Archive for the ‘Democrats’ Category

Elon Musk News Roundup For July 17, 2024

Wednesday, July 17th, 2024

A whole lot of Elon Musk news of note has popped up this week, so let’s dig in.

  • First, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt against Trump, Musk endorsed Trump for President.

    Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla, publicly endorsed Donald Trump for the first time in the U.S. presidential race, calling the Republican former president “tough.”

    Musk, the world’s richest person, posted the endorsement with a video of Trump with blood on his face pumping his fist after multiple shots rang out at Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday. Trump was safe.

    The posts cement Musk’s shift towards right-wing politics and hand Trump a high-profile backer in his quest to return to the White House in the Nov. 5 election.

    “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” Musk posted.

    “The martyr lived,” he wrote, citing a reported debate between conservative venture capitalist Peter Thiel and LinkedIn co-founder and Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman.

    Musk later posted a photograph of Trump at the event, followed by: “Last time America had a candidate this tough was Theodore Roosevelt.”

  • Musk also revealed that the EU offered him a secret deal to censor Twitter/X.

    It IS true that Twitter’s current version violates the Digital Services Act, arguably, because the Digital Services Act is nothing but a censorship regime intended to shut down any speech that doesn’t parrot exactly what the Davos Elites want out there. That isn’t even an exaggeration; that is what it is intended to do.

    If George Orwell wanted to write a law to make 2024 look like 1984, the DSA would be a great first start. It is, I say unironically, evil.

    Elon clearly wants this fight, and he took his first shot back at the E.U. by revealing that they offered him and the other social media platforms a deal: comply with our censorship demands and we will help you deceive your users. He accuses the other social media platforms of taking the deal, and I believe him. Nobody is taking any shots at them because they have knuckled under.

    The European Union isn’t just doing it for their own Elites–they are collaborating with US policymakers, the intelligence “community,” the MSM, and the censorship industrial complex to do their dirty work because there are limits placed on what government can do due to the First Amendment.

    Europe will censor when the US is limited to.

  • Finally, Musk is moving Twitter and Space X headquarters to Texas over California’s transsexual-fueled attacks on parental rights.

    Billionaire Elon Musk said he is moving the headquarters of X and SpaceX out of California after governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill barring school districts from requiring teachers to notify parents if a child changes their gender identity.

    “This is the final straw,” Musk said in a social-media post Tuesday afternoon. “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.”

    Musk said he previously told the California governor a new law like this one would “force families and companies to leave California to protect their children.” Tesla moved its headquarters out of California to Austin, Texas in 2021.

    California is the first state to pass such a law, and conservative groups have said they plan to challenge it in court. Ongoing litigation may complicate those efforts. A San Bernardino County judge already blocked one school district’s parental notification policy after the state’s attorney general sued last year.

    The California Policy Center, a conservative think tank in the Golden State, said the new law “opens the door to child exploitation.”

    “Gov. Newsom has okayed a bill that was based on the flawed logic that parents are dangerous and not to be trusted, and that the state or strangers are better positioned to deal with the difficulties of adolescence than parents,” said Lance Christensen, vice president of education policy and government affairs. “Hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements with victims of sex assault by public school employees is evidence that the opposite is too often true.”

    Musk is reportedly moving Twitter/X headquarters to Austin. If so, I happen to know a Senior Technical Writer who is currently between jobs…

  • While writing this post, I was also going to cover how Musk was reportedly donating $45 million a month to a pro-Trump SuperPAC, but Musk himself just wrote that this report was “fake gnus.” Insert your own Linux pun here…

    Feds Want To Eat 700,000 Acres of Texas/New Mexico Land

    Tuesday, July 16th, 2024

    The giant Borganism that is the federal government has a built-in bias to stick its tentacles into every orifice of the body politic, gathering more money, power and influence to itself in stark defiance of the Founder’s blueprints for a weak federal government checked by strong state and citizen sovereignty. In addition to money and power, it also wants to gobble up land, and now it wants to eat 700,000 acres of private land on Texas-New Mexico border.

    Under the guise of “land protection,” the federal government aims to acquire 700,000 acres of private land in the Southern High Plains region—which sits along the Texas-New Mexico border.

    The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently finalized its Land Protection Plan. The plan aims to acquire 700,000 acres of privately owned land and put it under federal control for “protection” in “perpetuity.” This is part of the federal government’s efforts to expand the Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge—which feeds into the broader aim of the Biden administration: fulfilling the “30×30” initiative.

    Through the “30×30” initiative, the Biden administration decided that 30 percent of the nation’s land and waters must be under federal control and management by 2030. President Biden launched the agenda via Executive Order 14008 on January 27, 2021.

    However, American Stewards of Liberty explains that the initiative was rebranded as “America the Beautiful” after facing public backlash.

    As the American Stewards highlight, the Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge is attempting to expand the “acquisition boundary” from 6,440 acres in Texas and New Mexico to 7,000,000 acres—all without congressional authority. After they acquire more land, they plan to federalize 700,000 acres through buying the land or obtaining permanent conservation easements.

    “Federally acquiring nearly three-quarter million acres from this region is a direct attack on the oil, gas, and mineral industries, agriculture production, and local economies,” the American Stewards write.

    They also claim counties were not notified of the expansion.

    “No direct notice was given to the counties or local governing authorities. The USFWS [U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] failed to coordinate this plan with the local governments as required by law.”

    The expanded area grabs land in 15 Texas counties including Bailey, Castro, Cochran, Crosby, Dawson, Gaines, Garza, Hale, Hockley, Lamb, Lubbock, Lynn, Parmer, Terry, and Yoakum. The expansion into five counties in New Mexico includes land from Chaves, Curry, De Baca, Lea, and Roosevelt counties.

    If you look at a map of the proposed takings, you can see federal environmentalists want to “conserve” (i.e. control) land rightup to the edge of Lubbock:

    Both this plan and the 30×30 plan in general smack of the sort of unauthorized, self-directed bureaucratic empire-building that the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision struck down. Both private land owners and the State of Texas should resist this blatant land grab with all the tools at their disposal.

    The Joe Biden Experience

    Saturday, July 13th, 2024

    This video is almost genius in its simplicity: Joe Biden as Joe Rogan, interviewing Joe Biden, all populated exclusively with actual Biden audio.

    I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow recap, since the video is short and you’ll probably recognize most or all of the snippets. And who doesn’t love the loopy Corn-Pop/rusty razors in rain barrels story?

    The creators missed an opportunity to spoof the theme music, though. “The Joe Biden Experience! 10-4 all day! None at night!”

    LinkSwarm For July 12, 2024

    Friday, July 12th, 2024

    Slow Joe continues sliding down the slope of senility, Democrats continue freaking out over same, the media continues to be shocked that the media hid Biden’s decline, Democrats gear up to commit more voting fraud in November, tractors join the culture wars, Skydance eats Paramount, and postal rates are going up again. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Biden’s “Big Boy” speech comes up small.

    President Joe Biden struck a defiant tone during what was perhaps the most consequential press conference of his political career, insisting that he is the best candidate to take on Donald Trump in November, even as he stumbled through several answers.

    Biden read prepared remarks off a teleprompter and answered questions from a pre-selected list of reporters Thursday night at NATO’s 75th anniversary summit, addressing a range of subjects including the history of NATO, Russia’s war against Ukraine, inflation, and Israel’s war against Hamas. The embattled president showed signs of his age throughout the event, as he coughed, whispered, stumbled over his words, and at time lost his stream of thought, at one point even referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump.”

    “Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president did I think she was not qualified to be vice president,” Biden said, defending his choice of Harris as his running mate. At the end of the press conference, Biden told reporters to “listen to him,” in response to a question about the gaffe.

    People are listening to him. That’s his problem.

  • Parkinson’s Specialist Met With White House At Least 9 Times Since July 2023.”

    Parkinson’s disease specialist from Walter Reed Medical Center visited the White House at least nine times in the past year, according to journalist Alex Berenson of Unreported Truths, while the NY Post has reported that a cardiologist was present during one of the visits.

    Dr. Kevin R Cannard traveled to the White House’s medical clinic each time, meeting with either President Joe Biden’s personal physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor, or a naval nurse who coordinates care for the president and other senior officials. O’Connor notably gave Biden a clean bill of health after his February annual physical.

    The visits spanned July 28, 2023 with the latest being March 28 of this year. That said, Berenson notes that the most recent logs are from April 1, so it’s unknown if Cannard has visited more recently.

    The question isn’t whether Joe Biden is suffering from cognitive declines, the questions is how many kinds of cognitive decline is Joe Biden suffering from?

  • “Biden’s Cognitive Collapse: Greatest Media Scandal We’ve Ever Seen. With Russia collusion, they were inventing things we couldn’t see and trying to convince us that they happened. With the Biden cognitive failures, they were trying to convince us that something we all saw didn’t happen and wasn’t happening.”

    You saw the debate and the interview.

    Joe is not well. He should not be president, it’s a national security risk. This is what the 25th Amendment is made for.

    There have been many media scandals. Rathergate comes to mind. But most immediately, Russia collusion was the most aggressive and sustained media misinformation campaign lasting years. It operated on the level of using bits and pieces of information and disinformation to try to convince us that something we could not see (collusion) did in fact happen.

    The media conduct towards Biden’s cognitive decline operated on a different level.

    We saw it. We wrote about it. But for years, at least since the 2020 election cycle, the media did its best to convince you that you didn’t see what you saw. The media didn’t try to convince you that something that didn’t exist existed, it tried to convince you that something that existed didn’t exist.

    It was a classic case of gaslighting.

  • Democrats are Putin.

    If we accept the actions and outcomes that are visible from Democrats right now, their definition of “democracy” is apparently to dismiss the will of tens-of-millions of Democrat party voters, and instead install a candidate the DC insiders select.

    Democrats and even Biden administration officials are being very open about their intent. They are dismissing Joe Biden and debating the installation of their chosen alternative; all while trying to jail their political opponent.

    Can democrats see their version of “democracy” is identical to horrible Vladimir Putin?…

    Additionally, having just returned from an extended visit to Russia, where I literally spent exhaustive time researching how the government views their role within the social compact – and its consequence upon the average population, the “we know better” outlook currently on display by Democrat influence operations in DC is stunningly similar.

    Democrats are defending “The Motherland,” where “mother” is their retention of omnipotent power. Yes, Democrats are Putin.

  • “Biden Officials Gave Radio Stations Questions They Could Ask Biden During Interviews; They Complied.” Of course they did. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Evidently donors aren’t interested backing a senile loser, as Biden campaign contributions have fallen off dramatically. “Contributions from large donors alone could be down by more than half this month and are lower across the spectrum, according to NBC News. ‘It’s already disastrous,’ a source close to the re-election effort told the outlet about the state of fundraising for the Biden campaign. ‘The money has absolutely shut off,’ another person close to the campaign said.” Now we get to see if Democrats will follow the will of actual voters who cast their ballots for Biden, or a donor class insisting he be kicked to the curb.
  • Democrats oppose a bill requiring American citizenship to vote. because of course they do. Getting illegal alien ballots in the system is one of the fraud vectors they need to stay in power. It’s amazing Republicans even need to specify that in a law.
  • Speaking of Democrats enabling fraud, DOJ confirms that it’s going to try to help Biden cheat in the Georgia elections again.
  • Ditto Michigan, where Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer signing bills eliminating the board of canvasser’s investigative powers, instead requiring the board to refer allegations of fraud to county prosecutors. So they can make sure Soros-backed prosecutors can bury any fraud.
  • This is potentially huge: “Court Holds Federal Ban on Home-Distilling Exceeds Congress’ Enumerated Powers.”

    Yesterday, in Hobby Distillers Association v. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, a federal district court in Texas held that federal laws banning distilled spirits plants (aka “stills”) in homes or dwellings exceed the scope of Congress’ enumerated powers. Specifically, the court concluded that the prohibitions exceed the scope of the federal taxing power and the Interstate Commerce Clause, even as supplemented by the Necessary and Proper Clause. The court further entered a permanent injunction barring enforcement of these provisions against those plaintiffs found to have standing (one individual and members of the Hobby Distillers Association.) The plaintiffs were represented by attorneys at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and background on the case (and the various filings) can be found on CEI’s website here.

    Hobby Distillers Association has the potential to be a significant post-NFIB challenge to the expansive of use of federal power.

    All sorts of federal regulatory shenanigans that depend on the Commerce Clause may be headed for the scrapheap of history… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Ukraine blows up a huge ammo dump in Voronezh, Russia.
  • They also hit oil depots in Pavlovskaya and Leningradskaya, Krasnodar, Russia.
  • Plus they hit a smaller oil depot in Kalach-na-Donu.
  • “How disinformation from a Russian AI spam farm ended up on top of Google search results. A fake article about Volodymyr Zelensky’s wife buying a Bugatti with US aid was promoted by bots.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Iranian warship sinks in port. That’s some mighty fine sailing there, Lu’ay…
  • Armed bystander stops a 4th of July mass shooter who killed three, including two kids.
  • Annals of evil: Porsche executive convicted for of throwing her newborn daughter out of a window to further her career. “Katarina Jovanovic, a Porsche executive in Germany, chose her career over family by throwing her newborn daughter out a 12-foot window to her death, and is now headed to jail for seven and a half years.” I wonder if German women’s prisons have shankings…
  • “Cruz Launches Investigation into Whether Big Tech is Funding Biden Administration Staff Salaries.”

    Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has launched an investigation into whether the Biden administration used the “obscure Intergovernmental Personnel Act program” to fund the salaries of Big Tech employees as part of an executive order.

    “To complete every action, agencies would have had to . . . bring on AI fellows by recruiting temporary — but influential — AI staff from external organizations through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) program. Critics, however, have raised reasonable concerns that these influential AI fellows are shaping federal policy to benefit their organizations’ funders and not the American people,” explained Cruz.

    “Moreover, as federal agencies request increased funding for AI hiring, it is important Congress understand the extent to which, and how, agencies have already acquired AI staff in response to the expansive and demanding AI Executive Order.”

    In October 2023, Biden issued an executive order to establish “new standards for AI safety and security.” The order also aims to address “best practices” for authenticating content and calls on Congress to pass “bipartisan data privacy legislation.”

    Six months after the issuance, the White House stated they had completed all the actions in the order.

    In Cruz’s investigation announcement, he casts doubt on whether hiring “only 150 people into AI roles” was enough to be able to complete the required work. Cruz also highlighted a number of reported incidents where, through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) program, Big Tech CEOs funded salaries of employees working in government agencies.

    “In effect, large AI technology companies are influencing the Biden administration’s AI policy from the inside and advancing their own anti-competitive agenda to shape the future of the AI industry,” Cruz said.

  • “Musk Announces X To Sue ‘Perpetrators And Collaborators’ Behind Advertising Censorship Cartel.”

    Elon Musk announced on Thursday that social media platform X will sue ‘perpetrators and collaborators’ who have colluded to control online speech, as revealed on Wednesday by an interim staff report released by the House Judiciary Committee.

    “Having seen the evidence unearthed today by Congress, 𝕏 has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators in the advertising boycott racket,” Musk wrote on his platform, adding “Hopefully, some states will consider criminal prosecution.”

    The House report details a coordinated effort by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative to demonetize and suppress disfavored content across the internet.

