RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17831/president-advisors

Published reports reveal that John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff and senior counselor to Barack Obama, has sent a memo to every Democratic Congressman reminding them the party “must unite and act together” to pass Biden’s “infrastructure” agenda.

Podesta, according to an email released from Wikileaks, was also previously approached by an advisor to Dominion Voting Systems who was “offering ‘anything’ that might defeat Trump.” What was the advisor to the voting machines company offering?

Podesta’s older brother, Tony, was a long time mega Democratic lobbyist and fund raiser. His lobbying career has been resurrected with a New York Times report that the embattled Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei has hired Podesta. Huawei was identified as a national security threat by the Trump administration and faces federal charges of racketeering and conspiring to steal trade secrets from American companies. One supposes that Podesta’s retainer is in dollars and requires him to promote the interests of a company alleged to be an extension of the Chinese government.

Given Biden’s curious response to ABC News, one could legitimately ask, just whose national policy are we actually pursuing? The president’s or his advisors?

Henry the VIII had Thomas Cromwell as his Privy Counselor with Cromwell playing a vital role in the King’s personal, domestic, and international relationships.

Napoleon depended on Talleyrand as his Grand Chamberlain, a master diplomat who managed to serve King Louis XVI, the leaders of the French Revolution, and then Napoleon.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/03/our-woke-national-icons/

As we watch events unfold in 2021, obvious questions about the fitness of our national leaders present themselves. Who are these new woke national icons and how did they come to lord it over the rest of us? Here are some observations by way of preliminary explanation.

The Strategist

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley conceded to Congress last week that he has been an anonymous source to controversial “inside” progressive muckrakers detailing the supposed dysfunctions of the prior administration. He strangely characterizes such anonymous, self-serving, behind-the-scenes leaking as some sort of public-service transparency. Evidently, it is now a part of the chairman’s duties to serve the media.

Among the many “background” quotes that Milley provided to meet his journalistic obligations were his various comparisons of his commander-in-chief to Nazis—a violation of Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. He reportedly offered further allegations to journalists that news outlets like the Epoch Times and Newsmax were “terrorist” organizations. When pressed on such details the usually punctilious Milley shrugs, in the fashion of James Comey’s under-oath testimonies, that he does “not recall” such specifics.  Such is the honor of the nation’s most visible military officer.

Although by statute Milley lacks operational command, he admittedly has intervened in the operational protocols concerning the use of nuclear weapons. At one point, after a conversation with, and on the apparent prompting of, HouseSpeaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), he redirected normal decision-making channels concerning the potential use of nuclear weapons through his own person. That is forbidden by law—despite what his beltway apologists have pleaded.

More interestingly, though, Milley took it upon himself to call up the major military leaders of Communist China, and to apprise them that (in his opinion) the United States was in crisis (“messy”). No worries, though: the freelancing Milley assured the People’s Liberation Army heads that they should not worry about any preemptive attack or aggression, since Milley himself apparently was in de facto charge of such strategic decision-making and would warn them in advance if his country seemed dangerously aggressive. Thus far in the imbroglio, the Pentagon and the retired military apparently seem comfortable with such a radically new role for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Milley ignored that Trump was the first president in memory who did not initiate a major new military engagement. And when pressed under oath, Milley himself later confessed that he did not think Trump was likely to start a war against anyone—which raises the question of why he even made such a peremptory call to our adversaries? Much of what Milley has testified to under oath before Congress is flatly contradicted by transcripts of his phone call with Pelosi, is in utter conflict with statements made by President Biden and the State Department and cannot be reconciled with his own frequent prior disclosures to journalists.

In sum, America’s highest-ranking honorific military officer has violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice, has violated the law concerning his own advisory role as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and has either serially not told the truth, or assumes that Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, several journalists (and various earlier incarnations of himself) are all not telling the truth.

Milley has set a new precedent for the leadership of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: it is now permissible to be overtly political, to leak confidential conversations to progressive book-writing journalists, to freelance and warn likely enemies if and when the U.S. military might take action against them, and to pick and choose when to exercise (illegally) operational command, and when (legally) to refrain, or at least to remain “only” an advisor, when culpability for a disaster, like the one in Afghanistan, is determined.

Historians will later ponder why this officer has not resigned and what his continued tenure says about the status of the current U.S. military.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/trust-fauci-and-bureaucrats-joseph-hippolito/

Today’s controversy surrounding COVID-19 vaccines might seem unprecedented. But nearly four decades ago, the now-famous doctor encouraging them advocated an ineffective, dangerous medication for a far deadlier disease — and got away with it.

During the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic ravaged the world and long before Dr. Anthony Fauci became a household name, he promoted AZT as a treatment for HIV in his role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Doctors once used AZT in cancer chemotherapy. But AZT not only failed to treat HIV. It made patients sicker.

The way that medical, pharmaceutical and political bureaucracies handled that crisis resembles the way they handle COVID-19. More importantly, both episodes suggest possible conflicts of interest among those charged with protecting public health.

Spin Magazine’s Celia Farber exposed the AZT debacle in her 1989 article, “Sins of Omission.” Farber described how the federal government, corporate media and a major pharmaceutical firm responded to public panic about AIDS by approving AZT and promoting it even after it proved to be deadly.

Doctors withdrew AZT as a cancer treatment because it destroys cells indiscriminately. But Burroughs Wellcome submitted it under an anonymous description to the National Cancer Institute in 1987, and AZT killed HIV in laboratory conditions. However, doctors at the Food and Drug Administration expressed extreme reluctance to approve AZT.

“We do not know what will happen a year from now,” said Dr. Itzhak Brook, the panel’s chairman. “The data is just too premature, and the statistics are not really well done. The drug could actually be detrimental.”

Despite Burroughs Wellcome’s promise to provide updated data every two years — a promise the firm never kept — and to limit AZT to emergency use for extremely ill patients, the panel considered rejecting the drug. Then FDA bureaucrats got involved.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/free-hero-locked-telling-truth-about-afghanistan-daniel-greenfield/

Who will pay the price for Afghanistan?

Not Secretary of Defense Austin, General Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not General McKenzie, who oversaw the disastrous retreat, or any of Biden’s other brass.

Instead the only man who has been locked up for the defeat in Afghanistan is a Marine Corps Lt. Colonel who made a video calling for accountability from the military leadership.

Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller committed the ultimate crime, he put his career on the line and called for the truth after the Kabul airport suicide bombing. Biden’s brass smeared him as crazy, they relieved him of duty, they threatened him, called him a spy, and locked him up. The Pentagon careerists are desperately terrified of a brave man who is willing to put everything on the line.

Our petition at the David Horowitz Freedom Center calls for action to free Scheller who is “being held as a political prisoner for speaking the truth about the U.S. military’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.” The only man behind bars over Afghanistan is there for telling the truth.

It all began over a month ago when he posted a video declaring, “I have been fighting for 17 years. I am willing to throw it all away to say to my senior leaders, I demand accountability.”

The original video has since been seen 1.5 million times on Facebook and LinkedIn.

The cronies of Biden’s brass accused Scheller of being mentally unstable. And then, just in time for congressional hearings on the defeat in Afghanistan, they tried to silence him.

Scheller, not Milley or McKenzie, was relieved of duty. He was ordered to “refrain from posting any and all material, in any form without exception, to any social media” and “prohibited from communicating through third parties or proxies.”

Milley had done interviews for anti-Trump books and woke officers had bashed Republicans and promoted Black Lives Matter on Facebook and Twitter. But only Scheller was silenced.

Except that Scheller chose to go to jail instead.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/illegal_aliens_harass_and_illegally_film_sen_kyrsten_sinema.html

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has this crazy idea that she is responsible to all of her constituents in Arizona, that a nation needs to border integrity and security (and that’s despite her being pro-immigration), and that fiscal insanity will destroy the country she represents. Because of those beliefs, despite most of her social and political stances coming from the left, she’s now a heretic to her leftists, and leftists, like all fanatics, despise heretics. That explains why leftists followed her into the bathroom and filmed her there, conduct that is a profound privacy violation, very threatening and, in Arizona, illegal.

I wrote here about how Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, despite rising politically through the left, has a strong grain of common sense running through her, something that’s given her more spine than a lot of RINOs I can name. (Too many Republicans in Congress are nothing more than the “moderate” branch of the Democrat party.) Sinema’s willingness to temper her politics with common sense is apparently making her anathema for the radicals in her own party.

And that’s how we end up with a video of amnesty activists chasing Sinema into the bathroom at Arizona State University where she was teaching a class:

And am I the only one wondering why someone who claims to have been in America since she was three sounds as if she were raised in Mexico until last year? This is not a young woman who is assimilating to America, even if she’s been here as long as she claims to have been. In a sane world, having identified herself as someone here illegally, she’d immediately be deported to rejoin her grieving grandmother. Moreover, if this woman wants to blame someone for her illegal status, she’d better look to her parents.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/are_the_russia_hoaxs_big_fish_finally_in_john_durhams_crosshairs.html

Of the many positions Kash Patel held during Trump’s presidency, his most important was as an aide to Devin Nunes when the latter worked doggedly to reveal that the Democrats’ Russiagate charges were a hoax coming from the Democrat party—specifically, from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Given Patel’s insider’s knowledge of events, it means something when he appears on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox show on Sunday mornings and says that he believes that Special Prosecutor John Durham is on the verge of issuing some serious indictments against big players in the Russia hoax.

Patel’s predictions about Durham are the first thing that Bartiromo elicits from him during the interview:

RealClearPolitics has helpfully provided a transcript of the interview:

MARIA BARTIROMO: When do you believe the FBI figured out that all of this was just one political campaign trying to take down another?

KASH PATEL: I think they knew right away.

And the documents that we put out in the Nunes investigation, the Nunes memo and the HPSCI report on Russian active measures show that the FBI knew right away, because their FISA abuse process, now that declassification process is complete, and your viewers can read it, that the FBI knew the information was fraudulent.

They knew the credibility problems with Christopher Steele. And they knew the DNC, through Fusion GPS and Perkins Coie, were piping in tens of millions of dollars into the machine, so that they could get up a FISA warrant on President Trump.

So, I think they knew right away, which is why I think…

BARTIROMO: Wow.

https://dailycaller.com/2021/10/01/democratic-party-pelosi-sinema-biden-manchin-leaks-name-calling-infrastructure-spending-bill/

Chaos has erupted within the Democratic Party after a member of Congress leaked the contents of a caucus meeting Friday as moderate and left-wing members work toward passing an infrastructure bill and a social spending package.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi initially promised a group of moderates, led by New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, that she would hold a vote for the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) on Thursday. However, Pelosi delayed the vote after failing to reach an agreement with left-wing members of her party, who will not vote for the package unless the Senate passes the as-yet unwritten Build Back Better Act through the reconciliation process.

House Democratic leaders will confiscate cell phones from members ahead of a Friday afternoon full caucus meeting with President Joe Biden, after one member leaked the entire contents of Friday morning’s full caucus meeting to Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/04/the-research-that-shows-how-destructive-the-biden-spending-will-be/

It’s truly frightening how obsessed the Democrats are with spending nearly $5 trillion on infrastructure and social programs. They’re behaving as if our republic would buckle and collapse if their agenda isn’t passed. The real danger, though, are their ideas, which are economic IEDs.

More than 20 years ago, UCLA professors Lee Ohanian and Harold Cole, now a University of Pennsylvania professor, produced a report that showed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies not only didn’t end the Great Depression, they extended the misery by seven years. Simply put, there was too much government intervention in the economy.

FDR’s policies and those of President Joe Biden and the Democrats are not entirely analogous. Ohanian and Cole focused “primarily on the impact of Roosevelt’s early policies that allowed for monopolies and too much union power to increase prices and salaries.” The Democrats’ bills are mostly, but not exclusively, about spending other people’s money.

Another difference: We are not in a depression. The country is recovering from a downturn caused by officials foolishly locking down the economy, which they told us was necessary to beat the pandemic.

However, we can expect at best a sclerotic economy, and depression-like conditions, if the Biden bills become law. The unbridled spending will exacerbate the inflation that’s disrupting the U.S. economy as well as compound the supply chain problems that are blowing “a stagflationary wind through the global economy.”

Citadel professor of ethics and free enterprise leadership Richard Ebeling calls “the fiscal mindset of those in the White House and in Congress who are proposing new federal budgetary expenditure,” and tax hikes “in the trillions of dollars,” a “fantasy land of financial irrationality.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/09/28/bidens-vax-mandate-to-be-enforced-by-fining-companies-70000-to-700000/?sh=1e5a568a1c0d

President Joe Biden didn’t just announce a Covid-19 vaccine mandate on companies employing 100 or more people, he plans to enforce it.

On Saturday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House quietly tucked an enforcement mechanism into their $3.5 trillion “reconciliation” bill, passed it out of the Budget Committee, and sent it to the House floor.

Buried on page 168 of the House Democrats’ 2,465-page mega bill is a tenfold increase in fines for employers that “willfully,” “repeatedly,” or even seriously violate a section of labor law that deals with hazards, death, or serious physical harm to their employees.

The increased fines on employers could run as high as $70,000 for serious infractions, and $700,000 for willful or repeated violations—almost three-quarters of a million dollars for each fine. If enacted into law, vax enforcement could bankrupt non-compliant companies even more quickly than the $14,000 OSHA fine anticipated under Biden’s announced mandate.

The Biden Administration has already started implementing its vaccine mandate enforcement blueprint:

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) set precedent this summer and published an emergency Covid-19 rule in the Federal Register taking jurisdiction over and providing justification for Covid-19 being a workplace hazard for healthcare employment.
Early in September, Biden announced his 100-or-more employee Covid-19 vaccine mandate and tasked OSHA with drafting an enforcement rule to exert emergency vaccine compliance authority over companies with 100 or more employees.
The legislative provision that passed the Budget Committee raises the OSHA fines for non-compliance 10 times higher – and up to $700,000 for each “willful” or “repeated” violation. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not announced when the House will vote on the reconciliation bill that includes the new OSHA fines.
If the legislation is enacted, OSHA could levy draconian fines to enforce Biden’s vaccine mandate, a move that could rapidly bankrupt non-compliant companies. The Biden mandate affects employers collectively employing an estimated 80 million workers.