Heh: NBC/BuzzFeed-Style Journalism

From Stephen Green, at Instapundit, "JOURNALISM, NBC/BUZZFEED-STYLE: “Controversy Framing” and the “SQUIRREL! Distraction,” Explained."

Shop Today

Thanks for your support everybody!

It's a challenge to keep this blog humming during the teaching semester, but I appreciate the readership, and if you're shopping through my Amazon links, a big hearty thanks once again.

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Lissy Cunningham in White

Here she is from 2015, "Rule 5 Sunday."

And on Twitter in September:

Some a little more innocent but #peachy 🤣🍑💋#blonde #model pic.twitter.com/AjBWF1dBp4

— Lissy (@LissyC5) September 29, 2017

Democrats Dogged by #HarveyWeinstein Cash

A great piece, at Politico, "Democrats dogged by Weinstein cash: The party tries to move past the sordid story, but Republicans aren't letting it go just yet."

Democrats hope to wash their hands of their ties to Harvey Weinstein. But Republicans aren't letting go just yet https://t.co/EIOkZKIpLE pic.twitter.com/bzqHJiXIw4

— POLITICO (@politico) October 12, 2017

Alessandra Ambrosio Selfie

On Twitter:

Cat eyes.. @alebyalessandra: https://t.co/rlZF8lblNb pic.twitter.com/FdEGulWVWi

— Alessandra Ambrosio (@AngelAlessandra) October 11, 2017

Alizee Coucke for Lui Magazine

At Drunken Stepfather, "Alizee Coucke Nipples of the Day":

Alizee Coucke is some model from France and she’s topless for LUI, because LUI the porn mag turned trendy fashion mag is what all these motherfuckers trying to make it are eager to get naked in, and they don’t even get paid to be naked in it, which is beyond my capacity of understanding because nudity is a commodity to me and I’ve been raised to believe that women do not get naked for free, it’s 10 dollars a song at the very least…it’s never free…so this girls getting naked for free, for people like me to see, people who have no business seeing them naked…just doesn’t process in my half retard booze soaked head…BUT it is happening, because naked isn’t a big deal, naked is perfect...

Rose McGowan Photos

Following-up, "Rose McGowan."

At Heckler Spray, "Rose McGowan Nudes Leaked Again – Yes, They’re Right Here (57 PICS)":

What do you like about Rose McGowan? Her pale milky skin? Sexy full lips? Her raven bangs? Perfectly sized natural boobs? Yes, we thought so.

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I'm out of here in a few minutes to work. More blogging tonight.

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Why Did it Take So Long to Stop the Las Vegas Gunman?

At LAT, "New disclosure shows a casino guard alerted hotel to gunman before Vegas massacre began. So why did it take so long to stop him?"

Before Vegas massacre, a hotel security guard called hotel officials to warn them about a gunman on the 32nd floor https://t.co/zp0tSpO8le

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) October 11, 2017

'SO JUST IN THE LAST FEW DAYS, two major centers of the anti-Trump resistance, Hollywood and the NFL, have collapsed...'

From Glenn Reynolds, at Instapundit, "Harvey Weinstein has destroyed Hollywood. Now what?"

BONUS: "TOWARD A UNIFIED THEORY OF CONTEMPORARY INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE."

Why 'Indigenous Peoples' Day' is Far Worse Than Columbus Day.

At the Federalist, via Bird Dog, at Maggie's Farm, "The beautiful, peaceful indigenous peoples living in harmony with the land."

Rose McGowan

This lady is rad!

pic.twitter.com/WYW7r4d9ui

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) October 11, 2017

Ben Affleck fuck off

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) October 10, 2017

The hole that @rosemcgowan just punched into @BenAffleck’s statement can be seen from distant galaxies pic.twitter.com/RQepXBu5Z2

— Chet Cannon (@Chet_Cannon) October 10, 2017

Actress Rose McGowan calls for entire Weinstein Company board to resign https://t.co/9221jycAG1 pic.twitter.com/GkpdB4TiZU

— HuffPost (@HuffPost) October 10, 2017

Rose McGowan tells Ben Affleck to 'f*** off' after the actor finally breaks his silence to condemn Weinstein https://t.co/cK6cYrg2rN pic.twitter.com/t8nc4PPddO

— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) October 10, 2017

Stephen Colbert and Hollywood's Hypocrites Stay Silent on Harvey Weinstein

I don't watch late night shows. I've literally never watched Colbert. It came on by accident once and I flipped the channel before the introductory music could get rolling. I hate these people.

Maybe Jimmy Kimmel will bawl about sexual abuse in Hollywood tonight?

At City Journal, "The Weinstein Silence."

Liberal entertainers laud themselves for “speaking truth to power”—so long as the targets are safe. https://t.co/yz9ob1Qpa6 pic.twitter.com/JcDFIb2D2b

— City Journal (@CityJournal) October 11, 2017

Maile Meloy, Do Not Become Alarmed

At Amazon, Maile Meloy, Do Not Become Alarmed: A Novel.

Mira Sorvino, Rosanna Arquette, and Asia Argento Share Their Accounts of Harvey Weinstein's Sexual Assault and Harassment

It's from Ronan Farrow, at the New Yorker. He's leftist. The New Yorker's leftist. I don't like them. But this story is irresistible, and it's leftist outlets leading the charge against Democrat/Hollywood hypocrisy. It's pretty amazing.

Safe link, "From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories":

! NYer Weinstein story just dropped, 3 women alleging rape + audio recording of Weinstein from NYPD sting operation https://t.co/EtDsJ1XWvj

— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) October 10, 2017

Since the establishment of the first studios a century ago, there have been few movie executives as dominant, or as domineering, as Harvey Weinstein. As the co-founder of the production-and-distribution companies Miramax and the Weinstein Company, he helped to reinvent the model for independent films, with movies such as “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” “The English Patient,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The Crying Game,” “Shakespeare in Love,” and “The King’s Speech.” Beyond Hollywood, he has exercised his influence as a prolific fund-raiser for Democratic Party candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Weinstein combined a keen eye for promising scripts, directors, and actors with a bullying, even threatening, style of doing business, inspiring both fear and gratitude. His movies have earned more than three hundred Oscar nominations, and, at the annual awards ceremonies, he has been thanked more than almost anyone else in movie history, just after Steven Spielberg and right before God.

For more than twenty years, Weinstein has also been trailed by rumors of sexual harassment and assault. This has been an open secret to many in Hollywood and beyond, but previous attempts by many publications, including The New Yorker, to investigate and publish the story over the years fell short of the demands of journalistic evidence. Too few people were willing to speak, much less allow a reporter to use their names, and Weinstein and his associates used nondisclosure agreements, monetary payoffs, and legal threats to suppress these myriad stories. Asia Argento, an Italian film actress and director, told me that she did not speak out until now—Weinstein, she told me, forcibly performed oral sex on her—because she feared that Weinstein would “crush” her. “I know he has crushed a lot of people before,” Argento said. “That’s why this story—in my case, it’s twenty years old; some of them are older—has never come out.”

Last week, the New York Times, in a powerful report by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, revealed multiple allegations of sexual harassment against Weinstein, a story that led to the resignation of four members of his company’s all-male board, and to Weinstein’s firing from the company.

The story, however, is more complex, and there is more to know and to understand. In the course of a ten-month investigation, I was told by thirteen women that, between the nineteen-nineties and 2015, Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them, allegations that corroborate and overlap with the Times’ revelations, and also include far more serious claims.

Three women—among them Argento and a former aspiring actress named Lucia Evans—told me that Weinstein raped them, allegations that include Weinstein forcibly performing or receiving oral sex and forcing vaginal sex. Four women said that they experienced unwanted touching that could be classified as an assault. In an audio recording captured during a New York Police Department sting operation in 2015 and made public here for the first time, Weinstein admits to groping a Filipina-Italian model named Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, describing it as behavior he is “used to.” Four of the women I interviewed cited encounters in which Weinstein exposed himself or masturbated in front of them.

Sixteen former and current executives and assistants at Weinstein’s companies told me that they witnessed or had knowledge of unwanted sexual advances and touching at events associated with Weinstein’s films and in the workplace. They and others describe a pattern of professional meetings that were little more than thin pretexts for sexual advances on young actresses and models. All sixteen said that the behavior was widely known within both Miramax and the Weinstein Company. Messages sent by Irwin Reiter, a senior company executive, to Emily Nestor, one of the women who alleged that she was harassed at the company, described the “mistreatment of women” as a serial problem that the Weinstein Company was struggling with in recent years. Other employees described what was, in essence, a culture of complicity at Weinstein’s places of business, with numerous people throughout the companies fully aware of his behavior but either abetting it or looking the other way. Some employees said that they were enlisted in subterfuge to make the victims feel safe. A female executive with the company described how Weinstein assistants and others served as a “honeypot”—they would initially join a meeting, but then Weinstein would dismiss them, leaving him alone with the woman.

Virtually all of the people I spoke with told me that they were frightened of retaliation. “If Harvey were to discover my identity, I’m worried that he could ruin my life,” one former employee told me. Many said that they had seen Weinstein’s associates confront and intimidate those who crossed him, and feared that they would be similarly targeted. Four actresses, including Mira Sorvino and Rosanna Arquette, told me they suspected that, after they rejected Weinstein’s advances or complained about them to company representatives, Weinstein had them removed from projects or dissuaded people from hiring them. Multiple sources said that Weinstein frequently bragged about planting items in media outlets about those who spoke against him; these sources feared that they might be similarly targeted. Several pointed to Gutierrez’s case, in 2015: after she went to the police, negative items discussing her sexual history and impugning her credibility began rapidly appearing in New York gossip pages. (In the taped conversation with Gutierrez, Weinstein asks her to join him for “five minutes,” and warns, “Don’t ruin your friendship with me for five minutes.”)

Several former employees told me that they were speaking about Weinstein’s alleged behavior now because they hoped to protect women in the future. “This wasn’t a one-off. This wasn’t a period of time,” an executive who worked for Weinstein for many years told me. “This was ongoing predatory behavior towards women—whether they consented or not.”

It’s likely that women have recently felt increasingly emboldened to talk about their experiences because of the way the world has changed regarding issues of sex and power. These disclosures follow in the wake of stories alleging sexual misconduct by public figures, including Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, Bill Cosby, and Donald Trump. In October, 2016, a month before the election, a tape emerged of Trump telling a celebrity-news reporter, “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. . . . Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” This past April, O’Reilly, a host at Fox News, was forced to resign after Fox was discovered to have paid five women millions of dollars in exchange for silence about their accusations of sexual harassment. Ailes, the former head of Fox News, resigned last July, after he was accused of sexual harassment. Cosby went on trial this summer, charged with drugging and sexually assaulting a woman. The trial ended with a hung jury.

On October 5th, in an initial effort at damage control, Weinstein responded to the Times piece by issuing a statement partly acknowledging what he had done, saying, “I appreciate the way I’ve behaved with colleagues in the past has caused a lot of pain, and I sincerely apologize for it.” In an interview with the New York Post, he said, “I’ve got to deal with my personality, I’ve got to work on my temper, I have got to dig deep. I know a lot of people would like me to go into a facility, and I may well just do that—I will go anywhere I can learn more about myself.” Weinstein went on, “In the past I used to compliment people, and some took it as me being sexual, I won’t do that again.” In his statement to the Times, Weinstein claimed that he would “channel that anger” into a fight against the leadership of the National Rifle Association. He also said that it was not “coincidental” that he was organizing a foundation for women directors at the University of Southern California. “It will be named after my mom and I won’t disappoint her.”
Sallie Hofmeister, a spokesperson for Weinstein, issued a statement in response to the allegations in this article. It reads in full: “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein has further confirmed that there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for refusing his advances. Mr. Weinstein obviously can’t speak to anonymous allegations, but with respect to any women who have made allegations on the record, Mr. Weinstein believes that all of these relationships were consensual. Mr. Weinstein has begun counseling, has listened to the community and is pursuing a better path. Mr. Weinstein is hoping that, if he makes enough progress, he will be given a second chance.”

While Weinstein and his representatives have said that the incidents were consensual, and were not widespread or severe, the women I spoke to tell a very different story.

Keep reading.

'I Need to Know'

What a totally unexpected and of course untimely death. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers just came off their 40th anniversary tour, and I was still hoping to catch them in concert. One of my favorite bands hands down. Too many classic songs to recount. Their music's just part of the culture, from the movies ("Silence of the Lambs") to sports (Superbowl halftime show) and on and on. I should've been blogging him more all these years of drive-time music blogging. Shame.

In any case, here's the New York Times' obit, "Tom Petty, a Mainstay of Rock With the Heartbreakers, Dies at 66."

And at the L.A. Times, "Tom Petty, down-to-earth rock superstar, dies at 66," and "Tom Petty's final interview: There was supposed to have been so much more."

And at the Sound L.A., from Friday' morning's errand-running drive-time, "I Need to Know":

Modern Love
David Bowie
12:26 PM

Tumbling Dice
The Rolling Stones
12:23 PM

Girls Got Rhythm
AC/DC
12:20 PM

Drive
The Cars
12:10 PM

Sweet Child O' Mine
Guns N' Roses
12:04 PM

Rock 'N' Roll Fantasy
Bad Company
12:00 PM

I Need to Know
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

Dance Sister Dance (Baila Mi Hermana)
Santana
11:49 AM

Kashmir
Led Zeppelin
11:36 AM

Josie
Steely Dan
11:31 AM

Roxanne
The Police
11:28 AM

Hello, Goodbye
The Beatles
11:25 AM

The Culture Wars Are Bad for Business

From Joel Kotkin, at the O.C. Register, "The bottom line of the culture wars: Catastrophic bad for business."

The bottom line of the culture wars: Catastrophic bad for business https://t.co/aujWUkohJF

— Panzer Leader (@ArmorCavSpin) October 10, 2017

The Democrats' George McGovern Redux for 2020

I love this piece, from Alan Greenblatt, at Politico, "Are Democrats Headed for a McGovern Redux?":

Are Democrats headed for a McGovern redux? https://t.co/nxu71HDkKT pic.twitter.com/223bu526bh

— POLITICO (@politico) October 9, 2017

As Trump continues his Nixonian campaign of white cultural-grievance politics, Democrats appear consumed by the same squabbles that destroyed them in 1972.

Four decades ago, Richard Nixon lived out the fantasy many liberals harbor about Donald Trump, stepping down in the face of possible impeachment over a slow-moving scandal long before his term was up. Before that happened, however, Nixon was reelected by a resounding margin, in large part because progressives made strategic errors that Democrats today appear hellbent on repeating.

In 1968, as in 2016, Democrats narrowly lost the White House after nominating a relatively moderate, establishment candidate instead of a more liberal alternative who had inspired a raging enthusiasm among younger voters. Democrats spent much of the next four years arguing about what direction the party should take. White working-class voters—traditionally a Democratic bloc—were sluicing away, and progressives, convinced the party needed to change both its policy direction and its coalition of supporters, demanded a new approach: a “loose peace coalition” of minorities, young voters and educated white Democrats, as strategist Fred Dutton wrote in his 1971 book, Changing Sources of Power. One year later, the party’s presidential nominee, the ultra-liberal Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, went on to lose 49 states in one of the most lopsided victories in American history.

We’re a long, long way from 2020, but it’s abundantly evident that Trump will again run a Nixonian campaign, tearing down his opponent and presenting himself as the champion of an aggrieved coalition that Nixon called the “silent majority” and Trump calls “the forgotten men and women” of America.

Consumed by internecine battles and the idea of opposition, Democrats run the risk of again nominating someone like McGovern who pleases progressives but steers a course too far from the country’s center of political gravity to win, even as Trump continues his funhouse mirror impression of Nixon as the avatar of white cultural-grievance politics.

Politics today are much different than they were then, as is the shape of the American electorate. But there are parallels that Democrats should bear in mind as they nurse their hopes of driving Trump from the Oval Office. Trump is a culture warrior, and progressives today are perfectly willing to engage that sideshow—just as they did 45 years with Nixon.

Look no further than the recent controversy over NFL players’ protests over police violence and racism, which Trump has successfully portrayed for most voters as an insult to men and women in uniform, the American flag, mom and apple pie.

“If the Democrats become the party of those in favor of kneeling rather than standing for the national anthem,” says historian Jeffrey Bloodworth, author of Losing the Center: A History of American Liberalism, 1968-1992, “that would be a full McGovern.”

Well, the electoral map today looks nothing like Nixon's 49 state blowout in 1972, but the comparisons are more than idle speculation. The Dems indeed are moving way to the left, and, frankly, the party's so ideological koo-koo it's like they're practically begging for a second Trump term.

Lol. One can only hope.

Keep reading.

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ICYMI: Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

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I've about 100 pages to go finished this one, and I'll tell you, this is an astonishing book.

At Amazon, Cormac McCarthey, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West — A Novel.