Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

MARK SANCHEZ NOW FACING A FELONY CHARGE STEMMING FROM INDIANAPOLIS ALTERCATION:

It should be noted that Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears is the same prosecutor who recently downgraded an attempted murder charge against Courtney Boose, a man with 99 prior arrests, to “aggravated battery.”

Make no mistake: if Sanchez is guilty, he should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. The injuries he allegedly inflicted on the 69-year-old victim are horrific. Yet it will be interesting to see how this prosecution unfolds, given the other prosecutorial choices Mears has recently made.

Sanchez was released from the hospital yesterday and immediately taken to jail, where he posted his $300 cash bond.

To their credit, Fox Sports Radio gives a thorough writeup of what’s known about the incident so far:

“GRAPHIC photos of the man attacked by former NFL QB and sportscaster Mark Sanchez. My colleague @maxlewis talked with his wife. The victim is 69 and was working at the time he was attacked. His family says he was cut in the fight and it went through his cheek and hit his tongue,” Ganote wrote on her X account, along with two photos showing the grisly injuries but blocking out the man’s eyes.

Sanchez was reportedly “acting erratically” and attack an elderly grease truck driver before he was stabbed in Indianapolis early Saturday (October 4) morning.

“This guy is trying to kill me,” the 69-year-old driver told police while recounting the incident, according to court documents obtained by the New York Post.

Sanchez was initially charged with battery resulting in injury, public intoxication, and unlawful entry of a motor vehicle in relation to the incident, which resulted in the driver stabbing him. The FOX Sports broadcaster, who was supposed to call the game between the Las Vegas Raiders and Indianapolis Colts at Lucas Oil Stadium on Sunday, allegedly got into an argument with the truck driver just before midnight on Saturday when he complained that the truck was blocking a nearby alley, sources with knowledge of the situation confirmed to FOX 59.

Sanchez was reportedly doing “wind sprints” in the alley behind the Loughmiller’s Pub and Eatery where he was drinking and “acting erratically” prior to the argument. Video captured from the nearby Indianapolis showed the former NFL quarterback approach and open the driver’s door of the truck, talk to the driver and walk over to the hotel’s security office, according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by the Indianapolis Star.

The two men then had another interaction before Sanchez began following the driver, who was seen backing away in the footage described by the charing documents.

“Sanchez is seen running after [the man] and the video shows Mr Sanchez grabbing and throwing [the man] towards the wall of the Westin,” the affidavit states.

The fight continued into the alley, at which point Sanchez allegedly threw the 69-year-old.

“Mr Sanchez is then seen throwing [the man] to the ground on the west side of the alley,” the affidavit states.

The grease truck driver told police that he used mace to protect himself from Sanchez but the attack continued before he stabbed the former quarterback two or three times, at which point Sanchez allegedly stared at him “with a look of shock” before turning around and walking up the alley, the affidavit states. Police found a trail of blood in the alleyway and Sanchez was rushed to the hospital in critical condition before later being upgraded to stable.

Sanchez was arrested, however, hasn’t been booked into Marion County Jail. The driver was reported to have suffered a laceration to his left cheek.

Based on the photos of the driver, which are indeed extremely graphic, that laceration is far more than just “reported.”

ED MORRISSEY: Release the Hounds: SCOTUS Rejects Ghislaine Maxwell Appeal. “As long as her attorneys keep up the appeals, though, federal judges will have plenty of cover to keep those transcripts sealed. The Epstein case screams out for more accountability for the trafficking-ring participants, but that usually comes from trials rather than grand jury deliberations. If Maxwell drops all appeals, though, maybe the judges controlling those transcripts will have changes of heart — and maybe Maxwell will see that as her best move. About the only hope she has now is a commutation, and that’s a long shot at best. And even then, it won’t be forthcoming for at least another couple of years.”

HERE WE GO: Bari Weiss: The Free Press is joining Paramount.

As of today, I am editor-in-chief of CBS News, working with new colleagues on the programs that have impacted American culture for generations—shows like 60 Minutes and Sunday Morning—and shaping how millions of Americans read, listen, watch, and, most importantly, understand the news in the 21st century.

And curiously, the legacy media is furious that someone who probably has a worldview comparable to that of Bill Clinton circa 1995 has a position of authority with CBS:

Oh no, not 60 Minutes, the home of Rathergate, Pallywood, and Scott Pelley in 2017 admitting on air the network was in bed with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Brian Stelter, whose Sunday CNN show, “Reliable Sources” was for years a safe haven for Dan Rather, tweets:

Not surprisingly, Stelter feigns the same cluelessness as all of his fellow Democrats at CBS right now:

Finally (for now), it’s obvious that there’s only one man who should be the new anchor of 60 Minutes: 

BEN FREEMAN: I’m Leaving the UK.

For years I clung to the belief that, despite the rise in hostility to the Jewish community, we could still build lives here. I had watched from abroad during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020, when Jew-hate poisoned the party and seeped into wider politics. Yet, despite my deep disappointment, I still believed in this country enough to move back from Hong Kong in 2022. I wanted to believe the Jewish story here still had a future, and I was determined to be a part of it.

October 7, 2023, changed everything. Hamas carried out the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, and instead of residents recoiling in horror, Britain’s streets filled with marches that celebrated it. Even after two Jews were massacred in Manchester yesterday, on Yom Kippur, the marches continued.

Jew-hatred has become mainstream here. It has been excused by leaders. It has been embedded in a culture where terrorism is justified and Jewish suffering denied. You see it in the tearing down of hostage posters across Britain’s cities, a painful message that Jewish lives do not matter. You can see it in the way Jew-hatred and violence are always paired with condemnations of “Islamophobia.” You can see it in a justice system that treats public displays of Judaism as a threat to public safety, rather than the Islamists who cause the danger. You can see it in placards calling for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state and for the genocide of Jews, and in crowds carrying the flags of proscribed terror organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah. These are not, and have never been, pro-Palestinian marches. They are, at their very core, anti-Jewish. They are about stigmatizing Jews as perpetrators of mass murder—and therefore creating the permission structure for violence against us.

Earlier: “I reckon Jews have about 10 years left” in England:

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:

UPDATE: Maybe the Union Jack caused the terrorism:

In any case: DEI Expert, One of the ‘Top 50 Influential Muslims,’ Explains Why Jews Can Be Killed in Synagogues. “Any hate towards said Jews would be valid.”

JOANNE JACOBS: Teaching kids the habits of anxious, depressed people isn’t working well.

For Generation Z, personalities are now defined as disorders, writes Freya India. In a 2024 survey, 72 percent of Gen-Z girls said “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.”

Adults diagnosed with mild autism, ADHD, depression and other syndromes often feel better, writes Ellen Barry in the New York Times. But the relief at having a name for their challenges fades over time. They feel less self-blame, but also “greater pessimism about recovery.”

Young adults who were diagnosed with disorders such as depression and ADHD in their teens do slightly worse than those with similar symptoms who weren’t diagnosed, concludes a large study by Cliodhna O’Connor, an associate professor of psychology at University College Dublin. “After controlling for symptom severity and socio-demographic factors,” the study found “young adults who were diagnosed with depression in adolescence had worse depression symptoms later, despite getting treatment,” reports Barry. Those diagnosed with ADHD “had worse peer relationships, worse self-image and worse emotional well-being.” The diagnosis lowers expectations.

For a 15-year-old, a diagnosis can be a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” warns Suzanne O’Sullivan, an Irish neurologist, in The Age of Diagnosis.

For some diagnoses, such as neurodevelopmental disorders like A.D.H.D. or autism, there’s not [a] path to recovery, she told Barry. “Although you’re relieved to feel explained and you’ve found a tribe, you are now trapped into an illness through the way you conceptualize it as a biological inevitability.”

Earlier: 23 Percent Of American 17-Year-Old Boys Have An ADHD Diagnosis.

ROGER KIMBALL: Trump’s Second Term Resets Washington’s Playbook.

Remember the good old days when the FBI would hang out in the parking lots of Catholic churches where the traditional Latin Mass was celebrated? The Bureau claimed that such churches were a breeding ground for what the Biden administration called “domestic extremism” and offered plenty of scope for what the FBI called “mitigation opportunities.” Hence, they jotted down the license plate numbers of the parishioners who just got done reciting really dangerous things like “Sanguis Christi custodiat me in vitam aeternam.” “See? See? They’re talking about blood!”

Those were the days. You could go to a school board meeting and watch hapless parents being tackled and hauled off by the police for complaining that they didn’t want little Johnny battened on books like Gender Queer or, come to that, they didn’t want that bloke Jack, who called himself Jill, moseying about the girl’s bathroom or playing touch football on the girls’ team. Wot larks!

That’s all over now. Sure, here and there, you will discover some pasty-faced feminist festooning her classroom with pride flags and banners instructing us to “globalize the intifada” or whatever. But those pathetic eructations are like the twitching of a frog’s legs after the dissection has begun: vestigial motor movements produced by stimulus, not life.

The magnificent address by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth last week was evidence of the new dispensation: “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses,” Hegseth said to the hundreds of senior officers he had summoned. “No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction, or gender delusions. No more debris.”

Read the whole thing.

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: A.I. Movie Stars: A Solution in Search of a Problem.

Look, I don’t know how to save the theatrical movie business… I don’t even know if it can be saved. But I do know that this is not the answer. Audiences in general are increasingly uninterested in seeing first run movies in theaters. Younger audiences in particular don’t seem that interested in movies at all… they seem to prefer watching content on Netflix, YouTube and Tik Tok. Whatever the myriad reasons (political messaging, cost, convenience) why people are turning away from theatrical movies, the fact is that there’s not a single person in America who would suddenly decide to start going to the movies more often if we would just get rid of all those damned movie stars.

Not a single one.

AI actors are a long con… a grift… another bullshit tech fantasy Silicon Valley is using to drum up another round of sweet, sweet V.C. cash. It’s just another iteration of the same insanity which convinced Hollywood to toss out the theatrical film and ad-supported network TV models in favor of streaming-based subscription fees… a decision which almost everyone in the industry now regrets.

Movie stars are one of the last remaining reasons to actually go out and see a movie in the theater. What we need to be doing is figuring out how to make more movie stars, not eliminating the ones we still have. If we are to have any hope of saving the theatrical movie model, that’s where we will need to start.

The movie star model works. It doesn’t need to be replaced. What it needs, is to be rejuvenated.

Still though, as “George” notes in his Substack, it makes for a great press release.

UPDATE: L.A.’s Entertainment Economy Is Looking Like a Disaster Movie. Work is evaporating, businesses are closing, longtime residents are leaving, and the city’s creative middle class is hanging on by a thread.

Don’t worry, I’m sure the AI actors will save the day!

HOW IT STARTED:

In the 1960s, American culture was fracturing along a fault line, with the common man on one side and scorn against his mores and values on the other. The league’s commissioner at the time, Pete Rozelle, chose to take the side of ordinary Americans in the raging culture war, because they were his natural audience. The league sent star players to visit troops in Vietnam and issued rules requiring players to stand upright during the playing of the National Anthem.

In 1967, the NFL produced a film that combined sideline and game footage titled, “They Call It Pro Football.” The film was unapologetically hokey. It was crew cuts and high tops and lots of chain smoking into sideline telephones. With a non-rock, non-folk, non-“what’s happening now” soundtrack, heavy on trumpets and kettle drums. John Facenda, who would come to be called “The Voice of God” for his work with NFL Films, provided the vaulting narration. The production began with the words, “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.” There was nothing Radical Chic about it.

The NFL surpassed baseball as America’s pastime with careful branding that conformed to the tastes and sensibilities of middle-class Americans – Nixon’s silent majority.

How it’s going:

Evergreen:

THE WASHINGTON POST, ATTACKING TRUMP, SOUNDS LIKE GEORGE WALLACE:

Included in the story is one startling aspect that, for those who know American history – and apparently that does not include The Post these days —  is shocking. It reads thusly, bold print for emphasis supplied.

“The (Trump) compact asks schools to pledge allegiance to conservative values and policies in eight enumerated areas, including by promising to:

*Prohibit consideration of factors such as gender, race or political views from being considered for admissions, scholarships or programming.”

Hello? Today’s Leftists – and The Post?– oppose the Trump “conservative values” view that colleges should not be allowed to take into admission qualifications like the “consideration of factors such as gender, race”?

Take a minute and hop in the history time capsule, and travel back to June 11, 1963. Famously, Democrat and decidedly segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace literally stood in the entrance to the University of Alabama (the “school house door” as it was then termed in the media of the day) to oppose the admission of black students to the then all-white state university.

Which is to say, Wallace was demanding exactly what The Washington Post apparently now thinks is a good thing in college admissions – taking into “consideration of factors such as gender, race…” They can’t imagine having empathy for a deserving white or Asian student not gaining admission to top colleges based on skin color.

The WaPo aren’t the only leftists who are whistling Dixie:

As VDH noted a decade ago, “The intellectual pedigree of sanctuary cities is not 1960s one-world ecumenicalism, but 1850s Confederate nullification. Their logical consequence is not a wide-open transnational continent, but utter disunion among the states and a second confederate attempt at destroying the primacy of the federal government.”

FACT CHECK: Kamala Harris Claims She’s ‘Not a Trained Seal’ Who Memorizes Talking Points.

Expert Analysis: We’ve seen no evidence to suggest that Kamala Harris is a seal or other semiaquatic marine mammal capable of performing tricks, so let’s assume she was speaking metaphorically. Harris’s interactions with the media during her failed presidential campaign were remarkably consistent. She would memorize a bunch of talking points and attempt to spout them off, no matter what the question was. On numerous occasions, she would ramble nonsensically about her “middle-class” upbringing in response to questions about inflation. Harris would inevitably get flustered when the otherwise friendly journalist tried to prod her towards a more coherent response, and this would often end in disaster when Harris tried to come up with new words on the spot.

Discover what can be, unburdened by what has been, and read the whole thing.

Related: Bill Maher sticks the rhetorical shiv in:

LEGENDARY MILITARY STRATEGIST PEGGY NOONAN IS NONE-TOO-FOND OF PETE HEGSETH:

UPDATE:

Who knows what to make of the weighting of the polls and the assumptions as to who will vote? Who knows the depth and breadth of each party’s turnout efforts? Among the wisest words spoken this cycle were by John Dickerson of CBS News and Slate, who said, in a conversation the night before the last presidential debate, that he thought maybe the American people were quietly cooking something up, something we don’t know about.

I think they are and I think it’s this: a Romney win.

Romney’s crowds are building—28,000 in Morrisville, Pa., last night; 30,000 in West Chester, Ohio, Friday It isn’t only a triumph of advance planning: People came, they got through security and waited for hours in the cold. His rallies look like rallies now, not enactments. In some new way he’s caught his stride. He looks happy and grateful. His closing speech has been positive, future-looking, sweetly patriotic. His closing ads are sharp—the one about what’s going on at the rallies is moving.

All the vibrations are right. A person who is helping him who is not a longtime Romneyite told me, yesterday: “I joined because I was anti Obama—I’m a patriot, I’ll join up But now I am pro-Romney.” Why? “I’ve spent time with him and I care about him and admire him. He’s a genuinely good man.” Looking at the crowds on TV, hearing them chant “Three more days” and “Two more days”—it feels like a lot of Republicans have gone from anti-Obama to pro-Romney.

Noonan on November 5th, 2012.

But why would Romney have had a chance?

The case for Barack Obama, in broad strokes:

He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.

Noonan on October 31st, 2008.

And in August of 2020, she was praising “The Rise of Kamala Harris. The daughter of East Bay professors grew up to become an excellent performer of politics.”

Exit quote: “It’s the big fact of American life now, isn’t it? That we are patronized by our inferiors.”

—By…well, guess who it’s by.

THE GOP EXECUTES AN IMPRESSIVE OCTOBER SURPRISE THAT COULD INFLUENCE VIRGINIA AG RACE:

National Review Online reported that when Jay Jones was a delegate in 2021, he acted in an incredibly demented manner. The Virginia House was honoring the memory of a long-time African American delegate who had just passed, and the Virginia Speaker, Todd Gilbert, a Republican, as well as other Republicans, had said the usual salutary boilerplate statements to praise the deceased.

Jones then sent a series of text messages to a Republican delegate where he scoffed at the “glowing” tributes that were being made by Republicans. “If those guys die before me,” Jones wrote, “I will go to their funerals to p*ss on their graves” to “send them out awash in something.” Jones then suggested that, presented with a hypothetical situation in which he had only two bullets and was faced with the choice of murdering then-Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert or two dictators, he’d shoot Gilbert “every time.”

When the Republican delegate expressed her alarm, Jones called her to explain his reasoning over the phone, where he shockingly doubled down, and later he tripled down with more vile texts, which among other things called Gilbert’s children “little fascists” who deserved to die.

It goes without saying that Jones’ behavior was unbelievably and disgustingly evil, reckless, crazy, and stupid. It is absolutely beyond the pale of American political discourse.

Which makes it impressive that the GOP operatives were patient enough to wait till the very last month of the campaign to explode this scandal. Jones, although he had to know this was coming, seems to have made things worse for himself by doing nothing to prepare for it, not even by warning his own party. His first attempted damage control statement was tone deaf, where he claimed “all people” send these kinds of texts, and that Attorney General Miyares and “Trump controlled media organizations” were unfairly playing it up. Then, when this didn’t satisfy anyone, he acted in a more contrite and appropriate manner.

It’s been quite a week in leftist depravity:

Data Republican is demanding refunds from Jones’ heavy hitting financial backers:

Naturally though, the WaPo isn’t calling for Jones to withdraw:

Flashback: Ralph Northam and the Washington Post — a story in three acts.

YOU ONLY LIVE WEISS:

As I’ve noted, Bari is actually more consistently centrist than her critics care to acknowledge. Indeed, for all the fears of rightward drift, it’s quite likely that her first brush with controversy will come when her free speech absolutism puts CBS and Paramount in direct opposition to Trump, who has been testing the limits of his ability to influence newsrooms and late-night studios. After all, when Disney pulled Kimmel amid F.C.C. pressure, Bari was the one who reminded us all about the definition of jawboning.

