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Ruth King

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Jeffrey Toobin and the Media’s Curious Code of Decency By Mark Heimingway

By on December 19th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/12/19/jeffrey_toobin_and_the_medias_curious_code_of_decency_144888.html

Some 3,000 Americans a day are dying of COVID-19, a significant chunk of the country won’t accept November’s election results, and Russian hackers appear to have compromised much of the federal government. Amid this mayhem, the mainstream media found time to address an issue that most Americans haven’t given a second thought: Will Jeffrey Toobin’s career survive?

In case you haven’t heard – or have mercifully forgotten – during an Oct. 15 New Yorker magazine staff meeting held on Zoom, the 60 year-old Toobin “was seen lowering and raising his computer camera, exposing and touching his penis, and motioning an air kiss to someone other than his colleagues,” according to a New York Times report. Dozens of staff members from the venerable magazine were assembled online for an election simulation exercise, which in retrospect sounds like an unfortunate euphemism.

On Nov. 11, Condé Nast, which owns The New Yorker, fired Toobin from a job he’d held for 27 years. Although he’s on self-imposed leave at CNN, he is still employed as its chief legal analyst. “Three CNN employees say that network president, Jeff Zucker, is a big fan of Mr. Toobin’s and a believer in second chances,” reports the Times.

Society’s blithe acceptance of ubiquitous Internet pornography might make an inadvertent indiscretion in front of your home computer seem understandable to many. However, for Toobin this isn’t a first transgression – it’s déjà vu all over again. His smarmy behavior has been public knowledge for a very long time. The Times recounts how in 2003 the married Toobin asked out a colleague. Before they could even go out, he left her an answering machine message explicitly describing in vulgar detail the sex acts he wanted to perform with her.

In 2008, Toobin had an affair with Casey Greenfield, the much-younger daughter of veteran political journalist Jeff Greenfield. When Casey Greenfield became pregnant, Toobin reportedly offered her money to have an abortion. When she refused, he told her he would make her regret the decision. After the child was born, Toobin had to be dragged into court and forced to pay child support.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The never-ending smugness of the NeverTrumpers They knew they were right even when they were wrong Douglas Murray

By on December 19th, 2020

https://spectator.us/nevertrumpers-betrayal/

In March 2016 as Donald Trump looked likely to be the Republican party’s nominee to run for president, more than 100 foreign policy professionals signed a letter vowing not only that they wouldn’t work for him should he become president but that they would work ‘energetically’ to prevent his election. As the months wore on, the light in which the signatories appeared often shifted. Once Trump became the nominee, and then the President, these representatives of the ‘national security community’ appeared to have demonstrated one of the most damaging things any such group could demonstrate: their own irrelevance.

It turned out that more than a decade and a half into a set of wars that the world’s most advanced military had managed to fight to various draws, the American public did not much want to hear from foreign policy professionals.

Once Trump was actually in office the whole thing appeared in another light. A Republican president was in the White House, but 120 people who would normally have filled the administration of such a president had already signed a document vowing not to work for him. A number of people who would have been crucial in specific roles were overlooked because they had signed this and other similar letters.

Shortly after this vetting was becoming clear, I met with one of those who had convened the biggest NeverTrumper list. In retrospect, I asked, was it wise of him to have invited so many people who could have been of serious service to their country to effectively remove themselves from the running? The convener had no qualms. The Trump team were struggling already — and would struggle for another four years — to fill up many of the key foreign policy positions. But it was worth it. The NeverTrumpers were not cooperating. All they needed to do was to sit back and be seen to be right. Though few did fully sit back. For four years, the NeverTrumpers formed groups and pacs, filed columns and blogs and launched many a derisive tweet. But at least they had not contaminated themselves.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

WHO IS STEALING AMERICA?

By on December 19th, 2020

Riveting and crystal clear. Watch when you have an hour and a half to focus on this excellent presentation.

https://www.youmaker.com/video/60bb93fa-d621-4d44-b9d0-420b9621cb57

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BOOKS, HISTORY Comments turned off

Tintin and the Jews By Michael Connor

By on December 19th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/12/tintin-and-the-jews/

The journalist, one of the real figures on whom the cartoon Tintin was based, spent three days in the Lwow ghetto. What he saw overturns much that I thought I knew about the Holocaust. The Jews he observed in the pretty Polish city, now in Ukraine, were crammed into hell: “The life they live here is infernal. They all want to flee.”

The people:

The sons of Israel, walking vultures, wander day and night in the alleyways, as though searching for scraps. Their hands wrapped in pieces of cloth, black against the snow, heads hunched into their shoulders by the mallet of misery, thoughtful, idle, standing still for no reason, in the middle of squares like prophets without a voice and without listeners, they afforest this ghetto rather than animate it, with their tormented, cypress-like silhouettes.

The centre of the ghetto:

A market? A field of manure, yes! The rabbits, whose skins are on offer, appear to have been slaughtered with a machine gun. The furs are nothing more than a mass of hair.

Streets of misery:

On the first day, I had to rush out from one of these doghouses in order to overcome the nausea caused by the smell. For the same reason, I had to rush out on the second day and twice on the third day. The two Jews who accompanied me cried and, in the evening, they sat at my table but were unable to eat.

Here were families, their children “crying of cold and hunger and rotting on the foulest of dung heaps”. In one dark basement two small infants stand beside something:

The pallet seems to stir. We lower our candles. A woman is lying there. But in what is she lying? In wet shavings? In stable straw? I touch it; it is cold and sticky. What is covering the woman would have once been a quilt, but is now nothing more than a mush of feathers and cloth oozing damp like a wall. We notice two more heads in the mush, tiny tots, four months, fifteen months old. The oldest smiles at the flame, which we wave above them. The woman did not utter a word.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Joe Biden’s ‘First Hundred’ Daze Did anyone truly expect a known plagiarist wouldn’t claim to have authored the pandemic’s ending? By Thaddeus G. McCotter

By on December 19th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/18/joe-bidens-first-hundred-daze/

Often during spring training, the Hall of Fame baseball manager of the Reds and Tigers, Sparky Anderson, was asked about how his team would fare in the upcoming season. To put off the question without appearing rude, the skipper would say, “we’ll know after the first 40 games.”  Interestingly, the jury is still out on whether Sparky actually believed this, because after the first 40 games he slyly put off the question for more and more games until his team had patently proven its competitive mettle (or lack thereof) to reporters and fans.   

In politics, Sparky’s 40-game “rule” is the “first hundred days.” The phrase and, indeed, the concept of its alleged importance was unknown in presidential history until 1933, when it was spawned by that marketing genius, Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

Entering office during the depths of the Great Depression and armed with only a haphazard amalgam of ad hoc, pragmatic policy proposals (the merits of which are still being debated today), FDR devised the “first hundred days” standard to show the new president was acting with urgency to solve the crisis. Consequently, the first hundred days was not a matter of economic policy; it was a piece of political propaganda.

Today, Joe Biden is spending his “presidency-elect” (or whatever the spoon-fed press calls it) pretending to be relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic. Granted, Biden got off to a bad start by opposing the barring of Chinese nationals’ travel to America; promising to “defeat the virus” with a secret plan that turned out to be establishing a commission; and supporting—then denying—continued lockdowns.  

Now, like FDR, Biden is under political pressure to show he is acting with alacrity; and to portray himself as the leader responsible for solving the pandemic that got him elected.  

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HOMELAND SECURITY, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

China: The Conquest of Hollywood by Judith Bergman

By on December 19th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16842/china-films-hollywood-censorship

One Hollywood producer told PEN America that suggestions for projects critical of China aroused the fear that “you or your company will actively be blacklisted, and they will interfere with your current or future project. So not only will you bear the brunt [of your decision], but also your company, and future companies that you work for. And that’s absolutely in the back of our minds.”

“It’s not just the Hollywood issue, it’s not just the tech issue, it’s not just the basketball or the sports issue, or various other industries. … It’s all across the board. To get products and services into that market, there are certain rules you have to play… so they allow you access to the consumers. But those processes… have gotten worse and worse… and more amplified over time…. [It]has got to the point where we either need to stop it now and fight back, or we are just going to lose….” — Chris Fenton, Hollywood executive and author of Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American Business. voanews.com, October 16, 2020.

The problem is much larger than just the movie business.

In October, for the first time, China overtook North America as the world’s largest film market. “Movie ticket sales in China for 2020 climbed to $1.988 billion on Sunday, surpassing North America’s total of $1.937 billion, according to data from Artisan Gateway. The gap is expected to widen considerably by year’s end,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter on October 18. “Analysts have long predicted that the world’s most populous country would one day top the global charts. But the results still represent a historic sea change”.

“The day has finally arrived when China is the world’s No.1 film market, surpassing the box office total of North America for 2020,” said the authorized government portal site to China, published under the auspices of China’s State Council Information Office, also known as the CCP’s Foreign Propaganda Office, China.org.cn, in a self-congratulatory article, “China officially the world’s biggest film market.” The article, published on October 20, went on to mention the Chinese blockbuster, The Eight Hundred, a WWII movie about a group of Chinese soldiers under siege by the Japanese army, which was the highest grossing film in the world in 2020, as well as a handful of other Chinese-made films scheduled for release in the final quarter of 2020.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump as a One-Term President Would Become DC’s Nightmare By J.B. Shurk

By on December 19th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/trump_as_a_oneterm_presid

Even as the president’s legal team continues to dispute election results in battleground states with large numbers of questionable mail-in ballots and election anomalies, Establishment Washington is pushing Donald Trump out the door. What it failed to accomplish through four years of Deep State sabotage and bipartisan efforts at thwarting the MAGA agenda, the D.C. Club may have finally succeeded through good old-fashioned vote fraud. The District of Corruption is salivating over the possibility of freeing itself from a foe who has singlehandedly damaged the Swamp forever.

No victory could be more pyrrhic.

Forcing Donald Trump from the presidency while half of all likely voters believe the election was stolen from him (including a stunning one-third of Democrats) would backfire on Washington spectacularly. Trump is too ferocious a competitor and too powerful a cultural force to ever disappear into a retirement not of his choosing. At least 75 million Americans voted for the president because, among other reasons, he is seen as an “outsider.” Now Washington insists on making him a martyr, as well.

What will happen if President Trump leaves office in January? He will instantly become the most consequential and powerful ex-president Americans have seen. Making Donald Trump a one-term president will become Establishment Washington’s biggest nightmare.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The man who said the election was the most secure ever didn’t know about a massive government hack by foreign actors? By Jack Hellner

By on December 19th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/the_man_who_said_the_election

Let me get this straight:

The media and other Democrats absolutely believe the now-fired Christopher Krebs, who had been the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, when he said the U.S. election was the most secure ever.

Yet, somehow, Russia or someone was hacking computers at many government agencies, under Kreb’s watchful eyes, for months, and yet he either didn’t know or did nothing to stop it.  

It doesn’t appear that Mr. Krebs or his agency did an analysis of the Dominion Voting Systems machines to find out whether they had capacity to flip votes, so why does anyone believe him when he says the election was the most secure ever?  

Does anyone believe that the Russians or other hackers have the ability to break into computers throughout government, but didn’t want to do it on voting machines?

Why isn’t it in the news that a forensic audit of voting machines in Michigan showed a 68% error rate, forcing ‘bulk adjudication of ballots’ by officials, which must be done by hand? Does anyone think that only that county had that problem?

The clear reason that so few supposed news outlets report about the clear evidence of fraud is because they just repeat the talking points that there was no fraud. They like judges who refuse to hear the evidence and just rule by fiat. 

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Devin Nunes Channels Thomas Paine as Patriots Fight the Deep State By Elise Cooper

By on December 19th, 2020

Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA) has always stood up for justice.  He has written a pamphlet book, Countdown to Socialism in the style of what Thomas Paine had distributed preceding the Revolutionary War. In the late eighteenth century, pamphlets electrified the colonies and helped to forge American democracy, ringing the alarm for what was wrong and what needed to be done. Now, Congressman Nunes is warning Americans that something needs to be done before this country loses its morals and values.  American Thinker had the privilege of interviewing him.

In Chapter One, he wrote, “the Left has wholly rejected the fundamental principles that bound Americans together and allowed us to work out our differences democratically and peacefully. They now reject free speech, a fair voting system, private property, and the rule of law. They don’t dare yet admit it publicly, but as you’ll see in this book, their policies and rhetoric are incompatible with any of these principles as we understand them today.”

He explained in the book, “Socialist regimes tend to excel at propaganda. By necessity socialism is a resentful ideology that exploits and widens class conflict, racial strife, and other social cleavages, pitting countrymen against one another. Their proposals have one thing in common: they will increase the Democrats’ vote count. At both the state and national levels, they are working hard to fundamentally change the voting system by abolishing the Electoral College, greatly expanding mail-in voting, enfranchising felons, legalizing vote harvesting, lowering the voting age, and allowing current non-citizens to vote through mass amnesties and other means,” not to mention packing the Supreme Court by expanding it.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Pitt cardiologist sues school after backlash to his article on affirmative action Paula Reed Ward

By on December 19th, 2020

https://triblive.com/news/education-classroom/pitt-cardiologist-sues-school-after-ba

A University of Pittsburgh cardiologist who faced backlash over an opinion piece he wrote criticizing affirmative action is suing his employers, the American Heart Association and the company that published and then retracted his article, alleging that he was demoted and defamed because his views were unpopular.

Dr. Norman C. Wang, who is a faculty member in Pitt’s School of Medicine and a doctor with University of Pittsburgh Physicians, was removed from his position as director of UPMC’s clinical cardiac electrophysiology fellowship program in August — days after his article was noticed by other cardiologists on Twitter.

“What’s remarkable about this is that he was not punished for an inappropriate joke or an intemperate remark in the classroom, but for publishing a thoroughly researched article in a peer-reviewed journal,” said Terry Pell, the president of the Center for Individual Rights, which is representing Wang in his suit.

“This should concern anybody concerned about academics and free speech regardless of whether it challenges conventional thinking.”

Wang filed suit Wednesday in U.S. District Court alleging that university officials retaliated against him for exercising his First Amendment rights. The complaint also includes claims for defamation, breach of contract, tortious interference and retaliation under Pennsylvania’s Whistleblower Law.

Named defendants include the University of Pittsburgh; UPMC; University of Pittsburgh Physicians; the American Heart Association; Wiley Periodicals Inc., which publishes the Journal of the American Heart Association; Samir Saba, who is the chief of cardiology at the school of medicine and Wang’s supervisor; Mark Gladwin, the chair of the department of medicine; Kathryn Berlacher, a professor in the cardiology division; Marc Simon, a cardiology professor and several people who are unnamed.

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