He should be on his knees begging God and the millions he wronged for forgiveness. He should be saying hey I was wrong, and I’m sorry for the way I vilified the brethren, how I pushed unfair and unjust treatment of the unvaccinated. He should be begging the people who were fired from their jobs due to the policies and politicians he pushed from his media soapbox. He should be ashamed and begging forgiveness for the treatment he gave all those who dared disagree with his vile politics and unjust and slanderous treatment he gave Trump and his followers.
But he’s not.
He’s now lecturing us on how we all need to forgive them and move on, while never once offering up any sign of repentance and maybe a mea culpa for his part in it all.
Instead, he’s victim blaming the people he slandered, and reminding them of their duty to forgive while he continues to sin against them from his bully pulpit.
All because he sees the writing on the wall and knows R’s will be back in charge.
Remember this the next time anyone tries to tell you he has any credibility, or cares at all about the kingdom.
Thankfully people are calling David out on his hypocrisy and the lies he pushed and the people he harmed.
While you may forgive him, never forget what he did, and point it out when he does it again, because he will.
This is an excellent piece from someone who was, in fact, quite right about many aspects of COVID policy (including opening schools, for example). Critics are forgetting the focus of this piece is that period when we knew so little. There *should* be grace. https://t.co/LY7pbtmO6S
David, you said it was a “moral crime” and evidence of the “darkness” on the right for people to question vaccines and masks. You mocked those who opposed mandates. You accused them of spreading disease and costing lives.
"When I’m standing next to an unmasked family in church, I’m not thinking they’re brave or bold. I’m seeing instead a tangible disregard for the health and safety of those around them." –@DavidAFrench
I suspect it’s not us who are forgetting, any more than we forget that your publication ran a call to put people into camps. Where do those of us tortured by people like this for two years go to receive any grace? When do those who suffered matter, not just those who did evil? pic.twitter.com/OEIRurfgUZ
“The conservative case for not holding people accountable after their politically-motivated totalitarianism destroyed millions of lives and small businesses.” pic.twitter.com/MZF4IcSj1p
"Think of de Blasio, telling religious believers they had to abide by the city’s rule against gatherings of 10 or more, even as he himself was violating these rules in public support of the George Floyd protests. Amnesty for this? Hell, no."https://t.co/hExonLTM9p
Most enraging thing I’ve read in a long time. You ppl destroyed lives, had people fired, set back kids for a generation, promoted an anti-American vilification/social passport system for “the unvaccinated,” censored, etc.
If @EvanMcMullin was an independent he wouldn’t be fundraising on ActBlue, the fundraising platform only available to Democrats and candidates who “share their values.”
"When the door was opened, Pelosi and DEPAPE were both holding a hammer with one hand and DEPAPE had his other hand holding onto Pelosi’s forearm. Pelosi greeted the officers." https://t.co/9AU7bznQUmpic.twitter.com/c4uiA8e8bj
@8:23 Re French: Funny [in a decidedly NOT humorous way]. People like him have used their substantial platforms to vilify others and then publicly look the other way at the unjust loss of jobs and livelihoods. More recently he’s been pushing the Ukraine war. As soon as that falls out of favor, he will probably be silent on the horrible damage inflicted by our participation. But maybe not, as he seems to be firmly in the Neo-Con camp , and they practically exist to promote wars and instability abroad.
Of course, he’s a well spoken christian so he’s probably the ideal candidate for those who don’t care about the damage his policies cause when implemented.
“The Republican National Committee has filed a lawsuit against the city of Flint, Michigan, for failing to hire an equal number of poll workers from each of the two major political parties in preparation for the midterm elections.
Michigan law requires election officials appoint an equal number “of election inspectors in each election precinct from each major political party.” Despite a demand letter from the RNC, Flint has failed to comply with state statutes. Roughly only 120 of the 680 election inspectors hired in Flint for the 2022 midterms are Republican, the newly filed lawsuit alleges. While Flint recently told the RNC it hired 50 more Republican-affiliated poll watchers, it refused to further ensure equal party representation among election workers.
That means only 18 percent of Flint’s approximately 680 election inspectors are Republican. Not to mention that on the city’s absentee ballot counting boards, the lawsuit claims, there are only six Republicans to 56 Democrats — a 9 to 1 ratio.
“Michigan election law clearly states that election commissioners have a responsibility to hire an equal partisan breakdown of election inspectors, but Flint has hired hundreds more Democrats than Republicans,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement. “This is unacceptable and unfair to Michigan voters: Republicans are going to court to deliver the fairness that Michiganders deserve.””
@8:26 The Tucker monologue was very good. I saw it last night. I often see part of his show, but only what is available on youtube. I thought the weakest part of it was the Obama clip, but still quite solid. Though there is a substantial amount of opinion, Tucker ends up doing more actual news than just about any other show that I’ve seen on cable. He has interviews with many diverse people, often on the left. And he periodically travels abroad to interview foreign leaders. I end up watching at least part of his show 2-4 times a week.
By ‘ratioing’ NBC’s Dasha Burns for questioning John Fetterman’s health, her fellow journalists hid the truth from the public but exposed how they manufacture consent”
“On the debate stage last week, Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman performed like one might expect from someone who survived a stroke only five months ago. In the aftermath of the debate, Democratic strategists have been asking—anonymously, of course—how anybody thought it was a good idea to foist Fetterman onto such a public stage. The simplest answer is that they thought they could get away with it because they believed their own hype.
A swarm of liberal political pundits and journalists had spent the previous weeks denouncing any questions about Fetterman’s health as illegitimate, while attacking the few reporters who dared raise such questions as heartless bigots and right-wing shills. In the process, they unintentionally revealed something essential about how the elite media distorts the public’s understanding of key issues by bullying journalists into repeating obvious lies.
Case in point: NBC News’ Dasha Burns. On Oct. 7, Burns conducted an on-camera interview with Fetterman. Because Fetterman has “auditory processing issues” as a result of the stroke, according to his campaign, he had to use a closed-captioning system to understand Burns’ questions. After the interview aired, Burns told NBC’s Lester Holt on air that Fetterman didn’t appear to understand her pre-interview banter. Burns was just doing her job by reporting on the fitness of a public official, but her assessment also seemed to lend credibility to the line of attack coming from Fetterman’s Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, who has claimed that Fetterman is suffering from cognitive decline and covering it up. Simply for stating the facts as she had observed them, Burns was seen to be supporting the “wrong” candidate.
The media felt a great disturbance in the Force. On Twitter, blue-check journalists jumped in to defend Fetterman and throw shade at Burns. Soon, Burns’ tweets were inundated by thousands of haters calling her “disgraceful,” “trash,” and, again and again, “ableist.” The Associated Press published a syndicated story amplifying the criticism and suggesting that Burns’ remarks had given ammunition to the Republicans. The New York Times published an op-ed deploring her remarks. Savannah Guthrie confronted Burns about it on air. On The View, Sunny Hostin implied Burns had acted unethically. BuzzFeed published an article essentially accusing Burns of putting disabled people at risk of violence. Recaps of the criticisms surrounding Burns’ interview appeared in The Washington Post, LA Times and other publications where they served to legitimate the idea of a controversy that the media itself had created.
That’s how it remained for two weeks: with Burns scolded and swarmed, and other journalists left to internalize the message about what would happen to them if they too stepped out of line.
Then, Fetterman’s abysmal debate performance vindicated her. Most of us know better than to expect the media establishment to pause for even a fleeting moment of introspection but, still, it’s incredible to see how many pundits and blue-check experts chose to double down on the “ableist” defense. The few nonconservative commentators who had the gall to note the reality about the debate were promptly disciplined. “There is no amount of empathy for and understanding about Fetterman’s health and recovery that changes the fact that this is absolutely painful to watch,” tweeted New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi. In response, Nuzzi was instantly accused of “ableism,” racism, acting out of hatred, and lacking a conscience. The experts had spoken! But for the rest of us, it’s an excellent time to take stock of what Burns’ colossal ratio and the subsequent swarm on Nuzzi were meant to accomplish.”
—
“In his book Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers, Andrey Mir describes what happened next. Starved of ad revenues, print media outlets changed their business models. They had already been drifting toward partisanship, but now they saw there was money in it. Instead of seeing their readers as consumers of the ads they sold, they started looking at them as potential donors. They began appealing to their political consciences, asking readers to subsidize their noble journalistic missions, NPR pledge-drive style. “Support our brave truth-telling work,” went the pitch, “for Democracy Dies In Darkness!”
This shift went full throttle during the Trump years, as the president attacked reporters as “the enemy of the people,” instantly transforming them into heroes in the eyes of Democrats. The only way to defeat Trump and his lies, liberals came to believe, was by forking over their money to The New York Times. Only The New York Times (and The Washington Post, and The Guardian, and The New Republic, and The Intercept, etc.) had the reporting chops, the prestige, and the national audience to counter Trump’s propaganda with the truth. By subscribing to the Times, you weren’t just paying to access a consumer product; you were donating to a cause. You were doing your part to make sure the truth got pushed out into the discourse, that it reached millions of Americans who, without it, might be left brainwashed by the MAGA hate machine and its “disinformation.”
In other words, you were paying to build your own propaganda apparatus to counter Trump’s.
Under Trump, the media brands behind the news Americans consumed became badges of political affiliation, even more than they were before. If you despised the administration, you would never dream of watching Fox News. Instead, you would watch CNN or MSNBC voraciously, and share stories from The New York Times or The Washington Post on your Facebook feed. During the Trump administration this became the media’s new value proposition to its consumers, and for a select few outlets, it was a godsend. The New York Times’ subscriber rolls ballooned, as did its newsroom, becoming the largest in the paper’s history.
As news organizations became more partisan than ever before, their loyal readers and viewers came to demand a standard of ideological fealty from their coverage.
Before the internet, a politically unpopular story might trigger a flood of nasty letters to the editor, but as long as it didn’t upset any major advertisers, the haters could be safely ignored. Now that it was the readers paying the rent, things were different. A revolt by your readers, if you were a newspaper publisher post-2016, was a direct threat to your bottom line.
But there was a threat even more perilous than that: a revolt by all the young reporters you hired to cater to the millions of outraged new subscribers you had enlisted in the fight against MAGA authoritarianism. Those young reporters were true believers. They’d never known the old, aspirationally nonpartisan mode of journalism. They had joined your outlet to fight for social justice, wielding their pens as swords. So had all the app coders you had enticed away from their overpaid but unfulfilling Facebook jobs with the promise that here, you might take a pay cut but you could also change the world.
Today, a politically unpopular article or personality can leave a publisher besieged from the outside while facing a revolt from within. We’ve seen this play out again and again, especially at The New York Times. There was The Nazi Next Door scandal, the Donald McNeil fiasco, the Tom Cotton op-ed outrage, the Andy Mills brouhaha, the Alison Roman inanity and everything that Bari Weiss ever wrote or tweeted. Some of these tempests may have started with readers, others with journalists, but mostly it was hard to say, because they emerged from the swamp where the media industry’s most indignant consumers and its loudest employees coalesce: Twitter.”
“With crime such an important issue, Americans depend on the FBI for accurate data. The crime data for 2021 is a mess, with almost 40% of law enforcement agencies around the country not submitting any data to the FBI. In California, 93% didn’t report crime data. In New York, 87% didn’t. Cities are embarrassed by the soaring crime rates, and even when they have collected the data they aren’t transmitting those numbers to the FBI.
But many more data errors are the direct responsibility of the FBI. Up until January of last year, I worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as the senior advisor for research and statistics, and part of my job was to evaluate the FBI’s active shooting reports. I found that they were missing lots of cases and had misidentified others. Unfortunately, the FBI was unwilling to fix any of these errors. Since leaving that job, I have found many more missed cases, updating the list this month.
Nor was that the first time I pointed out such errors to the FBI, and I published a list of them in a criminology publication in 2015.
These news reports relied on a series of FBI reports on active shootings put together by researchers at Texas State University.
The FBI reports that armed citizens stopped only 11 of the 252 active shooter incidents that it identified for the period 2014-2021. The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. But it does not include shootings that are deemed related to other criminal activity, such as robbery or fighting over drug turf. Active shootings may involve just one shot being fired at just one target, even if the target isn’t hit.
To compile its list, the FBI hired academics at the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. Police departments don’t collect data, so the researchers had to find news stories about these incidents.
My organization, the Crime Prevention Research Center, also undertook a search for news stories. The CPRC discovered a total of 360 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2021, and it found that an armed citizen stopped 124 of these. I also found that the FBI had misidentified five cases, usually because the person who stopped the attack was incorrectly identified as a security guard. We found these cases on a tiny budget of just a few thousand dollars. Though we found that armed citizens had stopped 11 times more cases than the FBI reports, I make no claim that we have identified all of them. It is quite possible that the news media itself never covers many such incidents.
But no one needs to take my word for it that the FBI missed many cases. All of the news stories that my team collected are listed on the CPRC website.
While the FBI claims that just 4.4% of active shootings were stopped by law-abiding citizens carrying guns, the percentage that I found was 34%. I am more confident that we have identified a higher percentage of recent cases, and the percentage in 2021 was even higher – 49%.
The FBI doesn’t differentiate between law-abiding citizens stopping attacks where guns are banned and where they are allowed, but you can’t really expect law-abiding citizens to stop attacks where it is illegal to carry guns. In places where law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry firearms, the percentage of active shootings stopped is above 50% for the whole period. And, again, we are more confident that we have more of the cases in recent years. The figure hits 58% in 2021.
In order to follow the FBI’s definition, I also had to exclude 24 cases because a law-abiding person with a gun stopped the attacker before he was able to get off a shot.
But there is a more basic problem in the reliance on news coverage to determine whether an active shooting was stopped by an armed civilian. The news media has a clear bias to cover cases where bad things happen over cases where bad things are prevented. The old adage is: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Killings are usually more newsworthy than woundings, and woundings more notable than confrontations defused simply by someone brandishing a gun.
As an example, I examined news stories of defensive gun use data from Jan. 1 to Aug. 10 of this year, and found 774 defensive gun uses, fully 85% involving people shot: 43% resulting in death and 42% in wounding. Less than 4% of cases involved no shots fired. But survey data indicate that in 95% of cases when people use guns defensively, they merely show the gun to make the criminal back off. Such defensive gun uses rarely make the news.
The problem is that the FBI numbers are used by academics who do research and by the media. To see how the FBI reports alter news coverage, see the July 17 Greenwood Mall shooting near Indianapolis, where a young man, Elisjsha Dicken, used his legally carried gun to stop what clearly would have been a horrible mass public shooting. The news coverage immediately relied on the FBI and Texas State University reports to tell people Dicken’s heroism was very unusual.
“Making Dicken’s heroism perhaps even more remarkable is the fact cases of an armed bystander attacking an active shooter are rare,” CNN noted two days after the attack. “The Greenwood incident is unique, however, because it became one of the rare instances of an armed civilian successfully intervening to end a mass shooting,” claimed the Washington Post the day after the attack. But what is really rare is the news coverage of these attacks. Few know that there were at least six other similar likely mass public shootings that armed civilians stopped in the first nine months of this year.
It is hard to ignore how all of this feeds into the gun control debate. Nor can one forget about the charges of political bias leveled by whistleblowers in the FBI.”
“Two news stories are illustrative of the current state of the COVID panic and public health. Biden got his third booster, but it appears he is nearly alone in this. Uptake for boosters is very low, with fewer than 10 percent of eligible people getting them.
The COVID vaccines’ lackluster benefits, significant apparent health risks, recent admissions that they do nothing to stop transmission, additive risk from boosters, combined with the general sense that COVID is not worth worrying about for most people have reduced COVID’s salience in the news and in our lives. With many people having already gotten and survived COVID with little difficulty, there is no longer the fear and uncertainty that prevailed in the earliest days of the pandemic.
The other important story is that New York municipal workers who were fired for not getting the COVID vaccine will be reinstated and given back pay. A white pill after two years of insanity, this small victory will do little to relieve the tens of thousands of airline employees, military personnel, and private sector workers who had to choose between their health and their livelihood. It is possible these people too will someday get relief, but the legal system moves very slowly and often inconsistently.
As things have returned to normal—even masks have become passé—it’s easy to forget the state of the nation only last summer. This was when jobs were threatened and lost over vaccine status, when blue state governors were threatening to return to lockdowns, and when parents were cajoled into giving children COVID vaccines, even though children faced minimal risk.
Similar to the recent Dark Biden speech about “MAGA Republicans,” last summer the Delaware Democrat called those who choose not to get vaccinated evil people, who were chiefly to blame for the continuation of COVID. He described the delta wave as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” even though there had already been millions of breakthrough infections by that time. Biden warned us imperiously, “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.”
At the time, there were even voices calling for depriving the unvaccinated of all healthcare, a policy never imagined for other diseases tied to lifestyle risks, such as AIDS, lung cancer, or cirrhosis of the liver. Every unvaccinated case in the hospital was trotted out as a dire warning to the pig-headed vaccine skeptics. Simultaneously, so many of the vaccinated said, in Pavlovian fashion, that they got COVID, but it would be much worse without the vaccine. The narratives sounded like hostage videos.
COVID was and remains chiefly a risk to the old and the infirm. Vaccines, on the other hand, seem to have particularly high rates of side effects among the young and the healthy.
As of late, there have been many mysterious cases of relatively healthy and fairly young people dropping dead of sudden cardiac arrest, a known side effect of myocarditis, which is itself a known side effect of the vaccines. While the data is hard for a layperson to analyze, there is apparently an across-the-board increase in mortality over the last year, which is presumably attributable to some unknown and widespread cause—whether it is long COVID, the vaccine, or something else will take careful epidemiological study.
It is easy to suppress the memory and the images of the last two years. We should make efforts not to allow any of it to go down the memoryhole. What happened in our country and around the world was damaging and horrendous. Lockdowns, social distancing, mask mandates, experimental vaccine mandates, persistent fearmongering, school closures, prohibitions on wedding and funerals, isolating old people from loved ones and one another, massive economic and psychological harm, and a generally heavy-handed, know-it-all approach by the managerial class have collectively imposed real trauma on the country.
We have the receipts. We should not let the perpetrators off easily.
Some overreaction may have been justified in the beginning, as the scale of the threat was unknown. While there was little data to support social distancing, masks, or many of the early “brute force” interventions, this appeared to be a Spanish Flu level event, ten times or more lethal than the ordinary flu. Some leeway is appropriate in such instances, but it soon became apparent that all of those assumptions were false.
Data on interventions like masking and lockdowns found no support. But these policies did ruin our lives.”
“Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday put a temporary hold on the handover of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns to a congressional committee.
Roberts’ order gives the Supreme Court time to weigh the legal issues in Trump’s emergency appeal to the high court, filed Monday.
Without court intervention, the tax returns could have been provided as early as Thursday by the Treasury Department to the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee.
Roberts gave the committee until Nov. 10 to respond. The chief justice handles emergency appeals from the nation’s capital, where the fight over Trump’s taxes has been going on since 2019.
Lower courts ruled that the committee has broad authority to obtain tax returns and rejected Trump’s claims that it was overstepping.
If Trump can persuade the nation’s highest court to intervene in this case, he could potentially delay a final decision until the start of the next Congress in January. If Republicans recapture control of the House in the fall election, they could drop the records request.
The temporary delay imposed by Roberts is the third such order issued by justices in recent days in cases related to Trump.
The court separately is weighing Sen. Lindsey Graham’s emergency appeal to avoid having to testify before a Georgia grand jury that is investigating potential illegal interference by Trump and his allies in the 2020 election in the state.
Also before the court is an emergency appeal from Arizona Republican party chairwoman Kelli Ward to prevent the handover of phone records to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.”
My 90 yo mother in law fell in July of ‘20, broke 10 ribs. We were told she had a week to live, if that. Her sons could not go see her in the hospital, or the care facility she was put in after the hospital was “too crowded to care for her.” We said our goodbyes on the phone. 1/2
My niece fell into deep depression. She missed her last year of junior high and her first two years of high school. She can’t be around people anymore. It’s all horrific.
My daughter, "Do you have COVID?" Neighbor, "No." My daughter, "Can you come over and play with me?" Neighbor, "Mom says no!" My daughter, "ok." This was a regular thing with neighbors, school friends, and cousins for over a year. All she had was us, her parents, to play with. pic.twitter.com/kvguA14cFO
I have a condition that wouldn’t let me 2 wear a mask. I was escorted for not wearing one by 4 cops from my doctor’s office who knew my health history. I was rolled out of a surgery room for the same reason. For almost 2 years I was refused medical treatments most of the time.
When I was in the hospital for the surgery, I was refused different screenings. I was only allowed to have 1 visit per day so I couldn’t see my sons together for 3 weeks. Not to mentioned losing my job & being attack by 300lb+ guy for not having facial diaper, I’m 115lb woman.
Just my mother dying alone in a senior care center with none of her children allowed to be with her, and our priest having to give her last rites by phone.
My father-in-law passed away on 11/20/20. He was a highly decorated WWII & Korean War vet. Unlike George Floyd’s THREE star studded funeral galas, we were only allowed a handful of mourners and had to sit far apart (God forbid anyone would try to console anyone else).
