RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/merrick_garlands_targeting_of_conservatives_reveals_a_bullet_dodged.html

“Hindsight is 20-20”, is an adage applied most often to hard lessons learned in retrospect, but rarely to occasions of great fortune. In the case of Merrick Garland, what we witness now of his yet short tenure as U.S. Attorney General speaks volumes in miniature about the damage of which he is capable, if given the life tenure of a Supreme Court Justice.

The career of a politician is long remembered, often either for the glory of a single greatest achievement, or as gored through by a single gravest failure. Forgotten politicians usually have failed to distinguish themselves, either for uncommon courage, or unchecked corruption.  Still others are neither remembered nor forgotten but rather come and go unseen, distinguished in no other way than by the irony that even in the most common of controversies, their apparent absence of conviction and of appetite for deliberation, produces in them no more refined legislative action than a grossly belched up vote of, “present.”

U.S. Senate Minority Leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, may rightly be accused at times of resembling each of these types. He has spent much of his considerable political career and capital, especially most recently under a hostile Senate majority, walking a tightrope situated six inches off the ground and over fluffy pillows, yet feigning for his constituent cameras, as if having championed such dizzying depths and breadths dwarfed only by those of the Grand Canyon. Or at least of Mt. Rushmore, where upon its noble face he undoubtedly mentally has chiseled his own countenance countless times, lost as it were, in the kind of self-exultant extasy common to mirror musings.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/30/the-lefts-suicidal-pact-with-silicon-valley/

The British comedian Jack Dee was the target of last week’s Two Minute Hate. The online left pointed its bony finger of judgement at the famously dour funnyman and accused him of the sin of bigotry. He’s far right, they screeched. He sides with fascists. Yet another cis white hetero dude spraying his prejudice everywhere. What offence did Mr Dee commit to attract such florid denunciations? He defended freedom of speech against the arbitrary power of unaccountable corporations.

Yes, in the 21st century it is ‘far right’ to believe in freedom and it is left-wing to insist that billionaires none of us ever elected should be the moral arbiters of public debate. We are well and truly through the looking glass.

Mr Dee’s fascistic offence was to take the side of the Free Speech Union when it was locked out of its accounts by PayPal on the utterly spurious grounds that it engaged in ‘misinformation’. The Daily Sceptic, the website set up by the FSU’s founder Toby Young, was similarly defunded by PayPal’s thoughtpolice. UsForThem, a campaign group that raises essential critical questions about Covid lockdowns and their impact on the young, was also frozen out by PayPal. All were physically prevented from accessing the thousands of pounds that citizens have donated to them. This was an extreme and authoritarian intervention into the democratic life of the United Kingdom by a multi-billion dollar corporation headquartered in San Jose. It is mindblowing that anyone, least of all those who call themselves left, could support such imperial interference by a section of the capitalist class into public discussion.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/29/time-to-investigate-the-fbis-sketchy-chs-program/

To the surprise of no one paying attention, the Department of Justice recently acknowledged the use of several FBI informants in its investigation of the Oath Keepers, an alleged militia group tied to the events of January 6. 

Prosecutors last week asked for a protective order to conceal from jurors information about confidential human sources (CHS) expected to testify during the seditious conspiracy trial of five members of the Oath Keepers; jury selection is now underway. Not only does the government want to prevent defense attorneys from asking personal questions that could reveal the informants’ identities but prosecutors don’t want the sources to publicly disclose any involvement in past or pending criminal investigations or details of “the FBI’s CHS program and the training and methods used by the FBI as part of their undercover operations.”

That request, of course, is to protect the bureau, not informants, in what appears to be just another corrupt, political, and unaccountable section of the FBI. 

For example, court filings in Special Counsel John Durham’s probe into Russiagate just revealed that Igor Danchenko, a subsource for the infamous Steele dossier now facing perjury charges, was hired by the FBI in March 2017 as an informant to shield the agency from questions about the dossier’s credibility in the early stages of the scandal. “[The] bureau put him on its payroll as a confidential human source, or CHS, making him part of the bureau’s untouchable ‘sources and methods’ sanctum and thereby protecting him and any documents referencing him from congressional and other outside scrutiny,” investigative reporter Paul Sperry wrote this week.

