Archive for the ‘media’ Category

Let’s Go to the Film…or Not Althouse, Schlichter, Treacher, York, Surber Edition Plus the REAL news of the Day

Posted: November 1, 2022 by datechguy in crime, media
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Yesterday Instapundit put a link to Ann Althouse who had a very interesting take on the Paul Pelosi story and how the NYT spun Elon Musk tweet answering Hillary Clinton:

The main thing Musk did there was ding Clinton for throwing out baseless speculation. He was emboldened — just kidding, he seems to have felt emboldened — to swing wildly because he was swinging back at her wild swing. She wielded the hammer of self-serving accusation and he grabbed it and demonstrated how badly you can hurt someone with it.

The article alleges that Mr. Pelosi was drunk and in a fight with a male prostitute.

Oh, my lord, now the vivid allegation is right there in the NYT. It was fit to print. Why?! Because Musk merely pointed at it in a tweet that was — as I read it — designed to tell Hillary Clinton to back off with the political propaganda. 

Mr. Musk’s tweet was later deleted, and it was not immediately clear who had deleted it.

But this is a news story. Musk linked to something, then deleted it. I’m inclined to speculate that the reason the NYT is elevating this story is that the drunk-fight-with-a-male-prostitute story is not beyond the pale. It needs to be rendered toxic so no one will pass it around. Don’t dare say it! 

Kurt Schlichter also had a few things to say on the subject:

An official investigation? Yes, please! This is a serious matter, we’re told. After all, the regime media and Democrats such as Ilhan Omar are out there making charges like “A far-right white nationalist tried to assassinate the Speaker of the House and almost killed her husband a year after violent insurrectionists tried to find her and kill her in the Capitol, and the Republican Party’s response is to either ignore it or belittle it.” Heck, Our Democracy is at stake, so the incoming Republican majority must get to the bottom of this alleged act of political violence.

I somehow think the Democrats will be reluctant to help, though Speaker McCarthy should not let any Democrats on the panel in the first place as payback for the 1/6 kangaroo committee. But why not investigate? These are serious charges, albeit from unserious people. Omar, a commie ingrate whose stupidity is exceeded only by her dishonesty, could not resist trying to leverage some cheap advantage from this grody scenario, but she should have passed on strategic if not moral grounds. By trying to place the blame for this on us, she triggered the Streisand Effect just when Democrats least needed to be associated with even more weird nonsense than they are already. Blaming Republicans for what appears to many people to be a sex tryst gone sour guarantees the wrongly accused – us – are going to hammer the Democrats unmercifully about it.

Well there are some obvious questions to be answered. Jim Treacher leads of his piece at Substack with the one most obvious:

The Pelosis are worth somewhere north of $100 million. Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and second in the line of presidential succession. You’re telling me her husband Paul was alone in a house with no security or surveillance cameras? This lunatic David DePape just walked right up to the house and broke in?

In fairness if you told me ten years ago that San Francisco would have “poop maps” I’d have found that pretty unbelievable too.

Those are all interesting takes but the most sensible take on the subject comes from a tweet from Byron York who is the king of sensible takes.

This of course is a good idea if you want to establish the actual facts. This is however why Don Surber believes this is unlikely:

I imposed the 24-hour rule on the attack on Paul Pelosi, 82, on Saturday. Today I impose the 24-year rule because we never will learn the truth because San Francisco’s police are not as depicted by Karl Malden and Michael Douglas a half-century ago. The cops put on this case are political operatives whose duty is to shield the truth from the public.

The left says Trump did this and cites social media posts which conveniently portray the assailant as a QAnon fan, et cetera.

The right says this was a lover’s quarrel.

The suspect was born and raised in Canada. 

None of this adds up. Nobody knows outside a few cops and those who were there. Pray for Paul Pelosi and move on. Forget it, Jake. It’s San Fran town.

Now the truth is charges not withstanding I don’t know what actually happened and neither do any of you but I hereby make this prediction: If the 911 audio, officers body cam video, the Toxicological tests the various reports and the camera footage from the Pelosi house and any surrounding cameras in the neighborhood support the media’s narrative then they will all be released pretty soon.

If they are not then I strongly suspect Don Surber’s 24 year rule will kick in, unless the GOP forces the issue as Mr. Schlichter suggests.

Now when it comes down to it regardless of which narrative if any is correct and whatever the fellow was actually doing at the strangely (particularly given how the left has been insisting that there have been an unrelenting wave of right wing violence over the last year) unprotected Pelosi residence assaulting the old man is wrong and we of course hope for his recovery.

This is a story that is generating a lot of buzz but if you want to know what story SHOULD be all over everyone’s tongue it’s this one also via Insty:

IF THEY REALLY NEED HER THERE, IT’S BAD NEWS FOR THE DEMS. IF SHE’S BEING SENT THERE TO KEEP HER OUT OF THE WAY, IT’S BAD NEWS FOR HER. Kamala Harris to stump for Maura Healey, Democrats, at rally Wednesday.

The story proper

The Biden Administration will lend its weight to Attorney General Maura Healey’s campaign again this week, when Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to hold a get out the vote rally in Boston.

“On Wednesday evening, Vice President Kamala Harris will attend a campaign rally in support of the statewide Massachusetts Democratic ticket. Massachusetts voters have the opportunity to make history by electing the first woman as Governor of Massachusetts with Maura Healey, the first all-women executive office team in the country with Healey and Lieutenant Governor nominee Kim Driscoll, and the first Black woman elected statewide in Massachusetts with Attorney General nominee Andrea Campbell,” the Healey campaign announced Sunday night.

Think about this for a second. It’s the final week of the campaign with critical races to defend the Senate and House for the Democrats and the Democrats find it necessary to send the VP to campaign in friggen Massachusetts to help Maura Healey in a race considered so safe for the left that they don’t even bother to list the 25.5 Democrat spread on the two pols they have listed at RCP.

No wonder the left/media would rather go all in on either the “Right winger attacks Pelosi” or “Right Wingers spread Pelosi conspiracy theory” stuff instead.

Solid support by Democrats for Biden and Fetterman betrays their biggest fault–their causes are more important than good results

Posted: October 30, 2022 by John Ruberry in congress, culture, elections, media, News/opinion, politics
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By John Ruberry

The warning signs have been there for many weeks. Shortly before winning the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, John Fetterman had a stroke. How severe was the stroke? We don’t know, because Fetterman, who appears to be morbidly obese, hasn’t released his medical records. 

But he’s a solid leftist Democrat, and that’s all that his party leadership and the people working on his campaign need to know. But can Fetterman perform the job as senator?

His brief public appearances have been filled with gaffes and non-sensical statements, such as this one, made during an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, in response to this question, “I just wanted to check in and see how you’re doing?” Fetterman’s response was, “I’m doing fantastic, it’s not about kicking balls in the authority or anything.” Earlier this month Fox News reported that since his stroke, Fetterman had participated just four interviews with a national media outlet-all with MSNBC. Possibly in reaction to that story, Fetterman reached out to NBC. Dasha Burns interviewed him–and the candidate was aided by a teleprompter. As part of her report, Burns said that Fetterman had issues engaging in “small talk” prior to their interview. There was no teleprompter until the cameras were switched on. 

The left-wing Twitter blue-check media army attacked Burns; Fetterman’s wife said that she should face “consequences” for doing her job, which in this case was providing information to Pennsylvania voters so they can make an intelligent choice on who to vote for in the Senate race.

Fetterman’s campaign says as a result of the candidate’s stroke–oh, once again, where are those medical records?–he suffers from auditory processing challenges. And if Fetterman doesn’t improve, how will he be able to understand what is going on in a Senate committee hearing?

Last week’s sole debate between Fetterman and his Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, was a debacle for the Democrat. 

“If this had been a boxing match,” Laura Ingraham said of the debate on her Fox News show, “the referee would have called this in the first sixty seconds.” Fetterman’s opening remark was, “Hi, good night, everyone.” Like his other post-stroke campaign appearances, the debate with Oz was another gaffe-fest for the Democrat. Fetterman was particularly ghastly when trying to explain his position on fracking. His campaign blamed the closed captioning on the candidate’s teleprompter. The network that broadcast debate strongly dismissed that complaint.

But to leftists, none of this stuff matters. That’s because Fetterman is “right” on all of the issues, well, maybe not fracking anymore. Maybe. He’ll vote “correctly,” the leftists believe, presumably with the help of his teleprompter, on the Senate floor. After all, under the protection of pandemic restrictions–they were overblown in my opinion, but I want to stay on topic–a frail and obviously mentally feeble Joe Biden was able to win the presidency while hiding in the basement of his Delaware home. 

If the basement bunker tactic worked for Biden, leftists probably believe, it can work for Fetterman too. 

But we are in the middle of a disastrous presidency, which includes a humiliating military defeat, high inflation, and a likely recession.

Back to Pennsylvania and Fetterman: If it were Dr. Oz who had suffered a stroke, state party leaders, and possibly his campaign staff, would call for, perhaps quietly, Oz to step aside in time for a replacement candidate to appear on the general election ballot. While conservatives of course have core principles, our side consists of many more pragmatists. That’s how we roll. For instance, how many conservatives do you find in academia? Or in the arts? The Democrats are the party of noble intentions. The GOP is the party of good results.

And Dems continue to hammer away on unworkable and unpopular polices, such as attacking fossil fuels, confronting inflation with even more government spending, and conducting catch-and-release so-called prosecution of criminals. Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner is one of the worst proponents of such prosecutorial malpractice.

Which means the hardcore support by the left for John Fetterman makes sense. A twisted sense, that is.

When you vote in this year’s general election–vote for pragmatism. Vote Republican.

As for you Pennsylvania voters–you need to say “good night” to Fetterman.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

If Pritzker is serious about flaws in the pro-criminal SAFE-T Act, he’ll call for a special General Assembly session to repeal it

Posted: October 2, 2022 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, elections, media, News/opinion, politics
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By John Ruberry

The foremost political issue in Illinois is crime. And we have plenty of other issues to choose from, including negative population growth and endemic corruption. The election of Kim Foxx as Cook County’s state’s attorney in 2016–her campaign was funded by radical leftist billionaire George Soros–set forth a rise in crime in Chicago and its inner suburbs that accelerated during the COVID-19 lockdowns. 

The spirt of Foxx’s catch-and-release philosophy of law enforcement will go statewide, but only worse, on New Year’s Day when the SAFE-T Act goes into effect. In case you missed my last two posts at Da Tech Guy, I cited a Democrat, Will County state’s state’s attorney James Glasgow, who had this to say to Fox Chicago’s Mike Flannery about the SAFE-T Act, “There are forcible felonies that are not detainable: burglary, robbery, arson, kidnapping, second degree murder, intimidation, aggravated battery, aggravated DUI, [and] drug offenses.” Which means these accused felons walk free with the promise of returning for trial. An exception for flight risks, which a former Cook County assistant state’s attorney, John Curran, who is now a Republican state senator, says is almost impossible to use for jailing accused criminals. Curran told John Kass last month in his Chicago Way podcast that the SAFE-T Act passed the state Senate at 5:00am in the morning on the last day of a veto session of the General Assembly. He was given one hour to read the 764-page bill.

Some critics of the SAFE-T Act are calling it “the Purge Bill,” a reference the 2013 movie, The Purge, where crime goes unpunished for a 12-hour span.

As I noted before, Pritzker notoriously claimed that the SAFE-T Act was about “making sure that we’re also addressing the problem of a single mother who shoplifted diapers for her baby, who is put in jail and kept there for six months because she doesn’t have a couple of hundred dollars to pay for bail.” I called on the fact-checkers–even contacting them directly–to vet that statement. I’m considering offering a $1,000 reward to the person who finds Pritzker’s “diapers mom.”

Kass, a former Chicago Tribune journalist who was essentially demoted after his woke colleagues falsely claimed that a column he wrote blowing the whistle on Soros was anti-Semitic, now writes essential articles at John Kass News. He’s been at the forefront of the battle against the SAFE-T Act, and he’s calling for its repeal. Illinois’ Democrat governor, billionaire J.B. Pritzker, is promising unspecific changes to it after next month’s general election. He’s up for reelection, his opponent is state senator Darren Bailey. 

Kass says, and I’ve been expressing the same view, that the Democrats are panicking about the SAFE-T Act. As they should, it’s a dangerous law that is a threat to public safety. He’s asking that Pritzker call an immediate special session of the General Assembly, “eat a few platters of steaming hot crow,” and repeal the SAFE-T Act. “J.B. Pritzker has the supermajority,” Bailey told NBC Chicago, which Kass recalled in his column. “Why hasn’t he called the legislature into action? Literally a text or a phone call, we could be demanded to meet in Springfield within a few hours. Why aren’t we meeting tomorrow at 9 o’clock hammering this thing out?” I believe I know the answer to that question. Pritzker wants to run out the clock.

Kass suspects that the SAFE-T Act is a woke exercise in credential building for the governor’s possible run for president. I’ll add my own theory. In addition to minting a badge of honor for himself, Pritzker is prepping himself for receiving a Nobel Peace Prize as the prophet who, at least in Illinois, atoned for the murder of George Floyd. Only the aftermath of an in-force SAFE-T Act will anything but peaceful.

Ads from the People Who Play By The Rules PAC focusing on violence have been very effective, even though at least three Chicago television stations have banned “The Scream.” A more recent ad, even more disturbing than “The Scream,” shows a robbery and a bloody assault that occurred last Sunday on Chicago’s CTA Red Line train. A few hours earlier my daughter was a passenger on the Red Line. One of the perpetrators in this attack has been arrested. He’s now locked up, amazingly, bail was denied to him. But the People Who Play By The Rules PAC has this message for Illinoisans, the attack you’ll below is “a non-detainable offense under Pritzker’s Purge law.”

Bailey, in my opinion, is still a decided underdog in the gubernatorial race, but the downstate farmer is closing his gap with Pritzker according to a recent Fabrizo, Lee, and Associates poll.

Twice last week non-political acquaintances of mine told me, “Hey John, you are wrong about the SAFE-T Act, I read a fact-check about it.” I exposed the phony SAFE-T Act fact-checks in an entry on my own blog a few days ago. Yet once again, and almost certainly not for the last time, I am compelled to point out that fact-checkers are primarily propagandists for various leftist narratives. And if you are told by someone that you are incorrect about the SAFE-T Act and they cite a fact-check as evidence, this needs to be your response: vomit on that person. 

Back to Pritzker: If he is really serious about addressing the numerous flaws in the SAFE-T Act, he’ll call for that special session of the General Assembly with the purpose of repealing all of it. His feeble and non-specific calls for changes to the SAFE-T Act are empty promises. 

Early voting for the November election in Illinois began last week. One way to block a Pritzker run for president is for voters to evict him from the governor’s mansion. A whole bunch of new state legislators in Springfield is needed as well.

By the way, no Republican legislators voted for the SAFE-T Act.

John Ruberry regularly blogs from suburban Cook County at Marathon Pundit.

In defense of “pink slime” newspapers

Posted: September 25, 2022 by John Ruberry in crime, elections, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

The latest media controversy in Illinois is the mailing of what the liberals call “pink slime” newspapers. The term was invented a decade ago by Ryan Zickgraf, a Washington Post reporter, to describe newspapers that aren’t “real,” such as the copy of North Cook News which was mailed to my home last week. On the other hand, as you can see in the photo, the North Cook News is printed on paper and it contains, get this concept, news. North Cook News, and similarly named publications (yes, I said it), is published by Local Government Information Services, which is run by Dan Proft, a conservative activist and former Illinois gubernatorial candidate, who is a co-host of a morning talk radio show on WIND-AM Chicago, part of the Salem News Network.

Proft is also the chair of the People Who Play By The Rules PAC, which has run a series of commercials, including “The Scream,” that have drawn much-needed attention to the SAFE-T Act. Among other things, the law eliminates cash bail in Illinois. Riding off of the emotion after the murder of George Floyd, the voluminous SAFE-T Act passed the Illinois state Senate at 5am on the last day of the lame duck session of the General Assembly early in 2021. It passed the state House that same day. Illinois’ Democratic governor, J.B. Pritzker, signed it into law a month later. Sensing trouble, Dem legislators, or whoever wrote the law, pushed the date that the SAFE-T Act takes effect until January 1, 2023, nearly two months after the 2022 general election. 

Not a single Republican voted for the SAFE-T Act.

As I noted in my Da Tech Guy post last week, in a discussion about the SAFE-T Act, Will County State’s Attorney, James Glasgow, a Democrat, told Fox Chicago’s Mike Flannery on his Flannery Fired Up show, “There are forcible felonies that are not detainable: burglary, robbery, arson, kidnapping, second degree murder, intimidation, aggravated battery, aggravated DUI, [and] drug offenses.” Not detainable means they’ll be set free until their trial date. 

Crime, particularly in the Chicago area, has skyrocketed since 2019. Blame is being given to Cook County’s catch-and-release state’s attorney, Kim Foxx and the anti-police policies of Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot. The mayor was sworn into office in 2019, as was Pritzker. Foxx supports the SAFE-T Act, while all but one of the other 101 county prosecutors oppose it.  

The mayhem of Chicago and Cook County will spread statewide. And the Chicago area will suffer even more because of the SAFE-T Act. 

People Who Play By The Rules PAC television ads and the Proft “pink slime” newspapers must be working. Pritzker and Illinois’ attorney general, Kwame Raoul, say they are open to amendments to the SAFE-T Act–but they don’t offer details. My guess is that the Democrats are panicking. I have no sympathy for them, they’ve had nearly two years to make major changes to the SAFE-T Act.

Meanwhile, Pritzker, a billionaire, is pushing back. He cancelled an appearance at a forum with his Republican opponent, Darren Bailey, sponsored by the Daily Herald newspaper. That paper is published by Paddock Publications, which printed Proft’s Local Government Information Services newspapers; LGIS used Paddock’s bulk-mailing permit to distribute them. That infuriated Pritzker. The governor’s campaign manager, among other things, called Proft’s papers, “fake and misleading and newspaper-style mailers.” Tellingly, the Pritzker camp doesn’t specifically attack the content of Proft’s papers. They are committing the ad hominem fallacy. Paddock, in a statement, announced that it cancelled future printings of LGIS papers. The forum is back on.

The headline of my North Cook News is “Former Chicago chief of detectives: Violent offenders given ‘get out of jail free card.'” That’s true.

Not only have Pritzker and the Democrats, who thanks to gerrymandering enjoy supermajorities in both chambers of the General Assembly, been negligent in fixing the SAFE-T Act debacle, so has the local media. With occasional exceptions, the newsrooms of Illinois’ major newspapers are woke echo chambers. They still claim to be the watchdogs for the public, but these so-called journalists are mostly interested in protecting and advancing leftist narratives. Contemporary reporters are a toxic combination of “the cool kids” in high school, with all of their arrogance, and the false ethical superiority of Iran’s morality police. Community newspapers usually only report on petty crime, but if you need to locate the nearest bake sale, well, you know where to find that information. These weekly papers are in fact weakly ones.

If the Illinois media performed their jobs honestly and capably, there’d be no need for “pink slime.”

Fact-checkers have been unkind to opposition arguments to the SAFE-T Act. The worst of these fact-checks comes from Jeff Cercone at PolitiFact. He deemed such opposition as “false.” Politi-Farce, that is Dan Bongino’s nickname for them, is partially funded by Facebook; the social media giant has used Cercone’s fact-check to blur out a video pointing out the flaws in the SAFE-T Act. Interestingly, Cercone’s Tweets are protected on Twitter. Is he afraid of his readers? I’m not. You can find me on Twitter. Come and get me, I’m not a coward!

Who did Cercone seek out as experts in his fact-check? Cops? No. Prosecutors? Nope. County sheriffs? Uh-uh. He called on Pritzker’s press secretary, Jordan Abudayyeh, and two criminology professors. Oh sure, he included links to articles with opposing opinions. As for Cercone’s experts, I don’t believe their defenses of the SAFE-T Act.

Instead, Cercone should have reached out to John Curran, a suburban Chicago Republican state senator who is a former Cook County assistant Cook County state’s attorney. That, my friends, is what I call an expert.

“You cannot take deterrence out of the system,’ Curran told John Kass last week in the former Chicago Tribune’s columnist’s Chicago Way podcast, “They’ve been doing that for years, the SAFE-T Act is the final straw. Crime is rampant because people don’t fear getting caught. They [the criminals] don’t stop, the police can’t pursue anymore because of insurance issues, coverage issues, and safety issues. They run and then when they do get caught–they know they are going to get processed, booked, and be back out that day. When there is no fear of accountability in the system, what is going to stop someone who sees something and says, ‘I want to take that?'”

Keep in mind, Curran is talking about the current status quo–before the SAFE-T Act kicks in. When that law goes live, Curran warns, what he described will “put that in place permanently.” Only worse, I’d like to add.

For flight risks, apologists for the SAFE-T Act claim, accused criminals can be detained. “The problem with that,” Curran pointed out to Kass, “is to show that someone is a willful flight risk the prosecutor has to prove that they are planning or attempting to intentionally to evade prosecution by concealing oneself. That is never going to happen,” adding, “You literally have to catch them with the plane ticket in their pocket going to the airport.”

So called fact-checker Cercone needs to listen to that Chicago Way podcast with an open mind.

As I mentioned earlier the SAFE-T Act, which is 764 pages long, passed on the last day of the 101st General Assembly. Curran said he was given one hour to read it.

Social media regularly blocks or suppresses stories that the “enlightened ones” deem false. Most notably is the New York Post’s initial report on the information found on the Hunter Biden laptop, which has since been found to be as genuine as today’s sunrise. On a personal note, I’ve been repeatedly warned by Facebook that my blog entries that I’ve posted on Facebook will be pushed lower into the general FB feed, meaning of course that fewer people will see my posts, because my writings have been labeled “false and misleading.” I am fairly certain I am “shadowbanned” by Twitter. I used to oppose setting up alternative social media platforms for conservatives–it’s best that the libs see the truth, was my reasoning.

Only they don’t see it.

Twitter and Facebook used to suspend accounts of users who claimed that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese laboratory. That story, still not debunked, may end up being authenticated. There are numerous similar tales

What to do?

Well, as a resort, to get an alternative message out, conservatives can mail out “pink slime” newspapers. As a last resort there is always the Howard Beale approach. You can open the window and scream, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna to take it anymore!”

Proft is undaunted. In a statement he fired back at the billionaire, “Governor Pritzker believes his money guarantees him control of government and entitles him to make all media subservient to his government. He lords over Illinois through executive orders. He sees the Fourth Estate as no different than his equestrian estate in Wellington, FL. If he doesn’t like a television ad, it must be taken off the air. If he doesn’t like a newspaper, it must not be printed or circulated.”

Oh yeah, television. Two Chicago TV stations pulled a People Who Play By The Rules PAC ad featuring a Pritzker critic, which the governor says is “false and defamatory.”

In that same statement, Proft vowed that his papers “will continue to be printed and distributed even if we have to return to the Gutenberg press and must enlist fair-minded people across Illinois who want the truth, not Pritzker’s ‘truth,’ to hand deliver them door-to-door.”

John Ruberry regularly blogs from suburban Cook County at Marathon Pundit.

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