BREAKING: Manhunt Underway for Felon Who Threatened to Assassinate Trump.

MEMORY-HOLED:

All merchandise for #StarWars ‘THE ACOLYTE’ has been removed for the Disney Online Store pic.twitter.com/qRkG47NS3U

— ScreenTime (@screentime) August 21, 2024

Disney has been memory-holing embarrassingly unloved streaming shows like “Willow” to save money. It looks like “The Acolyte” might be next.

The eight-episode first only season reportedly cost $180 million to produce — not including marketing expenses.

CHUTZPAH: Democrats, the Party of Freedom? I’m Laughing Through My Tears.

FOR THE CHILDREN™: Parents left scrambling after charter school in DC shutters days before school starts. “Eagle Academy classes were supposed to start Monday, but the D.C. Public Charter School Board recently rejected a plan to allow Eagle Academy to merge with the Friendship Public Charter School, 7News Reporter Nick Minock learned.”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (MOSCOW EDITION): ‘They Completely Smashed It!’ Ukraine’s Big Day of Airstrikes Is a Hit in Russia.

YOU DON’T SAY:

Gibberish from the DNC's poet: "We face a race that tests if this country we cherish shall perish from the earth and if our earth shall perish from this country." pic.twitter.com/xwPsvkbJjL

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 22, 2024

Sounds serious.

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Donald Trump Humiliates Oprah With Receipts.

WOKE IS BROKE: Corrupt Media Couldn’t Save ‘The Acolyte’ from Cancellation.

Modern journalists no longer share the news as it happens. They sculpt narratives based on their liberal biases, attacking readers along the way. It’s why serious journalists insisted video evidence of President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline were mere “cheap fakes” created by evil Republicans to take down a leader destined to grace Mt. Rushmore.

They lied. And lied. And told Americans not to trust their eyes and ears. They knew better. Until a fateful presidential debate stopped their lies. Cold.

Something similar happened from a pop culture perspective.

Audiences rejected “The Acolyte” en masse. Viewers watched the first episodes and slowly but surely abandoned the series. The ratings drooped. The show’s sizable budget stayed the same.

Disney brass crunched some numbers and called it a series.

Heads need to roll at Disney-owned Lucasfilm but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.

THE CANDIDATE: Untested. Unprepared. Ready to Do As She’s Told on Day One.

HMM: Harris erases Trump’s cash edge while RFK Jr. faces dwindling resources, new filings show.

THEY CAN’T TALK ABOUT THE ISSUES PEOPLE CARE ABOUT BECAUSE THEY’VE SCREWED THEM ALL UP: CNN Contributor Drops Major Truth Bomb About the DNC’s Messaging. “When it comes to the issues that matter to people, the Democratic Party is curiously silent — so much so that a Democratic Chicago Councilman even blasted the DNC for not talking about the issues.”

YOU HAVE TO VOTE FOR HER PLATFORM TO SEE WHAT’S IN IT: Democratic congressman says give Kamala’s ‘fuzzy’ policies ‘some time.’

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo), a member of the House Financial Services Committee, defended the recently announced fiscal policies of Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, telling Just the News that her ideas are “going to be fuzzy” because she has only been a candidate for about one month.

Cleaver was confronted with the words of Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell who castigated Harris for introducing a left-wing fiscal policy when the Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, has called her a communist. “When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?” was the headline of her piece op-ed piece.

“What are these ‘clear rules of the road’ or the thresholds that determine when a price or profit level becomes ‘excessive’? The memo doesn’t say, and the campaign did not answer questions I sent seeking clarification,” she wrote.

When asked about Harris’ price control plans, Cleaver suggested that Harris should be congratulated for being so vague.

She’s been running for president since 2019.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: DEI In Decline Everywhere but Boeing and the DNC.“Now the United States of America is perilously close to a commie takeover all because of a DEI idea that went horribly awry.”

LEFTIES HAVE IT WORST BUT DEPRESSION IS UP FOR EVERYBODY SINCE 2020:

"Depression increased the most among liberal young women, where it went from 15% in the late 2000s to 46% in 2021-22 — more than tripling in a little more than a decade."

— Jean Twenge pic.twitter.com/5VOeE2NIo5

— Paul Graham (@paulg) August 21, 2024

PEOPLE HAVE BEEN RAISING THESE QUESTIONS FOR MORE THAN TWO YEARS: Russia’s Glacial Response to Ukraine’s Kursk Advance Raises Questions About Putin’s Hold on Power.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED THIS KIND OF THING NEVER HAPPENED: Whistleblowers Risk Everything To Expose Shocking Practices At Texas Children’s Hospital.

Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston is the largest children’s hospital in the world. They treat more than four million patients under the age of 21 every year, most of them minors. And because of the hospital’s size and prestige, what happens at TCH doesn’t just affect those patients. What happens at TCH also influences how other major children’s hospitals all around the country conduct their operations.

That’s what makes the reporting out of Texas Children’s Hospital this year — most of it done by Chris Rufo — impossible to ignore. In the span of a little over a year, two whistleblowers have come forward to allege that TCH is systemically deceiving the public and potentially violating the law.

The first whistleblower, a general surgeon named Eithan Haim, provided records to Rufo which demonstrated that TCH had not, in fact, shut down its child sex-change program as promised. This was significant because the attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, had just released a legal opinion stating that child sex-change surgeries — as well as cross-sex hormone treatments — constitutes child abuse under Texas law. So TCH claimed that they shut the program down in order to avoid prosecution.

Read the whole thing.

THERE IS NO JOY IN CHI-TOWN: If What the Dems Are Peddling Is Joyful, I’d Like a Lot Less of It in My Life.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Against all odds, an asteroid mining company appears to be making headway.

When I first spoke with space entrepreneurs Jose Acain and Matt Gialich a little more than two years ago, I wondered whether I would ever talk to them again.

That is not meant to be offensive; rather, it is a reflection of the fact that the business they entered into—mining asteroids for platinum and other precious metals—is a perilous one. To date, NASA and other space agencies have spent billions of dollars returning a few grams of rocky material from asteroids. Humanity has never visited a metal-rich asteroid, although that will finally change with NASA’s $1.4 billion Psyche mission in 2029. And so commercial asteroid mining seems like a stretch, and indeed, other similarly minded startups have come and gone.

But it turns out that I did hear from Acain and Gialich again about their asteroid mining venture, AstroForge. On Tuesday the co-founders announced that they have successfully raised $40 million in Series A funding and shared plans for their next two missions. AstroForge has now raised a total of $55 million to date.

Plus: “There is no shortage of potential targets. Scientists estimate that there are about 10 million near-Earth asteroids, which come within one astronomical unit (the distance between the Sun and Earth) of our planet. Perhaps 3 to 5 percent of these are rich in metals, so there are potentially hundreds of thousands of candidates for mining.”

IT’S ALL FUN AND GAMES UNTIL YOU RETURN HOME TO XI’S CHINA:

Aging dictator Xi Jinping forced every single Chinese Olympics athlete to assemble in a grand reception hall and applaud him on state television for twenty minutes. This was their Welcome Home celebration from the Paris Olympics.

National Chinese state television broadcaster… pic.twitter.com/iw8ygeG5fB

— Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@DrewPavlou) August 21, 2024

DON’T GET COCKY — HER BIG NIGHT ISN’T UNTIL TOMORROW: It Looks Like the DNC Is Backfiring on Kamala Harris.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: California moves ahead with $0 downpayment ‘loans’ for new homes for illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile: While California politicians skirmish over housing, the shortage keeps growing.

CRISIS BY DESIGN: Northern Border Apprehensions Surge, Border Patrol Struggling.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Is Kamala Harris Dumb? (Illustrated).

KRUISER: I’m Still Clinging to My Guns and Religion, Now More Than Ever. “Thankfully, I am a Roman Catholic who lives in Tucson, AZ, so it’s never difficult for me to find a church, a place that sells ammo, or a range.”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (MOSCOW EDITION): Russians Baffled After Putin’s ‘Space Troops’ Deployed as Infantry in Kursk.

The deployment of temporary motorized rifle of Russia’s Aerospace Forces to the Kursk region was first reported by independent investigative Russian outlet Important Stories.

The unit, created between May and June, consists of personnel from security and logistics companies, engineers, mechanics, some officers, and servicemen from a Russian spaceport. There are also personnel from special warehouses of the Aerospace Forces and radar stations in Russia’s Voronezh region, who were previously in charge of manning Russia’s nuclear deterrent, the publication reported, citing a source familiar with the matter.

The Fighterbomber Telegram channel, which has links to the Russian Aerospace Forces, appeared confused by the decision to deploy the unit to Kursk.

Possibly not the ideal use of warehouse specialists, engineers, mechanics, etc.