KAROL MARKOWICZ: I have spent the last year angry at Jews.

Jews are traditionally liberals, that’s true, but we’re not traditionally stupid. We can see with our eyes who is on our side and the lack of gratitude from Jewish organizations, because they still hope that their political team will someday take them back, is abominable.

There were the galas, for example, thrown by many Jewish organizations. I don’t begrudge anyone pretty dresses and rubber chicken or self-congratulating awards. It was a tough year and the people who helped us get through it, standing up for Jews in general and Israel in particular, should be singled out for praise.

But where were the invites and awards for the conservatives who had unwaveringly stood by us? Where was Megyn Kelly? Where were Clay Travis and Buck Sexton? Dan Bongino? Xaviaer DuRousseau? Erick Erickson? Dana Loesch? Glenn Beck? Guy Benson? Sohrab Ahmari? Stephen “RedSteeze” Miller? Kurt Schlichter? Mary Katharine Ham? Pretty much everyone on Fox News? I only leave off Douglas Murray because he did get one from the country of Israel and one from the Manhattan Institute for his “unwavering defense of Western values,” which is for something even wider than just his defense of Israel and Jews, and Meghan McCain because she got one from the right-leaning magazine Algemeiner Journal. They both deserve even more.

My list of well-known non-Jewish conservatives, with giant platforms, who spent the year standing up for Israel and for Jews in America, could go on and on. These people went above and beyond and got no official thank you from the American Jewish community at all, not a single Jewish organization celebrated them. It’s sickening. These mensches didn’t benefit one iota from standing with Jews and with Israel. They took shots for us, they suffered abuse for us. They’ll say they don’t need the praise. They did it because it was right. But how dare we not say thank you? Throw your Tikkun Olam in the nearest trash can and learn Hakarat Hatov. And then wonder: where is the similar cadre of liberal writers and media personalities to defend you? It does not exist. Face it.

And that’s before we get into the moguls and the politicians. If there was a non-Jewish leftist billionaire who went to Israel, wore the dogtags, he would be headlining every major Jewish event. But it was Elon Musk so that didn’t count? Nearly every Republican politician effusively stood up for Israel and demanded the protection of American Jews. Where is Ted Cruz’s award? Ron DeSantis’s? Tom Cotton’s? Where is Donald Trump’s?

We know why. Most Jewish organizations are dinosaurs, committed to Democrats just as the Democrats make clear they are not at all interested in them. That’s the problem with tying your religion to a political party. The political party can tell you that your enemies, who want to destroy you and murder your children, “have a point” and you’ll just take it.

The late Charles Krauthammer’s Law still has an iron grip over American politics two decades after he wrote, “To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil,” Krauthammer wrote in 2002.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Watch: Kamala Won’t Say Whether Bibi Is ‘Real Close Ally’ of US.

PEAK GRAUNIAD REACHED: How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war.

A slick, high-priced television production. Speeches from top officials. A live audience of thousands. A unified show of collective sorrow and military resolve.

That is how the Israeli government hoped to mark the passing of one year since Hamas’s surprise and bloody attacks last 7 October. But little has gone according to plan.

Many of the families of people killed or taken hostage on that day have come out forcefully against the state-sponsored event, saying pageantry can wait until after the government secures a hostage deal and faces an independent investigation of its own failures before, after and on that day. Some parents have forbidden the government of Benjamin Netanyahu from using their children’s names and images.

Several of the kibbutzim that suffered the greatest losses have said they will boycott. Instead, they will gather in their communities to collectively grieve their loved ones, and remember their hostages, in “intimate, sensitive” rituals. In response, the minister responsible for the ceremony has nixed the live audience while seeming to dismiss the families’ objections as “background noise”. This has led to even fiercer denunciations on social media, with some of Israel’s top celebrities pledging their support to a rival commemoration.

For the government, “everything is a show”, said Danny Rahamim, a member of Kibbutz Nahal Oz.

That may be, but it seems certain that on 7 October, the official show will go on. Indeed it is nearly impossible to imagine a world in which the Netanyahu government – and the legacy Jewish organizations that echo its messaging around the world – would resist the chance to use the potent date as a megaphone to broadcast the same story about the attacks that we have all heard many times before.

It’s a simple fable of good and evil, in which Israel is unblemished in its innocence, deserving unquestioning support, while its enemies are all monsters, deserving of violence unbounded by laws or borders, whether in Gaza, Jenin, Beirut, Damascus or Tehran. It’s a story in which Israel’s very identity as a nation is forever fused with the terror it suffered on 7 October, an event that, in Netanyahu’s telling, will be seamlessly merged both with the Nazi Holocaust and a battle for the soul of western civilization.

In Germany, they speak of a Staatsraison, or reason of state – and in recent decades, its leaders have said that reason is protecting Israel. Israel has a Staatsraison too, related but different. Officially, it is Jewish safety. But integral to the state’s conception of safety is Jewish trauma. Building shrines to it. Erecting walls around it. Waging wars in its name.

As Mark Steyn once wrote, “The old joke — that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz — gets truer every week.”

HOW IT STARTED: Biden is planning for a Great Society 2.0.

—Headline, the Washington Post, March 17^th, 2021.

How it’s going: Horrifying moment protestor self-immolates outside White House.

A protestor attempted to self-immolate outside the White House during a Pro-Palestinian rally.

Samuel Mena Jr. was seen trying to light himself on fire in Lafayette Park, where a large number of protestors were gathered on Saturday.

Pictures taken at the scene by the White House capture the harrowing moment Mena’s arm ignited in flames.

Mena, who claims to be a ‘visual storyteller’, was seen waving his burning arm through the air as he shrieked in pain.

In the pictures, police officers are seen approaching cautiously as efforts are made to assist him.

Shortly after Mena set his arm ablaze, bystanders rushed to pour water on him to extinguish the flames.

* * * * * * * * *

Mena claims to be a graduate of The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University.

He describes himself as a production specialist who is currently ’employed as a Photojournalist for AZFamily Channels 3 and 5.’

Mena also claims to have done freelance videography for Arizona PBS and editing for RightThisMinute. He says that he has ‘collaborated’ on news stories that have aired on PBS Newshour.

His X.com profile is a picture of him smiling in front of the Palestinian Flag with the words ‘from the river, to the sea’ above it.

Before the rally on Saturday, he posted that he would ‘be streaming live from the White House exterior on Instagram.’

In another post on the same day, he wrote: ‘End settler colonialism.’

—The London Daily Mail, yesterday.

To give credit where it’s due, back in the 1960s, protestors who self-immolated were made much sterner stuff – they were able to actually finish the job.

NEW YORK JETS COACH ROBERT SALEH SPARKS HUGE CONTROVERSY BY WEARING A LEBANON FLAG ON HIS ARM IN THE WAKE OF ISRAEL’S STRIKES ON BEIRUT:

New York Jets head coach Robert Saleh sparked controversy during the team’s NFL game against the Minnesota Vikings in London on Sunday.

The 45-year-old was spotted on the sidelines at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium wearing a Lebanese flag below the Nike logo on the sleeve of his team hoodie.

The night before Sunday’s game – the first of the NFL’s international fixtures this season – Israeli bombing continued on Beirut, the Lebanese capital, amid the Israel-Hezbollah war.

The Hezbollah stronghold in south Beirut was hit by more than 30 strikes overnight, which were heard across the city, with smoke still seen billowing from the site after dawn, Lebanon’s official National News Agency said.

Saleh, who is of Lebanese heritage, previously wore a similar patch last October but his decision to bear the flag Sunday raised eyebrows as the anniversary of the beginning of the war in Gaza approaches.

Saleh’s clothing in the wake of the attacks left NFL fans divided on social media with many furious, while others defended his right to express pride in his heritage.

‘Robert saleh p***ing off a lot of the Jew York community with the Lebanon flag on his top no doubt,’ one social media user shared to X, formerly known as Twitter.

