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November 2022

It Isn’t Just Congress: A ‘Red Wave’ Is Hitting Social Media, Too

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/02/its-not-just-congress-a-red-wave-is-hitting-social-media-too/

With the 2022 midterm elections less than a week away, it’s easy to be obsessed with the outcome of the vote. If recent polls are correct, this will be a “red wave” election in which Congress is returned to GOP control. But there’s another “red wave”: The one that’s washing over the Big Media and Social Media.

In recent days, the mainstream media have been in a tizzy following Tesla and Space-X founder Elon Musk’s dramatic $42 billion takeover of Twitter. Along with jokingly calling himself the “Chief Twit,” he promises major changes at the popular social-messaging site, with a total of 1.3 billion accounts and more than 200 million daily posts.

What’s left unsaid is what it will do for free speech and the return of centrist and conservative voices to social media. Musk, regardless of his politics, which range from left to right to everything in between depending on the issue, has been a robust defender of speech rights.

After taking over, Musk fired a whole suite of executives who had created and executed Twitter’s insidious plan to “de-platform” conservative voices from Twitter. The whole enabling apparatus seems set to go: Of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, some 50% to 75% are expected to get the axe as soon as this week.

With the likely restoration of hundreds if not thousands of suspended accounts, America’s thriving online opinion community is about to have part of its political and free speech ecosystem restored.

Energy Policy for Dummies Biden goes from bad to worse with a windfall profits tax on oil.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/energy-policy-for-dummies-windfall-tax-oil-companies-joe-biden-11667339340

President Biden has the worst energy policy since Jimmy Carter, so it was probably inevitable that he would disinter one of Mr. Carter’s worst ideas—a “windfall profits” tax on oil companies. Doesn’t he know that when you tax something, you get less of it?

Sorry, rhetorical question. “Their profits are a windfall of war—the windfall from the brutal conflict that’s ravaging Ukraine and hurting tens of millions of people around the globe,” Mr. Biden said Monday of oil companies reporting strong earnings this year.

The reality is that their profits owe more to his Administration’s war on fossil fuels than Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion. Oil prices surged at the start of the war amid uncertainty about the impact of Western sanctions on Russian supply. But prices have moderated as China and India have continued to buy Russian crude at a discount, while markets have downgraded global economic forecasts amid central-bank tightening and Chinese lockdowns.

But gasoline prices remain relatively elevated because production, especially in the U.S., isn’t keeping up with demand. Recent refinery shutdowns in the U.S. and Europe have created a supply bottleneck, boosting refiners’ normally narrow margins. It’s no small irony that government policies and investor pressure to reduce production have inflated Big Oil’s profits.