I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER WORD ABOUT GLENN REYNOLDS’ CARBON FOOTPRINT: LAPD investigates Arnold Schwarzenegger car crash after woman is injured when the star rolls his GMC Yukon SUV over a Prius and then onto a Porsche Cayenne after lunch with his son and daughter.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
January 22, 2022
“HELLO, I’M TOM HANKS. THE U.S. GOVERNMENT HAS LOST ITS CREDIBILITY, SO IT’S BORROWING SOME OF MINE:” Ted Cruz Mocks Tom Hanks For Narrating Biden Video, Reminds Him ‘The Simpsons Did It First.’
ENZO ENDED: Mechanic totals $3.4M Ferrari after smashing into tree stump on test drive.
A mechanic totaled a $3.4 million Ferrari when he smashed into a tree stump on a test drive.
The bright red Enzo sports car, one of only 400 made, had two wheels ripped off and may be irreparable.
Local reports suggest a dealership mechanic was behind the wheel. He escaped unhurt but was taken to the hospital for a check-up.
A witness to Tuesday’s smash in Baarn, Netherlands, said: “I think he wanted to turn back to the dealership.”
* * * * * * * *
Just 400 of the mid-engine dream cars left the Ferrari production line between 2002 and 2004.
The photos are painful to look at; here’s Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason’s Enzo, shortly after delivery, looking much happier:
January 21, 2022
BIDEN VOTERS POSTING THEIR L’S ONLINE: Andrew Sullivan: How Biden Lost The Plot.
One explanation, perhaps, for Biden’s dense and hard-to-sell legislative juggernauts is that if he’d broken them up and prioritized any single policy, he’d have split his own party. Look what happened when infrastructure passed the Senate first: the left went nuts. In that sense Biden is not so much governing the country as trying to keep the Democrat coalition together, and in the end, achieving neither.
Another aspect of the problem is that so many Dem activists and groups have deeply imbibed the notion that America in 2022 is a “white supremacist” country, designed to suppress non-whites, and that we are now living in a system of de facto “legal fascism,” with a minority “white” party holding the country in its undemocratic grip, perhaps forever. The Democrats and elite liberals really seem to believe that we are back in the 1960s or 1890s or even 1860s, that we live in a black-vs-white world of good vs evil, and that the choice today is literally, in Biden’s words, between backing Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis. This is as self-righteous as it is ludicrous. It’s MLK envy. It’s an attempt to recreate the moral clarity of the civil rights movement, in a country no one from 1964 would begin to recognize.
The Democrats also increasingly view the Constitution itself as a problem for democracy. Notice how frequently they bring up the anti-majoritarian nature of the Senate and the Electoral College, as if that’s a bug and not a feature of the American republican balance. Notice how adding seats to the Supreme Court is also popular among Dems, because they have been outmaneuvered by the wily and shameless McConnell in the Congress. And how many more columns in the MSM do I have to read by people who believe the next election will be our last if the Republicans win? I remember when Norm Ornstein and Ron Brownstein, for example, were solid pillars of centrist conventional wisdom. Now, they both appear to believe it’s 1933 in Weimar, and without a federal takeover of elections, our democracy is over. Our democracy isn’t over. It’s our liberal democracy that’s under threat, and this kind of morally pure Manicheanism is one reason why.
Weimar, you say? Flashback to 2020: Niall Ferguson: ‘Weimar America?’ The Trump Show Is No Cabaret. Detractors have been equating the U.S. with 1920s Germany for 85 years, and they are still wrong:
Weimerica has recurred in dystopian function: in Stephen King’s “The Running Man” (1982), Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985), Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” (2004) and Suzanne Collins’s “The Hunger Games” (2008). In each case, although the focus is on life in a fascist America, there is a version of the Weimar back story, for without the degeneration of the republic, the rise of the dictatorship is inexplicable. (For some reason, the Weimar syndrome rarely claims dear old Canada, which provides a bolt-hole for the U.S. resistance.)
So when my old friend Andrew Sullivan urged us last month “to be frank” about recent developments in American politics and admit that it is all “very Weimar,” he was adding to an 85-year-old tradition.
“The center has collapsed,” Sullivan wrote. “Armed street gangs of far right and far left are at war on the streets. Tribalism is intensifying in every nook and cranny of the culture. The establishment right and mainstream left tolerate their respective extremes because they hate each other so much.”
It’s not the first time Sullivan has made the Weimerica argument. Six months before the 2016 election, he warned that “our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy” was leading “the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump” — and from there to tyranny.
As far back as September of 2007, Sullivan referred to then-President Bush as “The Weimar President,” as a way to do the Bush is Hitler analogy that every other leftwing pundit was making back then without fully redlining the Godwin Meter.
UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY, COMRADES! New York Times Refers To Women As ‘Menstruators’ For The First Time.
The New York Times referred to women as “menstruators” for the first time in a Thursday article on changing attitudes towards feminine hygiene products.
“New menstruators,” the article said in reference to young girls who have recently started their periods, “often turn to a parent for products and advice — now parents can hand over more than a disposable pad or tampon.”
The article avoided using feminine pronouns when noting that “the average menstruator can use thousands of tampons in their lifetime.”
The author did not use the words “woman” or “female” at any point in the article, and the article only says “girls” in reference to two specific girls the NYT interviewed for the piece. Instead, the author says “people” when referring to women experiencing menstruation periods and “young people” to describe girls experiencing menstruation.
Related: Watch: Matt Walsh Destroys Woke Gender Narrative With One Simple Question.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Infighting: Joe Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain Accused of Hidin’ Biden.
As Biden’s Chief of Staff, Klain is the nucleus of office politics, which are said to be rife with “grumbling” “personal score-settling and constraints… on Biden’s ability to reach out,” though top White House officials denied the report.
When Biden was asked at Wednesday’s press conference about what his 2022 reset would entail, Biden blamed coronavirus and not Klain for his detachment from his pragmatic way of “connecting with people.”
“I find myself in a situation where I don’t get a chance to look people in the eye because of both Covid and things that are happening in Washington, to be able to go out and do the things that I’ve always been able to do pretty well — connect with people,” Biden claimed.
Biden’s decision to escape the White House and speak with Americans is reportedly not in line with Klain’s priorities.
Biden’s confidants told NBC News that “Klain knows Biden ‘can be influenced by his old friends,’ and that ‘frankly, he should be, because there’s a lot of experience there.’”
The report also accused Klain of giving “outsize credence to cable news and social media” and supported the claim with evidence of incessant tweeting and retweeting to pacify the media.
Flashback: Journo Twitter runs the Biden administration.
DON’T GET COCKY: Republicans Beware! You Ain’t Won Anything Yet.
TEXAS JUDGE BLOCKS BIDEN’S FEDERAL WORKER VACCINE MANDATE. CBS News is quick to get both T-words in there; Trump and Texas: “A U.S. judge in Texas issued a nationwide injunction on Friday barring the federal government from enforcing President Joe Biden’s requirement that federal workers without qualifying medical or religious exemptions be vaccinated for COVID-19. Judge Jeffrey Brown, who was appointed to the District Court for the Southern District of Texas by then-President Donald Trump, ruled that opponents of Mr. Biden’s vaccination mandate for federal employees were likely to succeed at trial and blocked the government from enforcing the requirement.”
Somehow I don’t think they lost much sleep over the legendary “Hawaiian Judges” blocking The Bad Orange Man’s agenda.
UPDATE: Ace of Spades writes, “your employer does not have the right of Medical Prima Nochtae over you, which leftwing professors would grasp if a conservative president mandated, say, that all female government workers not get abortions or whatever. And the president’s power to order about the bureaucracy is limited by the powers actually given to him by Congress. And Congress has not given him this power…I saw a commentator, I forget who, maybe Brit Hume, note that Presidents and their attorneys are usually mindful not just about the personal price of losing on their claims of presidential power, but about the historic price of losing on claims of presidential power for all future presidents. And so that most presidents do not roll the dice and say ‘YOLO’ on very dubious, weak claims of power, knowing that in all likelihood the courts will say ‘No’ and put up a firm limit on presidential power. Brandon doesn’t roll that way, obviously. His presidency is not just disastrous for the nation’s current citizenry, but for all future occupants of the White House. This small, nasty, weak little man is enfeebling the office of the presidency for all future presidents out of pique and senility-caused anger.”
BUILD BACK BRANDON: Biden Says People Are Getting Raises—But New Data Show Wages Are Actually Going Down.
“NOW THAT THE NATIONAL MEDIA HAVE ‘MOVED ON,’ THE TRUTH COMES OUT:” Oh, Now They Tell Us: Texas Synagogue Terrorist Was Known Jew-Hater.
BUGATTI CHIRON OWNER TARGETED BY TRANSPORT MINISTRY AFTER 260MPH HIGH SPEED RUN ON AUTOBAHN:
Here, I should note that this was completely legal as the A2, the road used for this run, hasn’t got a speed limit and is known around the world as somewhere you can take your car to the peak of its performance – in a straight line anyway.
But now Germany’s Transport Ministry has criticised the driver and is accusing him of putting other drivers in danger after he posted a video of the stunt to YouTube (see above).
Despite the run taking place at 4:50am, where there’s barely any traffic on the road, the Transport Ministry said in a statement that it doesn’t condone driving at such high speeds on its public roads. It said it “rejects any behaviour in road traffic that leads or can lead to endangering road users”.
Passer, estimated to be worth over $300 million and is the Czech Republic’s 33rd richest person in the country, is now being accused of breaking the following law: “Anyone participating in traffic must behave in such a way that no other person is harmed, endangered or obstructed or inconvenienced more than is unavoidable under the circumstances.”
Video at link. As Richard Hammond once said on Top Gear, if there’s ever a speed limit on the Autobahn, “What’s the point in having Germany?”
BUILD BACK BUTTIGIEG: Emirates Airline president: The 5G snafu is the biggest screwup I’ve witnessed in my career.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: NPR ‘Founding Mother’ Unloads on Public Editor Over SCOTUS Story: ‘She’s Not Clarifying Anything!’
A spokesperson for NPR told The Daily Beast late Thursday that “we stand behind Nina Totenberg’s reporting.” The NPR offical added: “The public editor is independent and does not speak for NPR.”
McBride, for her part, told the Daily Beast on Thursday night that she stood by her recommendation, and that she does “think NPR should clarify the language in the story.”
But in her own telephone conversation with the Beast, Totenberg — a towering presence at NPR who has been there since 1975 — responded to McBride, the justices, and general criticism of her story.
“A non-denial denial from two of them doesn’t work,” Totenberg said, referring to the statement from Sotomayor and Gorsuch. As to Roberts, she said, “the other just refuses to accept the fact that I did not say that he requested that people do anything, but in some form did.”
“I have got nothing to say, except that I am sticking by my reporting,” Totenberg said while eating dinner. “I think it is absolutely valid.”
As Ed Morrissey wrote on yesterday:
It sounds suspiciously like NPR and Totenberg needed material for a narrative more than an accurate look at the inner workings of the court, especially as it chews on highly controversial topics like Roe v Wade and vaccine/test mandates.
And this last bit from [Robert Barnes of the Washington Post] more or less seals Totenberg’s fate on this report:
On the bench Wednesday, all of the justices again were masked, although a few took their face coverings off for brief periods. Sotomayor again participated remotely.
D’oh! So much for the NPR narrative.
Totenberg sounds like she’s entered into Dan Rather’s ”If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I’d like to break that story” territory.
January 20, 2022
KURT SCHLICHTER: Youngkin Brings the Pain and Shows Republicans How to Win.
Dumb people think the secret of Trump was mean tweets. No, those were just an amusing fringe benefit. Trump’s gift to the party was to demonstrate how Republicans can win going forward. And it’s not with some warmed-over perversion of Reaganism that the consultant class pushes. It’s easy. Focus on the concerns of the voters, not the donors or the elite, and then keep your promises. Simple, but effective. That’s the recipe for GOP success in the post-Trump era.
And Youngkin did it. A Republican moderate is not supposed to attack the institutional racism of CRT in the schools even though the people are screaming about it. That kind of cultural issue is icky, and people at the country club will turn up their noses at you. Talk about tax cuts, about liking the cops, and about building a bridge across the aisle to a better tomorrow.
But Youngkin was having none of that. He smelled blood and went for the jugular. He listened to the people, instead of trying to tell them what they wanted.
And so far, he looks like he’s having fun doing it as well: Glenn Youngkin Masterfully Trolls Woke Establishment With Diversity Hire. “The governor has renamed the state’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer the Diversity, Opportunity, and Inclusion Officer. Further, he appointed a conservative to the spot and also listed one of the job requirements as being an ‘ambassador for unborn children.’ Democrats are not used to being fought on their own ground. By and large, the left has come to expect that while they may be opposed, the guardrails they’ve set up will be respected. That’s why a change like this makes them so upset, and to be sure, the wailing in response has been deafening. You aren’t supposed to actually retake territory when you fight the left. You are, instead, supposed to kowtow to their institutions and work around the edges. That’s what they’ve come to expect from Republicans like Larry Hogan. Youngkin continues to impress, though. Instead of playing by the left’s rules, he’s decapitating their sacred cows. The inclusion of unborn babies in the mission of the state’s Diversity, Opportunity, and Inclusion office is master trolling, but it’s also an incredible moral imperative.”
UPDATE: Loudoun County schools’ chief of staff axed over sex-attack scandal: reports.
(Via Small Dead Animals.)
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Jordan Peterson resigns from his tenured position at University of Toronto.
We are now at the point where race, ethnicity, “gender,” or sexual preference is first, accepted as the fundamental characteristic defining each person (just as the radical leftists were hoping) and second, is now treated as the most important qualification for study, research and employment…
And it’s not just the universities. And the professional colleges. And Hollywood. And the corporate world. Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity — that radical leftist Trinity — is destroying us. Wondering about the divisiveness that is currently besetting us? Look no farther than DIE. Wondering — more specifically — about the attractiveness of Trump? Look no farther than DIE. When does the left go too far? When they worship at the altar of DIE, and insist that the rest of us, who mostly want to be left alone, do so as well. Enough already. Enough. Enough.
Read the whole thing.
WELCOME BACK, CARTER! Is Stagflation Returning in 2022?
During the late 1970s, American families experienced stagflation—a combination of economic stagnation and significantly higher inflation. By the summer of 1980, unemployment hit 7.8% and the economy was actually shrinking. On the year, inflation spiked 12.3%.
Some fear that today’s slowing economic growth (2.3% annualized last quarter) and the steepest price hikes in 40 years portend a return to stagflation.
Real weekly earnings have plummeted more than 6% since the middle of last year, and the cost of living eclipsed wage increases. Dramatic price hikes in housing, rent, vehicles, gasoline, and some food staples have fueled the feeling that something in our economy is amiss.
Government mandates, regulations, spending, and borrowing are largely to blame for this painful increase in the cost of living. These governmental actions suppressed the supply of goods and services while spurring demand.
Read the whole thing.
Lastly, Freedom speaks directly to Ming. “Listen, Yao Ming, you or your Communist Party cannot buy me. I do not need a luxury tour of China,” he says. “I want the world to see the real side of China under [the] cultish Chinese Communist Party’s brutal rule, [with] slave labor camps and millions living in fear because of inescapable government surveillance.” Freedom concludes the video, saying he will certainly buy his own ticket to China if Ming will agree to show him the real China of the Uyghurs, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Shuai.
Kudos to Enes Kanter Freedom for such a clear and clever response. It’s refreshing to see a high-profile celebrity refuse to bow to financial or social pressures and instead do and say what is right. It’s a good bet Yao Ming and the Communists wish Freedom would quietly go away. As of publication time, Ming and the Chinese government have yet to respond.
To invert the Godfather, Kanter-Freedom is making him an offer he can’t accept.
TEXAS SYNAGOGUE TERRORIST RANTED ABOUT “F***ING JEWS” IN LAST CALL TO FAMILY MADE DURING SIEGE:
The disturbing 11-and-a-half minute audio recording, obtained from a security source, reveals a conversation between Akram and his brother, Gulbar, 43, who was speaking from a police station in Blackburn in an attempt to persuade him to surrender.
In a semi-coherent ramble about American conflicts overseas, the terrorist said: “Why do these f***ing motherf***ers come to our countries, rape our women and f*** our kids? I’m setting a precedent… maybe they’ll have compassion for f***ing Jews.”
When urged by Gulbar to end the siege, do time in prison and come back to his family, Akram shouted that he had been “praying to Allah for two years for this” and intended to die. “I’d rather live one day as a lion than 100 years as a jackal,” he said.
“I’m going to go toe-to-toe with [police] and they can shoot me dead … I’m coming home in a body bag.”
He added: “I promised my brother on his deathbed that I’d go down a martyr.” One of his younger brothers died three months ago, reportedly from Covid.
And as soon as it was over, the media were quick to forget the story, Eve Barlow writes:
The news of this incident broke as it was happening, spread by Jewish media outlets and Jewish activists on social media. As is typical for the Jewish news cycle, when mainstream media picked up the story, they doubted its authenticity. The BBC, Guardian and Telegraph all reported the situation with quotation marks around the word ‘hostage’, because apparently it wasn’t obvious enough that this was a hostage situation. Associated Press wrote: ‘Hostages apparently taken at Texas synagogue’.
The news did not make the front page of the New York Times the next day. It didn’t receive nearly as much coverage on rolling televised news as such events warrant. Why? It has no political use. It’s not on the agenda. The hostage-taker Malik Faisal Akram – shot dead in the standoff with police and SWAT teams – wasn’t a white supremacist nor a neo-Nazi. He was avenging a Jihadi serving an 86-year sentence, who at her trial had asked that there be no Zionists or Israelis on her jury.
As for Twitter pundits, where the previous week people with zero interest in Jew hate were laying into JK Rowling over the question of whether or not her depiction of goblins in Harry Potter was antisemitic, causing it to trend with a hashtag. During this desperate moment for Jewish Americans? Crickets. The opportunists who used Jewish victimhood to attack a now controversial public figure had no business with this more prescient instance of antisemitism. Disappointing doesn’t cover the angering sense of betrayal and abuse.
The message was loud. Nobody cared. If they did, they were actively trying to minimise or justify the attack. Some blue tick voices made it about the Islamophobia that may or may not result from a scenario in which a terrorist was potentially going to kill four innocent Jews. Only a month prior to this, Zahra Billoo, the Executive Director of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), had given a spine-chilling speech in which she warned against ‘Zionist synagogues’ and other Zionist organisations as ‘enemies’.
It’s evil that people have a hard time naming an attack on a synagogue an act of antisemitism. Wonder why a Muslim extremist would hold a rabbi hostage at gun point and force him to call another rabbi in a faraway state believing that other rabbi had some institutional power to free an imprisoned terrorist? It is because that terrorist believed Jews wield such power. It is because that terrorist spread the oldest antisemitic tropes. The terrorist didn’t walk into a Starbucks. He walked into a synagogue. If this had been a Black church or an LGBTQ+ nightclub, there’d have been no question calling the act what it was. But Jews are not granted the same ferocious collective protection.
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and the story’s burial makes sense. In addition to there being no political use to the left, the media don’t want to remind voters, especially after Biden’s Afghanistan debacle, that, as Rabbi Michael Barclay writes, “It is a reality that there are wolves at the door.”
STEPHANIE GRISHAM MAKES WILD CLAIMS ABOUT ‘SECRET MEETINGS’ AHEAD OF JAN. 6TH:
The infotainment industry’s sources claim that Grisham’s testimony was “more significant” than expected, but there is nothing unusual about the sitting US President having meetings in which not every single solitary person in the White House is included.
Nonetheless, Grisham’s nothing-burger continues to gain traction in the media.
They need all the distractions they can get in an election year, when even CNN is reporting that Brandon is in serious trouble.
C’MON — IT’S BATMAN, NOT A DAVID LEAN MOVIE: The Batman Runtime Revealed: 2 Hours and 47 Minutes, Without Credits.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Biden Outperforms Nation’s Expectations For First Year By Still Being Alive.
DON’T UNDERESTIMATE JOE’S ABILITY TO F**K THINGS UP: We Will All Pay for Joe Biden’s ‘Minor Incursion’ Mistake.
The effect of Biden’s remarks was immediate. European capitals—Kyiv, in particular—erupted with indignation. “They watched those remarks, I think, with horror,” CNN’s Matthew Chance said of the Ukrainian government. One Ukrainian official said Biden had all but given Moscow a “green light” to invade. The White House immediately went to work cleaning up Biden’s comments, but it was wholly insufficient. “He was referring to the difference between military and non-military/para-military/cyber action by the Russians,” National Security Council Spokeswoman Emily Horne said. Some difference. Even if you believe Russia is parsing the fine distinctions between the president’s statements and their post-facto revisions by his more responsible staffers, “para-military” incursions are precisely what Moscow executed both in Crimea and in the Donbas region. There, Russian proxy forces have transformed the area into a warzone and carved out illegitimate “republics,” though the Russian currency and passports held by the residents of these puppet states leave no one confused as to who is in charge.
The president’s words and actions carry more weight than any half-hearted statement walking them back. Courtesy of his performance in Afghanistan, Putin has all the evidence he needs to conclude that Joe Biden will blink in defending American interests against an aggressor if he thinks the costs of such an effort are too high to bear. Biden has exposed the very real and now fully confirmed tensions within the Atlantic Alliance over how to respond to Russian aggression, if there is any response at all. All the tough talk in the world cannot undo that. Joe Biden has sown the wind. Now, we await the whirlwind.
Earlier, from Steve: Is Biden Inviting the Very War in Ukraine We Don’t Want to Fight?