WELL, NO VACCINE IS PERFECT: Israel says the Delta variant is infecting vaccinated people – as many as 50% of cases. But they are less severe.

Note, that’s 50% of cases are in vaccinated people, not that 50% of vaccinated people are getting it. Part of that may just reflect Israel’s high number of vaccinated. And Covid isn’t very severe in most people anyway, so if it’s less severe after vaccinaton. . . . Also, some of these people are only partly vaccinated.

Missing: How many people who had Covid previously are getting reinfected by the Delta variant. But if half the cases are among vaccinated people, then the previously infected people can’t be doing that badly. I continue to feel that the variants are being oversold.

TOP STORY OF THE DAY: Salma Hayek: My breasts keep growing ‘a lot’ — but they’re natural.

DEMS CAN’T RISK AN HONEST VOTE: Biden Administration To Sue Georgia Over Election Integrity Law.

THOUGHTS ON BIDEN’S NUKE THREATS: Dangerous, Threatening Rhetoric is the Tactic of Tyrants.

Flashback: Doubts about Biden’s mental acuity aren’t only reason to limit prez’s nuke power.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Democratic hypocrisy is “off the charts” here.

It was ever on the charts?

SHE NEEDS TO FIRE THAT DAMNED ATTORNEY: Woman Arrested for Trespassing in Capitol Riot Case Told to Denounce White Privilege By Her Own DEFENSE Attorney.

AT HELEN’S PAGE: From C.James Brown, Killing Influence (Earl Town Book 2).

LOOK OUT BELOW: China Tries To Solve Its Rocket Debris Problem.

#JOURNALISM:

SILENCE, PEASANT: Prickly Kamala Harris Refuses to Answer Why It Took so Long for Her to Visit Border.

FASTER, PLEASE: Muscling up with nanoparticle-based anti-inflammatory therapy.

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Ayn Rand Was Right About the Left (Again).

Plus:

• Race doesn’t matter to the progressives, but not in the good way
• Trump knows what Democrats would do for a Klondike Bar
• Netflix dating show jumps the shark… and the panda, and the bull, and some weird lizard thing…

So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

JUST SAY NO TO THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG: Send A Letter: American Bar Assoc. Proposed Mandated Law School Race Curriculum Will Restrict Academic Freedom and Debate: Imposing these changes would violate professors’ rights to academic freedom and stifle classroom debate.

UNMAKING PEACE: Biden Inches Away From Trump Recognition Of Israel’s Golan Heights Sovereignty. “Trump recognized the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights. The Biden policy sounds like Israeli control of the Golan is temporary. Israeli control of the Golan is also important for the security United States. Control of the land by a staunch ally like Israel provides a check on the Iranian land bridge and their movement of supplies, weapons, and people with the intent of damaging U.S. interests in the region.”

BECAUSE THEY’RE FULL OF HATE AND DRUNK ON POWER? Why Do Dems Keep Threatening To Nuke Gun Owners?

It’s telling that so many of them are willing to do to domestic political opponents what they would have regarded as war crimes if directed at foreign enemies.

THE WAR ON NORMALCY: Washington Elites Are Weaponizing the Tax Code Against Christians.

I DON’T THINK THEY’RE GOING TO LET JOE OUT IN PUBLIC MUCH MORE. THIS WEEK WAS A DEBACLE:

WEEKS, MONTHS, WHATEVER: Study: First cases of COVID-19 likely occurred weeks earlier than reported.

OVER THE TARGET, TAKING FLAK: Ron DeSantis Gets Labeled ‘Worse Than Trump.’ “This is what Democrats always do. Geroge W. Bush is Hitler until Mitt Romney comes along. Then, Bush is the harmless guy who paints who they wish all Republicans were like. Once Trump came along, Romney was rehabbed. Now that DeSantis is the frontrunner for 2024 in many people’s minds, and clearly, the one Democrats fear the most, he must become worse than the Republican who came before him.”

The only thing missing is the de rigueur “Unexpectedly!”

BYRON YORK: Biden’s reckless threat.

Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer “literally pulled the rug out from under their bipartisan negotiators,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. As for the president, McConnell said, “It was a tale of two press conferences — endorse the agreement in one breath and threaten to veto it in the next.”

GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, who was one of the bipartisan group of 21 negotiators, was much more blunt. If Biden is going to tie the two bills together, Graham told Politico Playbook, “He can forget it! I’m not doing that. That’s extortion! I’m not going to do that. The Dems are being told you can’t get your bipartisan work product passed unless you sign on to what the left wants, and I’m not playing that game.”

Graham said most GOP senators, and even some inside the bipartisan group, did not know the Biden-Pelosi-Schumer plan. “Most Republicans could not have known that,” he told Politico. “There’s no way. You look like a f—ing idiot now. I don’t mind bipartisanship, but I’m not going to do a suicide mission.” And that was that. The bright, shining bipartisan deal instantly became much less than it seemed.

“On the infrastructure deal, Biden’s word lasted about two hours,” York concludes. Was this and Biden’s F-15s and nukes ad-lib a bit of what was called in the Obama era “stray voltage?” As Allahpundit noted his post on the latter Biden debacle, he noted that Bombs-Away Biden may have wanted take the spotlight off of a report that he was planning to the worst thing of all in the far left’s eyes: refund the police. Acting like a hardliner on guns helps to take the spotlight off that. As he added, “Dems are almost certainly going to lose the midterms regardless but if Biden can convince swing voters that he’s at least trying to address their biggest policy anxieties he might be able to hold down the losses.”

KAMALA HARRIS ON WAY TO VISIT SPOT HUNDREDS OF MILES FROM THE ACTUAL BORDER CRISIS:

Asked about her trip while speaking to Newsmax in an interview Friday morning, Trump said he supported her making the journey — as long as she actually visits locations impacted by the crisis, as opposed to her planned tour of “a part of the border that is seldom violated.”

“I think she should go to the border,” the 45th commander-in-chief told the network. “I think she should go to the real part of the border, not a part of the border that is seldom violated.”

In reality, Harris’s photo-op will be occurring about 2000 miles away from the source of the actual border crisis. As Tom Cotton noted earlier this month, “‘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.’”

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.”

UNEXPECTEDLY: Biden Inches Away From Trump Recognition Of Israel’s Golan Heights Sovereignty.

AT CAFE HAYEK, some (skeptical) COVID links.

GLEICHSCHALTUNG: Mailchimp Suspends The Babylon Bee for ‘Harmful Information.’

ROGER KIMBALL: Joe Biden is not Mr. Normality.

Second, if the sovereign (‘We the people’) wants to move against the government of the United States, it doesn’t need F-15s and nuclear weapons. It needs legitimate, i.e., free and fair, elections. It was because of serious doubts regarding the 2020 presidential election that hundreds of citizens, and not a few rabble rousers and FBI instigators, marched on the Capitol on January 6. The subtext of Mr Normality’s comment about limiting access to guns and intimidating the populace was the free-for-all at the Capitol. But remember, no guns were fired by the so-called ‘domestic terrorists’ during that so-called ‘insurrection’: that’s ‘no guns’ as in ‘zero guns’, none, nada, rien. One person, alas, was shot and killed. That was Ashli Babbitt, the unarmed Trump supporter who was about the climb through a window when she was shot and killed by an unnamed Capitol Police officer.

‘Unnamed’, but not unknown. The Capitol Police know who murdered Ashli Babbitt, but they refuse to identify him. Question: what if Babbitt had been a drug-addled black man (or woman) who was resisting arrest? Do you believe that the name and image of the person who shot him would still be under wraps? To ask the question is to answer it.

The internet and airwaves are on fire today with commentary about the President’s comments about F-15s and nuclear weapons. I am not sure, however, that most of the pundits grasp the essential point. It’s not only that Joe Biden implicitly threatened to use the US military against American citizens. I believe that he had that contingency somewhere in the back of his, er, mind. But the real issue was his assumption that the ultimate locus of power in the United States is in the government. It is not. The ultimate locus of power is in the people. This is a difficult reality for timeserving denizens of the Deep State to wrap their minds around.

Or as Iowahawk noted yesterday: