RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/27/the-ignoble-lie/

“Noble lies” are rarely spun for anyone’s interests other than those of the liars themselves.

In a controversial passage in Plato’s Republic, Socrates introduced the idea of the “noble lie” (“gennaios pseudos”).
A majestic fiction, he says, could sometimes serve society by persuading uninformed citizens of something good for them.

Ever since, many prevaricators have used the excuse that they lied for the common good.

Take Dr. Anthony Fauci, our point man on the COVID-19 epidemic.

Fauci misled the country about mask-wearing during the pandemic by claiming they were of little use. But he argued that he lied so the public would not make a run on masks, deplete the supply, and thus rob medical professionals of protective equipment.

Fauci also told “noble” lies about the likely percentage of the public needing to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. He kept raising the bar — from 60 percent to 70 percent to 75 percent to 80 percent, to 85 percent.

Apparently, Fauci feared a lower figure, even if accurate, might lull people into complacency about getting inoculated.

Fauci also lied about his own role in routing U.S. aid money to subsidize gain-of-function viral research at the Wuhan virology lab — the likely birthplace of COVID-19.

Either Fauci was hiding his own culpability, or he believed the American people might not be able to fully accept that some of their own health officials were promoting the sort of research that was partially responsible for more than 700,000 American deaths.

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has serially lied about the number of undocumented immigrants who have crossed into the United States. He falsely claimed mounted agents were whipping migrants. He fibbed about the purported lack of federal data of apprehensions, detentions, and deportations. His assertion that the border is secure was a joke.

Apparently, Mayorkas believes the public would go ballistic or his own administration would be roundly despised, if he told the bitter truth about the border: by intent, the Biden administration has apparently deliberately left it wide open.

And it will likely allow 2 million undocumented immigrants into the country in the current fiscal year.

Related: Of Course: Fauci Revises the Definition of ‘Fully Vaccinated’

Lots of other unelected federal officials lied over the past five years by claiming or implying that harming the Trump administration was in the public interest.

Former FBI directors Andrew McCabe and James Comey likely misled the nation. McCabe admittedly lied that he did not leak FBI information to the media.

James Comey lied under oath on multiple occasions in congressional cross-examinations and claimed he did not know or could not remember basic facts about his own role in promoting the Russian collusion hoax.

Apparently, Comey and McCabe believed that by being less than truthful, they might better emasculate Donald Trump. And that result would be beneficial to America.

Our former intelligence leaders may have been the most brazen liars. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress about the NSA surveillance program, though he denied it.

When caught in the untruth, Clapper reverted to the noble lie that he gave the least untruthful answer, apparently on the pretense that he did not wish to damage the reputation of an important intelligence agency.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/10/27/you-should-resign-in-disgrace-judge-tom-cotton-rips-attorney-general-garland-runs-afoul-of-a-dissident-n1527492

Attorney General Merrick Garland generally enjoys the protection of the sycophantic Leftist media that works night and day to conceal the galloping disaster that is the Biden administration. Garland himself appears to harbor a taste for forcibly suppressing opposition voices, as became clear yet again when he set his FBI onto the trail not of jihad terrorists, or migrant criminals, or any other group that the Left would like to pretend doesn’t exist, but of disgruntled parents protesting at school board meetings against the implementation of the race-hate propaganda known as critical race theory in public schools. As Stacey Lennox noted, this “can only be described as a tactic to suppress dissent.” On Wednesday, however, Garland had an unusual experience: He ran into a dissenter. It wasn’t pretty.

The dissident in question was none other than Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who was clearly angry that Garland followed the National School Boards Association (which has since backtracked) in portraying parents as domestic terrorists simply for registering their outrage over the divisive Leftist propaganda being forced on children in public schools. Garland, however, insisted that the FBI was only concerned about threats of violence, not about simple dissent. Referring to the directive he sent to agents, he told Cotton: “Nothing in this memorandum or any memorandum is about parents expressing disagreements with their school boards. The memorandum makes clear that parents are entitled to have vigorous debates.”

