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Ruth King

The Democrats’ Capricious Energy Policy Has Been a Disaster By David Harsanyi

https://pjmedia.com/columns/davidhasanyi/2022/06/17/the-democrats-capricious-energy-policy-has-been-a-disaster-n1606007

Democrats have spent decades warning that the United States must stop using the most efficient and affordable energy sources or it will be consumed by heat waves, fireballs and cataclysmic weather events. Every flood, every hurricane — every natural event, really — is now blamed on climate change. We have burdened our children with an irrational dread over their future. Then again, many in The Cult of Malthus won’t even have children.

So, why, if we’re on the precipice of this apocalypse, if saving the planet trumps every other concern, is President Joe Biden begging everyone to drill? On the days Democrats aren’t blaming Vladimir Putin for rising gas prices (a cost the president not long ago argued was worth paying for “freedom”), they’re blaming oil companies for profiteering. Wednesday, as the national average hit $5.014 (nearly $2 higher than last year), Biden sent letters to refining companies threatening to once again abuse his executive powers if they do not immediately alleviate high prices — a political appeal to the imaginary “greedflation.”

Biden, who promised a 100% “clean-energy economy” with “net-zero emissions” in a couple of decades, now demands energy companies, already at utilization rates above 90%, invest tens of billions more in new drilling infrastructure, when everyone knows that tomorrow, when prices recede, Democrats are going to go right back to passing laws and regulations that undercut their business. Today, Democrats demand CEOs spend more; tomorrow, they will promise to “hold oil executives accountable” and drag them in front of congressional committees where they will be scolded by economically illiterate windbags.

Biden tells AP he’s unpopular because Americans are mentally unwell By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/06/biden_tells_ap_the_reason_hes_unpopular_is_because_americans_are_mentally_unwell.html

Joe Biden, as his party propaganda and media enablers say, is a man of compassion.

And he’s now loaded with such compassion with remarks like this, addressing his own unpopularity with the American people.

See, it’s not that we’re bad people or anything.  It’s not that we’re depraved deplorables, or terrorists, as Democrats have said in the past.  We’re just sick in the head.

And for Biden, that makes sense, given that his unpopularity stretches across party lines and includes traditionally Democrat constituencies such as black, Hispanic, Asian-American, and young voters now.

Here’s what he actually told the Associated Press in his interview with them:

AP: What’s that paradox?

BIDEN: Well, I think the paradox is, part of it is, I think what, the failure of the last administration to act on COVID had a profound impact on the number of people who got COVID and the number of people who died. Now here’s what I’m, I think Vivek Murthy is right and most of the international and National Psychological Association, whatever it’s, people are really, really down. They’re really down. Their need for mental health in America has skyrocketed because people have seen everything upset. Everything they counted on upset. But most of it’s a consequence of, of, of what’s happening, what happened is a consequence of the, the COVID crisis.

Biden’s Oil Tantrum

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/bidens-oil-tantrum/

Joe Biden isn’t mad. He’s just disappointed.

You see, gas prices have risen during his presidency, and that’s making him unpopular with one of the most important voting blocs in America: people who purchase gasoline. Gasoline prices are largely out of Biden’s control, with prices determined on global markets and various industrial factors limiting supplies.

In past attempts to seem like he’s doing something about the problem, Biden has ordered releases of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, pushed electric vehicles, and invoked the Defense Production Act to produce more renewable-energy components. As anyone could have predicted, gas prices were unaffected by those actions.

So now he’s just firing off notes to energy CEOs on White House letterhead threatening them with government action if they don’t do what he wants.

“Your companies need to work with my Administration to bring forward concrete, near-term solutions that address the crisis and respect the critical equities of energy workers and fence-line communities,” Biden wrote.

First of all, no, they don’t. No company in the United States needs to work with any presidential administration on anything if it does not want to. This remains a free country, and loyalty to politicians is not a prerequisite to doing business.

Second, it’s almost sad that Biden can’t get through a threat without genuflecting to his woke, environmentalist base. Whatever “critical equities” are, we’re pretty sure they aren’t part of the refining process.

The 39.9% president by Byron York

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-39-9-president

THE 39.9% PRESIDENT. President Joe Biden’s job approval rating has slipped below 40% in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. As of this writing, it is 39.9%, versus a 54.4% disapproval rating.

Biden, of course, has been underwater in the polls for a long time. The last poll included in the RealClearPolitics average in which Biden had an approval rating higher than his disapproval rating was a Reuters-Ipsos survey from Dec. 17, 2021. In that poll, Biden had a job approval rating of 48%, versus a disapproval rating of 46%.

The last poll in which Biden’s job performance won the approval of a majority of voters was a Politico-Morning Consult survey from Aug. 16, 2021. Then, Biden had a job approval rating of 51%, versus a disapproval rating of 46%.

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Those days are gone. Yes, it’s entirely possible that the president’s rating will nose above 40% — it has done that before when he briefly dipped into the 30s — but Biden seems mired in a world in which about 40% or less of voters approve of the job he is doing and about 55% of voters disapprove.

How could it be otherwise? With prices rising 8.6% on an annualized basis in May — the price of groceries up 11.9%, gas up 48.7%, used cars up 16.1% — voters by far say that inflation is the most serious problem facing the nation today. And now the Federal Reserve, in a bid to bring inflation under control, has raised interest rates three-quarters of a percentage point, the biggest increase in almost 30 years, which greatly increases the risk of a recession

Jan. 6 Committee Ignores Clear Evidence Of Mass Illegal Voting, Systematically Broken Election Laws By: Margot Cleveland

https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/17/jan-6-committee-ignores-clear-evidence-of-mass-illegal-voting-systematically-broken-election-laws/

The Jan. 6 Committee completely sidestepped the verifiable evidence of systemic violations of election law, illegal voting, and more.

In its attempt to blame former President Donald Trump for the crimes committed on January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol, House Democrats have spent the week focused on Trump’s unsupported claims of widespread election fraud. The Jan. 6 select committee and the legacy media outlets promoting the show trial completely ignore, however, the verifiable evidence of systemic violations of election law, illegal voting, and the constitutionally deficient execution of the November 2020 election—including issues Trump challenged following the election.

Georgia provides a peach of an example. President Biden won Georgia and the state’s 16 electoral votes by a margin of 11,779 individual votes, but before the state certified the results of the November 2020 election, Trump challenged the outcome, raising several issues both in and out of court. Trump hammered accusations of fraud in Fulton County, claiming counterfeit ballots secreted in suitcases and vote-flipping by Dominion Voting Systems gave Biden the victory. But Trump also contested the Georgia results based on evidence indicating that tens of thousands of illegal votes were improperly counted.

While Trump’s legal team argued illegal votes in some 30-plus categories were improperly included in the final election tally, violations of Section 21-2-218 of the Georgia election code alone closed the gap between the two presidential candidates. That section provides that state “residents must vote in the county in which they reside, unless they changed their residence within 30 days of the election” and “outside of the 30-day grace period, if people vote in a county in which they no longer reside, ‘their vote in that county would be illegal.’”

Biden’s ‘Equity’ Diplomat Pushed Global Reparations, Railed against Electoral College By Jimmy Quinn

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/bidens-equity-diplomat-pushed-global-reparations-railed-against-electoral-college/

Race-obsessed Twitter posts from the State Department’s first-ever special representative for racial equity raise questions about the direction of its diversity agenda.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s appointee to a newly created racial-equity post called for reparations on an international scale and decried the Electoral College as a vestige of slaveholding America that must be purged, in messages posted to her Twitter account before she joined the Biden administration. The stances articulated in those tweets are likely to raise questions about the aims of the administration’s fledgling agenda on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

Earlier today, Blinken announced that he had selected Desirée Cormier Smith to serve as State’s first-ever special representative for racial equity and justice. Cormier Smith, he wrote in a statement, “will lead our efforts to protect and advance the human rights of people belonging to marginalized racial and ethnic communities and combat systemic racism, discrimination, and xenophobia around the world.”

Blinken announced the position’s creation in April, as part of the State Department’s effort to implement an executive order signed by President Biden on his first day in office. That order required every government department to come up with an “equity action plan.”

Although the role’s responsibilities are vaguely defined, the State Department did relay some information about its scope to Congress last week. Among other things, the special representative’s mandate spans work to counter disinformation, engage with foreign officials on racial justice, and promote diversity within the State Department bureaucracy, as National Review reported.

White House Goes All In on Trans Agenda By Michael Brendan Dougherty

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/white-house-gnosticism/

Now we wait and watch the trans phenomenon end in overflowing rivers of tears.

Conservatives are pre-canceled in the debate about transgenderism. I get the sense that we’re not even participating in it directly at all. All the journalism and essays by Madeleine Kearns, Douglas Murray, or Abigail Shrier are ignored by our woke opponents. They are used only to inform the permitted antagonists: centrist “Nones” such as Bill Maher and Bari Weiss, or TERFs like Lierre Keith or J. K. Rowling, who take some, but not all, of our arguments into the arena.

The recent opening of real debate in formerly closed spaces — whether in Irish media or the news section of the New York Times — suggests that many liberals feel uneasy about the woke orthodoxy on gender identity and at least want to air a debate before the medical-malpractice lawsuits start rolling in.

We have grown used to the idea that ideologues want to tell the public that “gender is fluid.” But now the White House is proclaiming that it only flows one way. Away from biological sex and toward anything else, with the assistance of hormone therapy and surgery.

There is no debate that there is currently a social explosion of young people experimenting with gender identities. Children are responding, in a rash of social contagion, to their peers coming out with these new identities and to the all-but-open solicitation of this behavior among schoolteachers, psychologists, and especially digital peer groups.

Good News! Harris to Head New Biden Disinformation Task Force By Robert Spencer

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/06/16/good-news-harris-to-head-new-biden-disinformation-task-force-n1605895

The bad news is that the Biden administration’s notorious Disinformation Governance Board, a flagrantly unconstitutional effort to restrict the freedom of speech that was “paused” in May after an avalanche of criticism, is back (although its Orwellian name is still on ice). The good news is that heading up Biden’s handlers’ new foray into authoritarianism is none other than Vice President Kamala Harris. This is good news because Harris has handled the previous jobs she has been given with spectacular ineptitude. If she stays true to form this time, she may end up actually strengthening speech protections, rather than destroying them as she has been tasked to do.

The new incarnation of the Disinformation Governance Board, announced Thursday, will, according to the New York Post, be focused on “developing programs and policies” that will protect “political figures” from “disinformation,” “abuse” and “harassment.” This is already treading dangerous ground in terms of the First Amendment, as “abuse” and “harassment,” to say nothing of “disinformation,” are subjective terms. What is to prevent the person who is charged with judging what constitutes them — Kamala Harris, evidently — from considering sharp criticism, or even any criticism at all, no matter how accurate or justified, to be abuse or harassment?

The ‘White Nationalists’ Arrested At The Idaho Pride Event Were The Least Armed And Dangerous People That Day By: Eddie Scarry

https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/16/the-white-nationalists-arrested-at-the-idaho-pride-event-were-the-least-armed-and-dangerous-people-that-day/

There were no guns nor ammunition, but they did have some kind of document spelling out a plan to march in a line through a downtown park and agitate passersby.

By the way Chief Lee White of the Coeur d’Alene Police Department is acting, you’d swear he just prevented a mass shooting in a preschool using only psychic abilities and a roll of tape.

But that’s not what White and his force did. Instead, on Saturday they arrested 31 guys who were found to be in possession of nothing other than a single smoke bomb and a plan to make noise throughout the city.

Each individual was charged with one misdemeanor, “conspiracy to commit riot,” based on the fact that the men involved were dressed in distinguished uniforms of khaki pants and blue t-shirts, plus some of them had shin guards and shields. There were no guns nor ammunition, but they did have some kind of document spelling out a plan to march in a line through a downtown park and agitate passersby.

The intent was to align in “a column forming on the outside of the park, proceeding inward, until barriers to approach are met,” according to The New York Times, and “once an appropriate amount of confrontational dynamic has been established the column will disengage and head to Sherman [Ave.].” In other words: Show up, irritate pedestrians, and then leave.

Why Is Merrick Garland Smiling? The unprecedented collaboration between the Justice Department and Congress to target political foes of the regime endangers the rights of hundreds of Trump-supporting Americans.  By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/16/why-is-merrick-garland-smiling/

Attorney General Merrick Garland, the media insists, is handling the unprecedented criminal investigation into the events of January 6 with a calm, objective professionalism and is above reproach. The former federal prosecutor who sat on the D.C. appellate court for 25 years is somehow beyond the rising temperatures in Washington’s political pressure cooker and remains nonplussed by the January 6 drama produced on an hourly basis on Capitol Hill. 

To some degree, the media is correct about the attorney general’s detachment. Garland is to the Justice Department what Joe Biden is to the White House—a lost old man installed in office to give a grandfatherly-like disguise to the malicious puppet masters in control of his teleprompter. In Garland’s case, as the New York Times recently confirmed and American Greatness has reported for months, the real authority lies in the vengeful hands of Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, a longtime Obama loyalist.

But the carefully crafted hagiography portraying Garland as independent of the partisan machinations of U.S. Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and company came crumbling down this week. 

In response to a question from CNN correspondent Evan Perez—who helped launch the Trump-Russia collusion hoax narrative—Garland made clear the Justice Department is paying close attention to the January 6 committee’s made-for-TV performances. “I am watching and I will be watching all the hearings although I may not be able to watch all of it live but I’ll be sure, I’ll be watching all of it. And I can assure that the January 6 prosecutors are watching all the hearings as well,” Garland said with a smile.

Now, had the committee abided by its originating legislation and allowed even a hint of fair play, Garland’s comments might be considered noncontroversial. That, however, is not the case—and recent moves by Garland’s Justice Department indicate the agency is working closely with House Democrats to add a legal imprimatur to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) latest anti-Trump witch hunt.