RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://us.cnn.com/2023/08/11/economy/inflation-rate-spending/index.html

US inflation has had a snowballing effect on family budgets.

The typical American household spent $709 more in July than they did two years ago to buy the same goods and services, according to Moody’s Analytics.

That figure underscores the cumulative impact high inflation has had on consumer finances — even as price growth has cooled considerably in recent months.

“High inflation of the past 2+ years has done lots of economic damage,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, wrote in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Most of that increase in spending is driven by housing costs, which have surged, Zandi told CNN in an email on Friday. He added that families are also spending more at the grocery store; on buying, maintaining and insuring vehicles and on recreational services like cable.

Of course, paychecks have also grown over the past two years — but not by as much as the cost of living.

Inflation-adjusted earnings are stuck in 2019

Even though prices have soared, real earnings, which adjust for inflation, are stuck at late 2019 levels.

“Real earnings remain below what they would have been if not for the pandemic and the Russian war, which is weighing on the collective psyche,” Zandi told CNN in an email on Friday.

The good news is that wages are finally starting to outpace inflation and consumer price growth has eased significantly, so much so that many investors are betting the Federal Reserve is done raising interest rates.

Americans’ wages are finally outpacing inflation. Here’s why it may not last

Looking at just the last year, Zandi calculates that the typical household spent $202 more this July than they did a year ago to buy the same goods and services.

https://thespectator.com/topic/hunter-biden-special-counsel-david-weiss-investigating-probe/

At long last, Attorney General Merrick Garland decided to appoint a special counsel to continue the investigation of Hunter Biden, his family and associates. His choice: US Attorney David Weiss of Delaware, who has been on the case for several years. He was originally appointed as US attorney by Donald Trump, a point Democrats always highlight without noting that he was promoted by both Democratic senators from the state. 

Being named special counsel gives Weiss some authority beyond that of a regular US attorney. In particular, he can bring federal cases outside his narrow territorial domain without consent from US attorneys in those other districts. That’s an important point, since Weiss was apparently denied the right to bring at least two other cases his office sought. 

His appointment makes sense in one way: any other choice would have added years to the investigation. Weiss is already up to speed. The question is whether he is speeding down the right road. 

Weiss might have been appointed special counsel during the Trump administration, but outgoing AG Bill Barr has said he thought that decision should be left to the incoming administration. His rationale was a strong one: he feared that appointing a special counsel as one administration went out the door would set a precedent for future administrations to begin investigating their successors. If a special counsel was needed, Barr concluded, that should be up to the Biden administration. 

Shockingly, the Biden administration did not want to appoint a special counsel to investigate itself or the president’s family. The new attorney general could have given Weiss those additional powers two years ago but declined. Garland actually made the incredible argument that Weiss, as a US attorney, had more powers than he would have as a special counsel. 

Both Garland and Weiss have also told Congress that Weiss had ultimate authority to bring cases wherever he wished. But those statements may not be true, since Weiss was apparently blocked from filing cases in other jurisdictions, and since he told multiple IRS investigators that he was not the ultimate decision-maker on these cases. The latter statement directly contradicts what he and Garland have told Congress.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/08/the_deadly_untrustworthiness_of_general_mark_milley.html

Once, he was a soldier. Now, though, Milley has become a bureaucrat in uniform, trading national security for leftist policies.

General Mark Milley, who is Secretary of Defense, has forgotten that he was a soldier. Now, he’s only a leftist bureaucrat in uniform. Milley’s basic mode of operation is ingratiating himself to a political class that values the servile.

What makes Milley dangerous is his willingness to lie unhesitatingly, particularly in public. He is the highest-ranking military officer in the nation, and this matters. Technically the Secretary of Defense is a civilian post even though the Secretary may have a military background. The President and Congress provide civilian oversight but can only do so when presented with truthful, accurate information.

In June 2021, Tucker Carlson made some very strong remarks about Milley’s attempts to make teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the military seem benign. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Milley compared CRT to reading Marx and Mao, as if it’s just part of educating the troops about different ideologies. However, our military is not urging the adoption of Marxism. (At least not yet!) What Milley is doing is cooperating with the Democrat left to indoctrinate the troops in blatant racism.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/where-is-hillarys-indictment-on-the-same-charges-as-trump/

On December 12, 2016 (or D12), the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign endorsed a call by Christine Pelosi, the daughter of then House Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi, as well as other electors to receive an “intelligence briefing” on how “Russian interference was performed to help Donald Trump get elected” from Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Hillary Clinton and her senior campaign officials were aware that they had concocted the lie that the Russians had gotten Trump elected, outsourced it to a former British intelligence operative, Christopher Steele, who produced the infamous Steele dossier, and distributed it through the FBI and were exploiting it to subvert the Electoral College and hijack the presidential election.

The Clinton campaign was endorsing a move to influence members of the Electoral College to set aside their duty and corrupt the electoral votes. Electors are bound to vote in accordance with the ballot count. There was no purpose to a “briefing” on the conspiracy theories that were manufactured by the Clinton campaign except to persuade them to corrupt the vote.

The Wall Street Journal correctly described the move as an “Electoral College Coup”. Pelosi’s daughter and other Democrat electors were requesting “a briefing on all investigative findings, as these matters directly impact the core factors in our deliberations of whether Mr. Trump is fit to serve as President of the United States.” And they were asking it from Clapper who would go around pushing the Steele dossier and defending its conspiracy theories as based on facts.

Clapper, using similar language to the Democrat electors, would describe Trump as unfit.

The Clinton campaign endorsed this proposed Electoral College coup by claiming that the “electors’ letter raises very grave issues involving our national security. Electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution and we support their efforts to have their questions addressed.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/prosecutors-targeting-trump-gave-fbis-mccabe-a-pass/

Meet Molly Gaston.

“It is difficult to imagine a public interest stronger than the one in this case,” assistant special counsel Molly Gaston wrote in a court document filed Thursday, “in which the defendant — the former President of the United States — is charged with three criminal conspiracies intended to undermine the federal government, obstruct the certification of the 2020 presidential election, and disenfranchise voters.”

You may remember Molly Gaston from passes for Russiagate figures such as these.

In early 2021, Mr. Cooney pressed federal law enforcement officials to turn their attention to people in Mr. Trump’s orbit, including his flamboyant political adviser Roger J. Stone Jr., according to The Washington Post. He would eventually work on the successful prosecutions of Mr. Stone and another Trump adviser, Stephen K. Bannon.

He joined Mr. Windom’s team in mid-2022, then moved into Mr. Smith’s office late last year.

The assistant U.S. attorney in federal court on Tuesday, when a grand jury handed up a four-count indictment against Mr. Trump, was Molly Gaston, who has worked closely with Mr. Cooney on the Stone and McCabe cases.

See if you can spot the difference between the handling of the Stone, Bannon, and McCabe cases.