RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-bogus-lawsuit-against-ron-desantis-for-removing-a-rogue-prosecutor/

Florida governor Ron DeSantis suspended Hillsborough County state attorney Andrew Warren for announcing his refusal to prosecute entire categories of cases. Warren, a Democrat, is angry and suing the Republican governor to get his job back. But DeSantis is on solid legal ground.

Warren’s effort faces three problems, which I have explained at length. One, Florida’s constitution gives DeSantis the explicit power to suspend a state attorney. Two, the permitted grounds for doing so include “neglect of duty,” and the Florida supreme court has construed that phrase broadly as far back as 1937 to include failure to prosecute classes of cases, and confirmed the breadth of that power as recently as a 2019 decision upholding a DeSantis suspension of a sheriff. Three, the Florida Supreme Court has also recognized since that 1937 case that all the governor has to do is announce legitimate grounds for suspension; by the explicit division of authority in the Florida constitution, deciding whether the facts support the governor’s conclusion is up to the state senate, not the courts. Florida’s Republican-run state senate is unlikely to sympathize with Warren.

Warren has filed suit seeking a writ of quo warranto under Florida law, the same remedy the courts denied in those previous cases. In an attempt to get around the clear Florida caselaw, however, Warren filed his suit in federal court, and tacked on a First Amendment claim. It won’t help him. Warren’s complaint and his press conference announcing it were full of florid rhetoric about how DeSantis is supposedly trying to “toss out the results of an election” by exercising a constitutional power of oversight, and this bit of nonsense: “Warren brings this lawsuit to confirm that the First Amendment still applies even though DeSantis is the Governor of Florida and that the Constitution of the State of Florida means what the courts say it means, not whatever DeSantis needs it to mean to silence his critics, promote his loyalists, and subvert the will of the voters.” Critics of DeSantis who call his move “fascist” and a sign of “autocracy” and ask,  “Since when does the governor have veto power over the people’s choice?” should probably have read the Florida constitution and the cases. So should Warren and his lawyers at Perkins Coie before filing this stunt lawsuit.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/17/civil-war-porn/

As Joe Biden’s polls stagnate and the midterms approach, we are now serially treated to yet another progressive melodrama about the dangers of a supposed impending radical right-wing violent takeover. 

This time the alleged threat is a Neanderthal desire for a “civil war.”  

The FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Florida home, the dubious rationale for such a historic swoop, and the popular pushback at the FBI and Department of Justice from roughly half the country have further fueled these giddy “civil war” conjectures. 

Recently “presidential historian” Michael Beschloss speculated about the parameters of such an envisioned civil war.

Beschloss is an ironic source. Just days earlier, he had tweeted references to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who passed U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, in connection with the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.  

That was a lunatic insinuation that Trump might justly suffer the same lethal fate due to supposedly mishandling of “nuclear secrets.” Unhinged former CIA Director Michael Hayden picked up on Beschloss death-penalty prompt, adding that it “sounds about right.”                                                                                                       

Hayden had gained recent notoriety for comparing Trump’s continuance of the Obama Administration’s border detention facilities to Hitler’s death camps. And he had assured the public that Hunter Biden’s lost and incriminating laptop was likely “Russian disinformation”. 

So, like the earlier “Russian collusion” hoax, and the January 6 “insurrection,” the supposed right-wing inspired civil war is the latest shrill warning from the Left about how “democracy dies in darkness” and the impending end of progressive control of Congress in a few months. 

On cue, Hollywood now joins the civil war bandwagon. It has issued a few bad, grade-C movies. They focus on deranged white “insurrectionists” who seek to take over the United States in hopes of driving out or killing off various “marginalized” peoples. 

Pentagon grandees promise to learn about “white rage” in the military and to root it out. But never do they offer any hard data to suggest white males express any greater degree of racial or ethnic chauvinism than any other demographic.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/deplatforming-doctors-distracting-parents/

The regime wants to replace you

This week, for wondering aloud why we are now approving medication for children with no trial data, medical doctor Steven Bishop was flagged by the Twitter commissars. Now, his tweet is labelled “misleading,” users cannot see any of the tens of thousands of likes and responses accumulated over the week, and further engagement is permanently limited.

Within the same week, YouTube removed Joe Rogan’s recent interviews with Drs. Robert Malone and Peter McCullough, skeptics of the covid regime, both of whom also highlighted the absurdity and abusive nature of the response in regard to children. Throughout history, the old have sacrificed for the sake of the young, Malone suggested in his interview. The way American adults have recklessly mismanaged the lives of young people, he went on, is not only out of line with the natural way of things, but it will likely generate dramatic, civilization-threatening consequences in the near future.

Big Tech must come down on this information for the same reason they have come down hard on Christopher Rufo. It is the kind of thing that can and should galvanize parents. Any parent who has not completely resigned themselves to being, as I put it last week, the “temporary and essentially fungible custodian of state property” would react to this information with righteous indignation. Yes, those parents are a diminishing minority. But the narrative that the managerial elite cooperate to uphold is part of the reason parents feel alone, vulnerable, and totally powerless.

I challenge my readers to think of a single avenue of public life where parental authority remains a legitimate claim over the life and well-being of children.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-becomes-a-tool-of-government-censors-alex-berenson-twitter-facebook-ban-covid-

Alex Berenson was kicked off the site at the White House’s urging. That’s a violation of the First Amendment.

Alex Berenson is back on Twitter after being banned for nearly a year over Covid-19 “misinformation.” Last week the former New York Times reporter settled his lawsuit against the social-media company, which admitted error and restored his account. “The First Amendment does not apply to private companies like Twitter,” Mr. Berenson wrote last week on Substack. But because the Biden administration brought pressure to bear on Twitter, he believes he has a case that his constitutional rights were violated. He’s right.

In January 2021 we argued on these pages that tech companies should be treated as state actors under existing legal doctrines when they censor constitutionally protected speech in response to governmental threats and inducements. The Biden administration appears to have taken our warning calls as a how-to guide for effectuating political censorship through the private sector. And it’s worse than we feared.

Facts that Mr. Berenson unearthed through the discovery process confirm that the administration has been secretly asking social-media companies to shut down the accounts of specific prominent critics of administration policy.

On July 16, 2021, a reporter asked President Biden: “On Covid misinformation, what’s your message to platforms like Facebook.” Mr. Biden replied: “They’re killing people.” (The president later said he meant users were killing people.) Later that day, Twitter locked Mr. Berenson’s account, and on Aug. 28 it banned him permanently.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/18/its-the-culture-of-the-irs-to-target-the-most-vulnerable-taxpayers/

The Senate recently passed the inappropriately named Inflation Reduction Act on Aug. 7 (yes, a Sunday). Aside from the fact that even non-partisan analyses show the bill will have a negligible impact on actual inflation, one specific provision is raising red flags. In the plan, the Internal Revenue Service gets a fresh $80 billion in funding, with $45.6 billion of that slated for “enforcement” measures. This will involve the hiring of more than 87,000 new IRS agents. If past is prologue, it’s reasonable to expect this spells bad news for lower income Americans.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates this new investment in the IRS will generate an additional $203.7 billion over the next 10 years. A sum that large certainly casts doubt on the notion that this will only impact the super-wealthy.  It is especially concerning given the agency’s rates of audits across socio-economic classes in recent years.

According to IRS audit data, the most frequently audited county in the United States is Humphreys County, Mississippi. This rural county near the Mississippi Delta is known for catfish farming and has an average income of $18,000 per resident, making it among the poorest in the nation. Yet, Humphreys’ residents get audited far more often than those in cities such as New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-manhattan-d-a-s-trump-organization-case-ends-with-a-whimper/

Allan Weisselberg, the 75-year-old former chief financial officer for the Trump Organization, is pleading guilty to the fairly piddling tax-fraud charges on which he was indicted by the office of Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg last July. The case was always obviously not about Weisselberg or the accused crime, but about showing some progress against Donald Trump and either (1) obtaining Weisselberg’s cooperation against Trump or (2) punishing him for not cooperating. Under the plea deal, Weisselberg is likely to spend only a few months in prison, and he will not cooperate.

What does this all mean? For Bragg, it likely means that his office is closing up shop on an overreaching, overzealous, overpriced witch-hunt of an investigation, and putting his resources to some better use. Some diehard enthusiasts of the perennial “walls are closing in on Trump” narrative note that Weisselberg may now be unable to invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege against testifying, but how far does that get anyone? If Weisselberg were questioned about matters other than the small-beer tax issues he’s pleading to, he could still invoke the privilege unless granted immunity — but then, he could have been given immunity a long time ago if he was seen as an enthusiastic cooperator. The most that is likely to be accomplished would be to compel him to testify in the civil proceeding pursued by the New York attorney general’s office, but the exposure in that case does not present a realistic path to sending Trump to prison or making it impossible for him to run for office again. Anything else is noise; voters already assume that Trump is the kind of guy who cuts every corner on his taxes and in his business accounting that he can get away with. And Weisselberg is highly unlikely to be in position to incriminate Trump on anything bearing on the 2020 election or January 6.

Yet again: Maybe the legal system can finally find a silver bullet against Trump. But it still does not look that likely.

Let’s review why the collapse of the Manhattan D.A.’s case was inevitable. In March, the New York Times published the resignation letter from special assistant D.A. Mark Pomerantz to Bragg arguing for prosecuting Trump. As Charlie Cooke explained at the time, it is shameful in our system of justice to have a prosecutor do this kind of hit-and-run public argument where he accuses someone of a crime without even detailing the charges or walking through the supporting evidence, let alone making his case to a jury of the defendant’s peers. But taking the letter at face value, here is what Pomerantz said:

I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations of the Penal Law in connection with the preparation and use of his annual Statements of Financial Condition. His financial statements were false, and he has a long history of fabricating information relating to his personal finances and lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties, and many others, including the American people.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/the_incredible_shrinking_merrick_garland.html

Maybe Attorney General Merrick Garland is the modern Inspector Javert, the French policeman who chased poor Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s classic novel, “Les Miserables.”  I don’t know if that’s a fair comparison, but it sure looks to me like AG Garland has become obsessed with former President Trump.  Or maybe the White House told him to get obsessed or else.

Maybe it’s better to go to legal scholar Jonathan Turley for a description of the man.   

This is how Mr. Turley sees it:  
In the cult classic, “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” the character Scott Stuart is caught in a thick fog that causes him to gradually shrink to the point that he lives in a doll house and fights off the house cat. At one point, Stuart delivers a strikingly profound line: “The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet — like the closing of a gigantic circle.”

If one image sums up the incredibly shrinking stature of Attorney General Merrick Garland, it is that line in the aftermath of the Mar-a-Lago search.
It looks like things have grown more complicated for AG Garland, as Mr. Turley further explains:  
It is not that Merrick Garland is absent but that his presence often seems immaterial.
That’s correct.  He is there, but we can’t see the shrinking man.

Mr. Garland seemed like a good choice with he was nominated for Attorney General.  I mean that he’d be an attorney general who would avoid politics and stick to the job.  Unfortunately, he just can’t control his department’s leftist impulses, from targeting parents at school board meetings to overlooking the Hunter Biden scandal altogether.

And now he authorized, or we understand that he did, sending the FBI to a former president’s home.   

Apparently, no one at DOJ advised him of the blowback from a such a decision.  He seemed totally lost when he read from the TelePrompTer and sort of explained what he did.

Yes, the AG is shrinking faster and faster.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/doj-scrambles-find-non-existent-evidence-intent-jonathan-emord/

Under pressure from President Biden to find a way to prevent Donald Trump from becoming America’s 47th President of the United States, Attorney General Merrick Garland unleashed an army of FBI agents to scour Mar-a-Lago in search of something, anything that might fill in the enormous gap in DOJ’s case against the former president: The glaring absence of evidence of specific intent needed to bring any charge against former President Trump.  

While DOJ can snow a grand jury into believing lame evidence credible and succeed in indicting just about anyone (not difficult when the prosecution runs the show unopposed), it cannot be sure of a conviction from a court without evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of the specific intent necessary to prove its case. That evidence rarely exists and proof of it is, indeed, a very tall order. Short of planting evidence or making things up (in other words committing the kind of government corruption and fraud as occurred in the deceitful manipulation of evidence by DOJ and FBI in support of the Russia hoax or, more recently, in the FBI fabricated Whitmer kidnapping plot), DOJ is destined to hit a very high, virtually impenetrable burden of proof that will dash its partisan dreams to pieces.

From the warrant released by Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhardt on August 12, we see in attachment B the legal predicate offered by Justice for the search: 18 USC §§ 793, 1519, and 2071. For want of evidence, each statutory section fails in Trump’s case when evaluated fairly, and never should have been accepted as adequate justification under the Fourth Amendment for the unprecedented issuance of the warrant against a former President on the eve of his announcement of a second candidacy for that office. That want of evidence, of course, did not stop DOJ because the entire unprecedented pursuit is one driven by political motivations, not objectivity.  DOJ is not investigating a crime for which it has probable cause; it is trying to discover fragments of proof that can be woven into a tale of criminality to, at a minimum, place a cloud over candidate Trump’s head or, in their ideal scenario, justify preventing him from becoming the 47th President of the United States.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/dobbs-and-kennedy-rulings-intensify-lefts-war-bruce-thornton/

“Finally, the great paradox is that these champions of reason and science are promoting unscientific ideas such as the notion that biological sex is really a fluid “gender” created in a child’s mind by mental states. These dubious ideas, passed off as science, are weaponized by the “woke” in service to their attempt to aggrandize power for themselves and their faction. Or they are the expressions of what can only be called a cult, true believers who passionately and uncritically accept bad ideas, and persecute or “cancel” heretics who challenge them––the same tyrannical behavior that has characterized political religions like fascism and communism.”

The Supreme Court’s affirmation of the states’ power to settle controversial issues upon which the Constitution is silent has the usual “woke” suspects hyperventilating over religion’s dangerous power to undermine “our democracy.” This war on religion, now in its third century, is predicated on dubious ideologies, ignorance of the role of faith in the Constitution and America’s Founding, and an evangelical faith in the power of “science” that lies at the heart of our progressive technocracy.

As such, the hysteria over Dobbs is really about the power and authority of progressives who are threatened by religion and institutions of civil society.

Two examples of the “woke” panic about faith allegedly driving the Supreme Court’s decisions appeared last week. As National Review’s Isaac Schorr reported, a Politico scribe managed to completely misunderstand and garble the Justices’ argument in Dobbs, which she claims “marks a serious step in an emerging legal campaign by religious conservatives on the Supreme Court to undermine the bedrock concept of separation of church and state and to promote Christianity as an intrinsic component of democratic government.”