Pun Salad

The prognosticators at PredictWise have raised Joe Biden's probability of being Our Next President to 2%, so he's back, baby:

• MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Slams Jeb Bush for Visiting a ‘Fake Abortion Clinic’? Wow, that's a grabber.

  That turned out to be News from Planet Rachel. On Planet Earth, Jeb was visiting the Carolina Pregnancy Center, which (indeed) does not perform abortions.

  Is the Carolina Pregnancy Center, as Rachel claimed, falsely "designed to look like they provide abortions to patients"? Well, you have to be pretty oblivious to get that impression. In fact, if you can't figure it out from their home page, you have to travel one mere mouseclick from there to learn that they "do not offer, recommend, or refer for abortions."

  Some people out there get their news from Rachel. Pity them.

• The NYT gives a tonguebath to its favored candidate: Bernie Sanders’s ‘100% Brooklyn’ Roots Are as Unshakable as His Accent.

  “I’m very proud of the fact that he speaks Brooklyn, because he’s not a phony, and that shows,” said Marty Alpert, who used to cheer for Mr. Sanders when he was on the track team at James Madison High School, where she is now on the alumni board.

  Unassailable logic there.

• At Reason, Nick Gillespie puts forth the question: Agree or Disagree?: Rand Paul Should Go Libertarian or Go Home. Noting that Paul has lowered his score on the Libertarian Purity Test:

  As a matter of fact, on a bunch of recent issues, Paul has been very close to other, more-consciously conservative Republican candidates than to any vision of libertarianism. His response to the murder of a San Francisco woman by an illegal immigrant, for instance, was to denounce "Sanctuary Cities" and support an onerous surveillance program. He's against the Iran deal. While he was quick to call for yanking the Confederate battle flag from public grounds, he was slow-to-never in challenging Donald Trump's moronic view of Mexican immigrants as mostly criminal or to issue a statement about the Supreme Court's ruling on gay marriage (he eventually said he wants to privatize marriage). Earlier in the year, he supported more defense spending than a couple of GOP hawks (albeit, Paul wanted to pay for the increases with offsets elsewhere in the budget).

  Big surprise: when you blur your branding enough to blend in with the other candidates, you don't give anyone any special reason to vote for you.

• Huck went on Fox & Friends and meandered extemporaneously:

  Huckabee said that Trump has “struck a nerve with people,” and “I’ll be honest with you, a lot of the things that he’s saying, those are things that, in many ways, I’ve been saying those for eight years, before he was a Republican. Things like talking about how China has cheated. Talking about how there is this Wall Street-to-Washington axis of power that grinds out jobs against Americans. I mean, these are themes that I’ve been talking about. But, let me say this, if you put as much air in my balloon, not just you, but if all the media, will pump the air in my balloon, as has been pumped into Donald Trump’s balloon, I’ll be leading the pack as well.”

  Thanks be to Huck for reminding us that there's more than one know-nothing demagogic populist on the GOP side.