We all know what the official, "Everything's fine - you knuckle-dragging rubes just are too stupid to realize it" line is.Biden's retelling of economic history could win a fiction award: https://t.co/dhtSPAuTrs—…

Former President Donald Trump criticized American Jews who voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 on Thursday — a day after President Joe Biden threatened to withhold military aid to Israel. Biden told…

A Catholic High School in Mountain View, CA expelled two students in 2020 for allegedly wearing blackface. The families of the two boys sued and this week they won a $1 million judgment against the school.…

When the booze get the better of you. The post The one Rush concery Geddy Lee never remembered playing: “I had no idea” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Functionally, the answer to the question in the headline is that it really doesn’t matter and we might now finally have that moment, that utter and complete gaffe-tastic meltdown, which starts to serve as the wrong move that brings the Jenga tower down around Dirty Joe. I have my doubts about this, though my take — one which was shared by David Catron but not at all by Melissa Mackenzie in an excellent episode of The Spectacle podcast this week — is that eventually, the weight of these serial meltdowns will be too much for the Democrats to overcome. (READ MORE: Macklemore Shows Biden Between a Rock and a Hamas Place) What are we talking about? Well, this: 1. Was This A Policy Shift? Mike Johnson wasn’t sure. My buddy Joe Cunningham over at RedState recounted the House Speaker’s reaction to what Biden said in that CNN interview with Erin Burnett: This betrayal of Israel also brings me back to the current House Speaker. “And my reaction honestly was: Wow, that is a complete turn from what I have been told even in, you know, recent hours,” Johnson told POLITICO. “I mean, 24 hours ago it was confirmed to me by top administration officials that the policy’s very different than what he stated there. So I hope that’s a senior moment.” And here was Johnson on Fox News: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on Biden withholding weapons from Israel: “He’s defying the will of Congress and he’s defying what his own top officials in the White House assured me in writing and verbally. This idea of withholding weapons from Israel as somehow a… pic.twitter.com/fxwuzWPMwu — Matthew Feinberg (@thewebbie) May 9, 2024 Cunningham makes an interesting point. Johnson has torn his drawers, if you’ll permit me an old Southern saying, with the Republican base largely over efforts to pass funding for military aid to Israel, and this is what he gets? And yes, through some modern miracle, he got enough votes from both sides to pass an aid package that, among other things, included the very aid to Israel the Biden administration is now threatening to withhold. Of course Johnson is a bit miffed… publicly, at least. Privately, I assume he’s filled with as much rage as the rest of us, if not more given that he literally put his job on the line to get that aid passed in the first place. If that’s how Biden, who he had to work with to get the aid passed, is going to treat him after that, what motivation does Johnson have to do that ever again? Yes, yes, I know some of you are screaming “Well what did he expect?!” And that’s absolutely fair. Perhaps he shouldn’t have expected any different, but when you have someone passionately begging for you to work with them on something, only for them to then renege on their end of it because of (very dumb and mathematically inaccurate) political reasons, that will piss anyone off. Every time, the frog is upset that the scorpion stung it. Not because the frog is an idiot, but because the frog was a creature that took the scorpion at its word. The scorpion’s nature remains the villain of the story. If I had to make a call on this debacle, I would say that the administration’s position hasn’t changed and its holdup of the precision bomb shipment to the Israelis was more about yanking Bibi Netanyahu’s chain than it was shifting sides to supporting Hamas. I would come down on the side of “senior moment” here. But that said, Team Biden doesn’t support Israel. They can’t turn out the Arab vote in Michigan by supporting Israel and know that Jewish money, which is an incredible half of the flow into the Democrat Party’s coffers (as opposed to only 25 percent of the RNC’s donor flow), is in no real jeopardy of drying up even if they don’t support Israel. 2. Every Single Democrat Votes To Aid Illegals In Voting And Redrawing Congressional Maps (And The Electoral College) Seems like a pretty inflammatory claim, right? Well, not so much, because this happened: ALERT: House Dems just voted UNANIMOUSLY to give illegals representation in Congress AND the Electoral College. House Seats and Electoral College votes WILL BE added to areas with the most illegals (including all Biden illegals) unless Senate passes the bill. Invasion by design. pic.twitter.com/nVjhmsNh34 — Stephen Miller (@StephenM) May 9, 2024 The Equal Representation Act would eliminate the counting of illegals as part of the census to gauge population figures to be used to apportion congressional seats (which would then obviously affect the Electoral College), not to mention making for much tougher enforcement on the prohibition against illegals voting in American elections. And every single House Democrat voted against it. Chuck Schumer won’t even give it a vote in the Senate. Why? You know why. In the event Trump wins the election and has enough coattails to give the House and Senate to the GOP, it’s a national imperative that the largest mass deportation in American history must occur immediately after he’s inaugurated. (READ MORE: Manhattan Is on Trial) The thing is, while the border invasion causes lots of negative effects in its own right, the necessity of the mass deportations is less about the illegals themselves than the state of the modern Democrat Party, which is now nothing short of a conspiracy against the American people. Sure, that sounds like overheated rhetoric. How is it not true? They’re choosing illegals over American citizens — even those citizens who are reliable Democrat voters. I had something at The Hayride Thursday talking about how they ought to be dealt with in a state legislative context. Some of you might find that interesting. 3. The Mar-A-Lago Frameup? This item is not getting quite enough attention: This image was leaked to the media following the RAID of Mar a Lago, the first time such a dramatic action was taken against a former president. But it turns out those "classified" cover sheets were paper clipped on top of documents by the FBI. But it gets worse. In their haste… pic.twitter.com/s8czmf0xvl — Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) May 7, 2024 It’s beginning to look like your government, which you fund with your taxes (and the debasement of your currency), actively set out to frame a former president for a crime that does not exist. After all, as president, Donald Trump had plenary power to declassify executive branch records and therefore could not, by definition, be guilty of misappropriating classified records as he’s being charged in the Jack Smith South Florida case. You have some ugly elements here. You have a shipment of documents to Mar-A-Lago as that case was being prepared — in advance of the raid. You have evidence that the documents taken in the raid were disturbed and their order and chain of custody were violated. And you have evidence that the raid was conducted as a political photo op. The judge in that case has suspended the proceedings, and it’s beginning to look like she’ll toss the case altogether, or at least put it on ice until after the election. Remember, this was thought to be the meatiest of the four criminal lawfare cases against Trump. It can’t be stated forcefully enough that the U.S. Department of Justice is going to have to be all but disbanded if Trump wins. There are many agencies of the federal government that have been horribly corrupted over the past 16 years, but the DOJ is so full of monsters that abject fumigation is the only possible option. Tear it down to the studs and start over. 4. The Jokes Are Coming Faster Now I checked the RealClearPolitics polling average on Joe Biden’s approval Thursday afternoon, and it’s all the way down to 39.3 percent. Oof. I don’t need to tell you how rough a number that is. If you’re reading this column, you’re enough of a political junkie that you already know. But here’s another data point showing how disastrous things are. Call it anecdotal if you want, but when stand-up comedians are straight-up clowning on Team Biden, like for example the way Josh Ocean Thomas just did, it’s bad: If your a Biden staffer, never tell a comedian during his routine. Take this as a lesson learned. pic.twitter.com/gNeXujNH00 — Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) May 9, 2024 Of course, perhaps the best clowning on Joe Biden, without a doubt, can be found here. The Kindle version is only $3.99 until Sunday night! 5. Thumbs Down On A Man In Full I’m one of the people who counts Bonfire of the Vanities as one of the better film adaptations of popular books in the past however many years, and I’m a massive Tom Wolfe fan. The aforementioned King of the Jungle was inspired to an extent by Wolfe’s work. And the style of Bonfire and Wolfe’s other novels, in which nobody comes out alive regardless of their station in life, is the essence of social and political satire if it’s to be done correctly. Wolfe does it correctly. Brian De Palma, who directed the film version of Bonfire of the Vanities in 1990 (it starred Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Bruce Willis, with performances by Morgan Freeman, Saul Rubinek, F. Murray Abraham, Kim Cattrall, and others), did it correctly. (READ MORE: Film Noir Made Me Conservative) But David Kelley, the showrunner for A Man In Full, the just-released Netflix series based on Wolfe’s second novel, does not do it correctly. There is no social or political satire in A Man In Full. All we get instead is preachy pablum. The soul of Wolfe’s novel has been torn out and replaced with a painfully boring, woke facsimile of a story. Charlie Croker, the main character of the story, is nothing like the Charlie Croker in the book (if you haven’t read it and don’t want to treat yourself to it, here’s a Cliff Notes version), and the plot of the eight-episode series is widely divergent from the novel. Worse is Jeff Daniels’ portrayal of Croker, complete with a Georgia accent almost as bad as Dennis Quaid’s attempt at a Cajun accent in The Big Easy. The ending is completely different from the book, the plot devices are reconstructed wholesale and the characters are jumbled. In every case, the changes make for a worse story. It’s terrible art. Offensively bad. I wanted to like this, but as a fan of Wolfe, I would call this an atrocity so profound as to rival the film version of The Sum of All Fears. Don’t watch A Man In Full. It’s horrible. I could write a whole column about how lousy this is, and if I don’t stop now I probably will. The post Five Quick Things: Did Biden Betray Israel, Or Did Biden’s Brain Betray Him? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Why can you almost hear REM’s “Everybody Hurts” playing when a certain group on the political spectrum talks and The Partridge Family’s “Come On Get Happy” in the background when their ideological opposites speak? Thomas Edsall writes in the New York Times about the stubborn happiness gap between conservatives and liberals. For those innocent of conversations with people imagining sandwich boards as always in fashion, Debby Downer and Gloomy Gus gravitate leftward. (READ MORE: Protest Much? An Academic Reckoning Is Overdue.) “The happiness gap has been with us for at least 50 years, and most research seeking to explain it has focused on conservatives,” he explains. “More recently, however, psychologists and other social scientists have begun to dig deeper into the underpinnings of liberal discontent — not only unhappiness but also depression and other measures of dissatisfaction.” Edsall touches on some valid reasons why progressives do not go over well at parties. Then, he predictably veers off to psychoanalyze conservatives. (READ MORE: Boy Scouts Destroyed Itself By Accepting Girls) So, why cannot liberals see the rainbow through the rain? Here are 10 reasons: 10. Change for Thee, Not for Me Content people do not obsess over change. Unhappy people do. Rarely do they undertake the hard labor of self-improvement. Often they react to personal problems by seeking to change the world. Beyond this, change, for people marinating in it, causes tremendous internal upheaval. Eric Hoffer wrote in a time of intense revolutionary transformation nearly 60 years ago that “it is becoming evident that, no matter how desirable, drastic change is the most difficult and dangerous experience mankind has undergone.” 9. Staring into the Abyss Like the man with the muck rake, leftists fixate on the dirt — troubles, injustices, grievances. “Beware that, when fighting monsters,” Friedrich Nietzsche warned, “you yourself do not become a monster.” And if you do not rectify the problems over which they obsess, terrible results occur. If you do not vote for their chosen candidate this fall, this means the end of democracy. If you do not agree with them on this or that environmental policy, the world perishes in an inferno or a flood or some other manifestation of Mother Nature’s displeasure. If you believed this, how could you be anything but a neurotic? 8. Impotence Progressives strip humans of agency. External factors, such as big corporations or class structure or the various isms and phobias imagined as the height of human evil, control outcomes. This outlook necessarily cultivates a sense of powerlessness. 7. Political Neat Freaks Rather than seeing inequality as natural, radicals see it the way an obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferer sees a book upside-down on the shelf. Political neat freaks encounter a world with uncontrollable variables, unpredictable outcomes, and people taller and shorter, richer and poorer, stronger and weaker. This jars. 6. Holy Church of St. Madalyn Murray O’Hair Gallup’s periodic survey on belief in God shows liberals (62 percent) as the subgroup least likely to believe in a higher power. A depressing future of eternal darkness tends to weigh down more than a vision of light, salvation, and redemption. Liberals replace religion with politics (which explains the heaven-on-earth delusion). Not only do Adam Schiff and Rashida Tlaib make for unsatisfying gods, but the accentuate-the-negative tenor of politics makes for a quasi-religion obsessed with devils, sins, heretics, and excommunication. God, private property, and marriage make people happy. Socialists, from Robert Owen through Karl Marx to today, wage war on all that. 5. All Politics All the Time The total-politics mindset characteristic of contemporary progressives sees nothing for its own sake and everything as a means toward their political end. Thus, academia, late-night comedy programs, and sports become not about education, laughter, and competition, but transform through a jaundiced lens into stages to advance correct politics. Making laughter, music, or movies subservient to politics cultivates a joyless existence. 4. Grabbing, Not Giving Conservatives donate more to charity. Liberals show a greater enthusiasm for conscripting other people’s money and often do so for ideological rather than philanthropic causes. This mania for forcing sacrifices from others, but reluctance to engage in self-sacrifice, denies that undeniably wonderful feeling of helping other human beings. 3. Moral Deafness In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt shows how the ethics of WEIRD (western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic) people differ from the norm. Whereas they score highly on sensitivity to care and fairness, they suffer from an almost deafness to the categories of sanctity, authority, and loyalty. This can translate to a lack of self-respect concerning the sanctity of one’s body, a greater disrespect toward police, clergy, and university administrators, and a disconnection from family, community, and nation. 2. Utopian Baselines Liberals compare countries, outcomes, institutions, leaders, and much else to an ideal. Conservatives tend to compare to real-life alternatives. When you compare anything to the perfect, it falls short. When you compare, for instance, the U.S. to Candyland, America looks wanting. Compare America to, say, North Korea or Venezuela, and then America begins to look pretty good. Liberals allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good. 1. Darn Praxis Leftists remain obsessed with the genius of their ideology but are confounded by its failure to work anywhere outside of their cranial borders. This leads to not just frustration but a Groundhog’s Day loop in which leftists keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. This phenomenon inevitably depresses. (READ MORE: It’s Bigger Than NPR’s Katherine Maher) By no means exhaustive, the list omits such obvious curbs to happiness as a Nosferatuian aversion to the sun, an allergenic relationship to protein, and a perpetual identity crisis that in its tamest manifestation results in affected speech betraying not a geographic origin but a sexual interest, listening fidelity to NPR, moneyed aloofness, or something else that separates them from themselves and from whence they came. These behaviors seem if not confined to lefties then at least more prevalent among them. Some Christians seeking happiness wisely ask, “What would Jesus do?” Humbly, a better recipe for an enjoyable life asks, “What wouldn’t Rachel Maddow do?” The post 10 Reasons Liberals Haven’t Closed the Happiness Gap appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

It is a presidential election year and a leading candidate for president of the United States, who also happens to be a former president of the United States, is currently a criminal defendant chained to a dingy courtroom four days of the week — time that he should be spending interacting with voters out on the campaign trail. That’s terrible. But it’s only the beginning. The daughter of the presiding judge is a professional political operative for the presidential candidate’s opposition party, and the candidate himself is subject to an over-inclusive and unconstitutional gag order. The George Soros-funded district attorney, who campaigned on a platform of prosecuting that candidate, only pressed charges after his own left-wing predecessor opted not to do so due to the frivolous nature of the charges. One of the Soros-funded DA’s subordinates curiously joined his team, just in time to prosecute the candidate, from a high-ranking perch in the Department of Justice that is headed by the candidate’s chief political rival. (READ MORE: Manhattan Is on Trial) And this week, the candidate was subjected to tawdry and salacious testimony from a discredited former porn star, who spoke openly in court about how she “blacked out” during their alleged 2006 sexual encounter. Due to the sprawling gag order, the candidate was not — and is not — legally permitted to defend his honor and contest her lurid, legally irrelevant claims. Welcome to our American banana republic. America has many real, glaring problems on its hands. Inflation remains stubborn, and Americans widely report feeling pessimistic about the economy despite nominal low unemployment metrics. Our wide-open southern border is disastrous, leading to artificially suppressed working-class wages and the most rampant illegal alien crime in the nation’s history. Violent and property crime rates remain too high, especially in large urban corridors. Energy prices should be considerably lower, and they would be if our moronic leaders allowed producers to tap into America’s great natural wellspring of hydrocarbons. Around the world, hostile regimes act against our interests in an unrestrained and revanchist fashion. At home, childlessness, godlessness, anxiety, and depression are all rising, symptomatic of a broader civilizational rot and a society that has lost confidence in what it claims to stand for. (READ MORE: Prosecutor Jack Smith Admits to Tampering With Trump Evidence) Amidst all this, it would be ideal to have a normal, competitive presidential race, in which the flailing incumbent is directly confronted and his record is challenged for all to see. But Americans are now being deprived of anything remotely resembling a normal presidential race. Donald Trump is physically chained down to Judge Juan Merchan’s New York courtroom, unable to get out on the campaign trail and deliver his signature rallies to adoring fans across the heartland. Those fans are the very Americans who have been pummeled by President Joe Biden’s decades-high inflation, his ideological crusade against domestic energy production, and his reckless, crime-abetting border crisis. These often-forgotten Americans are, in a quite literal sense, denied the opportunity to hear the full argument against the Biden Regime due to these insidious workings of the Democrat-lawfare complex. Instead of permitting the Regime’s challenger, Trump, to campaign for votes in Wisconsin, he is forced to silently endure the unhinged courtroom musings of a literal porn star and a convicted felon (Michael Cohen) — all in furtherance of a case that suffers from insuperable statute of limitations problems, in addition to the structural absurdity of a local district attorney (the Soros-funded Alvin Bragg) prosecuting and attempting to prove a federal crime (campaign finance violation). Oh, and if Trump doesn’t shut up and keep quiet, Merchan might throw him in jail — as he has repeatedly threatened to do, if Trump keeps violating his unconstitutional gag order. What a sick, cruel joke it all is. Democrats seem not to have given any thought to what happens if they lose — an entirely distinct possibility, given the incumbent’s poor swing-state polling and widespread malaise among the electorate. If Trump wins, do Democrats seriously not expect him to respond in kind? Now that the Rubicon has been crossed and we have entered a world in which politicians attempt to not merely defeat their opposition at the ballot box but also prosecute and incarcerate them, there is no going back. Just as Senate Democrats’ November 2013 invocation of the “nuclear option” to end the filibuster for lower-court nominees directly led to Republicans doing the same for Supreme Court nominees just a few years later, so too is it impossible to know what may ultimately come from the lawfare precedent Democrats are setting today. (READ MORE: Biden, Trash-Talker in Chief) The new rules have been established. Many of us didn’t want these rules, but here we are anyway. So game on. To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM The post The Making of a Banana Republic appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from The Corbett Report:  TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/