RUTHFULLY YOURS

Only in Seattle do the tree trimmers make $160,000 per year!

Today, our investigation is an Editor’s Pick at Forbes: Why Seattle And Their Police Department Is In Trouble.

Our auditors dug into how Seattle is actually spending taxpayer dollars. We found: 

tree trimmers lopped off $160,604
the chief librarian made $197,704
electricians earned $271,070
electrical lineworkers made $307,387
police officers earned up to $414,543 

Last year, 601 city employees out-earned the mayor ($199,593), and the mayor out-earned 49 out of 50 state governors (top pay: $202,000).  

The city council member ($131,336) leading the charge to defund the police made more than the members of the New York general assembly — the most highly compensated state legislature in the country ($130,000). 

Read our breaking oversight piece at Forbes where we outline all the details. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/25/falling-covid-19-death-rates-are-even-smaller-than-they-look/
Once again, the U.S. is undergoing a media-driven COVID-19 scare after a “spike” in infections. But as we noted earlier this week, the number of cases depends on the amount of testing. The key gauge to watch is deaths. They’ve been falling since April, and there’s strong reason to believe they’re lower than the official count suggests.

The dreaded Wuhan virus is no doubt a nasty bug, worthy of our vigilance and ongoing concern. That said, its virulence, as measured by the daily number of deaths, appears to be waning, as the chart with this piece, courtesy of the COVID-19 Tracking Project of the Atlantic, clearly shows.

The average number of daily COVID-19 deaths on a weekly basis has fallen from a peak of just over 2,000 to 700 or so. That’s a roughly 65% decline. And it’s no fluke. The figure has been dropping steadily since April.

Hold on. That last number for June 23 on the chart shows a huge jump. Should we be worried? Is this the much-dreaded surge some have been talking up?

Apparently not. A big part of that one-time gain came from a revision by one state: Delaware.

As the Youyang Gu, an MIT data scientist who created the COVID 19-projections.com site, tweeted: “To put the increase in deaths in context, Delaware added 69 deaths today: ‘The revision came from identifying 67 deaths dating back to April.’ So if you take out those 67 deaths, the week-over-week deaths have not changed.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/24/explosive-new-fbi-notes-confirm-obama-directed-anti-flynn-operation/

Handwritten notes from fired former FBI agent Peter Strzok show that Obama himself directed key aspects of the campaign to target Flynn during a Jan. 5, 2017 meeting in the Oval Office.

Newly released notes confirm President Barack Obama’s key role in surveillance and leak operation against Michael Flynn, the incoming Trump administration national security adviser. The handwritten notes, which were first disclosed in a federal court filing made by the Department of Justice on Tuesday, show President Obama himself personally directed former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to investigate Flynn for having routine phone calls with a Russian counterpart. He also suggests they withhold information from President Trump and his key national security figures.

The handwritten notes from fired former FBI agent Peter Strzok appear to describe a Jan. 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting between Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Comey, Yates, and then-national security adviser Susan Rice. The meeting and its substance were confirmed in a bizarre Inauguration Day email Rice wrote to herself.

It was at this meeting, which was confirmed by testimony from Comey and Yates, that Obama gave guidance to key officials who would be tasked with protecting his administration’s utilization of secretly funded Clinton campaign research, which alleged Trump was involved in a treasonous plot to collude with Russia, from being discovered or stopped by the incoming administration.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/federal-appeals-court-orders-judge-sullivan-to-dismiss-the-flynn-case/

A divided panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this morning ordered Judge Emmet Sullivan to grant the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the indictment against Michael Flynn, who fleetingly served as President Trump’s first national-security adviser.

In a majority ruling written by Judge Naomi Rao and joined by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, appointees of Presidents Trump and Bush 41, respectively, the court held that the executive branch has the constitutional power of prosecutorial discretion, including the authority to decide which cases to charge and whether to persist in charges once they’ve been brought. This power is in tension with Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which requires the Justice Department to seek “leave of the Court” before dismissing an indictment. While not deciding the potentially legitimate parameters of this requirement, the majority reasoned that it is for the protection of defendants from prosecutorial harassment.

Relying on the D.C. Circuit’s 2016 Fokker precedent, the court found that Rule 48(a) does not permit a thoroughgoing inquiry into the executive branch’s reasoning for dismissal — at least in a case in which the accused joins the prosecution in seeking a dismissal with prejudice (such a dismissal stands as a final judgment and bars the government from re-charging the defendant with the same offense at a later date).

https://canadafreepress.com/article/democrats-exposed-as-the-racists-theyve-always-been

A black vote of 20 percent, and quite possibly 30 percent for President Trump, will teach the Democrats that even their most cherished “value”––abortion––is not enough to keep the black population loyal to their historically empty promises and innate racism.

