That reality speaks to the need for a proven vote-getter with lots of money and a logistical machine behind him. In Politics 101, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) meets — maybe even exceeds — those qualifications…
…If the answer is “yes,” the “solution” is really not complicated at all. In one scenario, Biden could ask Harris to resign and replace her with Newsom, who then becomes the heir apparent for 2024. Or Biden could replace Harris with Newsom and then resign himself, making Newsom the president before 2024 and arming him with the full force of the Oval Office.
Now, I may just be a caveman, but I see nothing in Article II, Section 1 about the President appointing the Veep under any circumstances.
Ever.
Still, Mr. McKinnon might be onto something.
Biden can’t “appoint” a Vice President. But he can appoint his cabinet.
So here’s the plan the Dems could use:
Alternate plan:
Appoint Newsom Secretary of State
Spread the word that Harris, Pelosi and Leahy have dirt on Hillary.
Resign.
Await the suicides of Harris, Pelosi and Leahy.
Newsom becomes president via order of succession.
It makes as much sense as McKinnon’s idea, and is actually (more or less) Constitutional…
Some on the left have come up with creative ways they think will encourage people to save Roe v. Wade.
Earlier this week on The View, co-host Joy Behar floated the idea of a sex strike.
“Women in the world have conducted sex strikes in history,” Behar explained. “In 2003, a sex strike helped to end Liberia’s brutal civil war and the woman who started it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2009, Kenyan women enforced a sex ban until police political infighting ceased. Within one week, there was a stable government.”
“We have more power than we think we do and some of it could be in the bedroom,” Behar insisted.
As a general rule, restricting the supply of something that generates little to no demand doesn’t change much. And for Behar and her colleagues, their greatest output is not sex appeal, but rather self-regard. So go ahead, get on the picket line! And rest assured, we won’t cross picket lines on this one.
Lesko Brandon’s domestic oil policies spiked gas prices so he released a million barrels per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help consumers at the pump.
You paid for that oil. He gave it away. Track its progress here.
Joe Doakes
So let’s get Brandon’s energy policy summed up: oil that Americans aren’t allowed to drill but must be imported from nations that hate or are actively planning war against us, can be given away to “allies” who’ve spent the past three decades actively making themselves dependent on our (and, unbeknownst to them, their) enemies, that being preferable to America drilling its own oil (forget about building more nukes).
If there’s one thing people love, it’s feeling better than others.
And as America has undergone its “Great Sort”, pop psychology has provided a dysfunctional society boundless opportunities to do just that. Those opportunities are scientifically dubious, but just plain feel good, because they satisfy that primal need to dunk on other people.
These opportunities came in successive waves of theories: “Conservative/liberals have better sex lives than liberals/conservatives”, self-adulatory navel gazing about Boomers/Xers/Millenials/GenZs, the brief fixation on the joys and superiority of introversion, endless diagnoses (during the Trump years, “narcissistic personality disorder” was in vogue)…
In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.
Stupid people, Carlo M. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born professor, who died in 2000. The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren.
The “five laws” are there, and make sense, more or less.
But I’m wondering – does nobody think this sort of affectation through? Ever?
Because if combine this (I predict) fad-to-be with the fad that is currently ebbing – the “Dunning Kruger Effect – people doing the diagnosing will realize that they are, largely…
…well, subject to which facile, self-adulatory cultural trope?
Again – don’t wanna keep seeing the same hands, here…
…that the loathsome Whoopi Goldberg had said the Holocaust wasn’t about racism, I thought it was bad.
Hearing what she actually said?
‘When you talk about being a racist, you can’t call this racism,’ she said. ‘This was evil. This wasn’t based on skin. You couldn’t tell who was Jewish. You had to delve deeply and figure it out. My point is: they had to do the work.
‘When you talk about being a racist, you can’t call this racism,’ she said. ‘This was evil. This wasn’t based on skin. You couldn’t tell who was Jewish. You had to delve deeply and figure it out. My point is: they had to do the work.
