May 25, 2025

MAKING PROGRESS:  A few months ago, Pete Kirsanow and I sent a letter to Members of Congress asking for college accreditation reform.  Now Senator Jim Banks has responded!  We got a bill going!  (Now all we have to do is get it introduced in the House, get it passed in both houses, and signed into law by the President.  Stay tuned …)

Posted at 8:25 am by Gail Heriot 11

TEN YEARS GONE:

The following year, Joe was making very ill-advised jokes about the topic: Joe Biden jokes about faking prostate cancer to get out of Obama administration.

At an event honoring former Vice President Walter Mondale, Mr. Biden recounted the conditions he placed on joining Mr. Obama’s ticket in 2008 and also made clear he would leave the administration if he encountered deep, substantive policy differences with the president.

“Two things: to be able to completely be level with you and argue with you if we disagree, privately,” Mr. Biden said of his 2008 conversations with Mr. Obama, in which the two men discussed the vice president’s role.

“And secondly, I want to be the last person in the room on every major decision, and I didn’t mean that figuratively, I meant that literally — the last person in the room,” he continued. “He’s president. He gets to make the decision, and unless there’s an overwhelming disagreement in principle, in which case I’d develop prostate cancer or something and leave, and he knew I meant that … I get to be the last person in the room. And that’s where I think I can serve best.”

Biden was cast by Obama in 2008 as the boring old grownup in the room to give the appearance of offsetting Barry’s inexperience and radical chic background. Who makes jokes like this?

UPDATE: Video surfaces of Biden making his very strange 2015 joke(?) about prostate cancer: Decade Old Video of Biden Shows Him Joking of Faking Prostate Cancer to Get Out of Obama Administration.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll 211

May 24, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Party on.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 1622

TIME TO STOP ‘CENSORSHIP WITHOUT DUE PROCESS:’ Like the old news anchor said in that movie, I am mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. Find out why here in my latest Substack column.

Posted at 6:37 pm by Mark Tapscott 15

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden Ads Never Ran Because the Campaign Believed They Were ‘Unusable.’

Before Joe Biden dropped out, his campaign team had a devil of a time trying to find footage from campaign events they could use that would demonstrate Biden’s ability to go “off script” and communicate with voters.

According to the book “Original Sin” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, at one point, the campaign decided to stage a town hall with handpicked audience members and staffers. Biden was given the questions in advance, supposedly ensuring he would provide the kind of answers that would make for footage showing him in charge of his faculties and with a firm grasp of the facts.

It was a failure. According to “Original Sin,” the event “went so poorly” that “people in the campaign determined the town hall yielded unusable material.”

The event was closed to the press. Only his most fervent supporters were present and asking questions Biden knew were coming. “Biden had trouble. The campaign ultimately decided that the footage wasn’t usable,” according to one of Tapper/Alexander’s sources on the campaign.

As I wrote last week, in 2023, the New Yorker linked to Biden’s video announcing “his” reelection bid, but failed to reference how little Joe himself actually appears on camera during the video, and how despite all of the audio editing in the voice over, he’s still slurring some words — but no member of the DNC-MSM wanted to go first in fear of throwing the election to the Bad Orange Man, and losing their access to the Obama Biden White House.

The following year, the conservative New York Post* reported, “Biden mocked over number of jump cuts in Trump debate challenge video: ‘Like a Claymation film.’” But the Democrats acted like their media really was Pravda, and forgot that in an age of diversified media, voters were still going to actually see see how badly Biden was performing, and how he was being propped up by his party’s operatives with bylines.

* A Murdoch newspaper, which was how Jake Tapper sneered away the Wall Street Journal’s reporting of Biden’s health declines in June of 2024: Wall Street Journal calls out Tapper for sneering at paper’s story about Biden’s decline.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board called out CNN host Jake Tapper on Sunday for previously dismissing the paper’s June 2024 article about former President Joe Biden showing “signs of slipping.” The criticism comes as Tapper’s new book on Biden’s decline while in office is set to be released.

“The Wall Street Journal reported, in a detailed piece on June 4, 2024, that those who observed Mr. Biden in person were concerned about his decline. Mr. Tapper quoted a White House dismissal of the story, including a sneer that the Journal is ‘owned by News Corp, which is run by the Murdochs,’ as if that rebutted the story. He then interviewed a Democrat who dismissed it,” the paper’s editorial board wrote, recalling a segment from Tapper’s CNN show, “The Lead,” from last year.

“A more curious journalist would have explored if it were true, and maybe even done some of his own reporting. Only now does he tacitly admit the Journal was right,” the board added.

The Journal reported at the time that the president was showing “signs of slipping,” as its reporters spoke to 45 lawmakers and administration officials about Biden’s mental faculties. Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” will be released on Tuesday.

“The Biden senility coverup is also a media reckoning. Whenever someone dared to point out that Mr. Biden wasn’t up to the job, a praetorian media guard assembled to deny it. We could quote chapter and verse from many media sources, but one example worth citing is none other than Mr. Tapper. Grabien, the TV clip service, has compiled a montage of the CNN host casting doubt on those who cast doubt on Mr. Biden’s mental fitness,” the WSJ editors wrote.

Now that the campaign is concluded, and Jake needs to sell some books, can it can be told.

Posted at 5:42 pm by Ed Driscoll 140

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Southern Poverty Law Center Puts Largest Conservative Grassroots Youth Group on ‘Hate Map’ With Klan Chapters.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is comparing the largest conservative grassroots youth organization to the Ku Klux Klan, adding Turning Point USA to its “hate map” that plots KKK chapters and claims to expose “the groups upholding white supremacy in the United States.”

The latest version of the SPLC hate map, released Thursday, lists Turning Point USA for the first time, categorizing the group as an “anti-government extremist group.” The hate map also includes PragerU, a nonprofit that uses digital media to spread conservative ideas, putting it in the same category as Turning Point USA.

Critics have long accused the SPLC of liberal bias in applying its “hate” accusations, though the SPLC contests these claims.

Having seen many of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s videos “owning the libs” on YouTube, it’s tough to picture him as a crypto-Woodrow Wilson supporter who admires “the terrorist wing of the Democratic Party.”

As for Prager U, Tyler O’Neil writes:

PragerU told The Daily Signal that the SPLC did not reach out to them before putting the group on the “hate map.”

“No, they did not notify us and if they’d like to know how we feel about SPLC, we actually have an entire 5 minute video about them titled The “Anti-Hate” Group That Is a Hate Group,” a PragerU representative said.

Here’s that video:

Ultimately though, isn’t this all academic? As America’s Newspaper of Record noted in 2021: KKK Disbands As Progressive Left Accomplishing All Their Goals.

Posted at 5:19 pm by Ed Driscoll 112

JUST GOOD OLD ENGLISH VIOLENCE: The Roman massacre that never happened according to a new study of an iconic archaeological site. “A re-analysis of the burials, including a new program of radiocarbon dating, has revealed that, rather than dying in a single, catastrophic event, individuals fell over periods of lethal violence spanning multiple generations, spread across the late first century BC to the early first century AD. This is suggestive of episodic periods of bloodshed, possibly the result of localized turmoil, executions or dynastic infighting during the decades leading up to the Roman Conquest of Britain.”

Posted at 2:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 116