Ruth's Report: The disgrace that is Hunter Biden

FOX NEWS reported today:

Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., called for an investigation of the Secret Service Monday, accusing the agency of taking part in a "bizarre" ploy to protect Hunter Biden, even when the Biden family did not have Secret Service protection. Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, joined "Fox & Friends First" to discuss a new report on a trove of emails that raise questions about the Secret Service's role in a 2018 incident involving Hunter Biden's handgun.

JAMES COMER: There are numerous instances where the Secret Service came and tried to bail Hunter out when he was in a jam, when he was in California and getting in all kinds of trouble, getting kicked out of a very exclusive hotel there. The Secret Service showed up to try to see if there was some way they could get him back to Delaware to his family to protect him. And then with this gun application, there's reports that the Secret Service went and visited the gun dealer and wanted a copy of the application. And I don't believe the gun dealer gave the Secret Service a copy of that application, but regardless of the fact at that point in time, Joe Biden did not have Secret Service protection. Joe Biden received Secret Service protection six months after he left the vice presidency and at the point when he declared for president. So there was about a two-and-a-half-year period there where the American people weren't providing Secret Service protection for the Bidens, yet there are numerous instances where the Secret Service always showed up to try to help Hunter Biden. It's bizarre. And this is another set of questions that Joe Biden needs to come forward and be transparent, not just with the American people, but especially with the House Oversight Committee, because we have a major investigation here and the Secret Service should now [be] a part of it.

I happen to agree with Mr. Comer. The Secret Service repeatedly worked to bail Hunter Biden out and that means a legal body was hiding his drug usage, his consumption of prostitutes, and other illegal activities. That is not what we pay taxes for and it is disgusting. I want to know who okayed it. I want to know why our tax dollars were wasted on these actions. RADAR notes:

Conservative political watchdog Judicial Watch obtained 487 pages of Secret Service records detailing an incident that took place in October 2018. Hunter’s girlfriend at the time, who was also his brother’s widow, Hallie Biden, took the recovering addict's .38 handgun and left it in a trash bin outside a Supermarket in Wilmington, Delaware.

The texts recovered from the laptop make mention of the Secret Service, as well as the FBI, being involved with the police probe related to the case.

According to The New York Post, a specialist within the agency’s Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division wrote to their colleagues: "It’s kind of odd that we were involved in the missing gun investigation when neither Hunter or Joe were even receiving USSS protection at the time? Hmmm."

Another within the same division suggested that "maybe we were asked for a favor."

At the time, Joe Biden was only a former vice president and his family weren't receiving Secret Service protection - but Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton claims that the Secret Service were "being cagey" about what they did for Hunter.

This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for today:

Monday, February 13, 2023. THE NATION is so broke and corrupt, it's using interns to churn out bad copy and we're all suffering as a result.

ADDED: MARCI E-MAILED TO REMIND ME THAT I FORGOT TO NOTE ROSEANNE BARR'S COMEDY SPECIAL DEBUTS TONIGHT ON FOX NATION. THANK YOU, MARCI. (SEE "Libya, Roseanne.")

A little over 90 minutes ago, THE NATION published a piece by Zurie Pope:

If a State of the Union Address holds any real purpose, it is for the president to amplify his past accomplishments while giving a preview of what’s to come. Although President Joe Biden largely accomplished that goal on Tuesday, some topics were, of course, given more time than others. Biden rightly used his speech to alleviate concerns about inflation and corner Republicans on Medicare. But, unfortunately, as the right’s crusade against queer people intensifies, LGBTQ rights were scarcely mentioned.

Though the address lasted more than one hour, the totality of Biden’s comments on the subject could be found in two lines: asking Congress to pass the Equality Act, to ensure that “LGBTQ Americans, especially transgender young people, can live with safety and dignity,” and referencing the recently passed Respect for Marriage Act. “While the legislation was intended as a buttress against right-wing attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, activists have criticized the Respect for Marriage Act for writing Republican religious liberty exemptions into law and focusing on an issue that impacts only a small and wealthy portion of the LGBTQ+ community,” wrote Theia Chatelle in The Nation last month.

We've already called out Joe for those two sentences -- and we noted them when we covered the State of the Union Address. We didn't, like Theia Chattelle, play a dumb bitch.

Marriage equality does not just effect "a small and wealthy portion of the LGBTQ+ community." What a stupid ass thing to write. We were kind when it was posted and ignored because it was so stupid. It's very telling that idiot Theia didn't write of the same legislation that it only "impacts a small and wealthy portion of the interracial marriage community."

See, the bitch is stupid, but she's not that stupid.

And maybe an undergraduate at Yale is the last person to talk about anything in terms of history or, for that matter, in terms of wealth. In other words, zip up your pants, Theia, your dangling wealth and privilege are hanging out.

Entitled and stupid, that's Theia -- a PUFFIN FOUNDATION winner on top of everything else. The entitlement reeks off Theia like body odor.

I was on the phone with a friend at THE NATION who had e-mailed saying, "Please highlight" the article we linked to and that THE NATION was finally going to take LGBTQ+ issues seriously.

Bout damn time but THE NATION's still not quite there.

Maybe that's the problem when you highlight the immature?

First off, Joe Biden made a huge mistake in the SOUA by refusing to seriously take on the attacks on the LGBTQ+ community. It was the victory lap that he took for the 'meaningless' (to Theia) that helped his polling (briefly) climb. Then came more stupidity from Joe with the classified documents being mishandled and people slowly grasping that the original claims put forward and attributed by Joe's lawyers were not accurate. That brought Joe back down to his low polling numbers.

The speech could have influenced the numbers if Joe had spoken seriously about the LGBTQ+ community. No, it wouldn't have won over the right-wing or the Jimmy Dore and Aaron Mates who hate gay people. You're never going to win those freaks over. But there is the segment of middle America that does not condone hate, that rallies against attack on LGBTQ+ people.

They recoil in disgust when they read a report like this one by Daniel Villarreal (LGBTQ NATION):

A Catholic school teacher says the local archdiocese fired her after seeing a photo of her kissing her same-sex partner.

Maggie Barton wanted to share values from her religious upbringing with future generations, so she became a technology and media teacher at the All Souls Catholic School in Englewood, Colorado. For six years, she taught kindergarten through 8th-grade classes. She called the school community her “second family.”

She was fired after someone sent the archdiocese an image of her kissing her same-sex partner. The image was taken from the partner’s social media account, Barton said. While the archdiocese said it won’t fire Catholic school teachers for having same-sex attraction, it apparently will fire them for acting on it.

“The school found it necessary to conclude the teacher’s employment because she did not honor the commitments she agreed to in her contract with the school,” the archdiocese said in a statement to CBS Colorado.

In Barton’s employee contract, she agreed to “personally exemplify the characteristics of Catholic living” and “[refrain] from taking any public position or conducting … herself in a manner that is contrary to the teachings of the Catholic church.” Her relationship violated that agreement, the archdiocese said.

Of course, she disagrees.

“I don’t think that being in a same-sex relationship or someone’s sexual orientation hinders your ability to [embody Catholic values],” she said. “It is hard for me to wrap my head around how these issues are still possible and things like this can still happen.”

This stuff took place all in the time in the past. Lillian Hellman's THE CHILDREN'S HOUR was first staged in 1934, after all. And Americans were bothered by it then -- not the lesbian teacher, but how she is treated because of who she is. And Americans today are bothered by the firing of the teacher.

Last week, when AOC noted the attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, she rightly said of the GOP, "This is the party that cannot pick on anyone their own size." (Words are easy for AOC. We haven't seen any follow up or action from her.)

Joe was seen as fighting for something important -- unless you're the dismissive Theia who doesn't know about life because she's so immature -- and Americans liked that and the polls registered it. When giving a State of the Union Address, a smart president plays to their strengths. Joe didn't. And no one cared. The phony talk of how he landed a home room or accomplished anything were revealed, within 24 hours, as hollow lies. The rating weren't there, the people just didn't care enough to tune in the way they had the year before.

That's on Joe. He had a home run with the legislation and he failed to capitalize on it.

Newsflash to THE NATION, I don't need to hear from mental midgets in their sophomore years of college about LGBTQ+ history. You damn well better believe that I had lived and I had read before I started weighing in on feminism. The ahistorical approach doesn't cut it for me. Nor does having to put in the work by myself. Yes, after we hit over and over for two weeks here on the reality that the ludicrous 'grooming' charges were a revival of Anita Bryant's hate mongering in the 70s, we did see some people begin to work that into their own writing. But honestly, as always, I'm still thinking, "If I was smart enough to bring it up -- me, the dumb one -- how stupid is everyone else?"

I do not understand why this issue is being farmed out to glorified interns. I do understand, at this moment and time, when we need to grasp history and roots, THE NATION employees useless (and elderly) writers like Joan Walsh and Kattha Pollitt but can't find anyone 30 or over to write about LGBTQ+ issues?

Because those are our issues. I say "our." I'm not a lesbian. But these issues impact my life, impactmy understanding of democracy and equality.

And I don't some little simp who thinks they're being brave by knocking something like marriage equality and claiming its only for the rich. You stupid idiot, you deeply stupid idiot.

Rights are fought for and won and it allows other rights to emerge.

I shouldn't keep calling these children stupid. Clearly the stupid people are the one who waived these juvenile pieces of writing into print and online publication.

The article that I linked to by Pope is less stupid than the one he cites by Theia. But it's still deeply stupid. He wants to talk about how gay voters can't or won't go anywhere else with their votes. That's not really the issue even if we're talking solely campaign politics -- which is all the young and stupid can conceptualize because that's all the left media offers as action (voting).

Even if you're going to stay on his tiny island of a topic, the reality is that the Dems don't fear losing the votes. What they fear is losing the money. And they do lose money.

In 1988, a Dukakis staffer was speaking to me and two other women -- all of us donors. She elected to tell us about this 'ridiculous' woman she met the other day and how that woman wanted to help and how that woman volunteered to do this and that and this and that and . . .

It was all so ridiculous, we were told, because the woman was clearly a d**e.

And the staffer (also a woman) then paused for the laugh.

None was forthcoming. As I again introduced the staffer to the woman on my left, I added, "You may have missed it but she's an out lesbian."

Yeah, the party's learned over time that they can't get away with that.

Because lesbians like my friend won't let them and because allies like myself won't let them.

THE NATION needs to stop farming out serious work to interns. If they have no other choice, they need to ensure that they are editing the pieces. The ones that THE NATION have aren't smart enough -- not informed enough, not analytical enough -- to write for a national magazine not named SASSY. That I have to point that out, is really sad. Then again, I may be the only one who bothered to read their work.

Zachary B. Wolf (CNN) notes:

Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, after trying for 10 years, is on the cusp of getting Congress to repeal the authorizations that led the US into war against Iraq in the early ’90s and again in the early ‘00s.

Along with a Republican, Sen. Todd Young of Indiana, Kaine has support from the White House and a bipartisan coalition. He and Young told CNN’s Jake Tapper about their proposal on “The Lead” on Thursday.

Ten years. Ten years and they can't end the authorization. Let alone bring US troops back home.

Kat's "Kat's Korner: Carly Simon LIVE AT GRAND CENTRAL" went up Sunday. The following sites updated: