RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/another-biden-parting-outrage/

Just recently, the White House announced that President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners, all murderers and some multiple murderers, on federal death row. (Yes, while most death penalty cases are handled by the states, the federal government has a death row for violators of federal crimes.) Biden commuted the federal prisoners’ sentences from death to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

In a statement, Biden claimed to be acting out of principle and conscience. He plainly said he did not want the federal government to execute anyone, and he specifically did not want the next president of the United States to allow the federal government to execute anyone. He never mentioned who that president might be, but he was referring, of course, to President-elect Donald Trump.

“I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” Biden said. “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

It is hard to believe, but even in such grave matters of law and conscience, Biden’s decision was all about Trump.

Biden is planning his last trip as president next month. It will be to Italy, where he will meet Pope Francis at the Vatican. The pope recently prayed that the sentences of death row prisoners in the United States “be commuted or changed.” Vatican News also reported, “Anti-death penalty activists and associations have been imploring President Biden to use his clemency powers before he leaves office to spare the lives of about 40 federal death row inmates who are at peril of imminent execution when the next president takes office.”

The pope, of course, speaks from a religious perspective. His position is consistent; he wants all death penalty prisoners to be spared. But Biden was not so consistent, because while he commuted the sentences of 37 prisoners, he left death sentences in place for three: Dylann Roof, who murdered nine people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015; Robert Bowers, who murdered 11 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018; and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who killed three and injured more than 200 in 2013.

Biden decided that Kaboni Savage, convicted of murdering 12 people, including a family of six in a firebombing, deserved mercy, while Roof, Bowers and Tsarnaev did not. Biden decided that Ricardo Sanchez and Daniel Troya, convicted of murdering a young mother, father and their 4- and 3-year-old boys, deserved mercy, but Roof, Bowers and Tsarnaev did not. Biden decided that Jorge Avila-Torrez, convicted or raping and murdering two girls, age 8 and 9, and later murdering a 20-year-old woman, deserved mercy, but Roof, Bowers and Tsarnaev did not.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/jimmy-carter-was-a-terrible-president-and-an-even-worse-former-president/

The truth is that historians have not been harsh enough.

A popular narrative surrounding the legacy of Jimmy Carter is that as president he was a victim of unlucky timing that impeded him politically but that he excelled during his long post-presidential career. The reality is that he was a terrible president but an even worse former president.

Carter’s true legacy is one of economic misery at home and embarrassment on the world stage. He left the country in its weakest position of the post–World War II era. After being booted out of office in landslide fashion, the self-described “citizen of the world” spent the rest of his life meddling in U.S. foreign policy and working against the United States and its allies in a manner that could fairly be described as treasonous. His obsessive hatred of Israel, and pompous belief that only he could forge Middle East peace, led him to befriend terrorists and lash out at American Jews who criticized him.

A former governor of Georgia who had little charisma and national name recognition when he began campaigning for president, Carter ended up in the White House as a fluke. He presented an image as an honest, moderate, and humble southern Evangelical Christian outsider — an antidote to the corruption of the Watergate era. He also benefited from the vulnerabilities of the sitting president, Gerald Ford.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/the-shamelessness-of-ta-nehisi-coates/

Recognition of what Coates is really up to — in The Message and elsewhere — should chasten those who have long treated him as the moral conscience of the West.

None of the many criticisms leveled at Ta-Nehisi Coates seem to land. Coates has made a fool of himself in his new book, The Message, and the tour promoting it, with TV and podcast appearances (including one in which he suggested that he, too, would have been tempted to raid Israel, rape women, and burn children alive if he grew up in Gaza) that would spell the end of nearly anyone else’s time in the limelight. Who can take seriously a man whose career was built on profound musings about race now observing that black Israeli soldiers — many of whom are Ethiopian Jews who have sought refuge in Israel — “would, in America, have been seen as ‘white’”? Is that what we have landed on? “White” just means the guy with the gun? The bad guy?

That’s where Coates has settled, which ought to make anyone who previously treated his musings on American racism as gospel question their own judgment. Yet, his TV appearances and media profiles keep coming, and his reputation seems likely to remain intact. He hardly seems moved to consider that perhaps he may have bitten off more than he can chew in pronouncing his judgment on one of the world’s most vexing conflicts after a short junket to Israel and the Palestinian territories, all of which he calls “Palestine.”

More onTa-Nehisi Coates

Black Critics Shake Their Heads at Ta-Nehisi Coates

The man is like the Dunning-Kruger effect incarnate — yet he acts as though he really has an irreproachable sense of moral discernment. After CBS host Tony Dokoupil was accused of racism and put through the sensitivity-training ringer for civilly pointing out that Coates’s book was extreme and thoroughly misleading, Coates kept mum. Perhaps it would be too much to ask Coates to stick up for Dokoupil by publicly admitting that Coates had pretended to analyze the Israeli/Palestinian conflict by amplifying conspiracy theories about the Jewish state. But a certain kind of public intellectual, committed to honest grappling with the world’s complexity, might have been tempted to tell Dokoupil’s tormentors to back off because the whole exchange was within the bounds of normal argument. He didn’t do that either. Honest grappling is not Coates’s commitment, attested to most of all by The Message, the publication of which affirms that for Coates, shamelessness remains the name of the game.

Shamelessness is one thread running through Coates’s short but eventful stint as the darling oracle of race-obsessed Americans. It did not begin with The Message. There’s a shamelessness to insisting with a straight face that white Americans are engaged in an ongoing race war against black Americans when the most basic facts that might prove such a claim actually point the other direction. (There is no race war, which you could have figured out by the amount of time Coates spends mind-reading in Between the World and Me, for which he won several awards.) There’s a similar shamelessness to hearing Dokoupil point out that Coates’s book about a region has completely ignored the eliminationism animating one side of a conflict and responding, yeah, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.

Most of what you need to know about The Message is that it’s a whole lot more of that: warning readers against the “elevation of complexity over justice” — as if that isn’t the consummate false choice, as if justice is self-evident and straightforward — and assuming that readers will pretend this is profound and not an incredible insult to their intelligence.

But merely calling Coates a shameless grifter misses the point. More important questions situate Coates in the context of a movement whose adherents allow him to get away with — indeed, get famous for — unserious drivel. Why are Coates and his writings impervious to criticism? How has he avoided consignment to laughingstock status?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/12/the_best_or_the_worst_of_times.html

Now that Christmas Day has passed, I have put down my beloved copy of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and picked up his masterpiece, A Tale of Two Cities.  As I have argued before, that novel’s opening sentence perfectly captures the contradictions of our time:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

And you thought that I struggled to locate a terminal period for some of my longest sentences!  In Dickens’s defense, it is one hell of a sentence!  It is also a sophisticated description of the tumultuous events that accompany transformative eras such as our own — what many have come to regard as a “Fourth Turning,” when crisis and social upheaval dominate life for a generation.  

Will we be able to “Make America Great Again”?  Will this be the beginning of a new American “Golden Age,” as President Trump suggests?  Or will we soon endure economic collapse and war the likes of which none of us has ever seen?  As 2024 comes to an end, it is fair to say that uncertainty is only accelerating and that the prospects for peace and prosperity are running neck and neck with their opposites.  

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21251/trumpmaganomics

The new economic policies of President-elect Donald J. Trump promise to include his campaign pledge to “Make America Great Again.” Just a few months ago, commentators were assessing that the Biden administration’s greatest ambition was “managing America’s decline.” What a difference a day makes: November 5, 2024. Trump, a businessman, appears to have a good grasp of most domestic and foreign policy issues that greet him at the stable door. He has already been overflowing with ideas — such as refusing to allow a hostile Communist China to control the Panama Canal, as it presently does; and aligning more closely with Greenland and Canada to provide the northern hemisphere a stronger foothold to safeguard its security and prosperity and that of the Free World.

In securing America’s financial future, Trump’s maganomic policies appear to turn on three points:

Making American not just energy independent again, but energy dominant. Making use of the “liquid gold” America has under the ground would not only enable Americans to buy just about everything at a lower cost than, as now, unnecessarily relying on expensive imported oil for manufacturing and for transporting goods and oneself. Using American energy could at the same time undercut the price of oil exported by America’s adversaries, such as Russia, Venezuela and Iran, and make them less able to conduct wars and other mischief.
Offering generous tax and other incentives, and removing obsolete regulations, to ignite the economy’s “animal spirits” so that more companies would relocate to America. Once again, “Made in America” would become the hallmark of excellence, affordability and abundance. What other country protects its businesses, workers and investments more comprehensively than the United States? The country is not just a haven for jobs and productivity, but also ensures that America will no longer naively misplace its trust in countries that intend to replace the current world order and, at whim, potentially deprive Americans of medicine, computer chips, and other necessities.
Lowering taxes for everyone while trimming excess fat from unwarranted expenses. This plan does not of course mean depriving the less fortunate of their safety net or demolishing social security. What the plan does mean is that Americans will be able to keep more of their hard-earned money to decide themselves how they would prefer to spend it. At least US citizens would know that the taxes thy are compelled to pay would fund projects they actually want or need, instead of vaporizing for “shrimp on treadmills,” “hamster fights” or more than $1trillion each year – greater than the entire proposed US defense budget of $849.8 billion — just to pay interest on the more than $36 trillion national debt. The US government, according to CNBC, each year wastes more than $247 billion, adding that “The problems mainly stem from the way our government tries to solve an issue, according to critics,” and quoting Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/no-circular-firing-squads-this-time-republicans/

We’re starting to see the results of the November election in a variety of ways, both within our movement and among the enemy. Look, folks, we’re dealing with human beings. That means we’re dealing with human nature. And human nature never changes. We’re just as susceptible to its vagaries on the right as they are on the left. That means we’re going to fight among ourselves within the newly formed Trump coalition. That means people on our side are going to jockey for power, positions, prestige, and, of course, money. As far as the other side, despite the fact they are alien lizard people, they’re going to do what human beings tend to do. They will retreat to doing what’s comfortable, even if it isn’t the most effective tactic. We need to take advantage of that.

