October 15, 2024

AMERICA’S TEAM IS OFFICIALLY A CLOWN SHOW: Dallas Cowboys Owner Jerry Jones Threatens to Fire Radio Hosts.

Bill Parcells was a miracle worker and took a 5-11 team to the playoffs in year one — with the abysmal Quincy Carter as quarterback! He also rebuilt the defense, groomed Tony Romo, and left the team with a loaded roster. They were as talented as anyone in the league.

So what did Jones do?

First, he alienated Parcells by forcing Terrell Owens on his hands. Then he replaced Parcells with another head coach, Wade Phillips (bad!) in 2007, followed by Jason Garrett (bad!) in 2010, and now Mike McCarthy (ugh!) in 2020.

This brings us to 2024, where the Detroit Lions just obliterated the Dallas Cowboys 47-9 on Sunday. It was the worst home loss in the history of their current stadium.

So naturally, the local Dallas media asked Jones about it on 105.3 The Fan. They had to; it would’ve been journalistic malpractice to ignore it.

Jerry Jones responded by threatening to fire all of ‘em!

“Your job isn’t to let me to [sic] go over all the reasons that I did something,” Jones seethed. “That’s not your job. I’ll get somebody else to ask these questions. I’m not kidding.”

And he’s not kidding: This is how Jerry Jones looks at the world. It’s HIS team. He owns it — as he liked to remind us over and over (and over) again.

But if it’s his team, then it’s no longer America’s Team.

As Tim Cowlishaw of the Dallas Morning News notes: By sparring with radio hosts, Jerry Jones shows Cowboys are equal parts tragedy, comedy.

When Jones entered the league in the late 1980s, he expressed his admiration for the original Darth Rader, Al Davis, who in his heyday, was a brilliant general manager and owner with the Oakland Raiders. But as Davis reached his dotage, he appeared increasingly out of touch with both the NFL specifically, and Planet Earth in general. At age 82, Jones seems determined to follow the same trajectory as his former hero.

Posted at 5:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

CNN: Say, Remember When Kamala Pledged to Prosecute Oil Producers Rather Than Praise Them?

Sure, I do. That was around the same time that Kamala Harris proposed and backed a Medicare for All socialized-medicine bill. And for that matter, bragged about her role in ensuring that taxpayers covered the cost of transgender surgeries for prison inmates, opposed a border wall, wanted to defund ICE, and so on.

Most of the Protection Racket Media has refused to cover these previous positions, or pretend that Harris has addressed them. Give credit to CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski for continuing to dig into Harris’ record, practically alone in his field in doing so. This afternoon, the K-File reporter reminds everyone that Harris ran in 2019 on a platform of prosecuting oil companies for producing fossil-fuel energy — production for which Harris now wants to claim credit:

When Kamala Harris ran for president in 2019, she repeatedly warned oil companies they should be prepared to face hefty fines and even criminal prosecution under a future Harris administration for their role in contributing to climate change.

Now, as the Democratic nominee, Harris is highlighting the country’s record oil and gas production. She rarely talks about climate change, and, despite having been a vigorous supporter of the Green New Deal, her campaign’s website is light on climate policy details.

It’s a stark shift that illustrates the delicate politics of energy — but also how Harris has abandoned a number of progressive positions she held before joining Joe Biden’s ticket in 2020.

Be sure to read it all. However, this is not really a new story, but rather an expansion on a common theme of Harris’ campaign as well as the lack of media attention to it. Candidates can and often do change positions on specific issues depending on election cycles and constituencies being sought. As J.D. Vance explained this week, he has changed his position on a national regulation on abortion because he sees the wisdom of Donald Trump’s federalist approach to it, and he is no longer running for a Senate seat where those issues would be debated anyway.

Related: Harris Says If You Like Your Car, You Can Keep It. Her Record Says Otherwise.

This is the challenge of running a change election with a candidate who not only is the same party as the person she’s hoping to replace, but has also been around the block a few times — she has quite a record of leftism, and she can’t disown it all.

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

WAS IT AN ACCIDENT, REALLY?

Posted at 4:51 pm by Stephen Green

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH JOHN FETTERMAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY:

In accordance with the prophecy:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

PRIORITIES: DOJ Tells Four Police, Fire Departments That It’s Racist To Expect Employees To Know Basic Math.

Most blacks generally pass the tests, and the lawsuits do not explain how the tests can be racist against only some blacks. Blacks who passed the tests are excluded from the financial payouts.

Last week, Durham, North Carolina settled with the DOJ, saying blacks failed the tests required to become a firefighter more often, and “Employers should identify and eliminate practices that have a disparate impact based on race.” It said the Durham Fire Department must pay nearly a million dollars to people who failed the test, and hire up to 16 of them.

While the DOJ said the tests were not relevant to actually being a good firefighter, an online practice test suggests that it is directly relevant, that people could die if such firefighters were hired. One question asks if a building is 350 feet away, how many 60-foot hoses would be needed.

DEI kills.

Posted at 3:49 pm by Stephen Green

THE NEW SPACE RACE:

It’s pretty much SpaceX versus the world — and SpaceX is winning.

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green

LIKE LED ZEPPELIN, IF YOU’RE GOING TO PLAGIARIZE, WHY NOT STEAL FROM THE BEST? Kamala Harris accused of plagiarizing Martin Luther King in her book.

Kamala Harris has been accused of plagiarising Martin Luther King in the book that helped launch her political career.

The US vice-president is accused of copying a more than a dozen sections of Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.

She appears to rip-off Rev Dr Martin Luther King in an anecdote from her childhood during the civil rights movement.

The 59-year-old wrote: “My mother used to laugh when she told the story about a time I was fussing as a toddler: She leaned down to ask me, “Kamala, what’s wrong? What do you want?” and I wailed back, “Fweedom.”

The story is very similar to one shared by the civil rights leader, as the New York Post and other outlets have previously noted.

“I will never forget a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother,” King told Playboy magazine in 1965.

“‘What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked at him straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom’,”.

Stefan Weber, an Austrian academic dubbed the “plagiarism hunter”, reviewed the book and accused the Democratic presidential nominee of dozens of instances of lifting passages without appropriate citation.

The plagiarism in Ms Harris’s book ranges from “minor transgressions” to more “serious infractions”, according to Dr Weber.

Related: Kamala Harris vs Martin Luther King Jr: Who said it better?

MLK: I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world.

KH: So, Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong.

MLK: Our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again.

KH: You know, if you just look at where the stars are in the sky, don’t look at ‘em as just random things. If you just look at ‘em as points, look at the constellation – what does it show you?’

If Kamala does go on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the contact high in the green room should be absolutely incredible.

Speaking of which:

Flashback: Kamala Harris Didn’t Send 1500 People To Jail For Pot — It Was More Than That. As “Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle discovered as he fact-checked Gabbard’s claim, the number of people Harris sent to jail for marijuana violations was actually closer to 2000.”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

WOKAL DISTANCE: There’s a huge story behind [Christopher Rufo’s] plagiarism investigations people have missed: The integrity of America’s elite institutions has been destroyed by fraud, lying, low standards, and political corruption. It’s just like the 2007 housing market.”

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

HMM: More bystanders using naloxone to save people from overdose.

When Helen and I had our advanced life support training (basically CPR, bleed control, and more) we were warned that people often come out of this not grateful for being saved, but violent and absolutely furious for having their high interrupted. So be careful out there.

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CHANGE: Walgreens to shut 1,200 stores as CEO Wentworth seeks turnaround. “The closures were announced in June but the company had not disclosed the number of affected stores at that time. It had over 8,000 stores in the United States as of Aug. 31 last year.”

So roughly one out of every seven stores.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Stephen Green

ALWAYS BRING YOUR OWN CAMERA: See how CBS aggressively edited an interview with Speaker Mike Johnson to fit the Narrative.™

Even for a mainstream media outlet this is disgraceful stuff:

Strap in folks, because it’s worse than you think. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson got edited into oblivion when he appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, and it becomes obvious why they did it once we look at the unedited footage.

Mollie Hemmingway tweets, “Holy schmoley. Time for all Republicans to refuse to even appear on CBS. Seriously.” But if you must, as Glenn has written, always bring your own camera to interviews.

Related: As is their quadrennial standard in the fall, CBS is going all in to help the team:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Pelosi admits she hasn’t spoken to Biden since she forced him out of the Presidential race.

Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden have not spoken since she forced him to drop out of the presidential election, the still-powerful former House speaker has admitted.

Pelosi was central to the effort by Democrats to get Biden to bow out of the race in July after a disastrous and concerning performance in his first and only presidential debate against Donald Trump of the 2024 election cycle.

On a Guardian podcast Tuesday, the California Democrat confirmed the once-close allies had not spoken since Biden was forced to make the stunning move. She said: ‘Not since then, no. But I’m prayerful about it.’

Pelosi maintained that while she still considered the president a friend and political ally, she knew that she had to do something to cut his time in the Oval Office short.

The desperate, late-in-the race move came amid continuing concern about Biden’s mental acuity and ability to lead, but was propelled by Democrats’  concerns over whether he could beat Donald Trump in November.

And, indeed, Pelosi also admitted it was the politics of beating Trump that pushed the decision to end Biden’s campaign forward.

‘Elections are decisions. You decide to win. I decided a while ago that Donald Trump will never set foot in the White House again as president of the United States or in any other capacity,’ she told the Guardian.

‘So when you make a decision, you have to make every decision in favor of winning… and the most important decision of all is the candidate.’

Pelosi may be age 84, and in November of 2022, it was reported that she would “step down from party leadership.” But in her mind at least, to paraphrase Woody Allen at the beginning of Manhattan, DC is her town, and it always will be.

(But remember, Trump’s the dictator.)

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll