THE CALLS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE! Bizarre 911 call released in South Carolina F-35 crash: ‘We got a pilot in our house.’
911 operator asks "How far did you fall?" as if it were a ladder accident.
Pilot answers: "2,000 feet." https://t.co/Unr9CfI0Fg
— NeverTweet (@LOLNeverTweet) September 22, 2023
DEMOCRACY DIES IN SMEARING THE TARGETS OF YOUR ARTICLES: Washington Post Admits It Smeared Dave Portnoy Just To Get Barstool Pizzafest Sponsor To Respond.
While the WaPo’s Emily Heil cancelled her 10 am interview with Portnoy and tried to reschedule it for just before the article dropped, there was one man she was able to get in touch with — the “conscience of the food and restaurant industries!”
The WaPo hit job on @stoolpresidente is out
Actual sentence:
"Rosenthal, a Minnesota-based mathematician who has positioned himself as the conscience of the food and restaurant industries, has been leading the charge against those involved"
The conscience of the food industry! pic.twitter.com/pFMRBe4wVw
— Amber Duke (@ambermarieduke) September 22, 2023
DAVID BROOKS MORPHED INTO VODKAPUNDIT SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: N.J. restaurant at center of David Brooks’ viral $78 Newark Airport meal running $17.78 special.
After reading the results of some social media sleuthing, Hallett no longer wondered where Brooks dined.
As an X post from Rebekah Jones pointed out using reference photos showing a similar burger and tables, it looked like Brooks had purchased a burger and fries from Hallett’s restaurant, Smokehouse BBQ, located in Terminal A at Newark Airport.
From the crinkle-cut fries to the burger garnish, Hallett, seeing the additional photos, immediately made the connection.
“I knew right away,” the restaurant owner tells NJ Advance Media.
Along with the fact that food and drink will often cost more at an airport, something else was glaringly apparent to many responding to Brooks’ tweet.
The conservative columnist, who as of late Thursday night hadn’t surfaced on X since posting the message, seemed to leave out a mention of the cost of liquor … if that was indeed what was in his glass.
David Brooks hasn’t been a conservative for almost two decades. In 2016, Glenn explored “How David Brooks created Donald Trump:”
“Trump voters,” [Brooks} wrote, “are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else. Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.” (Emphasis added.)
Well, it’s a lesson for a lot of people in the punditocracy, of whom Brooks — who famously endorsed Barack Obama after viewing his sharply creased pants — is just one. And if Brooks et al. had paid attention, the roots of the Trump phenomenon wouldn’t have been so difficult to fathom.
Brooks is, of course, horrified at Trump and his supporters, whom he finds childish, thuggish and contemptuous of the things that David Brooks likes about today’s America. It’s clear that he’d like a social/political revolution that was more refined, better-mannered, more focused on the Constitution and, well, more bourgeois as opposed to in-your-face and working class.
The thing is, we had that movement. It was the Tea Party movement. Unlike Brooks, I actually ventured out to “intermingle” with Tea Partiers at various events that I covered for PJTV.com, contributing commentary to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Examiner. As I reported from one event in Nashville, “Pundits claim the tea partiers are angry — and they are — but the most striking thing about the atmosphere in Nashville was how cheerful everyone seemed to be. I spoke with dozens of people, and the responses were surprisingly similar. Hardly any had ever been involved in politics before. Having gotten started, they were finding it to be not just worthwhile, but actually fun.”
* * * * * * * *
Yet the tea party movement was smeared as racist, denounced as fascist, harassed with impunity by the IRS and generally treated with contempt by the political establishment — and by pundits like Brooks, who declared “I’m not a fan of this movement.” After handing the GOP big legislative victories in 2010 and 2014, it was largely betrayed by the Republicans in Congress, who broke their promises to shrink government and block Obama’s initiatives.
So now we have Trump instead, who tells people to punch counterprotesters instead of picking up their trash.
To be fair, “get in their faces and punch back twice as hard” was also the motto of the man with the brilliant trouser creases whom Brooks supported.
David Brooks is getting cooked on Facebook by an airport bar and grill, social media's best days are still ahead pic.twitter.com/SVSpMdtwch
— Tom Gara (@tomgara) September 22, 2023
WELCOME HOME: Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson switches to Republican Party.
WAS IT OVER WHEN THE GERMANS BOMBED TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE? Biden praises ‘Congressional Black Caucus’ during address to Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE SHEINBAUM: Claudia Sheinbaum is on track to become Mexico’s first Jewish and woman president.
UNEXPECTEDLY! 95% of NFTs are Worthless: Report.
NFTs went mainstream, and then the bubble burst, as it often does. The financial failure does not even begin to scratch the surface of the environmental devastation wrought by crypto, either. It is unclear what the vast majority of crypto and NFT owners have gotten in return for accelerating climate change.
Iowahawk is taking his financial setback relatively well…
As God is my witness, I thought I could build an eternal empire of vast wealth for my descendants with jpegs of cartoon monkeyshttps://t.co/AQwVT07Pkj
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 21, 2023
GREAT MOMENTS IN ENVIRONMENTALISM: Gavin Newsom flew from Calif. to NY to tell the UN that burning gas is destroying the planet.
DID SEN. BOB MENENDEZ AND WIFE IMPROPERLY TAKE GOLD BARS FROM CORRUPT BANK EXEC?
Federal prosecutors are looking into whether an admitted felon helped arrange to give gold bars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez or his wife in exchange for help, sources familiar with the matter tell News 4.
Investigators want to know if Menendez, a Democrat, offered to contact the Justice Department to try to help that man who was accused of banking crimes. Those questions are now before a federal grand jury in Manhattan that is considering whether to hand up corruption charges against the senior senator from New Jersey.
Sources say witnesses are now testifying before that federal grand jury. Part of the investigation centers on the senator’s ties to Fred Daibes, a New Jersey developer and one-time bank chairman. Officials with the FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation want to know if Daibes or his associates gave gold bars to the senator’s wife, Nadine Arslanian — gold bars worth as much as $400,000.
At the time of the gift handoff, Daibes was facing federal bank fraud charges that could have landed him up to a decade in federal prison.
Will anything come of this? As New York magazine notes, “Menendez possesses an ability to hang on through corruption scandals that would bury most politicians.”
IN SOVIET SAN FRANCISCO, CITY BLAMES CAR OWNERS FOR THEFTS! San Francisco supervisor holds hearing on strategies to address car break-ins.
San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston on Thursday is sponsoring a hearing on strategies to address the city’s problem with car break-ins.
* * * * * * * *
Preston offered on idea on social media Wednesday night.
“Just as government in the 1980’s launched a massive “buckle up” campaign to retrain drivers/passengers to use seatbelts, we need as a city to pound in every way possible the message to visitors: do not leave anything in your car. Do this and we’ll dramatically reduce car break-ins,” said Preston. “We should not be throwing our hands up on this issue.”
When does San Francisco join Chicago and sue Kia and Hyundai for car thefts?
HOW IT STARTED:
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.
—David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse.
How it’s going: Public’s view of politics slipping, now ‘unrelentingly negative.’
None other than the Pew Research Center sums up the alarming state of politics in and around the nation at this time. It is “dismal,” the pollster advised.
“Americans have long been critical of politicians and skeptical of the federal government. But today, Americans’ views of politics and elected officials are unrelentingly negative, with little hope of improvement on the horizon,” noted the wide-reaching survey, which was released Tuesday.
“Majorities say the political process is dominated by special interests, flooded with campaign cash and mired in partisan warfare. Elected officials are widely viewed as self-serving and ineffective,” the survey analysis advised, noting that there was no single “focal point” in politics that is troubling the public.
Anger and exhaustion permeate the entire political process.
“There is widespread criticism of the three branches of government, both political parties, as well as political leaders and candidates for office. Notably, Americans’ unhappiness with politics comes at a time of historically high levels of voter turnout in national elections. The elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022 were three of the highest-turnout U.S. elections of their respective types in decades,” the poll analysis advised.
“But voting in elections is very different from being satisfied with the state of politics — and the public is deeply dissatisfied,” it said.
—Jennifer Harper, the Washington Times, today.
THE HARDEST WORKING WOMAN IN POLITICS! President Joe Biden to Establish First-Ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, To Be Overseen by Vice President Kamala Harris.
President Joe Biden has given Vice President Kamala Harris another job — she will head a task force dedicated to fighting online abuse and harassment.
Biden on Thursday will announce the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse and Harris will formally launch it by hosting a roundtable in the afternoon.
The administration said the task force was being launched ‘to address online harms, which disproportionately affect women, girls, people of color, and LGBTQI+ individuals.’
It’s the latest task to be handed to Harris, who has a full plate of issues she leads for the Biden administration, including defending voting rights and examining the root cause of migration.
Flashback: “On the latest Editors podcast, I floated the somewhat-tongue-in-cheek theory that Joe Biden has set Kamala Harris up to fail, a passive-aggressive form of revenge for her shivving him in that first Democratic presidential-primary debate.”
To be fair, there’s enough failure to go around for everybody in this administration.
I DO NOT TRUST THE INTERNET OF THINGS: The Man Amazon Erased.
On Thursday, May 25, Brandon Jackson, a software engineer in Baltimore County, Maryland, discovered that he was locked out of his Amazon account. Jackson couldn’t get packages delivered to his home by the retail giant. He couldn’t access any files and data he had stored with Amazon Web Services, the company’s powerful cloud computing wing. It also meant that Jackson, a self-described home automation enthusiast, could no longer use Alexa for his smart home devices. He could turn on his lights manually, but only in the knowledge that Amazon could still operate them remotely.
Jackson soon discovered that Amazon suspended his account because a Black delivery driver who’d come to his house the previous day had reported hearing racist remarks from his video doorbell. In a brief email sent to Jackson at 3 a.m., the company explained how it unilaterally placed all of his linked devices and services on hold as it commenced an internal investigation.
The accusations baffled Jackson. He and his family are Black. When he reviewed the doorbell’s footage, he saw that nobody was home at the time of the delivery. At a loss for what could have prompted the accusation of racism, he suspected the driver had misinterpreted the doorbell’s automated response: “Excuse me, can I help you?”
Read the whole thing.
DAVE PORTNOY PULLS OFF BRILLIANT TACTIC TO STYMIE WASHINGTON POST HIT PIECE:
During the call, Portnoy called out Heil for saying Portnoy had made “misogynistic comments” and displayed “other problematic behavior.” He called her out for seemingly having her opinion made up and for not treating him fairly. She defended herself by saying her opinion was not made up, but she was using a scare tactic in order to get the company to respond to her email.
The end result is they agreed to speak the next morning.
The bottom line is that when the article is released, at least some people will now know the exact process for how the Portnoy hit piece was made, which will allow them to evaluate the article more fairly.
Always good to see how the sausage gets made:
I Caught Wind That The Washington Post Was Writing A Hit Piece About Me And My Pizzafest So I Did What I Do. I Went on the Offensive pic.twitter.com/5oK2zJqVAs
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) September 20, 2023
UPDATE: WaPo’s Emily Heil locks account:
ANSWER: THEY LOST RUSSIAN AND CHINESE RESOURCES. Germany went from envy of the world to the worst-performing major developed economy. What happened?
I think Fetterman is analogous to Caligula’s horse. Suetonius relates that Caligula planned to appoint his horse Incitatus to the position of consul, but was assassinated before the appointment could be made. Why would Caligula name his horse consul? In order to insult and humiliate senators and other elites.
Similarly, the Democrats’ electing Fetterman to the Senate, allowing him to conduct himself in an inappropriate and unprofessional manner, and encouraging him in behavior that brings disgrace on himself and the institution he serves, are all intended to damage the public’s respect for the Senate. The Left is attacking all of our institutions in a multitude of ways. Not just tolerating but encouraging clownish behavior by a brain-damaged John Fetterman is just one of their tactics to undermine the Senate.
That’s a bit of an insult to Caligula’s horse though. I suspect Incitatus’ cerebellum had much more horsepower (sorry) than Fetterman’s brain at this point.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Fetterman Nation.
THIS OUGHT TO IMPROVE HOW PASSENGERS VIEW THEIR UBER DRIVER IMMENSELY! Robert De Niro to reportedly revive Taxi Driver role in Uber campaign.
The 80-year-old actor will apparently replicate Bickle’s unforgettable line: “You talkin’ to me,” in the series of ads being filmed in London this week, The Sun reported.
“He’s going to be Travis Bickle, saying some phrases and playing up to it,” an unnamed source told the outlet.
“His previous adverts have shown he has no problem poking fun at himself.”
The Oscar-winner has recently taken on several other ad campaigns — a possible consequence of the star’s costly divorces and separations from the mothers of his seven children.
Since they’re still around, were Woody Allen or Dick Cavett asked as well?
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