Wed-Brett Favre's Daughter Got a Volleyball Stadium

We Rob Banks

A woman held staff hostage at a bank in Lebanon's capital Beirut, demanding they let her withdraw frozen savings to pay for her sister's medical bills.

She left the bank after reportedly being given $13,000 (£11,240). It is not clear if she has been arrested.

Later, a man held up a bank in Aley in a similar attempt to get his savings.

They were the latest such incidents in weeks, as anger boils over among Lebanese at restrictions imposed because of an economic crisis.

Withdrawals of hard currency have been limited for most people since 2019, when the value of the Lebanese pound plummeted and inflation soared.




Was This Their Inspiration?

If I Were Going to Waste My Money Gambling, I Would Do It At the Hard Rock Casino

Cheers and tears — that’s how thousands of Hard Rock workers reacted when they learned their paychecks are about to get a lot bigger.

As inflation surges and recession fears linger, Hard Rock International and Seminole Gaming will spend more than $100 million to raise wages significantly for half of its U.S. workforce, more than 10,000 employees.

The increases are significant, more than 60% in some cases, with starting wages between $18 and $21 an hour for workers in 95 different jobs, including cooks, housekeepers, security public space, call center and front desk attendants. In Florida, where the company is headquartered, some team members could get $16,000 more than the state’s minimum wage, Hard Rock said.

Jim Allen, chairman of Hard Rock and CEO of Seminole Gaming, said he’s certain the investment will help the company retain workers and prevent turnover, even though it will have a big impact on the bottom line.

"I spent half my money on booze, women, and gambling. The other half I wasted." W.C. Fields, 1939

The Story of Vladamir and Volodomyr

On Wednesday, President Volodomyr Zelenskyy visited the recently liberated city of Izyum and thanked the Ukrainian forces there for their amazing work in freeing not just that city but the whole of Kharkiv Oblast in a counteroffensive that stunned the Russian military, and much of the world.

Once again seeing Zelenskyy out on the streets, talking to the troops, and even walking around in an area that was under Russian occupation just days before is in sharp contrast to the isolation and secrecy of Vladimir Putin. There is not a table long enough to get Putin to sit down anywhere inside the war zone he created.
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Vladimir Putin’s definitive quality as president — his refusal ever to back down — helped him project Russian global power for years. But amid repeated setbacks in a catastrophic war in Ukraine, his inflexible approach is looking more like his great flaw.

As Russian forces fled in disarray in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region Saturday — dressing as civilians, stealing bicycles, abandoning tons of military equipment and ammunition — Putin sounded strikingly tone deaf as he opened a giant new Ferris wheel in Moscow. “There is nothing like that in Europe,” he boasted via video-link.

Within hours, the Ferris wheel had broken down, and tickets had to be refunded. Repairing what’s broken about Putin’s war strategy and, by extension, his presidency and reputation, will be far harder.

Ukraine’s northeastern counteroffensive was underway even as Putin, at a conference in the Far East days earlier, insisted that Russia had “lost nothing and will lose nothing” in the war, a remark that seemed oblivious to Russia’s repeated setbacks and shockingly high casualties, and ignorant of what was transpiring on the battlefield.

I Bought My Mom Flowers




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The only thing wrong with this diagram is that it leaves out Josh Hawley. We’ll just assume he’s somewhere over to the right.

The QOP Isn't Giving Lindsey Any Love




New Pa. poll points to trouble for Republicans on abortion

A telltale shift in voter preference in bellwether northwestern Pennsylvania highlights the risk of GOP overreach

Back in August of 2020, Donald Trump led Joe Biden in northwestern Pennsylvania by a margin of 58-36 percent. He also led Biden in Central Pennsylvania 55-38 percent. Those two areas are some of the most conservative areas of the state, generally giving Republican huge leads in those counties.

However, a look at those areas in results released last week showed Fetterman with a six-point lead over Oz, 35-29 in northwestern Pennsylvania, and two tied in Central Pennsylvania with each candidate garnering 32 percent of the vote.

To be fair, the poll does show there’s a huge amount of undecided voters, ranging from 36 percent of voters in northwestern Pa. to 25 percent in Central Pennsylvania.

It’s certainly possible that both Oz and Mastriano could still come out ahead on Election Day. However, they may well need to run the table to do so.

So, what’s behind the surprising numbers? Well, it could be a blip on the radar screen. But after being burned by some poll numbers in the 2016 presidential election which had Hillary Clinton ahead of Donald Trump, the F&M poll’s administrators vowed to make the necessary changes to cure the problem of false polling.

Its polls have held up in every election since then.

You have to wonder if the abortion issue could be galvanizing women to vote in the fall election even in conservative areas such as Central and Northwestern Pennsylvania.

Qrevious Quy Goes Full Q

Donald Trump embraced QAnon’s “The storm is coming” meme as he went on a “retruthing” spree on his social media website Truth Social.

The one-term president re-posted an image of himself wearing a Q pin on his suit jacket above the “storm” caption and “WWG1WGA.”

Mr Trump has in the past promoted QAnon accounts, though the recent flurry of posts was Mr Trump’s strongest embrace of the right-wing conspiracy theory movement yet.

Both phrases are commonplace in the QAnon-sphere.

The “storm” is a conspiracy theory that eventually Mr Trump will release his secret plan to defeat the deep state and MAGA opponents and sweep back into power.

While a Q Follower Kills His Own Family

For decades, people have thought of conspiracy theories as harmless amusements. (Not all people.) But the past six years have demonstrated their extraordinary toxicity: They are incredibly dangerous to democracy, primarily because they destroy the shared reality necessary for it to function. By untethering people from reality, conspiracy theories poison relationships on every level, from national to local to the family itself.

As a recent incident in Michigan demonstrates, their ability to tear families apart is especially devastating. In the town of Walled Lake, a 53-year-old man named Igor Lanis became so wrapped up in QAnon and other Trumpist conspiracy theories—particularly the former president’s claims to have won the 2020 election—that he finally erupted at his family because they failed to fall down the rabbit holes with him, went on a rampage with a handgun and a shotgun, and gunned them down before being shot by police on his front lawn.