First World Problems...

What kind of pathetic quality control is this?

One balloon is merrily floating high in the sky family room, while the other one is lollygagging around on the floor, and has been for days!

I would be sympathetic if one was slightly..SLIGHTLY...more buoyant than the other, but this is ridiculous.

Where is President Trump when we need him?

Posted by: CBD at 02:00 PM | Comments (494) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Conviction vs. Convenience (scampydog)

What are the limits of your/their resolve? This is beyond politics. It is a fight for what is moral and what is worth preserving and building upon.

The murder of Charlie Kirk and the left's grotesque reactions to it on social media have shocked more than just political/policy partisan junkies. The "normals" are wide awake and are pissed off.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 12:00 PM | Comments (210) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Reading Thread [09/21/2025]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a young dildo found a list of 100 great books that everyone should read to consider themselves at least minimally well-educated. It was heavy on the Greeks and Romans, and conspicuously light on modern work. Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Caesar, (Gibbon of course). The Bible, Homer, Virgil, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, come to mind. Then Augustine, Beowulf, Chaucer, Thomas More, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Cervantes, Dante, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke... I don't remember them all, but you get the idea.

That article stayed with me for years. I remember seeing it folded up in a suitcase when moving during college, but that might have been my last sighting. There are current lists available, but a quick check of the internet yields lots of lists that are heavy on modern works, and conspicuously light on what until recently were considered The Great Books. I looked at more than a few, and too many had the immediate disqualifier of anything by Tony Morrison or Kurt Vonnegut or Burroughs or, well, you get the picture. We can have a discussion of whether some of those books are "great," but they are certainly not top-100 great! And the explicit criticism of Western Culture in most of the books of that ilk should be immediately disqualifying anyway.

Here are a couple of lists with some promise. The Good Books is actually a review of a book discussing 13 works of fiction that conservatives might like but probably haven't read! Sounds like fun, even though it isn't quite what I had in mind. St. John's Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum is exactly what I had in mind, and is a famous Great Books curriculum. I love the breadth of the list... there's music and art, natural science and physics as well as the usual suspects. Good stuff, and I will forgive them for sneaking in a few from my proscribed list!

***
Anyway... Below the fold is a book I am currently reading, by an author I have enjoyed for a very long time. I discovered him by chance, when he published a short story in Commentary magazine, back when it was a solid conservative institution.
Perfection: A Story, by Mark Helprin, is an odd but endearing peek into the confluence of baseball, the Holocaust, and the sometimes unfathomable intricacies of Orthodox Judaism, with a glimpse of 1950s NYC tossed in for color.

That short story introduced me to the author (I have a soft spot for good short fiction), and I have read several more of his works.

***

Posted by: CBD at 09:00 AM | Comments (401) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 21 September 2025

Top Story

• There isn't an AI bubble. There are three separate and distinct AI bubbles all happening at the same time. (Fast Company)
  
  As the article explains, there's an asset bubble, an infrastructure bubble, and a hype bubble, and while they all interact and reinforce each other, you need to examine them separately to try to figure out what is really going on.
  
  Yes, generative AI CEOs are all lying to you, but how much does that matter if you're not an investor?
  
  As to how much value will remain when the bubbles burst, I don't know. If I knew that I'd still be rich from the last bubble.
  
  
  

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM | Comments (193) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Saturday Night "Club ONT" September 20, 2025 [The 3 Ds]

There is always one Ford guy.
Tractor races at dawn. Loser cleans the Club.

Welcome to Club ONT! A collaboration the 3D's - The Disco, The Doggo, and The Dino. Breaking News: Management says no subscriptions - as long as you use turn signals while in the Club. Management lies.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 09:59 PM | Comments (580) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 9/20/2025

John Hughes

Pop culture voices that are intimately tied to a particular generation are common enough, but those with cultural staying power well past their prime moment are rare. John Hughes is one of those, I think. A writer/director/producer who became famous for writing and directing a small series of films about teenagers and Gen-X, Hughes captured the voice, anti-authoritarianism, and general desire to make something of oneself by one's own rules perhaps better than anyone else trying it through the 1980s.

Now, I come to the filmography of John Hughes with surprisingly little previous exposure. I'm a Millennial, and I was about six years old when Hughes released his final, directed feature, Curly Sue. My parents aren't Gen-X, and the only Hughes movie I had access to growing up with, of all things, Weird Science. I ended up seeing Ferris Bueller's Day Off more than once through high school, but aside from those two, I was unexposed to Hughes until now. I'd never seen Sixteen Candles. I had seen snippets of The Breakfast Club on television. I think I saw Uncle Buck once on television when I was about thirteen, so I come to this with fresh eyes.

And what did I find? I found a writer/director/producer who had a real voice, who could write realistic sounding teenaged characters, who was shockingly goofy, and whose dance of writing, directing, and editing was a dance on the edge of a knife, a dance that could only last so long before he fell off.

Posted by: TheJamesMadison at 07:45 PM | Comments (229) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Hobby Thread - Sept 20, 2025 [Harry Winston Rex]

Welcome hobbyists! Pull up a chair and sit a spell with the Horde in this little corner of the interweb. This is the mighty, mighty, mighty officially sanctioned Ace of Spades Hobby Thread. A spin of the Ace of Spades Wheel of Hobbies (TM) landed on jewelry making and metal casting.

Even if you are tempted to say "I don't make jewelry or do metal casting or do modeling or pay attention to photography or space, so there is nothing here for me," let the thought pass. No Moron could possibly say such a thing. The world is your oyster. You might be entertained or learn something. You might enjoy seeing what others are hobbying.

I have faith that you can find something in the content that resonates or contribute your own hobbying interests. Dig around in the content and soak in the comments. Be curious. Glad you're here.

[Top: The Vanderbilt Sapphire, Tiffany & Co., Up for auction on November 10, 2025 along with other Vanderbilt family jewelry]

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:30 PM | Comments (151) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Ace of Spades Pet Thread, September 20

Courtesy Terry Glenn

* * *

Good afternoon and welcome to the almost world famous Ace of Spades Pet Thread. Thanks for stopping by. Kick back and enjoy the world of animals.

Would you like a treat?

Let's relax a little with the animals and leave the world of politics and current events outside today.

Posted by: K.T. at 03:34 PM | Comments (62) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Gardening, Home and Nature Thread, Sept. 20

Rose 'Don Juan'

I was gone for a while in the spring, and missed a lot of spring flowers from Don in Kansas. Here are a few from Prime Time in his garden. More at the link.

The garden is at its most colorful now. Here are some recent snapshots.

Posted by: K.T. at 01:40 PM | Comments (58) | Trackbacks (Suck)

How did the center-left decide it wanted THESE heroes?

We continue to learn more about how different the right and left are at present, and perhaps how small the center is becoming. I have been trying to read a little more deeply.

Neo has a post up this morning on Speech as incitement. (h/t Skip)

Ace covers a few examples on the left here.

I suggest you go to the link and read it. It’s impossible to summarize.

But here’s one instance [emphasis mine]:

Meanwhile: the left has been promoting Cenk Uygur’s nephew …

… [H]e’s been celebrated by all the organs of leftist propaganda: Politico, CNN, the New York Times. He’s the Bro Whisperer for the left, and they want to make him famous.

What they don’t tell their readers, of course, is that he has been calling for the murder of Republicans (including Tom Cotton) and celebrating terrorist violence for years.

This is no fringe nobody. He is the biggest political streamer in the world, making millions of dollars, feted by the Democrat Party as the guy who is going to deliver them the young male vote again.

He urges his listeners to “gut” Republians and “shank” them: “You have to shank these motherf***ers so that their intestines writhe upon the stage! Slice ’em up! Slice ’em and f***in’ dice ’em!”

He also urges his followers to murder property owners, shouting “Kill them! Kill those motherf***ers! Murder those motherf***ers in the street! Let the streets soak in their red capitalist blood, dude!”

Bloodcurdling.

Posted by: K.T. at 11:20 AM | Comments (202) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Classical Saturday Morning Coffee Break & Prayer Revival

[Music H/T: Sock Monkey]
[Desired Coffee Mug H/T:Quarter Twenty]

Good morning boys and girls and everything in between. Before we enter the Prayer Revival there are a number of housekeeping matters to go over today. (Rulz for those of you in Grantsburg)

1. This is an open thread. Feel free to lurk, opine and/or bloviate.
2. A frightening story about the evils of coffee.
3. Be kind, be nice. Even douchebags troubled souls need warmth.
4. No. Are you nuts? No! You can't run with sharp objects here!!!!
5. Have a great weekend!

Posted by: Misanthropic Humanitarian at 07:52 AM | Comments (437) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Daily Tech News 20 September 2025

Top Story

• AMD silently launched the Radeon 7700 non-XT - a missing model in the previous generation of graphics cards. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The earlier 6700 non-XT slotted in neatly between the 8GB 128-bit 6600 XT and the 12GB 192-bit 6700 XT, with 10GB of RAM and a 160-bit bus. Since it was price to match, that was just fine.
  
  We don't have a price on the 7700 yet, but we do have specs, and they're... Odd.
  
  The 7800 XT (which I have) had 60 GPU cores and 16GB of VRAM on a 256-bit bus. The 7700 XT cut the cores by only 10% to 54, but the memory down to 12GB on a 192-bit bus.
  
  The new, non-XT 7700 model cuts the cores all the way down to 40, but leaves the memory size at 16GB on a 256-bit bus. A lot of memory and a lot of memory bandwidth for a relatively modest GPU configuration.
  
  AMD hasn't issued a press release yet so right now all of this is supported by just one link and one web page. Admittedly those are both on AMD's own site, but an actual product launch would be welcome confirmation.
  
  
  
• ASRock has launched the Radeon RX 7700 Challenger. (WCCFTech)
  
  Compared with the 32 core 7600 XT from the same range, it is clocked 20% lower, so compute performance is almost identical, but it has twice the memory and memory bandwidth.
  
  Might be interesting to see the benchmarks on this - it would highlight which games and applications really need that bandwidth.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM | Comments (183) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Yond ONT Has A Lean And Hungry Look

Hello Morons! We open this ONT with a word of warning about a sinister trend:

Posted by: WeirdDave at 10:00 PM | Comments (579) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Heavenly Boobs Cafe

My favorite internet dog, again.

ICYMI: Dog is the best piece of fishing gear.

Young progressives are so smart!

Rescuing a sickly abandoned dog who can't even stand up and healing him into the prettiest boy.

Little tough guy!

Man sees frightened, depressed dog in a kennel and instead of just passing him by he takes the time to sit with him and more. The YouTuber Rocky Kanaka makes this point in his Sitting With Dogs videos. Just because a dog isn't showing the usual signs of friendliness and loving humans doesn't mean he can't. He may just be shut down by neglect or abuse, or frightened to be in a loud, noisy place that is completely foreign to him. Even the dogs who cringe in the corner really want someone to show them that love is possible.

Dog sees a trampoline on TV and hooboy does he want one!

A reindeer cyclone.

Mammatus clouds -- boob clouds, in all their round, pendulous glory -- over a neighborhood.

Oooh, these knocker clouds are even heavier and hotter.

A tit bouncing around.

A green meteor explodes over Japan.

Baby it's cold outside.

The sea was angry that day, my friend. Like an old man trying to send soup back at a restaurant.

There be whales near.

Lightning storm over Japan.

For Duncanthrax: two penguins holding hands. And: noisy baby penguins.

Friends are just camels you haven't met yet.

Goofy donkeys.

This dog agrees with me about baby goats.

Attentive mother.

Elephant rolls up on a pack of lions, he don't care.

Golden is so excited to meet the new puppy.

Cats demonstrating why the word "copycats" evolved. A cat copies the baby.

This cat thinks that if he imitates the baby, he'll get fed.

Lions startled by lightning.

Posted by: Ace at 07:30 PM | Comments (316) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Surprise! The Left-Wing Assassin Who Came to Murder Supreme Court Justices In Ninja Shoes and Armed with a Chef's Knife Now Identifies as "MAGA"

Whoops, sorry, that headline was written by Jimmy Kimmel's no-talent "comedy" writers.

The "man" who planned to murder three conservative justices, and who was arrested sneaking into Brett Kavanaugh's home, is trans.

The man who attempted to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh identifies as a transgender woman and was deeply mentally ill and suicidal, according to court documents first obtained by The Daily Wire.

The Department of Justice is recommending that the defendant, 29-year-old Nicholas Roske, be sentenced to 30 years in prison for attempting to kill the Supreme Court justice in 2022, according to a Friday filing outlining the case against Roske. Roske pled guilty to the attempt to kill a United States Supreme Court Justice in April 2025, three years after authorities arrested him in Kavanaugh's neighborhood, carrying a bag full of weapons and burglary tools.

A filing from Roske's defense attorneys shows that Roske now goes by "Sophie Roske" and that his legal team will refer to him using female pronouns. A footnote on the filing, obtained exclusively by The Daily Wire, explains that the defense will not use Roske's legal name "out of respect" for the would-be assassin.

"The case is captioned as United States v. Nicholas John Roske," lawyers for Roske state. "That name remains Ms. Roske's legal name, and she has not asked to recaption the case. Out of respect for Ms. Roske, the balance of this pleading and counsel's in-court argument will refer to her as Sophie and use female pronouns."

Perfect timing, m'dude.

Deadpool emailed me: "You're joining the trans movement at kind of a low point."

As I keep saying: The Marxist Media has written 3,000 scare stories about the danger of letting your teenager (or twenty-five year old!) watch Joe Rogan.

They've written 3000 stories about the dangerous "right-wing extremism internet pipeline."

We've had two different school shootings with transgenders murdering children. We've had two assassins, one who killed Charlie Kirk, the other who tried to kill three Supreme Court Justices, both motivated by trans ideology.

Oh, and we had a transgender murder cult, called the Ziz cult, which murdered multiple people too. At least six that we know of.

Here's PBS explaining all about the Ziz Murder Cult, except they wait until the 20th paragraph to tell you that the leader claims to be a transgender (not "is a transgender," merely claims to be a transgender -- once again, who can ever know the motive?).

They also fail to mention that all of the members are transgender.

Tell me, Gentlemen and Female Gentlemen: In what century do you think the media will write a single story about the left-wing extremist internet pipeline?

I won't even ask about the specific left-wing trans-extremist internet pipeline, because you know they will never, ever write that story.

Posted by: Ace at 06:40 PM | Comments (233) | Trackbacks (Suck)

The Week in the Woke Terrorist Murder Cult

The Bee:

Several people have pointed out that the same people justifying the murder of a young father of two are now saying: Cancelling Jimmy Kimmel is an act of war.

Greg Gutfeld is incensed that the left is pretending that Jimmy Kimmel's low-rated show (which was going off the air in May 2026 anyway) is The Real Victim Here, the real outrage, not the public execution of Charlie Kirk.

More:

GregGutfeld
@greggutfeld

i have friends who will be performing in front of live audiences that number in the thousands. they aren't worried about being fired; they're worried now, about being fired upon. CNN hacks cannot grasp that because they've never had to worry about such threats, or an audience.

The Bee:

No, really: They think Jimmy Kimmel's low-rated Cavalcade of Flop-Sweat getting cancelled is The Real Crime Here.

No, really:

Stephen Colbert dramatically declared "we are all Jimmy Kimmel" during his Thursday night taping of "The Late Show" in a cringey monologue about ABC's firing of his fellow late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.

"Tonight we are all Jimmy Kimmel," the lame duck CBS host opened the episode wholly dedicated to his peer during its taping in Midtown Manhattan.

To get this post, you need to know that "Groypers" are the Nazi followers of Nick Fuentes, and the left spent a week insisting that Charlie Kirk's killer was a groyper. They didn't just want to murder a right-winger, they also wanted to fake a case that a pseudoright Nazi was the killer.

Kurt Schlichter
@KurtSchlichter

All the evidence is that Jimmy Kimmel was canceled by a groyper.

That is a top-shelf joke. Maybe if Kimmel still had a show Kurt could write for it.

In January 2024, in response to Aaron Rogers suggesting he was an Epstein Client, Jimmy Kimmel claimed he was a devoted truth teller who, get this, has a team of professional ABC/Disney "fact-checkers" who painstakingly verify all of his statements and joke premises for strict factual accuracy. (Latter half of clip, after showing Aaron Rogers on a podcast).

Megyn Kelly concluded, based on this claim, that of course Jimmy Kimmel and his "fact checkers" knew that his lie that MAGA was just scrambling to deflect from the fact that one of "our guys" was the shooter, was 100% false, but spread this dangerous disinformation anyway. If everyone else knew by Monday evening that the killer had been radicalized by leftist ideology, then Jimmy Kimmel's crack squad of ABC-certified Truth Verifiers knew that as well.

Mollie
@MZHemingway

Biden demanded that companies boycott THE STATE OF GEORGIA because the people of the state mildly improved the integrity of their elections. MLB bowed down and did so immediately. The media and other Democrat activists praised MLB for doing so.

Died in the wool, vote-blue-no-matter-who liberal Nate Silver says that the left's "epistemological closure" -- their refusal to acknowledge any reality outside the false one they've created inside their bubble -- is getting "really bad."

Specifically, he's astonished that people on the left who pose as Rational Evidence-Based Thinkers continue to push the utterly deranged claim that Charlie Kirk was killed by a right-winger in some kind of public palace coup.

Ignore that screencap having the name "Ezra Klein" on it. I forgot who wrote it when I named it. It's Nate Silver.

A group of protesters, all toting professionally-printed propaganda signs, spontaneously and totally organically assembled to protest Disney's choice to fire Jimmy Kimmel calling it fascism. DataRepublican notes that these signs were printed by "RefuseFascism.org," a revolutionary group founded by... Barack Obama's political mentor and founder of the left-wing terror group WeatherUnderground, Bill Ayers.

Keith Olbermann
@KeithOlbermann

Burn in hell, Sinclair.

Alongside Charlie Kirk.

American AF
@iAnonPatriot

Keith Olbermann DEFENDS Charlie Kirk's assassln, Tyler Robinson, by saying

"it was simply a man protecting someone he loved" 👀

He then says he's found The Real Killer Here: Take a guess who.

You got it in one: Donald Trump. He also... blames Donald Trump for the shooting of Donald Trump?

That post here.

I would cancel him but he's an unemployed shut-in too riddled with panic and anxiety to leave his bath-tub. What could we cancel? His Hallmark Channel subscription?

Blair White

No one is requiring you
To mourn Charlie Kirk.

They're asking you not to be
a satanic piece of shit who celebrates
brutal murder.

The bar couldn't be lower,
And it’s still too high for millions of you.
Sick.

H/t Cheri.

I haven't mentioned too many of the literally-hundreds of thousands of people celebrating Charlie Kirk's murder. It's too repulsive. Shoe0nhead, a lefty but a reasonable one who is, get this, anti-murder -- odd that that is now a brave position to take -- runs video of just a handful of the thousands of TikTokers (mostly leftwing women!) celebrating a man being murdered in front of his wife and children. She is shaken. She had no idea that 90% of her leftwing allies were, as she says, "psychopaths filled with blood-lust."

I'm surprised by that too. Yes, I knew there were many, many progressive terrorists -- but I didn't know it was a literal majority of progressives.

She says that she has tried to encourage the progressives she knows to say the murder of Charlie Kirk is a bad thing, but most disagree. Only "four or five" were willing to say that murdering a human being is wrong.

She makes a good point. The best responses the progressives can offer is "Maybe now we'll have gun control." She points out that a leftist just murdered a 31-year-old father of two in front of his children and the left celebrated. She says "good luck with getting them to give up their guns now."

@michaelmalice

You soulless conservatives cheering on what happened to Jimmy Kimmel haven't stopped to think about Jimmy's wife and children

They now have to spend more time with Jimmy Kimmel

No one deserves that

Thanks to weft-cut loop.

Depraved woman shows off her significant baby bump... as she brags that she's about to kill it in the morning. Discretion advised. Watch your blood pressure.

Posted by: Ace at 05:30 PM | Comments (277) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Death Cultist and the Left's "New Joe Rogan" Now an Object of Congressional Investigation; Pro-Murder Agitator Destiny Has His YouTube Monetization Suspended

Wow, an extremist getting his YouTube channel de-monetized. That has never happened before... to anyone on the far-left. The right they suspend at the drop of a hat.

If you're living a healthy life that doesn't revolve around the internet 24/7, you might not know who these serial inciters-to-assassination are.

"Destiny" -- Stephen Bonnell -- is a far-left literal cuck who "shared" his wife with another dude and left him for that other dude.

From Google's AI digest:

AI Overview
So streamer Destiny had a divorce recently, his wife leaving ...
Yes, Destiny (Steven Bonnell II), a popular streamer, was separated from his then-wife, Swedish streamer Melina Göransson, in late 2023 after she left their open marriage to be with another man in Sweden. The two had been in an open marriage, which Destiny later admitted contributed to the relationship's downfall, and they officially filed for divorce in December 2023.

Details of the Divorce

Open Marriage:
Destiny and Melina were in an open marriage, which Destiny admitted was a factor in the breakup, along with his difficulty in setting boundaries.

You certainly failed to make a boundary around your wife's vagina and mouth.

Melina's Affair:
Melina left Destiny for another man in Sweden. Destiny eventually learned about the relationship and had even visited them in Sweden.

Destiny's Response:
Destiny stated that he had been a "pushover" in the relationship and that the discovery of the affair was the "death nail".

I mean... If you're looking for an explanation, I have nothing. I mean, I explained poppers. There's a limit to my knowledge about left-wing sexual depravity. You will have to google this yourselves. I'm out.

Update: From Wikipedia.

Bonnell has been married twice and has a son. He is openly bisexual, and his second marriage was an open marriage with Swedish streamer Melina Göransson. Bonnell and Göransson married in December 2021. They separated and filed for divorce in December 2023.

He's also sexted with a 17-year-old.

He's now being grilled about his sexts with a minor while he attempts to imitate Charlie Kirk's "change my mind" style.

More here.

But that's not why he's currently in the news. He's currently in the news because he's attacking Erika Kirk and also calling for more Republicans to get shot so that we're afraid to speak and afraid to turn up at political rallies.

Posted by: Ace at 04:23 PM | Comments (359) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Dutch Parliament Declares Antifa a Domestic Terrorist Organization

Israel Now
@neveragainlive1

*The Dutch House of Representatives has just adopted the motion to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization.*

A Dutch parliamentary majority supported a motion to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization.

75-74 out of 150 seats.

This follows after the Trump admin said it will add Antifa to the terror list.

J. Michael Waller, a national security expert, opines:

J Michael Waller
@JMichaelWaller

18h

Since the Germans already listed Antifa as a left-wing violent extremist group, and the Dutch are in favor of a terror listing, @realDonaldTrump can list Antifa as a foreign terrorist group and set the legal wheels on motion for a domestic crackdown on its members & supporters.

Mike Jackson
@mkjcksn

ANTIFA is not a real group y’all, they just have a flag, official colors, uniforms, local chapters, meeting places, email signups, and clear directives for "members."

David Strom:

Democratic Party politicians are criticizing Donald Trump for classifying Antifa as a terrorist organization.

"It is an idea, not an organization."

Sure, it is an idea with all the hallmarks of an organization, but if you think about it, aren't all organizations really just ideas unless they have a tax ID number? Nothing is real until the IRS has a number to classify it.

Well, the Dutch don't care about tax ID numbers, and their parliament agrees with President Trump that Antifa is a thing, and that it is a violent terrorist organization that needs to be destroyed.

Posted by: Ace at 03:19 PM | Comments (404) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Democrats Vote Against Resolution Condemning the Charlie Kirk Murder and Denouncing All Political Violence

You will never get the left to agree to this. Many -- at least 40% of them -- are affirmatively pro-murder, pro-killing-the-deplorables, and the other 60% are cowards afraid of the other 40%. They bow to the extremists every single time, as they did at the New York Times when they fired an editor for publishing an op-ed by Tom Cotton. The 40% extremists demanded his firing, and the 60% cowards agreed.

GOP
@GOP

This is the text of the resolution that 118 House Democrats shamefully refused to vote for:

Resolved, That the House of Representatives--

(1) condemns in the strongest possible terms the assassination of Charles "Charlie" James Kirk, and all forms of political violence;

(2) commends and honors the dedicated law enforcement and emergency personnel for their tireless efforts in finding the suspect responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk and urges the administration of swift justice to the suspect;

(3) extends its deepest condolences and sympathies to Charlie Kirk's family, including his wife, Erika, and their two young children, and prays for comfort, peace, and healing in this time of unspeakable loss;

(4) honors the life, leadership, and legacy of Charlie Kirk, whose steadfast dedication to the Constitution, civil discourse, and Biblical truth inspired a generation to cherish and defend the blessings of liberty; and

(5) calls upon all Americans--regardless of race, party affiliation, or creed--to reject political violence, recommit to respectful debate, uphold American values, and respect one another as fellow Americans.

Posted by: Ace at 02:15 PM | Comments (376) | Trackbacks (Suck)

FCC Head Brenden Carr: Either The View Is a Bona Fide "News" Program, Or Else the Disney Groomer Network Will Have to Provide Equal Time to Republicans

Just because the law hasn't been enforced for a while doesn't mean it's not the law.

What would a "bona fide" news program look like? I don't know, but I imagine it would require editors who verify "facts" and would not allow Joy Behar and Sonny Hostin and Ana Navarro to just repeat whatever nonsense they saw on BlueSky three minutes before air.

Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr questioned on Thursday whether ABC's "The View" should be subject to review from the agency, making the daytime talk show Carr's latest target in his scrutiny of television programs that have been critical of President Donald Trump.

In an appearance on conservative commentator Scott Jenning's podcast, Carr said he wondered whether "The View" qualified as a "bona fide" news program, a program discussing current events.

If the show did not qualify, Carr said, the program would have to obey the FCC's equal time rule -- which requires broadcast stations to give equal airtime and access to competing political candidates.

"I think it's worthwhile to have the FCC look into whether 'The View,' and some of these other programs that you have, still qualify as bona fide news programs and therefore are exempt from the equal opportunity regime that Congress has put in place," he said in the interview.

The FCC head has long targeted the ABC daytime program. But his criticism -- and a hint that the agency may take action against the show -- takes on new relevance after Carr threatened ABC and its local affiliates on Wednesday to act against Jimmy Kimmel's late-night program following his comments about the death of Charlie Kirk.

ABC suspended Kimmel hours later. A spokesperson for "The View" did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mollie and Mark Hemingway made this point: The federal government really does have a statutory regulatory power over broadcast networks. The airwaves are regulated by the government because we can't just have six stations all attempting to broadcast on the same frequency in the same area, or else they'd all interfere with each other. So the federal government assigns these valuable spectrum rights to companies, but with restrictions and requirements. One is equal time, and Brenden Carr says he's going to enforce that requirement.

You know what the government has no control over? No statutory power to regulate?

The internet and cable, which are exactly the mediums that Obama and then Biden asserted power to censor.

Why didn't they also censor the broadcast networks, which they had the power to regulate?

Easy: They didn't have to. The broadcast networks were the pinnacle of liberal media power. They needed no federal "jawboning" to push the left-wing line.

It was the internet and cable where dissident wildcat media operations were blooming, and so that's where Obama and Biden declared a wholly-extralegal power to control.

Ed Morrissey wrote about this:

In this argument, Carr makes a very important distinction about jurisdiction. The FCC issues licenses for broadcasters only pursuant to the Communications Act of 1934 and other legislation, ie, those whose signal goes out over the public airwaves. As Carr notes (and as I noted briefly last night), the FCC does not have jurisdiction over cable channels such as Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, or others. The FCC has absolutely nothing to do with online outlets either, nor newspapers. This is a key difference between the FCC and OfCom, which polices all media in the UK -- and is politically corrupt, to boot.

Even so, why does Congress invest the FCC with the authority to terminate licenses for content or actions they consider to be "not in the public interest"? To understand that, one has to understand the nature of broadcasting. In the earliest days of radio, operators would "step on" each other's broadcasts by using the same or close-by frequencies, ramp up power, and attempt to drive competitors into collapse by literally blocking their signals. Congress put an end to it by declaring the commercial broadcast spectrums to be a federal jurisdiction and to be public property.

...

The FCC has mainly let its foot ease off that pedal in recent years, as Carr notes. Why? Most of the offensive material they would normally police has moved to cable or the Internet. The irony of this is that the FCC has largely stood down while the Biden administration essentially created its own OfCom [the shithole country Britain's all-purpose censorship operation] at the State Department and HHS, funding "misinformation" policing that targeted mainly the online and cable-channel markets. The federal government created censorship regimes on platforms where they had no jurisdiction, while allowing broadcasters to exploit government-provided monopolies with carte blanche on blatantly false content with clear partisan and malicious intent.

Now, one can argue that the FCC really should use a more laissez-faire approach to enforcing the "public interest" clause. However, one can't argue that the authority doesn't exist and hasn't been enforced in the past.

The anti-free-speech left is now pretending to be pro-free-speech, despite having cancelled or economically boycotted (or straight-up assassinated) every speaker on the right for at least 12 years. None of the latter-day Free Speech Absolutists said anything about the firing of Roseanne Barr or Gina Carano. Even now as they fulminate about the real Free Speech Martyr Jimmy Kimmel -- he lost a show, and that's terrible, and Charlie Kirk lost his life, which apparently isn't really something to be bothered about -- they don't even say, retrospectively, "Looking back, it appears the intolerance shown to Roseanne Barr and Gina Carano was also wrong."

No, they're sticking to their claim that of course conservative speech can be punished, because it's deplorable, but leftwing assassination-bait speech cannot be, because left-wingers are aristocrats with far more rights and privileges than the peons and serfs.

On that, Roseanne Barr made some news. I think. At least I never heard this before.

She says that she knows who is responsible for her cancellation -- Barack and Michele Obama, who she said both called ABC to demand her firing.

Posted by: Ace at 01:11 PM | Comments (379) | Trackbacks (Suck)