THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Pardon Me?

WELL, THAT’S ONE SOLUTION TO DEAD MALLS: How Shopping Malls Are Being Transformed Into Apartments In The US (Video).

JILL SENDING JIM CLYBURN UNDER THE BUS? White House blames Rep. Jim Clyburn for convincing Biden to pardon Hunter.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday that Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) played a key role in convincing President Biden to pardon his son Hunter.

Jean-Pierre claimed Biden, 82, “wrestled” with the decision to pardon his son for any and all crimes he committed between 2014 and 2024 — but it was a visit by Clyburn, 84, that tipped the scales and led the president to go back on his repeated promises not to do so.

“You heard this president say this many times before, he believes when it comes to his family, when it comes to how he moves forward, about thinking about his family, they’re the beginning, the middle and the end,” Jean-Pierre said.

“And he wrestled with this. It was not an easy thing for him to decide.”

A federal jury convicted Hunter, 54, in June of three felony charges after he lied on a gun purchase form in 2018, claiming he was not using or addicted to drugs when in fact he had an active crack cocaine habit at the time.

A sentencing hearing in the case had been set for Dec. 12.

Clyburn, who has long had President Biden’s ear, spoke with the lame-duck commander in chief two weeks ago and pushed for Hunter’s pardon, according to Jean-Pierre.

“This is Clyburn’s words: ‘The president was reticent’ when he tried to encourage him to pardon Hunter. … I think that’s important to note,” the White House press secretary said.

Jean-Pierre referenced Biden’s conversation with Clyburn several times more throughout the briefing, suggesting it was a major turning point for the president as he mulled going back on his promise to the American people.

Flashback to March 15, 2020: James Clyburn wants Joe Biden to pick an African American woman for vice president.

Clyburn is widely credited with saving Biden’s campaign following his endorsement in the South Carolina Democratic primaries.

“I’ll never tell you who I’m going to advise him,” Clyburn said in the interview, “but I would advise him that we need to have a woman on the ticket, and I prefer an African American woman.”

And we all know how that ultimately worked out last month, and of the alleged – very frequently alleged – feud between Jill and Kamala.

OBAMA CANNOT FAIL. ONLY WE CAN FAIL OBAMA:

By voting in a democratic election, millions of people proved they hate democracy. Yes, this Obama fellow is quite the intellect. https://t.co/qkAW9vCBJG

— Jon Gabriel (@exjon) December 6, 2024

Read the whole thing. Back in 2010 at the New Criterion, the late Kenneth Minogue warned:

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us.

In accordance with the prophecy:

https://t.co/yKk0VEHHyj pic.twitter.com/xN7toVRBdR

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) December 6, 2024

LET HE WHO HAS NOT CONSUMED AMPHIBIAN’S VENOM AT A SPIRITUAL CLEANSING RETREAT CAST THE FIRST STONE: Actress dies after consuming amphibian’s venom at spiritual cleansing retreat.

REMY: Pardon My Son. New video from Reason TV:

UNEXPECTEDLY: Tim Walz reveals why he’s stunned Kamala Harris lost the election in his first interview.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz opened up for the first time where he shared that he was surprised by Kamala Harris‘ devastating loss in the 2024 president.

The vice president’s running mate sat down for one-on-one interviews with two local Minneapolis TV stations where he spoke about the failed White House bid and what comes next.

Walz said leading up to the election, he felt that Democrats were headed toward a victory before the loss to President-elect Donald Trump, who ended up sweeping all seven battleground states.

‘It felt like at the rallies, at the things I was going to, at the shops I was going in, that the momentum was going our way,’ Walz said.

‘It obviously wasn’t at the end of time, so yeah I was a little surprised,’ he went on.

‘I thought we had a positive message, and I thought the country was ready for that,’ he told KSTP 5 Eyewitness News.

Yes, it’s that positive message of calling your opponent Hitler…

Yesterday, V.P. Harris compared President Trump to Hitler,  “Donald Trump is out for unchecked power. He wants a military like Adolf Hitler had, who will be loyal to him, not our Constitution. He is unhinged, unstable, and given a second term, there would be no one to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses.”

The V.P.’s comment comparing Trump to Hitler indicates she doesn’t care about minimizing the horrors of the Holocaust or she is an imbecile incapable of understanding.

Her comments were based on a story in the leftist magazine The Atlantic reporting that Trump’s former chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, called Trump a “fascist” and recalled his admiration for Nazi generals. Kelly also raised concerns about Trump’s recent threats to use the military against “the enemy from within.”

…And not considering that after 80 years, voters can see through that perennial smear, particularly after the former president didn’t do any Hitler-y sort of stuff in his first term.

AT MSNBC, RISING TENSIONS FUEL FEARS OF COLLAPSE:

MSNBC’s postelection viewership decline has surpassed its executives’ worst fears. Several top shows have lost more than half of their viewers since Nov. 5. This includes Rachel Maddow’s flagship show, as well as Joy Reid’s ReidOut, The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle, All In with Chris Hayes, and Inside with Jen Psaki. Morning Joe has suffered a fate nearly as bad, with hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough losing over 400,000 viewers in the same period.

In total, MSNBC averaged more than one million viewers during election week, but that number fell to just above half a million two weeks ago. This decline comes even as Fox News is scoring huge ratings, as viewership jumped 21 percent at the network following Trump’s win. (RELATED: MSNBC’s Attacks on Pete Hegseth Are Not About Trump — It’s About Fox News)

The collapse in viewership alone would be enough to induce panic among MSNBC staffers, but tensions have escalated even more following Comcast’s Nov. 20 announcement that it will spin off MSNBC and other channels, including CNBC, USA, Oxygen, and E!, into a separate company. Staffers are fretting that this will decimate the network’s journalistic reputability given that MSNBC’s relationship with NBC News provides it with a significant proportion of its journalistic resources. For instance, MSNBC utilizes NBC’s news bureaus and foreign correspondents to supplement its more opinion-focused staff. Without these resources, MSNBC would be pared back to hosts reading from a teleprompter in New York City or moderating roundtable discussions.

Staffers fear that the spinoff will result in layoffs, lower pay, and potentially even a sale. Under the current arrangement, NBCUniversal cable channels generate only 5.7 percent of Comcast’s current revenue, and the declining value of cable TV makes these channels even less appealing. By reorganizing the networks into a standalone company, Comcast may be positioning itself to offload this undesirable segment of its business. It also appears that MSNBC has overly high expenses. Most notably, Rachel Maddow just signed a contract to receive $25 million a year even though she only hosts her show once a week.

Related: MSNBC president Rashida Jones weighing network exit after Trump is sworn in: report.

MSNBC president Rashida Jones is considering leaving the network after President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in to a second term in the White House as the left-leaning channel’s ratings crash, according to a report.

Jones – who took the helm in 2021 and became the first black woman to lead a major national news network – is mulling an exit from the job early next year, according to a report by Oliver Darcy in his Status newsletter.

The move would only come after Trump is sworn in to serve a second term as president on Jan. 20, Darcy reported, citing anonymous sources.

* * * * * * * *

“It’s amazing how people want to spend more time with their families or look for new challenges when the ratings crash,” a TV exec said sarcastically — skeptical that Jones would be leaving the helm on her own accord.

“Of course she’s making the decision,” the TV exec added. “They’re all leaving on their own, Norah O’Donnell, Chris Wallace.”

And while Al Sharpton will likely be the last man standing there, he’s under pressure as well: Black church coalition calls on MSNBC to suspend Al Sharpton over donations from Harris campaign.

PAUL KRUGMAN RETIRES AS NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST:

Paul is an important figure in the recent history of Times Opinion. Time and again, he took on the big fights, grappled with policy deeply and seriously, held the powerful to account and spoke hard truths — sometimes as a lonely voice arguing unfashionable positions.

We’ll always have the memories of that deep and serious policy grappling:

● Paul Krugman Plays The Fool: ‘White Rural Rage’ Is ‘Single Greatest Threat Facing American Democracy.’

—Red State, February 27^th.

● Paul Krugman Predicted a ‘Biden Boom’ That Never Came.

—Matt Margolis, PJ Media.com, June 21^st, 2022.

● Paul Krugman’s 10-Year History of Being Wrong About Bitcoin.

—Reason.com, June 10, 2021.

● Krugman: “Crazy” To Re-Open Economy In A Few Weeks.

—Real Clear Politics, April 13^th, 2020.

(Texas began to reopen on April 17th, Georgia began to reopen on April 20^th, Florida began to reopen on April 29^th. Healthcare officials gave their blessings to the summer riot season in early June.)

● Paul Krugman: Market signaling a ‘permanent recession.’

—The Week, March 9^th, 2020.

● “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

—Krugman in the New York Times, November 9^th, 2016.

● Krugman: Nixon’s The One! Now More Than Ever!

—Nick Gillespie, Reason, September 3^rd, 2009.

● “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

—Krugman, Red Herring magazine, June 10^th, 1998.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: The Left Cheers An Assassination.

It wasn’t just Taylor Lorenz egging on crazed leftists to go on an assassination spree after the HealthPartners CEO was gunned down on the streets of New York.

It was a vast swathe of the Left who argued it was well-deserved justice and should be emulated with other CEOs. Lorenz herself suggested slyly that a Blue Cross CEO be next on the lst.

I used to think Taylor Lorenz was just a crazy Karen. Now I think she's an evil, repulsive, murder excusing stain that should be banished from polite society https://t.co/Jmdq5HT6cr

— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) December 5, 2024

Got to be honest, this kind of looks like an encouragement for murder.

Lorenz is not well, and people in her life need to stage an intervention. pic.twitter.com/lWsZBhzgQI

— Legal Phil (@Legal_Fil) December 5, 2024

Beege wrote earlier today a long post about Lorenz’s psychopathy, but the rot runs much deeper than one crazy “journalist” whose shtick is saying outrageous things then crying about how she is being oppressed by people who notice.

A vocal faction of the Left seems to revel in violence and violent imagery, cheering on riots, wearing T-shirts emblazoned with pictures of the murderous Che Guevara, identifying with Antifa, occupying buildings, and appropriating the raised first of defiance as their cherished symbol of resistance to civilization.

The Daily Beast sorta-kinda finds the assassin of Brian Thompson to be totally cool and dreamy: Disturbing Trend as Internet Thirsts After UnitedHealthcare CEO’s Assassin.

Although some social media commentators have condemned the yassification of the killer’s image—“control yourself” wrote one person—the fawning over an alleged murderer seems to reflect a phenomenon called hybristophilia.

DeSales University professor of forensic psychology described it as type of attraction when a person “gets sexually aroused over someone else committing an offensive or violent act” in an 2018 interview with Cosmopolitan. The public’s recent fascination with the Menendez brothers, Ted Bundy and other men of ill repute over the years seem to back this up.

Although there is “no empirical research” to illustrate just how common the phenomenon is, said Louis B. Schlesinger, Ph.D., comments about the UnitedHealthcare executive’s suspected shooter suggest it’s alive and well.

And not just in the offices of Rolling Stone these days, apparently:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Two contrasting views back-to-back on social media.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Julia Steinberg of the Stanford Review interviews Stanford president, Jonathan Levin:

Stanford Review: What is the most important problem in the world right now?

President Levin: There’s no answer to that question. There are too many important problems to give you a single answer.

Stanford Review: That is an application question that we have to answer to apply here.

Ouch. And:

Stanford Review: The first two categories are the buckets of questions that I have. So I’ll move on to my first question about Stanford’s educational and political climate at the present moment. In one of my classes, I was randomly assigned a partner to work on a presentation together. He told me that he had not read a book, cover to cover since the third grade, let alone at Stanford. In June, he will graduate with a degree from Stanford. How is this possible?

President Levin: Have you read a book at Stanford?

Stanford Review: I actually have. I’ve read fifty. I’ve counted. Probably at sixty now.

President Levin: I can’t speak to the particular student you worked with and exactly the way he or she has approached things. I think it’s a missed opportunity if you go through Stanford without doing a lot of reading, because at least in many fields, that’s the way to learn. Now, some fields, it’s true at Stanford, you learn in different ways that aren’t necessarily from books, but you know, I certainly would hope that any student who came to Stanford would spend a lot of time reading and thinking and reflecting. So I think it’s a missed opportunity if that’s not how you choose to spend a good fraction of your time here.

Stanford Review: I agree. Several freshmen I have talked to have bemoaned their mandatory COLLEGE classes that are contract graded, meaning that students will receive an A if their work is turned in on time regardless of quality. One frosh even told me that all of her first quarter classes are contract graded. How does this set students up for success at Stanford and beyond?

To be fair, Stanford doesn’t hold the exclusive on illiterate students: The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.

TATER TAUNTED:

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: In 2018, the BBC reported: MSNBC’s Joy Reid addresses homophobic blog post controversy.

A US TV host sys she “genuinely does not believe” she wrote a series of homophobic blog posts that have resurfaced in recent days.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid has come under fire after posts that mocked homosexuality and claimed to out people as gay were found on her old blog, The Reid Report.

Earlier this week, she denied making the comments and said her website had been targeted by hackers.

But on Saturday she admitted that there was no evidence for this claim.

“I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things, because they are completely alien to me,” she said on her morning programme AM Joy.

“I hired cyber-security experts to see if somebody had manipulated my words or my former blog. And the reality is they have not been able to prove it.”

Today, Reid is leaning hard into the T portion of “LGBTQQIP2SAA” (and whatever additional letters or symbols may have been added since this post was published): Reid Compares Not Giving Gender-Altering Hormones To Minors To Nazism.

One can never expect MSNBC’s Joy Reid to be the level-headed voice of reason, but even by her standards, her Wednesday edition of The ReidOut was off the charts crazy. According to Reid, Tennessee’s law, currently being challenged at the Supreme Court, that forbids so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors is part of a Nazi-like tradition of targeting transgender people.

* * * * * * * *

“In fact, there are more kids who have been exposed to gun violence, estimated at 3 million, than there are transgender Americans of all ages in total. Targeting trans people isn’t new. It is an age-old tradition which Nazi Germany did with brutally violent ends in the 1930s. While the Supreme Court refuses to do anything about weapons of war in schools, today they seemed inclined to uphold Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.”

To make her case, Reid put up two headlines but didn’t elaborate on the corresponding articles. Perhaps there was a good reason why, because comparing not giving hormones to 10-year-olds to concentration camps and eugenics is absurd. Ironically, the people arguing in favor of “gender-affirming care” are the ones that push others towards sterility, but such details are inconvenient for Joy Reid.

In 2013, Comcast signed off on ad promoting MSNBC that declared “Your children are not your own” — a message to which they apparently still agree:

VIRGINIA POSTREL: The world of tomorrow. When the future arrived, it felt… ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?

As the grassroots backlash against urban renewal schemes grew, however, it inspired laws that choked off the very dynamic processes Jacob had celebrated. Citizens, it turned out, often simply wanted to preserve the status quo. Historic preservation laws limited demolishing or in some cases even renovating old buildings. Where once city governments razed whole neighborhoods, now procedures for citizen comment shifted the default toward blocking even small private projects. The shift gave small groups veto power, overriding both democratic representation and market processes.

Using planning hearings and lawsuits, homeowners turned participatory democracy into a powerful defense against change. Sometimes they blocked projects altogether. Sometimes they simply delayed them until they became financially unviable. Many of today’s obstacles to building new housing and environmentally friendly infrastructure origi­nated in the backlash against the hidden costs of modernist progress glamour.

Since the 1980s, technological progress has enjoyed a few flickers of glamour, notably around the singular figure of Steve Jobs, who brought computing power into the everyday lives – and eventually the pockets – of ordinary people. Jobs fused countercultural allegiances with modernist design instincts, technological boldness, and capitalist success. Most important, he gave people products that they loved.

The outpouring of public grief at his death in 2011 demonstrated his power as a symbol. As Meghan O’Rourke wrote in The New Yorker, ‘We’re mourning the visionary whose story we admire: the teen-age explorer, the spiritual seeker, the barefoot jeans-wearer, the man who said, “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”’ Jobs embodied a new ideal of progress, at once uncompromising and humanistic, a vision of advancing technology that artists could embrace. (That the hippie capitalist could be a tyrannical boss and neglectful father were details obscured by his glamour.)

Jobs also helped to deliver on one of the touchstone technologies of twentieth-century progress glamour, a technology almost as evocative as flying cars. The twenty-first century kept the promise of videophones, and they turned out to be far better than we imagined. Instead of the dedicated consoles of The Jetsons, Star Trek, and the 1964 World’s Fair, we got multifunctional pocket-sized supercomputers that include videophone service at no additional cost. ‘I like the twenty-first century’, I tell my husband on FaceTime. But, like refrigerators, videophones aren’t glamorous when everybody has one. They’re just life. We complain about their flaws and take their benefits for granted.

Today’s nostalgic techno-optimists want more: more exciting new technologies, more abundance, and more public enthusiasm about both. Mingling the desires of the old modernists for newness, rational planning, and speed with those of the old nerds for adventure and discovery, they long for action. Their motto is Faster, please, a phrase popularized by Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds and the title of James Pethokoukis’s Substack newsletter.

Read the whole thing. 20 years ago, James Lileks wrote:

Sometimes I think you have to be middle aged to realize how cool things are. You grow up with MP3s and iPods, as my daughter will, and it’s the way things are. If you remember the KUNK-KUNK of an 8-track tape, having a featherweight gumpack that holds a billion bits of music is really quite remarkable. (Metheny was followed by something from the “Run Lola Run” soundtrack, which was followed by “I Apologize,” by some nutless 30s warbler, followed by “Dawn” by Grieg.) And then there’s the cellphones and the tiny cameras and the widescreen TVs and home computers that sing to each other silently across the world; wonders, all. This really is the future I wanted. Although I expected longer battery life.

We live in an age of technological wonder, and yet we take it all for granted. (Which itself is a very Jetsons-like response to being surrounded by all this technology.)

TSUNAMI WARNING TRIGGERS PANDEMONIUM FOR 5 MILLION IN CALIFORNIA AFTER MONSTROUS 7.0-MAGNITUDE EARTHQUAKE.

And while the warning was eventually lifted, it did seem for a time that Frisco might have had a chance for, a, err, clean start, as Iowahawk tweeted:

UPDATE: Twenty years ago, the bard of Des Moines (and Austin) warned: Top Scientists Warn: Sea Gods Angry.

Washington, DC — Pointing to the devastating weekend Indian Ocean tsunami that left over 24,000 dead, an international blue ribbon committee of climatologists and ecoscientists today issued a stark warning that man-made pollutants have increasingly “make water spirits angry.”

The blunt conclusion prefaced a 2300 page meta-analysis of hundreds of scientific studies and computer models detailing links between human industrial activity and wrathful eco-deities. Entitled “Fire Bad: Fire Very Bad,” the report warns that the planet faces additional catastrophies unless drastic regulatory action is taken to appease Earthen-furies.

“Unclean money devils anger sacred water spirit Tai-Waku,” explained Martin Knudson of Scripps Oceanic Institute. “He now call angry to son the whale, ‘make slap with anger-tails! Bring vengeance-surf to villagers!'”

While most empirical evidence supports the theory of wrathful whale-tail slappings, some scientists are exploring alternative hypotheses for the weekend tsunami. Ecobiologist Jane Geary of UC Santa Cruz points to mounting evidence that the ocean spirit-world may have been driven to gastrointestinal rage by gas-guzzling SUVs.

“Thunder-wagon make smoke cloud of greenhouse gas,” explained Geary. “hungry Tai-Waku eat smoke from thunder-wagon, pass giant wind with mighty fury.”

Peter Novak, chief science officer of the Sierra Club, dismissed Geary’s “Divine Fart” theory, arguing it was more likely that SUVs had triggered the tsunami via a spirit underword sexual encounter.

“Wheels of thunder-wagons wake up Big Earth Spirit-Mother, make to crazy tingle in hairy child-place. She now go to water lair of Tai-Waku, make big angry love on tectonic plate,” said Novak. “Big Earth Spirit-Mother say, ‘if ocean rocking, don’t come a-knocking.'”

In accordance with the prophecy, here’s Jake Tapper today, mining the same territory, apparently unironically:

Jake Tapper wonders if Climate Change is making earthquakes stronger.
A seismologist has to tell him there's no evidence of that. pic.twitter.com/vY5a9DNRZA

— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) December 5, 2024

CATHERINE HERRIDGE REVEALS STORY ABOUT CBS AND ELON MUSK THAT EXPLAINS WHY LEGACY MEDIA IS IMPLODING:

She took it to the CBS executives and they told her she “couldn’t do it live.”

She asked, “What do you mean I can’t do it live?”

“Well, we don’t know what he’s going to say” was their replay according to Herridge.

She said she replied to her bosses, “Isn’t that what journalism is all about?”

Herridge explained that CBS then tried to condition the interview with possible alternatives, including having it edited, taped, and only on CBS. She said she felt so ashamed that a news organization would place so many restrictions on an interview like that that she couldn’t go back to Elon Musk, the free speech advocate. But it indicates how fearful CBS was that something that they might not want to come out might come out in such an interview. When you think that way, you’re no longer operating as a journalistic organization. You should want to report on the truth, whatever it is.

Herridge was then laid off in February when she was also looking into the Hunter Biden laptop story and they laid off other employees.

Gentlemen (and ladies), you can’t commit journalism here – this is CBS News!

NETFLIX’S NEW CHURCHILL DOCUMENTARY: Churchill at War review: superficial primer is tailor-made for US audiences.

Every decent historical documentary series these days needs a gimmick to set it apart from the rest. Churchill at War (Netflix) arguably has three. The four-part series, which skims over Winston Churchill’s early life before giving us a highlights package of the Second World War, features a battalion of wonderfully restored and colourised wartime footage. Not a new trick, perhaps, but a good one.

Its second flourish, befitting a series produced by Hollywood big dogs Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, is to assemble a mighty war cabinet of talking heads. Not only do we have the expected coterie of historians, but a former British prime minister (Boris Johnson), a former US president (George W Bush) and the current British foreign secretary (David Lammy). This trio adds tremendous value.

At the very beginning of the first episode, Boris Johnson tells an unseen interviewer, “Churchill believed in freedom, free speech, democracy. Those ideals are not uncontested today — far from it.”

Does the Boris of 2024 remember the Boris of 2020? Boris Johnson Missed His Churchill Moment.

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.

“Freedom, free speech, democracy. Those ideals are not uncontested today — far from it.”

Related: How a Netflix Doc Used AI Winston Churchill.

DEATH WISH: Unhinged Taylor Lorenz Says She Wants Health Insurance Execs to Die.

She's always been disturbed but employment at @washingtonpost and @nytimes furnished some modest guard rails.

— PhilipTerzian (@PhilipTerzian) December 5, 2024

TYLER O’NEIL: Six False Claims Backing ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ in Key Supreme Court Case.

RIP: Marshall Brickman, Annie Hall and Manhattan co-writer who helped reinvent Woody Allen.

Born of multiple rewrites and a free-ranging shoot, Annie Hall assumed haphazard shape in the edit suite, as Brickman later recalled: “When I saw the rough cut, I thought it terrible, completely unsalvageable. It rambled and was tangential and just… endless.”

Yet the more incisive 93-minute release version expanded comedy’s horizons, principally by allowing for the prospect of romantic failure and disillusionment. Critics were wowed; cinemagoers stirred to the extent that it remained Allen’s biggest hit for the next 34 years. With the director-star a no-show at the 1978 Oscars, Brickman duly collected a screenplay gong, one of four wins on the night, including Best Picture.

Manhattan drew from a comparable well of personal experience, its protagonist a gagman who has quit television to try and pen the great American novel. Even in 1979, the relationship between the 42-year-old hero and a 17-year-old schoolgirl raised eyebrows – Pauline Kael wondered: “What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?” – but the movie’s lustrous look seduced critics, audiences and awards voters alike.

As John Podhoretz wrote in the Weekly Standard in his 2006 review of Allen’s Match Point, “‘The heart wants what it wants,’ Allen notoriously said after his girlfriend Mia Farrow found nude pictures of her 17-year-old daughter–the same girl who was a sister to the two children he had with Farrow–in his dresser drawer in 1992. Nobody, not even Farrow, had any right to be surprised by Allen’s shrugging dismissal of the moral opprobrium that greeted his conduct. He had already made it clear through his art that he did not believe that there were any consequences for engaging in immoral behavior.”

VDH: Yes, Mexico Knows Exactly What It Is Doing.

In La Raza literature of the past, and in Mexico’s chauvinistic moments, illegal immigration was envisioned as the ironic response to the ancient “theft’ of the American Southwest. The problem with that thesis is that most Mexicans, as polls have shown, would prefer to live in an American Southwest than a Mexican south.

And it is also increasingly likely that Mexican-Americans will be more prone to vote for border security than open borders—again further proof that their self-interest as patriotic Americans trumps Mexico’s cynical attempts to use them as political pawns. If those trends continue, the American Left and the Mexican government may well lobby for a secure border, in fear they are only augmenting a growing MAGA constituency.

In sum, Mexico understands the myriad ways that an open border, the destruction of U.S. immigration law, illegal immigration, and emigration of millions of its own citizens to America are entirely in its own interests and so hopes to see the continuation of the Biden-Harris-Mayorkas appeasement.

But, given the huge numbers of human trafficking, the chaos, the drugs, the violence, and the financial costs of supporting millions, an open border is increasingly seen by Americans as not to their advantage—as we saw in the recent Trump victory. That reality, not the rhetoric of Mexican presidents, will govern all future negotiations—a truth that President Sheinbaum should digest before she sounds off about a border that she knows her country has done so much to deliberately destroy—and to America’s detriment.

It’s VDH, so read the whole thing.

ON THIS DAY: Led Zeppelin made the decision to break up following the death of drummer John Bonham.

[44] years ago today — on Dec. 4, 1980 — Led Zeppelin made the difficult decision to break up, two months after the death of drummer John Bonham.

The band was supposed to begin an extensive tour in the fall of 1980 when Bonham passed away.  The tour was canceled and rumors swirled about whether the band would continue on with a new drummer.

However, the surviving members ultimately decided that it was not right to continue with someone else playing drums.

“We wish it to be known, that the loss of our dear friend and the deep respect we have for his family, together with the deep sense of undivided harmony felt by ourselves and our manager, have led us to decide that we could not continue as we were.”

Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones have occasionally worked and recorded together, but reunions of all three have been few and far between.

Related: The Hammer of the Gods: The First Critical Biography of Led Zeppelin Finally Available on the Kindle.

My latest, on Stephen Davis’ somewhat infamous 1985 look at Zeppelin’s now infamous very much non-#metoo-approved debauchery, over at Ed Driscoll.com.

BYRON YORK: The damage Biden has done.

Joe Biden will be president for the next 47 days. That’s enough to make anyone nervous. The 82-year-old president had to be forced, by his own party, to withdraw from the 2024 race because he is no longer mentally and physically up to the job. But, of course, he is still in the job. With a world full of dangerous conflicts, that Biden is in charge for 47 more days, especially with Vice President Kamala Harris in a deep post-defeat funk, is deeply worrisome.

The immediate problem will end on Jan. 20, 2025, when Biden leaves office. But the United States, and the Democratic Party, will be dealing with the damage Biden leaves behind for years. There is a reason voters, for 40 years, were never interested in electing the openly ambitious Biden president of the U.S. — until the bizarre circumstances of the 2020 election. They knew for decades that he would not be a good president. And he has proven them right.

Leave the damage Biden has done to the U.S. — the massive migrant influx, the decline in the standard of living for millions of people, and the chaos abroad — for another day. Right now, a new analysis shows the damage Biden has done to his party, and it is immense.

Exit polls show that in the 2024 presidential election, 35% of voters identified as Republicans, while 34% identified as independents, and 31% identified as Democrats. In addition to a big jump in the number of self-identified independents, the news is that in 2024, Democrats slipped to third place in party ID.

“For the first time since the Watergate era, independents surpassed one of the major political parties to rank second in terms of party identification,” writes Republican pollster David Winston, who has just finished an in-depth study of the election results. “In this presidential election, the percentage of the electorate that self-identified as Democrats came in behind independents. … This means that, in this election, Democrats are de facto more a third party than a dominant party in the electorate.”

Flashback: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.

ESQUIRE DELETES FALSE GEORGE BUSH PARDON STORY AFTER LIBERAL COLUMNIST MAKES MAJOR ERROR:

Esquire writer told people to ‘shut the f— up’ about Hunter Biden pardon by comparing to non-existent Bush pardon of his son Neil.

Esquire has deleted a column that used a false claim about former President George H.W. Bush as the basis to justify President Biden’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter.

In a Tuesday column, liberal pundit Charles P. Pierce claimed that Hunter Biden was not the first presidential son caught up in controversy, asking readers, “Anybody Remember Neil Bush?”

“Nobody defines Poppy Bush’s presidency by his son’s struggles or the pardons he issued on his way out of the White House. The moral: Shut the f— up about Hunter Biden, please,” he wrote in the sub-headline.

“[The] lucky American businessman[‘s]… father exercised his unlimited constitutional power of clemency to pardon the Lucky American Businessman for all that S&L business way back when. The president’s name was George H.W. Bush. The Lucky American Businessman was his son, Neil,” Pierce continued.

The only problem? Bush never pardoned his son.

The men’s magazine later added an editor’s note to the column: “An earlier version stated incorrectly that George H.W. Bush gave a presidential pardon to his son, Neil Bush. Esquire regrets the error.”

Sometime later, the piece was removed. The link now takes readers to a page that says, “This Column is No Longer Available.”

The page also includes a second editor’s note that notes the column was “removed due to an error” and “Esquire regrets the mistake.”

“The internet proved to be a cruel mistress,” RedState’s Bob Hoge adds:

A legacy media tragicomedy in 3 acts, by @CharlesPPierce and @esquire. HT @KFILE pic.twitter.com/sCl4yfY4Ue

— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) December 4, 2024

Flashback: “If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.”

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