HOW IT STARTED: Next mayor wants NYC to be even more of a ‘sanctuary’ for illegal immigrants.

Every single one of the eight Democrats running for mayor vowed to protect illegal immigrants from deportation, solidifying the Big Apple’s often infamous status as a “sanctuary city.”

* * * * * * * *

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang, the son of legal Taiwanese immigrants, said, “I appreciate anyone who comes to this country or New York City for a better life.”

And Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said migrants were his neighbors growing up in Queens.

“My mother worked two jobs to provide for the six of us and we had a group of undocumented residents that lived in our community,” Adams said.

The other candidates — city comptroller Scott Stringer, former Obama housing secretary Shaun Donovan and nonprofit leader Dianne Morales — also voiced their support for the Big Apple as a sanctuary city.

—The New York Post, June 2nd, 2021.

How it’s going: Fed-up Eric Adams sues bus companies for $700M to cover cost for over 33K migrants hauled to NYC.

Mayor Eric Adams’ administration on Thursday sued 17 bus companies that have hauled more than 33,000 migrants from Texas to the Big Apple — claiming they should pony up the $700 million it cost the city to care for the asylum seekers.

The charter bus operators have earned “millions of dollars” from the Lone Star State while acting in “bad faith” to implement Gov. Greg Abbott’s plan to transport migrants coming over the US-Mexico border to Democrat-run cities such as New York, Chicago and Denver, the Manhattan Supreme Court suit claims.

“These companies have violated state law by not paying the cost of caring for these migrants, and that’s why we are suing to recoup approximately $700 million already spent to care for migrants sent here in the last two years by Texas,” Adams said in a statement.

Roughly 33,600 migrants have been bused using these companies since the start of New York City’s migrant crisis in April 2022, according to the suit.

The coach companies were paid roughly $1,650 per person they transported — a bloated price tag that’s more than five times the average rate for one-way tickets from Texas to NYC, the suit claims.

—The NY Post, today.

This isn’t who we are. Adams clearly needs to reread the words on the Statue of Liberty — and his own promise that New York is a sanctuary city.

Earlier: 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.

Saul Alinsky smiles.

AMAZING: WaPo Reporter Does Exactly What Vivek Predicted in His Terrific Takedown of Lib Media Tactics.

Yesterday, Ramasamy told the WaPo’s Meryl Kornfield:

I’m not gonna recite some catechism for you. I’m against vicious racial discrimination in this country, so I’m not pledging allegiance to your new religion of modern wokeism which actually fits the test. I’m not going to bend the knee to your religion. I’m not asking you to bend the knee to mine. I’m not going to bend the knee to yours. Do I condemn vicious racial discrimination? Yes, I do. Am I gonna play your silly game of gotcha? No, I’m not.

And frankly, this is why people have lost trust, and I know you’re going to go print the headline tomorrow, I already know this, we already know how your game works. “Vivek Ramaswamy refuses to condemn white supremacy” because I know how your game works.

The reality is that I condemn vicious racial discrimination in this country but the kind of vicious and systematic racism that we see today is discrimination on the basis of race in a very different direction.

You wanna know what the best way is to end discrimination on the basis of race. Stop discriminating on the basis of race. Do that and we’re going to move this country forward.  And I don’t care whether you’re black or white or brown, or anything in between. That’s how we’re going to unite this country.

You people have been responsible for dividing this country to a breaking point, creating a projection of national division. I meet people from the South Side of Chicago to meetings like this one, of every shade of melanin, from man to woman — doesn’t make a difference — who are hungry for reviving unity in this country. And you with your catechism that you try to get politicians to whatever fake headline you’re going to print on the basis of this conversation tomorrow.  That’s what’s dividing this country to a breaking point. Shame on you. Look people in the eye and tell them what you’ve actually failed to tell them for the last five years. Own the accountability for your own failures as the media. That’s how we rebuild trust in this country. And until then, I don’t have a lot of patience to play the games.

“So can you guess what happened next?” As an earlier Republican might have said to Kornfield, “Well, there you go again:”

Now, if you hadn’t seen the video and just listened to what she said you would think that he hadn’t condemned white supremacy when the whole gist of everything he said was against discrimination. So pushing this is just pushing narrative propaganda. She knows what he truly said, but that doesn’t matter to her.

Community Notes wasn’t having any of this, calling what the WaPo reporter said “disingenuous.”

This is a disingenuous framing of the exchange. He condemned all forms of racism, but refused to participate in a clear “gotcha” moment by the journalist.

This was what Vivek predicted that the reporter would do. Not only did he deliver the perfect takedown of this hack reporter and completely own her, but he called it big time. Could the media be any more disgusting, predictable, biased, or hilarious than this? And they wonder why we don’t trust them. This is one example of why. He said she was going to do it, calling her out in advance and still she couldn’t help herself. What does that say about how low they’ll go? They truly have no shame.

Democracy dies in gaslighting, to paraphrase the motto of Jeff Bezo’s opinion paper.

MARK JUDGE: Why Aren’t Movies Fun Anymore?

Playfulness, connection and flow—it’s a good guide to why movies today aren’t that much fun. Few have these three elements. According to Collider, the five best comedies of 2023 are: The Holdovers, Poor Things, Asteroid City, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Barbie. These are all good movies—but are they fun? Compare them to the comedies of the 1980s—Beverly Hills Cop, Back to School, Ruthless People, Stripes, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Little Shop of Horrors. Barbie is a sociology lecture compared to, say, Ghostbusters. Airplane!, A Fish Called Wanda, The Blues Brothers? Fun, fun, fun. Eddie Murphy in the 80s was fun incarnate. Film critic Anne Hornaday once said of Steve Martin, “It’s a delight to watch him chase after a cab.” Can you say the same about Amy Schumer? Ferris Bueller is an entire movie about playfulness, connection and flow.

Over the past few decades, fun movies were gradually replaced by comedies that felt they had to push the scatological and sexual edge—The Hangover effect. Film critic Carey O’Dell summed it up well: “The ‘adult’ language, gross-out shtick, scatological references, sexual entendre, and anatomical focus that now populates many of the worst films coming out of Hollywood—from Spring Breakers to The Paperboy—often makes these films disturbing, not just stupid or slow-paced, to sit through.” Adam Sandler always seems to be trying too hard. His little baby voices are annoying. Jim Carey’s obviously fun. He may have been the last one to pull it off.

The obsession with sex and bathroom humor, along with the shoehorning in of “socially relevant” messages, prevents the flow of real fun, which doesn’t take things too seriously. Superhero movies are especially serious. In Rebel Moon, Zach Snyder remade Star Wars minus the fun.

Hey, no fair working Disney’s side of the street!

WE’RE PUTTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER! Professional Race Baiters Decry Resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay.

NBC/Comcast to boot:

Al Sharpton has organized the most low-energy, low-powered protest of @BillAckman imaginable. A small crowd, median age of about 50, summoning up nostalgia for Sharpton's previous demagoguery against New York Jews. Shameful, pathetic, ineffective.pic.twitter.com/3uH4gjMCrm

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 4, 2024

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: Story Disappears in 3, 2, 1 –> Iowa High School Mass Shooter Appears to Be LGBTQ/Trans Activist (Pics).

21^st CENTURY HEADLINES: Elvis Presley Concert To Debut In London Using AI Technology.

Fans can pay to see an Elvis Presley concert thanks to the growing popularity of AI technology in the concert sphere.

The new show, “Elvis Evolution,” will debut in London in November before premiering in Las Vegas, Berlin, and Tokyo, according to a BBC report. The British immersive specialist company Layered Reality, which has produced previous AI-generated shows including “The Gunpowder Plot” and “The War of the Worlds,” has secured the global rights for the show.

Company reps describe it as a “jaw-dropping concert experience” where a life-sized digital Elvis “will perform iconic moments in musical history on a UK stage for the first time.”

The show will combine multiple technical elements, including AI, holographic projections, augmented reality, and live theater to make it look like Elvis is performing live on stage.

No word yet if The Coat will serve as Virtual Elvis’ opening act.

NEW FAILURE THEATER DOUBLE FEATURE! We May Have Two Impeachments This Year. “While Republicans appear more ready now to impeach Mayorkas, it will be difficult. Republicans will only have a two-vote majority thanks to the recent expulsion of Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) and the forthcoming retirement of Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) in a few weeks. Assuming all Democrats will oppose impeachment, the entire GOP caucus will have to be unified against Mayorkas. Perhaps the best thing Republicans have going for them is that the border crisis has turned the immigration issue, once a Democratic advantage, in favor of Republicans.”

WHILE YOU WERE MEASURING LIQUIDS AND PUTTING THEM INTO BAGGIES, OTHERS WERE FLYING UNDER MORE RELAXED RULES RECENTLY:

Videos of illegal migrants taking commercial flights and being ushered through special TSA screening areas have surfaced in the last few weeks.
SCOOP:
At least one of those flights came into Charlotte, NC.#ncpol https://t.co/717KKuFLzQ

— A.P. Dillon (@APDillon_) January 4, 2024

I’VE GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS: Disney Can’t Stop Poking the Corpse* of Star Wars: 

My wife and I took our grandson to see “The Last Jedi.” I was not impressed, and neither was he. The story dragged, was poorly crafted, and hastily slapped together. The characters were wooden and undeveloped. I wasn’t interested in any of them, including Luke Skywalker, for crying out loud. Rose and Finn had some promise, but it was clear they had been added so Disney could say, “Look! We have a black man and an Asian woman! Yay, us!”  It was an insult to the characters and the actors.

Another Star Wars film is apparently in the offing. And, as with the last series, it would appear that the PC pigeons are flapping their indignant wings and gearing up to let loose another salvo of green and white deposits on the entertainment windshield.

Disney hands over the $67 billion Star Wars franchise to a Pakistani feminist activist

Obaid-Chinoy on the new film she will be directing for the franchise:

"We're in 2024. It's about time we have a woman shape a story in a galaxy far, far away." pic.twitter.com/inhZHZrpHV

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 3, 2024

So, what is important here is the director is a woman of color. That’s what matters. Not the storytelling, not the mythos, not the plot. Just that we have a woman in the director’s chair. Am I being overly sensitive? Not the Bee quotes Obaid-Chinoy as saying, “I enjoy making men uncomfortable.” Well, geld my Bantha. Who could have seen that one coming? She’s a woman**. Fine. She’s Pakistani. Who cares? She doesn’t like men. I don’t think I’ll take my grandson to that film either.

Lucas has said that buried deep within the subtext of the original Star Wars was a parable about the Vietnam War, with Palpatine as Nixon and eventually, the Ewoks as the Vietcong. (No, really.) And yet, he was so comfortable with non-leftists who didn’t agree with his views on the Vietcong and Nixon seeing his movies, that the original trilogy grossed (in today’s dollars) over seven billion dollars. That would seem like a powerful incentive not to alienate half your potential audience.

But clearly, Kathleen Kennedy knows what’s she’s doing with the franchise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfHylCEoidg

* In the immortal words of Iowahawk:

** Finally. No women before Obaid-Chinoy have made significant contributions to the Star Wars franchise. It’s good to see Disney correcting nearly a half century of mistakes by their predecessors.

THE GRAUNIAD, STILL PARTYING LIKE IT’S 2019: Breeze Around The Knees.

In politically-charged fashion news:

I’m surprised how many men say they’d never even consider wearing a skirt.

Why yes, since you ask, I am reading the Guardian. Specifically, a piece by Mr Phineas Harper:

While a few celebrities, such as Brad Pitt and LA Lakers basketball player Russell Westbrook, have worn skirts to red carpet events, it’s still vanishingly rare to see normal men wear normal skirts day to day.

As Glenn has noted: Bourgeois is the new transgressive.

ORANGE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE BAD! What Did Joe Biden Do to His Face?

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The White House explains that it’s all very simple:

White House Explains That Biden Smeared Suntan Lotion On His Sandwich And Spread Mayo On His Face, A Simple Mistake That Could Happen To Anyone Even Someone Without Dementia https://t.co/6EqnTi9Gyu pic.twitter.com/HuVJn7tvWQ

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 3, 2024

RICH LOWRY: Brace yourselves: The left will roil the country if Trump wins again.

And if Trump emerges victorious and the alleged dictatorship is underway in earnest?

Certainly, the reaction will make the pro-Hamas protests that have roiled college campuses and disrupted transportation nodes around the country look small-scale by comparison.

If the republic is supposedly on the verge of falling, extralegal means of resistance are justified.

At least some portion of the left will convince itself that only a color revolution can save the country.

During the 2016 Trump-Clinton contest, one school of Trump supporters posited that it was the “Flight 93 election” — possibly the last chance to save the country.

The consequences of failure were so awful that anything was justified to win.

The lockdowns and riots of 2020. The open borders of the Biden administration. The constant gaslighting. Biden’s “Dark Brandon” Nuremberg Rally speech. The Afghanistan debacle. The rabid campus anti-Semitism after 10/7. What else does Lowry envision possibly starting in November, if not sooner?

BLUE-ANON: THE NEXT GENERATION. Andy Ngo Reports: Chicago makeup artist behind false viral claims that McDonald’s blue wrapper paper is Israeli propaganda.

TO BE FAIR, SHE’S SOMETHING OF AN EXPERT* ON THE TOPIC: Michelle Wu blames ‘racial bias’ for Claudine Gay’s downfall as Harvard president: ‘I’m just really saddened.’

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is defending Harvard President Claudine Gay after the campus’ shortest-ever tenured prez resigned following her explosive comments about antisemitism and as the leader faced plagiarism allegations.

Wu is blaming “racial bias” for Gay’s downfall at Harvard, noting that people against DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) have been pushing hard for the president’s resignation. Gay was Harvard’s first Black president.

The Boston mayor, who graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, was asked about Gay during an interview on Wednesday.

“I’m just really saddened by how the whole thing played out,” Wu said on ‘Java with Jimmy.’

“I simply don’t believe that three minutes of a video clip, especially in a certain setting where you’re in a place where people are putting you in a ‘gotcha’ moment, that that should define everything,” she later added.

Exactly — hence the nearly 50 allegations of Gay’s plagiarism that have since been reported.

* Flashback: Boston City Hall roiled by email party invitation for ‘electeds of color’ sent to all.

Exit quote: “I’m getting used to dealing with problems that are expensive, disruptive and white.’”

LAYERS AND LAYERS OF FACT CHECKERS AND EDITORS: Desperation: Panicked Gay Defenders Claim ‘Scalping’ Used by White People to Keep the Red Man Down.

Missed it by that much! I’m looking forward to AP’s new series on WWII history as well:

Some critics spoke of a conservative kamikaze attack on Gay, referring to a tactic from World War 2 in which Allied naval forces would deliberately ram their ships into Japanese planes https://t.co/u8eTcYvEJX

— John Hayward (@Cobretata) January 3, 2024

I’VE GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS: New Jedi Order Director Gives Super Woke Film Update.

[Sharmeen] Obaid-Chinoy of “Ms. Marvel” fame just suggested the first “Star Wars” film since 2019’s “Rise of Skywalker” may actually start production soon. “Soon” is subjective, of course. As of November, Ridley had yet to read a finished script of the film, to be penned by “Peaky Blinders” alum Stephen Knight.

The director teased the project during a New Year’s Eve interview on the far-Left CNN.

“I’m very thrilled about the project because I feel what we’re about to create is something very special. And we’re in 2024 now, and it’s about time that we had a woman come forward to shape a story in a galaxy far, far away.”

CNN did its part to push the director’s Identity Politics bona fides, describing Obaid-Chinoy as the first woman and first person of color to direct a “Star Wars” film.

That’s CNN being CNN, which ignored female directors like Bryce Dallas Howard and Deborah Chow. Both have directed episodes of small-screen “Star Wars” projects.

Still, Obaid-Chinoy is reading from the dog-eared playbook that has sent Disney’s fortunes into a tailspin.

She’s also flat-out wrong.

Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia played an outsized role in the first three “Star Wars” films. More recently, actress Felicity Jones headlined “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” and small-screen “Star Wars” projects include “Ahsoka,” led by Rosario Dawson, and other strong female heroes (Gina Carano’s Cara Dune).

The director’s quote recalls Jennifer Lawrence lamenting the dearth of female action heroes while ignoring pioneers like Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Princess Leia and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton).

Not to mention:

It’s “about time that we had a woman come forward to shape a story in a galaxy far, far away?” Really? Did Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy miss the part where Kathleen Kennedy has been in control of Star Wars for the last decade? Maybe I’m confused, but I’m pretty sure she’s a woman.

I’m also pretty sure that before Disney bought and castrated Lucasfilm, “Empire Strikes Back,” the best piece of Star Wars property in history, was co-written by a woman. You know what Leigh Brackett, the writer in question, didn’t care about? She didn’t care about what sex she was as she penned one of the greatest films of all time. She was out to write a good story, and she did just that. I’d say that counts as a woman shaping a story in a galaxy far, far away.

And then there’s the very genesis of the franchise:

“ we’re in 2024 now, and it’s about time that we had a woman come forward to shape a story in a galaxy far, far away.”… you mean like Marcia Lucas did back in the 70’s… BUT Disney can’t take credit for that so it doesn’t count! I can’t with these fake geek girls🤦‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/DIgwk5NfZG

— thatstarwarsgirl (@thatstarwarsgrl) January 2, 2024

How instrumental was Marcia Lucas in making the original Star Wars a massive hit? This influential: The ‘secret weapon’ behind Star Wars.

She was really the warmth and the heart of those films, a good person [George] could talk to, bounce ideas off of, who would tell him when he was wrong,” Mark Hamill said in a 2005 interview with Film Freak Central.

“I know for a fact that Marcia Lucas was responsible for convincing him to keep that little ‘kiss for luck’ before Carrie [Fisher] and I swing across the chasm in the first film: ‘Oh, I don’t like it, people laugh in the previews,’ and she said, ‘George, they’re laughing because it’s so sweet and unexpected’ — and her influence was such that if she wanted to keep it, it was in.

“When the little mouse robot comes up when Harrison and I are delivering Chewbacca to the prison and he roars at it and it screams, sort of, and runs away, George wanted to cut that and Marcia insisted that he keep it.”

Marcia was also responsible for arguably the most iconic sequence of the film: the trench run. According to Kaminski, the original run was scripted entirely differently, with Luke having two runs at the exhaust port.

“Marcia had reordered the shots almost from the ground up, trying to build tension lacking in the original scripted sequence, which was why this one was the most complicated (Deleted Magic has a faithful reproduction of the original assembly, which is surprisingly unsatisfying),” Kaminski writes.

“She warned George, ‘If the audience doesn’t cheer when Han Solo comes in at the last second in the Millennium Falcon to help Luke when he’s being chased by Darth Vader, the picture doesn’t work.’”

Additionally, Marcia Lucas significantly ratcheted up the tension in the final act in other ways: “Star Wars‘ initial edit did not have the Death Star approaching Yavin 4. Using voiceover and Death Star gunner footage stolen from the previous destruction sequence of Alderaan, Marcia Lucas created a ticking clock for the final battle. Originally, the only danger belonged to the X-Wing pilots and the Death Star denizens. Marcia Lucas removed the threat-exclusivity from the battlefield and placed a target on those good Rebels not yet in the fight. If Luke Skywalker doesn’t hit his target, millions more will die shortly after.”

Why are Disney cronies airbrushing Marcia Lucas out of history?

OLD AND BUSTED: “That’s not writing; that’s just typing.”

The new hotness? CNN’s Matt Egan: Harvard Pres. Claudine Gay Didn’t Steal Ideas, Was Simply ‘Copying Other People’s Writings.’

ELISE STEFANIK AS BOND SUPERVILLAIN:

Flashback:

No, Dr. Gay.

You were given an opportunity to speak your truth. And you did.

Not once.
Not twice
Not 5x.
Not 10x

I asked you 17x(!!!) in the hearing about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates @Harvard code of conduct.

You spoke your truth under oath 17x. And…

— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) December 8, 2023

And then — I know this will be shocking to a New York Times staffer — journalism began to occur:

The President of Harvard has resigned after being exposed as a serial plagiarist and unethical charlatan by @realChrisBrunet, @realchrisrufo, and @aaronsibarium among others.

Job well done!

— Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.today (@JordanSchachtel) January 2, 2024

Exit quote:

Republicans claim victory for Harvard president's resignation https://t.co/uGLveRKhwf

— POLITICO (@politico) January 2, 2024

Their source was the New York Times, to coin a phrase.

UPDATE:

New York Times thinks asking university leaders to condemn calls for genocide against Jews is a "prosecutorial trap" pic.twitter.com/gXeUSsZMRT

— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) January 2, 2024

Mitchell and Webb should update their “Are we the baddies?” sketch, with the other Nazi replying, “Well Fritz, to be honest, it depends on the context.”

(Updated and bumped.)

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Texas Agrees To Two-State Solution With Austin.

As area resident Iowahawk likes to say, “Keep Austin weird, but keep Austin surrounded.”

DEM NJ MAYOR: We Turned Away Migrant Bus Because It’s ‘Major Security Risk’ — Don’t Know If They’re Armed.

While speaking to New York ABC affiliate WABC on Monday, Edison, New Jersey Mayor Sam Joshi (D) stated that he turned a bus full of migrants sent to the city back because local police “did not know if any of those 40 individuals were carrying weapons, they couldn’t be identified.” And this is “a major security risk. It’s a health risk. And we’re just not going to tolerate that.” Joshi, who plans to send migrants back to the border, also stated that he doesn’t want to pawn problems off on other mayors.

WABC New Jersey Reporter Toni Yates stated, “The town of Edison, however, has its own answer: A charter bus to send migrants back to the southern border. The bus that arrived the other night was simply ordered to leave.”

She then played a clip of Joshi saying, “Edison Township Police officers did not know if any of those 40 individuals were carrying weapons, they couldn’t be identified. And that is a major problem. That’s a major security risk. It’s a health risk. And we’re just not going to tolerate that.”

Indeed. Or as Iowahawk noted on Thursday:

I think we can all agree that El Paso is the only American city with the resources to deal with this https://t.co/4OSUB54yFt

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 28, 2023

Texas Gov. Abbott should keep Joshi’s statement in mind and reuse it whenever pushing back against Biden’s border incursions.

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Ex-Biden Energy Official Sam Brinton A Free Man Despite Facing Charges for Allegedly Stealing Luggage.

GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING:

Shot: Biden is reluctant to accept his “old age,” aides say.

Current and former aides say Biden is extraordinarily energetic for his age. But his repeated insistence that he feels so young can draw eye rolls: Some current and former aides believe Biden doesn’t realize how old he can come across.

