RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/nevertrump-republicans-just-cant-let-go-trump-bruce-thornton/

The Congressional show-trial disguised as a House committee investigation of the January 6 “insurrection” serves several partisan purposes. Most obviously, it attempts to distract the voters from Joe Biden’s and the Dem’s dismal record of failure both at home and abroad. But it’s also useful for NeverTrump Republicans who may find it difficult to attack President Trump given how starkly Biden’s failures contrast with the policy successes of their bête orange.

The hearings, then, provide Republican NeverTrumpers an opportunity to rehash some of their typical hyperbolic smears from the last six years, as well as potentially ending Trump’s political career. But in the end, all they will achieve is to remind us why ordinary voters distrust the Republican establishment and its fifth-columnist pundits like Bret Stephens.

A New York Times house-conservative and terminal NeverTrumper, Stephens recently posed the question whether the January 6 House investigation “can begin to steer some of the Trump faithful toward the kind of cult deprogramming they so desperately need.” Stephens here is reprising a favorite NeverTrump cliché that the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2016, and the 74 million in 2020, are members of a “cult of personality,” as NeverTrumper Jonah Goldberg put it. Indeed, Stephens speculates that “Americans may someday come to understand Donald Trump as the most successful cult leader of our times.”

The first problem with Stephens’ question is its obvious approval of a House committee that is a transparent exercise in partisan propaganda rather than a good-faith effort to establish facts. We knew this was the case when Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected two of Republican Minority House leader Kevin McCarthy’s recommendations for the Republican members of the committee. Instead Pelosi picked arch-RINOs Liz Chaney and Adam Kinzinger.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/governor-newsom-is-only-consistent-in-his-hypocrisy/

California governor Gavin Newsom’s campaign is running ads in Florida and other states touting his state as a beacon of “freedom” on key social issues. Observers say the ads are an effort to boost his standing for a possible 2024 run for president.

Back home, Californians quip that the “freedom” Newsom seems to be most interested in is the ability to practice blatant hypocrisy without limits.

This week, news broke that the governor was vacationing in Montana despite California’s ban on state-funded travel to Montana over its alleged anti-gay policies. The governor’s office refused to reveal whether or not state-funded security accompanied the governor on his trip.

This isn’t the first example of Newsom flouting the rules. He famously violated his own indoor-dining ban in 2020, when he attended a birthday party at the deluxe French Laundry restaurant in Napa. Months later he appeared maskless at a football game where face coverings were mandatory.

Last summer, he had to pull one of his kids out of a summer day camp that did not require kids to wear masks, a violation of state policy.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/08/dont-let-the-democrats-claim-the-mantle-of-freedom/

Psychological projection is the act of attributing one’s unpleasant traits to someone else. Psychological deflection is a way of shifting attention away from one’s poor behavior to another person. Both are used expertly by Democrats, who don’t want the voters to catch on to their act.

We could start with any of the Democrats’ many examples of projection and deflection, but let’s focus on one of the most recent instances of a Democratic pot calling a kettle black: California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Florida television ad.

“Freedom is under attack in your state,” Newsom said in a voice a bit less croaky than his usual raspy delivery. “Your Republican leaders, they’re banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women and doctors.

“I urge all of you living in Florida to join the fight or join us in California, where we still believe in freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom to choose, freedom from hate, and the freedom to love. Don’t let them take your freedom,” he finishes with a faux flourish that included a pointed finger meant to underline the sincerity the factory-made man sorely lacks.

The ad is a truly stomach-turning performance (typical of Newsom) for those who truly cherish freedom, and understand what it is – and isn’t. (It’s also filled with lies. Read this master Fisking of the governor’s tales.)

The California of Newsom, who many hope will save the Democratic Party from sinking under the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris millstones, is ranked 48th in the Cato Institute’s Freedom In The 50 States report. It’s where new prohibitions, such as bans on multiple plastic consumer goods, including single-use bags customarily given out by retailers, pop up on a regular basis, and food waste must be composted rather than thrown in garbage cans.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/06/american-confidence-in-the-presidency-drops-by-15-points-compared-to-last-year/

The latest poll from Gallup shows that Americans’ confidence in many major institutions in the United States, including the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court, has dropped to a new low this year.

Fox News reports that the poll showed just 27 percent of Americans described themselves as having “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in 14 institutions, which is three points lower than the previous record low in 2014.

With 16 different institutions mentioned in the survey, Gallup noted “significant declines” in 11 institutions in particular, including the presidency and the Supreme Court. Compared to the last poll in June of 2021, American confidence in the presidency has gone down by 15 points, while confidence in the high court has dropped by 11 points. Similarly, Joe Biden’s approval rating has dropped by about 15 points in the same span of time.

Congress remains the lowest-rated institution in the nation. In last year’s poll, only 12 percent of Americans polled reported “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the federal legislative branch. This year, that number is down to a mere 7 percent.

Five other institutions recorded substantial drops in confidence: The police, the criminal justice system, big business, organized religion, and newspapers. The only major institution to see its approval rating hold steady was organized labor, at 28 percent once again.

Respondents across both political parties, as well as independents, all recorded drops in confidence compared to last year. Republican voters’ confidence in the military fell from 81 percent to 78 percent, while their confidence in the police dropped from 71 percent to 67 percent. Independents’ confidence in the presidency plummeted from 31 percent to just 18 percent. Meanwhile, in the wake of numerous major decisions on abortion, Second Amendment rights, and other issues, Democrats’ confidence in the Supreme Court dropped from 31 percent to 13 percent.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/06/the-disappearing-american/

“Help wanted” and “Now hiring” signs are everywhere. Flights, construction projects, and healthcare services are delayed—or unavailable—due to labor shortages.

Hourly and monthly wages spiral. There is a growing disequilibrium between the number of available jobs and the declining pool of workers needed to fill them. 

What is going on?

During the nearly two-year-long COVID shutdown and economic downturn, firms cut costs by laying off millions of employees. 

As a result, some in their early- or mid-60s simply retired early and never came back to work.

Federal and state governments also vastly expanded financial support to the unemployed. Other workers figured they would not make all that much more by working and so are staying home on government checks.

Still other former full-time employees became used to the new, more leisurely lifestyle and are loath to return to a full 40-hour work week.

Employers also are now convinced that a hard recession is on the early 2023 horizon when the trillions of dollars of newly printed money run out.  Many are willing to put up with worker shortages now, rather than hire too many employees only to have them idle when consumer demand soon crashes.

Still other workers fear yet another COVID pandemic and are not eager to return to daily contact with the public.

The government has no idea how Americans remain sick with the mysterious “long COVID” chronic aftermath of the infectious phase of the disease.

Well over 100 million Americans have likely had COVID. An estimated 10-30 percent do not recover for months—or even years.

So, millions of COVID long haulers remain either unable to work or can only work part-time. 

Yet no one yet has fully calibrated the effect of newly disabled millions on the American economy.

Add up all these dark clouds and America is experiencing a perfect storm, in which only 61 percent of the able workforce is currently officially employed.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-democrats-most-bitter-pill/

On the menu today: You might think that, at this point, Joe Biden must have hit bottom in his job approval rating, but a Monmouth University poll finds him down to 36 percent. What’s notable about the polling lately is how many Democrats can no longer convince themselves that Biden is doing a good job. A lot of this is driven by the runaway-inflation crisis, and there’s a real problem for Democrats, in that the $1.9 trillion in new spending enacted in March 2021 — a massive spending bill that Larry Summers explicitly warned would “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation” — was passed on party-line votes. As they approach a red tsunami midterm, the Democrats have no one to blame but themselves.

A Dark Day for Biden in the Polls

Normal Democrats are increasingly open about their disappointment with President Biden. Yesterday, the Monmouth University national poll had Biden’s job approval down to 36 percent. If you follow politics, you know the usual split in these polls by party. Usually only about 10 percent of the opposition-party respondents approve of the job the president is doing, usually almost all of the members of the president’s party approve, and independents are usually roughly evenly split.

