"Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt... a performative display of hostility...."

"Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you."

Said Nick Bilton, "60 Minutes" executive producer, quoted in "Scott Pelley fired from ‘60 Minutes’ after confrontation with new boss/The termination marks the latest shake-up during a tumultuous period for the iconic newsmagazine" (WaPo).

What did Pelley say at that meeting?: "[Bari Weiss is] murdering ‘60 Minutes.... She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that. She has no qualifications for her job.... What qualifies you [Bilton] to be in this position?... You have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic. So why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?"

She does not love this place — How important is it that the insiders to a show love it? That could lead you awry. Outsiders were brought in to look at it critically — not through the eyes of love — and perhaps to put journalistic principles above catering to insiders who were enjoying the lovable place they had built and maintained. Maybe those erstwhile outsiders are actually terrible, and they are reshaping the place into something that suits them and ruins it for the longtime insiders. But Bilton is charged with running the place, and Pelley chose to insist on getting fired.

Was Donald Trump too mean to Norah O'Donnell on "60 Minutes" last night? I'll argue both sides.

Maybe you've noticed there's a big uproar over this part of the show:

Watch the video to get the full emotional effect. Here's the transcript:

"What we have is Karoline Leavitt's soundbite claiming they are evildoers in America (rapists, murderers, etc.). But isn't there much more to ask in light of the torture that we are revealing?"

"Tom Homan and Stephen Miller don't tend to be shy. I realize we've emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record."

Wrote Bari Weiss, in an internal memo justifying her action, noting the failure to "present the administration's argument."

Quoted in "Scoop: Weiss told top '60 Minutes' producers that delayed segment had problems" (Axios).

Also at Axios: "Yanked '60 Minutes' episode aired in Canada." 

It's easy to find the whole segment on line, but I'm not going to link to it.

Here's the NYT article about the controversy: "Turmoil at CBS News After Bari Weiss Pulls a ‘60 Minutes’ Segment/Several veteran correspondents questioned how Ms. Weiss, the new CBS News editor in chief, had handled the segment, after she defended her decision on a call with the newsroom." Excerpt:

"My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason..."

"... that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready."

Said Bari Weiss, quoted in "'60 Minutes’ Pulled a Segment. A Correspondent Calls It ‘Political.' Sharyn Alfonsi, a '60 Minutes' correspondent, criticized the network’s decision to remove her reporting from Sunday’s edition of the show" (NYT).

ADDED: Oh, for the golden age of "60 Minutes":

 

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"60 Minutes," wisely, makes the extended version of its interview with Trump available on YouTube.

Who would want to watch the edited version... other than to launch an investigation of the editing process? Presumably, it was a condition of Trump's participation that the unedited version would need to be posted. Also, "60 Minutes" is now under the watchful eye of Bari Weiss. That should make Trump more trustful and perhaps he wants to help Weiss succeed... if she plays the game his way and helps him succeed... which may consist merely of playing it fair.

I've listened to part of this interview, and I did notice that O'Donnell was interrupting Trump with repeated little jabs early on in his answers. I do not think O'Donnell would do that to, say, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, even though Biden and Harris are far more likely to babble nonresponsively and run out the clock. But Trump is great at taking whatever energy is thrown his way and turning it into something that works for him.

O'Donnell would say things like "Have some of these [ICE] raids gone too far?"

"For many veteran correspondents at '60 Minutes,' paying even $1 to settle a left-field lawsuit from an aggrieved president seemed too high a price."

"At stake, they believed, was the long-term credibility of the country’s most decorated and most-watched television news program, a journalistic institution since 1968 that prided itself on holding elected leaders to account. Late Tuesday, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, concluded differently. It agreed to pay $16 million so President Trump would drop a lawsuit that essentially boiled down to a politician’s gripe: that '60 Minutes' had edited an interview with his 2024 opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris, in a manner that he did not like. Many legal experts called Mr. Trump’s case frivolous and unwinnable, running counter to long-established First Amendment protections for the American press...."

From "For '60 Minutes,' a Humbling Moment at an Uneasy Time for Press Freedom/After an astonishing concession to a sitting president, the country’s most popular television news program faces the prospect of new ownership and a chilled environment for the First Amendment" (NYT).

"When Donald J. Trump sued CBS for $10 billion days before the 2024 election, accusing the company of deceptively editing a '60 Minutes' interview with Vice President Kamala Harris..."

"... many legal experts dismissed the litigation as a far-fetched attempt to punish an out-of-favor news outlet.... In a preview of the interview that aired on 'Face the Nation,' CBS’s Sunday morning show, Ms. Harris was shown giving a different answer than the one she gave in the version of the interview that was broadcast the next evening on '60 Minutes.'... CBS News said that Ms. Harris had given one lengthy answer to Mr. Whitaker’s question, and that the network followed standard journalistic practice by airing a different portion of her answer in prime-time because of time constraints.... Mr. Trump’s legal complaint relied on a largely untested interpretation of a Texas law that prohibits deceptive trade practices in things like marketing products to consumers.... Regardless of the lawsuit’s merit... Paramount owns broadcasting licenses, [and] it needs the blessing of the Federal Communications Commission to complete its planned merger with Skydance...."

From "Paramount in Settlement Talks With Trump Over ‘60 Minutes’ Lawsuit/A settlement, if reached, would be an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president" (NYT).

That makes it sound like an attempt at bribery. Perhaps Trump needs to avoid settling this case.

"When they got rid of civic integrity, it was the moment where I was like, 'I don't trust that they're willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.'"

Said the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, interviewed on "60 Minutes," summarized at CNN. 

If I understand this correctly, Haugen is in favor of greater censorship at Facebook and critical of the company for going as far as it does in supporting freedom of speech. She has a very self-righteous demeanor, so I'm afraid it can cause casual listeners to think she's on the good side in a battle of good versus evil, so pay close attention.

The term "civic integrity" is baffling, but I think it's a euphemism for censorship. Please correct me if I am wrong. There was a unit within the company called "civic integrity," and it was broken up after the election and its work was, it seems, reassigned. That's the sense in which it can be said "they got rid of civic integrity," but it sounds as though she's saying they got rid of the abstract ideal, integrity.

ADDED: Here's the full transcript. Here's the gist of what Haugen has to say:

Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money.... People enjoy engaging with things that elicit an emotional reaction and the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume.... Facebook has demonstrated, they cannot act independently. Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety. It is subsidizing, it is paying for its profits with our safety.

This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent Lesley Stahl reported on the health care challenges facing the transgender community," including the experience of "detransitioners."

CBS News reports. 

"I think we spoke to more people on this story than any other story I can remember reporting on in my whole time at 60 Minutes," Stahl told 60 Minutes Overtime. "We wanted to be thorough. We wanted to be fair. And we wanted to understand every aspect of this story. And it was really focused on health care. That was the primary idea for the story. Health care... We were concerned that the groups that oppose transgender people might try to weaponize our story and use it against transgender people."

She sounds very defensive, and if you watch the report — here — you'll see why she's on edge. The part about the detransitioners is very powerful. We spend quite a bit of time with a young woman who had her breasts removed and a young man who had his testicles removed. Both of them realized afterward that they'd made a terrible mistake. Obviously, they received terrible health care, and the idea was to cover the problems in transgender health care. It took some courage to include them in the story, but, of course, "60 Minutes" is being criticized for that.

"How Ron DeSantis’s critics are turning him into a hero for the right"

A WaPo column by Aaron Blake. 

Over the past year, DeSantis has repeatedly found himself targeted for his coronavirus response, sometimes in overwrought ways. The culmination came Sunday in a “60 Minutes” piece that cast a spotlight on his decision to run Florida’s coronavirus vaccination program through the grocery store chain Publix, which had donated $100,000 to his campaign in the weeks prior....

Even Florida officials with ties to the Democratic Party have defended the decision to use Publix, which is the state’s most popular grocery chain and has also donated to Democrats and progressive causes. Palm Beach County Mayor Dave Kerner (D), whose city was a focal point of the “60 Minutes” report, said flatly that the reporting was “intentionally false” and that “60 Minutes” had declined his offer to provide a counterpoint. He said it should be “ashamed.”...

"We’ve got a president who actually suggested selling Puerto Rico. Believe it or not, it could have been worse. He once asked our national security officials if he could nuke hurricanes."

"I mean, at least he didn’t do that. A nuclear hurricane seems like it would have been bad. I mean, it would be funny if it wasn’t. Look. Some of the rhetoric you’re hearing down here in South Florida, it’s just made up. It’s just nonsense. Listening to the Republicans, you’d think Joe was more Communist than the Castros. Don’t fall for that garbage, don’t fall for that okey-doke. Joe Biden is not a socialist. He was a senator from Delaware. He was my vice president. I think folks would know if he’s a secret socialist by now.... [The President] likes to act tough and talk tough. He thinks scowling and being mean is tough, and being rude is tough. But when 60 Minutes and Lesley Stahl are too tough for you, you ain’t all that tough. You got to walk out of a 60 Minutes interview, then you’re never going to stand up to a dictator. If you’re spending all your time complaining about how mean reporters are to you, you’re not going to stand up to Putin.... With Joe and Kamala at the helm, you won’t have to think about them every single day. There might be a whole day where they don’t be on TV. There might be a whole day where they don’t tweet some craziness. You won’t have to argue about them every day. It won’t be so exhausting. Just having a normal president.... We’re not going to have a president that goes out of his way to insult anybody who he doesn’t think is nice enough to him. We won’t have a president who threatens people with jail for just criticizing him. That’s not normal behavior, Florida. You wouldn’t tolerate it from a co-worker. You wouldn’t tolerate it from a high-school principal. You won’t tolerate it from a coach. You wouldn’t tolerate it from a family member. Florida Man wouldn’t even do this stuff."

Said Barack Obama at his Florida rally speech yesterday. Transcript.

"[O]ver 300 [Trump] ads were taken down by Google and YouTube, mostly over the summer, for violating company policy."

"But the archive doesn't detail what policy was violated. Was it copyright violation? A lie or extreme inaccuracy? Faulty grammar? Bad punctuation? It's unclear. The ads determined to be offending are not available to be screened. We found very little transparency in the transparency report. 'As you know, conservatives think that you discriminate against them,' Stahl tells YouTube's [CEO] Wojcicki, who replies: 'Well, first of all there are lots of very successful conservative creators on YouTube... Our systems, our algorithms, they don't have any concept of understanding what's a Democrat, what's a Republican...."

From 60 Minutes Overtime.

There's video of the "60 Minutes" segment at the link, but I can't get embedding code there, so I'm going to have to go to YouTube to look for usable video. Ah! Here:

"I'm grappling with how I feel about that subject and that material. I do grapple with things. I grapple with things personally, and racially, and politically. What does it mean to be me?"

Said Marc Bradford, quoted in a "60 Minutes" interview — presented at CBS News along with video of interviews with other artists. Excerpt:

Like Bradford, Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei thinks art should make a statement.

"I think every art, if it's relevant, is political," Ai told Holly Williams when she interviewed him for 60 Minutes in 2017.

Years ago, at a social event, I was talking with a woman who'd worked hard to acquire the ability to make distinctive and aesthetically pleasing bowls and vases and so forth. She said: "I'm still trying to figure out how to make them political." I said — in the sort of response I always imagined would make me a popular party guest — "But political art is the worst art."

ADDED: The subject Bradford says his abstract painting is about — what he's "grappling with" — is the Watts riots 1965.

ALSO: The woman who said "I'm still trying to figure out how to make them political" was absolutely not meaning to be humorous. She was utterly serious and sincere.

Did you watch that McCabe thing on "60 Minutes"?

I did.  I watched it very closely. With some meticulous rewinding and analysis (where McCabe declared Trump "disgusting" and it was hard to understand exactly why (Trump, campaigning, had weaponized a factoid from the Wall Street Journal)).

I thought the "60 Minutes" presentation followed a clever narrative arc, with a beginning that allowed McCabe to inflate himself, a middle that brought in his wife and complicated the story, and an ending that gave us so much reason to doubt his credibility that I said out loud, "This really isn't favorable to McCabe at all."

At first, I thought the reasons to mistrust McCabe should have been presented up front, so we could question his telling of the story as we went along, but in the end, I liked the narrative arc, which I think is typical of "60 Minutes." We're drawn in, and then things are not what they seemed, and we're challenged. Then, suddenly, it's that ticking clock on the screen. That's all you get. Figure it out!

Here's the full interview, with video and transcript. I'll just excerpt the text of the part we rewound and rewatched about 10 times:

But in the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign, The Wall Street Journal ran an article headlined "Clinton Ally Aided FBI Wife." It was about Jill McCabe's funding the year before. The article noted, accurately, that her husband's role in the Clinton email investigation began months after she lost. But candidate Donald Trump seemed to conflate the two.

President Trump at Rally: It was just learned that one of the closest people to Hillary Clinton with long-standing ties to her husband and herself… gave more than $675,000 to the campaign of the spouse, the wife, of the top FBI official who helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton's illegal email server.

Scott Pelley: How do you feel when you see that?

Jill McCabe: Sick. Sick to my stomach.

Andrew McCabe: I think sickening is the right word. It's disgusting. To see the candidate for the presidency taking those lies and manipulating them for his own advantage, and then to hear you know, the chants and the boos of thousands of people who are just accepting those lies at face value, it's chilling.

My question was: What lies? And: How did Trump manipulate them? We even paused on the text of the WSJ article so we could read it (the "Clinton Ally" was Terry McAuliffe).

The best I came up with in answer to my question was that Jill McCabe received the $675,000 and lost her election before Andrew McCabe took on a role in the Hillary Clinton investigation, so when Clinton's ally gave the money to Jill, her husband was not yet in the position she had a huge interest having influence over. I don't think Andrew McCabe is saying the WSJ published lies, and the only "lies" I see in what Trump said is giving an impression about the time line.

I think Jill and Andrew are horrified at how effectively Trump weaponized the material. Of course he used it "for his own advantage"! Is that what Andrew McCabe is calling "manipulating"? Why isn't that just being a very effective candidate?

"McCabe Says Justice Officials Discussed Recruiting Cabinet Members to Push Trump Out of Office."

The NYT reports on an interview with Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy F.B.I. director. According to McCabe, "top Justice Department officials were so alarmed by President Trump’s decision in May 2017 to fire James B. Comey, the bureau’s director, that they discussed whether to recruit cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office."

The interview (with Scott Pelley) is scheduled to run on "60 Minutes" this weekend, and McCabe is promoting a book. My first question is how serious was the discussion. All sorts of things are discussed in passing. Lots of people "discussed" the 25th Amendment in the early days of the Trump presidency, the idea being that Trump was mentally ill.

Mr. McCabe is the first person involved in these meetings who has spoken publicly about them. Mr. Pelley said, “They were counting noses. They were not asking cabinet members whether they would vote for or against removing the president, but they were speculating ‘This person would be with us, this person would not be,’ and they were counting noses in that effort....This was not perceived to be a joke,” Mr. Pelley added....

Funny that the key quotes come from Pelley, not McCabe.

Trump has tweeted this reaction:

Disgraced FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe pretends to be a “poor little Angel” when in fact he was a big part of the Crooked Hillary Scandal & the Russia Hoax - a puppet for Leakin’ James Comey. I.G. report on McCabe was devastating. Part of “insurance policy” in case I won....

The NYT doesn't elaborate on why anyone could have seriously thought the 25th Amendment applied. Looking back to early 2017 in my archive, I see that a couple writers at The New Yorker were pushing the Trump-is-insane theory of the applicability of the 25th Amendment. On May 8, 2017, I pointed to Evan Osnos. Excerpt:

Did "60 Minutes" heighten the color on Steve Bannon to make him "look like a bleary-eyed drunk"?

That's what a photographer named Peter Duke purports to show here:



The video has gotten enough attention to get this push-back at HuffPo: "No, ‘60 Minutes’ Didn’t Purposely Make Steve Bannon Look Like A ‘Bleary-Eyed Drunk’/News experts rejected the color-coordinated conspiracy theory."

The video lays out the evidence very persuasively, I think. So what's the refutation at HuffPo?

1. A “60 Minutes” spokesman says: “It’s nonsense.”

2. A journalism professor says: “The tendency [of heightened color saturation] is to make people look better... When I saw the interview, I actually thought he looked better. They smoothed over his skin.”

And that's it!* I think HuffPo is conceding that the color was heightened, and the "No" in the headline relates only to the inference about why it was heightened. What do you think? The video makes it clear that the color saturation on Bannon was much higher than on the interviewer (Charlie Rose). If it's just to make people look better, why isn't it the same for both men? And how could you possibly think the dark red lines on Bannon's eyelids look good?

___________________

* There is a third thing that I could put on that list. HuffPo tells us that Peter Duke's online portfolio of photographs includes some pro-Trump material. Should that count? I wonder what are the politics of the “60 Minutes” spokesman and the journalism professor. We're not told.

___________________

ADDED: Clicking around in Duke's online portfolio, I see that he's amused by abusive email he's received as a result of a NYT article about him: "The Annie Leibovitz of the Alt-Right." Excerpt:

“I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but a lot of people don’t read,” [Duke] told me over beers and pasta. “They look at the pictures.” He’s somewhat mystical on the topic of images; he believes that his photographs operate on a hypnotic level, an idea he picked up from Scott Adams, the creator of “Dilbert,” who predicted that Trump would win the election over a year in advance and has been cashing in on his bet ever since...

Duke believes in the primacy of visual culture, and most right-wing figures, he says, don’t take enough care to make themselves look good. Newt Gingrich, he tells me, is “disheveled”; Steve Bannon is a “schlub”; Trump’s hair is “problematic.” At the same time, he thinks left-leaning media outlets — which is to say, just about anything other than Breitbart News and The Drudge Report — go out of their way to present the right in a negative way. Recently, he drew my attention to New York magazine’s March cover story on Kellyanne Conway. Though he hadn’t read the article, Duke was bothered by Martin Schoeller’s clinically lit portrait, “the equivalent of being rendered by a fax machine,” he griped in an email....

The 4 a.m. screen shot puts everything into proportion.

Here's the Phys.org article that went up on Memeorandum at 5:55 ET on Tuesday morning, where it got my attention 5 45 minutes later as I checked my iPhone for the news before I got out of bed. I captured the screen shot and imagined that would make a good blog post. Is our world about to get shaken up? Will presidential candidates be asked if they are comfortable with a universe that's been around forever?

But the first blog post on Tuesday didn't go up until 7:56, and it was about a WaPo columnist's abstruse effort to support his assertion that it's "'trivial to compare' Roy Moore's trying to stop gay marriage in Alabama to George Wallace's blocking the door to racial integration at the University of Alabama." (The columnist thought what Roy Moore was doing is a much bigger deal.)

I'm seeing the old screen shot at 6 a.m. this morning because I plugged my iPhone into my computer just now. I'm remembering what I didn't blog on Tuesday and remembering what I saw on my iPhone this morning as I scanned the latest news from my supine position under the comforter. David Carr has died! He was only 58. He collapsed in the newsroom at the New York Times. Will I blog about his death when I did not blog the death of Bob Simon, reported on Memeorandum at 12:25 a.m. on February 10, whence it was read out loud from across the room by my husband Meade, causing me to ask: "Who's Bob Simon?"?

I had to be told he's one of the "60 Minutes" people. I don't watch "60 Minutes," but I do read the NYT, and I've read and enjoyed David Carr many times. Here's his 2008 article about his life as a crackhead:

To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs — you need, actually — to keep them at a remove. Let’s stipulate that I do not have a good memory, having recklessly sautéed my brain in fistfuls of pharmaceutical spices. Beyond impairment, there may be no more unreliable narrator than an addict. Recovered or not, I am someone who used my mouth to constantly create one more opportunity to get high.

Here is what I deserved: hepatitis C, federal prison time, H.I.V., a cold park bench, an early, addled death.

Here is what I got: the smart, pretty wife, the three lovely children, the job that impresses.

That's a journalist reporting on the mind of an addict: an addict spreads around versions on the truth depending on what you think anyone listening to you seems to need. And isn't that what we've come to feel the journalists seem to be doing? [Insert reference to Brian Williams.] And isn't that what we expect the politicians to do, for example, when they are asked, as Scott Walker was the other day, about whether they are comfortable with evolution?

At the Facebook post where we have a long thread about Scott Walker's response — saying he needed to "punt" on that question and that it's not the sort of thing politicians should have to talk about —Annie Gottlieb says:

Why do we say we "believe in" evolution? That gives away the fact that "science" is our modern religion, the thing we look to for an explanation of our existence and a hope of defeating death. (The third thing religion supplies, meaning, science is not so good at, although it does somewhat justify social Darwinism if that's your cup of tea.) What's funny about it is that science itself, without the scare quotes, is exposing the fact that we don't yet understand evolution very well at all.

And I say:

Yes, this is something I notice all the time. And people are pressured to believe because of the prevalence of believers -- their domination in positions of authority -- and not because we understand and see the reasoning of the science. So it's not just like religion. It's like authoritarian religion. By the way, some physicists are casting doubt on the Big Bang theory. Will they move into the position of authority at some point? Why does it even matter whether we agree or not? We can't check their work. We can't have an independent position. We're just called upon to be sheep for the Good Shepherd. Might as well go with Jesus. He's pretty good.

Sharyl Attkisson says CBS News suppressed a clip of Obama refusing to call Benghazi a terrorist attack.

This clip — recorded in a Steve Kroft "60 Minutes" interview — was evidence of the precise point that Obama denied in the second debate with Mitt Romney, the moment when the debate moderator Candy Crowley stepped in to side with Obama. In the "60 Minutes" clip — which was left out of the edited interview that aired — Obama said: "Well, it's too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved. But, obviously, it was an attack on Americans."

In a chat that aired on Howard Kurtz’s Fox News media program yesterday, Attkisson addressed the apparent suppression/possible misplacement of that clip: “The ‘Evening News’ people who had access to that transcript, according to the e-mails I saw, when it was sent from ’60 Minutes’ to ‘Evening News’ the very day that it was taken, they in my view skipped over it, passed it up, kept it secret throughout the whole time when it would have been relevant to the news and I think that was because they were trying to defend the president — they thought that would be harmful to him,” said Attkisson to Kurtz.

Even more damning: According to Attkisson, CBS Newsers directed her to use a “different clip from the same interview to give the misimpression that the president had done the opposite” — that is, that the president had indeed acknowledged terrorism early on.

The link goes to Erik Wemple's column in The Washington Post that has the headline "Sharyl Attkisson’s compelling gripe against CBS News over Benghazi coverage." I don't think I've ever seen the phrase "compelling gripe" before. If something is compelling, it's not a gripe! It's like they want to minimize it and call it a big deal at the same time. Obviously, it's a huge deal!

"Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting."

Eli Lake says Obama got it wrong on "60 Minutes":

Nearly eight months ago, some of President Obama’s senior intelligence officials were already warning that ISIS was on the move. In the beginning of 2014, ISIS fighters had defeated Iraqi forces in Fallujah, leading much of the U.S. intelligence community to assess they would try to take more of Iraq.

But in an interview that aired Sunday evening, the president told 60 Minutes that the rise of the group now proclaiming itself a caliphate in territory between Syria and Iraq caught the U.S. intelligence community off guard. Obama specifically blamed James Clapper, the current director of national intelligence: “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” he said.

Reached by The Daily Beast after Obama’s interview aired, one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq was flabbergasted. "Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting," the former official said.

"It's 1976 and CBS reports on NYC's hot new pickup spot: the department store Bloomingdale's."

Writes The Whelk at Metafilter. Oh, Whelk, we call it Bloomies.

This is hilarious and painfully nostalgic.