RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/11/fight-over-new-fbi-hq-part-of-larger-debate-on-draining-the-federal-swamp/

As of now, House Republicans have removed funds from the FY 2024 budget for the controversial $3.5 billion proposed relocation of the FBI’s Washington, D.C. headquarters to a new complex at one of three locations in the D.C. suburbs of Virginia or Maryland.

Some House Republicans want to keep the FBI headquarters at its current location and view the relocation proposal as unwise and wasteful. Others want to downsize, defund or eliminate the Bureau – and not to reward it with a sprawling new headquarters complex – because they believe it has been weaponized against conservatives.

There also is growing support by Republicans to save money and depoliticize U.S. government agencies by decentralizing them and moving most of their personnel out of the “Washington swamp” (the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area) to locations across the U.S.

The Political Battle Over a New FBI HQ

The FBI’s current headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover building, has been used by the bureau since 1974. It occupies a city block on Pennsylvania Avenue across the street from the Justice Department and equidistant between the White House and the U.S. Capitol.

FBI leaders have been fighting for a new headquarters building for over two decades because they claim the Hoover building is old and crumbling. They contend that a new and larger headquarters complex in suburban Maryland or Virginia will enhance the bureau’s operations and still be close enough to D.C. for its work with Congress, the White House, and federal agencies and courts.

President Trump opposed the FBI giving up its prime headquarters location and canceled the relocation. Instead, he ordered the FBI headquarters to be rebuilt at its current site. Congress blocked funding for this decision.

https://nypost.com/2023/08/11/merrick-garlands-latest-dirty-trick-to-protect-the-bidens/

Attorney General Merrick Garland may have just played his last trick card to save Joe Biden: appointing a special counsel to delay prosecution of his son Hunter.

With any luck, the official Justice Department final report on Biden family shenanigans will be released in December 2024, one month after the presidential election.

Perpetuating an investigation is the most respectable Washington cover-up scam.

Federal agencies and the Justice Department dragged out for five years the investigation of Hunter’s gun, tax and foreign influence peddling.

The statute of limitations already expired on several of his crimes, but that was OK because of the spelling of his last name.

Despite a string of crimes that would have sent average Americans up the river for a decade, Biden’s Justice Department cut a deal in June that permitted Hunter to plead guilty to misdemeanors, not serve a day in jail and dodge any other federal charges.

That deal collapsed when federal Judge Maryellen Noreika asked a few questions after she was blindsided by a last-minute sweeping exoneration paragraph added to the plea deal.

With no deal, Hunter Biden faced a federal trial.

The Justice Department cut a deal in June that permitted Hunter Biden to plead guilty to misdemeanors while not serving a day in jail and dodge federal charges.

But Garland came to Hunter’s rescue Friday by appointing David Weiss special counsel.

https://us.cnn.com/2023/08/11/economy/inflation-rate-spending/index.html

US inflation has had a snowballing effect on family budgets.

The typical American household spent $709 more in July than they did two years ago to buy the same goods and services, according to Moody’s Analytics.

That figure underscores the cumulative impact high inflation has had on consumer finances — even as price growth has cooled considerably in recent months.

“High inflation of the past 2+ years has done lots of economic damage,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, wrote in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Most of that increase in spending is driven by housing costs, which have surged, Zandi told CNN in an email on Friday. He added that families are also spending more at the grocery store; on buying, maintaining and insuring vehicles and on recreational services like cable.

Of course, paychecks have also grown over the past two years — but not by as much as the cost of living.

Inflation-adjusted earnings are stuck in 2019

Even though prices have soared, real earnings, which adjust for inflation, are stuck at late 2019 levels.

“Real earnings remain below what they would have been if not for the pandemic and the Russian war, which is weighing on the collective psyche,” Zandi told CNN in an email on Friday.

The good news is that wages are finally starting to outpace inflation and consumer price growth has eased significantly, so much so that many investors are betting the Federal Reserve is done raising interest rates.

Americans’ wages are finally outpacing inflation. Here’s why it may not last

Looking at just the last year, Zandi calculates that the typical household spent $202 more this July than they did a year ago to buy the same goods and services.

https://thespectator.com/topic/hunter-biden-special-counsel-david-weiss-investigating-probe/

At long last, Attorney General Merrick Garland decided to appoint a special counsel to continue the investigation of Hunter Biden, his family and associates. His choice: US Attorney David Weiss of Delaware, who has been on the case for several years. He was originally appointed as US attorney by Donald Trump, a point Democrats always highlight without noting that he was promoted by both Democratic senators from the state. 

Being named special counsel gives Weiss some authority beyond that of a regular US attorney. In particular, he can bring federal cases outside his narrow territorial domain without consent from US attorneys in those other districts. That’s an important point, since Weiss was apparently denied the right to bring at least two other cases his office sought. 

His appointment makes sense in one way: any other choice would have added years to the investigation. Weiss is already up to speed. The question is whether he is speeding down the right road. 

Weiss might have been appointed special counsel during the Trump administration, but outgoing AG Bill Barr has said he thought that decision should be left to the incoming administration. His rationale was a strong one: he feared that appointing a special counsel as one administration went out the door would set a precedent for future administrations to begin investigating their successors. If a special counsel was needed, Barr concluded, that should be up to the Biden administration. 

Shockingly, the Biden administration did not want to appoint a special counsel to investigate itself or the president’s family. The new attorney general could have given Weiss those additional powers two years ago but declined. Garland actually made the incredible argument that Weiss, as a US attorney, had more powers than he would have as a special counsel. 

Both Garland and Weiss have also told Congress that Weiss had ultimate authority to bring cases wherever he wished. But those statements may not be true, since Weiss was apparently blocked from filing cases in other jurisdictions, and since he told multiple IRS investigators that he was not the ultimate decision-maker on these cases. The latter statement directly contradicts what he and Garland have told Congress.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/08/the_deadly_untrustworthiness_of_general_mark_milley.html

Once, he was a soldier. Now, though, Milley has become a bureaucrat in uniform, trading national security for leftist policies.

General Mark Milley, who is Secretary of Defense, has forgotten that he was a soldier. Now, he’s only a leftist bureaucrat in uniform. Milley’s basic mode of operation is ingratiating himself to a political class that values the servile.

What makes Milley dangerous is his willingness to lie unhesitatingly, particularly in public. He is the highest-ranking military officer in the nation, and this matters. Technically the Secretary of Defense is a civilian post even though the Secretary may have a military background. The President and Congress provide civilian oversight but can only do so when presented with truthful, accurate information.

In June 2021, Tucker Carlson made some very strong remarks about Milley’s attempts to make teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the military seem benign. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Milley compared CRT to reading Marx and Mao, as if it’s just part of educating the troops about different ideologies. However, our military is not urging the adoption of Marxism. (At least not yet!) What Milley is doing is cooperating with the Democrat left to indoctrinate the troops in blatant racism.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/where-is-hillarys-indictment-on-the-same-charges-as-trump/

On December 12, 2016 (or D12), the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign endorsed a call by Christine Pelosi, the daughter of then House Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi, as well as other electors to receive an “intelligence briefing” on how “Russian interference was performed to help Donald Trump get elected” from Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Hillary Clinton and her senior campaign officials were aware that they had concocted the lie that the Russians had gotten Trump elected, outsourced it to a former British intelligence operative, Christopher Steele, who produced the infamous Steele dossier, and distributed it through the FBI and were exploiting it to subvert the Electoral College and hijack the presidential election.

The Clinton campaign was endorsing a move to influence members of the Electoral College to set aside their duty and corrupt the electoral votes. Electors are bound to vote in accordance with the ballot count. There was no purpose to a “briefing” on the conspiracy theories that were manufactured by the Clinton campaign except to persuade them to corrupt the vote.

The Wall Street Journal correctly described the move as an “Electoral College Coup”. Pelosi’s daughter and other Democrat electors were requesting “a briefing on all investigative findings, as these matters directly impact the core factors in our deliberations of whether Mr. Trump is fit to serve as President of the United States.” And they were asking it from Clapper who would go around pushing the Steele dossier and defending its conspiracy theories as based on facts.

Clapper, using similar language to the Democrat electors, would describe Trump as unfit.

The Clinton campaign endorsed this proposed Electoral College coup by claiming that the “electors’ letter raises very grave issues involving our national security. Electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution and we support their efforts to have their questions addressed.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/prosecutors-targeting-trump-gave-fbis-mccabe-a-pass/

Meet Molly Gaston.

“It is difficult to imagine a public interest stronger than the one in this case,” assistant special counsel Molly Gaston wrote in a court document filed Thursday, “in which the defendant — the former President of the United States — is charged with three criminal conspiracies intended to undermine the federal government, obstruct the certification of the 2020 presidential election, and disenfranchise voters.”

You may remember Molly Gaston from passes for Russiagate figures such as these.

In early 2021, Mr. Cooney pressed federal law enforcement officials to turn their attention to people in Mr. Trump’s orbit, including his flamboyant political adviser Roger J. Stone Jr., according to The Washington Post. He would eventually work on the successful prosecutions of Mr. Stone and another Trump adviser, Stephen K. Bannon.

He joined Mr. Windom’s team in mid-2022, then moved into Mr. Smith’s office late last year.

The assistant U.S. attorney in federal court on Tuesday, when a grand jury handed up a four-count indictment against Mr. Trump, was Molly Gaston, who has worked closely with Mr. Cooney on the Stone and McCabe cases.

See if you can spot the difference between the handling of the Stone, Bannon, and McCabe cases.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/4146449-the-new-york-times-seems-puzzled-by-bidens-low-approval-ratings-let-me-explain/

Peter Baker, White House correspondent for the New York Times, appears genuinely puzzled that President Biden’s approval ratings are not higher.  

He writes recently that many things are heading in the right direction: “Inflation at long last is down. So are gas prices and Covid deaths and violent crime and illegal immigration. Unemployment remains near record lows. The economy, meanwhile, is growing, wages are climbing, consumer confidence is rising and the stock market is surging.”

One negative trend, Baker notes, is Biden’s approval ratings which, in the latest New York Times/Siena poll, are at 39 percent, the lowest of any president at this point in his term but Jimmy Carter.  

In all of Baker’s lengthy exploration of the president’s prospects and standing, he mentions not one word about ongoing investigations into likely Biden corruption. No hint of the fastidious hearings being held by the House Oversight Committee under Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.). No reference to Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s past business partner, who blew up any remaining pretense that Joe Biden was not engaged in his son’s nefarious business activities in China, Ukraine and other countries.

Does Baker think that the Democratic Party’s “hear no evil” stonewalling on credible accusations that Joe Biden took a bribe from Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky will erase that charge from the nation’s consciousness? Do supporters of the president think it’s perfectly normal that Hunter Biden used dozens of shell companies to funnel money to family members, and also employed 14 encrypted apps and burner phones? That’s not normal.

The New York Times and Washington Post may not be reporting on these activities, but Democrats must know that the truth is seeping out. Thanks to the openness of Twitter, courtesy of Elon Musk, and to pervasive commentary elsewhere, Americans now know that Joe Biden is not the honest, moderate and likable person he pretended to be while running for president.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/davidhasanyi/2023/08/11/bidenomics-has-been-a-disaster-n1718157

After 40 years of “trickle-down economics,” President Joe Biden says, “Bidenomics is just another way of saying restoring the American Dream.”

It’s not often that a politician openly pledges to bring the country back to a time of crippling inflation, high energy prices and stifling interest rates. But this president is doing his best to keep that promise.

Unsurprisingly, “Bidenomics” is failing to gain traction among voters. This has caused consternation in the media. One thing to remember, though, is that “Bidenomics” isn’t really a thing. Unlike, say, “Reaganomics,” which helped bring about the largest expansion of the middle class in world history, the president does not subscribe to any coherent or tangible set of economic theories or principles. The White House defines its economic policy as being “rooted in the recognition that the best way to grow the economy is from the middle out and the bottom up,” which is just platitudinous gibberish.

“Bidenomics” encompass anything and everything that’s convenient for Democrats. And in this moment, it’s convenient for them to take credit for merely letting people go back to work. Biden, who once claimed that the Democrats $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan cost “zero dollars,” isn’t exactly a math whiz. But when he says stuff like “13.4 million jobs have been added to our economy” under his watch, more than “any other president in a full 4-year term,” anyone with even a passing familiarity with the events of the years preceding 2023 knows it’s a lie of omission.

The notion that presidents “create” jobs is itself a fantasy. In this case, though, Biden supported efforts to shutter private businesses during the pandemic, basically closing the entire economy, not only while running for president but after winning office. When Florida, and other states, attempted to ease some restrictions, Biden told them to “get out of the way” so that people could “do the right thing.” The pressure exerted on states to “do the right thing” was immense.

https://acdemocracy.org/blame-george-soros-for-the-pot-stench-ruining-americas-cities-and-addicting-her-citizens/

A major part of billionaire activist and philanthropist George Soros’s legacy will be the decriminalization of drug use in America. 

In the early 1990s, at the height of the crack epidemic, it was Soros who funded “harm reduction” clinics to distribute drug pipes as part of “safe smoking kits.” Similar “safe user kits” were made available to addicts in 2022 via the Biden administration’s crusade to enable illicit drug consumption throughout America.  

In 1994, shortly after Soros established his Open Society Institute in Manhattan, the mega pollical philanthropist decided to test the American criminal justice system and undermine the public’s resolve to maintain long-held attitudes and moral values. The savvy speculator selectively targeted criminal laws that governed the use of illicit drugs. At the time, using illegal substances was deemed unacceptable by 90% of Americans. But the crafty Soros anticipated that Americans’ attitudes would change once marijuana was legalized, and many would be willing to use drugs. He was right.

In three decades, Soros had managed to flip Americans’ views completely. A Pew Research Center survey in November 2022 found that 88% of the U.S. population supported the legalization of marijuana. His stunningly successful propaganda claimed that the enforcement of laws prohibiting the abuse of dangerous drugs caused “more harm than the drugs themselves.” In 1995, he acknowledged that “Some drugs are addictive,’ but falsely proclaimed “others, like marijuana, are not.”

Using illegal substances was once deemed unacceptable by 90% of Americans. But Soros anticipated that Americans’ attitudes would change once marijuana was legalized, and many would be willing to use drugs. He was right.