October 1, 2026

NO OTHER WAY OUT AT THIS POINT:

And the screencap:

It’s already war.

Posted at 5:20 pm by Stephen Green

DISNEY’S DANA WALDEN ON JIMMY KIMMEL’S LATE NIGHT FUTURE: “It’s a Challenging Daypart.”

Speculation about Jimmy Kimmel Live!‘s future has swirled since an early September Page Six story claimed Kimmel’s contract wouldn’t be renewed. ABC quickly denied that was the case, but other reports said the network is looking for significant budget cuts to keep the show going.

“The truth is, it’s a very challenging daypart,” Walden said Thursday at the Bloomberg event. “That’s not to say that Jimmy is not doing a phenomenal job, and his ratings are up. But they’re up relative to a smaller audience that’s watching late night on broadcast television.”

Kimmel and the show also have a big presence on YouTube and social media platforms, but those views and clicks bring in a fraction of the revenue that on-air advertising does. “That is not a lucrative opportunity for a very premium talk show,” said Walden.

As Stephen Krusier asked in May: Now That Colbert Is Gone, Can We Start the Clock on Kimmel? “Kimmel will no doubt use Colbert’s absence as an excuse to become more execrable than ever. ABC can keep him afloat for a while. The network is still a for-profit business, though, and not a weeknightly charity for the Democratic National Committee. ABC execs will almost certainly take a cue from their counterparts at CBS. Kimmel’s petulant attitude won’t do him any favors, either.”

Posted at 4:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

PLEASE, BARACK, WON’T YOU GIVE US THE OPPORTUNITY TO MISS YOU?

Posted at 4:37 pm by Stephen Green

JOHN NOLTE: Tom Cruise’s Global Warming Propaganda Digger About to Lose $100+ Million.

Here’s a movie designed in a Woke Lab to hit the sweet spot of critics…

  • Evil white men.
  • Evil businessmen.
  • Oil bad.
  • Global Warming/Climate Change is real (it’s not).
  • All of this delivered by Hollywood’s biggest movie star.

…and what’s the result? A rotten 52 percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes. And as I have said a thousand times, if left-wing critics pan a left-wing movie, that movie must suck like nothing has ever sucked in the kingdom of Suckdom, because these critics always-always-always grade on a curve for leftist propaganda.

Hilariously, as if to say Please-please-please David Ellison, buy us out before we destroy ourselves, Warner Bros. dropped $160 to $180 million into this bloated, anti-science lecture, and that does not include promotion costs, which probably lift it into the $250 million range. That puts break-even at right about $500 million worldwide.

And now it’s about to open wide all across America and, per the professional estimates, humiliate itself and its star with an $8 million to $12 million opening. If these projections hold, a movie made for no Normal Person could lose more than $100 million.

Meanwhile, Christian Toto spots more leftist propaganda that’s likely to flop: Jan. 6 Themed Social Reckoning Expected to Bomb at Box Office.

World of Reel shares a pointed reaction to the film and its subject matter:

January 6th eventually comes up, the entire film builds toward it. The film’s arc leads naturally to the suggestion that January 6th was, in part, a product of Facebook itself.

Sorkin has literally said the same thing on the record regarding Facebook and Jan. 6.

The problem?

Who will actually see the movie? Box office projections have “The Social Reckoning” opening to a very soft $6-$10 million on its opening weekend. The competition won’t be stiff.

The only other major new release is “Other Mommy,” a horror film starring Jessica Chastain.

Audiences may not want a lecture on Facebook’s alleged ills. They also won’t rally around a Jan. 6 movie, an issue that likely has exhausted Americans at this point in the culture.

That may explain why “The Social Reckoning” trailers leave out that fateful day.

Nolte used to call this Hollywood’s “liberal sucker punch.” They’re much harder for the industry to successfully pull off in the era of social media.

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Virginia AG is Making the Process the Punishment in the Old Dominion’s War on Guns.

Jay Jones, the anti-gun but pro-bullets to the head Virginia attorney general, announced on September 15 the creation of the Firearms Accountability & Industry Responsibility Unit within the Civil and Criminal Justice & Public Safety Divisions of his office. The unit’s job will be to bring civil enforcement actions against firearm industry members under the recently enacted Virginia Firearm Industry Standards of Responsible Conduct.

True to the Orwellian spirit of the gun control enterprise, the process promises to be anything but fair. The fact that the AG’s office is spinning up an entire unit to target a lawful and constitutionally protected business sector begs the question, just what are Virginia’s gun dealers doing wrong? The answer, under Virginia’s new legislation, is that they’ll find out when they get sued for it.

Gun bans get most of the attention when it comes to firearm policy, and this applies to both sides of the issue. But with the U.S. Supreme Court poised to determine the constitutionality of banning some of the nation’s most popular firearms, gun prohibition advocates are already planning their next offensive. Their target is the U.S. firearms industry, already one of the most heavily regulated in the country.

As Virginia’s law illustrates, however, compliance with known rules will no longer be enough under the new regime.

“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” the old checkist is supposed to have said.

Posted at 3:51 pm by Stephen Green

“OBSCENE” IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR “MORE THAN WE HAVE”:

It is not obscene when the Democrats have more because reasons.

Posted at 3:35 pm by Stephen Green

OLD AND BUSTED: “Get in their faces, and punch back twice as hard.” “Typical white person.” And then there were his supporters and colleagues. “God damn America.” “Go for the throat!” Sources: Biden likened tea partiers to ‘terrorists.’

The new amnesia?

Posted at 2:38 pm by Ed Driscoll

COLONIALISM, STRAIGHT UP:

The clip is from 2024, but it’s also timeless.

Posted at 2:33 pm by Stephen Green

UNEXPECTEDLY: UK-Iranian dual national arrested over RAF Fairford incident, police say.

A UK-Iranian dual national has been arrested on suspicion of preparation of terrorist acts in connection with the incident at RAF Fairford, counter-terror police have said.

The 27-year-old man was arrested in Westminster, London. A second man, a 26-year-old UK national, has also been questioned under caution, and two properties in the area have been searched.

Five men in their twenties who were arrested near the Gloucestershire airbase on Sunday remain on police bail. All five were UK nationals from London.

Counter-terror police are considering “all possible angles – including foreign state involvement”, the force’s senior national coordinator Vicki Evans said.

Exit question:

 

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

SURE WOULD BE NICE IF WE HAD THE SPARE REFINING CAPACITY TO HANDLE THESE LITTLE COMPLICATIONS: Persian Gulf crude oil flows have largely recovered. For diesel and gasoline, it’s more complicated.

Exports of crude oil have begun to normalize in the Persian Gulf, bringing some relief to global buyers. But in the refined market for products such as diesel, gasoline, and jet fuel, analysts say the picture looks tighter, more expensive, and slower to recover.

While crude oil exports from the Persian Gulf region have returned to roughly 98% of their pre-war levels, product exports — of diesel, gasoline, and other derivatives — have recovered only to roughly 3 million barrels per day, or about 58% of their pre-war levels. Goldman Sachs analysts led by Daan Struyven peg that figure lower, at roughly 50% of their 2025 average.

“The crude market has largely normalized even as refined product supplies remain constrained,” JPMorgan analysts led by Natasha Kaneva wrote to clients.

Hell, it would be nice if we just had enough refining capacity.

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

VDH: Remembering the False Gloom and Doom of the 1992 Elections—and the Upcoming Midterms.

[Lee] Atwater’s canny but hardball 1988 tactics had turned off establishment Republicans. So in 1992, Republicans reverted to the notion of losing nobly rather than winning ugly and resumed unilaterally playing by the Marquess of Queensberry rules. The result of Democratic demagoguery was that the sober and competent elder Bush was branded a heartless elitist who had wrecked the economy and defended Kuwait only for “blood for oil.” And without Atwater, the Bush team utterly failed to refute such caricatures and counterattack.

Third, and most important, the anemic Bush reelection campaign never refuted the Clinton-Gore economic hysteria. That “recession” deception had drowned out the historic foreign policy achievements of Bush’s four years, from the successful policies that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the decisive 1991 Gulf War.

Despite overwrought claims about a recession or even a new Great Depression, in truth, the recession had ended in March 1991. In fact, final GDP growth for 1992 was a robust 3.52 percent. That was hardly a recessionary indicator. Indeed, the election-year growth proved even stronger than in Clinton’s first year of governance in 1993.

While unemployment was still high at 7.5 percent, the 1992 stock market nonetheless grew by 7.6 percent. And the 1992 inflation rate had stayed moderate at 2.9 percent.

In other words, the economy had already begun to recover from the 1990–91 recession, which—to reiterate—had officially ended 20 months before the 1992 election.

One cause—eerily now familiar—of the earlier 1990–91 downturn was that oil prices had initially doubled after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the U.S. military response. But prices collapsed as soon as Operation Desert Storm began, despite the later torching of the Kuwaiti oil fields and continued uncertainty in the Gulf. Yet by the November 1992 election, oil prices had long been back to pre-invasion levels.

In short, the Democrats’ charge that 1992 saw the worst recession in 60 years was absurd. (The 1973–75 and 1981–82 recessions were far worse than the 1990–91 recession.)

Read the whole thing. As the Charlotte Business Journal wrote in 2010, “The U.S. economy actually grew 4.2% in the fourth-quarter that year and went on to enjoy a terrific decade-long run of prosperity. And we learned in hindsight that recession had actually already ended when the [September 1992 Time magazine] article was printed.” In December of 1992, Time’s leftists gloated that the economic turnaround was “Bush’s Economic Present for Clinton.”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

LOVELY:

This stands out:

Elon called to tell them everyone was safe. That the failure was a known risk. That the team would try again. That their family member had done extraordinary work and the explosion was not a reflection of their ability.

One engineer’s wife said the call lasted 4 minutes. She said Elon sounded tired but calm. She said he didn’t minimize the failure or exaggerate the optimism. He stated the facts and said “your husband is brilliant and we are going to fly again.”

They did indeed.

Posted at 1:32 pm by Stephen Green