Category: News

Not all of the midterm election results have been finalized, as of this writing, but one thing’s clear: that promised/threatened “red wave” that would make the GOP the sworn enemy of President Joe Biden never happened. Among the disappointments were scores of Trump-picked candidates either underperforming or bombing. It was so bad that by the next day there were already prominent Republican rags calling on the GOP to dump Trump.

Let’s start with The Washington Examiner (as caught by Mediaite), who, in a piece attributed to the paper at large, argued that the problem were candidates like Dr. Oz, Kari Lake, Blake Masters, and Herschel Walker, all fêted by Trump:

This is his fault. Without Trump to run against, Biden and the Democrats would probably have been roundly rebuked by voters. According to the exit poll — the same one that showed 74% of voters either “dissatisfied” or “angry” about the direction of the country — the only person more disliked than Biden was Trump.

As such, it was time for the GOP to release the guy who’s commandeered their party for the last six, incredibly long years. “These midterm elections have made it crystal clear that voters want to move past the chaos and dishonor of the 45th president,” they wrote. “They want the security and sanity that a competent and effective leader can provide. The Republican Party needs to recognize that, too, and act accordingly.”

The National Review (as per Raw Story) was even more blunt. “It’s time for Donald Trump to go,” wrote Charles C. Cooke. After Tuesday night’s “profoundly disappointing midterm-election result,” Cooke argued, Republican voters should tell “the Republican establishment to pound sand.” He also railed against the Trump wing of the party’s “frivolous, low-energy, old-boys-club complacency,” and called Trump’s attacks on Florida governor Ron DeSantis “classic establishment gate-keeping.”

But Cooke held the most ire for the big guy himself. “Trump is a loser. He squeaked past the most unpopular woman in America in 2016, he presided over a blue wave in 2018, he lost to a barely breathing Joe Biden in 2020, and he hand-picked a bevy of losing Republican nominees in 2022.”

Instead, Cooke charged that Republicans should turn to DeSantis, who won big in his re-election bid: “He beat the Democratic wave in 2018, he got the biggest challenge of the last four years — the Covid-19 pandemic — almost exactly right, and he won reelection by the largest margin achieved by any Republican gubernatorial nominee in Florida’s 177-year-history.”

Is this the end of the guy who gave the GOP such classics as the orb, the McDonald’s spread, and the attempted overthrow of democracy? Maybe, maybe not. After all, Teflon Don has weaseled out of trouble before.

(Via Mediaite and Raw Story)

It’s been nearly two years since the Jan. 6 riot, and Mike Pence has been pretty quiet about it. When he’s spoken about it, he’s been clear not to drag the man who helped start it: Donald Trump. He’s even defended him, despite Trump suggesting he deserved what he almost got. It’s all been a bit odd; after all, he was nearly killed by Trump’s amped-up supporters. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed in which Pence opened up about that fateful day. And who did he appear to blame? The Lincoln Project, of course.

The former vice president spent part of his piece detailing the events leading up to the Capitol riot, and he singled out December 5, a month after the 2020 election, as a turning point. For one thing, that was when he first heard Trump vow to challenge the results. For another, it’s when the band of anti-Trump Republicans put out another of their attacks:

An irresponsible TV ad by a group calling itself the Lincoln Project suggested that when I presided over the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress to count the electoral votes, it would prove that I knew “it’s over,” and that by doing my constitutional duty, I would be “putting the final nail in the coffin” of the president’s re-election. To my knowledge, it was the first time anyone implied I might be able to change the outcome. It was designed to annoy the president. It worked. During a December cabinet meeting, President Trump told me the ad “looked bad for you.” I replied that it wasn’t true: I had fully supported the legal challenges to the election and would continue to do so.

Is Pence suggesting that Trump wouldn’t have happened upon the (erroneous) idea that Pence could simply overturn an election had it not been for Trump critics? Sure seems like it. His entire op-ed goes out of its way to blame everyone but Trump for what happened. Elsewhere, he lays into John Eastman, architect of the byzantine plot that Pence refused to carry out (thanks, improbably, in part to Dan Quayle). On January 5, Pence recalls, the following happened;

The president’s lawyers, including Mr. Eastman, were now requesting that I simply reject the electors. I later learned that Mr. Eastman had conceded to my general counsel that rejecting electoral votes was a bad idea and any attempt to do so would be quickly overturned by a unanimous Supreme Court. This guy didn’t even believe what he was telling the president.

Pence also tries to explain away one of the more chilling unexplained episodes of the day: when he refused to get into a secret service car that would ferry him to safety:

I told my detail that I wasn’t leaving my post. Mr. Giebels pleaded for us to leave. The rioters had reached our floor. I pointed my finger at his chest and said, “You’re not hearing me, I’m not leaving! I’m not giving those people the sight of a 16-car motorcade speeding away from the Capitol.”

Pence met with Trump at least two more times after Jan. 6, and paints a picture of him as remorseful, speaking with “genuine sadness” about what had occurred. They even chatted in person on Jan. 14, the day after Trump was impeached for a second time. Pence claims he said a strange thing to him. As Pence stood to leave, Trump told him, “It’s been fun.”

And to think, none of this would have happened without a satirical anti-Trump ad.

(Via WSJ)

Because fate hates everyone, it decided that the most talented late-night host of all time should also be done the dirtiest. Yet long before his ascension to the big desk at The Tonight Show, Conan O’Brien took over for David Letterman’s old digs hosting Late Night With Conan O’Brien. It’s the show that most fans grew to love him in, but it was a rocky start in the apparently high stakes of past-midnight chat programming.

Near its launch, Washington Post critic Tom Shales wrote a scathing takedown of the show, aiming most of the vitriol at “fidgety marionette” O’Brien, only being charitable enough to say he should be the head writer but not the star. On his latest appearance on Howard Stern‘s show, O’Brien detailed how Charlie Rose read the review during their interview for some reason and the embarrassment was enough to make him lie down under his office desk for some alone time before getting back into the groove.

“From underneath the desk, I said ‘I’m fine, I just need to lie here under the desk for a while. I’ll start having meetings in ten minutes.’ That, to me, is when the needle got to the lowest,” O’Brien said. He followed up the anecdote with wisdom from his father, who told him at the time, “If you can survive this, it’s gonna make the whole story that much better.”

For even more wisdom, O’Brien revealed that Bruce Springsteen and Tom Hanks are two of his all-time favorite guests because they put in the work and were gracious to the entire team. They came early, brought ideas, and learned all the camera operators’ names. Charlie Rose would probably never do such things!

(via Howard Stern)

Pickleball, a sport with absolutely no real food involved despite its name, is getting a major celebrity push in a big way thanks to Stephen Colbert. The hybrid sport is gaining in popularity across the country, and later this month CBS viewers will get the chance to see celebrities take the court and play a bit of pickleball themselves.

The full list of pickleball rules is here if you want to get specific, but essentially it’s a combination of tennis and table tennis, played on a modified version of the former’s court. There’s a net, there’s a line you can’t cross without penalty in front of said net. And, importantly, there’s surprisingly expensive and specialized equipment necessary if you want to give it a try.

If that’s too much work, however, you can just watch celebrities play for charity in a two-hour special hosted by Stephen Colbert. Airing on November 17,

As Variety detailed, the two-hour special event will Colbert hosting along with basketball broadcasting legend Bill Raftery and Cari Champion. A pretty impressive list of celebrities are slated to participate as well, including Emma Watson, Sugar Ray Leonard and Will Ferrell among the participants. The latter’s Funny or Die is helping CBS and Colbert make the show a reality, of course, so that makes a lot of sense. And Colbert seems pretty excited to showcase a sport he fell in love with earlier in the year.

“You don’t get to be fully employed in Hollywood unless you are competitive,” Colbert said. “And these people are out for blood at all times.”

The Midterm Elections aren’t quite over yet. As of this writing, there are still a mess of races that have yet to be called. It’s still unclear which party will take control of the House or the Senate. But there was one clear winner in one case: According to IndieWire, Fox News drew the largest number of viewers on Tuesday night. But that only means a lot of Republicans tuned in to watch that much-promised “red wave” never materialize.

Here’s the breakdown, as per IndieWire:

Fox News drew an average of 7.170 million total viewers last night across primetime (8 p.m. to 11 p.m.), according to early Nielsen numbers, more than doubling its closest competitor, MSNBC (3.102 million). NBC proper was nipping at the heels of NBCUniversal’s cable news channel, with an average of 3.096 million viewers. ABC News coverage was not that far behind with 3.030 million viewers. Bringing up the rear was another tight race, this one between CBS News (2.504 million viewers) and CNN (2.476 million).

Fox News famously draws an older crowd, but even amongst adults 25 to 54, they crushed it, averaging 1.78 million in that demographic. Even Fox Business did comparatively well, averaging 598,000 viewers, 214,000 of those from the 25-54 demo, which helped them beat CNBC.

Again, what did they wind up watching? Well, they got to watch in horror as one Trump-picked candidate after another had their butts handed to them. They got to see the attention-nabbing race between Dr. Mehmet Oz and John Fetterman end with the former trailing hilariously behind the latter. They got to watch Doug Mastriano, the extremist MAGA candidate running for governor of Pennsylvania, crash and burn. They even got to watch Lauren Boebert come up short (in a race that hasn’t yet officially been called). And they got to watch scores of Fox News talking heads looking increasingly verklempt.

But hey, they could have been watching Mike Lindell’s “real-time crime” streaming nonsense succumb to one technical snafu after another, which might have been more entertaining television.

(Via IndieWire)

The United States men’s national team’s 26-man roster for the World Cup in Qatar is finally here. On Wednesday afternoon, U.S. Soccer held an event in Brooklyn to unveil the players that will be tasked with wearing the red, white, and blue on the sport’s biggest stage for the first time since 2014.

There were a few surprises, but for the most part, things played out the way that USMNT fans would expect. Here’s the list of players who are headed to the World Cup:

GK: Ethan Horvath, Sean Johnson Matt Turner
DEF: Cameron Carter-Vickers, Sergiño Dest, Aaron Long, Shaq Moore, Tim Ream, Antonee Robinson, Joe Scally, DeAndre Yedlin, Walker Zimmerman
MID: Brenden Aaronson, Kellyn Acosta, Tyler Adams, Luca de la Torre, Weston McKennie, Yunus Musah, Cristian Roldan
FW: Jesús Ferreira, Jordan Morris, Christian Pulisic, Gio Reyna, Josh Sargent, Tim Weah, Haji Wright

Arguably he biggest surprise comes in goal, where Berhalter’s preferred option for his entire tenure, Zack Steffen, missed out on the squad altogether. On recent form, this makes sense — Steffen has struggled for consistent playing time for years due to his role as a backup at Manchester City, while his recent move to Middlesbrough in search of time has been up-and-down. In the face of all that, Berhalter has rode with him, but Roger Gonzalez of CBS Sports reported on Tuesday that Steffen would stay home.

This clears a path for Turner, the best shot-stopping option in the player pool, to get the No. 1 shirt in Qatar. It seems a foregone conclusion that he will play every meaningful minute in the World Cup. Johnson is a steady hand from NYCFC of MLS, while Horvath, the hero in the Americans’ Nations League triumph over Mexico last year, rounds out the trio.

The defense is largely to be expected. Berhalter’s two preferred choices next to Walker Zimmerman in central defense, Miles Robinson and Chris Richards, are out due to injuries, so the second spot in the back will come from someone in the Carter-Vickers, Long, and Ream trio. Dest and Robinson are believed to be the first-choice options at fullback, Yedlin is a veteran option, Scally has impressed in Germany this year, and if there is a surprise, it is Moore — Zimmerman’s teammate in Nashville — getting the nod over another Berhalter favorite, Reggie Cannon.

A pair of midfield options, de la Torre and McKennie, have been dealing with injuries, but neither were expected to miss out on a roster spot assuming they would be healthy in time. As such, the presumed starting midfield — McKennie, Musah, Adams — is in tact, while Aaronson’s been a top player for Leeds United this year. Acosta comes off of an MLS Cup win with LAFC, while Roldan is another Berhalter favorite whose ability to play in the midfield or on the wing is valued.

The other big surprise comes in the forward pool, where Haji Wright, who has played twice for the national team under Berhalter and converted a penalty in his last appearance, gets the nod over options like Jordan Pefok and, more notably, Ricardo Pepi. The latter’s exclusion seems to clear the way for Ferreira or Sargent to be the first-choice option in Qatar. Beyond him, the Americans have their three dangerous options in Pulisic, Reyna, and Weah all on the roster, while Morris is the veteran in the group.

The Americans will kick off their time in Qatar on Nov. 21 against Wales, have a showdown with England on Nov. 25, and end group play on Nov. 29 against Iran. All of their games kick off at 2 p.m. EST.

From concerts to festivals to parades, people love to gather together in shared experiences. Crowds, however, can go from “Oh, there’s lots of people here” to a dangerous or even deadly situation without much warning.

The world was shocked and saddened by the news of a Halloween festival crowd crush that killed more than 150 people in South Korea, with officials left debating what safety measures could have prevented such a tragedy. The risk of a deadly surge is always present in high-density crowds, so it’s good to know what individuals can do to protect themselves if they find themselves trapped in a wave of people.

Crowd safety expert Paul Wertheimer started going to rock concerts and diving into mosh pits in his 40s, not because he was into Slayer or Metallica or Pantera, but because he wanted to analyze crowd behavior through firsthand experience. He’s now been studying crowds for three decades and has sage advice for what to do if you find yourself in a crowd crush situation.

