TIM WALZ ON THE VIEW: Trump going to work at a McDonald’s was disrespectful to McDonald’s workers.
Also Tim Walz:
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
October 21, 2024
HOW IT STARTED: Endorsement: Karen Bass for Los Angeles mayor.
—The L.A. Times, October 13th, 2022.
Hot It’s Going: Editorial: L.A. is broke. And the budget crisis is self-inflicted.
Los Angeles is teetering on the edge of a fiscal emergency, with its finances in “dire” condition and no money to cover unplanned expenses after a series of lawsuit payouts blew a hole in the city’s already-tight budget.
So if you were hoping this would be the year that City Hall, in preparation for the 2028 Olympics, would get moving on smoothing busted sidewalks, fixing burned-out streetlights, trimming trees or any other public investments to make the city nicer for residents and visitors alike — don’t hold your breath.
L.A. is broke. Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council have to get serious about developing a plan to stabilize the city’s finances this year and for the future.
It won’t be an easy task. In just the first three months of the fiscal year that started July 1, the city is on the hook for $258 million in liability costs. The largest category of payouts — 40% — is related to Police Department negligence or use of force. About a third of the payouts involve personal injury cases from dangerous conditions, such as broken sidewalks and streetlights. Some 15% are employment cases involving harassment and other workplace conditions.
While the liability expenses are the immediate cause of the dire financial picture, the budget adopted by Bass and the council was already overstretched in large part because of expensive raises for police officers and civilian employees approved in the last fiscal year.
* * * * * * * *
And city leaders have to decide what are the core services that L.A. can afford to provide — or should provide. Public safety is an essential responsibility of local government, but what tasks can civilian employees do more efficiently so sworn police officers can focus on responding to and resolving crimes?
Easing homelessness is a top priority, but should the city continue to pay for social support, mental health and treatment services that are the responsibility of county government? What programs and services should be cut because L.A. cannot afford to do everything for everybody? And what basic municipal responsibilities keep getting reduced because the city isn’t being judicious in its spending decisions?
—The L.A. Times, Friday.
Gooder and harder, L.A., though there is a potential bright spot: Another Poll Shows DA George Gascon Is In Trouble.
As Tom Cotton wrote in late 2021: Recall, Remove and Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.
20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: Joseph Campbell: Surprises, outliers, oddities: What to anticipate in the campaign’s closing days.
- Speculation about an October or November surprise, which is an unanticipated development that bursts across the political landscape with potentially shattering effect. Bush’s drunk-driving case, made public by a television reporter in Maine five days before election, certainly was such a surprise. Bush adviser Karl Rove figured the disclosure kept Bush from carrying states that would have ensured him clear popular vote and Electoral College victories. As it was, the 2000 election pivoted on a prolonged dispute about who carried Florida, a dispute settled in Bush’s favor by the U.S. Supreme Court.
A more recent October surprise was the FBI’s announcement, just 11 days before the 2016 election, that it was reopening an inquiry into the private email server Hillary Clinton used during her time as U.S. secretary of State. Clinton later said the FBI’s renewed investigation was “the determining factor” in her loss to Trump.
- Persistent discussion about the campaign’s great known unknown, which is whether pollsters have effectively modified their methodologies so that surveys this year accurately measure Trump’s support. Polls in 2016 and 2020 underestimated his backing, resulting in back-to-back polling embarrassments.
Some pollsters thought adjustments made after the 2016 election would serve them well in 2020. That wasn’t the case. The collective performance of the polls four years ago was the worst in 40 years. If polls underperform as they did in 2020, Trump could be well-positioned to win reelection.
Polling’s known-unknown won’t be resolved till after the election. Even so, it has been a leading topic of discussion among pollsters and pundits for months.
As for what happens after election Tuesday in November, choose your adventure: Politico Loses It Over Trump Losing But ‘Taking Power Anyway.’
Four years ago, a sitting president — rejected by American voters — attempted to seize a second term anyway, plunging the nation into confusion, conflict and, in its last gasp, violence.
Now, Donald Trump’s political comeback has revived a sense of dread among the officials and institutions who stood in his way last time: Could it happen again?
Dozens of interviews with people deeply familiar or involved with the election process point to a clear consensus: Not only could Trump make a second attempt at overturning an election he loses, he and his allies are already laying the groundwork.
“The threat remains,” said Tim Heaphy, who led the investigation into Trump’s election subversion efforts for the House’s Jan. 6 select committee.
