Particularly after the “Borking” of Robert Bork in 1987 (led by Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden) brought ideological critiques of the nominees out into the open, Republican presidents adopted a strategy of looking for “stealth nominees” who had little paper trail of judicial decisions and academic writings to pick apart. Souter, nominated in 1990 to replace Brennan, was the ultimate stealth nominee, a soft-spoken, reclusive, colorless bachelor with no major red flags (from a liberal point of view) in his twelve-year judicial record, most of it on the New Hampshire state courts. George H. W. Bush didn’t set out to put a liberal on the Court, but he was willing to take the risk, and that left him vulnerable to staffers such as White House Chief of Staff John Sununu (Souter’s fellow New Hampshirite) who had a pretty good idea of what Bush was getting. Democratic interest groups gave Souter the generic Republican treatment, with the National Organization for Women printing “Stop Souter or Women will Die” buttons with an image of a coat hanger, but it didn’t fly, and he was confirmed 90-9. Even Biden voted for him; Ted Kennedy and John Kerry didn’t.
Souter’s subsequent liberal record on the Court — including voting to sustain Roe in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey — made his name a conservative rallying cry of “no more Souters.” The stealth nominee strategy came to an abrupt end in 2005 after conservative opposition forced George W. Bush to abandon Harriet Miers, his White House counsel with a scant paper trail, and instead send the Republican-controlled Senate the nomination of Samuel Alito, who already had a long judicial track record that included ruling on the Third Circuit in favor of the pro-life law struck down in Casey. It seems unlikely that either party will attempt anything like the stealth-nominee strategy again.
PJM’s Matt Margolis adds, “Souter also aligned with the Court’s left wing in Bush v. Gore—a decision that reportedly left him so upset he considered resigning. In 2005, he joined a controversial ruling expanding government power to seize private property, sparking backlash and even a failed effort to seize his own home in protest. He retired in 2009, and President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to succeed him.”
Sam Altman is one of the most powerful men there has ever been. He runs OpenAI, the lab that gave us ChatGPT. He’s just turned 40 and he looks like he was AI-generated to run a tech company: casual clothes, big salesman eyes, furrowed brows. He tries not to think too much about artificial intelligence turning on us, he has said. But if it does, “I have,” he told The New Yorker in 2016, “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defence Force and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.” He also once said, “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there’ll be great companies.”
Regarding the new Pope, you never know how someone will serve once in office. Take Trump for example. We were told he would be the next Hitler and then he turned out to be a Democrat from 1991.
MARK FELTON: VE-Day Airborne Mission! Operation Doomsday (Video).
I love the moment at 13:32 when RAF Air Commodore Lawrence Darvall refuses to shake hands with Luftwaffe General Benno Kosch during the surrender ceremony. (On the other hand, I’m not sure why Felton currently has a photo of Anthony Hopkins and the extras from 1977’s A Bridge Too Far as his screen capture.)
Francis Ford Coppola got a standing ovation at the Dolby Theatre on April 26. He got the AFI Life Achievement Award (see page 42), heartfelt tributes from the likes of Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford and George Lucas, and, toward the end of the night, a glowing speech from Adam Driver, who hailed Megalopolis — the legendary director’s $120 million self-financed, genre-bending epic that stars Driver and pulled in just $14 million during its blink-and-you-missed-it theatrical run in the fall — as “a piece of art.”
What Coppola didn’t get — and apparently doesn’t want — is a distribution deal that lets anyone actually see Megalopolis on a home screen. It’s not on Netflix, Amazon, iTunes or anywhere else with a play button. It can’t even be found on DVD. For all the hosannas recently lavished on it, Megalopolis has become the most celebrated invisible movie of the year.
There is, it turns out, a (somewhat) logical explanation for the disappearing act. One of the perks of spending $120 million of your own money on a movie is getting to decide exactly how — and where — it gets seen. And according to sources close to Coppola, the last thing the 86-year-old auteur wants is for Megalopolis to be watched on a television set.
“He wants it to play in theaters, the way it was intended,” says one insider.
So, instead of a digital release, Coppola is taking the film on tour. Days after the AFI tribute, he boarded a flight to Boston for a sold-out screening at the Coolidge Theater. Later this month, he’s headed to Detroit.
