RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/a_visit_to_the_national_world_war_ii_museum_is_both_sad_and_uplifting.html

Some of you may have noticed my absence over the past week. That is because I made my first visit to New Orleans. The city is beautiful, although a bit overwhelming, because it hits every one of your senses. However, what I want to write about here is not New Orleans generally, but, more specifically, a visit to the National World War II Museum.

When it comes to the museum itself, it’s a well-designed, thoughtful museum. A friend of mine who is an avid historian usually fulminates against what the government does to American history. His oft-repeated line is “The National Park Service is where history goes to die.” However, although he had a few quibbles with the museum, especially the minimal focus on General Patton, he also thought it was excellent.

The museum’s exhibits are broken down into three sections. In the older building, through which one enters, there are movies, a gift store, and an entire exhibit dedicated to D-Day. In the larger, newer building, the exhibits are broken into the European theater and the Pacific theater. There is also a moving exhibit of the merchant Marines, who turned out to have one of the most dangerous jobs in World War II as they fought to keep the military supplied with food and equipment.

In each section, the museum designers tried to create a feeling of “you are there.” For Europe, the rooms felt like burned-out towns or, for the Battle of the Bulge, a forest in Belgium. In the exhibit on the Pacific, you felt as if you were entering a ship, and then you found yourself in tropical jungles. Of course, nothing could create the feel of actually being there, in the freezing cold of Europe or the tropical heat of the Pacific, all the while see-sawing between fear, boredom, and exhaustion. Still, it raised the museum above being sterile.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/the_truth_about_parental_rights_legislation.html

Considering how egregiously parents’ rights have been trampled in recent years, federal parental rights legislation recently reintroduced in Congress sounds promising, but its premise is dangerous. In fact, it could result in eroding parents’ God-given rights to direct the upbringing of their children.

The precedent for parental rights legislation was initiated by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose bill was dubbed by critics the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. A noteworthy feature of the DeSantis law is that it prohibits sexuality education in kindergarten through third grade (five through nine-year-olds). It is hard to believe that we need a law to prohibit sexuality education for children who, at these young ages, aren’t even thinking about sexuality, but nonetheless it is necessary.

Governor DeSantis has done more for protecting children and our country’s freedom than any governor I have observed in my lifetime. He has been right on education policy on many fronts and continues to take the lead on common sense education policy. But the reality is that parental rights are determined by our Creator, not the government. Despite such good intentions from leaders like DeSantis, any parental rights legislation is flawed at its inception, suggesting parents’ rights are determined by government rather than the fundamental, inalienable rights of parents afforded by their Creator.

Prominent conservative legal scholar Joanna Martin, JD, recently published an article titled “A Massive Transfer of Power Over Children from Parents to Governments” where she discusses similar concerns with parental rights legislation. She writes specifically about the bill passed by the North Carolina Senate, saying, “…what SB 49 does is to transfer power over children from parents to governments. Parents’ ‘rights’ consist of the privilege of being notified of decisions made respecting their children by governments; and they are granted certain rights to challenge some of the decisions.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/3906121-the-law-of-unintended-consequences-how-federal-judges-may-be-driving-up-crime-rates/

Despite the fact that tough-on-crime rhetoric may have cost them votes in the midterms, prominent Democrats continue to double down on calls to roll back bail reform. Earlier this month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) doubled down on her calls for bail reform efforts to be walked back, urging legislators to expand judges’ ability to lock up the accused while awaiting trial.

She’s not alone. New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) has been beating the drum against bail reform for months — and New Jersey lawmakers recently introduced a bill to scale back the state’s landmark bail reforms. Amid growing concerns about violent crime, politicians have seized on the idea that locking people up before trial leads to safer streets.

The problem is that decades of research show that mass pretrial incarceration actually undermines public safety. And a new study from Professor Siegler’s Federal Justice Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School suggests that judges are making the problem worse.

According to one well-known study, locking even low-risk arrestees in jail for just two or three days increased the likelihood that they are arrested for a new crime by 40 percent. What’s worse, people jailed pretrial often lose their jobs, homes, and custody of their children. 

https://dailycaller.com/2023/03/16/americans-oppose-corporate-diversity-quotas-poll-crc/

The vast majority of Americans believe U.S. companies should hire executives based solely on merit, character and quality, according to a CRC Research poll shared exclusively with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Among respondents, 87% supported a merit-based approach, compared to 8% who supported a quota system for race and gender and 5% who were unsure or refused to answer, according to the CRC Research poll conducted for the 85 Fund. The pattern held true across political affiliations, with most Democrats, Republicans and independents favoring a merit-based hiring approach for executives.

