March 16, 2026

ICYMI: THEY WERE WARNED.

Posted at 9:54 am by Glenn Reynolds

AUTOCRATS GOTTA AUTOCRAT: Russia Shuts Off Internet in Moscow as It Tests Nationwide Censorship System.

People in Moscow, a city of 13 million, have found themselves unable to pay online bills or message co-workers in recent days. Commuters stepping out of the city’s subway stations can’t order a cab to the office. Unable to access online maps, many are asking strangers for directions for the first time in years. Those who normally work from home are filling cafes as they seek a stable Wi-Fi connection.

In recent months, dozens of Russian regions have gone offline suddenly. The Kremlin has defended the shut-offs as necessary to protect Russians from attacks by Ukrainian drones, which can use local cellphone towers for navigation.

But analysts say what Russians are actually experiencing is the trial of a nationwide system Moscow has been honing to limit information and hobble connectivity in times of upheaval, inspired by lessons from Iran and other authoritarian states.

“This is a system they have wanted to build for years. Now the threat of Ukrainian drones is a perfect chance to test it nationwide,” said Alena Epifanova, an expert on Russia’s internet at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “They use it as a pretext, even in regions where there is no such danger.”

The drone threat is real, but the Kremlin loves having tight control — so who knows?

Posted at 9:36 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dems Aren’t Even Hiding Their Election Shenanigans Now. “The Dem talking points in this “debate” revolve around the notion that President Trump is going to use the troops to intimidate voters. It’s fantastical monster under the bed stuff, and it’s never explained exactly how that intimidation is going to manifest itself. It’s more nonsensical Trump Derangement Syndrome lunacy.”

Posted at 9:05 am by Stephen Green

#JOURNALISM: FIND SOMEONE WHO WILL SAY WHAT YOU WANT, THEN CALL THEM AN “EXPERT.”

Posted at 8:58 am by Glenn Reynolds

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Oscars 2026 Review: Resist, They Must.

[Conan] O’Brien channeled his inner Jimmy Kimmel.

“Tonight could get political,” he warned, but he offered a faux solution. “There’s an alternative Oscars hosted by Kid Rock at the Dave and Busters down the street.”

Dear right-leaning America. You may tune out now. And, likely, many who initially trusted O’Brien to stick to his apolitical brand did just that.

They were the lucky ones.

O’Brien cited the lack of British stars in the major acting categories, noting the response from an anonymous British official about that state of affairs.

“At least we arrest our pedophiles,” O’Brien said, a possible attempt to tie President Donald Trump to the Epstein Files, without evidence. The flawed premise was even more flawed than many thought.

Try Googling “British grooming gang scandal.” We’ll wait.

O’Brien dropped the comedy in the last part of the monologue, referencing “chaotic, frightening times” and a plea for optimism.

Good luck with this crowd.

Related: Everything You Missed at the Oscars 2026: One Battle After Another snags Best Picture, other top awards as Sinners also wins big.

And that’s a wrap! The 98th Academy Awards held at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles was a night to remember.*

“Sinners” and “One Battle After Another” were both nominated for a slew of awards and ended up picking up the big prizes of the night.

“Sinners” star Michael B. Jordan took home the Best Actor Oscar while “One Battle After Another” snagged the Best Picture award.

“Hamnet” star Jessie Buckley won Best Actress while “Weapons” star Amy Madigan won for Best Supporting Actress. Sean Penn won Best Performing Actor for his role in “One Battle After Another.”

* Interesting choice of phrasing there:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

THE ENEMY WITHIN: US bracing for more ‘lone wolf’ terror attacks amid war in Iran.

Publicly, authorities have been hesitant to link the attacks to the Iran war. But some observers say it is not a stretch to consider the possibility that the alleged attackers were retaliating for American and Israeli military strikes on the Islamic Republic.

“I absolutely believe it is connected to the Iran war,” former FBI Special Agent Jennifer Coffindaffer, a NewsNation law and justice contributor, said Saturday. “Look, there are individuals in the United States who have been radicalized and are just looking for that push to decide to commit a terroristic act like this.”

Rather than terrorist “sleeper cells” orchestrated by foreign nations, Coffindaffer said the recent attacks appear to be homegrown lone-wolf assaults — individuals acting on their own, possibly inspired online.

Like so:

Dearborn, Michigan.

Posted at 8:34 am by Stephen Green

CALIFORNIA POST: Eric Swalwell is not where he’s supposed to be.

Does Rep. Eric Swalwell live with his wife and kids in a posh spread near the Capitol they bought for $1.2 million in 2020?

Or does the wannabe gov reside in one rented room in Livermore, Calif. — not far from swanky hotels he frequents — in the district he represents?

With fraud a hot issue in California, Swalwell’s approach seems to fit right in. . . .

The residency dust-up is yet another potentially disqualifying episode for Swalwell.

Prior examples include the rep’s liaison with Chinese spy Fang Fang; his shilling for Dem tale tales about Trump-Russia collusion; his vow to prosecute and harass ICE agents; and his flatulence on live TV.

And then there’s the hypocrisy.

In 2012, Swalwell defeated a 20-term(!) Democratic incumbent to win his current House seat in a campaign centered in part on (wait for it) claims that his opponent lived outside of his district.

“I live in the district,” a smug Swalwell said in a 2012 video. “I will make sure that I commute to Washington and always stay connected to my district.”

If by “commute to” he meant buy a home there, move his family there, and then stay in hotels when “home” in his district, then yes, promise kept.

Everything about him is fake, except the sleaze and smarminess. That’s totally real.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA:

Posted at 8:18 am by Stephen Green

GAZA IS GARBAGE:

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

IS IT TRUE? I DUNNO, BUT IT EXPLAINS A LOT:

Posted at 7:47 am by Stephen Green

SIX YEARS AGO TODAY: “15 Days to Slow the Spread.”

The federal government issued new guidelines Monday for Americans on how to combat the coronavirus pandemic, titled “15 Days to Slow the Spread.” The 15 days are seen as a trial period for the new recommendations and add to previous guidance about practicing good hygiene, staying home if sick and following state and local authorities.

Or as Erick Erickson later wrote: Trump Platformed Fauci and Shut America Down [Six] Years Ago This Week.

Though Donald Trump and his supporters do not want to admit it, this week, [six] years ago, American kids were forced out of schools and into their homes. The President of the United States had chosen to give Tony Fauci a big platform and advocated shutting everything down. On Donald Trump’s last day in office, instead of pardoning the people who’d stormed into the Capitol on January 6th, he was giving a presidential commendation to Fauci. That’s the actual history. Here’s the video of Trump, Fauci, and Deborah Birx laughing it up as they shut down America.

Fauci and Birx’s glee during the announcement is something to behold:

Birx’s excitement is driven in part because in her mind, she was playing the (very) long game: Dr. Birx Praises Herself While Revealing Ignorance, Treachery, and Deceit:

Recall that for the remainder of the year, the White House was urging normalcy while many states kept locking down. It was an incredible confusion. The CDC was all over the map. I gained the distinct impression of two separate regimes in charge: Trump’s vs. the administrative state he could not control. Trump would say one thing on the campaign trail but the regulations and disease panic kept pouring out of his own agencies.

Birx admits that she was a major part of the reason, due to her sneaky alternation of weekly reports to the states.

After the heavily edited documents were returned to me, I’d reinsert what they had objected to, but place it in those different locations. I’d also reorder and restructure the bullet points so the most salient—the points the administration objected to most—no longer fell at the start of the bullet points. I shared these strategies with the three members of the data team also writing these reports. Our Saturday and Sunday report-writing routine soon became: write, submit, revise, hide, resubmit. 

Fortunately, this strategic sleight-of-hand worked. That they never seemed to catch this subterfuge left me to conclude that, either they read the finished reports too quickly or they neglected to do the word search that would have revealed the language to which they objected. In slipping these changes past the gatekeepers and continuing to inform the governors of the need for the big-three mitigations—masks, sentinel testing, and limits on indoor social gatherings—I felt confident I was giving the states permission to escalate public health mitigation with the fall and winter coming.

As another example, once Scott Atlas came to the rescue in August to introduce some good sense into this wacky world, he worked with others to dial back the CDC’s fanatical attachment to universal and constant testing. Atlas knew that “track, trace, and isolate” was both a fantasy and a massive invasion of people’s liberties that would yield no positive public-health outcome. He put together a new recommendation that was only for those who were sick to test – just as one might expect in normal life.

After a week-long media frenzy, the regulations flipped in the other direction.

Birx reveals that it was her doing:

This wasn’t the only bit of subterfuge I had to engage in. Immediately after the Atlas-influenced revised CDC testing guidance went up in late August, I contacted Bob Redfield…. Less than a week later, Bob [Redfield] and I had finished our rewrite of the guidance and surreptitiously posted it. We had restored the emphasis on testing to detect areas where silent spread was occurring. It was a risky move, and we hoped everyone in the White House would be too busy campaigning to realize what Bob and I had done. We weren’t being transparent with the powers that be in the White House…

Read the whole thing.

As Glenn wrote at the end of 2021: We must make public health authorities accountable for their COVID lies.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

HMM: Bond Market May Be a Last Guardrail on Far-Left Mayors as Moody’s Goes ‘Negative’ on Mamdani’s New York.

The ratings agencies are notoriously bad at judging risks and were heavily criticized after the 2008 financial crisis for slapping solid AAA ratings on debt that wound up in default. The agencies are paid by the bond issuers, so their incentives are not to be particularly harsh. They were late to discover the problems in Orange County, California, whose 1994 failure was, when it happened, described as the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Yet for all those limitations, the agencies—and the bond markets they communicate with—at least provide some constraints, a reality check on the impulse of the mayors to spend recklessly without sufficient tax revenue to pay for it.

The New York City comptroller, Mark Levine, called Moody’s decision “a sobering wake-up call.”

“The fact that this is happening at a time of relative health in our local economy is all the more remarkable. The underlying challenge is clear: New York City is currently spending more than it is bringing in,” Levine said.

Mamdani, meanwhile, attacked the rating agency. “I think that the decision to revise the outlook, frankly, is premature,” he said at a March 12 press conference.

The outlook will be fully mature soon enough.

Posted at 7:32 am by Stephen Green

THEY’RE NOT SENDING THEIR BEST PEOPLE TO CONGRESS:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

ALL THAT AND WORLD WAR THREE:

Posted at 7:16 am by Stephen Green

STEVE HAYWARD: Paul Ehrlich, RIP.

Paul Ehrlich, author of the monster 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb, has died at 93. The book sold millions worldwide, and was translated into dozens of languages. Most college students from the time have told me they were assigned Ehrlich’s book in multiple classes.

I think it was Shostakovich who quipped that Vivaldi only had one idea, which he repeated 383 times. At least Vivaldi’s one idea was a good one. Ever since Ehrlich published his infamous book he came out with a sequel every year or two that repeated his basic Malthusian outlook on humans and the planet. I suppose at least Ehrlich deserves credit for recycling.

Because of course his main prediction was falsified, and quite quickly at that. He predicted that “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.”

Somehow I missed this news as a teen in the 1970s.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll