Posted: November 30, 2021 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
By Christopher Harper
I usually don’t tell new acquaintances that I worked in the media for more than 25 years. That way, I avoid trying to defend the indefensible.
For example, the Russia dossier finally fell apart last week when one of its principal sources was arrested.
But much of the media haven’t admitted their errors. As Axios puts it: “It’s one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history, and the media’s response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid.”
BuzzFeed News, which made waves in 2017 by publishing the entire dossier, says it has no plans to take the document down. It’s still online, accompanied by a note that says, “The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors.”
Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn began reporting about the dossier before the 2016 election. Asked whether he planned to correct the record, Corn said,” My priority has been to deal with the much larger topic of Russia’s undisputed attack and Trump’s undisputed collaboration with Moscow’s cover-up.”
To its credit, The Washington Post corrected and removed large portions of two articles. Its media critic, Erik Wemple, has written at length about the mistakes made by The Post and other media outlets in their coverage of the dossier.
But that’s not the only scandal hanging around.
It is unthinkable that Chris Cuomo has lasted this long after breaking almost every ethical guideline in the book by shoring up his brother.
In his discussions with his brother’s support group, Chris “encouraged his brother to take a defiant position and not to resign from the governor’s office, people familiar with the conversations said. At one point, he used the phrase ‘cancel culture’ as a reason to hold firm in the face of the allegations, two people present on one call said.”
It was an embarrassment to have Andrew Cuomo around for so long. It is just as bad that CNN continues to have Chris Cuomo around.
But there’s more. The media look ridiculous in supporting President Brandon’s ban on travel to the United States from African countries when news organizations called President Trump a racist for similar acts.
In 2017, President Trump imposed travel restrictions on six predominantly Muslim countries over concerns of improper vetting. Much of the media called his actions a “Muslim ban.” When the pandemic began, Trump blocked travel from China and six other countries, including Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan, and Tanzania. Biden, a presidential candidate at the time, called Trump’s actions “xenophobic.”
It’s disheartening to see how far the media have fallen, particularly when I used to play a role in trying to prop up many of the organizations I now criticize.
Posted: November 29, 2021 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
By: Pat Austin
SHREVEPORT – It has been at least five years since I looked at Drudge with any regularity. In the (distant) past I rather enjoyed the site but man, the site really seemed to change. Such drama! Things just seemed so slanted. Did it change or was it just me? I don’t know, but I quit looking at it very often. Every now and then I’ll pop in over there and see what’s up. And then I leave.
Well so now we have the new Omnicron variant of the Coronavirus and Drudge is going crazy. Lockdowns! Likely in USA! Colossal outbreak! Unusual symptoms! State of emergency!
Please.
Just stop.
The variant has not been seen in the US and so far, the symptoms in people with this variant have been milder than in any other variant to date.
People are sick and tired of this panic. Now I’m not denying the Covid-19 is serious. I’m going to a funeral tomorrow morning as a matter of fact for the wife of a friend. She is a Covid fatality. Straight up. No other underlying conditions, nothing else. So yeah, I know it is a real thing, but it seems to me that if we keep crying wolf and stirring up all this panic all the time, people might be more receptive to whatever we need to do to deal with this.
Anyway. It is at least entertaining to look at Drudge every now and then, but I no longer take the site seriously as a news source. As we have established before, it is difficult to find an unbiased, accurate news site any longer. It’s the same situation for television news. Thank goodness for blogs, right?!
Perhaps this would be a good time to hit Pete’s tip jar!
Help me out…what are your go-to sites these days when you want news and information? Mostly blogs? News sites? Twitter? Where do you go? Expand my horizons, please!
Posted: November 29, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized
A while back I wrote about the relative measures of success for Brady and Belichick in their new positions. As Brady has already won a superbowl we can safely state that he has met the goals without re-iterating them.
As for the Patriots and Belichick I graded the Pats on the following scale based on the pre-Brady years:
Any year that the New England Patriots post Brady:
Have a winning record: should be considered OK
Win 11 games: should be considered a success
Win their division: should be considered a big success
Make the playoffs: should considered a huge success.
Win a playoff game: should be considered an spectacular success
Go to the Superbowl: should be considered an extraordinary success
Win a Superbowl: should be considered a Miracle
Now there are those who consider that a fair amount of Tom Brady’s success in general and the Patriots success in particular should be given to Coach Bill Belichick who some consider the greatest coach in Football history. For those of you who consider this the case let’s make a slight adjustment.
Any year the New England Patriots Under Belichick post Brady
Win a Superbowl, it’s an extraordinary success
Go to the Superbowl it’s a spectacular success
Win a playoff game it’s a Huge success
Make the playoffs, it’s a big success
Win their division, it’s a success
Win at least 11 games, it’s an OK season
Win less than 11 games…fire the bum!
These are reasonable expectations. I suspect that Patriots fans after two decades of winning will not be as generous as me with their expectations.
This makes the Bill Belichick Era going into today’s game a 24-34 as the coach of the New England Patriots in games not started by Tom Brady and in the three seasons that he coached the team sans Brady he made the playoffs….nearly once.
