PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.

Matt Margolis: Dems Run Using GOP Messaging to Win in November. “One thing this tells you is that these Democrats and those who are advising them realize that the abortion issue is not going to carry them across the finish line.”

Rick Moran: ‘Fact-Checkers’ Working Overtime to Give Cover to White House on IRS Expansion. “The media lies being told about IRS expansion are far more blatant and easily debunked — if anyone is bothering to fact-check the fact-checkers.”

Yours Truly: Who Tried to Murder ‘Putin’s Brain,’ Alexandr Dugin? “I think, kill, kill and kill. No more talk anymore. It is my opinion as a professor.”

FLASHBACK: The Longevity Dividend.

Related: Live Long — And Prosper?

UGH:  It turns out homicide is the top cause of death among pregnant women. I didn’t know that when I submitted my dissent to the Commission on Civil Rights’ 2021 report on maternal mortality.  If I had, I surely would have pointed it out to my progressive colleagues.  I’m not sure it would have changed their view that the top fear for African American mothers should be racist doctors and nurses.  But it would have given them something to chew on.

Many progressives don’t want to think about how crime affects African American victims.  They regard it as racist to even bring the issue up.  So far, the progressives on the Commission have been unwilling to conduct a study of the crime increase and its disproportionate effect on minorities.  I could say they don’t give a damn, but that may not be precisely true.  It may simply be that they care more about preventing bad publicity for Democrats.

I’M AFRAID THAT’S PEANUTS COMPARED TO THE COST OF REARING 10 CHILDREN:  Russia offers a hero’s medal plus $16,000 to women who have 10 children.

PARSING THE LIES:

I cannot get my head around the Democrat Party as “committed to defending First Amendment freedoms.” What’s that based on? It doesn’t resonate with me, and I’ve been watching the Democratic Party closely every day since January 14, 2004. I’m going to omit that phrase entirely and edit the rest into something as clear as I can make it: TV news, coopted by the Democratic Party, would like non-Democrats to watch.

Well, if you don’t watch, they can’t propagandize you. Also, they need ad dollars.

THIS MIGHT MAKE YOU CURIOUS ABOUT THE UNTOLD STORY OF RACIAL CLASSIFICATION IN AMERICA: Credit is also due Cory Liu, who actually authored the brief on my behalf.

OPEN THREAD: Take the wheel.

BIDEN ADMINISTRATION HAS BEEN PAYING $300,000 PER FLIGHT TO TALIBAN TO ALLOW U.S. CITIZENS AND AFGHAN ALLIES TO CONTINUE EVACUATING:

NATO allies vehemently opposed Biden’s unconditional withdrawal to such a degree that Secretary Blinken had phoned his boss from a NATO summit to tell him he had gotten a “jolt” in “in quadraphonic sound” opposing the move. His own military advisers had told him not to do it.

Nothing Biden and his people said about their botched evacuation from Afghanistan was true.

After withdrawing forces while leaving thousands of Americans behind on the ground, Biden reluctantly approved a limited evacuation whose military personnel were cut off from the start. Mobs overran the airport, with mostly young men filling up planes which took off. The State Department failed to plan for an evacuation or vet evacuees leading to dozens of Afghans with terror ties coming to America and massive backups of Afghan evaucees abroad.

After its Saigon moment, the Biden administration has been paying “approximately $300,000 per flight to a Taliban controlled airline in order to allow U.S. citizens and Afghan allies to continue evacuating.” Air Taliban is being funded by the United States with State Department officials confirming “that the cash-strapped Taliban are profiting from these payments.“

The Taliban had every incentive to sabotage our evacuation to profit from Air Taliban.

As an Obama-era retread, Biden sure loves giving pallets full of cash to Islamic terrorists.

GOOD LUCK: NASA’s epic Artemis 1 moon mission launch is just 1 week away.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Build a Bug Out Kindle: A Digital Survival Library at Your Fingertips.

ANTHONY FAUCI WILL STILL GET $350,000 A YEAR FROM THE GOVERNMENT AFTER HE RETIRES: “Of course, Fauci will be able to make much more money than that. He will surely write books and give speeches. Indeed, the doctor is well-positioned to capitalize on his newfound fame as a hero to Team Blue. No public official, not even President Joe Biden himself, personifies the U.S. government’s pandemic approach quite like Fauci, who quite deliberately positioned himself as the avatar of correct COVID-19 behavior. Fauci even said that critics who undermined him were attacking science itself.”

IT WOULD BE A GREAT LEAP FORWARD:

FASTER, PLEASE: Texas Has ‘Bused Over 7,000 Migrants to Our Nation’s Capital Since April.’

Meanwhile in Florida: “Responding to a question about an upsurge in Cuban migration during a recent interview on a South Florida Spanish-language radio station, Florida Lt. Gov. Jeannette Nuñez said the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis will send migrants who arrive to Florida illegally to Delaware…But a spokesperson for the Governor’s campaign later said Cubans coming to South Florida would be exempt.”

TOURISTS ARE OFTEN CARELESS: Floating Human Foot at Yellowstone Is Grim Reminder of Hot Spring Dangers. “The partial foot was inside a shoe in the Abyss Pool, one of the deepest hot springs in the park, whose temperature is around 140 Fahrenheit (60 Celsius).”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE HIDE RUNAWAYS: Female teacher arrested for ‘hiding’ a 15-year-old former student in her Florida home after she ‘lied’ to police about the boy’s whereabouts. “Students at the school were surprised by the news, but some said that she had been inappropriately friendly in the classroom.”

IT’S NOT PARANOIA WHEN THEY REALLY ARE OUT TO GET YOU: Rich Lowry: In Defense of GOP Paranoia.

The Russia investigation was a national fiasco that brought discredit on the F.B.I. and everyone who participated in it. The probe prominently featured a transparently ridiculous dossier generated by the Clinton campaign, eventually spinning into a special-counsel investigation that became, to some significant extent, about itself and whether Mr. Trump was guilty of obstruction. People who should have known better got caught up in the feeding frenzy and speculated that “the walls were closing in” on Mr. Trump, or that he might have been a Russian asset going back decades.

It all came to naught with almost no one expressing any regret about the unnecessary, yearslong psychodrama. It would be better if more people acknowledged — life being complicated — that even someone you hate and fear can be treated unfairly.

That experience guarantees that no Republican is going to take assurances about the Mar-a-Lago search, or any other Trump investigation, at face value.

Nor should they. Once you’ve seen that institutions — and alleged “straight shooters” like James Comey — are willing to prostitute themselves in service of a political vendetta, you would be foolish to believe that the vendetta suddenly stopped. That’s not how vendettas work. Or prostitutes.

BIG EYES: Surprising details leap out in sharp new James Webb Space Telescope images of Jupiter.

IS THE NEW YORK TIMES A LIBERAL NEWSPAPER? OF COURSE IT IS: New York Times Claims ‘Republicans of Color’ Are Distorting the American Dream.

New York Times reporter Jazmine Ulloa wrote:

“For decades, politicians have used the phrase ‘the American dream’ to describe a promise of economic opportunity and upward mobility, of prosperity through hard work.”

“Now, a new crop of Republican candidates and elected officials are using the phrase in a different way, invoking the same promise but arguing in speeches, ads and mailings that the American dream is dying or in danger, threatened by what they see as rampant crime, unchecked illegal immigration, burdensome government regulations and liberal social policies.”

She continued:

“But historians and other scholars warn that some Republicans are distorting a defining American idea and turning it into an exclusionary political message … The Republican Party is using it as a dog whistle. They are saying here is the potential of what you can have, if we can exclude others from ‘stealing it’ from you.”

More here: Headline Fail of the Week.

The New York Times published an article on “How a Storied Phrase Became a Partisan Battleground,” in which reporter Jazmine Ulloa claims, “A touchstone of political and social discourse, the nearly 100-year-old phrase ‘the American dream,’ is being repurposed — critics say distorted — particularly by Republicans of color.”

The article says that “a new crop of Republican candidates and elected officials are using the phrase in a different way, invoking the same promise but arguing in speeches, ads and mailings that the American dream is dying or in danger, threatened by what they see as rampant crime, unchecked illegal immigration, burdensome government regulations and liberal social policies,” and notes that many of the Republicans doing so are people of color, “including immigrants and the children of immigrants, for whom the phrase first popularized in 1931 has a deep resonance.”

In what is perhaps the most insane line in a deeply flawed article, Ulloa claims that “in the same way that many Trump supporters have tried to turn the American flag into an emblem of the right, so too have these Republicans sought to claim the phrase as their own, repurposing it as a spinoff of the Make America Great Again slogan.”

The Gray Lady wants it both ways: to claim with the “1619 Project” that America was born from Original Sin and is therefore irreparably damaged and evil. But also that “the American Dream” is a racist dog whistle when used by the right — and especially by “Republicans of color.” (Though as James Taranto likes to say, “if you can hear the whistle, then you’re the dog.”)

(Classical reference in headline.)

UNEXPECTEDLY: Biden takes two-week break as vacation time outstrips Trump, Obama, Bush.

Call him the “Out of Towner.”​

President Biden will wrap up a two-week vacation at his beach house in Rehoboth Beach, Del., Wednesday as one unofficial count indicates he has spent more time away from the White House than his three immediate predecessors at the same point in their terms.

The president and his family, including disgraced first son Hunter Biden, left Washington for their latest getaway on Aug. 10, spending almost a week at a $20 million mansion on South Carolina’s exclusive Kiawah Island.

As The Post reported earlier this month, the first family stayed for free at the nine-bedroom oceanfront estate owned by Democratic donor Maria Allwin, the widow of hedge fund founder James Allwin.

The president interrupted his vacation for one day to return to the White House on Aug. 16 and sign the Inflation Reduction Act​.

Related: The puppet-master’s victory lap.

While Biden’s Out of Office schedule shouldn’t surprise anyone, it is unfortunate that the president had to skip out on all of the post-signing gloating.

Fear not though Joe: a man was waiting in the wings who was thrilled to act as your pompous understudy.

Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain, took a break from retweeting Jennifer Rubin’s Washington Post columns, to give an interview to Politico about Biden’s winning streak.

Klain answered questions about what Joe Biden is dubbing “a season of substance.” He listed a variety of accomplishments including several pieces of legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, the American Rescue Plan and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Like so much of Biden’s presidency in Klain’s eyes, the passing of these incredibly expensive bills is historic. In fact, Ron Klain retweeted Robert Schrum, who pointed out that Joe Biden is the most legislatively successful president since Lyndon B. Johnson! Of course, The Spectator’s Stephen L. Miller was quick to rain on the parade, replying, “How’d that work out for LBJ?”

Exit quote: “In this same interview, Biden’s right-hand man also revealed that he can get a lot more work done when the president is not at the White House. Lucky for Ron, that seems to be quite often nowadays.”

NO. FULL STOP: Yikes! World Economic Forum Claims ‘Solid, Rational Reasons’ for Microchipping Children.

THIS EXPLAINS A LOT, ACTUALLY: Average Testosterone Levels Have Dropped 30%.

Here’s the original paper.

UMASS LOWELL BANS STUDENTS FROM VIEWING ‘OFFENSIVE’ MATERIAL:

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) highlighted UMass Lowell’s “acceptable use” policy for its monthly series spotlighting egregious free speech violations on campuses. This policy applies to all school-provided computers, but also any networks and/or services connected to the university, such as email or campus wifi. It provides the use of any such technologies to transmit or access “offensive material.”

This is deeply problematic and constitutionally suspect. After all, what, exactly, constitutes “offensive?”

For example, is a student who receives right-wing news sources in their email inbox violating it? It’s safe to say that many of the views commonly expressed in conservative media are considered “hate speech” by many woke campus administrators—but they’re also protected expression under the First Amendment.

“The Supreme Court has explicitly held, time and time again, that speech cannot be restricted by the government merely because it offends others,” FIRE points out. “In spite of such clear precedent, colleges and universities routinely ban offensive speech in campus speech codes, especially in IT policies. Whether a person is burning a flag at a protest or advocating for (or against) flag burning on Twitter, a ban on ‘offensive’ speech calls for impermissible viewpoint discrimination.”

Like Randi Weingarten, I blame Ron DeSantis.

KURT SCHLICHTER: IT’S NOT 2005 ANY LONGER, AND THE SITUATION IS TOO DESPERATE TO CONTINUE INDULGING WEAK AND FECKLESS MEN LIKE MIKE PENCE AND TIM SCOTT WHO DON’T KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS. As Ace of Spades responds, “it’s not true that these people don’t want to fight. They do want to fight. It’s just that they want to fight actual conservatives.”

SEAN DAVIS NEEDS JUST A FEW SCREENSHOTS TO SINK EX-SURGEON GENERAL’S PRAISE FOR DR. FAUCI’S HUMILITY:

Earlier today Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that he would be stepping down as head of the NIAID “to pursue the next chapter of my career.” If Sen. Rand Paul has anything to say about it (and if voters give the Senate back to the Republicans) part of that “next chapter” will be getting grilled at more hearings.

Former Surgeon General Jerome Adams noted Fauci’s announcement by claiming that the doctor never sought the spotlight…Sean Davis offered up a few screenshots that would indicate otherwise:

TUNE OUT, DROP OUT — OR ELSE: The approaching tsunami of addictive AI-created content will overwhelm us.