It’s another day when I had one space to fill, and I wanted to talk about so many things that a video-podcast seemed the easiest (for me) way to go. Some of these are news items you already know, and some may be new. All of them get a few minutes of my attention.

Incidentally, I know that some of you wish that I could include a transcript. I wish I could, too. At this point, my time limits and the mechanics of doing so are too difficult. I’m thinking about ways, though, to make a transcript possible.

In the meantime, for those who can listen to podcasts, this one covers:

• Jack Smith’s apparent retreat from the DOJ lawsuits against Trump, a tactic that is actually as slimy as the lawsuits themselves
• The FEMA worker who was fired for instructing people to ignore Trump supporters’ homes, and the situation isn’t as obvious as you think.
• The pathetic nature of today’s performers, which explains why it cost Kamala so much to bring them to her rallies (with a cameo from poor Britney Spears)
• The overall cult-like nature of today’s leftism
• A horrible development for women and girls in Iraq, something I lay squarely at Obama’s feet—along with a short rumination about how bad Democrats are for women generally
• The New York Times’s despicable anti-Israel animus
• A mass murder in China and what it says about guns and government

I’ve got a variety of ways for you to watch the podcast, whether videos on Rumble or YouTube (whichever you prefer) or audio versions on Libsyn and Apple (again, whichever you prefer):

Rumble:

YouTube:

Libsyn (audio):

Apple Podcasts (just a link; no embed code).

UPDATE: One of our wonderful American Thinker readers was kind of enough to generate a transcript. I am so grateful for this extraordinarily generous act of time and effort. Also, having read it, I realize that I overuse the words "so" and "and." I'll work on that

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ANDREA: Seemingly, I just can’t quit podcasts. They work for me at the end of a long day when I have so many thing I want to discuss and no place to put them or only one place to put them. And I’ve figured out a way to do all these little sound bites. I think the longest segment in this podcast is seven minutes. Some of them are as short as two minutes. So, let’s see how this works and if you like it. Some people have asked that I do transcripts. I will try to figure out a way to do that. Currently, it is so much work that I simply can’t right now. But if you like to listen to podcasts while you walk your dog or clean your house or cook or something, maybe this is a good alternative even for those who, like me, actually prefer read. So, on that note, let’s get going.

[Jack Smith]

ANDREA: One of the things that was a hallmark of the Biden administration was his political persecution. Not just his, but also the Democrats generally. Political persecution of Donald Trump, a decidedly un-American practice. Now, it’s important to note here that Donald Trump would have been righteous had he prosecuted Hillary for national security violations. That was not about politics. That was about the fact that Hillary committed, very blatantly, committed crimes that had an ordinary person committed them, would have resulted in their spending the rest of their lives in jail. That’s like saying well, you know, you robbed a bank. So, it doesn’t matter if you ran for president, you still robbed a bank. In this case, she robbed America of its national security. What happened with Trump is what Lavrentiy Beria did under Stalin, which is “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”.

So, this was targeting where they faked-up crimes to go after them. For example, the Mar-A-Lago case ignored the fact that the… neither the legislature nor agencies can control the president when it comes to national security. Now, keep in mind, when Hillary violated national security law, she was no more than the Secretary of State. When Biden did that, he was vice president. When Vance (Pence?) did that, he was vice president. All of them got a pass.

But Trump was president. He had plenary power to do whatever he wanted with the documents. As he said, “I just have to think about declassifying them.” When he took documents out of the White House while he was still president, he declassified them. And so the entire case was bogus. So were the cases in New York. The Alvin Bragg hush money case, which I’ll get back to in a minute. The alleged rape case. The case about the bank loans. These were all just made up to persecute Donald Trump. And so, there’s a great essay at The Federalist by Don Brown: “Jack Smith Ditching His Case Against Trump Is Not A Concession, It’s A Coverup”. And what they’re talking about is either dismissing it or continuing it. The Mar-A-Lago Case, actually, Judge Eileen Cannon dismissed, and she dismissed it for a reason that… the Supreme Court raised, that Clarence Thomas, total forgetting, I can see his face in my head, Clarence Thomas raised, which is that a special prosecutor can’t be appointed by the Attorney General. It is a constitutional- it is a position that Congress has to fill. So that Jack Smith was illegitimate and if someone is illegitimate, it means that everything they do is, here’s a great legal term, void abinitio. It means “null from the get-go”. It means as if it never happened. Merely dismissing it is inadequate because that lends an imprimatur of validity to it.

But what Don Brown writes, which is really interesting, oh, and the other thing is, by dismissing it, so it keeps a shadow hanging over Trump throughout his presidency. In the same way, Juan Merchan, the guy who imposed the… who ruled over the very, very poorly conducted trial about hush money, that hush money case, was very interesting because Trump did nothing illegal. And then the case said that by doing legal acts, he committed crimes that Bragg was not going to specify, and in fact, Bragg never did specify. Case ought’ve been dismissed out of the box, on the filings, Merchan did not do that, and then he kept delaying and delaying sentencing for the 39 million felonies that Trump is- now stands convicted of, and he did that too, ‘cause he was worried about the election and now he’s saying that he’s maybe we’ll dismiss it, but maybe he’ll continue it, till after Trump’s presidency. So in 2029, he will sentence Trump. So those convictions will still hang over Trump’s head. And that’s just obscene. And that is meant to be a political cudgel and Trump can take this all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary for denial of his civil rights and G-d-knows-what.

I’m not a criminal lawyer, I don’t know the procedure, I don’t know New York law, but there’s something very wrong there. But what I want to get back to, ‘cause I’m digressing, so worry about that, is about Jack Smith now making noises about ditching his cases against Trump. And let me read Don Brown at length, because what he says is super-important. And it’s regarding the fact that Smith was not appointed by Congress but, in fact, was simply appointed by Merrick Garland: “There’s no legal distinction between Smith’s and Mueller’s appointments. The Attorney General appointed them both without a specific enabling statute years after the Independent Council Act expired. Thomas, [i.e. Clarence Thomas], underscored this, emphasizing that the Appointments Clause of the Constitution mandates specific congressional legislation to justify the appointment of such inferior officers. Congress allowed the Independent Council Act to expire in 1999, but it has not renewed it since. Mueller could be next in line if a federal appeals court invalidates Smith’s appointment under the Appointments Clause. Defendants such as Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, General Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, George Papadopolous and others, all swept up in Mueller’s investigation, would have grounds to vacate their convictions as the fruit of a constitutionally flawed appointment. All together, Mueller’s Russian investigation resulted in the indictment of 34 individuals and three companies, and multiple prosecutions. But if these convictions are based on an unconstitutional appointment, the entire operation could unravel, exposing the Russia hoax as a legacy of judicial overreach."

That is huge and it is important, but if Jack Smith dismisses the cases before they can go up on appeal and have this matter decided, his constitutional regularity as well as Robert Mueller’s constitutional regularity remains an unchallenged issue. And those convictions in prosecutions in the Russia hoax case hang in the air. So, the whole thing stinks. Trump is loaded for bear, I’ll keep saying that over and over. He’s hit the ground running. He’s appointing some incredible, aggressive, committed-to-liberty people, and one of the things that they need to do is a massive house cleaning in the DOJ, where apparently there is tremendous panic. As there should be. If people are just partisan hacks they should be let go. If they engaged in blatantly illegal acts, not “we have to go find a crime” that where there were crimes all over the place, they need to face the consequences. Until Democrats face consequences for illegal actions, there is nothing to deter them from doing it all over again.

[FEMA]

ANDREA: You may have heard about the FEMA worker who got fired because it turned out that she told her workers to avoid homes with Trump signs. And she has since gone public about what happened, and what she says is this was very common at FEMA. I wrote a post about this, so I’ll be brief, but it is something I wanted to cover. Because what happened when I listened to the podcast she did with a guy named, I think, Gordon something-or-other, I’ve forgotten. Anyway, it turns out- oh, Roland Martin, not Gordon something-or-other. It turns out that she was scapegoated one way or the other. Because either she was doing something that legitimately addressed concerns, or she was reflecting a completely common FEMA culture and to make her the scapegoat really isn’t fair. So what happened is that she put out instructions to people to stay safe and to seemingly avoid all homes with Trump signs. But what she said is that the policy at FEMA was that you can’t specifically identify homes from people’s privacy. That people fill out reports and they might say on X block, or in this neighborhood, three people were hostile to me, and they all had Trump signs. And so they start getting nervous about Trump people. And that this was the norm in FEMA, that if people are likely to be risky, FEMA doesn’t approach them. For example, if they have painted purple on posts or trees, that means trespassers will be shot in some communities. Or in a neighborhood with crack houses, you really don’t want to go there.

What struck me, though, when I listened to her, was that she didn’t distinguish between a hostile work environment, her words, or comfortable, her word, versus dangerous. So here’s the real question: were FEMA workers deliberately avoiding places where Trump supporters were screaming at them and waving guns at them, in which case what they did was legitimate, and if a neighborhood had a lot of these people, you could assume that if three were hostile, the others with the Trump signs weren’t going to be so friendly, or is the attitude at FEMA that of snowflakes, which is that anyone who expresses a view with which you disagree creates a hostile work environment and you don’t have to put up with it, and if FEMA workers are gonna say they’re not fans of the swamp, and they’d like to see the government cleaned up, they can be abandoned. So I think Marnie Washington was scapegoated, because either she was legitimately protecting workers from real risks, or she was just a cog in an institution that is made up of people who are snowflakes and who get the green light from management to avoid anyone who makes them feel uncomfortable. So I certainly hope we get more data coming out of that, because one way or the other, Marnie Washington shouldn’t be the only one who’s hung out to dry.

[Performers]

ANDREA: One of the things that’s emerged since the election is that Kamala’s campaign, in addition to spending a billion dollars that it did have, spent twenty million it didn’t have. And a lot of that money went to entertainers. These were people who put on big shows for the crowds, and there was, as you may remember, a lot of upset that Beyoncé just endorsed Kamala but didn’t actually put on a show. And according to Libs of Tik Tok, the Harris campaign paid Megan Thee Stallion five million dollars for her and her team’s booty-shaking performance at a rally. And it occurred to me that they had to do this. For one thing, they were relying heavily on celebrity endorsements. And that proved not to make a difference. They also were relying on- heavily on celebrities to bring crowds to the rallies. Because they had to compete visually with Trump’s rallies, which were overpouring with people who just came to see Trump. But they knew that they couldn’t get those people to Kamala. But what I was thinking about was that the prices they paid these entertainers, some of it went in the entertainers’ pockets, but a lot went into mounting one of these shows.

And that got me thinking about old-time entertainers. And about modern entertainers. Bing Crosby, you could put him in front of a microphone, don’t even have to have music, he’d perform for the crowd. Ella Fitzgerald, the same. Old-time performers, they came up through vaudeville, they came up through lounge singing, they could actually perform. But modern singers are commercial products, and what they sell are these huge stadium shows. They sell big, and they don’t actually have, very often, useable talent. Their music is auto-tuned, I don’t know if you remember the Milli Vanilli scandal where it turns out they were lip-synching. Well, a lot of them lip-synch at performances because the stadiums are so loud they can’t hear what they’re doing. It’s actually necessary for them to lip-synch. And, so, it’s not just the celebrities are awful, I mean, Megan Thee Stallion is so trashy, so sleazy, so demeaning, and so horrible, that if she endorses someone you should run away from that person. It’s also that real talent really doesn’t thrive on the Left, because it can’t, because of the nature of what leftism has done to entertainment. So I’ll close this segment with a very sad recording from several years ago, really maybe twenty years ago or so, of Brittany Spears, poor thing, when she was still popular, without auto-tune.

