December 13, 2024

BEST. CITY NAME. EVER.

Please get this done, Judge Treviño.

Posted at 3:52 pm by Stephen Green

OUCH: YouTube TV Raises Price 14%, to $83 per Month, Citing ‘Rising Cost of Content.’

YouTube TV is getting more expensive — outpacing the rate of inflation — with a 14% price increase for the streaming pay-TV package going into effect for new customers immediately.

The cost of a new YouTube TV base plan subscription is increasing from $72.99 to $82.99, starting Dec. 12, 2024, for new users, the company said in a message to customers Thursday. The new price will go into effect Jan. 13, 2025, for most existing users, while those on existing trials and promotional rates “will not be affected.” The increase is “due to the rising cost of content,” according to YouTube.

With the higher fee, YouTube TV has now more than doubled in price in just under five years, from $40/month as of March 2018 to $83/month.

Has the value of the content doubled?

Posted at 2:50 pm by Stephen Green

WHY THE ONLINE LEFT IS SIMPING FOR LUIGI MANGIONE:

The details emerging about Mangione would suggest he was no raging leftist. He seems to have been a follower of the centrist podcast bros – those who dispense a mix of self-help, gym tips, nerdy AI chat and anti-wokeness. Perhaps more telling is his glowing review on the Goodreads website of the manifesto of Ted ‘Unabomber’ Kaczynski, who mounted a 17-year domestic-terror campaign, raging against industrial society. ‘You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution’, posted an account bearing Mangione’s name and likeness.

Some speculate that Mangione’s chronic back pain might have radicalised him, even though his incredibly wealthy background would mean it is unlikely he’d been left destitute and untreated. Shell casings found at the scene were marked with the words ‘deny’, ‘defend’ and ‘depose’ – words typically used in health-insurance policy documents, which inspired the title of a 2010 book, Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It. The police say that, when Mangione was arrested, he was in possession of a short ‘manifesto’, declaring that ‘These parasites had it coming’. ‘I do apologise for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done’, it reportedly says.

In their ‘joy’ and rationalisations, Team Luigi is being accused of mainstreaming revolutionary violence. The truth, I think, is much more pathetic. The frisson some leftists have felt from this killing – not the ordinary folks scarred by a woeful healthcare system, but the well-heeled commentators who no doubt have immaculate coverage – speaks more to a kind of morbid pessimism than to any genuine radicalism.

Those swooning over Mangione are not egging on some grand revolution, they are extracting a vicarious thrill from watching someone lash out, murderously, at ‘the system’. The claim that Thompson’s cold-blooded killing has, at least, generated ‘a conversation’ about healthcare is pretty weak, too. Not least because the main conversations it has generated thus far, across cable news and the internet, are whether or not Taylor Lorenz is a twat, or whether it’s acceptable to celebrate a killing, or whether it’s okay to find the killer sexy (Mangione clearly took on board all that podcast-bro workout advice).

This speaks to what American Marxist Fredrik deBoer, in another context, has described as the ‘​​fantasy of deliverance through political violence’ on today’s political left, bred of a ‘feeling of grasping at straws’. Having failed to transform the system, leftists fantasise about going to war with it, despite this being obviously doomed to fail in an era when the state is overwhelmingly better armed than the populace and the populace is generally disapproving of political violence.

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

JOHN STOSSEL DEBUNKS THE RECYCLING RELIGION IN NEW VIDEO: With an appearance from fellow Insta-co-blogger John Tierney.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: ‘Understandable’ Violence and the Left. “Anger is natural. A desire to peacefully bring about change through the democratic process is natural. Wishing murder on civilians because of your own pathological immaturity is not natural.”

It certainly seems to be becoming habitual in some corners.

Posted at 2:19 pm by Stephen Green

“BLUEGOISIE.” Heh.

Posted at 1:51 pm by Glenn Reynolds

SYRIA GOES OUT OF THE FRYING PAN…

…and into the sharia fire.

Posted at 1:48 pm by Stephen Green

JOHN NOLTE: Lesley Stahl, Van Jones ‘Extremely Worried’ About Death of Corporate Media Influence.

“I’m extremely worried about the press. I despair. I worry greatly. We’re at the point where if [sic] the POTUS is going to say ‘Legacy media is dead.’ I’m very dark about it.”

Eat it, sweetheart.

If the knowledge that Lesley Stahl is despairing and in a dark place does not make you want to stand up and cheer, you must be a feminist.

You see, throughout the 2024 campaign, the corporate media were Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. They didn’t know they were dead. Being ignorant of their own death, they played all their usual games assuming it would drag Kamala Harris — Celebrity Obama 2.0 — over the finish line. Stahl’s own 60 Minutes went so far as to dishonestly edit Kamala’s interview to make her sound smart. Van Jones’ own CNN raged on and on about Trump’s “Nazi rally” at Madison Square Garden and spread the hoax about Trump calling for Liz Cheney’s execution. Then…

The “too big to rig” results came in on Election Night and it finally hit them: We’re dead. No one believes us anymore. Our influence is gone. We can’t rig elections anymore with our lies and hoaxes. Despair! Despair! Despair!

Donald Trump visiting podcast after podcast, doing Joe Rogan, sitting down for a handful of Breitbart News interviews, is as big a sea change in politics as when John F. Kennedy embraced television in 1960. Radio was declared dead. TV was king.

Well, now, the legacy media is dead and alternative media is king.

But there is one important difference between 1960 and 2025, and that’s this: The 1960 switch was based on technology, the difference in what radio and TV offered. The 2025 switch is based on the legacy media’s credibility implosion, in other words…

Click over for a massive (and very likely incomplete) list of hoaxes “reported” by the DNC-MSM over the past decade. As Tim Graham writes at NewsBusters: Journalists Deserve All the Angst That Trump’s Win Brings.

Longtime CBS News correspondent Lesley Stahl engaged in conversation at the 92nd Street Y in New York City with columnist Peggy Noonan, and they both agreed the legacy media are “fraying” – for 20 years, Noonan insisted.

“I’m extremely worried about the press,” Stahl said, as she dragged out her usual story about Trump and press criticism. “I once asked Donald Trump why do you keep pounding on the press? This was right after he won, in 2016….It’s kinda boring, you say the same thing over and over, and you won! It’s time to drop it!”

This is a bizarre demand, since no one in the press announced, “well, Trump won, so it’s kind of boring to keep criticizing him, saying the same thing over and over.”

Stahl said she asked why he would do it, and Trump replied: “I do it, and I repeat it, because the more I do that, the less people are going to believe you when you say negative things about me….And it’s happened!” The media’s public trust ratings are the worst they’ve ever been in the television era.

This alleged Trump comment did not air on CBS, although Stahl drags out the anecdote like it’s nefarious. It’s the exact opposite of the Stahl shtick — if I attack Trump, and I repeat it, it means the more I do it, the less people are going to believe Trump when he attacks the press. But he’s won that battle.

“I despair, seriously. I worry greatly,” Stahl said. “We’re at a point where if the President of the United States is going to say ‘Legacy media is dead’…It is, kind of, sort of hobbling right now. And I don’t know how it recovers. I’m very dark about it.”

Noonan made the mistake of associating an unpopular press with the end of freedom of the press, which is not the same thing. The First Amendment doesn’t automatically grant sainthood to the press. You’re allowed to think the press has performed terribly without ending the First Amendment. That’s freedom of speech.

Noonan didn’t push back on Stahl. She could ask if CBS and 60 Minutes ever did anything wrong that undermined trust in the media. Dan Rather offered the nation phony documents about George W. Bush on 60 Minutes II.

Lesley Stahl is infamous among Republicans for lecturing Trump in 2020 that you could not report on the Hunter Biden laptop because it could not be verified. CBS reporter Catherine Herridge verified the laptop in 2022, and she’s no longer at CBS.

