RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/alvin-braggs-political-charge-against-donald-trump-new-york-arrest-presidential-campaign-2024-election-da-charges-stormy-daniels-f5c1b6e1?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Alvin Bragg may actually do it. The Manhattan district attorney is by all media accounts preparing to indict Donald Trump for failing to account properly for hush money paid to his alleged mistress, unleashing who knows what political furies. Mr. Trump said Saturday he expects to be arrested on Tuesday and urged his supporters to “protest, protest, protest.” Cry, the beloved country.

It’s impossible to overstate Mr. Bragg’s bad judgment here. Perhaps the local Democratic DA has discovered some new proof of criminal behavior. But based on the public evidence so far, he would be resurrecting a seven-year-old case that even federal prosecutors refused to bring to court.

As we wrote last week, the charge would appear to be falsifying business records to pay the mistress, Stormy Daniels. That is typically a misdemeanor in New York state, though Mr. Bragg might bump it up to a felony by claiming the falsification was to cover up an illegal campaign-finance donation to Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

A key prosecution witness would be Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer who is an admitted felon. Mr. Trump might claim in his defense that his payments were made to shield the affair from his wife. He has publicly denied an affair with Ms. Daniels. Proving intent to break the law will not be easy.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/progressive-democrat-braggs-motivation-in-nakedly-political-indictment-of-trump/

Progressive prosecutor Alvin Bragg’s impending criminal prosecution of Donald Trump is a disgrace, as a matter of due process and good governance. Rich is right that it’s good for Trump’s political fortunes, at least in the short term. We shouldn’t lose sight, though, that it is good for Democratic political fortunes in the long term.

Obviously, Trump does not merit immunity from prosecution just because he is a former president, a current presidential candidate, and an influential political figure with a devoted base of millions. Yet no former president and substantial candidate should be the target of a criminal prosecution, especially by the opposition party, unless the matter is truly serious — unless it would be treated as felony conduct if it were committed by anyone.

Besides Bragg’s investigation, we have carefully covered the pending probes of the former president in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his illegal possession of classified documents. Those are extraordinarily serious matters. We can agree or disagree about the legal theories that prosecutors may pursue; and we should watch carefully whether, on the classified documents, Trump is afforded equal protection of the law given that President Biden and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, among others, have engaged in similar conduct with (so far) impunity. Nevertheless, if Trump were indicted for, say, obstructing Congress on January 6, 2021, or obstructing the grand-jury investigation of his hoarding of secret intelligence at Mar-a-Lago, no one could credibly claim that these were (pardon the pun) trumped-up cases, even if the decision to charge them is politically fraught.

Not so with the Stormy Daniels caper.

Bragg is engaged in bare-naked politics. The case is not merely unworthy as a prosecution of Trump (which is why federal prosecutors walked away from it years ago, as did Bragg before he was pressured by progressive Democrats into reviving it); it is also a case that everyone knows Bragg would never bring against anyone other than Trump. Crime is rampant in New York, in part because Bragg’s default position is leniency and often non-prosecution when it comes to hardened criminals. Here, the case of falsifying business records against Trump (which we’ve analyzed, for example, here, here, here, here, and here) is, at best, a nonviolent misdemeanor that is stale and that could be inflated into a felony only by theories that are legally and factually dubious. This is a classic, invidious selective prosecution. It is being launched strictly for political purposes.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/calamity_joe_geopolitical_catastrophes_multiply_as_american_power_and_influence_crash_to_new_postwar_lows.html

In only two years, Joe Biden’s presidency has produced multiple catastrophes from which recovery will be difficult, if it is even possible. Domestically, we see the banking system teetering on insolvency, as the rapid escalation in interest rates has devalued long term Treasury notes that used to be considered a safe place for banks to park funds in excess of what could be safely lent. The reason for these Federal Reserve interest rate hikes is the inflation that was immediately triggered by Biden’s jihad against domestica oil, gas, and coal production, that triggered an inflationary spiral that continues today, devaluing the life savings of thrifty Americans, and pushing food and energy costs up so fast that many families have had to drastically reduce their standard of living.

Bad as these catastrophes are, the potential for serious damage to the welfare of the American people from the military and diplomatic policies of the Biden administration is much worse. Losing a war – or even just fighting a nuclear war – makes a mere Depression look like a day at the beach. And make no mistake, the Biden administration is flirting with a nuclear confrontation with Russia that China might well decide to join and eliminate for good the power of the United States to oppose its aims for dominance of the Asia/Pacific region (for starters). Meanwhile, as the potential for an ultimate confrontation increases, resources for America to counter the threat are rapidly diminishing.

Start with the monumental blunder of driving together China and Russia, not necessarily natural allies, indeed with a recent history of serious tension. But now Xi Jinping is about to visit Moscow, and the two are united in opposition to American hegemony. They are joined in the task of replacing the dollar as the world reserve currency by other rising powers of the BRICS.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/government_tyrants_play_with_fire.html

If Trump is really arrested on Tuesday, it will say something deeply disturbing about the state of our country.

The communist thugs controlling America’s legal system have chosen to cross the Rubicon, it seems.  President Trump says he will be arrested Tuesday now that New York City’s corrupt, Soros-funded district attorney has cooked up some cockamamie criminal indictment against him involving Stormy Daniels — the same political pawn who was already ordered to pay the president 300,000 dollars in legal fees as restitution in a prior case.

If anyone needed further evidence that we reside under a post-constitutional Uniparty regime with utter disdain for the rule of law, add this to the long list of government crimes and usurpations committed against the American people.

No doubt the politicians and their State-controlled agents in the press will actually hail President Trump’s arrest as shimmering validation that “no one is above the law.”  What poppycock!  What glittery abuse of power.  What abominable descent into tyranny!

If Bill and Hillary Clinton had ever been properly charged for their decades-long crime spree involving perjury, rape, investment swindling, real estate scams, stolen White House furniture, Chinese bribery, campaign finance violations, family foundation fraud, mishandling of classified secrets, conspiracy to defraud the United States with the Russia hoax, Epstein-linked prostitution and child-trafficking, or their uncanny proclivity for leaving a trail of dead associates in their wake, their rap sheets would stretch from here to the moon.  Had Barack Obama ever had to properly answer for illicitly using the IRS, EPA, DOJ, FBI, and Intelligence Community to target, harass, and persecute his political opponents or account for his stunning success in using his political office to transition from one of America’s poorest presidents to one of its wealthiest, he and his wife would not so absurdly yet flippantly claim that his presidency was aboveboard and “scandal-free.”  If there were not a two-tier “justice” system that exists only to protect Deep State friends and demolish Uniparty enemies, Joe Biden’s notorious reputation over the last half-century as a bought-and-paid-for stooge of foreign governments and domestic crime syndicates — with a family of drug users and reprobates who profit solely from his politically-protected name — would have at least kept him far from the White House, if not serving time in prison.

Only Donald Trump — the man who donated his salary for serving the American people and who has lost a fortune parrying endless and spurious criminal, civil, and regulatory attacks — finds himself in legal jeopardy, with his life, liberty, and property all on the line.

https://thespectator.com/topic/great-comeuppance-economy-silicon-valley-bank/

You can measure the health of the American republic, or at least its governing institutions, on a weekday-morning Acela train from Washington to New York. It’s too expensive to use for pleasure ($337 if you plan late and are unlucky), too time-consuming (almost three hours for the 225-mile trip) to permit idling in the café car. So the train is always full of strivers, working their cell phones. On Tuesday morning, the phone chitchat was anxious. Even in Washington, where analysts and economists had been working all weekend to contain the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the reeling of the financial system when markets opened on Monday caught people by surprise.

It shouldn’t have. The last time bankers ran off with the savings of their compatriots was only fifteen years ago. A lot of people at the time asked: “How could we have been so gullible?” But really, Americans, Englishmen and other finance-dependent peoples had reason to be trusting. The young bankers in all those photos from the time may have looked ridiculous — standing with their backs to the plate-glass windows of a Lehman Brothers conference room to receive their walking papers, or lined up with cardboard boxes to cart their office possessions home. But what strikes us now is that they were so numerous. There were whole skyscrapers full of them, devising their multivariable hocus-pocus and bragging about their sailboats to young women in wine bars after work. Few liked them as a group. But they seemed the product of a real, stable, indispensable service industry. By contrast, whenever SVB has been mentioned in recent days, you see a lot of B-roll of automatic teller machines. You wonder if they have any employees. Whenever the cryptocurrency-focused Signature Bank is mentioned, you see empty shop fronts in malls. You wonder if they have any customers.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/money/2023/03/risky-and-risque-banking-business/

” A $100 five-year bond paying 1 percent becomes worth much less than $100 (about $80 I think) if interest rates rise to 5 percent. Thus SVB realised steep losses when forced to sell bonds. Makes no sense unless you’re incompetent, hired to satisfy DEI requirements. Or distracted, occupied by the skin colour and sexual wotnots of you and your colleagues.”

Tucker Carlson of Fox News enjoyed himself the other day (15 March), making fun of the very woke Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). The risk manager of the UK arm of the bank – which sold for £1 to HSBC – described herself as a “queer person of colour from a working class background.” What has that do with banking or risk management, Tucker queried; as he did other woke performances from both SVB and, its fellow failed bank, Signature Bank. Apropos dancing bankers. Apropos a seminar on gender-neutral pronouns hosted by Signature Bank’s president Scott Shay, and featuring Finn Brigham, who identifies as a ”genderqueer trans male.” I can’t define that for you.

I worked in the second half of the 1980s for State Bank Victoria (SBV not SVB) as chief economist. You can’t imagine a set of people less woke. Yet the bank failed in 1991. So it isn’t wokeness per se that brings down a bank. It’s inattention to risk management. However, wokeness, particularly when exhibited in the cause of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), surely doesn’t help. It can mean that focus is taken away from the main game. And it can mean that people are employed and promoted on the basis of irrelevant criteria such as skin colour, sex, sexual preference and having gender-bending proclivities.

Risk management is a serious business. In fact you can say it’s the only game in town when it comes to commercial banking. At its core, banking itself requires few skills. Money is accepted on deposit at one rate of interest and then lent at a higher rate. Costs are paid and profit is earned. In normal times, it’s hard to make a mess of that. Thus bankers on the whole are not the brightest kids on the block. They don’t need to be.

A true story. Waiting in line to get the bad news of my redundancy, following the failure of SBV, a fellow executive, older than me and also for the chop, spoke to me in his distress. He told me of his father saying to him, “you’re not that good at schoolwork son, a bank’s the place for you.” He wasn’t at all sure what he would or could do next.

Run of the mill banking is one thing, when it comes to bank risk management, bright people are needed.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Sustainability is an over-used word. Or is it? Googling the word generates over three billion hits, almost three times the number of hits generated by its parent, sustain. It is a relatively new word, first appearing in the United Nation’s 1987 Brundtland Report, which defined sustainable development as meeting “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” It generally refers to climate and the environment and what man is doing (or not to doing) to sustain it, along with racial, gender and equity issues. Wikipedia defines sustainability as “a societal goal that relates to the ability of people to safely co-exist on Earth over a long time.” (Sustain is defined: to support, uphold, or strengthen.)

In 2015, the United Nations adopted a collection of 17 interlinked objectives called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which include: the elimination of poverty, reduced inequalities, climate, peace, justice, decent work, responsible communities, and strong institutions – all goals with which no reasonable person would disagree, but also words whose definitions are amorphous, and which can vary with user. Nevertheless, woke universities and colleges have been quick to add “Sustainability Institutes.”

But might the word be more inclusive? We must harbor our resources and protect the environment. But we must not constrain man’s propensity to create and adapt. It was underestimating man’s capacity to innovate that led to Thomas Malthus’ faulty prediction in 1798, that population growth would exceed resources. People need the freedom to express ideas, and the freedom to go where aspiration, ability and dedication take them. For that they need a sustainable political environment, which allows for individual freedom, functions under the rule of law, includes property rights, and provides access to free markets.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/17/feds-foreign-corruption-double-standard/

At the same time Department of Justice officials were using spying and corruption statutes to aggressively pursue Donald Trump’s allies based on what turned out to be rumor and innuendo, they declined to use those same laws to investigate evidence of wrongdoing involving Biden family members and one of their corrupt Chinese business partners, Justice Department documents and federal court records reveal.  

In 2016-2017, the evidence shows, the FBI raided the offices and intercepted the communications of Chi Ping “Patrick” Ho, a Chinese national suspected of espionage even as he was negotiating business deals with former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and brother James. 

The Justice Department later used information obtained from the searches and wiretaps—which included conversations with the current president’s son and brother—to convict Ho of bribery and money laundering, as part of a separate corruption case involving United Nations officials. But it declined to tap into its trove of evidence—including “over 100,000 emails”—to explore the connections between Ho and the Bidens, who received millions of dollars from Ho and a Chinese intelligence front and discussed sharing office space. 

