PrairiePundit

 Business Insider: The Taliban posted photos of hundreds of US military vehicles it said were abandoned in the chaotic pullout of Afghanistan and now form part of its army ... A picture from the Afghanistan Ministry of Defense shows US military vehicles that Taliban forces claim to have repaired. Afghan MOD The Taliban claims to have repaired and put back to use around 300 military vehicles abandoned by the US during its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. In a Twitter post by the Afghanistan defense ministry, rows of the vehicles are pictured, some of which appear to be armored trucks resembling Humvees. According to the Khaama News Agency citing state media, the vehicles had been intentionally damaged by the US and its allies during the hasty coalition withdrawal from the country in April, 2021, and are now being used by Taliban forces. The US abandoned $7 billion of military equipment it had provided the former Afghan government in its battle with Taliban insurgents bef...

 Benjamin Zycher: The “energy transition” continues to receive thunderous applause from all the usual Beltway suspects, an exercise in groupthink fantasy amazing to behold. For those with actual lives to live and thus uninterested in silliness: The “energy transition” is a massive shift, wholly artificial and politicized, from conventional energy inexpensive ( Table 1b and here ), reliable , and very clean given the proper policy environment, toward such unconventional energy technologies as wind and solar power. They are expensive , unreliable , and deeply problematic environmentally in terms of toxic metal pollution, wildlife destruction, land use massive and unsightly, emissions of conventional pollutants, and in a larger context large and inexorable reductions in aggregate wealth and thus the social willingness to invest in environmental protection. But the Beltway being what it is, the fantasists are impervious to reality, until the massive costs and dislocations and absur...

 Washington Examiner: China to have 150 more ships than US by 2028 under Biden budget, Navy secretary admits ... “By 2028, we will have approximately 291 ships or so,” U.S. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro told a Senate panel on Tuesday. “I can’t predict exactly what the Chinese will have, but estimates are upward of 440 or so.” Del Toro provided that comparison as Navy and Marine Corps leaders pitched Congress on a $255.8 billion budget for fiscal 2024. They justified that number with a series of warnings about the centrality of naval power in the competition with China — “We find ourselves at an inflection point, one that demands we renew our commitment to naval primacy,” as Del Toro testified — but the officials acknowledged that President Joe Biden’s budget request doesn’t even keep up with inflation. ... Biden would rather waste money on vote-buying schemes for leftists rather than US national security. 

 Daily Caller: Soros, Pelosi And Other Top Dems Pour Money Into State Party Ahead Of ‘Nonpartisan’ Wisconsin Supreme Court Race ...  “Janet Protasiewicz’ campaign is being bankrolled by far-left Democrats responsible for soft-on-crime policies, liberal prosecutors, and catch and release DAs nationwide,” Rachel Reisner, a Wisconsin GOP spokesperson, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “George Soros and J.B. Pritzker’s million-dollar contributions underscore that Protasiewicz will simply be a progressive rubber stamp, and they’ll drop whatever cash needed to buy her a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat because her pro-criminal record aligns with their agenda, one that has wreaked havoc on Democrat-run cities throughout America.” ... There needs to be a push back against this attempt to impose the evils of liberalism. 

 Fox Business: Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford is spotlighting an unprecedented national security breach that has seemingly gone overlooked by the Biden administration. EXPERTS SOUND ALARM OVER CHINA BUYING US LAND NEAR MILITARY BASES: 'CHILLING' Over 1 million acres of Oklahoma farmland are currently owned by foreign entities, and nations like China are, according to Lankford, "100%" using the land for drug production. "These are Chinese criminal organizations that are moving in, and you're not going to move in and move that much money without some awareness of the Chinese Communist Party and setting up. Just in the last year, China has doubled the number of acres that it has in the United States. They're buying up hundreds of thousands of acres across the country, and they're moving in criminal operations into the country," the Oklahoma Senator explained during an appearance on "Mornings with Maria." Foreign purchases of U.S. farmland h...

 Washington Post: Police response in Nashville school shooting was ‘exact opposite’ of Uvalde, experts say Body-camera footage shows heavily armed officers methodically sweeping classrooms and hallways until they find and kill the suspect — a police response experts described as “textbook.” The video of the officers sweeping the area and closing in on the shooter looks like a classic response to locating and taking out a shooter. It was a good job by the officers.

 Washington Examiner: The White House rejected House Speaker Kevin McCarthy 's (R-CA) entreaties for President Joe Biden to meet with him to discuss raising the debt ceiling before the country defaults on its loans this summer. Members of Congress have a constitutional obligation to lift the debt limit "as they did three times in the previous administration without conditions," according to press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre . "Business leaders and economists have warned that the threat of a default risks the livelihoods of American small businesses, retirees, and working families and would hand a massive win to China — and recent events underscore the need for Congress to address the debt limit as soon as possible," she wrote in a statement Tuesday. "It’s time for Republicans to stop playing games, pass a clean debt ceiling bill, and quit threatening our economic recovery." Jean-Pierre reiterated Biden is interested in "a separate conversatio...

 Warner Todd Huston: After a recent non-partisan study found that Google is seriously biased to the far left in its search results, the Internet giant lamely clapped back and claimed they aren’t biased at all — despite all the proof otherwise. Google basically just said, “Nu-uh, you big poopy head!” The study  published in Feb.  by a research group called AllSides found that Google News has a “strong political bias” to the far left.’ “Imbalanced or heavily biased news search results can have a negative impact on our democracy and elections,” Julie Mastrine, director of marketing and media bias ratings at AllSides, told  The Daily Signal  early this month. “When people cannot access the full range of views on political and societal issues, they are subject to partisan manipulation and cannot truly decide for themselves.” “The AllSides balanced newsfeed solves the problem of biased online news aggregation by curating articles from the left, center, and right, so p...

 Stephen Kruiser: ... Ever since Joe Biden and his handlers decided to turn the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the American Stasi, we’ve been hearing that the real threat to America is coming from “right-wing radicals” or some such nonsense. The FBI has been targeting soccer moms at school board meetings and pro-lifers who pray outside of abortion clinics. You know, the scariest people among us. Every time I write about the rogue FBI and its goon-squad priorities, I conclude by worrying about what the Bureau might be missing in the way of people who might actually commit violence. Thus far in the Biden era, it’s been a fairly steady stream of leftists who are snapping and killing. The parents at school board meetings have yet to amass a body count. The tragedy in Nashville this week has shed even more light on the continued violent radicalization of the American left.  Matt reports  that, prior to the shooting at The Covenant School, a trans activist group coordinat...

 Heartland: Energy prices have continued to rise under President Joe Biden’s radical energy and climate agenda. In 2021, household electricity prices rose 8 percent. Electricity price increases accelerated even more in 2022, and have now risen 17 percent since December 2020, the last month before Biden took office.1  Even with substantial 2021 price increases for all major energy sources, the price for each major energy source ended 2022 even higher than its 2021 closing price.  During the past two years, overall electricity prices rose 17 percent, industrial energy prices increased by 34 percent,2 home heating oil prices rose an incredible 88 percent,3 conventional oil prices rose by 61 percent,4 natural gas prices for residential consumers increased by 51 percent,5 and gasoline prices had risen $1.15 per gallon by the end of 2022.6  Average Household Paid $2,300 More in Additional Direct Energy Costs  After two years of Biden’s energy policies, the average...

 ISW: ... Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin may be using his influence in Russia’s mainstream media landscape to present himself as a contender in Russia’s 2024 presidential elections. Prigozhin’s own Federal News Agency published an interview that Prigozhin conducted with Russian journalists from Russia Today, RIA Novosti and Federal News Agency on March 14.[9] This interview was noteworthy for its unique format--during the interview Prigozhin seemed to mimic the way that Russian President Vladimir Putin films his choreographed public meetings, either to mock Putin quietly or to suggest subtly that Prigozhin could become Russian president like Putin. The choreography and staging of Prigozhin’s interview places Prigozhin in the camera’s frame at Prigozhin’s desk across from his audience in the same way that Putin’s filmed meetings and photo ops usually do.[10] This film style is unusual for Prigozhin, as Prigozhin’s public video statements typically do not employ such a ster...

 Robert Spencer: An extraordinarily strange scene unfolded at the White House on Monday after the news broke that a woman claiming to be a man had murdered six people at Covenant School, a Christian school in Nashville. Old Joe Biden came out to address the Small Business Administration’s Women’s Business Summit, knowing that the shooting had taken place and that there were fatalities, and likewise knowing that the world was waiting and watching, expecting him to make a statement about what had happened. Instead of striking a somber note, however, asking for prayers and expressing condolences, Old Joe was positively insouciant, yukking it up with some children in the audience, kidding around about ice cream, and generally showing himself to be in splendid high spirits. Was he buoyed at the prospect of another chance to push his agenda of disarming sane and law-abiding Americans? Biden began by  announcing , to laughter from the crowd: “My name is Joe Biden. I’m Dr. Jill B...

 Red States: Department of Homeland Security head Alejandro Mayorkas testified, on Tuesday, before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding how the Biden administration has been dealing with the border crisis. I think it’s fair to say that it did not go well. He testified a couple of weeks ago before the House and he got caught in a lie there . It didn’t go any better before the Senate. Mayorkas was ripped apart by the committee which, at this point, has rightfully lost patience with the Biden team’s inability and lack of desire to do anything to deal with the crisis at the border. Indeed, as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) exposed, Mayorkas’ head is so buried in the sand, he refuses to even acknowledge that the border crisis is a “crisis.” Listen as Cruz questions him and he won’t even acknowledge what we all know to be true, with a record number of illegal aliens flooding across the border. ... Although Mayorkas wouldn’t admit it is a crisis, Cruz pointed out that the Chief of the Border Pa...

 Beth Van Duyne: Walking down long, ornate hallways, across a grand central courtyard adorned with a Pegasus-topped fountain, and through yet more corridors, our bipartisan delegation was guided to the offices of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador for what we hoped would be a timely and useful meeting for our nations. Since the enactment of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), ongoing trade issues continue to flare up, and since the beginning of the Biden Administration our southern border with Mexico has deteriorated into a chaotic, dangerous, and lawless morass. In the days leading up to this meeting, Americans were kidnapped and killed in a border town, record seizures of deadly fentanyl were made, elements of the Mexican military and state police invaded and took over corporate facilities owned and operated by U.S.-based companies, and we were notified that mass illegal immigration, driven by Mexican drug cartels, was again reaching historically unimaginable numbers. It...

 Moneywise: Fill 'er up: This Texas gas station went viral over job postings offering up to $225K a year (along with benefits and vacation). 3 ways to make your own juicy compensation package Buckees gas stations are some of the biggest in existence.   There is one that I stop out between here and Houston with over 100 gas pumps and around 20 Tesla charging stations.  The building is huge with several food options .  The gas prices are usually lower than most gas stations in the area.  They are so popular that you sometimes have to wait for a pump to become free to do your fill-up.

 Moneywise: ... Between 2019 and 2020, the number of New Yorkers earning between $150,000 and $750,000 fell by nearly 6%, according to the New York City Independent Budget Office. ... Moreover, the number of real high earners — those making over $750,000 — dropped by nearly 10% during the same period. Some speculate that the wealthy elites are leaving New York because of the state’s high tax rates. While it’s hard to say exactly why people move, the loss of high earners can impact the city’s income tax revenue. For perspective, the 41,000 filers in the city’s top 1% pay more than 40% of all its income taxes. The 450,000 filers in the top 10% pay about two-thirds of all income taxes. In other words, the remaining 90% of taxpayers contribute about one-third of the city’s income tax revenue. In its most recent report, financial technology company SmartAsset found that in 2020, New York had a net outflow of almost 20,000 high-earning households — defined as households earning over $200...

 Fox News: Secretary of State Antony Blinken could be served a subpoena on Monday if he doesn’t turn over classified documents about the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said. "It's extraordinary to have 23 embassy employees dissenting to the policy of the secretary of State and the White House," Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, told " Fox News Sunday " host Shannon Bream. "We want to know – and the American people deserve to know, and the veterans and the Gold Star mothers deserve to know – what were in those dissenting cables." Last week during a hearing on the State Department budget, McCaul gave Blinken a Monday deadline to provide the committee a dissent cable authored by at least 23 diplomats stationed the U.S. embassy Kabul in July 2021. The cable warned about how security in Afghanistan was deteriorating before the U.S. withdrawal at the end of August 2021. The document was sent...

 J.B. Shurk: The House Armed Services Subcommittee for Military Personnel  held a hearing  last week to discuss the growing  national security crisis  arising from the military's cratering recruitment numbers.   A potpourri of Pentagon nincompoops all universally lauded the Defense Department's ideological obsession with "lived experiences" and "diversity for diversity's sake." While championing the Marxist military's decision to waste over six million man-hours of training on the dangers of "extremism" and "white privilege" and the seminal importance of "diversity, equity, and inclusion," not one Pentagon official could muster a real answer as to why  recruiting numbers are so disastrous . The touchy-feely, group hug–loving mandarins proved experts in Critical Race Theory but poor problem-solvers when tasked with the actual duties of their jobs — building and maintaining lethal military forces filled with top-notch warr...

 Fox Business: The doors of more than two dozen Michigan Burger King locations , all operated by the same limited liability company, will permanently shut by mid-April. EYM King of Michigan LLC said in a WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification) notice it anticipates its completion of the 26 closures, which began more than a week ago, will take place "on or about" April 15 and will ultimately result in 424 people total seeing their jobs cut, according to the letter. BURGER KING TO POUR $400M INTO ADVERTISING, RESTAURANT REMODELS, APP IMPROVEMENTS OVER 2 YEARS The company’s WARN notice, dated for March 22 , was published on the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity’s website. An exhibit accompanying the notice showed Detroit and nearby cities like Livonia, Southfield, Royal Oak and Flint are home to the affected Burger King restaurants. In the notice, EYM cited "unforeseen business circumstances and not being able to reach a resolution" wi...

 Fox News: Kamala Harris stumbles over her words in Ghana speech: 'A lot of that work is the work that I am here to do' 'There are a number of things on the issue of the economy that we must do,' vice president noted while visiting African nation She has become notorious for her word-salad speeches.