WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS…IS SOMETIMES PERMANENT: Speeding woman on cocaine kills drunk driver high on meth in North Las Vegas, police say.

JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Why Are Journalists Hiding These Radical Democrats Who Support Abortion Up Until Birth?

Whatever happened to “safe, legal, and rare?”

FLORIDA MAN: Florida highway driver ties giant dead alligator to back of SUV.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? If Conservatives are the New Punks, are Progressives the New Puritans? “Today, it is rightwing personalities like The Daily Wire’s Michael J. Knowles, comedian and Fox News host Kat Timpf, Mary Katharine Ham and Vic Matus on the Getting Hammered Podcast, and Twitter sensation ‘Comfortably Smug,’ who seem to be having all the fun. Shows featuring online shock jocks like Louder with Crowder and PragerU revel in entertaining their audiences by trolling liberals and mocking the bizarre beliefs held by extreme progressives. Between the copious amounts of Bang Energy drinks, the irreverent speeches, and the presence of adult film stars, companies like Turning Point USA have conferences that can almost resemble a rock concert. Further, compared to the straightlaced image of former Republican presidents, Donald Trump’s opulent lifestyle, crude demeanor, and ridiculous memeablity seem to have been attractions, not drawbacks, for many voters. All of this has led some commentators to declare conservatism the new ‘punk rock,’ a sentiment that has been echoed and embraced across much of the MAGA right.”

JAMES LILEKS ON NETFLIX’S THREE-EPISODE MINISERIES WOODSTOCK ’99:

I don’t remember any cultural impact of the event, aside from eye-rolling at trying to reprise the “Woodstock Spirit,” which means “swaying to hippie sounds or tripping to Hendrix while you stink worse than you’ve ever stunk before, then tottering off to a nearby copse to squat out whatever beans you ate the day before. The whole mystique is lost on me. It seems like the original was a nightmare of bad hygiene and music of varying qualities, subsequently regarded as a utopian moment for the high holy Boomer movement. I have an allergic reaction to all that stuff.

The 90s was when I lost touch with contemporary rock, so the bands mean nothing to me. They’re mostly angry. Very angry. Loud and tight and tuneless. You look back and wonder: I don’t remember the 90s being this feral. But you get the sense of a youth culture that had completely decoupled from the civilization that gave them life and food and purpose. Just RAAAAHHHHWWWWW dude culture, like the last horrible yawp before the internet fixed them all with a pin and everyone was anesthetized by a gaming console or a phone.

Read the whole thing.

GREAT MOMENTS IN OPTICS: Bundled-up Dem begs everyone else to cut back on AC during brutal heatwave. “California’s power grid operator declared a stage 3 energy emergency alert Tuesday evening, warning that rotating power outages were ‘very possible’ as a brutal heat wave walloping the state pushed electricity demand to its limits. ‘Energy Emergency Alert 3 with rotating #power outages very possible. Please reduce your energy use,’ The California Independent System Operator (ISO) tweeted…California Gov. Gavin Newsom, wearing what appeared to be a fleece jacket, and hat, issued a statement Tuesday commending Californians’ efforts so far, but qualified that everyone needs to ‘double down to save energy after 4 p.m.’”

The French Laundry sure has a relaxed dress code these days:

AD TOUTING DESANTIS’ LEADERSHIP EARNS PRAISE, EVEN FROM SOME ON THE LEFT:

A new ad for Ron DeSantis that features ordinary folks praising the Florida governor for his leadership on a host of business, education, and cultural issues during the COVID pandemic is drawing praise from across the political spectrum.

The 60-second ad, released by the Sunshine State GOP, has blue-collar Floridans, school-age teens, and senior citizens all thanking DeSantis for keeping the state open for business while other governors closed businesses and schools. DeSantis is up for re-election in November and polls show him with a widening lead over Democrat challenger Charlie Crist.

“He saved our jobs,” says a waitress.

“And kept us going,” ads a cook.

A car mechanic addresses DeSantis directly, saying, “They tried to shut us down and you saved our business.”

DeSantis famously refused to shut down Florida or impose the mask and vaccine mandates seen in other states in 2020.

And it’s a real money saver for DeSantis — it won’t take much to repurpose this ad for a presidential run…

This is a phenomenal ad for the governor who did a better job with covid than any politician in America. pic.twitter.com/5lPTIFqcCZ

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) September 6, 2022

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle in Florida: DeSantis War Room is just wondering why Charlie Crist’s running mate Karla Hernández-Mats would delete something like this.

WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: Poop and pee fueled the huge algae bloom in San Francisco Bay. Fixing the problem could cost $14 billion.

After an unprecedented harmful algae bloom first turned San Francisco Bay a murky brown color and then littered its shores with dead fish, many people assumed it was yet another climate disaster to add to the list, along with extreme drought, wildfires and heat waves.

While scientists suspect climate change played a role in triggering the bloom, what fueled it is not a mystery. Algae blooms need food to grow, and this one had plenty: nutrients originating in wastewater that the region’s 37 sewage plants pump into the bay.

SHE’S RUNNING: Hillary Clinton says she will never run for president again.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on threats to democracy.

NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe speaks with White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about what President Biden can do to curb threats against democracy in the wake of his speech last week.

* * * * * * * *

RASCOE: In his speech, the president also expressed concerns about the outcomes of elections being honored. What exactly is the Biden administration doing to ensure that the outcomes of the November elections are not undermined by false claims of voter fraud?

JEAN-PIERRE: Well, you know, I can’t get into politics from here from this particular position that I am as a government official. But what we believe is that if he used that moment to call that out — right? — he used that moment — the importance of free and fair elections and how that is very much part of our democracy and telling people, you know, there’s a — it’s time to stand up. It’s time to make sure that folks make their voices heard. And so that’s what the president was trying to make sure — that people understood this inflection point.

And you cannot have an extreme part of a party. And he didn’t say mainstream Republicans, right? He believes there are mainstream Republicans who believe in protecting our democracy. But there are these extreme part of the party, that MAGA party, that we need to call out when we see that our democracy is under attack, when we see that our freedoms and our equality is under attack. He believes as president, he has the — he has the biggest bully pulpit. And it is important to him to make sure he has the loudest voice as we speak about democracy. And that’s what he used that moment to do.

The calls of democracy being under attack are coming from inside the house! ‘Stolen’ elections and collusion: Karine Jean-Pierre’s Twitter history:

Notably, Jean-Pierre was not asked about her election denying past until today, and fumbled her response: Karine Jean-Pierre Struggles When Confronted with Her Record of Election Denial.

“I knew this was coming, I was waiting Peter when you were going to ask me that question,” she said, in response to a question from Fox News reporter Peter Doocy during the White House press briefing.

Jean-Pierre dismissed the questions as not relevant.

“Let’s be really clear, that comparison that you made is just ridiculous,” Jean-Pierre replied.

She claimed that she had since stated that Trump and Kemp won their elections.

Jean-Pierre immediately pivoted to the January 6th riots.

“Let’s not forget about what happened on January 6th 2021 when we saw an insurrection, a mob that was incited by the person who occupied this campus, this facility at this time,” she said.

It’s telling that she thinks only someone from Fox News would ask her about her election-denying threats to democracy, and not having a better response prepared in advance.

BRITAIN GETS READY FOR LIZ MANIA!

People desperately want grounds for optimism and Truss’s growth agenda at least aims to do that. Moreover, the widespread and strangely intense contempt for Truss is a great asset for her politically, as anyone who understands the British can grasp.

As Gareth Roberts noted here, Truss’s woodenness is her strength. In the UK, we tend to form ironic attachments to public figures we feel are publicly awkward or even a bit crap. She isn’t polished or slick. She is awkward in a way that most people are.

She also inspires a particularly unpleasant form of clever-clever loathing that will make fair-minded people warm to her. She tends to make her enemies so angry they overreach and sound unhinged. It’s here perhaps that comparisons with Thatcher are apt.

The comedian Joe Lycett may have won lots of attention and some more fans for his mockery of Truss on television on Sunday. But most people will have seen his performance for what it was: a smug twerp in a stupid yellow shirt thinking he was better than everyone.

