Washington Post executive editor Sally Buzbee has stepped down in a sign that things are not going well for the media institution. Despite the fact that it’s an election year and there is no shortage of news, the paper’s readership is down.
It’s been known for months now that the Post has a cash flow problem, but this is the first high-level management change to be made public.
It seems to be a case of “get woke, go broke.” They’re trying to stop the bleeding:
According to FOX News, the paper’s publisher and CEO, Matt Lewis, recently had a meeting with staffers that involved some tough love:
… “Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis had a blunt message for his staff during a tense meeting following the sudden ouster of executive editor Sally Buzbee, according to the paper’s own reporting.
“‘We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around,’ Lewis told the paper. ‘We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.'”
My guess is that they’ll move only ever-so-slightly to the right.
This guy – Jed Rubenfeld – calmly and objectively dissects the constitutional issues in the Trump trial. They were by no means the only issues. But constitutional law is his specialty, and that’s what he sticks to; he’s a law professor at Yale. As such, I think his message would be more difficult for Democrats to refute – although of course, where there’s a will there’s a way.
But I think that a certain significant percentage of Democrats are simply ignorant of the major flaws in the Trump prosecution that made it a travesty, and I believe that at least some of them would be at least somewhat disturbed to learn of them. But they wouldn’t take the word of someone on the right. That’s why this guy is important, and that’s why I think it would be a good idea if you could send it to any friends and relatives who might still have even slightly open minds.
You might ask, what about videos of Dershowitz talking about the trial? The problem with Dershowitz is that a while back he spoke up for Trump in one of his impeachment trials. That has already de-legitimized Dershowitz in the eyes of many Trump-haters. Dershowitz also gets very energized and slightly angry when he talks about the NY Trump trial. This guy, on the other hand, is a very calm character:
Trump has a lot of raw hatred against him—which brings out a lot of voters who will be voting against him…ones who would’ve probably not voted if he hadn’t been running.
Trump definitely has a great many voters energized against him by their hatred of him. Most of them are Democrats who would never vote for a Republican anyway, but quite a few are Independents and even NeverTrumper Republicans. However, are they ordinarily non-voters who are only energized to vote in order to vote against him? I think that’s a very small set.
What’s more, you can flip it around and say that “Trump brings out a lot of voters who will be voting for him…ones who would’ve probably not voted if he hadn’t been running.” I happen to think that group is much greater than the “only vote in order to cast a vote against him” group.
However, I have no way to know how big any of these groups are and have never even seen a poll that attempts to measure it. And I am firmly convinced that someone like DeSantis – whom I very much like – would not necessarily do better than Trump if the former were running this year against Biden.
There are many reasons for this. The first is that most people voting for Biden don’t just hate Trump, they hate Republicans. They hated Republicans even before Trump was elected, although his tenure in office and the propaganda around it may have deepened their hatred. But they hated Romney, too – a point brought home to me quite vividly during a book group meeting I attended in 2012 after the “binders of women” flap occurred. My fellow attendees were all dutifully mouthing the “Romney hates women” mantra as a result.
The second is that I’ve already seen DeSantis smeared as a homophobe and worse, so I have no doubt whatsoever that the smear machine would be cranked up to destroy a DeSantis or any other GOP candidate. The only questions are (1) how successful it would be, and (2) whether the most Trump-devoted voters would support that person, or whether a significant number of them would stay home if Trump weren’t running (I think, for example, that if Nikki Haley had been the GOP nominee, a significant number of Trump supporters would have stayed home).
It’s a conundrum, a riddle for which I have no answer. But it’s moot – at least, barring a flock of black swans – because Trump will be the nominee in 2024.
I had a friend about fifteen years ago, we’ll call her Marjorie. We were fairly good friends for about seven years, and then we both moved away and ended up living over an hour from each other and the friendship slowly faded. We haven’t communicated now in a couple of years, but I still have access to her Facebook page even though I’m not active on Facebook.
When we were friends, I knew that she was a liberal Democrat (I wouldn’t ever have called her a leftist) and she knew I was on the right. It was never an issue between us, and although we sometimes discussed politics we didn’t do so often, and we never argued. It was one of those “agree to disagree” things, for the most part. Our friendship was based on other commonalities.
To the best of my recollection, we still were in touch during the Trump years, although not often. But it was just the natural attrition caused by time and distance. Every now and then I’d check her Facebook page and see what she was doing: her kids and grandkids and travels and garden and that sort of innocuous, pleasant stuff. Did she ever post anything political? I don’t recall seeing anything at all, but if I did it was of a mild sort.
But a little while ago I saw that she’d recently posted the following text, which apparently first started circulating back in 2022. I reproduce the whole thing here for you; the original had a different last sentence (which you can find at the link):
Dear Republican Party: You sold your soul. You used to stand for patriotism but sold your soul to a traitor who conspired with an enemy to destroy our democracy.
You used to stand for our armed forces but sold your soul to a draft dodger who mocked their courage and sacrifice.
You used to stand for hardworking Americans but sold your soul to a con man who made his fortune by cheating them.
You used to stand for the American dream but sold your soul to a racist who traded the Statue of Liberty for walls and cages while praising the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
You used to stand for family values but sold your soul to a predator who betrayed all three of his wives.
You used to stand for Jesus but sold your soul to a wolf in sheep’s clothing who has made a mockery of Christianity.
Currently under investigation for tax fraud, voter fraud, insurrection and violation of the Espionage Act, you continue to defend his lies. Whatever he paid you for your soul, I hope it was worth it. But knowing him, you’re probably still waiting for your check.
I’m not even going to bother fisking the supposed facts in the message; the falsehood of so many of them isn’t why I’m spotlighting this. I am more amazed at the fact that this previously mild-mannered and non-vitriolic person saw fit to post it with approval, as though excoriating half her fellow Americans for losing their souls to what amounts to a devil seemed an appropriate thing for her to do. I assume that she has no current friends on the right (I wouldn’t count, since we haven’t been in touch at all for four years or so).
It’s chilling because she used to be tolerant of other points of view, and it wasn’t all that long ago, and to the best of my recollection even included some of the Trump years. Her posting this makes me very sad, because it means either that she knows no one anymore who is a Republican and/or that she has no problem publicly insulting her Republican friends and acquaintances and relatives.
This behavior is very different from that of the person I used to know. But this post is not really about Marjorie. It’s that I think she’s emblematic of a great many other people. Something – and I believe it’s been the unremitting propaganda from the left, mostly based on lies but apparently very persuasive – has accomplished the transformative task.
A juror in a huge pandemic fraud trial reports receiving a bag full of $120,000 with a promise of more where that came from if she acquits seven defendants who allegedly stole $40 million from a fund created to feed poor children during the pandemic.
The seven defendants are part of a huge federal criminal complaint alleging that 70 individuals stole more than $250 million of pandemic relief funds.
“This is completely beyond the pale,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said in court on Monday. “This is outrageous behavior. This is stuff that happens in mob movies.”
The case is in Minnesota, and the 7 accused individuals were part of agencies such as “Feeding Our Future.” More here:
Defense attorneys called the attempted bribery “un-American,” “very troubling,” “horrific” and “unprecedented,” but they had argued against detaining the defendants, none of whom have been in custody since the start of 2023. One has a GPS ankle monitoring device.
Brasel said they will be detained until investigators can figure out if one of them leaked the list. Defendants and their family members watching in the gallery cried and hugged as U.S. Marshals escorted the defendants out.
Brasel said the jurors are concerned about their families’ safety and the juror whose home was approached is terrified. “The juror remains at risk for retaliation,” she said.
The mysterious bagwoman said there would be a similar payoff if the juror voted for acquittal, but instead the juror turned the money in to authorities.
The first article I quoted doesn’t mention some salient facts in the case, and the second article I quoted doesn’t mention it until paragraph fourteen, but here’s what I’m talking about:
Said Shafii Farah, Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, Mohamed Jama Ismail, Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, Abdiwahab Maalim Aftin, Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff and Hayat Mohamed Nur were charged in 2022 with wire fraud, money laundering and other charges. They have connections to a Shakopee restaurant, Empire Cuisine & Market.
Shakopee is a suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Even back in 2017, when this article was published, it had a significant and growing Somali population, and I’m going to assume these seven defendant are members of that demographic.
The six men and one woman received more than $40 million for 18 million meals distributed at 50 food sites across Minnesota — from Rochester to St. Cloud — in 2020 and 2021. Prosecutors allege about 10% of that money was spent on food and defendants ran a “brazen” fraud scheme that created numerous shell companies to launder money, submitted rosters of made-up children’s names and inflated meal claims.
Prosecutors also say some of the defendants gave kickbacks to other people in the scheme disguised as consulting fees, leading to bribery charges. They said defendants spent the money on themselves, including a $1 million lakefront Prior Lake property, luxury cars and gold jewelry.
Three are elderly men and one middle-aged. The announcement is somewhat mysterious:
The Israel Defense Forces announced on Monday that it had confirmed the deaths of four Israeli hostages in Hamas captivity, following the gathering of new intelligence findings.
IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in a press briefing that the military could not immediately confirm the circumstances of the deaths of Chaim Peri, 79, Amiram Cooper, 84, Yoram Metzger, 80, and Nadav Popplewell, 51, but that it would investigate their deaths fully.
“We estimate that the four were killed together, in the Khan Younis area, several months ago, while being held by Hamas terrorists and while IDF forces were operating in Khan Younis,” he said.
“I know that difficult questions will arise regarding the circumstances of the deaths,” Hagari added, appearing to reference the possibility that the four had been mistakenly killed by IDF troops or Israeli airstrikes.
It is unclear whether the IDF discovered the bodies and whether part of the investigation will involve forensics on the bodies, or whether the intelligence has been gathered from captured Hamas operatives or from other informants. Three of the men were in a video released in December and the other in May. Hamas claimed the three were killed in an Israeli strike. That could actually be true, and if so it would be squarely on the shoulders of Hamas. Or it could be a false claim by Hamas. There is no way to get the truth from them; that’s why Israel is trying to figure it out. I wish them luck with that.
Hamas’ kidnapping of the hostages on October 7 set this all up, and it was obvious (or should have been) from the start why they did it and what their plan would be regarding them. The precedent set long ago by Israel was to release an enormous number of terrorists for one hostage, thus guaranteeing the taking of more hostages. Hamas scored a great coup on October 7 by taking so many, and in particular the children, the elderly, and the women.
This was guaranteed to create the maximum pressure on Israel to do anything, anything, to get them back. The hostages were Hamas’ insurance policy against being obliterated by Israel – that, and “international opinion” and “international law,” which would inevitably side with Gaza.
Once a person is under the control of kidnappers, all bets are off. The person can be tortured, raped, and/or killed at the kidnappers’ will. The kidnapper can hold out for a very high ranson price. In the case of Hamas, we don’t even have proof of life for the hostages, since even the very few who have been in videos are not holding recent newspapers, for example. Hamas is drunk with its own sadistic power, and knows the extreme value of its captives. It is willing to squeeze the last drop of agony out of the situation for the families, the Israeli government, and Israel’s sympathizers.
And many in Israel are cooperating by blaming the Israeli government for not doing enough – that is, for not utterly capitulating, or not waving a magic wand that causes the hostages to come home.
I can’t locate it at the moment, but I recall Caroline Glick saying in a video that there are actually more families of hostages who are saying to Israel’s government to not make any deal that would compromise the war effort than who are demonstrating to the government to free them at any cost. But that latter group is making the most noise and getting the most media coverage. And how can we blame that group, when their loved ones continue to be in such terrible peril? I can’t blame the families, even though I think that were the government to actually do what they say it would be disastrous. But they are suffering to an almost unimaginable degree, and their desire to have their loved ones rescued overrides everything.
How many hostages do I think are still alive? I think probably at least thirty, mainly young women who have been kept as sex slaves. Perhaps some men are alive, too, but nowhere near as many. However – and I think this is an important thing to remember – I don’t know that we’ll ever see many or even any of them again alive (or even dead), no matter what kind of “deal” may eventually be made. Since we don’t know who’s alive and who’s dead of the ninety or so hostages about whom Israel still has little to no information,, Hamas can do whatever it wants with them or with their living or dead bodies. Hamas has total power in terms of the hostages – including the withholding of information, the better to torment Israel and the families ever more exquisitely.
A very depressing and yet insightful podcast from Caroline Glick:
And from her sister Bonnie Glick, we have this article. Here’s an excerpt that reminds us that something similar had come through a different source a few weeks earlier:
Out of thin air, on May 6 Hamas agreed to the ceasefire terms. Only, what actually happened was that the terms they agreed to were not the negotiated terms that the US, Qatar, and Israel had seen. Indeed, Egypt edited the ceasefire terms in such a way that Hamas would get a “win” and say they accepted the terms, but the terms, as edited, were outrageous.
Here’s the heart of Bonnie Glick’s essay:
Egypt built a formidable border wall, something Donald Trump could not even imagine in a fever dream for America. It is impenetrable, militarized, and closely guarded with Egyptian troops and security forces. The way through it for Gazans seeking to get out of Gaza? Baksheesh. Upwards of $5,000 per person. It has also been a gateway for international aid and smuggling into Gaza resulting in over $88 million in profit to the holder of the border keys.
The holder of those keys is a Bedouin tribal leader named Ibrahim al-Organi, now the wealthiest man in northern Sinai. But how could an ex-con smuggler rise to a position of border control prince? Through connections to the Egyptian government, Organi has cultivated extremely close ties with Egyptian President al-Sisi, and more significantly, with al-Sisi’s son, Mahmoud. General Mahmoud al-Sisi is the Deputy Chief of Egyptian intelligence and he sits on Organi’s board.
Here’s another good discussion of the Biden forces’ unilateral declaration of a peace plan:
Some people disagree with much of this. One is David Horovitz (note the “v” rather than the “w”). His piece is extremely convoluted in its reasoning and he practically ties himself in knots trying to express what he’s saying, but here’s the headline and subtitle: “Biden’s fateful, carefully timed, and highly complex challenge to Netanyahu and Hamas: It seems the PM is being asked to choose between his own interests and Israel’s, while Hamas is urged to consent to its own demise. But maybe there’s a more limited US game plan.” That’s a mouthful, but I think this is the gist of it:
All of the above brings us to the possibility — I stress, the possibility — that Biden himself and his team do not actually envisage the Israeli proposal playing out as specified, and are in fact seeking more immediate goals with only a vaguer hope of long-term fateful change.
The Israel-Hamas conflict is a zero-sum game: Israel wants to destroy Hamas; Hamas wants to survive and get back to destroying Israel. Neither side will agree to terms that definitively thwart its core goals.
By extension, therefore, complete clarity from Biden would have doomed the deal he is more realistically trying to achieve — which may be for the implementation of the first phase, but perhaps only the first phase, of a hostage-truce agreement.
That way, at least many of the living hostages get to come home from Hamas captivity.
That way, just possibly, too, a modicum of calm is restored at Israel’s northern border.
That way, more humanitarian aid enters Gaza. Global hostility to Israel recedes at least a little. Smotrich and Ben Gvir leave the coalition and Gantz stays. All good news from the Biden administration’s point of view and, it believes, from Israel’s too.
Even this more limited process does not obviate the danger of Hamas securing the release, early in phase one, of extremely dangerous terror chiefs into the West Bank, a marked escalation of terror from that front, and Hamas terminating the deal early, with very few hostages released.
Ya think? In other words, the whole thing is absurd. We don’t even know how many living hostages there are, and Israel is supposed to negotiate for “players to be named later”? And give up hundreds and hundreds of terrorist/murderers in the bargain? And stop fighting? And do Biden or Obama or Blinken et al actually think Hezbollah will stop the pressure on Israel for more than a short while (if that) in order to fool the world into thinking something has changed? The whole proposal is sickening, and sickeningly cynical, even as an idea.
At the mention of Lebanon I’m reminded of something else that Biden said when he debated Sarah Palin back in 2008, in the good old days when he possessed whatever faculties he had at his best. To refresh your memory:
Said Biden of the Bush administration’s supposed Middle East follies:
“When … along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.”
Huh?
Assuming that Biden was referring to when, in 2005, American and French pressure helped the Lebanese people kick Syrian troops out of Lebanon, who ever thought NATO occupation of that deeply divided country was a good idea?
As if America’s NATO allies would have gone in the first place.
But hey, as long as it makes Biden sound presidential.
After that debate, the MSM praised Biden’s horse manure to the skies. They’re still doing it.
I usually finish my posting in the late afternoon, barring important breaking news. Today, though, I have some commitments for the next few hours and plan to post more in the evening.
There’s really too much news these days to cover fairly, even in a roundup. But here’s some of it:
(1) One less hostage body for Hamas to use as a cynical bargaining chip; one more Israeli dead on 10/7. RIP.
Dolev Yehud was a paramedic and was murdered by Hamas during the October 7 massacre, when he left his house in order to try to save lives. His body was located in Kibbutz Nir Oz.
Following an identification process that was carried out by medical officials from the National… pic.twitter.com/91bJTY6bvS
(2) Biden, that stalwart democracy defender, is readying an executive order about people entering over the southern border and claiming asylum. If I”m not mistaken, this is the sort of thing he said he couldn’t do without Congress, but that was a ploy to be able to label the GOP members of Congress as not cooperating with limiting the flow of people across the border. The AP covers this with an article headlined: “Biden prepares a tough executive order that would shut down asylum after 2,500 migrants arrive a day.” Biden, so “tough” on those “migrants.” This is obviously announced that way with a keen eye to the 2024 election and anger at Biden’s previous policy on illegal aliens. The order concerns those claiming asylum only, which as far as I know used to be a fairly small percentage of entrants across the southern border but in recent years is claimed by just about everyone who is apprehended coming in that way. The rules for asylum have relaxed, and the courts are so overwhelmed that claimants can be here years before their cases are heard (if they appear at all at that point).
(3) The pandemic was big business not just for the pharmaceutical companies, which one would expect, but also for the NIH:
New data from the National Institutes of Health reveal the agency and its scientists collected $710 million in royalties during the pandemic, from late 2021 through 2023. These are payments made by private companies, like pharmaceuticals, to license medical innovations from government scientists.
Almost all that cash — $690 million — went to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the subagency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and 260 of its scientists.
This was double the amount typical of pre-COVID times.
(4) The Hunter Biden gun trial is in the jury selection phase. Note that Hunter is being tried for something that has nothing to do with Joe. Note that he is being tried in Delaware, a solidly Democrat state and one in which the Bidens have had enormous influence for many many decades. This is IMHO a show trial, but a show trial of the opposite kind from the ones to which Trump is being subjected. This trial is going forward in order to give the appearance of even-handedness – “see, even the president’s son is not above the law.” But I predict Hunter will get the equivalent of a wrist slap. What’s more, Hunter almost certainly did commit a bona fide crime, and not just one, either.
(5) Eric Clapton put down his copy of The Protocols long enough to opine:
British rock guitar legend Eric Clapton moved one step closer to Roger Waters territory last week, telling an interviewer that “Israel is running the world, Israel is running the show.”
The 79-year-old musician, who has recently performed playing a guitar painted in the colors of the Palestinian flag, was interviewed on May 22 by David Spuria, an American Youtuber who hosts the popular Real Music Observer show.
Talking about the recent campus protests in the US against Israel, Clapton criticized the Senate hearings in which university presidents were asked about antisemitism on campus.
“I was so enthused about what was going on at Columbia [University] and elsewhere. And then what I couldn’t believe, because it freaked me out, were the Senate hearings, which were like the Nuremberg trials, you know?” he said.
Indeed, oh brilliant one. Just like the Nuremberg trials.
