OF COURSE THE DOJ IS: Lawsuit: DOJ Concealing Records of Biden Family Payoffs with China and Russia.
Archive for 2023
January 4, 2023
IT IS ABSOLUTELY JUSTIFIABLE: Texas National Guard Places Razor Wire, Other Fortifications Along Southern Border.
IS SHE OVER THE AGE OF TWO? Kamala Harris Demands Negative COVID Test for Senators, Guests Over Age of 2 for Swearing-In Photo.
IT’S WHAT THE LEFT DOES: NY Times and WaPo Continue Smear Campaign Against Orthodox Jews As Antisemitic Hate Crimes Surge.
BEHOLD, MY SHOCKED FACE: Germany: Migrant Gangs Armed with Fireworks ‘Ambush’ Police and Firefighters on New Year’s Eve.
UNDER-SECRETARY SCHULTZ DECLARES, “I SEE NOTHING, I KNOW NOTHING: DOJ hiding hundreds of Hunter Biden, James Biden records, lawyer claims.
GEE, I WONDER WHERE IT’S COMING FROM? Unprecedented NY flood of fentanyl causing ‘heartbreaking’ loss.
IF YOU’RE HUMAN YOU HAVE ANCESTORS WHO OWNED SLAVES AND ANCESTORS WHO WERE SLAVES – THE ONLY QUESTION IS HOW LONG AGO: Edward Norton discovers ancestors owned slaves: He’s ‘uncomfortable’ about it.
January 3, 2023
SO I HAVE AN EXPERIMENTAL SUBSTACK UP. Here’s a test post for those who are interested. It’s set up to let you subscribe, but we’re still testing. (“We” being me, with input from Helen and the Insta-Daughter). I think the final model will open comments to subscribers, but not to the general public. We have wide-open comments already at InstaPundit, and some people have asked for a subscriber-only model to keep the trolls out. We sort of had that with the old PJ Media comment platform, but with Disqus anyone anywhere with a Disqus account can comment on InstaPundit. Your thoughts on that are welcome.
And thanks to Juliett “Baldilocks” Ochieng for being my first paid subscriber! I was quite surprised to see that come through.
UPDATE: Some people are confused, or maybe I was confusing. Whatever I do with comments over there won’t affect this place. And it’s not a replacement for InstaPundit. More of an adjunct. I’m looking for an outlet for longer-form stuff that has more flexibility than newspaper columns do.
OPEN THREAD: Disport yourselves in the comments.
BARTENDER: “WE DON’T SERVE YOUR KIND HERE!” A tachyon walks into a bar. Why time-traveling tachyons probably don’t exist.
HE’S BEEN LYING, AND RECEIVING MEDIA ADULATION, FOR 50 YEARS, WHY STOP NOW? CBS Lets Humanity-Hating Curmudgeon Paul Ehrlich Spew More Climate Panic Inanity.
SO MANY PEOPLE DO, BUT THEY NEVER LEAD THE WAY, DO THEY? Remember that nice British chimpanzee lady? I think she wants us dead.
THAT’S NOT CREEPY AT ALL: Scientists Grew Stem Cell ‘Mini Brains’ And Then The Brains Sort-of Developed Eyes.
KEVIN CAN WAIT: McCarthy ends first day of speaker’s election on shaky ground.
It’s messy, and Democrats are mocking it. Of course, Democrats all voted in lockstep for the same guy. Maybe the GOP should tell them, “this is what democracy looks like.” Then again, the traditional approach would have been for McCarthy to meet quietly with the Freedom Caucus and promise them enough to win their votes. It seems like he could have done that quite easily — most of what the Freedom Caucus wants is popular with GOP voters generally. Is the problem that what the Freedom Caucus wants is unpopular with the GOP donor class? And, of course, it’s harder to make deals when there are “overriding trust issues.”
ABOUT FREAKING TIME: Humans haven’t set foot on the moon in 50 years. That may soon change.
READER FAVORITE: GTHUNDER Digital Night Vision Goggles Binoculars for Total Darkness. #CommissionEarned
WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? As legal pot grows, more kids sickened by edibles at home.
MATT TAIBBI: Twitter Files: Why Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In. “The documents lay out the scheme. You can see how the Russian cyber-threat was essentially conjured into being, with political and media pressure serving as the engine inflating something Twitter believed was negligible and uncoordinated to massive dimensions.”
HIDE THE DECLINE: TV’s awful year.
Congratulations to NBC. It passed CBS last year as the most-watched network on television — because NBC’s viewership fell by only 7%, while CBS lost 8% of its viewers.
45 of the top 50 TV channels and networks lost viewers. Only 3 gained (ESPN, ESPN 2 and the Paramount Network). TV Land and Bounce TV neither gained nor lost viewers.
The drop in viewers came despite an Olympics, a popular war and a federal election.
It is pretty spectacular that people tuned out coverage of a very close election. Fox News viewership dropped 1%, MSNBC dropped 22% and CNN dropped 34%.
You cannot blame the drop in viewers on cable cutting.
How bad is TV’s decline? CNN Lost a Third of Its Primetime Viewers in 2022 – an Election Year.
Related: The Good Times Lasted a Century. “From Herman Mankiewicz’s 1926 telegram [to Ben Hecht, in which he cabled, ‘Millions are to be grabbed out here. And your only competition is idiots.’] to the most recent depressing Warner Brothers Discovery earnings call, the business was doing, as we used to say when there was still a reason to say it, boffo business. Today, the worst thing you can do for young people trying to break into show business is encourage them. The number of movies in release has never been smaller, and studios are still trying to figure out the economics of the feature-film business in the age of streaming. They have only recently discovered that spending $100 million on a feature film that goes directly to streaming is a money-loser—but then so are multi-episode series that sit, unwatched, on the servers of Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, you name it.”
FANS GIVE MILLIONS TO DAMAR HAMLIN’S TOY DRIVE FOR KIDS. “Hamlin’s goal was simple: He wanted to raise $2,500 online to buy toys for needy kids. It took about two years. Then came Monday, when the Buffalo Bills safety was critically injured and needed his heart restarted on the field in a chilling scene that unfolded during a nationally televised game against the Cincinnati Bengals. He instantly became one of the biggest stories in sports, and thousands of people found his GoFundMe page. The result: roughly $3.7 million donated in the first 12 hours. And the number is climbing.”
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What Does “Brandishing” a Gun Mean? It’s mostly what the local prosecutor thinks it is, as this article even admits.