Human nature could end up handicapping us. Human nature could also end up handing us victories. We’ve got to be smart. We’ve got to be objective. We’ve got to think through what we’re doing to minimize our internal conflict and maximize the chaos on the other side. Are we doing that? The wackiness about the continuing resolution last week was an example of what we face. On our side, we have a very narrow majority which empowers dissenting individuals far out of proportion to their numbers. We’re also trying to navigate the reality that this is Donald Trump’s party and not the same GOP we grew up in. He’s the loudest voice, but he’s not the absolute dictator. There are incentives and rewards both for following him and defying him – as well as risks. How we manage our new coalition is the question. Our new coalition is not just conservatives. We conservatives make up a big chunk of it, but it’s also populists, anti-war folks who reject the old foreign policy consensus, as well as RFK granola/crunchy Make America Healthy Again types. Organized labor has an unprecedented presence too. Our Trump coalition is a new thing, a potentially unstable thing. We’re going to have growing pains.

This new coalition is unstable both because of competing interests and the fact that it hasn’t yet developed the institutional structures that minimize the disruption caused by internal disagreements. Let’s look at what happened with the continuing resolution. At one time, the Republicans were supposedly the budget-cutting party. They were the fiscal sanity folks, the deficit hawks. There’s still that faction in our coalition. But there’s another part of our coalition that really doesn’t care about debt that much. Donald Trump did not come into office as a budget cutter. Though he wants to see DOGE streamline the government and cut regulations, he did not get elected by promising to take a meat cleaver to America’s finances. In fact, he took entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and all the rest, which are the majority of our spending, completely off the table. So, you can see the problem. We’ve got both budget hawks and budget doves inside our tent. And that conflict has to be resolved.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21247/nuclear-fusion

As dreams of renewable green energy fade, along with electric car batteries that freeze in winter, explode in summer and cannot conveniently take you as far as you might want to go without a long refill that may or may not be available, and with windmills and solar panels that are dependent upon wind and sun when there might be much of either, the future keeps looking better and better for long-lasting, totally clean nuclear fusion energy – if and when it can be developed. Increasingly, people are starting to see nuclear fusion as the wave of the future for both affordable energy and “saving the planet” from being overrun by pollutants.

One small reactor in your car could enable it to travel for “a million kilometers” – quite different from trying to find a charging station while crossing a desert.

The good news is that entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman are already exploring how to capture this new magic fuel so that it can be put to use immediately. To that end, they are reportedly building small nuclear reactors in Nevada.

The bad news is that Communist China is developing them, already using them to fuse atoms at unimaginably high temperatures inside a device called a tokamak. They have been working in fusion atoms for energy this way for years while continuing to open at least two “dirty” coal plants every week, evidently just make sure they have their bases covered while they perfect nuclear fusion for commercial use.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/biden-commutes-sentences-capital-punishment-death-penalty

In the latest in a series of shameful closing acts, President Joe Biden on Sunday night commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 murderers on federal death row.

Biden’s midnight decision spared the lives of all but the three most notorious capital inmates: the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter, the Emmanuel AME Church shooter, and the surviving Boston Marathon bomber.

In his statement on the commutations, Biden said he was “more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.” It’s clear, then, that he only stopped short of a blanket commutation because of the backlash that would have come with pardoning these three mass murderers.

Make no mistake: Biden’s choice to spare the remaining 37 murderers is a moral travesty. In so doing, the lame duck president has once again shown that he is more beholden to progressive dogmas than to the pursuit of justice.

That’s obvious when you look at the killers Biden spared. Take Daniel Troya and Ricardo Sanchez, Jr., who murdered a family of four in cold blood, including three-year-old Luis Damian Escobedo and four-year-old Luis Julian Escobedo. Or consider Jorge Avila-Torrez, who murdered eight-year-old Laura Hobbs and nine-year-old Krystal Tobias in 2005. Avila-Torrez then joined the Marines, strangled U.S. Navy petty officer Amanda Jean Snell to death, and abducted and assaulted two more women before finally being apprehended.

Nine of those with commuted sentences were on death row for killing other people in prison. If capital punishment is not an option for such offenses, then there is no deterrence for prison homicides—and therefore no guarantee of safety for the incarcerated.