RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/23/russian-collusion-it-was-hillary-clinton-all-along/

After seven years of false charges and investigations of Donald Trump, both the FBI and Hillary Clinton walk away unscathed.

It was clear from the beginning that charges of “collusion” between Donald Trump and Russia during the 2016 election were phony — a cheap, and illegal, political trick. But they did their damage. While Trump beat Hillary Clinton, there has since been a non-stop Democratic Party-led campaign to tar him as a “traitor” or worse.

And, as the recent testimony of Special Counsel John Durham to Congress shows, Clinton lay behind this scheme to defraud American voters and throw an election. So, today, despite powerful evidence of official wrongdoing, we’re back where we were some seven years ago.

By the way, you might notice the headline above has quotation marks. That’s because it was the exact headline we placed on an editorial way back in August 2018. We didn’t need to change it a bit.

We wrote then: “It’s beginning to look as if claims of monstrous collusion between Russian officials and U.S. political operatives were true. But it wasn’t Donald Trump who was guilty of Russian collusion. It was Hillary Clinton and U.S. intelligence officials who worked with Russians and others to entrap Trump.”

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/adam-schiff-censured-house-false-allegations-trump-russia-collusion

The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to censure Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., for pushing claims that former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with Russia — a vote that made Schiff just the third member of the House to be censured since the turn of the century.

The resolution passed 213-209 in a vote — every Republican voted for it except for six who voted “present,” and every Democrat voted against it.

Immediately following the vote, Democrats gathered on the floor and chanted “Shame!” and “Disgrace!” as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., tried to gavel the House in order for several minutes. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., was heard calling McCarthy a “spiteful coward” and accusing him of “weak leadership.”

McCarthy then asked Schiff to present himself in the well of the House, and Democrats clapped and cheered as he approached. After being interrupted several times by Democrats, McCarthy said, “I have all night.”

Schiff then stood in well of the House as required by the resolution, and was hugged and cheered by dozens of Democrats who surrounded him. The measure also requires the House Committee on Ethics to investigate Schiff’s “falsehoods, misrepresentations, and abuses of sensitive information.”

It was the second time the House tried to pass a resolution censuring Schiff from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla. A resolution from Luna failed on the House floor last week because it recommended a fine against Schiff of $16 million, which Democrats and 20 Republicans opposed.

With that language removed, the resolution was able to pass on a party-line vote, which Luna said was needed to fight back against Schiff’s “lies” about Trump.

“As chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff launched an all-out political campaign built on baseless distortions against a sitting U.S. president, at the expense of every single citizen in this country and the honor of the House of Representatives,” Luna said before the vote. “With access to sensitive information unavailable to most members of Congress and certainly not accessible to the American people, Schiff abused his privileges, claiming to know the truth while leaving Americans in the dark about his web of lies… lies so severe that they altered the course of the country forever.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/irs-whistleblower-hunter-biden-probe-gary-shapley-joe-biden-bc42321d?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

One thing for readers to look for on Friday is what and where they read about Thursday’s testimony by a pair of Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers. Their claims, under oath at a House Ways and Means hearing, are newsworthy and politically explosive.

We’ve heard enough whistleblower tales over the years to be skeptical about claims that can be exploited by partisans, which is one reason we’ve been cautious about reporting the second-hand accounts about the IRS investigators from House Republicans. We wanted to see specific claims from specific individuals, and on Thursday we did.

Our Kimberley Strassel recounts some of the highlights from the testimony nearby. The details are shocking if true because they charge political interference and favorable prosecutorial treatment in the IRS probe of Hunter Biden. President Biden’s son agreed to a deal this week to plead guilty to two minor counts of failing to make proper tax payments.

But agent Gary Shapley claims his IRS unit recommended more serious felony charges based partly on what he described as a scheme to hide payments from Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that hired Hunter as a consultant and board member. Mr. Shapley claims U.S. Attorney David Weiss was blocked from pursuing those charges, which the Justice Department denies.

Mr. Shapley also recounts that his team obtained a July 30, 2017 WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden to Henry Zhao, a Chinese businessman. The testimony says Hunter wrote:

“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/22/the-toughest-job-in-d-c-transcribing-bidens-remarks/

Watching President Joe Biden try to make his way through a speech is painful enough. Reading a transcript of it is worse. Not just because Biden’s words are even more confusing in print, but because you start to feel a strong sense of pity for the person responsible for figuring out what he is trying to say, how much of it to transcribe verbatim, and which facts to correct.

We looked through Biden’s remarks from just this month and found 15 instances where the transcriber felt compelled to make corrections on things the president said.

Here’s an example from one 11-minute speech he gave over the weekend in Palo Alto.

Forty million — 40 million Americans already drinking water that thousands of farmers rely on for — for integration [irrigation].  And 40 million count on that river and so do the farmers….

Folks, flood mitigation: $3.5 million [billion] to reduce or eliminate the risk of repetitive flood damage to buildings, plus $1 billion in funding mitigation measures to increase community resilience, like supporting adaptations of hazard-resistant building codes

And maybe most important, I’ve committed by 2020 [2030], we will have conserved 30 percent of all the lands and waters the United States has jurisdiction over and simultaneously reduce emissions to blunt climate impacts.

Other examples from this month as they appear in the official White House transcripts:

“Mary Robinson [Barra], the Chairman of the Board of General Motors …”
“Instead, I signed into law the Bipartisan Safers [sic] Community Act, which you’ve referenced several times today …”
“Last summer, I had the honor of bestowing the Presidential Meda- — Medal of Freemon [sic] — Freedom on distinguished Americans …”
“The ticket seller, SeatGreek [SeatGeek], is also set to give customers the option of seeing all-in, upfront prices …”
“And I’m pleased we’re also joined by x-pay [sic] — xBk, a small venue in Des Moines, Iowa, that’s going be using all upfront pricing for its hundred events at — a year as well …”
“Let me tell you, the Inflation Reduction Act includes $369 billion to comat [sic] — combat climate change …”
“We made clear — they made clear that we’d rather th- — they’d rather threaten the default of the U.S. economy than cut or get rid of, for example, $30 billion in taxpayer subsidies to oil companies who made $200 million [sic] last year — billion.  I said ‘million.’  Billion dollars last year …”
“When we were at the G7, we talked about — one of the meetings was — they used to call the Build Back Better World. It’s not that now. It’s the PIII [PGII] — P-triple-I [sic] …”
“At the G7, it was originally called Build Back Better World, but we were talking about — there’s a new PPI [PGII] — anyway — an industrial policy that we’re all signed on to …”
“As Commander-in-Chief, I was proud to have ended the ban on transgester [sic] Americans — transgender Americans serving in the United States military …”
“And finally, this executive order means more resources, especially when it comes to improving military families’ access to quality, defendable [dependable], and affordable — affordable childcare …”
“This could have been the week that a catastrophic — catastrophic devault [sic] — default happened …”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-tyranny-of-the-clerks/

The Framers of our Constitution were well-versed through experience and history in the dangers of tyranny. Their education in Classical history and literature familiarized them with the political theory and practice of the world’s first constitutional governments like democracy and republics. Their European influencers like Montesquieu and David Hume were similarly trained. From these sources, and their own take on their experiences with King George III, the Framers learned that concentrated and centralized power ultimately leads to tyranny–– the degradation of civil liberties, freedom, and equality.

One form of despotism, however, they could not have anticipated is our modern tyranny of the clerks, the functionaries in hypertrophied government bureaucracies that degenerate into instruments of political factions to be used against rivals. For over a century the Constitution has been weakened and compromised by these unaccountable, mostly anonymous bureaucracies––as the excesses of federal agencies over the last seven years are now making obvious.

