RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/pelosis-h-r-1-is-an-authoritarian-outrage/

Democrats want to corrode the system because they believe it will help them win.

Democrats like to accuse anyone who doesn’t embrace every one of their brand-new, rapidly evolving, Constitution-corroding positions of being “authoritarians.” It’s often an impressive feat of projection. For a pristine example of the genre, take Jonathan Chait’s recent New York magazine piece alleging that former vice president Mike Pence is laying the “blueprint” for a fascistic GOP state in his new Heritage Foundation op-ed.

What “authoritarian” diktats does Herr Pence have in store for our fragile American democracy? For starters, the former vice president argues that states, as they always have, should conduct their own elections rather than permit a narrow partisan majority led by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to unilaterally nationalize and dictate the rules for every locality in perpetuity — as they did with a House vote on a sweeping measure known as H.R. 1.

To be more precise, Pence writes that he opposes empowering the federal government to:

compel states to count mail-in votes that arrive up to ten days after Election Day.
compel states to allow ballot harvesting.
compel states to ban voter ID laws.
compel states to allow bureaucrats to redraw congressional districts.
compel states to allow felons to vote.
compel states to undermine free-speech rights by imposing “onerous legal and administrative burdens on candidates, civic groups, unions, nonprofit organizations.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/house-passes-sweeping-bill-to-roll-back-election-integrity-measures/

The House voted largely along party lines late Wednesday to pass a sweeping electoral reform bill known as H.R. 1.

The bill, which passed 220-210, would roll back a number of election integrity measures, including by weakening voter ID laws and mandating automatic voter registration and at least two weeks of early voting. Additionally, H.R. 1 would make it difficult to purge voter rolls and gives voting rights to former felons. A proposed amendment that would lower the voting age from 18 to 16 was defeated in the House and was not included in the final bill.

“This reminds me of what it must have felt like at Valley Forge,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) told reporters on Wednesday before a House-wide vote on the bill. “Everything is at stake. We must win this race, this fight.”

Pelosi added, “At the same time as we are gathering here to honor our democracy, across the country over 200 bills are being put together, provisions they’re putting forward, to suppress the vote.”

A nearly identical bill was passed by the House in 2019, but was not considered in the Senate, which was controlled by the GOP at the time. With the Senate currently tied 50-50 and Vice President Kamala Harris giving Democrats the tie-breaking swing vote, it is likely that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) will bring the measure up for a floor vote.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_lefts_campaign_against_selfdefense.html

Last week, federal prosecutors offered an undisclosed plea deal to two lawyers who firebombed an NYPD van and drove around passing out Molotov cocktails to protesters at a violent May 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in Brooklyn. Urooj Rahman, 31, and Colinford Mattis, 32, who was driving the car used in the crime, had been indicted in June for arson, conspiracy, and the use of explosives. They faced life imprisonment.

In the name of “social justice,” politicians and the judiciary in many cities and states are bestowing moral rights on violent left-wing and anarchist groups. District attorney Mike Schmidt, for instance, announced in August that he won’t prosecute most of the 550 people arrested during the 75 days of mayhem in Portland last spring. He said the leniency was an attempt to “create a forum” to express “collective grief, anger, and frustration” at the death of George Floyd and the history of abuses endured by people of color. Worse, he said using the criminal justice system against them would “undermine public safety” for those “demanding to be heard.” Schmidt, his Democrat cohort, and leftist sympathizers in journalism, law, and academia willfully ignore the fact that such misplaced clemency condones and encourages militant groups’ violence, their disrespect for the law, and their anti-American agenda.

In stark contrast, prosecutors are bearing down heavily on gun owners who defended themselves at protests by militant leftist groups like Antifa and BLM. Under threat are the Second Amendment right to bear arms and the legal justification to act in self-defense.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/03/trumpism-without-trump/

Six weeks ago, Americans were assured that Donald Trump had left the presidency on January 20, 2021 disgraced and forever ruined politically. 

Trump was the first president to be impeached twice, and first to be tried as a private citizen when out of office. He was the first to be impeached without the chief justice of the United States presiding over his trial.

His nonstop complaining about the stolen “landslide” election was blamed by many as a distraction that lost two Republican Senate seats from Georgia. Joe Biden’s current Democratic majority Congress was the result. 

Americans were assured by Trump’s impeachment Senate prosecutors and the media that the January 6 Capitol assault was his fault alone. So Trump was condemned as a veritable murderer, responsible for five deaths at the Capitol. Many of his own advisors and cabinet members loudly resigned in disgust.

Yet six weeks later, a Phoenix-like Trump brought a crowd at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference to its feet. His 90-minute blistering broadside against Joe Biden’s radical first 40 days of executive orders and hard-Left appointments enthused thousands. 

Polls show that while he has lost some support in his party, Trump still wins 75 percent approval in the GOP.

So why is a supposedly once-toxic Trump apparently back at center stage? 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/dems-voting-fraud-encouragement-bill-joseph-klein/

The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the inappropriately named “For the People Act” (H.R.1) on Wednesday evening by the largely party line vote of 221 to 207. It now goes to the Senate. This bill, if enacted into law, will be a gift that keeps on giving to Democrats who care only about staying in power rather than securing the integrity of the electoral process. “This bill makes elections less trustworthy, not more,” said Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas.

