PrairiePundit

 Salena Zito: ... As one Democratic strategist told me last week, “If Biden can just get a win and pass this bill, voters will be happy,” completely missing why voters are falling away from Biden. Last week, the Goucher College poll conducted here in Maryland shows that since March, Biden's job approval has gone from 62% to 53%, with only 43% of independent voters approving of his performance. The two Democrats representing the state in the Senate, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who is up for reelection in 2022, and senior Sen. Benjamin Cardin, were underwater at 44% and 46%. Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, conversely, is at a robust 68% approval rating, up 6 percentage points since the last poll. ... I think Democrats who think passing a massive spending bill will solve their political problem are delusional. There are too many other issues where Biden and the Dems are underwater leaving many to be eager to vote against them.   If they are losing Maryland, their troubles are deeper...

 Joel Kotkin: Few things in life are as predictable as the rhetoric of climate change summits like this coming week's in Glasgow. Over the next week, you will hear again and again that the planet is dying and that climate change will cause mass dislocations and starvation. The end is nigh, the UN has told us, and only green house gas reducing penance can save us. We have been hearing this now for decades , with each global confab upping the ante, insisting that with the inevitable denouement , "not enough" is being done and what we need is to get more militant . And this despite whatever progress has been made. The climate industrial complex, as economist Bjorn Lonborg has aptly called the climate doomsday crowd, has persuaded the media to indulge consistent exaggeration and predictions that link virtually any weather event — droughts, floods , hurricanes or heavy rains —directly to human caused climate change. As President Obama's undersecretary of energy for s...

  Washington Examiner: Tensions emerge between Biden climate goals and Uyghur forced labor crackdown At this point, Biden has chosen to dither about the slavery issue.   He may see it as a lose-lose proposition.  I am of the opinion that he is overrating the climate change issue and avoiding a real-world problem of Chicom slavery in the production of solar panels. I am not a fan of solar panels.  They have limited usage and are unreliable on a mass scale.  They ae also vulnerable to extreme weather.

 Washington Times: China and Russia have dramatically accelerated their naval shipbuilding and modernization programs in recent years, while the U.S. has struggled to improve its own capacity for warfighting missions and been tagged with a poor readiness rating from national security analysts. The Chinese have made particularly notable strides, engaging in a maritime buildup that made global headlines a year ago when Pentagon officials sounded the alarm that Beijing’s total fleet roughly 350 warships had surpassed the roughly 300 maintained by Washington. The U.S. force still vastly outstrips China ‘s in terms of real power projection. America, for instance, has 11 active aircraft carriers compared with just two that Beijing has brought online since 2012. However, the Chinese Communist Party makes no secret of its goal to build a “world-class” military by 2050, and U.S. analysts are increasingly wary that Washington may struggle to keep pace with China ‘s rapidly expanding shipb...

 Western Journal: As gas prices soar across the country, President Joe Biden attempted to explain the benefits of electric cars. Predictably, his explanation was more confusing than it was helpful. Biden was giving a speech Thursday describing his two massive spending sprees, also known as the Build Back Better plan and infrastructure bill . According to a White House transcript , Biden was describing the need to replace buses and cars with electric alternatives like rail and electric cars. “When you buy an electric vehicle, you can go across America on a single tank of gas, figuratively speaking,” Biden said. “It’s not gas. You plug it in.” ... Biden’s suggestion that you can drive across the country in an electric car on the equivalent of one tank of gas is false on multiple levels. First, electric cars have a shorter range than gas cars. The average electric car can travel 250-350 miles on a single charge, the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies reported. The 350-mile ...

  Philadelphia Inquirer: Coal, a pariah fuel for climate activists, has made a quiet comeback this year in the post-lockdown economic resurgence . Coal stockpiles at power plants are getting so low that the regional electric grid operator, PJM Interconnection, has taken steps to prevent a system collapse this winter similar to Texas earlier this year . PJM, based near Valley Forge, this month imposed new rules on power plants in 13 states and the District of Columbia to make sure electricity generators do not run short of fuel during a cold snap. The rules could force some coal generators to curtail operations to build up emergency reserves, increasing power prices already on the rise. Demand for coal has jumped in response to rising natural gas prices, even though coal emits more toxic and greenhouse gases per kilowatt hour generated than rival fuels. Coal-fired power plants have struggled to replenish stockpiles because the energy sector is facing the same kind of supply chain ...

  Breitbart: Ethics Complaint: Terry McAuliffe Reportedly Accepted $350K Donation from Foreign Entity Linked to Money Laundering Probe ...   LycaTel LLC, an entity owned by a Sri Lankan-British national, reportedly donated $350,000 in July to McAuliffe. The   Free Beacon   reported the entity is a subsidiary of the owner of a “U.K.-based telecom conglomerate, which boasts a complicated web of offshore businesses and has been the subject of tax-fraud and money-laundering charges in France.” Allirajah Subaskaran, the reported mastermind of the web of entities, also reportedly owns additional companies in other sectors, which have come under scrutiny in France for alleged unpaid taxes. During the French investigation, French officials arrested “19 people suspected of being involved in a money-laundering system implicating Lycamobile and Lycamobile Services,” French prosecutors  stated . Activity linked to the alleged fraud was reportedly photographed in ...

 Power Line: A central tenet of Critical Race Theory is that America’s institutions are “systemically” rigged to favor white people. POCs just can’t catch up, no matter what they do. Of course, if that were true it would be hard to explain why whites rank only  17th  in median income, trailing such allegedly oppressed groups as Lebanese, Iranian, Pakistani, Syrian, Ghanian and Nigerian Americans, as well, of course, as Indian-Americans, whose median income is close to double that of whites. But devotees of Critical Race Theory have never worried much about facts. Then, too, we have the phenomenon of whites pretending to be people of color. If it is a crippling drawback to be Native American, why did Elizabeth Warren pretend to be one? Everyone knows the answer to that question–affirmative action–but somehow, it is improper to mention it in polite society. Everyone who applies for anything knows that it is a help, not a hindrance, to be a minority. Or, in more up-to-date j...

  Post Millennial: Caravan of migrants REFUSES offer of work visas from Mexican government   A group of thousands of migrants from Central America passing through southern Mexico has been offered visas to stay and work in Mexico by Mexican authorities on Friday. They refused the offer. This refusal should make them ineligible to be considered as refugees in the US.  This would be the case if there was any hint of sanity in the Biden immigration policy. See, also: Mayorkas admits Remain in Mexico policy works but administration launches second attempt to end it And:  Border Patrol tallies record 557 migrant deaths on US-Mexico border in 2021 fiscal year

 Fox News: Republicans demand answers from Biden Cabinet on reported payments to illegal immigrants: 'Horrific decision '  Republicans demand answers from Mayorkas, Garland and Becerra The Biden administration's handling of illegal immigration is already a polling disaster for the administration and this will only add to the intensity of the dislike of their handling of illegal immigration.  It is absurd to reward people coming here illegally with a large payout when citizens are already struggling with the results of Biden's inept economic decisions.  See, also: Reported Biden plan to pay illegal immigrants $450K could surpass payments to some 9/11, military families   Payments of $450K per person are reportedly being considered by the Biden admin And:  The true heinousness of the proposed $450,000 payments to illegal aliens

  Times of Israel: 1 in 4 COVID patients hospitalized while vitamin D deficient die – Israeli study   Among those without deficiency who are hospitalized, only 3% die; patients with insufficient D are also 14 times likelier to end up in severe or critical condition, research shows A British study showed similar results soon after the outbreak of Covid in that country.  People with dark skin were also especially vulnerable when having vitamin D deficiencies.  It suggests that taking vitamin D supplements can help people resist Covid fatalities.

  Red States: ISIS was trending this morning on Twitter, and that’s never a good thing. The reason was because there’s a very real terror threat warning for the weekend in Northern Virginia. Law enforcement is warning about a possible attack from an active terror cell on malls or shopping centers just outside of D.C. From CBS: “We have increased our police presence throughout the county to include major thoroughfares, transit hubs, shopping plazas and shopping malls,” Fairfax County police chief Kevin Davis said Friday. Police said the increased law enforcement presence will be in place through the Halloween weekend and ahead of Virginia’s gubernatorial election. Law enforcement officials said they are acting out of an abundance of caution, and as they learn more about the threat, the increased law enforcement presence could be extended through Tuesday’s election. “It’s just our responsibility to have a greater presence, to be more aware and to ask the community to have their eyes ...

 Epoch Times: ... The Pentagon maintains that the Afghan government wanted to classify the data and that it recommended against it but “abided by the decision of the original classification authority.” Overall, the department says it has cooperated with SIGAR since the office was created by Congress. The State Department, meanwhile, wrote to Sopko shortly after U.S.-backed Afghan forces were routed by the Taliban terrorist group as the U.S. moved to fully withdraw from the country. “Shortly after the fall of Kabul, the State Department wrote to me and other oversight agencies requesting to ‘temporarily suspend access’ to all ‘audit, inspection, and financial audit … reports’ on our website because the Department was afraid that information included in those reports could put Afghan allies at risk,” Sopko said. While the watchdog believes Afghans at risk should be protected, the State Department was never able to describe any specific threats nor could they explain how removing the ...

 Andrew McCarthy: Merrick Garland turns out to be a political hack. The attorney general very much enjoys his reputation as a distinguished former federal appellate judge and wants to be seen in his current incarnation as a wise, moderate progressive. Those types, we should know by now, are always progressives first. Their “moderation” reflects not skepticism about statist goals but awareness of the need to maintain political viability by not overdoing the pace of Change! It is a moderation too feeble, too blah, to temper the passionate self-righteousness, extortionate tendencies, and deep pockets of the Bolshevik Left that now dominates the Democratic Party. There was a reason Garland was an Obama/Biden nominee to the Supreme Court . Even if he is more law-and-order-oriented than his party’s increasingly anti-enforcement mainstream, he would have been a reliable vote on the cases that matter to the Left. And there is a reason President Biden named him attorney general. Given the r...

 Washington Examiner Editorial: J oe Biden had one job. He inherited a rapidly recovering economy and three approved vaccines for the novel coronavirus. All he had to do was sit back and watch his presidency succeed. Instead, through inflationary overspending and radical anti-energy measures, he has slowed the recovery to a crawl. The price of gasoline is up 50% and third-quarter economic growth was a pathetic 2%. Biden now wants to make that even worse with still more overspending. But Democrats keep providing reminders that, yes, it can always get worse. The far Left now has its heart set on taking away not just the income but also the wealth of billionaires. It is a deeply stupid idea based on a form of class envy that most people just don’t feel. Most people recognize that their lives are not at all made worse by the existence of billionaires — in fact, they create the billionaires in the first place, rewarding certain people’s innovations by purchasing their goods and services...

 Victoria Taft: Much is happening on the West Coast, Messed Coast this week. In the same week that yet another study showed that COVID is not “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” the good little tyrants-in-training at a Portland, Ore. high school held an interesting Portland pandemic protest. Was it filled with the typical West Coast, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, COVID mandates have got to go!”? Was it the chant they learned at the city-endorsed Antifa summer camp – “The whole damn system is guilty as hell!”? Or perhaps it was a sing-along to the old chestnut, “I’m gonna tell all you fascists, you may be surprised! People all over this world are getting organized!” No. Considering that protesting is encouraged and rewarded in Portland schools by their Antifa-friendly teachers, the school pandemic protest was, in a word, unexpected. Two hundred Grant High School students bravely and selflessly cut class to attend a rally in favor of forcing vaccination mandates on students. Said one student i...

 Jack Hellner: On August 25, the "experts" forecast third-quarter  GDP growth at 5.7% . On Sept. 28, the "experts"  lowered the projected growth to 4% . On Oct. 28, the first reading of third-quarter  GDP came out at...2% .  The experts were so close. While campaigning for Terry McAuliffe the other night, Joe Biden said the economy is doing great because of his policies and that the U.S. now has more jobs than before the pandemic. It was trash.  I would not say a decelerating economic growth from 6.7% is doing great, and we have five million fewer jobs, not more jobs.  (I must have missed the fact-checkers correcting this whopper.) Biden, his spokeswoman Jen Psaki, and others continue to intentionally lie that Biden's great policies brought us out of a deep recession when the facts show that the recession ended nine months before he took office and the economy was growing rapidly at the end of President Trump's term. ...

  NY Post: Parents sue medical examiner over suicide ruling for woman who died of 20 stab wounds Her activity before her death does not suggest suicide. 

 Wall Street Journal: The Supreme Court will soon reconsider the decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), which made abortion legal in America through all nine months of pregnancy. At that “point in the development of man’s knowledge,” as Justice Harry Blackmun put it in Roe, there was simply no consensus about when life begins. In other words, the fetus could not be said with any certainty to be alive and therefore wasn’t worthy of legal protection. As a diagnostic radiologist—whose youngest patients are fetuses, who are very much alive—I submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization urging the justices to rethink Roe, a case premised on a claim about science. I was joined by two other female physicians, a neonatologist and an obstetrician, who also value their youngest patients, believing that whether inside their mothers or born, premature or full-term, they are worthy of respect and protection. Ultrasound technology was in its infancy in the 1970s...

  Newsmax: Poll: 57 Percent of Americans Say Economy Worse Under Biden Spending is down too, but inflation is also eating up more of people's disposable income. 

  Fox News: Former US soldier returns to Afghanistan, rescues Christians from Taliban   Afghanistan war veteran returns to save his family targeted by the Taliban He got at least 30 people out of the country by moving them to Pakistan. 

 I&I: Swedish socialist economist Assar Lindbeck is semi-famous for saying that “in many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing.” It’s becoming clearer that one of the most efficient ways to destroy the U.S. economy, outside of bombing the country, is to put Joe Biden in the White House. Economic growth in the third quarter was a meager 2%, the Commerce Department reported Thursday, the most feeble increase of the pandemic recovery. Some economists had forecast a gain closer to 3%, leaving many disappointed. As the Asia Times accurately summed it up, the U.S. “economy ground to a halt.” The economy grew 33.8% in the third quarter last year, after two straight quarters of GDP losses due to ill-advised lockdown policies. It grew 4.5% in the fourth quarter, and 6.3% in the first quarter of 2021, when Trump economic policies were still in effect. A healthy 6.7% increase followed in the second quarter, but...

  John Solomon: Cognitively impaired nursing home residents in Wisconsin and Michigan cynically exploited for votes. Election mismanagement in Atlanta. Unlawful election instructions in Wisconsin. And 50,000 questionable ballots in Arizona, plus several criminal cases for illegal ballot harvesting and inmate voting. Eleven months after Donald Trump was ousted from office, the narrative that the 2020 election was clean and secure has frayed like a well-worn shoelace. The challenges of the COVID pandemic, the aggressive new tactics of voting activists and the desire of Democrats to make the collection and delivery of ballots by third parties legal in states where harvesting is expressly forbidden has muddied the establishment portrait and awakened the nation to the painful reality its election system — particularly in big urban areas — is far from perfection. Nowhere has that story become more clear than the battleground state of Wisconsin, where a local sheriff on Thursday dramatica...

 Stacey Lennox: ... This study was  published in the  European Journal of Epidemiology  on September 30, 2021, roughly three weeks after President Biden announced his vaccine mandate to distract from his flaming failure in Afghanistan. In the introduction, Subramanian noted: Vaccines currently are the primary mitigation strategy to combat COVID-19 around the world. For instance, the narrative related to the ongoing surge of new cases in the United States (US) is argued to be driven by areas with low vaccination rates [ 1 ]. A similar narrative also has been observed in countries, such as Germany and the United Kingdom [ 2 ]. At the same time, Israel that was hailed for its swift and high rates of vaccination has also seen a substantial resurgence in COVID-19 cases [ 3 ]. So how’s that going? Subramanian examined the relationship between the percentage of the fully vaccinated population and new COVID-19 cases across 68 countries and 2,947 counties in the United S...

  Washington Examiner: Supreme Court to review EPA authority to regulate power sector emissions The radical environmentalist want to change the nation's method of producing energy to inefficient and unreliable alternative energy.  They want to impose rules like California which have led to blackouts at the same time they are pushing electric cars. 

  Red States: PJ Media Stands Their Ground After Twitter Locks Account for "Misgendering" Rachel Levine What many conservatives are saying is that feelings do not override the facts of what your chromosomes reveal about your sex or gender.  Science can determine your sex or gender and not the voices in your head.   Big Tech appears to be siding with the feelings and not the science.

  Epoch Times: NYC: 40 Percent of Inspected Businesses Noncompliant With Vaccine Pass Mandate This looks like another example of what a limited tool mandates are in dealing with the virus.  By imposing them, the government is losing the respect of the people in many cases.  It looks like Florida and Texas have done better without them.

A Congressman with a realistic approach to energy makes his case.  He is spot on.

 Stephen Green: Desperate Democrats Aren’t Making Sausage, They’re Dropping Live Pigs Into a Woodchipper It is what happens when you have a slender majority and no mandate.  As soon as they round up one bunch a few strays break away.  The ability to compromise has also escaped them.  

  Clay and Buck: CLAY: Joe Biden is saying that he’s not in any way raising taxes on people even though he is. What do we have to do to end this inflation onslaught which I believe is at a 30-year high? I think even Jimmy Carter’s looking around wondering what in the world’s happened. PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, Jimmy Carter’s looking very good right now because he was sort of used as an example of how not to do things and he’s done a lot of better than what they’re doing right now. No, it is inflation nation. And to a certain extent it starts with the energy, fuel. You take a look at what we did, we were a totally… We were free! We were free from the Middle East. We were free from everything. We were energy independent. I think really the first time ever. They say the first time in 75 years. I would say the first time ever, and I was very proud of it. Now it’s the opposite. They’re going to OPEC, Russia. They went to Saudi Arabia individually. “We need oil, we need oil,” we’re begging....

  Washington Examiner: Dirty trick? McAuliffe campaign passes off tiki torch holders as genuine Youngkin supporters This looks like more politics of fraud by Democrats.  While the Democrats' campaign denies being behind the smear , other reports describe several of the participants as Democrat activists . ... In what appeared to be a coordinated hit, media figures and members of the Terry McAuliffe campaign immediately spread the picture as proof that white supremacists support the Youngkin campaign. Yet, it was obvious the picture presented the opposite. As I noted, you could zoom in and see that one of the men was black, which would be odd if these were actually white supremacists. Another appeared to be a woman. The entire ordeal was too perfect, as well. The “reporter” who spread the picture claims to have heard them say: “We are all in for Glenn.” Within minutes, McAuliffe’s spokeswoman was on social media saying the picture disqualified Youngkin from the race. ... The e...

 Newsmax: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday outlined all the steps his state is taking to secure the border it shares with Mexico, telling Newsmax that more than $3 billion of the state taxpayers' money has been appropriated so the state can meet obligations that the federal government and the Biden administration won't. "Listen, we have to do it," the Republican governor told Eric Bolling, the host of Newsmax's " Eric Bolling The Balance ." "We have to secure our border while the federal government twiddles its thumbs." Abbott said state officials are carefully monitoring the latest caravan heading its way. According to eyewitnesses, at least 2,000 migrants from Central America and the Caribbean are traveling north across Mexico in their push to reach the U.S. border. Texas will be ready to push back the caravan as well as others who are trying to enter the United States illegally, the governor stressed. "We're adding thousands up...

 John Daniel Davidson: If you want to know how well our elites are managing to control the discourse, consider this: a pair of “Let’s Go Brandon” anthems shot to the top of iTunes chart rankings this week . Rapper Bryson Gray’s song hit number one despite getting banned from YouTube on the ridiculous pretext that it contains “medical misinformation,” while rapper Loza Alexander’s “Let’s Go Brandon” hit number two. Both of them beat out Adele’s “Easy On Me,” which was knocked down to number three. (Another version of Alexander’s song nabbed the number four spot.) So three of the four top iTunes songs this week are “Let’s Go Brandon” anthems. Truth be told, the songs are not all that good. Their popularity has more to do with what they represent, which is a firm rejection of the idea that we can simply be told what to do and how to think by a cultural and political elite who hate us, and that we have no control over the public discourse or the narratives that define our times. Big ...