INTERNATIONAL BAGPIPES DAY UPDATES
A Salute to the Bagpipe Greats: AC/DC ... the Dropkick Murphys ... Steve Earle ... and Your Local Friendly Neighborhood Irish Marching Band!
-In a report from Axios - reported on Fox News and super-mediocrity Chris Cillizza, so you know it's true - President Biden's 2024 Presidential campaign has as one of its pillars incessant and personal needling and goading of Ex-President Trump (R-apist) XCI by Biden and surrogates, in the belief that Trump's fragile ego, more fragile personal financial/legal problems and actual cognitive declines will combine in both amping up Trump gaffes and doing so in such an obvious way it may shift some of the BIDEN B OLD storylines the political media have been so enamored with so far this season. If yesterday's campaign appearance by Trump in party leader Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (Z-Q-R, GA) district yesterday was any indication, the strategy is already bearing fruit, barely 48 hours after Biden's boffo State of the Union address.
-Right from the start, Trump decided the best way to attack Biden's stirring rhetoric was to try to taunt Biden by saying Biden "wanted to bring the country t-t-t-t-ogether!," again mocking Biden's lifelong stutter - one of Trump's go-to rhetorical devices. From there, Trump spent the speech with another in a series of literal slurring and firing, ranging from his BFF ("Vladimir Pote-in") to trying to give "Come ply mints" to someone in the crowd, to bemoaning the nation we have "be-crumb," to projecting and claiming Biden has turned the country into "a pile of shift" (or possibly "Schiff," referring to Democratic Senate nominee Adam Schiff?).
-Don't worry, Trump also continued in saying things people could decipher but were sorry they could, such as counterattacking Biden's point that Trump killed a bipartisan immigration bill because the idea immigrants had "dreams" to make better lives was a "fairy tale" because immigrants are "monsters," charging that people "in our country" that aren't Trump suporters are "more dangerous" than Putin and his ilk, holding up the aforementioned Greene as the kind of leader America needs more of, and blowing off Nikki Haley voters because "we don't need them!"
-Trump is diversifying the list of autocrats he wants to model himself after if he were to regain power in 2025, though. In addition to Putin and Kim Jong Un and Xi Jingping, add the name Viktor Orban to the list. The Hungarian strong man - ally to Putin and the man whose manipulation of an elected democracy into an autocratic state under his control is one Trump and fellow MAGA 'thinker' human canker sore Steve Bannon admire, was welcomed to a quasi-official dinner at the Mar-a-Lago compound that was so quasi-official Trump's quasi-wife Melania made a live appearance at it. Orban also met with a number of MAGAt Congresspeople to ask them to continue their opposition to aid to Ukraine to further assist the ur-autocrat they all look up to, Vladimir Putin.
-Aside: FK THAT - SLAVA UKRAINI! (And someone needs to talk to the Pope, who for some reason decided to butt into the Ukraine conflict by claiming Ukraine was losing and beseeching the country to surrender in the name of 'peace.' The Pope has been in and out of hospitals a number of times recently, so hopefully that's why he's saying that crap.)
-Back to the US, where the heaping of scorn on AL Sen. Katie Britt for her sub-community theatre performance continues to pile on. Noting that her chirpy breathy voice was clearly an affectation (one that Christian wives apparently are very adept at using), one of the central pillars of her speech was exposed as a flat-out lie: Britt's claim of a sex trafficked immigrant being raped while she was a child and clearly implying it happened under Biden's watch was exposed by the London Guardian as being a story about an incident that happened in Mexico in 2004 when George W. Bush was the President. The story, which amazingly was caught by writers of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE in their inevitable skewering of Britt by the well-cast if stunt-casted Scarlett Johnasson, was admitted to by people in Britt's office that indeed, the incidents did not happen while Biden was President - horrific as they obviously are. (Not to mention Britt trying to lie about Biden while supporting her party's nominee who is a well-known sexual assaulter.)
-On the immigration front, in an interview with Johnathan Capehart yesterday, Biden apologized for using the term "illegal" in describing immigrants as part of that State of the Union speech, saying he "deeply regretted" the use of the term. He also expanded on a 'hot mike' moment with Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) in which Biden told Bennet he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that "(Bibi) and I are going to have a 'come to Jesus' meeting" about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza as a result of Netanyahu's war on HAMAS. Biden referred to the Gaza crisis in the State of the Union hours after announcing American forces would essentially try to create a floating pier to get more humanitarian aid to Palestinians caught in the literal crossfire, and using the 31,000 fatality figure for the war that is closer to the Palestinian number than the Israeli number. Biden also told Capehart, however, that he will not disarm Israel, which is a demand many activists are pushing Biden and the U.S. towards as fighting continues.
-The primary season rolls on, and with it the inevitable end of certain campaigns. On the Democratic side, two such campaigns ended in strikingly different ways for strikingly different reasons. On one side, the somewhat sad campaign of Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips made good on his promise to end his campaign after Super Tuesday if he was going to lose - and while that seemed to be REALLY obvious, he conceded in a deeply gracious speech in which he endorsed Biden and told the story of Biden visiting his home in 2011, speaking to both his daughers and the catering staff with "decency and wisdom" and "ice cream - surprise surprise!" (and leading the erstwhile No Labels campaign careening to find SOMEone to campaign under their umbrella).
-On the other side, admirers and supporters of CA Rep. Katie Porter continue to reel in shock and disappointment after Porter finished third behind Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff and empty-suit Republican Steve Garvey for the runoff to fill the Senate seat previously held by Dianne Feinstein. Angered at being massively outspent (and by the Schiff campaign's push to get Garvey into the top two on the belief he would be a far easier opponent to defeat), Porter lashed out at that spending, doing so by using the Republican term and calling the results "rigged" against her. As the first wave of criticism hit, her clarification - that she was not attacking the vote counters and local officials or disputing the actual results of the primary - the criticism has not dissipated, primarily because as of this writing Porter has also ripped a page from the MAGA playbook and not yet conceded to Schiff. The three-term House rep, who opted for the Senate campaign after redistricting made her seat harder to hold, may have burned many bridges who saw her straightforward approach to complex economic problems - often accompanied with a white board - a welcome and needed voice. Hopefully she will make things right soon.
-It's Oscar Night! Betting houses are seeing a big night for OPPENHEIMER tonight, as well as a a potential very-late-breaking scandal (like yesterday afternoon) in which screenwriter Simon Stephenson (LUCA, PADDINGTON 2) has accused David Hemingson of "line-for-line" plagiarizing of Stephenson's script of his movie FRISCO into the Oscar-nominated (and favored) original screenplay THE HOLDOVERS. (There has been no comment from Hemingson, HOLDOVERS director Alexander Payne, or their representatives). Look for tension at the starting-an-hour-early show tonight, with Jimmy Kimmel at the head mike.
-Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the ledger, the Razzie Awards were given for the worst that was shown on screens this year. The ... uh ... 'winners' were Jon Voight for Worst Actor for a movie called MERCY (did you even know he was in a movie this year?!), Sylvester Stallone for Worst Supporting Actor for THE EXPEND4BLES (the fourth EXPENDABLES movie - Get It? GET IT!?!?!), a double nod (or is that head shake?) for Megan Fox as Worst Actress (for JOHNNY & CLYDE) and Worst Supporting Actress (THE EXPEND4BLES again) and, the Worst Movie of 2024 ... WINNIE-THE-POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY, a quickie slasher movie that took 'advantage' of the beloved childhood character becoming part of the public domain in a stinking pile of video code. Hooray for ... Hollywood?
-Anyhoo ...
-On this date in 1864, Ulysses S. Grant became the official Commander of the U.S. Army. On this date in 1933, the Nazi Regime opened its first concentration camp in Dachau. On this date in 1969, James Earl Ray pled guilty to assassinating Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
-Notable firsts on this date: telephone communication ("Watson, come here! I need you!", 1876), the first recorded 300 game of bowling (1913), The Book-of-the-Month Club (1926), live opera on the radio (1940), BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (TV series, 1997).
-Happy Birthday to Barry Fitzgerald, Sam Jaffe, Bix Beiderbecke, Heywood Hale Broun, Pat Patrick, Chuck Norris, David Rabe, Dean Torrence, Curley Culp, Tom Scholz, Austin Carr, Paul Haggis, Shannon Tweed, Sharon Stone, Mitch Gaylord, Pam Oliver, Gary Clark, Rick Rubin, Jasmine Guy, Jeff Ament, John Cangelosi, Neneh Cherry, Edie Brickell, Paget Brewster, Jon Hamm, Matt Kenseth, Timbaland, JB Bickerstaff, Danny Pudi, Carrie Underwood, Olivia Wilde, Ivan Rakitic, Emily Osment, Bad Bunny, Zach LaVine, and Justin Herbert.
-Rest in Peace/Rest in Power to Harriet Tubman, Dr. Herman Tarnower, Kostantin Chernenko, Ray Milland, Andy Gibb, Dr. David Gunn, Lloyd Bridges, Ernie Ladd, Richard Jeni, Corey Haim, Joe McGinniss, Keith Emerson, Joni Sledge, Robert James Waller, Hubert de Givenchy, Joe Tait, and Jesus Alou.
-Feed the Worms: the aforementioned James Earl Ray, corrupt soccer official Sepp Blatter, hack 'columnist' scuzzball Bob Greene, uber-evil-incarnate Osama Bin Laden, and Baltimore Ratbird ratbird Rod Woodson entered Earth on this date. Segregationist punk "Bull" Connor bought it on this date.
-Singer and accused plagiarist Robin Thicke's birthday is today. You decide if he gets a Happy Birthday or if he Feeds the Worms.
-The Number One Nonfiction Book in America on this date ... in 2024, BLOOD MONEY by Peter Schweizer ... in 2014, THE MONUMENTS MEN by Robert M. Edsel with Bret Witter ... in 2004, DELIVER US FROM EVIL by (blech) Sean Hannity ... in 1994, EMBRACED BY THE LIGHT by Betty J. Eadle with Curtis Taylor ... in 1984, MAYOR by Edward I. Koch with William Rauch ... and in 1974, PLAIN SPEAKING by Merle Miller.