RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/19/economic-optimism-has-collapsed-under-build-back-better-biden-tipp-poll/

Last week, President Joe Biden gave a speech about the economy, saying that “as I go across the country, our economy has gone from being on the mend to on the move.” What country is Biden talking about, exactly? Because here in the U.S., the economy went from booming under President Donald Trump to disaster under Biden. 

The latest evidence of Biden’s detachment from reality comes from the IBD/TIPP Economic Optimism Index, which plunged 9.5% in May, dropping down to 41.2 (anything under 50 signals pessimism).  

That puts it below the Index’s worst reading during the height of the COVID pandemic, when it bottomed out at 44 in July 2020. By the time Biden took office, it had rebounded and was back above 50, where the Index had been during the entirety of the Trump administration. 

The IBD/TIPP Financial Stress Index, meanwhile, has shot up to 69.3 (anything above 50 indicates high stress), roughly where it was during the 2008 financial crisis. It has climbed 22% on Biden’s watch. 

For Biden to say the economy “is on the move” is truly delirious. GDP was down 1.4% in the first quarter, and nearly half of adults think we are already in a recession, the IBD/TIPP poll found. 

Biden also bragged about how the economy created “8.3 million jobs in my first 15 months in office – a record.”  

Big deal. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/overdose-rates-are-rising-fast-cdc-drugs-opiod-crisis-substance-abuse-addiction-fatal-syringe-11652904604?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The latest tally of fatal drug overdoses from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows nearly 108,000 fatalities in 2021. This is far more than in 2017, when President Trump declared drug deaths a public-health emergency. Among blacks, the drug mortality rate has quadrupled in less than eight years.

The Trump administration acted aggressively and directed agencies to implement several recommendations from the Commission on Combatting Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis. These included changes to prescribing patterns, treatment paradigms and law-enforcement procedures. The rate of deaths from drug overdoses slowed and then dipped. But then Covid hit, with all its mental-health consequences. The addiction and overdose crisis is now the most important public-health issue facing the country.

Apart from asking Congress for more money, the Biden administration hasn’t focused on this crisis. President Biden’s most recent budget pays scant attention to it, while his National Drug Control Strategy provides resources, such as clean syringe programs, that aren’t coupled with strategies to help patients beat their addictions.

Most of the additional fatal overdoses post-Covid involve methamphetamine and fentanyl made in Mexico, China and India. For each overdose death, more than 100 people struggle with debilitating addictions to these dangerous substances.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chicken-wings-34-pent-inflation-140006054.html

(Bloomberg) — With a gallon of milk up about 25% since before the pandemic, and retail bacon 35% higher, it’s hard to imagine how US food inflation could get any worse. But evidence suggests that even higher prices are on the horizon.

Consumers have actually been shielded so far from the full brunt of soaring expenses that are facing producers, distributors and small businesses like restaurants. But they can only hold back for so much longer.

Take the case of Jeff Good, who co-founded three restaurants in Jackson, Mississippi. Around 18 months ago, a 40-pound box of chicken wings cost him about $85. Now, it can go as high as roughly $150. Expenses for cooking oil and flour have nearly doubled in the past five months, he said. But it’s not just ingredient prices going up. He’s paying more for labor and services, too. Even the company that maintains his air conditioners has tacked on a $40 fuel charge per visit. To cope, he’s raised menu prices.

A 15-piece order of chicken wings, a signature dish at his Sal and Mookie’s pizzeria, went for $13.95 before Covid hit. Now, wing costs can vary so much they’re labeled at “market price,” like some restaurants do with lobster. At peaks, the menu price can be be about $27.95 — but that represents a barely-there margin — and Good estimates the “real cost” is closer to about $34. He’s trying to decide whether to keep raising prices or take wings off the menu.

“We have never, ever seen anything like what we’re seeing right now,” said Good, who opened his restaurants nearly 30 years ago.

The difference between prices received by producers for their goods and those paid by everyday customers at cash registers can be seen by comparing the producer and consumer price indices.

he CPI, a benchmark for gauging inflation cited in headlines and by economists, has been surging. Consumer prices for food rose 9.4% in April compared with a year earlier, the biggest gain since 1981, government data showed this month. There were record increases for chicken, fresh seafood and baby food.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/05/17/clarence-thomas-reveals-when-he-plans-to-leave-the-supreme-court-n1598613

In recent weeks, left-wing activists have been calling for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from the bench or resign because of his wife’s activism in conservative politics.

Over the weekend, Justice Thomas revealed when he actually plans to leave the Supreme Court, and a lot of people aren’t going to be happy about it.

“One of the things I say in response to the media, when they talk about, especially early on … about the way I do my job, I said, ‘I will absolutely leave the Court when I do my job as poorly as you do yours.’ And that was meant as a compliment, really,” Thomas said during an interview at a conference in Dallas.

“It really is good to be me. It really is,” he added.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/17/how-dare-he-pick-on-communism/

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, you just might be named Ron DeSantis.

Let’s recap. On April 22, the Florida governor signed the “Stop WOKE Act,” which, in the words of USA Today, “prohibits any teaching that could make students feel they bear personal responsibility for historic wrongs because of their race, color, sex or national origin.”

The law was necessary because, as you can see in any number of YouTube videos of school-board meetings around the country, young children have indeed been taught, in accordance with critical race theory and other poisonous postmodern pap, that if they’re white or male they’re oppressors, bearing guilt for the actions of long-dead people who looked like them, and if they’re black or female, by the same logic, they’re victims. 

Six days later, DeSantis signed the “Parental Rights in Education Act,” which forbids kindergarten teachers in Florida from talking to their pupils about such topics as masturbation, ejaculation, and oral sex—an act his enemies dishonestly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

This law was necessary too, because, as you can see in other videos (many of which have been curated on the “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account) young schoolchildren are indeed being taught all kinds of things about sex that nobody, until the day before yesterday, would have considered remotely appropriate. 

Then, on May 9, DeSantis signed a third bill. It designates November 7 of each year as “Victims of Communism Day” and mandates that schoolchildren in Florida be taught about Communism for at least 45 minutes a year.

Like the two laws before it, this one, too, was necessary. All American schools teach about Nazism, and make it clear to students that Hitler was evil.

But Communism? Stalin? Not so much.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/critical_race_theory_has_infected_80_of_the_top_us_medical_schools.html

The U.S. medical establishment is in the process of absurdly identifying “racism” as the major determinant in health care outcomes.

Last January, I wrote about how the Biden administration was “institutionalizing medical racism nationwide.”  In a previous article in April 2021, I reported how “Medical Racism — Preferential Treatments for Blacks over Whites — Is Here.”  Yesterday, Fox News’s Brian Flood advanced this underreported story by noting how 39 of the nation’s 50 top medical schools have mandated Critical Race Theory training for their medical students.

At least 39 of America’s 50 most prestigious medical colleges and universities have some form of mandatory student training or coursework on ideas related to critical race theory (CRT), according to CriticalRace.org, which monitors CRT curricula and training in higher education. 

Earlier this year, CriticalRace.org found that CRT was prevelant in medical schools across the country. The project from Legal Insurrection Foundation, a non-profit devoted to campus free speech and academic freedom, has since expanded its database and found even more elite medical schools are focusing on “racialization” of medicine. 

“The national alarm should be sounding over the racialization of medical school education. The swiftness and depth to which race-focused social justice education has penetrated medical schools reflects the broader disturbing trends in higher education,” Legal Insurrection founder William A. Jacobson told Fox News Digital.

“Follow the science” in medical academia has now taken a backseat to “follow the CRT woke,” as medical schools around the country have fallen sway to the Marxist theory of radical Critical Race propagandists.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-massacre-blame-game-buffalo-shooting-payton-gendron-democrats-media-race-11652825519?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

American politics these days never fails to meet the public’s low expectations. The latest example is the transparently political attempt by Democrats and their media allies to blame political opponents for the murderous rampage of Payton Gendron in Buffalo.

As so often these days with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez looking over his shoulder, the exploiter in chief is New York Sen. Chuck Schumer. He used the moment to blame the Democratic Party’s recently unveiled, and focus-group tested, election campaign theme: “MAGA Republicans.”

“Every time MAGA Republicans or pundits vilify wrongly immigrants and call them invaders, every time they falsely claim that millions of undocumented people cast ballots in our elections, and every time loud bigoted voices bemoan the disintegration of an imagined ‘classic’ America, the subtext is clear: these hard-right MAGA Republicans argue that people of color and minority communities are somehow posing a threat—a threat—to the American way of life.”

He added: “This is replacement theory in a nutshell. It is a dangerous and a deeply anti-American worldview. It’s poisoning people’s minds who spend hours wandering the darkest wastelands of the internet.”

We’ve supported immigration longer than Mr. Schumer has been in Congress, and politicians should be careful in their rhetoric. But note his logic of massacre causation: Political opposition to unchecked immigration, or support for ballot integrity and American values, drove Payton Gendron to kill 10 African-Americans at a Buffalo supermarket. Oh, and Mr. Schumer also threw in Fox News (where we have a TV show) as fellow travelers in domestic terrorism.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/judge-jackson-wont-say-dobbs-leak-is-wrong-and-wont-object-to-protests-at-her-soon-to-be-colleagues-homes/?

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who will replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court after the current term ends in a few weeks, sat for an interview by the Washington Post. She was asked about the leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion in the Dobbs abortion case, and the consequent demonstrations at the homes of several justices — Chief Justice John Roberts, as well as conservative justices identified in media reporting as having voted with Alito to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Here’s the relevant excerpt from the interview:

Q: What was your response when you when you saw the draft leak [of a Supreme Court opinion that would strike down Roe v. Wade]?

A: Everybody who is familiar with the court and the way in which it works was shocked by that. Such a departure from normal order.

Q: Do you think it was a good thing or a bad thing?

A: I can’t answer that.

Q: What do you think about peaceful protests outside of Supreme Court justices’ homes?

A: I don’t have any comment.

This ranges from somewhere between cowardly and sinister, much like the failure of the justices to issue a joint statement that echoes the chief justice’s condemnation of the leak and statement of determination to identify the leaker, and that condemns the protests, which violate federal law.