THE HORROR…THE HORROR…: James Lileks spots Liberace and Red Skelton’s dancers performing Simon & Garfunkel’s “Feelin’ Groovy” in 1968. “Now and then you see something that cannot be paused, lest you discover it’s not real, a hallucination. You have to keep watching. There’s so much going on in this video. You could write a book.”
Click over to watch – if you dare!
RATS ON THE WEST SIDE, BEDBUGS UPTOWN: NYC polled as one of the dirtiest cities on the planet.
Why are Democrat monopoly cities such cesspits?
RIP: Ivana Trump, ex-wife of former President Trump, dies at age 73, ABC News reports.
THE MEDIA’S GLENN YOUNGKIN ROPE-A-DOPE:
On issue after issue, Youngkin was essentially asked to defend the idea he’s not a radical extremist or to criticize other members of his party as radical extremists. There is no Republican who will receive positive treatment by the press unless they are domesticated lapdogs or useful idiots for the priorities of the left.
The nomination of Trump in 2016 indicated that Republican voters finally recognized this game for what it is. Having seen the savage treatment of their ticket in 2012, GOP voters decided they were done playing nice or even trying to win the Washington Post to their side. And as I’ve noted in the past regarding the media’s attacks on the misogyny, heartlessness and extremism of the likes of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan: if you cry wolf long enough, you lack the vocabulary when the actual beast shows up.
In Youngkin’s case, he could actually be a formidable national candidate with many positive attributes and an ability to reach beyond the traditional party coalitions. And as soon as he was a threat to win, the media would depict him as the unthinkable: worse than Trump.
The reverse is true as well, and the strange new respect Trump will receive from the press in the runup to 2024 will be both astonishing and predictable, as well, as media socialists nationally discover their next Hitler: Terrified Dems Ramp Up ‘Worse Than Trump’ Anti-DeSantis Narrative as Fears About His Popularity Grow.
The explanation for the media shift is very simple. It has everything to do with Biden’s tepid response to the Supreme Court decision on Dobbs v. Jackson, the case that saw the overturning of Roe v. Wade, one of the religious pillars of Democratic Party politics. Abortion is also part of the political culture that many in the media reflexively defend down to their very bones.
The response to the landmark decision has involved minor protests and skirmishes from activists but almost no legitimate executive orders or policy solutions. On the day the ruling came down, Biden gave brief remarks and then got on his airplane and flew out of the country. His words and actions have been largely performative and had even the Atlantic wondering if Biden was “a Man out of Time.”
The Democratic activist base and the media want bold, loud, concrete action. Whether that means abolishing the filibuster to codify Roe, adding additional Supreme Court justices, or even impeaching them, as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has called for, they want action. Failing that, Joe has to go. The media were always going to hold Biden accountable from the Left flank on the issues they care about, such as climate change and abortion. They see a tired, part-time president and sinking poll numbers, not to mention the terrifying possibility of a Ron DeSantis presidency or the return of Donald Trump, and have hit the panic button.
But perhaps there’s a reason why the Biden/Klain White House hasn’t yet provided “bold, loud, concrete action:” Biden Surrenders to the Conservative Legal Movement.
The president’s far-left flank remains fixated on the policy outcomes that have and will follow Dobbs, which leaves them confused as to why the administration isn’t responding with policy-oriented solutions. By contrast, the White House remains focused on the new legal environment that the decision produced. In the process, it has confirmed that the right’s judicial philosophy has secured an even more sweeping victory than merely overturning Roe and Casey. Faced with the immovable object of an originalist judiciary, the president is deterred.
“As President Joe Biden faces calls for more drastic action on abortion, the legal team vetting his options has found itself preoccupied by a single pressing concern,” Politico reported earlier this week. “That any action they could take would simply be struck down by the very court that put them in this place.” The administration’s lawyers believe that a poorly calibrated response to the Court’s decision could “backfire,” opening the door to “even more severe limits” on executive authority.
This admission represents nothing less than a triumph of a multigenerational campaign of conservative judicial thought. Not only have the right’s arguments against the ephemera that created a constitutional right to abortion succeeded but so, too, have their efforts to incept in the judiciary a philosophy that rejects reflexive deference to the exercise of executive power. Rather than mount a slapdash assault on this new paradigm, Joe Biden’s White House is keeping its powder dry and placing the onus on the federal and state legislatures to do the work of legislating. In so doing, the Democratic president has reaffirmed the whole point of the conservative legal project.
Related: Why the Supreme Court’s EPA Ruling Has Politicians and Gun Control Advocates Worried.
QUESTION ASKED: WTH Happened to Boris Johnson?
A fascinating deep dive into what the hell is going on in the UK… And some pushback against the conventional wisdom. It seems it wasn’t one thing with Boris… it was everything: The lefty politics, the lying, the more lying and exhaustion with the drama. That’s the closest parallel to Trump America; the exhaustion many felt with the antics of the former president. But Johnson is a much deeper and sharper cookie; where Trump and Johnson are twins is in the lack of personal discipline. And both paid a heavy price.
Another key point about the Johnson term: He didn’t govern like a conservative. When you pull the proverbial lever for a candidate on the right, you expect him to, you know, be on the right. But the UK is laboring under higher taxes (the highest in half a century), labor unrest, green new deal style edicts etc. And no one wanted Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s politics without the winning smile… We jest, but not much.
But… but but but. Boris Johnson was wonderful on Ukraine, a star among leaders in his commitment to the defense of liberty and stalwart calls for more aid to beleaguered Kyiv. He also delivered Brexit, and spoke eloquently in pushing for separation from the cucumber-measuring-lawn-mower-regulating uber-bureaucrats in Brussels. That should not be forgotten.
At the end of the day, Johnson brought himself down. There’s a lesson there for all the actors on the American political stage.
Earlier: Boris Johnson Missed His Churchill Moment: The pandemic was Boris’s biggest test. He failed.
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: California law AB-5 is screwing over 75,000 truckers and will make inflation worse while Dems are tanking.
Related: VDH on California’s Brylcreemed governor: Gavin Newsom’s Weird Idea of ‘Freedom.’
RIOTS FOR THEE, BUT NOT FOR ME: AOC Freaks out Over Being Trolled in Public Days After Defending Harassment of Justice Kavanaugh.
Just days ago, AOC mocked the public harassment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh that ran him out of a DC restaurant.
To summarize, it’s totally cool for protesters to harass a Supreme Court justice in public, causing him to have to escape out the backdoor of a restaurant. That’s just democracy in action, and AOC is all for that. In fact, she’s so for it that she’ll make fun of anyone who complains about it. But if a comedian makes jokes about her on the Capitol steps, she wants law enforcement to arrest the guy while she becomes enraged at the fact that that type of public protest is even allowed.
Did you get all that?
“I will never understand the pearl clutching over these protests.” Perhaps she’s getting it now — or, likely not.
(Classical reference in headline.)
THIS DAY IN HISTORY: ‘Live Aid’ concert raises $127 million for Famine Relief in Africa.
Brilliant live performances, and a great McLuhan-esque “global village,” but it didn’t actually provide all that much famine relief: Live Aid: The Terrible Truth.
And as I wrote at the Weekly Standard in 2004, when Live Aid (minus Led Zeppelin’s disastrous set) was first released on DVD, “While Live Aid was spectacular television, it was just another in a series of Big Events from people who believed that throwing money at a problem eventually solves it. Eerily, it forecast how the left would interact with Iraq: Substitute Mengistu for Saddam Hussein and it’s amazing how all the rest of the players stay the same–the BBC, the United Nations, and celebrities who believe that despots can be reasoned with to do the right thing. We won’t get fooled again? Of course you will.”
BORIS JOHNSON MISSED HIS CHURCHILL MOMENT: The pandemic was Boris’s biggest test. He failed.
When Johnson’s idol, Winston Churchill, first came to power in 1940, France was in the process of falling to Nazi Germany. Most of the other great European powers had already fallen. For a time, Britain stood alone in the world, the sole defender of the West, with Churchill at its helm. Even when his own ministers urged him to accept Hitler’s peace offer, Churchill held firm to his convictions and chose to fight on.
This is the laudable mantle that Johnson has, all his life, aspired to shoulder. He faced just such a defining moment in March of 2020. The entire world had surrendered to the People’s Republic of China, adopting its totalitarian disease-control strategy, and unlike France or Poland in World War II, we surrendered without a shot being fired. If any man in the world was well-positioned to stand against this, it was the garrulous British renegade, Boris Johnson.
Instead, the United Kingdom became a police state.
Read the whole thing.
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Meet the Cori Bush Activist Who Wants To Burn Jews Alive. Neveen Ayesh wants to ‘set Israel on fire.’
NYT: ‘It’s just been hell’ for Ray Epps over the past 10 months thanks to right-wing media figures.
That’s some ratio that DNC stenographer Adam Goldman is racking up:
OLD AND BUSTED: Midnight basketball urged to curb teen mischief.
—The Baltimore Sun, January 23rd, 1995.
The New Hotness? Philadelphia DA Touts Pools As Solution To Violence Plaguing His City.
Democratic Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner promoted public swimming pools as a means for mitigating violence at a Monday press conference.
Krasner delivered brief remarks to promote public pools this summer, highlighting an exhibit on swimming and segregation, according to WHYY. City officials pointed to the need to open more pools and to extend operating hours for open facilities in order to curb violence.
“I don’t know if there’s any better way to put it than saving lives as opposed to taking lives,” Krasner said, according to the outlet. “I’d like to go down that path instead of seeing kids on either end of a gun.”
* * * * * * * *
The “progressive district attorney” has come under fire for his allegedly soft-on-crime policies. Former Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter, a Democrat, rebuked Kranser for having “little regard for human lives lost, many of them Black and brown, while he advances his own national profile.”
Krasner received almost $3 million from George Soros-linked organizations over the course of two campaigns, according to the New York Post. Voters reelected Krasner last year amid a rise in gun violence and criticism for his determination to preserve criminal justice reforms like no-cash bail.
—The Daily Caller, yesterday.
As New York Times owner Tom Cotton wrote in December: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.
A POPULAR UPRISING AGAINST THE ELITES HAS GONE GLOBAL: “Ultimately, there is a risk that climate policies will do to Europe what Marxism did to Latin America. A continent with all the conditions for widespread prosperity and a healthy environment will impoverish and ruin itself for ideological reasons.”
MILTON FRIEDMAN ISN’T RUNNING SHOW ANYMORE: New Inflation Data Show Real Wages in Decline.
Related: Inflation Spikes 9 Percent, Hits Four-Decade High in June.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Study Shows U.S. 4th Graders Now Gay At A 12th-Grade Level.
HOW IT STARTED: Starbucks barista arrested for spitting in police officers’ beverages.
How it’s going: Rising Crime Forces Starbucks to Shutter 16 Locations in Lawless Cities.
YOU CAN ONLY BE AVANT-GARDE FOR SO LONG BEFORE YOU BECOME GARDE: Rage Against the Machine Has Become the Machine.
(Classical reference in headline.)
GOODER AND HARDER, AMERICA: Severe recession needed to cool inflation, Bank of America analysts say.
JOE BIDEN IS THE KINDEST, BRAVEST, WARMEST, MOST WONDERFUL HUMAN BEING I’VE EVER KNOWN IN MY LIFE: Biden, the Manchurian Candidate.
ROGER KIMBALL: Against the Great Reset: ‘Sovereignty and the Nation-State.’
The question of sovereignty—of who governs—is at the center of all contemporary populist initiatives. It has been posed with increasing urgency as the bureaucratic burden of what has been called the “deep state” or administrative state has weighed more and more forcefully upon the political and social life of Western democracies.
The phenomenon is often identified with the election of Donald Trump in November 2016 and his candidacy in 2020. But the political, moral, and social realities for which Trump was a symbol and a conduit both predated his candidacy and achieved independent reality in countries as disparate as the United Kingdom, Hungary, Italy, and Brazil.
The question of sovereignty was perhaps most dramatically posed in the United Kingdom. In June 2016, more Brits voted to leave the European Union and return sovereignty to Parliament than had ever voted for any initiative in the long history of Great Britain. Some seventeen million people voted to leave the European Union and regain local responsibility for their own lives. That’s more people than had ever voted for anything in Britain. It took more than three years for that promissory note to be cashed. The U.K. formally began its split from the E.U. at 11 p.m. GMT on 31 January 2020. Like the Battle of Waterloo according to the Duke of Wellington, it was a “near run thing.” Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised that he would, deal or no deal, get Brexit done by the end of October 2019. He was stymied for months, as much by the established elites of his own party as by Labour.
The process of emancipation had not proceeded far before it was interrupted by the advent of a new Chinese import, the novel coronavirus which swept all other news from the front page for months (until, that is, it was half-superseded by the extortionist Kabuki theater of “Black Lives Matter”). As I write in the summer of 2021, Europe and the United States both are poised to return to a state of state-enforced semihibernation or “lockdown,” an insidious flu-like respiratory virus created in a Chinese virology lab having paralyzed their populations with fear and transported their governments with the tantalizing prospect of greater control over every aspect of life.
I am not sure I have ever heard Joe Biden utter the word “sovereignty.” But Donald Trump spoke about it often.
Read the whole thing.
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