OPEN THREAD: Can’t stop the signal.

YOU CAN’T TAKE THE SKY FROM ME: Firefly wins NASA contract for third lunar lander mission.

THIS IS AN EXCELLENT POINT. It took a combination of persistence, intellectual foundation-laying, and grassroots politics, but the progress has been unimaginable by the standards of the 1990s.

Gun rights were dead in the '90s. Now AR-15s are everywhere, Constitutional carry dominates, and the 2A is stronger than ever. If conservatives can win that fight, the MAGA agenda is absolutely winnable. Enough with the rampant defeatism! How many wins do you have to see before…

— Blake Kuhn (@blakekuhn) December 21, 2024

BIDEN ISN’T “CONSIDERING” ANYTHING. HE’S INCAPABLE OF IT. WHOEVER CONTROLS THE AUTOPEN IS DOING THE CONSIDERING. Biden considers commuting the sentences of federal death row inmates: report.

And we don’t even know who controls the autopen.

JOHN HINDERAKER: The Least Successful Conspiracy. “I don’t doubt that various people, including the press, conspired, but the fact that Joe Biden was senile was open and obvious. . . . What is striking to me is not the conspiracy to cover up his condition, which was hardly more successful than the alleged conspiracy to cover up the fact that smoking is bad for you. What is striking is how few people on the Left–approximately zero–cared about the fact that we didn’t have a functioning president. Why were Democrats so unconcerned about having a president who was basically a cardboard cutout? Because they don’t really think the president is very important. They were content to have the Executive Branch run by nameless White House aides and by party grandees like Barack Obama.”

Plus: “I think this narrative helps to explain why Democrats are so horrified at the prospect of a Trump presidency. Trump, a real, non-senile president? A president with a mandate from the voters to bring about important changes? A president who will re-assert control over the ‘fourth branch?’ A president who won’t be a pawn in the hands of Washington insiders? A president who actually understands and carries out his duties under Article II? A president capable of standing up to the Washington establishment? This is what passes for revolutionary change in our late-stage republic.”

OUT: “REVOLVERS DON’T JAM.” In:

The "ReVoLvErS NeVeR jAm" tards are awfully quiet. pic.twitter.com/49nqUFNARK

— Rando Kneanderthal (@RKneegrow) December 19, 2024

BYRON YORK: Kash Patel, onetime FBI target, now on track to run the FBI.

Not long ago, a left-wing journalist argued that when Republicans describe Kash Patel’s nomination to be FBI director as a way to “clean out” the FBI and “restore its integrity,” they are in fact creating “cover to go along with Trump’s scheme to unleash the FBI on enemies.”

RIP: Rickey Henderson Dead at 65. “There is a peculiar and painful symmetry here: the Oakland Athletics and the Oakland Athletics’ all-time greatest player, Rickey Henderson, have both departed from the scene within two months of each other.”

SCHRODINGER’S TERRORIST: On the one hand: Proposed Note: German Christmas Market Terrorist Was Islamophobic Right-Winger.

The AP report cited reads:

Taleb’s X account describes him as a former Muslim. It is filled with tweets and retweets focusing on anti-Islam themes and criticism of the religion, while sharing congratulatory notes to Muslims who left the faith.

He was critical of German authorities, saying they had failed to do enough to combat the “Islamism of Europe.”

He has also voiced support for the far-right and anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

…

Prominent German terrorism expert Peter Neumann posted on X that he had never before come across a suspect in an act of mass violence with that profile.

“After 25 years in this ‘business’ you think nothing could surprise you anymore. But a 50-year-old Saudi ex-Muslim who lives in East Germany, loves the AfD and wants to punish Germany for its tolerance toward Islamists — that really wasn’t on my radar,” he wrote.

On the other hand:

Despite claims made by the German press, Taleb Al Abdulmohsen is not an ex-Muslim atheist, nor is he a fan of the AfD or Elon Musk. While he may have spread this misinformation himself, it aligns with the practice of Taqqiye, an Islamic doctrine that permits lying and deception… pic.twitter.com/tU2tRS51Lr

— Maral Salmassi (@MaralSalmassi) December 21, 2024

[T]he practice of Taqqiye, an Islamic doctrine that permits lying and deception to advance Islamic objectives.

In reality, he is a radical Shia Muslim, as evidenced by his name and numerous tweets and chat leaks circulating on Arabic-speaking platforms like X. Disturbingly, his plans to carry out mass killings of Germans were brought to the attention of German authorities by a Saudi woman. Tragically, the police ignored her warnings.

The links are added in the thread.

Stay tuned.

THE E.V. BUBBLE CONTINUES TO DEFLATE: Toyota delays Lexus EVs until 2027.

NEO: About that David Samuels Piece — Obama’s “permission structures” seem to have gone awry.

But I don’t recall the public being in favor of Obamacare prior to its passage (see the early years in this chart). As for the Iran deal, also discussed at length in Samuels’ article, I don’t think the public ever bought into it. Only the party most faithful accepted any rationale for the Iran deal – and of course the ever-compliant MSM. So Obama didn’t enter into those things by convincing the public, whatever the media said and however the media helped. He accomplished them through Congressional machinations with the help of confederates such as Pelosi, and in the case of the Iran deal by ignoring any requirement that Congress approve it.

Biden was simply not as adept at any of this, even if he’d been in full possession of his faculties (which he was not). And although Obama was pulling strings behind the scenes, it was no longer working.

As with Bill Clinton having much greater political chops and charisma than his would-be successors, Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, the tactics that advanced Obama don’t translate nearly as well when the person behind the podium is Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.

ALMOST AS QUICK AS A TESLA: 2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 Claims BONKERS 0–60 Time!

LIMITED TIME DEAL: BISSELL Little Green Multi-Purpose Portable Carpet and Upholstery Cleaner. #CommissionEarned

UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY, COMRADE COWBOYS!

Exit quote:

(Image of Orwell in a cowboy hat created by Grok; text added and background extended in Photoshop.)

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 10mm vs .45 ACP for Self-Defense.

READER FAVORITE: Alpha Grillers Instant Read Meat Thermometer for Cooking Grill and BBQ Griddle.#CommissionEarned

DAVID SAMUELS: Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment.

During the Trump years, Obama used the tools of the digital age to craft an entirely new type of power center for himself, one that revolved around his unique position as the titular, though pointedly never-named, head of a Democratic Party that he succeeded in refashioning in his own image.

Just as in those commercially fed crazes, there was nothing accidental, mystical or organic about these new thought-viruses. Catchphrases like “defund the police,” “structural racism,” “white privilege,” “children don’t belong in cages,” “assigned gender” or “stop the genocide in Gaza” would emerge and marinate in meme-generating pools like the academy or activist organizations, and then jump the fence—or be fed—into niche groups and threads on Twitter or Reddit. If they gained traction in those spaces, they would be adopted by constituencies and players higher up in the Democratic Party hierarchy, who used their control of larger messaging verticals on social media platforms to advance or suppress stories around these topics and phrases, and who would then treat these formerly fringe positions as public markers for what all “decent people” must universally believe; those who objected or stood in the way were portrayed as troglodytes and bigots. From there, causes could be messaged into reality by state and federal bureaucrats, NGOs, and large corporations, who flew banners, put signs on their bathrooms, gave new days off from work, and brought in freshly minted consultants to provide “trainings” for workers—all without any kind of formal legislative process or vote or backing by any significant number of voters.

What mattered here was no longer Lippmann’s version of “public opinion,” rooted in the mass audiences of radio and later television, which was assumed to correlate to the current or future preferences of large numbers of voters—thereby assuring, on a metaphoric level at least, the continuation of 19th-century ideas of American democracy, with its deliberate balance of popular and representational elements in turn mirroring the thrust of the Founders’ design. Rather, the newly minted digital variant of “public opinion” was rooted in the algorithms that determine how fads spread on social media, in which mass multiplied by speed equals momentum—speed being the key variable. The result was a fast-moving mirror world that necessarily privileges the opinions and beliefs of the self-appointed vanguard who control the machinery, and could therefore generate the velocity required to change the appearance of “what people believe” overnight.

The unspoken agreements that obscured the way this social messaging apparatus worked—including Obama’s role in directing the entire system from above—and how it came to supplant the normal relationships between public opinion and legislative process that generations of Americans had learned from their 20th-century poli-sci textbooks, made it easy to dismiss anyone who suggested that Joe Biden was visibly senile; that the American system of government, including its constitutional protections for individual liberties and its historical system of checks and balances, was going off the rails; that there was something visibly unhealthy about the merger of monopoly tech companies and national security agencies with the press that threatened the ability of Americans to speak and think freely; or that America’s large cultural systems, from education, to science and medicine, to the production of movies and books, were all visibly failing, as they fell under the control of this new apparatus. Millions of Americans began feeling increasingly exhausted by the effort involved in maintaining parallel thought-worlds in which they expressed degrees of fealty to the new order in the hope of keeping their jobs and avoiding being singled out for ostracism and punishment, while at the same time being privately baffled or aghast by the absence of any persuasive logic behind the changes they saw—from the breakdown of law and order in major cities, to the fentanyl epidemic, to the surge of perhaps 20 million unvetted illegal immigrants across the U.S. border, to widespread gender dysphoria among teenage girls, to sudden and shocking declines in public health, life expectancy, and birth rates.

Until the fever broke. Today, Donald Trump is victorious, and Obama is the loser. In fact, he looks physically awful—angry and gaunt, after a summer and fall spent lecturing Black men, and Americans in general, on their failure to vote enthusiastically enough for his chosen heir, Kamala Harris, the worst major party presidential candidate in modern American history. The totality of Obama’s failure left party donors feeling cheated. Even George Clooney now disavows him. Meanwhile, Trump and his party are in control of the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court.

There’s way too much for me to quote here, so needless to say, read the whole thing. (If your browser has a reader view mode that strips away Webpage backgrounds, I would suggest using it, as I found the peach-orange background that Tablet chose to accompany Samuels’ essay to be rather hard on the eyes.)

Found via Mollie Hemingway, who tweets, “This Tablet magazine piece is the most brutal beatdown of David Axelrod and, to a lesser extent, Barack Obama — and their dystopic, authoritarian, and totalitarian approach to gaining and preserving power.” (Account names replaced by full names by me for ease of readability.)

DOES THE SUN MAKE NOISE? In space, no one can hear you beam.

IT’S 2024 — YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: The 25 Most Obnoxious Quotes of 2024. Including:

25) “You’ve heard the word ‘full moon.’ Sometimes you need to take the opportunity just to come out and see a full moon is that complete rounded circle, which is made up mostly of gases. And that’s why the question is why or how could we as humans live on the moon? Are the gases such that we could do that? The sun is a mighty powerful heat, but it’s almost impossible to go near the sun. The moon is more manageable.” — Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee

24) “I’ve been thinking that we really all need a tremendous hug in the world right now. But in our country, we need you to be Momala of the country.” — Drew Barrymore on Kamala Harris.

23) “The older I get the more absurd the concept of ‘dinosaurs roamed the earth until a great big meteor hit’ becomes to me.” — Candace Owens

22) “Right now, we have young black kids growing up in the Bronx who don’t even know what the word computer is. They don’t know, they don’t know these things.” — New York Governor Kathy Hochul

21) “Any man who has sex with women because it feels good is gay.” — Andrew Tate

Regarding that last quote, as always, life imitates the earlier, funnier episodes of the Simpsons:

PROTECT YOUR HEALTH, DRINK COFFEE AND WHISKEY: Commercial tea bags release millions of microplastics, entering human intestinal cells.

UNEXPECTEDLY! San Francisco’s new ‘weight stigma’ czar propped up by ice cream manufacturer.

San Francisco’s new consultant on “weight stigma” is a pro-fat activist promoted by the food industry.  On Monday, Virgie Tovar, the author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat, announced the new role with the city’s Department of Public Health to nearly 100,000 followers on Instagram.

“I’m UNBELIEVABLY proud to serve the city I’ve called home for almost 20 years in this way!” wrote Tovar, who describes herself as a “plus-size Latina author, lecturer, and leading expert on weight-based discrimination and body positivity” on her personal website.

Tovar released few details about her new role with San Francisco’s Department of Public Health on Monday, and the agency did not respond to repeated inquiries.

As reported in my new book out a month ago, Fat and Unhappy: How ‘Body Positivity’ Is Killing Us (and How to Save Yourself), Tovar is also one of the most prominent influencers for the fat acceptance movement with support from the food industry. In March last year, Tovar was featured in Dove’s “Campaign for Size Freedom,” a collaboration with similar influencers launched roughly 20 years after the company’s infamous “Campaign for Real Beauty” in 2004. The soap brand’s website characterizes the latest initiative as a “movement to end body discrimination” and lists the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance as a primary partner.

The San Francisco Chronicle notes that Frisco “has one of the lowest rates of adult obesity among U.S. cities, according to recent analyses that evaluated American cities’ health care, food, fitness green spaces. About 19% of San Francisco adults are obese, compared with 40% nationally.”

