CNN: Zucker Going Down Next?

Posted on | December 6, 2021 | Comments Off on CNN: Zucker Going Down Next?

Over the weekend, CNN announced that Chris “Fredo” Cuomo was being terminated “effective immediately,” and rumors immediately began to swirl about the nature of the “additional information” which the network said had “come to light” during their review of Cuomo’s case. Julia Marsh of the New York Post says her sources tell her it’s about “an alleged Chris Cuomo sexual harassment victim represented by a high profile attorney” — I’m guessing Gloria Allred, who always shows up at a sex scandal the way vultures show up for a dead carcass.

Now, the headline at Twitchy:

With next to nothing left to lose,
Chris Cuomo is apparently trying to take
CNN head Jeff Zucker down with him

That item links to a New York Post story:

In a new statement, a spokesman for the fallen TV star threw his longtime ally CNN President Jeff Zucker under the bus, while insisting the journalist “has the highest level of admiration and respect” for him.
“They were widely known to be extremely close and in regular contact, including about the details of Mr. Cuomo’s support for his brother,” the spokesman told the Wall Street Journal Sunday of Chris Cuomo’s shady support for his big brother as the governor’s sex scandal unfolded. . . .
The statement, however, prompted CNN to slam Chris Cuomo for peddling more alleged lies.
“He has made a number of accusations that are patently false,” the network told the WSJ. “This reinforces why he was terminated for violating our standards and practices, as well as his lack of candor.”

Here’s the the thing: It doesn’t matter if Cuomo is lying. Zucker was responsible for hiring Cuomo, and was therefore responsible for, at a minimum, tolerating an apparent conflict of interest. It would be difficult for Zucker to shield himself from blame even if CNN had good ratings, but their ratings are in the toilet, and the network recently changed owners, with David Zaslav now the de facto boss. If Zaslav needed an excuse to clean house, the Cuomo scandal is a gift-wrapped Christmas present, and this could be the end of Zucker’s tenure at CNN.

Category: CNN

Rule 5 Sunday: McKenna Grace

Posted on | December 5, 2021 | Comments Off on Rule 5 Sunday: McKenna Grace

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Normally, it would not be a compliment to a young woman to tell her that she favors Dr. Egon Spengler* from Ghostbusters. When that young woman is McKenna Grace, who’s playing Spengler’s granddaughter in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, though, it sounds quite a bit different. Here we see her as Phoebe Spengler, aboard the restored ECTO-1, ready to whup some ghost butt.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

She ain’t afraid of no ghosts!

Ninety Miles From Tyranny: Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1554, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.

Animal Magnetism: Rule Five John Galt Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: COVID Crumbley Debate, The Service Station, Patty Smyth, Hanna & The CIA, The Sex Lives Of College Girls, Badehotellet, Idina Menzel, Mikhaila Peterson, Kylie Minogue, Mia Mastroianni, Laura Nyro, Stolen Jars, Ghislaine Maxwell, Julianna Hatfield, Eight Nights Of Scarlett Johansson, Caroline Manning, and South Park Post-COVID.

A View From The Beach: Stuck on the Wheel of Time – Rosamund Pike, Fish Pic Friday – Jess Braendel, Now That’s a NutCracker!, Under the Midnight Sun, I Blame Brandon!, The Wednesday Wetness, Tuesday Tanlines, Or They Could Just Leave Them in the Bay for a Year or Two, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Well, It Does Make a Weird Kind of Sense and Palm Sunday.

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

*Played by the late Harold Ramis.

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Shop Sex & Sensuality Gifts

Category: Rule 5

Omicron Panic Porn

Posted on | December 5, 2021 | Comments Off on Omicron Panic Porn

Show of hands: Who’s worried about the COVID-19 Omicron variant? Not me, and probably not you, either, because you’re not watching CNN, MSNBC or any of the other liberal media outlets that are pumping out pandemic panic porn. Having spent months hyping the virus in 2020 as a weapon to damage Trump, the liberal media cannot switch messages now that Joe Biden is president. The fear narrative must continue, even while the media expect their audience to forget why it began:

We are less than a month away from entering 2022 — so why does it feel like March 2020 all over again?
Cable news networks are obsessively covering the new Omicron variant of Covid-19. They are hellbent on scaring the daylights out of any unsuspecting viewer who accidentally flips onto their programs. To be fair, the media is taking cues from the president. According to the Washington Post, the Biden administration is reportedly weighing up a seven-day self-quarantine for all travelers arriving on our shores, regardless of vaccination status, including US citizens and permanent residents. Travel bans, which fell out of fashion in the Trump years because they were “xenophobic”, are suddenly back in vogue.
It all begs the question: didn’t Joe Biden promise to shut down the virus?
Back in October 2020, then-candidate Biden — or whoever was running his Twitter account at the time — proudly tweeted, “I’m not going to shut down the country. I’m not going to shut down the economy. I’m going to shut down the virus.” That’s right. Joe was going to shut down the virus all while eating ice cream, wearing aviators and saying things like “God love ya.”
Unfortunately that tweet has aged about as well as the president. The only thing Biden has shut down since taking over in January is the Keystone XL Pipeline.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll.) The narrative was supposed to be how Biden had “shut down” the virus for which Trump was blamed, but now that Biden has failed, the media can’t figure out how to change the subject.

Category: Joe Biden

FMJRA 2.0: Radar Gun

Posted on | December 5, 2021 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Radar Gun

— compiled by Wombat-socho

SOTD (actually not baseball related)
This was a better week in Da Tech Guy’s 1969 league for me; despite getting screwed by the robot and losing two straight to the Dodgers, I won two out of three against the ChiSox, the one loss coming at the hands of Phil Niekro, whose flutterball flummoxed my lineup of sluggers. On to St. Louis!
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Ted is less cranky today now that the Senators have actually won a couple of games.

Rule 5 Sunday: ~~Scarlett Johansson~~Irina Shumskaya
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
EBL
Proof Positive

‘Killadelphia’ D.A. Turned Loose Teen Carjacker Who Murdered Marxist Student
First Street Journal
The Pirate’s Cove
357 Magnum
EBL
Proof Positive

Darrell Brooks: Menace to Society
Living In Anglo-America
EBL

‘Mac Jones Can’t Throw Deep’?
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: No Joy In Mudville
A View From The Beach
EBL

Confirmed: CNN Is Garbage
357 Magnum
EBL

Instapundit Goes Socialist?
EBL

In The Mailbox: 11.30.21 (Afternoon Edition)
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 11.30.21 (Evening Edition)
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 12.01.21
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 12.02.21
357 Magnum
EBL
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 12.03.21
EBL
Proof Positive

Top linkers for the week ending December 3:

EBL (12)
Proof Positive (7)
357 Magnum (6)
A View From The Beach (5)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: FMJRA Award

The Dumbest ‘Hate Crime’ Hoax Ever: Courtroom Sequel for Jussie Smollett

Posted on | December 4, 2021 | Comments Off on The Dumbest ‘Hate Crime’ Hoax Ever: Courtroom Sequel for Jussie Smollett

You’ll recall that front page from February 2019, and the truly shocking thing about this case is that Jussie Smollett would dare go to trial claiming innocence, when his guilt has always been beyond question.

Glenn Reynolds links a story with evidence that, contrary to what Smollett’s defense has claimed, his Nigerian accomplices are not homophobes, but why is that even relevant? They are not on trial, and their motives don’t matter in determining whether Smollett lied to police (spoiler alert: he did). From the moment Smollett’s tale of being assaulted by two MAGA-hat-wearing white men made headlines, every intelligent person knew it was a lie. Two Trump supporters prowling around downtown Chicago at 2:30 a.m. in below-zero weather?

Nope. Never happened. Beyond the range of human possibility.

There were so many things wrong with this story — how many Trump supporters ever heard of this guy? how did they know what hotel he was staying in? — that one wonders how Smollett didn’t see the obvious flaws in his absurd hoax scheme. But he’s a Democrat, and Democrats have been getting away with telling blatant lies for so long that Smollett probably figured, “Why not me?” His story of being attacked by Republican haters “yelling out racial and homophobic slurs” in the wee hours of an arctic-cold Chicago night was only slightly less plausible than the Steele Dossier, and nobody’s gone to prison for that hoax yet.

Probably what Jussie Smollett is counting on is that this Chicago jury will tacitly endorse his bogus “hate crime” by voting to acquit him, because they’re Democrats, and have no regard for truth anyway.

Which is always the way to bet, in Chicago.

Probably the best chance that Smollett could be convicted is if the jury had been watching Dave Chappelle.

“Find out where Kanye West was last night.”

Category: Celebrities, Chicago, Crime

The Savage Young

Posted on | December 4, 2021 | Comments Off on The Savage Young

Dave Reaboi is a hater.

The Southern Poverty Law Center doesn’t have a “Beatlephobia” category on their Hate Map, but if they did, Dave would be a dot on it.

