RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/09/bidens-paranoid-pardons-and-leftist-morality/

Pardoner-in-Chief

Joe Biden has now established two precedents in presidential history.

First, he “pardoned” his own son Hunter.

No prior president has ever tried that shameless act, which is an affront to the entire hallowed notion of “equality under the law.”.

Second, he did so in a way that no president has rarely, if ever, pardoned anyone.

Hunter, a convicted federal felon awaiting sentencing, was gifted by his father a blanket exemption from federal prosecution over the entire past decade (2014-2024).

Biden thus exempted Hunter from a series of much-discussed past criminal activities and provided further pardons for any federal criminal exposure occurring over the last ten years—yet to turn up.

Given the Biden suppression of the justice system and the media’s complicity in hiding the Biden family’s criminality, it is quite possible that in the next few years, disinterested prosecutors might finally expose Hunter Biden’s long-suppressed, sordid career. And that could mean possible criminal exposure for three generations of Bidens.

Third, in the remaining waning 40 days of his now nonperforming presidency, Biden threatens to establish yet another presidential precedent. He contemplates issuing pardons to a variety of controversial cronies, bureaucrats, and officers—even though none of them have yet been indicted or even are under federal investigation.

Worse, Biden completed his shameless trifecta by breaking his serial pledge, voiced at least six times, and most prominently as a 2024 campaign plug, unequivocally not to pardon Hunter Biden.

That performance-art braggadocio was serially greeted—by design—with glee in the media.

On spec, the vow supposedly contrasted Biden’s “reverence for the rule of law” with a purportedly legally insubordinate Trump.

Biden would put the law above family. Trump, in contrast, was supposedly chronically questioning the morality, fairness, and legality of his own five criminal and civil indictments over the campaign cycle—some of them (i.e., Bragg, Smith, Willis) demonstrably with the full knowledge of, if not coordinated by, the Biden White House.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/08/312542/

I always found the literary critic Harold Bloom (1930-2019) distinctly curate’s-eggish. You ask, “How is your egg this morning, curate?” “Good in parts,” comes the reply. But Bloom made one observation that stuck with me. Lots of literature, Bloom wrote somewhere, deals with the phenomenon of falling in love. But equally poignant is the story of falling out of love.

Bloom was thinking primarily of personal romance. However, the emotional dialectic he limned works itself out on the larger stage of political life as well. There is a certain mystery about both sides of the process. The public’s enthusiasms are as fickle as they are extravagant. What explains the infatuation with figures like Barack Obama? In retrospect, it is possible to offer more or less plausible explanations. Obama’s race, his smooth, non-confrontational manner, and his ability to dress up radical policy proposals in an emollient jelly of seeming common sense all help explain his political success.

Obama has occupied an enviable place in the magic circle of celebrity since his first election in 2008. It persisted through Donald Trump’s first term and for most of Joe Biden’s. There were signs that Obama’s star was fading during the later stages of Kamala Harris’s disastrous campaign. Trump’s resounding victory on November 5 crystallized the eclipse. Speaking at a “Democracy Forum” last week, Obama attempted to wheel out his old standby: that Republicans were in the habit of “weaponizing” the DOJ and other institutions in order to steal elections and cement their hold on political power. “One side tries to stack the deck and lock in a permanent grip on power,” he said, “ either by actively suppressing votes or politicizing the armed forces or using the judiciary criminal justice system to go after opponents.”

There was a time when Obama might have gotten away with such antics. Not anymore. His blatant act of projection was instantly called out and ridiculed. Quoting the remark, Miranda Divine spoke for the Zeitgeist when she observed that “It’s over for Obama. The spell is broken. Donald Trump vanquished him, Biden, Harris, the Bushes, and the Cheneys. All of them, with a spring in his step.” The commentator John Gibson offered a pithier précis of Obama’s comment: “Shorter: I accuse them of doing what we did, and they must be stopped.”

https://www.startribune.com/100-year-old-pearl-harbor-survivor-recalls-confusion-and-chaos-during-japanese-bombing-83-years-ago/601192005

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) — Ira “Ike” Schab, a 104-year-old Pearl Harbor attack survivor, was so determined to stand and salute during a remembrance ceremony honoring those killed in the Japanese bombing that thrust the U.S. into World War II some 83 years ago that he spent six weeks in physical therapy to build the strength to do so.

On Saturday, Schab gingerly rose from his wheelchair and raised his right hand, returning a salute delivered by sailors on a destroyer and a submarine passing by in the harbor. His son and a daughter supported him from either side.

“I was honored to do it. I’m glad I was capable of standing up,” he said afterward. “I’m getting old, you know.”

Schab is one of only two servicemen who lived through the attack who made it to an annual observance hosted by the U.S. Navy and National Park Service on a grass field overlooking the harbor. A third survivor had been planning to join them but had to cancel because of health issues.

The Dec. 7, 1941, bombing killed more than 2,300 U.S. servicemen. Nearly half, or 1,177, were sailors and Marines on board the USS Arizona, which sank during the battle. The remains of more than 900 Arizona crew members are still entombed on the submerged vessel.

Dozens of survivors once joined the event but their attendance has declined as survivors have aged. Today there are only 16 still living, according to a list maintained by Kathleen Farley, the California state chair of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors. Military historian J. Michael Wenger has estimated there were some 87,000 military personnel on Oahu on the day of the attack.

Schab agreed when ceremony organizers asked him earlier this year to salute on behalf of all survivors and World War II veterans.

“He’s been working hard, because this is his goal,” said his daughter Kimberlee Heinrichs, who traveled to Hawaii with Schab from their Beaverton, Oregon, home. “He wanted to be able to stand for that.”

Schab was a sailor on the USS Dobbin at the time of the attack, serving as the tuba player in the ship’s band. He had showered and put on a clean uniform when he heard the call for a fire rescue party.

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-extremely-gleeful-extremely-dark?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Brian Thompson, the fifty-year-old CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down on the street in New York Wednesday, in what appears to be a carefully planned and utterly cold-blooded assassination. I say appears because the shooting was captured on video: The killer, masked and dressed in black, steps out from behind a parked car as Thompson passes. A moment later, Thompson stumbles, falls, and doesn’t get up.

It is terrible to watch—and yet, even this literal snuff film is less disturbing than the various critics and commentators, many of them self-described progressive empaths who preach compassion for the marginalized and hashtag their posts with “#BeKind,” who are treating this real murder of a real person as though it were the emotionally cathartic climax of a John Wick movie—the part where the archetypal villain gets his just deserts. The police later revealed that the bullets fired at Thompson had the industry terms deny, defend, and depose written on them—a cinematic detail that only further encouraged the notion that he was killed as vengeance for UnitedHealthcare’s misdeeds.

The online reaction has been extremely gleeful and extremely dark: “My thoughts and prayers are on hold pending prior authorization,” reads one representative (and massively upvoted) comment on a New York Times Facebook story about the murder. Taylor Lorenz, recently of The Washington Post, wrote, “and they wonder why we want these executives dead” on Bluesky before cross-posting the name and photo of Blue Cross Blue Shield CEO Kim Keck to her accounts on multiple platforms (along with a cheeky suggestion that her followers engage in “very peaceful letter writing campaigns” against murderous insurance execs).

In a viral X post, Columbia University professor Anthony Zenkus—whose profile describes him as an “anti-violence” “trauma expert”—quipped, “Today, we mourn the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down. . . wait, I’m sorry—today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/05/scoop-biden-regime-quietly-revokes-veterans-hiring-preference-for-civil-service-jobs/

“A source from the U.S. Air Force told American Greatness: “This is government-wide hiring ramped up like never before seen. They are literally packing the federal workforce with as many loyalists and subversives as they can. Worst of all, they think it is their duty to do so.”He added: “Since DEI is getting pettifogged rather harshly (and rightly so) this is yet another way they can worm into the bureaucracy—at the expense of veterans.”The source told American Greatness that “veterans are being cast aside for this new workforce (wokeforce).”

The Biden regime has quietly revoked the veterans hiring preference for civil service jobs and promotions, which since the 1944 Veterans Act gave eligible veterans preference over others for appointments in federal civil service selection, a memorandum obtained by American Greatness shows.

The goal of the veterans’ preference law was to “provide a uniform method by which qualified veterans [could] receive special consideration for federal employment,” according to Military.com.

By law, veterans who are disabled or who served on active duty during certain specified time periods or in military campaigns are entitled to preference over non-veterans both in hiring from competitive lists and in retention during reductions in force.

New guidelines from the Defense Civilian Personnel Advisory Service (DCPAS) now stipulate that “veterans’ preference should be considered on an equal basis as other qualified candidates.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21179/trump-punish-woke-universities

A leftist-dominated educational establishment and its media enablers fear that Donald Trump will make good on his vow to defund educational institutions that embrace DEI and tolerate antisemitism.

That is why Trump’s scorched-earth approach is so necessary, even as it is being denounced by the same people who are responsible for creating or perpetuating the current mess as too extreme or even needed at all.

More to the point, it will mean that policing antisemitism on campus will be shifted away from the ineffectual Title VI complaints overseen federal education bureaucrats, to a campaign of lawsuits conducted not just by groups like the Deborah Project (valuable though they may be) but by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, with all of the vast resources at its command. In this manner, a message can be sent that will likely motivate the vast majority of college administrations to discard DEI and the tolerance of hate for Jews that accompanies it.

Instead of expressing horror at his determination to enact real change, fair-minded Americans of all faiths and in both major political parties should be rooting for him to keep his word and to do everything he promised to punish colleges and universities, in addition to any other entity that promotes the sort of woke hate that has made life for Jewish students and anyone else who dissents against the new secular orthodoxy so difficult.

A leftist-dominated educational establishment and its media enablers fear that Donald Trump will make good on his vow to defund educational institutions that embrace DEI and tolerate antisemitism.

Occidental College seemingly waved the white flag last week in its efforts to defend itself against charges of tolerating antisemitism on its Los Angeles campus. The school agreed to a “sweeping settlement” with the Anti-Defamation League and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law that acknowledged the ongoing hardships, harassment and discrimination faced by Jewish students since the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Occidental’s apathy to all this, which was little different from what has been happening at dozens if not hundreds of other American institutions of higher learning, violated its obligations to prohibit such discrimination under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/democrats-can-thank-themselves-for-the-preemptive-pardon-histrionics/

It’s not Kash Patel’s schtick that puts them in jeopardy. It’s that they took their shot at Trump, missed, and now have to worry about the oldest rule in politics.

President Biden is enmeshed in a pardon scandal of his own making. So what are Democrats and their media allies doing? What they always do: They’re blaming Trump.

At Politico on Wednesday, Jonathan Martin reported that the Biden-Harris White House is spun up over President-elect Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel to replace Chris Wray as FBI director. “Patel,” Martin stresses, “has publicly vowed to pursue Trump’s critics.” Against the backdrop of Trump’s fiery campaign riffs against his nemeses — the House January 6 Committee, Democratic prosecutors, et al. — we are supposed to believe it’s the Patel nomination that triggered President Biden to grant his son a pardon with a breathtaking eleven-year immunity bath. Moreover, the Patel pick apparently has the president and his advisers “carefully weighing the extraordinary step of handing out blanket pardons” to Trump’s enemies — even though they’ve “committed no crimes.”

Just two weeks ago, I observed that the eleven-week interregnum between the November election and Inauguration Day on January 20 was the season for histrionics. If you’re already exhausted, there are still more than five weeks to go. If you’re like me, you’re more bent out of shape by the “golden at-bat” proposal, the latest evidence that MLB’s anarchist commissioner Rob Manfred is bent on destroying the national pastime. The proposal is so ludicrous that even my pal, the closet baseball progressive Rich Lowry, is outraged!

