RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amg-news.com/incredible-judge-fines-pam-bondi-for-wearing-a-cross-then-tries-to-cancel-it-forgetting-she-knows-the-constitution-better-than-he-knows-his-own-job/

A judge tried to fine Pam Bondi for wearing a cross in court. Big mistake. She destroyed him with the Constitution, live in court. Now he’s under investigation — and the nation is watching what happens when tyrants get checked in real time.

Pam Bondi walked into the courtroom like she had thousands of times before. Calm. Prepared. Respected. But on this day, it wasn’t her case files or arguments that sparked tension — it was the cross around her neck.

A simple silver emblem of her faith became, in the eyes of Judge Martin Prescott, an “affront to courtroom neutrality.”

Within minutes, the judge halted proceedings and made an announcement that stunned the room:

“Ms. Bondi, you are in violation of decorum. You will be fined if the cross remains visible.”

A fine. For a symbol of faith. In a U.S. courtroom.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5205602-trump-biden-saudi-arabia-oil

When it comes to energy, President Trump is playing chess, not checkers. Former President Joe Biden wasn’t even playing tic-tac-toe.

Consider: Why are U.S. officials traveling to Saudi Arabia to negotiate peace between Ukraine and Russia? Why not more traditional diplomatic venues like Geneva or Vienna?   

Because Trump knows that Saudi Arabia is critical to lowering oil prices and pressuring Russia to come to the bargaining table. He also knows that Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, craves acceptance as a global leader and that hosting these high-level meetings helps him achieve that end.

Biden had spurned bin Salman, promising in 2019 to make him “a pariah.” Trump won’t be making that mistake.

Gasoline prices are down 11 percent from a year ago, providing welcome relief to Americans worried about inflation and a boost for the Trump White House. Trump campaigned on lowering energy prices; nothing could be more important to the success of this administration. Biden’s approval ratings were clobbered when gasoline prices breached $5 per gallon in 2022; for Trump, the stakes are equally high.  

Gasoline prices are lower because crude oil is hovering around $67 per barrel, down from $84 a year ago. Why the drop? There are numerous factors, but the most important is that OPEC+, for the first time since 2022, has agreed to expand output in April. Between next month and September 2026, OPEC-plus has agreed to reverse its prior 2.2 million barrel per day cuts; unless demand strengthens unexpectedly, or there is a major disruption of production in the Middle East, the bump in output should keep prices steady, and below the $78 level posted on Inauguration Day. 

For that, you can thank Trump and his outreach to bin Salman. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/03/21/john_roberts_is_responsible_for_the_high_courts_self-delegitimization_152535.html

At his 2005 Senate confirmation hearing to be chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts famously invoked America’s national pastime in describing his view of the judicial role in our constitutional order: “Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.”

If only!

Unfortunately, Roberts’ actual career on the high court has been one extensive repudiation of his lofty “umpire” proclamation. In exalting above all other concerns his personal conception of the institutional integrity of the Supreme Court, and by extension the entire judiciary, Roberts has ironically done more than anyone else to delegitimize the courts. His recent wildly out-of-line criticism of President Donald Trump’s call for impeachment of a rogue lower-court judge is just the latest example. For the court’s own sake, in these politically tense times, Roberts must change course immediately.

Roberts first showed his hand in the landmark 2012 Obamacare case, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. As was initially reported by CBS News’s Jan Crawford in the immediate aftermath of the decision and subsequently reported in later years by other court watchers such as CNN’s Joan Biskupic, Roberts initially intended to rule against the constitutionality of the health care law’s individual mandate — its most controversial feature.

But at some point during the court’s deliberations, Roberts changed his mind. He decided that he could throw a bone to the court’s conservative bloc by ruling against the mandate on Commerce Clause grounds, which the law’s drafters and the Obama administration alike had cited as its constitutional basis. But Roberts threw an even larger bone to the court’s liberal bloc, unilaterally opting to rewrite the statute so as to construe the mandate as a “tax” — which then-President Barack Obama himself had repeatedly told a skeptical public that it was not. Obama’s signature domestic achievement was thus upheld.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/03/generalists_wanted.html

Of all the pernicious concepts infecting minds today, perhaps none is more harmful than the belief that only “specialists” can tackle complex problems.  Strange as it might seem, “specialization” is a very recent human phenomenon.  Smart and capable people in the past did not limit their studies to particular subjects or avoid novel ideas emerging in unfamiliar fields.  Thinkers acquired and applied knowledge wherever they could.

Mathematician and Catholic cleric Nicolaus Copernicus not only developed the heliocentric model of the universe, but also formulated the “quantity theory of money” linking inflation directly to the amount of money in circulation.  The plays and poetry of William Shakespeare not only establish him as arguably the greatest writer to have ever lived, but also reveal his philosophical sophistication and proficiency in the modern fields of psychology and sociology.  Leonardo da Vinci was not only a master painter, but also an engineer, biologist, physicist, inventor, and military tactician.  We call these geniuses “polymaths” and “Renaissance men” today because they contributed so much to so many different subject areas.  As a critique against the twenty-first century’s obsession with subject-matter “specialists,” perhaps Copernicus, Shakespeare, and da Vinci should also be remembered as accomplished “generalists.”

Can you imagine one of today’s tenured “experts” from the mathematics or economics department of a modern university admonishing Copernicus for having published theoretical ideas well outside his canon law studies in the Catholic Church?  Or a political science or philosophy professor dismissing Shakespeare as a clever rhymer who was nonetheless out of his depth with regard to international relations and theories of the human mind?  Or an engineer or architect spurning da Vinci for being a mere portraitist?  Of course not.  All of these academic “specialties” and every other discipline with a department on a college campus stand on the broad shoulders of the great “generalists” of the past.