Closing the tabs ...

🚨This is BRUTAL for Democrats — and it's glorious that CNN has to report it!

Brianna Keilar: "New polling shows Democratic leadership with only a 27% approval. It's a record low for the party and CNN polling back to 2008!"

Frank Luntz: Democrats have "no idea how to offer an… pic.twitter.com/HwwFEayqBQ

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 29, 2025

Ed: Trump is experiencing some decline in ratings too, but not on this scale. Democrats have an opportunity to rebuild; instead, they're staying the course on a sinking ship. 

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While Spanish grid operator REE on Tuesday ruled out a cyber attack as the cause, Spain's High Court said it would investigate whether the country's energy infrastructure had suffered a terrorist strike while Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said his government had not ruled out any hypothesis.

"We must not rush to (conclusions) and (commit) errors through haste," Sanchez said on Tuesday. "We will find out what happened in those five seconds."

REE said it had identified two incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants, in Spain’s southwest that caused instability in the electric system and led to a breakdown of its interconnection with France.

Ed: Solar panels a fine, but a national grid should never rely on them. Industrialized nations require scalability for power sources to maintain grid stability when acute events force some providers to fail. Solar will never meet that scalability challenge, which is why nations should pursue solar as a plus-up to a rational power strategy. That means oil, gas, coal, and/or nuclear sources should be encouraged as part of a plan for abundance rather than rationing ... or darkness. (Side note: I'm considering a Tesla system for power generation and storage, because far too many bureaucrats are too invested in shortage/rationing.)

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I'm guessing it's not super fun in the halls of @Nike right now.

So many unforced errors.

Never again? WTAF was this marketing person thinking??

A purge of mid level marketers must be underway. Plus some high level ones. pic.twitter.com/sz8NXaDZdZ

— Jennifer Sey (@JenniferSey) April 28, 2025

Ed: WTAF indeed. Was this was a willful choice to curry favor with anti-Semitic progressives, which is Nike's target market, or just a series of people at Nike who have learned nothing about history? Hanlon's Razor suggests the latter, but Nike is so woke it hurts, so we can't rule out the former. 

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One of the Democrat strategists keen to get Piker more involved in the party was Brianna Wu. In the run-up to last year’s presidential election, it was her job to reach young voters, and she saw how Piker connected with them. So, she began brainstorming ways to get him “plugged in” with Democratic campaigns. But her enthusiasm for Piker quickly faded when she saw him broadcast terrorist propaganda on his Twitch livestream. “The more you understand about what he’s actually saying,” she told The Free Press, you realize: “He’s actually terrible for the country.”

“He is part of this push that’s brainwashed America’s young people into thinking the enemies of democracy are actually our friends,” Wu said. “If you’re asking yourself who is talking to your children on the left, it’s Hasan, and Hasan’s orbiters, which is fairly terrifying.”

Ed: Maybe people should vet their prospective political allies more carefully. The Left loves anti-Semitism, and it always has I'm hardly surprised at the popularity of Piker among progressives. 

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Last week, Treasury went live with its first automated payment verification system. In total, $334 million in improper payment requests were identified and rejected due to:
-Missing budget codes
-Invalid budget codes (i.e. the payment was not linked to the budget)
-Budget codes… https://t.co/Jmuc1cj9D7

— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) April 29, 2025

Ed: The White House should have a daily litany for the reporters on what DOGE has uncovered most recently. Most of them won't report it. but the clips would go bananas viral on social media. 

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Then, four years later… Germany goes to war in Europe. And it has atomic bombs. After it steamrolls Europe, we find out it got those plans from American and British spies who were working for Germany. We (quite logically) freak out and look for spies. But then… four years after that? In 1953? Germany goes to war with Russia using the H-Bombs we had just developed. And guess where they got them?

Sounds pretty terrifying, right? The thing is, the scenario I’ve outlined is essentially what happened during the Cold War; using stolen secrets, Russia got the atomic bomb in 1949 and the hydrogen bomb in 1953, using secrets stolen from our (and allied) military programs. And I dare say that if you had been alive during those years, you would have been terrified to realize that the Soviets had obtained not only the atomic bomb, but also the hydrogen bomb, far faster than they would have thanks to the help of disloyal Americans and Brits.

My point is quite simply that I suspect that if you had been around in the late 40s and early 50s, when McCarthyism took place, you would have seen the Soviet Union gaining the power to essentially destroy the world thanks in no small part to British and American spies. And you would have been freaked out the way so many at the time were.

Ed: It's an excellent essay that parallels the McCarthy era with the Big Brother/Big Tech Industrial Censorship Complex. And Greg Lukianoff argues that it's actually worse now, with even less justification. 

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.@POTUS on his first 100 days: "Either we’ve done everything or it’s in the process of being done." pic.twitter.com/h0IDwFdTkS

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 29, 2025