July 29, 2026

ED MORRISSEY: Fauci Takes the Fifth.

“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” he continued. “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect that I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”

That presents Paul and the Senate with an opportunity to pursue contempt charges. The Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination is not without boundaries. It applies when potential criminal liability exists, which – for most people, most of the time – is always present. In fact, it’s a very good idea to stand on one’s right to remain silent in most circumstances when hostile questioning takes place, at least until you get a good lawyer to figure out what the potential liabilities might be.

However, pardons create the rare exception to the use of the Fifth Amendment. Joe Biden granted a full pardon to Fauci shortly before leaving office for any federal crimes he may have committed during a ten-year period prior to 2025. That covers all of the COVID-19 pandemic, and then some. Fauci cannot be prosecuted or charged for any federal crimes that took place in that period, so he has no criminal liability in testifying. That puts Fauci in the rare position of being unable to refuse to testify under oath in any legitimate trial or hearing, including those in Congress.

Fauci claims that Paul is trying to spring a perjury trap on him today, but the Fifth Amendment cannot be used to avoid it, especially when a pardon exists. All Fauci has to do to avoid a perjury trap is to testify honestly. And as long as the questions focus on the period covered by the pardon, Fauci is required to testify.

Josh Hawley had plenty of fun with Fauci: Senator Hawley Hilariously Forces Fauci to Plead the Fifth on His Tie Color and the Day of the Week.

Related:

Tweet continues, “The chairman has DENIED your assertion of privilege and directed you to ANSWER, but you nonetheless refuse and stand on privilege despite the existence of the pardon. It’s AGAINST THE LAW to obstruct an investigation of Congress. There will be repercussions to your refusal to testify today.”

But will there?

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S A FAR CRY FROM JAIL TIME, BUT AT LEAST HE HATED EVERY MOMENT OF IT:

Posted at 11:57 am by Stephen Green

ALIENS? JWST Just Examined Two Stars Suspected of Harboring Dyson Spheres. Here’s What It Found.

“A civilization can hide its star behind a shell of solar collectors, but thermodynamics always collects its tax, and all that captured starlight has to come back out as a warm mid-infrared glow.”

That glow would be unavoidable. Just as a laptop or lightbulb gives off waste heat, so too would any machine that harvests a star’s energy. The larger the hypothetical megastructure, the brighter that excess infrared radiation should become.

That excess is exactly what Project Hephaistos, led by astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson of Uppsala University in Sweden, set out to find. Even false positives could teach us how to better search for alien tech – by revealing the many ways the Universe can mimic it.

The search sifted through roughly five million Milky Way stars looking for exactly this kind of infrared excess – more mid-infrared light than an ordinary star should produce.

Seven stars survived the team’s increasingly stringent tests, with the two studied here emerging as the search’s most compelling candidates.

JWST quickly exposed the two candidates as Dyson sphere impostors – and the explanation was brilliantly simple. The light from both stars was being boosted by a distant galaxy almost perfectly lined up behind them.

So not aliens then.

Posted at 11:42 am by Stephen Green

SPACE:

Faster? Please!

Posted at 11:26 am by Stephen Green

RACE-BASED SCHOLARSHIP SHOT DOWN AGAIN IN COURT, BUT MANY STILL REMAIN. Look, this is not hard. If we don’t want colleges to have awards like a Ku Klux Klan Scholarship for Excellence in Whiteness–and, contrary to what some on the left would have you believe, virtually no American wants to live in a society that does–you also can’t have awards meant only for black people, Latinos, or (in the linked case, oddly) Asians from Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia but not Thailand (because screw Thailand, I guess?). Just stop with the race discrimination already. We’re done. It’s over.

Posted at 11:25 am by Robert Shibley

JONATHAN TURLEY: Mamdani’s grocery stores will be the most expensive markets in NYC — paid for by you, the taxpayer.

Rather than deliver discount groceries, Mamdani is selling New Yorkers a bill of goods that will cost them millions.

It is not a description of a competitive grocery but a public charity. It is a quasi-food bank where taxpayers subsidize the cost.

As usual, Mamdani turns this into a class war, demonizing business owners. He suggests that real grocery stores are simply price gougers hoarding windfall profits from consumers. He ignores that they must pay rent, upkeep and fees — all things the city-run stores may simply write off.

He proclaimed, “May the most affordable grocery store win.”

Of course, the test is not which grocery is the most affordable, but which is the most sustainable. If you are willing to take a bath on sales, you can always offer the most affordable prices for as long as your excess cash holds out.

The first city-run grocery, in East Harlem, will cost $30 million to build — and perhaps more. It will never need to pay this money back nor factor it into its prices. The “warmth of socialism” will cover it; that is, you.

In reality, Mamdani will be selling apples at a far greater cost than any competitor, but those true costs will be buried in the city budget and paid for by the taxpayers.

There’s a new word for net taxpayers who stay in New York: Suckers.

Previously: Begun, the Class War Has.

Posted at 10:40 am by Stephen Green

“THEY ARE ALL DIFFERENT FACES OF THE SAME MANIA”:

Posted at 10:24 am by Stephen Green

CHANGE: AI tokens could become the kilowatt-hour of the AI age.

Earlier this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared, “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”

Many other AI companies seem to be betting on a similar future. If that vision actually comes to be, then “AI tokens” may break out of the world of nerdy tech and econ conversations and become a much more familiar part of our lives. The number of AI tokens businesses and consumers use could even become one of the defining measures of a new industrial age — the AI equivalent of the kilowatt-hour for electricity: the standard way we measure and pay for AI usage.

Think of tokens as the meter running in the background every time you use AI. Every time an AI model reads your prompt, writes an answer, or does a task, that work is measured in tokens. They are the tiny chunks of text and other data that AI models read and generate. In general, the more work a model does, the more tokens it typically processes.

While AI companies still tend to offer flat-rate subscriptions to average consumers, they’re increasingly charging businesses and developers based on the number of tokens they use. At the same time, companies, particularly in the tech sector, have been using AI in more and more of their work. As their AI usage has soared, many businesses have discovered just how expensive token-based pricing can become.

AI upends the old software business model of basically zero marginal cost per additional unit sold. Tokens are much cheaper than they used to be, but each one still requires compute to generate. Not sure how that shakes out, but it’s difficult to imagine demand for chips and energy slacking off any time soon.

Posted at 9:38 am by Stephen Green

LOL, CHRIS CILLIZZA:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): To be fair, that’s what they pay him for.

Posted at 9:22 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: It’s a Shame We Can’t Jail Dems for Torturing the Truth. “I run into that a lot here in my deep blue pinko commie neighborhood. There are ‘Stop the kidnappings! Report ICE…’ signs up all over the place. Of course, ICE agents aren’t kidnapping anyone. Leftists are incapable of dealing with anything intellectually, all they can do is rile up the low-info base with nonsensical emotional hysteria.”

Posted at 9:07 am by Stephen Green

NOVEMBER PREVIEW: Nine Republicans seeking Graham’s Senate seat.

Twelve attempted to get on the ballot; three were not certified by the state party.

Glenda Gail Parker and Danny Ford II, son of the former legendary football coach at Clemson, each filed before Tuesday’s deadline to a list led by Graham’s sister, two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and a former congressman and governor who briefly ran for president. Ford, however, was not certified and will not appear on the ballot.

Graham died July 11, two days after his 71st birthday, and would have been seeking a fifth term.

Per state law, the filing period is one week, followed by the primary two weeks later on Aug. 11. If a runoff is needed, meaning no candidate gets 50% of the vote plus one, it happens Aug. 25.

The successful candidate in the primary will take Graham’s spot on the ballot on Nov. 3. Dr. Annie Andrews, a Charleston pediatrician, is the Democratic opponent in November and is joined on the ballot by Libertarian Kasie Whitener.

Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nardone, to finish his term until the 120th Congress is seated in January. The 62-year-old Graham filed Friday and is backed for the six-year term by second-term Republican President Donald Trump.

Stay tuned…

Posted at 8:36 am by Stephen Green

I SEE DEAD PEOPLE:

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

VIGILANTISM IS MAN’S NATURAL STATE…:

…and we return to it when the authorities that were supposed to supplant it with something better fail.

Posted at 8:20 am by Stephen Green

WAIT, DO WE WANT A STRONGER GERMAN MILITARY?

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll