May 15, 2025

WATCH THIS LEGISLATOR RUN HEAD FIRST INTO A BRICK WALL OF LOGIC.

Posted at 12:19 am by Charles Glasser 13

May 14, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Never wear anything that panics the cat.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 1532

AFTER 100 DAYS OF DOGE:

How well is DOGE doing in reducing wasteful government spending 100 days after President Trump jump-started its efforts? The President renamed and retasked the 12-year-old executive branch agency on January 20, 2025, to identify and eliminate fiscal waste within the federal government. DOGE became very visible thanks to the involvement of billionaire Elon Musk, who serves as a temporary government employee advising the service.

Despite that visibility, answering the question of how much money it has saved to date is challenging.

If you go to DOGE’s website, it reports $160 billion worth of savings, or almost $994 per taxpayer. However, Jordan Green of the Memphis Commercial Appeal reviewed the receipts posted at the site, finding they summed up to be over $61 billion, leaving around $100 billion yet to be fully accounted for.

Related: Christopher Rufo: Washington Got the Better of Elon Musk. The tech tycoon’s Department of Government Efficiency was prevented from achieving its full reform agenda.

Posted at 9:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 133

JONTHAN TURLEY: Oregon Law Professor Accuses Oregon Law Review of Anti-Israeli Discrimination.

The University of Oregon has long faced controversies over the alleged political bias on its campuses, including celebrating the career of a professor who physically attacked pro-life students as a model of activism. It has been criticized for monitoring off-campus speech and unconstitutionally censoring dissenting faculty. Now, Law Professor Ofer Raban is accusing the Law Review and school administrators of discriminating against an Israeli professor who was allegedly rejected for publication because of his association with an Israeli university.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Paul Caron.)

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 17

TINY MUMMIES DIG BIG MEMORY HOLE: In “How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump,” the excerpt from the new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson published at the New Yorker, the Woodward and Bernstein of the 2024 campaign write:

“We got so screwed by Biden, as a party,” David Plouffe, who helped run the Harris campaign, told us. Plouffe had served as Senator Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign manager in 2008 and as a senior adviser to President Obama before largely retiring from politics in 2013. After Biden dropped out of the race, on July 21, 2024, Plouffe was drafted to help Harris in what he saw as a “rescue mission.” Harris, he said, was a “great soldier,” but the compressed hundred-and-seven-day race was “a fucking nightmare.”

“And it’s all Biden,” Plouffe said. By deciding to run for reëlection and then waiting more than three weeks after the debate to bow out, Plouffe added, “He totally fucked us.”

The real issue wasn’t his age, per se. It was the clear limitations of his abilities, which got worse throughout his Presidency. What the public saw of his functioning was concerning. What was going on in private was worse. While Biden on a day-in, day-out basis could certainly make decisions and assert wisdom and act as President, there were several significant issues that complicated his Presidency: a limit to the hours in which he could reliably function and an increasing number of moments when he seemed to freeze up, lose his train of thought, forget the names of top aides, or momentarily not remember friends he’d known for decades. Not to mention impairments to his ability to communicate—ones unrelated to his lifelong stutter.

It wasn’t a straight line of decline; he had good days and bad. But, until the last day of his Presidency, Biden and those closest to him refused to admit the reality that his energy, cognitive skills, and communication capacity had faltered considerably. Even worse, through various means, they tried to hide it. And then came the June 27th debate against Trump, when Biden’s decline was laid bare before the world. As a result, Democrats stumbled into the fall of 2024 with an untested nominee and growing public mistrust of a White House that had been gaslighting the American people.
“It was an abomination,” one prominent Democratic strategist—who publicly defended Biden—told us. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party. He stole it from the American people.” Biden had framed his entire Presidency as a pitched battle to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office. By not relinquishing power and refusing to be honest with himself and the country about his decline, he guaranteed it.

Curiously, in 2023, the New Yorker was running articles with headlines such as, “Joe Biden’s 2024 Opening Argument: It’s Me or the Abyss:”

Now it’s official: President Joe Biden is running for reëlection. In his opening argument of a campaign that will span the next eighteen months, he portrayed himself as a bulwark against right-wing assaults on freedom, democracy, and social rights. “That’s been the work of my first term, to fight for our democracy,” Biden said, in a three-minute campaign video posted online Tuesday that opens with footage of Trump supporters storming the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.

Biden cast the entire Republican Party as an extremist, Trump-dominated organization that is attacking basic American values. Around the country, he said, “MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms, cutting Social Security that you paid for your entire life . . . dictating what health-care decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love.”

The video, parts of which were filmed at the President’s home in Delaware, was short on policy pronouncements and large on the broader themes that he has sounded since he announced that he was running for the White House four years ago, and has further emphasized since the January 6th attack. Biden argued that a “battle for the soul of America” is still raging, as fundamental rights and liberties are in peril. The video includes images of Biden and civil-rights campaigners walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma; of him with Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom he nominated to become the first African American Justice on the Supreme Court; and of demonstrators protesting the high court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade. “This is not a time to be complacent,” he said. “That’s why I’m running for reëlection.”

The New Yorker could have noted that Biden rarely appears on camera delivering the above speech. Most of it is audio only, likely because editing audio together is much easier than video — there are no jump cuts to hide; it’s easier to smooth out “umms” and “errs” and cut out pauses when there’s no picture to worry about. And yet, he still slurs a few words. Biden only appears on camera in short moments delivering a couple of the key phrases of his speech:

The New Yorker has occasionally done real journalism — in 2014, Dexter Filkins reported on how Obama tossed aside hard-won gains in Iraq. But no Democrats — least of all Jake Tapper, Alex Thompson, and the staff of the New Yorker wanted to be first to say that Biden was cooked.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 8:00 pm by Ed Driscoll 244

COLONIALISM, STRAIGHT UP:

Posted at 6:14 pm by Stephen Green 251

THE 2028 GAME IS AFOOT: Gavin Newsom Twisted So Hard Right That He Might Get Impeached. “That’s a joke, obviously. Democrats never impeach their own, even after they become liabilities; they just exile them to the political wilderness. You and I have spent the last week or so watching them attempting to do just that to a sitting Democrat senator, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman. If Republicans had the same ruthless instincts, John McCain’s last public appearance would’ve been around 1990 — on the side of a milk carton.”

Posted at 5:23 pm by Stephen Green 86

MISSISSIPPI RISING: Look South for progress in reading achievement.

In 2003, Mississippi was worst in the nation, next to Washington, D.C., for fourth-grade reading on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), Daly writes. Now, Mississippi ranks fifth. “When the Urban Institute adjusted national test results for student demographics, Mississippi ranked first in fourth-grade reading and math, fourth in eighth-grade reading and first in math.

Black students in dirt-poor, low-spending Mississippi outperform black students elsewhere by large margins, Daly writes. “The average black student in Mississippi performed about 1.5 grade levels ahead of the average black student in Wisconsin,” which “spends about 35 percent more per pupil.”

The success of Mississippi and other Southern states “have been dutifully and perfunctorily name-checked in news stories,” Daly writes, but he sees “a reluctance among national voices to extol Deep South examples as worthy of emulation.”

That last bit speaks volumes about our elites putting snobbery over results.

Posted at 4:52 pm by Stephen Green 96