There will be no Morning Jolt on November 9, 10, or 11. Happy Veterans' Day! Many fine folks came out last night to celebrate the publication of Heavy Lifting; thanks so much to the fine group of friends, co-workers, and like-minded right-of-center wonks and political junkies. Cam discusses the book on his farm-life focused podcast, "40 Acres and a Fool." The Dumb, Dumb, Dumb Effort to Disrupt Saturday Night Live The groups trying to get Donald Trump booted off of Saturday Night Live are going about their objective entirely the wrong way. Pressure continued to mount on NBC to cancel Donald Trump's guest-host appearance on this weekend's "Saturday Night Live" as a coalition of advocacy groups delivered petitions to the network Wednesday calling for him to be dropped from the show. The petitions delivered to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, home of NBC and "Saturday Night Live," marked the latest attempts to dissuade the network from allowing the Republican presidential hopeful to host the show, with the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda earlier asking that NBC reconsider the decision. Their rhetoric is ludicrously over-the-top. "There's mounting evidence that Donald Trump's racist demagoguery is resulting in real-world violence and physical and verbal intimidation," Mushed Zaheed, deputy political director of Credo Action, one of the participating groups, said in a statement. Really? Really? Are they referring to those two thugs in Massachusetts? You really think those two would have been kumbaya-singing, tolerant, pacifist solid citizens if not for Donald Trump's speeches? They're even adopting the Code Pink style and threatening the heckler's veto. DeportRacism.com is working with activists in New York to disrupt the live broadcast of the show to both hold NBC accountable and make a statement to the world that Trump's racism has no place in the White House. The DeportRacism.com Political Action Committee will pay $5,000 cash to anyone on the set of the show or in the studio audience who yells out or gets on camera during the live broadcast clearly heard saying "Deport Racism" or "Trump is a Racist." This is a chance to turn Trump's appearance on the show into a media story that addresses his racist comments against Latinos. Anyone can claim the $5,000 bounty with no prior relation or involvement with the DeportRacism.com movement if they disrupt the show and meet the both of the following criteria: Notice, "This is a chance to turn Trump's appearance on the show into a media story that addresses his racist comments against Latinos." What, do they think Trump's comments in his announcement speech didn't get media coverage? Where have they been? Those comments were dissected, denounced, debated and denunciated. When are the rest of us allowed to move on with our lives? There's a much simpler argument, and one more likely to generate logistical and legal headaches for NBC. Help Trump's rivals organize their "equal time" requests after Trump's appearance: Let's say a legally qualified candidate asks for and receives an equal opportunity. When the stations agree that a candidate's claim for free time is valid, the station loses all control over what happens in that slot. The candidates are entitled to do or say whatever they want, and the station can't edit it out. "This is why broadcast station managers absolutely hate free time," said [William E. Lee, a professor at the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and co-author of The Law of Public Communication]. Of course, we won't know how many minutes Trump may actually have been seen or heard as the SNL host until the next morning. Since we can assume he won't be in every skit or the musical performance, let's just say the network counts 25 minutes of free time from a 90-minute show. This opens up NBC affiliates "big time" in those markets where Trump has several legally qualified opponents, Lee said, though NBC's top dogs must have realized a ratings bump would be more beneficial than a potential avalanche of candidate claims. Hey, Remember the National Debt? Another proud, historic, unprecedented moment for the Obama administration: 
The U.S. national debt shot up $339.1 billion Tuesday -- the largest daily increase in the national debt in history, according to Treasury Department data. The increase is largely a matter of accounting, in that the Treasury Department had been using "extraordinary measures" to artificially hold the total U.S. debt under the debt limit imposed by Congress. So on paper, the national debt had been frozen at $18.1 trillion since March, as the Treasury instead deferred payments to pension funds and borrowed from reserve accounts in order to keep the government running. Guess whose record he broke? The previous records for one-day increases in the national debt have all come under similar circumstances: A $328.2 billion increase after the government shutdown ended on Oct. 17, 2013, and a $238.3 billion increase the day after Obama signed the Budget Control Act into law on Aug. 2, 2011. Gold, silver, and bronze. As Allahpundit would say, "Nice work, champ." 13 Hours: Hollywood Approaches the Story of the Benghazi Attacks The trailer for Michael Bay's 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi looks surprisingly good. I feared some Transformers-esque over-the-top special-effects or Pearl Harbor–style schmaltz, but it looks a lot like other critically acclaimed military dramas like Black Hawk Down or Zero Dark Thirty.
Our Stephen L. Miller points out that by taking a deliberately seemingly-apolitical route, the film could do more damage to the administration and Hillary Clinton than if it took the course of agitprop: Its pop-culture treatment of events that night will have people talking and debating in a way that all the Fox News specials and C-SPAN hearings in the world couldn't. The recently released trailer has shown that no matter how scarce the names "Hillary Clinton" and "Barack Obama" are in the film, their involvement in what's depicted is unmistakable. The film is based on the Mitchell Zuckoff bestseller of the same name, which deals primarily with events on the ground that night, and the efforts of a small group of operators and security forces to extract their fellow Americans from the attacks . . . Questions damning to Obama and Clinton are implicitly raised in the dialogue. One snippet from the trailer has someone under attack at the embassy begging the soldiers for "immediate assistance," while another character demands that they wait, all delivered in typical over-the-top Michael Bay dramatics and punctuated with the gritty delivery of the order to "stand down!" from the station chief played by David Costabile. But we don't actually know if a "stand order" was given that night by anyone, because, to this day, we still don't know what orders Barack Obama, our commander-in-chief, gave. "If you don't send air support, Americans are going to die" another character warns. Air support was never sent, and Americans died. Why? A panicked voice on a radio proclaims, "If you do not get here soon, we are all going to die!" Forces never arrived. Why? The film's slug lines of "No support" and "The true story you were never told" are damning just by themselves, and that's how the film can ultimately harm Hillary Clinton; it doesn't even need to mention her name or Barack Obama's to simply remind casual observers of the indisputable facts: that four Americans were left to die, on the anniversary of 9/11/01, by a State Department and White House that seemingly couldn't be bothered in the middle of electioneering to deal with the crisis at hand. U.S. personnel on the ground were left to take matters into their own hands without U.S. military support. Why? Stephen points out that American Sniper was the highest-grossing film of last year -- meaning that audiences have a rarely-satisfied appetite for stories of American military men facing adversity in the Middle East. What happens if 13 Hours is a hit? ADDENDA: Remember this week's contention that Bill Gates is approaching super-villain status? Morning Jolt reader David reminds me of the first villain in Despicable Me . . . separated at birth?
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