TO BE FAIR, COLBERT LOSING CBS $40 MILLION A YEAR WAS ALREADY A BIG, EXPENSIVE PROBLEM: CBS Is About to Have a Big, Expensive Stephen Colbert Problem — and Howard Stern Is the Precedent.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
July 22, 2025
DON’T MISTAKE THE EXTREMELY ONLINE COMMUNITY FOR THE MUCH BROADER PUBLIC: The ‘Epstein Conspiracy’ Isn’t Costing Trump Much Support From His MAGA Base.
MAMDANI SUPPORTERS, TAKE NOTE: Kansas City poured millions into a grocery store. It still may close.
Nearly a decade ago, Kansas City spent $17 million to buy and fix up the moribund Linwood Shopping Center on busy Prospect Avenue. KC Sun Fresh opened in 2018 with a salad bar, fresh shrimp on ice and flower bouquets. “We were thrilled,” Taylor recalled.
The store was first run by a private grocer; Pierson’s nonprofit took over in 2022. Sales were okay at first, but after the pandemic, crime rose and sales began to plummet. Police data show assaults, robberies and shoplifting in the immediate vicinity have been on an upward trend since 2020. Shoplifting cases have nearly tripled.
At a community meeting last year, Pierson played videos of security incidents so graphic he gave a warning in advance — a naked woman parading through the store throwing bags of chips to the ground, another person urinating in the vestibule and a couple fornicating on the lawn of the library in broad daylight.
Advocates like Taylor have accused the city of neglecting the property. Discussions about fixing a fence behind the store dragged on for months until it was repaired in early July, and the city just remedied the sewer stench that Taylor and others say has pervaded the store for weeks.
“Obviously, they don’t feel like this is their responsibility. … Or they don’t care,” she said.
Or maybe government is no good at running a business, particularly in a neighborhood where assaults, robberies and shoplifting are all on “an upward trend.”
If K.C. stuck to fighting crime, maybe they wouldn’t need shovel millions into a failing state-run grocery store.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Mamdani’s government grocery scheme won’t work for New Yorkers — but that’s not who it’s supposed to benefit.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Hear Me Out: Dems Need More Hunter Bidens on Blow.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: LAPD’s Broken Concealed Carry Permitting Process is a System Designed to Fail.
Even as the majority of states embrace constitutional carry (29 so far), California continues to make it more difficult for its responsible residents to carry a firearm for lawful self-defense. Not only is the state’s concealed weapons permit law already more complicated and burdensome than those in other states, but some localities’ implementation of the law (or lack of implementation, to be more precise) has raised allegations of unconstitutional violations of California law and the Second Amendment.
The Los Angeles Police Department is allegedly advising applicants for CCW permits that a lack of resources means an expected processing time of around 18 to 22 months, even though California law mandates that permits be approved or denied within 120 days.
The LAPD, it is claimed, is even manipulating the statutory deadline “by putting applicants on a waiting list and not treating their application as ‘accepted’ until LAPD decides to receive it,” even though the 120-day period starts as soon as the application is submitted. Given that the term of a permit, once granted, is only two years, the outcome is a ridiculous situation where the process takes almost as long as the permit is good for.
CCW holders needing to renew are also kept waiting, and stand to lose their carry rights because renewal processing is liable to exceed the time in which a permit remains valid.
The situation isn’t much different in Colorado, where Democrats keep making it more expensive and more of a hassle to get a permit.
SEND MORE AGENTS: Noem Slams Nashville Mayor for Undermining Immigration Enforcement.
WINNING: The U.S. Economy Just Got Its Mojo Back as Consumers Brush Off Tariff Trauma.
Big banks like JPMorgan Chase initially forecasted a slowdown or even a recession. Those warnings have faded as economic indicators have improved. The bank now expects continued growth, though at a moderate pace.
Bank of America, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs have also reported healthier revenues. At United Airlines, travel demand rose sharply. All of this suggests that the economy is outperforming earlier fears.
A survey, conducted by marketing platform Constant Contact, of over 1,200 small-business owners showed that many are seeing stronger demand than projected in January. Nearly one in three entrepreneurs now plans to hire in the coming months.
These signs suggest that optimism is spreading beyond Wall Street and into Main Street. Small businesses are adding staff and expanding services to meet rising customer interest.
Still, growth remains modest and inflation is steady but above the Federal Reserve’s ideal. Manufacturing has shrunk for four consecutive months as of June.
Manufacturing ought to rebound as supply chains adjust to the tariff situation, which Trump warned us would be rough going at first.
STARVING THE BEAST: How We Cut Hamas Out of the Aid Game.
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Colorado’s auto theft capital gives green light to car thieves.
According to the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer, from 1985 until about 2000, Colorado averaged around 1,000 stolen cars per month. Increasing population and recession push that number slowly upward, to briefly touch 2,000 in 2006, before returning to the previous average for another decade.
Then, in 2014, the Colorado legislature, without any dissenting votes, passed a law to tie the level of criminal mischief for car theft to the value of the car stolen, while lowering the overall penalties. The sliding scale of punishment not only encouraged more theft, but it also encouraged thieves to pick on poor and working-class people, stealing cheaper cars to avoid more severe punishment. (This was a double-whammy to those families, coming on the heels of the federal Cash for Clunkers program which removed hundreds of thousands of inexpensive replacement vehicles from circulation.)
And so, unsurprisingly, car theft began to rise again, this time taking only three years to reach 2,000 a month, and prompting newly-elected Governor Jared Polis to declare car theft a major priority for his administration. That worked so well that car thefts doubled again to 4,000 a month from 2020 to 2022, from the combination of loose enforcement and economic restrictions from Covid and the George Floyd/BLM Summer of Love in 2020.
In Denver, reported thefts climbed to nearly 15,000 a year in 2022, or 1,250 a month. That was more than the entire state of Colorado had registered for most of its history.
…
Which makes it all the more infuriating that the Denver City Council voted to terminate the Flock camera program at the end of the year, not over legitimate privacy concerns, but in order to protect illegal aliens from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Good and harder, Denver.
Previously: ‘F’ Is for Democrat: Colorado’s Collapse Under One-Party Rule.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: That Escalated Quickly — Obama Russia Hoax Edition. “The Trump 47 administration is a well-oiled machine and — contrary to what the Dems would have you believe — not much for mere grandstanding. If there is a legal move to be made, this group makes it.”
OFF-RAMP TO NOWHERE: California’s Bullet Train Is a Model of Progressive Governance. “Trump gave Newsom a perfect opportunity to cut his losses and shift blame. Why didn’t he take it?”
This first leg should have been relatively easy since the state’s rural Central Valley is lightly developed and populated. No need to raze strip malls and housing developments. A private company built a 235-mile high-speed train from Orlando to Miami in 11 years for about $6 billion. Yet it has taken California more than a decade merely to bulldoze permitting barriers and clear lawsuits.
If all goes according to Mr. Newsom’s plans, the first leg might be done by the end of his second presidential term in 2036. Might. The state last week sued to restore the federal funds, which could mean years of litigation and more delays. “Trump wants to hand China the future and abandon the Central Valley,” he declared. “We won’t let him.”
Under the Chinese economic model, the government spurs unproductive growth by subsidizing wasteful investment, whether it be in real estate, electric vehicles or public works. China has borrowed some $1 trillion to build nearly 30,000 miles of high-speed rail lines, many of which connect lightly populated towns and carry few passengers.
That’s the future of Mr. Newsom’s bullet train to nowhere. Companies routinely cancel and write off bad investments. Why won’t Mr. Newsom and his Democratic Legislature? Because they fear voters will realize they were conned.
The thing I’ve learned about progressive voters is that they seem to enjoy being conned, so long as they’re in on the latest moral crusade.
DRONE WARS: Russia and Ukraine Race Toward a New Normal.
BRING IT ON HOME: AstraZeneca plans to invest $50 billion in America for medicines manufacturing and R&D.
AstraZeneca today announces $50 billion of investment in the United States by 2030, building on America’s global leadership in medicines manufacturing and R&D. This investment is expected to create tens of thousands of new, highly skilled direct and indirect jobs across the country powering growth and delivering next generation medicines for patients in America and worldwide.
The cornerstone of this landmark investment is a new multi-billion dollar US manufacturing facility that will produce drug substances for the Company’s innovative weight management and metabolic portfolio, including oral GLP-1, baxdrostat, oral PCSK9 and combination small molecule products. The new state-of-the-art centre will produce small molecules, peptides and oligonucleotides. This multi-billion dollar capital investment is in addition to the $3.5 billion announced in November 2024.
Offshoring pharmaceutical production was always stupid.
July 21, 2025
FREEDOM WORKS:
Breaking 🚨 | Extreme Poverty Drops 18.2% YoY to 7.4%, Driven by Real Wage Growth Outpacing Inflation for First Time Since 2020 pic.twitter.com/ZKa7cEcDWc
— ShellBanger (@Bangershell11) July 20, 2025
The world’s congenitally wrong credentialed class hardest hit.
SARAH ANDERSON: The Truth About Tariffs, Tomatoes, and America’s Farmers.
ALMOST NOTHING FOR SURE: Here’s Everything We Know About the F-47 Program.
COMMIES ARE LIARS BUT THEY SURE ARE PERSISTENT WITH THEIR NONSENSE:
No actually I hate working Monday and Tuesday and part of Wednesday every week without pay so that poors and foreigners and communist grifters can have free money https://t.co/TCuZhbNW6I
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) July 21, 2025
UGH: Did Microsoft Outsource DoD Data To China? “Why was the arrangement ‘critical’ to Microsoft winning the contract? Because they work cheaper than Americans? ‘We hire Chinese spies and pass the savings on to you!'”
DRONE WARS: Russia and Ukraine Race Toward a New Normal.
HOW TO RUIN A MULTIBILLION-DOLLAR FRANCHISE WITH THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK: Marvel’s President Kevin Feige Proves He’s Learned Nothing From Failures, Will Continue Pushing Wokeness.
DIS shares continue to badly underperform the market, down roughly 40% from the company’s 2021 high.
THE ENEMY WITHIN:
BREAKING: Calla Walsh, a proud member of Democratic Socialists of America, flew to the Islamic Republic of Iran and declares:
“Glory to all the martyrs, glory to the axis of resistance. May we see victory within our lifetimes. Death to America!”
— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) July 21, 2025