Conversely: Will Kamala commit to certifying a Trump win?
Should Trump win the election, we are sure to see a push from the Democratic Party and its allies in the media not to seat Donald Trump for a second and final term, invoking the insurrection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This would cause a constitutional crisis the likes of which the country has never seen and would likely involve the Supreme Court, which the media and Democrats have targeted repeatedly in the past.
If Trump represents the unique threat to democracy the left continues to claim, and if they truly believe he is another Hitler in waiting, a dictator from day one, to what lengths would they go to keep him out of office?
I’d say the two assassination attempts answer that question.
TO BOLDLY SMOKE WHERE NO MAN HAS SMOKED BEFORE: Break Time. “So I figured ‘taking a break’ would be a good theme to cover instead. Not only are we taking a quick break from artwork itself this issue, but we’ll be looking entirely at photos of other people taking breaks. Specifically, people on the sets of famous fantasy and sci-fi movies.”
THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Wicked — How To Tank Your Movie In One Easy Step (Video).
Flashback: In a 2013 post titled, “Alec Baldwin’s Real Twitter Problem Isn’t Homophobic Ranting—It’s the End of the Red Carpet,” Nick Gillespie wrote:
Remember the good old days, not just when there were only three national TV networks and one or two national newspapers, but when Hollywood studios could virtually completely control the image surrounding their contract players like halos on a saint’s shoulders? Those days are over, Baby Jane.
Considering the stars’ ability to implode their own projects (and their own careers) these days via their social media freakouts, I bet today’s studio heads desperately wish they could return to the good ol’ days of the iron-fisted Hollywood moguls.
UPDATE: Actress Playing Evil Witch in Wicked Melts Down Over Fan-Created Poster.
OUT ON A LIMB: Ben Shapiro says Harris passed over Josh Shapiro for VP because he’s ‘a pro-Israel Jew’ her ‘pro-Hamas’ voters dislike.
Prolific podcaster Ben Shapiro may not be related to Gov. Josh Shapiro, but he still has his back, telling The Post in no uncertain terms that Kamala Harris “100%” passed over the Pennsylvania governor in her veepstakes because he’s Jewish.
Backstage at a Young Republicans event at Ohio’s Miami University last week, the 40-year-old pundit pulled no punches in his assessment of Democrats’ treatment of Shapiro.
“Kamala Harris was forced to not pick a Jew. I mean, it’s that simple,” Shapiro said. “She didn’t pick Josh Shapiro because Josh Shapiro is a Jew.”
He’s unpersuaded by those who say she picked Walz because he’s a superior choice.
“Her attempts to pretend that Tim Walz is some magical, unimaginable, unspeakably great candidate over the very popular governor of the one swing state she absolutely, 100% needs to win are failing,” he told The Post. “That’s not why. She didn’t pick him because he’s a pro-Israel Jew and that’s just unacceptable to her pro-Hamas base.”
And what does that say about Harris herself? Kamala Harris, Iran’s Pick, Is the Wrong Choice for American Jews.
Harris also opposed the Israeli counterterrorism operation to root out Hamas in its Gaza stronghold of Rafah, which she warned would be a “huge mistake“—the very Rafah where Israel just found and eliminated the architect of October 7, Yahyah Sinwar. Harris has not only opposed successful counterterrorism operations against Hamas but has advocated negotiations with the terrorist organization which have gone nowhere. She has equally opposed Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, even though Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism and days away from nuclear weapons capability. She has also opposed placing the Iran-backed Houthis on the Foreign Terrorist Organization list and even denied the existence “radical Islamic terrorism” in the world.
Beyond the JDCA, Kamala has been endorsed by the most anti-Israel congressmembers, people like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who opposes supplying not only offensive weapons to kill terrorists but also funds for the Iron Dome Aerial Defense System to defend Israel’s civilian population. Harris has been embraced by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which is notorious for “spreading radicalization through the country through its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood—including Hamas,” according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Harris also wins the highest ratings from the National Iranian American Council, the lobbying arm of the Islamic Republic.
Iran itself has de facto endorsed Kamala by reportedly trying to kill Trump and steal internal documents from his campaign to share with pro-Kamala media outlets.
