RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/06/04/maher_toxic_positivity_and_the_lack_of_shame_

On the Friday broadcast of his program ‘Real Time,’ during a discussion of homelessness and addiction, Maher highlighted several government-sponsored PSAs in cities like New York and San Francisco that encourage safe drug use as an example of societal decline. See photos of the adverts below.

“I think part of the problem with us not having a solution to this is there are people out there that heard you say ‘first-world country’ and went ‘How dare you?’ because part of the problem with losing civilization is when you fail to make judgments about how some things are better than others,” Maher said. “We have seen this over and over again. Nothing is better than anything else. Keeping women in burqas is just a different way to go. And it’s just not a different way to go. And having shit in the park, human feces, when you’re trying to have a little baseball game with your kids or something is just worse.”

Maher read a poster that encouraged people to feel “empowered” for “safely” using drugs: ‘Don’t be ashamed you are using.’

“Okay, that’s the first thing it says. Yes, this is part of the problem of losing civilization. Shame is part of life. We do this to everything. Toxic positivity. ‘Everything is positive.’ Everything is not positive. You should be ashamed that you are using, that might help you to stop,” the HBO host said.
“Remember defining deviancy downward, that phrase from Patrick Moynihan?” Maher asked his panel.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/if-only-we-could-turn-hillary-loose-on-the-fbi/

If historical accountability now outweighs all concerns about due process, how could you do better than a Hillary Clinton trial?

‘Whither John Durham?” That is now the pressing question for every Russiagate watcher. Admittedly, the crowd of Russiagate watchers has grown smaller since Tuesday, when a Democrat-heavy jury in Washington, D.C., acquitted Michael Sussmann, the heavyweight Democratic lawyer, of Special Counsel Durham’s charge that Sussmann had lied to the FBI.

The answer, if we are to learn the central lesson of the Sussmann case, is simple: Indict Hillary Clinton.

But . . . for what?

I’ll resist the urge to say, “There’s always something,” which would be more a commentary on the career of the former secretary of state (and cattle-futures trader, travel-office-staff director, grand-jury amnesiac, “bimbo eruptions” scourge, pardons coordinator, voice of calm, suspender of disbelief, Russian “reset” visionary, Benghazi bungler, Muslim-movie maven, charity entrepreneur, and homebrew-server savant) than a real answer.

The truth is I have no idea whether Hillary has done anything indictable this time. Orchestrating the Trump–Russia collusion farce is icky politics and maybe even civil libel. But whether it violated the criminal law in some way is a tougher question.

I do know this, though: If you really want to get to the bottom of what is scandalous about Russiagate, there could be no surer way to do it than to indict that most ruthless of cutthroat, cold-blooded politicians and sit back and enjoy the show as she sets her phalanx of gladiator–lawyers on the FBI, the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies, and the Obama White House.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2022/06/03/hillarys-attorney-operated-an-fbi-office-at-law-firm-but-wait-it-gets-worse-n1602734

Do you ever get the feeling that we’re playing checkers while our enemies are playing chess? That things are not as they seem? That’s the way it feels in the story of Spygate, the Trump-Russia collusion lie, FBI corruption, and the latest chapter of that entire sad and duplicitous saga that was lived out in a D.C. courtroom this week. Hillary Clinton and Democratic National Committee attorney Michael Sussmann was acquitted by a jury whose forewoman said she felt the special counsel team led by John Durham should have better things to do than investigate a lawyer supposedly lying to the FBI about the president being a Russian spy.

No biggie, you understand.

As I reported for PJ Media, the evidence in the Sussmann case pointed to an extraordinarily cozy relationship between the FBI and Perkins Coie. Sussmann had credentials to get inside the FBI and was considered to be a trusted Confidential Human Source (CHS).

But the latest news about this relationship gives rise to more and more troubling questions.

Congressmen Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla) say a whistleblower informed them that Perkins Coie, for which Hillary and the DNC’s campaign attorneys Marc Elias and Sussmann worked, had an FBI outpost there. That’s right, an office space inside the Perkins Coie law firm was run  “in concert with the FBI,” according to Gaetz. And Michael Sussmann was “operating that worksite.”

There could be a simple (cough) explanation to which the proletariat are not privy on why the FBI would have an outpost there, but Gaetz has a few questions. In an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” (see video below) Gaetz wondered, “What reason would there be for that? What leverage would the Perkins law firm have over the FBI given this work they’re doing together? Why would [FBI Director] Christopher Wray allow it to continue?”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-biden-lied-about-gun-manufacturer-immunity-he-wasnt-close-to-the-truth/?utm_

I know this will be hard to believe, but Joe Biden lied in last night’s speech to the nation. Here is one especially egregious example:

We should repeal the liability shield that often protects gun manufacturers from being sued for the death and destruction caused by their weapons. They’re the only industry in this country that has that kind of immunity. Imagine. Imagine if the tobacco industry had been immune from being sued, where we’d be today. The gun industry’s special protections are outrageous. It must end.

Biden has made this claim before, as did Hillary Clinton. Politifact rated it false in 2015. As Biden knows perfectly well, or should know unless his mind is completely shot, there are multiple industries that enjoy federal statutory immunity from lawsuits over the use of their products.

Biden refers to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed by President George W. Bush in 2005. (Biden opposed it at the time.) Under the ordinary principles of tort law, product-liability lawsuits are for defective products that malfunction; the manufacturer of a legal product cannot be held responsible for the product working as designed, unless it has somehow failed to warn users of a risk of use. This is why Biden’s analogy to cigarettes is flawed: The theory of many product-liability lawsuits against cigarette manufacturers was either that cigarettes were marketed with false assurances of their safety or that the manufacturers concealed dangers of the product. That is obviously not true of guns: Everybody knows that guns are lethal weapons if used as designed.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/florida-ron-desantis-governor-covid-data-manipulation-rebekah-jones-ig-report-11654292011?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

A frequent phenomenon of our times is the flurry over an alleged scandal that on examination turns out to be false. The latest case is the claim that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis manipulated Covid data.

Mr. DeSantis became public-health enemy number one by defying the left’s lockdown consensus early in the pandemic. When former state health department employee Rebekah Jones claimed she was fired for refusing to fudge state Covid data to support the state’s reopening in spring 2020, national and local media outlets reported her allegations as fact.

“Florida Dismisses A Scientist For Her Refusal To Manipulate State’s Coronavirus Data,” NPR reported. After the Florida Department of Law Enforcement executed a search warrant of her home, Ms. Jones claimed Mr. DeSantis had “sent the gestapo” to silence her. “FDLE raid dramatizes Florida’s COVID-19 coverup” the South Florida Sun Sentinel editorialized.

But according to the Governor’s office, Ms. Jones was fired for repeated “insubordination” and making “unilateral decisions to modify the Department’s COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors.”

https://cei.org/blog/george-washington-george-jarkesy-and-the-administrative-states-lack-of-fundamental-justice/

The recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Jarkesy v. SEC is a victory for limited constitutional government on many levels. As Mario Loyola, professor at Florida International University and senior fellow here at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes in The Wall Street Journal, the court “has taken what could be a historic step toward restoring the Constitution’s checks and balances.”

The case involved the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seeking penalties for alleged fraud against hedge fund manager George Jarkesy. Utilizing a provision of the Dodd-Frank “financial reform” of 2010, the SEC chose to pursue Jarkesy in an internal proceeding before an administrative law judge (ALJ) rather than a normal federal court that is part of the judicial branch created by the Constitution’s Article III. As Loyola points out, in Jarkesy’s and other cases, the SEC “acts as rulemaker, prosecutor, and judge for America’s securities laws.”

On multiple grounds, the Fifth Circuit majority found the SEC’s denying Jarkesy the venue of a federal court in which to defend himself to be in violation of the Constitution. The court ruled that, because fraud has been a common-law offense to which jury trial right attaches, and the SEC in-house proceeding lacked a jury of his peers, Jarkesy was denied his Seventh Amendment guarantee of trial by jury.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/justice/sussmanns-cozy-relationship-with-the-fbi-revealed

Michael Sussmann’s cozy relationship with the FBI was revealed during his two-week trial and in a new letter by congressional Republicans, shedding new light on the Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer’s close ties to the bureau as he pushed since-debunked Trump-Russia claims.

Sussmann, a former Perkins Coie lawyer who represented the Democratic National Committee when it was hacked in 2016, was acquitted by a jury this week after being charged with lying to the FBI about whom he was representing when, in September 2016, he pushed false allegations of a secret back channel between the Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa-Bank.

Reps. Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray this week with details they had learned about the relationship between Perkins, Sussmann, and the bureau.

“We have learned that since March 2012, the FBI approved and facilitated a Secure Work Environment at Perkins Coie’s Washington, D.C., office, which continues to be operational. In a letter dated May 25, 2022, the law firm confirmed and acknowledged the arrangement,” Jordan and Gaetz told Wray.

“We have been informed that former Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann had access to this Secure Work Environment, and during the course of his recent trial, it was disclosed he had special badge access to FBI headquarters.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/02/another-justice-department-fail-the-flynn-unmasking/

Barack Obama’s crusade to destroy Lt. General Michael Flynn began months before Election Day in 2016. Flynn resigned as Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency director in 2014 amid clashes with his boss at the time, James Clapper, over the administration’s approach to the war on terror. In early 2016, Flynn, who had become an outspoken critic of Obama’s foreign policy, joined the Trump presidential campaign; a few months later, Obama’s FBI opened a counterintelligence probe into Flynn and three other campaign associates.

After Trump won, Team Obama accelerated its targeting of Flynn. Obama warned Trump during an Oval Office meeting shortly after Election Day not to hire Flynn, advice Trump promptly rejected. So, Obama set out to make Trump pay for his defiance.

The alleged details of discussions between Flynn, slated to serve as Trump’s national security advisor, and the Russian ambassador about U.S. sanctions against the Kremlin for “interfering” in the presidential election were leaked to the Washington Post a week before Trump’s inauguration.

Columnist David Ignatius first planted the idea that Flynn might have broken federal law by talking about sanctions in numerous phone calls. 

“According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking,” Ignatius wrote on January 12, 2017.  “What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The Logan Act (though never enforced) bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about ‘disputes’ with the United States. Was its spirit violated?”

https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/01/yes-biden-deserves-the-blame-for-inflation/

From top to bottom, the Biden administration botched the inflation problem.

“So, while it’s true that inflation is a complex, multifaceted problem that isn’t entirely any person’s or administration’s or event’s fault, it is fair to say that the Biden administration, from top to bottom, was as wrong as an administration could be on the issue. They ignored it. They weren’t prepared. They exacerbated it. At the very least, Biden deserves a lot more credit for inflation than he does economic growth. If you’re going to take credit for the latter, you deserve blame for the former.”

Joe Biden has written an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal detailing his plan to fight inflation.

Well, perhaps the word “detailing” is too generous. The preponderance of the column features Biden taking credit for economic growth that can be attributed to the reopening of an economy that was shuttered by the governing class during Covid. Biden, of course, not only championed those closings, but was critical of Republican governors who opened their states before he deemed it appropriate.

But with midterms approaching, there’s been a concerted effort underway to exonerate the president, and thus Democrats, of any culpability for rising prices. Biden sycophant “Morning Joe,” for example, contends that anyone who blames the president for more than a “passing impact” on inflation is a “lying hack or an ignorant rube.” One wonders if that group includes former Obama adviser Steve Rattner, who argues that inflation has been driven by government putting “too much money in people’s pockets?” Or Obama’s one-time Director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers, who had been warning for more than a year that cash infusions would exacerbate inflation? Or Jeff Bezos, who correctly pointed out that the “administration tried hard to inject even more stimulus into an already over-heated, inflationary economy?”

Even if we were to concede that there is no good way to quantify exactly how much recent spending helped propel inflation — which is outpacing other Western nations — it’s clear that the Biden administration completely mismanaged what should have been a slam-dunk recovery.