OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX Starship engine passes key test for Artemis 3 moon-landing mission (video).

WILL SKINNINESS STILL BE STYLISH, IF IT’S EASILY ATTAINABLE FOR THE PROLES? ‘Unique’ New Drug Is More Effective Than Ozempic For Weight Loss.

PROGRESS: Physical therapy linked to drop in falls for patients with dizziness.

PUTTIN’ ON THE RITZ! Dems Reveal More ‘Rules for Thee, but Not for Me’ Hypocrisy When It Comes to Senate Dress Code:

Fox’s Chad Pergram posted that now Senators can wear whatever they want, but others must comply with the dress code, which is: “Coats/ties for men. Business attire for women.”

This is coming from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who, as Senate Majority Leader, directed the Senate’s Sergeant at Arms to stop enforcing the rules. “Senators are able to choose what they wear on the Senate floor. I will continue to wear a suit,” Schumer told Axios.

It’s not hard to guess why. Even Axios noted the following in reporting on this change.

The new directive will allow Sen.John Fetterman(D-Pa.), who tends to favorgym shorts and hoodiesover the business attire traditionally required in the chamber, to linger on the Senate floor before and after votes.

Decline is a choice.

COMPARISON: Three Row SUVs.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

“I’m talking to America here excuse me”

All time line from this ref pic.twitter.com/03q9CgPmWO

— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) September 17, 2023

JON GABRIEL: Congress ignored warnings about its pandemic spending. Now the bill is coming due.

Rep. Smith, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, called the estimated fraud “the greatest theft of taxpayer dollars in American history.”

I don’t know if it’s the “greatest” — there’s $33 trillion worth of overspending with both parties’ fingerprints all over it.

Back in 1988, the Democratic Party Platform said Republicans had “mortgaged our children’s future by tripling our national debt.” At that time, it was a quaint $2.7 trillion.

In 1996, the Republican Party Platform proclaimed, “We have a moral responsibility not to leave our children a legacy of monstrous debt.” The total then was $5 trillion.

I guess our “children’s future” and our “moral responsibility” doesn’t matter much these days.

Occasionally, a brave senator or representative will point out the tsunami of red ink flowing from the Potomac. Kudos to Sen. Crapo and Rep. Smith for highlighting this latest scandal.

But most politicians have quietly agreed to increase the debt, year in and year out, until the entire artifice collapses from its own weight.

If you thought 2008’s housing bubble was bad, wait until the debt bubble bursts.

Exit quote: “A trillion here, a trillion there can really add up.”

DAN ZIMMERMAN: Random Thoughts on Hunter Biden, Domestic Violence, and Disarming Those Who Haven’t Been Convicted of a Crime.

RATS ON THE WEST SIDE, BEDBUGS UPTOWN: Horrifying moment New York City restaurant-goers spot a rat in the window next to the grade ‘A’ health inspection sign.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Armed man arrested at RFK, Jr. campaign event in Los Angeles. “The man was impersonating a member of Kennedy’s security team.”

Note that it wasn’t the Secret Service that protected him but his own private security. The Biden Administration denied him Secret Service protection, though in these degenerate times I think I’d feel safer with Gavin de Becker Associates if I were him.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What Does GTO Stand For?

LOS ANGELES ADMITS THAT GAS PRICES ARE OUT OF CONTROL AGAIN:

So, Los Angeles, how is Bidenomics working out for you? To listen to either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, you would think that everything is just going swimmingly. ‘Bidenomics. It’s working!‘ But Angelinos are experiencing a very different reality and all of the political ad campaigns in the world aren’t going to change that. Even the local CBS News outlet was forced to confront the truth this week and they picked one of the most visible indicators that a majority of voters have to confront each and every week. Gas prices are once again going up. And they’ve been going up for months. In fact, they have now reached levels not seen in almost a year, with the average price in Los Angeles County now sitting at more than five and a half dollars per gallon, seemingly destined to break the six-dollar mark before very long.

The average price of a gallon of self-serve regular gasoline in Los Angeles County rose today to its highest amount since Oct. 28, increasing 3.1 cents to $5.65.

The average price has risen 49 times in 54 days, increasing 67.4 cents, including 3.2 cents Thursday, according to figures from the AAA and Oil Price Information Service.

The average price rose 30 consecutive days, making it 19.1 cents more than one week ago, 39.2 cents higher than one month ago and 22.3 cents above what it was one year ago.

But for most California voters, isn’t this all good news? In September of 2019, after CNN’s seven hour “climate change town hall,” Bryan Preston wrote, “Seriously, if you see all of the above — which is just a sample — and vote for any of these people for any office at any level, it’s on you. If you like Venezuela, voting for any of them will bring you a whole lot of Venezuela.”

And as Kate of Small Dead Animals wrote after the CNN horror show, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking they don’t mean it.”

● Aren’t California’s High Gas Prices What The Left Have Wanted?

● NBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times in lockstep call for higher gas taxes.

● 2008 L.A. Times headline: “The joy of $8 gas.”

● “Under my plan, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket…”

In other words, Obama administration retreads are following the same playbook as the original Obama administration: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden:  As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

So despite Biden claiming today that high gas prices are Putin’s fault, is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.

“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”

● Biden praises high gas prices as part of ‘incredible transition’ of the US economy away from fossil fuels.

● Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.

● The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.

Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.

Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned

NOW DO OFFICIALS WITH ILLEGAL MASK MANDATES: “Kim Davis is ordered to pay $100,000 to same-sex couple she denied marriage license.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Can a vitamin transform natural killer cells into a cancer therapy? Scientists think the answer is yes.

HOWIE CARR: An en masse goodbye to Boston’s biggest hacks of today and yesterday.

Is it too late now for Shannon O’Brien to save her latest hack job by finally showing us her tattoo the way she promised back in 2002?

The state weed czar walked the plank Friday in a pre-Hurricane Lee news dump.

Ironically, she got whacked a day after the guy who defeated her in that 2002 governor’s fight, Mitt Romney, cashed in his chips before his new voters in Utah could give him the same bum’s rush down the steps.

All in all, it was a very bad week for the political protected classes in Boston. Seriously, who could have ever dreamed that Kendra Lara and Ricky Ricardo Arroyo would get fired before Chaim Bloom?

You ask, what did all these pampered pukes have in common, other than a breathtaking sense of entitlement?

They were all creations of the Boston Globe, Mitt perhaps less so than the others. But still, he always groveled before them, hoping to overcome his original sin of being a straight white male Republican who went to church on Sundays.

That’s why Willard marched in those phony-baloney BLM parades in 2020 — with a mask yet! It was to be his baptism into… wokeness.

Go woke, go broke. Now Mitt has sadly learned the same lesson as Transheuser Busch and Disney.

But has he learned any lesson at all? Romney has the most incredible sense of Stockholm Syndrome, considering what the DNC-MSM did to him in 2012. Flashback: Mitt Romney will give first post op-ed TV interview today on CNN.

Earlier:

Related: “I wish Romney had defeated Obama in 2012, but does anyone think this Massachusetts technocrat, who gave us the state-level version of Obamacare in the Bay State, signed up for a regional climate change cap-and-trade scheme, who appointed the egregious Gina McCarthy (Obama’s second EPA administrator) to be his environmental adviser, and appointed state judges who struck the first judicial blows for same-sex marriage, would have governed as a serious conservative had he won?”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX launches 22 Starlink satellites in 65th mission of 2023.

TWO-PARENT PRIVILEGE: