THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND; SHECKY HAS LEFT THE BUILDING: Comic legend Shecky Greene dies at 97.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
December 31, 2023
THE CALLS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE! Report: Chinese Spy Balloon Used U.S. Internet Provider.
The balloon connected to a U.S.-based company, according to the assessment, to send and receive communications from China, primarily related to its navigation. Officials familiar with the assessment said it found that the connection allowed the balloon to send burst transmissions, or high-bandwidth collections of data over short periods of time.
The Biden administration sought a highly secretive court order from the federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect intelligence about it while it was over the U.S., according to multiple current and former U.S. officials. How the court ruled has not been disclosed.
Such a court order would have allowed U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct electronic surveillance on the balloon as it flew over the U.S. and as it sent and received messages to and from China, the officials said, including communications sent via the American internet service provider.
That’s in addition to earlier reports that US-made equipment was found inside the balloon’s hardware: Chinese spy balloon used US technology: Report.
In February, Noah Rothman described the spy balloon as being an actual ‘Sputnik Moment,’ but in 1957, Ike was much more concerned about US enemies, in sharp contrast to Sundown Joe and his Obama-era retread handlers in 2023:
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Mugshots shared on social media by California law enforcement must use name and pronouns provided by arrestee, new law says.
SO ABOUT LAST NIGHT’S COWBOYS-LIONS GAME: Refs Appear To Steal Win From Detroit On Atrocious Call.
It’s hard to not understand Campbell being so unbelievably upset and frustrated. Instead of leaving Dallas with a 21-20 win and a 12-4 record, the Lions went home with a loss after a truly mind-boggling call.
Everyone on Detroit’s sideline seems to believe Decker reported, and the film appears to confirm that. Instead, the refs claim a different player reported as eligible and flagged the successful conversion.
Either every single person on the Lions is wrong and the tape is wrong or the refs made a massive mistake.
Or, after the ref’s call, Lions coach Dan Campbell could have sent his team out to kick the extra point instead of childishly ordering up three high-risk two point conversions in a row at the end of the game, and sent it into overtime:
The Lions succeeded in creating confusion. Three linemen — 58, 68 and 70 — all walk/run toward the ref. How many Lions does it take to report 1 lineman as eligible? 68 needed a personal escort from 58? 70 ran onto the field making a beeline for the ref as if he's reporting… https://t.co/ZoA3yK9Ovj
— Jason Whitlock (@WhitlockJason) December 31, 2023
RIP: Dan Greenburg, droll humorist and author, dies at 87.
Dan Greenburg, who gained a national following with his irreverent, mordantly funny books about sex, marriage and Jewish mothers, then reached a far younger audience with chapter books about paranormal adventures and a math-averse superhero named Maximum Boy, died Dec. 18 at a hospice center in the Bronx. He was 87.
The cause was complications of a stroke he had last year, said his son, journalist and author Zack O’Malley Greenburg.
A onetime industrial designer with a fondness for tongue-in-cheek humor, Mr. Greenburg wrote more than 70 books but was probably best known for his first, the 1964 bestseller “How to Be a Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual.” The satirical self-help guide sought to answer such pressing questions as “How many miles away should you allow your child to move?” (the answer came in the form of a math equation: “Distance = M.P.H. x Lambchop Defrosting Time”), elucidated culinary techniques like the “Proper Form for Administering the Second Helping” and featured a glossary for terms such as “unmarried surgeon: the answer to a mother’s prayer.”
“Give your son Marvin two sports shirts as a present,” Mr. Greenburg advised in one chapter. “The first time he wears one of them, look at him sadly and say in your Basic Tone of Voice: ‘The other one you didn’t like?’ ”
While Borscht Belt comedians had long poked fun at the image of the anxious, overbearing Jewish mother, Mr. Greenburg’s book reached a wider audience, selling more than 270,000 copies in its first year alone. The book “established the Jewish mother as a nationally and internationally recognized stereotype,” according to “You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother,” by Joyce Antler. It was adapted into a hit 1965 comedy album by actress Gertrude Berg, and two years later it made its way to Broadway in the form of a short-lived musical revue.
Greenburg’s book eventually became a springboard for one of the funniest hours of television ever produced: When the Jewish Mother Was an Icon.
A half hour before the taping started on November 12, 1970, Mel Brooks went into the bleachers in the studio at WNEW, New York City’s Channel 5, and warmed up the crowd. It was like he was back to his days as a tummler working the crowd in a Catskills resort. “He was in the audience doing shtick,” Greenburg remembered. “He was so on it was unbelievable.” Laughter rumbled through the set by the time [David] Susskind started his introductions at the top of the program. Usually unflappable, Susskind was breaking up as George Segal lovingly blew thick clouds of cigar smoke into the host’s face.
Within moments, Brooks went into overdrive. He announced in all the years he lived with his mother, he had never seen a piece of furniture. Sheets to keep the dust off had always covered it. “But what’s criminal is that my mother has four great paintings that we’ve never seen,” he proclaimed. When Goldberg talked about how the small Jewish population was dispersed in his hometown of Kansas City, Brooks said: “I bet they all get together for pogrom—gathered in one big Jew cellar while the Gentiles go thundering by!”
Susskind started [David] Steinberg off by asking if his mother were still alive. The comic stared into space as if he were trying to remember. He then described a dream in which they were in a ballroom on a luxury liner. “We danced until dawn,” he said. “I’m three and she’s 52 and I’m just about to get her into my crib—and I wake up.”
Brooks topped him later by claiming he had left the Jewish faith because the sign of the cross was easy to make in a time of panic. He demonstrated how a Star of David would require both hands. “Two triangles,” he said. “That’s a lot of work!”
The show became a joyride powered by a relentless, unpredictable Brooks, who could fill any pause in the conversation with a routine or a song. The performance had the technical crew in the show’s control room rocking with laughter. Assistant director Jim Shasky said the camera operators on the studio floor laughed so hard they were unable to keep their shots steady. “The live audience really set the tone,” said Herman. “I remember one of my assistants, a redhead, was the only person not laughing. She was a nice non–Jewish girl from California. I don’t think she knew what was going on.”
“It was anarchy,” said Segal, who sent the studio audience into convulsions when he got up from his chair to do a song from his days as a Dixieland jazz bandleader and stepped on the cord of the lavaliere microphone that hung around his neck. He started to choke when the cord tightened like a noose. When Susskind got face to face with Segal to help him, the actor looked in the host’s eyes and said softly, “What are you doing later?”
But it was Brooks who kept on taking command. He thought of the rest of the panel as straight men, and they knew it. “They were all funny,” he said. “As far as I was concerned they were very, very good, but I was better. It was just give me the mike and stand back and I’ll take care of the evening.”
“Mel has got that streak in him, that ‘I’m taking this over no matter what,’?” Segal said. “Welcome to the Mel Brooks Show. But that was okay. He was being Mel and that was the best part of him really. I don’t know what you call that kind of aggression, but it certainly worked on that show. Mel was totally comfortable with David Susskind. David kept giving him rope and Mel kept advancing.”
“Mel and I were sort of discovering each other there,” said Steinberg. “You could see me half improvising and finding material I didn’t even know I had on the show. At some point I realized all I wanted to do—whatever subject David Susskind hasn’t found, I wanted to find another one for Mel.”
* * * * * * * *
Brooks didn’t recall any immediate response to “How to Be a Jewish Son.” After viewers clamored for Susskind to run it again, the show was repeated annually around New Year’s Day. Its popularity and legend grew along with Brooks as he became a major comedy box office attraction as a director and performer during the 1970s with Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety, and Silent Movie. “Suddenly I’d hear about the show from one person and another,” he recalled. “It was very much like The Producers,” referring to his first film, released in 1968. “It made an explosion when it opened, and it was kind of quiet and little by little it gathered its own steam and its own force and moved forward. It got to be legendary. The same thing happened with this show. You never know what’s going to happen. Who knew that this little roundtable interview show, certainly not a great forum for my talent, would be one of the best things I ever did in my life? It would launch me as a first-rate comic personality. Who the hell knew? It was amazing.”
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a complete unedited version of the show online, but it’s been uploaded to YouTube in a series of 15 minute clips:
Click over to YouTube to see the rest.
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Raskin: Trump Among Tiny Number of People Who Have ‘Disqualified Themselves’ for Presidency.
[Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD)] added, “If they’re falling for the argument that this is undemocratic. Is it undemocratic that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jennifer Granholm can’t run for president because they weren’t born in the country? Of all of the forms of disqualification that we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic. It’s the one where people choose themselves to be disqualified in terms of your age or where you were born. That’s not up to. But Donald Trump is in that tiny, tiny number of people who have essentially disqualified themselves.”
The effete left has never looked too fondly at Queens, but I’m really looking forward to Raskin explaining how Trump is blocked by “Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution, which reads, ‘No person except a natural born citizen … shall be eligible to the office of President.’”
TO SERVE MAN: Cops: Pastor Tried To Deep-Fry McDonald’s Cook.
Latoya Gladney, a 44-year-old manager in training at a McDonald’s in North Carolina, told police that her employees were “disrespecting” her last night, so she called her husband “to assist her.”
Investigators allege that when Dwayne Waden, a 57-year-old church pastor, subsequently arrived at the restaurant in High Point, he chose not to turn the other cheek.
Cops say Waden walked into the kitchen and began punching Theodore Garlington, a McDonald’s cook, in the face. Waden also allegedly wrapped his hands around Garlington’s neck and began “pushing his head toward the deep fryer,” according to a police report.
Before Garlington, 34, could be dipped in hot oil, several employees interceded, pulling Waden (seen at right) off the victim.
To be fair, with 2023 winding down rapidly, McDonald’s is really running late in adding McSoylent to its menu.
2023 HAS EXPOSED THE MORAL DEPRAVITY OF THE RADICAL LEFT:
When Hamas sent men on paragliders, motorbikes and in jeeps into southern Israel on 7 October – murdering, raping, mutilating and kidnapping as many Jews as they could find – I thought those on the anti-Israel left would be forced to reassess. Forced to rethink their years of Hamas apologism – their thinly veiled support for these Jew-hating maniacs, who they have long whitewashed as a ‘legitimate resistance movement’ in Palestine.
After all, that dark day these supposed leftists were – or rather should have been – confronted by the barbaric consequences of their own luxury beliefs. They were shown, beyond doubt, that Hamas’s genocidal founding charterwas not just talk – that Hamas was not in fact ‘dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and long-term peace and social justice in the whole region’, as one Jeremy Corbyn once put it.
But they didn’t reassess. Many leftists openly celebrated the pogrom, hailing it as a ‘day of celebration’. The Socialist Worker called on its nine readers to ‘rejoice’. Many initially giddy tweets were deleted, as the more savvy left-wingers settled in to blaming Israel for being attacked and refusing to believe women were raped. It was victim-blaming on a geopolitical scale; atrocity denial for the Twitterring, TikToking age.
These supposed anti-racists happily provided cover for the world’s oldest bigotry. Many openly engaged in it themselves. Meanwhile, these supposed anti-fascists turned a blind eye as ‘pro-Palestine’ protests turned our streets into an open sewer of Jew hatred. Genocidal slogans were chanted. Swastikas were brandished. Hate crime soared. And they just didn’t care.
Of course, some things haven’t changed much, such as hiding behind moralistic euphemisms, something the left has specialized in for almost a century: This Isn’t ‘Bibi’s War’—It’s Israel’s.
The suggestion that this military campaign is some right-wing adventure or that it is Netanyahu’s alone is insulting to Israelis, who have banded together to show that their politically divided society can act as one the instant something more important than electoral jousting demands it. Warren, Castro, Sanders, and others cannot seem to wrap their heads around the concept. They should try harder.
But they won’t.
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Gov. Mike DeWine Vetoes Bill Protecting Kids From ‘Gender-Affirming Care.’
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed a bill to protect minors from experimental transgender medical interventions that are euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care.”
DeWine, a Republican, framed his veto of House Bill 68 on Friday as an effort to bring consensus on a divisive issue and to avoid having the government decide what medical decisions are best for children.
