RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/15/bidenomics-bidenflation/

We can imagine the White House summer meeting as President Joe Biden’s handlers, whoever they might be, desperately tried to figure out how boost his flagging favorability ratings among voters. Some genius, no doubt, shouted out “Bidenomics!” as just the ticket to repair his tattered reputation. They rolled it out and, well, Americans still aren’t buying it.

On Thursday, Biden’s people pushed him out once again to flog the nearly dead Bidenomics horse. At an appearance in Maryland touted by the administration as a “major” economic address, Biden told voters that his agenda is about “investing in America and investing in Americans,” and referred to Republican plans to reduce federal spending and lower taxes as “MAGAnomics.”

So far, such rah-rah, pro-Bidenomics rhetoric hasn’t convinced voters.

A recent CNN-SSRS poll, for instance, found that 58% of Americans say that Bidenomics has made the economy worse, up from 50% last year. This, despite a relentless tide of positive press in the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, a just-released Rasmussen Reports poll finds 52% saying the economy has become “worse” under Biden, versus 31% who say it’s improved. And our own recent I&I/TIPP Poll found a similar 51% who disagreed with Biden’s statement that his policies were “turning things around.”

Americans have good reason to be pessimistic. Recent headlines, mostly all about the ravages of inflation, and almost all within the last week, tell you why they’re not buying what Biden has to sell:

Bidenomics In Action: 16.7% Bidenflation — The Chickens Come Home To Roost, Hurting Americans (TIPP Insights)
Biden’s Food Inflation Record: Grocery Prices Up 19.6% (Breitbart)
Bidenomics strikes again: Real household income suffers biggest drop since Great Recession (Washington Examiner)
Credit card and car loan defaults hit 10-year high as inflation squeezes families (New York Post)
5 states’ residents got richer, but 17 states’ got poorer, new Census data shows (The Hill)
Inflation rises for second straight month in August on higher gas costs (USA Today)
Wholesale inflation surges more than expected in August (Fox News)
Inflation is weighing down Americans. Many trust Trump, more than Biden, to fix it (USA Today)
In a bad omen for inflation, US oil prices top $90 a barrel for the first time this year (CNN)

It seems there are lots of inflationary “bad omens” these days. At the heart of it all is what we might just as well call “Bidenflation.”

http://www.swtotd.blogsot.com

“I say again, the era of big government is over.”  President William J. Clinton   January 23, 1996

  “For he on honey-dew hath fed/ And drunk the milk of Paradise;” so ends Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan.” Xanadu, an extravaganza, was located in Mongolia, north of Beijing. Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, was Emperor of China. Xanadu became his first capital, later his summer palace. Khan was the founder of the Yuan Dynasty and ruled China for thirty-four years (1260-1294).

We in the United States have not been so grandiose…yet. However, in Washington there is a sanctimonious belief that all problems can be solved by government, that its bounty has no limits. In the September 12, 2023 issue of The Telegraph (London), Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and Jeremy Warner wrote: “The fiscal scale of Bidenomics is larger than Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s by a wide margin. It is larger than Johnson’s guns and butter in the 1960s, or Reagan’s military rearmament in the 1980s. We are witnessing an extraordinary experiment in U.S. economic policy.” The New Deal was a response to a global depression. Johnson’s Guns and Butter was to fund the Vietnam War and his “Great Society.” Reagan’s rearmament won the Cold War. Bidenomics was to mend the nation’s infrastructure, combat a pandemic that was already being addressed, and to fight inflation, a result of easy money, business closures during the pandemic, and rises in energy prices caused by Mr. Biden’s curtailment of exploration and production.

Expanding tentacles of our enlarged administrative state raise questions: How much larger can the federal government grow? White House employment alone, at 524 people, has grown by 27% in the past three years. Is it possible to shrink entitlements, the fastest growing segment of spending? What will be the effect of rising interest rates, which in two or three years will cost a trillion dollars a year? Interest costs are already roughly equal to defense spending. Will defense suffer in an increasingly dangerous world? (At 3.5% of GDP, defense spending is about half of what it was in 1982.)

The numbers are sobering. U.S. GDP is estimated to be $27 trillion in 2023. Total federal debt for this year is estimated to be $32 trillion, or 118.5% of GDP. In addition, state and local debt were $2.1 trillion in 2022. To put those number is in perspective, the ratio of federal debt to GDP at the end of World War II was 117.5 percent. That ratio declined for several years, troughing in 1981 at 32.5%. Fitch Ratings recently lowered their rating on U.S debt from AAA to AA+, saying that “the ratio of debt interest to tax revenue will reach 10% by 2025, the level where it starts to create a snowball effect.”