ROGER KIMBALL: Will Chuck Grassley’s Burisma bombshell finally get the Bidens fired?

Bottom line: the accusation is that Zlochevsky was coerced into paying the Bidens to ensure that Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin was fired in 2016. How much? Joe and Hunter were each said to have made off with $5 million, plus Hunter was given a spot on the Burisma board and a stipend of between $50,000 and $80,000 per month. Nice work if you can get it. And the Bidens can and do get it.

Bottom bottom line: Burisma “hired Hunter Biden ‘to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.’” Do you believe it? I do. Will it matter? Hard to say. The wagons are circled but the Apaches are angry and getting angrier. I am looking forward to the day I can say, “Well, son of a bitch, the Bidens got fired.”

In the meantime, even with the media burying the Bidens’ myriad scandals, Yahoo is asking: Why is Joe Biden so unpopular?

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Investigators Obtain Biden Financial Records Showing ‘Transactions From Ukraine And Russia’: Oversight Chairman.

VDH: The Biden Family Caricatures.

The apparent media subtext was that it was either just “Old Joe” trying to be too friendly or a symptom of his cognitive decline and thus not attributable to any sinister urge.

Senescence now provides paradoxical cover for Biden’s creepiness — newfound exemption for his old boorish behavior.

Also, during the president’s latest antics, cocaine was found in the West Wing of the White House.

All the White House spokespeople had to do was to reassure the public that the drugs most certainly did not belong to first son Hunter Biden — despite being a frequent guest resident of the White House and a former crack-cocaine addict.

Instead, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed reporters for requesting such clarification.

Then the official narrative went through several contortions as to where and how the bag of cocaine was found.

The disinformation only added suspicion that the White House either would not or could not be transparent about the discovery of illicit drugs abandoned at the very nexus of American governance.

Requests for clarity were understandable not only because Hunter has had a long history of drug addiction.

He also has a troubling habit of leaving a public trail of evidence of his drug use.

Hunter forgot his crack pipe in a rental car. He abandoned his laptop, which contained evidence of his own felonious behavior. And his unlawfully registered handgun turned up in a dumpster near a school.

In sum, the president and his son both have quite disturbing and all-too-public bad habits.

Read the whole thing.

OLD AND BUSTED: Whistleblowers are Time Magazine’s “Persons of the Year.”

The New Hotness? The Media Loved Whistleblowers. Until They Were Blowing the Whistle on Joe Biden.

The media celebrated and defended whistleblowers in former president Donald Trump’s administration. Not so much these days.

When two veteran IRS investigators testified before Congress on Wednesday that the Justice Department interfered in their probe of the president’s son, major news networks had other places to be.

And/or denigrated the integrity of the whistleblowers: “So Called” Journalism: NBC Calls the Two Respected IRS Veterans “So Called Whistleblowers.”

¡NO PASARÁN!: Adios, Amigo: RIP Carlos Alberto Montaner, Author of The Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot.

Carlos Alberto Montaner is no longer among us, writes José de Córdoba in the Wall Street Journal.

Montaner, who during a more than half-century career wrote thousands of columns and more than two dozen books and novels, was a leading Castro critic, especially known in Latin America where his columns were widely syndicated.

As I was building my personal website 20 years ago without understanding much of the internet, it was his weblog, El Blog de Montaner (then with yellow or cream colors dominating and under possibly a slightly different name), that influenced me the most, possibly because it also was in two languages. Then I learned of his book, “The Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot,” and both blog and best-seller were a revelation that I quoted a number of times on the blog which I was invited to join the following year (2004, the very blog that you are reading now).

Montaner, along with two other Latin American co-authors, wrote “The Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot,” published in Spanish in 1996. The book, which ridiculed the left for blaming Latin America’s ills chiefly on the U.S., became a bestseller, sparking debate throughout Latin America.

Read the whole thing.

YEP:

Every time I think I should educate myself on the details of new charges against Trump, I remind myself it isn't about the facts or the law. It is election rigging. No details needed.

NPCs are invited to say "No one is above the law" in the comments.

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) July 19, 2023

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: NPR: The FBI raided a notable journalist’s home. Rolling Stone didn’t tell readers why.

FBI raids on journalists are rare. News organizations often respond with formal protests and legal challenges. Under a 2021 Justice Department policy, raids, subpoenas and other compulsory means of obtaining materials from reporters are banned for any investigation of matters related to their journalism. The policy became the basis for a significant shift in the stance of the Justice Department toward the press.

The Rolling Stone story created a stir. Reporter Tatiana Siegel stated that the April 22 raid was “quite possibly, the first” carried out by the Biden administration on a journalist.

In this case, the journalist was ABC* News national security producer James Gordon Meek. A former investigator for the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, Meek had been with ABC News since 2013. He also was a producer of 3212 Un-Redacted, an investigative documentary that streamed on Hulu.

“Meek appears to be on the wrong side of the national-security apparatus,” it stated.

As the story noted, Siegel’s sources told her “federal agents allegedly found classified information on Meek’s laptop during their raid.” Siegel reported that Meek left his job at ABC after the raid; a publishing contract with Simon & Schuster evaporated.

As edited by Rolling Stone Editor-in-Chief Noah Shachtman, however, the article omitted a key fact that Siegel initially intended to include: Siegel had learned from her sources that Meek had been raided as part of a federal investigation into images of child sex abuse, something not publicly revealed until last month.

Rolling Stone, you say?

* A subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company: Is Disney’s “awokening” the reason it refused to release ‘Sound of Freedom’ for five years?

MATT TAIBBI: Twitter Files Extra: The Democrats’ War on RFK, Jr: After Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. faces contentious questioning in the House, a look back at requests to Twitter involving the presidential candidate.

OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.

WELL, MOST AMERICANS WILL BE PRETTY OLD BY 2073: Most Americans expect routine space tourism by 2073, but few would actually try it: report.

THAT MAKES IT EVEN BETTER THAT THEY’RE NOW AVAILABLE WITHOUT A PRESCRIPTION: Landmark Trial Suggests Hearing Aids Help Reduce Cognitive Decline.

I’M GUESSING MORE LEFTIST VIOLENCE:

BREAKING: Investigation underway after Rand Paul's Kentucky office destroyed in firehttps://t.co/YlS7PE8L3D

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) July 21, 2023

THAT’S NOT GOOD: Study: Weight loss surgery raises risk of developing a non-alcohol substance abuse disorder. My GI doc hates this surgery. He says 90% of it is unnecessary and just about making money.

WELL, GOOD: Omega-3 fatty acids from fish linked to sustaining good lung health.

HYBRID VIGOR: The Coyotes Are Not What They Seem.

MOCKERY IS THE PROPER RESPONSE TO ALL GINNED-UP FAUX OUTRAGE: Pay No Attention to the Ginned-Up Faux Outrage Over Jason Aldean’s Song.

THIS LOOKS HELPFUL: The Prepper’s Cookbook: 300 Recipes to Turn Your Emergency Food into Nutritious, Delicious, Life-Saving Meals. #CommissionEarned

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Meet the Coolest Gator Attack Survivor Ever. “This week, we have the old guy who joked his way through a gator attack, the stolen firetruck that ran out of gas, and Colorado Man absolutely failing to make it stay in Vegas.”

SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY: Fox News whistleblowers expose company’s support for far-left charities. “While on its face, this appears to be little more than an attempt at corporate beneficence, the company is willing to match donations to the Satanic Temple, the Trevor Project, Planned Parenthood (and local Planned Parenthood branches), and the Southern Poverty Law Center – radical leftist groups antipathetic to conservatives and the values they hold most dear.”

THE LEFT’S AGENDA IS ALWAYS THE SAME: A Former Law Examiner Comments On the NextGen Bar Exam: “The NextGen Bar Exam represents the complete abandonment of competence as a standard.”

WELL, BYE: Virtual Reality is Dead.

RIOTING FOR FUN AND PROFIT: Riot Act! NYPD Ordered to Pay Mad $tacks to George Floyd Insurrectionists.

DID THE PANDEMIC OR BLM SPARK THE CRIME WAVE? That violent crime has exploded across the country, especially in the cities and their close-in suburbs, is beyond question. But, as write in my latest PJ Media column, there are lots of reasons to see a link from the spiraling crime to the BLM riots that followed the George Floyd murder, rather than to the social and economic disruptions occasioned by the Coronavirus Pandemic, as claimed by many in the Establishment Left.

WAIT, THERE WERE SUVs 416,000 YEARS AGO? Greenland melted some 416,000 years ago, shows high risk of causing sea level rise today.

THAT HARDLY SEEMS POSSIBLE AND YET…: The Disinformation Police Are Even More Incompetent And Dishonest Than You Imagine.

The Federalist recently got an email from “NewsGuard Technologies” — a relatively new service that’s popped up in the last few years that purports to rate websites on their credibility based on some established criteria. It then sells its ratings services to schools, various corporate entities, and advertisers looking for someone to tell them what news outlets they can supposedly trust or what websites they don’t want to advertise on for fear of damaging their brand.

So how does NewsGuard go about making those ratings for websites? Well, it starts with firing off a series of hostile questions to the editors of a website about weirdly specific aspects of its coverage and demands you answer them in a vain attempt to improve whatever rating NewsGuard’s going to give you. Now it’s bad enough that this is an extortion racket, but it’s downright insulting to see NewsGuard’s team wheel around a website that publishes over a million words a year, cherry-pick some example of what they think is problematic coverage, and still demonstrate an inability to think critically or fairly about what they’re reading. If it questions a dominant narrative, it does not compute with these people.

That’s because progressive extortion rackets like NewsGuard exist to enforce the narrative.