Free Republic

The Biden administration has just announced yet another new weapons package for Ukraine worth $600 million, which now brings to total US military aid pledged since the start of the conflict to $15.1 billion. Crucially, in this case the arms are being sent under the presidential drawdown authority, which allows the White House to take arms directly from US military stockpiles for use by foreign allied forces. The administration confirmed it was the 21st time it drew from Pentagon stockpiles. The Guardian details, “Joe Biden authorized the latest assistance using his Presidential Drawdown Authority, which allows the president to authorize...

When a franchise sets out to compete with other companies that have a superior market or branding presence, they will sometimes exploit a strategy called “market saturation” in order to undermine their opponent’s visibility. An example of this is Starbucks, which sought to co-opt and then destroy the concept of the neighborhood hipster coffee shop by flooding every city and town with their own stores. After several years, there was at least four Starbucks within a mile of every other Starbucks store and often these franchises would sit right across the road from each other. Every coffee house was now...

Former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook dropped a bombshell in court on Friday – testifying that Hillary Clinton approved the dissemination of allegations that then-candidate Donald Trump had a covert communications channel with a Russian bank, despite campaign officials not being “totally confident” in the rumor, according to Fox News. Mook, who was called to the stand by the defense team for former Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann, was asked under cross-examination about the campaign’s understanding of the allegations against Trump, and whether the campaign planned to release it to the media. He told prosecutor Andrew DeFillippis that he was first...

Donald Trump’s attorney fired off a letter to the CIA demanding “immediate legal action” against 43 ex-agency employees who signed an October 2020 letter saying the Hunter Biden abandoned laptop story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” according to Just the News, which obtained a copy of the letter. Hunter’s laptop of course contained evidence of extensive international business dealings – including a relationship with a Chinese energy company that paid his company nearly five million dollars. In total the younger Biden took in $11 million from international dealings over the course of five years –...

It’s the Fed’s “hold my beer” moment. After more than a year in which Federal Reserve leadership appeared clueless, pollyannish, and indecisive, the Fed is conducting a full-throated messaging campaign to show that it is as serious as cancer about the inflation surge that is scaring the bejesus out of consumers, investors, and economists. Their public pronouncements in recent weeks go something like this: “Out of a good faith misreading of post-pandemic data we had concluded, mistakenly as it happens, that the inflation wave, which began in 2021, was transitory. But now that we know it is not, we are...

How Dare YouMarkets whipsawed yesterday after bad US initial jobless claims and Philly Fed data, with stocks down and bond yields also lower, as was the US dollar. Commodities were a mixed picture, however, and oil prices rose around 5% again from its intra-day low to close over $111. Referring again to a bond yields/commodities matrix, that suggested the Fed falling behind the curve, not getting ahead of it, in crushing demand to fit restrained supply. Lo and behold, we then got the headline, ‘Fed’s George Says ‘Rough’ Market Won’t Alter Fed Tightening Plan’. So, how far down can bond...

Gas prices at the pump hit $4 a gallon in every state for the first time Monday, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA). This is mainly due to languishing refinery capacity across the US, dwindling fuel stockpiles, and robust demand for gas ahead of the summer driving season. Kansas, Oklahoma, and Georgia — the last three holdouts — saw prices for regular gas surpass the $4 a gallon mark last night. The national average for a gallon of gasoline is $4.523, another record high. The increase comes as the cost of crude oil now tops $114 a barrel. In...

Almost two months after Europe rushed to declare it would impose unprecedented sanctions on Russia in response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine with no regard for how such sanctions would boomerang and cripple its own economies, the old continent which was and still remains hostage to Russian energy exports, is finally grasping the underlying math which was all too clear to Vladimir Putin long ago. According to new projections from the European Commission, the euro area’s pandemic recovery would grind to a halt, while prices would surge even more quickly if there are serious disruptions to natural-gas supplies from Russia....

If you think that the food and diesel shortages are bad now, then you will be absolutely horrified by what the globe is experiencing by the end of the year. All over the planet, food production is being crippled by an unprecedented confluence of factors. The war in Ukraine, extremely bizarre weather patterns, nightmarish plagues and a historic fertilizer crisis have combined to create a “perfect storm” that isn’t going away any time soon. As a result, the food that won’t be grown in 2022 will become an extremely severe global problem by the end of this calendar year. Global...

Hong Kong saw a net outflow of 65,295 and 66,334 residents in February and March respectively, according to the city’s official immigration data. The trend will remain strong, as a new poll revealed that nearly 80 percent of Hong Kong residents surveyed were interested in emigrating. In mid-March, Bartra interviewed nearly 500 Hong Kong residents aged 18 and above through an online questionnaire. According to the poll, 79 percent of the respondents indicated that they are considering emigration or will consider this in the future; 48 percent indicated that it was “possible in the future,” and 31 percent indicated that...

A new survey from Pew reveals that inflation is the top concern Among Americans, while COVID-19 has fallen to last place. 70% of Americans polled between April 25 and May 1 said inflation was a “very big problem,” while 23% said it was a “moderately big problem.” Meanwhile, just 19% said Covid was a “very big problem,” while 31% said it was a “small problem.” 12% said Covid was “not a problem at all.”Oddly, Pew didn’t ask about the war in Ukraine. When broken down by political party, inflation is the top national problem according to Republicans, while Democrats are...

The constant gaslighting of America over whose fault the soaring cost of living just went to ’11’ on the ‘do you think we are all f**king stupid’ scale. As Matt Margolis points out, it has been a wild ride for the blame-shifting until now… In the course of a year, we’ve gone from “inflation will be transitory,” to “inflation is a good thing,” to “inflation started under Trump,” to “it’s Putin’s price hike.” Polls show that no one was buying the blame-Putin strategy, so Biden and the Democrats are now accusing oil companies of price gouging. And now the blame...

Below is my column in the Hill on the leak and the refusal of President Joe Biden to denounce such conduct. It is a defining moment for his presidency that, even in the face of such a disgraceful and unethical act, the President cannot muster the courage to condemn it. He then magnified that failure by refusing to condemn the doxing and targeting of justices and their families at their homes. Here is the column: Nearly 70 years ago, a little-known lawyer named Joseph Welch famously confronted Sen. Joseph McCarthy (D-Wis.) in defense of a young man hounded over alleged...

Five-time, best-selling financial author James G. Rickards says, “We could be in a recession right now,” but the title of his most recent book “The New Great Depression” says where we are definitely going soon. Rickards says, “The current crisis is not like 2008 or even 1929. The New Depression that has emerged from the COVID pandemic is the worst economic crisis in U.S. history…”“Most fired employees will remain redundant. Bankruptcies will be common, and banks will buckle under the weight of bad debts. Deflation, debt and demography will wreck any chance of recovery, and social disorder will follow closely...

It looks like the analytical geniuses over at the San Francisco Fed have finally figured out something that Larry Summers anticipated nearly a year ago: When you pump trillions of dollars of stimulus spending into the economy, it causes inflation to overheat to the highest level in a generation. Of course, Summers was aggressively poo-poo'd by policy nabobs at Treasury (not to mention the Eccles Building) when he first projected that inflation would likely exceed 5% by the end of 2021 thanks to the federal government's decision to hand out trillions of dollars in stimmies, benefits and PPP loans (combined...

Ever since Russian forces invaded Ukraine, Americans have panic hoarded all types of ammunition, according to a top US online gun retailer.“A recent surge in consumer demand for small arms ammunition – the onset of which perfectly coincided with the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022,” AMMO, Inc., a US-based ammunition and components manufacturer, said in a press release Friday. Los Angeles-based Ammo reports between Feb. 24 and Mar. 10 that revenues surged 166%, and transactions are up 110% over the previous two weeks. Website traffic for the period is up 59%. Customers in Texas, Florida, and Washington...

Last week, we documented Special Counsel John Durham’s motion discussing the potential conflicts of interest of Michael Sussmann’s attorneys. That filing was important for a number of reasons, mainly because Durham stated that Sussmann’s client, Rodney Joffe (a federal contractor with access to “sensitive” data) “exploited” internet traffic data (domain name system, or DNS) pertaining to “the Executive Office of the President of the United States (“EOP”).”We also asked why Joffe and Sussmann continued to push false allegations of Trump’s ties to Russia after the election. One could theorize that they made the Trump/Russia connection in the summer and fall...

In a quiet response to the Senate Judiciary Committee three days before Christmas, the Biden DOJ says it won’t withdraw a controversial memo used to activate the FBI Counterterrorism Division to investigate parents voicing their opposition to a variety of topics – primarily mask and vaccine mandates, and teaching critical race theory. This week, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) revealed the pre-Christmas response – stating: “[I]n December we asked why the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division was getting involved in parents expressing their concerns at school board meetings. Now, just to be crystal clear, there’s no excuse for real threats or acts of...

Brian Dean Wright, a former CIA Ops Officer, explains in a brief but incisive Twitter thread that “former US intelligence colleagues are angry and deeply worried at what has happened in Afghanistan.” Wright warns that “there’s nearly universal belief that America and the world are in for one of the most dangerous, unpredictable times in modern history.” He continues: Afghanistan has shown the world — enemies & allies alike — that our military & intel assets are largely irrelevant because we can’t deploy them successfully. The blame lays at the feet of multiple Presidents. The Generals. The Spies. The Congress....