CRISIS BY DESIGN: ICE Non-Detained Docket Is Now Over 7 Million.

I HAVE ONE OF THESE, BUT IT’S FROM ROMANIA: Review: Century Arms WASR-10 Rifle.

THE DEMAND FOR HATE CRIMES — ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY ON THE LEFT — CONTINUES TO OUTSTRIP SUPPLIES: Another Democratic Candidate Arrested For Faking Hate Crimes Against Himself.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Biden Make His Mass Amnesty Move.

CUE THE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN:

I have been criticized by some for sharing these @POTUS Biden videos which appear almost every day. I have read numerous articles which somehow suggest that the camera angle, the duration of the clip or some form of right wing manipulation explains Biden’s behavior on camera.… https://t.co/n9aAXQGqdZ

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) June 16, 2024

Read the whole thing.

Biden was the Democrats’ backstop against Bernie Sanders in 2020 but the scheming White House cabal has left Democrats with no backstop against Biden in 2024.

CANCELING THE ELECTION WILL PROBABLY DO IT: Can we prevent a bird flu pandemic in humans?

GEE, THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG AT ALL AFTER THE COVID CRISIS SUBSIDED:

Oh, the irony.

NY Governor Hochul and NYC Mayor Eric Adams plan to ban masks on subways: pic.twitter.com/OSqTJGvQaG

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 17, 2024

PAULA BOLYARD [VIP]: Did Fox News Just Let the Cat Out of the Bag? “I flipped on Fox News for a few minutes yesterday after the Cleveland Indians game ended (don’t get me started on the name change) and thought I was watching MSNBC. First, Eric Shawn went to bat for a gun-grabber, trying to gin up fear about the recent Supreme Court decision to rescind the bump stock ban. But then it got worse.”

SPEAKING OF OFF-LABEL DRUG USES: Drugmaker to testify on why weight-loss drugs cost 15x more in the US.

THEY WENT WOKE: Doctor Who: New Ratings Low: Worst In 60-Year History: Fails On Disney+. “Doctor Who is also absent from the Disney-invested Samba TV charts who hasn’t released any viewership numbers, likely at the request of Disney because the viewership is so bad.”

ABOUT THAT BIG CRIME REDUCTION…: Secret Service agent robbed at gunpoint after Biden fundraiser. “On Saturday evening, a Secret Service employee had his bag stolen at gunpoint near a Southern California residential community, according to the Tustin Police Department. The agent fired his service weapon during the robbery, though it’s unknown whether the suspect was injured because they have not been located yet.”

I REMEMBER THE BRIEF PERIOD WHEN OFF-LABEL PRESCRIPTIONS WERE ANTI-SCIENCE: Antimalarial drug shows promise in treating polycystic ovarian syndrome.

IMAGINE IF MARJORIE TAYLER GREEN MADE THIS CLAIM: Cori Bush Claims She Miraculously Healed Homeless Woman’s Tumors by Laying Hands on Her.

OUT ON A LIMB: Antony Blinken embodies decades of failure.

There is no sign marking the entrance to Barman Dictat. The bar under 44 Khreshchatyk Street in Kyiv boasts the largest mezcal collection in Eastern Europe. On a typical night you can find it by noting the crowd of people wafting cigarette smoke into the evening air. Inside, you’ll find shelves of more than 400 glowing bottles perched above a steel bar stretching more than thirty feet. You’ll find bespoke cocktails — Kraken, Smoky Voice and Tickle Balls. And, on one particular May evening, you’ll find the seventy-first secretary of state of the United States of America at center stage.

Clad in black and wielding a scarlet electric guitar, Antony Blinken seemed less enthused about the moment than his staff had perhaps anticipated. “Listen, I know this is a really, really difficult time,” he told a small crowd of Ukrainians. “Your soldiers, your citizens, particularly in the northeast in Kharkiv, are suffering tremendously. But they need to know, you need to know, the United States is with you, so much of the world is with you. And they’re fighting not just for a free Ukraine but for the free world, and the free world is with you, too. So maybe we can try something?” And, displaying all the effort and verve of a sixty-two-year-old whose guitar skills are more rust than steel, he meandered his way through Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

The stunt didn’t play well. MSNBC worried that it conjured up “a kind of Nero fiddling as Rome burns vibe.” Ukrainian officials denounced it as tone-deaf. One Ukrainian veteran who lost both his legs in com- bat described it as “as inappropriate as possible.” And the choice of song came under attack, too. Rather than some rah-rah rocker advocating for pride in the Western world, Young’s lyrics depict American malaise and decline — which seems oddly appropriate for Blinken to misunderstand. The headline in New York magazine was blunt: “Antony Blinken Sucks at the Guitar and Should Stop Playing.”

Besides, Obama retreads know that when it comes to playing guitar while war is ongoing, there is only one man to call – well, maybe two: Awkward: John Kerry Brings James Taylor to Paris, Sings ‘You’ve Got a Friend.’

NOT EVEN PIZZA HUT KNOWS WHAT PIZZA HUT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ANYMORE: Another Fast Food Chain Is in Serious Trouble.

I WAS HOPING FOR FLYING CARS: Brain scans identify 6 types of depression in new study.

I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT SO: Wealth Taxes are Direct Taxes that are Subject to the Rule of Apportionment.

THE NEWS HERE IS THAT THERE’S STILL OIL LEFT TO RAID: Biden to Raid Strategic Oil Reserves Again in Desperate Bid to Lower Gas Prices Before Election.

How It Started: “We Are All Socialists Now.”

—The Washington Post, through then-subsidiary publication Newsweek, February 16^th, 2009, as Obama began his first term in office.

How it’s going, deep in his third term: “We’re All Soviets Now,” Niall Ferguson writes:

Meanwhile, as in the late Soviet Union, the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.

In the Soviet Union, the great lies were that the Party and the state existed to serve the interests of the workers and peasants, and that the United States and its allies were imperialists little better than the Nazis had been in “the great Patriotic War.” The truth was that the nomenklatura (i.e., the elite members) of the Party had rapidly formed a new class with its own often hereditary privileges, consigning the workers and peasants to poverty and servitude, while Stalin, who had started World War II on the same side as Hitler, utterly failed to foresee the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and then became the most brutal imperialist in his own right.

The equivalent falsehoods in late Soviet America are that the institutions controlled by the (Democratic) Party—the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the major foundations, and most of the big corporations—are devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities, and that the principal goals of U.S. foreign policy are to combat climate change and (as Jake Sullivan puts it) to help other countries defend themselves “without sending U.S. troops to war.”

In reality, policies to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” do nothing to help poor minorities. Instead, the sole beneficiaries appear to be a horde of apparatchik DEI “officers.” In the meantime, these initiatives are clearly undermining educational standards, even at elite medical schools, and encouraging the mutilation of thousands of teenagers in the name of “gender-affirming surgery.”

The Biden administration and its operatives with Chyrons going full Soviet to help prop up the elderly husk of their nominal figurehead doesn’t help matters. But then, as Katya Sedgwick warned in December of 2020: Biden’s Brezhnev vibes — Is the presumptive President-elect the candidate of American stagnation?

At least nobody in the Soviet Union voted for Brezhnev — the elections were a sham with Communist party candidates running unopposed. Everything was a sham, actually. In his mumbling, robotic tones, the general secretary delivered long-winded, heavy on Marxist cliches and utterly incomprehensible televised speeches. The economy flattered, dissidents were subjected to psychiatric torture, corruption proliferated, and the rate of substance abuse skyrocketed. That period of Soviet history is known as zastoi, or stagnation. It only made sense that the man on top was some sort of sclerotic.

Like Brezhnev, Biden’s rhetoric is ridden with clichés, but of a different, folksy kind. At the time when political slogans are catchy and provocative — Make America Great Again, Black Lives Matter — Biden’s yard signs read ‘Our best days are still ahead’, and ‘Build back better’. His Twitter account is full of platitudes like ‘This is our moment — ours together — to write a newer, bolder, more compassionate chapter in the life of our nation.’ He’s just a boring ordinary guy — until he lashes out at a voter, or bites on his wife’s finger.

Is Biden the candidate of American stagnation? His cognitive and physical decline is increasingly difficult to hide and it’s highly disturbing to witness it become a subject of speculation. I’ve lived through it before and it gives me the creeps. Free citizens of a free republic shouldn’t need a Kremlinologist to decipher what’s wrong with their president.

And here we are.

KRUISER: Of Course the White House Correspondents’ Association Is Working With the Dems.

As most of you know, I have been writing professionally about liberal bias in the mainstream media for most of the 21st century. It had bothered me for my first 15 or so years as a conservative activist (I started during the Reagan administration), so I finally started venting about it online when even getting online was an adventure.

It was a rather fortunate area of focus for me to choose, as I will never run out of material.

Back to the Dems’ family squabble. During one of his many unfortunate off-leash appearances last week, Joe Biden bristled at a reporter’s question, and slurred something about wishing that the reporters would “play by the rules a little bit.”

Oh-oh, Grandpa just let out a secret.

Read the whole thing.

THEY’LL BE LUCKY IF IT DOESN’T GO FROM FIGURATIVE TO LITERAL: How to Skewer Invisible Rulers.

IT’S NOT YOUR BOOK SHE WANTS TO TOUCH? A New York Times Book Reviewer “Longs” for Me. So Why Won’t She Touch My Book?

