DAVID MASTIO: Deporting one million undocumented immigrants a year is much easier than you think.

The Trump administration has powerful winds at its back that might allow it to launch roundups and deportations at an even faster pace. Computer technology and surveillance have both advanced markedly since 2009. There are more police than there were 15 years ago and crime is much lower — allowing more boots on the ground to enforce immigration laws if local police cooperate as they do in much of the country, and which Trump says he will encourage. The economy is much more digitized, making it harder to live a life where your identity is off the grid.

And there are powerful tools to make the United States much less welcoming to undocumented immigrants that the U.S. has never wielded. For instance, undocumented migrants paid federal, state and local governments nearly $100 billion in taxes in 2024, billions of which is returned to them in refunds fueled by tax breaks targeted at low-income earners. The U.S. could require proof of legal presence to pay refunds and hold the money until the immigrants agree to return to their home countries. Companies could be required to provide proof of legal presence for each employee whose salary they claim as an expense on their taxes. Such a move would hit farmers and hotels where undocumented workers frequently work, as each is dependent on undocumented migrants for workers, and the salaries of which are deducted on their taxes.

Donald Trump’s plans for dealing with undocumented immigration are big, and they could be undone by the competence problems that were rife in his last administration. But they are not as unrealistic as his critics proclaim.

Read the whole thing.

VDH: Blame Barack: Obama’s lost mystique marks the end of a political era.

Failed candidate Harris has been roundly faulted by staffers and donors for blowing through some $2 billion in assorted 2024 campaign money.

She ended up doing worse against Trump than Biden himself had in 2020.

Many Democrats believe that they might have done just as well had Biden stayed on the ticket even in his vastly diminished state.

The Obamas were further blasted for nullifying the wishes of 14 million primary voters by forcing Biden off the ticket — ironically in the same backroom, anti-democratic manner they had cleared the way for him in 2020.

Obama emerged from his comfortable retirement to hit the 2024 campaign trail, schooling the country that President-emeritus Donald Trump was a dictator, a fascist, a tyrant and, of course, a “racist.”

The more Trump polled even with, or ahead of, Kamala Harris, the more an exasperated and ignored Obama talked down to supposedly low-information voters.

But by the time Harris lost the election, voters had tuned out a nagging and patronizing Obama — and his stale, now-dated hope-and-changey boilerplate speeches.

What Obama did not mention, but what the voters knew, was that the border was more secure under Trump than during either the Obama or Biden tenure.

Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded countries during the Obama and Biden administrations but stayed put on Trump’s watch.

Obama’s bizarre vision of a new Middle East had sought to empower Iran as a supposed counterweight against moderate Arab nations and our ally Israel.

Hey, remember back in late October of 2008 on the eve of the election, when Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose pretended they knew nothing about Obama’s worldview, including his foreign policy views?  Good times, good times:

As transcribed by the Rush Limbaugh Show back in the day:

ROSE: I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is.

BROKAW: No, I don’t, either.

ROSE: I don’t know how he really sees where China is.

BROKAW: We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.

ROSE: I don’t really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?

BROKAW: Yeah, it’s an interesting question.

ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches.

BROKAW: Two of them! I don’t know what books he’s read.

ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?

BROKAW: There’s a lot about him we don’t know.

As Rush replied:

Incredible! (laughing) Let’s send the journalist to find out! Why, have you guys ever thought of that, Tom? Have you ever thought about sending a reporter to find out who the guy is? Charlie! You got plenty of reporters there at PBS, at least on the… Have you ever thought about sending anybody out to find out who he is, besides the two books? (laughing) I cannot believe this. We know who his heroes are — and, of course, that’s the point! We know who his heroes are. We know who his alliances are with. We know who his friends are. We know that he chose them all. But to hear… This is last night. This is, what, four days, five days before the election. These are two of Obama’s biggest media supporters! You gotta… I gotta hear this again. This is hilarious if it weren’t so damn maddening, because the answer to this is, ‘Hey, Tom? Talk to the bureau chief in Washington, the new guy who replaced Russert. What you do is, you assign a reporter to go out and find out who Obama is.’

The media would of course repeat the same pattern with Kamala, but were thwarted by her own words during her abortive 2020 campaign in the Democrats’ primaries, leading to their feigning shock when the Trump campaign used video of her promising sex changes to prisoners and illegal immigrants in their ads. (And of her vice presidential nominee’s actions — and inaction — during the infamous 2020 Minnesota riots.) It’s a reminder that it’s nigh-impossible to run a “change” election when your candidate is the sitting vice president and has a long history of making wild promises in an attempt to swing to the fences — and lacks the political chops and rock star charisma of the 2008-era Obama to hide his or her radical chic worldview.

ISRAEL SAYS IT WILL CLOSE DUBLIN EMBASSY, CITING ‘EXTREME ANTI-ISRAEL POLICIES:’

Israel will close its Dublin embassy due to the “extreme anti-Israel policies of the Irish government”, Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on Sunday, citing its recognition of a Palestinian state and support for legal action against Israel.

Israel’s ambassador to Dublin was recalled following Ireland’s decision on a Palestinian state in May, Saar’s statement added. Last week, Dublin announced its support for South Africa’s legal action against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Israel of genocide.

Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris said the decision was deeply regrettable. “I utterly reject the assertion that Ireland is anti-Israel. Ireland is pro-peace, pro-human rights and pro-International law,” he said in a post on X.

“Ireland wants a two state solution and for Israel and Palestine to live in peace and security. Ireland will always speak up for human rights and international law.”

Flashbacks to October: Bibi banned from Galway.

In a unanimous vote of all 16 councillors present in City Hall last Monday, a motion was carried that the City Council will not welcome any future visits to Galway by Netanyahu, Israel’s president Isaac Herzog, or ministers and ambassadors of the current administration after its military incursions into Lebanon.

The motion, tabled by Councillor Níall McNelis (Lab ), spells out that no senior Israeli officials are welcome here ‘for as long as illegal occupation of Palestine and bordering countries continues, and war crimes are being perpetrated by the Israeli state’. The measure mandates the city council to communicate its ban to President Michael D Higgins, Taoiseach Simon Harris, and minister for foreign affairs, Tánaiste Micheál Martin.

“Look, I know it’s just a motion, and I doubt Israel’s government will pay much heed, but we have to be seen to do something, especially as there are lads from Renmore [Barracks] in Camp Shamrock, and that just brings close to home what this bullying, bully state is doing,” said McNelis after the vote.

And: Antisemitism has made life in Ireland unbearable, say Israelis.

Israeli people living in Ireland have said their lives here have become “unbearable” in the past year with many afraid to leave their homes and some emigrating to other countries.

According to the 2016 census, 664 Israelis and about 2,500 Jewish people live in Ireland. However, the community claims that Ireland’s pro-Palestine stance has led to an increase in antisemitism that has left many families and their children feeling unsafe.

Bar Clara Mendez McConnon, 33, is originally from the upper Galilee region, which borders Lebanon, but has lived in Dublin on and off since 2012. McConnon is currently in Tel Aviv with her Irish husband and their two young children due to the discrimination they have received.

She said: “For me personally it’s just been heartbreaking. I’ve always been very proud to live in Ireland and was actually deep into my naturalisation process of becoming Irish, but the level of mistrust and isolation got to a point that was just unbearable.

“My eldest son who is seven got bullied at his GAA club a few times by his team-mates and the coach for being Israeli.

“We’ve completely avoided the city centre since October 7 because of the violent graffiti and posters of Hamas terrorists — my son is old enough that he’s able to read them. First he was scared and then he started being ashamed of who he is.

“We had families and friends of years that turned on us. I explained that I can only share the Israeli perspective because that’s my life. My family is being evacuated from the north and one of my childhood friends is one of the hostages that is still there [in Gaza].”

Concurrently: Is immigration to Ireland ‘out of control’? Many in the land of a ‘hundred thousand welcomes’ are worried.

The photo atop the article is there to replace the word that Sky News is afraid to insert into the headline.

DISPATCHES FROM THE SOCIALIST PARADISE: Germany issues security alert for travel to Cuba.

The German Foreign Ministry has issued a security warning for those planning to visit Cuba. In a notice in force since December 5, it informs travelers of the problems with electricity generation that, in the last two months, have caused at least three total power outages on the island.

Although in these cases the the national power network was eventually restored, “the capacity to produce electricity does not cover the needs,” the note points out. “On October 17, 2024, the Cuban government informed the population of another worsening of the energy situation in the country,” the text adds, attributing the blackouts to other difficulties and referencing “considerable restrictions” that extend beyond the days of total electrical collapse.

The energy instability is causing “water supply problems” throughout the country, restrictions on public activities and also in tourist centres such as the Varadero beach resort in Matanzas, the warning states. Only buildings with electric generators, such as hotels, can enjoy lighting and air conditioning during power outages, it says. Meanwhile, rescue services are functioning only “basically” and the capacity to provide medical care is also restricted.

“Streets and roads are left unlit at night, public transport is not running or is only operating in a reduced capacity. Internet and mobile phone connections are being cut off,” the statement said. “Food refrigeration cannot be guaranteed at all times under these circumstances, nor can a supply of hot water.”

Why warn German tourists about Cuba, when their visit gives them the chance to get a sense of potential things to come in the Vaterland?  Germany’s Industrial Slowdown ‘Unexpectedly’ Continues.

Bloomberg is going to Bloomberg, and so October’s decline in industrial production was “unexpected,” and nowhere is there any admission that one of the causes is the effect of Germany’s climate policies on the country’s all-important industrial sector, mainly, but not solely, because of their effect on energy prices.*

Nevertheless, here are some details:

German industrial production fell in October, kicking off the final quarter with an unexpected decline and dashing hopes that the key sector for Europe’s largest economy may slowly be overcoming its malaise.

Output decreased 1% from the previous month, worse than any forecast in a Bloomberg survey, which anticipated a 1% increase. The decline was mainly down to energy production, and “the automotive industry had a negative impact as well,” the statistics office said Friday.

“There’s still no end in sight to the industrial slump in Germany,” ING’s Carsten Brzeski said. “This is a very weak start to the fourth quarter, increasing the risk of a winter recession in Germany.”

* And speaking of German energy prices:

Who could have predicted such a thing? Flashback: Bull: 1, China Shop: 0.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: NY Times Declares The Woke Movies Era Is Dead.

The New York Times uncorked a withering attack on woke Hollywood movies. The piece flexes its progressive bona fides, but large swathes of the article could have been written by The Critical Drinker or Film Threat’s Chris Gore.

The headline and subhead are stunning and brave in their bluntness.

Is the Awkward ‘Diversity Era’ of Hollywood Behind Us?

The past decade’s clumsiest attempts to cram new faces into old stories now feel like a moment, and a genre, of their own.

The same paper that erupted in fury over a Sen. Tom Cotton op-ed let this missive through?

The biggest takeaway? The woke movies era is over. Done. Kaput. And The New York Times appears happy to report it.

But how can Hollywood even put out product in 2025, what with all of the stars who promised to leave the country if Trump won in November…

UPDATE: So when does the woke era at the New York Times conclude? NYT Puts Menstrual Products in Men’s Bathrooms ‘To Support Transgender and Non-Binary Colleagues.’

The paper’s decision was announced by the vice president for global real estate and facilities, Victor Liu, in a company-wide Slack message. From July 26 to July 29, Liu said, the company would begin “adding menstrual products and sanitary baskets” to the office’s men’s restrooms “to support transgender and non-binary colleagues.” The company also announced that it was “removing gendered imagery and adding language that colleagues are welcome to use the restroom in which they feel most comfortable.”

The move highlights the growing cultural and political rift between legacy media companies and the general public. Polls show that Americans generally support policies that require individuals who identify as transgender to use bathrooms that match their biological sex. President-elect Donald Trump hammered the transgender issue in his successful campaign last fall, which surveys show was one of his most impactful talking points.

The Times declined to comment.

Just 1 percent of the Times’s workforce identifies as “nonbinary,” a category which includes transgender individuals but also those who simply choose not to identify with either gender, according to the paper’s 2023 “Diversity and Inclusion Report.” The number of “nonbinary” employees, the report stated, does appear to be climbing, although they are still a negligible portion of the paper’s workforce.

The Times’s efforts to appeal to a broader swath of Americans are often hamstrung by partisan reporters and junior employees who demand the paper move further left. Staff at the paper revolted in the summer of 2020 after the opinion section published a column by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) that called for sending in the military to quell left-wing riots in the nation’s cities. That column prompted at least one writer, former tech reporter Charlie Warzel, to cry in an emergency staff meeting.

More recently, Times reporters are in the midst of a “rebellion” over the paper’s coverage of the war in Gaza, according to the Wall Street Journal. Senior editors, the Journal reported in April, are worried that some reporters “are compromising their neutrality and applying ideological purity tests.”

Because if there’s a safe place for nonbinary and LGBT people, it’s definitely the Gaza Strip.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

‘WE’LL SEE YOU IN HELL!’ Exhausted Oakland tiki bar lashes out on Instagram.

When news broke Wednesday that the Kon-Tiki, a downtown Oakland cocktail spot, will close Dec. 22 after seven years of mai tais and shrimp tacos, it seemed like only the latest struggling operation to throw in the bar towel.

But the closure drew added attention Friday morning, when the bar’s Instagram account roared to life with a blistering message aimed at the Oakland Police Department, mean and incompetent city officials, “bonehead” employees, and “Karen M on Yelp” who “wishes you’d close because a server forgot her mayo.” The rant noted that business has been slow, but the combination of break-ins and burdensome regulatory requirements, like training mandates, is what ultimately did in the bar.

Comments on the post were turned off. The Standard reached out to the Kon-Tiki for details, and owner Christ (“crist”) Aivaliotis confirmed that he wrote the message. His heartbreaking tirade resembles an October rant from Michelin-starred chef Peter Hemsley of the recently closed South of Market restaurant Aphotic. Hemsley’s post decried the lack of business at the Moscone Center and Aphotic’s location near the “ugly butt end of a desolate convention center suck hole.”

Gooder and harder, California:

“Folx” is quite the leftist tell; no word yet if the owner is a Columbia graduate.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Socialist Robert Reich on Election Night 2024 Warned Elon Musk: “I guarantee you I’m going to make life so difficult for you really so difficult for you so just be very careful of yourself.”

BYRON YORK: Now we know how many secret sources the FBI had on Jan. 6, but what did they do?

There are other things we don’t know as well. The report covers the FBI, which is under the purview of the Justice Department inspector general. But it does not cover the activities of the Capitol Police or the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, which are not part of the Justice Department. Did they have confidential sources or undercover agents? We also don’t know, as law professor Jonathan Turley has pointed out, whether the presence of the secret FBI sources was “revealed to the defense in the hundreds of prosecutions.”

Friday morning, reporter and DOJ critic Julie Kelly posted, “It struck me that not a single text between an FBI handler and CHS is included in the Horowitz report. No comms whatsoever. How is that an investigative work product?” Kelly also pointed out that Inspector General Horowitz could only review what the FBI gave him. Whether you think that is acceptable or not depends on your degree of trust in the FBI, which is quite low among Republicans these days.

So, there is a lot more to know about the FBI and its secret sources on Jan. 6. Yes, it’s good to know a specific number. But that’s not the whole story.

Hopefully, more details will emerge next year:

Kash Patel: once they admit there was undercover informants at the capital, their own narrative is defeated because it takes six months to place an undercover informant in with the proud boys. pic.twitter.com/6uZMGLDV1r

— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) December 13, 2024

END OF THE LINE FOR NANCY PELOSI: Hip Fractures, Mortality Rates, and Father Time.

She’s not someone who’s spent the past 20 years in a rocking chair. She seems fit, thin, and very active.

All of this matters. The healthier you were before your hip injury, the more likely it is you’ll recover.

But it’s a deadly serious situation for Pelosi and her loved ones. Almost certainly, she’s facing a steep recovery process, and at her age, it’s foreseeable that there could be a series of struggles.

Nancy Pelosi has been such a fixture in American politics for so many decades, she seemed larger than life — a permanent, immovable presence. It seemed as if, in 50 million years, there would still be cockroaches, taxes, and Nancy Pelosi pulling strings in the House.

If anyone could outlast Father Time, it’s her.

But for both good and bad, our legislators are human. Ones on the right; ones on the left; those in the middle: we’re all flesh and blood.

And we all grow old. We all get sick. All of us will die.

Even Nancy Pelosi.

In all likelihood, her career is over.

Still though, never underestimate the power of the dark side of the Force: Pelosi files 2026 statement of candidacy with midterm elections on horizon.

THE YEAR OF MCDONALD’S:

McDonald’s is central to American life, both physically and culturally. The last few months have provided two massive news stories that have emphasized this. At the end of October, there was the viral, and controversial, Trump campaign stop, where he “worked” for 30 minutes at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. Then, this week, there was the news that Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was caught in a McDonald’s—also, coincidentally, in Pennsylvania—because he was spotted by a group of morning regulars and employees.

The reaction to both stories in certain parts of the media has proved that a lot of commentators don’t understand what McDonald’s means to ordinary Americans—which basically means that they don’t understand ordinary Americans, period.

* * * * * * * * *

Trump’s superpower has long been signaling to working stiffs that he’s “just like you,” despite being on the surface nothing like them. His love of McDonald’s, which I believe is as genuine a feeling as any politician can ever have, is one of those signals. In fact, it may be his most effective, because it goads his critics into signaling that they are not “just like you.”

McDonald’s is wildly popular with every group of Americans—urban, rural, male, female, middle or working class; it unites every demographic in the U.S., with a single exception: the highly educated, especially academics. They alone, as a group, seem to have moral issues with McDonald’s, and while they might use it, they do so grudgingly, usually to appease crying kids or for a rest stop on a long trip.

So Trump’s embrace of McDonald’s becomes a political twofer. It shows he’s one of you: He is a back-row guy at heart. But it also shows that while he should be a member of the front-row, given his education and wealth, he’s not, because such people despise him for many of the same reasons they look down on you: for what he eats, how he talks, for what he believes in, and for how he arrives at those beliefs, which isn’t by spending years reading through approved syllabi, but having gone out into the world and learned from it, one mistake after the next.

The press, and his opponents, used the McDonald’s photo op to point out all the obvious absurdities. “The former president, before cosplaying as a successful businessman, was the quintessential elitist,” bleated MSNBC. “So what are MAGA die-hards and faux-centrist Trump apologists talking about when they praise his drive-through stint as ‘amazing and hilarious’?” Obviously, the article didn’t actually pose this question to any normal American, and instead just started quoting statistics.

Criticism like this fell flat because Trump also recognized the absurdities of his stunt, and didn’t care. And anyone who did could be seen, by him and his supporters, as the same old pedantic scolds—people who are so absorbed in their books that they can’t see the real and bigger truths of the world, including the idea that cosplaying as a McDonald’s employee for an hour, especially working the drive-through, is simply fun.

That’s all may be, but curiously enough, Ctrl-F “Kamala” on this Free Press article brings up zero results, when she was the whole reason Trump worked the French Fry machine and the drive-through at McDonald’s for one afternoon: ‘I Did Fries:’ Kamala Harris Claims She Worked at McDonald’s, but She Never Mentioned It Until She Ran for President. Did She Really Toil Beneath the Golden Arches?

As Trump said after his photo op, “I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala at McDonald’s.”

NEXT MONTH SHOULD BE FUN: Report reveals that FBI spied on its likely new director, Kash Patel.

It’s going to be awkward at FBI headquarters next month when President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the bureau likely takes over.

According to a new government watchdog report, the FBI spied on its prospective new boss, Kash Patel.

Patel has promised to “clean house” at the Hoover Building, and hold all those who “abused their power” during the Russiagate “witch hunt” accountable.

He might start with the officials and agents who secretly vacuumed up his phone records and emails starting in late 2017, when he led a House Intelligence Committee investigation into the FBI’s reliance on Hillary Clinton’s false opposition research to surveil a Trump campaign official as a supposed “Russian agent.”

According to a nearly 100-page report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, the FBI subpoenaed the records as part of an investigation it opened to find out whether congressional staffers leaked classified information about its Trump-Russia “collusion” case to the Washington Post and other media.

Working with career prosecutors at Justice, the FBI compelled Google and Apple to turn over the sensitive private information of subjects the FBI identified “between September 2017 and March 2018,” a period when Andrew McCabe was the acting FBI director. (Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions was out of the loop, the report said, having recused himself from the Russia probe.)

The court orders gagged the service providers from notifying Patel and other customers of the intrusion.

As chief counsel, Patel had no idea that the subject of his investigation — the FBI — was collecting his data and increasing the visibility of witnesses he was communicating with, including whistleblowers.

As Ward Clark adds at RedState, “The FBI, yes, needs major reform. Frankly, it would not be any over-reaction for Patel to simply dismiss anyone involved in this debacle. That would be what we might call ‘a good start.'”

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Drones and More Than a Penny.

NEWS YOU CAN USE? Don’t Get Burned: 2.6 Million Stanley Mugs Are Being Recalled Worldwide After 38 Reported Injuries.

Not to be confused with the fad dihydrogen monoxide conveyance device of early 2024: What is behind the TikTok thirst for Stanley water cups?

THE CRITICAL DRINKER ON THE BEST AND WORST MOVIES AND TV SERIES OF 2024 (Video):

GERMANY’S SCHOLZ NEARS HIS ENDGAME. HERE’S WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN:

Few other countries can choreograph a government collapse that’s as painstakingly slow and deliberate as Germany is doing right now.

Monday’s vote of confidence in Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the German parliament, which he’ll almost certainly lose, is just the latest step in a process that started in early November and culminates in a snap election on Feb. 23.

And even though the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is bound to try to throw a spanner in the works in the coming week, what happens next is largely predictable.

The constitution, designed to prevent the kind of tumult experienced during the Weimar Republic — which helped enable the rise of the Nazis — contains a series of provisions intended to make the unravelling of a government as stable and orderly as possible.

Here’s our guide to what to expect.

As Glenn insta-quipped right around this same time nine years ago, “We have the worst political class in our history. The Germans, at least, can say that’s not true for them. . . .”

BURIED LEDE: KATIE COURIC ACTUALLY GOT A STORY RIGHT! ‘Smartest Thing They Ever Did:’ Katie Couric, Jessica Tarlov Admit GOP Leaders Sending Migrants North Was Game Changer.

Katie Couric and Jessica Tarlov admit Republicans sending illegals to blue cities worked. Call it the “smartest thing they ever did.”

Correct. The only way to make left-wingers change is to have them suffer the results of their own policies.

pic.twitter.com/AUaqyMPXR2

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) December 13, 2024

Journalist Katie Couric and Democratic Fox News co-host Jessica Tarlov credited Republican governors for their strategy of transporting illegal immigrants to northern states.

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and former Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey in 2022 sent illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. Tarlov, on “Next Question with Katie Couric,” described DeSantis’ decision to relocate migrants to Martha’s Vineyard as remarkably intelligent, while Couric shared that her Florida-based friend believed the move effectively raised awareness about immigration issues.

“On the immigration front, there was a tendency amongst Democrats, and especially Democrats who were discussing the issue, so people who do interviews or are part of the media, to minimize it over the first two and a half years when there were a lot of people coming in here,” Tarlov said. “And I thought that it was a stunt when they started busing migrants … to Martha’s Vineyard. It was the smartest thing they ever did.”

“Well, it’s interesting ’cause I have a friend who lives in Florida, and I said, ‘What did you think of Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott taking some of these immigrants and moving them to northern states?’ And she said, ‘I thought it was great because nobody really was paying attention before that.’ And I do think that this untold story was the strain on social services and communities, particularly along the border, this huge influx of immigrants was having,” Couric responded. “And I think the mainstream media, however you define that these days, kind of ignored that story to its peril.”

Flashback: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.

The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.

It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.

Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.

These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.

The ghost of Saul Alinsky smiles: “Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. ‘You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.’”

WHY THE ONLINE LEFT IS SIMPING FOR LUIGI MANGIONE:

The details emerging about Mangione would suggest he was no raging leftist. He seems to have been a follower of the centrist podcast bros – those who dispense a mix of self-help, gym tips, nerdy AI chat and anti-wokeness. Perhaps more telling is his glowing review on the Goodreads website of the manifesto of Ted ‘Unabomber’ Kaczynski, who mounted a 17-year domestic-terror campaign, raging against industrial society. ‘You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution’, posted an account bearing Mangione’s name and likeness.

Some speculate that Mangione’s chronic back pain might have radicalised him, even though his incredibly wealthy background would mean it is unlikely he’d been left destitute and untreated. Shell casings found at the scene were marked with the words ‘deny’, ‘defend’ and ‘depose’ – words typically used in health-insurance policy documents, which inspired the title of a 2010 book, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It. The police say that, when Mangione was arrested, he was in possession of a short ‘manifesto’, declaring that ‘These parasites had it coming’. ‘I do apologise for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done’, it reportedly says.

In their ‘joy’ and rationalisations, Team Luigi is being accused of mainstreaming revolutionary violence. The truth, I think, is much more pathetic. The frisson some leftists have felt from this killing – not the ordinary folks scarred by a woeful healthcare system, but the well-heeled commentators who no doubt have immaculate coverage – speaks more to a kind of morbid pessimism than to any genuine radicalism.

Those swooning over Mangione are not egging on some grand revolution, they are extracting a vicarious thrill from watching someone lash out, murderously, at ‘the system’. The claim that Thompson’s cold-blooded killing has, at least, generated ‘a conversation’ about healthcare is pretty weak, too. Not least because the main conversations it has generated thus far, across cable news and the internet, are whether or not Taylor Lorenz is a twat, or whether it’s acceptable to celebrate a killing, or whether it’s okay to find the killer sexy (Mangione clearly took on board all that podcast-bro workout advice).

This speaks to what American Marxist Fredrik deBoer, in another context, has described as the ‘​​fantasy of deliverance through political violence’ on today’s political left, bred of a ‘feeling of grasping at straws’. Having failed to transform the system, leftists fantasise about going to war with it, despite this being obviously doomed to fail in an era when the state is overwhelmingly better armed than the populace and the populace is generally disapproving of political violence.

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:

JOHN STOSSEL DEBUNKS THE RECYCLING RELIGION IN NEW VIDEO: With an appearance from fellow Insta-co-blogger John Tierney.

Plastic recycling is a “dead-end street."

That quote…unbelievably…is from @Greenpeace.

In my new video, we debunk the recycling religion. pic.twitter.com/loe7F7gS2L

— John Stossel (@JohnStossel) December 12, 2024

JOHN NOLTE: Lesley Stahl, Van Jones ‘Extremely Worried’ About Death of Corporate Media Influence.

“I’m extremely worried about the press. I despair. I worry greatly. We’re at the point where if [sic] the POTUS is going to say ‘Legacy media is dead.’ I’m very dark about it.”

Eat it, sweetheart.

If the knowledge that Lesley Stahl is despairing and in a dark place does not make you want to stand up and cheer, you must be a feminist.

You see, throughout the 2024 campaign, the corporate media were Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. They didn’t know they were dead. Being ignorant of their own death, they played all their usual games assuming it would drag Kamala Harris — Celebrity Obama 2.0 — over the finish line. Stahl’s own 60 Minutes went so far as to dishonestly edit Kamala’s interview to make her sound smart. Van Jones’ own CNN raged on and on about Trump’s “Nazi rally” at Madison Square Garden and spread the hoax about Trump calling for Liz Cheney’s execution. Then…

The “too big to rig” results came in on Election Night and it finally hit them: We’re dead. No one believes us anymore. Our influence is gone. We can’t rig elections anymore with our lies and hoaxes. Despair! Despair! Despair!

Donald Trump visiting podcast after podcast, doing Joe Rogan, sitting down for a handful of Breitbart News interviews, is as big a sea change in politics as when John F. Kennedy embraced television in 1960. Radio was declared dead. TV was king.

Well, now, the legacy media is dead and alternative media is king.

But there is one important difference between 1960 and 2025, and that’s this: The 1960 switch was based on technology, the difference in what radio and TV offered. The 2025 switch is based on the legacy media’s credibility implosion, in other words…

Click over for a massive (and very likely incomplete) list of hoaxes “reported” by the DNC-MSM over the past decade. As Tim Graham writes at NewsBusters: Journalists Deserve All the Angst That Trump’s Win Brings.

Longtime CBS News correspondent Lesley Stahl engaged in conversation at the 92^nd Street Y in New York City with columnist Peggy Noonan, and they both agreed the legacy media are “fraying” – for 20 years, Noonan insisted.

“I’m extremely worried about the press,” Stahl said, as she dragged out her usual story about Trump and press criticism. “I once asked Donald Trump why do you keep pounding on the press? This was right after he won, in 2016….It’s kinda boring, you say the same thing over and over, and you won! It’s time to drop it!”

This is a bizarre demand, since no one in the press announced, “well, Trump won, so it’s kind of boring to keep criticizing him, saying the same thing over and over.”

Stahl said she asked why he would do it, and Trump replied: “I do it, and I repeat it, because the more I do that, the less people are going to believe you when you say negative things about me….And it’s happened!” The media’s public trust ratings are the worst they’ve ever been in the television era.

This alleged Trump comment did not air on CBS, although Stahl drags out the anecdote like it’s nefarious. It’s the exact opposite of the Stahl shtick — if I attack Trump, and I repeat it, it means the more I do it, the less people are going to believe Trump when he attacks the press. But he’s won that battle.

“I despair, seriously. I worry greatly,” Stahl said. “We’re at a point where if the President of the United States is going to say ‘Legacy media is dead’…It is, kind of, sort of hobbling right now. And I don’t know how it recovers. I’m very dark about it.”

Noonan made the mistake of associating an unpopular press with the end of freedom of the press, which is not the same thing. The First Amendment doesn’t automatically grant sainthood to the press. You’re allowed to think the press has performed terribly without ending the First Amendment. That’s freedom of speech.

Noonan didn’t push back on Stahl. She could ask if CBS and 60 Minutes ever did anything wrong that undermined trust in the media. Dan Rather offered the nation phony documents about George W. Bush on 60 Minutes II.

Lesley Stahl is infamous among Republicans for lecturing Trump in 2020 that you could not report on the Hunter Biden laptop because it could not be verified. CBS reporter Catherine Herridge verified the laptop in 2022, and she’s no longer at CBS.

RedState’s Nick Arama adds: Megyn Kelly Completely Wrecks Lesley Stahl After Her Whining About Legacy Media Dying.

Megyn Kelly explains to Leslie Stahl (of CBS 60 Minutes) how they can recover their credibility.

🔊 pic.twitter.com/RF2H9V1pom

— Wall Street Mav (@WallStreetMav) December 13, 2024

“Should we go over them?” she continued. Then she proceeded to completely wreck Stahl.

“Like maybe don’t say the laptop can’t be verified when it can,” she said, referring to Stahl’s response to the Hunter Biden laptop. How are you a journalist if you don’t want to follow up on that story?

“And then when your own organization verifies it, come out and do a mea culpa and admit you embarrassed yourself.”

Maybe don’t stealth edit the presidential candidate interview with ’60 Minutes’ — your flagship program that you’re an anchor of — without telling us, and then when it becomes a controversy, refuse to release the transcript because you’re more interested in running cover for the Dems than you are in honest reporting.

“60 Minutes” edited the interview that they did with Kamala Harris, reducing her word salad response. And frankly we don’t know what else they may have edited since they refused to release a transcript or the full video of the interview. Which tends to make you think they might be hiding even more nonsense.

Maybe don’t host a vice-presidential debate where you fact-check only one side. And then when your fact-check gets fact-checked by the vice-presidential candidate on the Republican side, you cut his mic.

Just a few thoughts off the top of my head what you can do about it.

Now, that’s a complete evisceration if ever there was one. That’s reality, and Stahl should listen.

But she won’t because that might actually require putting aside their bias and doing a little self-examination.

Since they’re absolutely incapable of self-examination, they’d be far better off in admitting their biases — the idea of an “objective” media is a fossil left over from the earliest days of three radio and later TV networks. Now there is an unending firehose of media to choose from. No wonder voters chose the media that they thought best reflected their interests — and equally important, didn’t condescend to them.

VDH: The evaporation of the Obama mystique.

Former President Barack Obama had long been rumored as the catalyst for the 2020 Joe Biden nomination — and thereafter played the whispering puppeteer behind the subsequent lost Biden administration years.

As such he and his coterie proved the virtual architects of the Biden administration, one of the most unpopular and failed presidencies in American history.

Recall earlier that after a flailing candidate Biden lost the first three 2020 primaries and caucuses, his inert campaign was headed nowhere.

Obama and fellow Democratic insiders abruptly engineered the withdrawal of his rival 2020 presidential candidates: hard left but likely sure-loser candidates, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg.

The Obamas ignored or withheld from the public their own firsthand knowledge that Biden was suffering from signs of dementia.

Instead, they found Biden’s cognitive decline and his former concocted reputation as workingman’s Joe useful as a veneer for a veritable Obama third-term, “phone it in” administration. Or as wistful Obama once conditioned his dream of a third term — “If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in.”

The Obamaites then got their wish for four years of enacted hard-left directives that they could only have dreamed of while in actual power.

But their radical menu since 2021 had divided and nearly wrecked the nation —hyperinflation, 12 million illegal aliens, a ruined border, spiraling crime, a shattered foreign policy of appeasement, the popular backlash against DEI/Woke/trans chauvinism, partisan lawfare, and weaponization of the government.

And the ruling radicalism beneath the Biden facade eventually cost the Democrats nearly everything — the presidency, the House, and the Senate.

An inert Biden is departing office with a 36 percent favorability rating in a recent Emerson poll. His Democratic nominee replacement, losing presidential candidate Vice President Harris, also has virtually vacated her office with 40 days left of her tenure.

Failed candidate Harris has been roundly faulted by staffers and donors for blowing through some $2 billion in assorted 2024 campaign money.

How bad was her campaign? At least one leftist Website is asking: How Much of the Harris Campaign Was a Scam?

DEVELOPING: Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 84, injured, hospitalized while traveling to Luxembourg.

KAMALA HARRIS IS FOR THEY/THEM. PRESIDENT TRUMP IS FOR YOU:

Flashback to 2017, when the elite leftists at the New Yorker were angry after voters chose a different direction for the country rather than four more years of leftist elitism:

That cartoon looked particularly silly after 2020, as “the smug pilots” were all over the place in response to Covid, to the point of flitting back and forth between not recommending masks, demanding everyone be masked up at all times, and then locking down the entire country — except if you’re peacefully looting and tearing down statues.*

And flashback to last month, and Axios’ Jim Vandehei having an aneurysm over Elon Musk telling Twitter users “You are the media now!” Axios CEO Beclowns Himself Defending Journalisming.

The best part of this sanctimonious rant is when he uses Qatari-funded Al Jazeera as an exemplar of a media outlet that does real truth-seeking reporting without fear or favor. https://t.co/AIeOH5Ga9W

— Philip Klein (@philipaklein) November 25, 2024

It didn’t help his case very much that his Website’s product soon afterwards was this piece, rivaling Woodward and Bernstein stalking Richard Nixon, or Edward R. Murrow reporting in London during the blitz: Why “fart walks” after meals are good for you, experts say.

Democrats long for about 1965, when LBJ believed he could “run the country” through a series of bureaucracies in DC Mies van der Rohe office blocks and the media consisted of three TV networks, news wire services, and a handful of newspapers per big city. But that world doesn’t exist anymore.

* Ultimate Irony: Neil de Grasse Tyson Told CNN Yesterday That You Should Only Trust ‘Experts.’

THE LAMPS ARE GOING OUT ALL OVER EUROPE, WE SHALL NOT SEE THEM LIT AGAIN IN OUR LIFETIME: Britain to axe up to 1.5m lampposts — see how it would look.

Around 1.5 million of Britain’s 7.2 million lampposts could be removed to save money and reduce carbon emissions and replaced with lighting that will make it safer for pedestrians.

Under existing rules, there is no requirement to light pavements for pedestrians. They are only lit because light spills over from lampposts, which were principally installed to make it safer for motorists.
But today’s cars have such effective headlights that lampposts, which are generally 10m tall on A-roads and 6m tall on residential roads, are not necessary in many parts of Britain.

Lampposts will remain in place in many locations where they are necessary, such as in cities where CCTV cameras rely on good lighting.
The first ones scheduled to be removed are in Hayton, a small Yorkshire village on the A1079 road between York and Hull. Starting in December, 30 street lights on each side of the main road are to be switched off and later removed. Around 300 more will be switched off and removed on a 19-mile (30km) stretch of the road.

What could possibly go wrong?

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: NASA Performs First Aircraft Accident Investigation on Another World.