Remember, I’ve argued that Trump must end lawfare — and have thus endeared myself to the MAGA warriors, . . . just as I’ve endeared myself over the past four years to apologists for progressive Democratic prosecutors and congressional Trump obsessives, who exploited the public’s investigative authorities (to say nothing of the mountain of taxpayer dollars) to pursue their partisan vendettas. I am also on record — and will be again come Saturday — urging that the president’s unilateral pardon power is an anachronism that ought to be repealed by a constitutional amendment. So, please, don’t take me to be urging either more lawfare or more pardons.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/06/can-elon-and-vivek-lead-us-to-a-more-efficient-government/

Once Donald Trump is inaugurated as our 47th U.S. president, Tesla, SpaceX, and X/Twitter CEO Elon Musk will likely head a Department of Government Efficiency commission (DOGE). Teaming up with tech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, this dynamic duo will focus on “drastic reforms” targeting “the entire federal government.”

Already there is talk that Musk and Ramaswamy have identified work-at-home policies for federal workers in an effort to trim $2 billion of bloat from the budget. One area they are targeting is waste at the Veterans Administration.

You might not support the movement to “transition” our country to electric vehicles. But you must be impressed with the sheer determination and sense of urgency Elon Musk applied to his vision of building EVs to scale as he did with Tesla. Similarly, Musk brought the U.S. space program back into existence with similar single-mindedness, having achieved 100 successful year-to-date space missions in 2024 with more to come.

A core aspect of his approach to development and production was found in his recent biography, a five-step process that he refers to as “the algorithm.”

Question every requirement. Never accept a requirement that came from a department or committee.

Delete any process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back 10 percent of them, you didn’t delete enough.

Simplify and optimize. This should come right after Step 2. Do not simplify and optimize a process that should not exist.

Accelerate cycle time. Every procedure can be sped up.

Automate. This comes last. Do not automate until all requirements have been questioned, processes have been deleted, everything has been simplified, and procedures have been sped up.

Imagine if these five steps were applied to reforming the U.S. government. It would probably look a lot like what Musk achieved with X/Twitter. Less than two years after Musk acquired the company, it operates today with 80 percent fewer employees and is much more productive, accurate, timely, and ideologically balanced.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/gunman-shot-kindergarteners-in-california-for-palestine/

Two kindergarteners were critically wounded when Glenn Litton, a monster with a long criminal record and apparent delusions, tricked his way into the school and then opened fire in a small California town.

Glenn Litton lied to gain access to the Feather River Seventh-Day Adventists school by claiming to be the grandfather of a prospective student before opening fire on the children.

The gunman wrote in a note that the shootings of children were “carried out countermeasure in necessitated response to America’s involvement with genocide and oppression of Palestinians along with attacks towards Yemen.”

The media emphasizes that Litton was mentally ill and I’m sure his sense of reality was probably none too grounded, but the note also makes it clear that he had been feeding off pro-terrorist propaganda on social media probably supplemented by media coverage.

Even apart from his recent support for Islamic terrorism, Litton was a poster boy for California’s revolving door criminal justice system.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2024/12/05/new-poll-all-of-trumps-nominees-are-viewed-more-favorably-than-unfavorably-n2648647

With Washington, DC consumed with controversy of a handful of Trump nominees, the American public is looking…pretty comfortable with what they’re seeing from the presidential transition.  We noted strong polling on this front before Thanksgiving, and the trend appears to be continuing.  Donald Trump’s overall favorability has pulled even at 48-48, whereas both his defeated rival and the current incumbent underwater by double digits.  You’ll see that recent Gallup data in the graphic embedded below.  As for the transition, a sizable majority (52/38) approves, with literally every single Trump nominee polling with more support than opposition — both according to Morning Consult:

One of Trump’s most embattled picks, Defense Secretary-designate Pete Hegseth, is above water by single digits, with the public splitting almost into thirds on his nomination: Support, oppose, and don’t know.  Hegseth is facing a series of allegations against him and responded in a Wall Street Journal op/ed yesterday.  An excerpt:

I’ve been through a lot: combat tours, job changes, divorces and family challenges. (Yes, I love my mom very much, and she loves me.) I have always led with honesty, integrity and passion. Tragically, many veterans never find the purpose for their next chapter and succumb to the bottle, depression or, worst of all, suicide. I understand what they are facing—because I’ve lived it. But by the grace of God, I took another path. My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has renewed and restored my life. I am saved by his grace. The press is peddling anonymous story after anonymous story, all meant to smear me and tear me down. It’s a textbook manufactured media takedown.