Closing the tabs ...
I am Honored to collaborate with current hostage Alon Ohel’s mother Idit, brother Ronen, family and friends with this new version of “Superman” to support Alon, all the hostages, and their families.
— John Ondrasik (@johnondrasik) April 14, 2025
May they all “Find a way to Fly - To a home I will soon see” 🎗️🧡 🇺🇸🇮🇱… pic.twitter.com/MymL79U3ZG
Ed: We missed this yesterday from my friend John, but let's not miss it today. It's a beautiful rendition of his classic "Superman" -- one of the most beautiful popular songs of all time -- and in a righteous cause. Please share it widely!
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Flogged by voters — and President Donald Trump — about rising utility bills, Democratic lawmakers in blue states are zeroing in on a juicy target: utility profits.
Squeezed by high energy prices on one end and attacks from Republicans on the other, they’re introducing proposals from New York to California to limit how much investors can earn from gas and electric utilities. The idea is to defend against attacks like Trump’s executive order last week blaming blue states’ clean energy policies for high energy costs — and, potentially, to lower bills.
Ed: Nope. This will just discourage investment into expanding sources and scalability of power. Most of these blue states, and especially California, restrict or entirely bar coal, oil, and gas for electricity generation, which creates scarcity that pushes up prices. That's why this problem is more particular to blue states, although even Texas has these issues to a lesser degree.
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"There are laws on the books that make it a criminal offense to shield or harbor illegal aliens — like sanctuary state and city leaders have been doing. Do you think they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law?"
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 15, 2025
Tom Homan: *long pause, smiles*
"Absolutely — and… pic.twitter.com/0tU4lmzi8f
"Absolutely — and hold tight on that one, cause it's coming."
Ed: Winter is coming! (We'll see. That could be easier said than done.)
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Starting the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust trial Monday with a bang, Daniel Matheson, the FTC's lead litigator, flagged a "smoking gun"—a 2012 email where Mark Zuckerberg suggested that Facebook could buy Instagram to "neutralize a potential competitor," The New York Times reported.
And in "another banger of an email from Zuckerberg," Brendan Benedict, an antitrust expert monitoring the trial for Big Tech on Trial, posted on X that the Meta CEO wrote, "Messenger isn't beating WhatsApp. Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy them for $1 billion... that's not exactly killing it."
These messages and others, the FTC hopes to convince the court, provide evidence that Zuckerberg runs Meta by the mantra "it's better to buy than compete"—seemingly for more than a decade intent on growing the Facebook empire by killing off rivals, allegedly in violation of antitrust law.
Ed: Seems like a violation to me, but it's just the start of the trial, too. Meta plans to argue that these communications are irrelevant, since competitors like Twitter already existed and that the acquisitions had no impact on competition. Good luck getting that one past a jury that reads e-mails like these, however ... if this is a jury trial. And here's a fun fact: the case is being heard by Judge James Boasberg.
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White House sends out another list of “Sick Criminals” “Who Democrats and the Legacy Media Are Defending” pic.twitter.com/VzUlfMGRsf
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) April 15, 2025
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U.S. Vice President JD Vance believes there is a “good chance” of Britain and America reaching a “great” trade agreement, in a boost to U.K. officials scrambling for a deal.
Vance praised the “cultural affinity” between the two countries and highlighted President Donald Trump's personal connection to the U.K. as he talked up the prospect of an agreement.
“We’re certainly working very hard with Keir Starmer’s government” on a trade deal, Vance said in an interview with UnHerd. “The president really loves the United Kingdom. He loved the queen. He admires and loves the king. It is a very important relationship.”
Ed: As Vance goes on to remind people, it's 'important' to Trump's businesses too. This seems a bit like deja vu; we had this conversation after Brexit too. I don't recall whether Trump succeeded in getting concessions from the UK in those negotiations, though.
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.@POTUS: "There is a chance that the money from tariffs could be so great that it would replace" the income tax. pic.twitter.com/SCBIOPD4zZ
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 15, 2025
Ed: Theoretically? Yes. However, Trump is also arguing that tariffs are intended to incentivize rehoming of manufacturing. That would cut against this idea. If we want to replace the income tax, a better approach would be a value-added tax -- but only after the repeal of the 16th Amendment. That was the Herman Cain platform way back when.
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President Trump will not attend this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner, a White House official tells Axios. ...
This comes as the White House and conservative groups have floated the idea of hosting a rival event on the same night as the dinner — potentially to celebrate First Lady Melania Trump's birthday, reports Politico.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt won't attend the dinner either, she announced during a podcast interview last month.
Ed: Least surprising development of the year. He skipped all of the Nerd Proms in his first term too.
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So, to recap: Most violence — surely an editor should have urged O’Sullivan to acknowledge he was talking about political violence — is attributable to right-wing extremism. And the audience is meant to accept this as gospel because O’Sullivan listed three examples, one of which is from 1995. Never mind that he could have rattled off examples of left-wing violence like the congressional baseball shooting, 2020 riots, Kavanaugh assassination attempt, Trump assassination attempts — oops, there’s five, none of which occurred thirty years ago.
Then, he only alluded to violent tendencies on the left before introducing Lorenz for a friendly interview that saw her introduced as someone who “spoke up” for the poor souls who celebrated a murderer, signal his understanding, if not his agreement with her kind words for Mangione, and gratuitously insult Trump voters by comparing them to crazy-eyed Mangione fangirls like Lorenz.
What the hell was CNN thinking?
Ed: What it usually thinks -- that it's a platform designed and edited to appeal to the progressive clique running the bureaucratic state and the Protection Racket Media elite. Why else would they have interviewed Taylor Lorenz about anything?
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Political influencers in California are greeting Kamala Harris’ potential bid for governor with a shrug, while registered voters in the state react more passionately — in good and bad ways — to her possible candidacy, according to a in a first-of-its-kind poll from POLITICO and UC Berkeley’s Citrin Center.
Insiders reported feeling “indifferent” more than any other emotion to a hypothetical Harris run, while registered voters were more likely to characterize their reaction as “joyful,” “outraged” or “hopeless.”
Ed: I was going to write more about this but became overwhelmed by a sense of indifference myself. The Politico article plays Hide The Lede for almost all of the article; readers have to get through half ot more before they see what the actual results are. Oddly, they were not bad numbers for Harris either, but a quarter of Democrat voters were indifferent. When she actually starts campaigning, though, these will look like a high mark.
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Karoline Leavitt on Joe Biden set to make his first "major" address tonight since leaving office in disgrace:
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 15, 2025
"I'm shocked that he is speaking at night time. I thought his bed time was much earlier." pic.twitter.com/45TUdTEfId
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