L.A. DODGERS TO CATHOLICS: DROP DEAD. Dodgers Re-Invite Anti-Catholic Drag Group To Pride Night, Issue Apology To LGBTQ+ Community Despite Letter From Marco Rubio.

After “much thoughtful feedback from Los Angeles’ diverse communities” the Dodgers have decided to re-invite the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to its 10th annual LGBTQ+ Pride Night. They also issued an apology to the drag group, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and their friends and families.

As Mark Hemingway tweets, “You will have your faith profaned and mocked in front of thousands and you’ll be called a bigot if you object.“

POTEMKIN ENVIRONMENTALISM: California Dumps Nearly Half of Its Hazardous Waste out of State.

California is revealing new information to the public that shows that the eco-friendly state is dumping tons of toxic waste in other states every year.

Since 2010, California has dumped nearly half of its hazardous waste out of state—mostly in Utah, Arizona, and Nevada—according to the state’s latest figures (pdf). Thirteen more states also have received California’s toxic waste but in much lower quantities.

In the past 13 years, the state has dumped 3.7 million tons of hazardous waste in Utah, more than 2.9 million tons in Arizona, and nearly 2.3 million tons in Nevada.

An investigation published by CalMatters in January found that one of the biggest out-of-state toxic waste dumpers was the state’s own Department of Toxic Substances Control.

The reason is that neighboring states don’t have as many environmental regulations for dumping hazardous waste, and it costs less.

There’s a pleasing circularity to California leftists using other states as their dumping grounds, since they also use the much more functional other states to help keep the lights on: California’s Potemkin Environmentalism.

A dirty secret about California’s energy economy is that it imports lots of energy from neighboring states to make up for the shortfall caused by having too few power plants. Up to 20 percent of the state’s power comes from coal-burning plants in Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Montana, and another significant portion comes from large-scale hydropower in Oregon, Washington State, and the Hoover Dam near Las Vegas. “California practices a sort of energy colonialism,” says James Lucier of Capital Alpha Partners, a Washington, D.C.–area investment group. “They rely on western states to supply them with power generation they are unwilling to build for themselves”—and leave those states to deal with the resulting pollution.

And California’s garbage, as well.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! How’s That Again, Joe? Biden Again Demonstrates His Abject Unfitness to Be President.

President Biden rambles unintelligibly for 40 seconds… pic.twitter.com/eaMZB0OQzo

— The First (@TheFirstonTV) May 21, 2023

Apparently it’s tough for his White House handlers to get John Gill’s adrenochrome dosage just right when he’s on a road trip.

DISPATCHES FROM ABC’S NEWS DIVISION: Whoopi Goldberg’s Latest Stupidity: Racist Attack On Tim Scott.

Karen Johnson, AKA Whoopi Goldberg, has added to her long list of mean, stupid statements. The View commentator, who believes she is the director of morality for the African American community, used Tim Scott’s announcement that he’s running for President to attack Scott and Justice Thomas. Goldberg said that Scott had “Clarence Thomas syndrome.”

Clarence Thomas syndrome happens when a commentator who can’t spell cat if you spot her the C and the A attacks a brilliant jurist who has been on the Supreme Court for 32 years. Why the attack? He is a black guy who doesn’t believe in the liberal agenda.

Meanwhile, a Washington Post scribe resurfaces a question he asked Scott in 2012: Reporter Recalls Asking Tim Scott If He’s a Virgin as Senator Announces 2024 Bid.

IT’S COME TO THIS: John Cleese is forced to cut famous Life of Brian scene about men having babies from his new West End show.

Cleese told an audience at his one-man show last week that when the scene (co-written with the late Graham Chapman) was performed at a read-through for the new show in New York last year, doubts emerged. ‘At the end, I said to the American actors: ‘What do you think?’ And they said: ‘We love the script, but you can’t do that stuff about Loretta nowadays.’

‘So here you have something there’s never been a complaint about in 40 years, that I’ve heard of, and now all of a sudden we can’t do it because it’ll offend people. What is one supposed to make of that? But I think there were a lot of things that were actually, in some strange way, predictive of what was actually going to happen later.’

In 1979, Malcolm Muggeridge had a meltdown over The Life of Brian. In 2022, it was the trans-obsessives. After reading Andrew Sullivan’s Friday Substack column, “The Queers Versus The Homosexuals,” I’m not at all surprised.

But then as Toby Young wrote in the London Spectator in 2019, about the debate between Cleese, Michael Palin, Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark, “The irony of Life of Brian is that by lampooning Christian beliefs for perfectly honourable reasons, the makers of the film contributed to the demise of the church’s authority and that, in turn, created a vacuum that has been filled by far more egregious examples of the closed mindset they objected to. The Pythons didn’t realise it 40 years ago, but the muscular Christianity that had been drummed into them at their private schools and which they hated with a kind of life-defining passion was acting as a bulwark against less organised forms of irrationality. They couldn’t imagine anything more suffocating or tedious than that ‘vast, moth-eaten musical brocade’; but they were wrong.”

GREAT MOMENTS IN LOGIC: MSNBC Guest: I Just Went to Florida for Spring Break Even Though It’s a ‘Terrorist State.’

MSNBC guest says Florida is about to be a “terrorist state” for black people and lesbians. These people are legit insane: pic.twitter.com/JKNwX8kCYh

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) May 22, 2023

Democrat strategist Aisha C. Mills: “I think it was extremely clever and I really appreciate the NAACP’s guidance on this issue. You know, I just took my family to spring break in Florida recently. And I think about all of the folks who travel there for sun and joy and peace and restoration. And to be reminded that actually this is getting to the point where Florida is about to be a terrorist state to many of us here in America. Certainly, as a lesbian, as a black woman, I don’t want to have anything to do with the place. And I think about all the other people who don’t want to travel there either. So, I think it was very clever on behalf of the NAACP, I thank them for issuing this broad guidance. And really, what it does is it turns a remarkable, I think, lens, on the United States and highlights how bigotry and bias and ignorance do as much harm as we accuse other countries of doing to people that they suppress.”

Related: TV Journalists Cheer NAACP’s Absurd ‘Travel Advisory’ Dinging DeSantis.

More: NAACP President Ignores Stats On Florida When Confronted By CNN Host.

CROWD SIZE FOR BRITTNEY GRINER’S WNBA RETURN BAFFLES COACH: ‘How was it not a sellout?’

The Phoenix Mercury were on the road to start the 2023 WNBA season as the team took on the Los Angeles Sparks at the Crypto.com Arena in Brittney Griner’s official return to the floor.

Griner had 18 points, six rebounds, four blocks and two assists in Phoenix’s 94-71 loss. But it was a big moment for the former Baylor standout as she returned to the court for the first time since 2021. She missed all of last season as she was jailed in Russia on a drug conviction. She returned to the U.S. in December as part of a prisoner swap for arms dealer Viktor Bout.

Because it was her return, Mercury head coach Vanessa Nygaard was expecting a much fuller arena.

“I mean, it was great. But like honestly, c’mon now LA. We didn’t sell out the arena for BG?” Nygaard said. “Like, I expected more, you know, to be honest. Right, it was great, it was loud. But how was it not a sellout? How was it not a sellout?”

Nygaard would know the answer if she read America’s Newspaper of Record: WNBA Games Now Last Place On Earth Where You Can Safely Social Distance.

SAUL ALINSKY SMILES: Florida GOP Chair makes the NAACP Chair an offer he will probably refuse.

Yesterday, we told you about the latest travel warning from the NAACP. The NAACP outrageously declared Florida unsafe for Black Americans. Today, Christian Ziegler, Chairman of the Florida Republican Party, made an offer the chairman of the NAACP surely cannot refuse (but he probably will).

You see, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the NAACP, Leon Russell, is himself a Florida resident. Can you imagine living in a place so unsafe? Chairman Ziegler, always one to be helpful to his fellow Floridian, offered to pay the moving expenses of Mr. Russell if he wanted to flee the dreadful state. What a generous gesture.

Heh, indeed.™

CONSERVING CONSERVATISM MOST CONSERVATIVELY: Leaked Policy Exposes Fox News Stances on Woke Ideology.

Fox News employees are allowed to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity, rather than their biological sex, and permitted to dress in alignment with their preferred gender. They must also be addressed by their preferred name and pronouns in the workplace.

These are just a few of the policies outlined in the company handbook, dated January 2021, a copy of which was shared with The Daily Signal. Fox also offers to help employees come up with a “Workplace Transition Plan” to ease their gender transition at work.

The revelations comes amid conservative consternation at Fox Digital’s use of activist language like “gender affirming care” in stories on its website, as well as the site’s consistent use of female pronouns for biological males like TikTok celebrity Dylan Mulvaney and swimmer Lia Thomas (formerly known as Will Thomas).

Fox also drew strong backlash for a June 2022 on-air segment praising a child’s gender transition as an “inspiration to others.” That segment briefly depicted California state Sen. Scott Weiner, a far-left Democrat who led the move to soften sex offender registry requirements for sodomy with minors, and highlighted the activist claim that a child might commit suicide if he or she is not permitted to transition.

Exit quote: “‘They want you to think it’s this place that supports traditionally conservative values,’ a former producer for ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ told The Daily Signal. ‘But in reality, they’re pushing this nonsense behind the scenes.’”

ECHO CHAMBER IS ECHOING: MSNBC Previews DeSantis 2024 By Labeling Him ‘Pro-White Supremacy.’

Knowing the difference between male and female is pretty big issue that is fundamental if society is to function. Not that CNBC’s Steve Liesman saw it that way, “It’s somehow been elevated and I think there was a piece in the Times not too long ago that says, it was basically, kind of invented.”

Liesman is referring to a New York Times piece that argued social conservatives latched onto transgenderism after special interest groups needed a new cause after losing the gay marriage debate, but no conservative needed to be told by a special interest group to oppose the idea that gender is subjective.

Prof. Basil Smikle then turned the conversation towards race, “Right, but that’s why I always say it’s not really about being anti-woke, it’s about being pro-racial hierarchy. That’s what he’s selling and he’s selling it to a very –“

After Liesman interrupted, asking Smikle to explain himself, he continued “It’s leading to the sort of pro-white supremacy, right? It’s like, we want to teach, we want to make sure that our version of history is taught, not your version.”

Nobody on the panel ever provided any evidence that disagreeing with them is somehow white supremacy. Smikle tried, “It’s a very specific type of version—of history that’s being taught in a very specific way. If you look at DeSantis’s battles against the College Board.”

And right on cue:

ROGER KIMBALL: Abandon the Swamp.

Suppose a document drops in the wilderness and no one is around to hear it. Does it make a sound? I submit that John Durham just tested this Bishop Berkeleyesque query. The special counsel spent four years beavering away in the forests of the deep state and what did he produce? Three hundred pages telling us what, for the most part, we already knew and with the result that exactly nothing, apart from a little hand wringing, will happen.

We already knew that James Comey, Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, John Brennan, Susan Rice, Michael Sussmann, Kevin Clinesmith, and all the other characters in and around the Russia Collusion Delusion had fabricated the story of Trump’s supposed connection with Russia out of whole cloth.

We already knew that they had gone out of their way to protect Hillary Clinton.

We knew that there was no predicate for obtaining a FISA warrant against Carter Page (one of many thousands of such warrants), thus opening a back door into the Trump campaign.

We knew that the surveillance apparatus of the regime had been weaponized to prevent Donald Trump from being elected and then, when he surprised everyone by winning anyway, to taint his administration and render him radioactive.

What should we make of Durham’s non-revelatory revelations? I think that, wittingly or not, they were just a big exercise in track-covering, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Well, nothing beyond the sound and fury, anyway.

Read the whole thing.

QUESTION ASKED: Did Jeffrey Epstein Blackmail Bill Gates? “There has long been speculation that Jeffrey Epstein acquired much of his murky fortune and influence through a sophisticated blackmail operation, but there has been no solid evidence reported in support of this theory. Until today.”

I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC: Target faces backlash for selling products from transgender designer promoting violence, drug use, Satanism.

LOOKING BACK ON THE SADISM OF THE COVID-19 SHAMING CAMPAIGN:

There’s a scene in videographer Matt Orfalea’s arresting new “Nobody is Safe!” compilation in which Jeff Van Gundy — one of the sharpest basketball announcers alive, and one of my favorites to watch — leans back and says, “I don’t even understand what means, ‘I’m doing my own research.’”

The whole quote, from a preseason Heat-Rockets game Van Gundy called in October of 2021:

What does that look like, you doing your own research? Are you doing studies yourself? Are you in a lab on a nightly basis? What are you doing? I don’t understand what that means, ‘I’m doing my own research.’

How about this: we’ve got really smart people… who’ve already done the research.

Flashback: Ignoring Them Is the Only Way Out.

THE RETURN OF THE IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY: Biden Says He Has Authority to Invoke 14th Amendment as Debt-Ceiling Negotiations Stumble.

I’LL TAKE HEADLINES FROM 1995 FOR $500, ALEX: Downtown San Francisco had a good run. Can it recover?

Downtown San Francisco is in distress. Indicators of urban well-being point in the wrong direction: office occupancy, BART ridership and retail foot traffic are down, as is the city’s population. Every week brings news of another high-profile exit: Recent closures include a Whole Foods flagship and Nordstrom, which announced the end of its 35-year run on Market Street due to changes in the “dynamics” of downtown. First Republic Bank, another San Francisco success story, went under after it couldn’t retain its wealthy customers and was sold to JPMorgan Chase. The future of its branches, the familiar green-and-gold presence downtown, is uncertain.

Now barely a day passes without the San Francisco Chronicle or another publication referencing a “doom loop” in the city. There’s a lot of finger-pointing, but no agreement about how to solve the actual issues, including the spiraling homelessness crisis, the unsustainable cost of living or a property crime rate consistently higher than that of similar metropolitan areas. If you see people smiling downtown, they’re probably tourists inside double-decker buses — and even that might be deceptive. Hotel occupancy rates remain significantly below pre-pandemic levels.

Like most people who had a good run for too long, San Francisco didn’t see it coming.

Ahh, but they did see it coming. They simply refused to change course: S.F.’s Homeless Legacy / Two decades of failure.

—The San Francisco Chronicle, September 7th, 2003.

THE GLARING PROBLEM WITH BIDEN’S WHITE-SUPREMACY WARNING:

Let’s put this in more context. Obviously, almost all serious terrorist groups are international in range, and very many are specifically Islamic — the stereotype of the Arab terrorist has been around for decades and didn’t come from nowhere. At present, al-Qaeda, the group responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths from the 9/11 attacks, has cells worldwide and controls a considerable amount of territory in Mali, Somalia, and Yemen. ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) is based in those troubled nations where once Eden lay. New player Boko Haram is Nigerian and in practice controls much of the northeast of that rising Motherland power.

Obviously, none of these truly major terror organizations — some of which, in practice, come frighteningly close to being unrecognized nations — qualifies as a U.S. domestic actor. And, speaking frankly, terrorism overall is probably no longer a top-five security threat to the United States — when compared with the rapid rise of China, the opiate and fentanyl epidemic (which killed 110,000 Americans last year), surging crime (murders hit 20,000 annually back in 2020), and so forth.

So, why the national-level focus on the rather niche problem of white supremacy — on 20 deaths per year vs. 20,000? I sincerely think it’s because what some see as white conservative perfidy can safely be targeted in modern America, with little fear of “cancellation” or political backlash, at least from the Left. Since the civil-rights era of the 1960s, working-poor white Yanks have been very much cemented into liberal mythos as an enemy group: the whey-faced, dirty-handed rioters screaming abuse at sainted MLK. And, unlike other groups that may sometimes be unpopular — “hood” black dudes, “slut-walking” feminists, Muslim Islamists, the over-the-top Pride partiers we’ll all see in a month — they form a population that can generally be attacked without significant social risk. They are the Default Villains of the Prevailing Narrative.

At this point in his (p)residency, there are only a few choices Biden has to argue about:

BIDEN STANDS UP FOR CHINA: Biden says China’s ‘silly balloon’ derailed open communications with Beijing.

The U.S. had reached an agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping to maintain open lines of communication with the country, but the spy craft incident earlier this year derailed the effort, President Biden says.

Biden made the statement during a news conference in Hiroshima, Japan, where he was present for talks with other G-7 countries on Sunday. Biden claimed that China’s balloon had temporarily stalled chances for open dialogue between Washington and Beijing. The president did say he maintains hopes to reopen those talks in the near future.

“How will you manage the diplomatic relationship with China?” a reporter asked in the early morning briefing.

“Well, number one, you’re right. We should have an open line [of communications]. With the Bali conference that’s what President Xi and I agreed that we were going to do and meet on,” Biden responded. “And then this silly balloon that was carrying two free cars worth of spy equipment was flying over the United States, and it got shut down and changed in terms of talking to one another.”

Classical reference in headline:

UNEXPECTEDLY: Casey DeSantis Becomes Politico’s Target.

The late Rush Limbaugh would often say of the media: They tell you whom they fear. In light of this Limbaugh truism, the media must fear the rise of Gov. Ron DeSantis after Friday’s hit piece on his wife, Casey DeSantis, in Politico.

Rumors have been flying that Ron DeSantis will declare his candidacy for president on Thursday. So while hardcore Trump supporters will guffaw and point to recent polls showing their man far ahead of the Florida governor, they forget that a poll is merely a snapshot in time. Plus, the primaries haven’t begun, it’s over a year until the party conventions, and DeSantis hasn’t yet declared, either.

But the media also know that Ron DeSantis is a popular governor, having won his re-election with over 59% of the votes. They also know of his impressive record of accomplishment in Florida. Plus, they are aware that he could attract not only rank-and-file Republicans, but also independents for whom Donald Trump is a turn-off.

So Politico attempted a flank attack on Ron DeSantis by writing a hit piece on his wife.

Huh. I’m so old, I can remember a Godfather-obsessed Senator Barack Obama cautioning against attacks against “civilians:”

IRISH DEMOCRACY: This high school put tampon dispensers in the boys’ bathrooms. You’ll be so proud of how the boys responded.

(Classical reference in headline.)

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Unhinged Nebraska Democrat Throws Tantrum Over Bill Protecting Children.

OUT ON A LIMB: Justice Neil Gorsuch blasts COVID response as one of ‘greatest intrusions on civil liberties.’

STEAMING INTO THE FUTURE! College baseball fans will get up-close look at Union Pacific’s heavy hitter Big Boy.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Climate Change Zealots Exploit Deadly Tornadoes To Push Their Unproven Hypothesis.

MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE:

Yet they didn't know what was going to happen next. https://t.co/xzg2gS1KCS

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) May 19, 2023