“Were House Bill 68 to become law, Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is best for a child than the two people who love that child the most, the parents,” DeWine said.
And yet, like the late John McCain, his fellow RINO, nothing DeWine will do will ever please the friends he desires on the left: Mike DeWine Seemed Like One of the Few Republicans Serious About Fighting COVID. He’s Not.
UPDATE: Why did Ohio voters have such a sense of Stockholm Syndrome?
https://twitter.com/JesseKellyDC/status/1740805020814135450
(Updated and bumped.)
WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: Portland Poop Crisis Triggers Bacteria Outbreak Normally Found In Third World.
(Classical reference in headline.)
MARK JUDGE: H.L. Mencken and the Worst Experience I Had as a Journalist.
2024 is the year to get out of journalism. The mainstream press has gone woke, which makes for very boring copy. The conservatives hire through nepotism and the buddy system and produce dull journalists. It’s all angry politics, wokeness, and celebrity stalking. There’s no real freedom. There’s no great coverage of the arts that’s the result of years of study and experience. It’s all hackery. A media crisis? It’s a catastrophe.
100 years ago, in January 1924, H.L. Mencken launched a new magazine—The American Mercury. Mencken historian Charles Mott described the Mercury: “It made an impressive appearance as a whacking big octavo in double-column Garamond-set page sheet bound in green covers. It was clearly planned for the more thoughtful reader of a free thinking sort who had fifty cents to spend on a magazine in those inflationary years. For such a reader the contents of the new review were both intellectually exciting and to the last page entertaining.” They reviewed the best books and artists and challenged the prevailing social mores, all with a great sense of fun. The writing was, is, astonishingly alive.
What media product today is “intellectually exciting and to the last page entertaining”? The Bulwark?* National Review? The Nation?
I recently re-read some classic Mencken, including his famous obituary of William Jennings Bryan. It was published in the Mercury in 1925 and is still fantastic: “Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest… He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”
One hundred years after being written, and four decades after I first read those words as a college student in the 1980s, Mencken still remains more real, hilarious and bracing than anything I’ve read in the media in years.
* The Bulwark, of course! Just ask its founder: Hilarious! Bill Kristol Claims He Is Still a ‘Reagan Republican’ and Twitter Collapses In Giggles.
L.A. REMAINS TRAPPED IN 2020: Los Angeles And Other Blue Areas Bring Mask Mandates Back For 2024.
For most people across the country, mask mandates are a distant, hated memory. But for the remaining sane individuals in heavily populated areas like Los Angeles, the Bay Area, New York or parts of Illinois, they’re once again becoming an immediate, horrifying reality.
Just last month, a number of counties in Northern California reinstated mask mandates in healthcare settings.
While some of those counties limited the mask requirements to the employees working in hospitals, a few others also required patients and visitors to wear face coverings. And now those rules are expanding to the nation’s largest county, yet again.
Los Angeles County public health covertly changed their masking requirements on Friday evening, based essentially on nothing. Out of nowhere, the county now requires everyone entering healthcare facilities to wear a mask. Employees, patients, visitors…everyone. Because of a nonsensical, meaningless CDC created metric on COVID hospitalizations.
Entirely coincidentally, I’m sure: Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time.
Earlier, from Jack Dunphy: The Slow, Agonizing Death of Los Angeles. “I was born in Los Angeles and spent most of my life within its city limits. My father was born there, also, and by the standards of L.A., where most people’s roots are as deep as a tumbleweed’s, this is rather like tracing one’s lineage back to the Mayflower. About twelve years ago, while still employed with the Los Angeles Police Department, I made what was at the time an anguished decision to move my family to the suburbs. Today, the only anguish I feel about Los Angeles comes when I’m obligated to go there for some work, social, or entertainment activity, and I’m grateful these are more infrequent as the years pass.”
December 30, 2023
RIP: Tom Wilkinson, Oscar-Nominated Actor Known for ‘Michael Clayton’ and ‘The Full Monty,’ Dies at 75. “His other film credits include playing Gotham villain Carmine Falcone in Christopher Nolan’s 2005 film Batman Begins and former president Lyndon B. Johnson in Selma and roles in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Debt, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Belle, Sense and Sensibility, RocknRolla, Rush Hour, The Patriot, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Black Knight, Valkyrie, The Lone Ranger, Denial and Snowden. On the small screen, he also appeared in The Kennedys, The Gathering Storm and David Copperfield.”
SKYNET SMILES, IS LOOKING FORWARD TO BEING THE NEXT PRESIDENT* OF HARVARD: A New Kind of AI Copy Can Fully Replicate Famous People. The Law Is Powerless.
Martin Seligman, the influential American psychologist, found himself pondering his legacy at a dinner party in San Francisco one late February evening. The guest list was shorter than it used to be: Seligman is 81, and six of his colleagues had died in the early Covid years. His thinking had already left a profound mark on the field of positive psychology, but the closer he came to his own death, the more compelled he felt to help his work survive.
The next morning he received an unexpected email from an old graduate student, Yukun Zhao. His message was as simple as it was astonishing: Zhao’s team had created a “virtual Seligman.”
Zhao wasn’t just bragging. Over two months, by feeding every word Seligman had ever written into cutting-edge AI software, he and his team had built an eerily accurate version of Seligman himself — a talking chatbot whose answers drew deeply from Seligman’s ideas, whose prose sounded like a folksier version of Seligman’s own speech, and whose wisdom anyone could access.
Impressed, Seligman circulated the chatbot to his closest friends and family to check whether the AI actually dispensed advice as well as he did. “I gave it to my wife and she was blown away by it,” Seligman said.
The bot, cheerfully nicknamed “Ask Martin,” had been built by researchers based in Beijing and Wuhan — originally without Seligman’s permission, or even awareness.
The Chinese-built virtual Seligman is part of a broader wave of AI chatbots modeled on real humans, using the powerful new systems known as large language models to simulate their personalities online. Meta is experimenting with licensed AI celebrity avatars; you can already find internet chatbots trained on publicly available material about dead historical figures.
* Oh heck, simply the next president, given Obama and Biden’s apparent love of the cut and paste tool.
ROGER KIMBALL: When will Harvard give Claudine Gay the boot?
First, there were the allegations of plagiarism. The charges began in a halting, tentative fashion. Harvard tried to circle its wagons, too, insisting that it was merely a matter of “duplicative language” (I hope they give the genius who dreamed up that euphemism a PhD). But the jackals were on the case now, and it was soon revealed that, paltry though Gay’s publication history was, it was shot through with gobbets of unacknowledged borrowings.
Then came Christopher Brunet and Francis Menton, who showed that Gay was not simply guilty of plagiarism, but of data falsification to boot. There are wheels with wheels to this story, perhaps the choicest being Harvard’s heavy-handed attempt to silence the New York Post, which had begun investigating the charges of plagiarism back in October. “Then it emerged,” Menton explains, “that… the Post had sent [the allegations] to Harvard for confirmation — only to get in return a threatening letter from the Clare Locke law firm (the same firm that had recovered over $700 million from Fox in the Dominion Voting case) asserting that the accusations of plagiarism were ‘demonstrably false.’” That was right before the Washington Free Beacon) another cache of “duplicative language” — some forty instances, “almost four,” Menton notes, “for each of Ms. Gay’s eleven academic articles.”
Many of my friends are demanding that Claudine Gay be given the push. Probably, she will eventually have to go. The billionaire Harvard donor — make that “former Harvard donor” — Bill Ackman recently tweeted that he had heard that the Harvard Corporation had asked for Gay’s resignation but “she has refused.” Delicious if true. My own feeling is that the longer Gay stays at Harvard, the more she calls attention to the Hindenburg-like flatulence of that morally and intellectually bankrupt institution. Claudine Gay is bad for Harvard, but Harvard is bad for the country, so her continued presence is a net positive.
So is Harvard simply crossing its legal t’s and dotting its contractual i’s before showing Gay to the exit door, or will she survive? Regarding the latter possibility: The DEI cosa nostra: Why Claudine Gay will survive Harvard’s antisemitism scandal.
SOD OFF, SWAMPY: WaPo: Why these homes in the hottest places don’t need AC.
All of these technologies have their contemporary equivalents: Electric fans, swamp coolers and insulation. But throughout the Earth’s hot zones, many of them in the Global South, the new technologies are expensive, and create dependence on erratic electrical grids and networks of production, commerce and transportation that are alien, and unsustainable.
The old technologies are also a resource: They offer a way forward, architecturally, culturally and climatically, not just for torrid zones in Egypt or Turkey, but for heavily populated regions throughout the world that rely on precarious sources of power. From Cairo to California, there are architects who are already incorporating these technologies in contemporary buildings. But there are multiple challenges: overcoming skepticism among people long dependent on modern systems, recalibrating what it means and feels like to be comfortable, and recovering and preserving the wisdom of vernacular systems.
The last of these challenges — undoing erasure and forgetting — is urgent. The few remaining houses from Fathy’s original plan are crumbling in New Gourna. In the searingly hot Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, in southeast Turkey, civil unrest and oppression has led to whole swaths of the ancient town, full of historic stone homes with complex fountain systems, being demolished. And in Cairo — where some of the world’s most sophisticated passively cooled houses were built centuries ago — decay, neglect and government sponsored demolition threaten to erase invaluable heritage.
Okay Washington Post, put your reporting into action, and lead the charge to translate that into something much more local: Ban A/C for DC!
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Sam Bankman-Fried spared from second trial.
U.S. prosecutors dropped plans for a second trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange.
In a letter filed in a Manhattan federal court Friday, prosecutors said “strong public interest” in a prompt resolution of their case against Bankman-Fried outweighed the benefits of a second trial.
Bankman-Fried was accused of looting $8 billion from FTX customers out of sheer greed.
Last month, he was convicted of fraud and conspiracy.
And would have faced a second set of six charges including campaign finance violations, conspiracy to commit bribery, and others.
Those six charges were severed from his first trial.
Flashback: FTX Founder Spent $40 Million As Democrat Midterm Megadonor.
Leading up to Sam Bankman-Fried’s spectacular implosion – in which his firm FTX evaporated billions in wealth after the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange allegedly commingled client assets with his trading firm into a liquidity crunch – he became the sixth-largest donor in this year’s midterm election cycle, giving some $40 million to mostly Democratic candidates and causes.
According to Forbes, Bankman-Fried was second only to George Soros among billionaire donors to Democratic groups during the 2022 midterm election cycle.
FTX allegedly loaned Alameda Research – a trading firm founded by Bankman-Fried – roughly $10 billion in client assets, which has landed him under federal investigation by the SEC, CTFC, and the Justice Department – the latter of which already had been working on a months-long investigation, according to the Wall Street Journal. The CTFC, meanwhile, is tasked with regulating certain elements of the crypto markets – including digital assets that are as commodities, and crypto exchanges and clearinghouses.
In late September, Bankman-Fried admitted that his political donations were mostly to Democrats, and Republican recipients were ‘targeted’.
Sealed with a kiss, you might say:
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA:
● Shot: California Taxes Are Among the Highest in the Nation.
—The Balance, January 6th, 2023.
And as a result:
● Chaser: List: California ranked in bottom 10 of charitable states.
—Fox 11 Los Angeles, Thursday.
Earlier: Homelessness is Mostly a California Problem: Raw data: Homelessness is down everywhere except California.
AND AFTER ALL QUEERS FOR PALESTINE HAVE DONE FOR THEM: FBI Lists San Fran as ‘Attractive Target’ for Terrorist Attack on New Year’s Eve.
But in case Fun City is feeling jealous: Authorities prepare for New Year’s Eve in Times Square and across the US as Israel-Hamas war presents elevated threats.
Fortunately though, the Biden administration is taking threats of terrorist attacks quite seriously, beginning with upping border security to the nth degree:
This is why you only see illegal migrants with small backpacks.
This driver carries all the people's bags across the border, so when the migrants are illegally crossing into the USA, they don't have to carry anything.
It's a whole operation.
This footage is in Eagle Pass,… pic.twitter.com/I1AB4BddKW
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) December 29, 2023
And by commissioning states to help as well:
DEMOCRATS DISPROVE CLAIMS THEY WILL COVERTLY RIG ELECTION BY RIGGING IT IN PLAIN SIGHT: Federal Government Operatives And Soros Money Behind Plot To Keep Trump Off Ballot.
Maine’s top election official removed Trump from the state’s 2024 primary ballot on Thursday, joining the Colorado Supreme Court in disqualifying Trump from running for president. Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows determined that Trump was ineligible to run under the 14th Amendment due to his alleged role in the January 6 Capitol riot.
“Tonight’s decision relied heavily on the precedents CREW’s clients set first in New Mexico in 2022, then again in Colorado last week,” said Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). “These decisions make it clear that nobody, including the former president, is above the law.”
But the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the storming of the Capitol was a security failure, not a coup attempt, and that undercover law enforcement informants or officers may have allowed, or even encouraged, it to happen. January 6 prosecutors have failed to prove a clear link between the rioters and Trump or his associates. And the fact that the Department of Justice declined to indict Trump for inciting an insurrection is a tacit recognition that Trump’s words leading up to the riot were legal speech.
Even some Democrats and mainstream news commentators agree the Maine decision has no merit. Said CNN’s senior legal analyst yesterday, about Bellows’ removal of Trump from the ballot, “She based her ruling on a lot of documents, but also YouTube clips, news reports, things that would never pass the bar in normal court. She’s not a lawyer, by the way.”
In trying to keep Trump off the ballot, Democrats and progressive advocacy groups say that they are protecting democracy. It’s true that some of Trump’s rhetoric is alarming to many liberal voters. For example, Trump recently said, after being asked if he would be a dictator if elected in 2024, “No, no, no, other than day one. We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.’”
But America’s system of checks and balances survived one term of Trump and would survive another. During Trump’s presidency, the separation of powers, backed by the Constitution and the American people, remained in place. The real threat to democracy today comes from those trying to deny the American people their right to vote for the candidate of their choosing.
Democrats might not enjoy living under the new rules they’ve created: The New Rules Dictate That Biden Be Struck From the Ballot With the 25th Amendment.
Or perhaps they will, at least next year:
(Classical reference in headline.)
DECK CHAIRS REPOSITIONED ON TITANIC: No one talks about Ukraine anymore.
Ukraine’s anguishing self-defense is not a novel. But we’re quietly losing interest in this conflict — I include myself — because it’s not satisfying our fictional appetites. Recall that about a year ago I worried here that our narrative expectations of this war may be taking us into the realm of fantasy. I observed glumly that the war’s probable resolution is an ugly moral compromise that sacrifices a goodly chunk of a sovereign nation to a monomaniacal bully — who will doubtless spin Ukrainian concessions as a dazzling military success, one that redeems for the Russian people his unprovoked aggression and the many deaths of their sons, brothers and fathers.
This endgame is more likely than ever. I’m not happy about that. In fact, it makes me sick. But the average age of the Ukrainian army is now forty-three, a statistic that makes me even sicker. They’re running out of young men, not because the young men won’t serve but because they’re dead. Ukrainian women are being sent to the front lines. Russia had nearly four times the population of Ukraine before the war; given the reduced population in Kyiv-controlled areas, the countries are now mismatched in manpower by a factor of five. With his legacy and political future on the line, Putin is clearly all-in for the long haul. The easily manipulated Russian public have not rebelled. Putin’s inner sanctum hasn’t staged a coup. Russian GDP has increased since last year. The rouble started rising against the dollar. Western sanctions have failed.
I don’t share the view of many Republicans that Ukraine should be thrown under a bus because the country is none of our business and America should spend taxpayers’ money on solutions to its own problems. But just because the conflict’s resolution has major geopolitical ramifications doesn’t mean we can write our own happy ending. No matter how much ordnance the US and NATO ship to Zelensky, we’re not providing the soldiers obliged to wield it. I say this with a heavy heart: if the writing is on the wall — if a negotiated settlement that cedes captured territory to Putin looks inevitable — maybe it’s time to urge the Zelensky government to enter talks to bring this depressing war to its depressing conclusion. Dragging out an entrenched stalemate merely racks up a higher body count and destroys more Ukrainian homes and infrastructure to no purpose. Sitting back and giving Ukrainians just enough weaponry to keep fighting to the last man and woman, only for the country to finally end up where we always knew it would, is not just immoral. It’s murder.
“No one talks about Ukraine anymore,” in part because the Washington Post has moved the topic to the backburner: WaPo: Ukraine War Is No Longer Newsworthy.
The Ukraine war has been one of the top drop-down items on the Washington Post’s web masthead for about two years. During that time, it was the cause celebre of all the best people, and it was widely assumed for most of that time that it would result in a triumph for the good guys.
But lately, things have turned sour in Ukraine. The hoped-for breakthroughs from the counteroffensive didn’t happen, and despite the West pouring more aid into Ukraine than Russia’s entire defense budget, the basic math of warfare never looked great for Ukraine.
Reality reasserted itself.
Russia has never been sophisticated at warfare, and they always do poorly at the beginning stages of a war (sort of the opposite of the United States). Russia’s superpower is the ruthlessness of its leadership; the Russians seem willing to use their citizens as cannon fodder, expending men the way the US expends bullets.
Ukraine’s success early in the war was miraculous, seemingly based on having far superior training and discipline than the Russians. I cheered them on as they pushed back Russia’s offensive and remain impressed by their limited progress in pushing Russian advances back.
But the current battle lines are similar to what they were at the outbreak of the war, and dislodging the Russian army from well-prepared defenses is almost certainly beyond Ukraine’s capabilities.
Understandably, the mood in the West about the war has turned sour. Lots of money is being spent, and lives lost, to seemingly no purpose. Zelenskyy seems to be the only leader left who believes that Ukraine can push Russia out of Ukrainian territory that it has held for nearly a decade.
One reason why the WaPo has begun to bury Ukraine headlines is the possibility that 2024 could be quite an ugly end to the battle: With hopes of victory fading, Ukraine’s war against Russia could get even harder in 2024.
Which America’s most profligate president will likely blame on Congressional Republicans: Joe Biden Wants to Kill Ukraine Funding And Blame the GOP For It.
JUST MSNBC THE MORAL EQUIVALENCE! Chris Matthews Says Addressing Rural Americans’ Anger Is Like ‘Fighting Terrorism.’
It never ceases to amaze me how members of the left-wing chattering class have no idea why regular folks despise them. Former MSNBC host Chris Matthews recently illustrated the type of condescending attitude towards a wide swath of Americans that is typical of progressive elites who remain insulated in their comfy echo chambers.
During a Tuesday appearance on “Morning Joe,” he chimed in on the anger displayed by rural Americans towards members of the media and liberal establishment, claiming that dealing with these individuals was somehow akin to fighting terrorists.
Matthews began his comments by pointing out that “people that didn’t go to college have a pretty good rage on their hands,” and noted that those living in rural America “are so angry at the liberal establishment, the coastal elite.”
The former MSNBC host went on to describe how rural folks feel about “those people on Saturday Night Live.”
“And the regular guy in the country goes, there they are snarling and making fun of us again. And every time we make fun of Trump, we’re making fun of them. That’s the weird… It’s a weird thing, but in a way, it’s like fighting terrorism. We think we just put the army in or Israel just puts the IDF and they’re going to solve the problem. It never solves the problem because you enrage people. And we did it with Afghanistan and we did it with Iraq. We enraged the enemy to the point where they were more fiery than ever and they hate us more than ever.”
Chris is returning to his roots (so angry over Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s, he once guest-hosted for Rush Limbaugh) by reminding those still at MSNBC that the left once again views terrorists as the good guys:
● TikTok made Gen Z pro-Palestine.
● Influencer Society and Its Future. Swallow the Ted pill on Unabomber stan TikTok.
● And as Chris himself noted in early 2020: Soleimani killing on par with deaths of Elvis, Princess Diana.
And perhaps Chris is preparing his former MSNBC colleagues for the future: How Will Modern Spin Doctors Address The Demise Of America’s Most Famous Eco-Terrorists?