RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/why-obama-failed/

In a revealing interview, Obama tried to burnish his image for progressive posterity — but he still doesn’t understand his fundamental errors.

B arack Obama rose to political stardom in the wake of his 2004 convention speech, during which he made an implicit promise that he could transcend party divisions in Washington, bridge the gap between Republicans and Democrats, and make the federal government functional again. I’ll confess that I really thought he wanted to do this when he ascended to the presidency. It took the first volume of his memoirs and a recent interview he gave to Ezra Klein of the New York Times to fully and finally disabuse me of that notion.

During his 2008 campaign, Obama seemed to display a certain capaciousness of intellect and imagination that would allow him to get inside his opponents’ heads, understand their position in good faith, and address it in a perspicacious way, creating an illusion of rapport. He also knew how to do this with journalists. The conservative columnist David Brooks, for instance, was caught off guard during an interview with Obama when it became apparent that the then-senator had a favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, of whom he could speak learnedly and with enthusiasm — a pleasant surprise for a conservative admirer of Niebuhr like Brooks. This circumspection is clearly a part of the Obama mythos that the man himself values, because he restates it at the beginning of his interview with Klein:

I forget whether it was Clarence Darrow, or Abraham Lincoln, or some apocryphal figure in the past who said, look, the best way to win an argument is to first be able to make the other person’s argument better than they can. And for me, what that meant was that I had to understand their worldview. And I couldn’t expect them to understand mine if I wasn’t extending myself to understand theirs.

After reading this quotation, many conservatives will likely wonder if they have gone through the looking glass. Close observers of American politics over the last decade will be aware that President Obama made very little effort to understand the worldview of his Republican colleagues in Washington. In fact, an interesting companion piece to Klein’s interview is this reported essay by Alex Thompson, written last summer for Politico, on the Obama-Biden relationship. Thompson’s sources indicate that Obama was exceedingly bad at persuading his Republican colleagues to back his proposals:

“Negotiating with President Obama was all about the fact that he felt that he knew the world better than you,” said Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader from 2011 to 2014. “And he felt that he thought about it so much, that he figured it all out, and no matter what conclusion you had come to with the same set of facts, his way was right.” Biden, he said, understood that “you’re gonna have to agree to disagree about some things.” A former Republican leadership aide described Obama’s style as “mansplaining, basically.”

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

In a criminal act, some person (or persons) at the IRS leaked confidential information on some of the nation’s wealthiest people. It was given to ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom based in New York City, which reported that they had “obtained” a “vast cache of IRS information” on “thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people,” which they then published.

In the report dated June 8th, Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen and Paul Kiel wrote: “ProPublica is not disclosing how it obtained the data, which was given to us in raw form, with no conditions or conclusions.” They claimed to have “verified” the information by “comparing elements of it” with dozens of already public tax details. They claim all people mentioned in the article were asked to comment. Those who responded, unsurprisingly, said they had paid whatever taxes were legitimately owed.

The incident raises questions: It is illegal to pass on confidential IRS data. Will the guilty party be exposed and punished? If unrealized capital gains should be taxed, as the report infers, would it be a recurring tax? And if unrealized gains can be taxed, what about unrealized losses? Could they be deducted against ordinary income? After all, there are years when stocks decline. Would future investment be inhibited by taxing unrealized gains? After all, expanding economies rely on capital investments, be it from a pension plan, the savings of an individual, or a business. But there is a broader question. What is the purpose of the IRS? Is it to levy and collect taxes so to fund the federal bureaucracy, or is its mission to redistribute income? ProPublica claims to investigate “abuses of power,” but the abuse they highlight is not the IRS, which a few years ago during the Obama Administration targeted conservative non-profits. Nor will they identify the unnamed leaker who abused his position by disclosing confidential information. No, they highlighted the assets of four wealthy individuals who had taken advantage of legitimate loopholes, all laid out in the 6,550-page Internal Revenue Code, which was passed by Congress.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/558050-supreme-court-confounding-its-partisan-critics

The Supreme Court this week continued to disappoint congressional Democrats and activists with a long line of embarrassingly unanimous, nonideological rulings. After all, the court is supposedly (to use President Biden’s words) “out of whack” due to its irreconcilable ideological divisions. Indeed, the court is allegedly so dysfunctionally divided that many, including Democratic leaders, have called for sweeping changes — from packing the court with new justices to changing its voting rules or even creating an alternative court.

That is why these weeks have so frustrated those who insist the court is a hopeless case of rigid ideologues. While next week could well bring some welcomed ideological divisions, the court is not making it easy on its critics.

Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer recently chafed at the claim that the court is “conservative” and condemned the calls to pack it with a liberal majority. A liberal group, “Demand Justice,” responded with billboard ads calling for Breyer’s resignation and warned him that he was risking his legacy. However, Breyer appears undeterred in ruling with his conservative colleagues when he considers that to be appropriate.

In the latest decision, Borden v. United States, the lineup of justices was strikingly nonideological. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion for Justices Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch, with a concurrence from Justice Clarence Thomas — three liberal justices and two conservatives agreeing to limit the meaning of a “violent felony” for purposes of the Armed Career Criminal Act.

Last week, the decision in Van Buren v. United States was a majority of three liberals and three conservatives. In that case, the most senior justice was Breyer; he assigned it to his conservative colleague Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote for Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, Kagan and Brett Kavanaugh. Although he was on the other side in Van Buren, Justice Thomas joined his liberal colleagues in Borden.

These decisions follow a litany of unanimous decisions from the court, which seems to be sending a message in the timing of the release of its opinions: The justices do not rule on cases to send messages to Congress, but they do control what cases are accepted and when those decisions are released. It is hard not to view the last few weeks as a type of judicial “harrumph” to the continuing calls for court packing. While we expect more ideological splits in a few upcoming cases, these cases reaffirm that they are not so rigid or “hopelessly divided” as Democratic leaders and other critics have suggested. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/13/civic_action_civil_discourse__the_dogma_of_systemic_racism_145919.html

In a classic example of civic action, conservatives have undertaken a variety of initiatives to counter the upsurge in progressive efforts to enlist American schools, U.S. corporations, and all levels of government in the promotion of the doctrine that the United States is systemically racist. Progressives, who generally favor civic action, have responded with indignation, derision, and calumny. The vituperation they direct at conservatives suggests that progressives either think the campaign to entrench systemic racism as the conventional wisdom stands above all criticism or suspect that it is fatally vulnerable to scrutiny.

Progressives greet the conservative defense of old-fashioned liberal ideas like toleration, individual merit, and equal treatment for all with ad hominin attacks. They reproach conservatives for daring to question the tenets of critical race theory, Ibram X. Kendi’s “antiracism” catechism, and Robin DiAngelo’s pronouncements on “white fragility” — a body of controversial opinions that many progressives believe prove racism is latent in the American spirit and woven into nation’s institutions. And, as is common on both sides of the political spectrum these days, they divide the world into Us and Them, seeing theirs as the party of compassion and benevolence while casting conservatives as the party of the benighted and the bigoted.

Consider New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb’s recent denunciation of South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott.

On April 28, Scott gave a forceful but measured response to President Biden’s address to Congress earlier that evening. Scott said that Biden “seems like a good man,” and “[h]is speech was full of good words.” Scott commended the president’s goals: “He promised to unite a nation. To lower the temperature. To govern for all Americans, no matter how we voted.” But the senator criticized the president and the Democrats he leads for betraying that promise. Instead of adopting “policies and progress that bring us closer together,” according to Scott, “the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further apart.”

Scott noted that in 2020 “under Republican leadership, we passed five bipartisan COVID packages.” But under the Biden administration, the senator lamented, the Democrats eschewed cooperation: “They spent almost $2 trillion on a partisan bill that the White House bragged was the most liberal bill in American history!”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/06/04/why-i-spoke-out-against-lockdowns/

Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

I had no choice but to speak out against lockdowns. As a public-health scientist with decades of experience working on infectious-disease outbreaks, I couldn’t stay silent. Not when basic principles of public health are thrown out of the window. Not when the working class is thrown under the bus. Not when lockdown opponents were thrown to the wolves. There was never a scientific consensus for lockdowns. That balloon had to be popped.

Two key Covid facts were quickly obvious to me. First, with the early outbreaks in Italy and Iran, this was a severe pandemic that would eventually spread to the rest of the world, resulting in many deaths. That made me nervous. Second, based on the data from Wuhan, in China, there was a dramatic difference in mortality by age, with over a thousand-fold difference between the young and the old. That was a huge relief. I am a single father with a teenager and five-year-old twins. Like most parents, I care more about my children than myself. Unlike the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, children had much less to fear from Covid than from annual influenza or traffic accidents. They could get on with life unharmed — or so I thought.

For society at large, the conclusion was obvious. We had to protect older, high-risk people while younger low-risk adults kept society moving.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, schools closed while nursing homes went unprotected. Why? It made no sense. So, I picked up a pen. To my surprise, I could not interest any US media in my thoughts, despite my knowledge and experience with infectious-disease outbreaks. I had more success in my native Sweden, with op-eds in the major daily newspapers, and, eventually, a piece in spiked. Other like-minded scientists faced similar hurdles.

Instead of understanding the pandemic, we were encouraged to fear it. Instead of life, we got lockdowns and death. We got delayed cancer diagnoses, worse cardiovascular-disease outcomes, deteriorating mental health, and a lot more collateral public-health damage from lockdown. Children, the elderly and the working class were the hardest hit by what can only be described as the biggest public-health fiasco in history.

Throughout the 2020 spring wave, Sweden kept daycare and schools open for every one of its 1.8million children aged between one and 15. And it did so without subjecting them to testing, masks, physical barriers or social distancing. This policy led to precisely zero Covid deaths in that age group, while teachers had a Covid risk similar to the average of other professions. The Swedish Public Health Agency reported these facts in mid-June, but in the US lockdown proponents still pushed for school closures.

In July, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article on ‘reopening primary schools during the pandemic’. Shockingly, it did not even mention the evidence from the only major Western country that kept schools open throughout the pandemic. That is like evaluating a new drug while ignoring data from the placebo control group.

With difficulty publishing, I decided to use my mostly dormant Twitter account to get the word out. I searched for tweets about schools and replied with a link to the Swedish study. A few of these replies were retweeted, which gave the Swedish data some attention. It also led to an invitation to write for the Spectator. In August, I finally broke into the US media with a CNN op-ed against school closures. I know Spanish, so I wrote a piece for CNN-Español. CNN-English was not interested.

Something was clearly amiss with the media. Among infectious-disease epidemiology colleagues that I know, most favour focused protection of high-risk groups instead of lockdowns, but the media made it sound like there was a scientific consensus for general lockdowns.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/06/12/lefts_refusal_to_acknowlege_progress_is_a_sickness.html

HBO’s Real Time host, Bill Maher, monologued on progressives’ view that progress has not been made in the United States on cultural issues, such as race relations and gay marriage. Maher called those on the left who believed that the United States lacked any progress had “progressophobia,” meaning “a brain disorder that strikes liberals and makes them incapable of recognizing progress.”

Maher continued, mentioning the views on gay marriage and racism have changed over the years in the United States. “This is one of the big problems with wokeness,” Maher said, “that what you say doesn’t have to make sense or jive with the facts or even be challenged lest the challenge be conflated with racism.’

“But saying that White power and privilege is at an all-time high is just ridiculous. Higher than a century ago, the year of the Tulsa Race Massacre? Higher than the years when the KKK rode unchecked and Jim Crow went unchallenged? Higher than the 1960s when The Supremes and Willie Mays still couldn’t stay at the same hotel as the White people they were working with? Higher than during slavery?”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/11/morning-greatness-dhs-sec-mayorkas-heads-to-mexico-to-cleanup-after-kamala-pr-failure/

U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas will travel to Mexico following VP Harris’s disastrous trip to the area. Harris was unable to say when or even if she would visit the border. The Harris team is worried that if Kamala is connected to the border crisis, it will hurt her chances of winning a presidential election. Let me tell you that’s not what will keep her from the presidency.  Mayorkas will head down to Mexico June 14-15 “to meet with counterparts in the Government of Mexico on areas of mutual interest.” Good luck with that.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-6-10-vxt2ve45uejrhg1ika45gx1mtq7

As you may already have learned, on Tuesday a left-leaning website called ProPublica published an article announcing that it had obtained tax returns of “thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years.” The headline of the piece is “The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax.”

