RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/14/thoughts-on-our-faucian-bargain/

“It’s a pity Donald Trump and his team did not consult Henderson’s work when COVID first reared its ugly head. They could have saved the country, and indeed the world, from much misery, not to mention Trump’s electoral prospects. They could also have saved the country from that other misery of listening to Anthony Fauci emit his poisonous advice. That would have been a blessing. But it would not not have done a thing to make the investigation into corruption at the NIH less pertinent. Kudos to Open the Books. ”

How much money does the federal government have? 

None. 

All those trillions of dollars the government spends is our money. Government has just appropriated it. 

The founders knew all about this process, and they abominated it. 

But as Christopher Marlowe put it in another context, “that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.” 

Over the years, I have several times written about the invaluable work Open the Books has done in exposing the corrupt, self-serving, nepotistic, unaccountable leviathan that is government bureaucracy. Ever since its founding in 2011, the organization has been like Jacob wrestling with the angel, struggling to bring transparency to the fetid, self-engorging swamp that our government, colonized by bureaucracy, has become. “Every Dime. Online. In Real Time.” Their motto is as neatly expressed as it is difficult to achieve. 

Open the Books has publicized outrageous taxpayer-funded pensions, lavish government subsidies to super-rich Ivy league colleges, and eye-popping public employee salaries. Every revelation is wrenched from the clenched fists of government bureaucracies whose byword, like that of the mafia, is “omertà,” silence. 

Perhaps their most damaging report was released just last week. Open the Books teamed up with Judicial Watch, another invaluable public-spirited watchdog, to mount a lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health in order to prise loose information about the millions and millions of dollars the organization has received from third-parties (that would be Big Pharma) and distributed to its scientists and administrators.

The last time the NIH was forced to disgorge such information was back in 2005 in response to a Freedom of Information demand filed by the Associated Press. 

The NIH, of course, is the preferred playground of Anthony Fauci, publicity hound and COVID scold par excellence. Fauci, as has been noted many times at American Greatness, is the highest paid federal employee. In 2021, his taxpayer-funded salary alone was $456,028. That’s $56,028 more than the salary of the president of the United States. (“But the president is Joe Biden,” you object. I point out that we’re talking about the office, not the man.)

Anthony Fauci has been a fixture in the public health establishment for decades. There he was during the AIDS crisis, warning that you might catch the disease from sitting next to someone who had it, and grimly raising the specter of “heterosexual AIDS.”

And there he was day-in and day-out at press briefings at the White House in 2020 and 2021, fanning the flames of COVID hysteria, dispensing oracular and contradictory advice to a confused and terrified public. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/fbi-resists-garland-pressure-to-politicize-domestic-terrorism-probes-of-americas-parents/

Good news: Director Christopher Wray has refused to let the bureau be sucked into the Justice Department’s weaponizing of federal law enforcement.

There was heavy breathing this week from House Republicans regarding Attorney General Merrick Garland’s abominable October 2021 directive that the FBI harass and intimidate parents who object to the woke indoctrination of their children by progressive school administrators. Garland’s memo echoed the suggestion of left-wing activists that the parents could be investigated as if they were domestic terrorists.

Garland’s actions are as condemnable as ever. GOP efforts notwithstanding, though, the only significant development in this story in the past six months is that the FBI has performed well. Director Christopher Wray has refused to let the bureau be sucked into the Biden Justice Department’s weaponizing of federal law enforcement.

Back in November, I explained that Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, had prematurely leapt from the correct premise that the FBI had opened a category of investigations, known in bureau parlance as a “threat tag,” to the unfounded conclusions that (a) the bureau had employed against parents such national-security authorities as the PATRIOT Act, whose investigative measures are meant for (mainly foreign) terrorists, and (b) Garland had committed perjury during congressional testimony when he denied that the FBI had either resorted to such measures or labeled parents as “domestic terrorists.”

Our Zachary Evans has the latest news about the investigations and, despite the renewed efforts of Jordan and Representative Mike Johnson (R., La.), what we’re learning is somewhat comforting.

To repeat what I said six months ago, the abomination here, about which Republicans are right to keep reminding people, is that the Justice Department brandished its awesome investigative powers in an effort to stifle parental dissent. It was a nakedly political gambit. There is no federal jurisdiction to monitor relations between parents and schools. There is no surge in violence against school administrators. Given the vastness of our country and the importance of education, it is inevitable that there will be occasional incidents of potentially criminal threats or assaults. But such incidents — in which school officials are often more at fault than parents — are not federal crimes; they are the concern of state and local law enforcement.

Yet, in its desperation to mollify the radical Left, the Biden administration quietly collaborated with progressive activists at the National School Boards Association on a letter to Garland, which depicted parents as domestic terrorists and implored the Justice Department to act on supposed threats. This served as the pretext for Garland’s October 4 memo directing district U.S. attorney’s offices throughout the country to work with the FBI in addressing this purported crisis.

https://www.nysun.com/article/spot-the-extremist-is-it-democrats-or-the-gop-who-will-shock-the-voters-on-abortion

Just recently, Republicans and Senator Manchin blocked passage of legislation that, as the New York Times described it, would “enshrine the landmark Roe v. Wade precedent in federal law.” Reporting on that defeat, few news organizations, including the Times, provided a link to the Democrats’ proposed  bill. There’s a reason for that.

While the Times dutifully linked to the leaked draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which has caused borderline hysteria on the left, the paper eschewed guiding readers to the pro-abortion legislation recently approved by 49 Senate Democrats. The Times failed even to mention the name of the bill until the 17th paragraph of its report on the vote, possibly worried that curious readers might research the 29-page legislation on their own.

Why keep the pro-abortion bill under wraps? First, because its expansive abortion rules come wrapped in racism, extolling “reproductive justice” and claiming that “restrictions on reproductive health, including abortion, perpetuate systems of oppression, lack of bodily autonomy, white supremacy, and anti-Black racism.”

Since black women, 14 percent of the population, account for roughly 40 percent of abortions performed in our country, some might think that legalizing the procedure is more persuasive of white supremacy, but never mind.

More importantly, the press might want to downplay the bill because it is a horror that goes way beyond Roe v. Wade. Most offensive, it allows abortion up through nine months of pregnancy, when, “in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health.”

https://quillette.com/2022/05/13/joe-bidens-faulty-gender-diktat/

On March 31st, Joe Biden’s White House issued a lengthy “fact sheet” claiming that science has spoken in favour of puberty-blocking drugs—lifelong synthetic hormones for young people who identify as transgender or non-binary and seek medicalised gender change. What used to be called “sex-reassignment” is now the more seductive “gender-affirming care.” We also have the leader of the free world boldly “confirming the positive impact of gender-affirming care on youth mental health.”

“Confirming” is the new asserting, and the Biden-Harris administration is also “confirming that providing gender-affirming care is neither child maltreatment nor malpractice.” It’s a small step from confirming to enforcing, and so the federal Justice Department has written to state attorneys-general warning them that if they deny minors the benefits of gender-affirming medical science, they will fall afoul of constitutional and statutory guarantees of equality, not to mention funding rules tied to grants from Washington. The first state under federal fire is Alabama, where a new law would impose up to 10 years’ prison time on clinicians taking anyone under 19 on a medicalised gender journey. The White House is even taking the fight offshore, pledging to uphold trans health rights with its foreign policy and overseas aid programs.

Biden’s blizzard of initiatives was unleashed on Transgender Day of Visibility. Timing matters in politics, and Biden’s may be a little off. Americans are starting to get their first glimpse of gender medicine as an intensely contested field; it’s nowhere near settled science. For several years, big left-leaning media outlets have told a simple story in which the medicalised gender-affirming approach is lifesaving, at least for those kids who say they can’t live without it. It follows, we’re told, that any restriction is a suicidally dangerous denial of health care, there being supposedly no alternative to hormonal and sometimes surgical interventions.