RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/03/yeah-right-after-border-debacle-biden-picks-kamala-to-push-voting-rights-reform/

You have to hand it to her: Vice President Kamala Harris has a knack for having her career advanced by others, despite continual abysmal performance as a public official. Unfair, you say? How else can you describe someone who fails so badly at one job, and then is immediately rewarded with another job of even greater importance?

There are lots of definitions out there for “failing upward” but probably the best comes from the “Simplicable” website, which calls it “a common feature of cronyism” in which members of a “social group continue to promote and reward each other despite an ongoing string of failures.”

Could anything better describe Harris’ political career, especially her latest turn as President Joe Biden’s “immigration czar”?

The most polite thing you can say about Harris’ so-far brief tenure as border czar is that she’s done little to make things worse. That’s largely because she’s a political cipher, picked precisely because she wouldn’t do a thing to stop illegal immigrants from crossing our borders.

That takes the heat off of Biden, whose early moves undid President Donald Trump’s smart, humane policy (which led to an enormous decline in both illegal contraband and border crossings), and replaced it with the Democrats’ dangerous, divisive open-border policy.

Harris is plainly incapable of doing the job. And that’s the point.

How else could you describe someone who claims that “climate adaptation” in Latin America is key to ending the U.S. border crisis?

Or someone who explained the “root causes” of the thousands of Central Americans illegally crossing the U.S. southern border by referencing the television show “Cheers,” where “everyone knows your name“?

Or someone who has focused on luring American companies to invest in Central America as a way to stop the surge, rather than focusing on the cause: Biden’s open-border policy?

Or someone who, during her 71 days as czar, refused to even visit the border or meet with border-state governors, who have desperately pleaded for help from Washington to handle Biden’s growing disaster?

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/reparations-are-political-suicide-and-joe-biden-knows-it/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

H.R. 40, the reparations bill, is DOA. Per Politico:

As a candidate, Biden said he supported a commission on reparations. But the administration has yet to endorse the actual bill. After his speech Tuesday, the president met with the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who brought up the need for H.R. 40, which is named after the “40 acres and a mule” promise that now symbolizes the lack of support formerly enslaved people received from the federal government. According to those involved in the conversations, Biden let them down gently.

“He didn’t disagree with what we’re doing,” said Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.), the 2nd vice chair of the CBC. “He did talk about his plate [being] full with trying to get the infrastructure bill passed and that he really wanted to make sure that he could get that through before he took on anything else.”

Ouch.

H.R. 40, note, would not spend any money on reparations. It would simply create a commission to look into spending money on reparations. If Joe Biden is against even that at this early point in his presidency, then he’s going to be against the idea at every single point in his presidency. The next few months are going to be taken up with attempt to spend trillions of dollars on “infrastructure,” and, after that, the midterm election season will be upon us. In a cosmic sense, Biden may not “disagree with” what the CBC is doing. In practical terms, though, he’s running away from them as fast as he possibly can — and, in so doing, killing the idea dead for at least the rest of his tenure.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-biden-attacks-courageous-maverick-democrats/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=second

President Joe Biden dinged both Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin during a speech in Tulsa, Oklahoma, yesterday, calling them “two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.” Some coverage alleged that Biden had merely insinuated that the duo voted against more than with him, but it’s a lie that would have generated cheeky chyron corrections on CNN and instantaneous across-the-board fact-checking — five Pinocchios and all the rest — had it been Donald Trump.

It’s not to say that Sinema and Manchin have signed on to all of Biden’s multitrillion-dollar agenda items — often larded with proposals that Biden himself opposed only a couple of years ago, such as ending the Hyde amendment and allowing unlimited taxpayer funding of abortions. But, to this point, Sinema and Manchin have voted with the president 100 percent of the time. If Republicans are looking to them to be saviors, they will likely be disappointed.

Biden’s quip was meant to pressure both to help pass H.R. 1, and to give Democrats an excuse to blow up the Senate filibuster. The president, after all, framed their obstinance as a roadblock to protecting the “sacred right” of voting, again claiming that state laws that codify traditional integrity measures, rather than allowing the chaotic COVID–style free-for-all voting to become the norm, were on par with Jim Crow. H.R. 1 is an attack on free expression, an unconstitutional federal takeover of elections. Its scope is unprecedented. Yet, since the press has adopted the Democrats’ framing of the legislation — a “voting rights” bill meant to stop “Republican-led voting restrictions across the country” — many voters are probably confused by any reluctancy to support it.

Of course, the way Sinema and Manchin are portrayed by the press bears little resemblance to the coverage of, say, Susan Collins, who often held up Republican-agenda items. She was a plucky maverick ready to stand up for her beliefs. And Mitch McConnell was not, as far as I recall, asked daily whether he was willing to destroy the republican norms of the Senate to ram through his legislative agenda with a razor-thin majority. And even if he had been, reporters wouldn’t be referring to it as “filibuster reform.” Yet, the filibuster is the obsession of political media. Sinema and Manchin are the obsession of the political media. All of it geared to help one party realize its goals.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/02/never-let-a-plague-go-to-waste/

During America’s first-ever national lockdown, thousands of unelected bureaucrats, as well as federal and state governments, assumed enormous powers not usually accorded to them.

They picked and chose which businesses could stay open without much rationale. They sent the infected into nursing homes occupied by the weak and vulnerable.

Their rules for prosecuting those who violated social distancing, sheltering in place, mask wearing, or violent protesting often hinged on political grounds. Their spending measures on “infrastructure” and “health care” were excuses to lard up redistributive entitlements.

Conservatives moaned that left-wing agendas were at work beneath the pretenses of saving us from the pandemic. And the giddy left bragged that it was true.

After the 2008 financial meltdown, Barack Obama spoke of “fundamentally transforming” the country. Now he’s back, weighing in on the panic-driven, multitrillion-dollar spending that has pushed America’s debt to nearly $30 trillion.

“There’s a teachable moment about maybe this whole deficit hawk thing of the federal government,” Obama said in a recent interview with Ezra Klein of The New York Times. “Just being nervous about our debt 30 years from now, while millions of people are suffering—maybe that’s not a smart way to think about our economics.”

He apparently means that borrowing tons of money in a pandemic and not worrying too much about paying it back is a new, better approach to economics.

Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom boasted about leveraging California’s statewide quarantine.

“There is opportunity for reimagining a progressive era as it pertains to capitalism,” Newsom said. “So yes, absolutely, we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.”

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-new-domestic-war-on-terror-has

The Department of Homeland Security on Friday issued a new warning bulletin, alerting Americans that domestic extremists may well use violence on the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre. This was at least the fourth such bulletin issued this year by Homeland Security (DHS) warning of the same danger and, thus far, none of the fears it is trying to instill into the American population has materialized.

The first was a January 14 warning, from numerous federal agencies including DHS, about violence in Washington, DC and all fifty state capitols that was likely to explode in protest of Inauguration Day (a threat which did not materialize). Then came a January 27 bulletin warning of “a heightened threat environment across the United States that is likely to persist over the coming weeks” from “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority” (that warning also was not realized). Then there was a May 14 bulletin warning of right-wing violence “to attack higher-capacity targets,” exacerbated by the lifting of COVID lockdowns (which also never happened). And now we are treated to this new DHS warning about domestic extremists preparing violent attacks over Tulsa (it remains to be seen if a DHS fear is finally realized).

Just like the first War on Terror, these threats are issued with virtually no specificity. They are just generalized warnings designed to put people in fear about their fellow citizens and to justify aggressive deployment of military and law enforcement officers in Washington, D.C. and throughout the country. A CNN article which wildly hyped the latest danger bulletin about domestic extremists at Tulsa had to be edited with what the cable network, in an “update,” called “the additional information from the Department of Homeland Security that there is no specific or credible threats at this time.” And the supposed dangers from domestic extremists on Inauguration Day was such a flop that even The Washington Post — one of the outlets most vocal about lurking national security dangers in general and this one in particular — had to explicitly acknowledge the failure:

Thousands [of National Guard troops] had been deployed to capitals across the country late last week, ahead of a weekend in which potentially violent demonstrations were predicted by the FBI — but never materialized.

Once again on Wednesday, security officials’ worst fears weren’t borne out: In some states, it was close to business as usual. In others, demonstrations were small and peaceful, with only occasional tense moments.