Tag Archives: political parties

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.

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.

An Incoherent Biden Diktat

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It’s in the offing. This time, President Joe Biden is threatening to inflict his “emergency powers” on American oil producing companies if they don’t produce more oil.

President Biden may resort to using emergency powers if American oil companies don’t increase output at their refineries, the president told oil CEOs in a series of letters Wednesday.
Biden’s statement blames oil companies for running “historically high profit margins” even as Americans experience surging gas prices.

Never mind that they cannot just turn on the faucet and more oil comes out of the tap. It takes lots of money and quite a bit of time to reopen capped wells, and it takes even more money and lots of time to drill a new, producing well.

But Biden’s administration stands in the way of all of that, even as he threatens his diktat. His administration has already canceled large leases in Alaska. His administration has closed most Federal lands to further exploration, much less drilling. His administration is slow-walking new lease applications. His administration is slow-walking the permits needed actually to explore, and then the permits needed actually to drill, once a lease is approved.

His administration has closed major pipelines and is slow-walking construction of other pipelines so that even were a new well drilled or an existing one uncapped, the producers would have no way to deliver output to a refiner.

Given all of that, and with existing refiners already operating at near capacity, there’s no reason to open/build new refineries—they’d have no additional oil to refine.

Beyond that, there’s the matter of trust. Beyond the time and money it takes to (re)open a well, it takes more time—years—for those costs to be recouped and profit begun to be received from the proceeds of that well. Biden’s administration, though, cannot be trusted not to pull the rug out from under those oil companies and demand wells’ or pipelines’ closure once the current—Biden-created—gas price abates.

And this: oil companies’ “historically high profit margins” exist in part (not entirely) because they’re limited in where they can commit their revenues. They can’t spend them on exploration, drilling, producing, transporting, after all because of those Biden administration policies above.

Biden isn’t alone in this incoherence, though—this is typical of his Progressive-Democrat Cabinet and of the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians who dominate both houses of Congress. Nor is the incoherence limited to oil: there’s the environment and Party’s separate global warming mantra. See, too, our southern border, Party’s immigration “policy,” Biden’s foreign policy, defense attitude, and on and on.