GREEN NUDE EEL: Coming To Texas This Summer: Demand > Supply.

THE TURNING TIDE: Total Vindication: Full Reinstatement and Back Pay For Three Barrington (RI) Teachers Fired For Refusing Covid Vax. “The teachers have been made whole. It is as if they were never fired.”

THE PODCAST BOOM ISN’T OVER: 2022 Podcasting Ad Revenue Up 26% YoY According to IAB’s US Podcast Advertising Report.

BLUE ON BLUE: Chicago Democrats in Trouble With Black Voters Over Migrant Invasion of South Side.

DIPLOMACY: Biden says he visited Northern Ireland ‘to make sure the Brits didn’t screw around.’

According to the transcript, Biden told party supporters at a private New York residence that he had visited Belfast “to make sure they weren’t — the Brits didn’t screw around and Northern Ireland didn’t walk away from their commitments.”

Those words drew predictable fire from the Democratic Unionists, the main pro-British party in Northern Ireland. The DUP has spent the past year blocking the revival of a cross-community government with the Irish republican Sinn Féin party in protest against trade rules that make it easier for Northern Ireland to trade with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member, than with the rest of the U.K. Power-sharing between British unionists and Irish nationalists was the central objective of the Good Friday deal.

“It’s unbelievable and frightening to think this man is the leader of the free world,” said Sammy Wilson, who criticized Biden’s remarks as both hostile to unionists and politically incoherent. “If you believe that there should be a special relationship between the U.S. and U.K., then at least show us some respect.”

Even the leader of Northern Ireland’s middle-ground Alliance Party, Naomi Long, was taken aback when told of Biden’s remarks.

Thanks goodness Biden is restoring confidence for the U.S. among our traditional allies.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Bragg Strikes Again: Hero Marine Who Helped Subdue Deranged Jordan Neely on Subway Faces Charges.

BUT THEY DIDN’T INFLATE COVID CASE NUMBERS: Top 20 non-profit hospitals got $23 billion in COVID-19 aid from the feds even as the medical groups’ profits, revenues and net assets ballooned, according to new analysis by Open The Books.

NOTHING HERE TO SEE, REALLY? It seems starkly obvious that House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) is just beginning to peel back layers of evidence of what looks like a Biden Bribery Bonanza. Here’s my look at just two of the foreign connections, Romania and China.

READER FAVORITE: GOLDTOE Men’s 656S Cotton Crew Athletic Socks. #CommissionEarned

GLEICHSCHALTUNG: Gay professor placed on leave for sharing chocolate that affirms biology of sex, he says.

David Richardson already suing community college district for punishing him for using “Do, Re, Mi” as preferred gender pronouns in mandatory seminar.

A California community college is investigating a tenured history professor for the “serious misconduct” of handing out chocolate, he claims.

The composition of the chocolate wasn’t the problem for Madera Community College, David Richardson told Just the News. It was the gender pronouns on the wrappers: “He/Him” for chocolate bars with nuts and “She/Her” for the “nutless” version, reflecting the human sexual binary.

He shared the human resources letter delivered “by a uniformed police officer” Monday evening at his home.

If that seems intimidating, that’s the point.

ACTIVISTS WANT A LOT OF THINGS. SO WHAT? Harvard activists want law professor to resign from oil company board.

BUSTED BORDER: Biden Administration Caught Coordinating Illegal Crossings with Mexican Government.

HIGHER EDUCATION’S CLIMATE OF HATE: EXCLUSIVE AUDIO: ‘I hate Catholic people’: Pro-drag students harass protesters at Loyola.

FALLOUT: Russia’s Budget Deficit Rises To $45 Billion In Four Months.

Russia’s Finance Ministry announced on Thursday that the federal deficit stood at 3.42 trillion rubles ($45.4 billion) from January 1 to the end of April, exceeding the annual plan by 2.9 trillion rubles, according to Bloomberg.

Public spending in Russia jumped 26%, while revenues fell 22%, as oil and gas revenues fell more than half from a year earlier.

Despite the Russian government’s efforts to limit spending, the deficit continued to deteriorate during the month of April, indicating that the government’s efforts in this regard have not been successful so far, which increases worries about high inflation rates in the period ahead and are forcing the central government to reverse some of the interest rate cuts it took last year, Alexander Isakov, an economist at Bloomberg and expert from Russia.

The Russian Finance Ministry said the increase in spending was due to advance payments made at the start of the year, which are not expected to continue for the rest of the year.

War is expensive.

Of course, in this country, so is peace:

If something can’t go on forever, it will stop.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: It’s Time for the Biden Border Fiasco to Become Supersized. “We here in the border states are going to have to deal with the pandora’s box that Biden is opening. The cartel action that’s about to get even busier here in Arizona is a much bigger concern than whatever is going on in Manhattan. These midwestern and northeastern libs who have been running around saying, ‘There are no illegal people,’ for years can just shut it.”

YOU CAN PRINT MONEY BUT YOU CAN’T PRINT WEALTH: The Great Wealth Illusion.

It’s no secret that for the past decade and a half the Federal Reserve has made it its mission to create a “wealth effect” in the economy by boosting asset prices. Back in 2010, Ben Bernanke explained, “…higher stock prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending. Increased spending will lead to higher incomes and profits that, in a virtuous circle, will further support economic expansion.” And so he began a process of printing money with the explicit purpose of inflating asset prices, a policy that has been continued by each of his successors.

Over this time, quantitative easing, as the policy is called, has been inordinately successful in boosting asset prices while not so effective in boosting the economy. The most straightforward evidence of this is the fact that household net worth relative to the economy has soared to record highs during the QE era. If it had worked the way Bernanke intended then, after a brief surge in the ratio, it would have flattened out as growth in the economy caught up to growth in asset prices. Clearly, that didn’t happen.

It does appear, however, as if the central bank did at least accomplish the first half of Bernanke’s mission (boosting wealth) even if it didn’t quite accomplish the second half (kickstarting a virtuous circle of economic growth). But when you look at household net worth relative to the growth in the money supply, it’s clear that the rise in the former was nothing more than an illusion. Net worth has actually declined relative to M2 since 2008 and is now back to levels not seen in the 20 years prior to that time. The truth is that there has been no “real” wealth created at all when measured this way.

At the time I referred to this as Cargo Cult thinking: Print the money and the goods will come. It’s amazing how many of our best-credentialed people believed it would work — and still do.

CRISIS BY DESIGN: Migrants Ditch Visas And Identification Papers In Sea Of Trash Just After Illegal Crossing.

Related: Biden DHS signals Mexican officials when to let illegal immigrants cross.

SALENA ZITO ON the decline of Dick’s Sporting Goods: They thought they were just ditching the “old white men” demographic when they stopped carrying guns, but gun owners are now a much more diverse group.

WELL, TO BE FAIR, SHE’S TERRIBLE: Shock Poll: Dem Elizabeth Warren Surprisingly Vulnerable, Trails GOP’s Charlie Baker by Double Digits.