The New Yorker has suspended reporter Jeffrey Toobin for masturbating on a Zoom video chat between members of the New Yorker and WNYC radio last week. Toobin says he did not realize his video was on.
“I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera. I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co-workers,” Toobin told Motherboard.
“I believed I was not visible on Zoom. I thought no one on the Zoom call could see me. I thought I had muted the Zoom video,” he added. . . .
[Two witnesses who were in the Zoom session] both said that they saw Toobin jerking off. The two sources described a juncture in the election simulation when there was a strategy session, and the Democrats and Republicans went into their respective break out rooms for about 10 minutes. At this point, they said, it seemed like Toobin was on a second video call. The sources said that when the groups returned from their break out rooms, Toobin lowered the camera. The people on the call said they could see Toobin touching his penis. Toobin then left the call. Moments later, he called back in, seemingly unaware of what his colleagues had been able to see, and the simulation continued.
Notice that Toobin does not apologize for masturbating during what was supposed to be a work session; rather, he apologizes that he accidentally forgot that his video camera was still connected. Everybody knows that Toobin is a disgusting pervert. He impregnated his “friend” Jeff Greenfield’s daughter, tried to force her into an abortion, and then denied paternity until a court-ordered DNA test proved it. Now get this:
A spokesperson for CNN said “Jeff Toobin has asked for some time off while he deals with a personal issue, which we have granted.”
Oh, he “asked for some time off.” Seems like he’s had too much time on his hands lately. And that ain’t all he’s got on his hands . . .
The first thing you have to understand about this is, the question Joe got here was scripted in advance — from a union official, pitching an underhand softball question to the candidate he supports — and that Biden’s response was also scripted. But as Ed Morrissey points out, Biden was tripping all over himself trying to answer:
TOM CALPIN, BUSINESS AGENT FOR IRONWORKS UNION: Good evening Mr. Vice President, Mr. Cooper. With the abundance of natural gas in northeast Pennsylvania. Do you support the continuation of fracking safely and with proper guidelines, of course, and growing the industry (INAUDIBLE) additional jobs to our region?
BIDEN: Yes, I do. I do. In addition to that, we can provide for right now as you know, for thousands of uncapped wells because a lot of companies gone out of business, whether they’re gas or oil facilities, we can put to work right away 250,000 people from iron workers and other disciplines, making union wages. Capping those wells that are leaking methane and their danger to the community.
And so, not only do I continue to support it. Jobs, it’s an important for this community. It’s important for Pennsylvania, and Ohio and other states. It’s an important, it’s an important business. And it’s a lot of wages are involved in that. But beyond that, beyond that, we can also get people working now, capping the wells that are left uncapped right now across this region and all the way there’s hundreds of thousands of them all across the nation. And that put a lot of people to work.
[CNN’s ANDERSON] COOPER: Let me just follow up on that. You said you won’t ban fracking but did you wanted to gradually move away from it ultimately. It sounds like to some of you’re trying to have it both ways that that I mean, politically, it’s understandable why you might say that but it — if fracking contributes to climate change, and climate change is an existential threat. Why should it fracking continue at all?
BIDEN: Well, fracking has to continue because we have transition, we’re going to get to net zero emissions by 2050. And we’ll get to net zero power admissions by 2035. But there’s no rationale to eliminate right now fracking, number one. Number two, those jobs that are out there, whether it’s a IBW (ph) worker, or whether it’s an iron worker, or a steel worker. What I’m proposing is that, you know, when Trump thinks about global warming, he thinks hoax. When I hear global warming, I think jobs. What I’m going to make sure we do is we could transition in a way for example. We’re going to build 500 — the reason why all these unions have endorsed me is that they know my position, that I’m going to make sure that we have 500,000 charging stations in our highways so we can all the electric car market, creating a million jobs and we can lead the world. And in Detroit, we can lead the world and making sure we move to electric vehicles
As president of United States, I’ll have one of the largest fleets — we spent $600 billion a year federal money for federal contracts, I got to make sure they’re all those contracts are all products made in America, including the chain that provides for every one of those products. I’m going to do away with the tax break that the President gave people who send jobs abroad, to make sure that if you in fact, have a contract, if you with taxpayers my money, you must use American products, you must buy American products, and you must not be in a position where you’re exporting. We have 25 — we have over 50% more people moving jobs overseas as a consequence of these contracts, so it’s all backwards. And this is going to provide a lot of good paying jobs for people in the trades.
God have pity on whoever’s job it was to transcribe Biden’s words here, but beyond the problem of his mangled syntax, the position that Biden was trying to describe makes no sense at all. He is claiming that he can “create” jobs by destroying the energy industry. If you believe what Biden says (and I don’t think you should but never mind), there are lots of union-wage jobs to be had by capping old wells that leak methane gas.
Question: Is President Trump against capping old wells?
Whatever the answer to that question might be, you see that Biden is only making this claim as a defense against the obvious implication of the Democrats policy against fossil-fuel production. Democrats want to eliminate all U.S. petroleum, coal and natural gas production, which would obviously be bad for miners in Pennsylvania, so in order to pretend that their “green energy” utopia won’t kill jobs, Biden makes this claim about jobs to be “created” by capping old wells.
“Net zero emissions by 2050” — by which time Biden will almost certainlty have been dead for more than 20 years. See how this works? You set a goal for some distant future point, so that it is basically impossible to measure your “progress” toward that goal in any meaningful way. The economic damage inflicted by your job-killing policies is immediate, whereas the alleged benefit of these policies is over the horizon somewhere. You are quite deliberately destroying a very valuable sector of the U.S. economy — real dollars paying for real people to produce real products — in order to pander to an autistic Swedish teenager and the rest of the climate-change panic brigade.
Only a fool could support such a policy, and Democrats nominated a fool.
Almost anything, actually. It is better to be uninformed than to be misinformed, and CNN is so hopelessly wrong about everything that the more you watch it, the less you know about current events, and most of what CNN viewers think they “know” is generally wrong. Today, I’ve had my office TV tuned to CNN all day (I watch, so you don’t have to) and I find myself stunned by how relentlessly narrow their coverage is. That is to say, the network executives have decided on which four or five stories CNN will cover, and what this coverage will include, and the same simple themes are reiterated hour after hour after hour. Once you’ve watched a couple of hours of this, anyone with an IQ above room temperature must be weary of the repetition of these themes, which omit any fact that might contradict the pro-Democrat/anti-Trump message.
There were still scant details about exactly what happened Sunday in the minutes before Blake was shot.
Police have said only that they were responding to a domestic incident. Neighbors said that there had been an altercation between two women at a birthday party for one of Blake’s sons and that Blake had been trying to break it up when officers arrived. [Attorney Ben] Crump said Blake was “simply trying to do the right thing by intervening in a domestic incident.”
See, that right there is the key to the whole thing, and yet CNN, with its legion of highly skilled journalists, seems utterly uninterested in discovering what this “altercation” was about. How many readers have ever heard of a child’s birthday party turning into a 911 call? Whose fault was that and — oh, just by the way — what was Jacob Blake planning to do when he decided he needed to grab a knife from his vehicle? But not only do CNN viewers not get answers to these highly relevant questions, the questions themselves are never mentioned, because asking questions might distract from the important message: VOTE FOR JOE BIDEN!
That’s the only thing any CNN viewer is supposed to care about, and so the network’s coverage of Kenosha, like their coverage of just about everything else, turns into an exercise in blaming Trump. Even if you were interested in that message, the most hard-core Democratic voter must get weary of having the same message — BLAME TRUMP! — inserted into every story and, as I say, the way CNN’s programming works, there are only four or five stories they really cover at all on a typical day, so that it becomes a tormenting drumbeat of repetition.
Whatever else might cause anyone to watch CNN, they certainly can’t be tuning in for the excitement. If it’s excitement you want, my suggestion is that you try watching real-crime video on YouTube:
The police officer keyed his microphone and spoke the two most important words of his career: “Shots fired.” He had just fatally shot a man, in the kind of split-second life-or-death decision that every law enforcement officer trains for, but none of them ever wants to experience. He repeated the communication several times — “Shots fired!” — and then added, “Send all units.”
When fellow officers arrived, Officer Bryan Pray was emotionally distraught by what had happened. “I can’t even talk right now, man. I didn’t want that to happen to him, man.” The policeman in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, had just killed Kevan Ruffin, after a nightmarish encounter in the early-morning hours of July 2.
Officer Pray had been dispatched by a 911 call shortly before 6 a.m. reporting a disturbance involving a knife-wielding man. Arriving at the scene of the incident, the officer found a woman crying hysterically. She said she had been attacked by a black man with two knives or swords, who looked at her with “pure hatred” on his face and called her “the devil in the flesh.” She had escaped without serious injury, and her attacker had gone eastbound up an alley toward South 15th Street. . . .
When they were rioting in Minneapolis, they were thugs and hoodlums, but attacking CNN? Civil rights heroes:
A protest erupted at CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta Friday amid nationwide demonstrations following the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd, with many of the protesters seen vandalizing the entrance of the building in videos posted to social media.
A crowd gathered in front of the CNN Center and grew over the course of several hours, initially breaking windows and spray-painting the CNN sign, and later throwing objects — including what appeared to be a firecracker that exploded — and reportedly shooting BB guns into the lobby.
The iconic CNN sign, a popular tourist destination in the downtown area, was covered with graffiti and others were seen jumping on top of the structure.
A CNN journalist captured footage of a window being shattered by the crowd, which can be heard sparking cheers.
Law enforcement eventually cleared the area, pushing the crowd further down the street.
Reporting from CNN correspondent Nick Valencia showed multiple police cars that were set ablaze and Georgia State Police entering the scene.
“This is terrible to witness, it’s terrible to witness,” Valencia told CNN anchor Anderson Cooper.
Terrible? No, it’s beautiful. Karma is a beautiful thing.
If you were hoping to see the mob dragging Brian Stelter’s lifeless corpse through the streets or parading with Jake Tapper’s head on a pike, however, you’ll be disappointed, because Jake works out of CNN’s D.C. bureau and Stelter’s in New York, not the Atlanta headquarters.
Apologies for the lack of blogging today. I crawled down through the layers of media bias in coverage of the Ahmaud Arbery case, got about 1,000 words into a post and then had to make a run to Little Caesar’s for dinner. Will try to finish that and post it later tonight. The difficulty, of course, is that I want it to be 100% accurate, and to avoid any appearance of justifying the actions that resulted in Arbery’s death.
Speaking of lack of blogging, a reader was asking about Wombat’s extended absence. I can report that Wombat is alive and healthy, but his current housing situation does not permit him to blog. He expects to have this problem solved soon, and we may have him back as soon as this weekend. Meanwhile, readers can hit Wombat’s tip jar to encourage him during this difficult time of Fear and COVID-19 in Las Vegas.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time” is not a strong defense in a murder trial, and the question everybody seems to be asking in regard to the death of Ahmaud Arbery is why Gregory McMichael and his son thought it was a good idea to grab their guns, jump in their truck and go out in pursuit of a man they assumed to be a fleeing burglary suspect.
It is not my habit to play Monday-morning quarterback in controversial murder cases. I’m not a lawyer, and my opinion in such matters is no more valuable than anyone else’s. However, I’ve spent more than 30 years in the news business, and I know a thing or two about media bias. In 2009, when I saw a bunch of pundits pontificating about the alleged “lynching” of a census worker in Kentucky, I got the wild idea to hit the road and investigate the reality of the story on the ground. As it turned out, the census worker had committed suicide and staged it to look like a lynching, in an insurance fraud scheme, but by the time the truth came out, the pundits who had smeared this Kentucky community as a haven of “anti-government extremism” seemed to have lost interest.
Could it be that the media’s coverage of the Ahmaud Arbery case is similarly biased? I’m trying to resist the itch for a road trip, but meanwhile I’m sick and tired of the way the story is being spun:
Brunswick is a seaport town on the Georgia coast with which I have a personal connection. During World War II, my maternal grandfather moved to Brunswick to work in the shipyard and my grandmother joined him there, working in the canteen that served meals to the more than 16,000 workers who built 99 “Liberty ships” in the Brunswick yards in a span of about three years. Founded in the 1770s, Brunswick remains today a major harbor, and its picturesque Old Town district attracts many tourists who visit nearby Jekyll Island and St. Simons Island.
Brunswick seldom makes national news, but that changed last month when the New York Times devoted a 1,700-word article to the February shooting death of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery. Why would this homicide be worthy of national attention? Because Arbery was black and the man who shot him is white and, until the case became the subject of round-the-clock coverage on CNN, no charges had been filed in the case. Now that 34-year-old Travis McMichael and his father, Gregory McMichael, have been charged with murder and aggravated assault, one might hope that journalists would be content to leave the matter to the justice system, but that’s not how the media operate in such cases. Instead, Americans are still being bombarded with updates and commentary on the alleged “lynching” of Arbery, who is described as a “black jogger” who was the victim of racism. . . .
One of the decisive moments of the Cold War, in my opinion, was Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention. In the post-Vietnam era, Democrats had adopted a “human rights” approach to foreign policy that tended toward a stance of moral relativism between Soviet-sponsored Marxist-Leninist regimes and their opponents. A sort of guilt complex about American influence — internalizing Communist propaganda claims about capitalist “imperialism” — had become part of Democrat foreign policy, and Kirkpatrick nailed it perfectly:
They said that saving Grenada from terror and totalitarianism was the wrong thing to do — they didn’t blame Cuba or the communists for threatening American students and murdering Grenadians — they blamed the United States instead.
But then, somehow, they always blame America first.
When our Marines, sent to Lebanon on a multinational peacekeeping mission with the consent of the United States Congress, were murdered in their sleep, the “blame America first crowd” didn’t blame the terrorists who murdered the Marines, they blamed the United States.
But then, they always blame America first.
When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn’t blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States.
But then, they always blame America first.
When Marxist dictators shoot their way to power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don’t blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies, they blame United States policies of 100 years ago.
But then, they always blame America first.
The American people know better.
Kirkpatrick’s speech put the choice in foreign policy in the clearest possible terms, and when Reagan won in a historic landslide, this mandate empowered him to confront Soviet power worldwide. One might have hoped that the lesson would have been clear, and yet, to this day, liberals still have not gotten the memo:
Bill Weir hates Jesus, America, and the internal combustion engine — not necessarily in that order. His job as Chief Climate Correspondent at CNN gives Weir ample opportunity to express his hatred of America’s petroleum-consuming habits, but it was not until recently that Weir explained how he blames Christianity for the world’s problems.
In a bizarre online essay entitled “To my son, born in the time of coronavirus and climate change,” Weir implies that the pandemic is somehow related to global warming, connected by “stories in a very old book” (i.e., the Bible) to explain why “we burned gasoline for no good reason.” Does that make sense? No, not logically, but Weir’s emotional gestalt pattern connects these dots without regard to logic. . . .
In his crucial role as Media Troll-in-Chief, our President had a memorable moment Monday, playing a brief video at his press conference contradicting the “Blame Trump” narrative that has been promoted in the media. Here’s the video, courtesy of the Telegraph:
Donald Trump absolutely lit up his own Coronavirus Task Force press briefing with a more than six-minute, tour-de-force media takedown that had CNN and MSNBC sputtering and reaching for the plug.
Trump said hello and turned the media briefing over to the NIH’s Dr. Anthony Fauci to clarify his words uttered on CNN on shutting down the country earlier to prevent more deaths.
Then, Trump took over and it was ON. He listed the timeline of his response to the coronavirus and presented a video of incorrect statements by the press on COVID-19. . . .
MSNBC and CNN, which usually begin taking the updates only after Trump has spoken, stayed with for Fauci and, when Trump began bagging on the media, bugged out early . . .
Trump is playing a video right now of how the media downplayed the coronavirus and how Democrat governors have praised him for working with them
CNN and MSNBC immediately cut away from the press conference because they don’t want their viewers to see what is really happening
CNN had to claim that Trump was “angry” and “melt[ed] down,” and that the video was “propaganda,” because CNN viewers — what few of them remain — are accustomed to being sheltered from any fact that contradicts the last-place network’s anti-Trump narrative.
