The projected launch date for Gerard’s book of 46 essays – THE NAME IN THE STONE – is November 1. I’m about 95% sure everything will be in place by then. I’ll let you know the details of how to order the book as we get closer to that date, but I thought you might appreciate this heads-up.
I’ve written about Clive Wearing before. He’s still alive now, at 86, although this documentary seems to have been made about twenty years ago:
The suspect is in custody, and Trump is completely unharmed.
You can read about it here.
I think this video is kind of fun. My observations follow:
(1) My mother called the refrigerator the icebox for most or maybe even all of her life.
(2) I have very strong memories of transom windows. In particular, they were a feature of my pediatrician’s office waiting room. I found them ominous after that, and still do. I hated that office with its odd medicinal smell.
(3) When I was in law school I lived with four other women in a house with a parlor and a living room. It had only one bathroom, however, which was quite a challenge with five or us.
(4) In my married life I lived in a house that had been built in the 1930s and had what you might call servants’ quarters, although we certainly didn’t have servants. There was a large garage, and over that were two very small rooms and a bathroom, accessed by a special staircase that led from the kitchen.
(5) I don’t have any personal experience of wash basins.
(6) That same house that had the servants’ quarters above the garage had a coal chute in the basement.
(7) I never had knob and tube wiring.
(8) When I was a child we didn’t have a milk door, but we had a milkbox right outside the kitchen door, on the side stoop. It was made out of wood and lined with metal.
(9) Yep, that same house with the servants’ quarters had a butler’s pantry, albeit a rather small one.
(10) Never had a dumbwaiter.
(11) Never had picture rails.
As Archie Bunker would say, whoop-de-doo.
I didn’t watch all of it; just a couple of minutes. But here’s an analysis from Elizabeth Stauffer at Legal Insurrection:
If Harris’s reply sounds familiar to you, it’s because we heard parts of it – almost verbatim – three days earlier, as she tried to dodge a similar question during the debate with former President Donald Trump. In contrast to her surprisingly strong and coherent performance on Tuesday night, her responses throughout this interview were laced with the “word salads” we’ve grown so accustomed to hearing from Harris.
Describing her answer in a post on X, The National Review’s Noah Rothman wrote, “It takes some species of talent to filibuster for 90 straight seconds while saying nothing [at] all of value.”
Here’s the interview:
Harris’ answers during the debate with Trump sounded canned, but that’s not so unusual because candidates always prepare for a set of topics they expect to encounter. But it is odd that she sounded more disjointed and rambling in this recent short sit-down interview from a friendly source pitching softballs. And if you think – as some people assert (“without evidence”) – that she got the questions for Tuesday evening in advance, why would you think she wouldn’t have gotten these questions in advance as well?
Personally, I think she just has a number of statements in her head that she’s practiced and used over and over, and sometimes she’s more coherent in stating them and sometimes less so. They are usually some combination of platitudes, lies, and meaningless stories. Nothing this woman says sounds sincere or authentic to me.
I think his smile here looks unusually genuine. And his banter sounds more on-point than is customary:
Some people are interpreting this exchange as evidence he’s trying to sabotage Kamala Harris and boost Trump. I don’t think so. But I have little doubt he’s angry at Pelosi, Schumer, Obama, Harris, and the others who pressured him to withdraw from the 2024 campaign.
The debate moderators last Tuesday left Candy Crowley circa 2012 behind in a cloud of dust in terms of strategic “fact-checking.” Crowley protected Obama in a 2012 debate against Mitt Romney by giving a dramatic and false “fact-check” (I wrote at length about it at the time, in particular in this post and this one).
But the moderators at the Trump/Harris debate “fact-checked” Trump (often incorrectly) again and again and again, while letting Harris skate on lie after lie after lie. No fact-checking for her. It was journalistic malpractice; if you’re going to fact-check in real time at all (which I don’t think should be happening), it must be fair, even-handed, and correct. This wasn’t even close. Then again, “malpractice” only would apply depending on what today’s newspeople consider their guiding principles, and for a long time objectivity has not been among them.
The other day I posted a video of some podcasters analyzing the back-and-forth in the debate in terms of the roles of the moderators and the questions they asked each candidate. In case you missed it, here it is again:
There are also a number of articles that deal with the lies Harris told that the moderators didn’t challenge in any way – and in fact, there was zero fact-checking of Harris during the debate. The lists are long enough that no article deals with them in depth, but here’s an example of such a list.
The problem is that Harris knows she’ll get away with lies because (a) there will be no fact-checking of her in real time (b) the MSM will almost certainly not be fact-checking her properly later unless they are forced to for some especially egregious error; and (c) most listeners will not know she’s lying because she’s often repeating lies told by the MSM for years, and therefore people don’t even recognize she is lying.
One fact-check the media was forced – by the public because of community notes on Twitter – to issue had to do with Harris’ support for paying for transition for illegal immigrants claiming to be trans. Here’s what happened:
Despite all of this being true, here’s how Time covered this moment: “The former President … falsely claimed that Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.”
Now, on top of Time being staffed with lousy, lazy, partisan, left-wing activists who spread misinformation, there’s another reason Time spread this lie… The idea of taxpayer-funded sex change operations for illegal aliens is so outside the mainstream, so wackadoodle, Time likely didn’t even bother to fact-check Trump’s statement. It was simply assumed Trump had invented this because no sane person would ever support something so ridiculously dumb. …
Well, much to Time’s humiliation, the truth will out and the outlet was forced to not only issue a correction …
Something similar happened to the New Yorker on the same subject. How many listeners see the correction? I haven’t a clue, but my guess is that it’s a lot fewer than saw the debate, and the MSM and the Harris contingent count on that.
I also want to call special attention to another “fact-check” during the debate. This one was on violent crime statistics. The use of statistics in politics is both common and tricky. Here is the exchange in question:
But not only did a report from yesterday say that violent crime is up, but the report under discussion during the debate was – just as Trump said – incomplete and missing important data. And then there are police sources reported on here who say that in NY, “migrant crime” is rampant:
Police sources shared with The Post a staggering estimate that as many as 75% of the people they’ve been arresting in Midtown Manhattan in recent months for crimes like assault, robbery and domestic violence are migrants. In parts of Queens, the figure is more than 60%, sources there estimate. …
The problem is made much worse by sanctuary city laws that mean New York cops aren’t allowed to work with ICE on cases in which they believe suspects are in the country illegally. Additionally, the NYPD says it is barred from tracking the immigration status of offenders.
This makes it almost impossible for authorities to get their arms around the problem, experts and sources on the ground say.
Or to compile valid statistics on the subject and report on it accurately.
But the authoritative moderator/”fact-checker” Muir knows nothing of this.
Towards the end of the segment I cued up in that clip, note the way in which Harris counters what Trump says about crime:
I think this is so rich, coming from someone who has been prosecuted for national security crimes, economic crimes, election interference, has been found liable for sexual assault and his next big court appearance is in November at his own criminal sentencing.
Accompanied by a sarcastic, derisive laugh. This particular moment hasn’t been emphasized much in discussions of the debate, even on the right. But to me it is one of the most chilling, maybe even the most chilling. First use twisted and novel versions of the law to blatantly persecute your rival in courts chosen for their bias for your side, and then laugh and mock in triumph at what you’ve done, using that “evidence” to say that your opponent doesn’t care about violent criminals targeting ordinary citizens because he is a criminal himself.
I could say so much more, but this is long enough for today.
Glick was incensed by Harris’ remarks on Israel during the debate:
ADDENDUM: Melanie Phillips writes about the media’s role in amplifying anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment:
The impression given by the British media for the past 11 months of this war has been that Israel is willfully killing huge numbers of Gaza’s women and children, recklessly bombing hospitals and schools full of displaced people, and preventing humanitarian aid from getting to civilians.
Those claims are the reverse of the truth. Yet a very senior military figure seems to have believed them because this media narrative is omnipresent. Even in newspapers whose editorial line is broadly sympathetic to Israel, the reporting is massively distorted by the promulgation of Hamas propaganda as news reports.
Kamala Harris’ remarks on Israel during the debate were in line with that sort of thing.
Are Haitian immigrants killing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio? There no proof of it, and although there’s testimony to that effect from a few residents, it may be a mere rumor. In fact, my guess would be that it’s not true.
But Trump’s accusation has certainly focused attention on a very real problem in Springfield. In fact, I can’t imagine that an enormous influx of immigrants from a very messed-up third-world country (an influx in numbers that equal between a quarter to a third of the previous number of town inhabitants) wouldn’t cause a great deal of strife and conflict in that town or any other town.
This sort of culture clash is probably happening in many places in America, although I think Springfield is a particularly egregious example. People on the left are concerned that the wilder allegations – the dogs and cats thing – will stir up hatred and even violence against asylum seekers such as the Haitians. And it might. But although the dogs and cats allegations may be false (we still don’t know), the plight of the townspeople is very real, and until now it seems it was getting very little attention.
And then there’s Aurora, Colorado:
Beginning last year, a large influx of Venezuelan migrants, some of them members of the notorious Tren de Aragua street gang, reportedly had “taken over” a series of apartment buildings in Aurora—and unleashed terror. Last month, Venezuelan migrants were allegedly implicated in an attempted homicide, an arrest of purported gang members, and shocking security footage that showed heavily armed men forcibly entering one of the apartments. In response to the chaos, police mobilized en masse and vacated one of the complexes after the city, alleging code violations, deemed it uninhabitable.
An obvious question: How did members of Venezuelan gangs suddenly find themselves in suburban Colorado? To answer this, we have conducted an exclusive investigation, which leads to a troubling conclusion: the Biden administration, in partnership with Denver authorities and publicly subsidized NGOs, provided the funding and logistics to place a large number of Venezuelan migrants in Aurora, creating a magnet for crime and gangs. And, worse, some of the nonprofits involved appear to be profiting handsomely from the situation.
How many cities are experiencing this sort of thing? Is that what happened in Springfield, as well? So far, in a quick search, I haven’t found anything answering the question as to why Springfield received such an enormous number of Haitian newcomers. What I do see is articles from the usual MSM sources pooh-poohing the problems and saying it’s all mostly imaginary and racist accusations, and others on the right describing the complains of some of the residents, especially involving a lack of services for the original town residents, as well as increased crime and traffic accidents on the part of the immigrants.
By now, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard that Taylor Swift has endorsed Kamala Harris for president (if you say “who’s Taylor Swift?”, then you probably have been living under a rock). This news underwhelms me, as do all celebrity endorsements. I don’t understand why they would matter to anyone, including fervent Swift fans.
The realm of music – or any art – and the realm of politics don’t really intersect, unless one’s music or art is already of a political nature. Being a good singer or songwriter or painter or sculptor or actor or director or poet doesn’t convey any special knowledge of politics or history or anything else of that sort, and therefore the opinions of such people are no more of interest than the opinions of any random person.
That seems obvious, although I’m well aware that for some people it doesn’t work that way, and celebrities have an influence. But wouldn’t it already be among people inclined to the same point of view? Wouldn’t the majority of Swift’s adult fans be leaning Kamala anyway? And for those who aren’t – for the Trump supporters among them – would any of those people really change their political opinion because of Swift?
I can’t imagine that would be the case. And yet there’s been such a brouhaha about this.
What if the stratospherically popular Beatles had endorsed a candidate when at the height of their fame? Did they ever do anything of the sort? I don’t recall that they did, but maybe I’m forgetting something. They did write some political songs, but not about candidates: “Revolution” and Lennon wrote “Imagine” during his solo career. But an official endorsement of a specific candidate? That seems to be a more modern phenomenon.