PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Covington Kid Nick Sandmann Sues NBC/MSNBC for $275 Million.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
May 2, 2019
STILL NOT ECONOMICAL IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD: Tesla to slash solar panel prices by 38% to stymie market share loss.
The Times reports that “To further reduce costs and complexity, customers will be asked to do many of the tasks Tesla employees used to do. Homeowners will photograph electric meters, circuit breaker boxes and other equipment and send the images to the company, reducing the need for site visits.”
Hmm.
WHAT A WAY TO GO… ER, STAY: Sex drug ‘effective’ as heart failure treatment.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Barr Won’t Take the House Judiciary Committee’s Bait. “Nadler has suggested that the committee will subpoena Barr and hold him in contempt if he does not appear and turn over the complete report. Barr has made the complete report available, excluding grand jury testimony, to some lawmakers, but only three Republicans have viewed it so far. Obviously, it’s super important to the Democrats.”
THIS WAS CNN: CNN sees ratings swoon in April.
CNN’s prime-time ratings dropped a whopping 26 percent in April compared to last year, according to Nielsen Media Research.
MSNBC’s ratings were down 14 percent in April 2019 compared to April 2018, while Fox News’s ratings overall were flat.
The sharp decrease for CNN marked its lowest-rated month in total viewers since October 2015.
In the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers covet most, it was the network’s least-watched month since Aug. 2015.
In prime time, Fox News finished first with an average of 2.4 million viewers. In April 2018, the network also averaged 2.4 million viewers, according to Nielsen.
MSNBC was second with an average of 1.66 million viewers, down from 1.93 million in April 2018.
CNN was third with 767,000 average primetime viewers, down from 1.04 million in April 2018.
Call it the Post-Mueller Effect.
MARINE COMMANDANT: You Can Have Purple Hair in Our New Cyber Force.
BLAME THE MESSENGER: May Sacks UK Defense Secretary Over Huawei Leak.
No. 10 has finished its investigation into the source of an embarrassing leak about a National Security Council vote to allow Huawei to help build out the UK’s 5G infrastructure despite Washington’s warnings and even some misgivings within the UK government itself.
As a result, the PM has decided to sack Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson, presumably because he was the source of the leak.
Williamson took his chances and paid the price. But he seems to have had the national interest in mind, which is more than can be said for any Western government doing business with Huawei.
NEVER APOLOGIZE FOR THE GOOD STUFF: Sorry, Bernie Sanders, but Disney Doesn’t Have To Apologize for Making $1.3 Billion with Avengers: Endgame.
LET THE WHOLE ROTTEN STRUCTURE FALL ON ITS OWN: Tucker Carlson Goes Off on GOP for Wanting to Intervene in Venezuela.
ONCE UPON A TIME IT WAS DIFFICULT TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE NYT AND PRAVDA: It’s Getting Difficult To Tell The Difference Between The New York Times And Al Jazeera.
It’s hard not to laugh reading The New York Times coverage of the Trump administration’s efforts to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. The three-person-bylined article kicks off by describing the group as a “storied and influential Islamist political movement with millions of members across the Middle East.”
Sounds like a global social club! Just some folks batting around ideas. The authors didn’t even have the decency to throw in a superficial adjective like “controversial” to create a veneer of balance.
Whether the Muslim Brotherhood’s many disparate groups and organizations meet the criteria of a single terror organization under U.S. law is debatable, but what isn’t debatable is that a large faction of the Muslim Brotherhood leads a Sunni movement that aims to implement sharia law under a global caliphate. Its deep network of “charitable” institutions and political parties form an infrastructure for extremist causes.
One could, if not a New York Times writer, describe its philosophy as dogmatic, illiberal, theocratic, and violent; and its “storied” history a long-term threat to secularism, Muslim reformers, liberalism, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East.
Read the whole thing.
Plus: “Sorry about the anti-Semitic cartoon. Please enjoy these five articles written by Palestinian terrorist apologists.”
INVESTIGATE BACK TWICE AS HARD: William Barr says DOJ to probe possibility of Clinton-Russia collusion.
BUT THE POINT ISN’T TO IMPROVE AND EXPAND HEALTHCARE DELIVERY. THE POINT IS TO DOUBLE THE INCOME TAX. Doubling Income Taxes Won’t Even Cover Medicare for All Costs.
TAKE A PANDER AT THIS: Gillibrand Plays Beer Pong In Ad.
Democratic New York Sen. and presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand released a new ad Monday on Twitter, in which she plays beer pong with water.
The video, which was shot in New Hampshire, starts off with Gillibrand standing at a beer pong table with water in the cups. She takes the shot and with the ball in mid-air, the video freezes.
Text appears, reading, “If Kirsten makes this shot… will you donate $1 to guarantee her spot on the Democratic debate stage?”
The text then disappears and she sinks the shot.
With water? Disqualifying.
FAIL, BRITANNIA: The Beginning Of The End For British Shale Gas.
Lacking the competence to ban fracking altogether, Local councils in the UK also started to craft new creative ways on how to nip the government’s shale push in its bud – for instance, the mayor of Greater Manchester introduced a so-called “presumption” with regard to new shale gas developments, effectively meaning that the default position of the local council would be to ban new projects in view of Greater Manchester’s grand target of becoming carbon neutral. As Greater Manchester hosts 10 exploration licenses, this is no small feat. Other local councils have taken similar steps to restrict fracking – even the city of London made the case for a “climate emergency” as the mayor Sadiq Khan pushed for a blanket shale gas ban. [of course –Steve]
The Scottish government, availing itself of the freedom it has on the matter, has prolonged indefinitely its shale moratorium until an already agreed-upon permanent ban is placed in vigor. Similarly, the Welsh government held public consultations throughout last year and thereupon decided to freeze all license issuing procedures for shale oil and gas, regardless of whether fracking is used or not.
What a waste.
CHICKS ON THE RIGHT: Your Mayday Mueller And Maduro Memo.
Liberals on Twitter were basically peeing themselves with excitement over the latest bombshell from the WaPo, which said that Mueller sent Barr a letter just a few days after Barr’s four page memo came out, and the letter stated that Barr’s memo “didn’t fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the Mueller report.
Liberals’ reaction? “OMG IMPEACH EVERYONE.” You should look at Joe Scarborough’s Twitter feed. He’s out of control.
What clowns like Scarborough decided to completely overlook was the part of the article that said that Barr asked Mueller directly if Mueller thought Barr’s memo was inaccurate, and Mueller said he didn’t. In fact, it sounded more like Mueller was concerned about how the MEDIA depicted everything.
But, you know, narrative.
Indeed.
ANOTHER DEMOCRAT OPERATIVE WITH A BYLINE: CNN’s Brooke Baldwin Lets Bernie Sanders Off the Hook on Venezuela.
GOOD. BECAUSE IT WASN’T SINCERE. Jewish Leader Does Not Accept New York Times Apology for Anti-Semitic Cartoon.
NEWSPEAK: Blurring the line between legal and illegal immigration.
Lately, the mother of all terminology battles has been fought over descriptions of the millions of persons who are in the United States illegally. Should they be described as “illegal immigrants”? “Undocumented workers”? “Unauthorized immigrants”? Some say the appropriate term is “illegal aliens”, arguing that we tilt the discussion when we identify those who have evaded the law as “immigrants” because an immigrant, under the law, is someone who has been admitted for residence in the United States.
Both sides understand that the terms of the debate are a matter of linguistic framing. By influencing public attitudes, they can shape policy outcomes.
What most concerns me is the effort to blur the line between legal and illegal immigration. It has gained momentum as many Democrats and other liberals have categorically rejected any policy that President Trump has adopted regarding the enforcement of immigration laws. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf gave forceful expression to this sentiment when she said, “We in Oakland have a community that welcomes and honors all people, no matter where they came from — no matter how they got here.”
The latest item involving language and framing that has caught my eye appears in an article about California senator and presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Published in the May issue of The Atlantic, it is titled “Kamala Harris Takes Her Shot”.
What jumped out at me was writer Elizabeth Weil’s summary of Harris’s platform. She wrote that the platform included “a path to citizenship for immigrants”. Weil did not see fit to mention that she was referring to a proposal to benefit those who have violated immigration law. By not reporting that salient fact, Weil did the work of the immigration activists who have long sought to blur the line between legal and illegal immigration.
Yet another Democratic operative with a byline.
PUTTING THE DEMOCRAT IN “DEMOCRATIC” SOCIALISM: Maduro apologist and Dem Rep. Ro Khanna blames Mike Pence for ‘inciting violence’ in Venezuela.
Who’s he going to blame when the crops don’t come in?