RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/joe-biden-and-the-circular-firing-squad/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

The word is definitely out that the president’s stock is going to zero — and it’s time to get out while you still can.

The giant sucking sound you’re hearing is the panicked divestment of elected Democratic politicians, progressive activists, and the mainstream media from the Biden administration. The word is definitely out that the president’s stock is going to zero — and it’s time to get out while you still can.

Two weeks ago, in a foreboding sign for the White House, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — with a finger to the political winds blowing on Instagram — announced that she wasn’t ready to support Biden in 2024. Then came California governor Gavin Newsom, asking “Where’s my party?” as Republicans and conservatives continue to score political wins. Newsom’s question sparked 2024 speculation for him, and then he stoked the flames even higher by buying ad time in Florida, demonstrating that he could identify and take on the real Republican threat, who is sitting behind a desk in Tallahassee: DeSantis.

After the Fourth of July weekend, we are now getting the hilarious reports — usually ones that a lame-duck president faces late in his second term. The first six sentences of Edward-Isaac Dovere’s dispatch for CNN sum it up:

Debra Messing was fed up. The former “Will & Grace” star was among dozens of celebrity Democratic supporters and activists who joined a call with White House aides last Monday to discuss the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/07/05/sec_climate_disclosure_rule_a_duck_that_quacks_840873.html

In his recent memoir, former attorney general William Barr recounts how the Trump administration lost its attempt to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census. After losing in the Supreme Court, Barr briefed President Trump on what had gone wrong. “If people were straightforward from the beginning, it could have gotten done,” Barr explained. “The trouble is the administration was too cute by half, and [Chief Justice John] Roberts threw the penalty flag.” The Supreme Court had thrown out the citizenship question because the Commerce department’s declared rationale for it was pretextual—that is to say, it was not the real reason that the Trump administration wanted a citizenship question in the census.

Much comment on the controversial climate disclosure rule proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has centered on whether the SEC has the necessary legal authority. By the end of the comment period on June 17, the SEC had received more than 3,400 letters, significantly more than usual. Linked to legal arguments on whether the SEC has an adequate statutory—or, indeed, constitutional—basis for its climate proposal is the question of pretextuality: Is the SEC being genuine in the stated justification for its sweeping climate disclosure rules? Should the SEC harbor doubts about its legal standing to compel climate disclosures—notably, greenhouse gas emissions data—from listed companies, it increases the likelihood that it will advance a public justification for the proposed rules that differs from its real one so that it better fits within its statutory authority.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/05/how-much-fossil-fuel-is-left/

Fossil fuel powers the economic engine of civilization. With a minor disruption in the supply of fossil fuel, crops wither, and supply chains crash. With a major disruption, a humanitarian apocalypse could engulf the world. Events of the past few months have made this clear. Without energy, civilization dies, and in 2020 fossil fuels continued to provide more than 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide.

This basic fact, that maintaining a reliable supply of affordable fossil fuel is a nonnegotiable condition for the survival of civilization, currently eludes far too many American politicians, including Joe Biden. Observes energy expert and two-time candidate for governor of California Michael Shellenberger: “One month ago, the Biden administration killed a one-million-acre oil and gas lease sale in Alaska, and seven days ago killed new on-shore oil and gas leases in the continental U.S. In fact, at this very moment, the Biden administration is considering a total ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling.”

Another basic fact, easily confirmed by consulting the 2021 edition of the BP Statistical Review of Global Energy, is that if every person living on Earth were to consume half as much energy per year as the average American currently consumes, global energy production would need to nearly double. Instead of producing 547 exajoules (the mega unit of energy currently favored by economists) per year, energy producers worldwide would need to come up with just over 1,000 exajoules. How exactly will “renewables,” currently delivering 32 exajoules per year, or six percent of global energy, expand by a factor of 30 to deliver 1,000 exajoules?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/revolution-against-administrative-state-daniel-greenfield/

Four days before Independence Day, the Supreme Court fired its own shot at the modern tyranny that has dismantled the Constitution and runs our lives to a degree King George III could never have imagined and that the Founding Fathers would never have tolerated.

The shot fired at the administrative state was almost missed in the fury over the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling. While the amateur liberals who live on ActBlue, wield blue checkmarks on Twitter and inhabit blue states raved over the fall of Roe v. Wade, the professionals of Washington D.C. were much more worried about another Supreme Court decision.

“Supreme Court climate case might end regulation,” E&E News, a Politico green energy site, warned. That may be excessively pessimistic for big government proponents or optimistic for conservatives, but there’s no question that big government has suffered a serious shock.

West Virginia v. EPA wasn’t just a victory for the coal miners of Appalachia, it sent shudders through the vast infrastructure of the D.C. administrative state. Dobbs v. Jackson was a cultural blow to a post-everything feminism that discarded women, but retained abortion, that felt like an earthquake, but changed surprisingly little, while West Virginia v. EPA is the real revolution.

https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/07/liz-cheneys-j6-committee-show-trial-theatrics-are-further-exposed-after-concerning-messages-source-is-revealed/

The January 6th hearings are unquestionably carefully orchestrated show trials designed to try and make self-important committee members look like they are “doing something!” to get to the bottom of the Capitol riot incident, who was allegedly behind it all, etc.

Unfortunately for the Democrat/NeverTrump “Republican” committee members, not only have they failed to produce any evidence that former President Trump intended to incite supporters to get them to breach the Capitol and/or was involved in some vast alleged conspiracy to subvert the democratic process or whatever, but their TV ratings have been abysmal, which is further confirmation that their efforts to “get Trump” are not the midterm election year motivator they’d intended them to be.

Just this week, we saw “star witness” Cassidy Hutchinson’s “bombshell” hearsay testimony about how Trump allegedly tried to assault a Secret Service agent in order to take over “the Beast” (or SUV) so he could join the protesters fall apart when the Secret Service told reporters that the two agents at the center of this fantastical tale were willing to testify under oath that what Hutchinson was told happened never happened, but that curiously they had not been called upon to do so this week by the committee for reasons that should be obvious to anyone.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/chris-queen/2022/07/05/u-s-oil-gas-association-savagely-burns-biden-for-his-bring-down-gas-prices-tweet-n1610448

The official presidential Twitter account for the Biden administration sent out a strongly worded tweet on Saturday urging oil and gas companies to lower the price that Americans are paying for gasoline — as if it’s as simple as changing the numbers on the sign at gas stations.

Joe Biden and his team of incompetents want the oil and gas industry to decrease prices to “reflect the cost [they’re] paying for the product” — in other words, to not make any money — in order to save the Democrats from a bloodbath in November.

People on Twitter with smarter economic minds clapped back at Biden with some brutality. My PJM colleague Rick Moran pointed out some of the most prominent examples of pushback on Sunday, including a notable tweet from Jeff Bezos.

Rick also gave the White House a reality slap of his own when he wrote, “Biden apparently doesn’t know that gas station owners are mostly independent small businesses whose razor-thin profit margins make it impossible to willy-nilly lower prices at the pump just because the president orders them to.”

But when an entire industry issues a brutal, clever response to an ignorant tweet from the president, it’s a pretty rough burn.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-exoneration-hustle

The headline is becoming more common: “Innocent Man Freed After Decades in Jail for Murder!” As a matter of statistical probabilities, it must be true that some innocent defendants are convicted. But experienced law enforcement officials are growing concerned that progressive prosecutors are freeing guilty murderers in their rush to enforce their own politics of decarceration and equity. A close look at how this exoneration hustle works is worth reviewing because the pattern becomes clear.

The homicide facts usually look something like the following. Two drug crews in Big City, USA are having a territorial dispute about who controls a certain street corner. Sam “Bam” Suber sees rival drug crew member Mark “Shark” Trowbridge dealing drugs on the disputed corner. Bam drives up in a car and shoots Shark, killing him. The murder is witnessed by a drug addict, a sex worker, and another member of Shark’s crew. Bam borrowed the car from his cousin and has been seen with a 9 mm handgun by multiple other individuals on the criminal fringe. Because Bam simply drove up, shot Shark, and drove off, police have not recovered the gun, and they don’t have DNA or fingerprints. At trial, the drug addict and sex worker identify Bam as the shooter, with both of them facing unrelated criminal charges for drug possession and prostitution. Shark’s buddy, facing a ten-year mandatory sentence in an unrelated drug case, also identifies Bam as the shooter. Various witnesses link Bam to the car and the gun. Bam is convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. This scenario describes a typical drug-related murder conviction in the United States.

Flash forward 20 years. Bam loses every direct appeal of his conviction. He is now into collateral appeals in federal court, the endless habeas proceedings of a convicted murderer serving life. But suddenly, a progressive prosecutor is elected in Bam’s hometown. This prosecutor is a former criminal-defense lawyer who believes that no one should do more than ten years in prison and that all eye-witness identifications are flawed. How does this progressive prosecutor go about exonerating Bam, burnishing her progressive credentials?

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-presidency-looks-out-control-worse

The Fourth of July weekend began with #ImpeachJoeBiden trending on Twitter. There appeared to be no illegal act cited as a basis for impeachment; instead, people were reacting to this tweet: “Former Senior Obama advisor David Axelrod to Jake Tapper of CNN: Things in the country are ‘out of control’ and Biden is ‘not in command.’”

Americans are furious, despondent, and fed up with President Joe Biden. They agree with David Axelrod; the country has gone off the rails and the president seems utterly incapable of fixing what’s wrong.

That’s not to say Biden isn’t making history. The president is causing a series of firsts, including some of the worst presidential approval ratings ever, some of the worst consumer sentiment, some of the worst bond market in modern times, and the worst-ever small business pessimism about the future.

And that was just in the first half of 2022. Can it get even worse?

Yes, unfortunately, it can. The economy is slumping, COVID confusion reigns, high energy prices are raising the cost of everything, air travel is a disaster, the chaos at the border is about to escalate and crime is surging. And, we remain disastrously low on baby formula.

All this at a time when even Democrats have decided President Biden can’t cut it.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/oil-us-reserves-head-overseas-gasoline-prices-stay-high-2022-07-05/

HOUSTON, July 5 (Reuters) – More than 5 million barrels of oil that were part of a historic U.S. emergency oil reserves release aimed at lowering domestic fuel prices were exported to Europe and Asia last month, according to data and sources, even as U.S. gasoline and diesel prices touched record highs.

The export of crude and fuel is blunting the impact of the moves by U.S. President Joe Biden designed to lower record pump prices. Biden on Saturday renewed a call for gasoline suppliers to cut their prices, drawing criticism from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

About 1 million barrels per day is being released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) through October. The flow is draining the SPR, which last month fell to the lowest since 1986. U.S. crude futures are above $105 per barrel and gasoline and diesel prices above $5 a gallon in one-fifth of the nation. U.S. officials have said oil prices could be higher if the SPR had not been tapped.

The fourth-largest U.S. oil refiner, Phillips 66 (PSX.N), shipped about 470,000 barrels of sour crude from the Big Hill SPR storage site in Texas to Trieste, Italy, according to U.S. Customs data. Trieste is home to a pipeline that sends oil to refineries in central Europe.

Yesterday in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, a rooftop gunman opened fire on the July 4 parade, killing at least six innocent people and wounding many others. As always in such cases, the first reaction on social media was not sympathy for the victims but immediate attempts by both left and right to blame the other side for inspiring a lunatic’s rampage. Within minutes each side was combing Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo and all the rest for ‘evidence’ to make their cases.

The suspect, identified as 22-year-old Robert ‘Bobby’ Crimo, is the son of a Highland Park small-business owner who recently contested the suburb’s mayoralty. Therefore, in the grand tradition of social media speculation, he must be a Donald Trump supporter because an entrepreneurial dad could only ever sire a fascist. As so many have noted, intelligence has never been a requirement for floating one’s insights in the Twitter sewer.

Right-leaning social media types were no less quick to identify a murderous leftist, observing that suspect Cimo’s facial and neck tattoos would not be out of place at an Antifa riot.

It will be for the courts to decide which motivation, if any, was at work in Highland Park, but a couple of recent social media post, though not directly related to the shooter, might help to explain the  mindset of those who treat a nation’s birthday celebration as an obscenity. One such example is atop this column, a tweet from Denver’s Democratic Socialists inviting one and all to come burn Ol’ Glory.

What credence, you might say, can be placed in the ratbaggery of a political party even further to the left than the most wild-eyed Democrats? As the tweeted invitation below attests, a faction in the ‘mainstream’ party of Biden, Schumer and Pelosi shares the same sentiment.

— roger franklin