Storm surge of media bias

“…“When it comes to extreme weather, Mr. Trump is complicit,” it read. “He plays down humans’ role in increasing the risks, and he continues to dismantle efforts to address those risks. It is hard to attribute any single weather event to climate change. But there is no reasonable doubt that humans are priming the Earth’s systems to produce disasters.”

In fact there are many questions as to what extent human activity is warming the Earth, though there is a verifiable warming trend, but that’s obviously not the most egregious charge made in the editorial.

To say that President Trump is complicit for this particular hurricane is a stretch, a distortion, a falsity and a swirling storm of mindless bombast. Not to mention highly irresponsible.

But the goal of the editorial, if not the paper, is to convince Americans that Donald Trump is the enemy of the people…”

http://www.bostonherald.com/opinion/editorials/2018/09/editorial_storm_surge_of_bias

The UN’s Palestinian refugee program perpetuated grievances and blocked peace. The U.S. is right to defund it.

“…UNRWA’s original mandate was to care for the displaced Arabs of 1948 and it is fair to say that it has pretty much accomplished that mission. Nearly all of the 1948 refugees spent the last half century of their lives in UNRWA camps (which grew into permanent neighborhoods and sprawling villages) in Jordan, where they received citizenship, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. It wasn’t a great existence, but the UNRWA provided a place to live, ample food, free medical care and schooling.

Those refugees are mostly gone now; only a few tens of thousands are still alive. But bureaucracies do not disappear just because their mission is complete. And so UNRWA found itself a new mission. It became a perpetual refugee-making machine, registering the children, grand-children and great-grand-children as bona fide refugees. The number ballooned to 5.4 million today from 700,000 in 1948. The U.S. provides about a quarter the agency’s annual budget.

UNRWA did nothing to help resettle these second, third and fourth generation refugees. It allowed its camps to be become a staging ground for terrorism. Worst of all, it educated students to believe that justice demanded armed liberation of their ancestral lands from the Zionist usurpers. Propagating the doctrine has been self-destructive, both to UNRWA and the people it supposedly serves…”

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-13/how-trump-s-mideast-moves-are-a-game-changer?srnd=opinion

Republicans Confirmed A Lot Of Judges While Everyone Was Focused On Brett Kavanaugh

Winning!

“…As the fight over Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the US Supreme Court unfolded this summer, consuming most of the oxygen available for judge-related punditry and spurring millions of dollars in ad spending by outside groups, the Senate confirmed more than two dozen of President Donald Trump’s judicial picks to lifetime appointments with little fanfare.

Twenty-six federal appeals and district court judges secured seats on the federal bench in the two months since Trump announced Kavanaugh as his latest Supreme Court nominee. That’s more than the number of judges confirmed in the first half of the year, and more than the number of judges confirmed in all of 2017.

Getting a second justice confirmed to the Supreme Court is a legacy-defining priority for the Trump administration. That White House counsel Don McGahn and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell managed to also pick up the pace on lower court judges while shepherding through Kavanaugh’s high-profile and contentious nomination underscores their shared drive to transform the entire federal judiciary while Republicans have the numbers in the Senate to do so.

The latest batch of newly confirmed judges includes five appeals court nominees. Only a small fraction of cases make it up to the Supreme Court, so the White House and Senate Republicans have placed a premium on getting seats filled on the circuit courts, where most cases end. Democrats over the summer agreed to expedite votes on 21 district court judges — a mix of nominees from red and blue states — to the dismay of liberals who want Democrats to use what limited tools they have left to hold up Trump’s picks. Two of the new district court judges received rare “not qualified” ratings from the American Bar Association…”

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/zoetillman/republicans-confirmed-trump-judges-kavanaugh?__twitter_impression=true

Facebook Bans Ex-Democrat #WalkAway Founder Weeks Before March On Washington

If you don’t know the big social media sites are censoring conservative speech its because you are not paying attention

“…He says that the ban has “devastated” his ability to reach people ahead of an October 26 march on Washington, all because of a Facbeook post that read: “Hey, Patriots! I’m going live on Infowars.com  in 15 minutes.”

