RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/23/the-big-divide/

Whether the economy is currently bubbling along or facing a slowdown, a slow-motion disaster is about to create a real crisis for the government, our future politics, and the shrinking middle class. Half of households have no retirement savings.

This is just one of many shifts in the economy that reflect the declining fortunes of the middle class. Wages have remained mostly flat for most workers—particularly those without a college degree—since the early 1970s. Recent high rates of inflation further cut into the ability of the self-identified middle class to make ends meet. But the biggest change has been the abolition of employer-provided pensions and their replacement with rickety and self-managed 401k savings plans.

All of this will only get worse over the next few decades. Social Security benefits are currently extremely modest. For those who do not own homes, rising rents will further cut into their ability to maintain a toehold on middle-class existence, assuming they can remain housed at all.

Who Gets to Retire?

It’s easy to think this is extreme, as retirement looks pretty good for most baby boomers. They are the wealthiest generational cohort, often benefiting from pensions, which are supplemented by real estate holdings, 401Ks, and IRAs. This prosperity is distributed unevenly, however.

For every retiree hitting the cruise ship circuit or playing golf, many others have learned too late that they may have to work much longer than they anticipated. The game changed abruptly during their lifetimes, as major companies shed defined benefit plans and replaced them with voluntary retirement accounts managed by workers. As this momentous change took place, the urgency of the moment was not impressed upon workers, and generational optimism blinded many to the difficult road ahead.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/pride-goeth-before-a-withdrawal

Smart lad, to slip betimes away, From fields where glory does not stay, And early though the laurel grows, It withers quicker than the rose.

The lines are from A. E. Housman’s poem “To an Athlete Dying Young.” Joe Biden is not an athlete dying young. He is a president, leaving old, at a shockingly late moment in the drama of the year 2024, just weeks before the Democratic convention. He should have slipped away a few years ago. 

About the dead, one must speak nothing but good. About Joe Biden in his withdrawal from the presidential race, commentators for now are saying nothing except that it was a difficult, poignant, and self-sacrificing deed, touched by nobility. His bombshell on a Sunday afternoon in July broke an unbearable tension in what used to be called the public mind—a tension compounded, week after week, by footage of the president walking stiffly, staring blankly, fumbling his words, and staggering as he ascended the short stairs onto Air Force One. His June 27 debate with Donald Trump was excruciating to watch. So it was that the announcement of his departure—not merely from the 2024 race but from a long and complicated public life—produced a kind of dazed relief. The first reactions were generous and grateful. And yet there was a note of nil nisi hokum in the air. 

It’s said that no president can be properly judged until 30 years have elapsed from the time he left office. By that rule, Joe Biden cannot be correctly evaluated until 2054 or thereabouts. 

For the moment, it would be well to remember that the incredible mess of American politics in the summer of 2024 is the doing not only of the egregious Donald Trump but also of a stubborn, prideful, selfish Joe Biden and his wife Jill and the rest of the Bidens, and his closest aides. In this debacle, Biden’s laurels are withered; he does not deserve much glory. In the wake of his reluctant departure from the race, he leaves a squalor of conspiracy theories and the scandal of his having persisted for so long. Conservative historians will write him off as an incompetent, while progressives—after overpraising his accomplishments—will recall him as the one who left the Democratic Party in chaos and, as may be, delivered the country to the carnivore Donald Trump.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/22/a-decade-of-conspiracists/

Who has most peddled conspiracy allegations the last nine years—all of them false and nearly all of them influencing national elections and public policies?

Once a target is constructed as Hitlerian, almost any means necessary to quash that perceived existential threat become justified. And we have seen a lot of them in the last nine years.

Russian collusion did not work. Christopher Steele was a fraud. Robert Mueller came up empty.

The Alfa Bank ping caper was a myth.

The Russian laptop disinformation was a lie and ruined the reputations of the “51 former intelligence authorities” who sanctioned it.

The first Trump impeachment was a strictly partisan vote, activated when Trump lost the House and Mueller had come up empty.

Only ten Republicans impeached Trump a second time; the Senate again acquitted then-private citizen Trump.

January 6 was a buffoonish riot. In magnitude and lethality, it marked only a fraction of the destruction in lives and property of the green-lit Antifa-BLM-organized 120-day “summer of love” of rioting, violence, and arson of 2020.

The post facto militarization of Washington into an armed camp, the presence of FBI informants on Capitol grounds, the decision not to beef up security forces, the weird effort to suppress videos of the riot and congressional testimonies and evidence, the promotion and canonization of the reckless officer Byrd who lethally shot an unarmed Ashli Babbitt, and the use of solitary confinement for the arrested, long detentions without trials, and inordinately harsh prison sentences (in comparison to the nearly 14,000 arrested in 2020 who were mostly released) will remain controversial until freedom of information suits release the full story of the day’s events and aftermath.

Sixteen states, in an unprecedented move, tried in vain to remove Trump from the 2024 ballot. All failed. If they had succeeded, elections as we know them would have ceased to exist.

Four prosecutorial teams, local, state, and federal, sought to bankrupt, jail, or render Trump inert during the 2023-2024 campaign cycle. All will likely fail—but risk opening a new chapter of tit-for-tat lawfare in lieu of relying on the voters to choose their own president.

The entire meme of Trump, the fascist who will institute a dictatorship, has likewise boomeranged.

Democracy is dying in darkness, given the current Democrat insider machinations of removing by diktat President Joe Biden. He won the most delegates in the Democratic “primaries”—but now apparently must be dropped either because he is behind in the polls or mentally unfit to remain a candidate or both. Stealth donors and covert politicos in the shadows—not transparent primaries and elected delegates—run the party that “defends democracy.”

But note those on the left would allow Biden to remain our president for the next six months in his debilitated state, but not to continue as their (losing) candidate. The quest for progressive power always trumps the collective interest of the nation: he’s not fit for me but fit enough for thee.

The recent assassination attempts to kill Trump likewise failed. The eerie laxity of the Secret Service and the Biden administration’s long stonewalling to prevent adequate protection for candidates Trump and Robert Kennedy, Jr., will be long examined.

No one has ever apologized for any of the above, although all were unprecedented efforts to use the courts, the administrative state, and the media to do what they feared the people might not through voting.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/07/when_democrats_incite_an_assassination.html

I monitor a lot of lefty chat rooms to see how the Marxist Borg is processing new information.  Wading through a sewer of fractured psyches is borderline torture, but it’s helpful to watch the commie hive mind in action.  The hogwash that self-described “smart people” claim to believe would make you cry for the sorry state of public education.

After the assassination attempt on President Trump, I tiptoed back over to Club Xanax to see how that hellscape was holding up.  By far, the great majority of leftists were flipping out that the gunman had been unsuccessful.  Reading through such hateful sludge masquerading as higher-order thinking is a chilling reminder that these terrorists-in-training have no qualms about putting us in shallow graves, so that they might build their rancid “Utopia” right atop our bones.  They are sick people with sick thoughts who express support for some very sick things.  But what else would one expect from a crowd of kooks who think pedophilia is no big deal but that meat-eaters should be hanged for heating the planet?

There’s no obvious way to reason with a bunch of psychologically damaged misfits who dress up in black hoodies and surgical masks before burning down churches in the name of “fighting fascism” because these yahoos abandoned reason a long time ago.  Case in point: the same sickos who spent two days hopped up on a rage bender after President Trump’s would-be assassin failed to fulfill their dark fantasies turned around and started complaining that conservatives were using “dangerous” language by implying that leftists are complicit.

What did they mean?  They didn’t like that Trump-supporters were saying, “They tried to bankrupt him; they tried to imprison him; and now they tried to kill him.”  “Who is this they,” the loony left collectively shrieked.  “It was totally a lone gunman with bad aim,” they continue to howl.  Democrats and their Antifa shock troops have been calling Donald Trump “Hitler” and demanding that he be “eliminated” for eight long years, and the moment someone listens to them, those verbal hitmen are downright offended that anyone might hold them personally responsible.  Sure, they’d gladly imprison anybody who dared to “mis-gender” a fifty-year-old creeper hanging around little girls, but to point an accusatory finger toward the leftist fifth column encouraging violence against conservatives is beyond the pale.  As I said, cuckoo commies abandoned reason long ago.

It does make you think.  Right now, lawfare assassin Jack Smith is arguing in front of black-robed tyrant Judge Chutkan that the once-and-future President Trump should be tossed in the hoosegow for daring to question the legitimacy of the 2020 election and “inciting” the so-called Capitol “insurrection” on January 6, 2021.  Anybody with a brain knows that there was never an insurrection, that President Trump never encouraged any criminality of any kind, and that trampling on a president’s right to free speech pretty much assures that the rest of us will soon be prosecuted for our political speech, too.  

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/03/27/kamala-harris-hamas-useful-idiot-rafah-invasion-israel/

As the Biden Presidency continues to sink at a rapid pace, with nearly two thirds of Americans now believing the country is on the wrong track, Kamala Harris is unwittingly doing her best to speed its demise.

Her latest television interview, with ABC News, can only be described as a train wreck that cements her reputation as a calamitous vice president. The interview followed her recent gaffe-ridden visit to Puerto Rico, where Harris cluelessly applauded anti-American protesters singing a song in Spanish accusing her administration of war crimes.

In yet another damaging blow to relations between the Biden Presidency and the Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Harris warned Israel against a military offensive in Rafah, while ludicrously boasting “I have studied the maps.” Harris, whose expertise on the Middle East is close to zero, saw fit to berate America’s closest ally in the region on its own counter-terrorism policy. The arrogance was breathtaking, and the ignorance of the complexities on the ground simply stunning.

Harris has been one of the least impressive vice presidents in US history. Her vacuous policy statements and speeches frequently display a staggering lack of knowledge. Her handling of the southern border crisis as the White House’s “border czar” has been an absolute disaster, with over nine million illegal migrant crossings since she and Joe Biden took office in January 2021.

Many Americans I have spoken to genuinely fear her one day taking over the presidency. With good reason. The only thing more embarrassing for the Biden presidency than Joe Biden himself are the media utterances made by his deputy, Kamala Harris.

https://thespectator.com/politics/biden-confirms-second-term-dropping/

President Biden’s announcement that he will not seek a second term — and his endorsement of Kamala Harris — came after weeks of increasing pressure from Democratic Party insiders, alarmed that voters had finally discovered what they had known for months. Joe Biden is a shell of the man he once was. Voters knew it — and they wouldn’t vote for him. Voters also knew they had been lied to by the White House, Biden’s political allies and the mainstream media, not once or twice but for years. Whatever credibility those sources still had is gone and, with it, a major prop in the Democratic coalition. The cumulative result was almost certain to cost Democrats not only the White House but the House and Senate, as well. Biden dropping out is unlikely to help. 

Biden’s inglorious exit evoked the fate of that great cartoon character, Wile E. Coyote. His futile pursuit of the Road Runner usually ended with Wile E. running off a cliff but remaining suspended in mid-air until he looked down. When he finally looked, he began plummeting to the canyon floor, far below. 

That was Joe Biden’s ultimate fate. He was as slow to grasp it as Wile E. Coyote. He ran off the cliff after his catastrophic debate performance against Donald Trump. For weeks he refused to look down. He wouldn’t look when his wife helped him walk down a few stairs after the debate. He wouldn’t look when President Obama had to guide him off the stage at George Clooney’s star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles. He wouldn’t look when major donors reported their shock at his frail appearance and began closing their checkbooks. He wouldn’t look as he stumbled through recent interviews. He wouldn’t look as more elected officials began calling for him to end the race for reelection. The canyon was too far below. It was far better to try and stay suspended in mid-air. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/22/kamala-harris-will-be-burdened-by-what-has-been/

On YouTube, there is a four-minute video that is nothing but Vice President Kamala Harris repeating this empty phrase: “What can be, unburdened by what has been.”

But no matter how many times she utters this idiotic mantra, Harris will, in fact, be heavily burdened by the disaster that has been the Biden administration. Burdened by her own dismal record as vice president. And burdened by the fact that she is so uniquely unqualified to be leader of the free world.

To say Harris is an empty pantsuit is an insult to empty pantsuits.

As we put it in an editorial a year ago:

Biden’s reelection campaign recently described Harris as a ‘powerful and effective messenger.’ Sure. Like when she says ‘As the name suggests, community banks are in the community.’ Or, when she says that ‘present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment, and we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment.’ Or … well, as Harris might put it, there are endless examples of her vapidity that stretch on without limit because there’s no end to them.

As we put it in an editorial we posted last week and updated over the weekend:

It might seem impossible, but she would be an even worse president than he was.

No matter how much Harris tries to distance herself from Joe Biden, she will carry the burden of answering for this failures. Among them:

The border crisis. One of the few jobs Biden gave her to do was stem the flow of illegal immigrants. She blathered on about “root causes,” after which 10 million or so illegals crossed the border and her “leadership role” was quietly memory-holed.

The economy. Harris will have to defend Biden’s economic record – inflation, falling real wages, widespread dissatisfaction.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/18/trump-is-dividing-americas-oligarchs/

The shot heard around the world may have been aimed at Donald Trump’s head, but it could also put extra cash in his pocket. In the aftermath of last weekend’s assassination attempt, two prominent billionaires – Elon Musk and investor Bill Ackman – announced their support for the former president. Two other formerly Trump-sceptical billionaires, Paul Singer and Ken Griffin, are also reportedly considering joining them.

The importance of these endorsements, as well as others from both Wall Street and Silicon Valley, reflect America’s increasingly oligarch-dominated political system. Traditionally, populist Democrats would have made much more of the announcements. In 2018, Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse claimed Trump was in the ‘back pocket’ of billionaires, but the attack didn’t quite land – not least because Whitehouse himself and his Democratic allies have become major recipients of oligarchic funds. Democrats received far more ‘dark money’ than the GOP in 2020.

Even recently, a spokesman suggested that Joe Biden was sending the message that ‘America is not for sale’. That is despite the fact that in 2020 Biden easily outraised Trump with a major advantage from donors in Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, just as Hillary Clinton had done in 2016. While some Democrats posture about seeking to reduce oligarchic power, they equally want to ensure that it’s their oligarchs who thrive.

None of this is to say that Trump was previously lacking his own reliable trove of right-wing donors. Investors like Jeff Yass and Timothy Mellon have given tens of millions to his campaigns. Trump donors tend to be rich investors who are in control of their own funds and less beholden to shareholders or a board of directors. In contrast, big corporate elites have, at least until now, favoured the Democrats and Biden. They have done this through contributions not only to Democratic candidates, but also to left-leaning nonprofits.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/20/donald-trump-and-baby-hitler/

In November 2015, when he was still the presumed frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, Jeb did an impromptu online Q&A while on his campaign bus. Among the questions he was asked was whether he “would go back in time and kill baby Hitler.” “Hell yeah, I would,” he responded immediately. And he would do so, he said, because “you gotta step up.” His only objection—or at least the only one he voiced in front of the cameras—was the butterfly effect, that is to say, the presumption that such a small change in history would have enormous future ramifications, the science for which he said “we all learned” from those “Michael Fox movies…Back to the Future.”

This answer raises two questions. First, why would Jeb answer that way? This is a guy, remember, who was raised in a very WASP-ish patrician home, was educated at the finest prep schools and one of the best public universities in the country, and converted to Catholicism. If he, of all people, thinks that the answer is an immediate “hell yeah,” then we have to ask ourselves why that is the case.

The second question is: why would anyone ask such a stupid thing anyway? Obviously, time travel is not possible, Back to the Future notwithstanding. So why would it even cross anyone’s mind to question a former governor and presidential candidate about the possibility of doing so? Where do people come up with these things?

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/americans-apply-jobless-benefits-layoffs-settle-higher-levels-112060209

U.S. filings for unemployment benefits rose again last week and appear to be settling consistently at a slightly higher though still healthy level that the Federal Reserve has been aiming for.

Jobless claims for the week ending July 13 rose by 20,000 to 243,000 from 223,000 the previous week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. It’s the eighth straight week claims came in above 220,000. Before that stretch, claims had been below that number in all but three weeks so far in 2024.

Weekly unemployment claims are widely considered as representative of layoffs.

The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark borrowing rate 11 times beginning in March of 2022 in an attempt to extinguish the four-decade high inflation that shook the economy after it rebounded from the COVID-19 recession of 2020. The Fed’s intention was to cool off a red-hot labor market and slow wage growth, which it says can fuel inflation.

“The Fed asked to see more evidence of a cooling economy, and for the most part, they’ve gotten it,” said Chris Larkin, managing director of trading and investing at E-Trade. “Add today’s weekly jobless claims to the list of rate-cut-friendly data points.”