They say that out of every bad thing comes a good thing. Ask any mother who has been through a 20-hour labor!

The same can be said of the criminal behavior of the Marxist-inspired radicals––Antifa and Black Lives Matters––which eclipsed the legitimate outrage that followed the horrific murder of George Floyd by a white policeman, Derek Chauvin, in Minneapolis, MN.

This crime called for reform of the Minneapolis Police Department, which had ignored 18 grievances against Chauvin. But that is not what happened.

Instead, the peaceful protests against this savage act were obliterated by the professionally orchestrated, bountifully financed rampage of the above-mentioned anarchists-cum-terrorists through American cities and suburbs, leaving a massive swath of destruction that included dozens of black-owned businesses and dozens of white-owned businesses that employed black citizens. So much for Black Lives Matter!

What a beautiful tribute to George Floyd––God spare all of us such a memoriam!

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/removal-of-sdnys-interim-u-s-attorney-is-washington-not-watergate/

Democrats weave a scandal out of an overdue personnel move.

On Saturday evening, I posted an extensive column on the homepage, exploring this weekend’s contretemps between Attorney General William Barr and Geoffrey Berman, the now-former interim United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (where I was a prosecutor for nearly 20 years).

The more one looks at this, the more clear it becomes that Democrats are contorting a long-overdue personnel move into a scandal. This is not an accident. We are four months from Election Day, and Barr has indicated we may be closer to some sort of reckoning in Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation. Barr’s deservedly stellar pre-Trump reputation notwithstanding, the president’s opposition is determined to discredit him and, derivatively, any malfeasance uncovered by Durham’s scrutiny of the Obama administration’s Trump-Russia probe.

It is dysfunctional of the Trump administration not to have installed a confirmed SDNY U.S. Attorney serving a four-year term. The post is among the most consequential in the Justice Department — indeed, in the government. Attorney General Barr has been trying to reestablish normalcy in that regard. For the reasons I laid out in the column, however, it is not easy to get nominees confirmed when Democrats hold both Senate seats in the state where the district is located.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/06/23/tucker_carlson_joe_biden_is_a_trojan_horse_for_the_radical_left_only_republicans_can_save_us.html
Posted By Tim Hains

During his opening monologue Monday, Tucker Carlson said Americans should stop pretending the November election is a contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden because, as he put it, “there is no Joe Biden.”

“The Joe Biden you remember no longer exists,” Carlson said. “The babbling husk you see may have the same name and similar features, but behind the mask there is nothing but a jumbled collection of talking points from the 70s. ‘Turn on your record player, no malarkey’. The candidate has no independent thoughts of his own.”

Carlson claimed that Biden’s actual function is to serve as a “perfect Trojan horse” for the grave intentions of the activist wing of the Democratic Party.”Their plan is to ride him to power,” he said. “Once there, someone tough and calculating and purposeful — Kamala Harris, probably — will change the country.”

“That’s what they learned. They’ll do it again. This time, the ‘Russians’ will be ‘Confederate sympathizers’ or ‘Nazis’ or … whatever other name they’ll choose to give to their political opponents. It doesn’t matter. But once they pick when they will gin up mass hysteria, because that’s what they are good at, the media will collaborate fully and we will have another witch hunt.”

“Who can save us from that? As of right now, only Republicans can save us from that,” he said. “Not because they’re inherently virtuous, not because they want to — they don’t — but because they’re the opposition party to the extent they still have opposition to anything. We have no choice but to ask for their help.”

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/23/its-time-for-republicans-to-stand-up-for-america-already/

The United States of America is starting to resemble a Target in Minneapolis, overrun by lawless mobs and left for dead by the very leaders charged with upholding the rule of law.

Today, we are witnessing the wealthiest, freest, and greatest country in the history of the world, which took more than 240 years to build, being burned to the ground at the hands of radical leftists motivated primarily by anarchy and a Marxist agenda, not racial justice. Compared to previous generations and their peers who sign up to defend America, these folks have contributed precious little to society. Yet, somehow, they have found a way to bend America to their will. How? Because most of our nation’s political class won’t stand up and lead.

Yes, those civilians choosing to loot businesses, paint “Kill Cops” on billboards, destroy property, and promote violence are being propped up by the very politicians—Democrat or Republican, take your pick—you’ve elected. But it goes deeper than that.

The very people you have sent to Washington, D.C. to make laws, uphold them, conduct oversight, and ensure America remains a safe and prosperous nation have cowered to the mob.

Politicians have allowed the community of CHAZ in Seattle, run by a self-proclaimed “warlord,” and BHAZ in downtown Washington (feet from the White House) to take over chunks of sovereign cities. They have sat idly as historical statues and federal monuments have been defaced, torn down, and destroyed. They have allowed the mobs to “cancel” anyone with opinions contrary to their radical agenda.