Wednesday night America was regaled once again by the demented crook who occupies the White House and browbeaten with auguries of the death of democracy should democracy result in a minority of Democrats holding seats in Congress.
It was what should have been a bizarre spectacle, but it isn’t bizarre. Not anymore. Now it’s banal. We’re governed by a political party that is out of ideas, whose policy prescriptions are simply more warmed-over 20th century socialism writ larger when there’s no more money to waste on them, and whose entire reason for being now is hatred of the other party.
The voters are increasingly likely to bury this party and turn their congressional majorities to dust. And rather than engage with the reasons why, Joe Biden can only insult Republicans — and, in turn, the Americans choosing to vote for them.
This isn’t something those about to be given political power by the American people should tolerate.
This space will soon be filled with columns talking about the various things the new Congress ought to do, but I’d like to get the conversations started on one project in particular.
Yes, I know that Kamala Harris is as big a disaster as Joe Biden is. And yes, she’s as big a puppet of the Obama Kalorama Krewe as Biden is. But Kamala Harris is exceptionally weak politically and she can be pushed around much more easily than Biden by an aggressive GOP congressional majority, and therefore she is becoming a viable alternative to him.
Because as the Democrats have trotted Biden out for campaign appearances, it has become abundantly clear that he can’t be allowed to front our federal government for much longer. It’s becoming time to push him out.
Here’s how you make this happen.
As soon as it’s sworn in, the new GOP majority in the House should, while filing bills of impeachment against the entire Biden cabinet, appoint a special or independent counsel (they’re not the same thing, but that’s a subject for another column) to investigate the Biden crime family while at the same time filing a bill of impeachment against Biden based on weaponization of the FBI, illegal COVID vaccine mandates, Afghanistan, and his misuse of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and his war on domestic energy.
And while that’s going on they should enter negotiations with what’s left of the Democrats’ leadership on a compromise — namely, 25th Amendment proceedings to get rid of Biden.
Specifically, that compromise would be that in exchange for dropping the special prosecutor and Biden impeachment, but not the cabinet impeachments (unless they’re willing to offer up some in order to save others, in which case that could get interesting), the Democrats would agree to support (1) a demand that Biden undergo an independent Montreal Cognitive Assessment and publish the results and (2) if those results are unfavorable or Biden refuses to take the test, they willingly support the 25th Amendment proceedings.
A congressional majority willing to go this route would have a lot of leverage to make it happen. Now that it’s on the books as precedent that you can deny somebody committee assignments just because you don’t like them, as Marjorie Taylor Greene can attest, the Democrats with all the seniority on the various committees expecting to be ranking members could be told that they can either take this compromise or have nothing to do but handle constituent complaints all day.
Put them to the question. Do they really want to fall on the sword for Joe Biden, whose incompetence and malaise put them in this situation?
The GOP majorities won’t have a whole lot else to do, you know. You really can’t legislate in a divided government scenario, especially when Biden is sure to refuse the tack to the middle that Bill Clinton executed after the 1994 elections. So there are two projects they’ll have the time and the need to take on. First is to put Congress back into regular order — committee markups, full amendment processes, and so on — particularly in terms of the appropriations process and exercising the power of the purse to impose limits on the size and scope of the federal government.
And second is oversight. This is oversight. Impeachments and hearings, like the ones the last column in this space talked about with respect to the COVID abuses, are congressional oversight.
Does this coming GOP majority have the political will to force Biden out? You should have serious doubts whether the leadership does. I’m starting to believe that particularly the rank and file in the House is actually up to the task. Then it’s a question of getting the leadership to do the will of the body.
But Biden has to go. You can’t have a country being run by a president who openly hates and disparages half the population. That’s a recipe for disaster. And the fact that the man is clearly non compos mentis simply seals the deal. For everything the Democrats said about Donald Trump, they’ve inflicted an invalid on the country, and it can’t be accepted any more.
No sooner did Elon Musk take over Twitter but Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez threw an absolute fit over his plans for the app.
Musk, as we noted earlier this week, put the word out that he was going to revamp Twitter’s blue-check system, which bestowed, essentially, feudal titles on the various “important” personages on the app. Instead, he first said he’d charge $20 per month for a “verified” blue check, and then he dropped that price to $8 per month.
But that still wasn’t good enough for AOC:
Lmao at a billionaire earnestly trying to sell people on the idea that “free speech” is actually a $8/mo subscription plan
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 2, 2022
The thing about Elon Musk is he tends to stand up for himself, and when he does he’s not above using ridicule to do it. So AOC got this response:
Your feedback is appreciated, now pay $8
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2022
And then came the memes:
— Richard Harambe (@Doc_Chimpanzee) November 2, 2022
It got better. Musk checked out AOC’s website and found that she’s got a bit of the profiteering greedy capitalist bug in her as well:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2022
Then came this:
AOC wants so much to be a victim that she’s now spreading a conspiracy theory that Elon Musk personally messed with her phone so it wouldn’t load up Twitter. Because technical issues never happen, right?
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) November 3, 2022
AOC’s response was … not great:
Proud of this and always will be.
My workers are union, make a living wage, have full healthcare, and aren’t subject to racist treatment in their workplaces. Items are made in USA.
Team AOC honors and respects working people. You should try it sometime instead of union-busting. https://t.co/TCOh3IHXlF
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 3, 2022
Unwittingly made the case to end unions, but whatever.
And THEN CAME THIS:
AOC says she doesn’t want to give @elonmusk any of her money but she bought a Tesla. pic.twitter.com/uVWglWgqbU
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) November 3, 2022
Please keep this going, Elon and AOC. It’s beautiful.
So Don Lemon’s morning show at CNN is a ratings disaster, as you’ve heard:
Despite heavy promotion from the network, “CNN This Morning’s” first show drew a mere 387,000 viewers and averaged 71,000 viewers in the advertiser-coveted 25-54 age demographic, according to Nielsen ratings.
By comparison, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” amassed 793,000 viewers head to head from 6 to 9 am ET. Meanwhile, Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” came out on top, averaging nearly 1.5 million viewers.
No show across CNN, MSNBC and Fox News ranked lower than Lemon’s program on Tuesday.
And so is Jake Tapper’s primetime show:
Liberal CNN anchor Jake Tapper is being tapped out of primetime and moving back to daytime following poor viewership.
“As part of a special lineup, Jake agreed to anchor the 9p hour through the midterm elections,” a spokesperson for CNN told Fox News Digital. “At the completion of that schedule, he’ll be returning to his award-winning program ‘The Lead.’ We will announce post-election plans for that time slot in the coming days.”
Tapper made his primetime debut on Oct. 11 with a splashy broadcast that included interviews with President Biden and movie star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Despite the big-named guests, “CNN Tonight with Jake Tapper” only averaged 854,000 viewers, which is a distant third behind Fox News’ “Hannity” with 2.6 million viewers and MSNBC’s “Alex Wagner Tonight” with 1.6 million viewers. Tapper’s audience substantially dipped since then.
And CNBC is dumping Shepherd Smith:
CNBC is cancelling Shep Smith’s show amid a broad network restructuring that president KC Sullivan said will force the business news channel to “make some difficult decisions.”
“The News set out on a bold mission of providing non-partisan, fact-based reporting on the most important stories of the day in the U.S. and around the world,” Sullivan wrote in an internal memo on Thursday, referring to Smith’s show. “At a time when misinformation and disinformation is rampant, The News succeeded in providing audiences with the clearest understanding of the facts.”
In his note to staff, Sullivan said that cancelling Smith’s program was part of a decision to refocus the network on core business and finance programming.
You already know about the mass layoffs at CNN:
“Unsettling.”
That’s the sort of news CNN staffers had delivered to their inboxes at 1pm ET on Wednesday when network boss Chris Licht candidly informed them that sweeping changes are imminent. In other words, brace for layoffs by the end of the year.
Licht, who has been conducting a business review of CNN for six months, said in a memo that he had identified areas where changes will be made. In addition, he noted that there is “widespread concern over the global economic outlook” and said that “we must factor that risk into our long-term planning.”
“All this together will mean noticeable change to this organization,” Licht said in a memo. “That, by definition, is unsettling. These changes will not be easy because they will affect people, budgets, and projects.”
And then there’s the $30 million fine CBS got hit with:
CBS and its former president, Leslie Moonves, will pay $30.5 million as part of an agreement with the New York attorney general’s office, which says the network’s executives conspired with a Los Angeles police captain to conceal sexual assault allegations against Moonves.
Under the deal announced Wednesday by Attorney General Letitia James, the broadcast giant is required to pay $22 million to shareholders and another $6 million for sexual harassment and assault programs. Moonves will have to pay $2.5 million, all of which will benefit stockholders who the attorney general said were initially kept in the dark about the allegations.
Let’s just say the legacy media isn’t living its best life right now.
Another project the next Congress might consider taking up is the question of whether it suits the needs of the American economy to allow the media space to be consumed by such a tight little oligopoly of so many identical-in-orientation media conglomerates, particularly when they can’t seem to do much right anymore.
I guess we all can, since we put up with him for eight years, but the hypocrisy and sanctimony still rankles:
OBAMA: "Most Republican politicians, they're not even pretending that the rules apply to them." pic.twitter.com/GmNGxqgSJV
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) November 3, 2022
I wish I could say Barack Obama isn’t relevant in American politics anymore. I don’t think he’s particularly relevant in terms of having the power to move votes. He didn’t really have that power when he was president; Obama shepherded the Democrats into a down-ballot holocaust in multiple cycles, which set the stage for what’s going to happen next week and might give the GOP some staying power in the majority.
But he’s relevant in that he’s the power behind Biden’s throne and everybody knows it.
I’ll have more to say on that subject down the road.
This is just terrible. I don’t know that the sport will ever recover:
A cheating scandal dubbed “BagGate” has sent shock waves across the professional cornhole world.
The controversy sparked in August at the 2022 American Cornhole League World Championships in South Carolina.
Devon Harbaugh filed a formal complaint against cornhole players Mark Richards and Philip Lopez, claiming the No. 1 ranked doubles team used illegal beanbags.
“I thought the bags were too thin,[”] Harbaugh asserted.
A $15,000 purse was on the line in the game where competitors toss bags filled with resin beads into a hole on slanted boards, which are approximately 27 feet apart.
After the complaint was lodged, officials performed a bag inspection. However, Lopez and Richards also wanted their opponents’ bags to be inspected as well. Turns out none of the players competing were using regulation size bags.
When pro cornhole players can’t even adhere to the ethical requirement of regulation bags, it’s over.
Next they’ll be kneeling for the national anthem or splitting off to join the Saudi cornhole league. Nothing is sacred anymore.
