WELL, THAT’S POOR SALESMANSHIP: Pfizer CEO tests positive for COVID-19 again.

FBI MISLED JUDGE WHO SIGNED WARRANT FOR BEVERLY HILLS SEIZURE OF $86 MILLION IN CASH:

The privacy invasion was vast when FBI agents drilled and pried their way into 1,400 safe-deposit boxes at the U.S. Private Vaults store in Beverly Hills.

They rummaged through personal belongings of a jazz saxophone player, an interior designer, a retired doctor, a flooring contractor, two Century City lawyers and hundreds of others.

Agents took photos and videos of pay stubs, password lists, credit cards, a prenuptial agreement, immigration and vaccination records, bank statements, heirlooms and a will, court records show. In one box, agents found cremated human remains.

Eighteen months later, newly unsealed court documents show that the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles got their warrant for that raid by misleading the judge who approved it.

I need to borrow Sarah’s shocked face for this post:

● This Is Not The America I Know: Dozens of FBI Agents Raid Home of Catholic Pro-Life Activist as Children Scream in Terror.

● Whistleblower: FBI Deliberately Miscategorizing J6 Cases to Boost ‘Domestic Extremism’ Claims.

● FBI labeled veterans group “terror organization” despite knowing they weren’t.

● Biden Reportedly Pressuring FBI to ‘Cook Up’ White Supremacy Cases.

● Majority see FBI as Biden’s ‘personal Gestapo’ after Trump raid.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): But see this as to the headline story: District Court Rejects Claim That “FBI Misled Judge in Obtaining Warrant To Seize Hundreds of Safe Deposit Boxes.”

GIVE ME HOT TUBS FOR MY MEN, AND SWIMMING POOLS FOR MY HORSES: Horse rescued from owner’s backyard pool in California.

WISH YOU WEREN’T HERE: Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters cancels concerts in Poland after Ukraine war comments.

City councilors in Krakow were expected to vote next week on a proposal to name Waters as a persona non grata, expressing “indignation” over the musician’s stance on the war in Ukraine.

Waters wrote an open letter to Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska early this month in which he blamed “extreme nationalists” in Ukraine for having “set your country on the path to this disastrous war.” He also criticized the West for supplying Ukraine with weapons, blaming Washington in particular.

Waters has also criticized NATO, accusing it of provoking Russia.

Funny how this keeps happening to Waters.

Flashback: Wish You Weren’t Here: Roger Waters’ Jewish Problem Catches Eye of Award-Winning Filmmaker.

DON’T GET COCKY: WaPo/ABC poll: GOP holds +5 edge on generic ballot — and wide leads on top issues.

As Glenn wrote last month, “I’ve been saying ‘don’t get cocky’ for a reason. If you care about the midterms, you should be volunteering and donating.”

HMM: Xi Jinping Trends Online Amid Coup Rumors, Canceled Flights. I’m skeptical of these reports, though I’d like to see Xi removed, so long as he’s replaced by someone better, not worse.

THE MEDIA FORGET THEMSELVES ON POLITICAL VIOLENCE:

We’ve seen 41-year-old Shannon Brandt, who purposely struck and killed 18-year-old Cayler Ellingson. Brandt claimed he thought Ellingson was a “Republican extremist” and admitted to murdering the teenager over a political dispute. Still, a brief search of the websites of CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS yielded no returns for the name “Shannon Brandt,” and save for conservative media, the story has evaded coverage by national outlets.

The next incident involved the murder of Las Vegas Review-Journal investigative journalist Jeff German. German had been investigating abuse allegations against Public Administrator Robert Telles. Telles had lashed out at German’s reporting several times on Twitter. Shortly after German’s murder, he was arrested and charged with the killing. Yelles, a Democrat, was also an enthusiast for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), attending her CNN town hall during the 2020 election.

Again, however, Telles’s party identification has all but been erased from national news stories. The media have settled on simply describing Telles as an elected official. In a detailed write-up of the crime and the charges Telles faces, the Associated Press completely omitted his party identification. Top line: Members of the national media are going out of their way to protect a person charged with the murder of one of their own colleagues. It’s a level of professional shamelessness rarely seen for an industry already well known for protecting Democrats.

Still, these are two specific and exceptionally serious incidents that occurred after the sitting president called for a full-frontal press against his political opponents — opponents, it should be noted, whom he openly described as unpatriotic extremists. But neither Biden nor his administration has been made to answer for this dark rhetoric. Either targeted political rhetoric leads to violence and even death, as our media dutifully warned for years, or it doesn’t. But it cannot be both.

This will of course, all change if the GOP takes one or both houses of Congress in November: Any violence remotely related to the right (or in fact not related to the right) will be called out en masse by the DNC-MSM.

DEAL OF THE DAY: Feastoria Double Long Soft Rifle Case. #CommissionEarned

MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Fire Breaks Out at World’s Biggest Produce Market in Paris.

A billowing column of dark smoke towered over Paris on Sunday from a warehouse blaze at a massive produce market that supplies the French capital and surrounding region with much of its fresh food and bills itself as the largest of its kind in the world.

Firefighters urged people to stay away from the area in Paris’ southern suburbs, as 100 officers and 30 fire engines battled the blaze at the Rungis International Market.

Flashback: Update On Food Plants: More Fires, FBI Alert, One Off-The-Wall Explanation. “Now the fact-checkers have come out in force, so we know there’s nothing to worry about. Right?”

ROGER SIMON: Even More Than the Economy, 2022 Is the Fentanyl Election.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who has been sounding the alarm on fentanyl for some time, reminds us of just how bad it is in an op-ed for The Washington Times:

“Fentanyl is an especially dangerous drug. Just two milligrams—the equivalent of a few grains of sand—can kill an adult male. The Mexican cartels have built super labs to mass produce this extremely deadly drug. Last year alone, authorities seized around 2.5 billion deadly doses of fentanyl at our border. Fentanyl overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 45.

“Each drug death and severe case of addiction is like a bomb going off in a community. Families are shattered, children are orphaned, promising young Americans are psychologically destroyed, and neighborhoods physically deteriorate. It’s little surprise that some parts of this country look and feel like warzones.”

The Biden administration allowed this horrendous crime—we can easily call it mass murder since more of us are dying annually from fentanyl than did American troops in the Vietnam War—via the open border. It’s time for all of us to channel Emile Zola and say “J’Accuse…!” No more of this crime against our nation’s citizens.

We can do so at the ballot box in November, obviously, but also this may well be the best issue with which to wake up those who hide behind the terms “liberal” and ”progressive” and think of themselves as “good people.”

How can you be “good” and countenance this?

It’s incumbent on all of us to publicize this expanding catastrophe as widely as we can, not just through articles and postings on social media, but even more potently one-on-one where people are often more prone to listen.

This is not just an epidemic in red America. It’s everywhere and growing.

Is it a conspiracy of communist China? You decide. But whatever it is, those pills, dressed up and repackaged as they are by the cartels in pretty, inviting colors, are killing our children as nothing has in the past.

COVID-19 is a piffle by comparison. Fentanyl is destroying our younger population, therefore our future. As Cotton noted, it is the leading cause of death between those 18 and 45.

Related: Texas sheriff: Fentanyl is a WMD — and Biden’s border crisis is the delivery method.

SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER: Female Muslim Syracuse U. students demand exclusive pool accommodations.

DISNEY REPLACES JAMES EARL JONES’S VOICE AS DARTH VADER WITH AI:

Actor James Earl Jones will no longer be tapped to voice his iconic Star Wars character Darth Vader thanks to artificial intelligence.

The 91-year-old actor has already provided plenty of archival recordings via the films that began in 1977, television series, animated programs, video games, and Disney’s various theme park rides. Now, Ukrainian start-up Respeecher will combine those recordings with artificial technology to provide a voice for Darth Vader that sounds similar to Jones’s voice.

Respeecher has already begun using the synthesized voice for the Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi while keeping the actor in the credits of each episode the voice is featured in. Jones last voiced the character during the 2019 film Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

It’s not all that surprising — Jones’ voice sounded awfully old in 2016’s Rogue One, which was written as a prequel to 1977’s Star Wars. (Watch the films back to back; thanks to digital effects and an unlimited budget, Vader is an absolute killing machine in Rogue One, yet moves at a much more lumbering pace in Star Wars, but his voice sounds much younger — as Jones was much younger — in the 1977 film.)

Combined with the digital effects that recreated the late Peter Cushing and a young Carrie Fisher for Rogue One, audio technology such as Respeecher will be bringing many more legendary actors alive again in digital form, just as Arthur C. Clarke predicted in the 1980s.

SCIENCE: Scientist at Columbia University publishes research paper claiming climate change creates hate speech.

CHANGE: Italy poised for hard-right leader as country votes in snap election. “Brothers of Italy has chimed with sections of the public who are concerned about immigration (Italy is the destination for many migrant boats crossing the Mediterranean), the country’s relationship with the EU and the economy.”

The usual suspects call this opposition semi-fascist, of course, but then when don’t they?

THE DESIRE NAMED STREETCAR: Amtrak’s Oakland to Los Angeles train is slower than the 1930s, but just as beautiful.

But why does California’s premier train connection take twice as long as driving?

Steve Roberts, president of RailPAC, a train advocacy organization, said the train’s slow speeds are tied to the nation’s 20th-century love affair with cars. In the heyday of 1900s train travel, before automobiles and highways supplanted mass transit, private railway companies operated a vast network of luxurious passenger trains. That was when rail travel came with elaborate art-deco drinking taverns and wood-paneled coffee carts.

Last century on the Daylight, dubbed “The Most Beautiful Train in the World,” the tracks and technology were upgraded so trains could zoom around corners at higher speeds. “The train at some places along the coast could go 90 miles an hour,” said Roberts.

But once passengers started skipping rail for their steering wheels, the private railway companies downgraded their faster infrastructure because it was too expensive to maintain, Roberts said. In 2022, Coast Starlight’s top speed is 79 miles per hour, but that velocity is rarely reached.

“Basically, society’s decision was to build the interstates,” said Roberts. “And the railroads stayed static.”

While lackluster infrastructure means slower trains, Amtrak’s biggest affliction is rampant delays caused by the nation’s economic workhorse: freight trains.

For the Coast Starlight, only 54% of passengers arrived within 15 minutes of their scheduled time in 2021. The dismal performance stems from a long-standing and bitter competition between Amtrak and freight train operators, both of whom are forced to cohabitate on the nation’s rail network. While Amtrak is supposed to be entitled to priority on railways, riders are often forced to wait hours for passing freight trains. Last week, in one of the latest dustups, Amtrak announced mass cancellations of its long-distance trains, including the Coast Starlight, due to freight workers threatening a strike.

I know California leftists hate the car and highways hate the car and highways, but why doesn’t the article mention the other development that made passenger railroading much less desirable? The jet passenger aircraft:

By the time Congress created Amtrak, intercity rail passenger service in the United States had been in a 20-year decline. Until the 1950s, railroads were the only way to travel long distances. But during that decade, the federal government began financing the interstate highway system, a $41 billion, 16-year project, and, as jet airplanes were introduced, significantly increased its support for the construction and improvement of airports.

Airplanes, personal automobiles, and buses began competing with the country’s railroads for long-distance travel. The railroads responded to the competition with new equipment on their prestige long-distance routes, replacing steam locomotives with diesel engines, and introducing lightweight stainless steel passenger cars with air-conditioning and double glazed windows. But as the number of passengers continued to drop, the rail companies had little incentive to make major capital investments to upgrade their tracks, signaling, stations, and maintenance facilities. Why, they thought, should their profitable freight business subsidize a means of intercity transportation that was competing with systems receiving federal and state tax dollars? By 1958, rail service accounted for just 4 percent of intercity travel.

The decline in rail passenger service and the deterioration of passenger facilities continued during the 1960s. By the end of the decade, the number of passenger trains had dropped to 500, down from more than 20,000 some 40 years earlier, and only 12,000 passenger cars remained in service. Losses from passenger service operations in 1970 came to more than $1.8 billion dollars in 1997 dollars. Most of the loss was on long-distance, intercity travel. Commuter and suburban lines obviously were less affected by airlines and, at least during the 1960s, lost little ridership to buses and private cars. Many of the railroad companies filed applications to get out of the intercity service on most or all of their routes. Among the most critical was the proposal by Penn Central (the merged Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central Railroad) to eliminate all its passenger service in the Northeast and Midwest.

Federal Action

The Railroad Passenger Service Act allowed the railroad companies to transfer their money-losing passenger operations to Amtrak in exchange for either a tax write-off or Amtrak stock. Only three lines, the Denver & Rio Grande Western, the Rock Island, and the Southern, did not join Amtrak, opting to continue their own passenger service.

The San Jose Mercury story at the top of the article notes that “the Bay Area portion – connecting Oakland and San Jose to Los Angeles – takes over 12 hours. In 1938, the now-defunct Daylight train cruised down to Los Angeles in less than 10.”

A flight from Oakland’s airport to LAX takes one hour and 25 minutes — and costs about the same for a ticket.

(Classical reference in headline.)

MICHAEL BERTOLONE: Blame blue city officials for the mass exodus of law enforcement.

UPDATE: Oops, I had it as Michael Barone originally. Sorry!

BUT OF COURSE: NASA calls off Artemis 1 moon rocket launch on Sept. 27 due to Tropical Storm Ian. “NASA won’t try to thread the weather needle with its Artemis 1 moon mission after all. The space agency had been targeting Tuesday (Sept. 27) for the launch of Artemis 1 from Kennedy Space Center (KSC), on Florida’s Atlantic coast. That remained the plan as recently as Friday (Sept. 23), though NASA officials stressed that they were keeping a close eye on a brewing storm in the Caribbean called Tropical Depression 9.”

I’LL BELIEVE IT’S A CRISIS WHEN THE PEOPLE WHO KEEP TELLING ME IT’S A CRISIS START ACTING LIKE IT’S A CRISIS: Climate Hawk Sean Casten Flew 6,000 Miles, Stayed in Luxury European Hotel to Fight Global Warming: Casten’s flights emitted more than 313,000 pounds of carbon.

DEAL OF THE DAY: Eveready LED Camping Lantern 360 PRO (2-Pack). #CommissionEarned

JEFFREY CARTER: Direct And Clear: There Is No Subtlety To This Market. Trump said Joe Biden would crush your savings and stock portfolio, and he was right. It wasn’t a hard call to be fair given what Biden said he wanted to do. I lost friendships over politics in the past years since Obama was elected. It’s not enough to say, ‘at least there are no mean tweets.’ The people in charge right now are deliberately destroying the country.”

“The people in charge right now are deliberately destroying the country.” Has that ever been a reasonable thing to say in the past?

Plus: “Socialist Representative Rashida Tlaib shows you exactly where the Democrats’ head is at on fossil fuels and using safe technology like nuclear power to build a larger electricity grid in general in her diatribe last week. It’s not just what she says, it’s her delivery and tone. This isn’t new. Obama led the world on the ignorant march to energy ineptitude. These people just aren’t serious people that spend time in reality solving real problems. The Martha’s Vineyard escapade along with the JB Pritzker response to The Scream ought to prove that fact to you. They don’t want to legislate they want to dictate. I am glad Dimon answered the way he did. It is time to be direct and clear.”

Time and past time.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Ken Burns Is Not Worthy of His Own Best Vision.

Sadly and tragically, Burns stumbles by leaving us confused as to whether the moral peril is confined only to those who are identifiably on the right.

This is most pronounced in the final episode of his series, when he directly preaches his lesson. He shows vivid and affective images in the screen of neo-Nazi types doing their thing in all its squalid ugliness. Here they are in Charlottesville, Virginia, wearing Nazi tattoos and screaming in full paranoiac breakdown mode about not being replaced. Here they are among the crowds on Jan. 6, waving violently anti-Semitic signs.

Fair enough. If this doesn’t concern every conservative, then we are in trouble.

But where was a focus on Louis Farrakhan, in one of any number of obscene, Jew-baiting moments? Here is a powerful leader who is unabashedly anti-Semitic and who is powerful enough to subvert politicians to his purposes — that is, he’s effective and dangerous. Why was he not featured? The best guess is that Burns’ politics obscured his vision here.

Where was a showing of Jewish campus groups’ meetings being broken up, Nazi-style, by organized groups dedicated to the destruction of the country where the world’s largest Jewish population lives? Where is a clip of powerful Democrat politicians, publicly embraced by Democrat leadership, spouting anti-Semitic tropes on the House floor and in speeches — Omar, Tlaib, Pressley, and other lesser lights? Where is the focus on the leftist ideologies that identify Jews as a class to be colonialists and white supremacists, and therefore worthy objects of mobbing, exclusion, and even violence?

Furthermore, Burns willingly and powerfully equates the denial of asylum to European Jews facing Hitler’s annihilation machine to today’s attempt to any organized control of America’s borders. Can one really make a moral equation? Is assuring that we can weed out the drug runners, human traffickers, and gang members from those seeking political asylum equivalent to denying shelter to Jews fleeing the gas chambers? Is it moral to conflate the two? This is mere political propaganda, an imposture of moral authority rather than the real thing. It contaminates and poisons the moral message.

Just think of Burns as a Democratic Party operative with director’s credit, and his “no enemies to the left” attitude makes perfect sense.

Earlier: Ken Burns’ Angry New Film.

WELL, HE’S RIGHT:

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: The Long Island Woman Who Goes to Vegas With a Hinge Date.

PAULA BOLYARD: This Is Not The America I Know: Dozens of FBI Agents Raid Home of Catholic Pro-Life Activist as Children Scream in Terror.

Related: Majority see FBI as Biden’s ‘personal Gestapo’ after Trump raid.

Remember, Biden’s own press secretary says that if you disagree with the majority, you’re an extremist!

Also, let’s publicize the names of those agents. There’s no privacy right in raiding people’s homes.

OPEN THREAD: Have fun.