RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/08/biden-is-increasingly-detached-from-reality-on-the-economy/

A favorite Democratic cliché is “never let a crisis go to waste.” But with the “urgently needed” $1.9 trillion relief bill, Democrats are inventing the crisis. While they keep depicting the economy as being in a free fall, it is, by historic standards, doing well.

Some Democrats are already coming to realize that piling another $1.9 trillion in deficit spending on top of the more than $3 trillion already targeting COVID relief is an enormous mistake. Here’s what Politico reported last week after liberal economist Larry Summers cautioned that the Biden plan was too big.

Summers, the former Treasury secretary for Bill Clinton and top economic adviser to Barack Obama, puts down on paper what many liberal wonks have been whispering about for weeks: that President Joe Biden’s stimulus bill may be too big, that its overall cost could sacrifice other progressive priorities and that it could harm the economy next year, when Democrats will be defending narrow congressional majorities in the midterms.

Summers warns of “inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar and financial stability.”

Give Summers and those anonymous “liberal wonks” credit, at least, for staying in the neighborhood of reality, something that seems to have escaped “No Malarky” Biden.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/george-pratt-shultz-11612725575?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

President Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, called his memoir “Present at the Creation,” an account of rebuilding the postwar world and the realities of a Cold War with the Soviet Union. Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who died Saturday at age 100, titled his memoir “Turmoil and Triumph,” an apt description of the historic role Shultz played in ending the Cold War some 40 years later.

Shultz served as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State for almost the length of Reagan’s Presidency, from 1982 until 1989. The “turmoil” of his memoir’s title described the world as he took control of foreign policy for Reagan.

The Soviet Union, possessing a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, was led by Yuri Andropov, a determined communist opponent of the West. Hard to believe now, but Europe then was still divided by what Winston Churchill called an “iron curtain,” which separated the free democratic nations of Western Europe from the closed, Soviet-dominated countries to the east. Millions were imprisoned inside these countries, unable to emigrate. Those who tried to flee could be imprisoned or shot.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/impeaching-trump-house-threatens-core-principle-jonathan-turley

Over the last four years, we have seen an alarming trend of law professors and legal experts discarding constitutional and due process commitments to support theories for the prosecution or impeachment of Donald Trump or his family. 

Legal experts who long defended criminal defense rights have suddenly become advocates of the most sweeping interpretations of criminal or constitutional provisions while discarding basic due process  and fairness concerns. Even theories that have been clearly rejected by the Supreme Court have been claimed to be valid in columns. No principle seems inviolate when it stands in the way of a Trump prosecution.

Yet, the statement of House manager Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., last week was breathtaking. A former law professor, Raskin declared that the decision of Trump not to testify in the Senate could be cited or used by House managers as an inference of his guilt – a statement that contradicts not just our constitutional principles but centuries of legal writing.

Yet, it appears a signature of this team of House managers. Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., insisted in the last impeachment that the failure of then-President Trump to turn over documents by citing privilege or other defenses should be cited as evidence of guilt on any underlying claims.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/reichstag-fire-democrats-daniel-greenfield/

There are thousands of soldiers outside Congress and political terror inside its halls. That political terror isn’t coming from a QAnon Shaman who only eats organic food, but from the Democrats who are using a manufactured state of emergency to purge the opposition.

Democrats deployed 26,000 troops to Washington D.C. at a cost of $500 million. Thousands of soldiers, authorized to use deadly force as they were forbidden to do either at the border or during the Black Lives Matter assault on the White House, will stay to fight an imaginary threat.

While walls, razor wire, and military encampments rise outside the halls of government, inside them the Democrats have unleashed a true coup. Protesters have “stormed” Congress before, from both the Left and the Right, which cannot be called overthrowing the government. But Democrats began their own overthrow by launching an unconstitutional post-office impeachment of President Trump for speaking at a peaceful protest and a push to remove Senate members who objected to the stolen election by abusing the 14th Amendment.

The fake emergency has been extended to March. The FBI continues falsely claiming that there is some sort of threat that requires 7,500 soldiers to conduct a military occupation of the nation’s capital. The FBI’s claims that this threat would occur during “First Amendment-protected protests” has a massive credibility problem because there have been no protests in D.C.

Even though these protests have yet to emerge for over a month, the occupation goes on.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/black-lives-matter-antifa-march-through-dc-chant-burn-it-down_3688149.html

Black Lives Matter protesters and Antifa agitators marched through Washington D.C. on Saturday and threatened people as they ate dinner, according to video footage and reports.

“Burn it down” is what the demonstrators said. “We are here tonight because black lives matter,” members of the far-left group also said. “Despite black lives mattering, black people are still dying at the hands of the police paid for by our tax dollars.”

Other video footage uploaded by independent journalists on the scene showed Antifa types fighting with police officers, who were trying to keep them away from restaurants. Some, who were clad in all black, could be seen holding the red-and-black Antifa flag.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/06/these-interesting-times/

From a torrent of executive orders to federal law enforcement agents acting like East Germans, the satirists are having a hard time keeping up.

I am told the exhortation “May you live in interesting times” is not really an old Chinese curse. But it might as well be. If you’ve noticed a new spring in Xi Jinping’s step lately, it’s because he sees all the slots coming up roses for China. Europe’s cozying up nicely. And the ascension of his preferred candidate, Joe Biden, to the U.S. presidency has him rubbing his hands together in glee. It is, as Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) noted, a dangerous eventuality. 

There’s a lot to be said about China’s rampant expansion. It seems to be the one country really to have prospered through—or maybe because of—the Wuhan Flu, a term Joe Biden doesn’t want us to use. But that’s where the virus started and it wouldn’t do to call Ebola “Ebola,” a tributary of the Congo River, and not name this impressive Chinese export after the city that’s home to the level-4 military biological research lab where it escaped or, just possibly, was pushed. 

But I digress. What I really wanted to talk about were these interesting times we are living in. 

A lot has changed in just a couple of months. The Wuhan Flu, or, rather, our heavy-handed response to it, is part of that story. As I have observed on multiple occasions, the panic and hysteria over this new respiratory virus, carefully and assiduously fanned by the Big Nurse health industry, aided and abetted by politicians and bureaucrats drunk with power, should someday provide a new chapter for Charles Mackay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The chief irony about the entire episode is that the petty tyrants screaming at people to wear masks—or two or three masks—and to quiver under their beds alone at home, do so while invoking “science,” as if the “science were settled” about how best to deal with this new cold virus that is highly contagious but deadly to a tiny portion of the population. And just try pointing out contrary evidence that challenges the Narrative and bang!—instant cancellation. 

But I still digress. Joe Biden may have woken up in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue because The Swamp rigged the election for him (even Time magazine admits that now), he may be in a sad state of cognitive decline, but he is surrounded by people who are panting eagerly to install the woke, politically correct oligarchy that they had to shelve in 2016 when Donald Trump unaccountably won the presidency. Hillary Clinton would have done a lot of what is being done now in Sleepy Joe’s name had she managed to do then what Biden’s handlers, with the conspicuous help of the media, social and the other sort, not to mention an increasingly woke corporate America, did this time around. We would have had the climate hysteria, the obeisance to China, the attack on the American energy industry, the erosion of America’s southern border, and various other globalist, America-last policies. 

https://www.theepochtimes.com/military-extremism-purge-may-lead-to-communism-former-navy-lt-commander_3687319.html

Former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Steven Rogers said on Thursday that an order by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin for the military to stand down to address “extremism” is unprecedented, unnecessary, and a dangerous road that leads to “communist China.”

“This to me, dangerous, it looks like a political litmus test, and it’s a road that you would only find in communist China or in the former Soviet Union,” former Lieutenant Commander Rogers told NTD.

Austin ordered a DOD-wide stand down to address extremism in the ranks on Wednesday.

Secretary of Defense Retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin answers questions during his confirmation before the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington, on Jan. 19, 2021. (Greg Nash/Pool via Reuters)

Rogers said that the United States military has been a role model in addressing discrimination, extremism, radicalism, which has made the U.S. military the greatest on the earth.

He expressed concern about whether conservatives would be singled out.

“I believe it’s the Defence Secretary under the Biden administration. Are they now going to purge conservatives? Are military members who have conservative views and values—are they the ones that are going to be targeted?” Rogers asked.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/02/06/impeachment_impossibility_145193.html

“Ultimately, the Senate can exercise its clear jurisdiction to hear the case, complete with senatorial bloviations, and lawyerly dodges. But, if the outcome is anything other than the status quo ante, meaning Trump remains eligible for the presidency in the future, the Senate will deal a grave blow to not just the Constitution but to every member of We the People who thinks they still have a choice.”

Perhaps they are thinking about the next election or their political legacies, but Democrats and some Republicans intent on impeaching and convicting former President Donald Trump are not reading the Constitution correctly. 

When the Senate trial begins Monday, there will be lots of grandstanding and lawyerly pettifogging, and we will find out if Democrats can convince 17 Republicans that they need to convict the former president. 

Fortunately, I don’t think they’ll succeed. I say fortunately because impeaching Trump would be wrong, constitutionally speaking. 

Forty-five Republicans recently voted that this second Trump impeachment trial is in itself unconstitutional. They are incorrect. 

The bipartisan group of 55 senators who voted to proceed to the trial think that the Senate can apply a sanction after conviction. Constitutionally, they’re wrong, too. 

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-when-the-white-house-cant-handle-the-truth

On January 21, President Biden’s first full day in office, White House press secretary Jen Psaki began her briefing with this: “When the president asked me to serve in this role, we talked about the importance of bringing truth and transparency back to the briefing room.” Now, the administration’s position on opening schools shut by COVID lockdowns is testing that pledge.

Psaki’s problem started on Wednesday, when the White House COVID Response Team held a teleconference for the press. Among the group was Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the president’s new choice to head the Centers for Disease Control. A reporter asked Walensky about the CDC’s priorities for vaccination, and in particular whether “the federal government would be working more closely with states to kind of get more vaccinations to teachers in particular so that schools can reopen in the fall.”

Walensky said that a group inside the CDC, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, had created a priority list for those receiving vaccinations. In December, the committee included teachers in what was called the 1b category, meaning they would be among those who should be next in line. But that wasn’t law — it was the CDC’s guidance for states to follow, or not to follow.

“We’ve left that to the states to manage,” Walensky explained, “in terms of recognizing the prioritization of ACIP, but also manage at their own local level.”

And then: “That said, I want to be very clear about schools, which is: Yes, ACIP has put teachers in the 1b category, the category of essential workers. But I also want to be clear that there is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated in order to reopen safely. So while we are implementing the criteria of the Advisory Committee and of the state and local guidances to get vaccination across these eligible communities, I would also say that safe reopening of schools is not — that vaccination of teachers is not a prerequisite for safe reopening of schools.”