Straka tweeted on Wednesday: “FACEBOOK JUST BANNED ME AS I AM PLANNING THE #WalkAway March on Washington!!! I have been banned from posting leading up to the March. This is devastated for our ability to reach people!!! I was banned for mentioning my interview with Alex Jones. Can anybody help???”…”

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-12/facebook-bans-ex-democrat-walkaway-founder-weeks-march-washington

The FB Censorship Army Is In Attack Mode, Just In Time For Midterms

“…I’m doing the best I can here to be calm and rational and I’m going to keep it as clean as possible.  I mean, I wouldn’t want the FACEBOOK POLICE TO SHUT ME DOWN OR ANYTHING.

You run that risk these days as a conservative.  And especially as a conservative woman.  The Zuck loves to smack us around.  Mansplain us.  Manhandle us.  We’re like the red-headed stepchildren in the social media world, dontchaknow.  We’re the scum of the social media family.  We’re treated like absolute sh*t, us conservatives…”

https://www.chicksonright.com/blog/2018/09/12/the-fb-censorship-army-is-in-attack-mode-just-in-time-for-midterms/

GOOGLE IS A DEMOCRATIC PARTY FRONT

John Hinderaker:

“…Someone leaked to Breitbart an hour-long video of an “all hands” Google meeting that was held just after the 2016 election. The video features Google’s co-founder, Sergei Brin, its CEO, Sundar Pichai, and numerous other high-ranking “Googlers” speaking in turn about the election’s tragic outcome. It is stunning.

All of the speakers express grief over Donald Trump’s election. All of the speakers assume that every Google employee is a Democrat and is stunned and horrified that Hillary Clinton–the worst and most corrupt presidential candidate in modern history–lost. There is much discussion about what Google can do to reverse the benighted world-wide tide exemplified by Brexit and Trump’s election. The insane doctrine of “white privilege” rears its head.

You really have to see it to believe it. Having suffered through the hour-long cri de cœur–OK, to be fair, there is a huge element of schadenfreude, too, and you will relish much of it–you probably will have several reactions: 1) These people may have certain valuable technical skills, but they aren’t very bright and are unusually lacking in self-awareness. 2) It is remarkable that they can achieve such an extraordinary monoculture in an organization with thousands of employees. It must require vigorous enforcement of right-think. 3) It is easy to see how these uniformly left-wing robots/people seamlessly transitioned into Resisting the duly elected Trump administration…”

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/09/its-official-google-is-a-democratic-party-front.php?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=sw&utm_campaign=sw

Tweet of the Day – Bias Against Conservatives at Google

End Game on Mueller Investigation

Conrad Black summarizes the end game on the Mueller Trump-Russia investigation and I could not have stated it better.

“…In their desperation to keep the president on his back foot until the midterm elections, the Democrats joined the Never Trump chorus in the McCain obsequies, and the habitually discredited political gossip Bob Woodward, reinforced by anonymous informants recruited or invented by the New York Times, wrote that the Trump White House was in chaos (irrelevant if the Constitution is not being violated and the policies work). Paid plants heckled at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings where Democratic senators reenacted a fictitious movie about a first-century slave revolt to protest the confidentiality of documents that had already been released, and Barack Obama hit the trail to rewrite the history of his broadly unsuccessful presidency. Even sensible and moderate commentators who don’t like Trump went back on autocue to announce that this was “the darkest hour” of Trump’s administration, as they have, every six weeks or so since the executive order about travelers from terrorism-plagued or -sponsoring countries in February 2017: Charlottesville, Helsinki, Manafort and Cohen, etc. Trump is about to declassify what congressional committees have been seeking, and the anti-Trump media will have real problems maintaining their implacable righteousness. By then, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe may have been indicted, and the charges won’t stop with him.

I recommend clemency. I don’t believe in a deep state, just an arrogant, smothering, bipartisan mindset that easily construed self-defense as service of the national interest, even when it involved criminal conduct. In this respect it does bear some comparison with the conduct of Nixon underlings in the Watergate era. The mystery is why Robert Mueller, for all his experience and vaunted probity, chose a gang of rabid Trump-haters to conduct this operation, and why, when he must have realized it was a wild goose chase, he didn’t fold it up or turn it into an investigation of the sleazy conduct of Trump’s enemies, which, given the Russian connection, would have been within his mandate. There is now evidence that Steele, even after he was fired by the FBI for leaking material, via senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr “and his lovely wife,” as Trump calls Mrs. Ohr (who worked at Fusion with Steele), moved straight to Mueller’s special-counsel team. Mueller may have mishandled this so badly, he ensnares himself in the misconduct of those who commissioned him. Mueller has prolonged this false cloud over the administration while using his authoritarian office to try to terrorize Paul Manafort into a false inculpation of the president, has mouse-trapped a couple of lesser figures (14 days in jail for George Papadopoulos), and purported to indict a number of Russians who will never appear in an American court and whose names could have been taken from the Moscow telephone directory.

