ARIZONA SCHOOL SHOWS SHOT MANDATE ABOUT POWER, NOT THE KIDS: If it was about the kids, the building operations director wouldn’t have been demoted to being a (substitute) teacher in the classroom.

2022 NOT LOOKING GOOD FOR DEMS: Polls, Biden approval tanking and solid candidate recruitment point to a solid GOP year. But don’t get cocky just yet.

THIS MAY BE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL NATIONAL ANTHEM RENDITION EVER: But fans attending and tuning into tonight’s NFL season opening game between the Super Bowl Champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Dallas Cowboys won’t get to hear it.

Victory Boyd, the songwriter/singer, declines to get the Covid vaccine, for religious and medical reasons. So, after agreeing to pay her $20,000 plus expenses for the appearance, the NFL refused her request for an accommodation. Why? Because the NFL insists the national anthem be sung on the field.

WHERE’S BIDEN’S AFGHANISTAN HOSTAGES WOG? Great question, Issues & Insights. The chief executive has a “Whole of Government” (WOG) approach for protecting abortion, why not one for rescuing Americans stranded and at the mercy of the Taliban terrorists?

TIMELINE OF BIDEN’S ABORTION REVERSALS: Who said this in 1994? “Those of us who are opposed to abortion should not be compelled to pay for them.” Yes, that was then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE). That’s just a small slice of the much larger story of what Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS), calls the “moral collapse” of Joe Biden.

What appears to be the key turning point came during the last two years of the Reagan presidency during Biden’s preparing for his first disastrous run for the White House. When that blew up, Biden salved his wounded pride by destroying Judge Robert Bork:

“1986: Senator Biden told the Catholic Diocese Newspaper, ‘Abortion is wrong from the moment of conception.’ NBC News also reported that he ‘seemed to offer the National Conference of Catholic Bishops moral support in pushing for limits, noting that the most effective pro-life groups are those who keep trying to push back the frontier.’ Speaking of that frontier, Senator Biden said, ‘I think medical science is moving the frontier back so that by the year 2000, we’re going to have more and more pressure, and rightfully so in my view, of moving back further and further the circumstances under which an abortion can be had.’

“1987: After a scandal erupted over Biden’s use of a British politician’s speech, he withdrew from the race for the 1988 Democratic Party presidential nomination. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden orchestrates the effort to reject President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of a conservative legal scholar, Judge Robert Bork, to the Supreme Court. Biden facilitates the opposition to Bork, citing the need to defend abortion rights and other court precedents.”

It’s lengthy and detailed, but Mohler’s timeline is a sobering reminder that Biden’s corruption and hypocrisy have been there for all to see for decades.

NEW STUDY SUGGESTS NEURAL CELL COMPLEXITY POINTS TO ID?: That’s “ID” as in Intelligent Design. The study, which is described in a recent Quanta Magazine piece, prompts this thought on HillFaith:

Greater complexity reduces the probability of a chance explanation for the existence of a single biological cell and thus increases the necessity for intelligent design as the explanation.

What say you, Instapundit thinkers?

UPDATE: A question mark was added to the headline on this post and the linked one to make clear that a suggestion was intended about what the Quanta Magazine article could mean, rather than a claim of what it must mean. Evidently, the subhead that was and remains in the linked post since it first went live — More Complexity =s Less Chance? — failed to make this sufficiently clear for some readers.

WOKE NFL CANCELS VICTORY BOYD NATIONAL ANTHEM: Doesn’t matter that the singer/songwriter’s refusal to get the jab is religious belief. The NFL wants its show at Thursday night’s season opener in Tampa Bay to feature somebody singing on the field, no exceptions. Gotta remember those priorities, which don’t appear to include the First Amendment.

A VIP WARNING FROM THE JEWS FOR GENTILES: Jeff Dunetz of The Lid explains why the next 22 days could be difficult. It involves baseball, too, because the first words of the Bible are “In the big inning …”

ABOUT THOSE CDC ‘GUIDING PRINCIPLES:’ Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium exposes the corrupt links between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the far-Left universe of activists non-profits.

As it happens, CDC all but contracted-out the research and writing of “Health Equity Guiding Principles for Inclusive Communications” to a brace of these activists. How that happened graphically illustrates how the career bureaucrats form a nearly seamless linkage with the activists who are thereby enabled to define and communicate official policy:

“The guide is the latest illustration of how progressive nonprofits capture public health agencies through a kind of technocratic activism, burrowing their ideology into medical language by framing social controversies as settled scientific fact.

“Government officials, like those at the CDC, then cite those activists alongside professional health associations, many of which have gone woke themselves. That boosts the activists’ credibility while undermining the government’s own: The CDC may be insulated from certain kinds of political pressure, but it is hardly immune to the ideological contagion of medical nonprofits.”

Republicans have never quite figured out either the importance of these malignancies of the public policy process or how to bust them up and prevent their reoccurrence, other than perfunctory “Defund the Left” campaigns during the Gingrich era. Some in the Trump White House, notably OMB Director Russell Vought, understood it, so perhaps a second Trump term would see new progress.

BIDEN LOSES MIGRANT KIDS, MSM YAWNS: Issues & Insights notes that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently acknowledged that it cannot account for more than 4,500 children of illegal immigrants who crossed the U.S. border with Mexico.

Credit goes to Axios for submitting the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that unearthed the data. But why does the public have to depend upon a feistily independent news outlet instead of the Grey Lady or the Washington Pest for such news?

“As of Sunday, the New York Times hadn’t mentioned it. Nor had the Washington Post. Nor any other major newspaper. There’s been no mention of the findings on the network news, on CNN, or on MSNBC. The story has been picked up only by some conservative news outlets,” Issues & Insights points out.

This is significant, of course, because when the previous administration lost track of a third as many migrant kids, the Times, Post, the networks, etc. etc. went crazy. One might think such hypocrisy would be so embarrassing that it would be addressed by the owners. I’m not holding my breath.

WILL THE REAL BART ERHMAN PLEASE STAND UP: If you remember the 1950s quiz show, the title will instantly make sense. Otherwise, you’ll just have to read the HillFaith post of philosopher William Lane Craig describing the two Bart Erhmans.

VETERAN ESPN PRODUCER FIRED FOR REFUSING VAX: Beth Faber is a widely respected sports radio producer who put in 29 years with ESPN. She chose not to get the Covid jab. Now she’s out of a job.

PRAYING FOR LIFE OCT. 2: Preparations are underway for a prayer gathering at the Supreme Court to pray for the justices as they consider the future of abortion in America. You can bet the Left will be out in force. Will the defenders of life?

PENTAGON PLANNER AT CENTER OF KABUL DEBACLE: You may recall that Senate Republicans unanimously opposed His Fraudulency’s nomination of Colin Kahl as the Pentagon’s top strategic planner. The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo and Alana Goodman report this morning that Kahl was at the center of the bungled evacuation’s planning.

“In Kahl, we have someone not even qualified for a security clearance at the center of President Biden’s incompetently planned and disorderly withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) tell Kredo and Goodman. Even a former Clinton administration State Department official is blasting Kahl’s appointment and his role in the Kabul debacle:

“Kahl ‘owns the [Department of Defense’s] failure to plan and implement a withdrawal that wouldn’t dishonor our veterans, our military, and our values,’ said Josh Block, a foreign policy scholar at the Hudson Institute and former Clinton administration State Department official. Block said Kahl is ‘unqualified for his job, a liability to American national security’ and ‘needs to be removed or made to resign,'” Kredo and Goodman report.

Frankly, if I was Kahl, I would be worried about being made the scapegoat for others’ failures. Spotlighting Kahl may be the start of a familiar Washington ritual that creates a shiny object to distract those calling for genuine accountability.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: Ever hear of “Disability Rights South Carolina” and “Able South Carolina?” No? Well, your federal tax dollars are the primary source of revenue for these two groups, according to the Capital Research Center (CRC). And they are fronting an ACLU lawsuit against South Carolina seeking to bar schools from giving students a choice about wearing masks.

If reading that fact upsets you, just always remember that it’s for your own good that your tax dollars are being spent, thanks to federal bureaucrats, on litigation to force you and other citizens to do what our betters instruct us and our kids to do, particularly when public health is involved.

NO ILLUSIONS ON KABUL BELOW THE MILLEY RANKS: Just the News (JTN) has copies of damning — for Biden — text messages from U.S. military commanders on the scene at the Kabul Airport and private parties trying to evacuate Americans.

