RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/18/joe-bidens-economic-dunkirk/

Just after Ronald Reagan won the presidential election in November 1980, economic adviser David Stockman wrote a memo warning the president-elect that he faced an “economic Dunkirk” thanks to the disastrous economy he was inheriting.

Among Stockman’s warnings was that the Carter administration had set a “ticking regulatory time bomb” that would blow up the economy.

“They have spent the past four years ‘tooling up’ for implementation through a mind-boggling outpouring of rulemakings, interpretative guidelines, and major litigation – all heavily biased toward maximization of regulatory scope and burden,” Stockman wrote.

Stockman – who would later serve as head of the Office of Management and Budget and ended up losing Reagan’s trust – had that part wrong. While Carter was a disaster as president, at least he showed an ability to learn on the job. And so late in his term, Carter embarked on a deregulatory campaign to fight inflation. Among other things, he freed the trucking and airline industries from onerous government mandates.

“Carter gave Reagan the phenomenal gift of deregulation. Combined with the (Reagan) tax cuts that largely took effect in 1983, the economy went on a growth tear,” wrote Brian Domitrovic, a scholar at the Laffer Center, in Forbes. “All the capital that Reagan freed up via his tax cuts found room to roam in the deregulated world which Carter had set up.”

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/marjorie-taylor-green-idiot-wreck-gop

It’s high time someone in the Republican Party told Marjorie Taylor Greene to turn all that bombastic self-serving showmanship and drama queen energy on Democrats, and stop trying to defeat her own party. 

The Georgia Republican, who famously displayed sexually explicit photos of Hunter Biden  during a committee hearing and called fellow representative Lauren Boebert a bitch on the House floor, is known for wild antics and equally harebrained conspiracy theories.   

Currently, she is threatening to oust Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. The Louisiana Representative, with a five-vote majority in the House, is attempting to keep his caucus intact as he navigates treacherous issues including funding Ukraine, which has become unpopular with some conservatives, and reauthorizing the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He also struggled to pass a funding bill, which required relying on Democrats to get another big spending package over the threshold. 

To be sure, not all Republicans approve of spending billions more to arm Ukraine, especially since our own border remains wide open; many in the GOP wanted Johnson to demand border enforcement in exchange for support of Kyiv. Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world (which is perhaps why Hunter Biden was so richly employed there) and it not clear that America’s billions sent to fight Vladimir Putin have all been spent towards that end. There is almost certainly inadequate oversight, as I wrote early in the war. 

Nonetheless, countering Russia’s power-mad dictator is the right thing to do

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/04/16/americas_broken_pendulum_150796.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The American constitutional structure was designed to promote moderation, compromise, and incremental change.  Throughout most of our history, it has worked as intended. The pendulum of public policy has swung from left to right to left to right, but rarely too far in either direction. 

American versions of socialism and corporatism, faith and secularism, traditionalism and progressivism, have all been far milder than those that swallowed other societies. For that, we can thank the multiple divisions of power, checks and balances, and freedom of debate that have always characterized our national spirit.

A bit more than a decade ago, the pendulum began to swing far outside its historic range. As recently as 2010, Obamacare’s passage represented a recognizable victory for the left. The immediate, natural, and expected corrective rightward swing produced the Tea Party and the midterm “shellacking” of Obama’s Democrats.

That’s when things began to go awry. The weaponization of the IRS against right-leaning activist groups heading into the 2012 election arrested the rightward correction. Instead, the pendulum swung dangerously leftward, much faster and farther from center than at any prior point in American history.

President Obama conceded that he lacked the constitutional authority to alter immigration laws, then imposed his preferred DACA policy anyway – earning great acclaim for his problem-solving acumen. 

https://www.newsbreak.com/news/3405944401654-disturbing-moment-anti-israel-protesters-swarm-nyc-subway-chanting-iran-you-make-us-proud?noAds=1&_f=app_share&s=i3

Alarming video shows anti-Israel protesters taking over a New York City subway car and horrifying Jewish riders with sick antisemitic chants — even saying they were “proud” of Iran for attacking Israel.

“Iran, you make us proud!” the group yell in a call-and-response chant as a young woman stares wide-eyed in horror during the vile scenes said to have been filmed Monday, the day American flags were burned in widespread protests.

“Yemen, you make us proud … Rafah, you make us proud. West Bank, you make us proud,” they also chant as scared Jewish riders sit nearby.

“From the river to the sea, all our people will be free,” they also chant, a phrase widely taken as an antisemitic call for the eradication of the Jewish state.

The footage was shared Tuesday by the Jews of NY Instagram page, which said it was sent by one of the horrified Jewish New Yorkers on the ride.

“It sure does feels like we are living in a horrifying science fiction movie,” Jews of NY wrote in a caption.

As well as chanting, the anti-Israeli mob – some seen wearing keffiyeh scarves — held signs including “Land you have to kill for is not yours — Free Gaza.”

The anonymous rider who took the footage said they were “completely surrounded on all sides and everywhere in the train car by these young Americans who were so filled with rage.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-woke-rackets/

The “longshoreman philosopher”  Eric Hoffer once observed, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” This course of corruption has been ubiquitous in U.S. history, but especially characterized the postwar period. In contemporary times, the post-Cold War period, it is accelerating and now reaching terminal velocity.

One of the great causes in our history was the Civil Rights Movement begun in 1954. The people who comprised it made a dignified moral and historical argument against segregation, onederived from Christian ethics and the Prologue to the Declaration of Independence, and eschewing the parochial identarianism and violence of leftist activists. The results were the epochal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It didn’t take long, however, for that noble cause to become a business, then degenerate into a racket that exploited discriminatory government polices like affirmative action, all predicated on a made-up “compelling state interest” called “diversity”––an Orwellian term that relied on crude racialist, superficial group characteristics, while ignoring the true diversity of individual hearts and minds.

The Civil Rights Movement then became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party and government agencies backed by federal law and enforced by hordes of bureaucrats. Consultants, trial lawyers, administrators, educrats, and diversity “trainers” waxed fat on political power and redistributed taxpayer loot.

Today’s diversity 2.0 DEI cartel has expanded the reach and power of Diversity INC to corporate C-Suites and Boards of Directors, magnifying the corruption. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote recently, “Grifters and opportunists mask their selfish agendas under the cloak of neo-Marxist care for the underprivileged or victimized minorities. Meanwhile, they seek to profit illegally as if they were old-fashioned crony capitalists.” 

This corruption of our constitutional order and foundational principles–– the assaults on the integrity of the First Amendment rights to free speech and religion, or the 14th amendment’s guarantee of “due process,” the “equal protection of the laws,”and the accountability of power to the people ––is a dire threat to our ordered freedom and political equality, for such debasement relentlessly subjects our republic to regulatory tyranny.

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-rise-of-the-civil-rights-constitution/

Editor’s Note: We cannot forget that the group quota regime is just that: not merely an ideology but a proper regime, a civilizational and constitutional rival to the American regime. It has its own legal and organizing principles, which directly challenge those of our own Constitution. These operating principles of the group quota regime have long been taking hold in our society and in our governing institutions.

Jesse Merriam, a legal and political philosopher, recently joined Tom Klingenstein to discuss that quiet revolution: its roots, its current state, and the possibility for reform. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

TK: Welcome Jesse Merriam. Jesse is an associate professor of government at Patrick Henry College and a research fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. Jesse holds a J.D. from George Washington University Law School and a Ph.D. in judicial politics and legal philosophy from Johns Hopkins University.

JM: It’s good to be with you.

TK: Jesse, you are a man of controversy. Among your controversial opinions are: 

The legal conservative movement has been much less successful than most conservatives believe.
Diversity and anti-discrimination are the twin pillars of today’s Constitution which makes it fair to say that today America operates under the Civil Rights Constitution. 
We should revive, to a degree, freedom of association, which you believe to be a right necessary for self-governance. 
The Federalist Society, despite notable successes, has not provided what the legal conservative movement needs to be successful.
Originalism has not, as intended, advanced a distinctly conservative agenda.
The recent Supreme Court affirmative action decisions are not likely to reduce affirmative action by very much. 
Harvard and Affirmative Action

TK: Let’s take the last claim first. My impression is that most analysts think that the recent UNC and Harvard affirmative action decisions will have a much greater impact than you do. Why are you so skeptical?

JM: My skepticism boils down to three reasons. One reason has to do with the unique status of affirmative action. We can understand this uniqueness in terms of both law and policy. Affirmative action law is unique in the sense that, since the civil rights revolution, affirmative action is the only type of governmental discrimination based on race that the Supreme Court has permitted. Affirmative action is also unique in American policy in that it is the only public program in all of American history—to my knowledge at least—that has expanded in breadth and strengthened in force in the face of growing resistance from the American people, state legislatures, and federal courts. 

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/16/the-fundamental-unraveling-of-america/

By now, it must be overwhelmingly apparent to every American citizen that what candidate Barack Obama promised on the campaign trail back in 2008 has come to pass. Obama touted a “fundamental transformation of America” if elected president and, once elected, he proceeded to accomplish that one huge goal.

It can certainly be argued that the country experienced a slow boiling of the frog during the eight years of Obama’s presidency and that, during that period, the pot neither got to boil too long nor did the frog feel the heat intensely enough to hop out. Hillary Clinton was anointed by the Democrats to follow Obama to continue the unraveling of America’s constitutional republic, replacing it with their own interpretation of a “democracy.”

But somehow, out of nowhere, a wrecking ball named Donald J. Trump collided with the original fundamental-transformation plan. However, that, as we all experienced, was only a temporary setback. Once the 2020 election was successfully rigged and stolen and a hand-puppet-Biden government was installed, Obama and his global handlers continued stirring and reheating the pot to the required boiling point.

As it turned out, this time around, turning up the heat also necessitated putting a lid on the pot because there was a real chance that the frog might finally catch on and attempt to jump out.

So, where are we now?

The pot continues to frantically boil, with the frog finally awakening to its fate—but trapped inside the pot. And the only one capable of removing the lid is that same old why-won’t-he-just-go-away-already Trump. Even with the onslaught of tactics straight out of the Jussie Smollett playbook (i.e., if you can’t find a crime, make one up), resulting in New York- and DC-style “fair” trials and verdicts, Trump continues to generate his own heat, resulting in the heads of Democrats boiling—and sometimes even exploding.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/16/joe-bidens-wars/

It’s long been known around Washington, as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates once said, that Joe Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four” – now five – “decades.”

So the conflicts raging around the world and forecasts of World War III should have been expected.

But, hey, at least we didn’t elect in 2020 the guy who sent impetuous tweets that upset elites and snowflakes.

As president, Biden has projected American weakness in a Carter-esque fashion, starting with his chaotic and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan, which a State Department report said suffered from “constantly changing policy guidance,” and a top general described as a “strategic failure.”

He’s been no Ronald Reagan. He’s not even been a Donald Trump. So it’s no coincidence that Russia invaded Ukraine a little more than two years after Biden took office. And we all knew it was coming, because three months after Biden stumbled into the Oval Office, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, as Sen. Tom Cotton noted just before the invasion, “sent tens of thousands of soldiers, tanks, and munitions to the Ukrainian border.”

In response, Biden proposed a presidential summit in Geneva, which, says Cotton, elevated “Russia in the eyes of the world” and “allowed the image-obsessed Putin to strut on the international stage and pretend that Russia was once again an equal to the United States.” Apparently, the hotline between Washington and Moscow was soon thereafter cut. Putin recently said he hadn’t spoken to Biden in two years, according to Richard Grenell, acting director of national intelligence for the Trump administration.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/14/the-battle-begins-trumps-trial-tests-american-justice/

Monday, April 15, 2024, is not only Tax Day in the United States.  It is also the day that this country will take another fateful step towards banana republic-like tyranny.  For it is the day that New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg—or, to give him his full title, “Soros-funded District Attorney Alvin Bragg”—will begin his 34-count felony trial against Donald Trump.

Exactly what is the presumptive Republican nominee for president charged with by the Biden Department of Justice?  Paying Stormy Daniels—or to give her the invariable epithet, “porn star Stormy Daniels” (think “swift-footed Achilles,” “gray-eyed Athena”)—to keep quiet about an alleged sexual encounter in 2006 (which Trump has consistently denied).

But is paying someone to sign a non-disclosure agreement a crime?  No.  Then what’s going on here?  As always seems to be the case when the subject is the Byzantine world of Donald Trump’s legal woes, it’s complicated.  One of the best brief summaries I have seen was in an editorial in The Wall Street Journal this weekend. “The facts,” the Journal writers explain, “are these”:

Ms. Daniels has said that in 2006 she and Mr. Trump had one, er, intimate encounter. A decade later, as the 2016 election neared, Mr. Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet. A nondisclosure agreement isn’t illegal. Mr. Bragg’s complaint is about the paperwork. Mr. Cohen was reimbursed through 2017 via a monthly retainer “disguised as a payment for legal services,” the DA said. He padded his indictment by separately charging each invoice, check and ledger entry to get 34 counts.

Falsifying business records in New York can be a misdemeanor, but the statute of limitations on that has expired. Mr. Bragg therefore must charge felonies, which under New York law means showing that Mr. Trump cooked the books with “intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-pro-hamas-crowds-will-soon-have-a-rendezvous-with-reality/

For over six months, the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas protests have accelerated, and now are predictably incendiary and violent.

Recently, they have jumped the shark with unapologetic chants of “Death to America”. Or so a cheering crowd in Michigan chanted in homage to the late king of all Western-hostage-takers, the murderous Ayatollah Khomeini. And the huckster speaker revved them up by quoting Malcolm X that America is “one of the rottenest countries that has ever existed on this Earth.” (Does such a condemnation of fellow Americans presage mass reverse migration of unhappy Middle Easterners back to the West Bank, Gaza, and Iran?)

The more these demonstrators shut down major bridges at commute hour, defaced iconic government monuments and cemeteries, disrupted Easter and Christmas services (try that with mosques at Ramadan), broke into the Capitol and congressional chambers (no January 6-like penalties to come?), and hunted down Jewish students, the bolder they became.

Apparently, the demonstrators were convinced that they were either exempt under the woke aegis, or too precious in Joe Biden’s Michigan electoral calculus, or too useful to campuses as rich full-tuition-paying foreign students on gold-plated student visas.

But everything and everyone have limits. They have now crossed them, and are about to face an accounting, and for a variety of reasons.

1) News is leaking out that Hamas may have for some time been bluffing about a ceasefire for hostages. Given Hamas has suddenly announced that they cannot meet the conditions of the proposed ceasefire, since not all the forty women and sick and elderly men taken hostage are still alive.

If true, then their months of bartering and “negotiating” were a likely sham, and their earlier claims that three hostages were collateral damage of Israeli strikes become more dubious.

Why would they kill their escape route?

To hide their torturing and raping of the kidnapped? In furor at their own-self-inflicted dilemmas? Sick hatred of Jews?