RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/where-john-durhams-investigation-is-heading/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=second

Reading the tea leaves, it appears the special counsel’s end game is something other than a sweeping indictment.

L ast week’s indictment of Igor Danchenko has the commentariat buzzing. If special counsel John Durham has cracked the core of the Russiagate case, if he has established that the Steele dossier on which the FBI substantially based its spy warrants was fraudulent, does that mean he is nearing a sweeping conspiracy indictment? Will there be criminal charges that target the real 2016 collusion — not between the Trump campaign and Russia, but between the Clinton campaign and U.S. officials who abused government investigative powers for political purposes?

Almost certainly not.

All signs are that Durham will end his investigation with a narrative report. It has looked that way for a long time. There are reasons why then-attorney general Bill Barr appointed then-Connecticut U.S. attorney Durham as a special counsel shortly before the Trump administration ended.

Unlike ordinary federal prosecutors, who either file charges or close investigations without comment, special counsels are required by regulation to write a report for the attorney general. As we saw with special counsel Robert Mueller’s report in 2019, there is typically great outside pressure on the AG to make such reports public (though doing so is not required). Barr obviously knew enough about Durham’s investigation to grasp that there was unlikely to be a grand, overarching criminal-conspiracy case; there had, however, been rampant malfeasance and abuse of power that might never come to light absent a comprehensive investigative report.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/12/07/california-is-the-only-state-to-hide-its-spending/?sh=706e7d5f72b7

In 2018, California resident Steven Childs wanted to know how much the state paid to a single vendor over a five-year period. Instead of the data, California Controller Betty Yee sent him an invoice for $1,250.

Childs asked more questions and the Controller’s chief counsel, Rick Chivaro, admitted the state held electronic records and “warrant records” akin to “maintaining a checking account online.”

Today, in a Sacramento superior court, the controller denies having a checkbook and claims the warrant register doesn’t contain vendor information. The Golden State is the only state in the nation not to produce state spending under open records laws.

Our organization at OpenTheBooks.com is battling the controller in this case over our freedom of information request for the entire line-by-line state vendor checkbook. When the controller rejected our request, we sued.

Yee is claiming her office “couldn’t locate” a single payment. No, that’s not fake news, or a comedy punch line. California’s top financial officer actually argued this in court recently, despite admitting she paid 50 million individual bills last year.

Furthermore, the controller now claims that transparency itself is an “undue burden.” She swears it’s necessary to take 72,000 work hours to go through each of the 50 million payments by hand.  

Here are some of the arguments Yee is making to stonewall our request: 

“In order to produce checkbook level data as requested … staff would need to manually review the estimated 50 million transactions …” (Emphasis added.) 
“The public interest served by not disclosing the requested records and data clearly outweighs the public interest in disclosure. As such, the [State Controller’s Office] is relieved of any obligation to produce the requested records.” (Emphasis added.)  

Do we have a representative republic if the representatives get to hide all transactions from the people—and claim that it’s for their own good? 

Controller Yee acts like she has something to hide. Here are just a couple items we learned during discovery about how taxpayer dollars are spent by the controller:

1. Using paper and string. An estimated 200,000 bills — submitted only on paper — were paid during the fiscal year. Incredibly, the justification for each payment contains even more paper — between 15-20 pages and is bound and physically tied together with string. It takes 7-10 minutes to deconstruct, copy, and reconstruct each file.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/10/its-time-to-stand-up-for-ourselves-and-our-country/

The first thing Victoria White noticed after emerging from the tunnel where she was severely beaten by two D.C. Metropolitan police officers on January 6 was the floor of the U.S. Capitol. Dressed in jeans and a light red turtleneck, shoeless, White was soaked with whatever toxic chemical gas the police sprayed on protesters.

“I noticed that this beautiful flooring was all wet, soaking wet, like a pipe burst,” she told me this week in one of three lengthy interviews about her harrowing experience at the Capitol protest. Water, however, was not the culprit; the floor probably was drenched because law enforcement had doused Americans with chemical spray for hours inside the U.S. Capitol building.

One officer—White doesn’t know if he was D.C. Metro or Capitol police—handcuffed her with zip ties behind her back. She was told to turn around and face the wall near a statue, White recalled, but she didn’t know the location since it was her first time inside the Capitol. She likely was standing inside Statuary Hall.

Others were there, too, mostly men and one other older woman. Police paraded the group of about a dozen protesters through various parts of the building, up and down elevators, almost as if to disorient their captives. White said they were taken underground near what she described as a set of small train tracks—the Capitol’s people-mover to get members and staff around the complex quickly—and led outside.

Suddenly, White saw a massive bright light. “There was a big news camera and a guy in a dress coat and matching hat. I knew it was a reporter, but how did they know we would exit there? It made no sense to me.”

