April 20, 2024

WE WERE SOMEWHERE AROUND CAPITOL HILL ON THE EDGE OF THE SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE WHEN THE DRUGS BEGAN TO TAKE HOLD: Mark Judge: A Hallucinogenic and Unrepentant Rant.

While reading One Way Back, the new “memoir” by Christine Blasey Ford, the accuser of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during the 2018 confirmation hearings, I was reminded of a frequently reoccurring scene on the show Cops: A perpetrator has been caught red-handed doing something wrong—let us say he’s got drugs in his car. As the police question and arrest him, the suspect proceeds to talk about everything in the world except the drugs. He was at his brother’s house. His dog is missing. He works afternoons at his job. He talks, incessantly, about absolutely anything but the bag of cocaine in his trunk.

So, it is with One Way Back. Christine Blasey Ford is an expert at not answering basic questions about the singular thing that made her famous while going on mindlessly about other things: surfing, her family, and what it’s like to stay in Oprah’s house.

Of course, how could Ford respond to basic questions regarding her attempted upheaval of the American political system? Doing so would require her to unmask herself and the plot in which she was involved.

Ford is, of course, the woman behind the allegations that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a high school party in 1982. Ford also claimed that I was in the room when it happened. Brett was confirmed, but the allegation upended Washington and caused serious trauma to many of us involved. As Kathleen Parker recently noted in the Washington Post of all places,  Ford couldn’t care less about the lives she has damaged. So it’s no surprise that One Way Back and her ongoing book tour reveal Ford to be a petulant narcissist.

Ford mentions me only once in this new book, and this time it is cautiously and only in the context of official government transcripts and records. The reason for her caution is obvious. As my lawyer put it, “liberals don’t want Mark Judge owning St. Martin’s Press.” Ford already ran over me, a private citizen, once. To do so again would be not only indecent, but enough to risk her reputation and litigation.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll

VDH: Are Iran’s Nine Lives Nearing an End?

Iran’s only hope is to get a bomb and, with it, nuclear deterrence to prevent retaliation when it increases its terrorist surrogate attacks on Israel, the West, and international commerce.

Yet now Iran may have jumped the shark by attacking the Israeli homeland for the first time. It is learning that it has almost no sympathetic allies.

Does even the Lebanese Hezbollah really want to take revenge against Israel on behalf of Persian Iran, only to see its Shiite neighborhoods in Lebanon reduced to rubble?

Do all the pro-Hamas protestors on American campuses and in the streets really want to show Americans they celebrate Iranian attacks and a potential Iranian war against the United States?

Does Iran really believe 99 percent of any future Israel barrage against Iranian targets would fail to hit targets in the fashion that its own recent launches failed?

Does Iran really believe that its sheer incompetence in attacking Israel warrants them a pardon — as if they should be excused for trying, but not succeeding, to kill thousands of Jews?

In sum, by unleashing a terrorist war in the Middle East and targeting the Israeli homeland, Iran may wake up soon and learn Israel, or America, or both might retaliate for a half-century of its terrorist aggression — and mostly to the indifference or even the delight of most of the world.

But where will all those leftist Americans on their New York Times “holidays in hell” tourist junket visit instead?

Related: Soviet-era tech and 1970s American jets: inside Iran’s ageing air defenses.

Iran’s air force is a particularly weak point in any potential conflict with Israel. Tehran is believed to only have a few dozen working strike aircraft, including Russian jets and US-made F-4s and F-5s that were acquired before the 1979 revolution.

[The International Institute for Strategic Studies] has reported that it has a squadron of nine F-4 and F-5 fighter jets, one squadron of Russian-made Sukhoi-24 jets, and some MiG-29s, F7 and F14 aircraft.

The Sukhoi-24 jets were first developed in the 1960s. Amir Vahedi, Iran’s air force commander, said this week they were in their “best state of preparedness” to counter any Israeli strikes.

Israel has hundreds of F-15, F-16 and F-35 jets, which all played a role in counter-mining Iranian drones.

Iran’s strength is believed to lie in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ stockpiles of ballistic and cruise missiles.

At least half of the missiles that Iran fired at the weekend were said to have failed before reaching Israel, raising doubts over the claimed ability of its domestically built air defenses.

No wonder the Iranian mullahs lust after owning the bomb: The Growing Biden Incentive to Go Nuclear. “Everyone who watched that 2011 operation understood that the US and EU would have never attacked Qaddafi if he had nukes. That includes Iran.”

And they could be very close to getting it: “Iran is now enriching uranium to up to 60% purity and has enough material enriched to that level, if enriched further, for two nuclear weapons, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s theoretical definition. That means Iran’s so-called ‘breakout time’ — the time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb — is close to zero, likely a matter of weeks or days,” Reuters reported on Thursday.

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll

DOINGS IN THE DARK: Senate passes reauthorization of key US surveillance program after midnight deadline.

After its midnight deadline, the Senate voted early Saturday to reauthorize a key U.S. surveillance law after divisions over whether the FBI should be restricted from using the program to search for Americans’ data nearly forced the statute to lapse.

The legislation approved 60-34 with bipartisan support would extend for two years the program known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It now goes to President Joe Biden’s desk to become law. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Biden “will swiftly sign the bill.”

“In the nick of time, we are reauthorizing FISA right before it expires at midnight,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said when voting on final passage began 15 minutes before the deadline. “All day long, we persisted and we persisted in trying to reach a breakthrough and in the end, we have succeeded.”

I didn’t trust them to use this fairly when it passed originally, and I trust them much, much less now.

Posted at 8:07 am by Glenn Reynolds

COLUMBIA: Columbia Students Call on President Shafik To Restore Order on Campus: ‘We do not feel safe walking to nor around campus.’

Related: Arab-Israeli Journalist Assaulted at Columbia University, Forced To Cancel Speech: ‘Instead of a lecture, I went to file a police complaint,’ Yoseph Haddad said.

Plus:

When people make threats like that, believe them, and act accordingly.

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Universities like Columbia must end the double standard and stop tolerating campus antisemitism.

Columbia University’s president and other college administrators have stated that the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is permissible political speech.

On an abstract level, they are correct.

It is also permissible for white supremacists to demand all blacks be sent back to Africa and all Muslims to Saudi Arabia.

The First Amendment protects homophobic, sexist and transphobic speech too.

But would any school permit such bigoted chants?

Imagine what would happen if a group of white-supremacist students demanded South Africa be returned to white apartheid control: “From the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, South Africa should be free of BLACKS and returned to WHITE control!”

Would it take action against such racists?

Of course it would.

The racist diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy and its bigoted brother “intersectionality” would demand it, and the school would comply.

So the issue is not one of abstract free speech.

It is whether the school applies the same standard to Jews, blacks, gays and other minorities.

And, of course, it doesn’t. “Free speech” is just a slogan to it, not a commitment.

Posted at 7:50 am by Glenn Reynolds

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It’s time to retire the laziest cliché in election polling.

Opinion polling has no lazier cliché than “snapshot in time.”

The aphorism is intended to suggest impermanence — that polls taken weeks or months before an election have limited predictive value. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked as the 2024 presidential election race has unfolded. It will be heard many times before the campaign ends.

All too often, “snapshot in time” is a convenient tactic for commentators and politicians to scoff at or dismiss poll results that contradict their partisan preferences.

More commonly, the phrase is a refuge or metaphoric shield for pollsters when their pre-election surveys misfire. In such cases, “snapshot in time” is cited in attempting to defend or rationalize polls that careen well off-target, as many of them did in the 2020 presidential election.

Joe Biden was elected to the presidency four years ago by margins well short of the double-digit blowout suggested by the polls of CNN, Quinnipiac University, Economist/YouGuv and NBC/Wall Street Journal.  Those polls estimated Biden’s end-of-campaign lead at 10 to 12 percentage points over then-President Donald Trump.

Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points.

The discrepancy in 2020 between election results and polls overall was the most pronounced in 40 years, and prompted characterizations that the outcome was a “train wreck” and “a disaster for the polling industry,” as David A. Graham wrote in the Atlantic.

But if the goal was demoralize potential Trump voters to believe there was no use in even going out to the voting booth, then 2020’s wonky polls certainly their job as far as the DNC-MSM is concerned! Read the whole thing.

 

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

BUNKERTIME: NPR’s Katherine Maher Is Not Taking Questions About Her Tweets.

[Uri] Berliner’s tell-all mostly took aim at specific examples of NPR being led astray by its deference to progressive shibboleths: the Hunter Biden laptop, COVID-19, etc. He implored his new boss—Maher’s tenure as CEO had only begun about four weeks ago—to correct NPR’s lack of viewpoint diversity. That’s probably a tall order, since Maher had once tweeted that ideological diversity is “often a dog whistle for anti-feminist, anti-POC stories.”

* * * * * * * *

When asked by event organizer Jon Bateman, a Carnegie senior fellow, to address the Berliner controversy, she said that she had never met him and was not responsible for the editorial policies of the newsroom.

“The newsroom is entirely independent,” she said. “My responsibility is to ensure that we have the resources to do this work. We have a mandate to serve all Americans.”

She repeated these lines over and over again. When asked more specifically about whether she thinks NPR is succeeding or failing at making different viewpoints welcome, she pointed to the audience and said that her mission was to expand the outlet’s reach.

“Are we growing our audiences?” she asked. “That is so much more representative of how we are doing our job, because I am not in the newsroom.”

We’ve all seen veteran newspaper columnists who swear up and down that they’re totally objective, and then, when bumped up or transferred over to write opinion columns, invariably start producing nothing but cant that’s so far to the left it would make Che Guevara blush. Maher has simply reversed the process — after more than a decade of being a Titania McGrath clone, now she wants us to believe that her radio network is totally objective and “serving all Americans.”

One person who isn’t buying her shtick: Larry Sanger Speaks Out. The Wikipedia co-founder discusses Katherine Maher and the corruption of the Internet.

Christopher Rufo: What are you thinking as you’re watching these statements from former Wikipedia CEO Katherine Maher, who is now the CEO of NPR?

Larry Sanger: I’ve been following your tweets. You’ve kind of shocked me. The bias of Wikipedia, the fact that certain points of view have been systematically silenced, is nothing new. I’ve written about it myself. But I did not know just how radical-sounding Katherine Maher is. For the ex-CEO of Wikipedia to say that it was somehow a mistake for Wikipedia to be “free and open,” that it led to bad consequences—my jaw is on the floor. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised that she thinks it, but I am surprised that she would say it.

Rufo: In another clip, she says explicitly that she worked with governments to suppress “misinformation” on Wikipedia.

Sanger: Yes, but how did she do that in the Wikipedia system? Because I don’t understand it myself. We know that there is a lot of backchannel communication and I think it has to be the case that the Wikimedia Foundation now, probably governments, probably the CIA, have accounts that they control, in which they actually exert their influence.

Exit quote:

Given her current position as head of state-run radio, her obsession with top-down government control and propaganda, and with racial identity, exactly!

As for the rest of us: Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) Pushes to Defund Taxpayer-Funded NPR.

Faster, please:

But of course, as Jesse Walker writes at Reason: Another Day, Another Doomed Plan To Defund NPR. “Maybe someday we’ll get there. But if [Jim] Banks [R-IN] and Blackburn manage to pull it off this year, I’ll eat an NPR tote bag.”

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

FROM RACONTEUR PRESS:  Wyrd West.

#CommissionEarned


At the fringes of civilization, anything can be true. Tall tales turn into fantastical realities, and the hidden is revealed to a few who brave the wilderness to push forward in exploration. The American Old West would have been no different, as chronicled in these tales of strange creatures, daring heroes, and unbelievable occurrences… or are they so far-fetched? With interior illustrations by Cedar Sanderson!

Posted at 7:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

JOEL KOTKIN: Mean Girls Rising: Democrats are increasingly beholden to leftist radicals in their midst.

nce the putative party of the people, the Democrats are increasingly the party of political “Mean Girls.” Epitomized by the congressional “Squad,” radicalized women are driving the party ever further to the leftist fringe on issues such as embracing Hamas, apocalyptic climate policies, mass illegal immigration, and transgenderism.

Party organs including the New Republic and the New York Times hail these activists as the “future of the Democratic Party.” Unlike traditional Democrats who won over small business owners, members of industrial unions, and aspiring middle class minorities, the Mean Girls have broken with the New Deal tradition that united the party. Rather than appealing to the aspirations of families, in the new configuration it’s all about “the personal is political,” with lifestyle and sexual orientation as defining issues.

Conservatives of course have their off-key women like Laura Bobert and Marjorie Taylor Greem, but few consider them intellectual leaders or particularly feminist. In contrast, Irving Kristol a half century ago noted the “feminization of the Democratic Party,” a process accelerated by the decline in family formation, marriage, and child-rearing. Some outlets like Salon see the rise of women and the gender gap as providing the keys to obtaining unlimited progressive power. Although married women tend to vote Republican, albeit by a smaller margin than men, single women prefer the Democrats by a whopping 37 point margin, even as young men are shifting somewhat to the Right.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Sam Abrams notes that politically engaged women, particularly those at elite colleges, increasingly stand at the tip of the progressive spear. They are far more likely to support cancel culture than their male counterparts. Overall, the Left’s political Mean Girls follow an agenda shaped largely by feminists and gay activists.

As George Orwell foresaw: “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

THEY ADDRESSING WHERE THE POLLUTION MOSTLY ISN’T RATHER THAN WHERE IT MOSTLY IS BECAUSE THE REAL CAUSE IS A DESIRE FOR TOTALITARIANISM:  Pollution and an air of confusion.

Posted at 6:00 am by Sarah Hoyt