Posts Tagged ‘media’

When the Biden White House calls on “experts” to support its agenda, watch your wallet

Posted: August 7, 2022 by John Ruberry in business, economy, media, News/opinion, opinion/news
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By John Ruberry

Outside of sheer incompetence, a theme has emerged from the Joe Biden administration. When they need help, the White House calls on people they deem to be experts. 

Here’s a dirty secret of politics, or if your prefer, of advancing a preferred narrative. Anyone can find an “expert,” more on them in a bit, to support any opinion. It works in journalism too, the media wing of the Democrat Party.

When the discovery of the Hunter Biden laptop was revealed by the New York Post nearly two years ago–the mainstream media, social media, and of course the Biden campaign immediately moved to denounce it. The casus belli for journalists, Facebook, Twitter, and the like–Biden brought this up in a presidential debate–was that its emergence three weeks before Election Day in 2020 had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” according to 51 former national security experts, led by James Clapper, a director of National Intelligence under Barack Obama. Every one of these “experts” either lied, signed on to something they knew little about, or just simply wanted to do whatever it took to prevent the reelection of Donald J. Trump. 

Eighteen months later, the New York Times admitted Hunter’s laptop, which provided voluminous evidence of his influence peddling centered on his being the son of a powerful politician, was authentic. The 51 experts can expect subpoenas from the House Judiciary Committee next year, assuming the Republicans take control of the House. Every one of these “experts” should have their security clearances permanently revoked.

Biden of course won the election. As a result of his policies, such as cancelling the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, blocking new permits for drilling on federal land, gasoline prices soared and remain high. Although the economy was well into recovery mode two years ago, Biden signed into law the unfunded American Rescue Plan. Many experts at the time claimed it would not fuel inflation. They were wrong. Just as those national security “experts” were wrong on Hunter’s laptop. 

When inflation began its ascent, the White House cited 15 Nobel laureates in economics who said that Biden’s Build Back Better bill, enacted in late 2021, would not fuel inflation. They were wrong too. Inflation is now at levels not seen since the early 1980s. Last year Biden and other “experts” were saying inflation was “transitory.” Liberals reading this post will blame inflation on the War in Ukraine, you know, “Putin’s price hike.” Sure, the war likely has an effect on inflation, but the scourge was with us before Russia’s invasion Ukraine. 

Build Back Better was originally part of a much larger bill, the green energy stuff was split off and later discarded after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said he wouldn’t support it. Well, Build Back Better Part Two is back, laughably renamed the Inflation Reduction Act. And to bolster its support, the Biden White House has–are you ready?–called on experts, this time, four former Democratic Treasury secretaries and one Republican, who claim, among other things, that the Inflation Reduction Act will “fight inflation” One of those ex-Treasury secretaries is Larry Summers, who warned last year the Biden White House, “We’re taking very substantial risks on the inflation side.” 

A good journalist would track down Summers and ask him specifics on why this bill really will fight inflation.

Earlier I mentioned that journalists have a role in advancing political narratives. For example, at Forbes, Rhett Buttle offers a slobbering French kiss of propaganda, which is accompanied by this headline, “Experts Agree: The Inflation Reduction Act Accomplishes A Lot For Small Business And Working Families.” While late in the piece Buttle manages to write about the bill, “some who represent select corporate interests in Washington don’t completely agree” with the hype. But if Buttle was truly a journalist, he would have tracked down opponents of the Inflation Reduction Act and presented a balanced article.

Then again, real journalism is dead. Twenty years ago such a piece as the one written by Buttle would contain the sub-headline, “news analysis,” assuming a magazine like Forbes would even publish it. I took some journalism classes at the University of Illinois. If I turned in such an article for an assignment, a professor would have deservedly given me an “F,” enhanced by this underlined comment written in red ink, “This garbage reads like a press release.”

But Biden’s new batch of experts have spoken: The Inflation Reduction Act, which the Senate will vote on Sunday afternoon, will “fight inflation.”

Watch your wallet. Watch the cash in it lose its value.

Disclosure: This blog post should be classified as “news analysis.”

UPDATE 5:15pm EDT: The Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act passed the Senate.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Fact-checkers are gaslighting Americans over definition of a recession

Posted: July 31, 2022 by John Ruberry in business, economy, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

“The fliparoo theory of PolitiFact is now confirmed,” Dan Bongino said early in his July 28 podcast, “The fliparoo theory is this: If a fact-checker, airquotes, PolitiFact, says something is true it is probably false. If PolitiFact says something is false it’s probably true.”

Which means, of course, that we are now in a recession. PolitiFact, in a piece written by propagandist Louis Jacobson entitled, “No, the White House didn’t change the definition of ‘recession,'” he fact-checked a claim that originally came from an Instagram post. In seemingly 10,000 words, meant to overwhelm low-information voters, Jacobson ruled that statement false.

Jacobson is wrong, he’s gaslighting us. We are in a recession.

And Jacobson is not alone.

The Biden White House, led by the embarrassment of a press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, has been redefining “recession” for at least a week. For decades, the generally accepted definition of a recession has been two successive months of negative GDP growth. In the first quarter of 2022, the American economy shrank by 1.4 percent, and it contracted by 0.9 percent in the second quarter. These are facts. 

“However, the two-quarter threshold cited in the Instagram post has never been official,” Jacobson said in his so-called fact-check. “It’s more like a rough guide,” he continued, “one piece of a complicated puzzle.” Translation: the wise and oh-so-brilliant Jacobson is right, and you are a semi-literate yokel for accepting the commonly agreed upon description of a recession. 

In another overly long fact-check, Newsweek’s Tom Norton, another hack apologist, also ruled “false” the claim that the Biden White House is redefining what a recession is. “Furthermore, the White House website doesn’t have a dictionary or catalog of all political terminology and jargon it uses (that is the case for other governments, such as those of the UK and Canada, too),” Norton offered. 

Wow. I’m convinced. Not.

In Norton’s Newsweak–or is it Newspeak?— fact-check, Norton quotes Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen, who, by the way, was wrong about inflation being “transitory,” that it is really up to a secretive private organization to determine a recession. Who knew? “There is an organization called the National Bureau of Economic Research that looks at a broad range of data in deciding whether or not there is a recession,” she revealed.

Another fact-check fabulist, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, appears to be on vacation so he hasn’t weighed in on the leftist-induced recession debate. Three years ago, while fact-checking Donald Trump, Kessler wrote, “A recession is two quarters of negative economic growth.” But Joe Biden wasn’t president then.

Another prominent (along the lines of someone having an ugly prominent nose) fact-checker, USA Today, also hasn’t recently given its opinion on what a recession really is. Oh, what’s this? In a 2020 fact-check USA Today informed us, “A recession is generally defined as two consecutive quarters of declining GDP, or gross domestic product, a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced during a specific time period.”

But on the other hand, Snopes is bowing to the Democrat Party mantra about recessions. Referring to a couple of social media messages, “The tweets quoted above may give readers the misleading impression that the Biden administration literally tried to revise the criteria economists use to determine when a recession has occurred. But that was not the case,” Bethania Palma chimes in for Snopes.

It is the case. Snopes is lying.

Here are some media talking heads talking not too long ago, based on who I see here and the chyrons, using the classical definition of a recession, in a montage compiled by the Media Research Center. You know the, you know the thing, as Biden likes to say, two consecutive quarters of declining GDP growth. C’mon man!

But, assuming briefly we are not in a recession when will we be in one? The Biden administration won’t say. Is it a recession when we have three successive quarters of declining growth? Four? Five-and-a-half?

Or will it be a recession only when there is a Republican president?

Dan Bongino is right. The fliparoo theory of “fact-checkers” is now confirmed. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Leftists in their silo created the Ministry of Truth, Ultra MAGA, and Chicago’s Summer of Joy

Posted: May 29, 2022 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

On occasion I get accused of living in a right-wing silo, or if you prefer, bubble.

But it’s left-wingers who are more likely to dwell in their own political silo. And it’s hurting their side. 

Good.

And because many people, particularly leftists, are terrible listeners, I have to repeat myself yet again.

Here we go.

Even if I wanted to, I can’t remain in a right-wing silo. Besides–broadcast and cable media, as well as streaming services, are dripping wet with liberal and woke bias. And I can’t always avoid them. Last year, Mrs. Marathon Pundit underwent a minor medical procedure. In the waiting room I had to sit through ABC’s Good Morning America, hosted by Clintonista George Stephanopoulos, and then, on the same network, The View. 

Earlier this year I had some complicated dental work done. My dentist has TVs in front of each chair. What was on? The View. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was one of the show’s guests. 

“John,” my dentist calmly said to me as she drilled, “tell me if you experience pain.”

Conservatives–and if you are a regular viewer of MSNBC or CNN this will shock you–are more tolerant of people who hold opposing views.

It’s an old study, but Pew Research found that liberals were more likely to block or unfriend a conservative than the other way around. 

The mainstream media, the Biden White House, and big-city governments are leftist monocultures. Big tech too, but I’ll attack them again, I am sure, in a future blog post.

When you live in an echo chamber, you are bound to inadvertently come up with ideas that outsiders will mock. Or even, like a lit stick of dynamite with a long fuse, have them thrown back at you. 

Last month, a contender–and oh my, is the competition steep–for worst Biden cabinet member, Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, revealed the formation of the Disinformation Governance Board. Conservatives immediately pounced, and almost in unison, called the group “Orwellian” and labeled it “the Ministry of Truth,” which is where reluctant liar Winston Smith toiled in George Orwell’s novel, 1984. When it was revealed that a disinformationist, who had cast doubts on the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Nina Jankowicz, was the head of that panel, the Orwell analogy was complete. 

One rule of politics, one that the woke ignores because of what Ben Shapiro calls the left’s “unearned sense of moral superiority,” is that when (not if, because the right errs too) you make a whopper of a mistake, you must immediately correct it. So rather than eliminating the Disinformation Governance Board as soon as Mayorkas acknowledged its existence, “the Ministry of Truth” and Jankowicz dangled for three weeks. During that time the Orwellian memes of Jankowicz flooded social media, and an embarrassing TikTok video of Jankowicz, singing to the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” emerged, which gained her the nickname Scary Poppins.

Anita Dunn, who in 2009 cited the genocidal Mao Tse-Tung as one of her favorite philosophers, which led to her departure from the Obama White House, worked on the 2020 Biden campaign. She was briefly a senior White House advisor to Biden. Dunn is said to have been behind the president’s recent use of not only MAGA as a pejorative, but the heretofore unheard moniker “Ultra MAGA.” Conservatives on social media immediately and proudly declared themselves as “Ultra MAGA,” mirroring the response in 2016 when Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump supporters “deplorables.” During a speech earlier this month, Biden referred to his predecessor as “the great MAGA king.” On Truth Social, Trump struck back with a Lord of the Rings-themed meme as he gleefully adopted the nickname.

If Dunn didn’t live in a left-wing bubble, she would have seen all of those snarky responses coming.   

On the local level, last month Chicago’s inept leftist mayor, Lori Lightfoot, declared that the summer of 2022 will be “the Summer of Joy.” John Kass has derisively referred to the Summer of Joy in several of his columns and he poked fun at it in his most recent podcast. Hey Jackass, the sarcastic yet accurate tabulator of Chicago murders and shootings, is selling Summer of Joy T-shirts and coffee cups. Now that Memorial Day weekend has arrived, every time there is a mass shooting in Chicago–and we only have to look back a few hours to find the most recent one–bloggers and right-leaning social media users will quip something along the lines of “Wow, here is more ‘Summer of Love’ Chicago carnage for you.”

All Lightfoot would have needed to prevent this mockery is to have a politically moderate advisor–she would never hire a conservative–who would be bold enough to say, “I don’t think ‘Summer of Love’ is a wise idea, and here’s why.”

As Mary Poppins, not Biden’s Scary Poppins, said in that classic movie, “Sometimes a person we love, through no fault of their own, can’t see past the end of his nose.”

Such is the status of liberalism in 2022.

Which is why it will be a glorious election season for the right this year.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Mike Myers’ Netflix debacle, The Pentaverate, attacks good taste and conservatives

Posted: May 15, 2022 by John Ruberry in comedy, culture, doctor who, entertainment
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By John Ruberry

After a long day at work earlier this month I clicked on the “Surprise Me” feature on Netflix. What popped up was Mike Myers’ new vehicle, The Pentaverate.

“Well,” I said to myself, “this might be pretty good.” 

In fact, The Pentaverate doesn’t even measure up to “pretty bad.” The six episode limited series is one of the worst shows I’ve suffered through. Oh, somehow I managed to view a couple episodes of The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer. I know about awful.

Warning: There are numerous spoilers and some rather disgusting things that I will mention in my review of this Netflix series.

The origin of The Pentaverate dates back to a throwaway line from Myers’ second film, So I Married an Axe Murderer, where the father of Myers’ lead character, also played by Myers, claims that a secret society, the Pentaverate, a five-man cabal, which at one time included Colonel Sanders as a member, rules the world. In this series narrator Jeremy Irons tells us, the original members of the Pentaverate discovered in 1347, contrary to the belief of the Catholic Church, it was fleas that spread the bubonic plague. 

As the first episode begins, the newest member of the group of five, Dr. Hobart Clark (Keegan-Michael Key), a scientist, is accepted into the Pentaverate after he is kidnapped. Apparently, he is the first non-white fellow of the all-male group, replacing a member who mysteriously died. The other members are played by Myers. Lord Lordington, an elderly Englishman, Bruce Baldwin, an Australian media mogul, who of course is based on Rupert Murdoch, Shep Gordon, a manager of various rock acts, a real person who is the subject of a documentary directed by Myers, and Mishu Ivanov, a Russian oligarch and Vladimir Putin crony.

Warning! Not-safe-for-work language in the trailer.

But Myers isn’t done with his roles. The lead character of The Pentaverate is Ken Scarborough, a television reporter who wears plaid sportscoats; he is a quirky throwback from the 1970s who does man-on-the-street interviews of other oddballs, while overshadowing them. Scarborough works for, wait for it, Toronto-based CACA news. Yep, caca. 

The other four Pentaverate members manufacture a story that Dr. Clark, who was invited into the secret society because they believe he can reverse climate change, is dead. Clark’s phony passing occurs while attempting to mimic an internet video fad–kissing your own anus. Clark’s room at Pentaverate headquarters is guarded by a sasquatch, who immediately defecates outside the scientist’s door. 

In addition to a Shrek cameo, Myers plays two other characters, internet personality Rex Smith, a stand-in for Alex Jones, and Anthony Lansdowne, a conspiracy theorist from New Hampshire. 

Besides being an assault on good taste, The Pentaverate is an attack on right-wingers, with the implied message that all conservatives are conspiracy whackos like Lansdowne. He is a believer, or has been a believer, in QAnon, Pizzagate, and the Illuminati. His last words as he falls to his death is, “But what about her emails?” 

Lansdowne, in his bumper-sticker laden van, which not surprisingly has a malfunctioning portable toilet, drives Scarborough and his pre-woke Doctor Who-like young female companion, Reilly Clayton (Lydia West) to New York City, which looks nothing like today’s NYC, but more like your standard Doctor Who “future metropolis.” Scarborough, recently fired by CACA, is convinced by Clayton and Lansdowne to infiltrate Pentaverate headquarters, and he does so after a painful penis tug initiation. 

Clark, following an intimate evening with the Pentaverate’s executive assistant Patty Davis (Debi Mazar) in the Moon Room studio–did the Pentaverate fake the moon landings?–suddenly dies, this time for real. He is promptly replaced by casino billionaire Skip Cho (Ken Jeong). Oh, I have never thought Jeong was funny. Jeong recently showed his true political colors after childishly storming off the set of The Masked Singer after Rudy Giuliani was revealed as a contestant.

Myers seemingly hasn’t emotionally moved on from being an 11-year-old. Flatulence jokes are among the things that ruined his cinema take on Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat, a children’s film, by the way. Scatological so-called humor also undermined another Myers movie bomb, The Love Guru. 

Outside of Myers’ fading fame, why did Netflix greenlight this debacle? Could it be that woke Netflix executives fell in love with The Pentaverate’s snide attacks on conservatives, who they probably believe are personified by Smith and Lansdowne? I have liberal friends. Really, I do. And many of them insist that I take marching orders from Alex Jones.

Here’s a tip for Netflix and Myers: the first rule of comedy is that comedies need to be funny.

Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022. Its stock value plummeted 35-percent last month. Yes, when you go woke you go broke. And I can’t think of a single Netflix dramatic series that is aimed at conservatives. Longmire was the closest show I can think of, but production of it ended in 2017, and Longmire was originally an A&E offering. And as I wrote in last week’s review of Ozark, that otherwise quite enjoyable show contorted itself to find ways to attack Republicans.

Over 70 million Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2020. That’s a lot of viewers, Netflix. We don’t live in vans with clogged toilets. We own televisions. 

Cloying use of easter eggs, that is, references to other works that do nothing to advance the story or add laughs–assuming of course there is even one laugh in The Pentaverate–is also another problem here. Winks to other Myers’ works, along with yet another tired replay of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as Game of Thrones, are simply annoying. Rob Lowe, a veteran of several Myers movies, makes an unnecessary appearance.

Myers’ acting, outside of his sympathetic portrayal of Scarborough, is subpar. In his review of The Cat in the Hat, Roger Ebert noticed that at times Myers sounded a bit like his Linda Richman “Coffee Talk” character from SNL. The use of convincing accents is supposed to be one of Myers’ strengths, but his Lansdowne character’s accent, rather than sounding like what you’ll hear from a rustic New Englander, varies from a Canadian to a New Yorker style of speech–that is, when Lansdowne isn’t coming across like Wayne Campbell from Wayne’s World.

Oh, when there is a crack within the five members of the Pentaverate, who do you think is behind it? Why of course! It’s the casino billionaire and the Murdoch stand-in. 

I hated The Pentaverate. Hated, hated, hated. If you have any sense of taste or decency, you will hate it too. 

You have been warned. 

Oh, if you think I am just a grumpy old man with a minority opinion on this actual sh*t show, as of May 15, the average critic score on Rotten Tomatoes is just 20 percent. Only once in the last week have I noticed The Pentaverate ranking as a top-ten most viewed program on Netflix. And based on the CGI and the A-List (to some people) cast, I imagine Netflix wasted a lot of money on this fiasco.

The Pentaverate is rated TV-MA for full frontal (possibly with use of prosthetics) nudity, animals engaged in sex, violence, suicide, adult situations, foul language, and scatological references. Well, at least no one smokes in it. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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