RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nysun.com/national/bidens-baking-an-orwellian-upside-down-cake/91557/

It’s bad enough that President Biden and the Democratic congressional leaders essentially double-crossed the GOP bipartisan infrastructure package including the democrats who participated, And it’s really bad that Speaker Pelosi & Co. are holding the infrastructure package hostage, to a tsunami of tax hikes and massive entitlement increases all of which will do great damage to the economy.

Now, though, President Biden is now comparing his multi-trillion dollar boatload of new entitlements to tax cuts. It’s an Orwellian upside-down-cake. Here’s what the President said:

“I think it’s time to give ordinary people a tax break … Why is this not a tax break for working folks when the stuff we give to the super wealthy are called tax breaks? Look, major action on clean energy, housing, caregiving, on child and paid leave, universal pre-k, free community college. The human infrastructure is intertwined with our physical infrastructure.”

Huh? They’re not tax cuts. They’re spending. Permanent spending. Remember what the great Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman said. “Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending, because that’s the true tax …”

And Mr. Biden wants government cash payments without any work qualifications or other employment incentives. They are middle class entitlements.

If you have a moment take a look at today’s Wall Street Journal editorial: “It’s the Entitlements, Stupid.” Then if you have a moment more, read the op-ed piece from my old friend and Reagan budget office colleague John Cogan entitled “Biden’s plan for an entitlement society.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/28/did-cops-attack-and-provoke-peaceful-protesters-on-january-6/

If the American people deserve the truth about an “attack on our democracy” then they deserve the truth about the way law enforcement handled the crowd on January 6. Release the tapes.

Joe Biden’s Justice Department is using every legal maneuver at its disposal to keep under wraps more than 14,000 hours of surveillance footage captured by the United States Capitol Police security system on January 6. Prosecutors insist the recordings are “highly sensitive” material; USCP’s general counsel warns that releasing the videos would provoke another “attack” on the Capitol complex.

But the trove of footage held by USCP isn’t the only video used as incriminating evidence in court proceedings, particularly hearings where prosecutors argue that a January 6 defendant should remain behind bars awaiting trial. The Justice Department also has footage recorded by body cameras worn by D.C. Metropolitan Police officers. (According to the USCP’s general counsel, Capitol police officers don’t wear body cameras. Interesting.)

Federal prosecutors routinely petition the court for pre-trial detention of January 6 defendants; judges have concurred in dozens of cases. Proof that the accused is a “danger” to society largely rests on cherry-picked video clips created by the government from video footage exclusively held by the government.

After news organizations complained their reporters could not see the clips during virtual court hearings, Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the D.C. District Court handling each one of the 500 or so Capitol breach cases, set up a way for journalists to access video evidence on a case-by-case basis.

The Justice Department now is using that ruling to perpetuate the idea that law enforcement officials were savagely attacked by bloodthirsty Trump “insurrectionists” on January 6. Earlier this month, the agency released a brief clip of a former New York City police officer angrily confronting a D.C. cop at around 2:30 p.m. on January 6. CNN, which obtained the clip, described the 56-second video as “horrifying.”

Thomas Webster, a decorated Marine and ex-NYPD officer with no criminal record, was arrested in February and charged with seven counts including assaulting the officer with a flag pole that was attached to his U.S. Marine Corps flag. (He did not hit the officer with the pole.) He’s been behind bars ever since.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/06/28/suck-it-liberals-manhattan-da-isnt-filing-charges-against-trump-n2591724

The media and the Democrats have attacked him so much, lobbed so many conspiracy theories, and propped up so many shoddy legal inquiries into Donald Trump and his entities that it’s hard to keep up. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance had been looking into the Trump Organization for months. The Left thought this would be it. The Left hoped this would be it, that Donald Trump would be charged over fraud allegations. Not the case. Don is still Teflon. Vance is not going to charge the former president and liberal America is going to lose it. Even out of office, Trump still owns the Left (via Politico):

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance has indicated he does not currently plan to charge the Trump Organization with crimes related to allegations of “hush money” payments and real estate value manipulations, according to a personal lawyer for Donald Trump.

Ronald Fischetti, a New York attorney who represents the former president, said on Monday that in a meeting last week, he asked Vance’s team for details on charges they were considering.

According to Fischetti, members of Vance’s team said they were considering bringing charges against the Trump Organization and its individual employees related to alleged failures to pay taxes on corporate benefits and perks. It has been widely reported that those perks included cars and apartments and appear to only involve a small number of executives.

“We asked, ‘Is there anything else?’” Fischetti told POLITICO. “They said, ‘No.’”

“It’s crazy that that’s all they had,” he added.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/general-milley-leads-enemy-within-daniel-greenfield/

“Milley has spent his career telling politicians what they want to hear because it was good for his career. His endorsement of the divisive racism of critical race theory shows that there are no limits to what he will support as long as it’s good for his career. But this time the cost may not just be thousands of dead Americans abroad, but a defenseless nation at home.”

