The elite media has been largely dishonest in reporting on this issue in order to attack President Trump.
1 – The elite media says that family separation and incarceration of illegal migrant minors started under President Trump because of his zero tolerance policy. This is not the case and they well know it. For example, the Washington Post March 11, 2015 under Obama, wrote about this very issue:
2 – The truth about family separation. The elite media leaves out all of the important details which bring clarity to this issue. The vast majority of Central American children who show up at the border are unaccompanied by their parents. The Border Patrol says that up to 85%, nearly 207,000 children from 2007 -2015 were unaccompanied when apprehended at the border; meaning that that an overwhelming number show up already separated from their family.
Parents can be detained until trial, but children can only be detained for 20 days because of the 1997 court ruling Flores v. Reno, at which time children are moved to a non-detention like facility or placed with any relatives that can be found in the United States, hence they are “separated from their parents”. Such has been the case long before Trump was President.
3 – Media reports of Trump backing down on “family separation” are wildly misleading. What they are not telling you is that Trump’s executive order states that the few minor border crossers who enter with parents must stay with their parents for as long as it takes, thus ending the separation, however, an executive order cannot supersede current law so this executive order will almost certainly be overturned by the courts.
4 – The conditions in which many illegal migrant children were held were much worse under Obama while Democrats and the elite media kept it quiet. The main reason for this is that more suitable and luxurious dorm like accommodations were not built up yet as they are today.
If you want to see some of the conditions that these children were held while Obama was president you can see for yourself HERE.
5 – President Obama said the same thing when he was in office that Trump is saying today. He also prosecuted many illegal border crossers:
Wow. Obama really did agree with @realDonaldTrump on Immigration.
Please show this to all your friends because the media lies about this, especially on CNN, are outrageous:
1 – A SPY is someone who is sent in to infiltrate and inform surreptitiously and is often paid to do so – this is what they did to Trump.
2 – An INFORMANT is someone who was already there and would approach the FBI (for example) and inform as to what he had seen voluntarily.
Quote:
…leaders of our institutions aren’t above engaging in spying. John Brennan spied on the legislative branch and lied about it to the American people. James Clapper spied on the American people through a domestic surveillance program and lied about it to Congress. Although the Obama administration never tweeted nasty attacks on journalists, it did spy on and prosecute them. It’s completely plausible that those in the upper echelon of law enforcement saw Trump as a threat, then used wobbly evidence as the pretext to investigate his campaign. If not, it’ll be good to clear their names.
“FBI used informant to investigate Russia ties to campaign, not to spy, as Trump claims,” read a truly sillyNew York Times headline last week. You can call it whatever makes you happy, but in the real world the act of furtively gathering information about someone else is called “spying.”
The Washington Postreported, for instance, that the informant was surreptitiously seeking information by “seeking out and meeting three different Trump campaign officials.” The spy, according to the piece, had contacts with the CIA. This is unprecedented.
Did anyone notice that Reince Priebus’ ouster as Chief of Staff was NOT leaked in advance? It speaks volumes about who Reince brought with him.
I think that Reince is an OK guy, but he brought in people who are RNC fund raisers and creatures of that world. Trump’s whole campaign is FU to the big donors and their control of the leadership of both parties.
I understand why Trump tried to reconcile those two worlds but it isn’t happening. One must defeat the other. Either the government runs on the consent of the governed or it will be controlled by a rich elite. One wins, one loses.
No matter what one thinks of Scaramucci, it looks like he was right.
Good journalism is important especially when there is so little of it. While the networks have digressed into reporting mostly corrupted news tabloid infotainment, formerly respected news sources such as The Hill and Forbes have been falling into the same unethical trap in hopes of generating “conflict” and “red meat” for certain groups of readers in hopes of keeping circulation and click rates up.
While Forbes still does some good reporting, their employee, Dan Alexander, continues to post dishonest hit piece after hit piece. He uses the same technique that many other corrupted journalists do, instead of just making things up he delivers partial facts from an incomplete context and combines that with a false narrative.
The article, starts by insulting those who attend the Eric Trump Foundation (ETF) charity event at Trump National Golf Club. After giving Eric Trump the obligatory pat on the head for raising money for St. Judes Children’s Hospital, the article goes on to explain to the reader how the Eric Trump Foundation is some kind of criminal front to launder charity money right back into their own pockets. The article however, omits key facts.
The Trump’s allow the use of the their golf course for free. The article paints that out to be a lie because the golf course billed ETF for expenses, quite deliberately blurring a very important distinction:
Say I want to hold a charity awards dinner at your house and you offer up your home for free for the event. Does that also mean that you will supply the food, catering personnel, parking, lights, extra seating, PA system, music, security and cleanup at your dime? Of course not.
Not charging for the use of the golf course is one thing, but the course should be reimbursed for the employees it needs to have on hand at the event, parking, catering, top VIP level security, repairs to the course after the event, etc.
While acknowledging that the golf event raises millions, Eric Trump is blasted because the expenses for the event keep going up every year, the article all but straight up accuses the Trump’s of criminally skimming the charity for personal gain.
What the article omits is that as the Trump’s global fame has increased exponentially thanks to “The Apprentice” having been a number one rated show and their increased political status, so it also makes sense that the charity event grows bigger every year, with more people showing up, more VIP’s and celebrities, more television coverage, better entertainment, bigger awards, more security etc.
Also keeping things into perspective, why would the Trump’s risk their entire brand, lawsuits and all that goes along with it, just to skim say $20-50 thousand in charity funds per year when such an amount of money is literally a pittance to a Trump?
According to Dan Alexander, author of this hit piece so carefully worded to just avoid a
Dan Alexander
libel suit, he and his pals at Forbes could not conceivably need $320,000 to run (their words) “a golf tournament”, and they know because they asked the lead golf instructor at Trump National too.
Last we checked, neither Dan Alexander, nor the lead golf instructor, have any experience running huge media celebrity charity events.
Alexander’s Twitter feed is typical Trump-hate fare complete with Russian conspiracy theories. Why Forbes employs someone like this can baffle anyone who took J-School ethics seriously.
The other big scandal mentioned in Alexander’s hit piece is that some of the money raised by ETF is given to other charities so all of it does not go to St. Judes. How nefarious. What Alexander omits is that this is not unusual among charities in the least. One needs to look no further than to the Red Cross, who shares a portion of its donations with various charity partners around the world.
By libeling the Eric Trump Foundation, Forbes is not likely to damage President Trump, but it is likely to impact the donations coming ETF, which only serves to hurt the children served by St. Judes.
President Trump is going to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord tomorrow.
The elite media culture is going to completely lose their minds. International corporations who have invested in “climate change” regulations as a tool to lock out cheaper competition and innovators will display a phony panic.
UPDATE – For example, here is Apple CEO Jim Cook on the Paris Accord:
Decision to withdraw from the #ParisAgreeement was wrong for our planet. Apple is committed to fight climate change and we will never waver.
Apple products are made in China—which as part of the Paris Accord is conveniently exempt from carbon limits.
There are a few facts that you need to know.
1 – If everyone who wanted the Paris Accord actually agreed to it the result, in theory based on computer models that have never accurately predicted temperatures in real life, might affect the temperature by a tiny fraction of a degree over hundreds of years.
2 – But in reality the Paris Accord is based on junk science which is why Global Warming Alarmists have simply given up on debates with real scientists and climate realists as they always lose.
3 – Europe is already in deep violation of the Paris Accord as their CO2 production levels keep rising.
4 – But no one cares about Europe. The Paris Accord is about sticking it to the United States.
5 – Most of the world is not signed on anyways (or simply signed on and ignored it like China) so by complying with it all we are doing is hobbling our economy while others sit back and laugh at us.
6 – The Paris Accord would have required the United States to pay less productive countries direct payments because they produce less than us. The United States would be forced to subsidize third world dictators and tyrannical regimes like Venezuela who would use that money to murder political opposition etc. We are $20 trillion in debt.
7 – No matter what the media says, CO2 is not a poison or pollution. It is vital for life. Plants use it for food.
Raw political operatives should not sit in top national security positions.
Bill Clinton did not have his chief political advisor, Dick Morris, on his National Security Council (NSC). George W. Bush did not have Karl Rove on his NSC. This writer thought that it was rather odd that Trump put Steve Bannon on his.
Politics and National Security often present a conflict of interest as we have all seen with Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, who was in reality nothing more than a raw political operative and thug. Rice used her position as head of the NSC for political reasons. Rice survielled Donald Trump and his campaign, spread parts of the information around in hopes to damage him. In doing so she is likely guilty of multiple felonies and for the sake of the country, if guilty, this writer hopes to see her remaining productive years spent in a federal penitentiary.
Steve Bannon is a political strategist, PR genius and an ideologue. In this writer’s view he is the right ideologue in the right place at the right time. The NSC is not the place for a chief political operative as recent events have shown.
Trump has moved former Texas Governor Rick Perry into the NSC and as an expert on the Texas border just as construction of the wall is about to begin there may be no better place for him at this time.
Trump prides himself on putting the right people in the right places. As he learns in his new job we are seeing him do just that.
Talk about disappointments. The US government’s much-anticipated analysis of Russian-sponsored hacking operations provides almost none of the promised evidence linking them to breaches that the Obama administration claims were orchestrated in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.
The 13-page report, which was jointly published Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, billed itself as an indictment of sorts that would finally lay out the intelligence community’s case that Russian government operatives carried out hacks on the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Clinton Campaign Chief John Podesta and leaked much of the resulting material. While security companies in the private sector have said for months the hacking campaign was the work of people working for the Russian government, anonymous people tied to the leaks have claimed they are lone wolves. Many independent security experts said there was little way to know the true origins of the attacks.
Sadly, the JAR, as the Joint Analysis Report is called, does little to end the debate. Instead of providing smoking guns that the Russian government was behind specific hacks, it largely restates previous private-sector claims without providing any support for their validity. Even worse, it provides an effective bait and switch by promising newly declassified intelligence into Russian hackers’ “tradecraft and techniques” and instead delivering generic methods carried out by just about all state-sponsored hacking groups.
Dwight Schultz of A-Team and Star Trek fame has a podcast worth listening to. In it has covers various subjects such as American politics, international affairs, Hollywood and at other times he just goes on an epic rant.
While most remember Dwight Schultz as Howling Mad Murdoch from The A-Team, I find myself appreciating his talents more on Star Trek where he played Lt. Reginald Barclay, a gifted physicist and engineer who suffers from severe anxiety disorder as well as a speech impediment. It is for this reason and the sheer ignorance of others which causes him to not be taken seriously, although he is more talented than almost everyone around him.
Very few superstar celebrities from entertainment actually take the time to do serious homework and can quote real evidence and arguments with the very best of them. Chuck Woolery is such a person, as are James Woods, Dwight Schultz, Dirk Benedict, Adam Baldwin, Kevin and Sam Sorbo.
Others worth mentioning are David Mamet and the late Ron Silver, who after they had made their fame and fortune, took the time to dig deep into the issues and completely abandoned the leftist orthodoxy.
I am sure that I am missing a few that are worth mentioning but no insult is intended.
Getting back to Chuck Woolery, not only does he do his homework, but he is very clever. Enjoy the following:
Woolery has his own podcast called Blunt Force Truth which can be listened to on Tunein, itunes and Stitcher.
Somethings are dumb, but sometimes the stupid is so over the top that it becomes corruption and when it comes to media corruption no one had more of it than our friends at CNN.
We are going to cover more about so called “Russian hacking” over the next few days, but the bottom line is this.
What we know:
1 – John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, The State Department under Hillary, and the DNC did not take cyber security seriously. Their flouting of even the most basic security rules amounted to violations of law.
2 – They did not keep software updates, antivirus and anti-malware security updated.
3 – Podesta himself had responded to one of those fake “send us your password” fishing emails that people with a brain simply delete. Some news outlets are reporting that Podesta, who was Hillary’s Campaign Chairman, even use the word “password” as his password for some accounts.
4 – The DNC prevented the FBI from reviewing their computers so they have no idea what happened there.
5 – The “US Intelligence Community” under Obama, who has been caught politicizing intelligence before, put out a report with “High Confidence” that it was the Russians who hack Hillary’s Campaign emails, but gives next to no supporting evidence which is unusual.
6 – Said report also shows that Podesta had an 18 month old malware program on his PC which could have sent his passwords out over the internet, but such software is unsophisticated, leaves an evidence trail, something any UPDATED anti-malware scanning program would have found, and in short is not something a state actor would use.
7 – Democrats and their allies in the elite media are desperate to create a narrative to delegitimize Trump’s electoral victory.
Getting back to CNN. Here is the story as it looks today, after they scrubbed it and cleaned it up, after being called out. Here is what it looked like on December 30th (Hat tip BGR):
The screen shot is obviously from the video game Fallout 3 or Fallout 4 as you can see from this Fallout 3 screenshot below:
Academics are taught about evidence, what it is and what it isn’t, and yet our universities have become so politically radicalized that all of that training is tossed out the window. For the far left, truth simply isn’t a value and as we have written about several times, they say as much in their own writings repeatedly.
This is the kind of person that your children are exposed to on campus every day. SUNY Geneseo Professor Tony Macula:
Everything that Reince Priebus says in here is absolutely true. What CIA assessment? Two newspapers who have been caught lying and spreading fake news against Donald Trump now say that there is an unnamed source in the CIA that says that there is an assessment that falsely claims that the RNC was hacked by the Russians and that the Russians were the cause of Trump winning the election because the Clinton Campaign and the DNC emails were released.
WikiLeaks says that they did not get the email from the Russians and the so called “17 agencies” mentioned by Chuck Todd said that their results were inconclusive but that some of the the hacking attempts detected were consistent with methods used by some Russian hackers. Of course, if the Clinton’s were not contemptuous of digital security protocols in the first place……
Keep in mind that the crimes, dirty tricks and corruption revealed in those emails were true. There was no serious attempt at refutation of them as many of the emails were DKIM authenticated making the spoofing of them near impossible.
That said, the CIA has engaged in partisan hit jobs before such as the faux Valerie Plame scandal and the infamous Iran Memo when President Bush was in office.
Legendary under cover journalist James O’Keefe exposed on video the Clinton Campaign hiring of thugs to create violence at Trump events, mass vote fraud, bussing in of people to claim they are citizens in order to vote for them etc.
O’Keefe spoke at David Horowitz’ “Restoration Weekend” and this is very much worth your time:
Religious people and many who tend to skip elections turned out huge for Donald Trump, a non-denominational Christian with three divorces under his belt. Why?
Prof. Bernstien argues that the Democrats own arguments in front of the Supreme Court energized churches and talk radio like never before.
Aside from Hobby Lobby and the gay marriage arguments mentioned by Prof. Bernstein. I would also add the arguments Democrats made in Citizens United v. FEC.
In Citizens United, President Obama’s Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart, said in oral arguments that any book, movie, film, video, on paper, digital or otherwise covering politics could be banned by the government if a corporation was involved in its production or distribution.
Think about that for a moment, all book stores are corporations as are most internet providers. Want to post to Facebook or your blog – sorry a corporation. Banks who provide loans are corporations, companies who provide paper are corporations. In short, the Obama Administration argued for the virtual repeal of part of the 1st Amendment by judicial fiat.
So upset were Democrats when the Supreme Court ruled against the government that President Obama dressed down the Supreme Court during a State of the Union speech and Democrats in the Senate even voted unanimously for a constitutional amendment resolution repealing many of the political speech protections of the 1st Amendment.
To what can we attribute Trump’s success? The most logical answer is that religious traditionalists felt that their religious liberty was under assault from liberals, and they therefore had to hold their noses and vote for Trump. As Sean Trende of RealClear Politics noted, since 2012:
Democrats and liberals have: booed the inclusion of God in their platform at the 2012 convention (this is disputed, but it is the perception); endorsed a regulation that would allow transgendered students to use the bathroom and locker room corresponding to their identity; attempted to force small businesses to cover drugs they believe induce abortions; attempted to force nuns to provide contraceptive coverage; forced Brendan Eich to step down as chief executive officer of Mozilla due to his opposition to marriage equality; fined a small Christian bakery over $140,000 for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding; vigorously opposed a law in Indiana that would provide protections against similar regulations – despite having overwhelmingly supported similar laws when they protected Native American religious rights – and then scoured the Indiana countryside trying to find a business that would be affected by the law before settling upon a small pizza place in the middle of nowhere and harassing the owners. In 2015, the United States solicitor general suggested that churches might lose their tax exempt status if they refused to perform same-sex marriages. In 2016, the Democratic nominee endorsed repealing the Hyde Amendment, thereby endorsing federal funding for elective abortions.
Megan McArdle of Bloomberg similarly pointed out, “Over the last few years, as controversies have erupted over the rights of cake bakers and pizza places to refuse to cater gay weddings, the rights of nuns to refuse to provide insurance that covers birth control, the rights of Catholic hospitals to refuse to perform abortions, and the rights of Christian schools to teach (and require students and teachers to practice) traditional Christian morality, some Christians have begun to feel that their communities are under existential threat.”
….
In short, many religious Christians of a traditionalist bent believed that liberals not only reduce their deeply held beliefs to bigotry, but want to run them out of their jobs, close down their stores and undermine their institutions. When I first posted about this on Facebook, I wrote that I hope liberals really enjoyed running Brendan Eich out of his job and closing down the Sweet Cakes bakery, because it cost them the Supreme Court. I’ll add now that I hope Verrilli enjoyed putting the fear of government into the God-fearing because it cost his party the election.
UPDATE: As co-blogger Todd Zywicki wrote to me on Facebook, “When you find yourself in the Supreme Court adverse to the Little Sisters of the Poor you might consider whether maybe you have pushed a little too far.”
Former and current black employees on Tuesday filed a class action lawsuit against Atlanta-based CNN, Turner Broadcasting and New York based parent company Time Warner for racial discrimination.
“As a result of the current discrimination lawsuit filed on behalf of DeWayne Walker vs. CNN, Time Warner & Turner, we have uncovered stories involving abuse of power, nepotism, revenge, retaliation and discrimination,” said Daniel Meachum said in a press release.
The press release provided a photo of DeWayne Walker, a CNN producer who sued CNN individually in January for $50 million for racial discrimination and retaliation for filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He accused CNN of not promoting him over 13 years because he is black, skipped over frequently for promotions in favor of white employees.
Walker is not actually a plaintiff in this particular case but is a client of Meachum’s and his individual lawsuit is still active. Celeslie Henley, a former executive administrative assistant at CNN, and Ernest Colbert Jr., a senior manager at TBS, are the only named plaintiffs though Meachum said 20 to 30 other unnamed current and former Turner employees helped him out with information about their experiences.
“This discrimination represents a company-wide pattern and practice,” the lawsuit asserts, “rather than a series of isolated incidents.” He said the company has been discriminating against blacks for more than 20 years.
The elite media is a bubble as we have seen by this past election. A previous example is when the New York Times’ lone “conservative columnist” announced that he was voting for Bill Clinton. To be fair, Safire did come back around to a degree.
The modern version, albeit worse, is the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin whose column is wrongfully named “Right Turn”. Rubin has been on a hate screed against any Republican bucking the corrupt status quo for years. You do not have to take our word for it, just browse her columns and start reading what she has to say about Republican reformers just since 2009. Rubin is indeed the far left’s favorite “”””Republican”””.
There is an important distinction between having a problem with excessive and unwise immigration policy and having a problem with an immigrant simply because he or she happens to be an immigrant. One position is perfectly reasonable, the other is much less so. Imagine how easy it is to word an immigration question to get the desired result of “Trump voters don’t like immigrants.”
In this video Rubin cites “polls” who go unnamed that she says back up her claim. Rubin knew Carlson was going to ask her about this as that is almost all he has done on his show since the election and yet she provided no citation, nor did she cite a verifiable one in her column.
Our friend John Hawkins has a nice list of famous fake news by the elite media.
CNN running propaganda for Saddam Hussein is worthy on any list. Another worthy of mention is the Obama Administration and Hillary Clinton blaming the Benghazi attack on a YouTube Video.
Hawkins’ list:
Newsweek’s Flushing the Koran story.
CBS forging National Guard documents to embarrass President Bush.
Selectively editing and lying about the George Zimmerman tape.
NBC’s exploding truck.
NYT Jason Blair scandal.
Rolling Stone rape story on the University of Virginia.
The Islamic militants understand how stupid political correctness is, they also understand that it is a weapon in their arsenal that helped them conquer Lebanon and get deep into Europe and the United States.
Abdul Razak Artan, the Ohio State University jihad attacker, recently appeared in Ohio State University’s The Lantern, in a feature entitled “Humans of Ohio State.” In it, he played the victim and spoke about being nervous about performing his Islamic prayers in public:
“I just transferred from Columbus State. We had prayer rooms, like actual rooms where we could go to pray because we Muslims have to pray five times a day. There’s Fajr, which is early in the morning, at dawn. Then Zuhr during the daytime, then Asr in the evening, like right about now. And then Maghrib, which is like right at sunset and then Isha at night. I wanted to pray Asr. I mean, I’m new here. This is my first day. This place is huge, and I don’t even know where to pray. I wanted to pray in the open, but I was kind of scared with everything going on in the media. I’m a Muslim, it’s not what the media portrays me to be. If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don’t know what they’re going to think, what’s going to happen. But, I don’t blame them, it’s the media that put that picture in their heads so they’re just going to have it and it, it’s going to make them feel uncomfortable. I was kind of scared right now. But I just did it. I relied on God. I went over to the corner and just prayed.”
I will just say it up front that I am not a fan of Megyn Kelly’s “journalism.” She hypes conflict and controversializes subjects and people to benefit herself. Conflict bias and hype is one of the biggest problems in journalism today.
That said, when Kelly gets it right this writer will say so.
The idea that Ben Carson isn’t capable of stepping into a new policy area such as HUD is preposterous on it’s face. Why?
Carson was a top military ROTC student leader, he is perhaps the most innovative brain surgeon in the history of the world, he started the famed Carson Scholars Fund which helps disadvantaged children get a quality education, Hollywood did a movie about his life, in a short time he became an expert on various political philosophies and can quote and debate the most noted political philosophers with anyone. Carson has debated and lectured on economic policy, health care law, trade policy, foreign policy etc, all self taught.
Governor Huckabee rightly points out that Barack Obama had virtually no qualifying experience when he ran for president and those who pointed that out were called racists by the Democrats and their allies in the elite media.
The New York Times exposed the threat of fake news even before the election of Donald Trump two weeks ago, arguing that spreading faulty information is a threat to the Republic.
The paper highlighted alt-right conspiracy websites publishing outrageous lies masquerading as news in a piece headlined“Journalism’s Next Challenge: Overcoming the Threat of Fake News.” The Times interviewed journalists and “longtime critic of fake news” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) about how credulous Americans often fall for narratives that confirm their pre-existing biases without proper vetting from objective reporters.
“If you have a society where people can’t agree on basic facts, how do you have a functioning democracy?” asked one D.C. editor.
Times readers had the inside scoop that the nation was witnessing “Hispanics Surge to Polls,” which would serve as the mortar in Hillary Clinton’s blue wall. The surge would not have been possible without the Clinton campaign, which was “Looking to Expand Lead With Hispanics” through Spanish-language ads and get-out-the-vote operations, as the Times reported on Oct. 2.
The New York Times‘ report on “dangerously fake news” ran alongside a report that “Hispanic America has been mobilized like never before in the 2016 election, and is emerging as a formidable force with the power to elect a president.”
“Energized by anger at Mr. Trump and an aggressive Democratic campaign to get them to the polls, Latinos are turning out in record numbers and could make the difference in the outcome in several highly contested states,” the Times reported.
The Times did not just rely on shoe leather but on hard facts so often missing from fake news sites. Without data, those susceptible to fake news can be led astray, such as the Pennsylvania voters who insisted Trump would win the state—a belief shared only by those trapped in a “bubble of such devoted [Trump] followers.” If Trump supporters ventured outside of their bubble, they would have known that “Trump Can’t Count on Those ‘Missing White Voters.’”
“The surge is real, and it’s big. It could be enough to overcome Mr. Trump’s strength among white working-class voters in the swing states of Florida and Nevada. If it does, it will almost certainly win her the election,” the Times reported.
Hispanics represented 11 percent of the electorate in 2016, the same as its 2012 share of the vote. Trump performed better with those voters than Mitt Romney did in 2012, according to exit polls. The election results were no better for the other groups that Times promised its readers would flock to Hillary and rebuke Trump: He won 8 percent of black voters, not the 4 percent that the Times saidhe would. Hillary also failed to garner the 20-point edge among women the Times suggested she would win, nabbing only 54 percent of the female vote.
The daunting poll numbers Trump faced led the Times to ask “Is This Election Over” on an Oct. 18 podcast, as Clinton’s chance of victory creeped up to 91 percent. The podcast came the same day the Times reported that the Clinton campaign aimed to turn a sure-fire victory into a blow-out with “its most ambitious push yet into traditionally right-leaning states.”
