RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/federal-court-blocks-biden-vaccine-mandate-lloyd-billingsley/

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Saturday blocked a Biden vaccine mandate that would have forced private companies with more than 100 employees to get workers vaccinated, submit to weekly tests, or face steep fines. 

Due to start on January 4 and affecting more than 80 million workers, the mandate was to be enforced through the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The appeal court cited “grave statutory and constitutional issues” with the Biden plan, which drew lawsuits from, among others, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton.

“WE WON,” Paxton tweeted after Saturday’s ruling. “The fight is not over and I will never stop resisting this Admin’s unconstitutional overreach!” Paxton told reporters the ruling “gives people hope that they aren’t going to lose their jobs and the president isn’t going to be able to ruin people’s careers and make their lives more difficult.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted. “Emergency hearings will take place soon. We will have our day in court to strike down Biden’s unconstitutional abuse of authority.”

A full 26 states had filed suit against the Biden mandate. Louisiana attorney general Jeff Landry called it “unlawful overreach,” adding that the administration “will not impose medical procedures on the American people without the checks and balances afforded by our Constitution.” For West Virginia attorney general Patrick Morrisey the ruling was “good news” and “Biden’s vaccine mandates are unlawful, unconstitutional and just wrong!”

Companies opposing the Biden mandate included the Daily Wire news website. As co-founder and  CEO Jeremy Boreing explained, “forcing Americans to choose between their livelihoods and their freedom is a grotesque abuse of power and we won’t be a party to it. We will not incur the cost of implementing this testing regime. We will not incur the liability of inserting ourselves into the private health decisions and information of our employees. Our company was founded to stand against tyranny, and we will.”

Biden charged that “the virus will not go away by itself, or because we wish it away. We have to act.” It had apparently escaped the Delaware Democrat’s notice that the vaccines currently being imposed have not exactly been trouble-free. For example, Finland, Sweden and Norway have paused the use of the Moderna vaccine, citing a risk of myocarditis.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/bidens_poll_numbers_continue_to_collapse.html

Thanks to relentless mainstream media propaganda, Joe Biden entered the Oval office with very good poll numbers. Despite the contentious campaign season and the even more contentious election, Americans were willing to give Biden the benefit of the doubt, with 57% of them expressing approval for him in the first weeks of his presidency. Since then, he’s had nowhere to go but down. The latest poll puts his approval at 38% and the slide shows no signs of stopping.

The most recent presidential approval poll comes from USA TODAY/Suffolk University and was taken between Wednesday and Friday last week. That means it caught the responses to the elections on Tuesday, including the way Virginia, which easily gave its Electoral College votes to Biden in 2020, has now turned red, with a Republican Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and State House.

USA TODAY sums up the most recent poll results:

A year before the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans hold a clear lead on the congressional ballot as President Joe Biden’s approval rating sinks to a new low of 38%.

A USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, taken Wednesday through Friday, found that Biden’s support cratered among the independent voters who delivered his margin of victory over President Donald Trump one year ago.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/rage-against-reality-bruce-bawer/

The other day, for the first time since the pandemic began, I was in a properly jam-packed watering hole. The establishment in question was my old Oslo hangout, a largish and rather legendary gay bar called London Pub. I was alone – in fact I seemed to be the only person who was alone in the whole place – and so I just sat there with my $12 glass of wine (welcome to Norway!) and, after a year and a half of living mostly like a hermit, took in the glorious sight of fellow human beings, maskless, enjoying one another’s company.

The patrons could hardly have been more varied, ranging from twenty-somethings to octogenarians, from tiny Asians to doorway-tall Norwegians, from rail-thin to massively obese. The attire was all over the place, from black tie to Lederhosen (Oktoberfest was underway), and there were more blacks than there would have been ten years ago, when I last lived in Oslo. And there was, as always, a sprinkling of women – even, for the first time in my experience, among the staff.

And what struck me was how mellow it all was. There was no tension in the air. Everybody was having a good time together.

My friend Frank, a straight American who used to tend bar at London Pub, wrote on Facebook just the other day that it’s better to work in a gay bar than a straight bar, because you never have to break up fights. A bit of an exaggeration, maybe – but just a bit.

I’ve always opposed the term “gay community,” because it rarely feels like a community. Some gay bars of my acquaintance have guys working the door who turn away the old and the unlovely.

https://jonathanturley.org/2021/11/07/fbi-raids-project-veritas-over-a-missing-biden-diary/

There is a curious story out this weekend on reported FBI raids of writers or associates of Project Veritas, the conservative investigative journalism outfit. Project Veritas has been described variously as “Gonzo” or “guerilla” journalism and some insist it is more of a political than a press organization. However, it fits the definition of journalism, in my view, and that makes the raids troubling. All the more troubling is the cause: the missing diary of President Biden’s daughter Ashley. [Update: The FBI reportedly also raided O’Keefe’s home]

The New York Times reported that the FBI searched two locations in New York in search of the “stolen” diary that went missing days before the 2020 presidential election. Project founder James O’Keefe questioned how the Times received the story within an hour of the first raid.

O’Keefe says that the organization actually received a tip that the diary was abandoned in a room, an allegation that harkened back to the abandoned laptop of Hunter Biden.  However, Ashley reportedly insisted it was stolen.

The use of the FBI is also reminiscent of the still unexplained use of the FBI when Joe Biden was Vice President to search for a gun owned by Hunter Biden that was discarded behind a restaurant.

Project Veritas decided not to run the story because it could not verify that the diary belonged to Biden. (The FBI may have just offered that confirmation). Instead, it alerted the police, according to O’Keefe: “Project Veritas gave the diary to law enforcement to ensure it could be returned to its rightful owner. We never published it.”

So why the raids?  Since when does the FBI conducted raids over missing diaries?

The FBI can cite the interstate elements of the alleged theft as raising a federal crime. However, what is the crime? It is not clear if they are suggesting that the responsible parties were seeking to sell the diary or that there was some national security element (which would be bizarre since Biden’s daughter was writing before her father ever became president).

https://brownstone.org/author/vinay-prasad/

Vinay Prasad MD MPH is a hematologist-oncologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco. He runs the VKPrasad lab at UCSF, which studies cancer drugs, health policy, clinical trials and better decision making. He is author of over 300 academic articles, and the books Ending Medical Reversal (2015), and Malignant (2020).

I recently came across two tweets that caught my eye.

Here is the first one from the CDC director:

And here is the second one, from a couple months back:

Together they got me thinking. What do they have in common? What do they tell us about the state of the public communication of science?

Let’s start with the one by Dr. Walensky. I don’t know how to put this politely, but it is a lie, and a truly unbelievable one at that.

First, of all, if it were true, it would mean that masking was more effective that the J&J vaccine (implausible). Second of all, we have actual cluster RCT data from Bangladesh showing a 11% (relative risk reduction). This occurred in a massive trial where masks were provided for free and encouraged. Even here, only surgical masks worked, and cloth did not, and had no where near this effect size. The idea that masks could reduce the chance of infection by 80% is simply untrue, implausible, and cannot be supported by any reliable data.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/11/07/batya_ungar-sargon_media_narrative_about_critical_race_theory_is_a_way_to_avoid_talking_about_class.html

Newsweek’s Batya Ungar-Sargon, author of Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, speaks with CNN’s “Reliable Sources” about how the media covered the Virginia gubernatorial election.

“We are hiding a class divide in America,” she said. “We are hiding disgusting levels of income inequality in America. We are hiding the total dispossession of the working class of all races by focusing on a very highly specialized academic language about race.”

“The media’s response to Youngkin’s victory is literally the reason he won.”

“Glenn Youngkin managed to flip majority Black districts, he managed to get about 50 percent of Latino voters, are all of those people white supremacists? Of course, they’re not. They’re people who are worried about, number one: the economy.”

“Number two: schooling. It is such a self-own to tell people who are worried about the economy that that is white supremacy, right? You are essentially criminalizing the views of working-class Americans, and you saw the same thing with the conversation around critical race theory, right?” she told CNN’s Brian Stelter. “You saw all these pundits saying these people don’t know what ‘critical race theory’ is. That is not a political statement. it is a class statement. [You’re saying] they are not educated enough to be opposed to ‘critical race theory,’ how dare they oppose it?”

https://conservativebrief.com/pelosi-descends-54057/

Concern Mounts After Pelosi Descends Into Incoherent Rambling Carmine Sabia

Is there a glitch in the Matrix? And if there is can someone explain what House Speaker and California Rep. Nancy Pelosi is saying?

The House Speaker gave her weekly press conference this week, which started as normal, but by the end she was stammering and making no sense.

As she was speaking on passing President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda the press conference delved into an incoherent mess.

We grabbed the transcript from the Speaker’s website to make some kind of sense of what she was saying, or at least get the words she was saying.

“The other thing that we’re getting or – we’re sending stuff over to the Senate.  Most of the product that we’ve done is – except now we may have added in the last hour or so – and some of what we added is Senate, to the bill, like hearing.  Bernie doesn’t like hearing – excuse me – Bernie loves hearing.  Manchin doesn’t want hearing in the bill and all that stuff.  So, some is Senate-oriented, and then we have the family/medical leave.  We figured if they’re putting things in, then we can put something in, even if Manchin doesn’t like it,” the Speaker said.

“So, we are getting some Byrd and privilege.  I think mostly we’re getting privilege scrub because privilege scrub is deadly to a bill.  Byrd?  Well, it’s important.  You have to take it out, but a privilege violation can take you out.  So, we’re, again, getting that as we go along as well.  But when we pass a bill, then they will see it in its aggregate and make some –,” she said.

If you are scratching your head and wondering what you just read do not worry, it is not you. We are baffled too but we assume she was talking about Medicare coverage for hearing aids.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/06/conspiracy-theory-or-conspiracy-in-fact/

Something to keep in mind about January 6 is when the Soothsayer came to warn Caesar about the Ides of March, he wasn’t warning about a conspiracy theory. He was warning about a conspiracy in fact.

Last week, Fox Nation aired “Patriot Purge,” Tucker Carlson’s three-part series on the January 6 protest in Washington, D.C. No sooner had the program been announced than the regime media went nuts. The former conservative Anne Applebaum, writing for The Atlantic, said it was a “sinister” piece of anti-American propaganda. NPR described it as an “off the rails” “conspiracy theory.” CNN said that it promulgated a “false narrative” that was “politically, historically and logically confused.” 

Translation: Carlson disputes the accepted narrative according to which the protest at the Capitol was an “insurrection” aimed at undermining “our democracy.” Ergo Carlson must be wrong. Cue the heated rhetoric and wheel out that all-purpose epithet “conspiracy theorist.” 

As a side note, I have always wondered why people of a certain ilk believe that uttering the phrase “conspiracy theory” or charging someone with being a “conspiracy theorist” disposes of any argument. George Orwell noted that the term “fascist” had been rendered nearly meaningless by its promiscuous application to all manner of things or people one didn’t like. “Conspiracy theory” is on even shakier ground, because in addition to make-believe conspiracies, the world is full of plenty of real conspiracies about which one needn’t theorize but simply observe and describe. 

When the Soothsayer came to warn Caesar about the Ides of March, he wasn’t warning about a conspiracy theory. He was warning about a conspiracy in fact, something that Caesar came to appreciate personally when the fateful day rolled around. Caesar to the Soothsayer: “The ides of March are come.” Soothsayer: “Ay, Caesar; but not gone.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/580391-durhams-latest-indictment-more-lines-drawn-to-clintons-campaign

“To my good friend … A Great Democrat.” Those words written to a Russian figure in Moscow, inside a copy of a Hillary Clinton autobiography, may be the defining line of special counsel John Durham’s investigation. The message reportedly was written by Charles Dolan, a close Clinton adviser and campaign regular whom news reports identify as the mysterious “PR-Executive 1” in the latest Durham indictment, this time of Igor Danchenko.

Danchenko, 43, was a key figure in the compilation of the infamous Steele dossier that led to the now discredited investigation of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government during the 2016 presidential race. But Danchenko, a Russian emigre living in the U.S., seems unlikely to be the Durham investigation’s apex defendant. In fact, Durham describes him at points more like a shill than a spy, an “investigator” who was fed what to report by Clinton operatives such as Dolan.

Durham is known as a methodical, apolitical and unrelenting prosecutor. Thus far, his work seems to betray a belief that the FBI got played by the Clinton campaign to investigate the Trump team. The question is whether Durham really wants to indict just the figurative tail if he can get the whole dog — a question that now may weigh heavily on a number of Washington figures, just as it did following Durham’s indictment in September of Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann.

Danchenko’s indictment on five counts of lying to the FBI serves two obvious purposes. First, these counts — with a possible five years in prison on each — are enough to concentrate the mind of any defendant about possibly flipping for the prosecution. Second, indicting Danchenko “hoists the wretch” for potential targets to see and consider that there but for the grace of God — and Durham — go they.

The background details of Durham’s three indictments so far have assembled an impressive list of “great Democrats” who contributed directly or indirectly to the creation of the Russia collusion scandal. Indeed, the collusion case increasingly is taking on a type of “Murder on the Orient Express” feel, in which all of the suspects may turn out to be culprits. While the statute of limitations may protect some, Durham has shown that he can use the crime of lying to federal investigators (18 U.S.C. 1001) as a handy alternative. Targets must admit to prior misconduct or face a new charge.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/04/ten-months-later/

Several storylines related to the events of January 6 have crumbled under closer scrutiny over the past 10 months: the “fire extinguisher” murder of Officer Brian Sicknick; the notion it was an “armed” insurrection and a grand “conspiracy” concocted by right-wing militias; claims that the building sustained $30 million in damages, and so on.

In the meantime, the Biden regime has attempted to cover up key aspects of that day, including the name of the officer who shot and killed Ashli Babbitt, which was only recently revealed. Justice Department lawyers continue to resist the release of 14,000 hours of surveillance video and the U.S. Capitol Police refuse to publish an 800-page internal investigation on officer misconduct as well as internal communications before and after the Capitol breach.

But a deep dive by the Washington Post, published last weekend, raises new questions about the alleged “pipe bombs” discovered just before Congress met on January 6 to certify the results of the 2020 Electoral College vote. Like so many supporting scenes, the veracity of the pipe bomb tale is in doubt after the Post revealed eyebrow-raising details about those involved.

And starting with the justified premise that nothing about January 6, especially anything bolstered by official government agencies in the nation’s capital, should be accepted at face value—to wit, all claims should be met with deep skepticism—the pipe bombs appear to be more stagecraft with no connection whatsoever to Trump or his supporters.

On the eve of January 6, a shadowy figure caught on video allegedly planted two pipe bombs outside the headquarters of the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee, both located close to the U.S. Capitol building. 

Security camera footage posted by the FBI shows a man in a gray hoodie, wearing a face mask and gloves, carrying a backpack in the same vicinity between 7:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. on January 5. (Video and photographs posted by the agency, however, do not show the suspect actually placing devices near the buildings.)

The bombs were made of “1×8-inch threaded galvanized pipes, a kitchen timer, and homemade black powder,” according to an FBI bulletin.