Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

‘God hates pride,’ from the Colorado GOP to you

“The month of June has arrived and, once again, the godless groomers in our society want to attack what is decent, holy, and righteous so they can ultimately harm our children.” After starting his Monday morning with a nice cup of tea, Cockburn was surprised to open his email and find this attack on the alphabet community from Dave Williams, chairman of Colorado Republicans. The email, which also had last year’s email pasted below, was short and aggressive: “Thank you, and as we said last year, together, we can protect our children and future... but only if you get involved and defend the most vulnerable in our society from these woke creeps.” A clip of Pastor Mark Driscoll's sermon was linked in the email, in which he engages in a cute object lesson.

pride cockburn colorado gop

Biden’s faux border crackdown

President Joe Biden announced an executive order this week that he claims will “help us to gain control of our border, restore order to the process” by banning migrants from seeking asylum if they cross the border illegally. At first glance, this seems like a welcome move to reduce a major pull factor for illegal crossings, even if it flies in the face of Biden’s claim in January that he had “done all I can do” on the border.As always, though, the devil is in the details. First, the limitations on asylum seekers only kick in once illegal crossings exceed 2,500 per day, which is nearly 1 million per year. As Ammon Blair, a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation told me, Biden is going to “meter the invasion.

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Joe Biden’s TIME interview: the good the bad and the ugly

President Joe Biden sat down for an interview with TIME magazine in the White House last week. The questions centered around foreign affairs, with interviewers Massimo Calabresi and Sam Jacobs asking about D-Day, Ukraine, Israel and Hamas, nuclear power, China, inflation, tariffs and immigration. Back in March Americans generally agreed that the economy and foreign affairs were weak points in Biden’s administration. The TIME interview is unlikely to change anyone’s mind. Cockburn identified a few overarching themes: Biden accused TIME of misreporting and leaving his accomplishments unreported. The first accusation: “The Russian military has been decimated. You don’t write about that. It’s been freaking decimated.” Another theme: senility.

Why Biden is ‘toughening up’ on the border

With “Securing Our Borders” signs behind him, President Joe Biden announced this afternoon that he’d sign an executive order to shut down asylum requests at the southern border once the average number of daily encounters hits 2,500. The action is set to come into effect midnight tonight, meaning requests will be shut down until the daily encounter number declines to 1,500. Here’s the math: since April 2020, when the Border Patrol recorded around 16,000 encounters (one of the lowest monthly totals in decades), the monthly number of encounters has surpassed 200,000 on at least ten separate occasions. If asylum requests are frozen when encounters reach 2,500, that means a maximum of 77,500 accepted asylum requests per month.

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Biden acts on the border… sort of… maybe

The contrast between the two parties on illegal immigration couldn’t be sharper. Donald Trump erected a wall. Joe Biden erected a pole. Oops. Sorry. That should be “poll.” And Biden didn’t erect it. He was skewered by it. Very few people think President Biden is doing a decent job at the southern border. More than twice as many think he has created a full-scale disaster. Those poll numbers aren’t just underwater. They’re headed for the Titanic in a flimsy submersible. Faced with this disaster, Biden finally did what he has said for three years he had no authority to do. He issued some Executive Orders to close the border... .well, sort of, partially, maybe, under certain circumstances.

Fauci in the hot seat

“This might be the most insane hearing that I have ever attended,” freshman Representative Robert Garcia quipped during today’s hearing featuring former head of the NIAID Dr. Anthony Fauci – the first time that “America’s Doctor” testified publicly in Congress since leaving government service. Fauci, who played a dominant role in dictating public health policy across multiple presidential administrations, appeared diminutive in both his physical stature and in addressing the role he played as America grappled with a once-in-a lifetime pandemic.

What shoplifters and DC grocers tell us about the state of elite America

Grocery store Harris Teeter’s DC locations started implementing a receipt check at the door. Giant Foods recently banned duffel bags or those measuring more than 14 x 14 x 6 inches, which disqualifies most backpacks, in their stores. And Safeway instituted a glass barrier at self-checkout, requiring customers to scan their receipt before they can leave. Shoplifting has become a major issue across the country. Retailers lost almost $100 billion to theft in 2021. These numbers are more than just a slip-a-candy-bar-into-your-pocket kind of theft. Most grocery stores attribute their loss to organized shoplifting, or “boosting.” People will steal goods and then sell them for cheaper.

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Don’t expect Mexico’s new girlboss to take on the cartels

The international media has a new Mexican girlboss to fawn over. Claudia Sheinbaum is Mexico’s new presidenta, leading a landslide for AMLO’s populist leftist Morena Party now empowered to alter Mexico’s Constitution according to his wishes. Should Donald Trump return to the White House, I can only imagine the “yas kween” memes that will emerge from their confrontations over the remain in Mexico policy. And did you know she’s a socialist and a climate scientist, too? Coming soon to a TIMEime magazine cover, a Vogue fashion profile and a children’s board book near you. Of course, those articles to come will spend more time on the glass ceiling than on all those pesky murders and missing people.

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Who is Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s new president?

Mexico has elected its first female president, with preliminary results showing former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum victorious. According to Quick Count, an exercise that the National Electoral Institute produces based on statistical samples from various polling stations, Sheinbaum won with 58-61 percent of the vote. The sixty-one-year-old will also become the first Jewish leader elected in the overwhelmingly Catholic country, as well as possibly the one that has won by the widest margin. She is now doubling her lead over Xóchitl Gálvez, who was backed by a coalition of the National Action (PAN), Institutional Revolutionary (PRI) and Democratic Revolution (PRD) parties. The win solidifies the shift that former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador began.

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Trump rails against ‘rigged’ trial

Former president Donald Trump railed against the “rigged” trial that saw him convicted on thirty-four felony charges during a forty-minute press conference at Trump Tower in New York on Friday. In addition to speaking about the case and the individuals he believed to be responsible for corrupting it — DA Alvin Bragg, Judge Juan Merchan and his former lawyer Michael Cohen, among others — Trump went on offense against the Biden campaign and administration and tied this latest trial to the years-long investigation into alleged Russian collusion and the three other cases pending against him. He claimed the United States is now officially a “fascist” country, flipping the term that Democrats have long used to describe him and and his plans for a second term.

Trump found guilty in America’s first-ever Stalinist trial

“What happens now?” That was the question flooding my inbox and what used to be called the Twittersphere. Why? Because shortly after 5 p.m. on May 30, Anno Domini 2024, the verdict in America’s first-ever Stalinist trial came down: Trump was guilty on all counts in the so-called “hush money trial” in New York. I always say “so-called” hush money trial because it was really designed to be a "hush Trump" trial. Rather, a “hush Trump” inquisition. So now the proximate legal fate of Donald Trump, former and very possibly future president of the United States, is settled. What happens next? Trump appeals, but that case is not heard until after the election. What happens next?

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Things fall apart for Team Biden

Welcome to Thunderdome. Democrats had a plan for 2024, a plan that they executed very well at the beginning. They would unleash a barrage of legal challenges on Donald Trump, designed to render him unacceptable to all but the hardcore Republican base whose support would still vault him to the nomination of a GOP contest where his only competition was really Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. That plan succeeded perfectly, perhaps even faster than they wanted, given that the candidates never really had time to tear each other down. Step one: a major success. Step two: use these assorted legal challenges to weigh down the Trump campaign with legal costs and distractions that pull him all over the country with hearings and pleadings and requirements to show up before various courts.

Why the conflict in Gaza matters less to poor students

Pro-Palestinian protests have disproportionately taken place at elite colleges, according to number-crunching by Washington Monthly. Their analysts used data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium with news reports of encampments and then matched that data to the percentages of students at each campus who receive Pell Grants. Protests and encampments have been rare among colleges with high percentages of Pell students (which are mostly from moderate and low-income families). For some reason, poor students do not appear to care about Gaza as much as elite students do. One of the more recent examples took place on Monday when a group of pro-Palestinian students at Princeton University attempted to stop a Memorial Day parade.

Joe Biden’s non-defense policy

No one can say the Iraq War was under-discussed. On the eve of the 2003 invasion, President George W. Bush and his advisors explained and defended Operation Iraqi Freedom to, among others, British prime minister Tony Blair, Saudi ambassador prince Bandar bin Sultan, the United Nations Security Council and skeptical members of Congress, the media and the American public. Bush even faced opposition from his own secretary of state, Colin Powell, who cautioned the president against invading Iraq with what would come to be known as the “Pottery Barn Rule”: if you break it, you own it. An experienced military leader, General Powell understood the complexities of war and the importance of having an exit strategy.

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Will Libertarians vote for Trump?

The Libertarian Party announced its presidential candidate Monday, and from the looks of it, they may as well have chosen Donald Trump.Chase Oliver is the porcupines’ pick for president, as RFK Jr. was rejected and Trump was ineligible for the nomination. Otherwise he “would have absolutely gotten” it if he wanted it, per his Truth Social account.Oliver describes himself on his website as having “[been] recognized as the ‘most influential Libertarian’ by Rolling Stone, [and] garnered national attention following his debate with incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker’s empty podium. With over 80,000 votes, Oliver forced a runoff between the Republican and Democratic candidates.

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Behind Justice Alito’s war with his progressive neighbors

“Somebody in a position of authority needs to talk to her and make her stop,” complained a thirty-six-year-old man to a Fairfax County, Virginia, officer on the line, according to a recording reviewed by the New York Times. The alleged perp here? Martha-Ann Alito, wife of conservative Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito. Like Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Virginia, Martha-Ann is now all over the news, with progressive activists ready to use her to discredit her husband’s rulings. Earlier this month, the Times reported the Alito household had flown an upside-down Old Glory flag at their Virginia home. The US flag code states that the flag ought not to be inverted “except as a signal of dire distress in instance of extreme danger to life or property.

Vivek Ramaswamy thinks he can save BuzzFeed with these three weird tricks

Before taking a slight hit to his wealth last year, Vivek Ramaswamy was one of America’s twenty youngest billionaires. His latest venture — a $3 million investment to save BuzzFeed — has Cockburn questioning how he’s made it this far in business.  Last Thursday, news broke that Ramaswamy has acquired a 7.7 percent stake in the ailing digital media company, briefly sending its stocks soaring over 80 percent. The former presidential candidate had apparently been snatching up shares since March, but BuzzFeed, like everyone else, only found out last week. Since then, Ramaswamy has increased his stake to 8.37 percent, becoming the company’s second largest Class-A shareholder.

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This Memorial Day, reflect on your freedom

Last summer, I spent some time in and about Port-en-Bessin-Huppain in Normandy. The little fishing village and its surrounding towns on the English Channel (“La Manche,” “the sleeve” en français) is delightfully picturesque in that rugged, elemental way that proceeds from the collision of tempestuous sea and commanding headland. Expansive fields of corn and other crops ripened fast, orderly in their serried, midsummer ranks. Orange-red poppies punctuated the grassy, flower-strewn verge and complicated the landscape, heavy with age and history. Poppies are for remembrance — and there’s a lot to remember in these parts.

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The good news about the left’s growing resort to intimidation

It has not escaped the attention of media observers that the current outbreak of violent campus demonstrations is but the latest in a series of disruptive left-wing movements, starting with Occupy Wall Street in 2012, followed by the Black Lives Matter riots over the summer of 2020 and now the anti-Israel protests. The right, too, has been associated with disorderly conduct — most notably during January 6 and the Charlottesville rallies — but neither of these events were as well-planned or long lasting as what progressives have been up to. And this fact has led many journalists to speculate as to why the American left has become so attached to civil disobedience.

RFK’s Libertarian moment

The 2024 Libertarian National Convention in Washington, DC, unsurprisingly attracted a quirky bunch. Attendees would find themselves greeted by a man wearing a “Fuck Vaccines” shirt (not that odd) that was doing some squats in the lobby (pretty odd). Also overheard in the lobby, a weird flex: “I read Mises before I was twenty” — and then an even weirder one: “I grew up without AC, a very libertarian upbringing.” “Ermmm, konnichiwa actually means good afternoon,” one lady told her interlocutor. Last cycle’s Libertarian vice-presidential candidate Spike Cohen told The Spectator, “It is useful to have Donald Trump speak, only if our candidate speaks right after him and rebuts him. Same with RFK. We should be leveraging them for attention, not the reverse.

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How the Special Relationship could be renewed after US-UK elections

A record number of countries will hold elections this, including Britain on July 4 and the United States on November 5. These two great powers — each with a veto at the UN — have enjoyed a bond that has survived for so long, is it known on both sides of the Atlantic as “the Special Relationship.” There have been stand-offs: Britain refused to join the war in Vietnam, and when Argentina seized the Falkland Islands in 1982, the US did not intervene. But Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher worked in tandem to bring down the Berlin Wall. And if the view on Ukraine and Gaza is not always the same, there is a shared commitment to the sovereignty of Russia’s neighbors and to a peace in the Middle East that secures the rights of Jews and Palestinians alike.

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samuel alito

Justice Alito stirs the pot

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. This old adage has taken on a new meaning for the left as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is developing a bit of a habit for displaying allegedly "far-right" flags. In under a week, the New York Times has unearthed images of dissident flags waving proudly at the justice’s house on two separate occasions, leaving Democrats clamoring about judicial ethics.   The smoking gun in the controversy is an “Appeal to Heaven” flag that was seen flying at Alito’s summer home on Long Beach Island in New Jersey last summer. The flag, which depicts a pine tree, was first used during the American Revolution but has since become associated with the “Stop the Steal” movement after being brandished by January 6 protesters.

The economy is as good as people think

Welcome to Thunderdome. One of the Biden White House’s biggest problems at the moment is that while they can point to all manner of aspects of the economy that are doing just fine — above all, the stock market — the lived experience of many key segments of the electorate is totally at odds with this analysis. Hammered by higher food, energy, healthcare and education costs, American households feel constrained by rates that keep them trapped in homes they no longer want to live in, with cars they no longer want to drive. Are people in gas lines and starving? No, of course not. But a line in a recent Wall Street Journal piece encapsulates the situation: “We used to take three vacations a year. Now we take one.

Will Trump be a convicted felon?

Former president Donald Trump’s defense team chose to rest in the so-called “hush-money” trial in Manhattan on Tuesday, moving the case forward to closing arguments next week and then jury deliberations. Trump did not end up testifying in his own defense, which he had suggested earlier in the trial he might do. Instead, the defense called only one significant witness: Robert Costello, an attorney and former advisor to Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani. Costello testified that Cohen told him previously that he had nothing incriminating to offer prosecutors about Trump and that he told him “numerous times” Trump did not know anything about payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

Is Venezuela preparing for war?

Earlier this month, two American supersonic fighter jets flew over Georgetown, the capital city of Guyana. The US show of force is not only for the attention of Venezuela’s socialist regime who has been escalating toward a military conflict with its smaller neighbor since at least September 2023 when Nicolás Maduro returned from Beijing. The message of sending two F/A-18 Super Hornets flying from a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier sailing in the Caribbean Sea is also for the Islamic Republic of Iran. At first glance, the Venezuela-Guyana conflict is about a century-old border dispute of a dense territory called the Esequibo that makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s land mass but only 15 percent of its population.

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Biden’s rough weekend

President Joe Biden had a rough weekend, committing at least three major gaffes during his public engagements. The president usually spends his weekend at one of his homes in Wilmington or Rehoboth Beach to get a respite from working at the White House. His recent appearances were a reminder as to why.Biden was the featured speaker at the commencement ceremony for historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta. But his speech was panned by critics who accused him of being divisive and treating the graduates as if they are victims because of their race. He also claimed his White House was filled with Morehouse graduates, telling the crowd, “I got more Morehouse men in the White House telling me what to do than I know what to do! You all think I’m kidding, don’t you?

Mayorkas’s daughter is on ‘national security threat’ TikTok

After offering explanations for why TikTok presents a danger to US security, Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted Friday that his college-aged daughter uses the controversial app.At a “signature event” held by the Economic Club at the capital’s Marriott Marquis Hotel, the club’s president, David Rubenstein, sat for a lengthy conversation with the secretary. On immigration, Rubenstein pressed him, asking about asylum policy, increasing encounters and whether having a physical barrier would have helped curb illegal crossings. This reporter asked Mayorkas if the administration was preparing for any policy changes given they recently hired two new senior-level officials.

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Harrison Butker exposes the media’s blindness

The mass freakout over Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Harrison Butker’s commencement speech to Benedictine College is a revelatory incident. For one, it’s another sign of the impatient obliviousness of our media landscape. The speech is a mere twenty minutes long, but it’s readily apparent that most commentators on the remarks didn’t bother to watch it. CNN’s Jonah Goldberg put the speech in the context of a reactionary attitude among men toward women in the workplace, which is just absolutely ludicrous if you watch the speech — most of which is an indictment of the current Catholic priesthood — in a segment where the CNN commentators ordered Butker to “stick to kicking.

Is Joe Biden debating scared?

Welcome to Thunderdome. I celebrated the official expiration of the Commission on Presidential Debates on my Fox podcast this week, which you can listen to here. It’s a long overdue mercy killing of an institution that has repeatedly failed in its duties and due diligence, with their repeated lies about C-Span’s Steve Scully and his “hacked” Twitter account. Enjoy the ignominious end to this ludicrously overpowered commission. Now the Biden White House and the Trump campaign have agreed on at least two debates, one in June and another in September. There really ought to be August and October debates, too — but those will likely only happen if Team Biden thinks he can convince some voters at a low risk for his candidacy. The big question is: why do this?

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Will Stormy Daniels flee the country?

Stormy Daniels is joining the long list of celebrities who have threatened to flee America because of Donald Trump. Given that Cher, Barbra Streisand, Snoop Dogg and every other Trump-hating celebrity is still stateside, Cockburn is doubtful Daniels will keep her word.  In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Barrett Blade, Daniels’s porn star husband, revealed that the couple will likely leave the United States if Trump is acquitted in his hush money trial. "I know that we would like to get on with our lives,” Blade said. “I know that she wants to move past this.”  Blade added his wife’s future will be uncertain whether or not she wins the trial. “Either way, I don't think it gets better for her. I think if it's not guilty, we got to decide what to do.

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Should you buy a folding phone?

Just five short years ago, Samsung released the first mainstream folding phone with their debut Galaxy Fold. It had some quirks — a small, slim, external display, thick bezels, an odd asymmetrical notch and an unprecedented $1,980 price tag — but what mattered most was the screen. Open the slim, TV-remote-shaped phone and you gazed upon a great, wide, 7.3-inch screen, bigger than any you could carry in your pocket before, with a folding crease in the middle. You could multitask, watch full-screen YouTube videos and browse the web as you would on a tablet. That is, you could do so temporarily. Early review units catastrophically broke at even the mention of a grain of sand, creating a run of viral tweets and videos.

Biden and Trump say ‘YES’ to debates

After months of speculation — will they, won’t they? — President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump have officially agreed to a set of two presidential debates. In a rather surprising move, Biden released a statement indicating he would not participate in the fall debates sanctioned by the Commission on Presidential Debates (a wholly partisan sham organization, by the way, as my colleague Ben Domenech points out here). Instead, Biden laid out his own set of conditions to his opponent: there will be no audience, no RFK Jr., only CNN, ABC, CBS or Telemundo may host, and microphones must be muted when a candidate’s time expires.

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Who actually gets hurt by sanctioning Russia?

The US crackdown on trade finance for Russia from international banks — designed to impede imports needed for the continuing assault on Ukraine — is biting hard, reports the FT, quoting an investor who thinks “the logical endpoint of this is turning Russia into Iran.” Quite right too: sanctions like these are a vital non-military way to hobble Vladimir Putin’s campaign. But war and finance intersect in many different ways. Consider also the fate of 400 western-owned commercial aircraft that were leased to Russian airlines before the invasion in February 2022. Now stuck in Russia or its satellites, unmaintained to western standards and unfit to fly back into our airspace, they’re a potential multibillion loss for their owners and insurers.

Johann Hari’s career-long trouble with the truth

British fabulist Johann Hari is at it again. After revealing he used Ozempic to lose forty pounds in his tell-all book, the alleged journalist still hasn’t shed his penchant for telling porkies. While the miracle drug made him “listless,” “strangely muted” and “emotionally dulled,” it hasn’t killed his energy for dreaming up facts.  In his latest book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs, Hari alleged that food critic Jay Rayner had lost pleasure in eating at even the finest Parisian establishments after taking Ozempic. The catch: Rayner has never used Ozempic or any other weight-loss drug.

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