Cross-Examination

• Biden’s “accomplishments” are a bad joke: Joe Biden’s X (Twitter) account called it “One more great year in the books,” but no one seems to have noticed. We’re speaking of a self-congratulatory post from December 30 in which Team Biden trumpets its, er, “major accomplishments” from the year past. You know — accomplishments like having “tackled inflation and lowered costs,” “tackled the climate crisis,” “invested in America and created good jobs,” “protected access to reproductive health care,” “made America safer from gun violence,” “made higher education more affordable,” “strengthened democracy at home and abroad,” and “confirmed highly qualified judges.” None of these claims can withstand scrutiny, and we could easily take each of them apart, but suffice it to say that both Biden and his publicists are benefiting from rock-bottom expectations. After all, it’s hard to fall off the floor. How, for example, could gravity-defying Bidenflation not eventually come down after having been so bone-crushingly high for so long? As such, these “accomplishments” merely betray the Biden administration’s delusions of adequacy.

• New York wants to join Colorado, Maine: Yesterday, we noted that Maine’s Trump-deranged secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, had kicked the once and perhaps future president off that state’s primary ballot for “insurrection,” and we called her move nothing more than a bizarre and desperate act of individual tyranny. Colorado’s Supreme Court had similarly removed Trump from the ballot in a dubious legal decision that’s sure to be overturned by the real Supreme Court. But perhaps we were premature in dismissing the appeal of this stunt. In neighboring New York, it’s monkey see, monkey do. There, as National Review reports, a New York City councilman is urging the state’s Board of Elections to disqualify Trump from the state’s 2024 primary and general election ballots for the same ridiculous Civil War-era insurrection claim. (Isn’t it interesting how leftists suddenly discover the Constitution when they think it can protect them from Donald Trump?) But, as Colorado’s GOP lawyers rightly warn, unless that lunatic court’s decision is overturned, “Any voter will have the power to sue to disqualify any political candidate. … This will not only distort the 2024 presidential election but will also mire courts henceforth in political controversies over nebulous accusations of insurrection.”

• Disney loses top spot: The Hollywood box office numbers are in for 2023 and, for the first time since 2015, Disney saw Universal take over the top spot for highest-grossing films of the year. While both studios raked in over $4 billion in global sales ($4.907 billion for Universal and $4.827 billion for Disney), it was the first time since 2014 (excluding the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021) that Disney failed to have a single movie cross the $1 billion threshold. Furthermore, it was the first time in years that Disney failed to have a movie in the top three grossing films. Disney’s slide has been illustrated by a string of movie failures like “The Marvels” and “Wish,” but the bigger lesson is that Disney’s decision to lean into leftist woke narratives has not paid off.

• Twenty-four EVs lose tax credits: While electric vehicle sales climbed last year, they still accounted for just 9% of total new vehicles sold in 2023. However, thanks to new federal rules on battery sourcing going into effect on Monday, EV sales will likely struggle, as a majority of EVs currently on the market fail to meet the new requirements for federal tax credits. Last year, 43 EV models qualified for the federal tax credit of up to $7,500. So far in 2024, only 19 EV models qualify for the tax credit. The list of automakers whose EVs now fail to qualify for the tax credit includes Nissan, Tesla, GM, VW, and Ford. Thanks to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which requires an EV to be assembled in the U.S. to qualify for a tax credit, roughly 70% of current EVs on the market now fail to qualify.

• Top Hamas official meets 72 virgins: You hate to see it. Just hate to see Hamas terrorists getting vaporized. But that’s exactly what happened to Saleh Arouri in a southern suburb of Beirut on Tuesday. Arouri, as the Associated Press reports, was the deputy political head of Hamas and a founder of its military wing. Apparently, he’d been on Israel’s hit list for years. “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had threatened to kill him even before Hamas carried out its deadly surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7,” the AP says. “Israel had accused Arouri, 57, of masterminding attacks against it in the West Bank, where he was the group’s top commander. In 2015, the U.S. Department of the Treasury designated Arouri as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist offering $5 million for information about him.” And now he’s in paradise. A drone enema will do that to a guy. Sounds like he knew he had it coming, though. Asked a few months ago about being in the crosshairs, Arouri said, “It is not strange for us for the commanders and cadres of the movement to be martyred.” To him, we can only belatedly say, Happy Martyrdom.

