HANDS-ON VEEP: Former senator told Biden he’d ‘kick the sh-t out of’ the then-VP for getting handsy with his wife.

Former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown threatened President Joe Biden with bodily harm when the then-veep allegedly got fresh with Brown’s wife more than a decade ago, he recalled this week.

“I told him I’d kick the sh-t out of – beat the – I told him to stop,” Brown told host Tom Shattuck on the “Burn Barrel” podcast Wednesday.

“He didn’t act the way I thought he should,” Brown added.

“And, you know, we called him on it, and that’s it.”

The incident occurred in 2010, when Biden, in his role as president of the Senate, posed for photos with Brown and his wife, Gail Huff Brown, at the Republican’s swearing-in ceremony in the US Capitol.

Photographers captured Huff Brown’s frozen grin as Biden’s right hand remained awkwardly behind her back – apparently near her posterior – as the portrait session ended.

Biden has always been a bully and a creep — and what a shame some husband or father didn’t publicly deck him long ago.

I’D RATHER NOT TASTE THE RAINBOW: Skittles Pulls a Bud Light.

DOUBTFUL, BUT THE SPECULATION IS CERTAINLY DETAILED AND ENTERTAINING: TR-3B: Does America have a reverse-engineered UFO?

FIGHT OF THE CENTURY: Elon’s Got the Receipt Proving Zuck Chickened Out of Charity MMA Fight.

VIDEO: China Is Screwed: Pipe People. “‘Those who are single simply adapt to homelessness, creating their own personal space amongst the concrete pipes.’ Or, you could have, you know, lived modestly, saved money, and shared housing with other people. The fact they haven’t gone this route and are instead living in pipes suggests something in the Chinese economy is even more broken than we think.”

If you don’t have the time or inclination to watch a video, Lawrence Person has done his usual fine job of breaking out the bullet points.

CRISIS BY DESIGN: Erie, N.Y., Halts Migrants Entering the County After Two Sexual Assaults in Two Weeks.

MALINVESTMENT: IRA Subsidies Are Driving Investment Decisions In A Dangerous Direction.

One result of having perhaps the worst possible class of people – politicians – making all these multi-billion-dollar decisions for the rest of us comes clear in the perverse incentives and unintended consequences the policies are now creating.

One of the best illustrations of this is the IRA/EPA policy effort to force 2/3rds of the U.S. transportation fleet to convert to EVs by 2032. The IRA contained the carrot of heavy incentives and subsidies for EV makers and consumers, and the EPA is implementing the stick of new tailpipe emissions and mileage standards designed to crowd most current internal combustion models out of the market.

This carrot-and-stick policy approach comes at the same time the U.S. power generation sector faces an already-severe and growing shortage of the transformers that are integral to any power generation or transmission project. It is now taking up to 4 years to source high voltage transformers, most of which are made overseas and moved via supply chains largely controlled by China.

The obvious problem here is that recharging millions of additional EVs will place an enormous new load on the nation’s power grids, a fact that Tesla CEO Elon Musk says will require at least a doubling of generation capacity in the coming years, and that even the Biden administration admits will require the build-out of 47,000 miles of new high-capacity transmission lines.

But get this: Neither the IRA nor the 2021 infrastructure law included subsidies or incentives targeting transmission or transformers.

Oh.

Just a reminder that all this DC-directed spending won’t deliver the promised results, will deliver a lot of misery or at least inconvenience, and come at the cost of productive investments required for healthy economic growth.

ANOTHER ONE: A Very Bad Week for Civilization in California. “Dear Californians: It ain’t rocket science figuring out what’s happening in your beautiful state. This is a direct result of lax enforcement of the law and a reluctance of prosecutors and district attorneys to uphold the basic values of civilization.”

Actually, it was an average week for California — worse than last week, better than next week.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Iran close to testing nuclear weapons for first time.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: A National Conversation About Locking Up the J6 Committee Creeps. “It’s outrageous and disheartening that these awful people have played such a significant role in all of the pre-election tampering that we’re seeing right now. Truth has been plagued by false leftist narratives here for far too long. The J6 Committee was created solely to keep a false narrative alive so that it could be weaponized to keep Trump off of the ballot.”

THAT’S NOT FUNNY: China has fallen into a psycho-political funk.

Sly, Soviet-style jokes are enjoying a subtle revival on Chinese social media platforms. Their art resides in being too obscure for censors to understand yet clear enough for cynics to chuckle at their mockery.

Some are so esoteric that their satire is confirmed only by the censors’ decision to delete them — echoing the cat-and-mouse dynamic that distinguished dissident humour in the former Soviet Union. One joke this week monitored by the China Digital Times, a US-based site that covers Chinese affairs, belonged to this genre.

