THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Crash and Burn — The Kathleen Kennedy Story.
As the Drinker notes, Kennedy “gambled some of the biggest franchises in Hollywood history on the modern audience. And wow, did she lose big. To paraphrase Chris Gore, she took boy brands that everyone could enjoy and turned them into girl brands that nobody enjoyed. Men felt excluded and disrespected, and women felt patronized and pandered to. The modern audience had failed to show up, and the existing audience was abandoning ship. Kennedy’s greatest gamble had failed, and inevitably it all finally caught up with her.”
I hope the destruction of both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises was worth it for her. Gene Siskel famously said that the test of a good movie is, “Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?” For Kennedy, the amount of damage control she’ll be engaging in from here on in will be far more fun to watch than any of the product she put up on the big and small screen.
Former Vice President Al Gore briefly accosted Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick after the Trump official’s speech on the sidelines of this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, The Post has learned.
When he stepped offstage, Gore walked up to him and said, “Boo” – like he was trying to scare him, a source told The Post.
Lutnick laughed and someone at the event remarked, “What an honor to have Al Gore boo,” according to an insider.
We’ve been here before with the Goracle, haven’t we? And with equally predictable results:
And note this:
“I sat and listened to his remarks,” the avid environmentalist told The Post in a statement.
“I didn’t interrupt him in any way. It’s no secret that I think this administration’s energy policy is insane. And at the end of his speech I reacted with how I felt, and so did several others.”
Al has sold Current, for the magnificent sum of $500-million, $100-million of which is his alone. Not bad for a TV station with less reach and inferior programming to most billboards.
To whom did the Lord of the Upper Atmosphere sell? Why to al Jazeera — which is to say, effectively to the ruler of Qatar, a wealthy country that has nothing else to sustain it but the sale of its huge petroleum resources.
Qatar is about oil, oil and more oil. It is a global warmer’s hell.
But what a paycheck! When Al Gore emerged from his energy-guzzling mansion to address the Senate in 2007 only to refuse to take his own energy reduction pledge from An Inconvenient Truth when presented to him by Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Ann Coulter quipped, “I kind of respect him more, it shows he is not stupid enough to believe all this global warming nonsense. He’s trying to get us to believe. Okay, fine, he may be a hypocrite but at least he’s not a moron.”
In 2019, a house started burning on Bethel Island, out at the eastern edges of the Bay Area. The East Contra Costa Fire Protection District — which no longer exists, for reasons that will be clear enough — had been eroding for years, closing one fire station after another as funding ran short. In 2019, ten firefighters (three each on three fire engines plus one battalion chief) covered 250 square miles, much of it well-populated. Bethel Island no longer had a fire station. Scroll to page two on this later report that discussed the reform of fire agencies in Contra Costa County, and you’ll find the fire department’s average response time to major emergencies on Bethel Island: a little under 14 minutes for the arrival of the first engine. So there was a house fire, which spread and turned into several house fires, and that cluster of fires was finally brought under control about three hours after the first house started burning. But the fire department existed. It didn’t collapse. In a serious emergency, an adequate response could be summoned in an hour or two.
One you start looking for this — government agencies that exist but are entirely inadequate for the performance of their basic responsibilities — you can find it everywhere.
Read the whole thing.
WELL, THEY STILL HAVE THURSDAY AND FRIDAY TO GO: ‘The View’ Sinks to a New Low… and Then Another. “Once again, ABC proved it has no shame by not only airing this garbage but not correcting the record in any meaningful way.”
Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris’s response to Justice Gorsuch’s question on the relevance of the Black Codes was spot on:
“It is 2026, and it is somewhat astonishing that Black Codes, which are unconstitutional, are being offered as evidence of what our tradition… pic.twitter.com/Xt9Bg7HY0K
Federal agents who are doing nothing more than carrying out our immigration laws are being verbally and physically assaulted in blue states, Minnesota and California in particular. Don’t try to convince us these are organic protests with only the purest of intentions.
It’s a generously funded insurgency inflamed by the Democrats, cynics who see a political opportunity to create havoc. The combatants are not in uniform, but they serve the same purpose as shock troops who are on the front lines of a revolution before the occupation forces move in.
Confrontations between ICE agents and protesters have been common for nearly a year. We’ll stipulate that some are simply demonstrating peacefully. But many are there to obstruct, and some of them have violence on their minds. We’ve seen the toxic brew result in at least one death — for now.
It’s foolish to think there won’t be more. There’s a lust for blood. Just this past weekend, a horde attacked a counterprotester in Minneapolis, reportedly whacking him in the head with a flagpole and chasing him as if he were prey. Videos show a man whose life is being threatened. He was bloodied because of his opinions.
Another man was harassed in Minneapolis by an anti-ICE crowd, apparently for having offended the rabble by wearing an American flag hoodie with the word “Freedom” on it. “Take it off and you won’t get hurt!,” his tormenters told him.
This is only a sampling of recent events over the course of a much longer reign of terror.
Which all seems so odd, considering that in 2016, CNN cheerfully went on a ride-along with ICE, and the prior year, Obama awarded Tom Homan “the Presidential Rank Award [which] is bestowed each year by the President upon a small group of career employees and is the nation’s highest civil service award.”
🚨 WOW: "Obama's ICE chief gets award for 920,000 removals. Trump's ICE chief is called a Nazi…"
Since we mentioned Jerry Seinfeld earlier today, here’s his “rooting for laundry” riff on pro sports in the era of free agency, which applies even more so to the left when someone changes party allegiance:
But then, the left is always rioting about something: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox. It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’”
A coalition of Republican attorneys general, led by the state of Florida, said Wednesday that a major climate group may be violating their states’ antitrust and consumer protection laws by artificially pressuring companies to adopt climate activist policies, according to a letter obtained by The Daily Wire.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier warned the Boston-based nonprofit organization Ceres that it may be illegally pressuring companies to adopt net-zero policies. He said the organization was pursuing policies that were an “assault on American families and businesses.”
“Ceres’ efforts to artificially move entire markets and sectors — and in turn artificially change the output and quality of the goods and services produced by those sectors — toward Ceres’ own preferred policy goals bears all the trappings of the ‘adverse, anticompetitive effects’ that antitrust laws seek to prevent,” the attorneys general wrote in the letter.
Ceres is an advocacy group that says it is “working to accelerate the transition to a cleaner, more just, and resilient world.” In emails obtainedby the House Judiciary Committee, it has described its work as “the Army ground troops” and “an ‘air cover’ strategic and silent bombing campaign by a newly funded division of the Air Force” fighting a war for net zero emissions.
Meow [the Moral Equivalent of War] has many cynical political uses: If every political opponent is the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler, if every political initiative tantamount to D-Day, then there is much that can be excused in the way of underhandedness, rhetorical excess, demagoguery, and the like. As [Jonah] Goldberg reminds us, war and war alone has been the great champion of socialism, because it provides an emergency pretext for the authoritarian project of reorganizing an organic society in accordance with the necessarily synthetic model decocted from ideology, bias, bigotry, eccentricity, and the self-interest, always unavoidable, of the planners empowered with drawing up the blueprints of this or that brave new world or utopia.
Since the century-old moral equivalent of war has long been the moral equivalent of a quagmire, it’s great to see sensible GOP attorneys general declaring a ceasefire.
This is a previously published essay of mine in memoriam Louis XVI, which I plan to republish annually on January 21 — the day in 1793 when, as Pius VI put it, “[b]y a conspiracy of impious men, the most Christian king Louis XVI” was put to martyrdom. Americans have particular reason to hold his memory in reverence, as explained below.
On this day in 1793, Louis XVI was executed by guillotine in the Place de la Révolution, now the Place de la Concorde, in Paris. The United States might well never have come into existence without the massive aid, military and financial, provided by Louis’ government; and the budgetary strains incurred by that aid contributed rather directly to the calling of the Estates-General in 1789 and thus to the Revolution itself. Hence it is fitting for Americans to honor Louis’ end. What follows is a bibliographic essay in memoriam, presenting a set of sources, written in or translated into English, on the pseudo-trial of the King and his subsequent martyrdom.
Louis’ eloquent last will and testament is helpfully provided by Andrew Cusack. The King forgives his enemies (while rejecting the legitimacy of their actions), asks for the forgiveness of anyone he has offended, professes his Catholic faith, and exhorts his son that “should he have the misfortune of becoming king, to remember he owes himself wholly to the happiness of his fellow citizens.” It reveals a monarch sincerely devoted to his family, to the welfare of his realm, and to the Church.
That the trial of Louis was indeed a sham — a proceeding for which “one can find neither pretext nor means in any existing law,” as Louis put it in his testament — is not seriously contestable
Read the whole thing, and understand that the French Revolution is where modern leftism got its start.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a
means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
