GOODER AND HARDER, FUN CITY: NYC ‘gateway’ and tourist destination overrun by mentally ill, drug abusers: ‘Humanitarian crisis.’

Unstable, strung-out homeless weirdos have swarmed large parts of Manhattan’s West Side, littering streets with needles and menacing locals and tourists alike — and there’s no help in sight.

The invasion of homeless, mentally ill and drug-abusing people is a full-blown “humanitarian crisis” greeting millions of tourists and office workers who arrive in Midtown and its highly trafficked surrounding neighborhoods, wrote Councilman Eric Bottcher in a recent letter to the mayor asking for aid.

“Our neighborhoods need help right now,” he wrote. “The status quo cannot be allowed to continue.”

West Side wackadoos — including one dead-eyed junkie wandering with a needle sticking out of his hand along 36th Street near bustling Penn Station — were out in force as The Post visited the neighborhoods over the past two weeks.

A bedraggled security guard, who only gave Fisher as his name, said he sees doped-up derelicts do drugs “all day and all night” in the public courtyard at the Midtown Holiday Inn hotel along Eighth Avenue’s infamous “strip of despair.”

“It’s crazy out here,” the battle-weary Midtown security guard, 50, said.

As Kevin Williamson warned a decade ago, “the thing about [Mike] Bloomberg is, he’s a busy body and a nanny and self-regarding and sanctimonious and unbearable, and Jesus, are we going to miss him when he’s gone, because Bloomberg, for all of this faults and his weird little psychosis about bacon and salt and soft drinks and sugar and all the rest of it, and smoking, especially, basically kept what was best about the Giuliani administration.”

Manhattan now spirals back into the pre-Rudy Bad Old Days:

It wasn’t so long ago that things were completely crazy, when guests at cocktail parties chatted about strategies for dealing with muggers (it was widely believed that you should always carry what we called “mugger money” so as not to anger your attackers). Those who were brave enough to park cars on city streets made sure to remove the stereos when they parked, then place “No radio, nothing valuable in car” signs on their dashboards.

—“NYC, July 1993,” Kyle Smith, the New York Post, July 21, 2013.

WIPE IT, LIKE WITH A CLOTH, OR SOMETHING? LOL-Now We Know Why They’re Hiding Her! Kamala Harris Asked to Explain Cloud Storage and Woof (Watch).

Kamala Harris is being hidden away, much like Joe Biden was. What makes this even worse for our pals on the Left is they at least had an excuse with Biden and could claim his age was the main issue when it came to answering questions or speaking without a teleprompter.

They can’t do that with Kamala because she’s only 60.

And her inability to answer a question without sounding like a drunk high schooler has nothing to do with her age and everything to do with her incompetence. For example, she tried to explain how the Cloud works …

No, really. She did.

WOOF.

If you’re wondering why Kamala hasn’t been let off the teleprompter for 14 days as the Dem nominee — she still hasn’t done a single interview or any unscripted voter meetings at all — here she is explaining cloud computing: pic.twitter.com/6OpDpAXD0C

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) August 4, 2024

No, it’s not some sort of deep fake AI manipulation – the original can be found on YouTube, at the 33:40 mark of her conversation at Google in 2010.

UPDATE: America’s Newspaper of Record reports: Kamala Harris Spends Flight Looking For Cloud Where Her Data Is Stored.

(Classical reference in headline.)

SUCKING IN THE ’70s: Inside the Booming Business of Punk Rock’s Past.

And yet, the dealer du jour for these sort of collectables is not some venerable auction house, but rather a 40-year-old New Jersey resident who has become arguably America’s most in-demand collector of rare punk memorabilia. His name is Brian Gorsegner, and he exhibits his envy-inducing loot on the Instagram account @AncientArtifax, whose 25,000 followers include an impressive array of illustrious cool kids: Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Lars Frederiksen (Rancid), Brian Baker (Minor Threat), Mac McCaughan (Merge Records), Violet Grohl (daughter of Dave), Roger Gastman (art dealer/graffiti guru), Lance Bangs (music-video director to the indie elite), Les Savy Fav (the band) and—who knew?—Brooke Smith (Silence of the Lambs/Grey’s Anatomy).

* * * * * * * *

“I’d come to realize that as important, or perhaps even moreso, than the items I was acquiring, was the first-hand tales that accompanied them,” Gorsegner writes in the intro. “I feel a great sense of pride and responsibility that the items in this book have been entrusted to me to survive another 40 years. This wasn’t memorabilia, and it wasn’t ephemera. These were artifacts of a time and a place that would shape my way of life.”

Gorsegner began collecting and selling as a teenager in central New Jersey. After touring the world as the vocalist for his own successful band (Night Birds), and establishing a career as a booking agent (whose clients include OG punk legends like Alice Bag and T.V. Smith), he saw his hobby take off during the pandemic, when everyone was at home “digging in their attics and their basements, either doomsday selling or doomsday buying.”

He began traversing the country to rummage through the mementos of aging punks, at times accompanied by a film crew for a four-part documentary produced by the rebooted Creem magazine. (The series is still looking for a home.) He pays good money for collections, often in the mid-five-figures. (“That’s me emptying my bank account.”) He keeps the items he can’t bring himself to part with and tries to break even by selling the rest either on Instagram or at occasional pop-ups, like the one Gorsegner is hosting at the Queens music venue-cum-gallery TV Eye as one of several book release events. Reflecting on punk’s evolution as a luxury commodity, Gorsegner is as astounded as the next guy. “This stuff was made by delinquent children,” he says, “and now it will sell for $10,000.”

Speaking of the ’70s, as original Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts famously said, “You can only be avant-garde for so long before you become garde.”

IT LOOKS LIKE A RECESSION IS COMING:

It’s mind-blowing that the Harris campaign would blame Trump for the poor jobs report and accuse him of “bringing us to the brink of recession.” He hasn’t been in office since January 20, 2021, and yet the current economy is now his fault?

Does that make sense to anyone?

While it is nonsensical to blame Trump for the jobs report, especially when Kamala has been claiming for years that “Bidenomics is working,” there is a method behind the madness.

An election year recession is devastating to the party in power. Case in point: McCain had a nearly three-point lead in the RealClearPolitics average before the economic collapse in September 2008. Stagflation also contributed to Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980 over Jimmy Carter.

So, the Harris campaign is trying to push the narrative that Trump is to blame for the coming recession. Do they really think that will work? It’s a desperate and weak strategy that is destined to fail, but it’s the only play they have.

In 1992, the DNC-MSM portrayed a growing economy as “the worst in 50 years” to help Bill Clinton, only to admit after he won that, as the Charlotte Business Journal noted in 2010, “The U.S. economy actually grew 4.2% in the fourth-quarter that year and went on to enjoy a terrific decade-long run of prosperity. And we learned in hindsight that recession had actually already ended when the [September 1992 Time magazine] article was printed.” Time described it in December of that year as “Bush’s Economic Present for Clinton.”

In 2008, in order to crown Obama as the next FDR, the media focused on what Virginia Postrel dubbed at the time as “Depression Lust, and Depression Porn.” In April of 2020, Kurt Schlichter wrote, “The Democrats Totally Want A Depression.” Will their media outlets portray Biden-Harris’s stagnant economy as still quite good to prop her up or the end of the world in an attempt to blame it on the Bad Orange Man — who’s been out of office for four years?

Exit quote:

Kamala is asked how she will fix inflation…

She answers by saying generic words about what inflation is for a solid 45 seconds.

Has there ever been a dumber person running for president? 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/5yvPotpDBX

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) August 3, 2024

UPDATE: Salena Zito: Middle America rattled by jobs report.

Paul Sracic, political science professor at Youngstown State University, said political strategist James Carville was right when he said “It’s the economy stupid” when he centered former President Bill Clinton’s campaign on economic issues.

“As it was then and now, it is how people feel about the economy and if their lives are better that is driving this election,” he said. “The word recession is powerful. A lot of economics is psychological. The numbers that came out on Friday is very bad news for the Harris campaign. They were touting a soft landing last week and that is not going to happen now.”

Sracic said Biden and Harris both got the messaging wrong from the onset on the economy: “It began with inflation. They woefully underestimated inflation from the start, dismissing it as transitory. Maybe if they had reacted sooner, not understanding would not have become an overarching theme for them.”

Just think of it as “Milton Friedman’s Revenge.”

OLD AND BUSTED: Cocaine Bear.

The New Hotness? Cocaine Sharks! Sharks Off Rio de Janeiro Test Positive For Cocaine.

Based on this 2020 Babylon Bee headline, the solution to the cocaine sharks may work itself out next year: Trump Retaliates Against Asian Murder Hornets With American Kamikaze Bears.

FROM OIL WELLS TO OH WELL: California Loses Chevron.

Net zero, net new jobs: Choose one.

Bloomberg:

Chevron Corp., based in California since the days of kerosene lamps, is moving headquarters to Texas after years of fighting Golden State officials over strict environmental policies and costly regulations.

The move announced Friday will end the company’s 145 years of being based in the most populous US state. The shift prompted Texas Governor Greg Abbott to welcome Chevron to its “true home,” while a spokesperson for his California counterpart Gavin Newsom dismissed it as a “logical culmination” of a years-long transition by the oil giant.

Doubtless those workers losing their jobs or forced to relocate will be comforted by the thought that their fate is the “logical culmination” of a long process.

* * * * * * * *

Chevron’s CEO, Mike Wirth, is saying that the decision to move is not about politics, but about “what’s good for our company to compete and perform.”  In reality, it’s obviously about both. He has clearly been eyeing Texas for a while and describes Houston as “the energy capital of the world.” Bloomberg quotes Wirth as telling an audience in, well, Houston back in 2019 that “policies in California have become pretty restrictive on a lot of business fronts, not just the environment.”

And those policies could become even more restrictive in the formerly golden state: California Regulators Propose Gov’t Takeover Of Oil Refineries To Stave Off Energy Crisis.

“The deployment of ZEVs [zero-emission vehicles] and a robust mass transit system are critical for achieving the state’s climate goals, reducing local air pollution, and eventually eliminating dependence on the volatile global petroleum markets. As demand for gasoline shrinks, refineries may close or convert to processing clean transportation fuels,” the report states. “This will lead to fewer gasoline refineries, with increased market concentration and associated market problems that often accompany it.”

To address the market concentration issue, the CEC proposed a variety of state interventions, including setting up state-owned refineries.

“The State of California would purchase and own refineries in the State to manage the supply and price of gasoline,” wrote the study’s authors, with the scope of the initiative ranging from “one refinery to all refineries in the state.”

Back in 2008, City Journal’s Max Schulz referred to “California’s Potemkin Environmentalism.” Now the Sacramento is looking to make it official and go full Soviet. Or perhaps worse; earlier this year, Steve Hayward dubbed the state “The North Korea of the USA.” As he wrote, “Never mind the social tyranny the state has attempted to impose, such as strict vaccine mandates, legal sanctions for anyone who dissents from transgender ideology or uses the wrong pronoun, and attempted legal penalties for any physicians who dissent from official Covid ideology. Stick with just economics.”

Otherwise, this could end as well as the real North Korea:

ROGER KIMBALL: Kamala Harris and the Masque of Magical Thinking.

How did the magical thinking arise in the first place? One source is the habit of credulity that is a by-product of all utopian thought. The Democrats have mutated into the party of nowhere, so it is not surprising that they prefer pleasing fantasy to sobering reality.

The other chief source is the attack on objective truth that, in various ways, has been the gospel proclaimed by fancy professors for the past several decades. Students everywhere are taught to be suspicious of truth, to proclaim the relativity of values. This is a brain-addling teaching, but one that you would have to look far and wide to find a place it hasn’t reached.