At Ho’s 2018 trial, prosecutors hid Hunter’s connection to Ho, redacting his name from court exhibits (see here) while describing Ho as “the person who flies around the world paying bribes to advance the interest of the oil company [CEFC China Energy],” according to hearing transcripts. 

A federal database shows the Bidens failed to register as foreign agents while engaged in activities on behalf of CEFC, a state-owned entity suspected of being a front for Chinese intelligence. Federal anti-spying laws require anyone acting as a lobbyist for a foreign power to register with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).  

The Justice Department did not prosecute either Biden family member for potential violations of FARA for representing the interests of the Chinese.  

This stands in stark contrast to the Justice Department’s aggressive pursuit of alleged FARA violations involving no fewer than six Trump campaign officials. In August of 2016, shortly after receiving a tip that a low-level Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos, had allegedly been told that the Russians might have dirt on Hillary Clinton, the bureau opened FARA investigations into Papadopoulos and three other Trump associates with no clear ties to Papadopoulos: national security adviser Michael Flynn; campaign manager Paul Manafort; and campaign adviser Carter Page. The FBI subsequently investigated Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates and Trump’s Mideast adviser Walid Phares under the same statute.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/a_visit_to_the_national_world_war_ii_museum_is_both_sad_and_uplifting.html

Some of you may have noticed my absence over the past week. That is because I made my first visit to New Orleans. The city is beautiful, although a bit overwhelming, because it hits every one of your senses. However, what I want to write about here is not New Orleans generally, but, more specifically, a visit to the National World War II Museum.

When it comes to the museum itself, it’s a well-designed, thoughtful museum. A friend of mine who is an avid historian usually fulminates against what the government does to American history. His oft-repeated line is “The National Park Service is where history goes to die.” However, although he had a few quibbles with the museum, especially the minimal focus on General Patton, he also thought it was excellent.

The museum’s exhibits are broken down into three sections. In the older building, through which one enters, there are movies, a gift store, and an entire exhibit dedicated to D-Day. In the larger, newer building, the exhibits are broken into the European theater and the Pacific theater. There is also a moving exhibit of the merchant Marines, who turned out to have one of the most dangerous jobs in World War II as they fought to keep the military supplied with food and equipment.

In each section, the museum designers tried to create a feeling of “you are there.” For Europe, the rooms felt like burned-out towns or, for the Battle of the Bulge, a forest in Belgium. In the exhibit on the Pacific, you felt as if you were entering a ship, and then you found yourself in tropical jungles. Of course, nothing could create the feel of actually being there, in the freezing cold of Europe or the tropical heat of the Pacific, all the while see-sawing between fear, boredom, and exhaustion. Still, it raised the museum above being sterile.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/the_truth_about_parental_rights_legislation.html

Considering how egregiously parents’ rights have been trampled in recent years, federal parental rights legislation recently reintroduced in Congress sounds promising, but its premise is dangerous. In fact, it could result in eroding parents’ God-given rights to direct the upbringing of their children.

The precedent for parental rights legislation was initiated by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose bill was dubbed by critics the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. A noteworthy feature of the DeSantis law is that it prohibits sexuality education in kindergarten through third grade (five through nine-year-olds). It is hard to believe that we need a law to prohibit sexuality education for children who, at these young ages, aren’t even thinking about sexuality, but nonetheless it is necessary.

Governor DeSantis has done more for protecting children and our country’s freedom than any governor I have observed in my lifetime. He has been right on education policy on many fronts and continues to take the lead on common sense education policy. But the reality is that parental rights are determined by our Creator, not the government. Despite such good intentions from leaders like DeSantis, any parental rights legislation is flawed at its inception, suggesting parents’ rights are determined by government rather than the fundamental, inalienable rights of parents afforded by their Creator.

Prominent conservative legal scholar Joanna Martin, JD, recently published an article titled “A Massive Transfer of Power Over Children from Parents to Governments” where she discusses similar concerns with parental rights legislation. She writes specifically about the bill passed by the North Carolina Senate, saying, “…what SB 49 does is to transfer power over children from parents to governments. Parents’ ‘rights’ consist of the privilege of being notified of decisions made respecting their children by governments; and they are granted certain rights to challenge some of the decisions.”