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Archive for 2022
October 12, 2022
THEY’RE NOT JOURNALISTS, THEY’RE LEFTY NARRATIVE POLICE: NBC reporter: None of the ‘journalists’ criticizing my Fetterman observations have been in the same room with him.
That reporting apparently touched off enough recriminations that Today host Savannah Guthrie had Burns address the criticisms. Twitchy has collated some of those from other journalists, including those who claim to have communicated with Fetterman without any issue. Those other journalists didn’t do in-person interviews, Burns tells Guthrie, and even the campaign acknowledged that Burns was the first in-person television interview the Senate candidate has had since his stroke five months ago.” . . .
Two points are particularly notable from this. One, why is this Fetterman’s first in-person interview for television? There are only four weeks left until Election Day, and Pennsylvania began early voting a couple of weeks ago. Normally Senate candidates go out of their way to get on TV as a means of getting their message pushed out as broadly (and cheaply) as possible.
That brings us to the second point, which is the thunderous silence from media outlets over the first point until now. That was bad enough, but now the reporters who should have spent the last several weeks reporting on Team Fetterman’s months-long attempts to dodge reporters and to refuse any transparency on his condition now are complaining about a reporter’s actual reporting. Shouldn’t they be complaining about their own lack of access and Fetterman’s attempts to hide from them? Wouldn’t they do that if the candidate involved was anything but a Democrat?
Literally, they don’t care about the truth, they just want a storyline that’s good for Democrats. That’s who they are, that’s what they do, and that’s why nobody trusts them anymore
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Nury Martinez leak reveals insults about Jews, Armenians too.
In the same leaked audio clips posted to Reddit in which former Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez made racist remarks about Black people and Oaxacans, she also made crude remarks about Jewish people and Armenians.
Martinez said Tuesday that she would take a leave of absence from the City Council, two days after a recording surfaced on which she was heard deriding some of her colleagues and making racist remarks. Martinez stepped down as City Council president Monday.
In the recording reviewed by The Times, Martinez can be heard saying the “judíos” — which means Jews in Spanish — “cut their deal with South L.A.”
Martinez was responding to former Los Angeles County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera, who had concluded, “I’m sure Katz and his crew have an agenda,” referring to former state Assemblymember Richard Katz.
Katz served on the city’s 21-member redistricting commission that worked on council district boundary maps. He was an appointee of City Councilman Bob Blumenfield.
“They are gonna screw everybody else,” Martinez said in the recording.
Martinez “announced she is taking a leave of absence Tuesday amid ongoing calls for her resignation after a recording revealing racist and offensive remarks was released over the weekend.” She “stepped down from her role as council president on Monday but did not leave her seat on the council, which has prompted backlash among those who want her out.”
RUDY GIULIANI’S NEW YORK IS DEAD AND DEMOCRATS MURDERED IT: Killings in NYC subway system skyrocket to highest level in 25 years — even as ridership plummeted.
PRIME DEAL: Hamilton Beach Electric Vegetable Chopper & Mini Food Processor. #CommissionEarned
HERE’S HOW THAT SPACE PROGRAM IS COMING ALONG: The DART mission successfully changed the motion of an asteroid.
Plus: Space Force telescope will hunt foreign spacecraft, asteroids and comets too.
Baby steps on the road to planetary defense.
THE DARK LEGACY OF NIKKI FINKE:
Everyone in Hollywood who was active during Finke’s reign—and it was a reign; she dominated the landscape from 2006 to 2013 in a way that is difficult to explain to those who didn’t experience it—has a Nikki story, and most of them are awful. She was awful. Screaming threats. 3 a.m. phone calls. Outright blackmail. I’m all for being super-aggressive on a story—but she’d try to destroy lives, to get agents and assistants fired if they wouldn’t do her bidding. She’d torment publicists with email subject lines like “today’s the day I ruin your career.” She once attempted to sabotage the book deal of a rival journalist I know, just because. She’d have her lawyer send frivolous and harassing letters, and in 2011 she convinced Penske to sue THR for $5 million over some website code we mistakenly used from a Penske site. (It settled.) Nobody does anything in Hollywood unless they’re afraid, she once told me. There’s an element of truth to that, and good journalists know how to exploit that fear, but Nikki took it to a destructive and selfish end.
We all loved to read when she went after someone, but Nikki once told me in blunt terms that she occasionally wrote horrible things she knew to be untrue about people in order to get them to play ball with her in the future. That’s pretty much the definition of libel, but to her it was just a casual Hollywood power play—a way for her to exert control over people with more power than her. And to control the nextstory, and the one after that. Most journalists, even those with a pointed voice and a perspective (myself included), wouldn’t write anything that they wouldn’t say to someone’s face. But Nikki sidestepped those ethics by being unseen by anyone. Her absence from events and lunches, and the lack of any boss or owner to call and complain about her, made her simultaneously ubiquitous and untouchable—hence that decades-old file photo hovered over Hollywood like a cloud of toxic smoke, and you never knew when she would decide to announce that, say, Paramount executive John Lesher was allegedly “whacked out and shit-faced and falling down drunk.” With Nikki, the power play was disguised as a righteous crusade. Like I said, awful stuff.
That’s why it’s amusing to see all these glowing obituaries and eulogies from journalists on Twitter today after Finke died at age 68 in Florida after a long illness. “Fearless.” “Disruptor.” “One of a kind.” That type of praise. It’s all true, of course—people can be innovative and terrible—but what’s been largely left out of the conversation about her legacy is the terrible part, the tactics by which Finke became so disruptive. Certainly unethical, arguably criminal, in most media environments, Nikki’s bullying would have been rejected, or at least countered. But for some reason—the egos, the fear-based culture, and the transactional nature of showbiz come to mind—Hollywood people not only tolerated her tactics; she was actually celebrated.
In a company town whose execs are legendary for their anger issues, and who lionized Roman Polanski and Harvey Weinstein? I need to borrow Sarah’s shocked face!
THIS IS ABUSE: Journalist Called Child Protective Services on State Senate Candidate—for Celebrating Columbus Day with Her Daughter. “A leftist journalist called Child Protective Services on a Republican state Senate candidate and single mother because she teaches her daughter to celebrate Columbus Day.”
INSURRECTION: UF students storm building, shout down Q&A with Republican Sen. Ben Sasse. “The protest was organized by a cadre of left-leaning student groups on campus such as the College Democrats and Young Democratic Socialists of America. Demonstrators held signs with slogans such as ‘drain our swamp,’ ‘Sasse sucks ass’ and ‘Gaytors against Sasse.'”
Bah. The Tennessee Vols drained your swamp a couple of weeks ago, losers.
RARE ACTUAL NEWS FROM MSNBC: MSNBC Reveals Just How Bad John Fetterman’s Health Really Is.
DON’T LET IT BE SAID THAT BIDEN REDUCED THE VALUE OF EVERYTHING: Thanks To Biden’s Border Crisis, The Million-Dollar Migrant Smuggling Industry Is Now Worth Billions.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Don’t Hold Your Breath Waiting for Tulsi Gabbard to Join the GOP. “Her greatest value is probably remaining independent and showing the way to regular American Democrats who don’t believe that kindergartens should be hosting drag queen story hours. They may not jump ship to the GOP, but they just might reconsider reflexively voting for Democrats who are trying to drag them off of the progressive cliff.”
SALENA ZITO: ‘No life’ in Braddock, the Pa. town Senate wannabe John Fetterman claims he saved.
“The town was the place to be,” Lundy said. “Braddock Avenue had four or five businesses on every block on both sides of the street, every kind of business you could think of — shoe stores, dress shops, men’s stores, restaurants, beauty shops, barber shops, a grocery store. Now look at it, there is nothing.”
He points down the desolate street, devoid of the crowds that he says once walked shoulder to shoulder to get from one place to the other. . . .
Fetterman has boasted that “as mayor of Braddock and its chief law enforcement officer, I worked with the chief of police, our police officers, and the community to reduce violent crime.” But data between 2005 and 2018 show that violent crime actually rose under his leadership. . . .
Lundy laughs when he hears Fetterman’s stories. “Brought it back to what? Life? Come on. Look around you, there ain’t no life here, nothing is rebuilt here, nobody brought anything back, it got worse,” he said of Braddock.
Lundy said he wished the Fetterman legend was true. “I really do, but you can’t put this back together, and it is insulting to those who live here to tell us that we are better off because of him.”
On the upside, though, Fetterman appears to be mentally competent enough to be President of the United States.
THIS IS WHY I DON’T CARE IF PEOPLE GET OFFENDED WHEN I ORDER AN “IRISH CAR BOMB” IN A BAR: Ireland women’s footballers sing pro-IRA song.
WE ALL ARE: White House Feeling ‘Trepidation’ Over 80th Birthday of Oldest President Ever.
The president’s allies are worried about “storylines surrounding his age,” which they see as a “sensitive topic,” prompting the White House to try to “downplay the birthday.”
Biden, the oldest person ever elected president, is facing intense criticism over his mental fitness. While giving a speech on Sept. 28, he called out for a congresswoman to stand up. The congresswoman had died two months before.
Previously:
It’s been a long way down for the Dems.
BOMBSHELL WSJ INVESTIGATION REVEALS RUNAWAY CORRUPTION IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT:
Some Americans still believe the federal government is working in the public’s best interest. If anything can disabuse these naive holdouts of this notion, it will be the bombshell Wall Street Journal investigation that just dropped—revealing runaway corruption among the federal bureaucracy.
The Journal reviewed more than 31,000 financial disclosure forms and analyzed more than 850,000 financial assets and 315,000 trades to shed light on any conflicts of interest among more than 12,000 senior career bureaucrats and political appointees. Its investigation found that “thousands of officials across the U.S. government’s executive branch disclosed owning or trading stocks that stood to rise or fall with decisions their agencies made.”
“Across 50 federal agencies ranging from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department, more than 2,600 officials reported stock investments in companies while those companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies, during both Republican and Democratic administrations,” the Journal reports. “When the financial holdings caused a conflict, the agencies sometimes simply waived the rules.”
The federal employees weren’t even subtle about it. Per the Journal, “More than five dozen officials at five agencies reported trading stocks of companies shortly before their departments announced enforcement actions against those companies, such as charges or settlements.”
More from Jeff Dunetz: Federal Employees Are Trading Stock in Companies They Oversee.
Gee, maybe I should get a job in DC.
For example, at the agency trying to control everything, including puddles, about a third of senior EPA officials “reported that they or their family members held investments in companies that were lobbying the agency.”
Isn’t that great? A job for a lifetime, excellent health plan, benefits, retirement, and if you make it to senior management, insider trading is legal.
As Steve would say, it’s good to be in the nomenklatura.
LESS THAN A MONTH AWAY: Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Ohio races top priority for conservative women’s bus campaign.
NO PASARAN: “Defund the Police” Vs. “Defund the FBI”: What Tocqueville and the Founders Might Have Pointed Out.
For instance, listen to one Matt Lewis. He claims to be a “conservative”, which may be true, but it seems more likely that he is using the left’s old trick whereby leftists write letters and posts claiming that “I am a lifelong and faithful Republican except that there is just this little problem that I cannot stomach that dreadful person (Trump/Bush/Reagan/Palin/etc/etc/etc…) that my party nominated” followed by (this being an actual Matt Lewis quote) “Today’s Republican Party is 180 degrees different from the party that most of its members—like myself—signed up to join.”
When you mention “the devastating revelations in the Jan. 6 hearings” (ho-hum) and the “many outrageously cynical flip-flops for the party of Trump”, Matt Lewis — without ever once alluding to any of the Democrat party’s many faults — you might just be a Liz Cheney-type RINO, and therefore an outright fake conservative.
But no matter. Let us hear what Matt Lewis has to say regarding alleged Republican hypocrisy:
After a 2020 election cycle that saw the “law and order” party criticize Democrats for wanting to “defund the police,” we’ve seen quite a few members of the right’s commentariat blithely wave off video of MAGA rioters beating Capitol police officers with flagpoles. (Those cops’ lives don’t matter, to the Blue Lives Matter crowd.) Now, a lot of those same voices on the rightare saying, “Defund the FBI.” So much for lionizing the law enforcement heroes who run toward danger.
Do the FBI’s “law enforcement heroes … run toward danger”, Matt Lewis? Or do they run towards hymn-singing pro-life activists and towards Melania’s underwear drawer in Palm Beach?
Read the whole thing.
DAN MARKEL UPDATE: Now out: Extreme Punishment: The Chilling True Story of Acclaimed Law Professor Dan Markel’s Murder.
PREPARING THE POST-ELECTION BATTLESPACE: In a Preemptive Move, Democrats Begin Blaming GOP Fraud if They Lose in November.
MARK JUDGE: News junkies: Margaret Sullivan’s new memoir and the media’s addiction problem. “To understand the modern media, it helps to view journalists as similar to alcoholics or drug addicts. This analogy will help you understand Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life, the new book by Margaret Sullivan.”
MORE DEADLY THAN JANUARY 6, BUT LESS REMARKED UPON: Police Accuse Wisconsin Dem Governor of Fueling Deadly Anti-Cop Riot.