RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/prosperity-requires-a-stable-dollar-federal-reserve-fomc-rates-easing-2024-vivek-bdfed87b?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

With a recession looming, and on the heels of recent regional bank failures, the Federal Open Market Committee meets this week. The standard account for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and now First Republic is that the Federal Reserve held interest rates too low for too long, only to hike rates too high too quickly. The deeper problem, however, is how the Fed has tried to achieve its mandate.

Attempting to balance low inflation and full unemployment—trying to hit two targets with one arrow—has proved to be disastrous since the Phillips Curve cult gained prominence at the Fed around 2000. If elected president, I will return the Fed to a narrower scope: preserving the U.S. dollar as a stable financial unit to help prevent financial crises and restore robust economic growth.

Beginning in the 1980s and lasting through most of the 1990s, the Fed governors, including Vice Chairman Manley Johnson and Wayne Angell, used a framework first adopted by Paul Volcker in 1982 to stabilize the dollar. The idea was to consider the dollar’s value in terms of commodities, letting it serve as a reference point for other nations’ floating fiat currencies. This provided financial stability for two decades following the stagflation of the 1970s.

Beginning in the late 1990s, the Fed’s scope drifted to include “smoothing out” business cycles. This was a mistake, since business cycles serve a healthy function by transferring the assets and employees of poorly run companies to more capable management. Even worse, the Fed’s actions often exacerbated business cycles by creating transitions that create boom-bust-bailout cycles instead. The Fed now typically tightens when an economic slowdown is impending, engineering a downturn of liquidity that catalyzes a profit downturn, leading to a credit-cycle downturn in which credit events—bankruptcies, credit spreads and financial-institution failures—prompt cries for bailouts. This was the pattern in 2000, 2008 and—so far—2023.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-ethics-reform-hearing-senate-democrats-john-roberts-clarence-thomas-ketanji-brown-jackson-sonia-sotomayor-d0304d65?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Senate Democrats are holding another hearing on “Supreme Court Ethics Reform” on Tuesday, and it’s important to understand that this isn’t about ethics at all. This is another front in the political campaign to delegitimize the Supreme Court, with a goal of tarnishing its rulings and subjecting it to more political control.

The campaign is on full display in the press, with reporters at multiple publications suddenly searching for supposed ethics violations or conflicts of interest. Our writers have examined and debunked these reports highlighting Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch in recent weeks.

It’s useful to expose for the record how thin these accusations are. But it’s also a mistake to assume that the facts matter to Democrats and their media researchers. This is a political project, and hyped accusations will continue to be asserted as if they are serious.

***

“Ethics” is a time-honored political weapon in Washington, and it’s being used now against the Court because conservatives have a majority that is cleaning up some of the legal mistakes of recent decades. It has sent abortion policy back to the states (to the political benefit of Democrats in most places), expanded protections for the Bill of Rights, and is slowly restoring constitutional guardrails on the administrative state. Most of all, the Court is no longer a backstop legislature for progressives to impose policies they can’t get through Congress.