Free Republic

I saw an interview with Robert Cahaly, who runs the Trafalgar polling operation, the other day. (It may have been off a Power Line link.) As I recall, he said that he isn’t polling in Florida because he doesn’t think there are any serious races there. I agree. For a time, Democrats believed, or pretended to believe, that retread party-switcher Charlie Crist could seriously challenge Ron DeSantis. In my opinion, that was delusional, and the Dems’ hopes seem to have faded. Here are two data points to support the proposition that anyone running against DeSantis in 2022 has no chance....

Never mind shortages of natural gas here and abroad: we may be running short of diesel fuel before long. Energy analyst John Kemp reported the troubling picture last week: Global shortages of middle distillates such as diesel, gas oil and heating oil are intensifying rather than easing – making it more likely a relatively severe slowdown in the business cycle will be necessary to rebalance the market. U.S. inventories of distillate fuel oil depleted to 106 million barrels on Oct. 7, the lowest seasonal level since the government began collecting weekly data in 1982. Given how much of our goods...

Less than two days after Mockingbird Media New York Times published a widely distributed piece for the New York Times, writer Stuart A. Thompson has egg on his face. Thompson opened up the baseless hit piece by saying: At an invitation-only conference in August at a secret location southeast of Phoenix, a group of election deniers unspooled a new conspiracy theory about the 2020 presidential outcome. Using threadbare evidence, or none at all, the group suggested that a small American election software company, Konnech, had secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party and had given the Chinese government backdoor access...

PLEASE BE AWARE: if partially or totally submerged in water, the lithium-ion battery pack used to power many electric devices and vehicles will suffer damage that will compromise its safety and stability. This damage can be even more severe if your battery pack was submerged in salt water. Please check your eBike as soon as possible. Unfortunately, if your eBike has been submerged in water during the storm, it’s very likely that its electrical system has been damaged and the eBike is unsafe to use. If the battery pack was partially or totally submerged, we advise that you carefully remove...

President Biden delivered an address at the first White House conference on hunger since 1969 today. (The White House transcript has not yet been posted.) My impression is that childhood obesity is a bigger problem than childhood hunger and that however big the problem of childhood hunger is, a lack of government spending devoted to it is not the problem. Some redefinition of the problem as one of “food insecurity” is required to turn up the spigot. At the conference Biden thanked “bipartisan elected officials” including Rep. Jim McGovern and Senator Cory Booker before seeking to acknowledge Rep. Jackie Walorski,...

British Prime Minister Liz Truss is going big. Her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, has unveiled an aggressive program of permanent tax cuts. The Wall Street Journal likes the plan:Mr. Kwarteng axed the 2.5-percentage-point increase in the payroll tax imposed by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and canceled a planned increase in the corporate income tax rate to 26% from 19%. … Kwarteng also surprised by eliminating the 45% tax rate on incomes above £150,000. The top marginal rate now will be 40%.As a percentage of GDP, it shapes up as the biggest British tax cut since 1972. From the Telegraph:As you...

The Washington Post reported yesterday that someone woke up Slow Joe: White House alarm rises over Europe as Putin threatens energy supply White House officials are growing increasingly alarmed about Europe’s energy crisis and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats to force a bleak winter on the continent. Seeking to punish Russia for the invasion of Ukraine and force a retreat, Western allies have moved to set a cap on what buyers pay for Russian oil. Putin last week said Russia would retaliate by cutting off gas and oil shipments, which could devastate Europe’s economy and hurt the United States by...

Joe Biden finally held a public rally after hiding for months from the American people. This comes after weeks of COVID infections and vacations. Joe traveled to nearby Maryland to hold a rally in a high school gym. During his outrageous speech where he labeled half of the country “fascists” one brave soul interrupted poor old Joe. The protester started screaming at Joe about stealing the election. Then he called out Joe Biden for being a pedophile. Buy that man a drink! This comes after news broke recently that Joe Biden was showering with his little girl naked at an...

Scott has been writing about the race for Governor of Minnesota that is now in progress. Incumbent left-wing Governor Tim Walz is running scared, for obvious reasons. Challenger Scott Jensen, a doctor rather than a professional politician, is working hard and resonating with voters. The latest polling has the race tied.We spent the day today at the Minnesota State Fair, one of the world’s extraordinary events. The two candidates’ fair presences highlight the differences in their campaigns. Scott Jensen is running an admirable campaign: fact-based, data-driven, all about the issues. ...***So what of Tim Walz? He can’t run on his...

A redacted version of the Affidavit that was the basis for DOJ’s Mar-a-Lago raid was made public today. In my judgment, it adds little to our knowledge of the case. The Affidavit recites various statutes and recounts the history of 15 boxes of documents that were removed from the White House to Mar-a-Lago and subsequently sent to the National Archives by President Trump. It says that those boxes included some documents that were marked as classified. It recites that there are additional boxes still at Mar-a-Lago, and says there is reason to believe that these boxes, too, may contain classified...

This essay by David Stevenson of the Caesar Rodney Institute Center for Energy & Environment appeared in May, but I just ran across it today. It analyzes data from the PJM electrical grid, America’s largest, between 2019 and 2021. This comparison of actual regional grid carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions between 2019 and 2021 shows increased use of wind and solar did not reduce emissions. Wind and solar electric generation are actually poor technologies no one would use without permanent government mandates and massive subsidies and taxes that are adding $1 billion a year in power cost. They are also unreliable,...

BIDEN HOPS ON THE RAPE BANDWAGON I wrote here about the sensational story of a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio who had to travel to Indiana for an abortion. The story, phoned into an Indiana newspaper by an abortionist who seems to spend most of her time promulgating pro-abortion propaganda in the press, spread around the world almost instantaneously. But there is little reason to believe it is true. No one, including Snopes, has been able to verify it, there is no sign of any criminal investigation or prosecution of the supposed rapist, and the abortionist who originally peddled the...

MORTON’S SPEAKS UP The harassment of conservative Supreme Court justices manifested at Morton’s in the District of Columbia on Wednesday evening. While Justice Kavanaugh ate dinner at the downtown steakhouse, protesters were tipped to his presence. The protesters showed up out front, called the Morton’s manager to tell him to kick Justice Kavanaugh out, and later tweeted that the justice was forced to exit through the rear of the restaurant. In response to to a request from Politico for comment, the Supreme Court offered nothing on the justice’s behalf. Morton’s, however, was not so shy. A spokesman for Morton’s sent...

The apparent Highland Park mass murderer who shot up the city’s Independence Day parade yesterday was on the prowl at the local Chabad center earlier this year. The center is located on Central a few blocks from the site of the shooting and sheltered escapees of the attack. Rabbi Yosef Schanowitz recognized the photo released by police following the shooting and realized he had encountered the suspect a few months earlier. “During the last Passover holiday, that person entered the Chabad synagogue. We have an armed security guard sitting in front… I approached him and sternly asked him to leave...

Ronald Stein makes excellent points in his column titled “Is it ethical to purchase a lithium battery powered EV?” The lower image is just one lithium supply mine where entire mountains are eliminated. Each mine usually consists of thirty-five to forty humongous 797 Caterpillar haul trucks along with hundreds of other large equipment. Each 797 uses around half a million gallons of diesel a year. So, with an inventory of just thirty-five the haul trucks alone are using 17.5 million gallons of fuel a year for just one lithium site. *** Today, a typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds....

President Obama’s grotesque tweet that Scott highlighted earlier in the week shows the single-minded fanaticism of the left in action: how dare someone shoot up a school during George Floyd week! Gets totally in the way of the narrative. What’s Al Sharpton to do at a moment like this? There’s no percentage in it. Meanwhile, inflation

President” Biden made big news this morning with his announcement that the United States would defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion by China. See the triple-bylined AP story “Biden: US would intervene with military to defend Taiwan.” The AP reports from Tokyo: President Joe Biden said Monday that the U.S. would intervene militarily if China were to invade Taiwan, saying the burden to protect Taiwan is “even stronger” after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It was one of the most forceful presidential statements in support of self-governing in decades. Biden, at a news conference in Tokyo, said “yes” when...

We haven’t heard anything about developments in the government’s persecution of Project Veritas in the matter of Ashley Biden’s diary since I wrote about the case last month. All my posts tracking the story are accessible here. I find the story chilling and do not want to let it recede from sight. Harmeet Dhillon is one of the Project Veritas attorneys lending a hand in the case. She appeared last night on Tucker Carlson’s show for a brief interview in which she brought the story up to date as of my most recent posts. In his intro Tucker stated that...

After Biden finished his speech, he turned around and tried to shake hands with thin air and then wandered around looking confused Joe Biden had been, for decades, a corrupt and incompetent pol. Today, he is either an extreme left-winger or an empty vessel through which the extreme left is exerting control over America But Biden isn’t the only one. Nancy Pelosi is gaga, a fact that she can’t hide with multiple plastic surgeries. A member of the U.S. Senate recently said–privately–that one-third of senators belong in nursing homes. In the New York Post, Maureen Callahan argues for age limits...

Remember how everyone said Trump was Putin’s poodle, and an isolationist to boot? Worth taking in his interview this morning with Stuart Varney on Fox Business: So much for the “Trump as isolationist Russian stooge.” You get a good sense here why Putin didn’t invade Ukraine on Trump’s watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-c1Me0Kezg