NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Jeremy Horpedahl Inflation Hits the Drive-Through Rising fast-food prices are eroding American household budgets.

Posted By on April 19th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/inflation-hits-the-drive-through

You don’t need to be a close follower of economic data to know that food has gotten more expensive. The sticker shock at the grocery store and the anecdotes on social media reflect the truth: food prices at groceries and restaurants have increased by more than 25 percent in the last four years. That’s more than overall inflation (about 20 percent) and slightly more than average wage growth (about 24 percent). The Wall Street Journal recently reported on USDA data showing that Americans are now devoting more than 11.3 percent of their disposable income on food, the highest percentage in 30 years. While other food-spending measurements show a slightly smaller rise than the USDA’s, Americans are certainly spending more on food than they were immediately before the pandemic.

The data contain one puzzle, though: Americans don’t seem to be cutting back on dining out. Eating at restaurants is rightly considered something of a luxury; the more frugal way to consume food, generally, is to prepare it yourself. As the USDA shows, Americans are spending less of their income on groceries today than they were 30 years ago, even with recent food-price increases. At restaurants, however, Americans on average are spending quite a bit more of their income than they were three decades ago—well over 5 percent today versus about 4 percent in the early 1990s.

To understand this development, some historical perspective is useful. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditures Survey tracks household spending on goods and services back to 1901. Over the course of the twentieth century, BLS reports that households cut the portion of their income spent on food from over 40 percent to about 10 percent. That remarkable change left Americans with much more money to spend on other things, both luxuries and necessities.

The BLS lumps together grocery and restaurant spending for most of its past data but separates the two from 1984 onward. The more recent data also allow us to focus on specific demographics, such as middle-class families (the middle 20 percent of earners in this dataset). In the mid-1980s, middle-class Americans spent about 7 percent of their gross income on food at restaurants, and about 10 percent on groceries. By the late 2010s, these numbers had fallen to about 5 percent on restaurants and 7.5 percent on groceries, similar to the numbers from 2022 (4.6 percent on restaurants and 8.4 percent on groceries).

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The ‘Better’ Civilians of Gaza by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on April 19th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20586/the-better-civilians-of-gaza

Among the so-called innocent “civilians” who Hamas claims have been killed by Israel, there are thousands of guilty and complicit civilians without whose assistance Hamas could not have succeeded in their barbarisms.

When Hamas provides its self-serving numbers of those allegedly killed by Israel, they refuse to distinguish between combatants and civilians. They certainly do not identify complicit “civilians,” nor do they indicate how many were killed by the “friendly fire” of Hamas and other terrorist groups, whose rockets routinely misfire and land within Gaza. In a deliberate effort to mislead, Hamas instead purports to list the number of women and children who have been killed. But they include terrorists under the age of 19 as “children” and female terrorists as “women.”

All in all, the number of absolutely innocent Gazans — babies, children and adults who are not complicit in Hamas crimes — is a fraction of those claimed by Israel’s enemies, including so-called human rights groups.

It is time for a thorough and objective investigation of the actual status of all those allegedly killed by Israeli military actions. The results will show that Israel has achieved a remarkably low and unheard of ratio of combatants and complicit civilians to innocent civilians.

“The crimes committed by the Germans are horrible and one hears on every corner of the misery and losses they have intentionally brought over the peoples. The strangest thing is that even the better people among the Germans are not conscious of their heavy responsibility for all these crimes committed by the government they have chosen themselves, and that the outside world is rather inclined to forget about it.”

Those words were written by Albert Einstein on September 16, 1945, shortly after the end of World War II, in a letter I was fortunate enough to acquire.

That letter could have been written to the so-called innocent adult civilians in Gaza. They too bear “a heavy responsibility for all these crimes committed by the government they have chosen themselves.” They elected Hamas and, according to recent polls, continue to support it and would vote for those terrorists again.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hamas apologism has taken Australia by storm Once poisonous but marginal views have become all too acceptable since 7 October. Hugo Timms

Posted By on April 19th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/19/hamas-apologism-has-taken-australia-by-storm/

Since the 7 October pogrom in Israel, it has become increasingly clear that hostility towards Israel is no longer confined to its Islamist enemies. It is increasingly prevalent in Western democracies, too.

This has certainly been true in Australia. Indeed, just days after Hamas committed atrocities in southern Israel, mobs stood on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, chanting ‘Gas the Jews!’. It set the tone for subsequent pro-Palestine protests, each one serenaded by the hateful chant, ‘From the river to the sea’. Israel has rarely been more threatened, and it has certainly never been so alone.

Of course, there have been anti-Israel pile-ons from activists over the years. But what had been less apparent in Australia was Hamas apologism, or a refusal to condemn the terrorists. Until now, that is.

This month, the Labor government, panicked about the prospect of losing seats to the pro-Palestine Greens, said that it intends to recognise a Palestinian state. Speaking last Tuesday, foreign-affairs minister Penny Wong said that statehood is ‘the only hope to break the endless cycle of violence’. She also said this was the best way to damage Hamas.

The response from Nasser Mashni, president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, to Labor’s position was revealing. He was provided with four opportunities by Sky News host Tom Connell to repudiate Hamas and agree that its involvement in the future governance of Gaza would be intolerable. Mashni dodged and equivocated on each occasion.

‘What we need to do is move beyond this fascination or infatuation with Hamas’, Mashni said, seemingly bewildered that a group that had carefully planned and executed the murder, kidnapping and rape of 1,200 defenceless civilians – ranging from babies to the elderly – was somehow relevant to a discussion on the future of Palestine. Towards the end of the interview, Mashni laid his cards squarely on the table: ‘The problem is not Hamas – the problem is Zionism, it’s settler colonialism.’

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Price of Surrendering Speech By Eliot Pattison

Posted By on April 19th, 2024

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

No one was particularly surprised when Vladmir Putin recently won reelection by a landslide. The near universal reaction could be characterized by a roll of the eyes and a sighed “what do you expect, it’s Russia.” We’ve seen this before, after all — it is his fifth term — but there is something new in its significance for us. What’s changed is the newly fragile condition of our own democracy, making the Moscow “election” emphatically relevant to America. Many are the differences between Russian and American society, but one of those gaps has shrunk with alarming speed over the past decade. Putin’s power has been built on the bones of a free press. America once had a fiercely independent media that was not just the hallmark of our liberty but also the guardian that kept our society free. But our mainstream press has abandoned its sentinel post, leaving America vulnerable as we move toward the most important election in generations. 

The Supreme Court recently cast a spotlight on the health of our free speech when it examined the Administration’s efforts to stifle critics through manipulation of social media. Reports on the hearing, however, missed the fundamental issue. Apologists asserted that there had been no top-down coercion of speech — “nothing to see here, move on.” But the ultimate issue wasn’t that the Administration initiated censorship, it was that our leaders were enabled by the repression of speech that was already endemic in the popular media. The Supreme Court will decide if indirect manipulations violate constitutional protections. Whatever the outcome, we are learning a bitter lesson: the Constitution, in all its brilliance, does not protect us from repression that grows outside government, from within our culture. Free speech relies on the Constitution, yes, but it also relies on our social compact and its moral framework of truth, which is collapsing in vital parts of society.  

Our mainstream media has been surrendering its freedom for years, not by any dictate from the top but by a seismic shift in its values and self-perceived role in society. The process started slowly, long ago, when publishers and editors discovered a gold mine in obsessing over celebrity heroes, then accelerated when they found that a celebrity villain offered the same rewards. They learned to favor sensation over substance, never worried that their chosen villains are not always evil, nor their heroes always virtuous. For them an off-color remark or over-the-top boast from one of their celebrities becomes more important than any substantive dialogue about policy. Why worry about terrorists infiltrating across the border when what the public really wants to hear is how the President blasted the “Neanderthals” who don’t embrace his climate agenda? Thus began the dumbing down of their readers. They taught their increasingly shallow audience that political engagement had nothing to do with liberty or constitutional government, but was simply about loving to hate the villain of choice.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

NYPD Arrests More Than 100 Protesters at Anti-Israel Protest on Columbia Campus By Brittany Bernstein

Posted By on April 19th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nypd-arrests-more-than-100-protesters-including-ilhan-omars-daughter-at-anti-israel-protest-on-columbia-campus/

New York City police arrested 108 anti-Israel protesters on Columbia University’s campus on Thursday after the university’s president asked law enforcement to step in and break up the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.”

NYPD officers in riot gear arrived on campus Thursday afternoon, more than 30 hours after the protest began, and warned protesters to disperse several times before they began making arrests for trespassing. Two protesters were charged with obstruction of governmental administration in addition to trespassing, city officials said at a news conference.

“These arrests were made without incident, and we will now let the rest of the criminal-justice system run its course,” police commissioner Edward Caban said during a news conference on Thursday evening.

Isra Hirsi, the daughter of progressive representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), was among the protesters who were arrested.

Mayor Eric Adams said police “ensured that there was no violence or injuries during the disturbance.”

“Columbia University students have a proud history of protest and raising their voices,” Adams said during the news conference. “Students have a right to free speech — they do not have a right to violate university policies and disrupt learning on campus.”

Asked why the Columbia sit-in was not considered a peaceful protest, Adams said “a peaceful protest is not in violation of city laws” or on public property.

