May 15, 2026

I HAVE ENJOYED POWERLINE IN THE PAST AND I’M SURE WILL IN THE FUTURE, BUT THIS IS SLOPPY, YELLOW JOURNALISM AND FRANKLY UNWORTHY OF THEM:  Pope Leo makes a statement.
I’m sorry. I try not to write essays here, but this entire post is nonsense. The outrage of the “award” (Vatican’s “highest award” my feet!) being given to Iran to send a message is nonsense. The entire “Leo was bath-mouthing Trump” is not true. It was spun up by our press and Leo HIMSELF denied it, (which let me add was at considerable risk to himself, since the Euroweenies in the Vatican would be big mad at his saying this outright.)
As for the award to Iran, it is nonsense. It’s an automatic medal given to an ambassador who has served x amount of time. In fact, most of “Leo’s scandals” are nonsense. A brief list: Fact check: Did the Vatican Library open a prayer room for Muslims? (Spoiler. No.)  Pope prays at mosque!  Or, you know: Pope visits Istanbul mosque but, unlike predecessors, opts not to pray there.  Keep in mind the man took the name Leo, our last strongly anti-communist pope. before John Paul II and also that he has said this: “Communism has penetrated even Christian circles disguised as solidarity. It is our pastoral duty to expose it.” – Pope Leo XIV .   Now is he perfect? No. No man is. Is he doing everything right? No. but the Vatican has its own deep state around which he has to maneuver.  HOWEVER so far, he’s making a lot of right moves. As I said often about Trump during his first term and still do sometimes: Give the man room to cook.
Before you say I’m saying all this because I’m Catholic, you should remember I’m the one Catholic who used to make “is the Pope Catholic” jokes about Francis. So, spare me. I know it’s lots of fun to indulge America’s oldest bigotry but it burns me to see you people fall for the left’s psyops.
He p*sses the left off by not liking commies. And they try to use him to beat Trump. But you? Think.

 

 

Posted at 12:33 am by Sarah Hoyt

May 14, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Happy Thursday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

STARSHIP TEST TENTATIVELY SCHEDULED FOR MAY 19. Godspeed.

Posted at 9:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

PEDRO PASCAL KNOWS EXACTLY HOW TO ADVERTISE A BOY’S SCIENCE FANTASY MOVIE: Kissing a Man on the Lips on National TV.

Chris Gore wrote that Disney changing Star Wars (and Marvel) from a boys brand to a girls brand was the costliest mistake in entertainment history.

But they didn’t change it to a girls brand.

They changed it to a gay brand.

What this says to me is that they know The Mandalorian and Grogu is going to be an absolute bomb and either don’t care any more or are looking to pre-emptively make excuses for the disaster. “The public is just too homophobic to accept a gay space bounty hunter!”

In more next-level marketing, Disney has decided that they should allow the fired, disgraced failure Kaffeine Kennedy to remind the public that she is responsible for this movie.

No wonder the movie is tracking at the same level that Soylo: A Soy Wars Soyry tracked at before becoming the first Star Wars movie in history to lose money.

Christian Toto adds: ‘Mandalorian and Grogu’ Faces Even More Box Office Woes?

Some influencers did get access to a 25-minute clip reel of the film and came away impressed. We’ve yet to hear of any early screenings for review purposes.

There’s more.

“Star Wars” legend Mark Hamill just posted, then deleted, an image of a dead President Trump. That ghoulish move got plenty of media attention, forcing him to post a quasi-apology.

Hamill isn’t featured in “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” but he’s an essential part of franchise lore and a brand ambassador.

At least he was.

From last week: Mark Hamill Posts Image of President Trump Dead in a Grave With Caption “If Only.”

As Spinal Tap manager Ian Faith might say, Disney seems determined to make the appeal of Star Wars as “selective” as possible.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): If I were a chick, I still don’t think kissing Colbert would boost my appeal. I mean, ick.

Posted at 6:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

CLAUDINE LONGET, CHANTEUSE AND ACTRESS WHOSE CAREER ENDED WHEN SHE SHOT HER LOVER, DIES AGE 84.

She played the female lead, opposite Peter Sellers, in Blake Edwards’s 1968 film The Party, but she was best known for her appearances on the weekly television show hosted by her husband, Andy Williams. She was, in Williams’s words, “a beautiful, athletic, slender, petite brunette with large doe eyes”.

From her spouse’s side, she radiated a mixture of glamour and wholesome domesticity. On the set of Williams’s famous Christmas specials, she would cast protective glances towards the couple’s young children as they unwrapped parcels under the studio tree.

But few stars have made the journey from idol to pariah quite so swiftly and irreversibly as Claudine Longet who, on the afternoon of March 21 1976, shot her lover, the champion skier Spider Sabich, with a .22 handgun at their chalet in Aspen, Colorado. The events of that Sunday afternoon shifted the emphasis so firmly from femme to fatale that even now, decades later, some residents of America’s most exclusive ski resort have yet to forgive her.

She inspired a mercilessly derisive song, “Claudine,” by the Rolling Stones. Originally destined for the 1980 album Emotional Rescue, it eventually appeared as a bonus track on the Some Girls re-release in 2011. “Now only Spider knows for sure,” one verse begins, “But he ain’t talkin’ about it any more/ Is he, Claudine?/ There’s blood in the chalet/And blood in the snow/[She] Washed her hands of the whole damn show/The best thing you could do, Claudine.”