It may not be the most efficient way to earn back that $120 million, but as Driver reminded the AFI crowd, commerce was never the point. “Believe me, I was there,” he said. “There was no talk about how we could make this more commercial.”
Wild viral footage has captured Frontier Airlines gate agents getting into a bust-up with a passenger who had sniped, “I’m never flying this sh—y airline again” after being hit with an unexpected $25 fee just to check in.
The caught-on-camera saga erupted when the male passenger — a 45-year-old married father of three — was trying to check in for his Frontier flight from Raleigh, NC, to Boston last Friday after a week-long business trip.
The passenger, who didn’t want to be identified, told The Post he’d arrived at the airport with roughly 50 minutes to spare but wasn’t able to check in on the electronic kiosk because, unbeknownst to him, he had missed the airline’s 60-minute pre-departure window.
When he went to speak to a Frontier employee, he was told he needed to cough up a $25 fee to check in at the desk per the airline’s policy.
That’s when he claims things turned sour.
That’s putting it mildly:
Frontier Airlines worker refuses to let a man check into his flight, taunts him as he tries rushing so he doesn't miss his flight.
Man: "I paid for a ticket."
Worker: "You didn't pay $25 for an agent assist fee. Hello? And you thought you was gonna get on your flight. And you… pic.twitter.com/A6m3rb1KsO
“You think I’m going to be sitting on a waiting line,” Caesar Flickerman — excuse me, Bernie Sanders — asks, “at United, while 30,000 people are waiting?” Sanders appeared on Fox News to answer questions about his Fight The Oligarchy tour, and Bret Baier honed in on the $220K-plus that Sanders has spent on private jet travel.
Sanders appeared to flounder, even though he knew the question had to be coming. “When was the last time you saw Trump at National Airport during a campaign?” Sanders asked, prompting Baier to quip, “Trump isn’t fighting the oligarchy.” Trump also owns his own plane, bought with his own funds, although his campaigns pay for the operating costs, of course.
Here’s the absurd argument in its entirety, coming from someone who never worked an honest day in his life before going into radical-left activism and politics. For an old socialist, Sanders really gets defensive when questioned about his luxurious lifestyle:
This is good @BretBaier asks Bernie Sanders why he spent $221k on private jet travel during his “fighting the oligarchy tour.” Bernie says he’s too important to fly commercial and wait in line like normal people. “No apologies.” pic.twitter.com/2gVIhsz7A4
That’s a pretty poor response for a story that’s three weeks old. The Free Beacon first reported this on April 17, which also notes that Sanders has spent “millions” on private jets over the last several years even apart from “fighting the oligarchy”[.]
Note that Sanders is “fighting the oligarchy” alongside a Congresswoman who crashed into her first year in office, ala the Kool-Aide Man running through a brick wall, demanding to ban “farting cows and airplanes,” and now she’s happily flying across the country as well on a private jet.
Bernie’s Website states, “Climate change is a threat to the planet: We must address it”
Former CNN journalist Chris Cillizza admitted there is “ample evidence” former President Joe Biden’s aides covered up his cognitive decline by shaming reporters and making it uncomfortable to seek the truth.
Cilizza, who previously served as CNN’s editor-at-large and now has his own Substack, opened up about his experience as the media industry reckons with the notion it failed to cover Biden’s declining health until his frail debate showing last June that led to him exiting the 2024 presidential race.
“I think there is now ample evidence that there was a cover-up on Joe Biden’s actual physical and mental condition by his aides in the White House. There’s been a ton of reporting on it… too much, I think, to dismiss it,” Cillizza told Fox News Digital in an email.
While Cillizza believes Biden aides were hiding the truth from the American people, the former CNN political analyst doesn’t believe the press was part of the cover-up.
“Instead, I think the Biden team made it really hard to ask questions about his health — they shamed you, said you didn’t like him, etc.,” Cillizza said, noting that many reporters, including himself, “let that be that.”
Cillizza doesn’t believe President Donald Trump’s team would receive the same treatment from the mainstream press. He feels that some reporters took the Biden team’s word for it because they were either more “inclined to believe a Democratic president,” or were likely to believe “someone who hadn’t said 30,000 false or misleading things while in office.”
