RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/22/biden-again-releasing-millions-of-barrels-from-oil-reserves-in-attempt-to-lower-gas-prices/

On Tuesday, the Biden Administration announced that it will be releasing another 1 million barrels of oil from a reserve in the Northeast, in yet another effort to lower gas prices ahead of the November election.

ABC News reports that the reserve in question, located in New Jersey and Maine, was established in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2013. The sale by the Biden Administration will take place in increments of 100,000 barrels, with the hope that there will be a competitive bidding process that will guarantee the flow of gasoline to local retailers throughout the summer.

The Energy Department said that the move aims to help “lower costs for American families and consumers,″ after a congressional mandate called for the executive branch to sell off the nearly 11-year-old Northeast reserve before its closure. This mandate was part of the spending deal that was passed in March to avoid a government shutdown.

The sale of 1 million barrels – which amounts to about 42 million gallons – comes as the average price of gas nationwide currently sits at about $3.60, according to data from AAA. This is not the first time that the Biden Administration has resorted to tapping into emergency reserves just to lower gasoline prices for political expediency, as he previously did so ahead of the 2022 midterm elections; this move was credited as one of several reasons why the Democratic Party did not face landslide losses as most polls projected.

“The Biden-Harris administration is laser-focused on lowering prices at the pump for American families, especially as drivers hit the road for summer driving season,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in a statement. “By strategically releasing this reserve in between Memorial Day and July 4th, we are ensuring sufficient supply flows to the tri-state and Northeast at a time hardworking Americans need it the most.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/23/has-gavin-newsoms-brain-always-been-mush/

California’s health is vital to this country. It’s too important to be run by political cranks. Unfortunately, it has become a True Blue state, setting much of the agenda for progressive politics everywhere. At the top is Gov. Gavin Newsom, who at one time seemed almost a happy warrior. Now it’s clear he’s an impulsive leftist hack who’ll say and do anything in the service of seeking ever greater power.

His most recent descent into Democratic madness was obvious a couple of weeks ago, when he blamed California’s $45 billion deficit on climate change.

“We anticipated that shortfall,” Newsom said at a news conference in which he outlined his plan to close the budget gap. “What we didn’t anticipate is these rain bombs … these atmospheric rivers that led to a federal declaration that led to FEMA and the IRS moving in a direction where we couldn’t collect our taxes until, I believe Nov. 16, as opposed to April 15.” 

He went on to say he considered “our financial delays as just another example of why we need to tackle” climate change, which “has impacts well beyond those that are often promoted.”

It’s a fact that California has had some heavy weather. To blame it on man’s combustion of fossil fuels is irresponsible. Actually it’s worse, it’s a sign of instability and desperation. As our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity said, “This man has a serious case of climate change derangement syndrome.”

But the governor said what Democrats want to hear and he is happy to give it to them.

Newsom’s ongoing breakdown became obvious in his now infamous August 2021 “damn” interview with editorial and opinion writers from the McClatchy chain’s California newspapers.

Just weeks from a recall election that he won, Newsom was described as “unhinged,” “odd,” “testy,” and “angry.” He said “damn” nine times, at one point screeched that he loves “this damn state.” Those who had the patience to watch the video in its entirety said he smacked his desk with his hand and fist 59 times.

At least he wasn’t rolling around a couple steel balls in his hands.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/squabbling-congresswomen-are-not-the-problem/

Last week several Congresswomen went toe-to-toe in an exchange of insults during the House Oversight and Accountability Committee Hearings. The pugnacious Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) took on Democrat firebrand Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), with Brooklyn Dem Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an aggressive interlocutor, piling on.

This unseemly brawl is a litmus test for how we think about the state of our government and how it should work. Many people see such vulgar exchanges of harsh rhetoric and personal attacks as a failure of our system of partisan faction who sacrifice the good of the public to their parochial ideological interests, instead of “reaching across the aisle” to “solve problems.”