It read: “While out and about on vacation, I stubbed my toe on something. Upon closer inspection, I saw it was a bronze lamp. It was smudged, so I picked it up and gave it a good wipe — and out popped a genie! The genie said it could grant me any wish. ‘Is that so?’ I said. ‘Well then, could you make you-know-who you-know-what?’ No sooner had the words escaped my lips than the genie rushed over, clamped my mouth shut, and asked: ‘Are we even allowed to say that?’”

The author’s account appears to have been shut down after the joke was deleted. “Of course, by banning the joke and its author, censors merely proved the punchline,” commented the China Digital Times. “This is not the first time that ‘Soviet-style’ jokes have become Chinese realities.”

But will the Chinese Yakov Smirnoff even want to try his hand at comedy in Woke America?

RABBI MICHAEL BARCLAY: Virgin Atlantic Airways Ruined My Family’s Trip With Intrusive Grooming.

THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT: Too much ‘trauma’ talk encourages fragility. “I was wrong about trigger warnings, writes Jill Filipovic in The Atlantic. Writing for a feminist blog in 2008, she thought warning readers about topics such as sexual assault might be helpful and could do no harm. Now, she sees the harm, especially to teenage girls who’ve embraced fragility.”

THE FIX IS IN: J6 Committee Accused of DESTROYING Key Intelligence Documents About Capitol Riot.

MAYBE NOT EXACTLY THE FIGHT OF THE CENTURY: Zuckerberg suggests August 26 for cage fight with Musk.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Joe Rogan Shares Oliver Anthony’s ‘Rich Men’ Battle Cry. “This song is worth ALL the hype.”

NOW WHAT? Rand Paul Says There’s ‘Smoking Gun’ Evidence That Dr. Fauci Committed Perjury.

“IT’S A GAG ORDER”: California Threatens Researcher Who Testified That Pandemic Closures Hurt Poor Kids. “Thomas Dee, who has studied academic outcomes for 11 years at Stanford, submitted testimony last month in support of the families’ claims in a 2020 lawsuit that the state harmed vulnerable children when they shut down classrooms and effectively stalled instruction. Within days, the California Department of Education sent him a letter claiming that because he works with taxpayer-funded data from the agency, he could not criticize the state in court.”

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: How to Do the Wrong Right Thing With a Stolen Porsche. “Florida Man Friday is your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week we have a preternaturally self-aware shoplifter, Tampa’s super-mayor, and Nevada Man’s toe-curling crime spree.”

OH MY: Historic Supreme Court case could imperil the entire US tax code.

Unless the justices take a middle road and define the 16th Amendment according to the history and traditions of the U.S. tax system, the case will result in bad law and worse outcomes.

The case (Moore v. United States) concerns the constitutionality of the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA). The act imposed a mandatory repatriation tax on pre-2018 profits that companies and some U.S. shareholders stored abroad. Previously, foreign business profits went untaxed until they returned to U.S. shareholders. But under mandatory repatriation tax, passed as part of Republicans’ comprehensive international tax reform, profits were taxed even if shareholders never received the income.

The revenue from the mandatory tax helped raise an estimated $339 billion that contributed to offsetting other individual and corporate tax cuts, as well as broader international tax reform in the 2017 tax cuts.

The court faces a difficult question: Is this mandatory tax on foreign profits that shareholders never actually received constitutional under the 16th Amendment? The Supreme Court has maintained since 1920 that income must be “clearly realized” for it to be taxable. Yet the U.S. tax code is riddled with taxes on unrealized income.

It’s clear that the income tax is unsalvageable — repeal the 16th Amendment!

THE MEDIA HAS ASSURED ME INFLATION WAS OVER: Inflation Ticks Up in July. And That’s Not the Worst of It.

I also couldn’t help noticing Biden’s belated narrative backflip on the Inflation Reduction Act.

THE MAFIA IS SMALL-TIME COMPARED TO THE BIDEN CABAL: ‘Strong-arming:’ Appeals court judges compare Biden social media pressure to mafia.

BREAKING: Rep. Greg Steube Files Articles of Impeachment Against President Joe Biden.

HMM: Biden Legal Team Negotiating With Prosecutors Over Classified Documents Investigation.

AND THEN THERE ARE THE UNELECTED CROOKS: ‘Criminals Are Running This City’: Veteran Seattle Cop Resigns With Scathing Letter.

“Their absurd policies have turned Seattle into a playground for anarchists and criminals, and they seem utterly unconcerned with the devastating consequences of their actions,” wrote Jessica Taylor, who joined the force in 1998 and resigned last week. “If you haven’t noticed, the criminals are running this city.”

Taylor refused to fill out a standard exit form and instead submitted the 15-page letter to chief of police Adrian Diaz, who she says “has brought this department and this city to its knees,” adding that the department “has transformed into a cesspool of corruption.”

Diaz and other city leaders prioritize “playing politics and pandering to radical ideologies rather than genuinely serving the city’s and its residents best interests,” Taylor said.

The worse, the better.