June 12, 2025

THE ENEMY WITHIN:

From the replies: “Ah yes, because Anne Frank was subsequently put on a plane back to her home country, right?”

Posted at 3:51 pm by Stephen Green 5

CBO REFORM PUSH GATHERS STEAM: Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wisc.) and a bipartisan coalition of House colleagues are sponsoring the “Stop the Baseline Bloat Act of 2025.” The measure focuses on an admittedly obscure problem — the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) considering emergency spending as permanent — about which most people couldn’t care less.

But that obscurity doesn’t negate the importance of what the Grothman proposal does – banning CBO from including temporary spending in long-term projections. The reason its important is fatter baselines help the legions of congressional sufferers from Federal Spending Addiction (FSA) keep increasing their fixes.

The fact there are co-sponsors from both parties on this one is an encouragement sign that perhaps sanity is mounting a comeback on the House floor.

Posted at 3:33 pm by Mark Tapscott 13

ROLL THEM UP:

Posted at 3:01 pm by Glenn Reynolds 179

PLEASE MAKE HIS DREAM COME TRUE: New woke Seattle police chief claims he will likely be arrested after vowing not to cooperate with ICE. “Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes declared Tuesday that he would risk prison time to protect Seattle residents’ First Amendment rights from what he described as hypothetical federal overreach in the city under the Trump administration, despite no indication from the White House or the federal government that they were planning on targeting him or the department. The remarks were delivered during a City Council Public Safety Committee meeting, as rioters have spent consecutive nights targeting a federal building downtown.”

Previously:

Posted at 2:49 pm by Stephen Green 51

NEW CIVILITY WATCH:

 

 

Posted at 2:40 pm by Ed Driscoll 150

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot:

Chaser:

● Rep. Maxine Waters Jokes About Threatening Trump Supporters ‘All The Time.’

● Maxine Waters: ‘Americans should be out in the streets screaming’ for Trump’s head.

● Democrat Maxine Waters Makes Public Call For Harassment & Violence Against Members of Trump Administration.

● Democrats Nuke Censure Of Maxine Waters For Incitement Of Violence In Minnesota.

● Maxine Waters Tells Protestors To “Get More Confrontational.”

● YouTube deletes Maxine Waters promise to ‘go and take out Trump.’

UPDATE: ‘I call it a rebellion:’ Maxine Waters’ history of enflaming crowds, from Rodney King to today.

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll 101

GREAT MOMENTS IN ENVIRONMENTALISM: At least since 2009, the New Republic has been championing electric vehicles, and has long been a proponent of radical environmentalism in general.

But as with the recent Tesla arsonists, they’re willing to make exceptions when it’s expedient: The Symbolic Power of Burning Waymo Robotaxis.

The fact the article ran in TNR’s “Climate” section is just perfect:

There’s no telling precisely why protesters have targeted Waymos in recent days; people tend not to publicly volunteer explanations for their illegal activities. But there are any number of possible practical and political reasons why they might. Some taking to the streets have reportedly dubbed Waymos “spy cars,” thanks to surveillance footage collected by 360-degree cameras that, as 404 News reported, has previously been obtained and published by the Los Angeles Police Department. Google—Waymo’s parent company—hands over that data upon request, typically via court order, warrant, or subpoena. Like other Silicon Valley firms, Google and its parent company, Alphabet, have either directly or through third parties entered lucrative contracts with the federal government, including ICE. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai attended Trump’s inauguration, to which Google donated $1 million. That company also recently removed a pledge in its AI principles to not develop or deploy products that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm.” Alphabet’s cloud computing unit in April expanded its partnership with fellow defense contractor Palantir to allow for the “reliable and responsible deployment of AI solutions” from Anthropic “for sensitive government use cases.” Andreessen Horowitz—the venture capital fund run by Trump ally Marc Andreessen, known as a16z—was also an early investor in Waymo.

Again, nobody really knows why Waymos were vandalized. Maybe they offered a convenient, on-demand way to block traffic that would inconvenience Google executives rather than regular people who need their cars to get to work and the grocery store. While less common in the United States, burning cars are a ubiquitous part of large-scale protests just about everywhere else on the planet. Waymos were vandalized well before recent protests in Los Angeles for a number of reasons laid out by Brian Merchant, the author of Blood in the Machine. Among them seems to be their tendency to honk at each other outside of apartment buildings at 4 a.m.

But you don’t need to look into the mind of a protester to see the symbolic power of a robotaxi. It’s easy to comprehend what they stand for: an effort by the richest people on earth to eliminate employees and any other human friction that might get in the way of profit or interrupt their efforts to cozy up to the Trump administration and aid in its quest to terrorize millions of people. Robotaxis can also just be really f***ing annoying. These aren’t unrelated phenomena.

Ned Ludd smiles.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll 31

YES, AND? CNN’s Ron Brownstein: Trump Sees LA as ‘Hostile Territory to Be Subdued.’

Wednesday morning, The Situation Room aired CNN political analyst and Bloomberg opinion writer, Ron Brownstein, in order to talk about the ongoing situation in Los Angeles, California. Brownstein tried his best to create clear division between parties while downplaying the events of the riots and made President Trump the aggressor attempting to “subdue blue jurisdictions” by using the military.

As read by co-host Wolf Blitzer, Brownstein wrote this in a Bloomberg piece, “Trump is governing as a wartime president, with blue America, rather than any foreign adversary, as the enemy. He is trying to use national power for factional ends: to impose the priorities of red America onto blue states and cities that have rejected them.”

Yesterday, Rich Lowry wrote, “We’ve all heard of the heckler’s veto. Karen Bass wants a rioter’s veto. The Los Angeles mayor maintains that everything would be fine if federal agents weren’t enforcing federal law in her city.”

But Barack Obama would like a word here:

Additionally, as I wrote in 2009, “President Obama has demonstrated that he’s always eager to view American politics as the continuation of warfare by other means, to flip von Clausewitz’s axiom on its head. Certainly class and culture warfare at least. It’s the Chicago way, after all.”

In December of 2022, Roger Kimball noted: The Deep State vs Donald Trump saga is not over.

The January 6 Committee, illegally constituted as it was, was a continuation of that work by other means — more or less in the sense that Carl von Clausewitz had in mind when he said that war was “nichts als die Fortsetzung des politischen Verkehrs mit der Einmischung anderer Mittel.” Ever since Donald Trump glided down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his bid for the presidency, the leviathan has been out to get him.

The left has always been the initiator in the culture war. And they always seem surprised and angry whenever the right fights back, particularly when it adopts the left’s tactics and/or uses the new rules the left creates against them.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll 59

WHERE’S DONIE? CNN’s Emmy-Nominated ‘Extremism’ Reporter Goes Missing Amid Outburst of Left-Wing Violence.

Maybe O’Sullivan is simply afraid to report on left-wing violence. In Los Angeles, the peaceful hooligans have been handing out fliers threatening journalists who attempt to film or photograph them, the sort of behavior that journalists routinely denounce as “fascist” or “extreme” when anyone else does it.

Update: O’Sullivan has finally surfaced. Sort of. He appears to have been hard at work producing a new segment for CNN. Does it have anything to do with the alarming outbursts of left-wing violence? No, of course not. He went to a conference of UFO enthusiasts and spoke to a “UFO lobbyist” who thinks Donald Trump will soon confirm the existence of alien life. “Greetings, do you all come in peace?” he told a group of freaks getting off a bus in the California desert. “We’re all Earthlings here.” 

O’Sullivan has made clear that he finds the concept of left-wing extremism and political violence to be rather giggle-inducing. In one episode of his Emmy-nomited series, he conducted a friendly interview with Taylor Lorenz, the demented former New York Times journalist who accused Joe Biden of commiting “genocide” by refusing to impose COVID-related mask mandates. They discussed how Lorenz and other left-wing freaks were fawning over Luigi Mangione, the cold-blooded assassin who gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

More great optics from CNN, where O’Sullivan and Lorenz laugh it up over leftist murders…

…And Brian Stelter excuses away leftist rioters:

During 2020’s Summer of Love, Jim Geraghty explored “The Rising Tide of Anti-Journalism:”

We’re witnessing an odd transformation in the media world. Increasingly, the debate within mainstream media institutions is what must not be written about, reported, or discussed.

* * * * * * * *

Major institutions of American journalism have decided that certain viewpoints must not be expressed within their pages, and certain factions and narratives must not be questioned, challenged, or opposed. Certain arguments must not be heard, certain supporting evidence must not be examined; certain ideas are simply too dangerous or malevolent to be brought to a wider audience. We are instructed that the very expression of them in any form makes certain staffers “feel unsafe” and thus must be treated as akin to a physical assault.

This is not the pursuit of knowledge; this is the avoidance of knowledge. This is not curiosity; this is an ironclad certainty that everything that is needed to be known about any given subject is already known. This is not informing the audience about what is going on in the world; this is making sure they don’t hear what is going on in the world, because it might run counter to a preferred narrative.

Whatever you want to call what these institutions are doing now, this is not journalism. This is anti-journalism.

Apparently, the new purpose of an opinions and editorial section is to reassure and soothe, not challenge or provoke. Shortly after internal outrage about Tom Cotton’s op-ed led to the ousting of James Bennet as the acting editorial-page editor of the New York Times, Katie Kingsbury, a deputy editorial-page editor, told the staff of the opinion section, “any piece of Opinion journalism — including headlines or social posts or photos or you name it — that gives you the slightest pause, please call or text me immediately.”

Hey, speaking of Tom Cotton:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll 38

JON CALDERA: Why has Boulder become the ideal soft target for violence?

The city pastime in Boulder is not baseball. It’s virtue signaling.

According to census data, more than 15% of Aurora’s population is “Black or African American.” Boulder’s population is only 1.02% African American. Boulder’s racist housing policies make it nearly impossible for poorer people, mostly people of color, to live there. Yet Boulder is the undisputed champion for most white households with “Black Lives Matter” yard signs.

The message is clear. Just because black lives matter, it doesn’t mean we want them living next to us. We’ll make an exception for Deion Sanders.

As a whole, Boulderites are unaware of how people outside of their elitist bubble perceive them. If you are off your rocker, planning to do violence, are you pulled to target the place where everyone not only knows they are better than everyone else, but must announce it?

Then there are some practicalities of violence to consider. If you are going to go on a violent rampage, the last thing you’d need is some armed citizen putting a quick end to you and your fun.

El Paso County has the highest number of concealed weapons permit holders, around 50,000, while Boulder County has about 3,000. Additionally, Boulder made carrying a gun in seemingly every place illegal.

Only 50,000 CCW holders here in El Paso County? I’m doing my part but those are rookie numbers.

Posted at 12:45 pm by Stephen Green 71

UP IN SMOKE: One of California’s most expensive licenses is now basically worthless.

A license to legally sell cannabis in California was once a coveted item, with some selling for millions of dollars. But now, as the California market’s struggles have left some pot licenses effectively worthless, that exuberance has turned into gloom.

Case in point: One cannabis company is offering its retail license in the Southern California city of Oxnard for “free” to anyone who will assume responsibility for paying the lease on the retail location, which has not yet opened for business. The listing still prices the license at $35,000, but broker Meilad Rafiei confirmed to SFGATE the seller is willing to walk away without getting any cash.

“From day one I was telling [the license holders], I don’t know if there’s any value here,” Rafiei said.

Rafiei, the CEO of cannabis industry consulting firm WeCann, said the Oxnard license could have once been sold for as much as $3 million, making the current deal a stunning drop in value.

Ryan George, the CEO of 420Property.com, which is a marketplace for cannabis licenses and real estate, said during the early years of legalization, licenses could trade from $500,000 to $3 million, with one Santa Ana license selling for $8 million. Now he’s increasingly seeing licenses trade for free as they become “effectively worthless” in certain areas.

“Fast forward to today, and the picture has changed dramatically. Market saturation, regulatory challenges, and competition from the illicit market have driven values down,” George said in an email.

As Steve wrote last week, “Sacramento forgot that, long before legalization, California had a robust ‘unlicensed’ infrastructure in place for the production, distribution, and sale of pot. Were they stupid enough to think they could tax and regulate licensed producers and sellers to the point where their product was more expensive than the ‘unlicensed’ stuff — and still collect their precious taxes? I suppose they were that stupid.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 198

NEW MILKEN INSTITUTE REPORT OUTLINES HOLLYWOOD’S BLEAK FUTURE (video):

In the current issue of Commentary, Rob Long implores, “Stop Giving Show Business Free Money:”

Let me tell you what happens when you give a movie studio some money: They use it to give themselves raises. In the same way that the union contracts of 2023 led to the Great Irish-Hungarian Exodus, the sugar that the state and global governments sprinkle on production budgets just helps us pay more to the above-the-line, high-salaried players. When I was shooting a show in New York State, for instance, the cash rebate allowed us to hire a lot of expensive writers (from Los Angeles) and a line producer (from Los Angeles) and a do-nothing non-writing producer (from Los Angeles) and an overpaid showrunner who ended up getting the show cancelled (me). When the show was done with, we moved out of the Grumman plant, and to my knowledge, it’s still empty. How, exactly, did the New York State taxpayer win?

And finally, there’s the impossible task of deciding what a “foreign” production really is. Rob Lowe’s show, The Floor, appears on American television with American contestants. It’s shot in Ireland, was developed by a Dutch company, and appears in versions all over the world. Is it Dutch? Is it American? Is it Irish? Do we slap Rob Lowe with a 100 percent tax? Or do we subtract the part of the budget that’s coming back to the United States and tax only the Irish portion?

Or do we just let show business figure out how to make stuff at home? Look, nobody wants to leave sunny, relaxed Los Angeles for rainy Ireland or spooky old Budapest. People in show business want to drive their cars from Brentwood to one of the studios and then head back to their giant kitchens with farmhouse sinks. What show business needs to do is what every other business needs to do, at some point, and that’s to come to grips with economic reality or go broke. What it doesn’t need—from the taxpayer, or the president—is help.

To revise and extend the remarks by the late P.J. O’Rourke, you can’t get good Chinese takeout in China, Cuban cigars are rationed in Cuba, and the TV and movie industry is failing in California. That’s all you need to know about communism.

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 42