RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-you-with-joe-biden-or-jefferson-davis-georgia-voting-rights-filibuster-11641943418?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Every official in America, President Biden said Tuesday, has a choice: “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. [ Martin Luther ] King or George Wallace ? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor ? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis ?” Seriously, he said that grandiloquent nonsense.

Mr. Biden’s speech in Georgia was a call to bulldoze the Senate’s filibuster to pass a rebranded version of H.R.1, a bill that would impose a federal election code on all 50 states, including forcing them to count late mail ballots that lack postmarks. If you happen to think that’s a bad idea, or that it’s unconstitutional, or that nuking the filibuster would hurt the Senate, well, then apparently you’re against Abraham Lincoln.

Mr. Biden’s demagoguery is all the worse because he continues to distort state voting laws like the one in Georgia. “Voting by mail is a safe and convenient way to get more people to vote,” he said, adding “they’re limiting the number of dropboxes and the hours you can use them.” Georgia had zero dropboxes before the pandemic election of 2020, and now they’re enshrined in permanent law. This isn’t “ Jim Crow 2.0,” no matter how many times Mr. Biden uses that incendiary phrase.

People disagree about the security of stand-alone dropboxes, but voters can also put absentee ballots in the mailbox. As for Georgia, all of its residents can request a mail ballot without giving an excuse, unlike in New York or Delaware. And here’s a figure Mr. Biden should know: In 2020, the Census Bureau says, black voter turnout in Georgia was 64%, compared with Massachusetts’s 36%.

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-way-out/

The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College reception in Overland Park, Kansas, on November 18, 2021.

Here are two questions pertinent to our times: (1) How would you reduce the greatest free republic in history to despotism in a short time? and (2) How would you stop that from happening? The answer to the first question has been provided in these last two disastrous years. The answer to the second has begun to emerge in recent months. Both are worthy of study.

Reducing a Great Republic to Despotism

To establish despotism in a nation like ours, you might begin, if you were smart, by building a bureaucracy of great complexity that commands a large percentage of the resources of the nation. You might give it rule-making powers, distributed across many agencies and centers inside the cabinet departments of government, as well as in 20 or more “independent” agencies—meaning independent of elected officials, and thus independent of the people.

This much has been done. It would require a doctoral thesis to list all the ways that rules are made in our federal government today, which would make for boring reading. The truth is that very few people not directly involved know how all this works. Although civics education is practically banned in America, most people still know what the Congress is and how its members are elected. But how many know how the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) came to be, under what authority it operates, and who is its head? Here is a clue: it is not Anthony Fauci.

Admittedly, this new kind of bureaucratic government would take—has taken—decades to erect, especially in the face of the resistance of the Constitution of the United States, which its very existence violates. But once it has been erected, things can happen very fast.

What, for example, if a new virus proliferates around the world? There have been procedures for dealing with such viruses for a long time. They begin with isolating the sick and protecting the vulnerable. But suddenly we have new procedures that attempt to isolate everybody. This is commanded by the CDC, an element of this bureaucratic structure, and by a maze of federal and state authorities, all of which see the benefit to themselves in getting involved. The result is that large sections of our economy were closed for months at a time, and citizens placed under the equivalent of house arrest. This has not happened before. The cost of it, and not just in monetary terms, is beyond calculation.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dr-fauci-smears-rand-paul/

Nothing in Paul’s critique of Fauci calls for any violence. It calls for a mendacious government official to be fired because he’s been awful at his job.

It’s no surprise that Anthony Fauci, who believes attacks on him are “attacks on science,” is extraordinarily thin-skinned. But today, after being grilled by Senator Rand Paul over his involvement in concerted attacks on apostate scientists, Fauci deflected by noting that a man who’d threatened to kill him had been arrested a couple of weeks ago. Fauci went on to, in part, blame Paul for threats against him, claiming that Paul’s accusations “kindle the crazies,” and even pulled out a printed copy of a “Fire Fauci” headline from the senator’s website.

Is Fauci really arguing that calling for his firing — from a job he’s held since 1984 — is tantamount to inciting violence? Does that go for the Democratic Party rhetoric that motivated a Bernie Sanders fan who attempted to murder, among other Republicans, Paul on a baseball field in Alexandria in 2017? Or progressive rhetoric that motivated a mob to menace Paul and his wife on D.C.’s streets in 2020? Nothing in Paul’s critique of Fauci calls for any violence. It calls for a mendacious government official to be fired because he’s been awful at his job. Even if Paul is wrong, political discourse shouldn’t be inhibited by the prospective actions of third-party nuts. We don’t let those nuts undercut our ability to freely express our political disagreements. Those who do are usually engaged in a transparent attempt to chill speech.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/education-secretary-cardona-solicited-nsba-letter-comparing-parents-domestic-terrorists-email

FIRST ON FOX: Education Secretary Miguel Cardona solicited the much-criticized letter from the National School Boards Association that compared protesting parents to domestic terrorists, according to an email exchange reviewed by Fox News.

The email exchange indicates Cardona was more involved with the letter’s creation than previously known.

President Biden’s Department of Justice relied on the NSBA letter, which suggested using the Patriot Act against parents, in creating its own memo directing the FBI to mobilize in support of local education officials.

In the Oct. 5 email, NSBA Secretary-Treasurer Kristi Swett recounted that NSBA interim CEO Chip Slaven “told the officers he was writing a letter to provide information to the White House, from a request by Secretary Cardona.”

Previous emails had revealed that the NSBA was in contact with the White House and Justice Department in the weeks before it publicly sent the letter.

The emails were obtained by the parents group Parents Defending Education in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

“Should this allegation be true, it would reveal that this administration’s pretextual war on parents came from the highest levels,” PDE President Nicole Neily told Fox News Digital.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/01/06/capitol_police_officer_w

When U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd went on “NBC Nightly News” to tell his side of shooting and killing unarmed Jan. 6 rioter Ashli Babbitt, he made a point to note he’d been investigated by several agencies and exonerated for his actions that day.

“There’s an investigative process [and] I was cleared by the DOJ [Department of Justice], and FBI and [the D.C.] Metropolitan Police,” he told NBC News anchor Lester Holt in August, adding that the Capitol Police also cleared him of wrongdoing and decided not to discipline or demote him for the shooting.

Terry Roberts, Babbitt family attorney:  “It’s astonishing how skimpy his investigative file is.”
Roberts & Wood

Ashli Babbitt: Her family calls the rushed Byrd investigation a “whitewash” and a “coverup” of misconduct by the officer.

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/if-you-are-a-vaccine-company-executive

Remember NINJA loans?

NINJA stood for “No income, no job/assets.” Back in the mid-aughts, when the banks and not the regulators were the ones going crazy and setting the financial system on fire with free money, they were all the rage.

I remember hearing ads for them in 2006 and 2007 and thinking, this has to be a bait and switch. You cannot walk into Your Friendly MegaBank and walk out with a few hundred grand for a house with no proof you even have a job! A job seems pretty basic.

But you could. And people did. Lots of people.

Underlying this madness was a model, naturally. American housing prices had never collapsed nationally and simultaneously since at least the Depression. Therefore the models that the banks and mortgage originators used said they never would.

Therefore on a national basis the collateral – the houses – underlying the mortgages would always be fine, even if the borrowers couldn’t repay them. The lenders just needed to be in different markets to be geographically protected. Besides, the bankers were all reselling the loans and offloading the risk. They got paid up front, whether the loans were paid back or not.

It was a very good business.

Until it went bad.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/10/durhams-investigation-incriminating-inference-in-the-fbis-empty-russiagate-predication/

James Comey’s cohorts were not memory-challenged Clouseaus but were more like diabolical Lex Luthors, ruthlessly plotting to take down a despised newcomer politician for partisan ends.

The vaporous predication for the FBI’s opening of its “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation of “Russian collusion” is often attributed solely to anti-Trump bias, with no more to learn from its study. But sustained examination shows it to be not only pretextual but also designed to conceal American history’s most insidious governmental treachery since Benedict Arnold.

According to the FBI, the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation was opened on July 31, 2016, because lowly Trump aide George Papadopoulos had been told by one Professor Joseph Mifsud that Russia had emails harmful to Hillary Clinton. Two weeks later, Australian (FFG) diplomat, British-connected Alexander Downer, pried from Papadopoulos that Russia had dirt on Hillary, which he repeated in July to an American embassy in London. 

Because both Mifsud and Downer were Western intelligence plants, without any knowledge of Russian designs, this was clearly a bootstrapped, circular predication. That millions of common citizens also suspected Russia had email dirt on Hillary did not seem to dampen FBI ardor.

Quickly thereafter, the FBI opened highly secretive “SIM” (Sensitive Investigation Matter) investigations on Trump advisors Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Michael Flynn, and George Papadopoulos without any actual evidence, on the speculation that they were the most likely conspirators. 

Later, the FBI was adamant to Inspector General Michael Horowitz that the CIA’s “Brennan did not provide the FBI any intelligence that predicated the opening,” nor did Comey’s team “become aware of Steele reporting until September 19, 2016.” Rather, “predication . . . was based solely on the FFG (Downer) information.” 

All of these denials, as shown below, are arrant nonsense, but why is the FBI staying so far away from these two sources? Wouldn’t both Steele’s and Brennan’s investigations strengthen the nonexistent basis for opening Crossfire Hurricane? 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/10/the-likely-cause-of-the-media-blackout-on-imploding-whitmer-kidnapping-plot/

Once upon a time in America, a high-profile federal prosecution imploding amid credible accusations of FBI entrapment would earn wall-to-wall headlines in the national news media. A wife-beating FBI agent who used at least one criminal informant and a dozen more government assets to concoct a plot to abduct a sitting governor—intended to create damaging headlines for an incumbent president right before Election Day—would receive nonstop coverage on cable and broadcast news outlets.

Social media would be flooded with all the juicy details. Names like “Richard Trask” and “Stephen Robeson” would be household names.

But none of that is happening with the Justice Department’s rapidly crumbling case against several men arrested for allegedly conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer from her vacation cottage in the fall of 2020. Defense attorneys have made a strong case that without the FBI’s guiding hand—and deep pockets courtesy of American taxpayers—the scheme never would have materialized past random social media chatter.

“[The] undisputed evidence . . . establishes that government agents and informants concocted, hatched, and pushed this ‘kidnapping plan’ from the beginning, doing so against defendants who explicitly repudiated the plan,” five defense attorneys wrote in a December 25 motion, one of several defense filings that details proof of an elaborate FBI operation to lure their clients into the abduction caper.

And the bad actors in the government’s script keep finding themselves in more trouble. 

Richard Trask, the lead FBI agent on the case, was fired for physically assaulting his wife in a drunken rage following a swinger party last summer. Body-camera footage made public last month shows a shirtless and clearly inebriated Trask being arrested by local police. (He was not charged with driving under the influence.)

A Michigan news station recently unearthed Trask’s Trump-hating rants posted on social media in 2020. “If you still support our piece of shit president you can fuck off,” Trask wrote on Facebook at the same time he was “investigating” threats against Whitmer. Trask said he hoped people who support Trump “burn in hell.”

Two other FBI agents working with Trask at the Detroit FBI field office who handled multiple informants also have been dismissed from the case; FBI agent Jayson Chambers is accused of running a security business on the side and FBI agent Henrik Impola is accused of committing perjury in another case. The Justice Department just notified the court that Trask, Chambers, and Impola are no longer on the government’s witness list.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/the-graveyard-of-false-covid-claims/

O n the Fourth of July, President Biden said, “Two hundred and forty-five years ago, we declared our independence from a distant king. Today, we’re closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus.”

How’d that turn out?

Bad predictions, bad information, and a habit of stomping all over the truth are a big part of the reason why so many Americans are feeling not just depressed but actually angry about what’s going on with the virus.

Six months after Biden’s “Mission Accomplished” moment, caseloads are at record levels, an average of 1,500 people a day are dying from Covid, and, far from being independent from the virus, we seem to be its seething subjects. Teachers are refusing to go back to school in Chicago and elsewhere, while strict mandates remain in effect in many locales such as New York and Los Angeles County, where two-year-olds are required to wear masks indoors, and masks are even required outdoors at large gatherings, such as the Super Bowl slated to be held in L.A. on February 13.

All this after we were told we were in the mopping-up phase. Studying the virus seems to work a lot like Hollywood, where, as William Goldman famously put it, nobody knows anything.

Consider that a Supreme Court justice said something utterly asinine the other day: “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators,” claimed Sonia Sotomayor. Only about 5,000 children are hospitalized with, or because of, Covid. Suddenly the Supreme Court is a fount of misinformation.