The attacks on Truss get much more vulgar from there. In contrast, one woman is already enjoying Liz Mania! to the fullest: Stop tweeting @liztruss your congratulatory messages. That’s not Britain’s new PM.

After Liz Truss was announced as the winner of her Conservative Party’s leadership vote on Monday — and officially appointed by Queen Elizabeth the following day — constituents, politicians and world leaders took to Twitter to share their reactions and messages to Britain’s newest prime minister.

Some of them tried to get her attention by including the handle @LizTruss. But rather than tagging the U.K. leader, who actually uses the handle @trussliz, they reached a woman named Liz Trussell. And, to the delight of many spectators, she’s having fun with it.

When one user erroneously tagged her in a tweet announcing Truss’ win, Trussell replied, “Gonna be busy.” On another announcing the vote tally, she commented, “Yay! Go me!!!”

Even Sweden’s prime minister wasn’t safe from the confusion. On Monday, her account mistakenly tagged Trussell in a congratulatory tweet (which has since been deleted and reposted with the right tag) emphasizing cooperation between the two countries.

“Looking forward to a visit soon!” Trussell responded. “Get the Meatballs ready.”

Heh, indeed.

LOOK AT THIS HEADLINE ABOUT THIRD-WORLD CALIFORNIA:

Nope, not even close.

A record heat wave is pushing California’s electric grid up against the point of failure this week, with officials pointing to climate change for putting continued stress on the system.

The California grid is only overworked because leftist politicians have been pushing toward energy policies that make zero sense for decades.

• Shut down nuclear plants? Check.
• Push solar and wind infrastructure that can’t sustain diddly squat in order to appear hip and cool? Check.
• Disincentivize the repair of aging power lines that tends to fail or spark and cause hundreds of wildfires by pushing companies to invest in green energy instead of maintaining current infrastructure? Check.

The California energy problem is man-made. It has nothing to do with climate change.

But it does have much to do with “California’s Potemkin Environmentalism:” No State Imports More Electricity Than California.

Even during the Schwarzenegger era, Max Schultz of City Journal, who coined the above phrase, noted that California’s “celebrated green economy produces pollution elsewhere, ongoing power shortages, and business-crippling costs.” And California’s man-made energy woes have only gotten worse since.

THE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE: Editorial: Beneath campaign nastiness, legitimate concerns about Fetterman’s health.

Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. and U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman has not fully recovered from the serious stroke he suffered in May. His campaign has acknowledged his obvious struggles with “auditory processing” and speech, but the persistence of those struggles has contrasted with the campaign’s rosier predictions of a return to the rigors of campaigning, including debating his opponent, Mehmet Oz.

If Mr. Fetterman is not well enough to debate his opponent, that raises serious concerns about his ability to serve as a United States senator.

Related: Salena Zito: The truth about John Fetterman.

On May 13, just days before the May party primary here in the Keystone State, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman suffered a stroke while on the campaign trail in Lancaster in his run for his party’s nomination for U.S. Senate.

As reporters and supporters noticed his absence, his campaign released a statement saying he had been hospitalized over that weekend after suffering a stroke caused by a clot from his heart during an episode of atrial fibrillation.

In the statement, Fetterman said: “The good news is I’m feeling much better and the doctors tell me I didn’t suffer any cognitive damage. I’m well on my way to a full recovery.”

The family referred to the medical incident as a “bump in the road.”

The public was told he would be back at the beginning of July. That moved to mid-July, then to August. With each change, no updates on his condition were made available to the press or the public.

The political ads he ran most of the summer had been recorded before the stroke. And although a flurry of Tweets did come from his account at a brisk pace, none of them provided a doctor’s update on his condition. Rather, they all centered on where his opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, had lived prior to 2020.

It is not clear if Fetterman does all of his own tweets or if staff do them as well. His campaign staff did not provide an answer to that question by deadline.

When Fetterman returned to the public forum in Erie, the stroke went from “a bump in the road” to him saying, “I almost died,” leaving open the delicate question of what is the extent of his illness, with no one to date offering that answer.

It was later revealed that the stroke required surgery to implant a pacemaker with a defibrillator because he had a serious heart condition, one that neither reporters nor voters nor his most ardent supporters knew he had.

