BUGS, THEY’RE JUST LIKE US! Like human shoppers, bees have irrational biases when choosing flowers to feed on.

PROFILES IN COURAGE: ‘Candidate of Change’ Kamala Mulls Keeping Biden’s Cabinet If Dems Lose Senate.

UNTIL THE NEXT ONE: This Might Be the Most Poorly Staged ‘Presidential’ Photo of Kamala Ever.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: VA makes emergency telemedicine available nationwide.

DEI KILLS:

In case you’re wondering why the response to Hurricane Helene has been a disaster… Fema’s goal 1 is to instill equity as a foundation of emergency management. This is real pic.twitter.com/bPFTmfkndE

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 30, 2024

More from Jerry Dunleavy:

FEMA’s “Strategic Plan” (2022-2026)

“Goal 1” — “Instill Equity as a Foundation of Emergency Management”

“Goal 2” — “Lead Whole of Community in Climate Resilience”

“Goal 3” — “Promote & Sustain a Ready FEMA & Prepared Nation”

Full strategic plan, such as it is, here.

Related (From Ed): Jon Gabriel in the Arizona Republic: DEI efforts are a distraction that more Arizona towns should reject.

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Hamas Commander Killed in Israeli Strike Led U.N. Refugee Agency Teachers’ Union.

A Hamas commander in Lebanon who was killed in an Israeli airstrike overnight was an accredited member of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, the embattled agency confirmed after his death.

Hamas’s Fateh Sherif and his family were killed in an airstrike at a Palestinian refugee camp in the southern city of Tyre, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced on Monday. “Sherif was responsible for coordinating Hamas’ terror activities in Lebanon with Hezbollah operatives, as well as Hamas’ efforts in Lebanon to recruit operatives and acquire weapons.”

While leading terrorist activities, Sherif also headed the UNRWA teachers’ union in Lebanon. Though employed by the U.N. agency, Sherif was suspended without pay in March due to allegations involving “his political activities,” UNRWA told the Times of Israel in a statement.

To paraphrase Alvy Singer, those who can’t do teach, those who can’t teach join Hamas.

Related: Benjamin Netanyahu Calls United Nations “Contemptuous Farce.”

I’M NOT GETTING COCKY: 2020’s Most Accurate Pollster Says Pennsylvania Is Trump’s to Lose… BUT…

BLUFF CALLED: I only bused migrants to NYC because Eric Adams opened his big mouth — and lied, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says.

Abbott wasn’t going to bus migrants to New York City. And then Eric Adams opened his big mouth.

That’s how the three-term Republican describes his 2022 decision to send 119,000 migrants from the Texas border to sanctuary cities across the country — including more than 45,000 to New York alone.

In an exclusive interview with The Post, Abbott explained that at first he was only sending migrant buses to Washington, DC, to make a point about the Biden-Harris administration’s failure to crack down on the massive surge of illegal crossings — and relieve some pressure on the border towns that were being overwhelmed.

Then, “out of nowhere,” Abbott said, “Mayor Adams started criticizing me for busing them to New York, which I was not doing. But he kept criticizing me.”

“I thought, ‘You know what? New York is a sanctuary city, if I’m going to get the criticism, I’m going to get the credit.’ So we started busing them to New York.”

Earlier: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.

The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.

It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.

Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.

These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.

As Jazz Shaw wrote: Sanctuary cities not enjoying actually being used as sanctuaries.

As Lipson points out, the reality of enacting various socialist and liberal policies is quite different than simply issuing press releases proclaiming your support for illegal migrants. Talking about being a sanctuary city carries no cost beyond perhaps a small budget for advertising time. Having hundreds of people suddenly showing up in your city with no resources or support networks, with most unable to even speak English carries very real and potentially significant costs.

But how do Bowser and Adams navigate these political waters? When they declare that the Republican governors are doing “something bad,” they are implicitly stating that having the migrants arrive in these sanctuaries is also “a bad thing.” But if you’re a sanctuary, why would accepting these people be a problem? That’s the equivalent of opening up a restaurant and then acting surprised and annoyed when people start walking in and trying to order food.

It was also the only for the media to cover the crisis-by-design that Biden-Harris created at America’s borders. If it was only a small Texas border town being absolutely overrun, there’s zero media coverage. Send them to the media capital of the planet, and the ink and pixels and video began to flow by the gallon.

