RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/02/during-fiery-hearing-gop-senators-blast-democrats-unseemly-efforts-to-delegitimize-supreme-court/

During a contentious Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Republicans shot down their Democrat colleagues’ efforts to intimidate and delegitimize the Supreme Court.

The Democrat-led “Supreme Court Ethics Reform” hearing was held amid a partisan media campaign accusing conservative justices of ethics violations and conflicts of interest.

Corporate media hit pieces in recent weeks have focused on Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, accusing them ethics violations, while ignoring the allegedly larger ethics violations of liberal justices, the Wall Street Journal editorial Board argued on Monday.

WSJ writers have “examined and debunked” multiple MSM reports accusing Thomas and Gorsuch of various ethics violations in recent weeks, and have concluded that the attacks have been part of a larger effort to subject the Court to more political control.

The first sign that this is all politics is the context for the hearing. Note that it’s been triggered by easily debunked reports about the conservative Justices, especially claims that Justice Thomas didn’t properly disclose certain financial transactions.

But Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson didn’t get the same attention when she revised her financial disclosures in 2022. Her oversights were far more extensive than Justice Thomas’s. There was also no outcry in 2020 when Justice Sonia Sotomayor amended her financial disclosures after the group Fix the Court found that she hadn’t disclosed reimbursement for trips to universities.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-war-on-boys-and-girls/

Over the years, a cause for teen angst, suicide, etc., has reportedly been the media. But there is no definitive evidence to corroborate that. In fact, every recent generation has traditionally pointed to the media or some other cultural factor as damaging to youth. In the 1920s, it was the Charleston, and in the 1940s, the bogeyman was radio crime dramas. Then in the 1950s, it was shoot-em-up westerns on TV and the advent of rock ‘n roll. But at the end of the day, most kids grew up normally.

These days cell phones and social media are supposedly culpable, but scientists still don’t know to what extent they are responsible for the rising mental health issues among teenagers and whether it is the primary cause. Alexey Makarin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, opines, “It seems to be the case — like it’s a big factor, but that’s still up for debate.”

What do we know?

A report from the CDC in February found that teen girls are experiencing “record high levels of violence, sadness, and suicide risk.” The data show that 57% of U.S. teen girls felt “persistently sad or hopeless in 2021—double that of boys, representing a nearly 60% increase and the highest level reported over the past decade.” About 30% had seriously attempted suicide. These numbers are dramatically higher than they were ten years ago.

Boys are suffering too. One of the main culprits for young males’ problems is the ongoing stress on so-called toxic masculinity, where feminists and the left take normal male behavior, exaggerate it, and then vilify it.

Toxic masculinity is a counterproductive term, to say the least. Boys are unlikely to react well to the idea that there is something toxic inside them that needs to be exorcised, especially as most of them identify quite strongly with their masculinity. Almost half of men said their sex was “extremely important” to their identity.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/02/gopers-order-blinken-to-turn-over-all-communications-with-hunter-biden-after-emails-show-he-lied-to-congress/

Following revelations that he allegedly lied under oath to Congress, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is facing calls from Senate Republicans to turn over communication records related to Hunter Biden and his shady business engagements.

On Monday, Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa sent a letter to Blinken demanding that he turn over any and all records “referring or relating to Hunter Biden, his business dealings, or his family’s business dealings” by May 15. The request comes as part of Senate Republicans’ investigation into the Biden family’s foreign business ventures.

In the letter, Johnson and Grassley document a series of emails revealing how Blinken seemingly lied under oath about his prior communications with Hunter. While testifying before Congress on Dec. 22, 2020, Blinken was asked if he had any means of correspondence —including phone calls, emails, or texts — with Hunter Biden during his time as President Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state, to which Blinken replied, “No.”

Emails from Hunter’s laptop, however, appear to contradict Blinken’s December 2020 testimony. As documented in the Johnson-Grassley letter, Hunter emailed Blinken at his personal email address on May 22, 2015, asking if the then-deputy secretary of state was available to meet.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/03/americans-reject-dei-dominated-wokeplace-schools-ii-tipp-poll/

So why is it being imposed on all of us?

American businesses and higher-educational institutions have been swept up in the “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” trend, which bases hiring, pay and promotion decisions on such things as political beliefs, gender, race and sexual orientation. Do most Americans support this trend? The answer is a resounding “no,” the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

Looking at the recent historic shifts among American commercial and educational institutions when it comes to their employment, promotion and pay practices, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll asked Americans “which of the following factors are important when it comes to hiring, raises, and promotions in the workplace?”

The list for rewarding employees included: “political belief,” “race,” “gender,” “political orientation,” which together comprise some of the essential elements of workplaces and schools that operate under the “progressive” ideals of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) movement.

But the other possibilities listed were employment practices still found in some, but not all, modern American workplaces and schools. These include judging employees on “quality of work,” “productivity/performance,” and “attitude toward work.”

(Note: Respondents were encouraged to select all the responses they thought were important, so the numbers reflect relative support, not absolute support, and don’t total to 100%.)

So did Americans prefer the new “woke-place,” or the old “workplace”? How about higher education?

The answer: Voters showed a clear and decisive 3-to-1 preference overall for the tried-and-true over the trendy-and-untested when it came to workplace practices.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vivek-ramaswamy-federal-reserve-monetary-policy-stable-dollar-presidential-race-2024-5b4abfaf?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Vivek Ramaswamy may be a longshot in his bid for the GOP presidential nomination, but the entrepreneur deserves credit for taking on issues that matter. His op-ed for these pages on Tuesday teed up reform of the Federal Reserve, a presidential-level issue that affects every American.

Most candidates haven’t done enough homework to talk about the Fed or monetary policy without looking foolish. And even for those who have, the conventional political wisdom is that the subjects are too complicated to grab public attention.

Yet that hasn’t always been true. Ronald Reagan campaigned on the need for a stable dollar, and the late Congressman Jack Kemp talked about making the dollar “as good as gold.” Those lines struck a populist chord as Americans faced the destructive inflation of the 1970s and the painful monetary tightening to defeat it in the 1980s. The U.S. is back at that same stand, with Washington having unleashed another inflation and the Fed now scrambling to beat it. Bank failures are one result.

Mr. Ramaswamy’s helpful contribution was to trace the Fed’s monetary mistakes back to the central bank’s loss of focus on keeping the dollar and exchange rates stable. That was the lesson Paul Volcker and other central bankers took away from the inflation of the 1970s, and their focus on stable prices led to more than a decade of healthy disinflation. It was called “the great moderation.”