THAT OTHER SUMMIT: Putin, Xi signal unity but fail to reach deal on pipeline sought by Russia. “Amid the elaborate ceremony of a visit to Beijing, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday failed once again to persuade Chinese leader Xi Jinping to sign off on a major new gas pipeline, underscoring once again the importance — and limitations — of Russia’s growing dependency on China for energy sales.”

“Growing dependency” is a good description of Russia’s relationship with China for a lot more than energy sales.

ROBERT SPENCER: A Man Plowed His Car Into a Crowd in Italy, but He Has a Perfectly Good Explanation. “Yes, okay, Salim El Koudri did drive his car into a crowd in Modena, Italy, last Saturday, maiming a couple of people for life (they both had to have their legs amputated) and injuring five others. But these are the days of compassion, the days when we know that the perpetrator of a crime has to be understood as articulating a grievance that we all must rush to assuage, and the era of empathy, when we don’t care nearly as much for amputated legs as we do for hurt feelings, if the legs are not attached to the right person and the feelings are.”

AND UN-SUNG HERO:

If he’s lucky he won’t be an organ donor.

WELL, BYE: Stunning number of illegal migrants who have been deported from US or left voluntarily is revealed by DHS.

More than 3 million illegal aliens have left the US or been deported since President Trump took office, the Department of Homeland Security has revealed.

Of those 3 million, 2.2 million have opted to self-deport through a program that allows migrants to turn themselves in via a DHS app in return for a cash stipend and free flight home.

Another 900,000 have been deported since Jan. 20, 2025, and as of this month, DHS has arrested 900,000 illegal aliens, according to agency figures.

It’s a marked shift from the Biden administration, which let an estimated 5 million to 6 million migrants into the country, according to the Cato Institute, under the less-than-watchful eye of then-border czar Kamala Harris.

I’ll remind you again that Democrats mocked Mitt Romney for suggesting self-deportation — but incentives work.

CORN, POPPED:

Five points:

1. Kristof minimizes Euro-Med’s chairman as someone whose views “can’t be taken lightly” — while failing to note a documented record that includes an Israeli anti-terrorism order against Abdu personally, and a brother-in-law who was a senior Hamas military commander.

2. Kristof cited peer-reviewed medical literature as scientific validation for the dog rape allegation. But that literature documents human-initiated bestiality and one accidental pet incident. Not one paper describes a dog trained to assault a human on command.

3. One of his only two named sources filed a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court after his detention, with lawyers, complaining about the food. He never mentioned rape. The Times calls this “additional details over time.” That’s not how things work.

4. Former PM Olmert accused Kristof of misrepresenting his words in the original column. The Times response doesn’t mention him once.

5. The Times confirmed its legal team reviewed the column before publication. Those internal communications now potentially exist for discovery.

Stay tuned…

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Now That Colbert Is Gone, Can We Start the Clock on Kimmel? “Jimmy 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.”

JUSTICE: Lawsuit Against Virginia Tech Alleging Anti-Male Bias in Title IX Proceedings Can Go Forward in Part. “Johnny has alleged abundant facts that, if true, raise grave concerns about the way VT, through these administrators, conducted the investigations of Pauline’s and Jane’s sexual-assault claims, as well as the ultimate outcomes of those inquiries. Simply put, Johnny has alleged facts that, if true, raise a plausible inference the VT discriminated against him in these investigations because he is male and, in so doing, violated Title IX.”

THE LEFT PROTECTS ITS OWN, ALWAYS:

THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY; THEY SELL COLA DIFFERENTLY THERE:

This was the last gasp of a shared culture and a mass media, which only two years earlier had gone all-in on removing Richard Nixon from power. As I wrote on July 4th, 2020, in-between Walter Cronkite droning on about the impending eco-disasters of a new ice age and overpopulation to viewers of the CBS Evening News, and episodes of M*A*S*H as a thinly-disguised Vietnam War commentary full of moral equivalence between the US, North Korea and Communist China, CBS could still muster up some of its biggest stars to host “Bicentennial Minutes” on the important events that led up to the nation’s founding. Today, the network would likely draft Stephen Colbert and Colin Kaepernick [hey, remember them, 2026 readers?] to opine on how the nation was born in Original Sin. Perhaps it was the lack of a 24-hour cable news cycle, or the increasingly left-leaning network remembering that it still needed to serve a wide swatch of viewers. In any case, even with a Republican president in the White House, the Bicentennial proved that as late as 1976, the Democratic Party-dominated overculture still offered room for all, decades before today’s “no escapism” mentality on the elite left.

XXX

ED MORRISSEY: DNC Autopsy ‘Paints Dismal Picture’ While Burying the Biden Cover-Up and Harris’ Incompetence.

What about the report itself? People can directly access the 192-page report, but it’s not easy to parse, thanks to the lack of effort in finishing the product. It’s unfinished in another sense, too: there is apparently no mention of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline or the effort to cover it up in the autopsy. The words “cognitive,” “dementia,” “senile,” and “mental” make no appearance in this document. The June 2024 debate barely gets a mention at all, and the report completely ignores its impact and what it revealed about Democrats’ attempts to sell a sick old man as “Sharp As A Tack™”:

Before the candidate switch, the pollsters never reviewed ad copy or content – and commented how they did not see ads until after they were airing, in some instances reading about the ads in the media. They also reported they had little insight into the data provided to leadership from the analytics team.

As the June 2024 debate neared, there were discussions about polling around the debate and after the convention. The polling team was informed the plan was for them to poll three times during the general election, and the post-convention polling would count as one of those three polling waves. They attributed this minimalist approach to research to members of the media team not believing polling data was essential to decision making.

The debate obviously changed many things. The dial-testing during the debate demonstrated the weakness of the President’s performance, and a post-debate survey was scrapped.

Whoever wrote this passage must have majored in Passive Voice Deflection while attending Progressive U. “The debate obviously changed many things,” the author(s) write, without ever explaining what changed or why, even though the necessity of that switch was the single biggest problem Democrats faced.

The autopsy never addresses the “candidate switch” in detail either, choosing to ignore the back-room “switch” that took place and the option Democrats had in using the convention to choose their nominee by a representative vote. This literally never gets discussed in the report, despite it being the single biggest DNC process issue in the 2024 cycle.

If the first step is admitting you have a problem, for the DNC the second step is going back to ignoring it.

NOVEMBER PREVIEW:

Almost left unsaid: Don’t get cocky.

OLD AND BUSTED: “What is a Woman?”

The New Hotness: What is a Women’s Museum?