July 21, 2026

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX targets July 23 for crucial Starship Flight 13 test launch after abort.

If all goes to plan, the 408-foot-tall (124.4 meters) Starship will lift off from SpaceX’s Starbase site in South Texas on Thursday during a 90-minute window that opens at 6:45 p.m. EDT (2245 GMT; 5:45 p.m. local Texas time). You can watch the action live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX.

It will be the second launch attempt for Starship Flight 13. The first came last Thursday (July 16) and ended in an abort, which occurred just as the giant rocket’s 33 first-stage Raptor engines were firing up.

Better luck with this one, fellas.

Posted at 7:33 am by Stephen Green

BLUE STATE UPDATE: California city chief arrested on a yacht just three weeks after taking over top job. “According to the Marin County Sheriff’s Office, Forbes initially told deputies the yacht belonged to her. Investigators later contacted the vessel’s owner, who said Forbes was not authorized to be aboard. Forbes was booked into the Marin County Jail on suspicion of felony burglary.”

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

EVERYBODY IS SICK OF PUTIN’S STUPID WAR:

Posted at 7:17 am by Stephen Green

ESCHEW ALL MODALITIES OF COCKSUREDNESS: Morning Joe warns Democrats are doomed to more election failure in 2028 as party continues to embrace ‘extraordinarily loony ideas.’

MS NOW host Joe Scarborough devoted a sizable chunk of Monday’s Morning Joe to warning about the rise of Democratic Socialism within the Democratic Party.

Scarborough, 63, said the party was at risk of alienating voters if the support continues into the next Democratic presidential race.

‘I mean, there have been some extraordinarily loony ideas coming from some of these people that have actually won races and are going to be seated in Congress, most likely,’ the former Florida Republican said.

‘Like, you know, getting rid of prisons, getting rid of cops.’

Scarborough said such policies ‘didn’t work well for Democrats before’ and ‘didn’t work well for American cities, either.’

He warned that years of success seen since were at risk of becoming undone.

‘America is getting safer again, in good part because both parties have come to the conclusion that police officers are a good thing,’ the host proclaimed.

‘Police officers make communities safer, make our children safer, make our schools safer.’

Scarborough admitted that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) organization was just ‘one extreme’ of a political spectrum that’s widened on both ends.

‘I guess my question is why the Democratic Party is so ill equipped to deal with those extremes, brush them off, and instead focus on candidates that are mainstream who are going to end up winning most of these primaries.’

Flashback to a pre-Covid February 2020: Why is Anyone Surprised That Chris Matthews Went All Nazi Comparison About Bernie?

Matthews came on after Democratic strategist James Carville went on a diatribe against Sanders, and as the MSNBC host made reference to that, he invoked the historical episode when the Germans overran the Maginot Line and forced France to surrender in the middle of World War II.

“It looks like Bernie Sanders is hard to beat right now,” Matthews said. “I’m with Carville all the way in terms of the dangers of what lies ahead in November. They’re sitting on so much oppo research on Bernie.”

A week later, Matthews was caught in a putsch, err, pushed out of MSNBC near the end of #MeToo’s reign of terror, but as Glenn wrote at the time, “In 2020, He’s Not Crazy Enough for Them…It’s really because he dissed Bernie. The rest is just window dressing.”

And speaking of crazy!

Exit question: Obama, Where Art Thou? “The day will come when Mr. Obama will have to speak for himself. He’ll have to take up the question posed in the famous labor union anthem, ‘Which Side Are You On?’ I think we know the answer, but it will be instructive to hear it from him.”

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

TRUTH:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

July 20, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

TATE BROTHERS ARRESTED IN US AS FURTHER UK CHARGES TAKE TOTAL TO 59:

Controversial influencer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan have been arrested in the US after British authorities issued 38 new charges against the pair.

The UK’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said Andrew was being charged with seven further counts of rape, as well as charges relating to sex trafficking and indecent images of a child.

Tristan’s charges include two counts of rape and three counts of arranging or facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation.

The total number of charges against the brothers is now 59, police said.

The Fashion Police are cracking down particularly hard:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS IS NO STORY, JUST LIKE OBAMA’S DEAD CHEF:

Posted at 8:51 pm by Glenn Reynolds

STRENGTH THROUGH JOY IS BRAT BACK, BABY!

Kamala Harris is running for president. She claims she “should have won” in 2024:

“She walks in as the front-runner. It is fairly obvious she is followed wherever she goes,” said one former aide. “And I don’t want to upset any narratives that any of the other candidates are pushing, but she comes in with 99 percent name ID and everyone else is going to have to raise money and buy it.”

It remains an article of faith among Harris’s tight-knit group of advisers that the 2024 race wasn’t winnable. Her polling lead was a mirage and did not square with what the campaign’s internal polls were showing. The compressed timeline after Biden dropped out of the race left her without enough time to appear as her own person, a particularly big problem when much of the public had tired of the president. And multiple former campaign staffers brought up the two assassination attempts against Trump as evidence that Harris’s loss was all but preordained.

…

“She is looking for where the wave is going and is determined to ride it,” said one supporter who had recently spoken with her and came away convinced that Harris is running in 2028. “Her mindset is that I should have won, and I am going to do it my way because my way would have won, and it was all these consultants that were telling me to take this position or that position, and it was their fault.” 

In 2004, Mark Steyn described John Kerry as a “Flip-flop hip-hopper:”

The time —last week; the place — MTV. The interviewer asks: “Well, we know that you were into rock ’n’ roll when you were in high school, and we know that you play the guitar now. Are there any trends out there in music, or even in popular culture in general, that have piqued your interest?”

“Oh sure. I follow and I’m interested,” says John Kerry. “I’m fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there’s a lot of poetry in it. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you’d better listen to it pretty carefully, ’cause it’s important. … I’m still listening because I know that it’s a reflection of the street and it’s a reflection of life.”

Really? You’re “fascinated” by rap and “listening” to hip-hop? You’re America’s first flip-flopper hip-hopper?

To pander to the Democrats’ base, Kamala is about to put Kerry’s flip-flops to shame over the next couple of years:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

TYPICAL.

Posted at 8:33 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HOW HOLLYWOOD LOST THE HOLLYWOOD PRESS:

At a time when the internet-model was already cutting deeply into news media profits, [Nikki] Finke’s strategy [at Deadline.com] was something of a revelation. It’s easy to imagine that the legacy trades, Variety and THR, must’ve looked at what Finke was doing and thought, “we need to be doing that too.” Subscriptions fees were down and Trade ads were fading away. The obvious strategic pivot was to follow Finke’s lead and begin to tailor some coverage for a broader non-Hollywood audience which loved behind-the-scenes Hollywood stories combined with social media snark.

Into this volatile economic mix came deep-pocketed Media Mogul Jay Penske and his Penske Media Corporation who, over the course of about a decade, bought or otherwise assumed control of all three of the most well-known trade papers beginning with Nikki Finke’s Deadline site in 2009, three years after Twitter’s launch and one year before the debut of Instagram.

And with corporate ownership came corporate expectations.

FADE OUT:

SMASH CUT TO: 2026

Today the Hollywood Trade papers are not the same publications they were thirty years ago. To scan the digital home pages of the Trades now is to recall the heady days of clickbait driven sites and their “X destroys Y with this one simple comment” and “You won’t believe what just happened…” story formulations. The modern Trades often lean into stories designed not only to drive clicks, but to go viral on social media, and much of the original purpose of the Trade papers has been subverted.

QED:

I’m old enough to remember when Variety handled the film and TV industry, and Billboard covered the music industry (my dad bought both trade publications every week in the 1970s and ‘80s). This tweet is purely Variety trying to drum up clicks through wading into the culture wars, something it rarely if ever did during the Before Times.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

GOOD QUESTION:

Posted at 6:35 pm by Stephen Green

DOMINIC GREEN ON THE MANCUNIAN CANDIDATE: Andy Burnham Is Mad for It.

Mr. Burnham’s new politics are the old politics that broke Britain in the 1970s, the lost decade of tax hikes, strikes, social decay, political extremism and a brain drain of talent. How will Mr. Burnham create his class-war time machine? By subsidizing reopened coal mines and shipyards under government management? Nationalizing British Airways (owned by an Anglo-Spanish conglomerate whose largest shareholder is state-owned Qatar Airways)? Seizing Heathrow airport from its French, Qatari, Saudi, Singaporean, Australian and Chinese proprietors?

What could possibly go wrong?

Posted at 5:37 pm by Ed Driscoll