YOU’RE GOING TO NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: Former NYT editor James Bennet: When the New York Times lost its way.

It became one of Dean Baquet’s frequent mordant jokes that he missed the old advertising-based business model, because, compared with subscribers, advertisers felt so much less sense of ownership over the journalism. I recall his astonishment, fairly early in the Trump administration, after Times reporters conducted an interview with Trump. Subscribers were angry about the questions the Times had asked. It was as if they’d only be satisfied, Baquet said, if the reporters leaped across the desk and tried to wring the president’s neck. The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.

Of course, it’s not like there weren’t previous signs of the Gray Lady’s increasingly unconstrained relationship with the truth: NY Times editor after blaming Sarah Palin for incitement in the Tucson shooting: ‘The right is coming after us.’

Then, sometime shortly before midnight, Bennet sent an email to [Elizabeth] Williamson: “Are you up? The right is coming after us…” He must not have slept much that night because the following morning he had sent an email to his team at 5:08 am: “Hey guys — We’re taking a lot of criticism for saying that the attack on Giffords was in any way connected to incitement.… I don’t know what the truth is here, but we may have relied too heavily on our early editorials and other early coverage of that attack. If so, I’m very sorry for my own failure on this yesterday. … I’d like to get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible this morning and correct the piece if needed.”

So if you’re following this closely, Bennet went from not knowing what was true in the early afternoon, to knowing in the evening that Palin was responsible as he rewrote the editorial, and then back to not knowing the following morning. The Times’ lawyers want to say that this proves it was all a mistake, i.e. he didn’t know he was wrong. But how can that be so if he stated he didn’t know the truth before the rewrite? Once he’d admitted that, wasn’t it his responsibility to research the connection before stating categorically that it existed? But Bennet claimed in his deposition that he never looked at any of the links provided to him, including the one Williamson had buried in her draft.

And note this quote from Bennet himself at the beginning of his essay:

“Are we truly so precious?” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, asked me one Wednesday evening in June 2020. I was the editorial-page editor of the Times, and we had just published an op-ed by Tom Cotton, a senator from Arkansas, that was outraging many members of the Times staff. America’s conscience had been shocked days before by images of a white police officer kneeling on the neck of a black man, George Floyd, until he died. It was a frenzied time in America, assaulted by covid-19, scalded by police barbarism. Throughout the country protesters were on the march. Substantive reform of the police, so long delayed, suddenly seemed like a real possibility, but so did violence and political backlash. In some cities rioting and looting had broken out.

It was the kind of crisis in which journalism could fulfil its highest ambitions of helping readers understand the world, in order to fix it, and in the Times’s Opinion section, which I oversaw, we were pursuing our role of presenting debate from all sides.

“It was the kind of crisis in which journalism could fulfil its highest ambitions.” If only the staffers manning the Times’ newsroom weren’t so woefully unprepared for fulfilling that mission brief by the spring of 2020.

PAULA BOLYARD: A Dirty Little Secret About Drudge.

Many of you will recall that Drudge at first did everything he could to promote Donald Trump. Then something happened, some sort of falling-out that no one ever really got to the bottom of, and Matt Drudge turned on the president. That was in 2019, a year of big changes for Drudge. There were rumors (still unconfirmed) that the site had been sold. Drudge changed its ad provider, and it began to lean more liberal and more favorable toward mainstream media. That same year, PJ Media became part of the Townhall Media family and the links stopped—abruptly. Literally on the day of the sale. Whoever was running Drudge at the time, whether Matt or some minimum-wage intern, apparently had some sort of grudge against Townhall and he/they even dropped us from the blogroll at the bottom of the page. Petty, vindictive, and, if I’m being honest, rather costly to our bottom line.

Now, if you go to the Drudge report you’ll find links to a bunch of left-wing UK sites, and well-funded mainstream media sites like the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the New York Post. Good for them, I guess. For whatever reason, Matt Drudge, who was reportedly apolitical and more interested in the success of his site than anyagenda, decided to tank the site. A comparison of Similiar Web (a site that ranks websites based on various metrics)  shows that Drudge was listed as #41 in the nation with 164 million visits in October 2018. Currently, the site ranks at #145 with 51 million visits in October 2023. That’s a major, major drop.

I’m not losing any sleep over any of this, and I trust you’re not either.

Not at all, but I’d love to finally get to hear the actual story of what turned Drudge into a zombie Website; a mere shadow of its former greatness. Flashback: Where’s Matt Drudge? “The Drudge Report reminds me of MTV in the early 2000s, a channel I returned to sheerly out of habit based on its greatness from decades before.”

ROGER KIMBALL IN THE LONDON TELEGRAPH: Liberals are realizing that Trump will probably win. And they are terrified.

If this story had sound effects, the primary noise would be what the Gospel According to Matthew called “fletus et stridor dentium”: wailing and gnashing of teeth. Remember Godwin’s law? That’s the contention, named for the writer Mike Godwin, that the longer an internet conversation continues, the greater the chances are that someone will be compared to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis. The Times writers go full Godwin right at the beginning of their desperate handwringing.  “During a Veterans Day speech,” they wail,  “Mr. Trump used language that echoed authoritarian leaders who rose to power in Germany and Italy in the 1930s . . .”

Wham: three short paragraphs and Donald Trump is already being compared to Hitler and Mussolini. Then come the “experts” to provide cover. We’re not just wacko name callers here. We’re The New York Times. Trump warned that:

“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”

Lincoln actually took a similar line when he noted in his Lyceum Address of 1838 that “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” But you are not allowed to mention Lincoln and Trump in the same sentence, except to trash Trump, so the Times calls on “experts” to do the dirty work. This “turn inward,” they write, “has sounded new alarms among experts on autocracy who have long worried about Mr. Trump’s praise for foreign dictators and disdain for democratic ideals. They said the former president’s increasingly intensive focus on perceived internal enemies was a hallmark of dangerous totalitarian leaders.”

Well, if “experts” say it, who are we to disagree?

Later on in the piece, Messrs Bender and Gold allow that “Some experts on authoritarianism said that while Mr Trump’s recent language has begun to more closely resemble that used by leaders like Hitler or Benito Mussolini, he does not quite mirror fascist leaders of the past.” Well, praise the Lord.

But how does Trump compare to Naomi Wolf fever swamp fantasies from September of 2008? Sarah ‘Evita’ Palin to Usher in Rovian Police State.

(That would be the same Evita whom AOC compared herself to in 2019 in a classic self-own. Exit quote: “Look just because she’s favorably comparing herself to the lady that Franco liked a lot who sheltered Mengele doesn’t mean… OK, I forgot where I was doing with this.”)

IF YOU’RE FROM CHICAGO, YOU’LL UNDERSTAND:  I’ve been down on Macy’s since they took over Marshall Field’s more than a decade ago.  I won’t shop there.  You can’t make me.  No one can.  Macy’s killed my favorite store.

I was therefore pleased to learn that “Stephen Miller’s Legal Group Targets Macy’s [Illegal] Diversity Policies.”  Go get ’em, Stephen.

PARTY OF YOUTH UPDATE: Biden Turns 81 — Say, How’s That ‘Bridge’ Coming?

On the menu today: Don’t expect the White House to make a big deal of it and remind everyone about one of Joe Biden’s biggest campaign liabilities, but today is the president’s 81st birthday. NBC News greeted the president with a new poll showing him trailing Trump nationally and his approval rating hitting the lowest number ever recorded in its survey. Even young voters, traditionally a demographic that Democrats win handily, appear surprisingly split about their options in a Biden–Trump rematch. Finally, former Obama chief strategist David Axelrod warns that Biden’s odds in a matchup with Trump are less than 50–50, and that, as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, Biden is relying on Trump’s odiousness to put him over the top — an unsafe bet. And if Axelrod is saying that publicly, how likely is it that former president Obama concurs privately?

* * * * * * * *

Back in 2019, Biden himself reportedly signaled to aides that he would serve only a single term. There was a lot of talk back then about Biden being a bridge to a new generation of Democratic leaders, and more than a little of that talk came from Biden himself. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said at a March 9, 2020, campaign rally with Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Gretchen Whitmer. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.” (Looking back at historical events from early March 2020 feels like watching events from the first ten days of September 2001. The world’s about to suddenly change, and nobody on screen knows it.)

But Biden clearly hasn’t been a “bridge” to anyone or anything. If you wanted Biden to be a transitional president, then the work of preparing the American public for President Kamala Harris would’ve had to start much earlier.

Well, Biden has certainly tossed many projects towards Harris to, depending upon how charitable you are, either demonstrate that she’s ready to take over, or (more likely) as revenge for her calling him a racist during the 2020 primaries:

● Psaki insists Harris still border czar after Guatemalan leader claims no contact.

● ‘How do I know it’s actually working?’ Kamala Harris really inspires confidence in her ability to fulfill new role as Biden’s electric vehicle ambassador.

● “Biden announced that Harris would head up the administration’s efforts to monitor and combat what he called the Republican Party’s ‘unprecedented assault on democracy.’”

● Biden: I’m putting Kamala Harris in charge of getting voting rights legislation passed through Congress. “Ah, that’s nice of him. Something new for her to fail at instead of just failing to ease the border crisis.”

Flashbacks:

● How Joe Biden is Hanging Kamala Harris Out to Dry.

● DOCTOR Jill Biden Told Kamala ‘Go F*** Yourself’ for Attacking Her Husband.

DON’T GET COCKY: Joe Biden is facing a near-historic deficit for an incumbent.

Take a look at recent national surveys from CBS News/YouGov, CNN/SSRS, Fox News, Marquette University Law School and Quinnipiac University. All five are high-quality polls that meet CNN standards for publication.

All five give Trump an advantage of 2 to 4 points over Biden among registered or likely voters. On their own, none of these data points mean too much. Trump’s lead in all of them is within the margin of error. Averaged together, though, they paint a picture of an incumbent with a real problem.

Over the past 80 years, incumbents have, on average, led their eventual challengers by a little more than 10 points about a year out from the election. This includes nearly every incumbent for whom we have polling since Franklin Roosevelt in 1943.

It includes Barack Obama against Mitt Romney in November 2011. This is notable because a number of Democrats have tried to dismiss the current data showing Biden in trouble by saying that Obama had been behind at this point, too. That simply isn’t true.

And this from Maureen Dowd:

According to a New York Times/Siena College poll, Donald Trump is ahead in five battleground states and, as some other surveys have found, is even making inroads among Black voters and young voters. There’s a generational fracture in the Democratic Party over the Israeli-Hamas horror and Biden’s age. Third-party spoilers are circling.

The president turns 81 on Monday; the Oval hollows out its occupants quickly, and Biden is dealing with two world-shattering wars, chaos at the border, a riven party and a roiling country.

“I think he has a 50-50 shot here, but no better than that, maybe a little worse,” Axelrod said. “He thinks he can cheat nature here and it’s really risky. They’ve got a real problem if they’re counting on Trump to win it for them. I remember Hillary doing that, too.”

The president’s flash of anger indicates that he may be in denial, surrounded by enablers who are sugarcoating a grim political forecast.

Biden has always lashed out, always punched down. Even if he isn’t surrounded by enablers, he doesn’t have the strength of character to listen to honest criticism.

THIS IS NOT YOUR GRANDFATHER’S ANTI-SEMITISM:

One way to begin to understand this more clearly is to think about the popular meme that shows a glowering Trump (my favor[ite] kind of Trump) with the legend, “It’s not me they’re after—it’s you. I’m just in the way.” We can paraphrase this by saying, “It’s not Israel we’re after—it’s the entire project of Western civilization. Israel is just in the way.” It is not for nothing that Iran, for example, has been calling the United States “the great Satan” for 40 years now. If they were to succeed in destroying Israel, we know who would be the next primary target.

John has already posted the video I include again at the end here because I want to add the question: If Israel/Gaza is the issue, then why are these protestors going to such trouble to take down the American flag?  (On Veteran’s Day, no less.) I think we all know why perfectly well.

Here’s more photo evidence, from a London protest:

Exit quote: “Just more reminders that the issue is not the issue.”

ROGER L SIMON: ‘You Don’t Make Peace With People Who Are Trying to Kill You.’

“Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.

“Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions—the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War—those people said.” It goes on with more details worth reading, but, disturbingly, further down in the article, we find Secretary of State Anthony Blinken weirdly equivocating: “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”
Why?

At the minimum, Mr. Blinken may fear acknowledgement of Iran’s role that, with that mounting American death toll, might appear a casus belli for the United States to attack Iran.

More likely, he is concerned it would redound poorly on the Biden administration and on Mr. Blinken himself for their Iran policy that recently resulted in the released $6 billion in sanctions to the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism.

The Biden Administration knew exactly who they were getting into bed with in Tehran and did so anyway. Rarely discussed (except by me, here) was Biden’s huge mistake in making the Palestinians a part of his hoped-for “mega-deal” Middle East peace process. That gave groups like Hamas (and their paymasters in Iran) an effective veto over the process — which they exercised in the most spectacularly brutal way imaginable.

OH, THAT LIBERAL FASCISM: Hillary Clinton Calls For ‘Formal Deprogramming’ Targeting Trump Supporters.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for a “formal deprogramming” of “MAGA” supporters during a CNN interview that aired Thursday.

Clinton weighed in on the ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who lost his gavel Tuesday, drawing a distinction between the “sane” wing of the Republican party and what she described as a Trumpist “cult.”

“I mean, we had very strong partisans in both parties in the past, and we had very bitter battles over all kinds of things,” Clinton said. “But there wasn’t this little tail of extremism, waving, you know, wagging the dog of the Republican party as it is today. And sadly, so many of those extremists, those MAGA extremists take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure. He’s only in it for himself. He’s now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions. And when do they break with him?”

“At some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, but something needs to happen,” she added.

C’mon Hillary be specific! Would these be modeled after the CCP’s Uighur reeducation camps, or the North Korean reeducation camps? Or perhaps something a bit more old school?

“One Soviet technique of oppression was to declare that dissidents were insane. They were then incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals where they were tormented and tortured. Some were used as human guinea pigs for dangerous experiments.” For example, Vladimir Bukovsky “spent a dozen years being shuffled between Soviet jails, labor camps, and psychiatric hospitals.”

One of the “therapies” was “putting a cord into Bukovsky’s mouth, threading it from his throat up through his nasal passages, and then drawing it out through one of his nostrils. Alas, this communist ‘treatment’ did not ‘cure’ Bukovsky of his rational (not irrational) abhorrence of tyranny and brutality.”

The type of “formal deprogramming” Clinton seeks could be promoted as public health issue and  imposed under the regime of White Coat Supremacy. That regime remains in place even after the alleged retirement of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the loathsome Lysenko figure who claims to represent science. For her part, Hillary Clinton recalls the 1979 point-counterpoint skit on Saturday Night Live about the Michelle Triola palimony suit against actor Lee Marvin.

And of course, “Notice [Christiane] Amanpour doesn’t question this language, or ask for specifics,” so it’s a safe bet she’d be fully onboard with the notion, especially given CNN’s proclivity for doxxing Trump supporters.

Related:

And just like that the real meaning of the Second Amendment becomes crystal clear. https://t.co/Ufc1SSs2gA

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) October 6, 2023

As Kevin Williamson wrote in his 2019 book, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics, “The Bill of Rights ought to be titled ‘A List of Things You Idiots Don’t Get a Vote On, Because They Aren’t Up for Negotiation.’”

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP [VIP]: The Legal Assault on the Trump Organization Is Far Worse Than You Think. “New York Democrats just imposed the ‘corporate death penalty’ on the Trump Organization. ‘It’s something that is almost never done.’ That’s the lead crazy on today’s Insanity Wrap, an entire week’s worth of the best bad news.”

Plus:

• Gavin Newsom’s newest assault on gun rights is two kinds of sinister.
• White people are mosquitos or don’t get bit by mosquitos or something bad like that because racism.
• What could go wrong with an Austrian dude wanting to remake the whole map of Europe?

So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

THE “DON’T NORMALIZE TRUMP” CAMPAIGN WAS THE DUMBEST AND MOST DESTRUCTIVE (AND SELF-DESTRUCTIVE) IN AMERICAN POLITICS: We’re supposed to believe that other politicians don’t say “whatever it takes to fulfill [their] desires and thirst for power.”

I don’t like the way the abnormalization of Trump has come at the cost of stifling our capacity to critique other politicians. The others may be more “normal” than Trump, but since when is a “normal politician” a genuine policy wonk who’s dedicated to telling the truth and serving the people?

I watched the entire interview with Trump — video, transcript — and it seemed to me that Trump was heavily immersed in policy. His haters act as though it’s a matter of principle to refuse to engage on the substance at all. Ironically, they are making it easier for him to win on the merits.

Stop dehumanizing him and answer him! The abnormalization strategy reinforces a suspicion that you don’t dare argue substance.

Watching the interview, I wrote down the time stamp 17:43. I wanted to remember where it was that I said out loud, “He’s going to win.”

Well, kids, don’t get cocky.

HOW IT STARTED: Kamala… They Are Coming for You.

If Biden is set to go, Kamala Harris must go first. A half century ago, when the Republican Establishment thought Nixon’s days as president were numbered, they decided they didn’t want VP Spiro Agnew around. So Agnew pled no contest to a felony charge of tax invasion. Gerald Ford became vice president, Nixon resigned, Ford became president, then in 1976 lost to Jimmy Carter. Watergate played a role. Can Biden scandals do it this time?

If they can’t find anything compromising in the past of Kamala Harris, Gov. Gavin Newsom could fulfill his pledge to appoint a black woman to Dianne Feinstein’s Senate by convincing Feinstein to resign, then appointing Harris to her seat. Better yet, Harris then could displace Chuck Schumer and become the “first woman” and “first black woman” to be Senate majority leader. (She’s relatively young; if she transitions, Democrats might back her for president in the future.)

* * * * * * * *

The powers in the Democratic Party can no more gamble on Kamala than on Joe. If either is on the ticket, more than the White House is at stake. Republicans would expand, not lose, their House majority. And Democrats would certainly lose their precarious hold on the Senate. Their best hope is an election that again is a referendum on Donald Trump; but regardless of who the Republican nominee is, not a referendum on Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.

Kamala must go before Joe does, certainly before Joe announces he won’t run.

One way or another — Kamala, they’re coming for you, and then Joe.

–Arnold Steinberg, the American Spectator, July 2nd.

How it’s going: It’s Getting Serious Now: L.A. Times Kicks Off the Dems’ ‘Dump-Harris’ Movement.

The Times’ George Skelton knows that the left, unlike the right, never turns on its own, and that a public acknowledgement of Harris’ manifest incompetence would be damaging not just for her, but for Old Joe himself. After all, the putative commander-in-chief has repeatedly praised her and declared as recently as May that she “hasn’t gotten the credit she deserves.”

* * * * * * * *

His plan for doing this involves Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California SSR), who is ninety years old and manages to make Old Joe look as if he’s sharp as a tack. Feinstein, Skelton writes, “is a problem for California because she’s no longer capable of fully representing the nation’s most populous state — a world-class economic power — in the Senate.” And thus the solution to the Democrats’ problems presents itself: “Feinstein could resign from the Senate and Gov. Gavin Newsom could appoint Harris to replace her. Biden then could find a more popular running mate, one more acceptable to voters as a potential successor.”

That successor could be, say, Newsom himself, although the left’s fondness for him as a possible future presidential candidate pays insufficient attention to the fact that he has presided over an unprecedented flight of patriots and other sane people from the Golden State.

No sooner does Skelton raise the possibility of Harris replacing DiFi and clearing the way for the Democrats’ dream candidate (well, the Dems’ real dream candidate would be a gay trans Marxist person of color, but if they can’t find one of those, then a more ordinary Marxist will have to do) than he dismisses it: “A great idea. But it’ll never happen because it would take all of the president’s persuasive and coercive powers to pull off. And he doesn’t seem the type likely to do that.” Indeed, not only has Feinstein said that she is going to remain in the Senate until her term ends, but Harris is unlikely to give up being a heartbeat away from pretending to be president for another Senate gig. What’s more, it’s essentially out of the question that Old Joe could persuade either of them to take this course, as the man can barely formulate a coherent sentence, much less charm two egomaniacs into being humble.

–Robert Spencer, PJ Media, today.

THIS ISN’T NORMAL OR SUSTAINABLE: Biden Budget Deficits Look Like Those Normally Seen In Recessions.

To hear President Joe Biden tell it, the US economy is booming. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is running monthly budget deficits that you would normally see during a deep recession.

With two months left to go, the deficit for fiscal 2023 now stands at $1.61 trillion, after the federal government charted another massive shortfall in July.
And Biden wants to spend even more.

To put the $1.61 trillion deficit in perspective, prior to the pandemic, the US government had only run deficits over $1 trillion four times — all in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Trump almost hit the $1 trillion mark in 2019 and was on pace to run a trillion-dollar deficit prior to the pandemic. The economic catastrophe caused by the government’s response to COVID-19 gave policymakers an excuse to spend with no questions asked. Now the Biden administration has settled into the new status quo – running ’08 financial crisis-like deficits every single year.

The July budget deficit came in at $220.78 billion, according to the latest Monthly Treasury Statement. The shortfall was due to a double whammy of big spending and falling government tax receipts.

Well, get used to that.

REMEMBER WHEN THE TRUMP WHITE HOUSE GAVE GUIDELINES FOR EXPLOITING LOOPHOLES IN SUPREME COURT RULINGS?  Biden Admin Releases Diversity Guidance for Colleges After Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Ruling.

If you don’t it could be because apparently (so called) “Fascists” don’t try to get around the law for more power. Funny that, uh?

DISTRACTIONS: Don Surber: Biden indicts Trump to hide USA’s credit rating dropping. “Now, whenever Biden indicts Trump, smart readers ask themselves what is Biden trying to distract us from this time? His son’s day in court? His secretary of state bowing to Chairman Xi? A whistleblower testifying before Congress? This time it is creditors getting uneasy about his overspending. For every dollar the federal government takes in taxes, it spends two. Lenders want to charge you more money when you do that.”

Related: “Arbitrary… Outdated!” – Yellen Outraged After Fitch Cuts USA’s AAA-Rating.

ANOTHER WEEK, ANOTHER LAYER IN THE HUNTER BIDEN STORY:

If you put the best possible—least scandalous—face on the Hunter Biden saga, it’s still repellent. A Ukrainian oligarch hired Hunter and paid him a fortune in hopes of influencing his vice-president father’s attitude toward Ukraine—and Joe Biden was just fine with it. Biden and his team falsely dismissed Hunter’s incriminating laptop in 2020 as Russian disinformation not to cover up any crimes but merely to keep embarrassing-but-true information from the American voting public during an election year.

That’s the defense, and it already cops to more sordid official wrongdoing than Donald Trump has ever been found guilty of.

But considering all the facts, the real story has the potential to get much worse. In 2014, Joe Biden was vice president of the United States and the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine, with a particular interest in addressing Ukrainian corruption. That year, Hunter Biden was hired by the notoriously opaque Ukrainian energy company Burisma to serve on its board. Despite Hunter’s having no work experience or education in energy exploration and extraction, Burisma paid him a salary of $83,000 a month. (About this arrangement, the State Department declared at the time that there was no conflict of interest.)

While Hunter was working for Burisma, Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian leaders to fire prosecutor general Victor Shokin—whose investigation into the company was, according to Shokin’s former deputy, “dormant” at the time.

America’s Newspaper of Record knows how it will all end: McCarthy Says 783rd Impeachable Offense By Biden Will Be The Last Straw. “At publishing time, Republicans confirmed they will soon retaliate against the Bidens by dragging cabinet members before a committee so Jim Jordan can angrily furrow his brow at them.”

BLUE-ANON: CNN anchor claims Jack Smith visiting Subway is ‘a message to Donald Trump.’

An anchor on CNN claimed on Tuesday that special counsel Jack Smith visiting a Subway was “a message to Donald Trump.”

The statement comes on the same day Trump announced he received a letter notifying that “I am a TARGET” of Smith’s grand jury investigation. Footage of Smith leaving a Subway in Washington was played on the network and was discussed by network anchor John King.

“Jack Smith going to Subway today is a message to Donald Trump,” said King. “Donald Trump tries to intimidate people, he tries to bully people, he tries to scare you away. That was Jack Smith with no words and a simple $5 sub in his hand saying, ‘I’m here, I’m not going anywhere.'”

CNN’s TDS knows no bounds, But their obsession with Smith’s Subway run leads to the question: Just how much ham was in the sub? Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime: “Prosecutors themselves understand just how much discretion they enjoy. As Tim Wu recounted in 2007, a popular game in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York was to name a famous person—Mother Teresa, or John Lennon—and decide how he or she could be prosecuted. . . . With so many more federal laws and regulations than were present in Jackson’s day,8 a prosecutor’s task of first choosing a possible target and then pinning the crime on him or her has become much easier. If prosecutors were not motivated by politics, revenge, or other improper motives, the risk of improper prosecution would not be particularly severe. However, such motivations do, in fact, encourage prosecutors to pursue certain individuals, like the gadfly Aaron Swartz, while letting others off the hook—as in the case of Gregory, a popular newscaster generally supportive of the current administration.”

MORE ON TRUMP’S REPORT THAT HE WILL BE ARRESTED FOR JANUARY 6 “INCITEMENT.” If the First Amendment protects an antiwar protester saying “We’ll take the f–king street later” while cops cleared out demonstrators, it surely protects Trump’s speech saying “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: Here’s What Will Probably Happen If Trump Wins The GOP Nomination.

I get that the memes and the Trump rallies are fun and the guy is entertaining as hell. I also understand the desire to vote for the politician who gave us 2016’s miracle win. I truly do. Yes, the former president has been his own worst enemy at times, but he also has been the target of an unprecedented level of lawfare from Democrats. The desire to see him not just vindicated but in a position to wreak sweet, sweet revenge on his – and our – persecutors is palpable. Hell, if I could wave a magic wand and make him president, I certainly would.

But I can’t, and you can’t, and for a variety of solid reasons, Trump can’t win the general election. So, it’s imperative that Republicans nominate someone who can. Our country, and our way of life, depend on it. There is a Door Number Two, if we’re wise enough to open it.

Read the whole thing.

ROGER KIMBALL: Trump Gets the Beria Treatment.

The Trump indictments—note the plural—are they not like the blind encountering an elephant for the first time?

One touches the beast’s trunk and says it’s shaped like a snake.

Another touches its tusks and says, no, it’s hard and bone-like.

A third, hands on the elephant’s capacious side, says it’s more like a wall of flesh.

That old story was meant to remind us of how limited our individual perspectives can be.

How easy it is to mistake the part for the whole, to seize on one thing we’re familiar with and elevate it to a general explanatory principle.

Noting the wild differences among people in their assessments of the latest—but not the last—of the Trump indictments, I at first thought the differences of opinion might be due to the differences in the vantage points from which individuals survey the news about the indictments.

But the more I learn about the issue, the more I think that’s too generous a conclusion.

It assumes a modicum of good faith among those issuing the judgments.

Alas, I don’t think the motives of every party to this spectacle are pure.

Exit quote: “Donald Trump is being given the treatment that Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of the secret police, advocated when he said, ‘Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.’ At the end of the day, Trump is guilty not because of anything he has done but because of who he is.”

WILL COLLIER: The Question.

If you’ve watched, read or heard national political reporters and pundits over the past couple of years, you’ve almost certainly seen them all-but rubbing their hands in anticipation of questioning Republican candidates for the 2024 nomination.

They aren’t excited about queries on inflation, or Ukraine, or the debt, or the border, or crime. They’re all a-twitter (pun certainly intended) over getting to ask this question, in front of as large an audience as possible:

“Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”

The question is viewed as a can’t-miss by the press: humiliating Republican candidates who answer in the negative as too afraid to cross Trump, enraging the hard-core Trumper base against anyone who says “yes,” and opening the floodgates for untold hours of gleeful on-air mockery from media figures all too happy to continue poisoning the electoral well for the GOP.

Any candidate who is seriously in this race had better have an answer ready, and it had better be one that the electorate at large can nod along with in agreement.

To be more specific, they had better be ready, willing and able to say, “Yes.”

Lots to chew on at the link.

I’LL TAKE HEADLINES FROM 2020 FOR $500, ALEX: Trump’s second term seems inevitable.

Face it: Biden isn’t that popular as world leaders go. In their respective countries, Narendra Modi (India), Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Mexico), Anthony Albanese (Australia), Lula (Brazil) and Giorgia Meloni (Italy) are all better liked. If you look at Biden’s job approval, using the RealClearPolitics average, he is now slightly more unpopular (a net approval of minus 11.6 percent) than Trump was at this stage in his presidency (minus 10.7 percent).

Trump is also not that unpopular. Indeed, he is less so than at this point eight years ago. In July 2015, Trump’s net unfavorable number was minus 39.3 percent. Today, it’s minus 16 percent. Then, just 23 percent of voters had a positive view of him. Now it’s 39 percent. The RealClear figure for Joe Biden is 41 percent, and his net unfavorable is minus 12 percent.

And that’s the state of play at the moment. But what if there’s a recession between now and next year? It’s not a certainty. There is more than one smart economist who still believes there could be a “soft landing,” despite all the recent worries sparked by US (and Swiss) bank failures. In an interview with CNBC, Apollo Global Management’s chief executive, Mark Rowan, even used the phrase “non-recession recession,” which we must hope doesn’t catch on.

