RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10908323/Joe-Biden-blames-Russian-invasion-spiraling-gas-prices.html

‘It’s outrageous what this war in Ukraine is costing’: Joe Biden AGAIN blames Russian invasion for spiraling gas prices that smashed $5 barrier for first time in history
President Biden is blaming a war happening more than 4,000 miles away for the rapidly rising cost of gas prices at home
Biden is facing growing political backlash as high prices increase the pain for American families, who are seeing daily records at the gas pump 
The US national average price of hit $5 for a gallon of regular for the first time in history on Saturday as prices are expected to continue going up 
It’s an increase of 19 cents from a week ago and $1.93 from a year ago 
Twenty-one states and D.C. now have an average price higher than $5 per gallon
It comes after inflation hit 8.6 percent in May, another record-high and the most Americans have seen since 1981 
It is the strongest signal yet that inflation has not yet peaked, as consumers tangle with high grocery, travel and energy prices nationwide

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/06/the-cherished-right-to-torture-evidence/

The claim that the American Constitution ever guaranteed a right to abortion is preposterous, and this is so irrespective of whether you think of such a right as a tremendous advance in human liberty or as a sacrilegious licence to kill the unborn.

The decision in Roe v Wade reminds me of the Queen of Hearts’ jurisprudence: Sentence first—verdict afterwards. The meaning of the American Constitution was tortured by the judges—by means of the most patent, one might almost say shameless, rationalisations—to a predetermined and bogus conclusion. I should perhaps here add that neither the right-to-life nor the right-to-choose arguments convince me on this matter.

Of course, I am no expert on the American Constitution. I once put it to such an expert that the right to bear arms did not include, nor was it intended to permit, taking a Kalashnikov or howitzer down to the local supermarket. If it had meant that, there would have been no preliminary clause about a well-regulated militia, but the amendment would simply have stated that the right to bear arms could not be abrogated. The expert, however, told me that I was mistaken, that when one properly understood eighteenth-century usage, it was clear that it did mean that people could not only own firearms, but take them anywhere they liked, as children take their soft toys everywhere they go.

It is a human trait to harbour a cherished opinion and then torture evidence and employ rhetorical legerdemain in its support as if it were a conclusion. Hands up all those who have never done this! There is even a certain pleasure in doing it, akin to what Francis Bacon calls “a natural but corrupt love of the lie itself”, for it assures us of our own dialectical ability, on which we then congratulate ourselves. There are few things more delightful in discussion than to get an opponent to accept a false argument.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/06/27/russiagate-misunderstood/

The FBI was Hillary’s collaborator, not her victim

When is a lie not a lie? When it’s a cover story.

That, in a nutshell, explains why Hillary Clinton–campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who quite intentionally gave the FBI false information about his motive in conveying derogatory information about Donald Trump, was nevertheless acquitted by a Washington, D.C., jury in the first trial generated by special counsel John Durham’s “Russiagate” investigation.

Durham, formerly the United States attorney for Connecticut, has been conducting his probe for over three years. In 2019, President Trump’s then newly appointed attorney general, Bill Barr, assigned him to open an inquiry into the origins of the Obama-era investigation that was premised on suspicions that Trump was a clandestine agent of Russia. Barr had preliminarily looked into the apparent bases for the FBI’s “spying” on the 2016 Republican presidential nominee, as the AG aptly put it, and found reasons to question the bureau’s basis for its assertion, in sworn applications for classified warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), that it believed Russia was coordinating with the Trump campaign in cyberespionage efforts to undermine the election.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/06/11/bill_maher_the_white_liberal_is_to_the_left_of_the_average_democratic_black_voter_most_black_voters_are_moderate.html

HBO host Bill Maher debated Bernie Sanders, socialism and black voters with Cornel West, Kellyanne Conway and Josh Barro in the online-only Overtime portion of his show ‘Real Time.’

“Maybe people are just not that in love with socialism,” Maher said about Sanders’ losing campaign in 2020.

“It’s not socialism,” West objected.

“Bernie is a socialist,” Maher said.

“He’s a New Deal liberal,” West responded.

“He calls himself a socialist,” Maher retorted.

“A lot of people like to call themselves things,” West said.

“Why would you want to call yourself a term that doesn’t have a positive connotation?” Maher responded.

“We have polling on this,” Maher said. “The white liberal is to the left of the average Democratic black voter. On social issues and economic issues. Most black voters are moderate, not liberal. More white Democrats are liberal.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/06/09/joe-biden-and-the-poison-of-identity-politics/

When we hear the word ‘identitarian’, we tend to think of a certain kind of person. Young, overeducated, not a fan of freedom of speech, probably white but positively obsessed with the pain and suffering of black people. They’ll be a TikToker too, no doubt, and a professional protester, forever turning up to public gatherings to shout ‘Black Lives Matter!’, or, for extra woke cred, ‘Black Trans Lives Matter!’. Well, it’s time we shook up our vision of identitarians. Next time you hear that i-word, think not of earnest Ivy League youths who spend too much time on social media, but rather of a 79-year-old man, stiff, not quite all there, and in possession of real political power rather than just influencer fame. Think of Joe Biden.

President Biden is the most powerful identitarian in the world. His presidency has been defined by identity politics. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, anti-woke liberals insisted that the insanity of identity politics would be kept in check if the American people ditched Trump and replaced him with Biden. Biden’s an old-fashioned political operator, they said, not a player in the pseudo-left’s crazy culture war against equality, reason and science. How wrong they were. Biden has guzzled down the identity Kool-Aid. He seems to view everything through the prism of race. He openly says he will pick people for high office on the basis of their skin colour rather than their skill set. Biden’s identitarian presidency risks overturning the great gains of the post-civil rights era, and replacing the humanising ideal of equality with the divisive new ideology of ‘equity’.

Biden’s hyper-identitarianism has been thrown into sharp relief by the Ilya Shapiro controversy. Shapiro was a senior lecturer at Georgetown University Law School. He resigned on Monday after months of controversy over a tweet he posted in February. Following Biden’s race-conscious promotion of the attorney Ketanji Brown Jackson as his pick for the Supreme Court, Mr Shapiro tweeted: ‘Objectively best pick for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, who is solid prog and v smart. Even has identity politics benefit of being first Asian (Indian) American. But alas doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.’ It was those last three words – ‘lesser black woman’ – that caused a social-media storm.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/11/the-get-trump-show/

Perhaps the best comment I saw in the hours leading up to the opening performance of Washington’s latest entertainment, the January 6 committee’s “Get Trump” show, was in the Babylon Bee. The Bee promised that Miley Cyrus would be performing at halftime. Alas, our new paper of record was pulling our leg. Miley was nowhere to be seen. It was only Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the show’s emcee, and his substitute for Vanna White, soon-to-be-former Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). 

That was a disappointment. But at least the Bee was accurate in its description of the show’s basic plot line. “The January 6 Committee said,” the Bee reported, that “the opening ceremony of the hearing will include previously unseen video footage of the Capitol riots, followed by a ritual burning of Trump in effigy.” The burning happened off stage, it is true, but I am told that the snazzy television producer the committee engaged to produce the show provided some aromatherapy for the audience inside the Capitol.  

Discussions are underway with Gwyneth Paltrow to provide a scratch-and-sniff option for home viewers in season two so no one need miss the ritual aspects of this sacrificial reenactment.  

The Democrats went all-out with this entertainment. I cannot, however, pronounce it an unqualified success. Nor did the public, which mostly reacted with a yawn. (The ratings, many outlets reported, were “dismal.”) No surprise there. For one thing, as certain carping critics have noted, this entertainment is really only an updated rebranding of that earlier Democrat-sponsored farce “The Robert Mueller Show,” starring Robert Mueller and co-starring James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok, with cameo appearances by Michael Sussmann, Glenn Simpson, and George Papadopoulos, among others.