“‘We are f*cking abandoning American citizens,’ an Army colonel assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division wrote Sunday in frustration in a series of encrypted messages that detailed the failed effort to extricate a group of American citizens, hours before the last U.S. soldiers departed Afghanistan,” JTN reports.

NO SURPRISE HERE: His Fraudulency waived a law that required him to brief Congress on the potential impact of reducing the U.S. forces below 2,000 uniforms in Afghanistan on our counter-terrorism efforts, according to The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo and Alana Goodman.

IT’S OVER: Sen. Ben Sasse’s summary statement of His Fraudulency’s accountability in the Kabul debacle:

“This national disgrace is the direct result of President Biden’s cowardice and incompetence. The President made the decision to trust the Taliban. The President made the decision to set an arbitrary August 31st deadline. The President made the decision to abandon Bagram Air Base. The President made the decision not to expand the perimeter around Karzai International Airport. The President made the decision to undermine our NATO allies. The President made the decision to break our word to our Afghan partners. The President made the decision to tell one lie after another as the crisis unfolded. The President made the morally indefensible decision to leave Americans behind. Dishonor was the President’s choice. May history never forget this cowardice.”

Actually, rather than saying the war in Afghanistan is over, it would be more accurate to say the focus of operations has shifted, back to the U.S.

TERRORISM IS BACK. THANKS, JOE: Issues & Insights reminds us that it was Trump’s mean tweets, not Islamic Terrorism, that had the American elites panties in a wad. There was a reason for that – Trump destroyed ISIS in Iraq:

“Since then, the number of Islamic terrorist attacks worldwide has plunged. In the U.S., there have been only two acts of terrorism in the past four-plus years that were fueled by Islamic extremism. And in Gallup’s poll of top problems, terrorism stopped even registering. No one mentioned it in the July 2021 survey.

“Then Biden, in an eerie repeat of the Obama years, decided to pull troops out of Afghanistan against the advice of many, after which the country quickly fell to Taliban terrorists – despite Biden’s promise that this wouldn’t happen. And then ISIS suddenly re-emerged, this time called ISIS-K.”

FBI PAID A WHITE SUPREMACIST BEAUCOUP BUCKS: Just the News did a little digging in court records and found the FBI paid a lot of money over a bunch of years to an informant who is/was a publisher of White Supremacists literature. Since the FBI also helped plot the kidnapping of a governor, another such revelation won’t raise that many eyebrows.

FEDS GET A RAISE: Hey, the bureaucrats did such a great job “managing” the Covid crisis from home that His Fraudulency awarded them a nice pay hike, Federal News Network reports.

IF IT WADDLES AND QUACKS LIKE A DUCK: Then odds are, it’s probably a duck. Does the same apply to the universe and the appearance of fine-tuning? Kyle Butt points to the multiple atheist advocates who concede there’s a lot of quacking going on out there.

CAN’T AFFORD TO BUY? HOMELESS? NOT TO WORRY: Ever heard of “Homes Guarantee?” How about the “Housing Justice National Platform for a Homes Guarantee?” Cogs in the Left’s campaign to socialize property and housing in the U.S., as Capital Research Center’s Robert Stilson explains.

ONCE THERE WAS A GOP: Newsmax White House Correspondent Emerald Robinson traces the steps by which what was once the party of Reagan, Coolidge and Lincoln has become an adjunct to the Washington Establishment. She’s not one to mince words:

“It’s not just Romney, Sasse, Murkowski, Collins, and the usual cast of “useful idiots” for the Democrat Party either. It’s Lindsey Graham telling you that he’s ‘getting to the bottom of things’ every night on cable TV for five years.

“It’s Kevin McCarthy getting caught renting rooms at the Frank Luntz Day Camp for Future OxyContin Lobbyists after being forced to remove the unpopular neocon gasbag Liz Cheney from GOP leadership even though McCarthy was the one who had elevated her in the first place. You simply can’t quantify that kind of stupidity.”

You need not agree with every particular to see that Robinson is warning the GOP base is near turning off the life-support.

(Bumped.)

GRANHOLM GOT MILITARY JET DURING AFGHAN EVAC: Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm had a summit to get to in Ukraine, so, naturally, her minions dialed up the Pentagon and presto! There was a U.S. military jet that could possibly have been better utilized a good ways further east of Ukraine.