BYRON YORK: Biden is still dragging his party down.

In the Senate, Democrats do have some reason for optimism about keeping their 50-50 tie, which, with the Democratic vice president, gives them operational control. Former President Donald Trump has pushed weak candidates in a few key races, Georgia and Pennsylvania foremost among them, who might end up costing Republicans their chance to win control of the Senate. There has been much discussion about Trump’s clout in GOP primaries, but of course, the final test is whether his candidates actually get elected.

The problem is, the House still looks bad for Democrats. And perhaps the biggest reason is this: A president’s job approval rating is a critical indicator, perhaps the best single indicator, of how well his party will do in midterm elections for the House. And Biden’s job approval rating is still low and unlikely to rise out of the danger zone in the next 2 1/2 months.

Don’t get cocky.

“ANOTHER PROUD MOMENT FOR WOMEN’S SPORTS”: This trans golfer is shellacking female opponents left and right in the LPGA qualifiers.

IT’S COME TO THIS: ‘Rape Nazis’ Will Exploit Dobbs Decision and Re-Populate Nation with White People, Claims MSNBC Doomsday Nutter.

On the other hand, Gaia forbid that a conservative calls an international socialist a national socialist:

GREAT MOMENTS IN STATE-RUN MEDIA: Facebook says posts without government talking points are ‘missing context.’ If you don’t include state propaganda you might get flagged.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Hornless Rino Edition.

HOW IT STARTED: Snowfalls are now a thing of the past.

—The London Independent, March 20^th, 2000.

How it’s going: Schools ‘considering three day week’ due to soaring energy bills and rising teacher salaries.

—The London Independent, Tuesday.

BRIAN STELTER DROPPED BY CNN: Why the ‘Reliable Sources’ host was shown the door. “‘Stelter departs CNN having done damage to both the network’s reputation and the wider media’s reputation like few others could do. Positing himself as a media reporter looking to help explain the journalism profession to the public and show how stories are made and shaped, Stelter actually exposed the national press for the knavish liberal partisans that they’ve become by inadvertently displaying their arrogance and childish refusal to accept even mild outside criticism,’ [NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck] told Fox News Digital.”

DEMOCRATS ARE PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1860 AGAIN: ‘Civil War Is Here:’ MSNBC Host Says There’s ‘No Dealing’ With Conservatives.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW. Watch: Jetson Completes the World’s First Ever Evtol Commute.

After months of trial and testing, Swedish company Jetson has conducted the first commuter flight of its Jetson ONE eVTOL. The footage, which was shared last week via social media, shows co-founder and Jetson ONE inventor Tomasz Patan flying from home to work. While exact details of the flight time and distance have yet to be revealed, the company has called it a ‘momentous occasion’ saying it reduced Patan’s commute time by an impressive 88%.

Jetson said, ‘We are incredibly proud to share that after months of rigorous trial and testing we completed the World’s first EVTOL commute!’

At least the pilot is enclosed on the Jetson One:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmAbvJC23qc

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: I Wish We All Could Leave California (Beach Boys Parody Video).

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: The week in whoppers: MSNBC’s Roe madness, Biden’s immigration baloney and more.

WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: Do dogs in San Francisco get stoned from eating human poop?

(Classical reference in headline.)

VDH: ‘Civil War’ Porn.

The FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Florida home, the dubious rationale for such a historic swoop, and the popular pushback at the FBI and Department of Justice from roughly half the country have further fueled these giddy “civil war” conjectures.

Recently “presidential historian” Michael Beschloss speculated about the parameters of such an envisioned civil war.

Beschloss is an ironic source. Just days earlier, he had tweeted references to the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who passed U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, in connection with the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

That was a lunatic insinuation that Trump might justly suffer the same lethal fate due to his supposed mishandling of “nuclear secrets.” Unhinged former CIA Director Michael Hayden picked up on Beschloss death-penalty prompt, adding that it “sounds about right.”

Hayden had gained recent notoriety for comparing Trump’s continuance of the Obama Administration’s border detention facilities to Hitler’s death camps. And he had assured the public that Hunter Biden’s lost and incriminating laptop was likely “Russian disinformation.”

So, like the earlier “Russian collusion” hoax, and the January 6 “insurrection,” the supposed right-wing inspired civil war is the latest shrill warning from the Left about how “democracy dies in darkness” and the impending end of progressive control of Congress in a few months.

On cue, Hollywood now joins the civil war bandwagon. It has issued a few bad, grade-C movies. They focus on deranged white “insurrectionists” who seek to take over the United States in hopes of driving out or killing off various “marginalized” peoples.

Read the whole thing.

Flashback to this classic moment from 2018: Dem Rep. Eric Swalwell: If we confiscate your guns and you fight back, we will nuke you.

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

Well-known writer and podcaster Sam Harris admitted in a recent interview what many on the Right have long suspected: When the Hunter Biden laptop story about questionable emails and overseas business dealings broke right before the 2020 presidential election, the media, Big Tech, and the intelligence community did everything they could to censor or dismiss it in order to improve Joe Biden’s chances against Donald Trump.

“Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared,” Harris recently told the Triggernometry podcast. “There’s nothing, it’s Hunter Biden, it’s not Joe Biden. Whatever the scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is…it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in.”

“It’s like a firefly to the sun,” he added.

I actually appreciate Sam Harris for saying this out loud. This is what the vast majority of the anti Trump crowd believes, but most of them won’t say it. At least when it’s said, you can see it for what it is.pic.twitter.com/NmOqshoZlS

— Dave Smith (@ComicDaveSmith) August 18, 2022

Further thoughts from John Nolte: Sam Harris Approves of Media Misinforming Voters to Stop Trump.

HARRIS: [Trump’s corruption] doesn’t answer the people who say it’s completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the New York Post’s Twitter account: ‘That’s a left-wing conspiracy to deny [Trump] his [second term].’ Absolutely it was! Absolutely! But I think it was warranted.

INTERVIEWER: You’re saying you’re content with a left-wing conspiracy to prevent somebody from being democratically reelected president.

Harris doesn’t say, No, that’s not okay. Instead, he argues that it was a conspiracy out in the open, so not really a conspiracy.

Sam Harris is one of those mercenary leftists who likes to stroke those on the right desperate for anyone on the left to agree with them about anything. So, yeah, he’ll say a few things we agree with. But at heart, he’s a fascist leftist. Just another scumbag willing to not only deceive you, but openly brag about his willingness to deceive you — laugh right in your face — to show off for his left-wing pals.

And Harris’s willingness to deceive you and laugh about deceiving you is not his only sin. He also lies about Trump’s “corruption” being a fact when he has been convicted of nothing, despite six years and billions of dollars aligned against him in the media, local and federal law enforcement, and all the impeachments and January 6 kangaroo courts.

Yesterday, Harris attempted to walk back what everyone heard with their lying ears: Sam Harris clarifies that clip where he says he wouldn’t have cared if Hunter Biden had children’s bodies in his basement.

JUDGE REINSTATES NORTH CAROLINA’S 20 WEEK ABORTION LAW.

SEE YOU LATER, TATER: Brian Stelter To Leave CNN As Network Drops Reliable Sources.

STACY MCCAIN: R.I.P., Republican Establishment.

THE WASHINGTON POST HAS A SAD: The man who shot Reagan wants to play concerts. It’s not going well.

If he were any other shooter — found not guilty by reason of insanity and later deemed not a danger to himself or others — Hinckley might have been free of the court system years ago, and blending in with his guitar at a New York City club. But his victims included a U.S. president, as well as a press secretary, a D.C. police officer and a Secret Service agent. Many people are not eager to see him enjoy the benefits of a life without court supervision.

The Reagan Foundation opposed lifting Hinckley’s restrictions and his attempt at a music career, saying in a statement that Hinckley “apparently seeks to make a profit from his infamy.” A 2021 op-ed in The Washington Post by Patti Davis, one of Reagan’s daughters, also protested his freedom.

“I don’t believe that John Hinckley feels remorse,” she wrote. “Narcissists rarely do.”

We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Patti Davis is a voice of sanity.

AGAINST RESTAURANT QR CODES:

Before Covid, a restaurant-goer would first encounter a host before being greeted at the table by a waiter. While restaurants are micro-economies unto themselves, the waiter serves as the primary representative. He interprets the menu, offers personal insight, captures the diners’ attention, and brings the experience to life. In today’s digital system, however, diners are directed to train their smartphone cameras on a link to a digital menu and make selections via the web.

This exacerbates our regrettable retreat from social life. Already battered by two years of masking, the practice of manners and of ordinary social interaction has been degraded further. For the shy child, the chance to interact maturely with an unknown adult is lost. For the laptop-class adult, a chance to interact with someone from outside of that bubble disappears. And the intercession of the smartphone itself into the dining ritual is destructive. Ordering each course requires the diner to redirect his attention to the mobile device. The QR service system all but guarantees that the phone will remain at a patron’s fingertips throughout the meal.

Read the whole thing.

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.

It was easy for Bowser to tweet meaningless platitudes like this…

…When the Trump administration was actually securing the border.

UPDATE: Sanctuary cities not enjoying actually being used as sanctuaries.

KURT SCHLICHTER: Cheney’s Humiliating Defeat Is Another Sign That We Are Winning.

She is Republican monkeypox, you know. She is a walking, talking, warmongering, loathsome disease infecting the nether regions of the Republican Party, and her resounding rejection by the decent Americans of Wyoming demonstrates that we are curing the infection that is her kind. The Bill Kristols, the Jen Rubins, the Jeff Flakes, and the John McCains are gone, and we don’t miss them. Miracle Whip Mitt will be gone next time. He won’t be missed either, except by MSNBCNN and WaPo when they need a sitting senator to sell out the people who once had his yellow back.

We are the new Republican Party, one not dedicated to getting its leading lights invited to DC cocktail parties but one determined to drop a turd in the DC punchbowl.

And the new Republican Party has no place for Liz Cheney, her horrific father, or other insipid creatures like them. We’re tired of GOP poohbahs who never met a war they didn’t want your kids to fight. The Cheneys are absolutely perfect examples of what we are talking about. What have they ever done? I mean accomplished, as opposed to run their fool mouths about. What’s Dick Cheney’s big score? What’s in his win column? Nothing, and the same with his useless daughter.

Or as America’s Newspaper of Record reported yesterday: Producers Confirm Liz Cheney Will Not Be Back For Season 2 Of January 6 Hearings.

RIP: Wolfgang Petersen, Air Force One, Das Boot Director, Dies at 81.

ILHAN’S COUNTRY:

Omar didn’t get to where she is by reconciling any of these contradictions but by making them work to her advantage. For most politicians, it would be a humiliating rebuke to have thousands of members of their ethnic and religious community rain boos upon them at a major public event held on their home turf. The smiles and laughter with which she greeted the opprobrium of young Somalis didn’t come from nervousness or surprise. This was the kind of confrontation that had helped turn her into a political star.

Omar’s instincts are rarely wrong, however polarizing a figure they’ve made her. In 2020, she ran 16 points behind Joe Biden, underperforming the president-elect by more than every one of the other 200-plus Democratic members of the House of Representatives up for reelection. But she still won 64% of the vote on the strength of a firm base of support that included far-left activists, college students, left-wing children of culturally conservative Somali immigrants, and the social-justice-minded bourgeois, newly activated by the protests and riots that broke out after the killing of George Floyd, which occurred in Omar’s congressional district. The Target Center incident might have looked like an ugly scene to people who knew little about her life and career, or like an opportunity for political opponents wrongly convinced that she’s beatable this year. Omar is up against former city council member Don Samuels in August’s Democratic primary, an unexciting alternative from an earlier political era who is likely headed for the same double-digit defeat that an earlier and even more promising challenger suffered in 2020. It’s unclear that any attack on Omar has ever landed particularly hard.

Being a lightning rod would have harmed Omar if she hadn’t proven to be such a skillful manager of her own story and her own image. That’s especially true when it comes to the more sensitive aspects of her dizzyingly complex life, which she has either ruthlessly neutralized, cleverly spun, or kept scrupulously out of view.

Earlier: “Everyone knows Ilhan Omar is a vile ingrate and egregious liar, but these may be among her less detestable qualities.”

CONSERVATIVE GROUP TAKES AIM AT DEMOCRATIC ‘WOKEISM’ WITH ADS TARGETING LATINO VOTERS:

According to Politico, which first reported on the group’s plans, Citizens for Sanity has been working with Republican operatives to place ad campaigns in contested congressional districts, beginning with those in Latino-heavy districts in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona.

A mission statement on its website says the group wants to “defeat ‘wokeism’ and anti-critical thinking ideologies that have permeated every sector of our country and threaten the very freedoms that are foundational to the American Dream.”

Beyond South Texas, Citizens for Sanity has been buying billboards in major markets that poke fun at progressive shibboleths such as criminal justice reform, transgender issues, and climate change.

A billboard that appeared alongside highways in Philadelphia and Detroit reads, “Violent criminals deserve our passion and respect. This fall, stand strong for progressive values.” Another, in Philadelphia and Chicago, reads, “Protect pregnant men from climate discrimination,” and one in Atlanta says, “Open the jails. Open the borders. Close the schools. Vote progressive this November.”

The Merry Pranksters smile.

GOODER AND HARDER, MANHATTAN: New York’s 9/11 museum to close down permanently after COVID revenue loss.