July 27, 2022
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
A recession wasn’t inevitable, but Biden hasn’t avoided one either by ending the implied carbon tax
By Robert Romano
President Joe Biden wants to have it both ways.
Before the Congressional midterms, Biden wants to continue to depend on relatively strong labor markets data published by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics in order to avert suggestions that the U.S. economy is either heading into recession or is already in one.
President Joe Biden told the Associated Press in June that a recession was “not inevitable”: “First of all, it’s not inevitable. Secondly, we’re in a stronger position than any nation in the world to overcome this inflation.”
For months, as bad economic news has been raining down like cats and dogs — inflation, record-high gas prices, inverted yield curves, Atlanta Federal Reserve negative GDP projections, food and energy shortages, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine choking off the world’s grain supply, continued production shortfalls, months-long waits for paper and other manufactured products, labor shortages, etc. — the Biden administration has repeated this “not inevitable” line.
But even labor markets may have already peaked. 315,000 jobs were lost in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey in June, the second month this year experiencing losses after 353,000 jobs were similarly lost in April. And initial unemployment claims have continued ticking upward on a seasonally adjusted basis. Since mid-March, when weekly claims hit a low of 166,000, now they are up over 251,000, the latest U.S. Department of Labor data shows.
All the while, Biden has appeared resistant to doing things that might well have averted a recession by boosting things like energy production, with the White House suggesting it wasn’t interested in long-term solutions to the high costs of petroleum and gasoline, but also natural gas that we need for electricity and home heating, through more drilling, citing long-term environmental concerns over carbon emissions.
And yet, more production is precisely the policy prescription that is called for when the problem is a supply shortage.
Biden correctly identified this problem himself when it came to semiconductors in his March 1, noting that in 2020, because of the Covid lockdowns, factories and industries slowed down production almost to a halt, and proposing to boost production here in the U.S. to overcome the shortfall.
And that was true across industries. The global economy stopped as tens of millions of jobs were lost. It was an artificial closure. And then, demand picked up before producers anticipated.
The same was true of energy production. As barrels of oil piled up, the price went to zero briefly in 2020. Even today, energy production remains below that of pre-Covid levels, when prices were much, much lower.
And that comes in spite of the war in Europe, where Russian oil and gas supplies are being cut off, and fuel and electricity costs have skyrocketed even more than here. Just recently, the Nordstream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany was briefly down for maintenance but only came back on at half its recent capacity.
If ever there was a time for Biden to pivot and put his green energy plans on hold for the sake of our allies — energy costs in Europe are much, much higher due to a massive squeeze — this was it.
And yet, just as the production halt was artificial, so too is the slowdown in ramping it back up. Biden doesn’t want to go back energy abundance of the Trump years. Ultimately, the green energy strategy is to make carbon fuels, despite their untapped potential, to be just as expensive if not more expensive than green energy, even as a shortfall in carbon energy tanks the economy.
When you want more of something, you subsidize it. When you want less of something, you tax it. In this case, it doesn’t exactly look like Biden is actually trying to “overcome the inflation” — which is the demand-pull inflation he described at the State of the Union — anytime soon by boosting production and ending the implied carbon tax. And maybe he’ll be the one who pays for it in November at the Congressional midterms.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/07/a-recession-wasnt-inevitable-but-biden-hasnt-avoided-one-either-by-ending-the-implied-carbon-tax/
Video: House Oversight and Reform Committee Investigated Football Team as Economy is Faltering
To view online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOpBAWLO7-Q
U.S. Rep. Michael Walz: Covid vaccine mandates from Biden admin may cripple National Guard
By U.S. Rep. Michael Walz
For decades, the National Guard has served as the backbone of saving Americans across the country in times of crisis.
Whether it’s helping coordinate hurricane responses, training our allies abroad, responding to domestic civil unrest, fighting wildfires, or establishing COVID-19 field hospitals and treating patients – they’ve been there for us.
But when the next crisis comes to our shores, the U.S. will lack the number Guardsmen and women to come to our rescue.
June 30 marked Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s arbitrary deadline for members of the National Guard and Reserves to receive the COVID-19 vaccine despite Congress’ mandate that the Department of Defense establish uniform procedures under which service members can be exempted.
Should Secretary Austin enforce this mandate on service members who have opted not to get vaccinated due to personal health reasons or religious exemptions, the National Guard will be crippled.
To date, approximately 60,000 National Guard and Reserves remain unvaccinated and the pending decision from the Biden administration could punish the very service members who have been on the front lines of fighting this pandemic.
As a congressman and National Guard colonel – who has had COVID-19 and been vaccinated - I can’t imagine a more reckless decision than to reprimand tens of thousands of National Guard members who have answered the call of duty.
Our current military posture can’t afford it either.
Currently, every branch of the U.S. military is struggling mightily to recruit men and women to join its ranks. This year is shaping up to be one of the worst recruiting years for our military since the Vietnam War.
Whether it’s enforcing a vaccine mandate on our troops, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, or the increased woke indoctrination through mandatory seminars and training, our military is being depleted.
Couple our recruiting struggles with China’s massive military buildup and Russia’s continued warpath in Ukraine, our national security can’t risk not having the personnel ready to fight the next war or take on an emergency here at home.
While the Biden administration mulls its decision, Guardsmen and reservists are not allowed to participate in training exercise or war games. This greatly reduces their fighting capacity should National Guard units need to activate for combat overseas or a natural disaster. We pride ourselves on having the best trained warfighters in the world and keeping them at home only makes us less prepared for our next military undertaking or large-scale domestic crisis.
Additionally, these Guardsmen have been barred from service pay and their retirement benefits are not being compensated.
Many proponents of the vaccine mandate will point to existing requirements that service members must receive other vaccines to serve. Of course, it’s important we have order and discipline in our ranks, and soldiers must follow orders. But leaders must re-evaluate orders once the circumstances have changed.
The reality is the COVID-19 vaccine was developed under an emergency order and other mandatory vaccines have decades of research to back their safety and effectiveness.
Two things have changed since the mandate was implemented. First, the vaccine has shown to not stop the spread but rather reduce symptoms. Second, tens of thousands of National Guard and reservists have expressed serious reservations about the emergency development of the vaccine.
To cripple our military, which is mostly comprised of healthy young men and women, is irresponsible.
Many of these service members have already been exposed to COVID-19 and last year’s defense bill specifically asks the department to consider whether previous exposures induce sustained antibody protection, which may produce similar levels of immunity as the vaccine.
If those findings are met – there’s no excuse to bar service members from serving in uniform.
As hurricane and wildfire season approach, it’s imperative our states have the necessary personnel to address worst-case scenarios.
President Biden and Secretary Austin have a decision to make. It shouldn’t be hard.
To view online: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/covid-vaccine-mandates-biden-admin-cripple-national-guard
FBI’s False Labeling Of Biden Laptop As Disinformation Is Even Worse Than It Seems. Here’s Why
By Margot Cleveland
FBI whistleblowers claim that agents opened a sham investigation into Hunter Biden to brand reliable and verifiable derogatory evidence as “disinformation,” according to an explosive news release issued yesterday by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.
If true, beyond exposing the FBI’s role in running cover for the Biden family, the whistleblowers’ claims prove significant for a second reason: By failing to thoroughly vet the evidence in its possession related to Hunter Biden — which included the hard drive for the MacBook Hunter had abandoned at a repair shop — the intelligence community ignored a momentous national security threat, namely that the Russians potentially possessed a second Hunter Biden laptop.
Late Monday, Grassley issued a news release citing “multiple FBI whistleblowers, including those in senior positions,” who raised “the alarm about tampering by senior FBI and Justice Department officials in politically sensitive investigations,” including “investigative activity involving derogatory information on Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities.” According to the Iowa Republican, the whistleblowers alleged that Washington Field Office Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy “Thibault and other FBI officials sought to falsely portray as disinformation evidence acquired from multiple sources that provided the FBI derogatory information related to Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities, even though some of that information had already been or could be verified.”
The news release added that “in August of 2020, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment, which was used by a team of agents at FBI headquarters to improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down.” “The FBI headquarters team allegedly placed their assessment findings in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation while shielding the justification for such findings from scrutiny,” according to Grassley.
The Iowa senator claimed that “Thibault also reportedly ordered the closure of a stream of information related to Hunter Biden and sought to improperly mark the matter within FBI systems in a way that would prevent it from being re-opened in the future.” “The FBI headquarters team allegedly claimed that reporting from the stream was at risk of disinformation,” but the whistleblowers told Grassley, “that all of the information obtained through that stream was already verified or verifiable.”
The FBI whistleblowers’ charges, if accurate, are devastating and mean that at a time that Hunter Biden was already reportedly under investigation by the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office, rather than work with the agents already investigating then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, FBI headquarters initiated its own “assessment.” Then, according to the whistleblowers, agents improperly shut down sources, falsely framed evidence as disinformation, and hid the reasoning for that determination from other FBI agents behind restricted areas.
The press release also suggests that the FBI’s “assessment” served to frame the investigation Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., were conducting into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealing as tainted by Russian disinformation. As part of that investigation, in May 2020, “Senate Republicans issued a subpoena seeking documents from the younger Biden and asked for information related to more than two dozen entities, including Burisma,” which was the Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter nearly $1 million a year to sit on its board.
With the Trump-Biden presidential contest in full force, Grassley and Johnson’s investigation into Hunter prompted pushback from Democrats, with Democrat members of the Gang of Eight sending a letter and classified addendum in July 2020 to FBI Director Christopher Wray “specifically citing the Johnson-Grassley probe into Hunter Biden as reason for an urgent briefing for Congress about foreign ‘disinformation.’”
The following month, Democrat Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote Grassley and Johnson and requested that members of the Senate Homeland Security and Finance committees, which they chaired, “receive a briefing from the FBI’s foreign influence task force related to their ongoing Biden investigations.”
According to an August 5, 2020, Washington Post article, “the Democrats have requested the member briefing for months, and the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies have previously briefed committee staff on possible foreign disinformation.” The FBI later briefed both Grassley and Johnson on August 6, 2020, but according to the senators, that briefing was both “unsolicited and unnecessary” and failed to provide any new information to the senators or any specific allegations that they had received “disinformation” as part of their Hunter Biden investigation.
Given that FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten, according to whistleblowers, opened his assessment into Hunter in August, the whistleblowers’ allegations raise serious questions concerning whether Democrats pressured the FBI into launching an investigation into Hunter as a pretext to provide the desired “disinformation briefing.”
Further, in April of 2021, someone leaked the fact that the FBI had briefed Grassley and Johnson on August 6, 2020, with the Washington Post running a story painting the senators as reckless in their investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings by suggesting they “ignored FBI warnings and thus may have been manipulated by the Kremlin.” As the Wall Street Journal reported at the time, it seems possible that “the FBI set up two Members of Congress for political attack under the guise of a ‘defensive briefing.’”
The whistleblowers’ accusations then, when coupled with the media coverage, suggest that an agent from FBI headquarters opened an assessment to provide cover to Hunter Biden, to eliminate source trails for the investigation into then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, and to taint the legitimate inquiry into Hunter Biden’s business dealings. That scandal, however, represents but half the issue because the whistleblowers’ statements, if true, suggest the assessment of Hunter was a sham. And as a sham, the agents would not vet the evidence available to them, which would have included the MacBook laptop Hunter had abandoned at a repair shop in Delaware.
The FBI seized that laptop in December of 2019, after being alerted to its existence in October. At that time, FBI agents were reportedly told that in addition to pornography, the computer had information “dealing with foreign interests, a pay-for-play scheme linked to the former administration, [and] lots of foreign money.”
What the FBI did after seizing the laptop in December of 2019 is unknown. However, given that the FBI was reportedly told it contained “a pay-for-play scheme linked to the former administration, [and] lots of foreign money,” any legitimate investigation would have involved reviewing the laptop for information relevant to Grassley and Johnson’s investigations. And had the FBI reviewed the laptop, agents would have discovered a video recording capturing Hunter Biden saying that in 2018, another laptop went missing when he was “partying in Las Vegas,” and that Hunter believed it was stolen by a group of Russians.
The video then showed a prostitute asking Hunter if he worried the Russian thieves would try to “blackmail” him. “Yeah, in some way, yeah,” Hunter replied, noting his father is “running for president,” and that “I talk about it all the time.” Hunter had also noted that the computer had “tons” of compromising videos on it.
But it was not just the compromising videos of Hunter of concern, but the financial information likely on that laptop that could implicate his father in the pay-to-play scandal. If that information were in the hands of “the Russians,” as Hunter believed, the national security risk was huge and demanded the intelligence community conduct a defensive briefing of Joe Biden.
Instead, it appears from the whistleblowers’ comments that a non-investigation took place, with legitimate sources and evidence falsely categorized as disinformation, and then rather than provide Biden a defensive briefing, the senators received one.
This scandal is no longer just about the Biden family; it is about every member of the law enforcement and intelligence communities who put our country at risk by failing to do their jobs.