JUST SO WE’RE CLEAR: ThERe iS ABsoLuTeLY nO fRAud!

(Ransom note style intentional.)

NATIONAL PUBLIC RANSOM NOTE EDITING: See How NPR Hacks Hack Up Testy Interview with Ted Cruz.

IT SAYS “DON’T TRUST THE INTERNET OF THINGS:” ‘NotPetya’: Latest Ransomware is a Warning Note From the Future. Well, that’s one of the things it says.

THE “RANSOM-NOTE METHOD” and the Twelfth Commandment.

YAHOO NEWS CARRIES OUT A CHEAP #FAKENEWS HIT ON LINDSEY GRAHAM:

Yet another example of ransom-note style editing by a Yahoo reporter, who’s boldly going where former Yahoo newsreader Katie Couric has gone before. They’ve since deleted the tweet, but as Jonah Goldberg wrote yesterday, “You Idiot Reporters Are Making It Worse.”

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE!

So when you've worked on the producing end as I did in my former life, some things are painfully easy to spot when the post-edit is complete.

In this case, I counted 28 cuts in this 2 minute video. 28. In something this short, *maybe* you do 5-6 cuts max. https://t.co/2xS3cSacst

— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) February 21, 2024

I’m so old, I can remember when jump cut ransom note videos were strictly for when the DNC-MSM interviewed Republicans, not to get one of their own over the hurdle.

LIBS OF TIKTOK’S CHAYA RAICHIK DISMANTLES USA TODAY OVER ‘INSANE’ HIT PIECE:

It all started with USA Today “journalist” Will Carless and his article trying to tie Raichik and her tweets to threats supposedly made to people and organizations whose derangement Libs of TikTok has highlighted on social media. Carless asserts his publication “confirmed dozens of bomb threats, death threats and other harassment” that can be traced directly to Libs of TikTok posts starting in February of 2022.

And where did Carless go to get such confirmations? Media Matters of America, of course. That bastion of truthfulness. Media Matters exists as a welfare scheme for liberal writers who failed to succeed in any other profession. Hillary Clinton co-founded MMA, so that’s all you really need to know.

Back to Chaya and the hit piece. She actually agreed to be interviewed by Carless for his piece, and, smart girl that she is, recorded their call in order to have the “receipts” when he and USA Today inevitably tried to skew her words and use them against her. The hit piece hit the internet last week and in print form on Monday.

* * * * * * * *

This isn’t Raichik’s first rodeo, and she went in prepared. She knew that Carless had already drawn a conclusion and found her guilty, but she spoke to him anyway. In doing so, she gave a masterclass on how conservatives should handle the mainstream media. They can’t be trusted to be honest brokers, so you have to assume their ill intent and make your own recordings any time you interact with “journalists.”

And that’s exactly what she did. Here are her receipts:

It’s important to remember that the hit pieces are already written before the media activists even reach out to you for comment. Nothing you say will change the article.

Here’s proof of @USATODAY leaving out very important context in their hit piece on me! Watch till end! pic.twitter.com/KFYGF4WMzS

— Chaya Raichik (@ChayaRaichik10) November 6, 2023

As Glenn wrote in the New York Post in September 2008, after Charlie Gibson’s interview with Sarah Palin was edited like a ransom note, always make your own recordings of the interviews.

REPORT: Trump releases audio that appears to refute claim he walked out of Piers Morgan’s interview over 2020 questions.

Turn the camera off,” Trump says at the close of the video clip as he appears to rise from his chair. “Very dishonest.”

But the audio of the end of the interview appears to tell a different story. The two men laughed and thanked each other, the recording shows. There are no signs of Trump’s storming off set.

“That was a great interview,” Morgan says in the audio at the end.

Trump agrees with a “yeah.”

“Thank you very much. I really appreciate it,” Morgan says.

That’s when Trump says, “Turn the camera off.” By then, the former president had already risen from his chair, according to his communications director, Taylor Budowich, who supplied the audio to NBC News.

Budowich alleged that the show’s producers deceptively edited the video by splicing the sound of Trump saying “turn the camera off” to make it falsely appear as if he made the statement while he was rising in anger.

As for Trump’s saying “very deceptive,” he made the comment after a frustrated Budowich called out Morgan for dragging out the interview and falsely and repeatedly saying he had one last question, only to ask more.

As Glenn wrote in the New York Post in September 2008, after Charlie Gibson’s interview with Sarah Palin was edited like a ransom note, always make your own recording of your interviews (preferably with video as well).

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: The Dalton Gang Shoots Itself.

Here is a link to the original text of the ransom note, which most of the Dalton faculty have signed. As Scott Johnston, who broke the news on his blog, comments:

The demands for additional staffers alone would add millions of dollars to Dalton’s annual budget. Siphoning off 50% of donations would dry up funding. Eliminating AP classes (referred to as “leveled courses”) would destroy college admissions. It’s not an exaggeration to say these demands, if implemented, would destroy Dalton altogether. According to insiders, much damage has already been done.

But if they don’t agree to the demands, what will happen? Don’t get me wrong, the protesters cannot be allowed to succeed. Yet if they don’t, knowing how insane progressives are on these issues, will they choose to destroy the school? After all, if Dalton is as racist as they say, how can they let it continue forming racist graduates to go out into the world and spread Evil?

Insert Kissinger joke on the Iran-Iraq War here.

ATTORNEY GENERAL BARR’S OFFICE SHREDS NBC’S CHUCK TODD FOR ‘DECEPTIVE EDITING’ OF BARR’S COMMENTS:

Todd focused in on the following exchange between Barr and [CBS News investigative reporter Catherine Herridge]:

HERRIDGE: In closing, this was a big decision in the Flynn case, to say the least. When history looks back on this decision, how do you think it will be written? What will it say about your decision making?

BARR: Well, history is written by the winner. So it largely depends on who’s writing the history. But I think a fair history would say that it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law. It helped, it upheld the standards of the Department of Justice, and it undid what was an injustice.

Todd only played the first two sentences of Barr’s comments where Barr said, “Well, history is written by the winner. So it largely depends on who’s writing the history.”

Given that NBC’s ransom note editing technique is now putting Barr’s exact quote into wider circulation, it’s a reminder of Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics: “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”

THEORDORE DALRYMPLE: Sacking Scruton — All too predictably, the British government dismisses the distinguished philosopher from an architecture commission.

Via what Stacy McCain has dubbed “ransom note editing” in an interview Roger Scruton gave to a publication he previously wrote a regular column for. Just think of a good chunk of British media as Labour Party operatives with bylines (and airbrushes) and it all makes sense.

YOUTUBER OUTWITS COMEDY CENTRAL, EXPOSES LEFTIST HOST AS MASSIVE HYPOCRITE IN INTERVIEW:

Posting a video to YouTube, [Avi] Yemini reveals that he set his phone down secretly and began recording the interview, knowing that he would be made out to look like a horrible person.

What he also caught on footage, however, was [Jim] Jefferies doing and saying things that degraded Islam that the left would be horrified by, especially in the wake of the Christchurch shooting.

Jefferies draws the prophet, Muhammad, before calling Islam dangerous. He also said wearing a burka is stupid, and compared Islam to a dingo. Then proceeded to say that if a dingo ate a Muslim baby it would likely vomit it up.

Jefferies wasn’t worried about saying any of these things, as he openly admitted that he never looks bad in his interviews.

In September of 2008, after Charlie Gibson of ABC’s deceptively edited his interview with Sarah Palin, Glenn warned “Bring Your Own Camera.” Over the years, Comedy Central’s Daily Show slanted interviews with numerous conservatives so badly that in 2016, Megan McArdle, now with the Washington Post, was succinct: “Don’t Ever Appear on ‘The Daily Show.’”

Not without your own recording to allow others to see how the ransom notes are cut together, that is.

“POLITICO’S OUTKICK [THE COVERAGE] FABRICATION SPEAKS VOLUMES:”

I did what I could to answer Ben Strauss’ questions as well as I could, while still producing, occasionally popping on air when Clay asked me a question, and handling the phone calls. This was by no means me sitting in front of an interviewer, but Strauss relentlessly grilled me on all aspects of Outkick, my politics, and Clay’s brand of entertainment.

If you read the Politico article, you’ll notice he quoted me several times in the roughly 4500 word piece. I probably spoke over ten thousand to him myself, but he picked about six sentences. Before I discuss those, let me explain how the interview went down. I can’t accurately describe how many times I was asked some variation of this question:

So, did Clay Travis make a conscious decision to appeal to the right for monetary and celebrity purposes?

