RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/irs-data-proves-trump-tax-cuts-benefited-middle-working-class-americans-most/ar-AARsJrs?li=BBnb7Kz

President Biden and congressional Democrats’ Build Back Better (BBB) Act is now in the hands of the Senate. That legislative body’s 50-50 partisan split will undoubtedly make the bill’s passage difficult.

In order for BBB to become law, Democratic Senate leadership will need to convince moderates such as Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) that the legislation’s $2.4 trillion price tag can be offset by expanding the IRS and its enforcement efforts while imposing substantial tax reform measures.

Congressional Democrats have argued that one of the best ways to pay for the legislation is to raise taxes on wealthy households, which, according to many on the left, have benefited disproportionately and unfairly from the 2017 tax reform law passed by Republicans and signed by former President Trump. The latest data, however, proves that this claim is pure mythology.

Income data published by the IRS clearly show that on average all income brackets benefited substantially from the Republicans’ tax reform law, with the biggest beneficiaries being working and middle-income filers, not the top 1 percent, as so many Democrats have argued.

A careful analysis of the IRS tax data, one that includes the effects of tax credits and other reforms to the tax code, shows that filers with an adjusted gross income (AGI) of $15,000 to $50,000 enjoyed an average tax cut of 16 percent to 26 percent in 2018, the first year Republicans’ Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went into effect and the most recent year for which data is available.

Filers who earned $50,000 to $100,000 received a tax break of about 15 percent to 17 percent, and those earning $100,000 to $500,000 in adjusted gross income saw their personal income taxes cut by around 11 percent to 13 percent.

By comparison, no income group with an AGI of at least $500,000 received an average tax cut exceeding 9 percent, and the average tax cut for brackets starting at $1 million was less than 6 percent. (For more detailed data, see my table published here.)

That means most middle-income and working-class earners enjoyed a tax cut that was at least double the size of tax cuts received by households earning $1 million or more.

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/584323-epidemic-of-smash-and-grab-crime-is-definitely-man-made

Crime is raging across the country, from violent attacks to brazen shoplifting to mob “smash and grab” attacks. The White House this week had a simple answer for the cause of this rising lawlessness: It was not “defund the police” efforts, or more restrictive policies for police and prosecutors. It was the familiar scourge cited in debates ranging from infrastructure to supply chains to tax increases — the pandemic.

The pandemic now seems to have reached the mythic levels of gods who once were blamed for everything that went wrong in life. Africans had Anansi the Spider, while the Norse had the trickster Loki. Both were known to assume different identities to wreak disorder or steal precious things.

For politicians, it is useful to have a lurking Loki to explain that social problems are not really of their making, the result of their failures. The Loki factor was evident in the press conference this week when Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked about the rising lawlessness seen in major cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles: “Does the president still think that crime is up because of the pandemic?” White House press secretary Jen Psaki replied that “many people have conveyed that.”

Doocy persisted: “So when a huge group of criminals organizes themselves and they want to go loot a store — a CVS, a Nordstrom, a Home Depot until the shelves are clean — do you think that’s because of the pandemic?” Psaki replied: “I think a root cause in a lot of communities is the pandemic, yes.”

That damned Loki.

Whole stores have been ransacked by gangs, and the crime is sweeping large and small businesses alike. At the same time, shoplifting has reached such high levels in cities like San Francisco that stores like Walgreens are closing up due to the losses.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/russia-hoax-whitewash-era-begins-2.php

The Clinton presidential campaign’s fabrication of the Russia hoax is the dirtiest trick in American political history. Beginning with Glenn Simpson/Fusion GPS and the Perkins Coie law firm, it enlisted co-conspirators in the Obama Department of Justice, the FBI, and the mainstream media. The principals are not only still at large, they have achieved high office, wealth, riches, and Pulitzer Prizes. They will never be brought to justice. They won’t even break a sweat.

We were never meant to be clued in. As the veil of the fraud was pierced by Rep. Devin Nunes and others including, most recently, John Durham, we now have a good handle on the con. It is almost unbelievable. It is also an inexhaustibly rich subject.

Matt Taibbi took up the role of the mainstream media at his TK News site in “The Russiagate Whitewash Era Begins” (mostly behind his subscription paywall, but also available in the form of a YouTube video and podcast).

