RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/15/exclusive-doc-indicates-special-counsel-failing-to-bring-collusion-hoaxers-to-justice/

John Durham’s team has known of these discrepancies for years but has failed to hold responsible those who used the CIA to target a political opponent with false smears.

A whitepaper obtained first by The Federalist suggests Special Counsel John Durham botched the investigation of a second Russia collusion hoax, the one concerning Yota cellphones.

In a scandal linked to the Spygate operation, Hillary Clinton cronies peddled to the CIA fake evidence they claimed established Donald Trump and his associates were using the Russian-made Yota cellphones in the vicinity of the White House and other key locations. The news of this operation broke during the special counsel’s prosecution of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann. However, the just-obtained Yota whitepaper that was supposed to undergird Sussmann’s claims differs substantially from the memoranda documenting what Sussmann supposedly said to the CIA.

Durham’s team has known of these discrepancies for years but has failed to hold responsible those who used the CIA to target a political opponent and the then-president of the United States with false smears of corruption with a foreign power. Now with the news that the special counsel’s office has let the grand jury expire, suggesting a winding down of the investigation, Durham’s failure to seek charges related to the Yota phone hoax is appalling. Durham offered the only apparent opportunity for justice in this entire collection of major scandals.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/doj-refuses-to-release-its-plan-to-implement-bidens-voting-initiative/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

Despite a court-imposed September 8 deadline, the Justice Department has failed to produce its strategic plan to implement President Biden’s directive regarding voter registration and participation.

On March 7, 2021, Biden issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to submit within 200 days their plans to promote voter participation. This directive, EO 14019, was premised on the fiction that “many Americans, including people of color, confront significant obstacles to exercising that fundamental right” (to vote). The Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), the public-interest group that filed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking disclosure from the DOJ, says there has been no explanation from Main Justice for its resistance to release relevant documents.

In a lawsuit it filed shortly after the directive, FGA noted the observation of many congressional Republicans that EO 14019 bore a striking resemblance to “a federal election takeover plan crafted by the radical left-leaning group known as Demos.” This plan, the lawmakers said, “called for the weaponization of the DOJ” for the purpose of imposing federal standards on the states. To attempt this in light of the fact that the Constitution essentially commits elections to the states is worrisome enough. But here, Biden is attempting to proceed by federal executive fiat, under circumstances in which the Constitution reserves only to Congress the prerogative of altering states’ election procedures.

This summer, a federal court ordered the Justice Department to respond well in advance of the midterm elections, and imposed a September 8 deadline for the production of documents. FGA reports that DOJ has turned over some heavily redacted documents but has refused to disclose its 15-page strategic plan.

FGO’s Tarren Bragdon asks why DOJ is “treating these documents like they are classified information dealing with nuclear weapons?”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/nature-attacks-scotus-as-anti-science/

“If anything is a “war on science,” it is publishing ideological articles like this in what is supposed to be a science journal — a trend that seems particularly infectious among establishment medical and scientific outlets. By pushing rank political advocacy that would have been perfectly appropriate in the Nation or Politico — as if the issues discussed were scientific matters — Nature undermined trust in its objectivity as an important institution furthering the dispassionate search for truth.”

Last month I criticized the prestigious journal Science for pushing ideological progressivism and attacking the Supreme Court’s conservative rulings — as if its authors’ and editors’ subjective beliefs and policy preferences are the same thing as supporting objective science.

Not to be outdone in conflating leftism with “science,” the British journal Nature — perhaps the world’s most respected “scientific” publication — has similarly attacked SCOTUS based on the wrongheaded idea that progressive policy preferences are somehow synonymous with good science. From “Inside the Supreme Court’s War on Science,” by Nature’s U. S. correspondent Jeff Tollefson:

In late June, the US Supreme Court issued a trio of landmark decisions that repealed the right to abortion, loosened gun restrictions and curtailed climate regulations. Although the decisions differed in rationale, they share a distinct trait: all three dismissed substantial evidence about how the court’s rulings would affect public health and safety. It is a troubling trend that many scientists fear could undermine the role of scientific evidence in shaping public policy. Now, as the court prepares to consider a landmark case on electoral policies, many worry about the future of American democracy itself.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/u-s-cities-worse-murder-rates-than-ukraines-civilian-death-rate/

You might have thought that when you hear a newscaster or reporter call a major U.S. city a “war zone” because of the high crime and murders occurring there that it was just an exaggeration. It turns out that it isn’t.

“Per capita murder rates in major U.S. cities such as Chicago, Baltimore and St. Louis are outpacing Ukraine’s recorded civilian death rate from Russia’s invasion,” according to Just The News.

Think about that. Cities that get touted as examples of successful progressive places to live have more people dying, relatively, than a nation at war. Cities that held “most peaceful protests” are less safe than a nation at war.

Now ask yourself this: If we are so upset with what is happening in Ukraine, why aren’t we even more upset with what is happening in our own country?

The website compiled information from the United Nations Human Rights Office, U.S. Census Bureau, and other sources to calculate the murder rates between the Ukraine and U.S. cities.