On the other hand, former treasury secretary Larry Summers has had a pretty good run ever since he called the Biden administration’s inflationary fiscal mistake back in February 2021, and he said last week that there’s a 70 percent probability of a recession within the next year. He is not alone.

I’m with the bears. What we have witnessed over the past two years is an epic monetary policy failure. In June 2021, the members of the Federal Open Market Committee thought that the target federal funds rate this year would lie between zero and 1.75 percent. By March of this year, they had to revise those figures up to between 4.75 and 6 percent. Having been asleep at the wheel in 2021, they have cranked up short-term rates to try to bring inflation back down to 2 percent. But they are still a long way from achieving that.

As central bankers love to intone, monetary policy acts with long and variable lags. The current lag is taking longer than people appreciate. Recessions resemble slow chain reactions. The signal from the policy interest rate to the wider economy goes through multiple channels, but the most important is the volume of bank credit.

In the twelve months through March, total bank credit in the US economy declined in real terms. That rarely occurs. Since 1960, it has happened only during, or in the immediate aftermath of, a recession. This is the indicator to watch, along with the surveys of borrowers and lenders.

The deceptive indicators are those that track consumer behavior and the labour market, which still look strong. In the latest GDP print, consumption was still growing. But non-residential investment contracted. The present game of chicken over the debt ceiling makes a recession more likely. As in 2011, the showdown will probably be resolved at the last moment, within twenty-four hours of the “X-date” after which the Treasury must either slash public spending or default on some part of the federal debt. But the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis took place during the sluggish recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, when inflation and interest rates were close to the zero lower bound. The risk of a bond market accident is much higher today.

What this suggests to me is that Joe Biden is in serious danger of following Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush into the trashcan marked “one-term presidents.” Why? For the simple reason that no president since Calvin Coolidge a century ago has secured re-election if a recession has occurred in the two years before the nation votes. It does not need to be as severe as the Great Depression that destroyed Herbert Hoover’s presidency. A plain vanilla recession will suffice.

In the wake of the 1976 Republican convention, Ford was trailing his rival, Carter, by thirty-three points in the Gallup poll. His campaign did an extraordinary job of closing the gap, so that the result was tantalizingly close. But over the GOP, as the New York Times put it in its immediate post-election report, “hung the shadow of Richard M. Nixon and a dangerously shaky economy.”

In 1980, it was Carter’s turn to lose, in part because of “last-minute rejections of [his] handling of the economy,” in part because of the Iran hostage crisis. “Inflation and unemployment had been a constant drag on Mr. Carter throughout the race,” reported the New York Times. “The issue got new prominence when Mr. Reagan stressed it as he closed his argument in the debate in Cleveland by saying, ‘Ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago?’”

And in 1992, Bill Clinton ran on “the economy, stupid,” one of three points on a sign that his chief strategist James Carville hung in the campaign headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas. (The others were “Change vs more of the same” and “Don’t forget healthcare.”)

If you think the economy isn’t going to be the issue in the 2024 election, I’ve got a Whip Inflation Now badge to sell you. Look at the Gallup poll on “satisfaction with the way things are going in the US.” That’s currently at the 1980 level, half what it was four years ago, before the pandemic. Gallup’s economic confidence index is deeply in negative territory, the opposite of where it was under Trump. And this is before any recession.

Whoever is running against Biden gets to play some variation on the “Worst economy in 50 years” tagline of Bill Clinton. But DeSantis can add a variation of Reagan’s trademark: “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Well, Florida residents aren’t. As to the rest of America…”

ROGER KIMBALL: Donald Trump ran rings around CNN.

[CNN’s Kaitlan] Collins tried to trip up Trump with E. Jean Carroll, the fruitcake who accused him of raping her in a dressing room at a fancy New York emporium thirty years ago. Sure, a New York jury just found Trump guilty of sexual battery and defamation, but he deftly filleted the charge, much to the delight of the live audience.

Collins kept throwing spitballs: was Trump going to apologize to Mike Pence for his behavior on January 6, 2021? No. And speaking of the jamboree at the Capitol on J6, what about the scores of political prisoners rotting in a Washington jail because they had strolled around the grounds that day? He would have to consider each case on its merits, Trump said, but he might well pardon many of those who had been swept up in the deep-state dragnet.

Did he want Ukraine to win in its war with Russia? He just wanted the killing to stop. (“Now why didn’t I think of that?” you could almost hear Collins mutter.) What about the the federal debt and negotiations over the debt ceiling? We had to have spending cuts, Trump said, and if the Biden administration refused to negotiate on that, the US would just have to default. Without serious spending cuts, it would happen sooner or later, he said, and the later, the more painful.

As Jim Geraghty writes, “You can argue this weakens McCarthy, by giving congressional Republicans an incentive to reject any deal and let the country default. Or McCarthy can go to Biden and say, ‘You heard him. I’ve got a maniac who’s arguing that a default wouldn’t be so bad, and that we should go ahead and default if you won’t agree to ‘massive cuts.’ If you don’t throw me a bone on IRS agents or something, there’s no way I can get my caucus to pass a deal, and if we can’t pass a deal, both you and I are out of a job in January 2025.’”

And then there’s Sundown Joe: “What the town hall showed was that Trump is in fighting form. In contrast, Joe Biden is not. When Trump and Biden face-off on a debate stage, if both are their party’s candidates, the current president will look as old and feeble as he is. Joe Biden can’t finish a sentence. Donald Trump refuses to stop talking until his answer is complete. Whether you like his personality and style of speaking or not, there is no doubt that he is in control of his mental acuity. Biden is an old 80 and makes Trump look like an almost youthful 76. If Biden is on stage with Trump, that will be apparent.”

IT’S EARTH DAY. AGAIN. CONTAIN YOUR EXCITEMENT:

Even the left finds the day more than a little glum just now though that’s because the world hasn’t ended yet. Remember—end-of-the-world doomsday scenarios make environmentalists happy, so when the end of the world fails to arrive on schedule, they get the sads.

Like The New Republic, which asks this week:

Remember When Earth Day Used to Be Cool?

A person could be forgiven for being cynical about Earth Day in 2022. Even ExxonMobil celebrates the holiday. . . ExxonMobil doing Earth Day is a lot like arms and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin co-opting International Women’s Day—a holiday which began as a protest of capitalism and war. . .

Many contemporary defenders of the planet despise Earth Day. In fact, at this point the hatred is an annual ritual, observed with headlines like “I’m an Environmental Scientist and I Hate Earth Day,” “I’m an Environmental Journalist and I Hate Earth Day,” and “I’m an Environmentalist and I Hate Earth Day.”

The author’s answer? More “mass protest.” Cue Greta Thunberg.

ExxonMobil “celebrating” “Earth Day” is a classic example of big business learning in the 1990s “that it’s pretty easy being green,” as Katherine Mangu-Ward of Reason wrote in 2006:

Ask Bob Langert about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and he starts to chuckle. “When we meet the regulators, it’s kind of nice,” says the senior director for social responsibility at the McDonald’s Corporation. “We just got an award from the EPA. When we see the regulators, we always hope it’s because they’re giving us an award.”

* * * * * * * *

The idea of the rich corporate villain gleefully dirtying Mother Earth is powerful and appealing. Children of the 1980s encountered this supervillain in comics, movies, public awareness videos, and science textbooks. Times were good for mandatory recycling, for mandatory emissions reductions, for anything mandatory aimed at restraining corporate polluters.

But in the late ’90s, something peculiar started happening. The men in suits were still middle-aged, round, and white. They were still just as concerned with profit and golf. Very few of them sported tie-dyed attire, aside from the occasional whimsical Jerry Garcia tie. But the men in suits started caring. Or at least acting like they cared. Which, if you ask a spotted owl, is the same thing.

So environmental activists across the nation bought their own ties and started dealing with corporations as almost-equal partners in planet saving. Businesses in turn learned that it’s pretty easy being green.

All the way up to Obama’s crony corporatism and beyond.

Related: Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth Day predictions of [2023].

53 years on, to paraphrase the late Kathy Shaidle on Trump as Hitler, I’m already on (at least) my fourth apocalypse:

Flashbacks:

• “Earth Day” Turns 50. Half a century later, a look back at the forecasters who got the future wrong—and one who got it right.
• “Earth Day” Founder And Notorious “Unicorn Killer” Ira Einhorn Has Died In Prison At Age 79.
• On the eve of 2011’s “Earth Day,” NBC stumbled into this headline and subhead to describe Einhorn: Earth Day co-founder killed, composted girlfriend. Ira Einhorn preached against Vietnam War and violence, but had dark side.

SAD: Portlandia No More.

Stare wrongly at the wrong homeless person, cut off the wrong car in certain neighborhoods, or just be a bystander when the gangs start shooting, and you could end up dead. Was it always so? Not like this. Crime has skyrocketed since Brownstein’s character asked after the previous life and times of the chicken she was ordering for dinner.

Once a commenter on a story I’d written at a conservative website, after seeing that my bio included Portland, wrote: “Portland? You must feel surrounded.”

It’s true that Portland is blue. It gets a lot of conservative bad press. Urinals were omitted from blueprints for the new mega-million dollar city hall—something about gender neutrality? When Antifa besieged downtown in 2020, resulting in months of rioting and millions in property damage, President Trump offered to send in the National Guard. City hall refused the help, and vilified Trump instead. A Trump fan wearing an insignia was murdered by a rabble rouser who laid in wait at a parking garage. The killer was later gunned-down by federal agents in a Washington State apartment complex parking lot.

Downtown hasn’t recovered. Businesses are still fleeing. Slabs of plywood cover many street-level windows. Intractable homelessness besotting block after block and open-air shooting galleries have turned Portland into a no-go zone for thousands of locals and decimated the tourist and convention trade. The pandemic played a part in creating the current malaise, but that’s over, and there’s been little discernible bounce-back.

Decline is a choice, and one Portland voters make again and again.