RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/jim_jordan_takes_on_a_corrupt_legal_establishment.html

On June 2, the internet was filled with reports of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan’s letter of June 1 to Attorney General Merrick Garland seeking information as to the FBI’s role in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of President Trump’s handling of classified information.  That the FBI was given a role in this matter by Garland is obvious from the FBI’s SWAT swoopdown on the president’s Florida residence last August.   

Here are selections from the Jordan letter. First, the opening paragraph:

“On May 12, 2023, Special Counsel John Durham released a report detailing the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) failings in opening and conducting an investigation — code named “Crossfire Hurricane” — into debunked allegations of collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government. The extent of the FBI’s bias and reckless disregard for the truth, which Special Counsel Durham laid out in painstaking detail, is nothing short of scandalous. The FBI has tried to dismiss the report’s findings by claiming to have “already implemented dozens of corrective actions” to prevent similar misconduct in the future. The FBI’s window dressing is not enough. The Special Counsel’s report serves as a stark reminder of the need for more accountability and reforms within the FBI. Accordingly, as Congress conducts oversight to inform these legislative reforms, we write to ensure the Justice Department act to preserve the integrity and impartiality of ongoing investigations from the FBI’s politicized bureaucracy.”

Chairman Jordan rightly described “the FBI’s bias and reckless disregard for the truth” in its earlier probe of President Trump, as “nothing short of scandalous” and underscored “the need for more accountability and reforms within the FBI.”  And to end the politicization of the FBI — under Garland’s stewardship, it is fair to infer.

“Public trust in the FBI is low.  Recent examples of political bias in FBI and Department of Justice operations show that the so-called “corrective measures” the FBI instituted after Crossfire Hurricane have done nothing to address, let alone cure, the institutional rot that pervades the FBI. It is clear that Congress must consider legislative reforms to the FBI, and the Committee has been engaged in robust oversight to inform those legislative proposals. In the interim, however, due to the FBI’s documented political bias, the Justice Department must ensure any ongoing investigations are not poisoned by this same politicization.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/06/02/end_american_gerontocracy_149306.html

President Joe Biden’s viscerally jarring fall on Thursday in Colorado Springs, while on stage dispensing diplomas to new U.S. Air Force Academy graduates, underscores a terrifying reality: The octogenarian denizen of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, palpably in the throes of debilitating mental and physical senescence, is not well. The sight of the commander-in-chief physically falling in front of a graduating Air Force Academy class, no less, is outright depressing to active-duty servicemen and telegraphs national weakness to America’s many adversaries abroad.

Make no mistake about it: Joe Biden is an absolutely massive liability as president of the United States, in charge of the nuclear football and primarily responsible for issues of war and peace. His vice presidential junior sidekick and would-be successor, the cackling nincompoop Kamala Harris, may well be totally insufferable, but this column has argued — and still maintains — that Biden should resign for the good of the country. At a bare minimum, it is foolish and selfish in the extreme for the doddering dolt from Delaware to seek reelection in 2024.

Biden’s Centennial State fall is hardly the only recent example of a high-ranking senior citizen appearing less-than-stellar in the public eye. The 89-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), whose political career first began in 1970 (one year before Biden’s), recently missed over two months of senatorial work while recovering from a nasty bout of shingles and encephalitis. When she finally made her way back to the Capitol, Feinstein, in the words of a May 18 New York Times article, “appeared shockingly diminished.” Since returning, the now-wheelchair-bound Feinstein has required additional staff assistance to merely cast her votes and has apparently forgotten she was ever out of commission to begin with: “No, I haven’t been gone,” she told Slate on May 16. Come again?

Overall, an incredible 68% of U.S. senators in the current Congress are aged 60 or older. The single most popular subgroup, at a whopping 34% of the putative “world’s greatest deliberative body,” is the sexagenarians — most of whom are old enough to receive Social Security benefits. The constitutional minimum age for being a U.S. senator is 30, but the cumulative share of senators in the current Congress under the age of 50 is a paltry 10%. There are three times as many senators in the current Congress aged 70-79 than there are senators aged 30-39. That ought to be alarming — these men and women are charged with decisions pertaining to declaring war and assessing our most sensitive intelligence, among other crucial matters. As for the U.S. Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett is the youngest justice at age 51, and five of the nine black-robed oracles are old enough to potentially receive Social Security benefits.

https://justthenews.com/government/congress/comer-wins-fbi-relents-agrees-deliver-subpoenaed-memo-alleging-biden-bribery

Facing a potential contempt of Congress vote, FBI Director Christopher Wray relented and has agreed to bring a subpoenaed document from the Biden family investigation to Capitol Hill for lawmakers to inspect on Monday, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer announced Friday.

The document in question, an FD-1023, contains uncorroborated allegations that an informant provided the FBI in June 2020 alleging that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, was engaged in a bribery scheme to change US policy in return for $5 million to his family’s businesses, lawmakers have said.

Congress was alerted to the document by an FBI whistleblower who raised concerns the allegations were never fully investigated. Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa demanded to see the document, and Comer followed with a subpoena.

As recently as Wednesday, Wray indicated he would not turn over the document in compliance with the subpoena, but would let lawmakers come read it at the FBI. But a deal was struck late Thursday for the FBI to bring the document to the Capitol, officials said.

“Chairman Comer will receive a briefing from the FBI and review the document on Monday,” his committee told Just the News in a statement. “Chairman Comer has been clear that anything short of producing the FD-1023 form to the House Oversight Committee is not compliance with his subpoena. This unclassified record contains pages of details that need to be investigated further by the House Oversight Committee.”

In a statement to Just the News, the FBI said it wanted to accommodate Congress while also protecting sensitive confidential human source information that often is recorded in memos even before it is corroborated.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/debt-ceiling-bill-budget-military-spending-biden-kevin-mccarthy-senate-pentagon-45db6323?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The debt-ceiling bill passed the Senate on Thursday evening with 63 votes, though not before several Senators warned about its cuts to military spending. They have a point that will have to be addressed.

Republicans succeeded in reducing domestic discretionary spending, but the political price was agreeing to President Biden’s defense budget request of $886 billion for 2024 and $895 billion in 2025. That’s a 3% nominal increase in 2024, and it at least breaks the Democratic Party’s long-time demand that every defense dollar be matched with one for social welfare.

But Mr. Biden’s number is a real cut in defense after inflation. The deal means U.S. spending on the military could fall below 3% of the economy for the first time since the height of the post-Cold War peace dividend in the late 1990s.

No one thinks the world is more tranquil today than in 1999, as Vladimir Putin prosecutes the first European land war in 80 years. The Biden budget shrinks the U.S. Navy to 286 ships by 2025—as China ramps up to a 400-strong fleet designed to subdue Taiwan.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/nyc_law_promotes_fat_pride_and_size_freedom.html

In his works on rhetoric, Aristotle said that a speaker can hope to persuade his audience only if the message is underpinned by logos, an appeal to reason; pathos, an appeal to emotions; and, above all, ethos, the appeal that derives from the speaker’s own character and credibility. On that last, vital count, Mayor Eric Adams of New York City (NYC) failed miserably last week as he signed legislation (Intro. 209-2022 A) banning discrimination by weight and height in employment, housing, and public accommodations.

But before we get to Adams’s hypocrisy, let us look at the grievance of size discrimination per se. Manufactured and overblown by ‘woke’ activists, it stands on shaky ground. Body-positive activism denies the fact that being overweight is unhealthy and upends attempts by healthcare professionals to drive home the message that there is a strong connection between obesity and a host of conditions such as hypertension, high LDL cholesterol levels, diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, gallbladder disease, kidney failure, and cancer. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) says there is a well-established connection between obesity and morbidity and mortality.

By blaming society for the misery felt by outliers in weight, height, or other physical traits, body-positive activism diverts them from the hard work of changing what can be changed and accepting what cannot. With faddish references to “fat pride” and “size freedom” and spurious charges of “fat shaming,” many people choose to reject a rather obvious salubrious solution: adopting a healthier lifestyle.

Fortunately, the new law permits height and weight standards to be used in situations in which job performance necessitates certain physical traits.  For example, law enforcement, firefighters and defense forces constitute categories with requirements that would be exempt from the strictures of Intro. 209-2022A.  Similarly, the bill permits operators of public accommodations to consider height and weight criteria as part of what is reasonably necessary for normal operations.  With these broad-brush exemptions, it’s hard to discern what purpose the law serves.

Now for Adams and his compromised ethos. The mayor, a former police officer who has been a crusader for healthy eating and fitness, ended up making a statement of questionable veracity while announcing the new law: “Science has showed (sic) that body type is not a connection to if you’re healthy or unhealthy. I think that’s a misnomer (sic) that we are really dispelling.”