RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/economy-tank-banks-reeling-inflation-sky-high-biden-telling

Are you angry yet? You should be. Our economy is slowing, banks are reeling, inflation remains scorching-high, real incomes are dropping, home prices are falling and Americans everywhere are becoming poorer by the minute.

On top of everything else, now we have the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, infuriating bailouts and the resulting panic over banks. As with nearly everything that has gone wrong on their watch, including the inexcusable border chaos, the catastrophic pullout from Afghanistan and harmful inflation, the go-to response by the White House has been to blame President Trump.

Specifically, to blame Trump for signing legislation that loosened regulations on regional banks in 2018.That was Joe Biden’s message in the pitiful 5-minute address in which he tried but utterly failed to reassure the nation that our banking system is sound.

Here’s what Biden didn’t say: they knew. Regulators knew that Silicon Valley Bank was on the brink of failure. Supervisors spotted fatal weaknesses at the tech lender last summer, including some deemed “matters requiring immediate attention”; they told SVB management last fall that its model was flawed and could result in a run on deposits. 

Despite the grave warning, the New York Times reports, management failed to change course and supervisors failed to act. By early this spring, SVB was in yet another review, this one on its risk management practices. Bottom line: there were none.

In other words, there were plenty of regulations and processes in place to prevent the catastrophe that occurred at SVB. Critics have assailed the San Francisco Fed, the supervisory authority, and its chief Mary Daly, for negligence. Some have rightly said that having SVB CEO Greg Becker on the overseer Fed board posed an obvious and dangerous conflict of interest.

It is hard to dismiss those who assert that the eagerness with which the Fed, the Treasury and the White House stepped in to bail out SVB and Signature Bank, caught in SVB’s backdraft, stemmed from the cozy relationships and giant political donations that Democrats receive from the tech community. It is, indeed, one big Happy Valley. 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/20/the-lingering-malady-of-trump-derangement-syndrome/

There’s a whiff of the banana republic to the reports that Donald Trump will be arrested this week over the Stormy Daniels affair. Trump said on Truth Social that he expects to have his collar felt by the cops tomorrow. It would be related to the 2016 investigation of the hush money Trump gave to porn star Daniels after he caught wind of the fact that she was trying to hawk the story of their extramarital affair. Trump gave her $130,000, which is perfectly legal, but he registered the hush cash as ‘legal fees’, which is not legal – that’s the falsification of business records, prosecutors say, which is a misdemeanour in New York. NYC district attorney Alvin Bragg set up a grand jury on this rather minor matter, and it’s possible an indictment will be announced this week.

You don’t have to be a Team Trump, ‘January 6’ hothead to know that such an indictment would be a brazenly political act, motivated more by coastal-elite animus towards the Bad Orange Man than by concern about a little white lie in Trump’s business accounts. Bragg is a radical Democrat. His loathing of Trump is well known. He’s also notoriously soft on crime, to the fury of many New Yorkers. As the National Review put it, ‘crime is rampant in New York’, in part because ‘Bragg’s default position is leniency and often non-prosecution when it comes to hardened criminals’. The idea that he’s now having sleepless nights over a fib told by Trump seven years ago is preposterous. No, this is ‘bare-naked politics’, in NR’s words.

What we have here, boiled down, is the ruling party using a trumped-up charge to punish the leader they pushed out of power. That’s what happens in banana republics. Republican senator Eric Schmitt was surely right when he said that ‘if this same behaviour occurred in an authoritarian state, our own US State Department would condemn it’. In liberal, woke New York City, however, it’s seen as perfectly okay. The shamelessly political nature of this legal act can be seen in the social-media crowing over it, too. Every detail of the possible indictment is being relished by Trump-haters. Memes abound showing Trump in cuffs. CNN and others can barely contain their glee that Trump would have to be ‘processed and arraigned at the courthouse, which includes fingerprinting and mug shot’. That mug shot would be everyone’s Twitter pic by Wednesday morning.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/keep_nine_and_ban_courtpacking.html

The independence of the Judiciary — enshrined in the Constitution and essential to both the rule of law and democracy itself — has not been immune to attack.  Acting through Congress, the federal government has on seven occasions changed the number of justices on the Supreme Court, chiefly for political gain.  Such court-packing reflects badly on the American judicial system as a whole, since the perception of judicial independence or its absence permeates all levels of the courts.

To end the pernicious practice, a group of 15 former state attorneys general — eight Democrats and seven Republicans — got together in 2019 to found the Coalition to Preserve the Independence of the United States Supreme Court.  They proposed a constitutional amendment to permanently ban court-packing — the one-sentence Keep Nine Amendment — which says: “The Supreme Court of the United States shall be composed of nine Justices.”

It now has the support of over 200 members of Congress, 19 state legislatures, attorneys general, governors, and other government officials.  Voters support the amendment, 62% for versus 18% against.  Many justices, including Stephen Breyer and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, agreed that nine is “a very good number,” large enough to represent some diversity of views, small enough to allow the Court to be sufficiently deliberative.  Nine is also the number of justices the Court has had since 1869. 

In September 2020, U.S. rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) introduced the amendment in the House of Representatives as House Joint Resolution 53; he reintroduced it in 2021 (H.J.Res. 11) and again in January 2023 (H.J.Res. 8).  In October 2020, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) introduced it in the Senate as Joint Resolution 76.  Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), too, proposed an amendment in 2021 that the Supreme Court bench shall constitute “not more than nine judges.”

According to Article V, there are two ways to amend the Constitution: by a two-thirds vote on a proposed congressional resolution or by a convention called by Congress in response to applications from two thirds of the state legislatures.  According to Paul Summers, former attorney general of Tennessee and current chair of the Keep Nine coalition, this is an opportunity for American leaders to come together despite their deep differences to protect the independence of one of the key institutions that protects our republic.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/ron_desantis_finally_speaks_up_about_the_probable_trump_indictment.html

Ron DeSantis finally had his say about the news, and he hit it out of the park.

In three minutes, DeSantis addressed the malevolence of Soros prosecutors, the legal principles at issue, and his own admirable record. He also threw in an attack against Trump that succeeded in triggering one of Trump’s famously self-harming counterattacks.

If you don’t want to watch the video, here are the key points DeSantis made:

He was limiting his comments because there are no concrete facts available.
Alvin Bragg is a “Soros-funded prosecutor” and, therefore, is “like other Soros-funded prosecutors—they weaponize their office to impose a political agenda on society at the expense of the rule of law and public safety.”
Even as Bragg is weaponizing his office, he’s making it impossible to put real criminals in jail, causing crime in Manhattan to go up, while “citizens become less safe.”
He reminded his audience that he is the only governor to date to have rid his state of a Soros-funded prosecutor.
He has no interest in getting involved in a Soros-prosecutor’s “circus,” which is to “virtue signal” to his base because he has to take care of his own state, which has real and immediate needs that are his responsibility.
And in a small, but vicious attack against Trump, DeSantis slipped in that “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair. I just I can’t speak to that.”

Trump, the counterpuncher, did what he always did: He went on the attack against DeSantis. It was a foolish attack because it showed that DeSantis is living in his head, just as Trump has lived in leftist heads. It shows fear.

He began with a post implying that DeSantis has a secret gay love life:

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/20/donald-trump-regime-foe/

The funniest thing I have read in, well, at least the last several hours, comes from Manhattan’s George Soros-funded affirmative-action district attorney, Alvin Bragg. Responding to the uproar that greeted Donald Trump’s all-caps Truth Social warning that he would be “arrested” on Tuesday, Bragg sent ’round a memo to his staff informing them, and the world, that “This office is full of the finest public servants in the country.” 

The comedy didn’t end there, however. 

“I am committed to maintaining a safe work environment where everyone is able to continue to serve the public with the same diligence and professionalism [!] that make this institution so renowned. In the meantime, as with all of our investigations, we will continue to apply the law evenly and fairly . . .” 

What a card! And, yes, that’s my emphasis but his credulity-breaking bluster. 

“Evenly and fairly,” forsooth. Everyone knows that Alvin Bragg does not apply the law at all evenly or fairly. Favoring and disfavoring certain groups is what he is famous for doing. It’s his standard operating procedure. When it comes to your common or garden variety violent thug, especially those of a swarthy disposition, Bragg is the Angel of Mercy. 

Last year, Bragg reduced the majority of felony charges that were brought before him to misdemeanors while at the same time targeting people like the bodega employee who fought back to protect himself after being assaulted by one of those common or garden variety thugs. 

Will Donald Trump be “arrested” this week? I wouldn’t be surprised. Minions of the state at every level have been working overtime to neutralize Trump for years. 

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/20/the-death-of-dissent/

The lead prosecutor in charge of the January 6 investigation, the largest probe in Justice Department history, just confirmed what American Greatness has reported for months: the number of criminal cases related to the Capitol protest is expected to at least double before it’s all over.

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves, an advisor to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign who took over the powerful office in late 2021, sent a letter to the chief judge of the D.C. District court warning up to 1,200 more individuals could face charges. 

“We expect the pace of bringing new cases will increase, in an orderly fashion, over the course of the next few months,” Graves told Beryl Howell, who ended her term as chief judge last week. Graves’ office just surpassed 1,000 total defendants in what he renamed the “Capitol Siege” investigation—which means the final caseload might well exceed 2,000.

Graves also indicated his team would ramp up the number of felony indictments; the overwhelming majority of charges so far are low-level offenses, including the laughable “parading in the Capitol” misdemeanor. The Biden regime clearly wants to juice the numbers before the 2024 election season.

And Graves isn’t wasting any time. Eight people have been charged since March 1, including a married couple from Indiana arrested on a civil disorder felony and four misdemeanors. The D.C. federal courthouse is monopolized by January 6 hearings and trials on a daily basis; one judge announced he would retire rather than deal with January 6 cases for the next several years.

In addition to ruining the lives of thousands of Americans for mostly nonviolent participation in the events of January 6, the Justice Department is accomplishing a more sinister goal: criminalizing and silencing political dissent in America. I warned two years ago, as Attorney General Merrick Garland’s prosecutors bastardized a post-Enron law in an attempt to turn political protesters into lifelong felons, that January 6 would be used in this manner.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-great-abdication-of-california

On August 15, 2022, an intersection in South Central Los Angeles fell prey to a particularly Southern Californian form of anarchy. Parked vehicles blocked the crossroad to through traffic, while inside the blockade, cars sped in tight circles, their burning tires emitting acrid smoke. Just after midnight, spectators to this “street takeover” stormed into a nearby 7-Eleven. They grabbed whatever lay closest to hand—candy, soft drinks, chips—jumped over the payment counter to get at cigarettes and lottery tickets, and pelted the lone salesclerk, cowering underneath the counter, with bananas and other items. The vandals live-streamed the mayhem from their smartphones. An hour earlier, a teenager had been fatally shot during a nearby street takeover.

Mass looting, in the post–George Floyd era, is hardly confined to California, but the sense of entitlement manifest in August’s double whammy of road and retail lawlessness is the signal feature of the state’s twin plagues of crime and vagrancy. California is being brought down by what one can call the Great Abdication. The law-abiding and the hardworking are no longer the main concern of public officials; instead, the interests of the lawless and the deviant prevail. Policy revolves around their alleged needs, not the needs of those whom they assault and encumber. The result of the Great Abdication has been brazen violence and streets mired in squalor.

You know street crime is bad when even rap celebrities complain about it. “Where I’m from, we like sneaky criminals. In L.A. . . . they bold!” opined Philadelphia rapper PnB Rock during a September 2, 2022, podcast. The day before, fellow rapper Wakko the Kid had been shot outside his North Hollywood house. The Kid had just returned home from a recording session when two men exited a parked car, yanked off his $80,000 necklace, and pumped 16 bullets into him and his audio engineer (both men survived). In February 2020, Brooklyn rapper Pop Smoke had been killed during a home invasion in the Hollywood Hills.

PnB Rock’s interlocutor on the podcast, DJ Akademiks, agreed with PnB’s assessment of the city’s robbers. “L.A.’s spooky, man,” Akademiks said. “I’m seeing mad videos, like they don’t even do it at night. . . . Broad daylight, that’s when they really do it.” A little over a week later, PnB Rock would himself be killed during a broad-daylight robbery at Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles in South Central Los Angeles. The assailant demanded PnB’s jewelry, fatally shot him when he resisted, and then grabbed his necklace anyway.

These rap stars had posted their diamond bling, luxury cars, and wads of cash on social media, often with location tags on the live photos. But less publicity-hungry residents have found themselves targeted as well, marked in upscale restaurants and bars and followed home, where they are assaulted exiting their cars.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/19/what-happened-to-stanford/

Stanford was once one of the world’s great universities. It birthed Silicon Valley in its prime. And along with its nearby twin and rival, UC Berkeley, its brilliant researchers, and teachers helped fuel the mid-20th-century California miracle.

That was then. But like the descent of California, now something has gone terribly wrong with the university.

Students at Stanford Law School recently shouted down visiting Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan. He had been invited to give a lecture by the school’s Federalist Society. 

The judge never even got the chance. The law school students drowned him out. They flashed obscene placards. They screamed that he was “scum.” One yelled he hoped the judge’s own daughters would be raped.

Others bellowed, “You’re not welcome here, we hate you!” “Leave and never come back!” “We hate FedSoc [Federal Society] students, f–k them, they don’t belong here either!” and “We do not respect you and you have no right to speak here! This is our jurisdiction!”

When the judge tried to reply, they drowned him out with “liar” and “scumbag.” Then, mission accomplished, they smugly stomped out.

Note these were ostensibly not teenaged undergraduates. Instead, they were wannabe adult professionals, in law school to learn jurisprudence and to enter the elite American legal system that is supposed to have protocols separating it from the mobocracies prevailing abroad.

One of those foundational principles is to honor the Constitution’s protection of free speech and expression—not to mention the ancient idea of respecting an invited guest, or the custom to treat with deference a federal judge, to say nothing of the duty to honor the codes and laws of the institution that they have chosen to join which prohibit disruption of lectures and any effort to drive out public speakers.

When an exasperated Justice Duncan called out for a university administrator to restore calm, his podium was instead hijacked by Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach. She then gave her own preplanned, scripted lecture that sided with the disruptive protesters! Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The diversity dean then turned on the speaker. She asked the startled judge whether it was even worth supporting his free speech rights, given he and his views were deemed abhorrent to the new absolutist Stanford.

Note well: DEI Deans normally do not attend law school lectures. She showed up because she apparently knew in advance that the law students would violate their own university’s codes of conduct and disrupt a speaker.

So she had planned, again in advance, to do nothing to stop them. Instead, she would prepare a performance-art speech for such a certainty, to chastise the speaker and defend the disrupters. She assumed correctly that none of the other administrators, who also strangely attended, would admonish her or the students for violating the laws of their own university. She apparently assumed, once more rightly, that her own leftist fides on campus would be enhanced.

So far neither the diversity dean nor the students have been disciplined by the university. When the dean of the law school, Jenny Martinez, offered an apology (but did not punish the students), most of her own class walked out on her. And dozens of Stanford’s law school students lined the corridor in attempts to intimidate her as if she was some sort of toxic pariah.

In a Soviet-style finale, the Acting Associate Dean of Students Jeanne Merino advised the Federalist Society students who were targeted by fellow law students that there were “resources that you can use right now to support your safety and mental health.” Then Merino directed them, inter alia, to none other than Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Dean Tirien Steinbach herself, the very dean who had taken over the podium to lecture Judge Duncan!

The debacle revealed four disturbing characteristics about the Stanford law students: One, they acted as if they were bullies and cowards. Videos of the mess showed how they turned mob-like in their chanting, flashing creepy placards, and, like Maoists, walking out on cue. Yet, when the judge fired back at their rudeness, like wounded fawns they took offense and pouted. And later, when there was mention that the names or photos of the protestors might be published, tit-for-tat, in the manner they themselves had put up posters of the Federalist Society members, they screamed that such exposure was unfair.