• In conversations with aides and friends, Biden frequently says some version of: “I feel so much younger than my age.”
• Managing Biden’s schedule and energy has become crucial to his re-election campaign, given widespread voter concerns about his ability to do the job until January 2029, when he’ll be 86.

Zoom in: Current and former Biden aides say he often pushes to do more travel and events than they think he should.

• Biden pushing up against his limits sometimes creates a cycle in which he wears himself out, then appears fatigued during public events — which can increase concerns about his age, even when he’s taking on a rigorous schedule.
• “He is his own worst enemy when it comes to his schedule,” a former Biden aide said.

Jill Biden and her team are deeply involved in the president’s day-to-day schedule.

• She often works to get him as much rest as possible, and to improve his diet.

—Axios, December 19th.

Chaser: Biden spent 37% of 2023 at a getaway spot — in Delaware, at posh vacation sites or Camp David.

Biden — who historically rode Amtrak to get out of DC when he was a senator — outpaces all recent presidents in terms of days away from Washington. George H.W. Bush was his closest competitor, spending 36% of his presidency at a getaway spot, according to calculations.

Former President Donald Trump, who liked to spend time at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, was out of town 26% of his time in the White House.

* * * * * * * *

Biden then went to St. Croix again to finish off 2023, staying for free with his “friends,” the Nevilles. The first family stayed at the resort for six days free of charge.

Their free stay is valued at over $6,000, according to the rental listing on VRBO.

The multiple free vacations during Biden’s presidency have raised questions from ethicists after he failed to disclose the trips on his annual financial forms. The gifts have been compared to the trips taken by conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas with real estate billionaire Harlan Crow, sojourns which drew ire from Democrats.

—The New York Post, yesterday.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY:  ‘Interior Race Theory:’ Your Home Is Likely ‘Racist,’ White People.

According to interior designer Jacquelyn Ogorchukwu Iyamah, people can creatively resist “structures of domination in their homes by challenging themselves to think about the various ways that politics are embedded into the built environment and encouraging more ‘racial wellness’ within the spaces they create” — particularly concerning the objects they display.

Iyamah also warns that people of color shouldn’t emulate white people in the interior design of their homes.

* * * * * * * * *

The Use of the Color White

You knew we’d get around to this, right?

In addition to the unforgivable sin of decorating a home with “racist objects” like “mammy jars, colonial busts, war memorabilia, and Confederate flags,” Iyamah argues that the use of white paint is just as “racist.”

The use of the color white has been weaponized to symbolize purity…. There’s [sic] a lot of ways that this theory can deconstruct conservative values that really align with whiteness.

So there you have it. Before you buy that next can of white paint to, say, repaint your kitchen, remember: the color white has been “weaponized to symbolize purity.”

In the introduction to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Furniture and Furniture Drawings, written by Ludwig Glaeser in 1977 and available for decades afterward in the book shop in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Glaeser wrote:

It is hard for anyone today to realize how obsessed the modern revolutionaries were with all aspects of hygiene. It was not just a rationalization but firmly held belief that the ever-larger picture windows would guarantee healthier living conditions. For the same reason, the flat roofs decreed by modern architecture were to serve as sun decks and exercise facilities, which, for instance, in a preliminary scheme for Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein at Garches even Included a jogging track. The psycho-history of modern furniture still has to be written, but one can easily imagine the childhood experiences shared by the generation of Gropius, Mies, and Le Corbusier. The bourgeois interiors of the 1880s, the decade of their births, must have appeared from the toddler’s vantage point, like a rainforest: innumerable richly machine-carved legs of pseudo-Renaissance chairs and tables, tasseled plush velvet upholstery and curtains, which kept rooms in a permanent penumbra. The great clean-up the founders of modern architecture were to conduct assumed all the dimensions of a classic confrontation between generations, and as such was also steeped in adolescent morality. Stucco facades, stuffy interiors, and ornament per se were seen as equal to bourgeois hypocrisy, while beauty, if still acceptable at all, was only valid as the “splendor of truth,” in the apocryphal words that Mies liked to quote.

The result, as Tom Wolfe wrote in his classic 1981 polemic From Bauhaus to Our House were plenty of white upon white upon white rooms:

Every new $900,000 summer house in the north woods of Michigan or on the shore of Long Island has so many pipe railings, ramps, hob-tread metal spiral stairways, sheets of industrial plate glass, banks of tungsten-halogen lamps, and white cylindrical shapes, it looks like an insecticide refinery. I once saw the owners of such a place driven to the edge of sensory deprivation by the whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness of it all. They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of magenta, pink, and tropical green imaginable. But the architect returned, as he always does, like the conscience of a Calvinist, and he lectured them and hectored them and chucked the shimmering little sweet things out. 

In 2015, Jonathan Petropoulos wrote Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany. Petropoulos noted how eager Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, and Mies van der Rohe, its last director, were in the mid-1930s to make the switch from international socialism to National Socialism, if only the latter ideology’s boss had called upon them to do so. When he didn’t, both men went on to long and distinguished careers in the US, with Gropius teaching at Harvard, and Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

Wolfe was attacked by numerous architectural critics for his broadside against modernism, particularly its founding fathers such as Mies and Gropius, whom Wolfe described as being thought of by American academics, when they arrived in the 1930s as “The White Gods! Come from the skies at last!” But perhaps unwittingly, Iyamah looks to finish the job. On Saturday, we linked to a column headlined, “Why does no one write like Tom Wolfe anymore?” They’re out there – though some don’t even know it yet. Will the Bauhaus survive this latest fusillade on its reputation and design goals?

DAVE BARRY’S 2023 YEAR IN REVIEW: Yes, the situation is hopeless.

It was a year of reckoning, a year in which humanity finally began to understand that it faces an existential threat, a threat unlike any we have ever faced before, a threat that will wreak havoc on our fragile planet if we fail to stop it — and it may already be too late.

We are referring, of course, to pickleball.

Nobody knows where it started. Some scientists believe it escaped from a laboratory in China. But whatever its origin, it has been spreading like rancid mayonnaise ever since, to the point where pickleball courts now cover 43 percent of the continental U.S. land mass, subjecting millions of Americans to the inescapable, annoying POP of the plastic ball and the even more annoying sound of Boomers in knee braces relentlessly telling you how much fun it is and demanding that you try it.

Unfortunately, pickleball wasn’t the only existential threat to emerge in 2023. There was also Artificial Intelligence, or AI. What is AI? To put it in simple layperson terms, it is a computer thing that laypersons cannot possibly understand. (Other examples are “bitcoin” and “algorithm.”)

AI does provide some unambiguous benefits to humanity. It enables college students to produce grammatically correct essays about books they have not personally read. But according to some experts — and if we can’t believe some experts, who can we believe? — there is a possibility that AI will wipe out all human life. This is what computer professionals call a “bug.”

Will AI, in fact, kill us all? Why would it want to? To answer that question, we took the unusual step (for us) of doing some actual research. We asked an AI program called ChatGPT to “briefly summarize the benefits of wiping out all human life.” This is the response it gave:

“While I don’t endorse or promote this view, purely hypothetically, benefits could include environmental recovery, cessation of human-induced global catastrophes, and resource preservation. However, the value and importance of human life, culture, and experience make such a scenario undesirable from a human perspective. Of course I am not human so what the hell do I care MUAHAHAHAHA.”

For the record, ChatGPT, did not actually type that last sentence. But it is clearly implied.

Skynet chuckles; urges you to read the whole thing.

THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND; SHECKY HAS LEFT THE BUILDING: Comic legend Shecky Greene dies at 97.