PrairiePundit

 Washington Examiner: O il prices soared on Tuesday following news that  European Union leaders  had reached a consensus on a plan to ban nearly all Russian oil imports by the end of the year, seeking to punish Moscow for its  war in Ukraine , even as the bloc  scrambles  to secure alternative supplies. News of the  embargo , which is slated to be finalized this week, sent crude oil futures rising Tuesday morning to the highest levels in more than a decade. International benchmark Brent Crude saw a 1.90% increase, rising to $123.98 a barrel in the early hours of trading, near the highest price since 2012. Meanwhile, futures for the U.S.-based West Texas Intermediate climbed to their highest levels in more than a decade, rising as high as $119.10 a barrel Tuesday morning — a roughly 3.50% spike. The last time prices were close to this high was mid-March. Leaders said on Tuesday that the planned oil embargo would immediately hit 75% of Russian oil imports to the bloc. It will halt all Ru

  Washington Examiner: Sussmann found not guilty in blow to John Durham's investigation It looks like Durham was facing a stacked deck with an Obama Judge and a DC jury made up of Clinton voters. 

 Red States: As we noted earlier,  Joe Biden is in a quandary as to how to change his sliding numbers. He’s  frustrated  even that his numbers are worse than those of President Donald Trump.  As NBC noted,  “He’s now lower than Trump, and he’s really twisted about it,” another person close to the White House said. He also thinks Democrats aren’t defending him enough. Biden is supposedly upset that his people are undercutting him, but his people respond, “We don’t say anything that the president doesn’t want us to say.” In other words, what Biden is saying now — or what NBC is spreading out there to try to make him look better — just doesn’t add up. That’s the problem when it comes to Biden; that’s why the polls are continuing to crash: because no one believes that Joe Biden knows what he is doing and they believe all the issues that we are having to deal with can be laid right in the lap of his confusion. It isn’t getting any better for him. The Civiqs poll just hit the basement on Bid

  Washington Examiner: Uvalde police stop cooperating with Texas investigations into school shooting: Report ...   Information presented by Texas officials has changed drastically over the past week as the investigations continue, though it now appears it took up to an hour on Tuesday before federal agents took  matters into their own hands  and killed the shooter in defiance of orders not to proceed. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in the attack. ... It looks like the delayed decision cost the lives of students and teachers. 

 Breitbart: House Democrats have such a bleak outlook for the upcoming midterms even districts President Joe Biden won by up to 15 points are in danger of flipping red, according to a report from  Axios . Citing the  Cook Political Report  that predicts Republicans will gain a net 20 to 35 seats in the midterm, shifting 10 races in favor of Republicans while only two in favor of Democrats, Axios concluded that Democrats have “bleak” prospects for this November. Per the report: 23 House Democrats have  announced  they won’t seek re-election, compared to just 11 Republicans. President Biden’s approval  has been hovering in the low 40s for several months, with inflation driving down his popularity. Polling shows Republicans are winning the  generic congressional ballot    by an average of 1.9 points — and they have still room to grow. Cook’s U.S. House editor Dave Wasserman said the most competitive races will be in states like New York, Michigan, Arizona, and California, states where “a

 Victor Davis Hanson: It was supposed to be a clear-cut, unambiguous invasion. Vladimir Putin’s much larger, richer, and more bellicose Russia staged a shock-and-awe attack on a much smaller, poorer Ukraine. He intended to decapitate the government in Kyiv. Then he would annex the eastern half of the country, and quickly consolidate his easy wins in preparation to ratchet up pressure to force western Ukraine into the Russian Federation. The rest is history. The Russian military proved ill-equipped and ill-supplied. It was poorly led, with a high percentage of low-morale, conscript troops. Russia had no viable strategic plan to capture, much less hold, the Ukrainian capital. Ukraine was Russia’s version of our Kabul—but tens of thousands of deaths added to the equation. Russian strategists naïvely believed NATO would become paralyzed in mutual recriminations and fear and follow the usual German prompt of appeasement. In fact, NATO united precisely because of the dire worries over furthe

 Laura Lam: The majority of Taiwanese don’t identify themselves as Chinese according to a  2020 Pew Research survey . This is consistent with other polls showing that people in Taiwan increasingly identify only as Taiwanese.  Xi Jinping , though, doesn’t care. His political ambition to bring Taiwan into the Chinese fold is the most influential factor in China’s policy over Taiwan—but even Xi’s ambitions may be insufficient when measured against the practical realities arrayed against him. A leaked memo from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in March 2022 suggested that Xi was planning an imminent attack against Taiwan. To that end,  Xi instructed family members  of senior CCP officials to sell all overseas assets to avoid inevitable Western sanctions. On May 24, a leaked audio clip revealed the CCP’s top brass  discussing the Taiwan invasion plan . This was the first-ever recording of a Chinese military leadership gathering. Taking advantage of Taiwan’s open society, the CCP’s military

 Miranda Devine: As Hunter Biden waits for the outcome of the Delaware criminal federal investigation into his taxes and overseas business dealings to be made public, new allies are attempting to flip the script on the scandal of his infamous laptop . Kevin Morris , the generous Los Angeles entertainment lawyer who loaned Hunter more than $2 million to pay off his tax debts, has launched a sensational public-relations campaign to discredit the laptop and divert attention from its damning revelations of the Biden family’s international influence-peddling scheme. Morris, 58, has assembled a team of 30 lawyers and investigators to help his friend Hunter , 52, “blunt the impact” of the Delaware probe, according to CBS News. But leaks from inside the Morris camp, and a hand-scrawled mind map he has shared with confidants, show a chaotic disinformation project attempting to rewrite the story of the laptop’s origins. The counternarrative Morris is mounting on Hunter’s behalf has nothing to d

 Fox News: Former Trump deputy national security adviser Victoria Coates denounced President Biden's decision Monday not to send rocket systems to Ukraine that could potentially reach Russia, arguing on " Fox News Live " that the move shows a "complete lack of strategy" from the White House regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine. VICTORIA COATES: It’s really remarkable. I mean, from the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, President Biden has repeatedly told Vladimir Putin what he will and will not do, and meanwhile, Putin's put everything on the table up to and including nuclear weapons. BIDEN SAYS PUTIN ‘NATOIZED’ EUROPE WITH WAR IN UKRAINE And here we are telling him, "Oh, we are not going to provoke you." It’s just emblematic of the administration’s complete lack of strategy on Ukraine. … CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP Zelenskyy has a plan. He has a strategy, he wants to win. The administration has no plan and they're not unleas

  Washington Examiner : President Joe Biden brought up 9 mm guns  in new comments  about gun control. The remarks on Memorial Day come one day after Biden visited  Uvalde, Texas , to  meet with the families  of victims and survivors of a school mass shooting that has renewed a wave of advocacy for more stringent firearm regulations. Speaking with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House, Biden had been asked how close Congress may be to  settling on gun access reforms , including red flag rules, to which he said it is "hard to say" because he has not been directly negotiating with Republicans. He spoke about a trauma doctor from New York who, decades ago, while Biden was a senator and holding hearings on what "rational" gun laws could be, showed him an X-ray while talking about "probably" being able to remove a 22-caliber bullet lodged in someone's lung to save a life. “A 9 mm bullet blows the lung out of the body," Biden added. "So the

  Jonathan Turley @JonathanTurley Biden just repeated his false statement about the Second Amendment again,. https:// nydailynews.com/news/politics/ us-elections-government/ny-biden-guns-second-amendment-uvalde-texas-school-mass-shooting-20220530-ekcx7zkqtzc33iavuxcnllyxb4-story.html … It does not seem to matter to the President that this is a false claim about the history of the Second Amendment. One could even call it disinformation. jonathanturley.org President Biden Repeats False Claim about the Second Amendment President Joe Biden on Wednesday repeated a claim about the Second Amendment that some of us have repeatedly challenged as untrue.  In asserting that “the Second Amendment is not absolute,” Preside… 12:48 PM · May 30, 2022 · Twitter Web App 1,058 Retweets 81 Quote Tweets 2,702 Likes Tip Tweet your reply Reply Jonathan Turley @JonathanTurley · 16h Replying to @JonathanTurley ...It is not clear if staffers have not explained to him that he is repeating a false claim (ove