Whelp, That Was Fun.

Orange Hitler won, and the party of very smart people can't figure out how . . . again. All they know is it's your fault. Regardless, it's a pretty damn fine For Funk's Sake Friday.

Or . . .

Okay, this one for good measure . . .

And away we go.

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A headline to make your day . . .

Think Axios is a little upset with the party?

And I have to note the misogyny here. A woman candidate loses and Axios defaults to the metaphor of a “cat fight.”

Tsk-tsk.

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We’ll get into that, but first . . .

And that’s how the horror movie starts.

“They are not infected with any disease whatsoever. They are harmless and a little skittish,” Yemassee Police Chief Gregory Alexander said Thursday morning.

The Rhesus macaque primates escaped from the Alpha Genesis facility Wednesday when a new employee didn’t fully shut an enclosure, Alexander said.

The monkeys are females . . .

So they will know to stop and ask for directions.

weighing about 7 pounds (3 kilograms) and are so young and small that they haven’t been used for testing, police said.

And if they’re smart, they’ll be headed somewhere without extradition.

But this isn’t the first time.

In 2018, federal officials fined Alpha Genesis $12,600 after dozens of primates escaped as well as for an incident that left a few others without water and other problems with how the monkeys were housed.

Officials said 26 primates escaped from the Yemassee facility in 2014 and an additional 19 got out in 2016.

But the part that made me laugh . . .

“The clear carelessness which allowed these 40 monkeys to escape endangered not only the safety of the animals . . .

What part of “research animal” do these people not understand? Being smashed on the highway by a car is a kinder death than they’re going to have.

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And he didn’t stop and ask for directions.

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Oh, that’s not the story.

Unsurprisingly, the hacker was quick to demand a ransom. In a humorous tone, the cybercriminal demands $125,000 … in the form of a baguette, in reference to Schneider Electric’s French nationality.

But if the company didn’t have that much bread on hand, the hackers said they would accept crypto.

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When I first saw this on Twitter, I thought it was just a joke, but alas the joke was on me.

The forecast was made on Monday when Moo Deng’s caretaker at the Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Chon Buri set out two pumpkin halves, each filled with pieces of dragon fruit, apples and carrots. One pumpkin had the name of Donald Trump carved in Thai on a watermelon rind, and the other that of Kamala Harris.

The almost-four-month-old calf ate the one with the name of the Republican candidate. Her mother, Jonah, ate the other with the name of the Democrat candidate.

I know, a bit hokey, but little Moo Deng did better than the dingbat who put out this poll . . .

The Des Moines Register reported with glee . . .

A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Vice President Harris leading former President Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters just days before a high-stakes election that appears deadlocked in key battleground states. . . .

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.” 

Clearly!

Kamala Harris was going to take Iowa and she was going to do it handily, with three percent, and the MSM were falling over themselves. This was a sign of things to come.

It was almost too good to be true.

Oh, wait.

Trump took Iowa by thirteen, meaning Ann Selzer was off by . . .

Maybe next time we should just ask the pygmy hippo.

It would be better than polling the gender studies students at the U of I, which is probably what Ann did.¹

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It’s a good week for selling Hollywood memorabilia.

For a cool million-dollars-plus, a pair of the famed and rare Ruby Slippers from The Wizard of Oz can take a hallowed place on your very own shoe rack.

The slippers, worn on-screen by Judy Garland in the 1939 classic MGM musical, are up for auction at Heritage Auctions, with the current bid at $812,500. Add in the buyer’s premium — a fee paid by the winning bidder to the auction house — and the price is currently at $1,015,625.

They get $200K just for selling them? I’m in the wrong business.

If you can’t afford them, you could try what someone else did.

The Heritage Auction pair also has a fascinating post-movie history: After the now-legendary MGM Auction in 1970 when a massive trove of MGM items were sold off by the studio, a man named Michael Shaw took possession of shoes. From the 1980s on, Shaw displayed his Ruby Slippers around the country, including at the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where they were stolen in 2005.

The Shaw slippers remained missing until 2018, when the FBI, acting on a tip, recovered the shoes, which, according to the Associated Press at the time, had been taken by an “aging reformed mobster” named Terry Jon Martin, who mistakenly believed that the shoes were covered in real jewels rather than sequins. (Martin was indicted in 2023 and pleaded guilty to a charge of theft of major artwork; earlier this year, Martin, in hospice care with cancer, was spared jail time due to his ill health, though he was ordered to pay $23,500 — in $300 monthly installments — in restitution to the museum.)

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the museum is not going to see much of that fine.

This one might be a bit harder to carry off, however.

Just for the record, that is not the Batmobile.

This is the Batmobile.

But I digress.

Christian Bale, Michael Caine, and others may have received top billing in the Dark Knight trilogy of Batman movies, but one uncredited star of the films was its Batmobile, nicknamed the Tumbler.

Because everything has to look strange and militaristic these days.

Now, for the first time, individuals who have an extra $2.99 million burning a crypto hole through their virtual wallets can purchase an officially sanctioned, drivable (but not street legal) replica of the Batmobile directly from movie studio Warner Bros Discovery’s Global Consumer Products division, and Relevance International, an expert experiential marketing firm.

Anyone want in? I’ll go million-ses. I must have $2.99 sitting around here somewhere.

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Read the caption under the picture: She sent her money back to Mexico but now we’re supposed to do something to make sure she has a good retirement.

So she worked here but her money was spent in another country taking care of people there. I get it. I don’t blame her. I’m sure they needed help. But . . .

Now the people whose job she took or who didn’t get the benefit of those tens of thousands of dollars being spent and invested in their communities are supposed to look after her.

That’s a pretty big ask.

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Speaking of pretty big asks . . .

I was getting text messages from “Barack Obama” still on Tuesday morning begging for change.²

From the Newsweek article above . . .

Kamala Harris’ presidential election campaign ended the 2024 White House contest “at least $20 million in debt,” according to Politico's California bureau chief Christopher Cadelago.

Cadelago made the claim on X, formerly Twitter, noting Harris' team had “$118 million in the bank” as recently as October 16.

Harris’s campaign raised over a billion dollars, and still she ended up in debt.

Hiring fake supporters must be expensive.

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Democratic vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz didn’t just lose the overall election to Donald Trump — he lost his home county to him, too.

President-elect Trump’s overwhelmingly win saw him net 49.6% of the vote in Minnesota’s Blue Earth County, where Walz’s family lived for 20 years before he was elected governor. . . .

That is a reversal from 2020, when President Biden handily won the county with 51% of the vote to Trump’s 46.5%, according to Politico.

You can just feel the love, can’t you?

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So did you watch the results roll in? I had to. It was nearly compulsory at this point. I was seeing this farce through to the bitter end.³

But much to my surprise, the end wasn’t so bitter.

Once Trump won Georgia and North Carolina, it all came down to Pennsylvania. If Kamala won it, Trump wasn’t done, but it was going to be a late night. If Trump won it, however, I got to go to bed.

I wanted to go to bed.

And the universe listened for once.

At about 11:30 PM as I was texting back and forth with my sister, watching CNN, keeping an eye on the New York Times election page, checking in with Twitter, and inputting debits and credits for one of the four entities I keep books for (because I needed to be doing something useful), I noticed someone on Twitter say Fox News had called Pennsylvania for Trump.

I checked and lo and behold, Twitter did not steer me wrong.

It was over.

I had to make one more stop though . . .

They’re trying so very hard, aren’t they?

The media’s job is to be honest, says Chris Hayes, and he would accidentally be more honest than most . . .

You see the important thing about democracy is that you have institutions in place to deter elected officials from carrying out the people’s will, or “democracy between elections,” as Mr. Hayes so eloquently put it.

You’d think at some point those in the mainstream media would learn, and for a moment there was a glimmer of hope on CNN . . .

Did Stelter finally have an awakening?

I mean, on Twitter, Brian promised to not mince words.

Of course, he didn’t want anyone replying about his brutal takedown and sharp wit, which should tell us all where this is going to go.

Donald Trump’s return to power is a hinge point for the American media – in ways big, small, and to be determined. His defeat of Kamala Harris is raising questions about the media’s credibility, influence, and audience. Some of the questions might not be answerable for years.

I have a feeling I can answer most of them right now.

In the hours after Trump won reelection Tuesday, some of his loyalists asserted that his victory is a complete repudiation of the news media. For a time on Wednesday morning, The Federalist’s lead headline was not about Trump, it was about the “corporate media industrial complex” being “2024’s biggest loser.”

Legacy media “is officially dead,” The Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh wrote on X overnight. “Their ability to set the narrative has been destroyed. Trump declared war on the media in 2016. Tonight he vanquished them completely. They will never be relevant again.”

That’s wishful thinking on Walsh’s part — Tuesday’s marathon election coverage was a testament to the media’s relevance —

Do you know why I turned in to CNN at all? To see the looks on Jake Tapper’s and Dana Bash’s faces when they finally understood that they participated in a soft coup only to see everything go south.

Here’s Jake when he realizes Queen Kami didn’t outperform the Grumpy Old Guy in a single county.

And when he understands just why (political orphans, baby).

And here is good ol’ Dana Bash revealing why we’re all nervous about letting a Democrat woman run things.

Well, if the “manosphere” means no longer drifting toward totalitarianism, count me in.

Or this one with Dana thinking that Kamala Harris just didn’t have enough time . . .

Yeah, time was totally the problem for Harris.

If the election season went on much longer, there’s every possibility she would have ended up where Biden was.

But my favorite moment on CNN? Van Jones starting to cry because all those undocumented hygienists are now living in fear of deportation and we’ve let black women down because they don’t feel included . . .

Do you know why I switched on MSNBC at all?

To see Joy Reid, one of the biggest bigots of all, blame white women.

If Joy Reid really wanted to be blunt, she might remember that North Carolina is also the state that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris abandoned after Helene.

I wonder if that had anything to do with Harris not winning the state?⁴

Had to be those traitorous white women.

But then Joe Scarborough the next morning had a whole other group in mind . . .

Yup, men of all shapes and sizes, it’s your fault. You have disappointed Joe and Mika and the Reverend Al.

Aren’t you ashamed?

Joe also blames the education system. They don’t teach civics anymore (though by “civics” I think Joe means “buy my bullshit”).⁵

Or Claire McCaskill blame the better angels for not showing up. (Little does she know that due to Bidenomics, they had to get third jobs and were not available that night because they were pulling a double shift.)

However, if Claire McCaskill is worried about people’s better angels, she might talk to this person.

Narrator: No, Trump did not actually say those words.

So I didn’t feel too sorry for Ms. Claire when she broke down on TV crying because Kamala Harris worked so hard for this.

And we can’t leave MSNBC without visiting the patron saint of incensed bovine herself . . .

But you see, Rachel Maddow doesn’t tell you the whole story.

Also from the Wall Street Journal a few days after the above article was published but in plenty of time for Rachel to have the information for this segment . . .

At the moment, Starlink satellite internet isn’t an option.

SpaceX said recently on X that Starlink isn’t on the ground in Taiwan today simply because it doesn’t have a license—adding that it can’t abide by a regulation requiring local majority ownership of any satellite internet provider.

So you see, it’s not that Elon Musk is denying Taiwan Starlink; it’s that Taiwan is denying Taiwan Starlink.

But Rachel’s version sounds so much better, even if it is blatantly untrue.

So when you hear this . . .

Knowing that Elon Musk did not in fact deny Taiwan satellite service on Putin’s request, what real reason do you think that Rachel Maddow would have for wanting Musk to lose all his government contracts.

Yes, Rachel, we do see the patterns of history. And that would be why Trump won.

And, finally, why did I turn to PBS?⁶

To find out from Mr. Jonathan Capeheart that Americans just don’t care about democracy enough.

Though to be fair to Mr. Capeheart, he was having a bad week. (If you’re scrolling, this one is fun. Watch all the way to the end. The schadenfreude is off the charts.)

No, we don’t turn in to the news media because they’re relevant. We turn in because they’re ridiculous.

You see, Harris ran a flawless campaign, by which Joy Reid means she got all of Hollywood to endorse her.

That’s it. That was her flawless campaign.

But that should have been enough for all you “uneducated white women.”

Let’s be clear. Harris lost because independents and political orphans had enough.

Simple as that.

Well, this didn’t help . . .

Speaking as a liberal who previously supported Democrats simply because they weren’t various versions of Liz Cheney and her sociopathic father . . .

Nor this . . .

Or this . . .

Though I’m kind of torn on Biden. I don’t know if the mistake was letting him talk or the mistake was deposing him so unceremoniously but not completely removing him from the White House. He might have enough brains to be really, really, really bitter about the whole thing and decide he has nothing to lose by throwing a monkey wrench in the works and watching the machine explode.

And even if he isn’t the one planning these “gaffes” . . .

This also did not help.

But, yeah, the problem was totally uneducated white women not voting their interests, because their interests were definitely being called garbage and having their furry little friends euthanized while their human friends are being raped by illegal aliens with multi-page rap sheets and then being censored on social media and labelled bigots when they tried to talk about it.

Yes, that’s totally the problem.

Back to the human potato.

. . . but the point is that many Trump voters share his wish. They believe the national news media is a big part of what ails America.

Oh, no, sweet cheeks, we know the news media is a big part of what ails America.

Alyssa Farah making sense. Mark your calendar. Note that Sunny Hostin, however, is still stuck in “not our fault” mode.

Not only do they distrust what they read, they often don’t read it in the first place. Can anything be done to change that?

Stelter goes on to cite this clip from Scott Jennings.

But then . . .

Liberal commentator Ashley Allison responded: “I think we have to listen to everybody, actually.” She said, “the people who voted for Kamala Harris are struggling too. They are feeling ignored too. A Republican’s pain is no greater or less than a Democrat’s pain.”

And this is why Trump won.

She didn’t listen to a damn thing Scott Jennings said. He never said Republicans were hurting. He said “common people” were hurting. They felt talked down to and ignored.

I have news for Ms. Ashley. I’ve arrived at what I am heretofore going to refer to the Tom Homan stage.

This is what happens when you play the emotional manipulation card one too many times. You get the eighties mom who, when you fell out of the tree and got a lump on your head, showed you no sympathy and told you it was your own damn fault for not listening to her.

I care about Kamala Harris voters. I care that their party duped them and lied to them and couldn’t find a better candidate than a nitwit in pearl earrings who never once in her life faced any opposition and found herself in the spotlight and was too stupid to step aside and let someone more qualified take her place because she’d spent her entire life being told her the only qualifications she needed were to be female and not-white . . . and she was special and oppressed, god damn it.

She rose to her level of incompetency and did a faceplant and took her voters and the media with her.

I deeply care that rather than find their roots, the Democrat Party has decided to go full Soviet and try to force people to conform rather than offer them reasons to unite (beyond “save our Democracy(TM)”). That’s good for none of us.

But you’re hurting because you believed the media when it told you that fire wasn’t hot and you got burned.

So what does Mr. Stelter suggest is the solution for the “credibility” issue the media has?

If history is any guide, Trump is never, ever satisfied with news coverage. He always wants a more pliant, propagandistic media. He even complains about Fox News on a regular basis, despite the network’s overwhelming support for him. Last month, he complained to Fox patriarch Rupert Murdoch about the network airing Democratic ads.

Thus, Trump’s reelection portends a new period of hostility with major media outlets that strive for impartiality as well as partisan outlets that oppose him. This raises another set of questions.

Will the Trump administration turn his words against the press into actions? Will he move to revoke licenses for TV stations, as he has suggested more than a dozen times this year? Will he limit press access to the White House, barring reporters he doesn’t like?

Further, will media outlets engage in self-censoring to appease Trump, and if so, how will readers and viewers who oppose Trump react?

So the “solution” to the credibility problem is . . . to play the victim, just like before.

But if the media would like back its credibility, maybe it can answer one question for me.

What happened to those fifteen to twenty million voters?⁷

Which is it, Bri-Bri?

Maybe soon we’ll get some answers to that and a whole lot more.

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Is it safe to come out now?

Actually, I’m conflicted. I feel immense relief, not that Trump won but that the Democrat machine lost. (Yes, there’s a fine line.) I am a little worried, however, about how I’m going to fill these posts without the election.

I’m sure the universe will provide.⁸

If you’re looking for a fun recap/reaction to the election, and you have two hours . . .

Walter was going on three hours sleep and I think he was high on relief. Trust me, I am too. I don’t love Trump. I don’t love conservative ideals. I do love the idea of not turning into a totalitarian state under a globalist regime. And on Tuesday, we took a slight step back from that cliff.

A little fun to see us out.

Have a great weekend.

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Edit: Sorry. I accidentally deleted one of the videos when I was editing. It’s fixed now.

1. I don’t know if the University of Iowa offers a gender studies degree. I’m just making stuff up here. Apologies to the university if it is smart enough not to.

2. I once donated to Tulsi Gabbard through ActBlue. Though how they got my number from that, I don’t know, but now I get texts and calls.

3. Or bitter beginning if it turned out that way. I wanted to know whether to go to bed depressed or relieved.

4. So anyone else wonder how Joy Reid plans to “flip” white women?

5. To be completely honest, if people were better educated, MSNBC and CNN would not exist. They’d have no audience.

6. Okay, that’s a lie. These came form Twitter. Full disclosure.

7. Just a qualification, as of the writing of this post, certain states are still not done counting. We’ll see if they find all those votes.

8. Ground News. Highly suggest it, particularly the OffBeat section.