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Afternoon Links: Ranking the Chains, the Best Roy Moore Reactions, and the End of ‘Pivot to Video’

By Jim Swift

Ranking the best national chains. Tom Sietsema, the Washington Post‘s food critic, spent some time at D.C.-area chain restaurants. His rankings are as critical as they are for D.C.’s finest food purveyors. Biggest loser? Buffalo Wild Wings. Biggest winner? Cracker Barrel. Sonny Bunch’s favorite, Chili’s, mustered a C-.

Collected thoughts on Roy Moore’s defeat. Here’s NRO‘s Michael Brendan Dougherty:

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You’re not helping the pro life cause or the faith by voting for creeps whose election confirm to everyone else that both the cause and the faith are just means for fleecing dim witted suckers.

Here’s our very own Bill Kristol back in August:


Senator Ron Johnson’s thoughts about Tuesday’s special election:

“Alabamians didn’t want somebody who dated 14-year-old girls.”


The National Abortion Rights Action League doesn’t know the difference between Alabama and Mississippi.

Here’s Washingtonian‘s Elaina Plott, responding to a dig by the Daily Caller’s Derek Hunter suggesting her view of the special election is “why someone like Roy Moore almost won and so many people despise journalists:”

“I’m an evangelical Christian from Alabama.”

Read Plott’s whole thread here. Derek Hunter, by the way, is from Detroit.

Here’s Jay Caruso, on what’s next for Steve Bannon:

Steve Bannon will now move on to losing Arizona for Republicans. Unless people there choose more wisely.

David Wright observes this about a political neophyte:

Charles Barkley is 1-0 against Steve Bannon in special elections.

Last but not least, NRO‘s David French:

I was born in Alabama. I live just over the border in TN. This isn’t the South I grew up with. It’s like the Moore campaign dredged up every embarrassing caricature it could find, popped them into public life, and condemns anyone who has the most basic standards as “elitist.”

Celebrities get burned by Keaton Jones’s mom: The first Keaton Jones bullying tweet I saw, where a person or group of importance was trying to show the young kid some love was the Boston University hockey team saying: “Keaton, we’d love to have you come hang out with us on our bench during a game anytime.”

Well, there is a risk to making nice gestures towards total strangers, especially in the age of the Internet and #woke culture of 2017. You don’t know much about to whom you’re making an offer, as the Daily Beast’s Amy Zimmerman writes:

This incomprehensibly cruel year only could have ended with Keaton Jones. Keaton’s viral fame and even faster backlash is about as 2017 as it comes; one last memory from 12 months of balancing real horror and pain with a never-ending barrage of tragicomic bullshit. Of course Keaton’s touching story pulled back to reveal a Confederate flag-toting family and arguably exploitative mother—not just because we’re living in a hell world that’s careening toward the worst possible outcomes at all times, but because 2017 is a year of unmasking, and of seeing things as they truly are. Even before the inevitable outing, social media vigilantes had begun holding stories like Keaton’s to a higher standard, interrogating why only certain (white) kids go viral; why some people’s pains are privileged over others. In the end, the family pictures riddled with Confederate flags were just the icing on the cake—added proof that we all should have been more skeptical from the start.

Read the whole thing. Ugh.

Journalists love Twitter. But does our obsession change how we work? That’s the question asked by the authors of a new study.

The research looked at the Washington Times, Breitbart, and the National Review among others as “Heavily Right Leaning;” Huffington Post, Vox, and the The New Yorker among those considered “Heavily Left Leaning;” the New York Post, Oklahoman, the Florida Times-Union, and the Orange County Register among “Right Leaning;” and USA Today, Bloomberg, BuzzFeed News, and The New York Times as among those it considers “Left Leaning.” They identified where on the spectrum an outlet is by scoring the ideologically informative terms used, and the frequency of that use. Researchers also accounted for terms journalists use in their work to determine “Left-Leaning” or “Right-Leaning,” including “equal pay,” “voting rights act,” “marriage equality,” “mandates,” “deal with Iran,” “overreach,” and “illegal immigrants.” The terms fall as you probably expect: The first three in this list scale “Left,” and the last four scale “Right.” The researchers point to studies that show “partisan terms can be used to identify at least some level of partisanship in writing,” and note that their results “do align outlets at political extremes correctly relative to each other.” Of the phraseology they examined, they settled on accounting for 114 terms—57 right-leaning and 57 left-leaning.

No TWS love? Sad! I’ve long felt that among TWS staffers, our Twitter followings were quite diverse! Guess we’ll never know now… (Editor’s note: The Oklahoman is a corporate cousin of ours.) You can read the paper here.

Omarosa is gone. It was never clear what my fellow Ohioan did for the campaign, other than add the sparkle of celebrity to Trump’s island-of-misfit-toys campaign staff. Now that she’s on her way out, it’s worth revisiting this report about nobody really knowing what she did while in the White House, collecting $179k a year in taxpayer money.

Schumer targeted in fake sex scandal smear. Axios reports: “Schumer calls cops after forged sex scandal charge.”

It appears folks were shopping around a fake document to reporters to try and smear the Democratic minority leader. The left-leaning fact checkers at Media Matters have tied this to right wing provacateurs Mike Cernovich and Charles C. Johnson.

Facebook’s paid ‘pivot to video’ killed: Facebook is ending its program whereby they paid people to produce Live videos, Digiday reports:

Facebook’s subsidies first began when the company decided to pay publishers and video creators money to make live videos in 2016. At the beginning, Facebook had agreed to pay $50 million to 140 publishers and video creators over the course of one year, including BuzzFeed ($3.1 million) The New York Times ($3 million), CNN ($2.5 million) and NowThis ($1.5 million), according to The Wall Street Journal. Facebook also paid celebrities such as Kevin Hart, Michael Phelps and Gordon Ramsay to go live on the platform. The subsidies prompted publishers to set up dedicated Facebook Live teams in order to produce this content. The New York Times, for instance, had a team of six staffers creating live videos every day; Refinery29, at one point, said it was building a team of 10 people focused on Facebook Live. Earlier this year, as it became clear that Facebook Live was a dud, Facebook changed its deals to include payments for both live videos and on-demand videos in the news feed. Under those deals, video makers were required to make a majority of their videos on demand instead of live, sources said.

Video is fickle, time consuming, and expensive as hell. As a certified hater, I can’t say that I am displeased.

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