My Grammy died from loneliness in a nursing home. These pics were taken just a few months apart. I will never forgive them. Not ever. pic.twitter.com/LaQHHITc1b
Lost my 25 yr career with .@TMobile because I refused the vax. Also lost contact with my dad/stepmom, and my aunt and uncle, because they don't want to be in the same room with an unvaxxed person.
The Pentagon officially confirmed today that US troops are on the ground in Ukraine, allegedly performing "inspections" of US weapon caches. This information was released via anonymous media briefing. No word on whether the troops are wearing "boots" as they walk "on the ground" pic.twitter.com/ok9aAT1gDk
Just wondering: when Biden launched this US military intervention back in February, did he say anything about US troops being physically deployed to Ukraine for extremely vague "inspection" missions
Wandering Views 
He should be on his knees begging God and the millions he wronged for forgiveness. He should be saying hey I was wrong, and I’m sorry for the way I vilified the brethren, how I pushed unfair and unjust treatment of the unvaccinated. He should be begging the people who were fired from their jobs due to the policies and politicians he pushed from his media soapbox. He should be ashamed and begging forgiveness for the treatment he gave all those who dared disagree with his vile politics and unjust and slanderous treatment he gave Trump and his followers.
But he’s not.
He’s now lecturing us on how we all need to forgive them and move on, while never once offering up any sign of repentance and maybe a mea culpa for his part in it all.
Instead, he’s victim blaming the people he slandered, and reminding them of their duty to forgive while he continues to sin against them from his bully pulpit.
All because he sees the writing on the wall and knows R’s will be back in charge.
Remember this the next time anyone tries to tell you he has any credibility, or cares at all about the kingdom.
Thankfully people are calling David out on his hypocrisy and the lies he pushed and the people he harmed.
While you may forgive him, never forget what he did, and point it out when he does it again, because he will.
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Gee, wherever did people get all these ideas about the Pelosi story?
I mean besides Politico, the media, and the govt?
Nailed it.
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I feel like Dems aren’t getting their money’s worth, which is good. 🙂
Grifters grift, it’s what they do.
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Where do people get these ideas from?
The usual suspects…
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The media spread lies and disinformation. It’s what they do best, but always to benefit D’s, of course.
“NY Times/Siena Poll Gives Dems Edge in Key Senate Races but Notoriously Underestimates Republicans”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/11/ny-times-siena-poll-gives-dems-edge-in-key-senate-races-but-notoriously-underestimates-republicans/
“The race for the Senate is still up for grabs and the polls shift almost daily, but the New York Times/Siena poll is giving Democrats a slight edge.
What you have to know is that the NY Times/Siena poll has a history of underestimating Republicans.”
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@8:23 Re French: Funny [in a decidedly NOT humorous way]. People like him have used their substantial platforms to vilify others and then publicly look the other way at the unjust loss of jobs and livelihoods. More recently he’s been pushing the Ukraine war. As soon as that falls out of favor, he will probably be silent on the horrible damage inflicted by our participation. But maybe not, as he seems to be firmly in the Neo-Con camp , and they practically exist to promote wars and instability abroad.
Of course, he’s a well spoken christian so he’s probably the ideal candidate for those who don’t care about the damage his policies cause when implemented.
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Stop the steal.
Again.
“RNC Sues Flint, Michigan For Stacking Polls With Democrat Workers Ahead Of Key Midterm Election”
https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/31/rnc-sues-flint-michigan-for-stacking-polls-with-democrat-workers-ahead-of-key-midterm-election/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rnc-sues-flint-michigan-for-stacking-polls-with-democrat-workers-ahead-of-key-midterm-election
“The Republican National Committee has filed a lawsuit against the city of Flint, Michigan, for failing to hire an equal number of poll workers from each of the two major political parties in preparation for the midterm elections.
Michigan law requires election officials appoint an equal number “of election inspectors in each election precinct from each major political party.” Despite a demand letter from the RNC, Flint has failed to comply with state statutes. Roughly only 120 of the 680 election inspectors hired in Flint for the 2022 midterms are Republican, the newly filed lawsuit alleges. While Flint recently told the RNC it hired 50 more Republican-affiliated poll watchers, it refused to further ensure equal party representation among election workers.
That means only 18 percent of Flint’s approximately 680 election inspectors are Republican. Not to mention that on the city’s absentee ballot counting boards, the lawsuit claims, there are only six Republicans to 56 Democrats — a 9 to 1 ratio.
“Michigan election law clearly states that election commissioners have a responsibility to hire an equal partisan breakdown of election inspectors, but Flint has hired hundreds more Democrats than Republicans,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement. “This is unacceptable and unfair to Michigan voters: Republicans are going to court to deliver the fairness that Michiganders deserve.””
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Game changer?
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@8:26 The Tucker monologue was very good. I saw it last night. I often see part of his show, but only what is available on youtube. I thought the weakest part of it was the Obama clip, but still quite solid. Though there is a substantial amount of opinion, Tucker ends up doing more actual news than just about any other show that I’ve seen on cable. He has interviews with many diverse people, often on the left. And he periodically travels abroad to interview foreign leaders. I end up watching at least part of his show 2-4 times a week.