The idea of technocracy or rule by “experts,” of course, was not unknown in antiquity. Plato’s famous utopia in the Republic (c. 375 B.C.) imagined a state run by cognitive elite “guardians” created by covert eugenic marriages, and trained for five decades in philosophy and virtue. Subsequently the idea of the “philosopher king” remained a staple of political fantasy all the way down to Marxism’s “vanguard” of the elite intelligentsia who could discern what Marx called the “inner but concealed essential pattern” of economics and history.

But Plato’s ideal has always encountered the problem that Roman satirist Juvenal identified: “Who will actually guard the guardians?” Such utopian notions foundered on the empirical reality of a flawed, irrational, universal human nature driven by “passions and interests.” And one of the most dangerous and destructive is the lust for power that seldom is sated, and always craves more.

That tragic realism, an inheritance from both our Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman cultural traditions, was also shared by the Founders. As historian Walter A. McDougall writes, “[A]ll Federalists believed human nature was flawed . . . envisioned no utopias, put little trust in republican virtue, and believed the only government liable to endure was one taking mankind as it was and making allowance for passion and greed.” Hence the Constitution’s structure of divided, mutually checking balanced powers.

The progressives at the turn of the 20th century, however, believed that the Constitution was an anachronism based on outmoded beliefs like mankind’s flawed nature. Progressives like Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Croly, in contrast, argued that new “sciences” such as economics, sociology, and psychology had made obsolete tradition, faith, and history as guides to human nature––and Darwinism’s “natural selection” had shown that human nature, rightly guided by technocrats, similarly could progress beyond the old realist view of it as flawed and unchanging.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/21/america-wakes-up-to-woke/

Wokeness was envisioned as a new reboot of the coalition of the oppressed. 

Those purportedly victimized by traditional America would find “intersectional” solidarity in their victimhood owing to the supposed sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other alleged American sins, past and present. 

The so-called white male heterosexual victimizing class was collectively to be held responsible for their sinful triad of white “rage,” “supremacy,” and “privilege.” 

Class considerations became passé. The Duchess of Sussex, and the billionaires Oprah Winfrey and LeBron James, shared grievances against all whites, whether they hailed from Martha’s Vineyard or impoverished East Palestine, Ohio. 

A bicoastal elite would draft the woke agenda and the oppressed would follow as ordered. 

That top-down blueprint would embrace massive multibillion-dollar reparations to blacks. 

In lockstep, all victims would rally around a Green New Deal that mandated high energy costs to discourage consumption of fossil fuels. 

The new transgender canon mandated three sexes. Sex is socially rather than biologically determined. And there is a large, oppressed, and transgender population: this presents the next great civil rights struggle for America. 

Historical wokeism lodged a list of grievances against the supposedly flawed American past. Indicting the dead required statues to be toppled. Names had to be changed. Histories were to be rewritten. Even the foundational date of America was to be reconsidered and altered. 

Yet, the rainbow fabric of woke is now fraying—and for a variety of reasons. 

For one thing, woke took off after the perfect storm of the COVID pandemic, the devastating lockdown, the 120 days of violent rioting and looting following the death of George Floyd, and years of endemic Trump Derangement Syndrome. Most of those catalysts are waning. Temporarily unhinged Americans are slowly reviving. Millions of the comatose are waking up to normality—and don’t recognize their own country. 

Two, woke is retrogressive, reactionary, and anti-civilizational. Decriminalizing the legal code, defunding the police, failing to apply norms to the homeless population, and destroying meritocracy have all hollowed out our major cities. 

San Francisco was a far cleaner, safer, and kinder city 20, 40, or 80 years ago than it is today. 

A woke FBI, Pentagon, or airline industry becomes a matter of life and death. 

Three, in modern America, class is now a far more accurate metric of oppression than race or gender. 

It is one thing to restrict fossil fuel development if you are in the upper one percent income bracket, quite another if you commute 50 miles a day in a used car. If there are to be reparations, why include Eric Holder or Al Sharpton, but not indigent Hispanics, Asians, and poor whites? 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/leftist_rage_against_courthouse_artist_claiming_he_made_trump_too_handsome.html

In courthouses where cameras aren’t allowed, the courthouse artist produces the image of record.

Which is why assorted leftists exploded in rage at the bland, courthouse drawings of William Hennessey, Jr., who up until now has said that his work rarely draws any attention.

According to Jack Montgomery at the National Pulse:

Leftists raged at an obscure sketch artist following Trump’s arraignment in Miami, seething that the former president looked too young and handsome in his courtroom drawings.

 “The courtroom sketch artist, William Hennessy [J]r., is far too kind to [Donald Trump],” wrote one Twitter user.

 “His pastel drawings make the pig look at least 20 years younger and 90 pounds thinner.”

 “Any chance you can whip up a quick indictment for false depiction of an indicted grifter?” wrote another, tweeting at a parody account of Jack Smith.

Some Twitter users went so far as to link Hennessy’s Facebook page and encourage others to harass him.

 “Yo Bill, why trim 70lbs off Trump? Just weird. Do you privately think of him as a trim superhero?” demanded one person on a Facebook post.

The first thing this little ragefest tells us is that leftists have too much time on their hands, using their hours here on earth to complain about somebody else’s courthouse artwork. Montgomery’s piece has the drawings here.

The second thing this tells us is that leftists set a great store on how someone looks. They’re all in on looks-ism, despite their bony finger pointed at others for the same thing.

The third and most important thing this says is that hand drawn sketches, which was all the leftists got out of this trial, are not easily manipulated the way photographs are. That the leftists raged about Trump’s pictures being too handsome for their expectations brought to mind that had the pictures been photos instead of drawings, they would have been able to manipulate them into unflattering photos, what what with a plethora of inexpensive photo editing tools on the Internet. They could have reddened Trump’s face, as 60 Minutes once did to Trump’s advisor, Steve Bannon, to make him look like a drunk. Or, they could have given Trump a five o’clock shadow and painted some sweaty beads on his face to discredit him, the way once-vice president Nixon was discredited with those features during his debates with then-politician John F. Kennedy on television. They could have made Trump dirty, or pasty-pale, or back-shadowed, or better still, upshadowed, to get the image of Trump they wanted, and of course, made him look guilty or sleazy or dishonest to the casual observer. They could have Photoshopped in handcuffs or a bright orange jumpsuit, which is what they’ve slavered for for years. They can’t do that to even a reproduction of a drawing on the Internet, because the picture would simply be not true.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19745/federal-disinformation-bureaus

Recently, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines announced the creation of a new office within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI): The Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC).

Support in Congress means the money grab is on, with federal agencies vying to secure funds for the hot new topic to grow their bureaucracy, influence and power.

Other agencies already involved in disinformation are numerous…. The DHS has, or had, a Countering Foreign Influence Task Force… and a heavily criticized, ridiculed and now disbanded “Disinformation Governance Board.”

Is the threat of a new Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” as big as it is toxic?… is this function for the federal government even appropriate?

The American government is extremely capable at generating its own disinformation… Disappointingly, Americans have seen this capability firsthand. Some U.S. intelligence leaders have used their status to aggressively plant disinformation to undermine presidents and influence elections.

Consider Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and FBI Director James Comey, who used their positions to undermine incoming President-elect Donald Trump in January 2017 by leaking and hyping to the media information based on a deceptive briefing they provided to Trump to begin framing him for supposedly colluding with Russia in the disruptive, two-year pretend-investigation known inside the FBI as “Crossfire Hurricane” and outside it as “the Russia Hoax.”

The “Russia Hoax,” it turned out — as its perpetrators reportedly knew all along — had been organized and funded by Trump’s presidential election opponent Hillary Clinton — evidently to deflect attention from her extensive destruction of classified material — as well as the Democratic National Committee; fraudulently prosecuted by the FBI, and laundered by the Perkins Coie law firm.

Other recent allegations about potentially malign activities by our government abound. The FBI incidentally collected data without a warrant on U.S. citizens 3.4 million times in 2021. Thirty percent of the times the FBI did so, it acted in error or roughly one million times.

The evidence appears to be overwhelming….. When Congress has set lines, the Intelligence Community and law enforcement have been more than willing to overstep their bounds and stretch their legal authorities.

It is time to hold those responsible accountable…. Crucially, given the federal government’s repeatedly demonstrated disregard for the law, it is time to consider whether it should even be engaged in this effort. It should not. The American government, based on the First Amendment, should not be anywhere near regulating protected speech. The American government should not be deciding what speech should be regulated and what speech should not.

Recently, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines announced the creation of a new office within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI): The Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC). It would encompass “election threat work, essentially looking at foreign influence and interference in elections, but it also deals with disinformation more generally.” Legislation creating the center was passed by Congress and signed into law in 2022.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/john-stossel/2023/06/21/less-freedom-n1704919

Politicians claim their bills bring us good things. Free health care! Child care! A cellphone for all!

But government isn’t Santa Claus. Government is force. Most every law takes away a little of our money or freedom or both.

The Heritage Foundation ranks economic freedom across the globe. The United States once ranked No. 4 in the world, but we’ve been in decline. This year, as my new video explains, we’re 25th.

“If you care about living a prosperous life, you should care about what government economic policies are,” says The Heritage Foundation’s Derrick Morgan.   

The foundation ranks countries’ economic freedom based on things like rule of law, regulatory efficiency, open markets, fiscal health, etc. 

The big reason the USA fell in the rankings is that Congress spends so much more money than government can squeeze out of us in taxes.  

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/21/the-great-white-hunter-privilege/

Presidential son Hunter Biden got the deal of a lifetime when he agreed to plead guilty to a pair of federal tax charges and a single federal firearm offense. He will reportedly be placed on probation for the former and dodge punishment altogether for the latter.

In effect, he just has to say “sorry” for “​​owing in excess of $100,000 in federal income taxes” in 2017 and 2018 but failing to pay “the income tax due for either year.” To walk away from the charge that he lied on a form during a gun purchase (he said he did not have a drug problem), he evidently has to do no more than attend a diversion program.

Could any of us have received such a cushy arrangement for the same crimes from the Justice Department? Could a son of Donald Trump, or the son of any prominent Republican lawmaker, get off so easy?

C’mon, man. We all know the answer. It’s good to be a Biden.

Clearly it was too much to ask that prosecutors make an example out of Hunter. Federal prosecutors are throwing their books at January 6 offenders as a warning to anyone who might want to protest for the wrong side, but apparently Democratic Party status has its privileges.

Naturally, Republicans are angry. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis complained about Hunter’s “sweetheart deal.” Rep. James Comer of Kentucky called it a “slap on the wrist.” Oklahoma Rep. Kevin Hern said the president’s son was treated with “kid gloves.”

Which means the story now in the media will be about how the GOP is weaponizing the plea deal for political purposes. The offenses of a presidential son? Covered and smothered like Waffle House hash browns.

Meanwhile, probes into Joe “The Big Guy” Biden’s classified document stashes and credible accusations of him selling his office to foreign interests for financial gain are being slow walked – if they’re moving at all. It seems the Justice Department can investigate and prosecute only one document case at a time, the sole focus in the foreseeable future being the legal action against Donald Trump.

Bribery? That can wait until either Biden is out of office – and too old prosecute, because that would just be cruel, the same people now propping up the shell of a man will say – or the Democrats have such a tight grip on the federal government that neither man can be touched.

God save the queen, man, and Democrats save their own.