To Taibbi’s assessment we can now add Aaron Maté’s RCP column “Five Trump-Russia ‘Collusion’ Corrections We Need From the Media Now — Just for Starters.” In addition to citing a few of the egregiously ludicrous stories that we paused over at the time, the column takes a look back at some of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Russia hoax journalism of the New York Times and the Washington Post:

In this article, RealClearInvestigations has collected five instances of stories containing false or misleading claims, and thereby due for retraction or correction, that were either among the Post and Times’ Pulitzer-winning entries, or other work of reporters who shared that prize. Significantly, this analysis is not based on newly discovered information, but documents and other material long in the public domain. Remarkably, some of the material that should spark corrections has instead been held up by the Post and Times as vindication of their work.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/to-deny-the-lab-leak-covid-theory?token=e

That COVID-19 infected humanity due to a zoonotic leap from a “wet market” in Wuhan — rather than a leak from a lab in the same Chinese city — was declared unquestionable truth at the start of the pandemic. For a full year, anyone dissenting from this narrative was deemed so irresponsible that they were banned from large social media platforms, accused of spreading “disinformation.” No debate about COVID’s origins was permitted. It had been settled by The Science™. Every rational person who believed in science, by definition, immediately accepted at the start of the pandemic that COVID made a natural leap from bats or pangolins; that it may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan which just so happens to gather, study and manipulate novel coronaviruses in bats was officially declared a deranged conspiracy theory.

The reason this consensus was so quickly consecrated was that a group of more than two dozen scientists published a letter in the prestigious science journal Lancet in February, 2020 — while very little was known about SARS-CoV-2 — didactically declaring “that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The possibility that COVID leaked from the Wuhan lab was dismissed as a “conspiracy theory,” the by-product of “rumours and misinformation” which, they strongly implied, was an unfair and possibly racist attack on “the science and health professionals of China.”

https://www.aol.com/news/colorado-supermarket-shooting-suspect-incompetent-204105432-094803629.html

DENVER (AP) — A judge ruled Friday that a man charged with killing 10 people at a Colorado supermarket earlier this year is mentally incompetent to stand trial and ordered him to be treated at the state mental hospital to see if he can be made well enough to face prosecution.

Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 22, is accused of opening fire at a busy King Soopers in the college town of Boulder in March, killing a police officer, shoppers and several store employees. 

Four doctors have now determined that Alissa is not mentally competent to participate in court proceedings, and he has “deteriorated” over the past couple of months while in jail, District Attorney Michael Dougherty said. Given the consensus, Dougherty requested that Judge Ingrid Bakke send Alissa to the state mental hospital in hopes that medication and treatment will enable him to become competent under the law — able to understand legal proceedings and work with his lawyers to defend himself.

Dougherty did not disclose why the experts determined Alissa is not competent, and the report explaining the evaluation’s finding is not available to the public, only to the lawyers and judge. Alissa’s attorney, Kathryn Herold, said Friday her client has a “serious” mental illness but did not provide details. She also agreed he should be sent to the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/04/2021-was-the-year-of-vindication-for-trump/

The year could not have started any worse for former President Trump. Thousands of his supporters from all over the country, of all different races and religions gathered at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., to show their support for a president who for four years fought for the forgotten men and women of this country.

They were proud of his many accomplishments.

Even with four years of lies and conspiracy theories about Russian collusion, and a bogus quid pro quo charge involving the president of Ukraine that led to an embarrassing impeachment, Trump still managed to cut taxes, reduce regulations, and preside over the highest labor force participation rate ever recorded in U.S. history, with 157 million Americans working—until the Chinese coronavirus decimated our economy.

Although the Left painted Trump as a sexist and a racist, he started a $50 million initiative to help create employment opportunities for women, offered new mothers the first ever paid family leave plan, and signed a bill that would permanently provide more than $250 million annually to historically black colleges and universities.

Trump rebuilt our military, increased national defense spending, eliminated the ISIS caliphate, negotiated peace treaties in the Middle East, secured our southern border by beginning construction of a wall and through robust law enforcement. He renegotiated unfair trade agreements, stood up to China, and delivered three vaccines and therapeutics during a once-in-a-century pandemic.

He fought for the factory workers in Indiana, the farmers in Michigan, the ranchers in Texas, the truckers in Pennsylvania, the military who kept the peace, and the police officers who kept us safe.

But in the blink of an eye, the real estate magnate-turned-politician was shunted back to Mar-a-Lago after supposedly losing the first ever mail-in ballot election to a 77-year-old feeble and often confused man who campaigned almost exclusively from his basement on the lie that he would restore our national unity. 

The ruling class told us we weren’t allowed to question the outcome of the most bizarre and corrupt election in history, one in which​ tens of millions of ballots were mailed out, without proper safeguards in place to ensure that the identity of the voter could be verified, and where several Democratic secretaries of state illegally changed election laws in defiance of state legislators.

Trump’s 75 million supporters were rightfully outraged, as they saw his election night lead slip away in the wee hours of the morning, while being labeled rubes and conspiracy theorists by the ruling class.

Before Trump had even finished speaking on January 6, and told his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard, hundreds of people had already stormed the Capitol building as a riot ensued.

No one who illegally trespassed should be excused from breaking the law. But contrary to false media reports, the only two people who were killed on that day were two unarmed female Trump supporters, Ashli Babbitt and Rosanne Boyland. Most consumers of the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC are probably unaware of that fact, and probably still believe that Officer Brian Sicknick was killed at the rally by deranged QAnon followers.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/04/oh-oh-omicron/

Last week, I dusted off my Chinese-flu soapbox and said a word or two about (cue the scary music) the Omicron variant. It sounds like the title of a Robert Ludlum novel, doesn’t it? A friend told me about a parlor game that the journalist Christopher Hitchens and his pals used to play in which the object was to contrive names for Shakespeare’s plays that sounded like the title of a Ludlum novel. Hamlet was “The Elsinore Conundrum.” I am sorry that Hitch is not still with us to try his hand at the Omicron variant. 

So far, I have to say, it’s been pretty much of a dud—unless, that is, you’re the stock market, which has taken a beating this last week or so, in part because of this new kid on the medical block (there is also that much more toxic financial emergency, the Biden Administration, but that’s for another day). The new variant has also been a godsend for scolds, nags, bureaucrats, and meddlesome so-called public health officials nannies who are just itching for another excuse to lock down your world, introduce new travel restrictions, and impose new testing protocols. 

How will it all play out? TSTS—Too Soon to Say, but I suspect this sequel is going to be a flop at the box office. For one thing, although only recently named, there is abundant evidence that Omicron has been around for months. If it had been previously unnamed, that is perhaps because it is no big deal. The South African doctor who first identified the strain noted that while the virus was possibly more contagious than versions named for letters earlier in the Greek alphabet, symptoms tended to be mild, indeed “very mild.” A typical news report notes that “patients mostly suffered from mild muscle aches, scratchy throat and dry cough.” (Remember colds? Remember the flu?) 

So why the panic? Partly, it is because panic is an antidote to boredom. People are heavily bored. Panic also licenses the people who want to run your life to, well, run your life. “Most Omicron cases so far have been mild,” runs one headline, “but experts say it will take weeks to understand how severe the variant can be.” Ah, “experts”! What would we do without them? 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/04/the-omg-variant-and-the-wests-disgraceful-response/

South Africa has practiced and modeled good science and good sense in response to the last COVID panic. Dr. Angelique Coetzee (pronounced koot-see-a) was among the first to alert South African epidemiologists to what has now been named the Omicron variant of COVID-19. Or, as dubbed here, the “OMG! variant.” 

A calm clinician, Coetzee had deduced that what she was seeing in her patients—and successfully treating—was a heretofore unseen COVID variant with attendant mild disease. 

South Africa’s skilled and responsible epidemiologists were quickly alerted and genetic sequencing commenced. And, voilà: A mutation! Also a completely unremarkable occurrence in the annals and course of epidemics. As molecular evolution and virology tell us, viruses—clever little RNA strands that they are—mutate during disease outbreaks without significant impact on the outbreak. 

By the good doctor’s summation, “I’ve seen nothing in this variant that warrants Britain’s extreme response to it.” Ditto that of the rest of the world. 

Coetzee and her colleagues were the ones encountering and treating Omicron. But the cretins at the helm of the international COVID cartel, based in Washington, D.C., had all the answers. Nobody was going to cramp their style, not least a stoic, calm, rational clinician in the thick of it. Ethics and efficacy be damned, travel to and from a poor nation, South Africa, was forthwith suspended. After all, unlike “the world’s factory,” China—free to spread disease with impunity—poor nations are incapable of retaliating.

So, while clinicians on the ground met Omicron with equanimity, Western politicians working the pandemic and armed with not much more than ignorance sprung into Brownian motion. 

Besides, aside from being eminently reasonable and calm, the South Africans were sharing a tidbit the television doctors and the pandemic’s political manhandlers were not keen to share: There were fully vaccinated people among “the new omicron variant sequenced in 77 cases.” 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/the_census_bureau_released_appalling_information_about_the_american_family.html

The nuclear family has always been the backbone of American liberty and prosperity. However, the latest information from the Census Bureau shows that the nuclear family, if not dead, is on life support. Only the smallest fraction of American children are being raised in traditional two-parent households.

Leftists have been waging relentless war on the nuclear family for decades in ways big and small. The big ways began in the 1960s with women’s liberation and no-fault divorce. While both of those may have relieved women from desperately bad marriages and dead-end jobs, they also served to take women out of their role as homemaker and the child’s primary teacher, often transferring those roles to immigrant women when the children were small and public schools when the children were older.

The welfare state also struck a blow at the nuclear family. Many women will acknowledge that, even if they like or love men, the latter aren’t always easy to live with, a problem that can go far beyond leaving up the toilet seat. Having a regular “paycheck” without the man attached can be a real blessing.

Even worse, welfare is structured so that having a father in the family can depress the woman’s income, and so that, the more children a woman has out of wedlock, the more money she gets. This isn’t money that would sustain the middle-class comforts many of us like but, as I happen to know from acquaintances, not everyone wants the middle-class lifestyle. Many people just want a check that will pay for rudimentary shelter, food, and drugs.