Category Archives: politics

Shortchanging

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And piecemeal, at that.

Recall that President Joe Biden (D) and his administration has sent to Ukraine Poland for Ukraine four multiple-launch rocket artillery systems. These HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) weapons are shoot and scoot weapons that are capable of launching rockets with very high precision onto targets as far away as 190 miles, but Biden has provided the systems with rockets that only can reach a bit under 45 miles. Biden doesn’t mind that at those ranges, the systems are still outranged by the Russian systems the barbarian is using in Ukraine.

Four of them. They’re in Poland, not Ukraine, because they’re being used to train Ukrainian soldiers. The systems won’t arrive in Ukraine until the end of the month.

Why can’t Ukraine have the longer range rockets for the HIMARS? Because, even though the Ukrainians have promised to use the systems for defense and not to attack targets inside Russia—a promise Biden extracted even for the shorter-range HIMARS—because Biden wants Russia, the invader, to be a sanctuary country, safe against counterattack by the nation the invader has invaded. Even though Russian forces are firing from within Russia as well as from within Ukraine, and even though Russian forces stage troops, weapons, ammunition, fuel, food, and other consumables in Russia a short distance from Ukraine.

Why can’t Ukraine have the longer range rockets? Also because Biden plainly doesn’t trust Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy to keep his word—which gravely insults the leader of the nation whose existence is in the wind and whose nation is fighting so staunchly for survival.

What Ukraine needs: Oleksiy Arestovych, a military advisor on Zelenskyy’s Chief of Staff staff, says Ukraine needs 60 of this sort of weapons system.

If we get 60 of these systems then the Russians will lose all ability to advance anywhere, they will be stopped dead in their tracks. If we get 40 they will advance, albeit very slowly with heavy casualties; with 20 they will continue to advance with higher casualties than now[.]

And

“The fewer we get, the worse our situation will be. Our troops will continue to die and we will continue to lose ground,” Arestovych said, particularly if countries with dozens of systems only “decide to donate four or five.”

Why can’t Ukraine have more than four HIMARS systems?

Because Biden doesn’t care. He’s satisfied with virtue-signaling.

It’s not just piecemeal. It’s casually destructive.

It’s a Weapon that should only Work Once

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Vladimir Putin is extending his murderously physical war on Ukraine into an economic war against Ukraine’s European nation supporters.

Russia’s state-owned gas giant Gazprom PJSC throttled deliveries via the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany this week….

And

Russian natural gas deliveries through a key pipeline to Europe will drop by around 40% this year, state-controlled energy giant Gazprom said Tuesday….

And

Slovakia’s state-owned gas importer SPP said it expected Thursday’s Russian gas deliveries to be reduced by about 30%, while Czech power utility CEZ said it had seen a similar fall….

And

France’s multinational utility corporation Engie said on Thursday that Russia has reduced gas shipments….

This should be a one-shot effort by Putin, and then his energy production should find no buyers outside of India and the People’s Republic of China—to which there are inadequate delivery routes for several years. The single shot aspect of this, though, requires the European nations to have courage and to move apace to find alternative sources—and there are a plethora of them. And then, Russia, which depends on exports of extractions rather than of manufactured goods would be…stuck. The Indian and PRC markets just aren’t all that.

Where in the World is Joe Biden?

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Last Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi all travelled to Kyiv to meet face-to-face with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a show of support, even by the three European national leaders who are the most wobbly in their support for Ukraine.

Which once again raises the question: where is the guy who sits in the American leadership chair, Joe Biden?

Not in Ukraine. Not ever in Ukraine. Mostly Biden is laying low in Delaware, with occasional sojourns to the White House Oval Office to sit in the big boy’s chair at the Resolute Desk and to spend the night, like a celebrity tourist in the Lincoln Bedroom, in the Presidential Bedroom Suite.

Another Example of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Racism

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This time, it’s in the housing market, via the Federal government-run Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The plans released last week [by FHFA, which regulates Fannie and Freddie] might have been written by California Representative Maxine Waters (D). Central to Fannie’s plan are “Special Purpose Credit Programs” that increase access to credit and encourage “sustainable homeownership for Black consumers.”
One program would assist black borrowers with down payments. Most home-buyers are required to put down at least 20% of the cost of a new home to reduce the risks of default. Fannie’s plan would effectively require taxpayers to subsidize down payments for black borrowers.

It goes downhill from there.

Once again, Party explicitly favors one group of Americans while explicitly disfavoring another group of Americans—solely on the basis of race.

The Putin Producer Price Inflation

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More evidence of President Joe Biden’s (D) fantasy of a time travel weapon possessed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. This time, the evidence is the Producer Price Index, as published by the US Labor Department and printed by The Wall Street Journal.

The WSJ‘s graph is constructed from data released by Labor. The monthly data in the graph are hard to read, but the WSJ‘s rendition allows mouse-over readings. What those readings illustrate is instructive.

In January 2021, when Biden took office, the year-on-year PPI was 1.6%. By the next month, it had risen to 3%. A year later, January 2022, the PPI had gone to 10.1% year-on-year. In February 2022—Putin didn’t invade Ukraine until the end of that month—the PPI was 10.4%. By May it was 10.8%.

My third-grade arithmetic says that fully 96% of the PPI’s increase had occurred before Putin’s invasion.

Plainly, for Biden’s blame-shifting assertions to be true, he has to be, once again, insisting that Putin’s regime has succeeded in developing time travel and is using it to wage economic war against us while he wages murderously killing war against Ukraine.

Oh, and one more thing. Given the lags inherent in economic forces as they move through a real-world economy, these producer-level data essentially baked in even the consumer inflation outcomes following Putin’s invasion. That shows even more clearly how fantastical Biden’s assertions are.