RED WAVE: Whispers That Colorado Senate Seat Could Go to GOP. “The multimillion-dollar question — with both parties now throwing massive amounts of money at the race — is this: Why does anyone think that a low-polling neophyte Republican has any chance against an entrenched Democrat?”

MICHAEL WALSH: To Save America, Repeal the 17th Amendment. “In trying to solve a problem of ‘special interests,’ rather than the states having two powerful advocates for their interests in Washington, Washington got two powerful advocates of its interests in each of the states, greatly assisting what we now call the Swamp in cementing its control over the nation. The sinister Left, currently fretting about losing ‘our democracy’ remains hell-bent on finishing off republicanism in both its senses; for them, only a government by national plebiscite will do. As any student of early-20th century ‘reform’ knows, the cure for ‘reform’ gone awry was and is always more ‘reform’ rather than a return to first principles.”

Plus: “The Senate is no longer regarded as the equally apportioned voices of the states in the upper house of Congress, but rather a way station for ambitious individual senators eyeing the road to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

LINCOLN BROWN: Racism Is the ‘Precious’ of the Left. “The one ring to rule us all and the one ring to find us. The one ring to bring us all and in the darkness bind us. Without it, the movement collapses. If it is lost, Mordor falls and its sway over the world evaporates in the sunlight. Without it, the Left loses power that it cannot afford to gamble away. Rather it is to be hoarded, strengthened, and wielded to terrible effect. It is the one ring that controls all others, and it seems almost impossible to defeat, which is why the Left continues to clutch it so tightly and use it for purposes great and small.”

SAY ANYTHING: Buttigieg Says Democrats Are Having A Hard Time Campaigning Because They’ve Been Too Successful.

MEH, THEY’RE LIKE THAT PRETTY MUCH ALL THE TIME: Liberals Will Freak Out When They Learn Who the Most Popular Politician in America Is.

BORIS BONDAREV: A Diplomat Defects From the Kremlin.

Resigning meant throwing away a twenty-year career as a Russian diplomat and, with it, many of my friendships. But the decision was a long time coming. When I joined the ministry in 2002, it was during a period of relative openness, when we diplomats could work cordially with our counterparts from other countries. Still, it was apparent from my earliest days that Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was deeply flawed. Even then, it discouraged critical thinking, and over the course of my tenure, it became increasingly belligerent. I stayed on anyway, managing the cognitive dissonance by hoping that I could use whatever power I had to moderate my country’s international behavior. But certain events can make a person accept things they didn’t dare to before.

The invasion of Ukraine made it impossible to deny just how brutal and repressive Russia had become. It was an unspeakable act of cruelty, designed to subjugate a neighbor and erase its ethnic identity. It gave Moscow an excuse to crush any domestic opposition. Now, the government is sending thousands upon thousands of drafted men to go kill Ukrainians. The war shows that Russia is no longer just dictatorial and aggressive; it has become a fascist state.

But for me, one of the invasion’s central lessons had to do with something I had witnessed over the preceding two decades: what happens when a government is slowly warped by its own propaganda.

Read the whole thing.

MEGAN FOX: Makeup Giant Ulta Goes Woke Highlighting ‘Trans Girl’ Dylan Mulvaney, Customer Base of Real Women Revolts. “The headline ‘Trans Girls Can Do It All!’ really irked many women who see grown men pretending to be “girls” as a weird sexual fetish that has nothing to do with being female and everything to do with men appropriating femaleness for their own titillation.”

REGIME MEDIA PROTECTS THE REGIME: Reuters Rushes in to Protect Government, Informing Us Nobody Promised Vaccines Would Prevent Spread of COVID. “The news outlet performs a staggering. revisionist history fact-check to tell us that it was all our own fault for believing the vaccines would save us from infection. We somehow came up with this conclusion on our own because, according to the news syndicate, nobody promised us the vaccines would work. Imagine everyone’s surprise.”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (RUSSIA EDITION): Russian Draftees Open Fire at Training Ground, Killing 11 and Wounding 15.

