RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/robbys-radar/5581563-gop-poll-numbers-rising/?tbref=hp

Republicans are winning the shutdown, and even CNN has to admit it. We turn now to my favorite pollster, Harry Enten, who has some shocking news for his colleagues at the network. Take a look. 

That’s right: GOP poll numbers are actually up! The way Republicans are choosing to handle the shutdown is actually resonating with voters. And not just their own voters, but also with independents. Republican voters, the MAGA base, they’re excited that the party is sticking to its guns, and independents are also rewarding them for it. I think that’s very telling.  

GOP voters do not want feckless establishment leadership to succumb to Democrats’ efforts at emotional blackmailing over healthcare coverage, welfare payments and federal employee salaries. Because let’s keep in mind, Democrats are asking for everything. They want to maintain healthcare insurance subsidies that were intended to be a temporary COVID measure. But like most temporary government spending programs, Democrats now expect them to become permanent.  

Democrats were willing to let the government shut down and say, look voters! Look what those mean Republicans are doing to you! They’re willing to withhold your paycheck, if you’re a government employee. They’re willing to take away your welfare! Blame them! 

Well, it’s not working. Republican and independent voters know that, at this point, the Democrats own the government shutdown. They could vote to end it anytime — Republicans are ready! But Democratic members of Congress are afraid to go along with this, because they fear the anger of their furthest left voters, who are demanding they stand up to the Republicans, even in performative and self-sabotaging ways. 

Well, they’re only hurting themselves, because a majority of voters — not everyone clearly, but enough people — are with the GOP on this one. Even CNN’s Jake Tapper sounded ever so slightly exasperated with congressional Dems.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fake-heritage-lovers-attack-trumps-ballroom/

Democrats and Rino Republicans like The Wall Street Journal have suddenly become architectural critics and historic preservation advocates over the demolition of the East Wing of the White House.

In 2020, most Democrats were fiery advocates of tearing down Confederate statues and memorials all over the country. They insisted that American heritage symbols were not worthy to stand because they got in the way of race-baiting DEI policies, CRT, and the globalist world order.

The massive list of destroyed or removed statues includes a statue of Christopher Columbus at the Minnesota State Capitol, a statue of J.E. B. Stuart in Richmond, Virginia, and various statues of Junipero Serra and Kit Carson, most notably in the state of California. The year 2020 saw over 100 Confederate monuments nationwide being removed or replaced.

Ironically, the same iconoclasts who celebrated the destruction of American heritage in the form of Confederate statues are expressing shock and outrage over the demolition of the East Wing.

Here’s the rub: American heritage and the Left are not compatible.

During the George Floyd riots in Philadelphia, the anarchy was so out of control that any statue of an old white man was targeted for toppling. Indeed, the large statue of former Mayor Frank Rizzo which stood for years near City Hall was splattered with paint and then dressed in transgender clothing-a bra-while a noose was thrown around the statue’s neck. Although anarchists failed to topple it, then Mayor James Kenney orchestrated the removal of the statue to storage.

Symbols of American heritage come in many forms. There’s ‘heritage’ in physical objects like statues and architecture, then there’s the philosophical side to heritage that woke Democrats attacked when they waged war on the country with gender ideology, race card-DEI supremacy, and the obliteration of the (honorable) heritage of legal immigration.

Democrats at this time came to resemble the Walter Gropius school of architecture (Bauhaus), which advocated the complete elimination of design tradition in favor of blowing everything up and starting from scratch.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/jihad-denier-brennan-busted/

The House Judiciary Committee has referred former CIA director John Brennan for criminal prosecution, charging that he “made numerous willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact” about the bogus Steele dossier and so forth. As the committee and the people should know, more serious offenses emerged in Brennan’s Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies at Home and Abroad.

Law restricts the Central Intelligence Agency to operations abroad but this CIA director first targets “enemies at home.” Brennan’s number-one enemy is the “evil, despicable and vile” Donald Trump, pronounced guilty of  “incompetence, dishonesty, and cravenness,” and so on. At the agency, this was not a private opinion.

