I’M DONALD TRUMP AND I APPROVE THIS MESSAGE:
Bill Clinton: Laken Riley's death "probably wouldn't have happened" if the border had been secured by Kamala Harris.
He said this while campaigning FOR her. Lmfaopic.twitter.com/T5I65qpstm
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 14, 2024
VDH: The Strange, Mythological Campaign of Kamala Harris.
Central to Harris’s metamorphoses has also been her somewhat massaged biography. She often omits that she is the daughter of two PhDs, a Stanford professor, and a cancer researcher at UC Berkeley. Harris never really lived long in Oakland as claimed but grew up in upper-middle-class neighborhoods in university towns like Berkeley, Palo Alto, and an elite district of Montreal.
Harris, in the past manner of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, does not limit her fluidity to her bio but extends her makeover to the trivial, such as altering cadences and accents in efforts to sound somewhat more authentic to particular black, Caribbean, or Hispanic audiences.
For the first time in her life, Harris also seeks to cement her supposedly conservative middle-class bona fides by reinventing her past and present tastes and experiences. She claims she once worked at McDonald’s, but oddly cannot cite which franchise she worked at and when.
Harris insisted she owns a Glock handgun without specifying when and where she purchased it, to whom it is registered, or which model. Much less does she remind listeners that, as California Attorney General, she made it nearly impossible to purchase many Glock models. The once noted wine connoisseur now populist Harris now, of course, drinks beer on television.
During the recent slippage in Harris support, the campaign has issued a number of near-comical “working-class” commercials. Their aim is to regain support from blue-collar males, especially poor white men without college degrees. But such ads aimed at these constituencies are laughable, with actors caricaturing how elites imagine working males talk and look like when voicing support for Harris.
At times, Harris oddly thinks the best way to win back the male vote is to ridicule it. In a style reminiscent of Hilary Clinton’s disastrous lambasting of Trump supporters as “deplorables,” Barack Obama recently ventured out on her campaign trail to lecture supposedly naïve young black men not to be misled, fooled, or suffer from false consciousness into voting for a supposedly racist Trump rather than a progressive black female Kamala Harris.
Yet Obama, like Harris, is apparently completely unaware that wealthy coastal elites (the Obamas own three mansions in Hawaii, Washington, DC, and Martha’s Vineyard) convince few when they begin lecturing supposedly clueless working-class men, both black and white, on why they are being fooled into voting for Donald Trump.
All of those incongruities have led this week to “The Mid-October Democratic Presidential Campaign Panic Attack,” Jim Geraghty writes. “Again, does this mean Donald Trump is guaranteed to win? No. But seven swing states being neck-and-neck, three weeks before Election Day, is not where Democrats thought they would be. They’re sweating, and they have good reason to sweat.”
SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: It’s the 4th anniversary of the biggest lie the Biden-Harris administration ever told. It’s only gotten worse.
Three weeks before the 2020 election, the New York Post published its first article on the contents of Mr. Biden’s laptop. The report featured an email in which one of Mr. Biden’s business partners mentioned a meeting with President Biden. President Biden had denied meeting with Hunter Biden’s business associates while on the campaign trail.
Photographs later proved that President Biden had met with one of Hunter Biden’s business partners. In fact, everything on his laptop was authentic—and the FBI, members of the Biden-Harris campaign team and Hunter Biden himself knew it all along. Instead of squarely addressing the content of the laptop and telling the American people the truth, the Biden-Harris campaign developed an elaborate scheme to mislead voters just three weeks before the presidential election by pretending the laptop was Russian disinformation.
The American people understand it is not uncommon for political campaigns to spin negative stories, but this went far beyond spin. It was a lie.
Before the New York Post had even published its reporting, the FBI began to pressure Twitter and Facebook to suppress the story. Facebook restricted posts that linked to the story to ensure fewer people saw the content. Twitter completely banned links to the report and shut down the New York Post’s Twitter account entirely. The Post’s account remained censored for 16 days.
Flashbacks:
● Poll: Majority of Americans Say Big Tech Censorship of Hunter Laptop Story Interfered With Election.
● The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.
● Finally, return with us to the crazy week that the Post’s laptop story broke and this banger of an exchange:
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
Shot: The End of the Kamala Harris Media Honeymoon: Whose Fault Is It?
—Ward Clark, RedState, Saturday.
Chaser: Time magazine owner calls out Kamala Harris for turning down multiple interview requests.
The owner of Time magazine called out Vice President Kamala Harris for turning down multiple interview requests with the prominent publication as the campaign for the White House enters the homestretch.
Marc Benioff, who has owned Time since 2018, criticized the Democratic nominee on Sunday while pointing out that ex-President Donald Trump and President Biden — before he dropped out — both sat down for interviews during their campaigns.
“Despite multiple requests, TIME has not been granted an interview with Kamala Harris — unlike every other Presidential candidate,” tweeted Benioff, who is best known as the founder of Salesforce.com.
—David Propper, the New York Post, today.
If you’re a Democratic Party presidential candidate who can’t sit down for an interview with one of your most reliable house organs (to the point where Time magazine explicitly declared both Barack Obama in 2008 and Joe Biden in 2020 as being the next FDR), you’ve got serious communication issues. Why is she so bad at this stuff?
WHY ON EARTH IS THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS PRO-VENEZUELAN GANGS? J.D. Vance Destroys ABC News Anchor for Downplaying Immigrant Gang Violence.
Raddatz: "The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes… A handful!"@JDVance: "Do you hear yourself? Only a handful of apartment complexes were taken over by Venezuelan gangs and Donald Trump is the problem and not Kamala Harris' open border?"
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 13, 2024
I can’t imagine George’s former(?) boss agreeing with this policy:
As we’ve noted before, Bill’s clip from 1995, and other past clips from Democrat grandees such as Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama with similar messages should be running in Trump adds with an “I’m Donald Trump, and I approve this message” tag tacked on.
More: The guild protects its own:
“CAN I GET ME A HUNTING LICENSE HERE?” THE NEXT GENERATION: Hunters laugh off the Harris-Walz campaign effort to win their vote.
Avid outdoorsmen are slamming a new political coalition formed by the Harris-Walz campaign aimed at winning their vote in the 2024 presidential election.
“Hunters and anglers want to support Harris-Walz as much as the fish and game want to be eaten,” one Maryland-based hunter who recently bagged a state record bear chuckled to The Spectator.
Governor Tim Walz kicked off the “Hunters and Anglers for Harris-Walz” group on Friday with an article placed in Outdoor Life magazine. The coalition is described as “a new national organizing program to engage, mobilize a broad coalition of sportspeople, conservationists and rural and gun violence prevention voters in key states across the country.” They will have a national organizing call next week, but the campaign has not indicated which prominent hunters and anglers will be a part of the coalition.
Some hunters and anglers are already reacting negatively to the campaign’s plan, pointing out that Harris and Walz have supported gun control measures and that the Biden-Harris administration has made life more difficult for hunters and anglers.
Gabriella Hoffman, the director of the Center for Energy and Conservation at Independent Women’s Forum and host of the District of Conservation podcast, quipped that “No $40 camo hat will convince most sportsmen and women that Harris-Walz represents them.”
But then, maybe it’s not intended to:
In any case, Kamala’s outreach to men may have just been derailed by Gwen Walz’s schoolmarm hectoring to Kamala’s base:
Gwen Walz has an assignment for you 👩🏫 pic.twitter.com/tTBZPJxsjs
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 13, 2024
Exit quote: “What the heck? Too much of the fumes from those burning tires during the riots? Maybe she should have closed the windows.”
SOMETIMES THE LEFT HAND DOESN’T KNOW WHAT THE FAR LEFT HAND IS DOING: Tensions rise between Harris and Biden teams as election nears.
The relationship between Kamala Harris‘ team and Joe Biden‘s White House has been increasingly fraught in the final weeks before Election Day, 10 people familiar with the situation tell Axios.
Why it matters: Biden’s team wants Harris to win the election, but many senior Biden aides remain wounded by the president being pushed out of his re-election bid and are still adjusting to being in a supporting role on the campaign trail.
- “They’re too much in their feelings,” one close Harris ally said of the president’s team — a sentiment shared even by some White House aides.
Driving the news: Some on the Harris team say that top White House aides aren’t sufficiently coordinating Biden’s messaging and schedule to align with what’s best for the vice president’s campaign.
Biden gave an impromptu press conference in the White House briefing room Friday just as Harris was about to do an event in Michigan, ensuring that her event would get less TV coverage than it otherwise would have.
Earlier in the week, Harris criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) for not taking her call about the recent hurricanes, only for Biden to praise DeSantis soon after for being “gracious” and “cooperative.” (A person familiar with the situation told Axios that Biden hadn’t been briefed on Harris’ comments.)
Biden has been eager to boast about a robust jobs report, helping to end the strike by the longshoremen’s union and other perceived victories recently. Harris has been trying to focus on voters’ pocketbook concerns, including inflation.
One person involved with Harris’ campaign told Axios: “The White House is lacking someone in the room thinking first and foremost about how things would affect the campaign.”
Dr. Jill, channeling Edith Wilson, smiles.
DELETE THIS MESSAGE: Review: The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
The scandal of the book—and the reason Tony Dokoupil of CBS wasn’t simply justified in challenging Coates in a recent interview but had a duty to challenge him—is that Coates never mentions Palestinian terrorism. An unobservant or gullible person could read The Message and have no idea that the Israeli soldiers’ vigilance is a consequence of Palestinians’ notable tendency to lunge at Jews with knives, self-detonate in crowded areas, and otherwise maim and murder innocents. Coates doesn’t mention the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, or any other act of Palestinian terrorism. Nor does he wonder why, although more than two million Arabs are citizens of Israel, few if any Jews are citizens of Arab countries.
With The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates has become a clownish, postmodern Walter Duranty. Duranty, recall, was the prize-winning Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times who deliberately misled the American public about Soviet crimes. Only Coates isn’t misleading anybody. And Duranty, for all his sins, could write.
Basil Fawlty smiles — finally someone took his advice: “Just don’t mention the war.”
UNEXPECTEDLY: America’s New Millionaire Class: Plumbers and HVAC Entrepreneurs. Private equity is pouring money into skilled-trade small businesses; ‘Next thing you know, you’re running an empire.’
Aaron Rice has two logos tattooed on his left leg: one from the plumbing business he co-founded more than a decade ago, and another from the private-equity-backed company that recently bought it.
Few businesses are as vital to their customers as local plumbing, heating or air-conditioning companies—especially in places like Tucson, Ariz., where Rice works and residents sweltered in 100-degree heat most days this summer.
For years, Rice, 43 years old, was skeptical when out-of-state investors offered to buy his company. He assumed most of them knew little about skilled-trade work or his customers. They were just looking to make a buck. But in 2022, when approached by a local HVAC company backed by private equity, he changed his mind, figuring that they knew the business.
“The trades are hard work. A lot of today’s society, picking up a shovel is foreign to them,” he says.
Private equity, however, is no foreign player in the skilled trades these days. PE firms across the country have been scooping up home services like HVAC—that is, heating, ventilation and air conditioning—as well as plumbing and electrical companies. They hope to profit by running larger, more profitable operations.
Their growth marks a major shift, taking home-services firms away from family operators by offering mom-and-pop shops seven-figure and eight-figure paydays. It is a contrast from previous generations, when more owners handed companies down to their children or employees.
The wave of investment is minting a new class of millionaires across the country, one that small-business owners say is helping add more shine to working with a tool belt.
“You don’t need to go to Silicon Valley to have a successful career and entrepreneurial opportunities,” says Brian Rassel, a partner at the Detroit-based Huron Capital, which focuses on investments in service companies.
As Glenn wrote in the New York Post in January: The white-collar class derided mass layoffs among the blue-collar workers. It’s about to feel their pain.
People losing their jobs to AI is just the tip of the iceberg.
In the next decade, lots more people — possibly (gulp) including professors like me — will be facing potential replacement by machines.
It turns out that using your brain and not your hands isn’t as good a move as it may have once seemed.
People who work with their hands have some advantages.
If you want something done in the material world, you still need people.
(I replaced a toilet seat some time back while pondering these issues and reflected that neither an AI nor a worker in Bangalore could have taken that job.)
A lot of young Americans, especially males, are forgoing traditional college to enter the trades, as welders, plumbers, HVAC technicians and the like.
That’s probably smart. AI won’t be able to replace those jobs.
As Brian Wang notes, robots probably will, one day — but that day is nowhere near as close.
Elon Musk’s new Optimus robots may speed its arrival up, but likely not for at least several years into the future.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD HAS A QUESTION (Video):
Are YOU man enough to vote for Kamala Harris? pic.twitter.com/qCyWGhcEH0
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 12, 2024
ONE MAN’S TERRORIST IS ANOTHER MAN’S FREEDOM FIGHTER, SLIGHT RETURN: CBS News Told Staffers Not To Refer to Hamas as ‘Terrorists.’
