WITHOUT FURTHER COMMENT:

DON’T EMBARRASS CRIMINALS: New York State’s citizens have for many years enjoyed  the strongest Freedom of Information laws in the nation. Now Gov. Andrew Cuomo is proposing wait for it … wait for it … that those laws be amended to prevent the public from receiving mugshots and general arrest information. One editorialist summed it up nicely, saying that Cuomo is more concerned with embarrassing the criminals than providing the public with information to which it has a right to know:

This is understandable, given the impressive montage that might be made from mugshots of one-time Cuomo aides, advisors, and associates now on their way to prison, but it nevertheless raises serious civil-liberties issues around press freedom and public information—and it seems like yet another gubernatorial pander toward the Democratic Party’s crime-coddling Left.

Once upon a time the Left could be counted on to oppose opacity in government, especially when the disinfectant of sunshine might expose police brutality, corruption in the justice system, or the denial of Due Process. Of course, nothing in Cuomo’s proposal would prevent a perp-walk circus, so the government is still free to allow (or even tip off) favored media to broadcast arrests for live television.

CATERPILLARS GOOD, BABIES BAD: A few days old, but the most telling thing I’ve seen in years. No matter where you stand on late-term abortion (or if you prefer, infanticide) the pretzel logic of the unthinking is stunning. Kathy Tran, the Democratic Virginia delegate who sponsored a bill in the Virginia House of Delegates that would allow the termination of a pregnancy up to 40 weeks old, is also the chief patron of a bill that would protect the lives of “fall cankerworms” during certain months.

Tran earlier pulled a Pelosi, admitting that she actually hadn’t read the abortion bill in full. Had it mentioned caterpillars, perhaps she’d have paid closer attention. Perhaps another explanation is that she only received $2,792 from Planned Parenthood in donations, but $7,236 from the Sierra Club.

I guess she charges more to actually read a bill she sponsors.

17 YEARS AGO: Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl was beheaded by Islamic terrorists for the twin crimes of being Jewish and being an American. The next time a journalist whines about being the target of a mean tweet (#LearnToCode) tell them to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine. If you think Jim Acosta is some kind of “brave hero” then there’s just no hope for you.

I’LL TAKE “TWEETS THAT DID NOT AGE WELL” FOR $500, ALEX:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

FIFTH CIRCUIT HOLDS “PLANNED PARENTHOOD” STING VIDEOS NOT DECEPTIVELY EDITED: Tyler O’Neil reports that the Court of Appeals has lifted the restraining order on videos showing PP agents negotiating the prices of fetal body parts. In 2015, the Center for Medical Progress (“CMP”), a pro-life organization, released more than eight hours of undercover videos disclosing conversations held at the PPGC headquarters. In the CMP videos, two individuals posed as representatives from a fetal tissue procurement company. They claimed to be interested in purchasing liver, thymus, and neural tissue from fetuses aborted during the second trimester of pregnancy.

With the help of PR/fixer firm Fusion GPS, the mainstream media bought the “deceptive edit canard” hook line and sinker. This is the same media who loudly and unsuccessfully defended other hidden videos, such as Gawker’s infamous “Hulk Hogan” sextape and Mitt Romney’s “47%” remark.

While this Texas case is about the State of Texas seeking to disqualify PP from Medicaid eligibility, the fact that the court rejected the “doctored video” claims, saying:

The district court stated, inaccurately, that the CMP video had not been authenticated and suggested that it may have been edited […] In fact, the record reflects that OIG had submitted a report from a forensic firm concluding that the video was authentic and not deceptively edited. And the plaintiffs did not identify any particular omission or addition in the video footage.

More to come on this, I’m sure.

ONLINE PLATFORMS FACT-CHECKING FAIL …AGAIN: Facebook has on at least three separate occasions tried and utterly failed to “manage” or “verify” news sites posted to their platform. They tried algorithms and that was a disaster.  Then they hired a crew of Social Justice Warriors — not one with any journalism experience — and that was a train wreck. Then, with the advice of an expensive PR firm they hired failed network “journalist” Campbell Brown to manage “news partnerships.”

Now Breitbart is reporting yet another swing and a miss, this time it’s Google:

NewsGuard, which is the establishment media’s latest effort to blacklist alternative media sites, is giving its sign of approval to proven hoaxes, even to stories that have been retracted […] here is NewsGuard’s seal of approval (on the Google search page) for Rolling Stone’s 2014 hoax about a gang rape at the University of Virginia (UVA).

Needless to say, that story was not only proven false, but the reporter was found to have acted with actual malice resulting in a multi-million dollar judgment against the magazine. Worse yet, they are still giving a green check to the discredited BuzzFeed story about what Michael Cohen told Mueller.

They’ll never learn, will they?

MY MOST POLITICALLY INCORRECT QUESTION: I’m aware that the US has agreed to ban the use of landmines that do not discriminate between civilians and combatants, but putting that aside, why wouldn’t 10,000 to 20,000 motion-activated Claymores along the Southern border be an effective deterrent? If POTUS declared illegal wall-jumpers as enemy combatants (MS-13 and the like) wouldn’t that work?
Discuss.

IF IT WASN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS, THEY’D HAVE NONE AT ALL: You know the stereotypical British leftie: All refugees must be accepted because borders are racist. And we have some sort of historical Original Sin to pay for, so somehow it’s our moral responsibility to ship cubic money elsewhere. Not to mention that taking pride in your nation’s history is racist, of course.

But when UK-based consumer electronics manufacturer Dyson announced it was moving its HQ to Singapore, the UK left has gone into melt-down mode, decrying the loss of prestige that Britain will face:

“Before Dyson, so the story went, we were terrific at inventing bright ideas but rubbish at turning those ideas into profitable businesses. Brits would have the lightbulb moment, but when it came to manufacturing the actual bulbs, that work – and profit – would be shipped far away. Then along came James Dyson, hailed by successive governments, who proved it didn’t have to be that way. A British idea produced a British business.”

Waitaminnit, what? Suddenly “business” and “profitability” and “national pride” are good things?
Who knew?

REPOSTED FROM EARLIER: My I24 interview today about the Covington Clusterf*ck.™

This story has got it all. Rush to judgment, confirmation bias, cowardly celebrity journalists, Social Justice Keyboard Warriors, the whole nine yards.

THEY SAY IT COMES IN THREES: So in the last 72 hours, we saw BuzzFeed screw the pooch with legacy media following them right off the cliff (“if true”), then we saw SJW social media drive “legitimate” media’s news agenda — absent any fact-checking at all — with a selectively edited video, and once the facts came out journalists are now furiously deleting their tweets. So what’s next? Any guesses?

**Update: my I24 interview this afternoon on the subject.**

IT GETS WORSE: Not only did the Keyboard Warriors use misleading video edits to smear the Covington teens, and not only did media and our celebrity superiors jump on the Outrage Train without any fact-checking, but now the “righteous” have doxxed the wrong kid: who is now getting death threats.

Nice going, all you virtuous jerks.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend on Facebook writes: “Note the common thread between the Kavanaugh and Covington hysterics: there is a significant sense in which ‘progressivism’ as a movement is driven by a cohort bent upon re-litigating its own middle- and high-school years. Perceived losses of social status then are recouped by revenge-by-proxy now. It’s like tens of millions of Jeanie Buellers, but without her own personal growth.”

WE GOT HIM NOW! WE GOT HIM NOW! How many times are we going to hear this? “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” And yet, this. The same guy that is hailed as the savior of the nation says “um, actually, no” and the brave Buzzfeed stands by a story in which the two writers have made completely conflicting statements about whether they’ve ever seen the supporting documents upon which the story was built.
I think in law school we called this a “shitshow.” More details here.

**BUMPED UP FROM EARLY AM**

THE DESTRUCTION OF POLITICAL JOURNALISM: My column is up at The Daily Caller.

Thousands of pages have been written about our age of political polarization. Public discourse and political reporting have deteriorated into an “either/or” game, and while polarization has been around since the Jefferson-Adams kerfuffle, the level of anger is unprecedented.

Agree with me or I’ll call you terrible names.

** It was interesting to see in the comments on original posting how many people proved my point. They saw critique of Trump’s personality (despite admitting I agree with some of his policies) and went into immediate freakout/insult mode instead of actually, you know, reading the entire column.***

NEIL ARMSTRONG ON MARS: Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee has displayed her idiocy for quite a while. “The Constitution is 400 years old.” “Today, we have two Vietnams, side by side, North and South, exchanging and working.” On and on. But now it’s serious. BuzzFeed reports that:

[A] woman, identified by a pseudonym, claimed in a lawsuit that she was raped by a former employee of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. She says Jackson Lee fired her as she was preparing to pursue legal claims over the alleged assault.

Being an idiot isn’t unlawful. But retaliatory firing of a whistleblower — let alone of an alleged rape victim — certainly is.

THE DESTRUCTION OF POLITICAL JOURNALISM: My column is up at The Daily Caller.

Thousands of pages have been written about our age of political polarization. Public discourse and political reporting have deteriorated into an “either/or” game, and while polarization has been around since the Jefferson-Adams kerfuffle, the level of anger is unprecedented.

Agree with me or I’ll call you terrible names.

LAYERS AND LAYERS OF FACT-CHECKERS: CNN ANALYST ACCUSES BLACK CONSERVATIVE RADIO HOST OF ‘WHITE PRIVILEGE’. CNN’s Areva Martin goes on a radio show, and the fun begins:

“Sirius XM radio host and Fox News Contributor David Webb brought Martin onto his radio show to discuss diversity in media, and he noted that he has always considered his accomplishments to be more important than his skin color when applying to jobs […] “I’ve chosen to cross different parts of the media world, done the work so that I’m qualified to be in each one. I never considered my color to be the issue — I considered my qualifications to be the issue,” Webb explained.”

Martin replied:

After Webb said that expertise and experience are what matter, Martin interjected: “That’s a whole ‘nother long conversation about white privilege, the things that you have the privilege of doing, that people of color don’t have the privilege of.”

Martin apologized for her comment and insisted that her team gave her incorrect information about Webb’s race. Exactly how does that work?

“Oh, by the way, Areva, you’ll be on with a white guy, so if you’re backed into a corner, you know what to say…”

THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS: One of the fundamental elements of good journalism is “show, don’t tell.” This means that reporting facts are preferred over interpretation or characterizations. But it’s not hard to see why distrust in the legacy media is ever-rising.

“Americans blame shutdown on Trump over Democrats by wide margin, poll finds” blares USA Today. Wide margin? The poll actually shows that:

When asked, “Who do you think is mainly responsible for this situation?” 53 percent of Americans told pollsters they blamed Trump and congressional Republicans.

Three points is a “wide” margin? Moreover, the story’s kicker admits that “The poll of 788 Americans was conducted Jan. 8-11 with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percent.” When the spread is less than the margin of error, that’s usually called a “split” or “close” race.

What more, this important fact isn’t revealed until the third paragraph. Given the fact that as many as 25 percent of American adults get their news from Facebook, and given that too many people never read past the headline, this is especially egregious. “Fake news”? No, but “Wrong” news? Absolutely.

CRYING WOLF FOR FUN AND PROFIT: I’m really not inclined to give any more oxygen to the trainwreck that is Ocasio-Cortez. In fact, it’s a rare time I agree with Whoopi Goldberg about anything, but in this case, AOC ought to take Whoopi’s advice and slow her roll.

But she or her handlers just can’t take a hint. Ever the victim, she tweeted this morning that:

“For those out of the loop, Republicans began to circulate a fake nude photo of me. The @DailyCaller reposted it (!) and refused to indicate it was fake in the title as well.”

Well, (avert your eyes!) here’s the “nude” photo in question:

OMG OMG OMG! Call the Vice Squad! Speaking of Vice, they even got a bunch of foot-fetishists to weigh in on the validity of the photo that had been rattling around the web for months before the DC published the story about the fake photo.

But morons gonna moron, and the media swallowed her latest “I’m a victim!” cry hook, line and sinker. People Magazine gullibly called it a nude in their lede, and Newsweek insists on using the phrase “fake nude” in their headline (tasty clickbait!) even though the story explains that it’s neither a nude nor a picture of AOC.

Sooner or later, she’ll have a legitimate grievance, but who in their right mind will take her seriously? Wait…don’t answer that…

**Disclosure: I write a bi-weekly column on media for The Daily Caller.**

SHOULD THE PRESIDENT HAVE A “PLATFORM” ON NATIONAL TV? Here’s my interview on global news network I24.  Short answer: yes.

MAXIMUM CHICAGO: “Chicago Seized And Sold Nearly 50,000 Cars Over Tickets Since 2011, Sticking Owners With Debt.” The magic part:

“In 2017 alone, Chicago booted more than 67,000 vehicles for unpaid tickets. In about a third of those cases, the driver couldn’t afford to remove the boot, and the vehicle was later towed to a city impound lot. Of those 20,000 impounded cars, more than 8,000 […] were sold off, with the owners receiving none of the sale proceeds. Instead, the city and its towing contractor pocketed millions of dollars, while residents were left with ticket debt.”

It’s Chinatown, Jake.

THE IRONY METER JUST EXPLODED: “WikiLeaks tells reporters 140 things not to say about Julian Assange.” The best part:

“There is a pervasive climate of inaccurate claims about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, including purposeful fabrications planted in large and otherwise ‘reputable’ media outlets,” Wikileaks said [in] an email sent to media organizations and marked “Confidential legal communication. Not for publication.”

(Italics added).

MEDIA MODE D’JOUR:

1) Find an unimportant and non-influential dope who tweeted something dumb;
2) Assert or imply that said idiot speaks for an entire party or movement; and
3) Feel satisfied you have managed to discredit tens of thousands of people with one meme.

The AOC dancing video and the phantom argument that “conservatives used it to smear her” was one example, and sorry to say this is the same bloody thing, only coming from the Right.

The 21st Century strawman.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Well, I thought about that very thing before posting a link below. But the account in question isn’t a random anonymous popup, but an established one with over 36,000 followers, and Steve Scalise himself weighed in with several other examples. So I’m not sure this is comparable to the dance-video kerfuffle.

UPDATE (FROM CHARLES): Glenn makes a very reasonable point. Still, I find similarity in ascribing bad motives to an entire group based on a few tweets. Remember, the Tea Party “were all racists” because the MSM could find at least a handful of yahoos to quote.

JOURNALISM ALGEBRA, 2018 EDITION: (Dishonest reporter with agenda + confirmation bias of editors) ÷ publishers drive to riding profitable Anti-Trump news appetite x (decimated newsroom fact-checking staff + journalism school failure to teach ethics) = Journalism 2018.

LEGAL FAIL OF 2018: “IT’S NOT HER FAULT, IT’S NEUROBIOLOGICAL.” OK, OK, I get it, some companies make dangerously defective products, and yes, at the same time there are lawyers who look for anyone from which to squeeze a dime. But then again, sometimes plaintiffs are just plain stupid and will go to extraordinarily lengths to say “not my fault.” Followed by “gimme money.” From the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit:

This case asks us to decide whether, under Texas law, a driver’s neurobiological response to a smartphone notification can be a cause in fact of a car crash […] According to Appellants’ amended complaint, Ashley Kubiak was driving her pick-up truck on April 30, 2013 when she received a text message on her iPhone 5. Appellants allege that Kubiak looked down to read the text, after which she turned her attention back to the road. At that point it was too late to avoid colliding with a vehicle carrying two adults and a child. The adults died, while the child survived but was rendered paraplegic. Kubiak was convicted of two counts of criminally negligent homicide.

But I had to look at the text! I’m conditioned that way! Nope, says the Fifth Circuit: “Because we decline to consider “neurobiological compulsion” a substantial factor under Texas law, we conclude that the iPhone 5 could not be a cause in fact of the injuries in this case.”

All I can say is Apple is lucky they didn’t get sued in California.
**Corrected to clarify that suit was brought by lawyers for estate of crash victims, who argued the driver was compelled to look at her phone.**