It’s A Story Pretty Gory For A Nursery Rhyme! Tabs, Tues., Sept. 26, 2023
It’s A Story Pretty Gory For A Nursery Rhyme! Tabs, Tues., Sept. 26, 2023
Come and get your Tabs!
I already used up my weekly allotment of Dreamgirls references so let’s just say indicted, corrupt Sen. Bob Menendez has made it clear that he’s not leaving. (Washington Post)
Cory Booker should probably demand that his fellow senator from New Jersey resign and quickly. (USA Today)
Menendez hasn’t explained the gold bars they found in his house but he did offer some hilarious explanations for all that cash he was stockpiling like a common gangster. Charles P. Pierce has some fun with him. (Esquire)
Far-right Washington Republican Joe Kent is back and wants to defund the FBI. (The Daily Beast)
Sam Bankman-Fried “trying not to freak out too much” over all those fraud allegations. Maybe he should freak out a little. (The New Yorker)
Felt like giving a shout out to my talented friend Sara. (Substack)
Maybe there’s hope for a private national rail system. (NPR)
Social media really does turn teenage minds into jelly, and you should see what it does to adults. (New York Times)
Kyrsten Sinema of the Sinema Party thinks she can win re-election with “10% to 20% of Democrats, 60% to 70% of independents and 25% to 35% of Republicans.” Yeah, those are crackpipe numbers. (NBC News)
Two Republican mega donors have funded Texas’ recent extreme-right shift. (CNN)
There’s gold in them there anti-vaccine hills. (Politico)
Can Los Angeles turn a crappy freeway into a lovely public park with affordable housing? (LA Times)
Caltrans built a three-mile stretch from the 405 Freeway to the edge of Marina del Rey. But community opposition in the 1960s scuttled the full freeway. Over the years, it went by many names: the Slauson Freeway, the Richard M. Nixon Freeway and, as Johnny Carson once mocked it, the Slauson Cutoff.
No, seriously, that line used to get big laughs on “The Tonight Show.”
Sixty is not the new 40. It’s just a more visible 60, especially for women. (Also LA Times)
A great deep dive into why so many Black folks (myself included) love movies by and about Italian-Americans, despite all the racism. (Vanity Fair)
I review the new Jesse L. Martin series, “The Irrational.” (Primetimer)
Hold my calls this November.
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Catch SER on his podcast, The Play Typer Guy.
Do you remember Body on Tap shampoo? Its tv ad is your hed gif source, via Bionic Disco: https://open.substack.com/pub/martiniambassador/p/body-on-tap-shampoo
A bit more on the Menendez soap opera: https://www.insidernj.com/kim-running-us-senate/
Kim is the only declared candidate for Neocon Bob's seat next year, but there are others, the most prominent of whom are Rep. Donald Norcross, the kid bro' of (former?) NJ boss 'King' George Norcross, who moved to Palm Beach, FL to be closer to this BFF Donald Trump. I'm told by those who personally know him he's a nice, if bland, guy, not terribly bright, and pretty much is a proxy vote for his older sibling.
The other is Rep. Josh Gotthiemer, something of a nutcase who's bankrolled by AIPAC, Wall Street investment banks and hedge funds, NYC region real-estate moguls; and is best known for being rabidly anti-progressive, with a special hatred of The Squad: https://theintercept.com/2019/05/08/josh-gottheimer-democrats-yemen/ He's also the Dem. co-chair of the Problem Creators Caucus, a bipartisan group that's one step removed from the GOP's Freidumm Zirkus.
The buzz is the NJ DP bosses are backing Gotthiemer, with the approval of House Minority leader Jeffries, and Senate Majority leader Schumer (who gave us Sinema).