RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2021/09/03/joe-bidens-excuse-for-the-horrible-jobs-report-is-ridiculous-and-insulting-n1475789

The wisdom of putting Joe Biden behind a podium more frequently in the wake of the disaster in Afghanistan is questionable. Yet, following the disastrous August jobs report, he ambled out to explain why the projections were off by a factor of three. Today he was mumbling Joe rather than petulant Joe. A slew of recent polling indicates Americans are feeling less safe, less secure, and less prosperous.

Predictably, these sentiments have cause Biden’s approval ratings to crater. While his handling of COVID-19 propped him up above 50% overall approval for most of the summer, polling shows even his marks on the pandemic are sliding. In Rasmussen’s daily Presidential Tracking Poll, his Approval Index dipped to -21 on August 24 and has remained at least -20 heading into the Labor Day holiday. There is speculation that it could be a durable decline rather than a blip.

Incredibly, Biden opened his remarks by saying, “As we head into Labor Day weekend, we have more evidence of the progress of our economy from last year’s economic calamity.” Someone needs to tell him the baseline is February of 2020. No one gets credit for reopening an economy artificially shut down by the government. Employees returning to their jobs and closed businesses reopening is not economic growth. And frankly, even those two things are not happening fast enough.

The only reason the economy did not completely collapse is because the economic fundamentals were strong. By  continuing to blow out spending, the Biden administration is eroding the foundations of the U.S.’s economic strength going into the pandemic. Still, mumbly Joe wants us to celebrate 235,000 new jobs when over 700,000 were forecasted. Employers are not going to create many jobs when there are already more than 10 million open nationwide.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/03/joe-biden-is-lying-to-americans-about-afghanistan/

John Lucas is a practicing attorney in Tennessee who has successfully argued before the U. S. Supreme Court. Before entering law school at the University of Texas, he served in the Army Special Forces as an enlisted man and then graduated from the U. S. Military Academy at West Point in 1969. He is an Army Ranger and fought in Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader.

Earlier this week, this writer addressed the Biden administration’s instinctive lying on matters big and small, concluding: “When the president allows his key advisors lie to us about a dog bite, the only confidence the American people can have is that he will not be honest with us about these and other life-and-death matters if the truth would hurt his poll numbers or endanger Democrats’ reelection chances.”

Regrettably, recent events confirm that the president’s deceptions and misstatements are intentional and driven by political motives. This was confirmed by multiple events, some the very next day after the previous article published.

The first confirming event was in President Biden’s own words. Biden verified that lying about success in Afghanistan is part of his political strategy.

A Foreign Quid Pro Quo Based on Lies

In a bombshell report on Aug. 31, Reuters reported on an audio recording of a July 23 call between Biden and then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. It released a transcript. In the call, Biden stated, “I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things aren’t going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban.”

Biden then gave Ghani his marching orders: “And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.” His own words condemn the president: “Whether it is true or not…” As the indispensable Mollie Hemingway noted on Fox News on Sept. 2, “What this phone call shows is that the withdrawal was, like so many other parts of the war, communicated to the American public with lies.” Indeed it was.

But this was even worse. Again, Hemingway: “While the previous president was impeached over a phone call and accused of a quid pro quo, here you actually have a president asking someone to lie on his behalf and conditioning military aid on part of those lies.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/economy-sputters-in-august-adding-only-235000-jobs/?utm_source=

The U.S. economy added about 235,000 new jobs in August according to U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics released on Friday, falling far short of economists’ expectations of around 728,000 new jobs.

The U.S. unemployment rate fell slightly to 5.2 percent in August from 5.4 percent in July, the Bureau said.

The disappointing August jobs report comes after extensive employment gains in the previous two months. Employers added a million jobs in July and 962,000 in June, according to revised official estimates.

Areas that saw job gains in August include manufacturing, transportation and warehousing, and private education. Leisure and hospitality jobs remained unchanged, the Bureau said, although restaurants lost 42,000 jobs over the past month.

Continued spread of the Delta variant of coronavirus has hindered some economic growth, economists told the Wall Street Journal. Overall, around 5.3 million fewer people were employed as of August than in February 2020 before the coronavirus pandemic caused widespread business shutdowns.

The U.S. economy has seen high levels of inflation, with consumer prices rising 5.4 percent in July 2021 over the same month in 2020. Supply shocks have also disrupted certain sectors, such as a shortage of semiconductor chips that has caused automaker GM to temporarily shut down factories.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-the-highly-vaccinated-states-are-showing-us/

Massachusetts is one of the most vaccinated states, yet it still saw a 25-fold increase in active COVID-19 cases from July 6 to August 31.

In yesterday’s Morning Jolt, I laid out how between July 6 and August 31, the number of active cases of COVID-19 infection in the state of Vermont increased 23-fold — from 114 to 2,668. But as dire as that sounds, the state is not really in a public-health crisis — hospitalizations and daily new deaths remain low in Vermont, in large part because the state is heavily vaccinated. (It also helps that Vermont is one of the least-populated states in the country.)

It’s a mostly but not entirely similar situation in the higher-populated, more urban state next door. Massachusetts ranks third in the country in percentage of total population that is fully vaccinated, at 66.1 percent — and remember, this figure includes kids 11 and under who can’t get vaccinated. Massachusetts ranks second in the country in percentage of total population that has one dose, at more than 75 percent. By August 31, every county in Massachusetts had at least 68 percent of eligible people — those age 12 and over — vaccinated. And an astounding 99 percent of Massachusetts senior citizens are vaccinated.

Once again, we see that high vaccination rates do not prevent the Delta variant from infecting lots of people in a state. On July 6, Massachusetts had 1,349 active cases of COVID-19 infection; by August 31, the state had 34,671 active cases, a 25-fold increase. It cannot be emphasized enough: Vaccination does not prevent infection and cases, and an increase in cases is not necessarily a reflection of low vaccination rates in an area.