HEH, INDEED: The Best Historical Analog For Liz Cheney Isn’t Lincoln. It’s Colin Kaepernick.

While Cheney’s self-indulged fantasies about becoming the country’s next Lincoln is great comedy, there is one figure throughout American history that the Wyoming representative measures up to quite well: former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

Much like Kaepernick, who made a Civil War era comparison of his own by relating the NFL draft process to a slave auction, Cheney has always been a washed-up nobody that was never good enough to make it in the pros. Rather than engaging in serious self-reflection as to why her popularity plummeted among the Wyomingites she swore to represent in Congress, Cheney decided to play the victim card and cast her work in the disgraceful Jan. 6 Committee as necessary for the future of the republic. From that point forward, anyone who refused to go along with her one-woman war against Trump became the enemy, while the bitter resentment intended to drive the rest of her political career completely divorced her from reality.

The same pattern of delusions can also be found in Kaepernick’s story. In the case of the disgraced former quarterback, Kaepernick has to believe that NFL teams’ refusal to hire him is all about racism because the reality — that he sucks and just isn’t good enough to make it in the pros — hurts his ego too much to be accepted.

When do the Raiders give her a tryout?

NOW WE NEED TO DROP THEM ON MARS: Scientists believe asteroids may have carried water to Earth.

ROGER SIMON: Movie Review: Matt Walsh’s What Is a Woman? Is an Absolute Winner.

Arguably, if you wanted to kill off Western Civilization at its root, massive transgenderism would be a good way to do it—just convince children that the developmental issues so many normally have are serious cases of gender dysphoria, and switching sexual identities is their road to salvation. More likely, it’s a road to suicide.

Cui bono? Big Pharma, of course. Once a child takes the first medical step into being transgendered, he or she (or whatever they want to call themselves) is on the way to spending millions on their health care over a lifetime. If you didn’t despise Big Pharma before seeing this film, you will afterward.

Walsh, with excellent support from Folk, takes us on a literal global adventure to demonstrate all this. Often it’s infuriating, as it should be, often heartbreaking, but sometimes mercifully funny, as when Walsh travels to Nairobi, Kenya, to ask the question “What is a woman?” of some Masai. More perceptive and intelligent than the so-called experts, the tribesmen seem nonplussed that anyone would ask something that obvious and silly.

Other notable stops along the way are with a pediatrician (in the infuriating category) who is so devoted to administering blockers to children that she appears to have a monomania in favor of gender switching. No one, to her, is born male or female, despite the apparent evidence in front of our eyes. Also infuriating, not surprisingly, is an academic in a gender studies department.

On the heartbreaking side is a woman who underwent seven operations to be a man, spent much of his/her life sick and depressed because of this, and now regrets ever having made the change. This noble person has now formed an organization to advise others against following his/her path.

Earlier: Don’t Overlook What Matt Walsh Has Done Here:  “These African men laugh – they literally laugh – at the notion a woman might have a penis. They laugh because it is a laughable premise (again, to everyone outside the West and its fabricated gender enlightenment). So how can the American Left respond to this? Obviously what these men are saying and doing makes a mockery of the left’s gender ideology. If said by a white American male, it would be considered the height of bigotry. But these aren’t white American men. These are black men (and women) of a different culture. Progressives may worship the idol of gender, but they also worship the idol of diversity and multiculturalism. By their own rules, their dismissal of, or disagreement with the lived experiences of another people group – particularly black-skinned groups – is racist and Anglo-centric.”

“MALE,” JUST “MALE”: Here’s What Happened When a Biological Male Tried to Pledge University of Alabama Sororities.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Costly high-tech blood pressure monitors no better than basic cuffs.

WE LIVE IN CRAZY TIMES:  Major law firms counsel their clients to keep disparate impact liability in mind when they make decisions about how to handle layoffs (as they should given that the law … or maybe I should say “the law” … requires it).  Meanwhile Minneapolis Schools adopt a policy of outright race discrimination against white teachers in layoffs.

(As always, if you haven’t done so already,  I urge you to read Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Everything Presumptively Illegal, which is a primer on this pernicious policy.)

MALPRACTICE: California gender clinic treats patients as young as 2-years-old. “UCSF explicitly adheres to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) guidelines, which recommends that children as young as 8 could begin medical transition. WPATH is set to release its new 8th edition guidelines this year, which plans to lower the minimum age for teens to obtain hormones, as well as face, chest, and genital surgeries.”

Related: Biden’s Change to Title IX Shuts Parents Out of Kids’ Mental, Emotional Health.

FASTER, PLEASE: Michael Mann’s Ferrari Will Get Fall 2023 Release.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Rutgers Seeks Dismissal Of Lawsuit Claiming Business School Created Fake Jobs For Graduates To Goose Ranking. “The amended complaint alleged that Rutgers inflated the school’s rankings in publications such as U.S. News & World Report by hiring graduating MBA students who were unemployed and placing them in “token permanent positions directly with the university.” The purported scheme duped prospective students about the potential employment opportunities that come with attending the school, according to the complaint.”

RULE, BRITANNIA: RAF ‘pauses job offers for white men’ to meet ‘impossible’ diversity targets: The alleged move has prompted the head of recruitment for the Royal Air Force (RAF) – herself a senior female officer – to resign in recent days in protest.

Get woke, go broke.

MATT MARGOLIS: Twitter Censored My Articles on the FBI Raid of Mar-a-Lago.

JEFFREY CARTER: The Retirement of Liz.

Liz Cheney went down in flames last night. Pundits are chalking it up to another win for Trump. He’s doing pretty good in his endorsements. It’s hard to say who he has actually put over the top vs who would have won anyway. Certainly, there are some like Blake Masters in Arizona who benefitted. But, Masters also had Peter Thiel money.

But, maybe Trump just has a good eye for people. All those years running a business might have made that skill sharp. No, the pundits missed it in 2016. They never understood why Trump came out of nowhere to win. They are missing it today.

Trump certainly is very good at articulating what people are thinking. He’s good at connecting with them.

But, I think it’s deeper than candidate Trump. These are votes against the Beltway Establishment. It’s a vote against the way things have always been done. Mr. Smith can’t go to Washington because they are living their lives outside the Beltway and want to be away from politicians. Most Americans agree the best government is the one that governs the least.

That’s where the “middle” is.

The mainstream media is of the Beltway Establishment. They don’t understand the real middle. Neither do the Twitter people or social media people. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg went to spend time with a Midwestern family and milked cows to try and get in touch with “regular people”?

What we all hate to see are career politicians that get rich simply because they are in Washington. They take no risk and make gigantic sums of money. They campaign on one thing and then do another.

Would the Cheney family have dynasty money if it weren’t for politics? What about the Dingells? What about the Chicago Daley Family? The Clintons? The Gores? Former and disgraced Speaker of the House Denny Hastert was a teacher, then a career politician. He was also a prescient and amazingly successful land speculator.

There are people like Senator John Thune too. When he first went to Washington, he didn’t seem like an establishment guy. But, once he got there and understood the system he became the establishment and enforced the establishment.

They usually do.

STEVE HAYWARD: Inside the Dishonest ‘Inflation Reduction Act.’

Environmentalist disappointment and subsequent outrage is destined to appear again regardless for two reasons. First, environmentalists can’t live without the frisson of apocalyptic doom, so they will have to resume the nonstop messaging of climate doom regardless of the results of the IRA. Second and more importantly, environmentalists are quietly lining up to make sure the implementation of the IRA’s climate provisions fail.

Yes, you heard that right. The adults in the room where climate policy is made have come to understand that the regulatory roadblocks environmentalists rely on to block pipelines, new oil refineries, and drilling on public land can also be used by grassroots groups in the states and localities to block the necessary infrastructure to enable wind and solar power to make any real impact on our electricity supply. The promise to reform environmental the permitting process, especially for a natural gas pipeline in West Virginia, was a large factor in getting Sen. Manchin back to the table. But as soon as the IRA passed, environmentalists vowed to stop any changes to environmental regulation, except for wind and solar power. It is unlikely that such narrowly tailored change can pass, and it wouldn’t reach the powers of state public utility regulators who guard their prerogatives jealously against federal encroachment.

And expect a fair amount of Obama-style trickle-down crony corporatism as well:

CRISIS BY DESIGN: ‘Woke’ Military Policies to Blame for Recruitment Crisis, Servicemembers Say.

YEAH, NO: Russia Collusion Hoaxer Wants Us to Trust the FBI on Trump Raid. Um, That’s a Hard Pass, Peter Strzok.

Flashback:

GOODER AND HARDER, NEW YORK: ‘It’s like walking through Dante’s inferno’: Manhattan’s trendy Chelsea neighborhood has become ‘a 24-hour drug and sex den’ as vagrants inject themselves in plain sight of a school and parents beg NYPD to ‘do something.’

RHODES COLLEGE: Pro-abortion alumni want Amy Coney Barrett out of college’s Hall of Fame.

SURPRISE! Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act [Sic] Will Raise Taxes on the Middle Class By $20 Billion.

WELL, TO BE FAIR, THAT’S JUST BECAUSE THEY’RE AGAINST FREE SPEECH: Under Biden, Education Department quietly shut down Trump-era ‘free speech hotline.’

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (EURO EDITION): Germany Faces Power Grid Collapse as Demand for Electric Heaters Soar.

Germans are now panic buying electric heaters after firewood supplies and stoves sold out, a desperate backup option to survive the plummeting winter temperatures.

But according to the boss of the Stadtwerke Wiesbaden Netz utility company, Peter Lautz, the sheer amount of citizens using electric heaters would put enormous strain on the country’s electricity grid.

Electric heaters use between 1,000 and 3,000 watts of energy, so when all are plugged in simultaneously, it could cause a massive overload and cause the grid to collapse.

“If everyone switched on a fan heater at home, it would mean that we would have to almost double the existing network structure on every street,” said Lautz.

Germans have bought 600,000 electric heaters already in 2022, which is a 35 percent increase from usual numbers, and that figure is likely to rise as temperatures drop.

Meanwhile: In a Belated Outburst of Rationality, Germany Decides To Keep Three Nuclear Plants Open.

They’ve shuttered 14.

GOOD POINT: Schumer Shrugs as Roe v. Wade Falls: The Inflation Reduction Act gave Democrats a chance to fund abortion. They didn’t even try.

Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, 25 Democratic senators wrote to President Biden demanding “a whole-of-government response” to the prospect of state abortion bans. Two months later, there was an opportunity to enact such policies regardless of Republican opposition, but Democrats in Congress didn’t even bother bringing them up for a vote.

The narrow Democratic majorities and the Senate filibuster had seemed to preclude legislation to counteract the effect of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Senate failed to overcome a filibuster on abortion legislation in February, and Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) oppose overturning the filibuster rule, meaning that abortion-related legislation would need 60 votes.

But the budget reconciliation bill that Congress just passed was different. It could—and did—pass the Senate with only Democratic votes, including Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaker. The bill also provided an opportunity to get around the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits most federal funding of abortions. The amendment applies only to appropriations through the annual spending bill that funds the Department of Health and Human Services.

Senate rules require all provisions of a reconciliation bill to have a primary nexus to the federal budget. Democrats couldn’t have used this bill to make policy changes like “codifying” Roe v. Wade or repealing the Hyde Amendment. But they could have allocated federal funds for abortion access in any number of ways, from creating grants to fund out-of-state travel to a tax credit reimbursing patients for the procedure itself.

Yet of the nearly 500 amendments that lawmakers filed on the budget reconciliation bill, the only ones touching on abortion came from Republicans. Not only did the issue not receive a vote on the Senate floor; it barely received a word of debate, belying the Democratic senators’ June push for “a whole-of-government response.” In the House, no Democrat attempted to offer an amendment to the bill—on abortion or anything else.

It’s as if all this “reproductive freedom” talk is just an empty slogan.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Cheney’s Concession Speech Was a Mentally Ill Cry for Help. “The race was called for Hageman about 14 seconds after the polls closed. What followed were a few hours of every leftist media outlet in America making Cheney out to be the bravest American woman since Rosa Parks.”

GEORGE KORDA: ‘Unfriending’ is a sign of America’s widening political divide: Rather than encouraging public debate and discourse, social media is exacerbating the anger and political polarization engulfing the nation.

And, as I’ve noted elsewhere, it’s doing so by design.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? Scientists Have Re-Created The Deadly 1918 Flu Virus. Why?

USUALLY DEMOCRATS ARE REWRITING THEM TO INSURE IT: Pennsylvania’s Mastriano rewrites debate rules to thwart anti-GOP bias.