RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-admin-telling-refugee-groups-to-prep-for-50k-afghans-without-visas/

The Biden administration has reportedly told refugee resettlement organizations across the U.S. to prepare to assist as many as 50,000 Afghans who will be arriving to the U.S. in the coming weeks without visas.

The U.S. government has not provided exact figures on how many Afghans the organizations should expect to help or how quickly they will arrive, said leaders from some of the nine nonprofit organizations that are contracted with the U.S. State Department to assist refugees with finding homes, jobs and other social services, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The groups have not been told which of the impending arrivals will come with approved Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) that will allow them to receive a slew of services, including months of healthcare and food assistance. 

For Afghans who arrive without visas, resettlement will rely instead on private donations, the report says. These people will be allowed to enter the U.S. as part of an immigration program known as humanitarian parole that grants people temporary permission to enter the country. 

People who enter under humanitarian parole are not entitled to resettlement benefits set aside for formal refugees. 

“We’re going to make it work, no matter how difficult, but I’d be lying to you if I said we aren’t concerned,” Mark Hetfield, president of HIAS, one of the contracted resettlement agencies, told the Journal.

https://www.nationalreview.com/author/joel-zinberg/

Progressives remain unconcerned with the eviction moratorium’s impact on small landlords.

Late last week the U.S. Supreme Court vacated a stay on a lower-court decision that struck down the Biden administration’s extension of the CDC’s nationwide eviction moratorium. Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed the Court’s decision was “cruel” and that it “immorally ripped away” tenant protections. But who is really cruel here? Neither Pelosi nor her progressive colleagues seem at all concerned about the plight of small landlords whose pandemic losses have been exacerbated by the moratorium combined with government ineptitude and indifference.

Yet, as the Court observed, “many landlords have modest means,” and millions of them around the country are “at risk of irreparable harm by depriving them of rent payments with no guarantee of eventual recovery.” A CBS Evening News story described one of them.

Brandie LaCasse, a veteran and single mother, has effectively been rendered homeless by tenants who refuse to leave her upstate New York house or pay rent. Despite more than $23,000 in arrears, LaCasse couldn’t evict her tenant because of federal and state eviction moratoriums. She and her daughter have been forced to live out of her car or stay with friends. Meanwhile, the tenant’s complaints about her own family’s health and financial travails make it clear that LaCasse is unlikely ever to collect any of the back the rent due.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/31/bidens-presidency-is-already-a-total-disaster-and-its-all-his-own-fault/

President Biden is not being swept along by the currents of history, he is turning every challenge he faces into crisis and disaster.

The first seven months of Joe Biden’s presidency have been fraught with crises. First it was the coronavirus pandemic and the vaccine rollout. Then it was the border crisis. Then it was the economy.

And now Afghanistan, where the Taliban are now reportedly hanging people by the neck from U.S.-supplied Blackhawk helicopters, and the U.S. withdrawal has left behind hundreds of Americans and perhaps thousands of Green Card holders in what now amounts to the largest hostage crisis in American history.

The administration is stumbling from one disaster to the next, with no end in sight and public opinion plummeting on nearly every major issue. In each case, the disaster has been entirely of the Biden administration’s own making. Events are not overtaking Biden, his own rank incompetence is.

(Just about the only disaster facing Biden right now that’s not a result of his administration’s policies is the hurricane slamming into the Gulf Coast. But there’s a decent chance he might well botch that, too.)

The events now unfolding in Afghanistan, where the Taliban control about $83 billion worth of U.S. military equipment, are by far the most dramatic and disturbing display of incompetency and horrible policy from the Biden administration, which recent polling reflects. But the Afghanistan disaster follows a train of incompetence that left the station on day one of this presidency.

As soon as Biden came into office, he signed executive orders that guaranteed we would have a migrant crisis on our southwest border. By reversing a raft of Trump-era policies that had managed to control illegal immigration amid a worsening pandemic, Biden effectively opened the borders, sending the message to would-be asylum seekers that if they could manage to get across the Rio Grande with at least one child in tow, they could stay — and if they sent their child alone, he or she would definitely stay.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/grim-rise-antivax-death-local-news-stories/

America is a porned-out society. Half of young men and a fifth of young women admit to viewing porn in the past week (millions more do so and then lie to pollsters about it). Prestige cable shows such as Game of Thrones built their popularity through a bevy of brazenly-displayed breasts. The best-selling book of the 2010s was an erotic BDSM novel; the second and third-place spots were taken by its sequels. And the concept of a quick, dirty, cheap high extends outside the domain of sex, which is why the world has food porn, architecture porn, and military porn.

And now, enter a new genre: COVID-19 death porn.

On Saturday, the Daytona Beach News-Journal noted the death of radio host Marc Bernier after a three-week battle with COVID. Bernier, the paper observed, was ‘an outspoken opponent of vaccinations’. The death of a local radio host might normally be a local story, but this one quickly went national. Many publications noted that Bernier was the third unvaccinated radio host to be stricken down in a single month, following fellow Floridian Dick Farrel and Tennessee veteran Phil Valentine.

Cockburn will concede that when a public figure stakes their life on a certain medical opinion and dies a preventable death as a result, the irony is enough to merit a news story. But he would be remiss if he didn’t observe that standards for this sort of thing seem a tad inconsistent. Losing weight is another entirely controllable way to reduce COVID risk, too, but the same publications that gloat over dead vaccine skeptics have published a Pravda’s worth of takes explaining that COVID-related fat shaming is not funny and not OK.

Plus, more than one article has lurched from an appreciation of public irony into thinly-disguised glee at the death of the unbelievers. A Sunday piece in the Hill with 40,000 Facebook shares absolutely glories in the demise of its subject, while also making it clear his real crimes weren’t vaccine-related at all:

‘Caleb Wallace, 30, who created the San Angelo Freedom Defenders, a group that held a rally to combat ‘COVID-19 tyranny’, died after spending more than a month in the hospital, according to a message posted by his wife, Jessica Wallace, on a GoFundMe page to raise money to cover his hospital bills.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/08/quisling-conservatives-and-the-implacable-left/

EXCERPTS- “It goes against the grain, but the sad fact is that civility is wasted on so-called progressives, who decline to respond in kind. Going along to get along, as did so many in lamenting Donald Trump’s abrasive vulgarity, brought us what exactly? A drooling fool in the Oval Office and all the failures now and to come that his handlers feed into the presidential TelePrompter”

I am not talking about those on the postmodern Left. Nothing can be expected of them but wall to wall dross. I am talking about commentators at various distances rightwards from the centre. They couldn’t help themselves. His policies were good but he was such a “braggard,” “liar,” “buffoon,” etc., etc. Relentlessly, on it went. And it added up.

Sure, players in Australia played only a small part, as did those in the UK and Europe, in tearing the man down. The main game was played out in America. Nevertheless, every bit contributed. Are we about to hear abject mea culpas from those who played their part in giving America a president so mentally unfit for office it defies belief? Don’t hold your breath. Almost all, if not all, of the snipers are know-it-alls.

I didn’t find Trump’s demeanour the least offensive. Was he different? Of course, he was. Without his gigantic personality, reflected in his self-belief, called narcissism by some, how could he ever have survived being dumped upon each minute of every day.

How could he have ever moved the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and forged pacts between Israel and numbers of its neighbouring Arab countries? How could he have let loose oil and gas exploration in this time of morbid climate hysteria? Slashed job-killing taxes and regulations. Started building that wall without congressional support? No other Republic president could have done those things. Think of Bush senior and junior.

Those who position themselves right of centre need to take a grip. They’ve already played their part in ridding us of a unique and powerful champion and given us a drooling fool as a replacement. A first step towards redemption is to admit culpability. Join a self-help group for quisling conservatives.