HUMBLEBRAG: Dan Bongino gets it. And proving he’s a smart guy, he scans both Instapundit and The Daily Signal for contrarian analysis.

MY THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS ARE WITH DON LEMON: As The Good Professor blogged here, CNN coughed up a settlement in the libel claim brought by Nick Sandman, one of the horrible, terrible, vicious and very very racist Covington Kids. In digging through the case file, I found this little gem argued by CNN:

“Courts treat statements characterizing people as “racist” as nonactionable opinion because they cannot be proved true or false… Sandmann cannot as a matter of law base a defamation claim on this statement as it offers an expression of opinion so subjective as to be unprovable.”

So, now CNN is saying it’s not possible to prove someone a racist? Did anyone run this by Don LeMons, who would call a dog “racist” if it pooped in his yard?

OMG! THE KIDS MIGHT BE EXPOSED TO UNAUTHORIZED IDEAS!
I’m always stunned by the call for censorship (sometimes a dogwhistle) from left-leaning media outlets. It’s almost as if they secretly fear their ideas will not stand up to scrutiny…

WAITAMINNIT:…isn’t he one of those folks who chided Trump for *not* invading Syria?

#MyWarGood
#YourWarBad

PLEASE DON’T DRIVE DRUNK: OK, OK, it’s New Year’s Eve, so in light of my plea, read this instead.

IT TAKES A ̶V̶I̶L̶L̶A̶G̶E̶ ENTIRE NEWSROOM: Glad to see it took the entire Reuters staff to bollix this up so badly.
Confirmation bias or just plain stupid?

AN OBSERVATION AFTER READING GLENN’S POST: “Newly Released Eric Holder Memo: Feds Can Use FISA to Spy on Journalists.”

From experience, I can just hear the voices in DC newsrooms:
“That was so three years ago. Obama is not President anymore, let it go. Oh, how are we doing on that story about Trump’s grandfather being all in for the Kaiser?”

SO MUCH FOR BEING THE SMARTEST PEOPLE IN THE ROOM:

Nothing beats being laid off just before the Holidays, huh?

WAITAMINNIT, WAT? Earlier this week, Bloomberg Media announced its first acquisition in more than a decade, buying CityLab:

“An offshoot website of the Atlantic that reports on a variety of areas—development, housing, transit, the environment—from an urban policy perspective. And as part of that purchase, it appears half of the website’s editorial staff could lose their jobs.”

According to Business Insider, 7,800 journalists have lost their jobs so far this year. I thought President Trump was supposed to be Biggest Threat to the Press Ever, what with him being mean to Jim Acosta and all.

But putting reporters on the breadlines? Nahhhhhhh.

WHO DOES HE THINK HE’S FOOLING? Mike Bloomberg’s decision to lopsidedly cover only Trump (and no Democrats)  has my old friends in the newsroom pretty ticked off. But leaving his own name off of the “Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index” is just dumb.

Not that I’m cheering for anyone of these people, but he’s giving Fauxcohoantas and Grumpy Socialist a stick with which to hit him over the head.

Res ipsa loquitur.

CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE: Spartacus makes a calm statement about yesterday’s murder of Jersey City police Detective Joe Seals and Jewish civilians but refrains from turning it into a political “anti-NRA” screed. First, now is not the time. Second, I’m willing to bet good money that the perpetrators were not NRA members, and even go so far as to say the weapons used were obtained in violation of already-existing law.

That said, we know the Jewish supermarket was targeted, yet nobody has released the names of the perpetrators so far.
I’m guessing it’s those damned Presbyterians again.

**UPDATE: Police say the shooters were from the “Black Hebrew Israelite movement.” Same nice folks who confronted the Covington Kids in DC.

SELF-AWARENESS DEFICIENCY ALERT: Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is launching a social-media website called WT: Social. The platform aims to compete with Facebook and Twitter, except instead of funding it using advertising, Wales is taking a page from the Wikipedia playbook and financing it through user donations.

Says Wales:

“The business model of social media companies, of pure advertising, is problematic,” Wales told Financial Times. “It turns out the huge winner is low-quality content.”

If there is any human being in the known universe who truly understands “low-quality content”, it is Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia might be the go-to site for cretins like Soledad O’Brien and Alexandria Occasional Cortex  but for the rest of the literate world…

HOW STUPID DOES SHE THINK WE ARE? WAIT, DON’T ANSWER THAT: Not content with trying to outdo Hillary’s “plain folk” masquerade (“I’m gonna get me a beer“); now she tweets out a picture of her family with their humble station wagon:

Which is all well and good, except that’s a 1953 Lincoln Capri. Hardly the preferred ride of working class families. It sold back then for $3,766, which adjusted for inflation,  is equal to $35,436.09 in 2019. Not exactly “dust-bowl” poor.
**Error fixed: this was Lincoln’s top of the line car in ’53. They did not offer the “Continental that year.**

LET’S PLAY A ROUND OF “WHISTLEBLOWER SHIT-SHOW!”  Well, CBS fired Ashley Bianco, producer formerly of ABC for allegedly releasing the video that outlines how ABC spiked an investigation of pedophile and Clinton mega-donor Jefferey Epstein. Megyn Kelly interviews her and she tearfully denies it. On the same day, James O’Keefe published a letter from the real whistleblower.

In the meantime both networks are following the DNC-talking points about investigating leakers: When the President does it, it’s bad. When they do it…crickets.

Where to start? I wish Kelly had asked Bianco what CBS told her when they fired her. That aside, I’ve been asked a lot about her legal remedies. Honestly, you could take what I know about Labor Law, put in your eye and still see pretty well. As I understand it, NY is an “at-will” state, meaning they can fire you for no reason unless it’s a race/age/gender thing.

Defamation? Maybe, but defamation claims in NY require “in hac verbae”, that is a pleading of the actual defamatory statement in the Complaint. And you can bet that both CBS and ABC would fight coughing up any docs for years, and would resist pre-action discovery to depose the HR departments to find out what ABC said to CBS. I doubt this lady has the financial wherewithal for that kind of fight.

But, this may be one of the rare instances where a cause of action for Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress might work. Very generally, the tort requires that the plaintiff must have been in the “zone of danger” of the defendant’s negligent act, or it must have been foreseeable that the defendant’s negligent conduct would have caused the plaintiff emotional harm. (And New York does not, like a few states, require physical harm or contact). And if CBS fired an employee on ABC’s mistaken say-so, well, that’s pretty damned negligent. Dare I even say “collusion”?

Who’s taking odds that CBS writes a check to make this go away?

BTW, Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself.

OUR MORAL BETTERS? NOT SO MUCH: The Newspaper Guild’s Washington Post Unit just published a study of pay disparities at the paper. Some highlights of their findings?

• Women as a group are paid less than men.
• Collectively, employees of color are paid less than white men, even when controlling for age and job description. White women are paid about the median for their age.
• Women of color in the newsroom receive $30,000 less than white men — a gap of 35 percent when comparing median salaries.
• The pay disparity between men and women is most pronounced among journalists under the age of 40.
• Men receive a higher percentage of merit pay raises than women, despite accounting for a smaller proportion of the newsroom.
• The Post tends to give merit raises based on performance evaluation scores, but those who score the highest are overwhelmingly white. The Post is fairly consistent across races/ethnicities and genders at awarding raises to those who do well on performance evaluations. But in 85 percent of instances in which a 4 or higher was awarded to a salaried newsroom employee, that employee was white.

According to the preeminent press ethics think-tank The Poynter Foundation, (second item on page) “the Post claims the study is “seriously flawed” and “does not accurately take into account factors such as position, experience and job performance.”

Do as we say, not as we do.

DUMB IS AS DUMB DOES: Remember how just last July, in Knight First Amendment Institute v Trump  the Second Circuit sided with Democrats who said (rightly, IMHO) that the President, using his Twitter account to make policy statements, could not block people? Someone forgot to tell Alexandria Occasional-Cortex, who blocked Dov Hivkin, a former Brooklyn Assemblyman who takes issue with her pro-Palestinian stance. He sued her pants off in federal court, and she threw in the towel this afternoon.

“I have reconsidered my decision to block Dov Hikind from my Twitter account,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement obtained by The Post on Monday. “Mr. Hikind has a First Amendment right to express his views and should not be blocked for them.”

I suspect she or her crack staff used Wikipedia for research again, an all-too-common problem with her.

*Wrong COA cited, fixed now. Thanks Prof. Volokh**