SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Fauci rips Cruz over Jan. 6 when asked about DOJ prosecutions.

Dr. Anthony Fauci shot back at Sen. Ted Cruz, who called for the Justice Department to prosecute Fauci for allegedly lying about funding gain-of-function research.

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases quipped about the Capitol riot on Jan. 6 when asked about Cruz, one of several GOP lawmakers who has attacked him.

“Yeah. I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?” Fauci quipped during an appearance Sunday on CBS News’s Face the Nation.

Complete non-sequitur. As Dan McLaughlin asks, “Is Dr. Fauci under the impression that nobody is being prosecuted for Jan. 6? Or is he saying Ted Cruz should be prosecuted for speech & debate on the Senate floor?”

More Fauci: Fauci would support a 9/11-style commission to study the US response to COVID.

That might not go the way he thinks it might:

● Biden on February 1st, 2020:

Yesterday, Donald Trump further diminished the United States in the eyes of the world by expanding his travel ban, placing new restrictions on the residents of six more nations that limit who is allowed to come to the United States.

Three years ago, he took aim at Muslim-majority nations. This time, he targeted primarily African…

And there is no evidence that they do anything to make us safer. If anything, they endanger the best tools we have to fight terrorism — our globe-spanning network of alliances and partnerships. They erode our moral standing in the world and make it less likely that other nations will work with us to take on terrorist threats before they can reach our shores.

Immigrants from each of these countries and their broader diaspora communities here in the United States enrich the larger fabric of American life as our friends and neighbors and make vital contributions to our economy. They make our nation stronger. The United States has a meaningful history of offering safety and opportunity to peoples of every nation — no matter where they come from, no matter if they are rich or poor, no matter the faith they follow.

Donald Trump is doing everything in his power to destroy that legacy. It’s a disgrace, and we cannot let him succeed.

—Statement from Vice President Joe Biden on Donald Trump’s Expanded Travel Ban, Medium.com

● Nancy Pelosi Visits San Francisco’s Chinatown Amid Coronavirus Concerns. “‘[W]hat we’re trying to do today is to say everything is fine here,’ Pelosi said. ‘Come because precautions have been taken. The city is on top of the situation.’”

—NBC Bay Area, February 24, 2020.

● Kamala Harris says she will be ‘first in line’ for a coronavirus vaccine if health experts approve it, but ‘if Donald Trump tells us we should take it, then I’m not taking it.’

—Business Insider after the debate between Harris and Mike Pence, October 7th, 2020.

● Here’s a montage of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Andrew Cuomo saying not so long ago that you shouldn’t trust the feds, the FDA, and the vaccine.

—Not the Bee, September 11th, 2021.

● Major Milestones in Governor Cuomo’s Nursing Home Deaths Scandals.

● Where Is Cuomo’s Apology for Killing 10,000 People?

● Whitmer Has a Covid Nursing Home Scandal of Her Own: Michigan nursing home death toll ‘could be double’ official count.

● Whitmer to Michigan: Stay Home and Shut Up.

● Why New Orleans Pushed Ahead With Mardi Gras, Even as It Planned for Coronavirus: A cache of internal emails reveals city officials believed chances were “low” that the festivities would help spread the virus, a prediction that proved tragically off base.

UPDATE:

Video montage of Democrat politicians expressing vaccine hesitancy for partisan reasons last year. Today, many Democrat politicians accuse vaccine skeptics or critics as people who want to kill others. pic.twitter.com/GgVmU4YfRL

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) November 28, 2021

More: Politico: Gov. Cuomo wasn’t a good pandemic leader and his daily ‘Cuomo show’ was management by press conference.

THAT’S CRAZY, SUVs HADN’T EVEN BEEN INVENTED: Collapse of ancient Liangzhu culture caused by climate change.

JEFF DUNETZ ON THE FIRST OF EIGHT NIGHTS OF CHANUKAH: The True Story And Meaning Of The Hanukkah Holiday.

FAUXCAHONTAS REDUX: Director of Indigenous Peoples’ Health Research in Canada Forced to Resign for Being a Fake.

UNEXPECTEDLY: ABC/NBC Most Concerned With How Omicron Variant Hurts Biden’s Agenda.

With the emergence of the new Omicron Covid variant out of South Africa that’s reportedly more transmissible than Delta, the liberal media’s initial reaction on Sunday was to fret for the future – not in terms of how it could hurt people, but how it could hurt President Biden’s agenda. ABC’s Good Morning America worried about the midterm elections and NBC’s Sunday Today wanted Biden to “use the bully pulpit” against Republicans.

ABC congressional correspondent Rachel Scott was filling in as co-anchor of GMA when she asked deputy political director Averi Harper about how the new variant could be a wet blanket for Biden. “Nearly 150 days ago the President said we were closer to declaring independence from the virus. Now we see this new Covid variant. How much of a challenge does this pose for the President,” she wondered.

“[W]e saw the markets took a nosedive on Friday all because of the omicron variant. So, I would say this poses a significant challenge to the Biden administration, particularly on the economic front,” warned Harper.

Her biggest concern was reserved for how Omicron could damage Biden’s and Democrats’ chances in the midterms[.]

Flashbacks to early March of 2020:

● Chuck Todd: Coronavirus Can Be to Trump Like Iran Hostages Were to Carter.

● ‘She’s actually smiling:’ MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace and guest discuss coronavirus that could become ‘Trump’s Katrina.’

Which dovetails nicely with this quote from Mickey Kaus in 2005: “In short, Katrina gives them a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq. No wonder Gwen Ifill smiles the ‘inner smile.’”

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

‘IMMIGRATION IS WAR:’ an interview with Éric Zemmour.

For Zemmour, the most craven expression of this hyper-individualism is militant political correctness — “le wokeisme.” He calls it “hypersensitivity to the rights of the individual, a generalized offensive against French and western culture, against the white heterosexual man. These people want above all to make the French and all westerners feel guilty, ashamed of their history, so that they amputate themselves, destroy themselves, abandon their culture, their civilization, simply so that they no longer feel guilty.”

This wokeness, he argues, is a kind of Trojan horse for the Islamification of formerly Christian nations. “It is by destroying our cultures, our history, that they make a clean sweep of all that and allow a foreign culture, history and civilization to come and replace it.”

Such talk — echoing as it does “the great replacement theory” of Renaud Camus — causes consternation in progressive circles. Somebody, probably David Aaronovitch, will no doubt accuse The Spectator of giving a platform to nativism or white supremacism merely by speaking to him. Yet Zemmour is utterly unabashed about his views and he’s currently second or third in the presidential election polls.

Might his preoccupations with national characteristics, the greatness of French literature and the collapse of western civilization have something to do with the fact that he is himself an immigrant child? His parents were Berber Jews from Algeria. His grandfather spoke better Arabic than French. His father drove an ambulance.

“What my family has done in terms of assimilating French culture should be an example,” he says, proudly. “I am a product of French colonialization. I am not one of these people who condemn the French colonizer. I say thank you.

Earlier:

● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

● Former Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”

● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”

● 69 Percent of Hispanics Disapprove of Biden’s Handling of Immigration.

● Tom Cotton’s Response to Kamala Harris’ Border Failures Should Be the Default for All Republicans: “‘You know, Laura, Kamala Harris didn’t have to go all the way to Guatemala and Mexico to find the root causes of this border crisis because they’re not there,’ Cotton told Fox News host Laura Ingraham earlier this week. ‘The root causes are in the White House.’ He further explained that it ‘happened on January 20th when Joe Biden took office, and he essentially opened our borders, reversing very effective policies that had our borders under control.’”

A core theme of the midterm and presidential elections won’t be too hard to figure out:

NOW OUT: Rush on the Radio: A Tribute from His Sidekick for 30 Years. #CommissionEarned

OUT: RULE OF LAW. IN: Wisconsin college students protest Kyle Rittenhouse verdict.

OH, YOKO! Beatles Fans* Think ‘Get Back’ Dispels The Idea That Yoko Ono Broke The Band Up And Peter Jackson Agrees.

* Not all of us, sunshine. Plus, doesn’t the author get that Peter Jackson had to keep the representative of John Lennon’s estate happy so that she would sign off on the production of the miniseries?

CYBER MONDAY DEAL: GOOLOO Jump Starter 1200A Peak Car Starter 12V SuperSafe Lithium Jump Box, Battery Booster Pack, Portable Power Bank Charger, and Jumper Cables for Up to 7.0L Gas or 5.5L Diesel Engine. #CommissionEarned

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University Administrators on the Rittenhouse Verdict. “Rather than encourage independent scrutiny, administrators on many campuses have issued statements that presuppose answers to hotly contested questions, and assert opinions about the not-guilty verdict in the case and its ostensible significance as though they were matters of community consensus. The whole episode is an illustration of a bigger problem in academia: Administrators make ideologically selective efforts to soothe the feelings of upset faculty members and students. These actions impose orthodoxies of thought, undermining both intellectual diversity and inclusion.”

THOSE MORONS AT IMPERIAL COLLEGE: New variant hysteria comes from same institution that popularized lockdowns & previous COVID scares. Given their track record, I don’t know why anyone listens to them. “Imperial College UK is the home of the infamous ‘doomsday models’ for COVID-19, which promised that millions of people would imminently be wiped off the earth if the Western world did not lock down in March of 2020 for COVID-19. The idea that the world needed to ‘flatten the curve’ through pseudoscientific lockdowns was spawned by a faulty academic model from Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College. When pressed to open source his models, Ferguson outright refused. He later resigned in disgrace from the U.K. government scientific advisory board. Yet ‘Professor Lockdown’ somehow remains a very influential figure.”

Related: Goldman Slams Omicron Panic: “This Mutation Is Unlikely To Be More Malicious; No Reason For Portfolio Changes.”

All the variant hype has been largely BS.

GOOD: Andrew Yang defends Chappelle over tense exchange with high school students. I love how the students actually expected Chappelle to apologize.

GREAT MOMENTS IN IDENTITY POLITICS: CNN columnist predicts “Harris and Buttigieg could be allies instead of rivals” in 2024:

STILL POPULAR: New Apple AirPods Pro. #CommissionEarned

WELL, IT’S GRETCHEN WHITMER: ‘Bad Leadership’: Detroit Businessman Blasts Gretchen Whitmer’s Economic Policies.

THE GASLIGHTING WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: One Target store. One huge spike in shoplifting reports. What does it mean for San Francisco?

A closer look at the data shows that the spike in reported shoplifting came almost entirely from one store: the Target at 789 Mission St. in the Metreon mall. In September alone, 154 shoplifting reports were filed from the South of Market intersection where the Target stands, up from 13 in August. And then, in October, the reports from this intersection went down again to 17.

What happened at this particular Target? Did the store see a huge spike in shoplifting in September? No, said store manager Stacy Abbott. The store was simply using a new reporting system implemented by the police that allows retailers to report crime incidents over the phone.

When asked why the shoplifting reports had decreased again in October, Abbott said she wouldn’t be able to answer any more questions and directed The Chronicle to the Police Department as well as Target’s media team, which did not answer questions either.

Officer Robert Rueca, a police spokesperson, said the new reporting system was accessible to other businesses and individuals on weekdays, not just the Target. He did not respond to questions about how long the system had been in place or whether the department had seen an increase in shoplifting incidents from other stores since the system’s implementation (publicly available data does not show such an increase).

Though the spike seen in the data generates more questions than answers, one thing is clear: A single (albeit large and busy) store’s decision to report a majority of its shoplifting incidents doubled the entire city’s monthly shoplifting rates.

As Ace of Spades co-blogger Arthur Kimes tweets, “In other words, if the rest of the stores in SF reported shoplifting AS IT ACTUALLY OCCURS then the reported amount of shoplifting in SF would be shockingly high.”

Though to be fair, it’s the San Francisco Chronicle, so I can understand why they’d be angered by accurate reporting.

SHOCK: CNN Analyst Has ‘No Idea’ What’s Behind Smash & Grab Robbery Wave—Then Supplies Answer!. “The punishment for this kind of crime is very, very minimal. In most cases it’s a misdemeanor. There are some DAs that have flat-out said they’re no longer going to prosecute shoplifting.”

Do tell.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Canadian school district cancels speech by ISIS rape survivor, Nobel winner due to ‘Islamophobia’ fears. The author was sold into sex slavery by ISIS at age 14.

HIGHER EDUCATION: Columbia Settles COVID-19 Class Action Tuition Refund Suit For $12.5 Million.

AMERICA’S PAPER OF RECORD!  Racist Joe Biden Bans Travel From Africa.

BRUTAL:  Dress-Up.

Deserved, but brutal. If I were Vanilli, I’d crawl in a hole and stay there.

IT MIGHT HOWEVER BE ABOUT A CRISIS IN AMERICAN EDUCATION:  No, Thanksgiving Isn’t About ‘Genocide And Violence’.

Let’s inform college professors we want them to actually know the truth, rather than just virtue-signal. Seriously. At this point most teachers in the humanities are as useful as a chocolate hammer. There is objective truth. It is discoverable. Let’s start there.

WELL, I SAY IT IS:  Interesting.

TO BE FAIR, OZ HAS GONE MAD ON ALL FRONTS:  Aussie Bushfire Madness: Fuel Load Not an Issue, All Climate Change.