RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/remember-when-inflation-was-just-going-to-be-transitory/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=third

So said President Biden last year. I don’t think many people believed it then and they sure don’t now.

It’s bad and will get worse, argues Timothy Nash of Northwood University’s McNair Center in this TownHall article.

Get ready for “Higher prices for basketballs, lipstick, pacemakers and automobiles — brought to you by the U. S. Federal Reserve Bank, the Biden Administration’s Green Energy policies and Putin’s foreign policy,” Nash writes.

Under Obama, Trump, and now Biden, the federal government has been creating money to cover its prodigious spending at an unprecedented pace. That’s actually what inflation is — the loss of value in the currency is just one of the consequences.

One of Nash’s key points is that Biden’s “green” energy policies have made a bad situation much worse. He observes, “If U.S. oil markets had remained less regulated under the Biden Administration, domestic and global oil supplies would be higher today. The price of oil per barrel on the global exchanges would be lower and Vladimir Putin’s ability to fund the acts of a tyrannical despot would be greatly reduced, while simultaneously validating that freedom and free enterprise is the best way to allocate resources globally.”

The American people are suffering as a result of our ravenous federal government, led by politicians who apparently believe that there are no adverse effects from their unbridled lust for spending and  control. Of course, Biden and his minions will try to pin the blame elsewhere, but I’m optimistic that more and more Americans are starting to realize that the problem is the Leviathan on the Potomac.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/27/hunter-biden-joe-biden-president-business-dealings

Influence-peddling is Washington’s ‘spectator sport’ – but now there’s an interest in taking a closer look at the president’s son.

To the political right in America, Joe Biden’s son Hunter has been the gift that keeps on giving, with his public struggles with addiction, scandalous private life and tangled business life. To the left, Hunter’s travails are dismissed as a Republican political obsession and a talking point for tabloid journalism and internet gossip.

But last week, two witnesses called before a federal grand jury seated in Wilmington, Delaware, which is looking into the tax affairs of the president’s son, made the subject harder to avoid.

First there was Lunden Roberts, with whom Biden has a three-year-old unacknowledged child. Then Zoe Kestan, an ex-girlfriend and lingerie and textile designer, spent five hours giving testimony on Biden’s spending, including – reportedly – stays at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, where, in 2018, allegedly, Biden was preoccupied with cooking crack cocaine.

Wretched and salacious as that sounds, much of Hunter Biden’s story, detailed at length in his autobiography Beautiful Things, published last year, tends that way. “I’m not a curio or a sideshow to a moment in history,” Biden claimed in his book. “I’ve worked for someone other than my father, [I] rose and fell on my own.”

But that’s not how Joe Biden’s political enemies see it.

Donald Trump tried to make issue out of Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine, Russia and China, which included high paid consultancies and gifts, and allegations that, as vice-president, Joe Biden had shaped American foreign policy in Ukraine to benefit his son.

For Trump, it backfired, when efforts to uncover information about the Bidens and Ukraine helped to trigger his first impeachment. Then came the surfacing of Hunter Biden’s missing laptop, with its library of decadent pictures and business email chains, mysteriously left at a Wilmington repair shop, which found its way to Republican political operatives including Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, plus the rightwing press and the FBI.

On the political flip-side, House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff said the laptop was a “smear” from Russian intelligence, and 50 former intelligence officials said it was probably Russian disinformation. Now, however, almost no one disputes its authenticity.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/02/28/this_time_politics_should_actually_stop_at_waters_edge_147261.html

“We must stop partisan politics at the water’s edge,” insisted Sen. Arthur Vandenberg on the Senate floor in March of 1947. At the time, the Michigan Republican chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Harry Truman, a Democrat, was formulating a policy of containment to constrain Russian imperialism.

In the decades since, Vandenberg’s words have generally been ignored. Republicans and Democrats often clash during foreign policy crises, sometimes debating in good faith over principled disagreements, sometimes leveling cheap attacks in hopes of scoring political points.

But Vandenberg’s principle can and should guide the behavior of our politicians as they respond to Vladimir Putin’s brazen invasion of Ukraine. This is not wishful thinking. Several factors of this crisis incentivize bipartisanship.

First, Putin is a manifestly dangerous force. As foreign policy analysts Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, a victorious Putin would instigate “a state of permanent economic war,” with the United States and Europe levelling  “sweeping sanctions, which Russia is likely to parry with cyber-measures and energy blackmailing.” Russia will also seek to encourage, “through methods fair and foul,” political division within Europe in hopes of weakening the NATO alliance. Neither of the United States’ two major political parties should want to live or govern in a world in which Putin has succeeded in becoming, as Fix and Kimmage foresee, “an anarchic presence” who sows instability. If there ever was a country-before-party moment, this is it.

Second, we already have a bipartisan consensus on a key point. “The President has been very clear that U.S. troops will not be fighting in Ukraine,” a Pentagon spokesperson said Friday. Republicans in Congress have not argued otherwise. To date, disagreements between the Biden administration and congressional Republicans involve the timing and scope of economic sanctions, which is not the stuff of deeply divisive debate.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/27/the-suicide-of-a-january-6-defendant-they-broke-him/

Matthew Perna did nothing wrong on January 6, 2021.

The Pennsylvania man walked through an open door on the Senate side of the building shortly before 3 p.m. that afternoon. Capitol police, shown in surveillance video, stood by as hundreds of Americans entered the Capitol. Wearing a “Make America Great Again” sweatshirt, Perna, 37, left after about 20 minutes.

Less than two weeks later, Perna was ensnared in what the former top U.S. prosecutor called a “shock and awe” campaign to round up Trump supporters and deter them from demonstrating at Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021. After he discovered his image on the FBI’s most wanted list for January 6, Perna immediately contacted his local FBI office and voluntarily submitted to questioning; on January 18, six FBI agents arrested Perna at his home.

His life from that point turned into a nightmare. Perna was indicted by a grand jury in February 2021 on four counts including obstruction of an official proceeding and trespassing misdemeanors. Despite his nonviolent participation in the events of that day—he did not assault anyone, carry a weapon, or vandalize property—Biden’s Justice Department and local news media nonetheless made his life pure hell.

Whenever his hometown paper, the Sharon Herald, published an article on its social media account about Perna, the majority of replies were “horrible and brutal,” his aunt, Geri Perna, told me on the phone Sunday. After more than a year of legal and public torture, Perna saw no way out.

On Friday night, Matthew Perna hung himself in his garage.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/islamic_infiltration_and_the_death_of_richard_higgins.html

America has lost too many good men lately.  Rush Limbaugh, Angelo Codevilla and Colin Flaherty come to mind, and now, sadly, another good man’s voice has been silenced. 

In his 2020 book titled The Memo, Rich Higgins was one of the first to sound the alarm of the Deep State coup to remove President Trump and of the subversives within the ranks.  Yet after three short months in 2017 serving on the National Security Council under President’s Trump national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, Rich was fired for telling the truth.

At the time, Rich was labeled as a “conspiracy theorist,” but with all the recent information that has since emerged, Rich has been fully vindicated. 

The Memo recounts how Rich Higgins’s twenty-year career fighting for America First within the bowels of the DoD and Pentagon bureaucracy enabled him to discern — well before anyone else — the Deep State’s efforts to stop and ultimately remove the president from office.  He was frighteningly accurate in anticipating the ferocity of the Deep State’s assault on the Constitution and President Trump.

Rich Higgins was the vice president of Unconstrained Analytics.  He served on the National Security Council in the Trump administration as the director for strategic planning.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/28/joe-biden-and-offensive-moments-in-self-regard/

Joe Biden capped off another rotten week of his sinking presidency saying he hopes his legacy “is that I restored the soul of this country.” His dementia might be relatively new, but he’s been a raging narcissist throughout his public life. Who does he think he is, Barack Obama? Or maybe even the Almighty?

In an interview Saturday, Biden also said that he wanted to be remembered for returning “some decency and honor to the office” and bringing “the middle class back to a place where they had real opportunity.” We might take on those delusions another time, but for now we want to focus on his irksome comment about restoring the soul of America. 

First of all, it’s not the president’s job to heal the nation’s spirit. Of course presidents can, and some certainly have, done damage to their country. Count Biden among them.

An embarrassing botched retreat from Afghanistan. Carter-era inflation. Short on jobs. Lagging incomes. Confidence down, dissatisfaction up. Bitter political and cultural divisions. We are without question worse off today in so many ways than we were before he took office last year. Biden has done nothing to boost Americans’ outlooks, but he’s done quite enough to pare them down.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/joe_biden_says_delusional_americans_are_imagining_inflation_.html

Hard-left podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen interviewed Biden. The topics were what would expect—Biden’s race- and sex-based Supreme Court nominee, claims that Trump and other Republicans support Putin, boasts about his strategic genius, etc.—but the real surprise was Biden’s claim that COVID has made Americans so psychologically unstable they can’t understand that the Biden economy is wonderful.

Here’s what Americans know: They are facing hard times. The economy is creeping back, but it’s nowhere near what it was under Trump before COVID. In 2019, unemployment was 3.6%. It went up to 6.7% in 2020. It’s now 4%, still short of the pre-COVID rate.

That 4% doesn’t even include the millions of people who dropped out of the workforce. CBS blames long COVID but it’s a good bet stimulus checks have also depressed the workforce. If people are paid not to work, they won’t work. When government money finally ends, they might come back.

Inflation is a problem, too. While wages have increased, those increases haven’t kept pace inflation’s 40 year high. A 3.5% raise is meaningless if life’s necessities (food, shelter, energy costs) increase in price by 7% or more.

Reagan rightly said of inflation that it’s “as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hitman.” People don’t care whether the inflation is because of the supply chain problem or because Biden’s green energy (or, really, green lack-of-energy) policies have dramatically bumped up the price of fuel. What matters is that their money is losing value daily.

People also feel despair because it’s frightening to live in the shadow of a potential third world war. They worry that an increasingly desperate, angry Putin, rather than retreating from Ukraine may, instead, go on the attack against Sweden and Finland. They also understand that other tyrants are watching. China, Iran, and North Korea (which just launched a ballistic missile) are gaining courage because they recognize that Biden is weak.

This is why 62% of Americans say Putin would never have attacked Ukraine if Trump were still in the White House. Perhaps they remember Trump’s 2019 threat to Erdogan. In a jovial letter, Trump said work with me for a good deal or I’ll destroy Turkey’s economy. The media sneered, but Erodgan retreated. Biden, however, invited Putin to engage in a “minor incursion.” Putin took that invitation and ran with it.

Things really are bad and Americans know it. Biden’s theory, though, is that everything is great. The problem, he says, is that Americans have become delusional thanks to COVID stress.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/26/this-happy-breed-of-men/

“There’s a deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith wrote to a young correspondent who contemplated with alarm British losses in the American War of Independence. As it happened, Britain absorbed the parturition of the United States with aplomb, growing ever stronger for more than a century. Where are we now? There’s lots of ruin about: no one disputes that. But how are we—we, the English-speaking peoples of the world?—

I am not sure who coined the term “Anglosphere,” but James Bennett gave it currency in his book The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-first Century. Bennett’s book was published in 2004. A paperback edition, with a new Afterword, appeared in 2007. The Anglosphere Challenge endeavored to make good on its optimistic subtitle. The 19th century had been the British century. The 20th century belonged to America. Today, the conventional wisdom predicts that the 21st century will belong to China.  But, Bennett argued, “If the English-speaking nations grasp the opportunity, the twenty-first century will be the Anglosphere century.”

“If.” A tiny word that prompts large questions. What were those opportunities that needed grasping? How sure was our grip? And who, by the way, were “we”? What was this Anglosphere that Bennett apostrophized? Winston Churchill’s opus on the English-speaking peoples, published in four volumes in the mid-1950s, principally included Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. He commenced his story in 55 B.C., when Julius Caesar first “turned his gaze” upon Britain, and concluded as Victoria’s long reign ended. By 2006, when Andrew Roberts extended Churchill’s work in his magisterial History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, the Anglosphere had expanded to include Commonwealth Caribbean countries and, more to the point, India with its 1.4 billion people and the burgeoning capitalist dynamo that is its economy.