RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/when-portland-died/

For several years, Portland was the pinnacle of artistic community. Its oddball style appealed to many and drew thousands to the city. There was even a comedy series, Portlandia, that celebrated its diversity.

But…those days are gone. And you can blame anyone that supported the “defund the police” campaign.

A new report from Fox News reveals that the city, which was one the “crown jewel of the West Coast,” has now fallen into hard times, mainly due to rising crime within the communities.

In fact, police data shows that crime has dramatically increased over that of other states – including Chicago and New York.

Speaking with Fox News, Washington County District Attorney Kevin Barton explained, “Each area has different challenges, but what we’re seeing in the metro area is absolutely rising crime.”

Spread across Multnomah County, Washington County and Clackamas County, the crime has reached astronomical levels, forcing both citizens and businesses to flee elsewhere.

“The increases that we’re seeing are nothing like the increases that we’re seeing in our neighbors,” Barton explained.

“What’s happening is with our de-carceration and elimination of bail culture, we’ve got all these people running around,” Kristin Olson, a trial attorney and host of the Rational in Portland podcast, added. “And it’s really scary because we also have this anti-police culture.”

So how did it come to this? It’s simple – Portland succumbed to those rioters that believed defunding the police would be the answer.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/07/39-describe-trump-charges-as-exaggerated-or-harassment-ii-tipp-poll/

Despite three criminal indictments, the threat of hundreds of years of prison-time and an unprecedented media assault on his character and reputation, former President Donald Trump has maintained his head-to-head lead in polls against President Joe Biden. How is that possible? A significant number of Americans simply don’t believe the charges are valid, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

For this month’s online national poll, taken August 2-4 of 1,369 adults, we asked the following:

“Former President Trump is facing more than 40 federal charges in connection with the Mar-a-Lago classified records case and the investigation into the protests in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. In total, these charges could amount to hundreds of years in prison. What best describes how you feel about these charges?”

We then provided four possible responses:

“The charges seem legitimate and should be pursued.”
“The charges are political harassment by the Biden administration to keep Trump from running for re-election in 2024.”
“The charges are exaggerated, but even if some are true, I will still vote for Trump in 2024.”
“Not sure.”

Given the massive media exposure to the multiple legal actions against former President and current candidate Trump, it’s probably no great shock that a slight majority of 51% responded that the “charges seem legitimate and should be pursued.” The poll’s margin of error is +/-2.7 percentage points.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/04/sorry-joe-but-its-bidenomics-that-has-never-worked/

‘Trickle-down economics has never worked.”

That’s what President Joe Biden says any time he’s talking about economic policy. Assuming our Octogenarian-in-Chief knows what he’s talking about, he’s guilty of what psychiatrists call projection.

Because it’s Bidenomics that has failed everywhere it’s been tried. At home. Abroad. Throughout history. And right now in states across the U.S.

Earlier this week in our What We’re Reading column, we linked to a multitude of stories that had been published detailing how Biden’s approach to economic policy — high taxes, heavy regulation, attacks on the rich and businesses, coddling criminals, and Biden-style graft and corruption — is ruining cities and states across the country (‘Blue-State’ Model Gets An ‘F’).

For years we have been documenting how Red states — conservative states that follow the pro-growth policies Biden derides as “trickle down” — have vastly outperformed Blue states. They suffered less during COVID because they didn’t embrace the left’s lockdown mania. They recovered faster because they rejected Biden’s get-paid-for-not-working policies.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/devon-archer-testimony-transcript-house-oversight-hunter-biden-joe-biden-ukraine-a21915bc?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

As soon as Devon Archer’s closed-door sitdown with the House Oversight Committee ended Monday, New York’s Daniel Goldman emerged to give the Democratic spin: President Biden’s conversations with his son’s business partners were innocent discussions about the weather or other niceties. That was exposed as false on Thursday when the committee made the complete transcript public.

Mr. Archer is a former business partner of Hunter Biden and served with him on the board of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma. Mr. Archer described the value-added that Hunter brought to the business as the “brand,” which was the Biden name. When Hunter put his father on speakerphone with his business clients, “there was [a] brand being delivered.”

He further clarified that it was Joe Biden “that brought the most value to the brand.” In other words, Hunter was selling his father’s power in Washington. That is what Burisma was paying for, and it looks like it got its money’s worth. “Burisma would have gone out of business if it didn’t have the brand attached to it,” Mr. Archer said.

Joe Biden famously bragged of his role in using $1 billion in U.S. aid to get Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired during his December 2015 visit to Kyiv. Mr. Archer says Mr. Shokin, who was investigating Burisma, was not “specifically on my radar,” and that he was spun a tale how of Mr. Shokin was actually “good for Burisma.” But he also said he wasn’t on the phone with Hunter, Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky and Burisma exec Vadym Pozharski when they “called D.C.” after a meeting in Dubai to discuss how Washington might alleviate the pressure on them.

All of this underscores Joe Biden’s horrendous judgment in blending his son’s business with his duties as Vice President. Mr. Biden was the Obama Administration’s point man for Ukraine, which was fighting Russia’s first invasion, and he can’t claim ignorance about his son’s dealings.

https://victorhanson.com/the-u-s-is-in-real-decline-no-kidding-part-one-energy/

There is proverbially a lot of rot in any great nation, which accordingly can endure a lot of self-induced damage.

But has the U.S. exhausted its reserves? Britain after World War I denied that its empire was doomed and its standard of living unsustainable. The Soviet Union was in decline gradually, then abruptly by 1989 became doomed. In the fourth century AD, Rome had established a modus vivendi of incorporating non-Romans into the empire, defending its borders, and tamping down on corruption. A century later, the Western empire collapsed from internal decay and tribal invasions across the Danube and Rhine.

Affordable energy had been America’s strength. We are still the largest combined natural gas and oil producer in the world—but determined to forfeit that advantage on the world stage and at home damage the viability of the middle class.

We were once the premier nuclear-generated power nation as well. No longer. Joe Biden and his surrogates on the state level have systematically waged war on fossil fuels, precluding even the reasonable idea that oil, gas, and coal can serve as necessary transition fuels over the next half-century, guaranteeing the American standard of living until the advent of viable alternative and renewable energies.

The only time Biden focuses on oil and gas is before a midterm or general election, when he hurriedly will either drain more of the strategic petroleum reserve or showboat a few more new federal energy leases.

A state like California has the highest taxed and the costliest electricity in the continental United States, mostly as a result of bragging that it is self-sufficient in daytime electricity production due to massive and heavily subsidized solar and wind farms. Yet it keeps mum that after dark it must import equally large amounts of fossil-fuel-generated power from neighboring states.

One of the most bizarre developments during the Biden years has been the complete exemption given massive and growing Chinese coal use, coupled with the furor over domestic natural gas production and use.

Think of the logic: we coax and ignore our Chinese enemies who are hell-bent on record dirty coal use, while hectoring the mostly now green American public on their supposedly toxic use of clean-burning natural gas—as if we could persuade 1.4 billion Chinese to cease burning coal by showing them that 330 million Americans can sacrifice by not burning natural gas.

Here again is the ancient bureaucratic principle in play of focusing on the misdemeanor of the law-abiding, as a way to square the utter inability to deal with the felony of the law-breaking.