RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/15/bidenomics-bidenflation/

We can imagine the White House summer meeting as President Joe Biden’s handlers, whoever they might be, desperately tried to figure out how boost his flagging favorability ratings among voters. Some genius, no doubt, shouted out “Bidenomics!” as just the ticket to repair his tattered reputation. They rolled it out and, well, Americans still aren’t buying it.

On Thursday, Biden’s people pushed him out once again to flog the nearly dead Bidenomics horse. At an appearance in Maryland touted by the administration as a “major” economic address, Biden told voters that his agenda is about “investing in America and investing in Americans,” and referred to Republican plans to reduce federal spending and lower taxes as “MAGAnomics.”

So far, such rah-rah, pro-Bidenomics rhetoric hasn’t convinced voters.

A recent CNN-SSRS poll, for instance, found that 58% of Americans say that Bidenomics has made the economy worse, up from 50% last year. This, despite a relentless tide of positive press in the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, a just-released Rasmussen Reports poll finds 52% saying the economy has become “worse” under Biden, versus 31% who say it’s improved. And our own recent I&I/TIPP Poll found a similar 51% who disagreed with Biden’s statement that his policies were “turning things around.”

Americans have good reason to be pessimistic. Recent headlines, mostly all about the ravages of inflation, and almost all within the last week, tell you why they’re not buying what Biden has to sell:

Bidenomics In Action: 16.7% Bidenflation — The Chickens Come Home To Roost, Hurting Americans (TIPP Insights)
Biden’s Food Inflation Record: Grocery Prices Up 19.6% (Breitbart)
Bidenomics strikes again: Real household income suffers biggest drop since Great Recession (Washington Examiner)
Credit card and car loan defaults hit 10-year high as inflation squeezes families (New York Post)
5 states’ residents got richer, but 17 states’ got poorer, new Census data shows (The Hill)
Inflation rises for second straight month in August on higher gas costs (USA Today)
Wholesale inflation surges more than expected in August (Fox News)
Inflation is weighing down Americans. Many trust Trump, more than Biden, to fix it (USA Today)
In a bad omen for inflation, US oil prices top $90 a barrel for the first time this year (CNN)

It seems there are lots of inflationary “bad omens” these days. At the heart of it all is what we might just as well call “Bidenflation.”

http://www.swtotd.blogsot.com

“I say again, the era of big government is over.”  President William J. Clinton   January 23, 1996

  “For he on honey-dew hath fed/ And drunk the milk of Paradise;” so ends Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan.” Xanadu, an extravaganza, was located in Mongolia, north of Beijing. Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, was Emperor of China. Xanadu became his first capital, later his summer palace. Khan was the founder of the Yuan Dynasty and ruled China for thirty-four years (1260-1294).

We in the United States have not been so grandiose…yet. However, in Washington there is a sanctimonious belief that all problems can be solved by government, that its bounty has no limits. In the September 12, 2023 issue of The Telegraph (London), Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and Jeremy Warner wrote: “The fiscal scale of Bidenomics is larger than Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s by a wide margin. It is larger than Johnson’s guns and butter in the 1960s, or Reagan’s military rearmament in the 1980s. We are witnessing an extraordinary experiment in U.S. economic policy.” The New Deal was a response to a global depression. Johnson’s Guns and Butter was to fund the Vietnam War and his “Great Society.” Reagan’s rearmament won the Cold War. Bidenomics was to mend the nation’s infrastructure, combat a pandemic that was already being addressed, and to fight inflation, a result of easy money, business closures during the pandemic, and rises in energy prices caused by Mr. Biden’s curtailment of exploration and production.

Expanding tentacles of our enlarged administrative state raise questions: How much larger can the federal government grow? White House employment alone, at 524 people, has grown by 27% in the past three years. Is it possible to shrink entitlements, the fastest growing segment of spending? What will be the effect of rising interest rates, which in two or three years will cost a trillion dollars a year? Interest costs are already roughly equal to defense spending. Will defense suffer in an increasingly dangerous world? (At 3.5% of GDP, defense spending is about half of what it was in 1982.)

The numbers are sobering. U.S. GDP is estimated to be $27 trillion in 2023. Total federal debt for this year is estimated to be $32 trillion, or 118.5% of GDP. In addition, state and local debt were $2.1 trillion in 2022. To put those number is in perspective, the ratio of federal debt to GDP at the end of World War II was 117.5 percent. That ratio declined for several years, troughing in 1981 at 32.5%. Fitch Ratings recently lowered their rating on U.S debt from AAA to AA+, saying that “the ratio of debt interest to tax revenue will reach 10% by 2025, the level where it starts to create a snowball effect.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/13/criminals-using-tiktok-to-teach-people-how-to-shoplift/

As the crime crisis worsens across the country, with hundreds of stores in major cities being targeted by mass looting attacks, some of the criminals who engage in organized theft have turned to the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok to teach looting techniques to their followers.