At 93%, Republicans were only slightly more likely to oppose racial and gender quotas in corporate hiring compared to other groups: 90% of independents and 86% of Democrats supported a merit-only hiring approach, according to the poll.

“Instead of simply finding the best people to serve their customers, companies utilizing these quotas admit that they are prioritizing catering to extreme Leftists over the people who actually purchase and use their products,” Will Hild, Executive Director of Consumers’ Research, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “As we have seen with SVB, there are real-world consequences when businesses focus on identity politics over their core business.”

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed Friday in one of the largest bank failures in history, and some have linked the failure to the bank’s massive spending on left-leaning initiatives.

https://nypost.com/2023/03/17/why-woke-frisco-fed-chief-missed-silicon-valley-banks-warning-signs/

Wokeness has replaced competence and merit across the banking sector, and San Francisco Fed Chief Mary Daly is the poster child of this pernicious trend.

A protege of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and short-list candidate for Federal Reserve vice chair, Daly was supposed to be supervising Silicon Valley Bank but apparently was too busy playing politics and pushing woke agendas to regulate rogue banks like SVB, the second-biggest bank failure on record.

Daly had other priorities, including climate change, George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, inequities between blacks and whites, LGBTQ+ rights and a host of other woke social-justice issues that had nothing to do with banking and finance.

Daly’s Fed bio gushes she’s committed to “understanding the economic and financial risks of climate change and inequities.” Never mind the more existential threat of banks in her jurisdiction amassing mortgage bonds with longer maturities that exposed investors to greater interest-rate risk.

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed rapidly within 48 hours. 

In a recent LinkedIn post, Daly appeared sidetracked by racial justice, writing: “What Black voices have I lifted up? Equity & inclusion begins with me. #GeorgeFloyd.” She also posted selfies with local Black Lives Matter activists.

Meanwhile, Daly missed all the warning signs of runaway inflation, which led to the steep interest-rate hikes that made SVB’s investments worthless.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/how_leftists_help_you.html

Make problems. Solve problems with other problems. Repeat

Progressivism’s response to issues of concern to the proletariat:

Since 2010, GDP has increased 53%, from $15T to $23.4T.  Since 2010, total government debt has increased 157%, from $14T to $36T.  Government debt has increased three times faster than national productivity.  Not to worry…we handle that by raising the debt ceiling, selling treasuries, and printing money.

Household debt is $17T.  We’ll help by canceling student loan debt ($1.8T).  You can show your appreciation at the ballot box, or by early or absentee voting.

Inflation persists, triggered in large part by the post-COVID fiscal stimulus programs the government cavalierly infused into the economy after shutting it down in homage to “science.”  Maybe, but we can blame it all on Russia.

Recent bank failures have occurred, due in part to Fed-mandated interest rate hikes instituted to combat the inflation it helped start in the first place.  We’re on it.  We’ll bail them out, probably with your money, especially if they funded the Tech industry…big Democrat donors.

Middle-class share of the U.S. aggregate income has fallen from 62% in 1970 to 43% in 2018.  Yes, but we’ll continue to send blue-collar manufacturing jobs to Asia.  Let them be responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, not us.  And since most of the ultra-wealthy in the nation are now of the left, we’re no longer too concerned with income inequality.

Health care costs amount to 18% of GDP, due largely to drugs, devices, and end-of-life care.  Assuring universal access to health care through Medicaid expansion will somehow take care of that.

We have no border security…but lots of new potential Democratic voters.

College dropout rates are around 40%.  A lot of degrees now awarded don’t have any marketplace relevance anyway.  It’s all about indoctrination.

Male labor force participation rate has fallen from 86% in 1950 to 68% in 2022.  Only natural.  As we have evolved from a manufacturing-based to an information-based society, we now have a female-based workforce.  A man’s place is now in the home.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19501/the-white-house-is-whistling-past-america-bank

Once I built a railroad, I made it run
Made it race against time
Once I built a railroad, now it’s done
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower up to the sun
Brick and rivet and lime
Once I built a tower, now it’s done
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Written by E. Y. Harburg and Jay Gorney during the height of 1930s, the song became America’s grim national anthem during The Great Depression.

As we watch the instability of our banking system unfold, those 90 year old lyrics may be more relevant than we wish to acknowledge.

Part of today’s banking crisis was instigated by the Federal Reserve whose micro-management of interest rates created a balance sheet gap for some regional banks, institutions that have played a crucial role in powering our economy by working with small and middle size businesses.

Another lit fuse in this crisis is a White House that has allowed crypto currency to be considered a genuine part of our economy. It is not. It is little more than a digital set of zeroes and ones with illusionary value, dictated hourly by an online marketplace. Then there is Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellin, who is currently engaging in a national theatrical performance seeking to convince Americans the banking system is secure. Her performance on and off stage leaves much to be desired.

https://www.city-journal.org/california-victimhood-forever

In December 2022, California’s nine-member Reparations Task Force, formed by Governor Gavin Newsom two years earlier, estimated that, if a reparations program were ever adopted, each black person in the state descended from slaves could receive as much as $223,200 in compensation for past injustice. The projected total cost, to California taxpayers, could reach $569 billion—almost two and a half times the state’s current budget. The task force is due to give its final recommendations in June 2023, including the exact monetary amount of compensation. “We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” said one task-force member.

And yet: California was never a slave state. It entered the Union as a free state in 1850 after its acquisition from Mexico, which had banned slavery in 1837. So the task force, while dictating that only descendants of slaves can receive payouts, has focused on housing discrimination that took place between 1933 and 1977, a period beginning 68 years after slavery was abolished in the United States. But this is just a baseline. Other areas—mass incarceration, forced sterilization, unjust property seizures, and devaluation of businesses—might warrant “future deliberation.”

Lawmakers in Democratic-controlled states such as Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Oregon have similarly introduced (or hoped to revive) proposals to study reparations; so far, only California has successfully advanced the cause. Its work could become a model not only for other states but also for a federal reparations plan. Meantime, San Francisco has introduced its own reparations initiative and has proposed a $5 million payment to each black resident.

California Democrats’ intention to pursue racially targeted financial payouts could prove politically risky.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/san-francisco-board-of-supervisors-endorses-race-reparations-to-cost-each-non-black-family-600000/

The slave state of San Francisco is moving forward on a plan to pay reparations for generations of slavery under the Bay Area Confederacy. And all it will take is $600,000 from every non-black family in the area.

“San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee submitted a proposal to the city’s Human Rights Commission that would pay every eligible African American adult living in San Francisco $5 million. The report calls for 18 other financial recommendations, including the cancellation of personal debts, annual income supplements for 250 years, and the conversion of public housing to condominiums that would be gifted to recipients.”

The cost, “presented on a per-household basis, will be nearly $600,000 per non–African American San Francisco household.”

And that’s a conservative estimate.

The major cost component of the proposal is the $5 million payment for each eligible African American who is 18 years or older. The Census Bureau estimates there are 46,466 African Americans in San Francisco. Among them are about 35,445 individuals who are 18 years or older, given the age distribution of the African American population.

Paying $5 million to 35,455 individuals totals about $175 billion. To put this in perspective, the city’s budget for the current fiscal year is $14 billion, while this proposed sum exceeds the current state budgets of all US states except for California, New York, and Texas.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/17/the-lefts-criminal-abuse-of-young-people/

Democrats have long portrayed themselves as the great guardians of the children. In truth, they are destroying the young. The harm they’ve done to children, teens and young adults has spiked in recent years, from scaremongering about global warming to pandemic lockdowns that have unnerved a generation to teaching them a divisive, politically charged curriculum.

According to ​​an online medical journal, the University of Calgary has determined there was a spike “in emergency department visits for attempted suicide and suicide ideation among children and adolescents” during the period of “social isolation” that coincides with the pandemic lockdowns. The university conducted a meta-analysis of 42 studies representing more than 11 million pediatric emergency department visits in 18 countries, and compared “the data on visits prior to the pandemic with those that took place during the pandemic, up to July 2021.”

Researchers found “a 22% increase in children and adolescents going to emergency departments for suicide attempts, and an 8% increase in visits for suicide ideation,” even though there was “a 32% reduction in pediatric emergency department visits for any health-related reasons during the pandemic.”

And which party was almost fully responsible for forcing the young into isolation? It was the Democrats in this country and their ideological kin in others, with the encouragement and approval of their media department, who placed the young under virtual house arrest and closed schools, houses of worship, playgrounds and other settings where social interaction takes place. No wonder so many lost hope.