The FBI-hatched plot to “kidnap” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer involved numerous informants working out of multiple FBI field offices. At trial, informants and agents confessed the rules were broken in the process of engineering the caper; violations included sharing a bed with a target, suggesting “overt acts” to produce incriminating evidence, and initiating the lead informant into a fake militia to advance the plot. Another longtime informant—a convicted felon many times over—committed at least two crimes while working the Whitmer fednapping ruse and was accused by the government of acting as a “double agent.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/anti-trump-legal-expert-reveals-real-motives-in-mar-a-lago-case-its-a-dynamite-story_4754384.html?utm_source=epochHG&utm_campaign=rcp

It’s with regret and some trepidation that I take issue on a legal matter with someone whom I like and respect as much as I do Andy McCarthy, the prominent legal affairs commentator and contributor to many publications, websites, and television programs. But like many other intelligent and otherwise convivial people I know, he’s unfortunately incapable of speaking or writing rationally about Donald Trump.

McCarthy has a particularly baneful influence on the discussion of Trump-related issues because he naturally brings to it the gravitas of his legal expertise and apparently authoritative articulation. But this is the same McCarthy who wrote to me five years ago that he had taken a “deep dive” into a lot of confidential material and concluded that Trump was guilty of serious misdeeds in his relations with the Russians.

And, as with other intelligent and otherwise likable people partly propelled through each day by an almost pathological hatred of the former president, when the Russian argument evaporated without a trace, not a word of remorse, embarrassment, or even inferable acknowledgment of a mistake followed. It was briskly on to the next conjuration of Trumpian outrages and delicts.

On the National Review website on Sept. 24, McCarthy fired the most unrigorous and imprecisely directed broadside that I have seen from him on this subject. He wrote that Trump was obviously guilty of an indictable offense in the document controversy that led to the FBI’s ransacking of his Palm Beach home.

It wasn’t precisely stated what offense he committed, but it seemed to be willful noncompliance with a subpoena requiring the production of certain documents that had been wrongfully removed and about which the former president was allegedly trying to clear himself from such a charge by a defense imputed to him by McCarthy of determining in his own mind that the relevant material was declassified because he wished it so and in accordance with a doctrine of automatic declassification of certain matters that he had promulgated among his staff but of which staff members were, according to McCarthy, unaware.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-orders-fbi-to-produce-information-from-seth-richs-laptop_4763994.html?utm_source=

The FBI must produce information from Seth Rich’s laptop computer to a Texas man, a federal judge ruled on Sept. 29.

The bureau improperly withheld the information from Brian Huddleston, the Texas man, according to a 53-page ruling from U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant.

Rich was a Democratic National Committee staffer who was murdered around 4:20 a.m. in July 2016 in Washington. Officials have claimed the killing was done as part of a botched robbery.

The FBI has acknowledged it has files from Rich’s computer but tried withholding them from Huddleston, citing a portion of federal law that enables agencies to withhold information that would be a clear invasion of privacy interests when the interests are not outweighed by the public interest.

The bureau said that Rich’s family members have a privacy interest in preventing the release of the information that outweighs the public interest, but Mazzant, an Obama appointee, rejected the argument.

“The Court is not persuaded by the FBI’s argument that Seth Rich’s survivors have a privacy interest in withholding the entirety of the information contained on Seth Rich’s laptop,” he said.

“Pointedly, the FBI cites to no case law for the proposition that survivors of the deceased have a privacy interest in information related to the deceased’s favorite music or relationship history,” he added.

Previous rulings in other cases have found that loved ones of dead people have a substantial privacy interest in preventing the disclosure of autopsies, death scene photographs, and other materials from a person’s final moments. Those rulings don’t apply to this case, Mazzant said.

He ordered the FBI to produce the information to Huddleston within 14 days.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/courage-strength-optimism/the-grotesque-politicization-of-hurricane-ian

Hurricane Ian ravaged Florida this week and caused enormous suffering. Hundreds have possibly died, a tragic toll that will most likely continue to grow. Millions are without power. The scope and scale of property destruction are impossible to put into words. And while many are stepping up to provide aid and support charitable efforts , much of the country is descending into political squabbles and partisan combat over it all.

The grotesque politicization of Hurricane Ian has come in two primary forms.

The first is a concentrated effort to exploit the natural disaster to push a Green-New-Deal-esque climate change agenda. The most prominent example of this blatant politicization is a now-viral interview in which CNN host Don Lemon repeatedly attempts to get an expert to blame Hurricane Ian on climate change.

When the expert calmly explains that no single disaster can be directly blamed on climate change, Lemon doesn’t accept this answer and asks again. (Now, another guest will apparently be going on to provide a more politically satisfying version of the “science.”)

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/28/why-ray-epps-matters/

For those who do not know who Ray Epps is and why he matters—and this includes most Democrats and many journalists—U.S. Representative Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) served up a handy reference guide last week. Gosar did this in the form of a resolution of inquiry (ROI) directing Attorney General Merrick Garland to hand over all documents relevant to the Epps case within 14 days. 

“Multiple videos show Ray Epps repeatedly urging crowds of people in Washington, D.C. on January 5 and January 6, 2021, to go to the United States Capitol and breach the building,“ Gosar explained. “Epps is the one person seen on video directing people towards the Capitol seconds before violence broke out, yet he has never been arrested or charged with any crime while more than 800 others have and countless more remained jailed.”

During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday of last week, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) went into more detail, showing numerous video clips and citing Epps’ own admission, captured on video, “I’ll probably go to jail for this. I’ll probably be arrested.” 

Epps had good reason to worry. In his red Trump hat and camo gear, a head taller than those around him, Epps was the most conspicuous of all the January 6 protestors. In fact, he was the only one caught on camera urging others to “go in to the Capitol,” which he did repeatedly on January 5. So suspicious was his behavior that his fellow protestors chanted “no, no, no” and “Fed, Fed, Fed,” over one of his many exhortations.

One video from January 6 shows Epps telling a protester, “When we go in, leave this here. We don’t need to get shot.” The unseen “this” was likely a weapon, perhaps a gun. More damning still, another video captures Epps whispering into the ear of a protester seconds before the young man helped make the first breach of the Capitol Police’s inept defenses.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/28/the-thinnest-veneer-of-civilization/

Civilization is fragile. It hinges on ensuring the stuff of life. 

To be able to eat, to move about, to have shelter, to be free from state or tribal coercion, to be secure abroad, and safe at home—only that allows cultures to be freed from the daily drudgery of mere survival.  

Civilization alone permits humans to pursue sophisticated scientific research, the arts, and the finer aspects of culture. 

So, the great achievement of Western civilization—consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit—was to liberate people from daily worry over state violence, random crime, famine, and an often-unforgiving nature. 

But so often the resulting leisure and affluence instead deluded arrogant Western societies into thinking that modern man no longer needed to worry about the fruits of civilization he took to be his elemental birthright. 

As a result, the once prosperous Greek city-state, Roman Empire, Renaissance republics, and European democracies of the 1930s imploded—as civilization went headlong in reverse.  

We in the modern Western world are now facing just such a crisis. 

We talk grandly about the globalized Great Reset. We blindly accept the faddish New Green Deal. We virtue signal about defunding the police. We merely shrug at open borders. And we brag about banning fertilizers and pesticides, outlawing the internal combustion engine, and discounting Armageddon in the nuclear age—as if on autopilot we have already reached utopia. 

But meanwhile Westerners are systematically destroying the very elements of our civilization that permitted such fantasies in the first place.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/will-biden-get-bailed-out-on-she-was-12-i-was-30/

You saw the creepy video right?

It muddied up social media feeds all weekend. People that have never expressed a single political viewpoint to me reacted with gross abhorrence to what Joe Biden appeared to seemingly imply.

As he wraps up some remarks in the video he spots someone in the crowd and in typical Biden stream of consciousness he abruptly changes subjects. Looking directly at the woman he has just spotted he bluntly instructs, “(You) gotta say ‘Hi’ to me.”

Then to the watching crowd he states, “We go back a long way, she was 12 and I was 30 but anyway…”

The crowd belly laughs.

Understanding that legitimate sexual misconduct claims abound all throughout the Biden family I began to ponder how this video—that went everywhere—can be dealt with.

In older chapters of Joe Biden’s life no one cares that Jill Biden was married when she first met Joe. They don’t much seem to care that she was still married when they began to date in March of 1975.

That Hunter Biden took up with his deceased brother’s wife also didn’t seem to matter.

Formal accusations of sexual misconduct by non-family members didn’t phase anyone. And the literally hundreds of  images of Joe Biden, touching, kissing, refusing to let go of, and of course sniffing bother some. He’s done it to women of all ages-school aged little girls all the way up to whatever age Hillary Clinton purports to be.

Yet in recent years there has been a bit of out-sized interest in some of the misconduct alleged of he and his family members.

We have one single goal: to capture government spending and show you how your tax dollars are being “invested.” Remember, it’s YOUR money!

After a dogfight lasting a decade, OpenTheBooks:

successfully opened up the California state checkbook for the first time in history;
uncovered $300+ million in third-party royalty payments to the National Institutes of Health, its leaders and 2,250 of its scientists;
Not to mention being canceled by Forbes after we published investigations on the highest paid federal employee, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

But those are just a few things we’ve done this year. And we aren’t stopping…

Learn more. Last weekend, our CEO and founder, Adam Andrzejewski, presented to the Road To Freedom Seminar at the Reagan Ranch in Santa Barbara hosted by Young America’s Foundation.