RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/matt-taibbi-congressional-democrats-heroic-fight-to-save-the-rich

Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, made an inspired plea recently. The Harvard man and Alpha Epsilon Pi brother is a member of the so-called “SALT caucus,” a group of congressfolk threatening to hold up Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill if it doesn’t include a full repeal of a Donald Trump-imposed $10,000 cap on deductions of state and local taxes.

“It is high time that Congress reinstates the state and local tax deduction, so we can get more dollars back into the pockets of so many struggling families,” intoned Gottheimer, one of 32 members of the SALT caucus, which includes 8 Republicans. 

Pressure on Biden to repeal the SALT cap has been amping up, mainly from tri-state Democrats like Gottheimer, fellow New Jerseyan Bill Pascrell, and Tom Suozzi of New York. “No SALT, no deal!” the trio power-tweeted a few weeks back. Just a few days ago, Gottheimer even came up with a new way to argue the plan, offering to pay for the repeal of the SALT cap by increasing audits.

“There is a way to do this by going after what people owe already,” he said.

The effort by the “SALT caucus” to hold a $2 trillion relief bill hostage in order to help what they’re calling “struggling families” in the “middle class” is just the latest development in a years-long saga revealing Congress at its phoniest and most shameless.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/caitlyn-jenner-opposes-trans-girls-competing-in-womens-sports/

Caitlyn Jenner said on Saturday that she opposes allowing biological males who identify as transgender to compete in women’s sports in schools, in comments to TMZ.

Jenner, a Republican gubernatorial candidate for California, was asked her opinion on legislation under consideration in several states that would ban biological males from competing in women’s sports.

“This is a question of fairness,” Jenner said. “That’s why I oppose biological boys who are trans competing in girls’ sports in school. It just isn’t fair. And we have to protect girls’ sports in our schools.”

When the interviewer asked whether Jenner’s position was “delegitimizing” the identity of male athletes who transition to females, Jenner responded “have a good day.” Jenner later reiterated her position in a statement on Twitter:

“I didn’t expect to get asked this on my Saturday morning coffee run, but I’m clear about where I stand. It’s an issue of fairness and we need to protect girls’ sports in our schools.”

Jenner underwent sex-reassignment surgery in 2017, and told ABC in 2015 that she had struggled with gender dysphoria throughout her life. Jenner was born as Bruce Jenner and won the decathlon in the 1976 Olympics.

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/science-politics-covid-will-truth-prevail/

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on February 18, 2021, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Phoenix, Arizona.

Scott W. Atlas is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He previously served for 14 years as professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center. From July to December 2020, he served as Special Advisor to President Trump  as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. 

The COVID pandemic has been a tragedy, no doubt. But it has exposed profound issues in America that threaten the principles of freedom and order that we Americans often take for granted. 

First, I have been shocked at the unprecedented exertion of power by the government since last March—issuing unilateral decrees, ordering the closure of businesses, churches, and schools, restricting personal movement, mandating behavior, and suspending indefinitely basic freedoms. Second, I was and remain stunned—almost frightened—at the acquiescence of the American people to such destructive, arbitrary, and wholly unscientific rules, restrictions, and mandates.

The pandemic also brought to the forefront things we have known existed and have tolerated for years: media bias, the decline of academic freedom on campuses, the heavy hand of Big Tech, and—now more obviously than ever—the politicization of science. Ultimately, the freedom of Americans to seek and state what they believe to be the truth is at risk.

Let me say at the outset that I, like all of us, acknowledge that the consequences of the COVID pandemic and its management have been enormous. Over 500,000 American deaths have been attributed to the virus; more will follow. Even after almost a year, the pandemic still paralyzes our country. And despite all efforts, there has been an undeniable failure to stop cases from escalating and to prevent hospitalizations and deaths. 

https://asiatimes.com/2021/05/americas-gender-warriors-in-a-deal-with-the-devil/

In a 1935 radio play, a man dies in a car accident and finds himself in a palatial home where a butler fulfills his every wish for wealth, women and so forth. The man (acted by Colin Clive, the first movie Dr. Frankenstein) cannot bear what he takes for Heaven, and tells his butler, “I want to suffer…I’m sick of Heaven…I can’t stand this confounded everlasting bliss…Well, whatever the devils do to me can’t be as bad as this. I want to go to Hell!”

The butler replies, “Why sir— wherever do you think you are? This is Hell, sir!”

America has turned into Hell — not the Hell of Christian theology, to be sure, but the real Hell in which the satisfaction of narcissistic desire drives the damned into ever more intense misery.

