Tuesday it Rains, and other Observations

Knee pain persists but is minimal. We got to the gym yesterday for a weightlifting session. 

We are in the midst of nor'easter here in New Jersey. Lots of rain. We still haven't given the yard the last autumn mowing, damnit. 

Hmmm, we're getting some traffic from the Netherlands. Have we finally gotten some traction in the families' ancestral homeland? [Your nephew discovered you're Krauts-Ed]. Whatever.  Amazon reports no Netherlands sales. So bizarre. Why don't you guys leave a comment here or look us up on FB or Gab?

We wrote yesterday that we're thinking of showing the Australian/Japanese strike* from USS Long Beach's CiC. We've always liked events being conveyed through radio back and forth. This method also allows us to differentiate between strikes. It's also an out from doing a lot of fancy F-111 technical details. USS George Washington and her battlegroup will be joining in. 

As we suspected, Governor Murphy plans to impose vaccine mandates after the election. Project Veritas has the hidden camera footage. James O'Keefe promises more. This blog endorses Jack. Both Maryland and Massachusetts have Republican governors, and New Jersey had Chris Christie just four short years ago. Jack's a good candidate but his ideas aren't great for New Jersey and we think circumstances are a draw.  A Jack victory is not impossible. But this blog remains skeptical. 

We began re-watching Dune last night. Denis Villeneuve's Dune is a visual extravaganza that invokes a lot of science fiction mythology. We can't quite place it, but we know we've seen some of these visuals before in sci-fi art, book covers and magazines. Villeneuve's camera moves slowly across the desert, Caladan... This gives the film a sweeping, epic feel without being pretentious. In fact the visual style is grand but shows rather simple scenes, a spaceship or a bit of brutalist architecture, another important part of the film's visual feel. The background is enormous, threatening to swallow the humans on screen. 

That's a lot of critical gobbledygook for we like what we saw. 

We mentioned before this debate between Libertarian radio guy Scott Horton and Neocon carb guzzler William Kristol. We found Irving Kristol's son as insufferable as ever. He actually said the US didn't do as much as we could have in the 'Arab Spring'. Kristol has the hots for Assad. There's a reason why he, Wolfowitz, etc etc get more and more sinister in the World War 1990 series. But we were surprised to see Horton was a bore as well. His points came down to 'US foreign policy bad' and blamed us for millions of deaths. Horton was better than Kristol, but that's no mean feat. That said we enjoyed his total (and appropriate) contempt for the Neocon. 

*Targets are the SS-11 base at Svobodny and their nearby bomber base an Unkranka. 

Kyle Jurek, Bernie Bro Extraordinaire

BREAKING: #Expose2020 - PART 1: @BernieSanders 2020 Field Organizer States “F***ing Cities Will Burn” if @realDonaldTrump Wins Re-Election; Calls for Violence, Mass Murder of Opposition, and “Reign of Terror”

FULL RELEASE: https://t.co/vKLMtR6ENFpic.twitter.com/qIAK31N2Ba

— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 14, 2020

Nothing like talking violent revolution over Coronas and Jalapeno Poppers. 

That's Kyle Jurek, Bernie Sanders campaign worker and all around Douche-bag. We're interested to see further biographical details emerge and look forward to being amused by them.

Kyle Jurek is a trash talking blowhard, a real bloomin' onion tough guy, if you will. This being James O'Keefe, reader(s) know more videos of Bernie Bros calling for violent revolution and gulags are on the way.

Exit question: Do you think Kyle Jurek has ever been punched in the face?

Will: The CNN Experience-I work here

We went to work at CNN Inside Politics in February of 1999. The office was/is located just down the street from Union Station. Every morning we'd take the Metro from Alexandria King Street into the District, a nice little half-hour commute, or so. We got a lot of reading done.

Now let's get something strait. We were the office equivalent of a hired hand. Not quite a temp, not quite a permanent employee. What me mean is we weren't being groomed for advancement. We were the guy they hired to do scut-work. We were actually less important than the interns. But we saw a hell of a lot.

So what did we actually do? We Xeroxed, we collated, we gathered data. For a while we entered poll data into their system. We transcribed political ads.

Inside Politics was located in a small office of about a dozen people headed by a producer (director?) named Tom Hannon. Nice guy, very late middle-aged Baby Boomer, if you know the type.

The whiff of Bill Clinton's impeachment still hung in the air. We once remarked on their use of horrible looking photos of Linda Tripp whenever they talked about her on air. We were met with a smirk, 'Yeah, well we don't like her very much,' a young female producer replied. Speaking of:

In CNN's case, the decision to put young people on the air has its roots in the 1992 Presidential election. That was the year Bill Clinton and Ross Perot went beyond the traditional news media to make their pitches directly to a wider audience, using talk radio, Larry King, David Letterman, Jay Leno and MTV. Tom Hannon, CNN's political director, said it was this new dynamic that inspired him to hire young journalists this year.

The office was actually loaded with young female news producers, which we'll get to in another post*.

Everything was geared toward producing that day's edition of Inside Politics. Just as we see in the first of the Project Veritas tapes, the day began with a morning phone call at the main table. That table was covered with editions of the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Washington Times, and the LA Times. Newspaper coverage set the agenda...and away they went.

*Babes of CNN. 

Will: The CNN Experience

James O'Keefe's says Project Veritas is bombing CNN beginning 12 PM today:

Judging by the previews it's at our old workplace at CNN Washington.

Honestly, we're most curious to see how the office has changed.

Though we've done so before, this week we'll go into what we saw during our six months working at CNN Inside Politics.