RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/biden_takes_in_a_6day_vacay_at_tom_steyers_18_million_lake_tahoe_mansion__with_a_side_trip_to_maui.html

The residents of Maui must be so thrilled to hear that Joe Biden will interrupt his regularly scheduled weeklong vacation to make a one-day side trip to their fire-ravaged island.

No wonder a lot of them are telling the press they’d rather he didn’t.

The New York Post notes that this is one of many such trips he’s made during his presidency:

WASHINGTON — President Biden and his extended family arrived late Friday for a weeklong Lake Tahoe vacation at the $18 million waterfront mansion of billionaire climate investor Tom Steyer.

Biden, 80, and his scandal-plagued son Hunter, 53, showed up separately to the six-bedroom Nevada retreat, which is touted on Redfin as “one of Lake Tahoe’s finest lakefront properties and the pinnacle waterfront estate within the gated Glenbrook community.”

The home features a “spectacular lakeside gazebo [that] rests between the park-like grounds and the calming shores of Glenbrook Bay,” the real estate website says.

The president has enjoyed free vacations at the homes of other prominent Democrats, but the White House said that he will pay for the stay at Steyer’s three-acre property.

“The First Family is renting a private home for their stay in Lake Tahoe,” a statement read. “The home belongs to Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor. The First Family is renting the home for fair market value.”

Fair market value? If that was the case, why did he choose the home of a political crony? Fair market value means he could have chosen anyone. The Post points out that there’s no way of verifying “fair market value” which could be anything, actually, let alone whether he paid it. He has taken many such vacations at the homes of billionaires before, during his presidency, and reportedly never paid a dime, nor did he claim these to-dos as “gifts” on disclosure forms.

Last August, Biden and his family spent seven days at the nine-bedroom Kiawah Island, SC, mansion of donor Maria Allwin, whose family runs a hedge fund, after asking her to use the home, a source told The Post at the time.

“They’re not paying. They’ve never paid,” the source said.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/20/unipartys-plan-to-save-our-democracy-unfolds/

The fish are plentiful today. There’s Hunter Biden and his various lies: about the sources of his prodigious income, his payment (that is, non-payment) of taxes, drugs, guns, child support, laptops and prostitutes. There’s Joe Biden and his lies, the sources of his prodigious income, and—the latest—his use of pseudonymous email accounts when writing to Hunter and Hunter’s business partners to discuss the weather—or was it the whether and how to siphon 20 million of the crispest into virtually untraceable bank accounts?

There’s the seemingly endless series of indictments directed at Donald Trump. The latest new there, if I am up to date, is that he told people to watch election returns on One America News Network. Clearly part of a RICO conspiracy. Someone whose math is sharper than mine calculated that President Trump is potentially on the hook for 450 years in the slammer for . . . well, his torts are mostly in the eye of the beholder.

This coming week, Fox News, whose leaders have made no secret of their contempt for Trump, are holding the first Republican debate. Problem: as of this writing, it looks as though Trump will not be participating. How rude! And to Fox News, which hates him, and to the RNC, which doesn’t like him very much. How could he do this?

The really delicious thing is that even if Trump doesn’t show up for the debate, he will upstage everyone. The word at the moment is that he’ll do an interview with Tucker Carlson on Twitter at the same time as the debate. My bookies report that viewership of that interview, should it take place, would be far higher than the viewership for watching Chris Christie throw his, er, weight around. Quick: who is Doug Bergum and does anyone care? Yes, the event will be an opportunity for Tim Scott and Vivek Ramaswamy to shine. It will also be a sort of last bite at the apple for Ron DeSantis and his sputtering campaign.

But let’s face it, whether Trump shows up or not, he is the star of the show. If he doesn’t show, his performance will be like that of Tallulah Bankhead who, late in her career, was dissed by some pushy ingenue. “I could upstage you dahling,” Tallulah said, “without even being on stage.” She did, too, by the simple expedient of precariously balancing a champagne glass half-on-half-off a table when she made her exit. The ingenue came on for her big scene, but all eyes were glued to the glass: would it or would it not fall off the table? (No one knew that she had put sticket tape on the bottom of the glass).

I don’t know what is going to happen in this election anymore than you do, Dear Reader. But I have been amused by the absolute certitude of the chattering class, which assures us with hands wringing that 1) Trump is a very bad man 2) That he cannot win the general election but that 3) The clever but insidious Dems will assure that he wins the nomination, thus assuring a Republican defeat come November 2024.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/woke_white_air_force_colonel_who_declared_other_white_colonels_racists_gets_promoted_to_brigadier_general.html

The Pentagon has gone to great ends to hide its wokery whenever it gets caught.

They’ve shut down drag shows on U.S. military bases. They’ve kicked openly white-hating wokesters teaching military kids upstairs to other things. They’ve taken down their Pride Month flags and tweets. They’ve changed course on hunting for “extremists” in the ranks when news emerged that they missed actual miscreants under their noses. They’ve investigated dog-sex officer pervert rings that had been going on for a long time in Hawaii. They’ve also denied, in testimony to Congress at appropriations time, that they are wokesters.

But personnel is policy and a look at who they’re promoting tells another story.

Get a load of this charmer, as noted by Kevin Downey at PJMedia:

Enter USAF Col. Benjamin Jonsson. He was nominated by *President Biden to be promoted to brigadier general. Col. Jonsson is white. And “woke.”

Col. Jonsson believes the “problem” with the Air Force is “white colonels” like himself—but not really him, just all the other white colonels.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/18/bidens-drug-pricing-transparency-rule-is-just-back-door-price-controls/

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services just proposed a rule supposedly designed to improve transparency in Medicaid.

That’s hardly the real objective, however. The proposal is a back-door effort to expand price controls in Medicaid and beyond, a surefire way to derail the next generation of medical breakthroughs.

The CMS rule would require certain drug makers to participate in annual “price verification surveys.” The agency claims the surveys will shed light on why certain drugs are priced the way they are. The kicker is that through this “survey” process, drug companies would have to share proprietary and confidential data with the government.

CMS has offered drug makers an escape route, however — much the way blackmailers and extortionists offer their victims a way out. All a company has to do to excuse itself from these annual audits is agree to set its drug prices at whatever level the government deems fair — or, as an alternative, to hand over larger rebates to Medicaid. It’s an offer they can’t refuse.

Those who don’t play ball and cut prices “voluntarily” can look forward to selective release or leaks of confidential material that activists will pounce on to apply outside pressure on prices.  

This is a flagrant abuse of government power. But more worrying still is the harm the rule would do to patients.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4158523-joe-bidens-odd-but-revealing-claim-about-inflation/

President Biden brandished a brand-new claim in his recent talk about the wonders of the Inflation Reduction Act:

“Now, one reason we’ve seen inflation fall by two thirds without losing jobs is corporate profits are coming back down to earth. The excesses are being eliminated by the corporations.”

In other words, “excess” company profits are dropping, and that has brought price increases under control. By Biden’s logic, if Corporate America went bankrupt, the economy would really be humming.  

Hasn’t anyone ever explained to Biden that it is profits that lead to investment, to productivity gains and to higher wages? Apparently not. Biden thinks inflation stems from corporate greed, not too much spending — no wonder the White House got it so wrong.

Biden’s anti-business mindset reminds us of the Obama years, during which the country experienced the slowest-ever recovery from a recession. Liberals like Paul Krugman continue to argue that former President Obama’s failure to boost U.S. growth stemmed from an undersized stimulus program. No, the problem was that Obama stomped on the green shoots of economic revival with a tsunami of regulatory changes that confounded employers and decision-makers, stymied investment and prolonged the downturn.

We are seeing much the same today. Biden keeps talking about building the economy from the middle out; I doubt even he knows what he is talking about. In reality, he is building the economy from the top down, with the government at the tip of the pyramid, issuing ever-more rules and making significant decisions about the allocation of capital and direction of industry.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/smiling-faces-lie/

Merrick Garland’s placidity disguises evil within.

In 1971, The Temptations reminded us that smiling faces tell lies (Undisputed Truth’s version came out later that year, and the O’Jays’ “Back Stabbers” the following year). “Smiling Faces” attributes the lies and “evil that lurks within” to jealousy, misery and envy. That just might be Attorney General Merrick Garland’s motivation for appointing David Weiss to be the so-called special counsel. For an erstwhile appeals court judge, not becoming a Supreme Court justice must really sting.

Weiss’ appointment is a scam and a fraud on the American people. He is the opposite of what a special prosecutor is supposed to be.

When the independent counsel statute expired in 1999, the Justice Department adopted regulations governing the appointment of a watered-down successor referred to as a special counsel. The current regulations call for the attorney general to appoint a special counsel when he or she determines that a criminal investigation is warranted and that investigation or prosecution by a U.S. attorney’s office would present a conflict of interest. Here, that should have led to the appointment of a special counsel two years ago.

Section 600.3 of the special counsel regulations provides,

An individual named as Special Counsel shall be a lawyer with a reputation for integrity and impartial decision making, and with appropriate experience to ensure both that the investigation will be conducted ably, expeditiously and thoroughly, and that investigative and prosecutorial decisions will be supported by an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies. The Special Counsel shall be selected from outside the United States Government.

Weiss has few of these qualifications. He is a Justice Department apparatchik. He appears to lack integrity, impartial decision making, and an ability (perhaps, more fairly, an intention) to conduct the investigation ably, expeditiously, or thoroughly.

Weiss has been investigating for five years, long enough to run out the statute of limitations on many of Hunter Biden’s most serious crimes. It does not require much effort to identify that it is unlawful to deduct payments to pimps, escorts, and paramours as a business expense. While it requires greater effort to review statements from 20 bank accounts, it doesn’t take a year to determine that upwards of $20 million ran through accounts owned by Hunter, or for which Hunter had an obligation to report his share of income, which he failed to do.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/gen-milley-admits-wokeness-is-undermining-military-recruitment/

The Washington Post chatted with the outgoing chief of woke armed forces to hear his latest excuses.

Gen. Milley showed off his usual excuses, admitting and denying, spinning and blaming everyone else.

“There’s clearly a recruiting challenge ongoing and you saw numbers. And the Army is particularly challenged to meet its numbers.

So why is that? I think there’s a lot of reasons. There’s never a single causal factor. So anyone who out there is saying that this is the reason, I would challenge them on that…

I think another contributing factor is clearly this perception of quote, “wokeness,” and I personally think that it’s overstated. There are things that are done in the military that certainly, you know, raise that as an issue, but the actual facts suggests that it’s much less significant than perhaps the perception is.”

When Milley is admitting that perception of wokeness is the issue, he’s admitting it’s a problem while claiming it’s only a perception issue. Like most officials who have to argue that the issue is perception, not reality, it’s spin to cope with a real problem caused by those same officials.

“I’ll use drag queen shows as an example. That’s been out there. I don’t agree with drag queen shows being on military bases. I don’t think that’s appropriate. And neither does Secretary Austin. So Secretary Austin put a stop to it. How many times it happened? It happened a few. That’s true. Probably shouldn’t happen. But it did. But to say that that is, you know, somehow the entire military went woke because a handful of drag queen shows that shouldn’t happen to begin with, I think is an overstatement.

The drag shows are the least of it. As is the whole Pride Month mess. It’s top military officials like Milley’s replacement, Gen. Brown, giving talks about how racist America is. It’s the push for racial and gender quotas. It’s the injection of radical political indoctrination amid the so-called ‘stand down’ on racism.

Milley knows all this and just keeps spinning.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/freecons-vs-natcons/

What time is it? Are we living in normal times or revolutionary times? Is the greatest threat to American conservatism today a Walter Mondale-style big-government liberalism? Or is it a woke revolutionary progressivism that seeks to utterly transform the American way of life—our politics, culture, economy, law, education, morality, manners, and mores? A recently-issued Statement of Principles, co-signed by a group of advocates for Freedom Conservatism, assumes we are living in the world of the former: the world of Reagan vs. Mondale.

To be sure, the FreeCon statement is benign. Friends with whom I agree on 95 percent of all issues have signed the document. It affirms the principles of individual liberty, the pursuit of happiness, private enterprise, the free market, the rule of law, equality of opportunity, secure borders, and a “rational immigration policy.” That is the text. What’s not to like? There is, however, a subtext, explained by Avik Roy (the main organizer of the statement) in a National Review essay. 

Roy makes it clear that the purpose of the document is to repudiate the National Conservatism Statement of Principles (issued last year), of which I was a signatory, along with the tenets of National Conservatism and the New Right more broadly. And so, as Roy suggested, let us examine the significant differences between what is being touted as Freedom Conservatism (or what in Europe and Canada would be liberal conservatism) vs. National Conservatism.

Neither the FreeCon statement nor Roy’s essay evinces any awareness of the powerful adversary that American conservatives and “Americanists” more generally face in the summer of 2023. By “Americanists” I mean those conservatives and patriotic liberals who advocate the affirmation, improvement, and perpetuation of the American way of life. The opposite of an Americanist would be a Transformationist, one who seeks to fundamentally transform the United States of America.  

https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/ukraine-turkey-joe-biden-used-personal-email-share-some-government

In late November 2014 — before the rest of the world knew that American Martin O’Connor was about to be released from detention in Turkey — the U.S. embassy in Istanbul sent an email to the State Department that was then forwarded to senior advisers to then-Vice President Joe Biden, the Obama White House point man for many foreign policy crises.

“The lead attorney for Mr. O’Connor reports that the court granted the detention appeal and he expected Mr. O’Connor to be released from jail today, barring any unforeseen problems,” the U.S. embassy in Istanbul wrote in an email that got forwarded to top Obama administration security and diplomacy officials, including current Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland. “Mr. O’Connor will not be allowed to leave the country until his next hearing which is set for December 11, 2014. The lawyer expressed confidence that he will be able to leave after that hearing. The attorney is handling his release arrangements, pick up and temporary housing near his law firm’s office. Istanbul consular plans to speak with Mr. O’Connor after his release.”

State Department officials forwarded the information to the vice president’s office, where Biden aide Colin Kahl (now President Biden’s Undersecretrary of Defense for Policy) sent it to the private email account robinware456@gmail.com. It wasn’t just any private account. It was one of three pseudonym accounts used by Joe Biden.

Soon after the then-vice president would forward the information to his globetrotting son Hunter Biden with the subject line “Fwd: Mr. O’Connor Being Released from Detention today.”

The email is one of more than a dozen that Just the News obtained and reviewed over the last two years showing how Joe Biden’s personal email accounts were sometimes used during his first White House tenure to forward government information or discuss government  business with his son.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/18/left-wing-rage-dont-pretend-it-doesnt-exist/

The Southern Poverty Law Center has its “hate map” of conservative groups that it hopes to marginalize if not kill off entirely. Meanwhile, the feds are looking for vicious, bloodthirsty right-wingers under the bed. But a university survey recently found that the left is more prone to political violence than the right. It’s exactly what we have come to expect from a group that is so sure of its superiority and the importance of its agenda that it’s willing to break an infinite number of eggs so that it can make its authoritarian omelet.

The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats’ June survey of 3,543 adults has produced a lot of data noise but it also includes some useful information. Of course the media want to ring the bells over one finding in particular: an increase in the percentage those who agree that “the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.” According to the project, in early April only 4.5% of those polled agreed with that statement. By late June, though, it had risen to (a rounded-up) 7%, “the equivalent of an estimated shift from 12 million to 18 million American adults.”

The media-wide implication is that the growing support for using force to put Trump back in the White House is fueled by the extremism (and dare we say “semi-fascism”?) of Republicans and MAGA followers. A prime example of this bias is found in the headline over a story in The Hill. It reads “More say violence could be necessary to restore Trump to White House.”

A closer look at the data, however, show both Democrats (4.5%) and independents (7.8%) agree with the statement. So it’s not just Republicans who would be sympathetic to the use of force in favor of Trump. Isn’t that a point worthy of highlighting?

There’s another figure that raises concerns that the media don’t seem to care much about: 9% of Democrats “strongly” agree that “the use of force is justified to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president,” and another 7.1% merely agree. That’s a total of 16.1%, compared to the total of 9.5% of Republicans who strongly agree or just agree that force is justified to hand the presidency back to Trump.

Again, isn’t this a fact that needs to be emphasized?