The right to vote in a free and fair election requires procedural protections to ensure that elections are conducted in an honest manner. We must have guardrails to protect against potential election fraud, voter intimidation, illegal votes, and inaccurate vote counts. The American people’s willingness to accept the results of an election, whether a voter’s favored candidate wins or not, depends on their being convinced that the election was carried out in a legitimate manner. H.R.1 strips away any semblance of guardrails. Instead, H.R.1 creates multiple paths to election fraud, including the following:

Online Registrations: Let’s start with the provision that mandates online voter registration in federal elections, which would also allow registered voters to update their voter registration information online. With no more paper registration forms as backup, this is an invitation for hackers inside and outside the country to run amok. Hacking last year by one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies of the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, nuclear labs, various cabinet department, and Fortune 500 companies should provide a clear warning that even highly secure systems are vulnerable. States’ voting registration databases will be easy pickings.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/fbi-goes-totally-comeytose-lloyd-billingsley/

“We have not to date seen any evidence of anarchist violent extremists or people subscribed to Antifa in connection with the sixth. That doesn’t mean we’re not looking, and we’ll continue to look, but at the moment we have not seen that.”

That was FBI boss Christopher Wray testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Wray claimed the FBI doesn’t care about ideology, but he left more than a reasonable doubt about how hard the FBI had been looking.

According to a January 13 FBI affidavit, self-proclaimed racial justice advocate Earle Sullivan, aka John Sullivan, “did knowingly enter or remain in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, or did knowingly, and with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions, engage in disorderly or disruptive conduct.”

As The Intercept explained, “the FBI determined that Sullivan was not just an observer but a participant in the riot, based on a review of nearly 90 minutes of raw footage of the raid that he recorded on his phone and posted on YouTube.”  Wray likely had the FBI looking for rioters in Antifa T-shirts. On the other hand, the FBI boss is experienced at overlooking events of significance.

Back in 2019, attorney General William Barr told a Senate panel that “spying did occur” against Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. As the Associated Press reported, Barr “seemed to be alluding to a surveillance warrant the FBI obtained on a former Trump associate.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/04/stop-the-steal-the-case-for-bidens-co

COVID-19 cases are plunging. Vaccination rates are booming. The economy is rebounding. States are running budget surpluses. Schools are reopening. All without the benefit of President Joe Biden’s “urgently needed” $1.9 trillion spending spree. So why aren’t supposedly moderate Senate Democrats standing up to oppose this Treasury theft, which will be paid for by future generations?

Just this week, we learned that Texas has dropped its mask mandate and is lifting limits on businesses. So is Mississippi. Biden said that vaccines will be available to all Americans by May. A report showed that manufacturing is growing at the fastest pace in years.

If you listen to Biden and his fellow leftist Democrats, none of this is supposed to be happening. To hear them talk, the economy is flat on its back, the virus raging, and the nation desperately in need of a massive dose of federal aid.

On Wednesday, Biden went on TV to say that “If we act now, decisively, quickly, and boldly, we can finally get ahead of this virus, we can finally get our economy moving again, and the people of this country have suffered far too much for too long.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosis-latest-partisan-commission-11614795409?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Yes, history repeats itself, especially when it is made by the same person, for the same reason, and with the same vehicle. Unlike the 9/11 Commission, which was praised for its bipartisanship, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s proposed commission to review the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol will mirror the unbalanced Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission she set up after the 2008 financial crisis, and will be a failure for the same reasons.

In the election following the financial crisis, the Democrats won overwhelming control of Congress and the White House. President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said that “you never let a serious crisis go to waste,” and many on the left realized this was an opportunity to increase regulation and government control of the financial system. There was at least one other plausible cause for the crisis: government housing policies, pursued by the government-backed corporations Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and strongly supported by congressional Democrats. By 2008 these trillion-dollar institutions were bankrupt and had fostered the creation of a massive housing bubble consisting of at least 31 million subprime and other risky mortgages worth $5.3 trillion. It seemed reasonable to suppose that when the bubble collapsed, the failure of these mortgages had brought the whole financial system down.

Yet if the speaker’s study had concluded that the financial crisis was caused, even in part, by those subprime mortgages, that would have weakened support for more regulation of the financial system. So the commission was set up with six Democrats and four Republicans. That would assure that the commission would place the blame for the financial crisis on insufficient regulation and not interfere with the enactment of legislation—later called the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010—that the speaker and other Democratic lawmakers had in mind.

https://spectator.us/topic/equality-equity-executive-orders/

It’s hard to keep them all straight, but among the many diktats emitted by the Biden administration during its first days in office, one deserves special commendation for its brazen mendacity. I mean the ‘Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government’.

The key word, as we’ve heard over and over again these last few weeks, is ‘equity’. The diktat (a more accurate term for what is happening than ‘Executive Order’) promises ‘a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all’ by ‘affirmatively advancing,’ well, ‘equity’. If you think you discern a little whiff of tautology, you’re right.

You are also right if, on second sniff, you catch the acrid scent of contradiction. We’re ‘advancing equity for all’, you see, but we’re doing it by ‘affirmatively advancing’ an ‘ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda’ catering to ‘historically underserved’ populations, to wit: ‘Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other persons of color; members of religious minorities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons; persons with disabilities; persons who live in rural areas; and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality’.

You might like the soothing strains of the word ‘equity’. The first definition in my dictionary says ‘equity’ is ‘the state, ideal, or quality of being just, impartial, or fair’. And that’s just what the Biden diktat says: ‘The term “equity” means the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals…’ But it then goes on to specify that by ‘all individuals’ it means some individuals (‘Black, Latino’, etc.). In other words, we’re going to pursue impartiality by being partial to certain groups and (just as important) by penalizing other groups.