Unleash Prosperity Hotline – Weekend Edition Issue #876
10/13/2023, 10/14/2023, 10/15/2023
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1) House Buffoons
The leading horse in the race for Speaker of the House is changing by the hour, and it is making the Republicans look like the gang that can’t shoot straight.
Our hope — now that Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise have been foolishly voted down — is that Jim Jordan of Ohio will be the next speaker. But a gang of moderates are now saying they will vote no – and that could prevent him from getting to the magic number of 217. The chaos caucus is spreading in the House like a virus.
Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Our view: it’s time for ALL House Republicans to rally behind the solid ideas Jordan has championed his entire career.
No dissents.
Total unity.
As we wrote a week ago, this is a time of great peril – all the more so because we have an incompetent and dangerous president. Don’t be distracted from that for one more day. Biden is the clear and present danger to fiscal sanity and our national security.
Jordan is a full-fledged fiscal conservative. He’s pro-growth. He’s a tough-as-nails blue-collar Ohioan. He’s been amazing as Judiciary Committee chairman – and the investigations into Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and the overall corruption of House Democrats have been masterful.
If the Republicans aren’t smart enough to rally and unite, they don’t belong in the majority.
2) Diversity Programs Don’t Make Companies More Profitable
A new study by two scholars at the University of North Carolina and a professor at Texas A&M examined the impact of DEI programs in corporate America and found no evidence that these programs lead to higher returns.
“The business case for diversity” is the dominant rhetorical paradigm for how U.S. corporations debate actions and policies around racial/ethnic diversity. In this paper, we conduct an empirical test of the paradigm by gathering data on the race/ethnicity of the individuals shown on the leadership pages of S&P 500 firms’ websites as of mid-2011, 2014, 2017, 2020 and 2021, and then determining if any of nine measures of the racial/ethnic diversity of these executives reliably predict…their firms’ financial performance over the next fiscal year. We do not find reliable evidence that they do. As such, our results do not support the “business case for diversity” when the claim is assessed using 1-year-ahead financial performance metrics and multiple measures of the race/ethnicity of S&P 500 executives over the last decade.
Diversity may be a goal in its own right – or pure corporate virtue signaling - but there is very little evidence that it benefits shareholders or the sustainability of the business. Firms are better off choosing employees based on their competence, not their gender or skin color.
IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn stole Trump's tax returns and sent them to the New York Times.
Littlejohn also stole tax returns of thousands of wealthy individuals and sent them to the liberal advocacy group ProPublica. ProPublica used the stolen tax returns to produce disingenuous stories suggesting the rich underpaid taxes (because unrealized gains are not taxed) published in perfect sync with Dems pushing through their $80 billion doubling of the IRS.
He’s a criminal who has violated the privacy rights of thousands of American citizens while undermining the trust that Americans have in the IRS, which is sworn to protect the privacy rights of tax returns.
CNN reported: "The contractor’s crime affected so many individuals that prosecutors plan to create a public website to notify the victims of any developments in the case."
But somehow he gets off with a slap on the wrist. He pleaded to just ONE count of "disclosing tax return information without authorization"??? Who does he think he is? Hunter Biden?
Also of note: none of the major media bloodhounds that we have observed have told us anything about Mr. Littlejohn. They don’t seem interested in why and how he committed the crimes that he did. The inquiring minds in the media seem to not want to know. We strongly suspect that this is because many in the media view him as a hero.
Sentencing is set for January 29, 2024, with a maximum punishment of five years – we'll see if he even gets that. We doubt it.
More evidence that our system of justice in America is perverted.
High-speed rail is all the rage among progressives (they hate cars and mobility), but just everywhere it has been tried it has gone off the rails. Here’s the latest fiasco:
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the U.K. has canceled the planned Manchester extension of the under-construction HS2 (high-speed rail line) from London to Birmingham. A previous branch to Leeds was previously canceled and there is uncertainty about the final leg into London, which would terminate six miles short of Euston Station in central London.
What went wrong? Cost overruns. A rail system that was planned to cost £32 billion in 2012 now has three times that price tag, or £106 billion.
Does any of this debacle sound vaguely familiar? Oh. Right! This is exactly what has happened in California, as even the New York Times acknowledges:
The San Francisco Bay Area to metro Los Angeles line was to have cost $32 billion in 2008, but has now escalated, to as much as $113 billion. This is even after plans have been scaled back to sharing tracks with slower trains (non-high speed rail) on portions of the route. Moreover, extensions to Sacramento and San Diego are not included in the $113 billion price tag, having disappeared from plans rather like the Manchester and Leeds extensions in the UK.”
5) The Media and the Climate Change Lobby Lied About the “Hottest Summer Ever”
Remember all those news reports claiming this past summer was the hottest on record? And how it all was due to climate change?
Well, it certainly was a hot one in the southwest and other regions. It’s true that the city of Phoenix suffered several weeks of temperatures over 100 degrees, but that’s not the whole story.
While central Phoenix had the warmest summer in 90 years, Professor Roy Spencer and his colleague Professor John Christy took the official surface temperature data for the centrally located Sky Harbor Phoenix Airport and compared it to all rural stations within 5 to 60 miles of Phoenix. They concluded that if you factor out the urban heat island effect caused by the concrete jungle that is now Phoenix, last summer was only the 11th warmest on record in the area.
Both Spencer and Christy are climate scientists at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and Christy has been Alabama State Climatologist since 2000.
“Cities are hotter than their rural surroundings, and increasingly so, with or without climate change,” Spencer says. “Most of what we hear through the media comes from urban reporting stations, or at least airports serving major urban areas.”
That can lead to measurements of extra warmth of up to 10 degrees, mostly at night.
In their new paper, they look at temperature data across the lower 48 States using satellite maps and data to compute how temperatures change with population density across thousands of closely spaced pairs of weather stations. They conclude that summer warming between 1895 and 2023 in the U.S. is only half as large as the official (but flawed) temperature reports. This past summer was only the 13th warmest in the record if adjusted for the effect of urbanization.
