PrairiePundit

 Trending Politics: ... “Woke is the new religion of the left and this is what they have in mind. That’s why they want CRT because they want to divide the country. That’s why they remove statues of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and take George Washington’s name off schools because they want to erase that history. They want to delegitimize our founding institutions and they want to replace that with their left wing ideology as the foundational principles of our modern day society.” But more than just wanting to punish those who haven’t kept up with the times on account of being dead, the woke want to rip apart the society that does exist now and replace it with some twisted, demented version of society that is utterly un-American. DeSantis exposed that too, next saying: “Woke-ism is a form of cultural Marxism. It is not just about raising taxes or bad economic policy. It’s about tearing at the fabric of our society and trying to replace it with something t...

  This gives a strong indication of the Hispanic trend toward supporting Republicans and running as Republicans in Texas.

  Legal Insurrection: Biden Killed The Israel-Europe EastMed Gas Pipeline, How’s That Looking Now?   Why is the U.S. continuing to pursue a policy that strengthens Russia and weakens our allies? .The most charitable answer to this question is that he is not intelligent enough to understand how he is aiding and abetting Russian aggression.  Alternative explanations suggest he is a Russian asset.

 Washington Free Beacon: A federal judge ruled Friday that Fairfax County Public Schools' racially driven admissions policies for its magnet high school unconstitutionally discriminated against Asian-American applicants. The Coalition for TJ, a parent group for students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in March sued the Fairfax County School Board after they adopted admissions standards that intentionally reduced Asian-American admittance by 43 percent. Judge Claude Hilton of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division ruled against the district. In October 2020, the Fairfax County School Board eliminated the entrance exam for Thomas Jefferson. The board then capped the number of students each of the district's middle schools could send to the elite, STEM-focused high school. The number of white students admitted to Thomas Jefferson's freshman class skyrocketed after the district changed the admission...

  DailyWire: Ukraine Official Claims Russian Troops Have Suffered Nearly 3,000 Casualties, Lost Hundreds Of Military Vehicles, Numerous Aircraft Time will tell how effective the Ukraine resistance is.  At this point, the Russian advance does not appear to be as rapid as they planned.  ... The latest figures appear to confirm what U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), vice chair of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee, relayed on Thursday, stating that the Russian conquest of Ukraine was taking longer than Russian Vladimir Putin expected and was also costlier. “Russia’s invasion has already taken longer & been costlier than Putin expected. Almost certain his military & intel leaders knew this ahead of time but no one dared tell him his expectations were unrealistic,” Rubio tweeted. Rubio also added that one of the main immediate goals of Putin and the Russian army is to overthrow the government in the nation’s capital, Kyiv, and install an interim Russian-pu...

  American Military News: Biden admin says it will keep working with Putin in ‘important areas,’ likely climate change Biden's anti-energy policies based on his "climate change" programs are what financed Putin's war against Ukraine.  Putin could not have done it with gas selling at the Trump administration levels.  Not only is Biden clueless, but apparently most of the people in his administration don't comprehend how their policies facilitated Russia's war efforts. See, also: Biden Turned Over Intelligence To China On Russia’s Plans To Invade Ukraine, China Gave It To Russia, Report Says This is more evidence of Biden's lack of intelligence.  It looks like those around him are not that smart either or they would be resigning at this point.  And: Biden is slammed for saying 'no one expected sanctions to prevent anything' after freezing all Kremlin assets in America.... but leaves Putin's rumored $200bn fortune UNTOUCHED

 The Hill: President Biden's approval rating has hit a new low of 38 percent, according to a new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey released exclusively to The Hill on Friday.  Seventeen percent of registered voters said they "strongly approve" of Biden's job in office while another 21 percent said they "somewhat approve." ... The same poll found that 64 percent of registered voters said Biden is “too lenient” with Russia, while 31 percent said he handles Russia “just right.” Five percent said he’s “too tough.” ... I question how that 17% who "strongly approve" of Biden can come to that conclusion.  See, also: Black Americans are rapidly abandoning Biden And:  Two new polls give Biden 'rock-bottom numbers' Democrats are losing interest in the news?  How do Democrats deal with Joe Biden? They've quit reading the news

 KT McFarland: ... The question we should be asking ourselves is how to stop Putin’s next power grab. What can we do now that will deter him from making a move against some smaller countries along the Russian border, especially Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? These three Baltic states, former members of the Soviet Union are now the most vulnerable members of the NATO alliance . he latest round of sanctions President Biden announced are a slap on the wrist. The only sanctions that might make Putin pause would be to kick Russia out of the international banking system. But that will never happen, as long as our European allies are dependent on Russian oil and natural gas for their economic survival. But there are the three things we should do now. First, the president should explain to his supporters that the existential threat Russia poses to our national security require him to reverse course and take the shackles off the American energy industry he imposed early in his presidency....