Politics aside, the more pressing question for Paramount and CBS centers on what happens to Bari upon going corporate. To date, she has built her brand by positioning herself as an outsider—a voice the Times couldn’t tolerate, a truth-teller too honest for the mainstream—and much of The Free Press’s commentary contains subtle or overt criticisms of the mainstream media. As one media entrepreneur of Bari’s generation put it to me, she’s ridden that hobbyhorse quite far. But what happens when she becomes mainstream media, and is responsible for what gets said on a national news network between broadcasts of NFL games and reruns of NCIS? It’s harder to punch up when you’re at the top.

Earlier: ‘It’s not a good place right now:’ CBS News staffers are ‘literally freaking out’ about Bari Weiss taking over newsroom.

To be fair, the CBS newsroom has been going very wrong for half a century now, both ideologically, and in terms of ratings. So why not take a chance on doing something different? Curiously though, Esquire’s Charles Pierce is yet another leftist with a case of the vapors over Weiss’s reportedly imminent arrival: Bari Weiss Is Simply Unqualified to Run CBS News.

Based on her résumé, Weiss isn’t any more qualified to run a major news organization than she is to fly Artemis III to the moon. Now, within the universe of wing-nut welfare, to which Weiss fled after departing The New York Times in a huff, one can rise simply on the strength of your superior bullshit. Weiss’s main riff was the “cancel culture” con. Which proved to be positively catnip for the money power, so she landed softly at her own joint, the Free Press.

Now, though, it appears that the elite legacy media has adopted that same philosophy—or it is being dragged into it by a bunch of tech-bro gazillionaires who don’t know any more about actual journalism than she does. In this case, it’s David Ellison, son of Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, the second-richest man in the world and an old pal of the current president, whom Ellison could buy and sell three times over. And if you’re willing to hire a conservative affirmative-action monitor for your newsroom, handing the wheel to an unconvincing ideological chameleon isn’t exactly a leap.

I’m not sure if Pierce should be making steering wheel references: “If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.”

Charles Pierce, the Boston Globe, January 5, 2003.

DEVELOPING:

SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES:

Well, they actually did, at least a couple of times, including 1988’s Running on Empty, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Judd Hirsch and River Phoenix. Lumet’s film sympathized with the Nixon-era anti-Vietnam War terrorists, now on the run from the FBI:

And then there was 2012’s The Company You Keep, directed by and starring the recently deceased Robert Redford:

Promoting the film the following year, Redford had this exchange on Good Morning America with fellow Democrat George Stephanopoulos:

Stephanopoulos was so enthusiastic towards Robert Redford and his sympathetic new film about an ex-1960s radical that the actor enthused, “You ought to get on the marketing team!” The aging actor/director appeared on Tuesday’s Good Morning America and endorsed the violent actions of protest groups. Reminiscing on his own past, the liberal Hollywood star recounted, “When I was younger, I was very much aware of the movement. I was more than sympathetic, I was probably empathetic because I believed it was time for a change.”

After Stephanopoulos wondered, “Even when you read about bombings,” Redford responded, “All of it. I knew that it was extreme and I guess movements have to be extreme to some degree.”

Among their other terrorist attacks during the Nixon era, the Weathermen bombed the Pentagon; right around the same time Redford’s film was bombing at the box office, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev quite literally bombed the Boston Marathon, leading to his totally cool and dreamy cover photo in Rolling Stone magazine. When Redford’s movie was previewed at Sundance in January of 2012, the late Kathy Shaidle wrote:

Over twenty years after Running on Empty came out and more than ten years after Bill Ayers told The New York Times (in its 9/11/01 morning edition, no less) that he regretted not setting more bombs, Robert Redford’s next movie sees him playing “a fugitive Weather Underground radical who has been in hiding for 30 years.”

I suppose it makes for a nice change from Weather Underground radicals who teach at major universities and hang out with the president.

Just to bring it all full circle, as Marathon Pundit noted back then, “Boston Marathon bombs similar to Bill Ayers’ Weather Underground nail bomb.” Ayers’ “device was intended to be detonated at a soldiers’ dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey.”

ACE OF SPADES: JK Rowling Finally Blasts Ungrateful Little Rich Bitch Emma Watson For Her Constant Attacks.

It’s a lengthy and absolutely nuclear-powered tweet:

And as a result, Watson makes the Critical Drinker’s “Crash and Burn” list:

And the savagery continues: