February 13, 2026

OBAMA WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL ❤️ JEFFREY EPSTEIN:

Kathryn Ruemmler has one of the most gold-plated resumes of any lawyer in America. She was an associate counsel to President Clinton, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, and the deputy director of DOJ’s Enron Task Force. She was a partner in Los Angeles-based Latham & Watkins.

In 2009, Ruemmler joined the Obama Administration as principal associate deputy attorney general. She then became President Obama’s White House Counsel. In 2014, she apparently was considered for the Attorney General post vacated by Eric Holder, but withdrew her name from contention and instead joined Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s most profitable businesses. In 2021 she became Goldman’s Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel, and serves as a member of Goldman’s Management Committee.

So one would assume that she is a person of remarkable ability, extraordinary dedication and–call me naive–sterling character. Maybe so. But it turns out that, alongside all her accomplishments, she was a good friend of Jeffrey Epstein. She has been embarrassed by the current dump of Epstein documents, as the New York Post reports:

Goldman Sachs’ top lawyer Kathy Ruemmler signed emails to Jeffrey Epstein with “xoxo” and wished him a happy birthday — prompting a crude joke from the disgraced financier about naming his penis, newly released Justice Department documents show.

Ruemmler, who served as White House counsel under then-President Barack Obama before becoming Goldman’s chief legal officer, emailed Epstein on his 62nd birthday in 2015: “I hope you enjoy the day with your one true love :-)”

Commence the anti-journalism from the DNC-MSM in response: Media Actively Cover Up Obama Lawyer’s Chummy Ties to Epstein. “Democrats Sure Got It Good…Need I even point out what these headlines would look like if Epstein’s gal-pal spent five years in Donald Trump’s White House, or if she had been Trump’s legal counsel, or even if her association with Trump were something as fleeting as she was once his Uber driver?”

UPDATE: More great moments in anti-journalism:

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE HYPOCRISY OLYMPICS. In his latest Commentary newsletter, Abe Greenwald writes:

Yes, there was a sex ring. The multimillionaire at the heart of it traveled with a harem of women and used them for his own sexual needs. But he regularly pimped them out to high-profile men as well. He assigned each woman a number so that the john, after viewing what was on offer, would just have to tell him which number he wanted. When the pimp had used up a particular woman, he’d discard her and replace her with a new one. It was really as vile as all that, and it’s absolutely true. The guy bragged about it.

Jeffrey Epstein?

Heck, no. I’m talking the man who’s currently being celebrated for his role as honorary coach of Team USA at the Winter Olympics: Snoop Dogg, America’s most beloved thug.

“I put an organization together,” Snoop told Rolling Stone in 2013. “I did a Playboy tour, and I had a bus follow me with ten bitches on it. I could fire a bitch, f**k a bitch, get a new ho: It was my program. City to city, t**ty to t**ty, hotel room to hotel room, athlete to athlete, entertainer to entertainer…. A lot of athletes bought p**sy from me.”

Well, at least he sounded conscience-stricken about it.

And there’s this. Snoop went on his pimp tour in 2003, when he had already been a rich and wildly successful recording artist for a decade. Which is perhaps why he was more generous than most pimps. “I’d act like I’d take the money from the bitch,” he said, “but I’d let her have it.”

What a guy, huh.

I previously wrote about Snoop in the context of anti-Semitism. Namely, about how the liberal establishment took a career-long defender of Louis Farrakhan and elevated him to the heights of cultural acceptability.

Why am I writing about him now? Because while Americans have worked themselves into a moral fit and launched a witch hunt for anyone whose name is mentioned glancingly in the Epstein files, they’re also delighted to their core that, as one CNN headline has it, “Coach Snoop is having a blast at the Olympics.” This is about moral hypocrisy.

The transition of Snoop from rapper to the Olympics’ ambassador of goodwill (and good chronic) has been helped by years and years of favorable TV appearances and commercial endorsements, and a lack of recent negative headlines. But then a lot of rappers from the ‘80s and ‘90s have gone on to play good guys on TV and in the movies, such as Ice Cube, and astonishingly enough, the Ice-T, who went from rapping “Cop Killer” in 1992, to playing a cop on Law & Order: SVU since 2000.

Posted at 5:17 pm by Ed Driscoll

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Edtech is booming, but so is ‘brain rot.’

IQ, which measures the ability to learn in school, used to correlate closely with years of schooling, Horvath writes. Not any more. “Despite spending more time in school than any generation before, Gen-Z is losing school-ability.”

Trying to make learning easier will backfire, he warns. “The more students rely on easy, supportive digital tools, the less friction they encounter and the less mental effort they must exert. But friction is not a flaw of learning: it is learning.”

“Edtech companies tout huge learning gains,” but researchers have found “technology rarely boosts learning in schools — and often impairs it, editorializes The Economist.

Around the world, in-school computer use is up and test scores are down, the story notes. “Back in 2013, Bill Gates remarked that it would take a decade to know whether education technology really worked,” The Economist concludes. “More than ten years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, the answer is increasingly clear.”

Maybe educating was never the point.

Posted at 4:54 pm by Stephen Green

IT’S FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: The Twofer Eye-Bleach Mugshot Edition. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn twice how not to pose for the camera, how to save the Baby Jesus, and how to (almost) steal booze in Texas.”

Posted at 4:23 pm by Stephen Green

NEW VIDEO FROM AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

On the other hand, when socialism is spreading nationally, it’s good to be an apparatchik: Hilarious Thread of Champagne Socialist Mamdani Bro Throwing Tantrums Over Airline Injustices a Must-Read.

