Local Maryland Don Quixotes Take on the Turbines…and Win

Local Maryland Don Quixotes Take on the Turbines...and Win 1

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Local Maryland Don Quixotes Take on the Turbines...and Win 2

While I’ve been tied up with elections here and abroad as well as covering the Biden administration pumping unspent Inflation Reduction Act bucks out the door to any random tramp that flashes a Green thong at them…

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…Yesterday, the Department of Energy’s Inspector General sent a letter to the Under Secretary of Energy for Infrastructure that basically laid a whuppin’ on the whole spend-a-palooza.

KNOCK IT OFF WITH THE HANDOUTS

The Federal Government prohibits conflicts of interest to safeguard the taxpayers against selfdealing, collusion, and fraud by Government officials and Government contractors.  In the private sector, each party has a “baked in” economic incentive to watch, track, and account for its own dollars.  That economic incentive does not exist in the public sector, where Federal dollars are more likely to be treated as “monopoly money.”  For this reason, implementing and overseeing robust conflict of interest protections is a critical role for Federal officials. 

The Department of Energy Loan Programs Office (LPO) is administering more than $385 billion in new loan authority without ensuring a regulatory and contractually compliant and effective system to manage organizational conflicts of interest. 0F 1  This poses a significant risk of fraud, waste, and abuse.  Congress issued this unprecedented volume of loan authority in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and related legislation. 2  The projects funded with this authority, which involve innovations in clean energy, advanced transportation, and tribal energy are inherently risky in part because these projects may have struggled to secure funding from traditional sources such as commercial banks and private equity investors.  

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…my girlfriend, TurnMDRed, has kept me up to snuff on how their fight against Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s off-shore wind plans has been faring. 

Now, she’s an inveterate, ardent, and skilled letter writer who, besides keeping the campaign alive in the local press, has been working with the other activists who’ve come together to try to save the Delmarva peninsula from the despoilation and destruction inherent in these boondoggles.

You might remember last year when I posted about the twin wind farm projects planned for the middle of the Carl Shuster Jr. Horseshoe Crab Reserve. The photos of the subsequent and unprecedented massive beaching and die-off of horseshoe crabs recorded on local beaches after surveying began horrified residents and conservationists alike.

Fast forward a year to this September.

…Where local opposition to the projection had been fractured, this seemed to be the galvanizing moment. People sat up and paid attention, not just to the local activists who’d been sounding the alarm (like our very own TurnMDRed here in the comments), but to seaside merchants who’d been saying, “Have you looked at the drawings? Do you see what the view from the beach will be?” and the assorted fishing groups, both pleasure and professional.

Merchants, mayors, fisherfolk, activists, and concerned citizens started banding together, sharing information, and educating themselves on permitting and environmental requirements in order to birddog every step of the process for errors or obvious favors done to developers.

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After all the opposition pleading to the Biden administration to rethink the permits and appeals from blue state governors (including MD’s Wes Moore) for financial help bailing out the projects for the states, collective breaths were held as they waited for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to issue its final yay or nay buying off on the project. When they did, it was devastating to anti-wind forces. Of course, the Biden administration was going for it.

But Maryland opponents were prepared for such an answer. In less than two months, the city of Ocean City, MD, and its partners had filed a 92-page federal lawsuit alleging the federal government had violated any number of federal regulations and statutes in their rush to approve the plan.

Everyone had an eye towards the 6th of November, with even a sour Bloomberg calling it an “election year play.”

All’s fair.

It turns out the folks in Maryland weren’t the only ones thinking of angles of attack. 

Delaware communities who were against the project have stepped up and may have helped deliver the coup de grâce.

While the lawsuit has to wind its way through court processes – or the eventuality of the Trump administration canceling it – the business of planning for building out the wind farm goes on. Or it did until a Delaware county took matters into their own hands to stymie the monstrosity.

Interrupting the parade of approvals was Sussex County.

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Their county council denied the permit to build the farm’s massive, ugly asterisk onshore substation near a local power plant and run the massive connector cables under a local beach.

We don’t see this as a Delaware problem, they said. Maryland wants it? 

Let them do it.

In a Sussex County council meeting on Tuesday, county leaders voted against a proposal that would have allowed an electric substation be built near Millsboro.

In a 4-1 vote, leaders denied Renewable Development LLC, a subsidiary of US Wind, a conditional use permit for land to build a substation near the Indian River Power Plant. The proposal involved bringing offshore wind power cables ashore under 3Rs Beach to the proposed substation.

The county council previously deferred its decision. 

“In my opinion, this application does not benefit the inhabitants of Sussex County,” Mark Schaeffer, 3rd District Councilman for Sussex County said in opposition to the proposal at today’s meeting. “None of the benefits flow to the residents of Sussex County or to the people of the state of Delaware. They all flow to benefit the state of Maryland.”

David Stevenson, the Director of the Center of Energy and Environment for the Caesar Rodney Institute, said he agrees with the council majority. Stevenson said that off-shore wind is a Maryland one, not a Delaware one. 

Perfection. 

US Wind execs were as pissed and ominously threatening as you could imagine.

…U.S. Wind’s CEO, Jeff Grybowski, told WBOC the decision was “anti-business,” and there was “no basis at all for today’s denial of our application– an application that the County’s Planning and Zoning Commission already unanimously recommended.” 

Grybowski went on to say, “It is obvious to everyone that the perfect place to build a new electric substation is adjacent to an existing substation, next to a big power plant, on land explicitly zoned for heavy industrial use. The region needs more electricity to grow the economy and support new jobs. Our new substation will deliver large amounts of clean power directly into the electric grid in Sussex County. But a few County officials ignored both these massive benefits and the law. We know that the law is on our side and are confident that today’s decision will not stand. Our plans to build the region’s most important clean energy project are unchanged.”

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Wait, whut – the “law is on your side”? Stuff a sock in it, dude.

The other terrific news is from feisty Ocean City, MD, again. Those Worcester County commissioners are letting no grass grow under their feet as they wait on their federal lawsuit.

US Wind had planned to use a couple of properties in West Ocean City Harbor to develop an operations and maintenance facility as it starts construction on the much-reviled wind farm. The entire character of the harbor would be changed forever, and the commercial and sport fishing, a traditional and vital part of the area, would be impacted severely, if not irreparably, forever.

I think the old phrase that’s applicable could be modified to the Worcester commissioners cut US Wind off “at the dock” instead of the pass.

On the largely undeveloped Delmarva peninsula – which is surrounded by the Chesapeake Bay to the west, the Atlantic Ocean to the east and includes portions of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia – local lawmakers are getting ready to take on a major international wind power company in an effort to save its crucial commercial fishing industry.

The Worcester County Commissioners in Maryland approved a resolution on Tuesday to acquire two properties in West Ocean City Harbor through eminent domain, which US Wind plans to develop into an operations and maintenance facility as it constructs a wind farm off the coast of Ocean City, Maryland. The action was taken in an effort to protect the county’s historic commercial and sport fishing industries.

The commissioners passed the resolution as US Wind, a subsidiary of Italian-based Renexia SpA, plans to construct a 353-foot-long-by-30-foot-wide concrete pier at the harbor to service vessels used to construct a proposed wind farm consisting of up to 118 turbines at least 15 miles off the coast of Ocean City. Along with the pier, the company plans to install 383 feet of bulkhead.

The two properties the county plans to acquire are currently being used by Southern Connection Seafood and the Martin Fish Company, which are the only two commercial seafood wholesalers in the area where watermen can offload and sell their catches.

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The US Wind rep pitched a fit there, too.

WAAH

It was a twofer the good guys yesterday.

Come January 20th, there may be even more good news brought on by a fresh breeze caused by the stroke of a pen.

Posted in Republican News

Elon Is the Target of the Day

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Elon Is the Target of the Day 4

It’s a go-to tactic of the left: focus all your energy on one target and destroy it. 

It’s about the concentration of force. You pick a powerful target, destroy it, and move on to the next, and the next, and the next. Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals frames the strategy.

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RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

Make it personal. Make it hurt a particular person. Ideas don’t feel the pain, but a person can get rattled and back off. That is the point of the strategy. 

The left tried this with Trump, and it didn’t work, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a powerful strategy. It’s just that Trump is sui generis. Nobody is like Trump. 

Today’s target–not that he hasn’t been a target in the past–is Elon Musk. Only the attacks on Elon are really meant for one audience and one audience only: Donald Trump, whose ego they are trying to bruise by attributing the fall of the continuing resolution to Elon’s influence, not Trump’s. 

Elon famously led the charge against the continuing resolution, and the rumors out there are that Trump wasn’t much focused on it until Elon and then Vivek raised a fuss about it. The first is undoubtedly true, although many members of Congress actually got the ball rolling as they read the bill and posted the most outrageous parts of it. 

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The second point–that Trump didn’t care–is more ambiguous. My sense is that he was told that a CR was coming and about one or two provisions, but he never got a full briefing on how this was really a ridiculous omnibus that would emasculate his presidency, and when he found out, he wanted the bill dead. 

Elon and Trump have become best buds, and Elon has been a very effective messenger for Trump over the past few weeks. The Democrats can’t touch Trump right now, but they feel confident they can take Elon down a few pegs and in particular drive a wedge between Elon and Trump. 

Democrats are counting on Trump’s prickly personality and his love of being the center of attention, so they are poking fun at Trump to get him to push Musk away. Musk has the muscle and the money to help Trump immensely–after all, Trump’s strength is setting direction, but no one man can follow through on everything, and Musk is a master at management. 

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Elon is incredibly dangerous to the Democrats because he is even less constrained than Trump, and is almost as good a communicator to the base as the president himself. Working together, Trump and Elon will accomplish great things. Split apart, neither will be as effective. 

It’s hard to say what impact this campaign will have. During Trump’s first term it would have been more likely to work–Trump really does respond to praise and criticism–but Trump seems a lot more focused and even confident of his path than in 2017. 

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The fact that this campaign is so obviously coordinated and aimed at Trump’s soft spot may actually hamper it as well. All these small people, who defended the truly mentally crippled Joe Biden as a strong president, are not exactly great messengers to persuade Trump of anything. 

Democrats clearly believe in the power of the Narrative™, and when people trust the messengers, it can indeed be very powerful indeed. 

But their ability to create a narrative outside their own bubble has been diminishing for a long time and was grievously wounded during the election season. 

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The public doesn’t care about any of this–Musk enjoys the same approval rating as Trump–but it is within the realm of possibility that Trump does. I can’t see into his mind and soul. 

God willing, he laughs at this transparent manipulation. Everybody in Trump’s orbit has a lot of work to do, and Elon’s part in killing the CR was a valuable contribution to our country. 

Posted in Republican News

Tablet: How Woke Social Media Overtook Traditional Politics

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Tablet: How Woke Social Media Overtook Traditional Politics 6

This is such an interesting and thought provoking article. It’s kind of a grand unified theory of woke culture. As author David Samuels explains it, woke culture may have gestated in the fever swamps of leftist academia but it came to dominate our national discussion and overtook the political structures we’d all grown up learning about in school because its methods were useful to certain progressive politicians, especially Barack Obama.

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Samuels is telling this story as the history of particular ideas about social control going back to the 1920 but his own introduction to it really began with the Iran deal which he reported on as it was happening.

When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves.

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But this wasn’t the end of the echo chamber, in fact it was only the beginning. Next up was Russiagate.

The conspiratorial messaging campaign targeting Trump as a Kremlin-controlled “asset” who had been elected on direct orders from Vladimir Putin himself seemed more like the plot of a dark satire than something that rational political observers might endorse as a remotely plausible real-world event. Having reported on the Iran deal made it easy to see that Russiagate was a political op, being run according to a similar playbook, by many of the same people. Familiarity with the Iran deal made it easy for reporters at Tablet, particularly Lee Smith, to see Russiagate as a fraud from the beginning, and to see through the methods by which the hallucination was being messaged by the mainstream press….

Needless to say, the model of politics in which operatives are constantly running permission structure games on the body politic, assisted by members of the press and think tankers eager to be of service to the party, has more in common with pyramid schemes and high-pressure network-marketing scams than it does with reasoned democratic deliberation and debate. At this point, it hardly seems controversial to point out that such a model of politics is socially toxic.

Even as Russiagate was winding down, the same tools were turned toward a new and even larger target: the Covid pandemic.

Messaging around the pandemic was the fourth and most far-reaching permission structure game that was run by small clusters of operatives on the American public, resulting in the revocation of the most basic social rights—like the right to go outside your own home, or visit a dying parent or child in the hospital. COVID also proved to be an excuse for the largest wealth transfer in American history, comprising hundreds of billions of dollars, from the middle and working classes to the top 1%. Most ominously, COVID proved to be a means for remaking the American electoral system, as well as providing a platform for a series of would-be social revolutions in whose favor restrictions on public gatherings and laws against looting and public violence were suspended, due to manifestations of “public opinion” on social media.

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Fauci and his minions knew a lab leak was a real possibility but wanted to prevent it from being discussed and gaining traction. They whipped up a supposedly scientific article saying it was all but impossible specifically to control the narrative. They browbeat skeptics into submission, at least for a while. Samuels describes this new approach as totalitarian in nature.

The permission structure machine that Barack Obama and David Axelrod built to replace the Democratic Party was in its essence neither modern nor conservative, though. Rather it is totalitarian in its essence, a device for getting people to act against their beliefs by substituting new and better beliefs through the top-down controlled and leveraged application of social pressure, which among other things eliminates the position of the spectator. The integrity of the individual is violated in order to further the superior interests of the superego of humanity, the party, which knows which beliefs are right and which are wrong. The party is the ghost in the machine, which appears to run on automatic pilot, using the human desire for companionship and social connection as fuel for an effort to detach individuals from their own desires and substitute the dictates of the party, which is granted the unlimited right to enforce its superior opinions on all of mankind…

The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create. 

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This helps explain why silencing, shunning and of course canceling are the most frequent tools used by woke activists, i.e. tools of social coercion. You either go along with the party line or you risk paying a steep price for speaking against it. At a minimum that price could be being viewed as a troglodyte unworthy of being part of polite society. At the worst, it could mean an avalanche of death threats, public confrontation and losing your job. On the other hand, providing service to the party and its goals can result in public praise, access to friendly media, and a kind of tenuous respect.

But of course the dictates of the party change constantly in a process that Samuels calls Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment (that’s the title of his piece). This is the process whereby people who want to remain on the inside, surrounded by social approval, instantly adopt the latest fad belief about topics like gender or race, at least superficially. Privately, most people have their doubts about DEI, affirmative action, giving children hormones, trans women in women’s sports, etc. The doubts are fine so long as most people are too afraid to speak up about them. As Samuels sees it, the whole apparatus began to collapse when Elon Musk bought Twitter, taking it away from the people who were creating the echo chambers.

Bullying large numbers of people into faddish hyperconformity by controlling the machinery of social approval may require both money and technique, but it is not art or thought. In fact, it is something like the opposite of thought. Lost in the hypercharged mirror world that they had created, they decided that having made themselves cool also made them right, and that evidence to the contrary could be safely dismissed as a “right-wing talking point.” Obama’s operatives shared the same character flaw as their master, a kind of brittle, Ivy League know-it-all-ness that demanded that they always be the smartest person in the room…

By letting Twitter go, and then making war on its new owner, in a belated attempt to get him to do their bidding, the Obama party showed both the scope of its ambition and also its hubris—a combination that split the country’s oligarchy on the eve of the key election that would have allowed the party to consolidate its power.

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They are still doing their best to punish Musk. If they can find a way to destroy him, they will. The same people who never had a bad word to say about George Soros, funder of uncountable progressive organizations and candidates, are suddenly outraged at having an unelected billionaire involved in politics.

Samuels wraps this all up by arguing that both Trump and Netanyahu were to the other key elements in bringing and end to the new world that Barack Obama tried to build. In his return, Trump triumphed over Obama’s successors, Biden and Harris. For his part, Netanyahu blew up the idea that Iran was a burgeoning power that needed to be catered to and normalized. That bet isn’t looking so good after the collapse of Syria and the defeat of both Hamas and Hezbollah.

The whole thing is worth reading especially for its insights on how social media was manipulated for social control.

Posted in Republican News

Fani Finale: Will Lawfare Case Exit Stage Left?

Fani Finale: Will Lawfare Case Exit Stage Left? 7

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Fani Finale: Will Lawfare Case Exit Stage Left? 8

Sic semper lawfarennis. But has the attempt to prosecute a RICO case in Georgia centered on Donald Trump come to an end with Fani Willis’ disqualification? It depends on how one defines “end.” 

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Technically, as David wrote earlier, the Georgia appellate court left the indictment in place while removing Willis and Fulton County from jurisdiction over it. That came from the punt by Judge Scott McAfee that David also described, but is in itself a punt too. In fact, the appeals court barely addressed the motion in its 2-1 ruling today, and missed the larger point behind it:

2. The appellants contend that the trial court erred in denying their motions to dismiss the indictment. The State responds that the appellants have failed to show that the trial court erred in finding that the appellants had not shown “that [their] due process rights have been violated or that the issues involved prejudiced [them] in any way.”

“Dismissal of an indictment . . . [is] an extreme sanction[ ], used only sparingly . . . for unlawful government conduct.” State v. Lampl, 296 Ga. 892, 896 (2) (770 SE2d 629) (2015). In the absence of express statutory authorization, dismissal of an indictment “generally cannot be imposed absent a violation of a constitutional right.” (Citation and punctuation omitted.) Id. While this is the rare case in which DA Willis and her office must be disqualified due to a significant appearance of impropriety, we cannot conclude that the record also supports the imposition of the extreme sanction of dismissal of the indictment under the appropriate standard. See Olsen v. State, 302 Ga. 288, 293-294 (2) (806 SE2d 556) (2017); Lamb v. State, 267 Ga. 464, 465-466 (5) (479 SE2d 719) (1997). We therefore affirm the trial court’s denial of the appellants’ motion to dismiss.

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This case didn’t just involve the appearance of impropriety. It involved actual impropriety, including factual misrepresentations during the hearing McAfee held on the disqualification motion. There are plenty of reasons to believe that both Willis and Wade lied in court about their relationship, which would not just be prosecutorial misconduct but outright perjury. A separate claim of witness tampering has yet to be pursued, but certainly raises all sorts of questions not just about the conflict of interest between Willis and Wade but also the entire conduct of the Fulton County DA throughout this case. 

If perjury and witness tampering aren’t “extreme” examples of prosecutorial misconduct, what is?

The court may have felt itself constrained to the findings of McAfee’s rulings as the trier of fact on this hearing. That limitation lent itself to Judge Land’s accusation in dissent that the court had adopted a new standard for disqualification. However, the short shrift that the ruling gives the dismissal motion looks more like a punt because without Willis, this indictment is almost certainly going nowhere — and the court almost certainly knows it.

To understand why, the Associated Press gives a thumbnail description of the process that will now take place to assign new jurisdiction:

The 2-1 ruling by appeals court panel means it will be up to the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia to find another prosecutor to take over the case and to decide whether to continue to pursue it, though that could be delayed if Willis decides to appeal to the state Supreme Court. A trial judge in March had set conditions that allowed Willis to stay on the case.

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Now, ask yourselves this: What prosecutor will want to take up this case at all, beyond the guilty pleas that have already been entered? That’s especially true of Willis’ Tinker-Toy edition of a RICO case, based mainly on political speech and without any permanent “organization” involved for a Racketeer Influenced or Corrupt Organization charge. Add onto that Willis’ attempts to make a racism argument in response to the DQ motion, including in a public speech at a church, and the entire mess looks distinctly unappealing, even for Democrat DAs that might otherwise be inclined to dislike Trump et al.

Do the judges know this? Probably not with total certainty, but … come on, man. They know the law and they read the indictment. They must at least suspect that no other DA will want to take this up with any real enthusiasm, and any other DA in Georgia might be inclined to quietly dismiss the RICO charges once the dust settles a bit. That includes Democrat DAs, where their constituents might be less impressed with lawfare against Trump, and their desire for re-election runs more toward dealing with actual crime rather than Politics By Other Means. 

This may be premature. Both sides could appeal parts of the ruling to the Georgia state supreme court — Willis on the DQ and Trump et al on the denial of the dismissal motion. There’s no real upside for the high court to disturb this ruling, though, because it has all of the virtues of effectively killing the case while maintaining an alibi. Even CNN recognizes that this case is “dead in the water,” even before Elie Honig weighs in:

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CNN Newsroom anchor Jim Acosta began the hour with the breaking news and brought on senior crime and justice reporter Katelyn Polantz.

“This is a big development,” said Acosta.

The appeal court’s ruling was indeed a big development, Polantz agreed, “and a big development that Donald Trump has wanted for a long time.” The case had “already been paused,” she said, but “now it’s not even back burner.”

“This is a case that will be dead in the water,” she continued, “because the Georgia Court of Appeals is now saying that Fani Willis, the leader of the prosecution against Donald Trump, the district attorney in Fulton county, Georgia, she should be disqualified from being able to bring that case.”

Honig then referred back to Willis’ public statements accusing Trump attorneys of being racist for opposing her, and wondered whether the judges would rule on that. As it happens, they didn’t:

And separately, and I’m looking to see if this is in the opinion, I believe it is, because I know it’s one of the issues that was briefed to the Georgia Court of Appeals, the D.A. made statements outside of court that the trial judge found were, quote, legally improper. For example, she went in front of a church while this case was pending, and she said, essentially, the reason these defendants have brought these motions, standard legal motions, is because they’re playing the race card.

And the defendants, Donald Trump and other defense lawyers, argued that that violated the responsibilities and ethics of a prosecutor. And the trial judge, oddly, said those statements that Fani Willis made out of court were, quote, legally improper, and then he did nothing about it. He said essentially too bad, there’s no remedy.

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The court never even addressed these issues, which apparently surprised Honig, but comes as no surprise with this punt on dismissal. It will loom large with any new attempt to prosecute this indictment, however, since the same taint will apply thanks to Willis’ highly publicized and inflammatory remarks. 

Posted in Republican News

Washington Whingers: Why Did Elon Musk Do This to Us?

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I do not believe I have ever seen such a bunch of whiny, whingy adults in one place in my lifetime.

The Capitol Hill Swamp Thangs who figured they could shove through this 1500-page Democratic Christmas pork present – as if the message of November 6th never, EH-VAH happened and wasn’t resoundingly clear to everyone but them – had to be smoking some of that new supercharged dope I wrote about the other day.

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Once the Continuing Resolution exploded over Democrats’ and Speaker Mike Johnson’s heads, those waggly fingers of blame started being pointed, and never at the perpetrators.

Oh, no, no, no.

It’s always someone else’s fault when Washington trips over its obtuse arrogance.

This ridiculous, unnecessary, embarrassing af CR exercise reminds me of the 3-frame meme where the guy is riding a bike, then leans over the handlebars to shove a stick through his front spokes. 

In the last frame, he’s on the ground, holding his knee and moaning some version of, “Why did Donald Trump do this to me?“

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It’s the saddest, most pathetic thing. To watch grown men and women get caught in broad daylight with their hands in the cookie jar yet again. 

Hello. 

They had all the warnings in the world – and 77,275,579 personal affirmations – that business as usual wasn’t going to fly, that those days were done.

Yet they still slapped 1500 pages down on the table with the “best we could offer” line of fabled yore.

Speaker Johnson is so well-versed in the Old Ways that his public excuses for the CR as it stood and was confidently presented to the House at large were made with the presumption of a ‘Done Deal.’ Based entirely on What Had Come Many Times Before.

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Besides, there were too many pages to read and too little time – ignoring that promise for ‘timely’ legislative submissions – plus the added emotional pressure of ‘and it’s CHRISTMAS.’ Well, the hierarchy knew they had this sucker in the bag just like every time before.

Obviously, there’s been nothing learned and zero clues taken from this election cycle about the dissemination of information and the blazing rate of speed in a viral news cycle. Not Meet the Press or the evening broadcast. Social media when it’s used purposefully in the pursuit of timely information and action.

And, man – did the news (with screenshots for evidence) of this flaming pile of dogcrap ever spread like wildfire across social media, mainly the now unencumbered-by-progressive-censors ‘X.’ The owner of X, Elon Musk, took to the platform, amplifying what everyone discussing the CR was feeling about both the legislation and the Republican members of Congress who have had the unmitigated temerity to offer it up in the first place.

The backlash was fast, furious, immediate, and stunned the crap out of unprepared for resistance of any magnitude Congresscreatures.

They were beyond flummoxed and probably the most uncomfortable they have ever been in their political lives.

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CALL A WAAHMBULANCE

Naturally, the fault couldn’t be with any actions they’d taken – it had to be with the reactions, and they needed to quickly finger someone to take the heat off.

The bogeyman for this misadventure in legislation and governance has been chosen by the stick-holding bike riders in Congress and their media toadies, and the winner is?

WHY DID ELON MUSK DO THIS TO US?

The shameless Congressional choral version of “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha” started post-haste.

Yup. That’s what they’re going to do.

BUT BILLIONAIRE!

The Washington Post’s morning email made a point to throw in ‘chaos’ in connection with Elon twice for good measure, as if he was a Marvel supervillain controlling everything from a mountaintop fortress in the Himalayas.

Elon BROUGHT chaos. Elon CAUSED chaos.

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Well, my gosh! What a terrible guy! Have we turned running the government over to a maniacal, ee-ville billionaire?

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 ‘T’would seem so if one is sucker enough to fall for the narrative they are desperately trying to build at the moment to cover this disgraceful betrayal of the confidence the American voters showed by handing Congress – actually all three branches of government – back to Republicans.

It’s not going to work, guys.

See, we all know what’s going on every single minute, and I know it’s killing you that we do.

So when you and your cohorts in pork and pilfering pull shameless stunts like this – blaming a private citizen (who allowed unfettered access to information) for callously freezing hurricane victims in North Carolina – you only harden our resolve to force you to finally do what voters voted for...

…and to crush any future machinations – along with your most precious political hopes and dreams – like the bugs you are.

The Democratic bugs who are, in fact, responsible for *checks notes* destitute, abandoned, and freezing hurricane victims in North Carolina.

Yeah – we’re keeping track practically by the minute.

Washington Whingers: Why Did Elon Musk Do This to Us? 12Information is power, and you all are in so much trouble.

This is where the confusion of an entrenched, sclerotic elite confronted by a resistance now armed with real-time information and power clashes.

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‘Surely one man is directing it all?’ they whimper, whinge, and wail. ‘These knuckle-dragging peasants couldn’t possibly have come up with this on their own.’

Hard lessons in accountability are coming, Congress.

Elon simply unlocked the gate.

You’d be smart to drop the stick before you do any more damage.

Posted in Republican News

NEW: Fani Got Her Fanny Kicked!

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Fani Willis was kicked off the case. 

Of all the cases against Donald Trump, observers believed that the Georgia RICO case against Donald Trump presented the most peril to the president. 

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As with the New York case, which is widely believed to be on track to evaporate because it is so awful that the appellate courts in New York will almost certainly toss it out, the Georgia case is in the state courts and, therefore cannot be easily dismissed through a presidential pardon. It has the potential to drag out for years, and it is remotely possible that Trump could have been convicted and imperiled by the prospect of jail time post-presidency. 

No doubt you recall the scandal that derailed this case: Nathan Wade and Fani Willis were found to have lied to the court and conducted a clandestine affair, calling into question the legitimacy of their effort to jail Donald Trump. Willis had a clear financial interest in prosecuting the case because her lover had been hired by her as outside counsel in the case–calling into question all the decisions made by Willis. 

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The irony is that the entire case is tainted by political bias more than financial. Willis was determined to “get” Trump in much the same manner as Letitia James and Alvin Bragg, but as with all Trump’s enemies, it is not Trump who presents the most danger to their goals, but themselves. Their determination to get Trump blinds them to everything but their goal.

Willis wanted to destroy Trump, and nothing would get in her way. The case was as personal to her as her sexual relationship with Wade, so she never acknowledged either as a problems. Both served her personal goals. Two types of lust were satisfied at the same time: the lust for power and plain ol’ lust. 

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But it is the moral degeneracy of the improper relationship with Wade that drove the stake through the heart of the case. It is ironic that it is her personal behavior, not the obvious political motives, that doomed this case. 

Judge McAffee didn’t actually “err” in allowing Fani Willis to stay on the case, as the Georgia appeals court ruled. The ruling was clearly wrong, but McAfee knew that Fani would be disqualified by a higher court and sought to avoid the political fallout during an election cycle in which he was running. He knew he would lose his race if he didn’t keep the Trump case on life support, so he punted. 

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This is another symptom of how political these prosecutions of Trump were. The claim that prosecutions of controversial figures are about the law is fiction. Politics always impinge in one way or another. The Hunter Biden case’s resolution was political, as was the initial attempt to immunize him through a plea deal. The lawfare against Trump was purely political–four criminal trials in one year- an election year! 

Even the civil trials were purely political–the E. Jean Carroll case was funded by billionaire Democrat Reid Hoffman, who also funded the “Trump will ban masturbating to porn” ads during the campaign. 

Theoretically, the RICO case can still move forward, but a different prosecutor has to run with it, and I would be somewhat surprised if one did because it is so tainted, and the original indictment was intended to kill Trump’s campaign and that failed. 

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Not to mention that the case is tainted by more than the Willis/Wade affair–collusion with the White House will soon be proven, and that will taint the indictment beyond repair. 

Still, don’t count out the Democrats. There is no end to the depth of their hatred for Trump. 

On the other hand, Donald Trump seems to have an inexhaustible supply of good luck. And this time around, the country is on his side. 

Posted in Republican News

Trump to Johnson: If You Want to Remain Speaker …

Trump to Johnson: If You Want to Remain Speaker ... 15

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Trump to Johnson: If You Want to Remain Speaker ... 16

… make better choices? Learn strategy? Look at the calendar before cutting deals that give away the store?

All of the above?

Donald Trump actually sounds as though he wants Johnson to survive his next Speaker vote, even after the missteps yesterday. Trump tells Fox News Digital that Johnson could win “easily” as long as he stops falling for Democrats’ banana-in-the-tailpipe tricks. Trump wants Biden’s budget settled while Biden’s on the hook for it, and he wants something else that might actually get bipartisan support:

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President-elect Donald Trump told Fox News Digital that House Speaker Mike Johnson will “easily remain speaker” for the next Congress if he “acts decisively and tough” and eliminates “all of the traps being set by Democrats” in the spending package. 

Fox News Digital spoke exclusively with the president-elect Thursday morning, just hours after the bipartisan deal to avoid a partial government shutdown was killed. 

“Anybody that supports a bill that doesn’t take care of the Democrat quicksand known as the debt ceiling should be primaried and disposed of as quickly as possible,” Trump told Fox News Digital. 

Vice President-elect JD Vance met with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Wednesday night. The two spoke about the potential continuing resolution for about an hour. Vance said the two had a “productive conversation,” and said he believes they will “be able to solve some problems here” and will continue “working on it.”

That’s actually a remarkable show of support for Johnson, under the circumstances. Trump has a habit of stirring the pot at the last minute on legislative negotiations, which creates its own problems, but this is a pickle mainly of Johnson’s own creation. The breadth of the giveaways in the supposed “continuing resolution” made it much more of an omnibus than anyone expected, even Johnson’s allies in the House GOP caucus. The more that emerged, the more embarrassing it got, to the point where it made a pretty good case that Johnson might not be the leader the caucus needs in the next session.

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Trump and Vance really don’t need that leadership war to reignite, however, especially in the all-important first 100 days while Trump still has electoral momentum. He understands that he might have only the first two years to get his agenda accomplished, and a crippling leadership fight might prevent Trump from any success at all. House Republicans also have a big stake in success, given their barely-there majority and the consequences of failing to deliver when the midterms roll around. 

Instead, Trump will try to cut a deal that both parties can live with — and to do that, Trump has to give Democrats something they claim to want. Hence, Trump is going on both Fox and NBC to offer to end the “debt ceiling” fantasy once and for all:

In a phone interview with NBC News, Trump said getting rid of the debt ceiling entirely would be the “smartest thing [Congress] could do. I would support that entirely.”

“The Democrats have said they want to get rid of it. If they want to get rid of it, I would lead the charge,” Mr. Trump added. 

Trump suggested that the debt ceiling is a meaningless concept — and that no one knows for sure what would happen if it were to someday be breached — “a catastrophe, or meaningless” — and no one should want to find out. 

To be more accurate, Democrats have mainly wanted to end the debt ceiling when we have Democrat presidents, but at least they’re on record at some point for ending this edition of Kabuki theater. Republicans have resisted this consistently, convinced that it gives them leverage in budget negotiations despite winning nothing substantive over debt and deficits in the 20-plus years they’ve played chicken with it. 

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On this point, Trump is entirely correct. Congress authorizes debt when it passes budgets that spend more than the federal government receives in revenue, a gap which has now spread out to $2 trillion a year or so. If the debt ceiling meant anything, Congress would act like it by passing budgets that keep debt within its limits. Instead, they just use it for another food fight while increasing deficit spending anyway, so how exactly is this a “limit” in any meaningful sense? Even Congress doesn’t act like it limits them in any way. If Congress really wants a debt limit, then they should budget accordingly; otherwise, a budget is a de facto authorization to borrow to get the funds appropriated. 

Had Johnson possessed any strategic sense, he would have pared down the additional baggage to get Trump the clean slate he clearly wanted in January. He could have offered up this essentially meaningless concession to get enough Democrats on board to pass a relatively clean CR/omnibus to clear the decks for the incoming administration. Johnson probably could have asked Trump what he actually wanted first, and if Johnson tried that, then he could have gotten Trump to go on record about it early so that his allies in the caucus could plan accordingly. 

Will Democrats accept a pared-down CR/omnibus that covers the rest of the year? Maybe or maybe not, but Trump wants that fight now rather than in March or June:

On the possibility of a shutdown, which would occur at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday if a funding deal isn’t reached, he said, “If there’s going to be a shutdown, we’re going to start it with a Democratic president” — suggesting that the fight playing out in Congress now is necessary to clear the decks before his administration begins in January. 

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Exactly. A CR that puts Trump in the middle of a potential shutdown strategy by Democrats isn’t a very good deal for Republicans generally, not just for Trump. One might expect a House Speaker to realize that. 

Posted in Republican News

The Real Lie of the Year

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The Real Lie of the Year 18

As you know, Politifact announced their “Lie of the Year” yesterday, and emphasized that the lie was so outrageous that there was unanimity among their staff about its particular outrageousness.

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“They are eating the dogs in Springfield.” The lie was so outrageous that you could practically feel the tears of rage and empathy for Haitian migrants dripping onto the keyboards of the fact-checkers. 

In a way, you can sympathize. Trump was able to refocus the country on the migrant crisis rather than the phony JOY! that the Pravda Media and Kamala Harris were trying to sell us. If I were one of the partisans at Politifact, I would be outraged, too. Despite the media and many observers thinking that Trump lost ground during the debate, it turns out that the “eating the pets” meme was the only memorable part of it, and Trump clearly won that exchange. 

Of course, the Springfield Haitian pet massacre wasn’t the lie of the year, except in the eyes of disappointed Democrats who thought they would be able to keep ruining our country. The biggest, most consequential lie is one that the Pravda Media invested a lot of time, energy, money, and sweat in propagating: that Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack.”

For years the media has been hiding the fact that the president is, for most purposes, a walking dead man. The man with his finger on the nuclear button and who is in charge of keeping our government functioning has been a vegetable, and the establishment liked it that way and wanted him to continue being in the Oval Office for another four years. 

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Of course, just as the “eating the pets” “lie” was so awful for them because it focused attention back where it belonged, the “sharp as a tack” line wasn’t a “lie” because it served their purpose, at least until it collapsed before our very eyes on June 27th. 

A president with a “vacant, open to rent” sign on his forehead was an advantage for the transnational elite. Biden’s will, for the most part, was not an obstacle to their own, although every once in a while the old man went off script. But with the right amount of tapioca pudding and cash funneled to Hunter Joe was a useful prop for the technocrats who really ran things. 

Here are a few handpicked snippets from the story, via Richard Hanania:

Some highlights: 

“At events, aides often repeated instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to the average person. Biden’s team tapped campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, a Hollywood mogul, to find a voice coach to improve the president’s fading warble.”

“Yet a sign that the bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted for Biden’s advanced age had arisen early on—in just the first few months of his term. Administration officials noticed that the president became tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes.”

“If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. ‘He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,’ the former aide recalled the official saying.”

“At some events, the Biden campaign printed the pre-approved questions on notecards and then gave donors the cards to read the questions. Even with all these steps, Biden made flubs, which confounded the donors who knew that Biden had the questions ahead of time.”

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The day after Politifact’s ridiculous “Lie of the Year” piece, the Wall Street Journal has its own outlining how the insiders at the White House worked tirelessly to hide Joe Biden’s decline. It is story in the “now it can be told” style, which brings up the obvious: isn’t it the job of the media to tell us these things when they matter, and not just after it no longer does?

Not anymore, at least as they see it. As part of the apparatus of governing, the media treats ordinary Americans as problems to be managed, not citizens who have the final say in how the country is run. 

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So in their view, “sharp as a tack” wasn’t a lie, but a Narrative™, and the right narratives are good because they get people to believe what is necessary to make them swallow what the elite is feeding us: a s**t sandwich. 

Posted in Republican News

Now They Tell Us Joe Biden’s Not Up For This Job

Now They Tell Us Joe Biden's Not Up For This Job 19

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Now They Tell Us Joe Biden's Not Up For This Job 20

Better late than never, I guess, but it doesn’t make regime media any less infuriating. 

Thursday morning’s Wall Street Journal features a lengthy story by Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer, and Siobhan Hughes documenting the lengths Joe Biden’s staff at the White House went to in order to cover up the President’s rapid mental and physical decline not just from the public, but from his own cabinet and advisors. In a normal world, it’s easily the biggest scandal of the century thus far. Sadly, we’re not living in normalcy, and we have not been since COVID.

As recent as June, there was only one narrative coming out of the Democratic-abetting Manhattan-Beltway media complex – Joe Biden is fine. He’s better than fine. He’s never been better. All this nonsense being peddling on right-wing sites and talk radio is disinformation. The videos we all saw were not real. They were cheap fakes. 

The New York Times on June 21st ran a headline that read, “How Misleading Videos Trail Biden As He Battles Age Doubts.” It parroted the White House line that videos showing Joe Biden addled and disconnected on trips abroad were “cheap fakes.” 

The Washington Post ran similar stories. On June 11, this piece.

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In edited videos, Republican officials and allies of former president Donald Trump repeatedly tried to turn Biden’s Normandy visit into a highlight reel of senior moments and missteps, aimed at showing the president as infirm, addled or out of his depth. Trump, who turns 78 on Friday, has also repeatedly attacked Biden over his age and fitness, and regularly shares videos of the president looking frail. 

But an examination of video feeds from the events in Normandy, France, makes clear that the selected clips had been edited to present a particularly damaging — and often misleading — picture. 

Such deceptively edited videos — known as “cheap fakes” because they misrepresent events simply by manipulating video or audio, or by leaving out context — have become staples of Republican attacks against Biden. They are easier to make and disseminate than content generated by artificial intelligence and can quickly go viral, allowing Biden’s opponents to take innocuous moments and turn them into attacks on his mental acuity or physical fitness.

Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post fact-checker, which is itself ironic in this piece covering disinformation, gives four Pinocchios to right-wing media for misleading videos and cheap fakes. Here’s a bit of his analysis along with co-fact-checker Adriana Usero. Perhaps each fact-checker donated two Pinocchios each. 

“Unfortunately, some of President Biden’s right-wing critics don’t respect their readers or themselves and resort to misinformation and cheap fakes because his performance in office — fueling the strongest economic growth in the world, bringing violent crime to historic lows, and advancing our national security in the world — is so threatening to them that they feel a need to make things up,” deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement. “It’s also telling that President Biden’s critics believe that giving a thumbs up to a skydiver or taking the time to thank veterans in Normandy is somehow negative.” 

The Pinocchio Test 

The use of these clips is an especially pernicious couple of examples of manipulated video — what we label “isolation” under our guide to manipulated video — because it’s intended to create a false narrative that doesn’t reflect the event as it occurred. The RNC and its avid followers in the conservative media earn Four Pinocchios.

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Joe Scarborough on MSNBC famously went on a screed against anyone who dares to believe Biden has slipped. The President had never been sharper. 

Here’s the problem. It was all a lie. Every single member of regime media lied to you. And not just this year, but all four years of the Biden presidency. They all knew Biden was losing it. 

In the Journal story this morning, the reportage is just stunning. Not surprising, but stunning that they finally covered in detail what we’ve known for years. 

To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan. 

Senior advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president. 

Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in the 2024 race.

Right from the outset, The Biden protection squad were deployed to keep visitors and cabinet members alike from getting too close, asking too many questions, or putting all the clues together that Chance the Gardener wasn’t just a character in Being There, he’d actually been inaugurated. 

This week, Biden has made a couple appearances, and hasn’t reassured anyone on his way out the door about anything. From the White House lawn to a gaggle wanting to know what was flying over New Jersey, here’s what the President said. 

Well, I’m sure that will calm everybody down. Joe seems fully briefed on the situation. 

Biden, for some reason, showed up on the More Perfect Union podcast with Faiz Shakir. Donald Trump spent 3 hours with Joe Rogan. Biden coughed up 13 minutes to Shakir. Here’s the highlights.

You’ll be glad to know that Joe Biden finally realizes grocery prices are still pretty high. Maybe it’s just me, but this realization seems to come a tad bit late. 

This next one made my eyes bug out. 

Come on, man. You would be hard-pressed to find a politician of either party in the last 100 years that has grifted off of his place in power, whether it be as a United States Senator, Vice-President, or the President more than Joe Biden. Peter Schweizer has written extensively on Biden, Inc. in Red Handed and documented the numerous cases of peddling influence domestically and internationally. For Biden to now feign outrage at pols who use their positions of power to game the system and enrich themselves, that actually breaks the hypocrisy meter. Why again did Hunter Biden get a blanket pardon for a time period spanning 11 years? It wasn’t just for a gun and drug charge. 

This may be the most truthful thing Biden has ever said in his entire career. Yes, I do believe we will be able to make a sharp contrast four years from now after Donald Trump’s term compared to the flaming wreckage turned in by this guy. 

Back to the Wall Street Journal piece, it makes one question this entire interview with Shakir. How many different edits and pick-up were necessary to get 13 usable minutes out of this? Who scripted the questions for him? Where were the Biden staffers to wave off the interview if Shakir deviated from the pre-approved script? 

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If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the official saying. 

While it isn’t uncommon for politicians to want more time with the president than they get, some Democrats felt Biden was unusually hard to reach.

James Hohmann, editorial writer and columnist for the Washington Post, excerpted long passages from this Journal article on his X feed. 

If only James had access to a news organization with resources to cover the White House and report the results of their journalistic curiosity to the American people. Alas.

Why now? Joe Biden’s debate performance against Donald Trump peeled the veneer off the facade that Biden was competent to be president, now or in the future. It was Joe Biden himself that forced the Democratic elite to kick him to the curb. It was the naked display of Biden’s slippage that caused regime media to briefly do stories like this one today in the Journal back in July. But once Kamala Harris was subbed in, the Biden aging angle disappeared once more from regime media. 

Again, why now? Does media harbor the fantasy that their past sins of commission and omission will be forgiven and forgotten, and their credibility will be restored in the new year now that the election is lost? Of course, not. So why now? 

Well, in short, It’s Christmas, and regime media is not feeling very merry. Chanukah happens to fall on Christmas day this year, and Jewish members of the press are not feeling very happy. They’re angry. They’re bitter. They feel used. Chuck Todd on a podcast with CNN’s Chris Cillizza pretty much summed it up with the pardoning of Hunter Biden. 

Regime media is ticked off that Joe and Jill Biden put them in this nightmare. They’re ticked because the Biden’s immediately backed Kamala Harris and they were forced to make a souffle out of that excrement sandwich. And not to be overlooked is the relationship Joe Biden and the White House has with their purported allies in media. 

Up to this point, all Democrats, media and elected politicians, including their staffs, were basically all in the same boat rowing oars in the same direction, because they’re all left-wing and they had a common enemy – Donald Trump. Now that they’ve lost, they’re not at all happy to have been treated like dirt for the last four years. Biden rarely, if ever granted interviews. When interviews were given, questions were scripted out, and if reporters deviated, staff would end the interview early. The White House Press Corps were herded in for photo ops, and promptly herded out before being able to ask questions. Press conferences were ridiculously stagecrafted and managed, if the White House held them at all. 

The Biden’s hold regime media in the same regard conservatives do, when push comes to shove, and as a long-time GOP hand tells me, it’s like a master beating his dog one too many times. The dog will take those beatings for only so long, and then eventually that dog will turn on him and fight back, and it’ll get ugly. I think that’s what you’re beginning to see, largely, and will continued throughout the remainder of Biden’s term. 

Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC appeared on So Many Issues with Lukas Thimm a few days ago, and revealed the frustration she dealt with trying to carry water for the Biden-Harris administration, compared to working with Donald Trump. Trump was at least responsive. He gave her a three-word colorful refusal when she ask to interview him, but he was accessible and took her call. It would be easier to rifle through Fort Knox than get Joe Biden on the phone unless you were Hunter with a ChiCom business opportunity. 

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If the President would have committed resources to the Southern Border with the same intensity as he did beefing up his White House inner circle, fentanyl deaths would have plummeted. Apartment buildings in Aurora would be safe. Jocelyn Nungaray and Rachel Morin would be alive.

Joe Biden’s legacy is not going to be a good one, and it’s not just because he was rotten on domestic policy, worse on foreign affairs, and decaying faster than the Halloween Jack-O-Lantern in November. All that is true. But the reason Biden will not age will in the history books is because deep down, he’s a nasty, bitter, vindictive, corrupt old man who has treated everyone around him akin to how Capone treated Chicago. 32 Days to go, and they can’t fall off the calendar fast enough. 

Posted in Republican News

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back?

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Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back? 21

In our first episode, our plucky hero (bear with me — Ed) has rattled the Empire by destroying its power base, using leaks to blow up its corporate HQ’s legal department. (Reportedly, anyway.) In the sequel, we find out that the Empire has a lot more leaky firepower than the plucky hero, who might be fortunate if all that happens is that he ends up on an ice planet in the Protection Racket Media galaxy far, far too near.

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If George Stephanopoulos wants to play Jedi leak tricks, looks like Disney isn’t afraid to unleash the Power of the Mouse Side. The New York Post — which serves as Tatooine, apparently — offered up leaks that exposed the “actual malice” in play over the defamation suit settled by Disney with Donald Trump. And I’m not even talking about the lawsuit:

George Stephanopoulos was repeatedly told by his executive producer not to “use the word rape” before going on the air to discuss Donald Trump but the ABC News anchor ignored the warning — a decision that cost the network $16 million, The Post has learned.

Parent company Disney’s capitulation last week in the defamation lawsuit by Trump against ABC News and Stephanopoulos shocked media and legal experts, but the damning revelation could help explain why Mouse House CEO Bob Iger signed off on the settlement so quickly. …

“‘This Week’ producer said ‘don’t use the word rape’ before the segment started,” a network source told The Post. “The EP [executive producer] said it so many times.”

A second source at the show confirmed via a text message viewed by The Post that Stephanopoulos was warned “not to say rape.”

As a number of people observed immediately on Twitter/X when this report came out last night, that would have been game-set-match in court. The Sullivan doctrine applies to public figures in defamation and libel cases by requiring a stronger standard of intent. For non-public figures, all plaintiffs need to show is that information published as fact are (a) false, (b) defamatory/damaging in a substantial manner, and (c) the result of negligence by the publisher. 

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For public figures, however, Sullivan adds another requirement: “actual malice.” That doesn’t mean hatred, but rather the establishment that the defamation occurred over something  more than negligence — that the publisher had good reason to know the information was false but published anyway. That is nearly impossible to prove, which is why two Supreme Court justices want to revisit Sullivan, but the one sure way to prove it is to get testimony or documentation that the publisher of the defamatory conduct was warned not to publish it. That’s why discovery is so important in these cases … and clearly why Disney didn’t want to allow the case to go that far. 

That raises another question about this leak, however. If Disney spent $16 million to avoid having this come out in court, why have it leak now? First off, there may be other communications that Disney needed to keep buried that would have been more damaging than this one, so perhaps this isn’t even much of a leak against interests. But it clearly seems intended to put an end to the effort to make Stephanopoulos into an Obi-Wan Kenobi martyr figure for the Protection Racket Media, whether that effort is coming from Stephanopoulos himself or his friends. 

Stephanopoulos didn’t get stabbed in the back during a light-saber duel with Darth Iger. If this leak is accurate, Stephanopoulos was staring into the light saber when he hit the power button. And now Disney wants everyone to know it after the blowback they got for settling a case that their supposed “news” host created out of his own arrogance and toxic bias. Disney’s willing to play the same game on the same turf, and they probably have played it a lot longer than Stephanopoulos. Heck, Iger has played it longer than Stephanopoulos.

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Will this convince Stephanopoulos’ allies to stand down? Probably not, so the rest of us should pop more popcorn. But if this leak is accurate, it demonstrates that Disney had no choice but to avoid a trial, and that the $16 million price tag may have been a far better discount than any found at its amusement parks.

Speaking of discounts, though, Stephanopoulos may have other motives for a potential leak war:

Coincidentally, an ABC News spokesperson told me today that Stephanopoulos has just signed a new, multiyear contract with the network, unrelated to the timing of the settlement. Several insiders speculated that Stephanopoulos’s new deal includes a pay cut, and noted that he is likely to eventually take on a more limited role, after already ceding pole-anchor position on special event coverage to David Muir. Disney is trying to lower costs across its linear portfolio, including at ABC’s Good Morning America, where Stephanopoulos and his co-anchors Robin Roberts and Michael Strahan have historically made around $25 million a year—a gross misalignment of funds, given the declining audience for morning television, generally, and particularly in light of GMA’s ratings slide since Almin Karamehmedovic became president of ABC News. Presumably, Stephanopoulos’s heir apparent, Whit Johnson, would deliver similar ratings and cost a lot less.

Indeed, that is where things seem to be headed—albeit with the discretion and diplomatic finesse befitting a revered network veteran who, despite his slip-ups, has earned the right to an elegant exit. Also, as you all know, television news is a business wherein executives and talent air kiss each other at lunch but complain ceaselessly about one another in private—their own version of being “electronically sloppy.” George may be headed toward his next act as a public figure, but no one wants to be the person responsible for it.

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The “elegant exit” option is out, entirely of Stephanopoulos’ own doing. 

Posted in Republican News