RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/democrats-can-thank-themselves-for-the-preemptive-pardon-histrionics/

It’s not Kash Patel’s schtick that puts them in jeopardy. It’s that they took their shot at Trump, missed, and now have to worry about the oldest rule in politics.

President Biden is enmeshed in a pardon scandal of his own making. So what are Democrats and their media allies doing? What they always do: They’re blaming Trump.

At Politico on Wednesday, Jonathan Martin reported that the Biden-Harris White House is spun up over President-elect Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel to replace Chris Wray as FBI director. “Patel,” Martin stresses, “has publicly vowed to pursue Trump’s critics.” Against the backdrop of Trump’s fiery campaign riffs against his nemeses — the House January 6 Committee, Democratic prosecutors, et al. — we are supposed to believe it’s the Patel nomination that triggered President Biden to grant his son a pardon with a breathtaking eleven-year immunity bath. Moreover, the Patel pick apparently has the president and his advisers “carefully weighing the extraordinary step of handing out blanket pardons” to Trump’s enemies — even though they’ve “committed no crimes.”

Just two weeks ago, I observed that the eleven-week interregnum between the November election and Inauguration Day on January 20 was the season for histrionics. If you’re already exhausted, there are still more than five weeks to go. If you’re like me, you’re more bent out of shape by the “golden at-bat” proposal, the latest evidence that MLB’s anarchist commissioner Rob Manfred is bent on destroying the national pastime. The proposal is so ludicrous that even my pal, the closet baseball progressive Rich Lowry, is outraged!

Remember, I’ve argued that Trump must end lawfare — and have thus endeared myself to the MAGA warriors, . . . just as I’ve endeared myself over the past four years to apologists for progressive Democratic prosecutors and congressional Trump obsessives, who exploited the public’s investigative authorities (to say nothing of the mountain of taxpayer dollars) to pursue their partisan vendettas. I am also on record — and will be again come Saturday — urging that the president’s unilateral pardon power is an anachronism that ought to be repealed by a constitutional amendment. So, please, don’t take me to be urging either more lawfare or more pardons.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/06/can-elon-and-vivek-lead-us-to-a-more-efficient-government/

Once Donald Trump is inaugurated as our 47th U.S. president, Tesla, SpaceX, and X/Twitter CEO Elon Musk will likely head a Department of Government Efficiency commission (DOGE). Teaming up with tech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, this dynamic duo will focus on “drastic reforms” targeting “the entire federal government.”

Already there is talk that Musk and Ramaswamy have identified work-at-home policies for federal workers in an effort to trim $2 billion of bloat from the budget. One area they are targeting is waste at the Veterans Administration.

You might not support the movement to “transition” our country to electric vehicles. But you must be impressed with the sheer determination and sense of urgency Elon Musk applied to his vision of building EVs to scale as he did with Tesla. Similarly, Musk brought the U.S. space program back into existence with similar single-mindedness, having achieved 100 successful year-to-date space missions in 2024 with more to come.

A core aspect of his approach to development and production was found in his recent biography, a five-step process that he refers to as “the algorithm.”

Question every requirement. Never accept a requirement that came from a department or committee.

Delete any process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back 10 percent of them, you didn’t delete enough.

Simplify and optimize. This should come right after Step 2. Do not simplify and optimize a process that should not exist.

Accelerate cycle time. Every procedure can be sped up.

Automate. This comes last. Do not automate until all requirements have been questioned, processes have been deleted, everything has been simplified, and procedures have been sped up.

Imagine if these five steps were applied to reforming the U.S. government. It would probably look a lot like what Musk achieved with X/Twitter. Less than two years after Musk acquired the company, it operates today with 80 percent fewer employees and is much more productive, accurate, timely, and ideologically balanced.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/gunman-shot-kindergarteners-in-california-for-palestine/

Two kindergarteners were critically wounded when Glenn Litton, a monster with a long criminal record and apparent delusions, tricked his way into the school and then opened fire in a small California town.

Glenn Litton lied to gain access to the Feather River Seventh-Day Adventists school by claiming to be the grandfather of a prospective student before opening fire on the children.

The gunman wrote in a note that the shootings of children were “carried out countermeasure in necessitated response to America’s involvement with genocide and oppression of Palestinians along with attacks towards Yemen.”

The media emphasizes that Litton was mentally ill and I’m sure his sense of reality was probably none too grounded, but the note also makes it clear that he had been feeding off pro-terrorist propaganda on social media probably supplemented by media coverage.

Even apart from his recent support for Islamic terrorism, Litton was a poster boy for California’s revolving door criminal justice system.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2024/12/05/new-poll-all-of-trumps-nominees-are-viewed-more-favorably-than-unfavorably-n2648647

With Washington, DC consumed with controversy of a handful of Trump nominees, the American public is looking…pretty comfortable with what they’re seeing from the presidential transition.  We noted strong polling on this front before Thanksgiving, and the trend appears to be continuing.  Donald Trump’s overall favorability has pulled even at 48-48, whereas both his defeated rival and the current incumbent underwater by double digits.  You’ll see that recent Gallup data in the graphic embedded below.  As for the transition, a sizable majority (52/38) approves, with literally every single Trump nominee polling with more support than opposition — both according to Morning Consult:

One of Trump’s most embattled picks, Defense Secretary-designate Pete Hegseth, is above water by single digits, with the public splitting almost into thirds on his nomination: Support, oppose, and don’t know.  Hegseth is facing a series of allegations against him and responded in a Wall Street Journal op/ed yesterday.  An excerpt:

I’ve been through a lot: combat tours, job changes, divorces and family challenges. (Yes, I love my mom very much, and she loves me.) I have always led with honesty, integrity and passion. Tragically, many veterans never find the purpose for their next chapter and succumb to the bottle, depression or, worst of all, suicide. I understand what they are facing—because I’ve lived it. But by the grace of God, I took another path. My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has renewed and restored my life. I am saved by his grace. The press is peddling anonymous story after anonymous story, all meant to smear me and tear me down. It’s a textbook manufactured media takedown.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/06/we-were-100-right-elect-joe-biden-hell-be-the-worst-president-in-u-s-history/

Editor’s note: Now that Joe Biden’s disastrous term as president is coming to an inglorious end, we thought it worth reminding readers that we predicted his failed presidency more than four years ago. Even we are surprised by how prescient we were. Every single item on our list came true.  The only thing we missed is that he would end his presidency by betraying his own party and all his sycophants in the media with a get-out-of-jail-free card for his miscreant son. Unfortunately, all the elites and pundits who gaslit the country about Biden will continue to be feted and fattened, while we do the hard and unglamorous work of telling the unvarnished truth. Below is our Oct. 20, 2020, editorial.

Elect Joe Biden: He’ll Be The Worst President In U.S. History

October 20, 2020

Ranking modern presidents, from first to worst, is an entirely subjective matter. That said, we’re quite sure Joe Biden will be, if elected, the most destructive president of our lifetimes if not of all time.

At I&I we tend to look at Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama as being the worst presidents from our lifetimes. Carter saw himself as the caretaker of the country’s inevitable decline rather than someone who would lift it from its malaise. Obama managed the worst economic recovery in our post-war history, allowed ISIS to grow into a terrorist power, and rolled over for Iran’s mullahs. His was the most divisive presidency of modern times. If this nation is on the brink of another civil war, as some suggest we are, it’s because he set the tone for the bitter separation we see today among Americans.

At least Carter led the deregulation of the airline, trucking, and rail industries, and in his 1978 State of the Union address acknowledged “we really need to realize that there is a limit to the role and the function of government.”

Biden would neither do nor say any such thing.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/05/what-the-trump-nominees-have-not-done-and-will-not-do/

Deflated by the resounding November defeat, the left now believes it can magically rebound by destroying Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees.

Many of Trump’s picks are well outside the usual Washington, DC/New York political, media, and corporate nexus.

But that is precisely the point—to insert reformers into a bloated, incompetent, and weaponized government who are not part of it.

Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, is already drawing severe criticism.

His furious enemies cannot go after his resume, since he has spent a lifetime in private, congressional, and executive billets, both in investigations and intelligence.

Instead, they claim he is too vindictive and does not reflect the ethos of the FBI.

But what will Patel not do as the new director?

He will not serially lie under oath to federal investigators as did interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a current Patel critic.

He will not forge an FBI court affidavit, as did convicted felon and agency lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.

He will not claim amnesia 245 times under congressional oath to evade embarrassing admissions as did former Director James Comey.

He will not partner with a foreign national to collect dirt and subvert a presidential campaign as the FBI did with Christopher Steele in 2016.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/the-end-of-a-scam/

Biden was never a wonderful guy, and definitely not the savior of democracy, no matter what his media supporters said.

How appropriate that the Biden presidency is ending with an act of self-dealing that he and his allies insisted, with great righteousness, would never happen.

Joe Biden was always a scam, and his pardon of his son Hunter Biden is just the latest evidence.

No one should have believed Biden’s flagrant lie that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter for his tax and gun crimes and other potential wrongdoing.

The president has a long record of dishonesty, about his own biography (which blew up his first presidential campaign in 1988) and especially about the family influence-peddling business that was at the root of Hunter’s tax evasion — the president’s son wouldn’t have had any money to evade taxes on if it weren’t for all the foreign largesse.

Every politician ends up shading the truth somewhere along the line, and it was going to be awkward for President Biden to admit that he might pardon his son. When asked about the possibility, though, the president could have said “No comment” or “I’m not going to discuss a hypothetical.”

Instead, he flatly denied it, and his allies wove his denial into a narrative about Biden’s abiding commitment to our system of justice. He was “a president living the rule of law” (MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann) and “a true American who believes in democracy and the way the system is supposed to work” (Joy Behar of The View). Etc., etc.

Now Biden has made all the people who issued these stirring testimonials look like naïfs and hacks.

Their mistake was attributing any grandeur to Joe Biden. He has made a long, undistinguished career of being a middling politician from a small Democratic state and had just enough staying power to become president when he was already a has-been.

In sizing up Biden and Trump, the Democrat’s media supporters could have paraphrased the famous bumper sticker from a 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election featuring two unpalatable choices: “Vote for the unimpressive hack — it’s important.”

Instead, they felt compelled to create an illusory Biden, an epic figure whose amazing personal qualities made him an indispensable buttress of our institutions and norms.

Biden was puffed up into a world-historical figure who had saved American democracy by winning one election against Donald Trump, who, of course, simply came right back to win another against Biden’s chosen successor, Kamala Harris.

https://jonathanturley.org/2024/12/02/liar-in-chief-president-biden-cloaks-his-legacy-in-infamy-with-the-hunter-biden-pardon/

President Joe Biden’s decision to use his presidential powers to pardon his own son will be a decision that lives in infamy in presidential politics. It is not just that the President used his constitutional powers to benefit his family. It is because the action culminates years of lying to the public about his knowledge and intentions in the influence-peddling scandal surrounding his family. Even among past scandals in the abuse of the pardon power, Biden has done lasting damage not just to his legacy but his office.

Despite its noble origins and purpose, the pardon power historically has not been a pristine power used by past presidents. As I have previously written, it was used to benefit the political cronies of past presidents. President Warren Harding was even accused of selling pardons, including to mob enforcer Ignacio Lupo, known as “Lupo the Wolf.” Former president William Clinton waited for the final days of his presidency to pardon his own brother as well as a major democratic donor.

In 2023, I wrote that Biden might follow this same pattern and pardon his son as a lame-duck president. The column suggested that Biden might withdraw as a candidate for office and then take the action as a father: “The pardon-and-apology approach might appeal to Biden not only as an effort to convert vice into virtue but to justify his withdrawal from the election as a selfless act.”

In the 2020 election and throughout his presidential term, Biden repeatedly lied to the American public with an ease and impunity that shocked even many political veterans in Washington. He was repeatedly asked if he knew about Hunter’s foreign dealings, including millions in alleged deals with Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese, and other clients. President Biden lied and denied such knowledge. As I detailed in my testimony in the Biden impeachment hearing, he had repeated discussions of these dealings. He is even on tape discussing news stories on the dealings.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/05/drain-the-swamp-for-the-economic-benefits/

There’s not much Donald Trump could ever do as president that will generate more resistance and hatred than bleeding the fetid capital swamp. It’s arguable that there’s nothing he could ever do as president that would be better for the republic.

Trump’s decision to make administration appointments from figures who are outside of the establishment adds to the loathing that so many in the political-media establishment already directed toward him. Various grifters, vipers and unprincipled schemers from both parties have spent their adult lives seeking seats of power, comfort and endless tenure in the capital. To see the secretarial positions, directorships, administrator posts and bureaucratic jobs that they have for years lusted after filled by outsiders makes them angry. No one should feel sorry for them, though. They are a drag on both our civic health and our economy.

In regard to the latter, the damage is more extensive that most would ever guess. A research paper updated during the first year of Trump’s initial term that measured the “cost per regulator” in the bureaucracy reached some appalling yet unsurprising conclusions about Washington’s impact on the private sector. According to the authors, “one regulator costs the U.S. economy the equivalent of 138 private-sector jobs per year.”

Here are a few more choice findings from the paper.

“Each $1 million change in the regulatory budget is associated with a change of about four regulator jobs.”
“A 10% cut in the regulatory budget results in a loss of 21,756 regulatory jobs.”
That same cut “provides for an additional $1.2 trillion in GDP annually over the five-year window, or $244 billion annually.”
“Each regulator costs the U.S. economy $11 million annually.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-lies-of-joe-biden-and-his-lying-enablers/

Joe Biden promised, emphatically, at least six times—all pre-election—that he would not pardon his son Hunter Biden.

His media lapdogs loudly resonated those boasts.

They claimed at the time Biden was a historic, Sir Thomas More-like protector of jurisprudence, morality, and our Constitution—sacrificing even his son on the altar of the “the rule of law”.

All again shameful lies.

These now disgraced talking heads have no more apologized than they did when they championed their “51 intelligence authorities” scam, who swore Hunter’s laptop was a product of Russian chicanery.

(No one has been more slavishly and obsequiously wrong about all the Biden pardon lies than the notorious Andrew Weissmann of the failed Mueller witch-hunt “dream team”.)

Anyone who knew the long, sordid history of Joe Biden (e.g., how he defamed the truck driver who was not culpable in his first wife’s fatal crash or was caught lying about his entire college career, and plagiarized his 1988 campaign speech), knew he was lying when he made these serial promises.

His letter excusing his pardon was worse than the lie itself.

Biden essentially pardoned himself by exempting all of Hunter’s crimes since 2014, in which Hunter had enriched the Biden crime family cartel due to ‘the big guy’s’ opportune calls and appearances with foreign crooks.

Joe knew that only a silenced Hunter would save the Biden syndicate after January 20, 2025.