Monthly Archives: March 2022

Is This Even Legal?

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Yesterday Trending Politics reported that the U.S. government paid media outlets to convince Americans to be pro-vaccine. I suppose this is no different than other public health campaigns, but the fact that this campaign was being waged while any information on negative effects of vaccines was being censored seems a little unfair. Why was the government pushing a vaccine that had not been in existence long enough to go through a rigorous testing protocol?

The article notes:

The government documents describing the media relations program were reported by The Blaze in an “exclusive.”

“In response to a FOIA request filed by TheBlaze, HHS revealed that it purchased advertising from major news networks including ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as cable TV news stations Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, legacy media publications including the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, digital media companies like BuzzFeed News and Newsmax, and hundreds of local newspapers and TV stations,” The Blaze’s story notes. “These outlets were collectively responsible for publishing countless articles and video segments regarding the vaccine that were nearly uniformly positive about the vaccine in terms of both its efficacy and safety.”

“Hundreds of news organizations were paid by the federal government to advertise for the vaccines as part of a ‘comprehensive media campaign,’” according to documents TheBlaze obtained from the Department of Health and Human Services. “The Biden administration purchased ads on TV, radio, in print, and on social media to build vaccine confidence, timing this effort with the increasing availability of the vaccines. The government also relied on earned media featuring “influencers” from ‘communities hit hard by COVID-19’ and ‘experts’ like White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and other academics to be interviewed and promote vaccination in the news.”

When you know that our media can be bought, does it change your opinion about what to believe?

While We Were All Watching Ukraine…

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On Friday, The New York Post posted the following headline:

Biden on verge of making worst deal ever with Iran

The article reminds us of some recent history regarding Iran and nuclear weapons:

The Obama White House claimed the Iran deal guaranteed the most intrusive inspections the world had ever known, but only Israel’s Mossad found the evidence Iran was cheating — a secret nuclear weapons archive that the mullahs kept hidden before, during and after negotiating the Iran deal. That archive led inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, to at least four previously unknown sites inside Iran. At three of them, the inspectors found traces of uranium.

…Russia has been a leading opponent of the IAEA’s probe in Iran for years. Since Moscow regularly breaks its own international treaty obligations — whether in the use of chemical weapons or the war crimes we see today in Ukraine — Russian diplomats work overtime to shield rogue nations like Iran and Syria from accountability.

The new deal takes Moscow’s side — flouting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, lifting sanctions and legitimizing Iran’s nuclear program without first demanding a full accounting of previous and current violations. Put simply, it is an agreement knowingly built on deceit that will encourage other authoritarian regimes to violate their international commitments.

Another important change since 2015: We know so much more about the ways in which key Iranian banks and companies finance terrorism. The Obama administration told Congress that nothing in the Iran deal precluded America from imposing terrorism sanctions on Iran. Congress, on a bipartisan basis, took that promise to heart and directed the Trump administration to impose sanctions on affiliates of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Today, the Central Bank of Iran, the National Iranian Oil Company and hundreds more entities are subject to US terrorism sanctions — not nuclear sanctions — due to indisputable evidence showing their involvement in financing terrorism. To lift sanctions on these banks and firms without any indication of behavioral change will be unprecedented. The deal will directly subsidize the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations — a win for another Russian client state, Syria, as well.

Hopefully this treaty will never get past the Senate, but that doesn’t mean the Biden administration won’t abide by it anyway. We currently have a lawless administration and an impossibility of impeachment due to a Democrat congress and a downright scary line of succcession–Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Grassley, Antony J. Blinken, etc.

Pray for the mid-terms and hope they won’t be too late.

Ignoring The Solution To High Energy Prices

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On February 28th, BizPacReview posted an article illustrating the Biden administration’s plan to deal with the current high energy prices.

The article reports:

White House press secretary Jen Psaki called for furthering green energy initiatives in the face of foreign oil dependence that could see Americans burdened by $150/barrel prices.

In an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Psaki dismissed calls for President Biden to restart the Keystone XL oil pipeline and instead harkened back to the executive order that canceled the project which stated, the U.S. “must prioritize the development of a clean energy economy.”

“What this actually justifies in President Biden’s view is the fact that we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, on oil in general,” Psaki claimed, “and we need to look at other ways of having energy in our country and others.

In 1948, Winston Churchill made a speech to the House of Commons in which he said, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” The actual quote is “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana-1905). Regardless of the origin or the wording, the concept is valid. Unfortunately we have an administration in Washington that is ignoring those words.

In September 2014, I posted an article about Spain’s attempt to convert from fossil fuel to green energy. I quoted a Daily Caller article detailing the results:

The IER study also notes that Spain’s green agenda was not able to keep its carbon footprint from rising. Between 1994 and 2011, Spain’s carbon dioxide emissions grew 34.5 percent, despite the country’s green push which began in the 1990s.

“While the renewable policies themselves were likely not the cause of the emissions increase, the upward trend does prove that renewable energy policies were insufficient to reduce CO2 emissions over a roughly twenty-year period,” according to IER.

“is anything but the model for American energy policy,” reads the IER study. “The country’s expensive feed-in tariff system, subsidies, and renewable energy quotas have plunged a sizable portion of Spaniards into fuel poverty, raised electricity bills, all while having almost no meaningful impact on curtailing carbon dioxide emissions.”

The article at BizPacReview states:

Contrary to Psaki, Bartiromo pointed out, “The only move for the United States at this point to protect itself is to become energy independent again.”

Bartiromo (Maria Bartiromo) further stated that Biden is partially responsible for the looming energy crisis as he canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and all drilling on federal land on his first day in office. Biden continued the assault on domestic energy production last week when the administration delayed decisions on permitting new oil and gas leases, Fox Business reported.

The delay is in direct response to an injunction that prevents these new leases from paying more than $50/ton on their carbon emissions that Biden also demanded on his first day in office. The judge’s temporary injunction allows the rate to remain at the $7/ton that President Trump had instituted following the initial $50+/ton under President Obama.

Biden had also proposed banning all crude oil exports from the United States in December, a consideration which was highly panned amidst an already suffering economy. Republican pushback against such devastating measures was led in part by Rep. August Pfluger (TX) who has once again stepped up to promote American energy security.

The war over Ukraine has further proven that America needs to be not only energy independent, but a major exporter of fossil fuel. That is the only way to remain a world power. If the Biden administration continues its race toward green energy, we can count on being a third-world country by the end of the Biden administration.

A Lot Of People Saw This Coming

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There have been a number of arguments to legalize recreational marijuana over the years. I am not going to get into the right or wrong of legalization, but I am going to post an article about a not-so-inevitable outcome of that legalization in California.

On Saturday, John Hinderaker at Power Line Blog posted an article about some recent problems in California that are the result of legalizing marijuana so that the state government could tax it.

The article reports:

How many industries have been damaged or destroyed by high taxes and excessive regulation? A lot. But I have mixed feelings about this one: California cannabis industry on brink as buyers return to dealers.

The cannabis industry in California is on the brink of collapse because of high taxes and onerous regulations that have burdened legal operators and allowed illegal growers to flourish, campaigners have warned.
***
About 75 per cent of cannabis consumed in the state comes from illegal sources, industry figures say. They blame taxes, too much regulation and a failure to tackle illegal competition, which is free from red tape and able to offer cannabis at much lower prices.

Marijuana is cheap and easy to grow. Legal sellers complain that police do little to enforce the laws against illegal dope, but once the government declares marijuana to be A-OK, there isn’t much reason to prioritize a crackdown on those who sell a legal product but dodge taxes. The case against legalized marijuana having been abandoned, legal sellers are in somewhat the same position as the taxi companies who tried to get Uber and Lyft banned in various cities.

The article notes that the marijuana industry is trying to get tax relief. Obviously, if legalizing marijuana was done to raise tax revenue, seeking tax relief goes against the whole reason for legalizing it. Having the police crackdown on people who are growing marijuana at home for their own personal use makes about as much sense as arresting someone for growing five tobacco plants in their backyard.

Ranked Choice Voting

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On Wednesday, Just the News reported that a legislative committee in California is about to hear a proposal to ban ranked choice voting in the state.

Fair vote has posted a map showing where ranked choice voting is in use in America:

The Heritage Foundation has one of the best explanations for Ranked Choice Voting that I have heard:

Think about what ranked choice voting destroys. It destroys your clear and knowing choices as a political consumer. Let us call it the supermarket contemplation. In reality, you are choosing one elected official to represent you, just like you might choose one type of steak sauce to buy when you are splurging for steaks. At the supermarket you ponder whether to buy A1, Heinz 57, HP, or the really cheap generic brand you have never tried.

In the real world, you compare price, taste, mood, and maybe even the size of the bottle and then decide on your steak sauce. You know nothing about the generic brand, so you rank it last among your choices, while A1 is ranked a distant third. In your mind, it comes down to Heinz or HP, and you choose the Heinz. You buy that bottle and head home to the grill.

Now imagine if, instead, you had to rank-order all the steak sauces—even the ones you dislike—and at checkout the cashier swaps out your bottle of Heinz 57 with the cheap generic you ranked dead last. Why? Well, the majority of shoppers also down-voted it, but there was no clear front-runner, so the generic snuck up from behind with enough down ballot picks to win. In fact, in this ranked choice supermarket, you might even have helped the lousy generic brand win.

Just the News reports:

The proposal (to end Ranked Choice Voting), contained in Assembly Bill 2808, would prohibit ranked choice voting in state and local elections. A ranked choice voting system allows voters to rank candidates based on preference, having voters indicate their first choice, second choice and so on.

The bill’s author, Assemblymember Patrick O’Donnell, said in a statement that ranked choice voting “allows an election to be gamed.”

“Our democracy and our recent elections may be under heightened stress and scrutiny right now, but our long-established voting system is strong,” O’Donnell said. “We are a model for the world. We must not abandon our voting principles to chase the election flavor of the month.”

If passed, the proposal would shift how elections are completed in several areas across the state. Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro and San Francisco adopted a ranked-voting system in the early 2000s and have used it for more than a decade to elect city officials, according to Fair Vote, an advocate of ranked choice voting. Additionally, Albany, Eureka and Palm Desert were set to begin using a ranked-voting system for local elections starting in November 2022.

…This bill is not the first time lawmakers have backed measures to prohibit ranked choice voting. Tennessee recently moved forward with its own ban on ranked choice voting earlier this week. Gov. Bill Lee signed legislation on Monday prohibiting the system from being used in state and local elections.

O’Donnell’s bill could be heard in committee on March 21, according to the state’s legislative tracker.

This is something to keep an eye on. We do not want ranked choice voting to become a national fad.

Politics Or Medicine?

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On Friday, The Epoch Times reported that New York City Mayor Eric Adams has announced that the vaccine passport system and school mask mandates will expire on March 7th. That is good news for New Yorkers. However, don’t get too comfortable–once a system of passports to enter restaurants and entertainment venues is set up for any reason, it can be resurrected for any other reason.

The article reports:

The mayor’s decision comes as a number of other Democrat-led cities, municipalities, and states have dropped COVID-19-related rules in recent weeks. They have cited a drop in the number of COVID-19 cases nationwide.

“This is about giving people the flexibility that is needed to continue allow not only safety, but we have to get our economy back on track,” Adams told reporters during an announcement at Times Square. “It’s time to open our city and get the economy back up and operating.”

New York City, under the de Blasio administration, became one of the first places in the United States last year to impose a vaccine passport system, impacting restaurants, gyms, sports venues, concerts, and similar businesses.

Critics say that the mandate created a two-tier society of vaccinated and unvaccinated people and also led to the unfair demonization of people who haven’t received the shot. A number of protests erupted across the city with thousands of demonstrators walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and other bridges in protest of the rules.

Starting in late 2021, New York City also has laid off thousands of workers, including police officers and firemen, who did not comply with the city’s vaccine mandate.

The mandates were probably illegal in the first place, and some have been struck down by the Supreme Court. However, I suspect the larger issue here is the approaching mid-term election. The Democrat party is associated with the mandates. States like Florida and North Dakota, run by Republicans, have abandoned mask and shutdown requirements very early in the epidemic and have fared as well or better than the states with strict lockdowns and mandates. States with Republican governors have recovered economically more quickly because they have loosed many of their Covid restrictions that were put in place nationally early in the pandemic. The elections are approaching, and even Democrat-run states are trying to recover their economies before November (even though President Biden’s economic and energy policies are going to make that very difficult).

Just remember, the freedom Americans gave up during the Coronavirus has not yet been won back. Mandates and shutdowns are still possible. What we need is a Supreme Court case that will make it clear that mandated masks and shutdowns are a violation of individual liberty and are thus unconstitutional.

Who Is Ketanji Brown Jackson?

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President Biden has nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court. Recently The Daily Wire posted an article about some of the items Judge Jackson has supported in the past.

The article reports Judge Jackson’s stand on various issues:

Abortion: Ketanji Brown Jackson represented NARAL Pro-Choice America, the League of Women Voters, and the Abortion Access Project of Massachusetts during her time in Boston’s Goodwin Procter law firm. In 2001, she helped write an amicus brief supporting a Massachusetts law that barred pro-life advocates from setting foot within six feet of any individual or vehicle that is within 18 feet of an abortion facility. Jackson’s record has earned her the fierce opposition of female leaders in the pro-life movement.

…Crime: Ketanji Brown Jackson served as vice chairman of the U.S. Sentencing Commission during the Obama administration. In April 2014, the commission propounded the “Drugs Minus Two” rule, which lowered the punishment for all drug-related crimes by two offense levels. The rule, which applied to an estimated 46,000 convicts, allowed judges to reduce convicts’ drug sentences by an average of two years and one month. “The result of the Sentencing Commission’s proposal will be to reward drug traffickers and distributors who possessed a firearm, committed a crime of violence, or had prior convictions,” wrote Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and then-Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) at the time.

Immigration: In September 2019, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a 120-page ruling (Make the Road New York v. McAleenan) that the Trump administration could not expand its use of “expedited removal”: that it could not fast-track the deportation of illegal aliens who had been in the country less than two years.

…Funding teen sex programs: When the Trump administration cut off $200 million in federal funding to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, which teaches children as young as 10 to use condoms and other contraceptives without emphasizing abstinence, Judge Jackson ruled that the funding must continue.

…Government bureaucracy and labor unions: In 2018, President Donald Trump issued three executive orders that would reduce the power of public sector unions and make it easier to fire employees for poor performance. They also ordered employees to spend at least 75% of their time on “agency business.” Trump limited the use of “official time,” which allows government bureaucrats to use government resources to conduct union business during working hours, at taxpayers’ expense.

He also said the government would not negotiate with labor unions on issues where it was not legally required to do so. In August 2018, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a 119-page decision eviscerating those orders, denying most of Trump’s actions (American Federation of Government Employees v. Trump). She admitted that, while Trump’s action did not “specifically and directly conflict with individual statutory prescriptions” (i.e., he did not violate the law), it so “diminishes the scope of bargaining” that, it seemed to Jackson, Trump’s orders are no longer “a good-faith effort.” The D.C. Court of Appeals once again overturned Jackson’s decision, ruling that Jackson lacked jurisdiction to rule on the case.

Please follow the link to the article to read all of the notes on Judge Jackson’s previous decisions. She is not someone who is going to put the U.S. Constitution above her own political agenda. I suspect she will be confirmed, but that is not good news for America.

I Wondered About This When He Said It

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There were a lot of misleading statements in the State of the Union address on Tuesday. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal posted an article about one of these statements.

The article reports:

Presidents typically embellish their achievements during their State of the Union addresses, but President Biden’s pose as a budget deficit hawk is one for the ages.

“By the end of this year, the deficit will be down to less than half what it was before I took office,” he said, adding that he will be “the only President ever to cut the deficit by more than one trillion dollars in a single year.”

That’s not by choice.

The article notes:

This assumes Congress doesn’t enact his Build Back Better plan or the more Covid relief he’s asking for.

He’s also using the fiscal 2020 budget as his benchmark. Congress passed $2 trillion in Covid relief in March 2020 to prevent a recession. Both parties piled on $900 billion more that December, and Democrats in March 2021 ladled out nearly $2 trillion more. The deficit is declining because Congress blew it out for two years.

…Inflation is always good for government coffers. Receipts are up 28% during the first four months of this fiscal year. But the Congressional Budget Office still projects deficits to exceed $1 trillion on average over the next decade.

The article concludes:

Mr. Biden is hoping the deficit reduction ruse will lure West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin to go along with more spending. Don’t fall for it, sir.

Remember, statistics can pretty much be manipulated to say anything a statistician wants them to say. President Biden evidently has some good statisticians in his speech writing department.

Do They Get Their Jobs Back Now?

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On Thursday, The Washington Times reported that the Senate voted Wednesday to end the vaccine mandate on health workers at places that receive federal funding. There is serious doubt as to whether the measure will actually get through the House of Representatives (which is controlled by the Democrats), although that may depend on whether or not the Democrats are reading the polls.

The article reports:

The Supreme Court struck down a broader mandate that required large companies to regularly test workers who refuse to get vaccinated. However, the justices upheld the health-worker mandate.

Republicans say the mandate is bad policy because it could lead to staffing shortages at hospitals and punish workers who served on the frontlines of the COVID-19 battle for two years and choose to remain unvaccinated.

The GOP is betting that forcing Democrats to defend COVID-19 mandates will help Republicans retake the House and the Senate in November’s elections.

One of the really sad aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic is that both political parties attempted to use to crisis for political gain. There was a time when both parties totally ignored the science. Now we are beginning to see that lives could have been saved if we had pursued early treatment as hard as we pursued a vaccine. We know now that early treatment works. We can’t say the same about the vaccines.

Americans are done with mask and vaccine mandates. I was recently told by a pulmonary specialist that when the masks come off we can expect an uptick in pneumonia cases–not because the masks were protecting us, but because wearing a mask interferes with your natural immunity system. After mask wearing, your immune system is not as strong as it would be without a mask, so you are more prone to illness. That’s not good news for the elderly who have been told to keep wearing their masks. Consider not wearing a mask to be like sending a child out to play in the dirt. The germs the child comes in contact with in playing in the dirt strengthen the child’s immune system. Walking around bare-faced exposes your immune system to germs and strengthens it. Also, the fibers in the mask are not close enough to each other to block virus germs. The masks were to make us feel better and to control us. Medically they were not helpful.

