#HIMTOO? CBS to pay $30.5M for hiding sexual assault claims against Les Moonves.

The settlement agreement follows an investigation conducted by James’ office that found Moonves and CBS attempted to conceal several sexual assault complaints made against the chief executive knowing that if they came to light he would lose his job, which would affect the company’s bottomline knowing that he’d be difficult to replace.

Moonves resigned from CBS in Sept. 9, 2018, after several women accused him of sexual assault and harassment over three decades.

According to a 37-page report by Jame’s office, prior to him stepping down, Moonves and CBS worked to conceal the allegations against him staring Nov. 10, 2017, when an unidentified women walked into the Hollywood Division of the Los Angeles Police Department to file a report accusing Moonves of sexually abusing her and workplace retaliation in the 1980s.

It’s a good thing that nobody has ever accused Hollywood of being a sex-grooming gang, or anything.

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: A theater troupe in England tried to recreate Romeo and Juliet as a non-binary romance set in Nazi Germany and it went over just as well as you’d expect. “A production of Romeo and Juliet for non-binary performers, with Juliet reimagined as a persecuted Jew and Romeo as a member of Hitler Youth, has become embroiled in a row over its failure to include Jewish people in a casting call.”

IT’S A START: Elon Musk plans to cut 3,700 jobs, half of Twitter.

Elon Musk plans to cut about 3,700 jobs at Twitter Inc or half of the company’s workforce in a bid to cut costs, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Twitter’s new owner will inform the staff affected on Friday, according to the report.

Bloomberg also reported that Musk intends to reverse the social media company’s existing work from anywhere policy and will require employees to work from office though some exceptions could be made.

Musk, in a tweet, had denied a New York Times report that said he was planning to lay off Twitter employees before Nov. 1 to avoid stock grants due on the day.

Speaking of the New York Times, last year, the paper reportedly employed 5,000 people. Why does Twitter need 2,400 more employees than one of the world’s biggest newspapers?

KATIE PAVLICH: Biden Gives Tired, Lie Filled Closing Argument As Dems Stare Down a Red Wave.

What else has he (read: his speechwriters) got?

THE TYRANNY OF A COVID AMNESTY:

Oster lists among the urgent issues of the day the learning loss experienced by children as a consequence of Covid policy, with the youngest and poorest hardest-hit. She notes the drop-off in routine vaccinations (also a consequence of Covid policy). To this list we might add the rise in non-Covid excess deaths, also a consequence of Covid policy, not to mention the stagnant economy and the rocketing inflation rate.

And these are all downstream of a pandemic-era public discourse that felt like the Brexit/Trump wars on steroids: a battle for class dominance, in which one side used its stranglehold on public institutions to frame censorship as “fact-checking”, and all dissenters as stupid, unscientific, or actively hateful. It’s not that “we” collectively tried to get it right, and “mistakes were made”. It’s that a self-righteous cabal arrogated to themselves a priestly right to determine the proper social order, and to excommunicate those who didn’t conform. Their record in securing the common good speaks for itself.

Public faith in objectively shared political ground was already dissolving while my daughter gestated. If the Virtuals have a problem now, it’s that their counter-volley to Trump and Brexit consumed the last vestige of trust in that shared political ground: our faith in science. And the notion that such ground exists is the sine qua non of Virtual political legitimacy in its current technocratic form.

In this light, Oster’s call for amnesty can present itself as an effort to rebuild the neutral space of shared political endeavour after a period of conflict. But it reads as a continuation of now-familiar efforts to weaponise the appearance of such neutrality and common purpose, in the interests of one side of that conflict.

We all knew every pandemic policy would come with trade-offs. The lawn-sign priesthood forbade any discussion of those trade-offs. I don’t blame the class that so piously dressed their own material interests as the common good, for wanting to dodge the baleful looks now coming their way. But no “amnesty” will be possible that doesn’t acknowledge the class politics, the corruption of scientific process, the self-dealing, and the self-righteousness that went to enforcing those grim years of lawn-sign tyranny.

Science, it turns out, is not always “real”. And nor, I suspect, will kindness now be everything.

Or to put it another way: No, There Will Not Be Any “Pandemic Amnesty.” “Nothing Forgotten. Nothing Forgiven.”

UNEXPECTEDLY! Right On Cue, Major Leftwing Pollsters Suddenly Credit the GOP with Having a Big Lead on the Democrats.

There is a very strong suspicion among poll analysts and critics. The People’s Pundit Richard Barris mentioned it in his last podcast, though he’s mentioned it before, and many people talk about it.

They talk about major pollsters deliberately publishing polls they know for a fact oversample Democrats and are therefore just wrong, in order to please their clients (who are often leftwing media companies and their gonzo shitlib audiences).

But then, right before the election, in the last poll before voting starts, they suddenly publish a poll showing the GOP in a much better position.

Suddenly, the Democrat oversampling they’ve been doing for months just poof! vanishes.

And why do they do this? Because, when people rank pollster’s accuracy, they usually only look at the last poll conducted before the election.

Still though, don’t get cocky. As Glenn likes to say, “Seriously, if you care about this election, you need to be out volunteering and donating. Commenting on the Internet doesn’t count.”

CRYING FOWL: Government Warns Of Turkey Shortage Ahead Of Thanksgiving.

America is heading for a turkey shortage and elevated poultry prices as families prepare to gobble up the popular bird this Thanksgiving.

The price per pound for an eight-pound hen has increased from $1.15 last year to $1.47 this year, according to data from the Department of Agriculture, with residents of the northeastern United States preparing to pay the most on average. An outbreak of the avian flu has impacted flocks in 43 states and 304 counties, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Some of the turkeys that are being raised right now for Thanksgiving may not have the full amount of time to get to 20 pounds,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on a call with reporters, according to a report from Axios.

Soaring costs of living have impacted Americans attempting to celebrate Thanksgiving and other holidays over the past two years. The American Farm Bureau Federation announced last November that the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner had increased 14% from the previous year.

Supermarkets will be shifting a lot of “Christmas Dinner in a Can” this year.

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! “We settle [our differences] peaceavely at the battle box.” Biden Ignores Issues People Care About in Primetime Speech, Focuses on January 6 and ‘Election Deniers.’

WHY WORKERS ARE FLEEING CHINA’S ‘IPHONE CITY:’

There is a video suggesting there were multiple deaths in a dormitory room at the Zhengzhou plant. The company denies any fatalities.

In any event, workers have had enough. “Foxconn really messed up, I don’t think a lot of people would want to go back,” said Dong Wanwan, a 20-year-old worker, who fled the Zhengzhou plant with her 19-year-old brother and walked 25 miles to get home. “I know I wouldn’t.”

Dong and her brother walked away—literally and figuratively—from one of the best-paying blue-collar jobs in China, and this suggests China’s strict worker controls are unsustainable. In May, Quanta Computer, which makes Apple’s MacBook, was hit by worker discontent due to another closed-loop system.

The disruption could not come at a worse time for Apple. The Zhengzhou factory, which employs about 200,000 people, would normally be operating at full-speed for the Christmas season. “A person with direct knowledge of the matter” told Reuters that the production of iPhones could fall “by as much as 30%” at the Zhengzhou plant. Foxconn says production there was, in the words of Reuters, “normal.”

“Normal”? In China, operating below capacity is now common. “COVID-control and other rules have for months crippled export-oriented factories in China,” says Jonathan Bass, a manufacturing expert at InfraGlobal Partners, to 1945. “American consumer electronic companies are critically reliant on subcontractors and assemblers in China and are now having major supply-chain problems in that country.”

* * * * * * * * *

Since the early months of the pandemic, the Party has made the number of China’s infections and deaths a measure of its effectiveness. Unrelenting propaganda maintains the line that Chinese communism is superior to American democracy because China has been better able to control the disease.

Therefore, every case of coronavirus in China is considered by the Communist Party as a threat to its rule. It does not matter whether disease-control measures make economic sense. This has become a matter of regime legitimacy.

The Party, at least up to now, has thought it could continue its oppressive system indefinitely, but the defiance of angry workers from Zhengzhou—and the broad support they received from society—show us the Chinese people have had enough.

The CCP’s obsession with the appearance of zero COVID isn’t just focused on the Foxconn plant, of course: Chinese ‘Zero-COVID’ Hell: The Bleakness in the East.

Earlier:

● October 26^th: The end of Apple’s affair with China.

● September 5^th: China’s Economy is Headed for One of the Largest Meltdowns Ever.

● July 6^th: Business Exit from China Accelerating. “The exit from China makes sense for many businesses and will probably have positive geopolitical consequences as the U.S. becomes less dependent on production in a communist regime. But the fundamental transportation problems the U.S. faces will remain the same, and some might even get worse.”

● November 13^th, 2019: How to Conduct Business with Chinese Companies That See a Dark Future.

WHITE HOUSE PREVIEWS BIDEN WITH TALK OF VIOLENCE-FANNING, ELECTION-DENYING GOP:

The White House said Wednesday that President Joe Biden’s speech about threats to democracy was important because of Republicans who won’t accept the results of next Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre previewed Biden’s speech at the top of Tuesday’s White House briefing.

“Democracy is under assault and we cannot pretend otherwise… Mega MAGA Republican officials…don’t believe in the rule of law,” Jean-Pierre said. “They refuse to accept the results of elections and they fan the flames of political violence.”

Jean-Pierre told reporters “an alarming number of Republican officials suggesting they will not accept the results of this election … The president believes it is a moment of reckoning. This is not a regular moment in our democracy.”

She did not identify the Republican officials who said they will not accept the results of the election, in which the party is heavily favored.

“Denying the results of an election makes you a threat to our democracy,” she said.

It’s good to see her calling out Biden, Ron Klain and herself as threats to democracy — that takes some real bravery from a president’s press secretary:

UPDATE: Fox News is in rare agreement with KJP tonight!

OLD AND BUSTED: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

The New Hotness? If You Ask for Proof That a MAGA Ninja Didn’t Attack Paul Pelosi You Are a Conspiracy Theorist.

(Link safe; goes to Dana Loesch.)

UNION STATION IS THE PERFECT BACKDROP FOR BIDEN’S SPEECH:

Just seven years ago, I interned down the street from Union Station. At lunchtime, the travel hub was packed to the brim with local employees looking for a quick bite or a coffee. Shoppers trolled the mid- to high-end retail stores. The Metro, bus and train platforms bustled with commuters.

Now, Union is essentially a ghost town. Thanks to a combination of neglectful law enforcement and a refusal to relocate the homeless encampments, the station has been overrun with drug-addicted and mentally-ill vagrants. It’s nearly impossible to enter Union Station without being accosted by a crazy person or, at the very least, walking through a cloud with the rank odor of feces and urine. It’s not uncommon to see one of the “individuals experiencing homelessness” outside on the subway grates suffering a drug overdose, or to bristle past another shouting out a schizophrenic rant.

Most of the stores inside have closed, including Starbucks, which cited safety concerns and a lack of customers as the reason for its shutdown. When you’re unlucky enough to have to catch a train to New York, you keep your head down, hold your bag tightly, and speed walk straight to your platform. No sane person dares stop in the bathroom.

It was major news when a shooting occurred in the food court area at Union Station in 2015. Comparatively, a person was shot near the Shake Shack in late September of this year; another was shot in 2020 near the bus depot. Hardly anyone covered either shooting besides a few local news outlets. Why? Because it was no longer surprising.

And it’s only going to get worse: Washington D.C. to Legalize Public Urination. It’ll also cut “the maximum penalties for offenses such as burglaries, carjackings and robberies.”

MARK JUDGE: The Stasi Media That White Knights for Nancy Pelosi Bought Every Wild Tale About Brett Kavanaugh.

The media is feverishly blasting the conspiracy theories that popped up after the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

They are right to do so. I’ve been fortunate enough in my career as a journalist to have great editors who warned me about jumping into a story too quickly when you don’t know the facts. Mr. Pelosi is an elderly man who was assaulted by a nutcase. There is nothing funny about that and it’s irresponsible to speculate. Across the board, the media condemned the wild speculation and partisan mania that surrounded the incident.

* * * * * * * *

I sure could have used some of that skepticism in 2018. In September of that year I got a call from Ronan Farrow from the New Yorker, called me and told me I was in a letter along with Brett, a letter that accused us of taking part in “sexual misconduct” in “the 1980s.” Farrow couldn’t tell me the specific time, the place, or even who the accuser was.

Related: Paul Pelosi and the violence we care about. “Media bias is apparent not only in the information and takes that the media publish but also in what the media decree to be important in the first place. And it would appear that the targeting of a right-wing, pro-life justice is less important – a lot less important – than the targeting of the home of a Democratic, pro-choice politician. Politics is clearly at play here. Kavanaugh’s moral outlook runs counter to that of the liberal media and coastal elites, and thus he makes for an unsympathetic character. Nancy Pelosi, on the other hand – she’s the crusading Democrat the chattering classes love. An assault on her home moves the liberal elites profoundly.”

150 YEARS OF THE ‘THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF OUR LIFETIME’ CLICHÉ.

MIDWIFE CONFERENCE BANS PRO-LIFE OB-GYNS AMID THREATS TO DECERTIFY THOSE WHO SPREAD ABORTION ‘MISINFORMATION:’

The American College of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM) held its Midwifery Works Conference last month, but the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) had no presence there for the first time in 6 years. AAPLOG, a non-sectarian organization, operated as a “special interest group” within the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) for 40 years before ACOG discontinued the designation. Now, ACNM, ACOG, and the organization responsible for certifying OB-GYNs, the American Board of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ABOG), have embraced pro-abortion stances.

“One of the greatest threats to maternal health care is the rabid pro-abortion activism currently being displayed by both ABOG and ACOG,” AAPLOG CEO Dr. Donna Harrison told The Daily Signal. “Three national studies have revealed that somewhere between 75% and 93% of OB-GYNs do not perform abortions in their practices.”

Harrison also raised the alarm about a July statement from ABOG, which she characterized as a threat to decertify pro-life OB-GYNs.

“Physicians and midwives who care for both of their patients, both the pregnant mother and the human being in her womb, are being systematically bullied and eliminated from being able to practice medicine, at a time when maternity care deserts are worsening around the country,” Harrison added. “ACNM has recently joined in the bullying by refusing to allow midwives who care for their in-utero patients to even speak or exhibit at the recent ACNM national conference.”

ACNM told AAPLOG in September that it could not participate in the midwifery conference, citing its official position that “Abortion Is Healthcare.”

“We are unable to accommodate as your mission doesn’t align with our position statement on abortion,” an ACNM staffer wrote to AAPLOG. “We affirm patient autonomy.”

It’s by PJM alumnus Tyler O’Neil, so read the whole thing.

NEW YORK TIMES OWNER ACQUIRES TELEVISION NETWORK: Tom Cotton Owns CBS Mornings Anchor in Tense Exchange Over Paul Pelosi Attack. “In my opinion, Cotton is one of the more underrated Republicans when it comes to putting on master classes in how to destroy media narratives in real-time under the harsh glare of the spotlight without breaking a sweat. In this case, it’s especially important that Republicans get it right and not fall hook, line, and sinker into the traps the press and Democrats are setting as it relates to the Pelosi incident from last week.”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Don’t forgive teachers unions, school leaders for failing to reopen schools during COVID.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Besides COVID, Here Are 43 Other Things Democrats Are Requesting Amnesty On.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Galactic Empire Requests Amnesty For Anyone Who May Have Gotten Carried Away And Blown Up A Planet.

GOT WOKE, WENT BROKE: Dan Snyder Hires Bank Of America To Sell Washington Commanders.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Reviewer Exposes EV Truck’s ‘Kryptonite’ After Trip Takes 3 Hours Longer Than It Should’ve.

[Henry] Payne, an auto critic for the Detroit News, set out to travel from Detroit to Charlevoix, Michigan. His trip was to be around 280 miles, and he was driving a new 2022 F-250 Lightning EV.

Payne wrote that he charged the truck to a full 100 percent charge ahead of the trip, and that the manufacturer claimed that a full charge should have allowed him to travel the whole distance without another charge.

But it wasn’t even close.

Payne wrote that as he sat at his third charging station of the day, another driver asked what sort of mileage he was getting on his roughly $93,000 EV truck.

“I’m getting about 170 miles of range on this trip up I-75,” he told the other driver. “How about you?”

The man replied, “I’ve got the turbo-6 cylinder. I’m getting 600 miles and 22 mpg. I don’t think I’ll ever get one of those electrics.”

At the bottom of his tale of woe, Payne reeled off the F-150 Lightning’s statistics, which included that it was supposed to have a 320-mile travel range on a full charge. But Payne only got about 170 miles down the road before he had to find a charger.

Read the whole thing, which is a preview of California’s future. Speaking of which:

Flashback: How It Started: California will ban sales of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035.

—NPR, August 25th.

How it’s going: Californians are urged to avoid charging electric vehicles, days after state announced ban of new sales of gas-powered cars by 2035.

—The Blaze, August 31th.

In accordance with the prophecy:

(Via Small Dead Animals’ recurring “We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars” series.)

JUST NBC THE PRO-CHINA PROPAGANDA! Video: CNBC’s Jim Cramer Goes On Bizarre Pro-China COVID Lockdown, Vaccine Propaganda Rant, While Pfizer’s logo is proudly displayed behind him.

Financial analyst Jim Cramer appeared to confuse the hell out of his CNBC co-hosts Tuesday by going on a bizarre rant about Chinese COVID lockdown and vaccine propaganda being a good thing.

The context for the strange outburst is that news of China potentially easing COVID restrictions and re-opening has seen improvements in the stock market.

China’s change in direction after months of brutal lockdowns is reportedly to be headed up by the nation’s chief propagandist.

And that’s where Cramer came in to sell the ‘good side’ of propaganda, noting that we only think of propaganda being bad because of “regimes we didn’t really appreciate.”

Cramer further stated that he doesn’t see any problem with suddenly locking people down without warning, even in giant theme parks, reasoning that he was able to get his own COVID test results back within a day.

“Let’s just go back over, I think chief propagandist, I call that person a dissembler, so to speak. But they have a narrative in which basically you can conquer COVID by just being locked down, and this has to change the narrative,” Cramer continued.

He then argued that China stealing and back engineering Pfizer’s vaccine is also a good thing.

“What is even better is homegrown mRNA, which I’m told they managed to get the intellectual property, stole it, which is good, and I say good because it’s better to have mRNA than not,” Cramer said.

Evergreen:

As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection exposed for millions of Americans to see: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.

MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE ZORA ARKUS-DUNTOV AGAIN: 38 Amazing Vintage Ads for Chevrolet Corvettes From the 1950s and Early 1960s.

EVERGREEN HEADLINE: The Press Has Officially Lost Its Grip On Reality.

Consider the recent string of events involving President Biden.

In the span of a few days, he called Kamala Harris a “great president,” got disoriented at an event on the White House lawn, claimed that his student loan giveaway was a law passed by Congress not his own executive order, misstated the name of Britain’s new prime minister, suffered another embarrassing teleprompter failure, appeared to nearly drift off into sleep during a TV interview, got confused about how to exit a stage he’d climbed up just moments before.

A neutral press would be demanding answers from the White House about Biden’s condition. They be talking to experts about the grave risks of having a president suffering from dementia in charge. They’d have their pollsters ask the public about its concerns with Biden’s mental health. (Something our Issues & Insights/TIPP has done).

Instead, reporters are feverishly sweeping Biden’s rapid deterioration under the rug. Indeed, if it weren’t for conservative news outlets, the public would have virtually no idea of how disturbing Biden’s decline has become.

They did the same thing with John Fetterman, the Democrat running for a senate seat in Pennsylvania. Reporters covering Fetterman haven’t been truth-seeking. They’ve been truth-denying about the debilitating effects of the stroke he suffered in May.

The public had virtually no idea how bad Fetterman’s condition is – until Fetterman’s debate with the Republican Mehmet Oz, which exposed it for all to see and has led to a sharp decline in Fetterman’s poll numbers. Why didn’t Pennsylvania voters know? Because the press was covering it up for fear that reporting on Fetterman’s condition would only help Oz, which could then lead to — horror! — Republicans taking control of the Senate.

The border crisis is another example. A little over a week ago, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agency released its latest report on illegal border crossings, and the numbers are truly shocking. In the last fiscal year, they’ve encountered 2.7 million illegals, up from 1.9 million in 2021 and four times the number in President Trump’s last year in office. Try to find news coverage about that report from the “truth-seeking” press.

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

MICHAEL WALSH: To Save America, Repeal the 18th Amendment (Again).

This week, we come not only to bury the 18th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, known as Prohibition, but also to praise the 21st, which put a stake through the 18th’s nasty dark heart just 14 years after its passage in 1919. Prohibition was enforced by a singularly bad piece of legislation called the Volstead Act which, although vetoed by Woodrow Wilson, was nevertheless overridden by a Republican congress, and which thus put D.C. muscle behind the “Noble Experiment” (Herbert Hoover’s words) in bossing the American people around for their own good.

The 18th was the third of the four so-called “Progressive Era” amendments, which began in 1913 with the 16th (income tax) amendment and continued down its gruesome anti-freedom path that same year with the 17th amendment. As is typical of a Leftist policy mandate, the amendments purported to solve a relatively minor problem by creating an ongoing and very destructive large one.

After all, the country had managed very well during the first century of its existence by limiting the reach of the federal government into the states’ prerogatives and the citizens’ lives by restricting its access to revenue to excise duties and tariffs; similarly there was no urgent need to tinker with the Founders’ carefully wrought structure of the Senate by effectively nationalizing the upper chamber via popular election rather than appointment by the state legislatures. In a single year, the entire relationship of both the states and the citizenry vis-a-vis the federal government had changed utterly and irrevocably.

Pour yourself a cold one, and read the whole thing.

Related: Jon Gabriel interviews Walsh on “The Great Reset” in a Ricochet podcast.