July 19, 2026

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Provocative Lake Oswego theater’s marquee message about Jews provokes criticism, worry.

A Lake Oswego [Oregon] movie theater known for provocative marquee messages drew rebukes from members of the Jewish community this week after its latest sign compared Jewish history to “The Odyssey,” the ancient Greek epic that inspired Christopher Nolan’s newest movie.

The marquee for the Lake Theater & Cafe in downtown Lake Oswego read, “Before there were the Jews, there was The Odyssey,” ahead of the film’s highly anticipated release Friday.

The message was removed from one side of the marquee on Thursday but remains on the other side, according to local residents who saw it Friday.

The foremost criticisms of the marquee missive included that the statement was incorrect – and that it might spark antisemitic acts, such as the death threat scrawled on Northwest Portland’s Congregation Beth Israel building in 2022.

“It’s historically inaccurate. That’s the first piece,” said Rabbi Eve Posen of Congregation Neveh Shalom in Southwest Portland. “It’s a movie that doesn’t need much to get people to come see it, so why the theater would make this decision knowing that it’s historically inaccurate makes no sense.”

Historians generally date “The Odyssey” to the eighth or seventh century B.C.E., while the Jewish people predate that period by centuries.

Posen said she began receiving complaints Wednesday morning from congregants who were offended by the message. Others in the community also were outraged by the theater’s message.

In an email to the theater, West Linn resident Abby Farber wrote: “I think your marquee advertising ‘The Odyssey’ contains an inappropriate reference to Jews. If it’s an attempt at humor, it falls flat. Moreover, in this era of rising antisemitism, I think it’s also highly distasteful to everyone who is a fair-minded person.”

Farber continued: “What do Jews have to do with this piece of fictional art? Why bring up a religion? Definitely not funny.”

Wait until the owners of the theater discover who invented the idea of longform motion pictures adapted from an important novel or story as well, long before Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey.

 

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH VAN JONES IS A VOICE OF SANITY:

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

BABYLON BERLIN, THE NEXT GENERATION: Transgender neo-Nazi assigned to women’s prison, despite wearing a mustache and being biologically male.

“A neo-Nazi who claims to be transgender has been sent to a women’s prison in Germany despite being suspected of mocking gender self-identification laws,” reports The Telegraph. It is Sven Liebich, a biological male who still has a mustache:

Marla-Svenja Liebich – who was born a man and named “Sven” before registering as a woman – was extradited on Wednesday from the Czech Republic to a prison in Chemnitz, Saxony.

The German far-Right provocateur, who has been photographed at rallies in a Nazi-style uniform, disappeared last August.

He had failed to attend a different women’s prison to serve a one-and-a-half-year jail sentence imposed in 2023…

The following year, while appealing against the sentence, the 55-year-old registered as a woman, exploiting a reform that made it easier to change legal gender.

His “transition” was widely seen as intended to mock the self-determination act…The reforms introduced by [Germany’s] centrist coalition simplified the process of changing a person’s name and gender on official documents.

Liebich, who now appears in public wearing women’s clothing and a moustache, claimed the gender change and request to serve the sentence in a female prison were in order to avoid “discrimination” from male inmates.

A male neo-Nazi was sent to a woman’s prison in Germany? Kamerad, you have no idea were a Nazi-curious politician almost went in America:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

GREAT CLEANER: Affresh Washing Machine Cleaner. #CommissionEarned I use this between washes and it keeps the washer from getting stale.

Posted at 3:02 pm by Helen Smith

OLD AND BUSTED: “Kids in Cages.”

The New Hotness? Meat in Cages! California Walmart locks up pricey meat to fight shoplifting.

First it was spray paint. Then eye drops. Now, even ground beef is under lock and key.

A San Jose Walmart has reportedly taken anti-theft measures to a new level, placing pricey cuts of beef and even packages of ground meat inside metal security cages to keep would-be shoplifters at bay.

Influencer Tony Bartleson — better known online as “Meatdad” — posted a video from inside the California store showing rib-eye steaks and ground beef wrapped in wire security devices.

Holding up a cowboy rib-eye priced at nearly $16 a pound, Bartleson quipped: “Welcome to California.”

The video also showed a three-pound package of ground beef locked inside its own metal cage. The clip has racked up more than 3.8 million views.

Bartleson said he was stunned by the response.

“Seeing basic food items locked behind cages is sad,” Bartleson said in a statement to The Sun.

“My hope is that we can get to a point where measures like this aren’t necessary anymore—where people don’t have to steal just to eat, stores don’t have to lock up food, and everyone has reliable access to the necessities they need.”

“I think most of us want to live in a world where people can put food on the table with dignity, and I hope we continue moving in that direction,” he added.

It’s not so much the wire around the meat, as the anti-theft tag attached to it, which trigger the store’s alarm if someone tries to tamper with it, or shoplift it.

Mr. “Meatdad” was quoted above saying, “I think most of us want to live in a world where people can put food on the table with dignity, and I hope we continue moving in that direction.” No, thanks to leftists in Sacramento, California is moving away from that direction. In December of 2022, Virginia Postrel wrote in the Wall Street Journal: What Shopping Did for American Equality.

The urban palaces of early department stores, the climate-controlled corridors of suburban malls, the endlessly scrolling pages of Etsy, the utilitarian aisles of Walmart and the chatty reveals of haul videos aren’t merely sites of envy or exchange. They’re places where Americans—both buyers and sellers—work out who we are and who we want to be. Since the mid-19th century, modern retailing has tested the practical meaning of equality and freedom.

When A.T. Stewart opened his multistory dry goods store in 1846, the Manhattan merchant introduced two revolutionary practices that we now take for granted. He let anyone come and browse freely, whether or not intending to buy, and he charged every customer the same price. Both policies changed the everyday meaning of social equality.

At Stewart’s, wrote a journalist in 1871, “you may gaze upon a million dollars’ worth of goods, and no man will interrupt either your meditation or your admiration.” The store and its many emulators established a new social norm. Any well-behaved patron, regardless of class or ethnicity, could freely examine the merchandise without being pestered or pressured to leave.

Unfortunately, there are less and less “well-behaved patrons” and more and more looking to fleece businesses – sometimes on an industrial scale – and thus more and more goods enclosed in cases and security tags.

Posted at 2:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

NIXON’S THE ONE, NOW MORE THAN EVER! Young conservatives have an unlikely new icon: Richard Nixon. ‘Nixonmaxxing’ swag and TikTok videos have helped trigger a rethinking of the former president’s legacy among some conservatives.

The reason Nixon is important for the right,” said Christopher Rufo, a conservative culture warrior who has advised Trump on dismantling the modern administrative state, “is that America has been essentially stuck in the year 1968.”

The progressive ideas that animated Nixon’s enemies now motivate the opposition to Trump, Rufo said, setting the stage for what he described as “a counter revolution.”
The first step in that rebellion for the right, he said, was for conservatives to recapture the memory of their own heroes: “It is a way for conservatives to regain their self-confidence, and to reject delegating their self-perception to the left.”
The White House welcomes the comparison between the two presidents.
“President Nixon exposed the treachery of the Deep State and Fake News media,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said.
“Decades later, President Trump has consistently, and successfully, fought against these same entrenched interests for the American people and put our country first every single day.”
Nick Solheim, 29, began to notice an uptick in discussions about Nixon during the Biden administration.
“I see this argument among young people going through our programs all the time about whether Nixon was all great or all bad,” said the CEO of American Moment, a conservative organisation dedicated to training right-of-centre policy staffers.
“I’d say the consensus is a little bit of both.”
Peyton Mikolayek, 19, regularly shows off her large collection of pins, posters, and other Nixon memorabilia to her nearly 500,000 followers on TikTok.
“I get a lot of strange old men in my DMs,” said the rising junior at Johns Hopkins University, who said she leans liberal.
“Maybe it’s just because I’m Gen Z, but there’s this certain emotional distance from his presidency,” Mikolayek said in explaining her interest in Nixon.
Asking her about Watergate, she said, “is almost like asking someone what they think of the Teapot Dome scandal.”
Mikolayek said she prefers a more complete picture of Nixon that includes the lows of Watergate, but also the highs of his accomplishments such as changing the voting age and Title IX.
At the Nixon Library, Vance compared Nixon’s 1972 win to Trump’s latest victory, arguing that the coalitions that returned both Trump and Nixon to the White House were broadbased and more durable than the one that made Ronald Reagan president.

“Reagan could not have won his landslide in 2024,” Vance said because of national demographic change, before adding “Richard Nixon maybe could have.”

Both the right impeaching Bill Clinton in 1998 and the left impeaching Trump twice during his first term (and they’ll catch another case of impeachment fever if they win one or both houses of Congress in November), have made Watergate look far less tectonic than when it was sold to the American public by the DNC-MSM in the 1970s. As Glenn has written, “Recent Events Have Made Me Doubt the Entire Watergate Story:” Nixon’s Revenge.

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

GOODER AND HARDER, LA:

The latter, as Adam Carolla noted last year:

In one of the books I wrote, I outlined a scenario.

I used to come here via Forest Lawn Drive, which is a long stretch of road that runs along the cemetery. It’s kind of long—you guys may know it—and it doesn’t have cross streets or anything like that. So people tend to speed on Forest Lawn Drive because it’s just long, and there’s rarely any traffic on it. People in L.A., when there’s no traffic, think, “All right, let’s make up a little of this time.”

So the scenario is this: I would drive down Forest Lawn Drive and see, on one side of the road, a motorcycle cop who would back his bike up a driveway in a shaded, wooded area near the Jewish cemetery next to Forest Lawn. He’d be back there with his radar gun out, waiting for citizens to speed. I’d see him pull over soccer moms in minivans because, inevitably, they’re going 57 in a 45, and they get pulled over. Okay, fine.

On the other side of Forest Lawn Drive were many illegal immigrants selling flowers that they’d bought downtown to resell without a business license or any other form of regulation—just cash and carry. On the other side of the street, a bunch of people were selling flowers to those visiting their dead nana in a mausoleum.

The City of Los Angeles—and, in general, California—is this way: it has no interest in the illegal activity happening on one side of the street. That’s people engaging in illegal behavior.

Now, there’s a florist up the street, and that person has to carry all kinds of insurance, pay all kinds of taxes, worry about being sued by an employee for wrongful termination, deal with OSHA, and so on. There will be very vigorous compliance enforcement for the taxpayer, and it’ll be very vigorous for the soccer mom. But for the illegal vendor? No problemo.

If you go to SoFi Stadium, you can buy shots of tequila outside the stadium while illegal vendors sell you Tecate beer and “ghetto dogs” right next to cops who are doing security.

The city has declared a war on taxpayers and regulated them to death. But if you’d like to sell food illegally, you can pop up on any corner and do whatever you want. They walk right past those people. They never shut them down, and they never send them a summons.

The city council agrees with this. They agree that you should be regulated out of business and taxed out of business. But if you want to create a street black market where you sell food, you can do it.

By the way, every time you send a health inspector over to my business, you’re doing it under the guise of safety. Except you don’t seem to have a problem with people cooking whatever food they want on a sidewalk and selling it to people. No thoughts.

Once cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles do this—once you essentially look the other way for the homeless, junkies, illegal immigrants, criminals, or whoever it is, while shining a spotlight on taxpayers with overregulation, over-permitting, and trying to manage every grain of their lives, versus saying to illegal immigrants, “Go do whatever you want,” or to the homeless, “Go shoot up wherever you want or sleep wherever you want”—then you’ve lost it.

L.A.’s there. San Francisco’s there.

Look, if you’re not a taxpayer and you don’t have a checking account, whatever city you’re in, they’re not going to be nearly as interested in you as they are in the people who have a checking account, pay taxes, and can be compliant.

Basically, the compliant people are paying them. So it’s like, okay, who do you make money on? When you’re running a city and you need to keep the lights on, who do you go to?

Well, I’d go to Mark Geragos or Adam Carolla because those guys have businesses. We can charge them for permits. We can charge them taxes—land taxes, business taxes, whatever.

Okay, what about the homeless guy with a load of shit in his pants over there? Well, that guy costs us money. He doesn’t have anything. He costs us money because we’d have to take him somewhere, incarcerate him, process him, put him in housing, or something like that.

So that guy costs us money. These guys make us money.

Then they go, “Well, why don’t we focus full-time on these guys because they make us money, whereas the illegal immigrants, the homeless, and the junkies cost us money?”

You go, “Okay, well, that sounds like a plan.”

But you focus too hard on these guys. Those other groups start flourishing in terms of numbers, and then these guys say, “Fuck it. I’m moving to Nashville because I’m tired of you being up my ass if you’re not going to do anything about these guys. I’m running a business, these guys are camping in front of my business, and you want me to pay taxes on my business, but you won’t do anything about them.”

And when that starts, that’s the beginning of the end of a society.

The Brits call it “managed decline,” but for L.A., it’s a rapid descent into anarchy.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

HMMM:

I would think ideology plays a far greater role than gender. In his 2001 book, Volume One of The Age of Reagan, Steve Hayward wrote that by the early to mid-1960s:

The deterioration in criminal justice was not limited merely to catching criminals; punishment also began to slip. Even as crime was rising sharply, the number of criminals in prison was falling, and average time-served was declining. Punishment was out; “rehabilitation” was in. The public went along with this—for a while. In July 1966, a Gallup Poll found for the first time a larger number of Americans opposed the death penalty, by a 47 to 42 percent margin. This did not last long, however, and as crime rose, support for the death penalty soared back to 67 percent by 1976, peaking at 79 percent in September 1988.

In the face of this obvious deterioration in the criminal justice system, liberals decided to blame—society. Johnson had appointed a President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, which reported to the American people in February 1967 that neither law enforcement nor the administration of justice could do very much by themselves to stem rising crime. “The underlying problems are ones that the criminal justice system can do little about,” the Commission said. “Unless society does take concerted action to change the general conditions and attitudes that are associated with crime, no improvement in law enforcement and administration of justice, the subjects this Commission was specifically asked to study, will be of much avail.”

The Commission’s report became a collateral endorsement for enlarging the Great Society: “Warring on poverty, inadequate housing and unemployment, is warring on crime. A civil rights law is a law against crime. Money for schools is money against crime. Medical, psychiatric, and family-counseling services are services against crime.” The Commission endorsed, among other progressive measures, giving convicts furloughs to work in the community during daytime hours. The only measures the Commission didn’t endorse were the ones the public most strongly desired: money for police protection and more prisons. To the contrary, the Commission endorsed lenience toward criminals: “Above all, the Commission’s inquiries have convinced it that it is undesirable that offenders travel any further along the full course from arrest to charge to sentence to detention than is absolutely necessary for society’s protection and the offenders’ own welfare.”

Liberalism would be a generation recovering from this kind of thinking. Many poor urban neighborhoods have yet to recover, for it was precisely the poor, and largely black, populations of central cities who suffered most from this negligent criminology—the very constituency liberals thought they were advancing. Blacks were two and a half times more likely than whites to be victims of crime in 1966, and this gap would widen over the next decade as black victimization in the inner city soared. Charles Murray noted that “it was much more dangerous to be black in 1972 than it was in 1965, whereas it was not much more dangerous to be white.” By 1970, social scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded, a person living in a central city faced a higher risk of being murdered than a World War II soldier did of dying in combat. But when Richard Nixon and conservatives called for a return to “law and order,” the phrase was attacked as “a code phrase for racism.”

Whatever their gender, why should we expect Europe’s pandering leftist judges to be any softer on crime than ours historically have been?

UPDATE:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

ROGER KIMBALL: ‘Art’ and the Pathology of our Age.

And then there was the student at the Ontario College of Art and Design who, in 1996, pushed his own boundaries with an “artwork” that consisted of him vomiting on paintings by others, a Piet Mondrian in New York and a Raoul Dufy at a museum in Ontario.