RedState’s Nick Arama adds: Megyn Kelly Completely Wrecks Lesley Stahl After Her Whining About Legacy Media Dying.

“Should we go over them?” she continued. Then she proceeded to completely wreck Stahl.

“Like maybe don’t say the laptop can’t be verified when it can,” she said, referring to Stahl’s response to the Hunter Biden laptop. How are you a journalist if you don’t want to follow up on that story?

“And then when your own organization verifies it, come out and do a mea culpa and admit you embarrassed yourself.”

Maybe don’t stealth edit the presidential candidate interview with ’60 Minutes’ — your flagship program that you’re an anchor of — without telling us, and then when it becomes a controversy, refuse to release the transcript because you’re more interested in running cover for the Dems than you are in honest reporting.

“60 Minutes” edited the interview that they did with Kamala Harris, reducing her word salad response. And frankly we don’t know what else they may have edited since they refused to release a transcript or the full video of the interview. Which tends to make you think they might be hiding even more nonsense.

Maybe don’t host a vice-presidential debate where you fact-check only one side. And then when your fact-check gets fact-checked by the vice-presidential candidate on the Republican side, you cut his mic.

Just a few thoughts off the top of my head what you can do about it.

Now, that’s a complete evisceration if ever there was one. That’s reality, and Stahl should listen.

But she won’t because that might actually require putting aside their bias and doing a little self-examination.

Since they’re absolutely incapable of self-examination, they’d be far better off in admitting their biases — the idea of an “objective” media is a fossil left over from the earliest days of three radio and later TV networks. Now there is an unending firehose of media to choose from. No wonder voters chose the media that they thought best reflected their interests — and equally important, didn’t condescend to them.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

VDH: The evaporation of the Obama mystique.

Former President Barack Obama had long been rumored as the catalyst for the 2020 Joe Biden nomination — and thereafter played the whispering puppeteer behind the subsequent lost Biden administration years.

As such he and his coterie proved the virtual architects of the Biden administration, one of the most unpopular and failed presidencies in American history.

Recall earlier that after a flailing candidate Biden lost the first three 2020 primaries and caucuses, his inert campaign was headed nowhere.

Obama and fellow Democratic insiders abruptly engineered the withdrawal of his rival 2020 presidential candidates: hard left but likely sure-loser candidates, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg.

The Obamas ignored or withheld from the public their own firsthand knowledge that Biden was suffering from signs of dementia.

Instead, they found Biden’s cognitive decline and his former concocted reputation as workingman’s Joe useful as a veneer for a veritable Obama third-term, “phone it in” administration. Or as wistful Obama once conditioned his dream of a third term — “If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in.”

The Obamaites then got their wish for four years of enacted hard-left directives that they could only have dreamed of while in actual power.

But their radical menu since 2021 had divided and nearly wrecked the nation —hyperinflation, 12 million illegal aliens, a ruined border, spiraling crime, a shattered foreign policy of appeasement, the popular backlash against DEI/Woke/trans chauvinism, partisan lawfare, and weaponization of the government.

And the ruling radicalism beneath the Biden facade eventually cost the Democrats nearly everything — the presidency, the House, and the Senate.

An inert Biden is departing office with a 36 percent favorability rating in a recent Emerson poll. His Democratic nominee replacement, losing presidential candidate Vice President Harris, also has virtually vacated her office with 40 days left of her tenure.

Failed candidate Harris has been roundly faulted by staffers and donors for blowing through some $2 billion in assorted 2024 campaign money.

How bad was her campaign? At least one leftist Website is asking: How Much of the Harris Campaign Was a Scam?

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

VIDEO: Diversity != Strength. “The ritual cliche invoked by the social justice left is that ‘diversity is strength.’ But as the Irish mother in the video notes, importing waves of unassimilated foreigners into local communities doesn’t strengthen them at all.”

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green