"Inflation is still high and barely moving downward as of last month, when it was 6.5% annualized. Even that statement understates the problem. For the inflation rate is not like the unemployment rate. Just because it goes down doesn't mean prices are coming back down and that your groceries are getting more affordable. Rather, it only means prices are rising slower than before, but they are still rising.

"Inflation is cumulative. So January's inflation rate of 6.4% means prices are still rising at a ruinous rate, almost certainly faster than your pay even though by less than the 9% rate that horrified shoppers last summer.

"Specific household expenses reveal inflation that is even worse than the headline number suggests. Groceries in January cost 11.3% more than a year ago. Electricity is up nearly 12%, and natural gas 27%. Airfares are up almost 26%. Rents are up almost 9%. The picture is grim despite continued low unemployment -- which may anyway not last if interest rates are cranked up further to fight persistent inflation."

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"Senate minority whip John Thune, R-S.D., will revive a piece of legislation originally introduced last year to prevent working Americans from bearing the brunt of President Biden's decision to suspend federal student loan repayments, which has cost the federal government billions of dollars.

"The measure -- which has been slightly updated and named the Stop Reckless Student Loan Actions Act of 2023 -- was originally introduced by Thune and a coalition of Republican senators last April.

"The bill being reintroduced Thursday would prohibit the president from canceling 'the outstanding balances, or a portion of the balances, on covered [student] loans due to the COVID-19 national emergency or any other national emergency.'

"'Taxpayers, especially working families, should not be responsible for bearing the costs associated with President Biden's federal student loan suspension,' Thune told Fox News Digital. 'It's incredibly unfair to those who never incurred student debt because they didn't attend college in the first place or because they either worked their way through school or their family pinched pennies and planned for higher education.'"

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"Christine Wilson, the sole remaining Republican on the Federal Trade Commission, announced Tuesday she plans to resign, citing what she said was Democratic Chair Lina Khan's 'disregard for the rule of law and due process.'

"Wilson announced her resignation, which she said will come 'soon,' in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Throughout Khan's tenure at the helm of the commission, Wilson has frequently bemoaned her approach in remarks at public meetings and in speeches.

"Wilson wrote in her op-ed that she has failed 'to persuade Ms. Khan and her enablers to do the right thing, and I refuse to give their endeavor any further hint of legitimacy by remaining.'

"Khan, who has been one of the most prominent figures of the progressive antitrust movement, has advocated for a more expansive approach to enforcement, including by pursuing risky cases with the potential to push the bounds of current case law. That approach has made her unpopular with more conservative antitrust thinkers, including Wilson."

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"The Biden administration on Monday announced another sale of oil from the Energy Department's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), with 26 million barrels set to be delivered to the market from April 1 to June 30, which will take the number of barrels in the reserve to a new low dating back to 1983. ...

"'Biden is front-loading SPR barrels to avoid a summer gasoline price spike, said Phil Flynn, analyst at Price Futures Group and FOX Business Network contributor. 'There are growing concerns among the Biden administration that gas prices are headed back to $4 a gallon and the president is fearful of the political heat he will have to take.'

"Price added, 'By pushing barrels forward from previously announced sales he is robbing Peter to pay Paul but is discouraging future U.S. oil and gas investment. There should be some backlash from Republicans who are getting tired of using the SPR for political purposes and creating short-term price relief in exchange for much higher prices down the road.'

"When Biden took office in January 2021, the SPR contained 638 million barrels out of a congressionally authorized maximum capacity of 713 million barrels. After a series of releases totaling more than 260 million barrels, the SPR is at about 371.6 million barrels as of February 2023 -- the lowest level since December 1983, according to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Selling another 26 million barrels from the SPR without adding new barrels of oil to offset the decline would take the SPR inventory to about 346 million barrels, which would be the lowest level since August 1983."

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"The Department of State has funded a deep-pocketed 'disinformation' tracking group that is secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news organizations vital advertising dollars, the Washington Examiner can confirm.

"The Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups, is feeding blacklists to ad companies with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling alleged 'disinformation,' the Washington Examiner reported . This same 'disinformation' group has received $330,000 from two State Department-backed entities linked to the highest levels of government, raising concerns from First Amendment lawyers and members of Congress."

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"Specialized U.S. Navy diving teams carried out the bombing attack against the underwater Nord Stream pipelines which supply Russian gas to western Europe during a top secret mission overseen by President Joe Biden, a bombshell report claims.

"Divers planted C4 explosives on three Nord Stream pipelines in June 2022 which were detonated three months later using a sonar buoy which broadcast a signal that triggered the bombs, according to the report.

"The attack was carried out in response to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and designed to force Germany and other European nations to end their reliance on Russian gas, it is claimed. The move would also disrupt Moscow's income from gas sales - which have contributed billions of dollars to its war effort.

"The sensational report by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, published to his Substack, cites a source 'with direct knowledge of the operational planning' behind the alleged plot. The White House and the CIA flatly rejected the report on Wednesday, branding it 'complete fiction'."

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"The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) proposed a revenue procedure this week to crack down on the service industry's reporting of tips.

"The Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program would be a voluntary tip reporting system in which the IRS and service industry companies cooperate, according to the announcement Monday. As part of the proposal, the IRS will give the public until early May to provide feedback on the program before implementing it.

"'Those 87,000 new IRS agents that you were promised would only target the rich,' tweeted Mike Palicz, federal affairs manager at Americans for Tax Reform. 'They're coming after waitresses' tips now.' ...

"'There's no reason they'd be issuing guidance on how to crack down on this if it was only going to end up being voluntary,' Palicz told Fox News Digital in an interview. 'Ultimately, the goal is to go and grab as much revenue as possible and from whoever they can.'

"'All of this in the backdrop of -- they told us they're not going to be coming after people earning $400,000 or less,' he continued. 'Well, here's a new IRS rule that's focused on bringing in tips from waitresses. That's what they're focused on doing, that's what they're putting new rules on.'"

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"State of the Union speeches are usually pretty scattershot, but President Joe Biden's 2023 one set a new record.

"He ranged across a world of issues without substantively addressing the biggest ones -- crime, the border crisis, China, the nation's looming economic woes -- because his record is so weak on all of them.

"Instead, he offered lie after lie in a shameless bid to fool the electorate ahead of his 2024 run for re-election. His only 'big idea' is to make bogeymen out of the wealthy and offer the American people more freebies, more unsustainable spending. ...

"His flagging polls show the American people aren't fooled. Just like Biden, they see that his act is getting stale."

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"California's secretary of state just issued data that show the 2022 election was a mess.

"Why? Because of voting by mail.

"Indeed, this was California's first election that relied on the United States Postal Service to get the mission accomplished. In September 2021, Sacramento passed new legislation that said everyone registered to vote -- dead or alive -- is automatically sent a ballot in the mail, every election.

"That might sound good, but the new data prove that mass voting by mail should have remained a pandemic experiment.

"An analysis by the Public Interest Legal Foundation shows over 226,000 mail ballots were rejected by California election officials. That's a quarter million citizens who thought their ballot would count, but it didn't."

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"When it comes to raising the debt limit, the White House keeps insisting on 'no negotiations,' a line President Joe Biden will likely repeat Tuesday in his State of the Union speech -- in stark contrast to his own decades-long record.

"It's not just that, as vice president, he led such negotiations time and again, calling them a 'normal political battle' and saying 'my way or the highway' is 'no way to govern.'

"Heck, during his decades in the Senate, Biden proudly voted against raising the limit nine times -- with explanations like 'I refuse to be associated with the policies that brought us to this point' (March 2006). ...

"As Biden himself said in 2011, 'grown men and women' need to 'learn that they have to have compromise' to avoid putting Uncle Sam in default."

Read the entire article here.