KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Democrats Are Finally Coming to Grips With Joe Biden’s ‘Stutter.’ “Having a man who can’t tie his own shoes holding the most powerful political office in the world is terrifying. Now that the Dems don’t care anymore, we’re finding out just how bad it’s been.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
December 23, 2024
ANTITRUST: Google’s counteroffer to the government trying to break it up is unbundling Android apps. “Instead of breaking off Chrome, Android, or Google Play as the DOJ’s filing considers, Google’s proposed fixes aim at the payments it makes to companies like Apple and Mozilla for exclusive, prioritized placement of its services, its licensing deals with companies that make Android phones, and contracts with wireless carriers. They don’t address a DOJ suggestion about possibly forcing Google to share its valuable search data with other companies to help their products catch up.”
EXCLUSIVE: J6 Prisoner Explains DC Event This Jan. 6.
COLD WAR II: US Says China to Build 1,000 Nukes by 2030 in Staggering Annual Report.
China’s stockpile of operational nuclear warheads has also increased from more than 500 last year to more than 600 in 2024, the report said.
It will have more than 1,000 by 2030, the Pentagon said, as Beijing pushes “to modernize, diversify, and expand its nuclear forces rapidly.”
This, it said, would enable China to “target more US cities, military facilities, and leadership sites than ever before in a potential nuclear conflict.”
Previously: Don’t Look Now, But There’s a Nuclear Nightmare A-Brewing. “China is engaging in what the Pentagon calls a ‘strategic breakout.’ Over the last few months, it’s been revealed that Beijing is constructing silos for an additional 230 nuclear-tipped ICBMs.”
That was three years ago. We’ve been mostly treading water all that time.
DEMS HATE A LOSER: The Dominoes Are Falling Fast Over the Biden Mental Health Cover-Up. “Democratic donor and operative Lindy Li hasn’t held back in her critiques of the party. For weeks, she’s been relentless, taking aim at Kamala Harris for squandering a billion dollars, criticizing her selection of Tim Walz, and calling out her embrace of radical positions. Li has even provided intriguing insider details about how Joe Biden was ultimately ousted, and what Pelosi and Obama really think of Kamala. Now, she’s dishing on Joe Biden’s mental decline.”
December 20, 2024
HAVING SOLVED ALL THE CITY’S OTHER PROBLEMS: ‘No One Has To Be Healthy’: San Fran Taps Fat Activist As ‘Weight Stigma’ Czar.
Tovar is against so-called diet culture for the obese, rejects Ozempic, and believes that “no one has to be healthy.”
“No one has to be healthy,” she said on a podcast. “Nobody owes anybody that.”
“No matter what size you are, you don’t owe anybody else your health.”
What does that even mean?
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Just Ban All the Cars Already. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, it’s an (almost) All Vehicular Madness/All the Time edition.”
OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Appellate Court Allows Joe Biden to Open Obamacare to DACA Illegal Aliens.
IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™ — Be a Shame If Y’all Got Caught in a Snowstorm.
IT’S HARDER THAN IT LOOKS: We’re about to fly a spacecraft into the Sun for the first time.
Almost no one ever writes about the Parker Solar Probe anymore.
Sure, the spacecraft got some attention when it launched. It is, after all, the fastest moving object that humans have ever built. At its maximum speed, goosed by the gravitational pull of the Sun, the probe reaches a velocity of 430,000 miles per hour, or more than one-sixth of 1 percent the speed of light. That kind of speed would get you from New York City to Tokyo in less than a minute.
And the Parker Solar Probe also has the distinction of being the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person. At the time of its launch, in August 2018, physicist Eugene Parker was 91 years old.
But in the six years since the probe has been zipping through outer space and flying by the Sun? Not so much. Let’s face it, the astrophysical properties of the Sun and its complicated structure are not something that most people think about on a daily basis.
However, the smallish probe—it masses less than a metric ton, and its scientific payload is only about 110 pounds (50 kg)—is about to make its star turn. Quite literally. On Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe will make its closest approach yet to the Sun. It will come within just 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) of the solar surface, flying into the solar atmosphere for the first time.
Yeah, it’s going to get pretty hot. Scientists estimate that the probe’s heat shield will endure temperatures in excess of 2,500° Fahrenheit (1,371° C) on Christmas Eve, which is pretty much the polar opposite of the North Pole.
Merry Christmas, Parker.
BIDENFLATION HIT DISCOUNT RETAIL THE HARDEST: Another brick and mortar goes belly up under Biden: Big Lots. “Other major companies have also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this year, including 99 Cents Only stores, Sam Ash Music, and Rue 21.”
IT WAS ALWAYS A MISSION STATEMENT: Democracy Really Did Die in Darkness.
IT’S A DIRTY JOB BUT SOMEBODY HAD TO DO IT: Musk Forcing Republicans To Act Like Republicans. “For whatever reason, something always seemed to take priority over balancing the budget, be it the war on terror, fear of being blamed for a shutdown, desire for campaign contributions from rich donors, tasty lobbyist favors, or their desire for hooker and blow parties (you make the call). The end result is that the national debt is now $36 trillion and rising, exceeding our GDP.”
INDEED:
Years from now, historians will look back on this presidency and ask why liberal gatekeepers joined in a conspiracy to hide the fact that the president was senile from the American people. And that is the only thing they will look back on. https://t.co/ZyUHGPukWl
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) December 20, 2024
From the replies: “I think historians will say that while Europe committed suicide, Americans stopped Biden from joining them.”
Maybe only barely.
BUILD MORE NUKES: ‘Explosive’ demand growth puts more than half of North America at risk of blackouts. “More than half of North America faces a risk of energy shortfalls in the next five to 10 years as data centers and electrification drive electricity demand higher and generator retirements threaten resource adequacy, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. said in a 10-year outlook published Tuesday.”
And get rid of the stupid EV mandates and impossible CAFE standards while you’re at it.
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? Funding Bill Includes Cash For a DOZEN Biolabs to ‘Research’/Engineer New Viruses.
WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE, ANYWAY?
🚨 Biden Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder says he "recently learned" there are actually 2,000+ U.S. troops deployed in Syria — far more than the 900 they had previously announced. pic.twitter.com/MKlqO2ZlqS
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 19, 2024
Is he lying or did the Pentagon misplace 1,000 or so troops?
The latter is absurd but that doesn’t mean it can’t be true.
APOLOGY ACCEPTED, CAPTAIN NEEDA: Chris Cillizza Absolutely Deserves to Get Beat up for This. “This is excuse-mongering, a brush-off, an attempt to regain credibility where none was deserved in the first place, and less than none is deserved now. Cillizza displays all the self-reflection of a vampire in a hall of mirrors.”
PARK MACDOUGAL: Obamaism From the Right.
We’ll simply observe that what [Jeffrey] Sachs is doing [during his Tucker Carlson interview] is recognizable as a genre of Obama-faction messaging that Tablet’s Tony Badran dubbed the “striptease” nearly a decade ago. To put it as simply as possible: The administration adopts a policy, such as guaranteeing Assad’s survival to the Iranians in order to buy goodwill for nuclear diplomacy, that it doesn’t think the American public (or U.S. allies) is ready for. In its public statements, it pretends to be doing something else (such as attempting to topple Assad). Then, handpicked experts launder a description of the real, current policy as a “critique” of the pretend policy (the “fan” that obscures the naked truth, in the striptease analogy).
Prior to the election, one saw this dynamic often with Biden’s Israel policy. In reality, as Scroll readers will be aware, the Biden administration was exerting whatever leverage it had to oust Netanyahu and press-gang the Israelis into a cease-fire deal. Yet the Biden administration, no doubt aware that Americans and U.S. allies would respond poorly to this policy, pretended it was offering “iron-clad support” to Israel, to use one of the administration’s signature phrases. Surrogates outside the government then pretended the rhetoric was reality and recommended that the administration “change” to a policy of … ousting Netanyahu and press-ganging the Israelis into a cease-fire. In an essay published earlier this month in Foreign Affairs, for instance, Obama’s top foreign-policy guru Ben Rhodes wrote that “Biden’s most prominent foreign policy initiative during his final year in office was unconditional support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s destruction of Gaza and his military escalation in Lebanon.” What’s more, he wrote it with a straight face.
Thus, we get Sachs’ offering: essentially a point-by-point description of the Obama-Biden foreign policy—détente with Iran, decoupling from Israel, dovish but transactional relations with Moscow and Beijing, all rationalized by hyperbolic threats of “all-out war” if the United States dares to assert its interests against its rivals—as a critique of a fictional “neocon” Obama-Biden policy, which in reality better describes the “Peace Through Strength” position of Donald Trump. To defeat the Obama-Biden “neocons” and avoid “World War III,” Sachs counsels, Trump must reject Trumpism and embrace Obamaism—now rebranded, with Carlson’s assistance, as “America First.” As The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, the Carlson-Obama faction has exerted at least some influence over personnel, via Donald Trump Jr. According to the report, Carlson and Don Jr. successfully blocked former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from a job after outlining “what they said were the dangers of bringing neoconservatives into the administration.”
That’s the bad news. The good news, as Badran observed in an excellent thread on Trump’s Monday comments praising Turkey’s “unfriendly takeover” of a hostile state in Syria, is that Trump does not appear to be fooled by the striptease—or by the fools in his own camp.
“Peace through strength” has a nice ring to it.
And here’s the conclusion to Tony Badran’s X thread linked to in the excerpt: “Trump’s outlook is not sectarian (unlike Obama, or, for that matter, his own VP). He identifies and understands the structural realities of the region and its geopolitics. His instincts are quintessentially American—maybe he’s the last of the Mohicans in that respect.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: I Can’t Wait for Tom Homan’s ‘Day One.’ “There’s never any equivocation on Homan’s part when anyone in the media presses him on how he and Trump are going to start reversing Biden’s insane policies. It’s a lot of fun watching interviewers continually offer things that they think are obstacles, only to have Homan smack them down. They’re all finding out that the era of resting on mindless Dem talking points is over.”
WHY DID BIDEN PROMISE THAT THE FEDS WOULD PAY FOR THE FRANCIS SCOTT KEY BRIDGE REPLACEMENT? THIS IS WHY:
The omnibus spending bill had $8 billion dollars for the Francis Scott Key Bridge replacement.
That is way too much money to rebuild the Key Bridge. Easily four times as much as it should cost. pic.twitter.com/iQxpz1AKqZ
— Matt Dursh (@MattDursh) December 19, 2024
Follow the money — if you can.