RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/dems-weaponize-irs-silence-critics-frontpagemagcom/

The public should be frightened that Democrats are passing new legislation to weaponize the already abusive Internal Revenue Service.

For nearly a century, the IRS has been used by presidents and members of Congress to harass and incriminate political foes. In addition to collecting revenue to fund the government, the IRS is a hit squad that destroys reputations and criminalizes dissenters.

A lot of pain can be inflicted under the guise of tax “auditing.” The bill passed by Congress last week, erroneously labeled the Inflation Reduction Act, will mean more audits and investigations. The bill roughly doubles funding for the IRS enforcement division, adding an estimated 49,600 agents and auditors.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden is starving the Defense Department, requesting too little funding to even keep up with inflation, despite Russian and Chinese aggression. Yet his bill will make the IRS three-quarters the size of the U.S. Marine Corps. Who’s Biden making war on?

It’s true the IRS needs funding to improve services to taxpayers, including getting phone calls answered and returns processed, and moving from antiquated paper files to modern technology. The bill allocates a minuscule amount to those priorities and puts the lion’s share — over $45 billion — into “enforcement,” including hiring and arming agents.

As much as 90% of the funds raised through beefed up audits will come from people making less than $200,000 a year, according to the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. Audits can bring a tsunami of government document demands and repeated visits from IRS agents over months or even years. Most people don’t have accountants and lawyers to insulate them from the pain.

While the bill increases IRS muscle, it fails to impose serious criminal penalties for leaking confidential taxpayer information and political targeting. History shows how dangerous that will be.

In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers who opposed his New Deal and adversaries like Huey Long and Charles Coughlin.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/22/bidens-in-big-trouble-with-his-own-base-for-2024-tipp-poll/

Sitting presidents usually get the benefit of the doubt from their own party. But looking ahead, President Joe Biden might have problems whipping up Democratic enthusiasm for a second term. The opposite is true for former President Donald Trump, the latest TIPP Poll shows.

For the August TIPP Poll, we asked members of both parties a similar question: “If the (Democratic/Republican) presidential primary were held today, who would you vote for?” The national poll of 1,182 registered voters was conducted online from Aug. 2-4, with a margin of error of +/-2.9 percentage points.

For Biden, the poll is clearly bad news. Of the 576 Democrats in our sample, just 30% answered that, as of today, they would vote for “Joe Biden, 46th President of the United States.” They were given 20 other possibilities for voting, plus “other” and “not sure.”

The good news for Biden is that no one looms very large as a potential challenger. Michelle Obama, former first lady, received 10% of the poll votes, while Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Vice President Kamala Harris tied for third with 8% apiece.

Trailing a bit further behind were California Gov. Gavin Newsom (6%), former Secretary of State and First Lady Hillary Clinton (5%), Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (all three at 4%). They, in turn, were followed by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both received 3%.

Last January, NIH spent taxpayer money to push back against my column at Forbes and the findings of our nonpartisan, nonprofit organization at OpenTheBooks.com.

We were simply reporting the facts about Dr. Anthony Fauci’s finances. Here’s just a small sample of our findings:

Tony Fauci out-earns the president.
Mrs. Fauci, Christine Grady, the chief bio-ethicist at NIH out-earns the vice-president.
When Dr. Fauci retires, his first-year pension will exceed the president’s salary.

Then, the NIH executive-suite applied pressure to Forbes, which ultimately cancelled my weekly column. All for reporting facts.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/has_the_great_reset_reminded_us_why_freedoms_worth_the_fight.html

When I was a child, I stumbled upon philosophy through a tummy ache.  I had eaten too much or run around too hard and found myself feeling miserable outside on a hot summer day.  While I was in my own private agony, I remember thinking, “I’ll never take all the hours I’ve spent without stomach pains for granted again.”  And I never did.  Sometimes when other childhood problems had me down, I’d think, “Well, at least you don’t have a stomachache,” and I’d nod in agreement to the voice in my head.  I learned to appreciate something simple — living without pain.  Yet I also remember wondering, “Did I really have to go through that momentary misery just to appreciate normal existence?”  I think the answer is “yes.”  

No matter how effectively my parents warned me about running hard right after eating a big meal, I do not think I would have learned the lesson without some painful experience driving the message home.  That epiphany, I realized, was bigger than a stomachache.  There was a fine line between painful consequences I could imagine and painful consequences that, for whatever reason, I had to experience firsthand.  Too often, in fact, I correctly imagined painful consequences in life and still insisted on experiencing them personally just to make sure they lived up to the hype in my head.  What can I say?  We humans are a strange lot.

Looking around today at this rumbling, raging contest between individual freedom and State-imposed control has me pondering that early childhood memory once again.  Can people imagine the costs of securing freedom without having to endure its attendant struggles?  Or is it necessary, from time to time, for some contingent of humanity to suffer through tyranny just so that it might subsequently fight for personal liberation?  “Freedom isn’t free.”  It’s a great bumper sticker, a message of sublime truth.  Do most people actually understand it, though, if they haven’t become personally acquainted with its painful meaning?  Or must they first lose what they were freely given before learning why liberty is so dear?  The past two years of COVID-1984 madness and Western governments’ increasing obsession with “climate change” fear porn necessitating today’s food and fuel rationing suggest an obvious, if dispiriting, answer.  

If Americans required a State-sanctioned stomachache to remind them of freedom’s natural bounties, they have certainly suffered the mother of all ipecac remedies.  As frustratingly difficult as it is to watch American politicians befoul the land with their Green New Deal communism and allegiance to the World Economic Forum’s New World Order, their attacks on Americans’ freedoms are simultaneously stirring in the collective American consciousness an equal and opposite effect that might not have previously been possible.  Until experiencing a pandemic police state that arbitrarily shut down lives and livelihoods at the whims of cynical and calculating bureaucrats, too many Americans put their faith in the government’s shameless cult of expertise.  Before the DOJ and FBI openly targeted fed up parents who objected to public schools’ abhorrently racist and sexualized curricula, most had no understanding of the Marxists’ pervasive indoctrination of their young children.  Before Congress’s J-6 Soviet show trials and the Deep State’s years of criminal persecution against Donald Trump and his voters, conservatives gave the federal government’s institutions entirely too much blind deference.  

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/20/the-feds-go-too-far/

I am pretty sure that I have had occasion to quote Gertrude Stein’s wise advice for the aspiring avant-garde. It is important, she said, to know how far to go when going too far. 

This sage admonition applies just as much to practitioners in the realm of government and law enforcement as it does to those in the arts. An illustration of how pertinent Stein’s advice is to the former is the still-unfolding aftermath of the FBI’s raid on President Trump’s residence in Palm Beach on August 8. 

Everyone instantly knew that the swaggering agency had gone too far. But that had happened often in the past. Just ask Michael Flynn or Roger Stone or Peter Navarro. The FBI often goes too far. It’s what they do. But in raiding Mar-a-Lago, did they go too far when going too far? 

The FBI clearly underestimated the public’s reaction to their unprecedented violation of a former president’s privacy. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, more than 50 percent of likely voters agree with the statement “there is a group of politicized thugs at the top of the FBI that are using the FBI as Joe Biden’s personal Gestapo.” I agree with it myself. 

Question for Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray: Was it worth it? You carted off Donald Trump’s passports and other documents, and maybe, as you did with the journalist Sharyl Attkisson, you also bugged Trump’s computers or planted incriminating evidence in Melania’s underwear drawer. 

Garland and Wray don’t know the answer to that question yet. They are holding their breath. It’s been worth it in the past. The Russian collusion delusion? That was made up out of whole cloth to destroy Donald Trump. The utterly fictitious nature of the gambit was eventually revealed, but so slowly and in such piecemeal fashion that the damage to the agency, and to the regime generally, was minimal. Even the people guilty of crimes—Andrew McCabe, Kevin Clinesmith, Michael Sussmann, and others—all walked. 

Clinesmith actually altered an email in order to open a FISA investigation on Carter Page, thereby providing the Feds with a backdoor into the nerve center of the entire Trump campaign. The original email said that Page was a CIA asset. Clinesmith inserted the word “not,” thus providing the specious grounds for the whole Trump-is-a-Putin-Puppet meme. He got probation (!) and was last in the news, page B-78, when his license to practice law was quietly restored. 

My point is that despite loads of negative publicity, whenever they overstep the bounds of propriety (which is often: see “The FBI’s Bad Apples” for a summary) the noise quickly abates, and the fickle public moves on to something else.