RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/03/mugger-money-and-a-new-epidemic-of-crime/

Rob Long is a television writer and producer, author and journalist. He was writer and co-executive producer of the comedy series Cheers.

“Young people in this city,” a native New Yorker said to me last week, “don’t even know what mugger money is.”

He went on to explain. Mugger money was the small wad of bills most New Yorkers would carry around with them between the mayoral administrations of John V. Lindsay (1966–1973) and David N. Dinkins (1990–1993).

Mugger money was what you kept with you because you expected to be mugged eventually and you needed something to hand over to placate the attacker and persuade him not to kill you. It was kept separately from your actual money in your actual wallet—my friend told me that some more theatrical friends of his would keep their mugger money in a dressed-up fake wallet—and you’d toss it to the mugger and then make a run for it.

The criminal would get some cash and the victim would keep the bulk of his money, along with his identification—a bureaucratic nightmare to replace—and his credit cards. It was, as progressive social scientists might say, a win-win. It was the tax you paid for living in the crime-infested City That Never Sleeps.

Mugger money symbolised the thirty-year lopsided truce between the law-abiding citizens of New York and the criminals and marauders who threatened them. New York apartments in the 1970s and 1980s sported doors with multiple locks and steel bars wedged between the door and the floor. Windows were barred or bricked in. Central Park and Washington Square were drug bazaars during the day and off-limits at night. Trash-can fires blazed in the heart of Alphabet City—unattended, unnoticed and certainly ignored by police and firefighters. Times Square was a cesspool of porn and small-time gangsterism. And only fools rode the subway.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/21/maryland-and-georgia-governors-suspend-state-gas-taxes-to-offset-fuel-prices/

On Friday, governors in two different states signed bills into law to suspend each of their respective statewide gas taxes, in order to offset the financial burden of rising gas prices on consumers.

The Daily Wire reports that Governors Larry Hogan (R-Md.) and Brian Kemp (R-Ga.) signed such legislation after the bills had already passed through the state legislatures, with Maryland’s gas tax being suspended for the next 30 days, while Georgia’s will be suspended through the end of May. Other states currently considering similar action include California, Michigan, and New Hampshire.

“This bipartisan action will provide some relief from the pain at the pump,” Hogan announced at a press conference prior to the signing of the bill, “and it is possible because of the prudent fiscal steps we have taken, which have resulted in a record budget surplus.”

“This is, of course, not a cure-all, and market instability will continue to lead to fluctuations in prices,” Hogan continued, “but we will continue to use every tool at our disposal to provide relief for Marylanders.” The bill in Maryland had passed through both houses of the state legislature with unanimous support.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/21/a-trump-hating-backer-of-bidens-supreme-court-nominee-is-married-to-the-top-j6-prosecutor/

Confirmation hearings for D.C. Circuit Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe Biden’s first U.S. Supreme Court nominee, began Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. During an event in Washington, D.C. on Monday morning, activists gathered to rally on behalf of the nominee who could be the first black woman seated on the nation’s highest court.

“It’s also, for so many of us, a moment that is personal,” Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, told the crowd. “It is personal if you have ever been the only person sitting in a room. It is personal if you have ever wondered, ‘Is that for me?’” Over the past several weeks, Graves, a graduate of Yale Law school, has given dozens of interviews in support of Jackson’s nomination.

In a January column for CNN, Graves denounced “the current homogeneity of the legal profession and judicial system” and claimed “the perspective of White men has been treated as the default” in court proceedings.

Graves’ D.C.-based nonprofit promotes any number of radical causes including unfettered access to abortion, gender “justice,” free child care, and LGBTQ equity. Appointed to lead NWLC one month after Trump’s inauguration, Graves was an outspoken critic of the president; she co-founded the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund in 2018 in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement and strongly opposed the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.

After the media declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Graves, in a racist screed, berated the 55 percent of white women who voted for President Trump:

[Most] White women who support Trump are not blindly voting against their own self-interest. These Trump supporters, aided by a toxic mix of racism and disinformation, seem to be consciously supporting what they believe to be their own group interest, putting them on the same team as the White men society has been largely built to benefit. The right-wing has long focused its sales pitch to White women on the promise of preserving the modest gains a misogynistic system has allowed them—advancing a delusion of forced scarcity that pits White, cisgender, heterosexual women against all others in a zero-sum fight for survival.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/03/21/ted-cruz-destroys-democrats-during-jackson-confirmation-hearings-n1568303

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was on fire Monday during Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings. He used his time to absolutely destroy the Democrats for their past reprehensible behavior and assured Jackson that Republicans would treat her more respectfully and fairly than Democrats have treated Republican nominees.

“Now, what should this hearing be? And what should it not be?” Cruz asked. “Well, you’ve heard a number of members on the Republican side of the aisle quite clear on what it should not be. This will not be a political circus. This will not be the kind of character smear that, sadly, our Democratic colleagues have gotten very good at,” he said, before detailing the Democrats’ shameful record.

He began by talking about a weekly podcast he did a couple of years ago on which a liberal guest insisted that both Democrats and Republicans smear Supreme Court nominees. But, Cruz pointed out, this person was dead wrong. “It is only one side of the aisle, the Democratic aisle, that went so into the gutter with Judge Robert Bork that they invented a new verb, to ‘Bork’ someone.”

“It is only one side of the aisle that, with Justice Clarence Thomas, was so reprehensible that […] President George Herbert Walker Bush wrote at the time, quote, what’s happening to Clarence Thomas is just plain horrible,” Cruz continued.  “All the groups that tried to beat him up on abortion, affirmative action have now come out of the woodwork, they’re trying to destroy a decent man. As Justice Thomas observed in that hearing, what happened there was, to use his words, ‘a high-tech lynching.’ And I would note the chairman who presided over that disgrace was Joe Biden.”