According to the New York Post, such videos appear under the hashtag “borrow tip and tricks,” which has accumulated 8.9 billion views as various “borrowers” share their methods for carrying out such criminal acts.

“Today I went to the mall so I’m going to show you what I borrowed,” said a user by the name of @borrowingqueen. Another user named @b0rrowing.t1ngz ranked stores based on how easy they are to steal from; the list puts Walmart, Walgreens, and Dollar Tree at the top for easiest to loot, while Target, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Sephora are ranked as harder to hit.

The user who gave the ranking then provided additional tips for theft, such as stealing small items first, heading to the restroom to remove the items from their packaging, and avoiding “suspicious” behavior such as looking around for security cameras.

Some of these videos are even being posted by current retail workers, providing information from the inside. One such clip, with over 7.1 million views, was posted by a Target employee who advised potential looters to avoid targeting the same store multiple times.

Mass looting has become a widespread problem in the United States, and particularly in states and cities run by Democrats who favor soft-on-crime policies. California in particular, having recently implemented a law which does not make it a crime to steal as long as the value of the stolen goods remains under $950, has seen a spike in looting even in luxury stores in such cities as Los Angeles. Combined with various bail reform laws that often see criminals released immediately after their arrest, and the penalties for such acts are now lower than ever before.

Looting and organized shoplifting has ultimately cost retail companies a total of over $100 billion, and has led to many prominent stores shutting down flagship locations in large cities due to being unable to combat the rise in crime.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/09/a_call_to_quills_for_writers_everywhere.html

From time to time, someone asks me for advice on writing.  I want to encourage people to write because this is a crucial time in history.  As the scourge of censorship takes hold across the West, we do not know whether the platforms of communication available to us today will be around tomorrow.  The days of handwritten samizdat may well return, and for this reason, it is important that freethinkers spend time recording their thoughts so that others may learn and do the same.

Writing is good exercise for the brain, and through trial and error, even non-writers will become writers quickly.  Most of what I know comes from reading the words of others — which is a testament to the power of writing.

The most important thing to know about writing is this: always write without fear.  The word “essay” actually means “an attempt.”  Our current understanding of the word as a form of written composition comes from the great sixteenth-century writer Michel de Montaigne, who recorded his thoughts in a collection of “attempts” (essays) during the French Renaissance.  Writing is not about producing perfection; it is about pursuing perfection.

Michelangelo said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”  When I sit down to write, I look for that statue and start to chip away at the rock the best I can.  I begin with an idea of what perfection might look like.  Invariably, I never achieve a perfect result, but sometimes I am a little closer to the ideal in my mind.  Everything I write is an “attempt” to reach this ideal.

Writing should be fun.  “I only write when inspiration strikes,” William Faulkner said before adding, “Fortunately it strikes at nine every morning.”  Although I have found the early morning hours a particularly rich time to write, I hardly ever write until my head is nearly bursting with ideas.  I let thoughts collect and percolate until my brain feels as if it might explode, and only then do I sit down and attempt to sculpt those ideas into something worth saying.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/13/impeach-joe-biden-3/

Editor’s Note: This editorial originally ran on September 26, 2019. Now that the House has announced plans to begin an impeachment inquiry into Biden, we reprint it here just to show how far ahead of the curve we were and how diligently the mainstream press has buried this story for the past four years.

Until the transcript of President Donald Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky emerged on Wednesday, Democrats were in a mad fury with accusations that Trump had bribed a foreign government to investigate the business dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

The claim, based on a whistleblower’s second-hand account, which none of them had seen, alleged that Trump withheld aid to Ukraine on the condition that it open an investigation on Biden.

Circumstantially at least, there seemed to be some crumbs to back this up. Aside from the mysterious whistleblower claim, the administration had held up an aid package shortly before the call. And then, statements made by Trump and his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, seemed to confirm some elements of the story.

When the transcript of the call came out, however, the story fell apart. There was no discussion of aid. Trump did not cajole or pressure Zelensky.

Of course, since the impeachment train had already left the station, Democrats couldn’t suddenly shrug their shoulders and say “never mind.” So the mere fact that Trump brought up the topic of the Biden investigation is now grounds for impeachment.

But if that’s all there is to it, why isn’t Biden under the impeachment cloud?

After all, no one disputes the fact that he pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin by telling officials there, in no uncertain terms, that if they didn’t, they’d lose out on $1 billion in aid.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/census-data-income-inflation-joe-biden-economy-social-welfare-spending-3897dbed?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

You almost have to admire the brass of the Biden White House. The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that Americans are poorer under Bidenomics, and the President quickly changed the subject to blame Republicans for rising child poverty on his watch. As usual, too many in the press corps bought the spin.

