December 4, 2024

OPEN THREAD: Please don’t stop the music.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

RIP: Marshall Brickman, Annie Hall and Manhattan co-writer who helped reinvent Woody Allen.

Born of multiple rewrites and a free-ranging shoot, Annie Hall assumed haphazard shape in the edit suite, as Brickman later recalled: “When I saw the rough cut, I thought it terrible, completely unsalvageable. It rambled and was tangential and just… endless.”

Yet the more incisive 93-minute release version expanded comedy’s horizons, principally by allowing for the prospect of romantic failure and disillusionment. Critics were wowed; cinemagoers stirred to the extent that it remained Allen’s biggest hit for the next 34 years. With the director-star a no-show at the 1978 Oscars, Brickman duly collected a screenplay gong, one of four wins on the night, including Best Picture.

Manhattan drew from a comparable well of personal experience, its protagonist a gagman who has quit television to try and pen the great American novel. Even in 1979, the relationship between the 42-year-old hero and a 17-year-old schoolgirl raised eyebrows – Pauline Kael wondered: “What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?” – but the movie’s lustrous look seduced critics, audiences and awards voters alike.

As John Podhoretz wrote in the Weekly Standard in his 2006 review of Allen’s Match Point, “‘The heart wants what it wants,’ Allen notoriously said after his girlfriend Mia Farrow found nude pictures of her 17-year-old daughter–the same girl who was a sister to the two children he had with Farrow–in his dresser drawer in 1992. Nobody, not even Farrow, had any right to be surprised by Allen’s shrugging dismissal of the moral opprobrium that greeted his conduct. He had already made it clear through his art that he did not believe that there were any consequences for engaging in immoral behavior.”

Posted at 9:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

VDH: Yes, Mexico Knows Exactly What It Is Doing.

In La Raza literature of the past, and in Mexico’s chauvinistic moments, illegal immigration was envisioned as the ironic response to the ancient “theft’ of the American Southwest. The problem with that thesis is that most Mexicans, as polls have shown, would prefer to live in an American Southwest than a Mexican south.

And it is also increasingly likely that Mexican-Americans will be more prone to vote for border security than open borders—again further proof that their self-interest as patriotic Americans trumps Mexico’s cynical attempts to use them as political pawns. If those trends continue, the American Left and the Mexican government may well lobby for a secure border, in fear they are only augmenting a growing MAGA constituency.

In sum, Mexico understands the myriad ways that an open border, the destruction of U.S. immigration law, illegal immigration, and emigration of millions of its own citizens to America are entirely in its own interests and so hopes to see the continuation of the Biden-Harris-Mayorkas appeasement.

But, given the huge numbers of human trafficking, the chaos, the drugs, the violence, and the financial costs of supporting millions, an open border is increasingly seen by Americans as not to their advantage—as we saw in the recent Trump victory. That reality, not the rhetoric of Mexican presidents, will govern all future negotiations—a truth that President Sheinbaum should digest before she sounds off about a border that she knows her country has done so much to deliberately destroy—and to America’s detriment.

It’s VDH, so read the whole thing.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

ENEMIES FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC.

Posted at 8:53 pm by Glenn Reynolds

YES.

Posted at 8:52 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ON THIS DAY: Led Zeppelin made the decision to break up following the death of drummer John Bonham.

[44] years ago today — on Dec. 4, 1980 — Led Zeppelin made the difficult decision to break up, two months after the death of drummer John Bonham.

The band was supposed to begin an extensive tour in the fall of 1980 when Bonham passed away.  The tour was canceled and rumors swirled about whether the band would continue on with a new drummer.

However, the surviving members ultimately decided that it was not right to continue with someone else playing drums.

“We wish it to be known, that the loss of our dear friend and the deep respect we have for his family, together with the deep sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were.”

Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones have occasionally worked and recorded together, but reunions of all three have been few and far between.

Related: The Hammer of the Gods: The First Critical Biography of Led Zeppelin Finally Available on the Kindle.

My latest, on Stephen Davis’ somewhat infamous 1985 look at Zeppelin’s now infamous very much non-#metoo-approved debauchery, over at Ed Driscoll.com.

Posted at 8:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

BYRON YORK: The damage Biden has done.

Joe Biden will be president for the next 47 days. That’s enough to make anyone nervous. The 82-year-old president had to be forced, by his own party, to withdraw from the 2024 race because he is no longer mentally and physically up to the job. But, of course, he is still in the job. With a world full of dangerous conflicts, that Biden is in charge for 47 more days, especially with Vice President Kamala Harris in a deep post-defeat funk, is deeply worrisome.

The immediate problem will end on Jan. 20, 2025, when Biden leaves office. But the United States, and the Democratic Party, will be dealing with the damage Biden leaves behind for years. There is a reason voters, for 40 years, were never interested in electing the openly ambitious Biden president of the U.S. — until the bizarre circumstances of the 2020 election. They knew for decades that he would not be a good president. And he has proven them right.

Leave the damage Biden has done to the U.S. — the massive migrant influx, the decline in the standard of living for millions of people, and the chaos abroad — for another day. Right now, a new analysis shows the damage Biden has done to his party, and it is immense.

Exit polls show that in the 2024 presidential election, 35% of voters identified as Republicans, while 34% identified as independents, and 31% identified as Democrats. In addition to a big jump in the number of self-identified independents, the news is that in 2024, Democrats slipped to third place in party ID.

“For the first time since the Watergate era, independents surpassed one of the major political parties to rank second in terms of party identification,” writes Republican pollster David Winston, who has just finished an in-depth study of the election results. “In this presidential election, the percentage of the electorate that self-identified as Democrats came in behind independents. … This means that, in this election, Democrats are de facto more a third party than a dominant party in the electorate.”

Flashback: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

 

ESQUIRE DELETES FALSE GEORGE BUSH PARDON STORY AFTER LIBERAL COLUMNIST MAKES MAJOR ERROR:

Esquire writer told people to ‘shut the f— up’ about Hunter Biden pardon by comparing to non-existent Bush pardon of his son Neil.

Esquire has deleted a column that used a false claim about former President George H.W. Bush as the basis to justify President Biden’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter.

In a Tuesday column, liberal pundit Charles P. Pierce claimed that Hunter Biden was not the first presidential son caught up in controversy, asking readers, “Anybody Remember Neil Bush?”

“Nobody defines Poppy Bush’s presidency by his son’s struggles or the pardons he issued on his way out of the White House. The moral: Shut the f— up about Hunter Biden, please,” he wrote in the sub-headline.

“[The] lucky American businessman[‘s]… father exercised his unlimited constitutional power of clemency to pardon the Lucky American Businessman for all that S&L business way back when. The president’s name was George H.W. Bush. The Lucky American Businessman was his son, Neil,” Pierce continued.

The only problem? Bush never pardoned his son.

The men’s magazine later added an editor’s note to the column: “An earlier version stated incorrectly that George H.W. Bush gave a presidential pardon to his son, Neil Bush. Esquire regrets the error.”

Sometime later, the piece was removed. The link now takes readers to a page that says, “This Column is No Longer Available.”

The page also includes a second editor’s note that notes the column was “removed due to an error” and “Esquire regrets the mistake.”

“The internet proved to be a cruel mistress,” RedState’s Bob Hoge adds:

Flashback: “If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.”

—Charles Pierce, the Boston Globe, January 5, 2003.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

NO SECRETS ANYMORE:

Posted at 8:10 pm by Glenn Reynolds

TRUMP SELECTS NEW NASA ADMINISTRATOR. “President-elect Donald Trump has selected Jared Isaacman, a billionaire who has commanded two SpaceX commercial spaceflights, as his choice to be the next administrator of NASA.”

A friend comments: “I heard him speak at the ISDC last year. Right attitudes, and has had experience with the DoD procurement system. But he will need a strong Deputy Administrator who knows the internal politics of NASA very well and knows where the bodies are buried.” I have a few potential names in mind, but we’ll see.

Posted at 8:01 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HMM: Security Camera Captures Targeted Murder of United Healthcare CEO On a New York Sidewalk. “What’s also unusual — and a fact most corporate media accounts have missed — is the fact that the shooter used a suppressed pistol in the shooting. Watch the video in the tweet embedded above. The shooter racks the slide of the handgun after each round is fired. At one point the killer has to knock the slide back into battery with the heel of his support hand. That seems to be the result of the use of either a home-made (3D printed?) silencer or something like a ‘solvent trap’ like the kind sold through sketchy outlets like wish.com. The shooter also didn’t seem to know that most semi-automatic handguns require the use of a booster or Nielson device in order to cycle correctly. The killer was clearly aware of the issue as he cycled the gun without hesitation.”

Posted at 7:03 pm by Glenn Reynolds

PHARMACIES ARE CLOSING EVERYWHERE, BUT NEW BANK BRANCHES ARE CONSTANTLY BEING BUILT: Millions Left Without Pharmacies As Closures Surge. I’d like that to be because people are getting richer and healthier, but I’m skeptical that that’s it.

Posted at 7:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

COMMUNITY NOTES REMAIN UNDEFEATED:

The replies are brutal, too.

Posted at 6:48 pm by Stephen Green

WELL.

Related:

Posted at 6:46 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BREAKING: French PM Michel Barnier ousted in no-confidence vote. “There’s now the prospect of months of turmoil in France – it took Emmanuel Macron two months to appoint Barnier, who only lasted a little longer in the role himself following his appointment in September.”

Posted at 6:23 pm by Stephen Green

DAVID STROM ON the Pete Hegseth Hit Job. The press, after defending a 54 year old drug addicted bagman’s coverup pardon as an incident of filial love, now has strict standards for personal deportment in and around the White House, and if it makes up evidence that you didn’t meet them it will become quite irate.

UPDATE: Things the press doesn’t become irate about:

Posted at 4:59 pm by Glenn Reynolds

JON CALDARA: Taxpayers foolishly subsidized my new electric car.

I want to thank the taxpayers of Colorado for my brand-new car. Really, thanks to each and every one of you dupes.

You see, I have never in my 60 years had a brand new, off-the-lot automobile. Instead, I buy used, and I mean really used, cars and drive them until they drop. Out of college I bought a sexy $500 Datsun 210 and sold it eight years later for $950.

My current beater is a 2010 Nissan Altima. I bought it with 95,000 miles for $6,000. It now has over 200,000 miles and still going strong. I drive ugly, old used cars.

Why do I drive these cars? Simply, because I know what women like. While they’ll rarely admit it out loud, when a woman sees a bald man tooling around town in a 15-year-old rusted-out Japanese car she can’t help but think, “Mommy wants me some of that.”

So why buy a new car? It’s more than just my boredom with hot women leaving their phone numbers under my windshield wiper blade. I figure at my age I should stop spending big bucks on chick-magnet hot rods and start living more frugally. And there’s nothing more frugal than getting other people to buy you crap.

And that’s where you came in. Thanks to obscene tax credits, mandates, and regulations from the people you voted into office, I didn’t pay for most of this car.

Well, “car” might be a strong word. It’s more of a golf cart with Bluetooth. It’s a Nissan Leaf.

Jon, you sexy beast.

Posted at 4:52 pm by Stephen Green

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: The Snow White Trailer Will Traumatise You For Life (Video).

As John Nolte adds: 215K Downvotes to Only 17K Upvotes for Disney’s Latest ‘Snow White’ Trailer.

The movie stars Rachel “The Mouthy Unibrow” Zegler as Snow White, an actress who has spent an inordinate amount of time smugly trashing the beloved original animated classic instead of promoting her own.

Zegler is a walking public relations disaster, a poster-chick for why there used to a studio system.

“It’s no longer 1937,” the actress smugly declared at one point. “She’s not gonna be saved by the prince, and she’s not gonna be dreaming about true love,” The Mouth Unibrow added. “She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be, and the leader her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave, and true.”

If that wasn’t bad enough, after Donald Trump won reelection last month, Zegler showed her true hateful self on Instagram. “Fuck you Donald Trump,” she screeched and then complained about the “deep, deep sickness in this country.”

She then wrote: “May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace.”

She later apologized, but no one believes she did so of her own volition. The groomers at Disney have a reported $350 million invested in this Snow White turd. Having their lead actress wish a terrible curse on more than half the country is no way to sell a movie that is already seen as a joke. Already Disney had to move the release date from the summer of 2024 to March of 2025 because of The Mouthy Unibrow.

To be fair to The Mouthy Unibrow, though, it wasn’t all her fault. For some ludicrous reason only a woketard could come up with, it was decided that the remake of a movie called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would not feature any … uhm …dwarfs. Instead there would be seven “magical beings,” who looked like the cast from Rent.

Nolte’s post went up this morning; as of mid-afternoon today, those numbers have only gotten worse:

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

퍼시픽 림 바나나 리퍼블릭: South Korea’s president Yoon could face severe consequences for his martial law stunt.

What this brief but extraordinary episode amounted to was a deployment of troops to the parliament building to bar the entrance of lawmakers. That operation failed utterly, as protesters were quickly on the scene to take on the military, in some cases with fire extinguishers, and facilitate the entrance of the representatives. And 190 lawmakers made it in, every single one of whom then voted for the suspension of the martial law decree (including nineteen members of Yoon’s own People Power Party — or PPP). A few hours later President (at the time of writing) Yoon rescinded it.

What now? The next step would seem to be the impeachment of Yoon, which a coalition of lawmakers from six opposition parties have called for today and which could be voted on within seventy-two hours. Lawmaker Hwang Un-ha summed up the mood when he told reporters that “the parliament should focus on immediately suspending the president’s business to pass an impeachment bill,” while the leader of Yoon’s PPP has called for defense minister Kim Yong-hyun to be fired and for the entire cabinet to resign.

But it could get worse than that for Yoon, and any others who were party to the decision to issue the decree — who that might be currently remains unclear. A senior member of the opposition party Park Chan-dae said that “even if martial law is lifted, he cannot avoid treason charges.”

Yoon will be lucky to escape jail. He can be impeached by the National Assembly if more than two-thirds of lawmakers vote for it. Yoon’s party controls 108 seats in the 300-member legislature but how many, if any, remain loyal to him is unclear. Yoon would then face trial at the constitutional court, which can seal his fate with a vote by six of the nine justices. In that event, or if he chose to resign, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo would act as interim leader until a new election, which would have to be held within sixty days.

Back in April, the Politico, feverishly hoping that Trump would join them, noted that “South Korea has already convicted its fair share of former presidents. Three of the last four presidents were investigated by prosecutors over the span of a decade. Roh Moo-hyun, from the liberal party, died of suicide while he and his close circle were investigated for bribery. Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye were convicted and sentenced to prison over bribery and abuse of power. Yoon Suk Yeol, the current president of South Korea, played a key role in the indictment of Park Geun-hye as prosecutor general at the time, and his achievement catapulted him to the stardom he needed to run for the presidency.”

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll