May 17, 2025

OPEN THREAD: Maclunkey!

Posted at 9:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 259

MARK JUDGE: Jake Tapper Is Why We Can’t Quit Stephen Glass.

Recently in The Free Press, Joe Nocera noted that we are still living with Stephen Glass. “There’s no excusing what Glass did,” Nocera wrote. “As a young staff writer at The New Republic in the mid-1990s, Glass wrote some 42 stories that were either partly or wholly made up. When he was drummed out of the profession, I applauded. What’s hard to fathom is why, of all the journalistic fraudsters over the past decades, his is the story that just won’t go away. It’s been told in Vanity Fair, and in the 2003 movie Shattered Glass. When The New Republic celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2014, it sent Hanna Rosin, once a close friend, to interview Glass and retell the sordid tale. Just last year, Washingtonian magazine ran an “oral history” of the making of Shattered Glass.”

Nocera thinks this is too much: “Enough already.”

Sorry, as long as Jake Tapper won’t come clean and people like Jamie Hood tell tall tales that are published by places that know better, there’s plenty of room left in this Glass.

In the past, there were periodic scandals about a journalist who was caught fabricating or massively distorting news: Janet Cooke, Glass, Jayson Blair, Dan Rather, Katie Couric, Brian Williams. But the past four years have exposed virtually the entire industry reporting on the Beltway as repeated — and quite shameless — fabulists.

Posted at 6:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 56

JUST NBC THE MEMORY HOLE! “Audio of interview confirms Biden memory lapses,” NBC reported yesterday:

Newly released audio of a special counsel interviewing then-President joe Biden confirms memory lapses that White House officials denied at the time, including a president clearly struggling to remember the year his oldest son died.

Even after the transcript was released, Biden aides, including then-White House spokesman Ian Sams, insisted that the president did not forget the year that his son Beau died of brain cancer. The audio shows that Biden struggled to remember the year and had to be prompted by his lawyers, who were sitting in the interview with him.

The recording of the interview was first released by Axios.

Sams did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The audio of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur is likely to fuel a growing debate among Democrats and others about whether there was a concerted effort to cover up the president’s diminished mental capacity, as well as whether that contributed to the party’s 2024 defeat at the polls. It also comes as several new books offer insight into what many behind the scenes knew.

Speaking of that “concerted effort to cover up the president’s diminished mental capacity,” perhaps NBC might want to check in on some of its employees: ‘The best Biden ever.’

And from NBC News on June 19th, 2024: Why deceptive Biden G7 video kept going viral.

The misleading videos were an example of so-called cheap fakes, in which low-tech editing or other minor changes to videos, along with incorrect context, can amplify false but convincing messages.

The episode illustrated the dynamics of the new information ecosystem, in which tech platforms are hesitant to emphasize vetted, factual information during an election year for fear of appearing partisan — even as partisan operatives take advantage of the platforms’ attempts at neutrality.

NBC, heal thy self.

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll 77

AN AUTOPSY REPORT ON BIDEN’S IN-OFFICE DECLINE: “Five people were running the country,” a political insider told the authors of the new book Original Sin. “And Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”

It is of course literally true that Biden could string two sentences together at the start of his presidency (and can now). But Original Sin makes clear that even before he launched his first campaign against Trump, Biden was struggling. The authors write, “Those close to him say that the first signs he was deteriorating emerged after the death of his beloved son Beau in 2015”—a decade ago. Tapper and Thompson point to recordings from 2017 of Biden speaking with Mark Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter of his memoir. These tapes, which came to light six years later as part of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 2023 investigation into Biden’s inappropriate handling of classified information, suggested that the president had lost a mental step, or several. “He grasped to remember things, he sometimes had difficulty speaking, and he frequently lost his train of thought,” the authors write, describing the recordings and the special counsel’s sense of them. “Biden was really struggling in 2017,” Tapper and Thompson write, adding, “His cognitive capacity seemed to have been failing him.”

Three years later, on the presidential campaign trail, Biden’s struggles became more obvious to those around him. Tapper and Thompson report that, in 2020, members of Biden’s inner circle gave the candidate a teleprompter with scripted questions for a local-news interview. It was an apparent effort to work around his dwindling communicative and cognitive abilities: Aides lamented that even then, “they couldn’t rely on him to stay on message, and he often had a very short attention span.”

On July 2nd 2020, AP “reported:” Biden did not use teleprompter to answer reporters’ questions.

A few months later, an official member of Team Biden did so as well: “Watch Joe Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo absolutely melt down when [Bret Baier] asks him if Biden has ever used a teleprompter for news interviews from his house. Ducklo explodes and, like he did throughout the interview, accuses him of being a Trump campaign shill.”

—Real Clear Politics, September 10th, 2020.

More from the Atlantic:

The book’s most astounding previously unreported story from Biden’s 2020 campaign concerns his staff’s attempts to create videos of the candidate speaking with voters over Zoom. Tapper and Thompson’s description of this is worth quoting at length:

Biden would sit in a room with several monitors beaming the face of real Americans in front of him so that they could discuss issues of importance.

The videos came back, hours of footage. Some on the team couldn’t believe their eyes.

“The videos were horrible,” one top Democrat said. “He couldn’t follow the conversation at all.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” said a second Democrat, who hadn’t seen Biden in a few years. “It was like a different person. It was incredible. This was like watching Grandpa who shouldn’t be driving.”

A special team was brought in and told to edit the videos down to make them airable, if only a few minutes worth. They had to get creative.

The authors go on to write, “Edited, the videos likely appeared fine to viewers, Biden no worse than any other senior on Zoom. But two of the Democrats who were involved in the films’ production together were dumbfounded. ‘I didn’t think he could be president,’ the second Democrat said. After what they’d seen, they couldn’t understand how Biden could be capable of doing the job.” (Two other top Democrats blamed the lousy footage on the awkwardness of Zoom.)

The idea that this same man, only a short time later, was able to reliably prosecute the duties of the position to which he was elected is hard to believe. Indeed, some incidents cataloged in Original Sin suggest that Biden may have been struggling to do the job even early in his term. Cabinet meetings were “terrible and at times uncomfortable,” one Cabinet secretary told the authors. “And they were from the beginning.” Biden relied on note cards and canned responses. (Some Biden aides told Tapper and Thompson that Cabinet meetings are stilted in every administration, and that Biden was more engaged in smaller meetings.)

So Biden’s comms team were using jump cuts and carefully selecting footage while Biden was on the campaign trail in 2020, a practice they would continue throughout his term in office: Biden mocked over number of jump cuts in Trump debate challenge video: ‘Like a Claymation film.’

Posted at 5:16 pm by Ed Driscoll 71

OLD AND BUSTED: #FIGHTFOR15.

The New Hotness? L.A. Votes For $30 Wages At Hotels And LAX—$17 Next Door. The Fallout Has Already Started.

  1. They may not hire the worker at all. Outlawing jobs below a certain pay doesn’t guarantee higher-paid work; it guarantees unemployment for those priced out. If a person’s skills or experience don’t merit $30 in the market, this law has made it illegal for them to earn a wage at all.Consider an immigrant with limited English who might start in hotel housekeeping, dishwashing, or entry-level service jobs. At $15 – $20 an hour, an employer might take a chance and hire them, training them on the job. At $30 an hour, that same employer will likely demand a more experienced, highly productive worker for the role (if the role isn’t eliminated altogether). The rung at the bottom of the ladder gets sawed off.

  2. Employers substitute and automate. When labor gets costlier, it drives businesses to find ways to get by with less labor. That can mean investing in machines or tech or shifting work onto customers or remaining staff. Many chains curtailed daily housekeeping and never restored it fully (often spinning it as “green choice” to save water, while conveniently saving on payroll).Expect more automation at the airport and hotels: kiosks instead clerks, mobile ordering in airport eateries, robotic floor cleaners. Even trash collection can be automated; Pittsburgh deployed robotic vacuum sweepers. When labor costs skyrocket, technology that replaces that labor suddenly looks a lot more attractive.

* * * * * * * *

In effect, L.A. could make itself even more expensive, driving away the very tourism dollars it’s trying to redistribute.

Speaking of which: California sees drop in international tourism, report shows.

A newly released report shows that California has experienced a significant drop in international tourism.

Visit California, a nonprofit that promotes tourism to the Golden State, said international tourist visits from Canada, Mexico, the U.K., Germany, and Australia, among other countries, are down 15% to 26% this year.

In March, international tourism dropped 11% compared to the same month the previous year.

For four decades, Kervan Samuel has been a street musician at Fisherman’s Wharf.

“I’m seeing less, I’m seeing fewer tourists. You’re not seeing the real spending type of tourists that we had a couple months ago,” Samuel said.

Considering that for the last 15 years, leftists have been obsessed with “binge flying,” isn’t that for the best?

Posted at 4:44 pm by Ed Driscoll 113

MARS AIN’T THE KIND OF PLACE TO RAISE YOUR KIDS. IN FACT IT’S COLD AS HELL. Mars weather: Clear with a low of 114 below zero.

Plenty of heat for your colony once you get a nice nuclear plant going, though. And highs are in the 70s.

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds 79