RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-deep-state-is-all-too-real-congress-chevron-delegation-civics-hunter-biden-985ed65e?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

There are two competing conceptions of American governance: the version students are taught in the classroom, and the one that exists in the real world. Grade-school civics teaches that Washington is designed to operate under a system of checks and balances, constrained by the Constitution and empowered by the consent of the governed. In practice, however, power has become concentrated in the executive branch and largely wielded by unaccountable career bureaucrats. The notion of a “deep state” isn’t a conspiratorial talking point but a manifest political reality.

The separation of powers is an animating principle of our nation’s founding documents. As the Constitution outlines, the U.S. has three distinct and coequal branches of government: a legislature that passes laws, an executive branch that implements them, and a judiciary that interprets them. This built-in division is meant to restrain government overreach and prevent abuses of power. The president and members of Congress regularly stand for election to ensure the government is accountable to the governed, and the judiciary serves in good behavior to ensure that justice is dispensed impartially.

While this sounds nice in theory, the federal government typically doesn’t honor it in practice. Congress has delegated much of its lawmaking authority to the executive branch since the 1930s. Federal agencies now issue regulations that have the force and effect of the law. “Administrative judges”—executive-branch employees—routinely preside over trial-like proceedings without juries, letting agencies act as both prosecutor and judge.

Under the Supreme Court’s Chevron doctrine, courts generally defer to the executive branch’s interpretation of the law—both in regulatory and enforcement proceedings. Many of the Constitution’s checks and balances, from the separation of powers to the right to jury trial, have fallen by the wayside.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/08/j6-jackals-circle-trump/

In 2002, David Frum, chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, coined the phrase “axis of evil” to describe the despotic regimes of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq during the nascent stages of the global war on terror.

Today, Frum is warning the country about a different axis of evil that he believes similarly threatens the security of America and perhaps even the world: Donald Trump, the Oath Keepers, and the Proud Boys.

“One after another, the foot soldiers of the January 6 attack on Congress are sentenced to prison terms, which for many will mean the lifelong loss of political rights,” Frum tweeted on May 8 in faux concern for the railroaded defendants. “Yet the commanders who plotted and ordered the attack are escaping with impunity—even running for high office.”

Frum, who hasn’t lost his touch as he’s transitioned over the past two decades from a neoconservative to a full-blown Marxist, was referring to the recent convictions of members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. Last Thursday, a Washington, D.C., jury found four Proud Boys guilty of seditious conspiracy, a post-Civil War statute nearly synonymous with treason; six Oath Keepers also have been convicted of the same charge for their participation in the events of January 6. Individuals tied to the groups have pleaded guilty to that count or been convicted of other conspiracy and obstruction felonies.

Now, none of these so-called “foot soldiers” possessed nuclear material or starved millions of their countrymen or harbored foreign terror cells bent on the annihilation of the United States. To the contrary, several defendants associated with both groups fought in the very same wars orchestrated by Frum and his former boss. For example, Joseph Biggs, a Proud Boy convicted last week of seditious conspiracy and other offenses, is a Purple Heart recipient who was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s.

But in Frum’s tiny, vindictive mind, men like Biggs—who brought no weapons to the Capitol and did not assault police on January 6—are comparable to, perhaps worse than, al-Qaeda and ISIS. 

After all, Osama bin Laden never expressed loyalty to the Bad Orange Man!

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/john_kerry_finds_his_vietnam_war_medals_pops_them_onto_his_suit_at_the_uk_coronation.html

Lurch makes a fool of himself in the pageantry of Britain.

In today’s ridiculous news, I present this picture:

Kerry is famous for tossing his Vietnam war medals over a fence, or at least, saying he did, before he later said it was just his ribbons, and then later still saying it some other guy’s medals. 

Here’s the New York Post report from 2004:

Presumed Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry said in an interview more than 30 years ago that he threw away some of his Vietnam combat medals – contradicting statements he has made as a candidate, it was reported yesterday.

“I gave back, I can’t remember, six, seven, eight, nine medals,” Kerry said in an interview with WRC-TV, a Washington, D.C., station on Nov. 6, 1971, ABC News reported. Kerry previously had told the network that stories about him tossing medals were a “myth.”

In the 1971 interview, for a program called “Viewpoints,” Kerry – who had not yet been elected to the Senate – said that war veterans who threw away their medals “decided to give them back to their country.”

When asked if he disposed of his Bronze Star, Silver Star and three Purple Hearts received as a Navy lieutenant in Vietnam, he replied, “Well, and above that. [I] gave back the others.”

Earlier this year, Kerry was asked by syndicated columnist Robert Novak, if he regretted throwing his medals away, and responded, “There was no regret,” but he added, “I threw away my ribbons, not my medals.”

…and this…

But in 1984, he told the Globe he still had his own medals but had tossed away another soldiers’ medal.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/09/reparations-derangement-syndrome/

A panel in California, where rotten public policy ideas metastasize like a fungus growing in dark, slimy conditions, has approved paying reparations to descendants of slaves. It is impossible to overstate just how insane this is.

The reparations task force, appointed by Boy Gov. Gavin Newsom, voted Saturday to recommend the state pay out as much as $800 billion to the descendants of enslaved or free black people who were in the U.S. by the end of the 19th century. That’s 2.5 times the size of California’s annual budget. Recipients could rake in as much as $1.2 million each.

Or more. Much more. Because San Francisco’s reparations advisory committee has recommended the city’s qualified African American residents be given a $5 million lump sum.

The committee also proposed “the elimination of credit card debt, car and student loans; a string of tax breaks; and 250 years of special benefits for African Americans such as a  guaranteed income of $97,000 a year (adjusted for inflation); and the ability to buy homes for $1,” says Rowena Itchon of the Pacific Research Institute.

The cost of this largess, says the Hoover Institution’s Lee Ohanian, will be “​​on a per-household basis … nearly $600,000 per non–African American San Francisco household.”

Let’s not pretend this is about justice, fairness and decency. It’s a shakedown – aided and abetted by rich, white, guilt-ridden, virtue-signaling progressives – that not even Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton could have envisioned a decade ago.

The case against reparations is irrefutable. Or would be in a sane world, which we no longer live in.

Despite the lunacy that has a grip on our politics, we will lay out the arguments.

First, no taxpayer in California or the U.S. was alive when slavery was allowed in this country, and none of those who were enslaved are alive either. Anyone who doesn’t think this is irrelevant is neither a clear nor honest thinker.

Second, we go to Andreas Koureas of The Spectator, who brings up an unpopular but salient point: “Ultimately, the great evil of slavery was practiced by all inhabited continents and all races.” Consequently, nearly every human on the planet has “an ancestral link to the slave trade.” 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19638/veterans-benefits

There is something uniquely despicable about a Democratic strategy in Congress that would turn the urgent need to cut waste in President Joe Biden’s proposed $6 trillion dollar budget into a political weapon by accusing the Republicans — falsely — of seeking to cut veterans’ benefits.

Let us start with the premise that the federal budget has considerable pork — billions, in fact. Let us also assume that the creeping inflation currently harming the hard-working middle class of America lies at the feet of those massive federal programs that printed billions of dollars in an ill-advised strategy to prop up the economy. As more dollars are printed, their buying power goes down – so you will need to keep paying out more dollars to buy the same item – as with food or to gas up the car.

Accordingly, House Republicans are rightly insisting that before we address the debt ceiling by its June 1st deadline, it is urgent to tackle the hard issue of where and how to contain out-of-control federal spending. The GOP leadership recognizes that, as at home, massive spending, unsupported by a balanced budget, can literally put a nation’s future at risk. Other nations have failed when they mismanaged their books — and America is not immune from economic collapse due to an unsupportable national debt with an unsustainable mushrooming service on the debt.

However, in a shameless display of partisan baiting, Democrats say that the Republicans’ “Limit, Save, Grow Act to Rein in Wasteful Spending and Grow the Economy,” which passed the House last week, will harm key programs and services at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), a department that barely serves our veterans even now.

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

What is a Woman?  You can no longer answer the question with alacrity.  In a 2022 documentary of the same name, when Matt Walsh poses that question to someone identifying as a gay male, he is told, “You should be asking a woman.  I don’t know; I’m not a woman.  Only women can define what a woman is.”  Not missing a beat, and putting the absurdity into sharp relief, Walsh rejoins by asking, “Are you a cat?” and following up the “No” with “Do you know what a cat is?”  The interviewee flees.

The dangerous trend to promote gender fluidity is concurrent with a movement to allow anyone to arrogate female status to himself.  Gender confusion often leads to tragic, lifelong, and irreversible consequences.  It must be noted, however, that the male-to-female transition by self-declaration has far greater societal impact than the reverse.  Males identifying as females hijack women’s sports and appropriate women’s spaces, often opportunistically or predatorily.  Radical ideology aims to eliminate sex distinctions under the guise of civil rights.  Its most egregious part is the targeting of minors, preying on their developing and fragile sense of identity.  For this reason, many states have passed or are considering legislation to safeguard minors and women.

The fightback is on four fronts: a) banning gender-transitioning surgeries and treatments for minors; b) banning age-inappropriate curricula, transition coaching, and events like drag queen story hour, often thrust on minors without parental consent; c) preventing males from using women’s bathrooms and locker rooms; and d) ending the invasion of girls’ and women’s sports by males identifying as females.

At least 16 states have passed or are developing laws to stop the targeting of children for transitioning.  This is important because many so-called progressive states have aggressive indoctrination and transitioning programs that do not spare minors.  Cases abound of individuals regretting transition once gender dysphoria is resolved; they often end up with lifelong infertility and disfigurement and may need multiple remedial interventions.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/07/the-impending-thermidor-reaction-in-jacobin-america/

The decade-long French Revolution that broke out in 1789 soon devolved into far more than removing the monarchy, as it became antithetical to the earlier American precedent. American notions of liberty and freedom were seen as far too narrow, given the state, if only all-powerful and all-wise, could mandate “equality” and force “fraternity” among its subjects.

Each cycle of French revolutionary fervor soon became more radicalized and cannibalistic—until it reached its logical ends of violent absurdity.

Originally, the idea of curbing the power of a Bourbon king through a parliamentary republic became lethally counter-revolutionary.

Soon even attacks on the Catholic Church and the abolition of the monarchy entirely were deemed insufficient. The king himself and his consorts had to be beheaded. Monasteries and churches were to be ransacked, and priests exiled or lynched.

The sometimes moderate Girondins, who favored constitutional government, were mostly executed by their former friends among the Montagnards. In turn, the latter were soon deemed too conservative for the emerging crazy Jacobins. So they, too, had to be decapitated. The ensuing year-long reign of terror guillotined thousands of innocents, deemed guilty of being guilty of something.

By 1793, the revolution had turned nihilist and suicidal. The foundational date of France was recalibrated (not as 1619 but) as 1789—or “year one.”

Jacobins sought to wipe out religion, both materially and spiritually. They replaced God, first, with the atheistic “Cult of Reason” and then a stranger still “Cult of the Supreme Being”—a dreamed-up, living, humanistic god that only the murderous Robespierre could fully envision, but eerily similar to our own Green New Deal deity.

The months of the year themselves were renamed, the days of the week renumbered and relabeled. Statues were toppled, first at night, later in shameless daylight. Place names were erased and renamed. The original revolutionary heroes were not to be mentioned; their uncouth successors deified. Money was printed to “spread the wealth”—until it was worthless.

Murderous cancel culture ran unchecked. Yesterday’s French revolutionary became today’s counterrevolutionary—and tomorrow’s decapitated.

Almost everyone who originally had opposed the absolute monarchy, and, like the Americans, wished for a constitutional replacement, was eventually executed by revolutionaries who were then executed by more radical revolutionaries. The longer and more radical the revolution ran, the meaner, dumber, and more deadly the revolutionaries who emerged from the woodwork.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/05/07/in-a-world-gone-mad-the-jordan-neelys-rule-n1693216

EXCERPTS

Jordan Neely was a mentally ill homeless man who had terrorized the citizens of New York — especially subway passengers — for many years. He had been arrested at least 40 times for crimes ranging from assault to disorderly conduct and fare evasion. And on the day of his death, several eyewitnesses report that Neely had made repeated threats to the well-being of passengers, “stating his willingness to ‘hurt anyone’ and saying that he was unbothered by the prospect of returning to jail or being killed,” according to NRO.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says Jordan Neely was “murdered” because he “was houseless and crying for food in a time when the city is raising rents and stripping services to militarize itself.”

So passengers and bystanders are just supposed to allow Mr. Neely to terrorize and assault them with no thought of defending themselves?

You picked the wrong hobby horse to ride, AOC.AOC isn’t the only one demanding “justice” for Neely. Protests erupted in New York with demonstrators shouting, “No justice, no peace!” Protesters are also heard yelling in the video, “Abolish the police.”

Without a doubt, the most outrageous response by a politician goes to Governor Kathy Hochul, who says Daniel Penny, the Marine who initiated the chokehold on Neely — and may have saved someone’s life — killed Neely “just for being a passenger” on a train.

https://thespectator.com/topic/jordan-neely-rorschach-test-new-york-subway/?utm_source=

Most of those who follow the news have already seen the distressing video. A black man, Jordan Neely, walked onto a New York subway train screaming obscenities and ranting about his own destitution. Another passenger, a former Marine called Daniel Penny, came up behind him, took him to the ground and placed him into a chokehold. Neely lost consciousness and died.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist could not create a better scenario that perfectly exemplifies everyone’s societal meta-narratives, a Rorschach test onto which we can map our assumptions and biases. It resembles a “what do you see? Two women or a wine glass?” kind of picture. Is this a black man, destroyed and choked by oppression, or the inevitable result of societal decay?

Pundits and politicians are already arguing, convinced that this event affirms their priors. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that Neely “was houseless and crying for food in a time when the city is raising rents and stripping services to militarize itself while many in power demonize the poor.” His aggressive outburst on the train was a cry for help and society responded with murder.

Conversely, Inez Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum, has pointed out that the Neely had forty-four prior arrests and an active warrant. A just society does not ask commuters to abide threatening scenarios on their daily commute. When DAs refuse to prosecute low-level crime and cities leave the mentally ill on the streets, disorder swells and vigilantism is inevitable.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-son-has-done-nothing-wrong-hunter-joe-biden-justice-department-indictment-5b0df0d8?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

“Mr. Biden’s claims about his son’s innocence complicate the job of federal prosecutors. Such a high-profile probe is always fraught with political implications, and many Americans will assume political influence if there is no indictment. But Mr. Biden shouldn’t feed those suspicions with his public statements.”

President Biden says he doesn’t interfere with the Justice Department’s prosecutorial decisions, but influence can take many forms. One is to send a public signal in an interview that Attorney General Merrick Garland will hear.

That’s what Mr. Biden did Friday when asked in a rare interview about the probe into his son Hunter’s misadventures. “My son has done nothing wrong,” the President said on MSNBC. “I trust him. I have faith in him, and it impacts my Presidency by making me feel proud of him.”

That’s a highly inappropriate message from a President. He’s essentially telling prosecutors that they are wrong to bring an indictment because Hunter is innocent of any criminal behavior. Some might think it’s only natural for a father to defend the son he loves, but the Justice Department is part of the executive branch that he runs. Mr. Garland and his prosecutors work for the President.