October 29, 2024

OPEN THEAD: This is where the magic happens.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell to leave namesake show, move to correspondent role at NBC.

Veteran political journalist Andrea Mitchell announced that she will exit her namesake MSNBC show after the inauguration, but will remain as a correspondent at NBC News.

Mitchell, who occupied the anchor chair at the left-leaning network for nearly two decades, will continue in her role as NBC News’ chief foreign affairs correspondent and chief Washington corespondent.

The anchor– who turns 78 on Wednesday — broke the news to viewers on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” Tuesday.

“And after sixteen years of being in the anchor chair every day, I want time to do more of what I love the most: more connecting, listening and reporting in the field,” Mitchell said. “Especially as whoever is elected next week is going to undertake the monumental task of handling two foreign wars and the political divisions here at home.”

Mitchell has been a reliable Democratic Party operative with a Chyron for decades. In addition to this Media Research Center compilation from 2013: “Andrea Mitchell: 35 Years of Liberal Advocacy,” there was this classic moment from last year: Did Andrea Mitchell climb down to fake a grovel to Ron DeSantis? Why, yes – yes, she did.

Posted at 9:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

BIDEN: Trump Supporters are “Garbage.”

I wonder how much longer Gutierrez will be with NBC News after allowing Biden to bigfoot Kamala’s closing speech?

Video of Biden’s “Deplorables” moment here:

John Gill’s staffers tried to walk the boss’s slur back, but…:

UPDATE: Oh My: Joe Biden Sabotages Kamala’s ‘Unity’ Speech by Opening Mouth, Inserting Foot on ‘Voto Latino’ Call. “So, just to recap, on the night Harris gave what is probably the biggest speech she’ll ever give in her political career just one week before the election, a speech where she claimed Trump was a divider and not a uniter, her boss Joe Biden tells the country that Trump’s supporters are ‘garbage,’ completely upending yet another anti-Trump news cycle that they hoped would be favorable to them. You just can’t make it up. As some of my colleagues have suggested, it’s almost like Biden’s doing this stuff on purpose to hurt her campaign. If so, all I have to say is ‘Thanks, Joe!’ Oh, and more, please.”

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

AND THIS IS WHY SHE’S NOT DOING JOE ROGAN:

She can do word salads as soundbites, not three hour+ interviews:

Posted at 8:50 pm by Ed Driscoll

I THOUGHT BLACK-BAG JOBS WENT OUT WITH HOOVER: Report: Whistleblower Claims There Was an Off-Book FBI Investigation Into Trump Ordered by Comey. “The existence of this investigation, which preceded Crossfire Hurricane, was never entered into any FBI system and was later hidden from Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.”

There is a Deep State, and it was violently opposed to Trump from thet beginning. Democrats used to pretend both ideas were conspiracy theory, now they just praise them.

Posted at 8:36 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE SPINAL TAP ELECTION: Everything Is Turned Up to 11.

For many women, abortion is a hard-won right and they believe that they alone should decide whether to keep their pregnancy or terminate it. Achieving that right (codified in the 1973 Roe v .Wade decision) was the most important feminist victory since the advent of voting rights for women. Their political opponents say pregnant women should not have unfettered discretion to deal with pregnancy since it involves another, innocent life. The debate over women’s rights, human autonomy, and the protection of innocents is suffused with both practical consequences and symbolic weight.

The same is true for transgender rights. The right of adults to choose their gender is now widely accepted, a major change from 20 or 30 years ago. The battles now are whether children should be subject to irreversible changes, who should make those decisions, whether transgender women (born men) should compete against biological women and girls in sports, whether biological and transgender girls should use the same bathrooms and locker rooms, and whether taxpayers should pay for gender-changing operations on prison inmates and illegal aliens. The numbers involved in these issues are relatively small, but their symbolic weight is large. Opposing sides face each other across a cultural chasm, drenched with contempt for the opposition.

These differences are playing out against a disorienting background condition, which is often ignored when we discuss politics and culture. The basic structure of modern economies is changing rapidly. The last such disorienting economic change was the Great Depression and, before that, the Second Industrial Revolution in the 1890s (the advent of big steel, oil, chemicals, and large corporations to manage them). Both the 1890s and 1930s produced long-lasting shifts in voters’ political alignments.

We are seeing another great realignment now, driven (on the economic side) by rapid innovation in computer technology, artificial intelligence, and robotics. When those are combined with low-cost transportation, virtually free communication, and trade rules that encourage globalization, the result is social dislocation and disorientation. There is a palpable threat to employment in American manufacturing and, increasingly, in service industries.

Both political parties have responded by supporting trade protection, with Trump taking the lead. Doing so has helped him forge a populist Republican Party, centered on the working-class.

Amid these vast changes and bitter ideological differences, it is hardly surprising to see our political discourse becoming more virulent, depicting the opposition as “enemies,” as Trump has done for some elected representatives (and not just violent extremists).

The only way to contain those differences peacefully is to channel them through established democratic institutions, using well-established procedures. That’s the only hope the losing side will accept the results as legitimate.

Supporters of Al Gore and John Kerry could not be reached for comment.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S THE PARTY’S HISTORY:

Posted at 7:50 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE DEMOCRATS’ INSANITY DEFENSE:

In the September debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump said something so ludicrous that many viewers must have dismissed it out of hand. “She did things that nobody would ever think of,” Trump said, while rattling off a list of some of the vice president’s most radical past positions. “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”

The idea that the vice president “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” seemed so patently absurd that The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser cited it in a column posted the next morning as an example of Trump’s lunacy: “What the hell was he talking about?” Glasser wrote of the trans operation lines. “No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’ point.”

That reaction was understandable—the idea of the operations was, as Trump himself said, a “thing nobody would ever think of.” The problem was that it is true.

* * * * * * * *

The same GOP staffer, who is currently working on a competitive congressional race, told me that one problem his campaign regularly faces is that aspects of Democratic governance are simply too insane for voters to find credible, even when they are documented as official U.S. government policy. “When you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down, because in both polling and focus groups, people just don’t believe it,” he said. “They are critical of things like boys in girls’ sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.”

Another Republican operative made a related point on the failure of the party’s attempt to message on trans issues in 2022, which was that the reality of the procedures was so gruesome that voters simply preferred not to think about it. “Phrases like ‘genital mutilation’ are disgusting and viscerally off-putting, even to voters who may be sympathetic to the Republicans’ position but will just write you off as a freak for talking about it that way.”

A similar dynamic plays out in foreign policy. On the one hand the Democrats conjured out of thin air the claim that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, which was, we now know, a conspiracy theory concocted by ex-spies and Clinton campaign operatives and seeded in the intelligence agencies and media by the outgoing Obama administration to cripple the new administration. That is to say that it is not a matter of partisan political opinion; it is simply false. Yet as of 2022, nearly half of U.S. voters, and a majority of Democrats, still believed that Trump was elected in 2016 due to Russian interference, and the hoax remains a mainstay of Democratic rhetoric. It even played a major role in the 2020 election, providing the predicate for the Biden campaign to collude with tech companies and retired spooks to censor reporting about Hunter Biden’s foreign influence-peddling schemes, which turned out to be entirely real.

If the past decade of politics has felt like staring into endless funhouse mirrors, needless to say, read the whole thing.

Related:

● Jake Tapper Is Lying About CNN’s Key Role In The Russia Collusion Hoax.

● Fake News Beetlejuice! Ace of Spades Shreds Jake Tapper in Brutal Thread Titled ‘The Tapper Files’ (Pt 1).

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

I THOUGHT THE “HITLER LEARNS…” VIDEOS WERE PLAYED OUT BUT THEN THIS ONE CAME ALONG:

Posted at 6:36 pm by Stephen Green

STEVE BANNON RELEASED:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll