Copyright © 2004-2022
Libertarian Leanings LLC
Old Man of the Mountain |
Your healthcare is no longer something that happens between you and your physician. It’s being bought and sold to the highest bidder by politicians in Washington. CrowdHealth is a different way to pay for healthcare which eliminates the need for health insurance and puts decisions about your health back in your hands. Use promo code GRANITE during sign-up for $99/ month for 3 months.
Click on the CrowdHealth image to join!
| |
|
Margot Cleveland, The Federalist: Like The J6 Committee, Fulton County DA Works Overtime To Criminalize Challenges To Election Law Violations
Further proof that the D.A.’s investigation is a sham comes from her focus on Trump’s January 2, 2021, telephone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Democrats and the sycophant media continue to falsely claim that Trump asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes during that call, even though a transcript of the conversation has been publicly available for over a year and a half. That transcript confirms that during the phone conversation with Raffensperger’s office, Trump and his legal team weren’t pushing Raffensperger to “find” more votes for Trump, but to investigate the evidence Trump’s legal team had accumulated showing illegal votes were cast in the 2020 general election in Georgia well in excess of Biden’s 11,779 vote margin.
Yet, in subpoenaing Cleta Mitchell, Willis reportedly asserted that Mitchell was a necessary witness for the grand jury proceedings because Mitchell participated in the call and allegedly “parroted claims of voter fraud.” The transcript, however, makes clear that Mitchell and the other attorneys involved were not pushing claims of voter fraud, but instead wanted the secretary of state’s office to investigate violations of Georgia election law.
Trump’s legal team had gathered evidence showing systemic violations of the state’s election code in some 30-plus categories. Trump had presented those arguments in a lawsuit his attorneys filed in Fulton County to challenge the election, but Brasher failed to timely appoint a judge to preside over Trump’s case. It was those same violations of the Georgia election code that Trump’s lawyers asked the secretary of state to investigate.
Yet in subpoenaing Mitchell, the Fulton County D.A. frames Mitchell’s legal representation of Trump as part of a “coordinated attempt” to “criminally disrupt” the 2020 election results. In other words, the prosecutor is seeking to criminalize legitimate legal challenges.
Read the rest here.
| |
|
Zelenskyy now says he needs another $750 billion.
— TheLastRefuge (@TheLastRefuge2) July 6, 2022
[That means $75 billion for the big guy.] pic.twitter.com/xkz1BgLGcj
| |
|
Mike Gleason, MoneyMetals.com: New Signs Economic Turmoil Will Prompt Fed to Lose Its Nerve
As trading kicks off for the month of July and the second half of the year, investors are hoping for a third quarter rebound.
It’s been a brutal year so far in financial markets. The S&P 500 is down over 20%. Bitcoin has crashed by 60%. Bonds have provided no safe haven amid hot inflation. And spiking mortgage rates point to a potential calamity in the housing market.
As for gold, the monetary metal is essentially flat for the year. It may not be cause for celebration, but gold holders have at least obtained some shelter from broader market volatility.
Gold investors are looking at a 1.0% decline this week as spot prices come in at $1,816 per ounce. Silver, meanwhile, is registering a weekly loss of 6.0% to trade at $20.09 per ounce and is once again taking it on the chin today with another healthy daily drop, although it has bounced off the sub $20 lows seen earlier in the trading day. Platinum prices are down 1.7% to sport a $901 handle. And finally, palladium is actually up for the week to trade at $2,013 per ounce as of this Friday morning recording.
Metals markets are caught between the forces of inflation and the threat of recession.
Signs point to an economic downturn already being underway. It could be accelerated by another outsized Federal Reserve rate hike later this month.
The Fed continues to feel pressure to do something about inflation. The central bank’s preferred core Personal Consumption Expenditures index came in this week at 4.7%. That represents a decrease for the third consecutive month, although the annual rate remains well above the Fed’s 2% target.
The core rate also excludes food and energy costs. Factoring those critical costs of living back in puts the PCE at 6.3%.
Alternative measures show inflation is running even hotter. But the recent plunge in commodity prices is likely to provide at least some temporary respite from inflation running at multi-decade highs.
Whether inflation is truly contained remains to be seen. Fed policymakers may be forced to scale back their tightening campaign if financial markets continue to plunge and the economy inches closer to recession.
Political pressures will also be bearing down on the Federal Reserve Board as the mid-term elections approach.
President Joe Biden claims he supports the Fed’s independence and isn’t trying to sway monetary policy decisions. But at the same time he has been moving to try remake the Fed into a more partisan institution and force it to pursue a radical new mandate for Woke social engineering.
Biden recently cheered the House of Representatives for narrowly passing the so-called Financial Services Racial Equity, Inclusion, and Economic Justice Act.
The Act requires the Fed to “exercise all duties and functions in a manner that fosters the elimination of disparities across racial and ethnic groups with respect to employment, income, wealth, and access to affordable credit.”
That means the central bank will have to veer from its dual mandate of full employment and price stability to prioritize race in monetary policy decisions and regulatory actions. The same central planners who failed to anticipate the high rates of inflation their policies have caused will now be tasked with using their tools to engineer equal outcomes among groups.
Earlier this year, Biden appointed radical activist Lisa Cook to the Fed’s Board of Governors. Cook has called for a racial “reckoning” that might, among other things, include reparations for slavery.
Last year, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston put out a paper calling for “restorative housing reparations.”
If there’s any silver lining for the sound money movement, it’s that the overt politicization of the Fed will hasten the fall of public trust in it.
From falsely proclaiming that inflation would be transitory to more recently denying that a recession is coming, the Fed has already lost a great deal of credibility with the public. It will lose even more if it goes full Marxist on redistributing wealth.
Other countries that have tried empowering central banks to radically reshape society have gone down the road to hyperinflation and economic ruin.
Such an outcome can potentially be avoided if voters force the political trajectory in Washington to shift. But it is still prudent to prepare for a worst-case scenario just in case.
Collapsing confidence in central bankers is an opportunity for sound money advocates and precious metals investors. The more apparent it becomes that the Fed is wielding its tools for ends other than a stable currency, the more people will realize the need for a sound alternative.
The soundest currencies historically have been gold and silver. They remain irreplaceable today as the ultimate stores of real wealth.
About the Author
Mike Gleason is a Director with Money Metals Exchange, a precious metals dealer recently named "Best in the USA" by an independent global ratings group. Gleason is a hard money advocate and a strong proponent of personal liberty, limited government and the Austrian School of Economics. A graduate of the University of Florida, Gleason has extensive experience in management, sales and logistics as well as precious metals investing. He also puts his longtime broadcasting background to good use, hosting a weekly precious metals podcast since 2011, a program listened to by tens of thousands each week.
| |
|
Spencer Brown, Townhall.com: BREAKING: Supreme Court Deals Major Blow to EPA Power
The Supreme Court on Thursday handed down a 6-3 decision in West Virginia v. EPA that denied the EPA's authority to enact sweeping regulations for greenhouse gases that would "decarbonize" American energy under the Clean Air Act.
In a blow to Democrats and climate alarmists, the opinion said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and its unelected bureaucrats could not use portions of the Clean Air Act to make rules limiting how the United States generates electricity and uses energy — such as ending the use of coal-fired power generation. The legal mess decided by SCOTUS Thursday arose from the Obama administration's attempt to wage war on reliable energy sources that, according to leftists and Democrats, are killing the planet.
In the majority opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the power-grab attempted by Democrats to push their radical energy-killing agenda with unelected bureaucrats gets eviscerated:
Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible “solution to the crisis of the day.” New York v. United States, 505 U. S. 144, 187 (1992). But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme in Section 111(d). A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is reversed, and the cases are remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
The Court's opinion is basically a "nice try, but no" to the EPA's attempts to implement Democrats and climate alarmists' "transition" away from the cheap, reliable energy sources that allowed the United States to prosper.
Read the rest here.
| |
|
Tom Luongo, Gold, Goats, 'n Guns: The G-7 Squawks But They’ve Already Lost the War Against Russia
...what I see next:
- Russia will not stop with their victory in Donbass
- They will take Nikolaev, Kharkov and Odessa (Note Russian spelling, screw the BBC!).
- Russia will not take the bait over Kaliningrad, but will cut off all gas to Germany.
- The German government will fall, but it won’t matter b/c the Greens, who set policy, control the Bundesrat.
- Russia will continue to not give Davos the excuse to start WWIII, even with Finland and Sweden entering the alliance.
- They will keep upping the stakes while further exposing the emptiness of their threats.
- The Biden Admin. will keep trying to start a war over Taiwan
- Eventually China will oblige them, even though they don’t want to.
- Bulgaria’s collapse is just the start of the end of the EU in Eastern Europe.
