Monday's Final Word

AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson

Tabs were on my side when I was surfing down the web, it was all site site site ... 

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Ed: These remarks were covered in April of this year at the Free Beacon. It has some context for today, however ... 

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The Midwesterner: An Egyptian American activist sentenced to life in prison in absentia by a Cairo court for his support of the Muslim Brotherhood is pumping cash into Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign for U.S. Senate.

Mohamed Soltan, the 38-year-old president of the American Committee for Middle East Rights, is funneling funds to El-Sayed’s Abdul for U.S. Senate candidate committee as ACMER contributes to Fighting for Michigan PAC, the super PAC backing the former Wayne County health official. ...

In April 2015, an Egyptian court sentenced the then 27-year-old to life in prison following what Soltan described as an unjust trial, according to NBC News.

He was released in May 2015 at Obama’s request and returned to the U.S., where he works as an international investment advisor and human rights activist.

Ed: "Human rights activist"? Er ... sure. This report claims ACMER gave $25,000 to El-Sayed's campaign, which is a drop in the bucket to the funds directed to his campaign from the super-PAC connected to his father in law, who is also connected to the Muslim Brotherhood through CAIR and ISNA. Those are a more connections to terror-related orgs than most election campaigns can sustain. And we're not done with the oppo research reveals, either. 

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Ed: Jordan Domingue got out while the getting was good. One has to wonder how many other secrets Domingue's waiting to see exposed. Some qualities of El-Sayed and his allies are hardly a secret, however ...

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Local 12/TNND: Far-left streamer Hasan Piker mocked the late Charlie Kirk while on a live tour, singing the “We Are Charlie Kirk” meme song, resulting in backlash from conservatives.

The video of Piker mocking Kirk circulating on the social media platform, X, shows Piker singing the song in front of a crowd while his co-hosts of his podcast were laughing on stage. ...

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Conservative streamer Lauren Chen shared the video of Piker singing to a crowd of people and said it was shameful.

“Hasan met Charlie many times,” Chen wrote on X. “I was on a panel with them at Politicon. They were fiery on stage, but still jovial and amicable with each other once it was done. Charlie would have mourned Hasan had he been shot. Hasan, on the other hand, chooses to mock Charlie. For shame.”

Ed: Shame is not an option for Piker and his fellow radicals. That includes El-Sayed, although he performs it out of desperation. 

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This is all in reaction to Michigan Democratic Congressional candidate Jeremy Moss, who happens to be Jewish, saying he is unsure if he will be able to support Abdul for these very reasons. 

Absolutely DISGUSTING. If Abdul El-Sayed had any courage at all, he would call this out and disavow Hasan Piker once and for all. We’re waiting, Abdul…

Ed: Israel is "Jewish ISIS"? The country with multiparty parliamentary democracy, the nation that allows other faiths to openly practice and worship? That's not even the craziest thing Piker says here, as Rogers points out. El-Sayed is now attempting to distance himself from his own campaign surrogate, but ...

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Michigan Advance: In response to comments made by online influencer Hasan Piker, a controversial left-wing streamer, in which he tied his criticisms of support for Israel by the American Jewish community to state Sen. Jeremy Moss of Bloomfield Township, Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said that “nobody speaks for this campaign besides me and my campaign spokespeople.”

Piker was a staunch supporter of El-Sayed in his primary campaign against U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Birmingham), and in the general election thus far, his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, has repeatedly attacked El-Sayed by tying him to Piker’s past comments — even calling him El-Sayed’s “running mate” at the state Republican Party’s nominating convention on Saturday. 

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“While politicians and pundits try to make this race about a Twitch streamer, we’re going to be talking about gas, groceries, good schools, and healthcare,” El-Sayed said in a statement on Monday. “Because that’s what Michiganders keep asking about. It’s why I’m fighting to get money out of politics, money in your pocket, and Medicare for All.”

Ed: BZZZT – wrong answer. Piker appeared with El-Sayed at campaign events and acted as a campaign surrogate. The front-page picture was taken in April at an El-Sayed campaign rally in Ann Arbor. El-Sayed can try running away from Piker now, but it's far too late to claim any kind of distance from the "Twitch streamer"-cum-revolutionary Islamist. 

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Ed: El-Sayed didn't address it because El-Sayed supports it too. In fact, this campaign statement doesn't actually contradict anything Piker said; El-Sayed just refuses to take any accountability for it. 

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The Hollywood Reporter: Jim Berk, CEO of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is defending Paramount after the studio called Mark Ruffalo’s anti-merger comments “antisemitic.”

“Words matter, and so does the willingness to draw a line when legitimate debate gives way to antisemitic tropes,” Berk wrote. “We commend Paramount for speaking clearly and refusing to allow prejudice to masquerade as political or corporate criticism. At a time when antisemitism is too often minimized, rationalized or repackaged in more socially acceptable language, this kind of moral clarity matters.”

“Invoking Israel in an issue where it is completely irrelevant is a textbook case of obsession and demonization. Paramount was right to call it out. More leaders and institutions should have the courage to call antisemitism what it is, regardless of who is spreading it,” his statement concluded.

Ed: Ruffalo's trying to rebut claims that he's anti-Semitic. In his defense, he may just be an idiot. It's not clear what Israel had to do with the Paramount-WBD merger anywhere outside of Ruffalo's warped mind. I'd take the Wiesenthal Center's view as dispositive in most cases, and perhaps especially in this case. 

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Dana Bash: “You said it.” 

Bill Maher: “I said it because it’s true.”

Ed: And Democrats like El-Sayed keep proving him correct. Also, Talarico wears his progressive agenda on his sleeve while calling it Christianity. There is a very large difference, especially when declaring God non-binary, professing a belief in six genders, and insisting that children should undergo sex-change therapies. 

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William Otis at Ringside at the Reckoning: Hence I bring you, for starters, this gem published today in the New York Times. The title is, “Let Iran Control the Strait of Hormuz.” I wish this were a joke, but you don’t find jokes like that in the Times. Some excerpts:

When President Trump isn’t threatening to make the Strait of Hormuz a U.S. territory, his administration is demanding that the strait revert to being a free international passageway for the world’s oil supply.

Oh no, not that!

The president needs to face reality: Neither of these things is going to happen. The strait needs to be reopened, even if that means Iran tolls transit through it. This outcome would be a defeat for the United States. But, at this point, it is the least bad option.

How the writer knows what “is going to happen” is never made clear. Maybe she’s one of the Lefties who “knew” in the Seventies and Eighties that that we needed to reach an accommodation with the Soviet Union, because it was time to understand that it was here to stay.

Ed: There are few things as fun in blogging as a good, old-fashioned fisking. Be sure to read it all, especially in regard to Bill's second topic, the arbitration ruling in the WaPo-Karen Attiah dispute. I wrote about that earlier as well. 

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Ed: Oh, I don't know. I suspect we're about to see this pay off in what Inigo Montoya promised would be "humiliations galore" for Prince Humperdinck in The Princess Bride. That may be a good tonic after the years of the Protection Racket Media treating these two entitled twits as the Voice Of Their Generation. 

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WSJ: A local business group sued New York City and Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday over the mayor’s plan to open five government-owned grocery stores around the city.

The Multicultural Business Coalition, a nonprofit that represents supermarkets, grocery stores and bodegas, filed the lawsuit in the New York County Supreme Court, arguing that the plan would introduce unfair competition to a struggling local industry already dealing with slim profit margins. The coalition says that the plan will particularly harm immigrant- and minority-owned businesses.

Many members of the coalition “cannot compete with the municipal grocery stores, and therefore, will be put out of business,” the complaint reads.

Ed: This is a novel approach, treating the government as a cartel. Will a court intervene on that basis? I'd bet courts would tend to treat this as a political question, especially in state courts. I wonder if this might be better tried in federal courts. It'll be interesting to watch it proceed. 

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Ed: Weren't the Browns evidence enough for that proposition? Don't @ me, Hugh and Andrew. The bust is legit, though ...

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NY PostSan Francisco 49ers owner Jed York was arrested on suspicion of engaging in prostitution in Ohio over the weekend, the California Post confirmed.

York pleaded no contest on Monday after the state of Ohio amended the one count of engaging in prostitution to a disorderly conduct charge.

Court documents obtained by the California Post on Monday state York responded to an ad on a known prostitution website and “arranged to have sexual activity with the female in exchange for $140.”

The 46-year-old from Youngstown, Ohio was arrested in a trailer park on Sunday in East Palestine, 30 minutes south of Yorktown, and booked into Columbiana County Jail.

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Ed: Soooo many questions, such as: Was the Tenderloin unavailable? Why not go to Nevada? Why is an NFL owner going old-school when he has the means to access more discreet entertainment? It's amazing how some people seem to have reputational death wishes. What a horrible situation for his wife and sons. 

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Kurt Schlichter on X/Twitter: When you kill three children in a row, it is not overzealous for the prosecutors to bring first-degree murder charges. Michael has criticized us for assuming her guilt immediately, but what he’s doing by saying the charges shouldn’t have been brought is assuming her legal innocence immediately. But for the mental capacity argument, this would be a straight up first-degree murder case. It’s absolutely premeditated and it’s got multiple victims. There’s nothing unusual about this charge. The job of a jury is to sort it out; you don’t take it off the table at the threshold when there’s evidence potentially supporting a first-degree charge. It would be insanely unusual if the prosecutors did anything else.

The emotional manipulation tactics he talks about, include showing pictures of the dead children. She saw their bodies, because she killed them. The determination here is whether she understood right from wrong. A jury can certainly consider what she saw with her own eyes when assessing whether she understood right from wrong. A jury is perfectly within its rights to believe that someone like Lindsay Clancy could not possibly look at those bodies and not understand that Dewing that was wrong. You may disagree with that conclusion, but it’s not an unreasonable conclusion to draw. 

To the extent there is emotion attached to the photos, yes that’s true. There’s always going to be emotion attached to the murder of three children. The test is generally, whether the probative value of the evidence is outweighed by the potential prejudice. Evidence is not prejudicial simply because it tends to support guilt. Prejudice is an unfair and inappropriate reliance on emotion to overcome fact. It is not offered to say that this was very horrible so you should believe she did it. She does not dispute that she did it. Here, what she saw is directly an issue as to the issue she raised – her mental capacity. Almost every murder case shows photographs of the victim(s).

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So, far from being unusual, this murder case is being handled exactly the same way as tens of thousands of murder cases that came before it. The limited nature of this case, where the issue is not whether she strangle those kids but her mental capacity when doing so, further supports admission of this relevant evidence.

Ed: I'm not at all clear why prosecutors are being criticized for charging the obvious crime of premeditated murder. The grand jury returned the indictment, and short of an insanity plea, this is obviously the correct charge for the killings of all three children by strangulation. Clancy has the right to an insanity defense, which her defense has presented; it is up to a jury to weigh that evidence. An insanity finding may be reasonable, but that does not mean that prosecutors should not pursue justice for the three victims in this case. 

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Saturday's lyric: "Funkytown" by Lipps Inc.

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