Posts on Thursday, March 16, 2023
At least two dozen people -- from Mar-a-Lago resort staff to members of Donald Trump's inner circle at the Florida estate -- have been subpoenaed to testify to a federal grand jury that's investigating the former president's handling of classified documents, multiple sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.
On Thursday, Trump's communications aide Margo Martin, who worked in the White House and then moved with Trump to Florida, appeared before the grand jury in Washington, DC. One of special counsel Jack Smith's senior-most prosecutors was involved in the interview. Martin, who is among a small group of former White House advisers who have remained employed by Trump
Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Rachel Levine promised that medically changing kids’ genders will soon be normalized.
Levine praised the "gender-affirming care" at the Pediatric Grand Rounds session at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford. Levine was invited to speak at the event about the Florida Parental Rights in Education law and the political implications of gender reassignment surgery taking place at children’s hospitals. Levine also said gender-affirming care for minors had the "highest support" of the Biden administration.
"But I'm a positive and optimistic person, and I choose to be positive, optimistic. And I think that the wheels
I’m neither a constitutional scholar nor a tax attorney, but as a 30-year professional money manager and tax-planning guy, I can’t see how Joe Biden’s non-income-based Billionaire Tax comes even close to being constitutional. Not that constitutionality has ever phased the woefully inept president, but I’m just sayin’.
While Biden’s plan to squeeze billionaires will be DOA in Kevin McCarthy’s Republican-controlled House, it’s worthy of discussion, for the simple reason that if the Democrats end up with control of both chambers and the White House after the 2024 election, hello billionaire tax.
Which reminds me: 2024 will arrive soon enough; let’s not screw it up. But I digress.
If you live in the Bay Area and your natural gas-powered water heater stops working after 2027, you will be required to install an electric model instead. Bay Area regulators voted Wednesday to adopt rules to phase out the sale and installation of natural-gas furnaces and water heaters over the next eight years, one of the most ambitious plans in the country to replace gas appliances with electric alternatives. The rules, approved by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, are meant to reduce air pollution from some of the worst home-appliance offenders. The main pollutants targeted are nitrogen oxides
The National Audubon Society, one of the most powerful bird conservation groups in the country, bucked critics Wednesday and elected to keep its name despite criticism from some groups in the birding community.
CEO of the National Audubon Society Elizabeth Gray defended the decision in a press statement, explaining that the organization’s namesake, John James Audubon, was a naturalist and illustrator who made "an important contribution to the field of ornithology in the mid-19th century and there can be no doubt of the impact of his life’s work and passion for birds."
Hallie Biden received a cut of $3 million in cash from China sent through an associate of Hunter, according to Republicans who released information from subpoenaed bank records.
Beau Biden's widow was identified on Thursday as the third member of the first family wrapped up in Rep. James Comer's investigation into allegations they used their names to profit on business deals around the world.
In a memo seen by DailyMail.com, Hallie received $35,000 in two transfers in March from Biden family associate John 'Rob' Walker, after he received a $3 million wire from the Chinese State Energy HK Limited,
Over the last several months, a growing number of Republicans, including Donald Trump himself, seem to be having a change of heart about universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting.(snip)Conservatives do not have the institutional or financial support to match Democrats in election activism and ballot harvesting, nor are they likely to be able to any time in the near future.(snip) But this is not necessarily a portent of gloom and doom. The growing number of ultra-left Democratic candidates are deeply unpopular and would be unelectable outside deep-blue areas under the election norms that prevailed prior to the Covid-19 lockdowns and the 2020 presidential election.
Hicklibs on Parade
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So you want to reclaim the frontier? Secure the few states left that are still safe for families? Preserve the prairies those wicked coastal elites scorn as “flyover county” and “Jesus Land”? You want to return to a mythical Main Street, U.S.A., where homemade apple pies cool on every windowsill and American flags fly on every porch?
Such places still exist, but there’s a new sheriff in town—and he’s wearing size 12 Lucite pleasers and a bulging spandex g-string.
