Newsbusters.

Overnight, a small group of Democrats proved that their party was in the driver’s seat of the longest U.S. government shutdown by crossing the aisle and voting with Republicans to reopen the government. The multimillionaires of ABC News’s The View were so bitter about federal workers getting paid and SNAP recipients getting food that they were raging and screaming into the cameras. The majority were angry over Democrats giving up their political leverage against Republicans following their electoral victories last week. One of them even shouted: “I want an opposition party!”

At the top of the show, moderator Whoopi Goldberg tacitly admitted that it was Democrats who were holding out during the government shutdown, and whined that “eight senate Democrats threw in the towel by siding with the GOP to advance a vote that could lead to the government reopening.”

Newsbusters.

Last Friday night, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, granted a request by the Trump administration, to temporarily stay a lower court ruling, which ordered the government to fully fund SNAP for the rest of this month, until the First Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in on the case. ABCNews.com reported it straight on Friday:

Yet mysteriously, when it came time to report on this story, Justice Brown Jackson’s name was no where to be found on several news shows including some of the Sunday shows. I wonder why that happened!

Read it.

A nonprofit with deep ties to anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour, strong supporter of New York City’s Democrat socialist Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, reportedly has received more than $4 million in taxpayer money.

The revelation raises questions about how far Mamdani’s administration will go in funding radical activism.

Public records reviewed by The Washington Free Beacon showed that the Arab American Association of New York, which Sarsour ran for more than a decade, received $3.3 million from New York City and $854,000 from New York state between 2017 and 2024.

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FDNY Commissioner Robert Tucker resigned last Wednesday morning, less than 12 hours after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race over Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, according to the Daily News and Firehouse.

In a letter to Mayor Eric Adams, Tucker said his final day will be Dec. 19. “Between now and then, I will continue to lead the greatest fire department in the world and will ensure an orderly transition,” he wrote.

A department source said Tucker has had no discussions with Mamdani’s team about remaining in his post.

The source added that Tucker, who is Jewish and a Zionist, believed he wouldn’t align well with Mamdani, a Democratic socialist who faced criticism during the campaign for remarks some viewed as anti-Semitic.

The report notes that Tucker, CEO of a private security firm and longtime member of the FDNY Foundation board, was appointed commissioner in August 2024, succeeding Laura Kavanagh, the department’s first female commissioner.

Read it.

The International Olympic Committee appears to be moving toward declaring a complete ban on male-born competing in female categories across all sports — a policy likely to take effect by the 2028 Summer Olympics, the Daily Mail reported on Monday.

Olympic sources confirmed that such a measure is very much the “direction” of the IOC, but it is highly unlikely the rule will be in force before the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy in February.

A rule change could be announced by February, according to a source, but insiders said it would take between six months and a year for it to be approved and cleared.

Newsbusters.

Despite detailed photographic evidence to the contrary, many liberals continue to assert that the Venezuelan boats recently destroyed by the U.S. Navy are merely fishing, not drug, boats. The Associated Press has jumped into the fray and in a roundabout “nuanced” way admitted that the destroyed boats are indeed drug boats. The “nuance” comes in via the AP asserting that among the crews of the drug boats, some worked mostly as fishermen or other low paying jobs with drug smuggling only as a side gig to boost their income.

The AP reluctantly made the ‘nuanced’ admission that the destroyed boats were drug boats on Friday with this report by Reginia Garcia Cano, “Trump has accused boat crews of being narco-terrorists. The truth, AP found, is more nuanced.”

Read it.

Markets always soar when Democrats cave. I wonder if there could be a connection there….

The New York Times, “All the News That’s Fit for the Crust to See in Print”.

After more than a month of stalemate, the Senate on Sunday took a crucial step toward reopening the government, when a small but critical group of Democrats broke from their party and voted with Republicans to advance legislation that would end the longest government shutdown in history.

The shutdown is not over yet. Sunday’s 60-to-40 vote cleared the way for the Senate to formally debate the spending measure before a final vote. If the Senate approves it, the package still must be passed by the House — which has been on an extended recess and has not yet scheduled a return date — and signed by President Trump.

Still, the deal that senators reached on Sunday night reflected important lessons for both parties from the shutdown fight and is likely to have far-reaching policy and political implications long after the government grinds back to life. Here are six takeaways.

UPDDATE: 16 Thoughts On The Dem Shutdown Cave (Brian Beutler/Off Message)

UPDATE: Dem civil war (Politico)

UPDATE: Democrats Fume Over Deal to End Government Shutdown (Wall Street Journal)

UPDATE: Thoughts on Democrats’ Shutdown Surrender (Dan Pfeiffer/The Message Box)

UPDATE: A Quick Take on Team Cave’s Big Win (Josh Marshall/Talking Points Memo)

UPDATE: Furious Dem Civil War Immediately Erupts Over Bombshell Shutdown Deal (Will Neal/The Daily Beast)

UPDATE: Trump made a huge blunder on the shutdown. So why did Democrats cave anyway? (Nate Silver/Silver Bulletin)  Maybe because they know more about it than Nate Silver does?

UPDATE: “It’s complete BS”: Dems go ballistic over Senate shutdown deal (Andrew Solender/Axios)

UPDATE: What Were Democrats Thinking? — Back in September, when I was reporting an article … (Ezra Klein/New York Times)

If you’re going to be homeless, I guess Hawaii is the best place to do it.

How far down the list do you need to go before you hit a colorably Red state?

New York Post.

Believing they’re “winning” the government shutdown, Democrats are playing a dangerous game of chicken, aiming to keep on exploiting the public’s misdirected ire — without it being turned on them.

Yet what’s already a record-long federal closure could blow up in their faces if their scheming means millions of Americans can’t see grandma at Thanksgiving.

Even though it’s the Dems refusing to let the government reopen, Senate and House Minority Leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries & Co. bet that voters would finger Republicans for gumming up the works.

The gamble seemingly paid off Tuesday, as Democrats outperformed expectations in Virginia and New Jersey; at least some polls also show the public blaming the GOP more.

Most Americans don’t look past who’s in charge of the House, Senate and White House to grasp how the filibuster lets the minority party block the bill to fund federal operations, and of course much of the media is happy to frame Republicans as villains who don’t care if SNAP recipients can’t eat or furloughed federal workers can’t pay their bills.

Newsbusters.

Last Thursday afternoon as Tesla shareholders were deciding to give their CEO Elon Musk a package that could be worth 1 trillion dollars, CNN’s Kasie Hunt was discussing it on her show, The Arena. Hunt concluded her interview with Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA) by asking, “Do you think Elon Musk should be a trillionaire, is that a thing we should have?” In other words, should we put a limit on how much financial success a U.S. citizen, especially a conservative one, should be allowed to attain? Just when you thought you’ve heard it all!

Khanna answered that he is all for Musk, or anyone, making all the money he can make, so long as they give a chunk of it to the government, on top of the taxes that are already in place. “..I’m all for Elon becoming a trillionaire, as long as we can have a 5 percent trillionaire tax…My problem is not the wealth generation. It’s that it hasn’t been taxed. Have a wealth tax on all these billionaires and trillionaires.” That answer seemed to please Hunt, who then broke the trillion bucks down this way.

All good, so long as we get to wet our beaks and buy some votes with  his money.

Read it.

Radical leftist and twice-failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has officially shuttered her dark-money-funded nonprofit network, including the New Georgia Project and its affiliate, the New Georgia Project Action Fund, a pair of organizations used to drive voter registration and turnouts across the state.

Last week, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (MO-08) released a statement that said the move to dissolve Stacey Abrams-founded New Georgia Project comes after the committee launched an investigation into whether the nonprofit illegally funneled millions into Abrams’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign. Smith urged the IRS to revoke its tax-exempt status.

Newsbusters.

PBS’s newest Frontline documentary, “The Rise of Germany’s New Right” concerns the rise of the AfD in Germany (Alternative for Germany) party and its supposed links to Nazism and Putin’s Russia. Director and correspondent Evan Williams has also made the Frontline docs Germany’s Enemy Within (2024) and Germany’s Neo-Nazis & the Far Right (2021).

Germany’s migrant problem surged after 2015, when former Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the borders to people (mostly fighting-age males, it seemed) fleeing the Syrian war. Over three million refugees and asylum seekers have entered Germany since, some bringing Islamic-style terrorism with them and causing understandable backlash toward the country’s open-border policy.

Yet terrorism involving migrants in Germany was barely noticed in the documentary and narrator Williams preferred to smear the AfD for noticing. He dredged up controversial statements and spurious links to Adolf Hitler. All the while, the main anti-Semitism on the ground in Europe today is coming from the pro-Hamas left.

Read it.

Medical interest in venom has long centered, reasonably enough, on snakebites. As many as five and a half million people per year — usually agricultural workers and children in Africa, Asia and Latin America — are bitten by venomous snakes. Those bites are responsible for more than 100,000 deaths, along with many more amputations, leading the World Health Organization to declare them “a neglected public health issue.”

But most venomous interactions take place outside our awareness, among invertebrates that we are liable to squish without a second thought. Now that researchers can, with the tiniest venom sample, identify every constituent molecule down to the last amino acid, they are discovering substances of extraordinary complexity. Tarantula venoms, for example, contain more than a hundred molecules. In the venoms of some spiders and snails, that number runs into the thousands.

Venom is generally considered distinct from poison. Whereas poison is passive — a substance, like a laundry-detergent pod or berries from a black nightshade plant, that can be lethal if ingested — venom must be actively administered by an animal, often via fangs, teeth or barbs, usually to capture prey or defend against predators. Nature has engineered this capacity surprisingly often. There are at least 1,250 species of venomous catfish alone, each with its own venom formula. Venomous creatures include insects, spiders, corals, mollusks, snakes, lizards and a few mammals (platypuses, shrews). Many of them, such as marine species, are difficult to observe in their natural habitats, and so we know next to nothing about how and why they use their toxins.

…

Other applications being investigated in other labs include a scorpion peptide that binds precisely to malignant tumors, including those in the brain. This peptide is engineered to be fluorescent so that during surgery to remove a tumor, doctors can see whether they have cut it all out. Eventually, similar molecules may be programmed to kill cancer cells outright, without chemotherapy or radiation, says Jim Olson, a professor at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute and the University of Washington, who initiated the project. A peptide from sea-anemone venom is in clinical trials as a treatment for some autoimmune diseases, according to Christine Beeton, the immunologist leading the investigations at the Baylor College of Medicine. In Brazil, a biochemist and neuroscientist, Maria Elena de Lima, is developing a peptide derived from the venom of a banana spider to treat erectile dysfunction.

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A Shift from Damage-Accumulation to Wave-Based Aging: Traditional aging models, such as the damage-accumulation theory, suggest that aging is a gradual process driven by oxidative stress, DNA mutations, and cellular dysfunction. In contrast, the quasi-programmed framework proposes that biological programs optimized for growth and reproduction become dysregulated later in life, leading to aging. Recent longitudinal research from Stanford University introduces a new perspective: a wave-based model of aging, identifying two critical stages of biological transitions around the mid-40s and early 60s. These waves reflect abrupt, systemic changes across metabolism, immune function, and the microbiome, redefining aging as a dynamic, stage-specific process rather than a linear decline.

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The Austrian Interior Ministry is continuing deportations to Afghanistan, if not exactly at breakneck speed. Early Sunday morning, a man convicted of drug-related crimes was deported back to his homeland. This marks the second deportation to Afghanistan since the Taliban regained power.

The Ministry has stepped up deportations in recent months, also returning Somali and Syrian nationals for the first time in decades. Interior Minister Gerhard Karner (ÖVP) emphasised that further deportations are planned to both Afghanistan and Syria.

The man, convicted in March for attempting to sell drugs in Vienna, was transported to Kabul via Istanbul under the supervision of Austrian police. Despite increased deportations, Austria has continued to approve Afghan asylum applications, with nearly 4,000 accepted in the first three quarters of the year and a recognition rate of 76%.

Read it.

I used to be an avid reader of the Weekly Standard until it ceased publication in 2018. Since then you have Bill Kristol who is sympathetic to Zohran Mamdani migrating to one end of the political spectrum. Tucker Carlson has moved in an opposing direction and gave a softball interview to Nicholas J. Fuentes, a white nationalist. In between, you have people like John Podhoretz and Matthew Continetti who might be considered not pro-Trump but “Trump Curious.”

Where would you all place the these former Weekly Standard staff is the following categories: Crazy left (CL) , Never Trump (NT), Trump Curious (TC), Pro-Trump (PT), Crazy-right (CR). You can use the abbreviations. Are these categories sufficient? I have added some of my observations

Bill Kristol (CL)
Stephen Hayes (NT)
Fred Barnes, (TC)
Johnthan Last (NT)
Philip Terzian (PT)
Max Boot (CL)
Joseph Bottum
Tucker Carlson (CR)
Matthew Continetti (TC)
Joseph Epstein (TC)
David Frum (NT)
David Gelernter
Reuel Marc Gerecht
Michael Goldfarb
John Podhoretz (TC)
Mary Katharine Ham (TC)
Brit Hume (PT)
Frederick Kagan
Robert Kagan
Tod Lindberg
Irwin Stelzer

The Foundry.

Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee who serves as chief judge of the D.C. District Court, is facing an ethics complaint for “political bias” against President Donald Trump and his administration.

Boasberg approved nondisclosure orders in 2023 that kept nearly a dozen Republican members of Congress from knowing their cellphone records had been secretly obtained by the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ), documents released by Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley recently revealed.

“Judge Boasberg enabled certain facets of what may be one of the biggest scandals in the history of the country,” the ethics complaint filed by the Center to Advance Security in America (CASA) and exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation states. “Weaponizing the DOJ to surveil political opposition not only violates the rights of the subjects of the investigation, but also the American people who were unable to know the facts of the investigation due to the secrecy of it.”

Now … where have I heard that name before?

The Foundry.

When Sen. Elizabeth A. Warren recently traveled to the Big Apple to endorse New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, she was asked if overt socialism is really the best model for Democrats to adopt. “You bet,” she replied in her signature folksy style.

The Boston lawmaker wasn’t just jumping on the sudden trendiness of socialism three-and-a-half decades after its near-extinction. With Senate fellow traveler Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Warren has been a catalyst for moving her party to the left since her first campaign in 2012.

She and Sanders are, in many ways, the godparents of the self-avowed democratic socialists such as Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who are providing the youthful energy for the Democrats in the Trump era.

Read it.

In 1965, the guru of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, penned an essay that neatly brought together both strands of the unitary threat faced today by conservatives defending Western civilization: the threat of online censorship and the threat of street violence. Six decades later, it has come back with renewed force.

Titled “Repressive Tolerance,” the essay’s dictates on the need to repress conservative views are followed almost word for word by 21st-century technocrats. Even what it says on the use of violence is heeded by the most leftist of Western governments.

These technocratic politicians, found across the West, run the gamut from the center right to the extreme left. They lead nation-states and multinational institutions, and consider a freewheeling internet a threat to an “expert-managed” international order.

Read it.

Brussels is grappling with widespread and increasing crime that shows little signs of abating. This weekend’s crimes yet again underscore the need for the government to urgently restore safety and reassure citizens amid the escalating violence.

On Friday, shots were fired at a group of people in the Schaerbeek district, fatally wounding a 25-year-old man. The suspects fled the scene, and authorities are currently looking for witnesses who may be able to provide information about the incident.

A few kilometers away, also on Friday evening, a police check almost ended in tragedy. Two patrol officers narrowly avoided being run over by a speeding car that deliberately drove toward them while they were conducting a vehicle inspection. They managed to jump out of the way at the last moment, but the car crashed into their police vehicle, severely damaging it. The driver—a 36-year-old man under the influence of alcohol—was arrested at the scene.

An explosion occurred in Antwerp early Saturday morning. Authorities believe the attack may be drug-related but say all possible motives are still being investigated. The Belgian city has become one of Europe’s largest drug-import hubs. Drug gangs often consist of young people with migrant backgrounds who struggle to find work in the traditional labor market.

The drug trade is partly responsible for the sharp deterioration in public safety in the capital and the recent wave of armed attacks. The situation has become so dangerous nationwide that the Minister of the Interior has announced an increase in police presence across Belgium and the installation of around €20 million worth of surveillance cameras in major cities. By the end of the year, soldiers will be deployed on the streets of Brussels to deter criminals.

Read it.

Doctors must take continuing medical education courses to maintain their licenses, and transgender activists took objection to one of these courses, leading a nationwide institution to effectively cancel it.

Washington State University had spent nearly a year reviewing—and then approving—a course explaining the side effects of experimental transgender medical interventions on children and Europe’s growing rejection of “gender-affirming care.” Yet activists cried foul, citing the Southern Poverty Law Center, a pro-transgender activist group best known for demonizing conservatives.

“It is deeply concerning that a set of educational courses developed from peer-reviewed, evidence-based presentations has been suspended following activist pressure,” a spokesperson for the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, the group that created the course, told The Daily Signal in a statement Thursday. “These CME modules were created to help clinicians understand Europe’s evolving approach to youth gender medicine and the growing emphasis on safeguarding and long-term outcomes.”

Read it.

How did an Islamist socialist who posed with an unindicted terror bombing coconspirator become elected to head a city of terror survivors, the “most Jewish city in America” and how did he defeat an Italian-American political dynasty in what was once an Italian-American city?

Because that New York City, the one people imagine from movies, no longer exists.

In 1989, the last year of Mayor Ed Koch’s administration, Jews outnumbered Muslims roughly 4 to 1. By 2013, the last year of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, the number of Muslims had doubled and the number of Jews continued to drop.

Concur.

The Telegraph (UK).

Officer seen doubling back to arrest accidentally-released prisoner, with help from Sky News reporter

Say what you will, American police aren’t (yet) as bad as British police.

The Telegraph (UK).

His name is not often spoken among the Ukrainian troops defending the shattered city of Kupiansk, but it is well known.
Lt Gen Sergei Storozhenko, the commander of Russia’s 6th Combined Arms Army, is probably the highest-ranking Ukrainian defector waging war against his homeland.

He grew up in a village a two-hour drive west of the city upon which he is now laying siege.

His mission is to recapture the vital stronghold on the north-eastern fringe of Ukraine’s front line, which has been under attack for two years. Occupied in the first months of the war and liberated in September 2022, Ukraine is desperate to prevent it falling for a second time.

If captured, it will act as Russia’s gateway into the wider region, threatening key supply lines and allowing Vladimir Putin’s forces to advance towards the bigger prize of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.

So many Russian men have been killed in the pursuit that Ukrainian war bloggers have joked that the 50-year-old traitor is either on their side, or might as well be.

The Telegraph (UK).

A Sudanese paramilitary group accused of slaughtering civilians in the city of El Fasher has been linked to fresh atrocities hundreds of miles to the east.

Galvanised by its capture of the last army-held stronghold in Darfur, the widely feared Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has escalated a bloody offensive against towns and cities in the Kordofan region of central Sudan.

As in El Fasher, RSF fighters have reportedly carried out summary executions and used starvation tactics as they seek to regain momentum in a two-and-a-half-year civil war that has brutalised one of Africa’s most troubled states.

The advance into Kordofan – which will bring the RSF closer to Khartoum, Sudan’s capital – is likely to deepen a crisis that has driven millions from their homes and may have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

The Telegraph (UK).

Rachel Reeves is “fighting for her political survival” as she prepares to raise taxes on millions of workers in a manifesto-breaking Budget, Labour MPs have warned.

A rising number of the Chancellor’s backbenchers are criticising her, saying she is “running out of road” and that her Budget will “go down like a bucket of sick”.

Other Labour MPs have started to go on the record with their criticisms, saying Ms Reeves will be “lucky to be here by Christmas”.

On Friday, the Chancellor told the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) that she planned to raise income tax in the Budget.
She is considering a 2p increase to income tax, which will be offset by a 2p cut to National Insurance (NI), allowing her to argue that “working people” are being protected.

But it has since been reported that the NI cut would apply only to those earning less than £50,270 – meaning a significant tax rise for millions of middle earners.

This includes 283,000 NHS staff, 137,000 teachers as well as police officers, pharmacists and train drivers, according to a Telegraph analysis.

The British government has less scope to simply print money as the U.S. government typically does in such situations.

The Telegraph (UK).

Labour MPs have urged Shabana Mahmood to soften her plans for a Danish-style overhaul of the immigration and asylum system.

The Home Secretary is expected soon to announce new measures to crack down on migration, taking inspiration from Denmark’s system, seen as one of the toughest in Europe.

Ms Mahmood, who sent officials to Denmark to examine the system, is understood to be looking at tighter rules on family reunion and restricting certain refugees to a temporary stay in the UK.

The Telegraph (UK).

The BBC will apologise for the misleading editing of a Donald Trump speech in a Panorama documentary, the Telegraph can disclose.

Samir Shah, the BBC’s chairman, will write to the culture, media and sport committee on Monday to express regret for the way the speech, made on the day of the Jan 6 2021 Capitol riot, was spliced together.

The apology will heap further pressure on Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, to quit over an 8,000-word dossier compiled by a whistleblower that alleged widespread bias within the corporation.

The Telegraph has previously disclosed that both Mr Davie and Mr Shah were warned of the doctored footage in May but appear to have kept quiet.

The decision to issue an apology now raises questions about why it has taken them six months to admit viewers were misled.

The Times (UK).

When Kathryn Sargent, the first female master tailor in Britain, meets a new client in her London atelier she needs to “get to know their body”. So she asks: what’s your daily diet? Is your weight stable? Do you work out? These days she is toying with adding a new question. Does she mean: do you dress to the left or the right, sir? “No, I never ask that! It’s the pen. Are you on the pen?”

Caroline Andrew, who, like Sargent, is one of a growing breed of female British tailors who make bespoke suits for both men and women, wrestles with the same issue at her Mayfair studio. “American customers are happy to admit they’re taking weight-loss drugs like Ozempic or Mounjaro. But the Brits aren’t so open. If they suddenly drop three sizes, they tend to say, ‘I’m just eating really healthily.’ ”

The Times (UK).

Rachel Reeves will announce a stealth tax raid on retirement savings, a move experts said would reduce take-home pay and cut the size of pension pots.

The chancellor is expected to use the budget to limit a tax break on pension contributions for both employers and employees to raise up to £2 billion a year.

There are concerns that the crackdown will penalise people for “trying to do the right thing” and save for their retirement as well as being detrimental to company pension schemes.

It is often useful to look at what is going on it Britain as a clue to what is coming ahead for the U.S., since Britain is commonly about five years further along the road toward political degeration.

Because of the way British government works, the party in office has an easier job of getting their agenda into law than in the U.S., since the British government doesn’t have the built-in ‘checks and balances’ that are built into the U.S. Constitution. Imagine if a law could be passed with just a vote of the House of Representatives—the Senate could merely delay it for a while, and the President couldn’t veto anything or order anything to be done in the executive branch. That’s what it would be like.

The Labor party (in office) are usually  doing what Democrats would like to do but couldn’t get away with (at present), and the Conservative party are, like Republicans, always talking a good fight but (in office) will reliably do what RINOs in the U.S. can be depended upon to push for (i.e. what the Left wants but just slower and more ‘respomsibly’).

In this instance, the rabid desire of Democrats to spend money, coupled with the Left’s hatred of anybody who can afford to live without government assistance of some kind, makes the existing tax breaks for retirement savings a luscious apple hanging just out of reach. If you doubt that, take a look at any of the Leftist ‘journalism’ about Peter Thiel and his perfectly legal and very cunning use of the Roth IRA to hold startup stock that eventually turned out to be worth more than a billion dollars.

The Left is all about people having retirement savings so long as it doesn’t give anyone an income that would put them above the poverty line; that way, they get the talking point of helping out old people without much reducing the dependance on government assistance and therefore the incentive to vote for the Party of Free Stuff.

Read it.

In time-honored Islamic fashion, Sudan is currently riven with civil strife. The RSF (Rapid Support Forces) is one of the armed factions that makes video recordings of their massacres while yelling “Allahu Akhbar!”

Read it.

The Blaze has reported that the pipe bombs found at Democratic and Republican offices on the night before the J6 fiasco were planted by a Capitol Police officer. The FBI already knew that the person who planted the bombs took the Metro using a farecard owned by the next-door-neighbor of the suspected cop. At the time, agents were ordered not to pursue this particular lead(!!?)

The same federal law enforcement agencies that could track down every granny who “paraded” on J6, failed to identify the fellow in expensive shoes who (illegally) built the mock gallows on Capitol grounds, could not explain to 200 agents dispatched to the J6 demonstration how the FBI was now doing crowd control but without the slightest attempt to integrate with DC or Capitol cops and most of all, could not identify the pipe bomb suspect.

The story is so very DC—Botched conspiracies? Incompetence? Coverup? All drenched in partisan spin.

A complicating factor is that there is absolutely no reason to rely on the integrity and competence of Director Wray or the investigative followup in the integrity-free zone that was the Biden FBI and DOJ.

At a minimum, the American people deserve straight and complete answers for some very basic questions. It is about time.

The Ruling About Passports Isn’t About ID. It’s About Social Control. (M. Gessen/New York Times)  It’s about which wins: Reality or Woke Fantasy.

Senate Democrats Urge Trump to Follow Court Order and Increase Abortion Pill Access (Oriana González/NOTUS)

Washington National Opera may move out of Kennedy Center due to Trump ‘takeover’ (Charlotte Higgins/The Guardian)

In MAGA stronghold, fury over SNAP but little blame for Trump in shutdown (Washington Post)  There’s that MAGA guy again—now he has a ‘stronghold’. I wish I had a stronghold. (MAGA is the New Nigger.)

How a backlash to Trump fueled Democratic gains with Latino voters (Washington Post)  It had nothing to do with being the Party of Free Stuff for Fashionable Minorities, of course. Not a bit. Perish the thought. Inconceivable.

Judge Rules Trump Illegally Ordered Guard to Portland

MSNBC’s Capehart Ties Nation’s Fear of Political Violence to Trump  The thought of Trump provokes political violence from the Left. This is obviously a character flaw in Trump.

Dems’ resistance stymies DOJ in Stephen Miller doxxing case (Marc Caputo/Axios)

Trump says GOP would never lose an election again if filibuster is eliminated (Julianna Bragg/Axios)

Todd Blanche on defending Trump policies: ‘It’s a war, man’ (Josh Gerstein/Politico)  Indeed it is.

Education Department’s out-of-office messages blaming Democrats for the shutdown are unconstitutional, judge rules (NBC News)

Trump Aid Cuts Kill More Christians Than Jihadists Do (Nicholas Kristof/New York Times)

The Mafia Presidency — Trump is saying, essentially, If you don’t want to get hurt, you’ll do what I say. (Adam Serwer/The Atlantic)

Wally is my hero.

Read it.

The German Federal Audit Office (Bundesrechnungshof) has dismantled the government’s hydrogen strategy. Neither on the supply side nor on the demand side do the results even remotely align with the ambitious political targets. Germany faces yet another subsidy ruin.

Berlin is in a state of hangover. The ongoing economic crisis is mercilessly exposing the delusions of the so-called green transformation. After the collapse of battery production – think of subsidy ruins like Northvolt – the retreat of industry from “green steel,” and the failure of the energy transition under the weight of wind and solar, which have become bottomless subsidy pits, the next major project is now under heavy attack: the hydrogen strategy.

Read it.

young women sporting “Hot Girls for Mamdani” T-shirts. In one viral video shared on social media following Mamdani’s election night victory to become the next mayor of the city, a young woman wearing the blue shirt joked, “Sharia law starts now,” seemingly poking fun at critics of Mamdani, who is a Muslim.

He’s more of a socialist than a Muslim,  when it comes right down to it.

Quillette.

Susan Sontag is a writer worth quoting, and “Fascinating Fascism” is one of her most deliciously sententious essays; an exhortation to share in her disdain for the justifiably reviled figure of Leni Riefenstahl. But beneath the rich supply of aphorism and wit, excoriation and outrage, we find a treacly moralism and naïve disengagement with historical precedent that reverses her earlier praise and defence of the director. It says as much about Sontag’s sensibility as it does about the aesthetic choices of her adversary.

Read it.

Governments attempting to restore ties with the Taliban are instead risking the legitimization of oppression. Doing so would deepen Afghanistan’s crisis, an independent UN human rights expert cautioned on October 30, calling for a principled approach that defends the rights of women and girls.

As the Taliban tighten control over Afghan society, everyone is forced to follow regulations and norms that the group has imposed. This includes the ban on women employees and a requirement that women must wear a burqa and have a male companion while traveling outside of the home. Everyone is expected to rigidly follow Islamic disciplines, especially going to the mosque. Failure to observe such requirements raises suspicion, and anyone can report violators to the local imam and/or Sharia police.

I doubt that ‘Islam’ as used here is strictly fair. It depends on what flavor of Islam is in charge. This is like talking about Christianity-controlled society and merely looking at Puritan Massachusetts. Catholic-controlled Maryland, or Anglican-controlled Virginia, were quite different. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are quite different, while both being thoroughly “Muslim-controlled”.

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Since day one in office, President Donald Trump has taken Beijing on a roller coaster ride of tariffs and export controls. For a regime that is already struggling with a stagnant economy and an international market increasingly wary of Chinese dumping, Trump’s actions have added an extra layer of uncertainty.

They say that like it was a bad thing.

Both sides went through multiple rounds of escalation and de-escalation. Last month, they entered a tentative one-year truce.

Tariff levels are down—overall about 47 percent on Chinese goods and 33 percent on U.S. goods. China will pause its extensive rare earth export control, curb the flow of fentanyl precursor chemicals into the United States, and will also buy soybeans from American farmers. In return, the United States will suspend its port fees on Chinese ships and the 50 percent rule—barring exports to any companies owned 50 percent or more by entities on the restricted list.

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It’s a challenge when you want to be a major political party and you can’t seem to avoid alienating about 90 percent of 50 percent of the population, but that’s the challenge the Democrats have accepted. People with penises who identify as men, I have some bad news for you. They don’t like you. Not at all. And their solution to this problem – and it’s a serious problem – is to try to convince you, in the least convincing possible way, that they dig you so you’ll shut up and vote as you’re told.

But they do not dig you. Not at all. And they deeply resent that the brutal arithmetic of politics requires that they at least try to appeal to dudes who are not femboys, pinkos, pervs, or eunuchs dominated by their evil faux first wives.

What do they dislike about men and masculinity? Well, the men and masculinity parts. Somebody has to be to blame for the fact that everything they lay their soft, girlish hands on turns to Schiff. Normal men are as good a scapegoat as any; there will never be any introspection about how the common denominator in the disasters that inevitably stem from feminized government (and everything else) is the feminization part. Helen Andrews has called it—check out her viral take on the phenomenon.

Forbes, a Voice of the Crust.

New York City supermarket billionaire John Catsimatidis went nuclear in June, when Zohran Mamdani, who had proposed opening a cheap city-run grocery story in each of the five boroughs, won the democratic primary for mayor. Catsimatidis held a press conference with Bodega owners; publicly threatened to shut down his 30-plus stores if the democratic socialist won the election; and ranted on TV. “He’s not qualified… this is silly,” he said on FOX News, comparing Mamdani to Fidel Castro. “It’s one big con game.”

He also called President Trump, who publicly backed his friend. “[Mamdani] actually wants to take over the grocery stores of John Catsimatidis, who’s a great guy, a rich guy,” Trump said of his buddy, whose net worth Forbes pegs at $4.8 billion, “He actually called me the other day, he’s concerned his stores are going to be taken from him, and they won’t be run like John runs them, believe me, he runs a good operation.”

Now that Mamdani has been elected, Catsimatidis is once again agitating. “I think a lot of business people are reducing their exposure to New York City,” he tells Forbes. Catsimatidis—whose $7.8 billion (revenue) Red Apple Group also owns a Pennsylvania oil refinery, some 400 convenience stores and a portfolio of real estate stretching from New York to Florida—had been looking to move Red Apple’s headquarters to New Jersey if Mamdani became mayor. He changed his mind after Tuesday’s election. “New Jersey didn’t go the right way,” he says—after the state resoundingly elected Democrat Mikie Sherrill as governor. Now, he’s looking for “friendly states” to relocate operations, with Florida being the most likely candidate. “The key word is a common sense place to do business in,” explains Catsimatidis.

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There’s a lot of black-pilling Republicans out there this week after a handful of elections in the northeastern US led to “sweeping” Democrat victories in New York, New Jersey and Virginia. As is always the case whenever Republicans lose any race no matter how insignificant to the bigger picture, suddenly the sky is falling and doom is about to come crashing down on America for all eternity. The panic has become quite tiresome.

Keep in mind, the gloom is limited mostly to social media and is exacerbated by a few hundred conservative influencers. As usual, these people still don’t realize that the social media world is not the real world.

If you were shocked by someone like Zohran Mamdani winning the mayor’s race in New York for example, then you have not been paying any attention to what’s been happening in blue cities lately. I predicted that liberals would turn out in droves to vote for the guy back in July.

The New York Times, paper of record of the Crust.

The Sierra Club calls itself the “largest and most influential grass roots environmental organization in the country.” But it is in the middle of an implosion — left weakened, distracted and divided just as environmental protections are under assault by the Trump administration.

The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit.

Its political giving has also dropped. Federal campaign-finance records show $3.6 million in donations from the Sierra Club during the push to defeat Donald J. Trump in 2020, but none as Mr. Trump stormed back to the presidency in 2024.

And this year, as the Trump administration returned better organized and better prepared than in its first term, the Sierra Club was the opposite. While Mr. Trump boosted coal power, canceled wind farms and rolled back pollution limits, the club was consumed by internal chaos, culminating when the board fired its executive director, Ben Jealous, a former president of the N.A.A.C.P.

This goes beyond shooting yourself in the foot, this is shooting yourself in the groin. Such is a perennial problem with the Wokerati—it isn’t enough to be in favor of just one or a few of the Woke agenda, you have to be equally in favor of every piece of the Woke agenda or you get caught by the circular firing squad.

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ust hours after New York City’s mayor election was called for Zohran Mamdani, a top Israeli official issued an invitation.

“New York will never be the same again, especially not for its Jewish community,” Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli tweeted. “I invite the Jews of New York to seriously consider making their new home in the Land of Israel.”

Chikli’s call dovetailed with another appeal to Jewish New Yorkers made by a spokesman for the Jewish settlement in Hebron, Yishai Fleisher.

“Indeed, it was a great run, and you were a blessing to NYC. But Jews will feel less and less comfortable in the Big Apple,” tweeted Fleisher. “So do yourself a favor, buy real estate in the Land of Israel.”