December 28, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Right about now, the funk soul brother.

Posted at 10:08 pm by Ed Driscoll

SOMALI PIRATES UPDATE:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS IS HOW YOU MAKE A FIRST-WORLD NATION INTO A THIRD-WORLD NATION:

And many of our so-called elites don’t care, so long as they still got theirs.

Posted at 6:10 pm by Stephen Green

THIS IS THE CORRECT TAKE:

Our hope — and Trump understands this — is to take away the Other People’s Money before we all run out.

Posted at 5:39 pm by Stephen Green

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: The Babylon Bee Would Like To Inform Tim Walz We Are Now A Functioning Daycare In Minnesota.

We at The Babylon Bee would like to let Governor Tim Walz know that we are now a fully functioning daycare in Minnesota serving literally millions of children.

After taking a long, hard look at our business model, we felt it financially prudent to expand beyond satire into the Minnesota daycare business, opening a very real daycare called “Li’l Bees”. We are incredibly proud of the fact that after just one day in operation, Lil’ Bees is taking care of four million children and serving seventy billion meals to starving kids every single day. It’s not much, but we are glad to be playing our little part to serve Minnesotans.

Mr. Walz can make out the check from the state government to cover those expenses to Seth Dillon, proud owner and operator of Lil’ Bees. The check will need to be mailed to a Florida address, which is standard operating procedure for Minnesota daycares.

To be fair, many other “news” outlets already consider themselves to be in the daycare business as well. The Bee is simply making it official.

Posted at 5:15 pm by Ed Driscoll

SACRAMENTO EXPORTED ITS POLLUTION TO NEIGHBORING STATES, AND CHARGED CALIFORNIA CONSUMERS FOR THE PRIVILEGE:

UPDATE (From Ed): In 2023, the Epoch Times reported that “California Dumps Nearly Half of Its Hazardous Waste out of State.” In 2008, City Journal was describing California’s need to import energy from other states as “California’s Potemkin Environmentalism.” “‘California practices a sort of energy colonialism,’ says James Lucier of Capital Alpha Partners, a Washington, D.C.–area investment group. ‘They rely on western states to supply them with power generation they are unwilling to build for themselves’—and leave those states to deal with the resulting pollution.”

Posted at 5:08 pm by Stephen Green

AN ANGRY TIPPING POINT:

Posted at 4:48 pm by Stephen Green

RIC GRENELL: Trump Kennedy Center Filing $1M Lawsuit Against Musician Who Canceled Christmas Show as Political Protest.

Musician Chuck Redd, this year’s host of the annual Christmas Eve concert, canceled the event following the Center’s board voting unanimously to rename the institution, “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

“When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd told the Associated Press Wednesday, hours before the event was scheduled to take place.

Grenell, who has worked assiduously to restore the struggling institution, is not taking the politically motivated cancellation lying down.

“Your dismal ticket sales and lack of donor support, combined with your last-minute cancellation has cost us considerably,” Grenell wrote Friday in a letter to Redd obtained by Breitbart News. “This is your official notice that we will seek $1 million in damages from you for this political stunt.”

Grenell hammed the artist for hurting an institution created to promote the arts throughout the nation, not to serve as an insulated haven for liberal elites.

“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution,” he wrote. “Regrettably, your action surrenders to the sad bullying tactics employed by certain elements on the left, who have sought to intimidate artists into boycotting performances at our national cultural center.”

Protesting against the renaming of the Kennedy Center and stomping away from his Christmas Eve concert was quite a savvy PR move by Redd, transforming his name recognition, heretofore mostly known to hardcore jazz cultists, and getting lots of headlines, which should likely improve his bookings in urban nightclubs. (See also: Hollywood’s full employment act for Alec Baldwin ever since 1998, when the actor “suggested on national television that people stone House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (R-IL) and his family to death.”

Posted at 1:27 pm by Ed Driscoll

PBS-LIKE BRITISH CHANNEL LETS JIMMY KIMMEL VOMIT AN ‘ALTERNATIVE CHRISTMAS MESSAGE:’

The “public service” Channel 4 in the U.K. knew what it was getting when they asked Jimmy Kimmel to give their annual “Alternative Christmas Message” this year. It wasn’t religious or charitable. It was like a monologue on his ABC show, except this time, as he mentioned being tyrannized by Trump’s government this year, he made no mention of what it was he said. The name of Charlie Kirk or the motive of his assassin went unmentioned.

Instead, Kimmel gave another false impression, like the notion Kirk’s killer was MAGA. He suggested Trump took him off the air because he can’t stand dissent. This is especially bizarre because the U.K. right now is the real censor of opposing views. “Hate speech” on social media can land you in jail.

Backed by cheery music, Kimmel began by suggesting he didn’t know what was going on in England, but “I do know what’s going on over here though, and I can tell you that, from a fascism perspective, this has been a really great year. Tyranny is booming over here.”

“You may have read in your colorful newspapers that my country’s president would like to shut me up because I don’t adore him in the way he likes to be adored,” and “the American government “made a threat against me and the company I work for, and all of a sudden we were off the air.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr uttered some threatening words (with no actions), but the real driver was ABC affiliate groups finding Kimmel’s Kirk comments to be dramatically insensitive, if not completely inaccurate.

As Tom Wolfe famously wrote, “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe:” The victims of Britain’s free speech crackdown. Reports show police are making more than 30 arrests a day over offensive online posts.

Posted at 12:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

SOMALI PIRATES UPDATE:

“Unexpectedly,” there’s a bit of a media blackout on their excesses in Minnesota:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll