COOKIN’ WITH KDJ: How to Make a Perfect Commie Every Time.

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY: Here’s the Best Reason Never to Do Fentanyl. “It’s your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week we have the dirtiest grandpa, golF cart mayhem, and how not to join the mile-high club.”

CHRISTIAN TOTO: ‘Beekeeper’ Takes Out the Trash (Including Hunter Biden?).

SCENES FROM THE Illegal Alien Bus War.

WELL, IT IS: Why Sports Fandom Is Good for All of Us.

PRIORITIES: FHP arrest man accused of using spray paint to cover up pro-Palestinian graffiti on I-95.

According to the arrest report, on Jan. 2, Florida Highway Patrol Troopers were dispatched to the scene on Interstate-95, near Marina Mile Boulevard, after receiving reports of “possible vandalism.”

Once at the scene, troopers found Maimon holding a spray paint can. A trooper then pulled out a taser and ordered Maimon to put the can down.

According to Maimon, he told troopers that he is from Israel and was trying to cover up the pro-Palestinian messages.

“I have family in Israel. I don’t like to see it,” he said. “It is a terrorist organization. They kidnap and kill people every day.”

Maimon painted over the words with gray spray paint, which he thought was the same color as the wall.

After FHP arrived, he was then cuffed, book and taken to the Broward County jail were he spent nine hours.

“They put the handcuff on my leg and on my hand,” Maimon said. “Then they asked me questions and I tell them I just covered the ‘Free Palestine,’ like nothing wrong, just ‘Free the Palestine,’ and they took me to the jail.”

Maimon’s boss, Eran Hazan, said that the troopers actions towards his employee were “very unfair” and humiliating. He said they should have given him a warning because Maimon wasn’t causing extra damage and was using the gray spray paint to match the rest of the wall.

Both Maimon and Hazan work at an organization called Yedidim USA, which does charity work in the South Florida Jewish community. The organization fed first responders after the Surfside collapse condo in 2021 and has sent humanitarian aid to Israel during its war with Hamas.

“Yoni has been working at our organization for four and a half years. This guy is an angel,” Hazan said. “He helps out families from the moment he wakes up in the morning until he goes to sleep.”

No arrests seem to have been made for the actual graffiti.

BY ANY MEANS FAIR OR FOUL — BUT MOSTLY FOUL: Is This How Democrats Will Stop Pennsylvania Going Red in November?

MAN, DON’T LET ANYONE IN THE HERTZ DEI DEPARTMENT HEAR ABOUT THIS…: Hertz is selling 20,000 electric vehicles to buy gasoline cars instead.

Hertz, which has made a big push into electric vehicles in recent years, has decided it’s time to cut back. The company will sell off a third of its electric fleet, totaling roughly 20,000 vehicles, and use the money they bring to purchase more gasoline powered vehicles.

Electric vehicles have been hurting Hertz’s financials, executives have said, because, despite costing less to maintain, they have higher damage-repair costs and, also, higher depreciation.

“[C]ollision and damage repairs on an EV can often run about twice that associated with a comparable combustion engine vehicle,” Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr said in a recent analyst call.

And EV price declines in the new car market have pushed down the resale value of Hertz’s used EV rental cars.

An over-used engine can be rebuilt but there’s really nothing to be done with a battery that’s endured too many charge cycles except replace the whole damn thing.

OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT, I JUST LAUNCHED A NEW VIP SERIES ON UNDERAPPRECIATED ALBUMS STARTIN WITH: Sinatra & Swingin’ Brass. “To borrow a line from Michael Lewis’s 1989 Wall Street exposé, ‘Liar’s Poker,’ this is the ‘big, swinging dick’ of Sinatra albums — but without the disdain Lewis was heaping on Salomon Brothers traders.”

SCIENCE! Vegan NYC Mayor Under Fire After He Advocates Ditching Diabetes Medication.

New York City mayor Eric Adams (D.) is facing criticism after he claimed in a Netflix documentary that he reversed his type 2 diabetes purely by going vegan and not using his insulin.

“When she saw my number reverse in my A1C, what is the, an indicator of your sugar level, she said, ‘Wow, the medicine must be working.’ And I remember placing all the medicine on the table, unused, and said, ‘No, I didn’t use the medicine. I went on a whole-food, plant-based diet,'” Adams says in the documentary, describing a checkup with his endocrinologist after his diagnosis.

Adams recounted the story, as reported Wednesday by Vice News, in an interview for the Netflix series You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment, which tracks a study measuring the health effects of a vegan versus omnivorous diet on sets of twins. The mayor appears in the series along with other prominent advocates of veganism.

Previously: Food-as-Medicine study finds no improvements in type 2 diabetes patients.

POSEURS GOTTA POSE: Sanctuary Cities Not Living Up to Their Name.

BECAUSE THEY AREN’T SURVIVABLE IN A HIGH-THREAT ENVIRONMENT. NEXT QUESTION? Forget the F-16: Why Doesn’t America Send A-10 Warthogs to Ukraine?

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: GOP Nomination 2024 — It’s All Over But the Veepstakes. “I have spent some time thinking about Trump’s potential running mates and, I’m not gonna lie, I can’t figure out the best fit. Trump has been very vocal about loyalty, which is most understandable when so many alleged and former confidantes have turned away.”

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: US Supreme Court declines to review Illinois high court ruling upholding gun ban. “The U.S. Supreme Court’s denial of state Rep. Dan Caulkins’ request for review was issued without comment and comes less than a month after Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined to put the law on hold ahead of a Jan. 1 deadline for gun owners to register banned weapons they owned before the law took effect on Jan. 10, 2023.”

But there is a bright spot: Most owners of assault-style weapons in Illinois appear not to have registered them as required by law.

C-PLAYERS ALWAYS HIRE D-PLAYERS: Biden Judicial Nominee Torched by Sen. Kennedy Goes Down in Flames.

TAXES, DAMNED TAXES, AND MORE DAMNED TAXES: 3 reasons why rich Californians are selling their mansions and moving to Las Vegas — Mark Wahlberg and Dean Cain have already made the move.

While it’s difficult at best to pinpoint a single statistic that proves an exodus from the Sunset Strip to the Las Vegas Strip among mansion owners, numbers from many corners of the economy show that rich folks are leaving Cali in dramatic numbers, while Vegas has seen some high-earning arrivals recently, including Wahlberg — who hopes to help build a movie studio there (more on that in a bit).

Meanwhile, about 27,300 fewer tax returns were filed in California between 2020 and 2021 that reported an adjusted gross income of at least $200,000, according to research by the non-profit Tax Foundation that cites IRS migration data. Last year, Redfin reported that Los Angeles and San Francisco accounted for the highest number of homebuyers searching to move to Las Vegas from April 2023 to June 2023.

And in terms of new Vegas construction, luxury homes worth in excess of $1 million sold at a record pace in the first half of 2023: 267, more than triple the number during the same period in 2018, according to numbers compiled by local research firm Home Builders Research and cited by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Overall in 2022, 2,130 luxury home sales of $1 million or more were completed in Southern Nevada, essentially unchanged from the elevated level in 2021, per the Nevada State Bank.

Related: California’s Next Suicidal Idea Will Shock You — Unless It Doesn’t

THAT OUGHT TO PUT THE PUBLIC’S CONCERNS ABOUT ANTISEMITISM TO REST: Harvard to Host Pro-Terrorist, Anti-Israel Summer Program

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Oops, Drudge Did It Again.

DON’T GET COCKY: How Corruption Hollowed Out China’s Military. “I’ve got to say, trying to get away with graft in your nation’s nuclear forces is a pretty bold move.”

I’M SO OLD, I REMEMBER WHEN EVEN SUGGESTING SUCH A THING WOULD GET YOU CANCELED: Fauci Now Says the Lab-Leak Hypothesis Isn’t a ‘Conspiracy Theory.’

HOW’S THAT UNMANNED SURFACE WARFARE VESSEL PROGRAM COMING ALONG? At-Sea Billet Gaps Rise to 22,000 for E1-E4 Sailors, CNP Says. “Overall, the Navy has 21,000 gaps in at-sea fill billets, Vice Adm. Richard Cheeseman told an audience at the Surface Navy Association Wednesday. Overall at-sea fill gaps are lower than those in apprentice manning because some at-sea billets for ranks E-5 and above are overmanned, Lt. Lewis Aldridge, a spokesman with the chief of naval personnel, clarified after the speech.”

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Can Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas Be Impeached for Incompetence?

“Will he be?” is an entirely different question.

THAT’S HOW DIVIDED GOVERNMENT WORKS, AS EXPRESSED BY THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE IN THE MOST RECENT ELECTION: GOP’s 2024 agenda: Stifle Biden at every turn.

DON’T ASK, HE WON’T TELL: Donald Trump Has Picked His Running Mate.

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Risk Is Our Business.

It’s impossible to discuss the politics of Star Trek without focusing on the original 1960’s series, which is where the entire ethos of the Star Trek Universe received its DNA. No series produced since then could exist without the context, the canon if you will, that this first series provided.

So first, let’s be clear about what the original Star Trek series, Gene Roddenberry’s first creation, actually was… it was a smart, muscular and unapologetic defense of the power of Western Civilization to change the world (universe) for the better… and it was a series which celebrated courage and risk taking as among the most important of all human virtues.

If any of that sounds like something that would send Conservatives fleeing for their lives like vampires before a runaway garlic truck with a busted brake line, well then you’re probably a BLM activist… or at the very least you are admitting that you’re entirely ignorant of the things that modern Conservatives actually believe.

The problem, in my experience, is that most Progressives have not actually seen much of the original series (TOS), and have only a very rudimentary understanding of the show’s ethos. To the extent they are familiar with TOS at all, it is often through modern media “criticism” of the show which focuses on what mainstream critics, which is to say Leftists, have concluded… that the show’s politics were proudly and unapologetically Progressive.

The problem is that this conclusion just ain’t true… it’s a misunderstanding often based on a single episode… “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, which has become the most famous episode of Star Trek precisely because it is about race… our modern culture’s most fraught, most talked about, most obsesssed-over issue.

Plus, a look at “A Private Little War” and “Patterns of Force,” so you’ll want to read the whole thing.