The ghost of Saul Alinsky smiles: “Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. ‘You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.’”

SHOT:

The modern economy rests on a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The road runs to the two mines that is the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers.

There are no alternative sources known. From Conway’s Material World: pic.twitter.com/mYfrfub8dw

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) March 9, 2024

CHASER:

I have asked for pictures on facebook. I joined the Let’s Talk #SprucePine #NC page. 12K+ Hundreds of families have loved ones unaccounted for…the roads into Spruce Pine are not passable. Bridges are collapsed. People are scared and desperate. Spruce Pine needs the… pic.twitter.com/FttEYIW3Ai

— Gretchen Smith🇺🇸 (@MAGAgpsmith) September 28, 2024

UPDATE (From Ed):

You’re about to hear “don’t politicize hurricanes” from the people who ran on “George Bush hates black people because Katrina” https://t.co/PBXt3qIA59

— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) September 30, 2024

RACISM, STRAIGHT UP: 68% Back Proof of Citizenship for Voting.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 68% of Likely U.S. Voters want Congress to enact a law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote in national elections. Just 22% disagree. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Congress on Wednesday passed a stop-gap funding measure to avert a partial government shutdown; Republicans tried and failed to include an amendment that would have required proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections.

However, 62% of voters would have supported a government shutdown to pass the proof-of-citizenship measure, including 48% who would Strongly Support a shutdown over the issue.

You might think that kind of overwhelming support would lend some backbone to the House GOP — alas.

LIMITED TIME DEAL: ThermoPro TP19H Digital Meat Thermometer for Cooking. #CommissionEarned

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: So Now Conservatives Are Evil for Liking — [Checks Notes] — Attractive Women? “The story begins, as these things always seem to do, with Sydney Sweeney’s breasts.”

UPDATE (From Ed): Prior to their war on aesthetics, and then their inability to define what a woman is, this used to a bipartisan issue. As P.J. O’Rourke wrote in his classic 1991 book Parliament of Whores, after attending a 1989 Housing Now! rally on the DC Mall to combat homelessness:

A few mainstream politicians paid lip service to the aims of the march, but they kept an arm’s length between themselves and the chief Housing Now! organizers, who were Donna Brazile, the former Dukakis campaign aide who accused George Bush of having a girlfriend, and Mitch Snyder, the perennial homeless advocate and incessant protest-faster who would commit suicide a few months later, thereby obtaining an eternal home, and a warm one at that.

Best of all, there were hardly any beautiful women at the rally. I saw a journalist friend of mine on the Mall, and he and I pursued this line of inquiry as assiduously as our happy private lives allow. Practically every female at the march was a bowser. “We’re not being sexist here,” my friend insisted. “It’s not that looks matter per se. It’s just that beautiful women are always on the cutting edge of social trends. Remember how many beautiful women were in the anti-war movement twenty years ago? In the yoga classes fifteen years ago? At the discos ten years ago? On Wall Street five years ago? Where the beautiful women are is where the country is headed,” said my friend. “And this,” he looked around him, “isn’t it.”

Flash-forward to a 21^st century that would make the Weimar Republic recoil in horror. Decline is a choice, America.

THAT AGED WELL:

I've obtained exclusive footage of just how quiet the Middle East has been lately:pic.twitter.com/7bNNcW00QJ

— Based Electrician⚡️🇺🇲 (@RyanHugeBrain) September 29, 2024

The Biden-Harris administration had spent a couple of years ignoring the Abraham Accords, boosting Iran, showing enough daylight between DC and Jerusalem to cause skin cancer, and expecting the Middle East to remain quiet.

Unless war was what Biden-Harris wanted, that is. If so, the way things are going can’t be what they’d hoped for.

DEMOCRATS ARE VIOLENT CHILDREN, CONT’D: Kari Lake’s daughter assaulted at Arizona State U. voter registration drive.

BAH! WHO NEEDS ELECTRICITY, ANYWAY: An interesting case is coming up before SCOTUS, in which electrical grid operators have filed an unprecedented amici brief. The bottom line, as Just the News reports is:

“Organizations that manage, coordinate and monitor electricity service for 156 million Americans across 30 states are warning that the Biden-Harris administration’s power plant rule will be catastrophic for the nation’s grid.”