Consider John Gentry’s Neutering the CIA: Why U.S. Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences. The author, a former CIA analyst,  adds, “Some IC [Intelligence Community] agencies that triggered the attacks on Trump remain intact, available for reactivation in the event of another serious candidacy by Trump or the election of another Republican president.”  

Both books confirm the judgement of Angelo Codevilla, an authority on the CIA like no other, that “intelligence officials abuse their positions to discredit opposition to the Democratic Party, of which they are part. Complicit with the media, they leverage the public’s mistaken faith in their superior knowledge, competence, and patriotism to vilify their domestic enemies from behind secrecy’s shield.” That’s Brennan all over, but the rot runs much deeper.

As Undaunted explains, Obama did not see counterterrorism as a fight against “jihadists.” So Brennan “pointed to the Islamic teaching that jihad is a holy struggle in pursuit of a moral goal,” and “violence and jihad not necessarily synonymous.” That contradicts a 1400-year record of jihadist attacks and was doubtless the official view of the CIA. Check out Brennan’s description of events on September 11, 2001:

At the very end of the meeting, the head of CIA’s Operations Center opened the conference room and announced that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. He had no further details on whether the aircraft was large or small, and it was unclear at that moment whether it was a tragic accident or the intentional targeting of the iconic twin towers. The staff meeting ended abruptly and we all headed back to our offices with an uneasy feeling about what we had heard and what we might soon find out.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/10/30/are-americans-better-or-worse-off-since-january/

The left wing and media rage hysterically from one Trump psychodrama to the next, while Trump trolls both on social media.

But all that is verbiage. What matters is the data and facts of Trump’s first nine months since January 20, 2025, in comparison to either Biden’s prior year or the averages of his four years in office.

Take the border. No one knows how many illegal aliens entered—or stayed in—the U.S. during Biden’s four years of open borders. What is clear is that he set a presidential record of well over seven million illegal entrants.

The border under Trump is now tightly closed. Prior to his administration, it was common for 10,000 people to cross illegally in a single day. In just nine months, approximately two million illegal aliens have been deported or self-deported. The rate of border crossings is now the lowest it’s ever been since 1970.

How about energy? For Trump’s first nine months, gas prices have averaged $3.19 versus Biden’s 2024 average of $3.30 a gallon. Over Biden’s four years, gas averaged $3.46 a gallon.

During the Biden years, oil production averaged 12.3 million barrels per day, compared to 13.5 million barrels during Trump’s first nine months. Biden removed 200 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, leaving office with only 394 million barrels in the SPR.

The reserve has already inched upward under Trump’s initial months to 406 million barrels. Releases have been cancelled. Purchases of replacement oil have been scheduled.

Regarding the economy, Biden’s four years averaged 2.9 percent GDP growth per annum.

Trump’s GDP rose 3.8 percent in the second quarter, with final estimates for 2025 ranging around 3 percent.

Inflation under Trump so far averages about 3 percent. Under Biden’s tenure, inflation increased by 21.4 percent over four years, or on average about 5.3 percent a year.

How about U.S. deterrence and defense?

Under Biden, the military fell short by approximately 15,000 recruits per year, crashing to a shortfall of 41,000 in 2023.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/10/the-outrageous-biden-autopen-scandal/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth

On Tuesday morning, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee released a report on former President Joe Biden’s use of autopen signatures on the many pardons and commutations he handed out during his term, and particularly near its end. Many of these were scandalous enough taken on their own terms, but what made them particularly outrageous was the suspicion that the bulk of these acts were the work of President Biden’s staff, not the senescent president himself.

After all, this was a president who had imploded onstage at the presidential debate in June 2024, revealing his basic day-to-day incoherence, and then dropped out of the presidential race via tweet a month later. One might reasonably understand how he found the time to preemptively pardon his family members, despite frequently promising never to do so, but it was harder to believe that he was setting aside personal time to commute the sentences of people like Maryland’s thrice-murdering “Black Widow” killer.

The House report confirms what voters long suspected: Biden’s inner circle hid the extent of his mental decline from the American people and, after he dropped out of the race, used his autopen as part of their campaign to set a new record for presidential clemency. Vast swaths of convict-applicants were granted commutations or pardons on the basis of crude search parameters and blunt filtering, not case-by-case examination.

There is little to be done but take note of the dangers of abusing one of the presidency’s core powers (not that President Trump has absorbed this lesson). Acts of presidential clemency are final. As scandalous as mass-printing commutations for the undeserving is, Biden approved of all of this, broadly speaking. One imagines he was not informed of the specifics of who was being granted presidential clemency, but he was aware of the fact that sweeping pardons were being issued under his name.

At the end of the day, this isn’t an autopen scandal so much as a Biden’s poor-judgment scandal. There were, of course, many of those prior to his late-presidency decrepitude, which made things so much worse.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

The word “elite” has roots in both Latin and Old French, meaning to choose. As an adjective it meant “elected,” or “chosen.” While the word appeared briefly in Middle English (1100-1500AD), it only reappeared in the mid-19th Century, meaning a “choice or select body.” The word is not in Webster’s 1828 dictionary. Wikipedia defines the word: “A small group of powerful or wealthy people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power, or skill in a group.” Nevertheless, when used today to describe the politically and financially powerful, the word is often used as a pejorative.

Just as cream floats to the top of an unhomogenized bottle of milk, the brightest and most talented, left untethered, will rise to the top of society. That is nature’s way. It is when position and power are used to enhance and protect one’s privileged status that corruption ensues.

For most of our Country’s history, elites who ran our financial and industrial businesses, who educated our young at prestigious universities and who governed our Country were drawn from east coast, WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) families – those who were wealthy, educated and civic-minded. They embodied the concept of “noblesse oblige,” but they protected their position through discrimination in education, in business opportunities, and in their social lives. However, time caught up to them. Their wealth, singular education, and political influence began to wane following the Depression and World War II. Like today’s elites, they had little in common with the average American. In a recent issue of The Spectator, Madeline Grant wrote of how WASPs are now in their twilight years, as “meritocracy and modernity” have edged them out. Ms. Grant, in my opinion, is late with her analysis, as I believe this transition has been underway for eighty years. While our nation was better off when merit replaced privilege, today it feels like the same game, but with different players.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/10/27/real-reason-democrats-meltdown-trump-white-house-ballroom/

Donald Trump has demolished an old office wing attached to the White House and begun building a large new ballroom, big enough to accommodate state dinners and other major events. Currently, those have to be held outdoors, under a temporary tent, because the White House lacks a large, permanent space.

Democrats are outraged by Trump’s move. They have filled social media with pictures of the demolition. Oh, the humanity. Tearing down any part of the White House is a travesty, they say, and an assault on one of our cherished national landmarks.

“Dial down the hyperbole” is the Republican reply. The renovations will improve the White House complex without damaging the central residence, where the president and his family live and where the historic public rooms are located. The only destruction is to a decrepit wing of offices built by Franklin Roosevelt, now lacking adequate electricity, plumbing, and electronic connections.

Republicans add that renovating the White House has been done many times and that the most extensive work, by far, was by a Democrat, Harry Truman, who gutted the entire White House residence and rebuilt the interior. While that work continued, the president and his family lived across the street in Blair House.

That’s all ancient history, say today’s Democrats, and it is not what matters now. What matters now is that Donald Trump is deliberately taking a wrecking ball to a national treasure. Worse, he’s doing it for his own aggrandisement, not for the country he serves. Republicans reject those arguments, of course. In fact, they think the Democrats’ whole meltdown over the issue is ridiculous.

Democrats say their opposition is noble. They want to preserve the integrity of the White House building and prevent its wanton desecration. Republicans respond that the project will make the White House much more usable for public functions. Future presidents, Democrat and Republican, will need a serviceable, year-round space for large events, and no one is better qualified to oversee its construction than a successful builder.

Republicans add that the new ballroom won’t cost taxpayers a dime. It will be given to the public by private donors, including Trump himself. “Opposing that is silly and selfish,” they say. “Why look a gift horse in the mouth and complain about the teeth?”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/10/26/the-lefts-never-ending-outrage-machine/

The Democrats appear to be a never-ending source of pitiable entertainment these days. Last week, it was the pathetic “No Kings” (what some mischievous wag called “No Brains”) rallies across the country. Those 2,700 anti-Trump therapy sessions for aging, anencephalic boomers were funded to the tune of $294 million by such public-spirited individuals and entities as Arabella Advisors, the Tides Foundation, George Soros, and Warren Buffett. Such streams of cash funneled millions through dozens of left-leaning entities, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the National LGBTQ Task Force, the Sierra Club Foundation, the Democracy Forward Foundation, and other havens for the perpetually aggrieved.

It was a noisy but preposterous temper tantrum, full of sound and fury, signifying stupidity. The union of Kumbayah gestures with rage-filled pantomimes was both inadvertently comic and repellent, the odor of rotting pseudo-idealism wafting over the proceedings everywhere.

The insurmountable problem all of those protestors faced was the incontrovertible fact that Donald Trump is not a king. He is a duly elected president who handily won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. He campaigned precisely on the issues that the unhappy pot-bangers and sign-wavers bewailed: closing the border, expelling illegal migrants, dismantling the woke DEI apparat in academia and the federal government, and resuscitating and Americanizing the U.S. economy.

If Trump were a king, why would he not simply outlaw such puerile displays of maliciousness as the “No Kings” rallies? Why wouldn’t he simply decree the government open again? No, the whole thing was ridiculous. I doubt that even the participants could have taken their make-believe protests seriously. But they probably feel they have to do something to make themselves heard these days. In the face of the perpetual-motion machine that is Donald Trump, what is an underemployed Democrat to do?

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so the wokerati abhor an absence of outrage. It is an addiction, a sickness, a craving that cannot be denied. “Outrage or burst”: that’s their motto. So no sooner had the hangover of the “No Kings” fiasco begun to dissipate than a new draught was necessary. Trump supplied it with the news that he was going ahead with his plans to add a new ballroom—paid for with private funds—to the White House.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/10/27/the-left-is-bleeding-kansas/

In the late 1850s, “Bleeding Kansas” was the term used to describe the escalating cycle of violence, when surrogates for the Union and soon-to-be Confederacy fought each other over whether Kansas would be admitted as a free or slave-owning state.

As the assaults and killings increased, radicals set the agenda. The logical next step was the nightmares of Fort Sumter and Bull Run.

Those calling for restraint and peaceful resolutions were considered weak and traitorous. The thuggish and violent, instead, were praised as the true idealists and patriots, the real “base” of their respective parties.

We have witnessed a growing wave of left-wing assassins and would-be assassins in the last few years: James Hodgkinson, Luigi Mangione, James Crooks, Ryan Routh, Elias Rodriguez, and Tyler Robinson, who have targeted Republican House leaders, CEOs, Donald Trump, Jews, and Charlie Kirk. For months, leftists vandalized or torched anything to do with the Tesla brand, and with virtual impunity, they sometimes went after individual Tesla owners. Jews walked in the shadows on campuses, where mobs cheered Hamas killers.

From June through October 2020, Antifa- and BLM-led rioting led to 35 deaths, $2 billion in damage, 14,000 arrests, and 1,500 injured police. On January 6, violence left five dead, four from the protesting side. But whereas the federal government immediately and often excessively jailed both violent and peaceful 2021 protesters, almost all of the 14,000 protesters and rioters of 2020 were released by left-wing blue-city and federal prosecutors and judges.

ICE officers and facilities remain under siege in a number of major cities. In this current left-wing legitimization of violence, the Democrat Party is now embracing an eerie channeling of an earlier, pre- and post-Confederate ethos. Nonstop Democrat grandees call for their resistance to hit the street, if need be, to go lower than the “gutter,” and to “let your rage fuel you.”

The demagogic, anti-ICE bluster of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, and Portland Mayor Keith Wilson is nullificationist and state-rights supremacy to the core.

New York mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani, in the spirit of Jefferson Davis, recently summed up the left’s resistance best, bragging that he hoped to disconnect New York local governance from federal government authority entirely—at least in the obligatory rather than beneficiary sense.