ELON MUSK’S PURCHASE OF TWITTER CAUSES MSNBC PUNDIT TO MIRACULOUSLY AWAKEN FROM COMA AFTER FIVE YEARS! Or perhaps, there’s some other reason for Ari Melber to exclaim on air:

“If you own all of Twitter or Facebook,” Melber prefaced by saying, “You don’t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party’s candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees.”

Apparently having no self-awareness or sense of irony at all, he continued his laughable speculation: “or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff, and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find out until after the election.”

The reaction on Twitter to Melber’s statement was something to behold last night: ‘This Can’t Be Real’: MSNBC Host’s Take on Musk Taking Over Twitter Is…Pure Perfection.

More here: The Melber foresight. “There is truly nothing funnier than this MSNBC host ranting about what Elon Musk could do to Twitter, and accidentally giving a perfect description of how Twitter has actually operated for the last five years.”

PRESIDENT KLAIN NOT HAPPY ABOUT ELON MUSK BUYING TWITTER:

ROGER SIMON: Can Musk Buy Facebook Too?

I had been off Twitter for several years, long before the Hunter Biden censorship. I had, on occasion, advised fellow conservatives to get off Twitter themselves, to stop sleeping with the enemy, and bankrupt the pernicious website.

Few, if any, did. Now, things are different. Or we hope they will be.

Should I go back?

Irrespective of its evident political bias, I had compared Twitter, and social media in general, to a form of online crack. We had to go back and back and back, even though we knew it wasn’t good for us, and that our time was better spent reading a book or even taking a walk.

That conundrum remains, even if Twitter becomes the town square that Musk envisions.

And what of Donald Trump? Should he return to the network that so famously excommunicated him while still giving public space to the likes of Ayatollah Khamenei?

If he does return, how would that affect his own burgeoning Truth Social?

Not simple, is it?

Nevertheless, thinking it through just a bit more, I have to relent and say, at least for now, a full-throated three cheers—not two and a half—for Elon Musk.

He has moved a moribund world forward. Facebook next?

Faster, please.

MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH: Russia appears to confuse ‘The Sims’ for SIM cards in possible staged assassination attempt.

NO BIG DEAL, JUST JEFF BEZOS ASKING QUESTIONS ABOUT ELON MUSK, TWITTER, AND CHINA:

And not surprisingly, there’s plenty of projection involved: Amazon Deleted Reviews of Chinese President’s Book Per CCP’s Demand.

UPDATE: China Daily paid US papers $19 million in advertising, printing. “China Daily, which is a Chinese state-owned English-language newspaper, is required by U.S. law to disclose its business dealings with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), according to a report by Freedom House. The Chinese paper’s most recent filings were submitted on June 1 and include expenses from November 2016 to April 2020, the Daily Caller reported. The Justice Department records show that over the past four years, China Daily has paid the Washington Post over $4.6 million, and The Wall Street Journal almost $6 million, in advertising expenses. The state-run media outlet also paid The New York Times $50,000, Foreign Policy $240,000, The Des Moines Register $34,600, and CQ-Roll Call $76,000 for ads, according to the records.” (Emphasis mine.)

FEDERAL JUDGE BARS BIDEN FROM LIFTING TRUMP-ERA BORDER POLICY. “Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced Monday afternoon that a federal judge signed off on a request to issue a temporary restraining order preventing President Joe Biden from lifting Title 42, a Trump-era policy authorizing U.S. Border Patrol to turn away migrants at the border over COVID-19 concerns.”

TWITTER LOCKS DOWN PRODUCT CHANGES AFTER AGREEING TO MUSK BID:

For now, Twitter won’t allow product updates unless they’re business-critical, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. The company accepted a $54.20-a-share bid from Musk after a whirlwind courtship that began with the Tesla Inc. magnate disclosing a 9% stake in Twitter earlier this month.

Product changes will require approval from a vice president, the people said. Twitter imposed the temporary ban to keep employees who may be miffed about the deal from “going rogue,” according to one of the people.

Meanwhile, outside of Twitter HQ: Total Meltdown: Liberals Absolutely Losing Their Minds Over Elon Musk Buying Twitter. Of course, some meltdowns are more spectacular than others:

Related: Stop Falling For This Facebook Scam.

FLASHBACK: San Francisco City Hall fed up with Twitter tax break.

The Twitter tax break is dead, and on Thursday City Hall gave it the most unflattering eulogy possible, lawmakers griping that the measure failed to transform the Mid-Market neighborhood and some swearing never to repeat the experiment.

Supervisor Matt Haney, whose district covers Mid-Market, arranged the post-mortem hearing, which took place at a regular meeting of the city’s Government Audit & Oversight Committee.

According to the meeting agenda, the intent was “to review the outcomes of the Central Market Tax Exclusion of 2011, examining the impact on City resources, economic growth, its effect on vacant store fronts, and the negotiated community benefits.”

In 2011 the city offers a 1.5 percent payroll tax break to Mid-Market companies. The deal expired in May, with nobody at City Hall taking up the mantle of arguing for a renewal.

The stated purpose of the deal was to boost the long-troubled Mid-Market neighborhood, but the clear primary intent was to prevent Twitter from moving out of San Francisco, and to attract similar companies to Mid-Market properties.

On Thursday, city economist Ted Egan noted that on some fronts the law was a success, as Mid-Market is indeed now well-known for playing host to a variety of big-name SF companies.

Egan also argued that the tax break was a win for the city’s budget, furnishing numbers that reveal the neighborhood generated a net tax increase of $6.75 million more that it would have if companies like Twitter had not relocated there.

But committee members were not eager to look on the sunny side of the now-expired policy. Supervisor Aaron Peskin called the tax exclusion “a terrible piece of public policy that should have never been passed” and “antithetical to good taxation policy.”

Others noted that Mid-Market still struggled with many of the same problems as it did before the tax deal.

San Francisco will miss Twitter, if and when it’s gone:

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Leftists Worried Elon Musk Will Turn Twitter Into A Place Where Terrible People Post Bad Opinions And Fight With Each Other All The Time.

REPORT: Twitter accepts buyout, giving Elon Musk total control of the company. Elon Musk will buy Twitter for $45.5 billion.

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record: Twitter Headquarters Suffers Severe Water Damage From Liberal Employees’ Tears.

VDH: Our Spanish Civil War?

Behind the scenes, Adolf Hitler provided enough aid to ensure Franco’s likely eventual victory. But he did not send quite enough immediate help either to antagonize his European democratic rivals, or to ensure a quick victory for the Nationalists that might have created a powerful and independent Iberian fascist rival bloc to his own.

The Soviet Union ostensibly countered fascist supply chains. But Joseph Stalin had even more strings attached to his aid. He systematically favored communist recipients and harassed and often eliminated their socialist and anarchist allies in the Popular Front.

Stranger still, even before the Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact of 1939, Hitler and Stalin were already secretly aiding each other’s rearmament in their shared hatred of Western European democracies. It would take years of research to fathom all of the subtexts and agendas behind the great powers’ interventions in the Spanish Civil war.

The same labyrinth of plots and twists will likely prove true in the present Ukrainian war. Ostensibly NATO and the EU are staunch Ukrainian allies. But powerful German interests remain worried about their tenuous energy supply lines from Russia and are not so ready to cut off all trade with Putin.

China seems all in as a Russian benefactor. But it is sending mixed diplomatic signals as it weighs lucrative gas and oil deals with an increasingly isolated Putin against endangering its profitable mercantile trading with the West. Before the war, plenty of Ukrainians from its majority Russian-speaking borderlands were playing both sides during the ongoing turmoil. As with the Spanish Civil War, Ukraine ostensibly is a war between elected governments and autocracies–but with deal-making and intrigue on both sides.

Related: Orwell’s Bad Republicans.

QUESTION ASKED:

‘A HERO:’ Greg Abbott Honors Missing Texas National Guardsman. “Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) honored missing National Guard Specialist Bishop Evans on Sunday after he went missing, presumably from jumping into the Rio Grande to save migrants from drowning.”

Related: Body Of Missing Texas National Guardsman Reportedly Found.

UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY, COMRADES: Citing Racism, Washington State Bans The Word ‘Marijuana’ From All State Laws.

AND HEAR THE LAMENTATIONS OF THEIR WOMEN PEOPLE WHO HAVE CERVIXES: Twitter, under shareholder pressure, begins deal talks with Musk –sources.

On the other hand: “Maybe we’re better off if Elon Musk’s attempt to take over Twitter fails. No, wait, hear me out.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION:

● Shot: WaPo’s Taylor Lorenz on ‘Libs of TikTok’ Exposé: ‘For All We Knew, This Could Have Been a Foreign Actor.’

During Sunday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz said one of the reasons she revealed the identity of the so-called “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account poster was because “for all we knew, this could have been a foreign actor.”

Lorenz also said given the “Libs of TikTok” poster’s willingness to conduct interviews with other media outlets, it was “quite important and in the public’s interest” to reveal who she was.

—Jeff Poor, Breitbart.com, yesterday.

● Chaser: German government funds ‘research’ project that doxxed Libs of Tik Tok.

The hit piece on the woman behind Libs of Tik Tok by the Bezos-funded Washington Post‘s professional victim Taylor Lorenz was based on a cyberstalking thread by an ex-Twitter employee who is working on a German-backed project.

Software developer Travis Brown, a former Twitter open source advocate per LinkedIn, unearthed Libs of Tik Tok‘s history on Twitter and posted a thread Saturday detailing information about the account’s profile changes.

Lorenz cited Brown’s series of tweets in her WaPo report published Monday doxing the woman who created the Libs of Tik Tok sleuthing persona.

Brown is working on an ongoing project with support from Prototype Fund, an organization that provides financial support to Brown’s so-called “Hatespeech-Tracker.” Protoype Fund is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

—The Post Millennial, Tuesday.

COLORADO MOVES TO CAST ITSELF AS THE ANTI-FLORIDA:

A public feud brewing between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his Colorado counterpart Gov. Jared Polis could be used by the latter to cement the Centennial State as the country’s anti-Florida stronghold.

The Florida Republican has leveled criticism and threats of retaliation against Disney and Twitter in recent weeks, prompting Polis to invite the two companies to relocate their headquarters to Colorado in the wake of DeSantis’s feud with the House of Mouse.

“Florida’s authoritarian socialist attacks on the private sector are driving businesses away,” Polis said in a tweet earlier this week. “In [Colorado], we don’t meddle in affairs of companies like @Disney or @Twitter. Hey @Disney we’re ready for Mountain Disneyland and @twitter we’re ready for Twitter HQ2, whoever your owners are.”

The Florida governor’s office told the Washington Examiner it considered the proposal to be odd, as Twitter and Disney are both headquartered in California, but declined to comment further.

The criticism from Polis could be an attempt to position Colorado as Florida’s political antidote — appealing to progressive voters and businesses in the meantime.

“I think picking a fight with Florida is good politics from Colorado,” Democratic political strategist Brad Bannon told the Washington Examiner. “I think there are some businesses out there who are deciding whether they’re going to move from California to somewhere else — they are more likely to move to a state like Colorado, where they’re not going to get caught up in right-wing social politics that they would be in Florida.”

CTL-F for both “Masterpiece Cakeshop” and simply “cake” yields zero results.

ALL THIS, AND WORLD WAR II: As Finland considers NATO membership, citizens mobilize for an invasion by Russia.

When the Finnish Reservists’ Assn. recently announced wartime defense courses for civilian women in the southern town of Haemeenlinna, the 400 slots filled almost immediately, with a waiting list of 500 more.

Topics will include shooting, cybersecurity and how to manage the first several days of an invasion from abroad.

“I wouldn’t call it fear,” said Sgt. Sonja Airikki, a 39-year-old reservist who will lead the training next month. “It’s more about being prepared.”

Military readiness is ingrained in the culture of this country of 5.5 million people that shares an 833-mile border and a long, complicated history with Russia.

The relationship has grown increasingly tense since Russia invaded Ukraine two months ago. For the first time, Finland is considering seeking membership in NATO, prompting threats of retaliation from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin really does consider himself the second coming of Stalin, doesn’t he?

MACRON DEFEATS LE PEN TO WIN RE-ELECTION IN FRANCE.

CLIMATE ACTIVIST DIES AFTER LIGHTING HIMSELF ON FIRE OUTSIDE US SUPREME COURT: As Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening:” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.”

VDH: How America Became La La Land.

ALEX JONES’ INFOWARS FILES FOR BANKRUPTCY AMID SANDY HOOK LAWSUITS.

THE FORGOTTEN ECONOMIC CRISIS OF ’68:

There have been many accounts of the 1960s, and of the tumultuous year 1968 in particular, but strangely missing from most of them, writes Collins, a historian at the University of Missouri at Columbia, is “the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression.” The crisis of 1968 “marked the beginning of the end of America’s postwar economic boom,” he argues, and helped persuade President Lyndon B. Johnson to cap escalation of the Vietnam War and curtail the Great Society.

The crisis-which culminated in March in a speculative run on gold (“the largest gold rush in history,” Time called it in a cover story) was brought on by a combination of factors, Collins says. The “most deeply rooted one was chronic U.S. balance-of-payments deficits. The causes: increased spending overseas, both by American tourists and a U.S. government vigorously prosecuting the Cold War, as well as increased imports from an economically resurgent Europe. The deficits produced a glut of dollars abroad, weakening other nations’ confidence in the dollar; (The dollar was then tied to the gold standard, while other nations’ currencies were tied to the dollar.)

The Johnson administration’s massive expenditures on the Vietnam War seriously aggravated the balance-of-payments problem and also fueled inflation.

In March of ’21, Robert Reich’s column at Newsweek was headlined, “This Is Biden’s LBJ Moment.” It sure is, Robert. It sure is.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, JUST THE CCP ENGAGING IN ORGAN HARVESTING: 71 Chinese inmates on death row had their hearts or lungs removed during executions before being declared dead, new study says.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Orange County school board member harasses parent handing out info in carpool line.

A school board member on the Orange County Board of Education North Carolina was caught on video harassing parents who were handing out information cards about issues in the district to parents in a carpool line.

Board member Hillary Mackenzie was videoed hurling insults at a parent for giving out cards to the website OCS Truth.

* * * * * * * *

Gretchen indicated Mackenzie had been videoing them from the moment she got out of her car. The video posted by the OCS parents only shows what happened after the parents also began taking video and said that Mackenzie “toned down her comments significantly” once she realized they were recording her.

Mackenzie also called out to parents driving by that what was being handed out was “propaganda” and called it “misinformation,” adding that parents should “call the school board if you have questions.”

Mackenzie can be seen videoing the parent with her cell phone as the parent hands out the cards.

While marching down the carpool line, Mackenzie yells out that “disinformation is fascism.”

Throughout the video, Mackenzie insults the parent, calling her a “fascist” and asking why the parent thinks being called that name is “insulting.” Later, the parent asks aloud why doing research for themselves and sharing information is a fascist act. Mackenzie didn’t answer.

At one point, Mackenzie yells out to the parent, “why are you a fascist, Gretchen?” The parent replies, “Why do you like to call names, Hillary? Is that what you teach your children?”

No law enforcement officer had been on-site at the carpool line prior to Mackenzie showing up, and the parents say that Mackenzie was the one who called one in but then “ran off as she saw him from a distance showing up.”

Video at link.

Related: Union Head Randi Weingarten Says Parents Are Stoking the Flames of War.

On a recent podcast, the AFT President suggested the current trend of parental interest and parental rights activism is “propaganda” and intimated that parents fighting for their liberties is akin to stoking warfare.

“This notion – we’ve been very lucky in America, and we in some ways live in a bubble for a long time…this is propaganda. This is misinformation. This is the way in which wars start. This is the way in which hatred starts.”

To recap, Weingarten believes that teachers and their union representatives colluding with government to override parental authority and set local and federal health policies is just fine, but parents opposing that collusion are warmongers.

What will it take for Democrats to learn the lessons of Virginia and Florida? Well, perhaps this: GOP Rep. Carl: ‘On the Verge’ of Giving House Republicans the Largest Majority They’ve Had in 100 Years. “And this is Jerry’s opinion — the moms. This is what turned out in Virginia. That’s the reason we keep pointing at Virginia. This is going to happen again.”

But don’t get cocky. As Glenn has written, “If you want to win, donate and volunteer. Winning takes work, and commenting on Internet blogs, even this one, doesn’t count.”