21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “Isaac Success didn’t live up to his name in bed.”

At the risk of entering into Steve’s territory, pro tip: chugging two bottles of Baileys will tend to cause that…

Found via Stephen Kruiser, who tweets, “I’m leaving this tweet here w/o even clicking the link and maybe retiring from Twitter now.”

FACEPALM:

Well, that’s one way of looking at what happened there…

UPDATE: Twitchy is working late on a Sunday tonight: Seriously!? Look who Donna Brazile’s applauding for taking ‘lead against sexual harassment.’

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LAURENCE JARVIK SENDS THIS LINK WITH THE COMMENT, “RUN, GLENN, RUN!” Breitbart Goes ‘Old Hickory’ in Tennessee, Gets 2 Establishment Scalps. I don’t think so. I doubt I’d get elected — but if I did, that would be even worse!

CHANGE: Trump unveils new strict 70-point immigration enforcement plan: Calls for comprehensive rewrite of laws to stiffen border and interior, cut chain migration.

Determined to finally solve illegal immigration, the White House submitted a 70-point enforcement plan to Congress Sunday proposing the stiffest reforms ever offered by an administration — including a massive rewrite of the law in order to eliminate loopholes illegal immigrants have exploited to gain a foothold in the U.S.

The plans, seen by The Washington Times, include President Trump’s calls for a border wall, more deportation agents, a crackdown on sanctuary cities and stricter limits to chain migration — all issues the White House says need to be part of any bill Congress passes to legalize illegal immigrant “Dreamers” currently protected by the Obama-era deportation amnesty known as DACA.

But the plans break serious new ground on the legal front, giving federal agents more leeway to deny illegal immigrants at the border, to arrest and hold them when they’re spotted in the interior, and to deport them more speedily. The goal, the White House said, is to ensure major changes to border security, interior enforcement and the legal immigration system.

Seems tougher than I was told to expect.

‘HARVEY WEINSTEIN’S MEDIA ENABLERS’? THE NEW YORK TIMES IS ONE OF THEM: Don’t miss the detail in this article by a former Timeswoman on how Matt Damon and Russell Crowe called her directly to tamp down an explosive story that would have severely compromised Weinstein’s reputation over a decade ago.

In 2004, I was still a fairly new reporter at The New York Times when I got the green light to look into oft-repeated allegations of sexual misconduct by Weinstein. It was believed that many occurred in Europe during festivals and other business trips there.

I traveled to Rome and tracked down the man who held the plum position of running Miramax Italy. According to multiple accounts, he had no film experience and his real job was to take care of Weinstein’s women needs, among other things.

As head of Miramax Italy in 2003 and 2004, Fabrizio Lombardo was paid $400,000 for less than a year of employment. He was on the payroll of Miramax and thus the Walt Disney Company, which had bought the indie studio in 1993.

I had people on the record telling me Lombardo knew nothing about film, and others citing evenings he organized with Russian escorts.

* * * * * * * *

After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my head at the Times, the story was gutted.

I was told at the time that Weinstein had visited the newsroom in person to make his displeasure known. I knew he was a major advertiser in the Times, and that he was a powerful person overall.

But I had the facts, and this was the Times. Right?

Wrong.

Read the whole thing.

As Jake Tapper tweets in response to Weinstein being fired, “so the Miramax partners had NO idea this had been going on for decades? And Weinstein paid all those settlements out of his own personal $$?” Author Laurie Stark adds, “Remember: The Weinstein Company didn’t fire Harvey because they found out he was a sexual predator. They fired him because WE found out.” And Glenn has an excellent suggestion: “Clearly we need Congressional hearings on sexual harassment in Hollywood. Make all the studio heads testify.”

Indeed. Although it would probably go something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUjjzwIrebQ

UPDATE: “New York magazine had the Harvey Weinstein story — or nearly had it — a year ago but didn’t run anything after the movie mogul and his team of lawyers and p.r. consultants intervened.”

GOOD: Trump proclaims Columbus Day, without Obama’s qualms.

MARK STEYN: Theory Of The Case. “At one level, it’s a ludicrous explanation – and yet it has the ruthless logic of a psychopath, of a man who, like a good screenwriter, subordinates all other considerations to the internal logic of an absurd proposition. It’s also a rare explanation that explains everything: the guns in the hotel, the explosive material in the car, the guns in his house, and in his other house, and doubtless in his other other house.”

THE MEDIA AS A SOURCE OF UNHAPPINESS IN AMERICA.

TREATING DIABETES WITH FECAL TRANSPLANTS FROM LEAN DONORS: “Response to lean donor FMT is driven by baseline fecal microbiota composition.” This is not so much a budding treatment, I suspect, as evidence that microbiome issues are involved.

DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS: The New York Times Reportedly Killed a Story On Weinstein’s Sexual Misconduct in 2004. “Ironically, a follow-up piece on Weinstein’s misconduct ran in the Times last week decrying the Hollywood celebrity’s ‘media enablers’ — which, based on Waxman’s piece, included the Times until just last week.”

As IowaHawk says, journalism is about covering stories. With a pillow. Until they stop moving.

AUSTIN BAY HAS BEEN SAYING SOMETHING SIMILAR: The case for brinksmanship with North Korea: Trump’s threats against Pyongyang could work.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 6 Reasons Your Right-Wing Friend Isn’t Coming To Your Side On Gun Control. “I find it hard to have an honest and vulnerable conversation about a deeply held right when the starting point is often challenging my motives while coming from a place of ignorance on firearms.”

BREAKING: WEINSTEIN CO. BOARD FIRES HARVEY WEINSTEIN, CITING SEXUAL MISCONDUCT ALLEGATIONS: “Mr. Weinstein on Friday began an indefinite leave of absence. In a brief statement on Sunday, the board cited ‘new information about misconduct by Harvey Weinstein that has emerged in the past few days.’”

UPDATE: “Weinstein’s been fired—the signal to Hollywood’s big names that it’s now officially O.K. to speak out. Let’s see how many do,” Terry Teachout tweets.

SALENA ZITO: All news is local.

There rarely is a proper obituary for old newspapers, nothing to chronicle how they were there when the school board was caught in a corruption sting, or how the local volunteer fire department saved the elderly couple on River Road. No one to praise when reporters held the town council accountable for reckless spending or caught a local politician taking cash from a union official or how the town rallied when flood waters crested the banks of the Youghiogheny or saved people when the train derailed.

It just dies.

Along with that death comes the death of the local reporter: the man or woman who knows their community inside and out, a career that typically starts with the cops beat or the local school boards, the places where a reporter really gets to know the pulse of their hometown and their people. Who knows how the town ticks. Who knows how it ebbs and flows. Who knows where the bad guys are, both on the street and behind a podium.

Who knows fundamentally that all politics is local.

Good journalism is not glamorous. It’s not sexy. It means long hours; it often means no personal life; it means wear and tear on your car; it means driving on rural roads where there are more deer than people or alleys where the state of the bodies you see outlined with chalk behind yellow tape will haunt you forever.

And when you go to a bar, you go to a bar; you don’t go to a cocktail party.

It is often not done in a fancy office with a ping-pong table and an espresso machine; the coffee is typically awful, and you spend more time chasing something down in a neighborhood than on Google.

And you never stop at the top – you pay your dues, you sacrifice your personal life, and you work your way up.

Not many reporters like that left. Thank goodness for Salena Zito! But as Andrew Kreig’s prescient book, Spiked: How Chain Management Corrupted America’s Oldest Newspaper made clear, newspapers got rid of shoe leather reporting because it was expensive, and replaced it with fluff that’s easy to get via the Internet, and then wondered why nobody was subscribing anymore.

DON’T TAKE MARRIAGE ADVICE FROM THESE WOMEN. OR ANY OTHER KIND OF ADVICE, REALLY. When making a sandwich is a crime against feminism.

WHEN young Sydney mother Maddie asked her closed Facebook group of 26,186 mothers for some tasty alternatives to sandwiches for her husband’s lunches, she wasn’t expecting the backlash.

“I would love to hear what other mums make their hubbies for lunch and snacks throughout the work day,” she posted on Tuesday. “We are getting over sandwiches.”

You would think she’d asked for a hemlock recipe, judging by the torrent of scolding which erupted.

She was nothing but a “slave” and a “1950s housewife”.

She was “weird” and no one in their right mind or a “pink fit” would do something so demeaning as make their husband lunch. Let alone snacks.

“Your husband is a grown up and you’re not his mother”, wrote one member of the North Shore Mums Facebook group.

“My husband can make his own damn lunch.”

“I make my husband the same thing he makes me. Nothing!!”

They sound lovely. And caring. Plus:

“I’m actually so devastated about some of these comments,” wrote Maddie.

She and her husband are saving up to buy their first home and, “he works in an extremely physically demanding job, he does housework, he cooks dinner every second night… He gets up in the middle of the night with our Bub. He is a champion.

“The least I can do is make him a bloody sandwich. I love my man, he deserves to eat lunch and we can’t afford to eat out.”

She sounds like a keeper, but looking at the other comments it’s easy to see why a lot of men have gone on strike.

SETTING THE BAR LOW: Toyota Just Made the Most Badass Minivan.

THE GUILD PROTECTS ITS OWN: SNL creator Lorne Michaels reveals the show gave Harvey Weinstein a pass, despite trying out a joke at his expense that got a ‘big reaction’ in dress rehearsal:

Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels has seemingly admitted the show chose not to roast Harvey Weinstein because the embattled film heavyweight is from New York.

When Michaels was asked as he was leaving SNL’s after-party at 4am why the show avoided the Weinstein controversy, the producer smiled and responded: ‘It’s a New York thing.’

* * * * * * * *

‘I remember a joke being made about him during Weekend Update… I don’t remember the joke, I just remember that it got a big reaction from the audience,’ an audience member revealed.

Yeah, it’s not like Weinstein is some sex-crazed monstrous degenerate like Gerald Ford, or something.

Hey, I thought it was on us to stop sexual assault, Hollywood. What changed?

CBS WALKS BACK REPORT THAT KAEPERNICK WILL STAND FOR THE ANTHEM IF HIRED.  Great journalisming from CBS: Jason La Canfora, the CBS sports journalist who interviewed Kaepernick is now tweeting, “Standing for Anthem wasn’t something that I spoke to Colin about sat. I relayed what had been reported about him standing in the future…” (ellipses in original).

As John Sexton writes at Hot Air, “Frankly, this doesn’t make any sense:”

If this reporter spent several hours talking to Kaepernick it’s hard to believe the elephant in the room wasn’t discussed. LaCanfora seemed pretty clear when he said “He’s not planning on kneeling” and “he’s planning on standing.” If they never talked about that.

I haven’t seen video of LaCanfora’s explanation yet, but this is a pretty big screw up, if it is one. It seems more likely to me that he was actually told those things by Kaepernick or his agent or someone but was asked not to report it. I’m guessing he got a call after his segment (above) aired.

In any case, Colin Kaepernick is a political extremist. He’s already made clear once that politics is more important to him than football. Even if he did make such a promise behind the scenes, why would a team take his word? Even if he does drop the anthem protest, there are lots of other ways he could continue to politicize his job (though probably few as counter-productive). Maybe some team wants his drama but it’s hard to see how the NFL as a whole benefits from it.

Nessa Diab, Kaepernick’s girlfriend, is also denying the report. Diab is currently a New York radio host who reportedly radicalized the former 49ers QB while DJing in San Francisco. During this past offseason, she issued a tweet that compared Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti to a slave owner and superstar former Raven Ray Lewis as his Uncle Tom. As Clay Travis of the Outkick the Coverage sportsblog writes in response to Diab’s tweet, “This is why Kaepernick is unsigned. Who needs this mess for a mediocre QB?”

UPDATE: Pass the popcorn — “Colin Kaepernick Camp Accuses Jason La Canfora and CBS of Fake News,” reports USA Today’s sports blog.

After La Canfora’s report, Kaepernick retweeted this entry from TV/radio personality Charlamagne Tha God, which said that Kaepernick “never spoke to CBS,” but that he “bumped into” La Canfora in a hotel lobby:

And currently on Kaepernick’s Twitter account is this bon mot:

Besides reports that Churchill likely never said that, the uber-woke Kaepernick is quoting the same infamous colonialist oppressor whose bust Obama banished from the White House? Now who’s being naive, Kap?

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IN CALIFORNIA, SEX TRIUMPHS OVER DEATH, MICHAEL WALSH WRITES: “To knowingly endanger the lives of others, not to mention to reinfect the public blood supply and receive in return a slap on the wrist, is just nuts. But, hey, rights.”

I’d make a California delenda est reference, but Jerry Brown and Sacramento, joined this week by Hollywood, seem to be doing a remarkable job of destroying the state all by themselves.

PENCE DITCHES COLTS GAME AFTER 49ERS PLAYERS KNEEL DURING ANTHEM:

Vice President Pence walked out of the Indianapolis Colts game on Sunday when ​some ​players from the San Francisco 49ers took a knee during the national anthem.

“I left today’s Colts game because @POTUS and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem​,” Pence posted on Twitter. ​

Sure, it was a stunt – Pence had to know that the Niners would kneel, just as they’ve done since Kap first blew-up the NFL last year, and at each game so far this season. But Pence’s message is the correct one – protest your causes all you want during your own free time, not during the national anthem.

In addition to rallying Trump’s base, this will of course ensure that the protests continue, which will further hurt the NFL’s image, alienate fans who just want to watch a game and spend a few hours away from the culture wars, and likely drive ratings further downward.

Or as Ace wrote a few weeks ago: The National Nervous Breakdown, and How to Exploit it Ruthlessly.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): AP: BREAKING: Quarterback Colin Kaepernick tells CBS he’ll stand during national anthem if given chance to play football in NFL again.

MORE (From Ed): AP and CBS walk back this report, with CBS sports journalist Jason La Canfora oddly now claiming that he was going by past statements by Kaepernick, and never discussed the issue with him, despite apparently spending several hours interviewing him. Also, Kaepernick’s girlfriend denies the claim. Much more here.