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The Biden Administration’s diplomacy with Israel over its war against Hamas has reached the Animal House “double-secret probation” stage, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken warning Israel that it may find itself diplomatically “isolated” in the world if it attacks Rafah. Is it possible for Israel to be any more “isolated” than it already is in the joke that is called “the diplomatic community”? Dean Wormer could hardly have done it better, though, to be fair to Faber College, Dean Wormer would make a better secretary of state than Blinken.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Hoodie) is having none of it:
I’m starting to think that instead of banning hoodies on the Senate floor, maybe we should require them. At least for Democrats.
Chaser—I’m finding it harder to dislike this guy for his otherwise liberal views:
dibs on your parking space https://t.co/o9QUhIbKyF
— Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) March 21, 2024
Chaser—Fetterman does have some competition this week, from the Ragin’ Cajun himself, James Carville: “A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females [dominating the culture of the Democratic Party].”
Robert “Beto” O’Rourke—remember him?—appeared on Bill Maher’s comedy show Friday night, and accused Big Retail—”the Walmarts, the Amazons, the Krogers of the world” of price gouging. But it is O’Rourke’s explanation that earns him an entire feature display in the Museum of Leftist Stupidity:
“They were jacking prices in the middle of inflation and blaming it on the economy.”
Imagine! Raising prices during inflation! Who ever heard of such a thing? I’m sure his solution will be government price controls, because when you are this dumb, it is too much to expect even a minimal grasp of economics.
Here it is in all it’s full glory:
Bill Maher is convinced Biden is going to lose the 2024 election because of food inflation.
Beto O'Rourke's spin:
"The FTC just yesterday released a report and said they're price gouging. These are the Walmarts, the Amazons, the Krogers of the world. They were jacking prices in… pic.twitter.com/kM31tDJTSC— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) March 23, 2024
The Times of Israel provides updates on Palestinian casualties according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, but suggests that skepticism is warranted. Indeed, the Ministry of Health is best understood as the functional equivalent of the Ministry of Truth (“Minitrue”) conceived by George Orwell in 1984, i.e., the ministry of propaganda.
In its update on Palestinian casualties in Gaza today, the Times of Israel states the numbers of dead and wounded according to “the Hamas-run health ministry,” but adds: “The terror group’s figures are unverified, don’t differentiate between civilians and combatants, and list all the fatalities as caused by Israel — even those believed to have been caused by hundreds of misfired rockets or otherwise by Palestinian fire.”
These are obvious points, yet the numbers are taken (or repeated) at face value by President Biden and others. Here is Biden performing his Big Brother shtick earlier this month: “You can’t have another 30,000 Palestinians dead as a consequence of going after [Hamas]. There are other ways to deal with Hamas.”
In his invaluable March 6 Tablet column, Professor Abraham Wyner explains “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers” and even Biden must “know” this. It’s yet another sign of Biden’s turn against Israel and/or support for Hamas.
Let me add today’s sign, per Vice President Kamala Harris: “We have been clear in multiple conversations and in every way that any major military operation in Rafah would be a huge mistake. Let me tell you, I have studied the maps — there is nowhere for those folks to go. So we’ve been very clear that it would be a mistake to move into Rafah with any kind of military operation.”
VP Kamala Harris takes a tougher line against Israel (re: going after remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah) on ABC’s “This Week”:
“We have been clear in multiple conversations and in every way that any major military operation in Rafah would be a huge mistake. Let me tell you, I…
— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) March 24, 2024
It is widely believed that Joe Biden’s anti-Israel, pro-Hamas policy is driven by his desperate need to carry Michigan if he is to have any hope of re-election. That seems like a reasonable assumption, although, to be fair, it is also possible that he shares his old boss’s anti-Israel animus. But here is another one:
Scoop: The US has urged Ukraine to halt attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure, warning senior SBU and GUR officials that drone strikes risk driving up global oil prices and provoking retaliation.
w/ @hallbenjamin @felschwartz @mylesmccormick_ https://t.co/DRussu4cAs via @FT— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) March 22, 2024
Biden’s team knows that Americans have had about all the Bidenflation they can stand, and a spike in energy prices between now and November could well doom Joe’s chances. Would Biden be willing to throw the Ukrainians under the bus, along with the Israelis, to improve his odds? I think we all know the answer to that one.
“My guest is Christine Blasey Ford,” said NPR’s Terry Gross on her March 19 “Fresh Air” show. “She testified at Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing that he sexually assaulted her.” Blasey Ford has a new book, One Way Back, and in the lengthy interview the author explains:
I did retraumatize myself, having to go back through everything and relive it. And I tried to write a book a couple of years after the testimony and just really wasn’t able to engage in the material. And when I looked at what I had written, I didn’t think it was something that would be very useful anyway. So I abandoned that project for a while and then took it back up once I felt a lot better five years later.
I expected a little bit of pushback in the hearing. And the hearing itself wasn’t particularly difficult. I mean, it was the difficulty that I expected it to be. Some of the questions towards the end started to get sort of off topic and confusing, but, other than that, I actually left the room feeling like I did a good enough job and I would be OK, and I would go back to California, and we would figure out our hotel life and move forward.
And the main thing is I just didn’t want to be on TV. That was my biggest fear at the time – was I don’t want to be – I was picturing the 1991 hearing and thinking, there’s just no way I could…
Well, I guess the main regret is that I didn’t know that that was the only time I would ever speak to them. I thought, well, of course they’re going to have follow-up questions and want to know more details and maybe look at the therapy records or talk to the friends or talk to people. I just didn’t think that was, you know, the only opportunity to speak.
I was definitely grieving – not over the outcome. The outcome is something I had to detach from before I even testified, that the outcome is going to be whatever it is. But the process was so difficult, especially with the DARVO [Deny, Attack and Reverse Victim Offender] and the smear attacks. I had a really difficult time with the social media comments and the memes and all of that. It was very hard to get through.
And so on, in classic style. Based on Blasey Ford’s testimony in 2018, people have a right to wonder what her 911 call might have been like.
Employees of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, participated in the October 7 attack on Israel, raping, torturing and murdering Jews in tandem with Hamas jihadists and taking Israelis and Americans hostage. Such deadly collaboration should come as no surprise. As Paul Johnson showed in his masterful Modern Times, the United Nations has always been hostile to the West in general and the USA and Israel in particular.
“The notion that Israel was created by imperialism is not only wrong but the reverse of the truth,” writes Johnson. “Everywhere in the West, the foreign offices, defense ministries and big business were against the Zionists.” United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, the worst possible choice for the post according to Johnson, “treated Israel not as a small and vulnerable nation but as an outpost of imperialism.”
The UN boss demonstrated “the way in which the UN could be used to marshal and express hatred of the West.” That emerged in the Algerian conflict of the late 1950s, with a dynamic that went back to Muhammed Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem. He “outrivaled Hitler in his hatred for Jews” and “organized the systematic destruction of Arab moderates.”
In March of 1962, Johnson recalls, “a Muslim mob sacked the Great Synagogue in the heart of the Casbah, gutting it, ripping the Torah scrolls, killing the Jewish officials and chalking on the wall ‘Death to the Jews’ and other Nazi slogans.” Muslims who had sided with French were “made to dig their own tombs and swallow their military decorations before being killed; some were burned alive, castrated, dragged behind trucks, fed to the dogs; there were cases where entire families, including tiny children, were murdered together.” Decolonization of Africa brought similar horrors.
Johnson charts the atrocities of Bokassa, Mobutu, Sekou Toure et al, but “the most instructive case” was Uganda’s Idi Amin, who became a Muslim at age 16. In 1970, Libya’s Col. Gaddafi and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat pressured Amin to mount a coup against Milton Obote. Amin toppled Obote in early 1971 and quickly showed his true colors.
“Amin’s was a racist regime, operated in the Muslim-Arab League from the start,” Johnson notes, “since he began the massacres of the Langi and Achili tribes within weeks of taking over.” The dead soon included “any public figure who in any way criticized or obstructed Amin.” The victims included two cabinet ministers beaten to death by Amin himself. The Ugandan Muslim was a “ritual cannibal” who kept selected organs in his refrigerator.
Amin deployed the deadly State Research Center (SRC), operated “on the advice of Palestinians and Libyans.” Amin’s terror, “was a Muslim-Arab phenomenon” and his regime “was in many ways a foreign one, run by Nubians, Palestinians and Libyans.” The UN did nothing to stop it and “the only government to emerge with credit was Israel’s which acted vigorously to save lives when Amin and the Palestinians hijacked an airliner at Entebbe in 1976.”
As Johnson sees it, “Hammarskjold and his school were responsible for prolonging the Amin regime by six terrible years.” This was “the consequence of the morally relativistic principle introduced by Hammarskjold that killing among Africans was not the UN’s business; and Amin could be forgiven for thinking the UN had given him a license for mass-murder, even genocide.”
The Organization of African Unity (OAU) elected Amin as its chairman but the worst was yet to come. On October 1, 1975, Amin addressed UN General Assembly and called for “the expulsion of Israel from the United Nations and the extinction of Israel as a state, so that the territorial integrity of Palestine may be ensured and upheld.”
As Johnson notes, such extinction amounts to “genocide,” but the Assembly gave the Muslim cannibal a standing ovation. The UN Secretary General at the time was Nazi war criminal Kurt Waldheim, who remained in the office until 1981. Waldheimer’s Disease makes people forget the UN boss was a Nazi.
Amin found sanctuary in Saudi Arabia, where he died in 2003 many decades too late. The UN continued to ignore Communist dictatorships and jihadist states such as Iran. That made the events of October 2023 entirely predictable.
The small, vulnerable nation of Israel is again targeted as an imperialist “settler state,” as Johnson noted, a reversal of the truth. Like Idi Amin’s Uganda, Gaza is basically run by Iran through Hamas. Calls to free Palestine “from the river to the sea” echo Amin’s demands for Israel’s extinction, which amounts to genocide. The UN does nothing to prevent the 10/7 attack, and UNRWA employees take part in the slaughter, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, with Israelis and Americans alike taken hostage.
The revelations prompted some countries to withhold aid for UNRWA. That move, though fully justified, falls short. The United Nations is an enemy of peace and freedom around the world. The time has come for mass withdrawal, with the United States of America leading the way.
Joe Biden turning against Israel puts Scott “in mind of the time when England stood alone against a genocidal maniac.” That was the time when Hitler’s National Socialist regime was allied with Stalin’s Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They signed their Pact on August 23, 1939, and Stalin began handing Jews directly to the Gestapo. In September, 1939, both powers invaded Poland, effectively starting World War II.
In November, 1939, Stalin invaded Finland and in April of 1940 Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway. On May 10, 1940, Hitler invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The genocidal maniac then turned his sights on England, standing alone during the Stalin-Hitler Pact. The American Communists, then collaborating with the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, picketed the White House to keep America out of the conflict, and fomented strikes in defense industries.
In the Battle of Britain (July 10, 1940 – October 31, 1940), England got some help from unofficial sources. Fliers from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Rhodesia, Belgium, France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and even the USA, threw in with the Royal Air Force. As the Imperial War Museum explains:
Germany’s failure to defeat the RAF and secure control of the skies over southern England made invasion all but impossible. British victory in the Battle of Britain was decisive, but ultimately defensive in nature – in avoiding defeat, Britain secured one of its most significant victories of the Second World War. It was able to stay in the war and lived to fight another day.
In the style of John Lennon, “imagine” if the American president had been sending millions of dollars in cash to the Nazi regime. Imagine if the American president told Churchill to back off his military campaigns. Imagine if the American president and prominent senators had called for an election to remove Winston Churchill, and so on. Had such moves taken place, England might not have lived on to fight another day. The parallels are lost on Joe Biden, who in a 2020 debate said “Hitler invaded Europe,” like something from the drunk at the end of the bar.
As Scott notes, Biden and his brain trust “support the survival of Hamas,” genocidal maniacs pushing for a second Holocaust. The History of Jihad author Robert Spencer has thoughts on what this might mean for America:
What do Biden regime apparatchiks think will happen if Hamas defeats Israel and survives this war? Do they think that the jihadis will be so overflowing with gratitude to the U.S. that they won’t ever strike Americans or U.S. interests? They’re in for a rude surprise.
This week’s episode could be mistaken for the Three Martini Happy Hour, because this week’s installment comes with a tangy twist. John Yoo is away this week, so we brought in a ringer to take his place: Prof. Hadley Arkes! Thus this episode become a Positivism-Free Zone, in which we review the deepest ground of the natural law unencumbered by John’s usual alarums, excursions, and errors.
The episode comes in three parts: Hadley made some news yesterday, celebrating the retirement of the noted Notre Dame Law professor Gerard V. Bradley, who will be joining Hadley at the James Wilson Institute on Natural Law and the American Founding.
Gerard V. Bradley
From there Hadley proceeds to answering the question that we’ve been kicking around ever since the Dobbs decision, namely, just how should pro-life politicians break out of their self-imposed muteness about abortion. Hadley has the strategy.
Finally, we spend some time toward the end getting down some of Hadley’s “origin story” that brought him to Leo Strauss’s classroom at the University of Chicago back in the 1960s, and key friendships made along the way—especially our late friend and unsung hero Michael Uhlmann.
Note: We had some internet glitches while recording this episode that weren’t easily edited or smoothed over, so we ask listeners’ indulgence with these hiccups, in return for which we’re presenting this installment ad-free.
As usual, listen here, or at our hosts at Ricochet when it goes live there.
John and I found the protracted humiliation of Kevin McCarthy in connection with his election to be Speaker of the House a clown show. By contrast, Steve Hayward looked mostly on the bright side in “In re: Speaker McCarthy — dissents and concurrences.”
It is at least worth noting that the GOP majority is dissipating. The clown show set the stage for the shrinking of the small GOP House majority to a number asymptotically approaching zero.
It empowered Matt Gaetz to trigger the chain of events leading to McCarthy’s ouster from the Speaker’s chair. I decried that development in “Gaetz of Eden.” Has anyone asked Gaetz what good he did in sacking McCarthy?
McCarthy was deposed this past October. It seems like ancient history. McCarthy subsequently resigned his House seat effective December 31.
I have here in my hand a list of names. According to the list, among the Republicans getting out of Dodge with McCarthy are Reps. Bill Johnson (effective January 21), Ken Buck (effective yesterday), Mike Gallagher (effective April 19), and George Santos, whose departure was involuntary.
“Normally they’re trying to talk people out of [retiring],” one House Republican told Axios. “Now we’re at a point where we’re trying to talk them out of leaving early.” It may or may not be a portent of trouble for Speaker Johnson and it may or may not be a portent of the coming Democratic majority, but it’s not good.
Robert Satloff is executive director of the Washington Institute. He took issue with the December 2 Washington Post story “Israel’s assault forced a nurse to leave babies behind. They were found decomposing.” Satloff deconstructed the Post story in the 5,000-word critique “Once Again, a ‘Palestinian Babies Story Merits a Washington Post Apology.”
Satloff’s critique elicited a response from Post executive editor Sally Buzbee. She stands by the Post’s story and demands that Satloff clean up his critique. Satloff publishes Buzbee’s response in his disappointed postscript “Sadly, WaPost Admits No Error in Story Filled with Them.”
This episode had me thinking back to my own examination of the Post’s reporting in this vein on Israel’s 2012 Operation Pillar of Defense. Mr. Satloff, I see your 5,000 words and raise you 5,000 words. I wrote several posts and well over 5,000 words on the story featuring the aptly named Jihad Masharawi. Forgive me for saying that those posts have stood the test of time! As the song goes, “same as it ever was.” I have retrieved this March 11, 2013 post from our archives.
* * * * *
I wrote about the photograph of BBC Arabic editor Jihad Masharawi holding the shrouded body of his 11-month-old son, Omar, in posts here, here, here and here. The photograph depicted Masharawi outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City early in Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense. The young Masharawi’s death was attributed to an Israeli airstrike.
The photograph went viral on the second day of the conflict between Hamas and Israel, being featured on the Web and in newspapers around the world. One such among many was the Washington Post, which ran it at the top of page one. The photo is below.
Washington Post ombdudsman Patrick Pexton devoted a column to complaints about the photograph. Paul Mirengoff explicated the manifest animus in Pexton’s column.
Everything Pexton asserted directly or indirectly as a matter of fact was wrong. When a major newspaper ombudsman is this utterly clueless, who ya gonna call? Not Ghostbusters. Power Line, I guess.
Paul Danahar is the BBC Middle East Bureau Chief and Masharawi’s colleague. He spent much of the day at Masharawi’s house on the day on the day Masharawi’s son was killed, tweeting a photo of the hole in the roof of Masharawi’s house. The house wasn’t bombed, Pexton to the contrary notwithstanding. Danahar described the munition that did the damage as a “shell.”
I tweeted Danahar to ask him on what basis he identified the munition as Israeli. I wrote at the time on Power Line that I doubted it was. I thought it was more likely to have been a Hamas rocket that failed to hit its intended target in Israel. (As I recall, something like 10 percent of the Hamas rockets landed in Gaza.) Danahar failed to respond to my tweet, although he relentlessly propagated the line that Israeli forces had killed Masharawi’s son.
Everything about the photograph looked phony to me. Was Masharawi sobbing? His face doesn’t even look like he has shed tears. Masharawi looks like he’s enacting grief. I understand that Masharawi in fact lost his son as a result of the munition that hit his house, but I found the photo odd (as I did the other photos in the series of Masharawi parading around for the cameras).
I thought that Masharawi was engaging in an opportunistic bit of Terrorist Theater, the kind I wrote about in the Weekly Standard article “He didn’t give at the office.” The article demonstrates how news service stringers in Gaza work as an arm of the terrorist authorities on whom they purport to report. By the way, the staged photos of Arafat that I wrote about in the Standard article were the work of an AP stringer. The photo of Masharawi that the Post ran was credited to the AP.
Terrorist Theater is a function of the sinister authority wielded by terrorist forces in the areas where they hold sway. Gaza is of course under the thumb of Hamas, one such terrorist power.
We held that the death of Masharawi’s son was a tragedy and offered our condolences to Masharawi on the loss of his son. We acknowledged that we didn’t know to a certainty what had happened or who is responsible for the death, and therefore asked readers to keep an open mind.
I hope you will forgive me for rehearsing what must seem like ancient history, but it really is necessary to put this report in context, as they say: “UN clears Israel of charge it killed baby in Gaza.” The Times of Israel has the story, based on this UN report:
United Nations report cleared Israel in the death of the infant son of a BBC employee during Operation Pillar of Defense in November, instead fingering a misfired Palestinian rocket for the tragedy.
The November 14 strike left 11-month-old Omar Jihad al-Mishrawi and Hiba Aadel Fadel al-Mishrawi, 19, dead. The death of Omar, the son of BBC Arabic journalist Jihad al-Mishrawi, garnered more than usual media attention and focused anger for the death on Israel, which was initially blamed for the death.
Rather, the report suggests, a 19-year-old woman and a baby were hit by shrapnel from a rocket fired by Palestinians that was aimed at Israel, but missed its mark.
Omar is dead, and Hamas killed him, but both Jihad and jihad live, and the BBC and the Washington Post among others are their willing tools.
Has there ever been a greater example of media malpractice and malevolence than the way Trump’s mention of a “bloodbath” for the auto industry under Biden (analysis: completely true!) was turned into some kind of MAGA Kristallnacht? I suspect Joe Biden’s new clown shoes are an ironic tribute to this in-kind campaign contribution.
Headlines of the week:
No. Just no.
So glad the Biden regime is protecting us from broken ice cream machines.
Wut?
And finally. . .
In France, at least two teachers have been murdered by Muslim students, one of them beheaded. The French press reports that “death threats and threats of rape have become common among pupils.” Those threats are directed toward both teachers and fellow students.
Now, students at dozens of French schools have been sent “threatening messages and beheading videos” by Islamic radicals. The story is hard to parse out, and more is, perhaps, being concealed than revealed:
At least 30 schools in the Paris region have this week received threatening messages accompanied by “shocking” footage of beheadings, the education ministry said on Thursday.
That effort is being made in support of Islamic terrorism:
The establishments – mainly secondary schools – have received “serious threats” containing “justification of and incitement to terrorism,” a representative of the education ministry told AFP.
The Muslims apparently made use of software that France uses to connect students and teachers. Reportedly, they “‘hacked a student’s email address’ in order to distribute the message and a beheading video.” They also have been making bomb threats:
In the department of Seine-et-Marne, to the east of the French capital, a secondary school received a message saying that explosives had been hidden throughout the establishment “in the name of Allah”, a police source said.
The latest threats follow a flurry of false bomb alerts targeted schools, airport and tourist sites in autumn 2023.
All of this is due to France’s feckless immigration policies. But, to be fair, their policies are a lot better than Joe Biden’s.
UPDATE: Of course, it could be worse. You could be in Russia.
We always hear a lot about the expense and difficulty of decommissioning nuclear power plants, but we seldom hear about the cost and difficulty of decommissioning wind mills, which only last half as long (if that much) as nuclear plants. Especially offshore wind, which is much more expensive to begin with. Here’s one estimate of the future problem:
JOHN adds: Offshore wind is possibly the stupidest way to generate electricity that has ever been devised. Someone should do the math, but I suspect it would make more sense to hire 10,000 men to walk on a treadmill. And liberals don’t clean up their own messes. There are already rotting hulks of wind turbines littering the landscape, often having been installed by now-defunct companies whose owners, long gone, have made off with the profits. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the billionaires who have gotten rich on government-mandated wind turbines to take down and dispose of offshore installations that have outlived their insanely brief useful lives. “Green” energy is, in multiple ways, the great scandal of our time.
When we started this site, exposing mainstream media bias was a big part of our mission. Using the then-new internet, we and many others held liberal outlets (i.e., virtually all of them) accountable in a way that hadn’t happened before. The effect of that effort was not that the liberal press became more accurate or more objective. Rather, they came out of the closet. For the most part, they no longer make any serious pretense of neutrality. Whether that is an improvement or not is debatable.
But, in any event, it no longer makes sense to criticize, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post for being biased. That would be like, if you were a soldier in World War II and a Panzer division was approaching, you were to say, “Those Germans are biased against us!” It isn’t a question of bias. They are just the enemy.
Donald Trump was perhaps the first major Republican politician to abandon the effort to curry favor with the press establishment. He famously denounced the fake news press (sometimes abbreviated to the press in general) as enemies of the people. The good news is, most Americans agree with him.
Rasmussen finds that Trump’s characterization is the majority view:
60% of Likely U.S. Voters agree that the media are “truly the enemy of the people,” as Trump said in 2019, including 30% who Strongly Agree. Thirty-six percent (36%) disagree, including 21% who Strongly Disagree.
That is an extraordinary finding. Respondents were asked this question:
Do you agree or disagree with this statement: The media are “truly the enemy of the people”?
And a clear majority said that they agree. The press has utterly squandered whatever respect it once enjoyed.
The Rasmussen survey also asked about the Democrats’ “bloodbath” hoax:
Former President Donald Trump recently said that it would be a “bloodbath” if he didn’t win in November. Which is more likely, that he was talking about auto workers losing jobs or that he was talking about widespread political violence by his supporters?
The result:
Forty-nine percent (49%) of voters believe Trump was talking about auto workers losing jobs when he warned of a “bloodbath,” while 40% think Trump was talking about widespread political violence by his supporters if he did not win the election. Eleven percent (11%) are not sure.
Basically, Democrats follow the Democratic Party press and swallow the Democrats’ talking points:
Among voters who Strongly Approve of Biden’s job performance as president, 78% believe Trump’s “bloodbath” comment was about widespread political violence by his supporters if he did not win the election. By contrast, among voters who Strongly Disapprove of Biden’s performance, 84% think Trump was referring to auto workers losing jobs.
But again, returning to good news, most voters believe that the media’s coverage is driven by the Biden administration’s talking points:
Among all Likely Voters, 63% believe it is likely that the major news media’s political coverage is dictated by talking points from the Biden campaign, including 42% who say it’s Very Likely. Twenty-nine percent (29%) don’t think it’s likely media coverage is dictated by the Biden campaign, including 11% who say it’s Not At All Likely.
Majorities of every political category – 78% of Republicans, 50% of Democrats and 61% of unaffiliated voters – believe it’s at least somewhat likely that the major news media’s political coverage is dictated by talking points from the Biden campaign.
So even half of Democrats admit that the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press are servants of the Democratic Party. The bottom line is that the liberal press serves certain functions on behalf of the Democratic Party: it reinforces Democrats’ talking points and keeps Democratic voters riled up. Those are valuable contributions, to be sure. But the days when the liberal media could actually drive public opinion are long gone.
It was Scott who first referred to the sacramental view of abortion, some years ago now. Abortion (much like slavery over the course of the 19th century) went from being a regrettable but sometimes unavoidable evil to being a positive good–indeed, these days, the noblest good to which political life can aspire.
To see this perverse attitude in full flower, you almost have to live in Minnesota. Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, is a far-left Indian activist despite being, to all appearances, Irish-American. (To be fair, she has much more Indian heritage than, say, Elizabeth Warren.) Flanagan actually tweeted this:
I filled out my brackets based on whether those schools are located in a state that protects access to abortion care.
By this measurement, it’s only fair that Minnesota didn’t make the tournament because they’d have been a favorite for the title. pic.twitter.com/nFQ5FKwFHG
— Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan (@LtGovFlanagan) March 21, 2024
So she had UConn facing Gonzaga in the final. Who wants to be the first to tell her?
One more thing–Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, liked Flanagan’s bracket tweet.
On March 20, the Sacramento City Council passed Resolution 2024, which:
Calls for an immediate and permanent bilateral ceasefire to urgently end the current violence; a true and effective bilateral ceasefire must include four key simultaneous elements. (1) Hamas must cease all military operations directed against Israel, (2) the immediate unconditional release of all Israeli hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, (3) Israel must stop the bombing and military action inside the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and (4) the elimination of all offensive weapons by Israel and Hamas directed at one another.
The Muslim and Arab-American communities are experiencing the terrible rise in Islamophobia and anti-Arab rhetoric, the acceptance of hate speech on college campuses and elsewhere against Muslims and Arabs, and the refusal of some to condemn Islamophobia and anti-Arab prejudice without qualifications as a shocking reminder of historic reality. Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate are centuries old prejudices that never go away. An independent Palestinian state remains the hope that Palestinians can live safely and freely and never again face threats to their very existence;
And so on, all backed the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). True to form, “Islamophobia” appears four times and anti-Semitism three times. Resolution 2024 was the project of Sacramento mayor Darrell Steinberg. As Sir Bedevire (Terry Jones) might say, who is this who is so wise in the ways of diplomacy?
Steinberg served as an attorney for the California State Employees Association, which gained a faithful friend in the state Senate. In 2004, the Sacramento Democrat sponsored Proposition 63, the Mental Health Services Act, which backers claimed would get the homeless off the street and keep people out of prison.
Promises Still to Keep: A Decade of the Mental Health Services Act, from California’s Little Hoover Commission, was unable to determine whether the money fulfilled any of the Act’s proclaimed intentions. The Sacramento Bee wondered if the money had been “shoved down a rat hole” with questionable uses “such as yoga, horseback riding, gardening, the purchase of iPads,” and so forth. On the other hand, the measure did give $7.5 million to the UC Davis Behavioral Health Center of Excellence, where Steinberg became director of policy and advocacy.
In 2012, voters faced four measures on taxes and spending. The Senate Governance and Finance Committee held hearings but Steinberg blocked citizens’ access by killing the live broadcast on the California Channel. When this came to light, Steinberg proclaimed, “I pride myself on being open and transparent.” Steinberg now backs Resolution 2024 which claims, “Sacramento is such a special place to live for many reasons.” That is true, but not the way Steinberg spins it.
Twenty years after Proposition 63, the homeless problem is worse than ever. As in San Francisco, dogs run the risk of stepping in human waste. Sacramento has been dubbed “Excremento,” and Steinberg’s Resolution 2024 piles it higher and deeper. As Katy Grimes of the California Globe explains, “it was likely a move to cover and distract from his $66 million budget deficit – and would serve to elevate his political image as Steinberg has his hopes set on a move up to the California Attorney General’s office.”
In his opening statement to the House Oversight Committee earlier this week, the glorious Mr. Tony Bobulinski torched Reps. Dan Goldman and Jamie Raskin:
We keep hearing from certain corners that our “democracy is at risk” and that “democracy is on the ballot in 2024,” yet the same people preaching this mantra, who know better, continue to lie directly to the American people without hesitation or remorse. Representatives Dan Goldman and Jamie Raskin, both lawyers, and Mr. Goldman a former prosecutor with the Southern District of New York, will continue to lie today in this hearing and then go straight to the media to tell more lies.
Mr. B., long may you run.
Professor Jonathan Turley takes it from there in the (highly recommended) Fox News column that he has now posted at his personal site: “The Dripping Away of the Democratic Party: Sir Thomas More and the Biden Corruption Scandal.” In the introduction to the column posted on his site, Professor Turley writes (links omitted): “Various members misrepresented my earlier testimony during the hearing on the basis for the impeachment inquiry. Members like Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) stated that I joined other witnesses in saying that there was nothing that could remotely be impeachable in these allegations. That is demonstrably untrue. My testimony stated the opposite.”
What about Goldman? You can’t leave him out:
Rep. Dan Goldman, D., N.Y., captured the problem for Democrats in even addressing any of the mounting evidence contradicting the president. Yet, Goldman has long shown a willingness to rush in where angels fear to tread.
In previous attacks, Goldman repeatedly hit the Bidens with friendly fire when eliciting damaging answers from witnesses. Goldman has a habit of raising the worst evidence that his colleagues have avoided. In one hearing, he stumbled badly in raising the WhatsApp message where Hunter told a Chinese businessman that his father was sitting next to him and would not be pleased unless he sent him money. On another occasion, he prompted an IRS whistleblower to note that an email Goldman read into the record was actually a direct contradiction of the denials of the president.
In the latest misstep, Goldman pressed former Biden partner Tony Bobulinski on a proposal shared with Hunter and others to reserve 10% for “the Big Guy.” In other emails, Bobulinski was told to use such codes to avoid mentioning Joe Biden’s name. He was expressly identified as “the Big Guy.” Video
Goldman snapped at Bobulinski, “Did anyone ever respond to that email?”
Bobulinski responded “Yes, they did numerous times. Hunter himself did.”
Goldman blurted out “you’re right” before angrily reclaiming his time to cut him off.
The video below excerpts Bobulinski’s anticipation of the Raskin/Goldman defense of the Biden family business.
House Oversight Committee hearing goes off the rails when Hunter Biden's former business partner Tony Bobulinski calls out Reps. Jamie Raskin and Dan Goldman for lying on behalf of the Biden Crime Family. pic.twitter.com/Xny4VTbhVc
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 20, 2024
The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Michael Ramirez posts his daily cartoons on Substack at the Michael Ramirez Newsletter. He is a conservative whose genius cannot be denied. Thus the Pulitzer. Readers can subscribe here.
Michael has also been writing weekly essays for his newsletter that I have posted in our Picks as each one was made freely accessible. Today Michael has posted an 18-minute video essay that is keyed to his recent cartoons on the Academy Awards. I found his remarks entertaining, interesting, and inspiring. He tells some inside stories and he talks about joining the protest at Columbia when he received his Pulitzer. He wraps up with a statement of his his core beliefs.
His is the voice of a free mind and a free man. I thought some readers might want to listen up.
President Biden has turned on Israel. He and his brain trust support the survival of Hamas. It’s a big-time sell-out. The cover of the current issue of England’s Economist depicts Israel Alone (cover story here behind the Economist paywall). It reminded me of the time when England stood alone against a genocidal maniac — alone against “the insane tyrant,” as Leo Strauss referred to Hitler in his tribute to Churchill — though the thought appears not to have crossed the mind of the Economist.
The IDF has yet to complete its mission in Gaza. Yesterday IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari conducted a briefing on the IDF’s return to Shifa Hospital to root out a large band of terrorists that had come to think of the place as home. Hagari conducted the briefing in Hebrew, but the video below superimposes the English translation, which the IDF has also posted here. This is the text per the IDF:
Good evening.
The operation at the Shifa Hospital continues. This is the operation with the largest aggregation of terrorists we have apprehended since the beginning of the war. So far, we have apprehended over 500 suspects, 358 of which are Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.
They are surrendering, we are interrogating them, and they are providing us with very valuable and important intelligence.We apprehended the chain of command of the Islamic Jihad, including:
1. Muhammad Jundia – Commander of the Shejaiya Battalion of the Islamic Jihad and the Deputy Commander of the terrorist organization’s Northern Brigade
2. Samir Ziad Abd Abu Odeh – Commander of the Al-Shati sector in the rocket unit of the Islamic Jihad.
3. Ahmad Samara – responsible for tunnels and underground terror infrastructure of the Islamic Jihad in the Northern Gaza Strip.We apprehended senior Hamas figures, including:
1. Hamdallah Ali and Omar Azida– Azida, a senior official in the West Bank Headquarters, responsible for directing Hamas terrorist activity in the area of Nablus. Ali, who advanced Hamas activity in the Qalqilya area. The two are senior officials in the West Bank Headquarters of Hamas, they acted within their roles to advance terrorist attacks from Judea and Samaria, directed the transfer of weapons and funds to terrorists. This group operated under Saleh al-Arouri.
2. Mahmoud Kwasma – an operative in the Hamas West Bank Headquarters, planned and financed the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in 2014, Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrach, may their memory be a blessing.In addition, we apprehended additional senior officials in Hamas’ Internal Security forces. Many terrorists in Shifa, especially from the Islamic Jihad, surrendered to our forces. This is a very hard blow to the Islamic Jihad – many of its operatives in the north, who are the majority of its significant operatives, either surrendered or were eliminated in the operation so far. With a number of them, we exchanged fire until they surrender or are eliminated.
During the last 24 hours, we entered the Qatari Building [in the Shifa compound]. This is a building that we also operated in during the previous operation in Shifa. This time, terrorists were hiding there. Shayetet 13 searched the building. During the scans on the basement floor, they encountered a terrorist cell. Our soldiers eliminated the terrorists without our forces being harmed. In another battle, another terrorist surrendered; after these battles, several terrorists surrendered. Among them are very senior officials – I still cannot publish their identities because they hold significant intelligence – after we finish interrogating them and find the intelligence with them, we will publish the identities of these terrorists. Senior Hamas officials understand well the significance of the operation and as the picture of the apprehended and of the eliminated terrorists becomes clearer – the pressure on them will increase.
At the beginning of the war, we destroyed the underground infrastructure dug under the hospital, and we confiscated military equipment and weapons hidden in it. The terrorists’ command center at the Shifa Hospital was dealt with then. The terrorists fled in the previous operation when we called to evacuate the compound.
This time we operated differently. This time we operated by surprise. We raided the compound by surprise. The operation, led by the 162nd Division and carried out by special forces units led by Shayetet 13, in full cooperation on the ground, shoulder to shoulder with the ISA and Unit 504 for intelligence extraction in the field. We used deception tactics in this operation, and it was this that led to the success and apprehension of all 358 terrorists and there are more still inside this compound who haven’t managed to escape. This led to Hamas and the Islamic Jihad being severely damaged as a result of the operation. Those who did not surrender to our forces fought against our forces and were eliminated. Among them also the head of the Special Operations Directorate of Hamas’ General Security – who chose to fight against our forces openly and our forces eliminated him.
The fighting continues inside the hospital buildings – inside the buildings at the hospital. There are Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists who decided to barricade themselves – they are currently barricading themselves in the area of the emergency room. At this stage, we are evacuating the patients – there are about 220 patients there – to another building. We are creating infrastructure for them, with appropriate medical equipment so that all the patients and doctors can be safe. For the past 24 hours, we continue to call upon the terrorists in the building to surrender, those who surrender will stay alive, those who do not we will fight against until we eliminate them.
Even at these hours, our soldiers are scanning the buildings, evacuating the wounded, and continuing to operate in the compound. There will be more ongoing combat here – there will be several more days to this operation.
Last night, when we visited the soldiers in the field during the operation, from all the special units – as I said, the Commander of Shayetet 13 briefed us, but there was also the ISA, also Unit 504 and also the senior command that came with us to the field. They told us something very very important – they emphasized to us, the soldiers and the commanders, that they will do everything necessary in this operation or another in order to bring about the release of the hostages. They emphasized – this is the most important thing to us.
We do not forget that in Gaza there are 134 hostages. It is our duty to continue and make every operational and intelligence effort, and also in negotiations, in order to bring them back home. This is what we are doing, and this is what we will continue to do. This is our responsibility.
I want to also send encouragement this evening to the families of the hostages. You and your loved ones are with us all the time.
Hagari’s remarks convey a seriousness and dignity in the face of a barbarous enemy. It is a seriousness and dignity that is conspicuous by its absence in the Biden administration.
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari delivered a speech in which he confirmed 600 arrested and over 140 terrorists killed in the Al-Shifa operation pic.twitter.com/g2RDbl8qcH
— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) March 21, 2024
Ammo Grrrll looks into the future: I THINK THAT I SHALL NEVER SEE…quite a few things!
Joyce Kilmer, author of the beloved and universally known American poem “Trees,” declared that he thought that he would “never see / A poem as lovely as a tree.”
Soon I shall list some things that we cannot BELIEVE we HAVE seen. And then several things that, like Mr. Kilmer, we will never see. No, not ever. But first an important word about Mr. Kilmer.
“Trees” is a short, sweet, simple religious poem and Kilmer was a devout Catholic. So, of course, the work has been much mocked and parodied by what passes for the intelligentsia in this great land. I feel duty-bound to mention that Alfred Joyce Kilmer was a poet, yes, but he was also a soldier. As a wealthy married man with five children, he surely could have avoided service in the meat grinder that was World War I, but he enlisted in 1917 and was tragically killed in 1918 by a sniper while scouting for a German machine-gun nest in the company of Wild Bill Donovan in the Second Battle of the Marne. He was 31.
So put THAT in your pipes and smoke it, arrogant, ignorant modern critics! I’m sure the obscene bleatings of a junkie are much to be prized over a dead soldier who liked trees.
Anyway, here are a few things that we HAVE seen that I never would have believed even 10 years ago, to say nothing of when I was young.
I’m sure students of history know that in the battle for women’s suffrage, one of the arguments in FAVOR of it was that women were the kinder, gentler, more nurturing sex and would bring those sensibilities to the body politic.
So imagine my shock and awe when for thousands of women, the main issue – and one which will be harped upon in ads running every 10 minutes until the merciful Chinese EMP attack – is the right to kill their babies up to the moment of birth. My former state, Minnesota, is a “Multi-Sanctuary” state where you can travel to kill your baby when the labor pains are three minutes apart — OR wait just a few years until a three-year-old plays dress-up with a dress and then declare that the little boy is actually a girl and have him castrated. Your choice. Because it’s a “woman’s right to choose.”
What else? We have seen a mostly-peaceful, interracial mob of thugs come together in Minneapolis to burn a police station to the ground while everyone in authority just let it happen. The daughter of the wretched Governor (Polka? Waltz? Chaha? Something…) even informed those thugs that the National Guard would not be on hand. That was a first for me.
Here’s another: A pathological liar in a TV series who met the police at his door with a “noose” around his neck went on television while an otherwise intelligent person like Robin Roberts watched Jussie, an ACTOR, cry on cue. He choked back tears as he spoke about the Bad MAGA Men who had been out shlepping around rope and bleach on spec in below zero weather – just IN CASE they ran across a gay black man. Did anyone else call “Poppycock” (or words to that effect) the MINUTE they heard that preposterous tale?
Nobody asked why the MAGA dudes didn’t actually hang him. Nobody asked why they let him keep his cellphone and even call people on it during the “assault.” Nobody asked what HE was doing out and about in frigid weather. Nobody asked why he had not a scratch on him from slapping at the potential lynchers, one-handed, while his sammich never left his other hand. Not one word of his pasture patty story made any sense. And that was BEFORE the authorities found the store cam stuff the paid black “assassins” bought. With a check.
He is not serving his sentence, and to my knowledge, has never repaid the poor Chicago Police Department for the hours of overtime they spent chasing phantom MAGA guys. Also, if Robin Roberts, or Kamala, or Spartacus has ever said publicly, “Boy, that’s one on us – we made some unwarranted racist assumptions and some hysterical statements, and we’re kinda sorta sorry,” I haven’t heard about that either.
There was a months-long crisis in the shipping pipeline while the Secretary of Transportation, a Howdy Doody clone who had once been a boy mayor of a potholed municipality, but mostly was just GAY as a criterion for his high-paying job, declared he was taking maternity time off. He sat in a bed with his husband pretending that the two of them had actually birthed the babies they held. I never saw that coming. It made my skin crawl. Not that two gay guys had “acquired” babies – whatever — but that they were pretending to chest feed and lying in bed as though they had just been through the 18 hours of labor (to pick a random number) that women (okay, I) had been through. Talk about stolen valor!
Truth to tell, I have rarely been very impressed with the miscreants who inhabit Congress. But even someone as cynical as I am could never have anticipated several brain-dead losers of various colors in Congress billing themselves as The Squad being unable to say a mumblin’ word against rape, baby-beheading, immolation of children, or taking civilian hostages. Oh, I’m sorry – they DID say a word – they said it was “justified.”
So these are things we HAVE seen. Is there ANYTHING that we will NEVER see? Like in the late Mr. Kilmer’s poem? Why yes, yes, there is! A Partial List:
*Obama’s Passport history. Ditto, Obama’s Academic Coursework and Grades
*Ghislaine Maxwell’s little black book of clients (that’s how we know that DJT is not in it.)
*A non-white mother of a criminal being held legally responsible for his or her criminality.
*The murderous trans girl’s manifesto
*A forensic audit of BLM
*A transcript of what the pukes in the Biden Administration have told Israel – apart from these few words we know were said: “Die, Jews! Just Lose! We’ve got the Michigan blues!”
*An audit of any city run by a black woman mayor. Heck, ANY big city mayor.
*The complete security tapes from the January 6th walkabout in the Capitol.
*A complete list of the payouts to victims of sexual harassment by members of Congress
*How many FBI agents attended the January 6th “insurrection” as provocateurs.
*What red states and towns the illegal alien criminal invaders have been sent to.
*A non-racist and logical explanation of why black people cannot find a picture I.D.
*An abject apology from the 51 “agents” who certified that the Hunter Laptop was just Russian disinformation. And the subsequent firing of those liars and election inteferers.
I’m waiting…how ‘bout you?
Here we have the video of the day. It depicts a horde of illegal aliens breaking through the razor wire (mounted, I assume, by Texas authorities) and overrunning Texas National Guard soldiers seeking to resist them in El Paso. The video raises many questions, among them how many many “migrants” does it take to mount used to be known as an “invasion”?
We have now entered year four President Biden’s open borders program. Why does Biden refuse to see that the law is faithfully executed? Why does he support the invasion of the United States? When do we get to defend ourselves? How long can this go on?
This is the moment when TX National Guard became overrun by migrants rioting to get across the border here in El Paso today
We were there and saw it all happen. Absolute chaos here. pic.twitter.com/VN6Kf663ie
— Jennie Taer (@JennieSTaer) March 21, 2024
In a long speech on the floor yesterday Senate Majority Chuck Schumer called for the replacement of the current Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Times of Israel has posted the full text of Schumer’s remarks here. According to Schumer, Netanyahu is an obstacle to peace, the two-state final solution, and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. We must popularize the phrase “He doesn’t know Schumer from Shinola.”
Jonathan Tobin places Schumer in the context of his career to date: “He’s been in public office continuously since the age of 25, and the 73-year-old Senate Majority Leader has spent his adult life grandstanding for the cameras and the press while always seeking some momentary political advantage as he schemed, back-stabbed and bloviated his way to the top of his profession.”
We can infer that Schumer now approves of foreign interference in another country’s elections. Only yesterday that was a big no-no for purported thought leaders toeing the Democrat Party line.
In this case the government Schumer seeks the replacement of a government that was democratically elected and formed by a close American ally fighting for its life under extremely difficult circumstances. That’s no way to treat a friend.
Schumer pretends that the relevant policies of the Netanyahu government are peculiar to Netanyahu and his coalition. That does not seem to be the case.
Schumer gives aid and comfort to Hamas and its friends in the Democratic Party. We can infer that the obstacle posed by Netanyahu is to the political objectives of the Democratic Party as conceived by President Biden.
Biden has just renewed his sanctions waiver on $10 billion held for the genocidaires of Iran. See Richard Goldberg’s New York Post column “Biden continues Iran’s access to $10 billion just weeks after its proxy killed three American soldiers.” Biden — he doesn’t know Schumer from Shinola.
One has to wonder about the impact of Schumer’s speech in Israel. It can’t help but demoralize Israelis fighting for their lives. However, they are unlikely to think they need Schumer’s help to assess their own best interests. In articulating and pursuing Israel’s war aims, Netanyahu speaks for the people of Israel. They do not support surrender to Hamas or adoption of the two-state final solution.
Senator Tom Cotton has posted a statement responding to Schumer. Senator Cotton sees the unstated obstacle Schumer is addressing: “[T]he main elections that worry Chuck Schumer aren’t Israel’s but our elections because the rampant antisemitism that the Democratic Party has allowed to fester in its ranks is massively unpopular with the pro-Israel American public.” Senator Cotton adds this “come to Jesus” element to his statement for Schumer’s benefit: “Chuck Schumer should remove the log in his own party’s eye before he whines about the speck in Israel’s eye.”
I ask readers to forgive me for repeating this personal note from last year. It is meant to pay tribute to my high school, my high school teachers — Latin teachers Lyman Hawbaker (who also taught ancient history) and Dave Sims in particular — and to my classmates. In the course of our high school years we were required to study Latin and dip our toes into Caesars’s Gallic Wars, among other things. We learned something about grammar, rhetoric, Rome, and English in the process. In English we read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and (I think) Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March.
I was a member of the St. Paul Academy High School Bowl team during my junior and senior years. By unanimous consent Chuck Berde was captain of the team. Chuck went on to get M.D./Ph.D. degrees from Stanford and more or less invent the medical specialty of pediatric pain relief. Chuck is Senior Associate in Perioperative Anesthesia and Pain Medicine, Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at Boston Children’s and Professor of Anesthesia (Pediatrics) at Harvard Medical School. In high school Chuck was also a good athlete and musician who somehow found time to play in a rock band with Steve Greenberg. Steve went on to write and produce “Funkytown,” the record that reached number 1 on charts around the world in 1980.
John Fitzpatrick and Jim Vose were the other members of the team. John is the Director Emeritus of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Jim is a retired Minneapolis attorney. We were all friends. Below is a photo of us in our final appearance on the High School Bowl program. University of Minnesota Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies Robert Sonkowsky was the High School Bowl referee. He had to cool things down in case fights broke out. That is Professor Sonkowsky with his hand on my shoulder. I would like to say I was so much older then, but will leave it to Bob Dylan at this point.
In our last go-round during our senior year we won three weeks in a row and retired undefeated. In the third week we faced off against Hopkins High School. Chuck was good at everything, but he excelled in math and science. One of the questions our last week required knowledge of several scientific numbers and the performance of arithmetic operations on them to produce another number. What famous event occurred in that year? Without missing a beat, and I mean instantly, Chuck answered: “The assassination of Julius Caesar.”
Ammo Grrrll has seasonal thoughts on WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM PROFESSIONAL SPORTS – especially BASEBALL. She wants commenters to know that she “will be slightly less interactive today as her son is here and we will be at a Spring Training game. It is just a coincidence (honest!) that this column was next up in the pipeline.” She writes:
Unless you are very lucky, the first thing you learn about professional sports is that their sole purpose is to break your heart. Your team is not going to make the playoffs. And if it does, it will be annihilated by the New York Yankees in the first round. Your football team is never going to win the Super Bowl, even with four bites at the apple. But at least you won’t have to sit through the Satanic Half-time Ritual with the Mandatory Wardrobe Malfunction because, with your team, the game has traditionally been over before half-time.
So, yeah, bitter disappointment is the norm no matter how hard you root for your team. How loyal a Vikings fan was I back in the day when all the players stood for the National Anthem because Bud Grant never would have allowed them to kneel?
Well, once I was approached by a New York ad agency to star in a commercial in which I would have to pretend to be a Packers fan – and I TURNED IT DOWN. Now, that’s commitment. Or economic insanity. Potato, Potahto.
It is an altogether good thing to learn early on that MUCH of life is going to be a vast surging disappointment. And still you will survive and even thrive!
You are probably not going to make the Cheerleading Squad. (I didn’t, and it broke my heart). You are probably not going to be a Homecoming Queen. (I wasn’t, but I knew THAT wasn’t in the cards!) You may not get into the college of your choice. (I did because back in the Pleistocene Age, you got into college with good grades and excellent test scores – isn’t that a quaint and backward notion?) You are probably not going to think up something like Amazon, Space X, or TurboTax. (I didn’t.) You are more likely to spend your time thinking up funny names for the harridans on The View and it doesn’t pay nearly as well.
In other words, the chances are excellent that you are going to be an Ordinary Person who works hard at an unexciting job for 55 years, lives and loves and procreates and enjoys grandchildren, Sudoku, and Pickleball. And you will realize at the end that that was much more important than being a cheerleader. Though I sure wish I would have thought up Amazon.
But, but, but, once in a great while, when the stars align, a miracle can happen. Always be on the lookout for miracles.
Else, what can we say about the 1987 and 1991 World Series wins for the Minnesota Twins? Or one of the greatest sports feats of all time, the 2004 ALCS series against the Yankees with the Red Sawx down 3 games to naught and behind in the 9th inning of Game Four to boot.
And God, who had been wearing his noise-cancelling headphones because he was so tired of listening to Bostonians whine in that particularly annoying accent, suddenly heard their prayers and declared: “Okay, Okay. It’s possible I have punished Boston enough.” And He smiled on Big Papi and decreed that a miracle would occur. And He saw that it was good.
The scruffy, scrappy Red Sox came back and won Game Four and the next seven straight games to make the World Series an anti-climactic bore, mostly because the usually excellent Cardinals decided not show up for some reason. I have long advocated that that ALCS Series be shown to cancer patients for never-give-up inspiration.
Today, with the emphasis on year-round fitness, and especially weight-training, baseball players look more like every other professional athlete than they used to. Time was a young fella could hope to be a baseball player even if he wasn’t 6’10” or didn’t weigh 300 lbs.
If a kid was gifted with some sort of bizarre, one-in-a-million people coordination, or the eyesight of Ted Williams, and was willing to practice, practice, practice, he had at least a prayer of making the majors. There was “Little” Freddy Patek, who must have got darn tired of hearing announcers call him that. There were a whole bunch of slender, muscular, HUNGRY players from the Dominican Republic. And, of course, Babe Ruth himself, who nobody would have guessed was a professional athlete if he had been a contestant on “What’s My Line?”
In professional football and basketball, because players are usually only seen with other enormous teammates and ex-player interviewers, it’s not always clear just how DIFFERENT they are from ordinary male mortals.
I was once in an elevator in a hotel in Atlanta when the Celtics were in town to play the Hawks and who should walk into my elevator but Kevin McHale and two teammates. I had always been a Celtics fan and blurted out to Mr. McHale that I was a Minnesotan and had been following his career from high school on. They were all polite and friendly. But, Good Golly Miss Molly, they were YUGE! I felt like a little Arizona barrel cactus amongst the California Redwoods.
We had a similar experience when Joe did some minor legal favor for Joey Browner of the Vikings and he invited us to a little party with a few other Vikings and their lovely ladies. Mr. Browner is a soft-spoken and classy man who often helped opponents he had just flattened to get up when they probably would have preferred to remain on the ground to take a short nap. He was only an inch taller than our Joe/Max, but outweighed him by 50 lbs. of solid muscle. Looking at Joe and Joey side by side a person would say, “One of these guys is a slender, fit, nice-looking attorney. And one of these guys is a safety on the Vikings who has been selected for four Pro Bowls.” And everybody would get it right in one.
One of the greatest things we learn from baseball, perhaps more than any other sport, is that as a batter if you succeed in getting a hit one out of three times, you are a virtual superstar! For Ted Williams and (oh so close .388) our beloved Minnesota Twin Rod Carew, they pushed that to 4/10 and it has never been equaled in 75 years!
Now that’s not a good lesson for a surgeon, an airline pilot, or even a programmer, as they have to get as close to 100 percent success as is humanly possible. But for non-life-threatening human endeavors, it is good to know that you don’t have to be perfect to be a success.
In one interview after his retirement — I am quoting from memory here, so give me a break… — the sportscaster asked Williams what he thought his batting average would be in the current era. Williams said, “I don’t know, probably about .220.” The sportscaster was incredulous. “You had a lifetime average of .344, and you think you would only hit .220 today? Why? Because of the way managers use several pitchers a game?”
“No,” replied Williams. “Because I am 70 years old.”
Sen. Alex Padilla, the California Democrat appointed to fill Kamala Harris’s Senate seat after she became vice president, wants Americans to be more certain to register to vote by linking it with free tax preparation. Padilla is leading a push for the U.S. Treasury Department to provide voter registration services at federally funded centers that prepare taxes for low- to moderate-income people, disabled people and people with limited English at no cost to them.
“Limited English,” like “undocumented” or “migrant,” is code for those illegally present in the United States. Federal law bars illegals from voting but Sen. Padilla helps them violate the law. As California’s secretary of state he deployed the “motor voter” plan that registers illegals to vote when they get their driver’s license.
After the 2016 election, Padilla refused to cooperate with a federal probe of voter fraud, and he wouldn’t say how many illegals voted in 2018 or 2020. That year Gov. Gavin Newsom tapped “election chief” Padilla for the U.S. Senate. The senator nobody voted for wants false-documented illegals registered to vote when the government does their taxes “at no cost to them.” It’s motor voter at a whole new level.
Biden has brought in more than seven million illegals, with no background checks, health records, English skills and so forth. Add Padilla’s plan to Biden’s “most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.” The mail ballots, the 2000 Mules, the squads of politiqueros, and so forth, all remain in place.
By these means, the citizens of a constitutional republic become fundamentally transformed into subjects of a woke junta, headed by a wax-works effigy of a president. Ask yourself how you like it so far.
Via InstaPundit, I learn that Karl Marx died on this day in 1883. I concur with Glenn Reynolds’ suggestion that March 14 should therefore be a holiday:
Marx performed the difficult feat of being wrong about everything. Most people are right about some things and wrong about others; the law of averages sets in. But if you are an ideologue, like Marx, and if your ideology is stupid, you can be wrong across the board. Marx’s historical analyses were either recycled conventional wisdom or wildly off the mark. He knew nothing about economics, which is why his labor theory of value–the lynchpin of his entire philosophy–is absurd. (Even Marx recognized that; he never finished the key section of Capital, leaving that inglorious task to Engels.) And he pontificated endlessly about workers and the means of production, without even once, as far as is known, setting foot in a factory.
Marx survives in historical memory for two reasons. First, hardly anyone has actually read Capital or his lesser works. Even a person of moderate intelligence could hardly do so without recognizing their foolishness. Second, Marx’s philosophy has served as a pretext for sadists to seize control of governments around the globe. Which is exactly what Marx intended.
Marx was a bad man, equally so in his private and public lives. He should be remembered only as an exemplar of how much damage a single-minded and hate-filled man can do.
I am so old, I can remember when “public servants” used to earn less money than they could have expected in the private sector. But those days are long gone. Now, government employees have the rest of us by the throat. Our tax dollars are enriching them, on the average, far beyond what they could earn anywhere else.
This is from Stephen Moore’s Committee to Unleash Prosperity:
The average cost for a government employee in December was $60 per hour, or 40.5% more than his or her private sector counterpart.
Benefits to government employees cost 80.3% more.
This chart shows the numbers:
I would think that if we looked at federal employees, the discrepancy would be even greater. And government employees pretty much can’t be fired, either, so they have these sweet gigs forever.
One interpretation of these numbers is that the rest of us are just serfs on the government’s plantation.
For years, the Democrats have been yammering about “election interference” by Russia that turned out to be either de minimis or entirely fabricated. Now, in a stunning display of hypocrisy, they are aggressively interfering in Israel’s internal politics.
Scott wrote here about the fact that the Biden Administration “obviously seeks to depose the government of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.” The administration has gone so far as to make public an alleged intelligence community assessment to the effect that Netanyahu is unpopular and his government is likely to fall.
Today, Chuck Schumer got into the act:
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday called for new elections in Israel to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This is absolutely stunning. Since when is it the role of the Senate Majority Leader to tell another country–an ally–that they need to replace their government?
Netanyahu has “lost his way,” Schumer continued, “by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel” and by indicating he isn’t interested in the formation of an independent Palestinian state, which has been a U.S. goal for decades.
But it is not a goal of Israel, not if it can’t be done without threatening Israeli security, which is certainly the case today. One might think that the Israeli people are the best judges of their security needs, not an American senator.
Schumer said that Netanyahu has aligned himself with “far-right extremists” like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who he said are “pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows.”
There is some truth in that last comment, as anti-Semitism, in the transparent guise of anti-Zionism, has erupted across the Western world. One might therefore think that this is a good time for American leaders to express support for Israel, not try to bring about the overthrow of its government.
But we are not living in normal times.
The Israeli response has been restrained, no doubt in the interest of trying to hold the alliance together:
Israel is a sovereign democracy. It is unhelpful, all the more so as Israel is at war against the genocidal terror organization Hamas, to comment on the domestic political scene of a democratic ally. It is counterproductive to our common goals.
— Ambassador Michael Herzog (@AmbHerzog) March 14, 2024
Let’s hope we have a more sensible administration in place as of January 2025.
Right now it seems the airlines (and especially Boeing aircraft) are suffering an epidemic of equipment failures and mishaps. Count me somewhat skeptical. I suspect the Alaska Air door frame blow out a few weeks ago, along with the tire falling off a United 777 the other day, has put the media on high alert, and now many episodes of mishaps and irregularities that might have gone unnoticed or unreported in the general media (the specialty aerospace press is a different matter—Aviation Week and Space Technology was a staple of my household’s magazine subscription pile when I was growing up, and it had lots of neat stories about aircraft problems) and are a source of headlines. (There is a second possibility: that standards for maintenance and manufacturing crews have been eroded on account of diversity mandates. . .)
Here’s the long-term data for mortality from airplane airframe-related accidents:
Everett Dirksen, the Republican Senate leader back in the 1960s, is famous for saying, “A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. . .”
That was in the days before multi-trillion dollar deficits. A billion dollars is hardly a rounding error in a federal program these days, and $1 billion is usually considered the entry fee for any proposed new program. A program that only costs $750 million is almost an insult at this point.
And Dirksen also never could have anticipated the utility of high speed-rail spending. If he was alive today, he’d likely modify his statement as follows: “A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, and maybe someday you’ll have a high-speed rail line in California.”
To no one’s surprise, this is in the “news” this week:
As the state faces economic headwinds, California’s mega high-speed rail project between San Francisco to Los Angeles also faces major funding hurdles, the project’s CEO Brian Kelly told state lawmakers Tuesday.
Kelly testified in front of the State Senate’s Transportation Committee on the High-Speed Rail Authority’s updated draft business plan. In Tuesday’s hearing, Kelly told lawmakers the project has $28 billion dollars on hand, but noted it was still a few billion dollars short to complete the Central Valley segment between Merced and Bakersfield. Depending on how long the segment takes to finish, it could cost between $32 Billion to $35 Billion. Kelly said the project is hoping to fill the gap with federal funds. That segment of the project is expected to be fully operational between 2030 and 2033, Kelly said.
Project leaders estimate it will still need an additional $100 billion to finish what voters were originally pitched in 2008: a bullet train that runs between San Francisco and Los Angeles. A timeline on its completion has not been set as the authority waits for environmental clearances for those segments.
Bold emphasis added. Because everyone knows federal money is free, or grows on trees or something. But with a state deficit now likely to be over $70 billion this year, there’s little chance California can pay for the completion of the rail line itself. And there’s no timeline set because everyone with a brain understand the high speed rail line will never be fully completed. The “environmental clearances” make that certain.
Last week the mainstream press ranked President Biden’s State of the Union address up there with the Sermon on the Mount. I reviewed it in detail and found it to be “The SOTU from hell,” but then I wasn’t the target audience. My assessment might have been unreliable.
In my comments I asked to whom the speech was addressed. That wasn’t clear to me. I guess it was addressed to all the Democrats who’d loved him before. He didn’t want them to walk out on him.
Taking a look at the polls after one week, the Hill reports that, ahead of the State of the Union, Biden’s approval rating in a Yahoo News/YouGov poll was 40 percent. In a new survey released on Tuesday by the same team Biden’s approval rating had fallen to 39 percent.
That does not appear to be an outlier: “Other polls also show the president failed to moved the needle following his address to Congress. FiveThirtyEight’s calculation of Biden’s approval rating showed him with just more than 37 percent Tuesday. On March 6, the day before the State of the Union, he had just under a 38 percent approval rating from the ABC News pollster.”
Trump and Biden have each secured his party’s respective nomination and are running neck and neck. The lack of excitement is almost palpable. It is same as it ever was before Joe got hopped up last week to shout into the void.
Via Rich Lowry/NRO.
In Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets,” the heroine announces that she’s unable to lunch today. Why? She has a good excuse — because she was strung up by a mob for killing “the man who had led her so far astray.”
Now Ms. Yellen regrets. Janet Yellen holds the venerable office of Secretary of the Treasury. Former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Yellen is well qualified for the job and an ostensibly serious person. Yet she has proved unfit for the office, regurgitating administration talking points with an utter lack of seriousness. Inflation — she declared in 2021 that it was “transitory.” Abortion — restricting it would be “very damaging” to the economy. By contrast, she supports the administration’s gusher of “green” spending as constructive. ‘S wonderful.
Ms. Yellen regrets she has revealed herself to be a political hack. “I regret saying [inflation] was transitory,” Yellen said in a March 13 interview on Fox News. “It has come down. But I think transitory means a few weeks or months to most people.” Three years later, it might be worth asking what “transitory” means to her and who suggested she use the term in coordination with the other occupants of the Biden administration clown car.
When Yellen adopted the administration line on inflation being “transitory,” nobody had led Yellen astray. She killed her own reputation. However, she is also able to lunch today. Why anyone should even believe anything she says is not exactly a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. No one should.
Dennis Ross is a scholar and diplomat of unmatched experience in the vagaries of “the peace process.” His 2005 memoir The Missing Peace: Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace runs to 880 closely printed pages. He served in both the Bush (41) and Clinton administrations. He also served as special assistant to President Obama and worked on National Security Council in both the Reagan and Obama administrations. He currently serves as a distinguished fellow on the U.S.-Israel strategic relationship at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His impressive Washington Institute profile is posted here.
On a personal note, I would like to add this. When I was working on the 2007 Weekly Standard article “How Arafat got away with murder,” I caught Ambassador Ross by telephone in his office late on a Friday afternoon. He was on his way out the door and didn’t know me from Adam, yet he took my question and responded as quoted in the article. He seemed to me a straightforward and decent gentleman.
Ross was invited by the MIT Jewish Alumni Alliance to speak at MIT’s “Standing Together Against Hate” program launched in the aftermath of the the October 7 massacre. MIT president Sally Kornbluth trumpeted the program as an effort aimed at “community building.” She put MIT chancellor Melissa Nobles in charge.
A Hamas apologist is scheduled to speak at MIT as part of the program on March 18. Jewish alumni reached out to Ross and confirmed his willingness to participate in the program’s speaker series. When attempts were made to move forward, however, program planners informed the alumni that Ross is not an appropriate speaker because they deem him “a politician.” The alumni group has posted its March 12 open letter to Kornbluth here.
The Washington Free Beacon’s Jessica Costescu now takes a deep dive into the story under the headline “MIT Refused To Host Dennis Ross. It Invited a Hamas Apologist Instead.” Subhead: “Dalia Mogahed, who described Hamas terrorism as legal ‘resistance,’ slated to speak as a part of MIT’s ‘Standing Against Hate’ Initiative.”
What’s the trouble with Dennis Ross? It’s not that he is a politician. He has never run for office:
Like Ross, Mogahed has served as a presidential adviser, albeit to fewer presidents and in more junior roles. She served as an adviser to former president Barack Obama in the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
For Matthew Handel and Lori Ullman, two Jewish Alumni Alliance members, MIT’s refusal to host Ross—and its excuse for excluding him—are insulting.
“It’s already patronizing for anyone to say we’re at MIT, so we think we’re smarter than you,” Handel, who co-founded the group, told the Free Beacon. “It’s beyond arrogant that they would say, ‘We work at MIT, so as MIT alums, we’re smarter than you; MIT students, we’re smarter than you; Congress, we’re smarter than you.'”
Costescu gives the reader everything he might need to understand the story and the actual trouble with Ross, including this valuable note: “MIT did not return a request for comment.”
Special Counsel Robert Hur found that President Biden willfully mishandled documents subject to the Espionage Act provision set forth in 28 U.S.C. § 793(e). However, Hur clouded the “willfulness” element of the offense by resting his non-prosecution recommendation in part on Biden’s present senility. Hur presents his analysis of the element of “willfulness” under section 793 in Chapter Nine of his report.
The relevant question is whether Biden committed the acts “willfully” at the relevant time. Hur had a smoking gun or two to prove the “willfulness” element of the offense. Among other things, however, he suggested that a jury would be reluctant to convict someone as out of it as Biden is and imputed the jury’s likely reluctance to Biden’s present inability to act “willfully” beyond a reasonable doubt. See, for example, Chapters Eleven and Twelve of the report.
Just to give an idea of the evidence Hur compiled, the Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman highlights a few passages from Hur’s report. Freeman quotes this from Chapter Twelve:
As with the classified Afghanistan documents [discussed in Chapter Eleven], there is evidence that Mr. Biden kept his notebooks after his vice presidency knowing they were classified and he was not allowed to have them.
The evidence shows convincingly that Mr. Biden knew the notebooks, as a whole, contained classified information. For eight years, he wrote in his notebooks about classified information during classified meetings in the White House Situation Room and elsewhere. He was familiar with the notebooks’ contents, which included obviously classified information. When reviewing the notebooks with [Biden ghostwriter Mark] Zwonitzer, Mr. Biden sometimes read aloud classified notes verbatim, but he also sometimes appeared to skip over classified information, and he warned Zwonitzer that the material in the notebooks could be classified. Mr. Biden also stored the notebooks in a classified safe in the White House for a time as vice president because the notebooks were classified.
In Mr. Biden’s written answers to questions from our office, he called into question whether he knew the information in his notebooks was classified. In those answers, Mr. Biden explained that when he described material in his notebooks to Zwonitzer as “classified’’ he did not actually mean “classified.” According to Mr. Biden, “I may have used the word ‘classified’ with Mr. Zwonitzer in a generic sense, to refer not to the formal classification of national security information, but to sensitive or private topics to ensure that Mr. Zwonitzer would not write about them.” Mr. Biden qualified this answer by explaining, “I do not recall the specific conversations you reference with Mr. Zwonitzer, which took place more than six years ago.”
This explanation-that “classified” does not mean “classified”-is not credible. At the time Mr. Biden met with Zwonitzer, Mr. Biden had nearly fifty years of experience dealing with classified information, including as a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a member and Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, a member and Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and Vice President of the United States. It is not plausible that a person of his knowledge and experience used the term “classified” in this context as a euphemism for “private.”
Hur discusses the existence of grounds for reasonable doubt regarding Biden’s willfulness at the time of the acts (i.e., evidence that Biden thought the notebooks were his personal property), but falls back on Biden’s subsequent incompetence (my word, not Hur’s). If Biden thought they were his personal property, why did he lie about the meaning of “classified”? As I wrote yesterday, Hur’s analysis has the quality of a student working backward from the known answer to a question. Hur thus concludes Chapter Twelve:
Given the intelligence and military officials present and the topics discussed at the meetings Mr. Biden recounted for Zwonitzer, Mr. Biden should have realized that his notes did or were likely to contain classified information. But taken as a whole, the evidence will likely leave jurors with reasonable doubts about whether Mr. Biden knew he was sharing classified information with Zwonitzer and intended to do so. For these jurors, Mr. Biden’s apparent lapses and failures in February and April 2017 will likely appear consistent with the diminished faculties and faulty memory he showed in Zwonitzer’s interview recordings and in our interview of him. Therefore, we conclude that the evidence does not establish that Mr. Biden willfully disclosed national defense information to Zwonitzer.
I thought someone would press Hur on the “willfulness” issue at the hearing. Rep. Ken Buck, who declared he’s outta here next week, came the closest to getting at it toward the tail end of the five-hour hearing (video below). Even within the five-minutes limiting each round of questions — Buck could have omitted his introductory remarks and gotten to the point — Buck almost got there, but this ain’t horseshoes.
As John notes, blue collar workers or minorities voting for policies that actually help them is an important trend, and a complement to Steve’s post about the border problem. As he showed, “immigration” helped to flip California from red to blue in presidential elections, so Democrats seek to repeat that trend “across the entire country.” That’s why Biden has brought in millions, and that’s a problem.
The possibility of becoming a public charge can cancel the prospect of legal immigrants becoming legitimate American citizens. On the other hand, for many illegals becoming a public charge is the goal. The ideal set-up is to get on welfare and work under the table for cash. That’s what enables the transfer of more than $63 billion to Mexico in 2023, a seven-percent hike from the previous year. In effect, the USA subsidizes the Mexican government.
Those on welfare have a problem becoming U.S. citizens and that’s what California attorney general Xavier Becerra was on about when he cited 10 million “immigrants” in California alone. It is illegal for foreign nationals and even registered aliens to vote, but California’s “motor voter” program registers false-documented illegals to vote when they get their driver’s license. Squads of politiqueros bribe, coerce and threaten the illegals to vote “a certain way,” code for Democrats.
Absent an independent investigation, citizens can have more than a reasonable doubt on ballot propositions to legitimize crime (Proposition 47), the recall vote for Newsom, and his reelection in 2022. Citizens may also have reasonable doubt on the 2020 presidential vote.
Stumbling Joe Biden, who campaigned from his basement, is a wax-works effigy of a president. On the other hand, with an eye on California, he has imported an electorate by the millions. As David Horowitz has often noted, Democrats are good at voter fraud and Republicans are poor at preventing it. So the nation could get four more years of Joe Biden, or someone even worse. All things have limits, except human stupidity and malevolence.
American Experiment’s Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling tell you what you need to know to respond to ill-informed advocates for “green” energy. There is much more at the link, but here is an overview:
1. Renewables can’t survive on their own
The renewable energy industry is a subsidy-based industry, as wind and solar are largely dependent on lucrative state and federal subsidies. However, renewable advocates justify these perpetual subsidies by claiming thermal generators receive more subsidies than wind and solar. This assertion is not based on reality….
***
In 2022, wind and solar generators received three and eighteen times more subsidies per MWh, respectively, than natural gas, coal, and nuclear generators combined. Solar is the clear leader, receiving anywhere from $50 to $80 per MWh over the last five years, whereas wind is a distant second at $8 to $10 per MWh.
Poor solar energy! No matter how many billions the government pours down the solar rathole, no one has figured out a way to generate solar power after the sun goes down.
2. Renewables increase the cost of electricity
Renewable advocates often claim that the adoption of more wind and solar will lead to lower electricity costs, but the opposite is true. In a previous Substack, we wrote in detail about how utility companies with the largest rate increase requests in the country admit the energy transition is a major reason behind increasing electricity prices for families and businesses.
“Green” advocates fake the numbers for wind and solar by the simple expedient of only counting a fraction of their costs. This chart shows the actual cost of the various energy systems if all costs are included:
3. More wind and solar means more blackouts
Advocates of renewable energy also don’t want to account for one of the most damning facts about policies that favor wind and solar energy at the expense of dispatchable generators: that they have led to electricity blackouts in more than one region.
Greenies are full of bogus reasons why increased use of wind and solar are not to blame for blackouts, but they can’t answer the simple question: why is that we didn’t have blackouts before spending hundreds of billions on wind and solar, but now we do have blackouts?
Isaac and Mitch conclude:
Despite claiming to be ardent followers of “tHe ScIEncE,” wind and solar advocates live in their own universe of alternative facts that deny the basic physics and economics of the electric grid. Hopefully, this piece is useful for you the next time a wind or solar stan is arguing with you in the comments section.
One more “green” myth remains to be exploded: the claim that wind and solar are better for the environment than natural gas, nuclear and coal-fired electricity. That myth will be addressed in an upcoming report.
The great Dr. Jay Bhattacharya hosts the Illusion of Consensus podcast. I have embedded his most recent episode below via X. In this episode he speaks with Martin Kulldorff. Please check it out in its native habitat here and help Dr. Bhattacharya extend his reach to other platforms.
Dr. Bhattacharya’s introduction to the podcast notes that “in this critical conversation we discuss a number of hot topics, most crucially Martin’s firing from Harvard for his opposition to vaccine mandates. He has broken the silence on this tragic issue and we are happy to host his first public conversation on the matter. We also discuss Martin’s firing from the CDC over the J&J vaccine and Harvard’s generally unscientific response to the pandemic. The conversation concludes with a discussion on decentralizing and reforming the scientific community.”
Drs. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff are are two-thirds of the team that hatched the Great Barrington Declaration. With any luck, they will be recognized in next year’s Samizadat Prize.
New Illusion of Consensus podcast with @martinkulldorff. Martin tells the story of his career in public health, his advocacy for the basic principles of public health in the covid era, and his departure from Harvard.
(The link to the podcast is in my bio. Please subscribe!) pic.twitter.com/K3GOZupBlQ
— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) March 12, 2024
The required reading for the Illusion of Consensus podcast is of course Martin Kulldorff’s March 11 City Journal column “Harvard tramples the truth.” Dr. Kulldorff also discusses his experience in the excellent City Journal podcast with John Tierney below (City Journal transcript here).
So Haiti is back in the news. As I mentioned yesterday, I thought the Clinton Foundation had fixed the place! Or Colin Powell in the 1990s. Or something. How soon until Biden sends in American troops? Or lets 500,000 Haitians come to America?
Anyway, Haiti is in the state of nature right now, with gangs and mobs rampaging. And yet, as a smart left-leaning friend of mine (I do have a few of those—opposition research) points out, the murder rate in Haiti is lower than many American cities:
The Biden administration obviously seeks to depose the government of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. The administration has released our intelligence community’s assessment that Netanyahu’s “viability as a leader” is “in jeopardy,” according to the annual report on the national security threats facing the United States that was presented to Congress on Monday. I assess that the wish is father to the thought.
The assessment provides: “Distrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war, and we expect large protests demanding his resignation and new elections,” according to the report. “A different, more moderate government is a possibility.” I assess that the wish is father to the thought and that the assessment bears the trademark of “Our Democracy.”
Netanyahyu’s voice can be heard in the response attributed to a “very senior” Israeli official in a statement issued to the media: “Those who elect the prime minister of Israel are the citizens of Israel and no one else. Israel is not a protectorate of the US but an independent and democratic country whose citizens are the ones who elect the government. We expect our friends to act to overthrow the terror regime of Hamas and not the elected government in Israel.”
The intelligence community could not be reached for comment.
Special Counsel Robert Hur testified for some five hours before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday on his investigation into President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents over his too long career in public life. I have posted the Washington Post’s YouTube video of the hearing at the bottom. At the same time, transcripts of Hur’s interview of Biden in the investigation were released: October 8 (99 pages) and October 9 (157 pages).
Mr. Techno Fog provided his hot take on the transcripts here (“confusion, evasion, and outright lies”). David Harsanyi cut to the chase in the Federalist column “Turns out Biden lied.” The Free Beacon’s Andrew Kerr reviews both Hur’s testimony and the Biden transcripts in “Interview Transcript, Congressional Testimony Shed Light on Biden’s Memory Lapses During Classified Doc Investigation.”
Hur confined his testimony to the four corners of the lengthy report he submitted to Attorney General Merrick Garland. Whenever he was asked about the facts of the case, he referred to the report’s findings. He demonstrated perfect poise and complete mastery of the case as set forth in his report.
It should go without saying that Hur knew his case, but contrast Hur’s grasp of the case with Robert Mueller’s failure to launch at the comparable hearing held following his Russiagate investigation. To put it charitably, Mueller appeared to be a figurehead who performed at best as an innocent bystander to an investigation run and conducted by others (e.g., Andrew Weissmann). Trump fans who harbor lingering animosity against Attorney General William Barr don’t understand that Mueller’s investigation would still be alive if it weren’t for Barr.
The House Democrats sought to impute a finding of “complete exoneration” of Biden to Hur. Hur begged to disagree. Hur was admirably noncompliant in the face of the Democrats’ efforts to put words in his mouth. The Free Beacon’s video of highlights (below) shows that “complete exoneration” misses the mark. As Hur put it in his opening statement, Hur “identified evidence that the President willfully retained classified materials after the end of his vice presidency, when he was a private citizen.” This evidence contradicted everything Biden himself has said in public about the case, although lying to the public is not a crime. It is standard operating procedure.
Hur was criticized for resting his recommendation of non-prosecution on Biden’s senility. Hur explained that he was required to “show [his] work” supporting his recommendation of non-prosecution. Hur reminded me of how I showed my work in solving high school physics problems. I began with the answer and worked back from there.
In Hur’s case, the answer was non-prosecution. A voice in his head from the film Network must have counseled caution: “Don’t do it, buddy! You’re a young man! You got your whole life ahead of you!” Hur’s explanation of the difficulty of obtaining a guilty verdict in the case was little more than absurd (as was his distinction of the Biden case from the Trump case).
In the course of his overlong political career, Biden has been a serial violator of the national security law. He is heedless to it. His misconduct is egregious. And he is a senescent dolt with the possible reservation that in some instances he may be senile like a fox. I don’t recall when “I don’t recall” was ever so plausible.
I would like to include one positive observation in these remarks. I was impressed by the demeanor of two congressmen whose names I had not even heard before. I don’t know anything else about them except what I saw yesterday. I am referring to Republican Ben Cline of Virginia and Democrat Glenn Ivey of Maryland.
However, yesterday’s hearing was incredibly depressing. It represents the dire condition of our politics. We have clownish Democrats volubly insisting on the things which are not. We have the exhibition of the two-tiered system of justice that Democrats have fashioned to resolve the problem of Donald Trump and other annoyances. We have the continuing exposure of the mental incompetence of the president of the United States. We have the mainstream press acting as the Democrats’ public relations arm.
This long piece in the London Times describes the efforts of some British Muslims to prohibit blasphemy, either through legal action or through mob violence:
Britain faces an alarming rise in intimidation and threats of violence against those perceived to have insulted Islam, a new report will warn.
Protests condemning acts of apparent blasphemy have become more frequent and radicalised, according to independent research commissioned by the government’s counterextremism chief.
The report, seen by The Times, exposes links between activists at the forefront of recent protests in the UK and an extremist Islamist political party in Pakistan whose members have regularly called for blasphemers to be beheaded.
It has been a long time since anyone was beheaded in Britain on religious grounds.
Robin Simcox, the government’s counterextremism tsar, commissioned the research after three blasphemy flashpoints in the UK: the 2021 protests against a teacher in Batley, West Yorkshire, who received death threats and is still in hiding…
Still in hiding, three years later–a teacher in West Yorkshire.
…after showing pupils a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed; Birmingham protests the following year over the screening of the film The Lady in Heaven, which depicted Mohammed’s daughter; and last year’s controversy in Wakefield, also in West Yorkshire, after a copy of the Quran was slightly damaged at a high school.
Some of the anti-blasphemy initiative is coming from Pakistan:
It described as “most alarming” the emergence of a UK wing of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a political party that was temporarily banned there because of violent rallies and its support for mob executions of perceived blasphemers. British mosques have hosted speakers who are supportive of TLP and each of the protests in Batley, Wakefield and Birmingham involved activists with links.
The report warned that such rhetoric “has the potential to radicalise their audience around the issue of blasphemy” and that this in turn “may increase the likelihood of sectarian violence and terrorism in the UK”.
The report stresses that most UK-based blasphemy activists have rejected violence and condemn terrorist acts such as the 2015 shooting attack in Paris on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine, in which 17 people died.
However, it says many are calling for stricter laws in the UK against blasphemy and seek to criminalise insults against Islam, which they present as part of a wider war on the faith by so-called enemies of Islam in the West.
Britain has admitted large numbers of Muslims from Commonwealth countries, and they now constitute a substantial political bloc. In recent months, they have repeatedly taken over large swaths of the city of London with kill-the-Jews rallies. While British authorities deplore these demonstrations, they seem to have been cowed by the implicit threat of violence that they manifest.
Black college athletes do, according to the NAACP. The NAACP is urging black athletes not to go to college in Florida:
The NAACP asked Black student-athletes to reconsider their decisions to attend public colleges and universities in the state of Florida, in response to the University of Florida and other state schools recently eliminating their diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
In a letter sent to NCAA president Charlie Baker and addressed to current and prospective student-athletes Monday, NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson wrote, “This is not about politics. It’s about the protection of our community, the progression of our culture, and most of all, it’s about your education, and your future.”
The idea that black athletes at major sports schools like Florida and Florida State need DEI departments to…what? Prevent them from being discriminated against? The idea is laughable, as is the NCAAP’s apparent suggestion that DEI bureaucrats are somehow helpful to a student’s education.
My guess is that not a single black athlete who otherwise wants to play for Florida, Florida State or any other public Florida college will be deterred by the NCAAP’s advice. What this episode really shows is how useless the once-relevant NCAAP has become. And also, how Florida has taken the lead in adopting common-sense policies that have put the state in the Left’s cross-hairs.
President Biden is reportedly “thinking” about imposing conditions on military aid to Israel if the IDF assault on Hamas’s redoubt in Rafah proceeds as planned. Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke by video to AIPAC’s annual policy conference in Washington. Netanyahu’s office has posted the video clip below on X and a six-minute video here on YouTube (with an echo for the first minute).
The Prime Minister’s Office has posted Netanyahu’s text here along with these further remarks in a Churchillian vein:
Some people would make you believe that the people of Israel are disunited. In fact, some people would have you believe there is the prime minister and then there is the people of Israel.
The truth of the matter is that the people of Israel overwhelmingly support the policies set forth by myself and my government. They overwhelmingly support the need for total victory. Overwhelmingly. They overwhelmingly oppose the idea of having a Palestinian state rammed down our throat.
We just had a vote in the Knesset, to illustrate the point I just made, 99 to 9 supporting this position. And you know what? It’s not irrational. It’s because they think that giving now a Palestinian state after the October 7th massacre will be the greatest reward for terrorism in modern times.
They overwhelmingly reject the idea that we should implant, after we’ve destroyed Hamas in Gaza, the PA that still inculcates its children towards terrorism and the annihilation of Israel. They want a future of peace, a future of security that is purchased by a resounding victory.
And as I say, the possibilities for this victory, the possibilities that are opened up are immense but they require that one word: victory. And I will repeat it again, victory, victory, victory. No substitute for that and we will achieve it together.
Netanyahu knows he represents the consensus of Israeli popular opinion on this point and he gives no sign of backing down.
We will finish the job. Watch my speech at the AIPAC policy conference >> pic.twitter.com/QvPEyzfQvc
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) March 12, 2024
Our pal Mark Perry reminds is that today, March 12, is “Equal Pay Day” that falsely assumes how far into 2024 the typical woman has to work to earn what her alleged male counterpart earned in 2023. Funny how feminists never consider something like “Equal Job Safety” or “Job Risk” day (Mark proposes “Occupational Fatality Day”), because the data looks like this and the “gap” would take years, not months, to close:
Men are 11 times more likely to die on the job than women. A rather different kind of femme fatale.
Chaser, FWIW (also from Mark):
Politico Playbook previews the testimony later this morning of Special Counsel Robert Hur before the House Judiciary Committee. Hur is to testify on the report of his investigation of Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents (i.e., the report submitted to Attorney General Merrick Garland). The Playbookers have obtained and posted Hur’s opening statement here. These are the operative paragraphs:
My report reflects my best effort to explain why I declined to recommend charging President Biden. I analyzed the evidence as prosecutors routinely do: by assessing its strengths and weaknesses, including by anticipating the ways in which the President’s defense lawyers might poke holes in the government’s case if there were a trial and seek to persuade jurors that the government could not prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
There has been a lot of attention paid to language in the report about the President’s memory, so let me say a few words about that. My task was to determine whether the President retained or disclosed national defense information “willfully”—meaning, knowingly and with the intent to do something the law forbids.
I could not make that determination without assessing the President’s state of mind. For that reason, I had to consider the President’s memory and overall mental state, and how a jury likely would perceive his memory and mental state in a criminal trial. These are the types of issues prosecutors analyze every day. And because these issues were important to my ultimate decision, I had to include a discussion of them in my report to the Attorney General.
The evidence and the President himself put his memory squarely at issue. We interviewed the President and asked him about his recorded statement, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” He told us that he didn’t remember saying that to his ghostwriter. He also said he didn’t remember finding any classified material in his home after his vice presidency. And he didn’t remember anything about how classified documents about Afghanistan made their way into his garage.
My assessment in the report about the relevance of the President’s memory was necessary and accurate and fair. Most importantly, what I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe. I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the President unfairly. I explained to the Attorney General my decision and the reasons for it. That’s what I was required to do.
This is confused and confusing. Did Hur base his non-prosecution decision on his putative inability to prove the mental element of the possible offenses? Hur implies it is “willfulness,” although “gross negligence” would have sufficed to prove the offense under 28 U.S.C § 793. Or did he base his non-prosecution decision on a jury’s anticipated pity for a senile dolt? I trust that some members of the committee will home in on this issue this morning.
Vaunce News 