HMM:
Stunning –> Team Clinton has a 100% ad-spending edge in battlegrounds.
In June 2012, it was 54%-46% for Obama pic.twitter.com/0odrbXFSyU
— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) June 19, 2016
“Free media” had better be worth more — a lot more — than Trump pays for it.
BILL PROMISED HE’D ONLY CHEAT WITH ME! Monica Lewinsky allegedly freaked out after Clinton’s affair with VP’s daughter. “President Bill Clinton had an affair with former Vice President Walter Mondale’s daughter — while multitasking with at least two mistresses in the White House — according to a tell-all by a Secret Service officer who guarded the Oval Office. Gary J. Byrne’s account of walking in on Clinton and the gorgeous Eleanor Mondale, then a TV journalist, is the first eyewitness report of the long-rumored affair.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: U. of Wyoming’s President Declares Financial Crisis.
The University of Wyoming’s president has declared a financial crisis and plans to reduce or cut academic programs and review the institution’s structure, according to a letter on Thursday from the president, Laurie Nichols, to the campus.
According to Wyoming’s financial-exigency policy, if the university is in a dire financial situation, it should follow guidelines to navigate the financial constraints fairly.
There will be more cases like this.
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: Nothing gets past the AP — in their Drudge-linked column, “DIVIDED AMERICA: Constructing our own intellectual ghettos,” columnist David Bauder suddenly notices that Americans like having choices where to consume their news and opinion:
In a simpler time, Albrecht and Dearth might have gathered at a common television hearth to watch Walter Cronkite deliver the evening news.
But the growth in partisan media over the past two decades has enabled Americans to retreat into tribes of like-minded people who get news filtered through particular world views. Fox News Channel and Talking Points Memo thrive, with audiences that rarely intersect. What’s big news in one world is ignored in another. Conspiracy theories sprout, anger abounds and the truth becomes ever more elusive.
I’m not sure if Cronkite is your go-to guy for a callback to a purer, better age, considering that at various times during his lengthy career as anchor at CBS, he claimed that Barry Goldwater was a crypto-Nazi, America had lost the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and that a new ice age was on the way. After he stepped down as anchorman, he yammered about one-world government and told Larry King on CNN in late October of 2004 that George Bush had Osama bin Laden on ice in order for him to dial-up speeches near the end of the election cycle, perhaps kept in the basement of the Ministry of Defense next to Austin Powers, Evel Knievel, and Vanilla Ice.
The month before Cronkite’s on-air meltdown with Larry King, his successor Dan Rather famously self-immolated over George Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service. But Rather also did his best at the start of his presidency to make it seem illegitimate:
“Florida’s Republican Secretary of State is about to announce the winner — as she sees it and she decrees it — of the state’s potentially decisive 25 electoral votes.”
“The believed certification — as the Republican Secretary of State sees it.”
“She will certify — as she sees it — who gets Florida’s 25 electoral votes.”
“The certification — as the Florida Secretary of State sees it and decrees it — is being signed.”
All the while claiming: media bias — who me?!
Fortunately, technology began increasingly to allow for alternatives. Alvin Toffler was writing about the “demassification” of mass media and how it might impact our culture during the very early days of cable TV in his 1980 book, The Third Wave. In 2006, I wrote an article for the New Individualist titled Atlas Mugged on how the Blogosphere was born due to bipartisan loathing of how newspapers and network TV news report the news.
As I wrote, neither side of the political aisle was happy with an “objective” media, which was a necessary fiction for radio and television to maintain for the first three quarters of the 20th century. This was a time when the first radio, and later TV networks were a massively expensive proposition, hence only three over-the-air national commercial networks. However, as a byproduct of their dramatic cultural influence, most cities were gradually reduced after WWII to only being served by a couple of newspapers. By the 1970s, the amount of news services producing content was remarkably small, despite an era that had no shortage of crises to report.
The arrival of first Rush and then in rapid succession Fox, Drudge, and the Blogosphere were a necessary and long overdue counterbalance to a left-leaning media posing as “objective.” Speaking of which, note that the AP still holds itself out as being objective, despite a howler such as this in Bauder’s column:
By 2002, Fox had raced past CNN to become the top-rated news network.
This was the beginning of a golden age of partisan media, though Rush Limbaugh had started a boom of conservative talk radio in the early 1990s.
There wasn’t anything to compare on the left, at least until summer 2006 when MSNBC host Keith Olbermann read about a speech where Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld equated Iraq War opponents to pre-World War II appeasers. The next night, Olbermann angrily denounced Rumsfeld. Olbermann half-expected his boss to fire him, but management instead saw viewers had responded.
“The next day he came into my office and said, ‘could you do one of those every night, buddy?'” Olbermann recalled.
His show became home for disaffected liberals in the Bush administration’s final years. MSNBC hired Maddow and eventually made the entire network left-leaning. It didn’t really stick: Low ratings forced a turn to straight news in daytime the last two years, but vestiges of partisanship remain.
“There wasn’t anything to compare on the left” – other than NBCABCPBSCBSCNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR. Not to mention, by 2006 a host of leftwing magazines, Websites, blogs and Internet forums. Plus Air America, which ran from 2004 to 2010 and served as MSNBC’s farm team.
But wait, there’s more:
Liberals like Jeff Cohen, communications professor at Ithaca College, believe that conservatives will always dominate mass media because of corporate ownership.
“Conservatives…dominate mass media,” despite the fact that journalists have been a reliably monolithic Democrat voter block since at least 1964.
And speaking of posing as objective when you’re really a group of Democrat activists with bylines, note the headline on this post, which is also a favorite leitmotif of James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal’s “Best of the Web” column. It was an AP headline in June of 2008, Democrat propaganda pretending to be news. Perhaps if AP had truly been worried about readers departing to “intellectual ghettos,” they wouldn’t have worked so hard to drive them away in the first place.
STEPHEN KRUISER: Trump Goes Full Democrat on Terror Watch List Gun Purchase Issue.
DAVE KOPEL: The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation. “Gay rights have helped shape modern Second Amendment law, thanks to the group Pink Pistols and men such as Tom G. Palmer and Jonathan Rauch.”
Related: Knoxville Pride Fest Draws Record Numbers In Wake Of Orlando Shooting. And I’m sure plenty of people are carrying, since about 12% of local adults have carry permits.
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GREAT MOMENTS IN PROGRESSIVE EMPATHY: Feminist Doesn’t Feel Bad About Toddler Alligator Death Because Father Was ‘White.’
Flashback to 2012: “It’s taboo to admit it, but I wish my unborn baby wasn’t a beastly boy!”
I hope mom is socking away plenty of money for therapy for when her son discovers that article online.
DISPATCHES FROM THE LEFT’S WAR ON BATHROOMS: How Androgynous Bathrooms Ruin Social Cohesion, And Women Can Restore It.
(Via Maggie’s Farm, which quips, “The retrograde author insists that there exist men and women.” As a Mr. E. Blair once said, during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.)
WHY ARE DEMOCRATIC-RUN CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF MISOGYNY AND GENDER DISCRIMINATION? Denver’s top employment hearing officer sues over gender pay inequality.
JOYCE MALCOLM: After Orlando an Attack on The Usual Wrong Suspects.
The point of the pivot to gun control is to distract from the undeniable truth that Obama’s failed Middle East policies, and failed counterterror attacks at home, have cause scores of Americans to be killed by Islamic terrorists. And the news media is happily complicit in this, because it promotes their political goals.
WHY THE ‘LONE-WOLF’ TERRORIST IS A MYTH: “A more accurate picture is that Mateen, an Afghan-American, was part of a disturbingly large Muslim family of sympathizers, supporters and even co-conspirators.”
MEDIA SLOWLY RECOGNIZING HOW DUMB THEY SOUND ON GUNS.
Alternate headline: MSM slowly recovering from massive systemic case of Dunning-Kruger Effect.
THAT’S BECAUSE IT’S RUN BY PEOPLE WHO ARE OVERPROUD OF THEIR SAT SCORES: The War on Stupid People: American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth.
As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”
The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.
Indeed.
DID PAUL RYAN THREATEN TO SUE TRUMP OVER BANNING MUSLIM IMMIGRATION?
IT’S NOT MEANT TO PROMOTE DIVERSITY, IT’S MEANT TO ALLOW SCHOOLS TO ADMIT PEOPLE WHO TANK ON THE LSAT: The GRE Is No Law School Diversity Tool.
OBAMA AND HIS GIANT MOTORCADE DESCEND UPON YOSEMITE: “The jokes always write themselves when Obama talks about ‘pollution.’”
I think Obama is simply doing performance art at this point. Fortunately, President Ash Carter remains vigilant.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Paine College Accreditation to Be Revoked.
INSTITUTIONAL RACISM: Clemson let white students be tarred and feathered for hate-crime they knew was hoax.
‘Our own administration has allowed the reputation of a majority of the student body to be torn to shreds’
One Clemson University student says he is very upset at campus leaders for their decision to allow the student body and the nation to wrongly believe that bananas hung from a pole on campus was a hate crime.
The incident took place in mid-April, but emails released a few weeks ago by the school show officials knew the same day the bananaing occurred that it was not racially motivated.
But “Bananagate,” as some now call it, had thrust South Carolina’s second largest university into the national spotlight because the day after the pictures of the hanging bananas spread like wildfire on social media students launched an eight-day sit in over claims of campus racism.
The “racist” bananas prompted student protesters to claim they felt unsafe at Clemson, that it was filled with racism, and that “Clemson does not embrace its students from underrepresented groups.”
Now at least one student, Clayton Warnke, said he believes campus leaders should apologize for their “lie,” he recently told “The Tara Show,” a radio talk show on local station 106.3 WORD.
“I do believe they should apologize,” Warnke said. “Clemson is made up primarily of white students, I think everyone knows that. … And our own administration has allowed the reputation of a majority of the student body to be torn to shreds in the public spotlight and has done nothing to stop this.”
Reached for additional comment by The College Fix, Warkne referred to his extensive comments given on the show.
Asked by Tara whether Clemson’s decision was discriminatory toward white students, noting “it really made white people at Clemson look horrible,” Warnke replied: “Absolutely it did. Talking to some of these people, I am basically told straight up that my opinion and what I have to say doesn’t matter simply because of the color of my skin.”
“Ironically,” he continued, “that is exactly the opposite of what Martin Luther back during the Civil Rights movement of the 60s advocated for.”
This is all about diversity and student-life educrats trying to build their empires via racial/political intimidation.
AIR WEAPONS: The Smaller And Cheaper Alternative.
I PREDICT ITS RESEARCH WILL BE AS CRAPPY AND POLITICIZED AS THE CDC RESEARCH THAT CONGRESS DEFUNDED: California Funds Its Own Gun Violence Research Center.
Here’s a piece on the CDC’s “pandemic of propaganda” about guns and violence by Don Kates et al.
TL;DR — I’LL GET TO IT LATER: 5 Reasons Why People Procrastinate.
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