The True Agenda Behind AG Garland's Bizarre Letter Targeting School Board Protesters

streiff reporting for RedState

Two days ago, the president of the National School Boards Association, Viola Garcia, sent a letter to Joe Biden demanding that federal law enforcement be unleashed upon parents who protest at school board meetings; see National School Board Official Demands Biden Use Patriot Act Against Protesting Parents. The idea behind it was as craven as you might imagine coming from an organization that sees itself as omnipotent when it comes to dealing with your children. Across the country, school board meetings have been filled with angry parents objecting to mask mandates, sexually explicit and deviant reading materials, and Critical Race Theory being introduced into the classroom. School boards, unable to provide coherent answers to the issues, turned to the government to shut down parent protests. I have to admit being so naive that I was caught by surprise with failed Supreme Court nominee and current Attorney General Merrick Garland declared that preventing “threats” was now one of DOJ’s top priorities (Biden’s Justice Department Announces It Considers School Board Protests to Be Threats and Promises Action).

As my colleague Nick Arama reported, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made no bones about his opposition to the use of federal law enforcement to quash parental involvement in school board meetings (see DeSantis Throws Down the Gauntlet: Confronts Garland on Troubling FBI Announcement). However, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley cut to the core of the matter when questioning Stellvertretender Reichsinspektor, sorry, I mean Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco about the bizarre directive from Garland.

Hawley: I want to come back to this extraordinary letter and memorandum that the Attorney General of the United States issued yesterday. Practically every day brings new reports about this administration weaponizing the federal bureaucracy to go after political opponents. Frankly, I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like it in American history. I mean for those of us who missed the McCarthy era, I guess this president is intent on bringing it to us but with new force and new power and new urgency unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Are you aware of any time in American history when an Attorney General has directed the FBI to begin to intervene in school board meetings…local school board meetings?

Monaco: I’m not aware and I’m not aware that—that…and that is not going on. Let me be very

Hawley: Really, this isn’t about local school board meetings? That’s not the subject of the memorandum? I thought that was in the memorandum.

Monaco: The memorandum is quite clear it’s one page and it asks the U.S. Attorney community and the FBI special agents in charge to convene state and local law enforcement partners to ensure that there’s an open line of communication to address threats, to address violence, and that’s the appropriate role of the Department of Justice to make sure that we are addressing criminal conduct and violence.

Hawley: At local school board meetings? Let me just ask you this, is parents waiting sometimes for hours to speak at a local school board meeting to express concerns about critical race theory or the masking of their students, particularly young children is that in and of itself is that harassment and intimidation? Is waiting to express one’s view at a school board meeting harassment and intimidation?

Monaco: As the Attorney General’s memorandum made quite clear spirited debate is welcome is a hallmark of this country um it’s something we all should engage in and

Hawley: I don’t think so, Ms. Monaco. With all due respect, it didn’t make it quite clear. It doesn’t define those terms, nor does it define harassment or intimidation. It talks about violence, I think we can agree that violence shouldn’t be condoned or looked aside from in any way swept under the rug at all. But harassment and intimidation? What do those terms mean in the context of a local school board meeting? I mean this seems to… in the First Amendment context we talk about the chill. The chill to speech. If this isn’t a deliberate attempt to chill parents from showing up at school board meetings of their elected school boards, I don’t know what is. I mean I’m not… I’m not aware of anything like this in American history. We’re talking about the FBI. You’re using the FBI to intervene in school board meetings. That’s extraordinary.

Monaco: Senator, I have to respectfully disagree. That is not what…

Hawley: Point me to an instance.

Monaco: The Attorney General’s memorandum made quite clear that violence is not appropriate. Spirited public debate on a whole range of issues is absolutely what this country is all about, um…

Hawley: Then why is it being investigated by the FBI ?

Monaco: It is not. When and if um…any…um…uh situation turns to violence, then that is the appropriate role of law enforcement to address it, um…now…

Hawley: The memorandum covers more than violence. It talks about intimidation. It talks about harassment. So, I’m asking you to draw some lines. We do this all the time in the first amendment context. This is, this is the sum and substance of first amendment law, so I expect that you’ll be available and… and willing to do it now. Tell me where the line is with parents expressing their concerns? Waiting for hours in the school board meetings. We’ve all seen the videos. This happened in my state. Parents have waited for hours. Sometimes the school board meetings have been ended before they can speak because the school board doesn’t want to hear it. And now parents are told that if they wait and they express their views that they may be investigated for intimidation?

Monaco: I don’t know who’s telling them that, Senator? The job of the Justice Department is to investigate crimes when a situation turns to violence–when and if a situation turns to violence–it’s the job of the Justice Department and local law enforcement to address that. The Attorney General’s memorandum simply asked the U.S. Attorney community, the FBI, and their counterparts to ensure that state and local law enforcement has an open line of communication to report threats whether they happen in the context of election officials being threatened, where they haven’t happened in the context of members of congress being threatened which the FBI responds to on a regular basis, as is appropriate the job of the Justice Department is to address criminal conduct.

Hawley: you know All I can say is this is truly extraordinary. I think you know it is. It’s unprecedented and you can’t point to a single instance where anything like this has happened before. And I think parents across this country are going to be stunned to learn, stunned, that if they show up at a local school board meeting, by the way, where they have the right to appear and be heard, where they have the right to say something about their children’s education, where they have the right to vote, and you are attempting to intimidate them, you are attempting to silence them, you are attempting to interfere with their rights as parents and, yes, with their rights as voters. This is wrong. This is dangerous. And I cannot believe that that an Attorney General of the United States is engaging in this kind of conduct. And frankly I can’t believe that you are sitting here today defending it. I intend to get answers to these questions. You won’t answer my questions, I’m going to get answer these questions. Mr. Chairman, we need to have a hearing on this subject we need to hear from the Attorney General himself. He needs to come here take the oath sit there and answer questions. We have never seen anything like this before in our country’s history and frankly I want to say I think it is a dangerous, dangerous precedent.

This is the critical part.

It talks about violence, I think we can agree that violence shouldn’t be condoned or looked aside from in any way swept under the rug at all. But harassment and intimidation? What do those terms mean in the context of a local school board meeting? I mean this seems to… in the First Amendment context we talk about the chill. The chill to speech. If this isn’t a deliberate attempt to chill parents from showing up at school board meetings of their elected school boards, I don’t know what is. I mean I’m not… I’m not aware of anything like this in American history. We’re talking about the FBI. You’re using the FBI to intervene in school board meetings. That’s extraordinary.

If you have any doubt about what the left means when it talks about “harassment and intimidation,” that takes place when anyone does anything to slow down their agenda.

(Read the rest of the thread, it gets more hysterical.)

He also knows how Conservative Inc. will react:

This is Andy McCarthy, hardly the wild-eyed populist, who puts the lie to the whole exercise:

Garland well knows, as he and Clinton officials stressed to me nearly 30 years ago, that in the incitement context, the First Amendment protects speech unless it unambiguously calls for the use of force that the speaker clearly intends, under circumstances in which the likelihood of violence is real and imminent. Even actual “threats of violence” are not actionable unless they meet this high threshold.

A fortiori, the First Amendment fully protects speech evincing “efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views.” As long as such speech does not constitute a clear and imminent threat to do violence if the individual acts on his or her views, there is no incitement — and hence no law-enforcement interest to vindicate.

Please read the whole thing; I rarely recommend anyone read anything from National Review, so mark this down as a special occasion: The Biden Justice Department’s Lawless Threat against American Parents.

The irony here is that Garland knows precisely what he’s doing. He knows that the protests at school board meetings are not illegal (that’s why there have been so few arrests), but he’s trying to take the pressure off the school boards that is being exerted by justly outraged parents. Thus, he is holding out potential criminal action or at least using the process to punish protesters by forcing them to hire attorneys to prevent Americans from using their First Amendment rights.

Records Show Facebook ‘Whistleblower’ Is Less A Concerned Employee And More A Radical Democrat Activist

Kylee Zempel reporting for The Federalist

Frances Haugen, the so-called Facebook whistleblower who leaked internal documents to the Wall Street Journal lamenting that the Big Tech company wasn’t censoring enough content, is a confirmed left-wing activist and partisan operative, Federal Election Commission records show.

A simple search reveals that Haugen, who previously worked for other tech giants Google and Pinterest, has made more than 40 donations to Democrats totaling more than $2,000 since 2015. She has frequently contributed to ActBlue and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and in January 2020, she gave money to the congressional campaign of radical Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, plus another contribution to AOC’s “Courage to Change” political action committee, according to The Daily Wire. Below is just a sampling:

Although Haugen had money to throw at AOC’s campaign, that same month she had enough in unpaid taxes that a $44,000 federal tax lien was placed against her, The Daily Wire also reported, noting that the lien was released earlier this summer.

Now the so-called whistleblower’s lawyers, who are otherwise working pro bono, are trying to raise $100,000 through GoFundMe allegedly to pay for their legal expenses.

This brings up another partisan snag for Haugen, whose lawyers are Whistleblower Aid — a group co-founded by John Tye and Mark Zaid. If Zaid’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he was part of the legal team, led by Andrew Bakaj, that represented the fake “whistleblower” whose complaint about then-President Donald Trump’s Ukraine phone call (a call about which the whistleblower did not have firsthand knowledge) catapulted the administration into a sham impeachment.

The whole Ukraine “whistleblower” debacle was fraught with deceit, such as his secretly meeting with Democrat members of Congress before filing his complaint with the intelligence community inspector general — a fact that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff lied about. Corrupt media also worked with Democrats to conceal the identity of the so-called whistleblower, although RealClearInvestigations identified him as Eric Ciaramella, one of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s top Ukraine advisers.

This would have been a problem for Biden, of course, since the whole reason for Trump’s infamous phone call was to encourage Ukraine to investigate how when Biden was vice president, he had bribed Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating his scandal-ridden son Hunter Biden’s company — a bribe Joe Biden later bragged about.

Haugen’s 15 minutes as the Facebook “whistleblower” thus bears a resemblance to the Ukraine situation. She carefully leaked Facebook documents to the press while working with Zaid as well as Tye and Bakaj, who both used to work for prominent Democrats. Now she’s receiving “strategic communication guidance” from former Obama aide Bill Burton’s PR firm Bryson Gillette, which The Daily Wire described as “helmed by a raft of Democratic operatives.”

On Tuesday, Haugen testified before a Senate hearing at least in part to gain congressional support for more Big Tech censorship. She alleges that the company puts profits over safety by amplifying so-called misinformation — which she said is killing people, a talking point that’s also been parroted by the Biden White House.

“The result has been more division, more harm, more lies, more threats, and more combat. In some cases, this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people,” testified Haugen, who has also been quoted making woke statements about “bias” and “inclusion” in her previous tech jobs. One science conference praised her for “specifically driving Pinterest’s recent change to give users the option to filter searches to specific skin tones.”

Haugen’s lawyers have filed eight complaints about Facebook with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the company’s ineffectiveness at removing hate speech and lamenting that Facebook didn’t deploy “lasting counter-measures” or sufficiently fight so-called misinformation, right-wing extremism, and violence regarding the 2020 election and Jan. 6 riot.

The entire Facebook “whistleblower” ordeal comes amid widespread Big Tech censorship and dramatic partisan calls for crackdowns on what Democrats deem misinformation.

In July, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced that due to a handful of unnamed people on social media posting what the Biden administration considered to be misinformation, the White House is actively “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation” and “helping” to “boost trusted content.” She went on to say nothing is “off the table” for using Big Tech to quiet opposing views.

When a reporter asked Biden that same week what his message is to sites like Facebook, the president replied, “They’re killing people.”

X22, SGT Report, and more-Oct 7th

 

Been having a great day, folks! Here's tonight's news:

Tucker Outlines How the DOJ-NSD Has Morphed Into a Political Targeting Operation

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse

Tucker Carlson hit the nail on the head in his opening monologue last night.  This is the first time the DOJ National Security Division (DOJ-NSD) has been spotlighted as the center of Main Justice’s political targeting operation.  One small but important point Tucker got wrong was the timeline of the DOJ-NSD being weaponized for domestic political targeting operations.   Tucker puts the shift as recent; however, the shift actually took place when Obama took office with Eric Holder as AG.

Some CTH readers may remember how the DOJ-NSD refused to accept inspector general oversight {pdf here} as led by AG Eric Holder and DAG Sally Yates.  More readers will remember the DOJ-NSD is the epicenter of FISA abuses.  It is the DOJ-NSD where Main Justice can operate in the shadows, because they use the shield of national security; a key strategy of the Fourth Branch of government.

The DOJ-NSD is the targeting center of Main Justice where folks like John Carlin, Mary McCord, Bruce Ohr, Andrew Weissmann, David Laufmann, George Toscas (and later Dana Boente) were operating against the incoming Trump administration and later the Trump presidency.  The DOJ-NSD is where selective Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) violations are used against political enemies like Michael Flynn, while people like the Podesta brothers are ignored.

The weaponization of the United Stated Department of Justice originated in the conference rooms of the DOJ-NSD, and soon thereafter the alignment with the intelligence apparatus to create the Fourth Branch of Government took place. {Go Deep}  AG Merrick Garland is just a continuum of the Obama mission to use the DOJ-NSD, that is why Lisa Monaco was installed as the operational command center of the DOJ-NSD and John Carlin was rehired.  WATCH:

The link to the Fourth Branch of government below will walk you through the major steps that took place between 2008 to 2021 which created the DOJ targeting operation; the FBI as a federal state police to target opposition; and the complete takeover of the U.S. government by the intelligence apparatus.

THE FOURTH BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT

Facebook ‘Whistleblower’ Was Part Of Election-Meddling Team That Nuked The Hunter Biden Laptop Story

Kylee Zempel reporting for The Federalist

The Facebook “whistleblower” thread has been pulled, and now the facade won’t stop unraveling — to the point that Frances Haugen has been revealed as part of the team
of Big Tech censors at the center of 2020 election meddling, The Post Millennial has found.

Haugen was a member of Facebook’s civic integrity unit, which was tasked with countering so-called misinformation (read: throttling politically disfavored content) about the 2020 election. In October, that entailed censoring The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which incriminated the Biden son and his father for corruption in the run-up to the highly contested election.

Just weeks before the November election, The New York Post reported that a laptop containing evidence implicating then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son for engaging in shady overseas business dealings had surfaced after Hunter Biden abandoned it at a computer repair shop in Delaware. Documents from the shop appear to show a signed receipt from Hunter for the repairs, and text messages, videos, and emails recovered from the device point to a “pay-to-play scandal” involving the current president.

Big Tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter, however, censored the story. Both Facebook policy comms director Andy Stone on Twitter and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in congressional testimony admitted to the company suppressing the bombshell report.

Haugen, who joined Facebook in 2019 on the condition of being tasked with censoring “misinformation,” was assigned to the 200-member civic integrity unit, where she worked until after the 2020 presidential election. Haugen and four other people, according to the New York Post, “were tasked with building a system to track misinformation targeted at specific groups of people in just three months,” and after their efforts were successful and Biden won the election, Facebook dissolved the unit.

The so-called “whistleblower” has already been confirmed to be a left-wing activist. Soon after Haugen came forward with stolen documents, lamenting that Facebook isn’t doing enough to censor hate speech and political dissidents, financial records revealed that she regularly donates to Democrats, including radicals such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Haugen’s attorneys are also deeply steeped in left-wing corruption. Her lawyers were part of the legal team that represented the fake “whistleblower” whose complaint about then-President Donald Trump’s Ukraine phone call (a call about which the whistleblower did not have firsthand knowledge) led to a sham impeachment. Now she’s receiving “strategic communication guidance” from former Obama aide Bill Burton’s public relations firm Bryson Gillette, which is run by Democratic operatives. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was a senior adviser there until September 2020.

On Tuesday, Haugen testified before a congressional hearing at least in part to gain lawmaker support for more Big Tech censorship. She accused Facebook of putting profits before safety by amplifying so-called misinformation — which she said is killing people, a talking point you might recognize from the Biden White House.

“The result has been more division, more harm, more lies, more threats, and more combat. In some cases, this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people,” testified Haugen, who has also made woke statements about “inclusion” and “bias” in her previous tech jobs, which have included Google and Pinterest. At the latter, she reportedly drove the company toward giving users the ability “to filter searches to specific skin tones.”

Haugen’s lawyers have filed eight complaints about Facebook with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including lamenting that the company doesn’t remove enough hate speech and didn’t deploy “lasting counter-measures” or sufficiently fight so-called misinformation, right-wing extremism, and violence regarding the 2020 election and Jan. 6 riot.

The Facebook “whistleblower” news comes amid widespread Big Tech censorship campaigns and partisan calls for crackdowns on what Democrats call misinformation.

In July, Psaki announced that due to 12 unnamed people on social media posting what the Biden administration considered to be misinformation, the White House is actively “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation” and “helping” to “boost trusted content.” Nothing is “off the table” when it comes to using Big Tech to quiet opposing views, she said.

When a reporter asked Biden that same week what his message is to sites such as Facebook, the president replied, “They’re killing people.”

“Rosies” reunite with WWII bomber they helped build at KCK Fairfax plant

 A veteran of World War II came home to Kansas City for a visit Monday. The veteran was a B-25D Mitchell bomber. The airplane now known as “Rosie’s Reply” landed at Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport. The airport is located just a short hop across the Missouri River from the Fairfax district in Kansas City, Kansas, where the plane was built in the 1940s. Some of those at the airport to welcome the bomber home were a few of the women who helped build it more than 70 years ago. The iconic image of “Rosie the riveter” came to symbolize all of the women who contributed to the war effort by working in manufacturing plants to build airplanes and other weapons. The women, many now in their 90s, have become known as “Rosies”.

 

 This is the first time the plane has been back to Kansas City since it left the North American Aviation plant in the Fairfax district during WWII. The bomber will be flying around Kansas City all week long taking paying passengers for rides and will fly over the Fairfax Festival at Kaw Point Park on Thursday, October 7.

https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article254752422.html?fbclid=IwAR05iFFWleK0OFYGvpJMaJoRNs3uFkJ4_LeyD0eyf8li1EDMWPKbSiOGhmU

America and The Dying Citizen - VDH

Freedom requires constant reinvestment in and

 replenishment of a nation’s traditions and ideals.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

Only a little more than half of the current world’s 7 billion people are citizens of fully consensual governments.

That lucky 50 percent alone enjoys constitutionally protected freedoms. Most are also Western. Or at least they reside in nations that have become “Westernized.”

Migrants, regardless of their race, religion, or gender, almost always head for a Western nation. And most often their destination remains the United States. The more it is now fashionable for Americans to take for granted or even to ridicule the idea of their own country, the more the non-American global poor risk their lives to crash America’s borders. 

Constitutional systems easily perish because they ask a lot of their citizens—to vote, to be informed about civic and political issues, and to hold elected officials accountable. That responsibility is perhaps why, of the world’s true republics and democracies, only about 22 have been in existence for a half-century or more. We are seldom told, then, that America is a rare, precious, and perhaps even fragile idea, both in the past and in the present.

American citizens are clearly also not the custom of the past. Unlike history’s more common peasants, citizens are not under the control of the rich who, in turn, seek undue influence in government through controlling them.

Instead, viable citizenship has always hinged on a broad, autonomous middle class. Those Americans in between lack both the dependence of the poor, and the insider influences of the elite. Suffocate the middle and we know that a binary feudalism will soon replace it. We are seeing just that medievalization in contemporary California.

Nor are American citizens mere migratory residents who drift across nonexistent borders in expectation of receiving more rights than meeting responsibilities. Forfeit a sacred national space, a place where common customs, language, and traditions can shelter and thrive, and a unique America disappears into a pre-civilizational migratory void like the fluid vastness of late imperial Rome.

Americans are quite different from tribal peoples, whose first loyalties are determined by mere appearance or innate blood ties. Take this nation back to pre-civilizational tribalism, and our future as the next Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or Iraq is assured.

Americans are not, then, premodern peasants, mere residents, and squabbling tribes—at least not quite yet.

But citizens also are equally suspicious and rightfully distrustful of the top-down subversion of citizenship by postmodern elites and the privileged. The latter often expect Americans to give up their ancient freedoms to a vast, unelected, and unaudited permanent administrative state, to be run by credentialed functionaries and sanctioned “experts.” That technocratic regimentation may now be the Chinese model, but it was never the vision of our founders.

Citizens object to “evolving” a 245-year-old republic into a radical socialist ochlocracy without checks and balances. That rebooting would mean scrapping ancient laws, long-held customs, and hallowed traditions—from the Electoral College and a nine-person Supreme Court to the Senate filibuster and 50-state union. Consensual societies usually implode when desperate factions resort to subverting hallowed rules for short-term partisan gain.

Some elites believe the founders’ Constitution is in dire need of radical deletions and alterations to fit their own utopian visions. So, they imagine an evolving Constitution to synchronize with supposedly a fluid, mutable—and always progressing—human nature. They are ignorant that the core of the Constitution does not change because our own natural, core sense of right and wrong does not either. 

Nor do citizens hand over their first allegiances to an abstract worldwide commonwealth—as if half of its membership are not illiberal theocracies, autocracies, and monarchies. Such a tired “citizens of the world” dream dates to Socratic utopianism.

Yet neither the defunct League of Nations nor the United Nations has ever offered any credible blueprint for viable transnational governance. Today’s globalists at Davos may snicker at nationalist democracies like the United States and Israel, but in cowardly fashion they usually appease a totalitarian and brutal Communist China that allows no dissent.

Given our privileges, affluent and leisured Americans must always ask ourselves whether as citizens we have earned what those who died at Gettysburg or on Omaha Beach bequeathed at such costs.

Refusing to stand during the national anthem is not and should not be illegal. But such blanket rejection of American customs is admittedly now a collective narcissistic tic—and hardly sustainable for the nation’s privileged to sit in disgust for a flag that their betters raised under fire on Iwo Jima for others not yet born. Sometimes citizens can do as much harm to their commonwealth by violating customs and traditions as by breaking laws.

Instead, freedom requires constant reinvestment in and replenishment of a nation’s traditions and ideals. Self-criticism of one’s country is salutary to ensure needed changes, but only if Americans accept that an innately self-correcting United States does not have to be perfect to be good—and especially when, in a world of innately flawed humans and failed states, it remains far better than any of the alternatives abroad.

The present article summarizes arguments in Victor Davis Hanson’s new book The Dying Citizen that appears this week from Basic Books.

Don’t Ask Politicans To Fix a Supply Chain Crisis They Created

 Don't Ask Politicians To Fix a Supply Chain Crisis They Created

Governments may not be able to make an economy, but they've proven they can break it.

J.D. Tuccille - Reason  10.6.2021 7:00 AM

(Martyn Wheatley/i-Images / Polaris/Newscom)

In recent weeks, multiple trade associations have asked the Biden administration to provide some relief regarding supply-chain issues that create shortages and push prices up around the world. Some of their requests (relief from tariffs, in particular) are good policy at any time, since barriers to trade hamper prosperity and innovation. The fact, though, that industry representatives see partial solutions to current economic problems in the federal government undoing its earlier interventions is a glimpse at the bad policies that brought us a world of empty shelves and clogged ports—and which may continue to plague us in the future.

"Tariffs on raw materials, low tech/cost components, equipment, and finished goods which are not adequately produced in the U.S., are causing delivery delays of critical products and/or higher consumer costs," the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, the North American Association of Food Equipment Manufacturers and the National Electrical Manufacturers Association point out in a white paper sent to the Biden administration last week. "Plant shutdowns and/or slowdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, including current difficulties attracting new employees despite competitive pay and benefits, have reduced manufacturing productivity," they added.

Separately, the American Apparel & Footwear Association also asked for tariff relief to ease "the chaos and cost increases caused by the shipping crisis."

The trade associations fret over serious worldwide supply chain issues often represented by backlogs at ports, but also involving the inability to source both components needed for production and finished goods. Some of the international disconnect between supply and demand can be attributed to specific policies, such as lockdowns that make it difficult for factories to satisfy customers.

"Governments have struggled to secure doses [of vaccine] and have imposed costly lockdowns that have left many factories without workers," Reuters reported in August of manufacturing woes in Asia.

Likewise, Britain's dearth of truck drivers has been laid at the feet of the border barriers imposed by Brexit, which certainly didn't help. But neither did the suspension of the approval process for commercial drivers or lockdowns that idled workers.

"Covid has had an impact and the most obvious Covid impact is that normally about 35,000—40,000 tests are done a year for HGV [heavy goods vehicle] drivers and had to be suspended quite rightly for Covid, and there's a backlog of tests," the head of a dairy co-op told the Yorkshire Post.

"Foreign labour was not scared out of Britain due to an abstract legal change; it was driven out by the Government's lockdown policies in response to the pandemic, which shuffled many from their jobs onto a souped-up dole," charges British economist Philip Pilkington, who points out that Ireland, which remains in the EU, also has a driver shortage. "Many realised that the dole is better where they came from on the continent, especially relative to the cost of living, and so they left." Pilkington also points to the delay in testing drivers as contributing to the shortage.

Lockdowns also changed people's lives, closing offices and factories and confining people at home. That resulted in massive and unpredictable shifts in demand and unreliable supply. Do you remember the disappearance from supermarkets of flour and yeast early in the pandemic? Who knew that people with time on their hands would discover their inner bakers (at least for the time being)?

"The period of contagion, self-isolation and economic uncertainty will change the way consumers behave, in some cases for years to come," observes the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. "The new consumer behaviors span all areas of life, from how we work to how we shop to how we entertain ourselves. These rapid shifts have important implications for retailers and consumer-packaged-goods companies."

How many of these changes will be permanent, and which will revert to old patterns after restrictions on normal life disappear? Businesses planning for the future have to guess, with their survival at stake.

"The idea that an economy could be indiscriminately shut down and turned back on without far-reaching consequences, as if a light switch or lawn mower, is utterly damnable," charges economist Peter C. Earle. "It could only come from the mind of an individual, or body of individuals, with no understanding of or consideration for the extraordinary interdependence of the productive sector."

"Market economies tend to be pretty good at getting food on the supermarket shelves and fuel in petrol stations, if left to themselves," agrees Pilkington. "That last part is key: if left to themselves. Heavy-handed interference in market economies tends to produce the same pathologies we see in socialist economies, including shortages and inflation. That has been the unintended consequence of lockdown."

Unfortunately, there's almost certainly more pain on the way. Electricity is now in short supply in China, partially because a drought has hobbled hydropower, but also because the government makes it impossible for electricity producers to compensate for rising coal prices.

"Power plants buy coal at market price but are not allowed to raise electricity rates on customers beyond small margins set by national planners," notes the Los Angeles Times. "When coal is expensive, many plants report 'maintenance outages' and reduce or stop operation rather than suffer losses."

That may ease the shipping logjam, but only because there will be fewer goods produced by factories shuttered by blackouts. Europe, too, suffers soaring energy prices as demand recovers from pandemic lockdowns even as prices rise for fossil fuels and governments' planned transition to renewable energy proves vulnerable to nature's whims. That also leads to manufacturing slowdowns. You can expect the consequences to cascade around the world, with yet more empty shelves.

The danger is that people see economic problems caused by earlier fiddling and then demand even more government intervention. The semiconductor shortage, for instance, can be attributed to production curtailed by lockdowns as demand for computers soared among populations compelled to work and study from home. But the trade-group white paper that asked the Biden administration for tariff relief also begged it to "Ensure that semiconductor supply is fairly and transparently allocated across industry sectors and that the Administration does not—explicitly or implicitly—favor any one sector."

The groups don't elaborate on what a semiconductor policy should look like. But if the government were to further meddle in the market to allocate products made scarce by earlier actions, it's hard to see how the result wouldn't be anything other than increased supply chain chaos.

Cocaine Mitch Backs Chuck Schumer Into a Corner and Mazie Hirono Freaks

Bonchie reporting for RedState

Politics is a delicate dance when dealing with an institution as intricate as the Senate, and that’s especially true when one doesn’t hold a majority. Every move affects the next, and sometimes, moves meant to paint the other side into a procedural corner are misinterpreted as something they aren’t.

Perhaps that’s why some on the right are claiming that Mitch McConnell “bailed out” Chuck Schumer this afternoon when he offered the Democrat majority leader a short-term debt limit increase.

Here was one response to illustrate what I’m talking about with people misunderstanding what McConnell is doing.

McConnell is not bailing out Joe Biden. Quite the opposite, in fact, and it doesn’t really take much effort to see what’s going on here. If anything, McConnell is backing Schumer into a corner. Stick with me here.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do when you don’t otherwise have much leverage (because you are in the minority) is to give your opponents options they do not want. Democrats want you to believe that the only way to raise the debt ceiling without Republicans playing along is to blow up the filibuster. That’s why they and their media allies keep spinning that narrative. That’s never been true, though, and the point of McConnell’s maneuver is to force Schumer to admit that.

In reality, Democrats can raise the debt limit via reconciliation without a single Republican vote, but they don’t want to go that route because they would be using the last bullet in the chamber on that after Biden’s “build back better” boondoggle. By offering Schumer a short-term extension, McConnell is forcing the Democrats to make a choice, and none of those choices includes blowing up the filibuster. The move also relieves pressure on Joe Manchin, who will be under immense assault if a shutdown happens, while at the same time highlighting that the Democrats could fix this themselves in short order if they wanted.

When analyzing these machinations, you have to accept that a long-term default is not going to happen. The debt ceiling will be raised eventually. The question is how it’s done and who pays the political price. But if you still aren’t convinced by what I’m saying, just listen to Mazie Hirono.

Does that sound like McConnell just caved? Or does it sound like he went full Cocaine Mitch and put Democrats into a position they don’t want to be in? I think the answer is clear.