RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/debt-ceiling-bill-budget-military-spending-biden-kevin-mccarthy-senate-pentagon-45db6323?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The debt-ceiling bill passed the Senate on Thursday evening with 63 votes, though not before several Senators warned about its cuts to military spending. They have a point that will have to be addressed.

Republicans succeeded in reducing domestic discretionary spending, but the political price was agreeing to President Biden’s defense budget request of $886 billion for 2024 and $895 billion in 2025. That’s a 3% nominal increase in 2024, and it at least breaks the Democratic Party’s long-time demand that every defense dollar be matched with one for social welfare.

But Mr. Biden’s number is a real cut in defense after inflation. The deal means U.S. spending on the military could fall below 3% of the economy for the first time since the height of the post-Cold War peace dividend in the late 1990s.

No one thinks the world is more tranquil today than in 1999, as Vladimir Putin prosecutes the first European land war in 80 years. The Biden budget shrinks the U.S. Navy to 286 ships by 2025—as China ramps up to a 400-strong fleet designed to subdue Taiwan.

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

In his works on rhetoric, Aristotle said that a speaker can hope to persuade his audience only if the message is underpinned by logos, an appeal to reason; pathos, an appeal to emotions; and, above all, ethos, the appeal that derives from the speaker’s own character and credibility. On that last, vital count, Mayor Eric Adams of New York City (NYC) failed miserably last week as he signed legislation (Intro. 209-2022 A) banning discrimination by weight and height in employment, housing, and public accommodations.

But before we get to Adams’s hypocrisy, let us look at the grievance of size discrimination per se. Manufactured and overblown by ‘woke’ activists, it stands on shaky ground. Body-positive activism denies the fact that being overweight is unhealthy and upends attempts by healthcare professionals to drive home the message that there is a strong connection between obesity and a host of conditions such as hypertension, high LDL cholesterol levels, diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, gallbladder disease, kidney failure, and cancer. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) says there is a well-established connection between obesity and morbidity and mortality.

By blaming society for the misery felt by outliers in weight, height, or other physical traits, body-positive activism diverts them from the hard work of changing what can be changed and accepting what cannot. With faddish references to “fat pride” and “size freedom” and spurious charges of “fat shaming,” many people choose to reject a rather obvious salubrious solution: adopting a healthier lifestyle.

Fortunately, the new law permits height and weight standards to be used in situations in which job performance necessitates certain physical traits.  For example, law enforcement, firefighters and defense forces constitute categories with requirements that would be exempt from the strictures of Intro. 209-2022A.  Similarly, the bill permits operators of public accommodations to consider height and weight criteria as part of what is reasonably necessary for normal operations.  With these broad-brush exemptions, it’s hard to discern what purpose the law serves.

Now for Adams and his compromised ethos. The mayor, a former police officer who has been a crusader for healthy eating and fitness, ended up making a statement of questionable veracity while announcing the new law: “Science has showed (sic) that body type is not a connection to if you’re healthy or unhealthy. I think that’s a misnomer (sic) that we are really dispelling.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/01/george-soros-and-the-new-york-city-subway-tragedy/

The tragic death of Jordan Neely and the despicable legal lynching of Daniel Penny are not random events.

Democrats have instituted globalist-inspired programs and policies, transforming major cities like New York into dystopian hellscapes. Public safety has been abandoned. Predatory criminals, the drug addicted, and the violently mentally ill roam the streets and subways with impunity. Police are either absent or passive spectators. States attorneys protect criminals instead of their victims.

The result is law-abiding citizens have been left to survive on their own. And when heroes like Daniel Penny stand up to protect their lives and those of their fellow citizens—they are crushed.

The Common Thread of Evil 

The common thread of evil which runs through every social catastrophe in America can be traced to George Soros—the dark soul of the Democratic Party.

Every Soros-financed initiative is designed to facilitate the destruction of the roots of Western culture and the foundation of American civilization. His objective is to tear down society by unraveling our culture, values, and traditions. That twisted vision is now the platform of the Democratic Party. 

Here are some items from Soros’ globalist playbook that are already destroying America with links to the front organizations he finances to implement it. 

Open borders.
Subverting the rule of law by financing the election of pro-criminal states attorneys.
Drug legalization.
Normalizing mass homelessness, untreated mental illness, and drug addiction.
Defunding the police.
Perpetuating the big lie of “systemic police racism.”
Prison abolition.
Institutionalizing the antiwhite racism and perpetual black victimhood of critical race theory.
Spreading transgender ideology and the depraved genital mutilation and castration of children.
Unlimited abortion in America and globally.
Global legalization of prostitution.
Euthanasia.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-student-loan-write-off-congress-vote-house-senate-supreme-court-29c2fb4f?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The Supreme Court will soon rule on the legality of President Biden’s unilateral decision to write down $400 billion in student-loan debt. If anyone doubts why the President dodged Congress on the issue, recent votes make clear that he would have lost.

The Democratic Senate voted Thursday, 52-46, to endorse a Congressional resolution to overturn the Biden write-off. That followed a 218-203 vote in the House a week earlier to do the same.

With a wave of his hand last summer, Mr. Biden canceled $10,000 to $20,000 in debt for some 40 million borrowers, though he had earlier conceded it was “pretty questionable” that he had the power to do so. Nancy Pelosi, then House Speaker, also said two years ago that “it would take an act of Congress, not an executive order, to cancel student loan debt.”

Who cares about the law when an election is nigh? The White House claims it has sweeping authority to forgive student debt under an obscure 2003 law to help veterans, and this is the claim the High Court is judging. But Mr. Biden’s transparent political goal was to buy the votes of young people who have student debt. While the write-down might have played well in Berkeley, Calif., it rankles most Americans who didn’t go to college or who sacrificed to repay their loans.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/31/is-the-sleeping-conservative-dragon-finally-waking-up/

Conservatives and traditionalists are often exasperated at the ongoing woke cultural revolution in their midst.

How can America be turned upside down, as it is, when there is little public support for the things happening around us?

They don’t see much backing for the current wide-open borders and unchecked illegal immigration, yet it continues.

Conservatives feel that most Americans reject the trend of biological men dominating female sporting events.

They fear American jurisprudence has become now vastly weaponized and warped.

Certainly, Donald Trump will be more likely indicted by a politicized New York City prosecutor for supposedly overvaluing his net worth over a decade ago than would be a current violent street criminal clubbing a subway commuter.

In 2020 torching a federal courthouse or massing at the White House grounds, in efforts to get at the president, earned either few arrests and little or no jail time. In 2021, if one entered the Capitol and illegally paraded around like a buffoon, he could get a five-year prison sentence.

Traditionalists feel that sky-high energy prices, out-of-control urban crime, a depressed economy, high interest rates, and a politicized FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and Pentagon are all needlessly self-created messes.

How then did these extremist policies that have little popular support become institutionalized?

Conservatives, by their nature and unlike the Left, are more inclined to accept existing institutions rather than to radically alter or destroy them.

They were asleep at the wheel in 2020, when left-wing-funded lawsuits radically transformed Election Day in many states into a mere construct. Some 70 percent of the electorate in key precincts voted by mail or early, with far fewer ballot audits or authentication.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/jamie-glazov-on-newsmax-barack-obamas-true-legacy/

In this new video, Frontpage Editor Jamie Glazov appears on Newsmax’s Chris Salcedo Show to discuss his new book, Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America, analyzing the fertile soil in which the Biden administration’s malice and destruction grew.

Don’t miss it!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/j1-the-anniversary-of-the-blm-insurrection-at-the-white-house/

On May 29th, 2020, the nationwide insurrection by the racist hate group BLM and its leftist allies arrived in the nation’s capital in a very big way.

On Friday night, a violent racist leftist mob, falsely described as “peaceful” by its media allies, converged on the White House. The insurrectionists assaulted Secret Service and Park Police officers. They shouted obscenities and threatened President Trump even as they fought their way past law enforcement personnel to reach the White House.

“It looks like a war zone outside the White House,”  Adam Parkhomenko, the former co-founder of Ready for Hillary, commented on a retweeted video of a burning building.

The Democrat insurrectionists hurled Molotov cocktails and rushed out for brief tactical forays even as a more telegenic crowd that was proportionately more female held their hands up for the cameras and chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot”: a BLM hoax popularized during the Michael Brown riots. While these human shields faced off with law enforcement, the real attack was underway with insurrectionists targeting security barriers and Secret Service personnel.

Secret Service personnel faced everything from bricks to incendiary devices and held the line. The insurrectionist assault was aimed at breaking the line, forcing the Secret Service to retreat allowing for a siege of the White House, followed by a full assault and penetration of the grounds. But despite the violence, the Secret Service did not retreat and none of the Democrat insurrectionists were able to make it over the White House fence.

The insurrectionist tactics on display were similar to those that had terrorized cities around the country, but what especially alarmed federal personnel was that the insurrectionists were not just aiming at the White House, but also at the nearby Treasury Department building.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-weaponization-of-the-fbi-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/

By some miracle, Republicans managed to time the news cycle correctly last week. The Durham report was released, excoriating the FBI’s handling of pretty much everything since Former FBI Director Robert Muller. And, the House Judiciary Committee held additional whistleblower hearings. Things could hardly look worse for the FBI — and, the once venerable institution deserves the scorn and opprobrium being heaped on it by the bucket full.

What exists now, barely more than a year out from my retirement, is unrecognizable.

It’s deeply saddening, watching an institution designed to ferret out and prosecute the enemies of the constitution being infiltrated, compromised, and consumed by the very ideologies it was created to combat. This isn’t something to be celebrated or trivialized by silly slogans like, “the FBI should be Control-Alt-Deleted.” Unfortunately, conservative media is all too happy to propagate such fatuousness. Soundbites rule over substance.

The media industrial complex is popularizing the same spirit of demagoguery that got us into this mess in the first place. It’s so easy to fall into this trap, especially when the enemy is within the gates. The loudest voices aren’t necessarily right.

Our country is in peril, perhaps like never before. The FBI ethos has been eroded, like a once proud marble edifice pitted, cracked, and broken by the onslaught of weather and time. And, just like the processes that reduced ancient structures to rubble, a process has been at work to deconstruct our civil society and our institutions.

The problem isn’t complex, its systemic, and the cause isn’t served by celebrating the loathsome. Perhaps I’m just too old school for this particular debate, but doxxing fellow FBI street agents in the name of “whistleblowing” is inexcusable. For me, it’s nothing less than fratricide — the guilty should face a rhetorical firing squad.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/01/how-to-defund-the-irs-top-10-reasons-for-a-national-sales-tax/

Let’s pick up where our IRS-defunding I&I editorial board brethren lately left off: “There is … a better way to fund federal operations. Move to a single-rate income tax paid monthly with no deductions and no withholding, or implement a national sales tax.”

This commentator chooses National Sales Tax for several trillion dollars, Alex. While he has engaged in many exercises to explain why that levy solves a whole range of problems, here are some highlights in Lettermanesque fashion – the Top 10 Reasons for a National Sales Tax:

10. Keep it simple, stupid! Flat tax or no, the biggest problem with an income tax: it’s on income. The complexity and intrusion relates to determining what is and isn’t, and tracking, income.

Uncle Sam gets to snoop on hundreds of millions of taxpayers to make sure you’re not hiding income. Admittedly, for most taxpayers calculations get simpler without deductions, exemptions and the like. But eliminating withholding would only increase demands for government to stick its nose into your business to ensure you’re not getting money under the table. Especially for the self-employed.

Even many employees get income from multiple sources, including savings and investments. The revenooers want all those records, plus taxpayers will also have to pay monthly to account for non-payroll sources. Who’s going to tell them how much? Certainly not the IRS. Citizens will overpay to be safe, still being stuck with near-compulsory overcharges.

Moreover, what about the corporate income tax? Twenty-seven million private companies generate billions of calculations and pages of required record-keeping. Will that tax also be flat? Gucci Gulch is guffawing.

A sales tax? One number for companies: percentage of sales. For consumers? No record-keeping, filing, or engaging professional help to pay a bill for a service. And no spying on individuals or companies other than sales income.

9.  Jobs, jobs, jobs. The second reason taxing income (and payrolls) stinks: your government taxes work and hiring. While paying people not to work. Madness.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/01/the-debt-ceiling-crisis-might-be-over-but-the-debt-crisis-has-just-begun/

Late Wednesday, the House passed an agreement to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for a few micro changes in spending. But despite all the (wildly exaggerated) warnings about a default, complaints from both sides about the terms of the deal, and what no doubt will be celebrations in the White House for getting a deal done – this fight has always been a sideshow. It’s the debt itself that poses the real and immediate crisis. And this debt ceiling bill does absolutely nothing to address that.

In other words, it’s business as usual in Washington, and anyone celebrating this agreement should be run out of town on a rail.

Here’s what the country faces today.

Interest payments are exploding: Thanks to unprecedented spending during COVID, not only does the government owe interest on $3 trillion more debt than it did when Joe Biden took office, interest rates are going up thanks to the inflation that all that reckless spending sparked. The chart below shows the shocking trend. In just the past year, quarterly federal interest payments shot up 54%.