CHANGE? Nike co-founder Phil Knight declares war on Democrats in Oregon. “Knight has invested millions into Democrat Tina Kotek’s opponents, and polls show a Republican lead.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Biden Grabs an Ice Cream to Distract From Inflation. “If you happened to have recently experienced a certain amount of internal bleeding whilst worrying about the state of your personal finances and the economy overall, you should know that Joe Biden thinks you’re an idiot.”

HMM: China’s economy is ‘in deep trouble’ as Xi heads for next decade in power.

As Xi prepares for his second decade in power, he faces mounting economic challenges, including an unhappy middle-class. If he is not able to bring the economy back on track, China faces slowing innovation and productivity, along with rising social discontent.

“For 30 years, China was on a path that gave people great hope,” said Doug Guthrie, the director of China Initiatives at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, adding that the country is “in deep trouble right now.”

While Xi is one of the most powerful leaders China and its ruling Communist Party have seen, some experts say that he can’t claim credit for the country’s astonishing progress.

“Xi’s leadership is not causal for China’s economic rise,” said Sonja Opper, a professor at Bocconi University in Italy who studies China’s economy. “Xi was able to capitalize on an ongoing entrepreneurial movement and rapid development of a private [sector] economy prior leaders had unleashed,” she added.

Rather, in recent years, Xi’s policies have caused some massive headaches in China.

The danger of one man rule is that there’s only one man to blame — and no nice way to make him go away.

GLEICHSCHALTUNG: LGBTQ+++© Police State: ‘Trans Buddies’ Now Assigned to Monitor Doctors for Transphobia.

NO. Did Saudi Arabia Just Hand the Midterms to the GOP?

Biden had hoped for cooperation from Riyadh to help starve Russian president Vladimir Putin’s war machine, which is largely funded by hydrocarbon sales, and further hinder his invasion of Ukraine (Russia’s deputy prime minister, who is under U.S. sanctions, was present at the OPEC+ meeting in Vienna). And of course, Biden wanted gas prices to be going down, not up, in the lead-up to November’s midterm elections.

The insult to Biden came just a few months after the president visited Saudi Arabia and exchanged an infamous fist bump with Crown Prince (and newly appointed prime minister) Mohammed bin Salman. That gesture of friendship with a brutal tyrant was readily interpreted as a nasty bit of realpolitik, with Biden bowing to the fact that he needed Saudi Arabia to keep the oil flowing to keep both inflation and Russia in check. On that visit, Biden secured an understanding from Saudi Arabia and its junior partner, the UAE, to increase production by a total of about 1.25 million barrels per day. The Saudis did ramp up production during the summer, when oil was over $120 a barrel, but backed off as prices began to fall again.

Biden ended American energy independence, called Saudi Arabia a pariah state, and then expected them to bail him out.

“Blame it on the Saudis” is nothing more than obvious post-election battlespace prep to discredit a GOP victory.

The left can’t blame the Russians this time, so the Saudis will have to do.

DON’T GET COCKY: Latest Battleground Poll Shows Things Getting Worse for Democrats.

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY: Can You Swim Faster Than a Police Helicopter Can Fly?

COMMIES: Xi wanted China to be at the tech frontier. 5 years on, tensions with the U.S. have dented that goal.

Xi Jinping once declared China should “prioritize innovation” and be on the “cutting-edge (of) frontier technologies, modern engineering technologies, and disruptive technologies.”

Since that speech in 2017, Beijing has spoken about technologies it wants to boost its prowess in, ranging from artificial intelligence to 5G technology and semiconductors.

Five years since Xi’s address at the Communist Party of China’s last National Congress, the global reality for the world’s second-largest economy has transformed. It comes amid an ongoing trade war with the U.S., challenges from Covid and a change in political direction at home that have hurt some of Beijing’s goals.

Communist regimes aren’t very good (I’m being kind here) at the efficient resource allocation, risk-taking, and tolerance for failure required for innovation.

We’re getting worse at those things, too.

OH: Republican US Senate candidate’s name not on ballots distributed in Illinois county. “Some early voters have already cast their ballots in Schuyler County, Illinois, despite Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kathy Salvi’s name not being listed as a choice. Instead of Salvi’s name, the name of her defeated primary opponent Peggy Hubbard is listed on the ballot as an option. Salvi won the seven-way Republican primary on June 28 by a significant margin.”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Thanksgiving Is Being Canceled by Many Due to Bidenflation.

QUESTIONS IN JOE BIDEN’S AMERICA: Are You Prepping For Food Insecurity?

THE ENEMIES OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION ARE IGNORANT BRATS WITH DADDY ISSUES: Eco-Vandals Defaced a Van Gogh for the Stupidest Reason Ever and the Reactions Are Priceless.

COLORADO: Conservative American Birthright civics program rejected by Colorado State Board of Ed.

American Birthright is a project of the Civics Alliance, a coalition whose mission statement says it formed to oppose a “new civics” more centered on global citizenship and activism than on understanding American ideals and responsibilities.

“American Birthright teaches about the expansion of American liberty to include all Americans, the contributions that Americans from every walk of life have made to our shared history of liberty, and America’s championship of liberty throughout the world,” the website says. “Students will learn of heroes of liberty such as Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ronald Reagan.”

Colorado’s social studies standards got a D rating from the Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank. Scheffel, who is dean of the school of education at Colorado Christian University, said American Birthright draws heavily from Massachusetts and Florida social studies standards that get much higher marks.

While Fordham has not rated American Birthright, Scheffel said she encounters many college students who lack basic information about American governance, and she believes the program offers more rigorous content and is more comprehensive than current state standards.

The left doesn’t even pretend at patriotism anymore, and hasn’t for years.

HMM: Trump Threatens Pulitzer Prize Board with Defamation Suit.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: We’re Heading for a Stagflationary Crisis Unlike Anything We’ve Ever Seen.

First question: Will the rise in inflation in most advanced economies be temporary or more persistent? This debate has raged for the past year, but now it is largely settled: “Team Persistent” won, and “Team Transitory”—which included most central banks and fiscal authorities—has now admitted to having been mistaken.

The second question is whether the increase in inflation was driven more by bad policies (i.e., excessive aggregate demand because of excessively loose monetary, credit, and fiscal policies), or by bad luck (stagflationary negative aggregate supply shocks including the initial COVID-19 lockdowns, supply-chain bottlenecks, a reduced U.S. labor supply, the impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine on commodity prices, and China’s zero-COVID policy). While both demand and supply factors were in the mix, it is now widely recognized that supply factors have played an increasingly decisive role. This matters because supply-driven inflation is stagflationary and thus increases the risk of a hard landing (increased unemployment and potentially a recession) when monetary policy is tightened.

That leads directly to the third question: Will monetary-policy tightening by the U.S. Federal Reserve and other major central banks bring a hard landing (recession) or a soft landing (growth slowdown without a recession)? Until recently, most central banks and most of Wall Street were in “Team Soft Landing.” But the consensus has rapidly shifted, with even Fed Chair Jerome Powell recognizing that a recession is possible and that a soft landing will be “very challenging.”

We’ve spent nearly three years flooding the economy with funny money, while engaging in lockdowns and productivity- and innovation-crushing re-regulation — particularly in the vital energy and transportation sectors.

If that isn’t a recipe for stagflation, I don’t know what is.

DURHAM TRIAL: ‘Salacious and Unverified’ Trump-Russia Dossier Story Too Juicy for FBI to Check.

An FBI intelligence analyst testifying in the special counsel probe by John Durham says he never really checked the fake story about the so-called “Steele dossier” in the Trump Russia collusion hoax — including the infamous and non-existent “pee tape” — and assumed FBI sources were telling the truth. This, even though the FBI offered a $1 million payday to verify it (it went uncollected), proving the FBI knew it was “salacious and unverified” in the words of former FBI chief James Comey. But knowing that, the FBI used the dossier against Donald Trump anyway and lied to the nation’s top spy court to get a warrant to spy on his campaign.

Why would they investigate? The FBI is in the business of establishing partisan narratives, not looking into crimes.