RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/inflation-cpi-consumer-price-index-march-2024/

Inflation remains the stickiest of problems for the U.S. economy, with the March consumer price index coming in hotter than expected — the third straight month that prices have accelerated. Gasoline prices and rent contributed over half the monthly increase, the government said on Wednesday.

Prices in March rose 3.5% on an annual basis, higher than the 3.4% expected by economists polled by financial data services company FactSet. It also represents a jump from February’s increase of 3.2% and January’s bump of 3.1% on a year-over-year basis. 

The latest acceleration in prices complicates the picture for the Federal Reserve, which has been monitoring economic data to determine whether inflation is cool enough to allow it to cut interest rates. But inflation, which measures the rate of price changes in goods and services bought by consumers, has remained stubborn in 2024, stalling the progress made last year to bring down the annual growth rate to the Fed’s goal of 2%.

“This marks the third consecutive strong reading and means that the stalled disinflationary narrative can no longer be called a blip,” said Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management, in an email.  

Shah added, “In fact, even if inflation were to cool next month to a more comfortable reading, there is likely sufficient caution within the Fed now to mean that a July cut may also be a stretch, by which point the U.S. election will begin to intrude with Fed decision making.”

Stocks fell on the report, with S&P 500 down 45 points, or 0.9%, to 5,164.96. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slumped 1% while the tech-heavy Nasdaq slipped 0.9%.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-absolutely-inane-case-in-manhattan/

On Monday, April 15, President Donald Trump will become the first former president and the first major presidential candidate in American history to face a criminal trial. Not only is this unprecedented, it’s happening with one of the weakest criminal cases in recent memory.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office searched for any way to charge the former president since 2017. The investigation poured over President Trump’s personal and business life, and they settled on charging the former president with 34 felonies for the non-felony of his attorney Michael Cohen settling a nuisance claim.

The case is so weak that The New York Times and The Washington Post both acknowledged that it’s a stretch. The New York Times reported: “The case against the former president hinges on an untested and therefore risky legal theory involving a complex interplay of laws.”

Meanwhile, The Washington Post wrote that the prosecution left some “legal experts . . . scratching their heads” as “they describe it as an unusual case.”

Indeed, it is unusual.

Soros-funded Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg says that President Trump “repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal crimes that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.”

Bragg’s indictment, however, shows that this is a false accusation from the DA.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/12/biden-bombs-his-own-country/

Do we have to bring up late Swedish socialist economist Assar Lindbeck, who said “in many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing”? Yes, we do. Joe Biden made us.

The White House is not proposing a federal rent control law. Even that would likely be too much for this runaway administration that has twice defied the U.S. Supreme Court and forgiven student loans. What it has done is place a 10% cap on rent increases on government-subsidized properties with low-income tenants

It’s a change in how the cap is calculated, so it’s not entirely new ground. But it’s nevertheless a form of rent control, meaning the bombs are still dropping.

Yes, we’re back to the air raid comparison. And Lindbeck was not alone in making the point with an analogy that is easily understood. After the war, as the communist country struggled economically, Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach pointed out that policies that “artificially encouraged demand and discouraged supply” had in effect blown up the capital city, leaving “all the houses” in a state of “disrepair.”

​​“The Americans couldn’t destroy Hanoi, but we have destroyed our city by very low rents. We realized it was stupid and that we must change policy,” he said.

https://tomklingenstein.com/republicans-must-wake-up/

Iregularly give politicians advice. They don’t ask for it, but it is the price they pay for the chance to dislodge me from a few shekels. When a politician comes hat in hand, there is one thing of which you can be quite sure: He will agree with your advice. He will invariably go one step further and claim that he practices it. In ornery moods, I tell them, “Well, you’ve been keeping it a secret from me.”  

Now, I have some very particular advice which I have been urging on visiting politicians for the past 8 years or so. As far as I can tell, none of them have listened to a word of it. Actually, that is not quite true. A few of them (or their staff) remember what I urged upon them at a prior meeting, and do me the honor of repeating it. Of course, remembering advice is a long way from taking it seriously.

The particular advice I have been giving is this: America is under attack from an enemy that wants to destroy the American way of life. This internal enemy—not China, the border, the economy, or anything else—is the danger of our time. Nothing else comes close. I call this enemy the “group quota regime.” The group quota regime currently exercises control of every major institution in America—from government bureaucracies, to the military, business, education, the media (social and mainstream), culture, entertainment, sports, and even religion. The woke radicals who exercise the increasingly totalitarian power of this regime believe that a just society is one where all identity groups have equal outcomes. To achieve these outcomes, group quotas must be imposed. Accordingly, American justice, which is based on merit, and the American way of life must be destroyed.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20563/who-will-help-the-new-forgotten-man

The Great Depression swept across the nation some 90 years ago, creating a level of despair that nearly crushed America.

Standing mute and dumbfounded on a breadline, tens of thousands became “forgotten men”; stripped of their jobs, their dignity, and their future. Washington was either indifferent or inept in responding to a calamity that threatened the very foundation of the republic.

Some of these forgotten men sought refuge in God, solace in the Bible, and prayed for salvation or, at the very least, a pathway that would lead them to a better life.

Others looked to a vibrant, dynamic president, who would inspire those victims of a national calamity that we are still a nation capable of greatness with the ability to rescue those forgotten men from devastating unemployment.

They found that “savior” in the form of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose confidence in America resonated with his fellow citizens of every background in every community. He lifted up the forgotten men and reminded them that, as Americans, there was a resolute nation to build and they were the people to do it.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/10/why-was-gender-ideology-allowed-to-run-amok-for-so-long/

Just like that, a trickle becomes a flood. After years of gender-critical voices being dismissed or ignored by mainstream media, they can be dismissed and ignored no longer.

The landmark Cass Review into gender-identity services in England, published today, has laid bare the scandal of the NHS’s treatment of ‘gender confused’ kids. There was never any evidence for subjecting troubled, often gay, often autistic, youngsters to life-altering hormones, drugs and treatments. But clinicians did it anyway, in thrall as they were to gender ideology.

The review is on the front page of the newspapers today. The BBC is platforming trans-sceptical experts – and not just so they can be hissed at live on air. Keir Starmer’s ever-opportunistic Labour Party is saying it agrees with everything in the report.

Of course it’s far too early to be declaring victory, and far too late for many of the victims caught up in this to celebrate, but something monumental happened today. The unsayable has become sayable, on gender at least.

The review, produced by top paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass over four years, is a stunning piece of work: a 400-page triumph of reason over unreason. It doesn’t tell us much we didn’t already know, but it tells us in painstaking detail and with undeniable, data-driven authority.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/11/dei-cronyism-and-woke-grifters/

When ideology replaces meritocracy or provides immunity from the consequences of illegal behavior, systemic mediocrity follows.

Under toxic National Socialism, Stalinism, and Maoism, millions of cronies and grifters mouthed party lines in hopes that their approved ideology would allow them to advance their careers and excuse their lawbreaking.

The same thing has happened with the woke movement and the now-huge Diversity/Equity/Inclusion conglomerate.

Grifters and opportunists mask their selfish agendas under the cloak of neo-Marxist care for the underprivileged or victimized minorities. Meanwhile, they seek to profit illegally as if they were old-fashioned crony capitalists.

During the disastrous COVID-19 lockdown, California governor Gavin Newsom pontificated about leveraging the quarantine to ensure greater equality: “There is opportunity for reimagining a [more] progressive era as it [relates] to capitalism…We see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.”

Meanwhile, Newsom did not seem very “progressive” when he was caught in one of California’s most expensive restaurants dining with sidekick lobbyists while violating the very mask and social distancing rules he had mandated for 40 million others.

Newsom also bragged about social equity when he signed a new California law mandating $20 an hour for fast-food workers—while many of his own employees at his various company-controlled eateries made only $16 an hour.

And he allegedly gave a unique exemption from his wage law to one particular bakery/restaurant chain, Panera, whose owner is an old friend and major campaign contributor.

Newsom apparently feels that the more progressively he postures, the less he’ll be called out for his own hypocrisy and self-interested agendas.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/no-more-special-counsels

Few innovations in American law enforcement have done more damage than “independent” prosecutors. Independent and special counsels have upended every presidential administration that has encountered them. They have never yielded benefits commensurate with their costs. They should be abolished.

From my perch at the White House Counsel’s Office, I was a front-row observer of, and direct participant in, Robert Mueller’s investigation of Donald Trump. What I saw then confirmed to me the fatal flaws of the special-counsel regime—flaws that, by now, should be obvious to everyone.

The current special-counsel regulation dates to 1999, the year Congress allowed to expire the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which inaugurated the role of independent counsel. That 1978 statute, a post-Nixon ethics reform, created “independent counsels” who, once appointed, wielded the “full power and independent authority to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions and powers of the Department of Justice.” These independent counsels reported to nobody, and they could only be removed for “good cause” and “by the personal action of the Attorney General.”

By the turn of the century, this regime had achieved bipartisan notoriety, spurring multiple Supreme Court cases, prompting perhaps Justice Antonin Scalia’s finest opinion (his solo dissent in Morrison v. Olson), and enabling the endless prosecutorial stalking of executive-branch officials.

Congress’s letting the independent-counsel statute expire should have ended the matter. Yet rather than make a clean break, the Department of Justice made a grave, if understandable, error. It adopted a regulation maintaining independent prosecutors but housing them within the Department of Justice under the supervision of the Attorney General. The department believed it was improving the lapsed statute by continuing to exempt these “special counsels” from the attorney general’s “day-to-day supervision,” while making such prosecutors—unlike independent counsels—ultimately answerable to the attorney general for their investigative and prosecutorial actions.

Experience has proved this system to be no better. For one thing, it does not solve the biggest problem with independent prosecutorial offices—that prosecutors and agents join teams dedicated to pursuing a specific person or group of people. In these supremely political investigations, people who are politically hostile to the investigatory target invariably jump aboard.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-serious-business-of-comedy/

Late last year at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s annual Restoration Weekend event, Seth Dillon, CEO of the wildly popular, controversial satire site Babylon Bee, gave a keynote speech and knocked it out of the ballpark. He was entertaining and inspirational, a great Christian conservative culture warrior doing courageous work defending our First Amendment rights and skewering the idiotic madness of the left’s agenda.

I made sure to invite him on the Freedom Center podcast I host called The Right Take, where I have conversations with important conservative thinkers, writers, pundits, and storytellers about the intersection of politics and culture. On January 11th, the man behind the Bee, “the definitive source of fake news you can trust,” appeared on The Right Take and did not disappoint. His insights into, and tales of fighting, the culture war were such that I thought it worth posting an excerpt from our conversation in case you missed it or just don’t like listening to podcasts. Check it out below.

Mark Tapson: Seth, welcome to The Right Take.

Seth Dillon: Thanks for having me.

MT: I know you’re a busy guy and – I’m sorry, I don’t mean to assume your gender – so I’ll get right to it. In the book Rules for Radicals by the late, left-wing strategist Saul Alinsky, rule number five reads, “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There’s no defense against it. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating.” Now, the left has wielded this weapon successfully against its political enemies for decades.

But the right has gone much of that time with no counterpart. I mean, in recent years, our side has had Greg Gutfeld, and he’s basically been it. Meanwhile, the left has had every late-night talk show host, basically the entire entertainment industry aligned against the right, with no real heavy-hitting pushback from our side until the Babylon Bee came along. And I think one of the important things the Bee has done for the culture war is that it’s proven that the left can dish it out, but they can’t take it, can they?

SD: They don’t like to be the object of mockery. There’s a number of reasons for that. I think that one of the reasons they don’t like mockery is because mockery does effectively undermine their ideas and their arguments, and they don’t like that, so they try to put a stop to it. We see them behaving like tyrants all the time.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/04/the_ministry_of_bs_will_see_you_now.html

I wonder if there is ever a moment while DHS Secretary Mayorkas is claiming that America’s borders are entirely secure and blaming “climate change” for the influx of tens of millions of illegal aliens into the United States when he thinks, “Wow, I am really full of BS.  I mean, it is simply amazing how much BS I shovel down the American people’s throats every single day.”

The notion that powerful people lie to the public is certainly not new.  You can go back through the centuries and find essays, songs, drawings, and folktales that all attest to the timeless truth that every generation sees its “rulers” as an unworthy camarilla of cutthroats, liars, backstabbers, and thieves.  Still, the lies being told today are just so brazen.  Damaging tornado?  That’s what we get for driving cars.  Too many white mathematicians?  Obviously another bout of “systemic racism” rearing its ugly head.  Trump’s beating Biden in the polls?  Duh — that’s because America runs on “hate”!  

Disney and other child-grooming companies keep telling us that the only way to protect America’s youth is to put them on puberty blockers and let them dance for skeevy adults.  We used to call those skeevy adults “pedophiles,” but now the medical community insists that we treat them with more respect.  I have trouble respecting a profession that wants me to respect child molesters.  I also have trouble respecting a profession that pushes experimental “vaccines” on patients without their informed consent.  The fact that so few physicians have taken responsibility for their unscientific and unethical behavior during totalitarianism’s favorite overhyped pandemic feels like a giant whiff and strike three for medicine.  Or maybe the white coats (“systemic racism” alert!) struck out four years ago when medical associations insisted that Antifa and BLM be allowed to burn down neighborhoods in the name of “social justice health,” while the rest of us were forced to stay inside and participate in the theatrical production of the “Great COVID Hoax.”  A lot of MDs have BS degrees.