For generations, seeing the Disney label on children’s entertainment has been tantamount to a seal of approval. Moms could be confident that Disney content would reinforce the lessons they teach at home: Virtue is its own reward, be brave, truthful, loving, patriotic—and good will triumph over evil in the end.

Sadly, that assumption is no longer operative. Disney seems to be pursuing a different, more progressive agenda. Last week, its CEO spoke out against a Florida law that’s been wildly mislabeled by the left as the  “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Actually, all it does is prohibit teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity to children in kindergarten to third grade.

Moms and dads ought to be paying attention: Why would an entertainment company that specializes in children’s entertainment oppose such commonsense legislation designed to protect children?

The trust of parents has been the fuel that built the Disney empire. 

That trust is fast eroding.

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We just got the new inflation numbers and they are—yet again—very bad.

We’re seeing the highest year-over-year inflation in a generation. President Biden tried to place the blame on the war in Ukraine, but that’s patently false. First, these numbers were for February and so the crisis had very little effect on it. Second, the government also reports something called “core inflation,” which excludes food and energy, two of the commodities most affected by the war, and the core inflation data was also the highest in a generation.

Putin has a lot of evils to answer for, but U.S. inflation so far is not among them. We did this to ourselves, or more precisely—our ruling classes did it.

When our currency is sound, foreign wars don’t give us inflation. For example, Iran and Iraq—both petro states—waged war during almost all of the Reagan presidency, and yet we beat inflation and dropped oil prices to some of the lowest levels ever.

The difference is leadership.

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President Biden’s blame game on inflation simply will not work.

Inflation soared 7 percent in 2021, the biggest jump in four decades. This was the result of massive federal spending over two years. The country is dealing with inflation on a scale not seen since 1979-80—an inflation that led to Ronald Reagan’s election.

President Biden is now eager to blame our accelerating inflation on Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In his blame-shifting onto Putin, Biden has gone not one, but many bridges too far.

Americans are not stupid.

President Biden’s priority—on day one—was the killing of the Keystone XL pipeline. That was a sonic-boom signal for the global market for oil: They guessed less petroleum would be forthcoming from North America—and prices went up. Markets are, after all, are forward-looking.

Biden continues to insist “I didn’t do it.” That’s what children declare when everything goes awry.

Biden’s protestations to the contrary are just more reason to rebuke him in the fall in the voting booth.

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Do six in ten Americans really support teaching children below the age of 10 about sexual orientation and “gender identity”? That’s what ABC News and Ipsos want readers to believe from its latest polling, but their methodology exposes this as yet another a media narrative stunt. 

By their own admission, the poll oversamples LGBTQ respondents in its too-small number of adults rather than registered voters. It appears that ABC and Ipsos polled specifically where they could expect opposition to be strongest—in selected urban areas—as a means to rebuke Florida governor Ron DeSantis. 

DeSantis will sign a bill that prohibits instruction on sexual orientation before the fourth grade, keeping sex-education efforts focused instead on basic human biology. 

DeSantis appears to have a better sense of parental opinion in Florida than ABC would like you to believe. We all need to watch carefully as media companies cook up surveys—like this one—in order to push a narrative rather than measure public opinion.

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Elton John once sang that, “Sorry seems to be the hardest word.” But hard or not, government officials must publicly apologize for their many destructive mistakes in handling the pandemic.

The purpose of an apology isn’t to humiliate or punish.

Rather, in a democratic republic like ours, government is the people’s servant. If government workers escape accountability, their mistakes aren’t corrected and public trust isn’t restored. Worse, it sends a message that they’re superior to those they’re supposed to be serving.

What’s more, the leaders at the CDC, NIH, and elsewhere didn’t just make mistakes. They tried to disgrace, marginalize and silence those with dissenting views who—for the most part—turned out to be right. That behavior ran contrary to best scientific practices and demonstrates why free speech and the free exchange of ideas matter. It was a disgrace.

We require school children to take responsibility for their wrongdoing. Surely high government officials can rise to the same standard.

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President Biden’s first State of the Union was in need of the fact check industry we heard so much from during the Trump years.

One item stood out to me as particularly misleading. Biden said he was—and I quote—“The only president ever to cut the deficit by more than one trillion dollars in a single year.”

Well, yeah, but the only way to get that badge of honor is to have had a deficit which was pushing three trillion dollars to begin with. And of course, there’s the basic issue of adjusting for inflation. A trillion dollars just ain’t what it used to be because of debasing of the dollar.

Once one adjusts for the debasing of currency and size of previous deficit, Biden’s deficit drop is pretty run of the mill—especially in comparison with other times when calamities have come to an end. 

If the “Covid War” is over, then when to we get our post-War boom?

We need our economy back.

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In the past 14 years, we’ve witnessed three crises involving Russian incursions against its neighbors. What did all three events have in common? High oil prices—and the broader issue of global inflation.

This isn’t happening now because Putin is a tyrant: Putin has always been a tyrant. It’s not happening because America’s foreign affairs ruling class is clueless, because they’ve been clueless for a long time. 

The variable is oil prices. 2008 invasion of Georgia; 2014 annexation of Crimea and now the 2022 war against Ukraine, all followed upon oil price spikes. Russia is a Petro-state. There is a direct correlation between oil prices and Russian income and Russia’s ability to finance imperial adventures. 
 
The most powerful way to change the calculus for Putin is to starve the Russian state of revenues by simply unleashing American energy ingenuity. 

Oil is now at nosebleed high levels. If we can drive it down, we can drive down Putin’s ability to feed his war machine. 

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“Iran got much more than it could expect. Much more,” brags Vladimir Putin’s negotiator to the negotiations to reinstate Barack Obama’s Iran deal. Not only did Russia deliver a better deal for the Iranian terrorist-financing theocrats, Mikhail Ulyanov bragged that China got in on the act too. “Our Chinese friends were also very efficient and useful as co-negotiators,” Ulyanov bragged.

Ulyanov’s declaration has all but confirmed that a national-security disaster authored by Russia and China may come in days.

How is this good news—in any way—for the US? And better yet, why are we outsourcing our national security to Putin’s regime and Xi Jinping? Either Biden is desperate for a foreign-policy win, or he wants access to more foreign sources of oil in order to avoid the strategic benefit of expanded American production.

This latter potential would explain Biden’s disgraceful wooing of Nicolas Maduro—the same Venezuelan dictator who has held six American oil executives on trumped-up charges for four years.

The moral compass of the Biden administration badly needs recalibration.

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Look at people’s priorities. They reveal everything about who they are.

Last week, as Russia ravaged Ukraine and the President delivered the State of the Union Address, Senate Democrats were busy thinking about … abortion.

The most charitable explanation is they were ashamed of the so-called Women’s Health Protection Act, and hoped to advance it when the country was too distracted to notice.

It’s an ugly piece of work. It would nullify virtually any state laws regulating abortion. The bill would prohibit bans on abortion for even the most discriminatory reasons—including disability or gender. States would be forbidden to protect unborn babies old enough to survive outside the womb. They couldn’t enact even reasonable regulations like waiting periods, informed consent laws, ultrasound requirements—even abortion clinic safety standards. 

Someone please explain to me how that “protects” women’s health.

This kind of extremism is chilling. Thankfully, the bill failed. 

But as long as they have majorities—today’s radical ideologues are sure to try again.

 

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Wendy Sherman—our current Deputy Secretary of State—was speaking before a House Committee last week.

She was asked a very simple question:

“Should Europe and the West divest Western Europe, uh, in the Western world, divest of Russian energy. In your opinion?”

Her answer: “No. I think that there is a lot of rethink and there will be about energy security worldwide…”

What is that nonsense? There’s a lot of “rethink”? This is just beltway speak. It’s Aspen Institute leftwing nuttery speak. 

There will be blood on the hands of this entire administration if they do not move immediately to stop buying Russian oil.

They are financing Russia’s genocidal campaign against the Ukrainian people. 

They are allowing it to happen. 

This mirrors what we saw in the Obama years: President Biden just does not understand the difference between good and evil in everyday life.

Putin is evil. Putin is a dictator. Putin is a tyrant.

Our nation needs to stop buying Russian oil today. We should have done it earlier, but there is no excuse not to do it now.

President Biden: It’s time to lead.

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