“Believe me, we weren’t disrupting anything at all,” Trump reportedly complained, as Obama obediently went to take his seat at the other end of the pew. “I’m the quietest person at this funeral. So quiet — you’d never even know I’m here, because I’m grieving so much. Mucho quiet. Now, if you want to talk about disruption, Jill, how about the smells that have been drifting up from your husband’s seat? Why don’t you make him go sit somewhere else? Sad! Unfair!”
The separation seems to have worked, as Jill Biden only had to turn around once or twice to give Trump a firm, hard stare as he whispered a conversation with Melania.
At publishing time, Obama and Trump had been reprimanded again after Jill caught Obama flinging a spitball at Hillary and Trump flicking Kamala’s ear.
80 years after WWII ended, it’s really nice to see new FDR and new Hitler playing so nicely together in 2025.
On Wednesday, it was announced that Wake Up Productions Ltd, Morgan’s own production company, is buying out Piers Morgan Uncensored from News UK, almost a year after it moved online following the scrapping of Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV channel. Owning the brand, Morgan said in a statement, “allows my team and I the freedom to focus exclusively on building Uncensored into a standalone business, editorially and commercially, and in time, widening it from just me and my content.”
In effect, a few months before his 60th birthday, 40 years after he entered journalism and long after he became bigger than any British TV channel that could employ him, Morgan is finally setting up his own shop. In doing so, he follows the likes of Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, two Fox News stars who broke away to earn even more money, and arguably more viewers, on the internet.
I eagerly await Morgan’s invertible hot take on why Winston Churchill was — even more so than Jimmy Carter — history’s greatest monster.
President Joe Biden kept telling officials to ‘fire away’ as he was briefed Thursday on the devastating Los Angeles wildfires.
Biden assembled Vice President Kamala Harris and other federal officials to give him an update on where things stood on the wildfires – as three large fires continued to burn through homes and businesses in Southern California.
The president spoke first and then turned the conversation to Harris – a California native and whose Brentwood home has been threatened by the blazes.
‘I know you’re directly affected, so you fire away,’ Biden said causing Harris to make a face. ‘No pun intended,’ the president added.
As he had other officials take their turns he used the phrase three more times, prompting an online outcry once the initial exchange with Harris started going viral.
‘People have lost their homes and some have even lost their lives and this guy has jokes,’ on X user commented. ‘Guy sure knows when to make a one liner,’ another offered.
Biden also used the meeting to subtly call out President-elect Donald Trump for politicizing the fires – and tried to tamp down some of the disinformation being spread around about water shortages.
‘You all do a hell of a job,’ he told his team*. ‘And we’ve learned, unfortunately so much. And there is, in case you haven’t noticed, there is global warming – it does change weather patterns,’ he said.
This is the ultimate in DEI: A morbidly-obese entitled woke woman telling you that if she’s not able to perform the tasks required by her job, that’s your fault, not hers.
You’re the one who got yourself into a burning building, after all. Don’t blame her if she’s too weak and out-of-shape to carry your husband out of the blaze.
LAFD Assistant Chief Kristine Larson:
"Am I able to carry your husband out of a fire? He got himself in the wrong place." pic.twitter.com/BofTVr6dWP
FBI agents searched the home of a Los Angeles deputy mayor this week as part of an investigation into whether he made a bomb threat against City Hall, officials said.
A statement from the office of Mayor Karen Bass said she was notified of Tuesday’s search at the residence of Brian K. Williams, her deputy mayor for public safety, as part of an probe into an alleged threat.
The Los Angeles Police Department confirmed that officers responded “earlier this year” to a bomb threat against City Hall.
“Our initial investigation revealed that the source of the threat was likely from Brian Williams, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety,” the department said in a statement Wednesday. “Due to the Department’s working relationship with Mr. Williams, the investigation was referred to the FBI. The FBI remains the investigating agency.”
So the “Deputy Mayor for Public Safety” is accused of making “a bomb threat against City Hall?” This is satire that even the Babylon Bee couldn’t come up with.
As if Los Angeles County residents didn’t have enough to worry about right now, the county’s official alert system appears to have sent out a terrifying warning by accident.
Much of Southern California has been forced to evacuate their homes due to the ongoing wildfires. The wildfires started in Pacific Palisades but due to strong winds, they’ve spread to several other parts of Southern California. So far, though, much of downtown Los Angeles and the valley appears to still be in OK shape.
However, on Thursday afternoon, millions of Los Angeles County residents received a terrifying warning.
“Emergency Alert. NEW: This is an emergency message from the Los Angeles County Fire Department. An EVACUATION WARNING has been issued in your area. Remain vigilant of any threats and be ready to evacuate. Gather loved ones, pets, and supplies. Continue to monitor local weather, news and the webpage alertla.org for more information,” the alert reads.
Los Angeles residents who thought they were in a safe area were understandably terrified.
“Every person in LA County got it,” one fan wrote.
“Got it in Long Beach,” one fan added.
The false alert was also heard live on at least one local news show, amplifying its coverage and further rattling LA residents, already on edge:
JUST IN: Los Angeles accidentally sends an evacuation alert to every LA county resident, emergency alert goes off during live news coverage.
The alert told people to “gather loved ones, pets, and supplies.”
In the annals of environmental law, no creature is more famous than the Snail Darter, the endangered species that shut down completion of the Tellico Dam in the 1970s. It required congressional legislation to allow the dam to be finished after years in the courts where judges maintained that the species had to be protected under the Endangered Species Act. According to the New York Times., the species may turn out to be as mythical as a unicorn.
The controversy began in 1967 when the Tennessee Valley Authority started constructing a dam on the Little Tennessee River, roughly 20 miles outside Knoxville. Environmentalists and locals opposed the project and, in 1973, a zoologist at the University of Tennessee named David Etnier went snorkeling with his students and found a possible solution. He spotted a small fish and called it a “snail darter” because of its movements and eating habits. He reportedly announced “Here’s a little fish that might save your farm.”
Dr. Zygmunt Plater, an environmental law professor at Boston College, represented the snail darter before the Supreme Court. He did an excellent job and, in 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that “the Endangered Species Act prohibits impoundment of the Little Tennessee River by the Tellico Dam” to protect the endangered snail darters.
That was then.
The Times now quotes Thomas Near, the curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum who leads a fish biology lab at the university, that “there is, technically, no snail darter.” Worse yet, it was actually just another member of the eastern population of Percina uranidea, or stargazing darters, which is not considered endangered.
Near and his colleagues have published the results in Current Biology.
In other words, years of litigation and millions of dollars were spent on what was a false claim, and the courts accepted the claims hook, line, and sinker.
As David Frum began the chapter titled “Dam Yankees” of his 2000 book, How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse), “An early flag of the American Revolution displayed a coiled rattlesnake (and the fierce motto ‘Don’t Tread on Me’) to symbolize the country’s fierce determination to rule itself. Two hundred years later, the animal with the best claim to represent the American character was not the rattler but a small freshwater fish: the snail darter…The fish might not have been much to look at, but it had a sure sense of timing.”
This may be hard to comprehend, dear reader, but the people of that enlightened land did not protect their daughters. I’m sorry to say they abandoned them to their fate. Police, whose duty it was to look after the most vulnerable, either arrested the girls, dismissed their pleas for help or left them with their tormentors. For that famously kind and decent land had fallen under a strange enchantment, which was called multiculturalism. It said that, no matter how wicked or cruel the men were to the children, you must never speak of it. The dark spell, and what a powerful spell it was (enough to vanquish justice and compassion), caused any who dared to say thatPakistani Muslim menwere targeting white girls to become the bad people. Because all cultures are equal, you see, even ones that don’t believe in equality or which agree that girls who aren’t virgins are whores and deserve to be punished.
And those who struggled against the powerful spell that stifled their countrymen were called racist. And to be racist or bigoted or “far-Right” was to be far more hateful than any hatred inflicted on female children,or so the people of the good and fair country were told by their leaders.
And when the monsters swore at the children whom they were raping, saying, “White slag!” “White c—!” – well, that wasn’t at all racist. Because multiculturalism and the BBCsay it cannot be so.
A few brave women (Julie, Ann, Maggie, Sarah) who woke from the enchantment and warned young girls were in danger from British Pakistani menwere banished and forced to apologise for being “reckless in my choice of words”. Or they lost their seat in the shadow Cabinet.
And the evil – a vast, suppurating evil such as the land had not known for a thousand years – continued to blight that good and fair country. The authorities colluded to make sure the hatred must never speak its name, and the girls carried their lonely torment within them and their rapists got access to the babies they had impregnated them with. (Oh, yes, they did. So strong was the multicultural enchantment it made people surrender the values they had been born to.)
And the monsters were not banished from the good and fair country, not one of them sent back to countries that were neither good nor fair, in case their human rights were breached.
Then, one day, the richest man in the whole wide world came along and broke the dark spell. Elon had read court transcripts telling what those monsters had done to the female children, and he could not believe such unfathomable depravity had taken root in the good and fair country. Because of his great wealth, Elon could not be intimidated into agreeing that thousands of white girls should have been used as a peace offering to placate the gods of multiculturalism. His righteous wrath shamed the cowardly leaders of the land and in their panic they cried “Misinformation!” But the people were having none of it. For they were awake now and they saw what horrors the brutes had been allowed to get away with. As the wicked enchantment lifted, the malevolent myth of multiculturalism was unmasked, the country slowly but surely recovered its senses and demanded the guilty be found and punished, even unto the highest in the land.
Today it is precisely the most rational, intellectual, secularized, modernized, updated, relevant religions—all the brave, forward-looking Ethical Culture, Unitarian, and Swedenborgian movements of only yesterday—that are finished, gasping, breathing their last. What the Urban Young People want from religion is a little Hallelujah! … and talking in tongues! … Praise God! Precisely that! In the most prestigious divinity schools today, Catholic. Presbyterian, and Episcopal, the avant-garde movement, the leading edge, is “charismatic Christianity” … featuring talking in tongues, ululation, visions, holy rolling, and other nonrational, even antirational, practices. Some of the most respectable old-line Protestant congregations, in the most placid suburban settings, have begun to split into the Charismatics and the Easter Christians (“All they care about is being seen in church on Easter”). The Easter Christians still usually control the main Sunday-morning service—but the Charismatics take over on Sunday evening and do the holy roll.
This curious development has breathed new life into the existing Fundamentalists, theosophists, and older salvation seekers of all sorts. Ten years ago, if anyone of wealth, power, or renown had publicly “announced for Christ,” people would have looked at him as if his nose had been eaten away by weevils. Today it happens regularly … Harold Hughes resigns from the U.S. Senate to become an evangelist … Jim Irwin, the astronaut, teams up with a Baptist evangelist in an organization called High Flight … singers like Pat Boone and Anita Bryant announce for Jesus … Charles Colson, the former hardballer of the Nixon administration, announces for Jesus, and the man who is likely to be the next president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, announces for Jesus. Oh Jesus People.
Several pro-life Facebook users are demanding their accounts be restored after Meta promised this week to support free speech on its platform.
In a letter obtained exclusively by The Daily Wire, the legal counsel for LifeNews and its founder Steven Ertelt, as well as pro-life mother Abby Covington, requested Meta “immediately” restore their disabled accounts.
“If Meta is truly committed to the free-speech principles that it recently announced, it will act swiftly to reinstate Mr. Ertelt’s, LifeNews’s, and Mrs. Covington’s accounts,” reads the letter from their legal team at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
Stay tuned.
DISPATCHES FROM THE REICHSTAG:
Former President Barack Obama casually and amiably chats with Adolf Hitler as the latter is set to assume power in 11 days, end American democracy, and impose a white nationalist dictatorship. https://t.co/4tbj46yVk8
The devastation in Southern California is almost beyond measure. A little over half of Pacific Palisades is gone. Most of the seaside parts of Malibu are in ruins. There are now seven active fires in Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties, none of them remotely contained at the writing of this column.
The human toll, which will continue to grow in the days and weeks, is heartbreaking. The property loss and personal effects consumed in the fires are just the beginning for a new batch of Angelino refugees. In the days, weeks, months, and years ahead, there will be ongoing concerns about shelter, and whether they can and will try to rebuild their lives in what once was among the most premium places to live in the world.
When the Santa Anas began blowing in earnest Tuesday morning and word broke out of a fire above the Palisades, I began to pray that the west side of Los Angeles would not end up with the same fate as Lahaina. By early evening, glued to local television reports from Malibu, a second fire in Pasadena and Altadena, and a third raging in Sylmar burning everything in its path, it began to sink in that by Wednesday morning, the landscape of the L.A. Basin would be changed for a very long time to come.
By Wednesday night, a new fire in the middle of the Hollywood Hills began. Sunset Blvd., Coldwater Canyon, Runyon Canyon, and possibly Hollywood Blvd., and any number of famed structures and houses on those roads, are in the destruction path.
Read the whole thing. If you want to get a sense of what California was like in the ’60s and ’70s, when it seemed like a land of endless possibilities, flashback to Jennifer Rubin’s last article for Commentary, in their September 2015 issue, before her performance art career at the Washington Post began: “California, There It Went.”
More than 40 years later, I still remember the bright sun and the palm trees when we got off the plane. California in 1968 was a magical place, a magnet for those seeking new opportunities or to lose an old identity. The Golden State was allowing the rich to get richer and the middle class to live out the American dream in its pristine state. The public schools and expanding state-university system (two separate systems, in fact) were the envy of the nation. The corruption and Mob influence that had paralyzed many eastern and midwestern states and cities were largely absent.
When my parents announced they were uprooting the Glazer family from a cozy suburb of Philadelphia, as 5 million people did from eastern and midwestern towns between 1950 and 1980, the news was met with a mixture of awe (“California…” they would breathlessly whisper) and bewilderment (“But what is there?”). The very act of migrating by plane was itself somewhat grand. In the years before airline deregulation, one dressed up to fly, as if sailing on an ocean liner, and at prices not all that much lower than an ocean voyage’s. And yet those we were leaving behind acted as though we were traveling by caravan, leaving civilization and going into the wilderness.
In a real sense, even in 1968, California was the wilderness. If the cost of air travel was prohibitive for a family of modest means, they usually drove, and from the flatness of the Midwest they found themselves left speechless by the vision of the Rocky Mountains, rugged coastlines, wide beaches, and empty space they knew only from the movies. Like emigrants leaving the old country in the 19th century, they often arrived friendless and unaccustomed to the habits of their new environment. Public transportation was in scarce supply; instead there were gleaming freeways with five lanes on each side. Tie and jacket? More and more restaurants didn’t care. Informality pervaded dress and speech at a time when, back east, adults still commonly addressed acquaintances as Mister and Missus.
In Southern California, the aerospace industry was booming, and middle-class professionals from all over the country flocked to work in and around it. The movie studios had fallen into distress and decay due to the growing popularity of TV (before the blockbuster era of the 1970s drew audiences back out of their living rooms), but if you went to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, you might spot the billionaire in a corduroy jacket whose name was above the door escorting Cary Grant around his collection. Every now and then you’d have a Fred Astaire or a James Stewart sighting.
In a very real sense, California in 2025 is the wilderness again, with nature and mankind returning to their feral states, as assembled in this recent Babylon Bee video:
Bill Maher appeared on an episode of the “Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade” podcast on Wednesday, where the three comedians got into a discussion about the media’s lack of coverage around Doug Emhoff’s #MeToo accusations, and “Saturday Night Live” ignoring them completely.
The podcasters welcomed Maher and recounted the SNL skit last month where Spade returned to the show to play Hunter Biden, while Carvey portrayed his old character “Church Lady.” Spade expressed surprise that the troubled son of the president hadn’t been lampooned before.
Spade said he “was always curious as to why they never had anyone play Hunter Biden. It was just sort of ripe for the pickings,” adding, “I thought of maybe a hot-tub talk show with guests and girls.”
Maher then flipped the conversation to other missed opportunities by SNL, asking “How about, why didn’t they make fun of Kamala’s husband when he got ‘me-too’d’?,” adding that “it is amazing the way this country is so partisan, including in the media and the entertainment parts of it, that when something happens for your team that’s bad, it’s like, you know, the angel of death just flying over the house on Passover. Like, ‘we don’t see a thing here.’ Because, you know, Doug Emhoff was credibly accused of things that others have been accused of.”
Spade followed up by noting, “Yeah, and that wasn’t plastered everywhere.”
Maher criticized SNL for having Andy Sandberg portray Emhoff as a “funny kind-of dorky Doug” when the allegations against him were “as credible as many other accusations I’ve heard.”
Right from its earliest days, SNL has always pulled its punches — in its first season, the show was absolutely brutal towards Gerald Ford, but when Jimmy Carter replaced him, its comedy became noticeably more apolitical. The result was SNL’s most memorable characters, including the Coneheads, the Blues Brothers, the Nerds, and Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd’s “Wild and Crazy” Festrunk Brothers. But this was simply because the show’s producers and writers were ‘70s-era liberals and leftists. There wasn’t the intense pressure generated by the denizens of social media to not attack anyone on the left, and the related cancel culture to remind everyone that Siberia awaits those who don’t toe the party line.
She may have wept grotesquely on election night—at that sad scene outside Howard University where her stepmother, Kamala Harris, didn’t even bother to show up to her own watch party—but the Brooklyn trust fund tyke and fashion’s toast to sycophancy, Ella Emhoff, is going to be just fine.
In fact, she’s already back on the ’gram, giving vibes, usually in the form of a dirty mirror selfie with her depressing and tasteless apartment as backdrop—a domicile that’s a fitting extension of her own pampered mediocrity.
But, if you’re the child of a famous Democrat, especially the Joy and Coconuts lady, well, the sky’s the limit. Little Emhoff is going to be a famous fashion designer and America’s cultural institutions are on board, no resume required.
(Like that time, in 2011, when Chelsea Clinton said, I think I’ll be a journalist, and NBC News tripped over itself to slam a $600,000 a year contract in front of her. During Clinton’s three years with the network, she produced exactly three reports: one about a diner in New Mexico that helped kids with their homework; another about a gym in Detroit that helped kids work out; a third about poetry class for kids in Arkansas).
Totally by coincidence and sheer talent, in January 2021, the month her stepmom became Vice President, Emhoff was signed to the prestigious IMG modeling agency. She received fawning style section profiles from the likes of CNN, the BBC, and TheNew York Times.
In the late 1990s, the federal and state governments did in fact forge a cooperative compact — called “Cal Fed” — to achieve what I said would be “water of sufficient quantity and quality to provide California’s needs for fish, farm and factory.” Both state and federal agencies were to budget and coordinate spending and permitting for agreed-upon projects to achieve that goal.
For some years there was such cooperation, particularly in the funding of conservation and environmental projects. But when year after year I included money in the state budget for surface collection and storage projects to bank against droughts, the money was removed by the Democratic majorities in the Legislature. When agricultural interests rightly complained that they were being cheated out of their fair share of projects, support for Cal Fed evaporated. The bargain had been broken.
Of course, there have been wildfires before. We’re accustomed to images of the Sepulveda Pass engulfed by flames. The specter of natural disaster has always lent Los Angeles an air of risk, a kind of sexiness.
There’s nothing sexy about right now. This is about the end of a place. In the future, the fires will be a demarcation. There will be the times before and after the disaster, and the one will be remembered as this happy, gauzy surreality that never was.
So far, the fires appear to have spared our house and all the things inside: photographs of my wife and me, bowls and pieces of jewelry that my wife has collected from around the world, the two knockoff paintings I bought in an alley in Shanghai, our children’s bedroom, documents, screens, kitchen appliances, books, lots of books filled with notes and scribblings from graduate school. All the unimportant things. If things get worse, I expect we’ll get a text from one of our neighbors.
No one knows what comes next. What Los Angeles will be. This is the city of unreality, and the city has always been comfortable in that unreal state—it has always felt at home in it. But now?
Now, everything feels dark and overwhelming. Los Angeles is cold and overcast and rainless. Everyone is asking where they’re supposed to go, and whether it’s safe to go home, and whether this street or building they used to know is still there. We are floating.
Even the violence we see in “Blade Runner” had been done before. Yet director Ridley Scott’s film rejuvenated and re-contextualized the archetype into something new and bold: A hardboiled detective in the future. It was revolutionary and disturbing, as all great art is.
2. Reagan’s 80s — The ’80s was the neon-glow decade. Think “Morning in America.” That “Shining City on the Hill.” Aerobics and health crazes (You think the latter is crazy now? Well, it all started in the ’80s).
We were collectively trying to shrug of inflation, malaise and the dirty hippy vibes of yore. It was slick, Miami Vice slick, with hot cars and hot babes and hot pants.
The Go-Gos and cocaine ruled … GO GO! The film’s dystopian vision couldn’t be more different.
Into that slick marketing campaign a shadow was born: Cyberpunk. A dark, dirty, grunge-y attack on corporate gloss.
Blade Runner was a dazzling preview of Los Angeles in 2019; like Pottersville in It’s a Wonderful Life, I wouldn’t want to live there, but it certainly would be intriguing to visit for a weekend. But the dystopian hellscape of Los Angeles in 2025 is far more terrifying than even Ridley Scott could have envisioned in the early 1980s.
And while it’s currently a hellscape, it’s soon to be purgatorial as well — “Gooder and Harder, California” has been a recurring headline here for several years, but L.A. citizens are going to see an entirely new level of Gooder and Harder in their efforts to rebuild:
Epic Adam Carolla rant from a hotel after the LA wildfires forced to evacuate from his home, where he predicts Hollywood leftists will be so frustrated by the rebuild effort that they will not vote Democrat: "You guys all voted for Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles. You all… pic.twitter.com/YhNqBnJJR9
President Joe Biden on Wednesday cancelled the final overseas trip of his presidency just hours before he was set to depart for Rome and the Vatican, choosing to remain in Washington to monitor the response to devastating fires raging in California.
Biden was scheduled to leave Thursday afternoon, after eulogizing former President Jimmy Carter at a memorial service in Washington, for the three-day trip to meet with Pope Francis and Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The trip was meant as a coda to the second Catholic U.S. president’s time in the White House and a final opportunity to showcase the strength of American alliances before he leaves office on Jan. 20.
While Team Biden obviously doesn’t want to generate optics reminiscent of Bush and Katrina, it also seems a bit silly. Biden is a withered husk of a figurehead. He’s not going to making any major decisions, and there’s nothing to be gained by him being in the White House. And after January 20th, other than pardoning Hunter, and maybe giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to several elderly leftist grandees, no one will remember what a lame duck president did in his last days in office.
Finally, it’s quite funny to turn to Lyin’ Brian Williams for journalism advice, but he turned the focus back on Biden:
It was crushing to watch so many working journalists attempt to generate the words to accurately describe a visibly struggling and diminished president, seemingly unable to complete a sentence or a thought in his disastrous and final debate.
Say it with me: It is perhaps the ultimate irony that the electoral collapse of the Democratic Party in 2024 was triggered in large part by the man who ran to save the country and democracy — the same man who then tried to stay too long at the fair.
They’re all upset that the “democracy savers” lost an election. If you’re asking Brian Williams for journalism advice, it’s like asking Biden for advice on when to quit.
The WaPo and the rest of the DNC-MSM aren’t quite ready to admit the role they played in propping up the 21st century equivalent of a post-stroke Woodrow Wilson: The Biggest Media Story of Biden’s Presidency. They failed to cover the cognitive decline of the commander in chief until it served them to do so.
January 8, 2025
GREAT MOMENTS IN DEMOCRATIC ORATORY:
Mayor Karen Bass stands in a stunned silence for nearly 2 minutes as a reporter asks her if she regrets cutting Los Angeles' Fire Department budget by nearly $20 million and being absent as her citizens' homes burned down.pic.twitter.com/64A1hlTv2m
This is Politics 101 stuff — “It’s too early to play the blame game; my heart goes out to the people impacted by the fire. When I get back to California, I will lead a full inquiry into both the cause of the fire and any shortcomings in the response to it.” Why is she clamming up?
UPDATE: Ron Burgundy, call your office!
Mayor Karen Bass literally just read the words "URL" off her script during the press conference instead of the emergency website for the victims of the fire.
President Biden is flirting with handing out preemptive pardons to some of President-elect Donald Trump’s favorite political targets.
In an interview with USA Today, Mr. Biden said he might hand out the get-out-of-jail-free cards to, among others, former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney and Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Mr. Biden said he urged Mr. Trump when he met with him in November to put his beef with Ms. Cheney, who voted to impeach him and co-chaired the Jan. 6 special committee, and others behind him.
“I tried to make clear that there was no need, and it was counterintuitive for his interest to go back and try to settle scores,” Mr. Biden said.
That’s pretty rich, considering Biden’s four years in office seemed to consistent primarily about settling scores against Trump. Speaking of which, here’s how the print edition of USA Todaysummed up the (p)resident’s term:
No need to go to a movie theater if you can rent first-run movies a few weeks after they’re in the theaters. Why sit in a restaurant and wait for bad service when you can pick up your food and take it home to eat at your leisure?
“Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home,” writes Thompson. American females spend more time engaged with their pets than they do with friends.
Perhaps one of the problems is that we judge our self-imposed solitude based on a comparison to the first half of the 20th century. From 1900 to 1960, membership in churches and labor unions surged, there were more marriages than ever, and the biggest baby boom in history took place.
All kinds of gathering places were built: theaters, museums, concert halls, and playgrounds. But then something happened that gave us an excuse to withdraw. “From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by nearly half,” reports Thompson.
