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June 2022

Biden Made His Own Mess Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/biden-made-his-own-mess/

The president was dealt an excellent hand and has played it terribly. He has no one to blame for the sorry state of his administration but himself.

You’d think someone whose career in national politics goes all the way back to 1972 would have noticed this, but apparently President Biden hasn’t: Unpopular presidents tend to complain that they were dealt a bad hand, and then grouse that the media are making things look worse than they are. But Biden was dealt an excellent hand; he has no excuses for the mess he’s in.

When Biden took office, the U.S. was already bouncing back from economic calamity, and tens of millions of vaccine doses were in the pipeline. If he had made smart decisions, the U.S. would be doing fine right now. Instead, he is the primary cause of the crises that are swamping his presidency. The media could scarcely be more inclined to spin things in his favor, and yet even they can’t entirely ignore the dispiriting facts.

A sympathetic-sounding author, Chris Whipple, who is writing a book about White House chiefs of staff, told NBC News that Team Biden “came in with the most daunting set of challenges arguably since Franklin D. Roosevelt, only to then be hit by a perfect storm of crises, from Ukraine to inflation to the supply chain to baby formula. What’s next? Locusts?” Biden has himself, according to the same NBC News story, been sympathetic to the why-am-I-so-unlucky view.

Biden’s Approval Rating Is Now Lowest In Gallup’s History

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/14/bidens-approval-rating-drops-to-lowest-in-gallups-history/

On day 487 in office, President Joe Biden set a new record. He has the lowest approval rating of all presidents at this point in their presidencies since Gallup started tracking this in 1945.

According to Gallup’s Presidential Job Approval Center, just 41% approve of the job Biden is doing. That’s worse than Gerald Ford, or Lyndon Johnson, or even Jimmy Carter on day 487. Much worse than Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama.

To add insult to injury, Biden’s approval rating is now lower than Trump’s was at this point in Trump’s first term.

Biden’s oh-so-presidential response to his cratering support: he is “seething.”

Instead of accepting blame, Biden and his “inner circle” are blaming everyone around them, including the White House staff. Politico reports that: “Members of Biden’s inner circle, including first lady Jill Biden and the president’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, have complained that West Wing staff has managed Biden with kid gloves, not putting him on the road more or allowing him to flash more of his genuine, relatable, albeit gaffe-prone self.”

Yeah, letting Biden be Biden will work.

A dangerous implosion of American politics Republican Congress facing a Democratic White House for two years would defer economic policy change until 2025 David Goldman

https://asiatimes.com/2022/06/a-dangerous-implosion-of-american-politics/

While working Americans suffer the worst decline in real income since the waning months of the Carter Administration, America’s political parties are in disarray with internal divisions almost as intense as the issues that have polarized “red state” and “blue state” America.

Neither party has a proposal – credible or otherwise – on the political agenda to alleviate the inflation that is crushing family income. And neither has the prospect of gaining a governing mandate, as opposed to a temporary majority.

It’s a national train wreck, and no one has a plan to stop it.

Unless his legal problems interfere, Donald Trump almost certainly will run for president again in 2024 and will be his party’s nominee. The Congressional commission investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot may have gathered enough information to motivate federal charges against the former president, but that remains unclear.

Trump’s obsessive belief that the Democrats stole the 2020 election damages him. More ominous is that his economic policies contributed to the present disaster, and Trump has no thoughts on the subject apart from assigning the whole of the blame to Biden.

Lockdown Damage Empirical evidence demonstrates that shutting down economies and schools brought little benefit and much harm. Brendan Patrick Purdy

https://www.city-journal.org/the-damage-of-covid-lockdowns

Did the Covid lockdowns save lives? Statistics can help answer the question.

In April, free-market economists Phil Kerpen, Stephen Moore, and Casey B. Mulligan published a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled “A Final Report Card on the States’ Response to COVID-19.” Their report considered three variables for all 50 states and Washington, D.C.: health outcomes (measured by adjusted mortality), economic performance throughout the pandemic (measured by unemployment and GDP), and the pandemic effect on education (measured by the percentage of cumulative in-person instruction). The authors investigated the relationships among the three variables using simple linear regression, a tool to summarize and study relationships between two continuous variables. This method yields a correlation coefficient that rates both the strength and the direction of the relationship between the two variables.

The results: locked-down economies did not have better health outcomes, open schools were slightly negatively correlated with health outcomes, and the lockdown of schools and economies were highly correlated.

Since the underlying data are available, I ran my own analysis, and the results were largely the same. Indeed, the relationship between health outcomes and economic effects was statistically insignificant. So, too, was the relationship between health outcomes and open schools. Thus, one cannot conclude that economic lockdowns or school closures were associated with saving lives during the pandemic. A significant relationship existed between states that locked down the economy and closed schools, which means that governments that were willing to lock down businesses also sent students home. Ultimately, whether a state or district locked down the economy or closed down schools hardly predicted the health of those that live there.

Reactionary ‘progressives’ strike again Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/reactionary-progressives-strike-again/

A few ignoramuses with rainbow flags gathered on Sunday at New York City’s Chelsea Piers to protest the participation of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the Jewish Leadership Conference, held annually by the conservative Tikvah Fund. Other speakers at the event included former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer, former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor and current Tikvah chairman Elliott Abrams, and a slew of conservative Jewish intellectuals.
The timing, at the height of Pride Month, couldn’t have been better from a propaganda perspective for the demonstrators present and behind the scenes. While countries around the Free World are going out of their way to celebrate the LGBTQ+ movement through parades, public-service announcements and all vehicles that highlight “choice” and “identity,” the very idea that any venue would dare to let DeSantis darken its premises presented a golden opportunity for bitching and moaning about victimhood.

The trouble is that this reactionary method of manipulation to silence all voices that don’t align perfectly with a “progressive” point of view works—at least, on liberals. Afraid to be labeled as Neanderthal right-wingers, the latter cave to pressure at the drop of a threat.
This is how the above conference, titled “Jews, Israel and the Future of the West,” got booted last month from the agenda of its originally planned location: The Museum of Jewish Heritage–A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. The excuse for the travesty was that the institution doesn’t “do politics.” Leaning on this phony assertion, the museum ultimately refused to sign a contract with Tikvah.