(snip)
If you google any small town in “red” America and the phrase “drag brunch,” you’ll find them everywhere. The plague of low cut-top-wearing locusts is devouring the dust bowl and raiding the ranchlands.
Recently, an organization on my campus put together an event entitled “Undefining Masculinity.” As recommended preparation for the event, it was suggested that attendees might profitably watch an episode of the “Man Enough” podcast, in which the hosts interview an individual named Alok Vaid-Menon. This person (I won’t be using pronouns to refer to Vaid-Menon, for the principled reason I’ve given elsewhere) is presented as an expert on gender and sexuality, though there is no evidence provided to support that status.
The hosts fawn in the most ludicrously exaggerated way over Vaid-Menon from the start: (snip)Five minutes in, after the guest has blurted out a series of unsupported claims about how
‘Utter Incompetence’: European Officials
Accuse US Of Ripping Up Banking Rules
With SVB Bailout replies
Accuse US Of Ripping Up Banking Rules
With SVB Bailout replies
European officials are enraged at the U.S. for its decision to bail out Silicon Valley Bank, according to the Financial Times.
European financial regulators have ripped their American counterparts’ decision to bail out Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in the wake of its collapse, claiming they violated their own standards in doing so, according to the Financial Times. They are particularly frustrated at the decision to cover all deposits when they were only supposed to guarantee up to $250,000.
The debate around child sex change health care continues. The surgery involves the contentious issue of providing medical interventions, such as hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgeries, to transgender children and adolescents who experience gender dysphoria
Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan made noise earlier this week when she said, “let’s be clear: this is life-affirming and life-saving healthcare. When our children tell us who they are, it is our job as grown-ups to listen and to believe them. That’s what it means to be a good parent.” (Snip) Musk responded, “Not when they’re fed propaganda by adults.”
The House Oversight Committee released records today outlining how the Biden family was paid by a Chinese energy company [House Link Here]. The bank records indicate payments to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden; Joe Biden’s brother, James Biden; Joe Biden’s daughter-in-law, Hallie Biden, and an unknown “Biden;” likely the principal, “big guy”, Joe Biden himself.WASHINGTON—Today, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability issued a memorandum revealing new evidence resulting from the investigation into the Biden family’s influence peddling and business schemes. Subpoenaed financial records show that from 2015 to 2017, Biden family members (snip) and their companies collectively received $1.3 million in payments from accounts related to Rob Walker
A Chicago reporter who filed a lawsuit against Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot for allegedly silencing him by pulling his city press credentials fired back at her yet again in a fierce exchange at a Wednesday city council meeting.(Video)"You shut down our schools, you shut down the churches, you shut down the businesses. You did the one thing I thought could never happen: As somebody who was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, I never thought in my life that I would ever see the city of Chicago brought down so low," reporter William Kelly slammed Lightfoot.
"I hope that, after today's city council meeting, you will
Biden's Lie of the Day
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President Biden is a pathological liar. His account of the epiphany that led him to support gay marriage is only the most recent example, though it was classic and blatant. Indeed, it was so blatant as to be laughable.
I have a high level of confidence that Biden lies every time he speaks in public. Take yesterday’s Remarks on Lowering Prescription Drugs Costs in Las Vegas — please. It is difficult to choose one statement from these remarks as Biden’s lie of the day. His dad banging on the headboard of his bed when he lost his health insurance strikes me as one among many, but I can’t prove it.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has moved into rare political space, reaching an approval rating higher than typical for a top party congressional leader and challenging former President Donald Trump’s approval among Republicans.
With a 52% favorability overall and 71% among Republicans, McCarthy has erased whatever it was that some House conservatives didn’t like about him during the drawn-out, four-day, 15-ballot speaker election controversy in January.Allies today suggested that McCarthy’s ability to make good on several promises
Nonprofits like American Friends Service Committee continue helping migrants as they come into the city. "Right now, we get about 30 new people," said Jennifer Piper, the program director of the Colorado office of the American Friends Service Committee. "But then we have about a thousand other folks, who've been here, anywhere from a week to two months, and those are the folks that we're really trying to help get resettled in Denver." (Snip) However, the concern is whether those numbers will creep up again, considering the activity happening at the southern border. On Sunday, a large migrant group rushed
Conservatives and Republicans could, a new report suggests, cut off establishment media outlets’ access in the 2024 election cycle as GOP lawmakers and candidates look to alternative communication channels to tell their stories.
