Besides Bannon, the other three men arrested were the founder of “We Build The Wall,” Brian Kolfage, 38, a triple amputee U.S. Air Force veteran who is a graduate of the University of Arizona; Andrew Badolato, 56, a financier from Florida; and Timothy Shea, 49, from Castle Rock, Colo.
Like you, my faith in America has been shaken this morning. If you can’t trust Steve Bannon….
We’ve held fast to our pledge not to watch any moment of either convention, and not because they’re without all of those lovely people who ordinarily crowd the arenas. We did, however, read parts of 44th president Barack Obama’s speech on Tuesday night and these words resonated:
“This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win.”
We already know that Donald Trump has a “heads you lose, tails I win” rationale to the upcoming election. If he gets more votes (in the Electoral College), he gets four more years. If he gets fewer votes, the election was rigged.
We already know that the cult of those who follow him has no problem with this. Go ahead. Go ask a Trump supporter you know. Ask them if they agree with the president that if Joe Biden wins the election that it was rigged. Ask them if they believe the election can be fair (Do you think they’d feel that way if it was Biden trailing by 10 points in the polls?).
The people I know who want Trump to remain in power put democracy and the Constitution a distant second (or not at all) to the Republican party remaining in power. Even if they don’t come out and say it, they mean it. They were all for democracy until there was a chance (thanks, Obama) that it meant the white way of life would no longer be the prevailing order. Then they had second thoughts about democracy.
Maybe Joe Biden will win. And maybe the transition from 45 to 46 will be relatively smooth (I doubt it). But Trumpism isn’t going away. Those white folks who resent their America being taken from them will do everything, including defacing every American ideal, to remain in power.
Trump may go. Trumpism, alas, isn’t going anywhere.
Last week I spoke to an old friend who lives in California but was born in Canada. She told me that if Trump wins, she’s moving back to Calgary. Not even the least bit ambivalent about that. Then she said something that stuck with me. “Who would vote for someone who gets compared to Hitler as often as Trump does?” she asked. “Their response is always, ‘He’s nowhere near as bad as Hitler.’ It’s not, ‘He’s nothing like Hitler.'”
She’s right.
This story on George Best by Pablo Maurer in The Athletic is a treat (click on the link if for no other reason than to watch Best’s unbelievable goal). The late ’70s and early ’80s North American Soccer League probably merits its own book (if someone hasn’t already written one). The world’s greatest washed-up soccer legends—Pele, Best, Giorgio Chinaglia, Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff—all made the pilgrimage to the States for big bucks, sexy models and probably plenty of coke and more. What a time to have been alive…and kicking!
Poor, dumb Reds announcer Thom Brennaman. What was he thinking here? Of course POTUS would just claim either A) this is locker room talk or B) he said “flag” and you just didn’t hear it correctly. Either way, here we are as a country: a man who is an announcer for a baseball team that hasn’t mattered in nearly 30 years is going to lose his job over saying the word “fag” but the guy who’s president said “grab them by the pussy” (in a similar circumstance) and keeps on going.
It sounds like something so dumb that only Florida could think of it, but it’s actually not as dumb as it sounds (we hope): In the next two years scientists will release 750 million mosquitoes in the Florida Keys.
But they’re not regular mosquitoes. They’re quite literally mutants (scientists have given them the cuddly name of OX5034, which also happens to be the shipping number for my next Amazon delivery), and when they breed with regular bite-my-ankles-you-bastards mosquitoes, they’re designed such that female offspring will die. Now if only scientists could genetically produce a similar species of OX5034 Trumps.
As you know, we’ve become huge fans of Chris Fowler‘s Instagram page the past couple years (brains, wealth, a love of the outdoors, a passion for college football and rugged good looks… it’s hard to believe there’s two of us). Here he is having just summited one of the 14,000-foot peaks in his adopted home state (from his tween years) of Colorado.
Chris turns 58 on Sunday. Do you know what Verne Lundquist looked like when he was 58? I mean…
A sharp spike in positive coronavirus tests, incited by an off-campus party, has led Notre Dame to suspend in-person classes for at least two weeks. The Irish brought students back on August 3rd (borrowing from Creighton’s playbook) so that they’d be able to send everyone home by Thanksgiving and call it a semester. That plan’s still a go, but being confined to dorm rooms for two weeks in South Bend in August? No bueno.
As one of my old Dillon friends proffered, “Would not want to be in quarantine with ______ during ‘The Night of the Gas’ whether or not I had mask, hazmat suit, etc. Cabbage-stuffed chimichanga in South Dining Hall is a key contributor.”
So two weeks of taking classes in your dorm room or running around the lakes to keep from going insane. And is there even gonna be football?
You may recall that Fr. John Jenkins was resolute back in the spring that Nore Dame would be able to safely reconvene students on campus and hold in-person classes this semester.
To be fair, Jenkins said that “we think we can achieve it” and even prefaced that with “If there’s a dramatic outbreak of the corona again, then we’ll have to adapt and change.” Which is what the school is doing.
Blame Jenkins if you like for, like so many, having the audacity to think that human will is enough to simply overcome the virus. Credit him for, unlike others, having the wisdom to adopt to real consequences. But don’t forget: Notre Dame and other schools already have the tuition (and room and board) checks. Is that a cynical view? Maybe, but it’s also a fact.
Maybe it hasn’t made much news south of the border, but the Canadian Football League canceled its 2020 season on Monday. One reason the CFL, which has nine teams, cited for not playing this fall is that it can’t be assured of receiving government assistance (we thought everyone in Canada received government assistance).
So there’s yet another boot to drop in Football v. Pandemic.
Also, it didn’t get much attention here, but did you know that the Edmonton Eskimos are now the Edmonton Football Team? We didn’t know that, either.
Til 2021, Grey Cup.
CNN’s website made a big deal of promoting this contretemps between Anderson Cooper and Michael Lindell, the creator of MyPillow. At issue was Lindell promoting a supplement that he claims is effective in fighting Covid-19 while not being upfront about the fact that he’s on the company’s board of directors (which got the company into the room with POTUS because Lindell is a big contributor).
But we had to laugh when Cooper asked, “How do you sleep at night?”
The dude created MyPillow. It’s kind of obvious how he sleeps, no?
So I was having an argument with a friend the other day and I decided to do the research myself. To me, both of these programs are signs of an unhealthy economy.
So what’s the broader lesson here? I’m not sure other than to say that both programs are welfare. If you’re against the latter (or former), you should be against the former (or latter). Or maybe you just think it is (or isn’t) the government’s job to be a charity organization? Or to put guardrails on capitalism.*
*It’s funny how often capitalism has to be put back on track by artificial means, like when your AFX car runs out of its slot and flies into the wall.
This from an article in The Kansas City Star, which I imagine would be a farmer-friendly publication:
Overall spending on food stamps is much higher than farm subsidies. But on a per-person basis, farmers come out ahead.
Now maybe I have the math on this wrong, but if you did not pay the farmers to not farm, then the price of their goods would be lower, so that it would not cost as much for food, so that your food stamps would go further. So, from a taxpayer vantage point, they’re not paying the farmers and they could spend less on the welfare queens people who use food stamps.
Ah, but you know the one group that no one ever lobbies for in Washington? Taxpayers.
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It was the bottom of the 9th inning at Yankee Stadium last night as the Bombers were about to lose their first home game of the season after 10 straight wins (you can’t play Boston every night). The Rays, leading 6-3, had reliever Chaz Roe on the mound when ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian noticed that if one Yankee got on base, then Tyler Wade would be coming to bat. “If the Yankees can get a runner on base,” said Kurkjian, who probably hadn’t thought his next words through very thoroughly, “we’ll get Roe versus Wade.”
You could hear Jimmy Pitaro screaming from here. Whoever ESPN’s play-by-play man was (Jon Sciambi), he wisely kept silent. After Miguel Andujar did get on base, bringing Wade up to bat, third man in the booth Eduardo Perez noted, “There’s your Roe versus Wade matchup.” Kurkjian did not acknowledge it. By then a producer had probably asked him, “And what’s your next statement going to be? Are you going to note that we’re late-term in this game?”
The 2020 presidential election is still 80 days away but the president is already claiming that his opponent got an unfair head start, or that he didn’t hear “Ready, Set, Go” or whatever dipsh*t kids on the playground do when they know they’re about to lose a race.
Speaking to cult members in Oshkosh, Wis., on Monday, President Trump said, “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” Those are the kind of statements that bring a $50,000 fine to a coach in the NBA or NFL. But when you’re Orange-ina, it’s okay.
Here’s a Trump tweet: “Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!” Unless, of course, those results show that Joe Biden is ahead, in which case we revert to the previous paragraph’s dictum.