What happened in the 1970s? Klinenberg, the sociologist, notes a shift in political priorities: The government dramatically slowed its construction of public spaces. “Places that used to anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have become less accessible or shuttered altogether,” he told me. Putnam points, among other things, to new moral values, such as the embrace of unbridled individualism. But he found that two of the most important factors were by then ubiquitous technologies: the automobile and the television set.
The construction of highways and interstates enabled the growth of the suburbs. The exodus was spurred by rising crime and racial tensions in the urban areas. As people moved farther away from each other, their only connection to reality became the television set.
Later, through smartphones and the internet, our children may have connected to others but not on the vital person-to-person level that leads to a healthy, adult psyche.
In the last week or so, there has been a sudden burst of recognition of the extent to which Democrats and the media worked together to cover up Biden’s progressing cognitive decline. One media figure after another has come forward to call this the “most under-reported” story of the last year or several years. Some examples among many include: CBS correspondent Jan Crawford on December 30 (“That [the most under-reported story] would be, to me, Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable in a televised debate”); Rolling Stone, December 30 (“Matt Yglesias, Josh Barro, and Mehdi Hasan regret failing to acknowledge Biden’s cognitive decline sooner — and its impact on the 2024 election.”); MSN, January 4 (“Media facing backlash for reporting on Biden’s cognitive decline.”)
I agree that this was a very big and very under-reported story during the Biden presidency. But was it the biggest? Not to me. The biggest under-reported story of the Biden presidency was the President’s corruption.
The big difference between these two stories is that the cognitive decline story was much more difficult to cover up. Despite the best efforts of Biden’s staff to limit his appearances, restrict difficult questioning, and prevent all deviations from script, the President was still regularly out in the public eye. Even as every powerful Democrat insisted that Biden was “sharp as a tack,” we could all see him uttering confused answers to questions, mixing up his location, stumbling and falling, shaking hands with the air, and so forth. The refusal to take a simple cognitive test was a persistent tell. Yes, the left-wing media should be ashamed of their reporting; but they were not really able to fool anyone who was paying attention.
The corruption story was different. It takes some knowledge of the facts and the law to understand whether there is anything to an allegation of bribery. The mainstream media simply refused to provide the chronology of facts or a summary of the law to assist readers to understand the circumstances. As just a few examples:
Republicans are seizing on the catastrophic wildfires that tore through the Los Angeles area early Wednesday, blaming Democratic policies for the deadly, wind-fueled conflagrations that forced tens of thousands to flee their homes.
President-elect Donald Trump lashed out at Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday, calling the fires “virtually apocalyptic” in a Truth Social post and pointing a finger at state rules protecting endangered species for limiting the amount of water that gets sent south from Northern California.
“I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA!,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “He is the blame for this.”
Well, yes:
Just 11 months ago, LA had the most rainfall in the past 25 years, and several extra feet of snowpack in the Sierras. Since CA is too busy destroying dams to build new reservoirs, the majority of that precipitation drained into the ocean. Newsom's Democrats own this. https://t.co/yxIYaNcE0x
Labour MPs have blocked an attempt to initiate a national inquiry into grooming gangs.
The amendment put forward by Conservative MPs that would have piled pressure on the Government to hold a statutory inquiry into historic child sexual exploitation was voted down by 364 to 111.
The move was branded as an “act of cowardice” by Conservatives following the vote.
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “It is disgusting that Keir Starmer has used his supermajority in Parliament to block a national inquiry into the rape gangs scandal.
“Labour MPs have put their Party ahead of getting to the truth and turned a blind eye to justice for the victims. Labour MPs will have to explain to the British people why they are against learning the truth behind the torture and rape of countless vulnerable girls.
“We will not let them forget this act of cowardice.”
Diddy is furious that alleged CEO murderer Luigi Mangione is seen as a bigger star by inmates at the Brooklyn federal prison where both are locked up, it’s claimed.
The rapper, 54, and Mangione, 26, are both awaiting trial at Brooklyn’s infamous Metropolitan Center in New York, and Diddy – real name Sean Combs – is reportedly raging that the alleged killer is more beloved than he is among inmates.
‘Diddy has been throwing tantrums over the fact that Luigi is getting all of the attention in prison and is being revered as a hero after literally murdering someone on camera,’ the source said.
Diddy is reportedly upset because he claims he is innocent of sex trafficking yet he continues getting ‘so much hate inside the lock up while Luigi gets so much love.’
‘Even in prison, Diddy’s ego is bigger than life,’ the source added.
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