- NATO will either collapse or nukes will fly…. I’m still betting on the former.
- Erdogan caving over NATO expansion means Putin will oppose him in Syria.
- The Fed will continue raising rates while the ECB hangs on for dear life.
Read the rest here.
| |
|
Petr Svab, Epoch Times: Fed Will Soon Return to Money Printing to Avert Government Default, Says Analyst
“I think they have to. I don’t think they have a choice,” he recently told Wealthion’s Adam Taggart.
The problem is that higher interest rates mean that government will have to pay more interest on its debt, which now stands at over $30 trillion. Moreover, higher rates mean less credit and less economic activity. What is already becoming apparent is that higher mortgage rates mean fewer home sales and less construction. That means the government will start collecting substantially less in taxes, according to Gromen. Meanwhile, a contracting economy translates to higher welfare expenses as more people go to the government for relief.
“The U.S government is not going to be able to cover its interest and interest-like expenses, which I call the true interest expenses—entitlement, pay-gos, Treasury spending—they’re not going to be able to cover that with tax receipts, which means they will have to default or the Fed prints the difference,” Gromen said.
Read the rest here.
| |
|
Not one of them!?!?! 🤬 what do we have to do to find out??? We deserve to know! pic.twitter.com/BmVMhQS78C
— REFUSE THE JAB!~ (@ReinstateTrump) June 29, 2022
— Robert Patrick Lewis (@RobertPLewis) June 30, 2022
| |
|
Nicholas Ballasy, Just the News: Rep. Burgess Owens wins House GOP primary in Utah
Utah incumbent GOP Rep. Burgess Owens on Tuesday night won the Republican nomination for the House seat representing the state's 4th Congressional District.
Read the rest here.
| |
|
How do they keep falling for the same shit 🤣🤣🤣 https://t.co/znFF61QjzT
— R.J. Kassam (@RaheemKassam) June 28, 2022
| |
|
Mark Wauck, Meaning in History: A Window Into Who Runs America
Before I get into the main topic, I’d like to quickly draw attention to an Epoch Times article that Zerohedge republished. It has to do with the campaign of fire bombings directed against churches and pro-life clinics across the country. Of course, we know that Antifa isn’t behind this firebombing campaign because Antifa isn’t a thing, as such—if you don’t believe me, just ask Chris Wray at the FBI. However, one thing should be clear—criminal campaigns of this sort require money and coordination.
[...]
The main topic is one that should be near and dear to Sundance’s heart. Red State has run an investigative article by The Heartland Institute that draws attention to the secretive—and, by normal standards, conflicted—dealings of BlackRock with the Zhou regime:
The White House’s Secret Meetings With BlackRock Are a Major Threat to Freedom
For anyone not in the know, here’s the short version of what BlackRock is—with the proviso (unmentioned in the article) that BlackRock is tightly integrated with the World Economic Forum (WEF)—the globalist Davos crowd who are heart and soul behind the war on Russia.
Read the rest here.
| |
|
Denes Albert of Remix News, ZeroHedge: Almost All 5,000 Gang Members In Sweden Are Either 1st- Or 2nd-Generation Migrants
The urban crime gangs dominating Swedish cities are almost exclusively made up of immigrants, according to Amir Rostami, a leading criminologist and professor who based his findings on police data.
In Sweden, the number of gang-related crimes is increasing every year, and as a result of mass and uncontrolled immigration, the authorities are losing control over more and more areas where migrant gangs are taking power.
“It is not enough for many immigrants to come to Sweden from a less developed country and enjoy the benefits. They want excitement and want to get rich quickly,” says criminologist Rostami.
Rostami has divided these gang members into two categories. Disorganized criminals are mostly made up of slightly younger members between 20 and 25 years old who have poorer impulse control, less education, and are primarily dealing with weapons and drugs. Then, there are the slightly more mature, rational, and better educated members who are involved in more extensive criminal networks; some of these members are even accountants, people with degrees, and former military personnel. This group is responsible for a huge share of crimes in Sweden, suspected of committing 40,000 criminal acts every year. These criminal networks not only compete with each other, but also work together.
Read the rest here.
| |
|
Babylon Bee: Weird: Democrats Suddenly Saying 'Woman' Today As If Everyone Knows What It Means
U.S. - Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Democrats nationwide have been accusing the Supreme Court of taking rights from "women." Onlookers have confirmed this to be confusing, as it seems to suggest that Democrats do in fact know what a woman is.
"Women today have less freedom than their mothers!" Nancy Pelosi took the stand today to defend "women's rights to make their own reproductive decisions." Onlookers found themselves befuddled by the rhetoric about the "women's right to choose," since Pelosi should have no way of knowing what a woman is since she is not a biologist.
Trans activists have come out in opposition to this timely recollection of what a "woman" is, decrying Pelosi's "exclusionary and transphobic language."
Read the rest here.
| |
|
Mimi Nguyen Ly, Epoch Times: At Least 46 People Found Dead in a Truck Carrying Suspected Migrants in San Antonio
At least 46 people were found dead in an 18-wheeler truck carrying suspected illegal immigrants on a remote back road in southwest San Antonio, according to officials.
William McManus, the city’s police chief, said that a city worker was alerted to the situation by a cry for help shortly before 6 p.m. on Monday.
Officers arrived at the site of the tractor-trailer rig near the intersection of Cassin Drive and Quintana Road and found a body on the ground outside the vehicle, which had a door that was partially opened.
Another 16 people, four of whom were children, were taken to hospitals with heat-related illnesses, Fire Chief Charles Hood said, adding that they were hot to the touch and dehydrated. He also noted that no water was found in the truck.
“They were suffering from heat stroke and exhaustion,” Hood said. “It was a refrigerated tractor-trailer, but there was no visible working AC unit on that rig.”
[...]
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott attributed the deaths to President Joe Biden’s immigration policies. In a blunt post on Twitter, the Republican governor wrote, “These deaths are on Biden. They are a result of his deadly open border policies. They show the deadly consequences of his refusal to enforce the law.”
Jack Staton, a former senior official with ICE’s investigative unit who retired in December, told Reuters that the I-35 highway near where the truck was found runs through San Antonio from the Mexican border and is a popular smuggling corridor because of the large volume of truck traffic.
Read the rest here.
| |
|
Anthony Hennen, Just the News: Pennsylvania considers welfare reform to keep food stamps from going to dead recipients
Proposed Pennsylvania legislation would require more state agency cooperation to ensure that welfare payments aren’t sent out after a recipient dies.
Awaiting approval in the House before it can go to Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf for a signature, Senate Bill 1124 would require the Department of Human Services to run a monthly check of death certificates with the Bureau of Vital Statistics to ensure Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are not spent on deceased individuals.
“It's our hope that this legislation will help ensure that important public funds dedicated to helping those who need it the most reach as many Pennsylvanians as possible,” Sen. David Argall, R-Berks/Schuylkill, wrote in a legislative memo.
The impetus for the bill came from a 2016 state audit on DHS’s electronic benefits transfer (which the state uses to distribute SNAP funds) to detect fraud and monitoring weaknesses that needed to be addressed.
Is veto a possibility?
Read the rest here.
| |
|
...so the committee can lie about it.
Joel B. Pollack, Breitbart: Ken Klukowski Accuses January 6 Committee of Withholding And Misrepresenting Critical Evidence, Challenges It to Release His Full Transcript
Klukowski was one of over 1,000 witnesses called to testify before the committee behind closed doors. He sat for several depositions, and for several hours at a time.
He told the committee he disagreed with the theory that Vice President Pence had sole discretion to unilaterally reject electors from contested states on January 6, 2021, based on his understanding of the Constitution and the electoral process.
However, in the fifth public hearing of the January 6 Committee last week, Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Liz Cheney (R-WY) suggested that he was part of a scheme to reverse the election results:
BENNIE THOMPSON: … A key focus of our hearing today will be a draft letter that our witnesses here today refused to sign. This letter was written by Mr. Jeff Clark with another Department of Justice lawyer, Ken Klukowski, and the letter was to be sent to the leadership of the Georgia state legislature. Other versions of the letter were intended for other states.
Neither Mr. Clark nor Mr. Klukowski had any evidence of widespread election fraud, but they were quite aware of what Mr. Trump wanted the department to do. Jeff Clark met privately with President Trump and others in the White House and agreed to assist the president without telling the senior leadership of the department who oversaw him.
[,,,]
In fact, Klukowski said in a statement Sunday, he supported exactly the opposite course of action. He accused the Committee of operating in bad faith, cherry-picking one snippet of his testimony that is contradicted by his deposition as a whole. And he challenged the committee to release the full transcript of his testimony:
Response of Ken Klukowski to January 6 Committee Hearing of June 23, 2022
The January 6 Committee falsely accused me on Thursday of being a go-between in a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.