However, Megan Fox recently did a deep dive into the supposed “threats” that school board members had supposedly received and that justified FBI intervention, and came up empty. Fox concluded: “There isn’t one legitimate threat on the NSBA’s list or a situation that wasn’t handled easily by the police. What the NSBA wants to do is crack down on free speech and, stupidly, they attached to their letter every example of parents speaking freely and demanding that the FBI stop it.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/going_full_soviet_judge_releases_jan_6_defendant_on_bond_after_he_renounces_trump_.html

The jailing of the Jan. 6 riot defendants is not just an obvious miscarriage of justice, given the length of time they’ve spent in detention without trial.  It’s also turning into something that’s full Soviet.

Here’s the latest from one Judge Amy B. Jackson, who, after denying release at least once to one guy, went ahead and let him out.  He’s a Buffalo, New York-based defendant named Thomas Sibnick, who’s recanted:

WASHINGTON — A federal judge reversed her bond decision Tuesday for a Capitol riot defendant accused of robbing a D.C. Police officer — in part because she found “toxic” conditions in the D.C. Jail were likely to contribute to his further radicalization if he was kept in pretrial detention.

U.S. District Judge Amy B. Jackson released Thomas Sibick, 35, released to his parents’ Buffalo, New York, home under 24-hour incarceration on Tuesday after hearing from his lawyer and a tearful plea from his father, Dr. Eugene Sibick, a former officer with the U.S. Navy who publicly criticized his son’s detention at the “Justice for J6” rally in September and has called him a “political prisoner.”

A good thread of what went down, with far more relevant details from WUSA reporter Jordan Fischer, was retweeted by journalist Glenn Greenwald and is worth reading here.

The reason he got out while the others stayed in?

His groveling letter denouncing President Trump, which was so self-abasing that it would make Nikolai Bukharin blush:

“While many praise Trump, I loathe him, his words and actions are nefarious causing pain and harm to the world,” Sibick wrote. “He is not a leader and should be ostracized from any political future, what he honestly needs to do is go away!”

That didn’t seem to be his point of view back on Jan. 6, when he was allegedly assaulting a police officer and stealing his badge, according to the charges.  He certainly was some kind of nut and probably had more legal problems than the other defendants, who were simply in the wrong place or who were pushed into the Capitol, possibly by the FBI’s paid agents provocateurs, or who were invited in by Capitol cops and waved the flag.  He probably ought to be punished.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/prof-biden-and-his-ambassadors-appointments-confirmation-payment-11635349354?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Presidents often reward big political donors with plum ambassadorships, but Joe Biden and the University of Pennsylvania appear to have come up with an innovation on the practice. Amy Gutmann, Penn’s president, awaits Senate confirmation as U.S. envoy to Germany, and David L. Cohen, until July chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees, as ambassador to Canada.

Ms. Gutmann isn’t a donor. Mr. Cohen and his wife, Rhonda, gave more than half a million dollars to Democratic campaigns and political organizations between 2017 and 2020, according to OpenSecrets.org. That includes the maximum $11,200 to the Biden campaign and $50,000 to the Biden Victory Fund, according to the Federal Election Commission database. (Mr. Cohen also donated a smaller amount to Republican candidates and organizations.)

Here’s the innovation: After Mr. Biden left the vice presidency in 2017, Penn created the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and appointed Mr. Biden to the bespoke position of Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor. Mr. Biden was paid personally for this job—$371,159 in 2017 and $540,484 in 2018 and early 2019 before launching his campaign.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on the arrangement in July 2019. The paper noted that the average salary for a Penn professor was $217,411 in 2017-18 and described Mr. Biden’s position as “a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fly-by-night-taxation-democrats-congress-tax-hikes-ron-wyden-joe-biden-11635371820?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

There’s never been anything like this, and we’ve been around a long time. Democrats are writing tax policy for a $22 trillion economy on the fly, floating new tax increases willy-nilly, with little thought to the consequences and no time for public debate.

One day it’s an increase in tax rates on corporations and the affluent. But wait, that doesn’t have the votes. How about a carbon tax? That won’t fly either. Hey, there goes Jeff Bezos. Let’s tax him and 699 other billionaires. It polls well. Everyone hates billionaires!

Oh, but that may be unconstitutional. We still need money, so let’s try a 15% corporate minimum tax—though be sure to exempt investments in green energy and other pet progressive ideas. So it will have to be a minimum tax on some companies but not others. Bring on the Gucci Gulch lobbyists, campaign checkbooks at the ready.

And don’t forget to cut taxes for some of the rich by restoring the state and local tax deduction, though only for two years. Need those New York and New Jersey House votes.

Then let’s rush to get all of this “framework” agreed to by Thursday so President Biden can have something to boast about at the global climate gabfest that will do nothing that matters about the climate.

***

What a spectacle. For a century Democrats have been the party of higher taxes, but at least they paid some attention to the policy merits. Tax writers Dan Rostenkowski and Lloyd Bentsen were serious people. This crowd has no clue what the consequences of their proposals will be, and they don’t much care.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/28/kill-the-biden-reconciliation-disaster/

The Biden reconciliation bill is full of mandatory spending which will act as a financial time bombs set to go off over the next decade. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has set an artificial must-pass date of October 30th for what was a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill which is nothing more than a far-left wish list of expanded government.  The reason for this date is that the Virginia state elections will be held on November 2nd and she rightfully fears that the results of that election will make it politically impossible to pass this dramatic expansion of the size and scope of government.

As most people are undoubtedly aware, Senators Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) are standing in the way of Senate Democrats getting the 50 votes necessary to pass the bill with the majority provided by the Vice President.

Recently, Americans for Limited Government provided a synopsis of 10 egregious big government expansions within the proposal which is a must-read to understand the breadth of the expansion this bill would impose.

One proposal that appears to be in deep trouble is the IRS reporting requirement for bank accounts of $600 or above.  It is being reported that Senator Manchin is throwing a monkey wrench into this intrusive Biden idea that would give the IRS access to virtually every bank transaction made across the country.

Given that Manchin and Sinema have each also demanded significant cuts to the amount of spending within the bill, President Biden has conceded that the actual spending over ten years could be more than halved.  But if the mandatory programs remain in place, they will likely live forever with costs increasing annually dwarfing the original price tags.

What’s more,  the regulations coming out of the broad language included in the bill will overwhelm any local dissent as Congress will have authorized things such as the federal takeover of decisions about school locations and retrofitting, expansion of Medicaid in those states which resisted the Obamacare eligibility expansion, and the creation of a Climate Corps that will be a massive taxpayer-funded environmental advocacy group masquerading as grassroots.

At a time when parents are waking up to the hate-America curricula being shoved down our kids’ throats, the federal government would pour tens of billions of dollars into pre-K education under the guise of providing daycare to the most needy. The reality is that they will be jamming a socialist value system into the highly formative minds of toddlers.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/28/dont-be-seduced-by-the-billionaires-tax/

The 19th Century German statesman Otto von Bismarck observed famously that “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best.” Sometimes, however, it’s not even the next best; it can be illogical, unworkable, and pie-in-the sky. Such is the nature of Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden’s tax proposal – which should be called the Wyden-Warren-Sanders’ Folly – to tax billionaires’ unrealized capital gains, such as stocks, valuable art works, or jewels, that appreciate in value with time. The gains are not “realized” until the item is sold.

This might be seductive to those who want “the rich to pay their fair share,” but it’s certainly not fair. It’s unwieldy and susceptible to manipulation, merely a wilted fig leaf to offer the illusion that President Joe Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar expenditures on social programs will be “paid for.” Ultimately, the expenditures will occur, but the revenues won’t materialize.

It’s one thing to tax income, which most Americans dislike but have gotten more or less used to, but taxing wealth in the form of unrealized capital gains is a horse of a different color – possibly literally.

What do I mean by that? Well, suppose you own a racehorse of not particularly distinguished lineage that you bought for, say, $50,000, and on a whim, you enter him in the Kentucky Derby and he wins it. Immediately, he could be worth $50 million, with stud fees in six figures. Under the Wyden-Warren-Sanders’ tax plan, you could have a huge tax bill for the horse (possibly, every year that you own him), because of his potential. But this could be finessed: You could reduce the tax due by (with a wink and a nod) selling the horse to a friend for a far lesser price, and have him sell the animal back to you, again on the cheap. In the face of actual sales transactions, who’s to say that the horse was undervalued?