RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/the_state_department_helped_defund_conservative_websites.html

Think about that: The government used your money to silence your politics.

Last week, news broke that American Thinker and other conservative internet sites were the subjects of a successful campaign to defund them by telling advertisers that their content was misleading. That’s bad. What’s worse is that we’re learning that the State Department was helping fund the campaign to defund conservative media.  

The Washington Examiner revealed in a two-part report (here and here) how various organizations claimed to track “disinformation.” That “disinformation,” of course, was anything that countered the Democrat narrative on politics and social issues. American Thinker was among the list of 39 conservative sites that also included Newsbusters, Town Hall, Rush Limbaugh, Daily Wire, Breitbart, etc. Rajan Laad explained how this worked:

Corporate houses seeking to promote their products online seek the services of corporate digital ad companies to run their online advertisement campaigns.

These firms contract “disinformation” trackers to obtain private information about the “blacklisted” websites in order to avoid placing their advertisements on them.

The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British organization, and its two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups, based in Texas, are instances of such “disinformation”-trackers.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/02/13/bidens-classified-documents-scandal-keeps-getting-bigger-n1670131

Newly disclosed emails from the National Archives indicate that Joe Biden’s classified documents scandal is even bigger than we initially thought.

The emails reference Joe Biden’s attorneys handing over documents in Boston, “confirming a little-known detail in the chronology of Biden’s classified documents scandal,” according to the New York Post.

On November 7, 2022, National Archives general counsel Gary Stern wrote to Biden attorneys Patrick Moore and Bob Bauer, “Please ensure that the boxes in your office in Boston remain secure in a locked space and are not accessed by anyone.”

This was sent five days after Biden’s attorneys found classified documents in Joe’s office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.

CNN reported last month that Moore had moved documents found at the Penn Biden Center to his legal office in Boston. According to that report, the documents weren’t sensitive in nature. However, the new emails “raise questions about the nature of the documents given the protocols requested by the National Archives.”

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/13/the-fbi-isnt-the-only-guilty-party-in-the-twitter-files-and-it-isnt-partisan-to-say-so/

Matt Taibbi took to Twitter on Saturday to express his frustration with the politicization of the “Twitter Files.” The fact that a considerable number of the responses to the “Twitter Files” has been right-wing political outrage and leftist “whataboutism” has turned it into a “partisan pissing match,” he said. Instead, he would prefer that outrage be directed at the “real targets” of his and his peers’ reporting, the federal bureaucracy and intelligence agencies.  

And whereas bureaucrats and spooks alike were exposed for engaging in actual fascism, a truth that Taibbi is clearly uncomfortable with remains: Everything the “Twitter Files” exposed indicates that the federal government and Big Tech colluded to further entrench a despotic regime in accordance with the Democratic Party’s political and ideological goals.

Taibbi’s statement is somewhat puzzling. After all, which political party overwhelmingly benefited from the “meddling” of the intelligence apparatus and Twitter? Which political party’s interests did this meddling explicitly serve? And what political party did the disenfranchised overwhelmingly belong to? 

The first installment of the “Twitter Files” revealed that Twitter and the Democrats collaborated to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, which verifiably altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. In it, Taibbi noted that whereas Twitter did take specific content moderation requests from Republicans, the “system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation.”

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.