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Paul Bedard:
“…The optimism Americans feel about their personal finances has touched a new high, setting the stage for President Trump to ride the economic recovery into the 2020 presidential campaign, according to a new survey.
The latest Gallup poll found that 56% rate their current financial situation as “excellent” or “good,” the highest in the poll dating to 2001.
What’s more, 69% said that they expect to be better off financially in a year, the highest for that finding in 16 years…”
“…The U.S. adding a robust 263,000 new hires in April while the unemployment rate fell to 3.6%, the lowest in a generation, according to a Labor Department report Friday. Nonfarm payroll growth beat Wall Street expectations of 190,000 and a 3.8% jobless rate, according to Dow Jones estimates…”
The circus in the House Judiciary Committee hearing this morning, and the wild accusations from Democrats in the House, are a smokescreen to give the Democratic media talking points and reasons not to cover the emerging, and shortly to be released, investigations into Obama Administration officials regarding malfeasance in the 2016 investigations into Clinton and Trump.
Real bombshells, not made up nonsense, are about to explode, and the Democrats are doing everything they can to divert attention.
JOE CONCHA:
“…CNN’s prime-time ratings dropped a whopping 26 percent in April compared to last year, according to Nielsen Media Research.
MSNBC’s ratings were down 14 percent in April 2019 compared to April 2018, while Fox News’s ratings overall were flat.
The sharp decrease for CNN marked its lowest-rated month in total viewers since October 2015.
In the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers covet most, it was the network’s least-watched month since Aug. 2015.
In prime time, Fox News finished first with an average of 2.4 million viewers. In April 2018, the network also averaged 2.4 million viewers, according to Nielsen.
MSNBC was second with an average of 1.66 million viewers, down from 1.93 million in April 2018.
CNN was third with 767,000 average primetime viewers, down from 1.04 million in April 2018…”
ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ:
“…When Kate Smith was a young, aspiring singer, she made a mistake, common in her time: she sang and recorded two songs with lyrics that today are understandably regarded as racially insensitive and offensive. She did not write the songs and she didn’t continue to sing them thereafter. Many other singers, including African-American legend, Paul Robeson, sang one of these songs as well. Back in the day, many lyrics reflected racial insensitivity.
Smith is now long gone, but her legacy is being attacked because of her youthful mistake. I am a Red Sox fan, so going to Yankee Stadium is for me, a painful reminder of how often the Yankees beat the Red Sox and my beloved Brooklyn Dodgers. But I always look forward to the playing of Smith’s rendition of “God Bless America.” No one ever sang this Irving Berlin classic quite the way she did. But the Yankees decided to end this tradition, as soon as the story of Smith’s youthful indiscretion became public. The Philadelphia Flyers went even further, removing her statue from in front of their arena.
So now let’s compare Smith’s youthful insensitivity toward race with the mature insensitivity of the New York Times with regard to anti-Semitism. The international edition of the New York Times republished a syndicated cartoon modeled on one that appeared in Nazi Germany in 1940. The Nazi cartoon showed a stereotypical Jew leading a naive Winston Churchill. The message was clear: Jews try to control the world by leading non-Jewish world leaders to do their bidding. The Times cartoon was even worse. It portrayed Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog with a Star of David around his neck leading a blind President Trump who was adorned by a kippah. The Times has acknowledged its mistake and insensitivity….”
Evergreen statement of the day.
The media and the Democrats lie about this statement over and over again.
Yisroel Goldstein, rabbi of Chabad of Poway:
“…The ambulances had not yet arrived. We all gathered outside. I don’t remember all that I said to my community, but I do remember quoting a passage from the Passover Seder liturgy: “In every generation they rise against us to destroy us; and the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hand.” And I remember shouting the words “Am Yisrael Chai! The people of Israel live!” I have said that line hundreds of times in my life. But I have never felt the truth of it more than I did then…”
JOHN HINDERAKER:
“…The White House Correspondents’ Association held its annual dinner Saturday night. Who knew? With President Trump and all senior members of his administration staying away, the event passed unnoticed. But Emily Zanotti has an account:
President Donald Trump announced several weeks ago that he would not appear at the annual event…for the third year in a row. For the first time, however, the president said all senior members of the White House staff will “boycott” the event.
***
That decision came after [Sarah] Huckabee Sanders endured cruel taunts at the hands of last year’s featured speaker, comedian Michelle Wolf. Fearing no Trump administration associate could show up at the WHCA dinner without being personally attacked, despite a longstanding tradition of good-natured ribbing between the press and the president through dueling speeches, the White House simply stopped RSVPing to the event.
Good for them. In response, the Correspondents’ Association dispensed with the usual “comedian.”
The White House Correspondents’ Association responded by making swift changes to the event’s lineup, substituting historian Ron Chernow for the expected comedy act, but it did not tempt the White House back to the dinner.
Interesting that with the White House not in attendance, the Association saw no point in hiring a comedian. Instead, the event turned gloomy.
President of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Olivier Knox, first delivered what Grabien News termed a “dark sermon” on the state of the First Amendment and the all-encompassing fear journalists who cover the president are now feeling.
Fear? Oh, please. Reporters and editors pretend to believe that the First Amendment is somehow in danger from the Trump administration, but they know better. Their real complaint is that the president has used his own right of free speech to expose their mendacity.
“I don’t want to dwell on the president,” Knox said. “This is not his dinner. It’s ours, and it should stay ours. But I do want to say this. In nearly 23 years as a reporter, I’ve been physically assaulted by Republicans and Democrats, spat on, shoved, had crap thrown at me. I’ve been told I will never work in Washington again by both major parties.”
Apparently being physically assaulted, spat on, shoved, threatened, etc. didn’t scare Knox. But Trump does?
“And yet I still separate my career to before February 2017 and what came after,” he continued. “And February 2017 is when the president called us the enemy of the people. A few days later my son asked me, ‘Is Donald Trump going to put you in prison?’ At the end of a family trip to Mexico he mused if the president tried to keep me out of the country, at least Uncle Josh is a good lawyer and will get you home.”
So we are to understand that journalists’ “fears” are based on the musings of small children? Needless to say, the Trump administration has not imprisoned any journalists, nor could it.
Ron Chernow joined in the gloom:
Historian Ron Chernow, perhaps best known for his biography of Alexander Hamilton which inspired the hit musical, also delivered a dark and ominous speech, comparing Trump’s relationship with the press to that of past presidents.
“George Washington felt maligned and misunderstood by the press, but he never generalized that into a vendetta against the institution,” Chernow told the audience.
Unlike Washington’s immediate successor, John Adams, who actually did jail a journalist.
Chernow then cautioned the audience to continue to report on the White House’s factual errors, lest the White House be allowed to whip the people into a frenzy for political gain — as though the press, which just spent the last 22 months pursuing an ultimately non-existent Trump-Russia election conspiracy, was blameless.
What chutzpah! Just about every liberal journalist in America should cover himself in sackcloth and ashes, repent, and take a vow of silence for at least the duration of the Trump administration.
“H.L. Mencken once warned of a political system that would ‘keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’ We simply cannot allow the press to become an imaginary hobgoblin exploited for political gain.”
Got that? Our “mainstream” press, which has long been biased but is now virtually demented, is an “imaginary hobgoblin.” Keep telling yourselves that, reporters. No one else is listening.
Related:
“…It’s wrong to think of them as an industry, or even as an institution. They’re a middle-school style clique, whose members’ chief goal is to perform for the approval of other clique members…”
Glenn Reynolds
Adam Kredo:
“…International peacekeepers stationed in Lebanon have confirmed Israeli intelligence showing the Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah has been operating several tunnels along Israel’s northern border, a tactic used by this group to conduct terrorist raids.
The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL, has confirmed the existence of at least five separate tunnels running between Lebanese and Israeli territory.
These types of underground bunkers have been used by Hamas and other terrorist groups to transport weapons and militants into Israeli territory in order to conduct attacks and kidnappings. Hezbollah, with Tehran’s backing, has also adopted this technique in a bid to cause further chaos on Israel’s northern border.
Israeli military officials forwarded to UNIFIL information on at least six separate tunnels, five of which the international group has been able to independently confirm…”
