Tho it’s not mandatory and it’s a pain, I’m masking it for my flight today. For myself, for others. pic.twitter.com/spbl2jySsc

— Ron Howard (@RealRonHoward) April 22, 2022

Related:

Took 14 months to go from “build back better” to “there will be food shortages.”

— Kevin Sorbo (@ksorbs) April 22, 2022

Disney Shares Are Cratering While They War With DeSantis; It Has Lost 31.5% Over the Year

“…Disney stock fell 2.79% on Friday, according to Google Finance. Company stock has fallen 31.25% in the past 6 months and trades for $118.27 per share as of press time.Disney stock prices dropped 5% on Wednesday, dropped further on Thursday, and have dropped 2.79% more so far today…”

Business run as a vehicle for liberal advocacy is a failure.

Regular people: Go woke, Go Broke

DeSantis and Florida Republicans: Go woke… **blows viking battle horn** and we shall burn your entire village to the ground and sing a song of victory so that any potential enemies in our future shall learn from your folly.

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) April 22, 2022

Dean Baquet, Joe Kahn, Racist Slurs, Twitter and Mao: on Passing the Torch at The New York Times

“…The Times has done everything short of admitting it erred. It still occasionally uses the very word that got me ousted, a word it was using in the same month in 2019 I uttered it in Peru. It didn’t punish Bret Stephens for his leaked column calling its decision hypocritical. It canceled the student trips program. It hired John McWhorter as a columnist even though he had trashed the decision to oust me and called it “contemptible.”

The Times has not publicly disputed even one of the 20,000 words I published March 1, 2021, describing what really happened in Peru and during the internal investigations.

Why? Because it knows they’re true. And because of corporate cowardice. The company instantly corrects its reporters’ errors, but it takes decades to admit blunders by its owners (such as ignoring the Holocaust.)

When I started in 1976, The Times was run by a former Marine who cared more about the mission — journalism — than about policing the personalities of his troops. Now it’s run by his grandson, a Brown graduate who believes in safe spaces and race-based capitalization. It once dealt calmly with criticism. Now it panics — even over a tabloid piece based on anonymous quotes from very naive teenagers. It hunts for someone to flog into the street, or uses threats to extract apologies it can issue with a groveling press release. (See below.)

To my mind, that shift began during the Jayson Blair/Judy Miller/Rick Bragg fiascos. The company became addicted to self-mortification. A weekly public editor column meant someone had to be hung out to dry every week, guilty or not.

The company has also hired more and more young elitists who sneer at average Americans. And who get their way by running to the teacher and weeping “I feel unsafe!” I found that tactic baffling when it was used against James Bennet in 2020. Who chooses journalism with an expectation of safety? It’s an incredibly exciting life; it’s not always a safe one — you may be sent to cover wars. I loved it…”

The man who wrote this Donald McNeil, described Americans as ‘selfish pigs’ in email to Fauci. The then-New York Times science writer compared us unfavorably to the average Chinese who ‘behaved incredibly heroically.’

Hat tip to Ed Driscoll

Fauci Says CDC Mandates ‘Should Not Be a Court Issue.’

Durham’s Investigation Is Finally Getting Interesting: Reading the Clinton tea leaves in the Sussmann prosecution

“…Let’sgive the Clintons their due: They’ve always had a sense of humor.

They’d have to. It would be impossible to survive without one given the messes they’ve gotten themselves into, and out of, lo these 30 years. And now, with yet another special counsel hovering, and apparently close to concluding that the Hillary Clinton campaign pulled off one of the great political dirty tricks of all time, it’s like we’re right back in the Nineties, wondering what the definition of is is.

The is of the moment is the attorney–client privilege….

…Durham and his staff are preparing to try heavyweight Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann in about three weeks. Plainly, their focus is broader than just the one alleged false statement to the FBI on which Sussmann has been indicted. Durham’s charging documents and court submissions strongly intimate that the Hillary campaign is the fons et origo of the Trump/Russia “collusion” farce that dizzied the country and hamstrung a presidency for two years.

The theory is straightforward: The Clinton campaign, working through its lawyers at Perkins Coie and its “oppo” gourmands at Fusion GPS, ginned up a smear that the Republican presidential nominee and his campaign were Vladimir Putin’s own little KGB cell attempting to take control of the United States government. The Clinton campaign not only peddled this narrative to the media-Democrat complex, which dutifully hyped it; Team Clinton also had operatives, such as Sussmann (a former Justice Department cybersecurity specialist and man-about-Washington), exploit their deep government ties to project the collusion story onto the radar of national-security agencies. This enabled the campaign to claim that concerns about Trump’s nefarious Russia relationship had blossomed into a criminal investigation.

When people are doing something sneaky and potentially illegal — and we should note that defrauding the government is a felony — they often take pains to conceal their connection to it. In miniature, that is what the Sussmann prosecution is about. His alleged lie was the claim that he was bringing derogatory Trump/Russia information to the government not on behalf of any client — just as a good, patriotic citizen and former U.S. national-security official who was trying to help the FBI protect Americans. In reality, Durham alleges, Sussmann was working for the Clinton campaign and Rodney Joffe, a pro-Clinton tech executive who was hoping to score a cybersecurity gig in the anticipated Hillary administration.

But let’s widen the aperture, beyond Sussmann. The interesting question here is not whether Sussmann fibbed to the bureau. It is: Why did the Clinton campaign and Joffe think it necessary to conceal their roles in the scheme?

What does that have to do with the Clintons’ sense of humor?

Well, as is standard before a criminal trial, the parties are now arguing about what evidence the jury will be permitted to hear. On that score, Durham has subpoenaed lots of information from the Clinton campaign, but it has declined to produce it, citing — all together now! — the attorney–client privilege. That’s an amusing touch in a case where the central allegation is Sussmann’s insistence that he was not acting as an attorney for the Clinton campaign.

While Team Clinton’s gambit is at Durham’s expense, the prosecutor is trying to make sure the joke is on Sussmann. For purposes of the trial, Durham has told the court, he may not need the underlying information he has subpoenaed; he just wants to show the jury that Sussmann’s collaborators have tried to withhold it based on the exact attorney–client relationship that Sussmann told the FBI he didn’t have with them.

It’s a tight spot for Sussmann: Unless the court finds some reason to rule in his favor, his only way around this evidence would be to stipulate that he was working for the Clinton campaign when he told the FBI he wasn’t working for the Clinton campaign. That would make for an awfully quick false-statements trial.

The more intriguing thing is the continuing effort by the Clinton camp to conceal relevant communications — hundreds of which, Durham reports, do not even involve a lawyer, much less pertain to confidential legal advice or preparation for litigation. Why the secrecy?

If they really believed Trump was Putin’s puppet, you’d think they’d be anxious for people to see those discussions. They could then say they were just trying to help the FBI with the Alfa Bank story and the Steele dossier — you know, like Sussmann was just trying to help the FBI.

A last thing to think about. Sussmann’s defense counsel say they would like to call Joffe as a witness. But Joffe won’t testify unless he has immunity, and Durham has represented to the court that he will not immunize Joffe because Joffe remains the subject of a criminal investigation…”

NOW – Biden: "In the US military, every vehicle is going to be climate-friendly. We're spending billions of dollars to do it."pic.twitter.com/3T16NHebY6

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) April 22, 2022

I can’t express my utter disdain for this nonsense. It is one crackpot, cult-like cause after another.

What a loser. Everything he touches turns to shit.

Biden Surpasses Jimmy Carter As Most Incompetent Steward Of US Economy

Here’s another cockamamie idiot:

‘You’ve Got 6 Years’: Kerry Threatens Natural Gas Industry

Liberals Lecture Americans On Earth Day While Jet-Setting On Private Flights

As Mortgage Rates Begin to Bite, Home Sales Fall to Lowest since June 2020, Supply Rises for Second Month

“…The spike in mortgage rates – a result of the Fed’s widely telegraphed future crackdown on inflation – would sooner or later have to impact the crazy housing bubble. We knew that. Now the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate has spiked to well above 5%.

For example, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported this morning that its weekly measure of the 30-year fixed rate jumped to 5.2%, the highest since April 2010, two full percentage points higher than two years ago, “causing a pullback or delay in home purchase demand,” the MBA said. “Home purchase activity has been volatile in recent weeks and has yet to see the typical pick up for this time of the year.”…

…today, the National Association of Realtors reported that sales of previously-owned homes – houses, condos, and townhouses – fell to the lowest since June 2020, down 4.5% from a year ago, the eighth month in a row of year-over-year declines, even as supply of homes listed for sale rose.

The NAR expects home sales “to contract 10%” this year, it said, and it blamed mortgage rates and inflation: “The housing market is starting to feel the impact of sharply rising mortgage rates and higher inflation taking a hit on purchasing power.”…”

House Republicans Demand Twitter Board Preserve All Records Related To Musk Buyout Bid

“…18 House Republicans have demanded that Twitter’s board preserve all records related to Elon Musk’s buyout offer – suggesting that they will conduct a congressional probe if their party regains control of the chamber this fall…”

DEMOCRAT-LINKED ORGANIZATION TIED TO FUNDING OFFER FOR NORTH CAROLINA ABSENTEE BALLOT PORTAL

“…In 2020, N.C. State Board of Elections Director Karen Brinson Bell made a successful push for the state to establish an online absentee ballot portal during COVID-19, however, emails show such a portal was already in the works long before the pandemic began.

Emails obtained by North State Journal show discussions between the N.C. State Board of Elections (NCSBE) and Democracy Live about adding an online absentee ballot portal happening as early as June of 2019; almost nine months prior to the emergence of COVID-19 in the state.

Democracy Live’s system utilizes “OmniBallot,” an online ballot replication system. The online absentee ballot portal powered by Democracy Live was first publicly named by the NCSBE in September of 2020.

According to a 2020 security analysis of OmniBallot conducted by Michael Specter of MIT and J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan, “OmniBallot uses a simplistic approach to Internet voting that is vulnerable to vote manipulation by malware on the voter’s device and by insiders or other attackers who can compromise Democracy Live, Amazon, Google, or CloudFlare.”…”

Amid Public Concern About Grooming Kids, American Library Association Picks ‘Marxist Lesbian’ As President

ICYMI: The American Library Association (ALA) just elected a self-described Marxist as its new president. Not what you want to see for the future of libraries. pic.twitter.com/kvbenTv07o

— The Based Librarian (@BasedLibrarian) April 15, 2022

WaPo Releases Statement Filled With Lies in Aftermath of Taylor Lorenz’s ‘Libs of TikTok’ Doxxing

A smug @NicolleDWallace accuses Governors Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin of "dehumanization" and compares them to "Russians [who] get their soldiers to rape children." pic.twitter.com/cwRTPERk6Z

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 20, 2022

They believe with a cult-like, religious fervor. And, of course, God is on their side:

BREAKING: Chief Bush-Cheney advisor: "If Jesus Christ was alive today, he would be called a groomer" pic.twitter.com/6he4MCIKhM

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) April 20, 2022

Here’s the audience for these cult leaders:

https://twitter.com/neurotard/status/1516479255147802626

House Republicans took to the floor as @AngieNixon called “when black votes are under attack what do we do?” & @repmccurdy responded “stand up fight back!”

Speaker @ChrisSprowls directed the chamber and Republicans then voted out the map as Ds scurried on the floor to vote no pic.twitter.com/xY88IbryTG

— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) April 21, 2022

https://twitter.com/Iplaywithgerms/status/1517093797171277826

Who cares what you do, Asshole?