- Ready to relive the most painful year of your 200-plus
year existence, America? Whether you are or not, a certain premium cable
network is about to make you go through it anyhow. Yes, HBO has announced it is
making a miniseries about last year’s presidential election, the one where
Americans faced an impossible choice and selected a giant hunk of mutated candy
corn as their next commander in chief. In the network’s defense, it didn’t start
this - its miniseries will be based on an upcoming book about Donald Trump’s
disturbing victory over Hillary Clinton, a book penned by Mark Halperin and
John Heilemann. The project will be helmed by Jay Roach, who directed HBO’s TV
movie about John McCain’s losing presidential campaign, “Game Change,” and Tom
Hanks will serve as a producer on the miniseries, as he did on “Game Change.” Being
linked to those two names works in HBO’s favor, but again, this election was
the dumpster fire that turned into an out-of-control wildfire (much like Trump’s
hair) threatening to leave entire states as scorched earth. “We are thrilled to
continue our relationship with Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, whose work on
their best-selling book Game Change set the bar for political reporting and
storytelling inside a presidential campaign,” HBO’s Len Amato said in a
statement. “Reuniting Game Change director and executive producer Jay Roach and
Playtone producers Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman with Mark and John for a project
based on their upcoming book promises to vividly capture the most unique and
impactful event in modern American politics.” Tell yourself what you need to,
Lenny, but you’re not helping Americans, you’re hurting them……
- Rarely is a group lining up for a courtroom brawl to get
rid of the landmark status assigned to its beloved property. But such is life
at the moment for a Brooklyn congregation raising holy hell in the hopes that
their church gets de-landmarked. The oddly-named Ukranian Church in Exile wants
a judge banish the city Landmarks Preservation Commission’s 2016 decision
designating the white Neoclassical building a landmark, claiming that carrying
that weighty designation makes upkeep too expensive. The building was
constructed in 1906 as the Williamsburg Trust Company Bank at 177 South Fifth
Street, but it became a courthouse after the bank went out of business. The
building soon fell into disrepair with all of the usual markings, including
busted windows, a leaking roof, peeling paint and wrecked plumbing. In 1961,
the church bought the building and spent a saintly sum of $2.5 million fixing it up. The brawl to
landmark the building began a mere five years later when the LPC first sought
to slap it with the designation, only to do what bureaucratic entities do so
well, namely let the issue slide for decades until it recently tackled nearly
100 properties in its back catalog. The church again protested, but the city
pushed onward, labeling the building “one of Brooklyn’s most outstanding and
monumental Neoclassical bank buildings,” according to a Manhattan Supreme Court
petition filed last month. Church attorney Richard Lobel said it’s unfair to
expect his clients to hold up their end of this burden. “It becomes cost
prohibitive for them. They have lovingly maintained their building … they are
now being penalized for having done this work,” Lobel said, insisting that the
LPC made the wrong choice to landmark the building………
- There are times sports cuts to your core and makes you
want to weep like a baby. This is one of those times and it comes to us from
Tampa, Florida, where an organization stuck in bygone notions of style and
personal appearance has snipered one of Major League Baseball’s best, most
compelling talents: young outfielder Clint Frazier’s hair. Frazier was acquired
last summer in a trade deadline deal that sent he and other pieces to the
Yankees for prized reliever Andrew Miller, who helped lead the Cleveland
Indians to the World Series and the deal led them to part with one of their top
prospects, Frazier. The burly, power-hitting outfielder reached the Triple-A
level with his new team last season and could make it to the majors this year,
but one part of him that won't be making it to the Bronx is his amazing head of
floppy orange hair, which had reached such epic proportions that manager Joe
Girardi claimed the team forced Frazier to cut it because it had quite
literally become a distraction. The obvious excuse would be the team’s
byzantine policies on personal appearance and specifically facial hair, started
by George Steinbrenner in 1973. That rule covers both facial hair and the stuff
on top of the head, but Girardi made it clear that Frazier's hair did not
violate the Yankees' policy, but that "it had become a distraction"
in camp. The amazing thing is that there are other dudes across MLB with long,
flowing hair (New York Mets hurlers Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard, among
others), but some how Frazier’s glorious mane of orange lettuce was a siren
call that no one can turn their attention away from, so it had to be cut…….
- Clearly, Turkish dictator/President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
did not get the memo. That memo clearly states in every language spoken in
every corner of the world, there are certain metaphors that are off-limits to
everyone: Nazis, the Holocaust, slavery, rape….those sorts of things. So how is
it that Erdogan’s first response when the he Netherlands barred a plane
carrying Turkey's foreign minister from landing to stop him from addressing a
political rally in Rotterdam was to immediately hurl a Nazi-based analogy
toward one of the very nations most terrorized by the Nazis - nay, the one
where Anne Frank was hiding when she was discovered by the Third Reich and sent
off to a concentration camp to die. Erdogan barely stopped to take a breath
after the Dutch government announced that Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu's
flight permit was revoked amid concerns over public order at the expected large
gathering of Turkish expatriates before the despotic overlord of Turkey went
all-in, comparing the Dutch government to Nazis while addressing crowds at an
opening ceremony in Istanbul. "They are timid and coward. They are Nazi
remnants and fascists,” he proclaimed to his terrified sycophants. Yes, all of
this just days after Erdogan angered German Chancellor Angela Merkel by making
similar remarks about Nazism in her country, which was still wildly out of
line but at least aimed at the same
country where the Third Reich arose. Maybe Erdogan was just bitter to have a
blow dealt to his efforts to win support for an April 16 referendum vote on the
Turkish Constitution, for which Cavusoglu was heading to Rotterdam to stump
for. The sweeping constitutional changes are being forced down Turkey’s gullets
by Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, in order to grant
him even broader powers and overhaul the way the country is governed - in his
favor, of course………
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