OPEN THREAD: It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses. Thread it.

DAVID FRUM: TRUMP IS OUR ‘PUNISHMENT’ FOR TERRIBLE CITIZENS NOT LIKING THE NEWS.

Frum also condescendingly lectured Americans on what he saw as their responsibility as citizens, including telling them not to whine about having to watch the news:

And you can’t put your responsibilities on the press and say, “why didn’t you make this easier for me, or more entertaining. Why didn’t you make the news less frightening than it is? I would like—I would like a different truth, please.” The job of the press is to tell you the truth as it is whether it’s good news or not. And then it’s your responsibility as a patriot and a citizen to accept it and to internalize it and to act on it.

Imagine saying to CNN’s Brian Stelter with a straight face that “The job of the press is to tell you the truth as it is whether it’s good news or not.” Would that it were true:

And it hasn’t been long before Jim Treacher’s 2014 tweet. Or as one author wrote in his book on the 1970s, documenting the slow breakdown in America’s institutions that would ultimately lead to Trump’s unexpected victory:

Some blame Watergate for this abrupt collapse of trust in institutions, but not very convincingly. For one thing, the decline in trust begins to appear in the polls as early as 1966, almost a decade before the Watergate was known as anything more than a big hole in the ground alongside the Potomac River. For another, the nation had managed unconcernedly to shrug off Watergate-style events before. Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater’s apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II—and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation’s sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions.

—An excerpt from How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse, David Frum, 2000.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: CNN’s Jim Sciutto Exposed as Two-Faced Tweeter on Diplomacy with Dictators.

Obama and Castro? Si! Trump and North Korean envoy Kim Yong Chol: Trump “is smiling next to a man who runs a gulag jailing some 200,000 North Koreans and who oversaw the sinking of a South Korean Navy ship killing 46 & the hacking of Sony North America.”

Talk about a buried lede, though: CNN apparently now thinks that Pyongyang are the bad guys for a change.

IT’S COME TO THIS: TSA Searches 96-Year-Old Wheelchair Bound Woman, Sparks Debate.

CRISIS AT THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES:

Every archive in the world suffers attacks, resulting in the theft of its records, the amending or destroying of them, and the archive has had five it knows of since Berger. Digital storage and authentication* will be a great help in securing all holdings.

[Sandy] Berger was supposedly reviewing records for a Clinton response to the 9/11 Commission’s considerations of mistakes made leading up to the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Dean Emeritus of Boston University Law School Ronald Cass wonders if there was telling marginalia by Clinton or others on some of these documents that were not on the file copies. The Clintons seemed to have a longstanding problem with records, since the disappearance in 1994 and reappearance in 1996 of the subpoenaed Rose Law Firm files in the Clintons’ private White House quarters.

Now the National Archives is faced with Hillary Clinton’s history-making assault on government records while secretary of state, which Cass describes as fitting a pattern of “destroy, deny and corrupt the process.” (This is no doubt why Harvard just awarded her the Radcliffe Medal citing her “transformative impact on society.”)

Read the whole thing.

* What could go wrong?

THE TONY AWARDS ARE TONIGHT. This 2004 piece, titled, “There’s No Business Like Tony Awards Business,” by Daniel Okrent, the former ombudsman at the New York Times, is a bracing look at how the foie gras gets made, both on the awards stage, and inside the paper that serves as its advertising house organ:

Unless I acquire some unexpected clout around here in the next 48 hours, Times readers will wake up on Tuesday morning to read a prominent story announcing the nominees for an artistically meaningless, blatantly commercial, shamefully exclusionary and culturally corrosive award competition.

Let me put it another way: unless Times editors have overcome several decades of their own inertia, readers on Tuesday will find a prominent story serving the pecuniary interests of three privately controlled companies whose principals have earned the right to convene in what Damon Runyon once called ”the laughing room.” That was Runyon’s term for the sound-proofed chamber where he imagined that the proprietors of the ”21” Club gathered to set the day’s menu prices. Today’s version would be the sanctum where the men who run the Shubert Organization, the Nederlander Organization and Jujamcyn Theaters gather to toast The Times and its generous support of their efforts.

Those are the three institutions that control Broadway and in turn, along with the sponsors of touring productions of Broadway shows, control the Tony Awards. The Oscars (or Grammys or Pulitzers) of theater the Tonys are not. It may be hard to defend the coverage of something as politicized, commercialized and overhyped as the Oscars, but at least the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doesn’t limit entrants to films shown only in movie houses of a certain size located in a single neighborhood.

If you’re interested in Broadway, read the whole thing.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Why is the media desperate to make out Ambassador Richard Grenell is a full-blown fascist?

From all of which one might have the impression that Grenell had backed Hungary’s Jobbik or Greece’s Golden Dawn. In fact the political leader in Europe that Grenell expressed himself a ‘fan’ of was Sebastian Kurz, the young Chancellor of Austria, and a man of the political conservative mainstream. Yet such is the level of ignorance and presumption about politics across the continent that various publications seized on this as yet more evidence of Grenell’s extremism. For the Austrian Chancellor is in a coalition with that country’s ‘Freedom Party’ which is frequently described as ‘far-right’. And therefore to meet with Kurz is to meet with someone who meets with the wrong people. Meaning that any meeting with him is itself suspect.

Perhaps after the Guardian, Pink News, NPR etc have worked out the difference between a conservative and a fascist they could also perform another public service. Which would be to identify which politicians across Europe an ambassador is allowed to meet with these days?

As Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2014, “This is a very old story:”

Joseph Stalin championed the idea that all of his political opponents should be dubbed fascists, including many of his fellow Bolsheviks, such as Leon Trotsky (whom Stalin had assassinated), and much of the Red Army’s officer corps (whom he had executed), and countless Ukrainians (whom he had liquidated). Stalin insisted that even mentioning the man-made – i.e., Stalin-made — Ukranian famine was evidence you were an agent of the Nazis.

Under Stalin’s “theory of social fascism,” any socialist, social-democratic, or progressive group or party not loyal to him had to be called fascist. Hence, for a while Moscow insisted that FDR and even Norman Thomas (head of the Socialist Party of America) were fascists.

Ultimately, Communist propagandists and their allied intellectuals would reflexively blame fascism for everything, regardless of the facts. That’s what prompted George Orwell to remark that “the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”

See also: Walter Cronkite and Daniel Schorr smearing Barry Goldwater in 1964. Even Cronkite’s left-leaning biographer Douglas Brinkley couldn’t whitewash this low moment in the CBS anchorman’s career:

As managing editor of the CBS Evening News, Cronkite seemed to relish pricking Goldwater from time to time for sport. In late July, he introduced a report from CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, a hard-and-fast liberal working from Munich. With an almost tongue-in-cheek smile, Cronkite said, “Whether or not Senator Goldwater wins the nomination, he is going places, the first place being Germany.” Schorr then went on a tear, saying, “It looks as though Senator Goldwater, if nominated, will be starting his campaign in Bavaria, the center of Germany’s right wing.” The backstory was merely that Goldwater had accepted an invitation from Lieutenant General William Quinn for a quick holiday at Berchtesgaden, a U.S. Army recreational center in Germany. But Schorr made the takeaway point that Berchtesgaden was once “Hitler’s stomping ground.” Goldwater, trying to show off his NATO bona fides, had granted an interview with Der Spiegel in which he mentioned a possible trip to Germany soon. Some Democratic opposition researcher floated the idea that Goldwater was infatuated with the Nazis. It was ugly stuff.

Indeed it was — and still is.

AT AMAZON, save on Craft Supplies.

Plus, save on Air Conditioning and Air Quality.

SHARYL ATTKISSON ON THE FBI’S FRACTURED FAIRYTALE.

Read the whole metaphor.

WHEN YOU’RE TOO WOKE FOR STARBUCKS…Leftist Starbucks Founder Says Democrats Have Gone ‘Too Far Left.’

IS THIS A GREAT COUNTRY, OR WHAT? San Diego crowd goes crazy after foul ball lands perfectly in woman’s cup of beer​:

Arguably the best catch at the San Diego Padres vs. Atlanta Braves game on Tuesday happened off the baseball field.

A 23-year-old Padres fan wasn’t the only one surprised when a foul ball soared across the stadium and landed in her full cup of beer.

The once-in-a-lifetime moment was caught on video by the Padres organization, and quickly spiraled Gabrielle DiMarco to social media fame.

“I felt like I won the lottery,” DiMarco told The San Diego Union-Tribune. “I was like, ‘What are the chances?’ I wasn’t even trying to catch this ball and it landed in my cup.”

As Iowahawk tweets, “I love my beautiful patient wife who bore me two perfect children, but by god I am filing for divorce tomorrow and proposing to this woman.”

QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Have Democrats Moved Too Far to the Center?

I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC: Vile blue-check loser with history of nasty takes even ticks off the Church of Satan with Anthony Bourdain tweet.

ROGER SIMON: Disneyland Pyongyang? Can Trump Co-Opt Kim?

This speaks to what Trump is attempting.  A creature of popular culture himself, he knows its allure and how to utilize it.  Whether he will succeed is anybody’s guess, but it is a different way of dealing in international diplomacy and more than worth trying. Perhaps he should bring along a bag of Big Macs and some fries to the negotiation.

Okay, maybe not, but the underpinnings of all this are not new.  Those of us old enough to remember recall the subversive nature of American culture during Soviet times,  clandestine jazz concerts in Moscow boîtes, hidden screenings of certain movies, samizdat publication of forbidden novels, etc. Everybody wanted it, even, apparently, General Secretary Andropov.

Read the whole thing. Maybe Trump should simply invite Kim Jong-un to visit the Safeway in Houston.

AT AMAZON, deals in Vision Care.

Plus, browse cool deals in Industrial and Scientific.

A TALE OF THREE HEADLINES AT THE SACRAMENTO BUSINESS JOURNAL:

● Shot: California could impose quotas for women on corporate boards.

● Chaser: 46% of San Francisco Bay Area residents plan to leave, survey says.

● Hangover:  Report: Sacramento among top three cities where millennials are moving.

Rinse and repeat until California is no more.