Mid-Day Snapshot · June 7, 2024

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“From The Patriot Post (patriotpost.us)”.

THE FOUNDATION

“Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” —James Madison (1787)

ON THIS DAY in 1776, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee officially proposed in the Continental Congress that “these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.” Less than a month later, the Declaration of Independence was issued.

IN TODAY’S DIGEST

ON THE WEB

FEATURED ANALYSIS

What a Difference a President Makes

The comparison between Ronald Reagan’s remarks 40 years ago and Joe Biden’s remarks yesterday couldn’t be more glaring.

Douglas Andrews

Little noticed this week amid yesterday’s 80th anniversary of the D-Day landing at Normandy was another anniversary just one day earlier: June 5 marked 20 years since the passing of our nation’s 40th president and this publication’s North Star: Ronald Wilson Reagan.

It’s no coincidence that Reagan’s name and words have become more closely associated with D-Day than perhaps even that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was commander-in-chief at the time of the invasion, and who himself offered a magnificent prayer on the grim occasion.

Reagan spoke twice on that day 40 years ago at Normandy: once at Pointe du Hoc, where some 225 U.S. Army Rangers braved German gunners during a harrowing 30-minute ascent of its sheer cliffs, and then later that day at Omaha Beach, which was the site of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting of all. And in each case, in both speeches, the man and the message came together with the moment. That’s why we remember Reagan’s remarks, and why we’ll soon forget those of Joe Biden.

“This was an emotional day,” recounted Reagan in Speaking My Mind, his book of selected speeches. “The ceremonies honoring the 40th anniversary of D-Day became more than commemorations. They became celebrations of heroism and sacrifice. This place, Pointe du Hoc, in itself was moving and majestic. I stood there on that windswept point with the ocean behind me. Before me were the boys who 40 years earlier fought their way up from the ocean. Some rested under the white crosses and Stars of David that stretched out across the landscape. Others sat right in front of me.”

Just listening to Reagan’s voice and his words that day is a moving experience. “Behind me,” he said, “is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there. These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc.”

Listening to Biden’s voice and words from yesterday? Not so much. Where Reagan’s words seemed heartfelt and natural, Biden’s seemed stiff and forced.

As our Mark Alexander wrote yesterday: “Regrettably, the D-Day anniversary events were sullied with a campaign photo-op drop-in by Joe Biden, who according to The Washington Post, used the event to ‘draw on the memory of allies united against tyranny to highlight the stakes of his campaign and draw a pointed comparison with Donald Trump.’”

We’d hoped that Biden’s speechwriters wouldn’t live down to our expectations by sullying the day with campaign politics, but it wasn’t to be. While Biden delivered a decent speech mostly devoid of politics, and he did so without any colossal flubs, he did warn of “tyranny” and “dictators” and “isolationism” in today’s world. Those remarks had a hint of campaign rhetoric to them. Trump, after all, as Biden disingenuously tells us on the campaign trail, “will be a dictator on Day 1.”

Biden also detoured into a weird rant about Ukraine, where his wastrel son once had a lucrative job selling the Biden “brand.” In doing so, he made an invidious comparison between Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin, a comparison that diminishes the true monstrosity of the former and gives undue “credit” to the latter. Or was Biden comparing Hitler to Trump? It wouldn’t be the first time.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why Joe Biden felt it either important or appropriate to mention the war between Ukraine and Russia, and especially to luxuriate in the “staggering” body count of the Russians, who were, after all, our allies in the battle against Nazi Germany, and who, while we were storming the beaches at Normandy, were fighting and dying in appalling numbers on the war’s eastern front. Indeed, for every American who died in World War II, as many as 60 Russians died. Nevertheless, Biden said of his friends the Ukrainians: “They’ve inflicted on the Russian aggress-, they’ve suffered tremendous losses, Russia. The numbers are staggering: 350,000 Russian troops dead or wounded.”

Perhaps, in his diminished state, he forgot that he was at Normandy.

To Biden’s “credit,” we suppose, he didn’t trot out one of his BIG Lies, but the mainstream media are doing it for him. That lie would be the one he occasioned in 2018, when Trump supposedly disparaged our war dead as “suckers” and “losers” and refused to visit Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris. None of that is true. And no one should be surprised.

Today, Biden will have another crack at politicizing that hallowed ground and that monumental day with a speech at Pointe du Hoc. As The Wall Street Journal reports: “President Biden will use the spot where U.S. forces helped turn the tide of World War II to drive home what has become the core argument for his re-election effort: He will preserve democratic freedoms, as American troops did here 80 years ago, while Donald Trump will undermine them.”

We predict it to be a shameful speech — and a speech entirely in keeping with this shameless president.

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Executive News Summary

Douglas Andrews, Nate Jackson, & Jordan Candler

Politics

  • Biden says he won’t pardon Hunter: As our Nate Jackson noted yesterday, “The biggest difference between Hunter [Biden’s] case and [Donald] Trump’s is that, if he wins, Trump can’t pardon himself of a state conviction. Joe Biden can pardon Hunter Biden.” Later yesterday, in an interview with ABC News anchor David Muir while in Normandy, the president said he would not pardon his son. “Will you accept the jury’s outcome, their verdict, no matter what it is?” Muir asked. “Yes,” Biden responded weakly after a pause. “And have you ruled out a pardon for your son?” Muir followed up. “Yes,” Biden responded again in his tired, old grandpa voice. And that was it. Muir thus accomplished a big headline for Biden — that he respects the Rule of Law while Donald Trump supposedly does not. Biden had just said of his challenger, “He got a fair trial. The jury spoke like they speak in all cases, and it should be respected.” Yet Biden also said he’d never discussed business with his son. He lied. Indeed, Biden lies about a lot of things. Is a pitifully weak one-word answer to the question the final word? Don’t bet on it. Because Joe Biden’s other maxim is, “No one f**ks with a Biden.”
  • President Biden still has not met Hunter Biden’s five-year-old daughter (National Review)
  • Biden claims he knew Putin 40 years ago — when he was undercover KGB agent (Washington Free Beacon)
  • Humor: Aides claim Biden nailed a 360 double flip McTwist on the White House half pipe but oh darn the reporters just missed it (Babylon Bee)
  • Trouble with “2000 Mules”: It’s an article of faith among diehard Democrats that Joe Biden got all 81 million of those votes on the up-and-up. Sentient beings, though, don’t buy it — not with tens of millions of mail-in ballots flooding the 2020 electoral zone, and not with the power-mad Democrats’ penchant for cheating. Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary about this very topic, “2000 Mules,” was supposed to be the smoking-gun proof that Dems stole the 2020 election, and we wrote as much here. Then, two weeks later, we hedged our bet. Now, The Wall Street Journal reports, “Salem Media Group, which co-produced this Trumpian fantasy mockumentary, ceased distribution of the film and issued an apology to Mark Andrews, one of the Georgia voters depicted as an illegal ballot ‘mule.’” Andrews was depicted as having stuffed ballots into a collection box, but after the Georgia Bureau of Investigation cleared him of any wrongdoing, he settled his defamation suit with Salem “for a significant amount.” The Journal’s editors apparently think this means that cellphone geolocation is an unreliable investigative technology, even though it’s been used to locate people at crime scenes and thereby put them in prison. And they believe that if D’Souza blew it with Andrews, then he blew it with everyone else he geolocated. Conservatives bear a higher burden of accuracy than our leftist counterparts, and “2000 Mules” didn’t meet that burden. We look forward to hearing D’Souza’s mea culpa for the Andrews failure and, if he sees fit, his defense of the rest of the film.
  • Steve Bannon ordered to report to prison by July 1 (NY Post)
  • Netanyahu to defend “just war” in July 24 speech to joint session of U.S. Congress (Times of Israel)

Economy

  • A good jobs report, but… “The U.S. economy added far more jobs than expected in May, countering fears of a slowdown in the labor market,” reports CNBC of the 272,000 jobs added in May. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, the bad news is at least five-fold. First, the unemployment rate rose to 4% for the first time since January 2022 as more people entered the jobs market and didn’t find one. Second, wages are finally exceeding the current inflation rate, though wages haven’t caught up to the cumulative 20% inflation under Joe Biden. Third, May might have exceeded expectations, but as we noted yesterday, last year’s officially reported jobs numbers were overstated by a whopping 730,000. Fourth, California fast-food restaurants have slashed 10,000 jobs since the state raised the minimum wage to $20. The minimum wage is $0 when you don’t have a job. Finally, as we noted Tuesday, half of the jobs added since 2019 are located in just two states: Texas and Florida. The Leftmedia always obscures such context when trying to boost Biden’s poll numbers.
  • Youngkin gets rid of Virginia’s Cali emissions standards: It’s said that as California goes, so goes the rest of the country. But Glenn Youngkin isn’t buying it. Virginia’s outstanding Republican governor announced this week that, after having conferred with Attorney General Jason Miyares, he’s withdrawing his state from subservience to the Once-Golden State’s extreme auto emissions standards. “Once again,” Youngkin said in a news release, “Virginia is declaring independence — this time from a misguided electric vehicle mandate imposed by unelected leaders nearly 3,000 miles away from the Commonwealth. The idea that government should tell people what kind of car they can or can’t purchase is fundamentally wrong. Virginians deserve the freedom to choose which vehicles best fit the needs of their families and businesses.” Are other free-thinking governors taking note? If the 50 states are indeed our laboratories for republican democracy, then Youngkin shouldn’t be the only one standing up against this California scheming.

Health

  • Whoa, those COVID vaccines might be killing folks? Among the more than seven million worldwide deaths that have been attributed to the Wuhan coronavirus, one casualty stands out among all others: Liberty. Whether the penalty was getting kicked out of college or kicked out of the military, the Left’s anti-scientific insistence that even healthy young people get the stick was, at the time, infuriating to those who believe in individual liberty. And now, that violation seems even more monstrous. As the New York Post reports, a new study from the Netherlands’ Vrije Universiteit suggests that the vax could be partly to blame for an “unprecedented” increase in deaths in both the U.S. and other Western countries in the years since the pandemic hit. “Analyzing mortality data from 47 Western countries, scientists … found that excess mortality has ‘remained high’ since 2020 — despite the widespread rollout of COVID vaccines and various containment measures.” How many excess deaths are we talking about? In the U.S., Europe, and Australia since 2020, that number is north of three million. Clearly, a reckoning is due. Will the pro-vax forces in government and the media stop staring at their shoes?

Culture

  • DeSantis once again schools Disney: You’d think by now they’d have learned their lesson. You’d think. And you’d be wrong. Florida’s Ron DeSantis, America’s Best Governor™, chalked up yet another win this week, as Disney announced plans for investing $17 billion for a fifth theme park in the Sunshine State. Strange, but wasn’t Disney just a few months ago trying to sue the pants off the DeSantis administration and threatening to skedaddle to more groomer-friendly climes? And now here it is inking a 15-year deal with the dreaded DeSantis. It’s “a win for the mouse-eared masses and the governor’s mansion,” says National Review’s Luther Ray Abel. “This deal comes as Disney is reorienting itself, cutting costs by $7.5 billion and focusing its studios away from streaming, a loser, and back on profitable franchises. Disney CEO Bob Iger is busy killing the darlings of his protegé predecessor while deflecting criticism of Disney’s perceived wokeness.” Disney has a long, long way to go if it’s ever going to rebuild its once-proud brand and recover its stockholder value. But ceasing to pick fights with a popular and family-friendly governor is a step in the right direction.
  • Google sullies D-Day: Thursday was the 80th anniversary of D-Day, likely the last major anniversary on which any of the Veterans of that day are alive. The youngest of them are approaching 100. For many days of recognition, Google reworks its homepage to honor the occasion. Not this one. Google has even neglected Easter, celebrated by more than a billion people worldwide. Instead, many of Google’s redesigns are to honor left-wing people or causes. Yesterday’s featured lesbian feminist activist and author Jeanne Córdova, “a pioneering leader of the LGBTQ+ rights movement.” Pride Month, gross as it is, trumps everything else. Meanwhile, Google-owned YouTube announced new age restrictions on some gun-related videos because it wants to “to make sure we are drawing the line at the right place.” Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg (you may have heard of him) applauded the “commonsense fixes.” We’re certainly not defending every gun video on YouTube — for example, video clips from extremely violent movies are available for any and all age viewers. But it’s certainly ironic that the heroes of D-Day used guns to liberate Europe, and all Google can do is restrict gun videos and honor a lesbian.
  • Covenant shooter cited transgender “rights” in shooting spree manifesto, contradicting official claims (Daily Wire)
  • Newly crowned Miss Maryland USA is a man (Daily Wire)

American Spirit

  • Conservative game-show host rides into the sunset: “Somewhere along the line, we became more than a popular show,” mused Pat Sajak. “We became part of the popular culture.” After 41 seasons and more than 8,000 episodes (a record for a single host), the 77-year-old “Wheel of Fortune” icon’s final episode will air tonight, though it was taped on April 5. Sajak began as a DJ on Armed Forces Radio while serving in Vietnam, moving to a local Los Angeles TV station before being chosen for the “Wheel” gig. “Throughout his stint as host,” reports Fox News, “Sajak was nominated for 23 Daytime Emmy Awards, winning three.” Sajak not only managed fame and, er, fortune with class, he did it without scandal and as a conservative. The Federalist’s Chris Jacobs notes, “During his tenure, he has served as a director of Eagle Publishing, of the Claremont Institute, and as chair of the Board of Trustees of Hillsdale College since 2019.” Nevertheless, Sajak said, “I’d rather leave a couple of years too early than a couple of years too late.” Longtime “Wheel” fixture Vanna White will remain with the show at least until 2026. Ryan Seacrest will take Sajak’s place next season, though he said, “No one can replace him.”

For the Executive Summary archive, click here.

Follow Nate Jackson and Jordan Candler on X/Twitter.

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The D-Day ‘Nazi’ Hunter

Hillary Clinton does what leftists always do — wrongly assume Nazis were right-wing and compare Republicans to them.

Nate Jackson

Ever since they decided to recast Nazis as “right-wingers,” leftists have dedicated their lives to hunting Nazis everywhere. Just like those brave men on the beaches of Normandy, they’ll have you know.

It’s disgraceful enough to compare virtually anything to the stunning bravery and heroism on display that fateful day in northern France. The day on which 2,501 Americans gave their lives to liberate Europe and preserve freedom even here, an ocean away. Total Allied deaths were 4,414, with 73,000 dying in the ensuing Battle of Normandy, after which more than 150,000 others came home with literal battle scars.

But it’s downright despicable to compare the Patriots of today with the Left’s ideological cousins in Germany.

The word Nazi is the German acronym for National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which doesn’t sound very right-wing to me. Adolf Hitler’s party exercised totalitarian control over the lives of Germans and the nation’s economy, which doesn’t sound very conservative to me. The Nazis conquered most of continental Europe, subjecting various people groups to their tyranny — all while murdering six million Jews in an ethnic genocide and millions of others through various brutality and battle — which doesn’t sound very much like the American Spirit to me.

No, the Nazis were socialists of the worst sort, essentially differing from communists only in their preference for nationalism and race instead of internationalism and class. Both are totalitarian left-wing ideologies.

Enter Hillary Clinton, the latest contestant in the Left’s favorite game, “Everyone I Don’t Like Is Hitler.”

On yesterday’s 80th anniversary of D-Day, Clinton asserted on X, “Eighty years ago today, thousands of brave Americans fought to protect democracy on the shores of Normandy. This November, all we have to do is vote.”

The language was slippery and Clintonesque enough for her to avoid directly comparing Donald Trump and his supporters to Nazis, but the fact that she “protected democracy” by turning off comments on her post was just another clue to what she meant.

She cheapened and disgraced the sacrifice of the soldiers of D-Day while grossly insulting half of her fellow Americans. Pretty much another day in the life of Hillary Clinton.

Going to vote, even if you have to wait in line — never mind voting early or mailing it in — is nothing like storming the beaches of Normandy under heavy machine-gun fire from 50,000 enemy troops. No one in America — not even the ideological kindred spirits occupying college campuses to call for another genocide of Jews — is actually doing what the Nazis did.

This isn’t new territory for Clinton, either. Last November, she opined that “Hitler was duly elected, right?” She called Trump somebody with “dictatorial, authoritarian tendencies.”

Last I checked, that described Joe Biden and his party, which is currently trying to put Trump in jail for “crimes.”

Last October, Hillary mused that “there needs to be a formal deprogramming of [Trump] cult members.” People fighting Nazis don’t set up concentration camps.

Clinton isn’t alone among Democrats, though. Paula Collins, the Democrat challenging Republican Elise Stefanik for her New York House seat, had the same idea for fighting back. “Even if we were to have a resounding blue wave come through, as many of us would like, putting it all back together again after we’ve gone through this MAGA nightmare and re-educating basically, which, that sounds like a rather, a re-education camp. I don’t think we really want to call it that,” Collins said. “I’m sure we can find another way to phrase it.”

Yeah, the only problem is the phrasing and labeling. Democrats already control the public schools, which teach the falsehood that Nazis were right-wingers. It’s never enough for them, though.

As for any comparison with the warriors of D-Day, there simply isn’t one. All we can do is live our lives worthy of their sacrifice. That means fighting for American values as outlined in our founding documents.

Follow Nate Jackson on X/Twitter.

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Ibram X. Kendi’s Self-Destruction

An autopsy of a briefly lucrative race-baiting grifter.

Emmy Griffin

The New York Times Magazine just published an article on the rise and fall of Ibram X. Kendi. He’s an academic whose core theory on racism is always questioning whether something is racist or anti-racist — but only as it pertains to race, not as a general measure, NYT assures its readers. He also has been the subject of criticism and scrutiny since his ascension to fame post-George Floyd.

Kendi’s rise to prominence garnered him name recognition for his books and afforded him the honor of being asked to be a guest lecturer for $20,000 a gig and cash for a research center. In 2020 alone, the Center for Antiracist Research received $55 million. That money was run through like water, forcing Kendi and Boston University to restructure the center; instead of full-time employees, the center issued nine-month-long academic fellowships that would exist as long as the money held out. It was a grift from beginning to end, but he is still hanging on in the event of another George Floyd moment to give his center and his pockets an infusion of cash.

Who exactly is Ibram X. Kendi? Well, his birth name is really Henry Rogers, but he changed it in his early 30s to a more authentically African-sounding name. Kendi is a complicated individual.

NYT Magazine paints this interesting contrast of Kendi. On the one hand, he is portrayed as a soft-spoken and kindly man who was put upon by unsought fame and struggles with being a misunderstood and introverted intellectual. On the other hand, it talks about a man who is fussy with his appearance to the point of mockery by his friends and is the bane of his colleagues’ existence. His coworkers give accounts of a god complex wherein the only rule for pursuing research is that it must be the carrying out of Kendi’s own ideas.

The magazine is very intentional in drawing a distinction ideologically between Kendi and his contemporaries like Robin DiAngelo. Perhaps the correct person to compare Kendi to is a figure like Patrisse Cullors, who cashed in on the BLM money train. Nonetheless, it is DiAngelo to whom Kendi is paired, and in the words of National Review’s Jeffrey Blehar: “For her, racism is a state of inexpiable white original sin that one must constantly apologize for. For Kendi, it is merely something you oppose by micro-interrogating every single action you take on a relentless second-by-second basis. The Times wants you to understand that his is the more sensible way to reckon with your failures.”

Speaking of failures, NYT Magazine went to extensive lengths to paint Kendi as a misunderstood academic, which was really an attempt to justify his failures with the Center for Antiracist Research he started at Boston University. This center, his brainchild, was supposed to be the compendium of knowledge and tracking of racism and antiracism to help activists positively influence policy for the black community. This mission is vague enough that those who worked at the center were hard-pressed to understand what their actual end goal or objectives were.

Kendi apparently created a toxic work environment for his employees by being secretive and hard to work with. Moreover, when a new executive director stepped in to help lighten Kendi’s workload, she found the center’s finances in disarray and a group of dissatisfied researchers with no clear objectives to follow and no tangibly achievable end goals. This, in a word, was Kendi’s destruction.

Ironically, Kendi blamed his former employees for their own complaints, insisting that they were being more ideologically radical and performing on that radicalism rather than trying to bring about change that would help people. Also, their real resentment was that they were being led by a black man. So they’re racist radicals?

The real reason that Kendi, BLM, critical race theory, and DEI are starting to fade is that the ideas are toxic. His ideas about racism and antiracism aren’t feasible; they are actively harmful. They usher in anti-white, anti-Asian, and anti-Jew racism. As Kendi once said himself, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

Kendi’s Roman candle of a grift is fizzling out, and not a moment too soon.

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Why Are Homeowners Insurance Rates Soaring?

Joe Biden’s media hacks will blame just about anyone or anything other than him, and that includes — wait for it! — climate change.

Brian Mark Weber

Prices for goods and services are going through the roof. And despite what Joe Biden and the Leftmedia want you to believe, it’s not the fault of greedy corporations maximizing profits by taking advantage of consumers struggling in a tough economy.

Instead, the blame lies with the people in power who implemented bad policies leading to inflation.

“Under most of President Donald Trump’s one term in office,” reports The Daily Wire, “inflation hovered around 2%. The inflation rate was just 1.4% in early 2021 when Biden took over before it jumped to 7% by December of that year. In June of 2022, inflation reached a peak rate of 9.1% before it dropped again, and it now stands at 3.4%.”

Those numbers, though, can’t capture the real fear and stress that so many Americans feel in trying to make ends meet in Biden’s economy.

For example, as a poll by the National True Cost of Living Coalition reveals, “Sixty-five percent of Americans often considered ‘middle class’ — those earning more than 200 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) — are struggling financially today and don’t expect that to change for the remainder of their lives, according to the new poll commissioned by the National True Cost of Living Coalition.”

It gets even worse: “40 percent of ALL Americans are unable to plan beyond their next paycheck, and 46 percent don’t have $500 saved for a rainy day.”

For a while, the Biden administration found it easy to spin the reality of high inflation by blaming others. These days? Not so much. We have more dollars out there chasing fewer goods. That’s the definition of inflation, and it isn’t easily fixed — especially by an administration that printed so much money it didn’t have.

Now, in a novel idea of excuse-making, Team Biden is blaming climate change for higher home insurance rates. Indeed, spreading fear about the climate is their go-to strategy to cover up their failure to help the very people they claim to care about. But it’s all smoke and mirrors.

There’s no doubt that homeowners are paying higher premiums. “Since 2019, home insurance rates in the U.S. have surged 37.8% to roughly $2,478 per year, according to new data published by LendingTree,” Fox Business reports. “That is noticeably faster than the overall 24% increase in the consumer price index recorded during that same time period. Researchers have blamed the skyrocketing prices on a number of factors, including weather disasters, rising home prices and steep home repairs as inflation pushes the cost of building materials higher.”

The reality is that we’ve always had floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters, but it wasn’t always so expensive to make home repairs. Now, inflation has made it an expensive proposition. Liberty Mutual, one of the nation’s largest insurance companies, explains that a variety of factors determine insurance premium costs, including industry trends like the volume of claims and costs for repairing homes or vehicles. “If those costs increase, the price of insurance premiums will likely increase as well,” they write. “Unfortunately, due to inflation these costs are increasing. Building materials for homes are more expensive, there’s a chip shortage driving up the cost of cars, and there’s also a labor shortage. These factors mean the cost to repair your home and vehicle have increased in the event of an insurance claim.”

With higher inflation, costs for lumber, shingles, windows, doors, and other building supplies are more expensive. As for hurricane season, according to the American Meteorological Society’s own data, the frequency and severity of storms have decreased in the last century.

Thus, climate change is just an excuse to empower government politicians and bureaucrats to force Americans to give up their cars and refrigerators and to leave others hoping for a sunny day to power their taxpayer-funded solar panels.

We can’t change the weather. Eventually, a powerful hurricane will hit the southern or eastern coast, so it’s probably best not to build a flimsy vacation home in a high-risk spot.

While we can’t change Mother Nature, we can change presidential administrations. In doing so, we can change the ill-considered government policies and regulations that stifle innovation and economic growth while leaving consumers worrying about whether to feed their families or pay the electric bill.

On November 5, we’ll have the opportunity to do just that.

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The Myth That Biden Had Nothing to Do With the Prosecutions of Trump

Biden is delighted that his own former prosecutor, a left-wing judge, and a Manhattan jury may well keep Trump off the campaign trail.

Victor Davis Hanson

The five criminal and civil prosecutions of former President Donald Trump all prompt heated denials from Democrats that President Joe Biden and Democrat operatives had a role in any of them.

But Biden has long let it be known that he was frustrated with his own Department of Justice’s federal prosecutors for their tardiness in indicting Trump.

Biden was upset because any delay might mean that his rival Trump would not be in federal court during the 2024 election cycle. And that would mean he could not be tagged as a “convicted felon” by the November election while being kept off the campaign trail.

Politico has long prided itself on its supposed insider knowledge of the workings of the Biden administration. Note that it was reported earlier this February that a frustrated Joe Biden “has grumbled to aides and advisers that had (Attorney General Merrick) Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former President Donald Trump’s election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded…”

If there was any doubt about the Biden administration’s effort to force Trump into court before November, Politico further dispelled it — even as it blamed Trump for Biden’s anger at Garland: “That trial still could take place before the election and much of the delay is owed not to Garland but to deliberate resistance put up by the former president and his team.”

Note in passing how a presidential candidate’s legal right to oppose a politicized indictment months before an election by his opponent’s federal attorneys is smeared by Politico as “deliberate resistance.”

Given Politico was publicly reporting six months ago about Biden’s anger at the pace of his DOJ’s prosecution of Trump, does anyone believe his special counsel, Jack Smith, was not aware of such presidential displeasure and pressure?

Note Smith had petitioned and was denied an unusual request to the court to speed up the course of his Trump indictment.

And why would Biden’s own Attorney General, Garland, select such an obvious partisan as Smith? Remember, in his last tenure as special counsel, Smith had previously gone after popular Republican and conservative Virginia governor Bob MacDonald.

Yet Smith’s politicized persecution of the innocent McDonnell was reversed by a unanimous verdict of the U.S. Supreme Court. That rare court unanimity normally should have raised a red flag to the Biden DOJ about both Smith’s partiality and his incompetence.

But then again, Smith’s wife had donated to the 2020 Biden campaign fund. And she was previously known for producing a hagiographic 2020 documentary (“Becoming”) about Michelle Obama.

Selecting a special counsel with a successful record of prior nonpartisan convictions was clearly not why the DOJ appointed Smith.

The White House’s involvement is not limited to the Smith federal indictments.

Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis’s paramour and erstwhile lead prosecutor in her indictment of Trump, Nathan Wade, met twice with the White House counsel’s office. On one occasion, Wade met inside the Biden White House.

Subpoenaed records reveal that the brazen Wade actually billed the federal government for his time spent with the White House counsel’s staff — although so far no one has disclosed under oath the nature of such meetings.

Of the tens of thousands of local prosecutions each year, in how many instances does a county prosecutor consult with the White House counsel’s office — and then bill it for his knowledge?

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s just-completed felony convictions of Trump were spearheaded by former prominent federal prosecutor Matthew Colangelo. He is not just a well-known Democratic partisan who served as a political consultant to the Democratic National Committee.

Colangelo had also just left his prior position in the Biden Justice Department — reputedly as Garland’s third-ranking prosecutor — to join the local Bragg team.

Again, among all the multitudes of annual municipal indictments nationwide, how many local prosecutors manage to enlist one of the nation’s three top federal attorneys to head their case?

So, apparently, it was not enough for the shameless Bragg to campaign flagrantly on promises to go after Trump. In addition, Bragg brashly drafted a top Democratic operative and political appointee from inside Joe Biden’s DOJ to head his prosecution.

Not surprisingly, it took only a few hours after the Colangelo-Bragg conviction of Trump for Biden on spec to start blasting his rival as a “convicted felon.” Biden is delighted that his own former prosecutor, a left-wing judge, and a Manhattan jury may well keep Trump off the campaign trail.

So, it is past time for the media and Democrats to drop this ridiculous ruse of Biden’s White House “neutrality.” Instead, they should admit that they are terrified of the will of the people in November and so are conniving to silence them.

©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.

SHORT CUTS

Jordan Candler

Theater of the Absurd

“The same resolve that the extraordinary men and women that we’re celebrating today showed then [D-Day], [Biden] is showing now.” —Secretary of State Antony Blinken

Non Compos Mentis

“I’ve known [Vladimir Putin] for over 40 years. He’s concerned me for 40 years.” —Joe Biden

Dumb & Dumber

“I can tell you that he is sharper than ever.” —Biden campaign spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod

“I don’t even know what that question means.” —Adrienne Elrod when asked, “How much should a candidate’s cognitive function factor into that decision when someone votes?”

Who Wants to Tell Them?

“If Trump wins, he could weaponize U.S. spy services against his domestic political enemies, former intel officers warn.” —NBC News

For the Record

“The supposed ‘capping’ of migrants at 2,500 per day is meaningless. Who will do the counting? If the cap is imposed on one day when the arbitrary number is reached, what happens the next day? Another 2,500, of course. All breaking the law to enter the country. This is like giving shoplifters a maximum they can steal before they are arrested and prosecuted. Oh wait, that is already happening in California.” —Cal Thomas

“Immigration is among the top issues for voters in 2024 and Biden’s executive order is in response to a political necessity, not the necessity of controlling the border. … This is the problem with so much that happens in Washington. A small number of people — some elected, some appointed — decide for more than 300 million people what they think is best for them, when it is more about what is best for themselves and their political careers.” —Cal Thomas

“Joe Biden issued 94 executive orders undoing everything Donald Trump did to really secure the border. … One order pretending to get tough won’t make up for 94 previous orders gutting border security.” —Gary Bauer

Upright

“The powerful like [Donald] Trump, Hillary Clinton, Sam Bankman-Fried, Jeffery Epstein, Diddy and Joe Biden, and the powerless, the rich and the poor, indeed, everyone needs to read more of the Bible and squander less time on fawning social media. We should all start with Galatians 6:7 — ‘A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction.’” —Armstrong Williams

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TODAY’S CARTOON

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“From The Patriot Post (patriotpost.us)”.

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