RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/22/gao-said-biden-administration-ignored-recommendation-for-national-broadband-strategy/

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in a recent report that the Biden administration ignored its recommendations last year to create a national broadband strategy to synchronize the fragmented patchwork of funding for broadband. This critical mistake puts billions of tax dollars at risk and hurts efforts to close the digital divide.

The GAO has noted now in two consecutive annual reports that there is extreme overlap in broadband funding programs, with 133 such programs administrated by 15 agencies. The complexities have only grown in recent years with the addition of such programs as Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) and Enabling Middle Mile Infrastructure.

The office pointed out that the number of programs and their overlap can lead to taxpayer waste, but such waste is hard to measure.

“Having numerous broadband programs can be helpful to address a multifaceted issue like broadband access, but this fragmentation and overlap can lead to the risk of duplicative support,” the GAO said in the report. “However, determining whether program overlap results in duplicative support can be challenging.”

The GAO did, however, identify situations in which waste could occur. For example, the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) High Cost program and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utility Service (RUS) programs had overlapping service areas. Officials from the FCC and RUS acknowledged the challenges of the overlap, but told federal auditors they don’t consider awards duplicative if they involve different levels of service and support different locations within the area. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/23/things-really-are-looking-up-under-biden/

Over the weekend, President Joe Biden claimed that some Republicans are hoping that the talks over raising the debt ceiling fail and the government defaults on its debt.

“I think there are some MAGA Republicans in the House who know the damage that it would do to the economy, and because I am president, and the president’s responsible for everything, Biden would take the blame,” he said.

What Biden is claiming assumes, of course, that things are going swimmingly right now, a point the president repeatedly makes, and how it’s all thanks to his policies.

Let’s leave aside that lie, which we’ve written about many times in this space. And let’s also ignore the fact that all the scaremongering about failure to raise the debt limit is just that. If the debt limit is not raised, the government won’t need to default on its debt. Every month, it raises far more in taxes than is needed to pay interest on existing debt. Despite what Biden says, any default would be entirely his fault.

How about his claim that things are going well and that only Republican malfeasance could hurt the economy?

Well, it’s true that things are looking up in America. The problem is that they are all the wrong things. Inflation, interest payments, debt, illegal immigration, labor force dropouts. Those are all way up under Biden.

To show this, we’ve put together a series of charts.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/philadelphia-voters-let-cops-be-cops-c6ebf736?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

After a violent era in Philadelphia, the city’s voters have rejected the broken and bloody promises of the progressive left and nominated two mayoral candidates pledging to restore public safety.

Since Democrats have an overwhelming advantage in voter registration, the likely winner will be Democratic mayoral candidate Cherelle Parker, a former City Council member and state legislator. At a Monday press conference she talked about her goal of “restoring our police department to its full complement and that means using every tool that we can to make sure we get officers on the job.”

She also wants to let them use constitutional tools to do the job. Ms. Parker—and remember she’s a Democrat—is not just saying fund the police. Once funded, she wants them to police vigorously—and last week’s primary victory says that voters agree with her.

The Journal’s Scott Calvert noted last week:

Ms. Parker, the only Black candidate in the top tier of polling and the candidate who had the most Black support, has spoken favorably of police investigative stops commonly known as stop-and-frisk. The practice in Philadelphia has been under judicial oversight since 2011 amid claims of police abuses.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/21/abandon-the-swamp/

Suppose a document drops in the wilderness and no one is around to hear it. Does it make a sound? I submit that John Durham just tested this Bishop Berkeleyesque query. The special counsel spent four years beavering away in the forests of the deep state and what did he produce? Three hundred pages telling us what, for the most part, we already knew and with the result that exactly nothing, apart from a little hand wringing, will happen. 

We already knew that James Comey, Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, John Brennan, Susan Rice, Michael Sussmann, Kevin Clinesmith, and all the other characters in and around the Russia Collusion Delusion had fabricated the story of Trump’s supposed connection with Russia out of whole cloth. 

We already knew that they had gone out of their way to protect Hillary Clinton. 

We knew that there was no predicate for obtaining a FISA warrant against Carter Page (one of many thousands of such warrants), thus opening a back door into the Trump campaign. 

We knew that the surveillance apparatus of the regime had been weaponized to prevent Donald Trump from being elected and then, when he surprised everyone by winning anyway, to taint his administration and render him radioactive.  

What should we make of Durham’s non-revelatory revelations? I think that, wittingly or not, they were just a big exercise in track-covering, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Well, nothing beyond the sound and fury, anyway.

Still, Durham’s bulletin is useful as a marker of the futility in which we labor. André Gide touched on this point when he reminded us that “Toutes choses sont dites déjà, mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer.” Over the past five or six years, virtually everything that Durham said in his report had already been said. But because no one was listening, it is necessary to start again and say it once more. 

In this spirit, I am going to say again some things I have said elsewhere, beginning with what has become my ritual invocation of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s observation that a week is a long time in politics. That’s time enough, as T. S. Eliot said in another context, “for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.”