"Imagine: a Rasmussen survey finds only 39% of likely U.S. voters think Biden is doing the job of president, while a majority (51%) say others are actually running the country, making decisions for Biden behind the scenes.

"Never before has the public concluded that the United States president is a puppet; it is a shocking suggestion.

"Such is the damage done by the calamity of Kabul. When the New York Times edges toward calling the president a liar, reporting that Biden made 'several misleading or false claims about the pullout and evacuation,' you know the landscape has shifted."

"Although we don't have much data on the effectiveness of masks on children under 12, we have tons of data on the effectiveness of vaccines on adults. And the science says they are highly effective.

"So, why don't these schools forcing children under 12 to wear masks also force teachers to get vaccinated? Why isn't Biden calling school superintendents and asking them to mandate vaccines for teachers?

"The answer is politics. The teachers unions oppose vaccine mandates for teachers, and so, schools are wary to impose them. That's why Biden is silent on the issue. He doesn't have permission from his political masters to raise this issue. That's just how scientific his approach is.

"There are no easy answers on what policies governments should adopt to deal with COVID. Lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates all come with trade-offs. In a country as big as the United States, it makes sense to let states and localities set policies that fit their communities and their values. What won't help anyone is for Biden to keep using COVID as a distraction from his disastrous handling of Afghanistan and a chance to score cheap political points against his potential 2024 rivals."

"With tens of thousands of Americans and allied Afghans still stranded in Afghanistan, President Joe Biden is facing a ferocious foreign-policy crisis. Or is he?

"'Facing' doesn't seem the right word. Biden's barely been seen since the Taliban began its march to Kabul, taking city after city before seizing the capital. Following four days of silence, the prez finally interrupted his Camp David vacation to address the nation Monday -- and promptly returned to Maryland.

"White House records show he's talked to just two foreign leaders in the last 10 days, Britain's Boris Johnson (it took him 36 hours to return the call!) and Germany's Angela Merkel. There's next to nothing on his schedule, yet he hasn't taken questions from the press all week, with the exception of a sit-down with a former Democratic operative. Even then, Biden bristled when ABC News' George Stephanopoulos stated the obvious: The Afghan withdrawal has been a debacle. ...

"Biden promised to bring America back. Instead, he's in hiding, fibbing or making little sense -- and at a time when he's needed most."

"After 20 years of effort, trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars spent and thousands of American servicemembers killed and wounded, it is important to do a post-mortem on our role in a country that deserves the moniker 'Graveyard of Empires.' One lesson that emerges is that the United States military has forgotten its mission to fight and win our nation's wars.

"'Who lost Afghanistan?' will be an interesting academic debate, but there are other questions that require immediate answers. How did we fight a 20-year war defending a country and end up with that country collapsing during our withdrawal? It defies logic. ...

"In war, momentum on the battlefield has a quality all its own. The Taliban have it. What we need to ask is, how did this end state happen and what lesson should we learn? In the end, it was a question of will. We wanted our efforts to succeed more than the Ghani government did. Prior administrations and their military advisers wanted Afghans to begin acting like Jeffersonian democrats. That seldom works and comes at a high cost. Each nation is unique, be it Iraq or Afghanistan. Our senior leaders, especially our generals, forgot this.

"The final lesson: in a war, any war, fight to win or don't sacrifice our treasure, whether our wealth or our most precious asset -- our sons and daughters. Many of our leaders, military and civilian, forgot that lesson, and that is why we are where we are today."

Read the entire article here.

"For Joe Biden, bad is quickly turning to worse.

"A day after the president tried to defend his decision to wave the white flag in Afghanistan and assure a jittery America his government could manage the fallout, the scope of the disaster came into sharper focus.

"An outbreak of the blame game is erupting among federal agencies trying to duck responsibility. Intelligence and defense officials are leaking that they warned the White House that withdrawing all American forces could lead to the sudden collapse of the Afghan military, but were ignored.

"Perhaps most worrisome for a Democrat in the White House is that the usual media handmaidens are aggressively poking holes in Biden's preposterous assurances instead of defending him."

"President Biden arrived in office with the southern border secure and Afghanistan in a state of fragile equilibrium.

"Eight months later, the border continues to be deluged with migrants overwhelming our capacity to properly house and process them, and we are evacuating our personnel from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, overrun by desperate Afghans fleeing the Taliban.

"The crisis at the border and the stunningly swift defeat in Afghanistan are entirely on Biden. He took sustainable situations and overturned them out of ideological fixity and fantastical wishful thinking.

"The outcomes were utterly predictable. Indeed, anyone who knew anything about the border or Afghanistan warned what would happen.

"The debacles haven't been the product of forces beyond Biden's control; events didn't take a hand, he did. These are man-made disasters."

"There's plenty of blame to go around for the 2-year debacle in Afghanistan -- enough to fill a library of books. Perhaps the effort to rebuild the country was doomed from the start. But our abandonment of the Afghans who helped us, counted on us, staked their lives on us, is a final, gratuitous shame that we could have avoided. The Biden administration failed to heed the warnings on Afghanistan, failed to act with urgency -- and and its failure has left tens of thousands of Afghans to a terrible fate. This betrayal will live in infamy. The burden of shame falls on President Joe Biden."

"AUSTIN, Texas -- The city of Laredo, Texas, has refused to take in migrants who have been bused in from elsewhere on the border after discovering 40% of them tested positive for the coronavirus, according to two local government officials.

"'That was very high,' Laredo Mayor Pete Saenz said in an interview, referring to the infection rate among migrants dropped off by the Border Patrol last week. Laredo health authority, Dr. Victor Trevino, confirmed the numbers.

"The 40% infection rate is the highest known positivity rate along the U.S.-Mexico border. Last week, McAllen, Texas, reported a 15% positivity rate among migrants released from custody."

"The California Secretary of State's Office has made downloading mail ballots from home possible for the recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom. The state legislature also passed a measure to send out mail ballots to every registered voter regardless if they asked for one or not.

"The methods being employed by the state add to concerns already raised by a group that brought up potential voter fraud issues during the 2020 general election.

"The Election Integrity Project California (EIPCa), a nonpartisan nonprofit organization advocating for the right of every eligible citizen to vote in California, purchased VoteCal voter registration and voting history files and after auditing them raised concerns about California's election system. The group published a list of questionable mail ballots sent out during the 2020 general election to deceased Californians and those no longer living in California. It also learned that 13 California counties have more registered voters than eligible citizens."

Read the entire article here.

"State legislatures in six states limited their governors' emergency powers wielded during the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing executives have overextended their authority.

"As of June 2021, lawmakers in 46 states have introduced legislation stripping governors of certain emergency powers, according to USA Today. Legislatures justified their actions as necessary to restore a balance between the branches of state government, pointing to examples of executive overreach and the centralization of power in the hands of governors.

"While in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Michigan Republican lawmakers have curtailed the emergency powers of Democrat governors, the cases of legislatures limiting executive authority in New York, Ohio, and Idaho demonstrate that power struggles between lawmakers and governors are not necessarily partisan."

Read the entire article here.