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“How the Media Trains Journalists to Lie
By ‘ratioing’ NBC’s Dasha Burns for questioning John Fetterman’s health, her fellow journalists hid the truth from the public but exposed how they manufacture consent”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-media-trains-journalists-lie-leighton-woodhouse
“On the debate stage last week, Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman performed like one might expect from someone who survived a stroke only five months ago. In the aftermath of the debate, Democratic strategists have been asking—anonymously, of course—how anybody thought it was a good idea to foist Fetterman onto such a public stage. The simplest answer is that they thought they could get away with it because they believed their own hype.
A swarm of liberal political pundits and journalists had spent the previous weeks denouncing any questions about Fetterman’s health as illegitimate, while attacking the few reporters who dared raise such questions as heartless bigots and right-wing shills. In the process, they unintentionally revealed something essential about how the elite media distorts the public’s understanding of key issues by bullying journalists into repeating obvious lies.
Case in point: NBC News’ Dasha Burns. On Oct. 7, Burns conducted an on-camera interview with Fetterman. Because Fetterman has “auditory processing issues” as a result of the stroke, according to his campaign, he had to use a closed-captioning system to understand Burns’ questions. After the interview aired, Burns told NBC’s Lester Holt on air that Fetterman didn’t appear to understand her pre-interview banter. Burns was just doing her job by reporting on the fitness of a public official, but her assessment also seemed to lend credibility to the line of attack coming from Fetterman’s Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, who has claimed that Fetterman is suffering from cognitive decline and covering it up. Simply for stating the facts as she had observed them, Burns was seen to be supporting the “wrong” candidate.
The media felt a great disturbance in the Force. On Twitter, blue-check journalists jumped in to defend Fetterman and throw shade at Burns. Soon, Burns’ tweets were inundated by thousands of haters calling her “disgraceful,” “trash,” and, again and again, “ableist.” The Associated Press published a syndicated story amplifying the criticism and suggesting that Burns’ remarks had given ammunition to the Republicans. The New York Times published an op-ed deploring her remarks. Savannah Guthrie confronted Burns about it on air. On The View, Sunny Hostin implied Burns had acted unethically. BuzzFeed published an article essentially accusing Burns of putting disabled people at risk of violence. Recaps of the criticisms surrounding Burns’ interview appeared in The Washington Post, LA Times and other publications where they served to legitimate the idea of a controversy that the media itself had created.
That’s how it remained for two weeks: with Burns scolded and swarmed, and other journalists left to internalize the message about what would happen to them if they too stepped out of line.
Then, Fetterman’s abysmal debate performance vindicated her. Most of us know better than to expect the media establishment to pause for even a fleeting moment of introspection but, still, it’s incredible to see how many pundits and blue-check experts chose to double down on the “ableist” defense. The few nonconservative commentators who had the gall to note the reality about the debate were promptly disciplined. “There is no amount of empathy for and understanding about Fetterman’s health and recovery that changes the fact that this is absolutely painful to watch,” tweeted New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi. In response, Nuzzi was instantly accused of “ableism,” racism, acting out of hatred, and lacking a conscience. The experts had spoken! But for the rest of us, it’s an excellent time to take stock of what Burns’ colossal ratio and the subsequent swarm on Nuzzi were meant to accomplish.”
—
“In his book Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers, Andrey Mir describes what happened next. Starved of ad revenues, print media outlets changed their business models. They had already been drifting toward partisanship, but now they saw there was money in it. Instead of seeing their readers as consumers of the ads they sold, they started looking at them as potential donors. They began appealing to their political consciences, asking readers to subsidize their noble journalistic missions, NPR pledge-drive style. “Support our brave truth-telling work,” went the pitch, “for Democracy Dies In Darkness!”
This shift went full throttle during the Trump years, as the president attacked reporters as “the enemy of the people,” instantly transforming them into heroes in the eyes of Democrats. The only way to defeat Trump and his lies, liberals came to believe, was by forking over their money to The New York Times. Only The New York Times (and The Washington Post, and The Guardian, and The New Republic, and The Intercept, etc.) had the reporting chops, the prestige, and the national audience to counter Trump’s propaganda with the truth. By subscribing to the Times, you weren’t just paying to access a consumer product; you were donating to a cause. You were doing your part to make sure the truth got pushed out into the discourse, that it reached millions of Americans who, without it, might be left brainwashed by the MAGA hate machine and its “disinformation.”
In other words, you were paying to build your own propaganda apparatus to counter Trump’s.
Under Trump, the media brands behind the news Americans consumed became badges of political affiliation, even more than they were before. If you despised the administration, you would never dream of watching Fox News. Instead, you would watch CNN or MSNBC voraciously, and share stories from The New York Times or The Washington Post on your Facebook feed. During the Trump administration this became the media’s new value proposition to its consumers, and for a select few outlets, it was a godsend. The New York Times’ subscriber rolls ballooned, as did its newsroom, becoming the largest in the paper’s history.
As news organizations became more partisan than ever before, their loyal readers and viewers came to demand a standard of ideological fealty from their coverage.
Before the internet, a politically unpopular story might trigger a flood of nasty letters to the editor, but as long as it didn’t upset any major advertisers, the haters could be safely ignored. Now that it was the readers paying the rent, things were different. A revolt by your readers, if you were a newspaper publisher post-2016, was a direct threat to your bottom line.
But there was a threat even more perilous than that: a revolt by all the young reporters you hired to cater to the millions of outraged new subscribers you had enlisted in the fight against MAGA authoritarianism. Those young reporters were true believers. They’d never known the old, aspirationally nonpartisan mode of journalism. They had joined your outlet to fight for social justice, wielding their pens as swords. So had all the app coders you had enticed away from their overpaid but unfulfilling Facebook jobs with the promise that here, you might take a pay cut but you could also change the world.
Today, a politically unpopular article or personality can leave a publisher besieged from the outside while facing a revolt from within. We’ve seen this play out again and again, especially at The New York Times. There was The Nazi Next Door scandal, the Donald McNeil fiasco, the Tom Cotton op-ed outrage, the Andy Mills brouhaha, the Alison Roman inanity and everything that Bari Weiss ever wrote or tweeted. Some of these tempests may have started with readers, others with journalists, but mostly it was hard to say, because they emerged from the swamp where the media industry’s most indignant consumers and its loudest employees coalesce: Twitter.”
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Must. Protect. The. Narrative…….
“Faulty FBI Data Obscures Successful Defensive Gun Use”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/10/31/faulty_fbi_data_obscures_successful_defensive_gun_use_148396.html
“With crime such an important issue, Americans depend on the FBI for accurate data. The crime data for 2021 is a mess, with almost 40% of law enforcement agencies around the country not submitting any data to the FBI. In California, 93% didn’t report crime data. In New York, 87% didn’t. Cities are embarrassed by the soaring crime rates, and even when they have collected the data they aren’t transmitting those numbers to the FBI.
But many more data errors are the direct responsibility of the FBI. Up until January of last year, I worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as the senior advisor for research and statistics, and part of my job was to evaluate the FBI’s active shooting reports. I found that they were missing lots of cases and had misidentified others. Unfortunately, the FBI was unwilling to fix any of these errors. Since leaving that job, I have found many more missed cases, updating the list this month.
Nor was that the first time I pointed out such errors to the FBI, and I published a list of them in a criminology publication in 2015.
These news reports relied on a series of FBI reports on active shootings put together by researchers at Texas State University.
The FBI reports that armed citizens stopped only 11 of the 252 active shooter incidents that it identified for the period 2014-2021. The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. But it does not include shootings that are deemed related to other criminal activity, such as robbery or fighting over drug turf. Active shootings may involve just one shot being fired at just one target, even if the target isn’t hit.
To compile its list, the FBI hired academics at the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. Police departments don’t collect data, so the researchers had to find news stories about these incidents.
My organization, the Crime Prevention Research Center, also undertook a search for news stories. The CPRC discovered a total of 360 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2021, and it found that an armed citizen stopped 124 of these. I also found that the FBI had misidentified five cases, usually because the person who stopped the attack was incorrectly identified as a security guard. We found these cases on a tiny budget of just a few thousand dollars. Though we found that armed citizens had stopped 11 times more cases than the FBI reports, I make no claim that we have identified all of them. It is quite possible that the news media itself never covers many such incidents.
But no one needs to take my word for it that the FBI missed many cases. All of the news stories that my team collected are listed on the CPRC website.
While the FBI claims that just 4.4% of active shootings were stopped by law-abiding citizens carrying guns, the percentage that I found was 34%. I am more confident that we have identified a higher percentage of recent cases, and the percentage in 2021 was even higher – 49%.
The FBI doesn’t differentiate between law-abiding citizens stopping attacks where guns are banned and where they are allowed, but you can’t really expect law-abiding citizens to stop attacks where it is illegal to carry guns. In places where law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry firearms, the percentage of active shootings stopped is above 50% for the whole period. And, again, we are more confident that we have more of the cases in recent years. The figure hits 58% in 2021.
In order to follow the FBI’s definition, I also had to exclude 24 cases because a law-abiding person with a gun stopped the attacker before he was able to get off a shot.
But there is a more basic problem in the reliance on news coverage to determine whether an active shooting was stopped by an armed civilian. The news media has a clear bias to cover cases where bad things happen over cases where bad things are prevented. The old adage is: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Killings are usually more newsworthy than woundings, and woundings more notable than confrontations defused simply by someone brandishing a gun.
As an example, I examined news stories of defensive gun use data from Jan. 1 to Aug. 10 of this year, and found 774 defensive gun uses, fully 85% involving people shot: 43% resulting in death and 42% in wounding. Less than 4% of cases involved no shots fired. But survey data indicate that in 95% of cases when people use guns defensively, they merely show the gun to make the criminal back off. Such defensive gun uses rarely make the news.
The problem is that the FBI numbers are used by academics who do research and by the media. To see how the FBI reports alter news coverage, see the July 17 Greenwood Mall shooting near Indianapolis, where a young man, Elisjsha Dicken, used his legally carried gun to stop what clearly would have been a horrible mass public shooting. The news coverage immediately relied on the FBI and Texas State University reports to tell people Dicken’s heroism was very unusual.
“Making Dicken’s heroism perhaps even more remarkable is the fact cases of an armed bystander attacking an active shooter are rare,” CNN noted two days after the attack. “The Greenwood incident is unique, however, because it became one of the rare instances of an armed civilian successfully intervening to end a mass shooting,” claimed the Washington Post the day after the attack. But what is really rare is the news coverage of these attacks. Few know that there were at least six other similar likely mass public shootings that armed civilians stopped in the first nine months of this year.
It is hard to ignore how all of this feeds into the gun control debate. Nor can one forget about the charges of political bias leveled by whistleblowers in the FBI.”
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You should forgive them if you can, but….
“Never Forget the COVID Fanatics”
https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/29/never-forget-the-covid-fanatics/
“Two news stories are illustrative of the current state of the COVID panic and public health. Biden got his third booster, but it appears he is nearly alone in this. Uptake for boosters is very low, with fewer than 10 percent of eligible people getting them.
The COVID vaccines’ lackluster benefits, significant apparent health risks, recent admissions that they do nothing to stop transmission, additive risk from boosters, combined with the general sense that COVID is not worth worrying about for most people have reduced COVID’s salience in the news and in our lives. With many people having already gotten and survived COVID with little difficulty, there is no longer the fear and uncertainty that prevailed in the earliest days of the pandemic.
The other important story is that New York municipal workers who were fired for not getting the COVID vaccine will be reinstated and given back pay. A white pill after two years of insanity, this small victory will do little to relieve the tens of thousands of airline employees, military personnel, and private sector workers who had to choose between their health and their livelihood. It is possible these people too will someday get relief, but the legal system moves very slowly and often inconsistently.
As things have returned to normal—even masks have become passé—it’s easy to forget the state of the nation only last summer. This was when jobs were threatened and lost over vaccine status, when blue state governors were threatening to return to lockdowns, and when parents were cajoled into giving children COVID vaccines, even though children faced minimal risk.
Similar to the recent Dark Biden speech about “MAGA Republicans,” last summer the Delaware Democrat called those who choose not to get vaccinated evil people, who were chiefly to blame for the continuation of COVID. He described the delta wave as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” even though there had already been millions of breakthrough infections by that time. Biden warned us imperiously, “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.”
At the time, there were even voices calling for depriving the unvaccinated of all healthcare, a policy never imagined for other diseases tied to lifestyle risks, such as AIDS, lung cancer, or cirrhosis of the liver. Every unvaccinated case in the hospital was trotted out as a dire warning to the pig-headed vaccine skeptics. Simultaneously, so many of the vaccinated said, in Pavlovian fashion, that they got COVID, but it would be much worse without the vaccine. The narratives sounded like hostage videos.
COVID was and remains chiefly a risk to the old and the infirm. Vaccines, on the other hand, seem to have particularly high rates of side effects among the young and the healthy.
As of late, there have been many mysterious cases of relatively healthy and fairly young people dropping dead of sudden cardiac arrest, a known side effect of myocarditis, which is itself a known side effect of the vaccines. While the data is hard for a layperson to analyze, there is apparently an across-the-board increase in mortality over the last year, which is presumably attributable to some unknown and widespread cause—whether it is long COVID, the vaccine, or something else will take careful epidemiological study.
It is easy to suppress the memory and the images of the last two years. We should make efforts not to allow any of it to go down the memoryhole. What happened in our country and around the world was damaging and horrendous. Lockdowns, social distancing, mask mandates, experimental vaccine mandates, persistent fearmongering, school closures, prohibitions on wedding and funerals, isolating old people from loved ones and one another, massive economic and psychological harm, and a generally heavy-handed, know-it-all approach by the managerial class have collectively imposed real trauma on the country.
We have the receipts. We should not let the perpetrators off easily.
Some overreaction may have been justified in the beginning, as the scale of the threat was unknown. While there was little data to support social distancing, masks, or many of the early “brute force” interventions, this appeared to be a Spanish Flu level event, ten times or more lethal than the ordinary flu. Some leeway is appropriate in such instances, but it soon became apparent that all of those assumptions were false.
Data on interventions like masking and lockdowns found no support. But these policies did ruin our lives.”
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Let the wailing and gnashing of teeth begin! 🙂
https://news.yahoo.com/roberts-delays-handover-trump-tax-135528279.html
“Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday put a temporary hold on the handover of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns to a congressional committee.
Roberts’ order gives the Supreme Court time to weigh the legal issues in Trump’s emergency appeal to the high court, filed Monday.
Without court intervention, the tax returns could have been provided as early as Thursday by the Treasury Department to the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee.
Roberts gave the committee until Nov. 10 to respond. The chief justice handles emergency appeals from the nation’s capital, where the fight over Trump’s taxes has been going on since 2019.
Lower courts ruled that the committee has broad authority to obtain tax returns and rejected Trump’s claims that it was overstepping.
If Trump can persuade the nation’s highest court to intervene in this case, he could potentially delay a final decision until the start of the next Congress in January. If Republicans recapture control of the House in the fall election, they could drop the records request.
The temporary delay imposed by Roberts is the third such order issued by justices in recent days in cases related to Trump.
The court separately is weighing Sen. Lindsey Graham’s emergency appeal to avoid having to testify before a Georgia grand jury that is investigating potential illegal interference by Trump and his allies in the 2020 election in the state.
Also before the court is an emergency appeal from Arizona Republican party chairwoman Kelli Ward to prevent the handover of phone records to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.”
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Good, because an accounting of their un-American and obviously partisan acts is way overdue.
“GOP Rep. Jim Jordan: We’re Going To Investigate The DOJ, FBI…”
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Never, ever forget what they did, or those who enabled them and encouraged the policies that caused this…
Make people like French and his ilk own their sins and crimes against us.
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Move along….
Nothing to see….
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Poor thing. 🙂
Keep whistling past the graveyard Joy. 🙂
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Our participation in the Ukraine war is more appalling than I can express. It grieves my heart to see it.
Debra
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Megyn Kelly and guests on the Dem/media double standards:
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@4:11 The MSM is a farce. A complete farce. And that’s why I watch very little of it.
Debra
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