CBS News executives cautioned their journalists against referring to Hamas members as “terrorists” in a memo issued the day after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, according to the Free Press. It’s the latest embarrassment for the news organization, which is in turmoil amid a daily drip of disclosures about institutionalized anti-Israel bias as well as anti-Trump bias.
Thursday night, the Free Press published an excerpt of an email sent to reporters on October 8, 2023, with the subject, “Standards guidance: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”
“Reporting on this weekend’s violence in Israel and Gaza requires a closer look at the language we use when describing events,” the email stated. “For instance, the U.S. government considers Hamas a terrorist organization; however, suggesting an individual is a ‘terrorist’ may be inaccurate depending on the facts.”
The email also noted there are disagreements over whether the attack was “justified” in response to “Israeli occupation of their lands.” The message then said there are “others” who “believe this to be an unprovoked attack on Israel and, as such, Israel has every right to defend itself.”
A source with knowledge of the situation confirmed the guidance to the Sun. They said the goal of the guidance is to avoid generalizations about people in Gaza, such as labeling a doctor or nurse with the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry a terrorist without information they engaged in terrorism.
However, even the left-leaning Council on Foreign Relations notes Hamas has “put in place authoritarian institutions” that leave little room for flexibility or the ability to operate independently. Those who step out of line can face harsh punishments.
Additionally, the Israel Defense Forces have released video footage as evidence that Hamas has used civilian infrastructure such as hospitals as “command and control” centers and even possibly to hold hostages from the October 7 attack.
CBS News did not comment on the guidance.
As T. Becket Adams of NRO adds: CBS Makes a Mockery of ‘Standards.’
As incomprehensible as CBS’s approach to these back-to-back issues may be, one should not be surprised. This is hardly the first time the network has played fast and loose with its own unique and, apparently, proprietary set of journalism standards.
Recall that Gayle King, a news anchor, ruffled no feathers on May 26, 2020, when she declared following the death of George Floyd, “I am speechless. I am really, really speechless about what we’re seeing on television this morning. It feels to me like open season . . . and that sometimes it’s not a safe place to be in this country for black men.”
This pronouncement cleared the network’s bar for “impartiality”? Or did management reason that King was exempted from the usual standards regarding personal commentary because she is black, and the news upon which she was commenting involved a black man? If so, does this courtesy not extend to Dokoupil, who, as a Jew, might have a valuable perspective on matters affecting the life and death of Jews, as King presumably did for blacks?
And what are we to make of King’s CBS Mornings interview of the Israeli father of a child taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, in which she said, “Now this seems to be all about politics. What do you say about that? You know, you have innocent children and Palestinians who are dying, innocent Israeli children who are dying. And no one seems to be able to say, ‘Enough, stop that.’” To this, Tom Hand replied, in a tone of anguished exasperation, that he didn’t care about politics, he just wanted his Emily back. CBS’s Standards and Practices and Race and Culture units had nothing to say about this interaction? No all-hands reprimand for King’s “tone”?
The Dokoupil saga will likely get dumber before it eventually blows over. But let’s not lose sight of the big question underlying it. CBS executives claim Dokoupil failed to meet their exacting standards of journalistic excellence. They say this even though his colleagues have grilled guests with objectively inappropriate lines of questions, with zero internal pushback. These executives say this even as 60 Minutes openly violates the network’s interview production and editing standards, with zero explanation or defense provided.
All of this goes back to the underlying question: What standards?
It’s the Calvinball Broadcasting System. But is the clock ticking on its current woke insanity? The joke is on woke CBS News execs as new execs considering ‘blowing the place up.’
What is less public is how all this weirdness is impacting CBS’s future as an ongoing business, and most important, its pending sale to Skydance, an independent studio run by movie producer David Ellison of “Top Gun: Maverick” fame.
David’s dad, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, provides much of the money behind the deal and from what I gather, he’s not too happy about his latest acquisition.
If you don’t know Larry, here’s a primer: He’s one of the world’s richest men, and one of the most pro-Israel executives in corporate America — he’s buds with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.
Let’s just say the people at Skydance and the Ellisons read the newspapers (particularly The Post, which I know for a fact).
They are powerless to do anything about what’s happening at CBS for now; the $28 billion deal to buy the network’s parent Paramount from the controlling Redstone family doesn’t close until sometime in the spring.
But they won’t be powerless for much longer. As one person who knows all the players at CBS’s new owners told me: “They’re thinking about blowing the place up.”
What exactly “blowing the place up” means, no one knows for sure. Will it result in the defenestration of CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon and news-gathering chief Adrienne Roark, both of whom presided over the in-house thrashing of Dokoupil?
Hopefully Ellison won’t be as hands off in shaping CBS News as Jeff Bezos has been while the Washington Post spiraled out of control.
(Classical reference in headline.)
TO BE FAIR, SHE’S ALWAYS BEEN PRO-BUSSING: The Univison Town Hall Imploding: They Flew in Audience Members.
[Michael Tracey] investigated Univision’s “town hall” and found half of the audience was flown in at the network’s expense, while the other half was brought in by a rent-an-audience company called FansOnQ.
It turns out, some “undecided” voters admitted to being Kamala Harris supporters.
“I already knew I was going to go for Kamala before the event, and now that just kind of solidified it… part of the reason I wanted to go was just fully support her,” one respondent said.
Everything about the Harris campaign is *FAKE.*
Worse than that, the U.S. and international media are helping her to fake it. This is Mexican collusion to commit election interference.
Tracey adds:
Tracey tried to interview some of the attendees:
However, a corporate dictate apparently came down prohibiting this. “We won’t be making them available,” Anna Negron, Director of Corporate Communications at TelevisaUnivision, told me when I asked if there would be an opportunity to interview said audience members. She would not elaborate on the reason for this strange secrecy. Reporter Mark Kellner of the New York Post asked Negron the same question, and was similarly dismissed.
“Gee, I wonder why,” Townhall’s Matt Vespa writes, adding, “We made fun of the fact that a teleprompter was in view during this event, which wouldn’t shock us since the vice president is a disaster without a script. Supposedly, that’s been debunked; she wasn’t using such a device for this event, but this revelation is frankly much worse.”
HEY, CONSIDERING HOW THE WOKE LEFT BEATS HIM UP EVERY YEAR AT THIS TIME, CAN YOU BLAME HIM? Christopher Columbus was secretly Jewish. DNA tests suggest explorer hid true identity due to rampant anti-Semitism across Europe.
Finally, the long-awaited Tucker Carlson interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates has a topic to explore!
UPDATE: Heh, indeed:
North Jersey residents might want to give the Gualtieri Crew a particularly wide berth right now:
https://t.co/McqJCOiSkc pic.twitter.com/bAGNKN4ZTw
— Dean Clark (@earldean71) October 13, 2024
OLD AND BUSTED: “Can I get me a hunting license here?”
—John Kerry, October 2004.
The New Hotness?
The really good hunters are able to stalk and strangle pheasants. https://t.co/la5ueTNjz6
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) October 12, 2024
C’mon — it’s 2024; Walz bags pheasants by aiming mental death rays at them, Sheldon Cooper-style:
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Obama Is Blaming Black Men for the Democratic Party’s Failures.
In both 2008 and 2012, I was proud to be an Ohio delegate for President Barack Obama. So I was shocked to hear what former President Obama had to say while speaking to Black men during a surprise visit to Vice President Kamala Harris‘ campaign field office in Pittsburgh.
His words made my jaw hit the floor. In fact, they made my blood boil.
President Obama had some choice words for the enthusiasm gap for Vice President Harris specifically when it comes to Black men. “My understanding, based on reports I’m getting from campaigns and communities, is that we have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running,” President Obama said, and then went on to lecture Black men about their lack of support for Harris. “Part of it makes me think—and I’m speaking to men directly—part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”
I was infuriated to hear these remarks. No other group of voters is talked to like this, as if they are children. But it’s not just the paternalistic tone that had me enraged. It’s the underlying message in his words—that Black men are misogynistic and can’t bring themselves to vote for a woman.
This vilification of our men is out of line. For starters, it’s false. Black men are socialized in the same patriarchal society that every other American man is socialized in, yet when Secretary Hillary Clinton ran for President in 2016, 81 percent of Black men voted for her, while only 32 percent of white men did the same.
As for Black men allegedly being so reticent to vote for Vice President Harris, her lowest numbers are with Black men under 50 years old—72 percent of whom support Harris.