The New York Post Analysis

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On Wednesday, The New York Post posted a list of the top 10 ways President Biden deluded himself during his State of the Union address.

Here is the list:

1. FEIGNING to stand up for Ukraine when he publicly told Vladimir Putin last month that a “minor incursion” was tolerable, and when his son Hunter treated Ukraine like a private piggybank during Biden’s vice-presidency.

2. CALLING for unity to a room full of Republicans while falsely claiming that the Trump administration’s 2017 tax cut only helped “the top 1%.”

3. POSING amusingly as an America First nationalist — complete with Trumpian “USA! USA!” chants from his colleagues on the floor. All power to Biden if he follows through on his promised “revitalization of American manufacturing,” but he will be going against his own record.

4. Securing our border: This takes some chutzpah when Biden deliberately dismantled Trump’s hard-won border protections and is still in court fighting the remain-in-Mexico policy.

5. BEATING the opioid epidemic: The “opioid crisis” he anointed as a bipartisan cause was turbocharged when he flung open the southern border to record quantities of fentanyl, a drug which is now the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45.

6. GASLIGHTING us on the pandemic: “Let’s stop looking at COVID as a partisan dividing line,” said the president who has done nothing but manipulate COVID fear for political purposes, and changed tune only after opinion polls on his handling of the pandemic headed south.

7. BLUNTING gas prices: He’s pulling our leg. Biden boasted about tapping into 30 million barrels of our emergency oil reserves — less than two days’ supply — while not mentioning a word about unleashing our plentiful untapped oil and gas supplies.

8. CHAMPIONING police “The answer is not to defund the police. The answer is to FUND the police,” Biden thundered.

9. VALORIZING the military Biden paid tribute to soldiers said to have contracted cancer from “burn pits” — an as-yet unproven claim on which he dwells in hope of a combat-related cause of his own son’s death from brain cancer.

10. MYSTIFYING the world Biden went off script after saying “God bless our troops” at the end of his speech. “Go get him!” he ad-libbed.

It would be wonderful if President Biden actually closed the southern border and acted to lower fuel prices for Americans by using our own resources. However, I think the chances of that are slim to none.

 

When The Actions Just Don’t Match The Words

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On Tuesday, Breitbart posted an article about a particularly odd comment in President Biden’s State of the Union address.

The article notes:

President Joe Biden used his State of the Union address on Tuesday night to call on Congress to “secure the border,” after his administration allowed roughly 1.5 million migrants to pour across the southern border in his first months in office.

This is a direct quote from the speech (via CNN):

And if we are to advance liberty and justice, we need to secure the Border and fix the immigration system.
We can do both. At our border, we’ve installed new technology like cutting-edge scanners to better detect drug smuggling.
We’ve set up joint patrols with Mexico and Guatemala to catch more human traffickers.
We’re putting in place dedicated immigration judges so families fleeing persecution and violence can have their cases heard faster.

We’re securing commitments and supporting partners in South and Central America to host more refugees and secure their own borders.

On December 9, 2021, The Washington Times reported:

If anyone is dismantling the immigration system, it is the Biden administration. While it systematically reversed the most successful border security policies ever created, it has been lying to the American people and projecting its failures onto its predecessors.

Within the first few days of taking office, Biden discontinued the Migrant Protection Protocol (MPP), better known as the Remain in Mexico program. He ended it even though it was the most successful border security program ever created and resulted in a significant decrease in illegal immigration. Even after officials from the Trump administration, including myself, consulted with his transition teams on multiple occasions about the risks of ending MPP along with the data that show it was a game-changer, Biden dismantled it anyway.

He also ended the Safe Third Country agreements the Trump administration had put in place with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the homelands of a majority of the illegal migrants entering the U.S. This policy was also effective at stemming unlawful immigration into the U.S. and helping to prevent thousands of fraudulent asylum claims. This policy made it possible for migrants who claimed to be fleeing fear and persecution from their home government to claim asylum in the first safe country they entered.  

The Biden administration then dismantled the deportation process by placing a moratorium on all deportations. To end consequences for illegal behavior only brings more illegal behavior. The proof can be seen in the caravans and accelerated flow of migrants since Biden assumed office.  

Securing the border is a really good idea. Americans are being killed not only by the illegal drugs coming across the border, but by illegal aliens driving drunk, and stealing from and assaulting American citizens. President Biden needs to undo the Executive Orders he put in place that have made our country less secure.

Unintended Consequences

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On Wednesday, Zero Hedge reported the following:

As discussed yesterday in “Buyers Balk At Russian Oil Purchases Despite Record Discounts, Sanction Carve Outs” the bevy of Russian sanctions have had the unintended consequence of also freezing Russian oil exports – despite explicit carve outs in terms set by Western nations – as buyers balk and boycott Russian crude sales amid fears that the country’s energy supplies may eventually fall under a sanctions regime anyway, leaving buyers stuck with millions in barrels they can’t then sell to downstream clients.

Today was a clear example of just that: citing traders with knowledge of tenders, Bloomberg reported that Surgutneftegaz (better known as Surgut) failed to award two tenders with combined volume of 880k tons of Urals for March loading.

…In short, there is a sense across the petroleum supply chain that sanctions aren’t done yet or aren’t well-enough understood yet. That’s why things are getting blocked. 

Meanwhile, Energy Aspects estimates that 70% of Russia’s crude trade is frozen but that will drop to 20% when there’s greater visibility on sanctions.

While that’s a reasonable proposition but there is an x-factor: could the final sanctions package actually be even more punitive for the country’s exports? Even if 20% were to end up frozen, that would still be a very bullish final scenario for the oil market; as a reminder, Goldman recently noted that even assuming full Russian output, the market remains undersupplied and continued disruptions will push oil much higher.

So what does the market think? Well, the 10x increase in Brent $200 June calls in the past week should give you a sense of what may be coming.

This is one of those articles I am sharing without having a really good idea of what it says or what it means. However, it seems as if this is information worth noting as the price of oil and gasoline continue their upward climb.

What Happens Next?

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On Tuesday, The Federalist reported that the Wisconsin Office of Special Counsel, headed by retired state Supreme Court justice Michael Gableman, has concluded that nearly $9 million in Zuckerberg grant funds directed solely to five Democratic strongholds in Wisconsin violated the state’s election code’s prohibition on bribery.

The article reports:

Last August, Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos authorized the Office of Special Counsel, headed by retired state Supreme Court justice Michael Gableman, to investigate concerns about election integrity and the 2020 election. Gableman delivered an interim report to the state assembly on November 10, 2021. Earlier today, the special counsel provided a second interim report to the state legislative body, noting the report “is final in the sense that it provides a list of recommendations with time for the Legislature to act before the close of its session in March.”

The article also notes:

The Zuckerberg 5 also violated the federal and state constitutional guarantee of equal protection, according to the special counsel report. The grant money targeted specific voters for special voting privileges, to the disadvantage of similarly situated voters located in other Wisconsin counties. The report also detailed troubling evidence the Zuckerberg 5 counties allowing private groups working with the granting organization, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, to “unlawfully administer aspects of the election,” including in one county where one organization was unlawfully embedded in local government election administration.

The special counsel’s report also highlighted the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) illegal directive to clerks to ignore the state election code governing voting in nursing homes. In several nursing home locations throughout the state, 100 percent of registered voters cast a ballot in the 2020 election—an unheard-of rate that included many ineligible voters.

Non-citizen and incapacitated citizens also remained listed on Wisconsin’s voting rolls, in violation of the law, according to the report. Because some non-citizens qualify for driver’s licenses, the law requires non-citizens’ names be removed from the master roll, but that was not done, according to the special counsel. Likewise, individuals declared incompetent must, by law, be removed from the master list, but again that did not occur.

I suspect the problems in Wisconsin are not unique. I also suspect that these problems are simply the tip of the iceberg. I have personally seen evidence of strange things happening in calculating voting totals via Dominican voting machines and other computer anomalies that are also cause for suspicion. We need to take a really good look at how we vote and how those votes are counted before the mid-term election. Election integrity is important and needs to be upheld by our courts and our representatives.

The Story Behind The Story

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On Monday, The Conservative Treehouse posted an article with a rather different viewpoint on the origins and purpose of the current war in Ukraine. It is a long, involved article, so I suggest you follow the link to read the entire article. I will try to provide some  highlights.

The article notes:

Current CIA Director William “Bill” Burns was the former ambassador to Russia and Jordan.  Bill Burns had a 33-year career at the State Department under both Republican and Democratic presidents and speaks fluent Russian. If the people in the background of Joe Biden wanted an intelligence operative to trigger a specific result from Russia, there’s no one more strategically perfect for the job than CIA Director Bill Burns.

The article by Beinart (Peter Beinart on substack {SEE HERE}) is mainly focused on pointing out the irreconcilable nature of Joe Biden implying Ukraine could join NATO, while his own CIA Director has a history of giving serious warnings emphasizing the “brightest of all red lines” about that specific point.

[…]  “Two years ago, Burns wrote a memoir entitled, The Back Channel. It directly contradicts the argument being proffered by the administration he now serves. In his book, Burns says over and over that Russians of all ideological stripes—not just Putin—loathed and feared NATO expansion. He quotes a memo he wrote while serving as counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Moscow in 1995. ‘Hostility to early NATO expansion,” it declares, “is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.”

On the question of extending NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about the breadth of Russian opposition are even more emphatic. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” he wrote in a 2008 memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” (read more)

The article reports the following:

The CIA Director is crystal clear that Russia would be seriously triggered about any prospect of Ukraine entering NATO.

Yet, in December of 2021, the exact same time when U.S. backchannel intelligence was being shared with China about Russian troop movements on the border with Ukraine, Joe Biden was telling Ukraine that membership in NATO was in their hands.

The war in Ukraine now can be conveniently blamed for economic woes, the high price of gasoline, the empty supermarket shelves, other supply chain problems, etc.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article.

The Continuing War On Energy

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On Tuesday, The Daily Caller posted an article about the Biden administration’s continuing war on energy.

The article reports:

Half of all U.S. states penned a letter to the Biden administration, arguing against its decision to reverse a Trump-era rule allowing energy firms to transport natural gas via rail.

“Biden’s war on energy is a war on America’s poor and working-class,” Landry said in a statement Monday evening. “It is high time the Biden Administration to put America first. Biden’s environmental virtue-signaling is burdening American families and jeopardizing the safety and security of our homeland.”

Natural gas is the largest source of electricity production in the U.S., accounting for about 40% of all generation, according to the Energy Information Administration. The Republican attorneys general’s letter noted, citing Environmental Protection Agency data, that greenhouse gas emissions have decreased 11.7% overall and a whopping 33.1% from electricity generation between 2005-2019.

They argued emissions have decreased as reliance on natural gas has increased over the past decade. Relying on domestic natural gas production for electricity generation also makes the U.S. less dependent on foreign producers, the states said.

America has managed to decrease its greenhouse emissions by using natural gas. China on the other hand has increased its use of coal for generating electricity. It makes no sense for America to cripple its economy when curtailing our emissions will have little or no impact on the overall greenhouse emissions around the world. It might make us feel noble, but all it will do is eliminate America’s middle class. The article notes that environmental groups, which have also opposed pipeline projects, argued rail transport of natural gas was too dangerous. Meanwhile the price of gasoline at the pump is rapidly rising because America has lost its lead in energy production. It is not surprising that there is evidence that Russia is working with America’s environmentalist movement.

Our Government Has Lost Its Mind

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On Monday, The Conservative Review posted an article about the latest information put forth by our government to insure our safety during a nuclear attack.

The article reports:

The Ready Campaign, a government program meant to prepare Americans for emergencies, advises Americans to maintain six feet of social distancing and to wear face masks when sheltering indoors to avoid nuclear fallout.

Nuclear fallout is the dangerous aftermath of a nuclear explosion, when the highly toxic radioactive particles expelled into the atmosphere fall back to earth.

According to the Ready Campaign, you should find shelter in the nearest brick or concrete shelter following a nuclear explosion. After removing contaminated clothing and washing areas of unprotected skin, you should protect yourselves from COVID-19.

“Go to the basement or middle of the building. Stay away from the outer walls and roof. Try to maintain a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your household. If possible, wear a mask if you’re sheltering with people who are not a part of your household. Children under two years old, people who have trouble breathing, and those who are unable to remove masks on their own should not wear them,” the recommendations say.

Do they really believe that after a nuclear attack, the most important thing on our minds will be social distancing and wearing a mask?

The article notes:

“Stay inside for 24 hours unless local authorities provide other instructions. Continue to practice social distancing by wearing a mask and by keeping a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who not part of your household,” they continue.

And in the case that authorities mandate evacuation to an emergency shelter, the government wants you to bring resources to stop the spread of COVID-19.

“If you are told by authorities to evacuate to a public shelter, try to bring items that can help protect yourself and your family from COVID-19, such as hand sanitizer that contains at least 60 percent alcohol, cleaning materials, and two masks per person,” the government says.

The website indicates that it was last updated on Feb. 25, but was updated in November 2020 to include information related to COVID-19.

Sometimes I just don’t know how to respond to government instructions.

A Solution That Is Being Ignored

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On Sunday, Townhall posted an article suggesting how President Biden could end the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The article suggested following some of the example set by President Reagan.

The article reports:

President Reagan famously ramped up military spending. He increased the defense budget by over 40 percent, and that included the creation of his space program called SDI. The media mocked it and nicknamed it the Star Wars program and relentlessly attempted to brand Reagan as a dunce who was a former actor who knew nothing about foreign policy. We know in hindsight that the Soviets were enraged that the U.S. could own space and potentially shoot their weapons right out of the sky with the SDI program. In response, the Soviets ramped up their spending on similar programs. 

But, Soviet money didn’t grow on trees.

A lot of the money grew, so to speak, in the wheat fields of Russia. Wheat has long been in the top three biggest Soviet exports and President Reagan unleashed our farmers to produce grain. 

We need to end the restrictions on American energy production.

The article continues:

Another aspect of Reagan’s Cold War strategy was taking the reins off of American oil producers and ramping up our oil production. It not only gave us a great advantage to produce our own energy here, it also dramatically lowered the price of oil on the world market. Oil was and still is Russia’s top export. 

In addition to domestic production, Reagan worked behind the scenes to encourage Middle Eastern oil producers to increase the supply on the world market. The Soviets took a HUGE hit in the pocketbook when their oil suddenly became worth a fraction of what it was when Jimmy Carter was president. 

President Reagan also waged a PR war against the Soviets. 

The most famous moment was Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg gate when he told the Soviets to tear down the wall that was separating the free people in Western Europe from those imprisoned in the oppressive communist system on the other side of the wall and razor wire. 

Reagan also sent funding and arms to freedom movements around the world that were resisting the Soviet Communist takeover of countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. 

And it worked. The USSR is on the ash heap of history. 

If we do not learn the lesson of President Reagan vs the Soviet Union, America will wind up on the ash heap of history. Unfortunately, the Biden administration is racing toward that heap.

The Current Culture Wars

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On Sunday, The Blue State Conservative posted an article listing six key cultural battles currently going on in America.

Here is the list:

#1: The political science might have determined Covid is no longer useful, but that doesn’t mean half of this country can easily escape their brainwash.

#2: The effort to instill wokeness on every level in our military continues, and the consequences are dire.

#3: The participation of female swimmers and presence of a crowd at the NCAA women’s swim finals proves most people are either cowards, idiots, or both.

#4: The left continues trying to expand what is considered ‘racist,’ but Americans aren’t buying it.

#5: Women demand equality when it suits them, and only when it benefits to identify what a woman is.

#6: Resistance is building against the left’s sexual and gender values being taught in schools.

Americans are beginning to wake up to the war against the American family and traditional American values. Just for the record in case anyone is reading this who has doubts, racism is NOT a traditional American value.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. All Americans need to get involved in the cultural war that is going on now in our country. If you are a parent or grandparent, pay attention to what your children or grandchildren are learning in school. Our future as a nation depends on involved parents.

I Guess We Don’t All See The Same Things

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On Tuesday, President Biden will deliver his State of the Union address. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki appeared on ABC’s “This Week” to preview the speech. I guess your perception of America right now depends a lot on which political party you belong to.

The article reports:

To close out her segment, host George Stephanopoulos brought up a stark reality that Biden is facing right now. “Finally, the president is approaching his State of the Union in a pretty difficult political position right now, 37 percent approval rating, Democrats trailing badly in the midterm polling. A majority in our recent poll out this morning even question the president’s mental capacity,” Stephanopoulos mentioned, highlighting the results of a new ABC News-Washington Post poll, which I also covered earlier.

“How is he going to turn that around on Tuesday night? And how much has his State of the Union been changed by this war in Ukraine?” Stephanopoulos asked.

The article includes Ms. Psaki’s answer:

PSAKI: Well, George, I think there’s no question that, in the State of the Union, the American people and anybody watching around the world will hear the president talk about the efforts he has led over the past several months to build a global coalition to fight — fight against the autocracy and the efforts of President Putin to invade a foreign country. That is certainly something that is present in all of our lives and certainly in the president’s life in this moment.

But what people will also hear from President Biden is his optimism and his belief in the resilience of the American people and the strength of the American people.

And you know, George, from covering State of the Unions for some time, that — that it is about delivering a message to the public at a moment in time. And if you look back when President Obama gave his first State of the Union, it was during the worst financial crisis in a generation. When President Bush gave his first State of the Union, it was shortly after 9/11.

Leaders lead during crises. That’s exactly what President Biden is doing. He’ll speak to that, but he’s also going to speak about his optimism about what’s ahead and what we all have to look forward to.

Wow. If we are all so thrilled with President Biden’s leadership, why are they putting fencing up around the Capitol?