The prospect of the establishment media’s precarious position was captured in a Tuesday article written by the Dispatch’s David Drucker in which he warned Republican lawmakers and candidates heading into the 2024 election cycle “could attempt to freeze out mainstream journalists,” paralyzing television networks’ content creation and crushing their claims of political neutrality.
After Missouri, Florida, and West Virginia announced their withdrawal from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) last week, nonvoting board member and founder David Becker tweeted that he would not accept renomination to ERIC’s board.
As previously reported by The Federalist, ERIC markets itself as a voter roll management system used by at least 30 states and the District of Columbia. It operates under the guise of helping states update their voter rolls by removing dead and duplicate registrants and comparing data with other member states. But ERIC does more to inflate state voter rolls than clean them,
I might be a brand new dad, but I’m no stranger to the concept of raising children. As the eldest of five brothers and sisters, I know something about kids.One thing I do know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that they’re complete and total idiots.
I don’t say that to be mean or edgy. I mean this as a natural statement of fact. When you first arrive in this world you have nothing but your instincts.(Snip) You start at square zero, and you accumulate knowledge about the world around you from that starting point.
It’s around this knowledge that you begin to form the basis for your personality.
If Donald Trump's forthcoming book of letters is an exercise in revealing how America's great and good turned on him once he entered politics, then the thank-you letter from Hillary Clinton stands front and center.
In it, she thanks the then-New York property mogul for his 'friendship and support' and a 'generous contribution' to her Senate campaign.
Dated May 2002, it is a reminder of how the two New Yorkers moved in the same social circles before going head-to-head in their bitter 2016 election contest.
NEW YORK — Eleven of the biggest banks in the country announced a $30 billion rescue package for First Republic Bank on Thursday, in an effort to prevent the California-based bank from becoming the third bank to fail in less than a week.
First Republic serves a similar clientele as Silicon Valley Bank, which failed Friday after depositors withdrew about $40 billion. It appears that First Republic, which had deposits totaling $176.4 billion as of Dec. 31, was facing a similar crisis.
In a statement, the group of banks confirmed that other unnamed banks had seen large amounts of withdrawals of uninsured deposits, which
"Put the adults back in charge," they whined. "Donald Trump will break the world," they lied. Well, they manipulated election rules to certify suspicious vote totals that preposterously portrayed senile Joe Biden as the most popularly elected president in history; censored and locked up anyone who complained; and covered up their crimes with J6 show trials drenched in untruths meant to hide from history the Uniparty's underhanded machinations in outright stealing a presidential election. The whole mess was so banana-republic-yucky that Biden was inaugurated behind barbed wire and a show of military force befitting the
Polish President Andrzej Duda said the nation is set to hand over PolSoviet-made MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine in coming days.
"In the coming days we will first transfer, if I remember correctly, four fully operational planes to Ukraine," Duda told a news conference in Warsaw.
Duda said that Poland's air force would replace the planes it gives to Kyiv with South Korean-made FA-50 jets and American-made F-35s.
The transfer would make Poland the first NATO member to have delivered the fighter jets, as Kyiv appeals for warplanes to fight Russian forces.
A young Dutch political party seeking to push back on the government's climate agenda achieved a stunning victory Wednesday as it won the most seats for a single party in the Dutch Senate. "This isn't normal, but actually it is! It's all normal citizens who voted," party leader Caroline van der Plas said. "But today people have shown they can't stay at home any longer. We won't be ignored anymore."
The Farmer-Citizen Movement Party, known as BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) in Dutch, built its victory on the back of protests against the government’s environmental policies, which aim to slash nitrogen emissions by dramatically cutting back on livestock numbers and buying out
As with the rest of the United States armed forces, the Air Force missed its recruiting goals in 2022 and they are on track to fall short again this year by at least 10%. This is a particularly dangerous time to be understaffed when so many of our resources are going toward training and equipping the Ukrainian military and we’re teetering on the edge of possible conflicts with Russia and/or China. So what are our flyboys (and ladies) to do? Whoever is currently in charge of this problem inside the Pentagon thinks they’ve struck on the answer. We clearly need more diversity, equity and inclusion! With that in mind,
First Republic Bank executives quietly sold nearly $12 million worth of its stock in just the past three months, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Executive Chairman James Herbert II sold the most of any of the other insiders, off-loading a whopping $4.5 million worth of shares since the start of the year. In all, four of the struggling bank's top executives sold $11.8 million worth of stock so far this year, at prices averaging just below $130 a share, the Journal found. Some of these sales came just days before the bank started facing liquidity troubles, as panicked investors sought to get their money back following the fall
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted during a Thursday Congressional hearing that Chinese Communist Party-linked businesses that had deposits in Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) will be made whole by the American banking system.
Senator James Lankford (R., Okla.) pressed Yellen on the matter during a Senate Finance Committee hearing held days after Silicon Valley Bank collapsed.
“It has been reported publicly that SVB had a large number of Chinese investors that are there, including some companies that were directly connected to the Chinese Communist Party,” Lankford said. “So what I’m asking is: will my banks in Oklahoma pay a special assessment to be able to make Chinese investors whole in Silicon Valley Bank?”
Before getting to the details of the Credit Suisse issue, it is worth taking a bigger geopolitical context to the dynamic. The initial backstop sought by Credit Suisse was from the Saudi National Bank; however, SNB Chairman Ammar Abdul Wahed AlThis is where we need to keep the BRICS -vs- WEF dynamic in mind and consider that ideologically there is a conflict between the current agenda of the ‘western financial system’ (climate change) and the traditional energy developers.Khudairy refused more lending {LINK}.Russia, Saudi Arabia and China are geopolitically aligned in interest against the western financial system. As a consequence, when western banks find themselves in need of capital
He's told versions of this story before, and it's an odd one. Maybe it's true, or partially true. Or maybe it's one of the many tall tales Joe has totally fabricated or drastically embellished over the years -- often seemingly designed to inject a dramatic personal angle to a story, in order to ingratiate himself to an audience for political purposes. Here he is being questioned by a gay actor on an entertainment channel the other day, and he's evidently eager to boast about his early enlightenment about same-sex marriage, far ahead of the societal curve. His 'epiphany' on gay rights, he claimed, happened in the early 1960s:
Battling persistently low approval ratings across party lines, Vice President Kamala Harris (D) appeared Wednesday on CBS’ The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in the latest attempt to burnish her public image. But Harris stumbled badly when she seemed either unable or unwilling to define the vice president’s job.
During the awkward exchange, host Stephen Colbert asked Harris to explain “what is the actual role on a daily basis” of the vice president.Harris avoided answering the question by praising President Joe Biden (D). “Well, I have the great privilege of serving with Joe Biden, who is president of the United States,” she said to thunderous applause
Wall Street Journal: First Republic Bank
talking to JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley
about a lifeline replies
talking to JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley
about a lifeline replies
First Republic Bank, facing a crisis of confidence from investors and customers, is actively discussing options for a lifeline — including a takeover, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Participating in the discussions Thursday are massive Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley, the Journal reported. A First Republic spokesman declined to comment to CNN.
Both Fitch Ratings and S&P Global Ratings downgraded First Republic Bank's credit rating on Wednesday on concerns that depositors could pull their cash from the bank. That sent shares plunging 26% Thursday, and the stock tripped several automatic circuit breakers designed to prevent shares from crashing.
Needless to say, I don’t often write about such things as healthy diets and lifestyles — which is not to say I don’t adhere to both — but when the World Health Organization calls on member governments to pass strict limitations on what I can eat and how much of it, it gets my attention — and should get yours, as well.
Again, my stance, particularly in this case, shouldn’t be confused with opposition to the current culprit in the spotlight: salt. Specifically, excessive consumption of salt. While I agree in principle with the notion, I don’t agree that it’s the job of the federal government to look
DeSantis Is Right About Ukraine
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Ron DeSantis came out against our current blank check n’ hack cliches Ukraine policy, stating the indisputable truth that Ukraine was not a vital US interest worthy of risking World War III with Russia. The next day he was proven right when a Russian SU-27 knocked a US Reaper drone into the Black Sea. Hey, feeding Russians (and Ukrainians) into a meat grinder is all fun and games until we get dragged into the abattoir too. Of course, all the right people got really mad about it – when Bill Kristol, Adam Kinzinger, David French, Max Boot and Mitt Romney are all for something, you need to be against it.
BLM member-turned-conservative decries
San Francisco 'selling oppression' via
reparation plan replies
San Francisco 'selling oppression' via
reparation plan replies
A former Black Lives Matter activist ripped his onetime ideology Wednesday after San Francisco's board expressed support for reparations. Xaviaer DuRousseau, now a PragerU personality who said he has ties to the Bay Area, told "The Ingraham Angle" the plan is a case of social justice "virtue-signaling" to "indoctrinate" minorities into feeling oppressed.
"I think it's important that, first of all, we call this exactly what it is: This is 111 ways to gaslight Black Americans into thinking that we need to be dependent on a system of handouts in order to be successful," DuRousseau said, adding he once believed the left-wing claims.
"Black Americans have been indoctrinated with these lies
Is It Time To Move the Capital?
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The City Council of Washington, D.C., recently approved legislation to reduce penalties for violent crimes, despite a recent surge of murders, carjackings, and robberies in the city. It was in keeping with similar measures approved in recent years in cities around the country to defund the police, reduce cash bail, and eliminate penalties for minor crimes like shoplifting and drug possession. Congress rightly overruled the measure under the city's home rule charter, but it was a sign of what's to come from D.C. city government.
The U.S. military on Thursday morning released dramatic video that it said showed a Russian fighter jet intercepting and then colliding with the American MQ-9 "Reaper" drone that crashed into the Black Sea on Tuesday. The U.S. has accused Russia of operating its warplane in an "unsafe and unprofessional" manner during the encounter near Ukraine's Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula.
On Wednesday, a senior Russian official said Moscow would try to recover the wreckage of the drone. U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters the unmanned aerial vehicle had likely broken during the crash and whatever debris was left likely
Love him or hate him, Tucker Carlson has become the most important political analyst of our era. (snip) Last night, he began his top-rated hour-long program with the following startling statement:
“You’re going to get a hot war with Russia – and China – whether you want one or not.”
He followed with analysis of the Black Sea drone incident and the calls for retaliation and escalation from Lindsey Graham and “his friends in the war party” that would likely lead to outright war. And wartime, he noted at the end of the segment, leads to extraordinary suppression of political dissent.
There’s No Liar Like A Biden
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How do we know when Joe Biden is lying? When he says he gives us his word as a Biden. But that’s not the only time he spins a whopper. He says something untrue quite regularly, the most recent instance a tall tale about his “epiphany” regarding gay marriage.
When asked about his “evolution on marriage equality” during an interview on Monday night’s “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, Biden radically revised his personal history so that he would appear to have been woke for more than a half century. Our president (how did such a thing ever happen?) said
The Sacramento Bee, a Northern California-based newspaper, has apologized for falsely claiming that Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk called to “lynch” transgenders.
Charlie Kirk had been scheduled to speak at the University of California Davis on Tuesday when Sacramento Bee opinion writer Hannah Holzer called the activist “another fascist” and said that he wanted to lynch transgender people.
“Among his most atrocious comments, Kirk suggested transgender people, who he has referred to as ‘garbage,’ ought to be lynched,” Holzer wrote.
Holzer also called Kirk a “vocal transphobe and Donald Trump fanatic” who has “turned controversy into money for years.”
Holzer based her opinion on an out-of-context clip from Charlie Kirk’s show
Max Boot, one of the most bloodthirsty American analysts and commentators, has apparently woken up long after most Americans with half his education, about the limits of American power and the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thankfully for us, he has penned his reawakening in the pages of , that astute bulwark of the establishment, a journal of which I am, in fact, a subscriber.
For 20 years, Boot has been calling for regime change, democracy building abroad, and even leaving American troops in dangerous brushfire to “polic[e] the frontiers of the Pax Americana.” Now, he says he’s changed. Changing one’s views in politics is hardly a cause for dismissal.
American's facing rising inflation have become nostalgic for prices from just two years ago when the cost of basic groceries were almost half their price.
In the past, people may have cynically recalled how the cost of everyday items had risen over decades, but now people see prices escalating right before their eyes, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Avocados cost an average of $1 each in early 2021 but had risen to $2.50 just one year later.'There is an element of whiplash,' a 41-year-old marketing consultant told the paper, regarding the price of avocados. 'Was that a bygone era from my youth, or was it just last year?'
It’s a particularly deadly time to be on Russian President Putin’s bad side — 39 bodies, piled up since war broke out in Ukraine, collectively underscore the point.
Just this month, two former bigshots bit the dust.
Sergey Grishin, a financial fraudster and oligarch who sold Harry and Meghan their Montecito, California, mansion for $14.7 million, perished from sepsis on March 6.
Coincidence or not, this happened after he criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Virologist Andrey Botikov — who helped develop the controversial Sputnik V Covid vaccine — went in a less subtle manner on March 1: He fell victim to a belt around his neck.
ATALAIA DO NORTE, Brazil—Brazilian federal agents aboard three helicopters descended on an illegal mining site on Tuesday in the Amazon rainforest. They were met with gunfire, and the shooters escaped, leaving behind an increasingly familiar find for authorities: Starlink internet units.
Starlink, a division of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, has almost 4,000 low-orbit satellites across the skies, connecting people in remote corners of the Amazon and providing a crucial advantage to Ukrainian forces on the battlefield. The lightweight, high-speed internet system has also proved a new and valuable tool for Brazil’s illegal miners, with reliable service for coordinating logistics, receiving advance warning
House Democrats anoint ‘so-called’
member of Congress to sabotage hearings,
trash whistleblowers replies
member of Congress to sabotage hearings,
trash whistleblowers replies
Now that Democrats are in the minority in the House and unable to abuse their power as easily as they have done the last two years, they are resorting to shameless lies to sabotage oversight hearings and trash whistleblowers and other inconvenient witnesses.
They have anointed as queen of this disinformation operation, a little-known Democrat named Stacey Plaskett, who is not even a full-fledged member of Congress.
Plaskett’s favorite adjective is “so-called,” which is ironic since she is a so-called member of Congress.
She does not have voting rights as the “at-large” delegate for the US Virgin Islands.
OXON HILL, Md.—Trips to Mar-a-Lago. Glowing speeches. Front-row seats at major events.
The first Republican presidential primaries are nearly a year away and the candidate field is unsettled. But already, a shadow contest of another sort is underway with several Republicans openly jockeying to position themselves as potential running mates to Donald Trump, the early front-runner for the nomination.
“A lot of people are right now auditioning,” Trump boasted to supporters in Florida last month.
The mere mention of a running mate this early in the process is a departure from the traditional timeline of presidential primaries, where candidates typically spend the opening months of a campaign introducing themselves to voters
Former NIAID Director and White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday night on NewNation’s “Cuomo” that Republicans are attacking him because he fulfilled his “responsibility to the American public to tell the truth.”
Host Chris Cuomo asked, “Why do you think that you are the target of so many accusations about covering up the source of COVID-19.” Fauci said, “I think it is pretty clear it’s politically motivated. I don’t know what they’re talking about, ‘covering up.’ I have been totally transparent throughout.”
Politics has a way of driving people into delusion. That’s because even laughably bad candidates can still find themselves in the limelight and aboard private jets, at least for a time. Kamala Harris’ disastrous presidential run is proof enough of that, though she managed to parlay her epic failure and intersectionality into a vice presidential position because failing up is a Democratic Party gold standard.
But while Harris at least had enough initial support to justify a run, there are others who deserve to be heckled for even entertaining the idea of running for president. Chris Christie is one of those people.