In Ukraine, 5,401 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since Russia’s attack began in February (this is actually believed to be an underestimate). With a population of about 41,167,300, this makes Ukraine’s civilian death rate 13.12 per 100,000 people using official statistics from the United Nations, according to Just The News.

Sadly, there are American cities where this would be an improvement. Baltimore’s homicide rate is 37.3 so far this year or 215 deaths. If the city had the Ukraine’s war-time death rate, the city would have had only 76 murders.

St. Louis’s murder rate is 38.2 per 100,000 so far in 2022. Chicago’s is 14.8 per 100,000.

“Using pre-pandemic data, 52 U.S. cities had worse homicide rates than Ukraine’s civilian death rate. However, crime in the United States has skyrocketed since then, meaning that there may be more cities that qualify as deadlier than Ukraine under assault by Russian forces,” Just The News reported.

How scary is that?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/harvards-sanctuary-for-failed-leftists/

What’s the best way to get to Harvard?

Don’t study and don’t know anything. Just have the right politics. Just ask former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who washed out of the presidential primaries, abandoned a gubernatorial bid after polling at 12%, and then dropped out of a congressional primary after polling next to last at 5%. At least that was better than the 0% that he polled during his presidential campaign.

Where could the most hated politician in New York go? To Massachusetts. Bill de Blasio has become the 2022 visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics.

What can Bill de Blasio teach Harvard students besides how to have your wife lose $850 million and get away with it? According to De Blasio, he’ll use his time at Harvard-Kennedy’s Institute of Politics to “to help inspire our nation’s next generation of leaders.” If his track record holds up, half of them will be inspired to move to Florida and the other half to stage a massive race riot.

At Harvard’s Institute of Politics, De Blasio will serve alongside other “prominent elected officials” like Secretary Natalie Tennant, one of the beneficiaries of Soros’; Secretary of State Project, who, despite claiming to oppose Obama while being endorsed by Michelle Obama, lost a Senate race by 62% to 34%. But 34% is still better than DeBlasio’s 5%.

Also on deck at Kennedy Street is former Prime Minister Stefan Löfven of Sweden, a leftist hack, who boasted, “my Europe doesn’t build walls” before folding and agreeing to some border security as the Muslim mass migration mobs swarmed out of control. His deputy famously burst into tears on camera as she announced that Sweden couldn’t take any more illegal migrants.

Neither cared about Sweden, but about their jobs.

Löfven met with terrorists, announced that he would recognize the Islamic terrorist entity inside Israel, and claimed that Muslim terrorists stabbing Jews doesn’t count as terrorism.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/15/attention-conservatives-theyre-coming-for-your-podcasts-next/

So many on the increasingly fascistic left are eager to censor talk they don’t like.

Conservatives have found a way to communicate that is free from Big Tech censors. But how long will it last?

Over the weekend, the liberal Brookings Institution released what it calls “a tool to monitor political broadcasts” on increasingly popular podcasts. Why? To combat “misinformation.”

Brookings treats the growth of podcasts the way Count Floyd would describe one of his movies on the classic Monster Chiller Horror Theater sketch on SCTV. “Ooh, that’s scary, kids, scary!”

Podcasts, it warns, “played a central role in disseminating election fraud narratives in the lead up to January 6.” Scary, kids!

Podcasts “also offered a prime avenue for the spread of pandemic-related misinformation.” Very scary, kids!

What’s really got the left scared is that nobody is controlling what gets said on podcasts. Valerie Wirtschafter at Brookings laments that “despite the real-world harms caused by this misinformation and the medium’s growing reach and influence,” podcasters “can say whatever you want.”

“The nature of the RSS feed, which is open-sourced and accessible by design, represents a significant hurdle for content moderation. Although Apple can remove the RSS feed from its platform, some smaller platforms allow any content on an RSS feed to be played through their services, making it easy for listeners to access a removed podcast elsewhere.”

The horror!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-robert-mueller-shredded-the-fbis-credibility-centralization-intelligence-investigation-crossfire-hurricane-bush-911-clinton-email-sussmann-11663173014?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Mr. Baker is a retired FBI special agent and legal attaché and author of “The Fall of the FBI: How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy,” forthcoming in December.

Four days after 9/11, Robert Mueller was summoned to the presidential retreat at Camp David. It was little more than a week since he’d become director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

That Saturday morning, Mr. Mueller gave President George W. Bush the FBI’s initial report on the attacks. The Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing Investigation, or Penttbom, would become the largest ever conducted by the FBI. It had already identified the 19 hijackers as well as their roles, nationalities, travel documents and histories. The focus had turned to establishing links between the hijackers and al Qaeda.

Mr. Bush, wearing a leather bomber jacket, sat at the head of a big square conference table in the rustic oak cabin. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, was at the president’s right. Mr. Mueller, as he later acknowledged, was confident in the report. The FBI had done what it does best—investigate.

Expecting praise or thanks, Mr. Mueller was taken aback when the president interrupted him. “Bob, I expect the FBI to determine who was responsible for the attacks and to help bring them to justice,” he said. “What I want to know from you—today—is what the FBI is doing to prevent the next attack.” That same morning Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet presented a proposed plan of action. At the conclusion of Mr. Tenet’s presentation, Mr. Bush exclaimed, “That’s great.” He turned toward Mr. Mueller and said, “That’s what I want to hear.” Mr. Mueller told me later that he felt humiliated.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/delayed-repairs-shrink-the-submarine-fleet-taiwan-china-navy-amphibious-assault-aircraft-private-shipyards-deployable-boats-materials-11663162266?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The U.S. Navy’s submarine fleet, America’s essential war-fighting instrument in the Indo-Pacific, is about three-fifths the size it should be, chiefly because of maintenance and production delays. This comes amid stepped-up threats to Taiwan by China.

Contesting such an assault would require a submarine force at maximum strength. Congress and the White House should act swiftly to integrate private shipyards that repair submarines into the Navy’s maintenance plans.

American strategists rarely concern themselves with the material issues that determine victory or defeat. They tend to regard international strategy as a question of will, not means. This takes for granted the traditional and outsize U.S. economic-material advantage.

America’s objective in a struggle over Taiwan would be to deny China a rapid victory. The war must become a slog, one that China labors to sustain in a geographically limited form. Generating this situation requires contesting China’s ability to stage an amphibious assault on Taiwan. Submarines would be crucial in such a contest.

The U.S. military today lacks the air forces, air defenses, and surface combatants with sufficient range to contest Chinese air control over Taiwan indefinitely, absent an interdiction campaign against the Chinese mainland that the U.S. has signaled it doesn’t wish to wage. Chinese anti-ship and ground-attack missiles, moreover, would cause damage. Recent war games suggest that in defending Taiwan, the U.S. would lose half its active air force and at least one carrier strike group—a collection of warships defending the aircraft carrier and its air wing. In such a scenario, China would lose 150 to 200 warships and tens of thousands of men.

https://www.newsmax.com/john-gizzi/joe-biden-vladimir-putin-propaganda/2022/09/12/id/1087015/

Nearly 20 months after Joe Biden became president, the area of public diplomacy — that is, using television, radio, digital venues, and other means of communication on the international front — is almost completely unused, grossly underfunded, and neglected.

This is happening at a turbulent time in the world. In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin increased the state media budget to 211 billion rubles (roughly $2.8 billion) — a 34 billion-ruble ($460 million) increase from earlier years — to spend on propaganda to win and enhance support at home for his war on Ukraine.

It is difficult to gauge the overall amount China is spending on propaganda. It has been estimated that $6.6 billion has come out of Beijing since 2009 to accentuate the Chinese media presence worldwide and to sculpt, as Raksha Kumar wrote for Thomson Reuters, “a sophisticated strategy to portray the country’s leadership in a good light.”

Further, Chinese foreign agent spending has skyrocketed from just over $10 million in 2016 to nearly $64 million last year, according to the Center for Responsible Politics.

In the U.S., public diplomacy, funded at $701 million, is funded at a microcosm of the overall State Department budget — just 1.16% of $60.4 billion, according to the budget for the Fiscal Year 2023.

But while the $701 million figure may sound impressive, the 1995 budget for the U.S. Information Agency (which then had exclusive oversight over public diplomacy) was $1.4 billion. Adjusted for inflation, that figure today would be $2.72 billion.

When USIA disappeared in 1999, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and their sister media became free-standing. All the rest of Public Diplomacy disappeared into the State Department.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/bidens_illegal_migrant_surge_costs_taxpayers_204_billion_a_year_study.html

As if inflation brought on by government overspending weren’t high enough already, a new study shows that Joe Biden’s illegal migrant surge is costing taxpayers $20.4 billion a year, or $9,232 for each illegal migrant.

According to Fox News:

FIRST ON FOX: The number of illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. since President Biden took office will cost the U.S. taxpayer over $20 billion each year, according to a new analysis by a hawkish immigration group.

The study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which advocates for lower levels of immigration overall, calculates that the illegal immigrants who have entered the U.S. since Jan. 2021 will add an extra $20.4 billion burden a year, in addition to the $140 billion existing illegal immigrants already cost.

The analysis is based on an estimated 1.3 million released into the U.S. by immigration officials, as well as approximately one million “gotaways” — or illegal immigrants who have slipped past overwhelmed agents. FAIR calculates that each illegal immigrants costs $9,232 a year to support.

Some two million migrants have come on in at Biden’s incentivization of illegal entry, flooding cities such as El Paso, which has now been described by locals as looking like “a third world country,” according to the New York Post. Biden’s catch and release policies of unvetted migrants into the country has created a disaster for U.S. national security, imported third world crime, and created a huge burden for U.S. taxpayers, who are already burdened by Biden’s multiple government spending packages, all of which create inflation.

The $20.4 billion figure, times four years of Joe Biden’s presidency, would bring the migrant total cost to $81.6 billion for the taxpayers which is well more than the $62.5 billion that Joe Biden has shipped to Ukraine to help that country protect its borders.