Mr. Biden is trying to avoid the real story, which is that the Census Bureau says median household income adjusted for inflation fell last year by $1,750 to $74,580. It is down $3,670 from 2019. Households in the fourth income quintile—those making $94,000 to $153,000—lost $4,600 in 2022 and $6,700 since 2019. Middle-class Americans who think they’re losing ground are right.***

The reason is that inflation has outpaced the earnings growth from work. Real median earnings for full-time workers last year fell $3,620 for men and $2,880 for women despite a tight labor market that had companies paying more to attract and keep workers. The female-to-male earnings gap declined to 16% from 18% in 2019, but mainly because inflation has eroded men’s wages more than women’s. Wages in industries with more female workers such as healthcare and hospitality rose faster than those with more male workers such as manufacturing. But neither men nor women kept pace with the cost of living.

By most statistical measures, income inequality also declined last year. Even when excluding capital gains, higher earners saw a bigger drop in real incomes than Americans at the lower end. One reason is the latter group includes many seniors whose Social Security checks are adjusted for inflation.

https://the-pipeline.org/the-column-a-dictatorship-if-you-can-keep-it/

Everybody knows Benjamin Franklin’s famous riposte when asked after the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia which type of government the Founders had come up with: “A republic, if you can keep it.” The constitution that emerged from the conclave went into effect the following year, and ever since Americans have at least paid lip service both to the document itself and the principles enshrined within. Until now.

From the moment Joe Biden — infirm, incontinent, mentally challenged (even in the best of times), crotchety, cranky, boastful, and mendacious, a lifelong pig sucking at the teat of government — took office and immediately decided to “rule” by executive order, the Constitution has been under explicit attack from those who abjure its existence and wish to see it nullified in nearly every particular. Democrat opposition to the nation-as-founded didn’t start with Biden, of course: during his term in office, Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson’s first vice president, murdered Alexander Hamilton and hatched his plot to sell out the United States. Burr was arrested and charged with treason in 1807 under the clause in the Constitution that reads: 

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court. The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.

Owing in large part to specificity of the Treason Clause, Burr was acquitted at trial. Ever since, anti-American rogues have skated. Woodrow Wilson had little or no use for the Constitution and subverted it as often as he could, including his constant odes to “democracy” instead of republican democracy — now the norm on the “progressive” left. Franklin Roosevelt invoked both the Depression and presidential wartime powers to get around many of its pesky provisions, eventually browbeating the Supreme Court into submission. 

Today, the attack on the Constitution is fiercer than ever. Leftists formerly known as “liberals” have all but abandoned their support for the First Amendment’s provisions of freedom of religion, speech, and assembly, especially since such safeguards are no longer useful to them in their charades of patriotism; the Second Amendment, meanwhile, they’ve always hated. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments they view as nugatory and, soon enough, they’ll be advocating the repeal of the Third, although their plan is not to force soldiers into citizens’ home but “asylum” spoofers, economic “migrants” and outright infiltrators. 

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/juliorosas/2023/09/11/liberal-activist-storm-and-take-over-kevin-mccarthys-office-n2628258

LGBTQ+ activists stormed into and temporarily occupied Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) office in the Rayburn House Office Building, across the street from the Capitol building, on Monday to push Republican lawmakers to fund the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) for another five years.

Video taken inside the office shows the protesters sitting down in the reception area, while chanting “Pass PEPFAR now, McCarthy!”

The six protesters were eventually taken into custody by Capitol Police.

Users on X, formerly known as Twitter, dryly asked if those who participated in the protest would be treated the same way as those who were charged with trespassing during the riot at the Capitol building on January 6.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/dennis-prager/2023/09/12/if-liberals-voted-their-values-america-would-be-saved-n1726281

The greatest reason for the existential threat to America posed by the woke/the progressive/the Left is that liberals vote for them.

If liberals voted for their values, the Left-wing destruction of every American institution — the American Medical Association and medical profession generally; the universities, high school and elementary schools; and the military, among many others — could not happen.

This is the American tragedy in a nutshell: The Left votes its values. The Right votes its values. Liberals do not vote their values. Liberalism has almost nothing in common with leftism, yet virtually every liberal votes for the Left.

Liberals believe in racial integration. The Left believes in racial segregation (all-black dorms on college campuses, for example).

Liberals believe in the ideal of color-blindness. The Left rejects the ideal of color-blindness. In fact, the Left claims the very term “color-blind” is racist.

The Left maintains that all whites are racist. No liberals do.

Liberals have always believed in America (without ignoring its flaws). The Left believes America is and has always been a fundamentally immoral country.

Liberals have always believed in free speech, which, by definition, includes “hate speech.” The Left, on the other hand, does not believe in freedom of speech. There is no example in history — from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution to the contemporary American campus — of the Left not suppressing dissent.