RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18948/wealth-redistribution-inflation

The Inflation Reduction Act is a lie. It doesn’t reduce inflation: it actually gooses it. The IRA is another inflationary leftist spending boondoggle that throws billions at green energy and $80 billion at the IRS to audit the middle class in the hopes of balancing out some of the crony cash.

A week after signing the IRA, Biden announced a trillion dollar loan bailout for his party’s base of perpetual grad students. Like the Inflation Reduction Act, this was a massive wealth transfer. Audit the middle class and send the checks to Tesla drivers and sociology grad students. Raise inflation rates with inflationary spending and transfer some of the wealth over to welfare voters.

That’s what the White House was really celebrating.

The Biden administration isn’t fighting inflation, it’s deliberately increasing it even as its cronies in the Federal Reserve hammer home new interest rate hikes to force the economy into a recession. This two-step dance destroys savings, wrecks investments and allows for a massive wealth transfer to Democrat donors, special interests and voters. The more that the Democrat majority spends, the worse inflation gets and the more justification there is for higher rates.

If a recession arrives, there’ll be even more justification for government wealth transfers.

“I’m kind of in a position that FDR was,” Biden modestly claimed. FDR’s position was to use the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s Italy as templates for dramatically transforming America through massive spending, socialist controls and crackdowns on conservative political opponents.

So far Biden has managed 2 out of 3.

The Biden administration is not here to “save the economy”…. The formula has always been really simple: create the crisis, worsen it, and then exploit it.

Honest socialists like Bernie Sanders would at least admit that they’re trying to replace the economy with socialism while pursuing massive wealth redistribution.

Biden is pretending that he’s a firefighter when, like FDR, he’s actually an arsonist in a big helmet and black boots. Inflation is one of the fires being fed to justify tighter government controls and interventions that reduce economic independence and redistribute wealth.

Devaluing money is the traditional tool of totalitarian leftist regimes. Runaway inflation provides them with a pretext for interventions such as wage and price controls, both of which were rolled out during COVID lockdowns on an unprecedented scale and still continue….

These trial runs involve government intervention creating artificial scarcity or higher prices by intervening in the production process, shutting down plants or oil and gas leases, and then stomping in to reshape the marketplace.

Anyone living under actual socialism can tell you that it can get much worse. And will.

When that happens, Biden will throw an even bigger party. And we’ll be the ones paying for it.

Biden threw a party to celebrate the Inflation Reduction Act on the White House South Lawn even as the latest figures showed that core inflation has continued to rise. Grocery prices had the steepest increase since 1979. Rent prices shot up again and medical costs are escalating.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/the_seth_rich_case_the_fbis_other_laptop_scandal.html

This is the tale of two laptops, one tale definitely damaging to the Democrats, one potentially so. What they have in common is that the FBI did its damnedest to bury both.

For all the hubbub about the Hunter Biden laptop, there has been little talk about the laptop owned by DNC data analyst Seth Rich. In the way of brief summary, the 27-year-old Rich was beaten and then shot by unknown assailants on a Washington, D.C. street in the early morning hours of July 10, 2016. His attackers appear to have taken nothing—not his wallet, not his phone, not his watch.

Rich’s laptop was in his apartment not far from the scene of his murder. For six years, its fate has remained a mystery. In less than two weeks, however, thanks to a recent federal court decision, the FBI will be compelled to share its secrets, presuming there are any secrets and presuming too those secrets have not been scrubbed.

The FBI’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop is well enough known. The FBI took the laptop into possession in October 2019. If the New York Post had not revealed its existence and some of its highly incriminating contents in October 2020, the public might not be aware of it even today.

FBI whistleblowers and Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley have pushed the Biden laptop back into the news. In a July 25  letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, Grassley noted that the FBI allegedly “developed information in 2020 about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity,” but FBI Headquarters “improperly discredit[ed] negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.” The agent who blocked the Biden investigation from proceeding, Tim Thibault, resigned under a cloud a month ago.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-world-wants-no-part-of-woke-but-its-glad-we-do/

The United States obsesses over whether biological men can compete in women’s sports as transgender females.

Crime is spiking at levels not seen in 40 years. But some consider it racist to suggest that arrests, indictments, convictions, and incarcerations deter crime.

Major U.S. downtowns almost overnight went from mostly safe and clean to terrifying and toxic — and we brag that we are at least “tolerant” of the medieval conditions.

The Pentagon and CIA put out recruitment videos that sound like kindergarten diversity, equity, and inclusion programming.

Yet the military is less eager to explain why the United States met utter humiliation in Afghanistan or why the army only has met about 50 percent of its scheduled recruitment targets.

Few dare to attribute declining morale, inept strategic thinking, and anemic recruitment to the stereotyping and targeting of middle-class white males, Soviet-style workshops, and diversity, equity, and inclusion mind conditioning.

The Biden administration in its first 18 months warred on the U.S. oil and gas industry. Radical cutbacks in fossil fuels supposedly would “transition” the world to a greener future.

Biden expressed little worry about the resulting economic damage to the middle class or the lack of commensurate efforts in India and China to curb emissions.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/03/biased-two-tier-justice-system-is-a-growing-problem-ii-tipp-poll/

One standard of justice for one group, but another for a different group? Even though that sounds distinctly un-American, many voters believe that’s happening today in America’s courts and legal venues. And it seems to be getting worse, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll suggests.

In June, a Golden/TIPP Poll (TIPP is Issues & Insights’ polling partner) asked Americans if “There is a two-tiered system of justice in America depending on your political affiliation and ideology?” At the time, a sizable majority of 63% agreed, either “strongly” (28%) or “somewhat” (35%), with that statement. Only 17% disagreed, while 21% said they were “not sure.”

But something intervened between that June 8-10 poll, the first time the question was asked, and the one taken from Sept. 7-9. Namely, the Aug. 8 raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate by the FBI, which took documents from Trump’s presidency along with personal effects.

The latest online survey of 1,277 voters found a significant increase from 63% to 71% of those saying they agreed that we now have a “two-tiered system of justice,” with 32% agreeing “strongly” and 39% agreeing “somewhat.”

Just 15% disagreed, with 5% saying they disagreed strongly and 10% saying they disagreed somewhat. The “not sure” responses fell to 14% from the earlier 21% reading.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/marxism-at-the-museum-new-york-washington-capitalism-socialism-marx-smith-wealth-productivity-schwarzman-donors-11664712471?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

“This is a rather loud message to capitalists Bezos, Musk, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg: Give your money away if you want to be remembered kindly. Just don’t give your money to libraries or museums. Please.”

Polls show more than half of 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. have a negative view of capitalism. More than half have a positive view of socialism. I wonder where they got that.

I recently strolled through the New York Public Library’s “Treasures” exhibit, which would delight readers and writers alike: Charles Dickens’s writing desk, a manuscript delivered in a box from former newspaper columnist Mark Twain, draft cover art for Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road,” and an illustrated page from Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” manuscript. Pretty cool stuff.

Ah look, a first edition of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” from 1776—the free-market bible. I was in awe until I read the description: “Adam Smith believed, as did Karl Marx the following century, that national prosperity was best measured by a country’s labor power rather than by how much gold lay in its treasury.” I guess the description is technically correct, but Karl Marx? In the same breath as Adam Smith, who called free markets “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty”? Unlike Smith, Marx naively saw a static world without productivity, only labor exploitation. He completely missed that labor is more brain than brawn. Add exhibit curators to the list of socialist tub thumpers.

I wonder what Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the rather capitalistic private-equity firm Blackstone and giver of $100 million to the New York Public Library, whose name is etched in stone outside, thinks about the Marxist agenda of the library’s curators.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/laurence-silberman-dead-judge-circuit-court-obamacare-arms-public-service-robb-11664726000?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The most famous judges in American history are those who make it to the Supreme Court, but that doesn’t mean they are the most consequential. One of the latter is Judge Laurence Silberman, who died Sunday, a few days short of his 87th birthday.

Judge Silberman had one of the great careers in the law and public service. Appointed by Ronald Reagan, he spent some 36 years on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, hearing cases even after taking senior status and up to the time of his sudden illness.

His most consequential opinions include Parker v. D.C. (2007), which found that the Second Amendment was an individual right to bear arms and not merely for a militia. Silberman’s opinion examined the history of gun practices in common law and the American founding, which served as the basis for Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion in the landmark ruling in D.C. v. Heller (2008).

He was also ahead of his time in 1988 (In re Sealed Case), when he held that the independent counsel statute violated the Constitution’s Appointments Clause. The Supreme Court ruled the other way in the dreadful Morrison v. Olson decision. But Judge Silberman’s view was echoed in Scalia’s famous Morrison dissent that would surely prevail with today’s Justices if the counsel statute hadn’t lapsed after Ken Starr’s investigation of Bill Clinton.

https://www.nysun.com/article/is-the-liberal-press-prepping-to-oust-joe-biden

Something strange is happening at the New York Times. In a rare break with the Gray Lady’s see-no-evil reporting about the failing Joe Biden, the paper published the other day a lengthy article concerning an astonishing lapse by the president.

It happened at a White House event, where Mr. Biden called out “Representative Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” He apparently forgot that Jackie Walorski, Republican of Indiana, had died in August.

Not only did the Times describe the embarrassing senior moment, the paper also reported on the questions asked later at the daily press briefing, when White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre refused to acknowledge the president had flaked out.

The back-and-forth with reporters was ridiculous. Ms. Jean-Pierre argued that Mr. Biden was not confused, but simply had the deceased congressperson “top of mind” and called out to her, even though he had acknowledged her death weeks earlier.

The back-and-forth confirmed the lengths to which the White House will go to pretend that the president is hunky-dory. Few were shocked by such fakery; the surprise was that the Times, staunch ally of Democrats and Mr. Biden, covered the story at all.

After all, when Mr. Biden appeared to get confused this past summer and shake hands with “thin air,” a stumble that attracted 2 million views on Youtube and widespread coverage elsewhere, the Times ignored the story, as it has many others.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/courage-strength-optimism/democrats-must-not-replicate-europes-energy-disaster

In the Alpine nation of Austria , where I currently live, residents are receiving the euro equivalent of $490 as a ” climate and anti-inflation ” bonus.

This will be a godsend for those struggling with rocketing European energy prices and sustained inflation . Other European nations are doing the same, as well as more than a dozen U.S. states. But doling out millions of dollars without increased economic production will likely do more to ratchet up inflation than minimize it. The Federal Reserve admitted as much in July. It certainly won’t expedite the end of the energy crisis.

What “anti-inflation” payouts represent, then, are failed energy policies. European coal plants are being fired up after years offline. LNG terminal projects in Finland and Italy are being greenlit to speed up imports. Germany’s last three nuclear power plants, set to be decommissioned this year, are receiving a second life as politicians concede the errors of the zero-carbon narrative. In the last decade, German leaders heralded the shutdown of nuclear, subsidies for solar and wind, and imports of wood pellets from southern U.S. forests as “renewable” energy. They fired up dormant coal facilities to fill the gap while Russian natural gas became the primary means of energy.

It was a sweet deal upended only by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which was followed by international condemnation and energy sanctions. With Nord Stream pipelines out of the picture ( sabotaged by whom, we may never know ), German politicians are left championing coal and absconding their distaste for nuclear energy.

German energy policy, known as Energiewende, was already acknowledged as a failure. Swapping domestic nuclear power for Vladimir Putin’s gas meant Germans could boast about the 35% renewable energy mix to global praise. But that Faustian bargain has left German leaders scrambling for energy alternatives from Western liberal democracies and Arab dictatorships to fill Russia’s void. Such a glaring failure should give pause to the green ambitions of America’s political class. Instead, the Democratic Party has chosen the same trodden path.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/01/time-to-outlaw-counting-by-race/

Speaking recently in South Korea, Kamala Harris, the vice president of the United States, publicly celebrated America’s “strong alliance” with “the Republic of North Korea.” Apparently Kim Jong-un thought that was as funny as I did, because the chubby dictator responded by firing off some missiles just as Madam Vice President was packing her bags. People don’t like it when Kim starts firing missiles because you never know what sort of payload they may carry or where they might land.

Madam Vice President is made of stern stuff, though. She shrugged off both her exhibition of bone-crushing ignorance and the modern world’s equivalent of minatory saber-rattling. Indeed, back home, she heard that Hurricane Ian had flattened large swaths of Southwest Florida, destroying the homes and businesses of untold thousands. There she was, publicly declaring that the Biden Administration would be doling out aid to victims “based on equity,” directing funds first and foremost to “communities of color.” 

You can’t make it up, but then you don’t have to. Bidenland does all the heavy lifting. 

Recently, we were told that the government (i.e., the taxpayers) will be footing the bill for billions upon billions of dollars in student loan debt. The following week, after someone figured out how expensive it would all be and the lawyers began salivating over the obvious illegality of the scheme, the administration began quietly walking back the plan to make Peter, who paid off his student loans, also pay for Paul’s.

It’s sometimes hard to keep up to date on all the wonderful things happening in our country, partly because the administration has been aggressively partnering with various media companies to censor news they don’t like, which is more and more of it. Just Friday, it was reported that some 20 conservative media sites—including the New York Post, Just the News, Fox News, the Washington Examiner, the Washington Times, the Epoch Times, and Breitbart—were flagged as peddling “disinformation,” i.e., stories that the administration did not like regarding the 2020 presidential election. Particular individuals, all of them conservative, were also flagged as having disseminated “disinformation.”

https://victorhanson.com/thoughts-on-the-cultural-revolution-in-our-midst-part-three/

Investigators will hone in on what transpired under the last four FBI directors: McCabe (lied four times to federal investigators and oversaw fake FISA warrants); Comey (leaked confidential memos of private presidential conversations, feigned amnesia 245 times while under oath before a congressional committee, and used the FBI as an extension of the Clinton campaign’s smear efforts); Mueller (absurdly under oath claimed that he knew nothing of the Steele dossier and Fusion GPS, both synonymous with lying and both jumpstarted his own investigations); and Wray (oversaw the Virginia school board meetings surveillance, the Trump home raid, the leg irons on Peter Navarro, the performance-art nocturnal wake-up of James O’Keefe, and the cell phone grabs of former Trump advisors).

The party that formerly railed about the “military-industrial complex” now finds the Pentagon’s chain of command the most efficient way of mandating woke indoctrination, politicizing the armed forces, and weeding out the politically suspect.

The army may be 50 percent short of its annual recruitment targets (we wonder why?), the public may express historical negative appraisals of Pentagon efficacy (in a recent poll only 45 percent voiced real confidence in the U.S. military), the Pentagon diversity/equity/inclusion czar may spout racist diatribes, the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs may be hunting the white-rage unicorn while overseeing the worst military disaster of the last 50 years in Afghanistan, the retired 4-star cohort may routinely and with arrogance violate Article 88 of their own Uniform Code of Military Justice, but no matter: we are told it is diverse and uses the right pronouns. That fact is surely worth a $15 billion carrier or two, or deters the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and leaves the Iranians terrified. The pride flag in Kabul was worth a division?

The now revolutionary party that always preached about the sanctity of the radical, activist Warren Supreme Court, now wages war on individual justices.