Those are rookie numbers, kid — and Tovar’s out to pump them up, bigly!

FASTER, PLEASE: Discovery of norovirus replication hubs offers new antiviral targets.

JIM GERAGHTY: We’re Already Talking about Joe Biden in the Past Tense.

You knew that Joe Biden was in rough shape. We predicted that after Biden left office someone like Bob Woodward or Robert Costa would reveal in some book, something along the lines of, “The president’s official health report said he was in fine shape for his age. But behind the scenes, Jill Biden, Ron Klain, and Susan Rice were deeply concerned the president’s health was rapidly declining, and that he would soon be unable to perform his duties.”

But the exposés didn’t even wait for Biden to leave office. And it’s easy to see Thursday morning’s 3,800 word report in the Wall Street Journal as just another edition of “Joe Biden was senile, and his staff tried to hide it.”

But it’s the details that really illuminate how, as Jeff Blehar wrote in one of his two blisteringly hot essays about this, “For four years, we have had a ghost as a president.”

* * * * * * * *

I’ve given Chris Cillizza a lot of grief over his 2021 CNN article that accused me and other Republicans of trafficking in the “gross, lowest-common-denominator politics that drive people away from public life” for daring to suggest that, as I put it, “something is wrong with the president,” demonstrated by Biden’s extremely limited appearances in public during the Afghanistan-withdrawal crisis.

In the meanest thing I can possibly do to Cillizza, I am going to quote him at length, from his explanation posted online on Thursday:

Not coincidentally, we’re already talking about the media that propped up the (p)resident in the past tense as well: 60 Minutes Reporter Who Told Trump Hunter’s Laptop Can’t Be Verified Afraid Her Industry Might Be Dead.

Like Biden, if only they hadn’t been napping for the past four years:

UPDATE: Scarborough’s gaslighting about Biden in March looks particularly horrific in light of Thursday’s Wall Street Journal article:

Is he slower? Does he move slower? Yeah, he moves slower. Is he stiffer? Yeah, he moves stiffer. Does he have trouble walking sometimes? Yeah, so did FDR. We get out of the Depression, we won a G.D. war against, against Nazism and, and, and against the Japanese.

But comparing that guy’s mental state — I’ve said it for years now: he’s cogent. But I undersold him when I said he was cogent. He’s far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he’s better than he’s ever been intellectually, analytically. Because he’s been around for 50 years and, you know, I don’t know if people know this or not, Biden used to be a hot head. Sometimes that Irishman would get in front of the reasoning. Sometimes he would say things he didn’t want to say. This is — and, and, I don’t — you know what? I don’t really care.

Start your tape right now, because I’m about to tell you the truth. And f-you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I’ve known him for years. The Brzezinskis have known him for 50 years. If it weren’t the truth, I wouldn’t say it.

—“Joe Scarborough: ‘F-You’ If You Don’t Believe This Is The Best Biden Ever,” Mark Finkelstein, NewsBusters, March 6th, 2024.

Related: Sleepy Biden forced grieving military families to wait hours — while he napped on Air Force One.

HOW IT STARTED: ‘When Hitler Isn’t Bad Enough!’ The Atlantic Ups Dictator Ante to Sound Alarm About Trump:

When it comes to the alarmist rhetoric from Democrat, the media and self-described anti-Trump “Republicans” who now only support Democrats, a lesson that should have been learned is “don’t peak too soon.”

Trump was laughably framed as “Hitler” and then “worse than Hitler” years ago, but now that the Republican nominee is leading in most (if not all) swing state polls with the election coming up quickly, something bigger is needed.

The Atlantic has served up another doozy for an emergency “when Hitler isn’t bad enough:”

How it’s going:

I didn’t have the author of Gulag: A History calling for banning free speech on my election year 2024 bingo card, but here we are.

NO CRIME IS TOO HEINOUS IF WOMEN FIND YOU ATTRACTIVE:

Meet the besotted groupies sending love letters, commissary money to accused United Healthcare CEO assassin Luigi Mangione https://t.co/XNpeEfQKFC pic.twitter.com/0GLIg4YJdK

— New York Post (@nypost) December 21, 2024

UPDATE (From Ed) To be fair, the Luigi Mangione fan club accepts members in all sizes — including supersized, as well:

Regarding the latter image, if you’re asking, “Why do they always look like this?” Ace of Spades has some thoughts.