PrairiePundit

 Moneywise: 'Go woke, go broke': Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya suggests that Northeast cities like NYC, Boston are bleeding income because of political ideology — all while the South keeps booming ... Palihapitiya sent out a screenshot of a recent Bloomberg article based on how six southern states had contributed more to U.S. gross domestic product than the northeast corridor of Washington-New York-Boston for the first time in history. ... The South is where the growth is of the US economy.  Liberal Democrats are a drag on the economy of cities where they dominate. 

 Daily Mail: Joe Biden 's slew of regulations implemented over the course of his two-and-a-half years running the country have cost every American household nearly $10,000. If the president continues on his current regulation path and is reelected for a second term in 2024, according to the report from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity , Americans could be slammed with a $60,000 increase in costs by 2028. Meanwhile, estimates from the report found that former President Trump ended up decreasing the cost of Americans by nearly $3,000 per year during his four year term. The analysis comes as President Biden unveiled on Wednesday his 'Bidenomics' plan during a speech in Chicago . The new proposal attempts to project a vision of middle-class prosperity by taxing the wealthiest and using those funds to invest in national security interests like semiconductors and education for middle-class Americans. Just last week a DailyMail.com poll revealed that 52 percent of all voters ...

 Yahoo News: In January of this year, the company ZeroAvia announced that its 19-seater jet had completed a flight using nothing but green hydrogen — a fuel that produces no harmful carbon pollution and is made with clean energy. At that time, the flight was the largest ever for an aircraft powered only by a hydrogen-electric engine. But about a month and a half later, on March 2, the aerospace company Universal Hydrogen completed an even larger test flight. ... But the company won’t be without competitors in this effort. Rolls-Royce , Airbus, and ZeroAvia are all testing out jets with engines that can use hydrogen fuel. ... The article does not indicate how the hydrogen was extracted and used for fuel.  That could be an important aspect of this business model and it might not be limited to just airplanes. 

 Time: ... Physically, Taiwan sits astride some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes and prevents China from projecting power far beyond its shores. If China were to annex Taiwan and station its military on the island, it would be able to limit U.S. military operations in the region and hamper our ability to defend our allies. Geopolitically, should we fail to counter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, our allies would have doubts about whether they could rely on us. China’s military, if occupying Taiwan, would be only seventy miles from Japanese territory and 120 miles from the Philippines. Our allies, questioning whether we would or even could come to their defense, would be faced with a difficult choice: drawing closer to China or taking their security into their own hands, potentially to include developing nuclear weapons. Either outcome would result in diminished U.S. influence and increased regional and global instability. Economically, given Taiwan’s dominance of semiconduc...

 Breitbart: 8 Cases Where Mishandling of Classified Information Went Unpunished Some of the names on the list-- Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, James Comey, Barack Obama, and others.  Most of the people on the list are Democrats which may explain why they were never prosecuted.

 Fox News: The U.S. Attorney who led the federal investigation into Hunter Biden was "briefed" on the key FBI form that contained allegations that then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national were engaged in a criminal bribery scheme that involved influence over U.S. policy decisions, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed Wednesday. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent letters to Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Trump-appointed Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who led the federal investigation into Hunter Biden demanding answers amid allegations from whistleblowers suggesting the probe was slow-walked and influenced by politics. GRASSLEY, GRAHAM DEMAND FBI TURN OVER KEY DOCUMENT LINKED TO BIDEN ALLEGATIONS Graham wrote to Garland and Weiss separately, seeking information on the alleged politicization that influenced decisions throughout the Hunter Biden probe. The document in questi...

 Larry Kudlow: ... Trouble with Mr. Biden is he’s a stick-in-the-mud class warrior. Middle, lower, upper … diversity, equity, inclusion … woke. … It’s all left-wing gibberish. Mr. Biden says his “middle out, bottom up,” whatever that means, is “working.” Sure it is, Mr. President…. A couple of new polls are out today. YouGov just said 29 percent of voters approve of his inflation policy, while 61 percent disapprove. Overall, a recent AP/NORC (University of Chicago) poll says 34 percent of voters approve of Biden’s economic policy. Just 34 percent. So, we have a disconnect here between rhetoric and reality. Or, in terms of “middle out, bottom up”: real hourly earnings, a.k.a., middle class wages, are falling 3 percent at an annual rate. Real average weekly earnings are falling at a 5 percent annual rate. For the bottom quartile of income earners — which is $38,000 a year or less — they’ve declined by 2.3 percent under Joe Bidenomics. For the second quartile — which is $57,000 or le...

ISW: ... The Kremlin may intend to assume formal control over the Wagner Group following its armed rebellion and turn it into a state-owned enterprise, although it is not clear if the Kremlin has committed itself to such a course of action. The Wall Street Journal reported that Russian authorities decided to assume control over Wagner’s activities abroad.[7] Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Vershinin reportedly flew to Damascus to tell Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that Wagner will no longer operate as an independent organization in Syria and that Wagner personnel reported to the Russian military base in Latakia. Russian Foreign Ministry representatives also reportedly told Central African Republic President Faustin-Archange Touadera and Malian leadership that Wagner will continue operations in their respective countries.[8] Putin claimed on June 27 that the Kremlin “fully funds” and “fully supplies” Wagner, and Russian officials may use Wagner’s existing status as a state-fin...

 Town Hall: Even though Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas joined Chief Justice Roberts in the majority opinion finding that using a student's race in college admission decision violated the 14th Amendment, Thomas also filed a concurring opinion explaining more of his thinking on the matter. In his usual style, Justice Thomas traces the history of the United States and its citizens' ongoing efforts to pursue a more perfect union — efforts that haven't always been smooth and have, at points, failed to move the country forward. Still, Thomas shares his optimism that America will continue to become a better place, all while excoriating the left's "equity" agenda. "The solution to our Nation’s racial problems thus cannot come from policies grounded in affirmative action or some other conception of equity," Thomas writes. "Racialism simply cannot be undone by different or more racialism. Instead, the solution announced in the second founding is in...

 Daily Caller: Biden Brags About Killing Coal Plants As Grid Operators Warn Of Rolling Blackouts He is killing fossil fuel energy without a viable replacement to take its place.  It is already clear that wind and solar will be inadequate and too unreliable to fuel American energy. And: Innovative research provides breakthrough in ‘night-time solar’ energy: ‘We hope for rapid progress’ ... Researchers at the School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney) recently produced electricity using solar power emitted as infrared light. The solar power most of us are familiar with uses sunlight; rays of light hit a solar panel, and cells in the panel absorb the sun’s energy and convert it to electricity. As it turns out, there is lingering solar energy available even at night. As the Earth cools each night, leftover solar power from the day radiates outwards in the form of infrared light — the kind of light night vision gogg...

 Telegraph: Pothole damage from electric cars is double that of petrol, Telegraph data show The heavier vehicles are also accused of being a threat to parking structures.  See, also: EV transition upends auto industry with rash of layoffs, buyouts, production cuts, bankruptcy

 Daily Wire: U.S. House lawmakers accused the Biden Administration in a new report on Monday of conspiring with Big Tech to directly undermine American citizens’ First Amendment rights by censoring free speech through government-funded third-party intermediaries. The House Weaponization Subcommittee released an interim staff report detailing how President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) allegedly used the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to surveil and censor Americans’ speech on social media in the run-up of the 2020 election and the 2022 midterm elections. “CISA must be reined in, as must the Biden Administration’s ‘whole-of-government’ approach to social media censorship,” lawmakers wrote in the report. “Every American has the right to express his or her opinion online, and to receive information from others. Government classifications of opinions as ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ do not nullify the First Amendment’s guarantees.” ...

 Bloomberg: Europe’s LNG Imports Overtake Pipeline Gas for First Time The LNG is imported from the US and other producers making Europe less dependent on the Russians. 

 Wall Street Journal: Throw Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal in the Trash The IRS whistleblowers say Justice sabotaged the investigation, so how can the agreement stand? The deal looks like something Hunter's dad wanted.  See, also: Biden denies involvement in son Hunter's Chinese business dealings after new message emerges WhatsApp message suggested President Biden was sitting next to Hunter during negotiations with Chinese businessman We need to have someone follow the money to be sure.  And: IRS whistleblower says 'most substantive felony charges were left off the table' in Hunter Biden probe IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley told Fox News' Bret Baier he is 'frustrated,' says team was 'hindered' while investigating the president's son And:   The Burisma Case in Ukraine and the Hunter Biden Case in the U.S. Were Forged Using the Same Scheme In order to get Hunter Biden out from under attack the Biden family successfully adopted the Ukrainian experience: a...

 Newsbusters: Many have suspected an internal rebellion at Twitter against owner Elon Musk’s vision of a free speech platform. And now we have evidence to show that Musk’s moves to make Twitter more of a free speech platform have been successful despite attempts by his disgruntled anti-free speech employees to thwart him. In recent weeks, Twitter has begun to slow its censorship of those criticizing the “transgender” movement. The shift came after the platform changed its “deadnaming” and “misgendering” policy on April 18, and following several staff resignations, including the head of Trust and Safety chief Ella Irwin ’s departure on June 1. Twitter saw a 261 percent drop in censored users and posts critiquing the left’s radical “transgender” ideology in the month after the policy change (April 18 through May 17, 2023) compared with the month prior (March 18 through April 17, 2023), according to data found in MRC Free Speech America’s CensorTrack.org database. The month prior sh...

ISW: ... Russian sources speculated that Wagner’s rebellion is already having widespread impacts on the Russian command structure. A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Wagner’s rebellion has prompted “large-scale purges” among the command cadre of the Russian armed forces and that the Russian MoD is currently undergoing a “crash test” for loyalty.[7] The milblogger claimed that the Russian Federal Protective Service (FSO) is conducting a review of the Russian military leadership as well as the individual unit commanders.[8] The milblogger claimed that Russian officials are using the MoD’s “indecisiveness” in suppressing the rebellion and “support for paramilitary companies (PMCs)” as pretexts to remove “objectionable” personnel from their positions. The milblogger notably claimed that Russian Airborne Forces (VDV) commander and rumored deputy theater commander Colonel General Mikhail Teplinsky assumed responsibilities as overall theater commander in Ukraine from Chief of the Gen...

 John Feehery: ... He is prone to wide exaggerations about his own life experiences and has a penchant for at times stealing the words of another . He often says things that have no possibility of being true. Because voters seemingly grade on a curve, Biden’s gift for gab and Irish charm has carried him to a position of power that just about nobody saw in his future. That includes his former boss, President Obama, who talked him out of running in 2016 and who made clear to anybody who would listen that he didn’t think Biden was up to the job. Biden has a habit of making exactly the wrong decisions. On international issues, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said of Biden , “he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” From his vaccine mandates to his mask mandates, from his reckless spending plans that helped to spur inflation to his embrace of the defund the police crowd, from his doubling down on the climate...

 USA Today: The majority of Marcos Perez’s friends fled the country last year. Now, he and his family are pooling their money to do the same. “Only a few of my friends are left, the ones who lack ambition and the ones who have kids. I could count them on one hand,” Perez said. His father sells goods on the black market to keep the family fed and clothed, and has even earned enough to buy a new, sleek metal fridge, an uncommon luxury in Cuba. Over the past year, 305,000 Cubans crossed the U.S.-Mexico border , most asking for asylum. That’s nearly 3% of the island’s population. Many migrants flew to Nicaragua or Panama, countries that do not require a specific visa for Cubans, and trekked through Central America and Mexico to arrive at the U.S. border. Others applied for visas to travel to the U.S. directly. The exodus was the product of the island’s economic collapse, which has driven many thousands into food insecurity. Originally, Cubans were exempt from Title 42, the pandemic-era...

 Hot Air: ... At issue is the claim that US Attorney David Weiss had free rein to charge Hunter Biden for any criminal acts uncovered in the investigation he was conducting. Both Attorney General Merrick Garland and US Attorney Weiss have testified or claimed that there was no political interference in the investigation, and the IRS whistleblowers have alleged that there was quite a bit. We do know that the IRS investigators were shown the door after making it clear that they felt the case was being improperly run–I wrote about that fact a while back, and that stinks to high heaven. But these latest allegations are far more serious: they include perjury on the part of the Attorney General, and lying to Congress on the part of Weiss. If true, both men are theoretically in legal jeopardy, and any fig leaf that the case wasn’t rigged–we all know it was, but couldn’t prove it–flies off into the winds of a hurricane. Well, according to the NYT, they have confirmed at least one of the al...

 PM: Hunter Biden told Chinese business associate 'The Bidens are the best I know at doing exactly what the Chairman wants' for energy company deal in 2017: House GOP The day after the message was sent, the committee revealed that Owasco PC, one of Hunter Biden’s companies, received a $100,000 payment from CEFC. It looks like the Chicoms got their money's worth out of their payment to the Bidens. 

 Robert Spencer: It was bad enough that 51 of the nation’s top intelligence officials declared in Oct. 2020, at the height of the presidential campaign, that Hunter Biden’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” But now the flagrant dishonesty of the whole affair has gotten exponentially worse, for any lingering doubt that these officials had access to adequate information when they published their assessment has been put to rest: it has now come to light that the FBI found the laptop to be authentic months before the intelligence officials told the world that it wasn’t. The last doubt that the 51 officials were brazenly lying to the American people has been removed. It’s important to remember exactly who it was who lied to us. The chief signatory was James Clapper, who is listed on the letter as the former Director of National Intelligence, former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, former Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligenc...

 PJ Media: The coordinated and sophisticated attacks on conservative Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are no accident. This is a deliberate campaign to tarnish the reputation of justices and delegitimize their decisions in the eyes of citizens. These attacks are long on rhetoric and short on substance. But that’s how the game is being played. Lacking actual proof of wrongdoing, the left has taken to insinuating ethics violations. The smears are being published on the left-wing website ProPublica. “ProPublica isn’t a news organization; it’s a front group for liberal billionaires wanting to ensure that the court rubber stamps their political agenda,” Judicial Crisis Network President Carrie Severino told the  Washington Examiner . ProPublica is a non-profit news site funded primarily by the Sandler Foundation, “which has  given  nearly $40 million to the organization since 2010,” according to the  Examiner.  The Sandlers have been plagu...

 John Solomon: When the  Justice Department discovered from journalists a storage locker  containing evidence against ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a search was executed immediately. But when IRS agents found a similar storage area containing evidence in the Hunter Biden criminal tax probe, they were denied the right to search despite meeting the probable cause standard, then Biden's lawyers were tipped off, according to new congressional testimony. Likewise, when federal prosecutors believed there was evidence of crimes at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, they launched an unprecedented and full scale-raid on the former president. But when agents wanted to execute a search warrant at Joe Biden’s Delaware home because they had probable cause to believe evidence of Hunter Biden tax crimes, they were turned down for a warrant to raid the guest house in which the first son was living. And when FBI agents believed former Trump adviser Michael Flynn had committed n...

 John Solomon: If Hunter Biden pleads guilty next month as expected to two misdemeanor tax evasion charges, he’ll be admitting he shorted the U.S. government of about $100,000 in taxes he owed in 2017-18. But it’s a far cry from the evidence the IRS and FBI developed showing a pattern of tax evasion and avoidance that stretched back to his father’s term as vice president a decade ago, according to newly released documents and testimony. Supervisory IRS Agent Gary Shapley told Congress in bombshell testimony made public Thursday that federal agents had evidence Hunter Biden had failed to pay about $2.2 million in taxes dating to 2014 and planned to pursue multiple felonies before they were thwarted by political appointees of the Justice Department. That alleged interference, according to Shapley and a second IRS whistleblower, ranged from refusing to approve search warrants and specific indictments sought in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles to allowing the statute of limitation to ex...

 ISW: ... It remains unclear whether the Russian MoD will dissolve Wagner detachments and reassign Wagner personnel to pre-existing regular units. Such a drastic reorganization would be tantamount to the dissolution of the Wagner Group in Ukraine as a distinct organizational entity and would eliminate the unique combat power that the Wagner Group developed for itself in Ukraine. A Russian MoD decision to maintain separate Wagner units within the MoD structure would pose stability risks when subordinating previously independent and overindulged Wagner forces under the MoD highly bureaucratic military command. Separate Wagner forces would likely continue to pose an internal threat to Russia due to their dissatisfaction with the Russian military command – the reason why Wagner forces followed Prigozhin into the armed rebellion in the first place. The Kremlin campaign to destroy Prigozhin’s reputation and possibly dissolve the Wagner Group’s Ukraine force decreases the probability of P...