☕️ GROUND HOGGING ☙ Thursday, July 25, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

A tale of two speeches—Joe rambled out a brief farewell and Netanyahu electrified Congress; good legal news for President Trump; great legal news for scrappy actress; Oklahoma returns to Bible; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your morning roundup of essential news and commentary includes: a tale of two speeches, beginning with Joe Biden’s short Long Goodbye; then Netanyahu’s triumphant return to Congress and the mostly peaceful protests it provoked; more good legal news for President Trump in his ABC defamation suit; great news for scrappy conservative actress and former MMA figher in her lawsuit versus Disney; and best of all, even for irreligious readers, the Bible lands on Oklahoma schools with a thrilling thud.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 Like the proverbial groundhog, Joe Biden tentatively emerged from his Rehobeth hidey hole yesterday, wriggled his nose, tentatively looked around, and mumbled thirteen minutes of empty platitudes someone else wrote for him, swallowing loudly from time to time, slurring certain words in a brand new kind of speech impediment, grabbing the side of the desk at one point for stability, and sitting rigidly in a tight frame at his Oval Office desk (or a reasonable facsimile thereof).

CLIP: Joe Biden addresses the nation after dropping out of 2024 race (13:23).

Groundhog Joe did not see his shadow, which means the Nation is destined for six more weeks of awkward presidential moments. Nobody else saw his shadow either because there was no one else in the frame, and despite not working all week, after ground hogging and delivering his brief remarks, Joe had no energy left for talking to reporters or answering questions.

A giddy and euphoric New York Times, doing its best to control its barely disguised joy at Joe’s candaditorial departure, multiplied the thirteen minutes of empty rhetorical calories into at least six long stories and editorials. One of the better-written, more bittersweet than swooning entries bore the headline, “The Beginning of Biden’s Long Goodbye.”

The Times had lots of company. Corporate media was packed with paeans to the old man. What courage! What self-awareness! What leadership! What a forgettable speech.

The headlines gave it away. There were tons of them, but none quoted any newsworthy line. In one of his longest speeches in recent memory, President Cabbage ignored the giant groundhog in the room, neglecting any mention of how he’d gotten to this point, and avoiding any reconciliation of his many vows to stay in the race on Friday (“I'm not going anywhere!”) with pulling the plug two days later on his barely-blipping, political cardiac monitor.

It was the same old headache-inducing pattern we are, unfortunately, all used to at this point: deny, deny, deny, deny, deny, deny, suddenly admit. And then shift the blame!

A picture of an actual groundhog I took on our last vacation. Not to scale.

I probably shouldn’t, but I’ll say it anyway. I’m not saying a ChatGPT deep fake delivered Biden’s Big Farewell Speech. You are welcome to decide that for yourself, it’s a free country, just ask any J6 inmate. But it sounded like a speech written by ChatGPT. Lots of bubbly words, call out to dead Presidents, rhetoric that might have been stirred if delivered by someone with a pulse, but no meaning.

So if you didn’t see it, you didn’t miss anything. We won’t miss Joe, either. Goodbye, President Groundhog. (With apologies to members of the marmota family.)

💬 It was a big day for speeches. The New York Times ran a companion story mirroring Joe’s Long* (* short) Goodbye, except this one featuring an ascendant political figure, pulse included, headlined “Netanyahu Delivers a Forceful Defense of Israel to Applause in Congress.” The two political speeches, delivered one after the other, presented fascinating points of comparison and difference.

Maybe the biggest difference between the two speeches was the optics. Joe delivered his brief, creaky address solo, abandoned and alone. The leader of the free world whispered to the country he allegedly leads for the first time in over a week for only thirteen minutes, through a camera. Nobody clapped.

But inside Congress, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, surrounded by hundreds of admiring Congressmen and other friends of Israel, spoke to a live audience for an hour, enunciating his words, not gulping like a beached goldfish, non-groundhog-like, and for his efforts was repeatedly blessed with rapturous applause — fifty times in 60 minutes.

Outside Congress, thousands of mostly peaceful, masked protestors burned U.S. flags, defaced historical monuments, delivered fiery, anti-Israel speeches condemning the war in Gaza, fought with police, dyed fountain water blood red, and raised Hamas flags on every flagpole they could get their hands on. USA Today reported the frantic scene outside the Capitol in its story headlined, “Police deploy pepper spray as Netanyahu protesters converge on Capitol.”

Nobody protested Joe’s lonely Farewell Address. Nobody cared.

The Biden Administration recently announced that Iran is financing anti-Israel protests in the United States. For whatever that is worth.

President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu have not gotten along well over the past several years. On Tuesday night, just before Netanyahu arrived, Trump provocatively posted a note of post-shooting sympathy he’d received from Palestinian Leader Mahmoud Abbas. Still, the two leaders meet in Mar-a-Lago on Friday, presumably to try to bury the hatchet of discord.

Netanyahu is also scheduled to meet with President Cabbage today, and later, separately, with Vice President Cackle. We’ll see how that goes.

🔥🔥 President Trump received some more good legal news yesterday. The Hill reported the story under the headline, “Judge won’t dismiss Trump’s defamation suit against ABC, Stephanopoulos.”

In a 21-page ruling issued yesterday, U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga rejected several defenses ABC and anchor George Stephanopoulos had raised against Trump’s lawsuit, including that they were protected by a fair reporting privilege. President Trump seemed happy:

Trump’s lawsuit alleged ABC’s anchorman defamed him. Stephanopoulos repeatedly stated on-air that President Trump was found “liable for rape” in the stale, thirty-year-old lawsuit brought by advice columnist, card-carrying cat lady, and one-letter first named E. Jean Carroll.

But the jury had found Trump liable for sexual abuse, not rape. They actually found him not guilty of rape.

For some reason for which ABC’s lawyers must someday answer, Stephanopoulos repeatedly and stubbornly refused to correct the record when given the chance. So Trump sued him. If the network’s lawyers ever wake up from their legal coma, they will advise ABC to settle. Now that the judge has denied dismissal, Trump’s team is entitled to discovery and the case will proceed to trial.

ABC lacks good options at this point. Under federal rules, the denial of a motion to dismiss is generally not appealable until after trial. So now, they’re on the Trump train till it reaches the final station, unless they buy their way off.

ABC did not respond to requests for comment. The delicious irony of giant media companies refusing to give statements when they are in the news is a dish best served warm with a side of vanilla syrup.

🔥🔥 There was more! Yesterday, Deadline reported a similarly terrific legal development in a story headlined “Gina Carano Beats Disney’s Move To Kill ‘Mandalorian’ Firing Suit; Now Trial Looms.”

In a story with potentially Galactic consequences, scrappy ex-MMA fighter and actress Gina Carano enjoyed a huge legal win yesterday. The actress starred as a popular regular in Disney’s top new Star Wars-themed show The Mandalorian. But Disney fired her in 2021 over a conservative tweet.

Yesterday, California U.S District Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett wrote a 23-page order denying Disney’s motion to dismiss Carano’s lawsuit. Presumably, Judge Garnett is not a Baby Yoda fan, and probably thinks he looks like a stupid puppet. But I digress. Disney tried to argue that its corporate mission was really to promote liberal values, and that Carano’s continued employment damaged the Disney brand.

I am not making that up.

But like an annoyed bounty hunter, Judge Garnett flatly rejected that silly argument. She wrote, “Defendants have not identified any evidence—in the Complaint or otherwise—to substantiate a claim that they employ public-facing actors for the purpose of promoting the ‘values of respect,’ ‘decency,’ ‘integrity,’ or ‘inclusion.’”

It seems to me that Disney has no business talking about values of respect, dignity, or integrity. Even the irony of invoking the value of ‘inclusion’ when they’d just fired an actress for thinking differently was, apparently, lost on the media giant, whose corporate mascot is a mutated rodent in desperate need of an exterminator.

Despite Disney’s high-mindedness, the judge found the company was actually in business to make money, and was not some kind of public charity. “Unlike the Boy Scouts or the Jaycees, Defendants are not members-only, nonprofit organizations. Instead, Defendants are for-profit corporations who, as relevant to this lawsuit, employ actors such as Plaintiff to create television series and films.”

With its motion to dismiss having been denied, Disney now, just like ABC, faces discovery. And in Disney’s case, discovery will be much more potentially risky and damaging than the kind of discovery ABC faces. Just imagine all the virtue-signaling emails about Carano that must have been shooting around the woke media company at the time.

They picked the wrong ex-MMA bounty hunter to pick on. If Disney were smart, it would settle. But Disney is woke, not smart, so who knows. But Judge Garnett just handed Carano a fully-charged blaster.

🔥🔥 Another state has joined the Biblical comeback. The Hill ran a very encouraging, counter-revolutionary story yesterday headlined, “‘The woke radicals will not like it’: Oklahoma releases Bible guidelines for schools.” Most of you will love this story.

CLIP: Superintendent Walters explains the need for the Bible in public education (1:35).

On Wednesday, Oklahoma released guidance to all the state’s school districts directing them to incorporate the Bible and the Ten Commandments into public school lesson plans, a change the state’s Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters mandated last month. Since nothing is truly official anymore until it’s on Twitter/X, Superintendant Walters posted this provocative tweet yesterday:

Why the American left allowed itself to be defined as the anti-Bible party is a mystery I will never understand. Teaching kids about the Bible’s massive historical significance should be uncontroversial, but the book apparently causes woke liberals to burst into flames.

If you’d like to see the details for yourself, the link to Walters’ tweet (above) included several sample pages from the new guidance. It focuses teachers and students on the Bible’s historical context, including themes like literary analysis, comparative ethical traditions (with other influential religious texts), historical documents and speeches, referencing Biblical sources, and critical thinking about how the Bible has influenced things like the development of Western Civilization and the civil rights movement.

Before our valued and respected secular C&C readers take umbrage, Oklahoma’s carefully written new standards also included a fulsome section on legal concerns, including forbidding the Bible from being used for religious indoctrination:

If you feel uncomfortable with the Bible’s re-entry into public schools, I would also encourage you to reflect on the woeful state of modern public education. The Bible can’t make things any worse. And it might even help! Let’s just try it and see.

These remarkable developments restoring our traditional Judeo-Christian heritage (i.e., Old and New Testaments) are the fruits of what I am beginning, more and more, to believe could have been the most influential in a recent series of terrific Supreme Court decisions.

Two years ago, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Supreme Court found a high-school football coach had been illegally fired for leading his team in prayer before games. In the decision, the Court essentially overruled a sour decision by a much more liberal Court in 1971, called Lemon v. Kurtzman.

Lemon created a legal framework or test, which for some reason everybody called the “Lemon Test,” for analyzing government actions to determine whether they violated the Establishment Clause and the made-up “separation of Church and State” standard. The Lemon Test caused Christianity to drain out of public school education. But in 2022’s Kennedy case, the Supreme Court discarded the Lemon Test, returning the country to the status quo ante.

The result, which we are watching play out in real-time, is a slow red-state return to the original types of historical educational standards that, until 1971, were commonplace. So it won’t turn America into a theocracy, despite liberal paranoid fantasies like The Handmaid’s Tale.

While decisions like Loper Bright (which upended the Chevron doctrine) dominate the headlines, the Kennedy case might have the most beneficial cultural effect on future generations of Americans. Oklahoma is leading, reminding me of the profound reason it is called the ‘Sooner State,’ which frankly I have no idea. I think they just made that up. Sooner than what?

Anyway, great work, Oklahoma! This is some truly terrific progress.

Have a terrific Thursday! C&C shall return tomorrow morning, with another terrific and mildly amusing roundup of all the day’s essential news and commentary.

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