"[W]hen the pandemic hit Ardern and Robertson had a decision to make. Respond in a fiscally prudent manner or borrow seventy billion, at least thirty of this was spent on non-pandemic frippery, and wrap themselves in a cloak of virtue while leaving an economic calamity to a future set of politicians. ...

"Ardern and Robertson used the pandemic to advance their own agenda ... [John] Key saw a crisis and, lacking an economic agenda or political philosophy, ran to the international money men to maintain the status quo rather than attempt meaningful reform.

"Given the content of the Covid Report the current government is right to highlight Robertson’s fiscal incontinence; pointing to the 70.4 billion total spend as a contrast with their own rectitude.

"Except. Well. ... [Nicola] Willis, who has managed to add over twenty billion new debt in her first two years in office, is projected to increase sovereign debt by more than Robertson achieved over the next five years.

"And this is without a pandemic, major earthquake or outbreak of foot and mouth. ...

"Imagine a company director who has seen revenue fall but maintains payroll by borrowing. Eventually the line of credit ends, staff lose their employment and the director is forced to sell the family home.

"That is our economic policy in one paragraph."

~ Damien Grant from his column 'John Key and Jacinda Ardern both turned to debt when disaster hit'

Jimmy Kimmel used his Oscar presentation to decry countries that curb free speech.

He name-checked North Korea and, tongue in cheek, elevated CBS to nation status for “silencing” Stephen Colbert.

If the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” host wanted to do something about free speech, he could invite Ben Bankas onto his ABC couch.

Bankas is an unabashedly right-leaning comic who has faced serial cancellations in recent months. He lost six sold-out shows in Minneapolis for making a crack about the late Renee Good.

Comedian Ben Bankas had six sold-out shows at the Laugh Camp Comedy Club in St Paul, Minnesota, cancelled after videos of him joking about the death of Renée Good went viral and sparked threats of protests.

Venue owner Bill Collins said the decision was made due to “heightened… pic.twitter.com/enxrV17iV9

— PinkNews (@PinkNews) February 3, 2026

Yes, a joke can still get you canceled in America. And the problem is even worse up north.

Bankas, a Canadian native, told the hosts of “Triggernometry” that he’s been repeatedly canceled in his home country for telling the “wrong” jokes. That won’t stop him, though.

“I don’t believe in censoring myself, especially on stage,” Bankas said.

The cancellation efforts are well-organized and aggressive, sometimes using street posters to coax people to pressure clubs that dare to host him.

“They have the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and all these organizations that are paid for by the Liberal Party in Canada … through back channels, apparently,” Bankas told podcast hosts Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin. “That organization’s goal is to shut down people like me, I guess, that aren’t censoring themselves or aren’t woke.”

Case in point. Two sold-out Bankas shows in Kitchener were just canceled.

The cancellation came after “an extensive internal and external review of safety, operational and legal factors,” including, the theatre said, its responsibilities under the British Columbia Human Rights Code and Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Bankas suggested that if someone like Kimmel suddenly switched their political allegiances, they might face some of the free speech scrutiny he endures.

RELATED: ALL KIMMEL DOES IS LIE (AND CRY)

Let’s not pick on just Kimmel for ignoring a fellow comedian in distress. Have other powerful Hollywood voices reached out to support Bankas’ right to tell his jokes on his terms?

Stephen Colbert? John Oliver? Jon Stewart? Seth Meyers? Mark Ruffalo? Sean Penn?

Have any of the folks claiming President Donald Trump is stifling speech said something about the restrictive speech rules North of the Border, let alone the Minneapolis situation?

Are they afraid to defend someone like Bankas because he leans to the Right? Or do they stay silent because there’s no way to hammer Republicans while defending a comedian’s free speech rights?

Either answer proves they don’t actually care about speech. It’s mere virtue signaling, the kind that falls silent when the “wrong” people are silenced.

The post Why Won’t Hollywood Rally Behind Ben Bankas? appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

At John Kass News, physician-author Cory Franklin discusses "What the Media & Experts Aren't Asking About Measles."

Having not heard of Franklin until this morning and finding this story through a conservative news aggregator, I half-expected a bunch of folderol "defending" MAHA, and for a brief moment thought I'd found it in Franklin's first point:

Why are a majority of the patients with measles older than expected?

75% of patients are over 5 years old, and in 2025, more patients were over 20 than were under 5. The peak demographic age is between 5 and 19.

If vaccine skepticism was simply the result of RFK Jr.'s blather (and the COVID pandemic), why is the average age of cases around 9? RFK Jr.'s rhetoric and policies may be contributory but they were not causative for an older demographic that was not vaccinated years before RFK took office.

I was primed to expect silliness in part by the fact that some Trump person wrote in to me to the effect that it's wrong to blame Bobby Junior for the current outbreaks because he's been in office for only a year. (I have never said or implied such a thing.)

Kennedy just took office! is a classic half-truth, and, were it not for the terms blather and contributory in the above, it might be easy to spin it for the purpose of defending Trump's HHS head.

The problem with such a "defense" of the founder of Children's Health Defense (sic) is that Kennedy had been slandering vaccines for at least two decades before he took office. So while, yes, it would be ridiculous to blame current outbreaks on him or even mostly on him, the date of his appointment hardly exonerates him, either.

Due to his actions long before he took office, Trump's crony is partly responsible for the current outbreaks. (Just by looking at the above link, anyone under 21 who isn't vaccinated may well owe that state to Kennedy's "activism.") Furthermore, his words and deeds both fail to stem that tide and threaten to make future outbreaks more frequent and severe.

If those things don't make Kennedy a poor appointment, I don't know what to tell you.

That said, Franklin's next question suggests to me that journalists are missing an opportunity to bring up or discuss herd immunity, an important aspect of preventing diseases like measles, and perhaps why we're suddenly seeing outbreaks, despite large numbers of people being unvaccinated for so long. Absent that concept, it might be difficult to explain why people should be encouraged to vaccinate, despite their own indifference to catching measles themselves.

Franklin's questions are all thought-provoking, and answering them requires not just a command of "facts on the ground," but an integration of those facts into the kind of knowledge that one needs, at a non-expert level, to fight or avoid illness.

Such knowledge transforms I should get vaccinated from mere dogma to actual knowledge and, on top of motivating a healthy practice, would also cause more people to question the many baseless slanders (disguised as "questions" or not) against vaccination and find them wanting.

-- CAV