(Playing of Brittany Spears segment)

[Cult]

ANDREA: If you are wondering whether modern leftism has become a cult, the conclusive evidence is in. Yes, it is. It’s not just the screaming and the weeping. It’s not just the beliefs that are based entirely on feelings and cannot be refuted with facts or logic. Leftists have now devolved into one of the core behaviors associated with cults, which is cutting people off from their family members. And I’m quoting from the Fox News story: “With the holiday season approaching, a prominent mental health expert told MSNBC viewers that they should feel justified in cutting ties with relatives that voted for President-Elect Donald Trump. Yale University Chief Psychiatry resident, and I’m gonna interject that if you’re the chief resident at a place like Yale, you’re considered a star. So, let me get back to that. Yale University Chief Psychiatry resident, Dr. Amanda Calhoun, spoke to MSNBC host Joy Reid on Friday night about ways liberals who are devastated with Trump’s reelection this week, can cope with news, including separating with certain loved ones. So, and I’m quoting her, “If you’re going into a situation where you have family members, where you have close friends who you know have voted in ways that are against you, it’s completely fine to not be around those people and to tell them why,” Calhoun told Reid.

This is deeply wrong. That’s me, not quoting anymore. You know, and during the entire 2008 through 2016 Obama presidency, I had a work colleague. He supported Obama, he knew I didn’t support Obama, and he knew in the 2016 year that I supported Trump, and yet we were friends, we went out to lunch, yadda-yadda-yadda. The day Trump won, I got a text from this guy saying he could no longer associate with me because I supported Hitler incarnate. I’m happy to report too that from that moment, his career collapsed. And the reason I’m happy, well, yes, there’s a little bit of schaudenfruede, but it also shows that mental illness is its own punishment. That cultism is its own punishment. Things are gonna go very badly for these people, and for the one level, it’s a tragedy, on the other level, it is a necessity for society to right itself. The question is whether Chief Psychiatry resident, I admit, yes, I got a text, I forgot to turn my phone off, Chief Psychiatry resident at Yale Dr. Amanda Calhoun, a woman whose credentials once meant something, will also face a consequence for her pronouncements, which have everything to do with cultism and nothing to do with improving people’s mental health. It’s time for a reckoning. It’s very clear that Trump is loaded for bear and ready to reckon, and let’s hope that all institutions and all Americans will force the cultists to either come to reality or pretty much go to the fringes of society where they belong.

[Girls in Iraq]

ANDREA: Democrats have an uncanny knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. It already started in Vietnam, that the time of the Tet Offensive, which was very successful, the U.S. was prevailing against the Vietcong. But the combination of protests on the ground and Walter Cronkite doing his shtick about how the war was over, I mean, I can’t tell you how influential he was for those younger listeners who don’t know the Walter Cronkite era. That was a dagger in the heart of every homeowner in America, every normal family when they heard Walter Cronkite say that the successful Tet Offensive, that it was over. In 2009, the moment he entered the White House, Trump (Obama?) started dismantling what had been a very hard-fought Iraq victory. We had won in Iraq, the Serge had locked it down, and Trump, er- Obama did- undid it all. And of course, in Afghanistan, yeah, well, after twenty years, it would have been a draw, but Trump would have withdrawn a loss with our heads held high, banners flying, all our equipment taken with us. And Biden turned it into an epic and bloody and humiliating defeat.

And I want to get back to what happens when the U.S. withdraws and creates a vacuum, because what you need to remember is that when we won in Germany and Japan, we stuck around to make sure that victory stuck. Victory doesn’t end on the battlefield. Victory means standing there and policing them and making sure people don’t fall back into their old ways. So, the news out of Iraq is, and this is from the news.com.au, which is an Australian outlet, “’Legalise child rape’: Iraq to lower the age of consent for girls to nine”. And the story is, Iraq is set to lower the age of consent to nine years old, a decision that women’s rights activists say will legalize child rape. The amendment to the country’s personal status law, also known as Law 1-88, would allow adult men to marry young girls, putting them at increased risk of sexual and physical violence, as well as deprive women of rights to divorce, child custody, and inheritance.

The law was actually passed in 1959 when Iraq was relatively secular, and it did give Iraqi women more rights than many in the Middle East. But now, in the vacuum that Obama created, and with Iran getting more and more of a foothold in Iraq, this is what’s happening to women. And of course, when you look at it, this is what happens to women when Democrats are in charge. Obama has led to this. I mean, Obama also lead to the Ysiti women being raped and enslaved. Obama has led to these nine-year-old girls being raped and enslaved under the guise of being wives. Biden took the Afghani women who had finally escaped from the servitude of radical Islam and put them right back in there. They- despite the Taliban’s promises to Biden, they have systematically stripped women of every single right. They’re back in those full blue burqas, they’re deprived of education, and they’re not allowed outside with men, they can’t speak, they have no property. It’s all over.

But what you realize is that Leftists have done the same thing to women at home. We can go into a long discussion about how feminism harmed women, and I’m someone who benefited from first and second wave feminism because I had a legal career, I have this career. Didn’t necessarily make me happier than the alternative of purely wife and mother might’ve had done. But I certainly got to exercise my very real verbal and analytical talents. But third wave feminism has been a disaster for women. You have only to look at Leftist women and realize they are deeply unhappy women, that they have been deprived of everything. And the other thing is the push for transgender rights has invaded women’s spheres. It’s deprived them of athletic opportunities, it’s put them at risk of rape and sexual harassment, it’s invaded their spaces. For all their talks about being the ‘party of women’, Democrats are awful for women. And all you need to do is look at what happened in Iraq to see that.

[New York Times]

ANDREA: It’s almost impossible to say how despicable the New York Times is. One of the things that was very clear, and I don’t have an example, but in the wake of the long-planned Muslim attack on Jewish soccer supporters in Amsterdam, and I should add that it’s not only long-planned, but Amsterdam is a city that is close to… I forget if it’s a little under or a little over twenty percent Muslim. And when you have a city that has that percentage of Muslims, you start seeing Muslim violence, especially against Jews and openly devout Christians. And lawlessness. So this was completely of a piece. But what happened was a lot of the media outlets just said… Israeli soccer supporters attacked after pulling down Muslim- Palestinian flags or something. So, they just covered up the fact that this was a planned attack, incredibly brutal, that people were beaten into unconsciousness, so pulling down a flag or fighting… chanting slogans, the Israeli soccer fans were not polite and it was probably a foolish thing to do in a heavily Muslim city. But a planned attack is a pogrom, and the media hid it. But today, the New York Times stunned again. It had a headline at the very top, the latest in international news. “Israel’s Bloody Cycle in North Gaza: Attack, Withdraw, Return: Israel’s Bloody Cycle of War in North Gaza”. Subtitle: “Israel said its forces had returned to Northern Gaza to fight a Hamas resurgence.” So, the article is about how Israel, by failing to win the war decisively, so now it’s not that Israel shouldn’t fight the war at all, saying now that, or that Israel’s fighting the war badly. Now, the problem is that Israel hasn’t fought the war well enough. And that because it just won’t finish the damn war, it keeps killing these pathetic Gaza civilians, and oh, by the way, Hamas keeps coming back again. However much you hate the media, you don’t hate it enough.

[China]

ANDREA: Something terrible happened in southern China yesterday in a city called Zhuhai. A man rammed a small vehicle into a crowd of people exercising at a sports center and last I saw, killed at least 35. That’s a tragedy. I mention it only because it stands as a counterpoint to the Democrat insistence that if you get rid of guns, you will get rid of mass murders. Certainly, guns have been used in mass shootings, but humans, as they have shown for the entirety of their history, are exceptionally good at figuring out ways to kill. The interesting thing is, it used to be when I went onto the Internet, I could find worst mass murders fairly easily, and it would give lists of mass murders with bombs and airplanes, suicides and vehicle rammings and fires. And now, page after page of worst mass shootings in the U.S. So if you ever wonder about the political bias of any Internet search engines, there you have it. But the important point to make also, is that it’s a point that I’ve been making for years and years and years and years: no matter how many people a crazed individual can kill, no matter how many tragedies someone can do at the Pulse nightclub or whatever, there is no killer greater than a government. Now, we all know about war. But if you want mass killings within a border, there’s no killer greater than a government that turns on its own unarmed people. So, you can look at this scale of mass shootings in America and say each is a tragedy, although many in the lineup are gang warfare, which is just simply different. But what you need to consider is the difference between a dozen here and five there, each awful, and six million here, ten million there, fifty million there. The scale is different, and the difference is when a government has disarmed its people. So just something to keep in mind as you contemplate the tragedy in China.

Thank you so much for listening. This is Andrea Widburg signing off.