The story set off a mass freakout in the Democratic Party. A Biden Justice Department-appointed prosecutor had indicted former President Donald Trump twice and Democratic prosecutors in New York and Georgia had indicted Trump two more times — and the former president was still leading President Joe Biden in the most important 2024 states. How could that be? The poll led to an unusually intense round of the usual fretting over Biden’s age, the state of the economy, the border, and the rest of the president’s liabilities.
Fast-forward six months to May 13, 2024 — yesterday. The New York Times published a story headlined, “Trump Leads in 5 Key States, as Young and Nonwhite Voters Express Discontent With Biden.” A new poll showed Biden trailing in the same states by nearly the same margin as the old poll. Compare this sentence with the one from six months ago: “The surveys … found that Mr. Trump was ahead of Mr. Biden in five of six key states: Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden led among registered voters in only one battleground state, Wisconsin.”
Think about it. In the past six months, Biden has traveled the country, touting what he believes are his economic accomplishments. He has spent zillions of dollars on advertising, focusing specifically on the key states. And at the same time, Trump was either preparing to go on trial or, since April 15, actually on trial in New York, facing a maximum of 136 years in prison. And Biden is still unable to catch Trump.
The American people don’t like seeing their justice system twisted for political purposes.
Still… don’t get cocky.
HOW IT STARTED:
In his own way, Trump has set us free. Reporters must treat Inauguration Day as a kind of Liberation Day to explore news outside the usual Washington circles. He has been explicit in his disdain for the press and his dislike for press conferences, prickly to the nth degree about being challenged and known for his vindictive way with those who cross him. So, forget about the White House press room. It’s time to circle behind enemy lines.
Washington reporting has long depended on a transactional relationship between sources and journalists. Journalists groom sources, but sources also groom journalists. There’s nothing inherently unethical about the back-scratching. When a reporter calls an administration source to confirm an embarrassing item, the source may agree to confirm as long as the reporter at the very least agrees to listen sympathetically to the administration’s context. But Trump’s hostile attitude toward the press, his dismissal of CNN for attempting to ask a question at the last conference, and his underhanded ploy at the last conference where he loaded the audience with cheerleaders has muted that mutualism. It’s easy to predict that instead of negotiating with reporters as equals, his administration will advance its agenda by feeding more pliant reporters material the way a trainer rewards circus animals.
Nobody ever became a journalist in order to become popular. The broad-stroke portrayals in movies and novels taught us, accurately enough, that journalists tend toward the coarse, vulgar, impudent and nosy. For many years, journalists were generally admired for those attributes in the way that the beef butcher is admired for the scars on his hands.
But thanks, in part, to a fall in status, as well as ever-irrational attacks from politicians like Donald Trump, today’s journalists routinely experience ridicule and harassment at public events like rallies and demonstrations. They’re not precisely pariahs in the new environment, but they’re no longer considered heroes in many places. Journalists don’t deserve any special pity, it should be noted. Police officers, teachers and even doctors often suffer more from the slings and arrows of the mob. But for journalists, the fall has been spectacular and seems never-ending.
Hanging over journalism like a gibbous moon is Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea’s successful lawsuit against Gawker, financed by the billionaire Peter Thiel, which Tani notes in his Semafor piece. Thiel’s successful action, which forced the site to shutter in 2016, has journalists everywhere looking over their shoulders in worry. In the new climate, law firms have built practices devoted to blocking the publication of tough-minded stories with formal legal warnings.
Perfectly fine publications do exist, and they deserve our support. For instance, there’s the Atlantic, which couldn’t win more National Magazine Awards if the contest were fixed. With stalwart writers like Caitlin Flanagan and Mark Leibovich, the magazine shows it can go full bravado when it wants to. But what’s its excuse for not breaking more icons? Too often, our media seems like it was produced to be consumed by our parents, most of whom are dead.
Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie blames the decline of swagger, in part, to generational forces.
“Millennials and Gen Z have been bred like human veal by their Boomer and Gen X parents who made sure their kids were constantly being surveilled and optimized for success in SATs, sports and entry into the Establishment pipeline,” he says. “Can we be surprised that such a system has produced generations of journalists who endlessly describe anything they disagree with as misinformation and want to control and regulate everything like the room temperature in an after-school enrichment program?”
This attitude has permeated the press, as editors recoil from publishing anything that might cause anyone offense.
“Every mainstream media narrative of the last five years has been wrong, if you really think about it, or skewed or morphed into something,” Carolla said.
“Maybe you start with Russian collusion and the Steele Dossier. ‘There’s a tape. There’s a pee-pee tape,’” he continued of the debunked attacks on President Donald Trump. “And you roll it all the way through COVID or George Floyd or Kyle Rittenhouse .. Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“They’ve been wrong. And not wrong around the edges… there’s always wrong around the edges. They’ve been flat-out f***ing wrong about all of it,” Carolla said.
“If you were to talk to some of the people who reported it, they would be confused,” Dr. Pinsky added of journalists who cannot be shamed for their egregious errors.
I hope those four years were worth it to the DNC-MSM.
You motherfuckers don't have "a soul" and the last three weeks of ignoring Jewish students being blocked on college campuses proves it. What fucking balls is this. pic.twitter.com/wcilH9Dzl7
Let’s finish what they did in 1968,” a Columbia protester said the other day.
In political terms, that would mean electing Donald Trump.
The disorder of 1968 — when LBJ declined to run again and Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace faced off — played right into the hands of Nixon, who rode his opposition to the riots and campus unrest into the White House.
As Luke Nichter writes in his book on the 1968 campaign, The Year That Broke Politics, “the great debate of the campaign, the issue that consistently struck the nation’s nerve, and where there were the greatest differences among the three candidates, was law and order.”
That’s not going to be true this year, when other issues loom much larger than do the student protests. But if “law and order” is broadly conceived to include the chaos at the border (as well as conflict abroad), it is a major theme of 2024 and has inarguably undermined Biden’s presidency. In sheer magnitude, the mayhem of 1968 was much larger and more consequential than anything that is happening today. After the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, as Nichter notes, more than 50,000 federal and National Guard troops were called out “in one of the largest peacetime deployments on American soil in history.” The rioting rumbled on for a week in Washington, and LBJ later wrote of his “sick feeling” as he watched smoke fill the D.C. sky.
Nixon also went out of his way to position himself as the statesmanlike centrist, which is never Trump’s impulse and rarely his tone.
Nichter explains that Humphrey sought to differentiate himself from Johnson to appeal to liberals, while Wallace ran to Nixon’s right. This ceded the center to Nixon. Pat Buchanan would recall that, while Nixon “was positioned as tough on law and order, he did not try to rival George Wallace.” (Ronald Reagan was actually harsher on the subject than Nixon.)
This allowed Nixon to own the issue, while, with his relatively moderate tone, he won strange new respect from the elites who had, heretofore, disdained him.
As with 1967 and ‘68, which saw far left protestors uncomfortably aligned against Great Society liberal LBJ, why not aim all of that anger at an actual Republican? As in 1968, why aim all your eco-doomsday fears at a fellow Democrat? Heighten the contradictions, to coin a phrase. From Trump’s perspective, it’s time to dust off Nixon’s 1968 “Law and order” ad and update it to reflect the past four years:
As this 2022 attempt highlights, you won’t be able to get the ad past Biden’s friends at Google of course, but the Streisand Effect might work to its advantage.
What Biden’s government should do, more broadly, is resist the self-sabotaging forces of progressive hyper-activism*. Noah Rothman’s magazine piece last year on “the war on things that work” is a useful reference point, cataloguing the ways activists have been “waging a crusade against convenience.” This includes, especially at the state level, fulminating against gas stoves, fighting the scourge of gas-powered lawn equipment, and banning single-use packaging in grocery stores. On that New Jersey bag measure, Noah wrote that the environmental benefits are unclear given that reusable bags take more energy and resources to make (read this; it’s priceless) — and “the only observable effect of the ban has been to make daily life marginally more expensive and noticeably more annoying.”
Speaking of: The administration’s persistent efforts to wipe away (transfer to taxpayers) college-student debt, especially while struggling to process present-day financial-aid applications, are yet another way to alienate voters. If the policy wasn’t invidious enough, one has to suspect more than a few (million) people saw the images this week of college students camping out, vandalizing property, occupying school facilities, and getting justifiably arrested and thought, perhaps while making their monthly car payment: So let me get this straight . . .
* Well, “self-sabotaging forces of progressive hyper-activism” is a pretty good definition of the Luddite left these days: QED: Hillary Clinton group wired $500,000 to climate activists behind disruptive protests. “‘Anyone who cares about public safety and preventing vandalism should be deeply concerned that money connected to Hillary Clinton is propping up these radicalized eco activists,’ said Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of the Power the Future energy advocacy group.”
On the menu today: More than a day late and a dollar short, President Biden says that breaking the law on college campuses is wrong. But he’s still ahead of his vice president, the former prosecutor, who for weeks has had absolutely nothing to say about the lawlessness that took over college campuses. If the objective for the protesters was to make some noise and postpone finals, maybe they accomplished what they set out to do. But if their objective was to influence or change U.S. public opinion, they failed miserably. Read on.
* * * * * * * *
Still, at least Biden eventually was roused to address the issue. As far as I can tell, Vice President Kamala Harris has not made any public remarks about the campus protests. The New York Times noted, “Vice President Kamala Harris, campaigning on Monday in Wisconsin, again took sharp swipes at former President Donald J. Trump for his actions on abortion, a hot topic across the country. But she stayed silent on the war in Gaza, another issue erupting elsewhere among the critical bloc of young voters she has been courting.” While speaking in Atlanta, “Harris did not address recent protests on Georgia college campuses tied to the White House’s handling of the conflict in Gaza.”
The vice president is a former prosecutor. She doesn’t have any thoughts on lawbreaking and whether the police should be called in on campus? For much of the reelection campaign, she’s been on a college tour!
It’s a headline that certainly grabs your attention.
“Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” read the title of an April 29, 2020 article in The Atlantic.
Written by staff writer Amanda Mull, the story suggested Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to reverse course on the state’s shutdown and lift restrictions on businesses was an experiment to see “how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.”
The decision, readers were told, was reckless and deadly.
“Public-health officials broadly agree that reopening businesses—especially those that require close physical contact—in places where the virus has already spread will kill people,” Mull wrote.
Without the government to protect them, all Georgians could do is “try to protect themselves as best they can,” Mull said. But she concluded that, because of the way the virus works, another deluge of cases “could be inevitable.”
“[It] may be two or three weeks before hospitals see a new wave of people whose lungs look like they’re studded with ground glass in X-rays,” Mull wrote. “By then, there’s no telling how many more people could be carrying the disease into nail salons or tattoo parlors, going about their daily lives because they were told they could do so safely.”
In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. Mr. Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.”
The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20.
That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows:
“Look, the national media’s all over me about letting you do this,” Mr. Trump said. “And they’re saying you don’t meet whatever.”
Mr. Kemp replied: “Well, Mr. President, we sent your team everything, and they knew what we were doing. You’ve been saying the whole pandemic you trust the governors because we’re closest to the people. Just tell them you may not like what I’m doing, but you’re trusting me because I’m the governor of Georgia and leave it at that. I’ll take the heat.”
“Well, see what you can do,” the president said. “Hair salons aren’t essential and bowling alleys, tattoo parlors aren’t essential.”
“With all due respect, those are our people,” Mr. Kemp said. “They’re the people that elected us. They’re the people that are wondering who’s fighting for them. We’re fixin’ to lose them over this, because they’re about to lose everything. They are not going to sit in their basement and lose everything they got over a virus.”
Mr. Trump publicly attacked Mr. Kemp: “He went on the news at 5 o’clock and just absolutely trashed me. . . . Then the local media’s all over me—it was brutal.” The president was still holding daily press briefings on Covid. “After running over me with the bus on Monday, he backed over me on Tuesday,” Mr. Kemp says. “I could either back down and look weak and lose all respect with the legislators and get hammered in the media, or I could just say, ‘You know what? Screw it, we’re holding the line. We’re going to do what’s right.’ ” He chose the latter course. “Then on Wednesday, him and [Anthony] Fauci did it again, but at that point it didn’t really matter. The damage had already been done there, for me anyway.”
The damage healed quickly once businesses began reopening on Friday, April 24. Mr. Kemp quotes a state lawmaker who said in a phone call: “I went and got my hair cut, and the lady that cuts my hair wanted me to tell you—and she started crying when she told me this story—she said, ‘You tell the governor I appreciate him reopening, to allow me to make a choice, because . . . if I’d have stayed closed, I had a 95% chance of losing everything I’ve ever worked for. But if I open, I only had a 5% chance of getting Covid. And so I decided to open, and the governor gave me that choice.’”
At that point, Florida was still shut down. Mr. DeSantis issued his first reopening order on April 29, nine days after Mr. Kemp’s. On April 28, the Florida governor had visited the White House, where, as CNN reported, “he made sure to compliment the President and his handling of the crisis, praise Trump returned in spades.”
Three years later, here’s the thanks Mr. DeSantis gets: This Wednesday Mr. Trump issued a statement excoriating “Ron DeSanctimonious” as “a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.” As Mr. Trump now tells the tale, “other Republican Governors did MUCH BETTER than Ron and, because I allowed them this ‘freedom,’ never closed their States. Remember, I left that decision up to the Governors!”
But then, many on the left forgot their obsession with lockdowns, when, to paraphrase Martha and the Vandellas, the summer of 2020 was here, and the time was right for rioting in the street.
Even the left finds the day more than a little glum just now though that’s because the world hasn’t ended yet. Remember—end-of-the-world doomsday scenarios make environmentalists happy, so when the end of the world fails to arrive on schedule, they get the sads.
Like The New Republic, which [asked] this week [in 2022]:
A person could be forgiven for being cynical about Earth Day in 2022. Even ExxonMobil celebrates the holiday. . . ExxonMobil doing Earth Day is a lot like arms and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin co-opting International Women’s Day—a holiday which began as a protest of capitalism and war. . .
Ask Bob Langert about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and he starts to chuckle. “When we meet the regulators, it’s kind of nice,” says the senior director for social responsibility at the McDonald’s Corporation. “We just got an award from the EPA. When we see the regulators, we always hope it’s because they’re giving us an award.”
* * * * * * * *
The idea of the rich corporate villain gleefully dirtying Mother Earth is powerful and appealing. Children of the 1980s encountered this supervillain in comics, movies, public awareness videos, and science textbooks. Times were good for mandatory recycling, for mandatory emissions reductions, for anything mandatory aimed at restraining corporate polluters.
But in the late ’90s, something peculiar started happening. The men in suits were still middle-aged, round, and white. They were still just as concerned with profit and golf. Very few of them sported tie-dyed attire, aside from the occasional whimsical Jerry Garcia tie. But the men in suits started caring. Or at least acting like they cared. Which, if you ask a spotted owl, is the same thing.
So environmental activists across the nation bought their own ties and started dealing with corporations as almost-equal partners in planet saving. Businesses in turn learned that it’s pretty easy being green.
If you lived through it, and I did, “spectacle” is the most generous term you could use to describe the media environment around the trial. It was the moment the entire media, seeing the ratings and attention tabloid shows were garnering, went all-in on the trash-exploitation and racial tropes that dominate news media today. Lead Simpson attorney Johnnie Cochran shamelessly made the trial about the LAPD versus another poor black man — and upon Simpson’s acquittal, was covered by television shows on Court TV and was an invited guest to Bill Clinton’s inauguration.
As Cochran stoked racial fires only a few short years after the Rodney King riots, Christopher Darden, a prosecutor during the trial, and a black man, was labeled a race traitor and an Uncle Tom.
Simpson’s legal team was dubbed “the Dream Team,” a label also attached to the 1992 Men’s Olympic basketball team. Sports and politics merged in a way that would later be seen in a way similar to Colin Kaepernick kneeling on the NFL sidelines. Jay Leno’s Tonight Show featured several dancing Asian men in black robes in a comedy segment he labeled “The Dancing Itos,” a reference to the judge of the trial.
Simpson attorney Robert Kardashian’s family later became national celebrities in their own right, with his wife Kris Jenner and her daughters cashing in millions on sex tapes and television shows, music albums, merchandise, perfumes and clothing lines.
In the middle of the trial, National Enquirer published leaked nude photos of lead prosecutor Marcia Clark, sold to them by an ex-husband. Everyone became a punchline, and a character, and a celebrity, due to and because of the guiding hand of the national media. Lost in all of it was the fact that two people had been brutally murdered.
On the menu today: It almost always feels like the scourge of cancer targets those who deserve it the least. I say almost, because yesterday, cancer ended the life of O. J. Simpson. You can make a strong argument that Simpson turned into one of the most terribly influential Americans of the last quarter of the 20th century — terrible both in the scale of his influence and in the moral dimension of his influence.
The Myth of the ‘Juice’
O. J. Simpson passed away from cancer Thursday. The instant meme was an image of the late Norm McDonald declaring, “Finally, O.J. can rest, knowing that his wife’s killer is dead.”
Kids, you may not believe this, but in 1994, it seemed absurd that somebody who was rich and famous would be the kind of person capable of murdering two people. There was just this blanket assumption that anyone living a lifestyle of “champagne wishes and caviar dreams,” as Robin Leach described it, would be happy.
This was before Phil Spector, before Robert Blake, before Oscar Pistorius, before Aaron Hernandez.
This was before TMZ, before cell-phone cameras showcased every celebrity meltdown, tantrum, and other outburst. The rich and famous people in Hollywood, and their handlers and agents and consultants, exercised a lot more control over their images. This was also before #MeToo, and it was a few years before the country realized it had elected men who saw the White House interns as their own personal sex kittens — not just in 1992, but also in 1960.
You could say it was a more innocent time, but it is likely more accurate to say it was a more naïve time.
When O. J. Simpson was mentioned “as the focus of the investigation” on June 14, 1994, the initial overwhelming attitude among the public, white and black, was that it was unthinkable that the famous face could have committed such a bloody and heinous crime.
A large part of what made O.J. “unthinkable” as a murderer was the byproduct of being an NFL superstar. Pete Rozelle became commissioner of the league in 1960, and with the help of NFL Films, its omnipresent in-house propaganda machine, created a myth of hard-hitting warriors on the gridiron who were unassailable gentlemen off of it. Even after the O.J. trial, even after Rozelle stepped down from his perch in 1989, this myth soldiered on remarkably well until Colin Kaepernick and Rozelle’s successor finished it off for good in 2016: Roger Goodell Killed the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.
In the 1960s, American culture was fracturing along a fault line, with the common man on one side and scorn against his mores and values on the other. The league’s commissioner at the time, Pete Rozelle, chose to take the side of ordinary Americans in the raging culture war, because they were his natural audience. The league sent star players to visit troops in Vietnam and issued rules requiring players to stand upright during the playing of the National Anthem.
In 1967, the NFL produced a film that combined sideline and game footage titled, “They Call It Pro Football.” The film was unapologetically hokey. It was crew cuts and high tops and lots of chain smoking into sideline telephones. With a non-rock, non-folk, non-“what’s happening now” soundtrack, heavy on trumpets and kettle drums. John Facenda, who would come to be called “The Voice of God” for his work with NFL Films, provided the vaulting narration. The production began with the words, “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.” There was nothing Radical Chic about it.
The NFL surpassed baseball as America’s pastime with careful branding that conformed to the tastes and sensibilities of middle-class Americans – Nixon’s silent majority. A half century later, Roger Goodell would kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
In August 2016, America was experiencing a polarizing presidential election. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the playing of the national anthem, to protest injustice. It was a politically divisive act directed at fans who regard the national anthem as something sacred. The league did not lift a finger to stop him.
Most employers don’t let their workers make controversial political statements to their customers. It is why you do not know your UPS driver’s views on the expansion of NATO. The Constitution does not prohibit private businesses from regulating speech during work.
A savvier commissioner would have reminded Kaepernick that he is being paid millions to wear the logo of the NFL, and the league does not permit players to use its brand to flaunt their personal politics. Instead, Roger Goodell permitted the pregame ceremonies to become the focus of intense political scrutiny, as the media lined up to catalog whether players stood, sat or knelt during the national anthem.
In retrospect, as somebody who had bought into Rozelle’s myth wholeheartedly, I’m glad that Kaepernick and Goodell finally buried it. That it could survive someone as heinous as O.J. Simpson is a testament to its strength, the gullibility of pro football’s most rabid fans — and whatever was going on this week in offices of the legacy media:
This is why The Free Press NPR piece is so important. Not a single person, journalist, editor, lawyer at THE FUCKING ASSOCIATED PRESS thought… "let's maybe not run this one?" https://t.co/O3UBixrkV8
As the 1960s kept ending, the next installment was the arrest of Charles Manson and four of his followers for the horrific murder of five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, at a luxury mansion north of Beverly Hills. When Manson’s trial began in 1970, Wenner [who would then have been about age 24–Ed] leaped at the story with an idea for the headline: “Charles Manson Is Innocent!”
Wenner’s headline was less insane than it sounds to modern ears. Manson was already an object of media obsession, a former Haight-Ashbury denizen who drifted to L.A. and collected hippie acolytes for LSD orgies and quasi-biblical prophecies. While the straight world viewed him as a monster, much of Wenner’s audience saw him, at least hypothetically, as one of their own. The underground press of Los Angeles, including the Free Press, cast him as the victim of a hippie-hating media. Manson was a rock-and-roll hanger-on. Wenner was convinced of Manson’s innocence by his own writer David Dalton, who had lived for a time with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, a Manson believer. “I’d go out driving in the desert with Dennis, and he’d say things to me like ‘Charlie’s really cosmic, man.’ ”
* * * * * * * *
Meanwhile, a lawyer in the DA’s office, believing he was doing a favor for a friend of [David] Felton’s at the Los Angeles Times and that this hippie rag from San Francisco was a benign nonentity, brought Felton [then-recently hired away from the L.A. Times by Wenner] and Dalton into the office to show them the crime scene photos of the butchered bodies of Manson victims — including a man with the word war etched in his stomach with a fork. Dalton blanched when he saw the words “Healter [sic] Skelter” painted in blood on a refrigerator, instantly recalling what Dennis Wilson told him about the coded instructions Manson heard in the Beatles songs. “It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” said Dalton. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.” Jann Wenner changed the headline.
WTF: CNN Contributor suggests black people identified with OJ because he k*lled white people.
“[OJ] represented something for the black community in that moment, in that trial, particularly because there were two white people who had been k*lled.”
The NPR article responding to Berliner goes on to miss the point yet again by bragging about how four out of 10 staffers are “people of color.”
In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR’s leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.
It’s like talking to a wall. They just can’t grasp how stocking the newsroom with DEI hires instead of hires based on actual viewpoint diversity could possibly lead to the outcome Berliner exposed in his piece.
Former NPR CEO John Lansing, who resigned a month prior to this writing, defended his tenure this way.
“The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?” Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner’s piece. “I’d welcome the argument against that.”
Sure, I’ll provide the argument against that. DEI does not “make sure it sounds like all of America” because left-wing ideologies are naturally self-selective. In practice, diversity quotas as produced by organizations like NPR create bubbles where only those who agree with DEI in the first place have their opinions heard and published. Thus, you get the insane bias and censorship demonstrated by NPR.
Naturally, no lessons will be learned and Berliner, who is himself a left-wing Democrat, will be cast into the abyss for speaking the truth. Meanwhile, NPR’s ratings will continue to flatline all while looking to the federal government for hand-outs. The cycle repeats.
As Don Surber adds, responding to Berliner’s article at Bari Weiss’ Free Press:DEI opens a liberal’s eyes.
The goal is not to diversify views because the MGIPOC and the LGBTQIA selected are all socialists. The goal is to convert the rest of the MGIPOC and LGBTQIA.
The biggest selling point to the MGIPOC and LGBTQIA is that white people caused all their problems, particularly the straight men. He pointed out that the union contract with NPR is a tool for DEI.
Berliner said, “In essence, this means the NPR union, of which I am a dues-paying member, has ensured that advocacy groups are given a seat at the table in determining the terms and vocabulary of our news coverage.”
Well, well, well, what do we have here? A white boy is complaining about paying union dues to make it harder for a white boy to make it at NPR.
They say a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. We will see how true that is because DEI just mugged Uri Berliner.
Berliner claims that “It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.” Fair enough on that last point — “scolding” would require dropping the famously tepid NPR announcer voice, if only temporarily. But the rest of those boasts seem ridiculous to anyone who hadn’t already drunk the leftist Kool-Aid pre-Trump. At Power Line,Steve Hayward links to a hilarious 1993 article by Glenn Garvin. The references are of their time, but the point is made nonetheless: How Do I Hate NPR? Let Me Count the Ways.
OF COURSE NOT, THEY SEE THE ISSUE AS THEIR LAST-HOPE DISTRACTION: Democrats Don’t Want You to Know How Moderate Trump’s Abortion Stance Is. “To the extent Trump adjusted at all, he moved to the middle. Biden has spent the last few decades moving to the extreme Left on abortion (and Israel, for that matter, although that’s much more recent). What does that tell us about the GOP and Democrat coalitions?”
Flashback: Trump Stakes Out Middle Ground in Abortion Wars. “The abortion wars aren’t over, and the likely result won’t look much like what either camp is imagining today. Donald Trump understands this, as shown in his recent offer to bring both sides together for a compromise. Does anyone else? A few lefty pundits do, which is why you see New York Times columns reassuring readers that yes, Donald Trump is still rabidly anti-abortion.”
It was always a fairy tale, but it was surely a nice one. Columbine’s tragedy was America’s tragedy. Las Vegas happened to all of us. Parkland, Florida, was everyone’s worst national nightmare. Regional differences were downplayed so we could grieve together. But Donald Trump came along to remind us that Puerto Rico is not really America, and Detroit is not really America, and California is definitively not America. It was an easy myth to puncture, and he has deftly and rapidly ensured that no city or state will ever be America’s battered sweetheart again. We are all on our own.
New York almost makes it too easy. The city has long been associated with unbounded greed and wealth, cultural elitism, and ethnic diversity. That encompasses Ted Cruz’s sneering dog whistle about “New York values” in 2016, and Trump’s newfound loathing of the city he called home for his entire life—a city he was maligning long before the coronavirus came along. Despite the country’s love affair with New York in the wake of 9/11 or even Hurricane Sandy in 2012, it’s also always been the case that the city coexists uncomfortably with the fantasy of rugged cowboys, wide-open spaces, and manly white men dominating nature, an American story Trump and his acolytes seem to love above all things.
Nobody can blame the coronavirus itself on this president, though we must keep track of how his failure to take action will cost untold American lives. But even as we sit here, waiting, it is worth remembering that Trump has led a three-year project in which leadership consists of laying blame, constantly and relentlessly, on everyone and anyone, and the more inchoate that group is, the better. Victims are to be further victimized, always. We have been so carefully trained in this response that even without Trump’s insistence that the media, Barack Obama, Andrew Cuomo, and thieving New York doctors are to blame for the rampant spread of the virus, we could fall easily into the habit of doing it ourselves. We haven’t had to do that; the president has still happily led the charge. The strangest thing is simply that New York is the same greedy, insomniac, starving, pushy, wisecracking, bighearted place it was in the days after 9/11. Americans need to hate her today because everyone needs to hate everything and everyone now. Just when we needed to rally together in a fight against death, we are realizing we’ve been primed to fight one another to the death instead. Even if the myriad historical acts of pulling together after national tragedies were planted in fantasy more than fact, the alternative—a vicious and slashing vilification of the other—will not keep any of us safe or free.
As I wrote four years ago, that last sentence is a classic case of projection. Isn’t Lithwick aware that the rest of the nation is also dealing with the same pandemic? And is a massively diverse group of people who don’t think in lockstep? I could be mistaken, but I don’t believe that Saul Steinberg drew his classic “View of the World from 9th Avenue” cover as a how-to guide to life for insular Manhattanites.
Rep. Beth Van Duyne, who represents the Irving, Texas area of North Texas, is running an ad in the New York Post. The full-page ad encourages New York City police to come to North Texas.
The headline reads, “Ladies and Gentlemen of Law Enforcement It’s Time to Escape New York and Move To Texas!.” There is a list of 15 North Texas law enforcement agencies where New York officers can apply.
“Your lives don’t have to be endangered by violent career criminals who are never locked away,” the ad states. “You don’t have to be beaten on the streets by gangs of illegal immigrant criminals. And you don’t have to be endlessly insulted by budget cuts by Defund the Police politicians.”
“It’s time for you to leave these loathsome and destructive fools behind,” the ad continues. “Escape from New York.”
No word yet if Lithwick approves of Duyne’s suggestion.
“If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way,” NPR veteran Uri Berliner writes. “But it hasn’t.” Perhaps not, but it’s been that way for longer than Berliner wants to admit, too.
And it’s not just NPR that Berliner dresses down in this detailed and damning mea culpa from inside the house, so to speak, at The Free Press. What Berliner writes about his own media organization pretty much applies to all American mainstream media outlets, and just as much as at NPR, if not more.
Berliner puts the beginning of the corruption at the election of Donald Trump, when NPR went all-in on Adam Schiff’s McCarthyism — and failed to call it out when it collapsed:
Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.
But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.
It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.
What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.
As Glenn noted in October of 2016, “I’m increasingly concerned that the neutralization of the Tea Party movement — an effort by both major parties — may have convinced a lot of people that civics-book style polite political participation is for chumps.”
As did the DNC-MSM’s coverage of Mitt Romney. In 2012, when Romney faced off against Obama, NPR attacked him with racial dog whistles that only Cokie Roberts could hear.
And then the network wondered why the Republican rank and file united behind Trump in 2016:
Oh you guys want to Portray Mitt Romney as an extreme and abusive sociopath? Okay, well here's the real thing then.
Flashback: How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class. “For a long time, the notion that America is an unrepentant white-supremacist state—one that confers power and privilege to white people and systematically denies them to people of color—was the province of far-left activists and academics. But over the past decade, it’s found its way into the mainstream, largely through liberal media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post, Vox, CNN, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. What changed? Most obviously: white liberals. Their enthusiasm for wokeness created a feedback loop with the media outlets to which they are paying subscribers. And the impact has been monumental: Once distinct publications and news channels are now staggeringly uniform.”
NATE SILVER DEBUNKS THE LATEST MEDIA TREND: Americans love Florida, even if you don’t: The rate of “mover’s remorse” is statistically low. Understanding why might help in understanding America. “In principle, a state could still have a net positive migration flow is a lot of people leave it, provided that even more people arrive But Florida isn’t like that: it has a high rate of in-migration and a low rate of out-migration. . . . Sure, in a state with 22 million residents, you’re going to find plenty of leavers, like the half-dozen people the NBC story interviewed. But this is not a typical pattern.”
Plus: “One of the underlying themes in my work is that people make far too many inferences about public opinion from the preferences expressed by their friends or professional peers. That may be especially true for progressives who work in media given the blob-like nature of the mainstream media, where progressive, liberal, centrist and center-right news outlets are all smooshed together, but there aren’t a lot of outright Trump supporters and there isn’t much cultural conservatism. And part of it is that Florida, like no other state, challenges the Emerging Democratic Majority hypothesis. If looked at in a highly abstract way, you might expect Florida — a diverse coastal state — to be solidly blue, but instead it has gotten redder: ground zero for Democrats’ increasing erosion with nonwhite voters. Some 42 percent of the Miami metro’s population was born abroad, the highest rate in the country. Miami proper is majority foreign-born, though many of the immigrants there are patriotic (as immigrants often are) and have become US citizens.”
IT WILL BE IF YOU VOTE FOR THEIR TICKET: It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap. “Inside the hall, the three presidents sat in matching white armchairs and took the stage to strains of ‘Born to Run’ by Bruce Springsteen, the unofficial bard of the Democratic Party. . . . Three Presidents were sitting in white armchairs before people who’d paid up to $500,000 apiece to sit in the audience in the most beautiful theater in the country. The comments over there are mostly about the fourth President. That guy, Mr. Trump, steals focus from everything. Also stealing attention were the protesters at the 3-Presidents event. They were shouting ‘blood on your hands’ Obama chided them: ‘You can’t just talk and not listen. That’s what the other side does.’ Seems to me protesters on Obama’s side have interrupted more speeches than those on the other side.”
Today’s Democratic Party machinery is getting the treatment from the Woke Left that it last got from the New Left in 1968. And as always, the talk of “blood on your hands” comes from the people with bloody-handed fantasies.
A great deal hinged on Joe Biden’s performance during Thursday evening’s State of the Union address. The White House knew more than anything that Biden had to dispel concerns regarding his age and cognitive decline. Naturally, the mainstream media did its part to help in shore up this narrative affirming Biden’s presidential competence, and wound up choosing the same entry from the thesaurus to characterize his delivery: “fiery.”
I’m sure it was just a coincidence.
But, it didn’t work for those of us who saw and heard Biden’s loud and angry delivery, which was punctuated by constant slurring and slip ups. One expert says that Biden’s performance featured the telltale signs of being medicated.
Dr. Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist specializing in elderly dementia patients, pointed out that Biden’s increased speed and volume during the address, contrary to his usual slow and stumbling demeanor, could be indicative of stimulant usage, potentially Adderall or another amphetamine.
“[Adderall]’s given to focus someone’s attention so if you give it to someone who is not focused and give it to them ahead of a big event like the State of the Union, it will improve their focus,” Lieberman told the Washington Times. “But it’s treating the symptoms rather than boosting the brain and it’s addictive so it’s dangerous.”
As compelling and convincing as Lieberman’s theory is, there’s actually more evidence Biden was not his usual self during the State of the Union.
I previously pointed to Biden brief encounter with reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, where Biden had curiously become his trademark low-energy, glitchy self. His explanation for his use of the word “illegals” to describe an illegal immigrant—which irked many in his party—was, to say the least, unimpressive.
But, even more indicative that something had changed in Biden was during his campaign speech in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Friday, which was virtually a carbon copy of his State of the Union speech, and yet it was a disaster.
At one point in the speech, he declared, “Pennsylvania, I have a message for you: send me to Congress!”
I’d take this as another cry for help from Joe — if he’s feeling overwhelmed by the duties of the White House and wants return to the Senate in November, I’m sure that can be arranged. As P.J. O’Rourke once wrote,“The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take one hundred of its most prominent numbskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm.”
But I don’t think we can blame alleged drug usage on Kamala’s gaffes:
“Democrats were extremely happy. They were relieved. He stood up there and talked for 68 minutes. And he seemed to yell a lot. Personally, I thought he was yelling a lot. He thought, ‘Well, maybe if I really yell, it’ll make me seem younger,’” York said. “I don’t think it convinced anybody who’s concerned about his capacity to serve till age 86.”
As Jim Geraghty wrote yesterday: President Steroids Shouts His Way through the State of the Union. “Taken as a whole, Biden’s speech started to sound like Howard Beale’s monologue from Network. But keep in mind, the number of Americans who watched the whole speech, beginning to end, is considerably smaller than the number who will see brief excerpts on the television news, or YouTube, or other social media. By shouting through almost the entire speech, Biden maximized the odds that any clip or segment that went viral would have him looking fired up and impassioned rather than like the sleepy, whispery, mumbling octogenarian that Americans have soured on so thoroughly.”
Can you believe it? Bill Clinton — yes, ol’ Slick Willie himself — has spoken in support of getting rid of the President. Although he did not name names, his comments can only be regarded as support for Donald Trump. Who could’ve seen this coming?
Doubt me? Here is a verbatim transcript [with one minor edit in brackets] of former President Clinton’s comments to students at the University of California:
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“I think how different life looks in the road ahead for you than it did for me when I was your age. Our country is still a great country with so much good in it but we could do so much better.
“Most Americans who played by the rules for the last [four] years have been punished. The average family is working harder, spending less time with their children, paying more for their education and health care. Worried about losing their jobs, worried about the future of this nation.
“In California alone half a million jobs have been lost.
“Your state government is broke and while you’re building more jails, education is being cut and as you well know, tuition is being raised.
“The middle class in this country is declining, the poor increasing. Only the very wealthiest have done better. Your nation has fallen from first to tenth in the world in wages.
“What we got to do now is fight for real change. Change that will require us all to take on interest groups and big government. Change that will require us all to assume more responsibility. Change that will require us to move away from a country in which the top 1% control more wealth than the bottom 90% for the first time since the roaring ’20s.
“Change that will require us all to be one community again, to confront and impose on ourselves higher standards of responsibility, and to listen to one another again instead of just scream at one another. To sit down together, and learn from one another, and honestly try to change ourselves. If we’re going to rebuild America, we’ve got to create more opportunities. We’ve got to require more responsibility. We’ve got to permit more individual choice and strengthen our communities.
“How are we going to do it? I’ll tell you one thing you’ll never do any of it until you change the presidency.”
___
OK, OK, time now for full disclosure: This is indeed a transcript of Bill Clinton talking to students at Cal, but it is from a campaign speech in 1992.
The bottom line? “The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand.” The cherry on top: it was a unanimous decision. “All nine Members of the Court agree with that result.” Ergo: “The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court is reversed,” quod erat faciendum, or, in the words of the document, It is so ordered.
Of course, it was always absurd that the anti-Trump brigade should pretend to save democracy by keeping Trump off the ballot because otherwise the people might vote for him. It was just another example of the malodorous fact that, for these people, “democracy” means “rule by Democrats,” not rule of the people.
The SCOTUS order is cheery news for partisans of genuine democracy, in which the people, not a cabal of self-appointed elites, get to decide who will govern us. But any cheer that is extracted from today’s decision should be tempered by the name John Roberts, chief justice of the Supreme Court.
In the past, Roberts has shown himself to be cautious to the point of cravenness when it comes to appeasing the left. Every time he decides something that favors the conservative principles of originalism, he seems to get nervous and prevail upon the susceptible members of the Court to do something to soothe the left. He did it with Obamacare, and he did it more recently with voting rights and redistricting cases. The question is, will he pressure his colleagues to throw Jack Smith a bone in the classified documents case that the Court just agreed to hear? Stand by.
Two new national #polls show Trump up +4 in prexy election matchup w/Biden@NYTimes-Siena has Trump ahead, 48-44 (980 likely voters); @Forbes-HarrisX has Trump in lead, 52-48 (3,021 registered voters) ➡️Biden not led @RCPolitics poll avg since Sept.https://t.co/svJLf3LlwN
— W. Joseph Campbell (@wjosephcampbell) March 2, 2024
The American people are sour on the state of things for a reason. Inflation may be lower than it has been, but goods still cost substantially more than they did when Biden took office—and any benefit Americans may be enjoying from the impressive wage growth they may have experienced has been immediately eaten up by higher food prices and higher interest rates and prices on big-ticket items like cars and homes. All of this can get better in the course of this year, but there’s no sign any of it will improve dramatically. And as was proved by the White House effort to make “Bidenomics” happen, with the same success Gretchen Wieners had in making fetch happen, you can’t talk people into feeling that the day-to-day difficulties of life are improving. They will either feel the improvement, have their mood lightened, and feel better about the country and its leadership or they won’t. Right now they aren’t.
And then there’s age.
If you dig into the crosstabs of the NYT-Siena poll you’ll find that there are a bunch of questions they haven’t yet released the answers to but will (I’m guessing) on subsequent days to keep their poll generating new news. I’m guessing those unreleased numbers have to do with perceptions of Biden and Trump on matters of age, competence, and criminality. And given that the results in this poll dovetail pretty well with the recent NBC News poll released three weeks ago, the age response is likely to be devastating for Biden. As Mark Murray of NBC News reported: “A combined 76% of voters say they have major concerns (62%) or moderate concerns (14%) about Biden’s not having the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term.”
It’s been said a billion times, but I’ll say it again: One thing Biden really cannot do is get any younger.
Thursday night the president will give the State of the Union address. The stakes are crazily high, because there’s no way to set the bar low. One false move and he’s done for.
But what does “done for” mean? I have no idea. No one can explain to me the modality of how Democrats would dump him from the ticket. That leaves it to Biden and his loved ones. The question is whether Biden himself is looking at these numbers—and in moments of clarity is able to discern the colossal humiliation he may be on the verge of experiencing, not to mention historical judgment that will be rendered of his feckless decision to hold on to the reins of power should he lose in November.
Might he, therefore, get himself out of the race and give Democrats a chance to do what they clearly think is the most important thing they can do—save America from another Trump term?
While the rest of the left are going “Full Cross-Tab Truther” on the poll, Kamala, Michelle, and Gavin smile.
All of this happened in the first five years of my career. In the worst of those days, I was attacked not only by colleagues, but also by acquaintances and friends. One friend contacted my girlfriend of seven years, asking whether she would take a stand against “Adam’s role in promoting fascism.” She—the tough-as-nails daughter of Peruvian immigrants who grew up hearing stories of her parents fleeing the Shining Path—ignored it, and some eight weeks later, we were engaged.
As painful as it was in my mid-20s to think that my journalistic career would end as a result of this episode, it’s even more painful to think that newsrooms haven’t learned the right lessons from it. If the Times or any other outlet aims to cover America as it is and not simply how they want it to be, they should recruit more editors and reporters with conservative backgrounds, and then support them in their work. They should hire journalists, not activists. And they should remember that heterodoxy isn’t heresy.
By telling the story the Times told about Cotton’s op-ed, the paper seemed to avoid confronting the tough reality that despite many staffers’ objections, the article was well within the bounds of reasonable discourse. What did it mean for the paper and its coverage that Times employees were so violently opposed to publishing a mainstream American view?
It was clear to me then and it’s clear to me now that the fight over Cotton’s op-ed was never about safety, or the facts, or the editing, or even the argument, but control of the paper and who had it. In the end, all that mattered was that an example had been made.
And it infects every bit of the NYT, not just the opinion section. The staff revolt proved that much, but so does its product. How else can one explain why the New York Times ran the unsubstantiated story that Israel had destroyed the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza at the start of the present war and killed 500 people, without waiting for the sun to come up? Within hours, the Hamas claim was proven false as the hospital remained standing, and it became clear within the day that a Palestinian rocket had misfired and landed in the parking lot.
And yet it took the NYT a week to add an “editor’s note” to their original report that Hamas had “failed to make [the] case” that the IDF had hit the hospital. As I wrote at the time, the NYT wasn’t interested in reporting news but in amplifying propaganda:
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Nor is this limited to Israel, or even Donald Trump. Nicole Gelinas has a must-read essay at City Journal today titled “Department of Incorrections,” in which the Times tried to cover for Mayor Eric Adams and his cash giveaway to migrants. Gelinas had reported on the no-bid deal to disburse $150 million to migrants for food and shelter, but without any safeguards or accountability. Instead of following up and getting answers, the Times went after Gelinas while blaming the criticism on “Republican leaders and conservatives voices.” The piece misrepresented what Gelinas had written, and then refused to correct it when Gelinas asked them to do so.
The Times treated Rubinstein the same way, throwing him under the bus when the staffer revolt erupted. They took his Slack messages out of context to make it sound as though he’d approved Cotton’s piece with “false equivalences” when that message pertained to specific photographs rather than the essay. And even apart from that, there was nothing all that novel about what Cotton advocated. Rubinstein notes the bitter irony of the opposition to Cotton’s suggestion of using the National Guard to quell the George Floyd riots that emerged just a few months later:
On January 6, 2021, few people at The New York Times remarked on the fact that liberals were cheering on the deployment of National Guardsmen to stop rioting at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., the very thing Tom Cotton had advocated.
Rosenthal retired from the executive editor position in 1986 and then wrote a twice-weekly column on the op-ed page until 1999. Along with James Reston and a handful of others, he is identified with the New York Times’ golden age, a time when the paper spoke to—and for—the nation. In May 2006, Rosenthal died after a massive stroke at the age of eighty-four. He had worked fifty-three years for the Times, after coming aboard as a copyboy in 1946 in his early twenties.
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A tribute of sorts to the ideological neutrality of Times news reporting under Rosenthal had come from a rather unusual source: William F. Buckley’s National Review, the very bible of American conservatism. In 1972, as Spiro Agnew railed against the “elitist Eastern establishment press,” and Richard Nixon was livid over the Times’ publication of the Pentagon Papers and its looming endorsement of George McGovern, the National Review produced an article examining the charges of left-leaning bias. Conservatives had long dismissed the Times as “a hopeless hotbed of liberalism, biased beyond redemption and therefore not to be taken seriously,” the magazine observed, asking, “But to what extent was this impression soundly based?” A subheadline telegraphed its findings: “Things on 43rd Street aren’t as bad as they seem.” The National Review audit examined five developing stories, which it said had a “distinct left-right line,” and concluded: “The Times news administration was so evenhanded that it must have been deeply dismaying to the liberal opposition.” It went on to state that conservatives and other Americans would be far more confident in other media—specifically newsmagazines and television networks—if those media “measured up to the same standard” of fairness. “Were the news standards of the Times more broadly emulated,” National Review said, “the nation would be far better informed and more honorably served.”
McGowan noted:
While encouraging reporters to write with more flair, Rosenthal eschewed the subjectivity of the New Journalism, seeing this genre as substituting reportorial ego for a commitment to fact. He was vigilant about conflicts of interest, once firing a reporter who was found to have been sleeping with a Pennsylvania politician she covered while working for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I don’t care if my reporters are f**king elephants,” Rosenthal was said to have declared, “as long as they aren’t covering the circus.”
UPDATE: When Will the Atlantic Apologize for Its Own Behavior? “The editor of the Atlantic at the time was Jeffrey Goldberg. The editor of the Atlantic is still Jeffrey Goldberg. Does he have something to share with us?”
The team at the newspaper concluded: ‘This is a dark moment for Mr. Biden’s presidency.
They said that Biden’s performance at his news conference on Thursday night was ‘intended to assure the public that his memory is fine and argue that Mr. Hur was out of line’ – but this is not what happened.
Instead, according to the opinion piece, ‘the president raised more questions about his cognitive sharpness and temperament, as he delivered emotional and snappish retorts in a moment when people were looking for steady, even and capable responses to fair questions about his fitness.’
The board wrote: ‘His assurances… didn’t work. He must do better — the stakes in this presidential election are too high for Mr. Biden to hope that he can skate through a campaign with the help of teleprompters and aides and somehow defeat as manifestly unfit an opponent as Donald Trump.’
Such headlines haven’t gone unnoticed at the other end of the Northeast Corridor:
Biden deputy campaign manager pointing out the pro-Trump bias of the…New York Times. https://t.co/NMWu5UaSVz
When McDaniel took over, Trump was about to be inaugurated, there were 52 Republican senators and 246 Republican members of the House, and 4,205 of the 7,383 state legislative seats (almost 57 percent) were held by Republicans. Today, Biden is president, there are 49 Republican senators and 219 Republican members of the House, and 4,022 of the 7,383 state legislative seats (54.4 percent) are held by Republicans. Filings with the Federal Election Commission indicate that the RNC begins 2024 with just over $8 million in cash on hand, the lowest since 1993, adjusted for inflation. The Democratic National Committee begins the year with $24 million on hand.
Red State’s Jennifer Van Laar reported that the RNC spent about $297,000 on office supplies, $1 million on management consulting, $70,000 on floral arrangements, $116,000 on media-booking consultants, and $263,000 on limousines — significantly more than their counterparts in the Democratic National Committee in each category. Meanwhile, the DNC significantly outspent the RNC on voter-file maintenance, get-out-the-vote texting, and transfers to state parties — you know, the sorts of efforts that actually help candidates get elected.
I don’t know about you, but I find all this “winning” exhausting. Will Rogers famously said, “I’m not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat.” Lately, the Republican Party is demonstrating all the organization of Bogota rush-hour traffic.
We can’t get a bipartisan consensus to aid our allies. America’s enemies must be laughing this morning.
As Jim Treacher adds, “Even Trump says Bud Light is good now. So I guess that whole thing is over. Sure, fine, so this was one of the few culture-war skirmishes the Republicans were actually winning. But what’s so great about winning anyway, right? Such a hassle. Lay down your guns, Kid Rock. War is over if you want it. Oceania is not at war with Bud Light. Oceania has never been at war with Bud Light.”
Exit quote:
Republicans want to run from every win (Disney, Bud Light) and race to every loss (Mayorkas impeachment, border battle). They're rudderless flotsam at the mercy of the winds. It takes skill to be that unbelievably ridiculous.
White House pharmacists reportedly distributed uppers and downers like candy to Trump administration officials during his time in office, according to a new report from the Department of Defense Inspector General.
The 80-page document, which was released on Jan. 8, found that “all phases of the White House Medical Unit’s pharmacy operations had severe and systemic problems due to the unit’s reliance on ineffective internal controls to ensure compliance with pharmacy safety standards.”
The investigation, which began in 2018 after the Office of Inspector General (DoD OIG) received complaints about improper medical practices within the White House Medical Unit, found a slew of compliance issues and improper safety standards. The medical unit’s operations fall under the jurisdiction of the White House Military Office. The report covers a period between 2009 and 2018, with a majority of its findings coalescing around 2017- 2019, during the height of the Trump administration.
While Trump lived under the White House roof, the pharmacy reportedly kept messy, handwritten records, spent lavishly on brand-name medications, and failed to comply with a slew of federal law and Department of Defense regulations governing the handling, distribution, and disposal of prescription medication.
Through in-person inspections and interviews with over 120 officials, the report concluded “that the White House Medical Unit provided a wide range of health care and pharmaceutical services to ineligible White House staff in violation of Federal law and regulation and DoD policy. Additionally, the White House Medical Unit dispensed prescription medications, including controlled substances, to ineligible White House staff.”
One witness told the DoD OIG that pharmacy staff regularly prepared go-bags of prescription medication to White House staff in advance of overseas trips. “One of our requirements was to go ahead and make packets up for the controlled medications. And those would typically be Ambien or Provigil and typically both,” the witness said. “So we would normally make these packets of Ambien and Provigil, and a lot of times they’d be in like five tablets in a zip‑lock bag. And so traditionally, too, we would hand these out.”
With every controversy he stirred, Wenner’s sense of himself was expanding. Jann Wenner for president. Given the obstacles, it’s remarkable how seriously the idea was being entertained. Wenner, after all, was a draft dodger with a “concomitant history of psychiatric treatment, suicidal ideation, homosexual and excessive heterosexual promiscuity, and heavy use of illegal drugs.” Nonetheless, Wenner said that in the late 1970s Sidney Harman, the founder of Harman Kardon, the stereo maker and Rolling Stone advertiser, offered to back Wenner if he wanted to run for president of the United States. “He said he would fund me if I wanted to do it,” recalled Wenner. “You never want to say no to people who think that because it enhances your mystery. And it’s true, I did have quite a little political team there—[Dick] Goodwin, Anne Wexler, Hunter, the writers. I could have done it. I could have tried it. I don’t think I could have gone very far.”
“I didn’t have the temperament for it,” Wenner said. “I couldn’t get up at six in the morning and shake hands outside a shoe factory.”
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On the twenty-second floor at 745 Fifth Avenue, Rolling Stone’s camera room—a darkroom with a buzzer for entering and a revolving light-trap door—had become a de facto cocaine emporium, run by two employees who doubled as dealers. The room, a version of which had existed in San Francisco, was dubbed “the Capri Lounge” after the bar in the TV comedy Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Wenner was the biggest customer of all, but he also used grams of cocaine as bonuses for employees who pleased him. “The deal was,” said Karen Mullarkey, Annie Leibovitz’s photo editor in the late 1970s, “if I got Annie through a deadline, and everything worked out okay, I would come in and find a bindle, one of those little folding envelopes of coke, on my light box. That was a gift from Jann.”
When Wenner threw parties at Rolling Stone, there were lines to the camera room, which Wenner manned like a velvet rope. “Anybody who came down there to buy drugs from them, they would take a Polaroid,” recalled Wenner. “They would sit around, do a little blow, and they had a whole hall with like four hundred or five hundred Polaroids of all their visitors.” Here was a common image of Jann Wenner in most stories told about him from the late 1970s: curled up in his swivel chair at the round table that Jane bought for him in 1968, snorting a line of coke and swigging straight from an open bottle of Polmos Wódka Wyborowa. This was the preferred cocktail of the jet set: vodka, which took the edge off the cocaine, which prompted more cocaine, which prompted more vodka.
Tucked away under a list of medications in the report on President Obama’s recent physical exam is this intriguing notation: “Jet lag/time zone management, direct physician prescribed program, occasional medication use.” Obama’s doctor, Navy Capt. Jeffrey Kuhlman, didn’t say what drug the president might be taking to fight the mind-numbing effects of crossing too many time zones. But sleep doctors we consulted say one possibility is Provigil, a stimulant that is regularly prescribed to help people fend off excessive sleepiness.
Fans claim you get all the benefits of a triple shot of espresso without the jitters or anxiety that can accompany a massive hit of caffeine.
“If they’re going to give him something to wake him up, Provigil is the way to go,” says Dr. Lisa Shives, medical director of Northshore Sleep Medicine in Evanston, Illinois.
While the White House won’t say what the president is actually taking, Provigil (also known by its generic name modafinil) is an intriguing possibility. The drug has acquired an almost mythic status in recent years as a pill that makes it possible for the user to bypass the all-too-human need for sleep and work 24 or even 36 hours at a stretch. Manufactured by Cephalon, it’s in a class of medications called “wakefulness promoting agents.” Fans claim you get all the benefits of a triple shot of espresso without the jitters or anxiety that can accompany a massive hit of caffeine. It’s reported to be increasingly popular among sleep-deprived cohorts like long-distance truckers, fighter pilots, and students pulling all-nighters—and brought in $1 billion for Cephalon in 2008.
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Ambien has had bad press in recent years—and it might be a riskier choice for the president. There have been reports of patients on Ambien sleepwalking and sleep-eating, and even occasional stories about people who drove while on Ambien and didn’t realize they were behind the wheel. When her patients complain of side effects, Shives simply tells them to stop taking the drug. “You do hear reports of some strange and bad behavior but you have to put that in the context of how many millions of people take this drug” without these problems, she says.
Again, we don’t know exactly what the president has taken to fight jet lag. But if these drugs are indeed part of his treatment, it’s easy to see why his doctors might have resorted to medication. Scientists have been studying jet lag for years and they’re just beginning to understand how body rhythms work to help us fall asleep and stay awake at regular times. It’s a very delicate system and you mess with it at your peril. The sleep-wake cycle shifts slowly; you can’t push it around more than an hour or two a day, says Charmane Eastman, director of the Biological Rhythms Research Lab at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. “It’s very hard to get it to go faster,” she says.
GREAT MOMENTS IN UN-SELFAWARENESS– Journalism Edition: I’m the first person to say that you have a right to bloviate bullsh*t. Fine.
But even understanding that The Daily Beastis about as scummy as it gets, (given that Gawker is no more), check the following phrases and you tell me if this is “reporting” or Op/ED:
“BOTTOM FEEDING”
“The MAGA network”
“The channel’s fourth-quarter primetime ratings, meanwhile, have dropped 14 percent compared to the previous quarter, though they are still up significantly compared to 2022” [Citation? Meh.]
“cartoonish pro-Trump sycophancy”
“the bottom-feeding MAGA channel”
This asshat is entirely within his rights to make such editorializations, but would somebody tell me why the slimeballs at The Daily Beast think this is “reporting” instead of editorial?
These dolts say “Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.” Am I the only one who thinks a good tip would to be stop dressing up Opinion as “news”? Go for it.
*Disclaimer: I have never represented either Newsmax nor The Daily Beast in any legal matter.*
A point of clarification here: I’d be more surprised if Senate aides weren’t banging at work all day. I think it’s hilarious, and I reserve the right to make stupid jokes about it. I haven’t been this amused since Anthony Weiner went away.
But there’s also a serious point to be made here. This kid genuinely doesn’t think he did anything out of the ordinary, because for his whole life he’s been told how amazing he is. Of course it’s okay for this very special person to scream at Jews and rut like a dog at his workplace. He’s one of the good guys, so he can do whatever he wants.
It’s those mean ol’ conservatives who are the problem. They’re the bad guys. They don’t care about Trump banging porn stars, but they care about this? Etc., etc.
I’m sure this kid will land on his feet, or some other body part. He’s now a victim of “revenge porn” by those evil Republicans, just like Katie Hill and Susanna Gibson. So now the libs will turn him into the next Dylan Mulvaney. For a shameless exhibitionist like Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the sky’s the limit.
Gibson’s defense of her choices is equally astonishing: “Choosing to share content, online or in whatever medium, with select people with the understanding that it will disappear and can only be seen by those present at the time — when we’re talking livestreaming, webcamming and Skype — that is a far cry from consenting for that content to be recorded and then broadly disseminated.” Cockburn was not aware of this, but is pleased to have been educated by someone who knows better.
Regarding nude images, Gibson tells Burns, “the moment that an image like that or a video like that gets put on the internet, it’s like lighting a fire in a dry forest. It spreads rapidly and extensively until it causes irreversible damage.” Cockburn agrees — and is not in the habit of taking nude photographs of his miserable soma. He might not therefore be the best person to ask, “is it different when you are the person posting said image on the internet? Deliberately? For profit? Rather than having a private image posted by accident, or hacked and posted without consent like Jennifer Lawrence, or stolen from a safe in your house like Pamela Anderson?” Someone should though!
Gibson is considering legal action against whoever made a copy of her livestreamed sex acts and posted them elsewhere on the internet. “I want the person who found and then disseminated illegal pornographic images of me — again, violating federal and state laws — they need to be held accountable,” she says.
Cockburn wishes Gibson luck in her search for the person responsible for her political downfall. Has she checked the mirror?
It’s unfortunate that the current incarnation of Saturday Night Live sees it as their mission to hide the majority of scandals involving Democrats, because a “Dukakis After Dark” style sketch featuring Gibson and Maese-Czeropski commiserating about their self-inflicted woes has the potential to make for great television. (Or at least it could have, starring their earlier funnier* cast members of the show.)
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