MAPS: See how large the California wildfires are. The Palisades Fire is already larger than the land size of Providence, Rhode Island.
Meanwhile, these images look far more like Dresden in 1945, than L.A. in 2025:
Drone shot over the Palisades from @KitKarzen pic.twitter.com/S0DO6pdgHe
— Los Angeles Scanner (@LosAngeles_Scan) January 9, 2025
A friend in LA just took this video pic.twitter.com/WJBWCHmCUs
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 8, 2025
THE MOST UNDER-REPORTED STORY OF THE BIDEN PRESIDENCY:
In the last week or so, there has been a sudden burst of recognition of the extent to which Democrats and the media worked together to cover up Biden’s progressing cognitive decline. One media figure after another has come forward to call this the “most under-reported” story of the last year or several years. Some examples among many include: CBS correspondent Jan Crawford on December 30 (“That [the most under-reported story] would be, to me, Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable in a televised debate”); Rolling Stone, December 30 (“Matt Yglesias, Josh Barro, and Mehdi Hasan regret failing to acknowledge Biden’s cognitive decline sooner — and its impact on the 2024 election.”); MSN, January 4 (“Media facing backlash for reporting on Biden’s cognitive decline.”)
I agree that this was a very big and very under-reported story during the Biden presidency. But was it the biggest? Not to me. The biggest under-reported story of the Biden presidency was the President’s corruption.
The big difference between these two stories is that the cognitive decline story was much more difficult to cover up. Despite the best efforts of Biden’s staff to limit his appearances, restrict difficult questioning, and prevent all deviations from script, the President was still regularly out in the public eye. Even as every powerful Democrat insisted that Biden was “sharp as a tack,” we could all see him uttering confused answers to questions, mixing up his location, stumbling and falling, shaking hands with the air, and so forth. The refusal to take a simple cognitive test was a persistent tell. Yes, the left-wing media should be ashamed of their reporting; but they were not really able to fool anyone who was paying attention.
The corruption story was different. It takes some knowledge of the facts and the law to understand whether there is anything to an allegation of bribery. The mainstream media simply refused to provide the chronology of facts or a summary of the law to assist readers to understand the circumstances. As just a few examples:
As Karol Markowicz recently tweeted:
POLITICO: REPUBLICANS SEIZE! Trump, Musk unleash on California Democrats over wildfires.
Republicans are seizing on the catastrophic wildfires that tore through the Los Angeles area early Wednesday, blaming Democratic policies for the deadly, wind-fueled conflagrations that forced tens of thousands to flee their homes.
President-elect Donald Trump lashed out at Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday, calling the fires “virtually apocalyptic” in a Truth Social post and pointing a finger at state rules protecting endangered species for limiting the amount of water that gets sent south from Northern California.
“I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA!,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “He is the blame for this.”
Well, yes:
Just 11 months ago, LA had the most rainfall in the past 25 years, and several extra feet of snowpack in the Sierras. Since CA is too busy destroying dams to build new reservoirs, the majority of that precipitation drained into the ocean. Newsom's Democrats own this. https://t.co/yxIYaNcE0x
— Jon Gabriel (@exjon) January 8, 2025
Mister, California could use a man William Mulholland again.
DISPATCHES FROM THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH: Starmer accused of ‘cowardice’ as Labour votes to block national grooming inquiry.
Labour MPs have blocked an attempt to initiate a national inquiry into grooming gangs.
The amendment put forward by Conservative MPs that would have piled pressure on the Government to hold a statutory inquiry into historic child sexual exploitation was voted down by 364 to 111.
The move was branded as an “act of cowardice” by Conservatives following the vote.
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “It is disgusting that Keir Starmer has used his supermajority in Parliament to block a national inquiry into the rape gangs scandal.
“Labour MPs have put their Party ahead of getting to the truth and turned a blind eye to justice for the victims. Labour MPs will have to explain to the British people why they are against learning the truth behind the torture and rape of countless vulnerable girls.
“We will not let them forget this act of cowardice.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY AND RADICAL CHIC: Jealous Diddy ‘is raging that Luigi Mangione is getting more attention than him at their Brooklyn prison.’
Diddy is furious that alleged CEO murderer Luigi Mangione is seen as a bigger star by inmates at the Brooklyn federal prison where both are locked up, it’s claimed.
The rapper, 54, and Mangione, 26, are both awaiting trial at Brooklyn’s infamous Metropolitan Center in New York, and Diddy – real name Sean Combs – is reportedly raging that the alleged killer is more beloved than he is among inmates.
‘Diddy has been throwing tantrums over the fact that Luigi is getting all of the attention in prison and is being revered as a hero after literally murdering someone on camera,’ the source said.
Diddy is reportedly upset because he claims he is innocent of sex trafficking yet he continues getting ‘so much hate inside the lock up while Luigi gets so much love.’
‘Even in prison, Diddy’s ego is bigger than life,’ the source added.
Jailhouse fame can be so fickle sometimes.
PRIORITIES:
There’s no water coming out of the fire hydrants because the city didn’t fill the reservoirs but at least the fire chief is a woman and gay! https://t.co/EXdtuAvM0O
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 8, 2025
On the left is the LA Fire Chief allowing her city to be burned down with no water in fire hydrants
On the right is the New Orleans Police Chief who allowed a terrorist attack on Bourbon without street barriers
DEI is quite literally getting people killed
Bring back merit pic.twitter.com/LEmtbC9owK
— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) January 8, 2025
Earlier, from Steve: While Los Angeles Burns, Mayor Bass Parties in Ghana, Fire Chief Fiddles with DEI.
WHY IS SCOTT JENNINGS THE ONLY VOICE OF REASON AT CNN?
.@ScottJenningsKY takes Democrats to the woodshed for the coverup of Biden’s cognitive state:
“One of the biggest cover ups in modern American political history."
🔥🔥🔥
"Democrat politicians lied, Democrat pundits lied. A lot of people who cover the White House looked the… pic.twitter.com/8GKYgpVCDR
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) January 7, 2025
Abby Phillip’s line, “And it would also be the, you know, kick a guy when he’s down,” is quite the tell. Are you there to report news, be the televised version of the proverbial first draft of history, or are you there as Democratic Party operatives with Chyrons hoping to keep Grandpa Joe happy in his twilight years? Phillip is definitely indicating it’s the latter — and inadvertently proving Jennings is spot-on.
MATT MARGOLIS: Never Forget: Jimmy Carter Pardoned a Child Molester.
Carter passed away last month, and the media has been desperate to canonize him and treat him as a great president when everyone knows he was garbage during his time in the White House. We’ve addressed some of his failings in the past, but now it’s worth bringing up another black mark on his record that hasn’t gotten much attention: his pardon of a child molester.
Why bring this up now? That child molester was none other than Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary fame. Yarrow passed away on Tuesday at the age of 86 from cancer.
Yarrow, of course, was a supporter of Democratic politics in the sixties, and really big in the anti-Vietnam War protests. In 1970, however, Yarrow pled guilty to taking ‘immoral and improper liberties’ with a child.
As Rolling Stone notes, Yarrow invited a 14-year-old girl named Barbara Winter and her 17-year-old sister to meet him at his hotel room, where he molested her as her sister watched.
Rolling Stone explains what happened next:
Read the whole thing (and to give the devil their due, kudos to Rolling Stone for reporting on this sordid aspect of Yarrow’s past — and Carter’s).
HOW IT STARTED: Rep. Swalwell Hails Inflation Reduction Act Bill of 2022.
—The Dublin CA Independent, August 17th, 2022.
How it’s going:
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB, PART DEUX:
As Fox News notes, “Internet roasts NYT headline about fact-checkers ruling Meta criticism of fact checks ‘false:’ ‘Beyond parody:’”
“This actually does an effective job revealing the problem with the fact-checking industry (perhaps by accident),” Reason senior editor Robby Soave observed.
“Fact-checkers fact-check claim that fact-checkers are the problem. Real headline from the NY Times,” civil liberties attorney Laura Powell noted. “How can anyone produce satire when the legacy media has become so ridiculous?”
“This is amazing. Meta says fact-checkers were the problem Fact-checkers rule that false,” Analytics Miami founder Ana Bozovic said in a post. “Rounding off the absurdity: this is the NYT reporting.”
“They really wrote this and then published it,” senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute Chris Rufo marveled.
The Federalist editor-in-chief Mollie Z. Hemingway wrote, “A beyond parody headline from propaganda outlet New York Times.”
“I had to look it up myself because I could not believe it wasn’t parody,” political columnist Moshe Hill wrote in surprise, “It’s real.”
Meteorologist and data scientist John Basham joked that the headline “could have easily been” from political satire website, The Babylon Bee, adding, “Life Has Become Parody On The Left.”
The editor of America’s Newspaper of Record says that there’s a bright future for the headline writer if he wants to take a significant step up from what Iowahawk once dubbed a “scrappy local paper:”
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB:
Perhaps the AP is taking their lead from the New York Times, which began 2024 by covering all the bases:
IT’S TIME FOR SENSIBLE FRUM CONTROL:
Here’s the likely piece in question: Canada’s Churches Burned Over an ‘Indigenous Genocide,’ New Excavation Results Tell a Far Different Story.
(Classical reference in headline.)
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Guy Who Said Facebook Was Not Suppressing Free Speech Announces Facebook Will Stop Suppressing Free Speech.
QUESTION ASKED: Who Needs Communists When You Have Home-Grown Progressives?
Last week Victor Davis Hanson noted that Germany’s current de-industrialization, born of its fanatical “Net-Zero” climate mania that has resulted in ruinously high energy prices, resembles a self-imposed “Morgenthau Plan” from World War II.
* * * * * * * *
Realize that the Morgenthau Plan would have ruled out post-war Germany as potent ally against the Soviet Union, especially significant after NATO was formed later. It was designed to ensure that Germany was poor and weak—easy pickings, perhaps, for the Soviet Union after the war.
Just how did such a punitive plan come about in the first place? It turns out that Morgenthau’s senior staff was highly penetrated by Soviet agents and Communist sympathizers. Most of the names of his staff have been forgotten, with the partial exception of Harry Dexter White, who committed suicide in the late 1940s right after both Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers named White as a Soviet agent. But M. Stanton Evans (my first mentor) and Herbert Rommerstein, long time senior staff member of the House Intelligence Committee, identified the others from corroborating testimony and the decrypted VENONA documents that came to light in the late 1990s. In addition to White, other Morgenthau staffers who were Communist sympathizers or perhaps even paid agents included Solomon Adler, Josiah Dubois, Sonia Gold, Harold Glasser, William Taylor, V. Frank Coe (who defected to Communist China after the war), and Irving Kaplan. Many of these figures were involved in developing the Morgenthau Plan.
Why, it’s as, “in a global sense McCarthy was on to something. McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much… The Age of McCarthyism, it turns out, was not the simple witch hunt of the innocent by the malevolent as two generations of high school and college students have been taught.”
ED MORRISSEY: EU Leaders to Musk: How Dare You Interfere With Our Interference!
According to BBC Newsnight, Britain's socialist government are considering ending their security partnership with the U.S. unless Donald Trump distances himself from Elon Musk's views on grooming gangs.pic.twitter.com/024Qbg1iaH
— Ben Kew (@ben_kew) January 7, 2025
So let’s get this straight. British national security is more dependent on keeping silent about the Pakistani rape gangs than it is on a military alliance with the United States? Is that what Starmer seriously wants to argue? Is that what voters in the UK believe, too? Because we can take our ball and go home any time, and leave Starmer and Macron to deal with Vladimir Putin on their own. Have fun storming that castle.
However, I’d bet that Starmer went way over his political skis with that suggestion. Trump will not just call Starmer’s bluff, but now he and Musk can raise Starmer a Zuckerberg, too. (How very Meta!) The EU Left is already in retreat over its refusal to enforce laws and control migration, as well as their economic policies and arrogant elitism. Starmer and Macron are political dead men walking at this point, and they know it. That’s why they are desperately trying to quash Twitter/X in the EU, only now that Zuckerberg has foresworn progressive “fact checking,” the EU will have to play Whack-a-Mole on several popular social-media platforms rather than just focus on Musk.
Much more like this, please.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Left Eats Its Own After High-Profile Activists Accept Medals From ‘Genocide Joe.’
Online progressives and leftists attacked humanitarian activists Bono and chef Jose Andres for accepting the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden on Saturday, claiming the pair were endorsing genocide.
Bono, the world-famous Irish frontman to the rock band U2, and Jose Andres, a Spain-born chef who has risen to prominence for his charity work with his World Central Kitchen program, were two of the 19 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor attainable in America, on Saturday.
While both celebrities have previously been on the receiving end of liberal praise for their charity and compassion, pro-Palestinian activists on X ripped them for appearing with President Biden amid what the activists claim is a presidency that has supported a genocide propagated by Israel.
* * * * * * * * *
“Biden is giving the award because Bono is the only Irish Catholic who doesn’t care at all about the Palestinians,” Jeet Heer, writer at the left-wing magazine The Nation, said on X.
Many of Bono’s own countrymen signaled their disdain for his actions.
“Irish rock star Bono shows 15 months of managing to ignore the Gaza Genocide really pays off,” one Irish blogger wrote.
“As an Irish person I’m disgusted by this image. We stand with the oppressed. We don’t stand with imperialist evil murderous monsters. Tens of thousands of us have been protesting here against this evil. Shame on you Bono,” Irish musician Martin Leahy tweeted Sunday.
Flashback: Antisemitism has made life in Ireland unbearable, say Israelis.
WHY WE MUST EXPOSE THE CRIMINAL FRAUD OF THOSE BEHIND BIDEN’S DISASTROUS PRESIDENCY:
I have, as you can tell, too many questions, but I will limit myself to the two big ones.
The first one is: What actual persons in the administration — names and addresses, please — made the calls in the persistent trampling on our citizen rights?
Someone ordered for Catholic groups and anti-transgender parents to be treated as terrorists by the FBI and Homeland Security. Someone erected and allocated funds for a tentacular online censorship structure that silenced or downranked opinions distasteful to those in power.
Someone “debanked,” or cast out of the financial system, persons lawfully working on artificial intelligence and crypto. Someone perverted the prosecutorial authority to hound and persecute political opponents, particularly of the Trumpist variety.
We know Joe Biden didn’t commit any of those unconstitutional acts. He was too far gone.
So who did? And what should be their penalty?
My second question is: Where the heck were the news media while this clown show was going on?
Acting as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, thrilled, like pre-Internet smalltown newspaper movie critics, to be so close to the action and the spotlights that they would accept any scrap of info the White House fed them. Because of their party allegiance, they were terrorized to bite the hand that feeds them, no matter how snotty Biden has always been with reporters, long before his brain completely withered away. And were equally terrorized that if they spoke up about Sundown Joe’s enfeebled condition, the other party’s presidential candidate would use their words in a campaign ad.
Old and busted: “Speaking truth to power.” The new hotness? Terrified of being the person who begins the preference cascade.
Related: The Biggest Media Story of Biden’s Presidency. They failed to cover the cognitive decline of the commander in chief until it served them to do so.
KEEP THE WARTHOGS FLYING: Flight of the old Hog: The US Air Force has a new task for its Cold War tank smashers.
YES, RISING INFLATION AND A FLAT ECONOMY WILL DO THAT: Wow, Democrats Lost the Capitol Riot Narrative Big Time.
LET HE WHO HAS NOT OPERATED A CHICOM SECRET POLICE STATION IN NEW YORK CAST THE FIRST STONE: New York Resident Pleads Guilty to Operating Secret Police Station of the Chinese Government in Lower Manhattan.
Law & Order is always looking for plots that magically place the Red State menace in downtown New York — here’s the ultimate Red Menace, if Dick Wolf is still looking for stories “ripped from the headlines.”
WASHINGTON POST TO LAY OFF “MANY DOZENS” AS READERSHIP CRASHES:
Last week, two other senior political reporters for the Washington Post — Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer — left the publication to take up new positions at The Atlantic, the magazine owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
In late October, two Washington Post staffers quit its editorial board in protest of Bezos’ decision to block an endorsement of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Bezos said the move to block the endorsement was made in order to bolster public confidence in his newspaper’s impartiality.
But readers of the newspaper were angered by the move. As many as 250,000 subscribers canceled their memberships as a result, according to reports.
As Ace of Spades writes in response:
I don’t think any of these woke media outlets can ever reclaim the figleaf of nonpartisanship. They will never, never again be considered authoritative or honest.
Therefore, there is no point in attempting to “re-position” CNN or the Washington Post as “centrist” and “objective.” Anyone who wasn’t a full on TDS #Resistance leftist stopped going to these sources years and years ago, and they’re not coming back. And as these outlets shed audience, they catered harder and harder to the remaining audience of mentally ill leftwing lunatics, which caused even Democrat normies to flee, and left their remaining audience base even more partisan and weird.
There is no way — none — to reverse this, so it’s my business advice that they not even try. The only course is to accept that they are permanently diminished and marginalized as fringe outlets of the intensely woke ghetto. They have to downsize until they hit the right, profitable level for a niche conspiracy-theory outlet.
They will have to shed at least half of their staff.
#SorryNotSorry. You effed around, and now you’re finding out.
Related: Will the media carry its snobbery problem into the next Trump era?
At the 92nd Street Y last month, an audience paid actual money to watch the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin record her podcast with Lincoln Project founding member George Conway. Admission was $20 — but can you really put a price on watching two deranged NeverTrumpers cope with the reality of a looming second Trump presidency?
In a set reminiscent of Inside the Actors Studio, Rubin began waxing poetic about why the media is so “mamsy-pamsey.”
This is the same woman who went from calling Barack Obama a “boring gasbag” to claiming his “mere presence reminded us of what a dignified, responsible president sounds like.” She has also performed a well-documented back flip on John Bolton that would make your head spin.
Those who agree to a 92nd Street Y discussion can apparently set wide boundaries about topics that they consider to be Omertà. (Jimmy Page spoke there a decade ago to plug one of his coffee table books, very likely knowing that there would be absolutely no discussion about the more sordid aspects of his past.)
During her 92nd Street Y interview with Conway, in-between insulting conservative Trump voters, Rubin also claimed:
Though Rubin has frequently criticized the Washington Post, particularly its owner Jeff Bezos, for trying to become more politically neutral, she has made no effort to resign out of protest and even joked about rebelling from within the paper.
“I can be a rebel in my own house because the mainstream media is now, as we talked about, kind of capitulating, so I get to, like, thumb my nose,” Rubin joked.
She also called out claims of her being politically biased, saying, “I think I am not biased at all. I am just accurate. Deadly accurate.”
Naturally, there was no pushback about how she was billed as the WaPo’s token conservative and Romney supporter in 2012 – and on some Websites in desperate need of updating, is still listed as a conservative:
By the way, when does Rubin bail out from the Post? Flashback to late October: Jennifer Rubin’s resignation from the Washington Post is surely imminent.
The non-endorsement is the new endorsement! Hot on the heels of the Los Angeles Times’s decision not to endorse a candidate in the presidential race, a controversial call made by the paper’s owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong that has been met with multiple staff resignations, the Washington Post is following suit.
A statement published Friday reads: “The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”
Public statements from leading Post personalities have been aghast. Columnist Karen Attiah tweeted, “Jesus Christ.” Then, an hour later, “…” Then an hour later still, “What an absolute stab in the back. What an insult to those of us who have literally put our careers and lives on the line, to call out threats to human rights and democracy.”
Of most interest to Cockburn, however, were the remarks of fellow columnist and MSNBC mainstay Jennifer Rubin to the LA Times resignations earlier in the week. In response to Sewell Chan’s resignation from the Times, she wrote, “Bravo. All respect.” Followed by, “and where are the rest of them?”
The implication is clear: now that her paper, too, is refusing to endorse the sainted Kamala Harris, Rubin must be set to join the charge of resignations in disgust, along with Robert Kagan, as a sort-of Potomac Joan of Arc. The prospect brings a tear to Cockburn’s eye. Such bravery.
But of the “unexpectedly” exceedingly slow-motion, waiting-to-develop style.
BIDEN SHAMES PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM EVEN FURTHER BY GIVING IT TO “SCIENCE GUY” BILL NYE:
The purpose of giving Nye (who is not in fact a "science guy") this award was so that when he is mentioned in the media going forward he can be referred to as "Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Bill Nye" – how dare you question Nye, he's a PMF winner. https://t.co/Tfv1QfBNYL
— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) January 5, 2025
On the other hand, as America’s Newspaper of Record notes, there may still be rough times ahead for Nye:
Bill Nye's Medal Revoked After Old Hate Speech Comes To Light https://t.co/mKLRz2PkFI pic.twitter.com/eXMWN0VtRJ
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 6, 2025
VDH: Conspiracies Too Awful to Imagine?
3. Never in recent election history had a presidential candidate in the midst of the final stretch of the campaign been the target of two assassination attempts—in part enabled by a climate of widespread and acceptable vituperation that equated Trump with a vile Hitler, fascist, Nazi, and dictator and thus encouraged unhinged would-be killers to delude themselves into believing they would forever be enshrined as heroes. And never would social media influencers, columnists, and celebrities voice near approval of such attempts on the leading presidential candidate’s life.
The first would-be assassin was an amateur shooter, who easily evaded Secret Service scrutiny to post himself in sight of bystanders, as he enjoyed a direct line of fire at Trump. Meanwhile, local law enforcement was desperately trying, in vain, to warn the lax Secret Service of the immediate danger to the president. The second wannabe assassin approached with impunity the most recognizably vulnerable spot on a local golf course, staked out a shooting position, and would have, if not spotted, been within minutes of having an uninterrupted shot at the president.
4. Finally, not since the Woodrow Wilson scandal of 1919-1920, have the media and the Democratic left conspired to hide the morbidities of a president that left him unfit mentally and physically to carry out the duties of the office.
That current and still ongoing covert effort put the nation at great risk, as evidenced by the catastrophic humiliation in Kabul, the successful Russian gamble that the U.S. would not or could not deter Putin from invading Ukraine, the unsteady and anemic reaction to the theater-wide wars in the Middle East, the hyperinflation of 2021-2, the erasure of the southern border, the deliberate greenlighting of some 12 million illegal aliens into the United States, and the weaponization of the FBI, CIA, and DOJ.
The final irony?
Those who were perpetrators of these illicit, unethical, and unprecedented efforts were themselves the first and most prominent to project Trump as the promulgator of conspiracies to debilitate the very institutions that they had already undermined and disgraced.
Read the whole thing.
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