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Democrats’ Bidenflation disaster by Byron York

Posted By on April 13th, 2022

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/democrats-bidenflation-disaster

You’ve seen the news — the government says inflation rose 8.5% in March compared to last year. That is up from the annual inflation rate last month, which was 7.9%. Both are the worst since 1981.

There are a lot of stories behind the big number. Inflation is up in every area of the economy. But the worst news concerns some very fundamental human activities: eating, finding warmth and shelter, and moving around. Look deep into the website at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and you’ll see how bad inflation is in those basic areas.

Start with the price of food. You’ve been to the grocery store. You know it is bad. Now, BLS says the price of meat, poultry, fish, and eggs rose 13.7% annually. The price of cereal and bakery products rose 9.4%. Fruits and vegetables, 8.5%. Nonalcoholic beverages, 8%. Dairy, 7%. And other foods that don’t fit into those categories, 10.3%. All of that adds up to the category of “Food at Home,” which BLS says went up 10% in March over last year.

Want to go out to eat? BLS says prices of full-service meals went up 8% in March, while limited-service meals went up 7.2%. There is simply no way to eat, at home or out, without paying more.

Move on to the subject of staying warm. It is hard to believe, but BLS reports the price of fuel oil is up 70.1% in March over last year. 70.1%! Then there is the price of what BLS refers to as “shelter,” which increased 5%. (What does the BLS mean by “shelter”? Here is its definition: “The cost of shelter for renter-occupied housing is rent. For an owner-occupied unit, the cost of shelter is the implicit rent that owner-occupant would have to pay if they were renting their homes.”)

BOOKS Comments turned off

The View from the Cocoon One has to wonder what kind of Beltway cocoon Continetti inhabits.  By Paul Gottfried

Posted By on April 12th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/11/the-view-from-the-cocoon/

A review of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, by Matthew Continetti (Basic Books, 496 pages, $32)

Sometimes one begins a book with such low expectations that one is delighted to find the printed material is not quite as bad as what one expected. This is precisely my impression of Matthew Continetti’s much touted monograph, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. As someone who holds the honor of being Bill Kristol’s son-in-law (and who holds his father-in-law’s vacated place at Fox News), and a prominent NeverTrumper to boot, Continetti is hardly an unbiased interpreter of conservatism. A revealing passage from his book tells us clearly where on the ideological divide he stands: “The one hundred years war for the Right is to conceive of it as a battle between the forces of extremism and the conservatives who understood that mainstream acceptance of their ideas was the prerequisite for electoral success and lasting reform.” 

As the world’s most notorious critic of misused political taxonomies, I shall allow myself to quibble about Continetti’s eccentric use of the term “Right.” For him and his well-connected friends, the designation mostly serves as a synonym for “Republican.” There are two groups on his telling, both located in the GOP, that are fighting to be the true face of the Right, but only one passes muster as “non-extreme.” This is where I start to part ways. Today, I would argue, the populist Right is the true American Right because it alone is fighting the cultural Left and its allies in the deep state, media, and educational establishment. I have no idea what makes its neocon and Republican establishment adversaries any kind of Right, since on most domestic social issues and certainly on foreign policy, this group happily cooperates with leftist power elites.

In explaining how the current populist Right came along, Continetti stresses the divisive character of the Iraq War and the failure of the George W. Bush Administration to carry along all self-identified conservatives. That prolonged struggle “delegitimized the conservative movement in the eyes of populist independents, conservative Democrats, and disaffected voters crucial to past GOP victories.” This observation is entirely correct. Bush’s invasion unleashed acrimonious debate at home, and a populist Right was able to consolidate itself by standing in opposition to a course of action heavily endorsed by neoconservative journalists and policy advisers. But cultural and moral issues, often intertwined with economic ones, soon became the sustaining themes of the populist revival, which has taken cultural wars and the plight of the working class more seriously than neocons and establishment Republicans have done.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

New York’s Child-Masking Madness:By Joel Zinberg

Posted By on April 12th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/new-yorks-child-masking-madness/

Mayor Eric Adams can and should disregard the erroneous advice of his health team.

One of the more curious storylines playing out in the early days of Eric Adams’s tenure as mayor of New York City is his stance on masking preschoolers. Adams, who projects a tough-guy, no-nonsense persona, ready to make the tough decisions, has decided to maintain the requirement that schoolchildren under the age of five wear masks even though the science is clear that they face little to no Covid risk and that, as I discuss below, masking that age group comes with a risk of significant harm.

Adams lifted the mask mandate for K–12 schoolchildren in early March and promised he would lift the mandate for preschoolers, ages two to four, on April 4. Then, citing a “slight uptick” in cases, he backtracked.

When a state supreme court justice enjoined city officials from enforcing the requirement on April 1, calling it “arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable,” Adams announced that the city would appeal. That evening, an appellate division justice stayed the injunction, effectively restoring the preschooler mandate until a full hearing takes place.

A week later, Adams announced the mandate would continue for at least another week. He claimed he’d like to lift the mandate but “I’m totally at the mercy of my health team.” That would be the one led by his new health commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, who continues to recommend masks “for most of us,” particularly for children under five because that age group is not yet eligible for vaccination.

Dr. Vasan’s reasoning makes little sense. The currently predominant Omicron variant — especially the subvariant BA.2 that is now dominant in the New York City area — spreads easily despite vaccination. Mayor Adams, who has just tested positive himself, can attest to that. If masks are necessary for toddlers, they should be necessary for everyone. In fact, Dr. Vasan’s own tweet from March 30 shows that case rates in the city are lowest in the zero-to-four age group and, far and away, highest among 25- to 34-year-olds.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Democrats Revolt over Biden’s Border Bungling Carine Hajjar

Posted By on April 12th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/democrats-revolt-over-bidens-border-bungling/

With the looming expiration of Title 42, some lawmakers are waking up from the progressive fantasy.

Democrats are being butchered in the polls, with their progressive shift not sitting well with average Americans. According to FiveThirtyEight, President Biden’s approval rating is hovering at 42 percent — that’s more than ten percentage points lower than at the same time last year. His falling approval is mirrored by his party, with 42.5 percent of Americans saying they want a Democratic win on the generic congressional ballot, as opposed to 44.7 percent favoring Republicans.

Despite Biden’s “unity” promise, Democrats are catering to a small, progressive wing whose goals simply do not resonate with Americans. On the April 1 episode of Potomac Watch from the Wall Street Journal, Kim Strassel was discussing Biden’s approval ratings and said:

There’s . . . increasing frustration with Joe Biden that he is pushing an agenda that is out of tune with what most Americans are interested in seeing done. . . . Joe Biden is following the agenda of a very small wing of his party that’s ascendant, the progressive wing, but that is not reflective of national mood or politics.

And yet, progressives think the polling problem is due to not being progressive enough. Last week, for instance, Chris Hayes blamed Joe Manchin and the failure of Build Back Better for “single-handedly” costing Democrats their standing among Americans. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez simply believes that the president isn’t delivering the progressive agenda he promised. On Errol Louis’s podcast, she said that “this isn’t just about middle of the road, an increasingly narrow band of independent voters” (well, actually, it is). She went on: “This is really about the collapse of support among young people, base, feeling like they worked overtime to get this president elected and they aren’t necessarily being seen.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Questions Loom After Verdicts in Whitmer ‘Kidnapping’ Trial What did top government officials know and when did they know it? By Julie Kelly

Posted By on April 12th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/11/questions-loom-after-verdicts-in-whitmer-kidnapping-trial/

It’s impossible to overstate the significance of the verdicts handed down last week for four men charged with conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 and use a “weapon of mass destruction” in the process.

Despite sworn testimony from several FBI experts and agents—including the primary FBI informant, Dan Chappel, who was compensated at least $60,000 by the bureau for his involvement—endless federal resources, and favorable rulings by the judge to withhold evidence and testimony, a jury of 12 Americans rejected the government’s case in cold fashion on Friday in a Grand Rapids courtroom. The Justice Department did not win a single conviction; two men walked free after 18 months in prison and two men remain behind bars as prosecutors prepare to re-try them after a hung jury could not agree on their guilt.

What the jury did agree on, however, is that the Federal Bureau of Investigation engaged in entrapment. Defense attorneys, with the consent of Chief District Court Judge Robert Jonker, argued that the FBI attempted to induce their clients into committing the alleged kidnapping crime. 

“When I look at what happened in this case, I am ashamed of the behavior of the leading law enforcement agency in the United States,” Joshua Blanchard, the lawyer representing Barry Croft Jr., who was not acquitted last week, told jurors in his closing statement. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

New Jersey to Force Second-Graders to Learn Explicit Details About ‘Gender Identity’ Welcome to “modern-day public school education.” Robert Spencer

Posted By on April 12th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/get-your-kids-out-there-new-jersey-force-second-robert-spencer/

The madness that is spreading through the land is coming to New Jersey second-graders: seven- and eight-year-olds with the misfortune of having to attend public schools will be forced this fall to learn all the latest fashionable insanity about how boys may really be girls and vice versa, setting up some of them to destroy their lives in the ensuing years. This is child abuse on a grand scale, otherwise known as a “modern-day public school education.”

New state sex education guidelines are set to take effect this September in the Garden State, requiring that once they have completed second grade, children should grasp the “core ideas” that all “individuals should feel welcome and included regardless of their gender, gender expression or sexual orientation.” Traditional morality would be disallowed under these guidelines, no matter how politely stated, for even a soft-spoken affirmation that some sexual orientations or gender expressions might actually be actively harmful to the human spirit would clearly not be welcome, and so are ruled out.

Predictably, it gets even worse. According to Fox News, “the standards listed ‘performance expectations’ for second graders, which includes discussing ‘the range of ways people express their gender and how gender role stereotypes may limit behavior.’” This range, of course, includes all of today’s officially sanctioned insanity, and the standards do everything they can to break down a child’s emerging sense of the differences between the sexes.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hunter Biden’s Laptop Leverage Will America’s woke, partisan intelligence community now turn on Joe Biden? Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on April 12th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/hunter-bidens-laptop-leverage-lloyd-billingsley/

“Federal investigation of Hunter Biden heats up,” headlined a March 30 CNN story that mentioned “a laptop purported to belong to Hunter Biden and said to include his business documents and other potentially salacious materials.” As CNN previously reported, the FBI took possession of the laptop in late 2019.

On October 19, 2020, 51 former intelligence officials claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” Since the laptop became a news item last month, the intelligence crew has not owned up to any falsehoods or expressed any second thoughts. The back story here is American disinformation, from official American sources.

The signatories to the October 19, 2020 statement include CIA directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Michael Hayden, along with former acting CIA directors Mike Morell and John McLaughlin. John Moseman and Larry Pfeiffer formerly served as chiefs of staff at the CIA.

Signatory Doug Wise was deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and Rick Ledgett, formerly deputy director of the National Security Agency. Joining these heavyweights is a squad of former CIA officers and analysts, along with former director of national intelligence James Clapper, who famously called the Muslim brotherhood a “largely secular” organization.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Future Of Energy In The U.S.: Which Projection Do You Believe? Francis Menton

Posted By on April 12th, 2022

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-4-10-the-future-of-energy-in-the-us-which-projection-do-you-believe

What will the production and consumption of energy look like in the United States in 2050? There are two very different answers to that question.

On Side One are those who assert that we face a “climate crisis” that can only be addressed by the rapid forced suppression of the production and use of fossil fuels. Therefore, some combination of government coercion, investor pressure and voluntary institutional action will shortly drive coal, oil and natural gas from the energy marketplace, to be replaced by carbon-free “renewables.” And thus by 2050 we will have achieved the utopia of “net zero” carbon emissions.

Those on Side Two think that the Side One vision is completely unrealistic fantasy. Simple arithmetic shows that without massive energy storage no amount of building of wind and solar generators can make much difference in fossil fuel use for electricity production; and adequate energy storage devices to fill the gap do not even exist as a technical matter, let alone at remotely reasonable cost. Result: no matter what the grandees say, fossil fuel production and use in 2050 will be as high or higher than they are now.

Which Side do you think is right?

At the moment, all of the Great and the Good seem to have planted their flags on Side One. President Biden leaves no doubt as to where he stands. By Press Release of April 22, 2021, Biden committed the U.S. to a “net zero” economy by 2050:

On Day One, President Biden fulfilled his promise to rejoin the Paris Agreement and set a course for the United States to tackle the climate crisis at home and abroad, reaching net zero emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050.

And by various Executive Orders, Biden has the whole federal bureaucracy committed to the fossil fuel suppression project, from stopping drilling to blocking pipelines to decommissioning power plants.

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why Sun Yat-Sen Was An American Thinker By Laura Lam

Posted By on April 12th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/04/why_sun_yatsen_was_an_american_thinker.html

In modern Chinese history, Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) holds a unique place. He led the revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911; devoted his life to championing an independent and democratic China; and was a revolutionary leader and a man of vision. Sun remains the only political leader honored by both mainland China and Taiwan. What’s fascinating about Sun, but little known in America, is that his birthplace, formal education, medical training, religious faith, and political values made him a true American.

Sun’s elder brother concealed the fact that Yat-sen was an American. His family would claim that he was born in China because a Chinese identity was crucial to his mission for China’s future but contemporaneous records show that he was an American citizen by birth. The National Archives at San Francisco verified on April 29, 1904, that Sun had US citizenship. The American Institute in Taiwan also confirms that Sun Yat-sen was born in Hawaii.

When Sun was 4 years old, his parents took him back with them to China. Then at age 12, he sailed on a British steamship back to Hawaii, to live with his elder brother. Sun received his secondary education at the ʻIolani School under the supervision of the Church of Hawai’i.

At 18, Sun wanted to convert to Christianity. He was baptized in Hong Kong by Rev. C. R. Hager, an American missionary. He began studying Western medicine at the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese. At 22, he joined a group of revolutionary thinkers called the Four Bandits. They founded the Furen Literary Society, which emphasized discipline, purifying the character, and learning from the West. In 1892 Sun graduated with a medical doctorate degree from the University of Hong Kong, a globally respected educational establishment in the British territory.

In 1894, Sun wrote a petition to the Qing Viceroy of Zhili, Li Hongzhang, presenting his ideas for modernizing China but was refused an audience. That same year, he founded a nationalist party in Hawaii, the Revive China Society. It would later be renamed the Kuomintang.

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Saudi television viciously mocks Biden By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on April 12th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/_saudi_television_viciously_mocks_biden.html

The whole world knows that Joe Biden is a husk of a man, mentally and physically not up to the job. On top the danger that his sheer incompetence poses for Americans comes the risk that enemies and less friendly countries (and even allies) will be tempted to defy or take advantage of the vanished leadership at the top of the federal government.

One country that has moved away from the status of ally thanks to the Biden administration’s insane backing of Iran through giveaway “negotiations” over restoring the JCPOA nuclear deal is Saudi Arabia. Media there are carefiul not to offend the government, so the following broad satire of an utterly decrepit Biden no doubt reflect government attitudes toward the man occupying the post that used to be called “leader of the free world.”