The playwright, John Balderston, wrote the 1931 film “Dracula” and other scripts in the horror genre. In 1960 Charles Beaumont, another genre writer, adapted Balderston’s playlet as an episode of The Twilight Zone. The theme derives from Goethe’s “Faust,” which in turn borrows from the biblical Book of Job.

The biblical Satan tormented Job by taking away what he needed, while the modern devil torments Faust by offering him whatever he wants.

Goethe’s protagonist rejects the devil’s blandishments, eschewing the “gold that runs through my fingers like quicksilver, a game that no-one wins, a girl who ogles my neighbor while I embrace her, honor that disappears like a falling star.”

Today’s Americans have taken the devil’s deal. As Faust told Mephistopheles, he is damned once he tries to hang on to the devil’s passing moment of pleasure. The Americans make a lifestyle out of it, and are just as miserable as the Colin Clive character in Balderston’s fantasy.   

Balderston and Beaumont wrote horror fiction, but not in their darkest imaginings could they have invented the tortures that the devil inflicts on the young people of the West today.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/race-demagogues-are-poisoning-our-politics/

Our racial problem is getting worse, even as we strive as a nation to marginalize racism.
S enator Tim Scott is entirely right: “America is not a racist country.” But America has a serious racial problem. Not a racism problem, a racial problem.

We have a party in power whose strategy for remaining in power is to divide the country along racial lines. Democrats calculate that urban-centered racialist tribalism, amplified by media and pop-culture allies and underwritten by cowed corporations, can cast mainstream America as a deplorable bastion of white supremacism.

The Republicans, the party out of power, generally lack Senator Scott’s confidence and tact in making the counter-case.

The Department of Justice is a key to the Democrats’ strategy. The Obama-Biden administration politicized the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus of our government, peddling with relish the progressive portrayal of an indelibly racist America. They’re ba-ack.

Any good agitprop scheme needs a villain. In the Left’s scheme, the nation’s police fit the bill. The scheme also has an abracadabra element: “disparate impact” theory, which conjures proof of “systemic racism” out of thin air.

The Justice Department is critical because the scheme needs the might of the federal government to impose the non-enforcement approach of progressive “policing” on the whole country. This is exactly the opposite of the way the system is supposed to work.

According to our founding framework, the states are responsible for governing their internal affairs. The Constitution would never have been adopted were it not for the principles of federalism. Nothing is more internal, more close to home, than ensuring law and order so that our neighborhoods can enjoy community, security, and prosperity.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/dershowitz-fbis-raid-of-giuliani-unconstitutional_3798677.html

The FBI’s recent raid on an apartment owned by Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for former President Donald Trump, violated the Constitution, according to constitutional expert Alan Dershowitz.

“This was just a misuse of the search and seizure power. Initially, it was turned down; now it was approved, both by a judge and by the attorney general of the United States, so it wasn’t lawless action, but I believe that they acted inconsistently with both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution and that there should be remedies for it,” Dershowitz said on Newsmax on Saturday.

“It should be done through subpoena, and that is the constitutional route to getting evidence,” he added.

A search warrant being executed points to officials believing the subject would destroy evidence if the search was not carried out. But the lawyer knew that he was being investigated for months, so there’s no basis for a search unless a subpoena was obtained, Dershowitz argued.

“The 4th Amendment demands a subpoena in these situations, not a search warrant. What they did in this case was unconstitutional,” he said.

Agents obtaining information that is covered by attorney-client privilege would taint prosecutors who may try to prosecute Giuliani, Dershowitz added, saying that he has advised Giuliani’s lawyers on a pro-bono basis to move to get the material back, have the government subjected to subpoena analysis, and force anybody who goes over the material to be from outside the prosecutor’s office, such as a judge.

Maybe you didn’t believe me earlier this month when I issued a warning that the U.S. was “getting ready to go full Venezuela” on economic policy. After Biden’s speech a couple of nights ago, are you starting to get the picture?

All constraints are now lifted. All limits no longer apply. The federal government is now fully unleashed to solve all human problems and bring about perfect fairness and equity in human affairs. And to do so immediately if not sooner. All through the magic of a few trillion additional dollars (per year!) of federal spending. And while we’re at it, we’ll also solve the “climate emergency.” That will cost just another few incremental annual trillion. In the context of our new superpowers, that’s a rounding error.

The flood of proposed new programs and spending is so enormous as to make critiques of any individual items completely pointless. Is there a single one of these proposals that makes sense, or that actually might enhance the well-being of the American people? If so it’s such a small portion as to be insignificant.

Instead, I’ll address what I consider to be the elephant in the room, the obvious thing that somehow never gets mentioned. That is, why haven’t the vast numbers of already-existing federal social service programs and spending already succeeded in solving the problems they were created and funded to solve?