  Fox Business: Facebook bans Russian state media from advertising and monetizing content on its platform   The move comes after Russia invaded Ukraine and began a war against the nation ...   Facebook's move to restrict Russian state media from advertising or monetizing on its platform comes just hours after Twitter announced it was halting all advertising in Russia and Ukraine. ... It is described as "a massive blow" to state media. 

 Texas Tribune/Houston Chronicle: Energy markets responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Thursday with soaring energy prices — the global benchmark for oil exceeded $100 a barrel for the first time since 2014 — which will bring higher profits for Texas’ oil and gas industry, at least temporarily. Energy analysts say the conflict could slow the flow of oil and gas from Russia — one of the world’s largest producers — to Europe in the weeks ahead. The price of oil dipped back down to $99 late Thursday after President Joe Biden did not target Russian oil and gas when he announced sanctions against Russia. Higher oil and gas prices mean more money for Texas producers — and could lead to industry growth in the near term, according to Karr Ingham, an economist with the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers. While Texas oil and gas producers could see more demand for their products, energy consumers in Texas and worldwide will foot the bill for increased global energy costs, analysts ...

 Just the News: Former Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard electrified a conservative audience Friday night with a stinging attack on President Biden, big government Democrats and media elites who she said were imposing cancel culture on America to crush free speech and the Bill of Rights.  "We have too many people in positions of power whose foremost responsibility is to protect our freedoms and uphold our God-given rights, and yet they are the ones who are actually trying to take these rights away from us," Gabbard said during an address at the Ronald Reagan dinner at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla. "This is the biggest threat to our country," Gabbard warned. "It is not coming from some foreign country — it is coming from power elites here at home and their co-conspirators in the mainstream media and the security state who are working to undermine our freedoms." Just six years removed from endorsing socialist can...

  Washington Examiner: Lawmakers fear Russian invasion could increase Chinese threat to Taiwan The Biden debacles keep mounting and the threat to Taiwan grows daily.  The world has become a much more dangerous place since Biden was elected President. He and his administration have been inept from the get-go.  Freedom has become a shrinking commodity.

  Jeff Dunetz: John Kerry: A Narcissist Who Doesn’t Care About Dead Ukrainians ... Anyone with a heart felt sick after watching one of the many videos such as the one above. John Kerry doesn’t have a heart. His concern was not the carnage Putin was inflicting on the people of Ukraine. He was worried about what the conflict will do to the climate. That is his job in the administration and is important to the key left-wing of his party. ... ‘But it could have a profound negative impact on the climate obviously. You have a war and obviously you’re going to have maximum emissions consequences to the – but equally importantly, you’re going to lose people’s focus, you’re going to lose certainly big country attention because they will be diverted and I think it could have a damaging impact, he continued. ... Kerry doesn't even understand how the US reduction of production funded Putin's war by restricting the supply and pushing up the price.  We had no material impact on emissions...

 Roger L. Simon: It’s tempting to laugh at Biden’s climate czar and devoted private jet customer John Kerry who complained to BBC Arabic that the Ukraine War could “distract the world from the climate change crisis and produce ‘massive emissions’ that will negatively impact the globe.” Only it’s actually tragic—and not for the environment. The truth is that people like Kerry and many of his colleagues and predecessors who have been obsessed with the same supposedly imminent ecological disaster literally for decades now, are to blame as much as anyone—with the exception of Vladimir Putin, of course—for the carnage in Ukraine. This environmental obsession obviously swept up our current president to such a degree that from the minute he was inaugurated he worked to reverse the American energy independence achieved under the Trump administration. He succeeded and then some in less than a year. Result: The United States imports oil to the tune of millions of dollars a day, including f...

 Rupert Darwall: Vladimir Putin’s inflammatory speech, in which he set out his aim to reconstitute the Russian empire and blamed Lenin for its demise, and his decision to back this up with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, signals the return of geopolitics. Until now, Western leaders have been saying that the biggest threat to the world is climate change. Now comes Putin armed with nuclear weapons, tanks, and thousands of troops declaring his intent to overthrow Europe’s post-Cold War order. The dilemma for the West: you can’t win a geopolitical conflict lasting years or decades with an economy powered intermittently by wind turbines and solar panels. From the start of the Biden presidency, tensions existed within the administration between geopolitical realists, notably Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and climate hawks led by the president’s climate envoy John Kerry, who saw friendly relations with China as an essential ingredient for any global deal on the environment. Althoug...

 Dov Fischer: Trump Knew How to Handle Putin. Biden Has No Clue.   It took only one year for our fearless leader to plunge us into chaos on a global scale. ...  During the Trump years, Democrats’ Resistance fixated over Ukraine and never-ending pipe dreams of ousting America’s duly elected chief executive. Hunter Biden, a crook and drug addict, was paid $50,000 monthly to sit on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. Though greasy, crude, and oily, he knows nothing of fossil-based crude oil, sweet or otherwise. Though full of natural gas, he knows nothing of fossil-based gas. And he knows nothing of Ukraine. As we learned of Hunter, who since has moved onto painting for dollars and seems destined for more greatness as various grand juries take countless hours of testimony from women with whom he has consorted, he has done well financially as a member of the Biden Crime Family.... ... There is much more. There is a nice breakdown of the Democrat politics of fr...

 Washington Examiner: The Biden administration is expected to sanction President Vladimir Putin on Friday, ramping up pressure on the Russian leader as Moscow continues a deadly military assault on Ukraine. President Joe Biden leveled new economic penalties on the Russian financial system and Kremlin elites and sanctioned the Russian-backed Nord Stream 2 pipeline this week amid the invasion. But Putin has not yielded to the measures, putting pressure on Biden to go further. Now the president appears poised to strike Putin personally, a rare financial clampdown on a foreign leader. RUSSIAN BANK AT CENTER OF DEBUNKED COLLUSION CLAIMS SANCTIONED FOLLOWING PUTIN INVASION Other Russian officials would likely be included, a U.S. official  told  CNN. The move follows an announcement by the European Union and the United Kingdom on Friday  that it would freeze  Putin's assets and those of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. However, the countries did not impose a tra...

 PJ Media: According to the Canadian financial blog Armstrong Economics, the emergency powers activated by Justin Trudeau to cripple the trucker protests have sparked panic among citizens, which could lead to a devastating financial crisis. On Feb. 14, Trudeau enacted the Emergencies Act, which enabled Canadian banks to freeze the assets of anyone who donated to protests against the vaccine mandates — without due process or any court action. Trudeau then ordered the banks to unfreeze the accounts after the protesters had been cleared away. But what is reported to have happened after that is being ignored by the corporate press. Armstrong Economics says there was a stunning run on banks across Canada, as  scared citizens are withdrawing their life savings  and transferring it to foreign banks in the United States and elsewhere. The sheer amount of money withdrawals from Canadian banks was massive. There appears to have been a 500% increase just in the previous 24 hours. Th...

 Andrea Widburg: At least one criminal case that Democrat activists filed against Trump may be ending with a whimper. You may recall that there's a criminal fraud case against Trump in Manhattan. To the New York Times' manifest despair, it seems that there is no evidence of an actual crime. Things are so bad that two of the lead prosecutors on the case quit when the district attorney expressed serious doubt in the case. In 2018, Cyrus Vance, Jr., Manhattan's then–district attorney, charged the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, with tax fraud allegedly related to overvaluing properties to obtain bank loans. From the outside looking in, it was obviously a fallacious charge. After all, any marginally competent bank conducts its own property valuation before issuing loans. Nevertheless, Vance pushed hard, going so far as to get a ruling from the Supreme Court allowing the district attorney's office to get Trump's tax returns. F...

 Victor Davis Hanson: For all his caginess, dissimulation, and opportunism, Vladimir Putin is more or less predictable. Putin’s aims? The Russian president’s two-decade dilemma has been how to reclaim the prestige and power of the former Soviet Union—but with only 75 percent of his country’s former territory and 140 million fewer people. When does he strike? First, Putin moves on neighboring former Soviet republics when the world price of oil is high, and his coffers are full. So he went into Georgia in 2008 and into Eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014 when he thought he had the financial wherewithal and public support to do so. But when the world is awash in oil, prices dip, and the United States reigns as the largest gas and oil producer, he hesitates. So he remained static between 2017 and 2020. Second, when the United States increases the defense budget and deters its enemies, Putin also pauses. In contrast, when America “resets” or appeases, he is emboldened. In 2008, the Uni...