RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/05/06/new-earmarks-costing-taxpayers-10-billion-proposed-by-324-members-of-congress–is-there-wasteful-spending/?sh=275a772c5a93

Pork is back on the table in Congress. Critics say that bringing back earmarks was the equivalent of bringing back Swine Flu.

This week, the U.S. House posted online 3,309 earmarks proposed by 324 members of Congress. The taxpayer cost of these new projects amounted to $9.7 billion.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com mapped each earmark by congressional district. Just click a pin (member district) and scroll down to see the earmarks rendered in the chart beneath the map.

The list was compiled from member websites where they were required to post their appropriation and infrastructure earmarks. There were 220 Democrats and 104 Republicans who embraced the “member directed spending.”

Review the rankings of all 324 members requesting earmarks here. Since 2011, Congress banned earmarks because of systemic corruption. Recently both parties decided to resurrect the practice.

Democrats requested 2,338 earmarks for $4.94 billion. Republicans requested 971 earmarks for $4.7 billion. Six of the top eight members requesting the most earmarks and 14 of the top 25 were Republicans.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.coM

In February 2017, less than a month after he had taken office, Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), in a floor speech, questioned Mr. Trump’s mental health. He was joined by Senator Al Franken (D-MN) and Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA). According to an article in The Hill on February 17, 2017, thirty-five psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers signed a letter to the New York Times that stated, “the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump’s speech and actions make him incapable of serving safely as president.” The American Psychiatric Association has long held that to render a professional opinion on a public figure one has not examined is unethical. However, that didn’t stop the thirty-five, none of whom had met with Mr. Trump. We now have a new President. While no gaggle of psychiatrists has weighed in on Mr. Biden, one wonders: Are the President’s cognitive abilities declining, as some have suggested? The truth is, we don’t know; but some, including me, are suspicious that age has taken its toll on the man.  

President Biden has been a stutterer since childhood. According to the National Stuttering Association, stuttering is a “neurological disorder that interferes with the production of speech.” It does not indicate a psychological disorder or mental deficiency. It does not suggest dementia, but neither does it preclude it. Dementia is a catch-all word to describe various symptoms of cognitive decline. Early manifestations would include forgetfulness and limits to social skills and reasoning. In 1988, Mr. Biden suffered two brain aneurysms, but there is no reason to believe they would lead to any form of dementia.

Like those eminent psychiatrists and psychologists who passed judgement on President Trump, my opinion regarding President Biden is empirical, not analytical, so accept my words with caution – a warning the Times did not offer. Yet, to publicly question Mr. Biden’s fitness for office is apparently off limits. In 2017, Republicans like Mike Simpson (R-ID) agreed that Mr. Trump exaggerated and made false statements, and that it is always fair to question any President’s judgements. Yet, there is a deafening silence from both sides of the aisle when it comes to questioning the mental well-being of President Biden. Why?

Why do I feel as I do? Mr. Biden spent thirty-six years in the nation’s most deliberative body – the U.S. Senate. He could be mean-spirited, as Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas came to learn, but he could also be a consensus builder. He campaigned as a moderate and unifier, yet he has governed by Executive Order, signing over sixty EOs in his first hundred days as President, more than double what Mr. Trump did and more than triple what Mr. Obama signed in his first hundred days.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/05/faucism-in-theory-and-practice/

“What is your opinion on how COVID became so well adapted to humans?” Margaret Brennan of CBS News asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor, on March 28. 

“You know, Margaret, that’s an argument that goes back and forth,” said Fauci, who has headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. “A very plausible explanation for this is that this virus jumped from an animal host, a bat to maybe an intermediate host and then to a human.” The “other theory” is that it “accidentally escaped” from “a lab.”

“I think the most likely one is that in nature, in the wild, it adapted itself,” Fauci concluded. Brennan showed no interest in the science behind that astounding statement. 

“All right,” she said, “And as you’re acknowledging there, no evidence. We’re still looking at it. We’ll continue following it. Dr. Fauci, thank you for your opinion and your perspective.” Had Brennan done her homework, she might have found “evidence” that the virus was indeed the product of a lab. For example, she could have asked Fauci if “gain of function” research enabled COVID-19 to become well adapted to humans.  

Gain of function research as Nidhi Subbaraman explains in Nature, “involves making pathogens more deadly or more transmissible.” As the Office of Science Policy of the National Institutes of Health puts it, this research can “enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs)” and that can raise “biosafety and biosecurity concerns.”

Fauci in 2012 cited the risks of such research, wondering “what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” The NIH banned gain of function research in 2014 but revived it in 2017 with no objection from Fauci. Three years later, after a global pandemic, Fauci’s August 2020 “Emerging Pandemic Diseases: How We Got to COVID-19” paper is silent on any role this dangerous research might have played in the COVID-19 outbreak. If anybody comes away from that suspicious of a coverup, it would be hard to blame them. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/05/are-americans-becoming-sovietized/

What ultimately ended the nihilist Soviet system?

Was it not that Russians finally tired of the Kremlin’s lies and hypocrisies that permeated every facet of their falsified lives?

Here are 10 symptoms of Sovietism. Ask yourself whether we are headed down this same road to perdition.

1) There was no escape from ideological indoctrination—anywhere.

TV commercials, a job in the bureaucracy, or military assignment all hinged not so much on merit, expertise, or past achievement. What mattered was loud enthusiasm for the Soviet system.

Wokeness is becoming our new Soviet-like state religion. Careerists assert that America was always and still is a systemically racist country, without ever producing proof or a sustained argument.

2) The Soviets fused their press with the government. Pravda or “Truth” was the official megaphone of state-sanctioned lies. Journalists simply regurgitated the talking points of their Party partners.

In 2017, some university and independent media monitoring centers found that 93 percent of American network media coverage of the early Trump Administration was negative. The most inflammatory of the media’s political assertions—Trump-Russia collusion, Hunter Biden’s laptop was a product of “Russian disinformation,” and Capitol Officer Brian Sicknick was murdered by a Trump rioter inside the Capitol—were all false.

3) The Soviet surveillance state enlisted apparatchiks and lackeys to ferret out ideological dissidents. Recently, we learned that the Department of Defense is reviewing its rosters to spot “insurrectionary” sentiments.

The Postal Service recently admitted it uses tracking programs to monitor the social media postings of Americans.