Only Lunden Roberts's Attorneys Are Asking The Right Questions

The conventional view of the Biden family finances we've had from the quasi-investigative right-wing press, along with limited information from the Comer committee, has been that Hunter is the business mind and the bagman who collects payments from assorted foreign businessmen, gangsters, and wannabes and funnels them into a general Biden family fund that supports somewhere between nine and 12 parasitic family members with assorted other cronies and retainers. It's alleged that part of the scheme is "10% to the big guy", based on a cryptic reference in an e-mail on the Hunter laptop. In part, this is also a view that Hunter himself promotes among some in the family, including his uncle James and daugther Naomi, also based on e-mails in the laptop.

But let's take a 30,000-foot look at Hunter's actual career. Every indication is that he never had much business or financial acumen, and in fact he himself led a parasitic lifestyle based on his position as son of a US senator until Joe became vice president. His most visible job before that was on the Amtrak board of directors, for which it was acknowledged at the time that he had no qualifications. He was nominated by Dubya in 2006 as part of some kind of deal, and he resigned in 2009 after Joe was elected vice president. This site estimates his salary as an Amtrak director at $123,704 per year.

The best authority we have on Hunter's finances during this period and earlier in his career is his ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, who was interviewed extensively during the release of her tell-all, If We Break. By the time of their divorce in 2016, she wrote,

Both our houses had a double mortgage and no equity. We had credit card debt and medical bills. We were in terrible financial shape. The sheer amount of our debt overwhelmed me. We owed as much for both houses as when we’d bought them. We were underwater.

So throughout this period, Hunter's earlier jobs at investment banks and lobbying firms, followed by his stint on the Amtrak board, and then the various deals and partnerships he formed after leaving Amtrak like Rosemont Seneca and BHR Partners, never paid his own bills. At the same time, the few more or less reputable people he worked with like Christopher Heinz wound up breaking with him -- Heinz did so after Hunter joined the Burisma board in 2014. As far as we can tell, the Burisma board was Hunter's peak. It paid him $83,333 a month until Joe left the vice presidency in 2017, when it was cut to $41,500 per month. But by my own estimate on Monday, even the million dollars a year he was said to be earning at his peak there couldn't have covered his extravagant expenses.

Hunter left the Burisma board in 2019, which was around the time the Bidens staged a family intervention over Hunter's lifestyle, which in turn was in anticipation of Joe announcing his run for president. There are numerous references on Hunter's laptop in January of that year to Joe assuming hundreds of thousands of dollars of Hunter's debts and meeting other shortfalls, again presumably to clean things up in anticipation of a presidentiual campaign.

So as of 2019, Hunter had left Burisma, but as was his pattern throughout his life, he was heavily in debt. His various other businesses and partnerships had collapsed or gone inactive by then as well. By that March, his employees were dunning him for unpaid wages. The terms of his divorce from Kathleen apparently included $37,000 a month in alimony, while his 2020 paternity settlement with Lunden Roberts was another $20,000 a month.

But in May 2019, he married Melissa Cohen, a "documentary filmmaker" with no income of her own but an apparent jet-set lifestyle; they had a child in 2020.

So every indication is that after 2019, although Joe had assumed his prior debts and shortfalls, Hunter had no regular income, yet nowithstanding any other obligations, he had $57,000 a month in alimony and child support, which comes to $684,000 per year. He is said to have sold some paintings via a gallery in several tranches. According to the New York Post,

Hunter, 52, has asked as much as $500,000 for his beginner works. He earned at least $375,000 in 2021 for five prints at a Hollywood art show attended by his father’s embattled nominee to be ambassador to India, then-Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, and it’s unclear how many additional sales he may have made.

But as with all things Hunter, whatever he may have made selling paintings won't ever cover his actual expenses. This brings us to an obvious question: who is sustaining his lifestyle? But the only people who are seriously asking it are Lunden Roberts's attorneys:

Judge Holly Lodge Meyer, who is handling Hunter Biden’s child support case in Arkansas, issued an order Monday saying President Joe Biden’s son must appear on July 10 at the Independence County Courthouse in Batesville to explain “why he should not be held in contempt” after lawyers for Lunden Alexis Roberts, the mother of Hunter Biden’s child, argued that Hunter Biden was ignoring the judge’s May order to hand over information on his finances.

. . . Hunter Biden has been ordered to answer inquiries about the current state of his finances, including all of his investments, his art sales, and other relevant financial transactions.

Hunter Biden’s 10% ownership stake in a Chinese government-linked investment firm has apparently been transferred to his Hollywood lawyer “sugar brother,” who paid off millions of dollars of Hunter Biden's back taxes, company records indicate.

But if we add over half a million a year in alimony and child support payments to what are now legal bills that must be in the range of a million dollars a month, plus the expenses of his new marriage and child, plus whatever else he's spending on whatever, just selling some paintings won't cover it.

Hunter is continuing to incur millions of dollars in expenses with no comparable income to cover them -- which of course has been his pattern all along. But these are non-trivial amounts, millions upon millions over a period of seveal years -- and this assumes Hunter is currently clean and sober. Where is this money coming from? Kevin Morris? I don't think so. I'll get into Kevin in more depth tomorrow.

But the one thing we can rely on is that Hunter, an addict who can never be trusted with money under any circumstances, can't possibly ever have been the guy who's been funding the Biden family lifestyle. This amounts to enormous sums that must be coming from someplace else.

My Kabuki Alarm Hasn't Stopped Beeping

On Saturday I said my kabuki alarm has been going off since the start of the elaborate cat-and-mouse between the Comer committee and FBI Director Wray over an FD-1023 form that may contain allegations of bribery against Joe Biden when he was vice president. This was all going to be settled when Wray brought the FD-1023 in question over to the Capitol yesterday to show it to Chairman Comer and Ranking Member Raskin in person -- except, of course, it wasn't. According to NBC:

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., announced Monday that his panel will start proceedings to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress, a move the agency called "unwarranted."

The FBI briefed Comer and Oversight Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin, D-Md., on Capitol Hill for more than an hour Monday and offered them the chance to review a document that purportedly describes an allegation that Joe Biden accepted a bribe as vice president.

Speaking to reporters outside the

secure briefing site afterward, Comer said the "FBI again refused to hand over the unclassified record to the custody" of the committee. "And we will now initiate contempt of Congress hearings this Thursday.

. . . In a statement, the FBI said it had been cooperative with Comer's request.

“The FBI has continually demonstrated its commitment to accommodate the committee’s request, including by producing the document in a reading room at the U.S. Capitol. This commonsense safeguard is often employed in response to congressional requests and in court proceedings to protect important concerns, such as the physical safety of sources and the integrity of investigations," the statement said.

"The escalation to a contempt vote under these circumstances is unwarranted,” it added.

Robert Spencer comments on PJ Media:

It’s a positive development, and long overdue: Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, announced on Monday that he would start proceedings to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress. Still, even though this is welcome news, Wray is unlikely to suffer any significant consequences, even if the full House votes that he is indeed in contempt of Congress.

How on earth is any of this a "positive development"? As far as I can see, this is a kabuki exercise that's been choreographed from the start and is likely to go on indefinitely. Based on what we've learned in the last several days, both Sen Grassley and Chairman Comer have already seen the FD-1023 in question. Director Wray was forced, once he was made aware of this last week, to acknowledge that the document exists, and that the allegations in it are at least credible.

But it also goes without question that whatever the merits of the allegations in the FD-1023, the Wray FBI is going to slow-walk any investigation. Whether any House action over finding Wray in contempt of Congress would actually open a substitute investigation into those allegations is a remote question and unlikely. But let's postulate that it will, and there'll be some type of House hearing on whether Joe actually took a bribe from some foreign actor to influence US policy as VP.

The sketchy information we have is that Joe took $5 million to do something unspecified about an unspecified US policy. The one thing that rings true here is how cheaply he was being bought, if in fact he was being bought. The Vice President of the United States took a bribe for five million? This is in league with the guy who tells a yokel that the Brooklyn Bridge is for sale, and he can have it for $50,000.

Right now, we don't know just when this is alleged to have taken place, so we can't locate it in the timeline of Hunter's over-the-top expenses, but as I've been saying here all along, the current level and timeline of payments alleged to have gone into a Biden family boodle just don't add up. We're talking about somewhare between nine and 12 completely unproductive people, of whom four or five are addicts with expensive habits on top of their other worldly tastes.

The level of payments into this boodle are generally described so far as a million here, three million there, every few years, passed on through shell companies, yada yada. Let's add this new $5 million alleged to the big guy himself. The problem with what we've been seeing is that Hunter alone, who is alleged to be the kingpin and the driving force behind the boodle, had expenses himself that, as I estimated yesterday, were at minimum in the $1 million a year range and for many years, especially after 2015, were probably much larger.

Hunter would have had to be skimming almost all the money that was coming into the putative family boodle for himself -- yet there were still eight or more other Bidens with their palms out. And beyond that, for much of the period after 2015, references on the laptop strongly suggest Joe himself was making up Hunter's shortfall. Even if Joe took a $5 million bribe from Chinese intellegence in a briefcase full of unmarked bills, all Joe could have done with an amount like that would be give it to Hunter to go up his nose. Even at that level, Dr Jill, brother James, sister Valerie, daughter Ashley, niece Caroline, Hallie, her kids, and the rest would have gone hungry and without a fix, and this still leaves out Kathleen Buhle and her alimony check.

So far, none of the allegations here meet any sort of reasonability check. This is not to say that the family isn't a thoroughly corrupt bunch whose lifestyles are far beyond their apparent means and who may well be on the take, but the amounts that would support the lifestyles of those dozen useless types are far, far greater than what's reflected in the rinky-dink frammis of sporadic baksheesh through shell companies we've heard about so far.

Short of much more convincing revelations about payoffs much bigger than what we've seen, I don't think it's productive to wish a Biden family boodle will have any effect on the 2024 election. Although I agree with Nikki Haley on almost nothing else, I think she's right to say it's a much better bet to campaign against President Kamala.

I'm Still Scratching My Head Over Kevin Morris

Kevin Morris, a Hollywood B-lister if ever there was one and reputed Hunter Biden sugar-bro, is back in the news, more or less:

A top House Republican is looking into the "suspicious" transfer of Hunter Biden’s stake in a Chinese government-linked investment firm to his "sugar brother" Hollywood lawyer who helped pay off millions of dollars of his back taxes.

Kevin Morris, a close Hunter Biden confidante [sic], appears to be the current owner of Skaneateles, an LLC started by the younger Biden through which he held his 10% share in Bohai Harvest RST (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Company, or BHR, according to the company's business records.

The question I've had all along has been the relatively piddling amounts involved in all of Hunter's transactions, in comparison, say, to Elizabeth Holmes, whose non-existent net worth was as much as $4.5 billion, or Sam Bankman-Fried, who is estimated to have bilked investors of about $8 bilion. In comparison, the value of Hunter's investment in BHR Partners, which is cited as the entity of interest in the story above, is trivial. According to Newsweek,

Among Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings that have come under the microscope is his involvement in the Chinese equity firm BHR and its relationship with powerful Chinese state-owned companies.

Hunter Biden had invested about $420,000 into the firm for a 10 percent equity stake in the company, the Wall Street Journal reported citing a statement from his lawyer, and he had a hand in creating BHR too.

The story gives somewhat more background on the transaction:

After flying to Beijing in 2013 and meeting investment banker Jonathan Li, Hunter Biden was also made chief executive and board member of private equity fund BHR Partners in China.

Rosemont Seneca Partners, a private equity firm he co-founded in 2009, partnered with a Chinese investment company to fund BHR in 2014.

After flying to Beijing in 2013 and meeting investment banker Jonathan Li, Hunter Biden was also made chief executive and board member of private equity fund BHR Partners in China.

Rosemont Seneca Partners, a private equity firm he co-founded in 2009, partnered with a Chinese investment company to fund BHR in 2014.

His earnings from Rosemont Seneca and Seneca Global Advisors are not publicly available.

But tellingly, the story adds,

In 2013, he was also commissioned as a part-time ensign in the Navy Reserve but was later administratively discharged after testing positive for cocaine use.

According to Military-ranks.org,

A Ensign is a junior officer in the United States Navy at DoD paygrade O-1. A Ensign receives a monthly basic pay salary starting at $3,477 per month, with raises up to $4,376 per month once they have served for over 3 years.

