July 1, 2026

JIM GERAGHTY: Nina Totenberg and the Gerontocracy Strike Again.

She heard the word “retirement” and just assumed that it was Alito?

The explanation is so shocking that social media has plenty of Alito retirement “Truthers” who contend the justice is planning to announce his retirement soon and Totenberg simply erred by reporting it too early; but that theory doesn’t make sense, because if that were the case, she would simply clarify her story. Some others wonder if this was Alito trying to sniff out the Supreme Court employee who leaked the Dobbs decision. (Back in April 2023, Alito sat down for an interview with the Wall Street Journal and said, “I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody.”)

Totenberg is 82. She has covered the Supreme Court since I was born, and I have a kid in college. Also, in the 1970s, Totenberg became close personal friends with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and one might think that a close personal friendship with someone you cover professionally is a major conflict of interest that ought to be disclosed to listeners, but “her friendship with Ginsburg was almost never mentioned in the hundreds of news stories, interviews and features Totenberg has done about the court over the years.”

Another one of Totenberg’s greatest hits, this one targeted at the late Senator Jesse Helms (R., N.C.): “In 1995, on the syndicated political television program Inside Washington, guests including Totenberg turned to a proposal by the North Carolina senator that Congress reduce spending on AIDS research. Totenberg said, ‘I think he ought to be worried about the — about what’s going on in the good Lord’s mind, because if there’s retributive justice, he’ll get AIDS from a transfusion or one of his grandchildren will get it.’” Wishing painful death upon the family of people you disagree with is the kind of comment we’ve come to expect from unhinged hatemongers, like the attorney general of Virginia.

Apparently, nothing matters when you’re on the left side of the aisle. Just do whatever you want, and there will never be any consequences.

As NewsBusters’ Tim Graham adds, “Totenberg is Exhibit A in how NPR is a thoroughly ideological outlet that should never have been funded by the taxpayers.”

 

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

ONCE YOU RECOGNIZE THE PATTERN…:

…you’ll never unsee it. Or stop seeing it repeated.

Posted at 11:57 am by Stephen Green

IT IS UNWISE TO ASK UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTIONS, COMRADE: How Many Lives Could Barack Obama’s Library Have Saved?

In the city of Chicago, which is about 90 minutes south of me, roughly 17 percent of the city’s residents live in poverty. That’s about 448,000 people, and of those, more than 160,000 were in ‘deep poverty,’ below 50 percent of the poverty threshold. That works out to about $21 per person per day. The majority of Chicago residents are Black or Hispanic, and about 29 percent of Black and 15 percent of Hispanic Chicagoans live in poverty.

It’s estimated that 25 percent of Chicagoans face food insecurity and persistent hunger.

For the 2025-2026 school year, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) face a $734 million deficit, driven by the end of federal pandemic aid and pension obligations. On top of that, students in CPS test well below the national average in math and reading, with just 31 percent proficient in reading and 18 percent proficient in math.

Chicago is also one of the most violent cities in the United States, with 416 homicides and 1,471 shootings in 2025. For the start of 2026, homicides are up roughly six percent and shootings are up slightly, too.

Despite these deplorable statistics, Democrats celebrated the Barack Obama Presidential Library, which opened about two weeks ago. The brutalist building, which looks like something straight out of the Empire in Star Wars, cost roughly $850 million.

To be fair, Barack didn’t build his library with his own money, either.

Posted at 11:42 am by Stephen Green

DON’T BE A SOFT TARGET:

And I liked this from the replies: “There’s no denying it. You need to be armed to the teeth to enter the big welcoming blue tent.”

Posted at 11:26 am by Stephen Green

IT’S MEASURED IN TRILLIONS OF BIDENFLATION DOLLARS: Is This Gavin Newsom’s Biggest Lie Ever? “California Governor Gavin Newsom, perhaps best described as ‘seven lying serpents in a skinsuit,’ just told a lie so big that even my jaded self had to sit back, take a sip of coffee, and admire the handiwork of whoever steam-cleaned the soul out of his body.”

Posted at 11:11 am by Stephen Green

ONCE AGAIN, IT’S THOMAS FOR THE WIN:

Posted at 10:55 am by Stephen Green

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME:

Shot:

Chaser:

“In the first place, I would like to observe that the older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us. They give us this Thing, knocked to pieces, leaky, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don’t accept it with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, ‘way back in the eighteen-nineties, nicely painted, smoothly running, practically fool-proof. “So simple that a child can run it!”

—John F. Carter, Jr., the Atlantic, September, 1920.

Posted at 10:50 am by Ed Driscoll

CEASEFIRE UPDATE: Iranian Clerics Urge Trump, Netanyahu Assassinations. “According to The Telegraph, the statement said killing ‘the criminal American president’ and ‘the wicked prime minister of the Zionist regime’ was a religious duty and that anyone who had the opportunity to do so ‘must not’ neglect it.”

Posted at 10:40 am by Stephen Green

SHE DARED TO NOTICE AND SPEAK THE TRUTH:

Murray was responding to this:

Which came from this: “Amy Wax got in trouble for remarking that she’d not seen a Black student in the top quarter of a Penn Law class. Thanks to hacked Columbia data, we can see that she was… Probably right!”

Posted at 10:28 am by Stephen Green

LAYERS OF EDITORS AND FACT-CHECKERS:

Of course, the corrections never generate the views (or rage) the original stories do. So for the Beeb, it’s mission accomplished.

Posted at 9:53 am by Stephen Green

WELL, GOOD: Air Force Accelerates Sending B-21s to Ellsworth.

One of the two B-21s now in flight testing at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., will be the first Raider at Ellsworth. “The test aircraft will be going there,” Meink said during a wide-ranging interview at the Pentagon.

“We’re going to actually turn the test aircraft into operational aircraft at some point in time. They’ll be going there and starting to really do the things you need to do to prepare the base to get the long-term operational aircraft there.”

An Air Force spokesperson declined to say whether both test B-21s at Edwards will move to Ellsworth, or exactly when in 2027 the first plane will arrive. Flight testing typically continues even after planes arrive at operating bases.

When the first B-21 rolled out in December 2022, the Air Force and manufacturer Northrop Grumman touted the first plane as “production-representative,” meaning its stealth coating, mission systems, and other components were virtually identical to the final model. The Air Force decided early that the first test B-21 would be production representative, rather than an experimental aircraft. Northrop officials said in 2022 that opting for the production-representative plane was more complicated up front, but would accelerate testing.

The Raider so far is one of those rare procurement success stories. Any delays (not many) and cost overruns were due largely to COVID lockdown stupidity and Bidenflation woes that hit everything.

Posted at 9:38 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: No Reason to Panic Over a Mild Case of SCOTUS Whiplash. “As you might imagine, I’ve been buried in the Supreme Court rulings and the reactions to them the last couple of days. It’s been a lot and, because there was no whiskey in my coffee either day, I was a little cranky. By early Tuesday afternoon, I had already decided to focus on the positive. We’re celebrating America’s big birthday this week, and I’m not going to let the news ruin it for me.”

Posted at 9:07 am by Stephen Green

HMM: Justice Kavanaugh May Have Handed the United States a Roadmap to Fix Birthright Citizenship. “Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the majority in striking down President Trump’s executive order but wrote separately in partial dissent. He concluded the order conflicted with existing federal law, not that it was unconstitutional. In his opinion, he also outlined a framework for addressing concerns surrounding birthright citizenship through legislation, making clear that any path to lasting change would likely require an act of Congress.”

That’s the rub, isn’t it?

Posted at 8:36 am by Stephen Green

WE KNEW THIS, BUT IT’S NICE TO HAVE IT CONFIRMED:

Posted at 8:25 am by Glenn Reynolds