Bird flu has infected three more people from Washington state after they were exposed to poultry that tested positive for the virus, according to health authorities in Washington and in Oregon, where…

All Hallows Eve, the night of the year where the veil between the realms of the living and the dead is thinned. Druids dance around fires, entranced to commune with the dead. Ghosts and ghouls haunt the…

Eww!

Mark Cuban is a big Kamala backer, but everyone is noticing that something else has changed about the famous billionaire investor. Copyright © 2024 by Mark Dice. All Rights Reserved.

Wednesday night, the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the New York Yankees lost it. Down three games to one, the fired-up Yankees got off to a hot start, seizing a 5-0 lead at Yankee Stadium behind three early home runs and a razor-sharp pitching performance by ace Gerrit Cole. And then came the fifth inning. When it was over, the five-run lead had disintegrated and the game was tied. Two almost inexplicable errors — Aaron Judge dropping an easy fly ball in center field and shortstop Anthony Volpe short-hopping a throw to third base that Jazz Chisholm then dropped, costing an easy force-out — were then compounded by Cole, who pitched brilliantly into the seventh inning, inexplicably failing to cover first base on a routine grounder behind the bag. None of those runs should have scored; five did before Cole was finally able to get out of the inning. The Yankees never recovered, though they did momentarily retake the lead before dropping a 7-6 series-ending game to L.A. It was one of the most memorable chokes in sports history. I grew up a Yankees fan as a kid, mostly due to 1970s and early 1980s ace pitcher Ron “Louisiana Lightning” Guidry, but I haven’t cared one way or another in a long time. Wednesday’s seppuku made me angry not out of any partisan sentiment but rather because it was such an affront to the game. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Wednesday’s pre-Halloween meltdown by the Bronx Bombers wasn’t even the worst of its kind out there. And it’s funny, because Donald Trump is from New York City and Kamala Harris is likely to return to her most recent home in Los Angeles in January. The geography of political Halloween meltdowns seems to be the inverse of those abiding in the realm of baseball. But we are in the midst of Team Kamala’s meltdown. Like the Yankees after the fifth inning on Wednesday, it’s still possible for her to have survived the recent reversals, though … probably not likely. Let’s count the ways, shall we? 1. The Biden Sabotage’s Grand Finale Late word has it that Joe Biden has been banned from “helping” the Kamala ticket any further after he spent this week making good on Barack Obama’s old warning to “never underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.” And boy, did Biden do exactly that to Kamala. Biden had given indications he was going to blow up his vice president’s campaign a few times before, but when he called Trump’s supporters “garbage” in a witless response to comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s impolitic joke about Puerto Rico’s catastrophic landfill problem, all of the oxygen in the political room was sucked out and replaced by methane, or something smelling a lot like it. Away went Kamala’s closing argument. She can’t press the issue of Donald Trump as Hitler or use the typical screeching about abortion that has driven get-out-the-vote efforts in the past. Instead, she’s now reduced to reassuring Trump voters that she doesn’t agree that we’re garbage. The problem being that everybody knows she agrees with Biden on that score. She’s made statement after statement fitting in with Biden’s “garbage” narrative like that perfect jigsaw puzzle piece, and so her walkbacks sound like lies. The lights are on, and the roaches are scattering every which way in a vain attempt at avoiding detection. And here’s Kamala’s major donor Vinod Khosla, a San Francisco tech billionaire who once attempted to fence off a public beach near his house so that the unwashed masses would be prevented from soiling the air, sea, and ground near his presence, making sure his candidate can’t wriggle off the “garbage” hook… Garbage is an understatement for MAGA extremists. Biden suggests Trump supporters are ‘garbage’ after comic’s insult of Puerto Rico https://t.co/bcYgVgCnn7 — Vinod Khosla (@vkhosla) October 30, 2024 The extent to which Biden’s gaffe stitches Kamala up is almost bottomless. Her campaign has mostly consistent of a string of celebrity endorsements. It’s the most outwardly, openly elitist political campaign we’ve ever seen, and it has come at a time when the public increasingly believes that the ruling elite in places like Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are worse than garbage — because of that elite’s utter contempt for average Americans that has now been reinforced by Biden’s comment. The Democrats’ efforts to force the inclusion of non-citizens onto the voter rolls of competitive states hardly helps Kamala’s cause, of course. As are their efforts to downplay the spike in crime from illegal immigrants. Remember that the scolding of JD Vance over the cat-eating allegations plays as a repudiation of those constituents of Vance’s in southwest Ohio who reported that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were making off with pets and avian park residents. Then Vance was accosted by ABC News’ Martha Raddatz over his pointing out Tren de Aragua was taking over apartment complexes, and he destroyed her by asking just how many times that should happen before it isn’t acceptable. Nobody in the Democrat Party seems to understand that average Americans are very cognizant of how much they’re despised by the ruling elite that the Democrats dominate. As Harris is a bit player in her own presidential campaign that is run by members of this elite who lack this understanding, the whole thing plays like a house of cards. And Biden bumbled into it face first, intentionally or not. Biden then managed to bite three children in one day. Melissa demanded I include this in my commentary on that incident… …but William Blake is what came to mind. Then Biden’s wife showed up at a White House Halloween party wearing a panda costume, which… Some of you still dont know what Panda Eyes mean… If you think this was just a random costume choice for the Joe Biden White House Halloween Party, you still aren’t awake. pic.twitter.com/mr6CbQZBOv — Redpill Drifter (@RedpillDrifter) October 31, 2024 …We had a Spectacle episode this week talking about how left-wing elites can’t stop putting sexual perversion in our faces, and this plays into that when everybody already has their antennae up. The Bidens are far too vindictive to just stage a coup and get rid of them, and not expect they won’t make you pay. We’re seeing what that looks like. 2. The Fun Rule Cometh This builds off Thing #1, but it should have been obvious a week or so when Trump staged a publicity coup by serving as a fry cook and a drive-thru window guy at a suburban Philadelphia McDonald’s, it was an obvious red flag in front of Team Harris that they needed something in the earned media to match it. So they brought Liz Cheney around to some campaign events, including one with Maria Shriver. And the public got to note the strange confluence onstage in which a war pig Democrats have been trained to hate for 20 years was appearing with two wives of men who broke up their marriages by sleeping with the nanny. As I’ve written, the Fun Rule is a thing. It matters, and it can decide elections. When one candidate is handing out McDonald’s fries at the drive-thru and the other is subjecting her voters to Liz Cheney, it isn’t good. Then Trump went to Madison Square Garden for one of the most high-profile political rallies in American history, with 20,000 inside the building and another 47,000 outside, and all Team Harris could do was to screech about the German-American Bund holding a pro-Nazi event at Madison Square Garden in 1939, as though the two have any confluence at all. Then comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who as Dan Flynn noted is well-regarded in many circles, told his Puerto Rican jokes (which in a different venue probably would have been fine but in this one constituted a glitch), and Team Harris threw an even bigger fit. Which led to Biden’s “garbage” gaffe. All the while, the message to the public was that Team Trump has jokes, and Team Kamala has complaints. Guess which team wins that competition? Especially when the Democrats’ idea of humor was this: All of this is bad enough. But then Trump decided to capitalize on Biden’s “garbage” gaffe by riding around Green Bay in a decked-out MAGA garbage truck wearing an orange safety vest over his shirt and tie in a political stunt that trumped (yes, I did that on purpose) even the McDonald’s win. At a rally in Green Bay, he crushed it even more with a story for the ages: You can’t let your opponent have this much fun trolling you. Meanwhile Kamala decided to give an exceptionally boring “closing speech” on the Ellipse in Washington, which was a stupid place to hold that event not just because it paints her once again as the Washington elite candidate but also because — if we’re going to play the Madison Square Garden Nazi Rally game — that venue stirs echoes of the 1925 Ku Klux Klan rally on that same turf… Team Kamala claimed to have 75,000 attendees at her closing speech. Only 31,000 cellular devices were geotracked there. Which tells you that Harris is less of a big deal than the Klan, who by the way were also Democrats, was in their time. The Fun Rule is leading to a run-rule victory for Trump in this category. Mostly because Kamala’s handlers either don’t understand the concept or they’re too incompetent to recognize the value of morale among their own supporters. And maybe that’s because her handlers are the elite drones who share Biden’s mentality that Americans are garbage, and they hate their own voters as much as they do the people opposing them. 3. Saying No to Joe Last Friday Trump scored a massive coup doing the Joe Rogan podcast, sitting down for three hours and having a regular-guy conversation with the internet’s most viewed podcaster. It constituted a picture-perfect short-circuiting of the mainstream media’s narratives, and, worse for Team Kamala, it happened in front of a gigantic audience she’s already getting slaughtered with — namely Gen X to Gen Z men, most of whom are unmarried. In 2022 exit polling, single men were an R+7 demographic, but they’re a little worse than that now because Harris’ campaign has been so incompetent in messaging to them. Trump spent three hours speaking directly to that audience by doing Rogan’s podcast. He’s hit most of the major podcasts delivering to that market. Kamala has avoided them like the plague, but when Trump did Rogan, her team finally appeared to recognize the problem. But recognizing it and doing something about it are very different animals. Harris’ people said they’d appear on Rogan’s podcast, but for no more than an hour, and he would have to come to them. Rogan said no and instead scheduled an interview with JD Vance, who on Thursday sat down with him not for three hours but for four. Rogan touched on the Harris snub in a subsequent podcast with British comedian and social commentator Konstantin Kisin: Like the rest of the elements of the Scary Harris Halloween Meltdown, this bodes ill on multiple levels. Not only does it come off as a snub of a male podcast audience, it also comes off as yet another example of cowardice. After the terrible performances in friendly interviews and the catastrophic one in the interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, the public perceives that Harris isn’t capable of having a real conversation with a real human being, and she reinforced that by refusing to be interviewed by Rogan on terms everyone else is willing to submit to. The whole thing comes off as bizarre. A politician averse to airtime? We have a descriptor for such an animal: It’s an incompetent loser of a politician. The mainstream media perfume-bomb of July through September aside, Kamala has carried that stink since she dropped out of the Iowa caucuses in 2020, and it now covers her once again. 4. Foreign Voters, Foreign Campaign Workers A couple of weeks ago, it made a few headlines when the news broke that the Labour Party in the U.K. was sending operatives to the States to engage in campaign activity on behalf of Team Kamala, as though somehow this wouldn’t fuel perceptions — once again — that Americans aren’t good enough for her. Then, the Federalist broke the news Thursday that the Harris campaign is actively recruiting and deploying foreign nationals to do all kinds of campaign activities, including social media trolling, phone banking, and lots of other grunt work. Already, there are 19 states conducting active investigation into ActBlue smurfing, a terrible dirty trick in which lax security protocols at the Democrat fundraising platform allow fraudulent donations from suspected foreign sources to be “smurfed” onto the books as coming from ordinary donors. Couple that with countless Democrat efforts to enable foreigners, and especially illegal aliens, to vote in this election — an Obama judge in Virginia attempted to block that state from scrubbing a few thousand illegals from the voter rolls, only to be shot down by the Supreme Court, in one such example — and you have a quite evidence-based common perception that Democrats are trying to collude with foreign governments and individuals to influence the election results. Which not so long ago was a terribly unacceptable thing, wasn’t it? 5. The Suicide of the Legacy Corporate Media Then of course there’s the complete abandonment of any journalistic standards by the Democrat Propaganda Press in this election cycle, and the joining of the legacy corporate media with Team Harris. This has been coming for a long time, obviously. If you want to argue that it was sealed in place during or before Barack Obama’s time in office, I won’t argue with you. But given the steps taken to stop Trump that the old media organs have either championed, soft-pedaled, or outright ignored, depending on what Harris’ circumstances called for, it just seems more intense this time. So much so that here was CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell, pretending to conduct an objective newscast on Trump’s garbage-truck masterpiece troll-job: CBS's Norah O'Donnell opens the 'CBS Evening News' mad about Trump's garbage truck "stunt" and that people are "giving" Biden any "no grace" for calling Trump supporters "garbage" last night: "Both campaigns are locking their focus on the battleground states. Vice President… pic.twitter.com/qLAfynERaG — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) October 31, 2024 Then there was MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace, a former fake Republican who now says voting for the most incompetent leftist Democrat candidate of all time is an “emergency”… Something similarly ridiculous went on at CNN, though Scott Jennings set it aflame in grand style: Few things are as fun as watching Scott Jennings make an entire CNN panel fall into disarray over stating a simple fact. Jennings: "I actually do believe he, Harris, the Democratic Party, and most of their campaign do believe that half the country is garbage. They‘ve also said… pic.twitter.com/GAyXVoTGuj — Brandon Morse (@TheBrandonMorse) October 30, 2024 Let’s not forget Politico: "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters." That's a direct quote. That's what Kamala Harris's boss said. This is how Politico decided to report it: Do @JonLemire @alexanderburns @politico have an ounce of integrity? Will they correct this obvious falsehood? pic.twitter.com/B1ktGVpLfz — JD Vance (@JDVance) October 30, 2024 I could go on and on with examples of how in the tank legacy media organs have been for Harris. This should have been a cycle when they stood aside and stopped burning their credibility on behalf of this nugatory political machine that had clearly outlived its useful life. As Melissa wrote, and rightly so, the long-term effect of Harris imploding on the Democrats is actually a positive, because it sweeps away a lot of political dead wood and gives the Democrats a chance to remake themselves into something the public can stomach. The alphabet-soup networks and the old-guard newspapers could have done nothing and let that happen. But they can’t. Even when, for example, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times opted out of endorsing her, both papers were hit with high-profile resignations and industry condemnations. And then this happened: Anonymous TV exec: "If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they're not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form." https://t.co/zWiIqKYx1b — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) October 30, 2024 Exactly. You gambled, and while this isn’t over — just like the Yankees still had the ability to stage a resurgence and win that game late on Wednesday night, but failed — it sure doesn’t look like that gamble paid off. Nobody cares what happens to Kamala Harris. If this election goes like it’s now expected to go, by Wednesday she’ll be the scapegoat of all scapegoats. So will Biden. And both will richly deserve the opprobrium their people will heap on them. But what’s most at stake at this point is the credibility of our “garbage” ruling elite, in culture, politics, and economics, who went all in for this turkey of a candidate only to watch her melt down as October turned into November — and to melt down themselves right alongside her. If it happens that way, it’s wonderful. One can only hope there are long-ranging, ugly consequences for the people involved. READ MORE: Voters Prefer Warts-and-All Trump to Photoshopped Harris The Garbage Election The Brilliant McDonald Trump The post Five Quick Things: Kamala’s Yankee-Style Scary Halloween Meltdown appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In today’s media landscape, where personality-driven content often holds more influence than traditional mainstream media, Donald Trump has capitalized on the formerly untapped power of podcasts.  This past week, the former president and Sen. JD Vance both sat for hours-long tapings with UFC commentator-turned-podcaster Joe Rogan for his eponymous show — just the latest (and greatest) stop along the campaign’s digital tour. Trump and Vance also taped separate episodes of comedian Theo Von’s podcast This Past Weekend, and the former president has been a guest on the comedy podcast Flagrant and sat for interviews with livestreamer Adin Ross and wrestler and YouTube star Logan Paul earlier this year.  In a race that was defined in previous months by Vice President Kamala Harris’s stingy, scripted media appearances, the hours and hours of content provided by Trump and Vance in recent weeks is telling. They’re clearly eager to sit down for a conversation with various podcast hosts — and, by extension, for a conversation with the show’s audience — and they’re having fun while doing so.  The interviews touch on campaign issues, but they move beyond rehearsed stump speeches or canned policy responses. Harris tried to seem relatable by awkwardly sipping a beer with Stephen Colbert on late-night TV. By comparison, Trump and Vance haven’t touched a drop through their hours of interviews, but they’ve worked to present themselves as the candidates with whom voters feel they could have a beer (and a coherent conversation). The podcasts aren’t staged photo-ops; they’re genuine opportunities to speak to Americans, to give potential voters a glimpse into the men at the top of the Republican ticket.  “Engaging with podcasters like Joe Rogan allows people to see the human side of President Trump that the mainstream media deliberately won’t cover,” explained Trump campaign adviser Alex Bruesewitz. If it seems like Trump’s podcast appearances are geared more toward men than women — well, they are. This election has become a “gender gap” race, with polarization driving a sizeable wedge between men and women.  It’s been no secret that Kamala has struggled to win support from male voters, and she was recently caught on a hot mic whispering to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer that her campaign needs to “move ground” among men. Trump, however, has been moving ground for months.  In the 2020 election, Trump earned 44 percent of the female vote, up from 39 percent in 2016 — but lost ground in the male vote. When up against Hillary Clinton, Trump won male voters by 11 points. Against Biden, Trump only managed a 2-point lead with male voters.  Even before Biden exited the 2024 race and the gender split became a defining characteristic of the election, Trump’s campaign had set its sights on wooing male voters. And what better way to win over gettable male voters than to meet them where they are?  Trump’s podcast strategy has given his campaign access to Americans who won’t necessarily watch a presidential debate but who regularly listen to their favorite comedian. Low-propensity voters in a handful of states will determine the election — but only if they actually go to the polls. With key demographics — especially young, politically unaffiliated men — Trump’s fireside chats could deliver him the “bro vote,” as some have called it. Take Joe Rogan’s audience, for example. Eighty percent of his listeners are male, and more than half of the audience is made up of younger Millennials and older Zoomers. Politically, Rogan’s listeners are split fairly equally, with 32 percent identifying as Republicans, 27 percent as Democrats, and 35 percent as “independent or something else.” Combine Rogan’s listeners with the audiences of the Shawn Ryan Show and Theo Von’s This Past Weekend — the next most-listened-to podcasts in the nation after The Joe Rogan Experience — and Trump has the ear of millions of Americans.  And he’s not just reaching regular listeners of these shows — Rogan’s conversation with Trump has nearly 42 million views, eclipsing his still-unbelievable 18.1 million YouTube subscribers. With over 3 million YouTube subscribers, Von’s interview has been viewed 14 million times.  Not to be outdone, Kamala Harris has appeared on a few podcasts, too, including Alex Cooper’s raunchy Call Her Daddy podcast — Spotify’s biggest podcast after the Joe Rogan Experience and the most popular show among female listeners. Like Rogan’s show, the audience skews Millennial and Gen Z, though Cooper’s audience is heavily female and leans more progressive.  But even the Atlantic admitted that the vice president’s strategy is “the mirror image of the campaign choices that Trump made months ago.” And after rejecting Rogan’s invitation to tape an interview in studio, Harris won’t be moving ground with those male listeners. As the former president might say: nobody else does it quite like he does.  Mary Frances (Myler) Devlin is a contributing editor at The American Spectator. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022.  READ MORE by Mary Frances Devlin:  California Redefines ‘Infertility,’ Paves Way for More Abuses Mayor of Majority-Muslim City in Michigan Endorses Trump Can the GOP Win Back the Senate? The post Tuning In to the Gender Gap Election appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

You know the Harris campaign is in trouble when you see headlines like these: “What If Joe Biden was the better candidate all along?” “Forget Kamala Harris: Should Democrats Have Picked Michelle Obama?” “Even Dem Voters Show Signs of ‘Buyers Remorse’ Over Party’s Unprecedented Electoral Moves,” and “Buyer’s Remorse in the Democratic Party Over Harris’s Weak Performance.” Even before this election is over, many Democrats appear to be resigned to losing, and they are blaming their party’s decision to nominate Harris for the loss. I feel safe predicting that Trump will win. And it appears that many Democrats agree — with good cause. The Machiavellian plan the party bosses put in play was never intended to make Kamala the nominee. As I explain further on, the Democrat chiefs were aware that installing an untested and unpopular vice president into the presidential campaign was fraught with problems. Despite their best efforts to put on a happy face and remake her image, the signs are clear that the party bosses know they have failed.  Their postmortems have already begun — even before rigor mortis has set in. Their off-the-record statements make it obvious that the Democrats’ internal polls show that “it’s all over but the crying.” You don’t have to read their polls to see that Harris is losing in swing states; just look at the number of incumbent Democrats who are avoiding appearing with Harris in public. Their excuses are laughable — the political equivalent of “my dog ate my homework.” The fact is that they don’t want to be associated with a losing campaign. In the Senate race, imperiled Democrats Bob Casey Jr., Tammy Baldwin, Elissa Slotkin, Jon Tester, and Sherrod Brown are bragging about the good working relationship they had with Trump. For example, ads in Pennsylvania boast, “Casey bucked Biden to protect fracking and he sided with Trump to end NAFTA and put tariffs on China to stop them from cheating.” And in Wisconsin, we hear, “Tammy Baldwin got President Trump to sign her Made in America bill.” Do you really believe that they would be associating themselves with a candidate that Harris says is a Hitler if their polls didn’t show that the public is not buying that outrageous slur? Kamala’s campaign is so desperate that they violated a standard political axiom: “The first person to play the Nazi card or invoke Hitler loses the argument.”  So, what made the Democrat bosses think that installing Harris as the nominee would work? The seeds for this debacle were sown in January 2020, when the Democrat establishment feared that a fractious primary season with Bernie Sanders would result in a second Trump term. The pooh-bahs selected, or should I say settled for, Joe Biden despite serious misgivings about him. Remember Obama’s famous warning: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.” They knew Biden had difficulty expressing himself and was prone to gaffes. But COVID gave them a perfect excuse to keep him in the basement and out of public sight. And, given his reputation as a “moderate Democrat,” they could pass him off to the public as a centrist. In order to lock down Rep. Jim Clyburn’s support, Biden committed to choosing a Black female as his running mate. He ended up choosing Kamala, despite her miserable presidential run in which she had failed to win a single delegate before dropping out. Biden’s promise to Clyburn may have garnered him the nomination, but it boxed him in to choosing a flawed running mate. Back in 2020, it appeared that the bosses’ strategy worked: Biden and Harris achieved the victory over Trump that the Democrats so desperately wanted. However, like the dog that chased the car only to be unsure what to do with it, the Democrats quickly found that there were inherent weaknesses in the Biden–Harris team. The party bosses were caught off guard by the rapidity of Biden’s mental decline. And they were stunned when news organizations reported that Kamala was a difficult boss to work for and had lost a number of key staffers in quick succession. Staff complained to the press that Harris refused to study her briefing books, leaving her woefully unprepared about key issues. Even worse, when Harris was criticized in the press, she blamed her staff for being unprepared. When major news outlets ran feature articles about her ongoing staff problems, the Biden White House was frustrated and angry.  By late 2022, it was clear that a Biden reelection would be difficult. Democrat megadonors, along with Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, plus the Obamas decided to pull a silent coup and dump Biden from the ticket. They doubted he had the mental and physical capacity to make it through another campaign no matter how hard they tried to hide his infirmities. However, that posed a second dilemma. Kamala Harris was the most unpopular vice president in recent history. Plus, her inability to answer direct questions without veering into unintelligible “word salads” convinced the political kingmakers they had to keep her out of the presidential race. This was delicate, though. Many Black voters assumed she would be Biden’s heir apparent. On the other hand, Black political heavyweights such as Jeffries and Clyburn knew she would make a horrible candidate. How could Democrat leaders, who owed their positions to Black Americans, the most loyal bloc of voters for their candidates, explain that they were sidelining the vice president who could become the first Black female president? The Democrat bigwigs figured they could avoid this dilemma by nominating a female so popular with Black voters, as well as the public at large, that they would not resent the sidelining of Kamala. But who would fit that bill? I picked up on this in early 2023. I was confident that I had figured out what the cabal was trying to pull off and wrote an article in The American Spectator laying out the planned coup. I wrote, “The Democratic establishment is laying the groundwork to dump Joe Biden…. Which raises two questions: when will they stick the shiv into Biden? And how do they plan to deal with the ‘Kamala problem’?” The answer to when their coup would happen was mid-June 2024, after the primary season. To do so, they had to hide Joe’s cognitive decline so that no ambitious Democrat would take on the incumbent president. Once the primaries were finished, the plotters set in motion the effort to induce him into an early debate. Biden’s staff (most of whom are Obama people) convinced Biden that a debate would energize his campaign. It would be the earliest presidential debate in history. Why so early? They needed enough time between what they knew would be a disastrous debate and the Democratic convention in order to “introduce” their chosen candidate in a blitzkrieg of key states before any other candidate could get a campaign off the ground.  An unsuspecting Biden agreed to the debate. I can just picture the Obamas, Pelosi, Schumer, and Jeffries chortling about how they suckered Biden into the early debate. Think of the scene in Blazing Saddles where the locals talked the sheriff into arresting Mongo, and one of the townspeople shouted, “The fool says he’ll do it.” As for how they expected to handle the “Kamala problem,” my piece in The American Spectator last year explained: [T]here is one path the Democrats could take which would immediately dispel any notion of betrayal. If Michelle Obama announced she is running for president, any resentment among black voters about Harris’s treatment would evaporate. While some may think this is farfetched, a Michelle Obama candidacy makes sense for many reasons. Michelle is very popular with the Democrats’ base and is far more popular than Kamala. Michelle has recently raised her profile, speaking out on issues important to the Dems’ base. This is a striking shift from the low-profile Michelle has kept since she and Barack left the White House. I pointed to several high-visibility moves by Michelle: Founding “When We All Vote,” which promised to register over one million new voters; launching her podcast, which is based on her book The Light We Carry, with a 50-city tour promoting it; co-founding a nutrition brand that she said would “jumpstart what I hope will be a race to the top that will transform the entire food industry”; partnering with Walmart for a new line of clothing and a national campaign boasting, “You Can Shop This Michelle Obama-approved Designer’s Activewear at Walmart”; and scoring an Emmy nomination that was announced with great fanfare on all of the networks.  It is clear that the Obama team — along with Pelosi, Schumer, and Jeffries — counted on her being able to clear the field once Biden had been forced out. With Michelle’s high name recognition and the Obama campaign team already assembled, Michelle’s entry into the race would discourage all other candidates. Any challenger would have to launch their campaign from a standstill. This is where their plan ran off the tracks. Recall that when Biden announced he would not seek reelection, his letter did not endorse anyone for the nomination. After his letter was released, Pelosi, Schumer, Jeffries, and Barack Obama all released coordinated statements calling for a “process” to select a candidate. They did NOT endorse Kamala right away. Barack Obama’s statement said, “We will be navigating uncharted waters in the days ahead. But I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.” Of course, he fully hoped that the outstanding nominee would be Michelle. My hunch is that when Joe and Jill made the decision to end his campaign, they did not want to endorse Harris, particularly because she was part of the threat to invoke the 25th Amendment against him. Plus, Joe and Jill were still smoldering from Kamala’s attack calling him a racist in their earlier presidential debate. I imagine that they sat nursing their wounded pride with their family gathered around them, growing more and more resentful of being muscled out of the race. However, as much as they had hard feelings toward Kamala, they resented the Obamas’ continued demeaning of Joe even more, and they were concerned that they would seek to propel Michelle Obama to the nomination. To spite the Obamas and their crew, Joe and Jill decided they would derail the nascent Michelle Obama bandwagon — by endorsing Kamala. Doing that would drive Michelle out of the shadows and force her to openly challenge Kamala. That was never part of the Obamas’ game plan, and they folded. Joe and Jill were able to give a big middle finger to the Obamas.  That is how we ended up with Harris as the nominee, and her campaign that we see collapsing in flames — a Democrat Götterdämmerung that will install Trump back in the White House and also bring down many Democrats in legislative races at both the state and federal level. In the end, the bitter Bidens have gotten their revenge.  READ MORE:  There Is a Reason Michelle Obama Wasn’t the Nominee. This Is It. The Collapse of Kamala Harris The Bloodless Coup of Joe Biden Will Not Work Out Well for Democrats The post Stick the Fork In, the Harris Campaign Is Done appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.