UPDATE: In a brilliant display of modesty, Cheney not-so-subtly compares herself to Lincoln:
Liz Cheney: "Abraham Lincoln was defeated in elections for the Senate and House before he won the most important election of all…” pic.twitter.com/3bIFVv2Ch0
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 17, 2022
(Which makes sense, since the Lincoln Project could be a future destination.)
ABOUT TIME: Germany: Finally Facing Energy Reality.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY, CHAIRMAN XI: China is facing a real estate bust.
OPEN THREAD: Make it sing.
WALTER DURANTY: THE NEXT GENERATION. NYT Cuts Ties With Reporter Who Called For ‘Killing,’ ‘Burning’ Jews ‘Like What Hitler Did.’
The New York Times has cut ties with a fixer in the Gaza Strip after his Facebook posts calling Jews “the children of dogs” and expressing support for the late Nazi tyrant Adolf Hitler resurfaced.
Fady Hanona has worked with multiple major news outlets to aid their reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Hanona was listed as a contributor in six of the NYT’s eight stories written on the latest conflagration between Israel and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terror group in the Gaza Strip.
The NYT apparently ended its relationship with Hanona on Friday, according to The Times Of Israel. The fixer has a history of making anti-Semitic statements, and the media watchdog Honest Reporting uncovered a slew of Hanona’s Facebook posts in which he called for “killing” and “burning” Jews “like Hitler did,” according to translations of the posts preserved by Honest Reporting. The date of the post is unclear.
I hear the local AP office might be hiring, if Hanona is looking for his next gig…
THE DEMOCRATS’ ‘INFLATION REDUCTION ACT’* BETRAYS THE PEOPLE PROGRESSIVES CLAIM TO CARE ABOUT:
President Biden signed the “Inflation Reduction Act” into law on Tuesday, a behemoth tax-and-spending plan ostensibly intended to reduce inflation, grow the economy, and address climate change. Progressive Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are already celebrating this major political victory. But if they were honest with themselves, progressives would admit that while it might be a political success, the actual details of this legislation betray the working-class people they claim to care about.
First and foremost, experts almost unanimously agree that the “Inflation Reduction Act” does absolutely nothing to reduce inflation. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the legislation will have a “negligible” impact on inflation in 2022, and by 2023, “inflation would probably be between 0.1 percentage point lower and 0.1 percentage point higher under the bill.”
In the same vein, an analysis from the Wharton School of Business warns that the behemoth spending bill would have an impact on inflation that’s “statistically indistinguishable from zero.”
Even Sanders himself admitted that this bill will “have a minimal impact on inflation,” although he nonetheless voted for it.
Curiously transformed by the media, even before it passed as, “Democrats’ Climate and Health Bill.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA’s Artemis 1 moon mission will carry 2 water-seeking cubesats.
A CHOICE, NOT AN ECHO: Greg Gutfeld and Stephen Colbert Late-Night Battle Reaches Its Apex.
Gutfeld described his competitors thusly when commenting on the launch of his new show in March 2021: “They’re as bland as string cheese and not nearly as appetizing. It’s the same jokes, the same assumptions, probably the same writers, all reading the same columns from the same hacks in the New York Times.”
The just-canceled Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, which aired on TBS, took that late-night mandate to the extreme, stating outright that its purpose was to “educate” and “empower” viewers with its liberal activism.
Bee’s most famous line from the show, “Ivanka Trump is a feckless c**t,” didn’t come off as empowering, so she was forced to apologize for it. But she still made time to set aside many a segment to lecture on the importance of a “woman’s right to choose.” After the Supreme Court declined to end Texas’ law empowering citizens to sue those who provided abortions, she said, “This was just the latest partisan abuse of the court’s shadow docket.”
Gutfeld’s show sounds quite different. Everything is over the top and absurd. He has no loyalty or special affinity for anyone; everyone is subject to being mocked and satirized. This is especially so because, as a libertarian, he doesn’t fit comfortably into either major political party. And his libertarianism allows him to look at the world with plenty of cynicism.
In response to the news last week of the cancellation of Bee’s show, he said: “As you know, TBS canceled the late-night show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. Actually, I’ll bet Kat’s salary you didn’t know. But if you saw it, you’d wonder: if that’s Samantha Bee, I’d hate to see Samantha C, D, or F.”
He continued: “Its ratings were pretty bad but slightly higher than my colonoscopy and that’s only because I do my own. Oh, it’s easy. All you need is a flashlight, a rib spreader, and the flexibility of Gabby Douglas.”
In a world where the every other late-night talk show is, as Stephen Miller likes to say, “group therapy for liberals,” it helps to offer a product that actually satirizes everyone.
IN THE FUTURE, EVERYONE WILL BE A SITH LORD FOR 15 MINUTES: NBC Now: Donald Trump Is Darth Vader! NBC in 2011: Dick Cheney Is Vader!
THE ONION: Dick Cheney Launches Last-Minute Invasion Of Wyoming To Bolster Daughter’s Reelection.
We’ll find out soon enough how successful it was: Live Results: Primaries in Wyoming, ‘Top Four’ Primaries in Alaska.
I’VE BEEN BLOGGING ABOUT THIS FOR YEARS: Scientists Gave Young Mice The Blood of Old Mice. Then Things Got Weird.
In a new experiment, young mice briefly experienced signs of old age when scientists infused them with the blood of older mice. A similar aging effect occurred when human cells were immersed in the plasma of older individuals.
The young mice – aged three months and all male – were given a blood transfusion from an older mouse, aged 22-24 months. The younger mice were then tested for muscle strength to see whether the old blood created the effect of tissue aging.
Compared to a control group (young mice who received a blood transfusion from another young mouse), the mice that received blood from an old mouse had “decreased maximal twitch force and significantly shorter rates of force development and relaxation during contractions”, the researchers reported.
The mice were tested for their physical endurance on a treadmill at baseline and seven days after the blood infusion. (Mice that refused to run were stimulated by a puff of air that kept them running until they were exhausted.)
Mice that received old blood became fatigued faster and ran a shorter distance on the treadmill than the control group.
These mice also had biomarkers for kidney damage and evidence of liver aging.
When older mice were given younger blood in this experiment, lipids and fibrosis and fatigue declined and muscle endurance increased.
It appears that the problem has more to do with toxic products of aging in old blood than with some youth elixir in the young blood: “The researchers hypothesized that cells from older mice were releasing a ‘senescence-associated secretory phenotype’ (SASP) that promoted aging, like muscle weakness, loss of endurance, and tissue damage.”
HMM: CDC changes guidance after dog contracts monkeypox from owners. “In this case, a 4-year-old Italian greyhound developed lesions and tested positive for monkeypox 12 days after its owners first showed symptoms. The owners are two male partners who live together but were not sexually exclusive. They routinely allowed their pooch to snooze in their bed. The couple began having symptoms of monkeypox a few days after sleeping with other partners. Both men said once their symptoms started they’d been careful to prevent their dog from coming into contact with other people or pets, CBS News reported.”
LIVE RESULTS: Primaries in Wyoming, ‘Top Four’ Primaries in Alaska.
THEY’RE EASY TO SPOT — THE ONES WITH THE CLEANING SOLUTION TASTE BETTER: 5,760 cases of Capri Sun have been recalled after being contaminated with cleaning solution.
OUT ON A LIMB: Bruce Springsteen does not care about you.
Many jilted Bruce Springsteen fans were still fuming Thursday morning, and for good cause. As some of The Boss’s 2023 U.S. concert dates went on sale Wednesday, prospective buyers were met with massive sticker shock — floor seats skyrocketing to more than $4,000 each retail, due to Ticketmaster’s “Official Platinum” dynamic pricing model, which allows costs to fluctuate based on supply and demand.
After my story reporting the unruly price hikes published Wednesday, I received dozens of emails from irate fans, most of whom repeated the same sentiment: Springsteen, the artist who has defined his career by singing about working-class and disenfranchised Americans, has forgotten his fans. They mirrored the notes I was sent in 2017, when “Springsteen on Broadway” tickets climbed to $850 each for orchestra seats.
As Christian Toto adds, “Springsteen’s devotion to the Democrats is part of the problem. New polling shows that middle class voters are switching to the GOP as progressive policies pummel Joe and Jane Sixpack. The rock legend, who campaigned hard for President Joe Biden, indirectly brought hardship to countless Americans facing soaring gas prices and shocking inflation rates. That’s a political miscalculation, but an apology would be nice.”
