December 2, 2025

ED MORRISSEY: Live Results: Special Election in TN-07!

Earlier, from Glenn in the New York Post: Tennessee vote a GOP warning — damning the left isn’t enough.

UPDATE: Considering how much she hates the city, I’d say both Behn and Nashville dodged a bullet tonight:

Posted at 10:05 pm by Ed Driscoll

I ONLY KNOW HER VIA SOCIAL MEDIA, BUT WE HAVE SOME MUTUAL FRIENDS WITH JANNA ABRAHAM, and her new PreservePress clothing site is now live. Not too late to order for Christmas. Or even Hanukkah.

Posted at 9:32 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Tuesday’s groovy.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

WORST. HITLER. EVER: Ellen DeGeneres Leaving UK to Return to U.S. After Fleeing From Trump.

Former talk show host and comedienne Ellen DeGeneres and her “wife” Portia de Rossi have had enough of the United Kingdom and reportedly plan to head back to the good old U.S. of A., just months after fleeing the country to get away from President Donald Trump. However, they claim they’re returning to California to avoid the super-chilly temperatures of the Cotswold region of Britain. In other words, America’s climate beats the dreary atmosphere of the UK, and the celebrity couple miss it so badly they’re willing to put up with a few months of President Trump.

Everybody has a price, right? Apparently, feeling physically uncomfortable is all it takes to make Ellen come crawling back. These folks refuse to commit to their own causes. They show no principles they’re willing to suffer for. Their actions say that rich and famous celebrities often perform for the public on social or political issues they claim to care about so they can look good, but when the rubber meets the road, they fold like a first-time poker player against Kenny Rogers.

DeGeneres has stated she plans to live in the UK until Trump leaves office; however, reports say she’s been telling her friends she wants to come back to Los Angeles for the winter. “She’s been telling friends they are coming home soon because they miss them and can’t take the winters over there, and Portia wants to act again. They will be here for the holidays and longer by the sound of it,” sources told the Daily Mail.

What is causing DeGeneres to dump the Cotswalds? Her attempt to flee the eeeeevil Trump Reich risks becoming a massive quagmire:

Well, according to a “source” who blabbed to the Mail on Sunday, Ellen will soon be heading back to California, and it’s not because the ongoing omnishambles of the entire UK political scene is beginning to make team Trump appear sane. No, Ellen simply, allegedly, cannot face another Cotswolds winter.

I know, bless, poor little Hollywood millionaires, are their tootsies getting cold in their Fendi wellies? Are their self-care saunas not working? Or has their heating bill just arrived? It’s risible, obviously. And yet, speaking from experience it would seem that, to paraphrase the bible, let he who has actually experienced a so-called Cotswolds winter cast the first stone. And I have, and so I won’t.

A Cotswolds winter is essentially the same as an average British winter, but for one key difference. Mud. Mud everywhere. Mud on everything. Mud in the car, mud in the house, mud on the floor, mud on the dogs, mud on the walls (yes, all over the walls!), mud on your clothes, mud on the furniture, mud, mud, mud! Sometimes, in the morning, you step out of the shower, put on some crisp clean clothes, skip down the stairs and take one final reassuring look at yourself in the hall mirror only to find that, somehow, inexplicably, you’re already covered in mud.

And it’s not a generic countryside thing. It’s a Cotswolds thing. The soil here is thin, Jurassic and lime-rich, meaning you add a single raindrop and it becomes lethal brown super glue. Even if you’re lucky enough to make it back indoors relatively unscathed, the tons of ambient mud around you (on the dog, on boots, bags and waterproofs) will soon harden, dry and puff insidiously outwards into a suffocating nano-cloud of silt that transforms your entire abode into post-Vesuvius Pompeii.

Exit quote: “And so my heart goes out to DeGeneres. I feel that she was sold a lie, or that she stared into the celebosphere and thought, ‘Cool. I’ll go to the Cotswolds! It’s full of fabulous people in big houses enjoying stylish soirees in fashionable outfits!’ And what did she get? Mud.”

I’m so old, I can remember when the Stalingrad winter was supposed to trap Hitler, not the communists.

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

PEOPLE ARE CALLING THE TN-7 RACE FOR MATT VAN EPPS, but Aftyn Behn was in the lead for a while and it’s still closer than it should have been. With her views and history she should be in the single digits.

UPDATE: Tennessee’s 7th District Special Election. “Victory for Behn, a progressive some dubbed the “AOC of Tennessee,” was once unthinkable in a district President Trump won by 22 points just last year. Despite her record of backing controversial policies, including transgender surgeries for minors, defunding the police, and even saying she hates Nashville, the very city she sought to represent, her support surged into the margin of error, leaving a tight race for today’s election. Her near-upset could have flipped a deep-red seat for the first time in more than four decades, validating Democrats’ new strategy and signaling a dark warning for Republicans heading into the 2026 midterms.”

Helen and I watched an AppleTV show called Physical, set in the early 1980s. The protagonist’s husband, a lefty Democrat, was running for state Senate and thought he might win because his poll watchers reported a lot of voters in Birkenstocks. Then a whole fleet of buses showed up, full of conservatively dressed Mormons who put his Republican Mormon opponent over the top. Dems have built their turnout apparatus, but the GOP — especially in my rather complacent state — hasn’t built a system to deliver its equivalent of the busloads of Mormons. It needs to get going on that, pronto.

Posted at 9:10 pm by Glenn Reynolds

#RESISTANCE:

Posted at 9:02 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THANK THE LORD: Virgil Walker delivers the welcome news that Rap/Hip-Hop is dying, if not already dead, at least among guys.

Posted at 8:51 pm by Mark Tapscott

GENTLEMEN, YOU CAN’T FIGHT HERE, THIS IS THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR ROOM!

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

SO MUCH FOR THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE: Righteous Sen. Ed Markey Quotes the Gospels in Replying to Sec. Kristi Noem’s Travel Ban Suggestion.

I’m not sure why Markey is going through all of this effort to push illegal immigration, when he believes in the End of Days.™

● Shot: Ed Markey pairs with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Green New Deal. 

—The Boston Herald, February 7th, 2019.

● Chaser: AOC: No, Seriously, We Only Have 12 Years Left.

—Jim Treacher, PJ Media, May 29, 2019.

With less than six years left for mankind, shouldn’t Markey be hunkered down waiting for the inevitable, like the cast of Stanley Kramer’s On The Beach? 

 

Posted at 8:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

FASTER, PLEASE: The end of the climate cult.

It has been a long, lucrative ride. Predicting the eco-apocalypse has always been a profitable business, spawning subsidies, salaries, consulting fees, air miles, best-sellers and research grants. Different themes took turns as the scare du jour: overpopulation, oil spills, pollution, desertification, mass extinction, acid rain, the ozone layer, nuclear winter, falling sperm counts. Each faded as the evidence became more equivocal, the public grew bored or, in some cases, the problem was resolved by a change in the law or practice.

But no scare grew as big or lasted as long as global warming. I first wrote a doom-laden article for the Economist about carbon dioxide emissions trapping heat in the air in 1987, nearly 40 years ago. I soon realized the effect was real but the alarm was overdone, that feedback effects were exaggerated in the models. The greenhouse effect was likely to be a moderate inconvenience rather than an existential threat. For this blasphemy I was abused, canceled, blacklisted, called a “denier” and generally deemed evil. In 2010, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal I debated Gates, who poured scorn on my argument that global warming was not likely to be a catastrophe – so it is welcome to see him come round to my view.

The activists who took over the climate debate, often with minimal understanding of climate science, competed for attention by painting ever more catastrophic pictures of future global warming. They changed the name to “climate change” so they could blame it for blizzards as well as heat waves. Then they inflated the language to “climate emergency” and “climate crisis,” even as projections of future warming came down.

“I’m talking about the slaughter, death and starvation of six billion people this century. That’s what the science predicts,” said Roger Hallam, founder of Extinction Rebellion in 2019, though the science says no such thing. “A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years,” tweeted Greta Thunberg in 2018. Five years later she deleted her tweet and shortly after that decided that Palestine was a more promising way of staying in the limelight.

Scientists knew that pronouncements like this were nonsense but they turned a blind eye because the alarm kept the grant money coming. Journalists always love exaggeration.

We may be reaching peak Blair’s Law here: “Coined by Australian journalist, Tim Blair as ‘the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.’” QED:

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

THAT’S THE SPIRIT:

Posted at 6:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: The Somali Fraud Story Busts Liberal Myths.

Minnesota has long prided itself on its generous welfare programs and reputation for good governance. But after the mass arrival of the new Somali population—many of whom brought with them different attitudes toward government and civil society—these programs became a weak point. George Floyd’s 2020 death in Minneapolis demonstrated that scrutiny could be deflected by making baseless accusations of “racism” against anyone who raised questions about the missing funds.

The uncomfortable truth for Times readers is that all cultures are not equal. Therefore, not all cultures are compatible with all political systems. In this case, the Somali criminal enterprise is incompatible with a generous welfare state, particularly in the context of a racial politics that intimidates whistleblowers and other honest brokers.

Though this story was particular to Minnesota, disruptive mass immigration is a national phenomenon. During the four years of the Biden administration, America imported millions of foreigners, many illegally. Some of these have brought, or are trying to bring, negative aspects of their home culture to the United States.

Indeed, cultural incompatibility was a campaign theme during the 2024 election.  Venezuelan gangs took over apartment buildings in Colorado. Haitian migrants overwhelmed deindustrialized towns in the Rust Belt. The Somali fraud story is another point in this plotline.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE:

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

TRUMP IS REMAKING THE ELECTORATE. WILL IT LAST?

Between 2020 and 2024, Trump nearly doubled his support among black voters, from 8 percent to 15 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Over the same period, his support among Asian voters rose from 30 percent to 40 percent, and his share of the Hispanic vote increased from 36 percent to 48 percent. That Trump was able to make these dramatic inroads among blacks and Asians while running against Kamala Harris, a woman of black and Asian descent, is even more remarkable.

What’s especially worrisome for Democrats is that Trump didn’t simply improve his performance among these groups in swing states—he also made gains in states that Harris carried. A postelection New York Times analysis revealed that in predominantly black and Hispanic New York City neighborhoods, Trump’s support improved by 46 percent and 55 percent, respectively. Democrats easily won deep-blue states like California, New York, and New Jersey, but by significantly smaller margins than they won them four years earlier.

Declining minority support for Democrats is a function of the party’s waning support among blue-collar voters, who are disproportionately black and Hispanic. The white working-class began abandoning Democrats decades ago out of frustration that party leaders were prioritizing the concerns of college-educated professionals and cultural elites. Trump convinced more nonwhites to do the same.

Curiously, wannabe shadow president Mark Kelly seems quite cross about Trump’s multiracial support: Mark Kelly Claims Republicans Don’t Want Brown People in America and HOOBOY, Let the DRAGGING Begin.

Wannabe shadow president Mark Kelly also seems to have forgotten that Trump has been shot at as well:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT ISN’T JUST THE AIRLINES NICKEL AND DIMING YOU TO DEATH ANYMORE: TSA announces $45 fee for travelers with no REAL ID. “This fee is part of the agency’s next phase of the REAL ID implementation process and will require individuals to verify their identity through a biometric or biographic system if they don’t have a compliant form of identification before they’re permitted to cross through the checkpoint.”

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green

ICYMI: NYT to WaPo: You Lied About Hegseth. “Everything I emphasized contradicts the WaPo’s sensationalist claims from last week. And, in journalistic terms, those three paragraphs amount to the NYT calling WaPo liars. I’d add that ‘sensationalist claims,’ in VodkaPundit terms, amounts to ‘WaPo either lied or was lied to and didn’t care.'”

Posted at 4:20 pm by Stephen Green

HERO: ‘High-G maneuvers’ amid enemy missiles earn USAF pilot Silver Star.

An Air Force squadron commander who led a history-making deployment to the Middle East was recently presented with the military’s third-highest combat award for combat heroism that reads like a Blockbuster movie script.

Lt. Col. William “Skate” Parks, who commanded the 480th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron out of Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany, until earlier this year, received the Silver Star at the Pentagon on Wednesday in recognition of a high-risk flight on March 27 that helped save the lives of his wingmen as well as his own from the urgent threat of running out of fuel, in addition to incoming enemy missiles.

The 480th EFS was designated in 2010 with one of the Air Force’s rarer and more risky missions: Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses, or SEAD. As the only squadron in Air Forces Europe and Africa performing SEAD, it destroys, spoofs and subverts enemy ground-based air defenses, such as surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft guns.

While Air Force releases and Parks’ award citation do not specify where the squadron was operating in the Middle East at the time, the timeframe aligns with Operation Rough Rider, a series of strikes against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green