Category: CNN

Three Gay Men Laugh About Oral Sex With Anderson Cooper’s Mother

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The weirdest thing is that Anderson Cooper himself introduced the topic in a discussion with Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan:

“My mom once wrote a romance memoir about men she had dated — and I use that term loosely — and she described one guy she was currently dating — my mom was 85 at the time — as the Nijinsky of cunnilingus. And she made me proofread the book.”

Much laughter ensued, and never mind the lifelong tragedy of Anderson Cooper’s mother, 89-year-old heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, who was the object of a notorious custody battle in the 1930s, who was married four times, and whose son Carter Cooper — Anderson’s older brother — committed suicide at age 23 in 1988.

We can only imagine what an old-fashioned Freudian analyst might say about Cooper, Savage and Sullivan sitting around laughing on national TV at Cooper mother’s sex life. However, I’m reminded of an observation Barbara Dafoe Whitehead made in The Divorce Culture: The emotional climate in certain types of families is hot or cold, but never appropriately and comfortably warm.

Anderson Cooper’s CNN show is third in cable news ratings, with 528,000 viewers, compared to 699,000 for Chris Hayes on MSNBC and more than 3 million for Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. Maybe people don’t want to watch gay men talk about old women’s sex lives.

 

 

UPDATE: Curious as to who the other guests were on that Anderson Cooper segment, I checked the transcript:

Joining me now is Dan Savage, author of “American Savage,” Andrew Sullivan from andrewsullivan.com, a CNN panelist and founding editor also of “The Dish,” also CNN commentator, Michaela Angela Davis and senior legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin . . .

OK, so three gay men, a former fashion editor at Essence magazine, and a Harvard lawyer who was on “Journolist” — with such a “balanced” panel as this, is it any wonder that Anderson Cooper reaches only 12 percent of the cable-news audience? Of course, I understand that when you’re producing a New York-based show the day after Christmas, it might be difficult to find, say, a Presbyterian heterosexual guest, but is CNN even trying?

 

If @PiersMorgan Hates America So Much, Why Won’t He Just Leave the Country?

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Piers Morgan is allegedly heterosexual, so it’s not a hate crime to disagree with CNN’s unpopular 9 p.m. host, whose third-place show got only 361,000 viewers Wednesday, compared to 712,000 for MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and 2.6 million for Fox’s Megyn Kelly.

Fourteen million people watch Duck Dynasty and maybe their contract means A&E “can do everything except torture you,” but Phil Robertson’s disapproval of homosexuality was not secret. Exactly how does the network expect to benefit by banishing the stars of their most popular show in order to appease the intolerant scolds who say the “rights” of a tiny minority should trump every other consideration?

So rednecks need to be politically correct now?
Wait, before the National Association of Rednecked Persons attacks me, let me be clear that I don’t mean “redneck” as an insult. Indeed, Redneck Pride has been on the rise ever since Jeff Foxworthy got rich informing people they “might be a redneck.”
Redneck reality shows have been all the rage: “Rocket City Rednecks,” ‘‘Hillbilly Handfishin’?” and, of course, “Swamp People.” But the gold standard is “Duck Dynasty,” which follows the Robertsons, a family that struck it rich selling duck calls. It’s like a real-life version of “The Beverly Hillbillies.” All of the men look like they stepped out of the Hatfield-McCoy conflict to smoke a corncob pipe.
What all of these reality shows have in common is their shock value. . . .
But here’s a twist. Phil Robertson (who — shhh! — has a master’s degree from Louisiana Tech) gave an interview to GQ in which he said that, as a Christian, he has problems with homosexuality. He got a bit too detailed with his anatomical analysis. But his real sin was calling homosexuality a sin comparable with bestiality.

What’s all the outrage about? Could someone please check the Official Federal Analogy Guidelines, because I seem to have misplaced my copy and wouldn’t want to commit a civil rights violation by publishing a forbidden metaphor or simile. Criminalizing figures of speech enables pompous twits like Piers Morgan — who are not  actually members of victimized minorities — to act as hall monitors, pointing the accusatory finger at people who say controversial things, thus to demonstrate their moral superiority to those who do not share their umbrage.

“How dare you not condemn Phil Robertson!”

What are we permitted to say without being accused of hate?

Is it an insult to rectal sphincters to call Piers Morgan an asshole?

 

 

UPDATE: Buy all your Duck Commander products through our Amazon Associates link here — A&E won’t get a cent of that money!

 


Category: CNN

Administration Says ObamaCare Site Is Working; CNN Finds Otherwise

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Elise Viebeck at The Hill reports:

The Obama administration claimed victory Sunday for making HealthCare.gov workable for the vast majority of users, a standard that will be tested as millions of people flood the site in the next three weeks.

Uh, do you really think “millions of people” will “flood the site”?

Or is that just what the administration is claiming? You might want to double-check, because claims by the Obama administration have a predictable way of turning out to be false:

ALISON KOSIK, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: So tell me about what happened, because we’re getting another error message here, and it’s supposed to be running smoothly. . . .
MATT SLOANE, CNN MEDICAL PRODUCER: I got through. I picked my state. I put in all of my information and I got through the whole process in eight minutes. And then it said my status was in progress. So I went to refresh it and I got the error message.

The Lonely Conservative:

Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters wonders how many other news outlets didn’t bother to test the site and simply took the administration’s word that it’s now working just fine.

Honesty has never been a requirement for employment with the Obama administration — or with most of the media, either.

 

News Flash: @DonLemonCNN Hates You

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And by “you,” of course, I mean the 60 million extremist homophobic anti-choice teabagging racists who didn’t vote for Obama:

CNN anchor Don Lemon shouted down a conservative guest after pushing him to admit he should be “embarrassed” over certain protesters at Sunday’s Million Vet March. . . .
“Ben, you have to be embarrassed looking at that video. You’re not embarrassed for some members of your party?” he pushed conservative radio host Ben Ferguson, who cast aside the influence of the “small group.”
“Who initiated this protest? It was Tea Party republicans. Come on, Ben, cut the crap. Don’t give me that,” Lemon responded, refusing to let Ferguson distance himself from the group. When Ferguson blamed the government for trying to make the shutdown more “painful,” Lemon exploded.
“Oh, now you are going on to something else. Can you sit – listen – no, no, no, no, no!  Don’t finish unless – stop, Ben! Unless you are going to stick to what I said, don’t take this and then turn it into something else,” Lemon shouted.

 

You haters probably never watch that obscure cable channel.

Now you know what you’re missing.

Or not missing. Haters.

 

 


CNN Now Aiming for Zero Ratings

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The Third-Place Cable Network Nobody Watches™ has decided to give America’s Least Popular Cable News Personality™ a special assignment: “White in America.” Paul Bedard reports:

CNN correspondent Soledad O’Brien, known for her “Black in America” documentaries that sometimes irk viewers, is now turning her cameras on whites. . . .
“We’re not just working on ‘BIA,’ but also developing a ‘White in America.’ Stay tuned for that one.”
Her statement came in reaction to a . . . story about her appearance in a short video posted by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, based in part on a speech she gave to the college about race and her “Black in America” series. She was just named a distinguished visiting fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

(“Distinguished visiting fellow” — take that, you haters!)

In [her] speech she said that some whites don’t want to talk about race. “People would sometimes, when I give speeches, stand up and say, ‘You know, I think your black America documentaries [are] divisive. I think like, you know, listen, we shouldn’t think of ourselves as African-American. We’re Americans, and everybody should stop separating themselves out.'”
She continued: “First of all, it’s only white people who ever said that — ‘if we could just see beyond race.’ ” And she said her reaction goes like this: “OK, white person, this is a conversation you clearly are uncomfortable with, and I have no problem seeing race, and I think we should talk about race.”

“We should talk about race” — talk about it constantly, because that’s all Soledad O’Brien ever wants to talk about because that’s the only thing she seems to know anything about.

 

Category: CNN

Why Did Those Racist Crackers at CNN Keep Roland Martin From Being a Star?

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Just by way of historical context, let’s remember that CNN was a trailblazer in this regard, making Bernard Shaw their primetime news anchor back in 1980. Keep that in mind in appraising the sour grapes rationalization by axed commentator Roland Martin:

Roland Martin on Thursday blamed racism for his inability to get his own show  at CNN.
“You have largely white male executives who are not necessarily enamored  with the idea of having strong, confident minorities, who say, ‘You know, I can  do this,'” he told HuffPostLive.
“I am simply saying ‘give folks a shot,’” he added. “We deliver, but we never get the big piece, the larger salary, to be able to get from here to there.”

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)

Update (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!

Category: CNN

Ratings-Killer @Soledad_OBrien Fired by Obscure Third-Place Cable News Network

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Soledad O’Brien: Nielsen needed a microscope to measure her audience

America’s Least Popular Cable-News Personality™ has joined the growing ranks of the nation’s unemployed, and you’ll excuse me for being so late to blog about it, but it took a while before I could stop dancing long enough to sit down and type.

Inside sources at CNN lauded O’Brien as an “award-winning journalist” and “a big star.” The reaction at Jammie Wearing Fools:

How is it this award-winning big star has no ratings?

This has been the enduring mystery of Soledad O’Brien’s failed tenure at CNN, as I reported in March 2012:

Executives at CNN must be in shock at the catatrophic implosion of their morning lineup, as Starting Point With Soledad O’Brien (7-9 a.m. weekdays) recorded the cable network’s lowest ratings for that time slot in more than a decade. Fewer than 100,000 adults 25-54 tuned in to O’Brien’s program on an average day, according to the latest quarterly Nielsen numbers.
Inside Cable News called the CNN morning numbers “brutal,” and “an epic ratings collapse,” further adding: “CNN cannot continue to hemorrhage viewers like this much longer without taking drastic corrective action.”

O’Brien is destined to be remembered as the biggest flop in the history of television news. The nadir of her CNN career came in August when she was caught reading talking points from a liberal blog during an interview with a Romney campaign surrogate.

 


Category: CNN

CNN Scrapes Bottom

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John Hinderaker summarizes a panel on cop-killer Chris Dorner at The Third-Place Cable News Network Nobody Watches:

CNN’s panel is excited about Chris Dorner. They can understand why lots of people think he is a “superhero.” They think his deeds were “exciting,” like a “Denzel Washington movie,” and agree that Dorner shed valuable light on the critical issue of police brutality. Their panel is more or less a Chris Dorner fan club, with one lonely exception who thinks the most salient fact is that he was a murderer . . .

Meanwhile, according to The Third-Place Cable News Network Nobody Watches, it’s a potential “career ender” for Sen. Marco Rubio to take a sip of water during a televised speech.

Category: CNN