RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/20/the-biden-family-caricatures/

The Biden first family seems determined to confirm every stereotype of their antisocial behavior—to the point of dysfunctionality.

During the 2020 campaign at least eight women alleged that then presidential candidate Joe Biden in the past had serially and improperly touched, kissed or grabbed them.

One, Tara Reade alleged she was sexually assaulted by Biden, who denied the charge.

Yet Biden himself finally was forced to apologize for some of his behavior. Or as he said at the time, “I get it.”

He claimed that he would no longer improperly invade the “private space” of women and had meant no harm.

But Biden’s obnoxious conduct extended well beyond the eight accusers.

Women as diverse as former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Biden’s own daughter-in-law Kathleen Buhle, have both alleged in their memoirs that Biden made them feel uncomfortable through his intrusive touching and embraces.

On several occasions, Biden developed a strange tic of becoming too physical with young girls. He habitually attempted to hug them while blowing in their hair.

His daughter Ashley wrote in her diary that she feared her past adolescent showers with her father had been inappropriate. Even as president, Biden has weirdly called out young girls in his audiences to note their attractiveness.

On one occasion, the president interrupted his speech to address a female acquaintance—enlightening the crowd that, “We go back a long way. She was 12 and I was 30, but anyway…”

As a result, Biden has likely been warned repeatedly to forgo intimate references to young women.

He has no doubt also been advised by his handlers to stop all close, supposedly innocent contact with young girls and children—if for no other reason than to prevent his political opponents from charging that Joe is “creepy,” “perverse,” or “sick.”

And yet like some addict, Biden cannot stop—regardless of the eerie image he projects around the world.

Last week, the president jumped the proverbial shark by embracing a young child in a crowd while on the tarmac of the Helsinki, Finland airport.

In his strangest act yet, Biden kept moving his mouth near the face of the young girl. He was apparently trying to nibble the youngster, almost in turkey-gobbling fashion.

She recoiled.

No matter—Biden continued at her shoulder.

Again, she flinched.

Biden then reverted to form, and sought with a second try to smell her hair and nestle closer.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/20/still-more-evidence-that-bidenomics-is-working/

Thirteen days after President Joe Biden told the nation that “Bidenomics is working,” the Congressional Budget Office released a report showing just how well it’s working – bankrupting the country far faster than anyone expected.

The report looks at spending and revenues for the first nine months of this fiscal year, which started in October. What it reveals is remarkable, both because it shows how reckless the Biden administration has been with spending and how it’s sapped the economy of strength.

The topline number is that the federal deficit so far this fiscal year has already topped $1.4 trillion, which is $875 billion higher than the same months last year and bigger than the deficit for all of fiscal year 2022.

The CBO finds that overall spending this year is running 10% higher than last year. At the same time, revenues are down 11% compared with last year, which defies claims by the administration that the economy is strong.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/irs-whistleblowers-hunter-biden-joseph-ziegler-gary-shapley-merrick-garland-david-weiss-e052e714?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

With each day it’s getting harder to believe Attorney General Merrick Garland’s insistence that there was no interference in the Hunter Biden case. A month ago President Biden’s son was given a deal on tax and gun charges that probably means no prison time. Now comes Wednesday’s testimony by two IRS whistleblowers, who say their attempt to investigate Hunter faced unprecedented meddling.

The two IRS agents are Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler. Two months back, each had spoken behind closed doors to the House Ways and Means Committee, but Wednesday was their first in the spotlight and the first time that Mr. Ziegler’s name was released.

They say the Justice Department interfered in their investigation, for example, by tipping off Hunter’s legal team to a planned search and preventing questions related to Joe Biden. They also said the IRS team didn’t have access to Hunter’s laptop and or the FD-1023 document in which an FBI informant alleged that Joe and Hunter each accepted a $5 million bribe from Ukrainian energy giant Burisma.

Some Democrats, such as Maryland’s Jamie Raskin, tried to dismiss this all as normal disagreement between investigators and prosecutors. But Mr. Shapley testified that Justice’s “handling of the Hunter Biden tax investigation was very different from any other case in my 14 years at the IRS.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/the_big_takeaway_from_an_imminent_trump_arrest.html

In an announcement that has sent shockwaves through the nation, former president Donald Trump declared that his arrest is imminent.  This declaration, shocking as it is, should be a cause for concern for anyone who values the principles upon which our nation was built.  As citizens, it is our duty to scrutinize the implications of this ongoing political assault.

In Mr. Trump’s words, this investigation is a “witch hunt,” an attempt to weaponize the law enforcement apparatus against him.  It appears to be an unprecedented attack on a former president, transforming political disagreements into legal battles, an alarming trend that threatens the stability of our constitutional republic.

The legal issues currently surrounding Mr. Trump range from a New York State case involving payments for a nondisclosure agreement to a federal case in Miami related to handling classified documents.  Now he is a target of the special counsel investigation of the January 6 Capitol Free Speech Demonstrations.  This exhaustive pursuit raises questions about the impartiality of our justice system, which should remain free from political biases.

On January 6, a faction of the crowd engaged in illegal activities, leading to a breach of the Capitol by some suspected of being planted provocateurs to discredit the peaceful event.  The justice system responded by indicting over a thousand individuals, with some defendants held for over 800 days before their trials.  Contrast this with the non-arrests or slaps on the wrists of participants of the Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots.

Labeling the actions of a few as an “insurrection” and using it to generalize the entire crowd is a blatant attempt to paint conservatives and Trump-supporters as extremists.  Such a narrative deepens divisions and fosters animosity.  These blanket accusations undermine the constitutional rights of millions of Americans and disregard their legitimate concerns over election irregularities.

Ironically, the same voices that dismiss calls for law and order in the face of destructive riots in our cities now cry foul, alleging an insurrection where there was none.  Law enforcement should never be a tool for political gamesmanship, yet we are witnessing its blatant misuse.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/07/senate_republicans_despise_their_voters.html

Lisa Murkowski is the perfect mascot for Senate Republicans.  She is a Democrat in all but name, an aristocrat who inherited her office, and a beneficiary of rigged elections.  She has more in common with Nancy Pelosi than the average Republican voter, and every time Alaskan Republicans attempt to throw her out of office, Mitch McConnell’s minions manipulate the rules to save her.  

For McConnell, Murkowski is another beholden senator kept securely in his pocket who will vote how he wants on any given day.  That might not be so bad (except for the good people of Alaska, whom she purportedly represents) if McConnell were not also an aristocrat who routinely betrays Republican voters.  However, because his loyalties lie with President Xi, multinational corporations, the World Economic Forum, and his good friend Joe Biden, China Mitch uses the leash around Murkowski’s neck only when he needs help sticking it to the American people.  And oh, how Senate Republicans love to screw over the American people!

I mention this person because she and other backstabbing Senate Republicans (think John Cornyn, Mitt Romney, John Thune, etc.) got together to do their version of Festivus in July, during which they told The Hill how much they absolutely loathe normal Republican voters.  “[O]ur party is becoming known as a group of kind of extremist, populist, over-the-top [people] where no one is taking us seriously anymore,” Murkowski laments.  

Our party?  Alaskan Republicans tried to cashier your rear years ago, and you thumbed your nose at their wishes, ran as a write-in candidate, and got elected by Democrats.  Instead of stripping you of your ranking position on choice committee assignments, Senate Republicans celebrated your “victory” over the actual Republican nominee (and Tea Party favorite, Joe Miller) by preserving your seniority.  Last year, Republicans again tried to be done with you, and McConnell and his boys rigged the election by implementing ranked-choice voting — an incumbent protection racket that also defeated Sarah Palin and sent a Democrat to the House!  Deep-red Alaska can’t represent conservatives’ interests when Senate Republicans work with Chuck Schumer to benefit Barack Obama’s favorite candidates!

That is the absurdity of the Murkowski position.  She and her ilk believe that the Republican Party should be represented by individuals who adore Barack Obama, voted for Hillary Clinton, and consider child-sniffer Joe Biden a close personal friend.  And because she is too daft to grasp the mood of the country and such a product of venal nepotism as to have scant self-awareness, she thinks the riffraff will eventually see things her way.  If they actually had elections in Alaska, Murkowski’s campaign slogan really could be “Let them eat cake,” and nobody would bat an eye.  It is what abused voters expect when Dirty Mitch McConnell’s election-riggers continue to hand out fortune cookies to the natives advising, “You shall be represented by a Democrat in Republican clothing.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/when-investigators-wont-investigate-joe-biden

One of the murkier aspects of congressional Republicans’ investigation of President Biden’s financial history concerns an allegation that Biden, when he was vice president, accepted a $5 million bribe from the corrupt Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. The alleged scheme also involved Biden’s son Hunter. Burisma, of course, was the company that for a time paid Hunter Biden about $1 million a year to do mostly nothing.

At issue is something called a form FD-1023, an FBI document that is said to “memorialize a confidential human source’s conversations with a foreign national who claimed to have bribed then-Vice President Joe Biden,” in the words of Kentucky Republican Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. That FBI confidential human source, Comer continued, was no fly-by-night character. Instead, he was a “trusted” source who has worked with the FBI “for over 10 years” and was paid “over $200,000” for his work during that time. “This is one of our highest-paid, most trusted, most respected, most effective FBI informants in the whole bureau,” Comer told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo on June 15.

In other words, it was a serious allegation from a serious source. Yet the FBI, Comer said, “never did one single thing to investigate this.” In a June 28 press release, Comer added, “The FBI has been sitting on allegations for years that Joe Biden solicited and received a bribe while he was vice president of the United States. We have no confidence that the FBI did anything to verify the allegations contained within this record and may have intentionally withheld it during the investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax evasion.”

Here’s the way investigators look at this. Is the bribery allegation true? Who knows? It might be false. It might be a misunderstanding. It might be a political hit job. Or it might be true. In any event, the only way its truth or falsity can be established is by investigation. If you don’t investigate, you’ll never know.

That is why top lawmakers, like Comer and Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, are pressing the FBI to tell them what the bureau did to investigate the source’s story. That has been the one key question they have asked the FBI and Justice Department all along: Did you investigate this? And that is what the FBI and Justice Department have refused to answer.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/17/the-supreme-court-ethics-scandal-is-the-new-russia-collusion-hoax/
Turning to Sheldon Whitehouse for ethical guidance is like seeking truth from Adam Schiff.

Senate Democrats are advancing a doomed Supreme Court “ethics” bill that would withhold $10 million in funding from Chief Justice John Roberts until the Supreme Court has “put into effect a code” for all justices.

The Senate doesn’t have the power to dictate how the Supreme Court conducts its business — any more than SCOTUS has the power to prescribe rules for the Senate. They know it. Then again, the effort to intimidate and delegitimize the court is meant to corrode constitutional governance, so perhaps the bill makes a certain amount of perverse sense.

Of course, turning to the likes of Sheldon Whitehouse and Dick Durbin for ethical guidance is much like seeking truth from Adam Schiff. And much like the Russia-collusion hoax, the effort to destroy the Supreme Court is a highly coordinated partisan scheme.

First, anti-court left-wing activist groups cook up some ethics “scandals.” These accusations are then laundered by complicit or credulous leftist media outlets for public consumption. Then, the bogus scoops are held up by partisans as proof of alleged wrongdoing. Everyone, other than perhaps the most gullible partisan hysteric, understands what’s happening.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19806/cisa-new-ministry-of-truth

A new interim report from the House Judiciary committee highlights politically motivated mission creep where we might least have expected it: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

The agency went, for example, from, ensuring the digital security of American voting systems to censoring criticism of those systems.

After the Biden administration was sued in federal court, CISA outsourced its censorship operation to a non-profit group funded by CISA itself. The Judiciary Committee report charges that the outsourcing was an implicit admission that CISA knew that its censorship activities were unconstitutional. CISA, meanwhile, said that it out sourced material to another agency to “avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”

There is more to see here, however, than just a thwarted attempt by a government bureaucracy to police the political speech of the American people in violation of the First Amendment. It is the use of funded or politically affiliated non-profit groups to do the government’s dirty work for it.

This parallels the behavior of the Justice Department under then Attorney General Eric Holder during the Barack Obama administration. The Government Accountability Institute did research into the DoJ’s pattern of using “consent decrees” to force private companies with threats of anti-discrimination lawsuits to donate funds to one or more designated non-profit organizations on a list helpfully provided by the Justice Department. These groups were largely “social justice warriors” who would then use the money to exert political pressure. This practice was immediately banned by the Trump administration when it took office in 2017, but that ban was quietly reversed by Biden four years later.

Not only that, but after the Biden administration took office, Vijaya Gadde — the woman who, a few weeks before the October 2020 presidential election decided that Twitter should censor the New York Post’s scoop about Hunter Biden’s laptop — became a member of CISA’s “Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation and Disinformation” subcommittee. Gadde, you may recall, was unceremoniously fired by Elon Musk on his first day of owning Twitter.

According to a report in The Intercept, this committee in 2022 recommended that CISA closely monitor “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper partisan media, talk radio and other online resources.

What the Judiciary Committee’s work so far has highlighted is the creation of “feedback loops”: that an agency of the government can create and use advisory boards to go well beyond its statutory mission, giving it cover for exercising power Congress never meant it to have.

How many more federal agencies are doing similar things?

https://www.city-journal.org/article/miss-netherlands-is-the-face-of-western-self-cancellation

Once upon a time, progressives sneered at beauty pageants. Whether the Miss America or the Miss Universe contest, all such “meat markets” objectify women, we were told. They turn females into sex objects! Reinforce patriarchal stereotypes! Teach girls that being in a state of partial undress, rather than learning how to code, is the path to success!

For girls in the 1970s, getting hotheaded about such chauvinist-pig traditions was a rite of passage, providing nearly as much satisfaction as biting off a hapless male’s head for holding open a door or helping with overhead luggage. Males soon got over such atavistic instincts, liberating females to lug their suitcases up subway stairs on their own, as able-bodied males unconcernedly pass them by. But the beauty pageant would not die. Organizers responded to the feminist critique by accentuating the social-activism component of the competition, eliciting from the contestants ever more fervent recitations of their aspirations, say, to found organizations for battered women.

Leftists were not impressed. For them, the beauty pageant remained an object of derision. Until now. For much of last week, the mainstream media breathlessly covered the coronation of “Miss Netherlands,” as she continues on her teary journey toward an ultimate goal of being crowned Miss Universe. One might even hear Bert Parks crooning “There She Is” in the background. And the reason for this sudden interest in an obscure preliminary stage of the contest? Miss Netherlands is really a Mister. Suddenly, even the swimsuit competition has become a worthwhile endeavor in a female’s life, as long as that female is a biological male.

An old school feminist might respond: isn’t that just like a man! Not content to dominate 99.99 percent of the world, males in all their toxic maleness have to jump in and take over the last .01 percent of what has been left to females. And the females are supposed to step aside and fall in line for the new top dog, even if he wears a dress.

The mystery is that females, by and large, are doing just that.

But if males are going to muscle females aside and claim to be not only the top male dog but also the top female dog, they could at least have offered some interesting new ways of being female. Instead, the most striking aspect of the trans revolution is its embrace of the most allegedly regressive female stereotypes. For the finals of the Miss Netherlands contest, Rikkie Valerie Kollé, né Rik, appeared in a cherry-red satin gown, slit all the way up the side to reveal the entirety of his long, gorgeous leg, predictably shod in strappy five-inch stiletto heels. The sleeveless, backless plunging dress was held up by the slenderest of spaghetti straps over Rikki’s suspiciously broad shoulders. Rikki’s long tresses were blow-dried into wavy smoothness, his foundation and blush exquisitely modelled to create the illusion of flawless skin. In short, the very image of Las Vegas glamour.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-new-censorship-2

On March 9, in the bowels of the Capitol building, a gathering took place of a type that might be possible only in Washington, D.C. The host was Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, chair of the curiously named House Select Committee on the Weaponization of Government. The guests: Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, semi-famous for revealing, in the “Twitter Files,” the deeply tangled relationship between the social-media platform and the federal government. The subject was freedom of speech in the digital age.

The Republicans had recently won a slim majority in the House and were eager to score points off the Biden administration. Taibbi and Shellenberger had been invited because they had a troubling story to tell about the abuse of power—what Jordan meant by “weaponization.”

According to Taibbi, federal entities, from the White House to the CIA, had developed a “formal system” to convey their demands to the digital platforms regarding what could be said online and who could say it. A gaggle of “quasi-private” organizations, many of them recipients of government funding, acted as force multipliers, repeating the same demands. Rather than question these practices, the news media aped them, becoming “an arm of a state-controlled thought-policing system.” Shellenberger called it the “censorship-industrial complex.”

The substance of the Twitter Files appeared to confirm these allegations. The FBI loomed large in Twitter’s content-moderation decisions. The agency dedicated as many as 80 staffers to hunting transgressors on the platform, overwhelming Twitter executives with requests for action and ultimately paying the company $3.4 million for its troubles. During the controversies surrounding the 2020 presidential campaign, Twitter leaned heavily on the judgment of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

Federal intervention in digital speech followed a tendentious pattern. Any opinion that offended establishment sensibilities was a target for suppression. That included left-wing populist views and eccentrics like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but most of the heretical voices belonged to Donald Trump and his Republican supporters. During the 2020 campaign, Trump was “deamplified” by Twitter—meaning that he was essentially talking to himself. After the January 6 riots in Washington, Twitter booted him off the platform, though it never identified how he had violated its terms of service. FBI personnel took jobs with Twitter in significant numbers, intensifying the partisan tilt. James Baker, who played a leading role in the Trump investigation while at the FBI, became a persistent advocate of expelling Trump after moving to Twitter.