President Trump deploying the National Guard to Chicago means that Jussie Smollett will FINALLY be able to walk the streets at 2am with his Subway sandwiches in peace.
It’s 2025. Surely Democrats learned to get on the right side of these issues. But for Democrats with national aspirations, the Be Normal Challenge remains very challenging.
Enter former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, who has led Republican Lt. Gov Winsome Sears by double digits throughout the year. She has been hailed as part of the great moderate hope for Democrats in the vibe shift after 2024. She is a mom who represented a swing district, and a former CIA agent. The Atlantic called her part of the Democrats’ “Patriotic Vanguard,” while the Washington Post hailed her “centrist” credentials along with a handful of other up-and-coming Democrats, whose claims rest mostly on the fact that they don’t seem allergic to the American flag.
But how normal is the Great Normie Hope in Virginia? Spanberger has said nothing about the boys suspended in Loudoun County. She has said nothing about five Northern Virginia school districts defying both Executive Orders and Virginia civil rights rules by “allow[ing] students of the opposite sex access to intimate sex-separated facilities and allow[ing] students of the opposite sex to participate in sex-separated sports.” Not just a culture-war flare-up, this is a legal issue she will have to contend with as governor, as the Trump Department of Justice will seek to pull funding for school districts that violate its Title IX rules.
It’s also not an issue that should require bravery, certainly not from an allegedly centrist leader. When polled, 70-90 percent of Americans agree that trans-identifying males should not compete in women’s sports leagues. The locker room question is less polled, but similarly lopsided.
“Abigail is a mom of three kids in Virginia public schools — the safety of Virginia’s kids is Abigail’s top priority, and she believes that parents have the right to make decisions about what is best for their children,” said Spanberger.
Remember when one of the things you looked forward to every summer was the return of the summer blockbuster movies?
We’ve seen some great summer blockbuster films, from the “Star Wars” original releases to “Indiana Jones,” “Jurassic Park,” “The Terminator,” and many more. Personally, though, I like depictions of great moments in history. Many of them, like the 2000 Roland Emmerich/Mel Gibson film “The Patriot,” were heavily fictionalized, but that doesn’t make them less enjoyable. But while I do enjoy films like Zack Snyder’s “300” – a guilty pleasure, I admit – I generally like my historical films to be a little more true to life, like the 1962 film, “The 300 Spartans.”
That doesn’t mean a film can’t be historically accurate and still be a great summer blockbuster. History is replete with blockbuster moments, and here are three I’d like to see given a decent, non-woke, accurate movie treatment.
I’m still waiting to see Hollywood produce Total Eclipse.
Although Fateh received 328 votes and Frey 227 votes, a review found that 176 votes were not counted due to an electronic voting system failure. Fateh won by a show-of-hands vote.
“What should’ve been an orderly, fair and transparent endorsement process instead became a textbook example of systematic dysfunction. One that disenfranchised members of our party, broke our own rules, and undermined trust both inside and outside the convention hall,” said one challenger, former DFL chair Mike Erlandson.
“According to the Minneapolis DFL’s respondents own brief, 176 votes were incorrectly not counted. If they had been, a third candidate, DeWayne Davis, would’ve been eligible for the second mayoral ballot. Because these errors were never corrected, everything that followed was likewise flawed,” Erlandson added.
Some DFL officials disagree that the outcome would have changed if the votes were counted.
“To say a violation has occurred is not enough to overturn an endorsement. To overturn an endorsement requires clear and convincing evidence that the violation was so significant that it would have materially changed the outcome,” co-chair of the Minneapolis DFL City Convention Dan Thomas-Commins said last week.
Fateh has been compared to New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani as an equally anti-Israel, far-left socialist. The Minnesota Senate’s first Somali and Muslim member, Fateh promised to raise the minimum wage to $20 per hour, ban new charter schools, and push to implement an income tax if elected mayor.
He who votes does not have power. He who counts the votes has power, to coin a phrase.
More here: Patel tweets: ‘No One is Above the Law.’ “Bolton’s name appears on a list of ‘corrupt actors’ from the ‘deep state’ in an appendix at the end of Patel’s 2023 book, ‘Government Gangsters.’”
UPDATE: Things Go From Bad to Worse for John Bolton With Second Raid, and His Old Comments Come Back to Haunt. “In a stunning development, former Trump administration official turned CNN anti-Trump talking head, John Bolton, had his home raided by the FBI early Friday morning. According to reports, the investigation is related to the alleged retention and leaking of classified documents, specifically regarding a memoir Bolton published in 2020. Now, things have escalated further, with a second raid being carried out at Bolton’s D.C. office.”
So Lucy Connolly has finally been released from prison, nine months into her 31-month sentence for ‘inciting racial hatred’ on X in the wake of last year’s Southport murders. Good. This childminder from Northampton should never have spent a day in prison, and even so will now serve out the rest of her sentence at home under as-yet-unkown release conditions. Now, we must ensure this authoritarian farce is never repeated.
Let’s start with the obvious. What Connolly tweeted on 29 July 2024, when the bodies of knifeman Axel Rudakubana’s three tiny victims were barely cold, was inexcusable. ‘Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care’, she raged to her 9,000 followers. ‘While you’re at it, take the treacherous government and politicians with them… If that makes me racist, so be it.’
Like so many others, Connolly was horrified by Southport – not least given that she had previously lost a child herself. Like so many others, she had seen the swirling online misinformation that the killer was a Muslim small-boats migrant. But startlingly few will have begun jabbering darkly online about burning human beings alive – albeit with that caveat, ‘for all I care’.
Was it ugly, bigoted, vile? Obviously. But should she have been locked up for it, held on remand, denied bail – twice? Should she have been handed down, what is believed to be, the longest prison sentence ever issued for a single social-media post – all after she had pleaded guilty, in the vain hope of getting home to her husband and daughter sooner? Obviously not. As a society, we continue to stub our toe on this crucial distinction, with disastrous consequences for all of our freedoms.
Connolly has accused Sir Keir Starmer of holding her as a political prisoner in her first interview following her release from jail.
Mrs Connolly, 42, a childminder from Northampton, said it was “bizarre” she had spent more than a year behind bars for posting a tweet inciting racial hatred in the wake of the Southport murders.
Mrs Connolly, a mother-of-two, explained she was “upset and angry beyond belief” and that a “red mist” had clouded her judgment. She accepted the post on X was not her “finest moment” but insisted she did not “advocate violence”.
In an exclusive interview with Allison Pearson, the Telegraph journalist who led the campaign for her release, Mrs Connolly also accused the police of being “dishonest” in allegedly misrepresenting her views on immigration and threatened to bring a legal claim against them.
Mrs Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison after pleading guilty to a post that wrongly suggested Axel Rudakubana, who murdered three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in Southport, had been an illegal immigrant.
Mrs Connolly called for “mass deportation now”, adding: “Set fire to all the f—ing hotels full of the b——s for all I care… if that makes me racist so be it.” She removed the tweet after three hours but by that time it had been viewed by 310,000 people.
As a legendary former general once said, if you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine:
Democrats are so cooked that they needed a memo to tell them that everything they say makes them sound insane to normal people. https://t.co/dnu2h27H4E
The Department of Justice has reportedly opened an investigation into Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook over alleged mortgage fraud, just one day after President Trump urged the Biden appointee to resign.
It is the latest move by the Trump administration to step up pressure on the Federal Reserve, which has faced criticism from officials for being slow to cut rates and splashing out $2.5 billion on revamping its HQ.
Bloomberg reported earlier on Thursday that Ed Martin, a senior DOJ official who led probes into Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and New York Attorney General Letitia James, has written to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell stating that Cook’s situation “warrants further scrutiny.”
“I strongly recommend that you suspend Ms. Cook from the Federal Reserve Board immediately,” Martin’s letter was quoted as saying. “No one believes it’s appropriate for her to remain in her role while serious questions linger.”
Speaking of which, exit question:
So she’s a plagiarist, an academic fraudster, and a mortgage fraudster? And she runs the Fed?
The man who led the prosecution of President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial is now worried about his own defense.
Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, the longtime California congressman and chief impeachment manager against Trump in 2019-20, has launched a legal defense fund amid accusations that he engaged in mortgage fraud for more than a decade.
It’s an accusation Schiff denies, but the director of the Federal Home Financing Agency is talking very tough.
In a criminal referral to Attorney General Pam Bondi sent in May, FHFA Director William Pulte wrote that Schiff and his wife, Eve, purchased property in Potomac, Maryland, in 2003 that they affirmed would be their “primary residence.”
That designation, Pulte wrote, enabled the Schiffs to “receive more favorable loan terms, including lower interest rates, than secondary residence mortgages.”
The problem for Schiff is that at the same time, he was receiving a homeowner’s tax exemption on a condo he owned in Burbank, California, which he was also claiming as a “primary residence,” according to Pulte’s letter.
The real reason Cracker Barrel has been struggling is that its service and food quality nose-dived after COVID, and instead of fixing that, the company and its woke executives decided to go full Bud Light and taste the rainbow and dare its customers to object.
The original series, ‘Anthology 1’ arrived in November 1995, around the same time as an eight-part documentary, and some of the first new music from the band since the death of John Lennon, with McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr working with Jeff Lynne on ‘Real Love’ and ‘Free as a Bird’.
It was followed up by two more albums, aptly named ‘Anthology 2’ and ‘Anthology 3’, which both arrived in 1996.
Now, it’s been confirmed that a new installment is arriving this year, with the documentary series restored, remastered and set to include a brand new Episode Nine.
And not surprisingly, the Beatles (Paul, Ringo, and their engineering and production boffins) used the latest AI technology to bring John’s ghostly vocal from his 1970s demo on “Free as a Bird” to the front of a new and much clearer sounding mix, which sounds dynamite on headphones:
All of the caveats from the 2023 release of “Now and Then” apply: this is the three surviving Beatles playing in the mid-‘90s on top of a demo tape John Lennon originally recorded in the mid-‘70s on a pair of “ghetto blaster” cassette recorders in Lennon’s Dakota building apartment. Likely a real studio performance would have both much more energy to it, and better shaped lyrics. But it’s still great to hear all four Beatles on the same recording.
HOLLYWOOD’S SUMMER OF MEH: “Alas, the summer movie season, which is finally in the rearview, was defined by mostly underwhelming reboots and sequels (Smurfs, 28 Years Later), way-too-tired I.P. (The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Ballerina), and barely released awards bait (Highest 2 Lowest). There was some original material that found its intended audience, like F1 and Weapons, but those were the two notable exceptions. Unsurprisingly, the season will drastically underperform the #Barbenheimer summer of 2023.”
THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Ice Cube’s War of the Worlds — the Greatest Thing Ever.
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