RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/12/biden-puts-us-on-a-fast-train-to-nowhere/

At long last, we’re building the first high-speed rail project in our nation’s history. And it’s starting here.”

That was President Joe Biden announcing last week that us taxpayers will be ponying up $3 billion to help a private company build a bullet train from Los Angeles to Las Vegas so gambleholics can start losing money more quickly.

The L.A. to Vegas train will supposedly be finished in time for the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 2028 — just four and half years from now.

Well, anything is possible. A private company is planning to build the thing and claims to have the route and rights-of-way all figured out. But when you consider that Biden put up $7.5 billion to get private companies to put EV chargers all over the country and two years later not a single one has been built, constructing more than four miles of complex high-speed electrified rail each and every month seems a bit optimistic. (It took eight years to build an 11-mile extension to the Washington, D.C., Metro Silver Line.

But let’s say this private company can build it that fast, and that it will be a huge win for travelers, as Biden claims. Then why on Earth are taxpayers on the hook for a third of its construction costs?

What’s more, Biden’s claim that this is the “first high-speed rail project” in the country is a flat-out lie. Or did he forget about the high-speed rail project from Los Angeles to San Francisco that California has been working on since 2008 — the one that he and President Barack Obama threw $3 billion at 13 years ago?

Actually, Biden did eventually bring it up in his remarks last week (as transcribed by the White House):

Another high-speed rail project we’re announcing today is in California. Ultimately, it’s going to take folks from Los Angeles, through the Central Valley, all the way to San Francisco, b- — in less than three hours. But today, the journey can take eight hours by bus or car. Think of how this train will transform California’s Central Valley with new businesses, new residents, visitors, economic opportunities, or what it will mean to folks who live in inland towns and commute to work in Californian coastal cities. It’s a game changer.

Biden announced that he is dumping another $3.1 billion of taxpayer money into what has so far proved to be nothing more than a monument to wishful thinking and government waste.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/11/not-trump-the-dictator-again/

It is “Trump Will Destroy Democracy” season again. And predictably the Left has gone hysterical, after experiencing a trifecta of frightening 2024 news.

One, current polls in the primaries and in a general election for now show that Trump would win.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s popularity dives below 40 percent. His policies on the economy, abroad, at the border, concerning crime, and about energy poll even more feebly. Never has an American president utterly and deliberately destroyed immigration law for the sole purpose of inviting in millions of illegal aliens, to establish political constituencies supportive of agendas that otherwise have scant public support.

Two, unequivocal evidence is mounting that the Bidens are one of the most corrupt political families in American presidential history. Hunter, the Leona Helmsley of our times, is now indicted for massive tax evasion, despite his earlier, government-aided efforts of running out the statute of limitations on the full array of his crimes.

When asked about his grifting, Biden angrily denies the undeniable. He can only become animated these days, when asked to square his denials about knowing what Hunter was up to with a multitude of facts and data to the contrary. And so in exasperation he shouts, “Lies!,” “Lies!,” and “Lies!”

There is now conclusive proof that Biden himself lied repeatedly when he swore that he knew nothing about his wayward son Hunter’s grifting business. He used several aliases to communicate directly with his son’s grifting and quid pro quo partners.

Canceled checks show the president was paid substantial sums by family members after they received money from foreign governments—for nothing other than being related to the future president. The pay-offs were hidden by “loan repayment” lies; no one expects ever to find any such evidence that there were formal loan documents or agreements between Biden and his family.

Former Hunter Biden associates, explicit messaging on his laptop, IRS whistleblowers, and bank records all explain why an opulent Joe Biden enjoyed a lifestyle impossible on either a senator’s or Vice President’s salary. While Biden toured the country sermonizing that the rich must “pay their fair share,” it is increasingly likely that he had received huge amounts from foreign governments eager to purchase him as an influencer—and never paid taxes on such occult income.

Three, Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and feebleness have reached a point where he is one fall, one bad cold, or one long brain-freeze away from incapacity. He clearly is not running the country. How could he be, when he cannot finish a sentence without mangling the syntax, slurring the vocabulary, and confusing his listeners?

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/10/bidens-son-of-a-gun-number-one-son-might-just-toss-him-under-the-bus/

So we finally have a serious indictment of Hunter Biden. Well, half-serious. After having been stiffed by lawyers for Biden fils, special counsel David Weiss removed one glove, checked the statute of limitations clock and the north-by-northwest breezes of public sentiment, and decided that he had better slip in a valid indictment or two, ones with some semblance of teeth or at least dentures,  before time ran out on all of them.

Back in August, I wrote in this space about “the sweetheart deal to end all sweetheart deals” that Weiss offered Hunter. Weiss was, I noted, “supposed to be prosecuting the case. In fact,” I continued,

it would be closer to the truth to say he was burying it.  The full measure of sugar he shoveled into the deal is something that became known only accidentally thanks to an attentive judge. The world knew that Hunter was escaping any jail time for his tax and felony gun crimes.  We discovered that the deal also immunized Hunter against future indictment only because Judge Maryellen Noreika, who presided in the case, actually read the deal and had the gumption to say “Hey, what’s this?

It was embarrassing all around but, as William Hazlitt once observed, “those who lack delicacy hold us in their power.” Do you think that the cadaverous apparatchik Merrick Garland, Weiss’s boss, gives a hoot about “embarrassing” revelations? He’s way beyond all that. You cannot shame a man who is shameless (an observation that prompts me to note again the linguistic curiosity that “shameful” and “shameless” are nearly synonyms in English).

https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-auden-things-worth-remembering?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Welcome back to Douglas Murray’s Sunday column, Things Worth Remembering, where he presents passages from great poets he has committed to memory—and explains why you should, too. To listen to Douglas read from W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” click below:

I want to turn today to the question of W. H. Auden and what happened to him just as the world was going mad.

Auden was hardly the only one left disoriented—shattered—by the outbreak of World War II, but I think his response to the war—his poem “September 1, 1939”—offers a uniquely powerful illustration of what happens to us when everything we think we know becomes uncertain.

The poem receded for decades—in no small part because Auden didn’t care for it—but after the attacks of 9/11, it achieved a newfound fame. It was especially popular in New York City, where the Twin Towers once stood, and because that’s where Auden wrote it. As he says in the poem’s opening lines:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street

That is a good opening.

What comes next is even more grabbing:

Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:

It’s a perfectly said, deeply appealing line. Who doesn’t want to feel like the poet—smoking a cigarette in a dive on 52nd street, drink and pen in hand—proclaiming boldly in the face of titanic, historical forces?

https://nypost.com/2023/12/09/news/iran-apologists-linked-to-robert-malley-got-50m-from-soros/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=mail_app

Far-left billionaire George Soros has funneled more than $50 million to a network of Iran-sympathizer groups whose members have gained significant sway within the Biden White House — pushing to defang US sanctions on Tehran while advocating for a renewed nuclear deal.

A Post examination of Soros’ Open Society Foundations records shows the progressive kingmaker has given a staggering $46.7 million since 2016 to the International Crisis Group, a lefty think tank tied to an alleged Iranian plot to manipulate US policy.

Robert Malley, the former US special envoy to Iran now under FBI investigation for his alleged mishandling of classified material, was the ICG’s president until he joined the Biden administration in 2021.

“Soros has continually funded organizations that act as apologists for the Iranian regime – downplaying their severe human rights abuses while working to advance Iranian propaganda,” Gabriel Noronha of the Polaris National Security think tank told The Post.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/the-hunter-biden-tax-indictment-is-a-disaster-for-the-white-house/

If you’ve been following the Biden saga, the indictment has some neon-flashing problems for the president.
There are several astonishing things about the 56-page grand-jury indictment filed with nine counts against the president’s son, Hunter Biden, by federal prosecutor David Weiss.

The first is that it’s dizzying.

The indictment is scathing in describing the younger Biden’s unsavory lifestyle, his deep dishonesty, and his willful decision to evade tax liabilities on millions of dollars in income and instead spend the money on escorts, drugs, luxury goods, and the like. Hunter is portrayed as exactly the kind of tax cheat who should be prosecuted. In fact, he appears to be just the sort of elitist scoundrel abominated in the rhetoric of his father and Democrats — privileged, addicted to consumption, producing little of real value, and greedily unwilling to pay his “fair share.”

But here’s the problem: Just four months ago, the same David Weiss tried to bury the same tax case against the same Hunter Biden — offering him a no-jail plea to two puny misdemeanors, a sweetheart deal so out of the ordinary that Weiss’s minions could not answer a judge’s simple questions about it, and that the ever-entitled Hunter’s defense lawyers foolishly blew up over fear of a hypothetical prosecution on tougher charges that Weiss patently had no intention to bring.

It is impossible to square Weiss’s slamming of Hunter in the new indictment with the blind eye he turned toward Hunter in the failed plea bargain — a submission in which the only narrative was a statement of facts sympathetic to Hunter, the drafting of which was clearly controlled by Hunter’s lawyers, not the agents who investigated the case.

In the indictment, Weiss scoffs that Hunter only filed his taxes in the relevant years because he’d been dragged into court in civil cases, which resulted in judges forcing him to fess up about his finances and produce tax returns. The irony here is rich. After all, why do we (finally) have this indictment? Only because Weiss could not rationalize the plea bargain he tried to give Hunter to make the case go away and, in his humiliation, was forced to go back to his office and act like a real prosecutor — whereupon he has thrown the book at Hunter as he should have in the first place . . . or at least that portion of the book that was still left after Weiss allowed statutes of limitations to run on offenses from earlier years.

https://thespectator.com/topic/hunter-biden-refusal-testify-strengthens-impeachment-argument/

Surprise! Surprise! Hunter Biden just told the House Oversight Committee he won’t to comply with their subpoena for a closed-door deposition.

Hunter’s refusal was delivered by his formidable attorney, Abbe Lowell. Their “stonewall strategy” was foreordained when Hunter chose Lowell several months ago. Lowell is smart, tough and relentless. He’s a “let’s fight” litigator, replacing Hunter’s former counsel, who was known for striking deals. When the sweetheart deal blew up in federal court, Hunter switched to Lowell.

Abbe Lowell’s strategy and persona borrow something from Roy Cohn, the equally tough attorney known for representing Joe McCarthy. Cohn once remarked that when prospective clients wanted the toughest SOB in New York for their attorney, he wanted them to think of just one name: Roy Cohn. Lowell has the same marketing strategy in the nation’s capital. He’s a fighter, not a compromiser, and he has demonstrated that in representing Hunter Biden. Presumably, that’s why the president’s son chose him.

Hunter’s latest refusal to testify reiterates his earlier one. The first refusal came wrapped in camouflage. Lowell told the Oversight Committee that Hunter was willing to testify — he couldn’t wait to do it — but that he would do it only in public. Actually, it is the committee, not the witness, who chooses how testimony will be given.

Hunter’s offer was always a slick gambit, with two purposes in mind. One was to run out the clock, delaying Hunter’s appearance until the committee had moved on and issued a report. The second was to fool the public by pretending Hunter actually wanted to testify and that it was the Republican committee making it impossible. In fact, testifying was the last thing Hunter wanted to do. He’s facing potential criminal charges in California and has a lot of information about how his businesses operated and what role his father played. Why would he possibly want to speak about those matters under oath before a congressional committee?