…of President Joe Biden’s (D) and his Progressive-Democratic Party’s war on our energy production industry.
Their war has contributed heavily to our current strong rise in inflation, since energy underlies everything in our economy from industrial production to transportation (shipping and Americans’ travel to/from work) to food, both its production and Americans’ purchases for our families’ tables.
H/t: ralf
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked by Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) whether the [Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps] has been asked to stop plotting assassinations. Blinken answered:
…one of the strong messages we send to them [Iranian negotiators] is they need to stop targeting our people…and they said they know what they would need to do to address this problem.
Cruz also asked whether it is the case that
the IRGC is actively trying to murder former senior officials of the US.
Blinken:
…there is an ongoing threat against American officials both present and past.
Ongoing, after the “strong messages” have been “sent.” Plainly, Iran has a different view of what the problem is and what they would need to do to address it than has Cruz. Blinken appears oblivious to the difference.
This is what Biden-Harris is begging to “negotiate” with from the kiddie table in Vienna and who he has doing the begging negotiating.
Russia has cut off natural gas deliveries to Poland and Bulgaria as Putin prosecutes his invasion of Ukraine.
European officials denounced the move, which threatens the continent’s energy supply, as blackmail by Russia.
This is war. What did these “European officials” expect when they made the conscious decision to create themselves dependents on the energy good offices of an enemy nation? And how could they not recognize Putin’s Russia as an enemy nation, given his years of rhetoric laying out his plans for and goal of restoring the Russian empire that was the Soviet Union—an empire that includes Eastern European nations, many of which are part of NATO, and one of which has been absorbed into a NATO member nation?
Other large European gas consumers like Germany and Italy haven’t been affected so far.
Of course not. Germany and Italy are much more compliant dependents. Germany in particular has been busily slow-walking, if not outright obstructing, weapons support for Ukraine. Never mind German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ talk about freeing up arms shipments to Ukraine. All he’s done, despite two such rounds of word-based commitments, is talk. No concrete movement, beyond an insultingly puny shipment of helmets, has followed his chit-chat.
Latvia’s Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš is much more clear-eyed on the matter.
This is part of the war; this is how the war affects us. The Ukrainians are paying with their lives, we are paying with higher energy prices.
But, then, Latvia, along with the rest of Eastern Europe, well remember what it’s like to live under Russian jackboots. Central and Western Europe, safe and secure and rich and fat and soft three and four generations after WWII and with all those Eastern Europe nations as buffers for their comfort, have chosen to not remember.
…if Russia’s President Vladimir Putin isn’t allowed to have his way with Ukraine.
Russia’s top diplomat said the West was engaged in a proxy war with his country that could escalate into a world war with nuclear weapons, as Western nations elevated their commitment to defending Ukraine.
“The risk is serious, real. It should not be underestimated,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a Russian state-television interview broadcast Monday night. “Under no circumstances should a third world war be allowed to happen,” he said, adding that “there can be no winners in a nuclear war.”
Then Putin shouldn’t start one. The only one talking about a nuclear war over Ukraine or flowing out of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine are Putin and his cronies.
Lavrov went on:
Mr Lavrov said the West was increasing the risk of a bigger conflict by providing arms to Ukraine: “NATO is, in essence, going to war with Russia through a proxy and arming that proxy.”
This is a cynical and wholly dishonest extension of Putin’s fiction that Ukraine is an integral part of Mother Russia, and all he’s trying to do is to bring the wayward child back home.
This is why nothing anyone in the Russian government says can be trusted, from Putin on down through his Duma, and the only negotiation possible is for Russian forces to leave Ukraine altogether.
And how far back from the Ukraine border Russian roads and railroads must be torn up and the terrain (re)sown with farm crops or trees, along with the promptness of the return of the men, women, and children kidnapped forcibly relocated from Ukrainian cities into Russia.
Now consumer companies are looking to get in on the Federal climate tax credit scam, this effort centering on “clean” energy claims.
More than 40 companies, including consumer brands such as Airbnb Inc, Lyft Inc, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co, and IKEA, are calling on Congress to adopt federal energy legislation to provide additional financial incentives for clean-energy projects such as wind turbine farms and solar installations.
And
They called for federal tax credits for developers and suppliers of major wind, solar, nuclear, and energy-storage projects, as well as for electric vehicles and charging-station tax credits, which could benefit company-run fleets.
Here’s a thought—work with me on this; it’s a concept new to politicians and to the Left generally: eliminate corporate taxes altogether (their customers are the ones paying those taxes anyway in the form of higher prices) and lower individual income tax rates to a single, low flat rate on all income regardless of source. Get our tax code completely out of the social engineering business, and tax credits (along with subsidies, deductions, the rest of the froo-froo) become irrelevant.
Businesses and people then could go about their decision-making based on what’s best for each of them without having to worry about what’s best for them from a Government taxing perspective.
Those decisions, naturally, would include businesses’ and citizens’ own assessment of the importance of such things as climate concerns, instead of having those concerns and their spending choices dictated to them by Know Betters.