RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/for_obama_the_coverup_emwasem_worse_than_the_crime.html

Jack Cashill’s newest book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, is available for pre-order in all formats.

Two enduring aphorisms emerged from the Watergate affair, both directed at then-president Richard Nixon. The one at the outset of the investigation was delivered in the form of a question: “What did he know and when did he know it?” The second came at the end in the form of a warning to future presidents: “The cover-up is worse than the crime.”

Thanks to the Durham report, we know the date that then-president Barack Obama learned about what John Durham calls the “Clinton Intelligence plan.” If CIA Director John Brennan’s notes are to be believed, that date was August 3, 2016.

This was the day Brennan briefed Obama and other key players about the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 26 July of a proposal from one of her [campaign] advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”

To be fair, Barack Obama likely had no more role in the orchestration of the Clinton Intelligence plan than Richard Nixon did in the 1972 bugging of the DNC headquarters at the Watergate. Obama did, however, play the critical role in the cover-up of the Clinton Intelligence plan. It could not have happened without him.

This past Sunday, former congressman Devin Nunes raised the cover-up issue on Maria Bartiromo’s show. Said Nunes, “We now know from Durham that Obama knew and his team knew that in August 2016 this was a dirty trick from the Clinton campaign.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-american-suicide/

America is in a fighting mood. Hardly a day goes by without video of a fight among airline passengers or fans at some sporting event surfacing on the Internet. Mobs block subway tracks to disrupt service. Still larger mobs gather at statehouses from Montana to Florida, angry and violent enough to suspend the legislative process. Retailers lock products behind plexiglass fearing hoards of looters.

Those causing such mayhem often avoid arrest, prosecutors routinely fail to prosecute offenders, and the results are anarchic. “The lawless in spirit are encouraged to become lawless in practice,” noticed one 28-year old state house representative. “Having been used to no restraint but dread of punishment, they thus become absolutely unrestrained.”

Disorderly scenes today are so common, we’ve become desensitized to them. “Such are the effects of mob law; and such as the scenes becoming more and more frequent,” observed this junior legislator. “The stories of which have even now grown too familiar to attract anything more than an idle remark.”

The idle remarks on Twitter and elsewhere only exacerbate this climate as mobs grow in number and size, and the danger extends to the nation itself. “By the operation of this mobocractic spirit, which all must admit is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed,” warned the young lawmaker.

These comments were delivered by Abraham Lincoln, who predicted in his January 27, 1838 speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/discredited-but-massively-wealthy-splc-working-with-corrupt-fbi/

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is one of the Left’s premier, well-heeled, and most dishonest and ruthless attack dogs. It relentlessly smears legitimate conservative individuals and groups by labeling them as purveyors of “hate” and lumping them in with the likes of the KKK and neo-Nazis. Its name-calling and defamation would be just more of the same rubbish that comes daily from the Left were it not for the fact that the social media giants and numerous other major corporations still take the massively discredited SPLC seriously and use its smear pieces as a guide to shun and deplatform various dissenters from the Leftist agenda. So the SPLC sounds like the perfect organization for the Biden regime to work with, right? Oh, absolutely. Now this sinister and hateful group is partnering with the equally corrupt and politicized FBI.

The Daily Signal reported Sunday that the FBI “appears, at least briefly, to have joined the Southern Poverty Law Center’s attempt to demonize Roman Catholics who follow the church’s teachings on marriage and who celebrate the Latin Mass.” One of those Catholics, Michael J. Matt, editor of a newspaper called The Remnant and producer of Remnant TV, noted that his organization, which is not remotely connected with violence or terrorism, was listed on a “leaked FBI memo,”  along with other Catholic groups that he pointed out were “defunct.”

Matt declared that this was an example the “FBI phoning it in,” as its list of “radical-traditional Catholic hate groups” came from a 2007 list compiled by the SPLC’s Heidi Beirich and Rhonda Brownstein. Matt asked incredulously: “They took Heidi Beirich and Rhonda Brownstein’s word for it, from 2007?!” He added: “There has been an explosion of traditional Catholic groups since Pope Benedict XVI brought back the Latin Mass. None of the new groups who are in positions of real influence are targeted in the memo.” That’s good, but the fact that the FBI is working with the SPLC and targeting law-abiding citizens because it disapproves of their religious beliefs is disquieting enough.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/22/gao-said-biden-administration-ignored-recommendation-for-national-broadband-strategy/

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in a recent report that the Biden administration ignored its recommendations last year to create a national broadband strategy to synchronize the fragmented patchwork of funding for broadband. This critical mistake puts billions of tax dollars at risk and hurts efforts to close the digital divide.

The GAO has noted now in two consecutive annual reports that there is extreme overlap in broadband funding programs, with 133 such programs administrated by 15 agencies. The complexities have only grown in recent years with the addition of such programs as Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) and Enabling Middle Mile Infrastructure.

The office pointed out that the number of programs and their overlap can lead to taxpayer waste, but such waste is hard to measure.

“Having numerous broadband programs can be helpful to address a multifaceted issue like broadband access, but this fragmentation and overlap can lead to the risk of duplicative support,” the GAO said in the report. “However, determining whether program overlap results in duplicative support can be challenging.”

The GAO did, however, identify situations in which waste could occur. For example, the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) High Cost program and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utility Service (RUS) programs had overlapping service areas. Officials from the FCC and RUS acknowledged the challenges of the overlap, but told federal auditors they don’t consider awards duplicative if they involve different levels of service and support different locations within the area. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/23/things-really-are-looking-up-under-biden/

Over the weekend, President Joe Biden claimed that some Republicans are hoping that the talks over raising the debt ceiling fail and the government defaults on its debt.

“I think there are some MAGA Republicans in the House who know the damage that it would do to the economy, and because I am president, and the president’s responsible for everything, Biden would take the blame,” he said.

What Biden is claiming assumes, of course, that things are going swimmingly right now, a point the president repeatedly makes, and how it’s all thanks to his policies.

Let’s leave aside that lie, which we’ve written about many times in this space. And let’s also ignore the fact that all the scaremongering about failure to raise the debt limit is just that. If the debt limit is not raised, the government won’t need to default on its debt. Every month, it raises far more in taxes than is needed to pay interest on existing debt. Despite what Biden says, any default would be entirely his fault.

How about his claim that things are going well and that only Republican malfeasance could hurt the economy?

Well, it’s true that things are looking up in America. The problem is that they are all the wrong things. Inflation, interest payments, debt, illegal immigration, labor force dropouts. Those are all way up under Biden.

To show this, we’ve put together a series of charts.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/philadelphia-voters-let-cops-be-cops-c6ebf736?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

After a violent era in Philadelphia, the city’s voters have rejected the broken and bloody promises of the progressive left and nominated two mayoral candidates pledging to restore public safety.

Since Democrats have an overwhelming advantage in voter registration, the likely winner will be Democratic mayoral candidate Cherelle Parker, a former City Council member and state legislator. At a Monday press conference she talked about her goal of “restoring our police department to its full complement and that means using every tool that we can to make sure we get officers on the job.”

She also wants to let them use constitutional tools to do the job. Ms. Parker—and remember she’s a Democrat—is not just saying fund the police. Once funded, she wants them to police vigorously—and last week’s primary victory says that voters agree with her.

The Journal’s Scott Calvert noted last week:

Ms. Parker, the only Black candidate in the top tier of polling and the candidate who had the most Black support, has spoken favorably of police investigative stops commonly known as stop-and-frisk. The practice in Philadelphia has been under judicial oversight since 2011 amid claims of police abuses.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/21/abandon-the-swamp/

Suppose a document drops in the wilderness and no one is around to hear it. Does it make a sound? I submit that John Durham just tested this Bishop Berkeleyesque query. The special counsel spent four years beavering away in the forests of the deep state and what did he produce? Three hundred pages telling us what, for the most part, we already knew and with the result that exactly nothing, apart from a little hand wringing, will happen. 

We already knew that James Comey, Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, John Brennan, Susan Rice, Michael Sussmann, Kevin Clinesmith, and all the other characters in and around the Russia Collusion Delusion had fabricated the story of Trump’s supposed connection with Russia out of whole cloth. 

We already knew that they had gone out of their way to protect Hillary Clinton. 

We knew that there was no predicate for obtaining a FISA warrant against Carter Page (one of many thousands of such warrants), thus opening a back door into the Trump campaign. 

We knew that the surveillance apparatus of the regime had been weaponized to prevent Donald Trump from being elected and then, when he surprised everyone by winning anyway, to taint his administration and render him radioactive.  

What should we make of Durham’s non-revelatory revelations? I think that, wittingly or not, they were just a big exercise in track-covering, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Well, nothing beyond the sound and fury, anyway.

Still, Durham’s bulletin is useful as a marker of the futility in which we labor. André Gide touched on this point when he reminded us that “Toutes choses sont dites déjà, mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer.” Over the past five or six years, virtually everything that Durham said in his report had already been said. But because no one was listening, it is necessary to start again and say it once more. 

In this spirit, I am going to say again some things I have said elsewhere, beginning with what has become my ritual invocation of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s observation that a week is a long time in politics. That’s time enough, as T. S. Eliot said in another context, “for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/21/the-absurdities-of-our-age/

A sign of a civilization in headlong decline is its embrace of absurdities. Unfortunately for the United States, we are witnessing an epidemic of nihilist nonsense. Here are a few examples:  

Reparations  

How could a dysfunctional state like California even contemplate $800 billion in reparations? 

The state currently faces a $31 billion annual deficit—and it’s climbing. Its $100 billion high-speed rail project is inert, a veritable Stonehenge of concrete monoliths with a foot of track.  

California’s income tax rates are already the highest in the nation. Its sales taxes, electricity rates, and gas taxes and prices are among the steepest in the country. And for what? 

Crime, homelessness, and medieval decay characterize the once great downtowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It is now not safe to walk alone in any major California city after dark.  

Shoplifting and smash-and-grab theft are no longer treated as crimes. The result is the mass flight of brand stores from our downtowns and inner cities, with all the accustomed cries of “racism,” even as racist public prosecutors pick and choose whether to indict the arrested on the basis of race.  

California infrastructure, once the best in the county, is now among the worst. Decaying and crowded freeways, inadequate water storage, and pot-holed streets are the new norm.  

The state’s public schools are dysfunctional. Once premier public universities are spiraling headlong into decline—junking scholastic tests for admissions, using illegal racial quotas to warp admissions, and institutionalizing racialized dorms and graduation ceremonies.  

Even if California enjoyed a huge surplus, even if 300,000 residents were not fleeing the state each year, even if California had a history of being a Confederate slave state, even if whites were the majority of the population, even if the black population was greater than its present 5-6 percent, it would be insane for the state to even contemplate racial reparations.  

Twenty-seven percent of the state’s residents were born outside of the United States, and have no American ancestors. The state is the most racially diverse in America, and one in which every group could, in theory, lodge complaints against the dead of the past. Mexican-Americans, Armenians, Asians, and the descendants of the impoverished “Okie” diaspora could all cite legacies of bias—but from whom exactly? The long dead?  

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/bill_barr_is_his_own_worst_enemy.html

Uniparty propagandist and Deep State shill Bill Barr is waddling from one television studio to the next to tell audiences that the feds will almost certainly indict Donald Trump by late summer for mishandling classified documents.  The Cheka FBI has been outed as a criminal enterprise engaged in subverting elections and spying on the American people, but sure, let’s get all worked up about whether the president of the United States — in whom the Constitution’s Article II executive powers are vested — has somehow inexplicably infringed his own declassification authority.  Although Augustus Gloop Barr can barely conceal his joy, this tiring new chapter in the never-ending “get Trump” saga comes off as yet another manifestation of Bizarro World, in which a group of criminals running the American government get to pretend that nobody is “above the law.”

Walrus Barr enjoys playing the “scolding father” who “knows best” in a worn-out daddy routine alongside scripted corporate news hosts performing for the cameras.  Although he remains a consummate Deep State stooge who will do anything to prevent Donald Trump from returning to the Oval Office, he also spends a great deal of TV time burnishing his “I’m the only adult in the room” bona fides.  He has called out New York State’s vindictive lawsuits against President Trump as a “political hit job” and “gross overreach.”  He has excoriated Democrat district attorney of New York Alvin Bragg’s Trump indictment as an “abomination” that “makes us look like a banana republic.”  He acknowledges that the Durham probe proves that “Russiagate” has not only been a “grave injustice” to Trump, but has also “vindicated” the president’s accurate denunciation of the Clinton-Obama Russia Hoax conspiracy as a “witch hunt” from the very beginning.  Barr readily admits, in other words, that state and federal prosecutors have shamelessly pursued Trump for recklessly and maliciously partisan reasons that have threatened both the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power in the United States.  

After broadly recognizing the seriousness of the Deep State’s crimes and the depth of its depravity, though, loyal palace guard Barr then sweeps these horrific State crimes to the side, shakes his head in disgust, and instead blames his former boss for being “his own worst enemy.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dark-matter/

In 2017, when then-president Donald Trump responded to the ongoing fever of far-left iconoclasm by predicting that radicals would soon be toppling statues of the Founding Fathers, mainstream commentators responded with mockery. Then, sure enough, the statues of our greatest presidents started coming down.

And it’s still happening – not just to political leaders, and not just to statues. It’s happening in every field, including astronomy. Which brings us to the case of the James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Christmas Day 2021. Articles published in Scientific American last July, when it began sending back images, make it sound like the marvel of marvels:

* “The most powerful observatory ever made promises to produce some of the most incredible discoveries of our lifetime and beyond.”

* “This is the picture we’ve all been waiting for[:] the deepest image of the cosmos ever captured. Humanity has never seen so far back and so clearly into the depths of the universe’s history.”

* “The next great era of astronomy truly began this morning….the James Webb Space Telescope has at last delivered a complete set of first full-color images.”

Who was James Webb? As administrator of NASA from 1961 to 1968, he oversaw the development of the Apollo program – which in 1969, of course, in one of the great triumphs of human history, landed a man on the moon. In his time (he died in 1992), Webb was a revered figure at NASA, and the naming of the telescope after him seemed, at first, entirely reasonable and certainly uncontroversial.

But in March 2021, just over a year before the above-cited articles appeared, Scientific American ran a very different piece about Webb and the telescope named after him. Carrying the bylines of no fewer than four scientists – Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, “an assistant professor of physics and a core faculty member in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire”; Sarah Tuttle, a University of Washington astronomer; Lucianne Walkowicz, an astronomer at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium; and Brian Nord, “a scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Chicago” – it was headlined “The James Webb Space Telescope Needs to Be Renamed.”