When your main third party candidate is the complete wackadoodle you only feared he was

 

Start to finish the wheels were never on the DeSantis bus

 

DeSantis Over Before It Started is the truest headline Drudge has posted in a long time

 DeSantis should never have run this cycle in the first place, but once in, you gotta be in it! This withdrawal after one lousy contest is just pathetic. Not being prepared to run through Super Tuesday March 5th is the sign of an unserious candidacy.

But the worst part is DeSantis quits quoting Churchill about having the courage to continue is what counts. DeSantis is not continuing, hello. Doesn't he realize he's implying he has no courage?

This is just awful.

This guy is finished, for good.

 

 

He didn't have the wisdom to refrain from running in this election cycle, and he didn't have the courage to continue beyond Iowa

He's done, along with the country.

Volodymyr Zelensky is still fighting, however.

 

 

 

Mediate's Jan 6 for dummies: When Pence ignored Trump’s plea, a mob stormed the Capitol lol

 

Here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yeah, if only Mike Pence had been at the center of this universe.

Pence issued his statement disavowing any unilateral authority over electoral votes just as he began to preside over the Joint Session of Congress, at about 1:02pm. He couldn't have cut it any closer, holding his cards close to his chest until the very last second. He had still been working on this letter at 9:00am.

A large mob had already gathered around the Capitol by 11:00am, with bad intent, and eventually succeeded in pushing back the Capitol police to the Capitol steps before the time Pence even began to perform his duties inside, at about 12:53pm, or issue his statement.

It took these rioters more than another hour to breach the Capitol, which subsequently brought proceedings in the Senate to a halt at 2:13pm, and in the House at 2:29pm.

Trump didn't finish speaking at the Ellipse 1.6 miles away until 1:10pm., a 30-minute walk from the Capitol, just after which the Joint Session had split up to debate separately the Arizona slate of electors.

Meanwhile Trump, Michael Moore's human Molotov Cocktail, was already having lunch by 1:25pm, enjoying the mayhem.

Ugly Americans: Romney doesn't care that American civil juries have become a circus of vindictive retribution and obscene excess

Romney Rips Voters Who Don't Care Jury Found He Raped Woman...

JURY: TRUMP SEXUALLY ABUSED, DEFAMED CARROLL MUST PAY $5M IN DAMAGES 

Jury awards De Niro ex-assistant $1.2M for sexist workplace discrimination...

Jury Finds Realtors Conspired to Keep Commissions High... Awards $1.78 billion damages...

She accused her ex of revenge porn. Jury awarded her $1.2 BILLION!

Idaho jury hits Ammon Bundy with tens of millions in damages in defamation suit...

JURY: ALEX JONES DAMAGES $1 BILLION...

Fox to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle election defamation lawsuit

 

Cop told to 'tone down your gayness' awarded $20 million...

Actor Geoffrey Rush Awarded $1.9 Million in #MeToo Defamation Case...

Hotel dishwasher awarded $21 million after boss made her work on Sundays...

University of Virginia Dean Awarded $3M in ROLLING STONE Defamation Case...

Sportscaster Erin Andrews Awarded $55M Over Secret Recording...

Man awarded $10m for SEGWAY accident while blindfolded...

Burglar's family awarded $300,000 in wrongful death suit...

Man Awarded $650K for Eye Injury Sustained During Lap Dance...

$240,000 awarded to man forced to cover Arab T-shirt...

Jury ordered an anti-gay Kansas church to pay $2.9 million in compensatory damages to relatives of a U.S. Marine after church members cheered his death at his funeral

Peter Navarro chose allegiance to the separate and equal power of the Executive, of which he was a part and which the Legislative transgressed in a political witchhunt

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department wants former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro to spend six months behind bars after being convicted of criminal contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena. ...

“The Defendant chose allegiance to former President Donald Trump over the rule of law,” prosecutors wrote in Thursday’s sentencing memo.

 More.

Joe Biden buys 73k more votes, now totaling over 3.7 million

The Biden administration has now canceled more than $136 billion in student debt for over 3.7 million Americans, according to the White House.

More.

Third continuing resolution since September passes Congress to fund federal government into March

WASHINGTON — Congress passed a bill on Thursday that would prevent a partial government shutdown this weekend and keep federal funds flowing through March 1 and March 8.

The Democratic-led Senate voted 77-18 on final passage after considering a few amendments. The Republican-led House soon followed suit, passing it by a vote of 314-108.

The bill now goes to President Joe Biden’s desk to become law before the funding expires Friday at midnight.

It is the third stopgap bill since last September as the divided Congress struggles to agree on full-year government funding bills. ...

The first stopgap bill led to the ouster of Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as speaker. His successor, Johnson, is seeking to avoid the same fate by selling the conservative victories in the latest deal.

More.

Peter Thiel is so mistaken about homeownership in his interview with John Gray

 Peter Thiel says "To unshackle ourselves economically, one should start by attacking the extraordinarily distorted real estate market", but never once mentions how the prime culprits of the distortion were and are all Federal.

These were the commoditization of housing by the so-called Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 under Clinton and Gingrich, followed by Federal Reserve interest rate suppression under Obama after the collapse of the ensuing housing bubble it caused, re-inflating that bubble.

To Thiel "interest rates went steadily down", as if by the influence of some mysterious force. What could it be? He is not i n t e r e s t e d.

Nor does he mention a third Federal culprit, how the demand side for housing was and is distorted by 15% of the population swelling with foreign born in the UK and the US as a direct result of legally admitting millions of immigrants since 1990 in the US and since 1994 in the UK.

These are the legacies of the Bushes, Bill Clinton, John Major, and Tony Blair, now augmented by deliberate non-enforcement of the border in America by the likes of Obama and Biden, turbo-charging the demand side for housing, and prices with it, by flooding the country with illegal aliens.

Thiel observes that culturally "We became too risk-averse, too bureaucratic, too reliant on peer review in the sciences" somehow, but doesn't connect this to the aging demographics, even though he is aware of it. Not re-inflating the prices of homes of Baby Boomers would have been political suicide. He fancies this is now "over", but misses that the heirs of all this property are voters too.

This is not over.

Thiel is essentially a radical, as was Ronald Reagan and also Margaret Thatcher. He completely misses how the libertarian impulse to deregulate under Reagan and Thatcher led in a straight line to the housing catastrophe we all live with these many years later. His libertarianism is myopic.

John Gray: "The difference is that this Truss wing of the Conservative Party wants to go back to Thatcher because they see that as a radical moment and they want to repeat the radical moments. But radical moments are very hard to keep repeating."

Peter Thiel: "They’re hard to repeat by doing the same thing. It was a one-time move to deregulate and lower taxes and then it’s not clear that doing it the second time does much good. ... The Reagan and Thatcher administrations ... allowed more companies to be acquired, more M&A activity to happen. It was a somewhat brutal but very powerful reorganization of society that was possible and in fact the right thing to do in the 1980s."

Incessant headlines about deep American discontent tell us we don't particularly like this now reorganized society. The new world order means your kid is saddled with horrible college debt, can't find a decent job, has to live at home with you, can't buy a house, can't get married, can't have children. 

But Thiel is still dreaming the pipe dream of "exponential growth" to solve these problems. He hopes technology will come to the rescue in the form of remote work:

"Is there some way to reopen a frontier in real estate? The possibility where I think the jury is very out, though it doesn’t look that promising in 2023, would be remote work. Could the internet be a way that people are not stuck in these cities? And that would reset all these real estate values tremendously because even in a rather densely populated country like England, there is plenty of space if you’re not forced to be within the green belt of London itself. And in the United States even more so."

The interview is here.  

Calvinism and free-market libertarianism are pretty much the same old, same old fatalistic thing

 Speaker Johnson: Biden Presidency 'God's Will'...

The is-is-ought fallacy.

Pakistan retaliates against Iran with military aircraft, attacks elements of the Balochistan Liberation Front just across the border, kills several

Pakistan Foreign Ministry:

 “Pakistan fully respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Islamic Republic of Iran".

More.

Long after Red Sea attacks began, ridiculous Biden administration appeasers finally re-adopt Trump designation of Houthis as terrorists which they had revoked in February 2021

The U.S. State Department on Wednesday designated the Iranian-backed, Yemen-based Houthi rebels as specially designated global terrorists, or SDGTs, in an effort to deter further attacks against commercial ships crossing the Red Sea. ...

The State Department under President Joe Biden revoked the Houthis’ designation as a foreign terrorist organization, or FTO, in Feb. 2021, just a month after it issued the label under former President Donald Trump.

The reversal came in response to calls from the United Nations and humanitarian groups who said that the terrorist classification and its associated sanctions were “accelerating Yemen’s slide into large-scale famine.”

Three years later, after months of Red Sea attacks, the Houthis have regained their spot on a U.S. terrorist list.

More.

Iranian ballistic missile attacks on Erbil, Iraq and Balochistan Province in Pakistan, a nuclear power, show the Biden administration's policy of appeasement is an abject failure

 Biden's weakness has emboldened Iran, which is betting that the superpower which cut and run in Afghanistan has no stomach to stop the aggression of the religious dictatorship in Tehran.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Within 24 hours, Iran launched missile and drone strikes on targets in three countries — Iraq, Syria and Pakistan — and took the extraordinary step of announcing its responsibility for the attacks, triggering anger from its neighbors. ... Baghdad recalled its ambassador to Iran after the Monday night attack ...

Pakistan’s foreign ministry said Tuesday that it “strongly condemns the unprovoked violation of its airspace by Iran” which it said killed two children and injured three more. It added that “it is even more concerning that this illegal act has taken place despite the existence of several channels of communication between Pakistan and Iran.”

More. 

Pakistan is believed to possess over 100 operational nuclear warheads which can be delivered from a number of different platforms. 

Would Iran attack Pakistan like this without having the same capability, or are they just fools?

The ARTIC blast at Drudge is finally over, six days later

 

How much enthusiasm does it take to fill out a mail-in ballot and mail it in, +28F or -18F?

Asking for a friend.

35 people who didn't get the memo braved -18F to vote for Chris Crispy Creme yesterday in Iowa, even though he had already dropped out

 The 108k who turned out under those conditions are a legitimate index of the proportional enthusiasm which exists.

Vivek got fewer than 9k votes and promptly, and properly, dropped out.

Change my mind.

 

Can you imagine working for Drudge and lifting this particular typo verbatim and reproducing it for a headline?

 C'mon man.

That guy's brain emits artic temperatures.

 

 

 

 

Oh for Pete's sake, the low temperature in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Feb 1, 2016 was +28F

 Only 14.4% of registered Republicans participated...

 

. . . in 2016, some 187,000 people cast ballots, a record high equating to 29% of registered Republicans.

Tesla will just have to install fossil-fuel-powered battery heaters to warm the batteries enough to charge in ARCTIC temperatures lol

 Tesla owners in freezing Chicago stuck in 'car graveyards' as vehicles won't charge

I mean, what could go wrong?