RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-ketanji-brown-jackson-biden-nominee-supreme-court-violent-crime-democrats-racial-identity-affirmative-action-racism-clarenc-thomas-11646769193?mod=opinion_major_pos7

Joe Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 when President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Mr. Biden accused Bush of putting racial identity ahead of qualifications: “Had Thomas been white, he never would have been nominated. The only reason he’s on the court is because he’s black.” Now the shoe is on the other foot.

If Sen. Biden could only speculate about the Thomas nomination, no such speculation is needed concerning President Biden’s choice of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to fill the seat being vacated by Justice Stephen Breyer. Two years ago, while running for president, Mr. Biden announced that his first nominee to the court would be a black woman. No whites (or men) need apply.

Later this year, the Supreme Court will consider a case involving the use of race in college admissions. The focus will be on whether these policies are compatible with the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause and with federal statutes that explicitly ban racial discrimination. Still, the dubious legality of racial double standards—clear to anyone who believes that words mean what they say—is only one of the problems with affirmative action. Racial preferences also serve to diminish black achievement. They allow others to take credit for black accomplishments, and they imply that black upward mobility can’t or won’t occur without officially sanctioned favoritism.

When Elizabeth Warren ran for the U.S. Senate in 2012 and was accused of identifying as Native American to bolster her academic career, she became indignant. “I got what I got because of the work I’ve done,” she told the Boston Globe. In other words, she responded the way any self-respecting woman would respond to accusations that she was less qualified but hired anyway for diversity reasons. Liberal proponents of affirmative action tell blacks that there is no shame in being hired based on their skin color, but why are black overachievers like Justice Thomas or Judge Jackson expected to be any less self-respecting than Sen. Warren?

The reality is that blacks were advancing at a faster clip, both educationally and economically, before the implementation of affirmative action policies in the 1970s. At best, racial preferences continued a pre-existing trend. In the 1940s and ’50s, the poverty rate fell further for blacks than for whites. In the 1960s, black household income doubled. The postwar economic boom lifted all groups, but blacks especially. A similar phenomenon occurred to a lesser extent in the pre-pandemic economy under Donald Trump, when black wages rose faster than white wages, and black unemployment and poverty reached record lows. Apparently, blacks need tight labor markets more than they need a woke president.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-joe-bidens-inflation-vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-prices-bureau-of-labor-statistics-11646952656?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Inflation keeps rising, and working Americans are paying the price in falling real incomes. That’s the bad news from Thursday’s consumer-price index report for February, and the White House can’t blame Vladimir Putin for this one, though it’s trying.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said prices rose 0.8% in the month, the fastest rate in four months. That’s 7.9% over the last 12 months, and 8.4% over the last three months. In other words, inflation is accelerating.

The inflation surge was driven by rising costs for gasoline, food and shelter (imputed rents). But the price increases were also broad-based, suggesting that the psychology of rising prices has set in with businesses and consumers. The price of services (not counting energy services) rose 0.5% for the month. Remember when inflation was supposedly caused by supply-chain shortfalls for goods?

Well, services aren’t goods. Transportation costs rose 1.4%, and shelter jumped by 0.5%. The latter are likely to keep rising because they usually trail housing costs (which aren’t directly part of the consumer-price index).

https://www.city-journal.org/homicides-are-a-national-crisis

In his State of the Union address last week, President Biden declared, “The answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them.” This line conflicts with Biden’s radical posturing after George Floyd’s death in 2020, but he’s right to talk about the necessity of adequately funding law enforcement. Over the past two years, homicidal violence has become a national crisis, with little coverage in the mainstream media.

As data from CDC and FBI crime reports released last fall demonstrate, 2020 saw the largest ever year-to-year increase in homicides. Following the George Floyd protests, cities such as Minneapolis, Portland, and New York City experienced an explosion in violence not seen in decades. The mayhem continued to mount in 2021, as under-resourced and demoralized police departments across the country struggled to quell rising neighborhood violence. At least a dozen cities nationwide shattered historical homicide records last year, including Portland, Austin, and Philadelphia.

Austin, Texas, saw one of the sharpest homicide spikes in 2021, with murders skyrocketing 86 percent. The city has never witnessed a higher homicide toll in a single year. “Typically, in Austin, homicide detectives average 3-4 homicides per year. 2021 was different,” Austin police lieutenant Brett Bailey told KXAN. “Several of the detectives were nearing [investigation of] their 10th homicide for the year.”

https://americanmind.org/salvo/trumps-virtues/

Many leading Republicans and conservatives want someone other than Donald Trump to run for President in 2024. But this judgment requires an assessment of Trump’s vices and virtues in the context of our current political and cultural circumstances, as well as an assessment of other prospective Republican presidential candidates. Among the talked-about alternatives to Trump, I have not yet seen anyone who possesses either his virtues or his backbone. I am not suggesting that everyone make way for Trump; rather that it is too early to throw him overboard.

I regularly ask Republican politicians what they think of Donald Trump. The most frequent response is some version of, “I like his policies but don’t like the rest of him.” But this formulation gets it almost backwards. Although Trump advanced many important policies, it is the “rest of him” that contains the virtues that inspired a movement.

Trump was born for the current American crisis: the life and death struggle against the totalitarian enemy I call “woke communism.” The “woke comms” have seized every political, cultural, and economic center of power in the country from where they ruthlessly push their agenda. That agenda rests on the conviction that America is thoroughly bad (systemically racist) and must be destroyed. 

If there is one thing that patriotic Americans know about Trump it is that he, like them, is unequivocally pro-American and willing to fight to defend the American way of life. When Collin Kaepernick and his ilk knelt before the American flag, Trump called them “sons of bitches.” As always, he was being forceful, authentic, and unmistakably clear.

https://www.thepostemail.com/2022/03/07/pandemic/

 — The pandemic rages on. The science tells us it is a disease of the mind. It mainly affects persons who have managed to go through life without ever learning to think rationally. Its primary symptom is an overwhelming desire to help the oppressed. Those infected believe that this desire is the essence, the sine qua non, of moral worth. They view anyone who does not share this belief as the embodiment of evil.

Beyond the question of caring for others, the infected show an admirable degree of tolerance for the failings of their fellow man. They are laudably forgiving of vagrancy, drug abuse, sexual license of every variety, petty crime, not-so-petty crime (shoplifting up to the house limit of $950 in California), and arson and vandalism (when done for a good cause). Anyone who does not share their tolerance for such indiscretions they view as the embodiment of evil.

Those infected typically experience an irresistible desire to tell others what to do. A British doctor has diagnosed the mindset of the infected thus: because what’s good for society as a whole is the standard of right and wrong, rather than what’s good for each individual, government experts acting on behalf of society are best qualified to determine how each person ought to live his life.

https://spectator.org/the-stench-of-spygate/

The more we learn about the Obama administration’s spying on Donald Trump, the worse it looks. The investigation into his alleged collusion with Russia never had any foundation to it. Feverish partisans pushed for the probe. Chief among them were John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director who despised Trump, and Peter Strzok, Brennan’s FBI liaison who texted his mistress that he was going to “stop” Trump.

The partisan origins of the probe are impossible to deny. But were they illegal? Can an administration just open up an investigation on a political opponent based on partisan hunches? This remains to be seen. Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has said that “quite a few more indictments” are likely to come from special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the probe. “[Then-Attorney General] Bill Barr, John Durham, and I, all looking at this intelligence, agreed there was not a proper predicate to open a criminal investigation into the Trump campaign, yet that happened,” he said.