RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/long-lines-back-us-food-banks-inflation-hits-86817760

PHOENIX — Long lines are back at food banks around the U.S. as working Americans overwhelmed by inflation turn to handouts to help feed their families.

With gas prices soaring along with grocery costs, many people are seeking charitable food for the first time, and more are arriving on foot.

Inflation in the U.S. is at a 40-year high and gas prices have been surging since April 2020, with the average cost nationwide briefly hitting $5 a gallon in June. Rapidly rising rents and an end to federal COVID-19 relief have also taken a financial toll.

The food banks, which had started to see some relief as people returned to work after pandemic shutdowns, are struggling to meet the latest need even as federal programs provide less food to distribute, grocery store donations wane and cash gifts don’t go nearly as far.

Tomasina John was among hundreds of families lined up in several lanes of cars that went around the block one recent day outside St. Mary’s Food Bank in Phoenix. John said her family had never visited a food bank before because her husband had easily supported her and their four children with his construction work.

“But it’s really impossible to get by now without some help,” said John, who traveled with a neighbor to share gas costs as they idled under a scorching desert sun. “The prices are way too high.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3558302-bidens-accelerating-inflation-will-lead-to-bidens-recession/

President Biden was no doubt delighted to be far, far away from home when the latest – disastrous – report on inflation was released. Confronted with news that prices had jumped 9.1 percent from a year ago, worse than expected, Biden issued a statement downplaying the news, saying the report was “out of date” since gasoline prices have dropped 40 cents over the past month. Got that? 40 cents.

The president was echoing a statement that his economic brain trust issued the day before in which Brian Deese and Cecilia Rouse provided “context” for the anticipated inflation read. They wrote that energy and food prices were especially volatile.

Americans may see a different sort of “context.” They might notice that nearly everything is getting more expensive and that despite a softening in some commodities in recent months, inflation accelerated in June.

They may also conclude that Democrats in charge are not helping.

While much of Washington is focused on the Jan. 6 committee hearings, Americans in the rest of the country are focused on how they can afford to feed their families, with food prices 12 percent higher than a year ago.

As Democrat climate zealots push to kill off our oil and gas industry, voters find themselves paying not only 60 percent more for gasoline than they did a year ago, but also 98 percent more for fuel oil.

While liberals debate whether men can get pregnant, families struggle to pay 11 percent more for a new car, 10 percent more for toddler clothes, an additional 13 percent for baby formula, 17 percent more for health insurance, 14 percent extra for auto body repairs, 34 percent more for airline fares, an increased 14 percent on delivery services and 13 percent more for gift wrap. Did Putin raise the price of gift wrap?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18712/searching-for-an-honest-man

Legend has it that long ago the philosopher Diogenes walked the streets of ancient Greece with a lamp held high in search of an “honest man.” His street theater suggested a quiet but dramatic protest against what he viewed as a corrupt society that smirked at government ethics and ignored personal responsibility.

A millennium or two later, the world’s greatest democracy has need to follow in Diogenes’ footsteps, as we collectively walk Washington, D.C. “looking for an honest man.”

America comes to this crossroads at a perilous time. There are those in our nation’s capital and leaders around the world who quietly believe our country is in a slow but deliberate decline, ceding global leadership to China much the way Great Britain gave way to the United States at the turn of the 20th Century.

If that is the case, then our world needs to brace itself for a dark, despotic era, for it was Abraham Lincoln who reminded all who would listen that the United States was, “…. the last best hope of earth.” Despite all of our domestic bickering, it remains so today.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/phony-rhetoric-about-our-democracy-bruce-thornton/

Ever since the political rise of Donald Trump we have heard mantras chanted about “our democracy,” usually in the context of how Trump allegedly is destroying it. This cliché obscures the actual nature of our Constitutional political order, which created a mixed government more typical of a republic than a democracy rightly understood; and was based on a realist vision of human nature whose destructive excesses the Founders sought to mitigate without diminishing the citizens’ freedom.

More devious, the sloppy use of “democracy” distracts from the fact that progressives for over a century have used the camouflage of “democracy” to hide their systematic dismantling of that Constitutional order that protects the freedom of individuals, civil society, and states from the tyranny of concentrated “large powers and unhampered discretion,” as Woodrow Wilson called for in 1887.

Much of the democracy happy talk reflects the global high estimation of democracy,  its “best of good names,” as historian Michael Mandelbaum describes its universal prestige as a form of government “honored and valued everywhere” with “the same kind of aura that surrounds medicine,” and esteemed as “a high human achievement that improves the lives of those fortunate enough to come into contact with it.” Like “natural,” “green,” and “organic,” it’s a term that reflexively evokes positive approval of whatever ideal or policy it’s used to promote.

But such marketing reinforces a false understanding of the American political order, one predicated not on human perfectibility and utopian ambitions, but on humanity’s permanent destructive weakness and corruptibility caused by our universal “passions and interest” that are “sown in the nature of man,” as Madison said. These indelible traits create diverse political “factions,” associations that compete with each other for the power to gratify both interests and passions.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/13/spoiler-alert-its-all-a-scam/

“The four corners of deceit are: government, academia, science, and the media. I had a hard time coming to this radical conclusion myself, as I wanted to believe otherwise, was not a conspiracist, and have attained all the laurels on offer from our current system. ”

Here is the hard-discovered truth. 

The Left, which now controls all the centers of power and the commanding heights of the world economy, seeks to codify their ideology as science, and thereby make it irrefutable. You can’t disagree with it or you are a kook or insurrectionist. You are outside what Thomas Kuhn, called the “paradigm of normal science.” 

Think about it. Everything these authorities tell you is true is, in fact, precisely the opposite of the truth.

Global warming is a hoax.  Universities are about indoctrination, not education. Government is a form of manipulation with a two-tiered justice system. The media is fake and journalism died long ago. The financial system is a Ponzi scheme. Trump did not collude with Russia. The border is wide open. Inflation is not transitory. Defunding the police increases crime. The pandemic did not originate in a wet market from pangolins. 

Joe Biden is illegitimate. Crackhead Hunter is not innocent. Epstein didn’t kill himself. Black Lives Matter and critical race theory are not about racial justice. Women are not men and vice versa. Virtue signaling isn’t about virtue. Religion is not malevolent. 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/13/gavin-newsoms-weird-idea-of-freedom/

In a run-up to what is likely to be a 2024 presidential bid, California Governor Gavin Newsom hit upon the bizarre idea of boasting in commercials that California is America’s true “free” state. 

Part of his ad campaign is to attack Florida—currently run by Newsom’s possible rival, Governor Ron DeSantis. 

Yet, with the most burdensome regulations and high tax rates, Newsom’s California is arguably the most unfree state in the union.

In return for these steep costs, the state’s public institutions, infrastructure, and services are among the country’s worst. 

California’s once-vaunted freeway system is near the bottom of all state comparisons. California’s Highway 99, which runs the length of the Central Valley, is one of the deadliest roads in America based on miles driven. 

Over half the nation’s homeless crowd the state’s major cities. One-third of America’s welfare recipients have flooded into the state. A fifth of the resident population lives below the poverty line. Well over a quarter of Golden State residents were not born in the United States. 

California public school test scores consistently fall among the bottom 10 states. San Francisco has the highest per capita property crime rate in the country. 

The recently recalled San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and his soon to be recalled Los Angeles counterpart George Gascón have nearly ruined their cities. Both are iconic of multibillionaire George Soros’ nationwide efforts to undermine the entire criminal justice system. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/14/cataloguing-bidens-ineptitude-on-inflation/

When the latest government report on inflation came out on Wednesday, showing that it had hit another grim milestone in June of 9.1%, President Joe Biden told the public not to worry.

That figure, he said, “is out of date.” Prices for key components of the Consumer Price Index have eased so far in July, he said. Besides, he said, inflation is higher “in many countries (in Europe) than in America.”

The public would do well to ignore anything Biden says about inflation, given his horrible track record when it comes to this topic. Since prices started their upward climb in March 2021, Biden has by turns claimed that it was the result of a booming economy, that it was temporary, that it was the result of supply chain bottlenecks, and most recently that Vladimir Putin is to blame.

When not making fact-free claims like those, Biden simply lies. Take his oft-repeated claim that Europeans have it far worse on inflation. Even Newsweek magazine felt obliged to conclude in its fact check “that Biden’s statement that U.S. inflation is the ‘lowest of almost every major nation’ is largely inaccurate.”

We don’t expect readers to simply take our word for it that Biden has been out to lunch on inflation. So we assembled a handy chart showing the annualized rate of inflation each month since January 2020. It matches up that record with statements Biden made about inflation.