RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/youre-not-imagining-food-inflation/

On the menu today: A new report in the Wall Street Journal confirms what you likely suspected — despite the Consumer Price Index numbers (CPI) getting much closer to normal, you’re still paying more to eat, whether you’re shopping at the grocery store or going out to a restaurant. In fact, Americans haven’t spent this much of their money on food since the early 1990s — a fact that is likely to widen the divide between the administration’s happy talk about the economy and Americans’ perceptions that they’re constantly being squeezed, even if they’re making more money than a few years ago. Meanwhile, to fight the rising cost of living, states are hiking the minimum wage, left and right. Hey, it’s not like that increased cost of labor could ever get passed along to consumers, right?

The ‘Shrinkflation’ Election

Have you had this experience? You read that the year-to-year numbers of the CPI indicate that inflation is largely, if not completely, beaten . . . and then you go to Trader Joe’s or your local grocery store, or you take the family out to eat, and when the bill comes you think someone has mistaken you for a much wealthier person. Did I accidentally get charged for a Lamborghini in there somewhere?

(This is where the typical Biden-defending lefty will jump in and say, “This is because you’re shopping at expensive stores and restaurants!” For what it’s worth, Trader Joe’s is less expensive than the average grocery store*. And if you want to argue that by living in northern Virginia, I’m buying food in a part of the country with a higher cost of living, fine, but the point is not that things are expensive compared to other places, it’s that things are expensive in this place compared to prices in the not-so-distant past in this place. )

Over in the Wall Street Journal, Jesse Newman and Heather Haddon lay out the numbers demonstrating that we’re not just imagining this. Americans are spending the biggest share of their income on food since 1991:

The last time Americans spent this much of their money on food, George H.W. Bush was in office, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” was in theaters and C+C Music Factory was rocking the Billboard charts.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-will-politicians-stop-calling-themselves-progressives-d7380f6f?mod=opinion_lead_pos12

This column has searched and searched for years and still cannot find evidence for the existence of any great civilization built by progressive leftists. Your humble correspondent does not want to be called a quitter and is determined to maintain an open mind. But it’s hard to keep hope alive. Seeing the destruction wrought by progressive policies on great cities and towns across this country, one wonders how long it will be before even the most radical elected officials refuse to self-identify with the tarnished label.

The brand now stands for human degradation, yet there are still a few hardy comrades willing to wear it proudly. As U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) campaigns for a third term this year, her campaign website proclaims her “one of the country’s leading progressive voices.”

When it comes to policy, she shows no sign of altering her course. To take one example, Sen. Warren still wants fewer cops and more treatment providers responding to drug-related 911 calls. But on the other side of the country another high-profile experiment in progressive drug policy has gone catastrophically wrong.

Katia Riddle reports for the Guardian:

When voters approved Measure 110 in 2020, they made Oregon the scene of a novel social experiment in the US by decriminalising the possession of small amounts of hard drugs and funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into substance abuse treatment.
The vote was celebrated as a groundbreaking step toward a compassionate approach to substance use disorders, one that prioritised treatment over punishment. But nearly three years after its passage, the law has become the subject of fierce debate as Oregon, like many US states, grapples with a spiralling opioid crisis…Lawmakers are now considering a number of bills that would reinstate criminal penalties such as fines and jail time for drug possession – a decision that could come any day.

No one is saying that treatment isn’t vital, but removing law enforcement from the equation now appears to be anything but compassionate. Ms. Riddle adds:

At a community forum in January, the Eugene district attorney Christopher Parosa summed up the recent prevailing mood. “What has developed in the last three years is not the utopian Shangri-La that we have been promised with ballot measure 110,” said Parosa, “but rather a dystopian nightmare that is akin to a grim Hollywood movie.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/02/21/how_to_understand_trumps_jeremiad_against_nato_freeloaders_150529.html

Donald Trump sent a shiver through official Washington and America’s friends around the world recently when he once again fulminated against NATO allies who refuse to pay for their own defense. His specific target was NATO members that failed to meet their pledge of spending at least 2% of their GDP on their military. Their “free riding,” he stressed, is costly to the U.S., Britain, Poland, and other NATO members who pay more than their share.

The problem is not a new one, nor an easy one to solve. Rich allies in Western Europe have been free riding for decades. The U.S. has been complaining and coaxing them for just as long. Unfortunately, neither cajoling nor warnings have ever been enough.

The reason for that failure is simple. Allies who want to skimp on defense know that Uncle Sugar will ultimately pick up the tab, not out of generosity but out of self-interest. They know Washington has long considered it in America’s vital interest to defend Europe against Russian (or Soviet) aggression, whether France or Belgium pay their share or not. When countries know this, they can free load. And some do. They’ve got plenty of other uses for their money if the U.S. will pay for their defense.

This knotty problem is the essential background for Trump’s threat to allies who refuse to meet their NATO commitments. The former (and perhaps future) president was speaking to them and to isolationist voters in the U.S., not to Moscow, when he made his latest incendiary remarks. Although it wasn’t quite reported this way in the media, Trump claimed that when he was president the leader of one NATO nation in arrears on its funding asked if the U.S. would still come to its defense if it was attacked by Russia. Calling this bluff, Trump said no, adding that he would encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to any ally that fell short of meeting its alliance commitments.

President Biden denounced those comments as “dumb … shameful … dangerous … un-American.” One of Trump’s erstwhile national security advisors, John Bolton, added that the former president wants to withdraw entirely from the alliance.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-2-19-the-stalinist-new-york-attorney-general-scores-a-big-win-against-trump-for-now

Josef Stalin set the example for the world as the most ruthless practitioner of the art of using a thoroughly corrupt and subservient “justice system” to eliminate all political opposition. Many, many others have since followed Stalin’s lead. Current notable examples include the recent murder of Alexei Navalny in prison in Russia; Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who fled that country in late 2023 after his arrest was threatened by the Maduro regime; and Pakistan’s former Prime Minister and current opposition leader Imran Khan, convicted in January 2024 of “disclosing a state secret” and sentenced to 10 years in jail. Funny how the countries that engage in such practices virtually always have failed economies as well.

The United States has been remarkably free of such practices during its history. But we have seen a sudden complete reversal of that commendable history with the efforts of multiple political actors and prosecutors to use the courts to take down former President Trump. Readers here are likely familiar with the long list of such efforts, from the two federal Jack Smith criminal prosecutions, to the Fani Willis criminal prosecution in Georgia, to the Alvin Bragg criminal prosecution in Manhattan (supposedly for incorrectly recording the blackmail payment to Stormy Daniels in financial statements), to the many efforts to remove Trump from primary and general election ballots.

Of all the multitudinous “get Trump” efforts, the most proudly and nakedly Stalinist is the civil fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. What distinguishes the James crusade from all the others, as political as those might be, is that the others all have had at least a pretext of investigating some known or suspected wrongdoing. With James, by contrast, from the start it has always been about finding some way, any way, to take out the man. James initially ran for AG in 2018 on a campaign explicitly promising to get Trump, who was President of the United States at the time. My first post covering James’s vendetta against Trump was on December 13, 2018, shortly after her first election victory and before she took office. That post quoted at length from an interview James had just given to NBC News. In her interview, James emphasized that her focus in office would be on somehow getting Trump, and she essentially conceded that she had no basis at the outset to believe that wrongdoing had occurred. A short excerpt:

“We will use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family as well,” James, a Democrat, told NBC News in her first extensive interview since she was elected last month. James outlined some of the probes she intends to pursue with regard to the president, his businesses and his family members. They include: – Any potential illegalities involving Trump’s real estate holdings in New York.

https://tomklingenstein.com/how-censorship-drives-the-woke-revolution/

The woke regime, like all totalitarian regimes before it, views your freedom of speech not as a right but as an obstacle. The suppression of dissent is a vital element of the power grab that will enable this regime to achieve its political goal: the establishment of group quotas as the organizing structure of American life, rather than individual merit and constitutional liberty.

What makes the group quota regime different from the tyrannies of the past is that it has access to mechanisms of political control that are entirely unprecedented in human history, thanks to the technological and social revolution of the last few decades. The migration of so much of our political life into the digital realm, the outsourcing of speech and information control to nominally private actors not directly bound by constitutional limitations, and the development of new tools for more efficient and effective manipulation — including, most recently, artificial intelligence — have created a perfect storm of censorship that is both more extensive and more subtle than that practiced by any previous authoritarian regime.

Those committed to individual merit and to the preservation of our constitutional order must first understand these mechanisms of control if they hope to combat them, and so preserve the hope of victory in the cold civil war against the group quota regime.

The information control apparatus that operates within the U.S. has the ability not only to censor facts but to construct pseudo-realities in which the truth itself becomes “disinformation.” Think of the narratives pushed by the woke regime regarding the origins of COVID-19, Hunter Biden’s laptop, or January 6th.  Alternative narratives, or pseudo-realities, were created about each of these events, then pushed by the media and supported by the government to silence discussion and suppress the facts. Those who spoke truthfully about these events were accused of spreading “disinformation” and were silenced. For the woke regime, individuals who challenge the constructed narrative or present facts that deviate from the prescribed ‘truth’ risk being labeled a “threat to democracy.” 

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hunter-bidens-lawyers-accuse-federal-prosecutors-of-mistaking-sawdust-for-cocaine-in-evidentiary-photographs/

Hunter Biden’s attorneys are seeking to undermine special counsel David Weiss’s criminal prosecution by accusing his team of mistakenly identifying sawdust as cocaine in evidentiary photographs.

Biden’s attorneys, lead by Abbe D. Lowell, filed a motion in Delaware Tuesday to support his effort to compel discovery in his federal gun case. They criticized Weiss’s investigation by invoking the photographs and the indictment of a former FBI informant for making false allegations of bribery against Joe and Hunter Biden.

“Multiple sources have pointed out, and a review of discovery confirms, this is actually a photo of sawdust from an expert carpenter and it was sent to Mr. Biden, not vice versa,” the court filing reads.

“The prosecution was reckless in making such a hyperbolic and sensational claim in a public filing, which it surely realized would prejudice Mr. Biden in the public eye,” the motion continues.

A federal grand jury in California indicted FBI confidential human source (CHS) Alexander Smirnov Wednesday on false statement and obstruction charges. Smirnov is the CHS behind an FBI whistleblower form produced in June 2020 featuring allegations Joe and Hunter Biden took $10 million in bribes from Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings. Senator Chuck Grassley (R.,Iowa) released the FBI document in July after the FBI allowed a select group of House lawmakers to view the document.

The indictment features text messages from Smirnov to his FBI handler disparaging then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Smirnov was previously thought to be credible by the FBI and supplied information about Burisma in 2017 memorialized by a different whistleblower form.

Hunter’s lawyers used Smirnov’s indictment in an attempt to undermine Weiss’s case.

“The Special Counsel charged Mr. Smirnov with lying and obstruction, but the more interesting part of this story is not that Mr. Smirnov lied. It is more remarkable that beginning in July 2023, the Special Counsel’s team would follow Mr. Smirnov down his rabbit hole of lies as long as it did,” the motion adds.

“Disclosure about why the Special Counsel abandoned its June/July 2023 agreements with Mr. Biden and the role played by the Smirnov allegations may reveal flaws worse than mistaking sawdust for cocaine.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/lets-stop-fetishizing-article-5/

At a rally in South Carolina recently, Donald Trump made some comments about Nato that predictably launched the usual NeverTrump suspects into stratospheric dudgeon. Recalling a conversation he claims he had with a Nato “president of a big country,” Trump told him that if Nato nations continued to stint their military spending and kept failing to meet the 2% of GDP requirement, ‘“No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.’”

The Wall Street Journal claimed such typical Trumpian caustic hyperbole will be “the reason many Americans won’t vote for him again even against a mentally declining President Biden,” but this prediction is highly unlikely, unless the editors define “many Americans” as the bipartisan political elite. I seriously doubt that some Trumpian trolling will even be remembered by most voters eight months from now.

More important than squawking over Trump being Trump is the uncritical, reverential acceptance of the Nato Treaty’s Article Five, which is a classic example of what James Madison called a “parchment barrier”–– like most treaties, a political document whose terms will be regularly violated. Consider its actual language:

“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/02/western_intellectuals_in_a_sorosbacked_think_tank_are_all_in_for_promoting_irans_interests.html

The Iranian regime does not solely advance its warmongering through employing a radical force like Hamas, or Hezbollah in Lebanon, or the Houthis in Yemen, with millions of dollars in payments and logistical support.

It also tries to influence policymaking in various European and American media and decision-making institutions. Iran does this to prevent any effort to halt to its massacres of the Iranian people, and to stop any efforts to block its warmongering, and any effort to end its construction of a nuclear bomb.

These advocates of appeasement also push economic interests in trade with Iran, while at the same time strongly condemning the wave of executions!

Recently, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, Ali Vaez, a so-called Iran expert, said that if we put too much pressure on the Iranian regime because of the devastating war in the Middle East, this regime would move farther towards building a nuclear bomb. Ali Vaez works within the Brussels-based, Soros-backed, International Crisis Group as its Iran Project Director, one of the few think tanks that have close relations with the Iranian Foreign Ministry. Alex Soros sits on its board of directors.

The Iran Influence Network

Recently, a large number of emails discovered by two media outlets, the American Semafor, and the Farsi-language Iran International TV broadcast, show that Tehran’s cooperation with the International Crisis Group was formed through the Center for Iranian Studies, which is affiliated with the Iranian Foreign Ministry.

These emails show that in the years 2013 and 2014, Crisis Group analysts were promoting the positions of the Iranian government, even when they contradicted the positions of the Obama administration. These emails reveal that the two had signed an agreement that was never made public. These documents well demonstrate that the International Crisis Group has played a significant role in nuclear negotiations and the lifting of sanctions on Iran for nearly a decade, consistently making recommendations to the Obama-, Biden-, and Trump administrations.

ttps://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/21/release-the-biden-transcripts-now/

“How in the hell dare he raise that.” — President Joe Biden, Feb. 8, 2024

In an effort to dismiss the claim that he couldn’t remember the year his son Beau died, President Joe Biden claimed he was simply angered because he was asked about it. Turns out, Biden lied.

“Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damn business,” Biden said at a hurriedly arranged press conference early in February.

Immediately, the media sprang into action attacking Special Counsel Robert Hur for bringing up Biden’s son.

“Beyond the pale,” they said. “A setup from the start.” “What does that have to do with the retention of classified documents?” “There is no legitimate answer for why he would do that … unless they were trying to trip him up, rattle him, gain oppo.” Etc., etc., etc.

Jill Biden even sent out a fundraising letter attacking Hur. “I can’t imagine someone would try to use our son’s death to score political points.”

Jill, who was not actually Beau’s mother, said that the day Beau Biden died from brain cancer was “forever etched” on her and Joe’s hearts.

But then last week, NBC News, to its undying credit, did something unusual for a mainstream media outlet. It tried to verify Biden’s account. And what did it find?

Biden lied, and Jill compounded the lie.

Hur didn’t bring up Beau, or ask when he died, NBC News reported. It was Biden who brought up his son – as he almost always does whenever he opens his mouth – and it was Biden who then tried to recall the year he died.

Here’s NBC News’ account of what actually happened: