RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-internal-revenue-leak-service-propublica-charles-rettig-chuck-grassley-11639437071?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Democrats want to give $80 billion to the Internal Revenue Service to audit millions of Americans each year. Yet six months after the progressive website ProPublica first published the secret tax information of rich Americans, the tax agency still can’t explain what happened. Senate Republicans led by Iowa’s Chuck Grassley are demanding answers.

In a Dec. 1 letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, all 14 GOP Members of the Senate Finance Committee express frustration at how little the agency has discovered or reported on the ProPublica leak. Mr. Rettig promised when the leak occurred in June to find out what happened, but in September he told Senators, “We do not yet have any information concerning the source.” Since then it’s been crickets.

The scale alone should make investigating the breach a priority for the IRS. ProPublica claims to have thousands of individuals’ tax information, and it has continued publishing confidential details since its first report. Neither the publication nor federal authorities have said they know who leaked the records. No one seems to know, or least admit, how it was done, or how many more taxpayer files might have been stolen.

The leak is a crime, but tracing it isn’t merely a matter of criminal enforcement. The breach highlights the general failure of the IRS to protect taxpayer data. In their letter, the GOP Senators refer to several known weak points in the agency’s systems.

The problems include the agency’s master file for tax submissions, which was developed in 1962 using a coding language now broadly considered to be outdated. Yes, 1962. That’s several digital revolutions ago. The Government Accountability Office concluded a review of the agency’s systems in 2020, and its report was unsparing. More than a year before the leak, it warned of holes that enabled “unauthorized access to, modification of, or disclosure of financial reporting and taxpayer data.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/12/14/it-took-a-special-kind-of-stupid-to-believe-jussie-smolletts-hate-crime-hoax/

So, to absolutely no one’s surprise except perhaps himself, Jussie Smollett, a third-rate homosexual black actor got convicted of faking a hate crime. When I originally heard of what had supposedly occurred, my reaction was, “Say what??”

Supposedly, the actor went out at 2 a.m. — during a polar vortex.

To get a Subway sandwich from a store supposedly open at 2 a.m. In the south part of Chicago.

And then out of nowhere, white men jumped out at him. Wearing MAGA hats. At 2 a.m. In Chicago. Carrying a noose. And they recognized him.

These “white men” grabbed him and said, “This is MAGA country.” And then they poured some bleach on his clothes. And put the noose on him.

They happened to wear MAGA caps in a black neighborhood of Chicago. And were carrying bleach around. And they just happened to be carrying a noose. During a polar vortex. At 2 a.m.

Then he returns to his apartment — still wearing that noose around his neck.

Riiiiight.

https://spectatorworld.com/newsletter/why-wont-the-white-house-take-inflation-seriously/

Let’s hear it for Colorado governor Jared Polis. He is a rare beast: a Democrat governor with a libertarian streak. And on Covid, he has admirably little time for both those who seem to want the pandemic to go on forever and those who have decided to lionize a reluctance to get vaccinated as some sort of brave stand for liberty.”

Everybody had more than enough opportunity to get vaccinated,” Polis said on Friday. “At this point, if you haven’t been vaccinated, it’s really your own darn fault.”

As a result, Polis sees no case for ongoing pandemic restrictions: “The emergency is over. You know, public health [officials] don’t get to tell people what to wear; that’s just not their job. Public health [officials] would say to always wear a mask because it decreases flu and decreases [other airborne illnesses]. But that’s not something that you require; you don’t tell people what to wear. You don’t tell people to wear a jacket when they go out in winter and force them to [wear it]. If they get frostbite, it’s their own darn fault.”

https://spectatorworld.com/newsletter/why-wont-the-white-house-take-inflation-seriously/

Why won’t the White House take inflation seriously?

As has been clear for some time now, the fortunes of Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislation and the state of the US economy are inextricably linked. With every bit of economic bad news, such as the worse-in-40-years inflation figures announced on Friday, the chances of the president securing fifty votes for his monster spending bill seem to fade.

Today, Biden will meet Joe Manchin and try to win the West Virginia holdout round. But one suspects nothing the president says to Manchin would be as persuasive as some good economic news — in particular, an easing of the price rises that Manchin has long said are a major reason why he cannot support the bill.

And for all that the Biden White House now claims to take the inflation threat seriously, one cannot help but feel the administration basically views the problem as one of messaging and spin, rather than anything more serious. Consider, for example, the insincere way in which Build Back Better has been rebranded as an urgently needed inflation-busting measure. The economic picture is radically different to when Build Back Better was first introduced. And yet we are supposed to believe that the legislation remains the perfect set of measures for the moment.

The White House has officially dropped talk of “transitory” inflation, but they clearly still think of it as a temporary problem. On Friday, Biden called price rises a “real bump in the road.”

Biden has assembled a handful of inflation-busting measures, but they feel designed so that he has an answer to the inflation question rather than as an earnest attempt to bring prices down. A government that was serious about the inflation threat would take an all-of-government approach. It would decide that now was not the time to double tariffs on lumber, for instance.

Rather than actually tackling inflation, officials are more interested in explaining why those prices aren’t the full story. Biden chief of staff Ron Klain decided that the best response was a flip chart explaining that everything was actually great. It is one thing to tout your economic achievements, it is another to deny the existence of any problems. On inflation, the White House too often finds itself telling voters not to believe their lying eyes.

To some economists, frustration among Americans at the state of the economy is a head-scratcher. GDP is surging, why aren’t people feeling better, they ask themselves.

But as the New York Times’s David Leonhardt explained on Friday, this really isn’t as much of a paradox as these economists seem to think. In his blunt assessment, “Americans think the economy is in rough shape because the economy is in rough shape.”

As Obama economic adviser Jason Furman told the Washington Post recently, “The typical family is spending an extra $4,000 this year because of excess inflation. It does not seem like much of a mystery why people are upset when they have to spend thousands of additional dollars more because of inflation.”

Not long ago, Klain called inflation a “quality problem.” He has learned not to say something like that again in public. But one can’t help but feel that, privately at least, that is still the White House view.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/christine-rosen/the-new-misogyny/

A new form of misogyny is taking hold in contemporary culture. It comes in the guise of a liberationist philosophy, a transformational movement dedicated to open-mindedness. Its advocates believe they are ushering in a world in which one can be whomever one chooses to be. And in doing so, they are treating womanhood itself—the defining feature of half of humankind—as though it is a disposable commodity.

Under the dictates of this new dispensation, anyone, regardless of physiology, must be allowed to lay claim to the biological realities of the female body. Anyone should have the right to call themselves a woman.

The misogynistic nature of this revolution has escaped proper scrutiny precisely because it is understood as progressive—as literally better than everything that has come before. And it casts everything that has come before as suspect: All forms of social organization and every idea that denies this movement’s claims have been deemed retrogressive and actively harmful to the forward march of greater rights for all.

This is an audacious form of woman-hatred, especially since it comes in the guise of opening up womanhood, of extending its benefits to all. But by doing so, it becomes nothing less than an assault on what it means to be a woman. And it is not being understood as such by its advocates and their fellow travelers because of a potent combination of two factors: First, people’s fears of being labeled bigots, and second, a genuine and commendable effort to extend compassion and care to a very small minority.

That compassion has largely been met with hostility. It is becoming increasingly clear that the new misogyny shares one feature with the old: contempt for women. The difference is that the contempt is now coming from the radical extremes of the trans movement. As the signs carried by trans activists who recently protested a women’s conference in the UK read, “Suck my dick you transphobic cunt.” This is not progress. This is misogyny.

These radicals insist on redefining women in masculine terms. Women are as tough as men; they are not biologically different from men; indeed, many of them were born men, came of age as men, and, despite having lived in the guise of women for but a scant portion of their lives, feel entitled to take positions of power away from women. Even motherhood must be acknowledged as something men should be allowed to claim as their own.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/eli-lake/trump-russia-fbi-russiagate/

In November, U.S. attorney John Durham indicted the primary source for the so-called Steele dossier—a document that supposedly offered proof of a conspiracy between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Kremlin. Igor Danchenko, a Russian national living in the United States, has been charged with five counts of perjuring himself to the FBI. The indictment alleges that a major source of information for the Steele dossier was an unregistered American lobbyist for Russia named Charles Dolan, who has been a close associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton for years.

This revelation has compelled some observers to look back critically on the behavior of the media these past five years. Erik Wemple, the media columnist of the Washington Post, said that “key claims in the indictment…[raise] specific concerns about reports in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and ABC News—as well as more general concerns about how outlets such as MSNBC, CNN, McClatchy and Mother Jones handled the story.”

Even so, the Paul Reveres of the Trump-Russia scandal are digging in. Even if former British spy Christopher Steele’s dossier was fake, they tell us, Russiagate was real.

“The Steele dossier undertook to answer the question ‘What the hell is going on with Trump and Russia?’” David Frum writes in the Atlantic. “But the disintegration of the dossier’s answers has not silenced the power of its question.” Indeed, he claims, Durham was actually appointed in 2019 by Trump-administration attorney general William Barr with the specific intention of silencing that question.

Max Boot, Jonathan Chait, David Corn, and Charlie Savage have offered similar arguments, contending that the recent focus on the fraudulence of the Steele dossier only plays into Trump’s effort to discredit the broader investigations into his campaign’s ties to Russia. There’s a kernel of truth to this argument. As I wrote in the January 2021 issue of Commentary, when it comes to Russia, Trump was both framed and guilty. Former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation did uncover impressive details about Russia’s operation to hack and publicize the emails of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign. Furthermore, a 2020 report from the Senate Intelligence Committee confirms that one-time Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s relationship to a man named Konstantin Kilimnik, who the report says is a Russian intelligence officer, presented a major counterintelligence threat.