Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

ROGER KIMBALL: The Biden crime family is our own reality-TV mafia show.

For one thing, as the legal commentator Jonathan Turley and others pointed out, the gun charges against Hunter appear to insulate the Big Guy, Mr. 10 percent, master of  the pseudonymous email handles, President Joe Biden.

And remember, it’s not just dear old dad who is being protected here. The bank records released by the House Oversight Committee in August show that Hunter received millions of the crispest from Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, the wife of the Mayor of Moscow.

The last time I checked, one of my least favorite constitutional amendments, the 16th, stipulated that Congress could put its hands in your pocket for “taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived.” There is no exception for money-for-access from Russian Oligarchs, Ukrainian businessmen, Chinese or Romanian shakedown artists. As Turley observed in one of his great moments of understatement, Hunter is “not going to be held accountable for the full range of the potential crimes here.”

I doubt that he will be held accountable at all, though given the Hindenburg-like implosion of the Biden administration, I can see how a truth-is-stranger than fiction scenario could unfold whereby Joe agrees to step aside to spend more time with his fantasy in exchange for Hunter quietly having the hook extracted from his mouth and getting tossed back in the pond to swim away. Stay tuned.

And the beat goes on: Hunter Biden Sues IRS. “He wants his tax charges dismissed, and he knows that Very Special Counsel David Weiss wants to dismiss those charges. But Weiss can’t do that, because the public objects. So Hunter files an absolutely baseless suit. This will give David Weiss the pretext for dismissing the charges. Just as in a normal Sue & Settle political op, Weiss will claim that he was legally forced to do what the public did not want him to do. Because Lawsuit.”

MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: WTH? What is going on in Plum Grove, Texas, Governor Abbott?

The community is called Colony Ridge and it is located in Plum Grove, Texas. Plum Grove is a small town in Liberty County and is north of Houston. I live in Houston. I write about illegal immigration and the Biden border crisis every week, sometimes every day. I try to keep up with it as best as I can because it is destroying our country, whether that is something people want to know about or not. So imagine my shock to read this report at the Daily Wire and discover this community just north of the city in which I live. I had no idea it is there.

This is a huge story and Republican voters should be outraged because Republican lawmakers, including Governor Abbott, are dragged into it. The development of Colony Ridge is sprawling and growing.

Read the whole thing.

VDH: Welcome to Post-Postmodern America.

[C]ash strapped border states started busing their illegal aliens to sanctuary blue-state jurisdictions.

Almost immediately, once magnanimous liberals, whether in Martha’s Vineyard, Chicago, or Manhattan, stopped virtue-signaling their support for open borders.

Instead, soon they went berserk over the influx.

So now an embarrassed Biden administration still wishes illegal aliens to keep coming, but to stay far away from their advocates — by forcing them to remain in Texas.

That means the president has redefined the U.S. border. It rests now apparently north of Texas, as Biden cedes sovereignty to Mexico.

Pre-civilizational greens in California prefer blowing up dams to building them.

They couldn’t care less that their targeted reservoirs help store water in drought, prevent flooding, enhance irrigation, offer recreation, and generate clean hydroelectric power.

Now an absurd green California is currently destroying four dams on the Klamath River. In adding insult to injury, it is paying the half-billion dollar demolition cost in part through a water bond that state voters once thought would build new — not explode existing — dams.

Read the whole thing.

 

MARINE CORPS LEADER ORDERS SAFETY STAND-DOWN OF ALL AIRCRAFT AFTER F-35 DISAPPEARANCE:

All Marine Corps aircraft, inside and outside the U.S., were grounded Monday after a stealth F-35 jet mysteriously disappeared in South Carolina, according to an order issued by Gen. Eric Smith, the acting commandant of the Marines.

Marine aircraft deployed abroad or with imminent missions can delay the order briefly but are expected to stand down for two days this week, officials said.

The Pentagon said in a statement that the pause in operations would allow units “to discuss aviation safety matters and best practices.” Marine leadership will use the stand down “to ensure the service is maintaining operational standardization of combat-ready aircraft with well-prepared pilots and crews.”

The debris of the crashed F-35 has since been found; America’s Newspaper of Record explains the method used: Military Personnel Seen Wandering Forest Pressing Button On F-35 Key Fob.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? Just What Chicago Needs, Government-Owned Grocery Stores.

Now, no doubt Chicago’s city-run grocery stores would have the same service, efficiency, and quality that Chicago residents have come to expect from the local government of a city ranked 149th in its financial stability, 67th in its education system, 71st in its health-care system, 80th in its public safety, 129th in the quality of its economy, or, credit where it’s due, 37th in its infrastructure and pollution. (That’s out of 149 U.S. cities.)

Call me crazy, but I think if you had safe streets and no shoplifting and petty theft, grocery stores could thrive in any neighborhood, because people have to eat. The good news is that so far this year, murder is down in Chicago, with “only”435 people killed from the beginning of the year to September 10, compared to 485 people in the same time period last year. The bad news is that overall, major crimes are up 30 percent from the same period last year. Motor-vehicle theft has nearly doubled from last year.

What could possibly go wrong? Boris Yeltsin knew: When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Houston:

About a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin’s next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn’t stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia.

In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits. Two years later, he left the Communist Party and began making reforms to turn the economic tide in Russia. You can blame those frozen Jell-O Pudding pops.

“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin wrote. “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.”

It is terrible to think about – but not terrible enough for Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.

NATIONALLY SOCIALIST TELEVISION NETWORK PBS HYPES SMEAR ON ‘POPULAR AUTHORITARIAN MOVEMENT WITHIN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY:’

[PBS host Laura Barron-Lopez]: ….Their new book, Tyranny of the Minority, concludes that part of the problem lies in the Constitution.

* * * * * * * *

Ziblatt: ….What’s so striking, though, because we have a federal system, that there are states in the United States where there are assaults on voting rights taking place, where there’s extreme levels of gerrymandering, so that it makes it possible for a party that doesn’t win the most votes to actually win control of state legislatures, where courts are then packed at the local — at the state level as well. So what we see across the United States is increasingly a divide between states where you continue to have voting rights and democracy and states where democracy is really under assault.

Yet after all the guff about the Republican threat to traditional governance, Barron-Lopez lets the authors explain why, in her words, the U.S. Constitution “is part of the problem, is part of what’s imperiling democracy.” So chuck the Constitution in the name of protecting Democracy? Harvard hates the Constitution, too.

CNN, interviewing the same authors, agrees that pesky Constitution must go as well: CNN Gets Roasted for Absurd Chyron Warning Constitution is ‘Outdated, Puts Democracy at Risk.

I’M NOT ENTIRELY SURE, BUT IT’S POSSIBLE KURT SCHLICHTER IS NOT A VERY BIG FAN OF MITT ROMNEY: That Miserable Bag Of Goo Mitt Romney Slinks Away Humiliated.

I knew there was something wrong with Mitt Romney, really wrong, when my mom – a daughter of Pennsylvania’s steel mill country, but a dedicated Republican, told me back in 2012, “I just don’t like him.” Of course, those steel mills are all gone now, moved to China by guys who either were, or looked exactly like, Mitt Romney. Now he’s finally calling it quits as a senator, apparently by popular demand. His departure is cause for celebration. Mitt Romney is a bad person who pretends to be a good person. He is the blow-dried embodiment of everything awful about the Republican Party that used to be. The only good thing about him is the riddance.

Mitt Romney is an empty $5,000 suit, a human Mad-Lib who tries to fill in the blanks with whatever his audience wants to hear. He is Eddie Haskell with incredible hair, who believes in nothing except the desperate imperative of his own success. That success, of course, has been limited – Mitt will be remembered for his failures. Love Trump or hate him, you have to respect the way The Bad Orange Man serially humiliated Mitt by encouraging his ambitions right up to the point where Trump publicly snatched back whatever job he was dangling in front of Romney’s nose. Brutal, and totally deserved.

Mitt believes he deserves the awe of the peasants; why is not so clear. Mitt got quite a head start in life because his dad was a rich guy deep inside Republican politics, and this grates on him. Mitt pulled himself up by his Gucci straps, unlike his nemesis JD Vance, who pulled himself up by his combat boot straps. JD, who was born into desperate poverty and actually worked his way up, was a United States Marine. Mitt couldn’t be troubled to serve in anything but his own cause. His only interaction with Vietnam was to ship American jobs there.

As America’s Newspaper of Record reported last week: Democrats Scramble To Find Replacement For Retiring Mitt Romney.

PUTTIN’ ON THE RITZ! Dems Reveal More ‘Rules for Thee, but Not for Me’ Hypocrisy When It Comes to Senate Dress Code:

Fox’s Chad Pergram posted that now Senators can wear whatever they want, but others must comply with the dress code, which is: “Coats/ties for men. Business attire for women.”

This is coming from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who, as Senate Majority Leader, directed the Senate’s Sergeant at Arms to stop enforcing the rules. “Senators are able to choose what they wear on the Senate floor. I will continue to wear a suit,” Schumer told Axios.

It’s not hard to guess why. Even Axios noted the following in reporting on this change.

The new directive will allow Sen.John Fetterman(D-Pa.), who tends to favorgym shorts and hoodiesover the business attire traditionally required in the chamber, to linger on the Senate floor before and after votes.

Decline is a choice.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

 

JON GABRIEL: Congress ignored warnings about its pandemic spending. Now the bill is coming due.

Rep. Smith, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, called the estimated fraud “the greatest theft of taxpayer dollars in American history.”

I don’t know if it’s the “greatest” — there’s $33 trillion worth of overspending with both parties’ fingerprints all over it.

Back in 1988, the Democratic Party Platform said Republicans had “mortgaged our children’s future by tripling our national debt.” At that time, it was a quaint $2.7 trillion.

In 1996, the Republican Party Platform proclaimed, “We have a moral responsibility not to leave our children a legacy of monstrous debt.” The total then was $5 trillion.

I guess our “children’s future” and our “moral responsibility” doesn’t matter much these days.

Occasionally, a brave senator or representative will point out the tsunami of red ink flowing from the Potomac. Kudos to Sen. Crapo and Rep. Smith for highlighting this latest scandal.

But most politicians have quietly agreed to increase the debt, year in and year out, until the entire artifice collapses from its own weight.

If you thought 2008’s housing bubble was bad, wait until the debt bubble bursts.

Exit quote: “A trillion here, a trillion there can really add up.”

LOS ANGELES ADMITS THAT GAS PRICES ARE OUT OF CONTROL AGAIN:

So, Los Angeles, how is Bidenomics working out for you? To listen to either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, you would think that everything is just going swimmingly. ‘Bidenomics. It’s working!‘ But Angelinos are experiencing a very different reality and all of the political ad campaigns in the world aren’t going to change that. Even the local CBS News outlet was forced to confront the truth this week and they picked one of the most visible indicators that a majority of voters have to confront each and every week. Gas prices are once again going up. And they’ve been going up for months. In fact, they have now reached levels not seen in almost a year, with the average price in Los Angeles County now sitting at more than five and a half dollars per gallon, seemingly destined to break the six-dollar mark before very long.

The average price of a gallon of self-serve regular gasoline in Los Angeles County rose today to its highest amount since Oct. 28, increasing 3.1 cents to $5.65.

The average price has risen 49 times in 54 days, increasing 67.4 cents, including 3.2 cents Thursday, according to figures from the AAA and Oil Price Information Service.

The average price rose 30 consecutive days, making it 19.1 cents more than one week ago, 39.2 cents higher than one month ago and 22.3 cents above what it was one year ago.

But for most California voters, isn’t this all good news? In September of 2019, after CNN’s seven hour “climate change town hall,” Bryan Preston wrote, “Seriously, if you see all of the above — which is just a sample — and vote for any of these people for any office at any level, it’s on you. If you like Venezuela, voting for any of them will bring you a whole lot of Venezuela.”

And as Kate of Small Dead Animals wrote after the CNN horror show, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking they don’t mean it.”

Aren’t California’s High Gas Prices What The Left Have Wanted?

NBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times in lockstep call for higher gas taxes.

● 2008 L.A. Times headline: “The joy of $8 gas.”

● “Under my plan, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket…”

In other words, Obama administration retreads are following the same playbook as the original Obama administration: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden:  As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

So despite Biden claiming today that high gas prices are Putin’s fault, is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.

“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”

Biden praises high gas prices as part of ‘incredible transition’ of the US economy away from fossil fuels.

Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.

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

Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.

Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned

HOWIE CARR: An en masse goodbye to Boston’s biggest hacks of today and yesterday.

Is it too late now for Shannon O’Brien to save her latest hack job by finally showing us her tattoo the way she promised back in 2002?

The state weed czar walked the plank Friday in a pre-Hurricane Lee news dump.

Ironically, she got whacked a day after the guy who defeated her in that 2002 governor’s fight, Mitt Romney, cashed in his chips before his new voters in Utah could give him the same bum’s rush down the steps.

All in all, it was a very bad week for the political protected classes in Boston. Seriously, who could have ever dreamed that Kendra Lara and Ricky Ricardo Arroyo would get fired before Chaim Bloom?

You ask, what did all these pampered pukes have in common, other than a breathtaking sense of entitlement?

They were all creations of the Boston Globe, Mitt perhaps less so than the others. But still, he always groveled before them, hoping to overcome his original sin of being a straight white male Republican who went to church on Sundays.

That’s why Willard marched in those phony-baloney BLM parades in 2020 — with a mask yet! It was to be his baptism into… wokeness.

Go woke, go broke. Now Mitt has sadly learned the same lesson as Transheuser Busch and Disney.

But has he learned any lesson at all? Romney has the most incredible sense of Stockholm Syndrome, considering what the DNC-MSM did to him in 2012. Flashback: Mitt Romney will give first post op-ed TV interview today on CNN.

Earlier:

Related: “I wish Romney had defeated Obama in 2012, but does anyone think this Massachusetts technocrat, who gave us the state-level version of Obamacare in the Bay State, signed up for a regional climate change cap-and-trade scheme, who appointed the egregious Gina McCarthy (Obama’s second EPA administrator) to be his environmental adviser, and appointed state judges who struck the first judicial blows for same-sex marriage, would have governed as a serious conservative had he won?”

ROLLING STONE FOUNDER JANN WENNER: Women, Black Musicians Not ‘Articulate Enough’ on ‘Intellectual Level’ to Feature in New Book.

Pressed to defend his comments in light of figures such as Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin, and Stevie Wonder, Wenner doubled down on his statement. “[G]o have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest,” Wenner pushes back. “You know, Joni was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did. The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock.”

“Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level,” Wenner maintained in a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times published on Friday.

Wenner’s upcoming book, The Masters, features conversations with “philosophers of rock,” including Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Bono. However, Times journalist David Marchese zeroed in on Wenner’s supposed snub of artists who are not “white guys.”

“In the introduction, you acknowledge that performers of color and women performers are just not in your zeitgeist. Which to my mind, is not plausible for Jann Wenner. Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Wonder, the list keeps going — not in your zeitgeist?”

‎Little, Brown and Company, the publisher of Wenner’s forthcoming The Masters is owned by Hachette Book Group. Will they drop the book as they did with Woody Allen’s autobiography in 2020, or were Wenner’s comments too close to its expected publishing date next week to affect its printing?

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO DETROIT: What happened to the great West Coast cities?

Migration patterns have changed as well. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Seattle participated in the region’s boom, which saw the addition of 187,000 domestic migrants. But now the Seattle metropolitan area is losing net migrants while many residents are moving to the state’s smaller metropolitan areas such as Bremerton, Spokane and Olympia.

Portland never achieved Seattle’s economic dynamism but was widely hailed as a model for dense, progressive planning and social liberalism — it positioned itself as a leisure-oriented San Francisco where “young people go to retire.” Despite being the whitest of America’s big cities, it was wracked with almost constant violent protests for much of 2020, extending even to the gentrified Pearl District. Spurred by crime and disorder, the Portland area is now losing domestic migrants. The region added 252,000 net domestic migrants between 2000 and 2020, but since then the Census Bureau has found that Portland’s urban core county, Multnomah, lost 13,000 net domestic migrants while the surrounding suburbs grew modestly.

Some still praise Portland as “an anarchic wonderland.” But now its streets are best known not for quirky food trucks and street musicians but growing fentanyl use. Over the past three years, the LA Times reports, the number of unhoused people in the Portland metro area has jumped from about 4,000 to at least 6,600. Shootings in the city have tripled. Homicides climbed from thirty-six in 2019 to ninety-seven last year. Lower-level crimes have spiked too: more than 11,000 vehicles were stolen in 2022, up from 6,500 in 2019. According to Portland’s KGW-TV, “every forty-two minutes there is a report of vandalism,” often involving broken windows. There were more reports of broken windows last year than during the 2020 riot year.

It is certainly too early to write off the once mighty Pacific cities. They retain many critical natural assets: they’re near mountains and spectacular water views; they have relatively mild climates (likely a big plus in a period of global warming), and a concentration of promising industries. The education base from the University of Washington, Berkeley, UCLA, Caltech and other top schools still gives the region a headstart in many promising industries.

In each of these Western cities, the key challenge is political. No one should expect a GOP resurgence, but there has been some modest pushback to the progressive agenda. San Francisco, for example, removed some particularly radical school board members and replaced its ultra-lenient DA, as did Seattle. There are stirrings in minority communities, as evidenced by a growing shift of Asian and Latino voters to the right, and in Oakland, the local NAACP recently denounced lax policing as a cause of growing violence, particularly in the black community.

Gooder and harder.

DISPATCHES FROM THE PARTY OF TOLERANCE FOR DIVERSITY: Jann Wenner Removed From Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation Board of Directors.

The move comes directly following an interview published by the New York Times Friday, in which Wenner, 77, addressed criticism of the scope of coverage in his new book The Masters, published through Little, Brown and Company.

In The Masters Wenner looks back at a collection of his interviews conducted in his years at Rolling Stone — all with white men, including Bono, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Pete Townshend.

* * * * * * * *

“When I was referring to the zeitgeist, I was referring to Black performers, not to the female performers, OK? Just to get that accurate,” Wenner told the NYT‘s David Marchese. “The selection was not a deliberate selection. It was kind of intuitive over the years; it just fell together that way. The people had to meet a couple criteria, but it was just kind of my personal interest and love of them. Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.”

Wenner clarified: “It’s not that they’re not creative geniuses. It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did. The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock … Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.”

Why is the left such a cesspit of racism and sexism?

OLD AND BUSTED: Pirates of the Caribbean.

The New Hotness? Pirates of the Oakland Estuary!

Pirates are taking over the Oakland Estuary Marinas. Yes, pirates. And local and federal authorities says it’s getting so bad – the U.S. Coast Guard is deploying help to patrol the area.

“Boat owners attacked by pirates,” said Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao. “There are no excuses for that.”

From shipwrecks to sunken sailboats to pirate attacks, the shoreline around the Oakland estuary is seeing a new level of violence that’s leaving the area torn up and trashed. The irony is it’s happening right in front of one of the agencies responsible for addressing it.

“I’ve heard it’s gotten to the point of near fist fights on docks,” said former Harbor Master Brock de Lappe.

The vessels abandoned are covered in graffiti — left like a battleground scene of an action movie.

Wait, I thought the Oakland Raiders had moved to Las Vegas in 2020. Now they’re back? In any case, gooder and harder, California: Oakland NAACP Blames ‘Defund the Police’ for Rampant Crime in City.

STACY MCCAIN: A New ‘Broken Windows’ Discovery? Violence Linked to COVID Relief Fraud.

Maryland’s U.S. attorney found a big connection between violent crime and COVID-19 pandemic fraud.

Maryland U.S. Attorney Erek Barron told the 11 News I-Team that his office found that 60% of violent criminals are also committing some type of COVID-19 fraud, and because of that, his office investigates every single violent crime target to see whether they’ve committed pandemic fraud.

Barron told the I-Team that the 20% reduction in homicides and the 10% reduction in nonfatal shootings in Baltimore City can both be explained by his office prosecuting COVID-19 fraud.

Barron said that if his office can’t lock up violent offenders for those crimes, there’s a good chance his office can prosecute them for pandemic fraud.

Barron said the bottom line is to get violent criminals off the streets by any legal means necessary.

Read the whole thing.