EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: White House Report Card: Biden sinks lower, to ‘supplicant’ status.

BLUE ON BLUE: Anti-Israel Delaware State Rep Heckles Harris at Veep’s Holiday Party.

OUR FAILING ESTABLISHMENT: “Liz Cheney couldn’t have picked a worse day to release her new anti-Trump memoir. Just hours after Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning hit bookshelves on Dec. 5, the presidents of three elite universities rife with anti-Semitic activism in recent months humiliated themselves on national television by bungling a simple question about whether it’s acceptable to call for Jewish genocide on campus. One of the presidents, Liz Magill of Penn, resigned in disgrace. The fallout is ongoing.”

Plus: “Like the other (seemingly countless) #Resistance memoirists, Cheney declines to consider that Trump and the support he continues to enjoy from millions of Americans is a symptom of some larger societal affliction, rather than the actual disease. At no point does she contemplate the implications of her deliberately alarmist rhetoric. For example: If America “cannot survive” another Trump presidency, as she and many others have warned, what sorts of actions might be justified to stop it from happening? Obstructing an official proceeding, at the very least, if it means saving the country? If not, then what?”

AT AMAZON, Last Minute Deals. #CommissionEarned

VIDEO: Fed Chair on monetary policy: ‘Inflation is too high… and the path forward is uncertain.’ “Longer term inflation expectations appear to remain well anchored, as reflected in a broad range of surveys of households, businesses, and forecasters, as well as measures from financial markets.”

And: Fed’s Goolsbee Says Too Early to Declare Victory Over Inflation.

FLASHBACK: We’re told to ‘follow the science’ — yet some of it is just plain wrong.

SMEARING THE HERO, HORATIO NELSON EDITION: “But it turns out that the claim that Nelson was pro-slavery is false. It is based on a letter that he wrote to a Caribbean planter shortly before his death, but we now know that the letter, in the version in which it became known, is a forgery. Anti-abolition planters, desperate to recruit the dead hero to their cause, made 25 changes to the letter Nelson actually wrote, and destroyed the original. We know this now only because Nelson’s copy of the letter, which has long languished among his papers in the British Library, recently came to light. . . . The ‘racist’ smear against Nelson lives on, despite being supported by no evidence, because certain people want to perpetrate it. Such charges are not made out of any genuine concern for the long-gone victims of slavery through the millennia, but rather to discredit the history of selected countries–i.e., the United States and Great Britain, but not China or Brazil. The project is a purely political one.”

The history the left pushes on the West is the kind of history a conqueror imposes on a vanquished nation: One devoid of heroes, and full of shame and division. It isn’t by accident that it is so.

COMIC RELIEF: SF reparations office on hold due to budget cuts.

ON SUNDAYS I DO A PROMO POST FOR (MOSTLY) INDY BOOKS:  Book Promo And Vignettes By Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

Yes, it starts with a list of my books on sale right now for 99c. To be fair, I’d list other people’s sales first, but I haven’t been sent any these last two weeks. It’s a weird holiday. And I have a lot of my books at 99c this week. then another batch over Christmas and after, ending New Years.

SANCTUARY, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG: Chicago Begins Impounding ‘Rogue’ Migrant Buses as a New Law Increases Penalties.

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE. THIS IS SOMETHING. THEREFORE. . . “We had to do something.” Joe Nocera joins John Tierney to discuss the government’s disastrous response to the Covid pandemic.

Now, the problem with the strategy, if the purpose of this strategy is to relieve the pressure on hospitals over a very short term, three weeks or so, there’s nothing wrong with it. If the strategy is that you’re going to lock everybody up and the pandemic is going to go away, that’s insane, because A, the pandemic doesn’t go away. It just kind of lurks around, waiting for you to leave your house, and B, all these virtuous people who are members of the Zoom class, they got their food from a guy from DoorDash, and they got their goods from some guy in an Amazon warehouse and FedEx and UPS and meatpackers, who got Covid like crazy. There was this whole sense that the working class and the poor had to put their lives at risk so that the Zoom class could feel virtuous.

I had not realized that D.A. Henderson, who was the man who ended smallpox, was against lockdowns and mask mandates.

Related: The COVID lockdown scolds killed people — but they still have no shame.

Also: The rich and powerful thrived as the rest of us suffered in the year of lockdowns.

The pandemic saw a huge amount of power and money transferred to what Michael Lind calls the “overclass” of politicians, corporate managers and bureaucrats. Small businesses shut down while big-box stores deemed “essential” remained open. The laptop class worked from home — to the delight of many of its members — while the working class brought them stuff. Federal money flowed like water to the connected. The national debt went from scandalous to essentially absurd, an amount of money that no one expects to be repaid.

The Chinese Communist Party used the threat of the pandemic and lockdowns to crush a rebellion in Hong Kong. The American powers-that-be did something similar: People who demonstrated for the wrong causes were called granny-killers and shut down; people who demonstrated for overclass-approved causes (like New York’s “Black Trans Lives Matter” rally, featuring thousands and endorsed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, even as he welded the gates of a Jewish park closed) received letters of support from “public-health” people who assured us that racism is a bigger public-health problem than COVID, even as they used COVID as an excuse to remake American society.
see also
Closed doors of the Pasadena Community Job Center in Calif., during the coronavirus outbreak.
Ongoing COVID lockdowns cost countless jobs

From the beginning, of course, the public-health crowd itself failed to perform.

Did they ever. We live in an era of massive institutional failure and corruption, and yet they still take the cake.

YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFULLY NOT TAUGHT:  Toronto’s latest woke moment exposes the left’s appalling ignorance.

NO A DECLARATION OF INTENT, FOR THOSE OF US WHO WANT TO SEE THE REPUBLIC RESTORED:  ‘Liberty and Justice For All’ – A Tattered Cliche?

DEAR PRESS, LEARN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PARODY AND DEEP FAKE. THE CREDIBILITY YOU SAVE MIGHT BE YOUR OWN:  Whiny NBC upset with Trump video.

YEAH, SO COULD I, SO COULD ANYONE NOT IN THRALL TO THE ‘OPEN BORDERS’ MOB:  Mayor Adams says he could help fix migrant crisis if he were in White House.

THOSE WHO FAIL TO LEARN THEIR HISTORY ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT:  Confederate memorial to be removed in coming days from Arlington National Cemetery.

Meanwhile the rest of us are condemned to be dragged along for the ride.

WELL, IT’S SOMETHING, BUT THE “CARBON OFFSETS” AKA GLOBAL MONEY REDISTRIBUTION SCHEME CONTINUES:  Loopholes in COP28 Agreement Suggest the “Iron Law of Electricity” Triumphed in Dubai.

SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED:  Gaza: IDF Uncovers Hamas Tunnel Network “Wide Enough for Vehicles to Pass Through” Near Israel Border.

Behold! My shocked face.

IT’S LIKE THEY REALLY REALLY REALLY DON’T WANT US TO GO TO SPACE:  Environmental groups file another complaint attempting to stop SpaceX launches at Boca Chica.

They’d hate to see their prisoners escape.

BLUE CITY BLUES:  Oakland thieves chase down driver, flip his car during robbery.

WHEN ALL YOU SEE IS GROUPS, AND SYSTEMS OF POWER BETWEEN GROUPS, YOU’RE GOING TO MESS UP IN REALITY:  System And Power.

WHAT LOSES CULTURE WARS? YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S:  Nice.

IT ALL DEPENDS ON THEIR CONTEXT:  Palestinians, people of peace, LOL, say Hamas quite right to attack Israel.

THE GOVERNMENT MANDATED THE VACCINES AND IMMUNIZED BIG PHARMA AGAINST DAMAGES BUT ONLY SUPER ULTRA HYPER MAGA EXTREMISTS MUMBLE MUMBLE:  Unseen Crisis.

… The crisis is ‘unseen’ because they suppressed knowledge of it as hard as they could.