RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/the-governments-war-on-transparency

Originally published in The Wall Street Journal Weekend edition, Section A, Page A9, September 17, 2022 as a paid editorial.

Dear Mr. and Ms. Taxpayer Voter,

Federal spending is out of control and they don’t want you to know about it. The fiscal irresponsibility of your elected officials and bureaucrats has taken the federal debt to levels not seen since World War II. With no end in sight.

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) redacted 350,000 federal executive agency employee names from our FOIA request (2021)—roughly $30 billion in compensation. In the last year of the Obama administration, only 2,367 names were redacted. OPM stated, “For those instances where data element are not released, they are being withheld under FOIA Exemption 6… the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

The Federal Reserve has 23,000 employees. They gave us the salaries of only 367 executives. They stated, “Releasing the names and specific salary information for all employees would not shed any further light on the Board’s performance of its statutory duties.” They told us that a database of their expenditures, a checkbook, does not exist. “Staff searched Board records and made suitable inquiries with knowledgeable staff but did not locate the information you seek.” This from our country’s central bank! 23,000 employees! No database of expenditures!

The Vice President refused to give us any information. They claimed, “The Office of Vice President is not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.” One would think the Vice President would want you, taxpaying voters, to know how she spent your tax dollars. Not so. Why?

The U.S. Postal Service refused to produce line-by-line checkbook expenditures. They stated that doing so would expose their “trade secrets.” It is hard to imagine Federal Express or UPS benefitting from the USPS’s money-losing “trade secrets.” USPS also refuses to produce bonuses paid.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/majority-of-americans-more-concerned-with-socialist-left-than-maga-republicans-poll/

Fifty-five percent of Americans are more concerned about the “Socialist Left” than they are about “MAGA Republicans,” according to a new Harvard-CAPS Harris poll.

The poll asked respondents: “Are you more concerned about the Socialist left in America and the power they are gaining or more afraid of MAGA Republicans and the power they are getting?”

Just 45 percent of respondents said they are more concerned with “MAGA Republicans.”

The poll also asked voters: “Do you think there are tens of millions of dangerous MAGA Republicans backing violence and trying to overthrow the constitution or is that a gross exaggeration and distortion?”

Most voters (54 percent) believe the number of “dangerous MAGA Republicans” is “grossly exaggerated.” Forty-six percent said there are tens of millions of dangerous MAGA Republicans, including 73 percent of Democrats, 20 percent of Republicans and 42 percent of independents.

The poll was conducted September 7 and 8, one week after President Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia saying former president Donald Trump and the ‘MAGA Republicans’ represent “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/biden-is-blind-to-our-inflationary-spiral/?itm_campaign=headline-testing-biden-is-blind-to-our-

The president could have prevented this crisis by being the ‘adult’ he always claims to be. Instead, he’s still pretending it’s not a crisis at all.

On the cardinal matter of inflation, Joe Biden is lost, and does not want to be found; he is blind, but does not want to see. Asked on last night’s 60 Minutes what he had to offer in response to the news that “last Tuesday, the annual inflation rate came in at 8.3 percent,” “the stock market nosedived,” and people continued to be “shocked by their grocery bills,” Biden raised his eyebrows and demurred. It’s important, he said defiantly, to “put this in perspective.” That “perspective”? That, per the most recent inflation numbers, the problem is “up just an inch — hardly at all. . . . It hasn’t spiked.” Suppressing a grimace, Biden’s interviewer, Scott Pelley, suggested that a broader “perspective” than the last month might perhaps be more useful to the viewers. “It’s the highest inflation rate, Mr. President, in 40 years,” Pelley said.

’Tis but a scratch!

It is clear from the president’s public pronouncements that he has not yet grasped the scale of the disaster that is unfolding before his eyes.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/?author=503a7965e4b0b543ed24305c

The latest endlessly recurring mantra of Democratic politicians and press is that some position articulated by the opposition is a threat to “our Democracy.”

I suppose that those words must resonate with some people, or otherwise they would not be so endlessly repeated. Of course the statement is fundamentally wrong, because we don’t actually have a “Democracy,” but rather a Constitutional Republic.

Having a Democracy would mean that a 50.1% voting majority can do whatever it wants to the hated 49.9%, including locking the 49.9% permanently out of power. The whole idea of the Constitutional Republic is to keep that from happening, and our Constitution puts multiple institutions in place to prevent a temporary slight majority from seizing permanent power for itself.

Most of the current railing about threats to “our Democracy” turns out, on examination, to represent nothing more than dissatisfaction with the fact that we have a Constitutional Republic rather than a Democracy. Understanding the distinction between Democracy and our Constitutional Republic is the key to distinguishing the real threats to our system of government from the nonsense filling the media every day.

This post considers a recent example of one of the real threats, which has received almost no press coverage.

Over in Europe, and particularly in those countries in the vanguard of the green energy transition, the enormous costs of this folly have begun to hit home. In the UK, average annual consumer energy bills were scheduled to rise as of October 1 to £3549/year, from only £1138/year just a year ago. (The figure may now get reduced somewhat by means of massive government subsidies, which only conceal, but do not obviate, the disastrous cost increases.) Germany’s regulated consumer gas bills are scheduled for an average annual increase on October 1 of about 480 euros, about 13%, from an already high 3568 euros.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/18/equal-justice-they-said/

What once distinguished the United States from illiberal regimes following the Orwellian mantra “some are more equal than others” was the hallowed American idea of “equal justice under the law.”

The phrase is engraved above the entrance to the United States Supreme Court—an ideal that took centuries to achieve. Yet it is an ancient concept—what the Greeks called isonomia that distinguished classical democratic Athens from its anti-democratic rivals. Isonomia later became enshrined as the central criterion of all Western consensual governments.

Does it still exist in Joe Biden’s America? 

In many ways, no—due both to state and private vendettas as well as state efforts to destroy rather than merely defeat political opponents. 

Is the law equally applied at the border? 

Ask yourself whether you are more likely to be hounded by the federal government for not being vaccinated if you are a citizen in the U.S. military, or illegally violating federal immigration law as you storm the southern border? 

Who needs a passport to leave and enter the United States—a citizen or an illegal alien?

If you nullify federal law and refuse to hand over a detained illegal alien to federal immigration agents, are you more or less likely to be prosecuted than someone who likewise deliberately seeks to nullify federal law by bulldozing on his property a nest of federally protected squirrels?

What tradition of Western jurisprudence allows violent criminals in America’s largest cities to be released upon booking? 

What law states they are instantly free to commit more crimes without worry of incarceration or punishment, while those accused of illegally parading sit in jail for years awaiting charges? 

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

It’s to be hoped that Maher is a barometer of the fact that leftist ideas are so extreme they’re even offending leftists

Bill Maher is a leftist (and proud of it), but he’s neither a fool nor a fantasist. Of late, he’s been one of the more prominent leftists pointing out that his side of the political aisle has gone too far and is destroying itself. Maher’s latest effort hit home with me because I was a college history major and have always understood that the past is a different place from the present. Rather like medieval man himself, the left doesn’t get that, and Maher at least made the effort to remedy that situation.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/magas_real_crime_spotlighting_government_failure.html

The midterm elections are only weeks away.  The Democrats are in complete control of the House, Senate, and presidency.  Donald Trump’s name appears nowhere near a November ballot.  Yet the only things Democrats talk about are the former president and his “Make America Great Again” voters.  It is as if Joe Biden’s and Nancy Pelosi’s political troops have no interest in touting their successes in opening the Southern border to endless illegal immigration, promoting divisive lockdowns and “vaccine” mandates, passing a Green New Deal spending extravaganza, encouraging transgender drag queen shows for elementary-schoolers, emptying prisons of criminals, eliminating cash bail for felony arrests, leveraging Americans’ pain at the gas pump to push them into expensive electric vehicles, or presiding over the highest rates of inflation in over forty years.  They’ve accomplished so much in such little time!  Maybe their campaign slogan could be “Making Americans Poorer and Less Secure for Their Own Good” or “Vote Democrat: Because We Know Better.”

Or maybe the Democrat party realizes that its policy “successes” have caused so much pain for the American people that the only path to continued power consists of cynically demonizing half the country as “extremists,” “insurrectionists,” and “terrorists” who must be defeated at any cost.  For a nation not engaged in violent civil war, it sure sounds as if 75 million Trump voters have been officially declared the enemy.  Senator Mazie Hirono says pro-life Americans who oppose abortion are “literally a call to arms.”  Representative Hank Johnson says parents attending school board meetings to protest racist, sexualized, and Marxist indoctrination disguised as academic curricula are part of a “coordinated attack happening across the country.”  Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan says, “We’ve gotta kill and confront” MAGA “extremists.”  Department of Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas claims that the country’s biggest national security threats come from “domestic extremists” who are “radicalized” by “anti-government sentiment” or “false narratives propagated on online platforms.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/doj-tramples-on-the-constitution/

The United States under the Biden administration is using the force of government to harass the late Phyllis Schlafly’s group in Alabama.

In recent months, the Eagle Forum of Alabama has helped write legislation in that state to protect children with gender confusion from receiving “treatment” that could permanently damage them.

In his End of Day Report (9/9/22), Gary Bauer writes, “After Alabama banned transgender surgeries on children, the Biden Administration sued the state in federal court to block the law. But they’re not just arguing against the constitutionality of the law. They are also going after a conservative public policy group that lobbied on behalf of the law.” Of course, that group is the Eagle Forum of Alabama.

The United States’ Department of Justice issued a subpoena in August demanding records from the Eagle Forum of Alabama, stating: “Several public statements suggest that Eagle Forum of Alabama staff may have had some involvement in drafting the legislation or its predecessor bills. As a result, the United States is issuing the enclosed subpoena for certain records in the Eagle Forum of Alabama’s possession from January 1, 2017 through the present.”

The official subpoena demands: “any draft legislation, proposed legislations, or model legislation.” This included all their communiques on the subject, e.g., “any social media postings.”

The Greek myth of the Augean Stables has rarely been more pertinent than today. In penance for his sins, the Greek hero Hercules (Heracles in original Greek) was ordered to scour the stables in which King Augeas kept 3,000 herd of cattle and which had not been cleaned in 30 years. The Labor was accomplished by diverting the river Alpheus through the structure, in itself no mean feat, even for a mythological hero.

The slogan “drain the swamp,” restored to our political discourse by Donald Trump, serves as the contemporary description and political purpose of the Herculean Labor undertaken by the former president, the nemesis of the fetid Washington quagmire. Regrettably, Trump had less luck than Hercules, but his attempt was no less heroic. Three-thousand oxen are nothing compared to the uncountable and unaccountable swamp dwellers thronging the offices, precincts, fields, and fens of American politics, and 30 years is an eyeblink in the history of political and moral corruption. Even Hercules might have quailed before the task, realizing that diverting the Potomac through the halls of power would have amounted to a mere trickle, by comparison, leaving the offal intact.

Something in the magnitude of Noah’s Flood would be needed to rinse and fumigate the grime and crud and sewage that has accumulated over the generations of grift and venality in the realms of authority, possibly never more feculent than at present under the reprobate administration of Joe Biden, a lawless DOJ, an unscrupulous FBI, a weaponized IRS, a tainted NIH, NIAID, and CDC, all operating in the debauched atmosphere of corporate socialism and generally associated with banana republics.

Nonetheless, some sort of housecleaning must be attempted, which may at least leave two or three stalls of the Washington Stables in reasonably decent shape, and Donald Trump is the only protagonist on the scene who is capable of performing even so truncated a mission. The objective is clear. MAGA Republicans must capture House and Senate. Biden will have to be impeached. The marsh of Democrat imbeciles and embarrassments who desecrate every department and agency must be disciplined or sent packing. Rogue civil service bureaucrats must be purged en masse via Schedule F. The military must once more be set upon its proper foundation as a fighting force second to none rather than a community center for intersectional clowns and incompetents.

Obviously, there are discrepancies in the analogy. Trump, for example, was not, like Hercules, punished for his sins, but undertook his Labor voluntarily. He was beholden neither to the gods nor subject to some Eurysthean wager. Neither would his quest be guaranteed of success. He might be defeated — arrested on false accusations, or worse — or otherwise thwarted by a vast machinery of special interests, Party traitors, an army of media sutlers and assorted public mercenaries, and a thick emulsion of establishment cronies and powerful adversaries resistant to political antiseptic.

But the effort must be undertaken, and Trump is the one to do it. His first sortie was an unexpected, if partial, success. He has now learned the extent of the stables and the enormous quantities of manure he has to deal with. Hercules was assigned Twelve Labors, but it is the Fifth that requires attention. The stables are rank and must be hosed out, so far as possible. But the task is immense, and I can’t see anyone else who has the thews and the gumption capable of mounting so prodigious an operation that even the gods might have spared him.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3647056-who-is-raymond-j-dearie-the-special-master-in-trump-case/

A federal judge on Thursday appointed Judge Raymond J. Dearie to serve as special master in the case involving documents the FBI seized from former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence last month.

The decision to install Dearie — a 78-year-old New York native and semi-retired judge from the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of New York — came in response to Trump’s request for an independent mediator to determine what, if any, materials recovered by authorities are protected by attorney-client or executive privileges.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the Trump documents case, granted Trump’s request for a special master and directed both his legal team and the Justice Department to provide a list of contenders for the job. Dearie was the only individual both sides agreed upon.

The longtime judge is now tasked with examining the more than 11,000 documents the FBI seized by Nov. 30.

Here are five things to know about Dearie.

Dearie is a former Reagan nominee

Dearie received a bachelor’s degree from Fairfield University in 1966 before earning his juris doctor from St. John’s University School of Law in 1969.

After working in private practice for two years, Dearie moved to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York in 1971.

Starting out as an assistant U.S. attorney, the New York native moved up the ladder at the office, leading the appeals division, general crimes section and criminal division before assuming the role of chief assistant U.S. attorney in 1980 and, in 1982, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.