There was more shocking inflation news Wednesday. The annual inflation rate hit 7% last year. The last time inflation was that bad, ET was getting ready to phone home!

Here’s some perspective: When Donald Trump left office last January, the inflation rate was just 1.4%. But in one short year, Joe Biden’s disastrous policies caused inflation to skyrocket to an annual rate of 7%, far outpacing any increase in wages. The result is an effective pay cut for many American workers and busted budgets for seniors on fixed incomes.

Wednesday, the Biden White House trotted out its economic team to try to reassure us. They failed miserably. Brian Deese, the director of Biden’s economic council, essentially told reporters, “We just didn’t see this coming.” Really?

Virtually every conservative and even some liberals have been warning that Biden’s socialist spending would stoke inflation. We warned that cutting our oil supply, with drilling bans and new regulations, would send prices for gasoline, natural gas and home heating oil through the roof.

If Biden’s economic advisers didn’t see this coming, they should resign!

So, inflation is up big. The worker shortage is up big. The supply chain crisis is up big. COVID infections are up big. Gas prices are up big. The only thing Biden has brought down is his approval rating, which fell to 33% in the latest Quinnipiac poll.

Biden’s Recruiting Crisis

The Pentagon just announced that it’s struggling to get the troops they need. How bad is it? Bad enough that the Army is offering $50,000 enlistment bonuses to skilled recruits.

A Pentagon spokesman tried to blame the recruiting crisis on COVID. Call me skeptical. But for starters, maybe the Pentagon should stop kicking out troops who object to Biden’s vaccine mandate. That’s only compounding the problem.

Some time ago, I predicted that the military’s increasing “wokeness” would cause many traditional conservative, Middle American families to stop encouraging their sons and daughters to join our thoroughly “modern” military.

The American people love the brave patriots who wear our country’s uniform, but they despise what’s being done to the institution of our military. As a result, confidence in the military has plummeted.

For more than a decade, the Pentagon bureaucracy has raced to satisfy and reflect the values of the Harvard faculty lounge, instead of the communities where their recruits are born and raised. For years, the fastest way to move up the ranks was to embrace the left’s latest demands, like open homosexuality in the military, which hurt morale.

While Donald Trump fought wokeness in the military, Joe Biden put it on steroids. Biden reversed a Trump-era policy so that a man can join the military, declare he is a woman and then force taxpayers to pay for the “reassignment surgery” and hormone treatments.

General Milley shocked the most pro-military members of the Congress when he announced that he wanted our soldiers to learn about “white rage.” Any commander who thinks the biggest problem facing America is “white rage” has no business leading our troops.

The chief of naval operations put “How To Be An Anti-Racist” on the Navy’s recommended reading list. That is one of the most radical, racially divisive books in the marketplace. Why is our woke Navy pushing it on our sailors?

As bad as all these things are, nothing is more of a barrier to recruiting America’s bravest young men and women than watching 13 of our sons and daughters die in Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.

That atrocity happened because Biden turned over security in Kabul to the Taliban. He trusted our enemies to secure the perimeter of the airbase where the retreat was organized. Such incompetence obviously hurts recruitment.

Donald Trump’s main them was America First. Our men and women in uniform are the personification of America First. They are putting America before their own lives.

The left’s main theme is that America was never great. In fact, they insist that it was evil from the beginning, founded on genocide and slavery, and remains evil today. They claim that America is so infected with “systemic racism” that it must be “fundamentally transformed.”

How many young men and women do you think would sign up to defend such a country?

Sadly, I fear our recruiting problems are just getting started, and just as the threats from foreign enemies are growing exponentially.

The Senate’s Nuclear Standoff

Yesterday, House Democrats passed a bill that combines several election-takeover schemes into one package. Although the timing is unclear, Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer will use this package to trigger the “nuclear option” to eliminate the legislative filibuster.

And just like Biden’s “Build Back Broke” socialist spending bill, this scheme to nationalize all elections will fail because of Democrat divisions. Democrats don’t have 60 votes to pass this terrible bill, and they don’t even have 50 votes to nuke the filibuster. They know that. So, this is all Kabuki theater, aimed at stoking left-wing rage and racial discord.

Yesterday, it was Kyrsten Sinema’s turn to torpedo the Democrats’ pipe dreams. Speaking on the Senate floor, she defended the filibuster, saying it was designed to “protect our country from wild reversals of federal policy.”

She’s right about that. In fact, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell echoed that sentiment Wednesday in a speech blasting Biden’s unhinged attack on Georgia’s election integrity law. McConnell said:

“The president’s rant yesterday was incorrect, incoherent, and beneath his office… A president shouting that 52 Senators and millions of Americans are racist unless he gets whatever he wants is proving exactly why the framers built the Senate to check his power.”

She’s Back!

There’s a new push to resurrect Hillary Clinton’s political career. This is not wild speculation. Douglas Schoen, a longtime Clinton loyalist, published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that for Democrats Hillary was the answer to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s tremendous unpopularity.

Like the monster from a bad horror movie, just when you think Hillary is gone for good, she pops back up to frighten us all.

If there’s anything that would settle the question for Donald Trump about whether he should run again, Hillary running again would be it. And just think of what her running again would mean for the country.

We know from Special Counsel John Durham’s indictments that Hillary’s campaign operatives, under her leadership, developed and implemented the biggest political dirty trick in modern memory.

They put into place a huge hoax that the 2016 election was rigged because Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election. That big lie weighed down the Trump/Pence administration all four years.

It is why Democrat claims about January 6th are so ludicrous. After losing the 2016 election, the left orchestrated a massive campaign to intimidate the Electoral College. Some electors received death threats. They challenged the certification of the votes in Congress on January 6, 2017, just as they did in 2001 and 2005.

And Trump’s hand was barely off the Bible on January 20, 2017, when James Comey’s FBI was trying to entrap his officials and undermine his presidency by claiming he was under Putin’s influence.

But evidently some Democrats think it would be a really good idea to replace Joe Biden with the architect of all that fraud. Biden does need to be replaced. But not with Hillary!

RNC Plays Hardball

One of the great frustrations of conservatives every presidential election is the biased media’s influence over the presidential debates. I am pleased to report that the Republican National Committee has had enough.

Chairman Ronna McDaniel informed the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) that unless there are major reforms to ensure fair and balanced debates, the RNC will require 2024 presidential candidates to boycott debates held by the CPD.

You may recall that values issues were virtually ignored during the 2020 debates. Joe Biden was campaigning as a “moderate,” and the debate moderators didn’t want to give Trump the opportunity to eviscerate Biden for his extremism on abortion the way he did to Hillary.