PLANETS I PROMISED, PLANETS YOU GET. LOTS AND LOTS OF PLANETS [VIP]:Sky Candy and the Planets: It’s Complicated.

VDH: The evaporation of the Obama mystique.

Former President Barack Obama had long been rumored as the catalyst for the 2020 Joe Biden nomination — and thereafter played the whispering puppeteer behind the subsequent lost Biden administration years.

As such he and his coterie proved the virtual architects of the Biden administration, one of the most unpopular and failed presidencies in American history.

Recall earlier that after a flailing candidate Biden lost the first three 2020 primaries and caucuses, his inert campaign was headed nowhere.

Obama and fellow Democratic insiders abruptly engineered the withdrawal of his rival 2020 presidential candidates: hard left but likely sure-loser candidates, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg.

The Obamas ignored or withheld from the public their own firsthand knowledge that Biden was suffering from signs of dementia.

Instead, they found Biden’s cognitive decline and his former concocted reputation as workingman’s Joe useful as a veneer for a veritable Obama third-term, “phone it in” administration. Or as wistful Obama once conditioned his dream of a third term — “If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in.”

The Obamaites then got their wish for four years of enacted hard-left directives that they could only have dreamed of while in actual power.

But their radical menu since 2021 had divided and nearly wrecked the nation —hyperinflation, 12 million illegal aliens, a ruined border, spiraling crime, a shattered foreign policy of appeasement, the popular backlash against DEI/Woke/trans chauvinism, partisan lawfare, and weaponization of the government.

And the ruling radicalism beneath the Biden facade eventually cost the Democrats nearly everything — the presidency, the House, and the Senate.

An inert Biden is departing office with a 36 percent favorability rating in a recent Emerson poll. His Democratic nominee replacement, losing presidential candidate Vice President Harris, also has virtually vacated her office with 40 days left of her tenure.

Failed candidate Harris has been roundly faulted by staffers and donors for blowing through some $2 billion in assorted 2024 campaign money.

How bad was her campaign? At least one leftist Website is asking: How Much of the Harris Campaign Was a Scam?

BLUE ON BLUE: It’s AOC vs. The Wicked Witch of the West in Oversight Committee Slugfest.

WHEN TRUST IS FORFEITED: CDC: Only 37% of U.S. kids have gotten flu shots.

VIDEO: Diversity != Strength. “The ritual cliche invoked by the social justice left is that ‘diversity is strength.’ But as the Irish mother in the video notes, importing waves of unassimilated foreigners into local communities doesn’t strengthen them at all.”

GET IN SHAPE: New Balance Men’s 608 V5 Casual Comfort Cross Trainer. #CommissionEarned

DEVELOPING: Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 84, injured, hospitalized while traveling to Luxembourg.

IT’S INHERENT: DEI Still Has An Anti-Semitism Problem.

NEVER CHANGE, ATLANTIC: Political Violence Is Kinda Mainstream, Ackshully.

HEH: Strange New Respect.

Strange new respect, or just political brown-nosing? Is there any difference between the two?

For the past two-plus years, ever since he raised the potential purchase of Twitter, the Left has demonized Elon Musk nearly non-stop. That hit a fever pitch almost two years ago to the day when Musk began to release the Twitter Files and exposed government censorship on social media and Big Tech platforms, and only increased when Musk began supporting Donald Trump. The Left has painted him as All That Is Wrong in Politics and Culture for two solid years.

How has that worked out for them? Badly enough that they’re now trying to kiss and make up, Politico reports today. And where that kiss is aimed, you can probably guess.

Heh.

KAMALA HARRIS IS FOR THEY/THEM. PRESIDENT TRUMP IS FOR YOU:

Flashback to 2017, when the elite leftists at the New Yorker were angry after voters chose a different direction for the country rather than four more years of leftist elitism:

That cartoon looked particularly silly after 2020, as “the smug pilots” were all over the place in response to Covid, to the point of flitting back and forth between not recommending masks, demanding everyone be masked up at all times, and then locking down the entire country — except if you’re peacefully looting and tearing down statues.*

And flashback to last month, and Axios’ Jim Vandehei having an aneurysm over Elon Musk telling Twitter users “You are the media now!” Axios CEO Beclowns Himself Defending Journalisming.

The best part of this sanctimonious rant is when he uses Qatari-funded Al Jazeera as an exemplar of a media outlet that does real truth-seeking reporting without fear or favor. https://t.co/AIeOH5Ga9W

— Philip Klein (@philipaklein) November 25, 2024

It didn’t help his case very much that his Website’s product soon afterwards was this piece, rivaling Woodward and Bernstein stalking Richard Nixon, or Edward R. Murrow reporting in London during the blitz: Why “fart walks” after meals are good for you, experts say.

Democrats long for about 1965, when LBJ believed he could “run the country” through a series of bureaucracies in DC Mies van der Rohe office blocks and the media consisted of three TV networks, news wire services, and a handful of newspapers per big city. But that world doesn’t exist anymore.

* Ultimate Irony: Neil de Grasse Tyson Told CNN Yesterday That You Should Only Trust ‘Experts.’

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: ‘Multilevel classes’ aren’t equitable or excellent, say teachers.

Mixing high-achieving, average and low-achieving students in the same class was a noble experiment, writes Ryan Normandin, a high school math and physics teacher in Newton, Massachusetts. But it’s not working in math, science and foreign language classes. Everyone learns less, he writes. The students who need the most support are doing the worst.

Tracking isn’t perfect, he writes. It can be hard for students to move up a level. Students tend to segregate by achievement and by race and ethnicity: Black, Hispanic and low-income students disproportionately take lower-level classes.

Multilevel classes in English and history had some success, writes Normandin. Students opted in. Teachers got support. Then administrators expanded the model to math, science and world languages, subjects that build on previous learning.

After three years, nearly all teachers at Newton South High, where he chairs the Faculty Council, say the model is failing students and exhausting teachers.

The only people who seem truly surprised by outcomes like this one are the experts.

BIDENFLATION:

🚨 INFLATION IS BACK UP 🚨

Wonder why?

The Fed has worked to quietly pump another $650 billion newly created dollars into the market over the last year.

This artificially gave the economy a buzz before the election, but now comes the inflation hangover.

As the money supply… pic.twitter.com/EzYuswALvL

— Richard A. Stern (@RichAStern) December 13, 2024

Plus this gem from Peter St. Onge in response: “The more the Fed prints, the greedier the grocers get.”

Flashback: Joe Biden, Milton Friedman, and the Tyranny of Tiny Minds.

Of all the stupid, petty, bigoted things Presidentish Biden ever sputtered, none bothers me so much as “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.”

In April of last year, when Biden’s $5 trillion “Build Back Better” scheme was first percolating in the dark, shriveled mass that was once his frontal lobe, the then-candidate told POLITICO he wanted “a new stimulus ‘a hell of a lot bigger’ than $2 trillion.”

“Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” a reportedly “fiery” Biden told POLITICO’s Michael Grunwald.

It wasn’t Biden’s first run-in with the libertarian-leaning, Nobel Prize-winning economist.

That was 2021. Biden spent his entire term butting heads with the late Friedman — and losing.

Blame it on the grocers, kulaks, hoarders, or the Jews, but in the end, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”

IT MIGHT BE THE ONLY CARD THEY HAVE LEFT TO PLAY: Iran’s Next Move Is Playing the Nuclear Card.

PAYBACK: Top Russian Cruise Missile Engineer Gunned Down Near Moscow.

Mikhail Shatsky was found dead in the Kuzminki forest park in the suburb of Kotelniki southeast of Moscow this week.

Shatsky was deputy chief of design and head of software at the Moscow Experimental Design Bureau Mars, which develops automatic control and navigation systems for satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles. Mars is part of Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom.

Exiled opposition journalist Alexander Nevzorov, who first broke the news of the assassination, said Shatsky also oversaw upgrades of Kh-59 missiles into the low-flying subsonic Kh-69 versions.

The upgrades must be going well enough or Putin might have had him thrown out a window.

THE LAMPS ARE GOING OUT ALL OVER EUROPE, WE SHALL NOT SEE THEM LIT AGAIN IN OUR LIFETIME: Britain to axe up to 1.5m lampposts — see how it would look.

Around 1.5 million of Britain’s 7.2 million lampposts could be removed to save money and reduce carbon emissions and replaced with lighting that will make it safer for pedestrians.

Under existing rules, there is no requirement to light pavements for pedestrians. They are only lit because light spills over from lampposts, which were principally installed to make it safer for motorists.
But today’s cars have such effective headlights that lampposts, which are generally 10m tall on A-roads and 6m tall on residential roads, are not necessary in many parts of Britain.

Lampposts will remain in place in many locations where they are necessary, such as in cities where CCTV cameras rely on good lighting.
The first ones scheduled to be removed are in Hayton, a small Yorkshire village on the A1079 road between York and Hull. Starting in December, 30 street lights on each side of the main road are to be switched off and later removed. Around 300 more will be switched off and removed on a 19-mile (30km) stretch of the road.

What could possibly go wrong?

AMY WAX, MEANWHILE, WAS SUSPENDED FOR TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT THEIR AFFIRMATIVE ACTION PROGRAM: Socialist University of Pennsylvania prof apologizes for praising CEO-killer suspect, school condemns her post. There will be no disciplinary action this time.

WHY IS ACADEMIA SUCH A HOTBED OF RACISM AND BIGOTRY? Fifty-One Discriminatory Scholarships At University of Rhode Island Challenged By Equal