A year ago this week, for example, I made five core claims: “Donald Trump is likely to be the next president of the United States; Ukraine will never win back its lost territory; the two-state solution in Israel/Palestine is dead; DEI is incompatible with a free society; and Joe Biden is too old to be re-elected.”
Not so shabby a year later.
Perhaps the most glaringly obvious was Biden’s age problem. In September 2023, I urged him to leave the stage. A year ago I wrote, “The idea that this 81-year-old man could command the country in four years’ time is as delusional as the blithe self-confidence of his team.” That’s long before Ezra Klein cleared his throat. Yesterday the WSJ ran a follow-up to its groundbreaking revelation of Biden’s decrepitude earlier this year. (It tells you something about the state of legacy media that the reporters were harangued for it at the time.) This detail leapt out at me:
As we begin to create coalitions in hopes of realizing a movement that can fight against authoritarianism and exploitation by the Wealth Class, we need to move past these simplistic and pleasing narratives and begin wrestling with larger truths. The failure to do so helped usher Trump back into power and has put us on the precipice of an authoritarian future controlled by that very Wealth Class.
Shortly after midnight last night, the Senate passed the continuing resolution to fund the government through March 14, 2025. The previous continuing resolution ran out at midnight, but as Bloomberg’s congressional budget reporter Steven Dennis explained, “midnight is NOT a hard deadline for a government shutdown. A shutdown occurs only when [the Office of Management and Budget] issues a shutdown order, which they traditionally will NOT issue if a bill is moving toward completion.”
President Joe Biden signed the bill this morning, praising the agreement for keeping the government open, providing urgently needed disaster relief, and providing the money to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore after a container ship hit it in March 2024, causing it to collapse.
Griffin is now Florida’s largest individual campaign donor, too.
Records show the ultrarich investor spent more than $28 million on state and local elections in Florida during the 2024 election cycle.
Griffin’s biggest gift was a $12 million donation to a group led by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ chief of staff that raised money to oppose a ballot initiative that would have legalized marijuana in Florida.
Picture this: your family is sitting down for dinner, but the beef stew costs twice as much as it did last year, and the vegetables on your plate are smaller, wilted, and pricier. Outside, the once-lush lawn in your suburban neighborhood has turned to brittle brown patches, despite skyrocketing water bills. Meanwhile, on the news, another report surfaces about America’s disappearing water supplies — this time, Kansas farmers are pleading for solutions as the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the largest freshwater sources in the country, runs dry. You shrug it off because the droughts are far away, but deep down, you know the truth: the crisis is coming for you, too.
The freshwater shortage is not some far-flung, hypothetical catastrophe for future generations — it’s here, now, and accelerating. Across the globe, rivers are drying up, aquifers are being sucked dry, and groundwater reserves, accumulated over millennia, are being pumped out faster than they can replenish. The cost of this crisis is mounting, and no one — not the politicians, not the corporations, and certainly not you — will escape its devastating impact. https://medium.com/edge-of-
It’s boom times at the Chickenshit Club.
Originally a term for federal prosecutors who avoided difficult fights against the rich and powerful, the Chickenshit Club, through Jesse Eisinger’s book of the same name, became shorthand for officials and politicians who failed to hold Wall Street executives accountable for the 2008 financial crisis. Now, as Democrats limp out of office once again, the cowardice and confused careerism of prominent party figures and outside powerbrokers is turning the Chickenshit Club into a mass membership organization.
For all the time we’ve spent closely examining what caused the Democratic coalition’s collapse this cycle, all it’s really required is casually following the news out of Washington since Election Day. For the past six weeks, headlines have documented a rudderless party being sunk by various self-interested factions: efforts to obfuscate blame for catastrophic losses, deference to outmoded process, petty meddling, and capitulation to the people who they called dire threats to democracy just months ago.
The 1986 American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as:
“fascism (făsh'ĩz'am) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”
We’re about to be there.
The power of government to both reward and punish is awesome. No other entity can legally take money away from citizens at gunpoint and hand it to others it favors. No other entity has the power to deprive people of their freedom and even their lives. No other entity can use both of those powers to regulate how business must be conducted.
When Disney, a $248 billion dollar company, decided to give a $15 million donation to Donald Trump’s presidential library slush fund, they didn’t do so because they were worried about losing a defamation lawsuit.
To the contrary, they would have easily won the case. The judge in Trump’s New York trial came right out and said, in front of God and the whole world:
The vote was 131-84, according to a Democratic aide.
Monday morning MSNBC and CNN (and, presumably, Fox, etc.) gave Trump roughly 40 minutes of live television time to rant and lie, threaten an Iowa newspaper and pollster, propose privatizing our Post Office, and muse about ending schoolchildren’s vaccine mandates for polio.
Everybody watching cable TV probably saw it; it was later the topic of numerous newscasts and newspaper articles that are still echoing across the news space.
Around the same time, President Joe Biden spoke at the inauguration of the Frances Perkins National Monument to FDR’s famous Labor Secretary and principal author of the New Deal. He truthfully pointed out that his one four-year administration had helped create 16 million new jobs, more than any single presidential term in history (and more than the jobs created by the Bush Sr., Bush Jr., and Trump administrations combined).
The cable networks chose to completely ignore Biden’s speech. As did the rest of the nation’s media. So, I get it, there’s a strong media bias in favor of Trump (“What new outrageous thing will he say? OMG! Click bait!!!”) and generally against Democrats.
In 2019, an offbeat viral news story caught the attention of Jack Boswell, a radio presenter for the BBC and podcast producer from London. A man in Mumbai, India, was poised to sue his parents for birthing him without his consent, arguing that life is suffering and the planet would be improved if humans stopped reproducing. The absurd legal action never went forward (the would-be plaintiff’s parents were both lawyers, no less), but the symbolic threat threw a spotlight on the philosophy he was articulating, known as anti-natalism.
It was the year of singing witches and feuding siblings, animated anxieties and neurotic robots, super-powered besties and tennis-fueled threesomes. Music biopics ran the gamut from Amy Winehouse to Robbie Williams to a coupla Bobs — the latter played by a young actor who took a break from being an interstellar messiah to portray a reluctant earthbound one. Even more popular were straight-up musicals, which came in the form of the Good, the Odd and the Folie à deux. A domestic-abuse drama was sold like a traditional romance-slash-lifestyle-
Today's quickiesWhich sexual position produces the ugliest children?
Ask your mother.
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How do you embarrass an archeologist?
Give him a tampon and ask him which period it came from.
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What's the difference between a bitch and a whore?
A whore sleeps with everybody at the party; A bitch sleeps with everybody at the party except you.
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What's the difference between a Catholic wife and a Jewish wife?
A Catholic wife has real orgasms and fake jewelry.
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What makes men chase women they have no intention of marrying?
The same urge that makes dogs chase cars they have no intention of driving.
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What is the biggest problem for an atheist?
No one to talk to during orgasm.
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What do you call an Amish guy with his hand up a horse's ass?
A mechanic.
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Who is the most popular guy at the nudist colony?
The guy who can carry a cup of coffee in each hand and a dozen donuts.
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Who is the most popular girl at the nudist colony?
The one who can eat the last donut.
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Jewish dilemma:
Free PORK.
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The three words men hate to hear most during sex:
'Are you in?'
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The three words women hate to hear most during sex:
'Honey, I'm home!'
What do Polish brides get on their wedding day that's long and hard?
A new last name.
Wal-Mart announced that sometime in 2013 it will begin offering customers a new discount item: Wal-Mart's own brand of wine.The world's largest retail chain is teaming up with Ernest & Julio Gallo Winery of California to produce the wines at affordable prices in the $2 to $5 range.Wine connoisseurs may not be inclined to put a bottle of the Wal-Mart brand into their shopping carts but, 'There is a market for inexpensive wine,' said Kathy Micken, professor of marketing at University of Arkansas, Bentonville. 'However, branding will be very important.'Customer surveys were conducted to determine the most attractive name for the Wal-Mart wine brands and varieties.The top surveyed names in order of popularity were:10. Chateau Traileur Parc9. White Trashfindel8. Big Red Gulp7. World Championship Riesling6. NASCARbernet5. Chef Boyardeaux4. Peanut Noir3. I Can't Believe it's not Vinegar2. Grape Expectations1. Nasti SpumanteThe beauty of Wal-Mart wine is that it can be served witheither white meat (Possum) or red meat (Squirrel).
