USA

There’s a funny clip from the TV series The Young Pope, in which Pius XII, a brash, cynical American played by Jude Law, hosts in his office the Vatican’s new marketing chief. She tells the pontiff that she was educated at Harvard.

“The word ‘Harvard’ may impress people around here,” the pope sneers, “but to an American, it means one thing only: decline.”

The Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza offers Iraq “a historic opportunity,” Hassan Nasrallah, the influential leader of the Lebanese group Hezbollah, said in his speech late last week.

Hezbollah is a political and military organization based in Lebanon and is opposed to Israel. As such, it is part of a network of groups in the region, which Iran supports to one degree or another, that feel the same way about Israel. That includes the Houthis in Yemen and various paramilitary groups in Iraq.

As Nasrallah said in his speech, all of these groups have been “distracting the enemy” during the Israel-Hamas conflict.

The Bezos Post sent Meryl Kornfield to the cornfields of Iowa to get a quote from Vivek Ramaswamy so she could write that he’s a white supremacist. She made the mistake of asking him the question in public, at a Ramaswamy rally, because that gave him the opportunity to humiliate her in public.

And he did.

WAPO reporter doubles down: You didn’t say that you condemn white supremacy though.

She immediately regrets it.@VivekGRamaswamy isn’t going to play the game. pic.twitter.com/2NHshriVZa

— Chris Carapezza (@Chris_Carapezza) January 3, 2024

h/t DS

If the Biden administration is really serious about tackling the threat posed by Iran-backed Houthi rebels to international shipping in the Red Sea, it needs to authorise the type of decisive military action that will deter the Iranian proxy from undertaking further attacks.

At a time when Iran is reluctant to provoke a direct confrontation with the US and its allies in response to the Gaza crisis, Tehran has instead opted to use its various proxies in the Middle East to do its dirty work.

My first Townhall Column of the year was my top 2024 predictions, but one prediction did not fit with its snarky vibe. Let me make it now. In 2024, we’re going to see a massive terrorist attack here in the United States. I’m not going to sugarcoat it – I’m worried that we’re facing a terrorist threat unlike anything we’ve ever seen and that a lot of Americans are going to die. It does not have to happen, but because the people running this country are so corrupt, malicious, and incompetent, it will.

h/t XC