RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/13/the-livelihood-thieves-of-washington-d-c/

Crime will be fresh on the minds of voters during November’s midterm elections. But there is no greater robbery than that being planned by the Biden administration. What it’s proposing is a government-backed mugging.

In essence, the White House wants to outlaw gig work in America. No, it’s not saying so outright. The Biden Labor Department obscures that harsh reality with words meant to deceive. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh says the department’s proposal is needed to safeguard “​​our nation’s most vulnerable workers,” and ensure they are not deprived “of their federal labor protections.”

Left out is the part that, should the proposal become policy, millions of Americans will be stripped of their jobs and income. Under its rule, the Labor Department would be free to “determine whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor under the Fair Labor Standards Act.” And it will determine in every case that the worker in question must be a hired employee, no longer free to continue his or her job as an independent contractor.

How can we be so sure as to say “every case”? There’s precedent. Almost three years ago Assembly Bill 5, passed and signed in 2019, went into effect in California. The standard it put in place to determine if workers could remain independent contractors is so high that it is virtually impossible to reach. Everyone has to be a hired employee or their job is lost.

But couldn’t businesses simply hire gig workers? Sure, some could. But many companies, especially growing companies, rely on independent contracting because the steep costs of employment that are mandated by government make hiring unaffordable.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/wholesale-prices-rise-for-first-time-in-three-months-and-show-inflation-still-raging-11665578458?mod=home-page

Producer price index climbs 0.4% in September — double the Wall Street forecast

The numbers: U.S. wholesale prices rose 0.4% in September to mark the first increase in three months, signaling little progress in the Federal Reserve’s fight to vanquish high inflation.

Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had forecast a 0.2% gain. Wholesale prices had fallen in August and July entirely because of declining gasoline prices.

The increase in wholesale prices over the past year, meanwhile, fell slightly to 8.5% from 8.7% in the prior month. Inflation is still running near a 40-year high, however.

A separate measure of wholesale prices that strips out volatile food and energy costs also increase 0.4% last month, the government said Wednesday. That was a larger than expected.

The increase in these so-called core prices over the past year was flat at 5.6%.

The change in wholesale prices offers clues on how much inflation is increasing. The consumer price index due on Thursday gives a better idea of how much the cost of living is going up for U.S. households.

Big picture: The Fed’s belated but aggressive strategy to raise interest rates to reduce inflation hasn’t shown much effect so far. Prices are still rising rapidly.

https://www.thepostemail.com/2022/10/12/the-premeditated-murder-of-the-american-family/

 Why would anyone––much less a huge number of people––want to destroy the greatest and most successful experiment in government in world history, one which President Abraham Lincoln described as “of the people, by the people, for the people,” the Democratic Republic of the United States of America?

Simply, because it flew in the face of every political system that previously existed––monarchies, dictatorships, oligarchies, aristocracies, totalitarianism, communism, socialism––systems in which the immense power and abuse-of-power that these regimes exercised would be vanquished if replaced by the Power of the People that the Founding Fathers of America envisioned.

The mission of those other regimes was never ever about concern for their populaces; rather it was––and is today––purely about the acquisition and maintenance of power and control and especially the immense wealth that comes with both power and control. Always, always, always follow the money!

HOW CAN WE DESTROY AMERICA?

The enemies of America thought long and hard about how to destroy this fledgling experiment. It was clear to them that America’s strength was a function of three phenomena:

A fervent belief in the God who makes miracles happen, for just one example the crushing defeat of the thunderously powerful English Empire’s armies by blazing patriots like General George Washington and his ragtag army of American heroes.
An equally ardent belief in and passion for the concept of Freedom. Men who knew they were going to die, and their wives who believed their deaths were for the noble cause of freedom, all sacrificed to bring about our victory over the monarchy that wanted to continue to rule us.
The most passionate was the embrace, belief, and allegiance to family, its sanctity, its strength, its ability to weather all storms and overcome all obstacles.

If we destroy all three, our enemies reasoned, the masses they considered essentially stupid would be forced to rely exclusively on Big Government. And so, to this day, the socialists-cum-communists among us are employing––as their predecessors did–– every malevolent, criminal, and vicious tactic they can muster to actualize that goal.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18965/washington-double-legal-standards

Our bureaucrats, it seems, have no boundaries when it comes to a former president of the United States. What a precedent to set. Let us compare that to how they treat themselves.

When Hillary Clinton’s emails were found to contain classified information, some marked at the highest levels of classification, the FBI did not raid her home in Chappaqua, New York. They did not overturn her office or closets when classified emails turned up that she had not sent back to the government or when she wiped the data on her personal server with BleachBit, which meant the government would never know the full extent of the documents Clinton kept. Why was she treated differently by the FBI?

Consider the case of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who lied to the Senate when he declared that the intelligence community had no mass surveillance program collecting data on Americans. Not only did he lie in his public testimony before the committee, he also refused to acknowledge his lie and instead tried to explain it away.

[Clapper] also refused to acknowledge his lie and instead tried to explain it away. Because Clapper is a protected bureaucrat, he faced no consequences, and even joined CNN as a paid national security contributor, regularly attacking former President Trump. CNN does not note that he perjured himself before Congress — with evidence — when they put him on the air.

Hayden also stated that the [CIA interrogation] tapes were destroyed, “only after it was determined they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative, or judicial inquires.” Again, all evidence points to the contrary, and Hayden is wrong to make these clearly false assertions.

Hayden’s efforts, however, were just another in a long line of efforts to cover up the actions of unaccountable bureaucrats, who not surprisingly, were never held legally accountable.

My candid advice to Biden, Hayden, Clapper, and many other media commentators, is to consider your own records — and be careful what you advocate.

Former CIA Director Mike Hayden, shortly after the FBI raided the home of former President Donald J. Trump, responded to a tweet by Michael Beschloss in a way that, apart from disregarding any presumption of innocence, seemingly endorsed the idea that Trump was a spy who, for allegedly having taken classified documents, should be executed by the government, as the Rosenbergs were in 1953 for having passed US nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. “Sounds about right,” Hayden wrote over of photograph of the Rosenbergs on Twitter.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/09/goodbye-columbus/

This Monday is the federal holiday called “Columbus Day” to honor a man who was once lauded as a great mariner and courageous explorer, whose exploits led to the European discovery of the Americas. 

But in recent decades, Columbus has been demonized and accused of all manner of atrocities against the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

The attacks on Columbus are part of the broader denigration of Western Civilization as racist, exploitative, and imperialistic. A major source of the assault on both Columbus and Western Civilization is a widely used history textbook by the late Howard Zinn, A Peoples’ History of the United States. Zinn was more of a Marxist polemicist than a legitimate scholar, and the book has been panned, even by left-wing historians who express concern about the damage that politicized history could do to their profession.

As Mary Graber has pointed out in her scathing critique of Zinn, his chapter on Columbus was plagiarized from Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth, a book for high schoolers, first published in 1976 by Hans Koning. As she and others, including Robert Royal and Armando Simon, observe, contemporary accounts contradict the portrait of Columbus painted by the likes of Koning and Zinn. He, like most men, was imperfect but far from the moral monster described by these modern leftist writers.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/sean-diddy-combs-stands-against-the-canceling-of-kanye/

Kanye West is determined to keep on wearing his “White Lives Matter” t-shirt, which he sported at his Paris Fashion Week show, despite fierce and expected backlash from the Left.

Kanye is clearly — as he said in his interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson — stating “the obvious.” He is also clearly distancing himself from — and countering — the woke hatred of the Marxist, thieving, destructive Black Lives Matter movement, which has only hurt black Americans.

West’s t-shirt also achieves something else: it presents the picture of a successful and wealthy black man in America who rejects victimhood and embraces ALL races — including white people. This is a nightmare for the woke leftists. And while they convulse in rage over West’s fashion statement, along comes another problem for them: entertainment icon Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs has stepped up in support of West having the right to do and say what he wants on this matter.

Although Diddy stated that the t-shirts were “very tone-deaf,” he also affirmed that people “don’t have to condemn Kanye or cancel him.”

Vanity Fair described Diddy as “the artist and mogul” who is “defining his next era,” and goes on:

The man who turned hip-hop culture into a global lifestyle brand in the go-go 1990s has a lot to think about during the cultural upheaval of the 2020s. “I am the happiest I’ve ever been in life, I laugh the most, I smile the most, I breathe the most,” he tells me. In a word, Combs has love on his mind.

It doesn’t please the woke, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, or its political and financial supporters, to see a black man happy in America.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/destroy-columbus-day-destroy-america/

A turquoise-colored sign on the door of my bank announcing closure on October 10 because of Indigenous Peoples’ Day inspired me to beat a path to a teller, even though I was not there for banking.

“Excuse me,” I said. “But I have a fun question for you…”

The question was far from fun but I didn’t want to appear strident. “Regarding the sign on the door…. What happened to the holiday called Columbus Day?” The teller rolled her eyes and said the wording on the sign was not the bank’s fault. She explained that the bank had made up a different sign that mentioned Columbus Day but the City of Philadelphia had forced them to scratch out Columbus and insert Indigenous Peoples Day (IPD).

“We didn’t do it,” she assured me.

I recalled how in February 2021 Mayor Jim Kenney signed an executive order effectively changing  Columbus Day in the City of Philadelphia with the (Communist China-sounding) IPD-identifier. That executive order had come after a contentious period beginning in 2020 with the George Floyd riots when left activist mobs attempted to pull down the Frank Rizzo statue (after dousing it in paint and dressing it up in a woman’s bra) located on the steps of the city’s Municipal Services Building since 1998.

As it turned out, the leftists didn’t have to dismantle the statue because Mayor Kenny announced that the city was making plans to remove it and put it into storage.

With the Rizzo statue gone, the Columbus statue in South Philadelphia’s Marconi Plaza became the city’s new Public Enemy No. 1.

Columbus statues were already being removed and beheaded around the country. Across the Delaware River, Camden, New Jersey had dismantled (and smashed to pieces) its Columbus statue in Farnham Park.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/10/64-of-voters-concerned-over-bidens-mental-health-ii-tipp-poll/

Concerns over President Joe Biden’s recent very public displays of possibly age-related mental impairments have jumped among voters since mid-summer, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows. And these worries aren’t partisan, with a majority of all political groups, including Democrats, now expressing concern.

In early August, we asked Americans: “Some people are concerned about President Biden’s mental health. How concerned are you about President Biden’s mental health?” At the time, a number of public displays of unsteadiness, confusion and verbal gaffes seen in the media suggested to many that that the nation’s commander in chief’s mental acuity was questionable.

For instance, 59% overall said they were worried about his mental health. The responses included 82% of Republicans, 56% of independents, but just 39% of Democrats.

We asked the same question in our most recent online poll of 1,376 adults across the country taken from October 5-7, with a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points. This time, the overall number grew to 64%, or nearly two-thirds of all voters.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/08/prudence-is-a-virtue/

Joe Biden has me thinking about Aristotle. 

If that seems odd—and I understand that it does—consider Biden’s much publicized remarks last week at a Democratic fundraiser about “Armageddon.” Referring to Vladimir Putin’s veiled but increasingly strident threats to use “all the means at our disposal” to defend Russian territorial integrity, Biden went full-Cuban missile crisis on the assembled members of the great Democratic ATM: “We have not,” he said, “faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis.” 

Hmm.

Are we to infer that Joe Biden is like John F. Kennedy facing down Nikita Khrushchev? You might think that. I couldn’t possibly comment. 

Granted, the idea is preposterous in about 87 different ways. But perhaps Biden’s speechwriters wanted to plant a seed. Anyway, we are probably meant to keep JFK in the back of our minds. 

Biden did not actually cite the Book of Revelation, which identifies Armageddon as the site of the final battle between good and evil at the end of the world, but I have no doubt that the word “Armageddon” was echoing loudly down the corridors of the Kremlin. That, I am pretty sure, was by design. Did it have Putin polishing the launch apparatus on some of his 6000 nukes? I don’t know.

Probably, though, Putin’s lips were pursed when he heard Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president and celebrated T-shirt model, call upon NATO to conduct “preventative action” against Russian targets to prevent their use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

I thought it was cute that Zelenskyy’s translator first said “preventative strikes” before correcting himself and substituting “preventative action.” 

Another seed planted. Was it deliberate? You tell me.