We'll have to wait a bit to see how things settle, but as of this morning, this May 24th Tweet isn't looking so good

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UPDATE:

The White House released this statement about Gene Sperling's departure:

When I took office, our economy was reeling, a pandemic was raging, and hundreds of thousands of small businesses across the country were at risk of shutting their doors. Having run Recovery Act implementation for President Obama, I knew I needed an American Rescue Plan Coordinator with the expertise and experience to hit the ground running. I'm glad I picked Gene Sperling.

Gene joined my administration as the only person to have ever directed the National Economic Council under two presidents, and has helped me execute a rescue plan that has led to one of the most equitable and resilient economic recoveries ever. His work helped nearly 40 million working families get unprecedented child tax cut relief and over 8 million renters get emergency assistance to help keep their families housed. Under Gene's leadership, the American Rescue Plan has delivered economic relief to cities and counties across the country, protected millions of union pensions, made the largest-ever federal investment in public safety, and kept thousands of small businesses afloat.

I also looked to Gene as a trusted advisor on the economy and gave him some of the toughest assignments, including serving as my liaison to the Big 3 automakers and UAW as autoworkers fought for - and secured - record contracts.

You must remember this, a kiss-off is just a kiss ....

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(See below*)

Multiply this story 1,000,000 X (or 10 million, or 100 million — your pick), and you have a good sense of how the guardians of our wallets spend what they find there:

NYC’s DOE accepts offer for nearly $5.6M worth of apples — leaving most to rot

The NYC’s Department of Education food-service managers ordered three times as many apples as needed — forcing them to throw away thousands of cases of rotting fruit in the last four months, The Post has learned.

In March, the city DOE’s Office of Food and Nutrition Services got an offer they couldn’t refuse and ordered 279,000 cases of apples worth a whopping $5,585,580 paid for by the federal government. The deal was part of an effort between the feds and the state Office of General Services to give schools fresh produce from the US Department of Agriculture. As a result, the city received a massive “bonus” of free Empire, Fuji, Gala, Red Delicious and Granny Smith apples.

But the nation’s largest school system bit off more than it could chew: The humongous order is overwhelming the DOE with more apples than schools can use in three years, kitchen insiders said. 

“They have apples every day — nothing but apples,” said the parent coordinator at a Bronx elementary school, wondering what happened to the peaches and mandarins the schools used to serve. 

Some students are served two apples at breakfast and another two at lunch, a food worker said. 

Kids are being deprived of other fruit, the worker said. “Students are looking for a piece of watermelon, or a tangerine, but now it’s ‘Nope, we have to give you apples,’ and if students don’t want them, they go in the garbage.”

A supervisor griped: “You order one case of oranges, you get two cases of apples. You want bananas, you get two more cases of apples. We’re getting apples up the nose.”

Out of 5,299 cases of apples already delivered, up to 45% have already been tossed, the source estimated. 

Stomach-churning photos show cases marred with moldy, rotten apples — some shriveled beyond recognition — and rancid juices soaking through the cardboard crates. 

Food distributors had 28,012 cases on hand this week with 15,544 more to come in September, according to emails viewed by The Post.

“Despite warnings from distributors, managers and cooks that schools cannot handle such a large quantity of fresh apples, the OFNS decided to proceed,” said a DOE source, adding that officials saw it as “free money.”

Schools have been forced to take a glut of apples — some already spoiled and bruised — from distributors hit with nonstop supplies from the USDA. The agency offers periodic “bonuses” of free food products to schools across the country.

“We have rotting apples, and before we can take more we need to know what your plan is for discarding them as they all begin to rot,” one food distributor pleaded to an OFNS director in emails obtained by The Post. 

“The apples will need to be accepted,” inventory management specialist Cristina Perez told the buyer.

“Please make arrangements for delivery,” director Lisa D’Amato confirmed. 

Buyers are also complaining to the farms, begging them to do quality-control checks before shipping. 

“We can’t tie up our warehouse everyday with thousands of cases of apples that are being shipped to us in very poor quality,” a distributor representative said in an email.

One of the city’s three grocery distributors said this week that the company will have to discard approximately 3,000 cases of apples. On Thursday, another tossed 86 cases, sources said.

In June, shortly before the school year ended, one of the distributors was slated to receive two shipments of 924 cases each. The fruit lasts 15 to 25 days.

*2013:

On Sunday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) appeared on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley and called Republicans ‘anti-government ideologues’ looking to shut down the government before declaring there is simply nothing left to cut in the $4-trillion-a-year federal budget.

CROWLEY:  President Clinton, President Bush, President Reagan and this president have all negotiated the debt ceiling and given up something for that.  So why now, we can't do this?

PELOSI:  The cupboard is bare. There’s no more cuts to make. It’s really important that people understand that.

Brainwashing the electorate

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David Strom, HotAir:

I am deeply worried that the compressed election cycle will allow the mainstream media and the brainwashing complex which includes Big Tech and social media to carry Kamala Harris to victory on their backs.

Kamala herself is a mental midget with no political skills to speak of, but she has behind her a brainwashing machine with decades of experience and trillions of dollars of infrastructure behind it. 

But Kamala's political skills or her electoral prospects are not my focus here: there is one advantage to the compressed timeline, and that is the need for the brainwashing machine to drop all subtlety and use all its tricks in one massive push. We can see the machine work in a way that has been more difficult before. 

Trump’s a coward

(I noticed this trope appearing in at least one reader’s comment even on this bitty blog — it’s all pervasiveL FWIW)

Yesterday (and presumably today) the new brainwashing line is that Trump is "afraid" to debate Kamala. The claim is everywhere, and you might think that it is so absurd as to not be worth considering. 

But that isn't the point at all. Both of these lines of attack and their constant repetition are designed to undermine the advantages Republicans have--Democrats are undeniably weird, and Trump is undeniably courageous. The goal is to program these facts out of the brains of people who pay attention casually and don't think deeply about the issues. 

Trump is afraid of nothing. He walks into the most hostile environments in the world with a smile on his face and a determination to win. 

The last time Trump debated a Democrat, the victim had to leave the field utterly defeated. Biden was mortally wounded. Then Trump got shot and stood up in defiance. Then he went to the Black Journalists Association to get ripped, when Kamala demurred because she won't take a single question from anybody, even friendly journalists. 

But by repeating "afraid"--and the word is everywhere right now from the Establishment--the idea is planted in people's minds in a way that precludes analysis. Nobody is thinking about these issues deeply. It's just in the air. 

For most people, politics are about vibes, not reasoned analysis. We outsource the analysis to others and choose based on a general feeling. 

Brainwashing is all about shaping those vibes and framing how people think about issues. The frame determines so much. 

Not too long ago, Kamala's bizarre inability to speak intelligently or not cackle in an irritating manner was universally seen as a political weakness; today, we are told that her idiocy is charming, her cackling is joyful, and that she is the new Jack Kennedy in Kamalot. 

We can look forward to four more years of this. UPDATED

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Kampallawalla’s new look,

How fake was this fake news? Even an NPR reporter felt compelled to speak up — that may be a first.

Heck, even NBC objected:

UPDATE: Well, she’s defined her image, alright: she and her handlers are bald-face liars

Dem Strategist Tells CNN Host Harris Will Be ‘Defining Herself’ With Ad Spending So She Doesn’t Need To Do Interviews

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

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WaPo: Obamaites Take Over Team Kamala

Ed Morrissey, HotAir:

“Ho hum, nothing to see here, just another cycle in which Barack Obama runs for president. What is this, five in a row now?

“In this case, though, we may have to give Kamala Harris a pass. It's not as if she developed a team of campaign experts on her own. Or that they'd stick around for long if she did (via Memeorandum):”

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris hired a battery of new senior advisers to her campaign this week, moving swiftly to replace lifetime loyalists of President Biden with Democratic campaign veterans, including multiple leaders of Barack Obama’s presidential bids, according to people briefed on the campaign shifts.

David Plouffe, a top strategist on both of Obama’s presidential campaigns, joins Harris as senior adviser for strategy and the states focused on winning the electoral college. Stephanie Cutter, the deputy campaign manager for Obama’s reelection who has been working in recent months with Harris, is the new senior adviser for strategy messaging. Mitch Stewart, a grass-roots organizing strategist behind both Obama wins, will become the senior adviser for battleground states. David Binder, who led Obama’s public opinion research operation and previously worked for Harris, will expand his role on the Harris campaign to lead the opinion research operation.

All of the new hires will report to campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, another veteran of Obama’s two campaigns. She managed Biden’s 2020 campaign and built his 2024 operation from the White House before moving to Wilmington, Del., this year. Harris took control of Biden’s campaign as soon as Biden announced he would not seek reelection, an operation consisting of more than 1,300 employees and more than 130 offices. She asked O’Malley Dillon to remain in charge.

Morrissey:

On one hand, this is smart politics, especially given Harris' record of abysmal performance on the campaign trail. Until now, Harris has only faced one significant competitive election against a Republican, the AG race in California, which she almost lost while other Democrats won statewide races by double digits. Thanks to California's jungle-primary system, she won her Senate seat against a fellow Democrat in the general election. She then failed to get to a single primary contest in 2020 after entering that primary cycle as one of the favorites, melting down in two debate exchanges with Tulsi Gabbard and utterly failing to inspire Democrat primary voters.

If anyone needs an Obama rescue, it's Kamala.

Still. During most of Biden's presidency, Obama's team largely drove policy, especially in foreign affairs, and Biden's clear cognitive decline made it appear that someone pulled the strings behind the scene -- and Obama was the most likely suspect. Then Biden got humiliated in a debate he demanded and suddenly Obama became even more of a public puppeteer in forcing Biden to withdraw. And now practically his entire political team has taken over Team Kamala even more than they had with Team Biden.

And not to be too conspiratorial about it, but how did we find out about this? In the oh-so-traditional Friday afternoon news dump. 

….

[W]e have term limits on the presidency for a reason. This singular executive office has grown too powerful for one person to control it for more than eight years. That's true when control is direct, and probably even more so when the control is indirect. This could be dangerous territory, which everyone would recognize in an instant if it were Donald Trump behind these activities rather than Obama. 

We aren't going to recognize this country in four years; nor remember it

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First, Wikipedia went to work eliminating all references on its website to Kamala Harris as border czar (which she never was, and don't you dare say otherwise). Not to be outdone, the politician-rating website GovCheck found that their own rating of Harris as the most liberal Senator in America was inconvenient, so ... poof. Now there's no evidence they ever rated her that way.

Room 101 awaits anyone who would question this new reality. 

This, too will be down the memory hole in mere days, if it hasn’t disappeared already:


Facebook Acknowledges It 'Mistakenly' Censored Iconic Trump Assassination Photo
https://pjmedia.com/rick-moran/2024/07/30/facebook-acknowled…identally-censored-iconic-trump-assassination-photo-n4931189

Jul 30, 2024 – Facebook is admitting that labeling the iconic photo of a blood-streaked Trump raising his fist in defiance after the attempt on his … Her post was in response to Charlie Kirk's observation that Facebook was not allowing users to share the photo, the New York Post reported … This has been fixed and we apologize for the mistake.— Dani Lever (@Dani_Lever) July 29, 2024A Facebook user with the handle "End Wokeness…

Trump Says Meta and Google Are Trying to Rig the Election. Here’s What He Means.
https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2024/07/30/trump-meta-and-google-trying-to-rig-election-n4931184

Jul 30, 2024 – Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp) was pretending that the assassination attempt on Trump did not even happen … Related: Facebook Acknowledges It 'Mistakenly' Censored Iconic Trump Assassination PhotoWhen I ran a search on Meta AI back on July … Meanwhile, we know (thanks to MRC Free Speech America) that Meta/Facebook has been interfering in elections for years.…