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After several weeks of different combos for different reasons, The Big Three® are reunited and bring a power hitting show with them. First up, we talk southern cooking (Rob is hosting from Oxford, Mississippi, site of this year’s Southern Foodways Symposium — and please, it’s a serious symposium — not “an excuse to eat fried chicken…”). Then, the hosts debate impeachment and the White House strategy for defeating it. We shift gears and welcome Daniel Krauthammer on the occasion of the paperback debut of The Point of It All, the book he edited for his late father in the months before Charles passed away. Then, the great Victor Davis Hanson (partially great because his podcast The Classicist is available on the Ricochet Audio Network and partially great because his best selling book, The Case For Trump is the definitive resource in these troubled times). The segment is a how-to guide on defending the President in the sure to be turbulent next few months. Finally, what is the best Halloween candy? Our hosts weigh in (heh) on this vitally important topic. Leave your picks in the comments, please.
Note: we did not get to the Long Poll in the show this week, but we did post a new one. Please take it.
Music from this week’s show: I Want Candy – The Strangeloves.
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“Curse you, instinctive demagogue!”
Mexico has sent approximately 15,000 troops to the U.S. border in efforts to control the flow of migrants to the U.S. …
Lopez Obrador previously deployed 6,000 troops earlier this month to Mexico’s southern border.
“The policy is a shift from previous practice. The Mexican security forces have long detained undocumented migrants as they travel in the country, but had not typically stopped them from crossing the US border in the past,” AFP noted.
Mexico’s military deployments was condition agreed upon by the nation’s leaders in exchange for avoiding tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration. …
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2019/06/mexico-sends-15000-troops-to-us-border/
Charming response
Big Dave Loggins fan, @annefy?
Yes, I don’t care for the song. I think it’s slow, cliched, and cloyingly ponderous.
Furthermore, @kedavis is, shall we say, very opinionated about this show (and several others we do). That’s fine, it’s the raison d’être of this site. But occasionally, I’m going to push back a bit on some of what I read. I draw a red line around Please Come To Boston.
But a very appropriate song for James’ visit.
Here are three I like better, in no particular order:
Fanatical local devotion, @jameslileks?
No, it’s “an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope!”
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x53j0l
But what James suggested/recommended was that Boston is a great place to visit for history, etc. So as an invitation, “Please Come To Boston” makes the most sense.
Idea:
P.S. If you do the above, my unsolicited advice is don’t be too literal with your song selections. Ideally, you want listeners to have to think a bit about what the song is referring to or commenting on in the show they just listened to (and yes, I admit that this week’s choice was a bit too on the nose). Also –and this is important– most of the time, I want to end the show on an upbeat note. I want you to hit that stop button feeling good that you gave us an hour plus of your time. Given that criteria, the Loggins tune (which again, I am well aware of) is too much of a downer for my purposes. I know you disagree with that opinion. And that’s fine.
I would be happy to be a guest on any Ricochet podcast. In fact I would love to do every Ricochet Podcast in 2020 as a guest, and also a stunt. But mostly for fun.
This can be arranged…
If not at the end because it’s too “down,” then maybe inserted right after James said that? I guess you don’t support things like that in general, but I heard a few “inserts” this time. Such as “Reunited.”
If James has a really bad future visit to Boston, use this….
Boston University:
I too noted how un-campus-like BU was when our daughter looked at it in 2002. Many of the school buildings just mixed in with the surrounding neighborhood with no defined campus boundaries. Architecturally dramatically different from Boston College.
I hope daughter of @jameslileks learns more than the currently most visible Boston University alumna did. That Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who received a BA cum laude in economics and international relations from Boston University in 2011, could demonstrate such ignorance about economics should embarrass the university.
A close runner-up for sure.
You heard only one (Reunited) and it was very much an outlier.
I went to graduate school in Atlanta on a campus that was integrated into the city apart from the very core buildings like the Student Union where tours could meet and then walk. When my son was university shopping, I took him there, and he was… uhhhh, no. Yet I liked it: this strange merging of school and town. We weren’t pretending to be Harvard, after all, and I love Atlanta. I liked the merging of the school with Atlanta’s spirit, even when the homeless were a problem or a class was late and one wanted a police escort to the parking garage. (Sounds strange, I know, but there was a weird cosmopolitan grit in all of that, which I wasn’t too old yet to find uninteresting.)
Then again, I suspect my state school tuition was a bit lower than BC. For the education I got, it was a bargain. :)
Same for NYU, where I went to school. One of my classes was in the same building, even on the same floor, as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire several decades before.
But is the Pearson’s Nut Roll better than Payday? I can’t go along with that.
NYU’s Bronx campus was more akin to an actual designated campus site. But the urban decay of the Bronx south of Fordham Road in the 1960s, the lack of close mass transit access and the hilly nature of the area, and the fact that Washington Square had far more cachet (and better real estate values) caused the university to dump it off to the city in the early 1970s, which turned it into Bronx Community College.
@jameslileks I also did my first visit to Boston in august while driving eastern Canada.
I really recommend if you go again, do the ghost tour it was a blast of fun. I only walked by Fanueil hall, but I made sure to make lots of Fallout 4 references in my posts to my facebook wall.
Just spending a lot of time in Boston Common was great. I have always wanted to visit the city and really wished to see all the sites from Banacek.
Which clearly should have been the song to play @blueyeti
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpdt7CXrVmI
I took the liberty of transcribing word-for-word Daniel’s response to Rob’s question about making an argument for civility in such a polarized society. I had to skip back and forth several times, but it was worth it. You’re welcome!
It’s not that I know I’m right, it’s that I know they’re wrong.
I love this.
Lol. Even more obscure than The Strangeloves! A new leader in the clubhouse…
@Lois Lane Heck, I wanted a police escort from the library at closing time when I went to UGA back in the late 1970s. I would probably have a stroke contemplating walking to my car at night in downtown Atlanta, where I was raised.
In response to Rob’s response on what food is unique to the South, the correct answer is boiled peanuts, a Southern Delicacy!
Reflections: My father used to always proclaim, “I hate yankee beans!” Traditional Southern green beans are pole beans, cooked for hours in ham hocks or a streak of lean. Me – I prefer yankee beans, although I never turn down old school.
I was at a conference in Denver immediately after the 2008 election where I met a woman from the Northeast. Upon learning I lived in Tennessee, she assumed I ate tons of fried chicken. I was bewildered. I responded that fried chicken is delicious, I was a rare treat. She basically told me that I was a liar and ate fried chicken all the time. Condescending twit. I might add that she was over the moon about Obama’s election. To the point that she really needed to quit talking.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I watched Banacek “religiously” when it was first on, and I never heard of The Strangeloves.
But you’d expect that from me, wouldn’t you?
In 2014, I drove across North America west to east, mostly on two lane highways, including through many American Indian reservations. I saw two (2) different high schools, each on a different reservation, with a sign out front announcing “Go [Mesa High School] Redskins!”
One of the signs included a picture of the trademarked helmet insignia sported by the Washington Redskins.
By and large, American Indians regard the term “Redskin” the same as Americans regard the term “Yankee,” which was originally intended as a slur.
I could have written that response pretty much word for word myself.