RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/hans-a-von-spakovsky/2022/09/20/this-should-terrify-every-american-doj-harasses-citizens-for-exercising-their-first-amendment-rights-n1630918

The Justice Department has hit the Eagle Forum of Alabama with a voluminous subpoena that violates the organization’s First Amendment rights to speak freely, engage in the political process, and talk to their elected representatives. It’s an intimidation tactic, pure and simple, and shows just how partisan the department has become. This out-of-control behavior should scare every citizen and volunteer organization, no matter where they stand on the political or social spectrum.

Eagle Forum is a very small non-profit in Alabama. It only has one full-time employee and a second, part-time employee. Virtually all of its work on issues of interest to its members is done by volunteers.  It is the quintessential, uniquely American grassroots membership organization that French historian Alexis de Tocqueville lauded in Democracy in America.

As the Eagle Forum’s motion to quash the government subpoena says, one of the issues its members have been concerned over is “gender-altering medical treatment to minors” and the “permanent and adverse effects of such medical procedures on those minors.” Those serious, lifelong effects deeply concern many physicians and parents.

Members of the Eagle Forum made their worries known by doing things every American has an absolute right to do: they spoke out, made speeches, organized meetings, talked to other residents and organizations in the state, and contacted their elected state representatives. In other words, they exercised their constitutional rights to engage in “freedom of speech,” to “peaceably assemble,” and “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” They also exercised their right to associate, recognized by the Supreme Court as implicit under the Fourteenth Amendment.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/21/the-coming-austerity-crisis/

The U.S. government’s debt is 150 percent of the gross domestic product. The current inflation is just the first problem caused by the debt. If deficit spending continues, soon high interest rates and the decline of U.S. debt credit will follow. Instead of incrementally fixing the problem, austerity economics will be the outcome. The Greeks went through it in 2007 and 2008, and they will be the first to tell you it was no fun. Congress, and especially during sessions with Democratic majorities, bears much of the blame for this.

Every time Democrats controlled the Congress during a Republican administration over the past two decades, they appropriated more money than the president requested. These additional expenditures, including the interest paid on them, well exceed $1 trillion in isolation. 

But each budget builds on the previous budgets enacted. For instance, the Trump Administration’s proposed budget for 2021 would have cut the deficit by $850 billion in 10 years. Adding up the money saved annually over those 10 years, it would have been trillions of dollars. If Congress had committed to the budgets submitted by Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the money saved would have totalled trillions more. 

On top of this, recall how Congress in 2007 rejected President Bush’s Social Security reforms, a program which remains the largest item on the federal budget by far. There is no study to show how much U.S. taxpayers would have saved if Democrats in Congress had not added money to the budget or reformed Social Security, but one can easily estimate that it would have been trillions of dollars.

Why Democrats didn’t do it is twofold. Spending is always popular if nobody has to pay for it, and they thought that the debt would never become a problem, or that, if it did become a problem, they would no longer be around to fix it or suffer the consequences. 

But others had a more ideological reason.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/21/marthas-meltdown-model/

Martha’s Vineyard has been all over the news. 

The tony resort community so loves aiding and comforting the undocumented immigrants who were flown in from Florida that it hugged them—for barely 48 hours. 

Oddly, the Left became unhinged when red-state governors—whose states the last two years were flooded with some 3 million illegal aliens—finally decided to spread welcoming chores among affluent blue-state communities. 

It was a natural fit. 

Most, like Washington, D.C., and New York, were on record as sanctuary city jurisdictions. In the abstract, they endorse open borders and celebrate diversity—from the serenity of thousands of miles away. 

The uproar at Martha’s Vineyard prompted the Democratic hierarchy to do some explaining. Why had it not earlier objected to the federal government night flights of tens of thousands of border crossers to red-state communities that had opposed illegal immigration? 

And why be angry with governors who were only emulating that policy by flying in a mere 50 newcomers—in the light of day—to a far wealthier and liberal-minded sanctuary resort?

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/22/the-medias-desantis-is-worse-than-trump-campaign-begins/

When New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote a love letter of sorts to Donald Trump and his “soft edges and eccentricity,” it didn’t take long for people to see this for what it is: an opening salvo by the press to start demonizing the next Republican.

In his column, Bouie coos about how Trump is “funny, he has stage presence, and he has a kind of natural charisma. He can be a bully in part because he can temper his cruelty and egoism with the performance of a clown or a showman. He can persuade an audience that he’s just kidding — that he doesn’t actually mean it.”

Anyone not blinded by Trump hatred would probably agree with this description. But it is Bouie who doesn’t actually mean what he’s saying.

Bouie is a guy who, when Trump first ran for president, declared definitively that “Trump is a fascist,” and that this was “the political label that best describes what the GOP front-runner has become.” Then he spent four years recoiling at the horror of the Trump presidency.

Bouie’s new-found love of Trump has nothing to do with a change of heart and everything to do with portraying the other leading presidential contender — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — as far worse than Trump.

And the only reason to do so now is because of the fact that DeSantis’ recent actions have raised his profile nationally and increasingly endeared him to conservatives.