RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/16/the-newsom-nuisance/

With a classified document scandal encircling him like a vulture waiting on a wounded animal to succumb to its injuries, Joe Biden’s chances to be a presidential candidate next year are closing in on nil. So who will be the Democrats’ flagship candidate? The smart money says it will be the foolish Gavin Newsom.

The California governor wouldn’t be the only candidate, of course. A lineup for the primaries is likely to include, at the least, current vice president and former U.S. senator from California Kamala Harris, as well as previous candidates Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Even former First Lady Michelle Obama appears in the betting lines.

The clear favorite, though, a year before the primaries, has to be Newsom. He has the backing, the teeth, the hair, the Hollywood glam – and 54 electoral votes.

What he doesn’t have is any good reason whatsoever to be president. He does, though, have a lot of good ones not to be. He is California’s Governor, not America’s Governor, a title better suited for Florida’s Ron DeSantis.

While perfectly cast in the role as the chief executive of California, and adored in blue states on both coasts, and a few in the middle, Newsom’s appeal to red America will be less indifference than outright contempt. He is everything that those voters dislike.

https://stephenrittenberg.substack.com/p/utopian-thinking-ii-the-assault-on?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=auto_share&r=2k6p0

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool

_ George Orwell

           In our previous essay we noted the universality of utopian yearnings, the longing for a perfect world where all conflict, pain, suffering and death would be eliminated. All would dwell happily in the Garden of Eden, or Heaven on Earth-Utopia. As psychoanalysts we noted the way this yearning constitutes a regressive pull back to the earliest phase of human development, the stage when the baby and its needs reign supreme. The longing for perfect bliss in a perfect world is so strong that some of the most gifted and intelligent among us have succumbed to its siren call. Even Lionel Trilling, perhaps the greatest literary critic and social observer of the twentieth century was briefly drawn to the utopian promise of Communism in the 1930’s.

Stalin’s brutal show trials disillusioned him and in the mid 1940’s he wrote a novel, Middle of the Journey, about the lure and the disillusion. The narrator, John Laskell, an intellectual and stand in for the author, is what was known in those days as a “fellow traveler.” All his friends were either Communist party members or strong sympathizers. At the height of his intellectual powers Laskell falls ill and nearly dies. He starts thinking about the reality of his biological self and the questions his near death raises. He muses about the limits death imposes. He searches for meaning not in utopian politics but in his own individual life. He remembers a woman he loved who died young before their personal relationship could grow. Personal loss, the body’s fragility, limits, begin to feel inevitable.

His close friends, ardent Communists refuse to talk with him about the spiritual and psychological questions his illness raises. He annoys them because death is not personal for them; their friendship is not personal. Rather he is a comrade member of a great revolutionary movement. He notices and is troubled that they aren’t really interested in his uniquely individual experience, but rather in him as a member of a class in the vanguard of the coming new world.

They particularly do not want to hear him say that his period of withdrawal from the world into his illness and recovery had its pleasurable aspect. He liked being cared for and in fact enjoyed contemplating a beautiful rose in his sick room, instead of mulling over the plight of the masses. Trilling places biological reality against utopian longings. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/paula-bolyard/2023/02/14/important-takeaways-from-ohio-govs-train-derailment-briefing-including-a-shocking-revelation-n1670610

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine took to the podium on Tuesday to update reporters and citizens about the devastating train derailment in E. Palestine, Ohio, on February 3. The small town has been reeling in the wake of the derailment and subsequent controlled burn of dangerous chemicals days after the wreck.

One of the most astounding revelations from the press conference (watch below) was that the train was not classified as carrying hazardous chemicals.

“I learned today from the PUCO [Public Utilities Council of Ohio] that this train was not considered a high hazardous material train,” DeWine said. As a result, the railroad was not required to notify anyone in Ohio about what the train was carrying.

“Even though some rail cars did have hazardous material on board, and while most of them did not, that’s why it was not categorized as a high hazardous material train,” said DeWine. “Frankly, if this is true, and I’m told it’s true, this is absurd. And we need to look at this. And Congress needs to take a look at how these things are handled. We should know when we are trains carrying hazardous materials that are going through the state of Ohio.” The governor called on Congress to investigate the matter and make changes to the law if necessary.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/15/as-inflation-continues-to-roar-why-do-biden-powell-and-yellen-still-have-jobs/

Almost exactly two years ago today, the New York Times ran an article headlined: “Biden and Fed Leave 1970s Inflation Fears Behind.”

That story has not aged well. Neither have the troika of ideologues and imbeciles behind the rebirth of ‘70s-era inflation.

On Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that prices climbed 0.5% in January, which is up from December’s 0.1% hike. Prices were up 6.4% over the year before, which is higher than economists had been predicting and comes amid warnings that inflationary pressures are building again.

This all comes one week after President Biden reassured the nation that “here at home, inflation is coming down.”

And it comes two years after the New York Times reported how Biden, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell were all in agreement that spending $1.9 trillion to stimulate an economy that was already roaring back from the COVID lockdowns would not set off an inflationary spiral.

“Administration and Fed officials argue that workers not getting enough stimulus help is a larger concern than potential spikes in consumer prices,” the Times wrote on February 15, 2021.

The story quotes Yellen saying “I have spent many years studying inflation and worrying about inflation. But we face a huge economic challenge here and tremendous suffering in the country. We have got to address that. That’s the biggest risk.”

The Times notes that Powell gave a speech in which he pushed back on the idea that Biden’s spending splurge combined with easy money when the economy was roaring back from the COVID lockdowns would spark inflation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/christine-wilson-resigns-federal-trade-commission-lina-khan-ftc-87328998?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan is breaking sundry regulatory norms in her rush to remake modern antitrust law, as commissioner Christine Wilson details nearby in explaining her resignation. Ms. Khan’s norm-busting ironically may make the FTC more vulnerable to legal challenges that eventually weaken its powers.

President Biden first broke political norms by installing Ms. Khan as FTC Chair immediately after the Senate confirmed her by a 69-28 vote to serve on the commission. It’s customary for a President when nominating members to independent agencies to announce at the same time if they will serve as chair. Mr. Biden didn’t.

The Chair has considerable power to control hiring, direct investigations and set the agenda. Many Senate Republicans might have opposed Ms. Khan as Chair because of her long record agitating to replace the antitrust consumer-welfare standard that Robert Bork helped develop in the 1970s.

***

After her elevation, Ms. Khan quickly expanded her power. On a series of 3-2 votes, Democratic commissioners supplanted the agency’s chief administrative law judge who had long presided over fact-finding and rule-making. They also scrapped a requirement for a commission majority vote before staff can launch an investigation.

She then abused an obscure voting rule in the autumn of 2021 to let former Democratic commissioner Rohit Chopra cast pivotal votes even after he had left the agency to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. These “zombie” votes allowed Mr. Chopra to break the agency’s then 2-2 partisan split, including on a major shift in merger policy.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/02/14/the_sudden_dominance_of_the_diversity_industrial_complex_880202.html

Little more than a decade ago, DEI was just another arcane acronym, a clustering of three ideas, each to be weighed and evaluated against other societal values. The terms diversity, equity, and inclusion weren’t yet being used in the singular, as one all-inclusive, non-negotiable moral imperative. Nor had they coalesced into a bureaucratic juggernaut running roughshod over every aspect of national life. 

They are now. 

The “diversity industrial complex” has arisen suddenly, with no fanfare on the order of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 warning of a “military industrial complex” in his farewell address.
Wikipedia

Seemingly in unison, and with almost no debate, nearly every major American institution – including federal, state, and local governments, universities and public schools, hospitals, insurance, media and technology companies and major retail brands – has agreed that the DEI infrastructure is essential to the nation’s proper functioning. From Amazon to Walmart, most major corporations have created and staffed DEI offices within their human resources bureaucracy. So have sanitation departments, police departments, physics departments, and the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education and energy. Organizations that once argued against DEI now feel compelled to institute DEI training and hire DEI officers. So have organizations that are already richly diverse, such as the National Basketball Association and the National Football League.  

Many of these offices in turn work with a sprawling network of DEI consulting firms, training outfits, trade organizations and accrediting associations that support their efforts. 

“Five years ago, if you said ‘DEI,’ people would’ve thought you were talking about the Digital Education Initiative,” Robert Sellers, University of Michigan’s first chief diversity officer, said in 2020. “Five years ago, if you said DEI was a core value of this institution, you would have an argument.”   

Diversity, equity and inclusion is an intentionally vague term used to describe sanctioned favoritism in the name of social justice. Its Wikipedia entry indicates a lack of agreement on the definition, while Merriam-Webster.com and the Associated Press online style guide have no entry (the AP offers guidance on related terms). 

Yet however defined, it’s clear DEI is now much more than an academic craze or corporate affectation.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/14/james-clapper-cant-stop-lying/

In an interview with The Washington Post’s “fact checker,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper contends that Politico misled the public about a letter he and 50 other former intel officials signed during the 2020 presidential campaign warning that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story could be Russian deception. “There was message distortion,” Clapper tells The Washington Post. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.”

It was not clear, at all. The purpose of the letter, apparent then as it is now, was to discredit the Post’s scoop and provide Democrats and the media with ammunition to reject it. Of course intel officials couldn’t definitively say that Hunter’s emails, which implicated Joe Biden as a business partner, were concocted by Putin’s spooks. They had no access to the laptop. The purpose was to enlist former intel chiefs to cast doubt on the story. A perfunctory CYA paragraph doesn’t change anything.

The laptop lie began, as is often the case, with Adam Schiff, the California congressman who used the intelligence committee as a partisan disinfo clearinghouse. As soon as the story broke, Schiff claimed that “we know” — a phrase he used numerous times — that the emails had been planted by the Kremlin. By then, though, everyone understood the congressman was an irredeemable liar. The director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, issued a statement stressing that, actually, there was no evidence to back Schiff’s claims.

That’s when Natasha Bertrand, the dependable Dem dupe who had passed along so many other fake stories for the intel establishment, “reported” in Politico that more than 50 former senior intelligence officials had signed a letter asserting that the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The most notable signees were Clapper, a man who ran a domestic surveillance program and then lied about it to Congress, and former CIA director John Brennan, a man who once oversaw an operation of illegal spying on a Senate staffer, and then also lied about it to the American people.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/13/politics/unknown-objects-leaders-response/index.html 

A deepening national security mystery is threatening a political storm after US fighter jets scrambled three days in a row to shoot down a trio of unidentified aerial objects high over the North American continent.

The flurry of attacks on the unknown crafts came a week after the highly public tracking and ultimate downing of a Chinese balloon suspected of carrying out surveillance. Now, the thin details trickling out of the Pentagon and Capitol Hill about are making an already highly unusual international episode even more bizarre and confusing.

No one – not the White House, the Pentagon or the government of Canada, whose airspace has also been infringed – seems able to say exactly what is going on with these latest downed crafts. This raises questions for top military brass and US spy agencies as well as for the potential safety of civilian aviation. And it creates an information vacuum that Republicans are again using to question President Joe Biden’s leadership.

The intrigue is also unfolding against a tense global situation, with already difficult relations with rising superpower China becoming ever more hostile and with the US leading the West in an effective proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

“What’s gone on in the last two weeks or so, 10 days, has been nothing short of craziness,” Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana said Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS, hours before an airborne object was shot down over Lake Huron.

“The military needs to have a plan to not only determine what’s out there, but (to) determine the dangers that go with it,” Tester said.

With the North American Aerospace Defense Command on heightened alert, US fighters have now blasted three objects out of the skies since Friday following the shooting down of the Chinese balloon off the South Carolina coast on February 4:

In the latest event, a high-altitude object was shot down on Sunday afternoon by an F-16 over Lake Huron, which lies between Michigan and Ontario. The Pentagon said the object was not assessed to be a military threat but was a flight hazard. But it did connect the craft to a radar signal picked up earlier over Montana, the home to US intercontinental missile silos and other sensitive sites.
On Saturday, a US F-22 warplane operating on the joint orders of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Biden fired a missile that took down an object flying at 40,000 feet over central Yukon in the far north of Canada. Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand described a “cylindrical object” smaller than the Chinese balloon.
On Friday, an F-22 shot down another unidentified craft over Alaskan airspace. US pilots were able to get up around the object before it was shot down and reported that it didn’t appear to be carrying surveillance equipment.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/13/did-a-government-intel-asset-plant-key-evidence-in-proud-boys-case/

It’s week five of the Justice Department’s most high-profile—and high-stakes—criminal trial related to the events of January 6, 2021. Five members of the Proud Boys face the rare “seditious conspiracy” charge. Guilty verdicts—almost certain given the government’s near-perfect conviction rate for January 6 defendants—would build legal momentum for a similar indictment against Donald Trump. (The trial is so crucial that Matthew Graves, the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia responsible for prosecuting every January 6 case, has shown up in the courtroom on at least three occasions.)

Trump is a major figure in this trial, an unindicted coconspirator of sorts. Last week, Judge Timothy Kelly allowed prosecutors to play a clip of Trump’s extemporaneous comment for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”—a remark uttered during a presidential debate in September 2020 more than three months before the Capitol protest. The Justice Department wants to portray the comment as a call to arms, tying the alleged “militia” group to the former president.

The clip is just another thin reed of evidence in the government’s landmark domestic terrorism case. In fact, much of the “evidence” amounts to nothing more than worthless trinkets, braggadocious group chats, and otherwise protected political speech. 

It now appears that one key piece of evidence was not the work of any defendant in this case but rather written by a one-time government intelligence asset with unusual ties to both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, another group involved in January 6.

A document titled “1776 Returns” is cited by the government to indicate the group had an advanced plan to “attack” the Capitol. In two separate criminal indictments, prosecutors explained how the document ended up in the hands of Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys: “On December 30, 2020 [an unnamed] individual sent Tarrio a document—[that] set forth a plan to occupy a few ‘crucial buildings’ in Washington, D.C. on January 6, including House and Senate buildings around the Capitol, with ‘as many people as possible’ to ‘show our politicians We the People are in charge.’”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/the_state_department_helped_defund_conservative_websites.html

Think about that: The government used your money to silence your politics.

Last week, news broke that American Thinker and other conservative internet sites were the subjects of a successful campaign to defund them by telling advertisers that their content was misleading. That’s bad. What’s worse is that we’re learning that the State Department was helping fund the campaign to defund conservative media.  

The Washington Examiner revealed in a two-part report (here and here) how various organizations claimed to track “disinformation.” That “disinformation,” of course, was anything that countered the Democrat narrative on politics and social issues. American Thinker was among the list of 39 conservative sites that also included Newsbusters, Town Hall, Rush Limbaugh, Daily Wire, Breitbart, etc. Rajan Laad explained how this worked:

Corporate houses seeking to promote their products online seek the services of corporate digital ad companies to run their online advertisement campaigns.

These firms contract “disinformation” trackers to obtain private information about the “blacklisted” websites in order to avoid placing their advertisements on them.

The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British organization, and its two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups, based in Texas, are instances of such “disinformation”-trackers.