RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-dies-in-illinois-democrats-unions-j-b-pritzker-11668462531?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden says last Tuesday was “a good day” for democracy, but he must not be paying attention to what happened in Illinois. Behold a case study in how Democrats change the rules to limit political competition and entrench one-party, public-union rule.

Democrats held supermajorities in both legislative chambers and a 4-3 majority on the state Supreme Court before the election. But their ex-boss Michael Madigan’s corruption scandal gave Republicans a chance to make gains in the statehouse, compete for Governor, and take control of the state Supreme Court for the first time in more than 50 years.

After deposing Mr. Madigan, Democrats last year did him proud by jamming through new state legislative maps that forced 12 Republican incumbents into six House districts. Democrats held 73 of 118 House seats under Mr. Madigan’s gerrymander. Their new, more extreme gerrymander helped them pick up four to five more seats.

Democrats also redrew state Supreme Court districts for the first time in 60 years. Three Justices are elected exclusively from Cook County, which includes Chicago. This guarantees Democrats three seats. But their majority looked in danger after a Democratic Justice representing central Illinois lost a retention election in November 2020 for the first time in state history.

Unions and Democrats have counted on the Democratic Supreme Court to block pension reforms and a ballot initiative backed by former GOP Gov. Bruce Rauner that would have established an independent redistricting commission. Democratic Justices have prevented citizens from using the ballot process to bypass the Legislature and enact government reforms.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/17/mayorkas-lies-again-to-congress-isnt-that-illegal/

On Monday, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol reported that it had “encountered” 230,678 migrants illegally crossing into the country, the highest number ever recorded in October and the third highest in the nation’s history.

On Tuesday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas assured Congress that the border is secure and that “we are working day in and day out to enhance its security.”
 
The back-to-back events lead to a question: How many times can a Cabinet secretary blatantly lie to Congress before he gets brought up on charges?
 
Federal law, after all, makes it a crime to “knowingly and willfully” give “materially” false statements to Congress, even if you’re not under oath. The penalty includes fines and up to five years in prison, or up to eight if the lie involves international or domestic terrorism.

Mayorkas is a serial offender who deserves the eight-year beef.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/15/mob-rule-and-the-death-of-trust/

It’s been clear to millions of Americans for decades that the media was biased, that the Democratic Party and their government employee union allies controlled and corrupted big city elections, and that the “climate crises” and the threat of “white supremacy” were being oversold. These and other annoyances were perennial. But for many skeptics, the level of mistrust remained tolerable. The system itself was resilient. Nothing is perfect. The tide can turn. The good guys could still win. The 2015 arrival of Donald Trump on the national political scene changed the rules. The system not only revealed itself to be even more fraudulent than most people had previously believed, but it became malevolent.

For over six years, representatives of every established institution in the country have stereotyped Americans who voted for President Trump as bigots, idiots, ignoramuses, haters, psychopaths, and traitors. The virulence of this condemnation has escalated each year, culminating during the 2022 mid-term election cycle with a full-court press to tag anyone who supports the former president as a fascist and and potential “domestic terrorist.”

Those who openly proclaimed their support for Trump, even if they expressed themselves with tact and rational arguments, focusing on his policies, and even while acknowledging Trump’s often confrontational persona, lost lifelong friends and faced threats to their livelihood. By the millions, they were made to feel unwelcome in their own country.

Anger breeds anger. Contempt breeds contempt. With Newtonian certainty, the disgust has become mutual. But on one side, with rare exceptions, the entire institutional weight of the most powerful nation in the world has lined up. The media, the search engine and social media platforms, the entertainers, the teachers and professors, the corporations, the government agencies, the politically active billionaires: Almost all of them proclaim Trump supporters to be horrible, dangerous people.

This asymmetrical assault is personal and profoundly alienating. Perhaps more than 100 million Americans now believe, with good reason, that they have been completely rejected by the nation in which they grew up.

Trump didn’t attract millions of Americans to support him because of his bombastic attacks on his opponents in politics and the media. That was comedic relief. Trump’s instant and enduring popularity owes to the way he speaks for millions of people who feel betrayed by the institutions they need to trust. Trump’s resiliency offers inspiration to them as he defies a mob that has destroyed the lives of countless individuals who dare to challenge a growing assortment of absurdities.

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

On November 3, Sunny Hostin, a cohost on The View, said, “White suburban women voting for Republicans are like roaches voting for the bug spray Raid.” Her hostility supposedly stemmed from Republican opposition to abortion. A co-panelist Alyssa Farah Griffin pointed out her previous opposition to abortion based on her Catholic faith, but Hostin was not deterred. On the one hand, this is a silly spat on a silly show. On the other hand, it matters a great deal when someone with a national platform likens people to insects.

Hostin’s language is similar to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, in 2018, referring to Jews as termites. Of course, Farrakhan is a hateful man who’s made a living from hate. He stopped attending college after three years and briefly made a living as a Calypso singer known as “Calypso Gene” before embracing his calling. He has generously expressed hatred of whites, Jews, and homosexuals. Hostin, however, has a different resume. She is a lawyer and has been in the media for a long time, including as a senior legal analyst for ABC News.

Two very different people but both doing something extremely dangerous, which is to dehumanize people. David Livingstone Smith has dedicated an entire book to this problem: Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. Smith argues that it is important to define and describe dehumanization because it is what opens the door to cruelty and genocide: “During the Holocaust, Nazis referred to Jews as rats. African Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals.”

https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2022/11/16/trump-shocks-the-world-by-nearly-putting-us-to-sleep-n659519

EXCERPTS…..

For all those tuning into Donald Trump’s announcement of his presidential candidacy Tuesday night expecting to see a rip-roaring, fired-up Trump tearing into Joe Biden, trashing the fake news, and just generally riling up the crowd, you were disappointed. Trump was unusually calm, almost somber even, and spoke mostly in a slightly-hoarse monotone. While he certainly delivered some of his red meat lines, he rarely went into his trademark ranting mode and stayed away from hot topics like the 2020 election, Crooked Hillary, and January 6. The words “Russia collusion” never came out of his mouth.

The substance of the speech was fine, although meandering. First, he delivered a defense of all he accomplished while he was president (which was a lot), then he turned his attention to criticizing Biden, which he did but—again—with a surprising lack of passion. Biden’s attacks on Trump have been much more savage than that as of late.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/16/voters-reject-amnesty-for-big-mistakes-made-during-covid-ii-tipp-poll/
Americans seek COVID accountability after lockdowns, economic damage, and thousands of deaths.

A recent online magazine article proposed a controversial idea: Those government and private officials who might have made serious errors during the COVID-19 pandemic should be granted “amnesty” for their mistakes. Will it fly? As the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows, the answer is “not likely.”

The article in question, Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty, appeared in the Oct. 31 online edition of The Atlantic. Specifically, the article, written by Brown University economist Emily Oster (who herself was heavily criticized for supporting school reopenings during COVID) urged:

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge.

But Americans mostly disagree with that idea, according to the latest national I&I/TIPP Poll, conducted online from a sampling of 1,359 adults from Nov. 2-4. The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-discrimination-demands-a-new-law-civil-rights-act-political-views-content-viewpoint-corporations-hostile-workplace-supreme-court-11668538745?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Republican politicians often ask what they can do in office to combat “wokeness.” The best approach is to amend state and federal civil-rights laws to protect employees from discrimination on the basis of political beliefs. Corporate viewpoint discrimination is unfair and widespread, a driver of polarization, and a direct consequence of the way existing civil-rights laws have been interpreted—a legal mistake that demands a legal solution.

On signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that it would “end divisions” and told Americans to “lay aside irrelevant differences and make our nation whole.” But while the act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and religion, it doesn’t protect political beliefs, and today corporations across America fire employees who express the wrong political opinions.

Disney fired actress Gina Carano after she compared the treatment of conservatives on social media to Nazi persecution of Jews. The company called her post “abhorrent and unacceptable,” although co-star Pedro Pascal wasn’t sacked for likening Trump supporters to Nazis. Longtime Sacramento Kings broadcaster Grant Napear lost his job for tweeting “ALL LIVES MATTER.” A Virginia high school teacher was fired for refusing to use a student’s “preferred pronouns.” A software company dismissed an employee for posting a TikTok video complaining about Bronx bodegas. A USA Today editor was demoted for tautologically tweeting: “People who are pregnant are also women.”

This is un-American, and it’s also counter to the spirit of the Civil Rights Act. You can’t be fired for expressing your religious beliefs or gender identity. Why can you be fired for your political beliefs?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbi-and-disinformation-11668550298?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Now that Republicans appear poised to capture a House majority, what should they do with it? This column is largely in agreement with those urging the GOP to focus on thoughtful legislative proposals to advance individual liberty and fiscal sanity, rather than partisan investigations. But there is at least one issue at the heart of individual liberty that demands investigation, even if Democrats aren’t eager to participate. U.S. citizens will not continue to enjoy foundational constitutional liberties if the FBI is permitted to abuse its powers as it did in targeting the 2016 Trump campaign and may have done in assisting the 2020 Biden campaign. A responsible defense of our First Amendment freedoms requires a thorough inquiry to determine to what extent the FBI and other federal agencies lean on social media companies to suppress government-designated “disinformation.”

The need is even more urgent given an exchange between a reporter and President Joe Biden at a White House press conference last week. Here’s an excerpt from the official transcript:

Q … Mr. President, do you think Elon Musk is a threat to U.S. national security? And should the U.S. — and with the tools you have — investigate his joint acquisition of Twitter with foreign governments, which include the Saudis?
THE PRESIDENT: (Laughs.) I think that Elon Musk’s cooperation and/or technical relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at. Whether or not he is doing anything inappropriate, I’m not suggesting that. I’m suggesting that it wor- — worth being looked at. And — and — but that’s all I’ll say.
Q How?
THE PRESIDENT: There’s a lot of ways.

Sunshine is especially needed here because with those words President Joe Biden is encouraging his executive branch to investigate Twitter’s new owner. It happens that this new owner is determined not to repeat Twitter’s disgraceful censorship of the New York Post’s accurate 2020 reporting on Biden family enrichment schemes.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/14/feds-had-informants-in-proud-boys-and-oath-keepers-for-j6/

If Republicans eke out a win in the House of Representatives—which now seems likely—GOP leaders have promised to investigate numerous government scandals, including the irredeemably corrupt Federal Bureau of Investigation. One path of inquiry is how the bureau manufactures data to promote the phony narrative that “domestic violent extremists,” i.e., supporters of Donald Trump, pose a security threat to the country.

Whistleblowers recently disclosed how the FBI is “misrepresenting the scale of domestic violent extremism nationwide by categorizing January 6th-related investigations as organic cases stemming from local field offices, instead of all related to one single incident,” according to a report by GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee. 

Shortly after the Capitol protest, FBI Director Christopher Wray designated the four-hour disturbance as an act of “domestic terror”; federal prosecutors routinely compare January 6 defendants to terrorists, enabling the government to seek—and receive—extended jail time for misdemeanors convictions and justify indefinite pretrial detention for nonviolent offenders.

During his Senate testimony in March 2021, Wray described members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, two groups involved in the events of January 6, as “militia violent extremists.” When Senator Lindsey Graham (RINO-S.C.) asked Wray whether he considered either group a domestic terror organization, the director refused to answer directly, instead insisting “individuals” associated with both groups are “domestic terrorists.”

Those comments alone should be fireable offenses. Set aside Wray’s excuse-making for leftist rioters—in 2020, Wray laughably refused to apply the same label to Antifa, calling it a “movement or an ideology,” not a terror organization—no evidence exists to support Wray’s accusations that the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys mimic terror cells comparable to al Qaeda. Of the nearly two dozen members of both groups now facing charges tied to January 6, only one is accused of using a weapon (a riot shield) and it is alleged he used it to break a window, not harm a person, that afternoon. 

Members of the Oath Keepers who drove to Washington to attend the president’s speech left their legally transported weapons at a Virginia hotel rather than violate the city’s strict gun control laws. Worst “militia” ever.

And no one in either group carried a firearm into the building or on Capitol grounds.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/15/wait-this-is-the-inflation-news-everyone-is-celebrating/

The moment the government’s inflation number came out last Thursday, the stock market rocketed upward. President Joe Biden took a victory lap. It was less than expected! Inflation is cooling off!

Sounds wonderful. Except that prices rose in October by almost 8% year-over-year. That’s four times faster than the Federal Reserve Bank’s 2% target rate. And it marks the 20th consecutive month since inflation has been above the Fed’s target.

It also comes on top of previous record-level price hikes.

When prices started shooting up last year, the White House said it was no big deal because of the “base effect.” They said that prices seemed to be climbing rapidly in 2021 only because the COVID lockdowns had knocked prices down the year before. Since the base was low, the year-over-year comparisons made inflation seem higher than it really was.

“Over the next few months, as the base effects’ months drift further into the past, this distortionary characteristic of the price data should fade,” the White House said in a report in June 2021.

Except, that didn’t happen. Prices kept climbing even as those “base effect” months passed on by. And we are still seeing historically high price increases on top of historically high increases.

October’s year-over-year price spike of 7.7% is on top of the 6.2% increase in October 2021. In other words, prices last month were 14.4% higher than they were two years ago. Ask yourself, has your income increased by more than 14.4% over the past two years?