Zsa Zsa Gabor died today, and we got to thinking how she was famous for being famous while we were growing up, and that it was sister Eva who starred in the absurdist masterpiece of our youth, and then we wondered whether Arrested Development creator Mitchell Hurwitz was a fan of Green Acres, so we went Googling for references, and then this happened.

We regret the error.

On Monday, freelance agents of the Russian government will vote to elect Donald Trump the President of the United States of America, following a successful campaign directed by Vladimir Putin to undermine the candidacy of his opponent.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

Instead, the Russians were supposed to launch a land war on the United States, breezing to success until a group of plucky Colorado teens resisted them. We were supposed to fight the Russkies, not welcome them.

Silly us, we thought Americans had a problem with tyranny. We should have known better.

And the thing is, we used to.

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If power, as an unindicted war criminal once said, is the ultimate aphrodisiac, there are a lot of Republicans sucking Donald Trump’s cock right now.

And swallowing.

Hard.

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John Glenn, American Hero of the Space Age, Dies at 95 [NYT]

The night of John F. Kennedy’s funeral — three days following his assassination — Lyndon Johnson met at the State Department with the world leaders who had traveled to Washington to pay their respects.

Although LBJ had been vice-president almost three years, he was not considered a vital part of the Kennedy Administration, and had been excluded from any significant role from the start. That fall, rumors had been circulating that he might be dropped from the ticket in 1964. JFK’s Harvard-educated Best & Brightest regarded Johnson as an embarrassing Texas throwback.

And now he was the most powerful man in the world.

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Cuba’s Fidel Castro, former president, dies aged 90 [BBC]

We’re going to make the mistake of deploying one anecdote across sixty million people, but hey, we’re grasping at straws at the moment.

The anecdote is courtesy of Rob Flaherty, formerly a digital-communications hack for the Hillary Clinton campaign. He’s originally from Massachusetts, and Wednesday evening he tweeted this:

Anecdote alert: Guy in a camo hat at my hometown bar talking about how he voted for Trump but is pissed about conflict of interest stuff.

We’re going to presume here that “conflict of interest” did not pass Camo Hat’s lips, since that’s Elite Talk. And we cannot know which bit or bits of news reached the space below said hat, since there are already so many to choose from.

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