The January 6 Committee needs its false connection between Ken Klukowski and Jeff Clark to fabricate the conspiracy case. It needs the fiction that there was no widespread election fraud to make the case that it was a conspiracy to stage a coup.
Read the rest here.
| |
|
I love this princess stood her ground, while Nancy showed her true colors. pic.twitter.com/17ArfkD3MG
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) June 27, 2022
| |
|
Techno Fog, The Reactionary: A Big Win for Religious Liberty at the Supreme Court
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, rejected the school district’s argument that the suspension of Coach Kennedy “was essential to avoid a violation of the Establishment Clause,” stating “an Establishment Clause violation does not automatically follow whenever a public school or other government entity fails to censor private religious speech.” He further noted that “where there is no evidence anyone sought to persuade or force students to participate, and there is no formal school program accommodating the religious activity at issue.” This means that all religious references are not inherently coercive or otherwise an Establishment Clause violation: “[T]his Court has instructed that the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by ‘reference to historical practices and understandings.’”
Liberal restrictions on free speech and the free exercise of religion so often rely on dishonesty.
The liberal Justices – Sotomayor, Breyer, and Kagan – dissented. The first sentence of Justice Sotomayor’s dissent started with an inaccurate description of Coach Kennedy’s actions: “This case is about whether a public school must permit a school official to kneel, bow his head, and say a prayer at the center of a school event.”
What Sotomayor gets wrong is that this case was never about praying “at the center of a school event.” Coach Kennedy prayed after the school event was over. Sloppy writing reveals sloppy thinking, and the dissent never recovers from this error.
Instead, Sotomayor only continues with the mistakes, alleging Coach Kennedy’s conduct caused “severe disruption to school events.” How can that be the case if the “school event” has concluded when the prayer takes place?
Read the rest here.
| |
|
Michael Walsh, The Pipeline: Guns N' Roeses
It has long been a dictum of mine that, as far as the progressive Left is concerned, "they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit." After their twin defeats at the Supreme Court last week, regarding two of their most sensitive issues (both of which derive from their devotion to cultural suicide, which is their principal objective), don't expect them to give up easily. They subscribe to their version of Islamism or the Brezhnev Doctrine: once they've conquered moral or physical tparerritory[sp], it can never go back to the way it was.
Read the rest here.
| |
|
Mark Wauck, Meaning in History, Die Weltwoche Interviews Doug Macgregor
Retired United States Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor does not suffer fools. In the West’s efforts to assist the Ukrainians in repelling Russia’s invasion, he sees a motley crew. Once regarded a war hero, the Gulf War veteran is now denounced as a “Putin apologist” for his uncompromising criticism of what he regards as the West’s duplicity toward the old Cold War foe.
The 69-year-old strategist tells Die Weltwoche, “At this point, the notion that the Russians would negotiate with anybody about events in Ukraine is simply unrealistic.” More ominously for the Ukrainians, Macgregor believes their fight for territorial integrity is already lost. He dismisses glowing reports of Ukrainian tactical victories as a politically concocted “fiction.”
Read the rest here.
| |
|
Mary Beth Pfeiffer, Rescue.Substack: The Heroic Dr. Jones & the Gift of a Boy's Life
Dr. Charles Ray Jones was eighty-seven years old and in his waning days of doctoring when Troy Murphy became his patient in late 2016. Early that year, the boy, age ten, had turned in mere weeks from exuberant, active, and whip-smart in school to unable to eat or walk and consumed by pain. Within months he was living in a hospital bed in the family living room. He was fed through a tube.
For his first appointment, this withered young boy was carried into Jones’ office, screaming and fearful of another doctor. In a three-hour examination he was reassured, and he came to trust. “You can be the same Troy you were before all this happened,” Jones, a giant of a man in a sweatsuit, told him. “You are fixable.”
And so Troy was. Two years later, he returned to school in a wheelchair, first part-time, then, months later, full-time. The following year, he started to walk the halls on his own. Today, six years later, Troy is a high school junior who hopes to try out for varsity soccer. He smiles broadly in family photos. He hikes and banters with his four brothers like he used to. He is happy and whole.
Dr. Jones died on May 15, 2022, at the age of ninety-three, from cardiopulmonary edema. Troy may have been one of the last children saved from disability and even death by this remarkable pediatrician. But, among thousands Jones treated from an office in New Haven, Connecticut, Troy was surely not the only one.
Read the rest here.
| |
|