Quick Hits

Kash Patel and Dan Bongino promise a "wave of transparency" with never-before-seen Russiagate documents to be released in the next two weeks.

FBI Director Kash Patel said on Fox News that "truckloads" of previously unreleased documents related to the Russia probe known as Crossfire Hurricane and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot will soon be made public in a "wave of transparency."

He said the previous FBI leadership hid documents and information pertaining to the Russia probe "where people weren't supposed to look."

Patel, alongside Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, said on the Fox News show "Sunday Morning Futures" that the release could happen within two weeks.

"Just give us about a week or two," Patel said.

A tall-masted Mexican navy ship crashed into the Brooklyn Bridge.

Authorities are investigating after a Mexican Navy ship crashed into the Brooklyn Bridge on May 17, leaving two dead and 19 injured.

The Cuauhtémoc, a sail training vessel for the Mexican Navy, lost power before striking the bridge connecting the Brooklyn and Manhattan boroughs around 8:20 p.m. ET, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said.

Social media videos of the crash showed the ship's 147-foot masts sheared off by the impact.

Adams said on X that there were nearly 300 people on board. In addition to the two sailors who died, two people are in critical condition, Adams said.

A Mexican ship crashed into a bridge in a blue city port and Charles Schumer has only one question: How did DOGE and Musk cause this?

Nick Sortor @nicksortor

NEW: Chuck Schumer has blamed DOGE for the Brooklyn Bridge ship accident

Man, the Elon Derangement Syndrome is STRONG here

According to Schumer, DOGE is the reason a MEXICAN SHIP reversed itself into a bridge at a high rate of speed, which it was too tall to clear.

WTF is wrong with these people?

Video of the senile obsessive Chuck Schumer here.

Video of the Musk-caused collision here. Too bad. It's a beautiful ship.

Marxist grifter AOC has removed her engagement ring.

Look closely and you'll see: Something is missing from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's (D., N.Y.) ring finger.

Ocasio-Cortez hasn't been pictured wearing her engagement ring since November 2023, according to an extensive Washington Free Beacon review of Getty and Associated Press images, as well as the lawmaker's social media posts and public appearances. The ring's 17-month absence, which has gone unnoticed in the press until now, raises questions about the status of her betrothal to her low-profile fiancé, web developer Riley Roberts, who proposed to Ocasio-Cortez during a vacation to Puerto Rico in April 2022. No news of their nuptials has emerged in the three years since.

...

Far from being mere tabloid fodder, the legal status of Ocasio-Cortez's relationship with Roberts also carries significant financial and ethical ramifications for the potential 2028 presidential candidate. By virtue of remaining unmarried to Ocasio-Cortez, Roberts retains certain privacy privileges not afforded to the legally married spouses of other lawmakers.

He has been exempt from publicly disclosing his assets, stock trades, and his places of employment as a part of Ocasio-Cortez's annual financial disclosure reports. It's a level of secrecy not granted to the spouses of Ocasio-Cortez's married colleagues such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), whose husband's market-busting stock trades frequently make national headlines.

I mentioned on Friday that Jen Psaki's ratings crashed the day after she debuted. Free Beacon:

Psaki debuted her new show, The Briefing, which will occupy Maddow's coveted 9 p.m. weekday time slot (except on Mondays, when Maddow hosts), on May 6. MSNBC's new boss, Rebecca Kutler, reportedly views Psaki as the "face of the network's new era." The ratings for the debut weren't bad, presumably because some Maddow fans were unaware of the switchover. They crashed down to earth the following day. On May 7, viewership in the crucial 25-54 age demographic--the only number advertisers care about--plunged from 139,000 to just 65,000, a decline of 53 percent. The Briefing was crushed in the demographic by time-slot competitors at Fox News and CNN. Psaki was also outperformed by reruns of Bob's Burger, King of Queens, and Paw Patrol.

During her first week in primetime, Psaki averaged 92,000 viewers in the demographic, a 47 percent decline compared to Maddow's last full week. On Tuesday, The Briefing drew just 79,000 viewers in the coveted age group, putting Psaki in fourth place among MSNBC's weekday hosts. Even Nicolle Wallace, the obnoxious personality known for her flirtatious infatuation with convicted felon Michael Avenatti, got more viewers. Only the Maddow look-alike Chris Hayes at 6 p.m. and Stephanie Rhule at 11 p.m., well past the bedtime of MSNBC's elderly viewers, had lower ratings in the demographic. Hayes is widely regarded as one of the worst hosts in the history of cable news.

The leftwing "analyst" at AdWeek finds good news for CNN: Kasie Hunt was their most-watched propagandist on Friday. That's the headline.

They ran that headline instead of the real headline: CNN's ratings are a disaster.

Their ratings in the all-important demo are well below one hundred thousand all day long:

You're not going to believe this: A former press secretary to "Doctor" Jill Biden said there was a "culture of concealment" in the Biden, Inc. crime family.

Biden family insider Michael LaRosa opened up about the former administration's culture of concealment while speaking to Fox News on Sunday, telling "FOX & Friends Weekend" co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy that the people surrounding the former president during his tenure in the White House were unwilling to be transparent.

"This was a group in the White House who were allergic to transparency, and I'm talking about just in the East Wing," he said. "The very first day walking into the White House, the usher was fired, and I couldn't get reporters straight answers, because nobody would give me straight answers."

...

"What I am suggesting... [is] it was not intuitive... it was not their style to be transparent about anything. They took days and months to be deliberative, and I'm talking about the small things, about when the dog bites occurred," LaRosa said, referencing the former first family's dog, Major, who had reportedly bitten multiple people.

"Or about the wedding with the grandkids," he continued. "They got caught lying to the press about press coverage, because they were so scared to be transparent about anything.

"I said to myself at some point, 'If it's this hard to get them to just be transparent and disclose things and to just be upfront from the beginning about anything, even the small things... My God, what would happen if there were big things?'"

Good thing those "big things" never happened. (Sarcasm.)

David Axelrod's call for us to put aside questions about the Biden Senility Conspiracy while he "struggles" with cancer -- and note, this cancer is now incurable, so he'll have it for as long as he lives -- is rejected.

If anything, Hur was too gentle with Biden. He patiently listened to the president's rambling, incoherent anecdotes, and attempted to steer him back to the topic at hand: alleged improper storage of classified documents. Biden's behavior during the five-hour interview raised serious questions about his fitness for office at that time, let alone whether he remained sharp enough to perform the most demanding job in the world for another four years.

Top Democrats, however, echoed Biden's talking points that behind closed doors, the president was at the top of his game. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D--N.Y.) said Biden's mental acuity was "as good as it's been over the years," and that the pair would talk several times a week. The message from virtually every Democratic leader who interacted with Biden was the same: Hur is a partisan actor and shouldn't be trusted, Biden is absolutely fine. Everyone knows that's false.

...

It would be very convenient for the Democratic leadership, then, if the media and the public simply moved on from the Biden cover-up. Unsurprisingly, at least one prominent Democratic pundit is advising just that. David Axelrod, former advisor to President Barack Obama and current CNN talking head, said on Sunday that conversations about Biden's cognitive decline "should be more muted and set aside for now as he's struggling through this."

That's a preposterous suggestion made in service of an obvious, partisan cause. Biden and his handlers steadfastly maintained that he was fit for office and should seek a second term, even amidst mounting, well-founded concerns about his health. They attempted to pull a fast one on the American people, and they were caught.

It is perfectly possible to remain respectful, magnanimous, and well-meaning toward Biden in terms of his battle with cancer while continuing to seek answers about who knew what, and when.

Roger Simon: It's time for the conspirators to resign in disgrace.

He calls them "traitors."

Alex Berenson has an accurate enough description of the rather lengthy leaked portions. (You can listen for yourself here if you have the stomach):

"They are awful. They show a man in severe cognitive decline. Biden couldn't recall even basic facts, like when elections are held. Yes, Joe Biden -- who had lusted for the presidency his entire life -- thought Donald Trump had won in November 2017, not 2016. It wasn't a verbal slip. He didn't know. An aide had to correct him.

"Even that summary doesn't capture Biden's struggles.

"What he says is bad. How he says it is worse. His voice is weak and whispery. He goes silent for stretches, loses his train of thought, offers oddly emotional asides about his son Beau -- though he could not remember when Beau died. He seems not to remember being vice-president; he speaks of being a senator and then jumps to running for president."

Is there anything remotely surprising about this? Not at all. If anything, it's understated. Nevertheless, it's good that we could finally hear some of the interview. The reasons it was covered up are all too obvious.

...

You can also be sure that every major and most of the minor nations of the world were well aware of what was happening simply by watching television, as the rest of us did, or through their intelligence agencies in greater detail. They may even have known about the cancer before any of us.

To put it bluntly, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Ayatollah Khamenei and Kim Jong-on, to name a few, all knew the so-called Leader of the Free World was "gaga." They also may know more of who was really calling the shots behind him.

Meanwhile, inflation ran rampant and illegal immigrants of all sorts flooded into our country weakening it, destroying our economy and threatening the safety of our citizens.

And yet Democrat Party leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries said nothing. Indeed, they did the opposite. They insisted Biden was fine, as did the vast percentage of the mainstream (aka legacy) media when almost all knew better. They did it for so long that when Biden finally fell apart they had no choice but to turn to Kamala Harris, far from the most formidable of competitors.

In this country, treason is defined as levying war against the United States or "giving aid and comfort to the enemy."

This coverup or coverups sounds like the latter to me. Whether it would hold in a court of law is another question, but nonetheless the perpetrators are people who still act as if they deserve to lead us. They decidedly do not. They are, quite clearly, liars.

Even CNN's DEI Propagandist Abby Phillip thinks Biden sounds pretty bad in those tapes that Biden fought desperately to conceal forever. (Maybe that was a clue Phillip could have followed up on two years ago.)

CNN anchor Abby Phillip said Friday that Special Counsel Robert Hur "undersold" former President Joe Biden's cognitive issues in his report on Biden's handling of classified documents.

Phillip made the comments on NewsNight after Axios released audio clips of Hur's 2023 interview with Biden, which included moments where the president appeared confused, struggled to recall dates, and grew emotional discussing the death of his son Beau.

In one excerpt, Biden paused before saying, "What month did Beau die? Oh God, May 30th," after stumbling over the timeline of events.

Another clip featured Biden saying, "Well, um... I, I, I, I, I don't know," when asked to recall details related to documents from 2017 or 2018.

Hur's written report about Biden's mishandling of classified documents described Biden as a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."

At the time, Democrats accused him of attempting to undercut Biden's credibility and peppering the report with political bias.

But Phillip said Friday night that Hur may have actually downplayed what the audio revealed.

"In a way, Robert Hur kind of undersold this," Phillip said. "He kind of threw Joe Biden a lifeline. It was an opportunity, actually, for Democrats to take it seriously, maybe change gears at that point, maybe give a potential nominee more time."

Sadly, Scott Adams announced he too has prostate cancer and does not expect to survive the summer.

I'm sure David Axelrod will call for a reversal of newspapers' cowardly decision to stop running his Dilbert cartoon because he was pro-Trump. Just while he struggles with cancer.

Right? Nor no?

Instapundit linked this important context: Don't go so hard on "journalists." They're all low-functioning alcoholics.

Journalists drink too much, are bad at managing emotions, and operate at a lower level than average, according to a new study

Lindsay Dodgson
May 19, 2017, 11:12 AM UTC

Journalists' brains show a lower-than-average level of executive functioning, according to a new study, which means they have a below-average ability to regulate their emotions, suppress biases, solve complex problems, switch between tasks, and show creative and flexible thinking.

The study, led by Tara Swart, a neuroscientist and leadership coach, analysed 40 journalists from newspapers, magazines, broadcast, and online platforms over seven months. The participants took part in tests related to their lifestyle, health, and behaviour.

...

The results showed that journalists' brains were operating at a lower level than the average population, particularly because of dehydration and the tendency of journalists to self-medicate with alcohol, caffeine, and high-sugar foods.

Forty-one percent of the subjects said they drank 18 or more units of alcohol a week, which is four units above the recommended weekly allowance. Less than 5% drank the recommended amount of water.

posted by Ace at 06:20 PM

| Access Comments