January 19, 2023

This Right-Wing Media Feud Just Took an Ugly Turn

Right-wing blowhard Steven Crowder is accusing Ben Shapiro’s media empire of being in bed with Big Tech—fighting words that have ignited a heated public dispute.

An increasingly ugly and personal feud has publicly broken out this week between two of the biggest names in the conservative entertainment complex, with one popular YouTuber accusing right-wing media boy king Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire empire of colluding with tech companies to tamp down right-wing content.

“Big Tech is in bed with Big Con,” Steven Crowder said in a video this week, complaining about a contract offer he’d received from The Daily Wire—without specifically naming the company.

A day after Crowder told his viewers to “Stop Big Con,” The Daily Wire’s chief executive Jeremy Boreing published an hour-long response video detailing the negotiating offer that the conservative media empire sent to Crowder’s agent.

Boreing, besides confirming The Daily Wire had initially offered Crowder $50 million, claimed the podcaster misconstrued and misrepresented many of the details of the potential contract. He also took issue with Crowder accusing his site of doing the bidding of tech companies, insisting The Daily Wire has also been a victim of Big Tech’s supposed one-sided censorship of conservative voices.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/stephen-crowder-and-ben-shapiro-a-right-wing-media-feud-that-just-turned-ugly

It's all about the Benjamins...

January 19, 2023

MAGA-Loving, Conspiracy Theorist MTG Picking Fights With Far-Right Allies To Try And Appear Legit

Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) appears to be changing her public approach to politics, leading to speculation that the famously far-right member of Congress may be trying to pull off a “remake” or “rebranding.” And while her new style might not be terribly convincing, it is getting attention. She recently has been picking fights with fellow far-right allies to make her case.

The latest development came Wednesday, when Greene picked a Twitter fight with her fellow Freedom Caucus member Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) after he tweeted a message congratulating her for the assignments on the House Homeland Security and Oversight Committees.

“Bravo @mtgreenee!” Gaetz wrote in a tweet. “She’s going to do amazing work for the people on these key committees she has EARNED.”

Instead of thanking her fellow MAGA Republican and moving on, Greene snapped back at Gaetz accusing him of wasting precious time by holding up Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) speakership bid earlier this month, suggesting Gaetz did not get any substantial results from his gambit — except successfully lowering the threshold of a “motion to vacate” (MTV) the speaker’s chair.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/maga-loving-conspiracy-theorist-mtg-picking-fights-with-far-right-allies-to-try-and-appear-legit

January 19, 2023

Kia, Hyundai thefts using USB cords on the rise in TikTok trend, police say

Local police are warning car owners of a TikTok challenge that is inspiring car thieves to target Hyundai and Kia vehicles by exploiting a manufacturing defect that allows them to easily be hot-wired with a USB phone charger cord.

The trend, amplified in instructional videos on the social media platform TikTok, is not new, but law enforcement officials say they are seeing an uptick in thefts.

In Prince George’s County in Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., that has seen a spike in vehicle thefts since the onset of the pandemic, police said thefts of Kia and Hyundai vehicles have accounted for nearly one-sixth of all thefts in 2022 and nearly half of all thefts so far in 2023.

Prince George’s County Police Department detectives on the Washington Area Vehicle Enforcement (WAVE) team arrested a 17-year-old this month who police said was driving a stolen Kia Optima. The department said detectives found a USB charging cord on the driver’s-side floorboard that they believe was used to start the stolen car.

https://wapo.st/3J3Ip7t

January 19, 2023

ALL THE WAYS DONALD TRUMP WILL PROBABLY "HANDLE" RON DESANTIS IN 2024

The ex-president threatened the Florida governor like a Mafia don threatening his enemies. Here’s how that will likely play out.

Is Ron DeSantis going to run for president in 2024? The Florida governor has not yet said but at this point, all signs very much point to yes. That would be generally unfortunate for the country, as a DeSantis presidency would be just as bad as a Donald Trump one in many ways, and specifically bad for Trump, as it’s very possible DeSantis could beat him, delivering the former guy’s second presidential-election loss in a row.

Trump clearly knows this, having shat several bricks following the midterms when Republicans and the conservative media alike all but dumped him for Governor Ron. He’s also had time to stew over it while hibernating in Mar-a-lago following the lackluster announcement of his 2024 candidacy. Speaking to The Water Cooler, a conservative podcast on Monday, he told host David Brody, of DeSantis, “So, you know, now I hear he might want to run against me. So we’ll handle that the way I handle things.”

Now, if you were an alien only recently dropped onto Planet Earth with zero knowledge about the 45th president, you might hear that line and think, “No biggie. He’s gonna handle it. Probably means he’s just going to outspend the other guy and make a compelling case to voters why he should be elected again.” Of course, if you’ve spent any amount of time on Earth whatsoever, you know that when Donald Trump says he’s going to “handle” something “the way I handle things,” you know that that’s absolutely a threat. And while Trump’s language—like that of a Mafia boss—is purposely vague, having observed him for many years, we have a few ideas of what he means when he says he’s going to “handle” DeSantis in 2024.

Name-calling

The bread and butter of Trump’s arsenal, the ex-president has already begun deploying his patented name-calling tactics against his would-be rival, dubbing him “Ron DeSanctimonious” at a campaign rally just before the midterms last November.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/01/donald-trump-ron-desantis-2024-threats

January 19, 2023

Trump thought photo of accuser was of ex-wife during deposition

Donald Trump mistook his sexual assault accuser E. Jean Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples when shown a photograph from the 1990s in a deposition at Mar-a-Lago last year, potentially undermining one of the common defenses he has used to deny an attack.

Trump, who is being sued by Carroll, an author and advice columnist, for defamation and sexual assault stemming from the same alleged encounter, has repeatedly said Carroll is not his “type,” suggesting an assault could not have occurred because he would not have pursued her romantically.

“That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife,” Trump said under examination from Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan, in a new selection of excerpts from the deposition that was unsealed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

Trump’s blunder in a sworn deposition was quickly corrected by his attorney Alina Habba, who told him it was Carroll, not Maples, an actress and singer who was married to Trump from 1993 to 1999.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/01/18/trump-deposition-carroll-photo/

Oops!

January 19, 2023

California vs. Florida: A tale of two Americas

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has spent the weeks since his reelection warring with “woke” enemies: picking a $2-billion fight with the world’s largest money manager over its environmental policies and vowing to go to court to defend a new law that blocks teaching about racial oppression and white privilege.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent time since his reelection attacking DeSantis — on Twitter and in an op-ed and spoken comments — while promising to make his own state a haven for many of the practices the Florida Republican opposes.

“He’s cruel,” the Democrat said of DeSantis in a recent interview. “I have no respect for bullies and people who’ve made their entire political careers on attacking vulnerable communities.”

“If Gov. Newsom is looking for any pointers on successful governance, he can follow Florida’s lead,” DeSantis’ spokeswoman Lindsey Curnutte said in response to Newsom’s comments.

The states are becoming two of the nation’s biggest ideological rivals. Superman has Bizarro, a powerful antagonist who resembles him from afar but has the opposite instincts. Florida and California have each other.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-01-18/florida-anti-california-newsom-desantis

California has always been a punching bag for other states. Guess it comes with being the fifth largest economy in the world.

January 18, 2023

"REALITY IS SUBMERGED IN FANTASY": THE VILLAGES IS A BOOMER'S UTOPIA--AND DEMOGRAPHIC TIME BOMB

Florida’s Trump-loving retirement community was meticulously created “to make boomers in particular feel comfortable and happy,” as Philip Bump writes in his forthcoming book, Aftermath. But behind its idyllic façade lurks a crisis that the Villages—and the rest of the country—have yet to reckon with.

When you consider how the baby boom has affected America, it’s impossible not to contemplate its natural conclusion.

There was a sudden, unexpected surge in births—and within a decade, diaper services went from a novelty to the equivalent in 2021 dollars of a nearly half‑billion‑dollar industry. Cities rushed to build more schools. Then a bit later America had millions of teenagers, so businesses and industries reorganized around them.

Over and over, age‑dependent systems struggled to accommodate the encroaching boomers. To use a boom‑appropriate analogy, America has been a nation of Lucille Balls scrambling to handle the conveyor belt of chocolates. And now, more than 75 years into the boom, you might be able to predict which systems will be overrun.

Harold Schwartz made just such a prediction back in the early 1980s.

Schwartz had been selling tracts of Florida real estate by mail until the practice was banned in 1968. After a brief foray into mobile‑home parks, Schwartz brought in his son Gary Morse, an advertising executive from Chicago, to overhaul the sales strategy. Morse shifted the focus to houses, including offering prospective retirees a half‑hour “video tape tour” of the concept by mail. The pitch went from shoddy to showbiz.

The eventual result was the Villages, a series of interconnected housing developments—the “villages” themselves—marketed as an all‑inclusive lifestyle that redirected retirement from senior community centers to senior‑ centered communities. Year after year over the past decade, the Villages landed among the fastest growing regions in the United States. In 2010, the Census Bureau estimated that about 86,000 people lived in the area. By 2020, the population neared 130,000. More than 7 in 10 of those residents are aged 55 or over, the largely inflexible minimum age required to own a home in one of the villages. Most of the Villages is contained within Sumter County, where, in 2003, 21.3 percent of its population were baby boomers. In 2019, 42.8 percent were, the third‑highest percentage of any county in the United States. The Villages grew so fast that, in the past two censuses, it helped Florida’s center of population stop moving toward Miami and start moving back toward Sumter County.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/01/the-villages-is-a-boomers-utopia-and-demographic-time-bomb

January 18, 2023

'You Don't Negotiate With These Kinds of People'

Over the past eight years, the Republican Party has been transformed from a generally staid institution representing the allure of low taxes, conservative social cultural policies and laissez-faire capitalism into a party of blatant chaos and disruption.

The shift has been evident in many ways — at the presidential level, as the party nominated Donald Trump not once but twice and has been offered the chance to do so a third time; in Trump’s — and Trump’s allies’ — attempt to overturn the 2020 election results; in his spearheading of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol; and most recently in the brutal series of votes from Jan. 3 to Jan. 7 in the House of Representatives, where 20 hard-right members held Kevin McCarthy hostage until he cried uncle and was finally elected speaker.

What drives the members of the Freedom Caucus, who have wielded the threat of dysfunction to gain a level of control within the House far in excess of their numbers? How has this group moved from the margins to the center of power in less than a decade?

Since its founding in 2015, this cadre has acquired a well-earned reputation for using high-risk tactics to bring down two House speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan. During the five-day struggle over McCarthy’s potential speakership, similar pressure tactics wrested crucial agenda-setting authority from the Republican leadership in the House.

“You don’t negotiate with these kinds of people,” Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Alabama and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, declared as the saga unfolded. “These are legislative terrorists.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/opinion/republicans-populism-political-psychology.html?unlocked_article_code=uXysTFgMCy74Uuj1Ey0s0zUoMlhjauViib6NttrFNr6ArngTZX6CbpSGGXMB0KzqjgWqAmoS8_-yD5ezcGFrFMoeu7a2D6DPNm_-W7FRM_YucPXpPctB-EUjLlO9nCdbi1UDJ7hI7G54PYrrOnqy3QIQwEV7M47gdw-vw_NeofMSAdY-osqNLovCSUsQivvTu4ROWq2cVIS4CCAgUbAIpkI9NFAZuqSKAwfkyNEn021iXemEjbR_zPdZO5ZIwpvNeN38kD_rc6hW_WcG1mVQ2a5raLbAjXTlSdbWeFqA0FSdFLYX526Taf1IaMYCODW_vf6SV66bL9i06CBqPYyrrRkRymaWkR2yURRCE8jrgwn2qSU&smid=share-url

January 18, 2023

They're Cover Girls. They're in Their 70s.

Sky-high demand for older models—women in their 60s, 70s, 80s and even 90s—is creating a silver wave in the modeling industry. They even get stopped at the supermarket.

Ninety-year-old Frances Dunscombe only began modeling at age 82 after the death of her husband. When her daughter, a model in her 60s, suggested Ms. Dunscombe join her to visit her agency, she scoffed, “You must be joking.” Now, she realizes, “Actually, I think it was quite a good time to start modeling, because it wasn’t going to go to my head.”

A childhood war evacuee in Britain, Ms. Dunscombe left school at 15 and didn’t have a major career until modeling. Now, several years into her modeling career, she’s done lingerie pictures, worn Prada in Hunger magazine and been on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar UK. Ms. Dunscombe, who lives in Surrey, United Kingdom, sees her mission as inspiring and advocating for older women. “I get extremely irritated when fashion editors promote the most frumpy of clothes for the older age groups,” she said. “Aren’t they aware of what is going on at the moment? That we are coming to the fore.”

Ms. Dunscombe is part of the fashion and beauty industry’s new silver wave. In recent years, luxury fashion brands, direct-to-consumer beauty brands and mass clothing lines have begun casting older models—much older models. Some are celebrities, but increasingly, they are unknowns.

It would appear brands are finally warming to the idea that women of all ages want to see themselves in advertising.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/older-models-fashion-over-60-aging-11673668643?st=4iccpkbt5neyooa&reflink=share_mobilewebshare

January 18, 2023

Ron DeSantis Squares Off With New 'Woke' Foe: The NHL?

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ latest target is a curious one. Republican strategists are wondering whether it was a smart move.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is squaring off with an unlikely opponent: the NHL.

In the latest battle of the culture wars, the NHL—where gloves-off fighting still brings just a five-minute penalty, where the player base is 93 percent white, and until the hiring of Mike Grier by the San Jose Sharks earlier this month there had yet to be a Black general manager in the history of the sport—has somehow become the new epitome of woke culture gone awry.

Over the weekend, the DeSantis administration got the NHL to fold on a local hiring event aimed at diversifying the league’s workforce ahead of its annual All-Star Game. (The All-Star Game and Skills Competition is set for the first weekend of February in Sunrise, Florida—a suburb a little under an hour north of Miami—home to the Florida Panthers.)

How DeSantis ended up dropping the gloves with America’s fourth most popular sport ahead of an event ostensibly designed to draw tourists to the state and Floridians into the NHL’s front office jobs is the result of a wash, rinse and repeat approach to corporate efforts to brand themselves as inclusive.

As one GOP strategist put it, DeSantis has found another way to “raise his profile as a fighter as well as raise money.” But as another Republican campaign veteran told The Daily Beast, this isn’t a risk-free strategy for the Florida governor and rumored 2024 contender; it could mark the beginning of a “strategy that works until it doesn’t.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ron-desantis-squares-off-with-new-woke-foe-the-nhl