‘What a t**d that guy is,’ another added, while a third wrote: ‘I hope they leave Hezbollah Sally in London when the Jets come back to New York.’

The Jets suffered humiliation at the hands of the Vikings throughout the first half of Sunday’s game, risking a blowout defeat until a last-gasp touchdown on the brink of halftime.

And some social media users claimed that Saleh’s political stance would not help his job security.

‘Bigger issue is the Lebanese flag on saleh’s sleeve,’ one fan said, replying to another post criticizing the Jets’ performance.

‘I am not sure that Robert Saleh wearing the Lebanese Flag, which he obviously added on his own, is going to help him with his ownership as his team gets embarrassed again,’ another added.

For what it’s worth, the Jets wound up losing today’s game to the Vikings 23-17.

While the NFL largely curtailed the kneeling during the National Anthem and overt wokeness, starting in 2022, the league began allowing players the option to “proudly wear a helmet decal of the country or territory’s flag that represents their nationality or cultural heritage.”

The American flag was added to NFL helmets after the September 11^th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. (Remember when we all put American flag stickers on our cars’ rear bumpers?) Naturally, the Roger Goodell-era NFL had to dilute that patriotic message. They either didn’t think through what would happen, or didn’t care that their decision would eventually lead to today’s headline.

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Scott Jennings Torches CNN Colleagues Calling for ‘Political Restraint’ Over Hurricane Response.

JENNINGS: I lived through Hurricane Katrina in the Bush White House, as I know you lived through it Anderson, covering it, and I don’t recall any restraint by Democrats or the national media coming after George W. Bush and FEMA and every other thing. It was immediately politicized, and, you know, I mean, I well remember it. It’s seared into my brain.

And so now, all these people are out here saying, “We can’t politicize this, we can’t criticize this,” you know, nothing can be said about Biden and Harris here or FEMA or anything else, and I just think, if a Republican were in the White House, and a Republican president were at the beach, and the vice president were raising money with celebrities, I guarantee you somebody would be mad about it.

As Bonchie of Red State adds, “There will be no ‘political restraint’ regarding hurricane responses after what Democrats did to George W. Bush. The Biden administration has made several mistakes that deserve to be called out before voters head to the polls in November. Perhaps one day, Democrats will learn not to set precedents that come back to bite them. Until then it’s game on.”

Flashback: They Shoot Helicopters, Don’t They?

On September 1, 72 hours after Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans, the Associated Press news wire flashed a nightmare of a story: “Katrina Evacuation Halted Amid Gunfire…Shots Are Fired at Military Helicopter.”

* * * * * * * *

Like many early horror stories about ultra-violent New Orleans natives, whether in their home city or in far-flung temporary shelters, the A.P. article turned out to be false. Evacuation from the city of New Orleans was never “halted,” according to officials from the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Louisiana National Guard. The only helicopter airlifts stopped were those by a single private company, Acadian Ambulance, from a single location: the Superdome. And Acadian officials, who had one of the only functional communications systems in all of New Orleans during those first days, were taking every opportunity to lobby for a massive military response.

* * * * * * * *

But the basic premise of the article that introduced the New Orleans helicopter sniper to a global audience was dead wrong, just like so many other widely disseminated Katrina nightmares. No 7-year-old rape victim with a slit throat was ever found, even though the atrocity was reported in scores of newspapers. The Convention Center freezer was not stacked with 30 or 40 dead bodies, nor was the Superdome a live-in morgue. (An estimated 10 people died inside the two buildings combined, and only one was slain, according to the best data from National Guard officials at press time.)

Tales of rapes, carjackings, and gang violence by Katrina refugees quickly circulated in such evacuee centers as Baton Rouge, Houston, and Leesville, Louisiana–and were almost as quickly debunked.

From a journalistic point of view, the root causes of the bogus reports were largely the same: The communication breakdown without and especially within New Orleans created an information vacuum in which wild oral rumor thrived. Reporters failed to exercise enough skepticism in passing along secondhand testimony from victims (who often just parroted what they picked up from the rumor mill), and they were far too eager to broadcast as fact apocalyptic statements from government officials–such as Mayor Ray Nagin’s prediction of 10,000 Katrina-related deaths (there were less than 900 in New Orleans at press time) and Police Superintendent Edwin Compass’ reference on The Oprah Winfrey Show to “little babies getting raped”–without factoring in discounts for incompetence and ulterior motives.

Such demagoguery produced results, as Bryan Preston wrote in November of 2006 at Hot Air. “What cost the GOP its majorities in Congress and statehouses?… The GOP’s fortunes fatally cratered in the Fall of 2005, and were recovering ever since minus a couple of blips this year. What happened in the Fall of ‘05? Katrina. That storm turned out to be the hurricane that changed history:”

There’s a lesson in all of this, that’s an old one but an important one to remember: Demagoguery wins, and more so when it comes in the middle of a horrific disaster. Also, lies do indeed travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. By the time the story of New Orleans buses surfaced (only to be buried by the AP and ignored by the national media), the disaster had been framed as a Bush failure and the damage was already done. The media’s later mea culpa did nothing to change the basic narrative that already had a life of its own.

Years later, then-DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile would later confess at CNN, “Bush came through on Katrina,” but as a wise future mayor would advise his fellow Democrats in the fall of 2008, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

ROBERT REICH MAKES SHOCK ENDORSEMENT OF DONALD TRUMP:

WELL, HE DOES SPEAK ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE, SO NOW IT ALL MAKES SENSE:

Really looking forward to Hollywood creating a digital recreation of Laurence Harvey to play Walz at the movies:

Run away very quickly if Kamala asks you to play a little solitaire!

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Who Should We Punish for the Fake Science Poisoning our Children’s Futures?

Last October, we reported two women in their early 20s were arrested in London for throwing soup over Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” painting during a protest against fossil fuels.

They both are now looking at over two years of jail time.

Phoebe Plummer, 23, and Anna Holland, 22, from the protest group Just Stop Oil were imprisoned for two years, and 20 months, respectively, according to PA Media.

These are the latest in a string of prison sentences handed to climate activists in the UK for engaging in disruptive protests against the use of fossil fuels. Two relatively new, controversial laws have boosted the powers of police and courts to crack down on protests that are disruptive, even when they are peaceful.

The sentences appeared to do little to deter Just Stop Oil: Hours after they were handed down, three more Just Stop Oil activists threw soup over two other Van Gogh paintings of sunflowers in the Poets and Lovers exhibition at the National Gallery, the same venue the 2022 protests was staged, according to the group.

Those years those girls are going to lose are essential. They are the years to complete an education or gain important work experience for a career. That is the time to make life-long connections and perhaps meet a future spouse. It is also the age at which many women are starting their families.

Because of climate hysteria driven by agenda-driven pseudoscience and pushed by a media that silences critics and ignores counter-evidence, progressive educators are enabled to push this dogma. Cult-like-leaders arise to encourage young people to ruin their futures to protect an Earth that is not in jeopardy from its carbon dioxide levels.

In his recent Substack, Glenn Reynolds asks a question I think should be pondered and answered: Should we criminalize scientific fraud?

As Reynolds notes, the issue is complex. Determining what real science fraud is versus typos and misinterpreting data can be difficult. However, as it relates to climatology, massaging data to produce temperature spikes and ignoring urban heat island effects to support the green energy agenda should have consequences. And, as we have seen with COVID-19, poor science used to promote disastrous rules and regulations isn’t confined to climate.

Reynolds reviewed a wide array of potential options to prevent science fraud. Based on his analysis, perhaps the best place to focus is “revising incentive structures.”

We’ve had a media and intellectual class that have spent well over half a century preaching that doomsday was just a few years away, with no thought given to what this would do to the mental health of kids who grew up being fed eco-apocalypse fables in the 1970s, now frightening their own kids. Which means this image will eventually become reality a decade or two from now:

HOLLYWOOD, INTERRUPTED: Hollywood’s big boom has gone bust.

For over a decade, business was booming in Hollywood, with studios battling to catch up to new companies like Netflix and Hulu. But the good times ground to a halt in May 2023, when Hollywood’s writers went on strike.

The strikes lasted multiple months and marked the first time since the 1960s that both writers and actors joined forces – effectively shutting down Hollywood production. But rather than roaring back, in the one year since the strikes ended, production has fizzled.

Projects have been cancelled and production was cut across the city as jobs have dried up, with layoffs at many studios – most recently at Paramount. It had a second round of layoffs this week, as the storied movie company moves to cut 15% of its workforce ahead of a merger with the production company Skydance.

Unemployment in film and TV in the United States was at 12.5% in August, but many think those numbers are actually much higher, because many film workers either do not file for unemployment benefits because they’re not eligible or they’ve exhausted those benefits after months of not working.

As a whole, the number of US productions during the second quarter of 2024 was down about 40% compared to the same period in 2022. Globally, there was a 20% decline over that period, according to ProdPro, which tracks TV and film productions.

That means fewer new movies and binge-worthy shows for us.

But experts say the streaming boom wasn’t sustainable. And studios are trying to figure out how to be profitable in a new world when people don’t pay for cable TV funded by commercials.

“The air has come out of the content bubble,” says Matthew Belloni, the founder of Puck News, which covers the entertainment industry. “Crisis is a good word. I try not to be alarmist, but crisis is what people are feeling.”

As Rob Long in the July/August issue of Commentary: Streaming and Screaming.

I’ve heard the same calculation from writers, directors, even people in talent management: cutbacks, tight belts, more people fighting over fewer opportunities, all signals to get out of the business while there’s still some money in the bank to start over, in some other place, in some other business.

“The interesting thing about battlefield medicine,” a U.S. Army medic who served in Iraq and Afghanistan told me recently, “is that the screaming is always the loudest well after the limb has been removed.”

That makes sense, of course. People tend to make the most noise when it’s too late—when the amputation is complete, when the parent is dead and buried, when the cultural change has taken root, when the next generation has taken over, when you wrote an unspecified number of Mr. Ed’s but haven’t had a meeting in years.

The screaming is always the loudest, in other words, when all hope is lost and whatever you’re screaming about is already permanent.

Which brings us to the entertainment industry in the summer of 2024, where the screaming is just getting started.

I’d do the usual “learn to code” jokes here, but a Hollywood that’s more interested in coding streaming platforms rather than making watchable product is exactly how they’ve wound up in their current predicament. (And as everyone warned them in 2023, maybe going on strike shortly after emerging from a pandemic was not a wise move by an industry that should have been doing everything it could to get butts back into movie theater seats.)

A PUPPET WITH HER STRINGS CUT: Watch Kamala Harris FREEZE and FALTER When Her Teleprompter Malfunctions.

Kamala Harris' teleprompter went out at the beginning of her speech in Michigan and she turned into a floundering mess until it came back on.

You can literally tell the moment it happened lmfaopic.twitter.com/zs0wAt02Gr

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 4, 2024

And just like that, an old friend checks in to tell us he’s still part of the Democrats’ inner circle:

CAN’T THEY JUST PAGE HIM? Potential successor to Hezbollah leader Nasrallah has been out of contact following Israeli airstrike.

The potential successor to slain Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has been out of contact since Friday, a Lebanese security source said on Saturday, after an Israeli airstrike that is reported to have targeted him.

In its campaign against the Iran-backed Lebanese group, Israel carried out a large strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs late on Thursday that Axios cited three Israeli officials as saying targeted Hashem Safieddine in an underground bunker.

The Lebanese security source and two other Lebanese security sources said that ongoing Israeli strikes on Beirut’s southern suburb – known as Dahiyeh – since Friday have kept rescue workers from scouring the site of the attack.

Assuming Safieddine has assumed room temperature, the headlines on his obit from the DNC-MSM will be following this pattern:

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Walz-Plant Edition.

OUT ON A LIMB: Comparing Helene To Katrina Suggests Americans Are Left To Die Because Democrats Run The White House.

FIREFIGHTERS BRAVELY RUSHING IN TO COVER BREAKING STORIES!

● Shot: Newsweek Discovers a New Pathology on the Right: Right-Leaning Men Have a “New Obsession,” and It’s Hot Girls With Nice Bodies and Conventional Good Looks!

—Ace of Spades, today.

● Chaser: Is Disney Bad at Star Wars?

—The Hollywood Reporter, yesterday.

● Hangover: Even America’s Newspaper of Record isn’t immune to be painfully slow on the draw! Are You An Unathletic Oaf Who Gets Winded Going Up A Single Flight Of Stairs? Why Pickleball Might Be For You.

—The Babylon Bee, yesterday.

JIM TREACHER: #MeToo Is Dead, and Doug Emhoff Killed It.

Once upon a time, Democrats pretended to care what happened to women.

In 2017, following the revelation that film producer Harvey Weinstein was a serial sexual predator, Hollywood and all their fellow liberals did a thorough housecleaning. They named and shamed men who had been abusing women for years. It was #TimesUp for toxic masculinity.

Or so we were told. And told. And told. Again and again and again.

Fast-forward seven years. The president of the United States is a dementia-addled basket case, and his even more inept VP is the Democratic candidate. Most of the “news” industry is frantically trying to convince you she’ll make a good president, because they don’t care about anything but keeping Donald Trump out of office.

So, what do the journos do in 2024 when a woman comes forward with a story of abuse by a powerful man? The first thing they do is check whether there’s an (R) after the guy’s name. If not, he’s off-limits.

They’ll ignore the story as long as they can. And when they’re finally forced to say something about it, they’ll minimize it as much as possible.

They’ll even transform the powerful Democrat into the victim.

That’s what Semafor just did:

To be fair, #MeToo was dead as soon as Joe Biden was nominated, and like Biden, its desiccated husk has been impotently twitching less and less in the years since.

THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Students created a way to access personal info via AI and smart glasses.

In a shocking turn of events, someone was able to use a new high-powered tech product for evil. Two Harvard students paired the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses with facial recognition software to rapidly identify strangers and compile their personal information from the internet to highlight the privacy concerns that are getting unboxed with easily accessible consumer tech.

In a video posted to X, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they built I-XRAY. The program uses the glasses to capture images of random people on campus and at a train station, identify them through a publicly accessible facial recognition search site like PimEyes, and then use a large language model (LLM) to trawl the web and compile the person’s information. Nguyen and Ardayfio could access people’s addresses, the names of their parents, and photos in mere minutes, and even approached unsuspecting people using the info they collected to make them think they had met before.

The creators said they would not release the code for this program but created it to highlight how it’s possible to build invasive tech with recent advancements like smart glasses and LLMs.

They may not be releasing the code themselves, but how hard would it be for someone to reverse engineer the process, now that the cat is out of the bag?

"The creators said they wouldn't release the code for this program but created it to highlight how it’s possible to build invasive tech with recent advancements like smart glasses and LLMs."

More here: https://t.co/2FYHsYPxPI

— Morning Brew ☕️ (@MorningBrew) October 4, 2024

“JUST WIN, BABY!” Striking Dockworkers Agree to Take a Measly 62 Percent Raise and Not Spoil the Election for Democrats. “Democrats want to win the presidential election. They have fully embraced a complete Al Davis ‘just win, baby’ mentality. If that means some traditional Democratic interest group gets the short end of the stick, there will be time and money to make amends after the election. But no part of the Democratic coalition is allowed to put its personal or parochial priorities ahead of the collective priority of winning the presidential (and down-ticket) elections. There is a discipline, focus, and clear prioritization at work on the Democratic side that simply isn’t matched by the disparate factions on the Republican side.”

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey adds that even if Kamala doesn’t win, there’s still an upside for Democrats:

Obviously, Biden and Kamala Harris needed to deliver for union members while not impacting consumers with shortages and higher prices in the days before an election. But now Biden can wash his hands of the automation issue, and so can Harris if she loses the election. The suspension leaves a stinky turd for Donald Trump if he wins just as he’s about to take office, assuming that ILA and USMX can’t settle on automation restrictions. And the rapid increase in labor costs built into the wage agreement over the next six years will incentivize USMX to expand automation as much as possible, so don’t expect this to get settled without another strike during Inauguration Week.

As with 2017, I’m sure there will be plenty of headaches and bad surprises left by Democrats for Trump to deal with over his first weeks in office if he wins next month.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Kamala Harris’s gushing tribute to Dick Cheney backfires spectacularly: ‘The single most evil man in the 21st century.’

‘Dick Cheney not only committed war crimes and helped kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, but he also caused the deaths of thousands of American soldiers,’ wrote journalist Mehdi Hasan.

‘They should send Liz Cheney to Michigan to campaign for Kamala in Dearborn and Detroit. She can explain why she and her dad still support Guantanamo, CIA black sites, torture, rendition, drones and the war in Iraq,’ wrote journalist Glenn Greenwald.

‘Yeah imagine how much worse off we would be without the service of Dick Cheney,’ wrote right-leaning podcaster Saagar Enjeti sarcastically.

President Joe Biden also praised Dick Cheney on Friday after he watched Cheney and Harris campaign together.

‘I know her dad. … We argue like hell but I always admired his courage and honesty,’ Biden said, and added, ‘She and her father have character. Character dammit is what we need in this country!’

You’ll want to be sitting down when you learn that the (p)resident was singing a very different tune about Cheney back in the day: “Biden Wanted Cheney Out Too,” CBS reported on October 1st, 2006:

On CBS News’s Face the Nation Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said he thinks Rumsfeld should lose his job because of what he sees as mismanagement of the war.

Biden also said that, in an Oval Office meeting, he told President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that he wanted Cheney to step down for the same reasons.

“The present said to me, quote, ‘Why do you keep picking on Rummy?’ I looked at the president, and I said, ‘Mr. President, with all due respect’ – and I looked at the vice president – ‘Mr. Vice President, I would call for your resignation as well, were you not a constitutional officer,'” Biden told host Bob Scheiffer.

“And the president said, ‘Why would you say that?’ And I said, ‘Mr. President, not one piece of advice either Don Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney has given you has turned out to be correct with regard to Iraq.’ And the president just seems completely wedded to the notion,” Biden said.

Biden said that the president has to change the course in Iraq. Despite the presence of more than 600,000 troops in the war-torn nation, violence is increasing.

But when Schieffer asked if Biden thinks the vice president should resign, Biden said no.

“I was making the point that these guys just don’t know what they’re doing,” he said. “And no one takes them seriously anymore except the president, apparently.”

On the eve of the election in 2008, Reuters reported Biden saying that “Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history.”

It’s astounding that Kamala expects hyper-online Dems to forget all of the branding her party and its media wing did during the first decade of the 21st century, and that her core voters would suddenly believe that Hitler has left the bunker, been rehabilitated, and given a shiny new suit.

SONNY BUNCH: Megalopolis Review.

I honestly have a hard time choosing which of the bonkers performances I most enjoyed. [Adam] Driver has made something of a career out of delivering bonkers performances for aging auteurs: as a Sancho Panza stand-in for Terry Gilliam; as Enzo Ferrari for Michael Mann; and now as Cesar Catilina for Coppola’s decades-in-the-works dream project. Aubrey Plaza’s depiction of Wow Platinum is weirdly timely, given that the character is a CNBC reporter who uses her smoldering sexuality to get the goods and marry rich. When she can’t land Catilina, she instead opts for his insanely wealthy uncle, Crassus, whom Jon Voight plays for an hour with the sort of manic energy he brought to his 10 seconds of screen time as a masticating lunatic on that one episode of Seinfeld.

Crassus’s other nephew, Clodio, is played by Shia LaBeouf as a sort of cross-dressing Donald Trump double, rousing the rabble and indulging in populist rhetoric to do … something. The politics of this film are not particularly well thought out; despite Clodio’s villainy, one could easily make the case that it’s a fairly straightforwardly fascist tale about the needs of a brilliant leader to guide the dull masses and the corrupt elite out of the muck in which they wallow and into a brighter future, democracy be damned. I haven’t even mentioned Dustin Hoffman and Jason Schwartzman and Laurence Fishburne and Talia Shire and Kathryn Hunter, all of whom deliver performances at roughly 110 percent of their required wattage.

Megalopolis isn’t a good movie, precisely—I think it fails on relatively fundamental levels as both standard storytelling and airy metaphor—but I’m glad it exists and happy to know that the thousands of dollars of Coppola Merlot I’ve consumed over the years helped in some small way to will this unwieldy monstrosity into existence.

Heh, indeed. It’s been a very long time since a movie has come along with such divisive reviews. QED:

● The New Yorker: “Megalopolis” Is Francis Ford Coppola’s Artistic Rejuvenation.

● SFGate (One of Coppola’s hometown newspapers): ‘Megalopolis’ is a piece of s—t.

WELL, THAT SETTLES THAT! Whoopi Goldberg Claims Hollywood Doesn’t Have A Liberal Bias.

GRAB THAT CASH WITH BOTH HANDS AND MAKE A STASH: Pink Floyd Sells Music Rights to Sony for $400 Million.

Sony has spent more than a billion dollars on catalogs from Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Queen’s non-North American rights in the past few years (with backing from investment firms like Eldridge Industries), and has never officially comment on the deals. Variety and others reported just two weeks ago that the Pink Floyd transaction was nearing closure.

The catalog had been in play for several years with a reported asking price of $500 million, and the group was close to a deal in 2022, but the bitter infighting between the band’s members — primarily over main songwriter Roger Waters’ controversial political statements against Israel and Ukraine, and in favor of Russia — have complicated the deal enormously and scared off a number of suitors. There seems little question that Waters’ incendiary comments, which have made him a pariah from all but his biggest fans and cost him his solo record deal, devalued the catalog.

Billboard asks: Could the Floyd’s publishing rights be up next? “While Luminate doesn’t track global album sales, Pink Floyd’s on-demand global streams averaged 2.37 billion over the last three years. Consequently, if the group owns all of its publishing, Billboard estimates that the band’s recorded masters bring in about $11 million in publishing royalties annually. If the band eventually decides to sell and can achieve a 20-times multiple — the going rate for superstar songwriters — it could bring in another $200 million-plus for the band’s songwriters. In general, music publishing asset trade at a higher multiple than recorded music assets, although the latter is catching up on that front.”

UPDATE: David Gilmour Will “Absolutely Not” Perform with Roger Waters Again. “I tend to steer clear of people who actively support genocidal and autocratic dictators.” “Gilmour and Waters have been at odds for decades. In 2023 alone, Gilmour blasted Waters as a ‘misogynistic, antisemitic, Putin apologist’ and shared a documentary detailing Waters’ alleged antisemitism. The paid last shared the stage together during Roger Waters’ ‘The Wall’ tour in 2011.”

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Joe Biden inadvertently writes the epitaph for his administration:

Reporter: “What do the states in the storm zone need — after what you saw today?”

Biden: “Oh, storm zone? I didn’t know which storm you’re talking about"

Holy crappic.twitter.com/qdXRBzcr68

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 4, 2024

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Jennifer Aniston Addresses Rumors She’s Wooing Obama And Rubs Fish Sperm On Face.

—Headline, the Huffington Post, today.

CUH-RAZY! Ana Navarro Loses It Over JD Vance’s Debate Performance, Starts Ranting About Shapeshifters:

I disagree with Navarro’s premise here, but so what if she’s right? I’m so old, I can remember last month, where Kamala’s “code-switching” was absolutely endorsed by all of the best people on the left. But then, we are talking the “It’s different when we do it” party here.