BOTTOM WORRY OF THE DAY: George Clooney: Now Who Will Fund Social Justice Movies!

FIRE ALARM PULLED: ‘Squad’ lawmaker in danger of losing primary as Dem-led attacks pile up.

A progressive “Squad” Democrat could see his career in the House of Representatives end after New York’s congressional primaries next Tuesday.

On one side of the contentious primary race in New York’s 16th Congressional District is Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., a former middle school principal who is backed by the progressive left, including self-described Democratic Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

On the other side is Westchester County Executive George Latimer, a more moderate candidate who has scored backing from Hillary Clinton, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and former Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y., who is vying to get back into Congress himself.

The fight is part of a wider fracture within the Democratic Party caused by Israel’s war in Gaza.

The recent socialist “It Girl” herself has weighed in: We Can’t Have an Election, We’re Democrats!

Liberals claim to be in favor of democracy–or, at least, Our Democracy™️–but if someone actually runs against them, they take it as a personal offense. Consider this tweet by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom I take as a good exemplar of contemporary liberalism:

People everywhere need to understand how disgusting and abnormal it is for special interests to dump nearly $15 million to unseat a member of Congress in a primary.

This is corruption. It is a core threat to American democracy. It also fuels Trump.

Support Jamaal Bowman. https://t.co/HAWJjKICr7

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 16, 2024

There is nothing shocking about $15 million being spent on a Congressional race. In the 2022 cycle, a number of House races drew more than $40 million in total spending. And Ocasio-Cortez herself knows how to spend money: she spent $18.9 million on her own 2020 House race.

In May, the left-leaning Daily Beast noted: Squad Rep Jamaal Bowman’s YouTube Page Is a Conspiracy Theorist’s Dream.

Old (internet) habits die hard.

When The Daily Beast revealed in January that Rep. Jamaal Bowman had promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories on his blog while working as a public school principal, the New York Democrat maintained it was just a bygone phase, and that his days of marinating in the nether-swamps of online paranoia were long over. But his personal YouTube account, where he continued to follow new channels and create playlists as recently as last month, indicates his taste for fringe content has endured into his tenure on Capitol Hill.

* * * * * * * *

Bowman has publicly identified himself in the past as a frequent YouTube user. At a panel discussion held at an Islamic center in the city of Yonkers in January, the Democrat described himself as “starstruck” to introduce the incendiary academic Norman Finkelstein, whom he said he knew from online videos.

“I watch them all the time on YouTube,” said Bowman, who subsequently had to denounce Finkelstein’s praise of Hamas’ bloody raid into Israeli territory on Oct. 7.

Sure enough, several of the pages Inner Peace follows—including DiEM25, Real News Network, Free Will, PoliticsJOE, TRT World—feature interviews with Finkelstein.

Moreover, a number of the accounts Bowman has subscribed to are of recent vintage: more recent, even, than his own ascent to power in 2020. For instance, one called Afripost—where recent video titles announce “Vatican Angry as PUTIN Declares Russia will Only Worship THE BLACK JESUS” and “African Historian Reveals hidden Secret: God did NOT CREATE WHITE: The Bible is all about BLACKS” (capitalization original)—was created in April of last year, just a few months after Bowman started his second term.

The previous month, the Washington Free Beacon reported: As a Principal, Jamaal Bowman Objected to Teaching About ‘White’ Figures Like George Washington, Honoring Cop-Killers Instead: Bowman celebrated an anti-Semite and cop-killers on ‘wall of honor.’

However, also a principal, Bowman presumably knew how his school’s fire alarms worked, which leads us to Bowman’s showstopping moment in Congress in October: Jamaal Bowman: I Pulled the Fire Alarm Because…Republicans Are Nazis?

The coda for Bowman’s scramble to win reelection is quite the summation of where the far left in general have positioned themselves in recent decades: “In late spring of 2022, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) reached out to a local Jewish leader in Westchester County to ask for an unusual favor as he prepared to defend his seat in an August primary against two Democratic challengers who were each gaining support from the district’s sizable Jewish community. ‘Do you have pics of us?’ Bowman texted the Jewish leader, with whom he had previously maintained a cordial if uneasy relationship, according to a screenshot of the message shared with Jewish Insider. ‘So I can show the world I’m friends with Jewish People.’”

DON’T GET COCKY BUT DO POP SOME CORN: CNN’s Enten: We’re Watching Historic Numbers Of Black Voters Under 50 Giving Up On Democratic Party. “Look at Black voters under the age of 50. Holy cow, folks, Joe Biden was up by 80 points among this group back at this point in 2020. Look at where that margin has careened down towards. It’s just — get this — 37 points. That lead has dropped by more than half.”