RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/down-the-gender-identity-slope/

Six Republican Senators — Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Josh Hawley, Mike Lee, and Marco Rubio — just did something important and clever by way of a letter they sent to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. The senators’ letter poses a series of questions about Cardona’s plan to treat Title IX’s ban on discrimination by “sex” as a ban on discrimination against “gender identity.” The questions posed by the senators draw on a series of recent incidents — punishments of students and teachers who refuse to use preferred pronouns; Florida’s new law protecting K–3 students from instruction on “gender identity;” the decision by schools to treat a biological girl as a boy, against her parents’ wishes; schools that withhold information about a child’s supposed “gender transition” from parents; the rape of a girl by a boy able to use the girl’s bathroom because he claims he is “gender fluid,” etc.

The ten very pointed questions in the senators’ letter are clever — and wise — in more ways than one. (Read them here.) Every question is a policy and political land-mine. The Secretary must be pressed to answer all ten, or held to account for refusing to do so.

Beyond the immediate policy and politics of the proposed change to Title IX, however, the letter and its questions hold a broader lesson about the culture war. For a couple of decades — from about the 1990s to the aught decade of the 2000s — it was argued by many that the culture war didn’t really exist, or that if it did exist it would soon be over. Now that the culture war is everywhere — and increasingly seems to rope in just about everything — you hear dismissive talk about the culture war less and less. For a long time, for example, many people believed that national recognition of gay marriage would effectively spell the end of the culture war. It hasn’t worked out that way.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/barr-calls-for-special-counsel-in-probe-of-bidens/

It’s time.

Former Trump attorney general Bill Barr is publicly urging incumbent Biden attorney general Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel in the ongoing Biden investigation, which is said to focus on the president’s son Hunter.

The investigation has been ongoing since 2018 and has scrutinized shady foreign financial transactions that stretch back to at least 2014 (when Joe Biden was vice president and steering Obama administration policy in Ukraine, where Burisma, a corrupt energy company tied to the corrupt government, suddenly decided it was a fine idea to put Biden’s drug-addled son with no relevant experience on its board of directors and pay him a king’s ransom). As we observed in a recent NR editorial, Hunter is the least important Biden in the investigation, the central question of which must be “whether Hunter is a vehicle by which his father . . . indirectly cashed in on his political influence.”

Although I despise the pernicious institution of special counsel, I argued back in early December 2020, when it was clear that Biden had won the election and would be the next president, that the Biden investigation was primed for the appointment of one. That’s because there is no getting around two problems: (1) The Justice Department has a profound conflict of interest if it is in the position of having to investigate the president and/or his close family members, and (2) federal regulations instruct the attorney general that when the department is conflicted in this way, a special counsel (i.e., a scrupulous, experienced attorney from outside the government) is to be appointed.

Barr elected not to appoint a special counsel before leaving office right before Christmas 2020. In his position at that time, it was the right call and a prudent one.

It was right because there was no conflict in the Trump Justice Department’s conducting of the Biden investigation. Clearly, if Barr had made the appointment in anticipation of Biden appointees taking over the Justice Department, the move would have been seen as political — exactly the opposite of what Barr was trying to do in depoliticizing the DOJ.

It was prudently deferential of Barr to trust his successor, who turned out to be Merrick Garland, to make the call on whether there should be a special counsel. The case appeared to be in capable hands, led by David Weiss, the highly regarded U.S. attorney in Delaware (although, as I’ve warily pointed out, there are other cooks in the kitchen, principally including Tax Division at Main Justice). Garland did not displace Weiss, and that no doubt has a lot to do with Barr’s having handled things the right way.

But as Barr now points out, things have changed.

https://justthenews.com/world/asia/rep-austin-scott-sounds-alarm-china-buying-us-farmland

Georgia Republican Rep. Austin Scott on Thursday warned about Chinese state-backed efforts to purchase farmland in the United States amid rising tensions with the oriental superpower over its economic practices and territorial claims in in the Pacific Rim.

Speaking on the “John Solomon Reports” podcast, Scott warned of the dangers of foreign ownership of the nation’s food supply and predicted bipartisan efforts to curb China’s purchases.

“[I[f you control the land, you control the food supply. And if you look at what China has done since the invasion of Ukraine, China, it says they’re not going to allow exports of rice and other products that they grow in their country,” he said. “And now, you know, they’re buying farmland inside the United States. This is something that we should have acted sooner than we have on this.”

“But we certainly don’t need our adversaries, buying up the cropland inside the United States and, outside of cropland, they do try to buy land close to our military bases,” he noted. “That’s, you know, obviously, for spying and for no purpose that is in the best interest of the United States. But we’re gonna have to reassess what is happening with these countries like Communist China buying land inside the United States.”

http://henrymarkholzer.blogspot.com/2022/07/saudi-arabias-american-hostages.html

Since September 11, 2001, much information has come to light about our so-called ally, the family business called Saudi Arabia: its quaint customs, like decapitation; its degradation of women; its subservience to Wahhabism; its being an incubator for terrorists; its financing terror attacks. What has not received enough attention, however, despite the efforts of a few politicians and journalist, is the Saudi kidnapping of American citizens.

The House of Representatives’ Government Reform Committee of Rep. Dan Burton (R. Indiana) has established beyond any doubt that nearly a hundred American citizens are being held against their will in Saudi Arabia – most of them girls or, by now, women. Many, some of whom are boys, were abducted from their American mothers decades ago by Saudi fathers. In Saudi Arabia, many have been physically abused (e.g., rapes, beatings,) psychologically deprived (e.g. no contact with mothers and siblings), forced to convert to Islam, and, if female, dumped into arranged marriages even at the age of twelve.

Despite heroic efforts by the captives’ American parents, lawmakers, journalists, and others – the bureaucrats in our Saudi-coddling State Department have, once again, proved to be willingly impotent – United States citizens cannot leave Saudi Arabia. Indeed, probably alone among nations of the world, Saudi Arabia prohibits all females from leaving the country without the written consent of their husbands or fathers.

Is there no way to help our countrymen, de facto imprisoned by a primitive regime that has not the slightest conception of human rights? Perhaps.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/davidhasanyi/2022/07/29/the-dems-new-proposal-does-nothing-to-lower-inflation-n1616689

The first thing to remember about the reconciliation bill Sens. Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer agreed to Wednesday is that, despite its utterly preposterous name, it has absolutely zero to do with inflation. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is crammed with the very same spending, corporate welfare, price fixing and tax hikes that were part of Build Back Better — long-desired progressive wish-list agenda items. Pumping hundreds of billions into the economy will do nothing to alleviate inflation. The opposite.

Let’s also remember the Democrats’ deflection on inflation last year — claiming it was “transitory” and “no serious economist” is “suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way,” and so on — was all part of a concerted political effort to ignore the problem long enough to cram through a $5.5 trillion iteration of their agenda. And when inflation suddenly became non-transitory, and politically problematic, the Biden administration argued that more spending would relieve inflation. They don’t care about the economy, as long as dependency is being expanded. 

The bill is far more likely to spike consumer prices than not. You can hate corporations with the heat of a thousand suns and grouse about the lack of fairness in the world, but it won’t change the fact that businesses don’t pay taxes, they collect them. The Dems’ bill claims it raises $313 billion with a minimum 15% corporate tax rate. Democrats seem to be under the impression that corporations that pay less than 15% are evading taxes rather than using completely legal tools like accelerated depreciation or taking advantage of tax credits. Whatever the case, raising corporate taxes means fewer jobs or higher prices. Maybe both. What it won’t do is lower inflation.