Revenge of the stenographers

Against Buttons-bashing

It’s hiring season at the Manhattan Institute — Christopher Rufo this week announced that Christina Buttons and Hannah Grossman are joining its Logos Initiative team as investigative reporters. “We’re building the best investigative team in right-leaning media. Whatever happens with the election next week, we will be shaping the news to come,” Rufo tweeted. 

Yet no good deed goes unpunished. X users have been poring over Buttons’s history. Some are outraged that Buttons is a former Democrat who voted for Obama, Hillary and Biden; others harped over the fact that she quit the Daily Wire over the strength of some of Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles’s language about trans people. But even more unsavory: a certain segment of the right, including Milo Yiannopoulos and former MI fellow Chris Brunet, has decided their best course of action is to highlight that Buttons seems to have featured in several pornographic films as a teenager. 

Does that apparent part of her résumé have any bearing on her ability as an investigative reporter? As far as Cockburn is aware, it doesn’t. Corey DeAngelis’s porn past hardly makes him a less effective school-choice advocate. Frankly the Manhattan Institute should be applauded for demonstrating heterodoxy and a commitment to the arts. Let her work speak for itself!

Revenge of the stenographers

Efforts to clean up President Biden’s slip-ups are causing controversy in government departments. On a Voto Latino Zoom call on Tuesday, Biden chose to respond to Tony Hinchcliffe’s Trump rally joke that Puerto Rico is “a literal island of garbage.” “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,” Biden said. 

According to a Thursday AP scoop, “White House press officials altered the official transcript of a call in which President Joe Biden appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity.” After conferring with Biden and his press team, an apostrophe was added to make it “supporter’s.” 

“The change was made after the press office ‘conferred with the president,’ according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by the AP… The supervisor, in the email, called the press office’s handling of ‘a breach of protocol and spoliation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.’” 

Cockburn is a stickler for grammar — how could he not be? — but the biggest surprise for him about this minor scandal is that there is an official Stenography Office?! Doesn’t that seem a little redundant given how most of the press here chooses to operate…?

JoJoFromJerz’s home run

The New York Yankees had a rough go of it this World Series — but they did have a longtime fan in the attendance: Joanne Carducci, better known to her million followers as @JoJoFromJerz, brought her son to the game for the paltry sum of $3,200.

Some of JoJo’s critics pointed out that that self-described “passionate anti-Trumper” may have better spent the money fixing her own home — literally. “Begging for money on Ko-fi, and spending $3200 on Yankees tickets. Nice,” Hamish Mitchell tweeted. He’s not wrong; JoJo is currently at 133 percent of her goal to “save enough money to buy my house out from my ex-husband.” Maybe she was able to use some of that extra 33 percent to buy the World Series tickets.

Despite living in a home that, in her words, needs “a new roof, a new furnace and a new chimney liner all at the same time,” JoJo has found the time for quite a lot of travels — including one infamous trip to the White House, where she and other hyper-online influencers were treated like royalty by then-chief of staff Ron Klain.

Perhaps as evidence of the loyalty of her fans, at least one person named “Yankees Fan” publicly sent her money. Unfortunately for JoJo, the Yankees flamed out to the Dodgers — and may be cursed after two fans interfered with the game and grabbed the ball out of Mookie Betts’s mitt.

Maybe the next time the Yankees make it to the World Series, JoJo can sit right behind home plate.

Costume party

Boo! The world of politics dressed up for Halloween this week — both in and out of the workplace. Treasury secretary Janet Yellen met a miniature version of herself yesterday, while a number of Trump-sympathetic conservatives including Megyn Kelly and Andy Ngo dressed up as garbage to own the libs.

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti put the “Breaking” in Breaking Points, hosting their show as Australian Olympic icon Raygun and the ghost of a Titanic passenger, respectively. A series of Democratic governors — Maura Healey, Janet Mills, Wes Moore, Phil Murphy and Gretchen Whitmer — dressed up as versions of Tim Walz. None opted for his China years, oddly.