Part of me feels sorry for these people who spent tons of money essentially betting on high-priced tickets to see LeBron James break his record during a Thursday game, only to have James break the record on Tuesday.

Sad trombone:

John Larson lives in Utah, but he really wanted to be in Los Angeles to watch LeBron James make history.

Mr. Larson, 54 years old, and his 24-year-old son, Adam, had studied Mr. James’s stats and took a gamble that this week the NBA star would break the league’s all-time scoring record.

Based on their math, they thought Mr. James would make history on Thursday, when his team, the Los Angeles Lakers, are set to play the Milwaukee Bucks at home. The Larsons bought nosebleed seats for sky-high prices: $333 each, double what similar seats would cost come Wednesday. They also booked a hotel and flights to travel on game day from Utah to Los Angeles.

But on Tuesday, Mr. Larson watched from his home in South Jordan, Utah—and not a noisy arena—as Mr. James netted his 38,388th point, breaking a scoring record Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had held for nearly four decades, in a game against the Oklahoma City Thunder.

“What the heck?” thought Mr. Larson, who supervises a team selling vacation packages for an airline. “I was cringing with every shot that he made.”

Mr. Larson still plans to go to the game Thursday, he said, having paid so much for tickets and travel. He and other basketball fans had spent big money for the chance to see Mr. James break the record.

Ticket prices for upcoming Lakers games soared this week as word spread that Mr. James was on track to break the record. Some resellers listed their courtside seats for $100,000, while normally affordable seats in the rafters were priced at several hundred dollars.

If you have $100,000 to stupidly burn on a basketball game, I doubt this bit of bad luck will matter much in the long run. Like I said, I sort of feel sorry for these suckers. Then again, sorta not.

I really can’t think of anything (in terms of entertainment) I love so much that I would burn $100,000 on it if I had that kind of money. In a world full of starving people, plopping $100,000 into the pockets of LeBron James (or any sports figure), their team and their league makes no sense to me.

LeBron James is reportedly worth $1 billion dollars.

Weird priorities run rampant in this allegedly Christian country.

Just like gold-plated television evangelists driving Rolls Royces and preaching the so-called “prosperity gospel” to their dirt-poor parishioners, right-wing media figures are constantly coming up with different ways to insist that God wants rich people to be rich.

Take, for example, Ben Shapiro, who took that route when he defended Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate Mehmet Oz, who has so many houses he can remember the exact number.

According to Mediatite:

The Daily Wire’s [Shapiro] offered a novel defense of Dr. Mehmet Oz on Friday, arguing that independently wealthy candidates are not “elitist,” but actually more like Biblical prophets.

“The real campaign issue in Pennsylvania, according to everybody, is Dr. Mehmet Oz is an elitist. Elitist. And we know if you earn money in the United States, that makes you unqualified for office,” Shapiro said of Oz — the Trump-backed GOP nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania.

“So, sure. The original founders of the country tended to be overwhelmingly wealthy men because again, the idea here is that if you don’t want people in politics or demagogues, then it’s good for them to have an outside source of income,” Shapiro argued.

“You want to cut down on corruption. It’s good for people to be independently wealthy before they’re in office. It’s not a bad thing,” Shapiro continued.

“It gives you the ability to say things that are actually on your mind because you have less to lose. This is why, biblically speaking, most of the prophets were actually kind of wealthy, because if you’re wealthy, you don’t have much to lose in any case,” Shapiro argued.

Yes, there have been wealthy members of Congress whose wealth allows them to speak up about issues of the common citizen, and perhaps even argue for policies that could actually make them less wealthy. But they had names like Kennedy and they have consistently been Democrats.

Wealthy congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have been exemplified by The Walking Dead extra U.S. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), about whom Wikipedia says:

[Scott] co-founded Columbia Hospital Corporation. Columbia later merged with another corporation to form Columbia/HCA, which eventually became the nation’s largest private for-profit health care company. Scott was pressured to resign as chief executive of Columbia/HCA in 1997. During his tenure as chief executive, the company defrauded Medicare, Medicaid and other federal programs. The Department of Justice ultimately fined the company $1.7 billion in what was at the time the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history.

Wikipedia also notes:

In 2017, Scott and his wife held stocks in firms that did business with the Maduro regime in Venezuela and a shipping firm with close ties to the Putin regime in Russia. Scott had been a harsh critic of the Maduro regime and chastised companies that invested in Venezuela, saying, “Any organization that does business with the Maduro regime cannot do business with the state of Florida.” By 2018, Scott and his wife no longer held stocks in the firms with links to the Maduro and Putin regimes.

