RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/did_the_fbi_finally_go_too_far.html

On reading about the Saturday arrest of pro-life activist Mark Houck, I thought the author at this alternative site had to be exaggerating. It struck me as beyond belief that two dozen or so armed FBI agents would swarm the house of a Catholic father of seven, rifles drawn, and arrest him in front of his weeping children for anything short of murder.

I have had to recalibrate my belief system. The “crime” fell quite a bit short of murder. On October 13, 2021, Houck brought his 12-year-old son with him for his weekly sidewalk counseling outside of a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Philadelphia. A volunteer escort at the abortion clinic reportedly called Houck’s son a “fag” among other insults and threatened him. Houck pushed the man away from his son, and the man fell. Houck, the founder of an organization that promotes Christian virtue among men, was not charged with a crime.

However petty the incident, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, had Houck seized at gunpoint nearly a year later and bragged about the arrest. Said PR hack Jennifer Crandall in a press release, Houck “assaulted a man because he was a volunteer reproductive health care clinic escort.”

Before proceeding, this sentence needs parsing. The most problematic word is “because.” Houck has had hundreds of opportunities to assault escorts if their offense in his eyes was to be an escort. Although the press release claims two incidents on that same day with the man, Houck had no prior or subsequent altercations.

Then there is the Orwellian phrase “reproductive health care clinic escort.” Ms. Crandall is somehow fusing the “reproductive rights” euphemism favored by abortion activists with the function of the escort, whose mission, of course, is to assure that no reproduction takes place on his watch.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-poverty-crisis-dems-will-never-let-go-to-waste/

Whether hard or soft, the Left operates through a few core tactics. One is “by any means necessary.” Double standards, “big lies,” violence, censorship––all are justified by the alleged nobility of their goals like “equity” and “social justice.” The other is the precept “You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste,” as Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel put it, since a crisis is “an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

And if there isn’t a “serious crisis”? Manufacture one by employing the tactics of “any means necessary.” If statistical data tell us that unarmed black men are not disproportionately and wantonly being gunned down by the police, just keep yelling the “big lie” that they are, while violently rioting, assaulting, and looting and burning businesses for the television and iPhone cameras. Shake down corporate hegemons for danegeld, intimidate mayors and governors into defunding police departments, demonize cops into retirement, and soon you can do things you “could not do before,” like hiring prosecutors who release violent criminals back on the streets to keep on killing and maiming.

Not wasting manufactured “crises” has been the progressives’ most successful methods for expanding and concentrating the power of the federal Leviathan.

One of the oldest “crises” the progressive technocrats have exploited for over half a century is “poverty,” especially “child poverty.” Last year, for example, Democrat Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer promised that expanding the tax credit for children would “cut child poverty in half,” and Biden repeated that promise.

In fact, as Phil Gramm and John Early pointed out recently, the poverty rate barely budged from 2020’, and remained higher than 2019’s, “even though government spent an extra $2.6 trillion on transfer payments in 2020-21.” And don’t forget, this largesse is added to the $23 trillion tab run up since Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” legislation of 1964. Worse, all that money has lowered official poverty rates by only a few points at best from 1964’s rate. So why do we continue this dysfunctional approach?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/huzzah-a-student-loan-plaintiff-frank-garrison-lawsuit-biden-pacific-legal-foundation-11664311394?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Biden Administration has to know it lacks the authority to unilaterally cancel a half-trillion dollars in student debt, but it may have calculated that no one could demonstrate the injury needed to bring a legal challenge. Well, maybe someone can.

An Indiana borrower on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit to block the President’s student loan write-off. He makes a strong case that he is harmed by the loan cancellation and that it’s illegal. Federal courts only hear cases and controversies. As a threshold matter, plaintiffs must show that they have suffered a concrete and particular injury.

Individual taxpayers aren’t directly harmed by the write-off, even if they will ultimately bear the cost. The cancellation is unfair to Americans who repaid their loans or didn’t go to college, but they haven’t suffered a concrete injury. Frank Garrison argues he will be harmed owing to quirks in federal loan repayment plans and Indiana tax law.

Mr. Garrison is enrolled in the federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which limits his monthly payments to a share of his income and discharges the remaining debt after 10 years of payments. The President’s loan forgiveness will immediately cancel $20,000 in debt. But this won’t reduce his monthly payments since they are already capped.

However, it will require him to pay more than $1,000 in state tax on the canceled debt this year. Indiana doesn’t tax Public Service Loan Forgiveness, so he wouldn’t face a state tax liability several years from now. Thus he won’t receive an “additional benefit from the cancellation—just a one-time additional penalty,” according to his suit.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-thinks-stock-market-doesnt-matter-heres-what-he-doesnt-get

Stock markets are crashing, but Joe Biden doesn’t care.

The cheery president is oblivious, even though U.S. investors have lost $7.6 trillion since he took office and we are now officially in a bear market.

Politico reports that Biden wants to hit the road, eager to tout his economic achievements and confident that the “nation’s outlook is brightening.”

This, as economists from Bank of America, among many others, are predicting a recession in 2023 and rising unemployment thanks to the Federal Reserve’s efforts to combat inflation. And, as prominent companies like FedEx and GE confirm such gloomy forecasts by warning more trouble lies ahead.

But then this is the same clueless president who hosted an “Inflation Reduction Party” featuring James Taylor crooning about drug addiction (???) the same day a bad inflation read caused the Dow to plunge 1,200 points – one of the worst drops this year.

Asked recently about the slide in share prices, Biden said, “The stock market doesn’t necessarily reflect the state of the economy, as you well know. And the economy is still strong.” Actually, the economy shrank during the past two quarters, the housing market is in freefall and an inverted yield curve is flashing red.