RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

It is hard to believe that eighty years have passed since American, British, and Canadian troops landed at Normandy and fought their way across fortified beaches covered in German mines and barbed wire fences.  What a nightmare it must have been to overcome such soggy, uneven terrain while enduring heavy fire from gun emplacements secured upon hills and steep cliffs.  It must have felt like being dropped off in Hell and navigating through a gruesome Jell-O of blood, sand, smoke, explosions, and whirring bullets.  There were no timeouts.  There were no “safe spaces.”  There was nowhere to hide.  You either advanced or died.

Could Allied Forces accomplish such audacious feats today?  It is hard to imagine the “Me-Me-Me Generations” putting their lives on the line for much of anything.  Could you convince a socialist who believes that everything should be free that freedom is never free?  Could you explain to a Millennial that storming a beach is not done for Instagram snapshots, social media approval, or Facebook likes?  Could you persuade all those Westerners who hate Western civilization to pick up a rifle and fight for the West’s survival?  I’m not so sure.

Don’t get me wrong; there are still plenty of patriots among us.  America’s armed services remain home to the kind of self-sacrificing heroes who would have parachuted behind enemy lines or fought tooth-and-nail to establish beachheads eight decades ago.  But the Pentagon has also watered down physical fitness standards, promoted “politically correct” Marxists into crucial command positions, and poisoned the rank and file with “woke” indoctrination.  

https://www.washingtontimes.com/staff/don-feder/

History teaches us that the best way to avoid a war is to prepare for one.

After World War I, another global conflict was unthinkable, the leaders of the democracies declared. Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese imperialists thought otherwise.

In the 1930s, Britain effectively disarmed, and France relied on static defense. The United States embraced isolationism, relying on two oceans for protection, while Germany rearmed and Japan invaded China. The cost of that lack of imagination was another world war and 75 million dead.

When World War II ended, shortsighted politicians rushed to downsize our military, even as communism advanced on four continents.

After Vietnam, the peaceniks who had taken control of the Democratic Party couldn’t wait to put our armed forces in mothballs. Then came Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, 9/11, ISIS, and radical Islam’s war on the West.

The Biden administration’s death march of folly began with the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, with 13 service members dead, thousands of Americans stranded and $7 billion in military equipment left behind. The weakness we displayed to our enemies set the stage for the next round of aggression.

President Biden is Neville Chamberlain, George McGovern and Jimmy Carter rolled into one.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/democrats-disrespect-d-day/

Over 4000 Allied troops, including over 1500 Americans, died storming the beaches of Normandy on this day in 1944, with thousands more wounded or missing. Today’s Democrat Party chose to honor them with petty political messaging and the hyping of Donald Trump as a threat to democracy comparable to that faced on D-Day.

Failed presidential candidate and Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Hillary Clinton, not a person known for empathy or for her concern for American troops, diminished the 80th anniversary of D-Day by tweeting a clichéd comparison of the former President to Hitler: “Eighty years ago today, thousands of brave Americans fought to protect democracy on the shores of Normandy. This November, all we have to do is vote,” she wrote.

Needless to say, this tone-deaf, disrespectful politicization of the sacrifices and heroism displayed by so many young warriors against tyranny was not well-received on social media:

“Holy s*** I despise these people,” Army Ranger veteran Sean Parnell posted. “It’s impossible to capture just how loathsome a comment this is. To cheapen what WWII heroes did to BS garbage politics makes me sick. Again, WWII veterans deserve so much better than this.”

“What kind of shameless, broken, lizard person do you have to be to tweet out some nonsense like this?” wrote ComfortablySmug. “‘Yes I know what it was like for those soldiers on Omaha beach ducking machine gun fire, I went to vote. I am braver than the troops.’ She has never recovered from Trump’s win.”

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.