RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/another_bad_day_for_the_inflation_reduction_act.html

We are not sure about Senator Manchin’s 2024 U.S. Senate plans. We did hear that Senator Tester of Montana is running for re-election.  In fact, Senator Tester said that he is running because “Montanans need a fighter holding Washington accountable and I’m running to defend our Montana values.”

Well, I hope someone will ask both men about the Inflation Reduction Act in light of the new inflation concerns.  This is from The Wall Street Journal:

This measure of inflation, a favorite of the Federal Reserve, accelerated in January at the fastest monthly pace since June. The PCE index is worth following because it offers a view of price changes from business sources and takes into account the substitution of goods and services in a way the consumer-price index doesn’t.

PCE inflation overall rose 0.6% for the month, up from 0.2% in each of November and December. 

The PCE index over the last 12 months is up 5.4%, which was up slightly from December after several months of decline. Inflation in services drove much of the increase and is up 5.7% since January 2022.

The story here is that inflation is proving stickier than many expected. 

Don’t you hate it when things prove stickier than expected?  I think consumers shopping for food can relate to that.  The Biden administration keeps telling you that inflation is dropping, but the prices of food and lots of other things are not.

The new report means that Chairman Powell may have to tinker with those interest rates again.  The new inflation concerns mean that Mr. Manchin and Mr. Tester will get questions about their votes that made the infamous Inflation Reduction Act possible.  I think a lot of good people in Montana and West Virginia will ask these gentlemen why they voted with Senator Schumer.

https://victorhanson.com/our-neronian-super-bowl-part-two/

The game itself was well-played and exciting. But the entire spectacle is heading into a strange and ultimately suicidal territory. Before the National Anthem, there was sung and observed the “Black” national anthem of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It is a wonderful song, but no substitution for our common, shared National Anthem, if such a thing even still exists in the era of a fragmenting America.

The country is supposedly “one people” with one anthem. There are now as many “Latinos” as there are blacks. So why not a Latino national anthem? Ditto Asians. But is it fair to have just one ethnic anthem and not others? What will be the criteria of segregated anthems?

How strange: If in 1960 Bull Connor had dictated to blacks (and who knows, he may have?), “you sing your own ‘separate but equal’ anthem before the nation’s National Anthem,” he would have been dubbed a racist up north and a segregationist down south. So have we come full circle?

Are we following the universities, those beacons of enlightenment and morality, which boast of multiple graduations, all predicated on race or gender? We could devote 30 minutes of pregame time to various chauvinistic anthems, or simply junk the game altogether and sing dozens of anthems ad nauseam?

The NFL bragged that its Super Bowl won 112 million viewers. But that number still counts as a million short from last year, and one million fewer than 2015, when there were about 15 million fewer Americans than now.

True, the NFL has recovered from its dismal Covid/Kaepernick years. But it seems bent to follow the descending trajectory of the NBA. Last year’s final NBA championship game earned a mere 14 million viewers. That was up from the 8.5 million catastrophe of 2020—but far below the 35 million in 1998. How, a quarter-century ago, could there have been 65 million fewer Americans and yet over 20 million more viewers! Where over the last 25 years did those 20 million viewers go?

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/02/24/did_us_firms_help_propel_chinas_balloon_fleet_148906.html

Sen. Mark Kelly, who previously served as a decorated space shuttle pilot with NASA, waded into the Chinese spy balloon uproar early this week after keeping publicly mum about it for several weeks.

The Arizona Democrat said it makes no sense for the U.S. military to launch expensive missiles at weather balloons or other benign floating objects. Kelly was referring to a heat-seeking, air-to-air missile used in recent weeks to shoot down several high-flying aerial objects that the administration later suggested likely didn’t pose a threat. Earlier in the month, a U.S. Air Force F-22 shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon after it breached American airspace and floated across the country, setting off a firestorm in Washington.

Kelly, who is set to be inducted into the U.S. Astronauts Hall of Fame in May, says he’s working on legislation that would require weather balloons to carry transponders that would communicate with air traffic control systems to separate research balloons from mysterious objects.

“It would really help the Defense Department to be able to sort out what is civilian science payload, what’s a weather balloon, what’s a NASA balloon, what’s a private company in the United States doing, what might be even a U.S. military,” Kelly, who was tapped to chair a Senate Armed Services subcommittee amid the balloon controversy, told the Associated Press.

Sen. John Tester, a Montana Democrat who is heading up the investigation into how a Chinese surveillance balloon was allowed to pass over crucial U.S. missile sites, including some in his state, was more forceful.

“We’re going to get to the bottom of what happened and make sure we have a plan going forward to detect and then find out what potential problems this balloon may have caused,” Tester told Fox News.

China’s high-altitude spy balloon controversy appears to have taken most Washington lawmakers and the intelligence community by surprise, but it really shouldn’t have. China’s interest in these stratospheric dirigibles has been an open secret for nearly a decade.