 Dear Weekend Jolter, Who could have predicted the job of U.S. president would involve compounding challenges arising simultaneously on a global scale? Not Biden, it seems, despite his prior eight years of intimate familiarity with the position. Based on press accounts and the president's own public laments, he is dismayed at the following: bad hands he's been dealt by the universe, the sheer number of problems he's called upon to do something about, inadequate messaging from staff, aides who correct his gaffes, insufficiently positive media coverage, insufficiently supportive Democrats, those damn Republicans, and on it goes. As is typical with those occupying high public office, nowhere on that list is evidence of self-reflection beyond the idea that he should have communicated better how incredible he is. It is true, as pieces on this website have pointed out on occasion, that challenges ranging from the supply-chain mess to inflation are not primarily of the president's making and involve forces outside his control (the Fed plays a bigger role in the latter and belatedly is trying to correct course). But it is not true that the buck stops everywhere but there. Isaac Schorr, who moonlights as a Jolt writer, riffs on this theme here, and Kyle Smith provides a reality check: Unpopular presidents tend to complain that they were dealt a bad hand, and then grouse that the media are making things look worse than they are. But Biden was dealt an excellent hand; he has no excuses for the mess he's in. . . . By the time Biden took office, the economy had rebounded energetically, growing 33.4 percent and 4.1 percent, respectively, in the last two quarters of 2020, and it was already roaring along at a 6.4 percent growth clip for the first quarter of 2021. Yet Biden pushed for more stimulus and got it, pouring $1.9 trillion worth of kerosene on the fire. And then he pushed for even more of the same, spending the rest of the year advocating trillions in infrastructure spending (which he got) and trillions more in spending on the so-called Build Back Better agenda (which he didn't). Gasoline prices are not as directly linked to Biden's actions as inflation, but he can hardly blame exogenous forces for the spike in the cost of fossil fuel when disrupting its supply has been a nakedly stated objective of the bureaucracy he put in place. . . . Biden is the primary author of the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan that first caused his approval ratings to sag. His softness on illegal immigration is the obvious cause of the ongoing border crisis. And his inability to get through even a heavily stage-managed appearance without looking as clueless as Grandpa Simpson is the reason Americans doubt his fitness to lead.
On inflation, the Biden administration's responses have been a tapestry of denial and misdirection and projection. The president often blames Vladimir Putin, despite the fact that prices were rising for months before the invasion of Ukraine. This week, Biden also blamed Republicans for — try and follow this — stopping him from tackling inflation by pumping more money into an overheated economy. To that point, nowhere do we see an acknowledgment that big-spending policies at least could have played a role or that it might be wise to reconsider those policies in light of events. As Charles C. W. Cooke has noted, the modern Democratic agenda amounts to an "inflation machine," including the goal to "increase the discretionary income of middle- and upper-middle-class Americans by writing at least $10,000 off the student-loan debt they owe taxpayers." Yet, what we hear is the world's smallest violin playing "Wail for the Chief." A recent NBC News story captured this dynamic: "I've heard him say recently that he used to say about President Obama's tenure that everything landed on his desk but locusts, and now he understands how that feels," a White House official said. Amid a rolling series of calamities, Biden's feeling lately is that he just can't catch a break.
From the New York Times comes the news that some Democratic insiders are starting to wonder whether they'd be better off cutting Biden loose in 2024. The piece, however, honors the conceit that a big part of the problem is his inability to pass "big-ticket legislation" and the "refusal" by congressional Democrats to "muscle through the president's Build Back Better agenda or an expansion of voting rights." A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll showed inflation, the economy, gun violence, and abortion to be top issues for Americans, and Biden's approval rating on the first was 28 percent. Perhaps the president's problem is not his inability to pass his panacean agenda but the growing realization that he doesn't have one. NAME. RANK. LINK. EDITORIALS For Democrats, a warning from the Rio Grande Valley: An Earthquake in South Texas Don’t worry, Biden is sending sternly worded letters about gas prices: Biden’s Oil Tantrum Enough with the "Putin's price hike" — there's much more to this crisis: Inflation Is Here to Stay ARTICLES Rich Lowry: The Kamala Harris Problem Kevin Williamson: The January 6 Hearings Are a Story without a Hero Robert Stein: The 60-Plus-Seat Senate Agenda Zachary Evans: Eastman Admitted Bid to Reject Electors Would Lose 9–0 in Supreme Court, Pence Counsel Testifies Caroline Downey: Mexican-Born Texas Republican Flips House Seat in Special Election Caroline Downey: ‘Open Season’: Pro-Abortion Terrorist Group Vows to Ramp Up Violence against Pro-Life Pregnancy Centers Abigail Anthony: Who Are People with Uteruses? Ryan Mills: Experts Sound Alarm on Heightened Threat to Judges after Foiled Kavanaugh Assassination Ryan T. Anderson: In the Transgender Debate, It’s Language vs. Reality Michael Brendan Dougherty: The Zombie War against Covid Isaac Schorr: College Republican Chapters War with National Org as Allegations of Incompetence, Corruption Fly Jimmy Quinn: Senior Ukrainian Officials Think Biden Has Begun 'Process to Lay Blame' on Them CAPITAL MATTERS Dominic Pino explains why the Ocean Shipping Reform Act is not the cure-all the president suggests it is: Biden Misses the Boat on Shipping Wayne Crews & Ryan Young have a novel idea for responding to — rather, preparing for — the next crisis: The Case for Letting Crises Go to Waste LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW. By the time this newsletter goes out, Paul McCartney will have turned 80. Kyle Smith honors the artist and all his achievements: McCartney at 80 To borrow the language of Jeopardy!, Brian Allen has a potpourri column this week. His highlights include an exhibition of haunting Nordic art: Centaurs and Reindeer Transfix at the Venice Biennale Armond White does not buy into the buzz on Lightyear: Lightyear Is Consumerism for Kids EAT PRAY EXCERPT MBD lets it rip upon the occasion of New York's mask-optional decision for little kids. Preach: Not a single elected official in New York City or Los Angeles has ever even attempted to demonstrate with data that the policy of masking two-year-olds was achieving a public-health goal for the city that other people in their states, or in Europe, were foolishly forgoing. They don't have to do this, because when you are trusting the science!, you don't have to think or reflect on what you're telling others to do. Covid is now becoming something like red meat. It is a thing public-health officials wish they could eliminate entirely, but in the absence of this power, they just make absurd recommendations about it that nobody follows. You might say that this is "traditional public health" — the enterprise where progressive MDs vainly try to normalize wickedly unhealthy things, like puberty-blocking drugs and refined carbohydrates, while at the same time casting as evil normal, healthy things, like dried sausage or childhood innocence about sexuality. The CDC says never to eat medium-rare or rare steak. Nobody frets about this. Similarly, New York City's public-health office recommends that every single person in New York City remain masked indoors. Nobody pretends to follow it. But we haven't gotten all the way there. There are still places in America where Covid remains a source of restriction, shame, coercion, and collecting a full-time check for doing a crappy job. Places like the Newark School District. Or certain prisons and jails that have banned all inmate visitations since the beginning of the pandemic. Or maybe your school still has ridiculous, parent-morale-destroying rules about exposure. A local science-truster tests their second-grader every twelve hours and reports a positive test, and now your child has to stay home for five days, or ten days, or two weeks leading up to graduation, even though nobody has so much as coughed or popped a fever. The pandemic was a legitimate public-health crisis, at one point. But along the way, as more people became vaccinated, and more people became infected with less-severe strains, it stopped being a public-health crisis and instead became a crisis for public health itself. We road-tested universal house arrest and the mass use of "emergency use" drugs, and began talking about entire countries as if they were wings of a universal human prison, entering and exiting out of "lockdowns." The last remaining restrictions on normal life are a national embarrassment. We should be ashamed that any American children are being told to wear their cloth masks for their moving-up ceremonies. Lunatic people were often more right than the experts. And I'm ashamed I didn't join the lunatics earlier. I'll never forget it.
Setting aside concerns about the structure of the January 6 committee, its public proceedings have served to expose just how cockamamie the schemes of Donald Trump’s inner circle were, by their own admission. From Zachary Evans at the news desk: One day before the January 6 riot, lawyer John Eastman privately admitted that his proposal for then-vice president Mike Pence to reject electoral votes that were unfavorable to President Trump would not have survived a challenge in the Supreme Court, former Pence counsel Greg Jacob testified on Thursday. Jacob revealed the admission during testimony to the House Committee on the January 6 Capitol riot on Thursday. Jacob said that in a meeting with Trump and Pence on January 4, Eastman said that Pence could either reject the Electoral College results outright, or that he could suspend the certification of results and demand that certain states reexamine their election results on the grounds that they were tainted by fraud. During a subsequent meeting on January 5, Eastman requested that Pence reject the Electoral College results, according to Jacob. However, Jacob said Eastman also admitted on January 5 that his proposals to nullify the results would be rejected by the Supreme Court, although Eastman also contended that courts would not hear the issue in the first place. "When I pressed him on the point, I said, 'John, if the vice president did what you are asking him to do, we would lose 9-to-nothing in the Supreme Court, wouldn't we?’" Jacob testified. "And he initially started it, 'Well, I think maybe you would lose only 7-2,’" Jacob said, "and after some further discussion acknowledged, 'Well, yeah, you're right, we would lose 9-nothing.’"
Abigail Anthony examines the assault on a once-popular word: The Daily Wire produced a documentary that features conservative commentator Matt Walsh traveling worldwide to ask a simple question: "What is a woman?" The responses are both shocking and unintelligible. The diverse interviewees include professors, female athletes, African villagers, and random pedestrians. The movie's initial comical tone grows sinister, as eminent doctors offer absurd explanations of gender as a social construct isolable from biological sex, then proceed to justify genital mutilation, castration, and sterilization for minors. Scholars in the movie condemn the pathologizing of gender dysphoria but praise its medical treatment. Those arguing that gender is independent of sex simultaneously encourage surgeries so that embodiment and gender identity correspond. Walsh refrains from debating and does not attempt to change his interlocutors' minds. Instead, he asks direct questions, and in response, progressives disgrace themselves repeatedly by failing to defend their own ideology with substantive arguments. The irony is profound: The people who earn degrees in women's studies apparently do not know what they are studying. It is troubling when the "experts" in the film provide definitions for "woman" that are wrong, but it is astounding when they cannot provide any definition and resort to the circular explanation that a woman is a person who identifies as a woman. I applaud the documentary as another valiant achievement in the effort to combat gender ideology, a ridiculous — and dangerous — thought experiment pervading virtually every aspect of American culture. Yet it neglects an important linguistic, sociopolitical phenomenon that deserves attention. The film operates on the premise that proponents of gender theory employ the word "woman." Increasingly, they don't. Progressives are crippled by a commitment to inclusivity, which demands abandoning the term "woman" in favor of gender-neutral language or phrasal substitutes such as "people with uteruses." . . . Examples are endless. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) has used the phrase "menstruating persons." The menstrual-product company Callaly argues that "not everyone who menstruates is a woman (periods can be experienced by trans men, and intersex and non binary people too) just as not all women menstruate (for a range of reasons including contraception, menopause, health conditions and trans gender)"so "'women' is therefore not the most accurate word to use when we're talking about the people who use our products." Tampax tweeted: "Fact: Not all women have periods. Also a fact: Not all people with periods are women. Let's celebrate the diversity of all people who bleed!" NPR tweeted that "people who menstruate are saying it's hard to find tampons on store shelves across the U.S. right now, as supply chain upsets reach the feminine care aisle." Evidently, "feminine care" is not experienced by females but rather by "people who menstruate."
An overview on inflation, what's causing it, and how long it might be with us, from NR's editorial: As an expression of optimism about the current economy, "peak inflation" has had a far shorter shelf life than "transitory." May's headline inflation number of 8.6 percent put an end to hopes that surging prices had peaked with March's 8.5 percent (in April, the year-on-year increase had declined to 8.3 percent). There is little in the immediate future to suggest that things will cool down any time soon. There is more to this than Putin's price hike™. The price of oil and of various foodstuffs, such as wheat, was increasing long before the war was on the horizon. To be sure, even these increases had only a limited connection to U.S. policy (thus unfavorable weather conditions made a significant contribution to the run-up in the wheat price). While those price increases are problems in their own right, they are still only relative prices and do not on their own represent a general increase in the price level. Much of our current inflation is homemade — by the Fed and, to a lesser extent, by reckless fiscal policy — and is now showing worrying signs of becoming entrenched. . . . The administration should demonstrate that it is determined to set this country back on the course of living within its means and that its intent is that this should be achieved by discipline on the spending side rather than higher taxation. This is a course correction that will take time, even in the unlikely event that the Democrats wish to make it. However, in the spirit of not making things even worse than they already are, plans to revive Build Back Better or, for that matter, to embark on an expanded student-loan-forgiveness program should be scrapped. Pressing forward with either will only reinforce Americans' perception that Washington is not serious about inflation, further increasing the risk that this bout of inflation will feed upon itself.
Shout-Outs Andrew Kerr & Jerry Dunleavy, at the Washington Examiner: LISTEN: The moment Hunter Biden says his father will do anything he tells him to Eric Boehm, at Reason: Why Biden's Claim of Cutting the Deficit Is False, in a Single Chart Austin Williams, at UnHerd: Zero Covid has radicalized Shanghai Reid J. Epstein & Jennifer Medina, at the New York Times: Should Biden Run in 2024? Democratic Whispers of 'No' Start to Rise." CODA A number of you responded to last week's solicitation for some lively (almost) summer live acts, with anecdotes and recs. With absolutely no ado . . . Here's the Mavericks doing "All You Ever Do Is Bring Me Down," courtesy of John Shelton Reed. Here's Rare Earth doing "I Just Want to Celebrate" back in 1974 (there's a story there), courtesy of Kevin in St. Petersburg, Fla. Kevin Antonio sends along Nick Lowe & Los Straitjackets, and John Wilsford gives appreciation for the cross-generational appeal of Brazilian superstar Roberto Carlos, live. Enjoy the weather, and thanks for reading. | 
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