His teleprompter reading skills are approaching Brandon’s Trunalimunumaprzure territory:

Yikes. pic.twitter.com/tm2Cc0mPCm

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) September 6, 2022

JIM TREACHER: How Long ‘Til California Runs Out of Juice? And not the orange kind.

EVERYTHING’S GOING SWIMMINGLY:

● Russia is running out of high tech parts and is now reduced to buying weapons from North Korea.

● Ukrainian Nuclear Plant Building That Stores ‘Radioactive Waste’ Damaged, U.N. Watchdog Finds.

● Russia Will Not Resume Nord Stream Gas Flow Until Sanctions Are Lifted.

Regarding that last item: Karine Jean-Pierre refers to the Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline as the “Nordstrom” pipeline.

HOW IT STARTED:

This is NEWS AND NOTES. I’m Ed Gordon. On today’s Roundtable, Senator Biden’s slave state – will it help him if he runs in ’08? And Kofi Annan booed in Beirut.

Joining us from out New York bureau is Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, and E.R. Shipp, distinguished professor of journalism at Hofstra University School of Communication. Also with us, Callie Crossley, social and cultural commentator on the television show Beat the Press, which is seen in the Boston area. She joins us as she gets that last-minute vacation in from Martha’s Vineyard. We appreciate you interrupting that, Callie.

E.R., let me start with you. The idea of – and we wanted to take a broad-based look at Dems as they move to ’08. A lot of talk about Hillary Clinton. But as we see others either quietly – like John Edwards – readying themselves, if you believe that he’s going to run, or others laying groundwork. John Kerry has suggested that he’s ready to go, and now has made claims which he backed away from immediately that perhaps Ohio didn’t do him right by virtue of voter intimidation.

We also hear now from Senator Joe Biden of Delaware when he talks about whether or not a northern liberal can be something that’s palatable to Southern voters. He said this on Fox News.

“You don’t know my state. My state was a slave state, my state is a border state, my state has the either largest black population in the country. My state is anything from a Northeast liberal state. We see Joe Biden embracing the fact that it was a slave state.”

Professor E.R. SHIPP (Professor of Journalism, Hofstra University): Yes. This -between Kerry and Biden, it seems like this is an episode of the Democrats version of Desperate Housewives; we just call it desperate politicians. With Kerry, he should’ve raised the issue back in 2004. And the particulars of the vote count then have been challenged and so far upheld. But what he’s doing now is pandering to try to raise money for the Democratic candidate in the race in Ohio.

But Biden sounds like he’s – he’s an interesting character – but it sounds like he’s basically saying, I had more slaves than you did. Delaware was just a slave state. I mean it was like – it’s ridiculous on his face. But he’s been known to have difficulties with expressing himself verbally.

Remember way back when when he gave this very heartfelt off-the-cuff speech about labor and all of that, and it was really plagiarizing a speech that had been given by a British politician earlier. So Biden – and he also was found guilty of plagiarizing in law school. Got an F in a class that he had to retake.

So he’s had difficulty with words, so who knows what he really wanted to say, but it didn’t come across well.

—“Roundtable: Slavery in Delaware; Heckling Annan,” NPR, August 30th, 2006.

How it’s going: Perhaps NPR is tacitly answering the question of what Biden wanted to say back then, particularly based on the administration’s Nazi and CCP-inspired “Dark Brandon” meme, which featured into last week’s disastrous optics: Biden’s so-white historians may miss crucial points on saving democracy.

—NPR, Sunday.

HOW IT STARTED:

“We are a city that is a sanctuary city. We have immigrants from all over the world who call Chicago their home. They’ll continue to do that, and we’re going to continue to make sure that this is truly a welcoming community for those immigrants and we want them to come to the city of Chicago.”

—“Chicago Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot Says Immigrants ‘Welcome’ Despite Donald Trump’s Remarks on Sanctuary Cities,” Newsweek, April 13th, 2019.

How it’s going: Chicago Asking for Help After Texas Sends Over…100 Migrants to IL.

—Julio Rosas, Townhall, today.

OLD AND BUSTED: “Defund the Police.”

The New Hotness?

It was a pretty quick transition to “Defund the Fire Department” https://t.co/13e1bwn42W

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) September 6, 2022

Earlier: This Might be the Political Ad of the Year.

SO, SECOND LOOK AT PUTIN? Russia bans Sean Penn, Ben Stiller, more US senators from entering country.

CHINA’S ECONOMY IS HEADED FOR ONE OF THE LARGEST MELTDOWNS EVER:

In the past, when the economy look fatigued, China’s business community could count on the central government to create growth with massive stimulus programs. That is, after all, how former Premier Wen Jiabao avoided contraction in China as the rest of the world suffered during the 2008 downturn.

Wen went big. In the half decade beginning in 2009, Beijing added an amount of credit equal to that in the entire U.S. banking system. The premier flooded an economy that at the end of 2008 was not even a third the size of America’s.

Wen went too big. Anne Stevenson-Yang of J Capital Research tells me that the Chinese have long compared their country to a train whose last car is on fire. The train has to go fast to make sure the flames blow backwards. As soon as the train slows, flames engulf the passenger cars.

“That is China and debt,” Stevenson-Yang, also author of China Alone: The Emergence from and Potential Return to Isolation, says. “If you add enough money to the system, you can keep refinancing the old debt, but you have to add money exponentially.”

The country has been exponentially incurring indebtedness, perhaps creating debt about seven times faster than it has been producing nominal gross domestic product.

Nobody knows how much debt China has accumulated, but total country indebtedness could be an amount equal to 350% of GDP. Because of the infamous “hidden debt” and Beijing’s misreporting—exaggeration—of economic output, the percentage could even be higher.

However much debt there is, senior Chinese leaders are facing problems they cannot solve, something evident from, among other things, defaults by large property developers, the so-called “mortgage boycotts” of homeowners refusing to pay loans, and bank runs.

The Communist Party knows—and has known for a long time—the game could not go on forever. Wen Jiabao himself in 2007 talked about what has become known as the economy’s “Four Uns.” Growth then, he said, was “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.”

What happens now?

Flashbacks:

● November 13, 2019: How to Conduct Business with Chinese Companies That See a Dark Future.

● July 6th, 2022: Business Exit from China Accelerating. “The exit from China makes sense for many businesses and will probably have positive geopolitical consequences as the U.S. becomes less dependent on production in a communist regime. But the fundamental transportation problems the U.S. faces will remain the same, and some might even get worse.”

IT’S STILL THE ECONOMY, STUPID: Why Republicans Shouldn’t Take the Bait and Make the Midterms a Referendum on Trump.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: After Using FBI To Suppress Son’s Crimes And Raid Political Rival’s Home, Biden Warns Democracy In Danger.

AND THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING: Amazon Prime Video blocks new Rings of Power reviews for 72 hours to prevent “trolls” from commenting as fans cry foul about the series.

Related: Amazon releases Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power but fans complain only second episode worked at first.

UPDATE:

(Updated and bumped.)

DON SURBER: A raid to get 1,693 newspapers?

Why on Earth did U.S. Magistrate Bruce Reinhart issue a warrant to raid Mar-a-Lago?

The stuff the FBI collected was not nuclear codes. It was a bunch of old magazines and newspapers. He and the FBI had no business confiscating them.

A detailed list of what the FBI claims it took shows Reinhart’s was a general warrant, which the 4th Amendment bans. I suppose this is FBI standard operating procedure because although they are sworn to defend the Constitution, the agents never seem to bother following it.

The full list of items taken is here.

Overwhelmingly, what the FBI took were newspapers and magazines, either in full or just articles clipped from them.

President Trump obviously needed the 1,693 articles, newspapers and magazines to help his ghostwriter write his presidential memoirs.

Why did the FBI take them? What evidence does an old newspaper provide? That the media lied (or as we should call it now, FBI-ed)?

Related: Federal judge hands Trump win, orders special master to review evidence seized from Mar-a-Lago.

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: ‘Doctor Poses For A Picture With The Child She Just Mutilated:’ Post From ‘Gender Affirming’ Surgeon With Patient Goes Viral.