But such passionate confrontations are nothing new, and do not bespeak a breakdown in our Constitutional order. Rather, they are signs of James Madison’s Constitutional guardrail that “ambition must be made to counter ambition,” that in the political tournaments of power, the efforts of one faction to aggrandize more control and influence will be checked by those of other factions who possess the same political rights. The goal is not to “solve problems,” which is the job of citizens, civil society, churches, families and states. Rather, protecting our freedom by checking and balancing power is how our political freedom and equality can be fortified against tyranny.

This fundamental feature of our Constitutional architecture reflects another dimension of human nature. Not only is faction “sown in the nature of man,” as Madison said, but also reflects the reality of diversity in the settlement of the original colonies. Our Diversity Inc. industry ignores these true variations that comprise America’s complex identities, and instead reduces it to crude, racist categories primarily expressing physical traits and characteristic.

Such caricatures, moreover, have kept alive stereotypes predicated on victimhood and grievance, and embodied them in fictive cultural narratives, all at the expense of our most important identity––that of unique individuals who exist on this earth only once. As French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut points out, “Like the racists before them, contemporary fanatics of cultural identity confine individuals to their group of origin. Like them, they carry differences to the absolute extremes, and in the name of a multiplicity of specific causalities destroy any possibility of cultural community among peoples.” Hence, we end up with imperialistic homogeneity and an intellectual and political monoculture rather than diversity.

https://thespectator.com/topic/cunning-democrats-lawfare-trump/

It saddens me to admit it, but the evidence is too overwhelming to dismiss: Democrats are significantly more cunning than Republicans.

I say “Democrats,” but that is an imprecise, even a misleading, designation. Party affiliation is not now, if it ever was, a really accurate predictor of ideological coloration.

What I mean are those people, most of whom happen to belong to the Democratic Party, who have been bitten by the bug of extremism, who are fired by revolutionary fervor, who regard every opponent, every contrary opinion, as a “by-any-means-necessary” fire alarm.

It is an attitude that has stirred their creativity, also their vindictiveness.

Hercules had to undertake twelve supposedly impossible labors. Donald Trump is fast catching up.

It would never have occurred to me — or, I’d wager, to anyone on my side of the ideological aisle — to transform through the alchemy of political bile a normal business proceeding into a high-profile trial in which a verdict of fraud was handed down and an eye-watering fine of hundreds of millions of dollars imposed even though there was no one defrauded.

But that was exactly what happened to Donald Trump.

Similarly, who on the conservative side would have been clever or malicious enough to elevate a nondisclosure agreement into a thirty-four-count felony indictment? The alchemists of old would have been impressed by that power of transmogrifying the base matter of political spleen into electoral gold.

That, anyway, is what District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the compromised Judge Juan Merchan are hoping to accomplish with the so-called “hush-money” trial of the former president.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/the_network_behind_the_pro_hamas_disruptions.html

How did anti-Israel protests erupt within a month of the Hamas-led October 7 massacre?  How did university campuses in America turn into tent cities of keffiyeh-clad youth calling for the liberation of Palestine, the annihilation of Israel, and death to Jews?  If you suspect these protests are well orchestrated and funded, you are right.

Behind them is a coalition of radical leftist and Islamist groups drawing sustenance from the vast dark money network of Neville Roy Singham, and linked through him to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  This has been confirmed by a 34-page report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), an affiliate of Rutgers University.

Analyzing open-source data using proprietary software, the NCRI’s multidisciplinary teams identify emerging threats to civil society.  The NCRI report describes Singham as a “known conduit for CCP geopolitical influence.”  As early as 1974, when he was 20, Singham was the subject of an FBI investigation for links with groups inimical to U.S. interests.

He is now based in Shanghai and, with his wife Jodie Evans, uses corporate entities and philanthropic hedge funds to channel money for fomenting unrest in free societies.  His network “exploits regulatory loopholes in the U.S. nonprofit system” to fund a) media groups promoting anti-American narratives, and b) “seemingly grassroots activist movements,” such as those behind the pro-Hamas protests.  The report says the network is a “significant concern to the internal stability” of the U.S.

