RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/28/who-is-responsible-for-the-death-of-matthew-perna/

Matthew Perna’s heartbroken family will say goodbye to him this week.

After more than a year of enduring nonstop torment by the U.S. Justice Department, the D.C. District Court, and the news media over his minor involvement in January 6, Perna, 37, hanged himself in his garage on Friday night.

His funeral is scheduled for Wednesday.

In a loving yet raw obituary, his family minced no words about who they hold responsible for his suicide:

Matthew Lawrence Perna died on February 25, 2022 of a broken heart. His community (which he loved), his country, and the justice system killed his spirit and his zest for life. He attended the rally on January 6, 2021 to peacefully stand up for his beliefs. He entered the Capitol through a previously opened door (he did not break in as was reported) where he was ushered in by police. He didn’t break, touch, or steal anything. He did not harm anyone, as he stayed within the velvet ropes taking pictures. For this act he has been persecuted by many members of his community, friends, relatives, and people who had never met him. Many people were quietly supportive, and Matt was truly grateful for them. The constant delays in hearings, and postponements dragged out for over a year. Because of this, Matt’s heart broke and his spirit died, and many people are responsible for the pain he endured.

As I explained in my column Sunday, Matthew Perna did nothing wrong on January 6. He entered an open door manned by two Capitol police officers who did not attempt to stop him or hundreds of other innocent Americans from going inside the building. Matthew did not carry a weapon, assault a police officer, or damage any property. His family said he stayed within the rope lines and took photos that afternoon.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-democrats-never-ending-supreme-court

Democrats keep escalating the judicial nomination battles and then demand that the other side unilaterally disarm.

Yesterday, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dick Durbin, told CNN’s State of the Union that he has “reached out to many Republicans, asking them to keep an open mind and to meet with Ketanji Brown Jackson, ask the hard questions, ask for materials — we’ll provide them. It’s in the best interest . . . of the U.S. Senate for this to be bipartisan.”

Is it? In October 2020, Durbin announced that he would be a “no” on Amy Coney Barrett before asking her a single “hard question” or requesting any “materials,” as did a bunch of other Democrats. Did Durbin have an open mind on Barrett? Or Brett Kavanaugh? Then–minority leader Chuck Schumer, as well as members of the Judiciary Committee such as Richard Blumenthal and Mazie Hirono — who not only spread fake rape allegations about Kavanaugh but argued that the nominee didn’t deserve the presumption of innocence — refused to even meet with Barrett. Schumer claimed that the Barrett nomination would “go down as one of the darkest days in the 231-year history of the United States Senate.” Was that in the best interest of a bipartisan Senate?

When it comes to Supreme Court nominations, Democrats are under the impression that they have the right to dictate the terms of hearings, and nominees always conveniently aligning with their political aims, whether they win or lose elections.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18282/puppeteers-puppets-dark-money

Are union moguls, puppeteers, power-players and profiteers assaulting the Constitution and US election laws?

“Dark money groups,” according to Open Secrets, a nonprofit that tracks political campaign financing and lobbying, “spends millions to shape our elections without revealing where their money comes from.”

About lobbying, they wrote, “Companies, labor unions, trade associations and other influential organizations spend billions of dollars each year to lobby Congress and federal agencies. Some special interests retain lobbying firms, many of them located along Washington’s legendary K Street; others have lobbyists working in-house.”

The freedom to give unlimited amounts to elections began with the Supreme Court in 2010, with the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The justices decided that, according to the First Amendment, political spending is an extension of free speech, and that corporations and unions could therefore give unlimited amounts to political campaigns.

Regrettably, nine years later, the Brennan Center for Justice wrote:

“The justices who voted with the major­ity assumed that inde­pend­ent spend­ing cannot be corrupt and that the spend­ing would be trans­par­ent, but both assump­tions have proven to be incor­rect.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/black-lives-matters-true-colors-david-horowitz/

It’s been almost two years since the summer of violent Black Lives Matter insurrections and cop-hating crusades. The actions of that summer inflicted $2 billion in property damage in 220 American cities, killed scores of people, and spiked record homicide rates in a dozen municipalities run by Democrat politicians and supporters. This unprecedented eruption of hatred and violence was fueled by a racial hoax claiming that there was an “open season” on black lives, despite the fact that there is no evidence to support this claim, whether statistical or circumstantial.

Apart from affirmative action, which was given a pass by the Supreme Court, and despite the false claims of the president, there is no systemic racism in America today. If police departments, for example, were systemically racist, there would be massive lawsuits invoking the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which specifically outlaws institutional and systemic racism. There are no such massive lawsuits because there is no systemic racism in police departments. Although the accusation of systemic racism is the main currency of the Black Lives Matter hate campaign — and, shamefully, of the rhetoric emanating from the White House itself — there is no factual basis for this slander. None.

