WHEN A DEM LOSES CNN and ABC…: ‘It’s Wrong:’ CNN Blasts Biden for Using Military As Backdrop for ‘Battle’ Speech.

A producer for ABC pointed out an obvious but important truth as well:

Meanwhile, even CNN talent was unnerved by the display. Chief National Affairs Correspondent Jeff Zeleny took issue with the staging of the Marines behind Biden for such a political speech, calling it a “break with White House traditions.”

CNN’s Brianna Keilar joined in the criticism as well saying the positioning of Marines behind Biden for a speech like Thursday night’s “flies in the face” of the idea that America’s military is “supposed to be apolitical.”

As one wag joked on Twitter, “Can we all bow our heads a moment in solemn memory of the White House advance man who will be found in Fort Marcy Park tomorrow.”

UPDATE: Biden’s ‘blood red’ backdrop steals show in speech attacking MAGA.

Related:

JON GABRIEL: Biden Warns That MAGA Republicans Pose ‘Clear and Present Danger’ to Nation.

It was fitting for Joe Biden to deliver Thursday night’s Independence Hall speech in a venue lit by gas lights. Backed by a blood-red background and two soldiers shrouded in darkness, the president condemned half the nation as insurrectionists who pose a “clear and present danger” to the United States.

The language was deliberate as it was divisive. “Clear and present danger” is a legal doctrine created by the Woodrow Wilson-era US Supreme Court to curtail the free speech of Americans. At the time, an antiwar activist was jailed for advocating draft resistance during World War I. In Schenck v. United States (1919), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote for the majority:

The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that the United States Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.

Thereafter, courts employed the “clear and present danger test” to limit citizens’ First Amendment rights. That is, until Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) replaced it to address only “imminent lawless action.”

Notably, Biden resurrected this extinct phrase to attack his political enemies just as the authoritarian Wilson used it to attack his detractors. He floated a legal pretext to silence Republicans heading into the midterm elections. The administration has already directed tech companies to ban dissenting voices on social media, so such a move would be in character. Not to mention his FBI’s raid on Trump’s home and his DoJ’s legal harassment of Trump’s legal team.

Woodrow Wilson, you say?

Flash-forward 14 years:

The optics alone of Biden’s speech are disastrous, making Biden look like John Hurt in V for Vendetta:

Related: ‘F*ck Joe Biden!’: Heckler Crashes President’s Speech in Philadelphia.

FASTER, PLEASE: Royal Caribbean To Be First In Cruise Industry To Equip Ships With “Kickass” Starlink Internet.

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: Texas sends buses of migrants to Chicago for first time, dropped off at train station.

—Fox News, tonight.

Earlier: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.

The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.

It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.

Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.

These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.

Lightfoot’s reaction to her bluff being called will be fun to watch.

UPDATE: And here we go! Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot blasts migrant buses from Texas as ‘racist.’

Chicago’s progressive mayor insists she welcomes being the latest Democratic destination for busloads of border crossers, as she accused Texas Gov. Greg Abbott of being “racist” and the Trump administration of “human cruelty.”

Does she know who the current president is?

(Updated and bumped.)

GOODER AND HARDER, COLORADO: Thousands of Xcel customers locked out of thermostats during ‘energy emergency.’  “Xcel confirmed to Contact Denver7 that 22,000 customers who had signed up for the Colorado AC Rewards program were locked out of their smart thermostats for hours on Tuesday. ‘It’s a voluntary program. Let’s remember that this is something that customers choose to be a part of based on the incentives,’ said Emmett Romine, vice president of customer solutions and innovation at Xcel. Customers receive a $100 credit for enrolling in the program and $25 annually, but Romine said customers also agree to give up some control to save energy and money and make the system more reliable. ‘So, it helps everybody for people to participate in these programs. It is a bit uncomfortable for a short period of time, but it’s very, very helpful,’ said Romine.”

JOSH BARRO: Digital Revenue Dies in Drumpfness.

According to the Times, the Post is considering layoffs and publisher Fred Ryan thinks there are substantial numbers of low performers in the newsroom who should be managed out — a plausible idea I’ll get to in a moment. I want to talk first about the strategic decisions the Post made that cemented its dependency on Donald Trump’s constant chumming of the news cycle — and the smarter ones the Times made to become more resilient.

But the Times, where I was a correspondent from 2014 to 2016, is also a lot of other things. It is a leading food and cooking publication. It owns one of the top product review websites, Wirecutter. It’s a major producer of successful podcasts. It has a market-leading team that produces graphics, interactives and visualizations — that team’s work is deployed to showcase the Times’ political and investigative reporting, yes, but it also is a driver of the Times’ general interest offerings, like the dialect quiz or this fun explanation of how “songs of the summer” came to sound so similar to each other. And the Times has the New York Times Crossword, helmed for decades by Will Shortz, as the flagship of its daily games offering.

None of those businesses, with the partial exception of the podcast business, is dependent on liberal political agita about Donald Trump. Most of them aren’t even dependent on high levels of interest in news. And even in the core news report, while there are several areas of coverage where the Times and the Post are comparable, it’s easy to identify areas remote from politics where the Times is clearly stronger — notably arts and business. It’s hard to think of any area where the Post clearly leads the Times.1

During the Trump era, the Post’s lack of diversification wasn’t a huge problem — politics was big business, liberal politics was really big business, and “Democracy Dies in Darkness” spoke to customers who wanted to stand up to Trump. Indeed, the Times reports the Post had once been planning to adjust its business for a drop in reader interest in politics — the team working on the strategy for this called it “Operation Skyfall” — but those plans were shelved in 2016 when Donald Trump unexpectedly won the presidential election and a pivot became unnecessary. But eventually the sky did fall, and the Times was ready for a post-Trump era in a way the Post wasn’t — it’s likely a lot of dual subscribers realized they could get all the political coverage they needed from one of the papers, and that the non-politics offerings from the Times were way more compelling than the Post’s.

So what should the Post do? I don’t think it has the option to become a specialist publication like the Journal or Politico.2 But it can diversify its business so it is like the Times not just in tone, but also in scope.

The Times article says the Post has been looking at acquisitions.3 If I ran the Post, and I had a budget to buy other companies, my first choice would be to buy a cooking publisher with a monetizable recipe archive — maybe America’s Test Kitchen, or maybe Conde Nast’s food magazine business. (Food is an especially logical core competency for a media company owned by Jeff Bezos because of the obvious cross-promotion opportunities with Whole Foods, Amazon.com, and Amazon Prime Video.) I would get into the games business. And more broadly, I would try to think like the Times has — about being a destination for information, not just news, which makes it possible to build a brand that might have a political valence but isn’t just about politics.4

It appears that some effort was made to create WaPo-branded television for Amazon Prime Video in earlier years, but these shows simply got swallowed up by the massive amount of flotsam and jetsam on the platform. Evidently, Bezos is content to let the Post exist as another backwater asset in his portfolio, while Amazon spends the big bucks on flashier product: Amazon’s $1bn bet on Lord of the Rings shows scale of its TV ambition.

‘SHOOT. ME. NOW:’ Obama Wanted To Drop ‘Condescending’ Biden, New Book Says.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden had such a “fraught relationship” that Obama wanted to drop Biden from the 2012 Democratic ticket, according to excerpts from a new book obtained by the Daily Mail.

Obama considered replacing his vice president with Hillary Clinton, leaving Biden “distraught,” according to The Long Alliance by Gabriel Debenedetti. Obama eventually stuck with Biden, though he was furious at his veep’s decision to blurt out the administration’s support for gay marriage, an announcement Obama wanted to make.

Biden’s actions were “tantamount to betrayal” and “an example of Biden trying to position himself in front of the president,” the book says, with staffers saying that “we can’t trust [Biden] to say his lines.”

For his part, Biden said he was “not going to grovel to this guy,” referring to Obama. “My manhood is not negotiable.”

There’s quite a “creepy Joe” tinge to that last line.

NBC PROJECTS MARY PELTOLA (D) HAS DEFEATED SARAH PALIN (R) IN THE ALASKA HOUSE SPECIAL ELECTION FOR THE AT-LARGE DISTRICT.

UPDATE: “But this doesn’t mean one should count Palin out just yet. Peltola will fill the late Rep. Don Young’s seat for the rest of the year. Both Palin and Peltola will be running to fill Alaska’s seat in the House in November.”

JOHN FETTERMAN EFFECTIVELY ADMITS HE ISN’T FIT FOR THE SENATE:

The Senate is a full-time commitment, not a brief intrusion on your afternoon. If Fetterman is not healthy enough to debate, he is not healthy enough to serve a six-year term.

Fetterman doesn’t want to debate because he doesn’t want to damage his polling lead, which has gradually dropped from 12 points when he made his first public appearance just over two weeks ago to 8 points now, according to FiveThirtyEight.

Yes, President Joe Biden showed in 2020 that candidates really could just hide from the voters. But look at how poorly that has turned out.

There’s a bit of an Trunalimunumaprzure vibe going on here:

Fetterman struggles to speak at a campaign event.

“What is wrong with demanding for an easy, safe kind of their income? A path to a safe place for them to win? Or, excuse me, to work? https://t.co/MGwNs605Y9

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) August 31, 2022

HERE WE GO AGAIN: Suez Canal Halted Again After Oil Tanker Runs Aground.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Watch: Biden Doesn’t Know Who’s Running for What in Pennsylvania.

“Please, please elect the attorney general [Josh Shapiro] to the Senate. Elect that big ol’ boy [John Fetterman] to be governor,” Biden said.

Recent polling from The Trafalgar Group found that both Shapiro and Fetterman hold small leads over their respective Republican opponents. Shapiro currently leads Republican State Sen. Doug Mastriano by four points, while Fetterman currently holds a five-point lead over Dr. Mehmet Oz. Both GOP candidates have plenty of time to surge ahead before November.

These are two important races in a battleground state, and it’s concerning that Joe Biden doesn’t seem to know which candidate is running for which position.

Related: Oz Drops Nails a Perfect Troll After Fetterman Refuses to Debate.

OKAY, GROOMERS: Children’s hospital partners with school district to explore gender in schools ‘beyond the binary.’

UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY, COMRADES: U.S. Forces Ordered to Stop Using Gender Pronouns to Improve ‘Lethality.’

A division of the U.S. Pacific Air Forces (PACAF), the branch tasked with confronting China, has ordered its senior leaders and commanders to stop using gender pronouns in written formats, saying the shift to more neutral language will help improve the fighting force’s “lethality.”

“In accordance with the Diverse PACAF priority, ‘We must embrace, promote and unleash the potential of diversity and inclusion,” states a May email sent to senior leaders and commanders at the Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, which operates under the Pacific Air Forces, according to a partial copy of the order obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Leaders at the base are instructed, “Do not use pronouns, age, race, etc.” when writing performance reviews or other materials, such as recommendations for awards. “Competition against near-peer adversaries requires a united focus from the command, the joint team, and our international partners. Welcoming and employing varied perspectives from a foundation of mutual respect will improve our interoperability, efficiency, creativity, and lethality.”

The policy change is part of a larger effort by the Biden administration and U.S. military to foster what it says is a more culturally sensitive environment. The U.S. Navy, for instance, recently published a video instructing its sailors on proper gender pronouns. The Army also mandates gender identity training and trains officers on when to offer subordinates gender-transition surgery, the Free Beacon first reported in March. Critics of these moves say a woke cultural agenda is handicapping America’s fighting forces and distracting it from pressing global challenges, such as terrorism and China’s aggressive war moves.

As the late comedian Bill Hicks (in)famously said, “‘The esprit de corps will be affected, and we are such a mora …’ Excuse me, but aren’t you all a bunch of f***ing hired killers?”

HOW IT STARTED: California will ban sales of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035.

—NPR, Thursday.

How it’s going: Californians are urged to avoid charging electric vehicles, days after state announced ban of new sales of gas-powered cars by 2035.

—The Blaze, today.

UPDATE: In accordance with the prophecy:

(Updated and bumped.)

GREAT MOMENTS IN MORAL EQUIVALENCE: Sam Harris: ‘Donald Trump Is a Worse Person than Osama bin Laden.’

“I’ve said on several occasions that I think Donald Trump is a worse person than Osama bin Laden. A statement is obviously meant to get your attention. I get that it’s surprising, but it’s not meant to be hyperbolic. I can defend every word of a statement like that. What I can’t defend are people’s misunderstandings and erroneous extrapolations of a statement like that. Perhaps I should just clarify that statement again, because it actually goes a long way to explaining my view of Trump, why I think he’s such a terrible person, but not nearly as scary as some people think he is, and not nearly as scary as many people think I think he is. I think Osama bin Laden was a more or less normal human being psychologically. He was just living in the grip of a dangerous and idiotic worldview. The moral structure he imagined he was living under and wanted to impose on the rest of the world given his beliefs was despicable, so he created immense harm and it’s very good that we killed him. But within the framework of his odious beliefs, he demonstrated many virtues. He was a man who certainly seemed to be capable of real self-sacrifice and he was committed to ideals beyond his narrow self-interest. He was by all accounts personally quite courageous. I don’t claim to know that much about him, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he was generally a person of real integrity and generosity and compassion in his dealings with his fellow Muslims*. None of these things can be said about Donald Trump.”

* Remembering the Muslims who were killed in the 9/11 attacks. “The victims were 28 Muslims who died in the twin towers of the World Trade Center, in addition to three Muslims who were among the passengers on two hijacked planes; one of them crashed on a Pennsylvania field before it reached its target, and the second one hit the Pentagon.”

Earlier:

● Anti-Trump writer Sam Harris admits the media tried to swing election for Biden—and actually defends it.

● Sam Harris clarifies that clip where he says he wouldn’t have cared if Hunter Biden had children’s bodies in his basement.

DEMOCRATS, I URGE YOU TO HEED THIS MAN’S ADVICE GOING INTO THE MIDTERMS: WaPo columnist argues Democrats ‘harming the criminal justice movement,’ moving in ‘wrong direction.’

Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. argued on Wednesday that the Democrats are “harming the criminal justice movement” and “moving in the wrong direction” when it comes to their stance on policing.

“Harming the criminal justice movement to gain advantage in intraparty feuds is petty and counterproductive. But that’s what happening, even if centrist Democrats don’t admit it,” Bacon wrote.

He noted multiple instances, such as the recall of Chesa Boudin, in which the left was losing ground in terms of criminal justice reform and said the dynamics in these situations were similar. “Centrist Democrats exaggerating the increase in crime, blaming not only the crime surge but also long-standing problems like homelessness and drug abuse on progressive reforms, and implying their left-wing opponents want to immediately and drastically reduce police spending with no plan to keep people safe,” Bacon argued.

He said centrist Democrats should use a different strategy that wasn’t “misleading.”

Related: 7 Minutes of Democrats Saying Defund The Police.

QUIET QUITTING: Why Gen Z’s latest trend is setting it up for failure.

Real wages are falling. Housing, groceries, gas and other necessities are increasingly unaffordable, thanks to inflation. And the economy has been mediocre at best and calamitous at worst in the early years of this generation’s careers.

All that said, “quiet quitting” is a terrible idea that’s only going to leave these young people much, much worse off. We’re in a recession, by the conventional definition, and while jobs numbers remain strong, it sure looks like that could change. Soon. And when it does, guess who’ll be the first name management picks for layoffs?

That’s right: the “quiet quitters” who racked up TikTok views by not only slacking at work and doing the bare minimum but bragging about it extremely publicly.

As always, life imitates the earlier, funnier seasons of The Simpsons: “Lisa, if you don’t like your job you don’t strike; you just go in every day and do it really half-assed — that’s the American way!”

HOW IT STARTED: “We are the one’s we’ve been waiting for.”

How it’s going: Biden Is the Semi-Fascist He Is Looking For.

21^st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Leonardo DiCaprio only dates women under twenty-five BECAUSE he’s an eco-warrior.

Social media is yet to understand the positives. One earth-ruiner said “Leonardo DiCaprio’s dedication to dropping his girlfriends that he only gets by reputation and name alone the second they hit 25 is genuinely disturbing. No one so extremely ageist doesn’t have skeletons in their closet. Like, how young do you REALLY like them? It’s alarming.”

Another climate change denier said: “I know it’s a running joke that Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t date anyone over the age of 25 and breaks-up with his girlfriends literally before/when they do turn 25 but I think we all need to really reckon with how absolutely fucking predatory this type of shit is.”

While those who don’t “Follow the Science” are calling for DiCaprio’s scalp, Cockburn commends him for his reliability and selflessness. The stats are truly breathtaking. There’s nothing better than a man who can put his feelings aside in order to single-handedly make inroads into overpopulation. Plus Camila Morrone will be fine: Pete Davidson is newly single, after all.

Heh, indeed.

Iowahawk charts the numbers:

LIBS OF TIKTOK: Mainstream media isn’t mad about gender surgeries on teens, they’re mad you found out.

WAS IT OVER WHEN JOHN FETTERMAN BOMBED PEARL HARBOR?! Fetterman Didn’t Show for Joe, as Biden Lapses Into Complete Confusion. “Joe Biden tells Pennsylvanians to elect Josh Shapiro as senator (he’s running for governor) and to elect John Fetterman as governor (he’s running for Senate).”

MEET THE PARENTS: Trust linked to Gavin Newsom’s in-laws made contribution to DeSantis PAC. A family trust run by Kenneth Siebel made a $5,000 to the Friends of Ron DeSantis PAC, records show.

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV’S BODY CATCHES UP THREE DECADES LATER TO HIS DREAM:

“The Soviet collapse was not Mr. Gorbachev’s goal, but it may be his greatest legacy,” reads the Washington Post’s obituary. “It brought to an end a seven-decade experiment born of Utopian idealism that led to some of the bloodiest human suffering of the century. A costly global confrontation between East and West abruptly ceased to exist. The division of Europe fell away. The tense superpower hair-trigger nuclear standoff was eased, short of Armageddon.”

That all reads unobjectionably. The obit writer then claims, “None of it could have happened but for Mr. Gorbachev.”

As the paragraph preceding indicates, Mikhail Gorbachev drifted helplessly in the currents, despite massive efforts to swim against them, of the 1980s. He did not propel them. Ronald Reagan did.

So did Václav Havel. So did Lech Wałęsa. So did Andrei Sakharov. So did Pope John Paul II. So did Margaret Thatcher. So did Helmut Kohl.

“I trusted him then and I still do,” Gorbachev explained of Vladimir Lenin. The people living behind the Iron Curtain repudiated Lenin. Mikhail Gorbachev never did.

For an unrepentant commie, he could sure sell pizza: ‘Hail to Gorbachev:’ Old Pizza Hut commercial resurfaces after former Soviet leader dies.

JENIFER SEY: Holding power to account. We went from ‘if you want schools to open you are a racist murderer!’ to ‘what a terrible thing schools were closed for so long, such a shame that happened!’ We skipped a very important step.

Last week, on Friday August 26, at a Women’s Equality Day celebration in Albany, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said:

“We’re going to peel back every dynamic and let’s look at not just in the workplace, but what happened to women when the decisions were made to have all the kids go home and learn remotely. Wow. Wow. What a mistake that was. What a mistake that was.”

She’s right. It was detrimental for women in the workplace, not to mention the kids cast aside into remote schooling for a year and a half. The  learning loss and mental health impact on children is well documented at this point. Reality is now accepted. But where is the accountability?

Did she push back on these policies made by then Governor Cuomo? No.

She had this to say in May 2020:

“NY Governor Cuomo announces K-12, colleges will remain closed for the remainder of the academic year. Distance learning will continue with a decision on summer school expected at end of May. This is the best course of action to keep students, staff and NY families safe.”

Read the whole thing.

HOW IT STARTED: Biden approval rating jumps to its highest level in two months in Reuters-Ipsos poll.

—The Hill, August 10th.

How it’s going: Biden approval falls, holding near low end of his presidency, Reuters/Ipsos finds.

—Reuters, today.

Say, what was going on in the news, right around this time a year ago? Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin marks anniversary of withdrawal from Afghanistan.