GAS PRICES: More decreases at pumps as nine states now have prices under $3 per gallon.

Gas prices fell yet again on Wednesday, continuing the recent trend of decreases at the pumps after the Labor Day weekend.

The national average price for a gallon of regular gas on Wednesday is $3.317, according to AAA. This is a drop from a week ago, when the average price for regular gas was $3.361 per gallon. Of particular note, nine states now have an average price for regular gas below $3 per gallon, the highest total number of states having such a cost in 2024. Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina have gas prices that plummeted to under that threshold.

Gas prices remain an important issue heading into the 2024 presidential election. With President Joe Biden deciding not to seek reelection, Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee, will have to indicate how she will address the country’s high gas prices and energy costs and how both affect the economy and people’s finances.

While prices have fluctuated in 2024, they have decreased in recent weeks and months. Nevertheless, gas prices remain higher than when former President Donald Trump was in office.

Which ultimately, Kamala believes is a good thing, right? Harris campaign dodges over EV mandate walkback.

Harris’ campaign has sent contradictory signals about her position on a mandate for automakers — a key issue in pivotal Midwestern states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where many autoworkers are based.

• In a lengthy “fact-check” email last week that covered several issues, a campaign spokesperson included a line saying that Harris “does not support an electric vehicle mandate” — suggesting she changed her previous position, without elaborating.
• On Aug. 28 Axios asked the Harris campaign to clarify her position, and whether she would sign or veto a bill she co-sponsored in 2019 that included such a mandate for manufacturers.
• On Tuesday afternoon, Harris’ campaign ultimately declined to comment.

I’ll take that as a “she still supports her 2019 mandate,” but is declining to say so, since the DNC-MSM is happy not to actually get her on the record on any issue. Besides, she’s the vice president of an administration that has been pushing for higher gas prices since it took office, and is full of Obama retreads who pushed for higher gas prices even before Barry took office.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Do aphrodisiacs work? What the science says.

POTATO ONE IS EN ROUTE, POTATO ONE IS EN ROUTE: Brian Stelter Returns to Clown Nation News.

What could go wrong?

October, 2020. Brian Stelter does an entire segment on how a fake news story is crafted.

"Manufacturing a storyline." From Russia to TV, by Brian Stelter.

The story that Stelter was calling fake? The Hunter Biden laptop story.😂 pic.twitter.com/f1H1D3sD9o

— MAZE (@mazemoore) September 4, 2024

THE WORST PART IS, THEY AREN’T EVEN LAYING OFF THE RIGHT PEOPLE: Game Developer Went Woke and… Can You Guess the Rest?

SHELDON COOPER HARDEST HIT: String Theory Has Failed for 40 Years.

THEY’RE FLAILING:

This comes a day after we learn that a high-level Chinese spy had infiltrated both Kathy Hochul's office and Andrew Cuomo's office. https://t.co/TUXIcuGBx1

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) September 4, 2024

But sometimes flailing works.

DANIEL HANNAN: How Long Until People Are Willing to Hear That Lockdown Wasn’t Worth It?

We have forgotten the taped-off playgrounds, the drones sent up to pursue solitary walkers, the police in Derbyshire pouring dye into a lake so it would be less of a beauty spot, and the ‘pingdemic’ — that bizarre period when people were self-diagnosing so that, if they could not take time off work they would self-diagnose as being all clear, and if they felt like a little time off they would claim to have been infected. We have crammed all of these into some remote corner of our memory. In fact, the very difficulty of those things became an argument for continuing. We got into the worst kind of sunk cost fallacy. In fact, the Secretary of State at the time explicitly used that argument: we have been through so much, so let us not let it all be for nothing.

By then, almost everything was pushed into a retrospective justification for the measures that we and other Governments — with one exception — had taken. If infections went up, everyone said, “Well, we can’t relax the restrictions. It would be extremely dangerous.” If they came down, everyone said, “Oh, it’s working. We just need to carry on with this.” People kept on saying, “Follow the science”, but the one thing that we were not doing was applying the normal scientific method. Karl Popper defines science as something that can be disproved, but woe betide you if you even asked the most basic questions at that time about whether there was proportionality. We already had the evidence by the end of April 2020 that Sweden had followed the same trajectory as everywhere else: that the infections had peaked and declined in a place where there were only the most minimal of measures, banning large meetings but otherwise relying on people to use their common sense.

That is what a scientific approach would have done. It would have said, “Consider the control in the experiment.” We had a laboratory-quality control there all along — we had a country that had stuck to the plan that we were panicked out of following.

What can we see about the results in Sweden? First, and most obviously, there is not a smoking crater where its economy used to be. In fact, Sweden suffered less of an economic hit in the pandemic than it did in the 2008 financial crisis. The Swedish budget was back in surplus by 2021 — imagine that. The last Government was done for by our selective amnesia about the cost of these lockdown measures and the current one will be too, because people still do not like to face the fact that for the better part of two years we paid people to stay at home, we borrowed from our future selves, and that money would eventually need to be paid back.

What if it was all for nothing? Let us ask the question: what price did Sweden pay for sparing its economy? At the time we were told that there would be an almost civilisational collapse there. I remember the Sun had the headline, ‘Heading for disaster’, while the Guardian’s was, ‘Leading us to catastrophe’. The argument was not that Sweden might end up with a slightly better or worse death rate than other countries, it was that this would be an outlier by any measure — that there would be bodies piled up in the streets.

Remember in 2020 and 2021 when the left thought mass lockdowns were so cool, they could solve a myriad of other problems as well? I remember: Are you ready for the climate lockdowns?

OH GOOD! THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE IS HERE TO PROTECT US FROM ‘FOREIGN INFLUENCE’ IN ELECTIONS AGAIN! For crying out loud, just put up a website saying “The fix is in. Suck on it, plebs.” Cheaper and less insulting.

PROGRESS: New $100M computer will apply AI to boost NOAA’s weather forecasting capabilities.

LOCAL COPS WERE QUICKER THAN THE SECRET SERVICE: We Have Explosive New Whistleblower Revelations About the Trump Assassination Attempt.

AS HIS BRAIN DAMAGE RECEDES, HE GROWS STEADILY MORE SENSIBLE Not sure what’s going on with the other Democrats. . . .

Good on @SenFettermanPA https://t.co/gGE7oH61EQ

— ZitoSalena (@ZitoSalena) September 4, 2024

WHOOPS: Guessing CNN Won’t Be Calling THEM Any Time Soon: Tim Walz Family in Nebraska Voting for Trump.

The media love, love, love to bring on people like Mary Trump, Donald Trump’s niece, and use her opposition to her uncle as some sort of proof that Mary is a good person and ORANGE MAN BAD because his niece doesn’t like them. They did the same thing with the Kennedy family and their condemnation of RFK Jr. (both when he ran as an independent and when he endorsed Trump).

But now that Tim Walz’s brother, Jeff Walz, has come out against the Democratic VP nominee, will he get the Mary Trump treatment?

We doubt it.

We also doubt the rest of the Walz clan will be hearing from CNN/MSNBC/ABC News any time soon:

One benefit of Walz being tapped by Harris is it does allow us to touch base again with a viral figure from late 2016 through early 2017:

WELL, GOOD: Study: Using Ozempic, Wegovy won’t increase risk of depression, suicide.

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT: How China extended its repression into an American city.

This investigation into Xi’s visit to San Francisco during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit is based on an analysis of more than 2,000 photos and videos from Students for a Free Tibet, the Hong Kong Democracy Council, the China Democracy Party, observers, social media and live streams; as well as interviews with more than 35 witnesses, U.S. officials and analysts; text messages from American security guards working with Chinese diplomats, messages shared in Chinese diaspora WeChat groups, medical reports and police reports obtained by The Post.

The Post also used facial recognition software to search more than 21 hours of footage to identify the actions of pro-CCP diaspora group leaders and Chinese officials. Several people were identified through leads from a separate facial recognition search engine, which were then independently verified by cross-referencing against news clips, interviews and publicly available information. Some of the most violent figures were wearing face masks, sunglasses and hats that obscured their faces and could not be identified.

The Post investigation found:

While there was aggression from both sides, the most extreme violence was instigated by pro-CCP activists and carried out by coordinated groups of young men embedded among them, verified videos show. Anti-Xi protesters were attacked with extended flagpoles and chemical spray, punched, kicked and had fistfuls of sand thrown in their faces.

The Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles paid for supporters’ hotels and meals as an incentive to participate, according to messages shared in WeChat groups reviewed by The Post. At least 35 pro-CCP Chinese diaspora groups showed up to the APEC summit protests — including groups from New York, Pennsylvania and Washington state.

Videos show at least four Chinese diplomats from the consulates in Los Angeles and San Francisco among the crowd of pro-CCP protesters, sometimes directly interacting with aggressive actors over four days of protests from Nov. 14-17. Some Chinese diaspora group leaders with ties to the Chinese state participated in some of the violence, the videos show.

Chinese diplomats hired at least 60 private security guards to “protect” Chinese diaspora groups gathered to welcome Xi, according to seven people involved in the arrangement.

Much more at the link.

HE’S RUINED HIS LAST THANKSGIVING WITH WOKE POLITICS, I GUESS:

🚨 BREAKING: The *entire* family of Kamala Harris running mate Tim Walz just endorsed TRUMP. This is the greatest troll of the 2024 election 🤣 pic.twitter.com/579a7iPLBp

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) September 4, 2024

ELON MUSK: Don’t Let Trump Cheat!

READER FAVORITE: Flat Plug Power Strip, Ultra Thin Extension Cord. #CommissionEarned

KRUISER: More Than Anything, Survival of the Constitution Is on the Ballot in 2024. “If Kamala Harris’s ‘Duck and Cackle’ campaign helps her get to the White House, the executive branch will unleash a full-scale assault on free speech, the right to bear arms, and due process. The Biden administration’s thuggish ways will seem reasonable by comparison.”

MATT WELCH: When Biden’s ‘Bubble Wrap’ Burst. Harris Helped Cover Up Biden’s Decline. Will She Face Consequences?

The political/media establishment that lied to you about President Joe Biden will lie to you about the new Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

When Special Counsel Robert Hur in February declined to prosecute Biden over his technically illegal mishandling of classified documents, in part because a prospective jury would be disinclined to convict an “elderly man with a poor memory” who has “diminished faculties in advancing age,” the reaction from the White House was swift and terrible.

“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” the president snapped to reporters that evening. “My memory is fine.” (Alas, not fine enough to prevent Biden at that same brief press conference from mixing up the presidents of Egypt and Mexico and falsely accusing Hur of bringing up during questioning the subject of his son Beau’s death.)

Hur’s assessment of the president’s memory, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre charged the next day, was “gratuitous,” “unacceptable,” and “does not live in reality.”

But the most over-the-top administration attack on the Department of Justice messenger, and on a message that would be so undeniable by July that Biden felt impelled to drop out of the presidential race, came from Harris.

“The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and [is] clearly politically motivated,” Harris claimed at a community forum the day after Hur’s report. “We should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw.”

We Americans have, through soul-deadening experience, come to expect a piddling level of integrity from our elected officials, particularly as they push ever higher up the greasy pole of political power. What makes Harris’ February brazenness all the more difficult to digest this fall is the knowledge that an entire swath of allegedly truth-seeking individuals and institutions will be enthusiastically abetting the Democratic nominee’s attacks on veracity, much as they disgraced themselves by doing the same with her boss.

Read the whole thing.

IT’S ALWAYS “JUST A MISTAKE”: Odd, isn’t it, that these “mistakes” always seem to run in one direction, huh?
Just The News reporting that:

“Amazon on Tuesday admitted that it made an error with its voice service “Alexa” when it provided fundamentally different answers on why a user should vote for Vice President Kamala Harris versus former President Donald Trump.”

Can you trust Bezos and Amazon Post?
AYFKM?

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS SITTING AT AN ALL-INCLUSIVE RESORT SWIM-UP BAR: Harris’ So-Called ‘Surge’ Is Thanks To Oversampling: Pollsters.

“Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in the public,” said Future Forward super PAC president Chauncey McLean said during a Monday event hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.

Now, the Washington Times reports that some pollsters are even sounding the alarm over Vice President Kamala Harris’ so-called ‘surge’ in the polls – which Harris pulled ahead in after replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee on July 21.

Since the switch, Harris is leading Trump nationally by nearly 2 percentage points and is either leading or tied with him in all seven battleground states. However, Republican analysts argue that these polling numbers may not accurately reflect voter sentiment due to biased polling methodology.

Polls in 2016 and 2020 underestimated Trump’s support by a few points and, even with today’s news, 2024 Trump is outperforming ’16 & ’20 Trump.

Still, don’t get cocky.

HE’S CURRENTLY HOLDING AT “COINCIDENCE”: Seriously, What the Hell Is Wrong with Tucker Carlson? “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING PRESIDENT:

Ahhhh… the tiny desk.
The White House now using forced perspective to try and make Joe look “big”.
Good luck with that, Gandalf.

pic.twitter.com/2kSQ8bLePm

— The Loftus Party (@theloftusparty) September 3, 2024

Alleged president, anyway.

I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC: Yale divinity students forced to read from witch’s ‘spell’ at orientation.

One of these small group periods was the first activity of orientation. Participating as an incoming student in one of these circles, I saw how the discussion opened with a set of “Restorative Circle Rules.” These rules boiled down to a warning to be open minded: all viewpoints were expected to be heard, that you only have to take what you want from the circle and participate as wanted – at least nominally.

After this show of inclusion, we as students were led to read aloud, line by line and one by one, from Adrienne Brown’s “Radical Gratitude Spell.”

Brown (pictured) has been described by Meeting of Minds as a “mixed-race Black queer American writer, community organizer, facilitator, witch and- may I say- goddess.”

Brown herself ascribes to witchcraft, and it informs her public work. Her website describes her as someone who “grows healing ideas in public” through “her writing, which includes short- and long-form fiction, nonfiction, spells, tarot” and “her music, which includes songwriting, singing and immersive musical rituals.”

This context of Brown, her work, and her particular spiritual inclinations was not given to students before participating in the reading. As such, the group reading of the spell took on an undeniable coven-like feeling, with students unable to fully consent to the pseudo-ritual knowingly, despite the Circle Rules.

A second-year student, who requested to remain anonymous, expressed to me a deep concern over this act by the orientation staff. The student called the provided spell “bizarre,” and “gross,” especially for students to not be told of the author or intentions behind the spell before being led to participate.

Consent is the most important thing in the world, except when it’s not.

IT’S DIFFICULT ENOUGH FOR A COUNTRY TO DEAL WITH ITS HOMEGROWN CRIMINALS: Illegal Alien Stabs 14-Year-Old Girl at Baseball Game.