RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/six-lessons-road-katie-hopkins/

Sixty days into my latest foray on the road around America, I finally find myself alone with a desk, time, and the warm evening skies of Orlando to enjoy.

I am trusting you will forgive the irregularity of my reporting these last few weeks. Sadly, the quieter art of writing has been somewhat pushed to the corners of my days between speaking, traveling, and documenting my time noisily on social media. And I miss it.

From California to Arizona, then Dallas to Denver, I have been given a temperature check on where America is at, as a foreigner and respectful outsider. Now, I wanted to share my dix lessons from the road as I listen to people laughing down by the pool and fireworks thudding somewhere Disney-ish in the distance.

1) America is filled with good people.

I am constantly amazed by the polite and mannerly way Americans greet each other, share pleasantries and kindness, and encourage each other throughout their day. Some of it is professional customer service, where you are world-class in your ability to offer choice and endless options and do it all with a smile. But it is much greater than that. It is the kindly gesture in the elevator, the stepping back to allow another ahead of you in a line, or a shared joke about nothing in particular. This nation still has goodness running through it, like a seam of gold in a mine.

2) Change and clean ups can happen.

When there is a political will, change is possible. I have seen it with my own eyes in Venice Beach and Skid Row, where former centers of squalor were swept clean (albeit temporarily) for disgraced Governor Newsom to survive the recall. The futility of this exercise is obvious, but it does give evidence to the fact that when a politician is concerned for their own survival, change can happen. When it is simply inconveniencing or distressing ordinary Americans, it goes unchecked.

To effect change, politicians need to be made to feel much less comfortable in power.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/09/28/bidens-vax-mandate-to-be-enforced-by-fining-companies-70000-to-700000/?sh=1e5a568a1c0d

President Joe Biden didn’t just announce a Covid-19 vaccine mandate on companies employing 100 or more people, he plans to enforce it.

On Saturday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House quietly tucked an enforcement mechanism into their $3.5 trillion “reconciliation” bill, passed it out of the Budget Committee, and sent it to the House floor.

Buried on page 168 of the House Democrats’ 2,465-page mega bill is a tenfold increase in fines for employers that “willfully,” “repeatedly,” or even seriously violate a section of labor law that deals with hazards, death, or serious physical harm to their employees.

The increased fines on employers could run as high as $70,000 for serious infractions, and $700,000 for willful or repeated violations—almost three-quarters of a million dollars for each fine. If enacted into law, vax enforcement could bankrupt non-compliant companies even more quickly than the $14,000 OSHA fine anticipated under Biden’s announced mandate.

The Biden Administration has already started implementing its vaccine mandate enforcement blueprint:

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) set precedent this summer and published an emergency Covid-19 rule in the Federal Register taking jurisdiction over and providing justification for Covid-19 being a workplace hazard for healthcare employment.
Early in September, Biden announced his 100-or-more employee Covid-19 vaccine mandate and tasked OSHA with drafting an enforcement rule to exert emergency vaccine compliance authority over companies with 100 or more employees.
The legislative provision that passed the Budget Committee raises the OSHA fines for non-compliance 10 times higher – and up to $700,000 for each “willful” or “repeated” violation. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not announced when the House will vote on the reconciliation bill that includes the new OSHA fines.
If the legislation is enacted, OSHA could levy draconian fines to enforce Biden’s vaccine mandate, a move that could rapidly bankrupt non-compliant companies. The Biden mandate affects employers collectively employing an estimated 80 million workers.

The Democrats are playing hardball.                      

President Biden embraced an aggressive stance earlier this month when he challenged Republicans who are threatening lawsuits over what they decry as his federal overreach: “Have at it. … We’re playing for real here. This isn’t a game.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/generals-contradict-biden-afghanistan-withdrawal-lloyd-billingsley-0/

“I know president to be and honest and forthright man.” That was Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. Trouble was, the questioner, Sen. Tom Cotton, did not ask Austin for his opinion of Joe Biden.

The Arkansas Republican, who served in Iraq with the 101st Airborne, wanted to know if it was true that, as Joe Biden said last month in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, no senior military officer advised him to leave troops behind in Afghanistan.

“Their input was received by the president and considered by the president for sure,” Austin testified but the senior military officers weren’t going to speak of “what they personally recommended in confidence.”

As U.S. Central Command Gen. Kenneth McKenzie testified, the officers recommended the United States maintain a presence of at least 2,500 U.S. service members in Afghanistan. Gen. McKenzie told the committee he made a similar recommendation in the fall of 2020 under the Trump administration. The general believed “the withdrawal of those forces would lead inevitably to the collapse of the Afghan military forces and eventually the Afghan government.”

Asked about future military involvement in Afghanistan, Gen. McKenzie said the United States reserved the right to go after ISIS and al-Qaeda targets, but “it will not be easy to do that.”

Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the committee his assessment was to maintain 2500-3500 troops and “move toward a negotiated solution.” On the other hand, Milley told Sen. Cotton, “I don’t discuss exactly what my conversations are with a sitting president in the Oval Office.”

Cotton pointed out that Kabul fell on August 15, and wondered why it took 10 days to ask about the continued presence of U.S. forces. If all this is true, Cotton said, “then why haven’t you resigned?”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/joe-biden-nowhere-man/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Unless Biden can reconcile his party’s competing priorities, his presidency will continue to unravel.

J oe Biden’s beleaguered presidency has fueled criticism of the man himself — his history of policy missteps, mental incapacity, and inept administrative style, as well as his family struggles. Whatever his personal flaws, though, the real cause of Biden’s incoherent and even contradictory policies lies not in his incompetence but in the contradictory nature of his agenda and his party.

Biden, despite decades in politics, remains something of a nowhere man, with no demonstrated, consistent worldview beyond expediency. He was elected because corporate power brokers saw him as the only viable alternative first to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and then to the widely detested Donald Trump. These forces, joined by some labor unions and the older black establishment, pushed him over the top in a bizarre, heavily scripted campaign funded largely by the ultra-rich. The pandemic proved ideal for muzzling Biden’s gaffe machine.

In this tumultuous period, the Democratic Party could use a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama, a leader who defines a coherent agenda and inspires voters. Some still believe that Biden’s reputation for compromise and bipartisanship is working, but his poll numbers suggest otherwise. The president’s approval rating, which was dropping before the Afghanistan debacle, is now heading toward the lows plumbed by his predecessor. Unless Biden somehow succeeds in elaborating a clear agenda, his presidency likely will continue to unravel.

Democratic Divisions and Contradictions

Like Caesar’s Gaul, the Democratic Party contains three distinct and often competing factions. The first consists of increasingly “woke” tech oligarchs and their Wall Street funders. They financed “a shadow campaign” for Biden, pouring millions into get-out-the-vote efforts and running media interference (most obviously in the Hunter Biden scandal) for his campaign.

Once elected, Biden duly inserted representatives of this class at the top of his administration. His cabinet is made up overwhelmingly of pedigreed, coastal metropolites (a third of the new cabinet went to Harvard). As the leftist Nation put it in a convincing story, under Biden the Democrats have become, without question, “the party of the rich.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-lawless-vaccine-mandate-constitution-occupational-safety-11632841737?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

President Biden told unvaccinated Americans this month: “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. . . So, please, do the right thing.” He backed up this request with a series of new regulatory mandates, including one from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which directs businesses with 100 or more employees to make vaccination a condition of employment.

The Covid vaccine has been widely hailed as a modern scientific miracle. Yet as a means to increase nationwide vaccination rates, the OSHA mandate far exceeds the authority Congress granted the agency, and if the president can order private companies to dictate such terms of employment, his power to coerce citizens in the name of public health might as well be unlimited. This would both be profoundly unconstitutional and fundamentally transform the relationship between the government and the people.

The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 authorizes OSHA to enact rules that are “reasonably necessary or appropriate to provide safe or healthful employment and places of employment.” But the Biden mandate is unreasonably and unnecessarily broad. As announced, it applies to all employees, even those who work at home, as millions have done during the pandemic. It’s simultaneously too narrow, failing to require vaccination for contractors, customers and other nonemployees who may be present at the work site.

It’s overbroad in another way: Previous Covid infection doesn’t excuse employees from the vaccine requirement. Natural immunity tends to be more robust and longer-lasting than vaccinated immunity, according to Marty Makary of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Worse, Dr. Makary says, there is evidence that people who already have natural immunity are at heightened risk of vaccine side effects caused by an augmented inflammatory response. For these reasons, lawsuits have already been filed challenging employer vaccine mandates as applied to employees with natural immunity.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-brass-faces-the-afghan-music-joe-biden-general-mike-milley-kenneth-mckenzie-senate-hearing-afghanistan-11632867833?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

They supported leaving 2,500 U.S. troops in the country and have doubts about the ‘over-the-horizon’ counterterror strategy.

President Biden hopes the political fallout from his botched Afghanistan withdrawal will fade quickly, but Tuesday’s Senate hearing with the secretary of Defense and two top generals doesn’t cast his decisions in a better light.

The hearing underscored that the President acted against the advice of the military in yanking the residual U.S. force from the country. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie both made clear in their testimony that they recommended that about 2,500 U.S. troops stay in Afghanistan to delay a Taliban takeover.

That’s not what Mr. Biden said he was told. Asked in an ABC News interview days after the August fall of Kabul if his military advisers urged him to maintain America’s small footprint in the country, Mr. Biden said, “No one said that to me that I can recall.”

The scandal isn’t that the President ignored military advice—he’s the decision-maker. It’s his refusal to own his decision. Mr. Biden wants political credit for ending America’s involvement in Afghanistan, but he’s not willing to take the political risk of admitting he overruled the brass in the process.

The generals also undercut Mr. Biden’s spin about their advice as the chaotic withdrawal was underway. He said the generals unanimously supported his Aug. 31 deadline for the departure of U.S. troops. But as Gen. Milley confirmed in questioning by Sen. Tom Cotton, that advice was given on Aug. 25—10 days after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/say-how-is-joe-bidens-memory-these-days/

Back on August 19, President Biden insisted none of his top military advisors warned against withdrawing from Afghanistan on his preferred timeline, and that none of them wanted the president to keep about 2,500 troops in the country.

Today before the Senate Armed Services Committee, U.S. Central Command General Frank McKenzie and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley both said they had recommended President Biden maintain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. McKenzie said he had also warned that a full withdrawal would lead inexorably to the collapse of the Afghan forces and government.

Back in August, Biden told George Stephanopoulos:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But your top military advisors warned against withdrawing on this timeline. They wanted you to keep about 2,500 troops.

BIDEN: No, they didn’t. It was split. Tha– that wasn’t true. That wasn’t true.

STEPHANOPOULOS: They didn’t tell you that they wanted troops to stay?

BIDEN: No. Not at — not in terms of whether we were going to get out in a timeframe all troops. They didn’t argue against that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no one told — your military advisors did not tell you, “No, we should just keep 2,500 troops. It’s been a stable situation for the last several years. We can do that. We can continue to do that”?

BIDEN: No. No one said that to me that I can recall.