RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/25/as-they-disband-chop-its-leaders-insist-their-anarchy-that-enabled-rape-and-murder-was-successful/

They came, they saw, they killed and raped and pillaged. CHOP was clearly a wild success.

“CHOP,” Seattle’s lawless Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, is no longer occupied.

The “Solidarity Committee” of CHOP, the six-block cop-free area previously named CHAZ for Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, addressed their “Comrades in the struggle” on Twitter Wednesday to break the news: “The CHOP project is now concluded.”

An important message from #CHOP #CHOPSeattle. Please amplify. Thank you for your support over the last two weeks. #ChopWasASuccess #CHOPcomms #CHOPCHAZ ☂️☂️☂️ #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/7e5ISrWvX6

— Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (Official Account) (@CHOPOfficialSEA) June 24, 2020

“Over the last two weeks, we achieved what no one thought possible. We successfully built a self-governing community and convinced city leaders to enact meaningful police reform, including substantial budget cuts to the SPD,” the committee said of their “beloved CHOP,” where very few demonstrators remain. The committee noted that their morning “census” revealed fewer than two dozen CHOP occupants near the police precinct and only 11 near Seattle’s Space Needle.

“Thank you to everyone for your support over the last two weeks and congratulations on your victories. You should feel proud!” the statement continued, accompanied by the hashtag #ChopWasASuccess on the announcement tweet.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/28/in-first-weekend-of-riots-looting-damag

Looting costs in America’s 20 largest metropolitan areas exceeded $400 million from the first weekend of rioting, according to a new report from the Anderson Economic Group.

“This includes property damage, lost inventory, cleanup and reconstruction costs, and closure-related lost wages,” the report stated. “[The study] did not assign any costs to peaceful protests or demonstrations.”

The report, published June 5, used “news publications to identify where looting occurred…and estimate the total costs of looting between May 29 and June 3.” The report authors say this value could be severely underestimated.

“Our estimates are based on observed patterns of looting in the 20 largest metropolitan areas across the country. We did not estimate costs in smaller metro areas that may have also experienced looting,” stated Brian Peterson, the firm’s director of public policy and economic analysis. “Furthermore, our estimates do not include costs to state or local governments that experienced property damage or incurred increased emergency service costs.”

According to an approximation given to Market Watch by Property Claim Services, damage incurred by riots in just Minnesota could total more than $25 million.

“We hope that those businesses that experienced looting and damage will be able to bounce back, but we know that some will not make it,” said Peterson. “That means empty storefronts and the loss of jobs at those businesses, which ultimately hurts local communities.”

https://spectator.us/where-deaths-coronavirus-wave/

The coronavirus doomsayers could not even wait until the fall for the apocalyptic announcements of the dreaded second wave. Because the red states recklessly loosened their lockdowns, we are now told, the US is seeing a dangerous spike in coronavirus cases. ‘EXPERTS SKETCH GLOOMY PICTURE OF VIRUS SPREAD: FAUCI TELLS OF “DISTURBING” WAVE, WITH A VACCINE MONTHS AWAY,’ read the front-page lead headline in the New York Times on Wednesday. ‘VIRUS SPREAD AKIN TO “FOREST FIRE”’ read another front page headline in the Los Angeles Times on Monday, quoting Michael Osterholm, one of the media’s favorite public health experts. Osterholm had told NBC’s Meet the Press: ‘I’m actually of the mind right now — I think this is more like a forest fire. I don’t think that this is going to slow down.’

The ‘this’ is an uptick in daily new cases from 19,002 on June 9 to 38,386 on June 24. The high to date in new daily cases was on April 24 — 39,072. Since April 24, the daily case count started declining, then began rising again after around June 9. What virtually every fear-mongering story on America’s allegedly precarious situation leaves out, however, is the steadily dropping daily death numbers — from a high of 2,693 on April 21 to 808 on June 24. That April high was driven by New York City and its environs; those New York death numbers have declined, but they have not been replaced by deaths in the rest of the country. This should be good news. Instead, it is no news.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/28/john-bolton-trump-book-profit-over-patriotism-column/3256625001/

Rep. Adam  Schiff, D-Calif. District 28, is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Bolton provides new evidence that Trump flagrantly abused power and confirms our central impeachment charge that he put his interests above America’s.

Last week, we witnessed the reemergence of John Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser, and the release of his book. In it, Bolton describes his personal experiences with Donald Trump and his great alarm at Trump’s incompetence, his dangerous subordination of our national security to his own personal interests, and his fundamental indecency.

In short, Bolton is telling Americans what we already know. That the president is exactly what he appears to be: petty, self-serving, ignorant and utterly supplicant to autocrats in China, Turkey, North Korea and Russia.

We proved during the impeachment trial that Trump withheld hundreds of millions in military aid to Ukraine to coerce that country into announcing a sham investigation of his political rival. Bolton confirms our case and provides additional evidence of that flagrant abuse of power by providing a firsthand account of how Trump confirmed this illicit quid pro quo during a conversation they had. Moreover, Bolton also corroborates the testimony of Gordon Sondland, the former U.S. ambassador to the European Union who testified that “everyone was in the loop.” Indeed they were, including the secretary of State, the Defense secretary and Attorney General William Barr.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/26/north-portland-looks-like-war-zone-after-antifa-allowed-to-rampage-for-hours/

Parts of Portland Oregon look like a “war zone” after a mob of about 200 antifa militants went on a destructive rampage late Thursday night into early Friday morning.

While the police stood by and watched, according to Portland-based journalist Andy Ngo, the antifa rioters tried to set up an “autonomous zone” outside the Portland Police North Precinct using barricades and stolen property.

“They’re occupying the space & trying to recreate another autonomous zone like the one they did outside Ted Wheeler’s condo,” he reported on Twitter. “A separate mob is demonstrating downtown.”

Throughout the early morning hours, the agitators started fires, smashed windows, looted and vandalized buildings. Militants also broke into a bank and also set fire to the Portland Police Bureau’s North Precinct, according to Oregon Live.

After the antifa militants fired mortars and paintballs at officers, resulting in multiple injuries, Portland police finally administered CS gas to disperse them, KATU News reporter Dan McCarthy reported. Only four people were arrested.

The radicals were allowed to do an extensive amount of property damage before they were shut down.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/27/a-coup-against-our-institutions/

Matthew Spalding, a scholar of the Constitution and dean of Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government in Washington, D.C., has written an important essay on the troubling possibility that the treatment of General Michael Flynn by the Obama administration and, later, by holdovers in the FBI, the Justice Department, and the CIA, represents not just a personal disaster for Flynn—who was, for a week or so, President Trump’s national security advisor—but also a brewing constitutional crisis for the United States.

Many commentators, myself included, have described the whole “Donald-Trump-was-a-Russian-Asset” caper as the biggest political scandal in U.S. history. We were ridiculed or condemned by the Left and the NeverTrump fraternity alleged to be on the Right for saying that, but time has proven us right. We were right, too, that this scandal was less a “hoax,” as it was sometimes called, than an attempted, if slow-motion, coup. It was an attempted coup because it aimed to disrupt the peaceful transition of presidential power from one administration, and one party, to another.

That sounds pretty dramatic, I know—aren’t “coups” things that happen in South American banana republics, not the United States? But as I wrote in May 2019, “coup” 

accurately expresses the deliberate effort by actors in the Obama Administration, including by President Obama himself, to assure Hillary Clinton’s victory by destroying the reputation of Donald Trump. “Most Presidents leave office,” the commentator L. J. Keith recently wrote, “and essentially step back from public life. Not Barack Obama. Shellshocked by Hillary Clinton’s loss, Obama, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and Clinton set in motion a series of events that will forever tar his presidency, and decimate the concept of a peaceful transition of power.”

I returned to Keith’s point last September, noting that “the Obama administration’s actions threatened not just Trump and his presidency, but the very processes and protocols by which the peaceful transition of power has been effected in the United States.”

This troubling truth is Spalding’s theme, and he brings together the threads of the argument in masterly fashion.