At the end of this post I have included a list of some 83 categories of federal “need based” spending programs. The list comes from a 2018 report by John Early written for the Cato Institute, but he took it from a document put together by the Congressional Research Service in 2013. In other words, I’m sure that there are plenty more of these things since this list was compiled. Note also that this is far, far, far from a complete list of federal income and in-kind distribution and benefit programs, since it specifically only includes those that are “need based.” Thus the list doesn’t even include the single largest federal income distribution program of all, which is Social Security. Aficionados of this subject will also recognize that large numbers of food and nutrition programs and job training programs are also missing, undoubtedly because they are not “need based.” (In this post back in 2014 I found a study that identified some 47 federal job training programs alone.).

Note that the Early list is broken down into two categories, those programs that figure “at least partially in CBO estimates” and those that are “not in CBO estimates.” The “estimates” referred to are estimates of income. The list of what CBO includes in “income” for its purposes differs from what is included by Census. The Census numbers, rather than those of CBO, are the source of things like our statistics on “poverty” and “income inequality.” Unlike CBO, Census does not include 5 of those first 7 categories in “income” in its measures. The excluded 5 are the EITC, SNAP, Medicaid, CHIP and the School Breakfast Program. If you wonder how the spending of a trillion dollars plus per year never seems to improve poverty or income inequality, this is how. The spending is simply excluded when the things we are trying to improve are measured.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-left-continues-to-destroy-itself?token=

The leading progressive Democratic candidate in New York City’s mayoral race, City Comptroller Scott Stringer, has had his chances for victory along with his reputation utterly destroyed over the last week. That happened due to allegations from a political consultant, Jean Kim, that Stringer groped her eighteen years ago, in 2003.

Despite no evidence presented that any of this happened, and despite this being the only assault accusation ever voiced about Stringer during his decades in public life, and despite Kim never having once claimed any of this even when she was working for a rival candidate who was ultimately defeated in 2013 by Stringer, and despite the sudden emergence of this accusation as Stringer’s mayoral campaign was surging, and despite evidence showing that Kim was highly misleading in several of her statements, and despite Stringer’s claims that Kim had been his girlfriend for several months accompanied by vehement denials of wrongdoing, numerous leftist groups and politicians who had endorsed him repudiated his candidacy within days of the emergence of these, issuing statements which treat Kim’s claims as proven truth and depict Stringer as a vile sexual predator.

That is because, as has been seen repeatedly, the prevailing mentality in left-liberal politics is that even grave life-destroying accusations are to be treated as true without the need for any evidence. They casually and with apparent glee ruin people’s reputations and lives without batting an eye the second someone utters an allegation of sexual misconduct. And one is required to mindlessly accept such accusations as truth — never ask for evidence if it is true — if one wishes to remain in good standing in those circles and to avoid being smeared oneself as an apologist for sexual misconduct.

To understand what is being done to Stringer, look at the identical smear campaign that Democrats launched in Massachusetts in August, 2020. Congressman Richie Neal (D-MA) is a walking embodiment of everything sleazy and slimy in U.S. politics. First elected to the House back when Ronald Reagan was still President, the Massachusetts Democrat, 72, is now in his 16th House term, and occupies the all-powerful position of Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which controls legislation governing revenue, taxes, social programs, and tariffs.

Neal’s entire career has been funded by large corporations, insurance companies and banks, and that is who he dutifully serves. He has used his immense power to block virtually every piece of legislation that his corporatist funders oppose but which left-wing populists favor. If you’re on the left, and you actually think the political goals you claim are important, there would be few priorities more pressing than removing Congressman Neal from power.

In 2020, the left was presented with precisely that opportunity. Over the past sixteen years, Neal has had no credible challengers in his Democrat-heavy district. But last year, 31-year-old Alex Morse — a dynamic and gay five-term Mayor of Holyoke — announced he would challenge Neal in the Democratic primary. Progressive groups lined up behind Morse with endorsements and donations, and polls began showing him closing in on Neal. This appeared to be one of the best opportunities in years to remove one of the sleaziest corporatists from power.

But then the left sabotaged it. The College Democrats of Massachusetts released a perfectly timed letter accusing Morse of predatory behavior: namely, that he had sought sex with and dated young adults, and had consensual sex with several of them, including students at Amherst where he taught a class as an outside lecturer (such relationships are not banned by university guidelines). When launching these accusations, the College Democrats group also dramatically announced that they had banned Morse from attending any of their events, as if he were some sort of menace. There were no “victims” claiming he had coerced let alone assaulted anyone. But no matter.