DEM-CONTROLLED SENATE DEFIES BIDEN IN VOTE TO RESTORE TARIFFS ON CHINESE SOLAR PANELS: Vote comes as blow for Biden, who has argued that Chinese solar tariffs would decimate green energy industry.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
May 3, 2023
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Nashville Shooter Manifesto Placed In Secure Crate Alongside Motive For Vegas Shooting, Epstein Client List, Ark of The Covenant.
Meanwhile, in real life:
Nashville PD: As a result of our being sued over withholding the killer's manifesto, we are going to withhold the killer's manifesto https://t.co/Nt2TmIEBmJ
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 3, 2023
JOE’S LATEST BUGOUT IS GOING SMOOTHLY: U.S. drones protect bus convoy as hundreds of Americans flee Sudan.
U.S. drones and other military assets protected a weekend bus convoy that moved hundreds of Americans through Sudan to the country’s coast, officials said, as Washington ramps up its effort to get citizens out of the war-torn African country as quickly as possible.
More than 200 Americans boarded buses that traveled more than 500 miles across Sudan. The convoy reached Port Sudan, a coastal city that’s relatively safe in comparison to other areas of the country that have been gripped by fighting between two rival armed factions.
Pentagon officials said that U.S. aerial and naval assets have aided in the push to get Americans out.
“The Department of Defense deployed U.S. intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets to support air and land evacuation routes, which Americans are using, and we are moving naval assets within the region to provide any necessary support along the coast,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said Saturday in a statement. “Our focus has been and remains to help as many U.S. citizens depart as safely as possible.”
Flashback: Joe Biden Comes Full Circle.
ACTUALLY, I THINK THIS IS MORE OF A POUNCE: CNN Frets Republicans Are ‘Seizing,’ ‘Up in Arms’ Over Biden ‘Cheat Sheet.’
As Jim Treacher likes to say:
May 2, 2023
WHEN YOU BOTCH THE ADRENOCHROME DOSAGE: Are These the Worst 9 Seconds of Joe Biden’s Political Career?
You know, it’s one thing — not a good thing, mind you, but perhaps a less-bad thing — when the American press hid from the world how feeble FDR had become, particularly during the last two or three years of his life. It’s quite another to pretend that a nuclear-armed POTUS is still capable of even friendly give-and-take when the White House Press Corps(e).
Or maybe it was just this weekend, when Biden seemed to forget where he was — just look at that vacant expression — after receiving a jersey and other goodies during an all-too-brief visit with the Air Force Academy Falcons football team.
Actually, the headline should be, “Are These the Worst 9 Seconds of Joe Biden’s Political Career — So Far?”
GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: More about the closure of that Whole Foods in San Francisco (plus Nordstrom closes two SF stores).
THE SONG IS OVER: Roger Daltrey is doubtful The Who will ‘ever come back to tour America.’
Nothing at the moment. I don’t know if we’ll ever come back to tour America. There is only one tour we could do, an orchestrated “Quadrophenia” to round out the catalog. But that’s one tall order to sing that piece of music, as I’ll be 80 next year. I never say never, but at the moment it’s very doubtful.
Touring has become very difficult since COVID. We cannot get insured and most of the big bands doing arena shows, by the time they do their first show and rehearsals and get the staging and crew together, all the buses and hotels, you’re upwards $600,000 to a million in the hole. To earn that back, if you’re doing a 12-show run, you don’t start to earn it back until the seventh or eighth show. That’s just how the business works. The trouble now is if you get COVID after the first show, you’ve (lost) that money.
I saw them in Philadelphia in 1982, and last year in Dallas, so apparently I’ve managed to catch two of their farewell tours. But I’m always up for another one if they change their mind.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Randi Weingarten Is Lying About Working to Re-Open The Schools, Says…CNN and Lori Lightfoot.
BOMBSHELL TRANSCRIPT PROVING ANTONY BLINKEN LIED TO CONGRESS LEAVES REPUBLICANS AT A CROSSROADS:
The obvious question is whether Blinken will be convicted. The obvious answer is that, of course, he’s not going to be convicted. There is immense value, though, in carrying out a very public impeachment process, exposing the fact that he did lie to Congress (and by virtue, commit a crime). Make Democrats go on record defending him. Make the press proclaim their own hypocrisy. Make Biden own the corruption within his administration. You don’t need a Senate conviction to accomplish those things.
But if Republicans drag their feet and keep waiting around to formulate the perfect case, they will lose their opportunity to really make something of this. Will there be other information that comes out after an impeachment starts? Sure, but the process itself needs to be started posthaste. Republicans are at a crossroads, and they can’t waste any more time deciding what direction to go.
Even if the GOP are in their usual “failure theater” mode, the theater aspect alone would make for powerful optics.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden Tells Muslim Guest At The White House To “Hush Up, Boy!” (Video.)
HOW IT STARTED: Next mayor wants NYC to be even more of a ‘sanctuary’ for illegal immigrants.
Every single one of the eight Democrats running for mayor vowed to protect illegal immigrants from deportation, solidifying the Big Apple’s often infamous status as a “sanctuary city.”
* * * * * * * *
Entrepreneur Andrew Yang, the son of legal Taiwanese immigrants, said, “I appreciate anyone who comes to this country or New York City for a better life.”
And Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said migrants were his neighbors growing up in Queens.
“My mother worked two jobs to provide for the six of us and we had a group of undocumented residents that lived in our community,” Adams said.
The other candidates — city comptroller Scott Stringer, former Obama housing secretary Shaun Donovan and nonprofit leader Dianne Morales — also voiced their support for the Big Apple as a sanctuary city.
—The New York Post, June 2nd, 2021.
How it’s going: Adams plays race card, accuses Abbott of hurting ‘Black-run cities’ with migrant buses.
—The New York Post, yesterday.
This isn’t who we are. Adams clearly needs to reread the words on the Statue of Liberty — and his own promise that New York is a sanctuary city.
Earlier: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.
The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.
It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.
Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.
These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.
Why, it’s as if: Democrats Discover Only The Federal Government Can Solve The Border Crisis.
And if you believe Karine Jean-Pierre, they have! “When it comes to illegal migration, you have seen it come down by more than 90%, and that’s because of the actions that this president has taken.”
That’s some off-the-charts gaslighting, right there.
BRENDAN O’NEIL: Why they hate Tucker Carlson.
This is the irony of Tucker Derangement Syndrome: the very people who fear the rise of Carlson created the conditions for the rise of Carlson. You think you can condemn the masses as a ‘basket of deplorables’, as imbeciles who ‘cling to guns or religion’, as gammon and Karens, as lizard-brained lowlifes, as gullible white trash led astray by Trump and Brexit, as transphobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic creatures in urgent need of re-education, and that there won’t be consequences? Get real. Carlson is the consequence. If he’s a monster – calm down, he isn’t – then he’s a monster of your making. Carlson’s ‘power’ among the white working class is directly proportional to the elites’ visceral derision for the white working class. Dehumanise people for long enough and they’ll look high and low for someone who treats them as human. Carlson did that, at least: he treated his viewers as human.
Following the end of Carlson’s relationship with Fox, the liberal elite has doubled down on its contempt for Fox viewers. Carlson’s rhetoric was ‘dangerous’, they say, not least because he had a ‘very impressionable audience’. There it is. The class hatred masquerading as media theory that underpins the elite disdain for Tucker in particular and right-wing media more broadly. Tuckerphobia is underwritten by a bourgeois dread that the TV-watching plebs will be driven mad by demagogues like Carlson. It’s Carlson they bash, but it’s the masses they fear. There has been much talk in recent days about Carlson’s ‘paranoid style’, à la Richard Hofstadter. And it’s true he bent towards paranoia at times. But it was the liberal establishment’s paranoid dread of the deplorable working-class that not only made Tucker possible, but which will ensure that, soon, someone will take his place.
And right on cue, as if to prove O’Neil’s point about class hatred: Jimmy Kimmel Tries to Dunk on Tucker Carlson, Thoroughly Beclowns Himself Instead.
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Hollywood writers to go on strike, slam ‘gig economy.’
Television and movie writers declared late Monday that they will launch an industrywide strike for the first time in 15 years, as Hollywood girded for a walkout with potentially widespread ramifications in a fight over fair pay in the streaming era.
The Writers Guild of America said that its 11,500 unionized screenwriters will head to the picket lines on Tuesday. Negotiations between studios and the writers, which began in March, failed to reach a new contract before the writers’ current deal expired just after midnight, at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. All script writing is to immediately cease, the guild informed its members.
The board of directors for the WGA, which includes both a West and an East branch, voted unanimously to call for a strike, effective at the stroke of midnight. Writers, they said, are facing an “existential crisis.”
Maybe wait and see if the film industry itself survives its own existential crisis before hitting the sidewalks with placards?
Could there be a small screen existential crisis as well? Writers’ Strike Might Be Late-Night TV’s Death Blow. Bee, Noah, Corden are gone … will Colbert, Kimmel and Fallon follow?
One can hope.
WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? In Court, Hunter Biden Cries Poor to Reduce Child Support Payments. President’s son says he slept ‘on cot’ in father’s room in Dublin, had his Porsche repossessed.
Biden, wearing a tight-fitting dark navy suit, appeared dejected as he walked into the county court room in small-town Batesville, Arkansas, as a passing train whistled down the street. He was flanked by D.C. super lawyer Abbe Lowell, who recently joined Biden’s legal team in the custody case.
Lowell said Biden is paying Lunden Alexis Roberts $20,000 per month in child support under an agreement they reached in 2020, shortly after President Joe Biden launched his presidential campaign. Lowell said Biden has paid Roberts at least $750,000 over the past few years.
The hearing came days after Arkansas Circuit Court judge Holly Meyer ordered Biden and his child’s mother, Roberts, to appear for all future court dates, arguing that their absences are needlessly delaying the case. “I expect this case to get done,” Meyer said on Monday. “I will run herd on you ladies and gentlemen until that happens.”
Biden’s lawyers objected to attempts by Roberts’s team to frame him as privileged and wealthy, arguing that he has only traveled on Air Force One one time and “stayed on a cot in his dad’s room in Dublin” during their recent Ireland visit. Biden no longer owns a Porsche, and his lawyer Brent Langdon indicated it was repossessed. Biden now drives an unspecified car given to him by celebrity lawyer Kevin Morris.
His lawyers did not respond to a Washington Free Beacon request for more information on the Porsche.
During the hearing, Biden’s lawyers said his only income is a percentage of his art sales from a New York gallery and that Biden is unable to provide a list of who has bought his paintings and how much they are worth. Lowell said Biden doesn’t know the names of any of the buyers under an agreement with the gallery, which is intended to avoid political influence-peddling.
Oh, about those paintings: Hunter Biden sells more paintings for up to $225,000 to anonymous buyers.
May 1, 2023
ROGER KIMBALL: Another Progressive Fusillade Goes Awry.
DeSantis brought in several new board members, including [Christopher] Rufo, and they instantly began shaking things up.
His statement that he wanted to help transform New College into “the Hillsdale of the South” was particularly galling to the woke mandarins in the media because Hillsdale, probably the best liberal arts college in the country, is calmly but conspicuously and determinedly non-woke.
Hillsdale is interested in education, not indoctrination.
That is its real tort: It refuses to be part of the “progressive” assault on independent thought and genuine learning.
The hilarity of the New York Times piece begins with its title: “This Is What the Right-Wing Takeover of a Progressive College Looks Like.”
We are meant to shudder at that phrase “Right-Wing.”
It’s true that most conservatives cower in the corner when accused of being “right-wing,” “racist,” “homophobic,” etc.
That cowardice is part of what’s wrong with contemporary conservatism.
But Rufo outflanked the machine by embracing the charge.
He linked to the NY Times column on Twitter and proudly assented to the charge: “Yes, this is what the right-wing takeover of a progressive college looks like,” he said. “And we’re just getting started.”
Oh no, narrative disruption!
Rufo continued: “My critics believe that the ‘progressive college’ is the only natural and legitimate form of the university.
“But we won’t play that game. Conservative voters deserve conservative institutions. In a republic, the people, through their elected representatives, get to decide.”
What a novel idea!
I (almost) felt sorry for the NY Times columnist.
Reading her column was like watching a toddler having a meltdown.
There she was wailing and pounding her tiny fists on the floor, but nobody was paying her the slightest heed.
Flashback: Jay Nordlinger in 2007 on Going Timesless.
MARK JUDGE: Reporting the snooze: When did journalists become so boring?
Christopher Hitchens. Hunter S. Thompson. Georgie Anne Geyer. Say what you will about these legendary American journalists , but they were not boring.
Thompson, known for his drug use, became famous by reporting on the biker gang known as Hell’s Angels, who beat him up when his book was published. Hitchens was a boozer, atheist, iconoclast, and war correspondent with a cutting wit. Georgie Anne Geyer was a fearless foreign correspondent who interviewed Fidel Castro .
Their kind has since disappeared from our media landscape, to be replaced by the likes of narcoleptic Andrea Mitchell, dear-Lord-is-he-still-talking-about-nothing Joe Scarborough, and cipher Taylor Lorenz.
What happened? When did journalists become so boring?
“Never mistake motion for action,” Ernest Hemingway, another great, nonboring journalist, once said. On Twitter, on 24/7 cable TV, in the newspaper, and on websites, there is a lot of frantic motion but not much action.
This past weekend provided an excellent opportunity to see what today’s “journalists” have morphed into: Here Are The Best & Worst Moments From The White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
FILM LADD: Bud Light and Trump Jr: Crimes Against Humanity (Video).
https://rumble.com/v2lfu9g-bud-light-and-trump-jr-crimes-against-humanity-youtube-censored.html
EPSTEIN DIDN’T KILL HIMSELF: Why Did Biden’s CIA Director Meet With Jeffrey Epstein After His Conviction?
Related: “But the most surprising name to emerge is Noam Chomsky, the decrepit radical linguistic philosopher and anti-American activist. According to Chomsky, Epstein arranged meetings between Chomsky and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak in which they discussed ‘Israel’s policies with regard to Palestinian issues and the international arena.’ Barak has confirmed the meetings. Chomsky? As the kids say, AYFKM?”
REGULATORS SEIZE FIRST REPUBLIC IN SECOND LARGEST BANK FAILURE IN U.S. HISTORY: “Early on Monday, regulators seized the San Francisco-based First Republic Bank and agreed a deal to sell its deposits and most of its assets to JPMorgan Chase, preventing further spiral in the banking industry. Three of the four largest-ever U.S. bank failures have occurred in the past two months. First Republic Bank, which as of April 13 had $229.1 billion in total assets and $103.9 billion in total deposits, is the second largest bank to go under in U.S. history, behind only Washington Mutual, which went down in 2008. First Republic has been struggling since the failures of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and New York-based Signature Bank in March.”