Everyone was hauled into an awaiting paddy wagon and taken to the nearby police station. White said the men were processed first while she and the older woman waited in the vehicle. Once inside the station, an officer asked for her personal information—her driver’s license was in the jacket she lost inside the tunnel—and finally cut the zip ties. “My hair had been hanging in my face the whole time and I couldn’t move it because I was handcuffed. When I put my hand to my hair, it was wet. I looked down and saw that I had blood on my hand.”

An officer told White she needed to go to the department’s medical office, which she did. But another officer said she probably would be released so White declined medical attention. She was afraid by accepting treatment, she might risk getting put in jail.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/10/rittenhouse-smollett-and-the-big-lie-eating-away-at-america/

Magnify the Kyle Rittenhouse prosecution and it is easy enough to see how our enemies, those I call the “woke communists” (comms, for short) are turning America into a totalitarian police state. 

Woke communism operates somewhat differently than 20th century totalitarian regimes. In those regimes, the government used arbitrary violence to control every aspect of public and private life. There was a scapegoat, as well as a simple narrative that explained everything.

In woke communist America, the government does not control everything, but where it leaves off, the cultural-business complex takes over. Education, corporate media, entertainment, big business, especially Big Tech and the Democratic Party, together constitute America’s woke communist regime. The scapegoat is white males. There is violence in the form of state-sanctioned mobs, but more often, and almost as effective, is cancelling. The narrative is that America is systemically racist and about to be overtaken by white supremacists. Everything must be made to fit this narrative. The Rittenhouse affair is a good example of how the facts must be twisted to fit the narrative. (The Jussie Smollett hoax is another example.)

The lies told by the woke comms about Rittenhouse (i.e., he was a white supremacist in search of blacks to kill) easily could have been debunked within 24 hours. After all, we had the video, which clearly showed that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense. But the woke comms told us it was murder. They demanded we reject what we could see with our own eyes. In a totalitarian regime, it is the regime that decides what is true and what is false. In such regimes the goal is to abolish the capacity for distinguishing between truth and falsehood. 

And the woke comms, like the totalitarian regimes of Stalin and Hitler, understand that it is necessary to inflict punishments without crimes.  

The mainstream media, Big Tech, the FBI, and high-level Democrats all silently conspire to support the woke comms’ Big Lie: America is systemically racist and about to be overrun by white supremacists. This is woke communism in action: multiple woke comm institutions defending the Big Lie. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/bidens-media-allies-cant-spin-away-our-economic-malaise/

The economy is in rough shape, voters know it firsthand, and they won’t be convinced otherwise.

 I n an excellent piece in today’s New York Times, David Leonhardt observes that “in recent weeks, economists and pundits have been asking why Americans feel grouchy about the economy when many indicators — like G.D.P. growth, stock prices and the unemployment rate — look strong,” before concluding that the “supposed paradox” to which they are pointing is “not really a paradox.” “Americans think the economy is in rough shape,” Leonhardt writes bluntly, “because the economy is in rough shape.”

Leonhardt is correct, and his explanations are solid. But he is remiss in one area: He doesn’t explain why “economists and pundits have been asking why Americans feel grouchy about the economy,” even though they’re evaluating the same set of economic facts as everyone else. So I will: Economists and pundits are talking up the economy because the White House has urged them to talk up the economy, and because unlike David Leonhardt, they have gladly acquiesced to the demand.

Don’t take my word for it. Earlier this week, CNN’s Oliver Darcy reported that the White House is “not happy with the news media’s coverage of the supply chain and economy,” and “has been working behind the scenes trying to reshape coverage in its favor.” These “conversations,” Darcy confirmed, “have been productive, with anchors and reporters and producers getting to talk with the officials.” And, sure enough, in no time at all the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank had decided that the press treats Biden worse than Trump, the Times’s Paul Krugman had proposed that “the public’s highly negative assessment of the economy is at odds with every other indicator I can think of,” MSNBC’s Joy Reid had lamented that Republicans were being so negative when “the economy is booming,” CNBC’s Jim Cramer had submitted that the economy is better than it has ever been in his life, Don Lemon had begun cheering tiny-and-temporary reductions in the price of gas, and The Hill’s Max Burns had not only criticized Americans for being ungrateful for the “surging economic recovery” but slammed Republicans for suggesting that our inflation problem might just get worse if the federal government continues to pump trillions of dollars into the economy.

Ask, and ye shall receive.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/building-back-bitter-11639171577?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Consumers and workers are taking a beating as Washington fails to maintain the value of our currency.

The Journal’s Gwynn Guilford reports:

U.S. inflation reached a nearly four-decade high in November, as strong consumer demand collided with pandemic-related supply constraints.
The Labor Department said the consumer-price index—which measures what consumers pay for goods and services—rose 6.8% in November from the same month a year ago. That was the fastest pace since 1982 and the sixth straight month in which inflation topped 5%.
The so-called core price index, which excludes the often-volatile categories of food and energy, climbed 4.9% in November from a year earlier. That was a sharper increase than October’s 4.6% rise, and the highest rate since 1991.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who seems to have abandoned the term “transitory” to describe this monetary destruction, has nevertheless succeeded in forging a Wall Street-Washington consensus that inflation will soon be heading smartly southward. Many institutional economists up and down the Acela corridor have very reasonable arguments for their case that inflation will be much lower a year from now than it is today. Let’s all hope they are right.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/norman-podhoretz-spiritual-war-for-america-conservatism-republican-trump-youngkin-carlson-11639

There was a time—roughly from the mid-1960s to the rise of Donald Trump in 2015—when the American right was more or less definable. No more. Major political parties are always riven by internal disputes, but even during George W. Bush’s second term, at the nadir of the Iraq war, the Republican coalition seemed to hang together better than it has these past six years. Mr. Trump’s candidacy was a sign of that fracturing rather than its cause, but his presidency wasn’t marked by unity in the GOP.

Quite the opposite. A significant faction of the party now advocates aggressive industrial policy as a means of alleviating social ills wrought by “unregulated” capitalism. Another demeans the party’s traditional predilection for hawkish foreign policy as an obsession with “forever wars.” The right’s leading media personalities, meanwhile, would rather talk about the latest cultural outrage—an androgynous Mr. Potato Head!—than explain the perils of turning social welfare into a middle-class entitlement.

Are the challenges facing conservatives really so different from what they were 50, 60 or 70 years ago? Most of the architects of postwar conservatism aren’t around to ask anymore, but Norman Podhoretz—editor of the Jewish intellectual magazine Commentary from 1960 to 1995 and one of the founders of neoconservatism—is 91 and as talkative as ever. I visited his book-laden Upper East Side apartment last month with the vague premonition that he might have something to say about the fractured state of American conservatism.

My timing was good. The day before, voters had elected a Republican governor in a state most observers considered blue, and indisputably blue New Jersey had come within a few percentage points of doing the same. “I wasn’t sure they were still out there,” Mr. Podhoretz says. Who? “The ‘deplorables,’ ” he says, gesturing quotation marks as he employs Hillary Clinton’s famous term from 2016. “I really didn’t know. If the results had gone the other way, I wouldn’t have been that surprised. Our troops were not as visible, at least to me, because the media and the culture are all on the other side . . . The other side has won the culture—that’s one battlefield—but they haven’t yet won the polity. That’s very encouraging.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/joe-biden-kamala-harris-tweets-backing-jussie-smollett-remain-up-after-guilty-verdict/ar-AARFrmC

Democratic President Joe Biden and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris have left up tweets expressing support for actor Jussie Smollett after he was allegedly a victim in a racist and anti-gay hate attack that occurred on January 29, 2019. However, on Thursday, a jury found that Smollett lied about the attack.

Biden’s tweet reads, “What happened today to @JussieSmollett must never be tolerated in this country. We must stand up and demand that we no longer give this hate safe harbor; that homophobia and racism have no place on our streets or in our hearts. We are with you, Jussie.”

What happened today to @JussieSmollett must never be tolerated in this country. We must stand up and demand that we no longer give this hate safe harbor; that homophobia and racism have no place on our streets or in our hearts. We are with you, Jussie. https://t.co/o8ilPu68CM

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) January 30, 2019

Harris’ tweet reads, “.@JussieSmollett is one of the kindest, most gentle human beings I know. I’m praying for his quick recovery. This was an attempted modern day lynching. No one should have to fear for their life because of their sexuality or color of their skin. We must confront this hate.”

This was an attempted modern day lynching. No one should have to fear for their life because of their sexuality or color of their skin. We must confront this hate.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) January 29, 2019

https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2021/12/10/jussie-smollett-verdict-guilty-disorderly-conduct-fake-hate-crime-attack/

Former “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett was convicted on five counts Thursday evening on charges he orchestrated a fake hate crime against himself nearly three years ago, while jurors acquitted him of one other count.

A jury of six men and six women deliberated more than nine hours over two days before finding Smollett guilty of five of six counts of disorderly conduct, accusing the actor of staging a fake racist and homophobic attack against himself in January 2019, and then lying to police about it, in a bid for publicity. Jurors found him not guilty of the sixth count of disorderly conduct.The charges for which Smollett was convicted dealt with his falsely telling several different police officers he was the victim of a hate crime and a battery.