RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/jeff-bezos-calls-out-joe-biden-s-latest-inflation-claim-straight-misdirection-or-a-deep-misunderstanding/ar-AAZ8m8L?ocid=&cvid=15ca4f845a4442969abdac9b8359a5a1

After President Joe Biden called on companies running gas stations to lower the price of gas, Jeff Bezos accused the U.S. president of misleading the public or said he lacked a “basic” understanding of the forces that actually drive prices.

“Ouch. Inflation is far too important a problem for the White House to keep making statements like this,” Bezos said in a tweet Saturday evening.

In the initial tweet, Biden made a direct appeal to gas stations and encouraged them to simply charge less for gasoline.

“My message to the companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump is simple: this is a time of war and global peril. Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product,” Biden said Saturday morning.

The president urged compliance, without any hesitation.

“And do it now,” he ordered.

Bezos said the tweet was very telling to him and may reveal how little Biden knows about the market.

“It’s either straight ahead misdirection or a deep misunderstanding of basic market dynamics,” Bezos added in his response.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/biden-plays-pretend/

The President is economically illiterate, delusional, a liar, or all three about the probability and causes of a recession.

The Biden administration has huffed and puffed its adherence to progressive dogma and, as a result, it is about to blow down the American economy. The situation won’t improve until the Administration resolves its catalepsy.

In March, I described the substantial risk that America was heading toward a recession. A recession may already have begun, and it will certainly soon do so if the Biden White House  does not immediately change course on energy and spending.

In June, U.S. and European economies slowed sharply as surging prices weakened demand. U.S. retail sales fell in May, and existing home sales have declined for four consecutive months. Economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal put the risk of a recession in the next 12 months at 44 percent, a level usually seen only on the brink of, or during, recessions.

The classic definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters during which Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declines. The U.S. has just completed one quarter during which GDP declined at an annual rate of 1.5 percent. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is projecting a flat second quarter. If results tilt down by just one dollar, that would make two consecutive quarters of decline.

https://nypost.com/2022/07/03/get-used-to-suffering-at-the-pump-its-joes-world-order/

If you had the unpleasant experience this July Fourth weekend of paying close to $5 for a gallon of gas, you can always comfort yourself with the idea that your pain is for a good cause: the “liberal world order.” 

So said Brian Deese, White House director of the National Economic Council, when he was asked on CNN: “What do you say to those families who say, ‘Listen, we can’t afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years. This is just not sustainable’?”

Deese, like his boss Joe Biden, is unmoved by the suffering of ordinary Americans, more than two-thirds of whom say gas-price increases are causing them hardship, according to a recent Gallup poll.

“This is about the future of the liberal world order, and we have to stand firm” until Ukraine defeats Russia, declared Deese.

He was echoing the president, who had referenced the Ukraine war a few hours earlier in Madrid, when he dismissed a similar question: “The war has pushed prices up. [Oil] could go as high as $200 a barrel . . . How long is it fair to expect American drivers and drivers around the world to pay that premium for this war?”

Biden responded with cold indifference: “As long as it takes,” he said.

Where’s the empathy?

That’s quite some take from a president who ran on the illusion that he possesses special empathy.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-supreme-court-for-the-constitution-originalism-dobbs-abortion-religious-liberty-11656711597?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

A funny thing happened on the way to the supposedly partisan Supreme Court finishing its term: It ruled for the Biden Administration on immigration. Somehow that case isn’t making the dastardly hit list of those eager to declare that the Court is now “illegitimate,” but the Justices applied the law regardless of the policy and decided for the executive branch.(See nearby for elaboration.)

This isn’t a partisan Court looking for preferred policy outcomes. It’s a Court that hews to the tenets of originalism, with different shades of emphasis by different Justices. The Court’s jurisprudence is focused more than anything else on who under the Constitution gets to decide policy, not what that policy should be.

This is the main reason Democrats and the press corps are furious about the Court’s decisions. For decades they have counted on a majority of Justices to deliver or bless the policy results they want: on abortion, voting rights, healthcare, racial preferences, climate and economic regulation. You name it, the Court found ways to deliver it with balancing tests, trimester analysis, and the discovery of unenumerated rights between the lines of the Constitution’s text.

For decades conservative critics have argued that the role of the Court should be different—supporting rights that are actually in the Constitution, but otherwise enforcing the separation of powers so each branch of government stays in its lane as defined by the Founders. With the arrival of three new Justices nominated by Donald Trump and shepherded to confirmation by GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell, that Court has arrived.

The result is the opposite of judicial imperialism. In the Dobbs abortion case, the Court is trying to extricate itself from abortion policy debates. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh put it, “the Constitution is neutral on the issue of abortion.” Policy will now be set by legislators in the states as informed by voters, subject to a low-level of legal review known as the “rational basis” test.

The political result may be surprising. The right-to-life movement now must persuade voters across 50 states, and most voters favor some limits on abortion but not an outright ban. If Republicans sound like moral scolds and can’t make their case with compassion for women, they will lose the debate. If Republicans seek a national ban on abortion via Congress, the Court could strike it down. The Court majority in Dobbs has invigorated democracy and federalism.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/07/poor_cassidy_hutchinson_nave_used_and_abused_or_shamelessly_ambitious.html

“She perhaps sought fame and fortune but she was, in the end, used and abused, by Cheney, the committee at large and by the media.”

The hapless Cassidy Hutchinson “testified” before the moonbat panel of Trump haters.  Her “testimony” was fraught with “I was in the vicinity of a conversation,” “I heard something to the effect of,”  “ I overheard,”…..the girl could testify only to hearsay.  Her performance was pathetic.  She was used and abused, most probably by Liz Cheney.  The other members of the committee seemed to know not a thing about what this “emergency witness” was going to say.  She was Liz’s surprise witness and, comically, no one thought to check her story which was chock full of lies, lies that were exposed within hours of that “emergency testimony.”   

So, who is this pitiful young woman?  She was an aide to Mark Meadows, about whom she lied as well; neither he nor Guliani sought pardons from President Trump.  The Secret Service agents she cited have both denied her claims that Trump “grabbed the steering wheel” or assaulted one of them in an attempt to go to the Capitol that day.  She even identified a note as one she had written that day when even Cheney knew that was a lie; it was written by Eric Herschmann.  She was apparently hoping for a job with President Trump at Mar A Lago but then was not hired for a position there.  Could she be mad?  

As Greg Gutfield commented, her appearance “made the Hindenburg look like a fender bender.”  Keep in mind that she had testified five times before this committee previously but then changed lawyers and suddenly came up with an entirely different story.  Was she threatened?  Paid a large amount of money? Promised fame and fortune?  Maybe she just wanted her five minutes of fame.  She got less than that before her tall tale was exposed as a tissue of lies. 

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/on-covid-schools-and-the-death-of/comments

The New Yorker just ran its second big negative piece on Ron DeSantis in a week, proof of how much the woke media fears the governor of Florida. (Yes, I read the New Yorker so you don’t have to.)

The article is nominally about DeSantis’s support for age-appropriate teaching of gender and sexuality in public schools. Or, as the Democrats like to call it, “Don’t Say Gay.” The wokesters have not figured out that label is not quite the devastating comeback they think.

Plenty of parents of six-year-olds are fine with not having teachers say “gay” – they think that even if they support same-sex marriage (as I do), they and not outsiders should decide what their first- or second-graders hear about sex and family structures. Then again, these are the people who thought “defund the police” was an electoral winner, so their political instincts may not be the best.

But I digress, briefly. As you would expect, the article treats DeSantis as a political opportunist. But, unlike most woke media reporters these days, the author actually took the time both to talk to conservatives who support DeSantis’s views and to try to understand why those views are gaining so much ground right now. (As opposed to just repeating Fox News misinformation racism misogyny America is the worst endlessly.)

The result was something close to the truth – and the best explanation I have seen for the way Covid continues to drive our politics, even if no one is talking about it anymore. I urge you to read these three paragraphs – especially the sentence I have bolded – closely:

When I asked Republican activists and operatives about the rise of the school issues, they told a very similar story, one that began with the pandemic, during which many parents came to believe that their interests (in keeping their kids in school) diverged with those of the teachers and administrators.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/the-january-6-committee-should-release-the-engel-and-ornato-depositions/

If the committee is honestly trying to get to the bottom of what happened in the presidential SUV, this and other steps would be in its interest.

The pushback against the congressional testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, former principal aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, has gotten more intense. (I addressed it in this post Wednesday.) After the fanfare with which the January 6 committee hyped Hutchinson’s testimony, which was presented in a nationally televised session, the panel owes it to the country to release recordings and transcripts of the behind-the-scenes interviews it has conducted with former White House operations director Tony Ornato and Secret Service agent Robert Engel.

To recap, Secret Service sources have told the media that Agent Engel, who ran Trump’s security detail, and a thus-far unidentified agent who drove the Secret Service SUV in which the former president was ferried away from his January 6 Ellipse speech both deny that there was a physical skirmish in the car. Hutchinson testified that she was told by Ornato, with Engel present and apparently concurring, that Trump grabbed the steering wheel, had his arm grabbed by Engel, and lunged threateningly at Engel with his free hand.

I continue to think this portion of the story is being overblown. Maybe I’ll be proved wrong. Vice chairwoman Liz Cheney, who assured skeptical Republicans that the committee would not be carried away by anti-Trump animus and would conduct a professional investigation, took the lead in presenting Hutchinson’s testimony. I’m taking her at her word, and thus assuming the committee would not intentionally present misleading testimony.

Hutchinson did not claim to have seen this encounter. Further, Hutchinson testified publicly and under oath. By contrast, the media’s sources are not only unsworn but anonymous. So in essence, Hutchinson is being contradicted about something she didn’t witness and probably would not be permitted to testify about in a real trial, by people who won’t attach their names to their claims and, for all we know, may have even less admissible testimony than Hutchinson — if they testified, which they haven’t.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/strangely-beautifully-alive-11656701722?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

This is the weekend for reflection upon the most important sentence ever written in this country:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Of course the Declaration of Independence, created 246 years ago this week, contained many other useful sentences. One in particular may offer a healthy perspective for those among us who are inclined to restructure American governance when it doesn’t yield a desired political outcome:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

The Declaration also noted that the “King of Great Britain” had “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” Among these offenses, contemporary political combatants may wish to note, was that the British government was not allowing enough immigrants to come to America:

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

In our own time the southern U.S. border has tragically become a place of lawlessness, suffering and chaos. Yet the people of color who endure almost unspeakable hardships, risk their lives and sometimes die trying to enter the U.S. demonstrate every day that America is not a racist, oppressive society but the hope of the world. People want in because they know that the liberty promised in that great sentence has been extended to all Americans. The founders were demanding an expansion of legal migration, which still sounds like a plan.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18666/dobbs-v-mississippi-case

Tribe’s blanket statement that never in history have Americans gone to bed with fewer rights than when they woke up is not only wrong historically and constitutionally, but also extremely insensitive to African Americans, Native Americans, the mentally ill, Japanese Americans and other marginalized groups that have been denied the most basic rights over the years.

The truth, which Tribe denies in the interest of his partisan narrative, is that the pendulum of rights has swung widely throughout our history. Even if Martin Luther King Jr. was correct when he said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” that arc has not always pointed in the direction of rights — or justice. In a democracy with a complex system of separation of powers, checks and balances and federalism, there will always be some back and forth with regard to rights.

Tribe seems to take for granted that his preferred rights are an ever-expanding given.

Falsehoods will not set us free. Only hard work, based on truth, will push the arc toward justice.

Whatever one may think of Dobbs v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court decision overruling Roe v. Wade, some critics have overstated its uniqueness in taking from Americans their preexisting rights. Professor Laurence Tribe badly misinformed his readers when he said the following:

“Friday was a singular day in our history: the first day in living memory that Americans went to bed with fewer inalienable rights than they had when they woke up. Not just in living memory. Ever.”

Tragically, there have been dozens of cases throughout our history in which Americans had their most fundamental rights taken away.