Commentary: Crafting a New Image for Justice in America

American flag behind barbed wire and fence

Were I of a more entrepreneurial bent, I might go into the statuary business. I would specialize in those statues of “Justice” one sees, or used to see, decorating the façades of courthouses. The old-fashioned, now deprecated models featured a berobed and blindfolded female figure holding aloft a pair of scales. The symbology, now on its way to the graveyard of discarded ideas, was simple but noble.  Justice was blindfolded because she was no respecter of persons.  Neither rank nor party nor sex nor ethnic origin would figure into her calculation of guilt or innocence.  She held scales to emphasize her devotion to impartiality.

Since those ideals have long since been superseded, my thought was to go into business producing new statues of Justice.  The figure could still be female, or at least identify as female, but it should probably be obese and sport dreadlocks. She—or “she”—should not be wearing a robe but rather a T-shirt and dungarees. Instead of a blindfold, this new figure of justice would sport a pride-flag pin and a WinBlue membership card. She would still brandish scales, but one side would be loaded down with affidavits, subpoenas, and indictments.

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Genomics Expert Who Discovered DNA Contamination in mRNA Shots Accuses Regulators of Lying About Cancer Risks

Moderna COVID Vaccine

The scientist who first blew the whistle on the DNA contamination in the COVID mRNA injections last year, said Monday that regulators and fact checkers have been “continually wrong” about his alarming discovery, downplaying its significance and telling flat out lies about the potential dangers.

Last April, microbiologist Kevin McKernan, published a paper establishing that simian virus 40 (SV40), a virus found in monkeys and humans, is present in Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA COVID-19 injections. The discovery was highly significant because SV40 has been linked to cancer in humans, and since the rollout of the mRNA products, the western world has seen a dramatic increase in cancers, especially in previously healthy working aged people.

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Commentary: Chronically Absent Students Need an Alternative

Empty Chairs

It’s no secret that chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed since the pandemic. As The 74s Linda Jacobson writes, a new analysis of federal data released in late 2023 shows the problem may be even worse than previously understood.

The report from Johns Hopkins University shows that two out of three students were enrolled in schools with high or extreme chronic absenteeism rates during the 2021-22 school year—more than double the rate in 2017-18. (Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.)

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Commentary: The Pandemic Years Accelerated Gen Z’s Departure from the Institutional Left

Young Conservatives

The pandemic years have all but disappeared from mainstream political discourse, which has now hinged onto the nebulous goal of “preserving democracy”.

Despite representing one of the most pivotal Black Swan events in modern history – maybe even in human history – the pandemic and its impact on culture has been relegated to an occasional footnote in modern politics.

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Commentary: Public Education’s Alarming Reversal of Learning Trend

School Work

Call it the big reset – downward – in public education.

The alarming plunge in academic performance during the pandemic was met with a significant drop in grading and graduation standards to ease the pressure on students struggling with remote learning. The hope was that hundreds of billions of dollars of emergency federal aid would enable schools to reverse the learning loss and restore the standards.

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Commentary: The Hysterical Style in American Politics

White Silence

The post-Joe McCarthy era and the candidacy of Barry Goldwater once prompted liberal political scientist Richard Hofstadter to chronicle a supposedly long-standing right-wing “paranoid style” of conspiracy-fed extremism.

But far more common, especially in the 21st century, has been a left-wing, hysterical style of inventing scandals and manipulating perceived tensions for political advantage.

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Feds Conceal Details About Anti-Ivermectin Campaign in Response to Doctors’ Reinstated Lawsuit

Ivermectin

The Food and Drug Administration wants to continue its selective promotion of off-label drug use: good for COVID-19 vaccines, bad for alternatives to those vaccines. It just doesn’t want the public to see its full reasoning for the latter.

The FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services filed a renewed motion to dismiss a lawsuit by doctors claiming  the agencies have a practice of demonizing ivermectin by conflating its human and animal doses and using “command” language, such as “stop it,” to discourage using the anti-parasite drug against COVID.

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Commentary: Conservative Methodist Exit Nears End Point

People Praying

The window that opened in 2019 to allow United Methodist churches to depart their embattled denomination closes in a week or so, at the end of the year, and at this late hour, approximately one-fourth of the member churches that constitute Protestantism’s second-largest denomination have climbed through that window.

In the largest U.S. church schism since Civil War times, nearly 7,700 churches of the roughly 30,000 in the United Methodist Church (UMC) have voted to take their property and go elsewhere.

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Americans Sour on Big Pharma After Pandemic, Opioid Crisis: Poll

COVID Pfizer

Public opinion on the pharmaceutical industry has declined sharply over the past decade, according to new polling released by Gallup.

The proportion of Americans who believe pharmaceutical companies provide good or excellent services declined 21 points between 2010 and 2023, according to a poll released Monday. Public controversies over COVID-19 vaccines and the opioid crisis have implicated the pharmaceutical industry in recent years.

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Commentary: COVID Redux

Masks People

Life is hard if you do not learn from your mistakes. With Covid, political leaders and public health authorities engaged in a series of missteps, miscalculations, and manias that amounted to an extreme overreaction to the disease.

First, statistical models overstated the risk of the disease by an order of magnitude. Then, even after these miscalculations became apparent, other extreme measures like lockdowns, mandatory masking, coercive vaccine mandates, and a million other indignities ensued. In the end, almost everyone got Covid, almost everyone survived, and, while the economic countermeasures increased our national debt by 30%, the economy soon recovered too.

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New Zealand Whistleblower Claims Public Health Data Shows COVID Vaccines ‘Are Killing People’

A public health worker in New Zealand was arrested on Sunday for allegedly accessing personal information on work databases.

Barry Young​, a whistleblower from New Zealand’s public health agency, Te Whatu Ora, leaked the information to tech entrepreneur Steve Kirsch, a prominent vaccine critic, on November 9. In an interview explaining his motives, Young said the data shows that the COVID jab “is a killer’ and is causing a “river of tears.”

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Federal Censorship Machine Started Years Before COVID, Involved Military Contractors: Whistleblower

Military Person on Computer

The public-private efforts to restrict and suppress purported “mis-, dis- and malinformation” across tech platforms started almost immediately after the surprise election of Donald Trump in 2016, ramped up a year before the COVID-19 pandemic, and included U.S. and U.K. military contractors and plans to cut off financial services to dissenters and sue them.

That’s according to a “highly credible whistleblower” who says they were recruited to participate in the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) “through monthly cybersecurity meetings hosted by” the Department of Homeland Security, independent journalists who reviewed the Twitter Files at new owner Elon Musk’s invitation said Tuesday.

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Analysis: Consumer Prices Up 6.1 Percent Since April 2021 a Personal Income Falls Behind

by Robert Romano   The U.S. economy has been on a rollercoaster ever since the COVID pandemic of 2020, first with high unemployment and near deflationary levels as the global economy was locked down, followed by a deluge of government spending, borrowing and printing almost $7 trillion, followed by inflation…

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Commentary: Elites Are Confounded by Populist Sentiment and Surprised Their Failures Are Fueling Their Ouster

American populism’s rise is directly connected to the failures of our self-styled elites.  American elites have in numerous instances missed the coming of important crises, some of which they have caused. Average Americans have borne the brunt of these crises.  Today’s populist rise is simply the people’s recognition of the elites’ hypocrisy and culpability in what they have had to endure.

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ACT Test Scores Fall to 30-Year-Low

A new report shows that the average high school student’s ACT college admissions test scores have fallen to their lowest point in 30 years, reflecting an ongoing decline in the quality of education in the United States after the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic.

As Fox News reports, the average scores for the American College Testing (ACT) exams have fallen for the last six years in a row, with the decline becoming noticeably faster in the years during and after COVID. The average score in 2023 was 19.5 out of 36, which comes out to a percentage of 54%. In 2022, the average score was 19.8.

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Commentary: Unemployment Remains Unchanged at 3.8 Percent as Record 11.1 Million Seniors Still Working

Labor markets appeared buoyed by still-working Baby Boomers in September as the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 3.8 percent, with 296,000 seniors finding jobs in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey.

With more than 11.1 million seniors still working — a national record — peak employment still abounds, even as a massive 47.21 million seniors are no longer in the labor force — also a record — amid the Baby Boomer retirement wave that has seen those 65-years-old-and-older not in the labor force have increased about 19 million the past 25 years.

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Commentary: Stand Up to Left’s Use of COVID to Shut Down America

The Democrat Leftists and oligarchical elites are very capable people; it brings pain to admit it, but it’s true. In the midst of seeking the demise the 45th President and his legal team from 2020, they have managed to continue the fear factor that ushered in mail-in ballots and multiple week voting ensuring a myriad of unexplained discrepancies, ballots without a chain-of-custody, and the White House.

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Commentary: A Mother’s COVID Regret

One of the most alarming aspects of the new COVID-centric regime is how people have been deprived of the truth regarding potential harms of the COVID-19 vaccines and how citizens have been forced to get the vaccine due to bullying from medical authorities, the government, or an employer.

When the medical decision to get the jab, whether well-informed or not, is that of a parent making the choice for a child, such a potentially life-altering move might devastate two people, not just one patient. Good parents always want to do the best for their children, and making a medical decision for your child that might have terrible consequences is scary to consider.

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Commentary: Non-COVID Deaths Are Still Way Higher than Normal

According to data reported weekly by the CDC, the death rate in America remains elevated. In the six years prior to the COVID era, deaths in the United States averaged between 2.6 and 2.8 million people per year. These averages are adjusted for population growth, and with a population as large as the U.S., the numbers should be, and are, remarkably stable. During the three years immediately preceding the 2020, for example, the population growth adjusted death rate from all causes varied by only 1.5 percent.

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Appeals Court Says FDA Denunciations of Ivermectin Look Like ‘Command,’ not Advice

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA)  is claiming in federal court that it never told doctors not to prescribe ivermectin to treat COVID-19. Federal judges aren’t buying it, and state medical boards that rely heavily on FDA guidance continue to investigate doctors for such prescriptions.

Echoing a federal district judge nine months ago, a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals pressed a Justice Department lawyer to reconcile the FDA’s repeated public denunciations of ivermectin as an off-label COVID treatment with its insistence that the agency is not liable for resulting investigations of doctors who prescribe or promote it.

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Commentary: Michelle Obama Could Really Be the Choice of the Democrat Establishment

The Democratic establishment is laying the groundwork to dump Joe Biden. When the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, Axios, and the Atlantic desert a liberal president, you know the knives are out. Which raises two questions: when will they stick the shiv into Biden? And how do they plan to deal with the “Kamala problem”?

To all but her most ardent fans, it is obvious that having Kamala on the 2024 ticket would be a disaster for the Democrats. Her 2020 campaign collapsed before a single vote was cast. Biden made her his running mate, not because she was a good candidate, but solely because he had backed himself into a corner when he promised he would choose a black woman as his running mate.

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Students’ Math and Reading Scores Aren’t Bouncing Back from School Closures

Students’ academic recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic has stalled despite efforts to make up for the learning loss, according to a Tuesday report.

Students on average need more than four extra months in school in order to catch up to grade-level expectations, according to a report by NWEA, a nonprofit organization that provides Pre-K-12 assessment data. The report showed that, on average, students’ math and reading scores are growing slower than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Commentary: As Hiring Slows Down, So Does the Economy

The U.S. economy added 209,000 jobs in June, according to the latest establishment survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than expected as 306,000 were added in May, as hiring slowed down nationwide. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate remained about the same at 3.6 percent.

Historically, when hiring slows down by establishments, that usually coincides with economic slowdowns and recessions. In the recent cycle, the 2020 and 2021 recovery from COVID notwithstanding, hiring peaked at about 5.2 percent annualized increase in Feb. 2022. Now, it’s down to 2.5 percent.

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Masks Offer ‘Small’ Benefit Against COVID, Increased CO2 May Be Tied to Stillbirths: Research

The termination of the COVID-19 national emergency has not ended mask mandates in various jurisdictions and settings such as healthcare, even as more peer-reviewed research suggests that face coverings can cause more harm than good.

The Annals of Internal Medicine published the “final update” to a three-year “living, rapid review” of research on mask effectiveness against COVID infection, which concluded masks in healthcare and community settings “may be associated with a small reduction in risk” — 10-18% — but that the evidence is weak.

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International Research Suggests Masks Better at Causing ‘Long COVID’ than Stopping Virus

Government-backed assumptions about the safety and effectiveness of high-quality mask-wearing against COVID-19 are facing scrutiny from new international research that shines a harsh light on the feds’ continued faith in face coverings.

Surgical and N95-grade masks might induce symptoms misidentified as biologically elusive “long COVID,” according to a “systematic review” in the peer-reviewed Swiss journal Frontiers in Public Health. It echoes a recent study of Norwegian adolescents and young adults on long COVID’s connection to “loneliness” and physical inactivity — conditions exacerbated by pandemic interventions.

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Trump Asks NRA Members for Their Votes to End the Radical, Gun Control Left’s Reign

Reminding gun owners what he did for the protection of the Second Amendment and pledging to do much more, former President Donald Trump closed the National Rifle Association’s main event Friday with a stemwinder that brought the crowd to its feet. 

In a full-on campaign speech, the Republican presidential frontrunner told those assembled at the NRA-Institute for Legislative Action Leadership Forum that he was running for another term to right the ship listing from “nation-wrecking, globalist marxists, RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) and tyrants.” 

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World Health Organization Puts CDC on Defense by Drastically Narrowing COVID Vax Recommendations

The U.S. one-size-fits-all COVID-19 vaccine policy, which recommends “up to date” inoculation at all ages regardless of risk level and provides the basis for ongoing mandates in low-risk settings, has become an even bigger international outlier.

The World Health Organization’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization is removing “healthy children and adolescents” from its default recommendations for primary series and booster shots, according to an official “highlights” summary from its meetings the week of March 20.

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Ohio Congressman Wenstrup Starts Probe of Wuhan Institute of Virology Funding and COVID Origins

Congressman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH-2) this week commenced a House of Representatives investigation concerning the genesis of the novel coronavirus that hit U.S. shores in winter 2020.

As the new chair of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, the southern-Ohio legislator formally requested an on-the-record conversation with former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci and other senior federal health administrators as well as security officials. Wenstrup’s subcommittee is working on the matter alongside House Committee on Oversight and Accountability which is chaired by James Comer (R-KY-1) who last month made initial requests for federal documents pertaining to COVID-19’s origins.

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Ohio U.S. Rep. Joyce Proposes End to Head Start Vaccine Requirement

U.S. Representatives Dave Joyce (R-OH-14) and Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA-1) are seeking an end to the COVID-19-vaccine mandate affecting workers at Head Start facilities. 

The federal Head Start program was founded in 1965 and provides numerous early-learning, wellness and parenting-support services to families with children ages five and younger who receive public assistance or have incomes below the poverty line. The program serves more than 800,000 children nationwide including 33,241 in Ohio and roughly 1,500 in Joyce’s district. 

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Federal Agencies Withholding Data Behind Pilot Heart Condition Change, COVID Vax Stroke Reversal

Federal agencies are withholding the data behind recent decisions that relate or may relate to COVID-19 vaccines and severe adverse events, fueling speculation that they are putting both vaccinated and unvaccinated lives at risk. The Federal Aviation Administration told Just the News it widened the acceptable range of heart rhythms for commercial pilots, who were initially subject to industry-wide vaccine mandates, in light of “[n]ew scientific evidence” that it has yet to specify.

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Newly Signed Ohio Bill Expands Afterschool Enrichment Accounts

A $6 billion spending bill that Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R) signed on Friday expands a program assisting parents and guardians with supplemental education purchases.

The ACE Educational Savings Account program previously bestowed a $500 credit on families seeking to purchase enrichment materials or services to help their children get past the learning setbacks caused by the COVID-19 school shutdowns. The new legislation raises the credit to $1,000. 

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Commentary: Biden Admin Blames the American People for its Own Ludicrous Spending

Last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen blamed the American people for the 40-year high inflation we have been enduring.

Appearing on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” she said that Americans “were in their homes for a year or more, they wanted to buy grills and office furniture, they were working from home, they suddenly started splurging on goods, buying technology.” According to her, this consumer “splurging” caused prices to rise so much.

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Rigorous International Study of N95 Masks Upends Federal COVID Narrative

The CDC took nearly two years to formally recognize distinctions between masks for mitigating COVID-19 spread, finally saying in January that cloth masks offer “the least” protection and N95 respirators, which meet strict federal standards, “the highest.”

The agency’s slight nod to the largely symbolic value of cloth masks, predominantly worn in school settings, followed months of calls by onetime White House COVID advisers, among others, to promote masks actually designed to stop aerosolized transmission. It also spurred a run on N95s, sending prices skyward.

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National Science Foundation Gives Tens of Millions to Fight COVID ‘Disinformation,’ Populism

Government efforts to squelch purported misinformation and disinformation on the most contested subjects in American politics don’t stop with Cabinet-level agencies.

The National Science Foundation has awarded at least $39 million in grants and contracts in fiscal years 2021 and 2022 for projects that target misinformation or disinformation, frequently pertaining to COVID-19 and elections.

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FDA Social Media Posts on COVID Under Legal, Medical Scrutiny for Misleading Claims

The FDA’s Twitter habits are getting scrutiny in court and from medical professionals as the feds seesaw between walking back their once-confident COVID-19 assertions and making sweeping new claims without providing evidence.

Having long ago conceded that COVID vaccines can’t stop viral transmission and that assertions to the contrary by President Biden among others were based on “hope” rather than science, the feds are now downplaying the influence of their social media to escape liability for allegedly violating statutory limits by interfering in medical judgments.

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Commentary: The Top 10 U.S. Senate Races to Watch

Americans will soon get to cast their first votes since the science–denying COVID mask and vaccine mandates, the second wave of COVID-related blowout spending and subsequent inflation, and the COVID-related school closures that allowed parents to see what the public schools are really teaching their boys and girls – including that they can choose whether they are boys or girls. With all of these matters implicitly on the ballot, how are things shaping up going into Election Day?

Starting with the House of Representatives, six months ago Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report projected “a GOP gain in the 15-25 seat range.” At the time, I responded, “While things could change over the next six months (although the cake is probably largely baked), a GOP gain of 30 to 40 House seats appears more likely at this stage of the contest than Walter’s projected GOP gain of 15 to 25 seats.”

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Commentary: The Left Were the Mad Scientists, Americans Were Their Lab Rats

As the midterms approach, one way of looking at America’s current disaster is that we, the American people, were lab rats. And since 2021, the Left were the mad scientists, eager to try out their crackpot leftist experiments on us. 

The result is that the housing market is tottering on the verge of collapse. 

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Ohio Think Tank Wins Lawsuit for D.C. Tavern Against COVID Mandate

A Columbus, Ohio-based think tank this week prevailed in an administrative case on behalf of a Washington, D.C. tavern owner against D.C.’s since-rescinded mandate forcing indoor establishments to require that patrons wear masks and submit proof of COVID-19 vaccination.

The Buckeye Institute handled the matter for Eric Flannery, a Navy veteran and co-proprietor of The Big Board, a bar and grill operating three blocks east of Washington’s Union Station. Despite the city’s mask and vaccine-card rules, Flannery announced that “everyone is welcome” at his restaurant. This winter, the D.C. Department of Health (DOH) officials responded by suspending the tavern’s operating and liquor licenses, ordering the place to temporarily shutter and slapping Flannery with a $2,000 fine. 

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Ohio Judge Rules Pennsylvanian Needn’t Pay Cleveland Taxes for Work Done from Home

Dr. Manal Morsy

A Cuyahoga County, OH court this week ruled in favor of a Pennsylvania resident employed in Cleveland who argued she did not need to pay taxes to that city for work she did from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The plaintiff, Dr. Manal Morsy, executive vice president at the Athersys biotechnology company who lives in the southeastern Pennsylvania town of Blue Bell, would commute to Cleveland and stay through her workweeks before COVID hit in 2020. Whenever she worked outside of Cleveland previously, she would receive income-tax refunds from the municipality. Pursuant to a state law passed in March 2020 which stated that work from home during the public emergency would be deemed to take place “at the employees principal place of work,” the city collect the municipal income tax from her employer without refunding it. 

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Commentary: The Fed’s Interest Rate Hikes Have only Destroyed $398 Billion of the $6 Trillion It Printed

“Our expectation has been we would begin to see inflation come down, largely because of supply side healing.  We haven’t. We have seen some supply side healing but inflation has not really come down.”

That was Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Sept. 21, speaking to reporters following the central bank’s meeting where the Federal Funds Rate was once again increased 0.75 percent to its current range of 3 percent to 3.25 percent in a bid to combat sticky 8.3 percent consumer inflation the past year.

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Biden Says COVID Pandemic Is ‘Over’ in the United States

President Joe Biden said the COVID-19 pandemic is “over” in the United States.

“The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it. It’s– But the pandemic is over,” Biden said during a pre-recorded CBS “60 Minutes” interview aired Sunday.

“As you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape, and so I think it’s changing,” he said.

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