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Ruth King

Top Democrat Begs For More Oil…From a Foreign Country Katie Pavlich

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/02/28/top-democrat-begs-saudi-arabia-to-pump-more-oil-n2603855

As oil prices continue to skyrocket thanks to leftist climate change policies, Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman is begging Saudi Arabia to ramp up drilling and exports.

The pathetic plea comes months after the Biden administration also begged OPEC to increase oil production abroad, while limiting and cutting off oil resources in the United States.

“Higher gasoline costs, if left unchecked, risk harming the ongoing global recovery. The price of crude oil has been higher than it was at the end of 2019, before the onset of the pandemic. While OPEC+ recently agreed to production increases, these increases will not fully offset previous production cuts that OPEC+ imposed during the pandemic until well into 2022. At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough,” White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan released in an August 2021 statement.

“President Biden has made clear that he wants Americans to have access to affordable and reliable energy, including at the pump. Although we are not a party to OPEC, the United States will always speak to international partners regarding issues of significance that affect our national economic and security affairs, in public and private,” he continued. “We are engaging with relevant OPEC+ members on the importance of competitive markets in setting prices. Competitive energy markets will ensure reliable and stable energy supplies, and OPEC+ must do more to support the recovery.”

Here’s the Thread That Shreds the Obama-Clinton ‘Tough on Russia’ Narrative Matt Vespa

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/02/28/heres-the-thread-that-shreds-the-obamaclinton-tough-on-russia-narrative-n2603845

I’m sorry, but I think that $30 million in crack pipes was really for the liberal media. Newsrooms needed scores of them to deal with the endless stream of bad news that emanates from the Biden White House. They can’t spin it. They can’t polish it. Every time one wave of bad news exits a cycle, a new one begins. Joe Biden is literally Mr. Magoo only he crashes into everything. It’s a disaster. Now, with war breaking out in Ukraine, Democrats and their allies in the media are in overdrive with their anti-Russian antics. It’s not to support the Ukrainians. It’s to attack Donald Trump who they’ve been obsessed with like OJ Simpson was with his ex-wife. They’re also beating the war drums. They were joined by some of their Republican colleagues as well. Yeah, World War III is just what we need from Congress.

Yet, Hillary Clinton resurfaced from her darkened lair to address the GOP directly, calling on the party to stand up to Russia and stop those from giving “aid and comfort” to Vladimir Putin. Here’s where the hits of the crack pipe come into play. When did the Democratic Party become tough on Russia? The Russian collusion hoax was not that—that’s long ventured into the realm of psychosis. It wasn’t that long ago that we learned that Hillary Clinton pretty much gave the Russians ownership of our uranium mines in the United States. Remember the Uranium One deal. Remember the $500,000 check the Clintons received from a Russian bank selling Uranium One futures. And this woman has the stones to lecture about being tough with Moscow. Please.

Kyle Becker, a former Fox News producer and promoter of Becker News, had a mega-thread that gutted this narrative with a hot knife. I mean, he charts it from Ted Kennedy’s collusion with the Russians during the Reagan administration to the Obama administration’s pervasive fecklessness when it came to our Eurasian adversary.

The Government From Hell By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/02/28/the-government-from-hell-n1562382

The trucker convoy has come and gone. The bouncy castles have been put away, the hot tubs dismantled, the 18-wheelers towed, the party atmosphere vanished into air, into thin air. They are such stuff as dreams are made on.

The convoy’s main accomplishment was to force the government to show its autocratic hand to the observant and the doubtful. The invoking of the Emergencies (or War Measures) Act was a groundless abuse of power and its hasty withdrawal a sign of an authoritarian government caught with its pants down. But in the aftermath of the Freedom Convoy’s magnificent display of resolute patriotism and good faith, the federal vaccine mandates it protested remain in place, a finance minister of dubious antecedents bears the fasces, and the administration of a petty and vindictive tyrant is still intact. The partial triumph of the truckers turns out to be a Pyrrhic victory, for it is the truckers who have suffered most.

Our blue-collar benefactors now face the consequences of the scorched-earth policies adopted by the anointed class. Many have lost their rigs. Operating licenses have been revoked. Criminal charges have been laid. Bans on trucker commerce have proliferated. Bankruptcy looms for many. Livelihoods have been demolished. Families have been obliterated. Marriages are bound to collapse. And I suspect that suicides will mount as desperation sees no escape from ruination. In effect, Justin Trudeau declared war on those who kept the goods and services flowing through the ersatz pandemic and who enabled the populace to weather the government-induced travesty. Gratitude is not in the dwindling catalogue of common virtues. The casualties, though hidden by the Soviet-style media, are devastating.

The Woke Weapon on Campus: ‘Danger’ By Carine Hajjar

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-woke-weapon-on-campus-danger/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

The cause of sparing anybody discomfort over anything is making college life miserable — for everybody.

C ollege students face “danger” everywhere they turn. A comment that makes you uncomfortable, an unsavory name on a building, a mask that fell under the nose, a nonprogressive comment in class.

Danger to college students (the woke ones in particular) is subjective — danger to me is danger to all.

The most recent and obvious such danger on college campuses is Covid. Even as the less-virulent Omicron wanes, hospitalization rates plummet, and state and municipal mask advisories are lifted, college students continue to face intolerable levels of Covid precautions.

One Harvard student and former classmate, Julie Hartman, decided to bravely question Harvard’s overzealous Covid policing. On Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal, she wrote about pandemic-related changes to Housing Day, a Harvard tradition put on hold for the past two years:

Sophomores, juniors and seniors storm freshman dormitories to tell first-year students which of the 12 “houses,” essentially big dorms for upperclassmen, they will live in for their remaining time on campus. Having lost two of these days during the 17 months that Harvard sent us home, I was excited to participate in one more traditional Housing Day my senior year. Instead, the student government said it would likely be a modified outdoor event.

Remember When Inflation Was Just Going to Be Transitory? By George Leef

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/remember-when-inflation-was-just-going-to-be-transitory/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=third

So said President Biden last year. I don’t think many people believed it then and they sure don’t now.

It’s bad and will get worse, argues Timothy Nash of Northwood University’s McNair Center in this TownHall article.

Get ready for “Higher prices for basketballs, lipstick, pacemakers and automobiles — brought to you by the U. S. Federal Reserve Bank, the Biden Administration’s Green Energy policies and Putin’s foreign policy,” Nash writes.

Under Obama, Trump, and now Biden, the federal government has been creating money to cover its prodigious spending at an unprecedented pace. That’s actually what inflation is — the loss of value in the currency is just one of the consequences.

One of Nash’s key points is that Biden’s “green” energy policies have made a bad situation much worse. He observes, “If U.S. oil markets had remained less regulated under the Biden Administration, domestic and global oil supplies would be higher today. The price of oil per barrel on the global exchanges would be lower and Vladimir Putin’s ability to fund the acts of a tyrannical despot would be greatly reduced, while simultaneously validating that freedom and free enterprise is the best way to allocate resources globally.”

The American people are suffering as a result of our ravenous federal government, led by politicians who apparently believe that there are no adverse effects from their unbridled lust for spending and  control. Of course, Biden and his minions will try to pin the blame elsewhere, but I’m optimistic that more and more Americans are starting to realize that the problem is the Leviathan on the Potomac.

Stealth Hunter: Biden’s tangled business dealings are becoming hard to ignore: Edward Helmore

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/27/hunter-biden-joe-biden-president-business-dealings

Influence-peddling is Washington’s ‘spectator sport’ – but now there’s an interest in taking a closer look at the president’s son.

To the political right in America, Joe Biden’s son Hunter has been the gift that keeps on giving, with his public struggles with addiction, scandalous private life and tangled business life. To the left, Hunter’s travails are dismissed as a Republican political obsession and a talking point for tabloid journalism and internet gossip.

But last week, two witnesses called before a federal grand jury seated in Wilmington, Delaware, which is looking into the tax affairs of the president’s son, made the subject harder to avoid.

First there was Lunden Roberts, with whom Biden has a three-year-old unacknowledged child. Then Zoe Kestan, an ex-girlfriend and lingerie and textile designer, spent five hours giving testimony on Biden’s spending, including – reportedly – stays at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, where, in 2018, allegedly, Biden was preoccupied with cooking crack cocaine.

Wretched and salacious as that sounds, much of Hunter Biden’s story, detailed at length in his autobiography Beautiful Things, published last year, tends that way. “I’m not a curio or a sideshow to a moment in history,” Biden claimed in his book. “I’ve worked for someone other than my father, [I] rose and fell on my own.”

 

But that’s not how Joe Biden’s political enemies see it.

Donald Trump tried to make issue out of Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine, Russia and China, which included high paid consultancies and gifts, and allegations that, as vice-president, Joe Biden had shaped American foreign policy in Ukraine to benefit his son.

For Trump, it backfired, when efforts to uncover information about the Bidens and Ukraine helped to trigger his first impeachment. Then came the surfacing of Hunter Biden’s missing laptop, with its library of decadent pictures and business email chains, mysteriously left at a Wilmington repair shop, which found its way to Republican political operatives including Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, plus the rightwing press and the FBI.

On the political flip-side, House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff said the laptop was a “smear” from Russian intelligence, and 50 former intelligence officials said it was probably Russian disinformation. Now, however, almost no one disputes its authenticity.

This Time, Politics Should Actually Stop at Water’s Edge Bill Scher

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/02/28/this_time_politics_should_actually_stop_at_waters_edge_147261.html

“We must stop partisan politics at the water’s edge,” insisted Sen. Arthur Vandenberg on the Senate floor in March of 1947. At the time, the Michigan Republican chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Harry Truman, a Democrat, was formulating a policy of containment to constrain Russian imperialism.

In the decades since, Vandenberg’s words have generally been ignored. Republicans and Democrats often clash during foreign policy crises, sometimes debating in good faith over principled disagreements, sometimes leveling cheap attacks in hopes of scoring political points.

But Vandenberg’s principle can and should guide the behavior of our politicians as they respond to Vladimir Putin’s brazen invasion of Ukraine. This is not wishful thinking. Several factors of this crisis incentivize bipartisanship.

First, Putin is a manifestly dangerous force. As foreign policy analysts Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, a victorious Putin would instigate “a state of permanent economic war,” with the United States and Europe levelling  “sweeping sanctions, which Russia is likely to parry with cyber-measures and energy blackmailing.” Russia will also seek to encourage, “through methods fair and foul,” political division within Europe in hopes of weakening the NATO alliance. Neither of the United States’ two major political parties should want to live or govern in a world in which Putin has succeeded in becoming, as Fix and Kimmage foresee, “an anarchic presence” who sows instability. If there ever was a country-before-party moment, this is it.

Second, we already have a bipartisan consensus on a key point. “The President has been very clear that U.S. troops will not be fighting in Ukraine,” a Pentagon spokesperson said Friday. Republicans in Congress have not argued otherwise. To date, disagreements between the Biden administration and congressional Republicans involve the timing and scope of economic sanctions, which is not the stuff of deeply divisive debate.

Russia launches fierce rocket attack on Ukrainian city of Kharkiv Bombardment overshadows talks between Moscow and Kyiv officials on the border with Belarus

https://www.ft.com/content/0b1a1f5d-147d-4300-8f56-41e16e3dfa2e?segmentId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9

Russian forces have launched a heavy bombardment of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, an assault that overshadowed the first direct talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials since President Vladimir Putin began his invasion five days ago. Residents of the city said they had come under intense artillery and rocket fire from Russian positions. Video footage shared on social media showed high-rise apartment blocks in Kharkiv being hit by heavy shelling that shrouded the sky with plumes of dark smoke. “Dozens of civilians are dying,” said regional governor Oleh Sinegubov. “It’s happening during the day when people go to pharmacies, for food, for drinking water. This is a crime.” Russia’s military operation, unleashed five days ago, has failed to unseat Ukraine’s government or capture any major cities, but has uprooted hundreds of thousands of civilians who have fled to neighbouring countries in search of safety. The war has cranked east-west tensions to new heights, with Putin putting the country’s nuclear deterrent on high alert and the west imposing swingeing sanctions on Moscow that sent the rouble into a tailspin and prompted Russia’s central bank to impose capital controls.

POLL; AMERICANS WANT MERIT NOT WOKE POLITICS TO DECIDE COLLEGE ADMISSIONS: TERRY JONES

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/28/ii-tipp-poll-americans-want-merit-not-woke-politics-to-decide-college-admissions/

America’s colleges and universities increasingly use non-academic criteria, including gender, family income and race, to decide who gets admitted and who doesn’t. It’s a trend most Americans seem to deeply dislike, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

Parents want their kids to face a merit-based admissions policy, over one that is for the lack of a better word, woke.

Indeed, if parents’ preferences mattered to institutions of higher education, schools would be making their admission decisions on such merit-based standards as academic achievements and aptitude, not woke criteria such as race and income or whether an applicant has famous parents.

I&I/TIPP asked American adults a simple question: “To what extent do you support or oppose colleges and universities using the following factors to make admission decisions?”

They then provided the following nine possible college admission criteria: “Race or ethnicity,” “Gender,” “Whether a parent went to the school,” “High school grades,” “Extracurricular activities,” “Athletic ability,” “Household income,” “The applicant is the child of a famous person,” “SAT/ACT scores.”

Possible answers included “Support strongly,” “Support somewhat,” “Oppose somewhat,” “Oppose strongly” and “Not sure.”

Biden’s Political Myopia Endangering Europe: Allow the EastMed Pipeline by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18281/biden-europe-eastmed-pipeline

Biden surprised EastMed partners by abruptly withdrawing U.S. support for the pipeline on January 9, thereby effectively killing the project, preventing a diversified supply of energy to Europe, and further assuring even greater revenues for Russia and its war machine.

“The Biden Administration’s actions in this matter are particularly objectionable and hypocritical in light of its tacit approval of Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline, which will only deepen Europe’s energy dependence on a volatile adversary.” — U.S. Representative Gus Bilirakis, January 24, 2022.

As Biden was busy undercutting three staunch U.S. allies in the Mediterranean [Cyprus, Israel and Greece] to appease Erdoğan and a fantasy of “green energy” — that is years from being either ready or affordable — to appease America’s Democrat Party, Ankara would once again prove to be only a part-time Western ally.

“During the vote [against Russia]… Turkey decided to abstain,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said. “We don’t want to break off the dialogue with Russia.”

Biden should immediately reverse his decision and permit the EastMed pipeline.

In December 2019, Biden had described Erdoğan as an autocrat and promised to empower Turkey’s opposition parties through democratic processes. Was that a joke, or is Biden a crypto-fan of Erdoğan?

Once again U.S. President Joe Biden’s strategic miscalculation is coming with a strategic cost: appeasing NATO’s pro-Putin, part-time ally Turkey and jeopardizing Europe’s energy security.