I spent nearly two years in the Washington news bubble, which became so bad that I left to cover the civil war in Lebanon.
My experience in Washington happened more than 40 years ago, but not much has changed.
Back then, Washington journalists had become part of the city’s elites, bringing down presidents, earning big bucks from book deals, and failing to acknowledge their biases.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 2,000 journalists work in Washington, the highest concentration of reporters in the country. One out of every 30 people in the District of Columbia works in journalism.
A recent study from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications revealed a stark lack of political diversity among American journalists, with just 3.4% identifying as Republicans and a significant 36.4% as Democrats.
Simply put, many of those polled lied. Many journalists of my era chose their jobs because they wanted to see change. They spouted the required allegiance to objectivity, fairness, and nonpartisanship. But you also had to present a point of view to stay acceptable to those on the cocktail and dinner circuits.
I worked in Washington during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The group grope was that Carter and his band of Georgians were country rabble and had no business running the country.
The press corps was hell-bent on ensuring he didn’t get a second term. I generally covered the second or third-string Carter f-up stories for Newsweek. It wasn’t hard to find these stories because Carter and his aides didn’t know much about running the federal government.
Back then, the bar talk revolved around how the country could survive a president who wore a sweater during an address to the nation about energy policy.
For the past eight years, the Washington media elite has attacked Trump as a dangerous rube who had no business running the country. Now, in yet another group grope, the journalistic elite, who covered up Biden’s intellectual decline, suddenly realized the current president isn’t up to snuff.
I hope the nation realizes President Biden was not the only loser in last week’s debate. The Washington media should also be blamed for allowing him to hide his weaknesses.
The one great failure of our Constitution proved over time to be the structure and organization of the Supreme Court. That branch is far too dependent on the supposed integrity of a small number of individuals, who have proved to be too flawed to yield that much responsibility and authority.
In her majority opinion, Barrett claimed that “[a]t this stage” of litigation, plaintiffs have not “established standing to seek an injunction” against the named federal agencies and that as such, the Supreme Court “lack[s] jurisdiction to reach the merits of the dispute.”
“The plaintiffs, without any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants’ conduct, ask us to conduct a review of the years-long communications between dozens of federal officials, across different agencies, with different social-media platforms, about different topics,” Barrett wrote. “This Court’s standing doctrine prevents us from ‘exercis[ing such] general legal oversight’ of the other branches of Government. … We therefore reverse the judgment of the Fifth Circuit and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
I’m sorry but Justice Barrett demonstrated extreme cowardice when she issued her opinion, along with a callous disregard for the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. Most unfortunately for the people of the United States, the other two faux conservatives on the high court, Roberts and Kavanaugh, sided with her.
Justice Alito wrote an epic and blistering dissent.
In his dissent, Alito noted that “[w]hat the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional” in a prior case before the court but that the feds’ censorship shenanigans documented in Murthy v. Missouri is “no less coercive.” In fact, the associate justice highlighted how the Biden administration’s efforts were “even more dangerous” due to the high-level government officials involved.
“It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so,” Alito wrote. “Officials who read today’s decision together with Vullo will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send.”
I predict that the Biden Regime and social media will strengthen their unholy alliance and accelerate their schemes to suppress speech that would make another stolen election more difficult.
The high court’s Wednesday ruling has major implications for the upcoming 2024 election.
Leading up to the 2020 election, for example, CISA upped its censorship efforts by flagging posts for Big Tech companies it claimed were worthy of being censored, some of which called into question the security of voting practices such as mass, unsupervised mail-in voting. This was done despite CISA privately acknowledging the risks associated with such practices.
The FBI also took on a censorship role during the 2020 election, in what has been characterized as a clear attempt to help Joe Biden’s election prospects. In the months leading up to the November contest, the agency — which had authenticated Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop as early as November 2019 — was issuing warnings to then-Twitter and Facebook to be on the lookout for so-called “Russian propaganda” and “hack-and-leak operations” by “state actors.”
Jonathan Turley of the Media Research Center provided an excellent summation of the betrayal of the First Amendment by the three cowardly faux conservative justices.
Jonathan Turley breaks down the frustrating anti-free speech ruling in Murthy v. Missouri.
"The Government is engaging in censorship by surrogate… they have made a mockery of the limits of the 1st Amendment." pic.twitter.com/K2eKnJtloF
Living in flyover country can expose you to issues that go unnoticed in the big city.
Just up the road near my home in central Pennsylvania is a prime example of what’s become known as “regenerative farming.”
Owner Josh Leidecker says the farm practices regenerative farming, or, more simply put, growing as nature intended. This method refers to growing practices that restore soil health and increase biodiversity through crop rotation and other means.
“It just takes a little while to get there,” Leidecker said of the vision for regenerative agriculture at Today Farm. “You know, we’ve got a big plan for this.”
Leidecker brings agriculture experience from his other business venture, Susquehanna Mills, an area manufacturer of organic cooking oils. The farm plans to grow oilseed crops and potatoes, some small stands of vegetables, and at least one of the fields will be grazing grounds for animals—a regenerative agriculture method.
What was once known as “organic farming” has become a national trend. Some regenerative farm techniques may include planting interceding crops to benefit the soil and feed livestock and using so-called”chicken tractors” as a form of crop tilling. The chickens move about the ground in a controlled manner and fertilize the ground with their feces, providing nutrients for crop rotation.
Here is a documentary about the farming methods: Roots So Deep (You Can See The Devil Down There) https://rootssodeep.org from Carbon Natio.
