should closely investigate how this program was implemented and which parents were subjected to FBI harassment, and should expose the links between policymakers and education pressure groups.

House Republicans are lecturing Attorney General Merrick Garland on the rights of parents over the education of their children: “Parents have an undisputed right to direct the upbringing and education of their children, especially as school boards attempt to install controversial curricula,” the 19 Republicans wrote. “Local law enforcement—and not the FBI—are the appropriate authorities to address any local threats or violence.” The October 25 letter was on the letterhead of the House Committee on the Judiciary and had no Democrat signatures.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley went a step further and asked for Garland to resign.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/27/the-ignoble-lie/

“Noble lies” are rarely spun for anyone’s interests other than those of the liars themselves.

In a controversial passage in Plato’s Republic, Socrates introduced the idea of the “noble lie” (“gennaios pseudos”).
A majestic fiction, he says, could sometimes serve society by persuading uninformed citizens of something good for them.

Ever since, many prevaricators have used the excuse that they lied for the common good.

Take Dr. Anthony Fauci, our point man on the COVID-19 epidemic.

Fauci misled the country about mask-wearing during the pandemic by claiming they were of little use. But he argued that he lied so the public would not make a run on masks, deplete the supply, and thus rob medical professionals of protective equipment.

Fauci also told “noble” lies about the likely percentage of the public needing to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. He kept raising the bar — from 60 percent to 70 percent to 75 percent to 80 percent, to 85 percent.

Apparently, Fauci feared a lower figure, even if accurate, might lull people into complacency about getting inoculated.

Fauci also lied about his own role in routing U.S. aid money to subsidize gain-of-function viral research at the Wuhan virology lab — the likely birthplace of COVID-19.

Either Fauci was hiding his own culpability, or he believed the American people might not be able to fully accept that some of their own health officials were promoting the sort of research that was partially responsible for more than 700,000 American deaths.

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has serially lied about the number of undocumented immigrants who have crossed into the United States. He falsely claimed mounted agents were whipping migrants. He fibbed about the purported lack of federal data of apprehensions, detentions, and deportations. His assertion that the border is secure was a joke.

Apparently, Mayorkas believes the public would go ballistic or his own administration would be roundly despised, if he told the bitter truth about the border: by intent, the Biden administration has apparently deliberately left it wide open.

And it will likely allow 2 million undocumented immigrants into the country in the current fiscal year.

Related: Of Course: Fauci Revises the Definition of ‘Fully Vaccinated’

Lots of other unelected federal officials lied over the past five years by claiming or implying that harming the Trump administration was in the public interest.

Former FBI directors Andrew McCabe and James Comey likely misled the nation. McCabe admittedly lied that he did not leak FBI information to the media.

James Comey lied under oath on multiple occasions in congressional cross-examinations and claimed he did not know or could not remember basic facts about his own role in promoting the Russian collusion hoax.

Apparently, Comey and McCabe believed that by being less than truthful, they might better emasculate Donald Trump. And that result would be beneficial to America.

Our former intelligence leaders may have been the most brazen liars. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress about the NSA surveillance program, though he denied it.

When caught in the untruth, Clapper reverted to the noble lie that he gave the least untruthful answer, apparently on the pretense that he did not wish to damage the reputation of an important intelligence agency.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/10/27/you-should-resign-in-disgrace-judge-tom-cotton-rips-attorney-general-garland-runs-afoul-of-a-dissident-n1527492

Attorney General Merrick Garland generally enjoys the protection of the sycophantic Leftist media that works night and day to conceal the galloping disaster that is the Biden administration. Garland himself appears to harbor a taste for forcibly suppressing opposition voices, as became clear yet again when he set his FBI onto the trail not of jihad terrorists, or migrant criminals, or any other group that the Left would like to pretend doesn’t exist, but of disgruntled parents protesting at school board meetings against the implementation of the race-hate propaganda known as critical race theory in public schools. As Stacey Lennox noted, this “can only be described as a tactic to suppress dissent.” On Wednesday, however, Garland had an unusual experience: He ran into a dissenter. It wasn’t pretty.

The dissident in question was none other than Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who was clearly angry that Garland followed the National School Boards Association (which has since backtracked) in portraying parents as domestic terrorists simply for registering their outrage over the divisive Leftist propaganda being forced on children in public schools. Garland, however, insisted that the FBI was only concerned about threats of violence, not about simple dissent. Referring to the directive he sent to agents, he told Cotton: “Nothing in this memorandum or any memorandum is about parents expressing disagreements with their school boards. The memorandum makes clear that parents are entitled to have vigorous debates.”

However, Megan Fox recently did a deep dive into the supposed “threats” that school board members had supposedly received and that justified FBI intervention, and came up empty. Fox concluded: “There isn’t one legitimate threat on the NSBA’s list or a situation that wasn’t handled easily by the police. What the NSBA wants to do is crack down on free speech and, stupidly, they attached to their letter every example of parents speaking freely and demanding that the FBI stop it.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/going_full_soviet_judge_releases_jan_6_defendant_on_bond_after_he_renounces_trump_.html

The jailing of the Jan. 6 riot defendants is not just an obvious miscarriage of justice, given the length of time they’ve spent in detention without trial.  It’s also turning into something that’s full Soviet.

Here’s the latest from one Judge Amy B. Jackson, who, after denying release at least once to one guy, went ahead and let him out.  He’s a Buffalo, New York-based defendant named Thomas Sibnick, who’s recanted:

WASHINGTON — A federal judge reversed her bond decision Tuesday for a Capitol riot defendant accused of robbing a D.C. Police officer — in part because she found “toxic” conditions in the D.C. Jail were likely to contribute to his further radicalization if he was kept in pretrial detention.

U.S. District Judge Amy B. Jackson released Thomas Sibick, 35, released to his parents’ Buffalo, New York, home under 24-hour incarceration on Tuesday after hearing from his lawyer and a tearful plea from his father, Dr. Eugene Sibick, a former officer with the U.S. Navy who publicly criticized his son’s detention at the “Justice for J6” rally in September and has called him a “political prisoner.”

A good thread of what went down, with far more relevant details from WUSA reporter Jordan Fischer, was retweeted by journalist Glenn Greenwald and is worth reading here.

The reason he got out while the others stayed in?

His groveling letter denouncing President Trump, which was so self-abasing that it would make Nikolai Bukharin blush:

“While many praise Trump, I loathe him, his words and actions are nefarious causing pain and harm to the world,” Sibick wrote. “He is not a leader and should be ostracized from any political future, what he honestly needs to do is go away!”

That didn’t seem to be his point of view back on Jan. 6, when he was allegedly assaulting a police officer and stealing his badge, according to the charges.  He certainly was some kind of nut and probably had more legal problems than the other defendants, who were simply in the wrong place or who were pushed into the Capitol, possibly by the FBI’s paid agents provocateurs, or who were invited in by Capitol cops and waved the flag.  He probably ought to be punished.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/prof-biden-and-his-ambassadors-appointments-confirmation-payment-11635349354?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Presidents often reward big political donors with plum ambassadorships, but Joe Biden and the University of Pennsylvania appear to have come up with an innovation on the practice. Amy Gutmann, Penn’s president, awaits Senate confirmation as U.S. envoy to Germany, and David L. Cohen, until July chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees, as ambassador to Canada.

Ms. Gutmann isn’t a donor. Mr. Cohen and his wife, Rhonda, gave more than half a million dollars to Democratic campaigns and political organizations between 2017 and 2020, according to OpenSecrets.org. That includes the maximum $11,200 to the Biden campaign and $50,000 to the Biden Victory Fund, according to the Federal Election Commission database. (Mr. Cohen also donated a smaller amount to Republican candidates and organizations.)

Here’s the innovation: After Mr. Biden left the vice presidency in 2017, Penn created the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and appointed Mr. Biden to the bespoke position of Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor. Mr. Biden was paid personally for this job—$371,159 in 2017 and $540,484 in 2018 and early 2019 before launching his campaign.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on the arrangement in July 2019. The paper noted that the average salary for a Penn professor was $217,411 in 2017-18 and described Mr. Biden’s position as “a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fly-by-night-taxation-democrats-congress-tax-hikes-ron-wyden-joe-biden-11635371820?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

There’s never been anything like this, and we’ve been around a long time. Democrats are writing tax policy for a $22 trillion economy on the fly, floating new tax increases willy-nilly, with little thought to the consequences and no time for public debate.

One day it’s an increase in tax rates on corporations and the affluent. But wait, that doesn’t have the votes. How about a carbon tax? That won’t fly either. Hey, there goes Jeff Bezos. Let’s tax him and 699 other billionaires. It polls well. Everyone hates billionaires!

Oh, but that may be unconstitutional. We still need money, so let’s try a 15% corporate minimum tax—though be sure to exempt investments in green energy and other pet progressive ideas. So it will have to be a minimum tax on some companies but not others. Bring on the Gucci Gulch lobbyists, campaign checkbooks at the ready.

And don’t forget to cut taxes for some of the rich by restoring the state and local tax deduction, though only for two years. Need those New York and New Jersey House votes.

Then let’s rush to get all of this “framework” agreed to by Thursday so President Biden can have something to boast about at the global climate gabfest that will do nothing that matters about the climate.

***

What a spectacle. For a century Democrats have been the party of higher taxes, but at least they paid some attention to the policy merits. Tax writers Dan Rostenkowski and Lloyd Bentsen were serious people. This crowd has no clue what the consequences of their proposals will be, and they don’t much care.