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Friday’s Final Word – HotAir

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May 15, 2026
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Friday's Final Word – HotAir

I’m worse at what I do best, and for this tab I feel blessed …





A funeral mass will follow at 11am, and burial will take place at Cedar Knoll Cemetery in Taunton, Massachusetts.

Ed: Let’s make this happen. Readers in the area, sound off if you can make it. 

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ABC News: Rep. Steve Cohen, a longtime Tennessee Democrat, announced Friday he will not seek reelection and instead retire at the end of his term, after his Memphis district was carved up in the state assembly’s redistricting effort.

“This is by far the most difficult moment I’ve had as an elected official,” Cohen said. his voice choked with emotion as he announced he sent a letter Friday to the state capital asking not to appear on the ballot.

“I don’t want to quit. I’m not a quitter, but these districts were drawn to beat me. They were drawn to defeat me,” Cohen said.

Ed: The previous districts were drawn to elect a black Democrat, and that never stopped Cohen. It’s very revealing that Cohen won’t even try to compete in one of the new districts. Democrats might have had some advantage with his incumbency … or maybe now they’ll have to look for a moderate rather than a hard-Left crank. 

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Ed: Yikes. 

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Nellie Bowles in The Free Press: This week, The Wall Street Journal brings us news of a perfect Covid scam. Just one little $10 billion example. Yes, billion. With a b. The scam was directed at the “Shuttered Venue Operators Grant,” which was meant to “support theaters and music halls.” Except most of the cash seems to have gone to rich performers and talent agents.

It’s hard to get one’s head around $10 billion of waste. Does the report say that the rapper Lil Wayne spent $1.3 million of the taxpayer grant money on private jets? Of course. Does the report say that Chris Brown gave himself a random $5 million bucks? Sure does.





The federal government is now trying to do a big fraud crackdown across the board. They estimate that $180 billion was stolen last year, mostly through Medicare and Medicaid scams. Which means this is, what, ten times that? Here’s Dr. Oz on the fraud crackdown: “We believe that at least half of the hospices in the entire area around Los Angeles are fraudulent. And today we announce 800 of those hospices have been suspended. . . . Eight hundred hospices that last year charged the federal taxpayer $1.4 billion will no longer be paid.”

Ed: Republicans warned that the rush to create COVID relief would mainly benefit scammers, but … holy hell. Let’s also not forget that we had to rush that relief because the medical establishment insisted on shutdowns that went well beyond the “15 Days to Stop the Spread.” We’d have been better off staying open, or failing that, simply backstopping payrolls for two weeks directly to employers and then forcing the reopening. 

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… If the Court will not deliver the right result, the Court must be expanded until it does. If the states will not deliver the right result, new states must be invented. If a particular law enforcement agency keeps enforcing laws the activist class dislikes, the agency must be abolished, and the laws retired and criminals protected.”

Ed: That’s a pretty good explanation for why Finger Lickin’ Good Cohen won’t try to run in the upcoming election. It’s also a very good description of everything Hakeem Jeffries has said over the last several months. 





===

Mark Goldfeder at NRO: Israel isn’t stupid. No serious observer believes the Israeli government is going to march into federal court and argue that Nicholas Kristof hurt the country’s feelings. But the critics are knocking down a straw man while missing the actual legal architecture that could work and which, if properly structured, would put the Times in a genuinely uncomfortable position. The play here is not a sovereign defamation claim. It is a narrow Israeli tort theory paired with American discovery. …

A global newspaper owes some duty of care before printing a claim this specific and this inflammatory. The more serious the allegation, the heavier the verification burden. The Times cannot hide behind the general importance of reporting on detainee abuse. Publishing that Israeli soldiers laughed while a dog raped a prisoner is not reporting on prison conditions. It is a factual claim that either happened or did not. If the Times has the evidence, production will vindicate them. If they do not, that is the story.

Which brings us to the real mechanism: 28 U.S.C. § 1782.

Once an Israeli proceeding is in reasonable contemplation, an interested person can apply in the Southern District of New York (where the New York Times is headquartered) to compel evidence production from a U.S. entity for use in foreign litigation. A properly framed § 1782 application does not ask the court to adjudicate the case; it simply asks the court to order the Times to produce the factual basis for one published allegation.

Ed: Read the whole thing. This makes a lot more sense in terms of inflicting pain on the NYT and Kristof, but I am not altogether convinced that a sovereign entity can’t sue for defamation. If not, Israel can file suit on behalf of the guards in these prisons as a class action, and that would also likely evade the Sullivan standard for “public persons,” too. 





