AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: In Major Deal, The Babylon Bee Purchases Competing Satire Site CNN.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
January 19, 2022
OUT ON A LIMB:
BUILD BACK BRANDON: Biden Frees Alternate 9/11 Hijacker and Military Base Truck Bomb Plotter.
GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING:
Shot: Gas prices are in the danger zone. Biden can’t do much about it.
President Joe Biden’s 2022 is off to a dreadful start. Prices at the pump could make it even worse.
Crude oil has already zoomed back to two-month highs. Gasoline prices, which move with a lag, have stopped their muted decline. And they’re starting to creep higher again.
The energy resurgence is only going to add to the economic anxiety gripping the United States and sinking Biden’s poll numbers.
“This is a terrible situation. Gas prices are in this political danger zone,” Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, told CNN.
The White House knows how deeply unpopular high gas prices are. That’s why Biden took sweeping action in November to intervene. The administration announced the largest-ever release of emergency crude reserves from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) in US history.
The return of $85 oil will pile pressure on Biden to act once again — and the administration is signaling further action is on the table.
“Tools continue to remain on the table for us to address prices. This is something the administration is continuing to watch and monitor very closely,” a White House official told CNN.
Yet presidents have limited power to lower gas prices. While Biden has options, they all have drawbacks.
—CNN, yesterday, in an article where CTL-F “Keystone” brings up zero results.
Chaser: Rising gas prices aren’t as bad as you think.
—Headline, CNN, March 21, 2012.
Hangover: In September of 2019, after CNN’s seven hour “climate change town hall,” Bryan Preston wrote, “Seriously, if you see all of the above — which is just a sample — and vote for any of these people for any office at any level, it’s on you. If you like Venezuela, voting for any of them will bring you a whole lot of Venezuela.”
And as Kate of Small Dead Animals wrote after the CNN horror show, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking they don’t mean it.”
Flashbacks:
● Aren’t California’s High Gas Prices What The Left Have Wanted?
● NBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times in lockstep call for higher gas taxes.
● 2008 L.A. Times headline: “The joy of $8 gas.”
Exit quote: “Under my plan, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket…”
In other words, Obama administration retreads are following the same playbook as the original Obama administration: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden: As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.
Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned
DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: One Political Party Has Always Fought For Civil Rights, The Other Created The KKK.
AKA, “the terrorist wing of the Democratic Party,” before the party recently branched out into Antifa and BLM.
MIDTERM BATTLEFIELD PREP BY NPR: The Movement To Stick Inflation Blame On Biden.
It’s hard to say how widespread use of these stickers actually is, but they’re all over the Internet. If you search “Biden sticker” on Google, they immediately pop up. In between TikTok videos of orangutans driving golf carts and a chipmunk named Squishy filling up his cheeks with nuts, there are hundreds of videos of TikTokers placing “I did that!” stickers on gas pumps. Dozens of online merchants sell packs of them on sites like Amazon and Etsy, usually for around 8 or 9 bucks for 100 stickers.
Etsy seller JolieJamesStyle typically sells “handmade jewelry with healing properties,” but now they’re selling Biden “I did that!” stickers. Kara Allbaugh, who owns a small design and marketing company in Columbus, Nebraska, says she started a secondary business selling these stickers on Etsy back in October. She says they’ve been flying off the shelves. “I don’t know how long this will go on for, but it’s still funny because now you can just put them on everything, not just gas,” she says.
Even before their recent en-wokening, NPR has always really hated grassroots protests by the right. Flashback: Taxpayer-Funded Immaturity: NPR Teaches Readers ‘To Speak Tea Bag.’
—NewsBusters, January 4, 2010.
As Glenn noted in October of 2016, “I’m increasingly concerned that the neutralization of the Tea Party movement — an effort by both major parties — may have convinced a lot of people that civics-book style polite political participation is for chumps.”
Incidentally, regarding that third link, why are Democrat monopoly institutions such cesspits of rampant ignorance and homophobia?
Related: How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class. “For a long time, the notion that America is an unrepentant white-supremacist state—one that confers power and privilege to white people and systematically denies them to people of color—was the province of far-left activists and academics. But over the past decade, it’s found its way into the mainstream, largely through liberal media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post, Vox, CNN, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. What changed? Most obviously: white liberals. Their enthusiasm for wokeness created a feedback loop with the media outlets to which they are paying subscribers. And the impact has been monumental: Once distinct publications and news channels are now staggeringly uniform.”
WAIT…SO THE FBI LIED ABOUT THE ENDING OF THE TEXAS SYNAGOGUE HOSTAGE SITUATION? “British national Malik Faisal Akram took four people hostage at Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. It lasted over ten hours. It had a good ending. All four hostages are alive and escaped injury. Akram is dead. Yet, we have new developments on how this whole saga ended. At least one was released, the other three were later released as well. That’s what was Initially reported. Now, it seems like the rabbi created the situation in which the hostages were able to make a break for it. In other words, the FBI lied again.”
January 18, 2022
AN IN-DEPTH LOOK AT THE REBUILDING OF NOTRE DAME CATHEDRAL.
“Rebuilding” covers a lot of territory, however: “Plans are afoot to turn Notre Dame cathedral, once it’s restored, into what some have called a ‘politically correct Disneyland.’”
INSIDE EVERY LIBERAL IS A TOTALITARIAN SCREAMING TO GET OUT: New poll finds 45% of Democrats want the unvaccinated sent to internment camps, 59% okay with just house arrest.
(Classical reference in headline.)
ROGER SIMON: Djokovic Actually the Big Winner in Australia—and So Are We.
Australia’s schizoid and sadistic treatment of Djokovic became just another symbol of this multi-national mess. But it could mark its opera bouffe apotheosis.
That is why I agree with Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club, a Sydney resident and old friend of mine, that a tremendous backlash is brewing in Oz and, I would certainly add, here in the United States as well, once COVID is over.
And, as I wrote earlier and many others have surmised, the Omicron variant is heralding that end, behaving as most viruses do at the end of a pandemic, weakening as it becomes more communicative. Soon enough it will be another irritation we must face, but rarely a fatal one.
The problem engendered by this is that much of the leadership in Sydney and Washington will be very reluctant to let go of it.
We see that all around us, particularly in the Biden administration where they cling to COVID-19 just as Obama claimed conservatives clung to their guns and religion, only more so.
Resistance, however, is building. What will be its watchword? Who will be the first to say “Mr. Biden, tear off that mask!”
Fernandez put the situation this way: “Already the signs of political disillusion are plain to see, from Joe Biden’s collapse in the polls, the SCOTUS rejection of his vaccine mandate, Boris Johnson’s slipping hold on power to Novak Djokovic’s amazing one-man stand against Australia’s vaccine visa policy: a worldwide storm is brewing and it will break over the political scene in 2022.”
Related: Australian Government Admits Letting Djokovic Stay Would’ve Undermined COVID Police State.
COMCAST APPROVED! Really MSNBC? Using A Jew-Hater To Discuss Texas Synagogue Takeover: Are You Nuts? Al Sharpton’s Antisemitism Goes WAY Beyond Crown Heights And Freddy’s.
THIS IS CNN: Should the government control the price of food and gas?
What could possibly go wrong?
WATCH: Behavior and body language expert breaks down Kamala Harris’s interview responses.
“She stammers as she tries to navigate what to say,” Hartley said. “When you’re feeling stressed, you lose your cadence, your normal cadence, and you lose your ability to structure language. … I think [Melvin] is under her skin here, and he knows it.”
The behavior and body language expert said it is difficult to know if Harris is lying in her comments about the 2024 presidential ticket but that she was hedging and did not have an answer.
“That would roll off my tongue if I knew I was going to be the running mate in 2024,” Hartley said. “I would say, ‘Eh, there is nothing to that. That’s just garbage’ and just push it aside. You didn’t see that. You saw stress, and you saw her blink rate go through the roof. Good indicators that something is going on inside her body.”
Hartley added that body language aside, Harris redirecting when answering questions is an indicator that she is unprepared.
RIDICULE IS MAN’S MOST POTENT WEAPON: Street Artists on Both Coasts Take Aim at COVID Authoritarianism and the Lefties Can’t Cope.
HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU? ANYTHING YOU TYPE ON THAT TELEPROMPTER, RON BURGUNDY WILL READ! 2020 Video of Joe Biden Saying George Floyd’s Death Accomplished More than MLK’s Goes Viral on MLK Day.
BRITISH MUSLIMS FEAR REPERCUSSIONS OVER TOMORROW’S TRAIN BOMBING: ADL Fears ‘Islamophobia’ After Muslim Storms Texas Synagogue.
(Classical reference in headline.)
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Union Pacific Weighs Avoiding Los Angeles as Cargo Theft Rises.
The letter added that “like our customers, UP is now contemplating serious changes to our operating plans to avoid Los Angeles County.” A spokeswoman said in an emailed statement on Sunday that the company is still considering such options.
In the three months leading up to the holiday shopping season, UP said an average of more than 90 containers were compromised per day and more than 100 arrests were made. “Of all those arrests, however, UP has not been contacted for any court proceedings,” the letter stated.
The railroad has increased the number of agents, drones, fencing and trespass detection systems. “We need the L.A. District Attorney’s help to ensure there are consequences for those who prevent us from safely moving customer goods,” UP said in the statement.
Good luck with that: “George Gascón is a proud supporter of both BLM and Antifa. He is a far-left progressive and one of many District Attorneys who has enjoyed the generous patronage of George Soros. He thinks looting is reparations. His policies are a complete enshrinement of BLM demands: defund police, stop arresting criminals, and close down the jails, because they’re racist. The only people he plans to target for arrest are cops, of course, and innocent people guilty of things like home self-defense, white privilege, and insufficient public wokeness. In other words, George Gascón is the disease—and the cure. Once he takes a wrecking ball to public safety, Lord help us all. The popsicle sticks and chewing gum holding this place together won’t stand a chance.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Five Reasons Battery-Electric Vehicle Road Trip Range Stinks. Electric vehicles have multiple issues that make them harder to use on road trips than plug-in hybrids or hybrids. Here is why the range between charges is so low on long road trips.
WANT TRUE EQUITY? CALIFORNIA SHOULD FORCE PARENTS TO GIVE AWAY THEIR CHILDREN:
If California is ever going to achieve true equity, the state must require parents to give away their children.
Today’s Californians often hold up equity — the idea of a just society completely free from bias — as our greatest value. Gov. Gavin Newsom says he makes decisions through “an equity lens.” Institutions from dance ensembles to tech companies have publicly pledged themselves to equity, along with diversity and inclusion.
But their promises of newly equitable systems are no match for the power of parents.
Fathers and mothers with greater wealth, education or other resources are more likely to transfer these advantages to their children, compounding privilege over generations. As a result, children of less advantaged parents face an uphill struggle, social mobility has stalled and democracy has been corrupted. More Californians are giving up on the dream; a recent Public Policy Institute of California poll found declining belief in the notion that you can get ahead through hard work.
My solution is simple, and while we wait for the legislation to pass, we can act now: The rich should give their children to the poor, and the poor should give their children to the rich. Homeowners might swap children with their homeless neighbors.
Now, I recognize that some naysayers, hopelessly attached to their privilege, will dismiss such a policy as ghastly, even totalitarian. But my proposal is quite modest, a fusion of traditional philosophy and today’s most common political obsessions.
Yes, it’s warmed-over Jonathan Swift in the San Francisco Chronicle. But it’s also Comcast and MSNBC-approved:
And it’s par for the course for the Chronicle as well, which published a column in 2008 on “Throwing less-is-more birthday parties” that declared, “There is nothing more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party.” (Great moments in self-awareness for a San Francisco-based newspaper.)
Not coincidentally, SF has had a birth dearth for years, culminating in this headline at ABC-7 News in April of last year: Bay Area sees big drop in births compared to pre-pandemic, data shows.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Far-Right Extremist Suggests Treating People Of All Races Equally.
JIM TREACHER: Only White People Can Commit Hate Crimes, Right?
Have you ever noticed how crime is only racially motivated when it’s committed by a white person? According to our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press, anyway. They’re very devoted to Critical Race Theory and whatnot, so they just love it when white folks do bad things. “See? There’s your proof! White people really are to blame for all the world’s ills!”1
We saw this with a couple of crime stories this weekend. First, in Colleyville, Texas, a British national named Malik Faisal Akram took hostages in a synagogue and demanded the U.S. release an Islamic terrorist named Aafia Siddiqui, AKA Lady Al Qaeda. He picked that synagogue because she’s being held in federal prison 25 miles away.
Akram live-streamed the attack, as is now depressingly common, and he told the world exactly why he did it. But it doesn’t fit the Democratic Party’s narrative, so the authorities had to just outright lie about it:
Read the whole thing.
JOANNE JACOBS: Losing the liberal moms.
Republican Governor Mike DeWine pressured schools to reopen in March 2021, but Cleveland offered only two days a week to kindergarteners. That was it for Schmitt and her husband. With two months left in the school year, they enrolled their son in a charter school that offered full-time in-person instruction.
When she questioned the party line online, she was “accused of being a Trumper who didn’t care if teachers died,” writes Schmitt.
She’s not a Republican. But Schmitt no longer trusts that the Democratic party is “motivated to act in the interests of those they claim to serve,” she writes. “How can I get excited about universal pre-K proposals, for example, when K–12 is in shambles?”
Rebecca Bodenheimer, an Oakland journalist and mother, is undergoing a political identity crisis, she writes on Politico. She went public last June with her views on reopening schools. Her progressive friends didn’t like it — or did, but were unwilling to speak up.
She now helps lead Oakland parents who are “pushing the school district to be more transparent about the process of reopening (particularly in negotiations with the teachers union).”
As Glenn mentioned earlier today, “It’s funny how the press, supposed sentinel of liberty, consistently sides with the rulers against the public, but the AJC’s portrayal of parents as crazed, knife-wielding stalkers is pretty low even for, well, the AJC.”
And yesterday, on her Substack, A.P. Dillon noted: Wake County NC Democrat tweet includes image disparaging parents:
Michigan’s Democratic Party decided to hop on the bandwagon as well, in a since-deleted tweet:
Ask Terry McAuliffe how treating parents as the enemy worked out for him in November, and how it’s working out for Joe Biden: Senators Demand Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona Explain Role in Letter That Called Parents Domestic Terrorists.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS…PRETTY CONSISTENT, ACTUALLY: This MLK Day, Remember How The FBI Targeted Him.