RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/the_big_takeaway_from_an_imminent_trump_arrest.html

In an announcement that has sent shockwaves through the nation, former president Donald Trump declared that his arrest is imminent.  This declaration, shocking as it is, should be a cause for concern for anyone who values the principles upon which our nation was built.  As citizens, it is our duty to scrutinize the implications of this ongoing political assault.

In Mr. Trump’s words, this investigation is a “witch hunt,” an attempt to weaponize the law enforcement apparatus against him.  It appears to be an unprecedented attack on a former president, transforming political disagreements into legal battles, an alarming trend that threatens the stability of our constitutional republic.

The legal issues currently surrounding Mr. Trump range from a New York State case involving payments for a nondisclosure agreement to a federal case in Miami related to handling classified documents.  Now he is a target of the special counsel investigation of the January 6 Capitol Free Speech Demonstrations.  This exhaustive pursuit raises questions about the impartiality of our justice system, which should remain free from political biases.

On January 6, a faction of the crowd engaged in illegal activities, leading to a breach of the Capitol by some suspected of being planted provocateurs to discredit the peaceful event.  The justice system responded by indicting over a thousand individuals, with some defendants held for over 800 days before their trials.  Contrast this with the non-arrests or slaps on the wrists of participants of the Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots.

Labeling the actions of a few as an “insurrection” and using it to generalize the entire crowd is a blatant attempt to paint conservatives and Trump-supporters as extremists.  Such a narrative deepens divisions and fosters animosity.  These blanket accusations undermine the constitutional rights of millions of Americans and disregard their legitimate concerns over election irregularities.

Ironically, the same voices that dismiss calls for law and order in the face of destructive riots in our cities now cry foul, alleging an insurrection where there was none.  Law enforcement should never be a tool for political gamesmanship, yet we are witnessing its blatant misuse.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/07/senate_republicans_despise_their_voters.html

Lisa Murkowski is the perfect mascot for Senate Republicans.  She is a Democrat in all but name, an aristocrat who inherited her office, and a beneficiary of rigged elections.  She has more in common with Nancy Pelosi than the average Republican voter, and every time Alaskan Republicans attempt to throw her out of office, Mitch McConnell’s minions manipulate the rules to save her.  

For McConnell, Murkowski is another beholden senator kept securely in his pocket who will vote how he wants on any given day.  That might not be so bad (except for the good people of Alaska, whom she purportedly represents) if McConnell were not also an aristocrat who routinely betrays Republican voters.  However, because his loyalties lie with President Xi, multinational corporations, the World Economic Forum, and his good friend Joe Biden, China Mitch uses the leash around Murkowski’s neck only when he needs help sticking it to the American people.  And oh, how Senate Republicans love to screw over the American people!

I mention this person because she and other backstabbing Senate Republicans (think John Cornyn, Mitt Romney, John Thune, etc.) got together to do their version of Festivus in July, during which they told The Hill how much they absolutely loathe normal Republican voters.  “[O]ur party is becoming known as a group of kind of extremist, populist, over-the-top [people] where no one is taking us seriously anymore,” Murkowski laments.  

Our party?  Alaskan Republicans tried to cashier your rear years ago, and you thumbed your nose at their wishes, ran as a write-in candidate, and got elected by Democrats.  Instead of stripping you of your ranking position on choice committee assignments, Senate Republicans celebrated your “victory” over the actual Republican nominee (and Tea Party favorite, Joe Miller) by preserving your seniority.  Last year, Republicans again tried to be done with you, and McConnell and his boys rigged the election by implementing ranked-choice voting — an incumbent protection racket that also defeated Sarah Palin and sent a Democrat to the House!  Deep-red Alaska can’t represent conservatives’ interests when Senate Republicans work with Chuck Schumer to benefit Barack Obama’s favorite candidates!

