RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/opinion/prosecuting-political-foes-is-incompatible-with-democracy/?utm_source=sendinblue&utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%2004-03-2023&utm_medium=email

These are heady times for those who hate both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The news that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had persuaded a grand jury to indict the former president on charges that have yet to be made public was greeted with chortles of satisfaction from the Jewish left, which was already celebrating the recent setback suffered by the Israeli prime minister after he put judicial reform on hold.

The prospect of Trump being booked in New York is not only being celebrated by those who call Netanyahu “crime minister” because of the long-running legal case on corruption charges that he has been fighting in and out of the courts for years. It has also allowed them to see the pair, despite the obvious differences between the two men and the legal stratagems that have been deployed against them, and their predicaments as part of a common struggle against what Haaretz called the way they both attack their respective countries’ democratic institutions.

To the left, that’s the important point.

Their claim is that both Trump and Netanyahu are enemies of democracy. That makes achieving their downfall not so much a matter of alleged wrongdoers getting their comeuppance but can be portrayed as a righteous cause in which threats to the common good are eliminated by lawfare. In that way, even the flimsiest of charges or the use of tactics that target an individual rather than enforcing the law is normalized rather than condemned as violating legal ethics. Actions that would easily be seen as an abuse of power are justified because of a supposedly higher purpose to the prosecution.

As different as the cases against Trump and Netanyahu are, what they have in common is that both men are political leaders being singled out by prosecutors for charges that weren’t so much tailored to their circumstances as they were invented for the sole purpose of taking them down.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/02/indict-one-and-all/

As we await the publication of all the impending indictments of former President Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Americans are trying to figure out what constitutes an indictable offense for current and retired public officials.

Most legal experts, Left and Right, have noted:

1) Bragg promised in advance that he would try to find a way to indict Trump. His prior boasts are reminiscent of Stalin’s secret police enforcer Lavrentiy Beria’s quip, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Nancy Pelosi gave the game away, when in her dotage, she muttered that Trump had a right to prove his innocence as if he is presumed guilty.

2) No former president has ever been indicted—and for good reason. Such prosecutions would be viewed as persecutions and render all former presidents veritable targets of every publicity-hungry and politically hostile local, state, or federal prosecutor. They would reduce the presidency to Third World norms. Gratuitously prosecuting former presidents would become a political tool to harm the opposing political party or to tarnish the legacy of a former president.

3) Trump is currently ahead in the polls for the Republican nomination to face Democratic incumbent Biden. And in head-to-head matchups, he outpolls Biden. For a prosecutor of the same party as the current president facing reelection to seek to destroy the viability of a likely opponent is a first in U.S. history. But again, it is now in accordance with Third World norms.

4) At least two left-leaning federal and state prosecutors previously have passed on the same evidence Bragg is now using for his indictments. They have explained that such a prosecution is infeasible because of statutes of limitations, because of a state attorney improperly appropriating the role of a federal prosecutor, and because non-disclosures agreements are a fact of life and not strictly illegal.

5) Bragg’s chief witness Michael Cohen is a felon and confessed liar, with a deep personal hatred of Donald Trump—a fact well known to all potential prosecutors.

6) The current indictment follows a long line of historic harassment of Trump, including the first incidence of two impeachments of a sitting president, the first impeachment trial of a president as a private citizen, and the first FBI armed raid of a retired president’s home, the first instance of an FBI director leaking confidential presidential conversations to the media for the purpose of appointing a special counsel to remove a president.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/left-wing-violence-chic/

A transgender Tennessee mass shooter last week executed three adults and three nine-year-old children at a Nashville private Christian school.
Supposedly she left behind her a manifesto justifying her mass murdering. As of this writing, law enforcement officials have declined to make the document public.

Yet in about a nano-second after the news was disclosed, the left-wing activist machine kicked in, led by politicians, entertainers, and the media.

Three predictable themes surfaced.

The first was led by none other than President Joe Biden. He lectured that guns were the cause of the mass deaths, not the free will of a psychopathic killer.

Few noted that the shooter illegally purchased firearms by hiding her documented record of emotional disorders.

Second, America was told that it would serve no purpose to publish the shooter’s manifesto. Apparently, this exception to the usual practice was due to fears her manifesto would hurt the transgender cause.

Third, some in the activist media claimed that, while such murdering was regrettable, it was also understandable – given supposed Christian, conservative America’s intolerance of transgender people. In our sick society, the targeted victims became the political victimizers.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/miacathell/2023/04/02/alvin-bragg-double-standard-on-crime-n2621354

While police are catching criminals on New York City’s unsavory streets, Soros-tied Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has caught a chronic case of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). The politically ambitious Bragg, whose self-styled crowning achievement is indicting a former U.S. president for the first time ever in American history, is using what he alleges to be a federal campaign-finance violation as a means to upgrade an otherwise-misdemeanor charge to a felony via an untested legal theory.

