TO BE FAIR, THEY WANT TO BAN FORD F-150s, TOO:   AR-15 and AK-47 rifle sales surge to 24 million, more than Ford F-150s.

DOES IT HAVE A RED BORDER?  Pete Seeger, folk singer and activist, gets own stamp.

“Activist” is a funny way to spell “Commie.”

OR SAY SO TO AVOID TROUBLE:  A large majority of today’s college students think blacklisting is a good thing.

SOCIALISM KILLS. FAST OR SLOW, BUT IT ALWAYS KILLS:  Socialism Is a Deal with the Devil.

IN CLOWN WORLD THIS MAKES SENSE:  TSA: Illegals Can Use Civil Immigration Arrest Warrants as an ID to Get on Planes.

DID THEY STEAL MY SHOCKED FACE? I HAVEN’T LOOKED FOR IT RECENTLY:  This is Our Shocked Face: California Fentanyl Suspects Don’t Show Up For Court After Release On Own Recognizance.

Oh, look, there it is, and it’s shocked, shocked, shocked!

WHY WOULD ANYONE EVEN LISTEN TO THIS GUY?  New York Times Economist Paul Krugman Admits He Was Wrong About Inflation.

NAH. GUILTY OF NOT BEING PROGRESSIVE:  Steve Bannon Found Guilty of Contempt of Congress.

YEAH, YEAH, BUT WHAT DOES “FRAUD” LEAN?  Cook Report Moves Georgia Governor Race to ‘Lean Republican’.

TRY BEFORE YOU BUY: A helpful reader reports that the Introduction and the first few pages of the first chapter of Classified are available for free as a “preview” at Scribd.

OPEN THREAD: Do that comment voodoo that you do so well.

WELL, IF THEY DIDN’T INVENT IT THEY SURE CONTINUE TO FIND IT USEFUL TO PROMOTE DIVISION BASED ON IT: How the Government Invented Race.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Impulse and Relativity announce proposal for joint Mars landing mission.

OUT: LIZZIE BORDEN. IN: LIZZIE BOREDTHEM. J6 witch hunt ratings dropped 21%. And they were never very high. “If this was the closing argument, the jury’s verdict is a resounding: We don’t care.”

BRET STEPHENS: Hey, maybe I shouldn’t have called Trump voters idiots and traitors.

Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds.
What were they seeing that I wasn’t?

That ought to have been the first question to ask myself. When I looked at Trump, I saw a bigoted blowhard making one ignorant argument after another. What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo.

I was blind to this. Though I had spent the years of Barack Obama’s presidency denouncing his policies, my objections were more abstract than personal. I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called “the protected.” My family lived in a safe and pleasant neighborhood. Our kids went to an excellent public school. I was well paid, fully insured, insulated against life’s harsh edges.

Trump’s appeal, according to Noonan, was largely to people she called “the unprotected.” Their neighborhoods weren’t so safe and pleasant. Their schools weren’t so excellent. Their livelihoods weren’t so secure. Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways.

It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists —clinging, in Obama’s notorious 2008 phrase, to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”
No wonder they were angry.

Remember, this is the NYT’s idea of a “conservative” columnist.

UPDATE (From Ed): On the other hand, Stephens’ column represents a small amount of progress for the MSM: NYT’s Bret Stephens Becomes First Corporate Media Figure To Acknowledge Russian Collusion Was A ‘Hoax.’

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): From the comments: “This is the inter-elections decompression season, when the liberal media admits their past lies, now, when it doesn’t matter, in order to ‘prove’ their credibility for future lies, when it does matter.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Food Expiration Dates Aren’t Based on Science. Here’s What You Can Do Instead. “Infant formula is the only food product with a “use by” date that is both government regulated and scientifically determined. It is routinely lab tested for contamination.”

NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT: National Institutes for Health’s (NIH) Dr. Anthony Fauci’s federal pension will be $414,667 annually. That’s more than the President gets in annual salary. Fauci, who is the highest paid employee on the federal payroll of 4.3 million people, has said he will officially leave the government in January 2025 after 59 years, at age 85.

That pension income, by the way, does not include any of those 23 secret royalty payments Fauci received from still-undisclosed payers and unknown amounts between 2010 and 2020. And don’t forget that Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, is also on the federal payroll in the same NIH, making a salary that is higher than that paid the Vice President.

“MEN?” “WOMEN?” WHAT IS THIS, THE DARK AGES OF 2019? Mental, physical activities benefit men’s, women’s brains differently.

RIP: Ace of Spades Coblogger Emeritus Dave In Texas Has Passed. “His humor could also be broad and silly, as in the case of the Crap Tree. His wife liked a nice classy Christmas tree. Dave liked hanging up crap ornaments he got from 7-Eleven and postcard give-aways from Hawaiian Punch on the tree. So his wife got him his own special, stupid Crap Tree he could hang his Dumb Ornaments on.”

UPDATE: Also in Ace’s obit for Dave in Texas:

In every thread, Proud Liberal Vet appeared to tell us that Bush ordered him to use White Phosphorus on civilians. Dave asked, “What was your M.O.S.?” Proud Liberal Vet would suddenly disappear.

Ultimately Dave cornered him and it became clear that Proud Liberal Vet did not have the faintest idea what an M.O.S. is, which of course is impossible if you were ever in the military; you can’t not know what job you have, or what code is assigned to your job. You have to repeat that number and write it on forms ten thousand times a year.

All of this inspired Dave in Texas to write one of the finest parodies ever written on the Ace of Spades blog: “Antarctica Now,” a first person account, ostensibly from Proud Liberal Vet’s POV, about fighting Charlie in Antarctica. He wrote in in the comments.

I later put it in a post, but who knows how to find that old thing. Fortunately, Mrs. Peel found it and sent it over to Michaels Comments to post. So you can read “Antarctica Now” there, if you like.

And you really should — it’s long, but very funny:

Antarctica, shit. I’m still only in Antarctica. Every time I think I’m going to wake up back on the ice floe. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I’d wake up and there’d be nothing… I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce. When I was here I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into McMurdo. I’ve been here a week now. Waiting for a mission, getting softer. Every minute I stay in this tent I get weaker. And every minute Charlie squats in the snow he gets stronger.

Each time I look around the tent flaps move in a little tighter.

Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service.

******

I was going to the worst place in the world, and I didn’t even know it yet. Weeks away and hundreds of miles up a glacier that snaked through the ice like a main circuit cable and plugged straight into Byrd. It was no accident that I got to be the caretaker of Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s memory, any more than being back in McMurdo was an accident. There is no way to tell his story without telling
my own. And if his story is really a confession, then so is mine.

*******

How many penguins had I already killed? There was those six that I know about for sure. Close enough to blow their last fishy breath in my face. But this time it was an American and an officer. That wasn’t supposed to make any difference to me, but it did. Shit…charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out snow shovels to Roald Amundsen. I took the mission. What the hell else was I gonna do? But I didn’t know what I’d do when I found him.

Read the whole thing when you have a few minutes to spare.

(Updated and bumped.)

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Kamala Harris Speechwriter Leaves Administration To Write For Sesame Street.

According to sources within the White House, Kamala Harris is once again losing another staff member as her top aide is leaving the administration after taking a new job. Sabrina Singh, Harris’ current deputy press secretary and main speechwriter, has been poached by Sesame Street to write speeches for them instead.

“I’m at a point in my career where I need to grow and be challenged and that’s not going to happen here with Vice President Harris. I want to move into the big leagues and start writing for legends like Big Bird, and Bert and Ernie,” said Singh. “With Sesame Street, I’ll be writing more intricately crafted speeches for an audience that simply won’t tolerate rambling, incoherent gibberish.”

Seems pretty racist though: Sesame Place to undergo bias training after calls of racism.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Is That ‘Woke’ I Smell? N.C. Police Chief, Entire PD Quit, Citing New Town Manager.

WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING: Surprise! Drug dealers released without bail don’t show up for arraignment.

WORKING CLASS HERO: Springsteen Silent on Outrageously High Ticket Prices.

STEVE BANNON CONVICTED IN JANUARY 6 CONTEMPT-OF-CONGRESS CASE.

A jury found former Trump adviser Steve Bannon guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress on Friday over his refusal to comply with subpoenas from the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot.

Bannon refused to testify and turn over records as requested by the House panel.

Jurors handed down the verdict in the Washington, D.C., federal court after just three hours of deliberations on Friday afternoon.

Bannon faces a minimum sentence of 30 days in jail per count. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for October 21 at 3 p.m.

Flashback: What Democrats said when Obama-appointed Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress.

MARK JUDGE: Why Film Noir Femme Fatales are More Accurate Than Fainting-Couch Feminists.