December 18, 2025

PEOPLE LOSE FAITH IN THE LAW WHEN IT ISN’T ENFORCED:

So let’s restore bigly faith in the law.

Posted at 11:27 am by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM BLUE COLORADO: Expect a special interest stampede if ‘progressive’ tax passes.

You can predict some of the damage from Initiative 181 just by reading its miserably-written text:

It would amend the state constitution to strip away the protection of the single flat rate.

With constitutional protection gone, it would re-write the tax code to make it more complicated, replacing the single bracket with ten new ones—five for individuals and five for corporations.

The individual income tax brackets would range from 4.21% to 9.51%—far above that of any other state in the region and one of the steepest in the entire country. Moreover, there does not seem to be any protection from “bracket creep,” the insidious process whereby people’s tax rates rise relentlessly merely because they have kept up with inflation. Year after year, you would find yourself paying more and more of your income to the state.

On the corporate side, Initiative 181 would jack up the marginal rate to 9.51%, the nation’s third highest. This is higher than corporate taxes in lefty states such as New York, Massachusetts, and California. What’s more, this burden would be imposed on even relatively small corporations—those earning more than $1 million a year.

Initiative 181 would abolish your TABOR [Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights] tax refunds for any additional money generated.

It would send the extra funds to various social programs, most of which have a record of waste and corruption. Not a single dime would be spent to counter Colorado’s crime wave, retire our excessive debt, or repair our crumbling roads!

But there’s more than the text of this measure reveals. As I pointed out in a previous column, punitive (“progressive”) state income taxes have a documented record of discouraging investment and killing jobs. This is particularly so when a state hikes levies while other states are cutting them, as is happening now.

Colorado Democrats hate TABOR and have been chipping away at it for years, because the 1992 constitutional amendment limits state and local government revenue growth to inflation plus population increases, requires voter approval for tax hikes or debt, and mandates refunds of any excess revenue to taxpayers.

181 would gut the last obstacle separating Democrats and the total Californication of a once-great state.

Posted at 10:41 am by Stephen Green

AT MONTANA STATE, FAKE THREATS TO BOLSTER A FAKE RACISM CLAIM: 18-Month Sentence for Anti-Asian/Anti-Gay Threats Sent by Montana State Univ. Chinese Culture Club President. “Lin cynically exploited these fabricated threats as campaign material for her student senate race. Together, she and Defendant Wu orchestrated campuswide propaganda condemning MSU’s alleged indifference to ‘students of color’—all built on their manufactured crisis.”

At this point, i pretty much assume that anything like this is fake until proven otherwise.

Posted at 10:39 am by Glenn Reynolds

BEN DOMENECH: Trump’s chief of staff can’t sway a media that revels in Republican ridicule.

Oops, they did it again.

The White House decision to cooperate with Vanity Fair, giving the magazine exclusive access to top Trump administration figures, is one more example of what happens when you let the legacy media pretend that this time, it’s changed.

That its editors won’t screw you over, its reporters won’t put the worst possible spin on your remarks, its photographers won’t dream of using Photoshop to highlight your every blemish for social-media snipers to spread far and wide.

Why, oh why, does every Republican administration fall in love with the idea of trying to win over the people who hate them?

Beware of writers who act like you’re a friend.

Unless I’ve bailed you out and didn’t write about it, I assure you, we are not.

It’s been quite a week. An administration that took Hillary’s late 2016 mantra of “fake news” and made it their favorite catchphrase has to know that Vanity Fair is incapable of writing anything but a hit piece about a Republican president’s team. The Vanity Fair debacle, coupled with Trump’s angry wordblast about Rob Reiner and Dan Bongino announcing he’s leaving the FBI, as Trump joked(?), to go back to his talk show, is creating a strong impression of an administration ending the year in utter turmoil.

In a 2010 article headlined, “Obama’s Hell of a Ride,” John Podhoretz wrote:

Something weird happens when presidencies go wrong — presidents become incompetent at doing the things they were always able to do in their sleep, and their aides follow suit. I noted this when I wrote my first book, Hell of a Ride, about the decline and fall of the first President Bush, back in 1993. When Bush spoke, it rained, and his advancemen weren’t quick-thinking enough to move his events indoors. When he went to Japan on a state visit, he vomited. He was so intent on getting out his message of the day that he referred to it as “Message: I Care.”

This week’s events don’t bode well for next November. As John Hinderaker writes at Power Line, “The midterm elections were destined to be tough, given the hysteria into which the Democratic base has whipped itself. But if the midterms turn into a rout, as seems entirely possible, it will be because the administration’s inept public relations efforts constantly help the Democrats to distract the public from the administration’s signal achievements.”

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll

THEY FIGHT: Democrats recruit candidates to run in every 2026 race in Texas.

The party is running 104 candidates to fill every congressional and state legislative seat, along with every statewide judicial and state Board of Education race, the Texas Tribune reported. Strategists speaking with the outlet said the move, which will see Democrats use resources in hopeless races, will have an upstream effect by pushing turnout in areas where top-level candidates usually cannot reach.

“Even the most relentless statewide candidate is never going to talk to every voter that they need to,” Texas Majority PAC Director Katherine Fischer told the outlet. “We need a network of talented, compelling Democratic communicators across the state to clearly communicate the message that Republican leadership has failed us, and that Texans should consider voting differently this cycle and in the future.”

The effort will also force Republicans to stretch their resources across the state.

The GOP should do the same in Dem strongholds, if for no other reason than to show Democrats a living, breathing, non-Nazi Republican to dispel the propaganda.

Longterm, the downstream effects could prove useful.

Posted at 9:39 am by Stephen Green

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump Hails 2025 Successes, but I’m Just Here for the Trolling. “I mean, I didn’t think that he could top the “official portrait” of the autopen, but Trump never ceases to surprise. The leftmedia hacks have been triggered and it’s beautiful to see. After what they put Trump through during the aforementioned Biden slog, I don’t think he can be too harsh to them. The harshness is all true, of course. His High Holiness the Lightbringer Barack Obama and Joe Biden have long been overdue for some honest assessments of their useless presidencies.”

Posted at 9:08 am by Stephen Green

YOU DON’T HAVE TO SELL ME ON IT, I’M ALREADY IN FAVOR: Ilhan Omar claims Trump travel ban is ‘cruel’ and ‘inhumane,’ says he has ‘creepy obsession’ with Somalians.

Omar appeared on CNN, where she discussed the travel ban in an interview with Wolf Blitzer and argued that the policy separates families. Groups of Somalians in Minnesota have been discovered to have been engaging in fraud by taking money for to provide government services that they never delivered. In some cases there have been kickbacks to others in the community who allowed those non-profit groups to claim they were providing benefits to those persons.

“The biggest worry of the new executive order is that it does separate families,” she claimed. “It doesn’t create an exception for US citizens to have their family members be able to come visit and celebrate milestones with them, so this is a very cruel, inhumane immigration policy that he is putting in place.”

Here’s another thing she recently said: DHS says Rep. Omar’s son was not pulled over by ICE, despite claims.

Posted at 8:37 am by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE LOST GENERATION:

The (very) lengthy tweet concludes with a reference to the above photo

I remember visiting a media company around 2015 that was very “hot” at the time, and the news floor was a sea of very young and hip-looking faces, mostly women and POC. Every once in a while a Steve Ballmer-looking guy in pleated khakis would emerge grinning from a corner office for a coffee refill. He’d peer out over the open-plan desks and hear fingers busily tapping on Macbooks. I sometimes wonder if that guy was smiling because he took pride in being a force for change, or if he was just waiting out the clock, and thinking about that lakehouse on Zillow.

***

My favorite memory from this era is this picture of a dozen white women, which was tweeted out in 2016 with the caption: Notice anything about this Huffington Post editors meeting?” Some poor girl thought this was going to be an iconic image of a bold new media era, where finally women would have a voice, only for it to be roundly ridiculed across dozens of thinkpieces for not including enough POC.”

Read the whole thing.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

BOB HOPE AND JOHNNY CARSON LEFT THE BUILDING A LONG TIME AGO: John Nolte: Failing Oscars Demoted to YouTube.

Starting in 2029, the irrelevant Oscars will have its annual irrelevant Academy Awards show broadcast on — lol — YouTube.

To dwindling ratings and cultural relevance, the Oscars have been broadcast on ABC since 1976. The final broadcast will occur in 2028, which also happens to be the 100thanniversary of the award ceremony.

Between 1974 and 2019, right before the Woke Era really took off, the Oscar telecast ensured incredible ratings and served as a national cultural event. At least 30 million, and sometimes as many as 50 million viewers, tuned it. Since 2021, the ratings have remained in the teens as Hollywood became more and more insulated, their movies got progressively worse, and the overall telecast became openly hostile and even mean-spirited towards Normal People.

So now the Oscars will stream on YouTube, where anyone who wants to can watch them for free online, at least through the end of the deal in 2033.

“We are thrilled to enter into a multifaceted global partnership with YouTube to be the future home of the Oscars and our year-round Academy programming,” Academy CEO Bill Kramer and Academy President Lynette Howell Taylor said in a statement published by People. “The Academy is an international organization, and this partnership will allow us to expand access to the work of the Academy to the largest worldwide audience possible — which will be beneficial for our Academy members and the film community.”

“The Oscars are one of our essential cultural institutions, honoring excellence in storytelling and artistry,” said YouTube CEO Neal Mohan. “Partnering with the Academy to bring this celebration of art and entertainment to viewers all over the world will inspire a new generation of creativity and film lovers while staying true to the Oscars’ storied legacy.”

According to various reports, the Disney Grooming Syndicate, which owns ABC, is happy to be rid of a ratings albatross that wasn’t worth the annual license fee, which was around $100 million per telecast.

Incidentally, it’s a good thing for all concerned that nobody is watching these days: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) is Breaking 1964 Civil Rights Act For Best Picture Nominations.

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

ROGER KIMBALL: Trump reels off 2025 achievements in White House address: He has accomplished more in 11 months than most presidents have achieved in eight years. “Really, what was Trump elected to do? Well, to seal the southern border. He has done that. To remove illegal immigrants from our country. He is well on the way to doing that, too. Trump was elected also to take on the whole DEI establishment. He certainly has done that. Then there are all the economic issues: energy, including the “green energy scam.” All of that is quickly becoming a vague memory scene in Al Gore’s rearview mirror. Above all, Trump was elected to restore confidence in and enthusiasm about the United States of America. That current of cultural self-confidence is absolutely central fulfilling the imperative of ‘Make America Great Again.'”

Posted at 8:11 am by Glenn Reynolds

UNEXPECTEDLY: Woman recognized as ‘first black Briton’ by BBC was actually white.

A woman who was recognised as the “first black Briton” by the BBC was actually white, a new genetic study has shown.

In 2016, the series Black and British: A Forgotten History, suggested that the Roman skeleton of a woman found at Beachy Head was from sub-Saharan Africa.

A plaque was erected to commemorate her heritage, which was later removed when a study suggested the woman was more likely to be from Cyprus, with a Mediterranean complexion.

Now a new DNA analysis of the skeleton by scientists at the Natural History Museum has shown that the woman originated from southern England and was white, with blonde hair and light eyes.

Dr William Marsh, who carried out the genetic study, said, “By using state of the art DNA techniques we were able to resolve the origins of this individual. We show she carries genetic ancestry that is most similar to other individuals from the local population of Roman-era Britain.”

Why, it’s as if:

No word yet if she shopped at the local Gap as well:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

COLD WAR II: Trump and Xi Are Talking — But the U.S. and China Are Headed for an AI Collision.

To understand the rivalry, consider a recent announcement by the U.S. Justice Department: on November 20, it charged two Americans, and two Chinese nationals, with a conspiracy to illegally export about 400 high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) to China. Federal law requires that a license be secured for export of these technologies, which can be used to develop and strengthen AI.

The co-conspirators didn’t have a license – and never even applied for one. In fact, they lied about the destination of the GPUs when shipping them. And for their services, they received a cool $3.89 million in wire transfers from China.

The backdrop to this smuggling scheme is Beijing having set a goal for China to be the world’s leader in AI by 2030. And it’s made considerable headway. “China is the global leader in AI research publications and is neck and neck with the United States on generative AI,” points out the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. It adds that China is “advancing rapidly in AI research and application, challenging the United States’ dominance in this critical field.”

Exit quote: “China is not abiding by the rules that are supposed to govern the global economy. And it’s using AI, says the Justice Department, to bolster its military, to test weapons of mass destruction, and to heighten surveillance.”

Posted at 7:35 am by Stephen Green