“I know the conflict in the Middle East has left many of us grieving and angry,” he added. “This is a painful moment for our city, for our country, and for the globe. New Yorkers have every right to express their sorrow, but that heartbreak does not give you the right to harass others, to spread hate.”

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Insane Asylum: The Policy Disaster at the Border By Peter Skerry

Posted By on April 19th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/06/insane-asylum-the-policy-disaster-at-the-border/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

The Biden administration‘s choices have produced lawlessness and disorder

The ongoing crisis at the U.S.–Mexican border has one distinct virtue. It presents Americans with the opportunity to clarify various misconceptions about what is not merely the largest wave of migrants in our history, but also the most disorderly and disruptive. These misconceptions have distorted our rightful understanding of ourselves as the world’s preeminent nation of immigrants. And after more than five decades of evasion and outright policy failures, immigration is now at the core of the profound disaffection so many Americans express toward our elites and mainstream institutions. It therefore behooves us to stop and scrutinize the ill-founded assumptions on which various positions and policies — whether “pro-” or “anti-immigration” — have become not just based but entrenched.

But a funny thing happened on the way to this crisis. The size, relative suddenness, and sustained nature of the mass of humanity arriving at our southern border has rendered dramatically less salient what had long been the dominant frame of the ongoing national debate: the line between legal and illegal immigration. Our decades-long national preoccupation with illegal immigration has — at least for now — been eclipsed by the more pressing concern, among elected officials and citizens alike, of addressing the chaos not only along our southern border but also in our major metropolitan areas. Legality has been superseded by reality.

At least since 1994, when the thunderbolt of California’s Proposition 187 prohibited the provision of most public services to the undocumented (before being gutted by the federal courts), the national debate over immigration had been fixated on the presumptively bright line between legal and illegal immigration. Yet that line had always been rather blurred, and in recent months it has become almost invisible. Under the Biden administration’s disastrous policies, jurisdictions — not just along the border but across the nation — have been overwhelmed with unprecedented numbers of migrants in need of basic services and support. State and local officials struggle to provide food, shelter, and medical care to hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention schooling for the tens of thousands of children accompanying them, all with minimal help from the federal government. We have as a nation come to focus not so much on the legal status of this crush of humanity as on the fiscal, logistical, social, and ethical challenges it poses.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Could EVs Compete In A True Free Market?

Posted By on April 19th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/19/could-evs-compete-in-a-true-free-market/

It seems we’ve reached “peak EV,” with sales in trouble and assembly line workers losing their jobs. The hard truth is electric vehicle sales would have never reached the level they have if the government had not trespassed into private matters.

The EV troubles are all around. Sales are slowing. Unsold cars have piled up in lots. Surveys plainly indicate that fewer Americans want them. In response to dramatically slowing sales, Ford announced last fall that it was delaying $12 billion in EV investments. Which should surprise no one, considering that the company lost nearly $73,000 on each EV it sold in the second quarter of 2023.

At roughly the same time, General Motors walked away from its EV strategy. Mercedes was excited about its new EVs just a few months back but learned that customers weren’t thrilled about about them. Earlier this year Hertz decided it would dump as many as 20,000 of its EVs. Now Tesla is laying off 10% of its global workforce, meaning around 14,000 former employees will be looking for new jobs.

Rivian is also dropping one-tenth of its workforce. The company’s share price fell 15% when the announcement was made. Production at Lucid, another EV startup, is expected to be “much lower than Wall Street’s expectations,” Reuters reports.

Meanwhile, BYD, the Chinese EV maker that’s heavily subsidized by Beijing, has seen a sharp fall in sales.

For years EV sales have been propped up like a corpse by public policy. The incentives to buy what are considered zero-emission automobiles but clearly are not come at an obscenely high cost. Research by the Texas Public Policy Foundation found that “nearly $22 billion in federal and state subsidies and regulatory credits suppressed the retail price of EVs” by an average of nearly $50,000. Or put another way, “the average model year 2021 EV would cost $48,698 more to own over a 10-year period without $22 billion in government favors given to EV manufacturers and owners.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

NPR Scandal Should Kill Taxpayer-Funded Broadcasting Charles Lipson

Posted By on April 19th, 2024

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/04/18/npr_scandal_should_kill_taxpayer-funded_broadcasting_150810.html

“I don’t want any yes-men around me,” said Sam Goldwyn, the Hollywood producer famed for his movies and malapropisms. “I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job.” The brass at National Public Radio must have heard Sam, but they add a slight amendment. We want only “yes-men” (they/them) and will boot anyone who dares to dissent.

Lest there be any doubt, NPR just proved it by suspending, without pay, the staffer who exposed the pervasive problems there. He dared to write publicly that that National Public Radio was uniformly ideological, deeply committed to its strident left-wing views, and determined to exclude any alternatives. For saying that out loud, they cut off Uri Berliner’s paycheck for five days. It’s their way of saying, “Thank you for your feedback.” Q.E.D.

Berliner, disgusted by NPR’s response, resigned Wednesday with a fiery statement: “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged.” Who could?

There are really two problems here, not one, and they go well beyond one journalist’s resignation. The first is political bias, which is a problem at all “elite” networks and newspapers, where “hard news” is heavily slanted. The second is that some of these outlets, notably NPR, PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) and their local affiliates, receive taxpayer funding.

Let’s take political bias first. It was once a cardinal rule of journalism that partisan or ideological viewpoints should be confined to editorials and opinion columns. The goal was to keep editorial views out of hard-news reporting, as much as possible. To do it, the editorial staff constantly fought with the business team, who wanted coverage to favor their advertisers.

Those days are long gone and so is even the ideal of unbiased coverage. We have returned to an earlier era when American newspapers were closely affiliated with political parties and local political machines and covered the news to favor them. Today’s newsrooms have revived that stance. They are as ideologically driven as a gender-studies class at Smith College. If you depart from that ideology, you are out, like Bari Weiss at the New York Times.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Legal Arsenal of the Group Quota Regime By T.J. Harker

Posted By on April 19th, 2024

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-legal-arsenal-of-the-group-quota-regime/

Editor’s Note: Lawfare, the weaponization of law against political opponents—both public figures and ordinary citizens—is now a mainstay of the Left’s political strategy. T.J. Harker, an attorney and former federal prosecutor, explains how the law itself has become the power mechanism of the present revolutionary threat, and illuminates how fully this new order has already supplanted the old American Constitution. From woke prosecutors to political disbarments to judicial activism, the group quota regime and the legal apparatus are now indistinguishable in large swathes of the country.

This essay was originally published in The American Mind under the title “The Regime v. America.” In the weeks since its release, at the end of a lengthy and expensive trial, a California Bar Court officially recommended that John Eastman be disbarred.

The American legal system was a thing of beauty. Refined across centuries and emerging from the precedence of millions of common law cases, by the end of the last millennium it had become the envy of the world. Serving both a dispute resolution and truth-seeking function, it channeled the violent passions of human nature into a controlled medium. It then subjected those passions to standardized procedures (the rules of evidence and civil or criminal procedure) to yield judgments that commanded the respect of the parties and the public. 

The American rule of law sustained our capacity for self-governance. The legal system midwifed the most sophisticated property rights regime in the world, improved our collective reasoning faculties, balanced the imperative of change with the demands of tradition, and settled disputes of trivial insignificance as well as controversies of monumental importance. The system functioned so well that most Americans never even thought about it. And it commanded such astonishing respect that virtually everyone obeyed its commands in even the most partisan contests. 

But today, sophisticated regime mandarins in Big Law, government, and non-profit activist organizations seek to pervert our legal system by hacking it. They warp its dispute resolution and truth-seeking function to one that advances and sustains their grip on power, delegitimizing that grip in the process. This is known as lawfare. Its variants include access denial, weaponized defamation law, weaponized criminal law, misuse of federal and state agencies, subversive professional licensing requirements, and “adversarial inversion.” 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bill Maher says the US has ‘passed the Rubicon,’ slams Dearborn, Michigan, ‘Death to America’ rally By  Yael Halon,

Posted By on April 19th, 2024

https://nypost.com/2024/04/17/us-news/bill-maher-says-the-us-has-passed-the-rubicon-slams-dearborn-michigan-death-to-america-rally/

“Real Time” host Bill Maher said it’s time to draw the line when it comes to chants of “Death to America” on American soil.

On Friday’s “Overtime” segment on YouTube, Maher addressed the protesters in Dearborn, Michigan, who shouted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” during an International Al-Quds Day rally earlier this month.

“Can I talk about American propaganda? Because there was a rally in Dearborn, Michigan, it’s a large Muslim population, [there were] chants of ‘Death to America.’ I feel like we’ve passed something here,” Maher said.

“The left has gotten mad at me for many years for talking about Islam. I try not to do it too much because I know it makes them go crazy, and I’ve made my point. But it needs to be talked about now. When you start chanting ‘Death to America’ in America.”

In a conversation with guests Piers Morgan and British journalist Gillian Tett, Maher pointed to quotes from anti-Israel activist Takek Bazzi, who headlined the hour-long rally in front of the Henry Ford Centennial Library in Dearborn.

In video shared by the Middle East Media Research Institute, Bazzi tells the crowd at the event that the “Death to America” chants were in honor of former Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini.