"Shortly after the pandemic struck last year, the Federal Reserve began buying billions of dollars in government debt every month to drive down borrowing costs and keep the economy from collapsing.

"Today, house prices are surging, stocks have continued their stratospheric rise, and banks have more cash than they know what to do with. Yet the Fed is still pumping billions into the economy. Why?

"That's what a growing number of lawmakers, investors and even some Fed officials themselves are demanding to know. They are warning that the central bank's vast purchases of government bonds and mortgage-backed securities are feeding financial bubbles in the housing, stock and even cryptocurrency markets, and stoking higher consumer prices, with little apparent benefit to ordinary Americans.

"'There's no justification for the Fed to maintain [its purchases] at current levels, and doing so seriously risks contributing to heightened inflation, Sen. Pat Toomey (Pa.), the top Republican on the Banking Committee, told POLITICO."

Read the entire article here.

"The self-proclaimed heroes and martyrs of the Texas Democratic House members who fled to Washington, D.C., aboard a chartered plane (without masks but with a case of Miller Lite and stronger liquids carried discretely in plain brown paper bags) have achieved little except to break quorum and thereby stop the special legislative session back home and prove themselves a super-spreader event in the nation's capital.

The reason for their rash action was to keep an election reform bill -- H.B. 3, sponsored by Republican State Rep. Andrew Murr -- from passing. But listen to their many public utterances -- from news conferences to cable news appearances to tweets and Facebook postings -- and you'll notice an utter lack of specifics. They condemn the bill as 'voter suppression' and 'Jim Crow 2.0' but without mentioning exactly what's wrong with the bill.

That's because the bill actually expands opportunities for voting, especially during the very popular 13-day early voting period in Texas, during which most of the state's voters cast their ballots. So maybe a reporter might ask what actual provisions of the bill they oppose?

To help that process along, here are a few suggestions for an enterprising reporter -- or even an interested constituent -- to ask the wandering Texans as they lounge in their downtown D.C. hotel rooms, awaiting their next COVID test, Zoom cable hit, fundraising pitch or release from quarantine."

Read the entire article here.

"As Democrats race toward squandering another $4.1 trillion -- perhaps with some Republican help -- we are being told over and over how the biggest stumbling block is figuring out how the new spending will be 'paid for.'

"There are technically two different bills being negotiated. One is a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that includes a wide range of liberal priorities. And the other is an infrastructure bill that would introduce an additional $600 billion in spending that a group of Republicans, for some reason, are still pursuing. But Democrats have indicated that if the bipartisan deal fails, that spending will end up being added to the reconciliation bill anyway, bringing the combined total to $4.1 trillion.

"It should be noted that this may even be charitable. The way Democrats have structured the reconciliation package is to set expiration dates for certain policies with the hope that once enacted, they would be hard to eliminate, and they would thus become permanent parts of the budget. According to an analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the true cost of the reconciliation plan could be as high as $5.5 trillion (not including the additional spending from the bipartisan package)."

"This week, President Joe Biden was asked whether he had any message for social media amidst a dramatic rise in the number of diagnosed COVID-19 cases thanks to the delta variant. Biden immediately responded that companies like Facebook were responsible for murder: 'They're killing people -- I mean, they're really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they're killing people.' Meanwhile, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said that Facebook had not stopped misinformation thoroughly enough on its platform, calling misinformation a 'serious threat to public health.'

"None of this is accurate. Facebook is, first of all, a platform; it is not a publication with the same responsibilities of editorial oversight as a publisher. To treat Facebook as such would be to transform its purpose. Furthermore, on a purely factual level, it is simply untrue that Facebook users are disproportionately likely to avoid vaccination -- in fact, according to Facebook's statistics, vaccine acceptance in the United States among their users now stands between 80% and 85%, and 3.3 million Americans have used their vaccine finder tool to seek a location for a vaccine.

"So, what's driving the Biden administration's finger pointing? Its broader agenda to utilize the massive market dominance of the social media platforms to squeeze alternative media sources out of existence. Before the rise of social media, most Americans who used the internet for news bookmarked a variety of pages and then visited them individually. Over time, as social media grew and as people began to access stories they liked through an algorithmically controlled newsfeed, Americans used social media for news. This centralized the mechanism for information dissemination.

"Now, the left sees an opportunity: If all the news is accessed in one place, by restricting access in that place, the news monopoly once held by legacy media can be reestablished. All that will be required is labeling everyone they don't like 'misinformation.'

"Nearly 9 in 10 voters say they are concerned about the rising cost of living in the U.S., according to a new survey from the conservative advocacy group American Action Network.

"Eighty-eight percent of voters surveyed said they were either 'somewhat' or 'extremely' worried about the rising cost of living, while 86 percent said they were worried about inflation and 79 percent said they were worried about rising gas prices. Seventy-three percent said they were concerned about 'impending tax increases.'"

"In a rare coordinated action on Monday, the United States, Britain, and the European Union condemned Beijing over its exploitation of Microsoft Exchange servers.

"The U.S. and Britain have also attributed broader attacks to China's civilian intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security. In a very telling example of its deference to Beijing, the EU only attributed the Microsoft Exchange attack to actors located on Chinese soil. Still, China's aggression and ambition here are defining. The Microsoft Exchange attack makes Russia's recent SolarWinds intrusion look like a polite request for classified information in comparison.

"Addressing China's broader cyber-espionage campaign, the Department of Justice says that the MSS successfully stole information related to 'sensitive technologies used for submersibles and autonomous vehicles, specialty chemical formulas, commercial aircraft servicing, proprietary genetic-sequencing technology and data, and foreign information to support China's efforts to secure contracts for state-owned enterprises within the targeted country (e.g., large-scale high-speed railway development projects).'

"The British government says that the Microsoft Exchange attack affected 30,000 corporations in the U.S. and many more globally. Britain also says the attack 'was highly likely to enable large-scale espionage, including acquiring personally identifiable information and intellectual property.'"

Read the entire article here.

"The fate of David Chipman, President Joe Biden's pick to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), is now in the hands of undecided moderate Democrats such as Senator Jon Tester and Senator Joe Manchin. If they're interested in protecting the Second Amendment rights of their sizeable gun-owning constituencies, they will reject his nomination.

"After spending 25 years at the ATF, retiring as a special agent in 2012, Chipman found work as a high-profile and zealous anti-gun activist, working with numerous anti-gun outfits, including Giffords, where he is employed as a senior adviser. There is, of course, nothing inherently unethical about gun-control activism, even if we happen to disagree with the goals of the movement. Yet, it's quite another story to empower such a political operative to run the agency tasked with upholding gun laws. ...

"As with most executive-branch agencies, the ATF director has the latitude and power to create and enforce a new regulatory regime. Presidents should be afforded substantial leeway in nominating people they trust, but Chipman has shown that he is both professionally and temperamentally unfit for the job."

"In the past year, city police departments across the country have reported a dramatic drop in manpower, as cops retire, resign, or leave for the suburbs. The NYPD's headcount fell to its lowest level in ten years. In Chicago, police retirements rose 15 percent. The San Francisco Police Department is short 400 officers; over 115 officers, including an entire unit dedicated to crowd control, have left the Portland PD; and nearly 200 have left the Minneapolis PD or are on leave, rendering the department unable to engage in proactive policing. A recent survey of police departments found that hiring fell an average of 5 percent in 2020, while resignations rose 18 percent and retirements a whopping 45 percent.

"What's behind this wave? Officers I spoke with who had left their old departments all offered the same explanation: since last year's explosive protests, they no longer feel that they have the support of the public or of civilian officials. As one now-retired NYPD officer put it: 'One day, the good guys became the bad guys and the bad guys became the good guys.'"

Read the entire article here.

"Congress should not increase funding for the IRS.

"Not $40 billion more, as a 'bipartisan' group of senators demands. Not $80 billion more, as Biden and the Democrat leadership demand.

"Not one red cent.

"It is ridiculous to even consider more tax dollars for the Internal Revenue Service until those at the IRS responsible for the 'leak' of private tax returns and audits to a left-wing political group, ProPublica, have been identified, fired, and jailed. Releasing IRS data is a crime punishable by five years in prison, per infraction.

"Not a penny more should flow to the IRS that only days ago refused to allow a Christian group to incorporate as any other religious nonprofit would because the IRS actually said that promoting Christianity helped the Republican Party.

"Rancid religious bigotry and partisan politics from the agency that demands to see all financial data of all nonprofits, including churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples, is unacceptable and unconstitutional. Only because this outrage made the press did the IRS back down. How many such groups are strangled quietly in the crib, never to be heard from?

"We know the answer to that one. During the Obama-Biden years, the IRS, led by Obama appointee Lois Lerner, crippled the Taxed Enough Already (TEA) Party movement by refusing to allow groups that sounded conservative to incorporate as nonprofits. This is normally (by government standards) a quick and easy process, but between 2009 and 2012 only one conservative nonprofit group was allowed to come into being."

Read the entire piece here.

"For socialists and their fellow travelers everywhere, it's turning out to be a bummer of a summer. It's almost bad enough to make you feel sorry for Sen. Bernie Sanders.

"Almost.

"Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and their anti-American ilk are stuck defending economic authoritarianism abroad while its victims are pleading for the United States to save them.

"To the millions of downtrodden in Cuba, Haiti and most of Latin America, the US remains the shining city on the hill, even as AOC and her Squad demonize the greatest country ever created.

"It must break their tiny hearts to see Cuban protesters waving American flags and Haitian officials asking the White House for American troops to keep order. Don't those people know America is a racist, colonial power that feasts on the poor?"

Read the entire article here.