RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thespectator.com/topic/impeachment-inquiry-looms-joe-biden/

The signals coming from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy are that his Republican majority will soon launch a formal impeachment investigation. The final decision hasn’t been announced — 

 and an investigation is still a far cry from a full House vote. But setting up an impeachment committee is an essential first step. Most of his caucus wants to take it. 

Most, but not all. The reservations of some Republicans and the calculations behind them are why McCarthy has moved slowly. The speaker’s problem is more than rounding up votes. The other problem is the investigation carries real risks as well as benefits. 

The biggest benefit is a technical, legal one. It gives House investigators the power to compel testimony and documents from all Executive Branch agencies, even the most reluctant, as well as private parties. According to the Office of Legal Counsel, the Department of Justice’s in-house legal advisor, “The House of Representatives must expressly authorize a committee to conduct an impeachment investigation and to use compulsory process in that investigation” in order to compel testimony and document production. With that committee, they can go to court directly to demand compliance. 

The president may be entitled to some protection for official communications, but, in 2020, the Supreme Court overwhelmingly rejected President Trump’s expansive claim that he and his aides had absolute immunity from congressional subpoenas. “Executive privilege” didn’t extend nearly that far. Instead, the High Court set standards to guide lower courts on what Congress could rightfully demand, including demands on the president himself. 

The court’s standards are a multi-part test:  

Subpoenas must be ‘detailed and substantial’;  
They must have legislative purpose, which includes impeachment;  
The materials must not be available to Congress another way; and 
Compliance must not ‘unduly burden’ the president as he fulfills his other duties 

The SCOTUS decision was “new law” since, for over two centuries, the president and Congress managed to resolve these disputes without the courts’ intervention. When that cooperation broke down, the court was forced to decide between the other two branches. 

https://www.city-journal.org/article/chicago-mayor-brandon-johnsons-first-100-days

Brandon Johnson has reached the 100-day mark as mayor of Chicago. His actions and statements in that time suggest that the city will face continued decline. He remains beholden to the group most responsible for his election: the Chicago Teachers Union. And when it comes to the twin dangers shadowing Chicago’s future—crime and fiscal irresponsibility—he has set the stage to make them even worse.  

Johnson was a former member of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), and the union provided him with crucial support that enabled him to vault past better-known candidates into the mayoral runoff. He has wasted no time in repaying his benefactor. He named Jen Johnson (no relation), the CTU’s former chief of staff, to be his deputy mayor of Education, Youth, and Human Services—a position that has traditionally taken part in negotiations with the union. But even before union negotiations for the next contract began, the mayor unilaterally gave the union a gratuity, extending parental leave to 12 weeks. That’s one less arrow in the city’s quiver for negotiations.

Mayor Johnson also fired Allison Arwady, the city’s health commissioner. Arwady was unpopular with the teachers’ union because she aided Lori Lightfoot in executing one of her best policies—reopening public schools during Covid. School closures have caused widespread learning loss in children, particularly ones in the most vulnerable communities that Johnson purports to serve. Nothing better illustrates Johnson’s likely course on education policy: he will serve special interests at the expense of Chicago’s children. When asked why he fired Arwady without having even met with her, Johnson gave no answer other than to quote a cryptic rap lyric. Chicagoans should expect no transparency when it comes to the mayor’s relations with the union, which has essentially taken over city government.

Shortly before Johnson became mayor, a large group of teenagers came downtown on a weekend evening, vandalized stores, and harassed and beat up passersby. Mayor Lori Lightfoot condemned the violence. Johnson, in contrast, labeled the behavior unacceptable but also sought to excuse it, saying that it was not constructive to “demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.” Asked after he had become mayor when crime would come down, Johnson responded that one could not expect results until poverty and the trauma of communities were addressed. This claim flies in the face of all that we know about crime control. Many communities poorer than Chicago’s have nothing like the city’s levels of crime. Moreover, proven strategies are available for reducing crime, like simply filling the many vacant positions in the Chicago police force. But Johnson is more interested in making crime a prop for his progressive talking points about inequality.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2023/09/trump-is-a-vulgarian-but-hes-a-competent-vulgarian/

EXCERPT

Apropos Western civilisation, Sheridan writes: “Trump was right to argue the ideological left had blighted schools. He was right to champion communities left behind by globalisation, right to want to secure borders. There were also many things he was wrong about.”

What “many things”? Please tell.

What things of substance did Trump do that were wrong? Getting NATO countries to stump up more for their own defence? Moving America’s embassy in Israel to West Jerusalem? Here’s some more things that apparently Trump did right according to Sheridan: creating a booming economy pre-COVID, calling out China and imposing selective tariffs, increasing US defence spending, the Abraham Peace Accords and “appointing three brilliant judges to the US Supreme Court.”

Why wouldn’t people vote for Trump if they read of his achievement’s in Sheridan’s many articles, supposedly decrying Trump. Professor so-and-so has a very brusque and crude manner and even though he is on the brink of discovering how to commercialise nuclear fusion, we can’t possibly have him on the faculty. Hmm? If you can handle a bit of Trump’s rough and tumble language, it’s all gravy from there on.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/09/alex_soros_announces_shifting_priorities_to_confront_the_threat_of_a_maga_victory_that_stands_to_undermine_the_war_in_ukraine.html

Alex Soros wants to set the record straight: what might look like a retreat in Europe is really just a shifting of priorities to head off the swelling tide of freedom and populism in the West, or what Soros calls the “MAGA-style Republican” movement and President Donald Trump.

Soros, heir of notorious Nazi collaborator George Soros and chair of the Open Society Foundations, authored a brief essay recently published by Politico; from the article:

News reports that the Open Society Foundations (OSF) and Soros are ‘leaving Europe’ are misleading. We are not leaving.

When looking at the current state of Europe, however, it’s clear that our foundation needs to change….

So, as OSF retools the way it works globally, we are shifting our priorities in Europe accordingly. Yes, this means we will be exiting some areas of work as we focus on today’s challenges, as well as those we will face tomorrow. And yes, we will also be reducing our headcount significantly, seeking to ensure more money goes out to where it’s most needed.

As Soros also writes, “we need to be ready and able to respond to an uncertain and dangerous future” which is… ? Well, the threat isn’t a “what” but rather a who. In one of the last paragraphs, we find this:

As someone who spends up to half their time working on the Continent and thinks former United States President Donald Trump — or at least someone with his isolationist and anti-European policies — will be the Republican nominee, I believe a MAGA-style Republican victory in next year’s U.S. presidential election could, in the end, be worse for the EU than for the U.S. Such an outcome will imperil European unity and undermine the progress achieved on many fronts in response to the war in Ukraine.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/05/can-bidens-jobs-number-be-trusted-any-more/

President Joe Biden has staked so much on his claim that he’s “created” 13.5 million jobs since taking office that it’s worth asking if his Labor Department is now goosing job growth figures to help him out.

On Friday just before the holiday weekend, Labor released its estimates for job growth in August – which it said worked out to 187,000, beating economists’ forecasts.

But at the same time, the government cut the job growth numbers for the previous two months by a total of 110,000.

As a matter of fact, Labor has quietly cut its initial job growth estimates for every month this year.

Based on its initial estimates, the economy should have created 2.2 million jobs in 2023. Now Commerce says that number is less than 1.9 million. In other words, it’s exaggerated job gains by more than 300,000 – or 19%.

“Every single month this year has seen its payroll numbers revised down. It’s difficult to stress how unusual this is as it’s so statistically unlikely. There is clearly something wrong with the estimations being done by President Joe Biden’s Department of Labor,” said EJ Antoni, an economist at the Heritage Foundation.

Earlier this year, we noted that Biden’s jobs record could be even more exaggerated because of the way the Labor Department fills in gaps in its survey data. We wrote that:

Jonathan Pingle, chief U.S. economist at UBS, told the Journal ‘that the level of nonfarm payroll employment at the end of 2022 was likely too high by several hundred thousand, and that the overstatement might have carried into 2023.’

The White House touted the August jobs news, with Biden declaring that “America is now in one of the strongest job-creating periods in our history — in the history of our country.”

He also bragged that “more than 700,000 people joined the labor force last month, which means the highest share of working-age Americans are in the workforce now than at any time in the past 20 years.”

He added, “People are coming off the sidelines, getting back to their workplaces.”

But that’s not what’s happening at all.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/austins-nightmarish-escalating-crime/

On the heels of the death of George Floyd, hundreds flooded to the streets, convincing city officials that cutting the budget of our police officers would be a necessary step in “making things right.” But now, years later, we’re seeing the effect of such a campaign, which is not only hurting thousands of fellow officers, but also the cities that they desperately tried so hard to protect.

One of those cities is Austin, Texas. That’s right, one of the sparkling jewels of that great state has now fallen to a higher level of violence. It’s seen a massive increase in homicide over the past few years; and its police presence has dwindled, to the point that the city’s own Police Chief has had enough.

Thomas Villarreal, president of the Austin Police Association, recently appeared on Fox & Friends to discuss the hazardous actions of city officials. He discussed how the city cut a massive $150 million from the police budget three years ago, and how the force hasn’t bounced back since.

“We just continue to have a city council that doesn’t show its police officers that [it] cares about them,” he explained.

Villarreal continued, “Back in December 2017, we had a city council vote down a police contract for the first time in the history of negotiating contracts. And, you know, we pushed forward to 2018, tried to get back under contract. Our city decided to go through what they called reimagining police oversight. And then, you know, we got back under contract.”