RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-weaponization-of-the-fbi-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/

By some miracle, Republicans managed to time the news cycle correctly last week. The Durham report was released, excoriating the FBI’s handling of pretty much everything since Former FBI Director Robert Muller. And, the House Judiciary Committee held additional whistleblower hearings. Things could hardly look worse for the FBI — and, the once venerable institution deserves the scorn and opprobrium being heaped on it by the bucket full.

What exists now, barely more than a year out from my retirement, is unrecognizable.

It’s deeply saddening, watching an institution designed to ferret out and prosecute the enemies of the constitution being infiltrated, compromised, and consumed by the very ideologies it was created to combat. This isn’t something to be celebrated or trivialized by silly slogans like, “the FBI should be Control-Alt-Deleted.” Unfortunately, conservative media is all too happy to propagate such fatuousness. Soundbites rule over substance.

The media industrial complex is popularizing the same spirit of demagoguery that got us into this mess in the first place. It’s so easy to fall into this trap, especially when the enemy is within the gates. The loudest voices aren’t necessarily right.

Our country is in peril, perhaps like never before. The FBI ethos has been eroded, like a once proud marble edifice pitted, cracked, and broken by the onslaught of weather and time. And, just like the processes that reduced ancient structures to rubble, a process has been at work to deconstruct our civil society and our institutions.

The problem isn’t complex, its systemic, and the cause isn’t served by celebrating the loathsome. Perhaps I’m just too old school for this particular debate, but doxxing fellow FBI street agents in the name of “whistleblowing” is inexcusable. For me, it’s nothing less than fratricide — the guilty should face a rhetorical firing squad.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/01/how-to-defund-the-irs-top-10-reasons-for-a-national-sales-tax/

Let’s pick up where our IRS-defunding I&I editorial board brethren lately left off: “There is … a better way to fund federal operations. Move to a single-rate income tax paid monthly with no deductions and no withholding, or implement a national sales tax.”

This commentator chooses National Sales Tax for several trillion dollars, Alex. While he has engaged in many exercises to explain why that levy solves a whole range of problems, here are some highlights in Lettermanesque fashion – the Top 10 Reasons for a National Sales Tax:

10. Keep it simple, stupid! Flat tax or no, the biggest problem with an income tax: it’s on income. The complexity and intrusion relates to determining what is and isn’t, and tracking, income.

Uncle Sam gets to snoop on hundreds of millions of taxpayers to make sure you’re not hiding income. Admittedly, for most taxpayers calculations get simpler without deductions, exemptions and the like. But eliminating withholding would only increase demands for government to stick its nose into your business to ensure you’re not getting money under the table. Especially for the self-employed.

Even many employees get income from multiple sources, including savings and investments. The revenooers want all those records, plus taxpayers will also have to pay monthly to account for non-payroll sources. Who’s going to tell them how much? Certainly not the IRS. Citizens will overpay to be safe, still being stuck with near-compulsory overcharges.

Moreover, what about the corporate income tax? Twenty-seven million private companies generate billions of calculations and pages of required record-keeping. Will that tax also be flat? Gucci Gulch is guffawing.

A sales tax? One number for companies: percentage of sales. For consumers? No record-keeping, filing, or engaging professional help to pay a bill for a service. And no spying on individuals or companies other than sales income.

9.  Jobs, jobs, jobs. The second reason taxing income (and payrolls) stinks: your government taxes work and hiring. While paying people not to work. Madness.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/01/the-debt-ceiling-crisis-might-be-over-but-the-debt-crisis-has-just-begun/

Late Wednesday, the House passed an agreement to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for a few micro changes in spending. But despite all the (wildly exaggerated) warnings about a default, complaints from both sides about the terms of the deal, and what no doubt will be celebrations in the White House for getting a deal done – this fight has always been a sideshow. It’s the debt itself that poses the real and immediate crisis. And this debt ceiling bill does absolutely nothing to address that.

In other words, it’s business as usual in Washington, and anyone celebrating this agreement should be run out of town on a rail.

Here’s what the country faces today.

Interest payments are exploding: Thanks to unprecedented spending during COVID, not only does the government owe interest on $3 trillion more debt than it did when Joe Biden took office, interest rates are going up thanks to the inflation that all that reckless spending sparked. The chart below shows the shocking trend. In just the past year, quarterly federal interest payments shot up 54%.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/05/30/u-s-government-now-confiscating-private-legal-fund-donations-to-jan-6-defendants-n1699148

Via the Associated Press (emphasis added):

Less than two months after he pleaded guilty to storming the U.S. Capitol, Texas resident Daniel Goodwyn appeared on Tucker Carlson’s then-Fox News show and promoted a website where supporters could donate money to Goodwyn and other rioters whom the site called “political prisoners.”

The Justice Department now wants Goodwyn to give up more than $25,000 he raised — a clawback that is part of a growing effort by the government to prevent rioters from being able to personally profit from participating in the attack that shook the foundations of American democracy.

An Associated Press review of court records shows that prosecutors in the more than 1,000 criminal cases from Jan. 6, 2021, are increasingly asking judges to impose fines on top of prison sentences to offset donations from supporters of the Capitol rioters.

The U.S. legal system is now transparently weaponized against what the DHS has alternatively described as “domestic terrorists” and “white supremacists” — according to the Department, the #1 terror threat in the country.

https://nypost.com/2023/05/30/biden-family-under-the-protection-of-the-nations-top-lawmen/

Here’s a novel concept: The FBI is not above the law. 

In theory, of course, it’s true, as in no American is above the law.

But is it really true in the sense that its leaders can be brought to justice if they break the law? 

That’ll be the day. 

Ever hear of Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok?

They were J. Edgar Hoover without the charm, spied on a presidential campaign without sufficient evidence, lied to the courts and never paid a price. 

In fact, each got a lot richer thanks to the big shots who monetize the Hate Donald Trump fan clubs in cable TV and publishing houses. 

Playing hardball 

The unmistakable lesson is that crime, or something very much like crime, paid handsomely in their cases.

If they weren’t above the law, they were certainly beyond its reach. 

So we must believe that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was speaking hopefully, not literally, when he told Fox Tuesday morning that unless FBI Director Christopher Wray turns over a document alleging Joe Biden sold his office as part of a $5 million bribery scheme when he was vice president, Congress will move to hold him in contempt. 

“I personally called Director Wray and told him he needs to send that document,” McCarthy said.

“We have jurisdiction over this . . . And if he does not follow through with the law, we will move contempt charges against Christopher Wray and the FBI. They are not above the law.” 

To which Wray effectively replied, go ahead, make my day, with the FBI later refusing to give up the document.

Republicans can pass their contempt citation, but it’s up to the Justice Department to turn contempt into a prosecution. 

And anybody who thinks Attorney General Merrick Garland is going to prosecute Wray for shielding the Biden family hasn’t been paying attention.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/31/will-your-next-auto-be-an-ev-most-say-no-ii-tipp-poll/

Policymakers inside the Biden administration have repeatedly assured Americans that electric vehicles (EVs) are an unavoidable and essential part of the “net-zero” carbon emissions world that they’re trying to regulate into existence. But despite hefty subsidies and future bans of gasoline-powered cars, Americans aren’t ready to jump on the EV bandwagon, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

For our most recent online public opinion poll of 1,412 drivers, taken from May 3-5, we asked a straightforward question of consumer intent: “How likely will you consider buying/leasing an electric vehicle for your next car?”

Among those responding, 53% said they were “not likely” to consider an electric car, while 39% said they were “likely” to. The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.6 percentage points.

But, to spout an inevitable cliche, the devil once again lurks in the details. Just 16% of those answering the poll said they’re “very likely” to consider an EV, versus 23% who said they were “somewhat likely.”

On the other side, more than a third — 36% — said they were “not at all likely” to consider an EV. Another 17% said they’re “not very likely” to do so.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

In his 1982 story of a small Irish village, Passing the Time in Ballymenone, American historian Henry Glassie (1941-) wrote: “History is not the past but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view…” All histories reflect the author. But good historians account for that, differentiating between actual events and their personal opinions. The Founding Fathers were conscious of history when they selected Washington as the capital of the new United States in 1790. It was a “federal enclave,” separate from both the commercial/industrial north and the agrarian south. It was not beholden to one party or one faction.

However, over time, as its bureaucracy increased and as public sector unions took sway, Washington changed; so that today in the District, according to the Pew Research Center, Democrat registrations, among federal government employees, outnumber Republican registrations two to one. While the leaders of Washington’s agencies reflect whichever party is in power, permanent federal government employees are, on balance, sympathetic to the Democrat Party.

The purpose of the Durham Report was to shine light on nefarious attempts to affect the outcome of the 2016 election – to address the widely accepted view that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to affect the outcome of the Presidential election that year. It also offers an alternative (and more accurate) perspective on subsequent efforts to undermine Mr. Trump’s Presidency. The Report details how the nation’s premier investigatory and intelligence services, in cooperation with the Clinton campaign, falsely implicated Mr. Trump as having colluded with Vladimir Putin to sway the election.  

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19679/non-us-citizens-voting

You probably know the [National Voter Registration Act] as “Motor Voter.” It is the federal requirement that requires state motor vehicle offices to offer voter registration and the ability to update your address.

Sounds convenient? Now, we have data showing one of the side effects of Motor Voter is to put non-citizens onto American voter rolls.

[W]e have collected extensive records of non-citizens asking to be removed from the voter rolls. Sometimes those records reveal how the foreign citizen was registered to vote, and the Motor Voter process represents the vast majority of cases.

Chicago officials provided registration records where some foreign nationals even checked “NO” to the question of whether the person is a United States citizen, and were still registered.

The Pennsylvania State Department admitted that due to what election officials referred to as a “glitch” that they had been accidentally registering foreign nationals to vote for two decades. They have been fighting for over five years to conceal details, including the number of foreign nationals the Commonwealth registered to vote by mistake.

The reports from Maricopa County and Chicago are not an inventory of every non-citizen vote, but only those who informed election officials they were not American citizens. So, the catalog of confessed non-citizens is almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg.

What can be done about non-citizens registering to vote?

Congress can solve the problem by allowing states to validate citizenship effectively. This could be as easy as providing a passport, birth certificate or other evidence of being an American at the time of voter registration.

Another easy fix is for Congress to add citizenship to the National Voter Registration Act’s reasonable voter list maintenance requirements for states. Motor Voter does not put the same obligation for states to keep voter rolls free from non-citizens as it does, for example, dead voters.

This month marks the 30th anniversary of President Bill Clinton signing the National Voter Registration Act into law. You probably know the law as “Motor Voter.” It is the federal requirement that requires state motor vehicle offices to offer voter registration and the ability to update your address.

Sounds convenient? Now, we have data showing one of the side effects of Motor Voter is to put non-citizens onto American voter rolls.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/29/three-years-later-no-justice-for-blm-insurrection-in-d-c/

“Our office prosecutes all acts of violence, regardless of political motivation, the same.”

So said U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves—under oath, mind you, and with a straight face—during a hearing of the House Oversight Committee earlier this month. 

Representative Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) questioned Graves’ disparate treatment of Black Lives Matters rioters who terrorized Washington, D.C., in 2020 versus Trump supporters involved in the events of January 6, 2021.

Although the start of both incidents was a mere seven months apart, they are a world away in terms of accountability. 

In what Graves calls the “Capitol Siege” investigation, more than 1,000 Trump supporters have been criminally charged. Graves, a Biden appointee, has promised to double that caseload before he’s finished. His office announces new arrests every week.

That, however, is not the case for rioters who caused far more violence and inflicted far more damage in the nation’s capital in 2020. The rioting that began on May 29, 2020 at Lafayette Square prompted the lockdown of the White House; Donald Trump, his wife, and teenage son were ushered to an underground bunker for their safety as looters and arsonists repeatedly tried to scale the fence and break through police barricades erected outside the White House.

And what started that night in 2020 didn’t just last a few hours, as was the case with the Capitol protest. On June 1, rioters burned part of St. John’s Church, an historical landmark across from the White House, and set ablaze other areas of the public park.

Chaos continued throughout the summer with the president, his family, and White House staff under constant threat. Police arrested 11 people at Lafayette Square in July 2020 for various offenses including assault of a police officer. “The Tuesday night incidents that stretched over hours are the latest confrontations to transpire near the White House, where protesters have been gathering daily for more than a month to protest for racial justice after the killing of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police,” the Washington Post reported on July 8, 2020.