RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-recession-predictions-begin/

Yesterday, Deutsche Bank became the first major bank to forecast a recession in 2023. Economists David Folkerts-Landau and Peter Hooper predicted that the Fed’s raising interest rates to control inflation will cause a recession next year and bump the unemployment rate up to 4.9 percent in 2024 (it’s at 3.6 percent currently). “Our call for a recession in the U.S. next year is currently way out of consensus,” they wrote. “We expect it will not be so for long.”

A Bloomberg survey of financial professionals and investors indicates that the view is becoming more widespread. Only 15 percent predict a recession this year, but 48 percent predict one next year. They are concerned mostly about the inversion in the yield curve for two-year versus ten-year Treasury bonds, which means the two-year bond has a higher yield than the ten-year bond. A yield-curve inversion has come before every recent recession (although the exact causal connection between the two isn’t totally clear).

Larry Summers took to the pages of the Washington Post yesterday to give his prognosis, which is similarly negative:

There is a first time for everything, but over the past 75 years, every time inflation has exceeded 4 percent and unemployment has been below 5 percent, the U.S. economy has gone into recession within two years. Today, inflation is north of 6 percent and unemployment is south of 4 percent.

He sees the Fed as “dangerously behind the curve” (a view that Scott Sumner shares). Summers is not convinced that inflation will return to an acceptable level largely on its own, which seems to be the Fed’s view based on its forecasts and projected rate hikes that are relatively modest by historical standards. He writes that “there can be no real question but that the American job market is unsustainably hot and in need of restraint” and that this hot job market is raising demand and prices.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/05/laptop-dancing/

Establishment media now acknowledge that Hunter Biden’s laptop, which contains information about his dealings with China and connections to “the Big Guy,” has no existential problem. Before the 2020 election, some observers now recall, 51 former intelligence officials proclaimed the laptop was only “Russian disinformation,” and not a single one has now admitted that Biden’s laptop was, in fact, genuine. That refusal is the true bombshell revelation. 

The signatories to the October 19, 2020 statement suggesting it was disinformation include former CIA directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta, and Michael Hayden, as well as former acting CIA directors Mike Morell and John McLaughlin, a host of former CIA officers, National Security Agency officials, and former director of national intelligence James Clapper. The statement adds that “nine additional former IC officers who cannot be named publicly also support the arguments in this letter,” which closes out: “it is high time that Russia stops interfering in our democracy.” 

For all but the willfully blind, this is a repetition of the Russia hoax, proclaimed by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and found false by Robert Mueller’s investigation. As this repetition shows, the vaunted “intelligence community,” like the upper reaches of the FBI and Justice Department, is now a partisan force for the Democrats. True to form, the CIA has also revealed itself as another woke bureaucracy that stands more for “Cisgender Intersectional Agitprop” than proven service on the intelligence front.   

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/russian-war-crimes-are-condemnable-but-not-by-the-international-criminal-court/

The ICC is an enterprise antithetical to the Constitution and national defense, and our government should never facilitate its mission and operations.

In an editorial published Monday evening, the Wall Street Journal’s editors appear to echo President Biden’s call for war-crimes prosecutions over Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine. Tellingly, though, the Journal omits the little detail of who, exactly, should do the prosecuting.

Presumably, that’s because the Journal well knows it shouldn’t be the International Criminal Court — not if the United States has anything to say about it.

The scenes of mass graves in Bucha and other Ukrainian towns are sickening, as are the well-documented reports of brutal Russian attacks targeting civilians, rape as a weapon of war, the kidnapping and murder of elected officials and their families, and Moscow’s troops conducting themselves as marauders rather than as armed forces beholden to the laws and customs of civilized warfare. Against this gory background, the Journal points out that an investigation “is already underway at the U.S. State Department and the International Criminal Court at the Hague.” In context, this observation appears to endorse an ICC probe of Russia, supported by the U.S. government. But the Journal stops short of proposing that, and for good reasons.

The U.S. State Department is a diplomatic arm of the United States government. It has no authority to prosecute anyone. Prosecution is the Justice Department’s job. DOJ, however, has been confined to enforcing statutorily based sanctions imposed against Russian oligarchs, officials, and entities. That is because the United States is not a combatant in the Ukraine war. Provocative rhetoric and military aid notwithstanding, the president’s top priority since Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion has been to prevent the United States from becoming a combatant.

