Archive for 2026

#JOURNALISM:

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED:

FROM THE BIRTHPLACE OF WHAT WE USED TO CALL ENGLISH LIBERTY:

RULE OF LAW:

WATCHING THE SAUSAGE BEING MADE:

This is a practice dating back at least 60 years. As Tom Wolfe told Bill Moyers when he was promoting The Bonfire of the Vanities in 1988:

[O]ne of the things is what I would call “media ricochet,” which is the way real life and life as portrayed by television, by journalists like myself and others, begin ricocheting off of one another. That’s why, to me, in The Bonfire of the Vanities, it was so important to show exactly how this occurs when television and newspaper coverage become a factor in something like racial politics. And a good bit of the book has to do with this curious phenomenon of how demonstrations, which are a great part of racial and ethnic politics, exist only for the media. In the last days when I was working on The New York Herald-Tribune, I’ll never forget the number of demonstrations I went to and announced to all the people with the placards, “I’m from The New York Herald-Tribune,” and the attitude was really a yawn, and then, “Get lost.” They were waiting for Channel 2 and Channel 4 and Channel 5, and suddenly the truck would appear and these people would become galvanized. On one occasion I even saw a group of demonstrators down in Union Square, marching across the Square, and Channel 2 arrived, a couple of vans, and the head of the demonstration walked up to what looked like the head man of the TV crew and said, “What do you want us to do?” He says, “Golly, I don’t know. What were you gonna do?” He says, “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, you tell us.”

Related: Maze Found a Positive CNN Story on ICE Arresting Criminal Illegals (Not During the Trump Years of Course).

DEVELOPING…:

DO NOT TRUST CONTENT FROM JACOB FREY:

CIVIL RIGHTS: DeStefano: ‘I will never tell Letitia James who bought my guns.’ “Orlando, Florida resident and Indie Guns owner Lawrence Michael DeStefano wants his 50,000 New York customers to know he will never give up their names, even though New York State Attorney General Leticia James has threatened to put him in prison for more than 500 years if he doesn’t comply immediately and furnish their personal information and purchase history.”

A STORY RIPPED FROM TODAY’S HEADLINES: The Trafficker: A Novel. This is by Scott Gerber, who’s been mentioned on this blog many times. I haven’t read it yet, but I bought it and have high expectations.

SASHA STONE: Confessions of a Recovering Liberal White Woman.

Drive Baby Drive. 

Hearing those words by Renee Good’s wife just before disaster hit and the bullets killed her instantly, I thought of Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise.

Back then, the controversial ending where they drive off a cliff and we assume crash to their deaths seemed like a twisted form of empowerment, but all it really meant was that they had to give up on a world that had given up on them.

Liberal white women in the past 20 years have lived the most privileged lives of almost anyone on the planet. But even having everything somehow wasn’t enough. They needed to still feel like Thelma and Louise, like they had no other choice but to scream in the faces of the ICE agents, no other choice but to resist, no other choice but to step on the gas.

Related: How have so many young women become brainwashed by the far Left?

MAKE SHOWERS GREAT AGAIN: Big Government Steps Out of the Shower Stall. “Eleven House Democrats crossed party lines to support Republicans in overturning the Biden-era regulation that restricted water flow in household showerheads. The resolution targeted a rule that capped gallons per minute, regardless of how many spray nozzles or settings a showerhead used.”

YOU NEED HELP, LADY:

She’s going to hurt someone.

DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Raids on WA public works account could put it in the red by 2028.

Since its creation in the 1980s, the Public Works Assistance Account has existed to provide funding for revolving low-interest loans for local governments for infrastructure improvement projects.

In the decades since its creation, the state Legislature has repeatedly raided the account to plug holes in its operating budget.

That practice continues into the current biennium, and could put the account in a negative balance, depending on budget proposals from elected officials as they scramble to cover a multibillion dollar deficit driven by increased spending that has outpaced record revenue levels.

It doesn’t matter how much money government has — it will always go looking for more.