In April 1976, before her case had even been heard, the first series of NBC’s satirical show Saturday Night Live featured a sketch called “The Claudine Longet Invitational” in which male skiers competed in a slalom competition, at the end of which they were “accidentally” shot by Claudine Longet.

As Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad wrote in their 1986 history of SNL, “One of [Standards and Practices vice president Herminio Traviesas’s] biggest mistakes came from not seeing how a piece played in performance. The sketch in question was [Michael] O’Donoghue’s ‘Claudine Longet Invitational’ ski tournament, which aired when she was facing trial for manslaughter. Traviesas, to O’Donoghue’s complete surprise, let it pass on the basis of a reading over the phone, not realizing that it came across much tougher visually than it did in the script. NBC’s legal representative on the show also let it pass after consulting with an outside law firm. Almost as soon as it aired, Longet’s estranged husband, Andy Williams, was on the phone with NBC’s lawyers in Los Angeles, threatening to sue. To placate Williams, Don Pardo read an apology in a subsequent show. ‘It is desirable to correct any misunderstanding,’ Pardo said, ‘that a suggestion was made that, in fact, a crime had been committed.… This is a statement of apology if the material was misinterpreted.’ Not a very sincere apology, but it served to keep the show out of court.”

Posted at 6:32 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: Remember Peoria!

The New Hotness? Screw those rubes in flyover country, we’re ramming wokeness right down their throats, even if they refuse to buy the product:

Yes, it’s Christopher Nolan, and the film will likely print money this summer, and yes, I want to read the reviews of the finished product before strongly casting doubts, but even he isn’t perfect:

But Dunkirk did lack emotional depth. It felt much more like Stanley Kubrick’s cold and detached Full Metal Jacket than a gripping war movie about one of England’s pivotal moments in WWII.

Regarding Oppenheimer, Will Jordan, aka the Critical Drinker, recently told GB News that Nolan is “a man of ideas and obviously very intelligent, very capable as a filmmaker, but there’s a certain sterility to what he produces. There’s a certain emotional element that’s just missing. I feel like when he does try to include it, it comes across as very clunky and very deliberate. For example, the love scenes in Oppenheimer did not feel like real human beings talking to each other. They felt like a couple of robots conversing, and I think that’s a bit of a shortcoming for him as a director. He basically needs to stay within his comfort zone in order to produce [his] best stuff. He’s a man of ideas — sci-fi, thrillers, that kind of thing. I think historical epics might not be to his taste.”

Still though, if Hollywood wants to lean heavily into reverse-race casting, Siraj Hashmi suggests the ultimate Project Hail Mary:

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE DEER IN FRANCE PRANCE MAINLY IN A TRANCE:

Posted at 5:39 pm by Stephen Green

EXILE IN THE UNCANNY VALLEY: South Park Creators’ AI Company Made The Rolling Stones Young Again for ‘In The Stars’ Music Video.

The Rolling Stones look straight out of the 1970s in the legendary rock band’s music video for new single “In the Stars,” thanks to de-aging technology courtesy of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone‘s AI company Deep Voodoo.

In the François Rousselet-directed video, which features Odessa A’zion, the band is rocking out in a warehouse as a crowd of fans dances around them and a slew of other musicians join in on the song too. At one point A’zion licks the digitally de-aged Mick Jagger’s face.

“Are you kidding me? It’s my dream,” A’zion said of starring in a Rolling Stones music video. “The first record that I ever got that I listened to from start to finish was Tattoo You. I’m obsessed with the Rolling Stones. This is in my bucket list for sure.”

There appears to be a variety of “is that him or isn’t it?” quick cuts of digitally recreated ‘70s-era Stones sidemen such as Billy Preston and Bobby Keys as well in the video:

The Beatles’ Get Back used heavy audio and video processing to generate almost eight hours of television footage from the raw footage shot for Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 Let It Be documentary. Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman and Michael used actors to tell their stories. Last year’s Becoming Led Zeppelin used clever editing of a handful of the band’s rare early television appearances to flesh out a two-hour documentary. Are the Stones opening up a floodgate of AI recreations of AARP-qualified bands who can afford the use of the technology, for both rock videos and documentaries?

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WAS THAT A BRAIN JOLT? As the number grows of credibly reported and analyzed Near-Death Experiences (NDE) involving claims of divine experience, folks who deny the existence of deity are scrambling to come up with an alternative explanation. And, according to the Discovery Institute’s Denyse O’Leary, their latest one consists of the argument that such experiences are merely the product of a staccato burst of stimuli in the brain occurring simultaneously. Hmmm.

Posted at 4:11 pm by Mark Tapscott

BAD NEWS FOR ILLEGAL ALIEN TRUCK DRIVERS AND THE PEOPLE WHO HIRE THEM: SCOTUS Decision Hits Shipping Brokers Like a Ton of Freight. “Up to today, trucking companies bore the liability for anything that happened with their vehicle or driver during. Brokers had always claimed immunity from any liability as they were a step removed from ownership. All they did was scheduling – pick up a phone and schedule with Company A or B to get a load from here to there. There were ways to know if said company was in full compliance with DoT regulations, had safety violations, and had paid their insurance bill, but zero impetus for a broker to check. The trucking company was just another name in the book, willing to deliver for the price quoted. A unanimous decision from the Supreme Court today has changed that dynamic and sent a seismic shock through the entire trucking industry.”

Big win for third party inspection/certification services, and the lawyers who will be suing the freight brokers who hire dangerous drivers.

Posted at 3:15 pm by Glenn Reynolds