Teddy Gentry, the bass player of the band Alabama, is a leading proponent of regenerative farming. He speaks about transforming his fields by listening to quail sing. See https://www.instagram.com/p/C8Upm_muwjI/
Since 1989, Gentry has been a pioneer in the cattle industry, creating the South Poll breed to combine the best traits of four breeds, resulting in heat-tolerant and efficient cattle.
The Farming Systems Trial from the Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute argues that organic agriculture performs as well as, if not better than, conventional agriculture. The study demonstrated how nutrient-dense organic food helped to prevent and reverse diseases.
The institute tries to create economic vitality in rural communities by training tomorrow’s organic farmers.
Jon Lundgren, a former entomologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, left the government when he realized the pesticides meant to control pest bugs were wiping out scores of beneficial insects critical for the local ecosystem. See: https://www.instagram.com/p/C7RRciMNAN-/
I was reading a piece about the potential sale of the money losing Washington Post when I noticed something I had missed:(emphasis mine)
Anyone who has paid much attention to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos over the years knows that he isn’t afraid to shut down something that isn’t working. In 2015, Amazon pulled the plug on its Fire smartphone, after announcing a $170 million writedown on unsold devices. In 2019, Bezos finalized a divorce from his wife of 25 years. In 2022, Amazon announced it would close down all 68 of its brick-and-mortar bookstores and retail shops. In 2023, Amazon discontinued its Amazon Smile program that let customers direct a portion of their purchases to charity. Earlier this year, Bezos announced he was ending his residency in the state of Washington after nearly 30 years, and moving to Florida.
“Embrace failures” is part of Amazon’s “Day 1 culture,” along with “high-velocity decision-making.” Implicit in that is recognizing when something is not working and isn’t worth keeping trying to get working, rather than indefinitely pretending that sometime in the future it will start working.
This is how bad the difference between blue and red states are, that ultra rich ultra liberals don’t want to live in ultra blue states anymore. That old villain reality is kicking in.
Throughout the week of June 10, CNN was only able to attract an average of 396,000 viewers throughout the total day.
That is astonishing.
During its dreadful primetime hours, CNN dropped below 500,000 total viewers for the week to a pathetic average of just 477,000.
This is apparently what happens when you decide to abandon straight news and decide to fight for the Nevertrump niche with MSNBC. Nolte sums up the reality nicely:
It’s one thing to cast the truth aside and revel in your Orange Man Bad hatred when the economy is booming…It’s one thing to enjoy the MSNBC and CNN lies and hoaxes aimed at the MAGAtards when the world’s at peace, gas costs $2.35 a gallon, and eggs are 99 cents a dozen…All that CNN and MSNBC insanity and dishonesty is pure entertainment when illegals aren’t flooding your city and your mortgage hasn’t doubled…
Apparently the nevertrump market can’t support both CNN & MSNBC as the niche simply isn’t big enough, darn that nasty reality!
As one person put it:
My gas tank bill is starting to look like a grocery bill and my grocery bill is starting to look like a Costco bill and my Costco bill is starting to look like a mortgage payment and I don’t know how people are affording to live right now.
— Meghan 🩷💜💙| The Pursuing Life (@thepursuinglife) June 15, 2022
A while back I covered a hate crime hoax in the next town during the Obama years that went national until it fell apart (no apologies of course and no national coverage of the reverse). Instapundit when writing about the hoaxes notes that the demand for hate crimes exceeds the supply now there is a new documentary about the phenom titled Demand for Hate:
They focus on a hate hoax out of UVA, Hollywood in Toto notes the reaction and the key line of the picture:
The filmmakers tried to interview Zyahna Bryant, the activist who helped rally the Left against Bettinger, UVA officials and University President James Ryan to glean their side of the story.
They all declined. Their silence speaks volumes. So does the lawsuit that gives the film a marginally happy ending.
“Demand for Hate” offers a single quote to sum it all up, courtesy of Jim Bacon from The Jefferson Council.
Reality is also hitting automakers like Ford who with the Biden admin’s pushing spent a lot of money on electric car are finding that like the proverbial dog who doesn’t like the dog food people don’t want electric cars:
Slowing demand for Ford’s F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck is delaying the start of full production at the company’s new West Tennessee factory and pushing vehicle deliveries to dealers until early 2026, according to the state senator representing the community home to the new facility.
State Sen. Page Walley, a Savannah Republican, told the Lookout his understanding is that full production of the truck at the BlueOval City campus in Stanton was pushed back earlier this year by nine months from its initially scheduled full production start date.
Based on “what’s happening, with (Ford’s) read on the economy,”the company might need “a little bit longer runway” before full production takes off, Walley said.
In general, more consumers are willing to consider buying an EV for their next car, with 38 percent of non-EV owners planning on buying a plug-in hybrid or full battery electric vehicle for their next purchase—a slight increase from 37 percent in 2022, according to Automotive News. Still, that dwarfs the number of Americans who will likely buy a combustion engine vehicle for their next car.
Even more surprising was the number of EV owners who plan on going back to gas for their next car. According to McKinsey, 46 percent of EV drivers in the U.S. said they’re likely to go back to a traditional engine in their next vehicl
In a bad economy the reality of getting from one place to another trumps false green dreams.
It’s been rather funny watching the reaction of the ultra leftist “just stop oil” campaign to the anger over their defacing Stonehenge one of the key historical sites of the world.
They can’t seem to understand why people are so upset at what they did when the world as the claim is at stake:
I did give an explanation to their question
for the same reason I don't believe a TV preacher who has been telling viewers for 50 years that if you don't give him your money that God will end the world.
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