RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/08/defund-the-united-nations/

The United Nations is running short of cash. This is not a crisis but an opportunity. Please rid us of this meddlesome, venal and baleful organization.

The Economist reports that “internal modeling” at the U.N. “suggests that the year-end cash deficit will, without cuts, probably blow out to $1.1 billion, leaving it “without money to pay salaries and suppliers by September.”

Apparently “some members are paying their bills late and others not at all” and it is the U.S. and China that “are pushing it to the brink of financial collapse.”

Who says the U.S. and Beijing have no common interests?

Two weeks into the second Trump administration, the White House announced it was considering withdrawing the country from, and ending funding for, three U.N. agencies, including the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

“UNRWA has reportedly been infiltrated by members of groups long designated by the secretary of state as foreign terrorist organizations,” says the White House, “and UNRWA employees were involved in the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.” 

Meanwhile, “UNESCO has demonstrated failure to reform itself, has continually demonstrated anti-Israel sentiment over the past decade” and has shown that it will not “reform itself.”

The U.S. is also quitting the U.N. Human Rights Council, which it has done once before, in 2018, during President Donald Trump’s first term. The misnamed Human Rights Council “has protected human rights abusers by allowing them to use the organization to shield themselves from scrutiny,” says the White House.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/05/doge_is_doing_the_clean_up_leftists_can_t_stand.html

In this allegorical scenario, Honey and Hank moved into a cozy home in a small community in New England 30 years ago.  The next day, their neighbor, Irene, brings over a hot, homemade casserole to welcome them to the neighborhood.

Within minutes, Honey and Irene “connect” in a phenomenon known as human chemistry.  They just seem to “get” each other.  And as their relationship evolves, they learn that they are on the same page on just about everything: raising kids, favorite foods, must-see TV programs, Mommy-and-Me classes, even the crocheting and knitting that their grandmothers taught them.  And each of them has three children, with two of them having the same name!

As luck would have it, their husbands also hit it off and have quite a lot in common, the biggest that both are on-the-road salesmen.

Over the years, the couples become so close that they vacation and celebrate birthdays and holidays together.  Honey and Irene even exchange house keys and list each other as emergency contacts on medical forms.

All good…for 30 years!

Uh-Oh…

Then, one day, Honey gets a phone call from her bank manager, Mr. Hervey, requesting that she and Hank come in for a sit-down.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/07/hyperbole-lies-and-delusions/

CHICAGO — Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s speech in New Hampshire last week was greeted by the media as yet another stirring call to arms for the rudderless Democratic Party.

“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption – but I am now,” Pritzker thundered. “These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box.”

Republicans protested that the governor came close to inciting political violence – and they have a point, given the attempts to assassinate Donald Trump, the dangerous attacks on Tesla, and the near-kidnapping of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

However, what Pritzker had to say in his speech before channeling Maxine Waters’ infamous call to harass Republicans should not be overlooked. It raises an important question: Is Pritzker delusional, a liar, or merely hyperbolic?

Hyperbole, lies, and delusions are all forms of falsehoods, but of different magnitudes. The first are exaggerated claims not meant to be taken literally. Trump himself is no stranger to this oratorical device. Lies are exaggerations or falsehoods the speaker wants others to believe – and, while shameful, are a too-frequent feature of modern political discourses. Delusions are false beliefs at odds with observable reality.

Jerry Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi” is an example of hyperbolic name calling. Seinfeld and his audience understood it was an exaggeration so grotesque that it was funny. No one thought the soup guy was actually a member of the SS. Jussie Smollett’s claim that MAGA bros assaulted him was a lie, albeit a calculated, elaborate, and harmful hoax. The Salem witch trials were the terrible consequence of a mass delusion.

So, is Pritzker channeling Seinfeld, Smollett, or Cotton Mather?

“It’s wrong to snatch a person off the street and ship them to a foreign gulag with no chance to defend themselves in a court of law,” Pritzker said.

“Standing for the idea that the government doesn’t have the right to kidnap you without due process is arguably the most effective campaign slogan in history,” he said before adding, “Today it’s an immigrant with a tattoo, tomorrow it’s a citizen whose Facebook post annoys Donald Trump.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21597/ve-day-national-holiday

I was just a young boy when World War II ended, but I can still remember the enormous burst of elation in my Brooklyn neighborhood when it was announced on May 8, 1945 that Germany had surrendered. We knew that Imperial Japan was still a tough and dangerous adversary, but no one knew that three months and two atomic bombs later, the war would be brought to an immediate end.

As we approach the 80th anniversary of the conclusion of World War II, we are morally compelled to reflect on a seminal conflict that took over 70 million lives. We need to memorialize that enormous loss while appreciating that it reshaped the global order then, and continues to impact us today and far into the future.

President Donald J. Trump is correct in stating that the end of this conflict is so important it deserves to be observed by this nation every year.

His comments recognize the sad reality that the final frontline witnesses to this war are departing, transforming our relationship with this historical period from one of personal recollections to the documents written by historians. This irreparable loss requires us to safeguard those first-person stories and, equally important, to impart the war’s lessons to a new generation of Americans, many of whom remain sadly ignorant of even the most basic facts about World War II.

While the focus has traditionally been viewed through the experiences of Europeans and Americans, we need to appreciate that the war impacted people across Northern Africa, Asia and the Pacific. It created a United Nations organization that is still struggling to be relevant and effective as an honest peacekeeping force. Postwar, the United States assumed the role of economic global superpower, a trust it continues to this day.

As I remember the Brooklyn celebrations of Victory in Europe (VE Day), some might say, “Why continue to commemorate a conflict that should now be consigned to the bookshelf?” Because it reminds our nation of the sacrifices required to defend our freedoms and how missteps, errors of judgment, and national unpreparedness can lead to catastrophe.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/trump-takes-on-a-globalist-trading-system-rigged-against-the-u-s/

For decades, U.S. presidents and congressional leaders from both parties rolled over and accepted global trading arrangements that have put the United States at a great disadvantage. The result is that the United States had a $1.2 trillion goods trade deficit in 2024, the largest of which has been with China.  

A fact sheet issued by the White House on April 2nd explains the stakes in what amounts to other countries’ economic attacks on America: “Large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits have led to the hollowing out of our manufacturing base; resulted in a lack of incentive to increase advanced domestic manufacturing capacity; undermined critical supply chains; and rendered our defense-industrial base dependent on foreign adversaries.”

President Trump has decided that enough is enough. He is using America’s enormous leverage to pressure its trading partners to ditch their unfair trade barriers and level the playing field. The White House fact sheet calls this “the golden rule on trade: Treat us like we treat you.”

America’s trading partners have imposed tariffs on U.S. goods imported into their countries that are far steeper than the tariffs that the U.S. has imposed on their goods. Even more insidiously, America’s trading partners have erected high non-tariff trade barriers that stifle U.S. companies’ access to their markets. These countries also flood the U.S.’s far more open markets with goods at prices subsidized by foreign governments that American companies cannot compete with.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/05/from-one-fake-left-wing-hysteria-to-the-next/

The decade-old age of fables like Russian collusion, laptop disinformation, or the pangolin/bat cause of COVID is not over; it is just hitting midstream.

For much of April, amid stock downturns, in the classical paranoid style, we were assured by the Wall Street Journal news reporters and the liberal press that Trump had either a) guaranteed an inevitable recession, b) engineered a losing trade war he likely regretted, c) crashed the stock market, d) lost his once majority favorability ratings, e) mostly had a failed first 100 days, or f) all of the above.

Some of us thought these diagnoses and prognoses were absurd. How in mediis rebus, during a radical counterrevolution never quite seen before, could anyone issue such bleak predictions? Would these same observers have said the U.S. was doomed to lose World War II after the bleak first five months of mostly failure in the Pacific, or North Africa, after the utter U.S. army disaster at the Kasserine Pass?

When the Biden administration compiled two consecutive quarters of negative GDP—the supposedly classic definition of a recession—most of these same pundits assured us that the data was meaningless and irrelevant. The same left-wing media throng insisted Biden was in his cognitive prime until hours before he abdicated from the ticket under pressure. They swore to us that Robert Mueller’s “walls were closing in” on Donald Trump, who would legitimately go to jail, buried by 93 lawfare indictments.

As for their polls showing that Trump was all but through after three months in office, almost all of them were not just off in the 2016 presidential race, but again in 2020. And given the chronic temptation to warp polls to create Democratic momentum and fundraising, they rigged their polls yet again in 2024—even when they knew in disgrace that they were ruining their brand. A former Harris campaign official just admitted that internal polls never showed Harris ahead—even as the majority of polls predicted her victory.

So why would anyone believe any of these people? Take the now-defunded Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Its recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll assured us that 45 percent of the public gave Trump an F for his first 100 days, with only 42 percent expressing approval of his job so far.

But this is the same bunch that also assured us in its final authoritative 2024 election poll, on the very eve before the voting, that Kamala Harris would win the race by 4 points—a lead proverbially “outside the margin of error.” (The next day, she lost the popular vote by 1.5 percent or 2,284,952 votes and the Electoral College by 312-226). The public broadcasting polling partnership was off 5.5 points, perhaps suggesting that it wished to aid the Harris campaign more than either adhering to professional and ethical norms or fearing to lose what little was left of its reputation.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/5277881-trump-china-tariffs/

President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, are engaged in a monumental struggle over tariffs and trade — will Barbie determine the outcome?  

Xi is betting that Americans are too spoiled to abandon the cheap imported goods — like the iconic Barbie doll — that have filled the shelves of Walmart and Costco for decades. Trump is betting that China’s economy will swoon under the burden of tariffs and that U.S. companies will prove more agile than expected in shifting output to other countries. 

Trump acknowledged the risk of his tariff war at a recent town hall. “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”  

Though almost 80 percent of the toys sold in the U.S. are made in China, some makers, like Barbie producer Mattel, have been quietly moving production out of China. Mattel said earlier this year that only 40 percent of its products will be made in China this year, down from 50 percent last year. And Mattel is not alone.

Nonetheless, if tariffs on Chinese goods remain at 145 percent, many toy prices will almost certainly head higher. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/05/republican-lawmakers-fiddle-as-economy-starts-to-burn/

In the time that President Donald Trump has issued more than 140 executive orders, what has Congress been doing?

Anyone?… Anyone?

Next to nothing. So far, it has managed to send just five bills to Trump’s desk for signature, a slower pace than any Congress in modern times.

Five. And none of them delivered on Trump’s agenda.

One was the non-controversial Laken Riley Act, which passed by large margins in both chambers.

Another was a continuing resolution to keep the government from shutting down, which was needed only because Congress failed to do its job of passing appropriations bills, like it’s supposed to.

The other three were bills blocking last-minute Biden regulations from going into effect, one of which would have required oil and natural gas producers to map the ocean floor in search of shipwrecks before they start drilling. Not exactly “Golden Age” stuff.

But that big, beautiful bill that Trump has been calling for? Well, here’s now NBC News described it last week:

Republicans are already hitting some snags as they begin the work of crafting a bill for President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy agenda. And they haven’t even made some of their hardest decisions yet.

Begin the work? It’s May, and they are just beginning the work of crafting this bill? And Republicans in the House say getting a reconciliation bill to the Senate is unlikely to happen before Memorial Day?