CALIFORNIA, WHERE THE FUTURE STARTS: HT to Arod_Lives44:

SANITY SIGHTED AT NYTIMES: Hard to believe as it surely is, Issues & Insights detects a concrete sign that sanity might actually be creeping back in at the Old Biased Lady. Guess who she’s holding accountable for the roaring inflation?

“The fact that the Times, along with others in the mainstream media, admits that inflation is a problem is in itself a noteworthy development, since for months it insisted that it was just a data anomaly – one that Republicans were trying to exploit for political gain.

“Now, with prices for many common household goods having gone up by double digits over the past few months and no end in sight for the trend, the inflation story is impossible to ignore.

“But the fact that any one of these ‘news’ outlets is willing to blame Biden for the inflation spiral is a truly stunning development, given they’d spent months blasting out ‘fact checks’ that aggressively slapped down any such claim.”

Sightings of Antifa droves heading toward the Times can be expected shortly.

WHOA! NOT THE ANSWER SHE EXPECTED: Margaret Hoover of PBS interviews the son of a former Mao intimate and asks him if Donald Trump is an “authoritarian.” The answer she gets from Ai Weiwei is a priceless. Thanks to Jeff Dunetz of The Lid.

A TIME FOR CHOOSING IN 2023: If Republicans regain a Hill majority in 2022, 2023 will be what Reagan called “a time for choosing” between a constitutional republic and an elitist monocracy. Our choice.

CHINA’S LEADERS LOOK AT EACH OTHER AND SHAKE THEIR HEADS IN AMAZEMENT: There is Hunter Biden, and now it’s Neil Bush doing business with a Chinese contractor on the U.S. blacklist. Chuck Ross at Washington Free Beacon has the report.

And in related news, Ross also reports the Chinese appear headed to getting a slice of His Fraudulency’s $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” pie, thanks to former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who, coincidentally no doubt, is Biden’s new infrastructure czar as well as senior advisor to the United States China Heartland Association.

What does that group do? Among other things, it encourages business exchanges between China and 20 U.S. states. Lenin was right about the capitalists selling the rope the communists use to hang them.

SENSE AND NONSENSE ON THE ‘TAX GAP:’ Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute digs into the $80 billion extra for the IRS in His Fraudulency’s Build Back Better (BBB) spending plan and finds — surprise! — that they aren’t telling us the truth about that “tax gap.”

“The U.S. tax gap is fairly low by international standards. The official net federal tax gap of $381 billion is 2.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). One pro‐​enforcement group puts the gap at 2.5 percent of GDP. If we add in an estimated state‐​local tax gap, then the total U.S. gap would be about 3.9 percent of GDP. By comparison, this study estimated that the average tax gap in the European Union (EU) is 5.6 percent of GDP, while this study found that the average EU tax gap is 10.7 percent of GDP,” Edwards writes.

And did you know Biden’s BBB repeals an important requirement that an IRS analyst who wants to assess the agency’s steep under-payment penalty against a taxpayer must first get a sign-off from a superior?

Edwards has much more. No wonder Biden, Yellen, Schumer, Pelosi, et. al. aren’t talking much about this part of the BBB.

NOT QUITE MAN BITES DOG: More like Philosopher Bites Conventional Wisdom. William Lane Craig is one of the “50 most influential philosophers” in the world, and he says it is indeed quite possible to know God. Something to think about as the holiday season approaches.

WORST POSSIBLE TIME, OF COURSE: His Fraudulency’s vaccine mandate for federal workers could leave the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) without hundreds of much-needed agents, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

BIDEN AI ACTIVIST AT FTC: Never heard of Meredith Whitaker? Neither have 99 percent of the rest of us, but she illustrates the enduring truth of the Reagan Era maxim: “Personnel is policy.” How so? Let me count the ways.

Whitaker announced Friday, according to Santi Ruiz of the Washington Free Beacon, that she is headed to the FTC as a “senior advisor” on Artificial Intelligence (AI). But guess what, AI is not Whitaker’s forte. She got the boot at Google, Ruiz reports, because:

“Although Whittaker has presented herself as an expert in artificial intelligence ethics, some former colleagues have accused her of inflating her credentials, noting that she has no formal training in the field and has done no peer-reviewed research. One manager described her impact inside Google as ‘nonexistent in the AI bias space, if not negative’ and said that ‘there is not a lot of value’ in the work she touted.”

No matter as Whitaker shares other Biden FTCers “obsession” with using anti-trust policy to advance the far-left agenda. Personnel is policy. Democrats understand this. Trump didn’t, neither do many Washington GOPers, still, after all these years.

HERE COME AL GORE’S CLIMATE SPIES IN THE SKY: The former Veep says he and his Climate Trace compatriots are a year away from being everywhere, as reported by  Jeff Dunetz at The Lid, quoting an MSDNC interview with Andrea Mitchell:

“We get data consistently from 300 existing satellites, more than 11,000 ground-based, air-based, sea-based sensors, multiple internet data streams and using artificial intelligence,” Gore explained.

“All that information is combined, visible light, infrared, all of the other information that is brought in, and we can now accurately determine where the greenhouse gas emissions are coming from.

“And next year we’ll have it down to the level of every single power plant, refinery, every large ship, every plane, every waste dump, and we’ll have the identities of the people who are responsible for each of those greenhouse gas emission streams.”

You know what comes next, right?

“If investors or governments, or civil society activists want to hold them responsible, they will have the information upon which to base their action and holding them responsible.” Just like the KGB’s neighborhood informants, only much more sophisticated.

UPDATE: Apologies, my friends, for failing to include the link when this post first went live. It’s there now.

NO MORE TALKING THE TALK BUT NOT WALKING IT ON SCHOOL CHOICE, GOP: Republicans have been talking about school choice for decades, but, at least at the federal level, such talk is cheap and little has changed.

Writing in The Federalist, Jonathan Tobin looks at the Virginia election of 2021 and concludes it was “a clarion call for Republicans to understand that an education platform that includes choice is a political winner, not the afterthought it has largely been for the party these past 20 years. As former Obama aide Stephanie Cutter said after the Virginia vote, the greatest danger for Democrats is for Republicans to become the ‘party of the parents.’ She’s right.”

Republicans, are you listening?

KRISTALLNACHT 83 YEARS AGO TODAY: Jeff Dunetz at The Lid reminds us that Kristallnacht was the public launch of the Holocaust. One cannot help but wonder if this is where Cancel Culture leads.

CHECK OUT JOB BOARD FOR PEOPLE WHO LOVE FREEDOM: Andrew Crapuchettes lost his job as CEO of a highly profitable tech firm because of his religious views. So he went out and started RedBalloon.work, a job board for connecting “employers who value freedom with employees who value it too.”

The web site adds that “we envision a world beyond cancel culture, where employees are free to work… without fear that they will find themselves on the wrong side of their employer’s politics. That’s it. No agendas, politics, or drama. Just work. Interested? Let’s create that world together.”

What a concept, a world where free people can work freely!

MAYBE THERE’S YET HOPE FOR THE ‘FIRST BRANCH:’ Congress was intended by the Founders to be the center of the federal government. They gave it all the “ultimate weapons” in the Constitution in any showdown with either of the other two branches.

But for decades, Congress under majorities of both political parties has given away its authority and delegated prerogatives to the unelected, unaccountable federal bureaucracy. Along the way, the idea of congressional oversight became little more than grandstanding for the cameras.

Now perhaps there is hope for a revival. It’s got to start somewhere, so why not with “the investigative arm of Congress,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

TYRANTS HATE TRUTH-TELLERS: And so they arrest them, throw them in jail, convict them in kangaroo courts, and punish them for the crime of telling the truth. Pray for Epoch Times Nigerian reporter Luka Binniyat.

WATCH THIS BEFORE IT’S BANNED: The horrendous reality of abortion.

BIDEN ACTS, PORTS GET WORSE: Issues & Insights has a carefully nice and diplomatic way of putting things, such as this succinct but restrained take on His Fraudulency’s “actions” to speed up the supply chain:

“Setting up task forces and convening a bunch of ‘world leaders’ to flap their gums about the need to work together might count as action to a guy who’s been a politician for 48 years, but it isn’t going to change the situation in Los Angeles.

“The truth is that Biden doesn’t seem to have any idea how to deal with this problem, other than blaming the private sector, most likely because his own policies are at least partly responsible.

“Critics of the $1.9 trillion partisan ‘rescue plan’ Biden signed in March said that it contained too many disincentives for workers to rejoin the labor market. Lo and behold, there are chronic shortages of workers, particularly truckers, which is contributing to supply chain problems across the country. Biden’s vaccine mandate will only make worker shortages worse.”

I think I need to have a little chat with the I&I editors about not being so diplomatic!

YES, THE CHURCH IS FULL OF HYPOCRITES: But the Colson Centre’s Sarah Stonestreet says there’s more to it than that. Three more things, in fact.

MANCHIN SHOULD JUST SAY NO TO BIDEN BILL: West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin looks at the $1.75 trillion “reduced” Biden Build Back Better and sees a pile of “shell games, budget gimmicks that make the real cost of the so-called $1.75 trillion bill estimated to be almost twice that amount, if the full time is run out, if you extended it permanently. And that we haven’t even spoken about. This is a recipe for economic crisis.”

That being the case, suggests Issues & Insights, Manchin should take a page from Nancy Reagan and bring this charade to a close.

IT’S ABOUT COMPLIANCE,  NOT PREVENTION: Rutgers forcing online student to get the jab. Because they can.

TWITTER, YOU IGNORANT SLUT: That’s the opening line of Quin Hillyer’s rollicking account on The Lid of his Twitter banning. Quin and I worked together at The Washington Examiner some years ago and he’s got a great book out, too.

HOW TO DEFEAT CANCEL CULTURE: Stop being scared of it. It’s that simple, according to Rap music artist Bryson Gray, whose “Let’s Go, Brandon” ditty hit #1 on the charts despite being censored by Instagram and YouTube.

BUREAUCRATS ARE SUFFOCATING U.S. MILITARY R&D: That’s according to the second-ranked general in the U.S. military who, according to The Epoch Times, pointed out to a recent gathering of defense writers that it currently takes four times as long to develop new weapons as it did during the Cold War.

“We can go fast if we want to,” Lt. Gen. John Hyten said. “But the bureaucracy we’ve put in place is just brutal.” Hyten is the outgoing Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As an example, Hyten said the U.S. first tested a hypersonic missile like that recently disclosed by China in 2010. But risk-averse bureaucrats killed it before it had a chance to go through the research and development process.

“We were developing hypersonics ahead of everybody in the world and the first test failed,” Hyten said. “The first test of everything fails. So the first test fails and we have two years of investigation into why it did fail. Two years. Then we launch again and it fails, and we failed. This time it was two fails and we canceled the program and we stopped.”

F-WORD OFTEN HEARD IN BIDEN WHITE HOUSE: No, not that one, this one – “Forget.” It’s a punchline on SNL, so things must be really dire for His Fraudulency. And if that’s not bad enough, the latest Issue & Insights/TIPP Survey finds 58 percent of respondents aren’t convinced Joe Biden is “mentally sharp.”

Here’s how that number breaks out: 36.9 percent sharply disagree that he is all there, 13.6 percent somewhat disagree and 7.2 percent aren’t sure. With SNL punchlines and poll numbers like those, Kamala may be in the big chair in the big office sooner than expected.

SPEAKING OF DARK AGES ON THE CAMPUSES: Campus Reform brings news of a school newspaper publishing a piece advocating the abolishment of “gifted and talented” classes in Pittsburgh. Here’s a depressing sample:

“The gifted program segregates students — sometimes based on IQ tests conducted at an early age. The program is deeply flawed, encourages students to unnecessarily compete against each other academically and often ends up leaving behind students of color. It is time for Pittsburgh to follow New York’s example and eliminate the gifted program from local school districts.”