$3,477 per month comes to a little over $41,000 per year. So at the same time that Hunter was running these big-ticket deals with China, Joe was scrambling to get him a no-show job as a Navy ensign worth $41,000 per year? And he lost that job within weeks when he failed his first drug test. According to this source,

A “typical” dose of cocaine is approximately 50 mg, but the effects are very short-lived, lasting only 30 minutes. Cocaine addicts will dose again and again, easily consuming a daily total of a gram or more. Of special relevance, people who have acquired a very high tolerance for cocaine may consume significantly more, up to a gram per dose. This is why a moderate cocaine addiction can easily cost $150 a day, or around $55,000 per year. Severe cocaine addiction is far more expensive, however, reaching hundreds – or even thousands – of dollars a day.

According to his ex-wife, Hunter had gone into rehab in 2012, but by 2013 he failed a drug test, so we may assume his cocaine use was at least up to the "moderate" $150 a day level, which even a no-show Navy ensign job wouldn't cover. But by 2015, after his brother Beau's death, Hunter's addictions, his various affairs, and his trips to luxury rehab and celebrity hotels were out of control, and as the link suggests, his overall expenses had almost certainly reached thousands of dollars per day.

What's puzzling is that we've never been able to learn just what his putative business ventures were bringing in. But if he was spending, say, $3,000 a day on hotel bills, fast cars, hookers, drugs, and girlfriends like Hallie and Liz Secundy -- a very lowball estimate -- that was over a million dollars a year. But how did this balance against what he was bringing in? From Burisma, which started in 2014,

In 2016, Hunter’s total income from Burisma was $999,996. In 2017 it dropped to $665,000, and then $498,000 in 2018.

Hunter resigned from the Burisma board in April 2019, according to his lawyer George Mesires, after his controversial business dealings dogged his father’s presidential campaign.

Everything I've been able to research says that Hunter's income never matched his expenses, and there's no way he could have contributed to a Biden family boodle, unless he had income sources far greater than any we've heard about so far. In fact, the sketchy information that's come out suggests that either Joe was making up Hunter's shortfalls at least from 2012 onward, or Hunter was simply able to stiff his creditors on the basis that he was Joe's son.

But this brings me to the next question: why has Keven Morris bought into this frammis? The various reports that have come out suggest Morris paid Hunter's $2 million IRS bill, paid his rent at various times in Venice and Malibu, and appears to be funding and managing Hunter's legal cases, both the child suppert with Lunden Roberts and the ongoing Delaware tax and firearm investigations.

He's also said to facilitate Hunter's art deals, but even at half a million a pop, these can't cover Hunter's current expenses, even if we assume the guy's now clean and sober, which I doubt.

Morris is now said to control Hunter's former stake in BHR partners, but we don't have any clear idea of what that's worth, and it's hard to me to avoid thinking it's basically just another money pit that will never come close to paying Hunter's debts. What's in this for Kevin Morris?

I think Kevin Morris is a mark.

Nobody Remembers This

In the wake of President Biden's fall at the Air Force Academy and his subsequent near-accident on Marine One, nobody has mentioned Jimmy Carter's September 16, 1979 collapse during a cross-country race near Camp David.

The incident occurred just 200 yards past the entrance to Camp David as Carter neared the top of the second major hill on the course. Between 800 and 900 runners were participating in the event.

Lt. Col. Paul Kramer of Washington, who was jogging close behind Carter, told United Press International he saw "his legs collapse. He looked in pretty bad shape. His head was down, and he just looked lousy."

Ther story had more details:

Carter, wobbly and moaning, was kept from collapsing by security men who held him erect as he staggered to the top of a long hill in the fourth mile of the Catoctin Mountains race.

Colman McCarthy, a Washington Post reporter who was running in pace with Carter, described the president as "ashen" and in distress.

Carter was assisted to a golf cart, where the White House physician, Dr. William Lukash, examined him and urged the president not to run any farther. He moved to a White House car and was driven into Camp David to recover.

Earlier that summer, July 15, Carter had given his "malaise" speech. That August, he'd taken a week-long cruise on a Mississippi steamboat that editorial cartoons at the time portrayed as a hyped-up but effective end to his presidency. Oddly, web searches on all these episodes suggest the airbrush artists have been hard at work. Discussions of the malaise speech say he never used the word, but I watched it, and I remember it clearly. Possibly he ad-libbred something that wasn't in the text. However it happened, everyone called it the maiaise speech.

By the same token, accounts of the riverboat cruise are strangely bland, when reaction in the country at the time, at least as I remember it, was that the trip was oddly irrelevant. Web searches on "Carter riverboat cruise cartoon" come up empty.

The problem is that presidential falls, or falls by presidential candidates, are news. Gerald Ford's knee gave way in 1975 on a trip to Austria, and he tumbled down the stairs of Air Force One. Bill Cinton fell going down steps at a party in 1997 under circumstances that have never been clear. Hillary stumbled and had to be bundled into a van during a 9/11 event in 2016. Ford's, Carter's, and Hillary's falls all either augured or influenced the outcome of their respective elections. Politico, even while trying to minimize Biden's own fall, commented,

Questions about Biden’s age can’t be shaken. And clips like the ones that came Thursday don’t help with the White House’s task of trying to dismiss those subterranean concerns from within the party.

Even after a successful midterm election cycle last fall, Biden’s approval rating remains stuck around 40 percent. And recent polls have shown that a majority of Americans would prefer a different Democratic candidate next year. Perhaps as much as the economy, national security or cultural issues, it is Biden’s age that could be a determining factor for voters. That’s true even if Republicans renominate former President Donald Trump, who is 76.

Jimmy Casrter was 55 when he fell in 1979. Gerald Ford was 62. Joe Biden is 80.

And Biden is about the last of the dwindling generation of elderly Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein who've been able to maintain a facade of respectability for the party that's lost the New Deal coalition of ethnics, Catholics, and labor in favvor of black separitists, parlor leftists, the urban criminal class, and radical queers. The national mood is sour. The visuals, at least for now, aren't good.

Have The Republicans Been Playing Director Wray Over The FD-1023 Form?

Over the past month, there's been a cat-and-mouse game between congressional Republicans and FBI Director Wray over a purported FBI FD-1023 form that may contain allegations of bribery against Joe Biden when he was vice president. My kabuki alarm had been going off over this from the start. Here was the status as of May 3:

Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member and long-time whistleblower advocate Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) today are demanding the FBI produce an unclassified record alleging a criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national. The document, an FBI-generated FD-1023 form, allegedly details an arrangement involving an exchange of money for policy decisions. Comer issued a subpoena today following legally protected disclosures to Grassley’s office.

Director Wray slow-walked a passive-aggressive reply on May 10:

FBI Director Christopher Wray declined during his testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday to confirm whether the document exists.

“I will tell you that we understand completely the importance of congressional oversight, that’s important to me,” Wray said. “I also understand very much, as I think you do, the importance of us protecting sources and methods and ongoing investigations.”

. . . “An FD-1023 form documents information as told to a line FBI agent. Recording the information does not validate the information, establish its credibility, or weigh it against other information known or developed by the FBI,” [acting FBI assistant directotr Christoper] Dunham wrote. “The mere existence of such a document would establish little beyond the fact that a confidential human source provided information and the FBI recorded it."

And over the next several weeks, there was wrangling over whether a specific FD-1023 detailing an alleged bribery scheme involving Joe Biden existed at all, and even if it did, whether it proved anything. And the Republicans continued to imply in their statements that an unnanmed whistleblower had simply told them about the FD-1023 -- and they simply wanted a copy, if the FBI had one. Per the link above,

Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, claimed they had spoken to an unnamed whistleblower who claimed the FBI document included evidence that Biden, while vice president, was allegedly involved in an illegal payment that also involved a foreign national. Comer subpoenaed the document, setting a Wednesday deadline for the FBI to provide it. Pressed in media interviews for more details about the whistleblower’s claims, Grassley has admitted he does not know whether they are true or false.

So their position for all of last month was, at least for public consumption, "Please, oh, please, Mr FBI director, if such an FD-1023 exists, please provide us with a copy! Or we shall have to demand it through channels!" Wray's answer has basically been "Bwahahaha!" But the log jam began to break on May 30:

Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Tuesday warned he would move contempt charges against FBI Director Christopher Wray

House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) issued a subpoena earlier this month to compel Wray to produce any FD-1023 forms — records of interactions with confidential sources — from June 2020 that contain the word “Biden.”

. . . McCarthy’s pledge to bring contempt charges gives weight to Comer’s threat. He said he personally called Wray to tell him to produce the document.

Notice, though, that the subpoena from the Comer committee was broad -- any FD-1023s at all that contained the word "Biden". This still implied that there was maybe such a thing or maybe not. And indeed, as of May 30, received opinion from Dan Abrams and NewsNation was that this was just a vague fishing expedition:

Former FBI agent Tracy Walder tells NewsNation host Dan Abrams it’s “highly unusual” for someone to demand the release of an FD-1023 and that the House Oversight Committee’s request seems like a “very broad fishing expedition.”

But late this week, everything turned upside down. First, according to the Daily Wire, on Friday:

Top lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee will review an FBI document containing allegations that President Joe Biden received a multi-million-dollar bribe from an “adversarial country” on Monday.

Committee chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) and ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) will review the document in a secured facility, known as the SCIF, for reviewing sensitive intelligence. The document will not be handed over to Congress, despite recent reports suggesting otherwise.

But even that changed later in the day, according to Just the News:

Facing a potential contempt of Congress vote, FBI Director Christopher Wray relented and has agreed to bring a subpoenaed document from the Biden family investigation to Capitol Hill for lawmakers to inspect on Monday, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer announced Friday.

. . . As recently as Wednesday, Wray indicated he would not turn over the document in compliance with the subpoena, but would let lawmakers come read it at the FBI. But a deal was struck late Thursday for the FBI to bring the document to the Capitol, officials said.

The threat of a Contempt of Congress vote against Wray would actually be idle, since the Biden Justice Deparment would have to prosecute it, and they simply wouldn't move forward. A civil lawsuit would take years to go through the courts. So what changed Wray's mind? The Federalist has what I think is the only credible take:

Sen. Chuck Grassley has already seen the FBI’s lengthy summary of a confidential human source’s claims that then-Vice President Joe Biden agreed to accept money from a foreign national to affect policy decisions, the Iowa Republican revealed on Thursday. Grassley further pledged to make the FBI report public as soon as the bureau complies with a congressional subpoena to provide an official copy of the FD-1023 form — something Director Christopher Wray has so far refused to do.

. . . That Grassley has already seen the FD-1023 summary of the CHS’s allegations raises the likelihood that the senator had access to additional documentary support for the whistleblower’s claims.

. . . And what about the other documents Grassley has requested that Wray provide? Does the senator already have copies of those?

This, of course, changes everything. It sounds to me as though when the unnamed whistleblower first went to Grassley and Comer, he already had a photocopy of the FD-1023 in hand, and the Republicans were playing Wray all along in subpoenaing the original. When did Wray become aware that the Republicans already had a copy of the FD-1023?

It does sound as though the Republicans, perhaps including Speaker McCarthy in his own call to Wray, eventually explained we can do this the hard way, or you can make it easy on yourself. This can be a disastrous blow to your credibility, or just a routine one.

Grassley has also pledged to make the contents of the FD-1023, which is unclassified, public as soon aa the FBI complies with the subpeoena. What's in it remains to be seen.

The Baseball Players

There's a notable overall pattern here: a dog that wasn't supposed to bark is actually barking, at least a little bit. A few Major League Baseball pitchers, including two on the Dodgers team itself, have objected to the Dodgers' plan to give a hero award to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. This comes in a context, whereby as early as last January, well before l'affaire Bud Light, some National Hockey League players refused to wear Pride jerseys for their respective teams' Pride nights.

The most recent example came on March 7, when Minnesota Wild players chose to not wear special Pride Night jerseys that had been designed.

According to the link, though, this is actually a dastardly Russian plot.

According to a report from The Athletic, there is a connection to Russia in all of this. On March 10, The Athletic published a report titled "The NHL's Russia-Pride jersey problem, explained: Why Wild became latest to scrap plans."

The report explains how NHL players specifically from Russia have played a part in what has become a league-wide controversy.

However, the story goes on to say that fully five percent of NHL players are from Russia, so they must have an outsize influence on their 95% non-Russian teammates. And it cites non-Russian players who are also objecting:

Florida Panthers forward Eric Staal and defenseman Marc Staal did not participate in the team's warmups prior to Thursday's game against the Toronto Maple Leafs after deciding not to wear Pride jerseys. The Panthers took their turn in hosting their annual Pride Night on Thursday.

The Staal brothers released a statement saying that they chose not to wear the Pride jerseys because it goes against their Christian beliefs.

. . . The San Jose Sharks held their Pride Night on Saturday and the team's players wore jerseys in support of the LGBTQ+ community during warmups. However, prior to the game, Sharks goalie James Reimer announced that he wouldn't be participating in warmups and cited his religious beliefs as the reasoning behind the decision.

. . . In an email to season-ticket holders, the [New York] Rangers revealed that they were planning to wear Pride-themed jerseys during warmups prior to their game against the Vegas Golden Knights on Jan. 27. Those jerseys, the team said, would be auctioned off after the game.

Instead, the team wore their traditional home jerseys when they took the ice for warmups before the Jan. 27 game.

Although as many as five percent of NHL players may have had problems with returning to Russia if they endorsed Pride merchandise, the actual roots of the NHL's problem are clearly more widespread, and the baseball players who are annoucning opposition to the Dodgers' plans are specifically citing Christian beliefs, not potential Russian retaliation. Brian Burch, head of CatholicVote, which has been in the lead for anti-Dodgers protests, said in an e-mail:

It’s now much bigger than the Dodgers. According to reports, the Major League Baseball players union is pressing the league to put a stop to teams pushing political agendas on players.

It has also been reported that a huge number of players will refuse to wear “pride” or “trans” flags if asked to by their teams.

I think the problem is that professional players work under contract. They have agents who manage their business affairs. The teams for which they play under contract can trade them or release them, so that they aren't tied exclusively to their teams' brand -- they have to maintain individual brands as individual entrepreneurs throughout their careers and even afterwards, when their endorsements continue to be valuable even when they retire.

The hockey players were clearly nervous even before Bud Light, but in its wake, baseball players have come to recognize that poor judgment in their teams' front offices can force them into endorsements that can be toxic to their careers and even hurt their retirements.

The saddest case is Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Anthony Bass:

This past Monday, Bass shared a video on his Instagram Stories that featured influencer Ryan Miller calling on Christians to boycott Bud Light over the Dylan Mulvaney partnership and Target for the Pride Merchandise collection. Two days later, he apologized.

The response from the Blue Jays front office was clearly meant to discourage anyone else from following suit:

The Blue Jays posted a short video of Bass on Twitter addressing reporters with a brief statement expressing remorse for boosting the visibility of a video on Instagram making a biblical case against spending money to support businesses that are pushing people, particularly children, to “darkness.”

. . . “I just spoke with my teammates and shared with them my actions yesterday. I apologized with [sic] them, and as of right now I am using the Blue Jays’ resources to better educate myself to make better decisions moving forward,” he added. “The ballpark is for everybody. We include all fans at the ballpark. We want to welcome everybody. That’s all I have to say.”

Commentators compared the video to a "hostage situation". Look at that facial expression in the photo at the top of this post.

The Blue Jay's subsequent reaction was remarkably heavy-handed:

. . . The Blue Jays issued a statement voicing support for the LGBTQ community.

. . . Toronto manager John Schneider indicated he believes there needs to be more than just an apology from Bass.

“We’re not going to pretend like this never happened,” Schneider said, according to MLB.com. “We’re not going to pretend like it’s the end and move on. There are definitely more steps that are going to follow.”

Is he gonna have to bend over and be gang raped by the team, or what?

At Bass's next home game appearance, he was roundly booed by the Toronto fans, although accounts indicate it wasn't clear whether they were booing him for his original support for a third-party opinion or for his subsequent cave. Clearly, though, the Blue Jays were able to make credible threats against him that the Dodgers have so far been unable to carry through with either their own Clayton Kershaw or Blake Treinen, who have both spoken out against the team's re-invitation to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. (I suspect both met with their agents and legal counsel before they spoke out. Bass likely should have but didn't.)

As to the question of whether the Toronto fans were booing Bass for his initial statement or his recantation, I'm with the first. Canadians are pretty much with the program.

Target May Have ‘Lost Control Of Narrative’

Gee, d'ya think? In this morning's New York Post,

Target’s decision to move some of its LGBT pride apparel in some of its locations made national headlines, and it may have lost control of its own narrative in the process, a top consumer researcher says.

Notice how gingerly the Post is covering this story. As I noted a week ago, Target's own corporate flack Erik Castaneda told Reuters that products are being withdrawn at all locations, not just in some southern states.

The products Target is withdrawing are being removed from all its U.S. stores and from its website, Castaneda said.

And as I noted yesterday, a YouTuber went undercover, representing himself as someone who wanted to buy a "tuck friendly" swimsuit, and was able to speak with a manager who explained these were "out of stock". Clearly Target is doing this very quietly, but as I noted in yesterday's post, it appeared to be actively dumping its Pride products even before the start of Pride Month.

But let's get back to the Post story:

[Chief insights officer for Collage Group David] Evans said Target had a long history of connecting with the LGBT community, but in the time period since it came to light that it was moving some of its Pride displays due to what it claimed were “threats” against some staffers, it’s faced heat from both ends of the political spectrum.

. . . "they probably did lose control of the narrative a little bit, because what ended up happening was the press is all about ‘Target pulls the merchandise,’ as opposed to Target employees are being threatened by, in fact, a very, very small group of people who represent a very small minority of anti-LGBT sentiment,” he told Fox News Digital.

Here's the problem. It's generally assumed that the Target and Bud Light boycotts are equivalent and stem from the same large-scale customer dissatisfaction with corporate catering to radical queers. The most easily quantifiable measure of how effective the boycotts have been is Bud Light sales:

The sales volume of Bud Light dropped 29.5% in the week ending May 20 as compared to the same period last year, according to data provided to Newsweek by Bump Williams Consulting and Nielsen IQ. This data showed the sales revenue drop 25.7% in the same period.

The nearly 30% drop marks another increase in losses week to week since the boycott gained traction in April. Bud Light sales dropped 28.4% from last year for the week ending May 13.

Bud Light lost 24% of its sales and Budweiser fell 10.5% in the four weeks ending May 20, according to the data.

Current headlines suggest this level of decline threatens Bud Light's position as the top US beer brand. This is simply not the result of "a very, very small group of people who represent a very small minority of anti-LGBT sentiment". We simply don't have equivalent reports of Target sales, but we do hear from headlines that Target's stock has been declining at record levels:

Target’s stock has lost a whopping $13.8 billion over the past two weeks, hitting its lowest levels in nearly three years as the “cheap chic” discount retailer continues to face backlash over LGBTQ-friendly kids clothing.

. . . The ongoing losses are a result of an ongoing 14-day boycott that was triggered by Target’s release of “PRIDE,” an LGBTQ-friendly line that includes clothing for children and “tuck-friendly” women’s swimwear with “extra crotch coverage.”

What this simply means is that investors are shorting Target stock irrespective of published sales figures, which aren't available.

Short selling involves borrowing a security whose price you think is going to fall from your brokerage and selling it on the open market. Your plan is to then buy the same stock back later, hopefully for a lower price than you initially sold it for, and pocket the difference after repaying the initial loan.

The link makes it clear that shorting a stock involves considerable risk, and short sellers must already have margin accounts with their brokerages to cover that risk. In other words, these are experienced investors who are making informed bets about Target's future performance. Again, this is not a story about "a very, very small group of people who represent a very small minority of anti-LGBT sentiment". This is a story about experienced investors who are losing confidence in Target's management.

That Target should be keeping so quiet about withdrawing its "tuck friendly" swimsuit range is an indication that its management is doing all it can to conceal a disastrous mistake. The whole situation is starting to remind me of the scene in The Big Short where Mark Baum, the contrarian fund manager, accuses a credit agency analyst, shown wearing medical eyeshades in the picture at the top of this post, of refusing to recognize that the mortgage securities her agency rates are fraudulent.

The corporations that are facing the boycotts are basically hoping it'll all blow over before they're forced to capitulate with apologies and CEO departures. It can take a long time for investors to respond to market reality, as The Big Short makes clear, but eventually there's a reckoning. Legacy media, including the New York Post, is feeding the denial, at least for now.

UPDATE: JPMorgan Chase & Co. downgraded Target stock on Thursday from "overweight" to "neutral," with analysts citing the possibility of a decline in sales due to consumers pulling back spending amid persistent inflation.

This comes as the retailer struggles with the backlash from its Pride merchandising marketing campaign which offered merchandise that included female-style swimsuits that have the option to "tuck" male genitalia.

The downgrade has nothing to do with that, of course. Just thought they'd mention it.

What do you think might happen to the stock if they actually announced they were sending the swimsuits to the landfill and the CEO was resigning?