Normally I expect that Jon Stewart, freshly back hosting The Daily Show on Mondays, will use his show to bash Trump. But this week he surprised by using a 15-minute opening segment to bash the media’s coverage of the Trump trial going on right now in Manhattan. I have to say it is pretty effective at making the media look stupid.
It goes off the rails when he brings on Daily Show correspondent Jessica Williams at the 12 minute mark, and you can skip the rest at that point.
Joe Biden believes that his uncle, Second Lt. Ambrose J. Finnegan Jr., could have been eaten by cannibals after being shot down over Papua New Guinea during World War II. There is no evidence for the claim, and current PNG president James Marape protests that “my country does not deserve to be labeled as such.” While this plays out, let me tell you about my uncle, World War II veteran James Richard Billingsley.
In the spring of 1942, uncle Jim left his university studies and signed up with Canada’s 8th Reconnaissance Regiment, known for being “first in, last out.” Uncle Jim was wounded twice in action, once by a German sniper. Army brass tapped him for intelligence work, but he returned to his regiment and fought on. Behind the lines, the Nazi foes had been busy.
From July 1942 until September of 1944, the Nazis deported 97,776 Jews from the Westerbork transit camp in Holland. A full 54,930 were shipped to Auschwitz, 34,313 to Sobibor, 4,771 to the Theresienstadt ghetto and 3,762 to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. On April 12, 1945, troops of the 8th Reconnaissance B squadron liberated the Westerbork camp, saving 876 Jews. American units liberated other death camps and American troops joined Canadians in the First Special Service Force. The FSSF was the elite unit that swept Nazi forces from Monte La Difensa, and other strongholds, opening the way for the Allies to move north.
Any WWII vets still around are doubtless shocked to see Nazi-style mobs on college campuses, screaming for a second Holocaust. The vets understand the perils of appeasing totalitarian aggressors, and Biden’s appeasement of Iran and China surely leaves them troubled. The vets would appreciate Lt. Finnegan, but Biden’s cannibal claim would have sprung a laugh from uncle Jim.
He served until 1946, finished his university studies, and earned a good living for his family. Uncle Jim died in 2017 at the age of 94, still bearing the scars of battle. Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau are not worthy to carry his shoes.
Mark Twain said that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress. However, he didn’t know about the Minnesota DFL party’s legislative delegation:
The arrest rate in the United States is 2,181.7 per 100,000 each year, or 2.18%.
The arrest rate for #mnleg Democrats is 3 per 104 in the last year, or 2.89%.
Elected #mnleg Democrats have a 32% higher arrest rate than the general population. pic.twitter.com/rXxYlU31qi
— Mitchell Williamson (@MWilliamsonMN) April 23, 2024
I wrote last night about Nicole Mitchell, the Democratic state senator who was arrested for first degree burglary after she broke into her step mother’s home in northern Minnesota, some 3 1/2 hours from where Mitchell lives. After consulting a lawyer (and, I suspect, Democratic Senate leaders who want to hold on to their one-vote majority), Mitchell put out a statement in which she claimed that she had been performing a welfare check on her step-mother, who she says suffers from Alzheimer’s.
Sure, that makes sense. Everyone performs welfare checks by breaking into a basement window at 4:00 in the morning, clothed in black and equipped with a flashlight covered with a black sock, and completes the welfare check by purloining someone else’s laptop. Walter Hudson, a Republican legislator, posted a photo of the basement window that Senator Mitchell broke into:
The entrance of good intentions. pic.twitter.com/IMRiSpNcFV
— Walter Hudson (@WalterHudson) April 24, 2024
Sure, that is how we all perform welfare checks. Now the transcript of the victim’s 911 call, which led to Mitchell’s arrest, has been made public. It makes for entertaining reading. The victim certainly didn’t think that she was the beneficiary of a welfare check by a relative:
A. Please just get here.
Q. All right. I’ll stay on–I’ll stay on the line with you. Don’t worry. I have officers en route right now. If you hear anything, just let me know what’s going on, OK?
A. Okay.
Q. Are you armed?
A. I have a little steak knife in my hand right now.
Great welfare check! More:
[A] 911 caller now identified as Sen. Nicole Mitchell’s stepmother said “Somebody has broken into my house… and they just ran down into the basement,” according to a 911 transcript obtained by KARE 11 News through a data practices request.
“I don’t know if he’s breaking out the back window or what,” the caller continued.
“Did you get a good look at him at all?” dispatcher Joe Robbins asked.
“No, it was completely dark. I tripped over ’em. Ah, he was on the floor next to my bed. He ran downstairs into my basement.”
Senator Mitchell was lying on the floor next to the victim’s bed. Far from identifying herself as a relative conducting a wellness check, the black-clad senator, mistaken for a man, fled to the basement where she had broken in. And where, fortunately, she was apprehended, telling local police “I know I did something bad” and “Clearly I’m not good at this.”
But that was then, and this is now. Today Mitchell is defending her actions and portraying herself as a victim of her demented step-mother’s paranoia. Still no explanation for breaking in the basement window.
Of course, the Democrats aren’t seriously trying to fool anyone. They just want to erect enough of a smoke screen to explain why Mitchell isn’t resigning, and thus triggering a special election that could flip control of the Senate to Republicans. When power is at stake, Democrats aren’t much worried about principle. Or criminality.
I wrote last night about the absurdity of Alvin Bragg’s criminal prosecution of Donald Trump. Today both Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Turley made similar points.
Andrew went into considerably more detail. He writes:
As I’ve related a few times, Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s elected progressive Democratic district attorney, is trying to hoodwink the jury into believing that (a) it is a crime for a candidate for public office to conspire with others to suppress politically damaging information, and (b) that Donald Trump was charged with such a conspiracy in the indictment that has resulted in the ongoing trial. In point of fact, there is no such information-suppression conspiracy crime in the law and the indictment against Trump does not charge a conspiracy — it charges 34 counts of falsifying business records with fraudulent intent to commit or conceal another crime.
In court on Tuesday, Bragg’s prosecutors became a bit more transparent in arguing that this “other crime” is a New York election statute that contains a conspiracy provision. But the theory is ridiculous. The statute does not criminalize what Bragg claims Trump did — again, suppress politically damaging information. The invocation of it still calls for Bragg to enforce federal election law, which he has no jurisdiction to do. It is plainly intended for state elections because Congress enacted federal campaign law — which is not Bragg’s remit — to control federal elections. And, cherry on top, the election law Bragg invokes is a misdemeanor — that is, Bragg is trying to exacerbate a single misdemeanor falsification of business records into 34 felony counts by rationalizing that Trump was trying to commit or conceal another misdemeanor.
Much, much more at the link.
In the New York Post, Turley writes: “Alvin Bragg has his Trump trial, all he needs now is a crime.”
It’s not a crime to pay for the nondisclosure of an alleged affair. It’s also not a federal election offense (the other underlying crime Bragg alleges) to pay such money as a personal or legal expense. Federal law doesn’t treat it as a political contribution to yourself.
Yet somehow the characterization of this payment as a legal expense is an illegal conspiracy to promote one’s own candidacy in New York.
***
The statute of limitations for this case’s misdemeanors, including falsifying payments, has expired. But Bragg (with the help of counsel and former top Biden Justice Department official Matthew Colangelo) zapped it back to life by alleging a federal election crime that the Justice Department itself rejected as a basis for any criminal charge.It’s not clear Trump even knew how this money was characterized in records. …
Besides running for president, Trump was married and had hosted a hit television show. There were ample reasons to secure an NDA to bury the story. Even if it was done with the election in mind, it is not unusual or illegal. There is generally no need to list such payments as a campaign contribution because the federal government doesn’t see them as a campaign contribution.
Like the Democrats’ other prosecutions of Trump, Bragg’s case is a naked political act, undertaken for no reason but to interfere with the 2024 presidential election. With their ridiculous prosecutions of Trump, the Democrats have turned the United States into a banana republic.
And, of course, a Manhattan jury that is probably hopelessly biased against Trump may, misled by an equally biased trial judge, return a guilty verdict. Polls suggest that such a verdict could change the outcome of the election. Bragg charges Trump, in effect, with stealing the 2016 election–he is the ultimate election denier. I am sure Bragg is well aware that the real theft in progress is of the 2024 election. He fervently hopes that his election interference will succeed.
I’m sure Biden’s staff has had conversations with him about not reading the instructions on his teleprompter, but whatever they have done isn’t working. Is it possible to use different colors on a teleprompter? I don’t know, maybe they could put the text in black and the stage directions in red. Here, Biden is instructed to pause so his audience can take up the “four more years” chant. Of course you know what happened:
I don’t know whether I could make it through another four years of Biden as president, but in any event, I am pretty sure he can’t.
It is tempting to suggest that the best of all worlds is for Trump to be tied down in the courtroom, where he can’t let fly with one of his frequent provocations, while Joe Biden gets out and campaigns more, reminding Americans that he is a doddering fool.
The big story last week was that Biden is the comeback kid! The polls have closed, with some putting Biden back in the lead! It was that boffo State of the Union speech what did it, along with Trump’s ongoing legal troubles and the Arizona Supreme Court opinion supposedly establishing the Handmaid’s Tale as the law of the desert land.
But today Bloomberg reports its latest poll, showing Trump going back into a statistically significant lead (49 – 43 nationally), especially in the crucial swing states:
President Joe Biden’s recent polling bump in key battleground states has mostly evaporated as a deep current of pessimism about the trajectory of the US economy hurts his standing with voters.
The April Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll found Biden is ahead in just one of the seven states most likely to determine the outcome of his matchup with Donald Trump, leading Michigan by 2 percentage points. Biden trails the presumptive GOP nominee slightly in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and his deficit in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina is larger.
Here’s the chart for the poll:
Bloomberg says “It’s the economy, stupid”:
The reversion comes as poll respondents offered a bleak near-term view of the economy, the issue that has consistently registered as their top concern at the ballot box. A majority of swing-state voters see worsening economic conditions in the coming months, with fewer than one in five saying they expect inflation and borrowing costs to be lower by the end of the year. Despite a resilient job market, only 23% of respondents said the employment rate would improve over the same time period.
My pal John Barnes notes:
Note that most of those companies are in the sectors where professionals are supposed to be heavily Democratic today (especially in the major media). Who are going to believe, those rosy job and growth statistics the Biden Administration reports every month, or your lying eyes watching your colleagues (or perhaps yourself) packing up their offices?
Then there’s this oddity, from CNBC:
Something strange has been happening with jobless claims numbers lately
Calling the state of the U.S. jobs market these days stable seems like an understatement considering the latest data coming out of the Labor Department.
That’s because most of the past several weeks have shown that first-time claims for unemployment benefits haven’t fluctuated at all — as in zero.
For five of the past six weeks, the level of initial jobless filings totaled exactly 212,000. Given a labor force that is 168 million strong, achieving such stasis seems at least unusual if not uncanny, yet that is what the figures released each Thursday morning since mid-March have shown.
The consistency has raised a few eyebrows on Wall Street. The only week that varied was March 30, with 222,000.
“How is this statistically possible? Five of the last six weeks, the exact same number,” market veteran Jim Bianco, head of Bianco Research, posted Thursday on X.
I’m really beginning to think a Trump landslide is possible—even likely—if he campaigns sensibly. He might even win bigger if he’s behind bars and can’t campaign at all.
Chaser—You hate to see it, but David Brooks is suddenly pessimistic about Biden:
Why I’m Getting More Pessimistic About Biden’s Chances This Fall
I still believe Biden is the party’s strongest candidate, but I’m getting more pessimistic about his chances of winning.
The first reason is not political rocket science: Voters prefer the Republicans on key issues like inflation and immigration. Most Donald Trump supporters I know aren’t swept up in his cult of personality; they vote for him because they are conservative types who like G.O.P. policies and think Trump is a more effective executive than Biden.
The second reason I’ve become more pessimistic is because of what’s happening to the youth vote. NBC News released an interesting poll last weekend finding that interest in this election is lower than in any other presidential election in nearly 20 years. Only 64 percent of Americans said they have a high degree of interest in the election, compared to, say, 77 percent who had high interest in 2020.
But what really leaps out is the numbers for voters ages 18 to 34. Only 36 percent of those voters said they are highly interested.
P.S. Meanwhile, Biden loses the battle with the teleprompter once again:
NOW – Biden: "Four more years. Pause." pic.twitter.com/PW1HBgaCVu
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) April 24, 2024
As we watch our most elite universities circle the drain by capitulating to a mob indistinguishable from the German professoriate that cheered on the Nazi Party in the 1920s and 1930s, I offer our quote for the day from our friend Inez Feltscher Stepman:
“Sorry I have no patience for people continually surprised by what’s going on in Columbia and across university campuses like what did you think would happen when you turned over the entire educational apparatus over to people who hate this country? They were pretty clear in 1968.”
Several months ago Gallup noted that public esteem for universities was falling fast—even among Democrats, who run all of our universities. I wonder what the numbers would look like if Gallup updated this poll today.
Chaser—One of Iowahawk’s classics, from 2015, playing out now at Columbia:
Add this sensible suggestion:
