RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tennessee-justin-jones-justin-pearson-bullhorn-biden-white-house-chuck-schumer-gun-control-b9a4d4f5?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Democrats are free to argue that the Tennessee House went too far this month when it expelled Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson for disrupting the chamber’s business. Yet it’s astounding to see prominent Democrats now justifying and outright endorsing the pair’s tactic of derailing legislative proceedings with a bullhorn to demand gun control.

Next week President Biden will roll out the White House red carpet for Messrs. Jones and Pearson, along with Rep. Gloria Johnson, who participated in the disruption to a lesser extent, and who was narrowly spared expulsion.

Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed at a Wednesday briefing that the three state lawmakers were punished “for peacefully protesting in support of stronger gun-safety laws.” She added that Mr. Biden phoned them and “thanked them for their leadership,” as well as for defending “democratic values.”

The response from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is even more unbelievable. Last week Mr. Schumer and four other Democratic Senators sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, asking him to investigate whether the Tennessee House violated the U.S. Constitution or federal law. These Democrats also go far beyond protesting the expulsions. They argue that the ruckus caused by Messrs. Jones and Pearson was following in the tradition of the civil-rights movement.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/20/sorry-bernie-minimum-wage-hike-would-still-hurt-poor-workers-most/

Vermont’s self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders is a nonstop cheerleader for a minimum-wage hike. Recently, in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, he once again called for a huge increase in the minimum wage. Sounds generous, until you realize it would in fact hurt most the working poor, those who supposedly would reap the greatest benefits of a boosted minimum wage.

“Whether they are greeting us at Walmart, serving us hamburgers at McDonald’s, providing childcare for our kids or waiting on our table at a diner in rural America, there are too many Americans trying to survive and raise families on $9, $10 or $12 an hour,” Sanders wrote. “It cannot be done. This injustice must end. Low-income workers need a pay raise and the American people want them to get that raise.”

The idea that there are “too many” people “trying to survive and raise families on $9, $10 or $12 an hour” isn’t exactly true, at least not for the vast majority of workers.

Among the 76.1 million hourly wage workers, the average earner took home $33.18 an hour in March, or roughly $1,141.39 a week. That’s $59,352 a year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own data (for 2021, the latest full year for data) show that just 1.4% of all hourly workers made at or below the current minimum wage.

There’s a reason for this. Businesses pay people what they’re worth to them. If they can’t afford to pay you the going rate, they don’t hire you and you can try elsewhere. But, as the data show, businesses for the most part pay their workers well.

OK, but, as Sanders would have it, why not just have the government force businesses to pay the higher minimum wage for those at the bottom? Such as $17 an hour, his current proposal?

With ever-greater advances in labor-saving technology, machinery and, most notably, artificial intelligence, America will soon see large numbers of formerly employed people become unemployed.

https://www.newsweek.com/nashville-controversy-reveals-liberals-anti-democracy-double-standard-opinion-1795087

In the last two years, the defense of democracy has been central to the Democratic Party’s attempt to portray itself as the last line of defense against Republicans’ alleged authoritarianism. But as recent events in Nashville showed, Democrats’ alleged fealty to democracy and abhorrence for agitators and mobs seeking to disrupt the legislative branch of government is more a matter of situational ethics than actual principle. As the career of a new Democratic idol, Tennessee State Rep. Justin Jones, demonstrates, they’re only against anti-democratic rioters when they’re seeking to silence Republicans.

Jones became a national celebrity when, along with two other Democrats—Reps. Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson—he disrupted a March 30 session of the Tennessee legislature to demand that it consider anti-gun rights laws that he supported. Acting in conjunction with a mob of demonstrators that had flooded the state capitol in Nashville, the trio, armed with bullhorns, seized the podium and shut down the assembly, ranting about Republicans being complicit in mass shootings. The demonstrators were kept outside the chamber but harassed both legislators and cops who were present. Eventually, order was restored and days later the legislature voted to expel Jones and Pearson. Johnson escaped the same fate by only a narrow margin.

At that point, the national media and leading Democrats like former president Barack Obama treated the state legislators’ expulsion as the only salient part of the story, ignoring the events of March 30. In that way, they turned Jones into a martyr and used the episode as more proof of the GOP’s supposed authoritarianism.

The hypocrisy and dishonesty of this narrative is staggering.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/04/19/ramaswamy_diversity_is_meaningless_unless_something_else_binds_us_together.html

Ramaswamy: Diversity Is Meaningless Unless Something Greater Binds Us Together

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/04/18/fetterman-returns-to-the-senatedressed-like-a-slob-n1688175

After undergoing inpatient treatment for clinical depression at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for several weeks, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), has finally returned to the Senate. He began his treatment in February and was discharged by the end of March. Since being sworn in as a U.S. Senator in January, he’s spent more time indisposed than serving. His absence has contributed to some significant headaches for Senate Democrats, as his and other senators’ absences have made the Democrats’ already slim majority in the upper chamber even smaller.