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The first thing to do, he says, is to create an exit strategy right off the bat. Look for exit signs and listen to your instincts. The time to leave a crowd is when you first start to feel uncomfortable, not once a crowd starts to surge.

Once you’re pinned into a crowd crush, it can be nearly impossible to get out. The pressure from being surrounded by bodies pressing into you can be thousands of pounds, which is what leads people to suffocate. People often mistakenly think crowd crushes become deadly due to people being trampled, but that’s not usually the case. Trampling generally happens in a stampede, in which people panic and run over one another, but in a stampede, there’s actually room to move. In a crowd crush, people get jammed so tightly together there’s no space to move individually at all.

Both stampedes and crowd crushes can be deadly, and Wertheimer shared tips for surviving both with ABC News after a scare at a Washington, D.C., Pride parade in 2019. Using a Mardi Gras crowd as a “for instance,” Wertheimer walked Matt Gutman and students from Loyola University New Orleans through changing their body position when stuck in a crowd to stay safer.

“Trust your Spidey sense” is pretty much always good advice. Most people don’t anticipate being trapped in a crowd surge, but it’s a real risk in any high-density crowd situation. If you haven’t managed to get out in time and you find yourself squashed into a human river unable to escape, try to protect your lungs and heart by holding your arms in front of you. If a crowd is tight enough, your arms may not be enough to protect you, but doing this will give you a fighting chance.

Concerts and festivals can be a lot of fun for a lot of people. Knowing how to spot crowd trouble and what to do if a surge happens can help you enjoy those collective experiences with fellow humans more safely.

This article originally appeared on 09.22.16

Imagine you’re working at a school and one of the kids is starting to act up. What do you do?

Traditionally, the answer would be to give the unruly kid detention or suspension.

But in my memory, detention tended to involve staring at walls, bored out of my mind, trying to either surreptitiously talk to the kids around me without getting caught or trying to read a book. If it was designed to make me think about my actions, it didn’t really work. It just made everything feel stupid and unfair.

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But Robert W. Coleman Elementary School has been doing something different when students act out: offering meditation.

Photo from Holistic Life Foundation, used with permission.

Instead of punishing disruptive kids or sending them to the principal’s office, the Baltimore school has something called the Mindful Moment Room instead.

The room looks nothing like your standard windowless detention room. Instead, it’s filled with lamps, decorations, and plush purple pillows. Misbehaving kids are encouraged to sit in the room and go through practices like breathing or meditation, helping them calm down and re-center. They are also asked to talk through what happened.

Meditation and mindfulness are pretty interesting, scientifically.

Mindful meditation has been around in some form or another for thousands of years. Recently, though, science has started looking at its effects on our minds and bodies, and it’s finding some interesting effects.

One study, for example, suggested that mindful meditation could give practicing soldiers a kind of mental armor against disruptive emotions, and it can improve memory too. Another suggested mindful meditation could improve a person’s attention span and focus.

Individual studies should be taken with a grain of salt (results don’t always carry in every single situation), but overall, science is starting to build up a really interesting picture of how awesome meditation can be. Mindfulness in particular has even become part of certain fairly successful psychotherapies.

Back at the school, the Mindful Moment Room isn’t the only way Robert W. Coleman Elementary has been encouraging its kids.

The meditation room was created as a partnership with the Holistic Life Foundation, a local nonprofit that runs other programs as well. For more than 10 years the foundation has been offering the after-school program Holistic Me, where kids from pre-K through the fifth grade practice mindfulness exercises and yoga.

“It’s amazing,” said Kirk Philips, the Holistic Me coordinator at Robert W. Coleman. “You wouldn’t think that little kids would meditate in silence. And they do.”

There was a Christmas party, for example, where the kids knew they were going to get presents but were still expected to do meditation first.”As a little kid, that’s got to be hard to sit down and meditate when you know you’re about to get a bag of gifts, and they did it! It was beautiful, we were all smiling at each other watching them,” said Philips.

The kids may even be bringing that mindfulness back home with them. In the August 2016 issue of Oprah Magazine, Holistic Life Foundation co-founder Andres Gonzalez said: “We’ve had parents tell us, ‘I came home the other day stressed out, and my daughter said, “Hey, Mom, you need to sit down. I need to teach you how to breathe.'”

The program also helps mentor and tutor the kids, as well as teach them about the environment.

They help clean up local parks, build gardens, and visit nearby farms. Philips said they even teach kids to be co-teachers, letting them run the yoga sessions.

This isn’t just happening at one school, either. Lots of schools are trying this kind of holistic thinking, and it’s producing incredible results.

In the U.K., for example, the Mindfulness in Schools Project is teaching adults how to set up programs. Mindful Schools, another nonprofit, is helping to set up similar programs in the United States.

Oh, and by the way, the schools are seeing a tangible benefit from this program, too.

Philips said that at Robert W. Coleman Elementary, there have been exactly zero suspensions last year and so far this year. Meanwhile, nearby Patterson Park High School, which also uses the mindfulness programs, said suspension rates dropped and attendance increased as well.

Is that wholly from the mindfulness practices? It’s impossible to say, but those are pretty remarkable numbers, all the same.

This article originally appeared on 02.02.19

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.” ― Robert Hughes

Great artists tend to live life swimming in a vast ocean of self-doubt. It’s that special blend of insecurity and perfectionism that fuels their desire to hone their craft and get better with each piece.

But that self-doubt can also be paralyzing and prevent potential artists from picking up the pen, paintbrush or guitar.

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To encourage his mother to stick with her art, Reddit user Gaddafo shared a picture of his mother, Cindi Decker, a school teacher from Florida, holding a lovely painting she made of an egret.

“My mom painted this and said no one would like it. It’s her 2nd painting,” he wrote.

Then Reddit user Cacahahadoodoo asked the forum to take the post a step further. “Someone paint the photo of his mom holding her painting and repost it with the same title for extra extra karma,” they wrote.

Karma is a reward earned for posting popular content on the online forum.

Reddit user u/k__z jumped on the task and painted a picture of Decker holding her painting.

Then lillyofthenight took things a step further by painting a picture of herself holding a painting of u/k__z holding his painting of Decker holding her painting of an egret.

“Took a while and not perfect, but I painted the guy who painted the other guy’s mom,” she wrote.

Then seamusywray stepped in with his contribution and things started to get freaky. “I painted the girl who painted the guy who painted the other guy’s mom who painted an egret,” he wrote.

This kicked off a chain reaction that’s come to be known “paintception.”

To keep things from getting too confusing, another Redditor created an interactive tree to show how they paintings relate to one another.

Decker was shocked by the chain reaction and couldn’t believe she inspired so many people to paint.

“Even though people say, ‘You inspired me to paint,’ I don’t know that it was so much me. I really give credit to the first artist who painted,” she told the CBC. “You know, I’m not a painter. I’m just somebody who went out and did a little painting thing, so I got lucky to get caught up in all this fun craziness.”

The question is: will the craziness ever end?

This article originally appeared on 03.07.16

A childhood game can go very wrong in the blink of an eye.

“You’ll never get me!”

“Freeze! Put your hands up.”

If you’ve ever played cops and robbers, you know how the game goes.

John Arthur Greene was 8 and he was playing that game with his older brother Kevin. Only the two brothers played with real guns. Living on a farm, they were both old hands at handling firearms by their ages.

The blast from the gun must have startled them both.

John Arthur Greene (left) and his brother Kevin. Image from “American Idol”/YouTube.

“We were always extremely safe. They were never loaded,” John said.

Except this time it was. And John’s brother died in his arms while he watched.

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It happens more often than you would ever want to imagine.

In federal data from 2007 to 2011, which is likely under-reported, an average of 62 children were accidentally killed by firearms per year.

Here’s a chilling example from Everytown for Gun Safety:

“In Asheboro, North Carolina, a 26-year-old mother was cleaning her home when she heard a gunshot. Rushing into the living room, she discovered that her three-year-old son had accidentally shot her boyfriend’s three-year-old daughter with a .22-caliber rifle the parents had left in the room, loaded and unlocked.”

And the numbers may actually be getting worse.

With an increase in unfettered access to guns and philosophical opposition to gun regulations, the numbers seem to be on the rise. Here’s how many accidental shootings happened at the hands of children in 2015 alone, by age:

From January 19-26 of 2016 — just one week — at least seven kids were accidentally shot by another kid.

If the pace holds up for the rest of the year, America would be looking at over 300 accidental shootings of children, in many cases by children, for the year. That’s far too many cases of children either carrying the guilt and pain of having shot a loved one or hurting or killing themselves by accident.

John Arthur Greene has been able to manage his feelings of guilt and sorrow through music and by sharing his story for others to hear.

He told his story during an audition for the final season of “American Idol.” He says music has helped him keep his brother’s memory alive:

“Right now I lift him up every day and he holds me up. Music is how I coped with everything.”

It’s a powerful reminder. No matter how we each feel about gun safety laws, guns should always be locked away unloaded and kept separately from ammunition.

Our babies are too precious to leave it to chance.

Watch John Arthur Greene’s audition for “American Idol” here: