Liz Peek: As recession looms, who will Biden blame?

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3939238-as-recession-looms-who-will-biden-blame/

It’s the economy, stupid.

Those famous words from Democratic strategist James Carville must be haunting President Biden’s White House as the economy begins to slow — and just as the 2024 election moves into view.

Most recently, the job market appears to be faltering, with March gains pegged at 236,000, way down from February’s 311,000 and the 334,000 recorded on average over the past six months.

This is challenging for Biden, who hopes to run for reelection and has relied on solid employment gains to prove that his “economic plan is working.” It’s been a tough sell, seeing that inflation has caused real wages to decline for two years in a row; writing last fall, the Dallas Fed noted that the hit from inflation was “the most severe faced by employed workers over the past 25 years.”

Biden’s approval ratings on the economy, according to Real Clear Politics’ average of polls, is a disastrous 37 percent.

Of course, the downturn in growth – we are not yet in recession – has been engineered by and will be welcomed by the Federal Reserve, which slammed on the brakes a year ago as inflation soared to 40-year highs. Having dithered for more than a year as price increases gained steam, Chair Jerome Powell then jacked up rates at a historically aggressive pace and has also been reducing the size of the Fed balance sheet.

‘A New World Order’? The Iran-Russia-China Axis During the Biden Administration by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19562/new-world-order-iran-russia-china

The Biden Administration has created a vacuum of leadership on the global stage.

If the US further pulls out of Asia, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, Ukraine, Latin America — anywhere — the vacuum created will surely be filled by the new axis of China-Russia-Iran. A US pull-out is, most probably, just what they are hoping and waiting for.

If Putin sees any gains in Ukraine, China will try to seize Taiwan.

“We’re sitting still, and the Chinese, the Russians, Iran, North Korea, and several others, are moving to shore up their relations and threaten us in a lot of different places… It’s an indication that the Saudis and others are [also] trying to hedge their bets with China and Russia, because they don’t think the United States has the resolve and the fortitude necessary to do what they need to do to protect the world against Iran and its intentions.” — Former US National Security Advisor John R. Bolton, yahoo.com, March 12, 2023.

“The Chinese have a strategy they’ve been following… We kind of wander around from day to day.” — John R. Bolton, yahoo.com, March 12, 2023.

Thanks to the lack of leadership and the vacuum that the Biden administration has created — and appears continuing to create — on the global stage, the new axis of Iran-China-Russia has been shaped with Beijing, Moscow and the ruling mullahs — rather than the brutalized people of Iran. The Axis is seizing leadership of the new world order, or — if the world’s communists manage to defeat the world’s democrats, as they seem tenaciously determined to do — it will be, more accurately, the new world disorder.

As Winston Churchill famously pointed out, “I never worry about action, but only about inaction”. The Biden administration’s inaction has led to the creation of a new axis of tyrannies: Russia, China and Iran, with North Korea not far behind. As the Tehran Times, which has close ties to Iran’s foreign ministry, wrote: “[T]oday we are witnessing the formation of a new world order….”

Au revoir, France! France now has more practicing Muslims than Catholics. Giulio Meotti

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/369747

Sonia Backès, French secretary of state for citizenship, has just said that “political Islam wants to bring the Republic to its knees”. If only it were the République…
The French National Institute of Statistics has just provided us with numbers that tell of an unprecedented change of civilization in the history of a country that is the cradle of European culture. It is truly historic: there are more practicing Muslims than practicing Catholics between the ages of 18 and 59 in France. Reading the latest report from Insee, the French Statistical Institute, helps us understand the change of civilization we are experiencing in Europe.

One and a half million of Catholics pray and 800,000 go to church. Two million Muslims pray and 726,000 go to the mosque. There has already been an Islamic overtaking of Catholicism. And without considering the under 18s, where Muslims outclass Christians with Bulgarian percentages.

Le Monde reports that secularization is proceeding quickly only for Catholics. Muslim immigrants are not becoming “woke”. The postmodernist virus has not corroded their minds. 91 percent of Muslims educated as Muslims remain so. They remain religious, even after two generations. The use of the veil for women is also increasing: from 18 to 29 percent of all women in France in just ten years.

