EVERY DAY IS CHRISTMAS:
BREAKING: Kash Patel will also serve as the Acting Director of ATF.
Holy sh*t
— Jack (@jackunheard) February 23, 2025
EVERY DAY IS CHRISTMAS:
BREAKING: Kash Patel will also serve as the Acting Director of ATF.
Holy sh*t
— Jack (@jackunheard) February 23, 2025
PANIC AT THE DISCO:
I mean, if you can’t name five things you accomplished in a 40 hour work week, then you aren’t providing any value. https://t.co/MTbim9757k
— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) February 23, 2025
The rational response from someone who actually does work for the federal government: https://t.co/wz2qvJWkBC pic.twitter.com/u2XjGxb54e
— Kyle Seraphin (@KyleSeraphin) February 23, 2025
The state of America: People feeling as if their rights are violated for having to make a list of 5 things they accomplished over a 40 hour period. How many people are going to list “responding to this email” as one?
— Chef Andrew Gruel (@ChefGruel) February 23, 2025
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Let’s Go Privateering! An old idea gets new enthusiasm.
Plus Grok Image Generator’s delightful idea of what a modern privateer might look like.
OPEN THREAD: Saturday night’s all right for blogging. Get a little action in.
MICROBIOME NEWS: The Cause of Alzheimer’s Might Be Coming From Inside Your Mouth.
AP SUES TRUMP ADMINISTRATION OVER WHITE HOUSE BAN:
The Associated Press is filing this suit to protect other (legacy bullsh#t) news outlets from suffering the same fate of being banished from The White House. Whatever would we do without CNN, MSNBC and the likes of them?
Help me understand this… because as a journo major (way back in the day), First Amendment does not guarantee access to an event. Further, prior administrations have excluded new agencies. Why does the AP think they get a pass?
— Vasiliki (@SilikiDeliganis) February 21, 2025
In the words of senile old Joe Biden, whose dementia AP willfully covered up for, what…? Four-plus years?
C’mon man.
And, while we are on the topic of Mr. Biden, remember when he banned The New York Post from a briefing on airline policies with Pete Buttigieg because of
One name: Miranda Devine. But it wasn’t just The New York Post that had their crews revoked back in 2023. More than 440 reporters lost their press badges when Biden was at the helm in 2023. More from Potato Head Stelter and CNN:
For decades The AP has been a foundational part of the so-called White House ‘press pool’ that travels with the president at all times and shares information with the wider press corps.”-Brian Stelter
Foundational. They are the standard all (liberal) news outlets follow. They do have their own Stylebook, after all.
The AP has not lost credentials. They can, in fact, still report on the news coming from The White House. They are just not invited to be present at certain times. They can continue to make up the fake news from afar. They were right up in former pResident Biden’s grill at all times back in the day and never once questioned his mental acuity or his son’s laptop. No one is stopping AP from writing or publishing their propaganda.
Such as this: Associated Press Continues to Act As Hamas’ PR Firm With Insulting Headline About How Bibas Family Died.
BREAKING: A body released by Palestinian militants overnight was confirmed by the family to be of Shiri Bibas, the Israeli mother whose sons also died in captivity. https://t.co/fcIypPLcGV
— The Associated Press (@AP) February 22, 2025
‘Died in captivity.’
No. The Bibas family were taken hostage by Hamas a year and a half ago. Her children were murdered in November 2023, and once Israel completes an autopsy on Shiri Bibas, we’re certain they’ll find the same.
The wordsmithing of this headline is absolutely ghoulish. "Died in captivity??" *That* is the way you choose to frame their story? You are 100% the #EnemyOfThePeople and a disgrace to both journalism and humanity.
— CarolinaConservative3 (@1776Carolina3) February 22, 2025
Wire services played a major role in disseminating news in the first half of the 20th century, when building the first radio and then TV networks was a tremendously difficult and expensive proposition. Because there were comparatively few national news outlets back then, those that existed had to at least feign some sense of objectivity. And if those conditions still existed in 2025, then AP might have a case today. (And they still might, if they can shop their lawsuit to one of the proverbial sympathetic far left “Hawaiian judges,” of the type that hamstrung President Trump’s first term.) But given how biased AP’s reporting has become in recent decades, and their role in allowing Team Biden to hide the (p)resident’s cognitive decline for four years, they are simply yet another leftist legacy news source, and should be treated as such.
SHOW ME YOU’RE A JEALOUS MIDWIT WITHOUT — WELL, NO, YOU’RE PRETTY MUCH TELLING ME YOU’RE A JEALOUS MIDWIT, TOO: Musk Biographer Claims There Is Zero Evidence Elon Musk Is Smart. “Boeing can’t make a space capsule anymore; the Space Launch System is a boondoggle, and Starlink and SpaceX are indispensable to the world. Musk did that. Tesla and SpaceX did not appear out of thin air, everybody said that their success was impossible and they have never been duplicated, and Blue Origin began with the same advantages as SpaceX–more, really–and has accomplished next to nothing. Everybody goes gaga over Nikola Tesla, rightly so, but he doesn’t hold a candle to Elon Musk. The world’s space industry would be 1/20th the size it is without Musk.”
TAIBBI HAS A GREAT IDEA: If you aren’t reading Matt Taibbi’s Substack column (ditto Glenn’s on Substack) on a regular basis, you are missing all kinds of important analyses, information, rebuttals and resources. And today, Taibbi offers up a great reference source that has the potential to spark a revolution in digital news tools. Here’s how he describes it:
“This morning, I sent out an article titled: ‘The Library: Timeline of Foreign Censorship Laws.’ It’s neither a news article, nor a finished product. It’s simply a chronological list of primary source documents around the theme of foreign speech laws. Twitter Files and/or FOIA documents may appear in these collections.
“The idea will be to create similar reference homes for emerging news stories: about USAID contracts, the EPA ‘gold bars’ scandal, court challenges to the Trump administration, whistleblower complaints, declassified information about controversies like Covid, and anything else that comes up.
“We’re living through a period of revolutionary change and are awash in revelations and document releases, yet few outlets are making an effort to show core materials. As these stories come out, I’m encouraging readers who work in relevant fields, follow these narratives, or who simply want to pitch in, to write to: library@racket.news, especially if they know of documents that should be added.”
This is an idea that ought to catch on quickly.
THE AP’S GLEE IS PALPABLE: President Trump Criticizes Elon Musk.
READER FAVORITE: Alpha Grillers Meat Thermometer Digital. #CommissionEarned
I’M LOVING THIS.
"What would you say, you do here?" pic.twitter.com/aYrStVSHMk
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) February 22, 2025
Related:
It works https://t.co/TFkpHlJa7a
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2025
Also:
Kash talked about doing this before being nominated, and it's great to see it happening. Hunstville has a major FBI field training center at Redstone Arsenal. This seems to indicate he is getting them out of office cubicles and out there to doing forensics and tactical…
— Free To Speak (@FreeToSpeak71) February 22, 2025
Let them fight actual crime outside of DC, rather than commit crimes in DC. And Huntsville is hardly a place of exile; it’s a very nice university town and nowadays the largest city in Alabama, though that perhaps says as much about Birmingham’s urban decay as about Huntsville’s growth.
Also:
I FEEL LIKE THE LUXURY SEDAN MARKET ISN’T AS IMPORTANT AS IT USED TO BE: Mercedes Is Readying a Significant S-Class Update for 2026.
As I said when I looked at the Maybach sedan, it would be nice if I had a driver, but most of the luxury is in the back seat. I do like that you can still get a V8, though a friend of mine is hoarding his V12.
Plus: “Mercedes’ plan to retain gas engines is likely a smart move, as buyers have proven to be fickle when it comes to high-priced EVs, especially with performance models like those made and tuned by AMG.”
At present, EVs are a niche product.
WELL, YES:
This is precisely it: 99% of the criticisms of Trump consists of shock that he is presuming to be president. https://t.co/xtayPSbR8x
— Jeffrey A Tucker (@jeffreyatucker) February 22, 2025
THE LONG MARCH THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS: Kash Patel Is Already Making Huge Changes at the FBI.
READER FAVORITE: 1,500 Sq.Ft Energy Star Dehumidifier for Basement. #CommissionEarned
MARK JUDGE: Justine Bateman and the return of the 1980s.
The New York Times is afraid that the 1980s are coming back.
In a recent column, “The 1980s are back, and not in a good way,” writer Elizabeth Spiers lamented that President Donald Trump has brought back the era of greed, when “being rich and preppy looked cool.” As in the Reagan era, young people are “rejecting the progressive politics of their elders.” Even fashion’s taken on “a slightly modernized 80s look.”
To which I say, awesome. The 1980s were not only fun — something that wokeness has tried to kill — but were also the first pushback against what historian James Piereson calls “punitive liberalism.” Punitive liberalism was hatched in the 1960s. It is the idea that America is a corrupt and sinful nation that needs to be punished.
Punitive liberalism fell out of favor in the 1980s, but crept back in the 1990s — and became a nasty contagion in the Obama years. Wokeness is nuclear-powered punitive liberalism. Everyone is racist, everyone is homophobic, capitalism is evil, shame, shame, shame.
Elizabeth Spiers exemplifies this negativity. She once admired the 80s as a young girl in rural Alabama, but now knows better: “for much of the world, the shining city on a hill [President Reagan evoked] appeared more like the distant compound of a Bond villain.
Read the whole thing.
IT’S NOT EASY TO BE A VIKING: Viking skulls inspected with CT scans reveal severe morbidity.
TRUMP FIRES CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF. Can You Guess Why?
Donald Trump is still draining the swamp, and this time, he has set his sights on the Pentagon. On Friday, Trump gave the boot to Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr., the woke warrior serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Brown is a cheerleader for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and that made his firing inevitable.
The ouster of Brown, only the second Black general to serve as chairman, is sure to send shock waves through the Pentagon. His 16 months in the job had been consumed with the war in Ukraine and the expanded conflict in the Middle East.
[…]
Brown’s public support of Black Lives Matter after the police killing of George Floyd had made him fodder for the administration’s wars against “wokeism” in the military. His ouster is the latest upheaval at the Pentagon, which plans to cut 5,400 civilian probationary workers starting next week and identify $50 billion in programs that could be cut next year to redirect those savings to fund Trump’s priorities.
“I want to thank General Charles ‘CQ’ Brown for his over 40 years of service to our country, including as our current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Trump said in a statement he posted on Truth Social. “He is a fine gentleman and an outstanding leader, and I wish a great future for him and his family.”
Trump is replacing Brown with Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, a no-nonsense pick who, fingers crossed, won’t spend his days fretting over pronouns or racial quotas.
“Today, I am honored to announce that I am nominating Air Force Lieutenant General Dan ‘Razin’ Caine to be the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Trump continued. “General Caine is an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a ‘warfighter’ with significant interagency and special operations experience.”
CNN and Susan Rice hardest hit: CNN Panelist Drops Reality Check on Susan Rice After She Has Meltdown Over Firing of Joint Chiefs Chair.
But replacing Brown wasn’t sitting well with Democrats like Susan Rice, who had a meltdown. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins set the tone saying she heard from unidentified source (a retired general, supposedly) who thought that this was “sadly political” and “tragic.” Rice shook her head sadly, as though this was a tragedy.
The Obama Machine is very unhappy about Trump’s new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs —
— Susan Rice laments Trump “politicizing” a formerly “apolitical” military:
“We have always had an extraordinarily apolitical professional military. It's one of our greatest strengths as a… pic.twitter.com/2xfQIpzLRF
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) February 22, 2025
Rice told Collins:
“We have always had an extraordinarily apolitical professional military It’s one of our greatest strengths as a democracy. We have civilian control, but we have men and women in our military of all backgrounds who are super highly qualified, and who serve with honor and serve with integrity and without politicization.
And now, suddenly, Donald Trump is bringing politics into the process of determining who should be our military leaders.
That is dangerous. It’s unprecedented. And it does not bode well for our integrity as a democracy.
What is it that he expects that Gen. Caine will do that one of the sitting four stars will not do? That’s the question we all need to be asking ourselves. They all take an oath to the Constitution to the United States, not to any individual president or any individual leader.”
Perhaps Susan Rice would like to check in on what her boss Barack Obama did in the past, in what some called a “coup” and a “purge” of 197 military officers to align the military with more of what he wanted? That was damaging and unprecedented.
Keep reading, for the obligatory “Scott Jennings explains to the CNN panel how the world actually works” moment. Exit quote: “If Susan Rice is unhappy, that pretty much confirms what a great move this is.”
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