SHE AND THE MEDIA DID EVERYTHING BUT FIRE UP THE ENOLA GAY: Harris Campaign Didn’t Go Negative Enough on Trump, DNC Autopsy Concludes.

A newly-released Democratic National Committee report looking back at how the party lost the 2024 election concludes that then-Vice President Kamala Harris lost, in part, because she failed to focus sufficient negative attention on President Trump.

“The national campaign did not effectively drive Trump’s negatives, and the White House did not effectively support Vice President Harris over three and half years to improve her standing before the candidate switch,” reads the autopsy, written by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, who was asked by the DNC to investigate why the party failed to wing big in 2024.

Rivera goes on to suggest that Democrats failed to remind Americans why they disliked Trump in his first term.

She should have really called Trump a super-duper really evil Nazi poopy-head than simply just another Hitler, I guess: In October of 2024,Kamala was comparing Trump to Hitler (while aggressively seeking endorsements from Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, who were Hitler from 2001 to 2008):

Yesterday, V.P. Harris compared President Trump to Hitler,  “Donald Trump is out for unchecked power. He wants a military like Adolf Hitler had, who will be loyal to him, not our Constitution. He is unhinged, unstable, and given a second term, there would be no one to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses.”

The V.P.’s comment comparing Trump to Hitler indicates she doesn’t care about minimizing the horrors of the Holocaust or she is an imbecile incapable of understanding.

Her comments were based on a story in the leftist magazine The Atlantic reporting that Trump’s former chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, called Trump a “fascist” and recalled his admiration for Nazi generals. Kelly also raised concerns about Trump’s recent threats to use the military against “the enemy from within.”

Flashback: Are Democrats Whitewashing Hitler with Lame Attacks on Trump?

MUSTN’T OFFEND THE PEOPLE BUSY SHOOTING AT ONE ANOTHER:

ELIMINATE THE POSITION, THEN NUKE THE SITE FROM ORBIT:

UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: Rape Dogs? No. Spy Dolphins? Maybe. “Every now and then a story comes along that you see isn’t quite right, and you correct it, knowing the correction will please absolutely no one, because truth is truth. This is one of those cases.”

OH, COOK! James May rates Tesla’s diner (honest review):

THE MOVIE LOOKS UNFORGIVABLY BAD (AND ANTI-WESTERN), AND I’M A BIG ENOUGH NOLAN FAN THAT I FORGAVE “TENET” ITS FLAWS:

BORN TO RERUN: Springsteen Claims CBS Has No Idea What America Is About In Ode To Colbert.

On Wednesday’s penultimate episode of CBS’s The Late Show singer Bruce Springsteen delivering his ode to host Stephen Colbert where he declared that the show is going away because President Trump can’t take a joke and because Paramount’s leaders “feel they need to kiss his ass.” Earlier, on ABC, Jimmy Kimmel sang a similar tune when he declared that they should be ashamed of themselves, even if they are not.

Before launching into his anti-Trump and anti-ICE song “Streets of Minneapolis,” Springsteen gave his ode to Colbert, “I am here in support tonight for Stephen, because you’re the first guy in America who’s lost his show because we got a president who can’t take a joke. And because Larry and David Ellison feel they need to kiss his ass* to get what they want. So, these are— Anyway, Stephen, these are small-minded people, they got no idea what the freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be about. This is for you.”

To be fair, Colbert isn’t the first CBS employee to think he’s being taken off air because “the president can’t take a joke.” As Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad wrote in their 1986 book Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live

CBS canceled the Smothers Brothers in June of 1969, five months after Richard Nixon became President. The reason the network gave was that one of their shows had been turned in after the deadline stipulated in their contract, but Tommy Smothers, Mason Williams, Rob Reiner, and Steve Martin believe to this day the cancellation was politically motivated. “Nixon came in and we were off,” Smothers said. “We were thrown off the air because of our viewpoint on Vietnam.” They were also thrown off, Smothers adds, “because we had no ally in high places” at CBS. That was a key mistake that Lorne Michaels, six years later, would not repeat.

* Earlier: NBC Miscasts CBS Ownership as Partisan Actor as Colbert Eulogies Begin.

CHLOE MELAS: CBS was recently acquired by Skydance Media, whose owner David Ellison is a prominent Trump supporter. CBS called the cancellation a purely financial decision and not related in any way to the show’s performance. But that statement doesn’t ring true to everyone. Brian Lowry is a media veteran reporter.

BRIAN LOWRY: There was a sense the studio was eager to curry favor with the Trump administration.

The idea of Ellison as “prominent Trump supporter” makes for good narrative ahead of Colbert’s cancellation. But it simply isn’t true. As our own Brent Baker noted, in 2024 Ellison donated $929,000 to the Biden Victory Fund. AS CNBC noted, this was “the largest recorded contribution that the Skydance Media CEO ever made to a federal candidate.” Not very MAGA. Also, not very accurate.

The Ellison MAGA rebrand is an important element in the ongoing canonization of late-night comics to Resistance™ sainthood. In Colbert’s particular case this narrative is useful inasmuch as it helps brush off the financial reality of the show as a key element of its cancellation.

It doesn’t help matters that Colbert’s nightly audience of about 2.75 million viewers have an average age that’s not far off from Springsteen’s, and the show was losing CBS $40 million per year.

UPDATE: Colbert’s demise, by the numbers.

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

SACRAMENTO LOOKS AFTER ITS OWN: Bill that tried to kill secret agreements with your tax dollars now faces its own silent death.

It’s costing taxpayers at least $1.1 billion, but there’s only so much lawmakers are allowing the public to know about the California Capitol Annex Project.

The project has been shrouded in secrecy for years due to thousands of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) preventing people from talking about the project. Now a bill attempting to invalidate those secrecy agreements is set to die behind closed doors without any discussion, debate or public input.

Assemblyman Josh Hoover, R-Folsom, introduced Assembly Bill 2445 in February. Three months later, the same lawmakers tasked with running the Capitol Annex Project never assigned AB 2445 to a committee. The bill never received a hearing and is scheduled to automatically die on May 27.

Hoover said the irony is not lost on him; his idea to kill secret agreements is scheduled to be secretly killed rather than publicly debated, approved or voted down on the merits.

“It would seem odd to me that there’s so much passion to kill this bill,” Hoover said. “But, certainly, someone is pressing to keep this from getting heard.”

And preventing people from seeing where the money went.

CRUEL, BUT TRUE:

STILL THE PRESUMPTIVE DEMOCRAT NOMINEE FOR SENATE:

THE ENEMY WITHIN: Palestine Chronicle editor-in-chief admits cousin was top Hamas commander who carried out suicide attack. “Ramzy Baroud, editor-in-chief of the US-based nonprofit The Palestine Chronicle, openly admitted during a recent interview that his cousin was a senior Hamas commander who later carried out a suicide attack in Gaza, revelations that surfaced as his organization is facing a federal lawsuit accusing it of aiding a Hamas operative, who was one of its journalists, that was holding Israeli hostages captive in his family home after the October 7 attacks.”

“Non-profit” seems to cover a multitude of sins these days.

DISPATCHES FROM THE RELIGIOUS LEFT:

One of the best? The L.A. Times tells us that Colbert is the Catholic evangelist:

In any case, I prefer my Catholic evangelists to be a bit more G-rated:

UPDATE: Brian Stelter jumps onboard the St. Colbert procession:

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT THAT WAY…:

AND NOW, A FIRESIDE CHAT FROM MAYOR FRANKLIN DELANO MAMDANI:

It’s an “unexpectedly” appropriate comparison:

FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.

—Frontiers of Freedom, December 14th, 2015.

New Documents Reveal FDR’s Eugenic Project to ‘Resettle’ Jews During World War II.

—Steve Usdin, Tablet, April 29, 2018.

A controversial executive order leads to internment camps:

The executive order didn’t specify Japanese-Americans as a group, but the U.S. military detained more than 100,000 people in the next six months and moved them to camps and facilities with armed guards and barbed wire.

There were 10 camps set up nationally, and about 120,000 people were interned in the camps during the war. About two-thirds of them were Japanese-Americans who were born in the United States. People of Italian and German heritage were also detained.

The controversial moves were met with legal challenges, which eventually were unsuccessful in freeing the detainees from the camps, despite the serious constitutional issues involved.

—The National Constitution Center, February 19th, 2024.