OUR AGE IN A NUTSHELL:
Who would have guessed that you'd wake up one day and find that all the conspiracy theories have turned out to be true.
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) October 20, 2024
October 22, 2024
NOW IT’S HARRIS AND PLAGIARISM: The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Silbarium reports Vice-President Kamala Harris provided congressional testimony while serving as a San Francisco District Attorney, much of which was plagiarized from a Republican.
CHARLIE MARTIN NEEDS HELP: I’ve donated $500.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Great Democrat McMeltdown of ’24 Might’ve Supersized Trump’s Chances. “As any social media veteran knows, the Number One rule when being trolled online is to not take the bait. It applies to conventional media as well. What Trump and his team did at McDonald’s was a master class in trolling and it is obvious that Kamala and the Dems don’t know Rule One.”
THE NEXT U.S. PRESIDENT MUST TREAT CENSORSHIP AS A TRADE BARRIER AND RESPOND WITH TARIFFS: Race to the Censorship Bottom.
FLASHBACK TO NOVEMBER 2019: Kamala Harris occasionally struggles with ‘performance anxiety,’ current and former aides say.
One of her issues has been what several current and former aides described to Politico as a “kind of performance anxiety that washes over in her tense times.” That’s led to struggles in big moments, such as when Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) attacked Harris’ record as a prosecutor during the second Democratic primary debate. Harris appeared indecisive in her response to the criticism, and Markos Moulitsas, the founder and publisher of the Daily Kos, points to the exchange at the moment Harris’ campaign began its downward trend. “Why wouldn’t you take that head-on in a prime-time audience?” Moulitsas told Politico.
The aides say Harris can sometimes have trouble listening to questions and comments — at least three times since beginning her campaign, the senator has said she misheard a question, Politico notes. Most notably, she said she didn’t hear a man call President Trump’s agenda “mentally retarded” even though video shows her laughing right after he said it. Harris apologized after the video was played back to her, calling it “upsetting.”
She also reportedly can be overeager in attempts to please her questioners and will sometimes revert to “comfortable scripts in her head” because she’s afraid she’ll flub an answer.
That last bit is a quirk of hers I’ve noticed on more than one occasion but it’s worse than just reverting to a script. Harris seems unwilling to contradict whoever is speaking and go along with it.
It made her an ineffective senator and, no doubt, would make her an even worse president.
AMY WAX UPDATE: Suspended Penn Law Professor Says She Has No Regrets. They used a lot of adjectives to describe what she said about their affirmative action programs, but I don’t remember them actually showing that it was incorrect.
DON’T GET COCKY, KIDS: Roger Kimball: Why Kamala Harris will lose: There will be no Covid to save Democrats this time. Nor will there be an ‘October surprise’ damaging enough to neutralize Trump.
When you look back on the 2024 presidential election and try to understand why it was that Kamala Harris lost, there are a few things to remember. The first is that the two most important issues for American voters were the border and the cost of living.
By “the border” I do not just mean the incomplete physical barrier along our southern frontier. That structure is merely the objective correlative of a policy that has its roots in such lofty ideas as sovereignty, the meaning of citizenship and national identity.
After her coronation as the Democratic candidate in late July, Harris began to squirm and prevaricate about her appointment by Joe Biden as the “border czar.” But we have the phrase in black and white in the record of the appointment. Indeed, looking after the border was one of her main responsibilities. She failed miserably.
Millions — literally millions — of illegal immigrants poured into the country during the Biden-Harris regime. Many thousands of those millions are dangerous criminals. As I write, in late September, data from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement has revealed that, of the nearly 7.5 million people who have been slated for removal but have not been detained by ICE, 425,431 are convicted criminals and 222,141 have pending criminal charges.
Of those, 62,231 have been convicted of assault, 14,301 have been convicted of burglary, 56,533 have drug convictions, 13,099 have been convicted of homicide, and 15,811 have sexual assault convictions.
Meanwhile, Senator Josh Hawley, in a 2022 confirmation hearing with the proposed director of the TSA, asked him about the fact that the TSA accepts an arrest warrant or a detention order as a valid form of identification for illegal immigrants seeking to travel by air. Think about that the next time you are palpated by an excited TSA agent. . . .
It is not close. Donald Trump will crush Harris-Walz in November. The voter rolls are not pristine, but they are much cleaner now than they were in 2020.
I suppose that another sniper’s bullet might put an end to Trump’s part in the campaign before November 5. But even that would guarantee that Harris-Walz would lose by an even bigger margin than they would have otherwise. As I have observed elsewhere, in 2016 Trump was allowed to take office but never really allowed to take power. Nevertheless, he presided over an astonishingly successful term, marred only by the advent of Covid.
There will be no Covid to save Democrats this time. Nor will there be an “October surprise” damaging enough to neutralize Donald Trump. The public knows him too well to be shocked by another Stormy Daniels or Russia collusion fantasy. Surrounded by serious and talented people like J.D. Vance, his running mate, RFK Jr., who abandoned his own campaign to support Trump, former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk and other business leaders, Donald Trump’s campaign will be like Patton’s Third Army racing across France in 1944.
Well, then, don’t run out of gas.
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THERE’S USUALLY A SHOCKER OR TWO IN EVERY ELECTION: Wargaming the Electoral College: Prepare to Be Shocked.
GOOD WAY TO ATTRACT BLUE-COLLAR MALE VOTERS: Kamala Harris’s Far-Left ‘Climate Engagement Director’ Accuses Oil and Gas Workers of Committing ‘Ecoterrorism,’ Weaponizing ‘White Supremacy’ and ‘Toxic Patriarchy.’