Its alarming assessment:

While nominally focused on Israel, the current protests can be better understood as a well-funded initiative driving a revolutionary, anti-government, and anti-capitalist agenda, with the leading organizations serving as versatile tools for foreign entities hostile to the U.S.

The unrest is likely to continue through summer and until the presidential election.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/while-military-families-go-hungry-pentagon-wastes-billions-on-equity/

Last year the United States Army recommended that military service members struggling with inflation should apply for Food Stamps. This year, the Military Family Nutrition Access Act was introduced in the Senate to make more military families eligible for food stamps.

In the past, Senate members and elected officials had tried to get military families off food stamps. Measures like the “Remove Service Members from Food Stamps Act” in 2000 set out to boost military pay. Bush and Gore both promised to end the need for food stamps and the number of personnel on food stamps dropped into the low thousands. It’s now over 20,000.

Instead of ending the need for food stamps, politicians are trying to make them easier to access.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has better ideas for where to spend the defense budget. The Pentagon is asking for $114 military to fund its DEI initiatives which would focus on  “ensuring our entire workforce lives by fundamental values that bolster unit cohesion”. This is a euphemism for leftist political indoctrination which has already gravely undermined morale.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is a term that represents replacing merit and equality with government intervention or ‘equity’ to achieve the ‘correct’ outcomes through measures such as affirmative action, penalizing people based on their race and spreading the idea that differences in outcomes are due to ‘systemic racism’ and ‘whiteness’ that have to be stamped out.

The millions will be spent on, among other things, fighting “problematic behaviors” and force officers to impose “a climate of inclusion that supports diversity” that ”is free from problematic behaviors.” Not only is the Defense Department determined to function like a college campus, but it wants to spend over $100 million to wreck what’s left of morale in the military.

https://spectator.org/the-anti-woke-counterrevolution-is-spreading/

Writing in this space five months ago, I argued that an anti-woke counterrevolution was starting on American campuses. While that is certainly even more true today, I am seeing increased signs of a more widespread revolt against relentless attacks on traditional American values such as respect for free speech and private property, as well as a reverence of God, hard work and assessing people on the basis of meritorious accomplishment.

Many revolutions are ultimately followed by a counterrevolution: the Russian Revolution was ultimately reversed, albeit after seven decades; the Protestant Reformation sparked a Counter Reformation; France went through several dramatic regime changes in the two centuries after its Revolution of 1789, including five forms of democratic republics. Similarly, in America a progressive movement contemptuous of traditional American values has captured college campuses, spreading to other sectors of life including churches and private business, but now the collegiate counterrevolution is beginning to take hold. As progressive-provoked excesses multiply on campuses and well beyond, many ordinary citizens are saying “enough is enough.”

Let’s start with the oldest continuous Western institution, the Roman Catholic Church. News stories are appearing how young Catholics are yearning for a return to traditions prevailing before the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, wanting fewer guitars at masses and more traditional rituals, including the use of Latin. In the leftist college town in which I live, Athens, Ohio, even the priests are amazed at the growth in young person mass attendance and their push for reviving old traditions dating back centuries. New Protestant denominations that emphasize God and traditional values like the Ten Commandments, and that downplay political activism, are booming, with local students telling me services are very well attended. Old-line large Protestant denominations like the Methodists that have increasingly tolerated values inconsistent with traditional Christian practices are suffering membership losses and undergoing internal civil war, especially over whether to sanction same sex marriages.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/staff/don-feder/

President Barack Obama said he wanted to “fundamentally transform” America. President Biden is more ambitious. He wants to abolish America. In three years, he’s made an impressive start.

The left doesn’t want to govern. It doesn’t want to compete in the marketplace of ideas. It wants to turn this country into a “woke,” broke shell of its once great self.

We no longer have borders, even the semblance of safety in our cities, an impartial system of justice, or a military capable of defending us. The Ten Commandments have been replaced by three — diversity, equity and inclusion.

Mr. Biden doesn’t fit the image of a revolutionary — no bristling beard or fierce mustache, no hours-long harangues. He can barely stand unsupported for more than a few minutes. But a lifetime of rage has given him an appetite for destruction. Instead of rule or ruin, it’s rule to ruin.

At least 10 million have entered the country illegally under this administration — more than the population of 36 states. They include over 20,000 Chinese nationals, mostly men of military age, and hundreds on the terrorism watch list. Their contribution to America may be seen in the actions of the six “migrants” who stomped two cops in Times Square in January.

In the latest Rasmussen Reports, 57% of likely voters said the purpose of porous borders is to keep the Democrats in power. Not coincidentally, 14 states do not require any form of ID to vote.

Political power aside, open borders are chaos for the sake of chaos.

Cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have been turned into cesspools of homelessness, drug abuse, crime and mental illness. San Francisco, which has maps to help pedestrians navigate piles of poop, now provides homeless alcoholics with wine, beer and vodka.

No one is safe on streets ruled by criminals and crazies. Random acts of violence are hardly news anymore. More police have been killed in the line of duty in the past three years than in any similar period on record.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/19/the-dodgy-data-behind-the-dei-crusade/

DEI has been pitched to Americans as an effort to foster workplace harmony. But if a scathing new report is anything to go by, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is nothing more than a cynical marketing ploy founded on corporate doublespeak. And the Biden administration has fallen for it.

An exposé published by the College Fix this week reveals that at least 51 federal agencies have justified their DEI policies by citing four studies by McKinsey and Company, an American consultancy firm. These glossy studies – ‘Diversity matters’, ‘Delivering through diversity’, ‘Diversity wins’ and ‘Diversity still matters’ – make the so-called business case for DEI. But critics are now eviscerating McKinsey’s research as shoddy, agenda-driven and riddled with weak data.

Take a new rule from the Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration, enacted in January last year. This rule expands the application of environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria – used to measure a company’s ‘social impact’ – to government pension funds. Essentially, this means retirement-fund managers now have to put ESG considerations at the heart of their investment decisions. Supposedly, this is because companies with a good ESG score will deliver the best returns. What research is this claim based on? You guessed it: two McKinsey studies that suggest ‘social responsibility’ is the golden ticket to productivity.

Economist Alex Edmans, professor of finance at the London Business School, has slammed the Department of Labor for clinging to McKinsey’s dubious work. He argues that the department had ‘already decided’ its preferred policies and ‘searches for any study that will support this idea, regardless of its quality’. ‘McKinsey is a consultancy, not a research organisation’, Edmans concludes. ‘The goal of its papers is marketing rather than scientific inquiry.’

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/20/sorry-but-dow-40000-isnt-worth-celebrating/

The headline in the Wall Street Journal typifies the reaction to the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing above 40,000 for the first time in its history — “Dow at 40000 Is Welcome News for President Biden.”

The Journal calls it “the latest sign the economy has shrugged off the threat of recession,” and says it’s “welcome news for President Biden, whose approval — and re-election prospects — are being held down by public dissatisfaction with the economy …. The Dow is up nearly 30% since Biden was inaugurated in January 2021. That is slightly higher than where the Dow was at the same point in Donald Trump’s presidency.”

The Biden campaign couldn’t have said it better! In fact, the first thing his campaign did was parrot that opening, with a post on X mocking Donald Trump in a split screen showing Trump predicting a market crash should Biden get elected and the clips of broadcasters popping Champagne corks as the Dow crossed 40,000.

Hitting 40,000 is, to be sure, an important milestone — even if it’s just psychological. It means the Dow has officially doubled in value in just over seven years (from 20,000 in early 2017 to 40,000 last week). That’s less than half the time it took to double from 10,000, which it hit in April 1999.