In the Monmouth poll, just 3 percent of Republicans, 29 percent of independents, and 74 percent of Democrats approved of the job Biden is doing. The survey found that 19 percent of Democrats were willing to tell a pollster they didn’t approve of the job Biden was doing, and another 7 percent volunteered that they didn’t know enough to have an opinion.

In other words, roughly a quarter of Democrats can’t bring themselves to say, “Yes, he’s doing fine.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/07/will-5-gal-gas-be-the-death-knell-for-bidens-i-did-that-presidency/

It’s a given that the Democrats are in trouble in the 2022 midterms. But President Joe Biden might also be on his way out. Desperate Democrats are sending signals they’d be happy if he didn’t run again in 2024, and might be even happier if he left before that, and took Vice President Kamala Harris with him. Why? A look at his disastrous bumbling on energy tells you all you need to know.

For those around during the 1970s, the gold standard for political ineptitude has always been President Jimmy Carter. Forty-three years ago this month, Carter gave his now-infamous “Address To The Nation” on energy policy.

It was a disaster, and wrong on all counts when it came to both basic economics and energy.

Some of his most memorable quotes, courtesy of the Foundation for Economic Education:

“The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75% of our energy are running out.”
“We can’t substantially increase our domestic production …”
“Within 10 years we would not be able to import enough oil — from any country, at any acceptable price.”

These were just a few of the many defeatist fatuities in that infamous speech, not one of them true. But no one thought Carter was intentionally lying. He was just wrong. And it led to soaring prices, gas rationing with lines that lasted for hours, and economic misery.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2022/07/06/covid-journalist-alex-berenson-settles-suit-with-twitter-is-reinstated-nearly-a-year-after-refusing-to-bend-knee-n1610725

Nearly one year after journalist and writer Alex Berenson was kicked off Twitter for being a sometimes COVID-19 contrarian, his account has been restored. He had to sue the tech platform to be reinstated.

Berenson announced a settlement with Twitter on Wednesday on his Substack page, “Unreported Truths.”

[L]ast August, Twitter banned me after I got five strikes under its Covid-19 misinformation policy. Which meant I’d supposedly made “claims of fact” that were “demonstrably false or misleading” and “likely to impact public safety or cause serious harm” (that’s the policy, that’s what it takes to get a strike, look it up).

Now we come to find those tweets “should not have led to my suspension”?

Here’s the tweet that got him “permanently suspended.”

Berenson is the former New York Times reporter whose specialty was reporting on pharmaceutical companies, dangerous drugs, health care, and government oversight. After leaving The Times, Berenson wrote novels and pamphlets. When COVID-19 burst onto the scene, Berenson began looking closely at government claims and wrote books and pamphlets about the disease.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/07

The Constitution provides for three branches of government, sharing sovereign power. In fact, we have a fourth branch, the sprawling administrative bureaucracies. They are nominally part of the Executive Branch, which struggles to control them. Congress struggles, too, and now spends much of its time trying to oversee them. The oversight is spotty and the bureaucracies are often left to their own devices, free to write their own rules on even the most important issues.

Last week’s Supreme Court decision took an important step to rein in these bureaucracies. It ruled the regulations for carbon dioxide emissions, written and enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency, went well beyond the vague laws passed by Congress.

Most comments about the court’s opinion have emphasized two likely consequences of the ruling, both important. One, highlighted by the left and especially by climate activists, is that the ruling could lead to more CO2 pollution. Indeed, it undoubtedly will do so unless Congress acts. The second, underscored by conservatives and the right, is that the courts are finally trying to constrain Washington’s vast, centralized “regulatory state,” which they see as fundamentally undemocratic and a threat to our constitutionally guaranteed liberties and our right to govern ourselves through elected representatives.

This debate goes to the very heart of how we as Americans rule ourselves. The left sees Washington’s administrative apparatus as “rule by experts,” essential for controlling a technologically complex society. Their preference is for the modern equivalent of Plato’s philosopher-kings, people who understand the population’s needs far better than the people themselves.