    As we noted on Wednesday, the WFA is a global association representing over 150 of the world’s biggest brands and over 60 national advertiser associations which created GARM in 2019.

    This alliance quickly amassed significant market power, representing roughly 90% of global advertising spend, which amounts to nearly one trillion dollars annually.

    GARM’s Steer Team reads like a who’s who of corporate America, including heavyweights such as Unilever, Mars, Diageo, Procter & Gamble (P&G), GroupM, AB InBev, L’Oréal, Nestlé, IBM, Mastercard, and PepsiCo. These corporations not only wield immense economic influence but are now revealed to be leveraging this power to control online discourse under the guise of “brand safety.”

  • “In New York City, hotels that have converted into shelters for hordes of illegal aliens have been given over $1 billion in taxpayer money to keep them in business. As reported by Fox News, the average hotel room for an illegal costs $156 per night, with some costing over $300 per night. As such, the city government has already spent at least $1.98 billion on housing for illegals, with 80% of that amount going to hotels or inns that have been converted into shelters, rather than to shelters operated by the city. Overall, the city has spent at least $4.88 billion on the mass migration crisis.” (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Another loss for Biden’s tranny school mandate. “Carroll Independent School District (ISD) won a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the revised Title IX regulations issued by the Biden administration in April. The rules were set to go into effect on August 1. Federal Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas issued the preliminary injunction on Thursday, July 11, the same day the Amarillo federal court issued an injunction in the case brought by the State of Texas regarding Title IX.”
  • Add Wendy’s and Jersey Mike’s as chain restaurants slashing staff and hours over California’s minimum wage hike.
  • Is TEMU’s shopping app spyware? (Hat tip: Texas Public Policy Foundation.)
  • Good news on the tractor front: Tractor Supply is reversing all its woke policies due to a customer backlash. Including eliminating all DEI programs and targets.
  • Bad news on the tractor front: John Deere is going full woke, with DEI idiocy out the wazoo and pushing tranny ideology on children. Plus they’re closing an American plant to move the jobs to Mexico.
  • USPS rates are going up again July 14. Media mail is going up by 50¢, and Forever Stamps are going from 68¢ to 73¢. Thanks, Joe Biden…
  • Skydance is buying Paramount. Does this mean less wokeness in franchises like Star Trek? Since Skydance CEO David Ellison (son of Larry) gave Joe Biden’s campaign $1 million, I rather doubt it.
  • Chicken Soup for the Soul, the company that owned Redbox and Crackle, is shutting down. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • It’s not just U.S. companies that have problems with unions: Samsung’s is threatening a general strike in their high speed memory fab at Pyeongtaek. Any machine that goes down on a fab line needs to re-qualified, which is a gigantic, time-consuming pain in the ass. A car factory can resume production in last than a day, but fab can take several weeks to months to get production.
  • Now bankrupt EV maker Fisker required a subscription and an Internet connection to use the sunroof.
  • Return of the zombie mortgage. People who thought their second mortgages were written off after the 2008 crisis but didn’t get it in writing are now suffering a rude awakening.
  • Dwight celebrates the 45th Anniversary of Disco Demolition Night.
  • “Democrats Warn Of Terrifying Fascist State Where Government Shrinks And People Can Afford Groceries.”
  • “In New ‘Ocean’s 14’, George Clooney Pulls Off $30 Million Heist By Tricking People Into Giving Money To Politician Before Revealing He’s Demented.”
  • “People Who Would Never Cheat In Elections Horrified By ‘Stop Cheating In Elections’ Bill.”
  • “Media Who Refused To Report On Biden’s Decline Furious That Nobody Reported On Biden’s Decline.” At this point Babylon Bee just seems to be straight up reporting…
  • Happiness is a stuffed crocodile:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Still between jobs, so hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    Poll: Trump Wallops Every Other Dem Even Worse Than Biden

    Thursday, July 11th, 2024

    A whole lot of Democrats still seem hot for dumping Slow Joe after his disasterous debate showed his obvious cognitive decline. There’s just one tiny problem: Every polled Democrat loses to Trump by even more.

    A series of prominent Democrats were tested in a head-to-head ballot against Donald Trump:

  • Vice President Kamala Harris: 49% Trump, 43% Harris, 8% undecided
  • Senator Bernie Sanders: 48% Trump, 42% Sanders, 10% undecided
  • California Governor Gavin Newsom: 48% Trump, 40% Newsom, 12% undecided
  • Former Vice President Al Gore: 47% Trump, 42% Gore, 11% undecided
  • Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: 48% Trump, 41% Clinton, 11% undecided
  • Senator Elizabeth Warren: 49% Trump, 39% Warren, 13% undecided
  • Secretary of State* Pete Buttigieg: 49% Trump, 39% Buttigieg, 12% undecided
  • Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro: 46% Trump, 38% Shapiro, 16% undecided
  • Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer: 48% Trump, 38% Whitmer, 15% undecided
  • The usual poll caveats apply, and the sample size of 1,370 is a bit low for a nationwide poll. But the crosstabs do show more Democrats than Republicans sampled, which makes things look even worse for Biden’s chances.

    The other caveat: The Sacred Spouse of Lightbringer McLegTingle wasn’t polled. She’s denied she’s interested in running, though swathes of media types are slavering over a potential candidacy, so I’ll have both of the the Bill Burr rants cued up.

    Finally, the DNC would never, ever, ever let Bernie Sanders get nominated, because that would mean an entirely new set of grifters kicking the current snouts out of the trough and inserting their own.

    If this poll is to be believed, then Democrats might as well roll with Biden, despite his brain being mush, because he still has the best chance to beat Trump.

    And that’s all that matters to them.


    *Yes, that was still up today. Last time I checked, Buttigieg was Secretary of Transportation (and doing a lousy job).

    New Orleans Tries To Game Gun Free Zone Law By Declaring Police Station A School

    Wednesday, July 10th, 2024

    You’ve got to hand one thing to the gun-grabbers: Their shameless, brazen tactics to disarm law-abiding American citizens know no bounds. There’s no strategy so dirty, underhanded or silly that they won’t try it. Today’s case in point: To disarm people visiting the French Quarter, they just declared that a police station is actually a vocational school.

    After New Orleans city officials were unsuccessful in their attempts to get state lawmakers to designate vast swathes of their city’s popular tourist area as a gun-free zone before Louisiana’s new permitless carry law went live July 4, they came up with their own solution, which is probably unconstitutional, definitely whacky and certain to be contested in court.

    The New Orleans Police Department has designated their Eighth District police station – which is located in the middle of the French Quarter – as a vocational technical school. In other words, they turned a working police station into a vo-tech. Now, everything within a 1,000-foot radius of the “school” is a gun-free zone, including more than five blocks of Bourbon Street, an international tourist destination.

    It is a felony in Louisiana to violate a gun-free zone, which is punishable by up to five years in a state prison at hard labor.

    Who will actually attend classes at the new “school” is not known. New Orleans Police recruits are trained at the police academy, which is located at a different facility. However, city and police officials now claim some of the recruits may take at least one class in a small room at the new “vo-tech.” There are no classes planned for civilian students.

    Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill balked at the city’s move, warning officials they could face civil rights lawsuits because of their “made-up designation.”

    “I’m working hard to help keep New Orleans safe, but the City cannot avoid state law by unilaterally designating police stations ‘vo-tech locations.’ You cannot just ‘designate’ yourself a vo-tech school. Among other implications, if it was one (it’s not) the police department would be under the jurisdiction of a board of supervisors for higher education, and it would be subject to other oversight requirements. I have no specific plans yet, but would caution the NOPD that it will likely be subject to civil rights lawsuits under Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act if it arrests people pursuant to its made-up designation, which is clearly not legal or effective. I certainly hope the NOPD isn’t violating people’s rights by making up their own rules, which is why the Department is under a federal consent decree,” Murrill said in a statement posted on social media.

    “Schools have classrooms, not booking rooms,” Murrill said in another post.

    Snip.

    Dan Zelenka is an attorney, a board member of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and president of the Louisiana Shooting Association, a nonprofit founded in 1966 with thousands of members, which is affiliated with the Civilian Marksmanship Program and the National Rifle Association.

    “The Louisiana Shooting Association of course opposes this redesignation, and the reason is that it’s not a school. You can’t wave a magic wand and create a school just because you teach a class there,” Zelenka told the Second Amendment Foundation Monday.

    Louisiana state law is very specific, Zelenka said, regarding what constitutes a vo-tech which, as the Attorney General pointed out in her statement, are subject to the supervision of a board of supervisors for higher education.

    “They’re claiming their new school is an adjunct of their police academy, but their police academy is not supervised or managed by this board of supervisors, so they can’t be a vo-tech,” Zelenka said.

    City officials, he said, have already changed their gun-free zone maps to include the 1,000-foot circle around the Eighth District station.

    “Personally, I think our laws are clear,” Zelenka said. “A police station is not a school.”

    New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell essentially slapped a Burger King crown on her head and demanded that people bow to her because she’s the Queen of Romania. A police station is not a vocational school, no matter how loudly the Democrats running New Orleans proclaim it nor how many signs they put up to that effect.

    But this is part and parcel of the Democratic Party’s insistence that they can ignore both law and reality at will if it furthers their political goals. A man wearing a dress magically becomes a woman simply by declaring it so, a widespread spree of looting and arson becomes “a mostly peaceful,” and state and federal statues can be mixed willy-nilly to charge and convict political enemies.

    Fortunately for law-abiding gun owners visiting New Orleans, the Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General are all Republicans, and Republicans run both houses of the legislature. The chances they let these blatantly unlawful shenanigans stand is very slim indeed.

    Perhaps the legislature should respond by simply scrapping ineffective, counterproductive “gun free zones” entirely.

    LinkSwarm for July 5, 2024

    Friday, July 5th, 2024

    I hope you survived Independence Day will all your digits intact! Slow Joe’s poll numbers plumb new depths, everyone knows the media is complicit in hiding his mental decline, Israel settles all family business, Rishi’s snap election is a debacle for the Tories, Wall Street looks to get the hell out of the Rotten Apple, and California legalizing weed was a big win…for illegal weed. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

    Oh, and parts of south Texas might get hit with a hurricane. So batten up and get prepped if it might roll into your neighborhood. Up here, we can use the rain. And that crazy guy trying to build a forest in the desert can probably use it too.

  • The post-debate polls are coming out and CNN is aghast: ‘I have never seen numbers this bad for an incumbent president during my lifetime.'”

    Voters that say Biden has the mental health to be President: It was only 35% pre-debate, look where it’s dropped to now post-debate, 27%.

    How ’bout that he should be running for President? It’s 37% pre-debate, it’s now 28%…

    I have never seen numbers this bad for an incumbent president during my lifetime … These numbers looked NOTHING like this in 2020. These numbers were bad already … they have gotten considerably worse even in just a few days after that first presidential debate.

  • How bad is Biden doing? This should come with the standard Instapundit “don’t get cocky” disclaimer, as well as a disclaimer that I haven’t examined this guy’s methodology and model at all, but even if the margins are half what he’s saying, it’s still really, really bad for Biden.

    As in “Biden is winning Illinois…by three points” bad. New York is within striking distance for Trump. And right now he’s even edging Biden in New Jersey. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Biden says that no one is pushing him out of the race, though even Lightbringer McLegTingle himself has reportedly joined the chorus of concern over Slow Joe’s debate meltdown.

    According to ‘several people familiar with his remarks,’ and perhaps most notably conveyed via the Washington Post, not only has Obama grown more concerned following the debate (and having to physically guide the 81-year-old off of a stage last month), the former president “has long harbored worries about his party defeating Donald Trump in November, repeatedly warning Biden in recent months about how challenging it will be to win reelection.”

    Not only that, “Just before the debate, Obama conveyed to allies his concerns about the state of the race.”

    So Obama gets to save face, while adding to the growing chorus of Democrats who have expressed everything from quiet panic to public hints, to outright calls for Biden to drop out of the race.

    Usual “sources close to” caveats apply.

  • The mainstream media is shocked, shocked that Democrats lied about Biden’s cognitive decline as they actively aided and abetted them.

  • They all knew:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Also via Ace, the inevitable Downfall parody:

  • Obama and the DNC foisted Sundown Joe on us because they had to.

    Democrats decided to shut Joe Biden down for a week. Not because they wanted to, but because they figured they had to. It was the only chance Biden had — thin as it turned out to be — to get through a 90-minute session in which he’d be asked questions he couldn’t answer with note cards, in which he’d be challenged vigorously and need to be quick on his shuffling feet.

    Here’s the thing, though. What we saw on Thursday night was the result of that week of preparation and rest. And it was a disaster. So . . . what must the prep have been like?

    Biden’s closest aides and the top Democrats with whom they are in constant communication know better than anyone in America that the president cannot function, that he cannot do the job. Yet, rather than ease Biden out, invoke the 25th Amendment if he wouldn’t go voluntarily, and ensconce in the Oval Office the vice president they insisted in 2020 would be ready to take over if the octogenarian collapsed, they decided they had to try to drag Biden across the finish line.

    Why?

    Because the Democratic Party is a trainwreck.

    As catastrophic as Biden is in his senescence, he remains useful cover for the fact that the youth, energy, and money in the Democratic Party is woke-leftist, Islamist, counter-constitutionalist, post-American, and unelectable.

    This doesn’t mean the whole Democratic Party is that way. But it does mean that sensible Democrats have to mind their tongues and genuflect in the crazies’ direction if they want to remain viable. They may personally believe, like the majority of Americans believe, that the border needs to be secure; that we can’t allow millions of illegal aliens a year to enter the country; that we don’t want boys and men invading the formerly safe spaces of girls and women; that mere statistical racial disparities in outcomes do not establish racism; that crime — especially recidivist crime — is a serious problem; that we need to back Israel’s wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, and their Iranian patrons; that a radical “green energy” transition the country is not ready for weighs too heavily on the budgets of everyday Americans even as it drives the national economy deeper into the ditch; and that America, warts and all, is fundamentally good — rightly, the envy of the world. But woe betide the Democrat who gives voice to such commonsense views.

    Democrats have thus rolled the dice with Biden, and with the nation’s security, because the alternative is dealing with that rift.

    Joe Biden is a lifelong mediocrity. But he has the fortuity of being both a Democrat from another era and Obama’s vice president. Because he’s a doddering blank slate, Democrats of all camps could project onto him their kind of Democrat. He could run in 2020 as the guy who could face down the radicals, and then govern under the thumb of the radicals — but with enough rhetorical feints to the old establishment Dems that they might yet rally around him . . . especially with no alternatives except the hard left and Donald Trump.

    Why Joe Biden? Because Democrats want to stay in power and propping him up, as impossible as that has now become, seemed to be the best plan. Sadly, it may yet be.

  • Unemployment is at a three year high. And those are just the official figures. The truth is probably far worse.
  • Rigging the 2020 election through Zuckerbucks. “(a) tax-exempt non-profits are prohibited by federal law from engaging in partisan political activity, and (b) the Zuckerberg-funded ‘cabal’ had no other purpose except to guarantee Biden’s election.” And it did this through get-out-the-vote efforts exclusively in heavily Democratic precincts.
  • Ukraine hits a gunpowder factory.
  • “Israeli Airstrike Eliminates Top Hezbollah Terror Commander in South Lebanon. Slain Hezbollah terrorist Muhammad Neamah Naser ‘was considered one of the most senior commanders in Hezbollah killed so far in the war.'”
  • In retaliation, Hezbollah fired 200 rockets and drones into Israel because, really, what else are they going to do?
  • If you look at the Livemap, Israel also seems to have stormed various towns in the West Bank this week.

    Israel may be in a “settle all family business” sort of mood…

  • “National Education Association members will vote on several anti-Israel resolutions at the union’s annual ‘Representative Assembly’ in Philadelphia this week, including the adoption of an official position holding that Israel is conducting a ‘genocide’ in Gaza and that opposing the Jewish state’s existence is not antisemitic.” I’m sure they’d rather focus on Gaza than undertake radical courses of action like teaching kids to read.
  • California legalized marijuana and the cartels took over.

    Six years after California legalized marijuana, the bodies keep piling up. Earlier this year, six men were murdered in the Mojave Desert. Four of the men had been burned after being shot with rifles. In 2020, seven people were killed at an illegal pot operation in Riverside County.

    Violence like this was supposed to disappear after legalization. Legalization advocates argued that making the drug trade legal would end the grip of the cartels. Instead, the legal market has failed, and the cartels are taking over sizable parts of California and the rest of the country.

    California’s legal drug revenues have fallen consistently, as have those in other legal drug states including Colorado, whose model helped sell the idea that drug money would fix everything.

    Despite falling revenues, Colorado legislators brag about $282 million in drug revenue. That number may sound high, but it’s a drop in the bucket considering the money that the state and cities like Denver are spending on homelessness, drug overdoses and law enforcement.

    While the legal drug business is also collapsing in California, the state is spending a fortune fighting marijuana even as it tries to tax it. Gov. Gavin Newsom paradoxically promised to close the budget deficit with $100 million in drug revenue, meant to be used to fund law enforcement and fight substance abuse. The state seized over $300 million in illegal pot this year and uses satellite imagery and heavily-armed raids to fight untaxed marijuana.

    But despite all those efforts, illegal marijuana has won and legal marijuana has lost.

    The Los Angeles Times warned two years ago:

    “Proposition 64, California’s 2016 landmark cannabis initiative, sold voters on the promise a legal market would cripple the drug’s outlaw trade, with its associated violence and environmental wreckage.

    “Instead, a Los Angeles Times investigation finds, the law triggered a surge in illegal cannabis on a scale California has never before witnessed.

    “Rogue cultivation centers like Mount Shasta Vista now engulf rural communities scattered across the state, as far afield as the Mojave Desert, the steep mountains on the North Coast, and the high desert and timberlands of the Sierra Nevada.

    “Residents in these places describe living in fear next to heavily armed camps…”

    Some of the growers are private citizens, but they aren’t likely to remain in business for long.

    Cartels and gang members dominate the business. And open borders allowed them to bring massive numbers of laborers to boost their ranks. Not only California, but places as far afield as Maine that have large open areas and limited law enforcement resources, have been overrun by drug operations that more closely resemble parts of Latin America and Asia than the USA.

    The coasts, from Southern California up to Oregon, are controlled by Mexican cartels which have expanded so much that they’re running short of workers even during the Biden open borders boom. Some have taken to brazenly advertising for illegal workers in Europe.

    A local California DA described “Mexican cartel groups coming up to grow pot, and people from Bulgaria, France and Russia.” The vast exodus across the border has made it possible for cartels to freely bring in any workers they want, even as drug legalization and open borders effectively ended any real penalties for either illegal migration or marijuana.

    Asian organized crime may be less on the radar, but it is no less ruthless or violent.

    A few years ago, four Chinese people were murdered at an Oklahoma illegal pot farm. Chinese organized crime had “taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States,” the head of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs revealed.

    Once again, “the mafias set their sights on Oklahoma when the state’s voters approved a ballot measure that legalized the cultivation and sale of marijuana for medicinal purposes.” Now the Triads run their own compounds “ringed by fences, surveillance cameras and guards with guns and machetes” with 3,000 illegal grows having a value estimated at as high as $44 billion a year.

    The Triads are not just in the illegal marijuana business, they traffic in everything from heroin to fentanyl. Legalizing marijuana, however, provided them with a profitable and semi-legal market that gives them a base to expand their efforts trafficking in even more lethal drugs.

    Drug legalization has failed on every level. The legal drug business is collapsing. MedMen, which once promised to be the Apple of weed, fell from a $3 billion valuation to a bankruptcy with $411 million in liabilities. Despite the green crosses and online apps, 80% of Californian’s pot is still the old-fashioned illegal kind. Politicians may be boasting about hundreds of millions in revenue, but the cartels are making tens of billions and they’re taking over entire forests.

    The future isn’t pot shops, weed apps or MedMen: it’s Mexican and Chinese organized crime compounds that are spreading across the West and parts of New England like a plague.

  • Also in California, State Farm is jacking home owners insurance into the stratosphere.

    State Farm requested massive increases to its California residential insurance rates, which calls its financial stability into doubt amid an ongoing crisis in the state’s insurance market.

    The company’s California subsidiary, State Farm General, the state’s largest writer of homeowners insurance, according to the Insurance Information Institute, submitted a request on Thursday to the California Department of Insurance for the following rate hikes:

    • 30% increase in homeowners insurance
    • 336% increase in condominium owners insurance
    • 352% increase in renters insurance

    With California’s property insurance market already facing an availability and affordability crisis, driven largely by rising wildfire risk, the timing could hardly be worse.

    Gee, maybe you shouldn’t have legalized shoplifting in the name of “social justice.”

  • “U.S. Supreme Court Unanimously Rules Against Texas Social Media Censorship Law.”

    The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has ruled unanimously in a case involving a 2021 Texas social media transparency law, sending it back to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

    House Bill (HB) 20, which requires major social media platforms to be more transparent and prohibit viewpoint-based censorship, passed in the 87th Legislature. It faced an immediate legal challenge, resulting in a temporary block by a federal district court. This decision was appealed to the 5th Circuit, which temporarily lifted the block, allowing the law to take effect.

    Justice Elena Kagan delivered the opinion for SCOTUS, writing, “Texas has never been shy, and always been consistent, about its interest: The objective is to correct the mix of viewpoints that major platforms present. But a State may not interfere with private actors’ speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance.”

    So the Supreme Court will not save Americans from big tech companies teaming up with secret government entities to impose censorship on their platforms. Americans will have to do that for themselves.

  • “A lot of Wall Street people are noticing that New York kinda sucks.” He fingers Miami as the next Wall Street, but I think Dallas also has a shot.
  • The Texas Supreme Court upheld the state’s ban on child genital mutilation.
  • The Tories got slaughtered in Rishi Sunak’s spectacularly ill-advised snap election, handing Labour, which seemed on life-support just a few years earlier, a 170 seat majority. “Labour got 3 times as many seats, but did not win – the Conservatives lost, and lost badly, punished by the electorate. Reform were the real winners – although they only got 4 seats.” Sir Keir Rodney Starmer KCB KC will now become Prime Minister, Sunak is going to go down as one of the Tories worst leaders, and Nigel Farage will finally sit in parliament. Will Labour take this as a greenlight to go full speed ahead on unlimited immigration and hard green NetZero? I wouldn’t put it past them.
  • Belarus does more sabre rattling on the Ukraine border. I suspect this is just a feint to tie up Ukrainian units on the border, as Putin puppet Aleksander Lukashenko might face a real revolt from his military if he tried to send units into Ukraine.
  • Remember all that panic over investors buying up housing? Thanks to the Biden Recession, they’re now unloading them at firesale prices. “It’s impossible to make money on mortgage properties with interest rates where they are today.” Well, unless they took out fixed rate mortgages, which real estate companies are evidently loath to do. “Inventory [in this Florida zip code] has gone up 800 to 900%.”
  • So I thought about doing a post on this Chinese-constructed, Malaysia-based, eco-themed Forest City ghost city just outside Singapore, with the obvious “post apocalyptic” slant, but one thing stopped me: It actually looks kinda cool and well-maintained, and if the usual shoddy tofu dregs building processes have been used, they’re not apparent in this brief tour. Everything looks classy and expensive. And for once, you can’t entirely blame the CCP for the debacle, since the Malaysian government evidently changed foreign ownership rules after most of it had been constructed.
  • This is a weird story: “Walter Ringfield Jr., the 27-year-old Phoenix resident charged with stealing keys to voting equipment from Maricopa County elections headquarters, has a history of theft allegations – and an apparent interest in running for public office.” He stole keys to a tabulating machine that couldn’t be used without access to other keys he didn’t have for a job he was temping at. Could be a another Democratic attempt at election fraud, or the guy just might be a klepto.
  • In California, Democrats failed to place ACA7, the bill which would have re-legalized racist discrimination, on the ballot for November.
  • Shocked, etc. “CNN Freelance Journalist Worked With, Supported Hamas.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Michigan lawmakers want to make the AR-15 the official state gun. Nice. Texas already has a state gun, the Colt Walker pistol, which is pretty important historically. Tennessee’s official state gun is the Barrett M82, which I think wins the firepower crown, until someone names the Ma Deuce the offical state gun…
  • Mark Steyn looks back at the success of Jaws. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Via AI, Beach Boys sing “99 Problems.” NSFW, naturally.
  • “Alarming Study Finds 33% Of Americans Are Dumber Than A Bag Of Hammers.”
  • Great Pyr watches baby goats:

    What more could you ask for? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Still between jobs, so hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    Knives Out For Biden Roundup

    Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024

    I love the smell of Democratic panic in the morning. It smells like…victory.

    Outside the Biden White House, the roars for Biden to step aside after revealing his cognitive decline to the nation via his disasterous debate performance grow louder.

  • First up: Austin liberal congressional fossil Lloyd Doggett called on Biden to drop out of the race.

    Congressman Lloyd Doggett (D-TX-37) became the first federal Democratic official to call on President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 race following last week’s debate with former President Donald Trump.

    The statement followed an interview where former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA-11) told MSNBC, “I think it’s a legitimate question to say, ‘Is this an episode or is this a condition?’”

    “And so when people ask that question, it’s legitimate — of both candidates.”

    Doggett’s statement reads, “President Biden has continued to run substantially behind Democratic senators in key states and in most polls has trailed Donald Trump. I had hoped this debate would provide some momentum to change that. It did not. Instead of reassuring voters, the President failed to effectively defend his many accomplishments and expose Trump’s many lies.”

    “Our overriding consideration must be who has the best hope of saving our democracy from an authoritarian takeover by a criminal and his gang. … I represent the heart of a congressional district once represented by Lyndon Johnson. Under very different circumstances, he made the painful decision to withdraw. President Biden should do the same.”

    In 1968, LBJ declined to run again because his escalation of the Vietnam War was deeply unpopular with Democrats, not because his brain was operating on the level of a baked rutabaga. The two situations are not comparable.

  • Doggett is not the only congressional Democrat calling for Biden to step aside.

    In television interviews, some Democrats are already throwing a bone to Vice President Kamala Harris. “I will support her if he were to step aside,” Representative Jim Clyburn (D., S.C.), a Biden-Harris campaign co-chairman and former House Democratic whip, told MSNBC. “This party should not, in any way, do anything to work around Ms. Harris. We should do everything we can to bolster her whether she’s in second place or at the top of the ticket.”

    Former representative Tim Ryan (D., Ohio) has been even more candid — calling on Biden to step aside and urging Democrats to rally around Harris in his place. “You’re asking the American people to ignore what they saw last week,” Ryan, who distanced himself from Biden on the campaign trail during his 2022 Senate run and who expressed early opposition to Biden’s reelection campaign, said in an interview with National Review on Tuesday “It’s completely irresponsible for those people to hide this from us — for him to be in in that condition.”

    Ryan said his party’s failure to confront voters’ concerns about Biden’s fitness for the job risks causing “irreparable damage” to a party that is already seen as out of touch with large swaths of the American public — including black voters and working-class voters — on a range of issues such as border security, the economy, and public safety.

    They’re seen as “out of touch” because the party’s hard left ideological core wanted a third term for Obama despite wildly unpopular policies that brought Republican majorities to both houses of Congress and thought they could blithely lie to the American public about a whole host of issues (importing millions of illegal aliens, radical transgenderism), not just Biden’s cognitive decline, while imposing revolution from above.

  • But what Doggett and other Democrats are getting at is that now that Biden has revealed that he’s as cognitively declined as Republicans have said all along, his chances of beating Donald Trump in November just went from slim to none, and boy howdy are they right about that.

    What? A Democrat telling “obvious lies that nobody but the dumbest partisans will buy”? You mean it’s a day ending in “-y”?

    My friend Stephen Green is reveling in schadenfreude over Silver’s latest election forecast, which is developing a trendline in exactly one direction — from bad to worse for “Sundown Joe,” showing “Biden with just a 27.6% chance of winning the Electoral College and 44.2% odds of taking the popular vote.” As a Democrat, Silver is grief-stricken and angry about the situation, going through the “woulda coulda shoulda” second-guessing about the process by which his party’s establishment, after foisting upon the electorate the Oldest President Ever, then apparently decided there was no risk in attempting to extend his White House tenure another four years. Last week’s debate disaster should have been foreseen, because what’s the point of getting paid as a “campaign strategist” if you can’t anticipate potential problems?

    Now, however, the same fools who led Democrats into that disaster are busy trying to convince their voters (and, perhaps more importantly, their donors) that they can somehow recover enough to win in November.

    “It’s fundamentally a terrible idea to ask the public to make the guy they saw on Thursday president until he’s 86,” Silver says in his pay-walled newsletter, stating the blindingly obvious truth.

    You’ve got to understand that Silver was one of those 20-something lefties who jumped into the political fray during the years when the Iraq War made George W. Bush very unpopular on college campuses. (One reason most conservatives my age roll our eyes at rhetorical symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome — the Hitler comparisons, etc. — is that it’s basically the same thing we heard about Dubya during the Bush Derangment Syndrome epidemic two decades ago.) Silver’s first big “win” as a forecaster, the foundation of his reputation as a polling expert, was in 2006, which in hindsight was the 21st-century’s high-water mark for Democrats. Silver predicted a big win for Democrats and he was right, and his winning streak continued two years later when Obama got elected. However, his accuracy since then has not been so stellar. In October 2010, Silver offered a “best guess” that Republicans would gain 48 House seats in the midterms; the GOP’s actual net gain in 2010 was 63 seats, the biggest net gain for House Republicans since 1938.

    Generally speaking, when Democrats have a good year, Silver’s projections are more accurate than they are when Republicans have a good year. Silver has never overestimated Republican performance. So if Nate Silver’s numbers are telling him that Biden’s got barely a one-in-four chance of winning? That’s bad for Joe, because the reality of his situation is probably a lot worse than that.

  • It’s not just elected Democrats and pollsters going after Biden, it’s also the MSM Praetorian Guard who actively hid Biden’s decline for four years finally telling us the truth.

    In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.

    Like many people his age, Mr. Biden, 81, has long experienced instances in which he mangled a sentence, forgot a name or mixed up a few facts, even though he could be sharp and engaged most of the time. But in interviews, people in the room with him more recently said that the lapses seemed to be growing more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome.

    The uncomfortable occurrences were not predictable, but seemed more likely when he was in a large crowd or tired after a particularly bruising schedule. In the 23 days leading up to the debate against former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden jetted across the Atlantic Ocean twice for meetings with foreign leaders and then flew from Italy to California for a splashy fund-raiser, maintaining a grueling pace that exhausted even much younger aides.

    Mr. Biden was drained enough from the back-to-back trips to Europe that his team cut his planned debate preparation by two days so he could rest at his house in Rehoboth Beach, Del., before joining advisers at Camp David for rehearsals. The preparations, which took place over six days, never started before 11 a.m. and Mr. Biden was given time for an afternoon nap each day, according to a person familiar with the process.

    Won’t someone please think of the terrible strain on Joe from having to start work at the crack of 11 AM?

    Let’s hope he got milk and graham crackers after his nap to reward him for being such a good boy.

    Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said on Tuesday that “the president was working well before” the 11 a.m. start time each day, after exercising. Still, at a fund-raiser on Tuesday evening, Mr. Biden blamed fatigue for his debate performance. “I wasn’t very smart,” he said. “I decided to travel around the world a couple times, I don’t know how many time zones.” He added: “I didn’t listen to my staff, and I came back and I fell asleep on the stage.”

    Are you trying to say that your staff advised you not to travel around the world to meet with international leaders, and not to celebrate the 70th anniversary of D-Day? So not to perform the regular duties expected of anyone who’s job is President of the United States of America?

    Joe, I’ve got to tell you, I have a pretty big problem with that as well.

    The recent moments of disorientation generated concern among advisers and allies alike. He seemed confused at points during a D-Day anniversary ceremony in France on June 6. The next day, he misstated the purpose of a new tranche of military aid to Ukraine when meeting with its president.

    On June 10, he appeared to freeze up at an early celebration of the Juneteenth holiday. On June 18, his soft-spoken tone and brief struggle to summon the name of his homeland security secretary at an immigration event unnerved some of his allies at the event, who traded alarmed looks and later described themselves as “shaken up,” as one put it.

    Democrat gaslighting us about “how sharp Biden is” snipped.

    But by many accounts, as evidenced by video footage, observation and interviews, Mr. Biden is not the same today as he was even when he took office 3½ years ago. The White House regularly releases corrected transcripts of his remarks, in which he frequently mixes up places, people or dates. The administration did so in the days after the debate, when Mr. Biden mixed up the countries of France and Italy when talking about war veterans at an East Hampton fund-raiser.

    Last week’s debate prompted some around him to express concern that the decline had accelerated lately. Several advisers and current and former administration officials who see Mr. Biden regularly but not every day or week said they were stunned by his debate performance because it was the worst they had ever seen him.

    “You don’t have to be sitting in an Oval Office meeting with Joe Biden to recognize there’s been a slowdown in the past two years. There’s a visible difference,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. “I’ve been amazed on one hand,” said Mr. Brinkley, who has not seen the president in person in a year. “The president can zip around the country like he does. But the White House may only be showing the Biden they want us to see.”

    The Times piece is peppered with moments when Biden was lucid for some task or short speech, as though occasional periods of lucidity somehow make up for obvious cognitive decline. (Hat tip: Jim Geraghty at National Review.)

  • The Biden family has responded to increased calls for Biden to drop out by sending Hunter Biden into his father’s meetings.

    Disgraced convicted felon Hunter Biden has reportedly been joining his embattled father and top aides in official meetings at the White House since the Biden family returned from Camp David, Monday evening.

    The Biden family gathered at Camp David over the weekend, where Joe Biden sat for a previously scheduled photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz for the upcoming Democrat National Convention.

    While staying at the presidential retreat in Maryland, according to reports, the family took the opportunity to urge him to stay in the race and keep fighting despite his humiliating debate performance.

    Since then, the scandal-plagued younger Biden has “popped into” official White House meetings and phone calls with advisors, four people familiar with the matter told NBC.

    Hunter has also reportedly been spotted talking to senior White House staff, prompting some to ask how the convicted felon could have a security clearance to be included in such high-level discussions at the White House.

    According to the sources, Joe Biden’s aides were “struck” by Hunter’s new advisory role.

    “What the hell is happening?” senior White House staff is quoted to have said.

    Given that my calendar doesn’t show a Take Your Crackhead Son To Work Week, I’m guessing this is to prevent anyone from cornering Slow Joe one-on-one to try to convince him to drop out of the race. The Biden Crime Syndicate shows no signs of being willing to step off the gravy train, and seems to fear (possibly correctly) that a whole lot of criminal indictments might be coming down on them if they did. After all, now that the MSM has stopped pretending that Hunter’s laptop wasn’t real, they have yet to come to grips with the vast pay-for-play foreign graft schemes the documents on that laptop revealed.

  • Will endangered Democrats be able to convince Biden to drop out “for the good of the party?”

    Stay tuned…

    Roundup Of Dem Panic Over Slow Joe

    Monday, July 1st, 2024

    Following Joe Biden’s dismal, mentally impaired performance in last week’s debate, there’s a huge roar of panicked Democrats suggesting (or demanding) his replacement as the Democratic presidential nominee. For now, Biden and his family/enablers seem to be digging in their heels.

  • Who is demanding Biden step aside? The same MSM who refused to investigate his cognitive decline.

    Editorial boards and editors from the New York Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The New Yorker have joined well-known cable commentators and columnists in pressing the president to step aside and pave a path to the top of the ticket for another candidate.

    The Washington Post’s editorial board stopped short of pushing the president to drop out of the race, instead pressing him to cancel weekend plans “in favor of some soul-searching.”

    What they’re saying: The Times’ board — in an op-ed entitled “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race” — said Biden appeared as “the shadow of a great public servant” at Thursday’s debate, contending there are “Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency.”

    Pieces from the AJC’s board and a New Yorker editor followed, similarly arguing that the best candidate to defeat an unrestrained former President Trump is not the current president.

    The New Yorker named Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore as a slate of potential Biden backups who “could energize Democrats and independents, inspire more younger voters and beat Trump.”

    MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s question of “whether this man we’ve known and loved for a very long time is up to the task of running for president of the United States” presents a particularly damaging dagger to the commander-in-chief, a loyal viewer of “Morning Joe” who often seeks the opinions of the Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, on key issues.

    New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman echoed Scarborough’s tone in a Friday op-ed, writing that watching the man he considers a friend struggle on the debate stage made him weep.

    Maybe someone who “weeps” at a politician’s decline is too chummy to be a political commentator.

  • Also this:

  • Not the Bee has a nice roundup of Democrat panic. Including this NYT snapshot:

    Plus this:

    By the end of the debate, I was hearing a level of anxiety and alarm from those Democrats and several other party leaders and operatives that I’ve never seen in 20 years of covering presidential politics. The discussion turned squarely to the need for the Democratic Party to replace Biden as the 2024 nominee, with four months to go to the election, and how to make that happen.

    And this Cenk Uygur rant:

    “This thing is over!”
    “It’s a guaranteed loss!”
    “He can’t even talk!”
    “This thing’s a bloodbath! He’s gonna get annihilated!”

  • However, at this late date, it may not even be possible to replace Biden.

    We are monitoring the calls from across the country for President Biden to step aside, either now or before the election, and have concluded that the process for substitution and withdrawal is very complicated. We will remain vigilant that appropriate election integrity procedures are followed,” said Mike Howell, Executive Director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.

    The Heritage Oversight Project has identified three swing states — Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin — where they believe removing Biden from the Democratic ticket would prevent anyone else from replacing him.

    Wisconsin does not allow withdrawal from the ballot for any reason besides death, while in Nevada, no changes can be made to the ballot after 5 p.m. on the fourth Friday in June of an election year unless ‘a nominee dies or is adjudicated insane or mentally incompetent.’ In Georgia, if Biden were to withdraw less than 60 days before the election, his name would remain on the ballot but no votes would be counted.

    Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin are all states Biden “won” in 2020 (some thanks to 3 AM ballot dumps). A theoretical Biden replacement could, just barely, lose all of them and still win by the skin of his teeth with 271 electoral votes if they held every other state Biden was awarded in 2020. Georgia and Nevada both have Republican governors, and Republicans control both the senate and house in Wisconsin, so last minute Democrat pushes to change the rules before November are off the table. Recent polls show Trump winning all three, as well as the other four swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Arizona.

  • It’s a bit ironic that the same people who want to push Slow Joe out are the same ones who lied about his decline and covered it up the last four years.

    Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week made it impossible to deny his senility, yet the Western elite is gaslighting they were supposedly oblivious to this until now. Time Magazine published a piece titled “Inside Biden’s Debate Disaster and the Scramble to Quell Democratic Panic”, which was complemented by CNN’s about how “Foreign diplomats react with horror to Biden’s dismal debate performance”.

    Both make it seem like Biden’s senility is a surprise for everyone who knew him.

    The reality is that they knew about this all along but covered it up by lying that any claims to this effect were “Russian propaganda” and/or a “conspiracy theory”, all because they actually approved of the Democrats installing a literal placeholder in the White House who the liberal-globalist elite could control. It was a refreshing change of pace from Trump, who was much too independent for their liking despite his occasional capitulations to their demands, and it also reassured America’s allies who disliked him too.

    They both went along with the lie that Biden is in tip-top mental condition for reasons of political convenience, but now it’s impossible to keep up the charade any longer, hence why they’re all feigning surprise and shock. The elite shouldn’t be allowed to get away with their latest gaslighting and should be exposed for one of the greatest cover-ups in American history. The country is being ruled by a shadowy network of transnational and domestic elites that are united by their radical liberal-globalist ideology.

    Biden was chosen as the Democrats’ candidate in 2020 precisely because he was already senile and therefore completely controllable. That party, which functions as the public face of the abovementioned elite network, wanted someone who’d do whatever they demanded on the home and foreign policy fronts. In particular, they sought to turn America into a liberal-globalist hellhole while ramping up NATO’s containment of Russia in Ukraine, but the second policy backfired after the special operation began.

    Nevertheless, they’ll never have another chance to install someone like Biden since 2020 was an exceptional election year due to it being a referendum on Trump – who a significant share of the public was preconditioned to falsely believe is the new Hitler – and mail-in voting due to COVID-19. These conditions can never be replicated in the same way again no matter how hard the elite try, which is why they decided to keep Biden as their candidate instead of replace him early on.

    In 2020, Biden’s mind was clearly already on the downward slope to senility, but he obviously had much longer periods of lucidity and energy than he shows now. In 2020 it was late afternoon, but in 2024, full night has fallen.

  • Biden’s family is encouraging him to continue on.

    At a Camp David gathering on Sunday, President Biden’s extended family urged him to ignore the growing number of voices asking him to quit the race — and many of his loved ones blamed his disastrous debate on his advisors. According to Politico, the two who most forcefully encouraged the 81-year-old Biden to continue were his wife Jill and his son Hunter — the two people whose opinion he reportedly values most.

    And really, who makes better decisions than Hunter Biden?

    The reports will strengthen a growing sense that Jill Biden is putting her own interests above that of her humiliated and failing husband. As one Democratic advisor told the New York Post over the weekend, “Jill Biden likes being First Lady…she doesn’t want to give that up.”

    Meanwhile, Hunter, who doesn’t exactly have strong reputation for sound judgment, is said to long for Americans to see a version of his father that — as paraphrased by the Times — is “scrappy and in command of the facts.” Much as he once was in denial about his drug problem, Hunter now seems incapable of admitting that that version of his father is gone forever:

    Biden family members are said to have blamed the debate debacle on three advisors: Anita Dunn, her husband Bob Bauer — who played the role of Trump in practice sessions — and Biden’s former chief of staff Ron Klain, who was in charge of the debate training. Aides to Biden denied these reports from multiple outlets.

    Yes, blame the help rather than yourselves for dragging Sundown Joe out on the trail once more so you can keep those sweet power and perks flowing.

    With Biden having spent a full week at Camp David gearing up for the debate, his family members and others are claiming the team worked the 81-year-old too hard, and tried to pack him full of too many statistics. They even fault advisors for a debate-night makeup job that transformed his summer-tanned face to one that was pale and unhealthy-looking.

  • Supposedly all Biden’s operatives are working overtime to calm the donor class and convince them they didn’t see what they saw.
  • “Dems Stick With Biden As It Would Be A Real Pain To Reprint These Ballots They Already Filled Out.”
  • So far Barack Obama, thought by some to be the only Democrat with enough clout to force Biden out, is backing him staying in the race.

    At least publicly…

    Texas Democratic Party Chair Says Election Fraud Is Real

    Sunday, June 30th, 2024

    Like Joe Biden’s mental decline, Democrats have sworn up and down that election fraud doesn’t exist, no matter how many documented cases came to light. But a funny things happened on that boating excursion up the River Denial: The Chairman of the Texas Democratic Party just swore in a lawsuit that voting fraud is taking place in South Texas.

    The chairman of the Texas Democrat Party, Gilberto Hinojosa, says election fraud is taking place in South Texas.

    This claim is based on a lawsuit filed in Hidalgo County contesting the election for Justice of the Peace Precinct 3, Place 1. The certified vote showed Sonia Trevino winning the Democrat primary runoff last month with 4,233 votes, while Ramon Segovia finished second with 4,202 votes.

    Segovia is currently challenging the election results, with Hinojosa representing him as his lawyer. The lawsuit makes numerous allegations of voter fraud, including:

    – Numerous votes were allegedly cast illegally by individuals registered at an address that was not their residence or was not a residence at all.

    – Many voters who cast ballots during early voting and on election day were allegedly assisted in reading or completing the ballot, despite not being eligible for such assistance under the Texas Elections Code.

    – Numerous mail-in ballots that were counted should not have been counted due to voters being ineligible to vote by mail, incorrect or mismatching signatures, and mail-in ballots prepared “without direction from the voter.”

    The contest argues that “because the number of illegal votes cast exceeds the difference in the total votes cast for the Contestant and those cast for the Contestee, the Court cannot ascertain the true outcome of the election and must declare the election void and order a new election.”

    They claim Sonia Trevino “conspired to monitor, influence, and pressure voters to vote for her by unlawfully exploiting the voter assistance laws in the State of Texas.”

    So the position of the Texas Democratic Party has gone from “There’s no election fraud anywhere ever” to “There’s no election fraud except for this one race where our party chairman says that a bunch of the election fraud tricks that Republicans have accused us of just happened to happen in this one particular race.”

    It sounds like Republicans should take Hinojosa’s filing to Attorney General Ken Paxton and demand the Texas Rangers investigate voting fraud all across South Texas to ensure the fraud Hinojosa alleges doesn’t occur in Hildago County or anywhere else this November. Voting rules should be scrutinized and purged, politiqueras should be interrogated and asked just how they “assist” people in filling out ballots and upon who’s instructions, email and bank account records should be subpoenaed, and Texas Rangers stationed inside early and election day voting centers to verify that Voter ID laws are being followed and to lookout for (and thus deter) in person fraud.

    The Chairman of the Texas Democratic Party just said that voting fraud is real, and we should take him at his word.

    Just like that Galveston Voting Rights Act lawsuit, the end result of Democrats filing a lawsuit to save their preferred candidate in a single election may be to enure a lot fewer Democrats are elected going forward.