RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-american-suicide/

America is in a fighting mood. Hardly a day goes by without video of a fight among airline passengers or fans at some sporting event surfacing on the Internet. Mobs block subway tracks to disrupt service. Still larger mobs gather at statehouses from Montana to Florida, angry and violent enough to suspend the legislative process. Retailers lock products behind plexiglass fearing hoards of looters.

Those causing such mayhem often avoid arrest, prosecutors routinely fail to prosecute offenders, and the results are anarchic. “The lawless in spirit are encouraged to become lawless in practice,” noticed one 28-year old state house representative. “Having been used to no restraint but dread of punishment, they thus become absolutely unrestrained.”

Disorderly scenes today are so common, we’ve become desensitized to them. “Such are the effects of mob law; and such as the scenes becoming more and more frequent,” observed this junior legislator. “The stories of which have even now grown too familiar to attract anything more than an idle remark.”

The idle remarks on Twitter and elsewhere only exacerbate this climate as mobs grow in number and size, and the danger extends to the nation itself. “By the operation of this mobocractic spirit, which all must admit is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed,” warned the young lawmaker.

These comments were delivered by Abraham Lincoln, who predicted in his January 27, 1838 speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/discredited-but-massively-wealthy-splc-working-with-corrupt-fbi/

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is one of the Left’s premier, well-heeled, and most dishonest and ruthless attack dogs. It relentlessly smears legitimate conservative individuals and groups by labeling them as purveyors of “hate” and lumping them in with the likes of the KKK and neo-Nazis. Its name-calling and defamation would be just more of the same rubbish that comes daily from the Left were it not for the fact that the social media giants and numerous other major corporations still take the massively discredited SPLC seriously and use its smear pieces as a guide to shun and deplatform various dissenters from the Leftist agenda. So the SPLC sounds like the perfect organization for the Biden regime to work with, right? Oh, absolutely. Now this sinister and hateful group is partnering with the equally corrupt and politicized FBI.

The Daily Signal reported Sunday that the FBI “appears, at least briefly, to have joined the Southern Poverty Law Center’s attempt to demonize Roman Catholics who follow the church’s teachings on marriage and who celebrate the Latin Mass.” One of those Catholics, Michael J. Matt, editor of a newspaper called The Remnant and producer of Remnant TV, noted that his organization, which is not remotely connected with violence or terrorism, was listed on a “leaked FBI memo,”  along with other Catholic groups that he pointed out were “defunct.”

Matt declared that this was an example the “FBI phoning it in,” as its list of “radical-traditional Catholic hate groups” came from a 2007 list compiled by the SPLC’s Heidi Beirich and Rhonda Brownstein. Matt asked incredulously: “They took Heidi Beirich and Rhonda Brownstein’s word for it, from 2007?!” He added: “There has been an explosion of traditional Catholic groups since Pope Benedict XVI brought back the Latin Mass. None of the new groups who are in positions of real influence are targeted in the memo.” That’s good, but the fact that the FBI is working with the SPLC and targeting law-abiding citizens because it disapproves of their religious beliefs is disquieting enough.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/22/gao-said-biden-administration-ignored-recommendation-for-national-broadband-strategy/

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in a recent report that the Biden administration ignored its recommendations last year to create a national broadband strategy to synchronize the fragmented patchwork of funding for broadband. This critical mistake puts billions of tax dollars at risk and hurts efforts to close the digital divide.

The GAO has noted now in two consecutive annual reports that there is extreme overlap in broadband funding programs, with 133 such programs administrated by 15 agencies. The complexities have only grown in recent years with the addition of such programs as Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) and Enabling Middle Mile Infrastructure.

The office pointed out that the number of programs and their overlap can lead to taxpayer waste, but such waste is hard to measure.

“Having numerous broadband programs can be helpful to address a multifaceted issue like broadband access, but this fragmentation and overlap can lead to the risk of duplicative support,” the GAO said in the report. “However, determining whether program overlap results in duplicative support can be challenging.”

The GAO did, however, identify situations in which waste could occur. For example, the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) High Cost program and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utility Service (RUS) programs had overlapping service areas. Officials from the FCC and RUS acknowledged the challenges of the overlap, but told federal auditors they don’t consider awards duplicative if they involve different levels of service and support different locations within the area. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/23/things-really-are-looking-up-under-biden/

Over the weekend, President Joe Biden claimed that some Republicans are hoping that the talks over raising the debt ceiling fail and the government defaults on its debt.

“I think there are some MAGA Republicans in the House who know the damage that it would do to the economy, and because I am president, and the president’s responsible for everything, Biden would take the blame,” he said.

What Biden is claiming assumes, of course, that things are going swimmingly right now, a point the president repeatedly makes, and how it’s all thanks to his policies.

Let’s leave aside that lie, which we’ve written about many times in this space. And let’s also ignore the fact that all the scaremongering about failure to raise the debt limit is just that. If the debt limit is not raised, the government won’t need to default on its debt. Every month, it raises far more in taxes than is needed to pay interest on existing debt. Despite what Biden says, any default would be entirely his fault.

How about his claim that things are going well and that only Republican malfeasance could hurt the economy?

Well, it’s true that things are looking up in America. The problem is that they are all the wrong things. Inflation, interest payments, debt, illegal immigration, labor force dropouts. Those are all way up under Biden.

To show this, we’ve put together a series of charts.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/philadelphia-voters-let-cops-be-cops-c6ebf736?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

After a violent era in Philadelphia, the city’s voters have rejected the broken and bloody promises of the progressive left and nominated two mayoral candidates pledging to restore public safety.

Since Democrats have an overwhelming advantage in voter registration, the likely winner will be Democratic mayoral candidate Cherelle Parker, a former City Council member and state legislator. At a Monday press conference she talked about her goal of “restoring our police department to its full complement and that means using every tool that we can to make sure we get officers on the job.”

She also wants to let them use constitutional tools to do the job. Ms. Parker—and remember she’s a Democrat—is not just saying fund the police. Once funded, she wants them to police vigorously—and last week’s primary victory says that voters agree with her.

The Journal’s Scott Calvert noted last week:

Ms. Parker, the only Black candidate in the top tier of polling and the candidate who had the most Black support, has spoken favorably of police investigative stops commonly known as stop-and-frisk. The practice in Philadelphia has been under judicial oversight since 2011 amid claims of police abuses.