The outcome of the midterm elections may depend on how quickly the administration can counter-attack on the legal front. When the Mueller charade is finally out of the way, everyone involved in the false applications for a FISA surveillance warrant against junior Trump campaign helper Carter Page will face the music, including Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and very prominent members of the Obama administration. Whatever happens in November, all this will unravel. The combination of the jungle ruthlessness of high American politics with the idealism of the Constitution occasionally creates bizarre and sordid dramas. Eventually, just when the pious claptrap about no one being above the law becomes almost insufferable, the puritanical conscience of America rises like a cobra and strikes the wrongdoers. The twist here is that the hunted president, who has broken no laws, will make the kill. It’s reality politics, wending toward a surprising climax…”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/robert-mueller-trump-russia-investigation-charade/

Image of the Day, Media Narrative on Hurricane – Trump is Complicit!

Meteorologist Joe Bastardi Destroys Media Hype on Hurricane-Global Warming Connection

Joe Bastardi has a great series of tweets on this issue and destroys media nitwits and cockamamie claims about global warming. Go read the thread. Its worth it.

https://twitter.com/BigJoeBastardi/status/1039586348930359296?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1039586348930359296&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitchy.com%2Fgregp-3534%2F2018%2F09%2F12%2Fno-clue-joe-bastardi-busts-climate-alarmists-linking-florence-to-global-warming%2F

The United States likely surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest crude oil producer earlier this year, based on preliminary estimates in EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO).

I am so old I can remember when the best minds and the best media said the U.S. could not drill its way to energy independence.

“…In February, U.S. crude oil production exceeded that of Saudi Arabia for the first time in more than two decades. In June and August, the United States surpassed Russia in crude oil production for the first time since February 1999.

Although EIA does not publish crude oil production forecasts for Russia and Saudi Arabia in STEO, EIA expects that U.S. crude oil production will continue to exceed Russian and Saudi Arabian crude oil production for the remaining months of 2018 and through 2019.

U.S. crude oil production, particularly from light sweet crude oil grades, has rapidly increased since 2011. Much of the recent growth has occurred in areas such as the Permian region in eastern Texas and western New Mexico, the Federal Offshore Gulf of Mexico, and the Bakken region in North Dakota and Montana.

Following the oil price decline in mid-2014, U.S. producers reduced their costs by temporarily scaling back crude oil production. However, after crude oil prices increased in early 2016, investment and production began increasing later that year. By comparison, Russia and Saudi Arabia have maintained relatively steady crude oil production growth in recent years…”

https://www.climatedepot.com/2018/09/12/the-united-states-is-now-the-largest-global-crude-oil-producer-surpassed-russia-and-saudi-arabia/

Journalism

Without evidence? How about the texts back and forth between FBI officials documenting their plans? Apparently CNN believes information from unverified anonymous sources is evidence, but digital capture of actual texts between individuals is not. Journalism!

Don’t Be Fooled, There Was Nothing ‘Financial’ About the 2008 Crisis

I generally supported President Bush’s bailout of the big financial companies in 2008. Now, I think time has shown that policy was a mistake.

“…Lehman’s bankruptcy didn’t cause a “crisis” as much as the Bush administration’s foolish decision to bail out Bear Stearns months before created the perception in the marketplace that Lehman would be saved too. As such, investors weren’t prepared for the correct decision to let Lehman go. Put simply, Lehman was only earth-shaking insofar as prior government intervention turned what was healthy into a surprise. And having erred mightily in bailing out Bear, the Bush administration chose to make a bad situation much worse.

Indeed, in conjunction with the SEC it banned short-selling on 900 different financial stocks. Talk about pouring gasoline onto the fire. Seemingly missed by Administration officials is that short sellers are ultimately buyers. When short sellers are able to express their pessimism in the marketplace, a huge reserve of buying power is created when we remember that shorts can only take profits insofar as they buy back the shares sold short. Yet when the markets needed them most as both price givers and liquidity providers, the Bushies banned them.

After that, bailouts are not free. Governments don’t mis-allocate the money of others only to walk away. They offer up the money of others only to demand a more muscular role in how the saved operate. Ok, but the 20th century was a monument to the failure of central planning. Is it any wonder that future-seeing investors looked negatively on a return of excessive government intervention in commerce?

What can’t be stressed enough about what happened in 2008 is that for economies to grow and markets to rise, it’s necessary that the mediocre and lousy constantly be replaced by the good and brilliant…”

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2018/09/11/dont_be_fooled_there_was_nothing_financial_about_the_2008_crisis_103409.html

Republican Attacked in California, Media Does Not Report

Glenn Reynolds:

WEIRD HOW THIS ISN’T GETTING MUCH PRESS EXCEPT ON DRUDGE:

If the parties were reversed there’d be calls for censorship of “hate sites,” and every GOP candidate would be asked about it by the press. But the Dems, and MSNBC, will escape all accountability I predict. Because our press is partisan and dishonest and corrupt and perfectly okay with violence so long as it’s against the right people.

How Anti-Trump Leakers Moved From Offense to Defense

“…A trail of evidence appearing in major news outlets suggests a campaign to undermine President Trump from within the government through illegal leaks of classified information, and then to thwart congressional investigators probing the disclosures. . . . Past and present U.S. officials say the template for the leak campaign can be traced back to the Obama administration’s efforts to sell the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which made the press reliant on background conversations and favorable leaks from government officials…”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/09/11/a_labyrinth_of_anti-trump_leaks_upon_anti-trump_leaks.html

Pope Francis: ‘The Great Accuser Has Been Unchained and Is Attacking Bishops’

The Pope has completely failed to address the real and criminal issues that affect the clergy. Does the Pope believe that blaming the accusations on the work of the devil will resolve the homosexual child abuse scandal and his failure to act on that scandal?

The Pope should resign.

“…During his homily at Mass on Tuesday morning, Pope Francis blamed the devil for the sexual abuse scandal that has shaken the Catholic church to its core. But not in the way you think. To the pope’s way of thinking it is the efforts to expose the sinful cover-ups of abusive clergymen that are the work of Satan.

Using the term “Great Accuser” during his homily at Casa Santa Marta on Tuesday morning, Pope Francis seemed to demonize those who question the actions of the leaders of the church, telling the assembled bishops that they seem to be under satanic attack in order to “scandalize the people.”…”

https://pjmedia.com/faith/pope-francis-the-great-accuser-has-been-unchained-and-is-attacking-bishops/

Small business optimism surges to highest level ever, topping previous record under Reagan

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/11/small-business-optimism-surges-to-highest-ever.html

GOVERNMENT FOR RENT

Iain Murray:

“…My organization (the Competitive Enterprise Institute) released a new report this morning by our brilliant Senior Fellow Chris Horner, detailing a scheme in which governors’ offices are coordinating with environmental activists and donors, who in turn are underwriting a massive, off-the-books campaign to provide staff and other resources to elected officials. The report, titled “Government for Rent: How Special Interests Finance Governors to Pursue Their Climate Policy Agenda,” uses public documents to demonstrate how donors are funneling tens of millions of dollars to privately fund staff—public relations professionals, consultants, and what aides call “necessary support functions”—for climate advocacy work at the governors’ disposal. This report follows Horner’s recent analysis detailing how activist donors are paying to place prosecutors in state attorney general offices to pursue an expressly partisan climate change agenda…”

9/11 Not Forgotten

Lee Harris:

“…Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.

They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.

They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.

The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours…”

‘Silent Donation’: Corporate Emails Reveal Google Executives’ Efforts to Turn Out Latino Voters Who They Thought Would Vote for Clinton

“…An email chain among senior Google executives from the day after the 2016 presidential election reveals the company tried to influence the 2016 United States presidential election on behalf of one candidate, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton. . . . The four page email begins with Murillo claiming she and others at Google were engaged in non-partisan activities not designed to help any one candidate or another—only to undercut her own commentary in later passages in the emails by openly admitting the entire effort to boost Latino turnout using Google products with official company resources was to elect Clinton over Trump. The critical miscalculation, Murillo wrote in a stunning admission in the email, was that Latino voters backed Trump by higher margins than any experts had forecast in the lead-up to the election. Trump’s 29 percent among Hispanics nationally blew prognosticators away, and he hit even higher numbers—about 31 percent—in the key battleground state of Florida, Murillo admitted…”

https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/09/10/silent-donation-corporate-emails-reveal-google-executives-efforts-to-swing-election-to-hillary-clinton-with-latino-outreach-campaign/

Doug Santo