If you were still harboring any doubts that the IRS is a criminal enterprise in service of the progressive cause, this should put an end to them.

It is highly doubtful that the IRS has ever really been an organization legitimately engaged in apolitical enforcement of the tax laws. As one major example from the earlier days, the use by FDR of the IRS as a “weapon of political retribution” against the likes of Huey Long and Andrew Mellon (and many others) is well-documented. More recently, you probably recall the Lois Lerner scandal of 2012-13. Lerner was the IRS Director of Exempt Organizations in 2012, during the run-up to the contest where Barack Obama got re-elected. In that role, she oversaw the holding up of routine tax-status approvals of dozens of conservative-leaning issue-advocacy groups, particularly TEA Party groups, thus effectively crippling their fundraising and preventing them from participating effectively in the election. Lerner was caught dead to rights, but was permitted to retire without consequence or penalty in September 2013. In that affair, neither the IRS Commissioner (Koskinen), the Treasury Secretary (Geithner) nor the President (Obama) ever had to answer as to their knowledge or involvement.

And now we have the latest scandal. If this is a leak from within the IRS, it is a crime of great proportions. Is there any other bona fide theory of how these tax confidential tax returns have been disclosed? I have seen only two other theories proposed, neither of which I find plausible: (1) a hack, and (2) a leak from a foreign government (the IRS has certain limited ability to share tax information with foreign governments in furtherance of its mission). To believe the “hack” theory, you would have to believe that the hackers took the time and effort to find and segregate out the tax returns of the “wealthiest people” while scrupulously maintaining the confidentiality of everyone else’s records. I don’t think that’s how hackers work. The foreign government theory would require that every one of the people whose tax returns got released had tax-significant dealings with the same foreign country. Again, that’s not too likely. So I’ll put about a 99% chance on this being a criminal leak from some one or a group of politically-motivated employees at the IRS.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/trump-doj-obtained-data-on-schiff?token=eyJ1c

The Trump Justice Department in 2017 and early 2018 issued subpoenas to Apple to obtain the communications records of at least two Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee, Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA). According to The New York Times, DOJ prosecutors attempting to determine who leaked classified information to the media about Russiagate suspected the two House Democrats were the culprits, and to prove that, they obtained their communications records as well as those of family members, including minor children.

A DOJ leak investigation aimed at sitting members of Congress is highly unusual. Both the Obama and Trump administrations, in a hunt for leakers, created controversy by obtaining the communications records of journalists, including — in the case of the Obama DOJ — the family members of those journalists. But investigating members of the House Intelligence Committee for leaking crimes — as opposed to corruption or other standard criminal charges — can present different dangers. Neither Congressman was charged with any crimes and the investigation reportedly bore no fruit.

The two House Democrats, among the most fanatical disseminators of baseless Russiagate conspiracies and long known to serve as anonymous sources of leaks to liberal media outlets, reacted with predictable outrage. “This baseless investigation, while now closed, is yet another example of Trump’s corrupt weaponization of justice,” Schiff intoned on Thursday night. As difficult as it is, Swalwell, as he often does, found a way to be even more melodramatic than Schiff: “Like many of the world’s most despicable dictators, former President Trump showed an utter disdain for our democracy and the rule of law.”

Investigating possible crimes — such as leaking classified information — is the job of the Justice Department. To accomplish that, FBI agents and prosecutors often obtain personal communications records about their suspects. But invading the communications records of journalists, as both the Obama and Trump DOJ did, can create serious threats to press freedom and the possibility of abuse and retaliation. The same is true for invading the communications records of members of the legislative branch, particularly ones hostile to the president. An investigation is certainly warranted to determine the propriety of these subpoenas.