Archive for 2025

November 6, 2025

ACTRESS ADMONISHES AUDIENCE:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 6th, 2025

BYRON YORK: Dick Cheney’s complicated legacy.

Trump called the Iraq war “a big, fat mistake,” and Republican crowds applauded. He called the entire Bush-Cheney administration a “disaster.” He dumped all over the Bush-Cheney legacy and went on to win the Republican nomination. Things had changed.

Still, Cheney actually supported Trump as the Republican nominee in 2016. Only after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot did Cheney declare Trump a “coward” and a “threat to our republic.” Cheney ultimately cast his last vote for president for Kamala Harris in 2024.

By then, Cheney’s brand of Republican politics, whatever you might think of it, had receded far into the past. The man who was Gerald Ford’s chief of staff half a century earlier could find no place in today’s GOP politics. The bitter irony was that Cheney, with the misadventure in Iraq and the calamitous end of the Bush-Cheney administration, had himself contributed to creating Trump’s Republican Party.

Bush’s “misadventure in Iraq” might be remembered a bit differently, if Obama hadn’t thrown all of America’s gains away for a 2012 reelection selling point.

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 6th, 2025

STRATEGIC DRONE WARFARE:

Posted at 8:21 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 6th, 2025

SYDNEY SWEENEY REFUSES TO APOLOGIZE ABOUT AMERICAN EAGLE JEANS COMMERCIAL: “The Ad Spoke For Itself.”

Katherine Stoeffel [of GQ] first asked Sydney Sweeney if she was surprised by the reaction and backlash that the ad was met with. The talented actress was very quick to admit that she couldn’t believe how big it had gotten, and that in her mind, she was just doing a clothing commercial:

“I did a jean ad. The reaction definitely was a surprise, but I love jeans. All I wear are jeans. I’m literally in jeans and a T-shirt every day of my life.”

The GQ features director then followed that up by asking how it felt to see that the President of the United States was weighing in on the matter (Trump called the ad “fantastic”). Stoeffel said that she would have probably been grateful to have high-profile people like the POTUS having her back, which kind of felt like a set up to get Sweeney to say the same thing.

But Sydney kept things cool and said she was busy filming a TV show when everything was really getting out of hand:

“It was surreal… it’s not that I didn’t have that feeling, but I wasn’t thinking of it like that. Or like, of any of it. I kind of just put my phone away. I was filming (Euphoria) every day.”

Finally, the interviewer from GQ stopped beating around the bush and opened the floor for the actress to say anything that was on her mind about the ad and the backlash. But what she was really doing was ever so graciously giving Sydney a chance to apologize for her involvement in the jeans/genes ad.

Sydney Sweeney didn’t take the bait, and refused to apologize:

 

Stoeffel may become a meme based on her exasperated reaction to Sweeney refusing to bend the knee to the stereotypical Condé Nast wokeness:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 6th, 2025

EVEN A FLATWORM IS SMART ENOUGH TO TURN AWAY FROM PAIN:

Posted at 6:46 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 6th, 2025

BOMB CANADA, THE CASE FOR WAR:

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 6th, 2025

NUREMBERG: What Russell Crowe’s new film gets right — and wrong.

The movie’s script — adapted by Vanderbilt from the 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai — is better than some of its acting. Goering accused the prosecutors of “American hypocrisy” and he was by no means wrong. It was a mistake to include in Nuremberg’s prosecution evidence of such episodes as the 1940 Luftwaffe bombing of Rotterdam, when Allied air forces had since flattened half the cities of Europe. It seemed even to many contemporaries a travesty that Soviet judges sat on the bench at Nuremburg alongside the British, French and Americans: until at least 1942 Stalin had murdered far more people than Hitler.

It is chilling to hear Goering offer some of the same excuses for dispensing with the processes of democracy that are offered today by American Maga chiefs. This does not brand the latter as Nazis but it reflects a matching, terrifying contempt for law.

So terrifying and contemptuous, that the fascistic Drumph and his minions in the Führerbunker have gone along (albeit sometimes grudgingly) with every rogue judge’s decision, appealing them to the Supreme Court (unlike his predecessor). I missed similar scenes in Laurence Olivier’s The World at War. 

Posted at 6:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 6th, 2025

PRETTY GOOD HEADLINE, SO I’LL ALLOW IT: “Whoa: 2nd Circuit Issues Stunning Decision on Trump’s NY Criminal Case.”

RedState’s Susie Moore writes a nicely wrapped file about the reversal and remand on the question of removal of NY criminal cases against him to federal court.

I can’t remember having dealt with Judge Hellerstein, and he’s been around for quite a while, and is too old to care about being reversed. That said, if Trump’s papers are well laid-out I’d say 75/25% chance Hellerstein reverses himself. But he doesn’t have to.

Posted at 5:25 pm by Charles Glasser on Nov 6th, 2025

IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: Kinetic Sanctions, Shadow Fleets, and the Long, Slow Bleeding of Russia.

The war on Russian oil just went global, and the question now might not be whether President Donald Trump’s new sanctions will work, but whether they’ll work fast enough to matter.

Since we first discussed Ukraine’s war on Russian energy production back in August with what some call “kinetic sanctions” on refineries, depots, and export facilities, Trump launched a new and serious round of traditional sanctions on Russia’s ability to sell crude oil and refined products.

How’s it going? As your neighbors with marital troubles say on Facebook, “It’s complicated.”

Much more at the link.

Posted at 5:24 pm by Stephen Green on Nov 6th, 2025

ERNST BILL CLAWS BACK $65 BILLION: It’s quite possible the Covid relief spending was the biggest boondoggle ever, but Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) introduced a bill today requiring the return to the Treasury of $65 billion that remains unspent.

Posted at 5:18 pm by Mark Tapscott on Nov 6th, 2025
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