RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3474968-joe-biden-is-making-americans-poorer/

Americans are getting poorer by the day, and they can thank President Biden.

Too harsh? Not at all. Stock markets are crashing, costing Americans trillions of dollars, and home prices will likely follow. All of this is happening even though our economy remains essentially strong.

Why the disconnect? Americans are worried about inflation and don’t think the Biden administration can fix it without plunging our economy into recession. With the president still hawking even more government spending, higher business taxes and increased regulations – all of which will drive prices higher – why would they?

Almost from the start, Americans knew that Biden’s policies were wrong for the country. From the second quarter of Biden’s presidency, consumer sentiment has trended sharply lower, even as jobs were plentiful and consumers flush with cash.

The University of Michigan consumer sentiment index stood at 88.3 in April 2021; today it has dropped to 59.4, one of the lowest levels since 1980, when the data were first collected. A reading, for sure, completely out of kilter with 3.6 percent unemployment.

According to a Real Clear Politics average of polls, only 38 percent of the nation approves of Biden’s management of the economy.

First, the facts: The economy shrank by an annualized rate of 1.4 percent in the first quarter, not because consumers stopped spending but mainly because we had a big jump in our trade imbalance. Imports surged nearly 18 percent on an annualized basis while exports fell. Economists at ISI Evercore estimate the blowout in the trade gap crimped real GDP growth in the quarter by 3.2 percent.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com

If what we are hearing about Roe v. Wade is true, perhaps Congress will do what it should have done forty-nine years ago – pass a law that reflects the will of the people, rather than depend on the opinions of nine Supreme Court Justices.

“The best defense is a good offense,” is an adage that has been used by many, from George Washington to Mao Zedong. It has been adopted by the Democrat Party. Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter has Democrats atwitter. Columnist Leonard Pitt wrote that the purchase “will turn one of the world’s leading social-media platforms into an even greater transmitter of disinformation and hate…” Keep in mind, Mr. Pitt’s definition of disinformation includes only that uttered by conservatives.

Barack Obama, speaking at a conference organized by The Atlantic called “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy,” opined: “It’s very difficult to get out of the reality that is constructed for us.” Constructed by whom, one might ask? As the New York Sun editorialized, Obama’s words were an “apt description of what Mr. Obama and the Democrat Press have built. Forget the metaverse. This is an alternative reality.” Speaking at Stanford University, a few days later Mr. Obama added that social media censors don’t go far enough, suggesting the government must step in. Six days later, the Biden Administration announced the establishment of a Disinformation Governance Board (DGB), an Orwellian-like “Ministry of Truth.” Coincidence? The DGB’s mission is to separate fact from fiction for the American people. Its real purpose, I feel certain, is to censor information that does not accord with the Administration’s narrative. The Board will be chaired by Nina Jankowicz who will report to Alejandro Mayorkas, U.S. Secretary for Homeland Security. Ms. Jankowicz seems an odd choice, as she disbelieved the truth of Hunter Biden’s laptop, claiming it was Trump “disinformation.” On the other hand, she did believe Christopher Steele, the discredited purveyor of disinformation about the fake Russian collusion story.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/restoring-america/equality-not-elitism/there-is-no-valid-defense-of-roe-thats-why-that-side-resorts-to-threats

Roe v. Wade “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” That was the conclusion in the Yale Law Journal of pro-choice legal scholar John Hart Ely.

“One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” That’s liberal legal scholar Laurence Tribe.

It’s near-consensus among legal scholars, even those who believe abortion should be legal, that Roe was a shoddy decision, not grounded in the Constitution.

“You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the opinion itself rather than the result,” wrote pro-choice scholar Kermit Roosevelt in the Washington Post.

“This is not surprising,” Roosevelt continued. “As constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent.”

The Constitution quite obviously does not protect abortion as a fundamental right. Roe relied on a “right of privacy” “emanating” from a “penumbra” cast by actually enumerated rights. It was clearly motivated reasoning.

Abortion has thus been protected from democracy by a ruling that everyone knows is garbage, motivated reasoning . I’ve collected here many pro-choice legal scholars saying how bad Roe was.

Subject to scrutiny, Roe falls, and abortion defenders need to convince politicians to vote in order to strip unborn babies of any legal protections.

This is why the pro-Roe side is relying on threats to protect Roe. Democrats promise that they will declare the Supreme Court illegitimate if it doesn’t uphold their decision. That directly implies that they believe the federal government and state courts should disregard any subsequent rulings from the court.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-irrational-misguided-discourse?token=

Politico on Monday night published what certainly appears to be a genuine draft decision by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito that would overturn the Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Alito’s draft ruling would decide the pending case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which concerns the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi law that bans abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy except in the case of medical emergency or severe fetal abnormalities. Given existing Supreme Court precedent that abortion can only be restricted after fetal viability, Mississippi’s ban on abortions after the 15th week — at a point when the fetus is not yet deemed viable — is constitutionally dubious. To uphold Mississippi’s law — as six of the nine Justices reportedly wish to do — the Court must either find that the law is consistent with existing abortion precedent, or acknowledge that it conflicts with existing precedent and then overrule that precedent on the ground that it was wrongly decided.

Alito’s draft is written as a majority opinion, suggesting that at least five of the Court’s justices — a majority — voted after oral argument in Dobbs to overrule Roe on the ground that it was “egregiously wrong from the start” and “deeply damaging.” In an extremely rare event for the Court, an unknown person with unknown motives leaked the draft opinion to Politico, which justifiably published it. A subsequent leak to CNN on Monday night claimed that the five justices in favor of overruling Roe were Bush 43 appointee Alito, Bush 41 appointee Clarence Thomas, and three Trump appointees (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett), while Chief Justice Roberts, appointed by Bush 43, is prepared to uphold the constitutionality of Mississippi’s abortion law without overruling Roe.

Draft rulings and even justices’ votes sometimes change in the period between the initial vote after oral argument and the issuance of the final decision. Depending on whom you choose to believe, this leak is either the work of a liberal justice or clerk designed to engender political pressure on the justices so that at least one abandons their intention to overrule Roe, or it came from a conservative justice or clerk, designed to make it very difficult for one of the justices in the majority to switch sides. Whatever the leaker’s motives, a decision to overrule this 49-year-old precedent, one of the most controversial in the Court’s history, would be one of the most significant judicial decisions issued in decades. The reaction to this leak — like the reaction to the initial ruling in Roe back in 1973 — was intense and strident, and will likely only escalate once the ruling is formally issued.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18475/election-integrity-dead

Many election operatives know that elections are won or lost because of process. For decades, one side has been focused on policy, big ideas, and winning debates. Meanwhile, the other side has been focused on process and the rules of the elections game.

[A] war is taking place around elections that has nothing to do with voting machines being controlled by Italian satellites or Internet hackers. They don’t need to be.

Election process fights have become a Darwinian “survival of the fittest.” Whichever side can effectively adapt to a new technological or cultural environment often determines who wins and who loses.

In 2020, an unprecedented burst of mail ballots swamped election offices because of the fright of COVID. All over the country, judges struck down or suspended laws that would have ensured those mail ballots were processed according to the law. At the same time, hundreds of millions of dollars in private money poured into election offices to change the way the elections were run.

It is a dangerous place we find ourselves, where citizens through the legislative process are enacting safeguards to keep our elections clean and manageable, yet a hyper-funded onslaught has mastered the art of killing real, verifiable, integrity in elections.

First, do not assume there will be a “red wave” this November. Many election operatives have demonstrated a fierce ability to adapt and leverage cultural and technological awareness into electoral wins.

Second, a “red wave” cannot overcome the “blue wave” tactics of 2020 seen in urban areas flush with outside cash.

Third, the Biden administration is already turning the battleship of the entire federal government toward turnout in 2022. Institutions have mobilized every single agency into a weapon to increase voter turnout among “historically marginalized communities.” Decoded, that means racial groups. This is all happening with little fanfare, and little means to stop it.

It also means that every federal agency has had a year-long head start into morphing into a get-out-the-vote tool. It means housing, welfare, and education offices will be turned into turnout machines. Institutions have adapted and created an architecture using the powers of the state to target certain voters and get them to the polls.

For good measure, the Biden administration proposed a $10 billion federal fund available for the next decade to replicate and expand the cash injections to election offices like those seen in 2020. Another $5 billion is requested for the U.S. Postal Service so it can expand its role in voting-by-mail. Even if the administration gets a fraction of that request, it will make the $500 million spent in 2020 from private groups to increase urban turnout look like small potatoes.

Perhaps most of all, we can start to pay close attention to the fights going on behind the scenes — the process fights. For so long, we have rightfully cared about policies such as taxes, government spending, education, and energy. We try to move heart and minds. But others put policy second: they are worried about whether process helps or hurts their ability to move bodies and ballots. Process is driving the outcomes of policies; it is time to fully engage before our ability to engage at all is extinguished.

In the wake of the 2020 election, states across the country enacted laws to try to prevent a repeat of the chaos from that election. In some states such as Arizona, Texas, and Florida, laws were passed to prohibit the private funding of election offices. In others, ballot custody vulnerabilities were addressed, such as limits on harvesting and drop-boxes.