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JUNE 23,  2022

THE WISE JUSTICE SPEAKS – FROM CLARENCE THOMAS:  Justice Clarence Thomas, who has withstood terrible abuse since his nomination to the United States Supreme Court because he thinks for himself, speaks out on how liberal policies have destroyed black communities.  A very good read.  Show it to your teenaged kids.  From the New York Post: 

In this excerpt from the just-published “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words” by Michael Pack and Mark Paoletta, the Supreme Court justice reflects on changes in his hometown, Savannah, Ga. The book is based on more than 30 hours of interviews Pack conducted with Thomas and his wife Ginni for the film of the same name; 95% of the book’s material is new, including this excerpt.

Michael Pack: You have talked a little today about how life in the black community has not been improved by many well-intentioned social programs. Do you think, in some sense, it is worse than when you grew up?

Clarence Thomas: It’s a disaster. When I grew up, you had family, you didn’t have drugs, you didn’t have gang-banging. You could walk down the street.

There was a change in our society. I think that these programs certainly had an impact. Just go back to Savannah and take a look around you. Our worst fears were realized. We didn’t want to be right; we wanted to be wrong. It wasn’t about winning an argument. No, we wanted to lose the argument. We did not want the damage to occur; that’s why we were involved. I don’t particularly like public life; I never wanted to be in public life. I’d like to go to football games. I’d like not to make decisions about other people’s lives, but what drags you into it is when you see these principles being undermined, which leads to such destruction. The policies destroy people, and, ultimately, I think, we’re going to destroy the very thing that allows us to have liberty and to have a free society.

MP: So the heirs to those movements, like Black Lives Matter, focus on other things: mass incarceration, police brutality. What do you think of the current movements for racial justice?

CT: I don’t really follow the movements du jour. I don’t quite understand them. It’s fascinating to me that the radical groups in the sixties, that we all were aware of and fond of back then, like the Black Panthers — that’s kind of mainstream now. But we knew they were more marginal back then. I don’t know what to say about this. But if you look at some of the things that still are problematic, like bad education, unsafe neighborhoods, drugs, alcohol, breakdown in families, it seems like these are things that we warned about back then.

We were told, basically, take a long walk on the short pier. And I understand that. I understand people not wanting to hear an opposing view. But at the same time, we’re not taking ownership of these policies’ having a significant role in the damage that’s been done.

MP: You’ve made many trips back to both Pin Point and Savannah. When you return, do you reflect on your life? Do you reflect on how it is now?

CT: I don’t reflect a lot about these sorts of things. A lot of this is depressing, and it didn’t have to happen. The Savannah that I return to is not the Savannah I grew up in. There are good parts, you’re free to move about. You don’t have the segregation, but you’ve got pathologies that we didn’t have before. You’ve got the crime we didn’t have before. You’ve got the disintegration of families that you didn’t have before, disorder you didn’t have before. And they were things that were avoidable. You didn’t have to do that to poor people, and it’s just heartbreaking. Something has changed, so it’s kind of hard to go back.

COMMENT:   Read the rest.  Absolutely valuable.  Clarence Thomas is a national treasure, a keeper of great values.  But when he retires from the Court, he will be ridiculed and laughed at by the hard left, which now dominates the civil rights movement. 

I just hope history is kind to Clarence Thomas, because he deserves it. 

June 23, 2022       Permalink

REMARKABLE RON:  Hand it to Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.  He knows how to govern, and he knows how to run for office.  The Democrats loathe him, which is a good-enough recommendation for me.  There is major presidential talk about Ron, should Trump not run...and even if he does.  A late New Hampshire poll show DeSantis making a dramatic impression on the Republican Party.  From Fox: 

DURHAM, New Hampshire – A public opinion survey in New Hampshire, the state that for a century has held the first primary in presidential race, indicates that Florida Gov. Gov. Ron DeSantis has a razor-thin margin over former President Donald Trump in a hypothetical 2024 GOP primary match-up.

According to polling numbers released on Wednesday by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, 39% of likely Republican primary voters in the Granite State would support the first-term Florida governor, with 37% backing the former president. Respondents were provided a list of potential contenders for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, and DeSantis margin was well within the survey’s sampling error.

Former Vice President Mike Pence stood at 9% in the survey, with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who served as ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration, at 6%. The other possible Republican White House hopefuls on the list offered by the pollsters stood at one percent support, or less.

The survey suggests support among New Hampshire Republicans for DeSantis is surging. Trump held a 43%-18% advantage in support of DeSantis the last time the UNH Survey Center asked a 2024 GOP presidential nomination preference question, in October of last year. Trump topped DeSantis 47%-19% in UNH’s survey last July.

COMMENT:  Clearly, a large number of Republicans are prepared to consider candidates other than the former president.  We make no predictions, and early leaders sometimes fade.  But I have the sense that Ron DeSantis is becoming a major national figure, with the political skill and brainpower to maintain that status.

June 23, 2022       Permalink

JUNE 22, 2022

NAILING THE MEDIA.  GUILTY AS CHARGED:  Apparently, many of those terrible things we say about the media are true.  From The Hill:

To say there’s a disconnect between many journalists and the public they serve is a gross understatement, according to a new in-depth survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. 

Per Pew, 65 percent of the nearly 12,000 journalists surveyed say the media do a solid job of “covering the most important stories of the day” and reporting news accurately. But a solid majority of the American public at large has the opposite view, with just 35 percent feeling the same way. That’s a 30-point perception gap. 

When asked if journalists perform well when “serving as a watchdog over elected leaders,” 52 percent of journalists agreed. But the number dropped precipitously again when the general public was asked, with less than 3 in 10 agreeing with the assessment. 

When asked if journalists manage and correct misinformation consistently, 43 percent of those in the industry said yes, while just 25 percent of the general public agreed. 

Almost half (46 percent) of journalists said they felt connected to their readers and viewers, while just one-quarter of the public says they feel connected to the media outlets from which they get their news. 

So why the disconnect? Perhaps it’s like the old saying about the key to good real estate: Location, location location. Most of the national media are located in two places: New York City and Washington, D.C. 

In the 2020 election, just 9 percent of Manhattan voters voted for Donald Trump. In D.C., the Trump support was just 5.4 percent, underscoring that those who live in or near these cities exist in overwhelmingly liberal silos. It’s only human nature that a journalist’s perception of issues will generally conform to the places and people with whom he works and lives.

Longtime newsman Bob Schieffer dove into this subject a few years back, explaining just how insulated journalists have become.

“In 2004, one reporter in eight lived in New York, Washington, or Los Angeles,” Schieffer notes in his must-read book “Overload: Finding the Truth in Today’s Deluge of News.” “That number is now down to one-in-five who live in those three places.”

COMMENT:  Read the rest.  A well-reported story, though I can't be shocked by the findings.  The press tilts leftward, and a great deal of damage is done by that tilt.  First, the perception of bias diminishes public belief in the press.  In a true national emergency, that can be catastrophic.

Joseph Pulitzer set the standard in the 20th century, trying to establish a press that would report "without fear or favor."  That standard is largely gone, replaced by something we started to see in the 1960s – a press made up of people who think their job is not to report the news, but to create a better society, one with liberal values. 

When the story of our time is written by historians, and if it is a story of a diminishing nation, I believe that the historians will attribute a great deal of the decline to an egotistical, underinformed press that has forgotten its true mission.  Sad.

June 22, 2022     Permalink

THE TITANIC IS SINKING.  QUICK, GET A BAND-AID, OR IS IT A BIDEN-AID?  The president of the United States has thought carefully and deeply about prices at the pump.  He has come up with an answer that salutes his intellect.  Please stop laughing.  It's not nice.  From Fox Business: 

President Joe Biden will ask Congress on Wednesday to suspend the federal gas tax until September as Americans across the country grapple with soaring prices as the pump.

The president will urge members of Congress to institute a three-month federal gas tax holiday without stripping money from the Highway Trust Fund that finances highways and mass transit.

"I want to be very clear, the president is calling on Congress to take this step to help American families without harming the Highway Trust Fund, which is funded by these taxes," a senior administration official said Tuesday evening.

The official suggested that the federal government's budget deficit shrinking by $1.6 trillion this year gives the U.S. leeway to suspend the gas tax while using other revenues to make the Highway Trust Fund whole for the roughly $10 billion cost.

The federal government currently charges 18 cents in taxes per gallon of gasoline and imposes a 20% tax for each gallon of diesel, the official said.

Biden will also call on states, oil companies and retailers to pause gas taxes. The Penn Wharton Budget Model published estimates Wednesday revealing that gas tax holidays in Georgia, Maryland and Connecticut saved consumers money at the pump. Most of the savings in these areas went to consumers instead of service stations and others in the energy sector.

The cost of gas began to soar last fall and continued to rise following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in late February, although the administration is framing the increase in gas prices as the "Putin price hike."

"[Biden] believes that states, oil companies and retailers have a responsibility in this unique moment – to do their part to ameliorate Putin's price hike," the official said. "He's calling on states to suspend their gas taxes or else find other ways to deliver the same relief, such as consumer rebates or relief payments."

The official further stated that the president is pushing for the gas industry and oil retailers to cut the price of gas as oil prices begin to lower.

"He is also calling on the industry to put its record profits to work and step up with more supply and more refining capacity to bring down gas prices and specifically calling for major oil refineries to come to the table with concrete solutions when the secretary of energy convenes them later this week," the official said.

"And when the cost of oil does come down as it has over the last couple of weeks, the president is calling on retailers to properly lower their prices and pass the savings on to consumers," the official continued.

The national average for a gallon of gas currently sits at near $5. Before this year, the highest national gas price average ever recorded by AAA was $4.114 per gallon in July 2008.

The president accused oil refiners of driving up gas prices in letters sent last week to seven refinery operators, including Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP. But oil refiners have said their ability to produce additional gas and diesel fuel is limited.

The American Petroleum Institute and American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers sent a joint letter to Biden last week saying that refineries are already operating close to their maximum capacity and nearly half of the capacity taken off-line was because of the facilities converting to renewable energy production.

And Chevron CEO Michael Wirth wrote a letter to Biden Tuesday pointing out that the company works every day to "help provide the world with the energy it demands and to lift up the lives of billions of people who rely on these supplies."

He continued, "Notwithstanding these efforts, your Administration has largely sought to criticize, and at times vilify, our industry. These actions are not beneficial to meeting the challenges we face and are not what the American people deserve."  

COMMENT:  It's a joke.  The savings to the American family will be small.  The real answer to our energy crisis is for the president to rescind the madhouse orders he gave on his inauguration day that vastly reduced energy production in the United States, and barred fracking, one of the most efficient methods of getting energy from the ground.  Biden did this to satisfy the hysterical left of his party and the fanatical extremists of the environmental movement.  Presumably, according to the left's political doctrine, the world would have come to an end if the president hadn't issued those orders.

Now we find Biden running around the world begging dictators to pump more oil.  What a contrast with the day President Trump left office.  Then, the United States was energy independent.  As a nation we had worked for that status for years.  And now it is gone.

June 22, 2022     Permalink