CHANGE:
● New Va. Gov. Youngkin issues executive orders on COVID mandates, CRT and more. “Executive Order Number Two delivers on his Day One promise to empower Virginia parents in their children’s education and upbringing by allowing parents to make decisions on whether their child wears a mask in school.”
● Winsome Sears to make history as first woman — and Black woman — to be Virginia’s Lt. Governor.
(Updated and bumped.)
STACY MCCAIN: Rich Democrats Are Never Guilty in Oregon.
It’s good to be in the nomenklatura.
QUESTION ASKED: The Left Controls Almost Everything. So Why Are They So Afraid?
NO, RAND PAUL ISN’T ‘PANDEMIC PROFITEERING’ OFF HIS #FIREFAUCI CAMPAIGN:
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump asked the same question on Thursday in a column titled, “How politically helpful have Rand Paul’s attacks on Anthony Fauci been?”
Using spikes in Google traffic each time Fauci and Paul have squared off, Bump determined that Paul had raised his media profile each time and, yes, that has translated into increased donations.
But this didn’t seem to lead Bump to the conclusion that Paul’s Fauci questions were merely or even primarily about political or financial gain.
“Paul was seeing higher weekly totals than he had been,” Bump writes, analyzing the two men’s exchanges. “From early May on, though, the level of fundraising was consistently at or above $100,000 a week, with only one exception. That pattern began when he got into the ‘gain of function’ fight with Fauci.”
Is Rand Paul’s Inquiry Still Legitimate?
But what Bump said next was most instructive.
“This is circumstantial,” Bump observed (emphasis added). “It’s clear that Paul is trying to generate contributions and attention from his fights with Fauci (the website to which Fauci referred is online, for example), but it’s not clear that this is central to Paul’s political efforts.
“Nor should one assume Paul’s confrontations are solely offered in bad faith,” Bump wrote. “While Fauci has repeatedly pushed back on his line of questioning, it’s a line of questioning that our fact-checkers consider to be in a gray area.”
Related: Doctor assures us that Anthony Fauci, an Italian from Brooklyn, ‘knows a guy:’
Porter is apparently the sister of Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), and has since locked her Twitter account, for some, um, behind the scenes waste management work.
Flashback: Why does Twitter allow the Left to encourage violence against Rand Paul?
To ask the question is to answer it.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN):
NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Crime-Swamped Philly Issues Pamphlet on How To Survive Carjackings.
MAKES SENSE; THE IRISHMAN’S LAST HOURS WERE AS LONG AS A JERRY GARCIA GUITAR SOLO: Martin Scorsese to Direct Grateful Dead Biopic Starring Jonah Hill as Jerry Garcia.
2024 PRESIDENTIAL RACE OFFICIALLY BEGINS:
● Florida Democrat Nikki Fried compares Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to Adolf Hitler.
● Samantha Bee Labels DeSantis ‘Worse Than Trump.’
Flashbacks:
● American Politics Reaches Its ‘Worse Than Trump’ Phase. “This is simply how Democrats begin to talk about Republican candidates whom they believe are capable of winning a national election. When such candidates reach office, they’re Hitler. When they’ve left office, they’re bad, but not as bad as the ones in office. And when they’re dead, they’re the sort of Republicans whom the living ones should be more like — yes, even if, when they were alive, they, too, were deemed to be Hitler. The assertion that ‘DeSantis is worse than Trump’ was inevitable from the moment Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.”
● Every New Republican Is the Most Evil Republican Ever.
● Every Republican president or presidential candidate is the next Hitler — even Calvin Coolidge, who served before the Nazis came to power.
KIDS SAY THE DARNEDEST THINGS: Watch: Kid accidentally calls out his woke mom for pushing him to be LGBT.
JIM TREACHER: We Need a Maximum Age Requirement for President.
No offense to my older readers, but we need to amend the age requirement to run for president of the United States. It’s fine to keep the minimum age at 35, but we need a maximum age as well. I’d propose Joe Biden’s current age minus, oh, let’s say four years just to be on the safe side. So that would cap eligibility at 75 years young.
A natural-born American citizen gets 40 years to make it into the White House. If you can’t get it done by your 75th birthday, too bad. You had your chance. That seems fair, right? Four decades is more than enough time, isn’t it?
Because the alternative is… this.
Biden’s always had anger issues, but now that he’s in his dotage, they’ve only gotten worse. (Trunalimunumaprzure!) As Treacher writes, “Joe Biden should step down before he falls down.”
JOHN NOLTE: CNN Lost 90 Percent of Its Audience. “CNN is left-wing talk radio with pictures, and CNN is failing at that because MSNBC does it a whole lot better with superior production values and appealing anchors. CNN is also in a death loop. Unlike MSNBC, which is honest about its biases, CNN still poses as a news outlet, but… CNN is constantly caught lying about the news or fabricating it. No one likes to be lied to, not even Democrats, which is why more Democrats watch MSNBC and even Fox News.”
QUESTION ASKED: “So how do you repel liberal blue state colonizers who will do to red states what they already did to states such as Colorado and Oregon? Inez Stepman recently posed that question:”
Related: The Fresh Start States Welcome Wagon project.
$200 BILLION HERE AND, AND $200 BILLION THERE, AND SOONER OR LATER, YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT REAL MONEY: Federal Government Lost 5x More to Stimulus Fraud than it Spent Developing COVID Vaccines.
FIRST SALVO? Ukraine hit by ‘massive’ cyber-attack on government websites. Suspected Russian hackers leave message warning: ‘Ukrainians … be afraid and expect worse.’
JAMES LILEKS ON TERRY TEACHOUT: “We corresponded over the years, as many did; he was generous on Twitter, where he kept a running account of music and movies worth your attention. We would get into the weeds in DMs about certain films and actors, but the great pleasure was tossing back and forth a link or a photo to something that spoke to our common bond: Smallville. Our luck to grow up in a decent place in the middle of the country in the waning days of mid-century culture, and how it shaped us — sometimes by what we experienced, and sometimes by what we sensed about the time that immediately preceeded our tenure. For him, Smallville was small: see above. The downtown is much less impressive than Fargo, but of course it was different, once. Local stores, no doubt a bustling 5 and Dime. A lunch counter with the swirling smells of hamburgers and cigarettes. Unlike some who run off to the big city and paint themselves as special orchids who could not bloom in the arid land of flyover America, Terry was proud of where he came from, and regarded it with affection and rue. The mark of a good and generous soul.”
“HE’D KILL YOU IF HE GOT THE CHANCE…:” Editor Walter Murch on Coppola’s The Conversation, the Nodal Concept of Montage and Our Modern Surveillance State.
Filmmaker: In the book you collaborated on with Michael Ondaatje [The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, 2002], you said, “There were many times while making the film that I had a sense of doubling. I’d be working on the film late at night, looking at an image of Harry Caul working on his tape, and there would be four hands, his and mine. Several times I was so tired and disoriented that Harry Caul would press the button to stop the tape, and I would be amazed that the film didn’t also stop.”
Murch: Well, there is some disorientation that comes with being up at 3am after working 18 hours straight.
Filmmaker: Right, but it seems like this experience, aside from being a part of the lonesome craft of editing a film, becoming intimate with its events and characters, tends to mirror the audience’s as the film plays. The viewing body is thrust into a symbiosis with Caul as they are with any closely hewn protagonist, but in the case of The Conversation, we are also brought into a synchonicity with the events themselves.
Murch: Well, to your point, Harry Caul is not a natural leading character for a feature film, and that was one of the things that Francis was interested in. Taking a character that at best, in another kind of movie, would have a two- or three-minute scene. The man who delivers the tape.
Filmmaker: We find ourselves drawn into a character’s fold by watching them work.
Murch: Right. When Francis hired me for the feature, he said “You’re a sound person, you’ll understand him.” But because he’s not a naturally engaging cinematic character by all conventional standards, one of the techniques we have to use, when presented with that kind of problem, is to not allow the audience any escape. It’s also true of Talented Mr. Ripley. This is not someone you want normally to be the lead.
Filmmaker: It’s less seldom the case in the 50 years since, but still holds largely true.
Murch: Right. So in these cases, the audience either willingly has to engage or become Stockholm Syndrome hostages to the film. There’s no wiggle room.
If you have any interest in great films from the 1970s, read the whole thing.
LARRY KUDLOW: America to Biden: It’s Time To Start Singing ‘It’s Over . . .’
As his political agenda falls apart the President has become more vitriolic and insulting in various speeches. Virtually every sensible person in politics is attacking Mr. Biden’s poisonous speech yesterday in Atlanta. The fallout from those poisonous words continues to spread today.
Then on the hill, Mr. Biden threw another temper tantrum about losing on the election takeover bill, but also adding this bizarre screeching about who counts the votes. Listen to this:
“We missed this time. We missed this time. The state legislative bodies continue to change the law not on who can vote, but who gets to count the vote. Count the vote. Count the vote. It’s about election subversion.”
By the way, the answer to who counts the votes is the Democrats who run the election day operations throughout America’s big cities. They’re the vote counters. Not Republicans.
And, let’s not forget Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who spent $450 million illegally placing his left-wing minions into election operations throughout the country and thereby bending every decision against Donald Trump and Republicans.
Meanwhile, even Mr. Biden’s State Department is acknowledging that this week’s talks with Vladimir Putin and his threatened invasion of the Ukraine have gone nowhere. I don’t know why they’re still talking.
The White House should’ve imposed across the board sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and Russian banks, and Russian natural resources, and oligarchs, and we should be publicly visibly selling lethal weapons to our Ukrainian allies, but none of this is happening.
Senator Cruz’s amendment to restore the Nord Stream 2 sanctions, which were a gift to Putin in the first place and should never have happened, looks to have been defeated on the Senate floor today by Democrats.
“A gift to Putin,” enabled yesterday by the same filibuster the Democrats profess to want to eliminate: Biden and the Democrats are colluding with Russia.
MARK HEMINGWAY: Friends don’t cancel friends.
If [Patton Oswalt’s behavior in regards to Dave Chappelle] is an example of what friends are not to do, I was at least reminded of one of the more inspiring public displays of celebrity friendship. In 2014, a Minneapolis Star-Tribune reporter asked actor Danny Glover about his friend and Lethal Weapon co-star Mel Gibson, whose alcohol-fueled antics involving racial and antisemitic slurs have largely destroyed his Hollywood career.
“I have a friendship with Mel Gibson,” Glover responded. “It’s a respectful friendship, and when I talk to Mel I know what’s gone down and heard what is happening. … I’ll say this: As I’ve said when people try to get me to throw … say something bad … I love Mel Gibson. That’s all I have to say about that.”
As you ponder that response, it’s worth noting that in contrast to Gibson’s reputation as a right-leaning traditionalist Catholic, Glover is a far-left political activist. But the reporter pressed Glover further.
“I don’t want to go any further with the question,” Glover told him. “You can say, ‘Danny Glover says he loves Mel Gibson.’”
The reporter pressed Glover again.
“This is not an interview with you,” Glover said. “This is [an] interview with me. What your friend says is relevant to your friends; what’s relevant to me is that I love Mel Gibson. Do you have another question?”
Glover gets it—being there for someone when they’re wrong is the whole point of friendship.
Exit quote (though not from Glover): “Anyone can defend you when you’re right. It takes a friend to defend you when you’re wrong.”
OUT ON A LIMB: Your Bubble is Not the Culture.
n 2020, the year Rowling made her most pointed statements on transgender issues, Harry Potter sales went up for its British publisher, Bloomsbury. In fact, “the paperback edition of ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ was the fifth-bestselling children’s book of 2020 to date, 23 years after it was first published.” This past June, the biggest Harry Potter store in the world opened in New York City to rave reviews. HBO is currently airing several specials celebrating 20 years since the first Harry Potter movie. And despite the pandemic, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has reopened on Broadway. The persistent popularity of Potter probably explains why outlets whose critics insist that the Potter party is over keep publishing pieces about the franchise. Insider, for example, has run over 80 such items—from “What It’s Like to Visit the Real-Life Diagon Alley” to “28 Major ‘Harry Potter’ Movie Deaths, Ranked From Least to Most Heartbreaking”—in the last year alone…
Rowling herself is doing just fine as well. The latest entry in her successful Cormoran Strike detective series, which she writes under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, was an international best seller and moved more copies upon release than any prior book in the series. In May, it won Best Crime and Thriller Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. (Insider, on the other hand, called this same book “poorly received.”) Rowling’s October children’s book, The Christmas Pig, another international best seller, sold over 60,000 copies in just its first week. (The entertainment site Giant Freakin Robot: “JK Rowling Facing Brutal Fan Reactions to New Children’s Book.”) Simply put, Rowling sells more books in a day than the critics claiming she’s been shunned will sell in a lifetime.
* * * * * * * *
Much of the current divergence between elite discourse and popular preference can be reduced to a simple heuristic: Most critics are on Twitter; most consumers are not. If you examine the coverage proclaiming the end of Harry Potter or Lin-Manuel Miranda, or castigating any other wildly successful cultural product or personality, you’ll quickly spot a pattern: The only evidence they tend to cite is an assortment of tweets.
But just because something makes waves on Twitter doesn’t mean it actually matters to most people. According to the Pew Research Center, only 23 percent of U.S. adults use Twitter, and of those users, “the most active 25% … produced 97% of all tweets.” In other words, nearly all tweets come from less than 6 percent of American adults. This is not a remotely good representation of public opinion, let alone newsworthiness, and treating it as such will inevitably result in wrong conclusions.
Why, it’s like “Twitter sentiment is a Styrofoam iceberg. You may think 9/10 of it is underwater, but actually, 9/10 of it is visible,” to coin an Insta-phrase. Somebody should write a book about this stuff.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: London Breed criticizes white San Francisco progressives again.
Breed said that her own “experiences of growing up in poverty and growing up in war zones similar to the Tenderloin” informed her decision-making process and took a shot at critics she perceives to be overly ideological.
“I think a lot of people, like some members of the Board [of Supervisors], like Boudin, did not grow up in poverty in San Francisco,” she said. “They did not grow up in these kinds of conditions. They have a theory as to what they believe based on their ideology. But they’re also white. They are not Black people who’ve had these unfortunately traumatizing experiences in communities where there’s not trust with the police, but also there’s a desire to be safe, right? And I’ve worked many of my years of growing up in this community to really turn that around because of the violence. ”
The unnamed members of the board she’s referring to are likely Dean Preston and Hillary Ronen. The former voted against Breed’s Tenderloin emergency declaration, while the latter threatened to undo the emergency ordinance if the San Francisco Police Department’s budget increases. Later in the interview, Breed specifically mentions District 5, which is Preston’s district.
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: California county bans large gatherings and asks residents to shelter in place to stop the spread of Omicron variant.
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Thieves Raiding Cargo Containers, Stealing Packages On Downtown L.A. Union Pacific Train Tracks.
A section of the Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles has been littered with thousands of shredded boxes, packages stolen from cargo containers that stop in the area to unload.
Thieves have been raiding the cargo containers, taking packages that belong to people from all over the country from retailers like Amazon, REI and others.
The refuse left behind, like home COVID test kits, are items that the robbers did not want or did not think were valuable enough to take.
Sources told CBSLA that the locks Union Pacific uses* are easy to cut, and officials with the Los Angeles Police Department said they don’t respond to reports of a train robbery unless Union Pacific asks them for help, which they said is rare.
While CBSLA was on the scene with cameras, one person was seen running off with a container used to hold smaller packages, and a Union Pacific officer was spotted chasing after two other people who appeared to be rifling through packages.
CBSLA also obtained video of University of Southern California Campus Police arresting a suspected thief last month. According to officers, the suspect’s bag was filled with stolen goods taken from the train tracks.
* I assume this refers to the locks used on the intermodal container cars that Union Pacific locomotives pull through the area where, as CBS-LA cameraman John Schreiber tweets, “trains frequently slow or stop…as they get worked into the [Union Pacific] Intermodal facility near Downtown LA. The thieves use this opportunity to break open containers and take what’s inside. I’d say every 4th or 5th rail car had opened containers.” More video in this Twitter thread by Schreiber:
Keep hearing of train burglaries in LA on the scanner so went to #LincolnHeights to see it all. And… there’s looted packages as far as the eye can see. Amazon packages, @UPS boxes, unused Covid tests, fishing lures, epi pens. Cargo containers left busted open on trains. @CBSLA pic.twitter.com/JvNF4UVy2K
— John Schreiber (@johnschreiber) January 13, 2022
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