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KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Mixed Bag and the Media Is Still Lying to You Thursday. “The past couple of days have provided new opportunities for members of the American news media to remind discerning, honest Americans why we despise them.”

Do you really need to be that discerning or even honest to despise the news media?

AMERICA’S PAPER OF RECORD: Trump’s Popularity Surges After Nation Learns He May Have Obstructed Congress. Heh.

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Democrats can’t wait to raise your taxes, and take your job, too.

As Bryan Preston wrote after the Democratic presidential candidates’ apocalyptic-themed “climate change” town hall on CNN in September, “If you like Venezuela, voting for any of them will bring you a whole lot of Venezuela. Thank you, CNN, just for letting these people talk. Do it again next week? Please?”

WELL, JOURNALISTS ARE ALSO TELLING US THAT REPORTERS NEVER SLEEP WITH SOURCES, AND THAT TRUMP IS HITLER FOR PROTECTING JEWS: Black Nationalist Hate Group Praised by Media Shot Up Kosher Market. So maybe the media’s take on things isn’t worth much.

WELL, IT IS THEIR ELECTION: Judge: South Carolina GOP can cancel its 2020 primary.

AWAKENING A SLEEPING GIANT: Gun sanctuary movement explodes as background checks near record high.

Am I exaggerating? Well, there’s this: Virginia Dems on gun confiscation: Never mind.

SINKING A HAZARD TO NAVIGATION: Is one of China’s fake islets in the South China Sea going down? Well, not yet. The USS Detroit sinks a vessel that has been declared a hazard to navigation in the Atlantic Ocean. Photo taken Nov. 23, 2019.

AYATOLLAH IRAN’S BLOODY DECEMBER

WHY IS EVERYONE PRETENDING REPORTERS NEVER SLEEP WITH SOURCES?

Creative license is always taken in biographical films. This isn’t breaking news. But because this time the character at the heart of the controversy is a journalist, all stops must be taken to stop Eastwood from telling his story, from his point of view, and journalists must be made to be the real victims of the Jewell saga and the film. It’s a recipe for a guaranteed box office hit for Eastwood, just as Joker was.

I for one would like to believe this plot decision was made on purpose by Eastwood to give the AJC a hint of the medicine they attempted to give Richard Jewell, or that the Washington Post, New York Times and CNN gave Nicholas Sandmann.

The AJC was the only news outlet who refused to apologize for their coverage of Jewell, and instead of settling with him, waited him out until his death in 2007. When the Atlanta-Journal Constitution apologizes to the family of Richard Jewell, perhaps only then should Eastwood offer his own concession.

Read the whole thing.

CHINA: Fissures in the Facade. “The anger on social media was also indicative of new insecurity among members of China’s middle class, who have never experienced an economic downturn and have always thought they had more protections than lower-paid migrant workers. People said they could see themselves in Mr. Li.” Plus:

The most subversive, explosive message you tell the Chinese people is something different. It goes like this:

The Party is a racket. The guys at the top are not any different from the ones you deal with at the bottom. The Party exists to make sure their kids have a spot at the front of the line no matter how much more your kids deserve it. You are not forced to call Xi all these fancy titles because it will help him restore China to its ancestral glory: you are forced to do all of that so Xi Jinping’s daughter gets into Harvard and his family racks up homes in Hong Kong. All of the taxes, the censorship, the ridiculous rules and regulations, the blustering about war, the hero-worship and the propaganda, the detention centers and the cameras—it is all a racket. You live a slave so that someone else’s children can get ahead.

That is the fissure in the facade. It is whispered of. It is wondered at. Sooner or later, it will explode.

Well, that’s because it’s the truth. Though the anxieties of the middle class vs. the professional class in China sound awfully familiar. . .

CHILDREN’S CRUSADE: Trump Jr. blasts Time for choosing Greta Thunberg as Person of the Year.

Flashback: It’s Disgusting What the Climate Panic Brigade Is Doing to Greta Thunberg.

The Swedish teenager is not some science prodigy who graduated young from an Ivy League school with an advanced agree in physics or anything like that. Rather, the daughter (and granddaughter) of famous actors and opera singers suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and selective mutism. I’m no medical professional, but these things might have been brought on when (according to public sources), starting at the age of eight, Thunberg was subjected to such a barrage of climate panic that she eventually became depressed and lethargic, and also developed an eating disorder.

Now Thunberg is paraded around the globe as the voice of sanity on climate change.

How dare they.

THE FIRST THING WE DO, LET’S KILL ALL THE PAKISTANI LAWYERS: Three die as marauding Pakistan lawyers rampage through cardiac hospital. “Lahore government official Kamran Ali told Reuters the lawyers were enraged by an earlier incident where doctors allegedly beat a lawyer at the hospital over his refusal to get in a queue of patients. The lawyers were particularly angry that the doctors filmed and shared the beating on social media, he said.”

Well, this will repair the reputation of the bar, no doubt.

SWAMPLAND: After bipartisan pushback, Trump ditches effort to kill major federal agency.

TYLER O’NEIL: Trump Protects Jews. Therefore, He Must Be Hitler.

GOOD: Hundreds of academics sign letter in support of prof who criticized ‘diversity statements.’

THE PRESS WANTS US TO BELIEVE THE WORST OF OTHERS, BUT ONLY THE BEST ABOUT ITSELF: Why is everyone pretending reporters never sleep with sources? The Twitter reaction to Richard Jewell is completely expected and completely contrived.

The excuse for going after Eastwood this time is the portrayal of Kathy Scruggs, the reporter for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution whose work targeted Jewell for the bombing. In the film, there’s a scene apparently (I say apparently because, much like Joker, a swath of journalists are jumping to conclusions on the content of the film rather than waiting to see it, of course) where the Scruggs character, played by Olivia Wilde, hints at offering sexual favors to an FBI source in return for details regarding Jewell and the case. The current editors of the AJC are even threatening Warner Brothers with a lawsuit citing defamation unless a disclaimer is added to the front title cards of the film: something that already exists, and has already existed in the credits of just about every single biographical film ever made. But that’s not good enough.

This plot device of course has Twitter journalists raging mad about something they describe as a ‘sexist trope’, which ‘doesn’t even happen at all’. Except it has happened, and as recently as two months ago. Jeffrey Young, senior reporter for HuffPost tweeted ‘The lazy, offensive, shitty way screenwriters so often treat female journalists infuriates me. Depicting women using sex to get stories is disgusting and disrespectful. It’s also hacky as hell. I was planning to see this movie but not anymore.’ Melissa Gomez of the Los Angeles Times wrote ‘Hollywood has, for a long time, portrayed female journalists as sleeping with sources to do their job. It’s so deeply wrong, yet they continue to do it. Disappointing that they would apply this tired and sexist trope about Kathy Scruggs, a real reporter.’ Susan Fowler, an opinion editor at the New York Times tweeted ‘The whole “female journalist sleeps with a source for a scoop” trope doesn’t even make any sense tbh like what does Hollywood think journalism is???’ By the end of the night on Monday, ‘Eastwood’ was the top trend in the United States.

Susan Fowler apparently doesn’t read her own newspaper, which just last year reported on the three-year affair between (surprise), New York Times reporter Ali Watkins and James Wolfe, a senior aide to the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a frequent source for her stories. In October of this year, an employee of the United States Defense Intelligence Agency was arrested for leaking classified material to two reporters, one of which he was involved in a romantic relationship with (this was allegedly CNBC reporter Amanda Macias.) It should be noted that both Watkins and Macias are still employed by the Times and CNBC. Not only does it appear the practice of sleeping with sources for information is more than a mere trope, it seems it’s something not punished by newsrooms.

That’s different because shut up.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Republican lawmaker asks Lindsey Graham to ‘rethink’ Senate’s impeachment strategy.

While Trump and his conservative allies in the House are pushing for an aggressive defense in the Senate impeachment trial — which they view as a chance to go on offense and clear the president’s name — Senate GOP leaders are taking a different approach. They’ve made clear that they don’t want the trial to turn into a spectacle, increasing the likelihood that long-simmering tensions between the House and Senate GOP could boil over.

“It is urgent we fight fire with fire and tell them enough is enough,” Banks said in the letter, obtained by POLITICO. “House Republicans have done all they can to push back and expose their motives to the American people, soon it will be at your doorstep.”

Banks also asked Graham to reconsider his position on conducting a speedy trial.

“We need to take our time and figure out exactly how Congress found itself in the current situation: poised to impeach a president on a completely partisan vote with no evidence and flimsy charges just before his re-election bid,” he wrote.

If the Senate could turn impeachment back on House Dems, it would be quite the feat of political jujitsu.

AS ALWAYS LIFE IMITATES THE EARLIER, FUNNIER EPISODES OF SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE:

Shot: Official: Cruise ship could house 1,000 Oakland homeless.

A San Francisco Bay Area city official wants to explore the possibility of using a cruise ship to house up to 1,000 homeless people in the region with a high cost of living and a shortage of affordable housing.

Oakland City Council President Rebecca Kaplan told a council meeting Tuesday that the ship would be brought to the Port of Oakland, but port officials said Wednesday the move would be “untenable.”

“We respect President Kaplan’s desire to address homelessness but Port of Oakland docks are designed to work cargo ships, there isn’t the infrastructure to berth a cruise ship,” port spokesman Mike Zampa said.

—AP, yesterday.

Chaser:

Michael Dukakis: There’s my friend Leroy Neiman. Let’s go see what Leroy’s doing. [ approaches Leroy, who’s painting a mural ] Hello, Leroy. That’s great. It’s great. What do you call it?

Leroy Neiman: Governor, I call this “What Might Have Been”. It shows the nuclear aircraft carrier Niemitz after its conversion into a floating shelter for the homeless.

Michael Dukakis: Well, it’s beautiful, Leroy.

Leroy Neiman: Thank you.

—“Dukakis After Dark,” Saturday Night Live, November 5th, 1988.

MUSTN’T DISRUPT THE NARRATIVE, DEAR: CNN, MSNBC Cut Away From Horowitz Hearing Into Obama FISA Abuses.

I ALWAYS GET MY BIOLOGICAL INSIGHTS FROM CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS: Katrina Karkazis: ‘You can’t use testosterone levels to divide people into male or female’: The cultural anthropologist on why our view of testosterone as the male sex hormone skews both science and society. “Science isn’t the only way to understand how to think about who’s a man and who’s a woman.”

Some of her work is actually interesting, but in today’s biology-is-a-fiction gender fad, it’s hard to take seriously.

WHY IS HIGHER EDUCATION SUCH A CESSPIT OF CORRUPTION? Dept. of Ed. Investigation Uncovers Over a Billion in Unreported Foreign University Funding.