Month: November 2021

Reported by The Hill‘s Joseph Choi….

James Carville: “What went wrong is just stupid wokeness. Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Wash. I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. I mean that…people see that.

Suburbanites in Virginia and New Jersey “pulled away” from such “wokeness.”

“It’s just really has a suppressive effect all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a ‘woke’ detox center or something. They’re expressing a language that people just don’t use, and there’s backlash and a frustration at that.”

“We got to change this and not be about changing dictionaries and change laws. These faculty lounge people that sit around mulling about I don’t know what…They’re not working.”

“Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud.”

A director-writer friend has shared a brilliant premise for a new theoretical Ryan Murphy political docudrama. Everyone and their parents would want to watch this — it would burn up Twitter. Here it is…

“Rather than rehashing a blowjob fracas, if Ryan Murphy had any vision and showmanship, he would dive right into a miniseries depicting what would have hypothetically occurred if the January 6th insurrection had succeeded in taking over the Capitol and had stopped the electoral confirmation of Biden’s victory over the beast. Would it have been Taps or Red Dawn or Wild in the Streets?”

Bret Stephens‘ “Why Democrats Are In Trouble” (11.3) should be retitled “Why Robin D’Angelo Needs To Wear Dark Sunglasses, Put On A Fishing Hat and Move to Central America For Nine Or Ten Years”:

Matt Taibbi: I met people who didn’t care about “Critical Race Theory,” if they even knew what it was, but were still offended by the existence of a closed Facebook group — the “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County” — that contains six school board members and apparently compiled a list of parents deemed insufficiently supportive of “racial equity efforts.”

Still others were troubled by a controversy involving the process by which an outside consultancy called the Equity Collaborative came to be hired, at a cost of roughly $500,000, to conduct an “equity assessment” based on a report of racial insensitivity at one school.

There is a version of that latter story that is almost too comical to be believed — one reason I have to go back is to nail down those particulars — but it’s undeniable there are Loudoun County parents, many of whom are high-powered professionals working at banks or white shoe law firms, who initially smelled a rat on the finance side and only later worried about the politics.

Also complicating the “Lee Atwater” narrative is the role of Asian and South Asian parents in yesterday’s results. “A lot of immigrant families came here specifically for the school system,” is how one Indian-American parent put it to me yesterday. “When you start messing with [the school system], and say, we don’t have a say, that’s when people who’ve always voted Democratic will flip on them.”

Reporting about Asian and South Asian families upset about new initiatives to deemphasize admissions criteria like test scores has often been dismissive or caricatured, and that certainly seems to have been the case in Loudoun County, where a significant portion of the people seriously being cast today as dupes answering a dogwhistle are immigrant, minority residents who’ve given Democrats their votes for decades.

Michelle Wu‘s victory means that a new Boston attitude has begun to take hold, and to HE that feels like an interesting and exciting thing.

You could go so far as to say that the old clam chowder-and-saltine crackers Boston is slipping away. The Irish Boston of whiskey-drinking legend. The Boston captured in The Friends of Eddie Coyle. The Tip O’Neill, Honey Fitz, lunch-at-Locke-Ober’s Boston. The Boston that The Verdict‘s Paul Newman lived and worked in. The Boston that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck grew up in. The Boston that Jack Nicholson‘s Whitey Bulger character exploited and terrorized.

If Wu is smart, she’ll steer clear of C.R.T. advocacy in Boston-area schools.

I’m only posting this (10.31.21) as an example of how utterly silly and stupid the basic action realm has become.

Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum, terrified of the cat, are sitting rock still. Then the cat strolls over to the kids’ SUV, the boy slams the driver door shut, and the girl, trembling with terror, opens up a can of cat food and thereby releasing the tangy aroma. Why would anyone with even a modest amount of brain cells do such a thing? Is she an idiot?

This leads to the cat knocking their SUV on its side. Then a shouting Neill gets the cat’s attention by holding a can of sealed cat food. Then he tosses it, etc. The cat can’t smell the sealed cat food, and it can’t open it either so what’s the point? I’ve lived with cats all my life so don’t tell me.

In short, the CG is better than decent, but the OwlKitty guys (1.7M subscribers) are morons in the screenwriting department.

Yesterday Tatiana was on a TV commercial shoot in downtown Los Angeles. The area was swarming with homeless people and other wretched-refuse types. Out of the blue she spotted a buck-naked white guy — late 30s to early 40s, good physical shape, relatively attractive — casually walking on a nearby sidewalk, and then waiting at a stop light and crossing the street like any average citizen. Q: “Was he wearing sneakers of flip-flops?” A: “I didn’t notice.”

I’m not saying Jodie Comer‘s Last Duel performance isn’t a lead — it is — but she’d have a better shot at winning if she was in the Best Supporting Actress category, and nobody would have an argument with her performance being so categorized.

With 83% of the Virginia vote tally, Greg Youngkin (R) has 53% (1,426,017) vs. 47% (1,263,758) for Terry McAuliffe (D). It’s a very bleak omen for what may happen in the 2022 midterms, and, in Virginia at least, a clear rejection of wokester policies as far as education (CRT) is concerned. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow: Virginia women went roughly 50-50 in the 2020 Presidential race, but they voted against McAuliffe, 57% to 43%, on the race-education issue.

Friendo: “Democrats will probably not get the message. They should but they won’t. They have to stop listening to Twitter. Everything and everyone is racist to the wokester left (Thomas Jeffersons statue being removed from NYC’s city hall, etc.) and moderate Americans are finally pushing back. I was surprised it was such a decisive win though — 51.9% to 47.4%. They all said Virginia would be a squeaker.”

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MSNBC exit polls say Terry McAuliffe‘s negatives are much higher than Glenn Youngkin‘s, and that probably means (unless MSNBC’s exit poll methodology is completely detached from logic and reality) that McAuliffe is going to lose the Virginia gubernatorial election. The legend is that McAuliffe basically committed suicide over the teaching of critical race theory in Virginia schools, and particularly by implying that parents who shared concerns along these lines were racist.

The implication is that other Democratic candidates who endorse CRT and the early instruction of non-binary gender studies in schools may be similarly threatened.

No question about it — woke terrorists have taken a serious hit. Speaking as a left-leaning moderate centrist, I’m feeling mixed emotions. I think McAuliffe asked for it and has no one to blame but himself. On the other hand I feel badly about any Republican winning anything in this godawful lunatic climate.

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…that I couldn’t identify, and at the same time I couldn’t push it out of my head. It kept playing, over and over. I knew it was either Max Steiner or Miklos Rozsa, but I couldn’t remember the film. I figured if I stopped trying, the answer would come. But it didn’t. I tried going back to sleep. It was 2:15 am. I thought of ex-girlfriends and childhood traumas and the endless boredom of school, distant cities, riding on trains through Switzerland…couldn’t drop off. Then it hit me…Steiner! Whew, what a relief. I finally dropped off.