A giant slide unexpectedly sent kids flying – and inspired a viral rap

When a giant slide reopened in Detroit last week after a two-year hiatus, videos of children cascading down the 40-foot structure at high speeds generated both laughter and genuine concern.

The six-lane slide was open for only about half the day before park officials closed it over safety issues. But the clips went viral — as did one local rapper’s rhythmic public-service announcement.

“You can break your back, on the giant slide,” Gmac Cash raps in his newest release. “You can even break your neck, on the giant slide. You can even bump your head, on the giant slide.”

Gmac adds that the $1 ride is “like jumping off a roof” — and “you can lose a tooth, on the giant slide.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/08/24/giant-slide-detroit-rapper-gmac/

A school district in Missouri has decided that things were much better back in the day when kids were allowed to be spanked at school. The school board in Barry County approved the new corporal punishment policy back in June, notifying parents Tuesday that the decision would be put to a vote this week. Parents are being asked if they would like to opt their child in or out of the program, which the county allegedly plans to administer on a case-by-case basis. Reprimanding kids by “swatting the buttocks with a paddle” is constitutional and legal in the state. “We’ve had people actually thank us for it,” Superintendent Merlyn Johnson told the Springfield News-Leader. The board has planned for the paddling to only be administered by a principal at the school, with a witness and never in front of children. “Surprisingly, those on social media would probably be appalled to hear us say these things but the majority of people that I've run into have been supportive,” Johnson was quoted saying. It is currently unclear how many parents will opt in, but the county should have a final vote by the end of the week.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/missouri-superintendent-merlyn-johnson-brings-spanking-back-to-barry-county-school-district

Oz campaign on Fetterman: If he had 'ever eaten a vegetable in his life,' he wouldn't have 'had a stroke'

Dr. Mehmet Oz has spent the past week defending himself from charges that he's hopelessly out of touch with most residents of Pennsylvania, where he is the Republican candidate for Senate.

Last Monday John Fetterman, Oz's Democratic opponent, resurfaced a video Oz recorded in what he called a "Wegners" — a mishmash of the Redner's and Wegmans grocery store chains — shopping for "crudité" and complaining about inflation. Fetterman's comment: "in PA, we call this a veggie tray."

In an exclusive statement as part of Insider's investigation into Oz, the doctor's campaign jabbed back. "If John Fetterman had ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn't have had a major stroke and wouldn't be in the position of having to lie about it constantly," Rachel Tripp, Oz's senior communications advisor, said.

https://www.businessinsider.com/oz-on-fetterman-if-hed-eaten-vegetable-wouldnt-have-stroke-2022-8

The letter, which was sent to the former president’s lawyers, described the state of alarm in the Justice Department as officials began to realize the nature of the documents kept at Mar-a-Lago.

President Donald J. Trump took more than 700 pages of classified documents, including some related to the nation’s most covert intelligence operations, to his private club and residence in Florida when he left the White House in January 2021, according to a letter that the National Archives sent to his lawyers this year.

The letter, dated May 10 and written by the acting U.S. archivist, Debra Steidel Wall, to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran, described the state of alarm in the Justice Department as officials there began to realize how serious the documents were.

It also suggested that top department prosecutors and members of the intelligence community were delayed in conducting a damage assessment about the documents’ removal from the White House as Mr. Trump’s lawyers tried to argue that some of them might have been protected by executive privilege.

The letter was disclosed on Monday night by one of Mr. Trump’s allies in the news media, John Solomon, who also serves as one of the former president’s representatives to the archives. The archives then released the letter on Tuesday.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/us/politics/trump-classified-documents-fbi-letter.html

What does it really mean to be gutsy? Join Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton on an unforgettable adventure to ask some of the world’s boldest and bravest women how they embody gutsiness when Gutsy premieres September 9 on Apple TV+ https://apple.co/_Gutsy

Inspired by the Clintons’ acclaimed New York Times bestselling book, “The Book of Gutsy Women,” the docuseries features Hillary and Chelsea as they embark on a thought-provoking journey to speak with pioneering women artists, activists, community leaders and everyday heroes who show us what it truly means to be gutsy.

Joining the Clintons are a number of extraordinary, courageous, and resilient women who have made an impact in their community and on the world, including Kim Kardashian, Megan Thee Stallion, Dr. Jane Goodall, Gloria Steinem, Wanda Sykes, Amy Schumer, Goldie Hawn, Kate Hudson and many more.

I'm not sure exactly how this guy who supports the anti-trans policy at GCISD thinks this speech is going to make him look.

Breaking History is the “Look, Daddy!” account of a child born on third and desperate to prove he got there on his own.

In her memoir of her stint as press secretary during the Trump administration, Stephanie Grisham revealed that the White House staff had a nickname for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump: “the interns.” Kushner in particular, she wrote, had a propensity for poking his nose into other, more qualified officials’ bailiwicks, wreaking havoc with the chain of command while knowing that his status as the president’s son-in-law would protect him from the consequences. “Javanka,” as Grisham referred to the couple, were also regarded in the office as “obnoxious, entitled know-it-alls” who sought the spotlight on ceremonial occasions, even when protocol dictated that they be excluded—most famously when, barred from Trump’s meeting with Queen Elizabeth II, they had themselves photographed overlooking the occasion from a window of Buckingham Palace, an inadvertently creepy image that inspired comparisons to horror movies, haunted dolls, and VC Andrews novels.

The nickname seems a bit unfair to interns, but Kushner’s new memoir, Breaking History, does read like one long résumé. Kushner has a way of assuring the reader of his accomplishments that makes you doubt everything he says. Grisham (who, like her former boss, has a knack for nicknames), also called him “the Slim Reaper,” for his adeptness at eluding responsibility for the messes he made, as well as for his penchant for scooping up the credit for any successes. He wants readers to know that during the campaign, he turned MAGA hats into a profit center and introduced daily Facebook videos, for which he was given “a budget of $400,000, but only spent $160,000.” Good job, Jared!

As Trump administration memoirs go—and I’ve read a ton of them—this one is pretty dull, with dashes of the obligatory score-settling and self-justification but precious little color. Kushner gets his digs in when covering such fallen rivals as Steve Bannon, John Kelly, and Rex Tillerson (who understandably complained that there should only be one secretary of state). But he has no eye for character or flair for dish, and his whole schtick was that when the going got crazy, he was off in Dubai, or sucking up to Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi prince who according to the CIA ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi (and this spring invested $2 billion in Kushner’s fledgling private equity firm, a deal currently under investigation by the House Oversight Committee).

Kushner’s dilemma is the same as Trump’s. Both are sons of rich, unprincipled self-made men and are desperate to prove what can never be proven: that they, too, would have made successes of themselves even without Daddy’s help. Kushner’s marriage to Ivanka Trump compounded his problem. Obviously, he would never have had a shot at Mideast diplomacy and negotiating trade agreements if he hadn’t been Trump’s son-in-law. He was entirely unqualified to do any of it. The purpose of Breaking History is to argue that it was nevertheless America’s good luck that such a can-do fellow happened into the position to solve so many of the nation’s problems. Like Trump, Kushner is a businessman—although a businessman who started out with the massive advantage of his father’s money and connections. Like Trump, he claimed that his expertise at business brought much needed know-how and hard-headedness to government, a notion that mulishly ignores the fact that government is not a business and by necessity has a different set of norms and goals.

https://slate.com/culture/2022/08/jared-kushner-breaking-history-trump-book-review.html