Monday tabbing -- so good to me ...
"The EU's trade war surrender follows the humiliating spectacle of NATO leaders genuflecting to Trump and calling him “daddy” as they rushed to obey his command for an artificial 5% military spending target"
— Dave Keating (@DaveKeating) July 28, 2025
Europe's leaders are content to be vassals.https://t.co/NQG4CizGK2 pic.twitter.com/3ecms664Ug
Ed: I'm not so sure this destroyed the EU's actual raison d'etre, which was -- originally -- to negotiate as a Common Market, as it was called at the time. Maybe the EU's desire to become a counterweight to the US politically as well as financially got damaged in this negotiation, but that was more fantasy than achievable reality anyway. The EU is collapsing under its own bureaucratic weight; Brexit won't be the last departure unless they stop their arrogant attempt to be any more than a trading consortium with its own currency.
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“It wasn’t a deal that President Donald Trump made with Ursula von der Leyen. It was Donald Trump eating Ursula von der Leyen for breakfast,” Orbán fumed Monday morning on his podcast. The Hungarian prime minister is both a longtime critic of Brussels and its leadership and a vocal supporter of Trump and his MAGA agenda.
Orbán added that the U.S.-U.K. deal was much better than the one the EU got. Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó wrote Monday on X that the deal is “another sign that Brussels needs new leadership.”
Ed: Maybe they just need a more realistic view of their capabilities. The EU could contend with the US as a market, but not while strung up by Old World bureaucracies and hard-Left activists running them. Their first target for reform should be energy production, but it will take years before they give up their Gaia worship for workable solutions to generate their own energy on sufficient and scalable platforms.
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The US-EU trade agreement is “worth more than just trade,” explains @ACEurope’s @ErikBrattberg.
— Atlantic Council (@AtlanticCouncil) July 28, 2025
At a time when Europe continues to depend on the US for support of NATO and Ukraine, it is “an investment in keeping Trump engaged on Europe.”https://t.co/3xEUAThxXd
Ed: That's called "leverage." And Trump used it very effectively.
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My colleague Joseph Lowndes and I have been studying the movement of nonwhite voters to the right for 15 years. When we began this work, people like Mr. Gibson — who told us they hated the establishment, who felt let down or left behind by the politics of the Democratic Party — were often disdained by liberals as dupes of the right voting against their own interests, votes they would regret once they saw their conservative beliefs in action.
But seven years since I met him, Mr. Gibson seems to be much less of an anomaly. Mr. Trump nearly doubled his support among Black voters from 2020 to 2024, won some 40 percent of the Asian American vote and took almost half of the Latino vote. Many of those I have spoken with recently — students, lawyers, mechanics, pastors and others — sounded strikingly similar to Mr. Gibson. Angry at a system they contend is indifferent to their lives, they express ideas that were once seen only on the far-right fringe.
The rightward drift of minority voters is not a story of just one election. It is a phenomenon years in the making, one that is reshaping the American political landscape. And to understand this movement, you must understand the transformations in the places they are happening.
Ed: Wow, the New York Times catches up with the breaking news of ... 2016. It's not that they're wrong, but they are very late to the party, and I doubt that the NYT truly understands what's actually happening. If they did, they would start cleaning house, as Jeff Bezos is doing at the WaPo.
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Hard-hitting journalism from the Washington Post this morning... pic.twitter.com/Z71sih6RX4
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 28, 2025
Ed: Well ... Bezos has more work to do, clearly.
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JULIE CARR: Hi, Mr. Vice President, Julie Carr from the Associated Press. I guess I’m going to be that person. There are some protesters outside accusing the GOP of protecting pedophiles, and we’re wondering what you think are the reasons the US government should shield the client list of Epstein from the public. And what you have to say about any relevance to that here today?
VANCE: ... For four years under Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, the media didn’t give a damn about the Epstein files or about the Epstein case for literally 20 years, the story about this scumbag, and he is a scumbag pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. He’s dead now, but for 20 years, you had Obama and George W Bush’s Department of Justice go easy on this guy. They didn’t fully investigate the case. They didn’t show any curiosity about the case, and now Donald J Trump is asking his Department of Justice to show full transparency, and somehow that’s a criticism of Donald J Trump and not Barack Obama and George W Bush.
If you want to criticize the people who aren’t showing full transparency, you ought to go after the administrations that went easy on Jeffrey Epstein, the administrations that concealed this case for 20 years, and the administrations that failed to show full transparency.
Ed: They are all "that person," including the fact-check industry within the Protection Racket Media. That's pretty much dead for the same reason that late-night talk shows are pretty much dead: They both became partisan propaganda platforms rather than serve audiences or their core value, whether it was 'truth' or 'comedy.'
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🚨Texas Democrat Greg Casar: “We will BLOCK funding for those mass deportations!”
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) July 28, 2025
Do Democrats WANT to lose?! pic.twitter.com/WvTiYtlmUF
Ed: Let's put it this way. If Democrats really were trying to lose, would their strategy look any different? Deporting criminal illegal aliens is a policy favored by 80% of the electorate in the Harvard-Harris CAPS poll, every month so far this year.
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All told, the existence of this case paints a fairly bleak picture of both contemporary sexual relations and our northern neighbors’ ability to adjudicate them in court. But its conclusion holds a glimmer of promise that cooler heads—and more thoughtful policies—may yet prevail. Because the judge who acquitted the men of all charges also did something that would have been virtually unheard of only a few years ago at the peak of the #BelieveWomen era: She explicitly described the accuser as “neither credible nor reliable.” ...
In the aftermath of the verdict, E.M.’s lawyer Karen Bellehumeur described her client’s shock and disappointment at the verdict: “She’s really never experienced not being believed like this before,” she said.
Indeed, she made these accusations at a strange moment in history when we briefly decided rapists didn’t need to be proven guilty. But that moment has passed: We don’t simply #BelieveWomen anymore. Instead, the ideological passions of recent years have given way to a world in which we remember once again that women are people and just as capable of making mistakes or telling lies as anyone else.
Ed: This is a fascinating essay by Kat Rosenfeld at The Free Press, well worth reading in its entirety. This appears to be a case where everyone involved acted in an appalling manner.
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Why did the Wayback Machine scrubb Strzok’s tweets? Who gave the order? pic.twitter.com/Evb7KF4QWf
— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) July 28, 2025
Ed: Wonderful thing, subpoenas. And grand juries. And indictments. However, I'd guess that Twitter/X still has the archives and can produce them on demand in response to the first two in that series.
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The bespectacled, cheery and ever-charming Lehrer was an unlikely provocateur, but many of his most outrageous songs – such as his upbeat reflection on World War III’s likely outcome, “We Will All Go Together When We Go” – were considered so shocking that they could not be played on radio or television in either America or Britain. As the New York Times wrote in 1959, “Mr. Lehrer is not fettered by such inhibiting features as taste.” Yet by the early 1970s, Lehrer had essentially retired both from songwriting and public performance, leaving a very select corpus behind him: he remarked in 2013 that he had written a total of 37 songs in 20 years, and performed a mere 109 shows. That he had had the impact that he had indicates the brilliance of these songs.
If you had wished, however, to hear Lehrer turn his attention to Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton or Donald Trump, forget it. He once quipped that “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,” and certainly he remained a figure of his time. Yet even in his eventual retirement, he was capable of causing amusement, if not outrage; when the rapper 2 Chainz sampled his song “The Old Dope Peddler,” Lehrer’s reaction was to remark “As sole copyright owner of ‘The Old Dope Peddler,’ I grant you motherf*****s permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?”
Ed: Tom Lehrer was by far the greatest political and cultural satirist of my lifetime, and probably any lifetime. At one time, I had memorized all of his lyrics, with the exceptions of "The Elements" and "Lobachevsky," and I came close on the latter. He had a wicked sense of humor along with mastery of language and the piano, and he targeted all of our foibles. He may be the closest we will get to a Gilbert & Sullivan. I have adored his work for most of my life, and his passing makes me want to play all of his music again. Here's a clip of Lehrer performing live, one that captures all of his best instincts for the jugular and his complete class in taking aim at it. Rest in peace, Mr. Lehrer, and thank you for all the joy you spread.
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