Simultaneously, as Bragg seeks to prosecute President Donald Trump, the GOP’s top 2024 contender, to the fullest extent of the law no matter the cost, the soft-on-crime DA has downgraded felonies to misdemeanors in a majority of his cases, handing get-out-of-jail-free cards to hordes of hardened criminals with little regard for the victims of these violent crimes in his own jurisdiction.

Dropping Cases

Bragg’s double standard on taking down whom he deems “the bad guys” has left the crime-infested Big Apple to rot.

The New York Post reported in December that because Manhattan prosecutors supposedly have too much on their plates, instead of trying a case, Bragg’s office proposed dropping four felony charges of grand larceny against gang member Charles Lindsay, requiring only that the gangbanger attend five counseling sessions sponsored by the Manhattan Justice Opportunities, an alternative sentencing program that assigns social workers to criminals convicted of both felonies and low-level offenses.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/03/this-generation-of-kids-wont-do-better-than-parents-ii-tipp-poll/

Parents in America, as elsewhere, traditionally have been concerned with one big thing when it comes to their children: That their kids’ lives should be better than the preceding generation’s. And for decades, that optimism was a given. But now, people are not so sure, a new I&I/TIPP Poll suggests.

Based on a growing body of evidence, both from the news and from a spate of recent studies and research, America’s parents, grandparents, teachers and others who make up the adult world today share a deep angst over how well their kids will do in the future.

To find out how pervasive this feeling is, the online I&I/TIPP Poll of 1,365 adults, taken from March 29-31, asked Americans a straightforward question: “How likely do you think today’s youth will have a better life than their parents?”

Of those responding, just 43% answered that it was likely that today’s kids would have better lives, with 21% saying it was “very likely” and 22% saying “somewhat likely.” And 8% said they weren’t sure.

Meanwhile, 49% took the more pessimistic view, calling it “unlikely” that today’s kids would do better than their parents. That includes 33% who said “somewhat” unlikely and 16% who said “very” unlikely.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/04/02/john-fetterman-gives-an-interview-and-well-n1683842

Pennsylvania is a critical state: Population over 12 million and 20 electoral votes. The media’s obfuscation of Senator Fetterman’s ability to serve is outrageous…..rsk

EXCERPTS

John Fetterman, who was released from Walter Reed hospital this week, gave an interview to CBS’s Sunday Morning anchor Jane Pauley two days before his discharge. The interview is a classic example of how the liberal media is attempting to portray Fetterman as a hero, despite his misleading voters about his fitness to serve in the U.S. Senate, because he sought treatment for depression.

“Initially, I was open to giving John Fetterman the benefit of the doubt and considered the possibility that the clip shared on Twitter had been edited for brevity’s sake. However, my curiosity led me to watch the full interview, and to my surprise, I noticed similar quick cuts scattered throughout the conversation.

While it’s understandable that Fetterman may want to present himself as capable and articulate, it is also important to acknowledge and address the challenges that he is still facing, and it is disingenuous of the media to try to conceal that. Fetterman’s poll numbers took a hit after his debate with Oz because the debate was broadcast live without the benefit of being repackaged for the audience.

For sure, there were portions where Fetterman was coherent for a sentence or two, but has he really improved since October? How can we know for sure when CBS clearly removed portions where Fetterman likely struggled to communicate and perhaps gave him multiple opportunities to say what he meant to say until it sounded good? We don’t know, but after watching the interview, I am suspicious of what CBS didn’t want us to see.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/philip-carl-salzman/2023/04/02/how-anti-white-discrimination-undermines-our-culture-and-citizenship-n1683935

American and Canadian institutions — business, education, military, medical, legal, and government — have all intentionally instituted systemic discrimination against white citizens who are increasingly treated as villains or excluded entirely.

In the past, when the democratic norm of respect for the majority was taken for granted, white citizens, who make up strong majorities in both countries — 60% in the U.S. and 70% in Canada — did not suffer from racial discrimination. But with the adoption of the Marxist model of society, in which there is an oppressor class of villains and an innocent victim class, whites have been cast as the villains to be legitimately attacked and thwarted.

Today, the discrimination against racial minorities in the past is no longer seen as justification for equalizing rights so that all enjoy equal citizenship and equal opportunity but as justification for flipping the racial hierarchy and giving minorities rights and benefits which are forbidden to white citizens.

I can report this firsthand from universities, where I taught for fifty years. For a couple of decades at least, there was a double standard, with preference given to minority racial applicants over more academically accomplished white and Asian applicants. This of course was institutionalized in the U.S. by “affirmative action,” transformed from President Kennedy’s insistence on equal treatment to President Johnson’s preferential treatment.

Today universities in Canada and the U.S. do not just favor certain minority races but systemically exclude other races, particularly whites, from fellowship support and from jobs as professors and administrators. It would be easy to offer hundreds of examples (see them listed on the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship website at safs.ca), but this one from the University of Ottawa illustrates the pattern:

Job Number: J0223-1057 Job Type: Tenure-track Job Category: Academic Faculty: Faculty of Social Science Department: Political Studies Union: The Association of Professors of the University of Ottawa (APUO)

The hiring for this position will be done in accordance with the University’s initiatives to combat systemic racial discrimination as announced by the University President in January 2021, which aim among other things, to remedy the under-representation of racialized peoples and Indigenous peoples within the ranks of its faculty members. In order to strengthen the diversity of the School of Political Studies, only qualified applications from racialized or Indigenous peoples will be considered and evaluated for the position. (emphasis added)

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19552/bring-down-trump

The indictment of former President Donald Trump is just the latest maneuver by many in the United States to distort elections.

The tactic appears reminiscent of Soviet secret police head Lavrentiy Beria’s: “Show me the man, and I will find you the crime.”

“[I]t is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it. It is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.” — Alan Dershowitz, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law School, New York Sun, March 15, 2023.

In the 2020 presidential election, under the pretext of Covid, election laws in many states were changed — illegally, some by not going through state legislatures, as required by the Constitution. There was also a series of maneuvers — including the federal government and 51 former intelligence officers knowingly suppressing media reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop — that cast legitimate suspicion, regardless of what the almost unanimous mainstream media said, on the outcome.

After President Trump, on January 6, 2021, called on his supporters to demonstrate “peacefully and patriotically,” in front of the Capitol Building, some skeptical and disappointed demonstrators — perhaps again with the intervention of the FBI — became disorderly. Politicians and the media did not hesitate to compare the events of that day to 9/11 attacks and Pearl Harbor. The only person unfortunately killed at the demonstration was an unarmed demonstrator, shot by a policeman. The federal government refused to release 14,000 hours of footage, presumably in an attempt at a cover-up. Trump was subjected to the absurd procedure of a second impeachment to remove him from office — even though he was no longer president. Finally, he was banned from Twitter and Facebook, which had been so useful to him in 2016 to bypass a hostile media.

Moreover, despite the efforts of many politicians and journalists to protect Biden, the new Republican-dominated House of Representatives has uncovered bank records showing “payments made to President Joe Biden’s son from a Chinese Communist Party-linked company,” as well as “showing Biden family members received more than $1 million from a Chinese energy company after passing through the account of a family associate,” [including] “an unknown bank account identified as ‘Biden.'”

Trump’s indictment, a humiliating “perp walk,” and the possible incarceration of a former president, serve as useful diversions to prevent the public from seeing evidence of a current commander-in-chief who has been questioned as being compromised.

No abuses will be spared Trump, or any other Republican who might run for president in 2024. It seems as if many in America, in what appears an escalating wish for authoritarian power are ready for all maneuvers to not let American voters choose their president democratically in 2024.

The indictment of former President Donald Trump is just the latest maneuver by many in the United States to distort elections.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-coming-biden-bailout-of-blue-states-and-cities-rhode-island-california-pension-liability-underwater-rates-svb-5033c1e5?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The Federal Reserve’s latest interest-rate hike paired with the continuing bank panic is causing credit conditions to tighten. State and local governments could be the next sinking ships that Washington gets called on to rescue.

More than a decade of near-zero rates allowed state and local governments to borrow cheaply. At the same time, the Fed’s quantitative easing inflated asset values and prompted pension funds chasing high returns to pile into riskier higher-yielding investments. Now that the music has stopped, the bills for years’ worth of monetary exuberance are coming due.

The balance-sheet risks for mismanaged states and municipalities have been hiding in plain sight just as they were at Silicon Valley Bank. Continued financial-market turmoil and a prolonged economic downturn could cause some pension funds to collapse and cities to declare bankruptcy. Taxpayers will invariably wind up on the hook for politicians’ bad financial bets.

Local government economic-development projects are already growing more expensive and less attractive to private investors owing to rising rates. Consider the $124 million minor-league soccer stadium in Pawtucket, R.I., set to receive about $60 million in state tax credits, federal Covid aid and public debt. Construction started over the winter, but the project’s developer is struggling to raise money to complete it as credit conditions tighten. That means taxpayers could wind up paying more of the costs, which explains Rhode Island Gov. Daniel McKee’s outburst at the central bank last week.