The Putin Inflation

A short word on President Joe Biden’s (D) allegation wherein he shifts the blame for our high inflation to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and the latter’s invasion of Ukraine. This graph is from Trading Economics:

May 2022’s year-on-year inflation rate is 8.6%, and it’s been in that range since March 2022. Putin invaded Ukraine on 24 Feb 2022.

The January 2022 year-on-year inflation rate was 7.5%. February’s was 7.9%; Putin’s invasion was too late in the month to have materially affected that month’s rate.

87% of May’s inflation rate was already occurring in January, two months before Putin invaded Ukraine.  By February, that had risen to 92%.

Apparently, according to Biden, time travel is a thing, and it’s a weapon solely in Russia’s arsenal.

Speaking of Rule of Law….

At any rate, I am, even if our Attorney General disdains to, or even to operate under it.

Federal US code 1507, states that any individual who “pickets or parades” with the “intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer” near a US court or “near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer” will be fined, or “imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”

Never mind that the avowed purpose of the protesters is to influenc[e] any judge while protesting near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge. Indeed, the purpose of any protest is to influence the target of the protest.

Yet Attorney General Merrick Garland refuses to take any action at all regarding such protestors, much less arrest them and hale them into criminal court to stand trial for their actions. This, even after the Justices’ home addresses were made public, even after one Justice became the target of a murder attempt, even after the children of another Justice became targets of the…protesters. Or in an atmosphere created by a Progressive-Democratic Party Senator openly threatening two Justices by name.

Again, I say: we dodged a bullet—one of President Joe Biden’s (D) hated large caliber 9mm ones that he’s so desperate to ban—when we didn’t get Garland on our Supreme Court.

Cajoling Producers

In a Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed centered on the high and rising cost of fuel and the deleterious effect that’s having on our businesses and our economy, Collin Eaton, David Harrison, and Doug Cameron had this remark:

The administration has also tried cajoling US oil companies into increasing production, but few have chosen to do so, instead sticking to leaner budgets urged by investors.

That’s laid off to the maxed out refineries in the US, so there’d be no place to ship increased production, anyway. That’s a player, certainly, but it’s a relatively minor one.

The far more important factor, and it plays to refiners, also is this. Drilling new wells and reopening closed wells each costs lots of money, and it takes years to recoup those costs. It’s the same for the pipelines and other transports used to get the oil and natural gas to refiners, and it’s the same for the refiners.

The Biden administration, though, cannot be trusted not to pull the rug out from under anyone in the oil and gas industry before those costs have been recouped.

There’s no reason, then, for refiners to (re)expand their capacity, even were there product ready for refinement. Biden and his Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate cronies are actively blocking the construction of additional pipelines with which to transport increased production. Biden and his Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate cronies are constantly promising to put the remaining hydrocarbon energy producers—oil and natural gas producers—out of business. This is a plain extension of what Biden’s favorite bud and predecessor ex-President Barack Obama promised to do to the coal producers and largely succeeded in doing.

I Disagree with Freeman

James Freeman, of The Wall Street Journal, has an op-ed out in which he says President Joe Biden should basically stay out of the public’s eye and not speak to us of important things.

For a while this column has been urging President Joe Biden to avoid public speaking, at least when the topic is important.

And

This column’s argument for the president to stick with prepared statements is not intended…as an ad hoc solution to the president’s reckless habit of making odd off-the-cuff statements about nuclear-armed powers.

I disagree. Biden should interact with the press—take questions without his handlers present, in addition to speak to the press—on a daily basis and always on the record. This would let us average Americans get a more accurate picture of Biden’s ability to function in the rough and tumble ad hoc-ery of the real world, and it would be more informative of his fitness for office and for reelection than watching him occasionally fumble with his teleprompter.

We also need to hear his off-the-cuff remarks to/about anybody and any nation, not just nuclear-armed powers. These remarks are much more informative to us average Americans regarding Biden’s thinking on the subject than any carefully scripted commentary or equally carefully scripted answers to just as carefully pre-selected questions from the press.

Wrong Answer

President Joe Biden (D) and his equally progressive crony DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas now intend to move illegal aliens crossing our border into the interior of our nation, at taxpayer expense, where they will live in accommodations also provided at taxpayer expense.

The plan is designed to lessen the crowding now taking place along the border, where illegal immigrants have flooded the shelters in many cities, causing Customs and Border Protection agents to reportedly release the crossers onto the streets.

This, of course, is the wrong answer to the (over)crowding now occurring along our border.

The right answer is to not have the crowding at all, by not allowing the illegal aliens to come into our nation in the first place, and to promptly deport those who do cross our border illegally and are subsequently caught.

No one—not armies, not individuals, not collections of individuals—has any intrinsic right to enter another country without that country’s prior permission. No country has any intrinsic obligation to grant that permission. Borders and permission-granted entries are how a nation protects its own culture—and in the particular case of the United States, it’s how we protect the American culture and opportunities that make our nation a desirable place to live and to come to.

But the Biden administration knows this. The flooding of our nation with illegal aliens is one aspect of Joe Biden’s and his predecessor and BFF/mentor, ex-President Barack Obama’s (D), promises to fundamentally transform America.