As I noted in that earlier column on magical thinking, epistemic nihilism is the order of the day in all the best colleges and universities. But the result is not so much a failure as a promiscuity of belief. Hence the hyperventilating media shamans with their intoxicating potions. Some conservative pundits are fretting that Kamala Harris represents a credible challenge to the Trump juggernaut. Absent an assassin’s bullet, the successful rekindling of  Democratic lawfare, or some other praeternatural intervention,  I think the Democrats are setting themselves up not only for major disappointment but for staggering disillusionment. That’s the trouble with magical thinking. Sooner or later, reality intrudes and destroys the web of fantasy that the spurious magic has spun. Donald Trump is an avenging angel of reality. The Dems, as well as certain besotted anti-Trump conservatives, are dancing now.  They won’t be gyrating when the music stops and the hall empties.

Like CNN before him yesterday, why is George Stephanopoulos obsessed with telling a black man why his opinions are wrong, and that being an Indian-American is a “slur?”

An unhinged George Stephanopoulos threw a tantrum this morning over Kamala Harris's "racial identity"

George: "I don't understand why you keep on repeating it. Why the president keeps repeating it"

Byron: "George, actually I'm not the one who keeps repeating it…you're the one… pic.twitter.com/tJ84k24GZJ

— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) August 4, 2024

More on the latter, here: Now, This is How You Do It! Byron Donalds Decimates George Stephanopoulos Over Kamala’s Heritage (Watch).

JOE ROGAN GOES LIVE ON NETFLIX… AND LIBERALS LOSE THEIR MINDS:

Let’s be clear: Joe Rogan is NOT a conservative. And he’s never been anywhere close to being a conservative. Ever. In fact, if you ignore the media’s coverage and focus instead on what Rogan actually believes, he’s a liberal man who “identifies” as a conservative man.

And I’d even go further: If he’d hosted “The Joe Rogan Experience” in the 1990s or 2000s, Rogan would’ve been — by a ridiculously wide margin — the single most leftwing man in American media: He supports gay marriage, increased social safety nets, drug legalization (and how!), abortion, and universal basic income. He even backed Bernie Sanders for president. His ideology isn’t exactly “The Way Things Ought to Be, Part II.”

This is why he’s such a useful barometer of how far to the left everyone else has gone: Only on a planet that’s completely fallen off a cliff could a leftwinger like Rogan appear to be a conservative… simply because he likes MMA, works out, wasn’t a fan of mandatory COVID vaccines, and thinks it’s unfair for men to fight women.

But Rogan’s biggest crime — and the reason the liberal media will never forgive him — is that he’s not hostile to conservatives.

It would be a much shorter list to narrow down the things that leftists don’t lose their minds over these days. But kudos to Netflix for airing Rogan’s special, and for reminding their workers when they had lost their leftist hive minds over Dave Chappelle, “As employees we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values. Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”

THAT WILL LEAVE A MARK: Michaelah Montgomery Sets It Off at the Atlanta Trump-Vance Rally.

This is the single most savage moment of the 2024 campaign cycle 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/U1mK2sIsn3

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 3, 2024

Earlier: Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff cheated on his first wife with daughter Ella’s nanny Najen Naylor — and got her PREGNANT.

$100 MILLION HERE, $100 MILLION THERE, AND SOONER OR LATER, YOU’RE TALKING REAL MONEY: U.S. Government Has Sent $239 Million to Taliban Since 2021 Due to State Dept’s Vetting Failures, Report Reveals.

The U.S. government has inadvertently sent at least $239 million to the Taliban in development assistance since 2021, according to a new report. The oversight occurred because the State Department failed to properly vet award recipients.

Less than a year after it was reported that the Taliban established fake nonprofits to siphon millions of dollars in U.S. aid to Afghanistan, a new investigation by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reveals that the terrorist group has received hundreds of millions in development assistance due to inadequate vetting by the State Department. Since the 2021 U.S. military withdrawal, at least $239 million have likely filled the Taliban’s coffers.

And there’s the billions of dollars worth of military equipment we left when the Biden-Harris administration bugged out in 2021:

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff cheated on his first wife with daughter Ella’s nanny Najen Naylor — and got her PREGNANT.

Kamala Harris’s husband’s first marriage ended after he got his children’s nanny pregnant, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff cheated on his first wife Kerstin with the blonde nanny, who also taught at their children’s pricey private school.

The woman, Najen Naylor, 47, did not deny the story when approached by DailyMail.com at her home in the New York millionaires’ playground, The Hamptons.

She would not comment, except to say, ‘I’m kind of freaked out right now.’

A close friend with direct knowledge of the affair and pregnancy told DailyMail.com that Naylor did not keep the child – though her social media shows a video of a mysterious baby girl named Brook in 2009, the year the baby would have been born.

Another  friend, Stacey Brooks, who mothered twin boys around the same time as Naylor was expecting, also did not deny any of the claims – but said she would not divulge further information without Naylor’s permission.

The incendiary news is said to be causing panic in Harris’s campaign, just as she has overtaken Donald Trump in several polls and as she ramps up her final push to win over voters in November.

Emhoff confirmed the story. “Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff acknowledged Saturday in a statement to CNN that he had an affair during his first marriage after the alleged details of the relationship were published by a British tabloid.”

To ask why a story like this was broken by “a British tabloid” and not the DNC-MSM is to answer the question.

UPDATE: When PR work replaces journalism: Doug Emhoff is pushing more men to advocate for abortion rights.

—Yamiche Alcindor, NBC News, May 8th. 

If the name sounds familiar: Remembering Yamiche Alcindor’s Greatest Hits.

Yamiche Alcindor, previously a White House correspondent for PBS, will be transitioning into a role covering Washington more broadly for NBC, the network announced Tuesday. She will continue to host Washington Week for PBS.

Over the years, Alcindor has built a reputation as one of the most partisan reporters in the mainstream press, using her seat in the White House briefing room as a soapbox for progressive politics, despite working for the taxpayer-funded, and ostensibly nonpartisan PBS.

Here’s a taste of what NBC will be getting out of its newest employee:

Not included: Yamiche Alcindor craps on Madison Cawthorn after he literally rises from his wheelchair to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

And given the topic, this post from October 27th, 2016 seems relevant: Buried Lede: Chris Matthews Does Journalism. Matthews Confronts NYT Reporter On Bias: Know Any Pro-Life Reporters? (Video):

“And really this is something I think that is kind of an effective argument,” NYT reporter Yamiche Alcindor told Matthews, referring to GOP nominee Donald Trump’s argument the “elite media” is biased against him and is helping rig the election. “Because people really do feel when they go and get the news that they are really getting it from these people who have some sort of plan to rig this election, or rig the economy, or don’t want to cover the real issues.”

* * * * * * * * *

Matthews interrupted: “Do you know anybody Yamiche at The New York Times who is pro-life?”

“That’s not a question I’m going to answer,” she laughed. “I have no idea.”

“Do you know anybody?” Matthews pressed. “Just, you don’t have to name names. Do you know anybody at the Times who is pro-life?”

“I have not asked my coworkers that question, I should say,” Alcindor replied.

“Oh that’s cute,” Matthews said.

As I wrote at the time, indeed it is. Shades of the deer in the headlights responses from Lesley Stahl, Andrea Mitchell and ABC Nightline host Dan Harris when asked in various television interviews if any conservatives work on the air at their respective networks.

MORE:

SHE DID THAT…

Loving these short, raw “courtesy of Kamala Harris” ads the Trump Super PAC is running in targeted swing areas.

Grocery bills, gas prices, border chaos, crime – very strong reminders of the issues that gave Kamala Harris a 35% approval rating. pic.twitter.com/v0tUUSYgkc

— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) August 3, 2024

…And then cackled at your torment.

FAIR ENOUGH, BUT DON’T GET COCKY, EITHER: Don’t Fall For ‘Operation Demoralize.’ “It happens every single election,” William A. Jacobson writes. “They create a narrative that it’s over, that the Democrat’s going to win, that it’s hopeless for Republicans to do anything…. All I can say is, I warn you, this is Operation Demoralize and they’re very good at it, and it seems to be working.”

BUG OUT!

Убирайся!

WHY IS DNC-CNN SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM? CNN Host Explains Why These Black Men Are Likely ‘Low Info Voters’ for Their Opinion of Kamala Harris.

Black guys at Harrisburg barbershop tell local CBS reporter that ⁦@KamalaHarris⁩ isn’t really black: “To me, no.” pic.twitter.com/cdZUX5UwEF

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 3, 2024

This brief segment yields a cornucopia of memes, none of them good ones for CNN, including:

And:

John Nolte wrote yesterday, “Well, the delusion is over. CNN has announced an end to the ludicrous fantasy. CNN Opinion is no more. And I mean ‘CNN Opinion’ is no more. Obviously CNN itself is all opinion, and lies and bullying to back up that opinion, but the vertical has shuttered.”

UPDATE:

2019. Charlamagne tells Kamala Harris that a lot of Black people question whether she is "Black enough." pic.twitter.com/p7GahAMgBR

— MAZE (@mazemoore) August 2, 2024

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Watch Out for August! Think July was historic? History says: beware the eighth month.

August isn’t just a month for natural disasters. Some of the biggest international crises have hit in the eighth month. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Bush 41 recovered quickly and formed an international coalition that went on to oust Hussein from Kuwait. The next August, Bush faced another international crisis, as old-guard Soviets unhappy with Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms placed the general secretary under house arrest. When Bush’s national security adviser Brent Scowcroft told the president about the coup, Bush complained that U.S. officials were surprised by the development. Scowcroft had the perfect retort: “Yes, so was Gorbachev.”

The final kind of August surprise has been scandal. Neither the Watergate burglary nor the original revelation of Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky happened in August, but the denouement of each scandal did. Nixon resigned in August 1974, elevating his unelected vice president Gerald Ford to the presidency. Clinton, faced with DNA evidence of his affair with Lewinsky on her infamous Gap blue dress, finally ended his repeated denials of the affair. He addressed the nation from the Map Room and confessed that “I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.” Here, for once, August proved a respite. Clinton went to Martha’s Vineyard with his family in an attempt to repair the relationships damaged by his admission.

There likely isn’t an American alive who could imagine a month more tumultuous than this past July for presidential politics. By all rational odds, things will calm down from here. Still, history warns: don’t bet on it.

Read the whole thing.

IT’S A BIT UNORTHODOX, BUT WHY NOT GIVE IT A GO? Mary Katharine Ham Has an Urgent Suggestion for the Sunday Morning News Shows.

OLD AND BUSTED: The Manchurian Candidate.

The New Hotness? The Montrealian Candidate! Inside ‘disco dancer’ Kamala Harris’s high school years in Canada — and why she keeps tight-lipped about them.

STEVE GREEN: Now We Know Exactly How Israel Assassinated Hamas Chief, and I’m Laughing Inappropriately.

[Ismail] Haniyeh had been staying at a “heavily guarded complex” in Tehran, according to the New York Times — an official state guesthouse “run and protected by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.” Nevertheless, Israel was able to

• Ascertain which room Haniyeh used during his stays there.
• Slip a remote-detonated bomb under his mattress.
• Ascertain when Haniyeh was back in Tehran.
• Make bomb go boom while Haniyeh slept.

This is all according to local sources who spoke to the Times with the usual protection of anonymity.

As martyrdoms go, Haniyeh’s was delightfully ignominious — in no small part due to Israeli operational genius, plus serious failures on the part of Iranian intelligence and the dreaded Revolutionary Guard. I shouldn’t laugh, but I just can’t help it.

Iran has vowed to strike directly at Israel in retaliation, so please consider this a developing story.

Worst. Vrbo. Home. Ever:

PARTY OF YOUTH UPDATE: Jimmy Carter Says He’s Hanging On to Vote for Kamala Harris.

As his 100^th birthday nears, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has revealed his ultimate birthday wish—to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

Carter, who has been in hospice care since Feb. 2023, could make history on Oct. 1 as the first president to reach their [sic–Ed] 100^th birthday. But he told his family a bigger goal for him would be to see the defeat of Republican nominee Donald Trump, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

His grandson Jason Carter said he told his son Chip a few days ago, when asked whether he was trying to make it to his 100^th birthday, that he is “only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris.”

No need to worry, he’ll make it — one way or another:

Last month, Howie Carr wrote that Joe Biden has finally supplanted Carter as “the worst president, ever.” Both men may be looking to Kamala to best them in the Red Queen’s Race for that ignominious title. However, as Carr wrote:

The biggest difference between Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden was that Carter was at least trying to do the right thing by the United States of America.

Everything Biden’s handlers conspired to accomplish was designed to subvert not just American society, but western civilization in general.

That’s Kamala’s goal as well.

Flashback: “I see the contrast coming into view. Joe Biden is making Jimmy Carter look like a good president.”

Was this the moment when everything went pear-shaped?

MOVE ALONG CITIZENS, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: 72 Percent Of Voters Oppose Men In Women’s Sports, Don’t Realize Kamala Harris Supports It.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Why the man that ‘gets s— done’ might not be able to save Kamala Harris in the rust belt.

If Josh Shapiro has a political philosophy, it is to “get s— done”. The Pennsylvania governor constantly uses the phrase, whether he is repairing a collapsed highway in a matter of days, negotiating a budget through a divided legislature, or posting on TikTok.

He even keeps a mug stamped with the mantra on his desk.

While less inspiring than some political slogans, it has helped Mr Shapiro position himself as a down-to-earth dealmaker who cares more about results than politics.

Now Kamala Harris looks likely to ask the popular, plain-talking governor to get something else done: to win her the key battleground state of Pennsylvania in the forthcoming presidential election.

While she has yet to formally anoint a running mate,  there are several clues that suggest Mr Shapiro, one of an ambitious new generation of Democrats, is in pole position to be the Democrat’s vice-presidential nominee.

While Kamala is, as the Ministry of Truth AP would say, “calibrating her policy pitch” to downplay her far left views as she feigns tacking towards the center for the general election, Shapiro is also busy airbrushing his record to minimize the damage his presence on the ticket would cause from other extreme elements in the current version of the Democrats’ “Big Tent:” Josh Shapiro Doesn’t Want You To Know This About Him.

Shapiro now insists he supports a two-state solution.

“I was 20,” he said. “I have said for years, years before October 7, that I favor a two-state solution — Israelis and Palestinians living peacefully side-by-side, being able to determine their own futures and their own destiny.”

For sure, views can evolve, but Shapiro is also now sadly downplaying something he shouldn’t. In the same aforementioned op-ed, he identified himself as a former volunteer for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Today, however, his campaign is downplaying that.

“While he was in high school, Josh Shapiro was required to do a service project, which he and several classmates completed through a program that took them to a kibbutz in Israel where he worked on a farm and at a fishery,” Manuel Bonder, a spokesman for Shapiro, told The Times of Israel. “The program also included volunteering on service projects on an Israeli army base. At no time was he engaged in any military activities.”

Simultaneously, Shapiro’s volunteering for the IDF has been scrubbed from his Wikipedia page.

Imagine being so desperate to be chosen as Kamala Harris’s running mate that you would look at volunteering for the IDF as something not to be proud of because you’re trying to appease the antisemitic and anti-Zionist wing of the Democratic Party. This is the Democratic Party of today.

Or to put it more bluntly, as Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) tweeted on Thursday, “These Progressives don’t want a Jew. Let’s say it out loud. Imagine if moderate Dems said they didn’t want a certain minority. The condemnations would be deafening. Yet now we hear much silence.”

Incidentally, “Getting s___ done” apparently has all sorts of meanings for Shapiro:

AND NOW, A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR: A recent graduate offers his thoughts on the 1966 Volkswagen Fastback Sedan:

RICK BEATO: A WHITER SHADE OF BURN (Video).

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Weird Edition.