RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-irs-is-about-to-go-beast-mode-chuck-schumer-joe-manchin-audit-taxes-middle-class-joe-biden-11659477320?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Progressives want Joe Biden to unleash what they call “beast mode” executive power, and the Schumer-Manchin tax bill supplies the cash to turn the Internal Revenue Service into Wolverine.

The pact between Sen. Joe Manchin and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer includes $80 billion in new funding for the tax man. Democrats claim this “investment” will yield more than $200 billion in revenue. That estimate is highly speculative, but if it’s anywhere close to right IRS auditors will soon be coming after tens of millions of Americans.

The $80 billion is more than six times the current annual IRS budget of $12.6 billion. The money will be ladled out over nine years and comes with few strings attached. The main Democratic command is for the tax agency to bring the hammer down on taxpayers.

The bill earmarks $45.6 billion for “enforcement,” including “litigation,” “criminal investigations,” “investigative technology,” “digital asset monitoring” and a new fleet of tax-collector cars. The result will be far more audits, civil suits and criminal referrals.

The main targets will by necessity be the middle- and upper-middle class because that’s where the money is. The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official tax scorekeeper, says that from 78% to 90% of the money raised from under-reported income would likely come from those making less than $200,000 a year. Only 4% to 9% would come from those making more than $500,000.

The IRS knows the super-wealthy employ lawyers and accountants who make litigation time-consuming and risky. It also knows that Democrats would howl if the agency pursues fraud in the earned-income tax credit program, despite what the IRS has estimated are $18 billion in improper payments each year.

A particular audit target will be “pass throughs” including Subchapter S businesses that file under the individual tax code. Democrats failed to raise the top individual tax rate, so unleashing IRS auditors is Plan B.

RE:Why I Support Reform Prosecutors Justice or safety? It’s a false choice. They reinforce each other.By George Soros(https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-i-support-reform-prosecutors-law-enforces-jail-prison-crime-rate-justice-police-funding-11659277441)

Dear Sirs,

The article by George Soros is as inaccurate as it is self-congratulatory. The only thing missing apart from any caring reference to the victims of the crime wave he has financed is the implied belief that we should be grateful to him for his incessant, tinkering, blood-drenched, philanthropy and his ubiquitous subversion of law & order in America. He thinks he deserves a “Thank You” card.

Mr. Soros has never allowed his spirit to roam beyond his own self-interest, just ask the Bank of England. He lives safely sheltered and heavily protected from the ravages and destruction of the policies he constantly seeks to impose on others. A good deal of hypocrisy is required to turn his suppurating, self-justifying, hand-washing article into a plausible argument for criminal justice reform but hypocrisy is something Mr. Soros has in abundance. 

“Americans need a more thoughtful discussion about our response to crime”, he tells us. Very well then, here it is: 

We want it stopped. We want more police officers better paid, better equipped and well-trained with stronger immunity from criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits. We want vicious thugs, with criminal records so long they wouldn’t fit onto the side of a bus, kept in jail until trial. We want the 45,000 gang members in L.A. County, count them, off the streets and if it takes the temporary suspension of the Posse Comitatus Act to do it we don’t mind. We want the politicians and officials who have allowed this plague on our streets prosecuted and sent to the same prisons as the gang members. We want violent underage criminals tried as adults. We want drug dealers, not drug users, executed. It works well in Singapore.

Mr. Soros intones that, “We need to acknowledged that black people in the U.S. are five times likely to be sent to jail as white people.” That would be unjust if they were committing the same crime but it implies that the police are out deliberately hunting down black people, trumping up charges and sending them off to jail because of their color. It’s preposterous. 

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/3584709-love-him-or-hate-him-trump-is-right-about-crime/

Love him or hate him, there is no denying that Donald Trump has extraordinary political instincts. For a billionaire real estate developer to win the Oval Office on a campaign of helping out working-class Americans, and to single-handedly realign our two great political parties in the process, was nothing short of astonishing.

Which is why, despite his multiple missteps, Republicans should pay attention to Trump.

When he ran his first-ever political campaign in 2016, Trump focused on the border and on China. Calling out the rising flood of people entering the country illegally and Beijing’s monstrous theft of America’s intellectual property got the attention of voters. “Build the wall!” became a chant heard across the country.

Today, Trump has a different focus. Addressing the America First Agenda Summit in Washington, D.C., recently, he talked about public safety, concluding that “our country is now a cesspool of crime.”

As we approach the November elections, that is what Republican candidates should talk about as well.

Why? Because, according to a recent survey, 81 percent of registered voters say crime is a major problem in the U.S., and 79 percent say crime and personal safety is one of their top concerns.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/wit-and-wisdom-kamala-daniel-greenfield/

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris might be the single worst pair of communicators to occupy the White House. Both Joe and Kamala are wedded to teleprompters because he has too much to say and she has nothing to say. Teleprompters are there to keep Joe Biden from telling wildly inappropriate stories about his leg hairs or announcing an impromptu surrender to China, but they’re also there because in her natural state Kamala is incapable of saying anything at all.

Presidents and their veeps are supposed to be a balance of strengths and weaknesses like a good marriage, but instead Biden and Kamala are a bad marriage in which their weaknesses are mirror opposites, but also so far apart that they’re incapable of balancing each other out.

Neither Joe or Kamala have any real skills. They both got to where they are as a combination of political accidents by men who were attracted to their weakness and incompetence.

Obama picked Biden because the failed presidential candidate was an old white man who would be too inept to build his own power base or function independently of his team. And Obama proved correct when Biden not only failed to declare his independence during eight years as his second banana, but even after Obama twice refused to endorse his presidential run is still dependent on Obama’s people to tell him what to do, where to go and what to say.

Kamala was handpicked by Willie Brown for her willingness to sleep with a much older man. And to represent Willie’s interests on various commissions. Despite no apparent skills or real track record, she advanced through the ranks because she was a hollow vessel. Having very little in the way of a mind of her own, she could be counted on to do what her bosses wanted.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/why-its-time-defense-secretary-austin-resign-amber-smith/

Amber Smith is a former Pentagon official and U.S. Army Kiowa Warrior helicopter pilot and veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. She is the author of ‘Danger Close’.

The consequence of the Department of Defense COVID vaccine mandate? A self-inflicted national security threat to readiness, recruitment, retention and ultimately to the all-volunteer force. Secretary of Defense Loyd Austin made a foolish decision to throw away battle tested, combat proven service members with years of priceless war fighting experience and leadership who were an incredible asset to the fighting force. This deliberate decision has caused irreversible damage to the military and the force’s ability to accomplish the mission.

Austin should resign for his failures to maintain necessary force end strength, the worst recruitment crisis since the Vietnam war, for playing politics with soldiers’ careers over the COVID vaccine mandate, and the botched Afghanistan withdrawal. His failure to intervene early in order to tackle these issues prior to becoming full-fledged crises has significantly degraded the military’s capabilities, readiness and national security. 

But Austin’s failures started long before COVID. 

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/07/31/harvard-study-only-8-of-capitol-rioters-wanted-insurrection/

A comprehensive study by Harvard University of the motivations of those who participated in the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol found that only 8% wanted to start an insurrection or civil war — contrary to claims by the January 6 Committee.

The Harvard Crimson reported last week:

In the most comprehensive study to date of what motivated the Trump supporters to attack the Capitol, Shorenstein Center researchers found that 20.6 percent of the rioters, a plurality, were motivated to take part in the riot because they supported Trump. Another 20.6 percent of the rioters cited Trump’s fraudulent claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged as their primary reason for participating in the Jan. 6 riot.

…

The third most common reason for attacking the Capitol: a desire to start a civil war or an armed revolution, according to the study. Almost 8 percent of defendants indicated it was their main motivation.

In an interview, Fagan said she was surprised by how frequently support for Trump and concerns about the election were cited as primary motivations for joining the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/01/the-fbi-twice-interfered-in-the-2020-election-to-sabotage-trump-now-what/

It could be the whopper of the year.

“I can tell you that in every case we follow the facts and the evidence and the law and we do so without regard to politics or ideology,” Matthew Olsen, head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, solemnly assured the House Judiciary Committee during a hearing last week.

Olsen was responding to a question by U.S. Representative Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) about the decision to arrest several men for supposedly conspiring to abduct and assassinate Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020. “The alleged Whitmer plot was announced on October 7, 2020 within a month of the U.S. presidential election,” Bishop asked Olsen. “How come that [was the] timing for the FBI’s announcement of this plot?”

Olsen refused to explain why, opting instead to commit borderline perjury by insisting the Justice Department turns a blind eye to politics—all evidence accumulated over the past six years to the contrary.

But now that two men have been acquitted after defense attorneys convinced a Michigan jury in April that the FBI entrapped their clients—the jury deadlocked on two other defendants who face a new trial next week—Bishop’s question demands an answer. And it won’t come from a dangerously-weaponized Justice Department focused almost entirely on prosecuting Americans who protested Joe Biden’s election on January 6, 2021 and with its sights now trained on indicting Donald Trump.

Despite Olsen’s stonewalling, the answer to Bishop’s question is in plain sight. Just as it did with phony claims of Russian election collusion in 2016, the FBI fabricated a scandal in 2020 aimed at sabotaging Trump right before a national election.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/fauci-deserves-a-trip-to-the-moon-not-an-official-portrait/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fourth

The National Portrait Gallery in D.C. flubs it in honoring the Covid lockdown’s high priest.

A couple of art-news stories are worth reporting. A few weeks ago, I wrote a pair of pieces about the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. It’s a great place and part of the Smithsonian. I love portraits, so it’s a natural draw for me.

In one piece, I suggested how the NPG, still new as museums go, could up its game. As an example, it displays many portraits whose subjects are laudable but, as quality goes, suck and shouldn’t be displayed. Since then, I learned that the museum has decided to commission a portrait of Dr. Cockroach for its collection. Fauci’s portrait will indeed premiere this fall.

You could resurrect Gainsborough and Reynolds, Rembrandt and Sargent, all laudable, even luminous, artists, but, alas, labor as they might, in Fauci’s case it’s the subject who sucks.

Fauci is the instigator and champion of the most profound case of public malfeasance in our history, more costly, more damaging, more extreme, and more futile than our failed wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He’s despised by half the country. No aspiring young doctor could look at him as a role model.

Fifty million children, most from poor or working-class families, tossed from school and subsequently tormented by a fear campaign, not to mention inferior online learning. Covid doesn’t affect them. Four trillion in new debt. Over 100,000 small businesses destroyed. Today’s dysfunctional economy, shocked and distorted by Fauci’s COVID regime. Soaring child abuse, drug overdose deaths, and suicides because lockdown left millions in isolation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/democrats-and-the-fbi-collude-again-on-a-russia-smear-against-republicans/

This time, they’ve been able to turn Democratic collusion with foreign powers into an illusion of disinformation.

Not since Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers has a couple gone cheek-to-cheek quite like Democrats and the FBI.

This spring, we watched special counsel John Durham’s first Russiagate trial blow up on him, not because he lacked evidence of a 2016 fraudulent scheme to portray Donald Trump as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin, but because he portrayed one of the two main schemers, the FBI, as if it were a victim. In Durham’s indictment, the Clinton campaign lies to the bureau’s babes in the woods, gulling them into opening a baseless foreign-counterintelligence probe of whether her Republican rival is a Putin puppet. In Durham’s proof at trial, however, top FBI officials turn out to be fully aware that they are colluding with Clinton campaign operatives in exploiting political opposition research to try to nail Trump — and then labor to cover their tracks.

It’s an unfortunate blind spot. Durham has one conviction so far: a guilty plea from FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, whose manipulation of a document caused the FISA court to be deceived into granting a surveillance warrant to monitor a former Trump campaign adviser — again, substantially based on the Clinton campaign’s bogus opposition research. Except the case wasn’t charged as a fraud on the court. It was charged as a false statement to another FBI official. Yes, it seems even when the FBI itself lies, the victim is . . . the FBI.

And now we learn how adaptable the Democrat–FBI Russia two-step is: You can run it in reverse! Not only can the scheme distort actual disinformation into an illusion of Republican collusion with foreign powers. It also can turn actual Democratic collusion with foreign powers into an illusion of disinformation. Now, that’s some choreography, right there.