by John Walters

Ballooney Tunes

One nation, in dirigible, under God…

Any time the day’s weirdest news story allows us to invoke F Troop, that’s a good day. A suspected Chinese surveillance balloon, hovering at roughly 100,000 feet is sailing over United States airspace and perhaps the craziest thing is that I type this neither Bill Pullman, Morgan Freeman nor Samuel L. Jackson is president. This story has already entered the fifth dimension in terms of cable news coverage.

One nation, in dirigible, under God…

We don’t understand what any of this means other than that it allows Sean, Tucker and Laura the avenue to avoid mentioning the AWESOME jobs report that also came out today. The headline: “America’s unemployment rate fell to 3.4% in January, the lowest since before the 1969 moon landing.” The U.S. added 517,000 jobs in January and not all of them were taken by illegal aliens.

Recession: Soft Landing
Balloon: Not Landing

— John Walters (@jdubs1966) February 3, 2023

The next time a MAGA cries to you about “they’re taking our jobs,” it may be good to note that 1) the MAGA whining to you is likely retired or 2) someone is hiring those people and you never seem to be upset with the “job dealers” and 3) actually, there are more than enough jobs to go around (even if too many pay poorly), which is why the immigration influx is happening, legal or not.

AR-You Kidding Me?

The healthier the economy and overall outlook of the country becomes, the nuttier the Republicans in Congress become. It’s purely tactical. Distract from the at-worst better-than-average 46 is doing in order to keep ’em playing defense. So you have Matt Gaetz proposing the pledge of allegiance become mandatory before every session of Congress (the author of the pledge, Francis Bellamy, did not have the words “under God” in his 1892 version; that was added 62 years later by President Eisenhower at the height of the Red Scare). Or the above Congresspeople wearing AR-15 pins where their U.S. flags used to be. Or Kevin McCarthy kicking Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee.

They do all of this to avoid having to acknowledge that Biden is doing a good job or that their party has no ideas for the betterment of American life. They just want to yank at the chains of liberals and continue feeding their base casual racism and GOD GOD GOD. There was a video yesterday where a man interviewed a MAGA who said all he knew was that he was against CRT but when pushed repeatedly to cite a single thing that he abhorred about CRT, admitted that he didn’t know much of anything about it. “I don’t really know what it’s about,” the MAGA said, “other than that I don’t like it.” Is there a better slogan for the GOP in 2023?

I Know What You Did Last Summer

Chevron, Conoco, Shell Oil and Exxon all just reported the highest profits in their company histories for the year 2022. Together, they did more than $1 trillion in sales. Trillion. Meanwhile, we all suffered at the pump last summer. So the war in Ukraine was just a false flag all along. You know where a lot of that oil money winds up? In the pockets of some of your least favorite legislators. It’s all a racket. If we weren’t all so used to it, this would be a major scandal. But who has time to revolt and protest what with the Super Bowl merely 10 days away?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: sports are the greatest way to subdue and mollify the masses this country’s power brokers have. If you do not believe me, return to the spring and summer of ’20 when the absence of sports led to mass rioting on other issues. Don’t believe it’s connected? I do.

Tommy Boy

It appears former Notre Dame quarterback and current Irish offensive coordinator Tommy Rees is headed to Tuscaloosa… in case you wondered if Nick Saban sees Brian Kelly as a legitimate threat. As tweep @ndsixstring noted…

I don't think it's been mentioned in the media, but my somewhat conspiracy theory is that Saban has less interest in Rees as an offensive genius and more interest in Rees's in-depth knowledge of Brian Kelly. You know Saban is probably still fuming that LSU beat them.

— Jonathon Hardy (@ndsixstring) February 3, 2023

You have to wonder if new Irish quarterback Sam Hartman feels as if he just had the rug pulled out from under him. Sure, he’ll still wear a gold helmet but you have to think Rees was part of the reason he chose South Bend. There’s no loyalty among plunderers, Sam.

Dollar Quiz

1. What is ground-breaking, or extraordinary, about George Kucor’s 1939 film The Women?
2. What is the deepest river in the world?
3. Who holds the MLB record for most wins by a left-handed pitcher?
4. Who wrote Catch-22?
5. Cinematically, what do Matt Damon, Ryan Gosling, Ed Harris, Tom Hanks and Jack Nicholson all have in common?

by John Walters

On Tuesday, January 31st, Gene Hackman celebrated his 93rd birthday while Cindy Williams passed away at the age of 75. Birth and death. Yin and yang. Abbott and Costello. Okay, maybe not all of those metaphors apply.

Anyway, Hackman and Williams (the latter best-known for her work in Laverne & Shirley) both appeared in the 1974 film mystery thriller The Conversation. I’ve never seen it but am pledging to change that by week’s end. It’s one of those under-the-radar classics, or so I’ve read.

The film was written, directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola, who by this time was feeling prit-tee, prit-tee good about his cinematic powers after producing The Godfather and The Godfather II (both, deservedly, Best Picture Oscar winners). Those two films accounted for six Oscars—five of which are directly attributed to FFC—and that’s on top of the Oscar he won for co-writing Patton in 1970.

Then there’s the cast: besides Hackman, who’d won a Best Actor Oscar a few years earlier as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, and Williams, who’d co-starred in American Graffiti, you have a pair of Godfather I & II veterans in Robert Duvall and John Cazale. Also, a young Harrison Ford as well as Terri Garr, who had either just shot or was about to shoot Young Frankenstein.

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The Conversation fits into that conspiracy thriller/paranoia genre that sprang up in the early to mid-Seventies, probably not coincidentally, in the wake of Watergate and also as Vietnam was winding down: Three Days Of The Condor, Marathon Man, All The President’s Men and this come immediately to mind. You can even throw Chinatown in there if you like. I’m sure there are others that do not immediately come to mind.

In the film Hackman plays Harry Caul, a San Francisco-based surveillance expert who, ironically, is obsessed with his own privacy. Three of the people he has listened in on have ended up dead. You never hear anyone quote The Conversation or much discuss it. I’ve never seen it come up on TCM. And yet it has that legendary cast and also was nominated for a trio of Oscars, including Best Picture. It did not win any, but FFC did not help himself by having it also go up against his own Godfather II.

If you’ve seen The Conversation and want to share a comment, please do. We’ll try to check it off our bucket list this week.

Also, if you get a chance, check out Hackman’s next film, 1975’s Night Moves, which is sort of like a dark, dark episode of The Rockford Files with a splash of Miami Vice. A hidden gem.

Finally, another example of an extraordinary cast in a film no one ever mentions: The Chase, from 1966. It has Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Robert Duvall (again… he was in EVERYTHING for awhile), Jane Fonda, Angie Dickinson, and the legendary Miriam Hopkins, arguably the greatest American-born female screen star of the silent film era and better-known as William Randolph Hearst’s longtime girlfriend.

Russian Doll

by Wendell Barnhouse

Last week’s news that Charles McGonigal, a high-ranking FBI agent, has been indicted on charges he was taking payments from a Russian oligarch is not getting much attention. And that’s just fine with the puppeteers who want us treated like mushrooms – kept in the dark and fed shit.

Trump’s “election” in 2016 was a finely crafted Russian op that had an influential insider (McGonigal) helping pull the strings. Take some time and read this. https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-specter-of-2016?r=f9j4c&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

The writer, Timothy Snyder, is an American historian who specializes in Europe and Russia. The spiderweb spun over the last decade is intricate. Some of the information – Clinton’s emails, Trump’s Russia connections, the Mueller Report, Trump’s first impeachment (involving Ukraine, a country that is involved in much of this story) – has been reported and analyzed. However, those stories have often been stand-alone headlines that miss the over-arching plot.

It’s worth watching (and praying and hoping) that McGonigal’s arrest blasts open the vault. Russia’s plan to influence the 2016 election was largely built on cyber intelligence and social media influencing. As you might recall, FBI director James Comey announced 10 days before the election that the FBI was reopening an investigation into Clinton’s emails that it had closed (“nothing to see here”) five months earlier. Two days before the election, Comey announced the new probe had found nothing nefarious, but the damage had been done.

Comey has now said that he made the announcement – which went against FBI policy to not influence an election so close to Election Day – because he believed if that if he did not, news of the investigation would be leaked. Rudy Giuliani was bragging about an “October surprise” that would benefit Trump. The New York FBI office had several agents who hated Clinton and Rudy had plenty of friends in that office.

While Merrick Garland and the DoJ wrestle with pursuing Trump and prosecuting the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, it now has another huge case on its hands with McGonigal.

McGonigal is charged with accepting money from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch. Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign manager for a short time in 2016, was connected (and owed money) to Deripaska. (Memory refresher: Manafort was found guilty of conspiracy and tax charges, was charged with conspiracy, was jailed… and pardoned by Trump in December 2020).

Before muddying this missive with any more character arcs, here’s why the McGonigal arrest is a big deal. Not only was a high-ranking FBI agent accepting money from a major foreign influencer, he happened to be in perfect position of information and influence. In 2016, McGonigal was section chief of the FBI’s Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section.  That October, he was put in charge of the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI’s New York office.

If you want to brush off those two nuggets as “coincidences,” then apologies for wasting your time. But McGonigal was in position, and possessed the ability and the motive (money) to put his thumb on the scale.

Snyder’s story explains with supporting information the who, what, when and why – the “tik tock” – of what occurred. Vladimir Putin has been at war with Ukraine for a year, but he has waged an ongoing shadow war with the United States during the last 10 years. If you don’t believe that, pay attention to the MAGA influence in the House.

Wendell Barnhouse is a retired sportswriter from the golden age of the craft who still quaintly believes in holding truth to power. May his torch continue to burn.