It wouldn’t just come as a question, as it would also include something like, “I mean you guys know what you’re doing, and it’s clearly working for you, but this was intentional, right?” That’s paraphrasing, but he felt the need to make up quotes and insinuations from me, so I’ll do the same to him. But, I’ll be courteous enough to admit it, and also won’t take him out of context, as he did to me.

I refused to give him the answer he walked in the door craving. This guy had an agenda, he had his title picked out, he had his “gotcha” piece scripted out in his head before he ever shook hands with either one of us this past Monday morning. To call this article biased and littered with manipulation would be a massive understatement.

Strauss would then ask the same question again, but with variance in the selected words, hoping I wasn’t educated enough to see what he was doing.

Didn’t you record your own copy of the interview? As Glenn wrote in the New York Post in 2008 after ABC edited a mashed-up video ransom note version of Sarah Palin being “interviewed” by Charlie Gibson, always bring your own video camera (or at least a digital audio recorder) to an interview. Just ask the folks who Katie Couric tried to gotcha last year.

And speaking of blasts from the past, Outkick’s Jason Martin writes:

Clay Travis isn’t alt-right in the least. I suggested to Strauss that I felt Donald Trump gave that incredibly small fringe movement a “wink and a gun” because he needed their support, and because he has no principles, merely interests. Correction, he has one interest, and it has five letters in its last name. The last four are “RUMP.”

Clay didn’t vote for Trump, and despite our many disagreements, he and I shared that in common. Never for a second did I consider Trump, and in fact as soon as he was the clear nominee, I officially registered as an Independent and removed the “R” from my name permanently. None of that matters to “journalists” like Ben Strauss, however. I’m alt-right because he and I wouldn’t necessarily vote the same way. I’m convinced most of the people that toss out “alt-right” like it’s a bodily function have no clue what it actually means.

Alt-right – for the media, it’s this decade’s version of calling everyone on the right “neocons,” ironically enough.

Exit quote:

Clay and I gave this man access, we answered his questions, we tried to ensure he had all the information he needed to write an article worthy of his time. He interviewed me, he interviewed Clay’s wife (and asked her some RIDICULOUS, uncomfortable questions about the family now being on the wrong side of history), and he even spoke to Bobby freaking Bones about Clay.

This is the behind the scenes account of how one writer came in not to learn anything, not to be objective, and not to write an intriguing portrait of a controversial public figure, but to try and find a punchline for his bad joke.

After reading the article, the punchline is actually the byline. Go figure.

Just think of Politico as being largely staffed by Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Women’s March Featured Speaker Who Kidnapped, Raped And Tortured A Man.

Hylton, along with three men and three other women, kidnapped 62-year-old real-estate broker Thomas Vigliarole and held him for ransom, before eventually killing him. As noted in a 1995 Psychology Today article, when asked about forcibly sodomizing the victim with a three foot steel pole, Hylton replied: “He was a homo anyway.”

Speaking about Hylton, New York City Detective William Spurling told Psychology Today: “I couldn’t believe this girl who was so intelligent and nice-looking could be so unemotional about what she was telling me she and her friends had done. They’d squeezed the victim’s testicles with a pair of pliers, beat him, burned him.”

According to that same article, Hylton delivered a ransom note to a friend of Vigliarole’s asking for more than $400,000, even though the victim was already dead by that point.

Well, when a Democratic president can get his start in Bill Ayers’ living room, there are no limits.

BREITBART.COM SHUTS DOWN ‘THE DAILY SHOW’ AT ‘GAYS FOR TRUMP:’

“I wanted to shoot raw footage of their interview with a young, gay conservative, because I wanted to compare it to their final cut and see whether they had been fair to him,” Pollak recalled.

“I didn’t want this person to be humiliated merely for being gay and having the ‘wrong’ political views,” Pollak added.

“They told me not to film, then they told me —incorrectly — that I couldn’t film them, and then one of their reporters pushed me. Finally, they gave up, packed up their cameras and ran away.”

Funny how a show infamous for its ransom note-style editing of conservatives, or anyone they’ve designated to be the daily straw man doesn’t like having their videos videoed. (See also: Katie Couric.) Or as Iowahawk tweets, “Alleged comedy show loses their shit after their ambush is ambushed.”

DOING TIME ON THE DAILY SHOW: Gavin McInnes explains what goes on behind the scenes, as the Viacom-owned show does “everything they accuse James O’Keefe of doing,” slicing and dicing footage and cutting in eye-rolling reactions from the host recorded after the interview is concluded, all designed to make the show’s conservative guests look as eeeeevil as they think their audience expects them to be, fresh meat to be “destroyed!” and “demolished!” by the host:

Though I’m confident I can discuss feminism and economics with clarity, I don’t actually know soccer players’ names, so when Minhaj asked me to name a few, I joked, “Bobby Daniels, Ziggler Norris, and a guy known to everyone as Junebug.” The last name was used to make it extra clear I was kidding. They had no idea. I know this because after the interview I told them they were made-up names and they were surprised. In the interview the correspondent was impressed with the names and called them “deep cuts.” In the edit they stick in a face where Minhaj sarcastically feigns interest like I’m an idiot. This is all over the interview. When you’re done talking, they capture a series of correspondent reactions they can put in later and they include this exasperated brow-pinching thing you do when you’re talking to a complete moron. On top of these edits, they add in voice-over where Minhaj can sound tough and yell, “You’re 0 for 2, Gavin” and “If you’re going to make up a name, you need to do better than Junebug.” Yeah, I know. That’s what a joke is.

Of course, the editing and voice-over are only the beginning. They had a team of researchers handling The Daily Show’s side of the argument. In the interview, the producer Stacey Angeles had her iPad ready to further Google any contradictions. “I want my information to be correct,” barked Minhaj at her when he appeared to be losing. His lap had a pile of notes on it, but they weren’t sufficient. They also had weeks afterward to carefully select a morsel that makes their argument look good. In the end, they were forced to pretend my joke was serious and put all their eggs in that basket. It was everything they accuse James O’Keefe of doing.

That’s been the experience of virtually everyone on the right who has appeared on the show, whether their interrogator was Jon Stewart, or current host Trevor Noah. In 2014, Megan McArdle’s assessment of the process was succinct: “Don’t Ever Appear on ‘The Daily Show.’”

At a minimum, as Glenn suggested in September of 2008 when Sarah Palin’s interview with Charlie Gibson of ABC received a similar ransom note editing technique, “Bring Your Own [Video] Camera” to have your own documentation of the interview, which McArdle strongly suggests as well.

RECREATE ’68! (PART II) VIDEO: Harvard students debate whether whites should kill themselves due to ‘[white] privilege.’

There’s a lot of jump cuts in the Drudge-linked post; and I wonder if there’s some “ransom note editing” going on to produce the desired result. On the other hand, regarding what can be heard, as Amy Alkon writes in linking to the clip, “If speaking comprehensibly is part of debating, this starts off with a fail.”

But in any case, haven’t we seen this all before? As veteran lefty author Todd Gitlin wrote in 1987 book, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage:

Over the next few months, Weatherpeople rarely surfaced among unbelievers. When they did, one of their themes was that all white babies were tainted with the original sin of “skin privilege.” “All white babies are pigs,” one Weatherman had insisted in Flint. [Feminist poet] Robin Morgan recounts that one day, a Weatherwoman saw her breastfeeding her baby son in the [radical journal] Rat office. “You have no right to have that pig male baby,” said the Weatherwoman. “How can you say that?” said Morgan. “What should I do?” “Put it in the garbage,” was the answer.

In a December article in the Politico, Josh Zeitz, another lefty historian, suggested that today’s “Campus Protesters Aren’t Reliving the 1960s:”

In some ways it is: Today, as in the 1960s, a collegiate generation raised with an expansive understanding of its own rights and entitlements is fusing macro political issues to personal, everyday experience and demanding changes both in the halls of government and in the college dining hall.

But there is a startling inversion of logic in the progression from the 1960s and today. Fifty years ago, college students self-identified with repressed minorities at home and abroad and demanded freedom from the shackles of in loco parentis supervision and stewardship. They clamored to be treated as emancipated adults and foisted on their elders a noisy and disruptive free speech culture. Today’s students, who are certainly no less politically minded than their forbearers, are demanding the opposite. Far from freeing themselves of stewardship, they demand faculty “create a home” in which they remain children in the protection of more powerful elders. They insist on protection from ideas and voices that upset them and require a nurturing and therapeutic environment that bears no relationship to the real world of politics (or, for that matter, of business, technology, art or culture).

Today’s protesters may think they are marching in the footsteps of those who came before. In fact, they are undoing much of that generation’s enduring accomplishment.

Perhaps – but they’ve sure internalized the radical racist vocabulary of their late 1960s predecessors haven’t they?

COMPLETE MORAL AUTHORITY: “What infuriates me is that idiots who can’t even get their facts straight, who play mix-and-match quotes in the process of assembling their ‘Ransom Note’ smears, nevertheless consider themselves so much my moral superior as to authoritatively condemn me based on their own ignorant misconceptions, and then act astonished that others don’t do the same.”

WARD CHURCHILL UPDATE:

The American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council representing the National and International leadership of the American Indian Movement once again is vehemently and emphatically repudiating and condemning the outrageous statements made by academic literary and Indian fraud, Ward Churchill in relationship to the 9-11 tragedy in New York City that claimed thousands of innocent people’s lives.

Churchill’s statement that these people deserved what happened to them, and calling them little Eichmanns, comparing them to Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who implemented Adolf Hitler’s plan to exterminate European Jews and others, should be condemned by all.

The sorry part of this is Ward Churchill has fraudulently represented himself as an Indian, and a member of the American Indian Movement, a situation that has lifted him into the position of a lecturer on Indian activism. He has used the American Indian Movement’s chapter in Denver to attack the leadership of the official American Indian Movement with his misinformation and propaganda campaigns.

That’s got to hurt. One can, of course, be of Indian descent without being an enrolled member of a tribe. Churchill, however, appears to have misrepresented his status.

UPDATE: Indian Country Today has much more:

Suzan Shown Harjo, a columnist for ICT who has tracked Churchill’s career, said that aside from the in-laws of his late Indian wife, he has not been able to produce any relatives from any Indian tribe.

Beyond the question of his personal identity is the question of his standing to represent Indian opinion, not only on 9/11 but also in his other published works. Mohawk ironworkers helped build the World Trade Center and other monuments of the New York City skyline, and one crew was actually at work in the flight path of the plane that struck the second tower. St. Regis Mohawk Chief James Ransom noted that they joined rescue teams at great personal risk.

Churchill’s other writings repudiate not only the U.S. but also most Indian tribal institutions. In one 1994 essay, he described tribal self government as a ”cruel hoax” carried out by ”puppets” of ”an advanced colonial setting.” He equated the status of Indian tribes in the U.S. to that of European colonies in Asia and Africa. His analysis reflected an extreme version of European left-wing ideology.

But wait, there’s more:

Far from suffering for his views, Churchill appears to have been sought out by many in the universities as a representative of American Indian thinking. But to many Native intellectuals, he is traveling under false pretenses, both in his ideology and his personal identity.

So Henry Farrell is rather wide of the mark (as usual) when he suggests that I’m being dishonest in noting that Churchill’s beliefs are representative of a depressingly wide swath of academia. There’s clearly a swath that prefers a fake Indian spouting extreme European leftism when it can get one, so much so that the spouter is actively sought out because of those views. That’s no surprise, of course, to anyone who has been paying attention to academia, which Henry apparently has not.

(Via View from a Height).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Boy, Farrell sure picked the wrong week to try to argue that support for hate-filled leftist stupidity isn’t really a problem in the academy. Churchill, after all, was an administrator at a major American state university. Now we have the ongoing problems at Columbia, a major private university:

COLUMBIA University is about to host yet another apparent anti-Semite. But President Lee Bollinger is still bent on saving his school’s image — rather than grappling with its real problems.

On Feb. 10, Columbia’s Heyman Center for the Humanities will host a talk by Tom Paulin, an Irish poet infamous for telling an Arab paper that Brooklyn-born Israeli settlers “should be shot dead . . . they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them.”

Paulin also says that Israel has no right to exist and that he resigned from Britain’s Labor Party because it was “Zionist.”

Of course, Paulin may be defended — if that’s the word — as a mere anti-semite, not an anti-American. Except that he seems to have a special hatred for American Jews:

THE Board of Deputies of British Jews is considering making a complaint to the police over a newspaper interview with the poet Tom Paulin in which he is reported as saying that American-born settlers in Israel should be shot dead.

