RUTHFULLY YOURS

The preamble is an introduction to the highest law of the land; it is not the law. It does not define government powers or individual rights.

Establish Justice is the first of five objectives outlined in the 52-word paragraph that the Framers drafted in six weeks during the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787. They found a way to agree on the following basic principles:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/09/a_timely_moment_to_wish_happy_236_to_the_us_constitution.html

We begin today with a “happy birthday” to the U.S. Constitution.  Maybe you remember this from your U.S. History class.  They taught it when I went to school, and I’m hoping that they still do today.  Or maybe they start today’s classes with a reminder that it was the work of a bunch of white guys who had slaves and didn’t let their wives vote.

This is the story that I learned:

On May 25, 1787, delegates representing every state except Rhode Island convened at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania State House for the Constitutional Convention. The building, which is now known as Independence Hall, had earlier seen the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the signing of the Articles of Confederation. The assembly immediately discarded the idea of amending the Articles of Confederation and set about drawing up a new scheme of government. Revolutionary War hero George Washington, a delegate from Virginia, was elected convention president.

During an intensive debate, the delegates devised a brilliant federal organization characterized by an intricate system of checks and balances. The convention was divided over the issue of state representation in Congress, as more-populated states sought proportional legislation, and smaller states wanted equal representation. The problem was resolved by the Connecticut Compromise, which proposed a bicameral legislature with proportional representation in the lower house (House of Representatives) and equal representation of the states in the upper house (Senate).

On September 17, 1787, the Constitution was signed. As dictated by Article VII, the document would not become binding until it was ratified by nine of the 13 states. Beginning on December 7, five states—Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia and Connecticut—ratified it in quick succession. However, other states, especially Massachusetts, opposed the document, as it failed to reserve un-delegated powers to the states and lacked constitutional protection of basic political rights, such as freedom of speech, religion, and the press. In February 1788, a compromise was reached under which Massachusetts and other states would agree to ratify the document with the assurance that amendments would be immediately proposed. The Constitution was thus narrowly ratified in Massachusetts, followed by Maryland and South Carolina. On June 21, 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the document, and it was subsequently agreed that government under the U.S. Constitution would begin on March 4, 1789. In June, Virginia ratified the Constitution, followed by New York in July.

http://Only a national government as universally corrupt as ours could feign ignorance about the Biden Crime Family’s sordid history.

Joe Biden’s corruption is outdone only by the mainstream media’s commitment to hide it from the public.  Why propagandists posing as journalists would feel the need to continue covering for China Joe and his quid-pro-quo mafia family is a mystery (although reporters are so addicted to censoring truth and spreading disinformation that they probably don’t know how to behave differently).  To be sure, the public has known about the Biden Crime Family’s notorious racketeering activities for decades.  

When a lifetime politician supposedly living on a “public servant’s” salary becomes filthy rich, no thinking person has difficulty understanding that corruption is somehow involved.  In Joe’s case, the corruption is remarkable, perhaps, because it has always been so brazen.  He has not simply become wealthy by using insider knowledge from closed-door committee hearings to effect profitable trades on the stock market (the standard form of corruption endemic in D.C.); instead, he sends family members all over the world to collect checks from foreign companies and hostile countries in return for his continued patronage within the halls of the federal government.  

No doubt many venal American politicians play the same shady game (after all, there sure are a lot of Congress-critters who enter office destitute and exit office as millionaires), but the Biden Crime Family’s particular brand of in-your-face extortion really takes the cake.  When his crackhead son Hunter is awarded a lucrative seat on a corporate board in Ukraine or receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Chinese Communist Party, it is not because he is an expert in paying for sex, drugs, and other shameful degradations.  It is because he has been taught how to collect bribes from foreign foes in return for his father’s promises to look out for their interests.

The mainstream media spent years trying to pretend that every Trump-owned property was really a front for enriching his family from secret special interests.  The partisan press were dead wrong, as always, but that did not stop them from pushing a narrative that President Trump (who took no salary for his service) was somehow using his office for personal financial gain.  In contrast, the evidence that Biden has used his various offices for pecuniary benefit is overwhelming.  In emails, witness testimony, and bank account histories, the Biden Crime Family’s business of extracting and laundering bribes is easy for any ordinary American to see.  Faced with such blinding corruption, however, the “expert” class now hilariously claims to see nothing.

In the press-titutes’ defense, though, they are lobbying Democrats pretty hard right now for more kickbacks from the government’s money-printing gravy train to keep their “profession” financially afloat.  It is quite difficult to bite the hand that feeds you.  It is even more difficult to excoriate a politician as a corrupt pig when you are feeding from the same trough.

https://justthenews.com/tv/maher-joined-barrymore-crosses-picket-line-says-time-bring-people-back-work

Bill Maher had the perfect Plan B for the ongoing Hollywood strikes.

The host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” joined the podcasting revolution earlier this year as a creative side hustle. So when the May 2 writers’ strike shut down every late-night talk show save Fox News’ “Gutfeld!” Maher kept on talking via his “Club Random” podcast.

Now, Maher is ready to resume his “Real Time” duties even though the strike is far from over. Drew Barrymore is doing the same on her eponymous talk show. 

Will these industry veterans pay a price for their actions?

For Maher, getting back to work made sense, and he shared why on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“It has been five months, and it is time to bring people back to work,” he wrote. “The writers have important issues that I sympathize with, and hope they are addressed to their satisfaction, but they are not the only people with issues, problems, and concerns. 

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/16/ken-paxton-acquitted-impeachment-texas-attorney-general/

The Texas Senate on Saturday acquitted Attorney General Ken Paxton of 16 articles of impeachment alleging corruption and bribery, his most artful escape in a career spent courting controversy and skirting consequences of scandal.

No article received more than 14 of the required 21 votes to convict. Only two of 19 Republican Senators, Bob Nichols of Jacksonville and Kelly Hancock of North Richland Hills, voted in favor of convicting for any article — a stark contrast to the more than 70% of House Republicans who impeached the attorney general in May.

Paxton, who attended just two days of the trial and was not present to witness his exoneration, was characteristically defiant.

“The sham impeachment coordinated by the Biden Administration with liberal House Speaker Dade Phelan and his kangaroo court has cost taxpayers millions of dollars, disrupted the work of the Office of Attorney General and left a dark and permanent stain on the Texas House,” Paxton said in a statement. “The weaponization of the impeachment process to settle political differences is not only wrong, it is immoral and corrupt.”

The dramatic votes capped a two-week trial where a parade of witnesses, including former senior officials under Paxton, testified that the attorney general had repeatedly abused his office by helping his friend, struggling Austin real estate investor Nate Paul, investigate and harass his enemies, delay foreclosure sales of his properties and obtain confidential records on the police investigating him. In return, House impeachment managers said Paul paid to renovate Paxton’s Austin home and helped him carry out ­and cover up an extramarital affair with a former Senate aide.

In the end, senators were unpersuaded.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/09/get_woke_go_broke_now_even_ibram_x_kendis_foundation_is_getting_layoffs.html

Wokesterism is all over, yet as corporation after corporation has learned the hard way, stoking racial or other grievance-group resentment doesn’t actually add value, and in fact is a very good way to go broke.

Therefore, money is drying up for corporations that embrace it, and the cash they dole out to downstream institutions, such as universities, think tanks, activist groups, and big white-shoe foundations. The Bud Light fiasco pretty well shows what happens to those who dive in to embrace woke.

It’s not just scandal-plagued groups like Black Lives Matter, which has done little but riot in cities (hitting black-owned businesses hard) and feather its leaderships’ nests, that has suddenly seen both a drop in public support and incoming funds.

 Now it’s the fancy stuff, the university think tanks, such as Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, led by Ibram X. Kendi, which is seeing big layoffs.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-supreme-court-and-the-duty-to-sit-recusal-standards-ethics-durbin-alito-93c4dbb6?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Justice Samuel Alito has refused a demand from Senate Democrats that he disqualify himself from a pending case because of an interview in this newspaper. One of us (Mr. Rivkin) is on the legal team representing the appellants in Moore v. U.S. and conducted the interview jointly with a Journal editor.

In a four-page statement Sept. 8, Justice Alito noted that other justices had previously sat on cases argued by lawyers who had interviewed or written books with them. “We have no control over the attorneys whom parties select to represent them,” he wrote. “We are required to put favorable or unfavorable comments and any personal connections with an attorney out of our minds and judge the cases based solely on the law and the facts. And that is what we do.”

The recusal demand came in an Aug. 3 letter to Chief Justice John Roberts signed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin and the committee’s other Democrats, excluding Georgia’s Sen. Jon Ossoff. It is part of a campaign against the court’s conservatives by Democratic politicians, left-wing advocacy groups and journalists whose goals include imposing a congressionally enacted code of ethics on the high court.

Although there already is a judicial ethics code, propounded by the U.S. Judicial Conference, it applies only to the lower federal courts, which Congress established. Proposals to create a Supreme Court code of conduct—including onerous and enforceable recusal requirements—raise fundamental issues of judicial independence and separation of powers. Chief Justice Roberts noted in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012) that the justices have a “responsibility to declare unconstitutional those laws that undermine the structure of government established by the Constitution.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19974/trump-maga-dog

If he wants to return to the White House, Donald Trump needs a dog.

That is not an idle observation.

White House history suggests that those presidents who enjoyed canine company in the Oval Office were better able to connect with their national constituency. No surprise when you consider that some 65 million American households report that they own a dog. Demographers also find that, as of 2021, the United States had the most dogs in the world per capita, 274 dogs for every 1000 people.

Dogs cannot but make you laugh, compel you to embrace their unconditional love and loyalty, and allow you to be a better person by simply being in the presence of a wagging tail and a wet nose. A candidate with a dog at his side sends a message that they share a unique insight into these qualities celebrated by dog owners across the country.

The importance of dogs in the White House has long been recognized to the point that in 1999, a Presidential Pet Museum was opened. Its mission remains to preserve the artifacts and legacy of Presidential pooches along with other White House pets.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump never had a pet in the White House and he is the poorer for it. It is easily corrected.

George Washington set the precedent. He is reported to have had 20 dogs, and visited the kennels daily to ensure some quality time with the brood when not guiding the new nation through its multiple challenges.

https://lawliberty.org/is-civic-decline-an-existential-threat/

Several factors combine to make our discordant times more perilous than most of those in America’s past.

The United States is going through one of the most politically divisive times in its history. Karl Rove, the Republican strategist, reminded us last month that sharp and seemingly intractable disagreements are the familiar grist of our national experience. Americans faced them around the election of 1800, in the leadup to the Civil War, in the Gilded Age, around the New Deal, and in the tumultuous 1960s. Yet we resolved all but one of those periods peacefully and emerged from these conflicts on a continued trajectory of ever-greater prosperity and global dominance.

Rove tells a hopeful tale, but past results are no guarantee of future performance. Four new factors combine to make our times more perilous than most past flareups of disunion. First, never have we had an educational establishment so hostile to the story of American exceptionalism, and as a result, never have the young been so willing to think America was bad from the beginning. Second, our cross-political associations have radically declined and with them the bonds that draw Americans together across partisan divides. Instead, we sort ourselves by geography and employment into blue and red bubbles. Third, traditional religious belief has dissipated. People still worship but ever more at the altar of politics. These comprehensive ideological views may give meaning to citizens’ lives but they make compromise hard. And fourth, the stakes (with the exception of those around the Civil War) are generally higher. Government is bigger and thus its control brings greater rewards. Even more importantly, many people claim—sometimes with not implausible reasons—that humanity faces existential crises, like those from climate change and AI. It is hard to feel goodwill to opponents who you think are bent on destroying the human race.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/14/post-postmodern-america/

When the progressive woke revolution took over traditional America, matters soon reached the level of the ridiculous.

Take the following examples of woke craziness and hypocrisy, perhaps last best witnessed during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

The Biden administration from its outset wished to neuter immigration law. It sought to alter radically the demography of the U.S. by stopping the border wall and allowing into the United States anyone who could walk across the southern border.

Over seven million did just that. Meanwhile, Biden ignored the role of the Mexican cartels in causing nearly 100,000 ANNUAL American fentanyl deaths.

Then border states finally wised up.

They grasped that the entire open-borders, “new Democratic majority” leftwing braggadocio was predicated on its hypocritical architects staying as far away as possible from their new constituents.

So cash strapped border states started busing their illegal aliens to sanctuary blue-state jurisdictions.

Almost immediately, once magnanimous liberals, whether in Martha’s Vineyard, Chicago, or Manhattan, stopped virtue-signaling their support for open borders.

Instead, soon they went berserk over the influx.

So now an embarrassed Biden administration still wishes illegal aliens to keep coming but to stay far away from their advocates—by forcing them to remain in Texas.

That means the president has redefined the US. border. It rests now apparently north of Texas, as Biden cedes sovereignty to Mexico.

Precivilizational greens in California prefer blowing up dams to building them.