They accused you of not liking Joe Biden, and you … kicked at the grass, turned around, and slowly walked away? How pathetic.
What an absurdly roundabout way to admit that you, and just about everyone else in your field, are really, really bad at your jobs. If you’re pretending to be a journalist and your subject ‘liking’ you is a factor in how you report, you should find a new line of work.
You’re not a journalist any longer. You’re a sheep.
How can you be so spineless that the people you’re trying to report on shaming you is a deterrent from covering them accurately? Granted, Cillizza comes off as about as tough and intimidating as a piece of toast, but still. Are there no reporters out there with some pride in their work? Willing to take a stand to give the American people the truth?
And no, you don’t get to shift blame onto Biden’s aides and pretend you had no part. Sorry. Yes, they’re responsible for one of the biggest cover-ups in American political history. But it used to be the media’s job to expose scandals like this.
As Byron York writes, “There is an inside story of Biden’s decline and an outside story of Biden’s decline. The inside story is the effort by the White House staff, plus its Democratic allies, plus its supporters in the press, to conceal Biden’s problem. The outside story is the many public appearances — moments of Biden appearing confused, lost, or frozen — during which millions of viewers could see for themselves that the president had a serious problem. Another way to put it would be to say that the inside story was the effort to deny that the outside story existed.”
Collectively, CNN worked very hard to ask viewers, who are you going to believe, us or your lying eyes?
DEVELOPING:
White smoke! The 133 Cardinal electors gathered in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel have elected the new Pope. He will appear soon at the central window of St. Peter’s Basilica. pic.twitter.com/XejI7mY43m
Many Americans are losing patience with statewide shelter-in-place orders.
“We don’t have months or weeks—businesses are hurting,” says Jim Desmond, a San Diego county supervisor who unsuccessfully attempted to introduce legislation hastening the re-opening of businesses in his county despite the statewide lockdown in California.
“[Those] hurt the most in this are the poor people, the people that rent, that worked in the hospitality sector and the restaurants, and a lot of single moms….We have people on the phone crying saying, ‘Hey, I got a kid to feed,'” Desmond tells Reason.
So have the lockdowns actually saved lives? There’s a debate over how to analyze the data.
“Lockdowns just don’t actually alter behavior all that much,” says Lyman Stone, an economist and demographer who’s an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. He argues that there’s no correlation between the timing of statewide or regional shelter-in-place orders and a decline in the COVID-19 death rate.
“We can basically build a theory and assert that the world obeys our theory and just go looking for any scrap of evidence that supports it,” says Stone, “or we can start by looking at what are the trends we actually observe.”
A month later, the trends we all observed were the dancing TikTok nurses promoting the George Floyd rioters. Both of which groups, perhaps unintentionally, definitively answered the question.
Disney is to open its first Middle Eastern theme park in a country where homosexuality is illegal after the US media giant watered down its diversity policies.
The company has unveiled plans to open a new resort in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, which it said will be “authentically Disney and distinctly Emirati”.
Disney’s decision to build a resort in the Arab country suggests a significant change in outlook at the entertainment giant, which has long prided itself on its LGBTQ+ friendly stance. Homosexuality is outlawed in the Emirati capital and punishable by up to 14 years’ imprisonment.
In 2022, the UAE banned Disney’s animated Buzz Lightyear film from cinemas over a same-sex kiss.
DEI programmes scaled back
The company was previously locked in a long-running legal dispute with Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, over controversial state laws restricting the teaching of sexuality in schools.
Disney criticised the bill, dubbed [by its critics, particularly the DNC-MSM –Ed] “Don’t Say Gay”, prompting Mr DeSantis to strip the company of its right to self-govern its Walt Disney World park, which it had held for more than 50 years.
Disney is facing backlash after the final credits for its latest film “Mulan” thanked government entities in Xinjiang, the province where Muslims have faced human rights abuses.
The film had already generated controversy after its lead actress, Liu Yifei, recently expressed support for police crackdowns in Hong Kong, spurring talks of boycotts on social media.
That sentiment only increased after it came to light that Disney filmed scenes for the “Mulan” movie in China’s Xinjiang province, where Beijing is accused of detaining more than 1 million Uighur Muslims.
After releasing “Mulan” on Disney+, eagle-eyed viewers noticed a “special thanks” in the film’s end credits that named eight government entities in Xinjiang, including the public security bureau in the city of Turpan, where the country is allegedly operating more than a dozen “reeducation” camps.
Netflix is now streaming a documentary with newly restored archival footage that promises to be one of the most immersive films ever made about World War II.
Colourised film and rare interviews tell the story of ordinary peoples’ lives during Germany’s bombing of Britain between 1940 and 1941.
With VE Day approaching this Thursday (8th May), now is the perfect time to brush up on some vital history, and Netflix’s new film Britain and the Blitz won’t disappoint.
While the documentary does showcase some fascinating slices of life — like the class divide between north and south when Eric moves to Coventry and clashes with the local kids — it also feels like a missed opportunity not to give more historical context or explore these stories through a wider lens.
For example, the evacuation effort initially included plans to send children to Canada, America, and New Zealand, until one of the ships was destroyed, killing 260 people in the process. That kind of background could have added a deeper emotional layer to Eric’s storyline, but it’s completely overlooked.
There’s also a slightly odd inclusion around the Communist Party, who are briefly shown as the plucky underdogs trying to undermine the government. Yet the film never acknowledges that they only supported the war after Russia was invaded, which feels like an important omission if you’re trying to be historically accurate.
Visually, the documentary is well-edited for the most part, with archival footage and photographs effectively used — but it’s constantly undermined by the musical score. I’m not sure whose idea it was to add a pulsating, overly dramatic soundtrack like we’re in a Hollywood action flick, but it really doesn’t work.
Moments that should land quietly are drowned out by soaring orchestral swells or over-the-top sequences that make you feel like Tom Cruise is going to rush on screen. At one point, when we’re told St. Paul’s Cathedral avoided being bombed, a choral score kicks in on cue, clearly designed to heighten the moment emotionally — but it just feels forced. Once you notice moments like this, it’s hard to unsee. Sometimes less really is more.
That’s perhaps the best summary I can give of Britain and the Blitz overall. There are some interesting anecdotes, and the first-hand accounts do help ground the documentary emotionally. But the narrow focus, stylistic overreach, and lack of broader historical insight all hold this back from being truly memorable.
It’s not an outright bad documentary — but compared to so many others on this subject, it sadly slips into forgettable mediocrity.
Like earlier Netflix documentary series World War II From the Front Lines (narrated by former Star Wars actor John Boyega, a man who truly loves his fanbase), 2025’s Britain and the Blitz’s newsreel footage is massively reprocessed. It’s been reformatted to the 16X9 aspect ratio, cleaned up, colorized, sharpened, and over-processed. As I wrote last year about the earlier documentary:
The classic 1970s Thames Television WWII miniseries “The World at War” used the footage of the Imperial War Museum and numerous other stock footage libraries to tell the history of WWII as had never been explored on television before. However, because film restoration technology was somewhere between non-existent and in its absolutely infancy, the black and white newsreel footage “The World at War” used was most assuredly the real thing, and not digitally processed and colorized to a fare-the-well. Because of the role of the battlefield cameraman, the footage was rarely as “in your face” as something shot by Hollywood for a dramatic war movie, but it was believable because it was real.
In contrast, “World War II: From the Front Lines”takes wartime footage that was much more competently shot than footage from the previous war, and massively overcooks the processing, often to absurdly surrealistic ends, with shots that seem almost psychedelic in the end result. Even more so than Peter Jackson’s reworking of WWI footage, it might make this material more palatable to 21st century audiences, but at the cost of diluting the original footage that’s somewhere at the base of the producers’ digital processing.
This trailer gives only a hint of how much processing has been slathered over some of the shots seen during the Netflix miniseries, but it does highlight another issue with the footage. As with Peter Jackson’s WWI documentary, “World War II: From the Front Lines”recomposites the original 4X3 footage into the widescreen 16X9 aspect ratio used by most 21st century HDTV sets, to make the footage that much more appealing to Netflix viewers, with little care that 1940s-era audiences would not have viewed footage in this screen format[.]
The same can be said of Britain and the Blitz:
Still though, could be worse — far worse. AI is now allowing for still photos to be animated, a technology that will end very, very badly:
India launched early morning missile strikes on both Pakistan and Pakistan-administered parts of Kashmir this morning, while the Pakistan government claimed it had shot down five Indian Air Force jets in “self-defense.” Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif described the attack as “an act of war” and ordered his country’s military to enact “self-defense” with “corresponding actions.”
On April 22, Islamists massacred 26 Indian tourists in Pahalgam, a town in Kashmir — the largest number of civilian casualties in a terrorist attack in India since the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai.
* * * * * * * * *
Unsurprisingly, the Indian government rejects this accusation and accuses the Pakistanis of waging war against them through terrorist proxies. Indian Foreign Secretary Shri Vikram Misri, in a statement this morning:
India had given inputs about [The Resistance Front] in the half-yearly report to the Monitoring Team of the United Nation’s 1267 Sanctions Committee in May and November 2024, bringing out its role as a cover for Pakistan-based terrorist groups. Earlier too, in December 2023, India had informed the monitoring team about LeT and Jaish-e-Mohammad operating through small terror groups such as the TRF. Pakistan’s pressure to remove references to TRF in the April 25 UN Security Council Press Statement is notable in this regard.
Despite a fortnight having passed since the attacks, there has been no demonstrable step from Pakistan to take action against the terrorist infrastructure on its territory or on territory under its control. Instead, all it has indulged in are denials and allegations. Our intelligence monitoring of Pakistan-based terrorist modules indicated that further attacks against India were impending. There was thus a compulsion both to deter and to preempt.
Earlier this morning as you would be aware India exercised its right to respond and pre-empt as well as deter more such cross-border attacks. These actions were measured, non-escalatory, proportionate, and responsible. They focused on dismantling the terrorist infrastructure and disabling terrorists likely to be sent across to India.
What’s that, India? You say you must send military forces across the border to hunt down a terrorist who murdered your people, hiding in Pakistan’s territory, with no sense that the local government is even trying to do anything about it? Fellas, we know exactly how you feel.
Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has shared the truth about when exactly she realized that President Joe Biden was in decline: the first presidential debate in late June 2024.
Appearing on Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast with hosts Max Tani and Ben Smith this week, Psaki discussed the moment she realized there was potentially no path forward for Biden. She recalled telling her colleagues partway through the debate, “This is a f—ing disaster,” adding that while she didn’t personally know what was going to happen from there, it became clear that many Democrats felt there was no path forward.
In response to a question from Smith about whether there was a cover-up regarding Biden’s condition, Psaki said, “I think ‘cover-up’ is such a loaded phrase… People use that term as related to Watergate or the covering up of not sharing public information about a war.”
During her time as press secretary, she continued, she “never saw that person… that was on that debate stage,” despite being in the Oval Office every single day. She added, “I’m not a doctor. Aging happens quite quickly.”
Setting aside that everyone on the other side of the aisle had seen Biden’s decline by the time of the 2020 election cycle, there are the implications of Psaki keeping quiet after the 20204 debate that made Biden’s decline too obvious to continue to deny:
Fox News’ @JoeConchaTV responds to Jen Psaki denying Biden’s mental health cover-up: “Jen Psaki only saw Joe Biden shake hands with the air, have conversations with leaders that had been dead for years, and couldn’t remember the names of his cabinet members.” pic.twitter.com/ddlhSereQz
In an attack on Trump’s suggestions that the U.S. “take back Panama,” or annex Greenland and even Canada, Biden painted his successor’s approach as dangerously unserious — and deeply damaging to the U.S. image abroad.
“And the way we talk about now that, ‘it’s the Gulf of America,’ ‘maybe we’re going to have to take back Panama,’ ‘maybe we need to acquire Greenland,’ ‘maybe Canada should be a [51st state].’ What the hell’s going on here?” Biden said.
He added: “What President ever talks like that? That’s not who we are. We’re about freedom, democracy, opportunity — not about confiscation.”
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a
means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
