L.A. CONFIDENTIAL IN REAL LIFE: He Used Plastic Surgery to Raise Rock Stars From the Dead. Decades before hologram tours, one rogue ’70s promoter found another way to put Elvis, Janis, Jim Morrison, and other late icons back onstage.

THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS: William A. Jacobson: Save The Country – My Top Ten Posts Of 2021.

2022-24 BATTLEFIELD PREPARATION: Glenn Greenwald: Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor More, Threatening the First Amendment.

For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing which the Committee announced will focus “on misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.”

The Committee’s Chair, Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of the Subcommittees holding the hearings, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), said in a joint statement that the impetus was “falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine” and “debunked claims of election fraud.” They argued that “these online platforms have allowed misinformation to spread, intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety,” adding: “This hearing will continue the Committee’s work of holding online platforms accountable for the growing rise of misinformation and disinformation.”

House Democrats have made no secret of their ultimate goal with this hearing: to exert control over the content on these online platforms. “Industry self-regulation has failed,” they said, and therefore “we must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation.” In other words, they intend to use state power to influence and coerce these companies to change which content they do and do not allow to be published.

Read the whole thing.

VOLKSWAGEN IS RETURNING TO ITS ORIGINS:

China’s totalitarianism, censorship and internment camps — what’s not to love if you’re VW?

JIMMY CARTER IS IN AWE: Biden Screwed America In World Record Time And Other Big 2021 Stories.

THEY MISS THE BAD ORANGE MAN SO BADLY: Mainstream Media Outlets Saw Massive Decline In Interest In 2021.

Related: MSNBC’s Deadline: White House mentions Trump more than twice as often as Biden.

A Grabien transcript search found the word “Trump” was uttered on the show 11,668 times from Jan. 20, when Biden succeeded Trump, to Dec. 30. As for Biden, his name was mentioned just 4,710 times, nearly 2.5 times less often on Wallace’s program, which airs weekdays from 4-6 p.m. ET and features a mixture of reporters and left-leaning pundits.

Going all-in with joyless megalomania means quite a crash when your opponent leaves office, as the post-Clinton American Spectator found out the hard way 20 years ago.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Alberta wind and solar produced 76 megawatts out of a theoretical 3,005 megawatts at noon on New Year’s Eve, with cold warnings all over the province.

THE BANNINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: Twitter Rampage: Suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene, Grabien.

GREEN NUDE EEL SNEAK PREVIEW: Europe’s power crunch shuts down factories as prices hit record.

RUSH REMEMBERED: In a new Ricochet podcast, James Lileks interviews James Golden, aka Rush Limbaugh producer “Bo Snerdley.”

GREAT MOMENTS IN TIMING: This People Magazine Cover Is So Cringey Now.

“Why did People magazine jump the gun? Well, as Variety notes, ‘The week between Christmas and New Years has historically been a prime window for print magazine sales, as travelers flying home from the holidays snap up reading material to occupy their attention.’ They do note, however, that prematurely celebrating her 100th birthday to hit that sweet spot for sales could ‘paradoxically spur more readers to purchase People’s White covers, which are now certain to become collectors items.’ Copies of the issue are already being listed at eBay, well above the list price.”

BLUNDERS? THESE WERE CRISES BY DESIGN: Ten Joe Biden 2021 Blunders that Killed the American Energy Renaissance.

Joe Biden wasted no time after being sworn in as president in destroying the U.S energy renaissance ushered in during Donald Trump’s presidency which made the country energy independent and a net annual petroleum exporter for the first time since at least 1949.

Through regulations, executive orders, and other means, Biden has driven up the cost of energy for Americans and made the country more dependent on foreign and often unfriendly entities for its energy needs.

Here are ten Biden policies that have ended abundant and affordable energy in America:

Earlier: “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

Seen in Cleburne, TX, Christmas Eve:

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM THE INSTITUTE FOR SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS AT PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY! How a Category 5 hurricane could wipe out New York City for good.

Vivek Shandas, director of the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University in Portland, Ore., also points to New York as being “incredibly high on the list of vulnerable cities.” She notes that it’s been a disaster waiting to happen since the 18th century, thanks to its questionable infrastructure created long before hurricanes were a real concern.

Hurricane Sandy in 2012 was a warning shot. And it wasn’t even technically a hurricane when it hit New York. Dubbed a “superstorm,” Sandy was a combination tropical storm and nor’easter. After it decimated eight tunnels and stranded millions of commuters between Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, the recovery effort cost a staggering $32.8 billion.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the Northeast Corridor: ‘Promise?’ Illustrated warning of what Washington, DC might look like if climate change isn’t addressed backfires:

Of course, there’s a way to help prevent both scenarios from ever occurring: Climate Change: Tax the Blue Zones!

HMMMM: ‘Mass Formation Psychosis’ — It’s Real, and It Was Purposely Caused by Biden and the Democrat Party.

Dr. Robert Malone, a noted virologist and immunologist whose recent work has focused on mRNA technology, pharmaceuticals, and drug repurposing research, compared mass formation psychosis in pre-World War II Germany to what we are today experiencing in America in response to COVID.

[We had] basically a European intellectual inquiry over what the heck happened in Germany in the 20s and 30s. Very intelligent, highly educated population, and they went barking mad. How did that happen? The answer is mass formation psychosis.

When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other, and has free-floating anxiety, and a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it. And then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis. They literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.

One of the aspects of [the] phenomenon is the people that they identify as their leaders — the ones typically that come in and say ‘You have this pain and I can solve it for you. I and I alone. Then they will follow that person through hell — it doesn’t matter whether they lie to them or whatever.

* * * * * * * *

As you might have guessed, Malone has been blasted by the left for “promoting misinformation about the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.”

To that end, Twitter on Wednesday permanently suspended Malone’s Twitter account for spreading “‘misinformation’ about the virus and vaccines.” The ban came just hours after the AP posted a controversial “fact check” report claiming Malone “misled” people by claiming the vaccines are failing against the Omicron variant.

Here’s the clip of Malone discussing this topic — which seemed to break Twitter today — with Rogan:

This Daily Dot headline is a sample of the freakout Malone received from the left today: Conservatives think the U.S. is experiencing a ‘mass formation psychosis’ because an anti-vaxxer doctor told Joe Rogan so.

UPDATE: Malone’s December 9th Substack article on mass formation psychosis.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Ted Cruz Says All His Haters Are Just Unable To Resist His Raw Sex Appeal.

HOW COVID KILLED GROWN-UP MOVIES AT THE THEATER: Audiences may never leave their couches again — unless it’s for Spider-Man 7.

The box office news from earlier this December was mixed. The stupendous success of the latest Spider-Man sequel, No Way Home, indicated that fears of the Omicron variant have not deterred audiences from coming out in the millions: it grossed $260 million at the US box office and $600 million globally.

But it also trampled other less franchise-friendly films. Guillermo del Toro’s new picture Nightmare Alley debuted to a dismal $3 million, and Steven Spielberg’s version of West Side Story will be one of the director’s greatest flops, having grossed a mere $18 million in the US so far. The chances of either film — expensively mounted period pieces from A-list directors — recouping their production budgets at the theater, let alone their advertising costs, is zero.

I can’t entirely blame COVID on the West Side Story remake’s failure; its director very likely doomed its box office chances with this uber-woke decision: “Forgoing subtitles for the Spanish dialogue was a deliberate decision. ‘If I subtitled the Spanish,’ Mr. Spielberg told entertainment digital media platform IGN, ‘I’d simply be doubling down on the English and giving English the power over the Spanish … I needed to respect the language enough not to subtitle it.’”

VIRGINIA CLOWN SHOW UPDATE: Good Riddance to Ralph Northam and Terry McAuliffe. Virginia is moving on without the Democratic duo.

Northam, who was term-limited, may have found it hard to come back in any future elections anyway thanks to the blackface scandal that nearly forced him to resign. While a monthslong investigation into a racist yearbook photo of two men (one in blackface, the other in a KKK outfit) was inconclusive, Northam admitted to once darkening his face with shoe polish to look like Michael Jackson (he was very close to moonwalking during a press conference before his wife stopped him and saved his governorship) and one of his college yearbooks listed “coonman” as one of his nicknames.

As a result, Northam refocused his time in office on racial issues, resulting in several positive reforms, including the abolition of the death penalty, banning no-knock search warrants, and the repeal of some Jim Crow laws that were still on the books even though they weren’t enforced. It shouldn’t have taken a scandal to get Northam to support these measures, though. Besides, Northam signed a slew of gun control bills into law, despite the racist roots of gun control and racially disproportionate harm they have.

Like pretty much every other Democrat in Virginia and most of the country, McAuliffe called on Northam to resign during the initial blackface outrage. Two years later, McAuliffe was asking Northam to campaign with him anyway.

In sharp contrast to all of the above: NYT’s belated discovery: In Virginia, Winsome Sears is the GOP’s messenger — and message.

Not for nothing, but this is pretty old news by today’s standards. Sears won that office and became the state’s first black woman elected to statewide office eight weeks ago. As Karen [Townsend] wrote at the time, the only media outlet interested in that narrative at the time of her election was Fox News. In fact, the Free Beacon’s Brent Scher had noticed a week earlier that national media outlets like the Paper of Record had a noticeable lack of interest in historical achievements when accomplished by a Republican[.]

But let’s not forget the bad old days too soon, without flashing back to this classic image from the McAuliffe campaign’s terminal moment: The Tiki-Torch Hoax Should Not Be Blamed Only on the Lincoln Project’s Grifters.

And this moment from May of 2021: Biden To Hold Event With Ralph Northam, Two Years After Saying He ‘Lost All Moral Authority’ And Should Resign.

The two men likely had much to discuss, not least of which how good Democrats have it, thanks to the levels of willful amnesia of their operatives with bylines:

Evergreen:

THIS IS CNN: ‘The Single Biggest Misconception Is That We Are Lying:’ CNN Contributor.

Neither [guest Mara Schiavocampo nor host Brian Stelter] mentioned CNN contributor Reza Aslan, who suggested he’d like to punch 16-year-old Nick Sandmann in the face during his viral stand-off with left-wing activist Nathan Phillips. “Honest question. Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?” Aslan tweeted of the teenager. Earlier, in 2017, Aslan had called President Donald Trump a  “piece of s***.”

CNN continued enumerating the common lies and errors about the media, with Shiavocampo saying “another big” misconception about the legacy media is that reporters suffuse their coverage with their own “political bias.” She said it seems “really ironic,” but “journalists are aware of our own political bias,” and so “we’ll overcompensate to make sure the other side really gets a fair amount of coverage and really gets explained properly.”

“So in my view, when we do have a political bias, it’s the other view that actually benefits from that because we’re trying to counter our own human impulses,” she claimed.

“That’s very interesting,” replied Stelter, who said that mistakes often creep in because of the network’s “crazy workflow.”

In reality, CNN has systematically purged every contributor who expressed the view of the 78 million Americans who voted for the Republican ticket last November. After the firing of former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum in May, nearly half of CNN’s remaining “Republican” commentators endorsed Joe Biden in advance of the 2020 election: Amanda Carpenter, S.E. Cupp, former Congressman Charlie Dent, Ana Navarro, former Ohio Governor John Kasich, and “Anonymous” author Miles Taylor. The network’s latest hire, Alyssa Farah, has also been highly critical of former President Donald Trump. Instead, CNN host Don Lemon said everyone who voted for the Trump-Pence ticket voted to associate themselves with neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. He featured no opposing viewpoint.

Then there’s what’s apparently going on behind the cameras: CNN’s Latest Pedo Scandal Is a Symptom of Left-Wing Derangement.

Related: Don Surber: 2021: the year the media paid for its lies.

FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN WUHAN CHINA: Ben Shapiro’s Hilarious Takedown of COVID Lies the Left Walked Back in 2021.

1. Cloth masks are ineffective against omicron (Leanna Wen, CNN);
2. The vaccinated can spread and get covid;
3. The death rate is comparable to the flu (Chris Hayes);
4. Many people are entering hospitals with covid, not from covid (Fauci);
5. Natural immunity is a reason omicron hasn’t been as virulent (Fauci);
6. We have to take into account societal needs, not just spread prevention (CDC);
7. The asymptomatic should not be tested (NFL);
8. We should focus on hospitalizations and deaths, not case rate (Biden);
9. Children are not at risk and schools should remain open;
10. Covid is predominantly an illness affecting the immunocompromised and elderly and we should not shut down society.

Hey, those Orwellian pivots don’t reroute themselves, you know.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: The top nine worst media moments of 2021.

ERIC ADAMS ENTERS OFFICE AS NEW YORK CITY MAYOR:

Eric Adams was sworn into office as mayor of New York City in a Times Square ceremony just after midnight Saturday.

The Democrat faces steep challenges early in his tenure as the nation’s largest city grapples with rising crime rates and skyrocketing COVID-19 cases spurred by the omicron variant despite sweeping mandates put in place to damper the spread.

But Mr. Adams’ message to the crowd at Times Square Friday night before being sworn in was one of hope.

“Even in the midst of COVID, in the midst of everything that we’re going through, this is a country where hope and opportunities is always, ever present,” he said according to the Associated Press.

“It’s just great when New York shows the entire country of how we come back,” he said. “We showed the entire globe what we’re made of. We’re unbelievable. This is an unbelievable city and, trust me, we’re ready for a major comeback because this is New York.”

A former New York City police captain, Mr. Adams is viewed as a more moderate alternative to his predecessor Bill de Blasio, also a Democrat, when it comes to fighting crime.

How bad was DeBlasio? ‘Sayonara sucker!’ Andy Cohen gives de Blasio a New Year’s sendoff. “An animated Andy Cohen did not mince words while telling viewers of CNN’s ‘New Year’s Eve Live’ coverage what he thought about former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was replaced by Mayor Eric Adams after the ball dropped. Cohen leaned into the camera and nearly needed to be held back by co-host Anderson Cooper as he unloaded on the ex-mayor — despite Cooper pleading with the Bravo personality not to ‘go on a rant.’”

On the other hand, as Red State notes, “Guess what Adams pledged to keep in place once the votes were counted? That would be de Blasio’s completely ineffective, business-crushing vaccine mandate. In short, no lessons were learned. New York City’s residents, by and large at least, continue to make the same mistakes they’ve been making since Rudy Giuliani left office. If de Blasio was so bad (and he was), why elect someone who agrees with him on 90 percent of everything, with the only exception possibly being policing. And given the penchant for Democrats to run further left once they gain office, I wouldn’t count on Adams keeping his word on that issue either. At some point, you deserve what vote for, and complaining on CNN about the consequences just comes across as cringe and pathetic. Bill de Blasio stunk as mayor. Eric Adams is likely to stink as mayor as well. Maybe actually learn some semblance of a lesson the next time around? Or just get loaded and rant on New Year’s again. I’m sure that’ll accomplish something.”

Related: NYC’s incoming mayor inherits finances soured by the pandemic.

RIP: NFL coach Dan Reeves dies at 77. “Reeves both played and coached in the league for more than three decades and included nine Super Bowl appearances and two wins. He played for and later became an assistant coach of the Dallas Cowboys and went on to become head coach of the New York Giants, the Denver Broncos, and the Falcons. His two Super Bowl wins were during his time with the Cowboys. He coached the Falcons to the 1999 Super Bowl, in which they lost to the Broncos. He retired from coaching in 2003 but stayed involved in the sport through broadcast and consulting. The Broncos and the Falcons both honored him for his impact on their teams.”

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Happy New Year Edition.

KEVIN ROCHE: Get the Hell Out of Here 2021 and Oh, Shit, Here Comes 2022.

The administration of floundering bozos who currently run the country are desperate to get out of the epidemic. Nothing, literally nothing is going right for them and they can’t really highlight other issues (although what winning issues the whackos fantasize they have is beyond the ken of mortal man, or woman) until they can declare an end to and victory over the epidemic. You can read the tea leaves from Fauci, Walensky, et al, the political stooges of the White House. Backtracking as fast as they can from their former rigid orthodoxy about how the epidemic had to be handled. Suddenly PCR tests aren’t reliable indicators of infectiousness and maybe every hospitalization and death attributed to CV-19 actually wasn’t caused by it. Two Democrat governors have said very clearly that mask mandates are worthless and masks do nothing to stop the spread. I am shocked that they were not instantly struck down with lightening bolts for such heretical apostasy to the mask religion. The mass media, which is slavishly devoted to the interests of the progressive wing of the Dumocrat party, is even publishing articles about the need to move on.

Nothing is going to stop the butt-kicking coming in November, but it will be magnitudes worse if we aren’t out of the epidemic by then, so I predict that sometime in the spring, the Presidementia will declare victory and do everything possible to end all restrictions and return to “normal”, if we even remember what that was. He and his party have to get the CV-19 millstone off their necks. Too late for the generation of children whose mental health and life goal attainment we have so substantially damaged. And just like that, the epidemic will be over and will recede into the background, no matter what new variants arise.

The pivot began this week.

COCKTAIL NEWS YOU CAN USE: For New Year’s Eve, Make a Sidecar.