Author: Peter Roff

Washington, D.C. – Inflation has taken a heavy toll on the purchasing power of the American consumer. According to the most recent data, which tracks the rise in prices for August 2022, prices are up 0.4 percent over the previous month. That works out, on an annualized basis, to 8.2 percent. In practical terms that means, for example, that the cost of food items – which overall were 0.8 percent more expensive in August than in July of this year – is projected to rise by 11.2 percent from January to December of this year. Most Americans have never seen…

Washington, D.C. – Will it be the women of America who decide the outcome of the upcoming elections? For months, the people who think they know more about elections than anyone else said that this would be the case. Their reasoning is faulty, as is often the case, but they’ve stumbled onto the right answer anyway in much the same way a blind squirrel still occasionally finds an acorn. Women are coming out to vote in November, perhaps in record numbers for a midterm election, but not for the reasons we’ve been told to believe. The number of women intending…

Washington, D.C. – Of all the places in the U.S. government to work, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission might be the worst, data collected from its employees in a federal survey concerning workplace satisfaction shows. Recent press accounts have suggested workforce job satisfaction within the agency responsible for enforcing U.S. antitrust regulations has declined considerably since Lina Kahn, President Joe Biden’s choice to lead the FTC assumed her post. The non-profit Phoenix Center for Legal and Advanced Public Policy Research decided to crunch the numbers to find out if that was true. What it found was troubling. The people working at…

Washington, D.C. – The impact Biden policies have had driving prices up is felt nowhere as acutely as in the traditional energy sector. What the president has proposed and the Democrats who control Congress have helped him enact have driven the price of gasoline up fueling a return to Jimmy Carter-like inflation and reducing confidence in the American economy. None of that may be accidental. Biden came into office promising to help wean the United States off what proponents of green energy alternatives have called its addiction to fossil fuels. It has been argued he had the support of the…

Washington, D.C. – Are America’s courts suffering from a crisis of public confidence? The chattering class seems to think so, pointing as it does to polling data from organizations like Gallup showing less than a majority of Americans – 47 percent – are willing to say they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the judicial branch. Given the assault on the Judicial Branch that began when Donald Trump started appointing an unending stream of originalists to the bench, it’s amazing the number is still as high as it is. If there’s a crisis, it’s because the…

Washington, D.C. – Columbus Day will soon be upon us. With it will come a slew of denunciations of white male privilege and other notions popular among those who think the existence of the United States to be a blight on the evolution of mankind. It’s utter rot, of course. America has done more to raise global living standards, secure peace and protect the poor and downtrodden around the world than any nation in world history. None of this has occurred without error – and the crimes against humanity sometimes countenanced here should never be forgotten. On balance, however, far…

Washington, D.C. – Over the last two years, Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar has spent much of her time trying to set the stage for the Federal Trade Commission to break up the companies known collectively as “Big Tech.” She hasn’t had much luck – even though her proposals increasing the FTC’s regulatory power have the support of some high-profile Republicans like Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee and someone who is regarded as a conservative stalwart. Though they may come at this from different sides, their goals are the same: Empower the FTC to break…

Washington, D.C. – Though the president’s job approvals number has been slowly creeping up, a new ABC News-Washington Post poll finds a majority of Democrats – 56 percent – want someone other than Joe Biden to be the party’s nominee in 2024, in part because of how badly he’s handled the immigration issue. From inflation to immigration, Team Biden’s performance has been, to be charitable, poor. Most of the major initiatives have gone by the wayside. Even his signature Build Back Better program was allowed to flounder for more than a year until being resurrected – in a considerably diminished…

Washington, D.C. – With polls showing her Republican challenger closing as the election nears, New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul finds herself mired in yet another official corruption scandal that may help deny her a bid for a term of her own. According to a story appearing in the New York Post over the weekend, significant questions have been raised about a no-bid contract to supply the state with COVID tests awarded to a New Jersey company whose CEO is a major donor to Hochul’s reelection campaign. New Yorkers had to pay “twice as much for COVID tests from a…

Washington, D.C. – A measure to block the Biden administration from pressuring social media sites to censor conservative opinions was introduced in Congress Wednesday by senior GOP congressional leaders. The proposed legislation, The Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act, would block members of the current administration as well as federal bureaucrats from using their positions of influence or authority to promote censorship online in any way. The bill, H.R. 8752, is the latest in a series of proposals and counterproposals being made to address allegations consumers of social media are being manipulated by individuals and entities engaged in the deliberate…