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Douglas Murray at the NY Post: As it happens, I have been in the prisons where the October 7 terrorists who were captured alive are being held. Over the years, I have been in many prisons where jihadists like them are detained. I have been in American- and Iraqi-run prisons where members of al Qaeda have been held. And the circumstances in which Israel holds the October 7 terrorists are exactly like those.

The conditions are sparse and unpleasant. But that is because the Israelis are holding prisoners who literally wanted to die as well as kill when they invaded southern Israel. In prison, they will use whatever they can find to kill their guards.

But these conditions are still a world away from the lies that Kristof and the New York Times decided to print without evidence. ….

Meantime, I am sure we can all look forward to the Gray Lady’s next piece pondering the inexplicable rise of Jew-hatred in the United States.

Ed: Or, more likely, celebrating it. 

===

Ed: Ah yes, the “fake but accurate” gambit. What a surprise that is coming from Ben Rhodes. 

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Isaac Schorr at Mediaite: Israel is an imperfect state composed of people both good and bad in its government, its military, and every other facet of its society. There should be little doubt that bad things happen in its prisons, for the same reasons that bad things happen in almost every prison across the world. Human nature is an ugly thing, and those indignities that have actually occurred are deserving of coverage. What Kristof has done, however, is amplify preposterous stories from proven bad actors and anonymous sources to paint a picture of a uniquely demented, inhuman people capable of inflicting horrors the rest of us can’t imagine.





Sound familiar?

There will be no apology or recanting, no reckoning or self-reflection. Instead, the Times will let Kristof’s shoddy work be forgotten by all but those who will use it as still more fuel for the ever-raging fire of the world’s oldest, most fervent, and resilient hatred — a new, fantastical blood libel produced by a useful idiot, in service of an ancient evil.

Ed: Useful idiot or willing amplifier of terrorist propaganda? YMMV. 

===

The directive was absolute, no item of Chinese origin was permitted to board the aircraft. The precautions extended beyond the departure itself. Delegation members had left all personal electronic devices at home before traveling to China and operated exclusively on clean burner phones throughout the duration of the trip.

Ed: “Don’t trust and verify.” That’s a good policy when dealing with the CCP. This is good hygiene, but it raises the question of the value of summits taking place in Beijing. If we can’t even trust their swag, what good are their promises and commitments?

===

Julio Rosas at Mostly Peaceful: It is ludicrous that someone who is supposed to enforce laws can campaign on telling illegal aliens, “Don’t worry, your immigration status can actually help you if you commit crimes in my county!”

It is no joke that sanctuary cities and counties are a big magnet for illegal aliens to settle in. When I was asking illegal immigrants at the start of the Bide-Harris border crisis where they were going, an unexpected place I kept hearing was North Carolina. I kept hearing North Carolina from people, who were not related, but were crossing in the same large groups.





I later asked a contact who worked at the Department of Homeland Security why, to which the response was, “Because the cartels funnel them to the sanctuary counties so they have an easier time working off their debt” since cartel operatives had set up shop there.

As I said in the video above, Democrats are not alarmed over the fact that up to 20% of people living in Fairfax County could be deported or know someone who could be deported. They are instead alarmed that large percentage of people have not been legalized!

Ed: Julio makes a hugely important point about “sanctuary” jurisdictions and human trafficking. Perhaps the Department of Justice should explore those connections more closely. 

===

Ed: That was the sense I got from China’s readout, which notably avoided even the mention of Iran. Beijing didn’t correct the record when Trump made the same claims publicly. One wonders whether Ahmad Vahidi got that sense of things as well. 

===

Politico: The Texas Supreme Court on Friday denied a push from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton to expel Democratic lawmakers who fled the state to delay a redistricting vote last summer. …

Texas Supreme Court Justice James Sullivan, who wrote the Friday opinion, said the incident “passed too quickly for us to engage in factfinding that might’ve justified quo warranto relief.”

But Sullivan appeared sympathetic to Abbott’s claims that quorum-breaking risked becoming a new normal. In his opinion, he said the Democratic flight created a “constitutional crisis” and “crippled” the Texas Legislature.





“Were it to happen yet again, I believe the next set of quorumbreakers had better be ready to pay us a visit,” he wrote. “Our original jurisdiction to issue writs of quo warranto will empower us to inquire whether they’ve abandoned their legislative offices and, if we so find, to throw them out.”

Ed: Meh. That’s an empty threat. If it had teeth, Sullivan should have imposed that penalty now so as to prevent the next set of absconders. 

===

Ed: Biden still hasn’t shown up for that second debate. 


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