America’s lawyer-Left has mobilized for the better part of two decades against military tribunals against combatants who mass-murdered Americans and against whom the United States has actually been at war. There are not going to be American prosecutions against Russia for war crimes against Ukraine. That is not to say the Justice Department may not apply Magnitsky Act provisions that enable our government to sanction Russian human-rights offenders: Seize any assets of theirs within our jurisdiction, bar them from entering our country — the sorts of things already being done under existing sanctions. But U.S.-initiated war-crimes tribunals? No.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/white-house-alters-transcript-clean-after-yet-robert-spencer/

On Saturday in Wilmington, Del., Old Joe Biden’s dementia came full circle: he has previously mistaken the vice president for the first lady, and now, at the Commissioning Commemoration Ceremony of the USS Delaware, he recalled the days when the First Lady was vice president. But as always, White House.gov was ready to do everything necessary to make it appear as if we have a competent and coherent chief executive: in the official transcript of Biden’s rambling remarks, his misidentification of his wife as the vice president is quietly corrected without explanation. But the correction actually creates more problems than it solves.

Biden said of First Lady Jill Biden: “And I’m deeply proud of the work she’s doing as first lady with Joining Forces initiative she started with Michelle Obama when she was vice president, and now carries on.” In the WhiteHouse.gov version, we get “And I’m deeply proud of the work she is doing as First Lady with Joining Forces initiative she started with Michelle Obama when she [I] was Vice President and now carries on.”

That’s helpful in case anyone actually thought that Jill Biden was once vice president of the United States, but it’s not what Joe Biden said, and the correction blandly obscures a fact that ought to be of keen interest to contemporary observers as well as to future historians: Joe Biden is not entirely in control of what he says. His misstatement here is not just some innocuous slip of the tongue to be matter-of-factly corrected as if it were an insignificant typographical error; it is just the latest in a long string of weird statements that should arouse genuine concern about the mental state of the president of the United States, if such concern weren’t immediately dismissed as tendentious partisan mudslinging.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/04/04/how-justin-trudeau-and-canada-differ-from-joe-biden-and-the-u-s-n1586861

Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau has been much in the news of late, vying for attention with the American president. Although both have earned widespread disrespect, Biden for his costly gaffes and Trudeau for his native hypocrisy, a blunderer like Biden is obviously a far more significant figure on the world stage than a dandiprat like Trudeau. But there are disproportionate differences in their national effectiveness that favor Trudeau.

Biden is a loose cannon; Trudeau is a Black Ops sniper. Biden is doddering and obviously cognitively impaired; Trudeau is relatively young and fit and knows what he is doing. Biden’s tenure as president is increasingly shaky as the specter of the 25th Amendment hovers over his political longevity. After signing a concordat with the NDP’s conniving Jagmeet Singh to create a coalition government, Trudeau has guaranteed his ascendancy until at least 2025.

Biden’s legislative initiatives are vigorously contested by Republican states and innumerable court filings. Trudeau’s forays into totalitarian territory are regularly approved in the Commons and meet with only sporadic resistance by patriot organizations and individuals. Biden is addicted to the incontinent deployment of Executive Privilege, which cannot feasibly go on forever without serious pushback. Trudeau can with impunity invoke the Emergencies Act (aka the War Measures Act), arrest people at will, suspend professional licenses, and exert centralized control over people’s lives by freezing personal assets and bank accounts.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/04/05/for-midterms-biden-races-to-the-center-and-trips-over-his-own-feet-n1587094

The last two Democratic presidents — Barack Obama and Bill Clinton — began their presidencies with grandiose plans to make America into a social-democratic paradise. Both presidents came crashing back to reality when their polling numbers went south very quickly. They began to emphasize decidedly conservative issues like the deficit, defense spending, and law and order.

Joe Biden now finds himself in exactly the same position as Obama and Clinton were in coming up to their first midterm election — dismal approval numbers and Republicans surging. He too will now look to emphasize less radical, more moderate issues.

But the difference for Biden is the party he leads compared to the party Obama and Clinton led.

The party Biden leads is the most radical, left-wing political party in American history. It can fairly be said that the kind of “transformation” desired by Democrats would leave the country unrecognizable to all but the most committed leftists.

Does anyone believe Biden’s lurch to the center is anything but an electoral two-step?

https://www.city-journal.org/feckless-in-seattle

Citing persistent violence, including a homicide directly in front of its main building, Amazon recently announced that it was temporarily relocating its Seattle staff to a new location. The quirky but beautiful Pacific Northwest city—boasting houseboats, good coffee, and great jazz—is following a familiar formula for urban decline.

The first step in that process is to elect a mayor who cares less about the nuts and bolts of governing a city than about an ideological agenda. The last Seattle mayor who paid attention to details and had a vision for improving everyday life was Paul Schell, who served from 1998 to 2002. Under Schell’s no-nonsense leadership, Seattle built a new City Hall and several libraries, parks, and community centers, while rebuilding its opera house and symphony hall.

Then the city drifted into progressive fantasy. Greg Nickels, mayor from 2002 to 2009, decided that he should lead the charge in environmental activism but couldn’t manage the city’s own environment—a 2008 snowstorm hurt his reelection bid, while homeless tent cities (derisively named “Nickelsvilles”) cropped up downtown. Self-proclaimed progressive outsider Mike McGinn, who served as mayor from 2010 to 2013, demanded higher taxes and marijuana legalization while making clear, amid violent riots, that Seattle had no place for police officers who did not share his views on social justice. Ed Murray, Seattle’s first openly gay mayor, began his term in 2014, but resigned in disgrace in 2017 following multiple allegations of child sex abuse. In 2017, the city elected Jenny Durkan, who distinguished herself mainly by criticizing Donald Trump and allowing the formation of the lawless Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in downtown Seattle in June 2020. (Asked how long the occupation could last, Durkan said: “I don’t know. We could have another Summer of Love!”) Following a series of political blunders and recall efforts, Durkan and Seattle decided that one term was enough. Residents can only hope that newly elected mayor Bruce Harrell, who bluntly stated that he “inherited a mess,” will break the streak of ineffective leadership.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/04/heres-some-of-the-garbage-democrats-funded-as-covid-relief/

Now, his administration continues to deliver on his 2009 promise. As the nation’s debt has passed $30 trillion and inflation continues to skyrocket, federal funds are being used to fund…four-star hotels and bailouts for deadbeat dads.

An Associated Press investigation discovered that the $1.9 trillion “Covid relief” package Democrats rammed through Congress last March has resulted in all manner of pork-barrel and wasteful spending programs—most of which have very little to do with the coronavirus, and all of which should outrage taxpayers forced to fund this nonsense.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

The spending spree Democrats passed in March 2021 included more than $500 billion in bailouts to state and local governments—on top of more than $400 billion in funds distributed to states in prior spending packages during 2020. These additional bailout funds, many of which have yet to get disbursed, came even though state and local government coffers were already flush by last spring, as lockdowns ended and the stock market boomed.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/04/garland-feels-the-heat/

If Hunter Biden is in handcuffs before Donald Trump, the attorney general, who will turn 70 later this year, will wish he had opted for retirement.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s swan song, we can presume, isn’t exactly turning out how he had hoped.

Appointed attorney general in 2021 as some sort of retaliation against Republicans for refusing to seat him on the Supreme Court in 2016, Garland, though largely a figurehead, is getting heat from members of both political parties—including the man who nominated him to serve as the nation’s top lawyer.

According to the New York Times, Joe Biden is displeased that Garland hasn’t yet charged the former president for crimes related to the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021. “[While] the president has never communicated his frustrations directly to Mr. Garland, he has said privately that he wanted Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6.,” the Times reported over the weekend. 

Although the Times attempted to portray Biden as hands-off when it comes to the business of his Justice Department, that is simply untrue. By repeatedly describing January 6 as an act of terror and comparing the protest, which resulted only in the deaths of Trump supporters, to 9/11 and other atrocities, Biden has signaled how he expects the Justice Department to proceed. His desire to see everyone from Indiana grandmothers to Donald Trump and his family behind bars hasn’t exactly been a secret.

As the chaos was still unfolding on the afternoon of January 6, Biden addressed the nation, blaming Trump for inciting “an insurrection” that “borders on sedition” while promising his administration would restore “the rule of law.”