That is the absurdity of the Murkowski position.  She and her ilk believe that the Republican Party should be represented by individuals who adore Barack Obama, voted for Hillary Clinton, and consider child-sniffer Joe Biden a close personal friend.  And because she is too daft to grasp the mood of the country and such a product of venal nepotism as to have scant self-awareness, she thinks the riffraff will eventually see things her way.  If they actually had elections in Alaska, Murkowski’s campaign slogan really could be “Let them eat cake,” and nobody would bat an eye.  It is what abused voters expect when Dirty Mitch McConnell’s election-riggers continue to hand out fortune cookies to the natives advising, “You shall be represented by a Democrat in Republican clothing.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/when-investigators-wont-investigate-joe-biden

One of the murkier aspects of congressional Republicans’ investigation of President Biden’s financial history concerns an allegation that Biden, when he was vice president, accepted a $5 million bribe from the corrupt Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. The alleged scheme also involved Biden’s son Hunter. Burisma, of course, was the company that for a time paid Hunter Biden about $1 million a year to do mostly nothing.

At issue is something called a form FD-1023, an FBI document that is said to “memorialize a confidential human source’s conversations with a foreign national who claimed to have bribed then-Vice President Joe Biden,” in the words of Kentucky Republican Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. That FBI confidential human source, Comer continued, was no fly-by-night character. Instead, he was a “trusted” source who has worked with the FBI “for over 10 years” and was paid “over $200,000” for his work during that time. “This is one of our highest-paid, most trusted, most respected, most effective FBI informants in the whole bureau,” Comer told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo on June 15.

In other words, it was a serious allegation from a serious source. Yet the FBI, Comer said, “never did one single thing to investigate this.” In a June 28 press release, Comer added, “The FBI has been sitting on allegations for years that Joe Biden solicited and received a bribe while he was vice president of the United States. We have no confidence that the FBI did anything to verify the allegations contained within this record and may have intentionally withheld it during the investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax evasion.”

Here’s the way investigators look at this. Is the bribery allegation true? Who knows? It might be false. It might be a misunderstanding. It might be a political hit job. Or it might be true. In any event, the only way its truth or falsity can be established is by investigation. If you don’t investigate, you’ll never know.

That is why top lawmakers, like Comer and Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, are pressing the FBI to tell them what the bureau did to investigate the source’s story. That has been the one key question they have asked the FBI and Justice Department all along: Did you investigate this? And that is what the FBI and Justice Department have refused to answer.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/17/the-supreme-court-ethics-scandal-is-the-new-russia-collusion-hoax/
Turning to Sheldon Whitehouse for ethical guidance is like seeking truth from Adam Schiff.

Senate Democrats are advancing a doomed Supreme Court “ethics” bill that would withhold $10 million in funding from Chief Justice John Roberts until the Supreme Court has “put into effect a code” for all justices.

The Senate doesn’t have the power to dictate how the Supreme Court conducts its business — any more than SCOTUS has the power to prescribe rules for the Senate. They know it. Then again, the effort to intimidate and delegitimize the court is meant to corrode constitutional governance, so perhaps the bill makes a certain amount of perverse sense.

Of course, turning to the likes of Sheldon Whitehouse and Dick Durbin for ethical guidance is much like seeking truth from Adam Schiff. And much like the Russia-collusion hoax, the effort to destroy the Supreme Court is a highly coordinated partisan scheme.

First, anti-court left-wing activist groups cook up some ethics “scandals.” These accusations are then laundered by complicit or credulous leftist media outlets for public consumption. Then, the bogus scoops are held up by partisans as proof of alleged wrongdoing. Everyone, other than perhaps the most gullible partisan hysteric, understands what’s happening.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19806/cisa-new-ministry-of-truth

A new interim report from the House Judiciary committee highlights politically motivated mission creep where we might least have expected it: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

The agency went, for example, from, ensuring the digital security of American voting systems to censoring criticism of those systems.

After the Biden administration was sued in federal court, CISA outsourced its censorship operation to a non-profit group funded by CISA itself. The Judiciary Committee report charges that the outsourcing was an implicit admission that CISA knew that its censorship activities were unconstitutional. CISA, meanwhile, said that it out sourced material to another agency to “avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”

There is more to see here, however, than just a thwarted attempt by a government bureaucracy to police the political speech of the American people in violation of the First Amendment. It is the use of funded or politically affiliated non-profit groups to do the government’s dirty work for it.

This parallels the behavior of the Justice Department under then Attorney General Eric Holder during the Barack Obama administration. The Government Accountability Institute did research into the DoJ’s pattern of using “consent decrees” to force private companies with threats of anti-discrimination lawsuits to donate funds to one or more designated non-profit organizations on a list helpfully provided by the Justice Department. These groups were largely “social justice warriors” who would then use the money to exert political pressure. This practice was immediately banned by the Trump administration when it took office in 2017, but that ban was quietly reversed by Biden four years later.

Not only that, but after the Biden administration took office, Vijaya Gadde — the woman who, a few weeks before the October 2020 presidential election decided that Twitter should censor the New York Post’s scoop about Hunter Biden’s laptop — became a member of CISA’s “Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation and Disinformation” subcommittee. Gadde, you may recall, was unceremoniously fired by Elon Musk on his first day of owning Twitter.

According to a report in The Intercept, this committee in 2022 recommended that CISA closely monitor “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper partisan media, talk radio and other online resources.

What the Judiciary Committee’s work so far has highlighted is the creation of “feedback loops”: that an agency of the government can create and use advisory boards to go well beyond its statutory mission, giving it cover for exercising power Congress never meant it to have.

How many more federal agencies are doing similar things?

https://www.city-journal.org/article/miss-netherlands-is-the-face-of-western-self-cancellation

Once upon a time, progressives sneered at beauty pageants. Whether the Miss America or the Miss Universe contest, all such “meat markets” objectify women, we were told. They turn females into sex objects! Reinforce patriarchal stereotypes! Teach girls that being in a state of partial undress, rather than learning how to code, is the path to success!

For girls in the 1970s, getting hotheaded about such chauvinist-pig traditions was a rite of passage, providing nearly as much satisfaction as biting off a hapless male’s head for holding open a door or helping with overhead luggage. Males soon got over such atavistic instincts, liberating females to lug their suitcases up subway stairs on their own, as able-bodied males unconcernedly pass them by. But the beauty pageant would not die. Organizers responded to the feminist critique by accentuating the social-activism component of the competition, eliciting from the contestants ever more fervent recitations of their aspirations, say, to found organizations for battered women.

Leftists were not impressed. For them, the beauty pageant remained an object of derision. Until now. For much of last week, the mainstream media breathlessly covered the coronation of “Miss Netherlands,” as she continues on her teary journey toward an ultimate goal of being crowned Miss Universe. One might even hear Bert Parks crooning “There She Is” in the background. And the reason for this sudden interest in an obscure preliminary stage of the contest? Miss Netherlands is really a Mister. Suddenly, even the swimsuit competition has become a worthwhile endeavor in a female’s life, as long as that female is a biological male.

An old school feminist might respond: isn’t that just like a man! Not content to dominate 99.99 percent of the world, males in all their toxic maleness have to jump in and take over the last .01 percent of what has been left to females. And the females are supposed to step aside and fall in line for the new top dog, even if he wears a dress.

The mystery is that females, by and large, are doing just that.

But if males are going to muscle females aside and claim to be not only the top male dog but also the top female dog, they could at least have offered some interesting new ways of being female. Instead, the most striking aspect of the trans revolution is its embrace of the most allegedly regressive female stereotypes. For the finals of the Miss Netherlands contest, Rikkie Valerie Kollé, né Rik, appeared in a cherry-red satin gown, slit all the way up the side to reveal the entirety of his long, gorgeous leg, predictably shod in strappy five-inch stiletto heels. The sleeveless, backless plunging dress was held up by the slenderest of spaghetti straps over Rikki’s suspiciously broad shoulders. Rikki’s long tresses were blow-dried into wavy smoothness, his foundation and blush exquisitely modelled to create the illusion of flawless skin. In short, the very image of Las Vegas glamour.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-new-censorship-2

On March 9, in the bowels of the Capitol building, a gathering took place of a type that might be possible only in Washington, D.C. The host was Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, chair of the curiously named House Select Committee on the Weaponization of Government. The guests: Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, semi-famous for revealing, in the “Twitter Files,” the deeply tangled relationship between the social-media platform and the federal government. The subject was freedom of speech in the digital age.

The Republicans had recently won a slim majority in the House and were eager to score points off the Biden administration. Taibbi and Shellenberger had been invited because they had a troubling story to tell about the abuse of power—what Jordan meant by “weaponization.”

According to Taibbi, federal entities, from the White House to the CIA, had developed a “formal system” to convey their demands to the digital platforms regarding what could be said online and who could say it. A gaggle of “quasi-private” organizations, many of them recipients of government funding, acted as force multipliers, repeating the same demands. Rather than question these practices, the news media aped them, becoming “an arm of a state-controlled thought-policing system.” Shellenberger called it the “censorship-industrial complex.”

The substance of the Twitter Files appeared to confirm these allegations. The FBI loomed large in Twitter’s content-moderation decisions. The agency dedicated as many as 80 staffers to hunting transgressors on the platform, overwhelming Twitter executives with requests for action and ultimately paying the company $3.4 million for its troubles. During the controversies surrounding the 2020 presidential campaign, Twitter leaned heavily on the judgment of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

Federal intervention in digital speech followed a tendentious pattern. Any opinion that offended establishment sensibilities was a target for suppression. That included left-wing populist views and eccentrics like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but most of the heretical voices belonged to Donald Trump and his Republican supporters. During the 2020 campaign, Trump was “deamplified” by Twitter—meaning that he was essentially talking to himself. After the January 6 riots in Washington, Twitter booted him off the platform, though it never identified how he had violated its terms of service. FBI personnel took jobs with Twitter in significant numbers, intensifying the partisan tilt. James Baker, who played a leading role in the Trump investigation while at the FBI, became a persistent advocate of expelling Trump after moving to Twitter.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/18/kamalas-population-bomb/

Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris received a round of applause when she said “​​when we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water.” And with that, she pulled back the curtain to expose one of the many horrors that is usually endorsed not quite so openly by the political left.

We acknowledge that Harris might have lost another one of the many battles she and her White House boss have with teleprompters and public speaking in general. The official transcript scrubs “population” and replaces it with “pollution,” as if that was the term the speech called for.

Maybe it is the word she was supposed to use. But we can’t rule out the likelihood she made a Kinsley gaffe, revealing a truth she didn’t intend to, because her side of the aisle has long been aligned with population-reduction cranks.

One Democrat who hasn’t been shy about population limits is Bernie Sanders, the Vermont bedlamite. During a 2019 town hall meeting, Sanders said “yes” when asked if he asked about “the need to curb population growth” in order to “address climate catastrophe.” He spoke for many that day.

Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich was not the first to advocate cutting the planet’s population, but he did blow up the world in 1968 with “The Population Bomb,” in which he shared his conviction that unless humanity was culled, the near future was one of “mass starvation” on “a dying planet.” To get to the beginning we’d have to go back at least as far as the late 18th century, when Englishman ​​Thomas Robert Malthus wanted to “court the return of the plague” and forbid “specific remedies for ravaging diseases” to stop what he thought was the pestilence of overpopulation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sexual-ideology-identity-trans-gender-school-dysphoria-puberty-blocker-parent-rights-seattle-new-jersey-florida-nea-777ffa84?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

A campaign is under way to introduce schoolchildren to the latest ideas about sexual orientation and “gender identity.” Pupils in New Jersey are expected to understand the differences between these concepts by fifth grade. An official of the National Education Association, the largest U.S. teachers union, recommends asking preschoolers their “preferred pronouns.” The NEA’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer+ Caucus has a reading list for elementary-school children that includes titles such as “My Princess Boy” and “Jacob’s New Dress.”

It’s important that children learn to accept differences; but indoctrinating them or promoting an agenda is another matter. Parents, many of whom find such ideas objectionable or exotic, are often kept in the dark about what their children are being taught, or told they have no right to opt out if they are informed. Parents around the country have filed lawsuits alleging that school officials withheld vital information about their own children from them.

Children develop at their own pace. Many aren’t psychologically or emotionally ready to discuss or think about their “identity.” I have seen many young adolescents overwhelmed by the need to know “who and what I am” in a heated and socially pressured environment. I have even had teen patients tell me that “identifying as heteronormative”—yes, they’ve been trained to talk that way—is stressful in an environment that idealizes being “queer.”

Preadolescent children are only beginning to discover who they are. All children (adults too) have both masculine and feminine parts of their personalities, which they should be free to explore in play. If a girl doesn’t like wearing dresses and a boy enjoys playing with dolls, it’s cruel and destructive to lead them to believe they’re actually members of the opposite sex.