My expectations scale was “fire the bum” if he failed to win at least 11 but given the Covid situation that while effecting all teams hit his team hard I’d give him another season’s leeway, particularly if he can manage to make .500. If not I think we can safely say that the question of Bill vs Tom in terms of credit has been answered conclusively.
Well the Patriots are now 8-4 , in first place in their division and while not a lock for the playoffs yet looking pretty good with Rookie Mac Jones at the helm. Under standard Patriots scale it’s already an OK season and the Pats only have to go 3-2 the rest of the way to qualify for OK status under my Belichick scale.
Belichick has done this with a Rookie QB who had four other QB’s picked ahead of him.
It may be early to say this but I think we must conclude that Brady + Belichick were the perfect storm of the best in their professions coming together and that neither one negates the greatness of the other.
But there are still a few games to play so let’s see…
Last Sunday a career criminal, Darrell Brooks Jr, allegedly drove his SUV into a parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six people and injuring dozens of others. He was out on $1,000 bail, an amount deemed “inappropriately low” the next day by the Milwaukee County district attorney, John T. Chisholm. Earlier this month Brooks allegedly ran over the mother of one his children in that same SUV.
Chisholm is one of many woke prosecutors elected in major metropolitan areas who believe in “affordable” or even no bail for individuals accused of violent crimes. Others include Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, who faces a recall election next year, George Gascón in Los Angeles County, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and Kim Foxx in Cook County, Illinois, where Chicago is the county seat. Many of their campaigns accepted contribution from sources tied to radical leftist George Soros.
Foxx, whose title is Cook County state’s attorney, made a national name for herself after dropping charges involving the hate crime hoax engineered by former Empire star Jussie Smollett. He was charged again after a special prosecutor was appointed after the uproar in response to Foxx dropped those charges. Smollett’s trial begins tomorrow.
But what is far worse than that is Foxx’s weak bail policy involving accused felons.
As I’ve mentioned before at Da Tech Guy, if you want to get the true story of how violent crime is devastating Chicago and its inner suburbs, you need to regularly visit CWB Chicago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Chicago Tribune–more on them in a bit–the Chicago Sun-Times, and the broadcast TV station websites document many violent crimes, particularly the murders. But CWB provides the indispensable back story.
Since New Year’s Day CWB Chicago has been documenting individuals “accused of killing, trying to kill, or shooting someone in Chicago this year while awaiting trial for a felony.” With a little more than a month left in 2021 CWB Chicago has discovered 55 such people. Of those, 26 of them are accused of murder–and two others are charged with reckless homicide involving a vehicle. That brings us to a total of 28 fatalities.
The complete CWB Chicago list, as of November 28, is here.
What else is there to be found in that back story?
Last summer John Kass, then a Chicago Tribune columnist, wrote a column about the rise in crime in big cities that have woke prosecutors whose campaigns were funded by Soros. Kass was attacked and essentially demoted when co-workers of his, by way of their union, the Chicago Tribune Guild, claimed that the Soros column was anti-Semitic. Soros, a Holocaust survivor, is by most accounts a secular Jew. Kass never mentioned the religion or ethnicity of Soros in that column. So why was Kass attacked? Because he was on to something, the truth that is, about Soros and those catch-and-release prosecutors.
By the way when I first heard of Soros I figured he was a Greek-American As for Kass, who is a Greek-American, well he’s also a big fan of CWB Chicago. A few months ago he accepted a buyout from the new owners of the Trib. He has his own site that I regularly visit. A site, as he mentioned in one of his Chicago Way podcasts, where he is allowed to use the word “riot,” which he wasn’t able to do when he was with the Tribune.
Clearly Chicago and Cook County–I live in suburban Cook–has an ongoing Waukesha problem. So far my family and friends have not been affected by the increase in violent crime here. Although on Thanksgiving I had to explain to my daughter and her cousins what to do if they hear gunfire.
And as bad as Kim Foxx is–she doesn’t deserve all of the blame. Although a hardened leftist as well, Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, has chilly relations with Foxx, a member of a rival political camp. But Lightfoot endorsed Foxx when she faced a tough Democratic primary last year. Lightfoot’s feckless police commissioner, David Brown, does Lightfoot’s bidding. The mayor pledged to reduce crime as a candidate–but crime has instead soared. Chicago already has endured more murders in 2021 than in any year since 1996.
Illinois’ governor, JB Pritzker, was seemingly talking tough last month when he said that Chicago is “nearly at a state of emergency in our need to address crime.” Then Pritzker got silent on the subject–presumably after he remembered that like Lightfoot and Foxx, he is a Democrat. Oops.
In 2023 Illinois becomes the first state to without cash bail. Pritzker signed that bill into law earlier this year. Judges will be able to jail those accused of serious crimes.
Oh, what about Cook County judges? Circuit court judges are elected here–and once on the bench they face a retention vote every six years. Typically nearly all judges are retained. It’s time that voters take a close look at the role that judges play in the catch-and-release atmosphere in Cook County.
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