RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Power and money are at the heart of politics, so it is unsurprising that politics is rife with corruption. Corrupt politicians rank among the world’s oldest professions. In his 1894 novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, Mark Twain wrote: “There is no distinctly American criminal class, except Congress.” Theodore Roosevelt is alleged to have once said, “When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‘present’ or ‘not guilty.’ Humor aside, has corruption become more common? Certainly, we have moved beyond the late 19th and early 20th Centuries’ big city political machines like Tammany Hall in New York and the Pendergast organization in Kansas City. But we live in a time and a place that venerates wealth and power.

President Truman famously refused a corporate board seat in 1953 – “You don’t want me. You want the office of the president, and that does not belong to me. It belongs to the American people and its not for sale.” His decision can be contrasted to the wealth accumulated by ex-presidents Bill Clinton ($80 million) and Barack Obama ($70 million). George W. Bush has an estimated net worth of $40 million. Unlike Messrs. Clinton and Obama, Mr. Bush entered the Presidency with an estimated $20 million. And then we have the greatly resisted Donald Trump who became the first individual to lose a billion dollars while President. Yet he is the one cited by an honor-challenged media as being the most corrupt.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/left-twisted-priorities-crime/

Crime is on the rise in cities across America and the left is asleep at the wheel. Democrats are set to be routed in the upcoming midterm elections, but instead of getting onboard with tough-on-crime policies, they’ve focused their efforts on measures that are wildly out of touch with even their own voters.

To start, Democrats have their pandemic lockdowns to thank for at least some of the crime crisis. Carjackings are up in cities, which experts attribute to teenagers who are not in school or extracurricular programs. James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said that the pandemic has given people too much free time, which can lead to an uptick in crime. New York City has seen major crimes increase by nearly 40 percent this year, and coincidentally also has some of the strictest pandemic measures.

Even though Americans are clamoring for a crackdown on crime, Democrats have spent the past few years going all in on criminal justice reform. They’ve advocated for “defunding the police,” which in its most generous interpretation means redirecting funds to social workers. Their bail reform policies have made it much easier for violent and career criminals to get out of jail after committing a crime. Plenty of these individuals, such as the Waukesha man who mowed down bystanders at a Christmas parade, commit even more heinous acts of violence after being released.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/14/the-civilizational-suicide-of-criminal-justice-reform/

The long and disturbing rap sheet of Frank James, the black nationalist New York City subway shooter arrested on Wednesday and charged by federal prosecutors with one count of committing a terrorist act against a mass transportation system, ought to serve as a national wake-up call. The 24 hour-plus nerve-racking manhunt ended in anticlimactic fashion, with James apparently calling the NYPD to report his own location. But the Brooklyn shooting, which left 10 people with gunshot wounds and 19 others injured in the resulting fracas, stands as the bloodiest act of carnage in the history of the New York City subway system.

It also should never have happened.

James’ rap sheet includes nine previous arrests in New York alone. Those Empire State arrests include such wide-ranging offenses as a criminal sex act, possession of burglary tools and theft of service. His rap sheet also includes three additional arrests in neighboring New Jersey for the equally wide-ranging offenses of trespass, larceny, and disorderly conduct. Most damning, one of the Garden State arrests entailed a resultant charge for a terroristic threat. James, an avowed anti-white racist, had also frequently talked about violence and committing mass shootings on his personal YouTube page—even doing so as recently as Monday, the day before the shooting.

There is no world in which James should have been out on the street, living a normal life. That he appears to be heading for a jail cell for the rest of his miserable life is just, but long overdue: It comes at least 10 gunshot victims and 29 total victims too late. That he was not already incarcerated is yet another data point evincing the woeful present state of the American criminal justice system. But our criminal justice system is not failing for the reasons “criminal justice reform” proponents from the Left and the libertarian faux-Right claim it is failing.

America, in the year 2022, does not suffer from an over-incarceration problem. On the contrary, we suffer from an under-incarceration problem. The sooner we awake from this collective slumber and seize the moral high ground back from the Soros/Koch-funded forces of “anti-prosecution” local district attorneys, “bail reform,” the jailbreak of slashed sentences and the broader civilizational suicide of the “criminal justice reform” movement, the safer and more secure we will be.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/apocalypse-air-bruce-thornton/

Ukraine’s scenes of urban rubble, streams of refugees, and piles of slaughtered civilians redolent of World War II. Continuing masks and lethal lockdown protocols of the Covid plague. Record levels of  inflation and gasoline nearly $6 a gallon.  Unchecked hordes of illegal immigrants and criminals penetrating our southern border. Mayhem, murder, and brazen theft stalking and defacing our cities.

Amidst these portents of apocalypse, it’s instructive to think of W.B. Yeats’ prescient poem “The Second Coming,” and its lines “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” and to wonder with the poet, “What rough beast, its time come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Such intimations of doom, of course, have been regular episodes in the last hundred years, the “rough beasts” ending up as pretenders. But we can’t rely on the cycles of history to prevent devastating changes in our way of life that will make the previous decades seem like the golden age.

Yeats published his poem in November 1920, when the flawed Versailles settlement of the Great War made optimism for the future difficult. Some knew, moreover, that none of the dysfunctions that had led to war had been corrected. Supreme Allied Commander Marshall Foch prophesized about the Versailles Treaty, “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.” Communism, Nazism, and Fascism arose, and the Great Depression was the crisis these three vicious political religions did not let go to waste.

Throughout the interwar period, the portents of doom appeared in popular novels and “next war” theorists.  “Trench reminiscences” proliferated, keeping alive the novel horrors of the war like poison gas, machine-guns, and artillery lobbing monstrous shells as heavy as a ton. The aerial bombing of the war’s last years inspired numerous warnings about the even more devastating possibilities of destruction from the air in the next war. Theorists wrote of a “knockout blow” on a nation’s capital that would decapitate the government and turn the streets into “one vast raving bedlam,” as historian J.F.C. Fuller put it.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/13/justice-department-plans-to-re-try-two-remaining-whitmer-fednapping-defendants/

Despite a humiliating defeat in what the Justice Department considered one of its biggest domestic terror investigations in recent history, federal prosecutors announced they will re-try two men who were not acquitted last week on charges of conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.

Chief District Court Judge Robert Jonker declared a mistrial on April 8 after a jury in western Michigan could not agree on the guilt of Adam Fox, the so-called ringleader, and Barry Croft, Jr. related to the alleged plot; two other men, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta, were found not guilty on all charges and went home last Friday night after spending 18 months in jail.

Defense attorneys argued the men were entrapped by the FBI, which the jury presumably believed in the case of Harris and Caserta. Numerous FBI experts and agents took the stand for the government, as did Dan Chappel, the lead informant and one of his FBI handlers. The three-week trial exposed a wide-ranging operation inside the FBI and Justice Department to target the men—who did not know each other until the FBI got involved—infiltrate the group with informants and undercover agents, create encrypted group chats monitored by the FBI, plan and fund excursions including a surveillance trip to Whitmer’s summer cottage, secretly record every conversation including when the targets were high on marijuana, and drive several defendants to the arrest site in October 2020 under a phony pretense.

Nonetheless, Andrew Birge, assistant U.S. Attorney for Western Michigan, confirmed this week his office plans to again prosecute Fox and Croft; Birge’s office told a Grand Rapids television station on Monday that charges will be refiled.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/13/loose-nuke-talk/

Americans, like the planet’s other 7.5 billion people, are not prone to talk or think much about nuclear weapons. 

Of course, some of us are old enough to remember how “mutually assured destruction,” or MAD, was supposed to ensure the general peace. 

Some recall the eerie Cold War-era nuclear bomb movies like “Dr. Strangelove” or “Fail Safe” or more recent postnuclear armageddon films like “The Book of Eli.”

Millions have grown up referring to the scary “doomsday clock” of atomic scientists that usually ticks closer to a midnight nuclear holocaust in times of crisis.

So the planet is not naïve about the dangers of its 13,000 to 15,000 nuclear weapons. In 1961, the Soviet Union terrified the world when it exploded history’s greatest nuke—the 50 megaton “Tsar Bomba.” 

The Cuban Missile Crisis a year later brought the United States and the Soviet Union closer to a nuclear exchange than at any time since. 

In 1983, Ronald Reagan countered the Soviet nuclear-tipped SS-20 ballistic missiles aimed at Europe by stationing American Pershing II missiles in Germany. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2022/04/13/feds-apologize-to-violent-blm-and-antifa-rioters-for-not-being-nicer-to-them-as-they-set-fires-in-front-of-white-house-n1589582

If you still weren’t convinced of the legal double standard between the right and the left, this announcement by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Wednesday should remove all doubt.

The Biden Administration’s radical civil rights division boss at the DOJ has “reached an agreement to settle claims in four civil cases arising from the June 1, 2020, law enforcement response to racial justice demonstrations in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C.”

This was during the Black Lives Matter and Antifa Reign of Terror or, as then-Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan accidentally coined it, a “Summer of Love,” after the George Floyd riots began in Minneapolis and spread across the country.

Protesters and violent rioters set seized upon Lafayette Square, breaching a White House perimeter, and rioted, rallied, and set fires for days. An umbrella group called “Shut Down DC,” composed of far-left professional agitators, including Lisa Fithian, called helped orchestrate the attack to incapacitate the nation’s capitol.

Washington, D.C. not only indulged this “first amendment activity,” but Mayor Muriel Bowser also encouraged it by memorializing part of the city streets with a Black Lives Matter mural paid for by taxpayers.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/13/biden-wanted-to-restore-the-soul-of-america-heres-how-much-that-cost-you-so-far/

All of this is thanks to the man who promised he would ‘lower the temperature,’ ‘bring the country together,’ and ‘restore the soul of America.’

Each and every time President Biden or any given White House official appears on TV, I imagine everyone watching feels his heart drop, dead certain that more bad news is about to be delivered. Seriously, when was the last time any administration official said something positive?

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s red hair flashed across my screen Monday, and I had no doubt that whatever was about to come out of her mouth was going to ruin my day. Psaki: “We expect March [Consumer Price Index] headline inflation to be extraordinarily elevated due to Putin’s price hike.”

The Labor Department announced the next day that consumer prices were up 8.5 percent from a year ago, the highest rate of inflation in more than 40 years.

Never fails! It turns out the only time you can assume Psaki isn’t lying is when she’s telling you how bad things are or how bad they’re about to get. To that end, under Biden, what exactly is going well in America?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-subway-ridership-mta-transit-police-shooting-brooklyn-36-street-station-attack-gas-

The subway system—lifeblood of this city’s economy and vitality—is in a precarious condition. Weekday ridership has hovered below 60% of pre-pandemic levels. Violent crime has risen in raw numbers even with the dramatic drop-off of riders. The perception and reality of danger loom large. A survey last month of the city’s workforce found that nearly 3 in 4 feel less safe on trains than they did two years ago. Transit officials say riders who never returned to the subways are even more terrified of crime underground.

Into this fray enters Frank R. James, the man suspected of releasing a thick gaseous substance into a train car in Brooklyn on Tuesday before opening fire, wounding 10 passengers. The rush-hour attack at a Brooklyn station deals an enormous blow to the city’s effort to win back riders. How can the New York City Police Department and the Metropolitan Transit Authority make the subways safe again?

The system is newly under the helm of three longtime transit-safety practitioners: Mayor Eric Adams, a former transit cop; MTA Chairman Janno Lieber, a transportation adviser to Mayor Ed Koch in the 1980s; and NYPD Transit Bureau Chief Jason Wilcox, a 35-year police veteran. Their challenges are considerable. The number of 911 reports of knives in the transit system was 139% above the spring 2019 level, and drug-sale reports in the subway were up 71%, the NYPD reported in March. By the first week in March there had been 428 reported transit crimes, about equal to March 2019 numbers, when ridership was twice as high.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/14/in-the-ongoing-war-of-the-states-the-red-model-beats-the-blue/

One of the genius elements of the U.S. Constitution was its allowance for competing models of success and failure. It did so by giving states great autonomy under the law, while limiting what the federal government can do. In the wake of a massive pandemic and a growing political divide among Americans, we’re seeing that concept work its magic.

Two new reports that look at how the blue and red states and cities have performed during the COVID pandemic show it’s no contest. Those that hewed to the Red State model of lower taxes, less regulation and respect for the rule of law thrived – while those that followed the “woke” blue-state model, built on socialist top-down control, forced equality and divisive racial identity politics, suffered.

One of the new studies, by Phil Kerpen of The Committee to Unleash Prosperity, Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago, and Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, and published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, ranked states by how they performed in three major areas during the pandemic: economics, education, and mortality.

That study, for good reason, has garnered much attention. It shows that red states, in general, beat blue states hands down during the pandemic, largely due to the latter’s dedication to damaging COVID lockdowns.