Honestly, the problem seems hard to deny — unless, that is, you’re in denial. Hostility toward America, and the West generally, is far too common in the academy, and members of the academy not only aren’t doing much about it, too many of them are trying to pretend it doesn’t exist now that people are pointing it out. This is doubly ironic in light of decades of PC efforts to purge the adademy of “hate speech,” efforts which seem to be applied with a rather sharp double standard in which the likes of Paulin and Churchill are seen as “provoking debate,” rather than as practicing hate speech. This certainly makes it appear that some kinds of hate speech are viewed as acceptable, or even good. (Would C.U. have hired this guy?).

MORE: Matt Bruce says that Churchill shouldn’t be fired for his remarks, as that would be a violation of academic freedom. I agree, of course, but academic freedom is no guarantee against criticism. Whether his rather dubious status as an Indian is a firing offense is a different question, and I don’t know enough to have an opinion.

And it’s nice to see that Brown University is not only admitting the problem, but also trying to figure out what to do about it.

On the other hand, here’s another university shutting down efforts to help American soldiers.

BEN DOMENECH: Welcome to Word Salad City — the vibes are running on fumes.

Welcome to Thunderdome, or as David Axelrod calls it, Word Salad City. Kamala Harris’s closing argument played out in a CNN town hall last night, and it wasn’t much of an argument at all. On question after question, Harris reverted to talking points that often had little or nothing to do with the query posed to her. On the border? No answer on why the administration took so long to act. On taxpayer funded benefits for illegal migrants? I was a prosecutor. On a border wall? It’s a dumb idea that I now say is a good idea.* On taxes? It’s a very complicated situation. On food inflation? Greedy price gouging grocers. On her weaknesses? They’re actually strengths. On any mistakes she’s made? She’s very well versed on issues. On the one single legislative priority she’ll have as president? Here’s a list to rival the Cheesecake Factory. On the filibuster? Apparently it’s in the House now, and we need to get rid of it to have Roe.

Other than that, everything went off swimmingly.

So here’s what we’ve got: a candidate who really does seem to be incapable of finding her way into bettering her closing message outside of abortion abortion abortion and Trump being Orange Hitler.

This is really all they can come up with? It’s a decidedly joyless way to finish this race, and it has seeped into the minds of Democrats, frustrating their voters as they wish she’d come up with something, anything, to fire back at a Trump-Vance ticket that has settled into a combination of McDonald’s-style showmanship and savage media bashing that is comfortably in their wheelhouse. The late breaking anti-Trump stories aren’t making a dent, and the late night hosts can only do so much covering for her. As Mark Halperin has been saying recently: It’s no longer even a contest between which candidate is having more fun on the trail. And it’s not hard to see why:

* Ace of Spades notes that “The Biden-Harris Administration was so determined that the wall should never be built that they sold off extremely expensive steel purchased by Trump for the wall for pennies to make sure that it could never be used to build a wall:”

The Biden administration is quietly auctioning off millions of dollars’ worth of unused parts from former President Trump’s border wall for peanuts — in an apparent end-run around pending legislation in Congress.

Since April, GovPlanet, an online auction house specializing in military surplus, has sold 81 lots of steel “square structural tubes” — intended for use as vertical bollards in the border barrier’s 30-foot-tall panels — hauling in about $2 million.

On Tuesday, GovPlanet netted $154,200 for 729 of the 28-foot-tall hollow beams, sold in five separate lots for an average $212 apiece.

Thirteen more lots are set to be auctioned on Aug. 23 and Aug. 30.

But just last month, as part of its annual defense appropriations package, the Democrat-led Senate passed a Republican-sponsored bill aimed at forcing Biden to stem the worsening migrant crisis at the US-Mexico border by extending the wall.

Up to $300 million worth of taxpayer-funded wall components have been left to rust since Biden came to office, Republicans have said.

* * * * * * * * *

And while the lot listings scrupulously avoid identifying the tubes’ original purpose, viewers of the company’s Instagram page weren’t fooled.

“Good for building a wall,” a user called honest_jake wrote Aug. 3 under a GovPlanet Instagram post touting the sale of “industrial steel tubing” — an entry that was deleted from the social media site Friday.

“Why don’t you put that up instead of selling it,” added Brian Prewitt. “This is why tax payers are just about done paying taxes.”

More from Jeffrey Blehar: Harris Finally Crashes and Burns on CNN.

But in all honesty I don’t particularly care about what Dana Bash thinks, save as a media barometer. Former Obama grand strategist David Axelrod, on the other hand, is a legitimately intelligent observer of politics and was perhaps the most devastating of all in his analysis, precisely because Axelrod still has the bones of an old-school Chicago journalist and therefore cannot bring himself to openly insult people’s intelligence despite his obviously close associations with Obama and Democratic politics. (“It was a mixed night,” he euphemistically summarized.) His review is worth both reading and watching:

When she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to word-salad city, and she did that on a couple of answers; one was on Israel, Anderson asked a direct question, “Would you be stronger on Israel than Trump?” And there was a seven-minute answer, but none of it related to the question he was asking. And so, you know, on certain questions like that, on immigration, I thought she missed an opportunity, because she would acknowledge no concerns about any of the administration’s policies. And that’s a mistake. Sometimes you have to concede things, and she didn’t concede much. But I’ll tell you something, John King mentioned Bill Clinton; no one’s going to be Bill Clinton, but you do want to relate to the people in front of you, she didn’t do a lot of that. She didn’t ask them questions, she didn’t address them particularly, she was giving set pieces too much.

Partisanship inevitably warps perceptions, so I consider it a valuable data point that Axelrod — whose politics couldn’t differ more from my own — saw the exact same thing that I saw. (He was far more polite and circumspect about it, naturally.) In a world where you should always strive to calibrate your own biases against reality, that’s a solid indication that Harris truly failed last night. Her friends could only bring themselves, out of charity, to characterize it as a missed opportunity.

When you’re a Democrat who’s losing your mouthpieces at house organ CNN in late October, you’ve got problems. (The cockiness, eschew it, etc.) Or as America’s Newspaper of Record notes: Frustrated Democrats To Consider Letting Voters Pick The Presidential Candidate Next Time.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Waking Up In The Wrong Movie.

The remarkable thing about the multiple crises facing Joe Biden is how quickly they’ve multiplied and worsened. These include, in no particular order:

the Mexican border problem;
the expanding war between Israel, Hamas, and possibly with Iran;
the gasoline supply disruption stemming from the cyberattack on the Colonial fuel pipeline;
economic trouble and warnings of impending inflation.

These sprung up in the first days of his term with an abruptness and progression that has taken pundits by surprise. The administration must have anticipated eventual problems would arise but not so soon nor from so many directions.

Not all of us were surprised, though even I have noted that it’s weirdly impressive how fast they’ve managed to wreck things:

The New York Times writes that the fighting in Israel caught Biden on the hop. Lulled by recent quiet in the region it did not seem a priority until all hell broke loose. “As spiraling riots, rocket attacks on Tel Aviv and airstrikes on Gaza threaten to escalate into a major conflict, calls are growing in the Democratic Party for Mr. Biden to play a more active role.”

They were also blindsided by the Colonial pipeline attack. CNN writes that “Biden administration officials have privately voiced frustration with what they see as Colonial Pipeline’s weak security protocols and a lack of preparation that could have allowed hackers to pull off a crippling ransomware attack, officials familiar with the government’s initial investigation into the incident told CNN.”

April’s dismal job numbers were also a total surprise. The administration had been expecting a boom. The NYT wrote that “April’s anemic job creation was so out of line with what other indicators have suggested that it will take some time to unravel the mystery.” It was so shocking that newsrooms had to junk prewritten articles announcing a Biden boom.

The progressives are hoping that the administration’s current woes are temporary in nature, that the misfortunes will soon wear away.

Yeah, don’t bet on that.

Plus: “Perhaps the biggest potential mistake the establishment might have made was that they overestimated the reserve buoyancy of the political system. With Trump gone they assumed they could rule as before, spend as before, lecture as before. Even Joe could do it. If Joe Biden’s woes are due to more than bad luck it, could be a sign that the design margin they had counted on for so long no longer exists.” They burned through that during the Obama Administration. Trump knew that, even if they didn’t.

JOE BIDEN’S UGLY BETRAYAL OF THE IRANIAN PEOPLE:

In the short time since taking office, Biden has already snubbed Iranian dissidents who courageously wrote to him from inside Iran, some writing from prison, urging him to maintain sanctions and other pressures on the regime and to provide support and solidarity for their democratic struggle. Instead, their message was received as an inconvenience by a White House national security team staffed with some of the regime’s leading U.S.-based apologists. The administration then quickly provided other sweeteners to the regime, including the lifting of sanctions on their proxy in Yemen, the lifting of restrictions on its arms buying and selling, the lifting of U.S. opposition to an IMF loan, and the neutering of a pro-freedom public diplomacy initiative from the State Department, which went overnight from being a popular source of information on the regime’s repression and corruption to the butt of jokes among Iranian democracy activists. The initiative‘s Persian-language Twitter account has had a steep drop in followers since the U.S. election because of its canceling of real-time statements about the regime’s human rights abuses in favor of promotion of the Biden team’s appeasement measures. When angry Iranians on Twitter pushed the State Department into taking a stand about the regime’s torture and killing of Behnam Mahjoubi, it only raised their ire by saying he was “mistreated.”

Biden’s decided U-turn away from maximum pressure on the regime to a posture of maximum accommodation has been accompanied by silence about the regime’s escalation of its war against its own people, and anyone else who is unfortunate enough to fall within its reach. Biden’s policy of appeasement has been accompanied by large increases in the number of executions and deaths in custody of political prisoners, the taking of foreign hostages for ransom, and threats to kill dual nationals like Swedish Iranian researcher Ahmadreza Djalali. The new administration has, in effect, taken every opportunity to demonstrate to Iran’s thuggish theocracy that it will give in, even signaling that the regime’s holding of American hostages will not be an impediment to negotiations on the nuclear program.

The results of this policy of accommodation are clear. Khamenei has not hesitated to respond by intensifying belligerence by the Islamic Republic’s proxies, who shell American troops in Iraq. America’s other leading adversaries, particularly China and Russia, are also taking note; they do not expect to be confronted for their aggressions and can more easily plot to fill the vacuum left by the United States in the Middle East.

Earlier: ecological Terrorism: Iran Behind Major Oil Spill Off Israel’s Coast.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Greta Thunberg tells cheering crowd ‘we will make sure we put world leaders against the wall’ if they do not tackle global warming as she attends climate protest in Turin.

Who is “We?” In any case, I eagerly await Paul Krugman’s forthright denunciation of this hateful eliminationist rhetoric. And as Glenn noted last week, “The mask sure has been slipping a lot.”

IMPEACHMENT CHARADE EXPOSES CAREER BUREAUCRATS AS DEVOUT LEFTIES: Conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell writes today on The Federalist that “what we’ve seen during the Rep. Adam Schiff hearings is that ‘experts’ in federal agencies exhibit bias and political philosophies of their own. They are not neutral.”

That shouldn’t have to be pointed out because, as Mitchell notes, “none of the precincts in and around Washington, D.C. are red. When the votes are cast, 100 percent of the precincts populated by large numbers of federal workers are blue. Every review of political contributions by federal employees reveals that federal employees give virtually no campaign contributions to Republican candidates.”

This is why the Reaganaut maxim “Personnel is Policy” points to what may well be Trump’s biggest tactical mistake — failing to install as many Trump loyalists as possible as political appointees in the highest reaches of the federal bureaucracy. At the very least, such appointees can recognize and disarm many of the bureaucratic IEDs set by careerists.

Careerists scream and yell endlessly that such appointees mean “politicalization” and “a return to the spoils system.” The reality is political appointees are a crucial tool for implementing the programs and policies voters endorse when they elect a president. The money saved by not having the maximum number of political appointees is utterly inconsequential compared to the costs of being constantly subverted by the entrenched bureaucracy.

HOPE HICKS DESTROYED RUSSIA COLLUSION HOAX, AGAIN: Congressional Democrats who thought former Trump 2016 campaign and White House insider would somehow revive the Russia collusion narrative got bumpkus, according to Margot Cleveland, writing this morning in the Washington Free Beacon.

Among much else, Cleveland reports “Hick’s responses during last week’s hearing also provided fresh insight into Trump’s behind-the-scenes response to news of Russian interference. Hicks noted that the campaign only ‘became aware that the Russian government was attempting to interfere in the 2016 elections’ when the story hit the press. The president’s former confidant added that any conversations she was privy to during the campaign concerning Russia interference in the election mirrored what Trump said publicly.”

Cleveland also helpfully provides in a separate piece the eight most VIP takeaways from the Hicks testimony and cross-examination.