Since we’re on the eve of a potential de facto fourth term for Obama, flashback: How Obama Paved the Way for the Iran-Promoting, Israel-Pummeling, Squad-Like Biden White House. “Why would the Biden administration have so empowered Iran and its proxies, while putting the screws to Israel in the first place — helping create the conditions for the catastrophe that has unfolded, which could well expand into a regional if not world war? To understand all of this, you have to understand how President Barack Obama normalized the unholy intersectional progressive-Islamist alliance that has now come to dominate the Democrat Party, including this White House.”
So, for those keeping score at home, here’s the rundown:
- Kamala says she worked at McDonald’s.
- Trump says, ‘Yeah, no you didn’t.’
- Trump mocks her by working at McDonald’s.
- Kamala is offered a chance to actually work at McDonald’s and … doesn’t.
How hard would it have been to accept the invite and, based on your alleged experience having worked there, run circles around Trump? Wonder why she wouldn’t jump at the chance. If she held a similar event, legacy media outlets left and right would have fawned over it. It would have disarmed Trump’s line of attack. She could have even argued he was lying, not her.
But she didn’t.
You have to admit, Trump’s move here was genius-level trolling. And this is coming from somebody who initially thought the argument was a little petty and unnecessary.
It’s a microcosm of the election, really. Trump saw a chance to prove he’s more a man of the people and seized on it. Pounced even, as the media might say.
Harris was actually handed a chance to pounce herself and prove she’s not a cold and detached person who makes Hillary Clinton look lively by comparison, and she dropped the ball.
If you can’t make good choices when it comes to working at McDonald’s, how can you be trusted to run the country? Self-awareness: -500 points.
Related: Lefties Are NOT Lovin’ It! Here Are the Top 10 ‘McMeltdowns’ Over Trump’s McDonald’s Visit and LOL.
Most of which boil down “it was a campaign stunt by a politician.” And?
UPDATE: John Ekdahl writes, “My theory on the great liberal McDonalds freakout is this: Donald Trump is not allowed to have fun. Remember, he is the physical avatar of humanity’s cruelty, evil, and malice. The left has also spent a large amount of time, money, and energy though both media and legal campaigns, targeting his livelihood and even his personal freedom all to ensure that the man can never crack a smile again for the rest of his life. And then he did. While donning an apron and serving fries. They can’t handle it.”
NEWSWEEK HAVING A NORMAL ONE TODAY: Great Moments in Protection Racket Media: Attacking Mickey D’s for Hosting Trump. Ed Morrissey writes:
Alternate headline: Newsweek Digs for Literal Dirt.
Does Newsweek have a running feature on fast-food health inspections? Or do they only do that when Donald Trump charms a battleground state a couple of weeks before an election?
Trump, a big fan of McDonald’s food and a self-professed germophobe, wore an apron over his shirt and tie but did not wear gloves or a hairnet during his visit, stating that his hands were “nice and clean.” According to the Meidas Touch, he went straight to work without washing his hands.
Employees not washing their hands was one of the reasons that restaurant failed its most recent inspection.
I’d guess that, as a self-professed germaphobe, Trump uses enough sanitizer on a regular campaign day to render an entire city block bacteria-free. He might have even improved matters by shaking hands with the entire staff.
Put that point aside for right now, though. What does a previous health inspection for a locally owned fast-food joint have to do with this campaign appearance? Nothing at all, except that it provides a media outlet a way to make Trump look bad and to counter-act any positive impressions of the event.
Did that work? We’ll see, but color me skeptical, as the story reflects much more poorly on Newsweek than Trump, especially with this note:
Newsweek has contacted McDonald’s and the Trump campaign for comment outside business hours. This article will be updated if a comment is received.
Ahem. Was this news about a failed previous health inspection so important that Newsweek couldn’t wait until the business opened to publish it? Why not wait for a response? Did Newsweek expect to get scooped by the New York Times or the Joy Reid show?
Also today, after Trump appeared in a skybox at the Sunday night Jets-Steelers game in Pittsburgh, a separate young (also British-based*, curiously-enough) Newsweek scribe spent nearly 400 words to tell her readers, “Trump Appears to Post Fake Image of Himself as a Star NFL Player,” in the same obsessively dull police blotter-style journalistic tone:
Trump’s torso and arms also appear to have been altered to appear more muscular than they do in other photos and videos of Trump in sportswear, such as those posted by Trump Golf’s Instagram account in July.
According to an image detector search through “Is It AI?” the photo is 81 percent likely to be constructed by AI.
Another AI image detector site, AIimagedetector.org, also concluded that the picture was likely AI-generated, stating the picture is approximately 30 percent human and nearly 70 percent AI-generated.
Newsweek reached out to the Trump campaign for comment via email outside of business hours, as well as to the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Gosh Newsweek, you’ve got Trump dead to rights with this one!
(Also, an American football fan would have noticed that Trump’s AI image has him wearing the Steelers’ current jersey style. However, Pittsburgh wore their ‘70s-era throwback uniforms last night, which have a different font than the numbers depicted in the Trump AI. The Bad Orange Man might have convinced America’s voters that the Steelers drafted him straight out of Hamburger University if it wasn’t for that one key detail…)
* Old and busted: Make America Great Again. The new hotness? Make Fleet Street Fun Again!
AMAZON REALLY MAKES ONE STOP SHOPPING EASY! WaPo’s Favorite Environmental Group Uses ‘Political’ Research To Link Climate Change to Natural Disasters. It’s Also Bankrolled by WaPo Owner Jeff Bezos. “Bezos’s funding for the group, paired with the Washington Post‘s favorable coverage of its research, raises questions about the newspaper’s declared independence from its billionaire owner. The Post’s stories citing WWA do not acknowledge that Bezos—who purchased the paper in 2013, one year before the group’s founding—also bankrolls WWA.”
UNEXPECTEDLY: California Cops Are Finding Out Teslas Are ‘Nearly Unusable’ As Police Cruisers.
California is all in on an electric future, planning to ban the sale of gas and diesel powered cars starting in 2035. To get ready for this brave new world some police departments started with buying a few Teslas. These departments immediately ran into serious problems using the vehicles as cruisers, such as a lack of charging infrastructure, inadequate interior space, expensive and lengthy retrofitting processes, interference from advanced driver safety assistance systems and more. Police Chief Cedric Crook for the Ukiah, California police department told San Francisco Gate he doesn’t think the department’s Model 3s will see action any time soon:
The car has other issues, namely size. Tesla back seats “only have room for one prisoner,” Crook said, limiting an officer’s ability to sequester suspects. With an all-Tesla police force, Crook believes incidents involving more than one party will require more officers to respond with more cars, putting strain on resources, all because of the tiny back seat.
Police are often required to transport suspects, witnesses or victims for cases they’re working, sometimes for long distances. Crook remembered a case where his detectives drove 630 miles to Mexico to transport a potentially dangerous subject in their vehicle. If the detectives were in a Tesla, Crook noted they would have had to spend an hour in the middle of the drive at an unsecured public charging station standing guard over the person, something that would not happen with an internal combustion engine.
The answer here is obvious: Ford needs to start reissuing the mighty Crown Victoria, once the pride of police forces across the land.
BYRON YORK: As attacks intensify, Trump becomes more popular. “It’s entirely possible that wildly negative media coverage is actually causing many people to view Trump more favorably. After all, the media are some of the least-trusted institutions in public life, and if top media figures say something, millions of people are likely to think the opposite. It’s hard to see Trump-bashing as helping Trump, but that might be what is going on.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN 21st CENTURY PARENTING: Massachusetts parents sue school district over student receiving ‘D’ after using AI for social studies project.
The parents of a Massachusetts high school senior who used artificial intelligence (AI) for a social studies project have filed a lawsuit against his teachers and the school after their son received detention and a “D” grade.
“He’s been accused of cheating, and it wasn’t cheating, there was no rule in the handbook against AI,” Jennifer Harris, who along with her husband, Dale, are named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed in Massachusetts’ Plymouth County District Court last month against the Hingham High School administration and the school district, told Boston 25 News.
The lawsuit alleges that their son will “suffer irreparable harm that is imminent” over the grade that his parents say kept him out of the National Honor Society, which they claim is threatening his standing with top tier colleges.
“So, our argument to the school was could you fail him with a 59 instead of a 53 so he can have a B minus? He’s applying to top tier schools,” Harris told the news station. “He’s applying to Stanford, he’s applying to MIT. They see a ‘C’ [grade] and it’s going in the trash.”
Harris said that the school “basically punished him for a rule that doesn’t exist,” saying that the school’s code of conduct handbook never mentioned the use of AI in projects until their son was punished, WCVB-TV reported.
She added that her son argued “it’s well documented that AI is the property of the person who generated it,” WBZ-TV reported.
While the school called it plagiarism, the parents and their lawyer disagree.
“There’s a wide gulf of information out there that says AI isn’t plagiarism,” Peter Farrell, who is representing the family, told WCVB.
Your son isn’t the future Capt. Kirk besting the Kobayashi Maru test at Starfleet Academy. There may not be a rule in the handbook against using AI now, but there’s certain to be one very soon. And arguing that “AI is the property of the person who generated it,” is a reminder that it’s also the property of all of the Webpages AI trolls to generate its responses, instead somebody studying those pages himself to learn something. And while a lawyer can make the technical case that AI isn’t plagiarism, it’s an awfully lazy way to get around actually doing what in less enlightened times was once called “hitting the books.”
But as AI does to text what the pocket calculator did to math, look for more and more of reports of students relying on it to attempt to skate through doing their homework: How do teachers detect AI-generated work?
HEY YOU, WORKING THE FRY MACHINE! DON’T GET COCKY: The Chronically Underestimated Kamala Harris. The “caricature of Kamala Harris as a bumbling dunce makes it easy to underestimate her, particularly in the closing weeks of an exceptionally close and high-stakes presidential campaign. Harris’s past is littered with older and more experienced men who saw her as easy pickings and came up short on Election Day.”
WE’VE ENTERED SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Trump’s genius McDonald’s stunt will fry Kamala at the ballot box.
“Even if you flippin’ fries at McDonald’s,” Oprah Winfrey once said, “if you are excellent, everybody wants to be in your line.”
I thought of this quote when Donald Trump turned up yesterday at a McDonald’s restaurant in suburban Philadelphia to work a shift making French fries, then handing bags of food to drive-through customers.
As political stunts go, this might have been the best I’ve ever seen, because it served two very powerful purposes in the presidential race.
First, it reminded voters that his rival, Kamala Harris, has repeatedly boasted about having a summer job at McDonald’s to make her sound more relatable to her fellow Americans, but to date, not a single person has been able to verify this.
This is quite extraordinary given how specific she has been, with her campaign team stating that she worked at McDonald’s on Central Avenue in Alameda, Calif., in 1983 after her freshman year at Howard University, working on the cash register, french fries station and ice cream machine.
But then, she didn’t mention it in her memoir, nor does it appear on the 1987 résumé she submitted when applying for a position at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office despite listing her other work experiences.
It was like it never happened at all!
Even more intriguingly, the New York Times reported on Sunday: “In subsequent years, Ms. Harris talked so little about her long-ago job at McDonald’s that even some of her friends and close aides did not know she had worked there.”
Hmmm.
Forgive me, but I smell the same gigantic, disingenuous rat that Trump’s been smelling about Kamala’s supposed McDonald’s career move.
And it matters because it goes right to the heart of the Democratic candidate’s persistent pitch that she is the truth antidote to fork-tongued Trump.
If you’re going to position yourself as a bastion of honesty, you can’t tell brazen, self-promoting “I’m middle class just like you” fibs about working at McDonald’s.
McDonald’s issued a very carefully written statement yesterday, droning on about the unique American qualities of the Golden Arches:
Did you catch that, buried four paragraphs into the boilerplate?
Though we are not a political brand, we’ve been proud to hear former President Trump’s love for McDonald’s and Vice President Harris’s fond memories working under the Arches. While we and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early ’80s, what makes “1 in 8” so powerful is the shared experience so many Americans have had.
“While we and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early ’80s” is a polite way of saying, “In spite of our best efforts, and believe me, we really tried, because as a ‘modern, progressive burger company,’ we really, really hate the Bad Orange Man, but we couldn’t find any proof she worked for us, either. What was she thinking doctoring her bio in the age of the Internet?”
(And why is the Kamala campaign sending out a tweet under Tim Walz’s name rather having Harris out front and center to dispute this story and/or offer proof she actually worked at Mickey D’s?)
The other benefit of Trump working at McDonald’s is that’s causing the DNC-MSM to massively overreach (or to borrow from their vernacular when they report on the response of the other side of the aisle, “sieze!” and “pounce!”) in condemning a politician for having fun with an obvious election season stunt. QED:
BROKEN MEDIA: CBS's Caitlin Huey-Burns SEETHES over Trump workday at McDonald's, calling it a "political stunt" pic.twitter.com/djiD8zKvzf
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) October 21, 2024
As the Book of Saul tells us, “A good tactic is one your people enjoy. ‘If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.'”
October 20, 2024
SAY ANYTHING: Bernie Sanders On Kamala Flip-Flopping On Major Issues: ‘Goal’ Is To ‘Defeat’ Trump.
Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) admitted over the weekend that Vice President Kamala Harris is flip flopping on major issues because she is trying to beat former President Donald Trump, not because she believes her new alleged stances.
Sanders made the remarks during a Sunday interview with Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union” while discussing the state of the 2024 presidential election.
“In addition to the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-all single-payer for health care, and ending fracking, in addition to those being positions that you hold, Vice President Harris used to be with you on all three of them and now is against you on all three of them,” Tapper said.
“Is she making a mistake having reversed those positions?” he asked.
Sanders responded: “I think what we’re seeing is a coalition of people, more establishment Democrats and progressive Democrats and progressive independents — I’m the longest serving independent in American history — come together with the goal of defeating a very dangerous candidate. And that is Donald Trump.”
So it’s safe to assume that she still believes everything she espoused during the 2020 presidential campaign: Kamala 2020 Makes Obama 2008 Look Positively Right Wing.
THIS IS THE WAY: The GOP Makes Democrats Pay the Price for Trans Insanity.
There used to be a time when Republican elected officials and candidates shied away from talking about trans issues.
They didn’t want to appear extreme or intolerant. Why bother wading in to a fraught cultural issue when there were so many other things to talk about? Deferring to “medical professionals” or “the experts” seemed the easy way out.
Now, though, Republicans have emphatically found their voice. Across the political landscape, GOP Senate candidates are hitting their Democratic opponents on their trans radicalism and have them on the run, while the Trump campaign is pounding Kamala Harris on the issue with perhaps the most prominent ad of this election cycle.
The chickens have come home to roost, and they are apparently all cisgender.
* * * * * * * *
For the longest time, Democrats have gone along with the steadily evolving trans orthodoxy as established by the cultural Left. Existing in a bubble, they assumed that doubters could be isolated or embarrassed into going along and didn’t realize just how wildly out of touch they’d become.
For his part, Donald Trump is airing an ad during football games highlighting how Kamala Harris said in 2019 that she supported government-funded transition surgery for prisoners and detained illegal immigrants. As the ad notes, it’s hard to believe that anyone seriously seeking public office would advocate such a thing.
Now, in the final weeks of an extremely tight election, Harris and her Democratic colleagues are being held to account for their ideological excesses. They can cry foul, but they brought it on themselves.
As Roger Simon wrote in 2022: Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Big Lie to Sen. Blackburn Exposes Progressivism.
When Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) asked Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to define the word “woman,” during Jackson’s U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she got the response “I can’t.”
When Blackburn responded with an incredulous “You can’t?” Jackson replied: “Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.”
It takes a biologist to define “woman”? Does Jackson think we’re morons?
In a way, yes. Or she doesn’t care.
She’s a progressive, and progressives have been redefining language—English and many others—to fit their purposes dating back to the Spanish Civil War and undoubtedly earlier. (See Davis Hunt III at The Pamphleteer.)
Jackson very well knows what a woman is. The nominee has known this all her life, as we all have. But these days, in her part of the political world, she’s not supposed to.
So she lied.
She simply parsed her words in order not to offend a constituency that has become imbued with “transgenderitis.” By that I mean a group taking what we all know—that a small percentage of people suffer from gender dysphoria to a degree that they seek to change sexes—and extending it into absurd public policy for reasons of power and control and, ultimately, money, not to mention a completely distorted and harmful view of gender itself. (In this case, see swimmer Lia Thomas.)
Those with that form of dysphoria, as do all with serious problems, deserve our sympathy and support, but no more so than everyone else with difficulties.
Nevertheless, they’ve been singled out for now and are being manipulated and exploited by the left, just as many minorities before them have been.
The transgendered are the favored class du jour. Tomorrow—I’m sorry to tell them—it will be someone else.
The one-two punch of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissembling and Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman? documentary in 2022 should have been a reminder to the left at how over their skis they’ve gotten on this issue, but once the left collectively loses its mind on a topic, it’s very difficult for them to reverse course.
MCDONALD J. TRUMP: He Did It! President Trump Makes McDonald’s Fries (WATCH).
ICONIC 🍟 pic.twitter.com/TeSI0ffffO
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 20, 2024
Next up, the drive-thru: Trump Practices Drive Thru Diplomacy as Woman Begs Not to Let U.S. Become Like Her Native Brazil (WATCH)
“Mr. President, please don’t let the United States become Brazil!” pic.twitter.com/ZEgujQMS35
— Margo Martin (@margommartin) October 20, 2024
To be fair, this isn’t the first time Trump worked for McDonald’s:
Meanwhile, this is CNN:
Do they really not get it?
“It’s unclear why the former President has latched on to Harris’ McDonald’s employment”
Just. Wow. 😂 pic.twitter.com/hjb7qSj64i
— Spitfire (@DogRightGirl) October 20, 2024
Naturally, conservative media cannot penetrate CNN’s self-imposed firewall: The Washington Free Beacon first dropped the “did Kamala actually work at McDonald’s story at the end of August: ‘I Did Fries:’ Kamala Harris Claims She Worked at McDonald’s, but She Never Mentioned It Until She Ran for President. Did She Really Toil Beneath the Golden Arches?
I’LL TAKE THIS HEADLINE AS A EUPHEMISM FOR “SHE NEVER WORKED THERE:” McDonald’s branch swears employees to secrecy over Kamala Harris’s employment history.
UPDATE: Achievement unlocked!
PRESIDENT TRUMP:
“Now I have worked at McDonald’s. I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala. She never worked here.”
This whole scene is masterful. pic.twitter.com/BeUSQ4ebgb
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) October 20, 2024
OLD AND BUSTED: Nixon’s imaginary “secret plan” to win the Vietnam War.
The New Hotness? Obama’s imaginary secret plan to beat Covid:
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Embarrassment of Success (VIP).
If we want to abolish failure one must perforce abolish success. Then society will move into the sunlit uplands more slowly, but surely at the speed of the slowest ship, a convoy commanded by the right thinking. Success only makes future unfairness inevitable. SpaceX’s technical achievements are unleashing inequity on a cosmic scale. JD Vance openly proclaims, “I believe the destiny of this country is to conquer the stars. Whatever your views of Elon’s politics, this is something that should inspire all of us.” Can Vance hear how evil that sounds? Destiny. Conquer. Could the danger be clearer? SpaceX is extending settler colonialism to the universe, exporting “surfacism” to the new “sacrifice zone.”
Space colonization has been discussed as postcolonial continuation of imperialism and colonialism, calling for decolonization instead of colonization. Critics argue that the present politico-legal regimes and their philosophic grounding, advantage imperialist development of space, that key decisionmakers in space colonization are often wealthy elites affiliated with private corporations, and that space colonization would primarily appeal to their peers rather than ordinary citizens. Furthermore, it is argued that there is a need for inclusiveand democratic participation and implementation of any space exploration, infrastructure or habitation.
Unless the American billionaires are stopped the US will seize or claim the inner solar system before North Korea or Africa even put a man into orbit. Something must be done or success will unleash poverty — or so the argument goes. But then the question arises: why then do new industries arise without the intervention of government? Why doesn’t old wealth dominate forever even with the help of government? Could success be due to something other than ripping the poor off?
As Glenn wrote on Columbus Day, “Musk favors expanding horizons – economically, technologically, and geographically (cosmographically?) as humanity expands through the immense resources of the solar system. This, too, is anathema to the left, since socialism is always about dividing up poverty, never actually about sharing wealth. Churchill called it the equal sharing of misery, but that was actually overly kind – misery in socialist countries is never shared equally. The folks on top always do just fine. You couldn’t easily sell socialism in America when people could set off for the frontier, and you won’t be able to sell it when people can set off for Mars, the Moon, or the asteroid belt. Or even get steadily richer on the product of those who do.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN PERFORMANCE ART: Al Sharpton and Donny Deutsch worry they’ll be imprisoned if Trump us re-elected.
MSNBC host Al Sharpton and frequent guest Donny Deutsch expressed fears Friday that Donald Trump would place them on an enemy’s “list” if he was elected president again, suggesting imprisonment or worse awaited them.
Deutsch, known for his excitable anti-Trump screeds on “Morning Joe,” said Trump would put enemies in jail and there would be no free media in another Trump administration, turning suddenly to Sharpton and asking, “Are you worried, going forward, that you’re on a list if Donald Trump is elected? Yes or no?”
“I’m convinced I’ll be on a list,” Sharpton said, with Deutsch chiming in “I am too!”