Post continues: “… they did not like my face.”

Aww, yes, the racist claim. Typical.

Keep going.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

Curiously, these tweets are all after early 2019, when the distaff Mamdani vowed to ban “farting cows and airplanes,” but then, globe-trotting enviromentals don’t mean that they should stop flying:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

TROUBLE IN CUBA:

Posted at 4:12 pm by Glenn Reynolds

I LOVE A STORY WITH A HAPPY ENDING: Kentucky Homeowner Thwarts a Not-So-Neighborly Home Invasion. “Hyatt decided his neighbor – yes, his neighbor – had some stuff he coveted. At 5 a.m., he forced entry. Local cops called it a straight-up home invasion. Hyatt’s neighbor, however, kept their safety rescue tool close by (not locked in a safe with ammunition stored separately), and used it to educate Danny on neighborly ethics.”

Posted at 4:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SPACE: The SpaceX Merger: If You Want More Compute, Leave Earth. “Tesla is building a ‘gigantic’ chip factory to produce AI hardware at scale: batteries, power electronics, chips (he’s musing about creating the factory’s equipment and memory from scratch, too). SpaceX is gearing up to build 10,000 rockets a year. Solar panels in orbit can collect 13x the energy of those on the ground, where unlike on Earth they’re always exposed to sunlight. Elon wants to launch solar-paneled data centers in space.”

Posted at 3:52 pm by Stephen Green

MCCONNELL DID THE MEME:

The meme:

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!

Posted at 3:46 pm by Stephen Green

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT LIKE THAT…

Staggering, really.

UPDATE: Embed isn’t working for whatever reason, so here’s a screencap instead.

Posted at 3:27 pm by Stephen Green

THE ENDLESS WAR ON GRAMMAR. Led, of course, by English teachers. They appear to be winning, so I suppose it would seem silly to them to stop!

Posted at 2:56 pm by Robert Shibley

UM…: Air Force Now Denies Receiving F-35s Without Radars.

The U.S. Air Force has now denied taking delivery of any F-35A Joint Strike Fighters from the latest Lot 17 production batch without radars installed. This comes a day after TWZ published a detailed piece examining a recent unconfirmed report that the U.S. military has been receiving radar-less F-35s since last June due to issues tied to the new AN/APG-85 radar. Earlier this week, the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) had declined to confirm or deny whether that was the case, citing “enhanced security measures.”

“USAF F-35A lot 17 aircraft are delivering with APG-81 radars,” an Air Force spokesperson told TWZ today in an unprompted statement. “The Air Force is working with the F-35 Lightning II Joint Program Office to deliver F-35s with APG-85 radars, and actual modernization plans, capabilities, and schedules remain classified to maintain program security.”

When TWZ broke the story earlier this week, the Air Force at first refused to confirm or deny — so who knows?

Posted at 2:50 pm by Stephen Green

CNN HOST KAITLAN COLLINS REVEALS KAROLINE LEAVITT DEFENDED HER PRESS ACCESS IN SAUDI ARABIA:

CNN host Kaitlan Collins credited White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday for defending the journalist while on a presidential trip to Saudi Arabia.

Collins explained on Heather McMahan’s “Absolutely Not” podcast that she was in Saudi Arabia on a trip covering President Trump’s visit to the country and noted the Saudis famously do not like the media.

“I asked a shouted question to President Trump, who had seen me when the US press came in,” Collins said. “He didn’t answer, which is, I mean, that’s how it works. You shout questions. They either answer or they don’t — it’s their prerogative. And then the world leaders left the room.

“The Saudi Royal Guard kind of freaked out because I dared to ask a question, and they’re not used to that there because they don’t have a free press.”

Collins said Saudi authorities then tried to stop her from entering the next press event and, when she pushed back, they told her she wouldn’t be allowed in.

“I could see them like, whispering, and pointing about me,” Collins said. “And some of the younger White House staff, they are with the press, weren’t really sure what to do, and they went to Karoline and, to her credit, she said, ‘No, Kaitlan’s coming in with the rest of the US press,’ and we went in. And, so, it didn’t become this huge issue.

So, to her credit, she, without a doubt, was like, ‘No, you’re coming in,’” Collins said of Leavitt. “Which I do think is important in that moment, especially when you’re kind of the US contingent abroad, and we don’t do things like they do in Saudi Arabia.”

Worst. Fascists. Ever:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China performs an impressive rocket landing.

China’s space program, striving to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030, carried out a test flight of a new reusable booster and crew capsule late Tuesday (US time), and the results were spectacular, Ars reports. The launch of a subscale version of the Long March 10 rocket, still in development, provided engineers with an opportunity to verify the performance of an important part of the new Mengzhou capsule’s safety system. A test version of the Mengzhou spacecraft, flying without anyone onboard, climbed into the stratosphere on top of the Long March booster before activating its launch abort motors a little more than a minute into the flight as the rocket reached the moment of maximum aerodynamic pressure, known as Max-Q.

China getting there on rocket reuse… The abort motors pulled the capsule away from the booster, simulating an in-flight escape that might be necessary to whisk crews away from a failing rocket. The Mengzhou spacecraft later deployed parachutes and splashed down offshore from Hainan Island. Remarkably, the booster continued its ascent without the crew capsule, soaring into space on the power of its kerosene-fueled YF-100 engines before reentering the atmosphere, reigniting its engines, and nailing a propulsive landing in the South China Sea, right next to a recovery barge waiting to bring it back to shore.

SpaceX won’t hold a monopoly on reuse forever…

Posted at 1:48 pm by Stephen Green