Obviously, that’s not going to happen, but whenever a candidate Bruce backs gets into the Oval Office, hard economic times aren’t far behind.
AS WITH OBAMA, THE PROBLEM ISN’T THAT SHE’S BLACK, BUT THAT SHE’S TERRIBLE: “I would never, ever say that I regret supporting the first Black woman vice president, ever. But the disappointment is real.”
But, as with Obama, her blackness caused people to overlook her terribleness until it was too late.
TDS REIGNS SUPREME: Trump is still scrambling the minds of the elites.
One of Trump’s greatest gifts has always been his ability to make his political enemies match him flaw for flaw in a race to the bottom. But Trump has never mattered as much as who he is supposed to speak for – an abandoned and demoralised multiracial working class, whose communities and families have been destroyed by the elites of both parties, and is viewed by those same elites with nothing but smug condescension.
To many of those people, there is something inevitable about the FBI targeting Trump over what might turn out to be a red herring. Because they can imagine that happening to them – not for having access to classified documents, but for holding the wrong kinds of views in the eyes of the liberal media elites, who sneer at them day in and day out.
Instead of trying to understand these people – who were once the Democrats’ base – liberal elites choose to mock and dehumanise them. As Obama adviser Ben Rhodes tweeted last week as the raid became public news: ‘The strangest thing about this epoch of American history will always be that tens of millions of grown-ups decided to form a cult-like devotion to, of all available people, Donald Trump.’
Apparently, for the left, the working class traded in clinging to their guns, Bibles and bigotries for clinging to Trump. How childish it was of these alleged grown-ups to have voted for someone who promised to overhaul NAFTA – and then did so. Who promised to stem illegal immigration – then did so. Who promised to get unemployment down – and then did.
So often, when you scratch at the pundit class’s claims to ‘expertise’, this is what you’ll find lurking just beneath the surface: a smirking condescension towards those with different views and different interests. And yet those very same grown-up experts are the ones who believed in the ‘pee tape’.
Related: The Elite Panic of 2022. “What terrifies elites is the loss of their cultural monopoly in the face of a foretold political disaster. They fear diversity of any kind, with good cause: to the extent that the public enjoys a variety of choices in cultural products, elite control will be proportionately diluted. Our cultural monolith, never popular, is today pounded by crosscurrents that undermine its solidity. Alongside the vast progressive choir, quieter voices—conservative, libertarian, religious, none-of-the-above—could soon arise, leaving our culture more fractured, more divided, and more representative of the nation as a whole. If that were to occur, sullen elites will point to 2022’s springtime of discontent, and remark, with typical vehemence, that their panic was fully justified.”
JOHN NOLTE: Kamala’s Husband’s Motorcade Caught Blocking Handicap Spots.
As someone who needs a handicap spot for my wife, it is beyond frustrating to see people parked in those spots who don’t need them. It’s not the close proximity to the store as much as the extra space needed to set up the walker or wheelchair. That’s what makes those spaces so necessary. And although we have all the necessary credentials, I don’t use that space unless we need it. We park in a normal spot if my wife isn’t exiting the car. Of course, when alone, I never use it—which is illegal anyway.
It’s the arrogance and hypocrisy of these people that’s so galling. Democrats seem to believe that if they profess to care about something, they can abuse it. Democrats claim to care about racial minorities, and yet Democrats are openly racist. Democrats claim to care about women’s rights, and yet they are openly sexist. Democrats claim to care about the handicapped, unless it might inconvenience their jaunt into Whole Foods.
Or to put it another way: ‘Grab [That Leftist] Privilege And Ride It Home, Cowboy!’: Harris Faulkner Blows Up After 2nd Gentleman Blocks Handicapped Parking.
FASTER? PLEASE! American Airlines’ Overture Order Boosts Boom Supersonic Backlog. “American Airlines has announced plans to acquire up to 60 Boom Supersonic Overture airliners, overtaking United Airlines as the biggest customer yet for the in-development Mach 1.7 transport.”
OUT SOON: The Elephant in the Room: Donald Trump and the Future of the Republican Party. I have a chapter titled “Donald Trump and America’s New Class War.”
John Hinderaker of Powerline was a contributor, too.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
