RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/new-steele-evidence-strengthens-durham-prosecution

It was in London that the whole Russia collusion caper began four years ago, so it seems only fitting that as the discredited probe enters its final phase that damning new evidence of the FBI’s failures would emerge back in England.

This week when a British judge ruled against the former FBI human source Christopher Steele, the decision delivered more than an order for the former spy’s company to pay damages to two Russian businessmen maligned by his dossier.

It also introduced new incontrovertible evidence that bolsters Attorney General William Barr’s and U.S. Attorney John Durham’s probe into whether the FBI engaged in misconduct and criminally deceived the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to win permission to spy on the Trump campaign.

Buried in Justice Mark Warby’s ruling were several new pieces of evidence that answer long lingering questions about just what the FBI knew, and when it knew it.

For instance, Congressional Republicans have long questioned when exactly the FBI knew that Steele’s dossier was a product ordered up for the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic Party. After all, the bureau never revealed the connection to the FISA court despite its central relevance to the motives of the dossier.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/goya-boycott-ceo-robert-unanue-praise-donald-trump/

Goya, which claims to be the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the U.S., is facing a backlash after CEO Robert Unanue praised Donald Trump during a Thursday event at the White House. “We’re all truly blessed at the same time to have a leader like President Trump, who is a builder,” Unanue said.

Unanue, who is of Spanish descent, was one of a handful of Hispanic supporters on hand as the president signed an expansion of the “Hispanic Prosperity Initiative.” The executive order is meant to “improve access by Hispanic Americans to educational and economic opportunities,” according to a White House press release.

Calls to #BoycottGoya quickly spread on social media, with hashtags including #Goyaway also trending. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro tweeted his disapproval of the company, urging consumers to “think twice before buying their products.”

Julián Castro

@JulianCastro
.@GoyaFoods has been a staple of so many Latino households for generations. Now their CEO, Bob Unanue, is praising a president who villainizes and maliciously attacks Latinos for political gain. Americans should think twice before buying their products. #Goyaway

https://www.city-journal.org/deadly-cost-of-lockdown-policies

Many years ago, one of my duties as a young surgical intern was to fill out death certificates for recently deceased patients. Under “cause of death,” Part I asked for the immediate cause, other conditions leading to it, and the underlying cause. Part II asked for “other significant conditions contributing to death but not resulting in the underlying cause given in Part I.” If you think this is confusing, you’re right. Did the post-operative patient found dead in bed really die of a heart attack, a pulmonary embolism, or some operative complication, like bleeding? Where do you list their colon cancer or hypertension?

The task has not gotten any easier during the Covid-19 pandemic. People are still dying of heart disease, stroke, cancer, and accidents. But now there is a new respiratory illness to account for. Not every decedent who tested positive for the virus that causes Covid-19 died from it—in fact, the disease is mild for most people. Conversely, some deaths due to Covid-19 may be erroneously assigned to other causes of death because the people were never tested, and Covid-19 was not diagnosed. Nearly everyone dying of Covid-19 has concurrent health problems—the average decedent has 2.5 co-morbid conditions—and hypertension, heart disease, respiratory diseases, and diabetes are among the most common. The presence and interaction of these co-morbid conditions is what sometimes changes Covid-19 from a relatively benign disease into a killer. But co-morbidities can also cause death regardless of Covid-19.

A common way to distinguish the mortality burden of a new infectious agent from other causes of death is to estimate the excess deaths that occurred beyond what would be expected if the pathogen had not circulated. A recent study of 48 states and the District of Columbia estimated 122,300 excess deaths during the pandemic period of March 1 to May 30, compared with expected deaths calculated from the previous five years. Deaths officially attributed to Covid-19 accounted for 78 percent of the total; approximately 27,000 deaths (22 percent) were not attributed to Covid-19. A second study, using the same database with different statistical methods for the period March 1 to April 25, found that 65 percent of 87,000 excess deaths were attributed to Covid-19.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-7-9-energy-production-and-consu

Over the past several days, you have probably seen multiple articles reporting on reverses suffered in the U.S. courts by developers of pipelines to transport oil and natural gas. In one case, a Federal District Court even ordered an existing, operational pipeline to shut down pending further environmental review. The multiple court decisions have been covered in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CNN, and every other large news source that you can think of.

Meanwhile, on June 19 the BP oil company issued its annual Report titled “Statistical Review of World Energy,” this version covering the year 2019. I’ll bet you haven’t seen anything in the news about that one. I make that bet because, aside from one article in Forbes magazine, every piece that I can find covering the BP Report appears in some sort of specialized or industry publication.

If you just see what appears before you in your news feed, you could be forgiven for getting the impression that producers of fossil fuels are on the run and will shortly be driven from the scene. But if you take the time to look, you can find the real picture in the BP Report. In summary, world production and consumption of fossil fuels continue their steady and inexorable aggregate growth (although with ongoing substitution of natural gas for coal). Despite all you have read about plans to reduce or eliminate CO2 emissions, in fact those emissions continue to grow from year to year. Production from “renewables” also has been growing, but at a pace insufficient to result in any reduction in use of fossil fuels. Indeed, it’s not clear that any amount of increases in intermittent wind and solar sources can result in reductions in use of fossil fuels, since the wind and solar sources require full backup from dispatchable sources. Meanwhile, the market shares between and among the energy sources barely shift from year to year.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/supreme-court-upholds-religious-liberty-joseph-klein/

The Supreme Court this term has thwarted the progressive left’s relentless assault on religious liberty in three milestone cases. In all these cases, a majority of the justices decided that religious freedom is such a fundamental constitutional right that it cannot be so easily encroached to serve secular objectives. As the Supreme Court has now made clear, the principle of separation of state and religious institutions does not mean compelling an individual to violate his or her religious beliefs in order to fulfill a secular government policy objective that can be achieved in a manner that is more accommodating of those beliefs. It does not mean forcing religious institutions to compromise their own religious teaching standards. And it does not mean that parents who wish to exercise their religious beliefs by enrolling their children in religious private schools are automatically ineligible for state aid that is made available to parents enrolling their children in secular private schools.

The First Amendment’s prohibition against the establishment of religion and its protection of freedom of religion are complementary, not antithetical to each other. Our Founding Fathers determined that the sacred is best respected by maximizing individual freedom of conscience, which is the essence of the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of religion and the prohibition against establishment of religion by the state. The separation of religious institutions and state ensures that all religious believers and non-believers receive equal treatment under the law, and that the government will never establish an official state religion. But it was not intended to punish or place unreasonable burdens on people of faith.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/convicted-terrorist-susan-rosenberg-raising-funds-lloyd-billingsley/

“There’s no way you can do any homework on Black Lives Matter and not see that it’s a Marxist political organization,” and the move to substitute a “black” nation anthem was “a communist political move.”  That was sports journalist Jason Whitlock in an interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News this week, when more obscure information about BLM emerged.

Convicted terrorist Susan Rosenberg (pictured above) is vice chair of Thousand Currents, a California-based charity that handles fundraising for Black Lives Matter. Rosenberg is a veteran of the May 19 Communist Organization that carried out a bombings in the early 1980s to counter President Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign. Rosenberg landed on the FBI most wanted list and was arrested with stolen explosives in 1984.

The terrorist drew 58 years but served only 16 because in 2001 President Bill Clinton commuted Rosenberg’s sentence. Since 2016, Rosenberg has been involved with Black Lives Matter, now openly recognized as a Marxist organization making communist political moves. One of those moves, supported by prominent Democrats is to defund the police, but BLM Philadelphia boss YahNé Ndgo is taking that to a new level. “One of the things that we are demanding over five years is the complete abolition,” she told Fox News Tuesday. “We don’t want to see any police in our community.”

Black Lives Matter has made a hero of Joanne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur) who murdered a New Jersey state trooper, escaped prison and fled to Cuba. As Atlanta and Chicago confirm, murder is becoming more common in communities where Black Lives Matter operates, and the abolition of police would make it more so. As it happens, in Communist doctrine and practice, murder is necessary for social progress.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-loser-pelosis-house-11594336504?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The Supreme Court on Thursday punted in two cases concerning subpoenas for President Trump’s financial records, sending them back to lower courts to resolve a host of legal questions. Yet if the cases had no clear winner, one of the rulings did produce an outright loser: Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s overzealous House.

Since the moment Mrs. Pelosi retook the gavel in January 2019, she’s operated as if her institution is the only branch in town, with limitless power. Within days of the 2018 election, an unnamed House Democrat bragged that the incoming majority was loading a “subpoena cannon,” aimed at more than 80 different areas of Trump investigation. The president’s tax returns, his firing of former FBI Director James Comey, his discussions with foreign leaders, security clearances, the Trump family business, Stormy Daniels, the reassignment of executive branch employees, the Mueller report. Ad nauseam.

No one disputes the House has oversight authority. But courts have always made clear that this power must be firmly tethered to a “legislative purpose.” Prior Congresses at least attempted to hew to the spirit of that phrase. Mrs. Pelosi’s committee chairmen—driven by fury over the Trump presidency—embarked on an extended fishing expedition. In doing so, they exposed how easy it is to abuse the legislative-purpose doctrine.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-danger-of-denigrating-americas-founding-fkers-opinion-634565

The fifth season of the hit HBO comedy series Veep opens with the fictional US president, Selina Meyer – played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus – panicking about the electoral tie of the previous day, which could result in her not being able to remain in the Oval Office for a second term.

Aptly titled “The Morning After,” the premier episode of the season highlights what happens in America when a candidate wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College. Addressing the nation, Meyer insists that she is in “barefaced awe of the majesty of our democratic system,” while also saying that the “electoral college is a somewhat arcane institution that many scholars say we should do away with.”

Talk about prescience.

The episode aired on April 24, 2016, nearly seven months before the election in which Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump beat his Democratic Party rival, Hillary Clinton, by garnering an electoral college majority – even though she had won the popular vote. Unlike Clinton, however, the protagonist of Veep ultimately obtained the electoral college coup that she needed to keep her coveted seat in the White House.

But before it was clear to Meyer that this was the case, she told her staffers sardonically that she had forgotten in her speech to “thank the voters for making our country look like a high-school Spanish

She added bitterly, “Didn’t those founding f**kers ever hear of an odd number?”

https://spectator.us/trump-mount-rushmore-1619-statues-speech/

Ahead of Independence Day last week, CNN went live to their correspondent Leyla Santiago. Here is how she described the upcoming celebrations: ‘Kicking off the Independence Day weekend, President Trump will be at Mount Rushmore, where he’ll be standing in front of a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native Americans.’ She went on to report that the President was expected to focus on efforts to ‘Quote “Tear down our country’s history”.’ And where might the President have acquired such an idea?

Even a few years ago it would have been unthinkable for a major network like CNN to have described Mount Rushmore in such nakedly hostile terms. America still had its agreed-upon holy sites, people and ideas – revered as unifying points of the nation’s past and necessary for any conceivable future.

Not anymore. Today every element of the American past is up for grabs, and the intensity of the campaign may well provide the likeliest means for Donald Trump to remain in the White House.

It is stunning to watch, this unweaving of a nation. While going on for decades, the latest orgy of iconoclasm has seen crowds assail statues of the Founding Fathers with equal ferocity to that aimed at Confederates. A statue of George Washington pulled down in Portland, Oregon had ‘genocidal colonist’ spray-painted on it. A statue of Thomas Jefferson, pulled down outside a high school bearing his name, was graffitied with ‘slave owner’, as well as the name of George Floyd.