RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/25/dark-money-groups-are-funding-the-lefts-court-packing-agenda/

A left-wing dark money group is pushing the Democratic Party to endorse remaking the judicial branch via court packing.

It’s telling that House Democrats unveiled their latest effort to pack the Supreme Court at an event hosted by “dark money.” Hidden donors pushing an unpopular, radical agenda from the shadows is the left’s modus operandi.

Meet Take Back the Court, the “dark money” group that claims credit for “mov[ing] the window on court expansion” from the fringe to the Democratic Party’s mainstream—proof that the activist tail is wagging the Democratic dog.

We’re told by these far-left activists that the Supreme Court’s “extremist majority” is too politicized because it was “stolen” by right-wing boogeymen, who’ve captured the entire appointment and confirmation process with “dark money.” So Take Back the Court plans to put the fix in by adding four new seats for card-carrying “progressives,” scheme enthusiasts believe couldn’t possibly backfire in the future. 

The lead sponsor of their preferred bill, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., believes the current Supreme Court is “at crisis with itself and with our democracy.” Worse, it’s threatening to “usurp the power of the legislative and executive branches.” In a flash, Democrats have rediscovered federalism. Although Johnson’s bill has been gathering dust for a year, Take Back the Court is working to keep it on life support. Yet a closer look at the group itself ought to raise some eyebrows.

Oddities abound. Oddity #1: Take Back the Court is run by Aaron Belkin, a self-described dancer and San Francisco State University professor specializing in “sexuality in the armed forces.” 

THURSDAY JULY 21- WEDNESDAY JULY 27

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-brazen-transgender-policy-agenda/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

It’s incredible how brazen the transgender policy agenda has become. Rachel Levine, Biden’s assistant secretary for health, in the Department of Health and Human Services, says he’d like to “empower” children to seek out “gender-affirmation treatment” in their state. Stripped of its euphemisms, what Levine would like to see is more gender-confused children going on experimental puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and undergoing surgeries.

Levine’s comments come after a federal judge temporarily blocked the Education Department’s Title IX guidance on gender issues through a preliminary injunction.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/farewell-sweet-pandemic-prince/

America’s Doctor is hoping for a quiet retirement, perhaps after a few more brazen lies and a few more adoring magazine-cover profiles.

After three years as America’s Most Famous Doctor — and more than 50 years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — the 81-year-old Anthony Fauci has his heart set on retirement. Not now, mind you — he still has a few more CNN and MSNBC panels in him. Just last week, he was on CNN’s New Day, warning that Americans “really should, in an indoor setting, a congregant setting, be wearing masks — it’s just the appropriate thing to do to protect yourself and your family, and those around you.” But according to a Monday Politico piece, “Anthony Fauci wants to put Covid’s politicization behind him,” and the good doctor is eyeing retirement at the end of Biden’s term:

After more than five decades of federal service under seven presidents, Anthony Fauci says he’s leaving by the end of President Joe Biden’s term. In a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO, he spoke of his legacy, the hard truths about the country’s pandemic response and his desire to calm the politicization wracking the country. . . . With his career winding down, Fauci wants to help repair the national bonds that the pandemic shredded, and tamp down the partisan polarization that has turned him, and science itself, into a lightning rod.

What is there to say about Saint Anthony that hasn’t already been said in oozing puff pieces from star-struck journalists? How are we to express our deep and abiding gratitude better than the “Thank You Doctor Fauci — We Will Wash Our Hands” yard signs, the devotional Fauci candles, and the Fauci figurines (mask included, of course) touted by, among others, elected Democratic legislators? Skeptics will argue that the man who presented himself as the flesh-and-blood embodiment of science itself, and who regularly accused his critics of attacking The Science — “they’re really criticizing science because I represent science,” he told Face the Nation last November; “I’m going to be saving lives, and they’re going to be lying” — is not well-positioned to “repair the national bonds that the pandemic shredded.” But we know better. In Fauci we trust.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/biden-lied-about-hunter-larry-oconnor/

In the early days of the 2020 Democrat race for the nomination, when most journalists were backing Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, the conventional wisdom was that Joe Biden was too old, too out of touch, and oh-by-the-way, that Hunter Biden thing makes him a non-starter. 

The New Yorker wrote a blistering expose on the former Veep’s son with the hopeful title, “Will Hunter Biden Jeopardize His Father’s Campaign?” But, by the time Spring of 2020 rolled around, and Biden looked to be a lock for the nomination, thereby making him the one person who could stop Trump, there was a virtual news blackout on all things Hunter. 

The legacy, corporate media, and their partners in Big Tech went so far as to ignore, censor, and even punish any promotion of the New York Post’s astounding work on the infamous “Laptop from Hell” story just two weeks before election day. 

A lot has happened since then. Even The New York Times and Washington Post have independently verified the contents of the aforementioned laptop. But one aspect of the embryonic Hunter scandal from 2019 has remained largely unscrutinized. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/sounding-alarm-over-joe-biden-byron-york/
President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects have seemed doubtful for months now. Many voters think the nation’s oldest president ever — he turns 80 in November — is too old for the job and is certainly too old for a second term. Many others think he’s simply doing a bad job. Many think both. And that includes Democrats who voted for Biden as well as Republicans who didn’t.

Now, we seem to have reached a turning point. In recent days, the most influential media voice among Democrats, The New York Times, has published two articles that appear to lay a foundation for pushing a reluctant Biden out of a reelection race in 2024.

The first was published on July 9 with the headline, “At 79, Biden Is Testing the Boundaries of Age and the Presidency.” Don’t be fooled by the gentleness of the headline. The article clearly suggested Biden is too old to be president. It reported that Biden’s upcoming Middle East trip was originally going to be part of his European trip last month until aides realized that putting the two destinations together in one trip “would have made for an arduous 10-day overseas trek” and that “such extended travel might be unnecessarily taxing for a 79-year-old president.” One official even called the idea “crazy.”

Biden’s aides acknowledge that he “looks older than just a few years ago,” the Times reported, calling that a “political liability that cannot be solved by traditional White House stratagems like staff shake-ups or new communications plans.” While the Times called Biden’s energy level “impressive for a man of his age,” it nevertheless said Biden’s energy “is not what it was, and some aides quietly watch out for him.”

“[Biden] often shuffles when he walks, and aides worry he will trip on a wire,” the Times reported. “He stumbles over words during public events, and they hold their breath to see if he makes it to the end without a gaffe.” Those public appearances have “fueled” the perception that Biden is too old to be president, the article said. “His speeches can be flat and listless. He sometimes loses his train of thought, has trouble summoning names or appears momentarily confused.” During the European trip, the paper said, Biden’s fellow leaders “protectively treat[ed] him like a distinguished elderly relative.”

In all, Biden’s age has become an “uncomfortable issue” for Democrats, the paper reported. “If he mounts another campaign in 2024, Mr. Biden would be asking the country to elect a leader who would be 86 at the end of his tenure,” the Times said, “testing the outer boundaries of age and the presidency.” Testing the outer boundaries of age? For many Americans, the simpler way of saying that is “too old.”

Now, the Times has published a devastating poll the paper conducted with Siena College. The survey found that 64% of Democratic voters want a different nominee in 2024 — just 26% want the party to renominate the president. On top of that, the poll shows Biden’s job approval among all Americans at just 33%. And, on top of that, just 13% of those surveyed believe the country is on the right track. “With the country gripped by a pervasive sense of pessimism,” the Times wrote, “the president is hemorrhaging support.”

And what is it about Biden that particularly worries his party’s voters? Age. “Concerns about his age ranked at the top of the list for Democratic voters who want the party to find an alternative,” the paper reported. “‘I’m just going to come out and say it: I want younger blood,’ said Nicole Farrier, a 38-year-old preschool teacher in East Tawas, a small town in northern Michigan. ‘I am so tired of all old people running our country. I don’t want someone knocking on death’s door.'” Farrier voted for Biden in 2020 in hopes he might “heal the nation’s divisions,” the Times said, but now “she is preoccupied with what she described as crippling increases in her cost of living.”

The second-highest concern is Biden’s job performance. The Times reported: “He hasn’t done what I think he’s capable of doing as president to help the American people,” said Kelly King, a former factory worker in Greensburg, Indiana. “As a Democrat, I figured he would really be on our side and put us back on the right track. And I just feel like he’s not.”

The poll offered one “glimmer” of good news for Democrats: Even in his weakened condition, Biden could still narrowly defeat Donald Trump 44% to 41%, in a hypothetical 2024 head-to-head matchup. But even Democrats who would definitely vote for Biden against Trump would still prefer another nominee.

What does it all mean? It means Biden is in trouble. But that has been clear for quite a while. Voters have long been concerned about the president’s age. They have been concerned about his ability to handle the world’s most demanding job. And they have wished there were some better alternative.

What is perhaps more newsworthy now is that the media institution most respected among Democrats, especially Democratic opinion leaders, has so frankly put the spotlight on Biden’s problems. From a Democratic perspective, it is one thing when Republicans complain about Biden. It is another when The New York Times does it. And now everyone, except perhaps the most dogged Biden loyalists, is alarmed about the state of Joe Biden.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/18/justice-department-designates-obstruction-as-an-act-of-terror/

To hear federal prosecutors tell it, Guy Wesley Reffitt almost single-handedly organized and led a bloodthirsty mob to overtake Congress on January 6, 2021.

One of the first protesters arrested in the Justice Department’s “shock and awe” dragnet of Donald Trump supporters, Reffitt was immediately indicted on numerous offenses. He spent more than a year in the D.C. gulag set aside for Americans who protested Joe Biden’s election under pretrial detention orders sought by the Justice Department—and he was the first January 6 defendant to stand trial in a city that voted nearly 93 percent for Biden in 2020.

In a matter of a few hours in March, 12 residents of the nation’s capital—not only one of the most lopsidedly Democratic cities in the country but one whose residents view the events of January 6 as an intrusion of their private fiefdom—found Reffitt guilty on all charges: two counts of civil disorder, two counts of obstruction, and one count of carrying a handgun on restricted grounds. (Prosecutors came up with the firearms charges months after he was initially indicted, claiming a holster he wore that day contained a semi-automatic handgun.)

Without question, Reffitt engaged in bad behavior that afternoon; he recorded himself making derogatory comments about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) before confronting Capitol police on the steps outside the building. The government’s most incriminating evidence in the case came from Reffitt’s teenage son, who secretly taped conversations with his father a few days after Reffitt returned to their Texas home, which the FBI raided on January 16, 2021. (I wrote about the case here.)