RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/07/shades-of-nixon-biden-refuses-to-turn-over-potentially-devastating-tapes/

Almost exactly 50 years ago, the Supreme Court ordered President Richard Nixon to turn over White House tapes that he had refused to release for nearly a year, citing executive privilege. On July 24, 1974, the court unanimously rejected Nixon’s executive privilege claim. Sixteen days later, Nixon resigned.

Fast forward to this year, and President Joe Biden is refusing to release tapes of his interviews with Special Counsel Robert Hur about his handling of classified documents, citing, as Nixon did, executive privilege, with an added twist about the risk of “deep fakes.”

Biden is, in fact, so determined to keep the tapes secret that he’s willing to let his attorney general get slapped with contempt of Congress, a charge two House committees advanced on Thursday for Garland’s refusal to comply with a congressional subpoena.

The White House is also being sued by the Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch, and a dozen news organizations – including CNN and the Associated Press – for access to the tapes after the White House refused to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests.  

The Biden administration argues that there’s no reason to turn over the tapes since the transcripts are already out.

But last Friday, the administration admitted that the transcripts had been altered.

That admission came in response to Heritage’s lawsuit. The White House told a federal court that the transcripts were “accurate … except for minor instances.”

In response to that, Heritage’s Oversight Project posted on X that: “After being forced into federal court by us, the White House admits they altered evidence to make Biden appear less incompetent This case has been blown wide open.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/06/an_out_of_control_administrative_state_turns_a_parking_lot_into_a_mine.html

Between the law and the nitty-gritty of its implementation stands the diabolical bureaucracy — without constitutional authority but with seemingly unquestionable powers to frame rules and regulations.  Sometimes, bureaucratic decisions are downright absurd — such as, most recently, designating a parking lot a coal mine!

But before we get to how the Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) wrested jurisdiction over a parking lot and ludicrously holds on despite legal reversals, let us run through some examples of arbitrary administrative overreach, an enduring problem over the last few decades:

The Environment Protection Agency (EPA) attempted to expand the definition of “waters of the United States” in the Clean Water Act to include wetlands on residential property. As a result, a landowner in Idaho was prevented from building a modest home on his property for 17 years until the Supreme Court ruled in his favor last year (Sackett v. EPA).
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) randomly decided that fishing operators should transport, house, and pay the salaries of federal inspectors who accompany them on trips to monitor compliance with fishing rules.  Previously, the NMFS itself bore those costs, as would be reasonable.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) weaponized the Antiquities Act to increase the regulatory burden on ranchers and farmers, hinder normal agricultural operations, and seize land.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) overstepped its bounds by arbitrarily banning a popular tourist activity — swimming with dolphins — citing disturbances to dolphins and their habitats.

The latest victim to raise a voice against such administrative overreach is KC Transport, Inc., a family-owned company based in Virginia and West Virginia.  The company parks, maintains, and repairs trucks; some occasionally haul coal.

In 2019, an MSHA inspector visited the company’s facility in Emmett, West Virginia, and cited the company for repairing two trucks without using blocks to secure the wheels. The inspector claimed that the company’s sporadic coal hauling brought it under MSHA’s jurisdiction and declared that the trucks and the parking lot constituted a coal mine.

Dr. Anthony Fauci sat for more than three hours of live questions by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

The day before the hearing, on Sunday, the New York Post broke our latest “follow the money” investigation into NIH third-party royalties.

Our auditors found that during the pandemic, $710 million in secret third-party royalties enriched the National Institutes of Health – with 97-percent of the payments flowing into Fauci’s institute, National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/01/after-the-republic-redux/

In the wake of Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 counts related to the effort to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign, the former president’s supporters lamented what they saw as “the end of the republic.” The United States, as we have always known, is over, they insisted. The formerly fairest and most envied justice system in the world has been irredeemably corrupted. What Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth” is “finished,” they said, likely never to recover. Tucker Carlson, the unofficial spokesman of the MAGA movement, took to Twitter/X to intone: “Import the Third World, become the Third World. That’s what we just saw…. Anyone who defends this verdict is a danger to you and your family.”

While one might sympathize with their frustration and concur with their infuriation at the political nature of Trump’s trial and the conviction, objectively, most of this lamentation is wildly misdirected. The trial and conviction of Donald Trump by an overzealous and partisan prosecutor is NOT the “watershed moment” in American history that many on social media claimed. It does NOT mark the end of the nation as we knew it. It does NOT signify that the American republic is over and done with.

ALL of that happened almost an entire decade ago.

Whether one likes Donald Trump or not, the truth of the matter is that he has been the target of the American “regime” ever since he first announced his candidacy for the presidency. Trump may be all of the nasty, horrible, and grotesque things his detractors say he is—or he may not be. I’m here neither to defend nor condemn him. I am here, rather, to point out that whatever one thinks of him, his treatment at the hands of institutions that were constructed specifically to prevent such treatment is both egregious and, disturbingly, precedent-setting.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20680/funding-pro-hamas-protests

Rather more jarring is that the Biden administration, and therefore taxpayer money, is also funding the protests, through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

“U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Vice Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference and Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee… discussed oversight findings from the EPW Committee that revealed a $50 million grant was awarded from the EPA through the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to ‘Climate Justice Alliance,’ a group that engages in pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic activities.” — US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, May 21, 2024.

“[We] went to the website of Climate Justice Alliance. This is what we found on the website that our taxpayer dollars are going to organizations such as this. This, at the bottom, is a picture of the bulldozer that went through the fence when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.” — Senator Shelley Moore Capito, May 21, 2024.

The People’s Forum’s executive director Manolo De Los Santos called for the complete destruction of the United States at the conference to great applause: “We have to bring down this empire with one million cuts, and those one million cuts have to come from every sector of struggle in this room.”

Terrorists and their billionaire, as well as less-affluent supporters, are actively conspiring to destroy the US with the backing of foreign powers — and very little, if anything, is being done to stop it.

The answers to the question of who is funding the groups behind the pro-Hamas, anti-Israeli protests on US campuses, continue to grow in complexity. It appears that a multitude of donors are falling over each other to help promote the cause of the officially designated terrorist group, Hamas – whose openly stated aim is the destruction of Israel and the Jews — to impressionable young students and the public at large.

https://www.thefp.com/

If you wonder why I—a woman of color, an African, a former Muslim, a former asylum seeker, and an immigrant—look at the antics of today’s anti-Israel, anti-American protesters with such fear and trembling, allow me to explain.

I was born in Somalia in 1969. The country had achieved independence nine years before. But less than a month before I was born—on October 21, 1969—a junior member of the brand-new Somali armed forces seized power with the help of the Soviet Union. The first two decades of my life were shaped by the upheaval that followed that coup.

The Somalia that gained its independence was a young, optimistic society full of national pride. We had such hope for growth, political stability, prosperity, and peace. But, in a story sadly familiar to many of my fellow Africans, those hopes were dashed.

What followed was a nightmare.

For me it is all captured in the earliest memories of my youth: statues of Mohamed Siad Barre, our dictator, sprung up across Mogadishu, flanked by a trio of dark seraphim: Marx, Lenin, and Engels. This particular communist experiment plunged Somalia into bloodshed, mass starvation, and a 20-year period of suffocating tyranny. I recall my grandmother and mother smuggling food into our house. I also remember the whispering: we felt the state was omnipresent. It could hear everything.

My father was thrown into prison. His friends—those other pioneers in pursuit of a democracy modeled on America—were either jailed like him or, in many cases, executed.

By the time I was eight, my family knew we needed to escape. We left in 1977. By 1990, the country had descended into a civil war from which it has never fully recovered.

https://victorhanson.com/the-destructive-generation-proving-americas-weakest-link/

Governor Ronald Reagan, in his 1967 inaugural address, famously remarked, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”

Reagan today might have expanded on his theme by declaring that civilization itself is both fragile and can lost by a generation that recklessly spends its inheritance while neither appreciating nor replenishing it—if not ridiculing those who sacrificed so much to provide it.

Such is the noxious epitaph of the Baby Boomer generation that is now passing after a half-century of preeminence and whose Jacobin agendas have nearly wrecked the nation they inherited.

In contrast to them, eighty years ago this week, the Allied powers of World War II—chiefly the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada—landed on five Normandy beaches to begin what Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied expeditionary forces, would call the great “crusade” to liberate Western Europe from four years of brutal Nazi occupation.

The plan was to land within a few hours and in stormy weather well over 150,000 Americans, British, and Canadians on the Atlantic Coast beaches of France, where they were to charge directly into the fire of tens of thousands of enemy troops. They were to charge uphill in the sand while being fired upon by entrenched German troops occupying the hills above. From there, the beachhead was to serve as the launching pad for two million more troops, who were to somehow drive eastward through France and into Germany to end the war and the devastation the Third Reich had inflicted on the world.

All that was accomplished in the ensuing 11 months. That can-do American generation assumed that impoverished teenagers emerging from the Great Depression, with equipment often inferior to their seasoned German enemies, would, over the ensuing months, surely prove able to route Waffen SS veterans. Many of them were hastily transferred from the murderous Eastern Front, such as the nihilist 2nd SS Panzer Division das Reich (“The Empire”). No matter, the Americans did the impossible in less than a year—from the Normandy beaches to well across the Rhine River.

That same generation went on to save South Korea, build an anti-totalitarian world order, defeat Soviet communism, and pass on to the Baby Boomer generation the strongest economy, military, and political system in history, or, to paraphrase the poet Horace, “monuments more lasting than bronze.” Or so we, the inheritors, thought.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/30/our-revolutionary-times/

Sometimes unexpected but dramatic events tear off the thin veneer of respectability and convention. What follows is the exposure and repudiation of long-existing but previously covered-up pathologies.

Events like the destruction of the southern border over the last three years, the October 7 massacre and ensuing Gaza war, the campus protests, the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown, and the systematic efforts to weaponize our bureaucracies and courts have all led to radical reappraisals of American culture and civilization.

Since the 1960s, universities have always been hotbeds of left-wing protests, sometimes violently so.

But the post-October 7 campus eruptions marked a watershed difference.

Masked left-wing protestors were unashamedly and virulently anti-Semitic. Students on elite campuses especially showed contempt for both middle-class police officers tasked with preventing their violence and vandalism and the maintenance workers who had to clean up their garbage.

Mobs took over buildings, assaulted Jewish students, called for the destruction of Israel, and defaced American monuments and commentaries.

When pressed by journalists to explain their protests, most students knew nothing of the politics or geography of Palestine, for which they were protesting.

The public concluded that the more elite the campus, the more ignorant, arrogant, and hateful the students seemed.

The Biden administration destroyed the southern border. Ten million illegal aliens swarmed into the U.S. without audit. Almost daily, news accounts detail violent acts committed by illegal aliens or their surreal demands for more free lodging and support.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/protect-womens-sports-from-transgender-inclusion/

Allowing boys to compete as girls will harm women’s sports. But many activists believe their feelings and the feelings of transgender athletes are more important.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by several Louisiana newspapers that are part of the Gannett-owned USA Today Network, then removed because it did not meet Gannett’s “editorial standards.” We are republishing it so that readers can judge its argument for themselves.   

Many players on the New Orleans Pelicans probably feel like a kid inside when they’re on the basketball court. They might even miss their days of dominating middle-school basketball tournaments, instead of squaring up against the giants in the NBA.

No one, however, would think it was fair if Zion Williamson joined a youth basketball league simply because he identified as a twelve-year-old. No middle-school boys could stop Williamson from getting to the basket, and they’d probably end up injured if they tried.

Men and women don’t compete for the same reasons. Yet transgender activists want athletic institutions to ignore these obvious physical differences so transgender athletes can feel included, even if it hurts biological girls in the process.

From middle-school gyms to NCAA swimming pools, activists seek to force women and girls to compete against biological men and boys. These activists claim it is a “myth” that transgender athletes have an advantage, but most Americans know this is untrue and unfair.

Starting in the womb and continuing through puberty, men develop physical advantages that help them outperform women in competitive sports. On average, men are taller and have higher bone density than women. When controlled for height, women also have 15 percent smaller hearts and 12 percent smaller lungs than men’s.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/the-tawdriest-political-dirty-trick/

Alvin Bragg has pulled it off.

If anything has been established in the courtroom the past couple of weeks, it’s that Alvin Bragg doesn’t have much of a legal case. But he doesn’t need one.

The legalities matter here only insomuch as they provide a veneer over an audacious political trick that has kept a major-party presidential candidate off the campaign trail for several days a week, and may — within days — give his enemies a political cudgel to use against him until November.

What’s the Latin for “specious legal case in service of frankly political ends”?

It’s true that if Trump gets off on a hung jury, it will play as a major victory and vindication for the Republican candidate, yet he still won’t be able to get back the time or resources he’s wasted fighting this case.

Even the most hard-bitten, cynical political operative would have been hard-pressed to imagine a way to keep an opponent off the campaign trail entirely. Rummaging through an opponent’s garbage, stealing his debate-prep materials, distorting his record in lavishly funded negative ads — all that looks amateurish compared with abusing the criminal-justice system for political ends the way Alvin Bragg has.