“The Jews all look the same to me”.
Even worse.
It fits snugly into the left’s current notion that racism is a uniquely American phenomenon that has always driven everything about the American experiment.
While it’s always worth casting a cold eye on polling numbers, it’s striking how poorly the Leader of the Free World is doing these days across the board. Real Clear Politics has the numbers and they aren’t pretty:
It’s one thing if Rasmussen, a pollster generally favorable to the GOP, posts ugly numbers for Joe Biden. What’s truly eye-opening are the results from Quinnipiac, a poll historically gentle with the portsiders. If their numbers are accurate, Biden’s disapproval rating is a whopping -19, and that’s from a poll conducted after the recent Pelosi-produced passion play of 1/6.
So what are the larger implications? A few thoughts:
If you’re Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, do you fear the political wrath of the leader of your party? Apostasy has rarely been safer.
If you’re Xi or Putin, do you concern yourself with anything Joe Biden says? Or, for that matter, with anything he does? I doubt the citizenry of Ukraine or Taiwan is particularly sanguine at the moment.
If you’re Mitch McConnell, do you sleep well? Never better, I would guess, and certainly better than your average Ukranian.
To: Mayors Carter and Frey From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant Re: Your Hostages
Mayors,
You just announced your new and, if I may be frank, moronic Covid restrictions:
BREAKING: The mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul announced Wednesday that people entering establishments serving food or beverages will need to show proof of vaccination or a negative test within 72 hours to enter. | https://t.co/lwztrdfv9A
I had the OG Covid, way back in 2020. Back before it got easy to catch and less virulent.
I’ve donated convalescent plasma. As much as I could, in fact.
Got vaccinated – not out of any ideological drive, but because I’ve got some exceptionally vulnerable relatives.
Pretty sure I just got over Omicron.
I’ve been contributing to herd immunity since most of you, my “Karen” neighbors, were hiding in your basement and dunking your food in rubbing alcohol before eating it. I am likely the immunologically safest person you will meet anytime soon.
And I will not be spending one dollar in Minneapolis or Saint Paul until this is over. And if I get completely out of the habit of spending in Saint Paul?
Oh, no.
Bear in mind – I’ve been trying to spend more money in harried Saint Paul establishments over the past 20 months; I’ve tried to help my neighbors out.
No more. You people voted for these hamsters. You all can go down with the ship.
An arrest warrant has been issued for a Houston-area mother whose teenage son was allegedly found in the trunk of her car at a COVID-19 drive-thru testing site on Friday…According to the charging documents, Beam told Gordon that her child was in the trunk because he had previously tested positive for COVID-19 and as a result, wanted to “prevent her from getting exposed to possible COVID” while driving him to get additional testing at the stadium.
Gordon told Beam that she “would not be receiving COVID testing until the child would be removed from the trunk of the vehicle and place[d] in the back seat of the vehicle.”
Great article, but I fear the CDC director is doomed. Here's why.
In the next few months, we will have to accept the inevitable, that all people will be infected with the virus at some point in the future. Better to be vaccinated/ or have nat immunity when you meet it…🧵 https://t.co/CzgwGteK80
Schools in Edina – once known as a good school district – are
Pictures of Normandale Elementary School in Edina show students eating their lunch outside with hats, coats and mittens on.
“Since the beginning of school, I learned that essentially if you brought a lunch from home, you were eating outside,” said Carissa Palm, the mother of a third-grader at the school.
The related article, from KSTP-TV, is too full of nauseatingly idiotic school administrator pullquotes, or, worse, “no comments”, to get through without yelling at the screen.
Government is the things we do together – stupidly and with the lowest common intellectual denominator in charge.
The number one story in the world this past three days: Alec Baldwin accidentally shot a cinematographer on a movie set in New Mexico.
It’s easy to feel Schadenfreud for someone who’s wallowed in so much of it himself:
I try to remain above that…
…but I’m only human.
Still.
Back in college, I worked as a stage hand (as well as acting in a few shows). The lady who ran the theater department had a long history working in show business of all kinds; she had been the first female theatrical producer in Los Angeles, had worked as a make up person on the original “Planet of the Apes“ (and had one of the masks in her office to show for it) and on and on.
We had two productions back then that involved some sort of weapons work; in one, one of the actors (and a classmate) “shot“ someone. The “prop gun“ in this case was a starter pistol, borrowed from the track and field team. The chamber was only big enough to hold starter gun caps. The barrel was not a barrel; there was no hole down the middle for a bullet. The only way to kill someone with that pistol would’ve been to beat them over the head with it – and even then, it would have been a long, slow process. Professor Lavin drilled us – the whole crew, not just the actor doing the shooting, since anyone onsince anyone on the crew might have to handle the starter pistol – on the safety rules like everybody’s life depended on it.
The absolute ironclad rule was “don’t point the gun at a person, even during the scene when you are “shooting” someone. The scene was “blocked out” (actors arranged about the stage) so that it would look like the gun was being aimed at the victim – but was in fact, pointing to a spot offstage with no cast, crew or audience. [1]
That was a piker, by the way, compared with all the things I had to learn to do a sword fight, when I played Henry II in “Lion in Winter“.
This was all emphatically nonunion. Professor Lavin relayed all sorts of stories about how universal this knowledge was among Hollywood crews.
So while I am minding Berg’s 18th Law on waiting for the facts, I find it less than completely convincing that *someone* on that set – the armorers, the prop people, the day labor on a set in rural New Mexico, and even Baldwin himself, who has engaged in gunplay in at least one movie in his career (chasing the spy through the “Sherwood Forest” of missile tubes in Hunt for Red October, a Union shoot if there ever was one) hadn’t been through the four basic rules of gun handling at the very least.
I can imagine why someone would put a live around into a “prop gun“; it looks more realistic when it fires.
Why someone would do it when they were apparently checking the blocking on the scene (I have to imagine the fact that the director and the cinematographer were standing directly in the line of fire meant they were setting up a camera shot) when the prop master/armor was yelling “cold gun“ (which tells me someone knew something about proper procedure on that said) is completely beyond me.
So I’ll keep following Berg’s 18th Law.
[1] That’s one of my dirty little secrets among conservatives; growing up in a anti-gun household, I learned all of my gun safety from a Democrat theater professor :-). I literally learned three of the four essential rules of gun safety – they are always loaded, never point them at something you’re not willing to destroy, and never put your finger on the trigger until you’re ready to shoot – doing theater.
President Joe Biden claimed on Wednesday that he once drove an 18-wheeler truck, but his remark—made during a visit to a Mack Truck factory in Lower Macungie Township, Pennsylvania—quickly garnered a skeptical reaction.
In audio recorded by local news channel WFMZ-TV, Biden can be heard off camera telling workers at Mack Truck Lehigh Valley Operations: “I used to drive an 18-wheeler, man […] I got to.”
This claim is, like many of the Leader of the Free World’s observations, unmoored from reality. Apparently back in 1973, Biden took a long ride with a truck driver, but there’s no evidence he ever drove the rig:
Zach Parkinson, director of RNC Research, also questioned the president’s claim, sharing a 1973 opinion piece written by Biden, who was then a first-term senator.
In that article, Biden talked about how he had ridden in a “47,000-pound cargo truck” on a 500-mile-plus trip from Delaware to Ohio.
“There is zero evidence that Biden ‘used to drive an 18 wheeler,'” Parkinson tweeted.
“The extent of Biden’s trucking experience is that he **rode in** a truck once, for one night in 1973 (he made sure to return home by plane though).”
Truck drivers and CB radios were a thing back in the 1970s and an advertising guy from Omaha named Bill Fries had a big hit single under the name C.W. McCall. The song “Convoy” made it to #1 on the country and the pop charts in the early part of 1976 and it led to a huge rise in sales for CB radios, which had been, up to that time, primarily a tool for truck drivers and other people in the transportation industry. The song was catchy and the trucker jargon lyrics were entertaining to hear coming through on the AM radio of your ’75 Cutlass:
Well, we rolled up Interstate 44 Like a rocket sled on rails We tore up all of our swindle sheets And left ’em settin’ on the scales
By the time we hit that Chi-town Them bears was a-gettin’ smart They’d brought up some reinforcements From the Illinois National Guard
“I was never a truck driver, even though people think I must have been,” Fries says. “I wanted to sound authentic. I wanted to talk like people talk. If you want to talk to truckers, you have to sound like a trucker.”
Biden has been straining for authenticity for 50 years now. He’s truck driver, a tough guy from Scranton, friends with Corn Pop and God only knows what else. And he has access to the nuclear codes.
Come on and join our convoy Ain’t nothin’ gonna get in our way We gonna roll this truckin’ convoy ‘Cross the USA
— Angela Belcamino (@AngelaBelcamino) May 29, 2021
…with something snarky like “So the good news is, I’d avoid a carnal quagmire with the Bride of Chucky. The bad news is I’d lose enough advertising space on that forehead for one of those yuuuuuge LED billboards.”
Fortunately, I am too much of a gentleman for that sort of thing.
We’re a week past the lifting of the mask mandates. But as Miranda Devine notes in the New York Post, confusion reigns:
This is how confused New Yorkers are about masks. At Barnes & Noble Wednesday, no mask was required to browse the bookshelves, but on the other side of Union Square, the Strand bookstore had mandated masks for all shoppers. Practically everyone inside both stores was wearing a mask, anyway, despite CDC advice that you don’t need one, indoors or outdoors, if you’re vaccinated against COVID-19.
Considering that more than half of Manhattan has been fully vaccinated, something is very wrong with the way we are processing risk. The trust between public health experts and the public is broken and now no one knows what to believe.
Why is that? Devine has a culprit:
We can blame one man above anyone for this parlous state of affairs: Saint Anthony Fauci, the coronavirus czar once hailed as the most trusted man in America for his leadership through the pandemic. He has flip-flopped on every piece of advice, never admits doubt and tells lies with brazen indifference.
True, Fauci is a dissembler for sure. But the weirdness must be just in places like Manhattan, right? But what are we seeing here in Minnesota?
Mitch shared a few examples yesterday. Here is what I’ve seen: I get a cup of coffee every morning at a gas station near my home. While I live in Ramsey County, I am not a St. Paul resident and there is no mask mandate for our community. The mask requirement signs are all taken down. But based on what I’ve observed, just about everyone who enters the station, at least in the morning rush, is wearing a mask. I started watching this behavior midweek. In the two days I observed, I saw about 25 people enter the store. Almost all of them were still wearing masks. The only guys who consistently didn’t wear a mask going into the store were the guys delivering milk. And, um, me.
Is there a health benefit to still wearing a mask, especially if you’re vaccinated? Or is it theater? Back to Devine:
It was just on Tuesday that Fauci admitted it was not science but theater that kept him wearing a mask — even double masking — despite being fully vaccinated for almost five months.
“I didn’t want to look like I was giving mixed signals,” he told “Good Morning America.” “But being a fully vaccinated person, the chances of my getting infected in an indoor setting is extremely low.”
So it is. But even then, he squirted out more octopus ink:
“I think people are misinterpreting, thinking that this is a removal of a mask mandate for everyone. It’s not,” Fauci told Axios. “It’s an assurance to those who are vaccinated that they can feel safe, be they outdoors or indoors.”
And Devine isn’t having it:
Fauci at this point is being deliberately confusing. He is feeding the mental disorder of vaccinated Karens who cling to their masks. He needs to tell them the truth and stick to it.
I agree. And don’t expect Governor Walz to help straighten things out.
Note: Thius story is safe for work. But use caution
Perhaps it’s a sign that I take firearm safety rules so very very seriously, but I can’t be the only one who looked at the specific piece of hardware in this story and got a nauseous feeling in the pit of their gut because:
the firearm in question was loaded
the trigger has no trigger guard
I don’t know for sure, but I can’t imagine with a hammer that small it’s a single-action piece, and
a trigger pull that short ain’t much safety even if it’s double-action.
None of the above was intended to be a double-entendre, pinky swear, although on second read it occurs to me that not only is every word of it is exactly that, but tjhere is literally no way around it.k
Remember when Trump nominated a raft of extremists for high executive offices?
No?
Right. There’s a reason for that.
In the meantime, this is who President Harris has picked to run Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the agency that regulates firearms, and occasionally participates in anti-gun psyops like “Fast and Furious”:
David Chipman, who will soon run the ATF, falsely claimed on his Reddit that the Branch Davidians shot down MULTIPLE helicopters during the Waco siege. That’s a complete lie. pic.twitter.com/0Uq94rGHlx
The fact that Democrats can say anything they want, anything at all, because their key demographic just isn’t that bright, is on the verge of being a Berg’s Law.
Former North Dakota Senator and current useless mouth Heidi Heitkamp calls Gina Carano a “Nazi”. Plain and simple, full stop.
Why have I not seen anyone talking about this? A former US Senator called @ginacarano some of the most heinous things while on Real Time with Bill Maher. How is this not slander? pic.twitter.com/34iFt1STCR
I’ll chalk this up to the (utterly true) idea that any Democrat can parrot any narrative twaddle, no matter how moronic, without fear, knowing that their audience hasn’t the critical thinking skills to call them on it. Or anything.
I’m Mitch Berg. I grew up in Jamestown. My mother, Jan Berg/Brooks, was a volunteer for any number of your campaigns at the state and federal level.
I fell a bit farther from the tree, politically, of course.
I’d like to make a media request – I’d love to interview y ou on my show (WWTC AM1280) in the Twin Cities regarding your assertion that Gina Carano is a “Nazi”.
I can either do it live on Saturday at 2PM, or record an interview at any time convenient to you.
The Strib is trying to shame people into getting the Covid vaccine:
Commentary: People who refuse to get the #CovidVaccine are "acting as epidemiological moochers. They're free riders, relying on the rest of us to protect them by helping the country reach herd immunity." https://t.co/0akoH9PWYD
Let’s apply this (for sake of argument) “Logic” to other patterns of behavior, shall we?
People who are “child free by choice” are “demographic moochers”. Everyone else’s children are going to have to pay the taxes and premiums to support them in their dotage, as well as their own parents.
People who live bike and transit-centered lifestyles are “fiscal moochers”. The taxes that pay for their bike lanes, paths, and transit routes and vehicles are paid, extremely disproportionally, by drivers and their gas taxes.
Those of you who are getting vaccinated, as opposed to getting and recovering from Covid the old-fashioned way, are moochers on multiple levels.
People who net out at no taxes paid in are “tax moochers”. The benefits they disproportionally receive are paid in their entirety by others.
The good news: After hearing Ben Shapiro roasting Rupar last week on his radio show, I have to say it’s been amazing seeing that more people nationwide are learning what we in the Twin Cities have known for most of a decade: that City Pages alum and Vox “writer” Aaron Rupar is a really terrible “journalist” and not an especially bright man (read the whole thread):
The bad news: these days, competence and discernment are less important than ideological purity and loyalty.
And, Rupar being simultaneously a definer and beneficiary of Urban Progressive Privilege, he’ll never be held to account for it any more than Jim Acosta or Esme Murphy.
City of Minneapolis reaches an independent settlment with the Floyd family…
…just in time to jeopardize the Chauvin trial.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called it a milestone. The city council unanimously approved the settlement.
Announcing the settlement in the middle of jury selection for the murder trial of Derek Chauvin confused legal experts.
“It was absolutely terrible timing, I would say for both sides,” said Mary Moriarty, the former chief public defender in Hennepin County.
Prospective jurors in the trial can still be questioned about their thoughts on the settlement, but Moriarty says no one knows how the news will affect the seven already seated.
“Most jurors I think would perceive [the settlement] as the city’s belief that Chauvin did murder George Floyd and that they are liable,” Moriarty said.
It’s assumed that it’d be very difficult to insulate any jury from hearing about the settlement.
Given the Minneapolis City Council’s performance over the past year, it’s hard to guess whether it was incompetence, malice or arrogance.
I say “Its the Minneapolis City Council. Why choose?”
Rep. Eric Swallwell – “Duke Nuke ’em” of yore, who is trying to be his own honky Squad – may be, along with the Squad, one of the great boons to the GOP in 2022.
This, about Neela Tandon whose Twitter feed got her booted from a cushy appointment as Biden’s budget director:
I represent one of the largest Indian-American districts in U.S. How do I look at what’s happening to @neeratanden and tell little girls of South Asian descent that they’ll have the same opportunities in life as white men? The answer: I can’t. And that’s a shame. https://t.co/EaZ4bhXR3I
I dunno, genius – maybe tell them to look at the sitting VP?
And then for a good example, the former governor of South Carolina, former UN ambassador and possible future president, Nikki Haley?
Normally about this point when a Democrat politician or talking head said something this daft, I’d throw in something about them really knowing better, but being able to count on the typical Democrat voter not knowing the difference, and being so bereft of any critical thought after years or decades of “progressive” reductionism that it makes no difference.
But I’m genuinely not sure Swalwell is actually smart enough to qualify for that exception.
Allahpundit looked into this on Tuesday, but the story behind Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s massively popular Instagram video where she describes her experience during the January 6th Capitol Hill riot keeps growing more convoluted. Despite claiming that she thought she “was going to die” and at least insinuating that rioters were attempting to break into her office, AOC wasn’t even in the actual Capitol Building when all of the action went down. Over at RedState, Nick Arama breaks down the distinctions between reality and perception. AOC’s office is in the Cannon Building which was never breached during the riot. She was briefly evacuated along with everyone else there, but other members were in immediate danger inside the Capitol Building and were far more at risk.
The writer – Jazz Shaw at Hot Air – points out he believes the #AlexandriaOcasioSmollett hashtag that erupted earlier this week on Twitter may have been a little off target – the Representative certainly didn’t concoct the riot from whole cloth.
I’m sure that AOC was legitimately afraid during the riot and with good reason. Assuming there’s a television in her office and she had the news on she would have known that hundreds of angry people were busting up the Capitol Building and acting in a threatening fashion. Given her unusually high profile for a very junior member, it would be reasonable for her to believe that some of the rioters could present a physical danger to her.
With all of that said, however, AOC failed to make one thing clear in her video (which quickly amassed more than six million views). At no time did any rioters enter the hallway where her office is located and it’s not clear that any of them ever entered any part of the Cannon Building at all. The one person who did reach her office was a Capitol Hill Police officer who was coming to evacuate her and her staffer. They had located a suspicious package (which was later cleared as being random and mundane) so they were getting everyone out of the building in an abundance of caution.
Leaving aside the sliming of the Capitol cop – who had a whole building to evacuate as his colleagues were being overrun a few blocks away – and even if you don’t make the Smollett comparison, I do find one thing intensely troubling.
The whole episode – the assault on the electoral process as well as a riot that led to five deaths, directly or indirectly – to her is nothing but a stage for…
…Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Her feelings, her sense of assumed victimnood…her.
To AOC, AOC is always the real story – by way of using that story to slime her boogeymen-du-jour.
UPDATE: I’m going to expand on this just a tad.
AOC was about as far from the Capitol riot as I was from the pharmacy that burned down, about 1000 feet from my house, during the riots.
Were either of us under immediate threat? No. Were both of us right to be nervous? Yep.
Should either of us be appropriating the experiences of those who were in immediate danger?
Let’s just call it emotionally manipulative overkill and hope everyone can do better in the future.
