RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/kamala-conundrum-larry-elder/

A USA Today-Suffolk University poll placed Vice President Kamala Harris’ approval ratings at 28%, 10 points below that of President Joe Biden. The U.K. Telegraph tweeted: “With Kamala Harris looking unelectable, the Democrats are considering the nuclear option. Whispers in Washington suggest Joe Biden’s camp has a plan to find a more popular replacement ahead of the 2024 battle.”

When Harris ran for president, she dropped out before the Iowa caucus, the first contest in the primary. She garnered little support from her home state, California. Harris got called out for hypocrisy during a debate by rival Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, for — among other things — prosecuting marijuana crimes only to make light in an interview about smoking marijuana.

When Harris quit the race, she said: “I’ve taken stock and I’ve looked at this from every angle, and over the last few days I have come to one of the hardest decisions of my life. My campaign for president simply doesn’t have the financial resources we need to continue.”

But the party’s presidential nominee picked her as his running mate. When Harris became vice president, Biden announced her role as a border czar and also asked her to be his point person to push the passage of a proposed “voting rights” law. The border remains a mess, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act was stalled in the Senate. Her staff grumbled off the record, calling these two jobs lose-lose, and even suggested “racism” at play given the growing stature of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. And then there is the cackle. Critics say Harris resorts to this kind of phony, uncomfortable laughter when she struggles to answer questions for which she is not prepared.

All of this raises the question: Why did Biden choose her in the first place?

The answer is simple. The woke/identity Democratic Party could not and would not abide another presidential and vice-presidential ticket with two white males.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/schumer-who-accused-trump-russian-collusion-daniel-greenfield/

“A single, ominous question now hangs over the White House: What could possibly cause President Trump to put the interests of Russia over those of the United States?” Senator Schumer insinuated in 2018.

Why is Schumer putting Russia’s interests ahead of those of the United States by blocking Nord Stream 2 sanctions on Putin’s pet pipeline into Europe?

Schumer, along with a number of other top Democrats, is a beneficiary of campaign contributions from top Democrat fundraiser Vincent Roberti whose lobbying firm was paid over $8.5 million by Nord Stream 2 which is owned by Putin’s state-run Gazprom energy monopoly.

Roberti, a former Dem politician, has maxed out his donations to Schumer and to Rep. Eric Swalwell, who may have been cheating on Fang Fang with Vladimir, and threw in a generous $171,000 to the DCCC, as part of the over $545,000 donated to the Democrat political machine.

The top Dem bundler is reportedly lobbying on “issues related to the U.S. position toward the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, including potential financial sanctions affecting the project.”

Suddenly, Schumer, who was accusing the GOP and Trump of being in bed with Putin, and demanding that they vote on sanctions, was refusing to hold a floor vote on Russia sanctions.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/ilhan-omar-bill-require-state-department-monitor-robert-spencer/

Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Lightfootland) have determined to take action against “Islamophobia,” and their initiative is gaining traction. The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Friday approved their bill calling for a State Department “Islamophobia monitor,” and now it will go to the full House for further consideration. The idea that Pelosi’s House would reject such a bill is virtually inconceivable.

This all started back in October, when Omar and Schakowsky introduced the Combating International Islamophobia Act, which would, according to a press release posted on Omar’s website, “require the State Department to create a Special Envoy for monitoring and combating Islamophobia, and include state-sponsored Islamophobic violence and impunity in the Department’s annual human rights reports.”

This would supposedly “help policymakers better understand the interconnected, global problem of anti-Muslim bigotry. It will also establish a comprehensive strategy for establishing U.S. leadership in combatting Islamophobia worldwide.”

The press release said nothing whatsoever about combating jihad terror or about how suspicion of Islam may be created by the all too common spectacle of Muslims committing acts of violence while screaming “Allahu akbar” and justifying their actions by reference to Islamic texts.

Omar and Schakowsky claimed that “this year, the United States has seen over 500 documented complaints of anti-Muslim hate and bias.” Their link went to another press release, this one from the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), claiming that these documented complaints include “hate crimes, harassment, school bullying, discrimination, hate speech, and anti-mosque incidents.”

“Hate speech”: this means that trivial incidents in which someone who is rude to a Muslim gets counted in as a hate crime, inflating the numbers of those crimes and contributing to the false impression that Muslims are victims of widespread discrimination and harassment in America today. With that low a bar, it’s no surprise that the press release at Omar’s site goes on to note that “in March, the United Nations Human Rights Council cited discrimination and hatred towards Muslims has risen to ‘epidemic proportions.”

Omar claimed that “we are seeing a rise in Islamophobia in nearly every corner of the globe. In my home state of Minnesota, vandals spray-painted hate messages and a Nazi swastika on and near the Moorhead Fargo Islamic Center. These types of incidents are all too common for Muslims in the United States and beyond. As part of our commitment to international religious freedom and human rights, we must recognize Islamophobia and do all we can to eradicate it. That’s why I’m proud to partner with Rep. Jan Schakowsky to create a special envoy to put an end to this bigotry.”

https://openthebooks.us20.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=2cf2a73e6220e59e3c1c4a60c&id=e2b29384a0
OpenTheBooks is on a mission to post every single dollar of public spending online, and in real time.

And government bureaucrats haven’t made our job easy.

After painstaking efforts, we’ve successfully posted 85% of funds taxed and spent by every single substantial unit of government across America.

Today, the Transparency Revolution marches forward!

Here are three highlights from 2021:
We’ve filed 40,500 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
We’ve captured 25 million public employee pension and salary records.
We’ve made significant progress on our lawsuit to open up the California state checkbook. CA is the lone holdout and the third state we have sued. We’ve never lost.

These are the first steps in a much larger battle.

Imagine… how will voters feel when they’re able to see and show corruption under a white-hot spotlight?

No media spin to cover dirty politicians. Just cold, hard facts.

OpenTheBooks is on a war footing and we have huge plans for 2022.

We will publish 500+ investigations (up from 290+ in 2021) with one single goal: to capture government spending and expose to the American public how your tax dollars are being “invested.”

We are working hard.

But right now, we need to raise $25,000 before midnight on December 31st to fuel our progress.

Will you consider joining us as a partner with a gift of $25, $50, or $100?

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-collapse-american-leadership-monica-crowley

It turns out that going from America First to America Last has real world consequences.

President Joe Biden’s rejection of President Donald Trump’s approach to national security and foreign policy has created devastating harm to American interests abroad and our security at home.

Trump’s main goal was to prioritize our interests, thereby leveraging American power to deliver greater global stability, certainty and relative peace. Biden prioritizes multilateralism and globalism, reversing Trump-era gains and introducing increasing chaos, instability, uncertainty and conflict.

President Trump’s critics often complained his America First policies were damaging our alliances and rewarding our enemies. The exact opposite was true: like President Ronald Reagan before him, Trump delivered peace through strength. Biden has diluted American power, and as a result, our allies no longer trust us and our enemies no longer fear us. American weakness always invites the wolves, and the wolves have returned.

Let’s recall where we were just one year ago.

The Trump administration had provided unwavering support to Israel and achieved historic peace agreements in the Middle East, agreements which cultivated economic and other cooperation that, in turn, is delivering enduring peace.
It had successfully pushed back on China’s economic aggression, human rights abuses, and geopolitical adventurism in the South China Sea and Pacific Rim.
It had successfully contained Russia’s expansionism and slowed the progress of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
It had productive diplomacy underway to contain North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
It had withdrawn from the catastrophic Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and was using its extensive sanctions authority to restrict Iran’s nuclear program.
It had negotiated a plan for a managed, conditional exit from Afghanistan that would have secured us a continuing intelligence capability.
It had realigned our relationship with our NATO allies, holding them to their promises of the alliance.
It had successfully negotiated fairer, more reciprocal trade deals with China, Canada, Mexico, South Korea and Japan, among others.
It had begun to modernize and rebuild our military, left hollowed out by the Obama-Biden administration.
It had largely solved the immigration issue through a more secure border and commonsense diplomatic agreements.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Being accountable for one’s actions and taking responsibility are fading qualities in our “woke” age. In the mid 1960s, on a snowy street in New Hampshire after a day’s skiing, my father, driving home, knocked a woman down, sending her to the hospital. The police told him it was not his fault. Nevertheless, he assumed responsibility, visiting her regularly until she recovered and was released. Such chivalry no longer exists. Like merit, hard work and objective truth, gallantry and graciousness are now, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote in the December issue of The Spectator, “manifestations of heredity and ‘whiteness,’” – therefore to be condemned.

“Victory has a thousand fathers, while failure is an orphan,” is an old quote used by President Kennedy. Today’s politicians no longer take blame for policies gone wrong. Instead, they follow advice Napoleon is alleged to have given: “Never retreat, never retract, never admit a mistake.” When the January 6 march on the Capitol turned disastrous, Donald Trump never admitted that his words that afternoon helped provoke it. But neither has Hillary Clinton accepted blame for the Steel dossier, which was at the heart of the $40 million (taxpayer money) discredited Mueller investigation. Governor Andrew Cuomo placed COVID-19 infected patients in nursing homes, leading to a plethora of unnecessary deaths. Has he expressed remorse or assumed responsibility? No. Has he expressed sorrow for abusing women who worked in his office? No. “Oh yes, the past can hurt,” says the shaman Rafiki in The Lion King, “but you can either run from it or learn from it.” Politicians choose to run from their past, not learn from it.

Dr. Anthony Fauci belittles those who disagree with him by claiming an attack on him is an attack on science. Yet the science about COVID-19 has changed as more has been learned. But his arrogance forbids any display of humility, or admission of personal responsibility regarding helping to fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (Dr. Fauci’s denial gained two Pinocchio’s from left-leaning The Washington Post.) The recent rise in energy prices, according to Senator Elizabeth Warren, is due to oil and gas producers “putting their massive profits, share prices and dividends…ahead of Americans.” Apparently higher prices have nothing to do with restrictions on drilling and cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline extension, policies which the Massachusetts Senator supports. In a recent article in The Epoch Times, Victor Davis Hanson wrote, regarding the disastrous flight from Afghanistan: “Few, if any, high-ranking officers have yet taken responsibility – much less resigned – for the worst military fiasco in the past half century.” 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/11/civilizational-suicide-not-omicron-is-killing-us/

Last week in this space, I included a few words about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s remarkable new book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. I also included a link to Kennedy’s appearance on “Tucker Carlson Today.” 

It was a remarkable exchange and I commend both the book and the interview to your attention. I disagree with Kennedy about various things, including the efficacy of vaccines in general, but his assessment of the highest-paid employee of the federal government, Anthony Fauci, is worth the price of admission. 

As I remarked a couple of weeks ago, I thought I had done writing about COVID. Surely, I thought, the hysteria is on the wane. Most people are rational. They know that the flimsy porous masks you see everywhere are useless tokens of conformity. They understand that the disease is serious for only a tiny part of the population. They also know staying home and practicing “social distancing” has its own liabilities, not least of which is a diminution in the potency of one’s immune response.

Unfortunately, the people making the rules are not “most people.” They are bureaucrats being advised by public health “experts” like Anthony Fauci who has demonstrated ostentatious incompetence at least since the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. When news of the so-called Omicron variant first surfaced a few weeks back, I assumed the fact that doctors first described it as very contagious but also with symptoms that were “very mild,” meant the “experts” would let us get on with our lives.

Fat chance. It’s not just the old Rahm Emanuel wheeze of never letting a crisis go to waste. It’s also a matter of fabricating crises where none exist because emergencies justify emergency powers, and emergency powers mean that you can push ahead with your agenda on all fronts using the fake crisis as justification for bending or discarding the rules. 

So, even as Fauci warns that it is a matter of “when not if” the definition of “fully vaccinated” will change to include at least one who-knows-how-many booster shots, the CEO of Pfizer, dollar signs in his eyes, has already said that a fourth jab may be needed “sooner than expected” because of the Omicron variant.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/09/morning-greatness-twelve-cities-set-murder-records-for-2021/

Welcome to Murderville, USA. Twelve cities have already set records for the number of murders in 2021 and the year isn’t even over yet. What is going on here?

“Nobody’s getting arrested anymore,” Robert Boyce, retired chief of detectives for the New York Police Department said. “People are getting picked up for gun possession and they’re just let out over and over again.” Note: the most vicious anti-gun cities are not prosecuting gun violence. Chew on that.

ABC News reports: “The FBI crime data shows that the number of arrests nationwide plummeted 24% in 2020, from the more than 10 million arrests made in 2019. The number of 2020 arrests — 7.63 million — is the lowest in 25 years, according to the data. FBI crime data is not yet available for 2021.”

Social justice racketeers have pressured cities to cut their police forces. Soros prosecutors are declining to charge criminals for their crimes. Bail has been abolished in some places and violent criminals go free before their trial to continue their crime sprees. Police are retiring and getting out of the business and the ones who remain are terrified to the point that they do not engage with perpetrators lest they become the next internet video star. Many of these SJW politicians have historically complained there there are too many criminals in jail and advocated accordingly. Now we have fewer criminals in jail and more criminals walking the streets. Victory?

Get away from these cities and go live somewhere that has not abolished law and order.