The GOP was in danger of losing statehouses across the country, while Clinton hoped a mandate and coattails would give Democrats control of the House and Senate. North Carolina was in play. So was Texas. Democrats were instructed “don’t gloat,” while reporters wondered how Republicans would address the “crucial and onerous decisions” to stonewall or negotiate with Clinton because “Mrs. Clinton is also viewed as someone capable of breaking the ice with congressional Republican leaders.”
With the race already decided, the Times turned its focus to the biggest storyline of the last two weeks of the election: Trump supporters rioting in the streets prompted by the billionaire’s insistence that the vote was rigged.
No one felt the threat of Trump’s looming fascism as acutely as the news media.
“Partisan Crowds at Trump Rallies Menace and Frighten News Media,” the paper reported on Oct. 15. Two days later the tone went from menacing to “sinister,” as news organizations began “providing security for staff members covering Trump rallies.” A child reporter from Scholastic was alarmed by the dangerous chorus of boos directed at the press by Trump. Meanwhile, “Hair Force One” was notorious for bumpy landings, “an apt metaphor for Donald J. Trump’s entire presidential run: chaotic, turbulent and skittering just on the edge of disaster.”
Times readers were also exposed to the human sides of each candidate. They learned how Trump was giving pre-school classes the opportunity to dialogue about bullying and fat shaming and toxic masculinity.
“She’s drenched now, her voice hoarse. The storm is mussing her hair. It’s time to leave the stage. But just before doing so, she turns and raises both arms, giving herself up to the storm and the moment—and the looming end of this adventure,” the Times reported.
The fake journalism that helped elect Donald Trump is now enemy number one for the fourth estate.
“The cure for fake journalism is an overwhelming dose of good journalism. And how well the news media gets through its post election hangover will have a lot to do with how the next chapter in the American political story is told,” one Times writer noted shortly before Trump’s massive victory.
Remember when CNN forged up the phony National Guard documents against President Bush? CNN was caught colluding with the Clinton Campaign and the DNC to generate false narratives to help Democrats win. Now CNN complains because Trump gives them the hand. Can anyone blame him?
The Congressional Budget Office CBO predicted that profits from ObamaCare’s top insurance companies would generate $8 Billion for the “Risk Corridor” – the pool of money to help insurers that lost money in the program. So how did the CBO do?
The new data shows that the amount insurers who made money in the individual market were required to contribute in 2015 was $89 million but the claims by losers against that money for that year amount to $5.3 billion. This is a ratio of about 60 to 1. The figures for the small group market are even worse: profitable insurers contributed a paltry $6 million to Risk Corridors. Losers in the small group market are owed $594 million for 2015.
It is hard to overstate how bad the 2015 data is. Here are some ways of assessing the magnitude of the financial bloodbath.
Although the individual market was considerably bigger in 2015 than it was in 2014, contributions to Risk Corridors were only about 1/4 as much in the individual market
There was one insurer in the individual market who made enough money in the exchanges that it could contribute over $10 million into Risk Corridors. There were 105 insurers in the individual market who lost enough money in the exchanges that they are owed over $10 million.
There was one insurer in the small group market who made enough money in the exchanges that it could contribute over $1 million into Risk Corridors. There were 61 insurers in the small market who lost enough money in the exchanges that they are owed over $10 million.
There were 24 states in which not a single insurer made a contribution to Risk Corridors in the individual market.
There were 33 states in which not a single insurer made a contribution to Risk Corridors in the small group market.
There are nine insurers (Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas”, “Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois”, “Blue Cross and Blue Shield of NC”, “Freelancers Health Service Corporation d/b/a Health Republic Insurance of New York”, “BCBSM, INC.”, “Highmark Inc.”, “Health Net Life Insurance Company”, “Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oklahoma”, “Humana Employers Health Plan of Georgia, Inc.”, “Colorado Health Insurance Cooperative, Inc.”) that have each requested more than $100 million in Risk Corridors money — more than all the contributions for 2015 put together.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas did so poorly it has requested $596 million in Risk Corridors money. It likely won’t see a dime of it. (This might explain why Blue Cross/Blue Shield requested a 58% rate increase for 2016).
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Political Arena 