“I want everyone to know that depression is treatable, and treatment works,” Fetterman said in a statement after his release from Walter Reed last month. “This isn’t about politics — right now there are people who are suffering with depression in red counties and blue counties. If you need help, please get help.”

Now that he’s back, we’re not only supposed to celebrate his bravery but we’re also supposed to forget all about the fact that he lied during the campaign about his physical and mental well-being, and his fitness to serve in the U.S. Senate.

“It’s great to be back,” he told reporters upon his arrival at the Capitol Monday afternoon. It should surprise no one that he did not answer any questions.

It should also surprise no one that Fetterman’s triumphant return to the U.S. Senate apparently wasn’t enough of a reason for him to dress the part of a U.S. Senator. Rather than donning a suit and tie, Fetterman showed up to the Capitol wearing his signature hoodie and shorts, because apparently, dressing like a slob is his thing.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/19/the-fda-needs-bold-reforms-instead-of-kicking-the-can-down-the-road/

When Dr. Robert Califf was selected by President Joe Biden for a second stint as Food and Drug Administration commissioner, we called it a safe but uninspired choice. Unfortunately, we have been proven right.

Califf is a distinguished academic cardiologist who specializes in clinical trial design, but the day-to-day regulatory decision-making happens at organizational levels below the commissioner, and he seems unwilling to engage with them. He has also made it clear that he’s not interested in criticism from the public, even though the FDA is required by law to consider public comments as part of the rulemaking process.

Dr. Califf did give some reason for hope last summer when he commissioned a review of the agency’s food and tobacco regulatory programs. We suspected that the report, prepared by the Reagan-Udall Foundation, would be a whitewash. But we are pleased to say we were partly wrong.

On the food front, the report echoed criticism from members of Congress, industry and public interest groups that there isn’t a single chain of command among various human food oversight offices, including the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition and the Office of Food Policy and Response.

Now, a diverse group of stakeholders is unhappy with the reorganization plan the FDA announced in January and fleshed out further in late February, because it doesn’t fully integrate the all-important food inspection work into the new Human Foods program. 

At a House Oversight Subcommittee hearing in March, Frank Yiannas, who resigned earlier this year as the FDA’s deputy commissioner for food policy, testified that the agency’s ability to protect food safety is hindered by staff turnover, a siloed culture, and a lack of decision-making power. Roberta Wagner, the Consumer Brands Association’s vice president of regulatory and technical affairs, noted that an external study of the FDA has found the agency’s food regulation suffers from “constant turmoil” and “little motivation.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/19/signs-of-the-great-divorce-2-6-million-fled-counties-that-voted-for-biden-since-2020/

Is the country separating itself into two distinct camps? One increasingly leftist and the other trying desperately to cling to traditional American values? Census data seem to show that it very well could be underway.

Last week, we commented on recent population data showing that people have been fleeing urban areas, noting that these are mostly Democratically controlled, and we’ve pointed out that people have also been moving from red states to blue.

But we wanted to go deeper and get more precise numbers. So, we matched Census net migration data from mid-2020 through mid-2022 for all the nation’s 3,000-plus counties (or their equivalents) and compared that with how these counties voted in 2020. Our working assumption is that the results of the incredibly divisive 2020 election would be a good barometer of the devoutly held political views in those counties. 

What we found was striking: There has been a vast migration out of counties that voted for Joe Biden into those counties that voted to reelect Donald Trump.

Census data show a net internal migration of almost 2.6 million (2,584,459 to be exact) from blue counties to red since Biden was elected. (These figures don’t count immigrants or births or deaths, just those Americans moving from one location to another.)

More than 61% of the counties that voted for Biden in 2020 lost population, while 65% of Trump-supporting counties gained population.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/collateral-damage-of-a-smear-campaign-harlan-crow-clarence-thomas-texas-real-estate-americana-discourse-interview-75c89213?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

American politics lately feels like an endless game of—pardon the infelicitous word—delegitimation. The aim isn’t to convince voters that a political adversary is wrong or misguided, or even that he’s stupid or lying. It’s to assure the like-minded that he has no legitimate place in the public square and to drive him out if possible. 

The habits of delegitimation have become so familiar that it’s easy to forget how antidemocratic they are: political correctness and, more recently, cancel culture; the invention of “phobias”—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia—to characterize dissent as mental illness; the wanton attribution of racism, misogyny, fascism and white supremacy; and of course the easy insinuation that any political figure of whom one disapproves is guilty of crimes. 

The politics of delegitimation arose on the political left, an inheritance of 20th-century collectivist ideologies that saw no legitimacy in the liberal capitalist regimes they aimed to overthrow. But sizable segments of the American right now indulge in it, too. Donald Trump rose to power by treating his adversaries exactly as they treated him, and indeed as they had treated George W. Bush: as de facto illegitimate. Mr. Trump’s claims that Mexican-American judges have no right to rule against him, or that President Biden’s election was fraudulent, may be false. But they aren’t unique. 

The impulse to delegitimate is at its ugliest any time a Republican president nominates a judge to the Supreme Court. During their confirmation hearings all of the current court’s conservative justices, with the partial exception of John Roberts, were accused of engaging in disreputable behavior or of holding opinions so bizarre and regressive as to disqualify them from service. In the stated views of their critics, these judges weren’t just wrong; they were bad.

Now that the court’s conservatives have a tenuous 6-3 majority despite the efforts of their defamers, the work of delegitimation has broadened to sitting justices and the court itself. Some recent headlines: “Supreme Court Term Begins Amid Questions about Its Legitimacy” (Washington Post), “Is the Supreme Court Facing a Legitimacy Crisis?” (New York Times), “The Supreme Court Is Fighting Over Its Own Legitimacy” (CNN). These and similar stories are manifestly intended to precipitate the “legitimacy crisis” they pretend to report.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

There is a sentence in P.G. Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves, in which Bertie Wooster speaks to Jeeves, that reminds me of today’s listening-challenged politicians and pundits: “On the occasion when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across the primaeval swamp…the clan has a tendency to ignore me.” Like Wodehouse’s Aunt Agatha, today’s politicians bellow and do not listen; so, concerns, if they are not of the woke variety, are ignored.

What have we become? Today’s transgender movement, with a biological male winning ‘woman of the year’ and with trans women athletes competing against biological females, is like watching a 1950s Hasty Pudding show. John Kerry and his crowd, in preaching of an impending climate apocalypse, remind us of a mythological Zeus hurling lightning bolts from atop Mount Olympus. Diversity, equity, and inclusion pronouncements could have been taken from Mad Magazine. Separate and segregated college graduation ceremonies are reminiscent of Jim Crow days: Dean Karayanis of The New York Sun recently wrote “that three dozen institutions from Yale to Ohio State are returning us to the days when ‘mixing the races’ was a secular sin, implementing policies that would make the most avowed Confederate grin.” Race and gender outrank merit in college selection and corporate advancement. Minorities, women, and the LBGTQ communities are told they are victims, and that they cannot rise above that appellation.

Political arrests and prosecutions remind us of Stalin’s Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man, and I will show you the crime.” Mass shootings elicit the expected response from the usual suspects: a Second Amendment defense from the right and more regulated sales of guns from the left. Ignored are the estimated 450 million guns already out there, many of them illegally acquired; gun safety rules, which in my youth came with the ownership of a firearm, are never mentioned by elected officials, and neither is the disturbing emotional behavior of most shooters as a possible cause. Declining birthrates will bring future demographic challenges, as the work force shrinks and the ranks of retirees expand. But progressives are focused on the right to abortion, at any time and any place. School choice is “fine for me but not for thee.” Families have disappeared into the maws of politicized governmental ‘communities,’ which encourage a lack of individual responsibility and accountability and that discourage the dignity of work and the benefits of personal independence. Future generations will wonder at today’s absurdities when preferred progressives’ ends were used to justify regressive means. In this overly sensitive world, there is no laughter.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/they_fear_you.html

Long before the Department of Homeland Security attempted to justify the formal recognition of a “Disinformation Czar” to monitor Americans’ speech or news broke that the State Department had been using a foreign organization called the Global Disinformation Index to censor conservative voices here at home, it was clear that the war for free speech had begun.  For years, conservative websites struggled to survive financially as shadowbans and stealth blacklisting eliminated advertising revenues and throttled user engagement.  Online trolls infiltrated comment sections posting inflammatory content that could be used as false flag justifications to legally threaten or otherwise punish conservative forums.  Conservative content creators and their readers strenuously objected to the organized censorship war being waged against them, but few politicians, reporters, or pundits cared.

Now the cat is out of the bag, and neither government agencies nor their corporate co-conspirators are hiding their embrace of viewpoint discrimination.  The FBI continues to flag more language — including words as innocuous as “red pill,” “based,” and “Chad” — as extremist rhetoric.  Google blocked Right Side Broadcasting Network from covering President Trump’s Democrat-engineered Manhattan arraignment on YouTube, claiming that the censorship was necessary to combat “elections misinformation.”  A revolving door now exists to fill social media companies with employees from the ranks of the FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security.  Meanwhile, Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum has announced the hiring of millions of “information warriors” tasked with the mission to “seize control of the Internet” and serve as “digital first-responders” combating “misinformation.”  Already in France, one woman faces a $13,000 fine for calling King Macron “filth” on Facebook.  

As the American Uniparty’s collaboration with Schwab’s Marxist globalists continues to grow, expect these serious violations of the First Amendment’s protections for free speech to proliferate.  After all, in a remarkable display of political and bureaucratic goose-stepping, the District of Corruption’s occupying workforce has been nearly unanimous in its enthusiastic support for and adoration of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and his “new Western democracy.”  No matter how many jackboots Zelensky sends to shut down churches, crush opposing political parties, or silence dissenting citizens, the bombastic Washington despots who endlessly chirp about “Western virtues” are the same ones proclaiming their full-throated support for the worst kinds of tyranny.  Welcome to the “new America,” where ruling-class contempt for freedom is no longer disguised.