RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/if_joe_goes_what_next.html

Everywhere other than in Big Media newsrooms, Americans speak openly of President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and wonder whether he can last out his four-year term.  If he cannot last, there are certain things we can be confident will happen and other things about which we can only speculate.  The latter will be much more intriguing.

Should Biden leave office, willingly or otherwise, Kamala Harris will become president.  This is a given.  Article II, Section 1, Clause 6 of the Constitution makes clear that in “case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President.”

The Constitution, as written, did not address what happens next.  The 25th Amendment, adopted after the assassination of President Kennedy, answered that question, at least in principle.  It reads, “Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.”

In recent memory, there have been two precedents, both involving Richard Nixon.  On October 10, 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew pleaded no contest to charges of tax evasion and money-laundering and resigned.  Despite Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, Democrats retained firm control of Congress, with a 50-seat majority in the House and a 14-seat majority in the Senate.  This mattered.  The Democrats all but dictated Nixon’s choice of the congenial, moderate House minority leader, Gerald Ford, to assume the vice presidency.  Ford was nominated two days after Agnew stepped down and confirmed by overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Congress.

 At the time of Ford’s confirmation, Democrats had good reason to suspect that Nixon would soon be forced out himself.  The coordinated Democratic-media plot to oust Nixon as a result of his presumed involvement in the Watergate affair was well underway.  The plot climaxed on August 9, 1974 with Nixon’s resignation.  Ford was sworn in later that same day.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/bidens-press-conference-whispers-joseph-klein/

“Creepy Joe” started trending on Twitter last week after a bizarre June 24th press conference during which President Biden started answering reporters’ questions in a whisper. Think of Biden as the donkey whisperer to the left-wing progressive base of his party and to his adoring fans in the mainstream media.

Biden weirdly leaned forward during the press conference and whispered to reporters that he “wrote the bill on the environment” (not clear what bill he was talking about). And then, presumably referring to the enhanced unemployment benefits that are incentivizing unemployed people to stay at home rather than fill the millions of current job openings, Biden whispered: “Pay them more. This is an employee’s — employee’s bargaining chip now what’s happening.”

Biden thought he was being clever. But all he showed was that he is a puppet of unions and of far-left progressives who want to pay people not to work.

In New York, for example, the average weekly unemployment benefit including the $300 federal boost has been calculated at $653. The weekly pay for a 40-hour week, using a $15 per hour minimum wage, would be $600. It doesn’t take an economist to see why unemployed residents of New York City, where the general hourly minimum wage is $15, would prefer to stay home and collect higher unemployment benefits than the wages they would earn if they went to work.

Government unemployment benefits were designed as a temporary safety net, not to serve as an employee bargaining chip. Due to the economic devastation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the federal government has temporarily supplemented the unemployment benefit payments that states are providing to workers whose employment was terminated through no fault of their own. But these individuals are supposed to be looking for new jobs at least equivalent to the ones they lost. They are not supposed to just lie around on their couches and wait for the benefits paid for by hard-working Americans to keep rolling in.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jun/26/crenshaw-releasing-crt-complaints-servicemembers/

Rep. Dan Crenshaw has begun publicly releasing whistleblower complaints from service members who object to recent military training initiatives which they say incorporate critical race theory instruction.

The Texas Republican and former Navy SEAL officer received the complaints through a whistleblower site he launched in late May in partnership with Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican and former Army infantry officer.

“Make no mistake about it, our military is still the strongest in the world,” Mr. Crenshaw said in a video posted on Instagram Friday. “But wokeism, identity politics, critical race theory, and blatant political activism have indeed seeped into this critical institution.”

Friday’s video is part of a series he calls “The Whistleblower Files,” through which he said he plans to release a portion of more than 400 complaints he received and determined to be credible over the following weeks.

The complaint released Friday details required training in which members of an Air Force squadron were separated physically by “points of privilege” such as race and sex in an exercise known as a “privilege walk.”

“So let’s point out the obvious: this is meant to shame people,” Mr. Crenshaw said in the video. “And shame people for something they have no control over. It also literally creates manufactured divisions in an environment that requires camaraderie, and puts down certain service members over others not on merit, but on skin color or gender.”

The complaints follow Pentagon efforts to stamp out extremism in the ranks after current and former troops were identified in the pro-Trump mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. In February, the Pentagon directed military units to hold a one-day “stand-down” to address extremism within the ranks.

“We want to have a reasonable discussion over these issues so we can keep these problems from compounding,” Mr. Crenshaw said in the video, and said all of the complaints released will preserve the confidentiality of the service member.

Mr. Crenshaw said the complaints point to growing politicization within the ranks of a notoriously apolitical institution.

“We’ve seen what it’s done to our college campuses,” Mr. Crenshaw told The Washington Times. “We’ve seen what it’s done to corporations, where people are walking on eggshells constantly, always worried about some kind of complaint being levied against them, always worried about what’s the next insane anti-racism training they’re going to have to go through. And the military is taking that on.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-covid-commission-americans-can-trust-11624823367?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Mr. Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist, is a professor at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Bhattacharya, a physician and economist, is a professor at Stanford Medical School.

The pandemic is on its way out, but how many Americans think the U.S. approach succeeded? More than 600,000 Americans died from Covid, and lockdowns have left extensive collateral damage. Trust in science has eroded, and the damage won’t be limited to epidemiology, virology and public health. Scientists in other fields will unfortunately also have to deal with the fallout, including oncologists, physicists, computer scientists, environmental engineers and even economists.

The first step to restoring the public’s trust in scientific experts is an honest and comprehensive evaluation of the nation’s pandemic response. Sens. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) and Susan Collins (R., Maine) have introduced a bill that would establish a Covid commission to examine the origins of the virus, the early response to the epidemic, and equity issues in the disease’s impact. Private foundations are also in the process of planning such a commission.

For a commission to be credible, it needs to be broad in both scope and membership. Members can’t have conflicts of interest. If the public perceives the commission is a whitewash, distrust in the scientific community will erode further. A commission must consider four major areas of the U.S. pandemic strategy:

• Public-health measures, including the closing of schools, businesses, sports, religious services and cultural events; other forms of physical distancing; protection of nursing homes; masks; testing; contact tracing; case counts; cause-of-death audits; decreased medical care; Cares Act payments to hospitals, and much more.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/battle-over-critical-race-theory-11624810791?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Critical race theory is the latest battleground in the culture war. Since the murder of George Floyd last year, critical race theory’s key concepts, including “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility,” have become ubiquitous in America’s elite institutions. Progressive politicians have sought to implement “antiracist” policies to reduce racial disparities, such as minorities-only income programs and racially segregated vaccine distribution.

The ideology has sparked an immense backlash. As Americans have sought to understand critical race theory, they have discovered that it has divided Americans into racial categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed” and promotes radical concepts such as “spirit murder” (what public schools supposedly do to black children) and “abolishing whiteness” (a purported precondition for social justice). In the classroom, critical race theory-inspired lessons have often devolved into race-based struggle sessions, with public schools forcing children to rank themselves according to a racial hierarchy, subjecting white teachers to “antiracist therapy,” and encouraging parents to become “white traitors.”

Alarmed state legislators have pushed back. In recent months, lawmakers in 24 states have introduced, and six have enacted, legislation banning public schools from promoting critical race theory’s core concepts, including race essentialism, collective guilt and racial superiority. Parent groups around the country have mobilized to oppose critical race theory in the classroom, arguing that it cultivates shame in white students and fatalism in minority students. According to a recent YouGov survey, of the 64% of Americans who have heard about critical race theory, 58% view it unfavorably, including 72% of political independents.

That’s a major liability for the political left. Sensing that they are losing control of the narrative on race, left-leaning media outlets have launched a furious counterattack. Liberal pundits at the New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC and elsewhere have begun spinning a new mythology that presents critical race theory as a benign academic concept, casts its detractors as right-wing extremists driven by racial resentment, and portrays legislation against critical race theory as an attempt to ban teaching about the history of slavery and racism. All three charges are false.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/06/27/boston-pro-palestinian-thugs-spit-at-and-curse-pro-israel-activist-n1457621

On Thursday, a group of pro-Palestinian activists surrounded Dexter Van Zile of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) at a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) rally at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. The pro-jihad protesters tried to intimidate Van Zile physically, poking their fingers in his face, shouting at him, shoving him, spitting at him, and calling him a “bitch,” “Nazi,” and “f**king pig.” Then they no doubt went away believing themselves to be on the side of righteousness. It was a small incident that reveals many of the big problems facing America today, thanks to the American Left.

Just before Van Zile was surrounded and menaced, a speaker at the pro-Palestinian rally told the crowd: “Uh, Dexter Van Zile over here is in the crowd, he’s a rabid Zionist with this group called CAMERA.” After the crowd booed and hooted, the speaker went on to explain how “Zionist racist fascists… under the guise of journalism, write only to smear and muckrake on our righteous movement.” He called upon the crowd to start chanting “Zionists, go home,” which they dutifully did, turning toward Van Zile to do so. Van Zile was surrounded, abused, and reviled shortly thereafter, even as one of the pro-jihad activists repeatedly tried to convince his companions not to do so, saying over and over again: “They will use this against us. They will use this against us. They will use this against us.”

Well, yes. And here we are. Because in the first place, no one in the crowd was saying that Van Zile should be left alone for any reason other than that surrounding him, yelling at him, and spitting on him would make the demonstrators look bad. No one reminded them of the American tradition of free discourse and Voltaire’s old adage, now completely forgotten, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The American Left has now replaced that idea, which is at the foundation of any free society, with “If I disapprove of what you say, I will revile you, slander you, and physically menace until you are too afraid to stand up against me.”