RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/hhs-secretary-xavier-becerra-i-will-do-everything-i-can-to-defend-sex-changes-for-children/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

That’s good to know. Americans should keep it in mind next time they show up to the ballot box.

While testifying before the House Budget Committee yesterday, Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Xavier Becerra affirmed that yes, his department was in favor of taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgeries for minors. “So for the record, you favor HHS funding . . . for sex-reassignment surgeries for minors?” Lauren Boebert, (R, Colo.) asked. Becerra answered:

I will do everything I can to defend any American, including children, whether or not they fit the categories you have mentioned or not. And if they talk about gender-affirming care, I am there to protect the rights of any American.

In other words: yes.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/04/06/democrat-gets-called-out-for-voting-to-end-fracking-n2605554

For weeks the Biden administration and their Democratic allies on Capitol Hill have attempted to pin out of control energy prices on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The White House communications team even dubbed price increases on oil and gas the “Putin price hike,” while also downplaying the amount of oil the U.S. previously imported from Russia. 

But as Democrats — who have been waging a war on the oil and gas industry — continue to blame Putin, Americans and some in the media aren’t buying it. In fact, the anti-fracking records of congressional climate activists are being scrutinized. 

During an interview with CNBC Wednesday morning, Democrat Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky doubled down on the need to ban fracking — which she voted for — and falsely claimed oil companies are price gouging customers. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/08/democrats-are-terrible-investors-of-your-tax-dollars-report/

Democrats love to say that when they forcibly extract taxpayers’ money and spend it on their pet projects that they are actually making “investments.” Yet Democrats, it turns out, are terrible investors. That’s what a report from WalletHub shows, in any case. Everyone should keep this in mind as they struggle to file their taxes this month.

When California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced his new budget plan, he bragged about how the $213 billion spending plan would “make history investments in California’s future.” This type of language is now typical of how the left talks about government spending – because “investment” sounds a lot better than “wasteful, duplicative, fraud-riddled government program.”

The problem is that no one is held to account for the lousy “returns” on their “investments.” If they were, they’d be fired immediately.

California’s investing acumen, for example, has resulted in a “bullet” train that will likely never be finished, a massive homeless population, rising crime, and fleeing residents. So why are taxpayers in the state willing to hand still more of their hard-earned money over to these people?

WalletHub took it upon itself to determine the “return on investment” on taxpayer money each of the 50 states. The result: States controlled by Democrats do worse on this score than those controlled by Republicans.

https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/not-a-kitchen-table-issue-jen-psaki?s=r

Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki accused Republican lawmakers of “engaging in a disturbing, cynical trend of attacking vulnerable transgender kids,” and exploiting them. “Instead of focusing on critical kitchen table issues like the economy, COVID, or addressing the country’s mental health crisis,” she said, “Republican lawmakers are currently debating legislation that, among many things, would target transgender youth with tactics that threaten to put pediatricians in prison if they provide medically necessary, life-saving care for the kids they serve.”

Life-saving care? Surely she must mean insulin or antibiotics?

No, she means “gender affirming care” that devilish euphemism for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and experimental surgeries whose benefits are unproven, but whose risks—permanent sexual dysfunction, infertility, cardiac event and endometrial cancer are a few—ought to nudge any doctor toward soul searching. As I’ve written many times, these treatments are often recklessly administered, of questionable benefit to children, and attended by forbidding risks.

For these reasons, in the last two years, national gender clinics in France, the UK, Sweden and Finland have all reevaluated or curtailed their use. But as Psaki made clear, any legislator who tries to follow suit will face double-barreled legal opposition from the current Administration.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/07/another-january-6-narrative-goes-boom/

How does a mob “illegally storm” the Capitol building when police let them in? That is the latest narrative-shifting question the media wants desperately to avoid after a federal judge on Wednesday found a January 6 defendant not guilty for his conduct during the protest at the Capitol that day. 

Matthew Martin was arrested in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 22, 2021; he later was charged with the four most common misdemeanors related to the Justice Department’s prosecution of Capitol protesters: entering a restricted building, disorderly conduct, violent entry, and parading in the Capitol building.

Those petty offenses comprise the overwhelming majority of criminal charges against the nearly 800 or so January 6 defendants. More than 150 people have pleaded guilty to the “parading” charge—many have been sentenced to a few months in prison.

But those defendants might regret accepting the plea deal offered by the government after D.C. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden not only acquitted Martin on all counts but agreed with Martin’s assertion that he was “waved” in by Capitol Police officers. Martin, who opted for a bench trial before the Trump-appointed judge and testified in his own defense, entered the building around 3 p.m. through a set of doors on the east side. He walked through the Rotunda and stayed inside for about 10 minutes.

For that activity—a right protected under the Constitution up until January 6, 2021—Martin’s life, like that of every other American ensnared in this abusive prosecution, has been destroyed. Following his acquittal, Martin spoke to reporters outside the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C. “I am very thankful for the judge’s verdict and hoping to get my life back together, get my job back,” said Martin, who was fired as a contractor for the U.S. Department of Energy after he was arrested a year ago.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/08/ketanji-brown-jackson-dave-aronberg-and-jeffrey-epstein/

Federal election records show newly anointed Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has given money to just two politicians, both Democrats: Barack Obama and Dave Aronberg.

