RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.racket.news/p/have-they-gone-mad

Hillary Clinton on CNN said of Trump supporters, “You know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members.” This among other things came in the context of a report in Newsweek to the effect that the federal government, and the FBI in particular, has “quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers.”

That seems… like a lot of people? In addition to the obvious observation that people like Hillary seem increasingly unmoored from reality, as well as wilfully deaf to the political consequences of their words — Maybe we need to formally deprogram you makes the “Basket of Deplorables” episode seem like a Valentine’s Day card — someone should point out that a month ago, on September 8th, Joe Biden renewed the original State of Emergency issued three days after 9/11 by George W. Bush. We spent the last 22 years giving presidents the ability to surveil, isolate, and detain even American citizens. Fortunately we’ll never regret those decisions!

What impolitic comment is next? “We have enough railway capacity for the job”? “Welcome, future deprogrammed!” banners above the entrances to decommissioned military bases? These people are truly Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and this would be funny, if Hillary Clinton’s mouth were not such an accurate weathervane for establishment thinking.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/10/07/grocery-prices-rising-social-media-complaints/71087569007/

Shilo Lewis was shocked by how much her last grocery store haul cost. 

A cart full of ingredients for sandwiches and tacos – enough for four lunches and a couple of dinners for her and her husband – plus an 18-pack of beer cost her just under $100. The 49-year-old snapped a photo of the haul and posted it on Facebook Wednesday in disbelief.

“If it keeps going up, I don’t know how so many people are going to be able to continue to eat,” she told USA TODAY, adding that she and her husband had to stop at a food bank to stock up on more supplies after the trip to Safeway. The food is meant to last them until Oct. 15, when her next paycheck comes in.

‘We’ve been struggling’

With grocery prices up nearly 17% over the past two years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, people are turning to social media to share how much money it takes to feed a family.

One user on X, formerly Twitter, posted a photo of a grocery store haul and said it cost more than $270.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-war-gaza-congress-military-iran-hezbollah-russia-china-a1d6b914?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

At least 11 Americans were among the hundreds killed in the weekend attack in Israel, which has begun striking back at Hamas. The invasion, planned with an assist from Iran, ought to wake up both parties in Washington. The world is awash in threats that will inevitably wash up on our shore if America doesn’t get its act together.

The Israelis have launched air strikes as a prelude to a larger effort in Gaza, and more volatile days are ahead—especially if Hezbollah, another Iranian client, opens a second front on Israel’s northern border.

The larger context is that the U.S. and its allies now face two regional wars provoked by rogue states that are increasingly aligned. Israel and Ukraine are on the front lines, but the risk of an expanded conflict is real. Iran is feeding weapons into Vladimir Putin’s invasion in Ukraine. Mr. Putin is a junior partner of the Chinese Communist Party, which could try to exploit the moment in the Pacific.

The strategic and political point is that the return of war against Israel isn’t an isolated event. It’s the latest installment in the unraveling of global order as American political will and military primacy are called into question.

The President now has an obligation to increase the defense budget and stop treating the U.S. military as a political wedge to feed the American welfare state. For three years Mr. Biden has proposed cuts in defense spending after inflation, even as the world has become more dangerous.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/punishing_hate_but_not_criminals.html

America appears to be becoming a society with fewer and fewer laws, or at least not enforcing those that remain on the books.  We have decriminalized “recreational” drugs and reduced felonies into minor misdemeanors while ignoring open looting and rioting save in certain politically charged circumstances.  Cities have downsized their police departments while no longer prosecuting quality-of-life offenses such as public urination.  Filth and open drug markets are now tolerated as just part of urban life.  

Yes, the criminal code has obviously been eviscerated, but the impetus for greater criminalization gains momentum elsewhere.  This new focus on crime centers on “hate” as the paramount evil facing society.  Now “bad thinking” apart from actual behavior becomes the target of law enforcement.  Criticize Islam’s treatment of women, and you are called Islamophobic; defending it makes you a sexist.  For some, mis-gendering a trans person is hate speech.  Countless colleges now enact speech codes to shield students from psychologically harm.  In fact, such hate — not behavior — has been characterized (p. 95)  as a poison that psychologically debilitates its victims, causing high blood pressure and drug addiction.  We now enforce laws against what Orwell called “thoughtcrime.”  

To use an extreme but hardly inconceivable possibility, a local Progressive district attorney would likely dismiss charges against those robbing a 7-11 convenience store or at least reduce the offense to a minor infraction without jail time.  But if the clerk shadows a young black who enters the store (“racial profiling”) and waves around a baseball bat, he might be accused of race-based hatred.  Thus, at least for the Progressive D.A., the clerk, not the would-be miscreants, must be punished.  And this would occur even if the clerk did not physically injure the would-be thief or bar him from entering the store.  In fact, woe to the clerk if he shoots that would-be black shoplifter in self-defense.  The victim (the shopkeeper) now becomes the criminal while the shoplifter is transformed into the victim thanks to hate crime laws.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/if_we_the_people_were_actually_in_charge.html

Perhaps no greater delusion stubbornly persists from one generation to the next than the idea that governments can be trusted.  Sure, they conduct their affairs in secret, spy on their own people, and arm themselves to the teeth — but, by all means, trust them as you would a dear relative.  Sure, they steal from productive citizens, manipulate markets, and swell their bureaucratic armies with ever-growing taxes — but, by all means, trust them as you would a close business associate.  Sure, they impose their beliefs on our culture, ban the public expression of unfavored religions, and interpose their agents between parents and children — but, by all means, trust them as you might a pastor, rabbi, or priest.

Even after the global wars, genocides, engineered famines, and kill squads that made the last century the most barbaric in human history, it is exceedingly common to hear Justin Trudeau, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and others from the Church of Big Government mock ordinary citizens for not putting absolute faith in government institutions.  Distancing themselves from the State-sanctioned atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao while nonetheless pursuing policies that similarly elevate the organs of government and intimidate citizens into compliance, today’s ruling-class cult leaders pretend that the twentieth century’s mass slaughters could never be repeated here and now — as if the predisposition toward mass murder were a peculiarly German, Russian, or Chinese prerogative and not a tragic ailment endemic to the whole human race.

Oh, sure, Justin Trudeau confiscated the bank accounts of Canadians who resisted his tyrannical COVID lockdowns, but such rank authoritarianism was necessary to protect the public’s health.  Sure, Barack Obama — with assists from a complicit Congress and Supreme Court — effectively nationalized a fifth of the economy under a broad system of health care mandates, but that, too, was necessary to protect the public’s health.  Sure, Hillary Clinton recently suggested that “there needs to be a formal deprogramming of MAGA cult members,” but her proposal might be justified as merely a mental health initiative intended to…protect the public from itself.  

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/08/thoughts-on-proclamation-7463-or-digital-mccarthyism-on-the-move/

On September 14, 2001, George W. Bush, exercising “the power vested in [him] as President of the Untied States,” issued Proclamation 7463, a “Declaration of National Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks.” That got the ball rolling on the construction of the surveillance state.

At the time, the extreme measure seemed justified. Three days earlier, the United States had suffered its most devastating terrorist attack in history.

But how about this: On September 8, 2023, Joe Biden quietly renewed the Bush era emergency measures for another year. I was told there would be no math, but that makes 22 years and counting that a vast array of surveillance assets have been mobilized against—against whom?

When George W. Bush was president, they were focused on al Qaeda and kindred groups. Today?

Today, that fearsome governmental power is still assembled. Increasingly, however, it seems to be focused against those the administration fears or dislikes.

Traditional Catholics, for example, or parents upset with their local school boards.

At the head of the list of potential “domestic extremists” are the tens of millions of people who support Donald Trump (not to mention, of course, Trump himself). A couple of days ago, Hillary Clinton took to CNN (it would be CNN) to say that something needed to be done to silence those misguided people who supported Trump. “Maybe,” she said, “there needs to be a formal deprogramming” of MAGA “cult members.”

Apparently the FBI agrees. According to a much-cited article in Newsweek, the agency has created a “new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers.” That article suggests that the FBI is struggling to combat genuine threats without attacking people who simply support Trump and other populist candidates. I wonder, though, how scrupulous they are being in protecting people’s Constitutional rights to free speech and political dissent.

Actually, I do not wonder. It is quite clear, as The New York Post observed, that the agency is deploying “some of the same counterterrorism methods honed to fight al Qaeda” in its scrutiny of Trump supporters and “AGAAVE,” i.e., “anti-government, anti-authority violent extremism” (an acronym that, as the Post suggested, “looks like a typo for a sugar substitute”).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20031/ronald-reagan-warning

The free-fall that is now the Republican majority in the House of Representatives is a needless self-inflicted political wound that only serves to distract the GOP caucus, and the nation at large, from the very real crises facing America.

Rather than focus on the open borders that are transforming our nation’s cities into migrant camps and threats from foreign adversaries such as the Chinese Communist Party, we are engaged in recriminations and intraparty personal feuds. Rather than tackle a crippling debt of nearly $33 trillion, we are witnessing a political drama associated with selecting a new Speaker of the House. Rather than advance American energy independence, we are parsing possible votes for former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s replacement. And instead of confronting those who would seek to steal the results of the next presidential election, we are engaged in recriminations and arguments about who and what sparked the historic firing of the Speaker.

These actions will not protect the integrity of the ballot box any more than chaos will rescue a democracy that is under cyber-assault and intellectual property theft by foreign states hostile to our role as leader of the free world.

This is distraction from the genuine challenges that will determine America’s standing in this century.

In the middle of this muddle is a Democrat-Progressive coalition content to watch that descent into political turmoil. It works to their advantage. The coalition may well be thinking — not without justification — that if Republicans are engaged in a needless ideological food-fight among themselves, the GOP is bound to lose focus on the truly important issues that will chart our future, thereby allowing us to set the agenda and win more Congressional seats in 2024.

What House Republicans have forgotten is the primary instruction offered by President Ronald Reagan:, “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” They also seem not to remember a California colleague of Reagan, Gaylord Parkinson, who served as that state’s GOP Chairman, who warned, “Henceforth, if any Republican has a grievance against another, that grievance is not to be bared publicly.”

https://swtotd.blogspot.com

Yes, Virginia, some people are above the law. They are known as politicians, asses and pachyderms; they can be found in barns, zoos, but also in the circus that is Washington. Exhibit ‘A’ includes both the current President and his immediate predecessor. Unlike spider monkeys or black-footed ferrets, politicians are not endangered. In fact, they rank with nematode worms as one of the more prolific animal species on earth.

And, yes Virginia, if one had to classify into one word our two main political parties it would be that Republicans are dysfunctional and Democrats mean-spirited. Two episodes this past week provide examples: Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and his group of eight self-serving, dissident Republicans colluded with Democrats to remove Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House. A day or so earlier, as Congress was trying to pass legislation to extend government funding for forty-five days, Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) pulled a fire alarm, so as to delay the vote. Incredulously, he had the temerity to claim he mistook the bright red alarm for an automatic door opener, a mistake impossible to believe of anyone, least of all of a former middle school principal. 

In the wake of the French Revolution (1789-1794), the philosopher and monarchist Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) is alleged to have written, “Every nation has the government it deserves.” Has that become our fate? Is it our fault that we have a cognitively-challenged President, an ego-centric ex-President as his main challenger, a Democratic U.S. Senator who dresses like a slob, and eight Republican Congressmen willing to sacrifice their Party for purposes of self-aggrandizement. Our Founders included Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, giants by today’s standards. Like all humans, they were imperfect, but their positive qualities outweighed their negative ones. After 250 years, can we say our politics have evolved in Darwinian fashion? Or is our current state of political affairs an example of dysgenics – a decrease in the prevalence of traits deemed to be socially desirable?

https://nypost.com/2023/10/03/federal-agencies-spent-3-3-billion-on-new-furniture-while-employees-worked-from-home-during-covid-pandemic/

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent $237,960 on roughly 30 solar-powered picnic tables while the vast majority of its workforce stayed home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The State Department paid more than $117,250 for as many as 40 luxurious Ethan Allen leather recliners to fill its embassy building in Islamabad, Pakistan.

And the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency spent $284,000 and $213,828, respectively, to spruce up their mostly empty conference rooms.

The extravagant purchases were all part of an eye-popping $3.3 billion federal agencies spent on new office furniture between 2020 and 2022, a watchdog report exclusively obtained by The Post shows.

The taxpayer watchdog OpenTheBooks.com revealed the furniture splurge in a study published Tuesday, which also cited a Government Accountability Office report that found 17 of the 24 federal agencies are using as little as 9% and as much as 49% of their building capacities well into the fourth year of the pandemic.

In total, the agencies spent more than $1 billion per year on the plush decor — a rate consistent with pre-pandemic levels despite departments filling just a quarter of their available space on average.