Libertarian: Times’ Laptop Flip Reveals Its Bias

If the recent New York Times story on Hunter Biden’s laptop “sounds familiar,” writes Jacob Sullum at Reason, “it’s because the New York Post first reported this eyebrow-raising information back in October 2020.” That story was greeted with “skepticism and disdain” by the Times — but “a year and a half later, the Times thinks the emails it viewed as suspect before Joe Biden’s election are now newsworthy.” And while this doesn’t mean “Joe Biden himself did anything improper or illegal,” it surely was “a legitimate issue to raise during the presidential campaign.” The question is “why the Times did not,” and the answer for that “clearly has more to do with partisan sympathies than the journalistic standards the paper claimed to be defending.”

Foreign desk: Russia’s Threat to the West

If Vladimir Putin were to die or be overthrown tomorrow, his replacement wouldn’t “have a dramatically different geopolitical worldview from his predecessor,” warns National Review’s Jim Geraghty. Whoever replaces him “would face the same domestic political incentives and disincentives, which would likely lead to a continuation of Russia’s confrontational approach to the West.” Blame geography: Spread over Eastern Europe and Asia, “Russia feels vulnerable and threatened, and so it seeks to avert those threats by taking a bellicose stance toward its neighbors. The great irony is that no one in Eastern Europe has any interest in invading and conquering Russia”; both Germany and Ukraine were happy trading with Russia. “War is always a tragedy, but this one was particularly unneeded.”

Economist: Stagflation May Be Inevitable

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates a quarter-point this week, yet Nicholas Sargen at The Hill wonders how it’ll continue “tightening policy while avoiding stagflation or a recession.” Fed chairman Jerome Powell and the others have yet to address why they failed to head off four-decade-high inflation, and doing so is key to ensuring they don’t “compound the problem.” Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers “believes the most likely outcome is stagflation,” with both unemployment and inflation over 5 percent. If a slowdown prompts the Fed to ease planned rate hikes, the “risk is that inflation will stay elevated beyond what is priced into financial markets,” triggering higher-than-expected boosts to the interest rate and a “tightening” in financial markets that could spur greater unemployment, as Summers envisions.

Neocon: COVID Should Open the Left’s Eyes

China’s COVID failure, writes Noah Rothman at Commentary, should kill the belief that, regarding the pandemic, the US “had been put to shame” by “streamlined authoritarian efficiency.” “The intellectual tendency that subordinates the human suffering under authoritarianism to . . . glittering Potemkin monuments” led to the idea that “freedom and the public interest were incompatible.” But “the virus has come roaring back in China” with “more than 50 million” in lockdown, and “Hong Kong, where 85 percent of the public has received the Chinese COVID vaccine,” is seeing “its worst rates of hospitalization and death. Seems “the West’s capacity for innovation coupled with its culture of free inquiry” actually works. The “intellectual temptation toward self-hatred . . . isn’t going away anytime soon,” yet the “forces of history regularly remind us” it’s wrong.

Energy beat: Behind Tight US Oil Supplies

The average cost of gasoline has surpassed $4 a gallon, “yet domestic oil production has barely budged over the past two years and remains stuck below 12 million barrels a day,” observes Paul H. Tice at The Wall Street Journal. “Why isn’t American supply responding to price signals?” Well, in 2020, a “combination of an OPEC+ oil-market-share battle and pandemic lockdowns briefly turned crude oil prices negative and decimated the energy sector,” causing almost every US energy company to embrace capital spending restraint and generate “free cash flow rather than simply expanding production.” Feeding into this self-imposed choke valve are the “Biden administration’s anti-fossil-fuel policies” that prevent US oil and gas producers from expanding drilling inventories.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board