RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4158523-joe-bidens-odd-but-revealing-claim-about-inflation/

President Biden brandished a brand-new claim in his recent talk about the wonders of the Inflation Reduction Act:

“Now, one reason we’ve seen inflation fall by two thirds without losing jobs is corporate profits are coming back down to earth. The excesses are being eliminated by the corporations.”

In other words, “excess” company profits are dropping, and that has brought price increases under control. By Biden’s logic, if Corporate America went bankrupt, the economy would really be humming.  

Hasn’t anyone ever explained to Biden that it is profits that lead to investment, to productivity gains and to higher wages? Apparently not. Biden thinks inflation stems from corporate greed, not too much spending — no wonder the White House got it so wrong.

Biden’s anti-business mindset reminds us of the Obama years, during which the country experienced the slowest-ever recovery from a recession. Liberals like Paul Krugman continue to argue that former President Obama’s failure to boost U.S. growth stemmed from an undersized stimulus program. No, the problem was that Obama stomped on the green shoots of economic revival with a tsunami of regulatory changes that confounded employers and decision-makers, stymied investment and prolonged the downturn.

We are seeing much the same today. Biden keeps talking about building the economy from the middle out; I doubt even he knows what he is talking about. In reality, he is building the economy from the top down, with the government at the tip of the pyramid, issuing ever-more rules and making significant decisions about the allocation of capital and direction of industry.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/smiling-faces-lie/

Merrick Garland’s placidity disguises evil within.

In 1971, The Temptations reminded us that smiling faces tell lies (Undisputed Truth’s version came out later that year, and the O’Jays’ “Back Stabbers” the following year). “Smiling Faces” attributes the lies and “evil that lurks within” to jealousy, misery and envy. That just might be Attorney General Merrick Garland’s motivation for appointing David Weiss to be the so-called special counsel. For an erstwhile appeals court judge, not becoming a Supreme Court justice must really sting.

Weiss’ appointment is a scam and a fraud on the American people. He is the opposite of what a special prosecutor is supposed to be.

When the independent counsel statute expired in 1999, the Justice Department adopted regulations governing the appointment of a watered-down successor referred to as a special counsel. The current regulations call for the attorney general to appoint a special counsel when he or she determines that a criminal investigation is warranted and that investigation or prosecution by a U.S. attorney’s office would present a conflict of interest. Here, that should have led to the appointment of a special counsel two years ago.

Section 600.3 of the special counsel regulations provides,

An individual named as Special Counsel shall be a lawyer with a reputation for integrity and impartial decision making, and with appropriate experience to ensure both that the investigation will be conducted ably, expeditiously and thoroughly, and that investigative and prosecutorial decisions will be supported by an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies. The Special Counsel shall be selected from outside the United States Government.

Weiss has few of these qualifications. He is a Justice Department apparatchik. He appears to lack integrity, impartial decision making, and an ability (perhaps, more fairly, an intention) to conduct the investigation ably, expeditiously, or thoroughly.

Weiss has been investigating for five years, long enough to run out the statute of limitations on many of Hunter Biden’s most serious crimes. It does not require much effort to identify that it is unlawful to deduct payments to pimps, escorts, and paramours as a business expense. While it requires greater effort to review statements from 20 bank accounts, it doesn’t take a year to determine that upwards of $20 million ran through accounts owned by Hunter, or for which Hunter had an obligation to report his share of income, which he failed to do.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/gen-milley-admits-wokeness-is-undermining-military-recruitment/

The Washington Post chatted with the outgoing chief of woke armed forces to hear his latest excuses.

Gen. Milley showed off his usual excuses, admitting and denying, spinning and blaming everyone else.

“There’s clearly a recruiting challenge ongoing and you saw numbers. And the Army is particularly challenged to meet its numbers.

So why is that? I think there’s a lot of reasons. There’s never a single causal factor. So anyone who out there is saying that this is the reason, I would challenge them on that…

I think another contributing factor is clearly this perception of quote, “wokeness,” and I personally think that it’s overstated. There are things that are done in the military that certainly, you know, raise that as an issue, but the actual facts suggests that it’s much less significant than perhaps the perception is.”

When Milley is admitting that perception of wokeness is the issue, he’s admitting it’s a problem while claiming it’s only a perception issue. Like most officials who have to argue that the issue is perception, not reality, it’s spin to cope with a real problem caused by those same officials.

“I’ll use drag queen shows as an example. That’s been out there. I don’t agree with drag queen shows being on military bases. I don’t think that’s appropriate. And neither does Secretary Austin. So Secretary Austin put a stop to it. How many times it happened? It happened a few. That’s true. Probably shouldn’t happen. But it did. But to say that that is, you know, somehow the entire military went woke because a handful of drag queen shows that shouldn’t happen to begin with, I think is an overstatement.

The drag shows are the least of it. As is the whole Pride Month mess. It’s top military officials like Milley’s replacement, Gen. Brown, giving talks about how racist America is. It’s the push for racial and gender quotas. It’s the injection of radical political indoctrination amid the so-called ‘stand down’ on racism.

Milley knows all this and just keeps spinning.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/freecons-vs-natcons/

What time is it? Are we living in normal times or revolutionary times? Is the greatest threat to American conservatism today a Walter Mondale-style big-government liberalism? Or is it a woke revolutionary progressivism that seeks to utterly transform the American way of life—our politics, culture, economy, law, education, morality, manners, and mores? A recently-issued Statement of Principles, co-signed by a group of advocates for Freedom Conservatism, assumes we are living in the world of the former: the world of Reagan vs. Mondale.

To be sure, the FreeCon statement is benign. Friends with whom I agree on 95 percent of all issues have signed the document. It affirms the principles of individual liberty, the pursuit of happiness, private enterprise, the free market, the rule of law, equality of opportunity, secure borders, and a “rational immigration policy.” That is the text. What’s not to like? There is, however, a subtext, explained by Avik Roy (the main organizer of the statement) in a National Review essay. 

Roy makes it clear that the purpose of the document is to repudiate the National Conservatism Statement of Principles (issued last year), of which I was a signatory, along with the tenets of National Conservatism and the New Right more broadly. And so, as Roy suggested, let us examine the significant differences between what is being touted as Freedom Conservatism (or what in Europe and Canada would be liberal conservatism) vs. National Conservatism.

Neither the FreeCon statement nor Roy’s essay evinces any awareness of the powerful adversary that American conservatives and “Americanists” more generally face in the summer of 2023. By “Americanists” I mean those conservatives and patriotic liberals who advocate the affirmation, improvement, and perpetuation of the American way of life. The opposite of an Americanist would be a Transformationist, one who seeks to fundamentally transform the United States of America.