Culture Good Night, and Good Luck—Lots of It If Broadway’s latest is the focus of resistance to Trump, the president can rest easy. Credit: Matteo Chinellato/Shutterstock The great Broadway lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, oft accused of advancing sentimental notions in such shows as Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music, once said, “In my book, there’s nothing wrong with sentiment, because the things we’re sentimental about are the fundamental things in life: the birth of a child, the death of a child, or anybody falling in love.” Excluded from this litany of appropriate objects of sentimentality: journalists and actors impersonating journalists on screen or stage.  George Clooney did not get the memo. Twenty years ago, Clooney wrote, directed, and costarred in Good Night, and Good Luck, which attempted to wring an inspiring moral fable out of the televised acrimony between CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow (played, in the film, by David Strathairn) and anticommunist Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (seen in news clips and thus, technically, played by himself). Clooney could have titled the movie The Demigod vs. the Demagogue. But now Clooney has brought his hero-worship to Hammerstein’s own Broadway. That songwriter may have waxed poetic about whiskers on kittens and such, but he could never have produced a work as sloppily mawkish as the stage version of Good Night, and Good Luck, which opened at the Winter Garden Theater in March and which was broadcast live on Saturday night on CNN. (I have not seen the show on Broadway, but I did draw the unfortunate assignment of watching the broadcast gavel-to-gavel.) In one sense, it was almost inevitable that Good Night, and Good Luck would eventually wend its way to TV: a script purporting to celebrate the special solemn mandate of television news would, naturally, be attractive to television news channels, especially those, like CNN, that have acquired a reputation for self-referential self-righteousness.  Indeed, the signaling of virtue was the pervasive theme of the evening. The inhabitants of our divided nation can seldom agree on anything, but the actors on the stage, the ticket-buyers at the Winter Garden, and the CNN hosts presiding over pre- and post-play coverage were all, blissfully, on the same page. Since he made the movie during the Bush administration, Clooney undoubtedly had different metaphorical targets in mind when he first found dramatic potential in the Murrow–McCarthy televised tiff. This time, however, Clooney’s only goal is to draw an equivalency between McCarthy and Trump—and, even more improbably, between Murrow and himself.  For those of us who dissent from Clooney’s metaphors, though, this latest iteration of Good Night, and Good Luck was tough going. Truth to tell, the original movie version was not altogether horrible: Despite its many insufferable qualities, it was well-photographed (in black-and-white) and generally well-acted, especially by Strathairn as Murrow. For the Broadway version, however, Clooney has taken up the role of the newsman himself. This seems less a concession to the commercial realities of Broadway than to the ego of Clooney: After all, since making the movie two decades ago, Clooney has cottoned to the idea that he is not merely a well-compensated screen actor but a Democratic Party power-broker capable of meaningfully contributing to the dislodging of his party’s presidential candidate.   On the basis of the CNN broadcast, the switch from Strathairn to Clooney had no upside whatsoever. With his lacquered jet-black hair, Clooney adopted something like the look of Murrow, but his attempt to imitate his voice was hilariously misguided: When speaking to his various colleagues and higher-ups at CBS, Clooney-as-Murrow adopted an approximation of his normal speaking voice, but when addressing the camera on the Murrow-hosted See It Now, the actor used a clipped, weirdly high-pitched tone that less suggested a midcentury news icon than one of the title characters on Alvin and the Chipmunks. The rest of the cast is burdened with the inevitable drabness of a televised play: Without the benefit of the tools of cinema, like editing, underscoring, and changes in scenery, they are left with words—many, many words, though all on the same theme: Murrow stands for all that is good and right, and McCarthy is evil without subtlety or shading. Clooney’s conception of the role of the news media is entirely one of confrontation: Murrow, far from being a neutral deliverer of “the news,” is lionized only because he openly went on the attack against McCarthy.  But this sort of critique implies that the crowd at the Winter Garden wanted actual entertainment. In fact, I contend, the play has been revived simply as a vessel for its intended audience’s favorite emotion, Trump hatred. This was proven by the timing and intensity of the applause heard throughout the broadcast. When a character sadly noted that “all the reasonable people took a plane to Europe and left us behind,” the audience, evidently embarrassed by the way their friends on the continent view their nation, responded with great expressions of sympathy, and when Murrow angrily denounced McCarthy, the crowd cheered with as the same effusiveness they presumably do when Rachel Maddow excoriates Trump.  Those with a sense of irony, or history rhyming in unlikely ways, need not bother. During one of his on-air screeds against McCarthy, Clooney-as-Murrow made reference to the “junior senator” having blurred “the line between investigating and persecuting”—an obvious crowd-pleasing line, even though this particular crowd was unlikely to be attuned to the reality that it is none other than Donald Trump who could most credibly claim to be a victim of such blurring of investigation and persecution.  A year ago, Clooney reckoned he was saving democracy by pushing Biden to the side; now, he seems to think he can swoop in to save television, which, by his reckoning, has been in decline ever since the purported high point of the Murrow–McCarthy row. Throughout the play, Milton Berle is spoken of with derision for being the most trusted man on television, and, in a pretentious, tendentious closing montage of various highlights and lowlights from the past 60-some years of American broadcasting, is thus weirdly made to seem to anticipate Jerry Springer, the O.J. Simpson freeway car chase, and the January 6 riot (clips of which are shown). We get it, we get it—Saint Murrow would be displeased.  After the conclusion of the spectacle, CNN’s Anderson Cooper returned to remind those still watching that the preceding presentation represented “the first time a Broadway play has been broadcast live around the world.” In so doing, Cooper inadvertently made a case for Trump’s attempts to defund PBS, which, historically, has shown stage shows on programs like Great Performances. Who needs public broadcasting when we have George Clooney?  The post Good Night, and Good Luck—Lots of It appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Right Can’t Rely on Leftist Incompetence Forever Actually getting things done is important if you want to keep winning. Credit: Anadolu/Getty Images Politics Things are not going terribly well for President Donald Trump and his band of merry men. The campaign promises of instantaneous world peace haven’t quite panned out; the administration’s marquee trade policy shakeup has run aground on court challenges and market disruption; the economy is looking shaky. The most compelling defense that anyone can seriously mount for the Big, Beautiful Bill is that something better probably isn’t politically viable. The Republican-controlled Senate can’t be bothered to work a full week to get the growing backlog of presidential appointments confirmed. Immigration enforcement remains Trump’s strong point in polling, but he continues to fall well short of promises. A competent opposition would be having a field day. Instead, the Democrats and the allied press persistently do their best to make it seem like the president is reasonable, moderate, and competent. There’s a particular dance exemplified by the media response to Trump’s sole memorable statement from his debate with Kamala Harris: “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people who live there.” This strangely mesmerizing tricolon launched a thousand indignant fact-checks. These concluded that, while perhaps the Haitian arrivals at Springfield were not actually engaged in cynophagia, they had been enormously disruptive to the life of the little town in other ways. This was not the moral victory Trump’s opponents thought it was; in debunking the florid Trumpism, they in fact disclosed a great deal more supporting the substance of the immigration-hawk critique. This keeps happening. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national erroneously deported to one of El Salvador’s megaprisons, became a cause celebre for a season, allegedly laying bare the injustice and inhumanity of the administration’s immigration enforcement program. Even after conceding its error, the administration slow-walked bringing Garcia back to the U.S., apparently betting that the longer he stayed in the news, the more morally vindicated the administration would seem. That bet appears to be paying out; Garcia is back in the U.S., true, but now faces credible charges of human trafficking. The correction of the administration’s mistake has just emphasized that Garcia and his ilk are not the sort of people you necessarily want to be letting into your country in large numbers—in fact, may be the sort of people you want to get out of your country. The same two-step appears to be under way with the anti-ICE rioting in Los Angeles. Trump ordered in the National Guard, and California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom and LA’s Mayor Karen Bass are both standing on their rights against federal interference. Here at the office, we’re pretty big on the 10th Amendment and all that jazz, and to that degree have some sympathy for Newsom & co. That said, it is quite a thing to see one of the Democrats’ 2028 frontrunners maneuvered into saying the scenes of men in balaclavas waving Mexican flags over burning cars show nothing but a “manufactured crisis.”   I’m not exactly sure how to account for this compulsive rake-stomping behavior; insisting that the broad left-of-center coalition is beholden to “the groups” at its fringe gets you only so far. At any rate, it has become consistent enough that the White House can organize PR around the assumption that its enemies will dig in on stupid stuff. Complacency is dangerous, though. I tend to think the market for political platforms does actually more or less work in the long run; no party likes losing forever, and nothing succeeds like success. The GOP more or less tolerated the Trump takeover in the end because it opened enough new voter pools that Republicans could win elections. The “abundance” liberals, incoherent and disempowered as they are now, are correct in identifying an unserved but significant political tendency in the U.S., one that prefers civil libertarianism, technocratic competence, and what is broadly called neoliberalism. True Andrew Yangism has never been tried, but, when it is, it will be an electoral force to be reckoned with. When the Democrats decide to try to win again—when they stop defending various sorts of indefensible people and positions in highly embarrassing ways—the right will have to fall back on actual substantive propositions and, after four years in power, on a substantive record. Economic deregulation—especially in the energy sector—and foreign policy offer the most obvious achievable wins. Yet it is not clear that Trump’s coalition of discontent has much of a coherent platform; it is even less clear that the administration is going to check the boxes on its campaign promises. That’s dangerous. Whether the Republicans can plausibly claim to be the party of doing things will determine its staying power, especially once the Democrats decide to return from the desert.  The post The Right Can’t Rely on Leftist Incompetence Forever appeared first on The American Conservative.