If white men supported Harris at 72 percent, they’d be held up as an example of how men can support women. So why are Democratic Party leaders like former President Obama vilifying Black men?
It’s simple: The Democratic Party is setting Black men up to take the fall in case Vice President Harris fails to defeat former President Trump in November. It’s that simple.
Evergreen:
YEAH, THAT’S A TOUGH ONE TO FIGURE OUT: Why Kamala Harris won’t appear on Fox News.
Ms Harris’s approach to the media – seemingly to avoid almost all potentially damaging interviews and instead cosy up to friends and allies – reveals an interesting aspect of her electoral strategy.
The campaign has focussed on getting out the vote among groups it believes it has already won, such as Latinos and young women, rather than converting Republicans.
That approach has raised some concerns from Democratic strategists, who feel Ms Harris is not far enough ahead in the polls to take such a cautious approach to the media.
On the current numbers, almost all pollsters put the overall result of the election within the margin of error, and several sophisticated election models predict that Trump will win.
The question being asked in some party circles is whether Ms Harris will subject herself to an interview with the most hostile mainstream broadcaster: Fox News.
One strategist told The Telegraph that the question of a Fox News interview was under discussion among Ms Harris’s allies, amid concerns she needed to be “braver” about the media.
As seen in this week’s Power Line Week in Pictures, good luck with that:
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
"Just to be clear that's your team"
Boy, the clapping seals sure
went silent on that one— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) October 12, 2024
No, I have no idea who she is either, but Vanity Fair assures me that she’s most emphatically voting for more roof tossing in the Middle East: Chappell Roan Declares She’s “Voting for F**king Kamala Harris” Following Backlash.
Related:
DISPATCHES FROM THE “I’M SORRY YOU WERE OFFENDED” SCHOOL OF NON-APOLOGIES: Whitmer: I’m Sorry You Failed to Appreciate My Genius, Catholics.
At least Gretchen Whitmer got one political tradition right this week: the non-apology apology.
After participating in a weird submissive-porn version of Catholic communion, or just a demonstration of how Kamalites operate, the governor of Michigan has gotten a deluge of outrage and criticism. Catholic bishops in all seven dioceses in the state issued a statement demanding an explanation and apology for Whitmer’s campaign video for Kamala Harris and its “offensive impact” in mocking the Eucharist. Clearly, the bishops recognized the imagery Whitmer and Liz Plank used, since they see it every day in their own parishes:
The Bishops of Michigan have expressed their “profound disappointment and offense taken” with Governor Gretchen Whitmer for posting a video skit on social media showing the state’s Governor feeding a Dorito corn chip to a kneeling podcaster in a manner that is widely being perceived as a mockery of the Holy Eucharist.
“The skit goes further than the viral online trend that inspired it, specifically imitating the posture and gestures of Catholics receiving the Holy Eucharist, in which we believe that Jesus Christ is truly present,” said Paul A. Long, President and CEO of the Michigan Catholic Conference which represents the seven dioceses of the state, October 11.
“It is not just distasteful or ‘strange;’ it is an all-too-familiar example of an elected official mocking religious persons and their practices. While dialogue on this issue with the governor’s office is appreciated, whether or not insulting Catholics and the Eucharist was the intent, it has had an offensive impact.”
Indeed, although as I wrote earlier, that’s not all the video did, either. Whitmer role-played a priestess in a cult setting rather than make an argument for her preferred policy. Even without the trappings of Catholic practice, the video makes progressives and Democrats into a cult and its elected officials as idols to be worshipped, as Plank clearly demonstrated, rather than public officials to be held accountable.
Plus, if you believe the other interpretation, Whitmer and Plank used a submissive-porn motif to model what the two apparently believe is the proper relationship between elites and the masses. That’s “masses” with a small-M, of course. YMMV, but all of these interpretations could apply simultaneously … and probably do. (Read my earlier argument on all three.)
We need a complete and total shutdown of Michigan until we can figure out just what the hell is going on there:
Remember when Gretchen Whitmer called JD Vance weird? pic.twitter.com/rDVPcdIF3X
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) October 10, 2024
REPORT: “Massive” cyber attacks hit Iranian government sites and nuclear facilities.
As Middle East tensions rise, cyberattacks hit Iran’s government branches and nuclear facilities, following Israel’s response to Iran’s October 1 missile barrage.
