YEAH, THIS TOO IS A SHOCK:  Jen Psaki Suddenly Tight Lipped About Hunter Biden’s Emails After New York Times Finally Confirms.

WE SHOULD PUNISH THE GOVERNMENT FOR HIGH OIL PRICES, ACTUALLY:  Repeating Old Oil Mistakes.

BEHOLD MY SHOCKED FACE:  BLM Activist and Hubby Face Federal Fraud Charges After Using Nonprofit Donations on Lavish Lifestyle.

WAIT, WAS THIS THE GUY WHOSE PARENTS WERE IN THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND?   The D.A. Is a Dud.

I’m super-shocked he’s not a good DA for an American city. Super shocked.

YEAH. HE NEEDS TO GET A GOOD START SO HE CAN SCREW UP THE RESPONSE TO THE NEXT DISEASE TO HIT THE US:  Fauci: Pandemic Hearing Would Distract Him From His “Work”.

THEY SOLD US AND DELIVERED US BOUND TO OUR FOE:  Iran Deal Gives Russia Major Nuclear Plant Contract .

TAP-DANCING ON THE POWDER BARREL:  Aristos a la Lanterne!

OPEN THREAD: Skip the light fandango.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Teachers union president misspells Ukraine on Twitter after posing with upside-down Ukrainian flag.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Looming food shortage is the next ‘slow-moving disaster’ to hit world.

WHO’S ZOOMING WHO? Portland’s Mayor Rethinks Rules After Comedians Troll Him Again During Zoom Meeting.

A beanie-wearing Millennial began, “Can you hear me?” When Wheeler told him yes, he began. Like a buffet meal where you can pick only the best treats, the speaker chose the most important issues of the day and delivered a delectable woke word salad.

“These right-wingers are trying to infiltrate Portland. And you know, I see Portland and Seattle as cities of artists.” He began to describe burning cars and graffiti as “art.” He continued, “And, you know, the only way to end this Ukraine thing … is if we can all do our part to get vaccinated. Cuz there’s so many people that are still not vaccinated. My grandmother was 95-years-old and she died because those around her refused to get vaccinated because they’re science deniers.” He held up a finger to tick off his point and then continued, “conspiracy theorists – they think it’s some sort of de-population goal by Bill Gates…” He wasn’t done with the Microsoft founder. “Bill Gates is a doctor and he is a medical professional.” He complained about Dr. Fauci “not getting any media coverage.”

Finally, “we should be praying for Ukraine and we should be getting vaccinated at the same time! I’m sickened that I had to go to Israel for my fourth booster shot.”

With a minute left he began a rant about “police brutality,” failing to save Breonna Taylor, and then ended with “on another positive note, George Floyd has been clean and sober for two years now.”

Of course, George Floyd’s death sparked months of Antifa and Black Lives Matter riotings in Portland, causing untold millions in damage.

That was a bridge too far.

“Time’s up,” said far-Left commissioner JoAnn Hardesty with two seconds remaining. Said Wheeler, “we need to rethink communications, colleagues. It’s really becoming a forum for no apparent reason. It’s really unfortunate what’s going on here.”

No, it’s not. They’re just getting a look at themselves and their superciliousness in the mirror and don’t like it.

Read the whole thing.

THEY SHOULD BE SUED FOR CONSPIRING TO DEPRIVE OTHERS OF THEIR CIVIL RIGHTS, BUT YEAH: Yale Law students tried to shout down a speaker, now a judge says maybe they shouldn’t get clerkships. But this is good too: “DC Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman sent an email to every federal judge in the country suggesting that students involved in last week’s Yale protest might not be suitable candidates for clerkships.”

Plus: “Hooboy, that’s gonna get the students’ attention *real* fast. Even if nobody agrees with Judge Silberman out loud, the possibility is always going to be lurking in the background.”

NO. GO AWAY. Fauci returns with a warning: We need to be ready to impose new restrictions.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: KSAT invests in dedicated lunar communications network.

CURIOUSLY, THIS HEADLINE ISN’T ABOUT BILL DE BLASIO OR ANDREW CUOMO: The psychopath who wrecked New York. Robert Moses, responsible for so much of the city’s architecture and infrastructure, played the humble public servant, yet he despised the poor.

Though there is talk of a Netflix series, there is still no film about this extraordinary man. The Bridge Theatre, however, has taken up his story. Nicholas Hytner is directing a new play the theatre has commissioned from David Hare. ‘It’s the greatest work of non-fiction I’ve ever read,’ says Hytner of Caro’s book. ‘The first thing you realise is that there isn’t a play in the Caro book because it’s just too immense. The play David has written is narratively narrower than the book. It’s about who Moses is, what he stands for, and what might resonate for audiences today.’ Ralph Fiennes will play Moses. Hytner reckons ‘that slightly mad glint in his eye’ should come in useful. Hare, incidentally, has form at writing villains. Back in 1985, he co-invented a fictitious newspaper tycoon, Lambert Le Roux, for his comedy Pravda. Anyone who saw it will remember Anthony Hopkins, fists balled, face jutting, like a human mastiff: ‘Who are you? You’re fired.’

‘This is a much subtler play than Pravda,’ says Hytner. ‘It’s not a big, ribald epic. It’s a more private play.’ It presumably helps that villains are all the rage and good box office? ‘I wouldn’t say we are doing this just because Moses was a villain. But it is true – if you get a villain right, it always works.’ Moses was actually a most sophisticated man. He was a visiting Rhodes scholar at Oxford who wrote a book about the British civil service. He loved the English poets. He was a big Dr Johnson fan and he knew screeds of Shakespeare by heart. Throughout his life, he was dapper, handsome, always the perfect host, always civil to his wife.

It is the case against Moses that makes the book so gripping. Moses used the grovelling New York press to smear and ruin those who crossed him. New York’s succession of mayors and governors were ultimately all in his power. He became indispensable. But it’s Moses’s racism that is the most potent charge against him today. According to Caro, he designed bridges too low to allow buses – the only form of transport for the under-paid minorities – to leave the city to get to his lovely beach park on Long Island. His contempt was revealed in little details. He had decorated the ‘comfort stations’ in Riverside Park with curling wrought-iron waves. But in the Harlem section alone the decorations are monkeys. Of the 255 playgrounds he built in the city in the 1930s, Harlem got just one. He also demolished swathes of perfectly good housing – with no regard for the evicted – for multi-lane expressways that choked up with traffic as soon as they opened. He left the city’s subway system to rot and spurned the idea of modern light railways, even to the airport. The city on his long watch became an Autogeddon of fuming cars and fuming drivers.

The “racist bridge” stuff was debunked last year after Pete Buttigieg told a CNN interviewer that he was laser-focused — not on fixing supply chain issues, but eliminating the “racism physically built into some of our highways.” Two days later, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler very reluctantly admitted that the DNC-MSM’s defense of Buttigieg comments was a racist bridge too far: Washington Post fact-check admits it was wrong for ‘knee jerked’ defense of Buttigieg’s racist bridge comments.

There has been some revisionism and Moses’s achievements are now viewed in a better light. In particular, the anecdote about the parkway bridges has been increasingly questioned, along with other details in [Robert] Caro’s book,” Kessler wrote.

One historian told the Post that “Moses did nothing different on Long Island from any parks commissioner in the country” because all parkways had low bridges at the time.

“Caro is wrong,” a separate historian emailed to the Post, noting anyone could access the beach.

Other historians disagree in the polarizing tale, but the Post’s in-house fact-checker feels “The Bottom Line” is that the liberal newspaper shouldn’t have been so quick to defend Buttigieg.

“Obviously this cannot be easily resolved. Caro quotes one of Moses’s top aides as saying the height of the bridges was done for racist reasons, but increasingly that story has been questioned as not credible,” Kessler wrote. “Buttigieg should tailor his remarks to reflect what is historically unimpeachable — and we should be more careful to double-check on the latest views of historians. Even a Pulitzer Prize-winning book is not always the last word on a subject.”

But assuming it has decent production values, and doesn’t simply use phony-looking CGI to recreate mid-century Manhattan, I’d love to see a film starring Ralph Fiennes as Moses.

SEAHAWKS’ PETE CARROLL: I’ve Talked With Kaepernick, and He Deserves Another Chance to Be an NFL Slave.

The Seahawks are looking for a quarterback, and Carroll said Wednesday: “I thought about another guy,” Carroll said. “You can ask questions about Colin Kaepernick. I know. You’re going to ask me, so let me just put it out there. He contacted me the other day. Said, ‘Hey, I’d like to get a shot. I’m working out.’ He sent me some videos. Next thing I know, he’s working out with Tyler Lockett. I don’t know how that happened. Does that guy deserve a second shot? I think he does. Somewhere. I don’t know if it’s here. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know if it’s even in football. I don’t know.”

A tepid expression of interest at best, but if Carroll thinks Kaepernick deserves another shot, he may be the one to make it happen. Kaepernick is the best-known mediocre (at best) quarterback in the history of the NFL: the San Francisco 49ers won two and lost six with him at the helm in 2015, and in 2016, Kaepernick was even worse, leading the 49ers to only one win against ten losses. He is 34 years old. Ordinarily, a quarterback with that kind of record would be looking into sportscasting at this point, but Kaepernick has made a name for himself with his far-Left off-field activities, and it is because he is a notorious Leftist, not in spite of that fact, that he might get another shot now.

Ben Shapiro explained why on Twitter Tuesday before Carroll revealed that he was interested in Kaepernick: “Honestly, I would love to see someone sign him and start him. Do it. Seriously, if you’re the Lions, you sign him and start him, the entire media fetes you for your bravery, you earn the eyeballs of a nation that couldn’t care less about you, and you simultaneously get to tank for a first round pick. Or alternatively, he shocks everyone and is good, and it’s the most incredible story in sports. There is essentially no business downside to signing him.”

Just as long as you’re prepared to ride out the social media onslaught that team and its head coach will receive after Kaepernick is eventually benched or cut.

HE’S CRUSHING THE COMPETITION! Lia Thomas Wins 500 Freestyle National Championship Over Biological Females.

Flashback: Matt Walsh Destroys Woke Gender Narrative With One Simple Question.

DON’T AIM IT AT ME: A Huge Beam of Antimatter Has Been Caught Streaming From This Runaway Pulsar.

UM, WHAT? A woman who doctors thought had a UTI actually had a glass tumbler stuck in her bladder for four years.

LEADERSHIP: Asked if Putin is a war criminal, Biden gives a strong solid “no” and walks away. Then he comes back and says, with equal emphasis, “I think he is a war criminal.”

Plus, from the comments: “A war criminal we are going to enrich with our Iran deal.”

Plus: “Putin and Zelensky had both indicated negotiations to end hostilities were proceeding towards consensus but Biden threw a spanner in the works by closing off a negotiated agreement. But perhaps Putin will ignore Biden like most people do.”

MEET YOUR NEW PRESIDENT OF UNITED EARTH: STACEY ABRAMS.

Congratulations to her on getting as close as she’s going to get to being president of any country.

Say what you will about Stacey Abrams, it’s a real achievement to have built a cultural profile high enough for stuntcasting as the president of Earth in a “Star Trek” series without ever having held federal or statewide office. She’s one of the most famous politicians in America somehow despite never having won an election bigger than a Georgia state assembly seat. She hasn’t held any public office at all in nearly five years.

That could change in November, but Abrams will be swimming against a strong Republican national current. Her only hope is Donald J. Trump splitting the right in Georgia between Brian Kemp and David Perdue, embittering the loser of the primary and causing a meaningful chunk of butthurt Republican voters to stay home in the fall.

He’s helped Democrats to unlikely victories in Georgia before. With Trump working on her behalf, only a fool would count Abrams out.

Although if I were her, given how well Republicans are doing on the generic ballot, I’d be glad to have a fallback career in science fiction.

Yes, it’s stuntcasting, but it’s a smart move by the makers of Star Trek: Discovery. With new episodes of Picard current rolling out, and the upcoming Strange New Worlds series being pitched as a return to the episodic Trek of old, STD risks being lost in the shuffle. They’re counting on the right getting angry at Abrams’ cameo and getting lots of free PR via social media in the process.

It’s somewhat reminiscent of the makers of Brokeback Mountain anticipating plenty of word of mouth via the right’s anger at a pro-gay film. In 2006, when the film didn’t go over the magical 100 million mark in domestic grosses, before Twitter existed and Facebook was just getting started, Mark Steyn noted that “The more artful leftie websites have taken to complaining that the religious right deliberately killed [Brokeback] at the box-office by declining to get mad about it.”

THAT’S BECAUSE SHE’S AWFUL, AND SHE’S THE BACKUP TO A PRESIDENT WHO’S COMPLETELY INCAPABLE OF DOING HIS JOB: Lucas: Kamala Harris as VP isn’t so funny.

Kamala Harris is looking for love in all the wrong places.

That’s her problem.

While in Poland last week, she should have gone to the border with Ukraine to greet the hundreds of thousands of refugees — mostly women and children — fleeing Vladimir Putin’s scorched earth invasion of Ukraine.

Instead, she held a pit stop photo op with Polish President Andrzej Duda and even screwed that up. . . .

Harris was on a three-day visit to Poland and Romania to talk about the strength and unity of NATO in the wake of Putin’s unprovoked invasion of neighboring Ukraine. While she met with politicians in both countries, she did not meet with any Ukrainian officials, let alone refugees crossing into Poland and Romania. Nor did she visit the Ukrainian/Polish border.

Granted Harris has a problem with borders, particularly with Joe Biden’s open Mexican border. She has taken legitimate criticism for her inaction.

But this was different. This was war. It was also an opportunity for Harris, who as repeatedly been mocked as unserious, unaware and unqualified, to reshape her image. All she had to do was break away from staged meetings and press conferences in Warsaw and head for the Ukrainian border.

But she screwed it up, because that’s how she rolls.

THAT’S A MAN, BABY! If He’s Not a Man, It Can’t Be Rape. “By law, in order to protect women, NHS wards are single-sex. But NHS policy is to put allegedly ‘trans’ women (i.e., men) in women’s wards. Hence the rape at issue in this case.”

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Study: Kids who spend more time on screens exhibit mental, behavior problems.

THIS BIDEN SCHEME IS COSTING TAXPAYERS BIG TIME BUT MOSTLY HELPING DOCTORS, LAWYERS: New Analysis. “Proponents of so-called ‘student debt cancellation’ typically paint it as much-needed relief for struggling Americans. In reality, it’s a taxpayer-financed bailout for relatively affluent college graduates. (Who, in a pure coincidence, overwhelmingly vote Democrat). You don’t have to take my word for it. We just got more stunning proof that this policy mostly benefits the well-off.”