Wednesday Potpourri

First, the bottom story of the week, via Benny Johnson:

They’re selling Kamala ‘Miss Me Yet?’ t-shirts at the airport in DC. I asked the sales lady how many they’ve sold. Sales lady: “Zero”

Second, Stephen Green performs an autopsy on the body of the Democratic Party. How did they turn success into failure?

Democrats weaponized the federal bureaucracy against the president who was elected to run it, handicapping the implementation of his policies and eventually helping to drive him from office. The Bad Orange Man was out of office, presumably forever, once the weaponized judiciary was done with him. 

They installed a puppet in the Oval Office, one who would sign pretty much anything they put in front of him... even if they had to have him do it by autopen. 

They jacked up peacetime federal spending to wartime levels while opening up the southern border to everyone from legitimate refugees (I'll stipulate there were at least a few in the mix) to sex traffickers to cartels to actual terrorists. 

They got their Green New Deal via the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, funneling a trillion dollars to Democrat-affiliate "winners" whose products would be mandated on buyers while handicapping the losers with crushing regulations.

They took Iran off the Naughty List, helped turn Europe's worst war in 80 years into an overlong grift-fest, and showed enough daylight between Washington and Jerusalem to make the Oct. 7 terror invasion nearly inevitable. 

They got men's sexually aberrant behavior — a predatory form of autogynephilia (and not to be confused with genuine gender dysphoria) — elevated to "the civil rights issue of our time," as Joe Biden put it on several occasions. 

All the while, Democrats' most important constituencies in education, entertainment, and the media enjoyed a flood of unaccountable dollars from the American taxpayers. All they had to do was breathlessly repeat — and in the case of inconvenient truths like the Hunter Biden laptop or COVID's leaky lab origin — enforce the party line.

They even got the GOP House to play along for the second half of Biden's term by locking in Democrat spending priorities with a series of continuing resolutions.

I could go on. And on. But you get the point….

"There is no constitutional crisis other than the Democrats lost," Legal Insurrection's William Jacobson said last month. "They are trying to create a constitutional crisis by having the judiciary and the federal district courts assume control of the executive branch.”

Third, the New York Post reports that the Covid lockdowns caused people to become ruder. Apparently, being socially involved promotes good manners. Not being socially connected does not.

“If the world seems to you a little nastier and more confrontational than it was just a few years ago,” notes Reason’s J.D. Tuccille, “you’re not alone. Many Americans say the world is a ruder place than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic” and the “public health” overreaction closed “businesses and schools” and “isolated large numbers of people.” “This isn’t unprecedented. It’s a pattern that’s been seen over and over again in the wake of public-health emergencies” and “authoritarian restrictions.” Why? Isolation “means the social lubrication of manners and experience with polite human interaction takes a serious ding.” “It appears that in the course of screwing with our lives and our livelihoods,” the “powers-that-be also managed to disrupt our relations with our neighbors.”

Fourth, how many people in this country live to be more than 120 years old? Evidently, the number is close to zero. And yet, many members of said group are receiving social security benefits.

Newsmax reports:

More than 12 million people aged 120 and older were found to be listed in the Social Security database, the Department of Government Efficiency reported early Tuesday.

Of that total, roughly 3.2 million people now have been marked as being deceased, DOGE said with an update on its website.

"For the past two weeks, @SocialSecurity has begun a major cleanup of their records," the announcement said. 

"Approximately 3.2 million number holders, all listed age 120+, have now been marked as deceased. More work still to be done."

By the most elementary of calculations that means that the country now contains 8.8 million citizens who are more than 120 years old.

We need more DOGE, not less.

Fifth, meantime, over in our 51st state, they have a new prime minister. They replaced Fidel’s bastard son with someone named Mark Carney. Interestingly, Carney has a transgendered son, who thinks he is a woman. Needless to say, she has become something of an activist.

Wesley Yang reports, in response to those who suggest that she should be off limits, shielded from criticism:

She's a 24-year old adult who has written publications taking strong positions on controversial issues of wide public consequence (such as giving children unrestricted access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones) that her father is in a position to legislate -- every aspect of that calls out for exposure and scrutiny. None of that is an "attack." These maudlin appeals to place this subject off limits in deference to some vacuous principle of never criticizing family members is merely a cynical and (futile) attempt to avoid that necessary scrutiny.

Finally, I have several free consulting hours in my life coaching practice. If you are interested email me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.