It may be temporary, but for now, our own Chris Murphy has reclaimed his title of dumbest moron in the Senate from Hawaii's Mazie Hirono

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Beat me by five minutes. Greenwichite sells his summer home for hefty sum . And for once, “hurry, this one won’t last” was more than a realtor cliche.

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This $12M oceanfront Maine home sold in 90 minutes

An oceanfront home in Kennebunkport set records Friday when it sold for $12 million.

Though some luxury properties around Maine are seeing price cuts due to cooling demand, luxury home values and prices have been steadily appreciating in the years since Maine’s real estate market spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, [listing agent Bill Gaynor] said.

“This number sounds extraordinarily high,” he said. “It is on a comparative historical basis, but it makes some sense. And stay tuned, right? Wait five years, it’ll be worth more than that.”

The home’s prime location, its 275 feet of bold waterfront and high standard of design are the reasons behind that eye-popping price tag, Gaynor said. Built in 1969 on an acre, the property has been owned by the same person for over 40 years, he said. The homeowner lived year-round in Greenwich, Connecticut, and summered here.

Its new owner is an industrialist from Chicago who has been visiting Maine for years, Gaynor said. Only 90 minutes after the property was listed in December, the buyer called in and made an almost full-price offer. It sold at full price, the agent confirmed.

Thirty-five years after McDonalds was pressured by "health experts" to switch from beef tallow to vegetable oil, it’s back to the future — for now

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Cholesterol is deadly, vegetable oils are groovy, eat lots of carbohydrates, the Bat Flu vaccine is perfectly safe and will stop Covid dead, 9 out of 10 doctors who smoke, smoke Chesterfields

Steak ‘N Shake Switching To 100% Beef Tallow

Steak ‘n Shake announced that they will switch completely from cooking in vegetable oil to “100% all-natural beef tallow” by the end of February.

This announcement came after Steak ‘n Shake posted a poll to their X account Monday. Over 90% of the respondents expressed their desire for the chain to switch to a healthier cooking option.

McDonald’s Historic mistake in 1990 paved the way for tasteless, deadly Freedom Fries

In the beginning, the McDonald brothers had one hamburger stand, and they bought their fry oil from Interstate. At the time, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil was the preferred frying oil, but hydrogenation equipment was too expensive for Interstate’s tiny operation. By providing clients with a blend of about 7% vegetable oil and 93% beef tallow, they could extend the oil’s shelf life without the use of costly machinery. McDonald’s irresistibly crispy, flavorful french fries? Simply a byproduct of frugal savvy. 

Ray Kroc, the salesman who would become the founder of the McDonald’s franchise, fell in love with this beef tallow–fried version in 1954. Imagining the treat replicated across the country, Kroc bought the restaurant’s franchise rights. He became a master of the french fry, developing potato curing methods and a “potato computer” to perfect cooking time.

This perfection got results. The signature fry, with its crispy edges and buttery, soft interior, delighted customers (including James Beard and Julia Child) and helped McDonald’s spread worldwide. But not everyone was a fan. In 1966, a business mogul named Phil Sokolof had a heart attack at the age of 43. In response, he founded the National Heart Savers Association to campaign against cholesterol and fat. His main target? McDonald’s, especially their  fries.

Sokolof spent several decades and $15 million on his crusade. Facing full-page ads and consistent attacks from Sokolof, McDonald’s caved. In 1990, the company announced that they would replace the beef tallow with 100 percent vegetable oil. After the announcement, McDonald’s stock fell 8.3 percent.

The new fry didn’t stack up. As it turns out, the beef tallow had added more than just cholesterol to the signature french fry. To compensate for the loss of meaty flavor, McDonald’s added “natural beef flavor.” Even worse, the fries lost much of the contrasting soft and crunchy texture that Kroc loved, and the new fries weren’t exactly healthier. As the public later learned, the trans fats in hydrogenated vegetable oil posed serious health threats, forcing McDonald’s to change the recipe again.

McDonald’s introduced french fry version 3.0, which is cooked in vegetable oil with less trans fat, around 2007. Fans of the first fry are still wondering why McDonald’s didn’t just switch back to the beloved original recipe. Journalist Malcolm Gladwell is one such die-hard fan: “Everything about it was a mistake,” he said in an interview on House of Carbs. “If they had any balls at all, they would turn around and say, ‘We were wrong, and we’re going back to fries the old way.’”

“I don’t remember doing that” (UPDATED)

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Ed Morrissey passes on this incident from January 2024 when the then newly-elected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson first realized that Biden wasn’t in charge.

“Can I ask you a question? I cannot answer this from my constituents in Louisiana,” Johnson recalled telling Biden. “Sir, why did you pause LNG exports to Europe? Liquefied natural gas is in great demand by our allies. Why would you do that? Cause you understand we just talked about Ukraine, you understand you are fueling Vladimir Putin’s war machine, because they gotta get their gas from him.”

Biden, according to Johnson, was stunned. “I didn’t do that,” Biden said. Johnson responded, “Mr. President, yes you did. It was an executive order like three weeks ago.” Biden continued to deny that he paused the LNG exports. At that point, Johnson suggested that the president ask the president’s secretary to print out the executive order, so the two could read it together.

Biden then recalled that he had signed an executive order, but it only called for a study on the effects of LNG. Johnson was firm. “Sir, you paused it, I know. I have the export terminals in my state. I talked to those people in my state, I’ve talked to those people this morning, this is doing massive damage to our economy, national security.”

In this exchange, Johnson said he realized that Biden was not lying to him. “He genuinely did not know what he had signed,” Johnson said. “And I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, “We are in serious trouble—who is running the country?” Like, I don't know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know.”

Morrissey then asks the important question: “why didn’t Johnson take action?” I’d answer that because everyone in the Washington political circus circle knew that Biden was non compos mentis even before he ran in 2020, no one felt an individual duty to expose him, and in fact, the Democrats’ plan all along was to prop him up as a figurehead while a select group of hidden “professionals” ran the country. “He’s senile? Well, d’uh; shut up.”

But here, to me, is the even more important question: Cui bono? The decision to cut off LNG shipments to Europe hurt domestic gas producers, and the global warmists certainly welcomed that damage, but it also drove the price of energy, including the electricity produced by that gas, sky-high in Europe. That weakened the continent’s economy and hammered Germany’s already-weak manufacturing sector. Russia benefited, as did the world-wide network of de-industrialists, but were their still more factions in the White House, representing still more interests? Who can tell? Who will tell?

Worse, this was clearly not an isolated incident: every government action and policy decision made over the past four years, foreign, domestic, and military was decided by some ghost cabinet, unelected and unaccountable to citizens. That’s historic, and scary. “Preserving democracy” indeed.

Whoever has been running this administration the past four years, it wasn’t the man elected to presidency, and Morrissey thinks someone should have stopped that:

Johnson … was and is Speaker of the House, and someone in position to take action if a president seems to be incapacitated or manipulated by others. … As Speaker, Johnson could have alerted the House to this potential incapacitation, formed a select committee to investigate it, and force White House aides and Cabinet officials to testify under oath to their interactions with Biden.

We have argued for most of Biden's term that the signs of senility/dementia were recognizable, if not painfully obvious. The April 2022 Easter Bunny incident alone should have prompted the mainstream media to demand these answers and for Democrats to come clean about what we now know they knew at that time. The timing and extent of Biden's infirmity needs a full investigation, as well as answers as to who issued directives under Biden's name by taking advantage of that situation.

But we didn't need to wait until Tuesday to start that process. Perhaps Johnson didn't want to create a constitutional crisis by forcing the issue, but defending the Constitution is Johnson's primary duty. If Johnson knew that Biden wasn't issuing the orders in the White House -- in a literal sense with this EO and others -- then Johnson had a duty to investigate that and force the question into the open. 

And this is why we probably will never get a full accounting of the Biden fraud and cover-up. Too many people participated in it, explicitly or implicitly, to the extent that full exposure will burn everyone. It will be a replay of Murder On the Orient Express. 

And while Joe Biden may very well be the worst president in history (save for James Buchanan, because come on), the current political class in Washington DC may be the worst in its history since the Civil War too. The 17th Amendment and the rise of the bureaucratic state have warped constitutional self-governance badly enough to turn Washington into nothing more than a swamp, where Congress abdicates its responsibilities and puppets dance stiffly in the Oval Office with no consequences for those holding the strings. 

UPDATE: I just remembered that there’s tape of Biden signing this ban:

And there are tens of thousands of these people, all working to defeat their enemy: you

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Over at Instapundit, Ed Driscoll links to a cautionary — depressing? — report from one who’s been there.

Tales From the Swamp

Civil servants are nominally intended to operate in the interests of the United States rather than in the interests of president or party. But that is all too frequently not what they do. Many civil servants act in their own personal and ideological interests, at a cost to the nation, and in counterproductive defiance of presidents with whom they’re not ideologically aligned.

The first Trump administration (“Trump I”) was chronically frustrated by the difficulties it had staffing the government with loyal employees. As a result, disloyal civil servants exploited the opportunity to build up an impressive track record materially harming the operational integrity of Trump I. There are examples aplenty of how, but for this essay, a few James Sherk documented should suffice:

  • Career employees in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division refused to prosecute cases they ideologically disagreed with, even when the facts showed clear legal violations. This included Civil Rights Division career staff refusing to work on cases charging Yale University for racial discrimination against Asian-Americans and protecting nurses from being forced to participate in abortions.

  • Career staff at the Department of Education assigned to work on politically sensitive regulations, including the Title IX due process regulations, would either produce legally unusable drafts that would never withstand judicial review or drafts that significantly diverged from the Department’s policy goals. As a result, political appointees had to draft the regulations primarily by themselves.

  • Department of Health and Human Services career staff circumvented President Trump’s hiring freeze issued soon after taking office by crossing out new hires’ start dates on their hiring paperwork. Staff used Sharpie pens to retroactively adjust the start dates to January 19, 2017—the day before President Trump took office.

  • Career lawyers at the National Labor Relations Board routinely gave political appointees misleading legal analyses. They would only cite cases supporting their preferred position and omit contrary precedents. Some career lawyers refused to draft documents whose positions they disagreed with.

  • Career attorneys in the Environmental Protection Agency did not inform political appointees about major cases the agency was involved in or the government’s positions in pending cases. Political appointees had to monitor public court filings to learn what the agency was doing.

  • Department of Labor regulatory staff intentionally delayed producing a departmental priority regulation. A competent private sector attorney could have produced a draft regulation in two to three weeks. The team of about a dozen career staff claimed they needed a year to do so—a pace that amounted to each attorney in the unit writing less than one line of text a day.

Further on in his report, Sherk* adds:

Career staff impeded Trump I by withholding information, refusing to implement policies, intentionally delaying and slow-walking orders, deliberately underperforming, leaking private information to Congress and members of the media, and acting in an outright insubordinate manner when the opportunity to harm the presidency presented itself.

* “The author of this report served on the White House Domestic Policy Council from 2017 to 2021. Agency appointees frequently described career staff resistance during his White House tenure. After leaving the White House, the author interviewed numerous political appointees about their time in government. This report documents their experiences with career staff.”

Driscoll adds this illustration of what Trump’s up against:


Walter Duranty lives!

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“here’s to the next hundred years”

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN: NYT ‘Journalists’ Write Tell-All ‘Exposing’ the Biden White House Cover-Up They Fully Participated In.

After actively engaging in a coverup of Biden’s cognitive state — the brave, intrepid journalists at NYT are out with a tell-all piece on the coverup — blaming Biden’s inner circle, and taking zero responsibility themselves.

Everything they lied about for years, they now admit is true — Biden’s “walkers” to hide his shuffle, the short stairs to AF1, his frequent falls, cognitive lapses, teleprompter woes, needing naps for debate prep — everything.

Legacy media is attempting to rewrite history and play the hapless victim of a White House inner circle that managed to dupe them for four years, in a vain attempt to salvage their tattered reputations and cratered credibility.

This is the latest installment of that strategy.

Here’s the New York Times’ article from yesterday: How Biden’s Inner Circle Protected a Faltering President.

They rearranged meetings to make sure Mr. Biden was in a better mood — a strategy one person close to him described as how aides should handle any president. At times, they delayed sharing information with him, including negative polling data, as they debated the best way to frame it. They surrounded him with aides when he walked from the White House to the waiting presidential helicopter on the South Lawn so that news cameras could not capture his awkward bearing.

They had Mr. Biden use a teleprompter for even small fund-raisers in private homes, alarming donors, who were asked to provide questions beforehand. They came up with replacing the grand steps that presidents use to board Air Force One with a shorter set that led directly into the belly of the plane. They chastised White House correspondents for coverage of the president’s age. They hand-delivered memos to Mr. Biden describing social media posts the campaign staff had persuaded allies to write that pushed back on negative articles and polls.

Mr. Biden’s fumbles continued this week. In announcing a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas on Wednesday he confused the emir of Kuwait with the emir of Qatar and said Hezbollah rather than Hamas was responsible for the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. He also referred to his national security adviser as “Secretary Jake Sullivan” before catching himself.

Six key people protected the president.

No, it was many more people than that:

Eugene Robinson, Associate Editor, Washington Post:

And start here at 2:00 minutes, fo a fun ride down Memory Lane:

Forgive and Forget

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sorry, kids, this one’s for my niece back in Greenwich

CT Sen Richard Blumenthal Wants Kristi Noem To Just 'Put Aside' Concerns About Biden Admin's Role In Losing Track Of '300,000' Children

Blumenthal asked the nominee if she is willing to support efforts that help reunite migrant children who were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, leading Noem to dispute the accusations that President-elect Donald Trump enacted a family separation policy during his first term. The nominee said that she is “alarmed” by the “over 300,000 children” who went missing under the Biden administration.

“Senator, the Trump administration never had a family separation policy,” Noem said. “They had a zero tolerance policy which said that our laws would be followed. What I’m alarmed by is the over 300,000 children that went missing during the Biden administration, and when we talk about children and what they’re potentially facing in this country, and the trafficking that’s going on, this administration’s lack of desire to find out where those children are or what they may be going through is alarming to me. So I want to stop that.”

“My time is expiring so I’m just gonna interrupt again with apologies to say, put aside, let’s put aside the labels, let’s put aside what happened in the past. There’s still 1,000 children who are separated and waiting to be reunited. I’d like your commitment that you’re going to continue the effort to reunite them with their parents,” Blumenthal said.

Blumenthal’s long-standing concern for children is both commendable and understandable, given Senator “I served in Vietnam”’s war record, and his service to children during that conflict. After using his family’s connections to receive five deferments, according to the NY Times, and with his local draft board still breathing down his neck, the young Harvard graduate managed to arrange a place in the Marine Reserve and be assigned to Washington, where he courageously and without regard for his own personal safety headed up the Corp’s local Toys for Tots campaign. Modestly, he has subsequently made little mention of the medals he was awarded during that deployment, and that itself speaks volumes for his character and endearing, self-effacing personality.

“It was on the mean streets of D.C. where I learned my compassion for the little ones”, the old fraud told FWIW, “but it was our incredible Vice President who taught me to strive for what can be, and live life unburdened by what has been. Mayorkis is history; the time to deliver toys to needy children is now, if we can find the little squirts.”