RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/23/fraudulent-illegal-unconstitutional-unconscionable-and-false-a-short-tour-of-government-in-action/

All governments are bad – always necessary, often useful, occasionally better than most, rarely genuinely helpful to all, but still bad.

From Athens to Zaire, from commune to kingdom, from democracy to dictatorship, when people come together to form a society there will always be those who take advantage, who prey, who scheme, who profit from their position.

Every government ever has violated its own laws, flouted its own rules, changed long-standing practices for immediate gain, side-stepped its foundational concepts and strictures, dismissed societal codes of conduct, and ignored the basic ethical standards of humanity.

Here in the United States – which actually has one of the best governmental systems and surely the best foundational governmental theory – we are not immune to these issues.

A necessarily brief – the internet is just not big enough to hold every damning detail – review of even our government practices shows this to be true.

The litany of the unconstitutional manipulation and/or imprisonment of the citizenry runs depressingly long, from the Alien and Sedition Acts to the abuses of the Patriot Act, from the Palmer Raids post World War I to the actions of HUAC in the 1950s.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/23/voters-show-deep-political-split-over-how-govt-handled-covid-ii-tipp-poll/

America these days has many powerful political disagreements, even for things that, at least superficially, don’t seem to be overtly political. One of them is the government response to the COVID-19 virus outbreak. It has divided the country politically as few other issues in recent years, new I&I/TIPP data show.

Those responding to the latest poll were asked whether the economic lockdowns, public school closures, masking requirements and social restrictions were “necessary or unnecessary to address the COVID virus.”

The majority believe the government’s actions were needed. By 57% to 30%, Americans answered that the COVID restrictions, however draconian and painful, were “necessary” rather than “unnecessary.” Another 13% said they were not sure.

These results emerged from a national online I&I/TIPP Poll of 1,359 adults, taken from Nov. 2-4. The poll’s margin of error is +/-2.8 percentage points.

When you look at the breakdown by political affiliation, the COVID schism clearly comes into view.

Among Democrats, an overwhelming 79% said the COVID lockdown restrictions were necessary, versus just 35% of Republicans. Among independents, 50% said they were needed.

But just 12% of Democrats said they were “unnecessary,” compared to 52% of Republicans and 32% of independents. Only 9% of Democrats were unsure; 13% of Republicans and a sizeable 18% of independents weren’t certain.

So approval of the COVID restrictions appears to have been mostly a Democratic phenomenon.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/ctrlaltdelete_the_totalitarian_state.html

There are three government narratives pushed today that are not real: (1) fraud-free elections, (2) a looming climate apocalypse, and (3) a COVID health emergency requiring total government control.  If you see through only one, then you’re not looking hard enough.  Or as Bill Engvall might say, “If you now believe COVID is mostly a hoax but are still terrified of global warming, here’s your sign.”  Conversely, if you do see through them, you’re likely being censored for expressing those points of view.  

Here’s our impasse: when governments claim to have a monopoly on truth, then citizens are expected to accept preposterous fantasies, no matter how much opposing evidence they might see.  The narrative is absolute.  Dissent is forbidden.  Total obedience is the objective.  Last century, free Westerners understood these features as telltale signs of totalitarianism.  Today, much less free Westerners have been taught to embrace — without scrutiny or wisdom — the government’s fairy tales as part of our required, if not sacred, deference to the bureaucratic State’s cult of expertise.  Whether citizens grasp this shift in individual freedom or not, the general rule handed down from governments is stark yet succinct: ask us no questions, and we will tell you no lies!

Westerners desperately need to reboot their systems of government before those systems of government delete the public’s power to make changes ever again.  It is not possible for political leaders to claim that their countries support personal freedom when they snatch that freedom away at the first sneeze, cow fart, or unapproved tweet.  It is not logical for governments to claim that they protect “democracy” when armies of unelected permanent bureaucrats run the modern State.  It is not reasonable for Western nations to claim that they cherish “free thinking” and “free expression” when their technocratic surveillance arms actively censor speech and promote State-approved points of view over all others.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/21/jen-psaki-investigations-for-thee-but-not-for-me/

It’s beyond ironic that the mouthpiece for a regime proceeding with yet another punitive and vengeful investigation into Donald Trump wants to be shielded from an inquiry into her own misdeeds.

Former White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, much like her old boss, is a big fan of investigations.

From her perch at the podium in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, Psaki routinely endorsed criminal, civil, and congressional inquiries into the events of January 6 and warned the individuals targeted—including Donald Trump and his former aides—that they must comply with the legal process. 

A reporter asked Psaki during her first briefing whether Joe Biden believed Trump should “be held accountable for the Capitol insurrection” on January 6. Calling the four-hour disturbance that afternoon an “horrific event,” Psaki said Joe Biden had spoken with lawmakers about how to proceed. “He is going to leave it to members of Congress to carry out their constitutional duty and determine what the path forward is,” Psaki announced on January 21, 2021.

Psaki later announced that Biden would not extend executive privilege to his predecessor related to the January 6 select committee’s inquisition, giving investigators carte blanche access to all of Trump’s records for most of 2020—most of which had nothing to do with January 6. “We are, we have been working closely with congressional committees and others as they work to get to the bottom of what happened on January 6th, an incredibly dark day in our democracy,” Psaki said in September 2021.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/victor-davis-hanson/2022/11/22/the-same-old-same-old-deja-vu-n1647817

Attorney General Merrick Garland has just announced the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith. But Smith’s team will not look into the Biden family quid pro quo syndicate nor its incriminating confessionals on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Instead, it will further investigate Donald Trump’s possession of presidential records that were hauled off from Mar-a-Lago, as well as his purported role in the January 6 “insurrection.”

We know the script that will follow because we suffered through it for 22 months and spent $40 million for it under Robert Mueller’s special counsel team.

First, the Smith investigation will bear no resemblance to special counsel John Durham’s probes. The media ignored Durham. His team did not leak to the press. And neither a Washington, D.C. nor northern Virginia jury was ever likely to convict any perceived enemy of Trump.

Second, upon the announcement of Smith’s legal staffers, the media will grow giddy that their resumes portend another “dream team,” “all-stars,” or “a hunter-killer team.”

Puff pieces will blanket the media. They will attest, just like “good Ol’ Bob Mueller,” that the former Obama Justice Department public integrity unit lawyer Smith is “an old hand,” “tough but fair,” “nonpartisan,” and a “prosecutor’s prosecutor.”

Weeks into the investigation, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, or MSNBC will darkly inform their audiences that “unnamed sources close to the investigation tell us that “a bombshell” is about to go off.

Perhaps the “stunning development” will be similar to the fake “walls are closing in” scoop about the conspiratorial pinging in Trump tower from the Alfa Bank in Russia, or the “game-changer” Christopher Steele-fed, pee-pee, Moscow hotel room fable.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/gregbyrnes/2022/11/21/attorney-general-merrick-garland-is-attempting-to-obstruct-a-congressional-investigation-n1647697

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint Jack Smith as a special counsel to investigate President Trump’s handling of government documents at Mar-a-Lago as well as January 6 needs to be thoroughly investigated and countered by the incoming GOP House of Representatives. They must study if this rogue Attorney General has committed impeachable offenses and, if so, act quickly to impeach him.

President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s loss of a 100% Democrat-controlled January 6th Committee to Republicans now has all the makings of a Constitutional crisis.

Rather than accepting that the other party is now in charge and allowing a peaceful transfer of investigative powers to the Republicans, the Democrats and the Justice Department have opted to break all norms to stop that. This is about more than Democrats losing control of their beloved “narrative.” The appointment of a special counsel will block the newly installed Republican House from investigating uncomfortable questions about the Justice Department and FBI’s behavior concerning the Capitol riot on January 6.

If there were embedded agents in some of the groups of bad actors responsible for the riot, why was no one warned of the impending attack? Or if they were warned, why did they fail to act? Why were law enforcement and the Justice Department so badly surprised by events? Why, despite President Trump’s offer of 10,000 troops in the weeks before the event, were law enforcement officials not pushing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mayor Muriel Bowser to be forearmed and prepared? Or if they were warned, why did they fail to act?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-misuses-of-a-colorado-atrocity/

When the news broke that an armed man had entered Club Q, an “LGBTQ” nightclub in Colorado Springs, at about midnight on Saturday, on the eve of something called the “Transgender Day of Remembrance,” and had proceeded to kill five people and wound at least twenty-five, one thing seemed all but certain. It was too early to know what had motivated the perpetrator, Anderson Lee Aldrich (who apparently was arrested last year, after a “brief standoff with law enforcement,” for making a bomb threat against his mother). But it seemed a safe enough prediction that the usual “LGBTQ” activists and their allies in the media would soon be spinning this atrocity to their advantage.

Sure enough, within a few hours, Colorado’s largest daily, the Denver Post, had posted an article in which one Elizabeth Hernandez linked the murders to “hateful rhetoric directed toward transgender people and the broader LGBTQ community.” The recently re-elected Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, stated Hernandez, “has been vocal against LGBTQ and transgender issues, including in a June tweet saying ‘Take your children to CHURCH, not drag bars’ and a 2021 speech on the House floor during which she warned of ‘young girls across America who will have to look behind their backs as they change in their school locker rooms just to make sure there isn’t a confused man trying to catch a peek.’” Hernandez also noted the controversy surrounding “all-ages drag shows at public libraries and other locations” and a Colorado librarian who was “fired from her job for planning LGBTQ youth programming.”

What do all of these specifics cited by Hernandez have in common? Simple: not a single one of them is about hatred for transgender people or anybody else. They’re all about legitimate questions of public policy.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/22/as-shortages-persist-under-biden-its-time-to-ask-is-this-on-purpose/

Did the United States suddenly become a socialist basket case? It’s hard not to come to that conclusion after reading about the endless shortages plaguing the nation. Each of which President Joe Biden either seems clueless to resolve or determined to make worse.

Let’s start with the biggest one: the shortage of diesel fuel. While Biden was busy draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to tamp down gas prices before the midterm elections, the real worry was that supplies of diesel fuel have been running short.

Two years after the short-lived COVID lockdowns ended, diesel inventories continued to trend downward to their lowest levels since 2008. The cost for a gallon of diesel fuel is 46% higher than it was a year ago, according to AAA, and now costs more than $5 a gallon.

That affects every corner of the economy because, while passenger cars mostly use regular gasoline, diesel powers just about everything else that makes the economy move, and many homes, especially in the northeast, rely on heating oil – a related product – to keep their families from freezing to death.

The American Farm Bureau Federation tried to alert Biden to the scale of this problem weeks ago. “Our nation’s food supply is driven by diesel. High diesel prices are severely impacting our farmers and ranchers, causing increased costs to consumers, and adding to food insecurity.”

One big factor for all this: declining refinery capacity. After trending upward for years, it has fallen off each year since. A big reason: Biden’s war on fossil fuels.

“If you are a refiner forecasting billions in losses — and you require massive investments in order to keep your refinery operating safely and in compliance with the laws — you may very well simply make the decision to close down,” writes Robert Rapier in Forbes.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/21/donald-trump-and-the-blue-tick-pricks/

So Elon Musk has done it. He’s brought back Trump. After conducting a Twitter poll on whether Trump should be unbanned – by far the most transparent thing the Twitter company has ever done – Musk and his minions pressed a few buttons and The Donald was back online.

Whether or not he’ll actually tweet again is another matter (he says he won’t). Regardless, Musk’s reinstatement of Trump’s account is a great blow against the tyrannical meddling of the worthy, woke, censorious fainthearts of Silicon Valley who have bizarrely come to exercise such extraordinary power over what may be thought and said in the 21st century.

The usual suspects are agog, naturally. There’s been a great relapse into Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trump’s return will ‘plunge Twitter deeper into chaos’, says CNN. Jack White has melodramatically fled the Twitter hellscape. ‘Absolutely disgusting, Elon’, wept this rocker who’s strangely scared of other people’s words.

Sadiq Khan, London’s pint-sized Torquemada, issued a statement saying Trump ‘must not be allowed to use social media’. Mate, who do you think you are? Mayor of the world? ‘Freedom of speech is vital’, said Khan, ‘but’ – there’s always a massive, unsightly but – ‘it must be balanced against keeping other people safe to protect our democracy and society’. Do we really need to remind folk, in 2022, of Benjamin Franklin’s words, about how those who would ditch liberty for safety deserve neither? Khan would have banned Franklin, too. A free-speech extremist? Deplatform.

Against all these unhinged demands to keep Trump banned – forever, one presumes – we should remind people of just how undemocratic and outright imperious Silicon Valley’s banning of Trump was in the first place. It was the most sinister act of social-media censorship to date. And that’s saying something.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/ill_barrs_latest_antitrump_diatribe_explodes_the_myth_that_hes_a_wise_man.html

The Bible holds that “Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise…” (Proverbs 17:28.) In the modern era, with attribution to Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, or others, that’s been reworked as “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.” Former Attorney General Bill Barr’s latest embittered statements about the documents the FBI stole from Mar-a-Lago place him squarely within that quotation.

In the government, where it’s almost impossible to get fired, those who stick around long enough become respected, even revered. That’s especially true for attorneys who work in the Department of Justice. Having the entire weight and resources of the government tends to give them a track record they wouldn’t earn in the free market. Barr’s pronouncements about Trump’s potential criminal liability when it comes to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid leads me to believe he earned his august reputation, not because he’s knowledgeable or bright, but just because he stuck around.

Barr appeared on PBS to opine about Merrick Garland’s politicized, despotic decision to investigate Trump the moment that Trump announced he was running again for president. Barr gave it as his opinion that the DOJ has a case:

Regarding the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago earlier this year as part of their criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of U.S. government records, Barr said, “If the Department of Justice can show that these were indeed very sensitive documents, which I think they probably were, and also show that the president consciously was involved in misleading the Department, deceiving the government, and playing games after he had received the subpoena for the documents, those are serious charges.”

When asked if Trump’s actions were a “serious enough crime” to prosecute, Barr said, “That’s serious.”

“Well, I’ve said that I personally think that they probably have the basis for legitimately indicting the president. I don’t know, I’m speculating,” he said. “But given what’s gone on, I think they probably have the evidence that would check the box. They have the case.”

Barr is totally and completely wrong because his premise is wrong. “If the Department can show that these were indeed very sensitive documents which I think they probably were….” Nope, that’s not how it works.