Like a lot of Beatle haters — and I could also name Ace of Spades in this category — Dave Reaboi is a Gen Xer, and one suspects that there is some sort of intergenerational Boomer envy involved in his irrational hatred of the Four Lovable Mop Tops from Liverpool. Coming of age in the blighted MTV era, when Michael Jackson and Madonna were The Big Thing, it’s difficult for Gen Xers to relate to the cheerful Good Old Days of 45 rpm singles, AM Top 40 radio and Ed Sullivan. Like all prejudices, Beatlephobia is rooted in ignorance and misunderstanding that expresses itself in slurs like “overrated” and “hippies.” The new documentary Get Back, focused as it is on the way the Beatles ended — drugs and Yoko and “peace” — is unlikely to bridge this generational gap. If you want to love the Beatles, you must start at the beginning.

Because I was just 4 years old when the Beatles arrived in America, I missed the initial wave of Beatlemania, although my older cousins Deborah and Trish were caught up in it. It wasn’t until I was a teenager myself that I got into the Beatles, listening to their first Greatest Hits double album (the red one) which I’d gotten from my brother Kirby after he went to college and the Army. Listening to those early tracks — “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” “From Me to You,” etc. — was an excellent introduction, and I also began rooting around in the trivia of the band’s origins. There was a copy of the 1968 Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies in our high school library, and I also listened to the crude early recordings that the Beatles made with Tony Sheridan in Germany in 1961, later released as The Savage Young Beatles.

In my mind, this is who the Beatles really were — rock-and-rollers in leather jackets and greased-back ducktail haircuts, playing Chuck Berry tunes for drunken crowds in Hamburg dive bars, popping amphetamines to make it through their eight-hour nightly sets. As Malcolm Gladwell observed in Outliers, it was in Hamburg that the Beatles did their “10,000 hours,” returning to Liverpool with a tighter sound that set them apart from the dozens of other rock groups in England. On their way to fame, they lost John’s buddy Stu Sutcliffe to a brain hemorrhage and replaced drummer Pete Best with Ringo Starr (who had played the Hamburg clubs with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes). They got cleaned up by manager Brian Epstein, a gay Jewish record store proprietor with a background in theater and, after having been turned down by several record labels (“groups of guitars are on the way out,” as one label executive remarked), caught the ear of EMI’s George Martin.

While the songwriting duo of Lennon and McCartney would eventually emerge as the greatest hitmakers of the decade, six of the 14 tracks on the Beatles’ first album were cover tunes, the most memorable of them being “Twist and Shout,” originally an R&B hit for the Isley Brothers. I don’t care how much Dave Reaboi or another Beatlephobe hates them, it is impossible to deny that this is one of the greatest rock-and-roll recordings of all time. Every serious Beatles fan knows the story of how this classic was recorded at the end of a 12-hour session at EMI’s Abbey Road studio. It was past 10 p.m. on Feb. 11, 1963, and John Lennon had been struggling with a chest cold. Because “Twist and Shout” required an all-out screaming vocal performance, they decided to record it last, knowing that John couldn’t get through it more than once. So what went onto the tape was a straight-up live recording, done in one take with no overdubbing, and it is absolutely perfect. If you want to know what had throngs of teenage British girls screaming their heads off in 1963, this track is the essence of it — wild and raw, that Savage Young Beatles sound cooked up during those long nights playing for crowds of gangsters and prostitutes in Hamburg’s notorious Reeperbahn district.

What you have to realize, if you want to understand how revolutionary the Beatles were at the time, was the difference between their sound and what was on the radio before they scored their big breakthrough. Go back and dig up some of the Top 10 hits of 1962-63 and see if you can find anything — anything — with a sound comparable to what the Beatles made. For example, contrast the Beatles’ version of “Twist and Shout” to the Isley Brothers’ original, and the difference is unmistakable.

Is it possible to make someone like Dave Reaboi understand this? Probably not. Love and hate are fundamentally irrational, and Dave’s anti-Beatles prejudice is unlikely to be overcome by any evidence or argument I could produce. My love of the Beatles is, of course, equally irrational, involving fond memories like the time I was bopping around my $1.80-an-hour job at Six Flags over Georgia when I was 16. Working the front line at the Plantation House restaurant, I was singing “From Me to You” when I heard a vocal harmony and found the buck-toothed girl at the cash register singing along. Ah, sweet memories!

Talk about doomed teen romance — Kathy’s favorite Beatle was George, while mine was John — and I could narrate the sequel, which involved Kathy’s younger sister (similarly buck-toothed, though more buxom) but why bother? Dave Reaboi could never relate. It’s so sad . . .

Dave doesn’t want to hear these stories from a gray-bearded old grandpa, but trust me: The Savage Young Stacy McCain was a wild man.