RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/06/05/americas-great-cities-are-gripped-by-decline-and-disorder/

For the past decade, America’s urban centres have been increasingly run by ‘progressive’ activists. Yet today, as US cities reel from collapsed economies, rising crime and pervasive corruption, there’s something of a revolt brewing, the success of which may well determine the role and trajectory of our great urban centres.

This emerging conflict is coming to a head next week in Los Angeles, the US’s second-largest city, in the Democratic primaries for LA mayor. Next week’s vote is likely to lead to a head-to-head between moderate billionaire developer Rick Caruso and progressive congressperson Karen Bass, once considered a potential vice-president for Joe Biden. On the same day, ultra-liberal San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin faces a potential recall amid rising crime rates.

The possible shift towards the centre reflects a move back to more traditional urban policies, particularly on crime and homelessness. It’s not Republicans leading the charge against ultra-progressive policies, either. It is African American, Democratic mayors like Houston’s Sylvester Turner and New York’s Eric Adams.

Even the denizens of left-leaning cities are rethinking progressivism. Last year, Austin – Texas’ blue capital – rescinded provisions, backed by progressives, that allowed vast homeless encampments to spring up across the city. Earlier this year, similarly left-leaning Seattle removed its ultra-progressive district attorney and Buffalo voters defeated a socialist-backed Democrat in favour of a moderate African American. Even in San Francisco, progressive school-board members were overwhelmingly defeated in February 2022 – an ominous development for Boudin’s chances next week.

We could be seeing the beginning of a sea change in urban politics.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-failure-cabinet-yellen-mayorkas-buttigieg

Folks, it’s not all Joe Biden’s fault that our nation is in trouble. 

His utterly inept cabinet is also to blame. 

Let’s start with Janet Yellen. 

Yellen, the first female treasury secretary, appeared to be the most seasoned, the best credentialed and least political of all Biden’s cabinet appointees. Not so.  

The treasury secretary recently confessed that she blew it on inflation. She didn’t apologize or admit its real cause, but at least she admitted she goofed. 

She said, “I think I was wrong then about the path inflation would take … there have been unanticipated and large shocks to the economy … that I didn’t at the time fully understand.” 

Yellen’s pitch is, essentially, that inflation blew in because of completely unpredictable events that no one could have anticipated. Untrue. Most economists agree that the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan spilled too much money into the recovering economy at the same time that we had goods shortages, sparking rising prices.  

In fact, a new book out says Yellen agreed with Larry Summers, who warned that Biden’s spending spree would have just that effect, and argued for a smaller American Rescue Plan. Though she denies that account, it rings true. In other words, she knew better. Far from being the intellectual anchor of this administration, Yellen turns out to be yet another shill for Democrats’ left-wing policies. 

Next up: Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas, the first Latino in that role, who has permitted the worst-ever assault on our southern border, failed to deliver a plan to confront the crisis and who lied to Congress when he claimed our “border is secure.”   

https://www.newsweek.com/biden-administrations-five-stages-grief-opinion-1712728

There are five stages of grief, according to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, beginning with denial and ending with acceptance. The Biden administration must have learned from that sequence, since it regularly trots out five successive explanations for its mounting policy failures. Like Kübler-Ross, the administration begins with denial.

Here are the Biden administration’s five stages:

It’s not really a problem. You just think it is.
It’s only a problem for some people, especially rich people. It doesn’t affect ordinary folks.
It’s only a temporary problem. Although folks may be feeling some pain right now, it will go away soon, thanks to our policies.
The problem is lasting a little longer than expected, but none of the experts anticipated that. The president himself is working hard to fix everything.
It’s not our fault, and there’s nothing we can do to fix the problem. Who is to blame? (In 2021, it was Trump; in 2022, it is Putin.)

Voters aren’t buying it. They elect presidents to solve problems, and they hold them responsible when they fail. Polls show only about one-fifth of the country thinks we are “on the right track,” a catastrophic number for the party in power. They don’t blame Republicans, either, because Democrats control the White House, Senate and the House of Representatives. They point directly at Biden and his flailing party.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/06/what-the-january-6-committee-hearings-wont-cover/

U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) promises the January 6 Select committee hearings “will tell a story that will blow the roof of the House.” Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) insists the committee’s “job is to tell the truth.” Turncoat Republican Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) claims her fellow committee members will be “focused on facts, not rhetoric, and we will present those facts without exaggeration, no matter what criticism we face.” 

After a year of unrestrained investigation led by seasoned federal prosecutors who interrogated at least 1,000 witnesses and collected hundreds of thousands of documents including records once considered privileged material, the committee will present its findings to the American people beginning with a much-hyped primetime hearing Thursday night. Their bottom-line task is to convince the public that Trump led a “coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” according to a committee tweet last week. 

To spark interest in the hearing, the committee has hired, at taxpayer expense, a veteran television producer to create a “blockbuster investigative special” featuring clips of the protest and witness interviews.

Democrats hope “chilling” revelations about the four-hour disturbance at the Capitol more than 17 months ago will prevent an electoral bloodbath for the party this November. Collaboration between Congress and Joe Biden’s Justice Department has resulted in contempt charges against Trump confidants Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon; meanwhile, Biden’s handpicked U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia has criminally indicted more than 800 Americans for protesting Biden’s election on January 6.

On the same day last week, FBI agents arrested Navarro in public at a D.C. airport and arrested two men from Florida on charges of civil disorder and three misdemeanors related to the Capitol protest.

Contrary to what Cheney and her Trump-hating inquisitors say, the January 6 committee is far from a truth-finding mission. In fact, what the committee fails to address will speak more to its true motivations—to drive a stake in the heart of a political movement that refuses to die and, in some regards, is stronger than ever—not prevent another “insurrection” in the future, which is how the committee was sold to the country.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18595/navarro-indictment-unconstitutional

Navarro has a strong claim of executive privilege that should be decided by the courts before any indictment can lawfully issue.

[A]bsent a judicial order, he cannot lawfully be indicted for invoking executive privilege and refusing to reveal arguably privileged material just because a committee of Congress, controlled by Democrats, has voted that he should. It is not enough to allow him to appeal after the fact, because information, once revealed, cannot be erased. He is obliged to claim privilege now and refuse to respond. That is not a crime. It is the constitutionally correct action.

Navarro’s indictment violates several key constitutional rights, including due process, fair warning and executive privilege. It also violates the separation of powers, under which the courts have the authority to resolve conflicts between the legislative and executive branches over claims of executive privilege in response to legislative subpoenas. Due process and fair warning require that these issues first be resolved by the courts before an indictment can be issued.

The Biden Justice Department knows the law and it should not be acting lawlessly to make political points.

In an age of partisan law enforcement, however, it is far from certain that neutral justice will be done. Some courts have been caught up in result-oriented injustice….

The Bible admonishes judges not to “recognize faces.” That command is the origin of the blindfolded statue of Lady Justice. But in our age of pervasive partisanship, too many judges peek out their blindfolds and rule differently based on the faces and political affiliations of the litigants.

The indictment of Peter Navarro for contempt of Congress violates several provisions of the Constitution and should be dismissed. Navarro has a strong claim of executive privilege that should be decided by the courts before any indictment can lawfully issue.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/what-woman-bruce-bawer/

Having consumed an extraordinary amount of information (and misinformation) about transgenderism – whether through terrific books like Helen Joyce’s Trans and Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage or YouTube videos by transgender “influencers” like Noah Finnce or canny critics of transgender ideology like Mr. Menno, Arielle Scarcella, and Kellie-Jay Keen – I worried that the just-released Daily Wire documentary on the topic, What Is a Woman?, produced and directed by Justin Folk and starring Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh, wouldn’t offer anything new.

In a sense I was right. My mind wasn’t changed. I went in knowing that transgenderism is deranged and dangerous, and the film confirmed my point of view. But what confirmation! Folk, Walsh, and company have put together a serious and definitive piece of work – at once a comprehensive survey, a chilling indictment, and, strange though it may sound, an often laugh-out-loud piece of entertainment.

Structurally, What Is a Woman? borrows from, of all things, Michael Moore’s debut documentary, Roger & Me (1989), about the effect of GM factory closings on the increasingly bleak economy of his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Moore structured his film around the conceit that he was on a quest to track down, and confront, GM chairman and CEO Roger Smith, the tongue-in-cheek premise being that, if informed about the town’s suffering, Smith would certainly take remedial action. The conceit propelling Folk’s documentary is that Walsh, the 35-year-old father of two boys and two girls, is hopelessly confused by the new concepts of sex and gender, which posit that a man can become a woman and vice-versa, and is traveling around the U.S. to learn from experts on the subject – and to pose one question in particular: What is a woman?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/06/stopping_quarantine_camps_in_new_york_state.html

This is the fight for freedom we Americans never dreamed we would have to fight.

Imagine a land where the government has the power to lock you up because the unelected bureaucrats in the Health Department think that you might, possibly have a communicable disease. They don’t have to prove you are sick. They don’t have to prove you are a health threat to others. They just need to think that, maybe, you were possibly exposed to a disease. And when I say “lock people up,” I mean lock you in your home or force you from your home into a facility, detention center, camp (pick your noun) that they get to choose and you must stay there for however long they want. No time limit; so it could be for days, weeks, months, or years….

Now imagine that there is no age restriction, so the government can do this to you personally, or to your child, or to your grandchild, or to your elderly parent, or to your ailing grandparent. The nightmare continues because you have no recourse. No chance to prove that you aren’t actually infected with the disease. No chance to confront your jailers, see their supposed evidence against you or challenge their quarantine order in a court of law before getting locked up. And they can use law enforcement to help them carry out their forced quarantine or isolation orders, so the knock on your door could very well be the sheriff or police coming to remove you from your home or to “check in” on you to ensure you are locked down in your home, isolated, in accordance with the Health Department’s order against you.

This dystopian horror sounds unbelievable to an American. That the government has the ability to control one’s every move is unnatural to us. Politicians and bureaucrats being able to have unbridled power to tell you where you can and cannot go, what you can and cannot do, and who you can and cannot see is the very antithesis of what our country stands for. It flies in the face of “liberty and justice for all.” After all, we are supposed to be a nation of governance of the people, by the people, and for the people.

And yet, the governor of New York and her Department of Health have promulgated a dystopian regulation that does all of that and more. The regulation is called “Isolation and Quarantine Procedures” and can be found at 10 NYCRR 2.13. It is a clear violation of the Separation of Powers because the governor is not supposed to make law, nor can an agency. Only the legislature can make law and agencies can only issue regulations that the legislature empowers them to issue. Simply put, an agency cannot just make up rules on its own whim. It must have a directive from the legislature to do so.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/on-bidens-decline/

Regarding our senescent POTUS, Dan observes:

If you have spent much time around elderly men with declining faculties, you will recognize the all-too-common pattern of lashing out because they need help for things they could once do themselves, rather than being thankful for the help.

Okay, but the main thing the in-his-prime-such-as-it-was Joe Biden could do for himself was say stupid stuff . . . that he would then have to pretend not to have said.

The difference between then and now is that, as president rather than blowhard senator, Biden has legions of staff, rather than just the media, to walk it back.

He was grateful for the media. But now he’s angry at the staff. I guess that’s the measure of decline.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/inside-the-infighting-on-the-january-6-committee/

Nailing Donald Trump is the only mission on which there is agreement between Democrats and the two Republicans on the committee.

There is internal division in the House January 6 committee regarding what legislative agenda to recommend to prevent a repeat of the 2020 election hijinks, according to an Axios report by Jonathan Swan and Hans Nichols. The fissure was inevitable.

On one side, this is a Democrat-dominated committee formed to address a supposed crisis. Like any Democratic partisan, the committee is determined to exploit the crisis to push for long-coveted radical change, even though the proposed change is largely unrelated to the causes of the crisis. On the other side, there is the Republican ally, Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, whom Democrats have accepted into the fold so they can claim their gambit is bipartisan. However opportunistic that was, Cheney inconveniently opposes the Democrats’ policy ideas.

To conduct a proper investigation, a congressional committee must have a bona fide legislative purpose. The January 6 committee has never had such a purpose. It is mutual loathing of Trump, and nothing else, that unifies the committee’s seven Democrats and two Republicans (Cheney is joined by Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, also tapped by Speaker Nancy Pelosi because of his public chiding of Trump).

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/07/are-we-amerika-now/

A 1987 television miniseries that visualized the condition of the U.S. a decade after the country had surrendered to the Soviet Union was probably not far off the mark. Life in “Amerika” was nothing like life in America before the Soviet takeover. Though the USSR no longer exists, life in this country in 2022 feels like Amerika due to transformational changes brought by virulent inside influences, just as Nikita Khrushchev said would happen.

The U.S. is not a single-party state. There are pockets of resistance to the progressive agenda, most notably in Texas and Florida. But the effort to turn this nation toward a hard-left future has been accelerated by the lockdowns, mandates, and the do-as-we-say diktats of the Great Coronavirus Panic, and the Democrats’ control of the lawmaking and executive branches, as well as the administrative state.

Unlike the Americans in “Amerika,” we didn’t surrender to the Soviets. We have simply handed power to the left. The hard (and unrelenting) left controls most of the media, sets the tone for popular culture, and has hegemonized most of our institutions and many of our businesses.

Consequently, freedoms have been overrun, dissent forbidden, free speech shredded, and crime allowed to thrive. Our Second Amendment rights are in grave jeopardy. The price of energy is intentionally being increased. Failure to conform to leftist demands risks ostracization. The rule of law is being ignored. Our justice system has been corrupted by politics. Both policymakers and activists want to increase the middle and lower classes’ dependency on government. Wealth is not to be created but redistributed by elected officials and their functionaries in the bureaucracy. Inflation caused by Democratic policies has wrecked the value of the dollar. Abundance has been replaced by shortages, the worst of which are yet to come.