Category: CNN

Russia! Russia! Russia!

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The headline stack on top of this morning’s Drudge Report:

Since Sunday, I’ve been watching CNN (so you don’t have to) and they’re 24/7 wall-to-wall on this, as might be expected. Whenever they bring on “analysts” to comment on the story, there is never anyone to present the pro-Trump side of the argument, i.e., that this whole thing was a set-up, a “honey trap” orchestrated by Fusion GPS, which was working for the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Furthermore, the way this Trump Tower meeting became public knowledge was that the Obama administration had obtained warrants to conduct surveillance of the Trump campaign based on the phone Steele dossier, which was commissioned by Fusion GPS with money supplied by Democrats.

This is what I explained last month:

Natalia Veselnitskaya was thick as thieves with Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, and it seems safe to conclude she was an agent-provocateur, hired to lure Trump campaign officials into a meeting which could then be used as “proof” that Trump was a Putin stooge.
Because Fusion GPS was working for the Clinton campaign, and because Fusion GPS also produced the phony Steele dossier that was apparently the main “evidence” used to get a FISA warrant to launch federal surveillance of Trump campaign officials, the obvious 2+2 conclusion is that Veselnitskaya was part of a set-up, a trap, a “sting.” Her assignment, we may suppose, was to get Trump campaign officials to say something that could be captured via surveillance to serve as “proof” that the Republican candidate was doing something illegal with Russians.

Nothing reported in the past month has changed these facts. All that we have learned is that Trump, as might be expected, didn’t want to admit that his campaign got suckered into this Democrat-rigged trap.

People who are getting their “news” from CNN are not being told this. CNN’s coverage assumes as its first premise that Trump is guilty, and all they have to do is talk about “evidence” of his guilt. In other words, CNN is part and parcel of the Democrat Party’s disinformation campaign, producing partisan propaganda thinly disguised as “news.”

By the way, readers might want to hit the tip jar for $5 or $10 to help compensate me for the psychological trauma of watching CNN all day.



 

‘Cohen! Cohen! Cohen!’

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Continuing to watch CNN (so you don’t have to), they have now switched from “Russia! Russia! Russia!” to “Cohen! Cohen! Cohen!” This reflects the headline today in the New York Times:

Michael Cohen Secretly Taped Trump
Discussing Payment to Playboy Model

Now, the ordinary non-CNN viewer may ask, “So what?”

Probably the not-obsessed-with-politics-24/7 person has no idea what’s going with the prosecution of Trump’s former personal lawyer, and as for Trump banging Playboy models, the reaction is, “So what?” Nobody with two eyes and a brain could have believed the billionaire real-estate tycoon Donald Trump was immune to the charms of the fair sex, or that he was particular scrupulous in avoid the danger of scandal. The “news”:

President Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, secretly recorded a conversation with Mr. Trump two months before the presidential election in which they discussed payments to a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump, according to lawyers and others familiar with the recording.
The F.B.I. seized the recording this year during a raid on Mr. Cohen’s office. The Justice Department is investigating Mr. Cohen’s involvement in paying women to tamp down embarrassing news stories about Mr. Trump ahead of the 2016 election. . . .
The former model, Karen McDougal, says she began a nearly yearlong affair with Mr. Trump in 2006, shortly after Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, gave birth to their son Barron. Ms. McDougal sold her story to The National Enquirer for $150,000 during the final months of the presidential campaign, but the tabloid sat on the story, which kept it from becoming public. The practice, known as “catch and kill,” effectively silenced Ms. McDougal for the remainder of the campaign.

In 2006, Donald Trump was a private citizen. He never held any public office prior to being elected President. That his personal lawyer was involved in efforts to keep this embarrassing tale out of the headlines is, again, one of those “So what?” revelations. Whether anything illegal was done in pursuit of keeping this story quiet is a matter we’ll leave the courts to figure out. The difference between this and Bill Clinton’s “bimbo eruptions” during the 1992 campaign was that all of Clinton’s sex scandals involved women he’d met through his position as Governor of Arkansas and, as was later revealed, Clinton used the powers of his office (e.g., Arkansas state troopers) to enable his affairs. This was a species of political corruption, whereas Trump banging a Playboy model was just a private citizen doing what perhaps a lot of other private citizens might have done, if they were celebrity billionaires.

Meanwhile, 17 people were killed when a tourist boat capsized in Missouri, but it’s all-Trump, all-the-time on CNN, so never mind.

 

‘Russia! Russia! Russia!’

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Up this morning at 6 a.m., I turned the TV to CNN and watched 15 minutes of “Russia! Russia! Russia!” Then I changed the channel to MNSBC, and watched another two hours of “Russia! Russia! Russia!” At this moment (8:23 a.m. ET, as I write this sentence), David Axelrod is being interviewed on CNN about “Russia! Russia! Russia!”

There is apparently no other news in the world. President Trump and Russia are everything, according to the CNN/MSNBC media axis. Does this OCD fixation match the American viewer’s interest?

Another week, another win in total viewers for Fox News Channel. The network continues its dominance across basic cable in total day for the week of July 9, marking 27 consecutive weeks at No. 1, per Nielsen live-plus-same-day data. Additionally, in prime time, Fox News topped cable with nearly 2.8 million in total viewers and 509,000 in the 25-54 demo.
Not only did FNC thrive in total viewers, it managed to earn a top 5 ranking in prime time among adults 25-54 (No. 3). . . .
CNN and MSNBC were down year-over-year across the board. CNN was -5 percent in total prime time viewers, -2 percent in the prime time demo, and -9 percent in total day viewers from last year. MSNBC’s decline was even steeper in prime time: -6 in total viewers and down double digits in the prime time demo.
Additionally, The Rachel Maddow Show had its lowest-rated non-holiday week in the demo of 2018, averaging 491,000 A25-54 viewers.

It would appear that Trump fatigue has set in, even among the kind of people who watch Rachel Maddow. At some point, people get tired of endless discussion of how awful President Trump is, and even people who hate Trump have gotten all the anti-Trump TV they need.

Remember: I watch CNN and MSNBC so you don’t have to.

And the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are still:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

 

News That @CNN Is Ignoring

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Today, I’m watching CNN (so you don’t have to) and they’re doing their usual wall-to-wall anti-Trump propaganda, which means that CNN viewers don’t know what’s actually happening in the real world:

On May 22, Susanna Maria Feldman went missing. It was the day after the Jewish holiday of Shavuot which celebrates G-d’s revelation of the Ten Commandments to Moses and a nation of freed slaves.
The fifth commandment is, “Honor thy father and mother.” The sixth is, “Thou shalt not murder.”
And in the German city of Mainz, whose Jewish community dates back to Roman times, a worried mother waited for the worst. Susanna had gone off with her friends. They came home. And she didn’t.
Her mother received a WhatsApp message from her daughter’s phone on the afternoon of the 22nd. “Mom, I’m not coming home. I went to Paris with my friend. Don’t look for me. I’ll come back after 2 or 3 weeks. Bye.”
According to Diana, Susanna’s mother, the message sounded nothing like her daughter. 4 hours later, the teenage girl’s phone was switched off. There was nothing more.
“I hope and pray that nothing bad has happened to her,” she posted on Facebook. “Please help me find my daughter safe again.”
The police reassured the frantic mother that her daughter had just gone off with some friends and would come back on her, but she feared the worst while the authorities stonewalled.
On June 1, she published an open letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel in which she wrote, “I feel abandoned by the German state.”
Two weeks passed.  The police searched. Dogs sniffed around but found nothing. And then someone noticed a flash of white among all that brown and green. It was the white of a clothing label.
They found her body between the railroad tracks and Autobahn 66. The killer had stashed the girl under a bush and covered her over with twigs to keep the body out of sight and to buy him some time.
Susanna’s body had been dumped a few hundred meters from the refugee shelter where her alleged killer had been living. The traffic noise of the highway would have covered any sounds the young Jewish girl might have made as a Muslim refugee brutally raped and then strangled her to death.
At only 14, a year younger than Anne Frank when she died, Susanna had been murdered in Germany.  The teenage girl had been strangled to death after being raped. Her killer then boasted of the crime.
While the German police were searching for Susanna’s body, the Bashar family, all eight of them, were on their way back to Iraq. The Bashar clan had been living in a refugee shelter even though they were apparently able to afford to book eight tickets to Turkey. The tickets were bought under different names than the ones they had used to apply for asylum in Germany. By June 2, they were back in Iraq. . . .

You can read the rest of that by Daniel Greenfield.

What infuriates me — and what should infuriate everyone — is that this atrocity is being ignored by CNN and other liberal “news” networks. Why is our nation so divided that the White House press secretary is denied service in a Virginia restaurant? Because the people who produce “news” are instead promoting partisan propaganda for Democrats. If CNN viewers think Trump is Hitler, nobody at CNN will tell them differently. Meanwhile a Jewish girl is murdered in Germany and they don’t care.

CNN is anti-Trump 24/7, and anything that doesn’t fit that narrative — e.g., Iraqi immigrants who rape and murder Jewish girls — is ignored.

If you’re not angry about that, you should be. I’m sitting here in my home office with the TV tuned to CNN, and my blood is boiling. They should be ashamed of themselves, but I guess if they had any sense of shame, they wouldn’t be working for CNN in the first place.



 

Yes, CNN Hates America

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CNN became notorious as the “Clinton News Network” during the 2016 presidential campaign, when the third-place cable news channel was so completely in the tank for the Democrat nominee that their programming was like a 24/7 contribution-in-kind to the DNC.

Since CNN’s candidate lost the election, they have spent the past 18 months attempting to delegitimize and subvert President Trump’s administration by promoting the phony “Russian collusion” narrative.

The liberal media should be ashamed of themselves, but if they had any sense of shame, they wouldn’t be liberals, would they?

CNN covered itself with disgrace when President Trump traveled to Singapore for his historic summit meeting with North Korea’s dictator. The network aired 100% negative coverage of the summit, completely reversing its usual bias in favor of Communist dictatorships. CNN praised Obama for traveling to meet with Cuba’s Communist dictator in 2016, but when Trump met with Kim, CNN presented this as a catastrophic blunder. The Free Beacon reports:

CNN host Wolf Blitzer said on behalf of the media “we love the American people” on Wednesday in response to President Donald Trump’s latest broadside against the profession.
Apparently angered by the media’s coverage of his nuclear summit with North Korea, Trump tweeted Wednesday that the “fake news” press was “our country’s biggest enemy.”
CNN analyst David Gregory attacked Trump for being unoriginal, saying all politicians don’t like the press.
“Everybody’s always criticizing us and not happy with our coverage, whether it was President Clinton or President Bush or President—they’re all criticized,” Blitzer said.
Blitzer went on to say a lot of Trump’s supporters believed the charge, which was “a really, really awful situation.”
“We are not the enemy of the American people. We love the American people,” he said.

No you don’t, Mr. Blitzer. Your network relentlessly insults and degrades the American people. You have done everything in your power to undermine the constitutional government of this country, to smear and silence voices critical of the Democrat Party’s left-wing agenda.

CNN has never apologized for promoting the #BlackLivesMatter terrorist movement, ignoring the reality of crime and race in America.  Heather Mac Donald exposed this reality in her book The War on Cops, pointing out that a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black man than the other way around (see “Putting Homicide in Perspective vs. the Media’s ‘Atrocity Narrative’ Propaganda,” Oct. 3, 2017).  CNN’s 24/7 propaganda for #BlackLivesMatter incited riots in Ferguson, Baltimore and Charlotte, and the network never reported about George Soros’s sponsorship of this movement, which was calculated to demonize law enforcement and incite anti-white hatred. If CNN didn’t hate the American people, why did they devote so many resources to promoting this dishonest and divisive racial propaganda?

The American people have not forgotten what you did, Mr. Blitzer, and you should ask yourself: Why is Donald Trump president? Isn’t it because he gave millions of Americans an opportunity to wave their extended middle fingers in the faces of “fake news” hacks like you?



 

CNN: The Most Trusted Name in Harassment, Extortion and Doxxing

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The Crazy News Network:

While the rest of America was celebrating Independence Day, CNN kept digging its own grave.
Furious over a silly video President Donald Trump posted Sunday, the flailing network sicced Senior Editor Andrew Kaczynski on its creator. He tracked down an anonymous Reddit user who first posted the GIF of Trump tackling a wrestler whose head was replaced with a CNN logo. Kaczynski then found out the person’s real name and threatened to release it if he misbehaved again. . . .
That’s right: a Senior Editor for CNN is blackmailing an American citizen for daring to criticize them.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

 

Category: CNN

GA-6: ‘The Big Short’ and the Establishment Media Bubble

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Tuesday night, I monitored election results from Georgia’s 6th District special election on my phone (via AoSHQ Decision Desk) while finishing up a day mowing lawns for my son’s contracting business. We were leaning on the truck and enjoying cold beverages while Jim chatted with his business partner when the Decision Desk called it for Republican Karen Handel — a sweet moment. Democrats had poured an estimated $30 million into “Pajamaboy Carpetbagger” Jon Osoff’s doomed campaign and came away with another “L,” their fourth consecutive special-election defeat since Trump’s election.

Democrats’ hope of returning to power by riding a wave of anti-Trump “backlash” has been exposed as a delusion based on denial. Along with their media allies, Democrats simply refuse to accept the reality that American voters have rejected them. Democrats are the ex-boyfriend who refuses to move on, and voters are the girl getting stalked on Facebook by an obsessed loser who can’t take a hint. It’s creepy.

The now iconic image of the CNN crew at 9:43 pm ET Tuesday is a perfect distillation of a problem we can call the Establishment Media Bubble.

Those pictured were CNN’s political director David Chalian, CNN’s chief political analyst Gloria Borger, CNN’s executive director of Political Programming/Sr. Political Analyst Mark Preston, and Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash.

The pretense of journalistic objectivity, which is the Establishment Media’s stock in trade, has become so transparently implausible that no intelligent viewer could be deceived by it. Beyond that, and perhaps more importantly, the media’s pretense of political expertise was even more brutally exposed as a fraud — a hoax as bogus as “Haven Monahan.”

If Mark Preston is such an insightful political analyst, why couldn’t CNN accurately predict the outcome of this election? For the same reason that CNN was so disastrously wrong in 2016: They are no longer a news organization, but instead are a Democrat propaganda operation. Mark Preston is a partisan Democrat who, as a University of Massachusetts student, worked in Ted Kennedy’s office. Ask yourself this question: In his role as a CNN executive, would Mark Preston ever hire a reporter who had worked for Rand Paul or Ted Cruz? Answer: Fuck no.

CNN, like every other Establishment Media organization, actively discriminates against Republicans in its hiring decisions. Mark Preston’s network is a sort of political cult that only employs True Believers. The organization’s journalistic standards are subordinated to its political mission, which is to persuade viewers to vote Democrat. Period.

 

* * * * *

 

When my son had finished up talking with his business partner Tuesday night, we went to my son’s house and watched The Big Short on Netflix. My son had already seen the movie twice, but I never had, and I kept trying to shush him and my brother, who were talking during most of the show. Because a lot of my son’s business involves “repo flips” — rehabbing properties that have been repossessed, so that they can be resold — he has a direct familiarity with how the housing market operates at the practical level. And he’s been doing this kind of work since he was a teenager, during the final years of the bubble, so he can tell you what it was like from the ant’s-eye view. The Big Short is a fascinating movie, but the “moral of the story” at the end of the film is badly flawed. The filmmakers want to sell the audience an “Occupy Wall Street”/Bernie Sanders left-populist myth, that the subprime mortgage industry was a result of deregulation and/or Bush-era Republican corruption.

“Stop the movie!” I shouted at Jim, when we got to that payoff scene, after Mark Baum (who in real life is actually Steve Eisman) has made the final decision to sell his short options. “The people who got those mortgages were as guilty as the people who gave them the mortgages!”

If you were buying a $400,000 home with a zero-down ARM for which you could not qualify under any normal standards of credit worthiness, you weren’t the victim of a fraud, you were an active accomplice. People who “bought” homes with so-called NINJA (no income, no job) loans were engaged in an immoral enterprise, and it is wrong to exempt them from blame for doing something they must have known was wrong.

To repeat what I’ve said before: If something seems too good to be true, it is either (a) not really true, or (b) not really good. The notion that any random loser could (and should) become a homeowner was always dubious, and government policies intended to promote minority home ownership By Any Means Necessary played a huge role in the housing bubble, a crucial factor that The Big Short does not acknowledge. The filmmakers want to exempt from blame the people who became “homeowners” by getting ARM mortgages they knew (or should have known) they would not be able to pay back. If you want to blame “greed” for the housing bubble, isn’t it true that the people who bought homes with NINJA loans were as greedy, in their own way, as the bond hustlers whose collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) financed those loans?

Well, what does this have to do with CNN’s pathetic excuse for political journalism? It’s this — the people who watch CNN are as much a part of the problems as the people who run CNN. Just as the housing bubble could never have happened, had there not been so many uncreditworthy borrowers willing to buy homes with no-money-down ARMs, there could be no Establishment Media Bubble, if there weren’t so many people willing to consume the blatantly biased “journalism” produced by CNN (and NBC, and the New York Times, etc.). You will never go broke underestimating the intelligence of Democrat voters, and the Establishment Media’s business is based on exploiting this stupidity.

The Democrat viewers who let CNN convince them that Jon Osoff was going to win GA-6, and thereby vindicate the anti-Trump #Resistance, learned nothing from Tuesday night’s results. Those viewers woke up this morning and turned on their TVs to watch the “experts” on CNN explain to them what went wrong and what this means for the future. But why should anyone believe the Establishment Media’s explanations for another Democrat defeat, when the Establishment Media failed to predict this defeat, in the same way they failed to predict Hillary’s defeat?

 

Mark Preston is not an omniscient political genius. He is not really that much smarter than the average Democrat, or else he wouldn’t have been sitting there Tuesday night on the CNN set looking like a guy who just got home from Vegas and has to tell his wife how much money he lost.

Stephen Miller at Heat Street summarizes the result:

Herein lies the Democrats’ problem, just as it was a problem when Hillary Clinton bellowed about a basket full of deplorables during the 2016 campaign. The Democrats and their base (Hollywood) think the key to winning elections is to insult voters. “They don’t vote for us because they are bigots” is not a strategy I would employ as a campaign manager but they are welcome to keep trying this, and they are welcome to keep losing.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)



 

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

 

‘Fake News’ Network CNN in Third Place? Did Russia Hack the TV Ratings?

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Primetime cable news ratings for Thursday, March 2:

8 p.m.
FOX The O’Reilly Factor …………………………….. 4,114,000
MSNBC All in With Chris Hayes ………………….. 1,744,000
CNN Anderson Cooper 360 …………………………. 1,381,000

9 p.m.
FOX Tucker Carlson Tonight ……………………….. 3,489,000
MSNBC The Rachel Maddow Show ………………. 2,532,000
CNN Anderson Cooper 360 ………………………….. 1,327,000

10 p.m.
FOX Hannity ………………………………………………. 2,824,000
MSNBC Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell … 2,160,000
CNN Tonight With Don Lemon ……………………… 1,055,000

You that CNN, dubbed the “Clinton News Network” for its one-sided bias during the 2016 campaign, has slumped down to third place, with MSNBC pushing into second place. Liberal viewers trust MSNBC’s lineup of avowed leftist hosts more than they trust the phony “objective” personalities at CNN. The network that was in the tank for Hillary Clinton last year, and which has been excoriated by President Trump as a purveyor of “fake news,” has a credibility problem even with liberals.

What happened? Well, you might say, the Russians hacked the ratings.

Nothing has captured CNN’s attention more in recent months than the idea that the claim that the presidential election was somehow stolen as a result of computer hacking and other sinister activities by Russian agents in collusion with the Trump campaign. Over the weekend, however, this conspiracy theory was exploded to smithereens after Trump took to Twitter to suggest that the alleged “investigation” of this Russian scheme was, in fact, an illegal effort by the Obama administration to help Clinton win by spying on the Trump campaign.

This was Trump calling the media’s bluff. The media kept claiming anonymous “intelligence officials” and “law enforcement sources” were telling them about the supposed investigation of the Trump-Russia “scandal.” If it was true, as the media reported, that Obama administration officials had sought warrants to conduct surveillance about the suspected illegal contact between Russians and the Trump campaign, couldn’t this be construed as a Watergate-type abuse of power? Certainly it could, if the media’s reporting was accurate.

Andrew McCarthy at National Review:

Now that they’ve been called on it, the media and Democrats are gradually retreating from the investigation they’ve been touting for months as the glue for their conspiracy theory. It’s actually quite amusing to watch: How dare you suggest President Obama would ever order surveillance! Who said anything about FISA orders? What evidence do you lunatic conservatives have — uh, other than what we media professionals been reporting — that there was any investigation of the Trump campaign? . . .

Read the whole thing. It’s amusing to see the media walk into a trap like that. The “Russians hacked the election” story always looked suspiciously like the 2016 version of the 2000 Florida recount, i.e., whenever Democrats lose an election, they claim Republicans cheated.