July 20, 2026

THIS IS NO STORY, JUST LIKE OBAMA’S DEAD CHEF:

Posted at 8:51 pm by Glenn Reynolds

STRENGTH THROUGH JOY IS BRAT BACK, BABY!

Kamala Harris is running for president. She claims she “should have won” in 2024:

“She walks in as the front-runner. It is fairly obvious she is followed wherever she goes,” said one former aide. “And I don’t want to upset any narratives that any of the other candidates are pushing, but she comes in with 99 percent name ID and everyone else is going to have to raise money and buy it.”

It remains an article of faith among Harris’s tight-knit group of advisers that the 2024 race wasn’t winnable. Her polling lead was a mirage and did not square with what the campaign’s internal polls were showing. The compressed timeline after Biden dropped out of the race left her without enough time to appear as her own person, a particularly big problem when much of the public had tired of the president. And multiple former campaign staffers brought up the two assassination attempts against Trump as evidence that Harris’s loss was all but preordained.

…

“She is looking for where the wave is going and is determined to ride it,” said one supporter who had recently spoken with her and came away convinced that Harris is running in 2028. “Her mindset is that I should have won, and I am going to do it my way because my way would have won, and it was all these consultants that were telling me to take this position or that position, and it was their fault.” 

In 2004, Mark Steyn described John Kerry as a “Flip-flop hip-hopper:”

The time —last week; the place — MTV. The interviewer asks: “Well, we know that you were into rock ’n’ roll when you were in high school, and we know that you play the guitar now. Are there any trends out there in music, or even in popular culture in general, that have piqued your interest?”

“Oh sure. I follow and I’m interested,” says John Kerry. “I’m fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there’s a lot of poetry in it. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you’d better listen to it pretty carefully, ’cause it’s important. … I’m still listening because I know that it’s a reflection of the street and it’s a reflection of life.”

Really? You’re “fascinated” by rap and “listening” to hip-hop? You’re America’s first flip-flopper hip-hopper?

To pander to the Democrats’ base, Kamala is about to put Kerry’s flip-flops to shame over the next couple of years:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

TYPICAL.

Posted at 8:33 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HOW HOLLYWOOD LOST THE HOLLYWOOD PRESS:

At a time when the internet-model was already cutting deeply into news media profits, [Nikki] Finke’s strategy [at Deadline.com] was something of a revelation. It’s easy to imagine that the legacy trades, Variety and THR, must’ve looked at what Finke was doing and thought, “we need to be doing that too.” Subscriptions fees were down and Trade ads were fading away. The obvious strategic pivot was to follow Finke’s lead and begin to tailor some coverage for a broader non-Hollywood audience which loved behind-the-scenes Hollywood stories combined with social media snark.

Into this volatile economic mix came deep-pocketed Media Mogul Jay Penske and his Penske Media Corporation who, over the course of about a decade, bought or otherwise assumed control of all three of the most well-known trade papers beginning with Nikki Finke’s Deadline site in 2009, three years after Twitter’s launch and one year before the debut of Instagram.

And with corporate ownership came corporate expectations.

FADE OUT:

SMASH CUT TO: 2026

Today the Hollywood Trade papers are not the same publications they were thirty years ago. To scan the digital home pages of the Trades now is to recall the heady days of clickbait driven sites and their “X destroys Y with this one simple comment” and “You won’t believe what just happened…” story formulations. The modern Trades often lean into stories designed not only to drive clicks, but to go viral on social media, and much of the original purpose of the Trade papers has been subverted.

QED:

I’m old enough to remember when Variety handled the film and TV industry, and Billboard covered the music industry (my dad bought both trade publications every week in the 1970s and ‘80s). This tweet is purely Variety trying to drum up clicks through wading into the culture wars, something it rarely if ever did during the Before Times.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

GOOD QUESTION:

Posted at 6:35 pm by Stephen Green

DOMINIC GREEN ON THE MANCUNIAN CANDIDATE: Andy Burnham Is Mad for It.

Mr. Burnham’s new politics are the old politics that broke Britain in the 1970s, the lost decade of tax hikes, strikes, social decay, political extremism and a brain drain of talent. How will Mr. Burnham create his class-war time machine? By subsidizing reopened coal mines and shipyards under government management? Nationalizing British Airways (owned by an Anglo-Spanish conglomerate whose largest shareholder is state-owned Qatar Airways)? Seizing Heathrow airport from its French, Qatari, Saudi, Singaporean, Australian and Chinese proprietors?

What could possibly go wrong?

Posted at 5:37 pm by Ed Driscoll

THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHE’S MORE FAMOUS AND IMPORTANT THAN YOU ARE:

Posted at 4:34 pm by Stephen Green

NOTHING LIKE THIS HAPPENED ON JANUARY 6:

Posted at 4:33 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SHE’S THE WORST:

Posted at 4:04 pm by Stephen Green

BANS ON DIVISIVE CONCEPTS RISK STIFLING SPEECH. Rather than go tit-for-tat trying to shut down the people who have been shutting you down, you know what would really throw them off their game? Creating an environment where they have to make and defend their arguments.

Posted at 3:41 pm by Robert Shibley