RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/biden-commutes-sentences-capital-punishment-death-penalty

In the latest in a series of shameful closing acts, President Joe Biden on Sunday night commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 murderers on federal death row.

Biden’s midnight decision spared the lives of all but the three most notorious capital inmates: the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter, the Emmanuel AME Church shooter, and the surviving Boston Marathon bomber.

In his statement on the commutations, Biden said he was “more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.” It’s clear, then, that he only stopped short of a blanket commutation because of the backlash that would have come with pardoning these three mass murderers.

Make no mistake: Biden’s choice to spare the remaining 37 murderers is a moral travesty. In so doing, the lame duck president has once again shown that he is more beholden to progressive dogmas than to the pursuit of justice.

That’s obvious when you look at the killers Biden spared. Take Daniel Troya and Ricardo Sanchez, Jr., who murdered a family of four in cold blood, including three-year-old Luis Damian Escobedo and four-year-old Luis Julian Escobedo. Or consider Jorge Avila-Torrez, who murdered eight-year-old Laura Hobbs and nine-year-old Krystal Tobias in 2005. Avila-Torrez then joined the Marines, strangled U.S. Navy petty officer Amanda Jean Snell to death, and abducted and assaulted two more women before finally being apprehended.

Nine of those with commuted sentences were on death row for killing other people in prison. If capital punishment is not an option for such offenses, then there is no deterrence for prison homicides—and therefore no guarantee of safety for the incarcerated.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fetterman-comes-out-for-common-sense-again/

It used to be taken for granted on both sides of the aisle that once the presidential election was over, the country should unite behind the president, whoever he was, and support him for the good of the nation. Disagreements would begin almost immediately, of course, but there used to be what was generally known as a “honeymoon period,” during which politicians of both parties paid tribute to the national unity by wishing the new chief executive all success. But that was in an earlier, less fractious age; now, Sen. John Fetterman (D-But Sane), has landed in hot water with the left for stating what used to be a commonplace sentiment.

Fox News reported Sunday that Fetterman “says he hopes President-elect Trump is successful, and spoke out against those who feel otherwise.” Every senator should be saying the same thing, but Fetterman was one of the few Democrats, if not the only one, to dare to state publicly that Bad Orange Man shouldn’t fall on his face and end up behind bars, or worse, before his term of office is up.

“I’m not rooting against him,” Fetterman said sensibly; after all, if the president fails, the nation suffers, so what American should be wishing for that? “If you’re rooting against the president,” Fetterman continued, “you are rooting against the nation. And I’m not ever going to be where I want a president to fail. So, country first. I know that’s become maybe like a cliche, but it happens to be true.”

Leftists were predictably enraged. Over at Bluesky, where the hard-left can let its freak flag fly without having to put up with the benighted, hateful, and evil ones who dare to dissent from their crystal-clear vision of what constitutes truth and righteousness, our moral superiors were giving full vent to their tolerance and broad-mindedness. “Fetterman,” said one, “is a giant moron.” Another waxed eloquent: “F**king Fetterman can f**k off. There. I said it. I love being able to use the F word here. And f**king Fetterman deserves it. F**king traitor.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/luigi-mangione-unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian-thompson

On the morning of December 4, 2024, in midtown Manhattan, a masked male snuck up behind the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a health insurance company, and pumped three bullets into the executive’s back and leg. Brian Thompson, a 50-year-old father of two, was pronounced dead a few minutes later.

Celebrations of the murder broke out on social media almost as soon as the killing was reported. The unknown assailant had provided a public service by taking out a leader in a predatory and heartless industry, the killer’s fans asserted. The jubilation grew in fervor as each newly released surveillance video confirmed the original impression that the killer, still at large, was young and handsome.

Once an arrest was made, the lionization of the suspect, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, reached a frenzy. “Luigi”—always “Luigi”—was the “hot assassin.” Merchandise featuring his image and phrases from a handwritten manifesto he had carried with him sprung up on Amazon. A video projection of Mangione’s face was cheered at a rock concert in Boston. A crowdsourced defense fund quickly swelled with donations. Wanted posters appeared in Manhattan with pictures of other corporate CEOs. The names and salaries of health-care executives were posted on line. Private citizens who had helped with the manhunt were vilified as snitches; police officers involved in arresting Mangione received threats.

To the mainstream media, the question posed by this episode was obvious: Why are Americans so angry at health-insurance companies? And so reporters and opinion columnists got to work limning a portrait of the health-care industry—its profits, the salaries of its executives—and fleshing out the animus against it.

The only relevant question in the wake of the Thompson murder, however, is: What has gone wrong with Americans’ moral compass that so many could cheer the extrajudicial killing of an innocent man? That question has not been deemed worthy of exploring.

When the high fives for the assassin started appearing on the web, some observers dismissed that support as a minor emanation from the fever swamps of social media, where anonymity and the desire for a following push users to rhetorical extremes.

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28292/mama-make-america-moral-again

 goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

Every day I read chilling statistical reports on the escalating violent crime in America––murder, rape, robbery, assault. The staggering increase is horrifying, but what is most alarming to me is the percentage of young people who accept criminality as a societal solution. The Hill posted a stunning article online December 17, 2024, titled, “Shock poll: 41 percent of young voters find killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO acceptable” written by Filip Timotija. Why is this so?

The alarming decline of morality that is convulsing America today is the consequence of the globalist elite, and its relentless replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate. The separation of Church and State that our Founding Fathers institutionalized as protection against a state religion has been exploited and perverted to allow the insertion of Marxist principles, indoctrination, and ideology to be practiced as a state religion inside America.

Primary schools, high schools, colleges, and universities across the nation have embraced American Marxism and its amoral foundation which advances its ends justify the means for the greater good principle. There is no individualism or individual morality in Marxism, only rules to follow that advance the collective. It is precisely this amoral Marxist narrative that has separated young Americans from the morality and protection of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Indoctrinated young Americans have not understood the formulaic consequences of the ends justify the means principle that can and will be used against them, the moment their usefulness expires.

Marxism is a collectivist replacement ideology that has been funded, fomented, and weaponized by the globalist elite to shatter the Judeo-Christian morality and the individualism it protects. The amoral tenets of the woke Marxist narrative, including Diversity Equity Inclusion (DEI) and Environmental Social Governance (ESG) that affect education, medicine, law, investment, and corporate governance, are designed to collapse the Judeo-Christian morality and infrastructure of the United States––and they have been wildly successful. The evidence is reflected in the stupefying statistic reported in The Hill article, “A poll found 41% of adults under 30 consider the killing of Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson acceptable.” Additionally, “Since Thompson was shot, first in the back and then again as he fell to the ground, a number of social media posts from people saying they do not have sympathy for his death have gained popularity.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-corrupt-pardon-of-death-row-inmates/

Last week, as we covered here, the Biden Justice Department filed a death penalty charge against Luigi Mangione, the alleged cold-blooded killer of health insurance executive Brian Thompson. Mangione was already facing state murder charges for the murder committed on a Manhattan street. The only reason to pile on a capital charge — for an administration that both says it philosophically opposes the death penalty and has imposed a moratorium on executions since President Biden entered office in January 2021 — was to grab headlines in a case that had riveted public attention.

And now, just days later, Biden has cynically commuted the sentences of almost all remaining federal death row inmates — 37 of the 40 — so that none of those defendants will be executed.

I say “cynically” because this is the game Biden and Democrats in power play with capital punishment, which is broadly popular nationally but reviled by their party’s progressive base. For public consumption, in murder cases that enrage voters, they take on the mantle of capital punishment’s reluctant champions. Thus did the Obama-Biden Justice Department indict Dzokhar Tsarnaev on death charges when he and his brother bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013 — notwithstanding that Obama, like Biden, had imposed a moratorium on executions. And when a Democrat-appointee-dominated First Circuit appellate court irrationally reversed the death sentence endorsed by the Boston federal jury, the Biden Justice Department appealed and convinced the Supreme Court to reinstate it.

But that was out of one side of the administration’s mouth. On the other side, Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland were assuring their political base not to pay any mind to these theatrics because, after all, they weren’t going to allow anyone to be executed.

And, naturally, Tsarnaev is one of the three death row inmates whose sentence Biden did not commute — the others are Dylann Roof, the white racist who in 2015 murdered black worshipers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, and against whom the Obama-Biden Justice Department sought the death penalty despite its claimed constitutional qualms; and Robert D. Bowers, the Jew-hating murderer who killed worshipers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, and against whom the Biden Justice Department decided to proceed with death penalty charges in 2023.

The Democrats’ death penalty cynicism aside, this is a corrupt invocation of the pardon power — I should say, yet another corrupt invocation — by Biden.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/what-was-so-different-this-time-about-trumps-election/

In the weeks before the 2016 Trump Electoral College victory, Donald Trump was polling between 35 and 40 percent.

He would average only about 41% approval over his tumultuous four-year tenure.

No one knows what lies ahead over the next four years. But for now, Trump already polls well over 50% approval.

His inauguration in a few weeks will likely not resemble Trump’s 2016 ceremony.

In the 2016-7 transition, Democratic-affiliated interests ran commercials urging electors to become “faithless,” and thus illegally to reject their states’ popular votes and instead elect the loser, Hillary Clinton.

Massive demonstrations met Trump on Inauguration Day.

In less than four months after assuming the presidency, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to investigate the hoax of Russian collusion.

That wasted 22-month, $40 million investigation found no collusion, but did derail the first two Trump years.

What followed the collusion ruse was a consistent effort to undermine the Trump presidency — two subsequent impeachments, the laptop “disinformation” hoax, the COVID-19 nationwide lockdown, and news suppression of any mention of the Chinese lab origin of the virus or questioning the closing of schools.

In the Trump administration’s last summer of 2020, 120 days of riot, arson, looting, assault, and murder followed, with the denouement of the January 6 turmoil.

In contrast, the 2024-5 Trump transition has all but assumed the presidency. Over 100 foreign leaders have elbowed each other to be invited to Mar-a-Lago or to phone in their congratulations to the newly elected Trump.

Remember that in 2016 the Left screamed “Logan Act” if a Trump transition appointee even talked with foreign officials.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/24/old-saint-knick-washington-irvings-antidote-to-woke/

According to Walter Russell Mead’s recent analysis, “One way to read Trump’s second victory in three elections is that the movement for a post-American America with a successor ideology and post-Judeo Christian cultural and ethical foundation aimed at fundamentally changing American society has reached its sell-by date.”

Do not hold your breath.

The demise of “Woke” has been greatly exaggerated. The unfortunate truth is that the Woke Era, under which the great mass of Americans has been harassed since the reelection of Barack Obama, is merely the latest spasm of the puritanism that has periodically plagued the body politic since the English Civil War. The particular issues change, but the insufferable moralization and coercive war on preexisting cultural traditions and symbols are always recognizable.

Fortunately, Wokeness does appear to be receding at the moment, the antidote having been provided by a New Yorker who “looked at things poetically rather than politically” and “revered the past and the stability that a sense of the past provides.” No, I am not referring to Donald Trump, but another Knickerbocker — Washington Irving.

Born in 1783, the year of victory over the British, Irving’s life would span the entire antebellum period of American history. Fittingly named after the father of his country, Irving would go on to establish himself as the Father of American Literature. He believed that America’s puritanical impulses stunted healthy cultural development, a belief developed in rebellion against a puritanical upbringing under Irving’s strict Presbyterian father.

“I have no relish for Puritans either in religion or politics, who are pushing for principles to an extreme, and overturning everything that stands in the way of their own zealous career,” wrote Irving. Instead, Irving had faith in tradition, where “population, manners, and customs remained fixed.” And nowhere is Irving’s impact on American traditions greater than in the way we celebrate Christmas.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/12/no_daniel_pennys_migrant_sets_woman_on_fire_in_new_york_subway_as_cops_bumble_and_gov_hochul_touts_making_subway_safer.html

In a grotesque confluence of all the horrid doings in wokester New York City, a Guatemalan migrant brazenly set a woman on fire in broad daylight in the New York subway just to watch her burn, and no Daniel Pennys came forward to stop the barbaric crime.

According to the New York Post:

A Guatemalan migrant has been arrested for allegedly lighting a sleeping subway rider on fire in Brooklyn on Sunday morning — then watching as his innocent victim burned to death in what the police commissioner called “one of the most depraved crimes one person could possibly commit.”

The savage killing — which happened at about 7:30 a.m. on an idling F train at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station — shocked commuters, MTA workers and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who said Sunday that the heinous crime “took the life of an innocent New Yorker.”

“As the train pulled into the station, the suspect calmly walked up to the victim, who was in a seated position at the end of a subway car … and used what we believe to be a lighter to ignite the victim’s clothing, which became fully engulfed in a matter of seconds,” Tisch said at a press conference.

Patrolling cops smelled and saw the smoke, then followed it to the flame-covered woman, the commissioner said. 

They extinguished the blaze, but the victim died at the scene.

Horrifying video obtained by The Post showed the suspect calmly looking on as flames consumed the still-unidentified woman, who stood inside the open subway car door.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/23/americans-mostly-like-trumps-idea-of-replacing-income-tax-with-tariffs-ii-tipp-poll/

Soon to be President Donald Trump has talked about getting rid of the U.S. income tax and replacing it with a system of tariffs. He has come under heavy criticism from Democrats and many economists. But average Americans appear to like the idea, with a plurality favoring Trump’s idea, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

The December online I&I/TIPP Poll asked 1,441 adults across the country the following question: “President Trump has talked about replacing the income tax with tariffs (taxes on selected imports). Would you support or oppose such a move?” The poll has a margin error of +/-2.6 percentage points.

A plurality of those responding answered yes. Specifically, 46% said they either support the idea “strongly” (17%) or “somewhat” (28%). On the other side, 38% said they opposed the idea either “strongly” (24%) or “somewhat” (14%). A sizeable 16% said they were not sure.

But by far the strongest support for the idea came from Trump’s main constituency, Republicans. They support the tariff idea by a hefty 75%, with only 13% standing opposed and 12% “not sure.”

Democrats aren’t so keen on the tariff idea, with 24% supporting and a majority 62% opposing the idea, with 14% not sure.

Independent/third-party respondents once again more or less split on the issue, with 39% supporting it, but 43% opposing. The “not sure” response was 19%, indicating significant indecision on the proposed plan.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Democrats are puzzled that their majorities among the working-class, blacks and minorities are shrinking. Why, they wonder, is the Party that long showed concern for working Americans being abandoned by those same people? They have forgotten that political parties are not static entities. Democrats’ current bar-bell approach, with coastal elitists offset by those dependent on government, ignores the vast middle-class. Smugness and complacency have enshrouded their leaders, as they did Republicans half a century earlier.

Political parties change, adapting to demands from their wealthiest backers and noisiest constituents. Prior to the Civil War, abolitionists joined the new Republican Party, while slave-holders were mostly Democrats. But over time, the Party of Lincoln morphed into northeast coastal elitists, while Democrat segregationists of the mid-Twentieth Century south joined with civil rights activists. Now, another change, which has been underway for the past few decades, is reaching a climax. New England, dominated by Republicans in the 1950s and ‘60s, has become – with the exception of New Hampshire – a bastion for Democrats. In the past thirty years, there has been only one New England State that voted for a Republican president, and that was New Hampshire in 2000. In contrast, in the 36 years ending in 1988, Republican presidential candidates won more than twice as many New England states as Democrats.

There is a scene in the Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye 1954 movie White Christmas that captures the image: Entertainers Crosby and Kaye follow two girls (Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen) they had met in Florida to the Columbia Inn in Pine Tree, Vermont, an inn now run by their former World War II commander, General Waverly (Dean Jagger). Because of a lack of snow, Waverly is having a tough time. Crosby and Kaye decide they must do something, something unusual: “What do you think would be a novelty up here in Vermont?” asks Bing Crosby. “Who knows?” replies Danny Kaye. “Perhaps we can dig up a Democrat.” Today Democrats outnumber Republicans in Vermont by more than two and a half to one. However, empirical evidence suggests Republicans are, once again, beginning to narrow the gap.