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Catching the Starship: A Breakthrough for Humanity.
Many of the barriers to interplanetary travel and colonisation that feature in popular science articles—such as the threat of cosmic radiation and the difficulties involved in running bioregenerative life support systems—are in fact mass problems in disguise. Radiation can be mitigated by travelling faster through deep space—which uses more propellant, so it’s a mass problem; and by employing additional shielding, also a mass problem. A closed-cycle bioregenerative life support system, which recycles all human waste products into consumables, is beyond our technology at present—but the gap between what is needed and what can be produced through recycling can be made up with supplies from Earth—and so that, too, is a mass problem.
There are still many engineering problems to be solved, but there is also an ample supply of problem solvers on Earth, whose work will be enabled by the coming dramatic drop in launch prices. Just as the density of transistors was the fundamental problem that had to be solved to enable the entire computer industry to rapidly solve software problems, cheap mass to orbit is the fundamental problem which, when solved, will allow rapid solutions to all the other problems of living in space. If the Starship development program succeeds, it is going to unlock this for us.
Starship flight test 6 could come before the end of the year.
WHY NOT, NOBODY CARES WHAT BIDEN SAYS ANYMORE: Did Arab Nations Give Israel a Green Light to Attack Iranian Regime?
AND THE ROLE OF PAULINE KAEL WILL BE PLAYED BY…: New Yorker writer admits he’s never met a Trump supporter at work in 15-year media career. ‘So, yes, there is a liberal bias to the news,’ the longtime journalist wrote.
Jay Caspian Kang, a staff writer for The New Yorker, ascribed media bias not to a conspiracy among journalists, but to the fact that the overwhelming majority of journalists are left-leaning.
Kang wrote a piece for The New Yorker, “How Biased Is the Media, Really?” in response to a recent Gallup poll showing that Americans’ trust in mass media remains not only historically low, but consistently abysmal for the third year in a row.
He responded by addressing multiple common critiques from Americans on both sides of the political spectrum, including the accusation that “Every news organization that feigns objectivity is actually heavily slanted toward the left. Not only that; the media is actively working with the Democrats to defeat Donald Trump.”
“The most obvious explanation for this impression is that the press corps is mostly made up of liberals,” he wrote in the piece, adding that “At prestige outlets—many of which do don the armor of impartiality—the imbalance skews a lot further to the left than what many outsiders might imagine.”
He recalled Uri Berliner emerging as a whistleblower against NPR and the rise of progressive identity-politics, but argued the effect of such politics on journalism is ultimately “negligible compared with the effect of the fact that nearly everyone who works [in the media]” are “college-educated Democratic voters from middle- to upper-middle-class families. I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: in the course of a fifteen-year career that has included stints at radio shows, print outlets, digital media and television, I have yet to meet a Trump supporter at work.”
As Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s film critic was quoted after the 1972 election, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”
But certainly not in a newsroom, curiously enough.
But then, given the way that the New York Times’ uber-woke young staffers turned on former Weekly Standard assistant editor Adam Rubenstein like the torch and pitchfork-wielding rampaging mob out of a 1930s Universal horror movie for publishing Tom Cotton’s op-ed in 2020, would anyone who’s even Trump-curious admit to such inclinations in a 2024 newspaper newsroom?
THAT’S TYPICAL: Ilya Shapiro: With SCOTUS, the Statistics Belie the Vibe: The Left laments a political Supreme Court, but it’s the liberal justices who vote in lockstep. “For the moment, the Left is only convincing itself. The Court’s approval rating is now higher than it was before it overturned Roe v. Wade, though the partisan gap has never been greater. Moreover, at a time of historically low institutional trust, the judiciary enjoys more public confidence than any other part of the federal government and significantly more than the media organizations that amplify most attacks against it.”
To be fair, nowadays people trust gas station sushi more than they trust those media organizations.
WHAT DERANGED HELL WORLD HAVE WE ENTERED THAT I AGREE WITH TINA BROWN? Tina Brown says Meghan Markle’s ‘ideas are total crap,’ calls Prince Harry ‘naïve’ and working with Harvey Weinstein was ‘dumbest’ career move.
THE GIFT THAT KEEPS GIVING: I gathered all the 🔥 memes about Trump and McDonald’s because America needs this.
Meanwhile, a friend writes: “What was great is how decent he is to people off the cuff. One of the people in the drive through line thanked him for looking out for ordinary people and he said you’re not ordinary. Kamala couldn’t fucking script that if she and Hollywood tried.”
Plus: “Saw a clip of Kamala saying yes she worked at McDonald’s and then she shit on them for a McDonald’s job not supporting a family.”
Related: Harsh, but not unfair.
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Gun Control Paradise: 21 Shot in Chicago Over Weekend.
PLAUSIBLE:
Sixth Woman Added To Cast Of 'The View' https://t.co/zOGYzZDrPc pic.twitter.com/h7557tHIFG
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 21, 2024
Related: Smart Targeting: Tim Walz Targets ‘Male’ Voters in Gabfest with Liberal Ladies of ‘The View.’
THE ‘BOB CASEY WORKS WITH TRUMP’ CLAIM IS WHAT PROS CALL A CLUE: Another Vulnerable Democratic Incumbent Hit by Forecast Change From Cook Political Report.
AND THIS IS WHY A LOT OF US AREN’T TAKING VACCINES ANYMORE: When a jab doesn’t work, just change the name.
EXPLAINED (FOR DUMMIES): The Problem With Solar.
