RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/sounding-alarm-over-joe-biden-byron-york/
President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects have seemed doubtful for months now. Many voters think the nation’s oldest president ever — he turns 80 in November — is too old for the job and is certainly too old for a second term. Many others think he’s simply doing a bad job. Many think both. And that includes Democrats who voted for Biden as well as Republicans who didn’t.

Now, we seem to have reached a turning point. In recent days, the most influential media voice among Democrats, The New York Times, has published two articles that appear to lay a foundation for pushing a reluctant Biden out of a reelection race in 2024.

The first was published on July 9 with the headline, “At 79, Biden Is Testing the Boundaries of Age and the Presidency.” Don’t be fooled by the gentleness of the headline. The article clearly suggested Biden is too old to be president. It reported that Biden’s upcoming Middle East trip was originally going to be part of his European trip last month until aides realized that putting the two destinations together in one trip “would have made for an arduous 10-day overseas trek” and that “such extended travel might be unnecessarily taxing for a 79-year-old president.” One official even called the idea “crazy.”

Biden’s aides acknowledge that he “looks older than just a few years ago,” the Times reported, calling that a “political liability that cannot be solved by traditional White House stratagems like staff shake-ups or new communications plans.” While the Times called Biden’s energy level “impressive for a man of his age,” it nevertheless said Biden’s energy “is not what it was, and some aides quietly watch out for him.”

“[Biden] often shuffles when he walks, and aides worry he will trip on a wire,” the Times reported. “He stumbles over words during public events, and they hold their breath to see if he makes it to the end without a gaffe.” Those public appearances have “fueled” the perception that Biden is too old to be president, the article said. “His speeches can be flat and listless. He sometimes loses his train of thought, has trouble summoning names or appears momentarily confused.” During the European trip, the paper said, Biden’s fellow leaders “protectively treat[ed] him like a distinguished elderly relative.”

In all, Biden’s age has become an “uncomfortable issue” for Democrats, the paper reported. “If he mounts another campaign in 2024, Mr. Biden would be asking the country to elect a leader who would be 86 at the end of his tenure,” the Times said, “testing the outer boundaries of age and the presidency.” Testing the outer boundaries of age? For many Americans, the simpler way of saying that is “too old.”

Now, the Times has published a devastating poll the paper conducted with Siena College. The survey found that 64% of Democratic voters want a different nominee in 2024 — just 26% want the party to renominate the president. On top of that, the poll shows Biden’s job approval among all Americans at just 33%. And, on top of that, just 13% of those surveyed believe the country is on the right track. “With the country gripped by a pervasive sense of pessimism,” the Times wrote, “the president is hemorrhaging support.”

And what is it about Biden that particularly worries his party’s voters? Age. “Concerns about his age ranked at the top of the list for Democratic voters who want the party to find an alternative,” the paper reported. “‘I’m just going to come out and say it: I want younger blood,’ said Nicole Farrier, a 38-year-old preschool teacher in East Tawas, a small town in northern Michigan. ‘I am so tired of all old people running our country. I don’t want someone knocking on death’s door.'” Farrier voted for Biden in 2020 in hopes he might “heal the nation’s divisions,” the Times said, but now “she is preoccupied with what she described as crippling increases in her cost of living.”

The second-highest concern is Biden’s job performance. The Times reported: “He hasn’t done what I think he’s capable of doing as president to help the American people,” said Kelly King, a former factory worker in Greensburg, Indiana. “As a Democrat, I figured he would really be on our side and put us back on the right track. And I just feel like he’s not.”

The poll offered one “glimmer” of good news for Democrats: Even in his weakened condition, Biden could still narrowly defeat Donald Trump 44% to 41%, in a hypothetical 2024 head-to-head matchup. But even Democrats who would definitely vote for Biden against Trump would still prefer another nominee.

What does it all mean? It means Biden is in trouble. But that has been clear for quite a while. Voters have long been concerned about the president’s age. They have been concerned about his ability to handle the world’s most demanding job. And they have wished there were some better alternative.

What is perhaps more newsworthy now is that the media institution most respected among Democrats, especially Democratic opinion leaders, has so frankly put the spotlight on Biden’s problems. From a Democratic perspective, it is one thing when Republicans complain about Biden. It is another when The New York Times does it. And now everyone, except perhaps the most dogged Biden loyalists, is alarmed about the state of Joe Biden.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/18/justice-department-designates-obstruction-as-an-act-of-terror/

To hear federal prosecutors tell it, Guy Wesley Reffitt almost single-handedly organized and led a bloodthirsty mob to overtake Congress on January 6, 2021.

One of the first protesters arrested in the Justice Department’s “shock and awe” dragnet of Donald Trump supporters, Reffitt was immediately indicted on numerous offenses. He spent more than a year in the D.C. gulag set aside for Americans who protested Joe Biden’s election under pretrial detention orders sought by the Justice Department—and he was the first January 6 defendant to stand trial in a city that voted nearly 93 percent for Biden in 2020.

In a matter of a few hours in March, 12 residents of the nation’s capital—not only one of the most lopsidedly Democratic cities in the country but one whose residents view the events of January 6 as an intrusion of their private fiefdom—found Reffitt guilty on all charges: two counts of civil disorder, two counts of obstruction, and one count of carrying a handgun on restricted grounds. (Prosecutors came up with the firearms charges months after he was initially indicted, claiming a holster he wore that day contained a semi-automatic handgun.)

Without question, Reffitt engaged in bad behavior that afternoon; he recorded himself making derogatory comments about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) before confronting Capitol police on the steps outside the building. The government’s most incriminating evidence in the case came from Reffitt’s teenage son, who secretly taped conversations with his father a few days after Reffitt returned to their Texas home, which the FBI raided on January 16, 2021. (I wrote about the case here.)

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/19/los-angeles-will-soon-be-in-shackles-again/

If trends continue, Los Angeles County will issue an indoor mask mandate by the end of the month. Officials are of course saying they’re just following the guidelines. But they have no regard for freedom and refuse to acknowledge the data that show mask mandates are useless.

It’s as if they get a perverted thrill out of holding in their hands the raw power to dictate the terms of other people’s lives.

Los Angeles County reached the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s high community level last week. Which is “​​determined by looking at hospital beds being used, hospital admissions, and the total number of new COVID-19 cases in an area.” If it remains “there for the next two weeks,” the Los Angeles Times reported Friday, “the county will reissue an indoor mask mandate with an effective date of July 29,” not even five months since the most recent of its multiple mask mandates was lifted.

Though she’s likely to deny it, Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, who is not a doctor, not a physician’s assistant, not a nurse, not even a receptionist at a doctor’s office, but a social welfarist, has been looking forward to July 29 for some time.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/17/biden-and-the-destruction-of-wisdom/

There used to be an agreed-on body of wisdom, which both Left and Right, Republicans and Democrats, generally accepted. Heated arguments and invective centered on implementations and methods of solving problems, which at least both sides agreed were problems. Both ideologies accepted a common core of wisdom, despite their radical differences in interpreting it.

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and especially Biden’s strange cabinet of loud Jacobin amateurs, reject the very hallowed knowledge upon which civilization is based. In that sense the public has begun to recognize them as nihilist and anarchist. Nearly two out of three Americans in some polls hold unfavorable views of the Biden Administration. They fear that it is decoupled from both the past and reality, and quite capable of destroying their lives as they have known them.

Nuke Nuttiness

Since late August 1949, a consensus emerged that nuclear powers, for good or evil, were treated differently in matters of global tensions than non-nuclear powers, given the chance of a nuclear conflagration. Arcane rules, but rules, nonetheless, grew up in the Cold War between the Soviet Union, China, the United States, Britain, France and a few other nuclear states about the trip wires surrounding conventional conflicts. 

The agreed upon wisdom from the Hungarian Revolution and Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Middle East wars was to ensure such confrontations did not escalate to nuclear exchanges.

No longer. In the last five months, there has been more idle talk and threats about nuclear warfare than in the 73 years since the Soviet Union got the bomb. In a rational world, there would be two Western agendas amid the Ukraine war: first, how to aid the Ukrainians to resist Russian aggression without destroying their entire country; second, how to do so without either provoking or allowing Russia to use a nuclear weapon, or to encourage other powers like China to consider such alternatives.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/progressive-policies-make-new-york-city-criminal-joseph-klein/

New York City has become a haven for mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless people who live on the streets and in the subways, free to menace the general public. Dangerous criminals are released repeatedly after their arrest with no bail requirement, free to resume preying on innocent victims. There are less police officers available to protect public safety, thanks to reckless cuts in the New York Police Department budget and the departure of police officers in droves who were tired of working in a hostile environment. And New Yorkers have to walk on eggshells when it comes to defending themselves against a criminal attack. Manhattan’s radical progressive pro-criminal district attorney believes that self-defense can be charged as murder.

Just recently, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged a bodega worker with murder for defending himself with a knife against an unprovoked attack by an ex-con that resulted in the assailant’s death. Meanwhile, the assailant’s girlfriend has escaped all charges whatsoever for stabbing the bodega worker because, prosecutors said, she was only trying to help her boyfriend fight back against the bodega worker.

Bragg may be backtracking on the murder charge after speaking on July 12th with city bodega owners who are pressuring him to reverse course. However, the fact that Bragg would even consider filing a murder charge in the first place speaks volumes about his perverse priorities. The radical progressive district attorney has sent New Yorkers the message that they should think twice before fighting back in self-defense. Bragg has compounded this message by supporting efforts in New York to continue limiting law-abiding residents from carrying guns outside their homes for self-defense because “more guns in our communities make us less safe.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/18/progressives-carpet-bombing-of-america/

Russia has changed its war strategy in Ukraine from direct confrontation to simply reducing cities to rubble, often killing civilians. Avoiding indiscriminate death, destruction, and misery no longer matters to the Russians so long as it facilitates their conquest. Sadly, progressives here have adopted a similar approach to imposing their policies and ideologies.

A civil society must be willing to confront disagreement head-on, issue by issue, even though it can be challenging. The goal should be to reconcile different perspectives constructively without unnecessary collateral damage. But progressives seem willing to die on every hill, with their desired ends seeming to justify any means and any pain along the way.

Overreach is everywhere. Progressive climate policy may be the most egregious. Even without knowing the extent of climate change or humans’ impact, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) has become a widely accepted goal. But progressives are like children who want what they want now. They demand immediate, indiscriminate controls on fossil fuels, or even their abolition. They oversell renewables and conceal their true costs and environmental impact. Promoting electric vehicles, they harbor delusions of unlimited natural resources and magically appearing infrastructure. They pay no heed to the limitations of the power grid. They ignore other countries’ non-cooperation, and on and on. The American public pays a steep price for all this, now and for the foreseeable future.

Congress provides munitions in the form of trillion-dollar programs too large to allow for proper monitoring. Pet causes are slipped in – as if a small percentage of trillions of dollars is inconsequential – by hiding them in the fog of war. The resulting inflation lays waste to many businesses and lives.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/18/inflation-has-now-eaten-up-all-of-bidens-covid-rescue-checks/

When he signed the “American Rescue Plan” into law in March 2021, President Joe Biden bragged about how it would put “$1,400 checks into the pockets of millions of Americans; help to keep folks in their homes; help to put food on the table.” A family of four was in line to get $5,600, he said.

What he didn’t tell the public was that the rampant inflation his “rescue” plan would unleash would cost Americans more than the $1,400 Biden was handing out. Much more.

Biden’s $2 trillion “rescue” came after the Trump administration had already rushed through two massive COVID relief bills and at a time when the economy was already roaring back from the COVID lockdowns. Which is why many economists, including liberal economists like Larry Summers, warned that Biden’s “rescue” would spark runaway inflation. 

And, despite repeated promises from the White House that such a thing would never happen, the Consumer Price Index shot up 8.3% in the first half of this year. (Going back to 1986, the average inflation rate for the first half of the year is 2.6%.) June’s reading had year-over-year inflation at 9.1%.

Under Biden, prices have been climbing much faster than wages, which means that Americans started losing ground almost the moment Biden signed his “rescue” plan into law. 

https://www.nysun.com/article/in-tilting-windmills-biden-gets-it-wrong

Remember Mr. Biden shouting — literally — about food lines under President Trump? Here’s his outcry: “My God, this is the United States of America. The idea that people would have to wait in line an hour or an hour-and-a-half to get a box of food in their trunk — it’s just unbelievable.”

Guess what?

ABC News reports those food lines are back, “as working Americans overwhelmed by inflation increasingly seek handouts to feed their families.”

The broadcaster recounts that a main food distribution center in Phoenix delivered food packages to more than 4,000 families in June, a 78 percent increase over the prior year. Reports from other states indicate the surge is nation-wide.

Sadly, about 10 percent of the people seeking assistance are first-timers. Also, many have jobs. Even so, with real wages down 3.8 percent over the past year and food prices up 12 percent, millions of Americans are struggling.

The country-wide food bank network Feeding America reports being caught off guard by the rise in demand; the economy was doing so well, the management says, Feeding America did not expect so many people to need their help. They didn’t expect inflation to hit families so hard.

Neither, apparently, did Mr. Biden, who otherwise might have been a little more judicious in blasting the emergency that occurred under Mr. Trump. And, whose policy priorities in this time of need are all wrong.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/january-6-committees-bid-to-prove-trump-criminally-liable-for-violence-falls-short/?utm_

If anything, the panel has bolstered Trump’s defense rather than undermining it.

The January 6 committee seemed to hit the point of diminishing returns this week. The Democrat-controlled panel is straining to establish that its target, former president Donald Trump, is not just morally and politically but criminally culpable for the deadly Capitol riot, but it can’t make the case. Its evidence of criminal intent is too weak, and its tactic of conflating Trump’s state of mind with the unhinged words of extremists who reacted to his rhetoric is sleight-of-hand.

Plus, Trump has an intent defense: He was trying to ratchet up political pressure on Congress, not provoke a forcible uprising. And the committee is not only ignoring that defense but bolstering it (however inadvertently).

To be clear, I am speaking here narrowly about crimes involving the intent to use force, a necessary element of such offenses as seditious conspiracy, with which the Justice Department has charged several rioters. Trump’s liability for other potential crimes arising out of the events that culminated in the Capitol riot remains an open question. The committee is correct that Trump orchestrated a raucous rally on the National Mall on January 6, 2021. But the evidence that he intended the rally to turn lethally violent, as the committee implies, is slim.

To draw the committee’s conclusion, one must pretend, as the panel mulishly does, that Trump never said, during his speech at the rally that preceded the riot, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” (Memo to the Committee: In real criminal proceedings, which, unlike scripted political presentations, have cross-examination and the right to present a defense, your case gets laughed out of court when you get caught burying the exculpatory evidence. Competent prosecutors confront the exculpatory evidence head-on. Rather than signaling fear of it, they try to persuade the fact-finder that it’s trumped by other, more compelling evidence. Being persuasive involves playing it straight to maintain your credibility.)