Archive for 2024

HEH:

It’s amazing how many Democratic leaders look like Disney villains.

GET YOUR SLEEP: Sleep apnea might change brain, speed aging. A friend told me a while back about the middle-aged single lifestyle: “Taking a CPAP with you on a booty call.”

IT’S A DIRTY JOB BUT SOMEBODY HAD TO DO IT: Musk Forcing Republicans To Act Like Republicans. “For whatever reason, something always seemed to take priority over balancing the budget, be it the war on terror, fear of being blamed for a shutdown, desire for campaign contributions from rich donors, tasty lobbyist favors, or their desire for hooker and blow parties (you make the call). The end result is that the national debt is now $36 trillion and rising, exceeding our GDP.”

INDEED:

From the replies: “I think historians will say that while Europe committed suicide, Americans stopped Biden from joining them.”

Maybe only barely.

BUILD MORE NUKES: ‘Explosive’ demand growth puts more than half of North America at risk of blackouts. “More than half of North America faces a risk of energy shortfalls in the next five to 10 years as data centers and electrification drive electricity demand higher and generator retirements threaten resource adequacy, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. said in a 10-year outlook published Tuesday.”

And get rid of the stupid EV mandates and impossible CAFE standards while you’re at it.

WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE, ANYWAY?

Is he lying or did the Pentagon misplace 1,000 or so troops?

The latter is absurd but that doesn’t mean it can’t be true.

OBSCURE RULE LEADS TO CHARGERS MAKING NFL’S FIRST FAIR CATCH KICK SINCE 1976:

Chargers kicker Cameron Dicker made the longest fair catch free kick in NFL history Thursday night, as he made the 57-yard attempt to make the score 21-13 Broncos going into the half. The previous long was 52 yards by Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers in 1962.

It had appeared the Chargers would go into halftime down 11 points after Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert threw an interception late in the first half. But a quick three and out by the Denver Broncos‘ offense and a fair catch interference penalty by Broncos cornerback Tremon Smith gave the Chargers an untimed down to end the second half, a game they went on to win 34-27.

“The last player to make a fair catch free kick was Ray Wersching of the San Diego Chargers in 1976. Broncos coach Sean Payton said on the television broadcast that the team prepares for these scenarios.”

Click here to watch on YouTube, because for some reason the NFL doesn’t allow for their videos to be embeddable.

VDH ON BHO AND JRB:

APOLOGY ACCEPTED, CAPTAIN NEEDA: Chris Cillizza Absolutely Deserves to Get Beat up for This. “This is excuse-mongering, a brush-off, an attempt to regain credibility where none was deserved in the first place, and less than none is deserved now. Cillizza displays all the self-reflection of a vampire in a hall of mirrors.”

“LIBERTARIANS WANT TO SLASH GOVERNMENT AND HURT THE POOR.”

PARK MACDOUGAL: Obamaism From the Right.

We’ll simply observe that what [Jeffrey] Sachs is doing [during his Tucker Carlson interview] is recognizable as a genre of Obama-faction messaging that Tablet’s Tony Badran dubbed the “striptease” nearly a decade ago. To put it as simply as possible: The administration adopts a policy, such as guaranteeing Assad’s survival to the Iranians in order to buy goodwill for nuclear diplomacy, that it doesn’t think the American public (or U.S. allies) is ready for. In its public statements, it pretends to be doing something else (such as attempting to topple Assad). Then, handpicked experts launder a description of the real, current policy as a “critique” of the pretend policy (the “fan” that obscures the naked truth, in the striptease analogy).

Prior to the election, one saw this dynamic often with Biden’s Israel policy. In reality, as Scroll readers will be aware, the Biden administration was exerting whatever leverage it had to oust Netanyahu and press-gang the Israelis into a cease-fire deal. Yet the Biden administration, no doubt aware that Americans and U.S. allies would respond poorly to this policy, pretended it was offering “iron-clad support” to Israel, to use one of the administration’s signature phrases. Surrogates outside the government then pretended the rhetoric was reality and recommended that the administration “change” to a policy of … ousting Netanyahu and press-ganging the Israelis into a cease-fire. In an essay published earlier this month in Foreign Affairs, for instance, Obama’s top foreign-policy guru Ben Rhodes wrote that “Biden’s most prominent foreign policy initiative during his final year in office was unconditional support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s destruction of Gaza and his military escalation in Lebanon.” What’s more, he wrote it with a straight face.

Thus, we get Sachs’ offering: essentially a point-by-point description of the Obama-Biden foreign policy—détente with Iran, decoupling from Israel, dovish but transactional relations with Moscow and Beijing, all rationalized by hyperbolic threats of “all-out war” if the United States dares to assert its interests against its rivals—as a critique of a fictional “neocon” Obama-Biden policy, which in reality better describes the “Peace Through Strength” position of Donald Trump. To defeat the Obama-Biden “neocons” and avoid “World War III,” Sachs counsels, Trump must reject Trumpism and embrace Obamaism—now rebranded, with Carlson’s assistance, as “America First.” As The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, the Carlson-Obama faction has exerted at least some influence over personnel, via Donald Trump Jr. According to the report, Carlson and Don Jr. successfully blocked former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from a job after outlining “what they said were the dangers of bringing neoconservatives into the administration.”

That’s the bad news. The good news, as Badran observed in an excellent thread on Trump’s Monday comments praising Turkey’s “unfriendly takeover” of a hostile state in Syria, is that Trump does not appear to be fooled by the striptease—or by the fools in his own camp.

“Peace through strength” has a nice ring to it.

And here’s the conclusion to Tony Badran’s X thread linked to in the excerpt: “Trump’s outlook is not sectarian (unlike Obama, or, for that matter, his own VP). He identifies and understands the structural realities of the region and its geopolitics. His instincts are quintessentially American—maybe he’s the last of the Mohicans in that respect.”

IT’S GOOD TO SEE OUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES GET THE RESPECT THEY DESERVE:

Plus:

The notion that you don’t have a right to have an opinion on this stuff if you’re not working for the government is deeply revealing.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: I Can’t Wait for Tom Homan’s ‘Day One.’ “There’s never any equivocation on Homan’s part when anyone in the media presses him on how he and Trump are going to start reversing Biden’s insane policies. It’s a lot of fun watching interviewers continually offer things that they think are obstacles, only to have Homan smack them down. They’re all finding out that the era of resting on mindless Dem talking points is over.”

WHY DID BIDEN PROMISE THAT THE FEDS WOULD PAY FOR THE FRANCIS SCOTT KEY BRIDGE REPLACEMENT? THIS IS WHY:

Follow the money — if you can.