SUPREME COURT STAYS LOWER COURT RULING, ALLOWING TRUMP TRANSGENDER BAN TO PROCEED.

ED MORRISSEY: Could ‘President’ Boasberg Pick His Own US Attorney for DC?

Donald Trump — who last I checked was the duly elected president of the United States — nominated Ed Martin to serve as US Attorney for Washington DC, and also has him serving as interim US Attorney. With only a simple majority needed for confirmation, there should have been no problem getting Martin in place before the May 20 expiration of his interim appointment. However, Martin apparently got sloppy with his disclosures, and some Senate Republicans are now balking:

As CNN previously reported, Martin failed to disclose nearly 200 media appearances in his initial disclosures last month, and claimed under oath he did not recall some of his most controversial past statements in response to a series of questions put to him by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Apparently, the big worry is around Sen. Thom Tillis, and not for the first time this year, although he may not be the only worry:

North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told CNN last week he has “serious questions” about Martin, given his previous comments denigrating police officers who defended the US Capitol during the January 6, 2021, attack.

“I don’t talk about that stuff,” Tillis said when asked if the president had reached out to him.

GOP Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, who also serve on the panel, have also privately expressed concerns about supporting Martin, a source familiar with the process told CNN. Cornyn told CNN on Monday that Trump had not reached out to him, and he declined to say how he would vote on the nomination.

Normally, we could chalk this up by saying nominate in haste, repent at leisure. Trump simply needs to go back to the drawing board and find a new nominee. However, this situation has a complication, thanks to the decision to have Martin serve as interim US Attorney. If that position is not filled within 120 days by a Senate-confirmed appointment, the chief judge of the circuit can appoint an interim US Attorney to serve until that confirmation takes place.

And guess who is the current chief judge of the DC Circuit?

Old and busted: 867-5309. The new hotness:

YIKES! New Yorker Photo of Alex Soros and Huma Abedin Sure Sends a Message (Not the One They Wanted).

Wait, are we sure Alex and Huma weren’t deliberately going for looking like Bond villains in their SPECTRE-built lair? It looks a bit like Alex is getting bored with the photographer and reaching for the button to activate the trap door above the piranha pit that’s just out of shot:

2025: A LUDDITE ODYSSEY. Leonard Nimoy The BBC Goes In Search Of “The people refusing to use AI:”

[Sabine] Zetteler runs her own London-based communications agency, with around 10 staff, some full-time some part-time.

“What’s the point of sending something we didn’t write, reading a newspaper written by bots, listening to a song created by AI, or me making a bit more money by sacking my administrator who has four kids?

“Where’s the joy, love or aspirational betterment even just for me as a founder in that? It means nothing to me,” she says.

Ms Zetteler is among those resisting the AI invasion, which really got going with the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022.

Since then the service, and its many rivals have become wildly popular. ChatGPT is racking up over five billion visits a month, according to software firm Semrush.

But training AI systems like ChatGPT requires huge amounts of energy and, once trained, keeping them running is also energy intensive.

While it’s difficult to quantify the electricity used by AI, a report by Goldman Sachs estimated that a ChatGPT query uses nearly 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query.

Which, prior to the debut of AI in late 2022, similarly gave the BBC the heebie-jeebies: Why your internet habits are not as clean* as you think.

A decade ago, each internet search had a footprint of 0.2g CO2e, according to figures released by Google. Today, Google uses a mixture of renewable energy and carbon offsetting to reduce the carbon footprint of its operations, while Microsoft, which owns the Bing search engine, has promised to become carbon negative by 2030, and efforts are underway to investigate whether this footprint is now higher or lower.

According to Google’s own figures, however, an average user of its services – someone who performs 25 searches each day, watches 60 minutes of YouTube, has a Gmail account and accesses some of its other services – produces less than 8g (0.28oz) CO2e a day.

Newer search engines, however, are attempting to set themselves apart as greener options from the outset. Ecosia, for example, says it will plant a tree for every 45 searches it performs. This sort of carbon offsetting can help to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but the success of these projects often depends on how long the trees grow for and what happens to them when they are chopped down.

Regardless of the search engine you choose, using the web to find information is more sustainable than browsing in books. In fact, a paperback’s carbon footprint is around 1kg (2.2lbs) CO2e, while a weekend newspaper accounts for between 0.3kg (10oz) and 4.1kg (9lbs) CO2e making reading the news online more environmentally friendly than poring over a paper.

But you could still read a lifetime of paperbacks – 2,300 to be precise – for the same carbon footprint as a flight from London to Hong Kong, so don’t feel too guilty for reading the next best seller. (Read more about how to reduce the impact your flights have on the environment.)

Or not – it’s eco-guilt all the way down with the British left. And it all ends in a very, very bad way:

This is vandalism – pure eco vandalism.

Farmers lives are being destroyed for this junk. Future land fill. Imported. Plastic wrapped.

This needs to be stopped. And fast pic.twitter.com/zphU16r4zO

— Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins) May 1, 2025

* I’m not sure that’s a headline I’d want to run if I worked at the Beeb…

FBI ‘MISLED THE PUBLIC’ IN CLAIMING 2017 GOP BASEBALL SHOOTING WASN’T DOMESTIC TERROR: HOUSE INTEL.

The FBI “misled the public” for years in claiming a sniper’s attempt to kill Republican congressmen at a June 2017 baseball practice was “suicide by cop”, when it was in fact domestic terrorism, according to a new congressional report released Tuesday.

The 27-page House Intelligence Committee report concludes “the FBI’s bottom line – ‘the FBI does not believe there is a nexus to terrorism’ – was based upon falsehoods, half-truths, and manipulations of the known facts.”

