Category: Conservative Review
Democrats Lose CNN as Party Uses Food Stamps as Shutdown ‘Leverage’
CNN hosts have clashed with prominent Democrats this week as the party signals it’s willing to let tens of millions of Americans’ food stamp assistance expire in order to increase their political “leverage” four weeks into the government shutdown.
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Deep-Pocketed Rockefeller Fund Behind California AG’s Lawsuit Against ExxonMobil, Official Says
The Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF), a progressive foundation that funds green energy initiatives and seeks to dismantle the oil industry, quietly helped lay the groundwork for California attorney general Rob Bonta’s (D.) high-stakes litigation accusing ExxonMobil of deceiving the public about its role in the “global plastics pollution crisis.”
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ROOKE: Democrats Went All In On Massive Political Gamble That Even CNN’s Jake Tapper Seems To Think They Are Losing
‘How much longer you can survive the polling decline’
Miyares: Virginia Dems’ ‘Last-Ditch’ Gerrymandering Gambit Is Unconstitutional
According to Miyares, there is no lawful path available for Democrats to redistrict the state ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Karine Jean-Pierre’s humiliating book tour is even worse than you think
Karine Jean-Pierre has been hawking a new book in a desperate attempt to cash in on her time as White House press secretary — and it’s not going well.
Whereas fellow lesbian and propagandist Rachel Maddow of MSNBC suggested that the book was a “truly new and valuable contribution to our understanding of the Biden presidency,” the Washington Post shredded “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House Outside the Party Lines,” noting that it was a “fascinating book for all the wrong reasons.”
‘Sorry, I’m not trying to be dense. I’m a little unclear about what this has to do with Democratic leaders.’
The reviewer — confronted with 180 pages’ worth of Jean-Pierre’s thoughts “written in the outmoded register of one of those lawn signs proclaiming that ‘in this house, we believe kindness is everything'” — expressed amazement “that someone who writes in such feel-good, thought-repelling clichés was hired to communicate with the nation from its highest podium.”
The Post concluded on the basis of the book that Jean-Pierre is a “blinkered” establishmentarian whose recent departure from the Democratic Party and identification as an independent “seems to be less of a strategy than a style”; whose “thinking remains so decidedly in the box”; and who “appears to have little authentic understanding of why her erstwhile party’s approval rating has cratered.”
Journalist Matt Taibbi’s review of the book for the Free Press was similarly damning, dubbing it “history’s most incoherent memoir.”
“Jean-Pierre had over a year to think about what to say about all this, and instead of writing the book the whole world wanted, the true story (complete with photos of Biden’s used-bib collection and pictorial toilet guides) of her frustration at having to be the public face of one of the most obvious and legally perilous cons in American political history, she denied there was anything to cover up, much less that she had responsibility for it,” wrote Taibbi.
Photo by Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images
In the book, Jean-Pierre reportedly rejects the obvious justification for Biden’s ouster — the mental and physical decrepitude that had him tumbling, mumbling, and bumbling — and claims that she “saw Biden every day and saw no such decline.” As for Biden’s humiliating performance in his TV debate with President Donald Trump, Jean-Pierre blamed a cold and travel-related exhaustion.
Perhaps worse than the reviews for the book are Jean-Pierre’s efforts to sell it on tour.
For instance, Jean-Pierre befuddled a sympathetic journalist with a series of word salads in her recent interview with the New Yorker.
Isaac Chotiner repeatedly pressed Jean-Pierre on her explanation for how and why the Democratic Party supposedly undermined former President Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 election.
When asked the second time why the Democrats had it out for Biden, Jean-Pierre said — in an interview the New Yorker indicated was edited for length and clarity — that:
they believed that he needed to step aside. There’s more to this than just that period of time. This is very layered, right? There’s a period of time that I questioned what was happening and how do we treat our own, how do we treat people who are decent people. And then you also have to think about how I’m thinking about this as a black woman who is part of the LGBTQ community, and living in this time where I also don’t think Democrats right now, Democrats’ leadership, is protecting vulnerable people in the way that it should.
The interviewer responded, “Sorry, I’m not trying to be dense. I’m a little unclear about what this has to do with Democratic leaders and many Democrats in the country thinking that Joe Biden was going to lose to Donald Trump — which was what the polls all showed — and therefore thinking that he should be replaced.”
After Jean-Pierre launched into a rant about how “nobody knows” about what could have alternatively happened, Chotiner indicated that he had no idea what the former Biden spox was trying to say.
Toward the end of the viral interview, Jean-Pierre — who had made sure to mention her LGBTQ status and race numerous times and suggested the subtitle of her book, “Inside a Broken White House,” was referring to the Trump White House — accused Chotiner of pushing Democratic Party talking points.
David Weigel, a political writer for Semafor who was among the multitude of critics awestruck by how badly the interview went, said, “Turns out you can do a career-ending interview even after your career is over.”
Even Jean-Pierre’s interview with Stephen Colbert — a liberal propagandist who helped raise millions for Biden’s campaign last year — went off the rails when the CBS late-night host proved unwilling to buy what the former White House spox was selling.
Colbert, like Chotiner, asked Jean-Pierre to explain how the Democratic Party betrayed Biden. Even though that’s a core claim in the former press secretary’s book, she appeared unable to answer, launching into a speech about Biden’s perceived accomplishments and how he was still “engaging, understood policy, and was always putting the American people first.”
The late-night host pointed out that “it takes more than that to be the president of the United States, and in a moment of great pressure on stage, we saw someone shock us and worry us. And nothing could assuage that worry. So I don’t think it was necessarily a betrayal of Joe Biden as other people saying, ‘We don’t think we were shown the Joe Biden that you saw.'”
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Democrats admit to weaponizing shutdown for ‘leverage’ against GOP while Americans feel the sting
The Democrats’ narrative pinning blame for the government shutdown on Republicans is losing steam.
Left-leaning lawmakers have openly admitted that they are using the impending expiration of SNAP benefits as “leverage” against their GOP counterparts. This tactic has ignited significant backlash, even from those who typically align with them, including CNN anchor Jake Tapper and the American Federation of Government Employees.
‘Who’s winning, who’s losing? Well, 100% America loses with this.’
The fallout is increasing the pressure on congressional Democrats to work across the aisle to pass a clean continuing resolution, averting disruptions for SNAP recipients as benefits are set to lapse this Saturday.
“Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House. Frankly, this is our only moment of leverage,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) told C-SPAN on Thursday in reference to the government shutdown. Coons admitted that it was “a very unpleasant tool to use.”
Senate Republicans called Coons’ comments “absolutely deranged.”
“Chris Coons believes that denying Americans their SNAP benefits may be ‘unpleasant,’ but it’s worth doing because it gives Democrats political ‘leverage,’” Republicans wrote.
RELATED: Democrats’ shutdown blame game backfires — even Jake Tapper calls them out on SNAP benefits
John Fetterman. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark (Mass.) similarly admitted during an interview in mid-October that her party was using the shutdown as leverage.
“Shutdowns are terrible, and of course, there will be families that are going to suffer. We take that responsibility very seriously. But it is one of the few leverage times we have,” Clark stated.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told journalist Nicholas Ballasy this week that the shutdown is “the only lever we have.”
Ballasy also asked Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) for his thoughts on the ongoing stalemate. Fetterman was one of the few Democrats to break ranks and vote for Republicans’ proposed continuing resolution.
“I’m not going to describe the lives of millions of Americans as, like, a euphemism, as ‘leverage.’ I mean, this isn’t a political game,” Fetterman told Ballasy on Tuesday.
“Who’s winning, who’s losing? Well, 100% America loses with this,” he concluded.
RELATED: Democrats brush off pressure from federal workers’ union to end government shutdown
John Thune. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) used his time on the Senate floor on Wednesday to call out Democrat lawmakers for their controversial admissions.
Thune mentioned a comment from Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who previously said, “Every day gets better for us,” when referring to the shutdown.
“Lest there be any question about who is responsible for shutting the government down, make no mistake about it: These guys are the ones who are out there bragging about it ‘getting better for us every single day,’ or, ‘we have more leverage now,’” Thune stated.
Thune explained that 60 votes are required to pass the clean continuing resolution, noting that it has failed 13 times with only 55 votes.
“So, the question is, are there five people over there with a backbone? Five courageous Democrats?” he added.
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Sources Allege Illegal Electioneering By Democrat Mayor’s ‘Political Machine’ In New Jersey
‘You’re going to do what the political boss asks you to do,’ one source said of Union City Mayor, state Senator, and Jersey kingmaker Brian Stack.
‘Carrie’ and the monster who raised me
The devil and his minions have haunted me all my life.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve been visited by the unquiet dead, the hungry ghosts, and even Old Scratch himself in my dreams. Perhaps these nighttime visitations were spiritual attacks, perhaps they were the predictable manifestation of the violence and instability of my upbringing.
Like Piper Laurie in ‘Carrie,’ my mother forced me to kneel while she stood above me bellowing. ‘Humble yourself before me!’ she shrieked. ‘GodDAMN you, humble yourself!’
Maybe they were both; maybe the kind of moral derangement that afflicted my parents was a kind of demonic possession.
The devil I know
I’m not sure I believe in God, but I’m getting closer to believing in the devil. That’s a confused position, admittedly, but that’s what you get from a guy who believed as a child until it was punished out of him and then spent too many years as an obnoxious “new atheist” adult.
Whatever the answer may be, I’ve been terrified and fascinated by the supernatural, the uncanny, and the grotesque all my life. The kinds of spooky stories that gripped me were the type you find in Victorian English ghost story anthologies. Authors like E.F. Benson, M.R. James, and Elizabeth Gaskell.
If you like these too, no one reads them better than English podcaster Tony Walker. His “Classic Ghost Stories Podcast” is one of the few I find so good that I voluntarily pay for it. This is no amateur sideshow; Walker’s narration is professional grade. Why he’s not rich reading books for Audible, I’ll never know.
Weeping and wailing women in veils who glide down hallways. Rain-bedraggled brides hitchhiking on the side of the road who disappear from their ride’s passenger seat as he drives past Resurrection Cemetery. Fingerprints that appear on the windows of automobiles that cross the railroad tracks where a locomotive hit a school bus long ago killing the children on board. Their spirit fingers gently push your car along to make sure you don’t meet their sad and untimely fate.
In search of … belief
Like many kids of the 1970s and 1980s, I grew up watching shows like the cryptid/aliens/spook-filled “In Search Of,” narrated by Leonard Nimoy. My library card was full many times over with every book on Bigfoot, extra-sensory perception, telekinesis, poltergeists, and the Bermuda Triangle.
Have you heard about the moving coffins of Barbados? That’s top-quality spine tingles. As the story goes, a wealthy family living on the Caribbean island built a family vault in the cemetery. Every time a member died, the crypt was opened to accept a new coffin. And every time the crypt was opened, the coffins that were already there were tossed about helter-skelter.
Maybe it was flood waters. Except that there was no evidence of water incursion. Maybe pranksters did it. But the family sealed the stone door and sprinkled sand on the floor, and there was never a footprint betraying a (living) human presence.
For a proper classic haunting, you can’t beat the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall. Nearly everyone with a passing familiarity with the spirit world of 20th-century popular culture has seen the photograph of this long dead woman, a translucent, begowned figure descending the grand staircase of the palatial home in Norfolk, England, built during the reign of James I in 1620.
According to two photographers who were documenting the inside of the estate in 1936, as they were setting up a shot, they looked up at the stairs in astonishment. A veiled specter was float-walking silently down the stair treads, and they had just enough time to open the shutter on their plate camera and capture the most famous ghost photograph of all time.
Was she the shade of Lady Dorothy Walpole? Lady Walpole was said to have been immured in a room in Raynham Hall for the rest of her life at the hands of her husband, Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, who was angered by her unfaithful dalliances.
Or was this just the first and best example of trick-ghost photography, a double-exposed photographic plate? In the early days of photography, the public was not wise to the trickery available to a skilled image-maker. Long before Photoshop and AI, the public believed the camera never lies.
I want to believe. There’s something magnetic, romantic, and almost erotic about the possibility that a curtain separates us from the realm of the dead and that it thins at certain times, like now. As a child, I delighted in being scared so badly I didn’t dare turn off the flashlight under the covers I used for my clandestine and very-much-not-allowed post-bedtime reading.
Joy interrupted
Yet the possibility of an ethereal realm where the dead who refuse to acknowledge their condition “live,” a plane where real devil cavorts are not merely fun and games. If that plane exists, and if it’s populated by any of the henchmen attributed to Satan, then the other side is very serious business indeed. I’m not so sure I want to believe, in that case, but I’m also not so sure that I don’t.
When I was 8 years old, my family took a rare trip to a sit-down restaurant on Christmas Eve. We were poor, and a night out at Demicelli’s Italian Restaurant was so special that Christmas would have been joyful even if we didn’t get a single present. As we walked toward Placentia Boulevard in Fullerton, California, I looked at the night sky and saw the brightest star I’d ever seen.
“Mommy, look!” I said, tugging at my mother’s sleeve. I pulled on her cigarette hand, which annoyed her. “It’s the star of Jesus, Mommy. It’s the star that guided the Wise Men to the baby Jesus!”
It was wondrous. It made me feel light-headed with a joy I’d never felt.
My mother made a derisive sniggering noise as she blew out smoke. “Oh, no it isn’t, Josh,” she mocked. “It’s just a star. Probably Venus.”
My face went red with embarrassment, and I stayed quiet the rest of the night. I felt stupid. Unsophisticated. Dumb. Childlike. Naive. And substandard. This was a problem that repeated itself over the years. My mother was the resentful “victim” type, and she was at war with God.
I convinced her to take us to the Presbyterian church where I’d been (to her reluctance, as she recalled it) baptized as an infant for Christmas Eve services in 1986. Mother spent the walk home railing about those “Goddamned hypocritical Christians! Where were they for this single mother when I needed a little help to put food on the table?”
I can’t repeat the rest of what she said in a respectable publication.
Maternal monster
It wasn’t until my 40s that I realized why I had been captivated to the point of obsession with certain dark characters in disturbing films like 1976’s “Carrie.” This was an adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel of the same name, a book that still ranks among his finest work. It’s only nominally about a teen girl with telekinesis, the psychic ability to move objects with her mind. The story is really about a frightened girl who grew up with a maternal monster.
If you’ve seen the movie, you remember Piper Laurie’s almost kabuki performance as Margaret White, a religious fanatic tormented by her own sense of failure and sin. Seeing herself as a fallen woman who fornicated with a man, she uses extreme interpretations of scripture to berate and subjugate the result of that union, her daughter, Carrie. Just as Margaret believes she can never be forgiven, she can never forgive her daughter for being born, for embodying her mother’s sin in too-real flesh.
So she screams at Carrie, beats her, forces her to confess sins the girl has never committed (they were Margaret’s sins), and worst of all, locks her in a “prayer closet.” The scene that terrified me the most was the vignette in the dining room when Margaret forces Carrie to her knees as she intones about how God had loosed the raven on the world, and the raven was called sin.
“Say it, woman! Say it!” Margaret screams. “Eve was weak. Eve was weak!”
She drags Carrie to the prayer closet, a black cloak whirling about her like the wings of the raven, and babbles insanely while her daughter screams for mercy. Lighting a candle in the dark, Carrie looks up to a figure of St. Sebastian on the wall, a grotesque effigy with agonized eyes reflecting the pain of his arrow wounds.
Fascinated by fear
Margaret White obviously had a severe condition called Borderline Personality Disorder, which also afflicted my mother. While my mother was not a religious fanatic, she treated me the way Margaret White treats Carrie. Just as in the movie’s dining room scene, my mother forced me to kneel while she stood above me bellowing. “Humble yourself before me!” she shrieked. “GodDAMN you, humble yourself!”
My mother did not want what she claimed she wanted: respect and filial piety. She wanted to be worshiped. My mother created herself God in her own image.
So I prayed to God to be delivered from my mother’s prison, but I never got an answer, or one I recognized. I was more certain that the world was full of angry entities, though, and to say I felt haunted wouldn’t go far enough.
That which terrorizes also fascinates. Over my life, I’ve tasted and re-tasted the fear through movies like “Carrie” and “Mommie Dearest.” Fictional versions of my real-life horror were a poison candy; they hurt so good, like the compulsion to thrust the tongue repeatedly into a canker sore that won’t heal.
I still don’t know what I believe about God, the soul, heaven, or hell.
I knew what I saw
No Halloween story would be complete without a personal anecdote of an encounter with the unexplained. This is the first time I’ve told this story to anyone, let alone in print. Like I do myself, you may doubt me. I admit that I was halfway to drunk when it happened. But in the moment, I knew what I saw and heard, I knew I was only buzzed on three beers, not falling-down drunk. I wasn’t hallucinating pink elephants or anything else.
It was 1992. I was 18 years old and sharing an apartment with my best friend, Lisa. It was movie night in the living room, and it was my turn to fetch fresh Molson Goldens from the refrigerator. I put the sweating bottles on a round cocktail tray with a rubber no-slip bottom I’d brought home from the restaurant I worked at.
I was a skilled waiter who could hold a tray with four entrees and several cocktails without spilling. And though I’d had a few beers, I was not drunk. In the hallway as I was about to enter the living room, one of the standing beer bottles on the tray violently flipped over to the horizontal with a thud. It wasn’t the kind of soft thud that happens when something tips over. It was a THUD, as if someone had thrown the bottle into the tray.
Remember, it was a rubberized tray. It was actually difficult for a glass on such a tray to slide, let alone tip over. I had not tilted the tray; I was not weaving drunkenly as I walked. The other beer bottle didn’t tip over. The two mugs on the same tray didn’t move. More, the same thing happened a few minutes later in the living room. My (replaced) beer bottle on the side table, three feet from reach, loudly tipped over on a perfectly level table and made a loud rap.
I remember so clearly stopping still as the blood drained from my head. Did I really just see what I thought I saw? I did. And I felt it, too.
In that moment in the hall, I said this in my head: “What you just saw and heard really happened. You’re not drunk, and you’re not hallucinating. But no one will believe you, and over time, you will not believe you either. Your memory will soften, and you will convince yourself that you were drunk and that you somehow caused these bottles to tip over in apparent defiance of the laws of physics and friction.”
That’s exactly what happened. As I tell you this story, I doubt myself. At the same time, I remember the warning I spoke to myself in my head about doubt there, in the moment, and I know I wasn’t crazy.
Happy Halloween.
States Need To Stop AI Chatbots From Warping 70 Percent Of American Teens (And Counting)
Our nation is in desperate need of legislation that protects children from the dangerous interactions of exploitative AI companion chatbots.
