RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vivek-ramaswamy-federal-reserve-monetary-policy-stable-dollar-presidential-race-2024-5b4abfaf?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Vivek Ramaswamy may be a longshot in his bid for the GOP presidential nomination, but the entrepreneur deserves credit for taking on issues that matter. His op-ed for these pages on Tuesday teed up reform of the Federal Reserve, a presidential-level issue that affects every American.

Most candidates haven’t done enough homework to talk about the Fed or monetary policy without looking foolish. And even for those who have, the conventional political wisdom is that the subjects are too complicated to grab public attention.

Yet that hasn’t always been true. Ronald Reagan campaigned on the need for a stable dollar, and the late Congressman Jack Kemp talked about making the dollar “as good as gold.” Those lines struck a populist chord as Americans faced the destructive inflation of the 1970s and the painful monetary tightening to defeat it in the 1980s. The U.S. is back at that same stand, with Washington having unleashed another inflation and the Fed now scrambling to beat it. Bank failures are one result.

Mr. Ramaswamy’s helpful contribution was to trace the Fed’s monetary mistakes back to the central bank’s loss of focus on keeping the dollar and exchange rates stable. That was the lesson Paul Volcker and other central bankers took away from the inflation of the 1970s, and their focus on stable prices led to more than a decade of healthy disinflation. It was called “the great moderation.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/americas_transgender_craze_.html

Future historians may look back on 2023 as Peak Trans Women insanity. The highly publicized boycott of Bud Light beer over Anheuser-Busch’s choice to feature the trans “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney may have garnered the most publicity, but it is only a small part of this craze. This prominence is particularly visible in the fashion industry, where leading brands such as Chanel, Versace, and Victoria’s Secret now showcase biological men dressed as glamorous women. Even Sports Illustrated, a magazine targeting sports-minded men, once portrayed the transgender model, Leyna Bloom, on its cover. Thirty-sex transgendered women are currently earning a living as fashion models.

While portraying trans women in glossy magazines may attract more notice, more consequential is how biological males are replacing women in sports. It’s hard to know the numbers here, and some estimates put the figures on the low side (e.g., a 100 or so at the college level, five for K-12 ), but the impact extends beyond the raw numbers since biological men frequently dominate and thus deprive biological girls of financial rewards such as college scholarships or trophies.  A gay-oriented website summarizes this pattern with the headline,  “These 20 trans women have won national or international competitions or championships.” Who can forget the mediocre male swimmer Lia Thomas winning swimming championships as a female? Meanwhile, a trans weightlifter competed as a woman in the Olympics. A transgendered athlete recently defeated 14,000 female competitors in the London Marathon.

Far less publicized is that state prisons now contain 5000 men who identify as women while some 1300 are inmates of federal prisons.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-layoffs-jumped-in-march-as-job-openings-fell-3805c6a1

Construction, leisure and hospitality and healthcare cuts drive March increase in layoffs

U.S. job openings dropped to their lowest level in nearly two years in March and layoffs rose sharply, in signs that demand for workers is cooling a year after the Federal Reserve began lifting interest rates to combat inflation.

Layoffs rose to a seasonally adjusted 1.8 million in March from the prior month, up from a revised 1.6 million in February, the Labor Department said Tuesday. The increase was led by job losses in construction, leisure and hospitality and healthcare industries—sectors that have driven job growth in recent months as tech, finance and other white-collar industries cooled.

Employers also reported a seasonally adjusted 9.6 million job openings in March, the Labor Department said Tuesday, a decrease from a revised 10 million openings in February.

Openings reached their lowest level in March since April 2021 and are down from the record 12 million recorded last March. But they remain well above levels before the pandemic and exceed the 5.8 million unemployed people looking for work in March.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com
This essay was prompted by former deputy director of the CIA (2010-2013) Michael Morrell’s interview with House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH). In that interview Morell said he had phoned Antony Blinken in October 2020 about the Hunter Biden laptop story, which had appeared in the New York Post on October 14, 2020. A consequence of that call was that a few days before the 2020 election fifty-one former intelligence officers signed a public letter (a letter prepared by Morrell), which claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop story had all the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation. As those officials have since acknowledged, the letter was written without any evidence of Russian involvement; yet those intelligence officers chose to propagate a false story to help Presidential candidate Joe Biden. Reporters from mainstream media were provided an out from having to follow up on the Hunter Biden laptop story. Integrity, where art thou?

Why, I wondered, would someone with Antony Blinken’s pedigree stoop to such a dirty trick?  At the time he was a senior advisor to the Biden campaign, with hopes of a position in a Biden administration. And why would fifty-one former intelligence officers do something that may have affected the outcome of a Presidential election? Is integrity as rare among Washington’s bureaucracy as it is among elected officials?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19613/harvard-council-on-academic-freedom

It is good that so many professors signed on to it [the Council on Academic Freedom] so quickly. It is bad that it is even needed at a place like Harvard whose motto, Veritas, means truth. But “truth” can be a double-edged sword, especially at a university.

The “truth” can sometimes be the enemy of freedom. When people believe they, and only they, have access to THE TRUTH, they see little need for debate, dialogue, dissent and disagreement. Indeed they regard such contrary views as heresy. That has been the way of many religions over the years as well as numerous ideologies such as communism and fascism.

[T]he real headline is that so many faculty members refused or declined to participate in an organization whose goal is to promote free speech.

The shared perspective [of the Council] is in favor of freedom of speech and academic freedom for all views, no matter how unpopular. The goal is to protect the expression of all views and to protect those who are threatened or sanctioned for expressing them.

Freedom of speech, due process, the right to counsel and other fundamental liberties are in peril…. Remaining silent is often the safest course, so self-censorship has become a widespread tactic among individuals who do not support the political correctness of the day.

The fact that more than 100 Harvard University professors have now joined together in a council on academic freedom is both good news and bad news. The purpose of the group, organized by my colleague and friend Steven Pinker, is to ensure that freedom of speech and academic freedom survive at Harvard. It is good that so many professors signed on to it so quickly. It is bad that it is even needed at a place like Harvard whose motto, Veritas, means truth. But “truth” can be a double-edged sword, especially at a university.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/05/why-harlan-crow-purchased-the-home-of-clarence-thomass-mother/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The attacks on Justice Thomas never stop. Shortly after falsely accusing him of breaking the law by failing to disclose trips he took with his close friend Harlan Crow, the Democrats and their media allies are now smearing the justice by claiming that Crow’s purchase of Justice Thomas’s mother’s home was some scheme to enrich the justice.

This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Justice Thomas and Harlan Crow both acted honorably and ethically in this transaction, and it’s important to understand what led Crow to want to purchase this home. (Full disclosure: I worked on Justice Thomas’s confirmation as a lawyer in the White House in 1991, and I remain close friends with him. I have also co-edited the book Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words and have gone on trips with him and Harlan Crow, with whom I’m also friends. I have also represented Ginni Thomas in the House Select January 6 Committee inquiry.)

Crow, the son of a nationally renowned real-estate developer, was born into a wealthy family. Thomas was born into abject poverty, to uneducated parents, and had a father who abandoned the family when he was two years old. He grew up under segregation in the Deep South. Despite their different backgrounds, Crow’s and Thomas’s shared interests and values led them to cross paths. The two developed a close friendship after first meeting in 1996.

As has been well reported, Crow is a serious collector of American historical artifacts. He strives to preserve, learn from, and celebrate the history of our nation’s journey. As a friend of Justice Thomas, Harlan also recognized that the justice’s life story is one of the great American stories that highlights the best of America.

In 2001, Crow and Thomas visited the justice’s hometown of Savannah, Ga. During the visit, Crow visited the Carnegie Library, which was segregated when Thomas was growing up. It was here that Thomas fell in love with reading and widened his worldview to look beyond the racist laws and practices that were then in place. The library was in disrepair, and Crow wanted to help. He decided to provide funding in 2001 to restore this building where his friend, who was now the second black Supreme Court justice in our history, had first learned to dream. To honor this incredible success story, the gift came with a request to name a wing of the library after Justice Thomas.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/01/rep-james-comer-hunter-bidens-lawyers-testing-the-limits-of-witness-intimidation-by-contacting-potential-whistelblowers/

House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman James Comer is accusing Hunter Biden’s lawyers of “testing the limits” of witness intimidation in the Republican-led investigation into the Biden Family’s influence-peddling operation.

Rep. Comer (R-Ky.) said witnesses and subpoenaed individuals cooperating with their probe have told his staff that Biden’s attorneys have inappropriately contacted them with veiled threats about their own potential liability in regard to the Biden clan’s shady business schemes.

“We feel that this is close to crossing the line,” he told Fox News’ Sandra Smith Monday.  “Obviously their objective, in my opinion, is witness intimidation.”

Comer added that his subpoena authority has proven to be a “very fruitful” oversight tool in the Oversight Republicans’ Biden probe.

“We have bank records, we have access to all the bank violations in the Treasury cabinet and now we have whistleblowers who are coming forward,” he said.

When asked if he stands by his accusation of witness intimidation,” Comer replied, “it depends on your definition of intimidation.”

“If you get a call from the lawyers and they remind you of your potential liability in some of these business schemes, then yes, I would consider that witness intimidation,” he said. Comer told Smith that Republicans are now trying to get immunity for the witnesses “going forward” due to the threats.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-top-ten-woke-lies-part-4/

At the heart of wokeness is a lie – the Marxist lie that human society is reducible to power imbalances between the oppressor and the oppressed. Thus wokeness depends on false narratives to sell itself and smear its opponents.

Below is the next pair in a series of the Top Ten Woke Lies subverting American politics and culture. To see the first 5 lies in the series, numbers 10-6 in ascending order, click HERE, HERE, and HERE.

5) “We’re Not Coming For Your Precious Guns”

“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” declared then-candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke during a 2019 presidential debate. Give him credit for that moment of honesty, because the usual dismissive response from the Left to conservative concerns about endangered gun rights is some variation of, “We’re not coming for your precious guns, you right-wing conspiracy nut!”

The Left’s insistence that they have no intention of confiscating guns but simply want “commonsense gun laws” is one of the most blatant of woke lies. First, we already have commonsense gun laws in this country. It will never matter how many more restrictions we pile on, we are never going to end all gun crime because – steady yourself, because this will blow your mind – criminals by definition do not respect the law. Indeed, the areas with the strictest gun control suffer the most gun violence. Take Chicago (please, as the late comedian Henny Youngman might add). The only people burdened by tighter and tighter gun restrictions are law-abiding gun owners.

Ah, but that is exactly the demographic that leftists want to control. Today’s pro-crime Left is completely indifferent to the scourges of gang-related or black-on-black gun crime. They never launch protests or grandstand in Congress about children killed in drive-by shootings or by stray bullets in the inner city. They have no interest in understanding, much less addressing, the cultural or moral reasons that might explain why America suffers more mass shootings now than in decades past when there was widespread access to guns. They call immediately for more gun control in the wake of a mass shooting rather than waiting for all the facts or ascertaining the shooter’s motivation because the Left doesn’t actually care about getting to the root of gun violence, but about exploiting the most-publicized tragedies to demonize gun ownership itself.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/05/01/bffs-celebrated-leftist-hero-noam-chomsky-and-child-sex-trafficker-jeffrey-epstein-n1691787

A bombshell report from the Wall Street Journal (demonstrating that Murdoch’s media empire outside of Fox News is still capable of decent work) establishes previously unknown ties between Jeffrey Epstein (that mysterious suicide) and numerous figures of cultural import.

Among them is celebrated leftist academic Noam Chomsky. If you have not traveled in leftist circles, Chomsky may be a fringe figure or perhaps even totally unknown to you.

But to the Social Justice™ left, he’s a literal demigod.

Will the antifa people have the moral integrity to change their tune when they discover his deep and longstanding connection to Epstein?

Let’s not count on it.

Via Wall Street Journal:

Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, invited Epstein, who brought a group of young female guests, to the campus. Noam Chomsky, a professor, author and political activist, was scheduled to fly with Epstein to have dinner at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in 2015.

None of their names appear in Epstein’s now-public “black book” of contacts or in the public flight logs of passengers who traveled on his private jet. The documents show that Epstein arranged multiple meetings with each of them after he had served jail time in 2008 for a sex crime involving a teenage girl and was registered as a sex offender. The documents, which include thousands of pages of emails and schedules from 2013 to 2017, haven’t been previously reported.

What business, one might ask, does a wonky MIT academic have with a pedophilic mass groomer?

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/05/01/lefts-plan-hostile-takeover-supreme-court/

“If successful, the Left’s hostile takeover of the Supreme Court will destroy the independence of the judiciary that is necessary for our liberty.”

Democrats in Congress, together with their allies among left-wing groups and in the media, are attempting a hostile takeover of the Supreme Court. Their current tactics demonstrate what “by any means necessary” really means.

In the system of government America’s Founders gave us, limits on government are necessary to achieve its purpose of protecting liberty. Those limits include the separation of powers, federalism, a written Constitution, and a judiciary that will follow—rather than control—that Constitution.

Limits like those help keep too much power from ending up in too few hands.

The Left, however, is after power rather than liberty and, therefore, sees limits on government as obstacles to be overcome. They especially want to control the Supreme Court because it’s the final interpreter of the Constitution, the “supreme law of the land.”