RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/02/why-we-still-need-a-militia-and-how-to-build-one/

In an obscure but important footnote to the first volume of the Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wonders what would have become of the Soviet terror if the citizens of Russia had armed themselves with hammers, axes, pokers—anything—so that arresting officers of the NKVD would have had to worry whether they would survive each night. The most powerful tyranny in the world could not have stood up against such action. Instead, tens of millions of Russians submitted meekly to the state, one by one. Why?

The same question came up in my elementary school unit on the Holocaust—why did the Jews get onto the trains? Did they fail to understand what was in store for them? In my childhood mind, I tried to unravel questions that seemed as bitter as the fact of the Holocaust itself: Why was there no effective resistance? Was submission so ingrained in these people, or individual courage so lacking?

The answer in both cases is that it was not courage that was lacking, but organization. This concept glimmers through Solzhenitsyn’s description like a fleck of gold in the pebbly shallows of a stream: He imagines a group of neighbors, a half-dozen perhaps, lying in ambush downstairs for the secret policemen. He specifies a group of neighbors. He specifies collective action. One courageous man resisting alone is a suicide. But one courageous man leading a few of his friends can put up a fight.

The wording of our Second Amendment—or, rather, the placement of a single comma—has engendered a raging debate that reached the Supreme Court and persists to this day: Is the second clause of this all-important sentence operative, or dependent? Is the right to bear arms absolute, or does it exist only because of the need for a militia?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/03/is-biden-blowing-his-covid-vaccine-rollout/

When not attacking the Trump administration for the pace of COVID-19 vaccine distribution, President Joe Biden said he’d dramatically accelerated the rate at which Americans got treated. What’s more, he was supposed to be ready on day one. At least, that’s what he and his team kept telling the public.

So why is the growth rate of daily vaccinations decelerating? And why is Biden now busy making excuses?

Before taking office,  Biden stated that he’d directed his team to prepare a “much more aggressive effort, with more federal involvement and leadership, to get things back on track.”

T.J. Ducklo, a spokesman for Biden’s transition, told CNN in early January that “the president-elect believes we must accelerate distribution of the vaccine while continuing to ensure the Americans who need it most get it as soon as possible.”

The Boston Globe reported on Jan. 8 that “President-elect Joe Biden plans to order the distribution of almost all available doses of the COVID-19 vaccines, in a striking departure from the Trump administration’s strategy of holding back roughly half of the stock to ensure those who have been vaccinated would receive their second dose.”

So, what’s happened since Biden took office?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/kamala_harris_already_becoming_a_problem_for_biden_white_house.html

I suspect that regret already is setting in among his handlers over their pick of Kamala Harris for Joe Biden’s running mate. The first of what will be many clean-up efforts began yesterday for her bungling an incident 8 days in office.  CNN reports:

The White House called Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin after Vice President Kamala Harris conducted interviews with West Virginia media, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation.

The outreach comes after Harris’ apparent move to apply pressure on Manchin frustrated the conservative Democrat, something that he made clear over the weekend.

The pressure VP Harris attempted to apply came in the form of an exclusive interview she granted to WSAZ TV in Huntington, WV. Curiously, I have been unable to locate a video clip on Rumble or YouTube or Twitter. Even WSAZ’s own website is not making available what has to be one of the most newsworthy broadcast moments in the station’s history.

In the interview, Harris tried to pressure the popular former governor by speaking directly to his own constituents:

On Thursday, Harris promoted the $1.9 trillion Covid relief plan in interviews with television stations in West Virginia and Arizona — states that are home to Democrats whose votes could be critical to passing Covid relief, including Manchin in West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, along with Sen. Mark Kelly, who will face re-election in the state in 2022, in Arizona.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/02/02/trump-lawyers-claim-impeachment-is-a-legal-nullity-n1422577

On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump’s lawyers Bruce L. Castor, Jr., and David Schoen released Trump’s answer to the Democrats’ article of impeachment accusing him of “incitement of insurrection.” Trump’s response breaks the Democrats’ impeachment article into eight separate allegations and responds to each claim. In a nutshell, the former president argues that it is unconstitutional for the Senate to remove a president when he has already left office and that he is innocent of the Democrats’ charges.

Trump asks the Senate to “dismiss Article I: Incitement of Insurrection against him as moot, and thus in violation of the Constitution, because the Senate lacks jurisdiction to remove from office a man who does not hold office. In the alternative, the 45th President respectfully requests the Senate acquit him on the merits of the allegations raised in the article of impeachment.”

The Senate already voted to take up the impeachment, with five Republican senators joining 50 Democratic senators in holding the matter constitutional. However, 45 Republican senators voted not to hold the trial, given constitutional concerns. This vote signified that the Senate is not likely to convict Trump.

The former president makes a few extremely salient arguments against the Democrats’ impeachment article. In addition to the claim that the Senate cannot convict a former president on impeachment, Trump argues that the Democrats violated his free speech and due process rights in rushing to impeach him and that the article of impeachment is deceptively drafted in an unfair manner. Trump also claims that disqualifying him from office would constitute a “bill of attainder,” which has been broadly interpreted to mean a legislative act against a class of people that inflcits punishment on them without a judicial trial.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-cancels-the-u-s-senate-11612288061?mod=opinion_lead_pos5 Google’s YouTube has ratcheted up censorship to a new level by removing two videos from a U.S. Senate committee. They were from a Dec. 8 Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on early treatment of Covid-19. One was a 30-minute summary; the other was the opening statement of critical-care specialist Pierre Kory. […]

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/01/the-lincoln-project-lowlifes-and-their-enablers/

The Trump era has spawned an abundance of show clowns clowning either for or against the president. One can’t help but wonder what the country did to deserve the likes of Anthony Scaramucci, Michael Avenatti, and Ana Navarro all foisted upon us at the same time.

Not since the days of James Carville and Mary Matalin has a power couple like the Conways and, unfortunately at least one of their children, epitomized the political war tearing families, friendships, businesses, and the overall country apart.

So it’s appropriate—and gratifying—to see the Lincoln Project, the poisonous outlet co-founded by George Conway, the corpulent husband of Kellyanne, now drowning in its own droppings amid confirmation of one of Washington’s worst kept secrets; co-founder John Weaver is a closet homosexual who preys on young men, some as young as 14. (Karl Rove admitted in an interview Monday that he’s known about Weaver’s behavior since 1988.)

According to a New York Times exposé published over the weekend, nearly two dozen men said Weaver, who is married with two children, “for years sent unsolicited and sexually provocative messages online to young men, often while suggesting he could help them get work in politics.” Weaver mostly attempted to lure his prospects via direct messaging on Twitter.

The “longtime Republican strategist,” as the Times described Weaver, helped manage the failed presidential campaigns of the late Senator John McCain in both 2000 and 2008 and former Ohio Governor John Kasich in 2016. But Weaver and his fellow Lincoln Project lowlifes weren’t bolstered by the media and funded by rich Democratic donors because of winning campaign records or savvy political skills or telegenic good looks.

No, like other NeverTrump shticks—a “former” Republican or “disgruntled” conservative acts as the anti-Trump foil on CNN or in the Washington Post, as I detail in my bookLincoln Project hoodlums revitalized stalled careers by relentlessly and viciously attacking the former president, his family, his administration, and his supporters in Congress.

This slime machine includes losing campaign advisor Rick Wilson and losing campaign manager Steve Schmidt; they spend most of their time making threats on Twitter and cable news shows. Last month, Schmidt warned he will punish pro-Trump Republicans. “They will not write their history,” Schmidt claimed. “We will write their history. And their shame will last forever. They are carved like etching into granite, granite, onto history’s list of villains in the country.”

https://nypost.com/2021/02/01/biden-is-the-most-radical-left-wing-president-in-us-history-period/

Joe Biden is off to the most left-wing start of any Democratic president in recent memory. 

Just two weeks later, the dulcet tones of Biden’s inaugural address already seem an artifact of a bygone era. Republicans will hammer him for the rest of his presidency for failing to deliver on his unifying message, but the fact is that Biden is governing as he promised — further to the left of his own record, further to the left of his ex-boss, former President Barack Obama, and further to the left of any Democrat who made his career prior to the ascendency of the cultural left. 

It isn’t new for Democratic presidents to want to tax, spend and regulate, even if Biden seeks to do more of all three than his immediate predecessors. Biden layers on top of this a cultural agenda that represents a new dimension of radicalism that would be alien and baffling to bygone Democrats, who may have wanted to extend the New Deal but never sought to transcend the gender binary. 

Biden is willing, too, to go it alone via rapid-fire unilateral executive actions. 

If Lyndon Johnson gave us the Great Society, he came to office after the assassination of John F. Kennedy seeking to fulfill the legacy of his martyred predecessor, which included passing a tax bill that reduced income-tax rates across the board and slashed corporate taxes. Once he was elected in his own right in 1964, Johnson embarked on a spate of federal activism that no subsequent Democrat has been able to match, although Johnson largely enacted his priorities the old-fashioned way, by passing bills through Congress. And he operated in a much more culturally conservative country and party. 

Jimmy Carter doesn’t really rate. He ran in 1976 as a genuine Southern moderate, and his early administration was marked by ineffectual overreach. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/who-dc-judge-who-let-fbi-criminal-light-lloyd-billingsley/

On Friday, former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith got a “slap on the wrist,” Debra Heine reports, for falsifying an email in the quest to gain a FISA warrant to spy on an American citizen, Carter Page. Clinesmith was facing a maximum five years in prison and a fine of $250,000, so twelve months probation, a $100 fine and 400 hours of community service, is indeed a slap on the wrist. Even so, it still falls short.

Carter Page might expect the judge to lecture Clinesmith about the lawyer about sullying the reputation of the FBI and DOJ, and betraying the federal government that employed him to uphold the law. None of that for District of Columbia judge James Boasberg. He opted for leniency because the allegedly remorseful Clinesmith had suffered by losing his job and “standing in the eye of a media hurricane.” It was a curious choice of words for the Obama appointee.

“Crossfire Hurricane” was the name of the FBI-DOJ covert operation against candidate and President Trump. And as it turns out, according to official sources, since 2014 Boasberg has served as the presiding judge of United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”

That detail failed to turn up in news reports on Clinesmith’s slap on the wrist, which was much less than three to six month prison sentence sought by special counsel John Durham. After appointment by attorney general William Barr in May, 2019, Durham has failed to bring any criminal charges against major “Crossfire Hurricane” players James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page and others.