It must be said that it was nice to spend a Saturday afternoon in a tightly packed movie theater full of people who are enthusiastic to see a movie. That doesn’t happen frequently anymore, shy of hyper-successful films like “Dune: Part II” and “Barbie.” It is rare nowadays to get turned away at the box office because the theater is full, as the guy behind me was; my local theater is still having trouble giving away free “Furiosa” posters.  

However, it shouldn’t be surprising that animated films would be the things that break the trend. “Kung Fu Panda 4” grossed $545 million this spring primarily because it was the only animated movie in theaters through three months, and “Despicable Me 4” is currently tracking for an $80 million opening for the July 4 weekend. April’s rerelease of “Shrek 2” grossed more than Pixar’s last three releases combined. 

Naturally, the surprise comes in the fact that this opening is for a Disney film — coming from a studio that is facing enormous amounts of burnout and controversy due to its perceived partisan slant, declining quality, and proclivity for anti-creative decision-making, and that doesn’t include this week’s Project Veritas sting. In 2019, Disney produced eight of the 10 most popular blockbusters of the year, and seven of them broke the billion-dollar mark at the box office. In 2023, seven of their eight films were box-office disasters. Disney is an unwieldy unprofitable sinking ship, and the majority of its franchises are battered and exhausted.  

An animated family picture like

Credit to Michael Barbaro of The New York Times for ever so gingerly happening upon the lesson Democrats should have taken from the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, but didn’t. Or more likely, refuse to.

On Tuesday’s edition of the Times’ “Daily” podcast, Barbaro and Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak mulled over the ruling, and at the very end of the episode, Barbaro had his epiphany. “Another way to think about this ruling if you step way back,” he said, “is that it’s kind of the Supreme Court saying that when you elect a president, you have to accept, dear American people, that the Constitution gives them a tremendous amount of power and legal latitude to kind of do what they want …”

Barbaro was cooking. You could feel it.

He continued his revelation. “And we, the Supreme Court, are going to make it pretty hard to hold that president criminally responsible for their actions,” he said, “so, voters need to think really carefully about who they want to possess this level of immunity.”

I imagine Barbaro swelled with pride at having successfully followed that pure and true train of thought to its logical end. He did it! He really did it!

I just wish the rest of his peers in the media and the Democrat Party would do the same.

Immediately after the ruling, holding that a president carrying out his constitutional responsibilities can’t be held criminally liable for it once out of office (duh), Democrats and leftist triflers

Michigan lawmakers filed a legal brief on Monday requesting a federal appeals court consider their lawsuit against two Democrat-backed constitutional amendments they claim violate the Michigan and U.S. Constitutions.

“It is extremely important to have these constitutional questions adjudicated as rapidly as possible,” plaintiff and Republican Sen. Jim Runestad said in a Tuesday release from Michigan Fair Elections. “I am a firm believer in the Constitution. The people have a right to have this issue decided in a court of law, so everyone can have confidence that we are preserving civil rights and obeying the Constitution.”

Filed in September by 11 state GOP legislators against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, and the director of Michigan’s Bureau of Elections, the lawsuit in question contended that two, constitutional ballot amendments — one approved by voters in 2018 and the other in 2022 — violate the elections clause of the U.S. Constitution, which stipulates that the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”

In their original lawsuit, plaintiffs argued that the amendments to the Michigan electoral system are invalid because the U.S. Constitution says the power to implement such changes to state election laws lies with the state legislature. The legislators further claimed the Michigan Constitution provides state legislators similar powers.

Among the leftist-backed election practices added to the Michigan Constitution under the 2018 and 2022 initiatives are automatic and same-day voter registration, no-excuse absentee voting “during