FBI Director Kash Patel announced in April that he had handed over to Congress long-sought bureau records related to the shooting at a ball field in northern Virginia.

The GOP-led Intelligence panel said in the report Tuesday that Patel’s cooperation is “a welcome change from previous FBI leadership, who thwarted Congressional oversight and public accountability at every turn, however, after reviewing the case file, the Committee could not be more disappointed by the FBI’s incomplete investigation and substandard analysis in 2017.”

James Hodgkinson, a left-wing activist from Illinois, shot four people in the June 14, 2017, attack, including Louisiana GOP Rep. Steve Scalise. He reportedly asked GOP congressmen who had left the practice early, and before the attack, whether the players were Republicans or Democrats. He died a day after a 10-minute shootout with police. The members of Congress were practicing for an annual charity game.

The FBI concluded the attack was “suicide by cop” instead of domestic terrorism — a position the bureau did not reverse until 2021, and a position the FBI has never fully explained.

Flashback: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History. And additional examples of leftist violence and eliminationist rhetoric at the link.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Pulitzer judges pass over iconic AP photo of Trump defiantly waving his fist with blood running down his face after assassination attempt.

Might that be for this reason, noted by The Conversation at the bottom?

In Vucci’s photograph, we are given the illusion that this photograph captures “the moment” or “a shot”. Yet it doesn’t capture the moment of the shooting, but its immediate aftermath. The photograph captures Trump’s media acuity and swift, responsive performance to the attempted assassination, standing to rise with his fist in the air.

In a post-truth world, there has been a pervasive concern about knowing the truth. While that extends beyond photographic representation, photography and visual representation play a considerable part.

It made Trump look like the hero we know him to be, the decisive, swift-acting, self-sacrificing leader that voters had been looking for. The picture turned up on tshirts, coffee mugs, stickers and posters, signaling how much the public was moved by it. Of course he won the election.

Some must have blamed this photo for it. But it was hardly propaganda — it was the work of an experienced photographer able to act with split-second instincts in a dangerous situation with events still unfolding. What’s more Vucci was hardly buddies with Trump. In March, he testified against the White House exclusion of AP from the photo press pool over the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ being renamed the ‘Gulf of America.’

Given Vucci’s photos, it seems kind of counterintuitive for the White House to exclude Vucci over a dispute like that, but the Pulitzer board didn’t notice.

But not entirely unexpected:

Or to put it another way:

UPDATE:

COVID FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY: What Neil Ferguson’s booty call tells us about modern politics.

The conspiratorial left, convinced the world is run by secret cabals of bankers and cigar-chomping media moguls, thinks the Neil Ferguson story is a ‘dead cat’. In other words, they think the Daily Telegraph – Evil Tory Rag – revealed that Ferguson carried on bonking his mistress in defiance of a lockdown that he himself bears much responsibility for in order to distract attention from Britain overtaking Italy with the highest Covid death toll in Europe. A ‘dead cat’ strategy is when a sensationalist story is introduced to the mix to divert attention from a far more serious political crisis. Ferguson’s sexual antics are the Tory regime’s dead cat to Britain’s corona death toll, apparently.

This sums up the political infantilism of the left. It is actually incredibly important news that Ferguson, the Imperial College modeller who said it was possible 500,000 Brits would die if we didn’t lock down, defied the lockdown. It deserves the frontpage treatment it is getting today. For Ferguson’s booty call with his married lover actually reveals a great deal about the 21st-century elites and how they view their relationship with the masses. It’s one rule for them and another for us. They can carry on enjoying sneaky freedoms because their lives and jobs are important; we can’t because we are mere little people, whose silly work lives can casually be disrupted, whose love lives can be turned upside down, and whose families can be ripped apart. The Ferguson affair provides an illuminating insight into the new elitism.

It’s worth thinking about the largeness of this scandal. Ferguson’s scaremongering, his predictions of mass death if society didn’t close itself down, was the key justification for the lockdown in the UK. It influenced lockdowns elsewhere, too. Of course, this isn’t all on Ferguson. He does not exercise mind control over Boris Johnson. It was a combination of disarray among the political class and the wild clamouring of the media elite for the severest lockdown possible that led to the working people of Britain being decommissioned and almost the entire population being put under an unprecedented form of house arrest. But Ferguson’s figures, his graphs and models, his worst-case scenarios, were the godly pronouncements upon which this historic disruption of society was based. And Ferguson fully backed the lockdown that sprung from his work.

As the BBC reported the same day, Ferguson “quit as a government adviser on coronavirus after admitting an ‘error of judgement’.”

Mistakes were made! But the biggest was made by the man who hired him: Boris Johnson Missed His Churchill Moment: The pandemic was Boris’s biggest test. He failed.

When Johnson’s idol, Winston Churchill, first came to power in 1940, France was in the process of falling to Nazi Germany. Most of the other great European powers had already fallen. For a time, Britain stood alone in the world, the sole defender of the West, with Churchill at its helm. Even when his own ministers urged him to accept Hitler’s peace offer, Churchill held firm to his convictions and chose to fight on.

This is the laudable mantle that Johnson has, all his life, aspired to shoulder. He faced just such a defining moment in March of 2020. The entire world had surrendered to the People’s Republic of China, adopting its totalitarian disease-control strategy, and unlike France or Poland in World War II, we surrendered without a shot being fired. If any man in the world was well-positioned to stand against this, it was the garrulous British renegade, Boris Johnson.

Instead, the United Kingdom became a police state.

Well, to be fair, Airstrip One become an even bigger police state — and most of the authorities there needed little prompting to scale up their efforts.

THE GALACTIC EMPIRE: FIRM, BUT FAIR*. Andor v. Star Trek: How Star Wars gets government right. New video from Reason TV:

* QED: As Sonny Bunch noted in the Washington Post in 2015: The destruction of Alderaan was completely justified.

HEY, REMEMBER IN THE FALL OF 2024, WHEN THE KAMALA HARRIS CAMPAIGN SOUGHT TO REHABILITATE THE REPUTATIONS OF DICK CHENEY AND GEORGE W. BUSH? Dr. Jill says, hold my zinfandel!

The left absolutely vilified Mike Milken in the 1980s — he was pardoned by Trump in February of 2020 — now Jill is going to work for him; that’s just perfect. More details at the Daily Caller, in an article headlined: Former First Lady Jill Biden Finds A New Gig In The Swamp.

PROGRESSIVISM, WHERE TIME STANDS STILL: Benjamin Kerstein: We have met the pigs… In the 1960s and 1970s, a totalitarian movement almost destroyed the republic. Now it threatens to do so again.

Put simply, the professoriate regime is the 1960s New Left. That is, it is the New Left in its decadent and hopefully final form as an institutionalized totalitarian movement. It has now collapsed into the antisemitism that appears to be the endgame of almost all totalitarian movements. It has decimated its enemies within the institutions it controls and, as a result, has found a new and ultimate enemy. It has finally arrived where it was always going: the Elders of Zion.

Like all things, this is illustrated by the fact that none of this is new. Even a brief examination of an unbiased historical account of the late 1960s proves as much.

II.

One of the best of these histories is Theodore H. White’s extraordinary The Making of the President 1968, which chronicles the tumultuous presidential election that witnessed the tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the escalating Vietnam War, the devastating Chicago New Left riots that shattered the Democratic party and the New Deal consensus, and ultimately, Richard Nixon’s victory.

White’s book is of immense value for two reasons: First, he was a brilliant writer with a gift for pithy insight and revelatory aphorism. Second, he wrote before the professoriate regime conquered and colonized academia and American intellectual life. As a result, he did not attempt to rewrite history in the New Left’s favor.

The professoriate regime that now controls the writing of that history has long since whitewashed and falsified the history of the New Left. However, it has yet to completely burn all the books that bear witness to what really happened. Consequently, White remains to tell us something like the truth.

In doing so, White provides conclusive proof that none of this is new. The monstrous crimes we witness on US campuses today were occurring decades ago, and the ideology that “justifies” them already existed in full. It was partially institutionalized at that time and is now completely institutionalized, yet it remains unchanged.

A single passage in White’s book provides conclusive proof of this. It details the rhetorical strategies and underlying ideology of the 1960s New Left students’ movement, which had already laid out and made public its stunningly successful plan to conquer and colonize the universities. Not all members of the student movement were totalitarians, but the totalitarians eventually emerged victorious in the struggle for leadership, with devastating consequences.

White is ruthless in his deconstruction of the movement. He does so in a lengthy excerpt that cannot be truncated without damaging its insights. I reproduce it in full below:

I don’t want to quote the whole passage by White for Fair Use reasons, but note this:

In this new rhetoric, normal contradictions of thought vanish. Thus, the old virtues of tolerance and free speech becomes repressive tolerance, a sinister effort by the establishment to smother the truth by indulgence; this, apparently, justifies the denial of free speech to those who disagree. To steal, seize or destroy offices or files becomes to liberate. The old Marxist adverbial phrase objectively speaking becomes, in the new rhetoric, a transitional phrase to any statement that cannot be factually proven; when a speaker begins a paragraph with objectively speaking, it means that any construct of the imagination he thinks should be true is indeed so. The word non-violence is turned inside out. If what can be won by the massing of bodies, the occupation of buildings, shoving, and the use of brawn is yielded immediately, it proves the validity of non-violence. (Stone-and-bottle-throwing can be classed, in this vocabulary, as non-violent.) If the non-violent aggressors are resisted, then those who resist are styled violent and brutal. Eric Sevareid [a prominent television news reporter] was recently reminded, in one of his broadcasts, of his European experience: “They [the student activists] have the same approach, ” he said, “as the early Nazis and early Communists. ‘We are right,’ they say, ‘we are progress. If you resist us, or defend yourself, you are the instigators of violence.’ ”

If this infamous Orwellian moment from CNN in August of 2020 took you by surprise, it shouldn’t have; it was totally predicted by the worldview of the ’60s New Left, which as Kerstein writes, has burrowed deeply into 21st century academia:

At American Greatness, Roger Kimball explores: The Politicized Mind: How the University Lost Its Way.

As Kerstein writes at the first link, it lost its way a long time ago indeed.

TYLER O’NEIL: How Many Biden Appointees ‘Burrowed in’ to the Permanent Bureaucracy?

Left-leaning federal bureaucrats aim to oppose President Donald Trump from within the administrative state, and some Biden administration appointees have attempted to “burrow in” to the federal bureaucracy by switching from “political” to more permanent “career” positions.

While presidents appoint more than 3,000 people for political positions, the federal government directly employs roughly 2.3 million people, most of whom serve in ostensibly nonpolitical, career positions.

“The biggest challenge that every single new Cabinet secretary and their subordinates will face is the entrenched bureaucrat,” Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday.

“Some of it is overt, and we saw an example of that with the FBI employee trying to coerce his subordinates to ‘dig in’ against the administration,” he noted, referencing an email FBI agent James Dennehy wrote in January shortly before his retirement.

“What’s worse is the quiet insubordination,” Whitson warned. He said many bureaucrats will “slow policy,” simply ignoring the president’s orders.

Read the whole thing.

WATCH: David Portnoy livid over bait-and-switch local ABC News interview. Language alert:

So @6abc begged me to do an interview about the incident at our bar. Since it was local I agreed. Then the reporter tried to say Barstool and I and white men were responsible for the incident. Austin started recording once it got contentious pic.twitter.com/ug8CX83HHp

— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) May 5, 2025

Dave has definitely taken Glenn’s “Bring your own camera” advice to heart: “My terms were let me record interview so you can’t cut and edit. Same thing I offered to let Business Insider do. Weird how nobody but me will accept these terms.”

And if you missed it yesterday: Portnoy announces fitting punishment for bigots who launched vile anti-semitic attack on his Philly bar.

JULIE BURCHILL: ‘Protect the Dolls’ is trans activism at its creepiest.

Reading a Guardian report on the new pro-trans ‘Protect the Dolls’ t-shirt campaign, I reflected that there’s no tell like a self-tell.

When Tilda Swinton and a host of lesser-known fashion and showbiz faces (I had personally never heard of Pedro Pascal or Troye Sivan) put on one of these hilariously over-priced garments – £75! – and smiled self-servingly for the cameras, did they have no inkling of how the use of the word ‘dolls’ would play? Not after all the years when we gender realists declared so many times that women are born, not made? That ‘female’ is not a costume you can wear in the way that Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs wore the skins of his victims?

Even the tiny minority of autogynephiles who have had themselves turned inside out by surgeons who would give Dr Frankenstein a run for his money can never truly be refashioned as women. They can, at best, become an imitation of one.

So, in a way, transwomen are ‘dolls’. But not the kind they think of themselves as. Social media have fuelled the rise in images of men with body dysmorphia and / or a kink portraying themselves as fairies and little girls, even when they’re six-foot-four abattoir workers called Big Al. Whether these men are deluded or having a laugh is a matter of conjecture, but I’d say that either one indicates what the centrist dads call a ‘bad-faith actor’. The silly and the sinister often overlap on certain issues. ‘Palestine’ is one, trans is another.

There are without doubt ‘transwomen’ who have simply got carried away with the thrill they get from dressing up like Widow Twankey when their wives are at book club. But there are some who are downright creepy, and their embrace of the ‘dolls’ motif only draws attention to this, however unwittingly.

Why is yet another Disney actor with a zillion dollar movie scheduled for release in a couple of months issuing politicized statements that will alienate potential moviegoers? Flashback to two weeks ago: Another Day, Another Disney Celebrity Tanking Their Franchise:

THIS IS CNN: Wow — CNN Officially Crosses A Line In Their Trump Hate With Disturbing Interview of Drug Cartel (Watch).

Well, well, well, there it is. Just when we think the fake news, lamestream media can’t get any lower, they once again prove us wrong. Ok, to be fair, we expect this sort of garbage from MSNBC because after all, they kept Joy Reid around for years even after they knew she was a racist, hateful bigot. And while we know CNN is pretty bad, we’ve always sort of seen them as a bit saner than MSNBC, which of course, isn’t saying much.

But this? CNN just gave MSNBC a run for their ‘hot mess of putrid media’ money.

Imagine hating Trump so much you feel sorry for the drug cartels being called ‘terrorists’.

Watch this:

Remember when angel mom Patty Morin emotionally described to the White House press how an illegal immigrant brutally raped and murdered her daughter?

CNN cut away from Patty to air segments about Gavin Newsom and the NBA. https://t.co/pzAsOG0qZa

— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) May 5, 2025

Flashback: ‘Shameful:’ White House Blasts CNN, MSNBC For Refusing to Air Angel Mom’s Speech.

In April, White House aide Stephen Miller tweeted, “CNN’s and MSNBC’s contempt for the victims of migrant crime is reprehensible.” CNN is really leaning into the brand, apparently.

RIOTS FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME: Life at the top, and the bottom of New York. The New Yorker has a photo spread of “Power Houses: Inside the living rooms of notable New Yorkers,” including Alex Soros and Huma Abedin, AOC, Al Sharpton, and “Ella Emhoff, textile designer,” in their wealthy digs, all very far removed from (but approving of): Tren de Aragua Tykes Rain Mayhem Down on Times Square, Mock NYPD.

Just to be on the safe side: Kamala Harris takes 25 taxpayer-funded bodyguards to the Polo Bar after trashing Trump over economy.

Republican NYC mayoral candidate Curtis Silwa said it was ‘an outrage’ the incumbent Eric Adams gave Harris a police escort.

‘Secret Service is fine; NYPD, no. NYPD needs to protect the people, we don’t have enough of them,’ he told DailyMail.com.

‘She’s going to a bar to enjoy herself, and she’s got like an army of security paid for by us, not her.

‘We should get a rebate from her so we can actually use these cops to protect citizens on the subways and streets.’

Tom Wolfe may have passed away in 2018, but the version of the Matrix he programmed is still working absolutely fine:

(Classical reference in headline.)

A PINCH OF PROJECTION BY THE GRAY LADY:

How odd that the New York Times, which arbitrarily decided in 2019 that America’s real founding was 1619, not 1776, and got a number of schools to sign on that notion, is angry about Trump arbitrarily renaming the Gulf of … Oh wait, I don’t want to deadname something that has fully transitioned to its new aquatic identity:

In February when Don Surber wrote “Mocking Woke Speech: The real reason is it is the Gulf of America is the name bugs the right people,”

Glenn responded that “Changing names and words and demanding that people go along with the change has been the left’s game for as long as I’ve been alive. It’s always a power move disguised as courtesy.”

SURE, WHY NOT? Trump says he will reopen Alcatraz prison.

President Donald Trump says he is directing his government to reopen and expand Alcatraz, the notorious former prison on a hard-to-reach California island that has been closed for more than 60 years.

In a post on his Truth Social site Sunday evening, Trump wrote that, “For too long, America has been plagued by vicious, violent, and repeat Criminal Offenders, the dregs of society, who will never contribute anything other than Misery and Suffering. When we were a more serious Nation, in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

“That is why, today, I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders,” he wrote, adding: “The reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE.”

And a jail that criminals will really not want to escape from!

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: How it started:

At @barstoolsports event in Philadelphia, a sign read “Fuck the Jews.”

If there was this level of overwhelming and overt bigotry towards any other group, it would receive nonstop attention, but with Jews, it’s completely ignored. pic.twitter.com/EqlnU5dwsV

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) May 4, 2025

How it’s going: Dave Portnoy vows to ‘come for throats’ over vile antisemitic act at his Philadelphia Barstool bar.

In a heated rant posted to his account on X, Barstool Sports founder and president Dave Portnoy called out patrons at one of his company’s branded bars for an anti-Semitic sign that was held up in Philadelphia.

An enraged Portnoy posted an ‘Emergency Press Conference’ video on Sunday after being informed that a light-up sign at the Barstool bar that said ‘F*** the Jews’ was spotted by his fans.

The Massachusetts native says he has been tracking down those responsible and promised to ‘come for throats’ over the despicable display.

Portnoy said he was getting ready to attend an event over the weekend when his phone started ‘blowing up’ over the sign spotted at the Barstool Sansom Street located in Philadelphia’s Center City neighborhood.

‘Usually a great bar. You know, bottle service, people buy drinks, you get a sign. There was a sign yesterday that said, “F*** the Jews”,’ Portnoy said.

‘I’ve been shaking. I’ve been so mad for the last two hours. Like I instantly got on, this is why the Emergency Press Conference is late, because I was so over the top.’

Language alert:

How refreshing to see someone care and not just roll over. https://t.co/v9DU1z7OY6

— Melissa Braunstein (@slowhoneybee) May 4, 2025

UPDATE: Portnoy announces fitting punishment for bigots who launched vile anti-semitic attack on his Philly bar. “It’s cliché and very unlike me, but I talked to both the culprits who I know are super involved in it, talked to the families. I’m sending these kids to Auschwitz. They’ve agreed to go. That’s, of course, the Holocaust concentration camps. Been in touch with [New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft — who runs the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism]. We’re going to send these kids to Auschwitz, and they’re going to do a tour of the concentration camps in Germany [sic] and hopefully learn something and maybe their lives aren’t ruined and they think twice.”

FREDDIE DEBOER: The Indoor Plumbing Test. What can AI enable you to do that you couldn’t already do by other means?

Plumbing – bringing fresh water from one place to another and disposing of human waste via engineering – goes back to antiquity, and you occasionally find claims of affordances like flush toilets in ancient times. Today, modern people in most developed parts of the world have constant access to free-running clean water and toilets that can remove physical waste to a secure processing facility or holding unit, with heated water on demand a very nice extra. That’s largely a 20th-century and forward phenomenon. There were pretty sophisticated sewer systems in Victorian London, the White House got running water in the Jackson administration, and as usual major metropolitan areas in rich countries were ahead of the game generally. But it wasn’t until the 1920s or so that indoor plumbing became a true mass phenomenon, again only in wealthy countries, and it was perfectly common for a soldier coming home from World War II in 1945 to be coming home to a house with a well and an outhouse. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a majority of American homes had indoor plumbing, which means that the beginning of the Space Age overlapped with a period where most Americans couldn’t wash their hands whenever they wanted to. And, as cool as NASA and launching satellites and orbiting the Earth and traveling to the Moon are, their practical impacts on human life pale in comparison to modern plumbing.

So when I read people putting the iPhone as the pinnacle of human ingenuity, I have to imagine that they’re big fans of shitting in their yard. Because if faced with a choice, they’ve indicated that they’d choose their smartphone over their toilet! And that’s quite a choice. It might be worth doing a little reality check in that regard by spending a month without one and then a month without the other. So you see how life feels without your smart phone for 30 days, and then you see what it’s like to not be able to access indoor plumbing for 30 days. You have to piss and shit outside. You have to walk to a well, if you can find one, to get (hopefully clean) water, and then you have to heat it up on your stove if you want it hot. You can’t shower, and taking a bath would be a remarkably laborious process that still left you with tepid water. And this isn’t just a question of comfort but a question of essential hygiene, by which I mean medically-relevant hygine – cholera, typhoid, gastrointestinal worms, scarlet fever, hepatitis, and many more diseases were massively harder to avoid before mass indoor plumbing. I don’t know you, personally, but I feel considerable confidence in suggesting that your desire to avoid those diseases is greater than your attachment to Instagram.

That’s the shitting in the yard test, or the indoor plumbing test, for those who prefer to avoid vulgarity. The test requires you to compare the hype about a particular tech product up against the actual brick-and-mortar changes wrought in the great period of human advancement that began sometime in the late 19th century and ended sometime in the late 20th; the modern flush toilet is just a particularly relevant example. Is Zoom really a bigger part of your life than food refrigeration, a technology that has saved untold millions of lives over the decades by dramatically reducing deaths from foodborne illness? Is cloud storage really a bigger deal than infant vaccines, which save six lives a minute? Does Android Auto really rate when compared to the airbag? You can call these questions obtuse, and some do, but they are natural and necessary things to think about in an era of obsession with artificial intelligence. (By which people mean LLM/neural net-based artificial intelligence, which is a whole other thing.) When you say that AI is the most important invention in human history, you’re making some really, really powerful claims. And yes, you have to then justify saying that AI is more important than, for example, the transistor, self-negating claims that deny the importance of technologies that make large language models possible. But you also have to justify saying that AI is more important than, like, the bowl. By which I mean, bowls. To put food in. To eat out of. Try and spend the rest of your life without ever using another food container and get back to me about whether ChatGPT is more important. Food containers are inventions!

In his 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, James Pethokoukis explored the massive economic boost the benefits of the Industrial Revolution brought in the first half of the 20^th century:

In late October 2012, a storm surge from Hurricane Sandy knocked out power in New York City for several days, deluged the subway system and most of the road tunnels leading into Manhattan, and disrupted voice and data communication as flooding damaged a key switching facility in lower Manhattan. For a brief stretch, the financial capital of the world wasn’t New York City, as the New York Stock Exchange had to close for two consecutive days. As Robert Gordon writes in The Rise and Fall of American Growth:

Sandy pushed many of its victims back to the nineteenth century. Residents of New York City below Thirty-Fourth Street learned what it was like to lose the elevators that routinely had carried them to and from their apartments.… Anyone who had no power also lost such modern inventions as electric lighting, air-conditioning and fans to ventilate dwelling spaces, and refrigerators and freezers to keep food from spoiling. Many residents had no heat, no hot food, and even no running water. Those living in New Jersey were often unable to find gasoline needed for commuting because gas station pumps could not function without electricity. Moreover, communication was shut off after batteries were drained on laptops and mobile phones.

For a brief time, New Yorkers didn’t have access to the great inventions that made what Gordon has termed the special century of rapid economic and productivity growth from the 1870s to early 1970s. Three of the most important emerged within three months in 1879: the electric light bulb, the internal combustion engine, and radio, Gordon points out. These were fundamental “general purpose technologies” (GPTs) that spun off scores of inventions that made the modern world New Yorkers currently enjoy. (“What great births you have witnessed,” wrote Mark Twain to Walt Whitman on the latter’s seventieth birthday, referring to those and other mechanical marvels of the age.) And, crucially, of all those Sandy-created deprivations, the one probably most tolerable was the dodgy wireless service. While we all love the ability to stay in touch with everyone and everything at all times, it still probably places well behind the lack of hot food, water, a heated home, and mobility (well, for most of us who aren’t Twitter addicts, at least).

This difference between losing the marvels of the latter part of the Industrial Revolution (or Second Industrial Revolution) and losing those of the Information Technology and Communications Revolution (or Third Industrial Revolution) helps illustrate the nature of the slowdown that began with the Great Downshift. Those special century inventions changed life in such a profound and unrepeatable way and across so many dimensions of our lives, Gordon argues, that it’s hard to imagine living without them. And while these inventions had a massive impact on American life, their effect on productivity had been exhausted by the early 1970s. And the one-off nature of them means they can’t be repeated. Only once can you bring indoor plumbing to a country or cover it in concrete highways or move from an economy powered by horses to one driven by horsepower. Progress after 1970 certainly continued, but it was focused more narrowly on entertainment, communication, and information technology—important advances, but none that created a second Up Wing golden age of the sort imagined during the 1960s. At least not yet. They were significant enough to create a productivity blip in the late 1990s and early 2000s that has since faded. “[The] invention of the Internet, web browsers, search engines, and e-commerce created a fundamental change in business practices and procedures that was reflected in a… temporary, rather than a permanent, upswing in the pace of progress,” Gordon writes. His skepticism about the IT Revolution is the empirical conclusion that is referenced by the “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” meme.

“Only once can you bring indoor plumbing to a country or cover it in concrete highways or move from an economy powered by horses to one driven by horsepower.” Indeed.™

DAVID MARCUS: Yep, it’s Fetterman’s brain that triggered the Left’s hit piece.

In 2022, when John Fetterman had a stroke while he was running for his Senate seat, the Democrats and their media allies were insistent that to even question his fitness to serve was ableist and unacceptable.

My, how times have changed.

This week, New York magazine, as reliable a Democrat organ as there is, ran a scathing hit piece on Fetterman in which current and former staffers all but suggest that not only should he not be Pennsylvania’s senior senator, he belongs in an assisted living facility.

The piece has no “gotcha” moment that would make any fair person say that Fetterman needs to step aside – you know, the kind former President Biden provided daily. Rather, it is a collection of anecdotes about him snapping at staff, or withdrawing into himself, perhaps not taking his medication. Try as they might, the folks at New York magazine constructed a molehill, not a mountain.

But why, one wonders, two years after waiving away similar behavior is a liberal news outlet suddenly parading the senator’s alleged diminished capacities? What changed?

Well, the article itself gives us a big hint with this line, “The endless fights over Israel, which saw Fetterman draw further into himself, coincided with setbacks in his recovery regimen.”

You don’t say.

Allow me to humbly suggest that this is not, in fact, a coincidence. Fetterman’s strong support of Israel, America’s ally, and his other recent moderate positions have placed a giant target on the back of his hoodie sweatshirt.

Also: Dem Senator’s Camera-Thirsty Wife Does Her Husband Dirty. “According to the outlet, Gisele visited her husband’s senate office in November 2023, weeks after Hamas attacked Israel, and got into a heated debate about the burgeoning war and her husband’s support for the Israeli state. Gisele also went behind her husband’s back, reportedly texting staffers in the wake of their fight on multiple occasions.”

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS NO ONE IS ASKING: How to respond to ‘May the fourth be with you.’

