RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lefts-war-on-the-rule-of-law-constitution-democrats-ethics-reform-kavanaugh-gorsuch-abortion-5f7b2b61?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The left was able for decades to get through the courts, including the Supreme Court, what it couldn’t get through Congress. Today, however, liberals are trying to subvert the legitimacy of the Supreme Court because it contains a majority of justices committed to the Constitution and the rule of law. Suddenly, instead of repeatedly approving the left’s agenda, the federal judiciary has become one of its greatest impediments. Believing they can no longer win at the court, progressives now want to change the rules of the game. Rather than improving their legal arguments and strategy, they are attacking the referees.

The first contours of the plan emerged in March 2020. As the justices prepared to rule on a Louisiana abortion law, Sen. Chuck Schumer stood in front of the Supreme Court and declared that Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch had “released the whirlwind” and would “pay the price.” He warned that they wouldn’t “know what hit” them if they went forward with “these awful decisions.” The pattern of attack that emerged since then makes it clear that Mr. Schumer meant what he said. The judiciary, and the justices themselves, are in the left’s cross hairs—sometimes literally.

The first step of the left’s plan to transform the courts was to end the filibuster. Breaking this longstanding Senate procedural norm would eventually give the majority party power to overhaul the membership, structure and jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. Next came a push for court-packing, both via legislation and President Biden’s presidential commission on court reform. Although these efforts weren’t successful, Democrats haven’t given up. They still want to end the filibuster and pack the court and are merely waiting for the right political moment.

A slew of attacks on judicial norms constituted the next step in the left’s plan to transform the courts. Liberal activists called for term limits for Supreme Court justices. They pressured Justice Stephen Breyer to retire during President Biden’s term. They protested outside the justices’ homes after the Dobbs decision leaked, and a potential assassin even targeted Justice Kavanaugh.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-durham-report-special-counsel-fbi-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-russia-peter-strzok-christopher-steele-d4a01d4e?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Two special counsels, several inspector general reports and six years later, the country finally has a more complete account of the FBI’s Russia collusion probe of the 2016 Donald Trump campaign. Special counsel John Durham’s final report makes clear that a partisan FBI became a funnel for disinformation from the Hillary Clinton campaign through a secret investigation the bureau never should have launched.

The 306-page Durham report released Monday afternoon is far more comprehensive than anything issued by original special counsel Robert Mueller. Mr. Durham had already unfurled some of the narrative with his prosecutions of Russian national Igor Danchenko and Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann. He lost those cases, though the indictments laid out how the Clinton campaign used foreign nationals, an oppo-research outfit, and political insiders to feed the FBI and the media lies about Trump collusion.

The Durham report gives a fuller picture of the FBI’s complicity under former director James Comey and deputy Andrew McCabe. It scores an FBI that “failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law.” Here are some of the specific findings:

• No basis for investigation. The FBI lacked “any actual evidence of collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia when it violated its standards and jumped over several steps to initiate a full investigation, including probes into four members of the Trump campaign.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/16/in-a-healthy-democracy-john-brennan-would-already-be-in-prison/

The former CIA director should have been driven into exile years ago.

The just-released Durham report confirmed that the FBI not only failed to corroborate the Steele dossier, Hillary Clinton’s oppo-doc against Donald Trump, but it regularly ignored existing, sometimes dispositive, evidence to keep the investigation alive. Some officials were credulous. Others were devious. But no one “stole” our democracy — other than perhaps intelligence officials and the journalists who helped feed the collective hysteria over Russia.

John Brennan, Hamas-loving authoritarian and partisan propagandist, almost surely knew it was a con from the start. Yet he spent four years on television sounding like a deranged subreddit commenter. Even after privately admitting he knew there was no collusion, Brennan kept lying and using his credentials to mislead the public.

From Durham’s report:

CIA Director John Brennan and Deputy Director David Cohen were interviewed by the Office and were asked about their knowledge of any actual evidence of members of the Trump campaign conspiring or colluding with Russian officials. When Brennan was provided with an overview of the origins of the Attorney General’s Review after Special Counsel Mueller finding a lack of evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian authorities, Brennan offered that “they found no conspiracy.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/05/16/breathtakingly-corrupt-fbi-exposed-in-durham-trump-russia-report-n1695650

Special Counsel John Durham called the FBI’s acts in the Crossfire Hurricane (Trump-Russia) probe “sobering” and said the actions displayed a “lack of fidelity.” But Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said the probe exposed a “breathtakingly corrupt” FBI that is “subversive of the Constitution.”

Somebody might want to take Christopher Wray’s airplane away, halt those billions for a new FBI building, and get the FBI Director a new pair of underpants after this report.

In a series of tweets, Lee, a Constitutional scholar, said the Durham report laid bare the series of political decisions to get Trump instead of following its own rules.

Lee said that “the gravity of the misconduct uncovered by Mr. Durham cannot be overstated.”

“The LEAST one can say of it is that it involved a malicious use of federal law-enforcement officers to conduct a contrived investigation utterly lacking any valid, factual foundation from the very beginning. That is itself incredibly troubling—and also unconstitutional,” he wrote. But he said that the Durham Report indicated that the FBI corruption “was SO MUCH WORSE than that.” He stated that the ramifications of the Report showed “a powerful, long-respected, federal law-enforcement agency” using its power “to render a presidential candidate unelectable—entirely in the absence of any valid, good-faith basis for doing so.” [emphasis added]

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

For the last few years, the stench of wokeness has enshrouded our nation – in schools, corporations, politics, and cultural institutions. It arrived under the names “Political Correctness” and “Diversity;” as it came in on T.S. Eliot’s “little cat feet,” unobtrusively, but seductively and relentlessly, backed by the arrogance of the self-righteous. While many of its proponents want a world where racism does not exist, where sexuality is a choice, and where a sustainable climate allows mankind to flourish, the world they have created has the absurdity of Gulliver’s travels to the kingdom of Balnibarbi and the island of Laputa.

It is the folly of wokeness that augurs its demise: that slavery defined our nation’s founding, and that racism infects all white people, at least those who do not hew to a progressive line; that biology does not define a man and a woman, and that gender is a choice; and that unless we all give up gas stoves and drive electric vehicles the world will become uninhabitable.

At the same time, we face real problems: failing public schools; a shrinking military; a permeable southern border; federal debt that, as a percent of GDP, is higher than at any point since World War II; persistent inflation; an aging population that will require more entitlement spending; a decline in global influence; a general sense of pessimism expressed in declining birth rates; and a President who, as Bruce Thornton recently wrote, “makes Chance, the Gardner look like Abraham Lincoln.”

Students score poorly on international tests in math, science and reading, and they fail questions regarding history and civics. We have been divided into tribes, into oppressors and the oppressed. Those who are seen as victims (and their heirs) are condemned to victimization for all eternity. California has considered reparations to descendants of slaves, including those five to seven generations removed.  Ignored is the instinct for people to better themselves. Neglected is the Biblical admonition from Ezekiel 18:20: “The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father the guilt of the son.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/15/in-scathing-report-durham-finds-fbi-had-no-actual-evidence-of-collusion-to-justify-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/

In a damning 300-plus page report released Monday afternoon, Special Counsel John Durham said that the FBI had no verified intelligence or evidence to justify the Trump-Russia investigation into President Donald Trump’s campaign in the summer of 2016.

The Bureau’s Crossfire Hurricane probe was ostensibly opened to determine whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to influence the presidential election. Former Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham to “investigate the investigators” in May 2019 when it became clear that the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe was a political “witch hunt” meant to hobble Trump’s campaign and then his presidency.

According to Durham’s report, “neither U.S. nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

Notably, the report states, “on July 26, 2016, Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

Igor Danchenko, a Clinton subcontractor, invented the most explosive allegations in British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier—including the so-called “pee tape,” and fraudulently sourced the rumors to Sergei Millian, an innocent Belarusian-American businessman.

Steele was hired by an Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm, on behalf of Perkins Coie, the law firm for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.  Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded in December 2019 that the dossier played a “central and essential” role in the FISA Court’s approval of the FBI’s secret surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

Durham’s report noted the the FBI failed to corroborate any of the dossier’s key claims: “Our investigation determined that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting.”

The report added: “Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the Department and the FBI failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/15/hang-all-the-members-of-the-liars-club/

Federal prosecutors last week announced the indictment of U.S. Representative George Santos (R-N.Y.) on a host of charges, including misuse of federal campaign funds and wire fraud, almost all of them resulting from his pathological lies.  

Certainly, Santos deserved the attention of prosecutors for lying on federal documents and affidavits that may have helped him win a congressional seat as well as personal lucre. 

But if that’s the case, why haven’t federal prosecutors also gone after Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)? She clearly lied her way into a Harvard Law School professorship and an erstwhile presidential candidacy by claiming, in part, quite falsely she was a Native American, supposedly Harvard’s first indigenous law professor. 

Her Senate colleague, Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), flatly lied (he said “misspoke”) about being a Vietnam War veteran. He never confessed to “misspeaking” about his résumé until caught. Both senators, apparently like Santos, gained political traction in their various campaigns from such lies, but the two apparently never put them in writing, or at least not as blatantly as did Santos. 

New Federal Standards? 

Are federal and states prosecutors now setting a new moral and legal standard by criminalizing Santos’ lies? If true, congratulations—it is long overdue. 

Now can we please extend the long arm of the law to reach far beyond a bit player like Santos? 

Why not reboot with the really big liars? Their lies far more undermined the integrity of our key agencies and indeed our national security. 

So let us start with John Brennan, the former CIA director. He lied on two separate occasions, in one case while under oath before the U.S. Senate. His untruths were not mere campaign finance fabrications. They involved falsely swearing that the CIA did not spy on the computers of Senate staffers (“Let me assure you the CIA was in no way spying on [the committee] or the Senate.”). He also lied that U.S. drone missions in prior years had not killed innocent bystanders (“There hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.”).  

Brennan, only when caught, admitted to both lies. But he faced zero consequences and, in fact, was soon rewarded with an on-air analyst job at MSNBC.  

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-bidens-habitual-race-baiting/

Joe Biden ascended to cruising altitude over the weekend to issue a comprehensive critique of the evil lurking in his fellow countrymen’s hearts. In a commencement address before the student body at the historically black Howard University, Biden took the measure of American history and found much of it wanting.

The story of American life “has not always been a fairytale,” the president said of the straw man he came to bury. It is a narrative of constant struggle between “the best of us” and “the worst of us,” symbolic of the “harsh reality that racism has always torn us apart.” Speaking of the permanent conflict for the soul of the nation, Biden said it demands that Americans of good faith “stand up against the poison of white supremacy,” as he has. He reiterated that “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.”

Biden’s elision of the word “domestic” from his identification of white nationalists as the nation’s primary terroristic adversary forecloses on invoking the FBI statistics that might have justified a narrower claim. But to include this qualifier would have taken all the sting out of the president’s contention, which, despite his explicit insistence that his comments were not audience-dependent, was likely designed to reinforce negative racial assumptions.

Joe Biden long ago sacrificed the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his forays into racial agitation. We don’t need to sift through the annals of history for examples of his reflexive race-baiting — the notion that Republicans sought to put black Americans “back in chains,” the idea that African Americans who declined to vote for him “ain’t black,” the implicit contrast between Barack Obama, an “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” and other “mainstream African American” political leaders. We need only look at the president’s record in his first term in office.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/15/the-great-debt-ceiling-deceit/

At the heart of all fearmongering over the debt ceiling “crisis” is the claim that if the federal government can’t borrow more money it won’t be able to pay interest on its existing debt, leading to a default.

But that’s poppycock. The government will collect more than a trillion dollars over the next three months. (It collected $638 billion in taxes in April alone.) That will be more than enough to pay interest on the debt. And it will be enough to pay all Social Security benefits, Medicare and Medicaid bills, welfare checks, food stamps. There will even be enough money to pay for Joe Biden’s new electric car subsidies.

There just won’t be any money left for anything else. Nothing for the military, infrastructure, education, the environment, law enforcement, or any other program the federal government currently operates.

That’s because, as it stands today, every penny collected in taxes goes to pay interest on the debt and a category described as “payments for individuals.” Everything else is paid for with borrowed money.