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April 2022

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Welcome To Stagflation

By on April 29th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/29/welcome-to-stagflation/

When it comes to the economy, Democrats like to say it’s unfair to judge a president by his first year in office. Very well. President Biden is now in his second year and now we have the statistical verdict of his economic stewardship rendered by the first-quarter drop in GDP. Stagflation, anyone?

It may well be that the first quarter’s annual GDP growth of -1.4% marks not just the beginning of a period of low or no growth accompanied by inflation, but also the return to the stagflation that ruined the decade of the 1970s and helped destroy the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

And no, you can’t blame Donald Trump anymore for things that go wrong. The economic disasters piling up are now on the progressive Democrats’ tab. They broke it, they bought it.

Biden immediately spun the bad GDP news as due to “technical factors,” including a slowdown in government spending and a decline in net exports, which both contributed to the GDP drop.

“What you’re seeing is enormous growth in the country, that was affected by everything from COVID, and the COVID blockages that occurred along the way,” Biden said, after the Commerce Department delivered the bad news.

“No one is predicting a recession now, they are, some are predicting a recession in 2023. I’m concerned about it,” he said.

“But I know one thing, if our Republican friends are really interested in doing something about dealing with economic growth, they should help us continue to lower the deficit,” Biden added, saying he wants “a tax code that is actually one that works.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

STILL WAITING — U.S. HOSPITALS FLOUT HEALTHCARE PRICE DISCLOSURE RULE

By on April 29th, 2022

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/investigation-hospitals-ignoring?s=r

Before he left office, President Donald Trump made good on his vision that hospitals should be transparent about the prices they charge patients for services.

His administration proposed a rule that those prices must be posted online in real time for everyone to see.

If it was price disclosure at the grocery store or the gas station, it wouldn’t have been revolutionary. But, the hospitals went crazy!

In a recent study, 857 out of 1,000 hospitals audited weren’t complying — a full year after the Biden administration finalized the price transparency rule.
 
Hospitals are slow-walking price transparency. And we found that the Biden administration has yet to levy a single fine!

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

DHS head Mayorkas spars with House GOP and blames Trump for border troubles by Virginia Aabram,

By on April 29th, 2022

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/dhs-head-mayorkas-spars-with-house-gop-and-blames-trump-for-border-troubles

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sparred with Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee over the crisis at the southern border, while he and the Democratic lawmakers blamed the Trump administration for his department’s troubles.

While the GOP members pressed Mayorkas on migration statistics at the Thursday oversight hearing, Democrats acknowledged that he “inherited something of a mess,” as Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, said.

“One of the greatest obstacles we have, Mr. Chairman, is to overcome the distrust that was sown by the prior administration,” Mayorkas told New York Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler. “Through its global policies, many still feel fearful, given what trauma they experienced and continue to experience.”

Nadler said that “the previous administration did all it could to break our immigration system” by enforcing family separation policies in which “children were literally kidnapped from their mothers and fathers with no plans to reunite them” and doing everything in its “power to block legal pathways.”

Mayorkas, in response to Lofgren’s lamentation of the state of the immigration system left by former President Donald Trump, agreed that “the prior administration decimated the legal immigration system, leaving U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that administers our nation’s legal immigration system, on the brink of bankruptcy.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Americans for Merit-Based Admissions Poll respondents say academic achievement matters more than race.

By on April 29th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-for-merit-based-admissions-pew-research-poll-ibram-x-kendi-11651181826?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Progressives are preoccupied with imposing racial preferences in education and hiring, but the American public wants these decisions to be based on merit. Witness the results of a new Pew Research Center poll.

The survey, conducted in March, asked more than 10,000 respondents what factors should matter for college admissions. In a landslide, respondents favored academic achievement over race and gender.

Ninety-three percent of respondents said high school grades should count toward college admission, with 61% saying they should be a major factor. Nearly four in 10 said standardized test scores should be a major factor, and 85% at least a minor factor.

Nearly three of four said race or ethnicity should not be a factor in admissions. That includes 59% of blacks, 68% of Hispanics, 63% of Asians and 62% of Democrats.

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EDUCATION, HISTORY Comments turned off

Harvard, Slavery and Judaism What the story of Judah Monis tells us about America and the children of Israel. By Ira Stoll

By on April 29th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-slavery-and-judaism-slaveholder-judah-monis-hebrew-professor-founders-11651172214?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Mr. Stoll is managing editor of Education Next, based at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The first Jew at Harvard was a slaveholder. That’s the bombshell, so far as I can tell, buried in the appendix of the new report “Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery,” released by the university this week.

The report’s “list of human beings enslaved by prominent Harvard affiliates” includes the “enslaved persons” Cuffy and Cicely, owned by Judah Monis. Monis lived from 1683 to 1764 and was an instructor in Hebrew at Harvard College from 1722 to 1760. In researching this article, I discovered a third possible slave, “my Negro child Moreah,” mentioned in Monis’s 1760 will.

I first encountered Monis’s name more than a decade ago while working on a biography of the American revolutionary leader Samuel Adams. Part of the required curriculum for Harvard students from 1735 to 1755 was the study of Hebrew grammar from a textbook written by Monis. That might seem like an obscure detail, but it’s of historical significance because Harvard students in that era included Samuel Adams, his cousin and the future President John Adams, and their fellow signers of the Declaration of Independence John Hancock, Robert Treat Paine, William Williams, and William Ellery.

Monis had converted to Christianity from Judaism one month before joining the Harvard faculty. In a 2018 article for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Jon D. Levenson writes that the conversion had been a condition of hiring. The baptism took place in Harvard Yard. “Although doubts about Monis’s sincerity in converting have long been raised, I am certain that he was absolutely sincere in his desire for a Harvard professorship,” Mr. Levenson writes.

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ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

The Anti-Israel Past of NYT Jerusalem Bureau’s Latest Hire Alana Goodman

By on April 29th, 2022

https://freebeacon.com/media/the-anti-israel-past-of-nyt-jerusalem-bureaus-latest-hire/

The latest hire in the New York Times‘s Jerusalem Bureau doesn’t exactly have a history of scrupulous objectivity when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hiba Yazbek, a former intern for Israeli-bashing Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), called herself a victim of Israel’s “mental occupation” and said Palestinians are a “minority in our own land” in a 2020 speech.

Yazbek, who joined the Times as a news assistant last week, deleted similar comments she had posted on Twitter, as well as posts in which she condemned Israel for killing terrorists, according to the media watchdog group Honest Reporting.

Although Yazbek deleted a number of her politically charged posts, she still has a photo of her sitting next to squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) as her Twitter background. Another photo posted on Twitter shows Yazbek posing with Tlaib. Yazbek interned in 2019 for Tlaib—one of the most vocal anti-Israel members of Congress who has accused the Jewish state of “apartheid.”

The hire is likely to fuel concerns about Times reporting on the Middle East conflict, which pro-Israel watchdog groups claim is deeply skewed against the Jewish state. In 2019, the Times was forced to apologize after publishing an anti-Semitic cartoon that depicted then-Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog with a Star of David on his collar, leading a blind President Donald Trump who was drawn wearing a yarmulke.

The outlet also caught flak for publishing a glowing portrayal of Louis Farrakhan and a lengthy interview with Alice Walker that failed to mention their anti-Semitism in 2020. That same year, Times opinion editor Bari Weiss stepped down and said she had faced harassment from colleagues over her support for Israel.

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