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The fossil fuel industry is effectively a public-private partnership. It depends on generous subsidies in the form of long-standing tax breaks and preferential leasing, but also on all manner of infrastructural support and diplomatic maneuvering to make the world friendly to U.S. fossil fuels. The concept of energy independence is itself the result of dedicated, state-led industrial policy first unveiled by the Nixon administration in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, meant to boost domestic energy production. Even the ownership of the Colonial Pipeline itself shows just how much public capital makes oil flow. Shell and Koch Industries are both major owners, alongside private equity firms. Yet also behind the pipeline are companies that manage public pension funds in Australia and Quebec, as well as South Koreas state-run National Pension Service.

If energy independence were McCarthys real concern, it would make sense for him to favor temporarily halting fuel exports, which he instead wants to expand. It would make sense for him to urge refinery operators to invest more in being able to process the light, sweet crude flowing out of the Permian Basin. Needless to say, the Midwestern Keystone XL pipeline expansion McCarthy and other Republicans have used the cyberattack to pitch would not have either prevented a ransomware attack or alleviated fuel shortages among the East Coast gas stations the Colonial Pipeline supplies.

While the industry has cast just about any climate policy as a radical intervention into the economy, most of what Democrats have proposed so far amounts to either withdrawing some small portion of the mountains of state support oil companies currently enjoy or providing similar, much more modest benefits to the clean energy sector. The fossil fuel companies have trained plenty of attack dogs to make their case.

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The Republican Response to the Colonial Pipeline Hack Is Bananas - The New Republic

Update, May 10: Businessman Glenn Youngkin has won the Republican gubernatorial nomination.

GALAX, Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Kirk Cox was several minutes into a wonky election security answer at a diner when January 6 came up again.

Did President Joe Biden win the election? Cox avoided directly answering the question at this recent event, though he had previously acknowledged that reality, the one GOP frontrunner willing to do so.

Instead, he refocused on proposals like voter ID requirements, which are popular with lots of voters. But now Lin, a Trump supporter who had posed the Biden question, had another one. She wanted to know whether he agreed with the Virginia Senate censuring one of its members, Amanda Chase, after she called the people who stormed the US Capitol that day in January patriots.

Did Cox support the freedom of speech of Chase, now one of Coxs competitors for the Republican nomination?

Im very much for freedom of speech, Cox answered.

So you were against [the censure vote]? asked Lin, who supports Chase in the race. I dont want to put words in your mouth, but I need a yes or a no.

This narrow line on the 2020 election and cancel culture is one Republicans have had to dance along for months in courting voters before Saturdays Virginia GOP gubernatorial convention.

The GOP has had a tough go of it statewide in the past few years in Virginia, with demographic changes helping push the state to become reliably Democratic. The partys response running further and further to the right has only exacerbated the problem. But Virginia might not be lost to the right kind of Republican. At least not yet.

Republicans will choose their nominee in an unassembled convention; nearly 54,000 Republicans who successfully applied to be a delegate will be able to cast ranked-choice ballots at 39 drive-up locations around Virginia. Its a process that has had more than a few bumps along the way, including Chase alleging the party chose a convention over a primary to prevent her from becoming the nominee. It could also take several days to know the results candidates have already sown doubt about the race.

Its going to make the Iowa caucuses look like a well-oiled machine, a Democratic operative said, with a touch of hopeful glee.

Virginia last chose a Republican in a statewide election in 2009. Since then, the GOP has run candidates that its own insiders say dont appeal to the states growing suburban population. Theyre going to have to make inroads back into those communities to have a hope of winning, says Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabatos Crystal Ball at the Center for Politics.

I always look at, in the 2016 primaries, places where candidates like John Kasich and Marco Rubio did well against Trump: Those are the areas that have moved more toward the Democrats since places like Loudoun County, Hanover County, Chesterfield County, Coleman said. Maybe those voters are still open to the right type of Republican after voting for Hillary [Clinton] and Biden.

