CRISES BY DESIGN: SecDef Austin and Gen. Milley Defend Operational Decisions That Led Chaos in the Fall of Afghanistan.

Related: Biden doubles down on Afghanistan withdrawal, snaps over question about horrific scenes.

President Biden maintains that no mistakes were made in the US withdrawal from Afghanistan — waving off the scenes of chaos, confusion and desperation in his first interview on the matter since the fall of Kabul.

“So you don’t think this could have been handled — this exit could have been handled better in any way, no mistakes?” ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos asked Biden.

And when Stephanopoulos tried to ask Biden about the horrific scenes of people clinging to and falling from departing US airplanes, the president grew combative.

“We’ve all seen the pictures. We’ve seen those hundreds of people packed in a C-17. We’ve seen Afghans falling –“

“That was four days ago, five days ago!” Biden cut Stephanopoulos, even though the images were taken on Monday.

As Matt Vespa asks: Wait…That’s How Biden Reacted to the Pictures of Afghans Falling From US Planes? “In other words, ‘screw it,’ which seems to be the ethos behind this shambolic exit.”

No, I think it’s more a case of “screw them.” Hey, they fell out of landing gear enclosures to their deaths. It’ll be forgotten once the news cycle gets back to COVID, right Joe?

And MSNBC is happy to help him speed things up: Biden announces Covid booster shot rollout for vaccinated Americans.

CRISES BY DESIGN: Mask Nazis Remain Silent About the Biden Border Super-Spreader Event.

UPDATE: Mayorkas says ‘we’re going to lose’ the border crisis: Leaked audio. “Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed the administration is ‘going to lose’ the border crisis as ‘unsustainable’ numbers of migrants continue to pour into the United States.”

(Updated and bumped.)

CRISES BY DESIGN: ‘It’s Truly a Public Health Crisis.’ One Border Town Is Busing Hundreds of Untested Illegals to Austin and Houston Every Day.

CRISES BY DESIGN: Biden admin to require vaccination for legal foreign visitors. Others? Not so much.

CRISES BY DESIGN: Trump Explains Why Joe Biden Is Worse Than Jimmy Carter. “I see that everybody is comparing Joe Biden to Jimmy Carter. It would seem to me that is very unfair to Jimmy Carter. Jimmy mishandled crisis after crisis, but Biden has CREATED crisis after crisis.”

KURT SCHLICHTER: Academia Needs to Go Extinct. “Crises clarify what is true, and what is indisputably true during this crisis is that academia, as currently constituted, is a poisonous cancer infecting our society. Like many other institutions, academia has gone from respect to contempt in the eyes of normal people, if not our garbage ruling class. But its latest series of public disgraces may wake up even the most obstinate cheerleaders for pretending that nothing fundamental has changed.”

Plus:

But there was another aspect to this, one that is even more likely to change minds and hearts in the direction of reality. It is the realization by the people with an antiquated view of the universities that their kids are likely to never see the inside of a big name campus. Oh, the very richest kids’ spawn will. They will have no problem getting into the Harvards and Yales because daddy has $1 billion and just paid for the new wing of the Social Justice and Decolonization Department building. But regular folks, whose children aren’t able to check multiple boxes on the intersectionality form are out of luck. The big lie is that if you work hard enough and show merit, your kid can get in too. But your kid can’t. These are exclusive clubs, and your kid better stay outside the velvet rope because your kid is not on the VIP list.

Everyone recently saw that story of the A+ graduate with near perfect SATs who actually started his own company, and yet couldn’t get admitted into any of the top universities. He made the mistake of being Asian, which is a mistake on par with being some white kid from the suburbs. The colleges have decreed, and the awful wine women inhabiting their admissions departments concur, that if you were those things you don’t get a shot. Merit is dead for the designated undiverse. And when people realize that their kids are out of luck if they don’t have some bizarre gender identity or something else that makes them thrill the hearts of the Chardonnay-swillers who pick and choose the Ivy student bodies, these voters are going to say “Oh, hell no!” next time they are asked to subsidize academia both with tax money and respect.

We need a higher education sector that Looks Like America.

GREAT MOMENTS IN LEADERSHIP: Biden Disappears from the Public Eye When Crises Hit.

At 11:52 a.m. Eastern, today’s pool reporter for the president, USA Today White House correspondent Francesca Chambers, reported “the White House has called a lid for the day, before the pool call time. We will not be seeing the president today.”

Now, the president doesn’t have to make a public appearance during an ongoing foreign crisis. At 2:48 Saturday, Biden spoke for three minutes about the terrorist attacks against Israel, and the White House issued a written statement. He hasn’t done any interviews or press conferences since then. The only thing on Biden’s public schedule today is receiving the presidential daily briefing. President Biden attended a barbeque in the Rose Garden for the White House executive staff last night.

As Rory Cooper observed, the president could, if he wished, partake in all kinds of public events designed to demonstrate the U.S. government’s support for Israel. “He could go to a synagogue to pray with the Jewish community. He could bring his national security team together for a meeting and media avail. He could visit the Israeli embassy.” But Biden will spend today behind closed doors in the White House.

Exit quote: “At some point, it stops being believable that these are all deliberate scheduling decisions, and it is more plausible to conclude these are the inevitable consequences of a president who turns 81 next month.”

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Waking Up In The Wrong Movie.

The remarkable thing about the multiple crises facing Joe Biden is how quickly they’ve multiplied and worsened. These include, in no particular order:

the Mexican border problem;
the expanding war between Israel, Hamas, and possibly with Iran;
the gasoline supply disruption stemming from the cyberattack on the Colonial fuel pipeline;
economic trouble and warnings of impending inflation.

These sprung up in the first days of his term with an abruptness and progression that has taken pundits by surprise. The administration must have anticipated eventual problems would arise but not so soon nor from so many directions.

Not all of us were surprised, though even I have noted that it’s weirdly impressive how fast they’ve managed to wreck things:

The New York Times writes that the fighting in Israel caught Biden on the hop. Lulled by recent quiet in the region it did not seem a priority until all hell broke loose. “As spiraling riots, rocket attacks on Tel Aviv and airstrikes on Gaza threaten to escalate into a major conflict, calls are growing in the Democratic Party for Mr. Biden to play a more active role.”

They were also blindsided by the Colonial pipeline attack. CNN writes that “Biden administration officials have privately voiced frustration with what they see as Colonial Pipeline’s weak security protocols and a lack of preparation that could have allowed hackers to pull off a crippling ransomware attack, officials familiar with the government’s initial investigation into the incident told CNN.”

April’s dismal job numbers were also a total surprise. The administration had been expecting a boom. The NYT wrote that “April’s anemic job creation was so out of line with what other indicators have suggested that it will take some time to unravel the mystery.” It was so shocking that newsrooms had to junk prewritten articles announcing a Biden boom.

The progressives are hoping that the administration’s current woes are temporary in nature, that the misfortunes will soon wear away.

Yeah, don’t bet on that.

Plus: “Perhaps the biggest potential mistake the establishment might have made was that they overestimated the reserve buoyancy of the political system. With Trump gone they assumed they could rule as before, spend as before, lecture as before. Even Joe could do it. If Joe Biden’s woes are due to more than bad luck it, could be a sign that the design margin they had counted on for so long no longer exists.” They burned through that during the Obama Administration. Trump knew that, even if they didn’t.

MIRROR-IMAGE MAYORS: “Like John Lindsay, Bill de Blasio conjured up crises to win the mayor’s office—and, like Lindsay, he may soon face the real thing,” Fred Siegel writes at City Journal:

Both Lindsay and de Blasio promised to carry on the work of presidents who massively overreached. Fifty years after Lindsay, de Blasio still proposes social programs as an alternative to work—but with an important difference. In 1965, Great Society liberals held out the hope of racial inclusion. Today’s liberals offer make-work jobs designed to produce Democratic Party majorities. The underlying problem with both mayors is that they proposed, as [William F. Buckley, who ran against Lindsay in 1965] warned, to do the impossible when they promised to straighten the “crooked timber of humanity.” But government, let alone local government, can do no such thing. As New Yorkers who are angered by de Blasio’s ideological tours in Iowa understand, mayors must stick to the prosaic problems—union contracts, road repairs, and taxation. When a mayor neglects these responsibilities, he ends up as Lindsay did— an exile in his own city.

Read the whole thing.

IT’S ALL ABOUT EVOLUTION: Chimps and orangutans may experience midlife crises, say scientists. “Radical and often ill-advised changes in lifestyle have become the calling cards of the midlife crisis, but if it is more than a myth, then humans may not be the only animals to experience it. Now an international team of scientists claims to have found evidence for a slump in wellbeing among middle-aged chimpanzees and orangutans. The lull in happiness in the middle years, they say, is the great ape equivalent of the midlife crisis.”

I think a midlife crisis is designed to kick you into breeding again before it’s too late. That may not be what you think is going on, but . . . .

BORDER CZAR TO FINALLY VISIT BORDER: Harris to visit Arizona border town to highlight immigration plan.

Vice President Kamala Harris will visit the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona this week, her campaign announced Wednesday as she desperately tries to flip the script on what’s been a persistent political weakness.

Ms. Harris is scheduled to visit the border town of Douglas in the key swing state of Arizona on Friday. She will give a speech on immigration, though campaign officials did not reveal any details about the trip.

Ms. Harris last visited the border when she traveled to El Paso, Texas in 2021 as she faced pressure over the increasing number of immigrants crossing the southern border into the U.S. The trip was scheduled after Ms. Harris was widely criticized for dismissing calls to travel to the border during an NBC news interview.

The lack of visits to the border is somewhat surprising since President Biden had tasked her with overseeing the root causes of immigration, which led to her being called the “border czar.”

Polls show that former President Donald Trump has a significant advantage with voters on the issue of illegal immigration and border security. A massive influx of immigrants shattered records as millions crossed the border each year under Mr. Biden’s watch.

Crises by design:

● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

● Former Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”

● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”

● Tom Cotton’s Response to Kamala Harris’ Border Failures Should Be the Default for All Republicans: “‘You know, Laura, Kamala Harris didn’t have to go all the way to Guatemala and Mexico to find the root causes of this border crisis because they’re not there,’ Cotton told Fox News host Laura Ingraham [in June of 2021]. ‘The root causes are in the White House.’ He further explained that it ‘happened on January 20th when Joe Biden took office, and he essentially opened our borders, reversing very effective policies that had our borders under control.’”

BUILD BACK BRANDON: It’s not just electricity. We’re heading for shortages of diesel, jet fuel and gasoline.

Our total operating refinery capacity dropped by 4.5 percent between 2020 and 2021 to 17.7 million barrels per day. That’s the lowest level we’ve seen since 2013. The current U.S. stockpile of diesel fuel is at a nearly two-decade low. The distilled fuel oil stockpile also declined precipitously. Meanwhile, the price of jet fuel has been rising due to supply and demand issues. Because the vast majority of food and other goods are all transported by a combination of aircraft and trucks (the vast majority of which use diesel), when those prices rise, the cost of everything goes up. And when the supply of those fuels falters, the supply chain shuts down. We already saw examples of this over the past six months. If something doesn’t change, it’s going to get worse.

All of this is taking place during the same period of time when President Biden has canceled three oil and gas lease sales.

Crises by design: Biden praises high gas prices as part of ‘incredible transition’ of the US economy away from fossil fuels.

PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.

“MOST RELIGIOUSLY OBSERVANT COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF IN HALF A CENTURY’: Catholic Groups Scorch ‘Catholic’ Biden Over Anti-Catholic HHS Directive.

PARTLY BECAUSE THE LEFT WON’T ALLOW IT: Why We Need to Keep Talking About Election Fraud.

MORE THAN A CENTURY OF CRISES BY DESIGN: The Tyranny of Experts and the Great Unlearning.

20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: Harris surrounded by disaster, mayhem entering the final weeks of the presidential race.

A deadly hurricane, a massive labor strike and wars raging around the globe are among the crises engulfing the Biden-Harris administration one month before the election.

Former President Donald Trump is flipping the script on Democrats, who for months have warned voters that he would bring chaos if he returns to the White House.

“It’s a choice between freedom and chaos,” Ms. Harris told her audience at a rally in Milwaukee this summer.

Her argument isn’t resonating with voters as war erupts in the Middle East, illegal immigrants swarm across the southern border, and rural residents in Georgia and North Carolina beg for help from the Biden-Harris administration in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

President Biden toured the disaster area in North Carolina by helicopter on Wednesday as the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided aid and rescued people stranded by flooding.

The president and Ms. Harris have been criticized for waiting to visit and failing to provide enough resources as taxpayers spend millions of dollars to shelter illegal immigrants and send $175 billion in aid to Ukraine.

“We’ve given them all we have,” Mr. Biden said this week when asked whether more resources would pour into devastated areas of North Carolina and Georgia.

Mr. Biden has abdicated an active role in resolving a port worker strike that shut down all East Coast shipping on Monday. The walkout threatens economic calamity in the coming weeks. Instead, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have endorsed the strike, which is poised to disrupt the nation’s supply chain, leaving store shelves empty and sidelining thousands of workers.

“Presidential campaigns are usually decided by the two P’s — Peace & Prosperity — and right now we have neither,” said Jim McLaughlin, who polls for the Trump campaign. “The world and country are on fire, and where it’s not on fire, it’s underwater.”

Ms. Harris, he said, “can’t run away from it.”

Kamala’s line that “It’s a choice between freedom and chaos” should be placed front and center in Trump campaign ads, alongside visuals of the ongoing chaos she and Biden are doing nothing to solve, and in some cases, deliberately set in motion themselves.

Earlier: A Storm, a Strike, and a War Are All Working Against the Harris Campaign.

Don’t get cocky.™

I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS: Avoiding A Presidential Succession Nightmare.

The ousting of Kevin McCarthy as speaker threw the House into turmoil for weeks, and the situation would have been more chaotic if it weren’t for a little-known rule adopted 20 years ago that put Rep. Patrick McHenry in the chair temporarily. That rule is inadequate, however, as it limits the speaker pro tempore to mostly ceremonial functions. The rule reflects a broader problem of poor succession planning in the U.S. government that extends to the White House. The current system for ensuring continuity in the U.S. presidency has gaping holes that could create political instability in a national emergency. Solving these problems doesn’t require a constitutional amendment; Congress can do it with new legislation.

Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, if the U.S. president and vice president both die, become incapacitated or otherwise leave office, the House speaker is next in the line of succession, followed by the Senate president pro tempore, then the cabinet secretaries, starting with the secretary of state. But a closer examination of this plan reveals lurking dangers.

The current system is flawed in several ways, but four stand out. The first problem is that lawmakers are in the line of presidential succession, which could create a political crisis if a speaker from one party replaced a president of the other. Republican Speaker Mike Johnson could replace Democratic President Joe Biden. One can imagine the outcry and the challenges to presidential legitimacy that could arise. Scholars have also long been split on the constitutionality of lawmakers’ succeeding to the presidency. Except for succession involving a president-elect and vice president-elect—which has a different constitutional basis—legislators should be removed from the line of succession and replaced with cabinet secretaries to eliminate concerns over the constitutional separation of powers and to ensure party continuity in the White House.

The second problem is that current law makes it possible for several successors to serve as acting president during a brief period. If a cabinet secretary becomes acting president, the law permits either the speaker or the Senate president pro tem to unseat the acting president if a lawmaker doesn’t initially take the reins of the executive branch. This provision should be eliminated altogether.

The third danger is that there is no legal process for determining when the president and vice president are incapacitated or how they might regain their powers and duties if they recover. If both officeholders are unable to serve, the U.S. must have a plan of action. Congress should adopt a statute modeled after the 25th Amendment, which governs situations in which the president alone is incapacitated. The statute should allow the designated successor to the presidency—ideally the next eligible cabinet secretary—and the other secretaries to determine whether both the president and vice president are unable to fulfill their responsibilities. The successor and the cabinet would then submit that declaration to Congress. The president and vice president could regain their powers and duties through procedures similar to those outlined in the 25th Amendment.

Finally, under current law, the U.S. has no process for handling the problem of an incapacitated vice president serving alongside a healthy president. This scenario carries risks: It thwarts the 25th Amendment’s mechanisms governing presidential incapacity, in which the vice president plays an essential role. It also means that if the president dies or suddenly leaves office, the incapacitated vice president is poised to become an incapacitated president. Congress should create a process, again modeled after the 25th Amendment, to determine when a vice president is unfit to serve and to designate someone to fulfill the office’s succession- and incapacity-related responsibilities.

Following 9/11, the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution co-sponsored a bipartisan panel—the Continuity of Government Commission—to explore policy options for preserving our political institutions during crises. In 2021 AEI established a successor commission following the Covid pandemic. Both panels highlighted the current succession plan’s shortcomings. Despite their warnings, neither the executive branch nor Congress has shown much interest in fixing the flawed presidential succession statute.

With much lower stakes, I served on a state commission to amend the Tennessee Constitution to fix some succession bugs for the Governor. Our changes eventually wound up in the Tennessee Constitution over a decade later. These things seem to move slowly, but it’s very much worth addressing the problems in advance.

QUESTION ANSWERED: Why Bill Watterson Vanished.

“Work and home were so intermingled that I had no refuge from the strip when I needed a break,” Watterson recalls. “Day or night, the work was always right there, and the book-publishing schedule was as relentless as the newspaper deadlines. Having certain perfectionist and maniacal tendencies, I was consumed by Calvin and Hobbes.”

By Watterson’s own admission, he cannot accurately recall a whole decade of his life because of his “Ahab-like obsession” with his work. “The intensity of pushing the writing and drawing as far as my skills allowed was the whole point of doing it,” he says. “I eliminated pretty much everything from my life that wasn’t the strip.” While Watterson’s wife, Melissa Richmond, organized everything around him, he furthered his isolation, burrowing ever more deeply into the strip’s world. There was no other way, he believed, to keep its integrity absolute. “My approach was probably too crazy to sustain for a lifetime,” he says, “but it let me draw the exact strip I wanted while it lasted.”

When crises arose, it often seemed like the end of the world. First, there was the fight with the syndicate. It looks like a piddling matter now, when few newspapers turn a profit, but in the Reagan era, there was still some money to be made in print media—particularly in licensing the rights to popular cartoons. Watterson wasn’t opposed to licensing in principle, but he felt that nearly all the merchandising proposals presented to him would devalue his strip of its artistic merit. He fought with his syndicate for years and expressed his dissatisfaction with the business side of the comics industry in speeches, in interviews, and, eventually, in court. At last, he won a renegotiated contract and the right to draw bigger, more complex Sunday strips, something Watterson had wanted since he began. The victory was pyrrhic. “For the last half of the strip, I had all the artistic freedom I ever wanted, I had sabbaticals, I had a good lead on deadlines, and I felt I was working at the peak of my talents,” he says. But Watterson had designed a world for himself so self-contained that any disruption could mean its destruction: “I just knew it was time to go.”  

Read the whole thing.

CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Weaponizing Coronavirus, Leftist Foundations Dedicate Millions to Transform 2020 Elections. “The left has created multiple emergency working groups to be cited compliantly by mainstream media sources as unbiased election experts. One Potemkin outfit is the self-styled National Task Force on Election Crises. In reality, the group is the usual collection of far-left race activists, liberal law professors, vendor grifters sprinkled in with one or two non-crazies to give the organization a whiff of not-entirely-nuts. It is designed to appear bipartisan but in action, it is the opposite.”

JAMES LILEKS ON THE PROS AND CONS OF ‘80S NOSTALGIA:

The problem with nostalgia is the way you burnish and polish the past, until you’ve a curio that bears little resemblance to your actual experience. The question isn’t whether things were somehow Better when there were post-modern geometric patterns at Taco Bell; the question is why in the NAME OF GOD you would even begin think things were better. Because they weren’t, and I know it. Some things were, but there was an underlying dread of an existential sort that today’s climate-emergency hyperbole can’t touch.

Let me put it this way: we were, at any time, a few hours away from a series of mistakes or overreactions which would result in the destruction of our civilization.

If that didn’t happen, we would all get SEX CANCER.

On the other hand, glass blocks made a comeback in architecture, and that was cool.

For everyone who lived through the 1970s, with one disaster after another (the Penn Central bankruptcy, Watergate, the oil crisis, the disastrous last days of the Vietnam War, leisure suits, the Iranian hostage crisis, sky-high unemployment, inflation and interest rates, nuclear winter, Super Train, and Hello Larry, etc., etc.) that mid-1980s period of Miami Vice, MTV and the last vestiges of modern architecture and cool European design really did seem like “Morning in America,” and helped George H.W. Bush get elected in the hopes the good times would continue. (Until the DNC-MSM convinced voters that they wouldn’t.) Read the whole thing.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM: Ignore The Prosecutor, Ignore The Problem.

Prison reformers are making a hash of things again. A measure designed to reduce the unfair use of mandatory minimums in Drug Laws may be ignoring, or possibly worsening, one of the biggest problems in the criminal justice system today—the coercion of plea bargains. . . .

Both the new proposed law and the one it replaces create a situation in which defendants are punished much more severely if they exercise their right to trial. They do so in part by leaving to prosecutors, not judges, discretion in when to pull the trigger on minimums. As Ginatta wrote, “Our research found that sentences for federal drug defendants who exercise their right to go to trial are three times as long as those who forgo that right.” This strikes us as contrary to the spirit of the Constitution, if not necessarily the case law on what it allows the government to do (we are not lawyers).

As we noted the other day, prosecutorial culture plays an enormous and under-appreciated role in the criminal justice and prison crises.

Happy to see this piece reference my Ham Sandwich Nation.

LAWRENCE SOLOMON: Losing the Anti-Semite Card.

The anti-Semite card that Democrats have played so deftly over the years — the single-biggest reason Jews provide Democrats with more than 50% of their campaign funding — looks phony to many Jews. When Schultz got up to speak in praise of Obama, the normally sedate Jewish audience heckled her, leaving her visibly rattled.

The upset many Jews feel today is mostly directed toward Obama, whom they see as tolerant of anti-Semites such as Louis Farrakhan, tolerant of anti-Semitic organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and intolerant, even hostile, to Israel. But Democrats on the whole need beware — more than a presidential election is at stake.

When Jews began to perceive Canada’s Liberal Party as being tolerant of anti-Semitism and unfair to Israel — such as through Liberal participation in the UN Durban conference and the accusation that Israel had committed a war crime — the rock-solid support that the Liberals had long enjoyed from Jews evaporated. . . .

Anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli venom is on the rise, and it is coming mostly from the left. Anti-Semitism on U.S. college campuses is a “serious problem,” concluded the 2006 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “There is more sympathy for Hamas [on U.S. campuses] than there is in Ramallah,” wrote award-winning Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, who found during a 2009 speaking tour of the U.S. that it “is not about supporting the Palestinians as much as it is about promoting hatred for the Jewish state.”

Surveys by Jewish organizations confirm that anti-Semitism is on the rise, as does a 2009 survey by researchers at Stanford and Columbia University, designed to find explicit prejudice toward Jews as a result of the financial meltdown. To the researchers’ surprise, they found that “Democrats were especially prone to blaming Jews: while 32% of Democrats accorded at least moderate blame, only 18.4% of Republicans did so,” a difference that jars “given the presumed higher degree of racial tolerance among liberals and the fact that Jews are a central part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition.” Warning that “we must take heed of prejudice and bigotry that have already started to sink roots in the United States,” the authors noted that “Crises often have the potential to stoke fears and resentment, and the current economic collapse is likely no exception.”

Almost as if on cue, the Occupy Wall Street movement arose, with Jews often crudely singled out for blame, and with prominent Democrats, Obama and Pelosi among them, stoking the anti-1% sentiment.

Read the whole thing.

YOU SNOOZE, YOU LOSE: Drudge reports that 60 Minutes hoped to sit on the explosives story until the very last minute.

News of missing explosives in Iraq — first reported in April 2003 — was being resurrected for a 60 MINUTES election eve broadcast designed to knock the Bush administration into a crises mode.

Jeff Fager, executive producer of the Sunday edition of 60 MINUTES, said in a statement that “our plan was to run the story on October 31, but it became clear that it wouldn’t hold…”

It doesn’t hold, all right. It doesn’t hold water.

So they lost their story. And there was time enough to debunk it. That’s what they get for playing partisan games.