Worth clicking over for a humorous deconstruction of the hollow, emotional nonsense that passes for carefully considered judgement in the Hollywood-media-academia-elite circles of this country.

Kyle Smith:

“…In the final episode of Fosse/Verdon, one of the two titular characters, Bob Fosse, is shooting one of the greatest films of all time. The other, Gwen Verdon, is having a quarrel with her unspeakably dull boyfriend about whether he approves of her performing in a road-show production of a Broadway musical. These two matters are given roughly equal importance, as are the lives of Fosse, a genius who left an indelible mark on both Broadway and film, and Verdon, a second-tier hoofer and actress whom nobody would be thinking about, much less making a series about, if she hadn’t been married to Fosse.

So it went throughout Fosse/Verdon, an eight-episode miniseries shown on FX (still available on demand) that had flashes of brilliance but also proved to be a victim of the #MeToo movement, or rather a victim of Hollywood’s obsession with that movement, or mindset, or complaint. Fosse/Verdon was originally conceived as a show about Fosse. It was to be based on a biography called Fosse. It should have been called Fosse. Then #MeToo hit, and the (male) creators of the show panicked. Everything had changed! (No, it hadn’t. It rarely does.)

How, the creators and their bosses wondered, should they work #MeToo into the show? Correct answer: They should have ignored it and carried on as planned. Actual answer: Just as #MeToo morphed almost instantaneously from a movement about punishing sexual misbehavior in men to an affirmative-action reparations/hiring policy for Hollywood women, the makers of Fosse/Verdondecided they had to apply a sort of retroactive affirmative-action admittance policy to the genius club, or at least to the important-figures club. Hence Gwen Verdon, a forgotten hoofer whose work barely survives anywhere unless you count the memory of elderly Broadway veterans, had to be sanctified and made the equivalent of Fosse, a larger-than-life figure who directed Sweet Charity, Pippin, and Chicago on Broadway and the films Cabaret, Lenny, and All That Jazz. Sure, the series tells us, Cabaret was a revolutionary screen musical unlike anything ever seen before on screen and won eight Oscars (including one for Fosse over Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather), but did you know Verdon picked the gorilla costume used in the “If You Could See Her from My Eyes” number? Clearly the whole movie would have fallen apart with a lesser costume.

I’m wondering how far #MeToo feminism is going to take its logic. Maybe next year we’ll get a show called Rembrandt/Mrs. Rembrandt. No! Foolishness. What am I thinking? It would have to be Mrs. Rembrandt/Rembrandt. Still not enough. She had a name, you know. Saskia van Uylenburgh/Rembrandt. Actually, who cares about Rembrandt? Men’s stories have been told for too long. Time for some herstory. Coming soon on FX: Saskia. Do we know enough about Saskia to fill up eight hours of television? Never mind. We’ll just imagine her being suffering yet proud, suffused with unrecognized brilliance, a woman ahead of her time. It’ll sweep the Emmys. Get Michelle Williams on the phone; she’ll play it to the hilt. (You think I’m joking: The New Republic’s television critic Rachel Syme wrote “Fosse/Verdon is a pas de deux. . . . Part of me wishes it was a solo.” Guess which character she considers expendable?)…”

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Worth clicking over

RICH LOWRY:

“…The worry last week was that the Trump administration was ginning up fake intelligence about Iran blowing up oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz to justify a war against Iran. Then, this week, President Donald Trump said the Iranian attacks weren’t a big deal.

The episode is another indication of the underlying modesty — not a very Trumpian word — of the administration.

Subtract Trump’s taste for nonstop controversy and rhetorical brinkmanship, and you’re left with an incrementalist center-right government that has pursued an expansionary fiscal policy and avoided foreign war, for a period of peace and prosperity that — in any other universe — would be at the core of a stay-the-course reelection message…”

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#Resistence

Jake Dima:

“…New York clerks in upstate counties are refusing to comply with Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s recently passed “Green Light law,” mandating they issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

Clerks in Rensselaer, Niagara, Chautauqua and Allegany Counties are refusing to comply with the law following Erie County Clerk Michael Kearns’s statements to the press that he will not grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.(RELATED: New York County Clerk Is Refusing To Give Driver’s Licenses To Illegals, Despite New Law)

Green Light passed the state senate and was signed into law Monday by Cuomo. The controversial bill allows illegal immigrants to apply to the DMV under a special classification to receive driver’s licenses. Applicants need not present a social security card or other documents that substantiate legal residency…”

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Remember the source of the reporting on Trump pulling back. The Yellow Leaker  “Resistance” clique inside the administration, what’s left of it anyway, will say and do anything to make the President and the administration look bad.

Liz Sheld:

“…Corporate media’s flagship scandal sheet, The New York Times, is reporting that President Trump was ready to strike Iran but suddenly pulled back. We all know how reliable the Times and their “sources” are so take with a  grain of salt.

President Trump approved military strikes against Iran in retaliation for downing an American surveillance drone, but pulled back from launching them on Thursday night after a day of escalating tensions.

As late as 7 p.m., military and diplomatic officials were expecting a strike, after intense discussions and debate at the White House among the president’s top national security officials and congressional leaders, according to multiple senior administration officials involved in or briefed on the deliberations.

The Times also said the WH did not ask the “news” paper to hold the story, I suspect the administration wants it out there that Trump had his finger on the boom-boom button but changed his mind. The president campaigned against the neocon, blood lusty, nation building tours we’ve come to expect from the GOP elites, he is not looking for a war and he made that clear on Thursday. Not so much for his advisors. “Mr. Trump’s national security advisers split about whether to respond militarily. Senior administration officials said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; John R. Bolton, the national security adviser; and Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, had favored a military response. But top Pentagon officials cautioned that such an action could result in a spiraling escalation with risks for American forces in the region.”

Reuters is reporting that that Trump sent a warning Iran via Oman. “In his message, Trump said he was against any war with Iran and wanted to talk to Tehran about various issues…He gave a short period of time to get our response but Iran’s immediate response was that it is up to Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Ali) Khamenei to decide about this issue,” one of the officials told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A second Iranian official said: “We made it clear that the leader is against any talks, but the message will be conveyed to him to make a decision…However, we told the Omani official that any attack against Iran will have regional and international consequences.”

The Democrats are confused. They wanted so badly to burp up their pre-fab, anti-war talking points but Trump isn’t making war. What to do, what to do? Politico has it covered with a piece that was probably pre-written after news broke that Iran shot down our drone, ‘Step back from the brink of war’: Democrats slam Trump on report he ordered Iran strikes.  The Democrats needed some opportunity to seem relevant and Politico delivers. But why would anyone care about foreign policy strategy from the party who secretly gave the Iranian terror regime billions of dollars and pulled back sanctions to sign a nuclear “deal” with no oversight?

Let’s be honest, there are plenty of things the U.S. can do that don’t involve invasion and bombs: bank accounts can be emptied, people can disappear. It can be very dangerous to be an Iranian agent walking freely around Latin America and Africa. Things happen. “No comment.”…”

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Ocasio-Cortez Gets Head Stuck In Bucket, Journalists Rush To Explain Why It Was Actually A Genius Move

MARK TAPSCOTT:

“…WASHINGTON—Critics insist that President Donald Trump’s order to begin mass deportations of illegal aliens next week can’t be done, but a former immigration court judge and other experts interviewed by The Epoch Times claim that ousting a million or more illegal aliens is quite possible.

“It’s not practical to think that our immigration system at this moment in time could handle” the Trump directive, Jennifer Quigley, director of refugee advocacy for Human Rights First, told the Los Angeles Times.

But a closer look at immigration data reveals large groups of illegals in this country who are likely to be relatively easy to remove, including many who will leave on their own, according to a former federal immigration court judge.

“There are about a million aliens who are defying orders for removal who really just need to be picked up, given a plane ticket, and sent home,” said Andrew A. Arthur in an interview on June 19. Arthur, who was an immigration court judge from 2006 to 2014, is now a resident fellow of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)…”

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I view this as a positive step.

William Gallagher:

Victor Davis Hanson:

“…’Third World’ is now an anachronistic geographical term of the old Cold War. But after 1989, “Third World” was reinvented from a political noun into an adjective to mean more than just Asian, African, and Latin American nations nonaligned with either the West or the Soviet bloc.

Rather, the current modifier “Third World” has come to transcend geography, politics, and ethnicity. It simply denotes poor failed states all over the globe of all races and religions.

Third World symptomologies are predictably corrupt government, unequal or nonexistent applicability of the law, two rather than three classes, and the return of medieval diseases. Third World nations suffer from high taxes and poor social services, premodern infrastructure and utilities, poor transportation, tribalism, gangs, and lack of security.

Another chief characteristic of a Third World society is the official denial of all of the above, and a vindictive, almost hysterical state response to anyone who points out those obvious tragedies. Another is massive out-migration. Residents prefer almost any country other than their own. Think Somalia, Venezuela, Cuba, Libya, or Guatemala.

Does 21st-century California increasingly fit that definition — despite having the nation’s most amenable climate and most beautiful and diverse geography, with major natural ports facing the dynamic Asian economies, and being naturally rich in timber, agriculture, mining, and energy, and blessed with a prior century’s inheritance of effective local and state government?…

…If someone predicted half a century ago that a Los Angeles police station or indeed L.A. City Hall would be in danger of periodic, flea-borne infectious typhus outbreaks, he would have been considered unhinged. After all, the city that gave us the modern freeway system is not supposed to resemble Justinian’s sixth-century Constantinople. Yet typhus, along with outbreaks of infectious hepatitis A, are in the news on California streets. The sidewalks of the state’s major cities are homes to piles of used needles, feces, and refuse. Hygienists warn that permissive municipal governments are setting the stage — through spiking populations of history’s banes of fleas, lice, and rats — for possible dark-age outbreaks of plague or worse.

High tech does its part not to clean the streets but to create defecation apps that electronically warn tourists and hoi polloi how to avoid walking blindly into piles of sidewalk excrement. In Californian logic, public defecation butts up against progressive tolerance, so it is exempt from the law. Yet for a suburbanite to build a patio without a permit, for example, costs one dearly in fines. Indeed, a new patio without a permit can be deemed more dangerous to the public health than piles of excrement in the public workplace.

One out of three Californians who enters a hospital for any cause is now found to be suffering from either diabetes or pre-diabetes, an epidemic that hits the Hispanic community especially hard but for a variety of reasons has not led to effective public-health efforts and sufficient publicity. State-run dialysis clinics now dot the towns and communities of the Central Valley — a tragic symptom of dietary culture, massive illegal immigration, and poor public-health education…”

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Choice quotes from Free Enterprise Project (FEP) Director Justin Danhof, Esq.:

“…Why is this woke company so afraid of viewpoint diversity? When I filed a shareholder proposal asking the company to consider the idea of expanding viewpoint diversity on the board, the company scoffed.

In April, Google ended its AI advisory board before it even got off the ground because a few close-minded Googlers objected to the inclusion of Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles James on the project. This outrage mob called James so many words that I’m not going to say in this public forum.

Regarding her experience with Google, James wrote this: “In 1961, at age 12, I was one of two-dozen black children who integrated an all-white junior high school in Richmond. White parents jeered me outside the school, and inside, their kids stuck me with pins, shoved me in the halls and pushed me down the stairs. So when the group of Google employees resorted to calling names and making false accusations because they didn’t want a conservative voice advising the company, the hostility was reminiscent of what I felt back then — that same intolerance for someone who was different from them.”…

…Shame on Google and every single person involved in ending the A.I. board and giving in to this mob…

…The company’s intolerance is staggering. From working with the racist, bigoted and discredited Southern Poverty Law Center…

…OK, my question is for Mr. Pichai then. Will you commit today to a course correction at this company and start promoting actual viewpoint diversity? Perhaps you could establish a public policy advisory board that includes folks such as Ms. James to help the company actually become tolerant and inclusive…”

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THIN SKIN: CNN Cuts from Trump Rally After Crowd Chants ‘CNN Sucks!’