Archive for 2025

I’D CALL IT A GOOD START:

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Prestigious Virginia K-8 School Hit with Civil Rights Complaint over Environment ‘Hostile to Jews.’

How hostile? This hostile:

The Nysmith School, known as one of the top 10 institutions in the country for students between kindergarten and eighth grade, allegedly expelled Brian Vazquez and Ashok Roy’s three Jewish children in March, after the parents complained about its “unwillingness to respond to anti-Semitic harassment of their 11-year-old daughter,” according to a copy of the complaint the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed with Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares.

The complaint accuses the tony school—a feeder institution for the elite Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Falls Church—of fostering an environment “that is hostile to Jews,” suggesting that the hatred displayed on America’s college campuses has also infected younger students.

The school “allowed anti-Semitism to take root in her class” over the course of several months, including with a social studies project that saw students promote Adolf Hitler as a “strong historical leader.” That project “was shared with the entire school community” and contributed to “a pattern of persistent and severe anti-Semitic harassment,” the complaint alleges.

Jim Treacher adds: DC-Area Schoolkids Taught to Harass Jews and Admire Hitler.

October 7 opened the floodgates on this antisemitic hatred, and now it’s mainstream on the left. I’ve never seen any of those Charlottesville guys on Fox News, but you can turn on CNN or MSNBC at any hour of the day and hear someone defaming the Jews.

At this point, America might actually be more antisemitic than Europe. Bob Vylan is being dropped from festivals in England, Germany, and France for chanting “Death, death to the IDF.”

As Treacher concludes, “This won’t end well. And I have no time for anybody who’s trying to deny it because they want to win elections. Best of luck, NYC!”

JIM GERAGHTY: Joe Biden Emerges — to Lament the Reversing of His Record.

Since leaving the presidency, the 82-year-old Biden hasn’t completely disappeared from the public eye, but his public appearances have been few and far between.

He’s done one major televised interview, with the ladies of The View. His office has intermittently released brief statements, such as his insistence that he “made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.” (Note the irony of Biden insisting he was always aware of what he was doing and signing and did not simply trust his staff’s directions and requests . . . through a brief written statement distributed to the press by his staff.)

As with Biden’s speech to the conference of the National High School Model United Nations, there was not a lot of media coverage of the remarks of the former president, beyond a little local television coverage. As far as I can tell, no transcript of Biden’s remarks has been released.

Perhaps the most extensive coverage of Biden’s remarks that we can find are from the Wall Street Journal, in an article under the headline, “Biden, in Rare Remarks Since Presidency, Warns His Accomplishments Are Coming Undone.”

Biden is quoted as saying, “Many of the things I worked so damn hard, that I thought I changed in the country, are changing so rapidly.”

You can almost hear everyone who voted for Trump answering, “Yes, that’s the point.”

* * * * * * * *

Let’s also point out that if Biden is lamenting that his legacy is being destroyed right before his contact-lens-assisted eyes . . . he has a lot to do with that! In the past months, we’ve seen whole bunch of books detailing how a slew of videos taped for the 2020 convention were deemed unusable, as Biden “couldn’t follow the conversation at all”; how he couldn’t remember the names of national security adviser Jake Sullivan and communications director Kate Bedingfield; how Senator Mark Warner ended a phone call with Biden concluding that the president had no idea what was going on in his own counterterrorism policy; how in the early months of 2024, the Biden campaign’s high command debated whether Biden could get away with refusing to debate Trump; and how Biden couldn’t get through a single 2024 debate practice session.

Just how durable a legacy did Biden and his top staffers think they were building under President Mr. Magoo?

Finally, from that article in the Journal:

Johnny C. Taylor Jr., SHRM’s president who joined Biden on stage after his address, asked him what he would most like to be remembered for.

“Being a good father,” Biden responded.

Beg pardon?

Oh, that’s right, the former president already did that.

But not a very good grandfather: “‘Every single day, I contact every single one of my grandchildren,’ Biden, who as president repeatedly failed to acknowledge the existence of the granddaughter his son, Hunter, fathered out-of-wedlock, claimed.”

SWING AND A MISS! Hakeem Jeffries Generates a Meme Storm Trying to Look Tough With a Baseball Bat.

The Democrats really are just overgrown theater kids. No matter how cringeworthy their last stunt was, rest assured that they will find a new stunt that will make everyone wince even harder with embarrassment.

As President Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ returned to the House of Representatives last night, the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, needed to try something to make himself look tough in his opposition to the bill (even though he has no power to stop it if Republicans hold together).

This is Jeffries, on Instagram, ‘looking tough’:

Based on Cynical Publius’ take on the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and considering that post-Trump, the Democrats have chosen to brand themselves as the party of death and violence, no wonder Jefferies is posing as a pint-sized version of Robert DeNiro’s Al Capone from The Untouchables:

Which is why, based on his past statements, Jeffries recommends not delaying further:

He’s really become an excellent salesman for the BBB:

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Tax dollars flow to non-profit run by Colorado state legislator.

Democrat State Representative Lorena Garcia was appointed by a vacancy committee to her seat in the Colorado legislature after her predecessor resigned in 2023. She successfully passed a re-election bid in 2024 and is now serving out a full term in the statehouse.

Prior to that, Garcia worked at a number of nonprofits, landing in 2018 as the executive director of Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition (CSPC), a job she presently still holds.

Mirroring Garcia’s political rise among the majority Democrats at the Capitol, CSPC’s fortunes have also greatly improved. According to the nonprofit’s tax form 990, CSPC’s revenues when Garcia took the helm were about $517,000, growing by about five times to $2.7 million in 2023 (the last filing year available).

Clearly CSPC was pleased with Garcia’s leadership, since her salary went from $57,000 to $133,000 in the same period.

This in and of itself isn’t remarkable. It makes sense that those at the helm of a non-profit be compensated when the organization does better; it would, at least, be smart to align things that way. There is a plot twist here, however. CSPC’s revenues have ballooned in large part because of lots of state tax dollars flowing in.

Colorado runs a website called the Transparency Online Project (TOPS), a statewide database where, among other things, you can search to see who the state is paying, from what department, for what, etc. Think of it as an online register for Colorado’s checkbook.

Details at the link.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Amazon will soon employ more robots than humans as 1 million machines toil across facilities.

Many of these robots cover the heavy lifting involved in warehouse work, picking items down from tall shelves and moving goods around facilities.

Others are advanced enough to help humans sort and package orders, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Three-quarters of Amazon’s global deliveries are now assisted in some way by robots, according to the company.

“They’re one step closer to that realization of the full integration of robotics,” Rueben Scriven, research manager at robotics consulting firm Interact Analysis, told the Journal.

Exit quote: “These advanced bots work in tandem with human workers at the Louisiana warehouse, handing products to employees to fill orders and reaching for hard-to-grab items inside shelves as workers supervise. Products whizz through this facility 25% faster than at other warehouses.”

CHANGE:

CHANGE? Gov. Gavin Newsom signs housing bill overhauling California’s landmark environmental law.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law an overhaul of California’s landmark environmental protection rules that he says is essential to address the state’s critical housing shortage and long-running homeless crisis.

The Democratic governor widely seen as a potential 2028 presidential candidate called the two-bill package a historic reshaping of environmental rules that, while initially well intentioned, too often resulted in tangles of litigation and costly delays that strangled much-needed development.

Newsom said the bills, which he signed Monday night, represent the most consequential housing reform in recent California history.

“We have too much demand chasing too little supply,” Newsom said at a news conference. “So many of the challenges that ail us can be connected back to this issue.”

Well, yeah — it’s just weird to hear a progressive Democrat say it.

Also: He’s running.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump’s Win Over CBS Another Nail in the MSM Coffin. “The condescending arrogance of the leftists in the media is really something to behold, given how paste-eatingly (I just made it up, it’s a thing now) stupid they all are. Almost every fabrication that they try to sell to the Dem base is easily disprovable by anyone with internet access who knows how to watch a video.”

THIS NEEDS MORE ATTENTION, BUT WHAT IT REALLY NEEDS ARE PROSECUTIONS, AND MAYBE EXECUTIONS:

WELL, GOOD: The Dalai Lama announces plans for a successor, signaling China won’t have a say.

It is unclear when the search for his successor will start, though the process can take several years. The Dalai Lama has only said it would be “in accordance with tradition.”

The Tibetan spiritual leader had previously speculated that his successor might be an adult, could be an “attractive” woman, or there might not be one at all. In his recently released book Voice for the Voiceless, he said that the new Dalai Lama will be born “in the free world” and outside of China.

“Free Tibet” seems to have disappeared from the Left’s concerns in recent years.