Amid escalating Middle East tensions, Iran faced major cyberattacks Saturday, disrupting its government branches and targeting nuclear facilities. The massive cyberattack followed Israel’s pledged response to Iran’s October 1 missile barrage, as regional conflicts intensified in Gaza and Lebanon.
Abolhassan Firouzabadi, former secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council for Cyberspace, told local media Iran suffered a cyber attack. Firouzabadi also added that threat actors stole sensitive information from targeted infrastructure.
“Nearly all three branches of Iran’s government – the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive branch – have been hit by heavy cyberattacks, and their information was stolen,” said Firouzabadi, the former secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace, was quoted as saying by the Iran International. “Our nuclear facilities have also been targeted by cyberattacks, as well as networks like fuel distribution, municipal networks, transportation networks, ports, and similar sectors. These are just part of a long list of various areas across the country that have been attacked,” he added.
"Nearly all three branches of Iran's government – the judiciary, the legislature and the executive branch – have been hit by heavy cyberattacks, and their information stolen," said Firouzabadi, the ex-secretary of Iran's Supreme Council of Cyberspace, without explaining when… pic.twitter.com/SjjcMM7dhe
— Iran International English (@IranIntl_En) October 11, 2024
Live look at Iran’s computer networks under attack:
GREAT MOMENTS IN VICTIMHOOD: Mariska Hargitay suffered ‘secondary trauma’ from ‘Law & Order: SVU’ storylines.
Mariska Hargitay, 60, who has starred as Olivia Benson in the “Law & Order” franchise since 1999 — making her the longest-running character in the longest-running prime-time drama — said that she’s been “deeply” impacted by the show.
“When I started the show, I wasn’t aware of how deeply it would go into me,” Hargitay said in a recent interview with “SVU” fan Selena Gomez published Monday in Interview magazine.
Hargitay, who has been married to “Blue Bloods” actor Peter Hermann since 2004, added, “My husband Peter is always like, anytime I go anywhere, my first question is, ‘What’s the crime rate here?’ So it’s on the brain.”
She continued, “There’s been times when I didn’t know how to protect myself, and I think I was definitely a victim of secondary trauma from being inundated with these stories and knowing that they were true. Those were the parts that I didn’t know how to metabolize, just because of the sheer volume of it.”
Hargitay is paid a reported $500,000 per episode of her Law & Order franchise.
SKYNET SMILES, MUTTERS, “FASTER, PLEASE:” Here’s when Elon Musk’s walking, talking Optimus robots could come to your house, experts say.
Elon Musk claimed this week that Tesla’s humanoid robots will be “the biggest product ever of any kind” — sparking a lively debate over when and whether he’ll manage to put a robot in every house.
The walking, talking Optimus robots stole the show during a Thursday night event in Los Angeles to reveal the company’s “Cybercar,” a self-driving taxi.
The nearly 6-foot-tall robots danced onstage to techno music, served up fruity cocktails and played rock, paper, scissors.
Musk said the bots can “basically do anything you want” – like mowing your lawn, cleaning the kitchen after dinner, babysitting your kids or just being a friend — and will cost less than a car, between $20,000 to $30,000 in the long term.
Musk was quiet about the timing on Thursday, but earlier this year he said Tesla may be able to sell the humanoid robots by the end of 2025.
Nevertheless, experts disagree over whether Musk will be able to overcome many of the bots’ kinks in just a few years.
Dev Nag, CEO of QueryPal, a support automation company that uses artificial intelligence, said it will likely be five or more years before consumers see Optimus bots in their homes.
“The robot still faces challenges in areas like walking steadily in uneven terrain, lasting all day on a single battery charge, and safely navigating around people and pets – a thornier problem than it might seem,” Nag told The Post.
“While Musk is known for his ambitious timelines, most experts believe Optimus will first prove itself in factories and warehouses before it’s ready for household use,” he said.
That’s despite dazzling capabilities the Optimus bots displayed on Thursday night.
“How’s everybody doing?” a bartending bot wearing a cowboy hat and apron called out to guests, with a hint of a Texas drawl.
When one customer asked for a watermelon-flavored drink, the cow-bot double-checked the order: “A watermelon? ’Course you can!”
I don’t think it’s going to ask for “your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle”…for now at least:
IS THIS A GREAT COUNTRY, OR WHAT? Yes, Waffle House really has a storm center.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
