RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/04/25/charges-loom-for-hunter-biden-as-his-dad-launches-presidential-bid-n1690151

The big news of the day is that Joe Biden, in a pre-recorded video, announced his 2024 presidential campaign. Polls have repeatedly shown that Americans don’t think he’s done a good job and that he’s too old for the presidency, but that may not be the worst of his problems.

Lawyers for Joe’s embattled son, Hunter Biden, are expected to meet with Justice Department officials this week to discuss possible tax fraud charges and another charge stemming from a gun purchase, according to CNN. The meeting comes amid allegations by an IRS agent that Hunter Biden received preferential treatment during the agency’s investigation. Two senior law enforcement sources told NBC News last week that most of the work on Hunter Biden’s case was completed around a year ago and expressed frustration over the mishandling of the case.

The federal investigation of Hunter Biden began in 2018, and the decision of whether or not to press charges will be made by U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who was appointed by President Donald Trump and subsequently retained by the Biden administration.

“Oddly enough, Hunter’s criminal case has been revived from the dead, only days after a career IRS supervisor filed for official whistleblower protection, accusing the federal government of shielding Hunter from criminal charges,” Fox News’s Sean Hannity said. It is somewhat poetic that, after shielding Hunter Biden from criminal charges for roughly a year, it’s now very possible that Hunter Biden could be indicted the same week his dad announced his presidential campaign.

https://nypost.com/2023/04/25/hunter-biden-told-burisma-colleague-of-blinken-meet-emails/

First son Hunter Biden kept his business partners apprised of at least two scheduled one-on-one meetings with Antony Blinken, emails reviewed by The Post show.

The decade-plus-long relationship between Blinken and Hunter made headlines last week after the House Judiciary Committee revealed that former CIA acting director Michael Morell testified in private that Blinken — then a Biden 2020 campaign adviser — “triggered” a letter from 51 ex-intelligence officials that sought to discredit The Post’s reporting on bombshell emails from the first son’s abandoned laptop.

The Post’s initial scoop detailed Hunter’s role on the board of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma, a position he attained in April 2014 despite no previous industry experience.

On May 22, 2015, 13 months after joining the Burisma board, Hunter Biden emailed Blinken, then President Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state, with a request.

“Have a few minutes next week to grab a cup of coffee? I know you are impossibly busy, but would like to get your advice on a couple of things. Best, Hunter.”

“Absolutely,” Blinken emailed back. “I’m just about to land in Tokyo en route back DC from Burma. I’ll be in office from Tuesday on. Copying Linda in my office to find a good time. Look forward to seeing you. Tony.”

Hunter Biden forwarded Blinken’s reply without comment to Devon Archer, a fellow member of Burisma’s board.

“Roger,” Archer responded.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19603/confidence-building-in-leadership

Military journals report that the United States is preparing to make the Pacific island of Guam a veritable “fortress.”

One suspects no one has used that phrase since the days just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor when the United States finally woke up to the fact that the Land of the Rising Sun had every intention of owning the Pacific. History would go on to record that our decision to fortify Guam would come too late as our isolated defenders would eventually be forced to surrender to overwhelming enemy forces. Few would survive their imprisonment.

Today, military analysts say that 21st century Guam could be overwhelmed by Chinese drones, missiles, and carrier-borne fighter-bombers to ensure that our extensive military outpost could not interfere with any potential invasion of Taiwan. It is the reason the Pentagon is racing to place resources and weaponry on that island in hopes it will deter what some believe is the inevitable Chinese attack on Taiwan.

All of this begs a larger question.

Is America’s Commander in Chief capable of responding strategically to the threats facing our nation? And even a broader question. Does he have the confidence of the American public that he is right person for the job at a time when we are witnessing an inconceivable land war in Eastern Europe and a Chinese military that is deliberating seeking to isolate our allies while engaging in provocative military activities designed to test our resolve.

The Marines have a saying, “Know your enemy.”

So, it would be instructive to review what one historic Chinese philosopher long counseled.

https://nypost.com/2023/04/24/bidens-corruption-is-enough-to-disqualify-him-from-office-now/

A little advice to Republicans overseeing the Biden investigations: Don’t worry if he’s a criminal. It’s bad enough to be corrupt.

James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has been teasing details about his committee’s Biden investigation.

We’re led to believe that a dozen of more Biden family members — not just the president, his ne’er-do-well son Hunter, and his smooth-operator brother Jim — will be implicated in the transfer of piles of foreign money into the family coffers.

Comer suggests that the only rational explanation for this is that foreign regimes, including such hostile ones as Communist China, were buying Biden’s political influence.

This would be shocking if proved.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

It is easy to be pessimistic:

Americans’ trust in government, according to a June 6, 2022 Pew Research Center study, has fallen from 75% in 1958 when the study began to 20% today. Total Fertility Rates, which measure the average number of children born to a female over their lifetime, have declined in the United States from 3.58 in 1960 to 1.64 in 2020. (To maintain population, the TFR must be 2.1.) The numbers portend a shrinking labor force and an increasing number of retirees. A February 2023 WSJ/NORC poll showed that only 21% of Americans feel their children will be better off financially than they are. Belief in God has fallen to 81%, down six percentage points from 2017, and the lowest since the question was first asked by Gallup in 1944.

Less than half of all Americans express a great deal of confidence in the military, with 77% of young Americans physically unfit to serve. Only 9% of those eligible to serve wish to do so, according to an op-ed in the April 15-16, 2023 issue of The Wall Street Journal by the authors of Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America. For more than fifty years, Cassandras have been predicting climate apocalypse. A generation ago, the UN Environment Program claimed that “…entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” Undeterred by past failures, they continue to predict catastrophe. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently issued a report: “We’re hurtling down the road to ruin and running out of time to change course.” Failure has not chastened these prophets of doom. 

Wherever we turn, there is bad news. Crime rates and mass shootings make daily headlines, with perpetrators too often seen as “victims.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, weekly earnings for private-sector workers, adjusted for inflation, declined 3.6% over the past two years, the longest stretch since the 1970s. High school math and reading scores on international tests (PISA) remain low, while political indoctrination is high. Interest rates on U.S. Treasuries have risen, but remain below the rate of inflation, implying negative real returns. Abortion is a super-charged political issue, yet, according to the Guttmacher Institute, the number of abortions in the U.S. was 930 thousand in 2020 versus 1.6 million in 1990, and 93% of all abortions occur in the first trimester, according to the same source. Rational debate is off the table, and ignored is the wisdom of President Clinton from 1992: “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” Keep in mind, we were all fetuses once and were given the chance to live. At this point, it looks like voters in 2024 could be faced with the same Hobson’s choice they had in 2020 – the Scylla of a cognitively challenged and corrupt Joe Biden, or the Charybdis of an ego-infested, unprincipled showman, Donald Trump. As a nation, can we not have better choices? Despite two individuals having declared for the Democrat primary, the DNC says there will be no Democrat primary debates.

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3961719-europe-backs-off-climate-push-as-voters-rebel-will-biden-take-note/

Europe is beginning to back off its aggressive carbon-zero policies. Why? Because consumers are balking. European Union administrators have gone too far, too fast, and the citizens of France, Germany and the Netherlands, among others, have had enough.

There is a lesson here for Joe Biden. Unfortunately, he and his White House climate zealots are unlikely to learn from what is going on across the Atlantic.

Ironically, it is the French Green Party that most recently tried to block plans pushed by the European Parliament to put a carbon tax on fuel used in heating and transport. Its members fear that the measure will reignite the protests of the Gilets Jaunes, the yellow vest group that emerged overnight to oppose a proposed carbon tax on diesel fuel and whose protests all but shut down France. It is not that the Greens have gotten realistic about the need for oil and gas as a bridge fuel, or have suddenly recognized the economic risks of betting on unreliable renewable fuels; rather, they worry that, as one legislator put it, “in a few years’ time, people will hate climate policies. People will go to the far-right parties.”

The proposal to force businesses to buy emissions allowances on fuel and heating would increase household costs by an estimated 50 percent — too much to be politically acceptable. Nonetheless, the EU Parliament approved the measure, which will not go into effect until 2027 and could be postponed if energy prices increase.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/23/do-we-even-know-we-are-all-socialists-now/

Sometimes when you are in the midst of a revolution, you do not even know it. 

I doubt all the Germans who voted in National Socialism quite foresaw what quickly was to come. Those who overthrew the Bourbons or the Romanoffs had no real idea that they had sown the wind and were soon to reap the Jacobin and Bolshevik whirlwind. 

Socialism With a Whimper

So it is with our “woke”—a euphemism for the socialist revolution we are in and do not fully appreciate or even understand.

Socialism is variously defined. The Merriam-Webster dictionary emphasizes the role of the state in near-communist terms: “Any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.”

The Cambridge Dictionary more accurately notes that socialism is “the set of beliefs that states that all people are equal and should share equally in a country’s money, or the political systems based on these beliefs.”

The latter definition perhaps best sums up much of the operative ideology of the new Democratic Party, the Biden Administration, and its subordinates, both elected and administrative. 

But perhaps socialism in America 2023 is even better described as something like “the doctrine of enforced ‘equity’ by government redistribution of money and power from one ‘oppressive’ group to another ‘oppressed,’ with the caveat that the elite redistributors have the right to supersede the law based on their own self-professed superior morality, and the assurance that they will never be subject to the baleful consequences of their own unnatural ideology.”

We have been drifting into such a socialist system for decades, but it was accelerated by the eight years of the Obama Administration and has arrived at near fruition with the Biden Administration. Note first that the more socialist we become, the greater the resistance grows, and the more desperate and cruel the socialists become to force down the throats of the public something they otherwise would vomit up.

Under the woke socialist model there are no longer any absolutes, laws, or customs. We are left instead with mere constructs deemed illegitimate and arbitrary, in need of systematic dismantling in the interest of the proverbial people. 

Such redistributionist, compensatory and reparative efforts to make us equal on the backside have in common a war against all meritocracy and indeed any accomplishment deemed singular and beyond the abilities of the masses. 

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nyc-mayor-eric-adams-says-migrant-crisis-under-biden-administration-has-destroyed-city?intcmp=tw_fnc

Democrat New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Friday the migrant crisis the country is facing under the Biden administration has “destroyed” his city.

Adams made the comments during a panel discussion with the African American Mayors Association in Washington, D.C.

“[The] city is being destroyed by the migrant crisis,” Adams said during the discussion. 

Adams even appeared to take a hit at politicians from his own city, suggesting they aren’t doing much to fix the issue at hand.

“None of my folks came to Washington, D.C., to fight for the resources, that’s going to undermine every agency in our city,” Adams said.

Adams made similar comments Wednesday, when he said that the “national government has turned its back on New York City,” adding that “every service in this city is going to be impacted by the asylum seeker crisis.”

In a memo from the New York City Office of Management, reported by the New York Post, the city will spend an estimated $4.2 billion on costs related to migrants and asylum seekers that would be spent through June 30, 2023, and the end of fiscal year 2024.

According to the internal city memo, Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan would reimburse the city for up to $1 billion in migrant aid, which only covers 29% of expected shelter costs.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3963743-antony-blinken-and-the-made-men-of-the-biden-administration/

Secretary of State Antony Blinken would really, really prefer to talk about grain in Ukraine this week. But many people are less interested in what Blinken is doing as secretary of state than in what he did to become secretary of state. 

This week, Blinken was implicated in a political coverup that could well have made the difference in the 2020 election. According to the sworn testimony of former acting CIA Director Michael Morrell, Blinken – then a high-ranking Biden campaign official – was “the impetus” of the false claim that the Hunter Biden laptop story was really Russian disinformation. Morrell then organized dozens of ex-national security officials to sign the letter claiming that the Hunter laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Morrell further admitted that the Biden campaign “helped to strategize about the public release of the statement.”

Finally, he admitted that one of his goals was not just to warn about Russian influence but “to help then-Vice President Biden in the debate and to assist him in winning the election.”

Help it did. Biden claimed in a presidential debate that the laptop story was “garbage” and part of a “Russian plan.” Biden used the letter to say “nobody believes” that the laptop is real.

In reality, the letter was part of a political plan with the direct involvement of his campaign, but Biden never revealed their involvement. Indeed, over years of controversy surrounding this debunked letter, no one in the Biden campaign or White House (including Blinken) revealed their involvement.

Of course, the letter was all the media needed. Discussion of the laptop was blocked on social media, and virtually every major media outlet dismissed the story before the election. 

That was also all Biden needed to win a close election. The allegations that the Biden family had cashed in millions through influence peddling could have made the difference. It never happened, in part because of Blinken’s work. 

Once in power, Blinken was given one of the top Cabinet positions. He was now one of the “made” men of the administration.

He was not alone. The 2016 election was marred by false allegations of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. Unlike the influence peddling allegations made against Biden, the media ran with those stories for years. It later turned out that the funding and distribution of the infamous Steele dossier originated with the Clinton campaign. The campaign, however, reportedly lied in denying any such funding until after the election. It was later sanctioned for hiding the funding as legal expenses.