Three years ago, Muslims in France were 7 percent. Today they are 10 percent. Pierre Brochand, former director of the French internal secret service, has just said that “the critical point will be when Muslim immigrants cross the 50 percent threshold”. France is already teetering on Islam at 10 percent (in most big cities it’s 20 to 30 percent).

New Israel Fund reveals string of donations to anti-reform protest groups By David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/new-israel-fund-reveals-string-of-donations-to-anti-reform-protest-groups/

The U.S.-based New Israel Fund, which provides financial support to progressive and anti-Israel groups, on Monday posted to its Hebrew website a list of its donations to groups involved in the protests against judicial reform.

Demonstrations, sometimes turning violent, have roiled Israel for the past three months and, at least temporarily, derailed the government’s legislative plans.

The total amount spent, spread across 26 groups, comes to about 2 million shekels, or $660,000. Indeed, NIF money helped to ignite the protests, funding the first major demonstration on Jan. 7 in Tel Aviv.

“They’re not exaggerating their role,” Gadi Taub, a senior lecturer at the Federmann School of Public Policy at Hebrew University, told JNS. “They’re taking pride because they think they might have succeeded in stopping the reform. And they might have.”

Taub added, however, that the protesters (whose numbers he said the left has in any case exaggerated) were only indirectly responsible for the government’s decision to impose its legislative freeze. The direct cause was “a near mutiny in the army.”

The Trump Trials: Changing the Subject by Pete Hoekstra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19570/trump-trials

Red lights have to be flashing for the current administration and its supporters: “danger ahead.”

Inflation continues threatening to turn into a crushing recession. Iran is reportedly days away from a nuclear-weapons breakout. A Chinese spy balloon just spent a week doing figure-eights over America’s most sensitive nuclear sights while transmitting information back to Beijing in real time. Communist Chinese President Xi Jinping is telling his people to prepare for war. And the House Oversight Committee keeps finding more bank evidence that the Biden family appears compromised by foreign payments.

What do the current administration and its supporters do, then? Revert to the tried-and-true playbook of the Trump era and launch the latest “Trump trial” to distract from the administration’s challenges. The pattern has been consistent – create a false narrative that is more favorable to themselves and more problematic for whoever is challenging them.

After seeing multiple high-level Democrat operatives from candidate Hillary Clinton herself approving a disinformation operation against then-candidate Trump, her campaign and the DNC reportedly financing the Steele dossier, DNI James Clapper reportedly leaking info on the Steel dossier to the media, Adam Schiff misleading his colleagues about information leading to the first Trump impeachment, and 51 former intelligence officials signing a bogus letter about the Hunter Biden laptop, there should be little surprise that New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg — whose campaign was indirectly supported by a million dollars from George Soros while Bragg “promised to put Trump behind bars” — decided to move forward with what ended up a totally fabricated, politically-motivated indictment of Trump. It did not even fulfill the constitutional requirement for Trump “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation” – meaning: Bragg did not even name the supposed federal crime.

Those now in charge will seemingly do almost anything to make the narrative leading up to the election once again about allegations against Trump instead of the geopolitical and economic shortcomings of Biden’s policies. If a presidential candidate, a Director of National Intelligence, and a Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee will engage in hyper-partisan political activities under the guise of legitimate government activities, why should we be surprised that a local prosecutor might do the same thing?

The bottom line is that every Republican potential candidate will have to address the “Trump issue,” probably multiple times during the upcoming weeks and months, rather than discussing their solutions and proposals to address the economic and national security concerns gripping Americans today. For the current administration, that is “mission accomplished.”

What’s a politician to do? Going into a presidential election year, the incumbent president looks to be facing a difficult reelection campaign. Persistently high inflation numbers remain a problem. Energy prices are still up. America’s southern border is being overrun with illegal border-crossers and fentanyl. Major bank failures have raised the specter of a banking crisis. There are multiple House of Representatives investigations covering Biden family finances, the weaponization of government agencies, China, and the origins of COVID. For the current administration and its supporters, the answer is as easy as it is familiar: change the subject to Donald Trump. It has been an oppositional go-to foil since Trump dared step onto the political stage in 2016.

National Institute of Standards and Technology Forces Race and Gender Speech Codes on Scientists By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/06/national-institute-of-standards-and-technology-forces-race-and-gender-speech-codes-on-scientists/

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a federal agency for the study of science and technology, is now enforcing race- and gender-based speech codes on its scientists, having made a top priority out of the language-policing efforts.

As reported by Just The News, the guidance documents issued by NIST orders its federal employees to not use words such as “blacklist” or “whitelist,” allegedly due to these words carrying racial connotations. The document also forbids employees from “using terms that assign a gender to inanimate objects, such as male/female connectors.”

Other directives from the document include orders to “avoid terms such as master/slave that perpetuate negative stereotypes or unequal power relationships,” and “avoid descriptive terms that are condescending or reductive in favor of language that the groups being described would prefer.”

The guidance was largely implemented on the advice of Steven Lipner, chair of the Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board. Lipner sent a letter to NIST back in 2020 specifically demanding that the agency ban the use of the words “blacklist” and “whitelist,” as well as banning the use of the words “slave” and “master.”

“Many technology and security standards contain racially insensitive language that is both offensive to many of our colleagues and is also, in many respects, ambiguous – technically and culturally,” Lipner said in his letter. “Examples of such language include using the terms blacklist and whitelist instead of block-list and allow-list and using the terms master and slave.”

Jennifer Huergo, a spokeswoman for the NIST, defended the guidance by claiming that it “was created primarily for the benefit of NIST staff experts who participate in the development of documentary standards as expert collaborators and leaders.”

The Gathering Storm Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s flop was merely the unsatisfying appetizer for the feast on Donald Trump that is about to come. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/06/the-gathering-storm/

The first grand jury indictment against Donald Trump, like so many highly-anticipated gotcha moments involving the former president, landed with a thud this week.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s 34-count bill of goods failed to impress legal and political observers across the spectrum. Even Ruth Marcus, associate editor for the Washington Post, admitted the legal basis for the charges is “unnervingly flimsy at worst.”

News coverage of Bragg’s faceplant is quickly disappearing from the front pages as all desperate eyes now turn to Jack Smith, the mysterious figure appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland last year ostensibly to take over the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump’s culpability for January 6 and alleged mishandling of classified documents. As I explained here, Smith is special counsel in name only; the team of investigators and prosecutors who initiated the first set of inquiries simply changed letterhead.

Given the targets of Smith’s recent subpoenas, we can surmise there is nothing independent or impartial about his behind-the-scenes work. In rapid succession, Smith has successfully sought testimony from Trump’s inner circle, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows and White House lawyer Evan Corcoran. 

For the first time in history, a vice president will testify before a grand jury considering evidence of crimes committed by his former boss. Mike Pence, after winning partial immunity, reportedly will answer questions about his exchanges with Trump in the weeks leading up to the protest at the Capitol. Oddly, Pence will not be compelled to discuss what he did on January 6—a dubious protection considering his key presence throughout the day and into the next morning.

Tornadoes, Climate Change, and the Media By Anthony Watts

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/04/tornadoes_climate_change_and_the_media.html

After the recent devasting tornadoes in the Midwest and South, some media outlets scrambled to try to link the weather events to climate change, when in fact there is no hard data to support this. In fact, tornado data refute claims that tornadoes are increasing in number, range, or severity. However, Salon, Axios, and the Washington Post among others ran articles suggesting climate change is expanding the length of tornado season and area over which tornadoes commonly form, as well as adding ingredients to the atmosphere to make more and bigger tornadoes.

The Salon article, “How climate change made the Mississippi tornadoes more likely,” (actually a reprint from Grist) claimed, “That added ingredient of more heat and moisture is going to be the big thing that will influence what happens and we can expect potentially worse tornado outbreaks,” said William Gallus, a professor of meteorology at Iowa State University.  

Axios piled on with “What we know about how climate change affects tornado outbreaks,” which claims, “We also have expectations that the number of severe thunderstorms (hail, wind, tornado) will probably increase in the U.S.”

The Washington Post article, “Here’s what we know about how climate change is influencing tornadoes,” asserts, “Average global temperatures have risen more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s, and the impact is clear: Warmer air provides more energy for storms to develop and intensify, and holds more moisture, which can also fuel storms. Warm, moist air is a key ingredient for developing severe tornadic storms.”

These claims of increased storms due to more heat and moisture are misleading at best and demonstrate a clear lack of understanding of how weather fronts collide to form tornadoes. As Climate at a Glance: Tornadoes points out: “Tornadoes typically form when very cold, dry air clashes with warm, humid air. Climate change warms the Arctic more than the tropics and subtropics, resulting in less of a clash between cold Arctic air masses and warm Gulf of Mexico air masses. As a result, fewer and less violent tornadoes are occurring today than in previous periods, despite media claims that tornadoes are getting more frequent, stronger, or both.”

A Nation Divided and a World in Turmoil Maybe ignorance really is bliss? by Larry Elder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-nation-divided-and-a-world-in-turmoil/

A happy, upbeat friend does not watch television news, whether national or local, does not read a newspaper and avoids discussing politics, religion or even sports. Self-employed, he found out about something called the coronavirus while driving to work the day the California lockdown mandate began. That morning he encountered no traffic on the normally busy streets of Los Angeles and said, “What’s going on?!” It seems unthinkable that someone in his mid-to-late 30s could erect news blinders, especially when he, like most everyone else, uses a smartphone for personal and business matters. He even maintains a Facebook page to keep up with friends and family.

He does not know that since Joe Biden became president, five million illegal aliens entered the U.S. from over 100 foreign countries, their whereabouts now mostly unknown. Border patrol arrested dozens of border crossers on the terror watch list, with no telling how many entered undetected.

He does not know that America faces a crisis of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid more potent than heroin by as much as a factor of 50, and morphine by as much as a factor of 100, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. China supplies the precursor chemicals and Mexican cartels process, manufacture and bring the fentanyl into the United States. At 64,000 deaths among those aged 18 to 49 in 2021, fentanyl killed more than those who died from COVID-19, cancer and car accidents combined.

He knows nothing about a Donald Trump-hating Manhattan district attorney who might arrest and indict the former president under a legal theory that even The New York Times called “untested.” He does not know about the “weaponization” and collusion of the DOJ and Big Tech social media platforms to attack conservatives, stifle dissent about vaccine and mask mandates and suppress the cost-benefit debate about COVID-19 lockdowns. Among other things, the student learning loss suffered due to virtual versus in-school learning.

Murder Manifesto Mystery Hale planned the attack for months, but her “manifesto,” in the hands of the FBI, has yet to be released. by Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/murder-manifesto-mystery/

On Monday, March 27, as the April 1 “Trans Day of Vengeance” approached, Audrey Hale, a woman who thinks she’s a man, shot open a locked door and entered the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.

In 14 minutes, Hale fired 152 rounds from an AR-15–style rifle and 9mm Kel-Tec SUB2000. Hale shot dead Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, Mike Hill, 61, William Kinney, 9, Katherine Koonce, 60, Cynthia Peak, 61, and Hallie Scruggs. That nine-year-old was the daughter of Chad Scruggs, senior pastor at the Covenant Presbyterian Church, on the same site as the school.

With six people dead, including three children, Hale’s attack qualifies as a mass murder, and in any murder case, the question of motive is paramount. Hale left clues in a manifesto, but trans-friendly activists sought to suppress its release. For example, Charles Moran, of Log Cabin Republicans, advocates for equal rights for LGBTQ+ Americans, warned of “serious consequences” if the manifesto was released to the public.

Enter Nashville city councilman Robert Swope, who worked as Tennessee state director for Donald Trump in 2016 and now heads the city council’s Public Safety, Beer and Regulated Beverages Committee. Swope told the New York Post that the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit is working “in tandem” with the Metro Nashville Police Department to complete “a very in-depth analysis of certain aspects of the shooter’s life.”

According to the councilman, “the manifesto is going to be released. It’s just a matter of when. There are some incredibly brilliant psychological minds and psychological analysts combing through her entire life.” While revelations await, one fact is perfectly clear.

The FBI, supposed on guard 24/7 against domestic terrorism and violent extremism, failed to prevent Audrey Hale’s attack. Relatives of the victims have reason to wonder what the FBI knew and when they knew it.