• Few illegal migrants interested in voting: With Washington, DC, recently joining several Democrat-run cities across the country in extending voting rights to noncitizens, often with little distinction between legal and illegal residency, Republicans have rightly raised objections. Indeed, most of the rationale behind Joe Biden’s de facto open border is to grow the Democrats’ voter base. Yet even with the Democrats’ blatant efforts to effectively disenfranchise American citizens, data shows that these efforts have so far failed to have a significant impact on elections. Back in 2016, San Francisco first allowed noncitizens to vote in local school board elections, yet in the 2022 election with over 300,000 votes cast, just 72 were from noncitizens. Maryland has long led the nation in pushing voting rights to noncitizens, but like San Francisco, it has witnessed few noncitizens embracing it. In Takoma Park, Maryland, which recorded 347 noncitizens on its rolls in 2017, just 72 cast ballots that year. Maybe the reason noncitizens aren’t voting is because they worry that registering would put them at risk of being thrown out of the country.

• Woke cancel culture warriors tear down another statue: In Jacksonville, Florida, a statue erected 108 years ago as a “Tribute to the Women of the Confederacy” was removed by order of Democrat Mayor Donna Deegan last week. Deegan’s reason for removing the statue was that “symbols matter,” and she argued that the statue was a divisive symbol of inequality and racism. But was it? The truth is the exact opposite. The statue was erected as a symbol of unity and reconciliation to a nation that had been ripped in two by a civil war. It was in keeping with Abraham Lincoln’s admonishment for the nation to “strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.” As Republican Florida State Representative Dean Black observed of Deegan’s action, it was not only a “stunning abuse of power” but “another in a long line of woke Democrats’ obsession with cancel culture and tearing down history.”

• Obama overrated? Say it ain’t so: History finally appears to be catching up with our nation’s first half-black president, and not a moment too soon. As The Washington Times reports: “Former President Barack Obama has been compared to Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela, which may explain why he was the runaway winner in a newly released poll of conservative thinkers on the most overrated political figures. Mr. Obama topped the rankings of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity survey, which compiled responses from 120 ‘influential conservative thought makers,’ including lawmakers, governors, scholars, business leaders and writers.” Obama made history in 2008, but he was overhyped from the get-go, and he was thus doomed to disappoint his legions. Indeed, beyond winning our nation’s presidential popularity contest, writing three (and counting) memoirs, and raking in a laughably preemptive Nobel Peace Prize, what does he actually have to show for his time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — aside, that is, from fundamentally transforming our nation for the worse? Answer: Not much. Not much at all.

Headlines

• House GOP’s majority to shrink further after member announces resignation (Daily Caller)

• Biden administration asks Supreme Court to approve cutting of Texas’s border razor wire (National Review)

• New York Times publishes op-ed by Hamas mayor of Gaza, gets blasted (Daily Wire)

• “Screams without words”: How Hamas weaponized sexual violence on October 7 (New York Times)

• One in five young Americans has a positive view of Osama Bin Laden (Daily Mail)

• Sen. Bob Menendez hit with new allegations involving bribes and a Qatari investment deal (NBC News)

• U.S. debt eclipses $34 trillion for first time (Washington Post)

• U.S. office buildings face $117 billion debt time bomb (Daily Mail)

• China ramping up nuclear energy as U.S. turns to wind and solar (Washington Times)

• At least 103 killed in Iran “terrorist attack” at event honoring general taken out in U.S. drone strike, Tehran says (NY Post)

• Court rules that federal government cannot force Texas hospitals to carry out abortions (Washington Examiner)

• Man arrested after breaking into Colorado Supreme Court, opening fire (National Review)

• Blatantly unconstitutional California law banning concealed carry goes into effect (MRCTV)

• New California law: suspect’s preferred pronouns to go with mugshots (MRCTV)

• USA Boxing allows men to fight women with new transgender guidelines (Daily Wire)

• Seventy-two things higher ed declared racist in 2023 (College Fix)

• Policy: Are you in an anti-free speech state? We now have the definitive list (Jonathan Turley)

• Humor: Epstein list hangs itself moments before release (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.