The truth is that, rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, there is nothing new or “challenging” about the “artists” who populate the trendy precincts of contemporary art. All their “shocking” moves were long ago pioneered by Marcel Duchamp and his fellow Dadaists. Indeed, Marcel Duchamp mapped out both large domains of the pseudo-avant-garde. When Duchamp took objects from everyday life — a bottle rack, a snow shovel—and impishly exhibited them as works of art, he pioneered the entire genre of art-as-banality. When he exhibited a urinal as a sculpture, he twitted the more delicate sensibilities of an earlier age with exactly the same sort of naughty schoolboy outrage that (to take but one example) Tracey Emin’s sordid exhibitionism recycled, lo, these many years later. (Pardon, that’s Dame Tracey Emin to you. Yes, really.)

What our latter-day Dadaists have accomplished is simply the domestication and routinization of the avant-garde. They preserve the gestures but lack the spirit. They pretend to be “challenging” or “transgressing” conventional boundaries, but all such boundaries were long ago erased. Far from guying conventional taste, today’s self-styled avant-garde are today’s conventional taste. The only thing these “artists” challenge is our patience. It is a melancholy, not to say tiresome, spectacle. What it says about our culture is partly depressing, partly anger-inducing. The really breathtaking feature of the thing is that these “artists” actually seem to believe they are brave aesthetic and existential pioneers. It’s contemptible, yes, but also quite sad. Curiously, this is something that Duchamp himself recognized when his impish gestures became celebrated by the art world. “I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge,” Duchamp noted contemptuously, “and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.”

Assuming the BBC didn’t go full Michael Moore and staged this scene, you knew the war in Afghanistan was doomed when our betters thought that Duchamp’s style of modernism was something vitally important to teach to young women there: Money Down The Toilet In Afghanistan, that time when progressive US colonialists tried to enlighten Afghans by teaching them about the glories of Dadaist art.

Cockburn dredges up something so horrible and hilarious that it’s straight out of a Monty Python sketch. In it, the American occupiers attempt to enlighten a group of Afghan women by showing them Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal-as-museum-piece, and telling them that it’s important art. Cockburn says watch to the 31-second point and see the moment when America failed in Afghanistan:

https://youtu.be/wdrvpSfJM1w?si=bsn2Ie6tsshKp89c

As original Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts famously said, “You can only be avant-garde for so long until you become garde.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

PROGRESSIVES OF BOTH PARTIES, DEMOCRATS, LEFTISTS, AND OTHER STATISTS HAVE BEEN CHIPPING AWAY AT IT FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY:

And here is what Charles Cooke was replying to: “Democratic Socialist co-chair Ashik Siddique says the DSA would abolish the Senate: ‘We do believe that government should be proportional to the population… We just don’t see the point of the Senate.'”

Posted at 11:40 am by Stephen Green

SAME REASON HILLARY DOES IT — THEIR AUDIENCES EAT IT UP:

I’ve never understood the desire to be pandered to in that way, but apparently, Democrat audiences love it.

UPDATE (From Ed): Indeed they do. From last year: She Don’t Feel No Ways Tired: Nancy Pelosi Chews Up Six Minutes Claiming Democrats Didn’t Move America ‘Too Far To The Left.’

“[T]here are certain people in the country who don’t want to see … women, LGBTQ people, people of color, immigrants taking their place in anything,” she said. “And that’s just the way it is. That’s their problem. That’s not America’s problem. America is this great country with this beautiful diversity.”

Pelosi also ranted about her Catholic views to claim she valued all different types of people — before appearing to attack Republicans while seeming to use a southern accent.

“You’re people of faith? You go to church on Sunday and pray in church on Sunday and prey on people the rest of the week. What is this? What is this?” she asked, laughing.

“Pelosi chuckles, but not even the moderator or Harvard student crowd seems to find it funny:”

There’s no doubt that Pelosi already has the support of Zohran Mamdani, Hilaria Baldwin, Jasmine Crockett, Kamala Harris, and Hillary Clinton, but seems little interested in growing the party’s base much beyond the code-switching far left:

Posted at 11:14 am by Stephen Green

SUICIDAL EMPATHY:

Posted at 10:30 am by Stephen Green