One of the biggest reasons why King Charles is traveling to Australia and Samoa over the next two weeks is because he will attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM). This will be his first CHOGM as king, and he is nowhere near as beloved as his mother. QEII held the British commonwealth together through sheer force of will, and some countries do not value their commonwealth ties the same way now that she’s gone. The issue of slavery reparations percolated for years during QEII’s reign, but nothing ever happened. According to the Daily Mail, the issue of reparations will be front and center for Charles’s first CHOGM.

King Charles and Sir Keir Starmer are set to face demands for the UK to pay an astonishing £200 billion in compensation for its role in the slave trade when they attend a Commonwealth summit later this month. A group of 15 Caribbean governments has unanimously agreed to put slavery reparations on the table at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Samoa on October 21.

It comes after the Prime Minister of Barbados told the United Nations that reparations for slavery and colonialism should be part of a new ‘global reset’. Mia Mottley, who is leading the demands from the West Indies nations, met the King in London earlier this month for talks in advance of the 56-nation Commonwealth gathering. Ms Mottley has praised Charles for declaring two years ago that slavery is ‘a conversation whose time has come’, although Buckingham Palace declined to reveal the contents of their latest ‘private discussions’.

The calls come in the wake of the Prime Minister’s controversial decision to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius earlier this month, a move which has led to fears for the future of British control of other strategic territories including the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy – who is descended from enslaved people – has described how his ancestors heard ‘the twisted lies of imperialism as they were stolen from their homes in shackles and turned into slaves’. He also controversially supported protesters who toppled the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol and dumped it into the harbour four years ago. Dozens of other memorials to traders and colonialists were removed in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests.

Estimates of the likely reparations bill for British involvement in slavery in 14 countries range from £206 billion to a staggering £19 trillion. The higher figure was cited last year by UN judge Patrick Robinson, who called it an ‘underestimation’ of the damage caused by the slave trade. Mr Robinson said he was amazed that countries involved in slavery think they can ‘bury their heads in the sand’ on the issue, adding: ‘Once a state has committed a wrongful act, it’s obliged to pay reparations’.

[From The Daily Mail]

King Charles has spent the past two years splitting his time between a dozen different royal castles, palaces and mansions while his second wife raids the Royal Collection jewels. In my head, Charles surveys all of what he inherited and wonders “how could one even begin to part with any of it?” Anyway, reparations should happen. The fact that the reparation conversation has taken this long to make it to the CHOGM agenda speaks to the affection QEII engendered from commonwealth nations. But over the past five years or so, all of that has fallen to the wayside. Now the Windsors are seen as colonialists dumbf–ks who are too stupid to do even the most basic of soft diplomacy.

Photos courtesy of Instar, Avalon Red.

A few weeks ago, Jimmy Carter became the first former president to live to 100 years old. President Carter’s son told the media a few months ago that his father had two big goals for the rest of the year: to live to 100, and to cast a ballot for Kamala Harris. Early voting began in Georgia on Tuesday, October 15th. Meaning, Mr. Jimmy Carter has hopefully fulfilled both of his goals!

Former President Jimmy Carter accomplished one final goal on Tuesday during early voting in Georgia, making Oct. 15 a special milestone for him. His grandson told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution over the summer that Carter had said, “I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris.” The former president, who has been in hospice care for nineteen months, has now lived long enough to achieve that make that dream come true, progressive outlet MeidasTouch Network first noted.

Carter also made headlines recently for another milestone. Two weeks ago, he celebrated his 100th birthday, making him the longest-living president in U.S. history. Carter marked the occasion with a rare public appearance to watch a flyover in his honor as other notable Democrats sent their well wishes. His detractors haven’t forgotten him either; Donald Trump regularly dings him at his rallies, suggesting Joe Biden makes him look good by comparison.

[From The Daily Beast]

I’m so glad that Jimmy Carter has lived to 100 and lived to make it to Georgia’s early voting. I’m greedy though – I want him to live to see Kamala Harris win in November. I also hope he lives to see her inauguration. Carter’s son says that his father still has very lucid moments, and while he can’t always speak and articulate everything, he’s watching the news and following certain stories with interest. I imagine President Carter will be delighted if he gets to see Kamala Harris win. I hope he was also told about how many people have been rooting for him for a long time.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

It’s been five years now, if not longer, of a collective psychosis towards the Duchess of Sussex. Part of the psychosis is that they can’t say or admit the actual thing which upsets them: she’s a Black American woman who rejected the monarchy, rejected all of the royal trappings and the “elevated status” which was supposed to be the pinnacle of British society. She saw all of it and she dipped, and she took the handsome, charismatic prince with her. That’s why they’re actually still mad at Meghan, but they can’t or won’t say it. Instead, royalists like Ingrid C-Word cry about how Meghan and Harry are doing “separate” events and maybe Harry will come back but no one will ever forgive Meghan so she’s not allowed to come back! GMAFB.

Meghan Markle won’t ever be forgiven for dissing the royals and Prince Harry must go it alone to salvage his reputation, an expert says. Ingrid Seward said the Sussexes seem to be going in “slightly different ways”, having both appeared in public separately of late. It comes amid rumours they maybe drifting apart and claims Harry is keen for a return to the UK. And the expert said the Duke could very much still be forgiven, despite becoming a Black Sheep of the Firm after making multiple damaging allegations, particularly against brother Prince William.

“But I don’t see the same thing for Meghan,” Ms Seward added. “Deep down people still love Prince Harry, and they want to love him, I think they’re just very, very disappointed in him.”

Referring to his bombshell memoir Spare, Ms Seward added: “He made millions out of it, but he seriously has paid for it, because it’s done his reputation an immeasurable amount of harm, especially with his family, but the way that people view him.”

Ms Seward told The Sun of Meghan’s outing at the LA Children’s Hospital gala: “It did look very much as though she was just posing for the camera. She didn’t look like she was really involved in what she was doing.”

However, she admitted – with Meghan in a glamorous plunging red dress and her hair down – she is “striking out on her own in a purposeful way”. The expert continued: “She wants to remind people that she is still around, although at the moment Harry is getting all the good publicity. I feel that they’re both going slightly different ways to see if it works. They’ve tried it together, and it didn’t work so well. So, they’re doing it separately to see how well it works. And then Harry puts a little tomfoolery into it as well by going into this house of horror.”

She was quick to couch her comments by saying seeing a couple acting separately doesn’t mean they are breaking up. “It just means that they’re doing things in different ways on their own, which is eventually what all members of the Royal Family or members of any family do,” she said. “They do things together, and then they do things on their own, so I’m not surprised about that.”

[From The Sun]

So even though Harry “sold out his family” with Spare and even though Harry has given more public statements about his family and said much more damaging things, Harry is the one who could be “forgiven,” but Meghan will never be forgiven. Because, again, she left them. And they’re still really mad about it and they’ll never “forgive” her for rejecting the gilded, toxic cage. I also enjoy that after C-word talked complete nonsense about Harry and Meghan going their separate ways, C-word is then like, but obviously, all of the royals work separately all the time and it’s no big deal. They’re desperately trying to make “the Sussex separation” happen without drawing attention to the very visible issues in the Wales marriage.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red and Cover Images.

A month ago, an affair was outed between New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi and Robert Kennedy Jr. Kennedy is married to Cheryl Hines and, throughout the year-long affair, he was a presidential candidate. Nuzzi was engaged to Ryan Lizza, a Politico reporter and editor. Their engagement sort-of ended about a month before the affair was outed. Then, two weeks ago, Olivia marched into court and received a restraining order against Lizza, claiming that he was blackmailing her and stealing her devices. She also went to the FBI and made some claims about Lizza. Well, on Tuesday, Lizza finally got to defend himself in a hearing at a DC court. His side of the story… um, makes more sense than Nuzzi’s version.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Olivia Nuzzi – his alleged “paramour,” 39 years his junior – that he wanted to impregnate her during their nearly year-long affair, her ex-fiancé claimed in a court filing revealed Tuesday. Journalist Ryan Lizza alleged new details about Nuzzi’s relationship with Kennedy the day before encountering his former fiancé, who is accusing him of blackmail, in a D.C. court.

In mid-August, Lizza wrote in a filing to the court on Oct. 14, “I discovered that Ms. Nuzzi had been cheating on me with a married man [RFK Jr.] for almost a year. She admitted the affair and over the course of weeks of conversations she confided how she fell into what she described as a “toxic,” “unhealthy,” “stupid,” “psychotic,” “crazy,” “indefensible” relationship with a 70-year-old “sex addict” who told her he wanted to “possess,” “control,” and “impregnate” her.”

“She told me that there was a huge power disparity between them and that he manipulated her…. No device of Ms. Nuzzi’s was ever hacked to learn any of this information,” Lizza wrote, challenging one of the main accusations leveled against him by Nuzzi in her filing to the court on Sept. 30. “Almost everything I know about her affair comes directly from Ms. Nuzzi herself.”

Lizza, who has wholly denied the accusations of blackmail against him, says that he discovered the affair on Aug. 17, two days before the start of the Democratic National Convention, at which point he asked Nuzzi to move out of their home. He says that Nuzzi then spent weeks trying to convince him to stay with her, following the revelation of her affair with RFK Jr. Three days after he found out about the affair, Lizza says, Nuzzi “pleaded with me to consider returning to the relationship, telling me “her affair “wasn’t real” and that “I don’t want to give up” on our relationship.” Nuzzi, Lizza claims, also asked him to tell friends that they were still together.

Lizza quotes a series of alleged texts from Nuzzi, in which she supposedly described herself as “heartbroken” regarding the possible end of their relationship. He says that they started discussing the possibility of moving to Manhattan. Nuzzi then came to stay with him in New York in the second week of September.

“Throughout this period,” Lizza stated to the court, “including on our last day together, I told Ms. Nuzzi that I would help her get away from the disturbing relationship with her paramour [Kennedy], but that I seriously doubted that it was possible for us to have a future together, [and] that she needed to make arrangements to move her belongings out of our apartment. Ms. Nuzzi resisted any effort to formally end our relationship and she repeatedly asked me for more time to consider our future,” Lizza claims. “This remained her position up until the last time we had any discussion about it, on September 15th.” He quotes from an apparent text in which he told Nuzzi he would always be there if she needed him.

“Her allegation of [me] trying to blackmail her back into our relationship is a disgraceful lie contradicted by the most basic facts,” Lizza writes. “Ms Nuzzi’s own recklessness is solely responsible for the public ridicule, humiliation and professional damage she says she has suffered.” Lizza goes on to deny that he ever stole a personal device from Nuzzi, as she claimed, or recovered “deleted materials” from one. “These too are defamatory lies that were meant to create sensational headlines, damage my reputation, and distract from press attention about Ms. Nuzzi’s catastrophically reckless behavior.”

He also rejects Nuzzi’s claim that he “threatened physical violence” against her, a claim Nuzzi says Lizza made when she refused to share in the financial responsibility of their abortive co-authored book project. “I did tell Ms. Nuzzi,” Lizza writes, “that I thought she should be responsible for paying back our book advance since this is the second presidential cycle in a row where Ms. Nuzzi’s personal indiscretions have sabotaged our book project.”

Lizza also addressed the question of who leaked news of the affair, or alerted Nuzzi’s employer, New York magazine, to the existence of it. He says that “as Ms. Nuzzi knows, I did not inform her employer about her affair.”

“At every turn,” Lizza claims, “I counseled Ms. Nuzzi to make decisions that would help her and that would limit the damage and embarrassment to her, to me, to our families, to our respective journalistic institutions, and to the family of the person with whom she had an affair. I pleaded with her to break off all contact with her paramour. I strongly urged her to remove reporting material from him that she included in a draft of her most recent article. (She removed the material and later admitted to a mutual friend that the decision may have saved her job.) While we were together in New York, I pleaded with her to go to her editors and disclose her affair before they found out about it on their own. (She refused.) I was also not the source for the reporter who first broke the news of Ms. Nuzzi’s affair,” Lizza writes, referring to Oliver Darcy. “Ms. Nuzzi knows this because the reporter told her this.”

Lizza concludes by emphasizing his shock at what has happened since he and Nuzzi broke off their relationship for good on Sept. 15, four days before news broke of her affair with RFK Jr. “For weeks Ms. Nuzzi has harassed me with a coordinated defamation campaign by peddling these false accusations to the press. No responsible reporter would print Ms. Nuzzi’s lies. She then repackaged them in this CPO [Court Protective Order] application and leaked it to the media long before I was ever served. Ms. Nuzzi is wasting this Court’s time and is abusing the protections meant for survivors of domestic violence to ruin my reputation in a last-ditch effort to salvage her own.”

[From The Daily Beast]

“Since this is the second presidential cycle in a row where Ms. Nuzzi’s personal indiscretions have sabotaged our book project…” What happened in 2020?? Who was Nuzzi banging in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic? Probably some Trump official, don’t you think? Anyway, I tried to give Nuzzi the benefit of the doubt – even if her affair with Kennedy showed everyone that she has a completely catastrophic personality – but yeah, Lizza’s version of events makes more sense. He was also telling her to go to New York Mag and disclose the affair before her editors found out and she refused. Then when her editors found out, she lied to them and denied the affair. Also: Kennedy wanted to impregnate Nuzzi??? Good god.

Photos courtesy of Nuzzi and Lizza’s Instagrams.

Jeremy Strong does not miss Succession. He said that playing Kendall Roy “f–ked me up.” He went to some surprisingly dark places on that show. [Socialite Life]
Should Sabrina Carpenter play Britney Spears? [LaineyGossip]
Donald Trump & JD Vance absolutely support a national abortion ban. [Jezebel]
Abbott Elementary is still great! [Pajiba]
This woman’s boyfriend is cheating & she needs to dump him. [Buzzfeed]
Anne Hathaway endorsed Kamala Harris. [JustJared]
Leslie Abramson talks about the Menendez brothers. [Hollywood Life]
You can own a piece of Star Trek. [Seriously OMG]
Saoirse Ronan wore LV to a screening of The Blitz. [RCFA]
New music from Paris Hilton. [OMG Blog]

I feel like Gael García Bernal is one of those actors who is always working yet because he minds his own business, we know almost nothing about him. For example, I had no idea that he’s been acting since he was 11 years old or that he’s married with three children. Gael’s latest project is a limited Hulu series called La Máquina, which co-stars Diego Luna and Eiza González. He recently sat down with NPR’s Rachel Martin for an interview on The Wild Card podcast. During the interview, they talked about his feelings on getting older, on how acting was always his calling, and when he’s the best version of himself. What’s really intriguing, though, are Gael’s thoughts on death and transcendence.

On growing up in the theater: I grew up in the theater with my parents. It felt like when I was a kid, theater and life were very intertwined. The stage was just a step away. So in a way, I realized growing up that I was born into something special — into a world that is very unique. And the more I grew up, the more I saw the difference. There was the outside and there was inside. There was my home and there was the world. And there was a big moment in my adolescence that I didn’t want to be an actor.

He tried not to be an actor: I was completely and absolutely reluctant to do it because that’s where I was born in a way. That’s the place that was handy for me. So I wanted the challenge of something else. And I had other curiosities with archeology or sociology or anthropology, philosophy, and I studied philosophy in the Mexican National Autonomous University. And so I tried my best to not become an actor. And it was impossible to escape it.

He’s the best version of himself when he’s acting: For me, it isn’t the acting, it isn’t being on stage. It is the smell of the place. It is like a temple kind of thing. It is the place where I know that everything will be OK. There is this moment of incredible tension and excitement before going on stage, you know, before appearing. And then when you’re there, everything is amazing. Everything is just incredible. So I think I’m the best version of myself because, first of all, I don’t know who I am. So I guess the best of myself, kind of — not shines through, but that’s what we see in an actor when we look at their performances, we know they are someone else.

What he’s found surprising about getting older: Now I know how to do things better, but my body’s not responding as it used to, no? So, for example, with football — I play a lot of football and I just gave up because now it hurts. And I get hurt. But I think I play better than ever because now I know where to [go and] what position to be in.

How his feelings of death have changed over time: It’s changed a lot. Definitely. I guess the first time for me, and must have been for many, many people as well, is becoming a father, no? Like, for example, somebody the other day was telling me, like, “Does anyone remember the name of the grandfather of your grandfather?” And I was like, “No. I don’t think no one remembers that I know.” Like, wow, it’s crazy how all these things that we’re going to build and all these structures that we fight for or try to achieve…

He wants to leave a legacy: And so therefore, you see that transcendence is something else, no? And definitely with a baby transcendence is there, no? There is something that is there and will continue and will live and will reproduce and will be something else and you will just admire. But it is similar to what we do in films, as well. I mean my approach to doing films — and it might sound a little bit presumptuous — but it’s like trying to do something that hopefully has some transcendence. You really want these films to kind of transcend and hopefully be seen in many, many years, because that’s who we were at that point.

“Nothing ends. Everything transforms”: I love the mystery and the poetic behind all of it — but not as a believer. Mostly like that kind of enjoyment or curiosity. Nothing ends. Everything transforms. And that’s a law of physics. And I can feel it. I mean, there are so many examples I can say, some of them are incredibly personal. But when we knew that my daughter was — that we were pregnant, my father passed away. So it was that kind of, like, tag team (laughs). Yeah.

[From NPR]

It sounds like Gael has given all of these topics a lot of thought, especially how he believes that he was destined to be an actor and his thoughts about death. I could have those types of philosophical conversations all day because the topic fascinates me. I agree with him, though. On both a spiritual and physics level, I think that all of our energy gets transferred into something else when we pass. His example of losing his father while his wife was pregnant with his daughter is similar to something my family has experienced, too. What Gael says about building things for future generations to appreciate even after your name is forgotten reminds me of Hamilton lyric, “It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.” I always found that such a poignant way of looking at life and why we do the things we do now so that future generations can build off of it and are better for it.

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As a non-Swiftie, it amuses me to watch Taylor Swift beclown her fans with the long-sought after but never released Reputation (Taylor’s Version), her modern rerecording of her 2017 “comeback” album, after the “cancelation of 2016.” People have been begging for RepTV for two years, maybe longer. She still hasn’t released it, but she has been giving her fans some visual clues that RepTV is imminent. The Swifties are still playing along. Well, this morning, Taylor was supposed to make a big announcement. People were once again wondering if this would FINALLY be RepTV. It was not. Taylor is releasing an Eras Tour book and a vinyl and CD “anthology” version of The Tortured Poets Department.

We’ll be kicking off the final leg of The Eras Tour this week, which is hard to comprehend. This tour has been the most wondrous experience and I knew I wanted to commemorate the memories we made together in a special way. Well, two ways actually. Excited to announce that The… pic.twitter.com/kH8cSEy64U

— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) October 15, 2024

This is for Black Friday here in the US – the day after Thanksgiving, where the national pastime is getting into fistfights at Best Buy over discounted TVs. Taylor’s album and tour book are exclusive to Target, and I would imagine Taylor will be bringing A LOT of people to Target just because of this. Apparently, the TTPD: Anthology vinyl and CD versions have not come out yet, she had only released those songs digitally. If Taylor is going to do anything, it’s squeeze every last dime from her fans AND scam the charting system to stay on top for as long as possible.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.

For years, the Princess of Wales’s work events consisted of “send Kate somewhere and have her do some kind of stunt for the cameras.” The lack of substance was the point – it was solely about the photo-op. So we got events that amounted to “Kate goes down a slide” or “Kate makes jazz hands at a painting” or “Kate wears a life vest.” Kate has been largely absent from public events this year, so I guess Prince William is trying to fill that void with his own stunts. Today’s episode is “Huevo throws a football.”

The verdict’s in, and it seems Prince William has a hidden talent — he has a golden arm! The Prince of Wales, 42, attended an engagement with the NFL Foundation UK on Tuesday, Oct. 15, and across the board, the royal’s throwing ability was praised by those in attendance.

Of his throwing arm, Louis Rees-Zammit, a former Welsh rugby player who is now a wide receiver for the Jacksonville Jaguars NFL franchise, tells PEOPLE that “It was great. It was a lot better than mine.”

“Thankfully in my position, I just have to run and catch,” Rees-Zammit adds. “He could definitely be a quarterback one day!”

William, a passionate sports fan and the president of the Welsh Rugby Union, was interested in Rees-Zammit’s transition from one sport to another.

“He was intrigued about the transition I’m doing and the sport itself,” he said of the future king. “He asked me what I could bring from rugby into the NFL, like my speed.”

Of William’s own talent playing football — which he exhibited while playing flag football at the event — “He definitely wants to learn,” Rees-Zammit says. “That’s why he’s come out here to support these kids who want to learn flag football. It’s a growing sport in the U.K., [and] even myself, I’m always learning new things. He came out here to try to pick up a few things, and one of them — he could throw the ball,” he adds.

[From People]

Looking at the photos, no, William is not a natural and no, he could not be a quarterback. He has no idea what he’s doing. To be fair, American football is not big in the UK whatsoever, and this was probably William’s first time ever handling an American football. But to see him lavished with praise for this photo-op is really something. Very “don’t believe your lying eyes.” Also, Harry attending the Super Bowl a few years ago and being lauded by the American sports community still stings, right? “Look, Harry, I’m into football too!! Pay attention, Harry!”

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.

Throughout the month of July, everything fell apart and then quickly came back together for the Democrats. Now that we’re months past the ratf-cking of Joe Biden, I have assembled a list of reports and beliefs of how everything went down: many Democrats were looking for a reason to push out a popular and effective Democratic president even before Biden’s poor debate performance; there was a feeding frenzy between a childish Beltway media and dozens of leaky Democrats post-debate; those people closest to Pres. Biden, like Chuck Schumer, tried to keep everything handled privately and within the Dem family; Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama’s public reticence to back Biden led to a revolt from donors; the Democratic coup plotters wanted a twofer, pushing out Biden AND passing over Kamala Harris as they publicly pipe-dreamed of an “open mini-primary” and a brokered convention.

After Pres. Biden dropped out and endorsed his VP, it took VP Harris less than 48 hours to secure the delegates for the Democratic nomination. She did so while raising tens of millions of dollars, a war chest which meant that she didn’t have to beg the donors who knifed Biden in the back for anything. VP Harris has spent the past three months building her own coalition using the electoral strategy of Biden’s 2020’s win (much to Pelosi’s chagrin) and putting her own spin on it. All of this is much to Nancy Pelosi’s dismay – Pelosi publicly took Biden out and tried to passover Kamala, because Pelosi has always hated that VP Harris never needed Pelosi’s machinery to win anything. Kamala has never kissed Pelosi’s ring AND Kamala and Joe out-maneuvered Pelosi. All of this will be a fertile political drama for historians. Unfortunately, Jonathan Alter is not that historian. Alter has written a new book called American Reckoning, and it looks like Pelosi is still pissed that she got outmaneuvered. Some highlights from the American Reckoning excerpt in Vanity Fair:

Alter got a heads-up that the Dems wanted to replace Biden: On Father’s Day, eleven days before the historic June 27 CNN debate, I spoke to a senior Democratic senator who told me that if Biden did poorly in the debate, Democrats would have to find another presidential nominee. Surprised by this, I immediately broke (again) my New Year’s resolution not to scheme against Biden.

Pelosi was left with the bloody knife: The key figure in getting Biden to change his mind was Pelosi, who drew on their forty-year friendship. At first, she thought Biden could survive what he described as his “bad night.” But Pelosi is an institutionalist; she loves the House, and her nightmare of not regaining control of that chamber (when Democrats were so close to winning it back) seemed to be coming true. With Republican control of the presidency, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, who would check Trump’s authoritarian impulses? After Biden under-performed with Stephanopoulos, Pelosi expected that Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill would stage an intervention. “But the men were MIA,” one insider told me. “She wasn’t happy that the only bloody fingerprints on the knife were hers.”

Biden did not consult the Clintons or Obamas: As Biden weighed this momentous political decision, he cut himself off for more than four days from almost everyone outside his family. The wounds of what he called “Obama’s deal with the Clintons” in 2016 were still surprisingly fresh, and he consulted none of them in this period—an extraordinary decision in itself. He would make this excruciating call without the wisdom of the fellow presidents he had once considered good friends.

Biden caught them off-guard: After finalizing his decision with aides Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti on Saturday, Biden got up Sunday, July 21, and began telling people, including Harris. Senior staff heard the news only moments before the world did. Pelosi found out when she was performing community service with Jon Bon Jovi in New Jersey; Obama was playing golf. Just one hour before withdrawing, Biden was on the phone with the president of Slovenia putting the finishing touches on the largest prisoner swap since the Cold War, more proof that he was still a global leader of great skill and compassion.

[From Vanity Fair]

“Pelosi expected that Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill would stage an intervention. ‘But the men were MIA,’ one insider told me. ‘She wasn’t happy that the only bloody fingerprints on the knife were hers.’” The men weren’t MIA, they were just conducting their business in private, while Pelosi showed her whole ass on Morning Joe and briefed crap about Biden to every DC reporter for two weeks straight. While Pelosi was leading the public coup, Hakeem Jeffries was privately expressing his concerns to Biden’s people AND publicly supporting the president. Chuck Schumer went to visit Biden in Delaware for a one-on-one heart-to-heart, which we only learned after Biden’s withdrawal from the race.

The part which Pelosi and her people don’t want to say out loud is that their classlessness and public tantruming was a huge part of why Biden’s poll numbers were going down and why the donors backed away, then Pelosi cited those polls and donor nerves as evidence that Biden needed to step down. She orchestrated the chaos and then got mad when her coup blew up in her face and she was left holding the bloody knife.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.

Over the weekend, the Princess of Wales apparently was out in Berkshire, watching Prince Louis play soccer/football. This news comes via a TikToker, who shared a pic. This reminds me so much of all of those weird “Kate sightings” in the first half of the year, when “eyewitnesses” swore up and down that Kate had been seen shopping or watching her kids’ play sports, and yet no one ever thought to take photos. Anyway, given Kate’s surprise appearance last week in Southport, I would assume that Project Kate Is Keen To Work Once A Month is a go. But according to royal sources, there’s not even an expectation that Kate will go “Royal Christmas” at Sandringham this year?

Princess Kate is under “no pressure” from the Royal Family as a key date looms, according to a royal insider. The Princess of Wales stepped back from public life earlier this year after undergoing major abdominal surgery. One such engagement would be joining the rest of the Royal Family on the Sandringham Estate for Christmas.

A source told The Express: “Kate is on the guest list for this year’s Christmas gathering. She’s keen to join her children and family to celebrate the holidays, but there’s no pressure for her to attend. Obviously everyone is looking forward to having her there, but if she doesn’t feel up to it on the day, the family will understand.”

The royal insider detailed what this year’s Royal Family Christmas will look like at Sandringham House. They claimed: “There will be a large number of people present at this year’s dinner. It was trialled in the ballroom for the first time last year and proved a big success so this year will be held in a similar fashion. There will be a buffet-style roast served where members of the family can help themselves. It will include a traditional roast dinner spread with all the trimmings.”

[From GB News]

It’s possible that Kate’s health issues are still a concern, but even royal sources talk about Kate like she’s already separated from her husband. “She’s keen to join her children and family to celebrate the holidays, but there’s no pressure for her to attend.” As in, William and the kids will have to attend – even though they split up the kids in another room – but everyone will understand if Kate skips. And it’s weird that they’re talking about Christmas like that’s the next big thing, when really, it will be a big deal if Kate doesn’t make it to any of the Remembrance events next month. I think she will do one or two Remembrance events, honestly – if she can be shuffled out five days after Meghan wore a red dress (and broke the British media’s brain), then Kate can do Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.