Morning Note

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough exposed how out of touch he is on Thursday, appearing visibly shocked to learn how high the cost of butter has gotten over the last four years.

“A few weeks ago… somebody who was going to be voting for Kamala Harris came up to me and said ‘oh my God, Trump’s going to win… I go to the grocery store [and] butter is over three dollars’” the GOP congressman-turned-Democrat mouthpiece said.

“It’s seven dollars… I’m just saying it’s seven,” Scarborough’s wife and co-host Mika Brzezinski interrupted.

“Butter is seven dollars… What, is it framed in gold?” Scarborough replied incredulously, with a look of shock on his face.

The cost of living was one of American voters’ top issues this election, and Morning Joe’s overt unawareness of the problem’s extent symbolizes the DNC’s broad refusal to try to understand why its program is so unpopular. Having a remote clue of what’s happening in the country would have made Donald Trump’s victory easier for Scarborough to comprehend.

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Biden publicist Karine Jean-Pierre deflected blame for Kamala Harris’s electoral defeat away from the president on Thursday, fumbling her words during the White House press gathering and trying to filibuster her way to the briefing’s end.

“President Biden believes that he made the right decision when he decided to step aside — uh — and — uh — immediately endorsed the Vice President and you saw the party come behind her, support her, and he believed it was the right thing for the American people,” she said. “He was very proud and when he made that decision to hand over the torch — to hand over the torch, pass the torch to the vice president, he believed it was the right decision to make at that time. Uh — he believed that she was ready.”

Jean-Pierre went on to attribute the Democrat’s loss to COVID, citing “global headwinds because of the COVID-19 pandemic” as a reason for Harris’s overwhelming defeat.

Jean-Pierre has yet to announce plans to seek new employment.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blamed sexism for Donald Trump’s reelection on Thursday while warning that the next four years will be a “scary” time in America under “the fascist” Donald Trump.

“If Kamala Harris was Tom Harris, we may have a different result today,” she said in an Instagram video. “[Now] we will have to deal with the consequences for the rest of our lives.”

The Democrats’ landslide loss was not a result of race, sex, xenophobia, or bigotry. It was because of the party’s ineptitude. Four years of economic hardship, an open border, feeble foreign policy, and perpetual condescending rhetoric drove voters away from the Biden-Harris agenda because it failed to meet their basic needs.

The candidates’ identities were not relevant.

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Despite election night outlooks suggesting Democrats would flip the House of Representatives, the GOP is on track to claim the majority and complete its electoral sweep. 

As of early Friday, Democrats would need to win 19 of the 25 remaining uncalled Congressional races to win a House majority and maintain a semblance of government power.

Republicans are also eyeing a larger Senate majority than expected, currently guaranteed to hold at least 53 seats and threatening to claim two more. The races in Arizona and Nevada have yet to be called, and both GOP candidates are reportedly within two percentage points of the lead.

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene slammed critics on Thursday who called her a “radical, fringe extremist,” triumphantly declaring that Tuesday’s election mandated the MAGA movement as “mainstream America.”

“They’ve attacked me continuously, called me radical, fringe extremists,” the Georgia representative said during an appearance on Real America’s Voice. “You know what they found out today? President Trump will have over 5 million of the popular vote ahead of Kamala Harris. He will, by the time this is done, likely have 312 electoral college votes. The message that was shot across the bow is, guess what? The American people, the voters that voted for Trump overwhelmingly, they are MTG. MTG is not radical or extreme. She’s mainstream America.”

Recent Democrat attempts to paint Republican leaders and voters as demented radicals failed miserably, leading to Trump securing the largest Republican electoral college victory since 1988.

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Outgoing Senator Bob Casey refused to concede his race to Senator-elect Dave McCormick on Thursday despite a consensus of news outlets calling the pivotal contest in the latter’s favor.

“There are tens of thousands of ballots across the Commonwealth still to count, which includes provisional ballots, military and overseas ballots, and mail ballots,” a Casey spokesman said after the senator’s defeat was announced. “This race is within half a point and cannot be called while the votes of thousands of Pennsylvanians are still being counted.”

Casey’s denialism is rich given his history of opposing the questioning of election results. “Anyone who’s an election denier should not serve in any office, from local office to federal office,” he reportedly said in January.

According to the Associated Press, McCormick leads Casey by over 30,000 votes with over 98% of tallies counted.

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Handfuls of American universities reportedly canceled classes following Donald Trump’s reelection, replacing them with “safe spaces” for students to “recover” from the neoliberal agenda’s crushing defeat.

Georgetown University, for example, drew mockery after reportedly inviting students to a "self-care suite" to recover from the stress of the 2024 presidential election. 

The university offered students treats like milk and cookies and hot cocoa as well as Lego toys and "Coloring and Mindfulness Exercises" to help them escape the election results.

Other institutions like Harvard, Oregon, Michigan, and Virginia Tech took similar measures.

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Eric Adams announced his mayoral administration’s plans to stop supplying illegal immigrants in city shelters with prepaid debit cards on Thursday, ending the program that allocated millions of welfare dollars to help noncitizens pay for things Americans have to fund themselves.

“As we move towards more competitive contracting for asylum seeker programs, we have chosen not to renew the emergency contract for this pilot program once the one-year term concludes,” Adams’s office said in a statement.

The program reportedly distributed preloaded Mastercards to asylum seekers at hotel-turned-shelters with a family of four receiving around $350 a week to cover groceries and baby supplies.

Americans do not receive $350 weekly government grocery subsidies.

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South Carolina authorities warned residents on Thursday to lock their doors and windows after over 40 monkeys escaped from a local research facility.

The primates, said to be "very young females weighing approximately 6-7 lbs," reportedly broke loose from a Beaufort County Alpha Genesis facility and are yet to be recaptured.

Rest assured that the people in charge are committing every resource necessary to retrieve the naughty Simians. Alpha Genesis is reportedly using sophisticated traps and thermal imaging cameras to locate the band of fugitives.

No one knows the mission behind the monkeys’ jailbreak, if one exists.

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Something about Kamala Harris’s concession speech felt off.

It wasn’t her language; the vice president said roughly what you’d expect of someone in her position. It was the vibe.

The media billed the address as the second coming of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 speech after her electoral defeat, but the two spectacles were completely dissimilar. As a former first lady, senator, and secretary of state, Clinton carried an aura that at least felt grand, leading most listeners, even the former Democrat candidate’s detractors, to conclude that she would at a minimum remain somewhat pertinent in America’s public discourse. 

The same cannot be said for the vice president.

No one had ever heard of Harris until 2018 when she became an establishment darling by harassing Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings. The then-senator’s attempt to capitalize on her newfound stardom fell flat, however, when her subsequent presidential campaign failed so miserably that she ran out of money and dropped out before the first primary.

Then, despite being the past target of Harris’s thinly veiled racism allegations, Joe Biden tapped the Californian as his running mate because, as Biden repeatedly said, he wanted “a woman to be vice president.”

A qualified woman? A woman who would be an effective president? No. Just “a woman.”

Next, Harris’s vice presidency went as one would expect for any affirmative action hire thrust into a position for which she was deeply unprepared: disastrously. Harris oversaw the federal government’s biggest dereliction of duty in history at the southern border, unpromptedly baited Russia into invading Ukraine, and perpetually humiliated herself with mind-numbing media appearances that portrayed her as a babbling and incoherent halfwit.

Kamala’s performance as vice president made it abundantly clear that she was not destined for a promotion to the Oval Office, and despite her party’s 100-day push to brainwash the country into believing otherwise, she will not receive one. 

She’ll also no longer receive media inquiries, celebrity treatment, or any attention when she weighs in on the country’s biggest issues. No one will care.

With Harris’s impromptu presidential bid over, some Democrats will be surprised to see how quickly she reverts to inconsequential obscurity. They shouldn’t be. Harris isn’t suddenly returning to being irrelevant. She was never really relevant in the first place.