Because of the coronavirus, the source of which Trump is not responsible for but the insane levels of calamity (1,358 dead here just yesterday; good job, good effort, Donald) he is totally responsible for, more Americans than ever will likely be voting by mail this fall. And that means it will be very irresponsible for any media (networks, newspapers) to declare a winner on the night of November 3rd. It’ll just be too early.
And that doesn’t mean we’re looking at a hanging chad scenario. It just means you’ve got to give the election officials time to count the ballots. Have you ever tried opening 10 million envelopes in one night?
But what did the president have to say about that in May? “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mailboxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed….“
Of course, the president himself is not voting in person. But he refers to that as “absentee balloting,” as opposed to mail-in voting. Quick translation: If you vote for Trump, that’s an absentee ballot; if you vote Biden, that’s a mail-in ballot.”
This piece in this morning’s New York Times reports that President Trump has already publicly questioned the integrity of our voting process 91 times this year (or 91 more instances of something other than hospital visits to sick Covid patients who are not his brother). If only he had a job where he were in a position to do something about that. Oh, well. How many times would Barack Obama have had to have done that back in 2012 for Bill O’Reilly to have stopped sexually harassing co-workers long enough to go batshit crazy on-air that the President of the United States had impugned the integrity of our electoral process? I’m placing the over/under at “1.”
Perhaps his most outright transparent statement in all of this came earlier this week with Fox Business drone Maria Bartiromo, when he told her why he was against further funding the U.S. Post Office: “Now they need that money in order to have the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots …. But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”
Just win, baby. That’s how Trump who, like Al Davis, is a reptile born and raised in the boroughs of New York City, thinks.
Yeah, we’re gonna try to go convention-free the next two weeks. All the battle lines have been drawn and no one’s about to change anyone’s mind. Unless the St. Louis couple comes out on stage brandishing their firearms at the RNC (and who are we to wager against that?) next week, we’re going to try and block out the noise.
It was 39 years ago that a 20 year-old rookie in southern California took baseball’s breath away. Now, in the summer of 2020, a little down the coast from Los Angeles, a 21 year-old 2nd-year player is doing the same.
Dodger pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, meet Padres slugger Fernando Tatis, Jr. The 6’3″ shortstop from the D.R. banged out a 3-run homer and his first career grand slam (on a 3-0 count with the Friars up 10-3 in the 8th) in successive innings last night. His 11 home runs lead all of baseball.
*The judges will also accept “From Claven To Craven”
Not everyone who works at the post office is Newman. Or Cliff Claven.
Neither rain, nor snow nor the Trump dynasty will impede the U.S. Postal Service from doing its job. A job whose very existence was put into place in the U.S. Constitution (ah, that old and musty document that we all once adhered to as opposed to just worshipping the 2nd Amendment).
It’s called “flooding the zone” and it’s what Trump does best. Throw so much misinformation and lies out there that it becomes too exhausting to sift through what’s true-or-false and so your average “I Love The Poorly Educated” American sates him- or herself with a catchphrase: e.g., “Lock Her Up.” (never mind that the man who coined it belongs in prison, but whatevs).
So now the president is flooding the zone against the postal service. You know what is not a sign of a healthy democracy? When the people in charge would rather not have people vote.
Our friend Arash Markazi resigned from the Los Angeles Times over the weekend, which is the least disruptive outcome to this somewhat sordid affair. Ben Koo has an insightful analysis on all of it in Awful Announcing.
We spoke to Arash a week ago and will be there to support him wherever he lands next. He’s a righteous dude and that job was never the right fit for him, anyway. One thing we did tell him is how proud of him we are regarding his weight loss. That’s not easy to do at all.
Most of us get knocked down in life, whether it is of our own devices or not (often a combo of both). The trick is in always getting back up, no?
Scientists in Siberia have unearthed a 14,000-year old puppy, found almost perfectly preserved in Russia (above, NOT the puppy). And what they’ve learned is that inside the puppy’s stomach is a not fully digested piece of wooly rhino (above), which went extinct about 14,000 years ago. So, not only are dogs being blamed for eating our homework, but also for causing entire species to go extinct.
The puppy, scientists believe, must have died shortly thereafter. It was probably rhino-intolerant (and here I said I wasn’t going to mention the Democratic National Convention; shame on me).
*The judges will tell you this is one of our more inspired headlines, but you have to be familiar with UNC-Chapel Hill to get it.
The first chink in the armor Football F*ck Your Feelings (i.e., the ACC, Big 12 and SEC) just happened in Chapel Hill. The University of North Carolina, a member of the ACC, just announced that it is abandoning in-person instruction for undergrads this semester after at least 177 students tested positive for the coronavirus.
Related: the Norwegian band A-Ha once wrote that “It’s no better to be safe than sorry” but they were talking about romance, not pandemics.
Anyway, stay tuned to see how UNC justifies having a football program this autumn when it just said that it ain’t safe for undergrads to congregate in class rooms (How many times have we heard that the football field is a classroom of sorts?). And once UNC falls, who’s next? We may just have an autumn of Clemson and Alabama playing one another 12 times, and let’s face it, there are worse things.
It’s Medium Happy’s eighth birthday today (and to celebrate, we will not be raising your annual subscription rate). We won’t have time tomorrow morning to lay down a track, so this is your serving for Sunday-Monday.
According to Media Happy’s indefatigable research crew, there have been five aviation disasters on the planet since 9/11 that have claimed at least 225 lives. They are:
–American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed shortly after takeoff from JFK in November of 2001 (just two months past 9/11).
Deaths: 265
–Iran Ilyushin II-76, an Iranian flight that was either brought down by pilot error or terrorism (a number of Iranian Guard members were passengers) in February, 2003.
Deaths: 275
–Air France 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in June of 2009.
–Deaths: 228
–Malaysian Air 270, which disappeared over the Indian Ocean in 2014 and has never been found (Lost is real?).
–Deaths: 239
Why do we mention these four aviation disasters? Because if you add the number of deaths from the four worst aviation disasters of the past 19 years (at least three of which had nothing to do with human malevolence), the total number of deaths is 1,007.
Meanwhile, the U.S.A. has been averaging more coronavirus deaths per day pretty much since the start of the outbreak. That many deaths every day. You take the four deadliest air crashes of the 21st century, place them all on the same day (you think that might arouse cable news producers), and then you do the same thing the next day. And the next. And the next.
For more than five months now. I think at a certain point Americans would stop boarding planes. So how come there are still Americans who refuse to wear masks? Or are still so cavalier (“It is what it is“) about the virus?
In an Op-Ed column for The New York Times where some dopey editor spelled it “Kamelot” as opposed to “Kamalot” (Micah, take note, autocorrect tried to “fix” this three times…I blame half my typos on autocorrect), Maureen Dowd wrote a perfect paragraph. We’d wear this on the front of a T-shirt:
President Trump represents the last primal shriek of retrograde white men afraid to lose their power. He’s a dinosaur who evokes a world of beauty pageants, “suburban housewives,’’ molestation, cheating on your wife when she’s pregnant, paying off porn stars, preferring women to be seen and not heard, dismissing women who challenge you as nasty, angry and crazy.
We can maybe shorten it up so as to just print the first sentence. That’s pretty much enough. If you print it, we’ll wear it. In a borderline red state. I’m not too worried because the Deplorables will be too busy trying to figure out what “retrograde” means to fight me.
The 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings.
The 1972 Miami Dolphins.
The Summer of 2020 Bubble Suns.
Three professional teams that compiled a perfect record. The Phoenix Suns have still not won an NBA championship in more than 50 seasons, but what they just accomplished in two-plus weeks in Orlando may merit a 30-for-30 episode.
Despite being without arguably their second-best player (Kelly Oubre… at worst, their third-best), the Suns ran through Orlando with an 8-0 record.
Behind Devin Booker’s signature 35-point outings, the Suns were the only team to run through the Bubble season without a defeat. And yet, they missed out on the play-in game via a tiebreaker with Memphis. Which almost makes it all the more beautiful.
Another t-shirt I’d wear: 2020 Bubble Suns, with that vintage square Suns logo from the 1970s.
We’re no longer on Twitter, but we hear that not even 12 hours since the death of Robert Trump, the president’s younger brother, #WrongTrumpDied is trending. And the libtards are being called out for their insensitivity.
So which is it: Are libtards snowflakes cuz they can’t take a little teasing or are they “nasty” because they’re not sensitive enough? Hmm.
The president called his younger brother “my best friend.” This has to be crushing to Rudy.
Officials have not determined a cause of death other than to say that Robert did not hang himself in his jail cell.
More than 18 million people have viewed this Best Man speech, so you may have already seen it. It really is as good as advertised. This guy’s a natural and what makes him so good are two things: 1) his sense of timing and 2) that he doesn’t laugh at his own humor (almost never). Also, I guess we should add: he writes great material.
He sounds Canadian. Not surprised.