March 19, 2025

March 18, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Woke up on this groovy Tuesday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 1655

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: A Nation, Not A Side Quest. We’re lucky to have Elon to help save us, but let’s turn America into a nation that doesn’t need saving.

As always, if you like these essays, please sign up for a paid subscription. I thank you, and my family thanks you.

Posted at 9:06 pm by Glenn Reynolds 112

DON’T GET COCKY: The Democratic Party Is Collapsing. “If you have had difficulty finding some reason to support the Democratic Party and its increasingly bizarre policy positions, you are not alone. Two national polls released on Sunday reveal that the party’s favorability ratings have plunged to catastrophic lows. According to a new NBC News survey, just 27 percent of registered voters hold a positive view of the Democratic Party — its lowest rating since 1990. Likewise, a new CNN poll indicates that only 29 percent of U.S. adults regard the party favorably — a low not seen since 1992. These two polls confirm an equally ominous Quinnipiac survey conducted last month. Both surveys clearly illuminate why the public harbors such a low opinion of the Democrats, and why this is very unlikely to change.”

I should note that Bill Clinton took the White House two years after that previous 27 percent low. I don’t think the Democrats have another Bill Clinton waiting in the wings. Gavin Newsom seems to be traversing in that direction, but his track record is too damning, and he comes across as a bit creepy and unlikable. The Democrats’ male Meghan Markle.

Posted at 7:42 pm by Glenn Reynolds 230

THEY’RE ALL GOING CRAZY AT ONCE.

Related:

Posted at 7:36 pm by Glenn Reynolds 282

VINDICATION FOR TWO IRS WHISTLEBLOWERS: They blew the whistle on how the IRS and Justice Department were taking care of Hunter Biden. Their reward? Isolation, denigration, defamation, and much more, all of it debilitating. But now these two brave guys are being promoted to positions that enable them to have a major say in the reorganization of the tax agency. It’s a step toward justice.

Posted at 7:25 pm by Mark Tapscott 34

YES, THE THEFT IS THE LEAST OF IT:

Posted at 6:49 pm by Glenn Reynolds 79

I’M PRETTY SURE THAT MEANS THAT IT IS A WIN: China’s Xi Is Angered by Panama Port Deal That Trump Touted as a Win.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is angry about a Hong Kong company’s plan to sell Panama Canal ports to a U.S.-led group, in part because the company didn’t seek Beijing’s approval in advance, people familiar with the matter said.

The Xi leadership had originally planned to use the Panama port issue as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Trump administration, according to people close to Beijing’s decision-making, only to see the rug pulled out from under it.

President Trump, who in the first minutes of his administration called for the U.S. to reassert control over the canal, celebrated the deal as a victory over Chinese interests in America’s backyard, turning Panama into a symbol of the U.S.-China battle for global influence.

Xi’s unhappiness suggests he, too, sees the canal that way and doesn’t like to be painted as the loser. His government republished a commentary last week describing the deal as a betrayal of the Chinese people.

Boo freakin’ hoo.

Posted at 6:17 pm by Glenn Reynolds 91

KURT SCHLICHTER: Boot the Ungrateful Foreigners the Hell Out of America.

I am loving this uproar over that communist terrorist fluffer from Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil, who the feds detained with an eye towards booting his sorry rear out of our glorious country. First, I love how the commies are crying about it, how suddenly they care about free speech even though they carried absolutely nothing about free speech when normal patriotic Americans were being rounded up for daring to oppose abortion and bogus elections. I love how they’re calling his totally legitimate arrest a “kidnapping” when this guy’s unseemly and eager onanism over his dirtbag Palestinian buddies’ kidnapping of innocent Israelis is what got him busted in the first place. But mostly, I love this imbroglio because it shows that we Americans are not going to take any more guff from uppity foreigners.

We’re booting this tool out of our great country. It may take a bit of time to wind its way through the courts, but he’s gone. We should be booting his wife out, too, before she drops her kid – hey, a fetus leftists don’t want to kill! – and it gets American citizenship. In fact, we should boot out all these agitators and malcontents, deporting every single weirdo, loser, and mutation who hates America and thinks they have a free pass to try and gin up their Marxist revolution here on our sacred soil.
We’re done. We tried tolerance, and they attacked Jewish Americans. They would murder the rest of us too given the chance, so we’re not giving them one. Get the hell out.

And they will get the hell out. The law is very clear, and it’s very clear that this guy is going to soon be on a one-way flight to whatever geographic zit he popped out of. So will a bunch of his fellow travelers. See, we’re done with ungrateful foreigners. We’re not taking it anymore. American idiots are bad enough. We don’t need to import any more idiots. In fact, we need tariffs, idiot tariffs. And idiot reparations from the garbage countries they come from, but that’s down the road.

Related: Whoopi: ‘Any One of Us Could Find Ourselves Being Deported’ By Trump.

The Trump administration’s deportation of several violent Venezuelan gang members who were in the country illegally made the liberal ladies of ABC News’s The View very upset, Monday morning. Co-host Sunny Hostin called it a “constitutional crisis” while Ana Navarro suggested it was an attack on the Venezuelan Americans who voted for President Trump (she also basked in their purported misery). But moderator Whoopi Goldberg took the most factually inaccurate stand when she erroneously claimed it was evidence that any American could find themselves deported by Trump.

I’m not much of a fan of ABC’s News division, but unlike Whoopi, even I wouldn’t compare them to terroristic Venezuelan gang members. What is she trying to imply about the corporate hell-world in which she’s forced to work?

Evergreen:

UPDATE:

Heh, indeed.™

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 186

DON’T GET COCKY: ‘Bunch Of Losers:’ Dems’ Emerging 2028 Field May Not Bode Well For Liberals.

Political strategists are not yet sold that Democrats rumored to be prospective 2028 presidential candidates have all that it takes to unite the party and retake the White House.

Failed 2024 candidates Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and a handful of Democrat governors — Gavin Newsom of California, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Wes Moore of Maryland  — are all thought to be potentially sizing up runs for the White House in 2028 as Democrats try to fight their way out of the political wilderness. Even though there is still plenty of road to go before the campaign kicks off, the prospective candidates could find it quite difficult to unite the party and appeal to enough of America to win back the presidency, pundits told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“We are in what has been referred to as the ‘invisible primary’ phase of the election cycle, because it is so early and the public isn’t paying attention to these early machinations,” Len Foxwell, a Maryland-based Democratic strategist, told the DCNF. “The only ones who are participating in the process at this point are the prospective candidates themselves and a relatively small and insular ecosystem of donors and party activists and elected officials who do this sort of thing, either as a passion or as a profession. It’s a very small and limited process right now, but it’s definitely happening.”

Related: VDH asks: What Are the Left’s Solutions for the Problems They Created?

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 150

LOW COST? DID SOMETHING GO WRONG? BlueHalo’s FE-1 Low-Cost Surface-To-Air Missile Fired For First Time. “The successful live-fire demonstration of the FE-1 Controlled Test Vehicle (CTV) was only recently announced but took place from Jan. 16-18 this year, at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona. It was conducted as part of the Next-Generation C-UAS Missile (NGCM) program, which aims to ramp up America’s munitions industrial base to meet rapidly evolving aerial threats, specifically drones.”

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green 45

WAIT, YOU TOLD ME HE WAS HITLER. NOW YOU WANT TO NEGOTIATE WITH HIM? Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo and More Than 400 Hollywood Names Urge Trump to Not Let AI Companies ‘Exploit’ Copyrighted Works.

More than 400 Hollywood creative leaders signed an open letter to the Trump White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, urging the administration to not roll back copyright protections at the behest of AI companies.

The filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians and others — which included Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Erivo, Cate Blanchett, Cord Jefferson, Paul McCartney, Ron Howard and Taika Waititi — were submitting comments for the Trump administration’s U.S. AI Action Plan⁠. The letter specifically was penned in response to recent submissions to the Office of Science and Technology Policy from OpenAI and Google, which asserted that U.S. copyright law allows (or should allow) allow AI companies to train their system on copyrighted works without obtaining permission from (or compensating) rights holders.

“We firmly believe that America’s global AI leadership must not come at the expense of our essential creative industries,” the letter says in part. The letter claims that “AI companies are asking to undermine this economic and cultural strength by weakening copyright protections for the films, television series, artworks, writing, music and voices used to train AI models at the core of multibillion-dollar corporate valuations.”

That’s quite a newfound sense of patriotism for an industry that normally professes to hate America and has thrown its lot in with the CCP. But as Conquest’s First Law of Politics states, “Everybody is conservative about what he knows best.”

Still though, maybe you shouldn’t have gone all-in on the Hitler and Nazi stuff for the past decade, huh?

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 244