NO FUN FOR YOU, CALIFORNIA! Some July 4th Fireworks Shows Got Canceled Thanks To Environmental Activists.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
June 29, 2023
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:
EXCLUSIVE: Berkeley Law School dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains how he has secretly enacted a policy of racial discrimination in faculty hiring—which is illegal in California.
"If I'm ever deposed, I'm going to deny I said this to you." pic.twitter.com/GYgtNZfhtb
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) June 29, 2023
TOP NIH OFFICIAL ADVISED COVID SCIENTISTS THAT HE USES PERSONAL EMAIL TO EVADE FOIA:
A top adviser to Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health admitted that he used a personal email account in an apparent effort to evade the strictures of the Freedom of Information Act, according to records obtained by congressional investigators probing the origin of Covid-19. The official also expressed his intention to delete emails in order to avoid media scrutiny.
“As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly,” wrote David M. Morens, a high-ranking NIH official, in a September 2021 email, one of a series of email exchanges that included many leading scientists involved in the bitter Covid origins debate. “Stuff sent to my gmail gets to my phone,” he added, “but not my NIH computer.”
After noting that his Gmail account had been hacked, however, he wrote to the group to say that he might have to use his NIH email account to communicate with them instead. “Don’t worry,” he wrote, “just send to any of my addresses, and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”
That’s not shifty at all.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES: Many Americans Think Life Was Better 50 Years Ago. They’re Misguided.
OBAMA SMILES: Wisconsin State Senator LaTonya Johnson says “f*ck the suburbs” on the senate floor during a debate on crime spilling from cities to suburbs.
Wisconsin State Senator LaTonya Johnson says “fuck the suburbs” on the senate floor during a debate on crime spilling from cities to suburbs.
pic.twitter.com/YvlJy57uda— Greg Price (@greg_price11) June 29, 2023
Flashback: Great Moments in Projection:
Shot: Obama: Only Working People Trump Knows are His Maids and Mowers.
—Bridget Johnson, PJ Media.com, today.
Chaser:
“[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn’t want to be on one of those trains every day,” said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. “The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions… that was scary to him.”
—Obama biographer David Mendell in 2007.
“When the president visits suburban backyards, it sometimes seems like a visit from a ‘president from another planet.’ After all, as a young man, Obama told The Associated Press: ‘I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.’”
—Joel Kotkin, as quoted in an October 2010 Insta-post headlined “Obama’s Mistake: Suburban Nation, but Urban Political Strategy.”
‘I said something everybody knows is true, which is there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my home town in Illinois, who are bitter,’ he said on a visit to Muncie, Indiana. ‘So I said when you’re bitter, you turn to what you can count on. So people vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community,’ he said. ‘Now, I didn’t say it as well as I should have. If I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that.’
—“Obama ‘sorry’ for God and guns jibe,” the London Guardian, April 12, 2008. Note the big dog-eating grin on Obama’s face in the photo the Guardian chose to accompany their headline.
ROCHELLE WALENSKY: AMERICA NEEDS MORE DESPAIR.
Public health work will continue to be critically important and the challenges just as complex. Yet I fear the despair from the pandemic is fading too quickly from our memories, perhaps because it is too painful to recall a ravaged nation brought to its knees.
I don’t think we actually need more of it — despair is actually quite common an emotion among Americans during the Biden era.
DISPATCHES FROM THE DOOM LOOP: Former SF County Supervisor Issues Warning about San Francisco Becoming Detroit (Video).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCfHCoBIsew
HOW IT STARTED: City of Berkeley Approves Police Defunding Plan.
—NBC Bay Area, July 15th, 2020.
How it’s going: Berkeley man, 69, lit on fire by stranger, in critical condition. Police say the assailant poured gasoline on the man and lit him on fire. Then he fled the scene.
—The Berkeley Scanner, yesterday.
Related: 4 out of 10 Californians say they are ‘seriously considering’ leaving state, poll shows.
—Los Angeles’ KTLA 5, last Friday.
IT’S A GOOD START: Ron DeSantis says he would eliminate four federal agencies if elected president. Florida’s Republican governor said he would seek to abolish the departments of Education, Commerce, and Energy, as well as the IRS.
JONATHAN TURLEY: Was Garland Lying? New York Times Confirms Weiss was Blocked from Bringing Additional Charges.”
(Fixed link. Sorry. Charlie)
THE OCEANGATE DISASTER: A SUBMARINE CAPTAIN’S EARLY UNOFFICIAL ASSESSMENT.”You may not be interested in mother nature, but mother nature is interested in you, and if you do not follow mother nature’s commands and respect her power, you will die.”
June 28, 2023
IF ADVENTURE HAS A NAME, IT MUST BE PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGE! Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny Box Office Projections Described As “Abysmal,” Film Could Lose Upwards Of $250 Million.
TAKE THAT, GAVIN NEWSOM! How Texas shrank its homelessness population — and what it can teach California.
San Jose’s homelessness response team visited Houston earlier this year. City and county representatives from the Los Angeles area went last fall. They came away jealous of some of the advantages Houston has over California cities – such as the lower housing costs that make it easier for the Texas metropolis to find or build homes for people.
But the Californians also were impressed by the way the city coordinates with the county and other local organizations, prioritizes funding for permanent housing instead of temporary shelters and finds places for people before clearing encampments.
“What those folks are doing – really focusing on housing folks – is working,” said Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow for the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
In April, two city council members from the East Bay city of Richmond headed to Austin to tour a 51-acre tiny home community that provides permanent housing for 350-and-counting homeless residents. Elected officials from Sacramento trekked to San Antonio to see a 1,600-person shelter that offers everything from dental care to counseling – serving nearly the city’s entire homeless population in one place.
Many experts agree California can learn something from these homeless solutions. But unless the Golden State fixes its housing affordability crisis decades in the making, copying the Lone Star State will get us only so far, said Eric Tars, legal director of the National Homelessness Law Center.
“Elected officials in California are desperate for quick-fix solutions,” he said. “They want a silver bullet to be able to solve homelessness for them. And so when they see results like what’s happening in Houston…they say, ‘that’s great, we want that.’”
As Thomas Sowell wrote about the Bay Area’s ultra-expensive real estate, it’s “The Housing Price of Liberalism.”
In this part of California, liberalism reigns supreme and “open space” is virtually a religion. What that lovely phrase means is that there are vast amounts of empty land where the law forbids anybody from building anything.
Anyone who has taken Economics 101 knows that preventing the supply from rising to meet the demand means that prices are going to rise. Housing is no exception.
Yet when my wife wrote in a local Palo Alto newspaper, many years ago, that preventing the building of housing would cause existing housing to become far too expensive for most people to afford it, she was deluged with more outraged letters than I get from readers of a nationally syndicated column.
What she said was treated as blasphemy against the religion of “open space” — and open space is just one of the wonderful things about the world envisioned by liberals that is ruinously expensive in the mundane world where the rest of us live.
As Sowell writes, “Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.”
PLEASING YOUR ENEMIES DOES NOT TURN THEM INTO FRIENDS: Macon Bacon baseball team refuses to change name.
A collegiate summer baseball team in Macon has faced some bacon backlash from a nonprofit led by doctors who claim the organization glorifies unhealthy foods.
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) has demanded the Macon Bacon baseball organization choose a new name, offering a suggestion like “Macon Facon Bacon” instead. The nonprofit said a name change would help encourage fans to stay healthy.
The group even went as far as to sponsor a billboard in town aimed at fans of the Georgia baseball team, warning of the risks of cancer.
“Macon Bacon’s glorification of bacon, a processed meat that raises the risk of colorectal cancer and other diseases, sends the wrong message to fans,” wrote Anna Herby, DHSc, RD, CDCES, nutrition education program manager for the PCRM in a letter to Macon Bacon president Brandon Raphael. “I urge you to update the team’s name to Macon Facon Bacon and promote plant-based bacon alternatives, such as Facon Bacon or Mushroom Bacon, that will help your fans stay healthy.”
But the Macon Bacon organization pushed back, saying it will not change its name.
Raphael said when he received the letter, he initally thought it was a joke until a local newspaper started reporting on it. That’s when he said the organization realized the nonprofit was serious about its stance against bacon.
“We didn’t feel as though we were glorifying bacon even though bacon is glorious,” Raphael said.
Exit quote: “Bacon Yesterday. Bacon Today. Bacon Tomorrow. Bacon Forever.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
HUNTER BIDEN INVOKING ‘MY FATHER’ RESULTED IN MILLIONS FLOWING FROM CCP-LINKED COMPANY:
Hunter Biden sent messages to Chinese businessman Henry Zhao on July 30, 2017, in which he leveraged his father’s name and threatened CEFC executives unless a lucrative deal was worked out with Ye, whose biography said he had been “deputy secretary-general” of the China Association for International Friendly Contact, which the U.S.-China Commission assessed was a “front organization” for the People’s Liberation Army’s General Political Department.
The newly released messages provide key context to previously discovered foreign bank transactions involving Hunter Biden. Within days after the president’s son named dropped his father in a text threat, Hunter Biden and his associated businesses soon received an estimated $5 million in payments from CEFC in 2017 and 2018, with Chinese payments quickly beginning to roll in, according to banking findings from a 2020 Senate report.
“I am sitting with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment has not been fulfilled,” Hunter Biden told Zhao in one of the July 30 messages. “I am very concerned that [Ye] has either changed his mind and broken our deal without telling me or that he is unaware of the promises and assurances that have been made have not been kept.”
Astonishingly, the story has begun to trickle out to the DNC-MSM: Who let the dogs out? CBS goes after Hunter Biden and Garland.
BURIED LEDE: JEFFREY TOOBIN IS STILL HOLDING HIS OWN! This liberal journalist’s defense of COVID vax mandates makes zero sense.
(Classical reference in headline.)
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA:
I’m sorry but people (and I mean everyone of age) MUST listen to Sheriff Grady Judd of Polk County Florida. This (sadly) horrific description of this Disney World employee is happening in many, many places around our country and the world.
Is there a cabal of cannibals and… https://t.co/dagHD4W4ID
— General Mike Flynn (@GenFlynn) June 28, 2023
CBS MOURNS OPPOSITION TO TRANSGENDER CAMPAIGN WITH ANHEUSER-BUSCH CEO:
Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth joined the crew of CBS Mornings on Wednesday to discuss the fallout to Dylan Mulvaney marketing campaign. It would prove to be a segment full of corporatespeak, Republican bashing, and covering up of just how badly the campaign backfired.
While talking about the Mulvaney campaign, co-host Gayle King illustrated, “How and why did it — did it go so off the rails? Because that certainly wasn’t your intention when you did one can to one person.”
A guy with “10.8 million TikTok followers and another 1.7 million on Instagram.”
For his part, Whitworth conceded it has “been a challenging few weeks,” but lamented “I think the conversation surrounding Bud Light has moved away from beer, and the conversation has become divisive. And Bud Light really doesn’t belong there.”
Still no apology from Whitworth. Things became “divisive” because Anheuser-Busch waded into the culture war — and in a war, the other side gets to fire back. It also became divisive because former Bud Light Marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid chose to insult her brand’s former customers. As Ed Morrissey wrote last month, “This is what happens when corporations take sides in social debates — especially when their executives either don’t know their customer base, don’t like their customer base — or in Heinerscheid’s case, both.”
KRISTI NOEM: “The best way to celebrate America’s Birthday is with fireworks at Mount Rushmore. Today, the Biden Administration rejected them. Again.”
Which means: “The last time there were fireworks at Mount Rushmore was in 2020, when Trump was president, meaning that the Biden administration has denied it every year they have been in office.”
WAS IT OVER WHEN VLADIMIR PUTIN BOMBED PEARL HARBOR? Even cheat sheets couldn’t save Biden from a gaffe: President, 80, says Putin is clearly ‘losing the war in Iraq’ while clutching notes on the Wagner uprising.
SOCIALISTS NATIONALLY HAVE DISCOVERED THEIR NEXT HITLER:
MSNBC’s @JoyAnnReid: @RonDeSantis is running “the most openly fascist campaign I’ve ever seen.”
Lincoln Project’s @stuartpstevens: He’s “worse than Trump. [He] is a threat to what it means really to be an American, & I think we have to realize that, & address it accordingly.” pic.twitter.com/Wil9pvqKXw
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 27, 2023
With the exception of Eisenhower, every Republican presidential candidate, from Thomas Dewey (smeared as a Nazi by no less than Harry Truman) to the present will be attacked by the left in this fashion, no matter his temperament, or his small government, libertarian bona fides. He will then be rehabilitated* by the DNC-MSM as a wise elder statesman, compared with the terrifying GOP demagogue who has or is about throw his hat into the ring.
* Including Trump, since he’s by far the media’s favorite choice to run against Biden.