February 3, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Speaker Kevin McCarthy marshaled the votes to remove Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee on grounds of her anti-Semitic bigotry. David Harsanyi comments on her removal in this New York Post column. Anticipating her removal, Omar had this to say on the House floor: “I am a Muslim. I am an immigrant. And, interestingly, from Africa. Is anyone surprised that I am a target?”
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February 3, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The AP reports on the Chinese spy balloon spotted over Montana. The AP story reads like satire. This is the Age of Biden: The U.S. is tracking a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that has been spotted over U.S. airspace for a couple days, but the Pentagon decided not to shoot it down over concerns of hurting people on the ground, officials said Thursday. The discovery of the balloon puts a
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February 3, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Following up on John’s post about ChatGPT, reader Mark Vorderbruggen has been inspired “to try an experiment.” He asked it to write a bill requiring public power utilities to purchase solar panels and wind generators that were manufactured using solar panels and wind generators. He would like to submit the resulting draft “to assorted congresspeople.” The draft requires some fine-tuning to effectuate its “purpose” — for one thing, the “requirement”
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February 3, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Ammo Grrrll recalls formerly NEWFANGLED THINGS! She writes: Remember when “quiche” had its moment in the ’80’s? I really used to like it and was sad to see it leave menus, banished as unhip, uncool, passé. I have gotten into a little retro cooking where I am making quiches and eating an easy-peasy breakfast of microwaved quiche. You got it all – eggs, milk, cheese, spinach, very proteiny. My much-younger
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February 2, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Underneath the image of the New York Post cover above, Miranda Devine comments in her Devine Online email newsletter (sign up for free here) this morning: For more than two years Joe Biden has maintained the fiction that the laptop his son Hunter abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware was a “Russian plant.” Well, yesterday, Hunter finally admitted the laptop is his, only now he says his data
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February 2, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Once upon a time the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop were deemed akin to Russian “disinformation” by former law enforcement and national security authorities, candidate Joe Biden, and the media regurgitating the party line on Biden’s behalf. Anyone with an ounce of sense could see the party line a fairy tale, to put it kindly. Now lawyers representing Hunter Biden seek criminal investigations of those involved in the dissemination
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February 1, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday CBS News reported that the FBI searched the Penn Biden Center offices in mid-November, according to “two sources familiar with the investigation,” after lawyers for President Biden had found about 10 documents marked classified there on Nov. 2. It is not clear why the White House has not disclosed the search. It is not clear when the search occurred. It is not clear whether additional classified documents were seized.
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February 1, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Minneapolis’s Star Tribune illustrates how the major daily newspaper of a metropolitan area can contribute to its decline. The owner of the newspaper has a high tolerance for mediocrity and the local news reads like public relations for Minnesota’s DFL. Today’s case in point is Briana Bierschbach’s page-one story on the new abortion law Democrats rammed through the legislature in record time: “Gov. Tim Walz signs law strengthening abortion rights
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February 1, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I learn from John Podhoretz’s New York Post column that President Biden said yesterday, “The COVID emergency will end when the Supreme Court ends it.” It’s a long way to temporary. Podhoretz comments: I’m not sure whether that statement fills out your “Biden is an idiot” or your “Biden is senile” square on your “There’s Something Wrong With Biden” bingo card, but you can certainly make an argument for either
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January 31, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I take it there is no news advancing the Biden classified documents matter today. Assuming our readers were intimately familiar with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, I may have mystified some by adapting the title of Edgar Allan Poe’s fantastic story “MS. Found In a Bottle” for several of my posts on the Biden matter. (“MS.” is an abbreviation of “manuscript.”) Published by Baltimore’s Saturday Visiter newspaper on October
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January 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I can’t stop laughing at Taylor Sirianni’s imitation of her dad as Eagles coach Nick Sirianni held court after the NFC championship game yesterday. To entertain herself as the coach droned on, she performed a formidable Nick Sirianni impression. Something tells me a star is born. Taylor could step right into the old Bob & Ray routine featuring the nonidentical twin band leaders Claude and Clyde — the McBeeBee Twins.
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January 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Miranda Devine buries revelations extracted from Hunter Biden’s laptop inside today’s New York Post column ostensibly devoted to public opinion on the Biden classified documents matter. Devine observes that “[t]here are several clues on the laptop that Hunter may have been selling classified information to his foreign paymasters” and cites the “uncharacteristically cogent email about Ukraine written by Hunter Biden in 2014…” I wrote about Devine’s discovery of the “uncharacteristically
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January 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi has renamed his TK News site Racket. On Saturday he posted “Responding to Hamilton 68” — his analysis of the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s “fact sheet” on the Hamilton 68 “dashboard” that he exposed as a fraud in the fifteenth installment of the Twitter Files (the link is to my notes on it). Taibbi summarized his response to the fact sheet in the subhead: “After refusing to answer
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January 29, 2023 — Scott Johnson
When Don Everly died in August 2020 I put together a set of videos with previous reflections on the music of the Everly Brothers. This is the season of their birthdays — Don was born on February 1, 1937, Phil on January 19, 1939. I thought I would use the occasion to revise it slightly and replay it one more time in the hope that it might capture the interest
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January 28, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Now that Democrats control Minnesota’s political branches, they are in let’s go crazy mode. I’ve lived here all my life. I don’t want to let them drive me out, but they are doing their best. I want to take my stand and go down fighting. Besides, I’m afraid Florida is so overpopulated that it will detach and capsize. The state overcharged taxpayers in the last biennium by some $18 billion.
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January 28, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi has posted the fifteenth installment of the Twitter Files. It is a thread that comes in 42 tweets that can be accessed via the first (below) or read in unrolled form via the Thread Reader app here. 1.THREAD: Twitter Files #15MOVE OVER, JAYSON BLAIR: TWITTER FILES EXPOSE NEXT GREAT MEDIA FRAUD pic.twitter.com/bLRpDpuWql — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 27, 2023 Taibbi’s thread addresses the Hamilton 68 “dashboard” fronted by
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January 28, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Three recordings related to David DePape’s October 28 break-in at the Pelosi residence in San Francisco were released yesterday. The judge overseeing the state criminal case against DePape ordered the release of the tapes on the petition of a consortium of media outlets over the objection of the parties. Picked up by Capitol Police surveillance video, the first of the three recordings depicts DePape’s battering glass to make his way
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