By Rick Manning

Politicians are always desperate for headlines, after all, any news coverage is better than no news coverage.  This is particularly true when the political party in charge is almost universally loathed and is expecting an electoral blood bath if things continue on their current course.

With inflation raging out of control, wars and rumors of wars rattling Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, an impending food shortage threatening to bring famine across the globe, a broken supply chain which is strangling the domestic and world economy and Dr. Anthony Fauci waving around a combination of monkey pox and the latest Covid strain to keep himself relevant, there are no shortage of problems for Congress to work on and perhaps show some value.

With all of these and more (crime, border, regulatory induced energy crisis) Congress will be digging deep into the fundamental issue that ties all of these problems together this week.

The House Government Reform and Oversight Democrats have the answer we have all been waiting for… investigate the Washington Redskins-Football Team-Commanders over sexual harassment allegations from about a decade ago.  

Mind you, this is the same House of Representatives which maintains a secret slush fund to pay off staff which makes sexual harassment allegations against members of Congress and top staff.  The names of those members of Congress whose actions warranted taxpayer payouts to make them go away are more difficult to find than Dick Cheney’s famous remote, undisclosed location during the George W. Bush administration.

A 2017 House report showed that $17 million had been paid out since their internal Office of Compliance was formed to make sexual harassment charges go away.  Since then, a cursory check of google reveals that no one appears to be asking for updates on official bribes paid to make people claiming they were sexually harassed or abused to go away.

I’m confident that the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee will get right on that question as soon as they get done piously and publicly chastising the Redskins, Football Team, Commanders owner.

Maybe if Dan Snyder is lucky, Representative Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) will make a special appearance at the hearing so he can pile on.  After all, nothing like a member of the House Intelligence Committee, the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence and the Judiciary Committee to lend his gravitas to the proceedings.  Who would know better about the dangers of sexual misbehavior than a man who was reported to have been having an affair with a Chinese spy named Fang Fang?

The absurdity of the Democrats in Congress, who have forgotten the definition of a woman over the past eighteen months, wagging their collective fingers at a private entity which has a better record than they do cannot be overstated.

A mere twenty-five years ago, a Democrat president left DNA evidence all over an intern’s dress in the Oval Office in one of the most egregious acts of misogynistic abuses of power publicly reported, and current Speaker Nancy Pelosi was front and center defending that president.

But Dan Snyder has committed the cardinal sin in D.C., he has allowed himself to become an easy target.  An unprotected person who Democrats in Congress believe they can attack with few repercussions, on a subject that combines America’s obsession with professional football and sex.  So, hearings must be held and statements made by unctuous empty suits looking to provide proof of life for their constituents back home.

After all, it would be too easy to try to get to the root of the dramatically expanding crime problem, or to finish the wall, or investigate Chinese spy operations and how Tik Tok plays a role in them.  To really score an electoral touchdown, Democrats need to get to the bottom of what happened at Redskins Park a decade ago.

The attack Dan Snyder desperation play is perhaps the worst play call in D.C., since Jim Zorn was patrolling the sidelines for the ole “maroon and black.” 

It is no wonder that the American public is looking to flush the whole lot of these jokers out of the swamp in November.  A recession is looming and the only question is who will be on the unemployment lines first – the American people or the Democrat politicians whose failed policies put them there. No amount of NFL smoke and mirrors rhetoric will save them.

Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/07/house-dems-attack-on-dan-snyder-reeks-of-desperation/

David Harsanyi: Recession? No Problem. Just Pretend It Doesn’t Exist

By David Harsanyi

In 2009, mired in the slowest recovery in American history, the Obama administration decided to dispense with antiquated economic metrics and cook up a new, non-falsifiable number that would better accommodate the president. And so, we were introduced to jobs, “saved and created.”

Every month, an administration economist, under the veneer of expertise, would trot out this fake statistic — one that had never been used by the Labor Department or Treasury Department or the Bureau of Labor Statistics or anyone else. And every month, the political media would dutifully report on it without much skepticism. Obama claimed his recovery plan would “save or create three to four million jobs over the next two years.” But once the “saved” part of “created and saved” was removed, we found out the economy had lost 2 million jobs, with unemployment reaching 9.4 percent. All of it was transparently stupid, yet it was flat-out genius compared to the messaging of the Biden administration.

Get ready for a very dumb debate over the word “recession.” It’s true, there’s no scientific definition for a recession because economics isn’t an exact science. Yet for decades, the media, government, economic textbooks, and dictionaries have all, more or less, defined a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. But now, with the prospects of this week’s GDP report being in the red — the Atlanta Fed estimates GDP will contract 1.6 percent — the administration and media are engaged in a pedantic discussion over the real meaning of a recession.

“What is a recession?” the White House Council of Economic Advisers ponders. “While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle.”

It isn’t? It is true that on rare occasions, as the National Bureau of Economic Research did in the early ’90s, experts will declare a recession when there are non-consecutive quarters of negative growth, but not once has the media covered two consecutive quarters of contraction as anything but a recession.

Every fresh report of Keynesian economic failure during the Obama years was treated as “unexpected.” When the same policy fails during the Biden years, the media depicts our sputtering economy as weird and unpredictable. Is it? This week, we’re going to see a new consumer confidence number. It will likely be bad. Interest rates will likely rise, as will inflation. And perhaps the best predictor of a recession, the yield curve inversion, is already with us. It’s not that weird.

The administration argues we aren’t technically in a recession because of the low unemployment rate. But simply because the Biden administration says we’re experiencing historic job growth doesn’t mean we have to play along. Indeed, the private sector hasn’t even regained the jobs lost due to the “man-made” downturn that was caused by needless government-compelled Covid shutdowns. The Chamber of Commerce says 3.25 million fewer Americans are working today than were in February of 2020. (In 2019, presidential candidate Joe Biden argued the economy was “teetering on recession” when there were zero quarters of negative growth and the unemployment rate was at 3.7 percent. Today it’s at 3.6 percent.)

Biden has been assaulting voters with these kinds of juvenile economic talking points from the start. It was a year ago that the president claimed “nobody” was “suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist,” even as many were. Biden’s National Economic Council deputy director Brian Deese had said early that inflation was “actually a good sign” for the economy. Then, the administration and its allies argued that the best method to alleviate inflation would be to shove through a $5.5 trillion welfare state expansion bill.

The president also claimed Build Back Better actually cost “zero.” This is a president who demands that “companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump” bring down the price, as if the local 7/11 attendant can control the price of a fungible commodity. Then again, Mayor Pete just recommends everyone go out and buy an electric car.

Presidents don’t create or save jobs. They do, however, propel inflation when sending checks into an overheated economy, creating energy scarcity, and passing needless infrastructure bills (with the help of Republicans). So it’s not surprising that the same people who tried to redefine inflation are now, conveniently, treating a “recession” as an unknowable concept.

To view online: https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/25/recession-no-problem-just-pretend-it-doesnt-exist/