Archive for 2018
June 5, 2018
OPEN THREAD: Conduct yourselves accordingly.
SOUTHERN GIRLS CAN DO ANYTHING:
— Old Row Outdoors (@OldRowOutdoors) June 4, 2018
Hey, maybe since Miss America is getting rid of the swimsuit competition, they could replace it with a catfish-wrangling event based on this. I’d watch that.
AT AMAZON, save on bestsellers in Kitchen and Housewares.
Plus, deals on Pet Supplies.
DAN RATHER ON TRUMP UNINVITING EAGLES: ‘Akin To McCarthyism.’
Geez, I know Eagles owner Jeff Lurie is a left-leaning guy, but calling him a Communist seems like a bit of a reach, even for Gunga Dan…
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: ‘Solo’ Will Lose $50M-Plus in First Defeat for Disney’s ‘Star Wars’ Empire. Weird that a film with a female director producer and a lot of social-justice points didn’t make a lot of money.
What longstanding American institution will be the next to fall to dumb politically-woke remaking? Well. . . .
Evergreen:
JIM TREACHER: The Final Act of ‘The Final Year’ Is the Best Comedy of 2018.
After the first hour or so, I was about ready to demand my 99 cents back. Jeff Bezos may be made of money, but I’m not.
But then, in the blink of an eye, the entire tone of the film changed. In an instant, it became much, much less difficult to watch. Suddenly, all the arrogance and pomposity of the previous 72 minutes was worth it. Suddenly, I was laughing out loud and clapping.
Why?
November 8, 2016.
You may have seen the following meme-worthy moment from the film, in which the documentarians stick a camera in Ben Rhodes’ face after he’s just gotten the final election results. We see his every twitch and nuance as he haltingly expresses his feelings about being so completely wrong.*
SPOILER: It is wonderful.
As George C. Scott’s Patton famously warned at the conclusion of the movie, “For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph — a tumultuous parade…Sometimes his children, robed in white, stood with him in the chariot, or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.”
In the last 50 years, that person has been the documentary filmmaker, as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Chuck Berry all discovered the hard way. Or as Kyle Smith wrote in his review of The September Issue, the 2009 look back at Vogue and the sneering pomposity of its editor, Anna Wintour just before the dead tree publishing industry hit the big iceberg, the magic of the documentary is simple: “Convince somebody that you’re going to make them a big-screen star, then let them hang themselves.” Except that with The Final Year, both its stars and its director were absolutely certain how their movie was going to end. But in the end, Ben Rhodes built an echo chamber too far.
RADICAL CHIC, GOPHER STATE DIVISION: “Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison has chosen to give up his sinecure in Congress to run for the office of Minnesota Attorney General,” Scott Johnson writes at Power Line. “State representative Ilhan Omar is among those who will seek the DFL endorsement to replace Ellison in Congress:”
What we have here is a case study in the civil war on the left that Steve has chronicled in 60 parts so far. Those of us viewing this part up close cannot enjoy the show. Minnesota has never seen a major party candidate for attorney general with Ellison’s shady past. That he might serve as the state’s chief law enforcement officer is a sick joke out of a dark satire. Minnesota has seen a major party candidate for Congress like Omar before — that would be Ellison — but she is even so something else again.
Read the whole thing.
ROME BUILT WALLS: A review of “Hadrian’s Wall: Archaeology and History at the Limit of Rome’s Empire.” As usual, Dr. Nofi’s review is a brief history class.
SEYMOUR HERSH ON THE ANTI-TRUMP FBI: It’s the biggest missed story of all time.
But maybe “missed” isn’t quite right.
SALENA ZITO: Hollywood Desperately Needs to Fill the Hole Left by Roseanne:
If the lesson the left takes away from this is that all Trump voters are racist, it will be making the same mistake the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the national news media and the NFL have made in misunderstanding this coalition of people. But if wisdom prevails, the left will step back and realize there was a void in the market that even Roseanne Barr could fill — a person who conservatives have reviled for years.
If there was a hole that big in Hollywood, then we should take an honest look at our programming and how our entertainment industry treats Middle America. Plenty of lessons are coming out of this chapter of Barr’s life. Most of them are obvious: Words matter, and there are consequences for hateful behavior.
But people will miss two other very important lessons. The first is we have to stop leaping to the assumption that all people who voted for Donald Trump are racist and everything they like has tinges of racism — from guns to how the NFL has handled the national anthem controversy.
The second is that Hollywood hasn’t been serving a great big chunk of this country for a long time. As a result, a show no one predicted would be popular broke all the records. I sincerely hope ABC is able to revive some version of “Roseanne” under a different name and with some of the same characters, as has been reported. Because right now, people in a large swath of the country are hungry for something that authentically reflects their lives. That’s where the story is.
Much like Jimmy the Greek handing CBS all the reason they needed to fire him after his freshness rating had long expired, Roseanne was axed because her racist tirade gave Disney the perfect excuse to both dump a TV series whose premise they hated, and send a symbolic warning shot to flyover country to know your place, rubes. Disney is such an enormous conglomerate of broadcast and cable TV channels, movies, amusement parks, and a bottomless merchandising well that the revenues lost from cutting Roseanne’s series is little more than tip money. But as with dumping Tim Allen’s conservative-friendly series after Trump was elected president, the frisson of pleasure that Obama and Hillary-supporting Disney executives felt when sacking yet another flyover country favorite makes any minor financial imposition feel all worth while. Roseanne should have had the common sense to know that she was on double-secret probation, and that in television, even the biggest names are ultimately replaceable.
I ALWAYS THOUGHT IT MIGHT: Magnetic helium makes superfluid time crystal.
DO MEN REALLY CARE ALL THAT MUCH ABOUT A WOMAN’S “BEACH BODY?”
Inspired by MEL’s Summer Body Issues package, I got to thinking, how much do men actually care about a woman’s “bikini body”?
This, of course, sent me down a rabbit hole of vanity, insecurity, Ashley Graham videos, BIKINI BODY MOMMY™ workouts, beauty standards and what really constitutes “the male gaze.” Most importantly, the call I put out to my Twitter followers on the subject left me feeling deeply sad for women because by far the most common answer was: “I wish she could see herself the way I see her.”
But here speaks the voice of a long-married man: “I’d rather her get into shape so I don’t have to hear about it anymore.”
FROM THE INSTA-WIFE: Thoughts on Kate Spade, Depression and Suicide.
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: What REALLY Happened to Melania Trump? “These guys aren’t brave enough to tell you what they think happened to her, but I am.”
Wasserman Schultz cornered House Chief Administrative Officer Phil Kiko and called him a “fucking Islamophobe,” saying “you will not so much as take away their parking spots,” the two House employees said Kiko told them.
The congresswoman also told Kiko she had invited Awan’s whole family to her daughter’s bat mitzvah and said she had “helped him with a land deal,” the sources said. A spokesman for Kiko declined to comment on this story.
A 2009 article in the Pakistani publication Dawn, headlined “Influential expat shields father from long arm of law,” said Awan’s father was facing criminal fraud charges involving a land deal, but Awan used political connections to pressure the police into targeting the alleged victims instead.
Awan’s father purchased “huge chunks of land from different farmers in 2008,” but all the checks bounced, the report said. “The police high-ups are ‘ominously’ indifferent to proceed against Awan,” and it’s “noteworthy” how they were “complying with the desires of” Awan, who the paper described as a “White House employee.”
Read the whole thing.
Flashback: Shocking video shows former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz threatening the Chief of Capitol Police to ‘expect consequences’ if he didn’t return a laptop taken during a criminal investigation.
SUSTAINABILITY: Federal Government Set To Borrow $1 Trillion This Year. “The Federal Government will borrow more than $1 trillion this year for the first time in more than a half-decade.”