RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/your-top-priority-is-the-emotional?s=w

When Hillary Clinton’s divine entitlement to the U.S. presidency began to look imperiled in 2016 — first due to the irreverent and unkempt (but surprisingly formidable) Democratic Party primary challenge from Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist Senator from Vermont — her campaign and its media allies invented and unveiled a deeply moving morality tale. A faceless horde of unnamed, uncredentialed, unmannered, violent, abusive and deeply misogynistic online Sanders supporters — dubbed with the gender-emphasizing name “Bernie Bros” even though many were women — were berating, insulting and brutalizing Hillary, her top campaign surrogates (U.S. Senators, former cabinet members, corporate executives), and especially pro-Hillary corporate journalists with a vast artillery of traumatizing words and violent tweets.

This storyline — and especially the way it cleverly inverted the David v. Goliath framework of the 2016 campaign so that it was now Hillary and her band of monied and Ivy-League-educated political and media elites who were the real victims — was irresistible to Harvard-and-Yale-trained journalists at NBC, CNN, The New York Times and Washington Post op-ed pages who really believe they are the truly marginalized peoples. This narrative scheme enabled them — the most powerful and influential media and political elites in the world, with access to the most potent platforms and megaphones — to somehow credibly lay claim to that most valued of all currencies in American political life: victimhood.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/02/trading-realpolitik-for-a-puppet-show/

A week, as the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is supposed to have said, is a long time in politics. Poor Joe Biden would doubtless agree, assuming that he remembers what a week, what a long time, and what politics are. It was just about a week ago, on March 26, that he said, “As a result of our unprecedented sanctions, the ruble was almost immediately reduced to rubble.” 

I wonder who thought of that play on words? The ruble is rubble. Ha, ha, ha. 

The Russian currency did take a sharp dive. But then, almost immediately, it recovered. Why? There are several explanations. The conventional headscratchers hold that it is largely because the nefarious Vladimir Putin has nefariously blackmailed the weak-willed Germans and others who prefer bucking the sanctions in order to heat their homes. What cowards. 

A better explanation, I think, is that Putin, having played this game before, more or less knew what to expect when he invaded Ukraine. The Western press was full of gloating stories about how Mastercard and Visa stopped handling transactions when Biden announced the sanctions. That’ll show ’em. But those companies had done the same thing back in 2014 when, with Barack Obama at the helm in the United States, Putin gobbled up Crimea. This time, Putin was ready. He had already implemented his own card payment system. Mastercard and Visa piggybacked on it. One irony of the situation, as the web site Daily Reckoning observes, is that “instead of Visa and Mastercard getting the fees, Russia’s central bank collected 8.2 billion rubles in net profit, or about $94 million at current exchange rates. Russia actually profited from Visa and Mastercard sanctions.”

File that under “unintended consequences.” 

https://freebeacon.com/columns/biden-runs-out-of-gas/

‘This is a wartime bridge to increase oil supply into production,” President Biden said during his announcement Thursday that he would release more barrels of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve than at any point in American history. His decision was also a concession. None of the policies Biden has enacted throughout his short presidency have alleviated the problems they were meant to solve. Quite the opposite: In practically every case, Biden has made things worse.

Energy? Killing the Keystone pipeline was one of the first things Biden did when he took office. In February, Biden delayed approval of new oil and gas leases. He continues to blame the increase in gas prices on Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, even though prices began to rise early in Biden’s term. Biden scapegoats oil companies for sitting on profits, while he could be doing everything in his power to ramp up domestic production of available fuel sources — including nuclear.

The fallout from Putin’s war was bound to make energy scarce and thus more valuable. Biden could have lessened the pain on the American consumer by pursuing an all-of-the-above energy dominance policy from the start, and by reducing the size of the American Rescue Plan so that it didn’t contribute to inflation. He chose to ignore the warnings of economists such as former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and followed his advisers who incorrectly predicted that inflation would be temporary. By turning to the Strategic Reserve, Biden is promoting a temporary fix while the long-term solutions are plain to see. He’s relied on similar gimmicks before. They haven’t worked.

Consider Biden’s immigration policy. He spent his early days as president tearing up President Trump’s agreements with Mexico and several Central American countries that forced asylum-seekers to stay in third-party nations while U.S. judges decided on their claims.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=fefc435a63

About two weeks ago, the New York Times published an article finally conceding that the Hunter Biden laptop and many of the emails on it are authentic. Yesterday (March 30), the Washington Post followed suit. The laptop in question is the one that Hunter left at a Delaware computer repair shop, and whose contents the New York Post revealed in a series of explosive October 2020 articles. Those articles got the NY Post banned from Twitter in the run-up to the 2020 election, while some 51 ex-intelligence officials denounced the laptop as likely “Russian disinformation.” Meanwhile, the Times and the WaPo never breathed a word about the laptop’s existence or its contents for the intervening year and a half.

Both the recent Times and Washington Post articles mention the laptop in the context of reporting on a federal criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax liabilities and business dealings in foreign countries including Ukraine and China. Clearly the newspapers are trying to get out in front of a likely impending indictment of the President’s son. After all, it would be quite embarrassing for them if the President’s son were to get indicted based on events that have long been public but which events have never been mentioned in either of those two papers.

But how about the question of how this investigation, and Hunter’s underlying conduct, relate to President Biden himself? To read the Times and the WaPo, you would think that that whole question is somehow out of line. The Times’s piece doesn’t even discuss Joe’s role or involvement, although it does include this bizarre line:

It is not clear whether the criminal probe is focused solely on Hunter Biden, or if he is among a group of individuals and companies being scrutinized.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18393/business-vs-government

If a corporation builds a better mousetrap than the government, we buy it. And generally, that is a good idea. But it may come with costs, not easily measurable in dollars or speed.
The Constitution itself was not designed for efficiency…. Ours was designed to check and balance power, rather than to expedite results. We pay a price for our desire to prevent too much centralization of authority in any one person or institution. And sometimes we grow impatient at the slow pace of progress.
We want our mail delivered faster and more frequently; we want to know the outcome of elections tonight not next week… we want our disputes resolved without months of pretrial discovery. And so, we turn to the classic American solution: private enterprise, free market competition, capitalism.
The time has come to consider the consider the costs and benefits of this important development.
It is not the object of this article to resolve these issues or to propose specific jurisprudential shifts. It is simply to bring together a number of related changes that have in common the privatization of traditional governmental activities, and to begin a discussion of the legal changes that, especially in the area of social media censorship, seem urgently required.
We must begin a discussion of the legal changes that seem urgently required, especially in the area of media censorship, invasion of privacy and lack of transparency by private companies that appear to be performing functions, possibly at the behest of the government, as a way of bypassing the restrictions placed on the government by the First Amendment.

When I was growing up, the mail was delivered by the post office, money was printed by the treasury, votes were counted by election officials, wars were fought by the army, prisons were run by departments of correction, law enforcement was conducted by the police force, space exploration was done by NASA, legal disputes were resolved by judges and juries.

https://www.nysun.com/article/biden-is-playing-with-fire-in-a-bid-for-hispanic-vote

President Biden is following in President Obama’s footsteps, scrambling to curry favor with disgruntled Hispanics before an upcoming election. Under pressure from immigration activists, Mr. Biden has rescinded Title 42, a policy adopted by President Trump that allowed for the swift expulsion of those entering the United States illegally.

As of May 23, Title 42 will be gone. That will open the doors to what will doubtless be another wave of caravans heading north, the participants convinced that the current White House will allow them to stay. They’ll have every reason to think so. Mr. Biden has long blasted his predecessor for his “inhumane” treatment of people trying to gain asylum here.

Mr. Biden has eagerly undone the policies — including the construction of a border wall and the “Remain in Mexico” approach — that helped slow the stream of migrants during the Trump years. Title 42 used the threat of Covid-19 as an excuse to expel undocumented people; now that the pandemic has receded, activists pressed Mr. Biden to change course.

The Biden-friendly New York Times reported late last year that over the prior twelve months, “encounters” of illegal migrants had soared to 1.7 million persons, a level not seen since “at least” 1960, “capping a year of chaos at the southern border.” The Times noted that under Title 42, one million individuals had been deported, which invites the question: what happened to the other 700,000?

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/ron-johnsons-unanswered-2020-questions-joe-biden-loom

Back before the 2020 election, when Democrats and their allies in the corporate media were still claiming the Hunter Biden story was a conspiracy theory or Russian disinformation, GOP Sen. Ron Johnson released an open letter to America posing questions to then-candidate Joe Biden.

Like most Biden scandals at the time, it mostly got ignored or ridiculed. But the questions were rooted in facts and evidence gathered over two years by investigators on Johnson’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Now nearly two years later, a funny thing has happened. The giants of the corporate media – the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN among them – have abruptly reversed course and acknowledged Hunter Biden’s foreign business pursuits raise legal issues and that content on his laptop left behind in a Delaware repair shop in 2019 was authentic all along.

And now Johnson’s unanswered questions posed in August 2020 loom larger than ever as a federal grand jury in Delaware investigates Hunter Biden for his Ukraine and China business deals, taxes, foreign lobbying and other issues, and some Democrats reportedly brace for a possible indictment.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/31/more-scandals-envelop-the-scandalous-fbi/

“You’re in big fucking trouble.”

So said an FBI agent to Julian Khater, one of two men accused of assaulting Capitol police officers with pepper spray on January 6, during a tense interrogation last year. Desperate to sustain the falsehood that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was killed by Trump supporters during the Capitol protest, the FBI claimed to possess video footage that showed Khater and his friend, George Tanios, attacking Sicknick and other officers with chemical spray. Khater was arrested on an airplane at the Newark airport on March 14, 2021 after he arrived home from a trip to Florida.

For more than two hours—shackled to a metal bar in a freezing room at the New Jersey FBI field office—Khater, who has no criminal record, was interrogated without a lawyer present. FBI Special Agent Riley Palmertree refused to tell Khater why he was under arrest until he agreed to proceed without counsel in the room, which Khater reluctantly did. Recently released video confirms Khater initially told the agents he “would feel more comfortable if I had a lawyer” answering questions on his behalf. An hour later, Khater again said he wanted his lawyer.

But Palmertree pushed back, presenting videos and photos implicating Khater in the alleged assault. Palmertree assured Khater that by admitting he sprayed Sicknick with pepper spray rather than a can of bear spray—an item Palmertree later testified was not used that day—a judge would go easy on him. Khater signed a statement confessing that he attacked officers with pepper spray.

Khater has been in jail ever since, housed in the D.C. gulag specifically used to detain January 6 protesters; his trial is scheduled for June 6.

But Khater’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, is now asking the court to toss the interrogation as evidence, arguing that the FBI used “coercion and deception” to force Khater into waiving his Miranda rights. Further, Tacopina wrote in a February 22 motion that Palmertree lied in his FBI report by claiming he advised Khater about the “nature of the interview” before asking Khater to waive his rights.