Firehose #105: Ambitious Crossover Events
Also: Second Sunday 6 PMish (ET), drinks Monday in Pittsburgh!
Tryna knock this Firehose out before Gold Medal Saturday gets too cranked up…. So listen: As paying subscribers know, one of the benefits to the Never Fly Coach tier is that it guarantees you access to our monthly Second Sunday Zoom-call podcasts. HOWEVER, we have also typically though not quite always opened it up to ALL of our paying subscribers … but this can lead to traffic jams, particularly during insane presidential campaign seasons. So I don’t currently know whether this Sunday’s exercise will be NFC-only, or whether we will introduce some token system by which we can ensure that the back of the plane isn’t sneaking in…. BUT! You can pencil in the call for around 6 pm ET, pending traffic on the Scranton road to Pittsburgh. About which more below.
* I don’t usually cross streams, either here or there, but listeners at both locations really seemed to enjoy this week’s Reason Roundtable ambitious crossover event with The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg (veteran of Episode #182) and Kevin Williamson (#44), talking (pre-emptively) about the Dem veep pick, J.D. Vance, Oregon drug legalization, and how the Olympics are awesome. You can watch:
* In the (abbreviated) show notes for #439, Moynihan guesstimated that this was degenerate gambler Steve Kornacki’s fourth appearance on the world’s greatest podcast. In fact, Moynihan was … correct! You can enjoy the Big Sexy of political numbers in #152, #204, and #337. You can see his math on Tim Walz here. And you can watch Leslie Jones hump his leg (metaphorically) here:
* Moar Moynihan: Ol’ Hollywood did some Honestly’ing this week with former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, then hopped on one of those Free Press livestream deals to break down those Walz stories with (among others) The FP’s Rupa Subramanya, Batya Ungar-Sargon (#451), and with Coleman Hughes (#121, #144, #181, #188, #201, #379, #412 & #442). Here’s a clip:
* I know we’re borderline Free Press fanfic at this point, but I cannot stand idly by while Fif fave Eli Lake (#52, #65, #141, #174, Special Dispatch #51, #326, #368, #407, Members Only #184) is given the mic for a solo spin, in a piece titled “Kamala Harris and the Election of Laughter and Forgetting.” From the promo copy: “But in her anointment to the top of the ticket, there’s been a strange and silent rewriting of history by the press and party loyalists with the support of a lot of tech companies, who together are changing our collective understanding of the present and of the very recent past. Eli argues this has happened before. And not in America….”
* Bonus (if that’s the right word) Eli/A.I. musical content:
* Comrade Mike Pesca (#343, #418) this week advertised a great media-criticism piece the correct way: “My friends at The Fifth Column and Politico’s Jack Shafer have been on this ridiculous anti-journalism trend propagated by two prominent journalism professors. It is time to point out that the Margret Sullivan / Jay Rosen news suppression initiative has been a disaster.” Here’s a healthy selection:
Rosen phrases his advocacy of media self-censorship as “Not the odds, but the stakes.” By this he means that election news other than news of how bad Trump will be needs to be suppressed. Rosen has been at this game for a while. He was among the more prominent adherents to the idea that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “bullshit”, and that media suppression of its actual existence and validity wasn’t a black eye, but an example of progress. […]
[Then] came press coverage of Joe Biden’s decline. The attention paid to this fact, which Biden eventually acknowledged, vowing “to pass the torch to a new generation”, was cited by Sullivan and Rosen as yet another example of a distracted media in need of fundamental reform.
One particularly embarrassing column of Sullivan’s was titled “The Media's Circular Logic and Destructive Obsession with Biden's Age; Yes, it's fast becoming the 2024 version of the media's obsession with Hillary's emails”.
Believing the voters to be idiots, Sullivan writes of the coverage of Biden’s cognitive decline: “For the media to make this the overarching issue of the campaign is nothing short of journalistic malpractice.”
That was back in February. Sullivan has been writing versions of this column ever since, producing one as recently as 3 weeks ago. Two weeks later Biden dropped out, because Biden’s age was in fact an “overarching issue of the campaign.” There was no mea culpa. It’s not clear from her writing that Sullivan has even contemplated her error. Of course, when your project is bending the rules of journalism toward a conclusion-first approach, what hope is there for reflection or humility?
* In “100%” agreement with Pesca was Kornacki kompatriot Nate Silver, who was also seen this week over at Just Asking Questions, assessing the current likelihood of a Kamala Harris victory.
* Sometime very soon on C-SPAN you can watch me do another one of those Book TV interviews, once again with Breitbart’s Joel Pollak, author of the new The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days. Here’s a previous Book TV convo I had with Pollak four years ago about his Red November: Will the Country Vote Red for Trump or Red for Socialism?:
* Comment of the Week comes from Mike:
Ok…trying to bring up the enthusiasm for a Pgh meetup. Let’s gooo!! A potential idea below. Hoping fellow Pittsburghers chime in with thoughts:
Standard market and pint house - downtown Pgh. Would only be a Sunday option (closes at 10). Mostly beers and wine (self serving beer wall) + a full service bar, but lots of standing room space.
https://standardpgh.com/
Other options:
Bridges and bourbon - downtown. More of a cocktail place/restaurant. Probably only a good option if the group was very small and/or folks wanted to sit/eat.
https://www.bridgesandbourbonpgh.com/
The Foundry - North Shore (across the river from downtown). Lots of craft beers. Only open until 9pm though Sunday (closed Monday).
https://www.thefoundrypgh.com/
Shorty’s - also north shore. Has some outdoor seating. Open late Sundays and Mondays. https://www.shortysx.com/pins-x-pints/north-shore
Mondays happens be the day when a lot of Pgh places are closed, so not as much variety!
Well, tough luck, since our last-ditch improvised Pittsburgh meetup (w/ me & Nancy R.) is indeed Monday night, so … Shorty’s it is! Maybe 6 p.m.? Get hyped!
Speaking of baseball, walkoff music comes care of alert listener JW:
Don’t Blame Steve brings our Spotify playlist (yes, I said our *plays USSR music extremely loud*) to an exact and even 16 hours. Is that enough time to drive to Chicago? Miami? Is that the amount of time it takes me to get from Queens to the comedy cellar on the F train?
Threat received! Just upgraded to NFC! Got notice that our company is going to be audited by the IRS so why not?? While we can’t write off the scrip as a business expense, I might expense it as healthcare related as you 3 keep us sane. I wish everyone in the country could understand what it is like to run a small business and how much BS busy work the govt bureaucrats add not related to the actual function of our business.