But can they do that while turning out the 44 percent of the state that went for Trump?

The mix of contenders has been revealing.

But regardless of how candidates are positioning themselves, there are certain issues that keep coming up on the trail: support for law enforcement, the eradication of critical race theory from schools, and election integrity, to name a few.

And for some voters, like Heather, who attended Coxs event in Galax, the last on that list is most important or, more specifically, its the question of whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election that matters most.

Thats a huge one, she said. Thats first and foremost for this election or any election.

The future of the GOP after Trump is an open question. And barring disputes like the one playing out between US Rep. Liz Cheney and the bulk of the House GOP right now, Virginia might be the best glimpse we get before the 2022 midterms.

Heres what it looks like: There are seven candidates running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, with four in real contention (Youngkin, Chase, Cox, and Snyder). All of them tout their traditional conservative bona fides being pro-Second Amendment, anti-abortion, pro-business, and the like. Many of them rail against Covid-related closures, praising Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for keeping schools and businesses open throughout the pandemic.

All across Virginia on day one, we are going to get every single school open five days a week, every single week, with a real, live, breathing teacher in every classroom, Snyder told a crowd at a brewery in Wytheville last weekend. And folks, getting the schools open is only the beginning. We need to break the backs of this special interest monopoly of the teachers unions and bring real change to our schools.

Given the countrys rate of vaccination, decreased community spread, and reopening, those pandemic issues might not be as relevant come November or in 2022 and beyond. Trump, though, still will be.

At Snyders event, an emcee opened the afternoon by asking, How many of you wish Donald Trump was president right now? and a one-time Trump operator told the crowd they had to get to work to defeat the socialists, who might even be worse than socialists, theyre bordering on communists.

Youngkin, for his part, makes sure to note in his stump speech that hes won praise from Trump, but he was also willing to criticize the former presidents tone as a bit harsh at a campaign event in northern Virginia.

Loyalty to Trump isnt the key thing, argues Peter Doran, a former think tank CEO and one of the other three candidates recognized by the state party. (The others are former Roanoke Sheriff Octavia Johnson and retired Army Col. Sergio de la Pea.)

Most Virginia Republicans are painted as these big hard-right, hard-conservative voters who only care about Donald Trump. Thats not true, Doran said. They care about their job. They care about whats happening to their kids in this past year, and their education. And they care very deeply about the Republican Partys failure to win over the past decade.

Wilma, a mother of four and delegate in the convention, agreed, saying the GOPs future relies on getting young people to understand conservative values like small government, constitutional rights, and concern about the deficit.

My kids all look at the stimulus it might be nice to get that money, that cash, she said. But eventually they know in the long run, theyre the generation thats going to have to pay it back.

Still, its no longer enough to tick the fiscal conservative, Christian, gun owner, and anti-abortion boxes. There are new ones on the list keywords of the culture war issues the former president helped animate.

Take critical race theory, which Chase says is part of the reason she decided to homeschool her children.

As Voxs Fabiola Cineas explained, critical race theory is a framework for grappling with racial power and white supremacy in America. But its also become a catch-all term for what the Trump administration thought was an effort to indoctrinate American students and workers with divisive and harmful sex- and race-based ideologies:

Theyve lumped everything together: critical race theory, the 1619 project, whiteness studies, talking about white privilege, Kimberl Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist and UCLA and Columbia University law professor, told Vox. What they have in common is they are discourses that refuse to participate in the lie that America has triumphantly overcome its racist history, that everything is behind us. None of these projects accept that its all behind us.

Its not just Chase using the term frequently: Almost all the candidates make sure to highlight their opposition to it; six have signed a pledge opposing critical race theory. As journalist Dave Weigel pointed out on Twitter, Youngkin went so far as to upload multiple video clips of him criticizing it.

Trumps impact, though, is perhaps most evident in the obsession with election security.

On one hand, Amanda Chases stance on the 2020 election sets her apart from the rest of the party so much so that she, her supporters, and some outsiders claim the state party chose a convention rather than a primary to mitigate the risk of her ending up at the top of their ticket.

Last month, in an interview with the AP, Chase even questioned whether Biden won Virginia. (He carried it by 10 percentage points, as official election results show.)

But none of the candidates can distance themselves too far from Trumps lies and doubt-sowing about the 2020 election. They need only look to the US House to see the consequences of doing so.

Neither Youngkin nor Snyder will say Bidens presidency is legitimate. Cox appears willing to do so (at least when hes not at a diner in southwest Virginia).

And everyone has plans to improve election integrity. Youngkin promotes his election security task force, one plank of which is updating voter rolls monthly. He and Cox talk about making the state election commission nonpartisan. Snyder wants to make Virginia No. 1 in ballot integrity.

Theyre all fairly anodyne-sounding proposals, but talking about things like that is a requirement for securing the nomination, says Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington.

While they may not support what happened on January 6, they do want to offer a position that shows some sympathy to the position of Trump supporters, Farnsworth said.

That doesnt necessarily mean the rhetoric will dog them during the general election Youngkins spokesperson said they believe election security isnt a partisan issue, its a democracy issue.

And Kirk Cox is an example of a candidate who accepts Biden as a legitimate president but nevertheless speaks in ways that gives some solace to Trump supporters, Farnsworth pointed out, adding its likely that voters in November will not be dramatically impacted by whats said in May.

Still, the insistence on making Americas elections more secure helps perpetuate a world in which seven out of 10 Republican voters still say per a recent CNN poll that Biden didnt win enough votes to be president.

And the continued questioning of elections has applied even to their own partys choices. Some of those choices, admittedly, merit scrutiny from candidates extolling the importance of signatures on absentee ballots. But it also led Youngkin, Cox, and Chase to write to the party, demanding it not use untested and unproven software that creates uncertainty, lacks openness and transparency, and is inconsistent with our calls as a party for safe and secure elections.

Now, every ranked-choice ballot will be counted by hand, at a ballroom at the Richmond Marriott, race by race. Chair Rich Anderson detailed to the Virginia Scopes Brandon Jarvis the lengths the Republican Party of Virginia is going to try to instill confidence in the process:

Theyve also set aside money to livestream the counting process, because, Anderson said, I just dont want to repeat what was done in different places around the country where people were concerned about it being an opaque process.

Thats left no room for any conspiracy theories about the counting to crop up, says John March, the state party communications director. Even so, there are bound to be some dissidents, and if it takes days, Coleman says he can see the conspiracy theories now.

When you have a multi-candidate field in a multi-round election, Farnsworth said, the only sound bet is expecting that the party wont get together and sing kumbaya when this is all over.

Virginia, once home to the capital of the Confederacy, has moved left enough in presidential races that on election night in 2020, the forecast group Decision Desk called it for Joe Biden right as polls closed. Trump ended up with just 44 percent of the vote here, Biden with 54.

But the GOP argues the state is not lost to them just yet.

In recent decades, Virginia had a peevish streak, electing a governor from the opposite party that just won the White House. The candidate to break that trend was former Gov. Terry McAuliffe whos running again this year.

And March points to the unprecedented level of interest in the convention as a sign of whats to come: 54,000 people are getting involved on the grassroots level. ... You dont really see that, and that just shows how excited Virginia Republicans are.

Without Trump on the ballot this year, there might be an opening a slim one for the governorship, but a bigger one to flip competitive state House districts. The person Republicans choose on Saturday will matter a lot.

One thing I do think that could bode well for them is even though he lost, in 2017 Ed Gillespie got more votes than any previous Republican nominee for governor, Coleman pointed out. So maybe if Youngkin or whoever else can get that type of Gillespie turnout, which is definitely a question mark, and Democrats cant get that anti-Trump turnout, maybe its going to be closer.

Even so, its going to be an uphill battle for the GOP to narrow margins in some areas, let alone retake them. Take Chesterfield County, which Republicans easily won for decades. In 2020, it went for Biden by more than 6 percentage points.

Going forward, Coleman says, this may be the last potential cycle where the Republicans could win a county like Chesterfield, and that may not even be enough it may be necessary but not sufficient.

Democrats seem to think it wont be.

Were ready for a fight; we expect a fight. We expect a tough race, said David Turner, the communications director for the Democratic Governors Association. But what I would say is you cant report accurately on the state of Virginia without acknowledging theres pre-Trump and theres post-Trump, and were still post-Trump.

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Glenn Youngkin wins Republican nomination for Virginia governor: Inside the Trumpy governors race - Vox.com

WASHINGTON Minutes after a group of congressional Democrats unveiled a bill recently to add seats to the Supreme Court, the Iowa Republican Party slammed Representative Cindy Axne, a Democrat and potential Senate candidate, over the issue.

Will Axne Pack the Court? was the headline on a statement the party rushed out, saying the move to expand the court puts our democracy at risk.

The attack vividly illustrated the emerging Republican strategy for an intensive drive to try to take back the House and the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans are mostly steering clear of Democrats economic initiatives that have proved popular, such as an infrastructure package and a stimulus law that coupled pandemic relief with major expansions of safety-net programs, and are focusing instead on polarizing issues that stoke conservative outrage.

In doing so, they are seizing on measures like the court-expansion bill and calls to defund the police which many Democrats oppose as well as efforts to provide legal status to undocumented immigrants and grant statehood to the District of Columbia to caricature the party as extreme and out of touch with mainstream America.

Republicans are also hammering at issues of race and sexual orientation, seeking to use Democrats push to confront systemic racism and safeguard transgender rights as attack lines.

The approach comes as President Biden and Democrats, eager to capitalize on their unified control of Congress and the White House, have become increasingly bold about speaking about such issues and promoting a wide array of party priorities that languished during years of Republican rule. It has given Republicans ample fodder for attacks that have proved potent in the past.

They are putting the ball on the tee, handing me the club and putting the wind at my back, said Jeff Kaufmann, the chairman of the Iowa Republican Party.

Democrats argue that Republicans are focusing on side issues and twisting their positions because the G.O.P. has nothing else to campaign on, as Democrats line up accomplishments to show to voters, including the pandemic aid bill that passed without a single Republican vote.

That was very popular, and I can understand why Republicans dont want to talk about it, said Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the new chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. But were going to keep reminding folks who was there when they needed them.

The contrast is likely to define the 2022 races. Democrats will sell the ambitious agenda they are pursuing with Mr. Biden, take credit for what they hope will continue to be a surging economy and portray Republicans as an increasingly extreme party pushing Donald J. Trumps lies about a stolen election. Republicans, who have embraced the false claims of election fraud and plan to use them to energize their conservative base, will complain of radical Democratic overreach and try to amplify culture-war issues they think will propel more voters into their partys arms.

A release from the National Republican Senatorial Committee highlighted what it called the three pillars of the Democratic agenda: The Green New Deal, court packing and defund the police, even though the first two are far from the front-burner issues for Mr. Biden and Democratic leaders and the third is a nonstarter with the bulk of the partys rank and file.

Last week Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, sought to thrust a new issue into the mix, leading Republicans in protest of a proposed Biden administration rule promoting education programs that address systemic racism and the nations legacy of slavery. He has taken particular aim at the 1619 Project, a journalism initiative by The New York Times that identifies the year when slaves were first brought to America as a key moment in history.

There are a lot of exotic notions about what are the most important points in American history, Mr. McConnell said on Monday during an appearance in Louisville. I simply disagree with the notion that The New York Times laid out there that year 1619 was one of those years.

Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the Republicans Senate campaign arm, has been explicit about his strategy.

Now what I talk about every day is do we want open borders? No. Do we want to shut down our schools? No. Do we want men playing in womens sports? No, Mr. Scott said during a recent radio interview with the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt.

Do we want to shut down the Keystone pipeline? No. Do we want voter ID? Yes, he continued. And the Democrats are on the opposite side of all those issues, and Im going to make sure every American knows about it.

Democrats who have fallen victim to the Republican cultural assault concede that it can take a toll and that their party needs to be ready.

It was all these different attacks that were spread all over mainstream media, Spanish-language media, Facebook, WhatsApp, said Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a former Democratic House member from South Florida who was defeated last year after Republicans portrayed her as a socialist who was anti-police. A lot of it was misinformation, false attacks.

She said Democrats must begin taking steps now to combat Republican misdirection, warning that their legislative victories might not be enough to appeal to voters.

We can have a great policy record, she said, but we need to be present in our communities right now, reaching out to all of our constituencies to tell them we are working for them, that their health and their jobs are our priorities.

On the Supreme Court issue, progressive groups began pushing the idea of an expansion after Mr. Trump was able to appoint three justices, including one to a vacancy that Republicans blocked Barack Obama from filling in the last year of his presidency and another who was fast-tracked right before last years election.

Hoping to neutralize the issue, some Senate Democrats who will be on the ballot next year have made it clear that they would oppose expanding the court, and the bill seems to be going nowhere at the moment. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would not bring any court bill to the floor until at least after a commission named by Mr. Biden to study the matter issued its report, which is due in six months. The president has been cool to the expansion idea as well.

The office of Ms. Axne, the only Democrat in Congress from Iowa, did not respond to requests for reaction to the Republican attacks on her over the court plan. In an interview with MSNBC, Ms. Axne said that she, like Ms. Pelosi, would await the findings of the commission.

But Republicans are not waiting to try to score political points. They say more moderate Republican voters and independents who broke with the party during the Trump years have been alienated by the call to enlarge the court and other initiatives being pushed by progressives.

One key for Republicans next year will be winning back suburban voters while running campaigns that also energize the significant segment of their supporters who are fiercely loyal to Mr. Trump and want the party to represent his values. That may be a difficult balance to achieve, as evidenced this week when Republican leaders moved to strip Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming of the partys No. 3 leadership post for calling out the former presidents false election claims.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said it would matter less what Republicans said about Democrats than what his party was able to accomplish.

The one thing that will win people over, no matter what they do, is whether we can deliver, he said. They are doing what appeals to their base, but the voters in the middle, including a good chunk of Republican voters, actually care about getting things done.

Mr. Peters said Democrats would be better positioned to rebut attacks such as those that falsely portray them as pressing to defund the police after voters had experienced two years of the party holding power.

President Biden and the caucus have been very clear that we are not about defunding the police, we are about making sure police have the resources they need to do their jobs, he said. Ultimately, it is about how it is impacting peoples lives.

Mr. Kaufmann, the Republican leader in Iowa, begged to differ. He said he believed the hot-button issues Republicans were homing in on would drive voters more than the nuance of tax policy and who gets credit for the vaccine. He is eager to get started.

Some of this stuff is really controversial, he said. These are all very bold and clearly delineated issues. I can use this to expand the base and get crossover voters.

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Republicans Attack Democrats as Liberal Extremists to Regain Power - The New York Times

WASHINGTON The disappointing jobs report released Friday by the Labor Department is posing the greatest test yet of President Bidens strategy to revive the economy, with business groups and Republicans warning that the presidents policies are causing a labor shortage and that his broader agenda risks stoking runaway inflation.

But the Biden administration showed no signs on Friday of changing course, with the president defending the more generous jobless benefits included in the $1.9 trillion bill he signed into law in March and saying the $4 trillion in spending he proposed for infrastructure, child care, education and other measures would help create more and better-paying jobs after the pandemic.

Speaking at the White House, Mr. Biden urged perspective on the report, which showed only 266,000 new jobs added in April. He said it would take time for his aid bill to fully reinvigorate the economy and hailed the more than 1.5 million jobs added since he took office. And he rejected what he called loose talk that Americans just dont want to work.

The data shows that more workers are looking for jobs, he said, and many cant find them.

Republicans cast the report as a sign of failure for Mr. Bidens policies, even though job creation has accelerated since Mr. Biden replaced President Donald J. Trump in the White House. They called on his administration to end the $300 weekly unemployment supplement, while several Republican governors including those in Arkansas, Montana and South Carolina moved to end the benefit for unemployed people in their states, citing worker shortages.

This is a stunning economic setback, and unequivocal proof that President Biden is sabotaging our jobs recovery with promises of higher taxes and regulation on local businesses that discourage hiring and drive jobs overseas, Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, said in a news release. The White House is also in denial that many businesses both small and large cant find the workers they need.

Business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which have backed pieces of Mr. Bidens broad economic agenda, also suggested the aid was holding back hiring.

The jobs report begins to confirm that this is a barrier not the only barrier, but a barrier to filling open positions in the recovery, said Neil Bradley, the chambers executive vice president and chief policy officer.

We absolutely have to begin to make the preparation to turn the supplement off, he said. The sooner we do that, the sooner its going to become clear how this has been holding us back.

The unemployment supplement has quickly become Republicans preferred weapon in attacking Mr. Bidens economic stewardship, with lawmakers and conservative economists arguing that his heavy spending is having a negative effect on the recovery and will ultimately slow growth. While Democrats command narrow majorities in Congress, Republicans are trying to turn public sentiment against Mr. Bidens approach and to stall plans to spend $4 trillion on policies that would be offset by higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

Republicans backed a $600 weekly supplement in the first stimulus bill approved under Mr. Trump, but they said the need for it no longer existed and that it was providing a disincentive to look for work. Economists who support that view pointed to details of the jobs report including rapid wage gains in the hospitality sector saying that they suggested that employers were rapidly raising pay to encourage new hires to accept jobs.

White House officials disputed that reading. Heather Boushey and Jared Bernstein, members of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, both pointed to a gain of 300,000 jobs in the leisure and hospitality sector and to a falling number of workers who told the department they had left the labor force out of concern over contracting the coronavirus as signs that the unemployment supplement was not deterring workers. Other officials noted that under the rules of unemployment benefits, workers could not turn down suitable job offers and still qualify for assistance.

Asked if he believed the enhanced benefits had any effect on the job gains, Mr. Biden replied, No, nothing measurable.

Administration officials say that any clogs in the labor market are likely to be temporary, and that the recovery will smooth out once more working-age Americans are fully vaccinated, schools and child care centers are fully open and people feel more comfortable going back to work.

This is progress, Ms. Boushey said in an interview. We are adding an average of over 500,000 jobs a month over the past three months, she said.

Thats evidence that our approach is working, that the presidents approach is working, Ms. Boushey said. It also emphasizes the steep climb coming out of this crisis.

Administration officials expressed optimism that the pace of job gains would accelerate in the months ahead. Substantial portions of the relief money that was approved in March have yet to flow into the economy. That includes the $350 billion that was allocated for states and municipalities, which have 1.3 million fewer jobs than their prepandemic peak.

States and cities are awaiting guidance on exactly how the money can be spent and what strings are attached. Republican-led states have filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration over its position that states cannot use relief money to subsidize tax cuts, which could further slow the rollout.

Mr. Biden said at the White House that the administration would begin releasing the first batch of money to state and local governments this month. He said the money would not restore all of the lost jobs in one month, but youre going to start seeing those jobs in state and local workers coming back.

The administration also took steps on Friday to get money out the door more quickly, saying the Treasury Department would release $21.6 billion of rental assistance that was included in the pandemic relief legislation to provide additional support to millions of people who could be facing eviction in the coming months.

Officials said they expected increased vaccination rates to ease some lingering fears about returning to jobs in the pandemic. The number of Americans 18 to 64 who are fully vaccinated grew by 22 million from mid-April, when the survey for the jobs report was conducted, to Friday. That was an acceleration from the previous month. Some White House officials said the administrations push to further increase the ranks of the vaccinated could be the most important policy variable for the economy this summer.

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, speaking at the White House, said that a lack of child care related to irregular school schedules was making it a challenge to get the labor market back to full strength. She also said that health concerns about the pandemic were holding back some workers who might return to the market.

I dont think that the addition to unemployment compensation is really the factor thats making the difference, Ms. Yellen said.

She said that she believed the labor market was healthier than the figures released on Friday suggested, but she allowed that the economic recovery would take time.

Weve had a very unusual hit to our economy, Ms. Yellen said, and the road back is going to be somewhat bumpy.

Ms. Boushey and Mr. Bernstein said that it appeared the economy was working through a variety of rapid changes related to the pandemic, including supply chain disruptions that have hurt automobile manufacturing by reducing the availability of semiconductor chips and businesses beginning to rehire after a year of depressed activity because of the virus.

Its our view that these misalignments and bottlenecks are transitory, Mr. Bernstein said, and theyre what you expect from an economy going from shutdown to reopening.

Other key economic officials treated the report as a sign that the labor recovery ahead is likely to prove wildly unpredictable. Robert S. Kaplan, the president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said in an interview that his economics team had warned him that the April report might show a significant slowdown as shortages of materials including lumber and computer chips and labor bit into employment growth.

He said he was hoping to see those supply bottlenecks cleared up, but he was watching carefully in case they did not resolve quickly.

It shows me that getting the unemployment rate down and moving forward to improved employment to population is going to have fits and starts, Mr. Kaplan said. He noted that sectors that were struggling to acquire materials, like manufacturing, shed jobs, and he said leisure and hospitality companies would have added more positions if not for challenges in finding labor.

Its just one jobs report, cautioned Tom Barkin, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, in Virginia. But he said labor supply issues could be at play: Some people may have retired, others may have health concerns, and unemployment insurance could be encouraging low-paid workers to stay at home or allowing them to come back on their own terms.

I get the feeling that people are being choosy, Mr. Barkin said. The first question I have in my mind is is it temporary or is it more structural?

He said that the supply constraints playing out were likely to fade over time, and that while businesses complain about rising input costs and might have to raise entry-level wages somewhat, he struggled to see that leading to much higher inflation the kind that would worry the Fed.

The Fed is trying to achieve maximum employment and stable inflation around 2 percent on average. It has pledged to keep its cheap-money policies, which make borrowing inexpensive, in place until it sees realized progress toward those goals.

Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said the payrolls disappointment vindicated the Feds slow-moving stance.

I feel very good about our policy approach, which is outcome-based, Mr. Kashkari said, speaking on a Bloomberg television interview shortly after the report came out. Lets actually allow the labor market to recover, lets not just forecast that its going to recover.

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Biden and Republicans Spar Over Unemployment as Job Gains Disappoint - The New York Times

DES MOINES, Iowa Conservatives last week gobbled up a false news story claiming President Joe Biden planned to ration red meat. Colorado Rep. Rep. Lauren Boebert suggested Biden stay out of my kitchen. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted out a headline warning Biden was getting Up in your grill.

The news was wrong Biden is planning no such thing but it was hardly the first time the right has recognized the political power of a juicy steak. Republican politicians in recent months have increasingly used food especially beef as a cudgel in a culture war, accusing climate-minded Democrats of trying to change Americans diets and, therefore, their lives.

That is a direct attack on our way of life here in Nebraska, Gov. Pete Ricketts, a Republican, said recently.

The pitched rhetoric is likely a sign of the future. As more Americans acknowledge the link between food production and climate change, food choices are likely to become increasingly political. Already, in farm states, meat eating has joined abortion, gun control and transgender rights as an issue that quickly sends partisans to their corners.

On the right, they are just going for the easiest applause line, which is accusing the left of declaring war on meat. And its a pretty good applause line, said Mike Murphy, a Republican consultant. Its politically effective, if intellectually dishonest.

Ricketts was among the first to seize on the issue in recent months. In March, the governor whose state generated $12 billion from livestock and meat products last year slammed his Colorado counterpart, Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, for suggesting Coloradans lay off the red meat one day as a way of cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions.

Republican Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds followed Ricketts comments quickly, claiming in a campaign fundraising email, Democrats and liberal special interest groups are trying to cancel our meat industry.

In her weekly column a few weeks later, Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa blasted everyone from out-of-touch politicians to Hollywood elites as leading the lefts war on meat.

But the issue blew up last week after a Daily Mail news story debunked within 24 hours suggested the Biden administration could ration how much red meat Americans can consume as part of its goal to slash greenhouse gas pollution.

During the storys short life, conservative figures pilloried Bidens apparent invasion into Americas dining room.

While the story was false, theres little doubt the livestock industry is a contributor to climate change.

A 2019 Environmental Protection Agency report noted agriculture was responsible for 10 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, a quarter of which is emitted by livestock before they are butchered.

There are signs that Americans may be adjusting their diets out of concern for climate change. About a quarter of Americans reported eating less meat than they had a year earlier, according to a 2019 Gallup poll, chiefly for health reasons but also out of environmental concerns. About 30% of Democrats polled said they were eating less meat, compared to 12% of Republicans.

For some, its hard to imagine Americans abandoning beef and easy to see its power as a political symbol, said Chad Hart, an Iowa State University agriculture economist.

Americans dont get overly sentimental about barns crammed with chickens or thousands of hogs, but few images are as quintessentially American as cattle grazing over rolling hills.

When you think about American food, beef is what is in the center of that plate, Hart said. And thats likely to remain a national identity when it comes to what an American food plate looks like.

To be sure, food isnt new to culture war politics.

First lady Michelle Obama was attacked as intrusive by conservatives for championing higher nutritional standards in school lunches.

As a presidential candidate in 2007, Barack Obama was accused of food elitism when he asked a group of Iowa farmers whether they had seen the price of arugula at Whole Foods, an upscale grocery chain that had not yet made it to Iowa. Obama still won the states caucuses.

Even more famously, Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis was pilloried by Republicans as far out of touch with rural America in the midst of the 1980s farm crisis when he suggested Iowa farmers consider diversifying crops by planting Belgian endive.

That prompted Republican vice presidential nominee Dan Quayle to hold up a head of endive, a green used in salads, to show a crowd in Omaha just how the man from Massachusetts thinks he can rebuild the farm economy.

In the past, food was a way of painting Democrats as out of touch with rural America. Today, the message is about climate and the economy.

There is a growing movement to discourage meat-eating and a massive market for meat replacement foods. The Green New Deal, a sweeping environmental outline championed by liberal New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, calls for a sharp reduction in livestock production.

Biden has called the plan an important framework but has not endorsed it.

As these policies remain only plans for now, Republicans complaining about them have offered little substance with their claims of a war on meat.

Still, Republicans have looked for ways to signal which side theyre on. In April, Ernst introduced a bill that would bar federal agencies from setting policies that ban serving meat to employees.

Ricketts declared Meat on the Menu Day in March and came back Wednesday to name all of May Beef Month.

These efforts do little to address the beef industrys substantial problems, including a backlog in slaughterhouses stemming from the pandemic, drought and the high cost of feed.

And a spokesperson for the National Cattlemens Beef Association kept her distance from the food fight.

When emotions and rhetoric run high on either side of the political aisle, NCBA remains focused on achieving lasting results, said spokesperson Sigrid Johannes.

Associated Press writer Grant Schulte contributed to this report from Lincoln, Neb.

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Republicans are pulling out the steaks as they turn culture war into a food fight - pressherald.com