At the heart of the case is that the grid operators’ research says:

“[T]hey found a number of problems. The EPA grossly overestimated the ability of intermittent wind and solar to deliver reliable electricity during peak demand periods, according to the analysis, and it also found the agency didn’t perform any reliability analysis on the rules. The result would be blackouts lasting days in some cases.”

The question (for me, anyway) is will the same Court that flipped Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council remain steadfast in maintaining that “agency interpretations of statutes — like agency interpretations of the Constitution — are not entitled to deference.”

I’ve had my own run-ins in litigation against federal agencies (mostly in FOIA matters) and found maddening the argument that an agency could get away with simply saying “because we said so.”

If I had better Google-fu I’d insert that clip from one of the Sunday talk shows where during the Bureau of Land Management and Cliven Bundy mess, Harry Reid, in a remarkable example of body language, said essentially when the federal government says do something, you do it. Key was the image: while he said the words “federal government” he emphatically pointed at himself. Most telling.

I suspect that the enormous elasticity applied to “Chevron deference” might have been partially fueled by district court judges who, feeling overburdened, were only too happy to clear one more matter off of their dockets.

Worth keeping an eye on.

**If anyone can find that clip, please feel free to add it in comments and I’ll update this post.**

THE GREAT REPLACEMENT: Kamala’s Bungling Border Visit Comes as Shocking Illegal Crime Stats Revealed.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Med school prof claims there are student ‘concerns’ over Israeli student’s ‘participation’ in ‘genocide’ due to IDF service.

DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT MIDDLE EAST JUSTICE [VIP]: ‘Justice’

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: Machete-armed man with Palestinian flag wounds 31 in Germany with arson, ramming attacks.

A 41-year-old Syrian national wounded 31 people, including two children who were left in critical condition, in arson attacks on Saturday in the German city of Essen, according to police and media reports from Sunday morning.

At around 5:10 p.m. on Saturday, the man set fire to a residential building on Altenessener Strasse, at the corner of Pielsticker Strasse, according to Bild. He later drove a few streets over, where he set fire to a second residence.

The fire service said that 31 people were wounded in the arson attacks, while Essen police placed the number at 30.

Tagesschau reported that people threw children from windows onto cushions on the street to escape the flames.

After setting off the fires, the man reportedly drove to Katernberger Strasse, where he rammed his car into a store before reversing and ramming into the building again.

There are nearly one million Syrians in Germany — about one out of 20 Syrians.

WELL, WITH TODAY’S LEFT IT’S MORE LIKE HYDE TO HYDER:

When ideologues fear impending defeat, they often suffer a nervous breakdown resembling a Jekyll/Hyde transformation. Until they can regain their composure the breakdown reveals something unexpected and quite terrifying.

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) September 30, 2024

THIS IS JUST TERRORISM: Protesters Force UC-Berkeley FedSoc Event On Judicial Reform in Israel To Shift Online; Dean Chemerinsky To Pursue Disciplinary Action Against Disruptive Students. Punish them severely, not just with a slap on the wrist. The leftist culture of impunity needs to end.

LIMITED TIME DEAL: Power-Bank-Solar-Charger – 42800mAh Portable Charger. The built-in flashlight also looks handy. #CommissionEarned

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Kamala Harris’s Border Kabuki Isn’t Going to Sway Anyone. “Harris was in Douglas, AZ. Fun fact: I briefly lived in Douglas in the early 1970s, just 12 blocks from the border. Things were a bit messy even back then, but we didn’t have to worry about the cartel people traipsing through our back yards.”

PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS OFTEN ENCOURAGE THE BULLYING OF NERDS: The public school teacher would like to make the young guy seem like the nerd that “popular” kids shun? If that’s a debate strategy, I hope to detect it in real time.

It won’t be hard.

“I’D RATHER HAVE A SISTER IN A WHOREHOUSE THAN A BROTHER IN THE FBI.” The FBI Raided the Wrong Home—the Government Refuses to Pay for the Damage. “The FBI had a warrant—for a house with a different address number on a different street. Now, the Institute for Justice (IJ) is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to revive their lawsuit for accountability, which has been thrown out by the lower courts.”

Classical reference in headline.