August 25, 2026

ABE GREENWALD: Harping on Natalie.

All the fuss began a week and a half ago, when Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia made a dig about the two of them. Trump, he said, “wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” Ossoff was referring to Trump’s covertly switching planes on his return from Turkey in July. The president had left Marco Rubio (and others) on the possibly targeted Air Force One while making off with a small group including Harp.

This became a juicy story for several reasons. Harp is an attractive young woman who’s always at Trump’s side, and Ossoff seemed to be insinuating that there’s something inappropriate about their mutual fondness. And when Ossoff, a possible Democratic contender in 2028, then denied that he was implying anything of the sort, a bipartisan game of gotcha was underway. While Republicans voiced their disgust over Ossoff’s innuendo, Democrats and liberal media went digging into Harp.

Which is interesting. Because while the left went looking for dirt in the life and letters and family members of a young woman who had survived bone cancer, lost her father to suicide, and committed the crime of working for Trump, feminists were beginning to organize in support of Lindsay Clancy, a suburban mother who had killed her three small children.

That’s just an aside I couldn’t resist. What’s more surprising is that the tale of the president and his loyal aide makes Trump look better than any story I’ve ever read about him.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

SUGAR ISN’T GOOD FOR YOU: These Babies Grew Up With Strict Sugar Limits. Decades Later, The Results Are Dramatic. “Compared with the babies who didn’t experience sugar rationing, the babies who were sugar-rationed for their first 1,000 days were 69 percent less likely to develop liver cancer in their adult lives. They also saw reduced incidence of prostate cancer (52 percent lower), lung cancer (41 percent lower), rectal cancer (40 percent lower), and breast cancer (36 percent lower). The sugar-rationed babies also tended to show longer telomeres – the caps at the ends of chromosomes that protect our genetic material, which are linked to longevity.”

Posted at 8:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

ROB LONG IN 2020: The Beauty Parton.

At the 2017 Emmy Awards, Dolly was reunited with her co-stars from the 1980 hit comedy Nine to Five. It was nine months into the Trump administration, and two of the presenters weren’t about to let you forget it. Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda let loose mini-screeds against Trump. Dolly looks uncomfortable, then defuses the awkwardness by making a joke about the size of her breasts. And the podcasters want to know—they need to know—why Dolly didn’t attack Trump along with her co-stars and friends. Doesn’t she hate the guy? (Translation: Please tell us you hate the guy!) For the first time in the podcast, Dolly seems confused. She doesn’t hate Donald Trump. She prays for Donald Trump.

And if the podcast producers thought they were frustrated by her refusal to be a feminist or an LGBTQ activist, they’re stopped cold by this admission. Dolly prays for Trump, by which she means, she’s not praying that he wins reelection or lowers his handicap. She prays that God will grant him wisdom and foresight and guide him as he leads the nation. Praying for the president—any president, every president—is actually part of the official liturgy of the Episcopalian church. But this is problematic for Dolly’s interviewers, for whom basic religious faith seems weird and baffling. They keep asking How does she do it? And she keeps answering them By writing songs that are emotionally true and not being a political activist and praying for God’s guidance. And they just don’t hear it. Can’t be that. Gotta be something else.

Dolly Parton’s singing “I Will Always Love You” to Porter Wagoner is one of those moments you hear about and think, This is going to be an Oscar-winning movie scene someday. But what came after the song wasn’t so nice. Porter Wagoner sued Dolly Parton for $1 million and trash-talked her for years. And then, a few years later, when she was a superstar and he had fallen on hard times, she bought his music-publishing company from his creditors and gave it back to him.

Weren’t you furious with him? the podcast producers want to know. He sued you. He took your money. Some have said he abused you. Again Dolly demurs. See it from his side, she says. Wagoner made her a star. He took a chance on her, introduced her to an enormous audience, stood by her. She was grateful to him. And she forgave him. She helped him financially and reconciled with him and was there at his deathbed to remind him that the words she sang to him years before were still true.

You forgave him? they ask, as if the word is strange and foreign and written in a different alphabet. Forgiveness, she says. “That’s all there is.”

Mary Katharine Ham adds:

Tweet concludes:

You can look through the window of her one-bedroom childhood home on display at Dollywood while listening to “Coat of Many Colors” and know she was rich long before she was rich and she wanted everyone else to know it, too.

Related:

Posted at 6:43 pm by Ed Driscoll

WINNING IS GOOD:

Posted at 5:54 pm by Stephen Green

ONE NIGHT IN BANGKOK:

Posted at 5:43 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S NOT JUST FOR MELONVILLE AND THE TRI-CITY AREA ANYMORE:

I’m looking forward to seeing broadcasting from 3CP1, Russian Television, once again:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

FLASHBACK: Dolly Parton represents all that’s best about America.

She has, for 25 years, run a literacy programme for children, sending books to different parts of the world without fanfare. The daughter of an illiterate but intelligent father, she set up the Imagination Library, rather than, more obviously, a support for the performing arts. She understands that few people are going to have her route out of grinding poverty but that many who learn to love to read will make a success of their lives.

She has been a supporter of gay, lesbian and trans rights for decades; she stays out of party politics, very wisely not condemning what much of her audience will passionately believe. She is, in short, a living embodiment of the American trust in the transformative effect of hard work and talent. She has done it without losing an iota of her good humour or charm, and never giving the slightest hint of the usual American sanctimoniousness; she is, as everyone agrees, a very good thing indeed.

Dolly has never complained much about the barriers she had to overcome, preferring to bring out some well-worn jokes on the subject. On her villainous collaborator in the early years, Porter Wagoner, she has said: ‘I knew he had balls when he sued me for a million dollars. He was only paying me $30 a week.’ There is no question, however, that these barriers were substantial, and defeated many others. Bobbie Gentry, a similarly determined and intelligent singer of the time, withdrew from public appearances altogether by the end of the 1970s. Dolly has often put these problems down to her sex, and the difficulties of being a woman in a man’s world. I’m not so sure. That is part of it, but the worst humiliations she faced sprang, surely, from something Americans find very hard to discuss: class.

Dolly was, from the start, perfectly sincere in her spectacular look — hair on a scale not glimpsed since Mme de Pompadour, rhinestones, glitter and an unforgettable silhouette which surgery may have contributed to. When the scientists in 1996 succeeded in cloning a sheep with cells taken from the mammary gland, the result was always going to be called ‘Dolly’. We love all these things about her now, of course, but they threw a lot of commentators into a class-driven frenzy that had little to do with her sex. In a television interview in 1977, Barbara Walters thought herself entitled to ask Dolly when she experienced puberty, whether her husband felt obliged to be faithful, and whether her breasts were real. She even submitted her guest to the indignity of standing up and inviting the audience to inspect her body. Would Walters have ever done this to Meryl Streep or Meg Ryan? It was sheer class hostility, and no doubt much more of it took place in private, and in boardrooms.

—Philip Hensher, The Spectator, January 14th, 2021.

UPDATE: This story dropped just one day ago, so presumably some sort of holographic or “Digital Dolly” will be touring concert halls at some point in the near future: Dolly Parton Is Exploring Avatar Concerts So Fans Could See Her Perform Long Into the Future.

Posted at 5:23 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPACE: NASA Sets Coverage for Roman Space Telescope Launch from Florida.

Named for NASA’s first chief astronomer, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will pair sharp infrared vision with a field of view at least 100 times larger than the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope. Its crisp, sweeping surveys will help scientists investigate dark energy and dark matter, discover and characterize exoplanets, map billions of galaxies, study black holes, and explore objects from our own solar system to the edge of the observable universe.

After launch and separation from the rocket, Roman will travel to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, about one million miles from Earth. The mission has a five-year primary lifetime with a goal of operating for 10 years, and Roman’s science data will be publicly available after processing.

Plus: “NASA and SpaceX are targeting Roman’s liftoff for no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday, Aug. 30, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Launch coverage begins at 6:20 a.m.”

Those Falcon Heavy launches are something to see, and there aren’t many of them.

The core on this launch will be expended, but SpaceX plans to recover both side boosters and the fairings.

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green

THEY WERE WARNED:

Glenn noted years ago that lefties suck at understanding second-order effects, and I’ve seen nothing to contradict that.

Posted at 4:35 pm by Stephen Green

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHEN SECONDS COUNT, THE POLICE ARE ONLY MINUTES AWAY: Homeowner’s Gun Works When Restraining Order Doesn’t. “Police later confirmed the obvious: the dead man had an active protective order barring him from the very address he’d chosen to invade. Paper and ink meant nothing to a genius who thought ‘restraining order’ was just a polite suggestion. Then again, a restraining order doesn’t enforce itself. Armed self-defense proved harder to ignore.”

Posted at 4:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

NIFTY: Data centers become ‘killer application’ for new power transformer tech.

Several US companies, including Amperesand, Heron Power, and DG Matrix, have collectively raised more than $280 million in funding over the past year to commercialize solid-state transformer technology.

Solid-state transformers could also greatly reduce the amount of copper and other materials needed by data center projects, while their smaller physical footprints allow data center developers to do other things with the available space, Lukic explained.

In the long run, successful commercialization of solid-state transformers could even help ease the broader supply chain shortage affecting power transformers. That would make transformers more readily available for power grid upgrades and expansions beyond data center projects.

“There are relatively few specialized companies that manufacture [conventional] transformers, while solid-state transformers are like an electronics device,” Lukic said. “It completely opens up the space for who can play in the transformer space, and also opens up where transformers can be manufactured.”

Faster, please.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

FREE ALBERTA!

But — oh, Canada — there’s always more:

Posted at 3:33 pm by Stephen Green

LIES, DAMN LIES AND $40 TRILLION NATIONAL DEBT: Issues&Insights nails the Mainstream Media’s attempts to blame Trump and tax cuts for the $40 Trillion national debt (that is actually $176 Trillion).

Posted at 3:15 pm by Mark Tapscott

OBAMA SAID HE’D MAKE COLLEGE MORE AFFORDABLE AND YOU CAN GUESS THE REST:

Posted at 3:02 pm by Stephen Green

SMALL-TOWN CRIME: Ungodly Doings In Godley. “In a small city of some 5,000, you would expect there to be some overlap between the city council and other institutions in town, like the volunteer fire department, the PTA, or the Kiwanis Club. One thing you wouldn’t expect city council overlap with: a prostitution ring.”

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green