January 18, 2025

I’M BEGINNING TO AGREE: Mark Steyn:It’s Paedos All the Way Down.

Like, this is the core constituency of leftist/globalist politics. Personally, my solutions draw on Curtis LeMay and Arthur Harris.

Posted at 11:49 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Just do it.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

#JOURNALISM:

You can’t despise these people enough.

Posted at 6:56 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THIS IS NO ACCIDENT, BUT BY DESIGN. But Trump should use it as an excuse to go Full Millei. Never let a crisis go to waste!

Posted at 3:21 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WITH TIK TOK DUE TO SHUT DOWN TOMORROW, here’s one last hurrah from InstaPundit’s Contributing TikTok Editor, Meredith Mochel. She’s been the source of pretty much all the TikToks I’ve posted over the years.

@dukegomez7

I’m over it now guys

♬ original sound – Duke Gomez

The Normies have had enough.

Posted at 3:18 pm by Glenn Reynolds

AG MERRICK GARLAND GETS A ROUSING SENDOFF IN VIDEO THAT COULD BE OF ASSISTANCE TO TRUMP & PAM BONDI:

Related: Lessons About the Civil Service and Political Appointees.

The first Trump administration (“Trump I”) was chronically frustrated by the difficulties it had staffing the government with loyal employees. As a result, disloyal civil servants exploited the opportunity to build up an impressive track record materially harming the operational integrity of Trump I. There are examples aplenty of how, but for this essay, a few James Sherk documented should suffice:

  • Career employees in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division refused to prosecute cases they ideologically disagreed with, even when the facts showed clear legal violations. This included Civil Rights Division career staff refusing to work on cases charging Yale University for racial discrimination against Asian-Americans and protecting nurses from being forced to participate in abortions.
  • Career staff at the Department of Education assigned to work on politically sensitive regulations, including the Title IX due process regulations, would either produce legally unusable drafts that would never withstand judicial review or drafts that significantly diverged from the Department’s policy goals. As a result, political appointees had to draft the regulations primarily by themselves.
  • Department of Health and Human Services career staff circumvented President Trump’s hiring freeze issued soon after taking office by crossing out new hires’ start dates on their hiring paperwork. Staff used Sharpie pens to retroactively adjust the start dates to January 19, 2017—the day before President Trump took office.
  • Career lawyers at the National Labor Relations Board routinely gave political appointees misleading legal analyses. They would only cite cases supporting their preferred position and omit contrary precedents. Some career lawyers refused to draft documents whose positions they disagreed with.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

YOU’RE NEVER ALONE WITH A SCHIZOPHRENIC: The Biden Admin Forced Gas and Coal Plants To Embrace Carbon Capture—Then Privately Told Climate Activists To Fight It.

Last April, the Biden administration finalized environmental rules that effectively force gas and coal plants to adopt carbon capture—an expensive and controversial process in which emissions are stored underground—or risk shutting down. Months later, in November, a senior Biden EPA official told activists to “keep fighting” an ExxonMobil carbon capture project in Texas, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

The comments were made by Earthea Nance, who leads the EPA’s Region 6 office, at a meeting held on Nov. 18 in Jefferson County, Texas, according to contemporaneous notes from a meeting attendee reviewed by the Free Beacon. And they came in response to environmentalists’ protests regarding ExxonMobil’s proposed Rose Carbon Capture and Storage Project, which the EPA is tasked with permitting.

Nance’s comments are significant because the Biden administration forced gas and coal plants to embrace carbon capture in order to lower their overall emissions to acceptable levels under the EPA’s strict regulations—and companies who don’t comply with the regulations face hefty fines. According to the EPA, carbon capture and storage is a “key part” of the Biden-Harris administration’s goal to reach a net-zero emissions economy by 2050 and Congress earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars to the EPA and Department of Energy to support such projects.

Related: A Farewell to Bidenomics—The Era of Economic Mismanagement Ends.

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

HMM: A chain reaction: HIV vaccines can lead to antibodies against antibodies. “When they carried out the experiments on blood from animals that had received multiple doses of an experimental HIV vaccine, they discovered something surprising: some of the antibodies were not binding directly to the HIV viral antigen, but to immune molecules on its surface. . . . In a series of follow-up experiments on HIV-vaccinated animals, Brown, Ward, and their colleagues showed that these kinds of anti-immune complex antibodies often emerge between the second and third administrations of a vaccine.”

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: The Total Collapse of the Washington Post.

It makes complete sense that the Washington Post is the paper that is collapsing in America today. If there is one sentiment uniting Americans right now, it is that the culture of woke repression that has reigned supreme for so many years — keeping Americans on edge and fearful of being canceled by the mob — has come to an end. People want more freedom of speech, open spaces to consider policy, and a richer diversity of thought.

The paper where woke writers scream “Comply!” to their colleagues and readers no longer has any business being one of the country’s top newspapers.

*****

The Post’s staffers are now acknowledging the total collapse of their publication. On Tuesday night, more than 400 Post journalists sent a letter to Bezos imploring him to intervene in the crisis.

Their foremost concern was their lack of confidence in Will Lewis, who previously achieved enormous success as chief executive of Dow Jones & Company and publisher of Wall Street Journal, only to encounter disdain and racial grievance as CEO of the Post.

Several Post reporters, alongside leaking the letter, dished anonymously to NPR that they were suspicious that Bezos picked Lewis for the position “because of his ease in handling conservative figures.” It was as though these staffers believed any association with conservatism would taint their organization. The staffers also communicated to NPR that there was backlash at the Post to Bezos as well because “he has publicly warmed up to President-elect Donald Trump.”

This ideological puritanism, which is exactly what put the Post in this position in the first place, will continue to run it into the ground.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN: NYT ‘Journalists’ Write Tell-All ‘Exposing’ the Biden White House Cover-Up They Fully Participated In.

After actively engaging in a coverup of Biden’s cognitive state — the brave, intrepid journalists at NYT are out with a tell-all piece on the coverup — blaming Biden’s inner circle, and taking zero responsibility themselves.

Everything they lied about for years, they now admit is true — Biden’s “walkers” to hide his shuffle, the short stairs to AF1, his frequent falls, cognitive lapses, teleprompter woes, needing naps for debate prep — everything.

Legacy media is attempting to rewrite history and play the hapless victim of a White House inner circle that managed to dupe them for four years, in a vain attempt to salvage their tattered reputations and cratered credibility.

This is the latest installment of that strategy.

Here’s the New York Times’ article from yesterday: How Biden’s Inner Circle Protected a Faltering President.

They rearranged meetings to make sure Mr. Biden was in a better mood — a strategy one person close to him described as how aides should handle any president. At times, they delayed sharing information with him, including negative polling data, as they debated the best way to frame it. They surrounded him with aides when he walked from the White House to the waiting presidential helicopter on the South Lawn so that news cameras could not capture his awkward bearing.

They had Mr. Biden use a teleprompter for even small fund-raisers in private homes, alarming donors, who were asked to provide questions beforehand. They came up with replacing the grand steps that presidents use to board Air Force One with a shorter set that led directly into the belly of the plane. They chastised White House correspondents for coverage of the president’s age. They hand-delivered memos to Mr. Biden describing social media posts the campaign staff had persuaded allies to write that pushed back on negative articles and polls.

Mr. Biden’s fumbles continued this week. In announcing a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas on Wednesday he confused the emir of Kuwait with the emir of Qatar and said Hezbollah rather than Hamas was responsible for the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. He also referred to his national security adviser as “Secretary Jake Sullivan” before catching himself.

Six key people protected the president.

No, it was many more people than that:

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

AMERICA BRACES FOR AN AVALANCHE OF TRUMP EXECUTIVE ORDERS ON DAY ONE:

Cold weather is the official reason for moving the ceremony from outside to in, and it seems true — the seventy-eight-year-old president-elect may wish to avoid the fate of his predecessor William Henry Harrison — although there’s plenty of speculation that security is the real factor. The Donald, in benevolent king mode, also didn’t want the poor horses to freeze to death on his big day. It’s funny what goes on in that very famous orange head.

Trump will then make an appearance at the Capitol One Arena, for the fans, before going on to the White House so that he can, as he promised, jokingly yet seriously last year, be a dictator for one day. He will do this by signing as many as 100 executive orders. It would be very Donald to have added a few more directives just so he can reach the nice round century. Expect the growing legion of Trump loyalists to begin a chorus in the media: he’s done more in one day than most presidents do in their first 100. We’re so back, et cetera, ad infinitum.

Trump has promised from day one to live up to his day one promises and he’s made quite a few since 2020.  Reporters usually talk about a “flurry” of presidential executive orders. This will be more like an “avalanche” or a “barrage” of commander-in-chiefing. The Republican senator John Barrasso called it a “blizzard” and a “shock and awe” approach.

No word yet on how many Constitutional amendments he’ll make via Twitter as well:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Bombshell Report Reveals New Juicy Details About How Biden Was Forced To Drop Out.

From the start, there was little enthusiasm among Democrats for Biden to seek a second term. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer faced the task of persuading the president to step aside. Schumer’s challenge became urgent after Biden’s disastrous showing in the debate and his subsequent “COVID diagnosis” during a Nevada campaign stop, both of which exacerbated concerns about his fitness for office. Biden’s frequent moments of forgetfulness and erratic behavior had already raised red flags, and by this point, the report reveals that Democratic senators were nearly unanimous in their opposition to his re-election bid. In fact, Schumer privately estimated that only five senators would support Biden staying on the ticket, and Biden’s campaign didn’t think he had much of a shot, either.

“If there were a secret ballot among Democratic senators, Mr. Schumer would tell the president, no more than five would say he should continue running,” the New York Times explains. “Mr. Biden’s own pollsters assessed that he had about a 5 percent chance of prevailing against Donald J. Trump, Mr. Schumer would tell him — information that was apparently news to the president. And if the president refused to step aside, the senator would argue, the consequences for Democrats and Mr. Biden’s own legacy after a half-century of public service would be catastrophic.”

The tipping point came as other prominent Democrats began taking action. Rep. Jamie Raskin privately urged Biden not to run, though he eventually went public after being ignored. Behind the scenes, former President Barack Obama played a pivotal role, counseling Biden to step down without taking a visible role in the effort. Meanwhile, Biden’s humiliating NATO press conference underscored his inability to address mounting concerns about his competence.

According to the report, the breaking point for Biden came during a candid meeting with Schumer at the president’s Rehoboth Beach home. Schumer laid out the brutal truth: Biden’s re-election bid lacked support, his poll numbers were catastrophic, and his ability to defeat Trump was in serious doubt.

“If you run and you lose to Trump, and we lose the Senate, and we don’t get back the House, that 50 years of amazing, beautiful work goes out the window,” Schumer told him. “But worse — you go down in American history as one of the darkest figures.”

Related: Mike Johnson: Here’s When I Knew Biden Wasn’t Running Anything.

When President Biden met with congressional leaders in the West Wing in January to negotiate a Ukraine funding deal, he spoke so softly at times that some participants struggled to hear him, according to five people familiar with the meeting. He read from notes to make obvious points, paused for extended periods and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out.

In a February one-on-one chat in the Oval Office with House Speaker Mike Johnson, the president said a recent policy change by his administration that jeopardizes some big energy projects was just a study, according to six people told at the time about what Johnson said had happened. Johnson worried the president’s memory had slipped about the details of his own policy.

In one sense, it’s good to see Johnson speak publicly about this. If one reads the WSJ report from June carefully, this anecdote and others came through anonymous sources. At one point, reporters note that they spoke with “more than 45 people over several months,” but those sources who warned that Biden had become functionally incompetent remained anonymous. The only person of note to go on the record about Biden’s cognitive decline was Kevin McCarthy, who’d been removed as Speaker and had already left Congress, and had no way to press the issue other than talking to the press.

Johnson, however, was and is Speaker of the House, and someone in position to take action if a president seems to be incapacitated or manipulated by others. And that’s the biggest question this raises: why didn’t Johnson take action? As Speaker, Johnson could have alerted the House to this potential incapacitation, formed a select committee to investigate it, and force White House aides and Cabinet officials to testify under oath to their interactions with Biden.

Indeed. We know why the DNC-MSM circled the wagons to protect their boss. Why on earth would Johnson? As Ed Morrissey writes, “And this is why we probably will never get a full accounting of the Biden fraud and cover-up. Too many people participated in it, explicitly or implicitly, to the extent that full exposure will burn everyone. It will be a replay of Murder On the Orient Express.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll