RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/14/to-counterpunch-smokin-joe-g-o-p-must-rebrand-as-government-of-the-people/

Stipulated: Feisty Joe Biden deceived, demonized and divided his way through his State of the Union thumper. But he also adeptly defied his Republican foils – cleverly cornering catcallers in an impromptu imbroglio.

And more important, deftly demagogued with a people-oriented pitch that may well set the stage for a surprise surge. The money line in suddenly-Smokin’ Joe’s populist appeal?

“Americans are tired of being played for suckers.”

Dang straight. The Scrantonite and his scribes are on to something in combating “junk fees” and other indignities heaped upon the non-upper crust.

Biden took on a Corn Poppish cornucopia of love-to-hate lowlifes: Health care hustlers. Old folk defrauders. Cable conmen. Cellphone scamps. Financial institution fleecers. Ticket tricksters. And most deliciously, airline over-chargers, whom he justifiably asserted “treat your child like a piece of baggage” in dinging families to travel in the same zip code as their toddlers.

This swift switch to common-guy champion packs all the more punch when contrasted with Wrong-Way Republicans’ stubborn staying of the course.

To wit: recent votes re-cementing into leadership three-election-cycle loser Ronna McDaniel as Republican National Committee chair and Establishment icon Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker. Followed by McCarthy’s disavowal of the national sales tax on which he promised conservatives, per conflicting reports, a vote or hearing.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-junk-economics-of-junk-fee-politics-state-of-the-union-biden-overdraft-charge-credit-cards-credit-banks-31c6543b?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden is from the federal government, and his bureaucracy is here to help you. That’s the political subtext of all the President’s promises in his State of the Union address, notably his vow to remove what he calls “junk fees” from the economy. But the results are likely to harm the very people he claims to help.

There’s no dispute that customers shouldn’t be charged without their consent for products they don’t want. Nor that businesses should disclose add-on fees before consumers sign a contract or make a purchase. But Mr. Biden’s regulators are targeting common business practices that aren’t deceptive or unfair.

In recent years, more banks have begun offering free checking accounts and other services. To cover their costs, they charge fees to customers who overdraw their accounts. This is now a target of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which has issued guidance prohibiting “surprise” overdraft fees on debit transactions.

For example, an individual with $100 in his account might incur an overdraft fee if he has an $80 monthly cable bill automatically withdrawn and then uses his debit card to buy a $90 pair of sneakers. CFPB director Rohit Chopra calls this a “surprise” fee. But anyone who tracks his bank balance would know he doesn’t have enough money to buy the sneakers.

https://www.city-journal.org/fictions-of-emancipation-exhibit-rejects-beauty-and-cultivates-racial-resentment

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted an exhibit whose curatorial philosophy, were it widely adopted, would spell the end of art and of art museums. The art press greeted the show ecstatically, as a sign of the Met’s new direction. This prognosis is undoubtedly correct.

Fictions of Emancipation (on view through March 5, 2023) is built around an 1873 sculpture by the brilliant French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. The marble bust, titled Why Born Enslaved!, portrays a black woman, bound by a rope, looking over her left shoulder with a piercing expression of defiance, incredulity, and contempt.

Why Born Enslaved! has been understood since its creation as an antislavery work. The Met, however, knows better, now that it has been reborn as an “antiracist” institution. Fictions of Emancipation argues that the Carpeaux bust furthers whites’ ongoing “domination over Black people’s bodies,” in the words of the exhibit’s curators. And Carpeaux was not the only artist to give an aesthetic gloss to racial oppression, while seeming to oppose it—Fictions of Emancipation portrays abolitionist art more widely as a fig leaf for Western colonialism and white supremacy.

Arriving at this reading of the Carpeaux statue and of similarly themed works requires the deconstruction of virtually every aspect of artistic creation. An artist’s use of live models, the representation of the nude, the selling and buying of art—all are revealed by the Met as ploys used by a white European power structure to oppress nonwhite people.

The Met’s first engagements with Why Born Enslaved! provided no hint of the revisionist readings to come. In 1997, a donor gave the museum a terra-cotta version of the bust, dating from 1872. In announcing the gift, the Met described Carpeaux as a “liberal romantic” whose “humanitarian sentiments” were manifest in the museum’s new sculpture. The museum was still in the business of stylistic explication rather than ideological denunciation, so it noted the influence of Carpeaux’s most important master in the bust’s “Michelangelesque sideward turn.”

In 2014, the Met assembled a magisterial Carpeaux retrospective, introducing many Americans to this stunningly gifted artist for the first time. The show, The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, included some of Carpeaux’s most psychologically acute busts, along with his tormented self-portraits and flamboyantly kinetic paintings. It traced the artist’s hard-fought rise, from son of a stonemason in provincial northern France to premier sculptor of the Second Empire. Carpeaux’s fountains, pediments, and bas-reliefs contributed exuberant beauty to the public-works projects then transforming Paris. (Why Born Enslaved! was an offshoot of one of those commissions, for the Fountain of the Observatory in the Luxembourg Gardens.) The exhibit also marked Carpeaux’s harrowing end, dying in agony at 48 after a botched cancer operation pierced his bladder.

The 2014 show displayed the Met’s terra-cotta version of Why Born Enslaved! Even in 2014, the museum could still discuss the work in sympathetic terms. The bust’s early success was due to the “beauty of the woman’s expression and the powerful emotion to which it gives rise,” the catalog suggested. Art historian Laure de Margerie wrote in a catalog essay that the bust “partook of the prolonged enthusiasm generated by the abolition of slavery in France in 1848 and in the United States in 1865.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/12/bombshells-landmines-and-nemesis/

For much of 2017 through 2021, Americans suffered the “bombshell” and “walls are closing” mythologies first of Russian collusion, then of supposedly vast Russian social media investments to sabotage the election. From there we moved on to the Alfa Bank ping-pong fable, the supposed Putin bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan that Trump was said to have ignored and, of course, the idea that Hunter’s laptop was just “Russian disinformation.” 

These were journalistic sins of commission, warping the news cycle to advance ideological agendas and win elections. There emerged, however, other real landmines of omission—things the media deliberately ignores, but have the potential to go off and blow up a presidency. 

Taxes Paid by Mr. 10 Percent? 

Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) mocks the Hunter Biden laptop scandal of a “half-fake” laptop. Yet such puerile flippancy only confirmed her own trademark arrogance and ignorance. Is she claiming the laptop was, was not, or is just sorta not genuine? Hunter’s lawyers are suing to stop the dissemination of his “half-property”? 

Hunter, who never in the past has denied ownership of the laptop, has now confirmed it really was his. A revisionist Hunter should have first conferred with his dad, since, on the presidential debate stage in 2020, Joe Biden swore to the American people the laptop was a product of Russian disinformation. He cited as support “50 former intelligence officials” who signed a statement claiming as much—all organized to deceive the pre-election electorate by former CIA Directors James Clapper and John Brennan. Both previously were best known for admitting to lying under oath to Congress. 

Any fair examination of the laptop’s contents would conclude that Joe Biden received percentage payments from the various quid pro quo enterprises for the merchandising of his name and status as a senator and then vice president. So it should be a simple task for the IRS to compare his reported income over those years with his net worth and yearly likely expenditures, to determine whether he paid taxes on his alleged 10 percent cut, or whether any of the Biden family paid gift taxes on their various cash interchanges with one another. 

It is one thing to fight the IRS over deductions, but quite another over income. The former can become sticky matters of legal interpretation, the latter is mostly black or white: Money either came in and was reported—or not. If Biden did not pay income tax on percentage payouts to him by his family and business associates, then he committed tax fraud, and likely would be impeached. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/02/bidens_right_his_word_means_nothing.html

“I give you my word as a Biden” just means that whatever is said next is almost certainly untrue

Installed (p)Resident Joe Biden loves to make promises secured by the supposed worth of his family name.  “I give you my word as a Biden,” he said back in March of 2020, “When I’m president, I will lead with science, listen to the experts and heed their advice, and always tell you the truth.”  Again giving his solemn word before the 2020 mail-in ballot presidential selection, he promised both “to turn division into unity and bring us together,” as well as to “be an ally of the light, not the darkness.”  Just over a week ago, he declared, “My word as a Biden: I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s future than I am today.”  My goodness, if only Biden’s family name possessed more value than that of Benedict Arnold’s, we would be blessed with a man in the White House committed to truth, unity, spiritual guidance, and American success.  Yet Biden’s name is synonymous with none of those things, is it?

Instead, the Biden family name has really stood for only two things: buffoonery and corruption.  For fifty years, Joe Biden has managed to hold onto some slice of power in D.C. as a senator, vice president, and Oval Office stooge not because he is renowned for his erudition or virtue but rather because his doltish behavior and venal character make him ideal for others to control.  Perhaps no other Washington relic has accomplished so little for the American people over such a prolonged government career or managed to harness those defects for lucrative advancement more successfully than China Joe. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bidens-biggest-lie-at-the-state-of-the-union-address/

President Biden’s State of the Union Address missed an opportunity to foster unity and cooperation. Instead of bridging the divide between political parties by appealing to the concerns of Republican members of Congress, who now control the House of Representatives, the president opted to attack them, all while making extremely misleading or downright false claims about his achievements.

For example, Biden dishonestly claimed that Republicans are calling to “sunset” Medicare and Social Security, a move that would eliminate two of America’s biggest social safety nets — even though Republican leadership has consistently said that they have no intention of doing that.

Biden also misleadingly suggested, “Inflation has been a global problem because of the pandemic that disrupted supply chains and Putin’s war that disrupted energy and food supplies.”

Although inflation has undeniably been impacted by supply chain problems and the war in Ukraine, the most significant cause of inflation has been the massive amount of government spending that has occurred over the past three years — the period during which the federal government spent and created more money than any other in US history.

Government spending, not wars on the other side of the world and supply chain problems, has been the primary catalyst for inflation, a reality proven by the fact that our current inflation crisis began before Russia invaded Ukraine but after the supply chain crisis was at its worst (during the coronavirus pandemic).

But of all the dishonest statements made by the president during his latest State of the Union Address, the biggest and most outrageous of them all was the absurd claim that his administration has “created a record 12 million new jobs, more jobs created in two years than any president has ever created in four years.”

Biden’s claim of “creating” 12 million jobs is wildly misleading. The actual number is much lower. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy has only seen an increase of 2.7 million new jobs since Biden’s first full month in office, in February 2021. The remaining 9 million jobs were recovered after the COVID-19 lockdowns ended, not because Biden “created” them, but rather because pharmaceutical companies developed vaccines while President Trump was in office that alleviated many of the fears held by policymakers and the public. Businesses that had long been shuttered or were running at partial capacity were suddenly able to reopen or expand, spurring an inevitable recovery.

The fact is, Joe Biden had absolutely nothing to do with most of the job growth that occurred in 2021. Any president, regardless of his or her ideological views or governing abilities, would have experienced a similar result.