Were You Ever In The USSR?

AUGUST 30, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

REMEMBERING MIKHAIL GORBACHEV [UPDATED]

I was sorry to learn of Mikhail Gorbachev’s death today. Some time around 2000 Gorbachev was the Annual Dinner speaker for my organization, Center of the American Experiment. It was an epic event; we drew a crowd of 2,000 to the field house at the University of Minnesota. I was the chairman of American Experiment’s board at that time, so my daughters greeted Gorbachev at the airport and presented him with flowers. There was a photo of that on the front page of the Star Tribune the next morning. I wound up spending a portion of the day with Gorbachev, and found him to be a genuinely nice guy. (His daughter, who was traveling with him, was another story.)

At dinner that night, my wife and I were on the dais along with Gorbachev and some others, and I was seated next to him. We chatted a little; his English was excellent, but he delivered his speech in Russian with a simultaneous translation, like at the U.N. Everyone thought it was a fine speech. When he was finished he got a round of applause and returned to his seat. He sat down, leaned over to me, and asked, “Did I talk too long?”

Gorbachev was no free enterprise conservative. He tried to make Communism work and to preserve the USSR, but he failed. One could say that his real accomplishment was putting a human face on Soviet leadership. In the end, he was not willing to order the violence that would have been needed to keep the Soviet regime in power. All I can say about the incidental time I spent with Gorbachev was that, in my opinion, the human face was real.

UPDATE: This is the photo that appeared in the Star Tribune:

Gallery: Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev receives a bouquet of flowers at Holman Field in St. Paul, Minn., from Kathryn Hinderaker, 3, while her older sisters Alison, 9, far left, and Laura, 11, look on with Victoria Renner, 7, and Jack Inglis, 6, far right. The Hinderaker sisters are the daughters of John H. Hinderaker, CEO of the Center of the American Experiment. Gorbachev’s daughter, Irina Virganskaya, stands at background right. Glenn writes the following:

Soviet Gorbachev was a different animal during his USSR life.

Note:

I’d been to the Soviet Union on two occasions…..in the month of August in 1965 and returned October a generation later following the disaster at Chernobyl. I had taught Russian for twelve years….and possessed a tsarist rather than American accent. I purposely chose the language in the 1950s when I entered college. I was certain Russia would be our enemy when South Korea was invaded by their northern communists. I’ve never regretted my wisdom of the day being able to speak a foreign language beautifully without knowing it. (I was taught by elderly Russians of the tsarist type who fled fascist Manchuria during the Chinese Communist War. I spoke as I was taught….in Leningrad, Moscow, Rostov, Kiev, Sochi and so on! (I was welcomed by common folk the minute I bought my Soviet clothing, black pants with white shirt!)

Today’s California is a sample of fascistic deterioration where TRUTH DOESN’T EXIST. President Joe is a criminal gangster rather than Soviet, but the result of inferior action seems to be similar.

Gorbachev was an angel compared to his Soviet competitors. May God Bless Him! ghr!

Folks Avoid Damaged Minneapolis, THE BEST THEY CAN!

AUGUST 30, 2022 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at Power Line:

SAMANTHA BELCOURT’S STORY

Samantha Belcourt is a former Minneapolis police officer who turned in her badge following the Saint George Floyd riots of 2020. In her reporting for Alpha News Liz has been providing a multidimensional view of Minneapolis’s descent into the gutter. Liz writes up Belcourt’s story here based on her interview in the video below.

The subhead on Liz’s story extracts one thread: “Giving up the Third Precinct was intentional, according to a former Minneapolis cop, who said it was offered as a ‘prize’ to rioters. The officer turned in her badge just a few weeks later, betrayed by the city she had devoted her life to protecting.”

By contrast, over the weekend the Star Tribune served up the work of a dozen reporters and photographers who fanned out across Minneapolis to document a summer night. “What they found was a city of resilience — not a ‘dystopian ghost city.’” All is — if not well, pretty damned good, according to the Star Tribune.

Who ya gonna believe, the Star Tribune or your lyin’ eyes?

ESG NEEDS TO BE CRUSHED….LIKE AND EGG!

AUGUST 30, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

FIGHTING BACK AGAINST ESG

One of the most pernicious trends of our day is the employment of “environmental, social and governance” (ESG) criteria in investing. Former Vice President Mike Pence writes at Real Clear Markets:

On Wall Street, major investment firms are rating companies based on their adherence to left-wing environmental, social and governance (ESG) values. Like the social credit scores issued by the Chinese Communist Party, a low ESG score can be devastating, making it virtually impossible for a company to raise capital.

If that last statement sounds extreme, consider this from Goldman Sachs, as related and commented on by my colleague Isaac Orr:

A recent article by Goldman Sachs explains how so-called green banking practices are pushing up the price of oil.

The article states:

Even as oil prices climb higher, the flow of money into new oil and gas projects has stalled as investors increasingly avoid industries that produce fossil fuels and heavy carbon emissions. …

Your research shows that the link between higher energy prices and capital expenditures has broken down. What severed that connection?

Michele Della Vigna: “The capital markets engagement on climate change has reached very high levels. We can measure it in many ways, like climate change shareholder resolutions where the approval rate went from 10% to 40% during the past 10 years. And this drives a complete divergence in the cost of capital of high-carbon versus low-carbon energy projects. We estimate there’s been a divergence of 15 percentage points in the cost of capital. This is just to give you an indication of how extreme the impact is of the capital markets focus on climate change.

Because of this shift, the industry finds itself severely capital constrained on traditional hydrocarbon investment in different ways. For smaller exploration and production companies it’s about getting financing. For larger integrated oil and gas companies it’s about decarbonizing. But either way, none of these companies can scale oil and gas projects the way they used to. And if you think that most companies effectively are forced to embrace a carbon budget, a carbon budget ultimately leads to less oil and gas development, leads to higher hurdle rates, or cost of capital for these projects, and automatically means that whatever the cash flow available may be, capital expenditures are restrained.
***
Higher oil prices are absolutely consistent with a push for decarbonization that comes from the capital markets.”

So higher prices for gas and oil are a choice by the Biden administration and liberals in the investment community who are trying to force a transition to unworkable wind and solar energy.

Here is another example: Vista Outdoor is a profitable, growing company in which I am an investor. Vista Outdoor is currently selling at a price/earnings ratio of only 3.26, while the average P/E of the S&P 500 is currently 15.97, and the average P/E in the outdoor recreation industry is 17.8. What gives?

Vista Outdoor has two divisions: one sells outdoor recreation products–camping, golf, fishing, bicycling and the like. The other division is America’s largest seller of ammunition. Because of its ammunition sales, which are booming and highly profitable, the company has been shunned by liberal investors. As a result, Vista has announced that it is dividing the company in two:

Vista Outdoor Inc. (NYSE: VSTO), an Anoka-based company that sells both ammunition and consumer brands like Bell bicycle helmets and CamelBak water bottles, plans to separate into two publicly traded companies.

Following the split, the company’s outdoor products business — the consumer line that also includes brands like Giro, Camp Chef, Bushnell, Bushnell Golf, Foresight Sports — will be led by current Vista CEO Christopher Metz but will be based in Bozeman, Montana.
***
Shooting sports — how Vista refers to its ammunition business, though it also sells to law enforcement and military customers — is roughly twice the size of its consumer-oriented outdoor products unit, accounting for $1.5 billion of Vista’s total 2021 revenue of $2.22 billion.

Both segments saw growth of more than 20% from the previous year, as both gun sales and outdoor activities saw a surge of interest during the pandemic.

This should be a great deal for shareholders, as the outdoor sports business will now trade at a P/E ratio typical of the industry. Left-wing investors will still shun the ammunition company, but it will be a cash cow for investors.

That is one way of fighting ESG. Back to Mike Pence:

Fortunately, many states have had enough and are beginning to fight back against the Woke Wolves of Wall Street. West Virginia recently announced that Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and BlackRock will be banned from doing business with the state as a result of the companies’ pernicious ESG policies that punish the coal industry. All five companies had previously announced that they were drastically cutting investments in new coal projects.

Other states are also rising to the occasion. Already, the New York Times reports that Louisiana and Arkansas have joined West Virginia in pulling more than $700 million out of BlackRock. State treasurers in Utah and Indiana are demanding an end to the insidious practice of ESG. And state attorneys general, led by Mark Brnovich of Arizona and Doug Peterson of Nebraska, are pursuing Wall Street firms for possible antitrust violations and the illegal restraint of trade or commerce, a perfect description of the tactics inherent to ESG.

If ESG investors have been communicating with one another and agreeing to boycott certain companies, it would be a clear violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. I’d like to see criminal liability here; prison terms under the Sherman Act can be up to 10 years.

States with large employee pension funds invested in the stock market would be well advised to rein in massive investment firms that are pushing a radical ESG agenda. State and local governments should entrust their money to managers that don’t work against their citizens’ best interests. States should also pass model legislation developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council requiring government pension fund managers to vote the state’s shares, rather than delegating that authority to Woke Wolf of Wall Street firms.

Every state in the union should follow West Virginia’s example and give Wall Street a simple choice: either serve the interests of our citizens, or take your business elsewhere.

One more thing: by prioritizing politics over financial return, ESG investors like BlackRock inevitably underperform for their clients. There must be a huge market for investment funds that simply want to maximize return for investors and shareholders. One such is Strive Asset Management, founded by Vivek Ramaswamy, the author of Woke, Inc.. Strive launched a U.S. energy ETF (“DRLL”) that attracted $250 million in a matter of days. Strive has several more ETFs in the works. From the linked Bloomberg article:

As outlined in Tuesday’s filings, Strive will “generally vote against board members and proposals that advance social or political agendas unrelated to providing excellent products and services to customers” — which in DRLL’s case, means encouraging oil companies to drill more. That pits the issuer against the likes of BlackRock Inc., which has launched a wave of environmental, social and governance-focused funds in recent years.

There are signs that the ESG fad has already crested:

The Ohio-based Strive is planning its expansion as flows into ESG ETFs falter. Dogged by poor performance as energy stocks soar, just $4.5 billion has been funneled into the category so far in 2022, data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence show. Compare that to two straight years of more than $30 billion of inflows.

But let’s not take any chances. ESG is one of the worst ideas of recent times. It needs to be crushed.

Working the FBI

AUGUST 30, 2022 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at Power Line

TIMOTHY THIBAULT EXITS FBI

Citing unnamed whistleblowers, Senator Chuck Grassley specifically called out FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Washington Field Office Timothy Thibault in his letter to Attorney General Garland and FBI Director Wray dated July 18, 2022. Senator Grassley posted the letter online here.

Working the FBI public corruption beat, Thibault himself appears not be an entirely straight shooter. Miranda Devine put it this way at the bottom of her New York Post column yesterday:

As we know now from whistleblowers who came forward to Sen. Chuck Grassley, the FBI obstructed its own investigation of the laptop.

Timothy Thibault, an FBI assistant special agent in charge at the Washington field office, has been on leave since Grassley started raising concerns about his suppression of negative information about Hunter before the 2020 election.

The whistleblowers also told Grassley that the FBI had “developed information about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity . . . verified and verifiable derogatory information” but that was “falsely labeled as disinformation” by FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten in August 2020.

Auten has been identified as the analyst who failed to alert his colleagues in 2016 to the “inconsistencies” in the phony Steele dossier, cooked up by the Clinton campaign to claim Trump was a Russian agent.

The same playbook was being applied to the Hunter Biden information.

Now comes word that Thibault has resigned his position with the FBI. Among those who have pieced the story together are Bradford Betz and David Spunt for FOX News here, Kerry Picket and Jeff Mordock for the Washington Times here, and Emily Crane for the New York Post here.

Picket and Mordock’s story opens:

A senior FBI official in the bureau’s Washington field office has abruptly resigned after coming under congressional scrutiny for suspected political bias in handling the investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop computer.

The Washington Times learned that Timothy Thibault, an assistant special agent in charge, was forced to leave his post. The information came from two former FBI officials familiar with the situation.

Mr. Thibault was seen exiting the bureau’s elevator on Friday. He was escorted by two or three “headquarters-looking types,” according to eyewitness accounts provided to one of the former officials.

It is not clear whether Mr. Thibault left on his own accord or was forced out of the bureau. The 25-year FBI veteran was on leave for at least a month over revelations about political statements he made while leading the public corruption unit.

The FBI declined to comment. Attempts to contact Mr. Thibault were unsuccessful.

Republican lawmakers have been scrutinizing Mr. Thibault for making anti-Trump statements in social media posts in 2020. At the time, he was helping lead the FBI’s probe of Hunter Biden, whose father, President Biden, was running for the White House.

The FBI is a deeply corrupt institution at the leadership level. It needs to be dismantled and reconstructed. Wray’s wruminations before congressional committees charged with oversight of the FBI have been farcical.

I don’t think the FBI has responded to the letters of Senator Grassley and Senator Ron Johnson on this subject. The FBI owes the public a long overdue accounting of the corruption at the bureau that is hiding in plain view. The exit of Timothy Thibault represents the latest case in point.

Fake Senator From Fake Massachusetts Elizabeth!

August 29, 2022

Fake Indian, fake economics: Elizabeth Warren unleashes her economic illiteracy on inflation

By Monica Showalter at American Thinker:

Like a fussy old librarian, Elizabeth Warren is suddenly all worried about the Federal Reserve tipping the economy into a recession with its coming rate hikes, a topic she’s never shown much concern about until now.

According to Reuters:

WASHINGTON — Sen. Elizabeth Warren said on Sunday that she was very worried that the Federal Reserve was going to tip the nation’s economy into recession and that interest rate hikes would put people out of work.

“Do you know what’s worse than high prices and a strong economy? It’s high prices and millions of people out of work. I am very worried that the Fed is going to tip this economy into recession,” Warren, D-Mass., told CNN on Sunday.

The U.S. central bank’s chief, Jerome Powell, warned on Friday that Americans were headed for a painful period of slow economic growth and possibly rising joblessness as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to fight high inflation.

Powell said in a speech on Friday the Fed will raise rates as high as needed, and would keep them there “for some time” to bring down inflation that is running at more than three times the Fed’s 2% goal.

So you see, she’d prefer we continue to have high prices — high, higher, highest — soaring to the Venezuela-style levels, instead of the Fed taking the only known action that can stop the godawful dynamic. That’s because rate hikes, which are done to kill off inflation, have these other unpleasant consquences.

She’s perfectly right about that, but does she know what she’s talking about? About as much as she knows about Native American cuisine and what to serve at Pow-Wow Chow.

What she’s saying with this economically illiterate statement is that inflation should continue to run rampant, because she doesn’t like the consequences of stopping it. 

That’s a tone-deaf statement given that inflation is America’s number one concern right now, according to polls, toxic and corrosive to the economy, while the only solution thus offered by the Bidenites has been to sic the IRS on taxpayers to drain more money out of the system, a notoriously inefficient solution. 

We don’t hear any complaints from Warren, who founded the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau, about that nasty business, despite her claims to be all in for the little guy. All we hear from her are proposals for ever greater amounts of federal spending, which is fueling the inflation, and now this unseemly demonization of the Fed which is the last thing that can stop it.

Who’s the loudest advocate for student loan debt “forgiveness”? That’s right, Liz Warren. Biden, after all, has proposed forgiving $10,000 in student debt in most cases. That harebrained scheme, by a Penn-Wharton estimate, is expected to cost Uncle Sam $1 trillion.

Warren would like that figure to be $20,000.

Were Warren serious about avoiding rate hikes to avoid the deleterious effects of rate hikes, she might just consider turning off the federal money spigots for a stretch.

But you’ll never hear that kind of talk from her. And that’s where we see the full panoply of her fake-economic stupidity:

Inflation is caused by the Fed printing money, which, when the Treasury asks for it, the Fed will do.

Inflation is “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” as Milton Friedman insisted. Friedman was icily firm on this because he knew what he was talking about  — and as architect of the Reagan prosperity years, he had the results to show for it.

Rate hikes are a necessary evil when the government can’t stop spending money. They happened during the era of Fed chief Paul Volcker in the early years of the great Ronald Reagan administration, cleaning up after the federal spendathons done by Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter. They are likely to happen now, according to Fed chief Jerome Powell, given that Joe Biden can’t stop turning on the federal money spigots.

Biden’s done that big at least two times in just this month alone with his monstrous $790 billion “Inflation Reduction Act,” and his $10,000 federal student debt amnesty executive order which will add as much as a trillion dollars in federal spending. Throw in various multi-billion-dollar Ukraine war spending bills, and the federal spending just keeps rising.

Spendingwise, Biden’s like a drunk going on extended and increasingly frequent benders as his disease progresses.

Warren is even worse, her only virtue being that she doesn’t have her hands on the levers of power. She’s demanding that inflation be allowed to run and the federal government to just keep spending at an even higher rate than Joe Biden is doing already. Rate hikes to stop it? No way. Rate hikes intended to correct this imbalance of too much money chasing too few goods will slow the economy down and cost jobs, even if regulatory red tape is fixed so that more goods may flow, so she’s yelling about rate hikes.

But on the input side fueling the inflation, she’s as bad as Joe Biden, who once crowed that Milton Friedman is not in charge anymore, if not worse. 

She hasn’t a clue about where inflation comes from, She just wants to spend and spend, and never let anything like inflation ever stop her.

“It’s Not 1983 Any More!”

AUGUST 29, 2022 BY STEVEN HAYWARD at Power Line:

CASE STUDY IN LEFTIST IDEOLOGY PATH DEPENDENCE

Cast your mind back to the early 1980s for a moment, and the early innings of the AIDS epidemic. It was widely understood that AIDS was predominantly spread through high-risk or unprotected homosexual contact, and public health authorities, even in San Francisco, initially said that gay bathhouses that were venues for casual and largely unprotected sexual encounters should be closed down.

In those days, however, the ethic of “liberation” and “sexual freedom” was riding high, and to be sure, homosexuality was still stigmatized by large portions of the population, such that San Francisco was an oasis for gays celebrating coming out of the closet at long last.

The furious protests of gay activists shouting that they would not be “shoved back into the closet” caused public health authorities to do an immediate about face and retreat from the common sense step of closing the bath houses. Read the Randy Shilts book And the Band Played On for a honest narrative of this shameful response—Shilts was gay himself, and died of AIDS in 1994.

And then the head of the of the infectious disease division of the NIH, a certain Dr. J. Edgar Fauci, declared that heterosexuals were just as much at risk as gays (which was not true), and thus everyone should just wear full-body condoms all the time—only a slight exaggeration, inspired by Naked Gun.

In other words, the leftist politics of liberation trumped sensible public health measures, and thousands of people died because of this political correctness. If ever there was a case of shutting down to “stop the spread,” it was then.

Fast forward to the present moment, and the outbreak of Monkeypox. It is well known that Monkeypox is spread predominantly in much the same way as AIDS, but our public health bureaucracy, now thoroughly politicized partly because of the AIDS epidemic, did cartwheels to avoid directly saying “AVOID unprotected gay sex. Oh, and by the way, can we please change the name of the disease because ‘Monkeypox’ is racist or something. . .”

My hunch was that it’s not 1983 any more, and that straight talk (no pun intended) to gays about the risks of Monkeypox would not summon forth an ideological reaction. Times have changed, and the ideology of sexual freedom uber alles is no longer the primary principle of the gay community.

And sure enough, UPI reports today:

Survey shows gay men cutting back on sex to avoid monkeypox

A survey conducted among American gay and bisexual men in early August found about half saying they’d cut down on sexual activity — including one-night stands and app-based hookups — in response to the global monkeypox outbreak.

The survey, conducted online Aug. 5-15, was led by Kevin Delaney, of the Monkeypox Emergency Response Team at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“These findings suggest that men who have sex with men are already taking actions to protect their sexual health and making decisions to reduce risk to themselves and their partners,” Delaney’s team reported.

The timing of the survey — and its finding that America’s gay male community reacted swiftly to the monkeypox threat — coincides with a recent global decline in monkeypox cases.

Who’s living in the past now? Leftists who learn nothing and forget nothing. And now allowing outdated political correctness to damage the gay population once again.

“President Biden is depleting the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which is currently at its lowest level in 37 years”.

What happens when Biden’s energy bribes run out?

by JAZZ SHAW Aug 29, 2022 at HotAir: 

(AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

We’ve known for some time now that Joe Biden has been selling off the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a steady pace. It adds up to millions of barrels of oil per day. He’s even been selling some of the oil to China and other foreign markets. This was all being done in the interest of bringing down gas prices ahead of the election, though it hasn’t had all that much of an effect. The releases mostly just stopped the prices from going up even faster. Analysts at the Institute for Energy Research have been monitoring the situation closely and their latest report suggests some bad things are on the horizon. First of all, the SPR is at the lowest level it’s been in 37 years and it will continue to be depleted up until a few days before the election. At that point, the sales will supposedly halt, and along with them, the braking effect that’s been applied to gas prices. Shortly after the election (conveniently), gas prices are now projected to begin rising again and they will exceed five dollars per gallon by the end of the year.

President Biden is depleting the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which is currently at its lowest level in 37 years. On July 26, 2022, the U.S. Department of Energy announced an emergency sale from the reserve of up to 20 million barrels, which will go through the end of October, just prior to the mid-term election in November. And, along with that announcement, Goldman Sachs revised its forecast for gasoline prices upward to $5 a gallon by the end of the year.

Previously, its price forecast was at $4.35 a gallon. That’s because, despite the Biden SPR releases, the market must still balance demand with tight supplies. According to Goldman Sachs, a sustained $5 price should eventually solve the market deficit. The $5 gas price is accompanied by a Brent futures price expectation of $130 a barrel.

What the White House has been doing truly is the equivalent of bribery, though it’s the energy market that’s been accepting the bribes. By artificially driving the price of oil lower via emptying the SPR, the natural ebbs and flows of the oil marketplace are dampened. But that situation isn’t going to hold permanently. As soon as the SPR oil stops flowing to the market, the prices will rise substantially. Brent Futures predicts that oil will be back up to 130 dollars per barrel. But by design, that won’t happen until after the election and Biden and his party can stop worrying about how upset people are when they can’t afford to fill their tanks.

Meanwhile, the SPR will be massively depleted and the government will have to pay hugely inflated crude oil prices to begin refilling it. (Most of the oil currently left in the reserve was purchased when oil was selling for 60 dollars per barrel or less.) And that’s assuming that they even plan to replace it. That oil is supposed to be there in the event of hurricanes, earthquakes, or other natural disasters that can shut down the power grid for extended periods of time. Emergency generation plants can be brought online to produce power locally, but they almost all burn oil. If there’s no oil available, bad things happen quickly.

These efforts to artificially tinker with the energy market are very similar to all of the wind and solar subsidies that the Democrats keep jamming through Congress. As long as renewable energy looks relatively cheap to produce, people will keep investing in it to the detriment of the oil and gas industry. But when the bribe money runs out, the costs of those renewable energy sources will shoot up in a similar fashion. You can only bribe the system for so long before the energy chickens come home to roost.

The amazing part is that the Biden administration is unapologetically doing all of this right out in the open, trusting that the media will largely ignore the story. (And they’ve lived down to those expectations so far.) Joe Biden actually had the nerve to schedule the end of the SPR drain a few days before the election. It takes a week or so before the market forces catch up and the prices begin to rise. So he’s doing this strictly to try to gain political advantage with no plan in place as to what we’re supposed to do once the election is safely behind him.