In a universe where Wookiees roar, lightsabers hum, and the Force flows, there exists a day that unites fans across star systems: May the 4th. But why this date? It’s not just a random alignment of celestial bodies; it’s a playful pun. You see, “May the fourth” sounds eerily similar to the iconic phrase: “May the Force be with you.” So, whether you’re a Jedi Knight, a Sith Lord, or just a casual admirer of droids and starships, let’s explore the origins of this cosmic holiday and discover how to respond when someone greets you with those magical words.

Or, you could “Take Five,” and decide to be a grownup about the topic:

JEFF DUNETZ: The Democrats Who Call Trump Nazi And The Reporters Who Don’t Confront Them.

What is it with those Trump-hating politicians? If they disagree with a Trump policy, say so and explain why. Why do they insist on cheapening the memory of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, those who survived the Holocaust torture, and the Jews who mourn the victims’ pain every day? In the rare cases when a Republican makes a similar disgusting statement, the media would be all over them like cheese on pizza. But when a Democrat spews that hatred, there’s nothing but crickets.

It used to be a basic rule of American politics never to speak of the Holocaust or any of its related terms, such as Nazis or Hitler, for political warfare. But that doesn’t matter anymore.

Anyone who says Trump, his supporters, or other Republicans is Hitler or a Nazi doesn’t care about minimizing the horrors of the Holocaust. Any reporter who doesn’t challenge that disgusting statement is just as bad.

QED: NY Times: ‘Chilling Parallels’ Between Third Reich and Trump’s Second Term.

David Segal, a feature writer for the New York Times, interviewed German-born novelist Daniel Kehlmann, who “sees chilling parallels between what happened [under Hitler] and what has unfolded since Trump’s second inauguration.”

The “Republican president = Hitler” smear has been a tired and offensive liberal trope since the Reagan Administration, unworthy of appearing in a once-prestigious newspaper. The Times headline writer wasn’t subtle:

In a Nazi-Era Filmmaker’s Compromises, a Novelist Finds Reasons to Fear

Daniel Kehlmann wrote ‘The Director’ only to realize how loudly the moral quandaries faced by G.W. Pabst would resonate today.

* * * * * * * *

At the end, Kehlmann cited his own paranoia to prove himself right that American had become a dangerously intolerant place under Trump.

“Immediately I’m thinking, can it be bad for me to say something like this to The New York Times? Which, I think, proves my point.”

How so? What’s going to happen to you? As Tom Wolfe in “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America” about a panel he was on at Princeton in 1965 when LBJ was in the White House and the topic began to focus on – see if this rings a bell – “the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folks waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck.”

I couldn’t make any sense out of it. I had just made a tour of the country to write a series called ‘The New Life Out There’ for New York magazine. This was the mid-1960’s. The post-World War II boom had by now pumped money into every level of the population on a scale unparalleled in any nation in history. Not only that, the folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history.

* * * * * * * * *

Support came from a quarter I hadn’t counted on. It was [Günter] Grass, speaking in English.

“For the past hour I have my eyes fixed on the doors here,” he said. “You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow.”

Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”

He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

Most recently: German Intelligence Officially Designates AfD an ‘Extremist Organization’ That Threatens Democracy.

MATT VESPA: JD Vance Absolutely Wrecked an Anti-Trump Commentator Over This Trump White House Post.

Vance responded and drove over Kristol with a tank:

As a general rule, I’m fine with people telling jokes and not fine with people starting stupid wars that kill thousands of my countrymen.

Kristol was one of the leading voices supporting the Iraq War when neoconservatives dominated the foreign policy thinking of the GOP, which led to a $1 trillion disaster in Iraq, a brutalization of the GOP in the 2006 midterms, and a humbling moment that exposed the limits of American power vis-à-vis importing the American Revolution into the Middle East.

Other reactions were either laughably inauthentic, eye-roll-worthy, or outright hypocritical.

* * * * * * * *

Liberal America and the media called Obama the Second Coming. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer mocked the sacrament of communion.

Spare us the lectures, libs. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Even in 2025, typing “Obama halo photos” into Google Image Search brings up these vintage results; wire service photographers absolutely loved framing Obama in front of his campaign’s logo in 2008 and the presidential seal in 2012 to create the symbolism of a halo:

In 2008, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist anointed Obama as “the Lightworker:”

Here’s where it gets gooey. Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.

* * * * * * * *

But there simply is no denying that extra kick. As one reader put it to me, in a way, it’s not even about Obama, per se. There’s a vast amount of positive energy swirling about that’s been held back by the armies of BushCo darkness, and this energy has now found a conduit, a lightning rod, is now effortlessly self-organizing around Obama’s candidacy. People and emotions and ideas of high and positive vibration are automatically draw to him. It’s exactly like how Bush was a magnet for the low vibrational energies of fear and war and oppression and aggression, but, you know, completely reversed. And different. And far, far better.

The following year, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas declared Obama Is ‘Sort of God:’

 Newsweek editor Evan Thomas brought adulation over President Obama’s Cairo speech to a whole new level on Friday, declaring on MSNBC: “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”

Thomas, appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews, was reacting to a preceding monologue in which Matthews praised Obama’s speech: “I think the President’s speech yesterday was the reason we Americans elected him. It was grand. It was positive. Hopeful…But what I liked about the President’s speech in Cairo was that it showed a complete humility…The question now is whether the President we elected and spoke for us so grandly yesterday can carry out the great vision he gave us and to the world.”

At the beginning of 2013, Thomas doubled down on this theme:

Branching out a bit in the interim, in 2010, a Newsweek cover declared Obama “God of All Things:”Newsweek Depiction of Obama as Lord Shiva Upsets Some Indian-Americans:

Newsweek’s depiction of President Obama on its latest cover has irked some Indian Americans who, fresh off Obama’s visit to the world’s largest democracy, are not happy with the image of the U.S. president as the Hindu deity, Lord Shiva.

The Newsweek cover shows Obama with several arms carrying policy issues while balancing on one leg. The headline reads: “God of All Things” with a subtitle, “Why the Modern Presidency May be too Much for One Person to Handle.”

Shiva, who is one of three pre-eminent gods in the Hindu religion along with Brahma and Vishnu, is considered the destroyer of the world, which must end, metaphorically speaking, in order to be reborn as a more universalistic place. However, the god’s purpose is not to foretell an apocalyptic ending.

Of course, for many on the left, the post-Obama years have been “Apocalypse Now,” to coin a phrase.

More here: Obama Lackey Tries Outraging MAGA With Obama Pope Pic and It Does Not Go the Way He Planned … At All.

UPDATE: Kamala Harris posed for pics, celebrated San Francisco Pride with Catholic-mocking drag queen from Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

VDH: The Trump Counterrevolution and the Moral Ledger.

Despite the media hysteria, President Donald Trump’s counterrevolution remains on course.

Its ultimate fate will probably rest with the state of the economy by the November 2026 midterm elections. But its success also hinges on accomplishing what is right and long overdue — and then making such reforms quietly, compassionately, and methodically.

No country can long endure without sovereignty and security — or with 10 to 12 million illegal immigrants crossing the border and half a million criminal foreign nationals roaming freely.

The prior administration found that it was easy to destroy the border and welcome the influx. But it is far harder for its successor to restore security, find those who broke the law, and insist on legal-only immigration. Trump is on the right side of all these issues and making substantial progress.

Everyone knew that a $2 trillion budget deficit, a $37 trillion national debt, and a $1.2 trillion trade deficit in goods were ultimately unsustainable.

Yet all prior politicians of the 21st century winced at the mere thought of reducing debts and deficits, given that it proved much easier just to print and spread around federal money. As long as the Trump administration dutifully cuts the budget, sends its regrets to displaced federal employees, seeks to expand private sector reemployment, and quietly presses ahead, it retains the moral high ground.

Read the whole thing.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Shedeur Sanders Fan Sues NFL for Emotional Distress Over Sanders’ Late Draft Pick.

Plaintiff seeks a “formal acknowledgment from the NFL regarding the emotional distress caused by their actions and statements,” a “retraction of the slanderous statements made about Shedeur Sanders, along with an apology,” “[i]mplementation of fairer practices in the drafting process,” and $100M in punitive damages “for the harm caused to [Doe] and the impact of the NFL’s actions on his emotional well-being.”

Plaintiff states that he’s unable to pay the filing fees, so the court will screen it to determine (among other things) whether it’s “frivolous,” which is to say “it lacks an arguable basis either in law or in fact.” I expect the court to indeed promptly dismiss it as frivolous.

UPDATE: Prof. Andy Geronimo (Case Western) Tweets: “Not sure it’s [intentional infliction of emotional distress] to see your favorite college player fall to the fifth round of the draft, but a claim that you now have to be a Cleveland Browns fan is [plausible].”

Heh, indeed. In other news regarding the Browns’ new backup QB*: CBS analyst recalls time Shedeur Sanders missed pregame obligation with network.

People asked me, NFL people asked me after that game, ‘What did you think of Shedeur?’ And I said, ‘I didn’t get to talk to him.’ Maybe he’s the greatest kid ever, maybe he’s a bad kid. I don’t know. But I told them the story, and they just kind of nodded their head.

“And it just made me wonder how many stories are there like that in which Shedeur did things that were not customary. He did things non-traditionally. It certainly seemed like that was the deal with a lot of the combine interviews and meetings with teams. And especially at that position, I think it makes them very nervous that already in college he was getting out of things that you’re supposed to be doing. What’s he gonna be like if he’s a first-round pick in the NFL Draft?”

More here: What caused Sanders’ draft slide? [Albert] Breer details QB’s interview red flags:

Sanders, the son of an NFL superstar and one of the biggest names in college football last season, isn’t a “blend into the background” type of player. And according to Breer, he didn’t act like it in the lead-up to the 2025 draft.

“He handled the process like he was a top-five (pick) lock,” Breer said, adding that Sanders declined to meet with several teams with the assumption that he’d be taken early in the first round.

“All these teams that either heard the bad stories from the other teams or that (he) refused to meet with or that had a bad experience with (him) personally … now the amount of teams that are willing to (draft him) has narrowed,” Breer said of teams passing on Sanders in the later rounds.

What exactly are those “bad stories” about Sanders? Breer shared two examples he heard from NFL sources, including one that came during a meeting with a team that asked Sanders to install an offensive play to test his football knowledge.

“They give players an install, and there are mistakes intentionally put in the install,” Breer said, noting that this is a common practice among NFL teams. “He didn’t catch them and got called on it, and it didn’t go well after that. … He was pissed that they did that to him.”

The other example came during an NFL Combine meeting with a team that asked him to explain one of his interceptions.

“He throws a bad interception. It was a deep throw early in the game,” Breer said. “They go in the meeting, they show the interception and they say, ‘What happened here?’ (Sanders responds,) ‘Well, I like to get into a rhythm earlier in the game.’

“They get into it over that, and (Sanders’) conclusion is, ‘Well, maybe I’m not a fit for you.'”

“The person who told me that story was like, ‘I’ve never heard that before.’ It was in a combine interview when you’re just going from team to team trying to put your best foot forward.”

* Not yet: “Sanders faces an uphill climb to win the QB job in Cleveland, which currently has five signal-callers on its roster in Deshaun Watson, Joe Flacco, Kenny Pickett, Gabriel and Sanders.”