The time that has elapsed since the launch of the left’s racial witch hunt has provided ample opportunity to expose the malicious, self-serving criminal agendas of the Black Lives Matter movement. These have nothing to do with the welfare of black communities, which have not received a penny of the tens of millions of dollars raised in their name. Contributions to Black Lives Matter have gone to line the pockets and enhance the real estate portfolios of its leaders. Meanwhile, the chief victims of the homicides unleashed by their actions have been poor black inner-city communities — with no show of concern by Black Lives Matter and its allies.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/slow_joe_digs_in_against_opening_up_us_energy_production_to_checkmate_russia.html

It’s the easiest thing in the world: cut off Russia’s oil earnings and watch its war against Ukraine collapse.

A U.S. oil embargo on Russia would destroy its cash stream which is financing 30% of its government, including its attack on Ukraine.

In a war, at least one you want to win, you cut off supply lines.  Grant and Sherman understood this.  But General Biden is a little different.  He wants to keep Putin getting that money until Bad America reforms to a green energy system to his liking.  He has a live war in front of him; he has the solution on the table; and instead of taking that solution, he sticks to his green energy “priority.”

Here’s how bad it’s gotten:

Transferring the entire economy to unreliable green energy, number one, is never going to happen.  Scott Johnson at Power Line explained that clearly in 2020: it won’t happen because there aren’t enough rare earth minerals out there to create all the batteries and greenie retrofits, even if China would gladly sell to us, to get the job done.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/02/28/top-democrat-begs-saudi-arabia-to-pump-more-oil-n2603855

As oil prices continue to skyrocket thanks to leftist climate change policies, Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman is begging Saudi Arabia to ramp up drilling and exports.

The pathetic plea comes months after the Biden administration also begged OPEC to increase oil production abroad, while limiting and cutting off oil resources in the United States.

“Higher gasoline costs, if left unchecked, risk harming the ongoing global recovery. The price of crude oil has been higher than it was at the end of 2019, before the onset of the pandemic. While OPEC+ recently agreed to production increases, these increases will not fully offset previous production cuts that OPEC+ imposed during the pandemic until well into 2022. At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough,” White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan released in an August 2021 statement.

“President Biden has made clear that he wants Americans to have access to affordable and reliable energy, including at the pump. Although we are not a party to OPEC, the United States will always speak to international partners regarding issues of significance that affect our national economic and security affairs, in public and private,” he continued. “We are engaging with relevant OPEC+ members on the importance of competitive markets in setting prices. Competitive energy markets will ensure reliable and stable energy supplies, and OPEC+ must do more to support the recovery.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/02/28/heres-the-thread-that-shreds-the-obamaclinton-tough-on-russia-narrative-n2603845

I’m sorry, but I think that $30 million in crack pipes was really for the liberal media. Newsrooms needed scores of them to deal with the endless stream of bad news that emanates from the Biden White House. They can’t spin it. They can’t polish it. Every time one wave of bad news exits a cycle, a new one begins. Joe Biden is literally Mr. Magoo only he crashes into everything. It’s a disaster. Now, with war breaking out in Ukraine, Democrats and their allies in the media are in overdrive with their anti-Russian antics. It’s not to support the Ukrainians. It’s to attack Donald Trump who they’ve been obsessed with like OJ Simpson was with his ex-wife. They’re also beating the war drums. They were joined by some of their Republican colleagues as well. Yeah, World War III is just what we need from Congress.

Yet, Hillary Clinton resurfaced from her darkened lair to address the GOP directly, calling on the party to stand up to Russia and stop those from giving “aid and comfort” to Vladimir Putin. Here’s where the hits of the crack pipe come into play. When did the Democratic Party become tough on Russia? The Russian collusion hoax was not that—that’s long ventured into the realm of psychosis. It wasn’t that long ago that we learned that Hillary Clinton pretty much gave the Russians ownership of our uranium mines in the United States. Remember the Uranium One deal. Remember the $500,000 check the Clintons received from a Russian bank selling Uranium One futures. And this woman has the stones to lecture about being tough with Moscow. Please.

Kyle Becker, a former Fox News producer and promoter of Becker News, had a mega-thread that gutted this narrative with a hot knife. I mean, he charts it from Ted Kennedy’s collusion with the Russians during the Reagan administration to the Obama administration’s pervasive fecklessness when it came to our Eurasian adversary.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/remember-when-inflation-was-just-going-to-be-transitory/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=third

So said President Biden last year. I don’t think many people believed it then and they sure don’t now.

It’s bad and will get worse, argues Timothy Nash of Northwood University’s McNair Center in this TownHall article.

Get ready for “Higher prices for basketballs, lipstick, pacemakers and automobiles — brought to you by the U. S. Federal Reserve Bank, the Biden Administration’s Green Energy policies and Putin’s foreign policy,” Nash writes.

Under Obama, Trump, and now Biden, the federal government has been creating money to cover its prodigious spending at an unprecedented pace. That’s actually what inflation is — the loss of value in the currency is just one of the consequences.

One of Nash’s key points is that Biden’s “green” energy policies have made a bad situation much worse. He observes, “If U.S. oil markets had remained less regulated under the Biden Administration, domestic and global oil supplies would be higher today. The price of oil per barrel on the global exchanges would be lower and Vladimir Putin’s ability to fund the acts of a tyrannical despot would be greatly reduced, while simultaneously validating that freedom and free enterprise is the best way to allocate resources globally.”

The American people are suffering as a result of our ravenous federal government, led by politicians who apparently believe that there are no adverse effects from their unbridled lust for spending and  control. Of course, Biden and his minions will try to pin the blame elsewhere, but I’m optimistic that more and more Americans are starting to realize that the problem is the Leviathan on the Potomac.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/27/hunter-biden-joe-biden-president-business-dealings

Influence-peddling is Washington’s ‘spectator sport’ – but now there’s an interest in taking a closer look at the president’s son.

To the political right in America, Joe Biden’s son Hunter has been the gift that keeps on giving, with his public struggles with addiction, scandalous private life and tangled business life. To the left, Hunter’s travails are dismissed as a Republican political obsession and a talking point for tabloid journalism and internet gossip.

But last week, two witnesses called before a federal grand jury seated in Wilmington, Delaware, which is looking into the tax affairs of the president’s son, made the subject harder to avoid.

First there was Lunden Roberts, with whom Biden has a three-year-old unacknowledged child. Then Zoe Kestan, an ex-girlfriend and lingerie and textile designer, spent five hours giving testimony on Biden’s spending, including – reportedly – stays at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, where, in 2018, allegedly, Biden was preoccupied with cooking crack cocaine.

Wretched and salacious as that sounds, much of Hunter Biden’s story, detailed at length in his autobiography Beautiful Things, published last year, tends that way. “I’m not a curio or a sideshow to a moment in history,” Biden claimed in his book. “I’ve worked for someone other than my father, [I] rose and fell on my own.”

But that’s not how Joe Biden’s political enemies see it.

Donald Trump tried to make issue out of Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine, Russia and China, which included high paid consultancies and gifts, and allegations that, as vice-president, Joe Biden had shaped American foreign policy in Ukraine to benefit his son.

For Trump, it backfired, when efforts to uncover information about the Bidens and Ukraine helped to trigger his first impeachment. Then came the surfacing of Hunter Biden’s missing laptop, with its library of decadent pictures and business email chains, mysteriously left at a Wilmington repair shop, which found its way to Republican political operatives including Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, plus the rightwing press and the FBI.

On the political flip-side, House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff said the laptop was a “smear” from Russian intelligence, and 50 former intelligence officials said it was probably Russian disinformation. Now, however, almost no one disputes its authenticity.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/02/28/this_time_politics_should_actually_stop_at_waters_edge_147261.html

“We must stop partisan politics at the water’s edge,” insisted Sen. Arthur Vandenberg on the Senate floor in March of 1947. At the time, the Michigan Republican chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Harry Truman, a Democrat, was formulating a policy of containment to constrain Russian imperialism.

In the decades since, Vandenberg’s words have generally been ignored. Republicans and Democrats often clash during foreign policy crises, sometimes debating in good faith over principled disagreements, sometimes leveling cheap attacks in hopes of scoring political points.

But Vandenberg’s principle can and should guide the behavior of our politicians as they respond to Vladimir Putin’s brazen invasion of Ukraine. This is not wishful thinking. Several factors of this crisis incentivize bipartisanship.

First, Putin is a manifestly dangerous force. As foreign policy analysts Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, a victorious Putin would instigate “a state of permanent economic war,” with the United States and Europe levelling  “sweeping sanctions, which Russia is likely to parry with cyber-measures and energy blackmailing.” Russia will also seek to encourage, “through methods fair and foul,” political division within Europe in hopes of weakening the NATO alliance. Neither of the United States’ two major political parties should want to live or govern in a world in which Putin has succeeded in becoming, as Fix and Kimmage foresee, “an anarchic presence” who sows instability. If there ever was a country-before-party moment, this is it.

Second, we already have a bipartisan consensus on a key point. “The President has been very clear that U.S. troops will not be fighting in Ukraine,” a Pentagon spokesperson said Friday. Republicans in Congress have not argued otherwise. To date, disagreements between the Biden administration and congressional Republicans involve the timing and scope of economic sanctions, which is not the stuff of deeply divisive debate.