SAY ANYTHING: Hillary Claims ‘Climate Change’ Killed 500,000 Last Year, ‘Particularly Pregnant Women.’

THE BABY BUST: Kim Jong Un Weeps as He Begs North Korean Women to Have More Kids.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was seen weeping as he begged women across his country to start having more babies during an event on Monday.

He told a hall full of hundreds of women gathered for the National Mothers Meeting that they needed to halt North Korea’s declining birth rate and strengthen its national power.

The hermetic country’s fertility rate has been in steady decline for the past decade. The average number of children being born to North Korean mothers stands at 1.8.

1.8 is still more than double South Korea’s worst-in-the-world fertility rate of 0.78, which has some interesting implications for future relations between the two countries.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Drug Shortages Hit Record High (But So Did Drug Overdose Deaths). “Just this summer, the nation’s pharmaceutical shortage reached a ten-year high, but the problem since then has gotten only worse — and in more ways than one.”

REALITY ONLY BITES AFTER YOU’VE BEEN DENYING IT: Economic reality bites as Newsom faces a big California budget problem.

During his much ballyhooed, nationally televised debate with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom boasted that the state’s economy is “booming” and leads the nation.

“California has no peers,” Newsom declared. “California dominates.”

About 18 hours later, reality reared its ugly head. The Legislative Analyst’s Office revealed that state tax revenues are running tens of billions of dollars behind expectations due to a slowing economy, creating a monumental budget headache.

The dilemma became apparent when the November income tax filing deadline – seven months later than the original date – passed, and tax receipts for 2022 could finally be counted.

“With the recent receipt of various postponed tax payments, the impact of recent economic weakness and last year’s financial market distress on state revenues has become clearer,” the LAO authors said in a preliminary report on the state’s fiscal situation. “The postponed payments came in much weaker than anticipated.”

I had been assured that Bidenomics was working.

WHAT DOES A GOVERNMENT HAVE TO DO THESE DAYS TO GIVE AWAY FREE MONEY? You Won’t Believe How Many EV Chargers Biden Can Buy for $7.5 Billion.

“THIRD-PARTY” IS LIZ-SPEAK FOR “BIDEN STALKING HORSE”: Liz Cheney says she’s ready to consider a third party, warns of ‘grave’ threat of Trump-led GOP.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Never Mind a Second Term, Can We Make It to the End of Biden’s First? “This is a most dangerous and inopportune time for the United States to have a weak chief executive. The worst people in the world tend to act up a lot when there is a lack of spine in the White House.”

WOEING: Boeing Exits Air Force’s ‘Doomsday Plane’ Competition.

In a surprising development in the program, Boeing has reportedly been dropped from the competition to build a successor to the U.S. Air Force’s E-4B Nightwatch ‘Doomsday Plane.’ If true, the latest move would appear to leave the door wide open for Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) to provide the Survivable Airborne Operations Center (SAOC) that will supersede the E-4B, which is based on a Boeing 747-200 airframe. However, the new aircraft platform will almost certainly still be a Boeing product.

According to a recent report from Reuters, Boeing told the news agency that the Air Force has “eliminated” it from the SAOC competition. Valued at over $8 billion over the next five years, a contract award for SAOC is expected in early 2024.

The Air Force is staying mum on why Boeing was booted from the competition.

TAKE A GUESS: Everybody Is Upset About Civilian Casualties in Gaza, but Where Do the Numbers Come From?

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS IN A MEDICALLY INDUCED COMA: DOJ deviated from ‘standard processes,’ gave Hunter Biden ‘special treatment’ in probe, House GOP report says.

“The whistleblowers, who came forward only after IRS leadership failed to address their concerns, noted several deviations by Justice Department officials ‘from the normal process that provided preferential treatment, in this case to Hunter Biden,’” the report states.

The report points to Shapley and Ziegler’s claims that the Justice Department “allowed the statute of limitations on certain charges against Hunter Biden to lapse, prohibited line investigators from referring to or asking about President Biden during witness interviews, withheld evidence from line investigators, excluded the investigative team from meetings with defense counsel, and tipped off defense counsel about pending search warrants.”

As part of the investigation, the committees have heard testimony from nearly a dozen DOJ officials, including Special Counsel David Weiss, who is leading the Hunter Biden probe, and have obtained “hundreds of pages of documents.”

“The testimony and documents received by the committees to date corroborates many of the allegations made by IRS whistleblowers,” the report states.

But Hunter’s six-figure art sales and seven-figure foreign no-show jobs were legit, right?

KEVIN DOWNY JR: ‘Woke’ Was Invented to Kill the West, and It’s Working.“What happened to Western men? ‘Woke’ happened.”

MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH: You Won’t Believe How Many EV Chargers Biden Can Buy for $7.5 Billion.

STANDARDS? WE DON’T NEED NO STINKIN’ STANDARDS: Prof says he was fired after sounding alarm on grade inflation at women’s HBCU.

LINCOLN BROWN: The Sociopathic Generation. “These protestors have come of age in or become accustomed to living in a bubble in which their needs are always met and their whims are always accommodated. And if those demands are not met quickly enough, a tantrum or outburst will ensure compliance. Be that as it may, they know what they are saying and what those words mean, and they don’t care.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: India now credibly has the third most advanced deep-space program in the world.

A little more than three months ago the Indian space agency, ISRO, achieved a major success by putting its Vikram lander safely down on the surface of the Moon. In doing so India became the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon, and this further ignited the country’s interest in space exploration.

But it turns out that is not the end of the story for the Chandrayaan 3 mission. In a surprise announcement made Monday, ISRO announced that it has successfully returned the propulsion module used by the spacecraft into a high orbit around Earth. This experimental phase of the mission, the agency said in a statement, tested key capabilities needed for future lunar missions, including the potential for returning lunar rocks to Earth.

Impressive.

But India is really in fourth place if you count SpaceX as its own space program apart from NASA’s — which in many ways it is.

THE FIRST STEP IS ADMITTING YOU HAVE A PROBLEM, AND THEY AREN’T THERE YET: Maybe This Idiocy Will Finally Break Trump Derangement Syndrome Fever Forever.

TEXAS: Cruz Campaigning Against Phelan Stooges. “Ted Cruz has announced he will campaign for the primary opponents of anyone running against the Republican state house incumbent who voted to kill school choice.”

WARD CLARK: Colorado Eyes Reintroduction of Wolverines.

Here’s a question for the governor: Why? What will Colorado gain that will make this expenditure worthwhile? Even assuming a successful reintroduction, which is far from certain, the wolverine is not only a wilderness animal but a very secretive one. Even here in Alaska, where we almost certainly have more wolverines than the contiguous 48 combined, as the 48 have somewhere between 25 to 300 wolverines in total, hard numbers on an elusive animal like this are near-impossible to obtain. But Alaska and Canada have wolverine populations estimated in the thousands, and Canada has plenty of wolverine habitat, as does Alaska.
…
That brings up a somewhat obvious question: Why, then, spend taxpayer dollars to bring wolverines into a Southwestern state where the habitat is marginal when there are healthy populations farther north?

So city folk can lord it over the rubes in the sticks.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Now It’s Trump’s SCOTUS Judges Who Will Destroy Muh Democracy™. “The new narrative’s target: Three of the few serious people in Washington dedicated to doing a serious job. They aren’t evil or dangerous or anything like that — they just have the misfortune to be associated with two things the Left can’t stand: Donald Trump and the Constitution.”

DAVID HARSANYI: Hubris, Not Conspiracy, Kept Israel From Anticipating Hamas Terrorist Attack.

Israelis can be arrogant and dismissive about their enemies. It leads to disasters. In this case, it’s clear Israel overestimated the effectiveness of its security services and its border and underestimated Hamas. Their enemies might be terrorists, but they aren’t stupid.

There probably isn’t another nation that has such a pronounced economic, moral, and lifestyle disparity with its neighbors. Perhaps South Korea? Israel’s per capita GDP is on par with most Western European nations at $54,660, while in Palestinian territories the per capita GDP is $3,789 — which, despite claims of Gaza being an “open-air prison” etc., is on par with Egyptians ($4,295), Jordanians ($4,205) and Lebanese ($4,136).

This unpleasant reality is often forgotten by Israelis, who live in a technologically and morally advanced first-world democracy. The Iron Dome. The top-tier conventional military. The prosperous Western lifestyles. Its innovative science and tech sectors. All of it can lull a country into a false sense of security.

Just as it did in 1973, when the disparities between Israel and her Arab neighbors were much less pronounced than they are today.

KRUISER: The ‘Trump Will Be an Authoritarian Destroyer of Democracy’ Narrative Is Patently Absurd. “In recent days, ‘authoritarian’ has been popping up more and more in scary stories about Trump. By Monday morning, it was easy to spot in three of the first four MSM items I merely glanced at. It was heavily implied in the fourth one, by the way.”

BREAKING: We’re Learning More About the Owner of the House That Exploded Near D.C.—and It’s Disturbing.

NOT BY ANY OF THE ESTABLISHMENT FACT-CHECKERS, OF COURSE: Biden Campaign Gets Fact-Checked for Fake Trump Quote.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Forget Hamas, the Feds Still Think We’re the Bad Guys. “In a time when our southern border is being besieged by various and sundry criminals and college campuses are overrun by protesters who support the most heinous terrorists in the world, it would be nice to think that the formerly trustworthy people at the Federal Bureau of Investigation were focused on some of them. Alas, this is the Biden FBI, and it is singularly focused on any threats to Democratic election victories.”

HMM: Someone bet against the Israeli stock market in the days before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.

According to Columbia Law School Professor Joshua Mitts, one of the authors of the study, “that’s extremely unusual.” It was also profitable: the shares sold short for one Israeli company alone yielded a profit of nearly $900,000.

Mitts and his co-author, Professor Robert J. Jackson Jr., ran a number of comparisons over the past 13 years to see whether the same thing had happened before other major moments of instability in Israel, like the 2014 Israel-Gaza war, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the judicial reform initiative that led millions of Israelis to take to the streets in protest.

They found that the short-selling activity in early October was “really extraordinary, even when you compare it to those periods of instability, which there were many.”

Something similar had happened before, though — on April 3, a couple of days before the Jewish holiday of Passover. The study links this to an Israeli media report claiming Hamas had initially planned its attack for the eve of Passover.

“It’s almost the same magnitude.What are the odds?” asks Mitts.

“The other thing we know,” he adds, “is that this looks to have been the product of a single trader, based on what we can see in the data. This is extraordinarily unusual.”

All of this led them to their conclusion that the trades were not a coincidence, but a tactic by someone who knew the attack was coming.

“We think it’s virtually impossible this happened by chance,” Mitts told CBS News.

Underground rocket factories don’t pay for themselves, you know.