This is graphene oxide's reaction to 5G radio waves. This is in every vax and ends up in your brain. Imagine what will happen when they turn the 5G on to full power at 64Ghz. UTL COMMENT:- Well have fun VAX TARDS... Sorry you got this shit in your system you need to get rid of it...

Waymo, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, is temporarily removing its autonomous cars from downtown Los Angeles after rioters set some of the vehicles on fire in response to federal immigration raids.  Waymo said it quickly removed its autonomous vehicles from downtown L.A. and "will not be serving that area for the time being out of an abundance of caution." The company said it still plans to operate in other parts of Los Angeles.  A spokesperson told FOX...

House Democrats were divided over whether to support a resolution to condemn the antisemitic attack in Boulder, Colorado, and “express gratitude” for the work of federal immigration law enforcement. The resolution cleared the House with a 280-113 vote, as 75 Democrats crossed party lines to join Republicans in support. Meanwhile, 113 Democrats opposed the measure, and six opted to vote present. Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO) and other Colorado Republicans introduced a three-page...

Time magazine’s new cover might make some Democrats cry ― but not without a laugh. In an issue dated June 9, a donkey is featured under a “LOST” sign with tear-off phone numbers to call the Democratic National Committee in case someone finds the party. “Democrats know they have a branding problem that transcends policy, messaging, or leadership questions,” Charlotte Alter wrote in the cover story, later adding: “They know they need fresh ideas and new leaders,...

Among all the lurid details and allegations that have surfaced in Sean “Diddy” Combs’s trial on federal charges, including sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, one potential aspect of the music mogul’s relationships has flown under the radar. What we haven’t heard on the witness stand is a concept crucial to understanding intimate partner violence and how individual incidents can form a pattern of abuse over time. That pattern, described by sociologists as “coercive control...

Amazon plans to invest at least $20 billion to build out two data centers in Pennsylvania, the e-commerce and cloud computing giant announced Monday alongside Keystone State leaders.  The new data centers will be located in Salem Township alongside the Susquehanna nuclear power plant and in Falls Township on the site of a former steel mill, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) said...

President Donald Trump said he would support White House border czar Tom Homan arresting Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom amid their clash over the ongoing protests in Los Angeles. “The president of the United States just called for the arrest of a sitting governor. This is a day I hoped I would never see in America,” Newsom said in a post on social platform X. “don’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican this is a line we cannot cross as a nation — this is an...

When you're in the throes of parenting a newborn, there's not much room for glamour. You spend your days exhausted and looking like a haphazardly thrown together preschool art project because your nights are filled with feedings and diaper changes. Being able to take a shower feels like a spa day, especially if you have other small children who need your attention. A California dad of four knows this dance of exhaustion all too well, but he never expected that looking like a tired parent would result in having the police called on him. That's right, someone called the police on him for looking as if he rolled out of bed and grabbed the closet clothes he could find. Chapman Hamborg was taking his newborn for a walk when one of his neighbors called the police on him reporting that he was a homeless man that had stolen a baby. The dad recorded the unbelievable interaction with the police who thought they had a kidnapping situation on their hands only to find out it was all a misunderstanding. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Hannah & Chapman Hamborg (@thehamborgs)Hamborg uploaded the video to his social media platform where it has been viewed over 50 million times. In the video, you see the exhausted dad trying to laugh off the situation as he explains to his wife, "Someone called the cops on me thinking that I was homeless with a baby, so the cop needs to see my ID." His wife, who can be heard in the background, is in disbelief. The caption of the video explains what happened in greater detail, reading, "I take our newborn daughter for walks around our neighborhood while wearing her in the baby carrier multiple times a day. I am surprised all of my neighbors haven’t seen me and recognize me by now. Well this lady thought I was homeless and had a (stollen?!) baby and she was concerned enough to call the police, and get in her car and follow me home. Apparently I need to work on my appearance—I guess being an artist or a tired dad isn’t a valid excuse."Since it was clearly a mistake, the police seem to apologize and leave Hamborg to continue caring for his newborn. People who viewed his video could relate to his exhausted look while others were confused on how the woman followed him to his home but still thought he was homeless."Honestly we all look homeless with a newborn, it’s called exhaustion." one person writes."She clearly doesn’t understand homelessness if she followed you home," another says."Since when is being homeless with a baby a crime? Homeless people have children," someone else points out. Home Equality GIF by INTO ACTION Giphy Instead of getting upset or letting the incident go as an innocent mistake, the artist is using it as a teachable moment for others. The art studio owner already had a picture he painted of him wearing one of his other children when they were an infant. That sparked the idea to use the painting titled Unseen Path to help the homeless. Hamborg contacted the United Way of Orange County and is working with them to sell prints of his painting with 20 percent of the proceeds going to helping the homeless. They both hope to address the misconception of who experiences homelessness. The United Way pointed out to NBCLA that 371 families contacted them due to either already experiencing homelessness or being imminently at risk of being homeless. The dad wants to teach his children how to be compassionate towards homeless people and one day hopes to meet the neighbor who called the police to thank her for being vigilant.