As the Black Lives Matter riots torched the country, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted that the violent assaults threatening the nation’s capital were merely protests, and berated Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller who warned, “These cities are burning”.

After the White House came under attack and a BLM mob set fire to the gatehouse, Trump aides, at the request of the president, drafted a document invoking the Insurrection Act that would have ended the nationwide reign of Democrat terror by putting troops on the street.

Milley vocally rejected the idea, claiming that the violent riots were just a protest, and it wasn’t appropriate for the military to be involved in political issues. Of course Eisenhower had sent the troops into Little Rock to integrate the schools, Kennedy had sent them to Mississippi to do the same, and George H.W. Bush had sent them to Los Angeles to put down the Rodney King riots.

After accompanying President Trump to Lafayette Square, where Black Lives Matter rioters had tried to set the ‘Church of the Presidents’ on fire, Milley quickly withered under media pressure.

“I should not have been there,” Milley recited in an apology video and defended the BLM-Antifa insurrections as responses to the “centuries of injustice toward African Americans.”

After scores of cities had been torched, statues pulled down, and hundreds of police officers wounded at the hands of racist Marxist hate groups, Milley argued that, “we should all be proud that the vast majority of protests have been peaceful.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/four-biden-proposals-would-dole-out-taxpayer-money-based-on-critical-race-theory

What happens when you mix toxic critical race theory with progressive economics? Thanks to President Joe Biden, we may soon find out.

Under Democratic leadership, the federal government is rolling out numerous race-based economic initiatives that explicitly dole out taxpayer money along racially discriminatory lines. Here are four examples, as identified by Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty attorney Dan Lennington.

A nearly $10 billion Treasury Department mortgage-assistance initiative plans explicitly to favor “socially disadvantaged individuals,” essentially defined as nonwhite people, in assigning the funds.
A $1 billion Department of Agriculture initiative targeting “socially disadvantaged farmers” would specifically dole out taxpayer money “based on race and ethnicity.”
Another USDA program would spend up to $400 million to buy food from “local, regional, and socially disadvantaged farmers,” with “socially disadvantaged” once again basically standing in for “non-white.”
A $10 billion Small Business Administration credit program intends to emphasize funding businesses with nonwhite ownership.

There are too many problems with this race-based approach to federal spending to count.

For one, the legality and constitutionality of these openly discriminatory government schemes are highly dubious. Some race-based government programs such as affirmative action have, unfortunately, been upheld by courts in the past. However, a federal appeals court ordered a halt to a similar Biden administration initiative that allocated COVID-19 relief funds based on race.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/29/the-left-is-now-scaremongering-the-covid-delta-variant/

COVID-19 infection rates are down. Deaths are down. Vaccinations are up. So what’s the response from the left? It continues a desperate attempt to scare the public and blame Republicans.

The left’s bellwether outlet, the New York Times, perfectly sums up this agenda with a story headlined “Red America’s COVID Problem,” in which the Times writes that “COVID remains a serious threat to unvaccinated adults, especially those middle-aged or older” and that it’s rising in Trump-supporting areas of the country where vaccination rates, they say, are lower.

“No wonder, then, that the number of new cases keeps falling in Biden counties, while it has begun to rise in Trump counties,” the Times goes on.

The Washington Post’s increasingly leftist “conservative” columnist Jennifer Rubin declares that “Red states are dangerous to America’s health.”

President Joe Biden is doing his level best to keep the country in a state of panic, warning that the new “Delta variant” is more easily transmissible and potentially deadlier and, he claims, is “especially dangerous for young people.”

The congenital liar Anthony Fauci chimed in as well, saying that “the Delta variant is currently the greatest threat in the U.S. to our attempt to eliminate COVID-19.”

Fauci, you may have noticed, has changed the goalposts again, from “flattening the curve” to eliminating COVID-19 entirely – which is an impossibility, but would let him play dictator for years to come.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-plan-for-an-entitlement-society-11624918494?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The federal government’s system of entitlements is the largest money-shuffling machine in human history, and President Biden intends to make it a lot bigger. His American Families Plan—which he recently attempted to tie to a bipartisan infrastructure deal—proposes to extend the reach of federal entitlements to 21 million additional Americans, the largest expansion since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

For the first time in U.S. history—except possibly for the pandemic years 2020 and 2021, for which we don’t yet have data—more than half of working-age households would be on the entitlement rolls if the plan were enacted in its current form. Contrary to Mr. Biden’s assertion that his plan “doesn’t add a single penny to our deficits,” his plan would add more than $1 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

The American Families Plan proposes several new entitlement programs. One promises students the government will pick up the entire cost of community-college tuition; another promises families earning 1.5 times their state’s median income that Washington will cover all daycare expenses above 7% of family income for children under 5; still another promises workers up to 12 weeks of federally financed wage subsidies to take time off to care for newborns or sick family members.

The American Families Plan would follow longstanding government practice and make temporary emergency programs permanent. In March, Congress enacted the American Rescue Plan, which expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies and refundable tax credits for child care and low-wage workers. The expansions were sold as temporary measures to combat the effects of pandemic lockdowns. A month later, Mr. Biden asked Congress to make them permanent.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-the-entitlements-stupid-11624920486?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Sen. Joe Manchin’s public support Sunday for at least $2 trillion in new spending in a partisan budget bill is a huge win for the political left. This means a giant tax-and-spend bill this year is likely, and the biggest expansion of the entitlement state since the 1960s is now possible.

The entitlements are by far the biggest long-term economic threat from the Biden agenda. Tax increases can be repealed by a future Congress. Spending on infrastructure will slow as funding falls. The courts may block his racial preferences. But entitlements that spend automatically based on eligibility are nearly impossible to repeal, or even reform, and they represent a huge tax-and-spend wedge far into the future.

The media won’t talk about this, and Republicans are so far missing in action. But Americans need to understand the stakes.

***

Hoover Institution scholars John Cogan and Daniel Heil document nearby the entitlement expansions of the Biden Families Plan. It’s an important piece that lists how far the progressive left wants to go in expanding government’s reach into American family life. Federal child care, government paid family leave, free community college, a $3,600 tax credit per child, a permanent expansion of ObamaCare premium subsidies, universal pre-K, permanent expansion of the earned-income tax credit to workers without children, and more.

We’d highlight two points. First is the dishonesty about costs. Entitlements always start small but then soar. The Biden Families Plan is even more dishonest than usual.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/amazons-woke-smokescreen?token=eyJ1c2VyX2l

A few years ago, my friend Dan Ahdoot was auditioning for a sitcom on Fox. And things were looking good; he’d heard from his agent that he made it to the last round. Then, he got a call from one of the creators of the show, a friend of his who was calling to say sorry: Dan wasn’t going to get the part. The reason, he said, was that he wasn’t “diverse.”  

Dan is Iranian. He has photos of his parents in Tehran before the revolution and the eyebrows to prove it. (Don’t worry, I asked Dan if I could objectify him.) But Fox apparently didn’t see Iran as “diverse.” 

Given that Dan is not just Jewish but also Persian and therefore in possession of more than the usual amount of chutzpah, he then thought to ask: What about Afghanistan? Was Iran’s neighbor sufficiently diverse?

The showrunner said he’d find out and give him a call back. 

In the meantime, Dan says he hopped onto his Wikipedia page and inserted a little edit: He was now an “Iranian Afghan Jew,” despite the fact that nobody in Dan’s lineage is from, nor has ever visited, Afghanistan.

The showrunner called back and pronounced that, according to the poobahs over at Fox, Afghanistan was indeed diverse. 

I thought of this story when I read Amazon Studios’ new inclusion policy, vaunted by stenographers in the mainstream media. It announces a goal, by 2024, of having 50% of creative roles in its movies and shows filled by women or people of color.

https://spectator.org/science-progress-publishing-journals/

“We must choose between science and science fiction.”

When you hear “Science says … ,” there’s no such thing. It’s bullying rhetoric, like “Everyone knows … ” or “It’s common wisdom that … ” Sometimes we can turn to authorities like the CDC or the WHO, but they are hardly omnipotent nor without political agendas. At one time they were at least essentially apolitical, but no more. Likewise for smaller institutions like colleges or universities, or for individuals. Of late, Anthony Fauci has come to mind.

Fact is, there’s strong evidence the progress of science is slowing — masked by relatively few high-profile advances (such as cell phones) and click-bait journalism with “breakthroughs” that never materialize. And there’s evidence of a decline in the quality of the scientific literature, even as it’s accompanied by an explosion in quantity. Publication seems to be doubling every nine years. Yet as I’ve noted previously here, the Alzheimer’s arsenal is effectively empty. Cancer progress has been achingly slow — the “War on Cancer” goal was to cure all types by 1976. And now over 50 years since Apollo 11, we actually don’t have the ability to return people to the moon.

The standard in observable advances is supposed to be published, peer-reviewed literature. But never mind that sometimes, as with COVID-19, it can take a long time for that to appear. Further, a recent study indicates that there may be a bias that makes publications in prestigious journals less reliable precisely because of what it takes to get in one, plus the desire of those publications to print the most cutting-edge or simply exciting material.

We have long known that the vast majority of published studies are never replicated because of such culprits as fraud, bias, negligence, and hype. In 2005, Stanford Professor John Ioannidis published “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” the most downloaded paper ever in the Public Library of Science, better known as PLOS. Not incidentally, he has also become notorious for his minority views on COVID, including criticisms of case prediction models and the efficacy of lockdowns. Insisting on empiricism can make you very unpopular.