But who is Aronberg? He is a high school friend of Jackson from Florida, who, like her, has been accused of being soft on child sex offenders. The two were also classmates at Harvard Law School. Her financial gift to him is yet another data point indicating she is strangely not happy with laws protecting kids from sexual predators. With the Senate Thursday voting to confirm her 53-47, she is now in a lifetime position to review the constitutionality of those laws.

In 2009, Jackson donated $250 to Aronberg, then a Democratic Florida state senator (she contributed $400 to Obama the previous year, records show). At the time, Aronberg had been in the news for pushing a controversial bill to cut in half the distance registered sex offenders are required to live from schools, daycare centers, parks and other places kids congregate.

Jackson complained about such laws while attending Harvard Law with Aronberg.

In 1996, the year they both graduated, Jackson wrote an 18-page brief in the Harvard Law Review arguing that the judicial system was unfair to people who sexually prey on children, because it sentences them to monitoring and treatment after prison, which she viewed as additional “punishment” masquerading as prevention.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/if-the-hunter-biden-story-was-irrelevant-why-was-it-censored/

At the University of Chicago’s “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference this week — a “how to” discussion, apparently — the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum was asked about the use of the “disinformation” charge as a pretext for suppressing news. Specifically, the student was referring to the concerted effort by mass media, Big Tech, and government to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story to protect Joe Biden.“My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is I think it’s totally irrelevant,” she responded. “I mean, it’s not whether it’s disinformation. . . . I didn’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States.”

Someone might let the January 6 committee, which questioned Ivanka Trump for eight hours the other day, know that the actions of the president’s offspring are totally irrelevant. Applebaum believed questions about presidential kids were relevant during the Trump years. She shared dozens of them, and wrote her own piece about their alleged corruption. And when the Hunter story broke, Applebaum thought it relevant enough to note that the “amazing thing is that even the fraudulent claims about Hunter Biden are so much less bad than many genuine, fully-reported, well-known stories about Trump, his children and their business deals.”

My italics indicate a word that is a synonym of disinformation. That was Applebaum’s contention. Now that a Politico reporter, the Washington Post, and New York Times have all confirmed the veracity of the New York Post’s reporting (probably because that information is going to be revealed in some filing), suddenly the story is a mere distraction.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/obamacare-politicizes-irs-internal-revenue-service-affordable-care-act-subsidies-families-tax-code-healthcare-biden-obama-11649337661?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

President Obama visited the White House Tuesday to support his successor’s attempts to expand ObamaCare. The big news is that the Biden White House has succeeded in convincing the Internal Revenue Service to propose a rule that would illegally extend insurance subsidies to people who are ineligible for them.

Mr. Obama’s presence at the White House was ironic given that the IRS’s proposed policy reverses its decision from a decade ago, when he was president. At that time, the IRS believed it had to follow the law as written. The reversal shows that the enforcement of the tax code has become deeply politicized. Through this rule, if finalized, the IRS will expand ObamaCare subsidies by billions of dollars a year beyond what Congress authorized.

At issue is whether an employer’s offer to provide health insurance to an employee’s dependents disqualifies those dependents from ObamaCare subsidies. The 2010 law created large subsidies for plans in the new exchanges—so large that lawmakers worried the fiscal cost would be untenable. Mr. Obama insisted that ObamaCare cost less than $1 trillion in its first decade. To meet that demand, Congress limited subsidies to people without access to Medicaid or an affordable employer plan.

The trick was determining affordability. ObamaCare based affordability on the cost of coverage for the employee alone. Both he and his dependents offered coverage are ineligible for subsidies if his premium payment for self-only coverage exceeds 9.6% of income.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/questions-media-hunter-biden-dad-andrew-mccarthy

At a 2020 debate, President Donald Trump tried to press his rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, on an intriguing financial transaction: $3.5 million invested in a fund controlled by Biden’s son. Though Hunter Biden is better known for drug addiction and overall instability than business acumen, Elena Baturina, the widow of Yuri Luzhkov, longtime mayor of Moscow and confidant of Vladimir Putin, for some reason saw wisdom in pouring Russian money into a Hunter venture. 

If Biden had been the Republican in the race, Trump would not have had to raise the question. The media would already have been asking it incessantly. The animating question of the campaign would have been why, when President Barack Obama made his vice president the point-man on administration policy regarding such countries as Russia, Ukraine, and China, people connected to those notoriously corrupt regimes suddenly thought it expedient to pay Biden’s ne’er-do-well son millions upon millions of dollars.

But Biden was the Democrat in the race. The media-Democrat complex, far from haranguing him until he answered such questions, was sure to help him deflect. In fact, an establishment-friendly assortment of former intelligence officials baselessly floated the notion that damning data on a computer that patently belonged to Hunter might be Russian disinformation. The press dutifully ran with it. 

So, in response to Trump, Biden parroted the disinformation dodge, dismissed his opponent as a “clown,” and posed as if the Hunter questions were not worth dignifying with answers.

The tables have turned.