RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/30/when-small-people-like-cassidy-hutchison-have-big-moments/

Anyone who has spent much time in the room with major politicians or C-Suite executives can tell out-of-school stories that would curl your hair.

The bad conduct and off-the-wall statements attributed to Donald Trump by 20-something former White House aide Cassidy Hutchison before the Jan. 6 House Select Committee, if true, are not excusable – but also not all that surprising.

One quickly learns that world-changers are generally big personalities who break eggs, occasionally dishes, and frequently, the rules.

Sometimes, along the way, they blurt out-of-the-box ideas and are talked down from the ledge by wise counselors whose job it is to steer them away from their worst impulses – and help build on their best.

And sometimes, small people like Ms. Hutchison who also get to be in the room, but lack that skill or insight, think instead that they can make themselves bigger by eschewing the loyalty that is supposed to come with access, and bringing those big personalities down based on what they’ve witnessed.

Rarely, when there is conduct that somehow crosses the line – or as has been the case over the last few years, a line newly established – they succeed.

More commonly, they only succeed in making themselves look smaller and wrecking their own careers. Yes, they will have 15 minutes of fame and may be remembered fondly (or otherwise) within the confined and insular worlds of politics or business. But for the most part, they will be shunted aside as the world moves to the next big story, often by the very wreckers (read: Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney) for whom they are briefly useful fools, and the sycophants tweeting plaudits about their “courage.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/donald-trump-show-cassidy-hutchinson/

Since it debuted in 2016, The Donald Trump Show — the televised meta-commentary from hell we’ve all been living in — has been through many reinventions. Its first season was a tautly plotted election thriller that managed to make the impossible seem possible; its middling stretches were a darkly comic take on The West Wing. It even proved later on that it could continue without its main character, introducing a new president, Joe Biden, who ushered in elements of slapstick humor and cringe comedy.

Now, with last night’s episode, The Donald Trump Show has veered into Kiefer Sutherland territory.

The testimony of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson before Congress was one of the program’s most dramatic moments yet. Just when you thought Trump had finally been written out of the script, there he was again, chewing the scenery and possibly drenching it in ketchup. The writers, via Hutchinson, introduced a side of Trump that we’d never seen before, not just chaotic but violent and even dangerous. Per Hutchinson, Trump once slung his lunch at the wall in a fit of rage and tried to choke his own Secret Service agent.

Or did he? This is the great thing about The Donald Trump Show going all the way back to the James Comey arc: it never lets you get too comfortable. No sooner had Hutchinson testified than — plot twist! — a source told reporters that the Secret Service had denied the allegations. The writers have thus put two very different and sympathetic characters on a collision course: the twenty-five-year-old civil servant and the head of the former president’s security detail. One of them has to be lying…or both? With plotting this devilish, who can be sure?

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/hillary-clinton-trashes-clarence-thomas-sotomayor-disagrees/

A few mornings ago, Cockburn caught Hillary Clinton on one of the CBS morning shows. As it turned out, she was on to discuss the recent Dobbs decision, and she had some choice words for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

“I went to law school with him,” she said. “He’s been a person of grievance for as long as I’ve known him. Resentment, grievance, anger…women are going to die, Gayle. Women will die.”

Clinton is entitled to her opinion (though who is she to call anyone else resentful?) but her sentiment on Thomas’s statements has been contradicted by none other than Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Thomas’s ideological opposite on the Supreme Court. Here’s what Sotomayor said two weeks ago in a speech to the American Constitution Society:

I suspect I have probably disagreed with him more than with any other justice; that we have not joined each other’s opinion more than anybody else. And yet, Justice Thomas is the one justice in the building that literally knows every employee’s name… He is the first one who will go up to someone when you’re walking with him and say, “is your son okay?” …He is the first one that when my stepfather died, sent me flowers in Florida. He is a man who cares deeply about the court as an institution, about the people who work there, about the people.

The point is that while Sotomayor disagrees with Thomas, she still sees him as a good man doing what he sees as right. And while Thomas has become the mainstream media’s biggest target since his controversial Dobbs opinion, her comments seem far more informed than those of her fellow birthing person.

The question should be asked: who knows Thomas better? Someone who might crossed paths with him at law school decades ago? Or someone who currently works with him every day? Cockburn can only suppose the latter.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/06/a_jan_6_witness_ludicrously_claims_trump_tried_to_choke_his_secret_service_agent.html

The headlines were ominous and the leftist gloating on Facebook was disturbing: It seemed as if the January 6 Committee finally had its smoking gun in the form of an attractive, mid-20s woman named Cassidy Hutchinson. The big excitement came when she recounted a wild tale about President Trump, desperate to get to the Capitol, trying to choke his Secret Service agent as they wrestled for control of Trump’s car, Outside of the kangaroo court, though, actual facts indicate that nothing she said actually happened.

The media was in a frenzy of excitement over Hutchinson’s testimony. Among other things, she testified that, when the Secret Service informed Trump that there were armed with everything from rifles to bear spray at the Stop the Steal rally, and asked to limit the crowd, Trump pushed back. “I don’t f***ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me.”

But the real bombshell was some hearsay Hutchinson offered. She claimed she learned the following from Tony Ornato, the deputy White House chief of staff for operations:

When Trump was told it was not safe to go [to the Capitol] — the riot was already under way — he was quoted saying words to the effect of, “I’m the f- – -ing president, take me up the Capitol now.” Then he had reached up to the front of the vehicle to try to grab the steering wheel. Robert Engel, the head of Trump’s security detail, grabbed his arm and said, “Sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel. We’re going back to the West Wing. We’re not going to the Capitol.” With his free hand, Trump “lunged” at Engel and Ornato gestured toward his clavicles, suggesting Trump went for Engel’s throat.

There was more, of course, all sorts of gossip and tittle-tattle. But that bit about Trump turning into a wild man and trying to beat his way through the Secret Service agents in the car to grab the steering wheel and take control was the biggie. My Facebook page, on which I have a lot of  “friends” from my past life in Democrat enclaves, exploded with glee, with many claiming Hutchinson was a new American heroine.

What all these leftists (in the media and out) forgot is that a kangaroo court doesn’t get to the truth. It is, instead, a forum for promoting lies. After all, in a court of law, Hutchinson would never have been allowed to get away with quoting Guiliani and other unnamed people in the office or recounting the narrative about a frenzied Trump fighting for control of his armored car. Every bit of it (and most of the other things she testified to) is hearsay and inadmissible.

There’s good reason for hearsay’s inadmissibility: Hearsay is inherently unreliable. Subject to specific exceptions, in a proper proceeding, one hedged about with due process protections, unless it comes from the horse’s mouth, it’s kept out lest it prejudice the defendant—and Trump is a defendant here, despite his being denied any opportunity to cross-examine witnesses or present his case.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18661/failed-leadership-america

A contemporary of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, penned a series of acerbic commentaries and observations in a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, still in print.

Some of his biting but spot-on definitions include:

Apologize, (verb) – to lay the foundation for a future offense.

Acquaintance, (noun) – A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to. A degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous.

Politics, (noun) – A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

Year, (noun) – a period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

Bierce was clear eyed about the human condition and politics in particular. One can only imagine what he would make of our current political landscape.

Consider some of today’s words and phrases that would provide him with much to consider. He might hope that his scathing wit could prompt within us the wisdom we all need now. Channeling our inner “Ambrose Bierce,” we might tackle these words with the following definitions:

Schadenfreude, (noun) – In German, it means taking pleasure in the pain of others; in Washington, it seems a state of being.

Power Player Profiteers, (noun) – Lobbyists, political advisors, and special interests reportedly sometimes masquerading as patriots.

Fifth Columnists, (noun) – Clandestine political forces hiding in plain sight while waiting for the moment we are distracted to undermine our democracy.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18615/biden-energy-crisis

The ongoing world energy crisis… seems to have proven for once and all that energy independence is a matter of national security.

To transition to renewable energy, America would have to transform its energy infrastructure and invest heavily in wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars, all of which require rare earth materials as central components. A single industrial-size wind turbine, for instance, requires about one ton of four different kinds of rare earth materials.

Guess who mines more than 70 % of the world’s rare earth materials, and holds at least 85% of the world’s capacity to process them into materials that manufacturers can use? China. Who produces more than 60% of the world’s solar panels, and 45% of the global supply of solar-grade polysilicon, the base material used in solar cells? China. Moreover, rare earths is not a market that outsiders can simply enter. According to the Danish Institute for International Studies: “China today has the expertise, IP rights and production facilities, as well as its own REE- [rare earth elements] consuming industries. China also manufactures a significant and growing share of goods containing REEs, making it practically impossible for competing companies outside China to get a foothold.”

The ongoing world energy crisis, which began in 2021 and has caused record price spikes for oil, natural gas and coal — in combination with Russia’s war on Ukraine — seems to have proven for once and all that energy independence is a matter of national security. Both Europe and the US have recently had to relearn this lesson — yet again — when Russian President Vladimir Putin cut gas supplies to a number of European countries after they refused to pay in Russian rubles — and before that, when the West was confronted with the need to sanction Russian oil and gas exports, while at the same time being dependent on them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/how-liberals-quash-housing-development-getting-richard-l-cravatts/

Kristin Richardson Jordan, Harlem’s City Council member, seems to have put the final nail in the coffin of a 917-unit development, One45, proposed by developer Bruce Teitelbaum for a location on West 145th Street in New York.

Even with the developer’s latest pledge that 40 percent of the units in the twin towers would be affordable, Ms. Jordan (pictured above, center) was apparently unsatisfied—in fact, insulted—that the proposed development was not comprised completely of affordable, rather than mixed-income, units, referring contemptuously to Mr. Teitelbaum’s offer as merely “11th-hour breadcrumbs.”

Maintaining a concentration of poverty has no positive benefits for a neighborhood and specifically works to dissuade middle- and upper-income residents from moving into the area, including white ones, whose presence in Harlem will inevitably result in better public services and schools, upgraded businesses, and an enhanced quality of life.

Ms. Jordan may wish to condemn Harlem to being a monoculture of poverty, entrapping its poor, mostly black residents in an intergenerational trap of decaying real estate, dangerous social pathologies as a result of poverty, and a general cultural and physical stagnation, but no one—including Harlem’s poorest residents—should believe that this outcome is either inevitable or desirable.

Housing for the nation’s poorest citizens is the responsibility of the government and taxpayers, not private real estate developers like Teitelbaum who may wish to do the right thing by offering a portion of One45 as affordable housing but whose main concern is, and should be, maximizing a return on his investment.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/one-more-blockbuster-supreme-court-decision-could-still-be-coming-after-fridays-abortion-ruling

Believe it or not, overturning Roe v Wade may not be the Supreme Court’s most dramatic decision this year. Instead, its ruling on West Virginia vs. the Environmental Protection Agency could prove far more consequential. It could literally upend how our government works.

For the better.

West Virginia vs. the EPA asks whether important policies that impact the lives of all Americans should be made by unelected D.C. bureaucrats or by Congress. This SCOTUS could well decide that ruling by executive agency fiat is no longer acceptable.

The case involves the Clean Power Plan, which was adopted under President Barack Obama to fight climate change; the program was estimated to cost as much as $33 billion per year and would have completely reordered our nation’s power grid. The state of West Virginia, joined by two coal companies and others, sued the EPA, arguing the plan was an abuse of power.

By deciding in favor of West Virginia, the court could begin to rein in the vast powers of the alphabet agencies in D.C. that run our lives and return it to legislators whom we elect to create…legislation. Just as the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that abortion laws are more appropriately left up to the people’s elected representatives, it may decide in West Virginia vs. EPA that Congress, and not federal agencies, should write our laws.

A decision that puts Congress in charge would stall environmental rules intended to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. Legislators, back in the driver’s seat, would have to debate and go public with the consequences – and costs — of regulations that are now adopted with little buy-in from the public.