RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/15/despite-biden-denials-most-say-were-in-a-recession-and-govt-is-to-blame-ii-tipp-poll/

While the big media and some economists might disagree, a majority of Americans believe that the U.S. economy is now in a recession, the latest I&I/TIPP data show. And voters, when asked what caused it, are clear in their response: Government.

Recently, a number of government economists, including Fed chief Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, along with non-economist President Joe Biden, have suggested that, despite two quarterly declines in U.S. GDP, the country is not in a recession.

“What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle,” a blog from the  White House Council of Economic Advisers noted in a typical response, calling a recession “unlikely.”

Well, most Americans don’t agree.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/how_to_break_up_the_fbi.html

I suspect that August 8, 2022 will live in infamy.  Historians may conclude that it is the day that the United States became a banana republic.  It is the day that a politically weaponized FBI raided the Florida home of former president Donald Trump in an effort to knock him out of the 2024 presidential election.  Prior to the raid, opinion polls rated him as the favored Republican candidate.

No other president in the history of the United States has had his residence served with a federal court search warrant after leaving office.  News reports indicate that approximately 30 agents descended on Mar-a-Lago and that the raid lasted for nine hours.

I personally believe that President Trump has already been indicted by a corrupt D.C. grand jury and that the Democrats are planning a show trial against him in Washington, D.C.  I also expect, regardless of the evidence, President Trump to be convicted if brought to trial.  No prominent Republican can be acquitted of criminal charges in Washington, D.C. because of the anti-Republican bias of the trial court judiciary and the jury pool, where only 5% of the registered voters are Republicans.  If you think Steve Bannon got a raw deal, wait until you see what happens to President Trump.

The FBI tormented President Trump during his presidency and has continued to do so after his leaving office.  It has become a political weapon of the Democrat party and has forfeited its right to exist.

The FBI is beyond redemption.  It needs to be dismembered and its remains scattered to the four winds.  This article will offer suggestions of how to do so.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/08/11/the-mar-a-lago-raid-is-a-dangerous-moment-for-america/

“To say the institutions of American justice have become alarmingly politicised is not to indulge in deep-state conspiracy theories. Merrick Garland has been under intense pressure from Democrats to prosecute Trump for something, anything, since he took office. As the New York Times reported in April, Joe Biden has told confidants he believes Trump is ‘a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted’ over ‘January 6’ – a chaotic pro-Trump riot which has been transformed, in liberals’ feverish imaginations, into a serious coup attempt led by Trump himself.”

You know a nation is in trouble when its security services are raiding the residence of a former president. Doubly so when said nation’s supposedly liberal intelligentsia seem tickled pink about this unprecedented development, without a whiff of concern or scepticism about what the feds are up to. That’s where the United States is at the moment, in the wake of the FBI’s search of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida on Monday, reportedly over a dispute about missing official documents.

There’s still much we don’t know about this bizarrely explosive dispute between Trump and the National Archives. But what we do know is puzzling, to put it lightly. According to the New York Times, officials had been after Trump for months over official and potentially classified materials he still had in his possession. After archivists retrieved 15 boxes of documents, including some sensitive material, the US Department of Justice was called in. A grand jury was convened. Federal investigators, including counterintelligence officers, were deployed. And, unsatisfied with what had been retrieved, officers then secured a search warrant.

https://spectator.org/have-the-cheneys-forgotten-the-deep-state-hit-on-scooter-libby/

“I have been ashamed to hear members of my party attacking the integrity of the FBI agents involved with the recent Mar-a-Lago search,” the perversely self-righteous Liz Cheney tweeted on Thursday. “These are sickening comments that put the lives of patriotic public servants at risk.”

Rep. Cheney seems to have forgotten one significant event in her family’s political life: the same weaponized deep state that okayed the raid on Mar-a-Lago convicted her father’s chief-of-staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby on charges that were as manufactured as those leveled against President Trump. If Liz has forgotten, former vice president Dick Cheney surely remembers.

Trump’s pardon should have gladdened Cheney’s heart. It certainly did Scooter Libby’s.

In June 2007, Libby was convicted in a D.C. court of one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of lying under oath, and one count of making false statements. “I believe firmly that Scooter was unjustly accused and prosecuted and deserved a pardon,” Mr. Cheney told CNN’s John King in 2009, adding, “I was clearly not happy that we, in effect, left Scooter sort of hanging in the wind.” By “we” Cheney meant President George W. Bush. Cheney did little to conceal his disgust with Bush for failing to pardon Libby.

The charges against Libby stemmed from an investigation into the leak of the name of the low-level, Langley-based, CIA agent Valerie Plame. The White House was alleged to have leaked her name to punish her husband, Joe Wilson, an international hustler and occasional ambassador. Wilson purported to be a whistleblower. He wasn’t. He was a showboater.

File This Under: Too Ridiculous. 

The IRS is adding 87,000 auditors paid for by an $80 billion appropriation in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. 

However, the IRS isn’t just staffing up…

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found that the IRS purchased of tens of millions of dollars in guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment since 2006. 

In fact, the IRS has stockpiled 5 million rounds of ammunition and 4,500 guns. For example, their gun locker includes 539 long-barrel rifles, 621 shotguns, and 15 sub-machine guns.

Thankfully, the issue is getting more attention, as legislation has been introduced in Congress to ‘Disarm The IRS.”

We broke the news in 2021 – Read It All Here!

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-blasts-fbi-raid-on-mar-a-lago-says-it-changed-the-country-that-we-grew-up-in/?utm_

Former Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard criticized the FBI’s raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, saying it “changed the country that we grew up in.”

“Now, whatever your views are on Donald Trump, there is no denying that the unprecedented raid on his Palm Beach home earlier this week has set our country on a dangerous new course, and there’s no turning back. The FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago changed the country that we grew up in,” Gabbard said Friday in an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Trump was the first person to announce the FBI’s raid on his residence Monday, saying, “These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is under siege, raided and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.”

A federal judge unsealed the search warrant Friday. A list of items taken from Mar-a-Lago shows the FBI recovered eleven sets of classified documents, including some top-secret documents, roughly 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note, the executive grant of clemency for Roger Stone, and information about French president Emanuel Macron.

“We grew up believing that, ‘Hey, our government will apply the law equally to all Americans, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat.’ We’re seeing more and more that, that country no longer exists. Law enforcement at the highest levels of government, whether it’s the DOJ, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and now even the IRS have been weaponized to target the political opponents of the uni-party, the permanent Washington and the Biden regime,” Gabbard continued.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2022/08/donald-trump-official-enemy-of-the-state/

“The American political establishment — leading Democrats and Republican never-Trumpers alike — is desperately afraid of a Trump political comeback in 2024. They fabricated a Russia collusion hoax, spent two years on a special counsel investigation, impeached Trump twice, jailed Trump supporters for trespassing at the Capitol, held partisan Congressional hearings to broadcast hearsay evidence against the former President without the opportunity for cross-examination, and weaponised the entire federal law enforcement bureaucracy (and some state ones, too) against this one man. And if they can do it to him, they can do it to anyone.”

The Washington Post ran it just above a (news?) article titled “Inside Biden’s Hot Streak, from the Poolside to the Capitol”. Seemingly unsure whether or not they could trust Donald Trump even on this, they went with the headline “FBI Searches Trump safe at Mar-a-Lago Club, Former President Says”. Those final three words are the editors’ hedge: maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t, but no one can deny that he said it.

The Post helpfully explained that Trump has a history of stealing government property from the White House, and has been at loggerheads with the National Archives over presidential records ever since he left office. A previous trawl of Trump plunder yielded “a cocktail napkin, a phone list, charts, slide decks, letters, memos, maps, talking points, a birthday dinner menu, schedules and more”—this, from a confidential source inside the investigation!

The desperation of the American political establishment has come to this: attempting to prosecute a former president for appropriating a White House cocktail napkin. Not even a full-sized linen serviette! They probably don’t have little ‘White House’ monograms in the corner.

Well, Trump always did like monograms.

The Wall Street Journal — a News Corp outlet but editorially independent — reported that “Former President Donald Trump said FBI agents ‘raided’ his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida on Monday” (their scare quotes, not mine). In its full explainer article, the paper exulted that:

Officials can face up to five years in prison for removing classified materials to an unauthorized location. The penalties for breaking other laws related to the removal of official records also include disqualification from holding federal office—including the presidency.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/clean-house-fbi-justice-department/

The two most striking features of the FBI’s unprecedented raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home are its bold intrusiveness and the public’s mistrust of the Bureau’s honesty and integrity. The Department of Justice could have used low-profile subpoenas to force Trump to turn over any documents, including the most sensitive ones. It didn’t. Instead, it sent carloads of federal agents to search the former president’s house. That raid was also unusual in a second sense. Although mishandling federal documents is a felony, it happens with some frequency, alas, and is almost never subject to full-scale raids.

The blowback has been a Category 5 storm. The damage has grown because the FBI and Department of Justice remained silent for three days, refusing to explain their actions.

Now, the FBI or DoJ are busy leaking their justification, alleging (anonymously) that Trump took highly-classified nuclear secrets when he left office. That would be a grave matter, if true, but it raises several obvious questions. One is whether he really did wrongly remove such materials. The second is whether less-invasive means could have been used to retrieve them. The third is whether the real purpose of the raid was to collect materials for other investigations, such as January 6 and Trump’s efforts to delay Joe Biden’s certification as president. Seized materials can be used in other investigations, but it is illegal to get warrants for one purpose when your real purpose is something else. The fourth is public skepticism about the government’s explanations.

The blowback and public mistrust are nothing new. The past few years have been hurricane season for the FBI. The Bureau and, to a lesser extent, the Department of Justice have destroyed their reputations and undermined the public trust essential for law enforcement in a democracy.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/13/a-token-of-the-managerial-age-bewails-trumps-surge/

I was chatting with a politically mature friend today who, in the course of some delighted words about Attorney General Merrick Garland, reminded me that in his famous “evil empire” speech of 1983, Ronald Reagan quoted a few choice lines from the preface of C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. “The greatest evil,” Lewis wrote, is not now done in any Dickensian “dens of iniquity” or even in “concentration camps and labor camps.” Such brutish moral cesspools, Lewis says, are rather “the final result” of the encompassing evil evoked in his awesome (in the old sense) satire. 

On the contrary, the evil he has in mind is “conceived and ordered . . . in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.” Men, that is to say, like Merrick Garland, a lugubrious embodiment of the “Managerial Age,” the “world of ‘Admin’” that Lewis so abhorred. Here, he suggested, is the home office of Hell, “something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business con­cern.”

The reason, by the way, my friend’s words about Merrick Garland were “delighted” was because of the huge, if inadvertent, boost the attorney general has just given to Donald Trump’s political prospects. 

Monday’s FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach residence, was probably the single biggest boon to his stature among voters since he left office in January 2021, bigger even than the partisan witch hunt over which future CNN hostess, Liz Cheney, has been presiding with such ostentatious zeal.

This is obviously a concern among the beautiful, well-pressed people with white collars and clean fingernails who hate Trump. Employing a ju-ju they recognize but do not understand, Trump has time and again demonstrated an uncanny ability to goad his would-be attackers into contortions of self-immolation. 

https://www.city-journal.org/the-elite-panic-of-2022

On April 18, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down the federal requirement for wearing surgical masks on airplanes, in airports, and while riding mass transit. Online videos showed passengers and airline staff ripping off their masks and celebrating in mid-flight. Given the accumulated frustration of two years of pandemic travel, the reaction was understandable.

Far more remarkable was the vehemence of those opposed to the ruling. Judge Mizelle was unfit for office, they said. She was too young, at 35; she was unelected; she was a single, unrepresentative voice. Worst of all, she was an “activist Trump judge” and thus branded with the mark of the beast. Rescinding government policy—the kind of thing that American judges engage in with abandon, and usually to progressive cheers—in this instance was condemned as a usurpation of the powers of the executive branch.

Judge Mizelle had crashed an exclusive party reserved for people of higher caste. “The CDC has the capability, through a large number of trained epidemiologists, scientists, to be able to make projections and make recommendations,” said Anthony Fauci, bureaucratic czar of all things Covid-19. “Far more than a judge with no experience in public health.”

That was the heart of the matter. Fauci embodied a bureaucracy and political class that, with the active support of the media, had converted the public’s fear of infection into a principle of elite authority. Under this principle, only trained scientists can make projections and recommendations. The writ of government stretched as far as the boundaries of scientific truth—and those boundaries were, of course, determined by government agencies. It wasn’t just a question of specific policies like lockdowns and vaccine mandates. At stake was the restoration of the public’s habit of obedience that had gone missing during the Trump years.