This is the top challenge facing the Democrats today. Yet they are shockingly M.I.A. in dealing with it. Democrats overwhelmingly would rather do anything than do what is needed: two, three many Sister Souljah moments. Consider how Democrats have handled culturally-inflected issues since their 2024 election defeat.
Trans? A few peeps, quickly slapped down by the Groups and party activists.
Immigration? Everything Trump’s doing is wrong. We’ll only cooperate with federal law enforcement when we feel like it.
Crime? Not a problem. Everything’s going great—especially in D.C.! Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries: “The crime scene in D.C. most damaging to everyday Americans is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.” Trump’s turning D.C. into a police state!
Race? DEI is wonderful and we’ll defend it to our dying breath. Same thing with racial preferences. Those who oppose these policies are racists and white supremacists.
The list could go on. Using the traditional 0-10 Sister Souljah scale, where zero is doing nothing at all, 5 is barely adequate, and 10 is what Bill Clinton did, I’d give today’s Democrats a 1 for the occasional grudging admission in interviews and the like that maybe the Democrats have overdone their noble commitments a little bit (though of course their heinous opponents are 100 percent wrong). And the 1 might be generous.
Moments like these are when the Old Guard that pissed everything away is usually forced aside by the Young Turks to build things back up. But in the Democrats’ case today, the next generation seems even more radical, and determined to continues pissing everything away.
I keep saying two things: They can’t stay stupid forever, and that they seem determined to try.
Go long on popcorn.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Karen Bass Exists to Make Gavin Newsom Look Competent. “Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has been getting all of the wrong kinds of press since fire destroyed Pacific Palisades and other areas of her city. We’ve seen public officials not handle crises well before, but Bass is going to need her own wing in the Mega FAIL Hall of Shame. Bass is the mayor of the second largest city in the country and has performed as if she couldn’t be trusted to keep fake houseplant alive.”
Continuing to buy into the A.I. hype might bring its own perils. In a recent article, Zitron pointed out that about thirty-five per cent of U.S. stock-market value—and therefore a large share of many retirement portfolios—is currently tied up in the so-called Magnificent Seven technology companies. According to Zitron’s analysis, these firms spent five hundred and sixty billion dollars on A.I.-related capital expenditures in the past eighteen months, while their A.I. revenues were only about thirty-five billion. “When you look at these numbers, you feel insane,” Zitron told me.
Something that can’t go on forever will stop, the wise man once said.
The Department of Justice has reportedly opened an investigation into Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook over alleged mortgage fraud, just one day after President Trump urged the Biden appointee to resign.
It is the latest move by the Trump administration to step up pressure on the Federal Reserve, which has faced criticism from officials for being slow to cut rates and splashing out $2.5 billion on revamping its HQ.
Bloomberg reported earlier on Thursday that Ed Martin, a senior DOJ official who led probes into Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and New York Attorney General Letitia James, has written to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell stating that Cook’s situation “warrants further scrutiny.”
“I strongly recommend that you suspend Ms. Cook from the Federal Reserve Board immediately,” Martin’s letter was quoted as saying. “No one believes it’s appropriate for her to remain in her role while serious questions linger.”
Speaking of which, exit question:
So she’s a plagiarist, an academic fraudster, and a mortgage fraudster? And she runs the Fed?
In the humanities, 82% of all published articles get zero citations. Most of these are mediocre pieces by mediocre scholars. Citation justice would require citing these articles as often as the most informative, original, and best written articles. https://t.co/QbjY6T0gf3
As I wrote earlier this week, “California Governor Gavin Newsom believes in nothing aside from furthering the endless ambition of California Governor Gavin Newsom.”
Since early August, Ukraine has targeted a number of oil refineries including Novokuibyshevsk, Syzran, Ryazan and Volgograd in response to Moscow’s missile and drone attacks.
In Russia’s far eastern region of Primorye, local media reported lines stretching back kilometres (miles) as motorists queued to fill up with gasoline. Authorities blamed an influx of tourists.
NNK, an oil company, said many of its gasoline carriers in the region were stuck in traffic jams for three to six hours at a time due to repair works on the roads, according to local media.
Yevgeny Balitsky, Moscow-appointed governor of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, which is mostly under Russian control, said on Thursday that gasoline retail sales in several areas were suffering problems because of peak demand and refinery maintenance.
“In the Zaporizhzhia region, the fuel shortage is further complicated by logistics issues and the threat of enemy attacks on fuel trains,” he said.
If you’d like more details than Reuters can provide, there are plenty of them on this X thread.
“It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invaders country. It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defence, but is not allowed to play offence. There is no chance of winning! It is like that with Ukraine and Russia,” Mr Trump wrote in his Truth Social website.
“Crooked and grossly incompetent Joe Biden would not let Ukraine FIGHT BACK, only DEFEND. How did that work out?”
I’d rather Trump wrangle an equitable armistice, but since Putin seems determined to slow walk the peace process, I’m very curious to see how Kyiv’s systematic attacks on Russia’s energy oil infrastructure pan out.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION:
So a Fed governor gets popped for potential mortgage fraud and NOW a Fed president is excusing it by saying mortgage paperwork is too complicated for a Federal Reserve official?!
If you’re not smart enough to get a mortgage, you shouldn’t be a fed governor. And if mortgages are too complicated for fed governors to understand, then the mortgage regulators should all be sacked.
“The default setting of the Europeans is to wait, worry and complain,” said Kurt Volker, who was U.S. special representative for Ukraine during Trump’s first term.
“This is the worst instinct possible for dealing with Trump. What you need to do is be positive, do your own homework and make your own proposals and be proactive. I think Monday was a good demonstration of everybody figuring out how to do that.”
In other words, “leaders” should act like leaders, not spoiled children. An idea so crazy it just might work! The whole article is pretty charitable to the Europeans, but it literally boils down to taking some responsibility and displaying absolutely basic political skills.
DON’T FORGET THIS SCANDAL, WHICH IS PROBABLY ALSO A CRIME:
…With Biden effectively abdicating his own responsibility, staffers were allowed to effectively add names to a signed blank page, exercising a presidential power with the level of circumspection of an inter-office memo.
The man who led the prosecution of President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial is now worried about his own defense.
Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, the longtime California congressman and chief impeachment manager against Trump in 2019-20, has launched a legal defense fund amid accusations that he engaged in mortgage fraud for more than a decade.
It’s an accusation Schiff denies, but the director of the Federal Home Financing Agency is talking very tough.
In a criminal referral to Attorney General Pam Bondi sent in May, FHFA Director William Pulte wrote that Schiff and his wife, Eve, purchased property in Potomac, Maryland, in 2003 that they affirmed would be their “primary residence.”
That designation, Pulte wrote, enabled the Schiffs to “receive more favorable loan terms, including lower interest rates, than secondary residence mortgages.”
The problem for Schiff is that at the same time, he was receiving a homeowner’s tax exemption on a condo he owned in Burbank, California, which he was also claiming as a “primary residence,” according to Pulte’s letter.
ERIK HAS A QUESTION: How do you get non-material consciousness when all you have to work with is material? Regardless if you are an atheist or a theist, it’s the kind of question that will make you think hard about what you think and why you think it.
The real reason Cracker Barrel has been struggling is that its service and food quality nose-dived after COVID, and instead of fixing that, the company and its woke executives decided to go full Bud Light and taste the rainbow and dare its customers to object.
OPEN THREAD: Because I love you and want you to be happy.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a
means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
