MARK JUDGE: News junkies: Margaret Sullivan’s new memoir and the media’s addiction problem.

For an entire generation of young journalists, the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s was like a powerful drug. The toppling of Richard Nixon provided a high. Called by Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee “the longest shot in the history of American journalism,” Watergate altered the political and media landscape the way heroin rewires the brain. The point of journalism went from covering the news to destroying the president — especially if such a figure were a Republican or a conservative. The language of addiction, a “rush,” came to define the media’s behavior whenever there was a political scandal. They even created fake scandals to feed their habits.

Sullivan was in high school in her native town of Lackawanna, New York, when Watergate hit. A kid who loved language, by the time Nixon resigned, she was the editor of her school newspaper. Here she is on Woodward and Bernstein: “They were badass, the essence of swashbuckling cool, especially when confused in my teenage mind with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman … I wanted to be them, or at least immerse myself in that newsroom culture. Righteousness could be achieved, according to the self-important journalism adage, by ‘afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.'” (Why the comfortable should be afflicted is never explained.)

That’s easy – they had an (R) after their names:

Among the funniest parts of Newsroom Confidential are Sullivan’s reports of the freakout in the Washington Post newsroom when Donald Trump was elected president. Editor Marty Baron had to keep reminding the staff that they just had to “keep doing their jobs.”

This was not possible. Trump was fentanyl, an insanely powerful drug that was equally dangerous. The media went crazy. They simply could not let the man do his job. The press suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story , defended the security agencies they had ferociously distrusted after Watergate, and speed-balled the idea that there was a seven-hour “gap” in President Trump’s White House phone logs. Bob Woodward, the original scandal dealer, was rolled out to huff and puff and proclaim that this was, yes, worse than Watergate. The story turned out to be false.

Read the whole thing.

WISH YOU WEREN’T HERE: An Open Letter to Roger Waters (and Joe Rogan).

(Classical reference in headline.)

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Nury Martinez leak reveals insults about Jews, Armenians too.

In the same leaked audio clips posted to Reddit in which former Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez made racist remarks about Black people and Oaxacans, she also made crude remarks about Jewish people and Armenians.

Martinez said Tuesday that she would take a leave of absence from the City Council, two days after a recording surfaced on which she was heard deriding some of her colleagues and making racist remarks. Martinez stepped down as City Council president Monday.

In the recording reviewed by The Times, Martinez can be heard saying the “judíos” — which means Jews in Spanish — “cut their deal with South L.A.”

Martinez was responding to former Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera, who had concluded, “I’m sure Katz and his crew have an agenda,” referring to former state Assemblymember Richard Katz.

Katz served on the city’s 21-member redistricting commission that worked on council district boundary maps. He was an appointee of City Councilman Bob Blumenfield.

“They are gonna screw everybody else,” Martinez said in the recording.

Martinez “announced she is taking a leave of absence Tuesday amid ongoing calls for her resignation after a recording revealing racist and offensive remarks was released over the weekend.” She “stepped down from her role as council president on Monday but did not leave her seat on the council, which has prompted backlash among those who want her out.”

THE DARK LEGACY OF NIKKI FINKE:

Everyone in Hollywood who was active during Finke’s reign—and it was a reign; she dominated the landscape from 2006 to 2013 in a way that is difficult to explain to those who didn’t experience it—has a Nikki story, and most of them are awful. She was awful. Screaming threats. 3 a.m. phone calls. Outright blackmail. I’m all for being super-aggressive on a story—but she’d try to destroy lives, to get agents and assistants fired if they wouldn’t do her bidding. She’d torment publicists with email subject lines like “today’s the day I ruin your career.” She once attempted to sabotage the book deal of a rival journalist I know, just because. She’d have her lawyer send frivolous and harassing letters, and in 2011 she convinced Penske to sue THR for $5 million over some website code we mistakenly used from a Penske site. (It settled.) Nobody does anything in Hollywood unless they’re afraid, she once told me. There’s an element of truth to that, and good journalists know how to exploit that fear, but Nikki took it to a destructive and selfish end.

We all loved to read when she went after someone, but Nikki once told me in blunt terms that she occasionally wrote horrible things she knew to be untrue about people in order to get them to play ball with her in the future. That’s pretty much the definition of libel, but to her it was just a casual Hollywood power play—a way for her to exert control over people with more power than her. And to control the nextstory, and the one after that. Most journalists, even those with a pointed voice and a perspective (myself included), wouldn’t write anything that they wouldn’t say to someone’s face. But Nikki sidestepped those ethics by being unseen by anyone. Her absence from events and lunches, and the lack of any boss or owner to call and complain about her, made her simultaneously ubiquitous and untouchable—hence that decades-old file photo hovered over Hollywood like a cloud of toxic smoke, and you never knew when she would decide to announce that, say, Paramount executive John Lesher was allegedly “whacked out and shit-faced and falling down drunk.” With Nikki, the power play was disguised as a righteous crusade. Like I said, awful stuff.

That’s why it’s amusing to see all these glowing obituaries and eulogies from journalists on Twitter today after Finke died at age 68 in Florida after a long illness. “Fearless.” “Disruptor.” “One of a kind.” That type of praise. It’s all true, of course—people can be innovative and terrible—but what’s been largely left out of the conversation about her legacy is the terrible part, the tactics by which Finke became so disruptive. Certainly unethical, arguably criminal, in most media environments, Nikki’s bullying would have been rejected, or at least countered. But for some reason—the egos, the fear-based culture, and the transactional nature of showbiz come to mind—Hollywood people not only tolerated her tactics; she was actually celebrated.

In a company town whose execs are legendary for their anger issues, and who lionized Roman Polanski and Harvey Weinstein? I need to borrow Sarah’s shocked face!

BOMBSHELL WSJ INVESTIGATION REVEALS RUNAWAY CORRUPTION IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT:

Some Americans still believe the federal government is working in the public’s best interest. If anything can disabuse these naive holdouts of this notion, it will be the bombshell Wall Street Journal investigation that just dropped—revealing runaway corruption among the federal bureaucracy.

The Journal reviewed more than 31,000 financial disclosure forms and analyzed more than 850,000 financial assets and 315,000 trades to shed light on any conflicts of interest among more than 12,000 senior career bureaucrats and political appointees.  Its investigation found that “thousands of officials across the U.S. government’s executive branch disclosed owning or trading stocks that stood to rise or fall with decisions their agencies made.”

“Across 50 federal agencies ranging from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department, more than 2,600 officials reported stock investments in companies while those companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies, during both Republican and Democratic administrations,” the Journal reports. “When the financial holdings caused a conflict, the agencies sometimes simply waived the rules.”

The federal employees weren’t even subtle about it. Per the Journal, “More than five dozen officials at five agencies reported trading stocks of companies shortly before their departments announced enforcement actions against those companies, such as charges or settlements.”

More from Jeff Dunetz: Federal Employees Are Trading Stock in Companies They Oversee.

Gee, maybe I should get a job in DC.

For example, at the agency trying to control everything, including puddles, about a third of senior EPA officials “reported that they or their family members held investments in companies that were lobbying the agency.”

Isn’t that great? A job for a lifetime, excellent health plan, benefits, retirement, and if you make it to senior management, insider trading is legal.

As Steve would say, it’s good to be in the nomenklatura.

NO PASARAN: “Defund the Police” Vs. “Defund the FBI”: What Tocqueville and the Founders Might Have Pointed Out.

For instance, listen to one Matt Lewis. He claims to be a “conservative”, which may be true, but it seems more likely that he is using the left’s old trick whereby leftists write letters and posts claiming that “I am a lifelong and faithful Republican except that there is just this little problem that I cannot stomach that dreadful person (Trump/Bush/Reagan/Palin/etc/etc/etc…) that my party nominated” followed by (this being an actual Matt Lewis quote) “Today’s Republican Party is 180 degrees different from the party that most of its members—like myself—signed up to join.”

When you mention “the devastating revelations in the Jan. 6 hearings” (ho-hum) and the “many outrageously cynical flip-flops for the party of Trump”, Matt Lewis — without ever once alluding to any of the Democrat party’s many faults — you might just be a Liz Cheney-type RINO, and therefore an outright fake conservative.

But no matter. Let us hear what Matt Lewis has to say regarding alleged Republican hypocrisy:

After a 2020 election cycle that saw the “law and order” party criticize Democrats for wanting to “defund the police,” we’ve seen quite a few members of the right’s commentariat blithely wave off video of MAGA rioters beating Capitol police officers with flagpoles. (Those cops’ lives don’t matter, to the Blue Lives Matter crowd.) Now, a lot of those same voices on the rightare saying, “Defund the FBI.” So much for lionizing the law enforcement heroes who run toward danger.

Do the FBI’s “law enforcement heroes … run toward danger”, Matt Lewis?  Or do they run towards hymn-singing pro-life activists and towards Melania’s underwear drawer in Palm Beach?

Read the whole thing.

PROJECT VERITAS DROPS BLISTERING UNDERCOVER VIDEO OF KATIE ‘KAREN’ HOBBS AND HER STAFF.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● Shot: ‘Striking hypocrisy’ — Thunberg fury as EU lawmakers back green label for nuclear and gas.

—Recharge News, July 6th.

● Chaser: Greta Thunberg Calls Possible Shutdown of Nuclear Power Plants in Germany a Mistake.

—Latestly, today.

Senator Blutarsky could not be reached for comment, but his former fraternity brothers were quoted as saying:

Exit question from Jon Gabriel: “Wait, so it wasn’t a good idea to base your national security and economy on the tantrum of a scientifically illiterate Swedish teenager?”

UPDATE: Britain Faces Possible Winter Blackouts as European Energy Crisis Worsens.

BIDEN’S FBI STORMTROOPERS RAID ANOTHER PRO-LIFE ACTIVIST IN EARLY-MORNING RAID, ASSAULT WEAPONS AT THE READY, IN FRONT OF HIS YOUNG CHILDREN:

A cadre of armed FBI agents descended on the family home of one of the 11 pro-life activists targeted by President Joe Biden’s Justice Department for peacefully protesting outside an abortion clinic in Tennessee.

The DOJ charged pro-life leader Paul Vaughn with “a civil rights conspiracy” and a Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act) offense over the activist blockade of a Nashville-area abortion facility in early March 2021. A federal indictment unsealed Wednesday alleges that the pro-life defendants “engaged in a conspiracy to prevent the clinic from providing” and patients from receiving abortion services and violated the FACE Act by “using physical obstruction to intimidate and interfere with the clinic’s employees and a patient.”

If convicted, Vaughn faces up to 11 years in prison, three years supervised release and fines of up to $350,000.

Vaughn, the president of Personhood Tennessee, told FOX Chattanooga at the time that it was “like church service in there” with pro-life protestors “singing hymns, reading scripture, praying,” and sitting on the floor in the hallway outside of Carafem Health Center Clinic, an abortion facility located within a medical office building.

Earlier: FBI Escalates Its War on Anti-Abortion Protesters.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: THE NEXT GENERATION. Watch: Not even MSNBC can ignore the signs that something is very, very wrong with John Fetterman. “Like Biden, they’re just trying to get him across the finish line.”

We’re approaching Captain Pike territory here:

NBC reporter on her interview with John Fetterman: "You'll see he has a screen in front of him that is transcribing my questions as I ask them."

"Once he can read, he can fully understand what I'm asking." pic.twitter.com/sdRBEj56qh

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 11, 2022

UPDATE: See It: Fetterman uses computer to understand reporter’s questions.

RIP: Angela Lansbury, ‘Murder, She Wrote’ star and legendary Hollywood actress, dead at 96.

In the 1940s, Lansbury and her family headed to New York where Moyna kicked off her acting career and embarked on a tour. The family eventually traveled to Los Angeles where Moyna helped her daughter land a screen test at MGM. At age 17, Lansbury made her movie debut in 1944’s “Gaslight.” The role earned her an Oscar nomination. She went on to play Elizabeth Taylor’s sister in “National Velvet” that year.

The following year brought another Oscar nomination for Lansbury, thanks to 1945’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” At 19, Lansbury married leading man Richard Cromwell. The couple separated nine months later and Lansbury learned the actor was gay. The two remained friends until his death in 1960 from cancer.

In 1949, Lansbury married Peter Shaw, a British actor who later became a Hollywood agent, in London. Moyna served as matron of honor. Lansbury kept busy pursuing a thriving career both on the big screen, on television and on the stage. At one point, she played Elvis Presley’s mother in 1961’s “Blue Hawaii” despite the actress being 10 years older than the singer.

In 1962, she played Laurence Harvey’s mother in “The Manchurian Candidate.” For this role, she was three years older than her on-screen son. It earned Lansbury her third Oscar nomination.

Nobody ever looked at solitaire the same since.

GERMANY CYBERSECURITY CHIEF FACES SACKING OVER RUSSIA TIES — REPORTS.

BAN ALL THE THINGS! Gov. Newsom signed a bill that will discontinue single-use plastic bags at grocery stores.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into a law a bill last week that will change grocery stores throughout the state in the near future. SB 1046, put forth by Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman, will force supermarkets to phase out single-use plastic produce bags, called pre-checkout bags, that are often seen near the fruits and vegetables section by Jan. 1, 2025.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, stores will have to use recycled paper bags or compostable bags instead.

DEMOCRAT CANDIDATE IN OHIO SENATE RACE HAS DEBATE MELTDOWN:

Where [Vance] really hit back against Ryan, though, was by reminding that the alleged criminal in the case of a 10-year-old girl who was raped and became pregnant as a result, was here illegally.

“But let’s talk about that case,” Vance mentioned. “Because why was a 10-year-old girl raped in our community, raped in our state in the first place? The thing the media and Congressman Ryan, they talk about this all the time, the thing they never mention is that poor girl was raped by an illegal alien, somebody that should’ve never been in this state in the first place.” Vance then turned towards Ryan to decry how “you voted so many times against border wall funding, so many times for amnesty, Tim. If you had done your job, she’d never have been raped in the first place.” As the buzzer rang to call time, Vance called on Ryan to “do your job on border security, don’t lecture me on positions I don’t actually have.”

Vance used the moment to hit Ryan not only on abortion, as he did, but on illegal immigration as well, which would also come up at a later point in the debate, with the prevalence of fentanyl in this country and in Ohio.

PJM’s Paula Bolyard adds, “J.D. Vance DOMINATES in Ohio Senate Debate Against Radical Left-Wing Congressman Tim Ryan.”

GET WOKE, GO BROKE, PART DEUX: DC Comics Canceling Gay Superman’s Solo Run After Failure to Sell.

Flashback: Oh No! Laid-off HBO Max Execs Confirm Warner Bros. [DC’s parent company] Is Ditching Wokeness and Embracing ‘Middle America.’

MICHAEL WALSH: To Save America, Repeal the 16th Amendment.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: God Moved To FBI Watch List After Pro-Life Comments Surface.

TO BE FAIR, THAT’S SETTING THE BAR AWFULLY LOW: Hispanics Favor Columbus Over Biden and Harris: Report.

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA:

They scrub the videos but I find them.

This is what they thought of Joe Biden before 2016. pic.twitter.com/3OGUS5Owmm

— MAZE (@mazemoore) October 10, 2022

Why, it’s as if: Joe Biden Exposed #MeToo Movement as Total BS.

QUESTIONS NO ONE IS ASKING: Did Madonna Just Come Out as Gay?

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: PayPal Value Down $6 Billion, ‘Delete PayPal’ Searches Soar 1,300% After Daily Wire Report Exposes ‘Misinformation’ Policy.

ED MORRISSEY: John Fetterman defied ‘effete, elite’ caricatures of the Left, declares … elite Manhattan magazine.

Rarely will one see this much water carried at one time for a political candidate from a supposed journalistic outlet. And in fact, one can’t actually see it unless they buy a subscription to New York Magazine, the elite Manhattan publication that spent a lot of pixels and social-media effort to convince everyone that John Fetterman is not (a) elite, (b) effete, and (c) out of touch.

We can certainly stipulate to (b) — Fetterman doesn’t come across as effete at all. That isn’t just due to his impressive size, physicality, or tattoos, although those are contributing factors. “Effete” isn’t a word that springs to mind, however, for someone who chased down an innocent black man with a shotgun for running through his neighborhood, after all. Nor for someone who vandalized a black business.

As for the rest, it’s tough to argue without reading the article itself. Normally, criticism of such an article without a careful read would be a fraught exercise, but thankfully New York Magazine posted a string of tweets laying out their argument, so we can at least chew over that much. Our colleagues at Twitchy have captured the thread laying out the case for Fetterman as a real man of the people, a man they claim has “attained folkloric stature.”

Somewhere, the late Tom Wolfe must be rolling his eyes over what has happened to the magazine he helped launch.

Related: Fetterman slammed ‘tough on crime’ policies to anti-cop group in 2018.

LIBERAL MEDIA SCREAM: Psaki says if media don’t cover, Hunter Biden isn’t news.

This week’s Liberal Media Scream shows the ridiculous spin liberal flacks are eager to use to deflate the Hunter Biden scandal story as the midterm elections near.

In focus this week is former Biden White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who said the Hunter Biden story is a big zero since she hasn’t seen it show up on the front pages of many of the nation’s newspapers.

Psaki said on Meet the Press, “As much as there was so much news happening in Washington this week, it doesn’t always translate, and often doesn’t translate, to what voters are talking about in states. And I think that’s what we’re seeing currently.”

Given the revolving door nature of Obama administration retreads such as Peppermint Psaki going into “journalism” (and vice-versa), it’s quite easy to think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines.

Evergreen:

QUESTION ASKED: The last of the Covidians — how should we treat those who refuse to acknowledge the pandemic is over?

A PACK NOT A HERD: Rita Panahi on Sky News Australia: ‘Inevitable:’ UK citizens do police’s work as climate protesters cause disruptions.

To be fair, the British police have much more important things to do, such as arresting people for tweets that “cause anxiety.”