RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/07/another-january-6-narrative-goes-boom/

How does a mob “illegally storm” the Capitol building when police let them in? That is the latest narrative-shifting question the media wants desperately to avoid after a federal judge on Wednesday found a January 6 defendant not guilty for his conduct during the protest at the Capitol that day. 

Matthew Martin was arrested in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 22, 2021; he later was charged with the four most common misdemeanors related to the Justice Department’s prosecution of Capitol protesters: entering a restricted building, disorderly conduct, violent entry, and parading in the Capitol building.

Those petty offenses comprise the overwhelming majority of criminal charges against the nearly 800 or so January 6 defendants. More than 150 people have pleaded guilty to the “parading” charge—many have been sentenced to a few months in prison.

But those defendants might regret accepting the plea deal offered by the government after D.C. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden not only acquitted Martin on all counts but agreed with Martin’s assertion that he was “waved” in by Capitol Police officers. Martin, who opted for a bench trial before the Trump-appointed judge and testified in his own defense, entered the building around 3 p.m. through a set of doors on the east side. He walked through the Rotunda and stayed inside for about 10 minutes.

For that activity—a right protected under the Constitution up until January 6, 2021—Martin’s life, like that of every other American ensnared in this abusive prosecution, has been destroyed. Following his acquittal, Martin spoke to reporters outside the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C. “I am very thankful for the judge’s verdict and hoping to get my life back together, get my job back,” said Martin, who was fired as a contractor for the U.S. Department of Energy after he was arrested a year ago.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/08/ketanji-brown-jackson-dave-aronberg-and-jeffrey-epstein/

Federal election records show newly anointed Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has given money to just two politicians, both Democrats: Barack Obama and Dave Aronberg.

But who is Aronberg? He is a high school friend of Jackson from Florida, who, like her, has been accused of being soft on child sex offenders. The two were also classmates at Harvard Law School. Her financial gift to him is yet another data point indicating she is strangely not happy with laws protecting kids from sexual predators. With the Senate Thursday voting to confirm her 53-47, she is now in a lifetime position to review the constitutionality of those laws.

In 2009, Jackson donated $250 to Aronberg, then a Democratic Florida state senator (she contributed $400 to Obama the previous year, records show). At the time, Aronberg had been in the news for pushing a controversial bill to cut in half the distance registered sex offenders are required to live from schools, daycare centers, parks and other places kids congregate.

Jackson complained about such laws while attending Harvard Law with Aronberg.

In 1996, the year they both graduated, Jackson wrote an 18-page brief in the Harvard Law Review arguing that the judicial system was unfair to people who sexually prey on children, because it sentences them to monitoring and treatment after prison, which she viewed as additional “punishment” masquerading as prevention.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/if-the-hunter-biden-story-was-irrelevant-why-was-it-censored/

At the University of Chicago’s “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference this week — a “how to” discussion, apparently — the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum was asked about the use of the “disinformation” charge as a pretext for suppressing news. Specifically, the student was referring to the concerted effort by mass media, Big Tech, and government to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story to protect Joe Biden.“My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is I think it’s totally irrelevant,” she responded. “I mean, it’s not whether it’s disinformation. . . . I didn’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States.”

Someone might let the January 6 committee, which questioned Ivanka Trump for eight hours the other day, know that the actions of the president’s offspring are totally irrelevant. Applebaum believed questions about presidential kids were relevant during the Trump years. She shared dozens of them, and wrote her own piece about their alleged corruption. And when the Hunter story broke, Applebaum thought it relevant enough to note that the “amazing thing is that even the fraudulent claims about Hunter Biden are so much less bad than many genuine, fully-reported, well-known stories about Trump, his children and their business deals.”

My italics indicate a word that is a synonym of disinformation. That was Applebaum’s contention. Now that a Politico reporter, the Washington Post, and New York Times have all confirmed the veracity of the New York Post’s reporting (probably because that information is going to be revealed in some filing), suddenly the story is a mere distraction.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/obamacare-politicizes-irs-internal-revenue-service-affordable-care-act-subsidies-families-tax-code-healthcare-biden-obama-11649337661?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

President Obama visited the White House Tuesday to support his successor’s attempts to expand ObamaCare. The big news is that the Biden White House has succeeded in convincing the Internal Revenue Service to propose a rule that would illegally extend insurance subsidies to people who are ineligible for them.

Mr. Obama’s presence at the White House was ironic given that the IRS’s proposed policy reverses its decision from a decade ago, when he was president. At that time, the IRS believed it had to follow the law as written. The reversal shows that the enforcement of the tax code has become deeply politicized. Through this rule, if finalized, the IRS will expand ObamaCare subsidies by billions of dollars a year beyond what Congress authorized.

At issue is whether an employer’s offer to provide health insurance to an employee’s dependents disqualifies those dependents from ObamaCare subsidies. The 2010 law created large subsidies for plans in the new exchanges—so large that lawmakers worried the fiscal cost would be untenable. Mr. Obama insisted that ObamaCare cost less than $1 trillion in its first decade. To meet that demand, Congress limited subsidies to people without access to Medicaid or an affordable employer plan.

The trick was determining affordability. ObamaCare based affordability on the cost of coverage for the employee alone. Both he and his dependents offered coverage are ineligible for subsidies if his premium payment for self-only coverage exceeds 9.6% of income.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/questions-media-hunter-biden-dad-andrew-mccarthy

At a 2020 debate, President Donald Trump tried to press his rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, on an intriguing financial transaction: $3.5 million invested in a fund controlled by Biden’s son. Though Hunter Biden is better known for drug addiction and overall instability than business acumen, Elena Baturina, the widow of Yuri Luzhkov, longtime mayor of Moscow and confidant of Vladimir Putin, for some reason saw wisdom in pouring Russian money into a Hunter venture. 

If Biden had been the Republican in the race, Trump would not have had to raise the question. The media would already have been asking it incessantly. The animating question of the campaign would have been why, when President Barack Obama made his vice president the point-man on administration policy regarding such countries as Russia, Ukraine, and China, people connected to those notoriously corrupt regimes suddenly thought it expedient to pay Biden’s ne’er-do-well son millions upon millions of dollars.

But Biden was the Democrat in the race. The media-Democrat complex, far from haranguing him until he answered such questions, was sure to help him deflect. In fact, an establishment-friendly assortment of former intelligence officials baselessly floated the notion that damning data on a computer that patently belonged to Hunter might be Russian disinformation. The press dutifully ran with it. 

So, in response to Trump, Biden parroted the disinformation dodge, dismissed his opponent as a “clown,” and posed as if the Hunter questions were not worth dignifying with answers.

The tables have turned.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/06/judge-acquits-j6-protester-in-first-defeat-for-doj/

D.C. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden today delivered a major blow to the Justice Department’s aggressive prosecution of January 6 protesters. Following a bench trial this week for Matthew Martin, a New Mexico man charged with the most common misdemeanors related to the Capitol protest, McFadden found Martin not guilty on all counts. It is the first acquittal in a January 6 case; nearly 800 Americans have been arrested and charged, mostly on petty offenses, for their involvement in the four-hour disturbance that day.

Martin was arrested a year ago on four counts: entering and remaining in a restricted building, disorderly conduct in a restricted building, violent entry, and parading in the Capitol building. Prosecutors confirmed he was in the building for roughly 10 minutes.

He pleaded not guilty and opted for a bench trial before McFadden, a Trump appointee. Taking the stand in his own defense, Martin said he was “waved” into the building by Capitol police. According to BuzzFeed’s Zoe Tillman, who is covering the in-person trials in Washington, an official for the U.S. Capitol Police testified that police “were so vastly outnumbered and couldn’t stop people [and] all they could do was observe [and] try to make sure no one got hurt.”

Calling Martin’s conduct “minimal and non-serious,” McFadden found it “plausible” that Martin was allowed into the building and did not realize the grounds were off-limits to the public.

McFadden’s ruling could impact pending cases and plea offers since a government witness confirmed for the first time under oath that police stood by as people entered the Capitol. The next trial for a January 6 defendant facing the same charges is scheduled for April 13 when Russell Dean Alford will appear before Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee.

https://justthenews.com/government/congress/ron-johnson-calls-biden-family-grifters-and-influence-peddlers

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) on Wednesday derided the Biden family as “grifters” and “influence peddlers,” as more evidence emerges of questionable business deals involving President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and brother, James.

“They knew exactly what they were doing,” Johnson told “Just the News — Not Noise.” “They were using Vice President Biden’s position and his name to peddle influence, and rake in, vacuum in millions of dollars from all over the world

“The Bidens are grifters. They’re influence peddlers. They’ve made millions. They’ve compromised themselves, and they’ve compromised America’s national security.” 

Johnson spoke on the Senate floor Tuesday with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) about their ongoing investigation into the Biden family’s shady financial connections, including partners tied to communist China and Russian oligarchs.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/07/is-the-big-guy-in-big-trouble/

So far, the lurid news reports of global influence peddling, sex and drugs emanating from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop and its thousands upon thousands of damning emails have been treated solely as the risqué escapades of President Joe Biden’s ne’er-do-well son. However sad this episode might be, we’ve been told it has nothing to do with the president himself. Oh, really?

In fact, based on what we know so far, President Biden could be in a world of legal trouble.

Ordinarily, influence peddling involves a middleman with access to someone powerful. The middleman uses his access to a powerful politician or official to obtain money and/or favors from a third party, who in turn wants favors or access from the powerful official.

Strangely enough, the Supreme Court in recent years has actually softened its treatment of this behavior, in essence saying that what we normally call influence peddling is a part of our democracy, unsavory though it may be.

This allows such curious practices as political lobbying to occur. Essentially, lobbyists are well connected people who sell their access to others. It’s legal.

Legal, except that is, when the politician himself benefits financially. Then it’s garden-variety corruption, a bribe.

The Justice Department has made it clear in recent years that “it is a violation of federal law for any federal, state, or local government official to ask for or receive anything of value in exchange for, or because of, any official act. Public corruption is a federal crime.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/proof_has_emerged_from_the_white_house_that_bidens_presidency_is_over.html

Barack Obama was at the White House yesterday, making it clear, as did others at the reception held in Obama’s honor, that Biden’s presidency is over. Watching Obama suck the oxygen out of the room made me wonder if Obama is planning a comeback, something he can easily do.

The ostensible reason for Obama’s return to the White House was to celebrate Obamacare’s twelfth anniversary (if you can celebrate our modern, cowardly, corporate-run “medical care,” along with overpriced insurance that does little for people with serious health issues).  The reception in Obama’s honor, though, hinted that the event’s real purpose was to signal to Democrat apparatchiks that Biden is now shark chum.

The chumming process began when Obama referred to Biden as the “vice president,” adding, after a long pause, “That was a joke.”

Self-deprecating humor when you’re allegedly the president of what is (was?) the world’s most powerful nation isn’t charming; it’s unnerving.

Worse was still to come.  Normally, everyone in the room should be clamoring to be near the American president.  After all, political power is the strongest magnetic force in the world.  But in Biden’s case, he was the creep at the party, the one everyone assiduously ignores and avoids:

Not only was Obama the magnetic force in the room, but he also made it clear to all that they should shun Biden:

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-recession-predictions-begin/

Yesterday, Deutsche Bank became the first major bank to forecast a recession in 2023. Economists David Folkerts-Landau and Peter Hooper predicted that the Fed’s raising interest rates to control inflation will cause a recession next year and bump the unemployment rate up to 4.9 percent in 2024 (it’s at 3.6 percent currently). “Our call for a recession in the U.S. next year is currently way out of consensus,” they wrote. “We expect it will not be so for long.”

A Bloomberg survey of financial professionals and investors indicates that the view is becoming more widespread. Only 15 percent predict a recession this year, but 48 percent predict one next year. They are concerned mostly about the inversion in the yield curve for two-year versus ten-year Treasury bonds, which means the two-year bond has a higher yield than the ten-year bond. A yield-curve inversion has come before every recent recession (although the exact causal connection between the two isn’t totally clear).

Larry Summers took to the pages of the Washington Post yesterday to give his prognosis, which is similarly negative:

There is a first time for everything, but over the past 75 years, every time inflation has exceeded 4 percent and unemployment has been below 5 percent, the U.S. economy has gone into recession within two years. Today, inflation is north of 6 percent and unemployment is south of 4 percent.

He sees the Fed as “dangerously behind the curve” (a view that Scott Sumner shares). Summers is not convinced that inflation will return to an acceptable level largely on its own, which seems to be the Fed’s view based on its forecasts and projected rate hikes that are relatively modest by historical standards. He writes that “there can be no real question but that the American job market is unsustainably hot and in need of restraint” and that this hot job market is raising demand and prices.