TDS REIGNS SUPREME: Trump is still scrambling the minds of the elites.

Instead of trying to understand these people – who were once the Democrats’ base – liberal elites choose to mock and dehumanise them. As Obama adviser Ben Rhodes tweeted last week as the raid became public news: ‘The strangest thing about this epoch of American history will always be that tens of millions of grown-ups decided to form a cult-like devotion to, of all available people, Donald Trump.’

Apparently, for the left, the working class traded in clinging to their guns, Bibles and bigotries for clinging to Trump. How childish it was of these alleged grown-ups to have voted for someone who promised to overhaul NAFTA – and then did so. Who promised to stem illegal immigration – then did so. Who promised to get unemployment down – and then did.

JOHN NOLTE: Kamala’s Husband’s Motorcade Caught Blocking Handicap Spots.

As someone who needs a handicap spot for my wife, it is beyond frustrating to see people parked in those spots who don’t need them. It’s not the close proximity to the store as much as the extra space needed to set up the walker or wheelchair. That’s what makes those spaces so necessary. And although we have all the necessary credentials, I don’t use that space unless we need it. We park in a normal spot if my wife isn’t exiting the car. Of course, when alone, I never use it—which is illegal anyway.

It’s the arrogance and hypocrisy of these people that’s so galling. Democrats seem to believe that if they profess to care about something, they can abuse it. Democrats claim to care about racial minorities, and yet Democrats are openly racist. Democrats claim to care about women’s rights, and yet they are openly sexist. Democrats claim to care about the handicapped, unless it might inconvenience their jaunt into Whole Foods.

Or to put it another way: ‘Grab [That Leftist] Privilege And Ride It Home, Cowboy!’: Harris Faulkner Blows Up After 2nd Gentleman Blocks Handicapped Parking.

REVEALED: How anti-Trump Republican Lisa Murkowski’s staffers pushed to change Alaska’s primary to ranked-choice voting in bid to help her defeat MAGA challenger Kelly Tshibaka.

HOW IT STARTED: Joe Biden: I’m going to ‘shut down the virus’, not the US.

—The Grauniad, October 23, 2020.

How it’s going: First lady Dr. Jill Biden tests positive for Covid-19.

—CNN, today.

GENTLEMEN, START YOUR CHEVY SUBURBANS! Climate Change May Finally Reveal Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and Other Cryptids.

GOODER AND HARDER, NYC: Rents for One-Bedroom Apartments in Manhattan Hit a Record High of $5,100 in July. Here’s Why.

THE FLASH STAR EZRA MILLER SEEKING TREATMENT FOR ‘COMPLEX MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES:’

“The Flash” star Ezra Miller says they are seeking treatment for “complex mental health issues.”

In a statement provided to Variety by a representative of the actor, Miller broke their silence about the troubling behavior that they have exhibited in recent years, which has led to a series of legal issues and assault and abuse allegations. Miller also apologized for their actions.

“Having recently gone through a time of intense crisis, I now understand that I am suffering complex mental health issues and have begun ongoing treatment,” Miller says. “I want to apologize to everyone that I have alarmed and upset with my past behavior. I am committed to doing the necessary work to get back to a healthy, safe and productive stage in my life.”

He’s not the only one with “complex mental heath issues,” as can be spotted by the many instances of “they” and “their” in the above Variety article. As Jim Treacher asked last month: Why Should I Use Ezra Miller’s Preferred Pronouns?

RICH LOWRY: Merrick Garland looks set to indict Trump — despite his glaring conflict of interest.

It’d be one thing if Trump had shot someone on Fifth Avenue — a clean, no-doubt crime that wouldn’t require any novel theories or difficult-to-probe contentions about his state of mind to prosecute.

In contrast, Trump’s Jan. 6 offenses involve alleged crimes like obstructing Congress or defrauding the United States that are going to involve tricky questions about his motives and where the legitimate exercise of his powers ends and the supposed criminality begins.

Needless to say, the country is not prepared to adjudicate such questions in a calm, high-minded manner. It will be the O.J. Simpson trial meets the Hiss-Chambers case, with a presidential race not in the background but very much in the foreground.

The fact of the matter is that while Trump’s moral blameworthiness for Jan. 6 is not in doubt, his legal culpability is. It’s easy to write an op-ed or say on cable TV that Trump incited an insurrection. As a legal matter, though, Trump didn’t come close to crossing the line to incitement, which has very specific and high standards under law.

Even his infamous Georgia phone call looks different on the close reading it would get as part of any court case — by the end of the call, his lawyers were only asking that the secretary of state’s office tell them why their count of suspected fraudulent votes was off.

In an environment of ever-spiraling political conflict, it’s difficult for anyone to exercise forbearance — to realize the most emotionally satisfying course isn’t necessarily the correct one and to be constrained by the public interest, even if that enrages his or her own side.

Merrick Garland can still err on the side of statesmanship. He looks set, though, to choose the abyss.

Related: Trump deserves the Hillary treatment. The FBI has once again put the country in a no-win situation.

More: The Payback for Mar-a-Lago Will Be Brutal. What went around [last] Monday will come around hard for the Democrats when Republicans control the Justice Department and FBI.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Contrary to Rich Lowry, I don’t think that Trump is even morally responsible for January 6, which I also think has been wildly overblown, especially against the 2020 background of government-sanctioned riots in cities across the country.

FASTER, PLEASE: The Covid Reckoning Is Coming.

If Republicans retake the House next year, they should dedicate themselves to a full accounting of where this money went. Much of it did not find its way to the people who needed it. This spring, the Labor Department estimated that “at least” $163 billion in “overpayments” went to both legitimate recipients of unemployment benefits and fraudsters. The Paycheck Protection Act, which provided forgivable loans to businesses adversely affected by the pandemic, was described by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz as an “invitation” to defraud the government. “What didn’t happen was even minimal checks to make sure that the money was getting to the right people at the right time,” he said. That program has disbursed roughly $800 billion, about half of which has been forgiven.

And that’s just the unintended misuse of pandemic-related relief. What about the intended squandering of this taxpayer-funded largess? The Republican Study Committee’s review of where some of these funds were supposed to go is just as enraging as the abuse of those funds: “tree equity work,” environmental justice “boot camps,” “safe smoking kits,” and syringes for using illicit narcotics, refurbishing a minor-league baseball stadium in New York, upping the prize money at Arizona horse-racing tracks, and providing public-school staff with instruction in “high-need topics” like “implicit bias” training and “restorative practices.” As a Department of Education document averred, the pandemic was a perfect time to engineer a “culture shift” in America’s schools.

This investigative work is only one element of a comprehensive retrospective on the pandemic. Americans should confront the impulses that led governments to close houses of worship, abrogate the rights of property owners, and draft private enterprise into the work of law enforcement in what were patently obvious violations of the Constitution. There should be hearings into the conduct of teachers’ unions and into school boards in the major metropolitan areas that clung to school closures long after the terrible consequences for young people’s mental health and educational advancementwere known. And what connection was there between the engineered breakdown of society and the eruption of social tensions culminating in some of the costliest rioting the country has ever seen?

The public health apparatus’s reluctance, throughout this miserable event, to meet the public where it lives has become a cliché. They won’t budge, and the country is moving on without them. But moving on is impossible in the absence of a thorough reckoning. The Covid pandemic already seems unlikely to be “forgotten” by history like the outbreak of Spanish Influenza a century ago. Unlike our forebears, we marinate in our trauma. It’s incumbent on this generation to establish for posterity what went wrong over the last two and a half years, if only so that we will never do this again.

Indeed. Much more like this, please: The Elite Panic of 2022.

THE LID: One Year After Biden’s Afghanistan Debacle.

One year ago this week, buoyed by President Joe Biden’s feckless surrender, totalitarian thugs known as the Taliban — an evil group that protected perpetrators of the 9/11 terror attacks — swept into Afghanistan’s capital following the collapse of the country’s government.

Even isolationists and anti-military zealots in the West remember the horrifying images that followed, most notably Afghans falling from cargo planes and an infant being tossed over razor wire.

This never should have happened. And it effectively ended Biden’s presidency just seven months in.

Following the Aug. 26 murder of 13 U.S. servicemen in Kabul by an Islamist suicide bomber, I wrote, “The attack that killed 13 Americans and at least 100 in Kabul on Thursday does not spell “the end” of the Biden presidency, but it’s absolutely a moral and political catastrophe for the 46^th president.”

While Biden, who’s enjoying another oceanside vacation, claims Americans agreed with his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, he had over 50% approval on Aug. 19 last year, then dropped 20 points once people saw the horrific images. He’s never recovered.

If only there was a visual metaphor for Biden’s dramatic poll drop. If only.

OLD AND BUSTED: “Men Can Have Periods, Too!”

The New Hotness? Women in Scotland outraged as country’s first ever Period Poverty tsar is announced as a MAN.

The decision to appoint a man as Scotland’s first ever so-called ‘period dignity officer’ has prompted outrage, on the same day the flagship law offering free period products to all in need of them was launched.

Dundee man and former personal trainer Jason Grant is the newly appointed period dignity officer for the Tay region – who has the task of promoting access to free sanitary products across schools and colleges – where he will also discuss issues around the menopause.

It follows the Scottish Government’s introduction of the Period Products Act, which means councils and education providers are now legally obliged to offer out tampons and pads for free in a response to a period poverty campaign.

We live in truly the stupidest timeline imaginable.

THAT’S NOT CREEPY AT ALL: Amazon studio plans lighthearted show of Ring surveillance footage.

Viral videos captured by doorbell cameras have been hot for a while now. You can catch them on late-night talk shows, the r/CaughtOnRing subreddit, and on millions of TikTok users’ For You page. Amazon’s media properties, perhaps sensing an opportunity to capitalize and soften Ring’s image, are sallying forth with an officially branded offering.

Ring Nation will feature “neighbors saving neighbors, marriage proposals, military reunions and silly animals,” Deadline writes. But Ring Nation might be aiming even higher, according to Ring founder Jamie Siminoff—to something approaching a salve for our deeply divided nation.

“Bringing the new community together is core to our mission at Ring, and Ring Nation gives friends and family a fun new way to enjoy time with one another,” Siminoff told Deadline. “We’re so excited to have Wanda Sykes join Ring Nation to share people’s memorable moments with viewers.”

Ring sharing its owners’ moments with other viewers has been a contentious issue. The surveillance company recently admitted giving police access to Ring recordings without user consent for “emergency” requests. Ring partnered with more than 600 law enforcement agencies to encourage Ring installations in communities and ease police access to footage. Ring has since made it easier to opt out of police requests.

I do not trust the Internet of things, to coin an Insta-phrase.

BRENDAN O’NEILL: From Rushdie to Rowling — how identity politics turned violent.

The Ayatollah Khomeini’s famous quote that “There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious,” is the mantra of the far left as well: THAT’S NOT FUNNY! Hysterical Reinhart Meme Goes Viral After Twitter Ban.

GO OUTSIDE, PROGRESSIVE WRITERS: In which Charles C.W. Cooke asks the (likely rhetorical) question, “Do America’s progressive writers know anybody who isn’t . . . a lunatic?”

Do America’s progressive writers know anybody who isn’t . . . a lunatic? I ask this because, in the course of my morning reading, I came across two widely shared pieces that, had they been presented to mixed company at the pitch stage, would ineluctably have yielded raised eyebrows, widespread confusion, and, eventually, a friendly “are you feeling all right?”

The first contribution is from the Atlantic. It’s called “How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol,” and it claims that those shadowy, ever-present “Christian nationalists” have started combining sacramental beads and “gun culture.” To underscore the idea, its artwork is in the form of an animated gif that replaces a Rosary’s beads with bullet holes. This claim is typical of the whole:

Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.

The conclusion:

The “battle beads” culture of spiritual warfare permits radical-traditional Catholics literally to demonize their political opponents and regard the use of armed force against them as sanctified. The sacramental rosary isn’t just a spiritual weapon but one that comes with physical ammunition.

As an example of the “I saw a few weird things online and fed them into my paranoia” genre, it’s an instant classic. As a reflection of real life in America, it is a disaster. I would say that the author needs to stop trawling the Internet and go out and meet some actual American Catholics, but, having looked him up, I learned that he lives in Canada. That, at least, provides him with an excuse. I’m not sure what the Atlantic‘s is.

The Atlantic has changed the headlines and artwork multiple times:

BRUCE BAWER: Diving Into a Pool of PC.

Some people are foolish enough to take their political cues from show-business celebrities like Bette Midler, Rob Reiner, and Cher. Not me. I listen to athletes. So when I heard that 28-year-old British diver Tom Daley had made a documentary about the current status of human rights in certain former British colonies, I sought it out at once.

Just in case you didn’t know, Daley won a gold medal at the 2020 Olympics. He’s also come in first at the Commonwealth Games no fewer than four times. The premise of his documentary, Illegal to Be Me, is that, as this year’s Commonwealth Games approached (they were held in Birmingham between July 28 and Aug. 8), he began to think about the fact that, in 35 of the 56 countries competing in the games, it’s illegal to be gay. In three of those countries, homosexuality is punishable by death.

In some of Nigeria’s northern states, he informs us, the penalty for homosexuality is death by stoning. He doesn’t explain why this is the case in the north but not the south. Want to guess?

Daley says that since he himself is gay — he came out in 2013 — and has competed all over the Commonwealth, these statistics give him a queasy feeling. He’s won medals in some of those 35 anti-gay countries: How, he asks, should he feel about those medals? The anti-gay laws also pique his historical curiosity — where did all this hatred come from? — and make him want to “get the sporting world to try to change things.”

His tentative goal, he tells us at the outset of the documentary — which aired on BBC One on Aug. 9 — is to persuade Commonwealth Games officials to deny countries with anti-gay laws the right to host the Commonwealth Games. But he realizes that this stratagem may be misguided. “I still have so much to learn,” he admits. So he travels to a couple of the anti-gay Commonwealth countries to “meet some queer athletes,” see how they live, and bounce his ideas off them.

First up is Pakistan…

Ellipses mine. It’s the BBC, so I think you can see where this is going, but read the whole thing, nonetheless. If Netflix teamed up Daley with Colin Kaepernick to host a series, the level of wokeness and blinkered PC-thinking would likely implode the universe.

Speaking of the latter athlete turned woke activist: Adam Schefter Shoots Down Kaepernick to the Cleveland Browns Rumor: NFL World Reacts.

I think the author may have misspelled “yawns” at the end of that headline.

JAY LENO’S GARAGE: Jay drives the 2023 Nissan Z (video):

https://youtu.be/lL6a1q0eoVw

GOODER AND HARDER, L.A.: Los Angeles County DA George Gascon recall petition found ‘insufficient’ to qualify for ballot.

A petition to recall Gascon had nearly 200,000 signatures out of more than 715,000 invalidated.

VDH: Why Merrick Garland Is Losing the People.

Despite Garland’s pious assertions, we know the modus operandi of selective leaking from the career of Andrew McCabe. The disgraced former interim FBI director admitted to lying to federal investigators about his role in leaking to the Wall Street Journal. And the inspector general found McCabe lied on several other occasions about his efforts to leak to and massage the media. At this point, we should assume that “sources tell us” and “according to unnamed sources” are indications that the sources are Justice Department and FBI contacts who were given the green light to manipulate the news by their superiors.

Let’s put Garland’s decision to approve the raid on Mar-a-Lago in the context of the past seven years. The Justice Department and FBI in 2016 interfered in a presidential election in two major ways: They exonerated Hillary Clinton’s clearly illegal use of a private server and her destruction of subpoenaed data. The FBI hired Clinton operative Christopher Steele as an informant and gave its “Crossfire Hurricane” imprimatur to the entire Russian collusion hoax, feeding a 2016 left-wing mantra that Trump was a Russian “asset.”

In 2015, we learned that candidate Hillary Clinton, as Barack Obama’s secretary of state, had emailed classified government materials using her own private server, likely as a way of skirting Freedom of Information Act requirements. 

In the thick of the 2016 campaign a year later, FBI Director James Comey reported that Clinton had, in fact, broken the law. Yet he assumed a role of federal attorney that was not his own, deciding Clinton’s wrongdoing should not lead to an indictment. 

In that improper role, Comey, not U.S. attorneys, declined to hold Clinton accountable. We learned later that Attorney General Loretta Lynch had met secretly on an airport tarmac (“a brief, casual, social meeting”) with Bill Clinton. 

Somewhere within this tangle of lies (both said they met only to talk about their grandchildren, not about whether the Justice Department would charge Hillary Clinton), we learned: 1) Lynch abdicated her role and simply let Comey play the role of investigator and prosecutor, and 2) Hillary Clinton had “bleached” thousands of emails, some of them under federal subpoena, and destroyed her communication devices and records—all federal felonies.

Trump won the election in 2016, but he never controlled the federal government. For 22 months, at a cost of $40 million, Robert Mueller investigated whether Trump had “colluded” with the Russians to take the White House. Ironically, there was ample evidence to show that Hillary Clinton may, in fact, have done exactly that.

Read the whole thing.

PAPER THAT ONCE DECLARED “WE ARE SOCIALISTS NOW” SUDDENLY SQUEAMISH ABOUT NATIONAL SOCIALISM REFERENCES: Mega-thread shows that WaPo didn’t always have an aversion to Nazi comparisons and terms like ‘banana republic.’

AP: Afghanistan marks one year since Taliban seizure as woes mount.

Ctrl-F “Biden” returns zero results, unexpectedly.

UPDATE: Joe Who? ABC Avoids Biden’s Name in Report on ‘Sad,’ ‘Hungry’ Afghanistan.

(Updated and bumped.)

WELCOME BACK, CARTER! Grocery prices in July had largest price increase since 1979 — with one food staple rising by 38% on the year.

CHANGE? It’s happening: “LGB drop the T” keeps trending on Twitter as gay activists turn on transgender activists.

RIP: Anne Heche dead at 53; actress removed from life support after organs harvested.

THE LID: Even The Left Is Now Furious With Biden’s Most Inept Cabinet Member.

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra’s inept leadership embodies the overall failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

President Joe Biden should fire him but will not because the White House runs on identity politics. Becerra, therefore, brings trivial “diversity” to the team, and they like that nonsense while Americans suffer.

Early in 2021, Biden drew criticism from woke Hispanic radicals who wanted more progressive Hispanics elevated to Cabinet positions. Biden panicked and assuaged the radicals, offering Becerra the vital job during a pandemic, despite the Californian being a lawyer with absolutely no executive or medical experience. Even Speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly “had worked closely with Becerra in the House and viewed him as untrustworthy.”

Becerra rightly received zero confirmation votes from Republicans as every Democrat senator embarrassingly fell in line.

But now, even the mainstream media is irked.

Read the whole thing.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: All the Times Roger Waters Made Zero Sense.

You’re gonna need a much bigger blog.