Archive for 2019

OPEN THREAD: The weekend’s over, but the holiday weekend isn’t far away.

COCAINE MITCH IS MAKING CHRISTMAS GREAT AGAIN: Deck the Halls with Mitch McConnell, Fa la la la la, la la la la; You Better Act Fast – This Offer Won’t Last.

“It features alternating photos of the smiling Senate Majority Leader wearing a Santa Claus hat and what else, snowflakes…Order yours here! CNN’s Jake Tapper tweeted a photo of the paper with the caption, ‘This is real.’”

Damn straight it is. Cocaine Mitch is definitely dreaming of a white Christmas.

HER PLAINTIVE CRY: “I MATTERED IN 2015!” Feminist Tries To Cancel Disney’s ‘The Mandalorian’ Over Lack Of Female Characters, Gets Wrecked. “Career radical feminist, Anita Sarkeesian, tried to ‘cancel’ Disney+’s hit new Star Wars property, ‘The Mandalorian’ earlier this week but met with a wave of pushback by Star Wars fans and social media users who’ve grown tired of Sarkeesian’s woke crusade against nerd culture.”

HMM: Many Chinese manufacturers are behaving as though they have no future. Symptom: “a new mood among many Chinese businesspeople that they are at the end of the long Chinese boom and that there’s no reason not to burn their bridges with non-Chinese firms, because they’re not going to be doing business with them for much longer no matter what.” This is self-fulfilling, as it just encourages more companies to move their supply chains.

WELL:

Stay tuned.

FEDS MOVE TO LOOSEN MOVIE DISTRIBUTION RULES, WHICH COULD HURT INDIE THEATERS:

The Justice Department is moving to terminate legal rules that have governed the movie industry since the late 1940s, a step that could shake up how movies are distributed and the terms on which they hit the big screen.

The department’s antitrust division has concluded that the rules, laid out in long-ago legal settlements known as the Paramount consent decrees, have outlived their usefulness in a world where the movie business has changed considerably.

“As the movie industry goes through more changes with technological innovation, with new streaming businesses and new business models, it is our hope that the termination of the Paramount decrees clears the way for consumer-friendly innovation,” Makan Delrahim, the department’s top antitrust official, said at an American Bar Association conference in Washington, D.C. on Monday.

I’m OK with this, provided the Hollywood tax cuts are also repealed.

JUST SAW MY FIRST MIKE BLOOMBERG FOR PRESIDENT AD, and it seems designed to make you think that he, not Rudy Giuliani, was mayor at the time of 9/11. (Yeah, it says “after 9/11,” but while showing pics of the day after 9/11). Kinda cheap, but I’m sure some consultants made a lot of money.

UPDATE: Heh.

NOVEMBER OF 2019 IN THE MOVIES: Sexy replicants invade Los Angeles city streets.

November of 2019 in real life: FedEx delivery robots invade New York City streets. But DeBlasio is not happy:

“First of all, @FedEx, never get a robot to do a New Yorker’s job. We have the finest workers in the world,” Hizzoner wrote. “Second of all, we didn’t grant permission for these to clog up our streets. If we see ANY of these bots we’ll send them packing.”

Having failed miserably as a presidential candidate, DeBlasio is no doubt trying to line-up his post-mayoral career as an opinion writer at Vox.com by pandering badly to notorious robophobe Matthew Yglesias.™

MICHAEL BARONE: The Democrats’ Impeachment Pseudo-Event.

The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events is the title of a 1960s book by historian and Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin. Pseudo-events, he wrote, are staged solely to generate news media coverage. Real events, in contrast, involve independent actors and have unpredictable outcomes.

It’s not difficult to say which category the House Democrats’ impeachment hearings belongs in. It’s a classic pseudo-event stage-managed to prod sympathetic media into running predictable stories. Inconvenient questions from Republican members are blocked. Even the name of the original “whistleblower” is concealed, though no law requires that, and the stage managers know who he is.

Yet on the front pages and cable news, this pseudo-event is crowding out two genuine events of potentially world-shaking importance and uncertain outcome.

Indeed. Of course, to be fair, this is with the full and knowing cooperation of the news media.

Related: While Everyone Is Distracted By Russia, Chinese Spying And Influence Runs Wild. But it’s not just China.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● Shot: We Are All Socialists Now.

Cover story of Newsweek’s February 16 2009 issue, back when the opinion magazine was still owned by the Washington Post. 

● Chaser: Washington Post Prints Blatantly False Article: ‘Barack Obama, Conservative.’

NewsBusters, today.

Democracy dies in gaslighting. Exit quote from Tim Graham of NewsBusters: “Doesn’t someone in [the Post’s Outlook section] have more intellectual integrity than to publish this pratfall of an article? But this is apparently [David] Swerdlick’s modus operandi. He can defend Obama from the right, and defend Obama from the left. He really should be working for Obama.”

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it’s obvious that he is.

ABSOLUTELY: