Cockburn’s Diary

Chicago Big Little Lies season three is happening, says Young Sheldon Convention guests looking to play a game of IRL “Who? Weekly” were best off hanging out at the CNN-Politico Grill, which served free booze and local delicacies all week. Smoking was forbidden, sadly. On Thursday Cockburn caught up with Iain “Young Sheldon” Armitage — who confirmed that a third season of Big Little Lies is “happening” while he was mixing an ice cream float — and spoke to Dean Norris, AKA Hank from Breaking Bad. “I’m having a blast,” said Norris, “I’m having a brat summer.

In there like swimwear For any readers seeking evidence that, despite the election, we are in the heart of silly season, look no further than this week’s non-troversy concerning Republican congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna and her swimwear.In midweek, TikTok users apparently discovered a 2016 video of APL wearing a “Make America Great Again” one-piece swimsuit. The chatter migrated to X, when a troll posted the clip with the caption, “Anna Paulina Luna should be working at my local Hooters, NOT in Congress!” https://twitter.com/thephillipholz/status/1823697402416476491 This prompted a defiant response from the Florida congresswoman. “I have a confession to make since the TikTok Democrats are onto me: I wear bikinis to the beach and mineral sunscreen...

Axed-ios Axios announced in an email to staff this week that they are laying off 10 percent of their workforce — and to add insult to injury, the announcement was stylized like one of their editorial products.“Why it matters: We’re eliminating about 50 positions to get ahead of tectonic shifts in the media, technology, and reader needs/habits,” the email read. The canned staffers were also informed via email rather than in an in-person meeting, which Axios claimed was for logistical reasons.It gets worse. A spy tells Cockburn that the laid-off workers were summarily frog-marched out of the media company’s northern Virginia building Thursday by security.

Oppo veepstakes: which of Kamala’s VP picks has the dirtiest laundry? Have you canceled plans this weekend? Are you a white dude for Kamala? You just might be in contention to be the Democratic pick for vice president this year! The nation’s hacks are doggedly monitoring the movements of electable white dads from convenient states as the campaign formerly known as Biden 2024 prepares itself for weekend auditions ahead of an announcement next week. Similarly, America’s grubbiest political operatives have been working overtime to farm out opposition research on the men in question.

Sofa, so good? What does “fake news” mean in the post-truth era? Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and rebranding of it to X, was supposed to augur a new age of unfiltered information, to combat the censorship of Silicon Valley apparatchiks. For a lot of this week, that meant you’d see Laura Loomer and Charlie Kirk sincerely assuring you that Joe Biden was dead or about to die (he addressed the nation, weakly, on Wednesday, an impressive feat for any corpse). How is the discerning reader supposed to separate fact from falsehood in this climate? That’s the question facing tech-savvy Senator J.D.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin In the bars of Mitchell International Airport, the Bloody Marys are freely flowing. Cockburn can’t blame the departing attendees of the 2024 Republican National Convention: anyone who was in the Fiserv Forum for Hulk Hogan’s high-T address yesterday will have felt the need to sink a few cold ones after. Carrying on his form from earlier in the week, Cockburn did precisely that, heading to the irritatingly named Drink Wisconsibly opposite the arena after the conclusion of Trump’s remarks. On the way in he exchanged a respectful nod with former congressman Madison Cawthorn, who was wearing a bottle blonde as a seatbelt across the lap of his wheelchair (Ubers are hard to come by in the Cream City).

Writer: kicking Biden off the ticket comparable to ‘rape culture’ At the latest count, seventeen House Democrats and one senator have made the egregious yet ruthlessly pragmatic decision to call for Joe Biden to step aside as the Democratic nominee and allow a mentally fitter candidate to run in his place. A deluge of further letters was anticipated after the end of the NATO seventy-fifth anniversary summit last night. Biden is thought to have staved off the reaper for a while with a not-entirely-awful press conference performance yesterday evening. And some online pundits have been eager to point out that Democratic primary voters should not be robbed of their agency.

Sleepy Joe: ‘I’m tired’ Joe Biden has come out swinging against the “Sleepy Joe” allegations... by telling Democratic governors that he is not getting enough sleep. According to the New York Times, Biden said he “needs to get more sleep and work fewer hours, including curtailing events after 8 p.m.” The CNN debate on June 27, in which Biden performed disastrously, began at 9 p.m. ET. The State of the Union address in March also began at 9 p.m. ET.

Pole position Where did you take in last night’s car crash of a presidential debate? Cockburn was holed up in his DC townhouse, washing away the night’s many embarrassments with a glass of Macallan 15. If only he’d known he could have enhanced the viewing experience by watching at a New York gentlemen’s club — as @botticellibimbo, who writes the Strippernomics newsletter on Substack, revealed. “the worst thing about them playing the debate at the strip club rn is that neither sound nor subtitles are on so its just the vibe of the debate,” she tweeted. “the never ending loop of mindless edm playing over this... i imagine it’s what’s going inside their minds.” “ok update at our back bar they do have the sound on!

A touching tale The anti-porn crusade is claiming more territory. Kentucky lost access to Pornhub earlier this month, with Indiana, Idaho and Kansas to join them a week from today and Nebraska to miss out from July 17.Those states join seven others — Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Texas, Utah and Virginia — where residents can’t access the world’s thirteenth most visited website, as they have passed or are passing laws that mandate age verification through uploading a government ID. Pornhub pulls access to locations that pass these laws in protest, as the company feels that on-device age verification is “the only effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike,” whereas uploading a government ID opens up users to the risk of data breaches.

Are books about Tucker Carlson not guaranteed bestsellers? That’s the claim of Politico’s Michael Schaffer today, who revealed that Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind by the New York Times magazine’s Jason Zengerle has been shelved by Little, Brown & Co. According to Schaffer, “the cancellation stems at least in part from the belief that Carlson, once the biggest name on cable, no longer has the kind of cultural footprint to warrant a pricey, complicated book by a top-shelf writer.” Tucker Carlson, publishing house poison?

Briahna Joy Gray, the former Bernie Sanders deputy press secretary and fierce defender of Palestine, has been ejected from the Hill’s YouTube show Rising. Gray, the regular co-host with Reason’s Robby Soave, tweeted out an unsigned termination letter from parent company Nexstar, in which her first name had been misspelled twice. Sources confirm that the decision was made by the parent company and that Hill management had no say.

The morning after the night before The week in Washington was overshadowed somewhat by the antics up the Acela corridor in New York, where a Manhattan jury found Donald Trump guilty of thirty-four counts of falsifying business records. For Trump haters, Thursday’s decision adds to a long list of “firsts”: he’s the first president to be impeached twice, the first president to be found liable for sexual abuse... and now, the first president to be convicted of a felony. But as with his previous court fights — over E. Jean Carroll’s accusations of sexual impropriety against him and Letitia James’s real-estate fraud case — it’s not yet clear how the guilty verdict will harm him in the polls as he attempts to be reelected as president.

Cockburn snagged an invite to Tulsi Gabbard’s book party in DC on Thursday night, hosted by Spectator editor-at-large Ben Domenech and his wife Meghan McCain. Some Fox News heavy hitters such as Harris Faulkner and Howie Kurtz were there, as well as Mark Halperin, Robby Soave, Mary Margaret Olohan, Ryan Girdusky, Amber and Jonathan Duke, Bethany Mandel, Juliegrace Brufke, Reagan Reese, Vanessa Santos and others. Word on the street was that one day prior, Tulsi was informed by President Donald Trump that she would not be chosen as his vice president.

Elon Musk has often clashed with members of the tech press — irritated by their “targeting” of him over minor matters such as how he runs his businesses and who he fires. He has a longstanding feud with contentious Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz — but is that all for show? That’s the astonishing claim of self-described “investigative journalist” Nicole Slaski, @coolndizabled on TikTok. In a video this week, Slaski talked about how she’d been speaking to a Thiel Fellow, John H. Meyer, who alleges he has been “falsely” imprisoned for arson — and says that Meyer had told her that Lorenz and Musk were in fact romantically involved with each other.  https://www.tiktok.

Barron Trump, modern-day Octavian? In the weirder quarters of the right-wing internet, kooks have long made comparisons between Donald Trump and the emperors of Ancient Rome — viewing him as a Caesar wronged by his rivals and betrayed by his friends, willing that one day his successor might avenge him. A story this week gave fuel to the fire that Trump’s youngest son Barron would become the Octavian to his Julius. The Mail Online reports how Barron has “quietly blossomed into an engaging young man who has leading conservatives purring over his charm and political acumen” and describes him as a “strapping 6ft 7in teen who has never uttered a word in public.” “I see all the attributes of a future president if he has the appetite for it. And why not?

Rising from the ashes of anti-porn laws racked up by hardline Republicans in Texas, Virginia and Oklahoma comes a team-switcher who flipped from flying his freak flag to wiping his history of porn likes on Twitter. Dan Osborn, who is married with children per his website, is the Democrat-turned-Independent running for a US Senate seat in Nebraska this November. He’s leaning heavily on his time helming a local union, but it’s his extracurricular activities that raised Cockburn’s eyebrows — mostly the slew of hardcore gay and straight porn he’s liked on Twitter. The faint-hearted should skip to the next item now...

Who pays for posts? A new post on X from “Billboard Chris” provides some insight into how the online influencer racket actually works. Earlier this week, pro-Trump poster Ryan Fournier shared a suspect report that claimed former president Donald Trump was considering picking North Dakota governor Doug Burgum to be his VP — and then listed all of the reasons why that would be a bad idea. The problem? Billboard Chris points out that an “influencer marketing firm” tried to pay him to post the exact same thing.  “I’ve been told there’s a story dropping today that I think would fit well in your feed re a GOP gov who vetoed a bill that would’ve banned biological males playing in female sports. Wanted to see what your rate was to share/write a post?

Who turned the Republican National Committee into a low-budget slasher flick? Just days after Trump’s chosen successors to chairwoman Ronna McDaniel took over the GOP, nearly sixty staffers were ruthlessly shown the door. A source tells Cockburn that Trump informed the new co-chairs, Michael Whatley and Lara Trump, that he wanted “shock and awe” and “headlines”. He got what he wanted: nearly every major media outlet breathlessly covered the mass firings and put “bloodbath” back into the lexicon weeks before Trump used it to describe the auto industry.

The fires of liberty Dramatic scenes at the new Dupont Circle headquarters of Reason this week, as the libertarian magazine’s staff evacuated due to billowing plumes of smoke from a first-floor fire.“The staff of Reason was briefly driven out of our Connecticut Avenue offices by a literal dumpster fire nearby on Tuesday,” editor-in-chief Katherine Mangu-Ward confirmed to Cockburn. “Everyone is fine, and our only regret is there was no private firefighting company to call in our time of distress.” The Spectator’s Washington editor Amber Duke was on the scene for a taping of her new YouTube show with Robby Soave. She offered Cockburn her retelling of events.