RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

This essay was begun before Russia’s threat on Ukraine’s border became front page news. Putin’s actions validate the thesis that the political stakes are high, that the risks are existential, and that the United States and its Western European allies must change tactics from promoting “social justice” to affirming and defending a belief in classical liberal democracy.

The Cold War lasted for 42 years, from 1947 until 1989. It pitted the United States against the Soviet Union, along with respective allies. It ended with the fall of the Iron Curtain, and when a wave of (mostly) peaceful revolutions overthrew Communist governments in the Eastern Bloc. Three years later Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, which argued the universal acceptance of Western liberal democracies represented the final form of human government. The intervening years have shown how wrong he was. He appears to have misunderstood geo-politics, and he underestimated human desire for power and control.

Today, liberal Western democracies face a new challenge: an autocracy epitomized by China, where power is concentrated in the 205 members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a Party that comprises less than seven percent of the population of the world’s most populous country. Joining the Communist Party can take several years and is generally open only to those with Han ethnicity. Xi Jinping is the current, paramount leader. He serves as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Chairman of the Central Military Commission and President of the People’s Republic of China. China’s Communist Party is not diversified, equitable or inclusive. According to Statista, 88% of its members are ethnic Han. There are only nine women who sit on the Central Committee, a committee composed of 205 members. Its parliament, the world’s largest, stands at 2,924 members and which, according to CNBC, includes 100 billionaires. The 209 wealthiest members have an average wealth of $300 million. This is a country where the mean adult net worth is less than $68,000, and where GDP per capita is one sixth of that in the U.S.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/23/another-biden-nominee-who-deserves-to-be-dumped/

Of the more controversial nominees to come out of the Biden administration, Gigi Sohn, the President’s pick to be a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), might be facing the broadest opposition of all.

A second confirmation hearing further revealed deep-seated concerns about her policy positions, past statements and actions on critical issues, and unprecedented and eyebrow-raising ethical issues.  The White House even managed to hurt its relationship with allied organizations due to an opaque and seemingly disingenuous nomination process.

The FCC is an independent federal agency that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable.  Among its fundamental mission, the agency is supposed to promote competition and innovation, and work toward a media regulatory framework to ensure “that new technologies flourish alongside diversity and localism.”

In a highly regulated sector like telecom, ownership, and market participation are especially vital for underserved communities.  FCC overreach can easily make it more difficult to own a radio or TV station or reduce the investment needed to bring broadband connectivity to underserved areas, including the 991 majority Latino rural counties in the U.S., for example.

As advisor to previous FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler during President Obama’s second term, Sohn spearheaded a push for regulation that would have enabled big tech companies to effectively use content from smaller programmers, including many Hispanic and other minority-owned ventures, without paying them for their intellectual property.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/23/america-has-two-major-political-parties-the-republicans-and-the-authoritarians/

Yearning to breathe free has become an offense in Canada punishable by arrest. The extreme measures taken by boy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in breaking up the truckers’ protest should appall every person in this country. But one group of Americans overwhelmingly approves of Trudeau’s jackbooted crackdown. In another time they’d be called the agents of tyranny, but for now they’re still known as Democrats.

Rather than sitting down with the truckers demonstrating in Ottawa to civilly discuss their grievances and seek a peaceful end to their takeover of the capital’s downtown, Trudeau instead launched “an unprecedented violation of civil rights.” A “giant security force” was “amassed to quell the demonstration,” writes Canadian Laura Koot, managing editor of The National, which covers the Middle East. She went “from feeling great pride for my home country to being filled with shame and horror” in the course of a week.

While we support the truckers’ objective – to break Trudeau’s infringement of human liberty – a legitimate government has the authority to remove those who block public spaces, whether they are Black Lives Matter belligerents, Antifa thugs, or truck drivers who simply want to be left alone to do their jobs.

But Trudeau went well beyond that. His government became illegitimate the moment he used the country’s Emergencies Act to destroy, as radio talk show host Dennis Prager wrote, “the lives of Canadian dissidents.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/connecting-dots-russiagate-hillary-clinton/

Let’s connect the dots between John Durham, Russiagate, the FBI, and Hillary Clinton. They strongly suggest the Clinton campaign ran a sophisticated, multi-prong coordinated intelligence operation against Trump with either the active or tacit support of the FBI.

In the case of prong one, the dossier, the Clinton campaign hired MI6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The hiring was through its law firm, Perkins Coie, which hired Fusion GPS, which hired Steele to hide the funding source. The use of the law firm as a cutout allowed Hillary to deny that she’d funded the dossier, and the media to claim for a year or more that it was actually the Republicans themselves who paid for it. This also set up the distracting he said/she said cover that Clinton would use throughout the operation.

Once they had hired Steele, the Clinton campaign itself fed lies to Steele. Steele used credibility to hide the non-credibility of his pushed sources. They were taken seriously only because Steele was taken seriously, albeit only because he was paid by Clinton to do so. You could not achieve much putting a thug like Igor Danchenko on CNN. This is known as embellishing your sources.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/feb/22/why-bidens-transformational-presidency-is-failing/

President Biden’s transformational presidency is unraveling. He simply lacks energy and ideas and is surrounded by top officials with resumes that nominally check the boxes on experience but lack the vision to solve big problems.

The whole justification for his candidacy was he was not Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose socialism many voters feared, or former President Donald Trump, whose character many disliked but whose policies voters never rejected.

In 2020, Mr. Biden managed to win, but Democrats lost seats in the House. In 2021, the off-year election went badly for liberals in Virginia and elsewhere. In 2022, the president’s approval ratings are lower than a snake’s belly, and generic polls favor the Republican Party to take back the House.

Mr. Biden chose Vice President Kamala Harris for her race and gender and charged her with addressing the southern border crisis. As with most issues, she is more concerned with politics than the substance and is accomplishing little.

Often, she doesn’t do her homework and then blames the staff for poor results. Frustrated by her resulting lack of clout in the administration, key staffers have left.

Mr. Biden was warned his stimulus package was much too large, and now the country bears 7.5% inflation, declining real wages and many benefits of asset bubbles going to Wall Street bankers.