In a July 2018 financial disclosure statement, Scott and his wife reported earnings of at least $2.9 million in hedge funds registered in the Cayman Islands, a well-known tax haven. The financial statement said that the assets were held in a blind trust and a 2018 campaign spokesperson said Scott did not have a role in selecting particular investments.

Scott and his wife invested at least $3 million in the parent company of All Aboard Florida, a rail investment company that proposed to build high-speed rail between Orlando and Tampa. In 2018, Scott supported the efforts of the company to build the rail and get taxpayer-financing. He had previously, early in his tenure as governor, rejected $2.3 billion in federal funding to develop high-speed rail between Tampa and Orlando. Scott stated the original project was fiscally irresponsible given the recession, and he supported a public-private partnership approach when the state’s finances were in order.

Scott was an investor in the firm Conduent Inc., which was awarded a $287 million Florida contract in 2015 to manage SunPass, the toll program in the state of Florida. Due to glitches in SunPass, motorists were charged bank fees and overdraft charges, and the Florida Department of Transportation was criticized for failing to take action. Scott, a Conduent investor, defended the department’s handling of the SunPass controversy.

Well, gol durn it, if that doesn’t prove Shapiro’s point about “you want to cut down on corruption. It’s good for people to be independently wealthy before they’re in office,” I don’t know what does.

Sen. Scott has been a walking, talking advertisement in favor of corruption every single day of his health care and senate careers, and he’s also now the leader of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). His Wikipedia page reads like a How-To manual for people who want to make the levers of government work for the wealthy and against average citizens.

Yes, and Florida residents elected him. Which explains why Florida’s health care system is ranked 48th in the nation.

From the start, the Michigan Democratic Primary contest that pitted two congressional incumbents — Reps. Haley Stevens and Andy Levin — against one another because of redistricting was going to be painful. Levin is a liberal stalwart, Stevens a centrist moderate.

So the two overriding themes that mainstream media latched onto were:

1. The battle of Democratic left-wing vs. the Democratic centrists. According to Politico, “the race brought national Democrats to the state. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) stumped for Levin, while Stevens had the support of abortion rights group EMILY’s List and Hillary Clinton.”
2. A battle between a staunch no-compromises supporter of Israel (Stevens) and a Jewish congressman who supports Israel, but has not been afraid of speaking up for the Palestinians (Levin).

That is pretty much how I saw it. But Politico has a very good piece up about how those national issues certainly played a part, but it was way more complicated than that.

Especially when the race got ugly:

[The conservative American Israel Political Action Committee-AIPAC] invested massive sums of outside money to oust Levin — its super PAC reportedly spent at least $4.2 million in the race. But its attacks on Levin seem to have resonated less with the Oakland Democrats I spoke with than the ads his defenders at a more progressive Jewish political group, the J Street Action Fund, ran in response. They attacked Stevens for having AIPAC’s support and suggested that she was siding with Jan. 6 insurrectionists and Republican House members who tried to overturn the 2020 election.

In reality, Stevens supported the impeachment of Donald Trump over his actions on Jan. 6. She has never flirted with election denialism. And the suggestion from Levin’s allies that she had done so backfired, escalating frustration among Michigan Democrats over the aggressiveness of Levin’s campaign message, according to multiple party insiders, and prompting at least one senior leader in the local party to personally tell him to tone it down.

“It’s not helpful [to the party], and frankly, it doesn’t really register,” one Democratic insider and elected official told me ahead of election day. “All it does is just put a target on the back of a lot of Democrats.”

“Framing her as an insurrectionist? Come on,” says an aide to another member of Congress, describing the private reaction among the Michigan delegation. “That was a step too far.”

It prompted Woodward himself to endorse Stevens — an unusual step, considering his friendship with both candidates and the fact that the primary election was only five days away. “The attempt to link her to insurrectionists just went too far for me — and far enough for me to put my own reputation on the line,” he says.

Same with Mari Manoogian, a second-term state representative who flipped a Republican state House seat in Oakland’s wealthy Birmingham area in 2018. She considers both Levin and Stevens friends and stayed out of the race until its closing days, when the attacks on Stevens by Levin allies drove her to endorse the congresswoman. “I couldn’t take the negativity anymore,” she says.

Politico also points out that many voters preferred to vote for a younger woman than an older man whose family is a political dynasty in the state. Note also that African-Americans in the district overwhelmingly backed Stevens.

It’s all very inside politics and, if you enjoy such things, an interesting read at this link.

You’ve no doubt heard of Libs of TikTok, a right-wing front group for the worst kinds of online harassment from white supremacists, especially harassment related to LGBT issues. The founder of the group has a suspicious obsession with all things LGBTQ. (If you’re not familiar with them, read about the group here.)

Which brings me to Omaha’a LGBT Pride celebration, which culminated in a parade this weekend in the city’s downtown.

It was a celebration of love and unity Saturday morning during the annual Heartland Pride Parade.

Hundreds gathered in the Old Market to celebrate.

“This year we grew even bigger,” said Nikke Trahan-Ferris, the Vice President of Heartland Pride. “We have 144 entries which we’ve never seen before. According to police, that’s the biggest they’ve seen in this area.”

This year’s theme is “Open Hearts, Open Minds.” Complete with floats and performers– there was no shortage of color or pride.

“I think it’s really cool to have the generation before us be here and show us the ropes and what it means to be here out and proud and they really paved the way for people like us to even exist.”

Downtown is still the relatively new home for Heartland Pride, after moving over from Council Bluffs two years ago. Organizers say every year gets bigger and bigger.

“We actually had to turn people away, which is very disheartening. So we’re looking at changing the route next year so we don’t have to turn people away, and they can all be part of us.”

After having left Omaha for most of my adult life, I moved back in 2017. And I can confirm that 144 entries in the local Pride parade is undeniable progress for this city.

Boston’s Republican Mayor Jean Stothert also took part with a contingent from the Omaha Police Department, which would definitely not have happened not so long ago. (See Facebook post below.)

But, as with Pride parades everywhere, even in much bigger cities, there was right-wing homophobic drama, including that stirred up over the Pride sponsorship of Omaha’s Children’s Hospital and Medical Center.

It started with just some local yahoos, including people from the campaign of GOP gubernatorial candidate Jim Pillen. Then things blew up:

Then the Libs of Tik Tok account, with over one million followers, joined in, condemning the hospital for information on their website that indicated they performed hormone therapy for adolescents which includes reversible hormone blockers.

Now checking the website, none of the information appears to be there.

Children’s said in a statement on their website that they sponsor the event to recruit a diverse workforce.

“We cultivate an inclusive environment where people feel they belong,” said the Children’s statement.

In that same statement, the hospital said children and families who seek care relating to gender identity will be given evidence-based best practice, aligned with standards from the American Academy of Pediatrics, and that they do not perform gender-transitioning surgeries.

While Children’s remains a sponsor of the event, Phillip Koenig, President of Heartland Pride, tells 3 News Now that Children’s has “opted to just not use all of the marketing resources this year” and he believes they’re the only sponsor not to make that decision.

It’s not unique to Omaha, but it is still weird in 2022 that certain people (many with their own hang-ups and secrets, mind you) are still obsessed over these issues.

Given the mess that was started by a “fact checker” at the Washington Post named Glenn Kessler when he joined the right-wing attack on a story about a 10-year-old having to travel to Indiana for an abortion, it is probably a good idea to re-visit this article by the always excellent Alex Pareene in the pages of TNR:

At the June 28 Democratic presidential debate, Senator Bernie Sanders said, “Three people [in this country] own more wealth than the bottom half of America.” And Glenn Kessler, who leads The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” blog, wrote, “This snappy talking point is based on numbers that add up.” But Kessler, having checked the fact and confirmed that it was true, for some reason continued checking. “People in the bottom half have essentially no wealth,” he helpfully pointed out. “So the comparison is not especially meaningful.”

That seems like a judgment call best left to, say, a “meaning-checker,” but Kessler, a former business section editor who happens to be a descendant of Royal Dutch Shell and Procter & Gamble executives—an actual member of the American elite and a likely member of the one percent—makes Sanders the regular target of his attempts to police the bounds of acceptable political realities from his perch at The Washington Post. In June, he dinged Sanders for saying that “millions of Americans are forced to work two or three jobs”—because, while Sanders was right, at least eight million do work more than one job, 95 percent of Americans don’t. His team has also taken on Sanders’s claim that health care costs lead to 500,000 bankruptcies a year, going so far as to fact-check the study where Sanders found that statistic. Finding fault with its premises, they declared the study to be untrue, and awarded the candidate three “Pinocchios” for referencing it. (In the lexicon of the Post’s fact-checking department, lies, rather than causing Pinocchio’s nose to grow, cause him to spontaneously reproduce, like a very naughty paramecium.)

Sanders may get the worst of it, but no one is safe from Kessler’s cherry-picking, his tendentious selection of experts from an array of reliably center-right publications and think tanks (“Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute wrote recently for Bloomberg” is a typical Kesslerism), or his insistence on presenting center-right economic assumptions as “facts.” When Senator Cory Booker, for instance, made an entirely factual statement about American gun violence, Kessler took issue, again, with Booker’s premise, calling it “facile” (raising the question, once more, of whether we are reading the “Fact Checker” or the “Superficiality Checker”).

Because Kessler is particularly bad at his job—or, rather, because he is doing a different job, that of a centrist columnist disguised as a fact-checker—he has deflected attention from his competitors, most of whom also routinely mistake elite conventional wisdom for truth. In September, PolitiFact, the venerable fact-checking operation run by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, waded into a fight between Julian Castro and Joe Biden over their health care plans, and found a disputable but eminently supportable claim Castro has made—that there is a “big difference” between a plan people are automatically enrolled in and one they opt into—to be “mostly false.”

You can read the rest here.

Sometimes when a newspaper as storied as the New York Times f**ks up (again!) this badly, you really do have to turn to Wonkette to capture how dumb it is that the mainstream media continues to do these things in the name of “balance”

In case you were blessedly off Twitter on July 4, the paper of record gave space to a Leah Libresco Sargeant, a fervently anti-choice religion writer, to weaponize her own ectopic pregnancy to muddy the waters of the fetid swamp we’re swimming in after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

“Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, states face a new reality about where to draw the line in pregnancy for when abortion is permitted,” she begins. “In these debates, ectopic pregnancy is a key issue.”

Well, yes … sort of. An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg attaches itself somewhere other than the uterine wall, most often to the fallopian tube, and starts burrowing into tissue where it doesn’t belong. Ectopic pregnancy is not uncommon, occurring in roughly two percent of pregnancies, and it will never lead to the birth of a baby. Left untreated, however, it can cause serious damage, rupturing fallopian tubes leading to hemorrhage, sepsis, and death.

Among doctors, there is no issue at all. But among forced birth fetishists, ectopic pregnancy is a “key issue” because they doggedly refuse to concede that this “potential life” has zero potentiality, and thus the only “moral” course is to remove it immediately, either surgically or via methotraxate, a drug which attacks the egg cells before they can damage tissue and cause the woman to bleed to death.

Before Dobbs, we saw ignoramus lawmakers proposing to criminalize surgical or pharmaceutical treatments, having somehow convinced themselves that ectopic pregnancies could be re-implanted. (They cannot.) Now, with trigger laws kicking in to make abortion illegal, doctors are terrified of running afoul of these hastily worded statutes barring abortion except to save the life and/or health of the mother, and are reportedly waiting until patients with ectopic pregnancies show signs of distress before removing a non-viable egg, lest they fall foul of some crazed district attorney who learned all the biology he needed to in church.

In this charged environment, the Times has seen fit to give Libresco Sargeant a platform to demand that we all treat these non-viable eggs like children so that she can engage in an elaborate fantasy that she gave birth, instead of having the “abortion” which was absolutely necessary to save her life and allow her to go on to have other children.

“From a pro-life perspective, delivering a baby who is ectopic is closer to delivering a baby very prematurely because the mother has life-threatening eclampsia,” she intones somberly. “A baby delivered at 22 weeks may or may not survive. A baby delivered in the first trimester because of an ectopic pregnancy definitely won’t survive. But in both cases, a pro-life doctor sees herself as delivering a child, who is as much a patient as the mother.”

Okay, look …

As someone who gave birth and suffered a miscarriage myself, I am entirely sympathetic to the loss of a wanted pregnancy. But I didn’t tell myself a fairy tale that I’d “delivered” a “child” at five weeks, and I certainly didn’t use my own loss to try to curtail other women’s choices by demanding that doctors treat a fertilized egg that will never become a baby like a “patient.”

What she said.

No matter how much pro-life people insist otherwise, ectopic implantations aren’t even “pregnancies” in the sense that a baby could ever be gestated and delivered from one.

It’s just another way that anti-abortion zealots try to muddy the waters with magical thinking.