NY TIMES STILL REHABBING COMMUNIST EAST GERMANY: ‘A FUN PLACE TO PARTY?’

Based upon the Gray Lady’s reportage over the years, evidently, it was a great place to kick back and have a smoke, after all that swinging sex in the Soviet Union.

VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS? Virginia Democrats Just Voted For A Man Previously Jailed For Sex With A Minor.

NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” DEMANDS HIGHER DIVIDENDS: AOC Wants a Raise. Here’s a Better Idea.

It makes one wonder if AOC understands that campaign money and her salary are two different things.

In any case, it’s all a sign that, just months after arriving at the swamp, Ocasio-Cortez has already forgotten her roots. Even without a raise, she’s pulling down three times what the median household makes in her district.

So here’s a modest proposal. Tie AOC’s salary, and everyone else’s in Congress, directly to the incomes of the people they represent.

That would mean, rather than give AOC a raise, she would make just $58,331. That’s the median household income in her district, according to a cool Census tool called My Congressional District.

At that pay, AOC would truly represent New York’s 14^th Congressional District. Exactly half the households would make more than her, and exactly half would make less.

Better still, if she wanted a raise, she’d have to see to it that her local economy is thriving and people in her district are gainfully employed, thereby pushing up the median income.

Since the chief reason most people go into politics is graft, there’s a reason why the Issues & Insights editorial board used the phrase “a modest proposal.”

HAVE I MENTIONED THAT I HAVE A NEW BOOK OUT? Don’t just sit there, buy a copy. And maybe one for your local library.

JOHN STOSSEL: Real X-Men: Designer Babies Are Coming.

NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO MAKE NEW FRIENDS ACROSS THE AISLE: Ted Cruz offers to team up with AOC to make birth control available over-the-counter.

And if you missed it from Glenn in USA Today: I’m a libertarian and I agree with AOC on over-the-counter birth control.

NOT ALL HEROES WEAR CAPES: Soldier to become Iraq War’s first living Medal of Honor recipient.

MAFIA HIT MAN ASSESSES JOHN DEAN: The aging Watergate felon came back for an encore Monday before the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York.

The American Spectator’s George Parry, a former federal attorney, talked to an old informant, a reformed Mafia hit man, who knew Dean in federal prison. The hit man’s assessment of Dean? Nadler should hold on tight to any silver coins he has.

HMM: Changes to Facebook Graph Search leaves online investigators in a lurch. “When Facebook Graph Search launched six years ago, it was meant to help users discover content across public posts on the platform. Since then, the feature stayed relatively low-profile for many users (its last major announcement was in 2014 when a mobile version was rolled out), but became a valuable tool for many online investigators who used it to collect evidence of human rights abuses, war crimes and human trafficking. Last week, however, many of them discovered that Graph Search features had suddenly been turned off.”

I can’t imagine Facebook shut this down due to any genuine privacy concerns.

THIS IS JUST DUMB: Google Protecting Jussie Smollett From ‘Disparaging’ Searches. “Search-engine’s autocomplete feature filters out hate crime related searches.”

NEW YORK’S LEGENDARY FOUR SEASONS RESTAURANT SERVED ITS LAST MEAL YESTERDAY:

In 1996, the restaurant’s veteran managers, Alex von Bidder, a staid Swiss trained at the Hotel School of Cornell University, and Julian Niccolini, an churlish Tuscan trained in Rome, took over as managing partners, maintaining The Four Seasons’ eminence well into the 21^stcentury.  Then, in 2000, real estate developer Aby Rosen bought the Seagram Building and said he would replace The Four Seasons with a new restaurant, forcing out von Bidder and Niccolini.

Because of the interior’s landmark status, Rosen could do little to alter anything in the original design. He changed the names of the two dining areas to The Grill and The Pool, and the restaurant received respectful reviews upon opening, attracting a few of the old regulars and a lot of curiosity-seekers.

But because von Bidder and Niccolini retained rights to the name The Four Seasons (which was always something of a problem when guests showed up thinking they were checking into the Four Seasons Hotel), they were able to attract investors to recreate, if not replicate, what had been a unique institution. The assumption was that the old-time regulars would return, bringing along a new generation of financial industry power brokers, even if many of the former had outgrown the trappings of what The Four Seasons once represented or just plain passed away.

The look of the new restaurant echoed some of the design elements of the original but, given its much smaller size, could never match its grandiosity or glamour; nor did it have anything distinctively New York about it, looking as if it could have been opened in any world capital.

There was also the widely reported issue of Niccolini’s behavior, which would once have been called “swinging” but which had led to two instances of harassment charges (both settled). Niccolini had always had the reputation of being Puckish, playing the commedia dell’arte jester, priding himself on his ability to rib and cajole some of the world’s richest men and women with mild insults. But last December, with von Bidder’s approval, Niccolini  was removed from his position as managing partner for his refusal to get treatment for his problems.

Then, a devastating review of the new Four Seasons by New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells appeared, spending nearly as much space on Niccolini’s reputation as on the food, service and new design. Thereafter it was clear that in the Me Too era, the new restaurant was not going to attract many professional women to a place that already had enjoyed a reputation as being emblematic of the city’s flagrant Mad Men past.

Hence this depressing paragraph in the Gothamist on Saturday:

While Pete Wells recently downgraded the restaurant to one-star, during a recent dinner at the bar (a beautiful centerpiece at the new space that is reminiscent of the iconic pool they left behind at the Seagram Building), I had a wonderful meal filled with classics like their crab cakes and lobster cocktail. While the whole evening felt like we had traveled back to the Mad Men era, knocking back old fashioned and Aviation cocktails, it was eerily quiet with absolutely no other customers in the place—the experience felt similar to “dining on the Titanic,” as my companion put it.

Who knows — in a few years, Rosen could acquire the rights to the Four Seasons Restaurant name and logos minus von Bidder and Niccolini, run a splashy “The Four Seasons Returns to the Seagram Building” ad campaign, and peace and harmony are restored to the New York restaurant world. He might even get a good restaurant review in the New York Times.

AT AMAZON, save on Pet Supplies.

DAVID HOROWITZ: LGBTQ Bigotry: Tyranny Masquerading as Tolerance.

WHY IS THE FAR LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF HOMOPHOBIA? Stephen Colbert Makes Another Homophobic Trump-Putin Joke.

Like I said earlier today, we need a complete and total shutdown of CBS until we can figure out what the hell is going on there.

ED MORRISSEY: Local CBS Affiliate: Why Isn’t Omar Talking About Her Tax Issues? “The national media might not take a lot of interest in Ilhan Omar’s curious tax filings, but at least some of the local media has awoken to some of it. The local CBS affiliate attempted to get answers from the House Democrat about the questions raised by her tax filings, but got nothing but stonewalled. Why, WCCO wonders, does Omar not want to explain why she filed joint married returns with one man while being legally married to another, a violation of state law, at the least?”

CALVINBALL: Google CEO: YouTube Will Begin Targeting ‘Content Which Doesn’t Exactly Violate Policies.’

GREAT MOMENTS IN KABUKI: When did Congressional testimony become performance art?

[Jon] Stewart was attending a hearing for a bill that would protect the health benefits of 9/11 first responders. Noting that around half of the subcommittee’s 14 members were absent, Stewart launched a pitch-perfect nine-minute-long assault on the errant lawmakers, which was going viral before it even finished.

Stewart was attending a hearing for a bill that would protect the health benefits of 9/11 first responders. Noting that around half of the subcommittee’s 14 members were absent, Stewart launched a pitch-perfect nine-minute-long assault on the errant lawmakers, which was going viral before it even finished.

* * * * * * * *

What Stewart, Ocasio-Cortez, Owens and Soave actually said, whether it was right or wrong, matters far less than the way they said it. In the last 10 years, the rules of the game have changed. Politicians, activists and writers are no longer giving testimony to a committee, as Butterfield did in 1973. They are competing for attention and influence on the internet. As William Davies wrote recently in the LRB:

‘This calls for a very different set of political and personal talents: confrontation, wit, defiance, spontaneity and rule-breaking.’

This has much more in common with performance art than politics. In the old Situationist movement there was a technique known as a détournement – which simply means hijacking, or rerouting. In practice this meant turning the familiar upside down – logos against advertisers, slogans against politicians – in order to demonstrate just how arid the familiar really was. Is this not what the most canny operators are doing to our old, boring, complicated institutions?

Read the whole thing.