RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/the_media_at_their_lowest.html

When Joe Biden claimed this week on The View (see it here) that the Obama administration “had not a whisper of scandal” during eight years in the White House, the audience cheered wildly. And why wouldn’t it? It’s a partisan crowd that overwhelmingly leans left.

Those of us on quite the other side of the aisle didn’t bother falling out of our chairs at such an absurd claim. We know how the game is played: make sure that statements such as this from Democrats are played in front of a partisan audience on a biased show that isn’t about to challenge the assertion.

As a reminder for candidate Biden, let’s review a partial list of the dozens of scandals and all the corruption during the Obama administration:

IRS targeting of conservative 501(c)(3) nonprofits
The $500-million Solyndra scam admitted to by secretary of energy Steven Chu
Attorney General Eric Holder held in contempt for lying to Congress
Mass domestic spying by the NSA
Illegal DOJ investigations of journalists
Complete mismanagement of the war in Syria
Transferring $1.7 billion in cash to Iran
The Benghazi cover-up
Operation Fast & Furious
Secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s pay-for-play scam with foreign governments
Falsified Veterans Administration documents after patients died waiting to be seen

https://quadrant.org.au/

Eleven years ago, back in 2008, the blog Creeping Sharia was launched on the WordPress platform, the same publishing system used by Quadrant Online. On Sunday, May 12, an item was published that went entirely unreported by the Australian press and received only fleeting attention from mainstream US media: FBI agents had raided and made arrests at a compound in backwoods Alabama allegedly being used as a training centre by an Islamist cell said to have been planning to use small children as human bombs.

It would be the last item ever published on that site, as the following day its operators were informed by WordPress that permission to continue publishing on the blogging platform had been withdrawn for ever. Creeping Sharia had earlier been alerted by both Twitter and WordPress that its recent reproduction of the Charlie Hebdo cartoon below “violated Pakistan’s laws”. Yes, the laws of Pakistan, where a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, spent ten years with a death sentence hanging over her head after her Muslim neighbours accused her of “insulting the Prophet”. Now safe in Canada, the Toronto Sun reports an imam has vowed to track her down and deliver the Prophet’s brand of summary justice.

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/nyu-journalism-teacher-the-gop-is-a-terrorist-organization/

She seems nice.

No stranger to controversy, the 28-year-old Fordham grad and author of How to Start a Revolution tweeted last year on the death of evangelist Billy Graham, “The big news today is that Billy Graham was still alive this whole time. Anyway, have fun in hell, bi*ch.”

Controversy, vindictiveness masquerading as commentary, potato, poTAHto.

Me, I’m with Twitter user “VillainsMatter” who replied, “You know this whole acting like a complete asylum inmate bit, people look at it and vote trump 2020 because of it.”

This summer, Duca will teach a class at NYU called “The Feminist Journalist.” According to Wikipedia, the class will “focus on intersections of feminist ideology and the practice of journalism.” If Duca’s work is any indication, feminism and journalism — at least as journalism was once practiced — make up a Venn Diagram of two circles with zero overlap. That NYU finds someone so viciously partisan worthy of training tomorrow’s journalists tells you everything you need to know about the actual worth of an NYU journalism degree.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-5-13-frances-fox-piven-icon-of-the-left

In the New York Times, they have a section that goes by the name “New York” on weekdays and “Metropolitan” on Sundays. This section contains next to no useful information about what is going on in New York and/or the surrounding area. Even local news staples like murders and fires rarely get covered. And if you want to learn about the latest corruption in City government, or important new laws coming out of the state legislature, you mostly have to look elsewhere.

But they have to fill the space with something. A fair characterization of the large part of it would be “support for our team.” To illustrate, yesterday’s “Metropolitan” section was totally dominated by a single article that contained nothing about relevant local news. Instead, it was, to put it mildly, a fawning profile of a woman named Frances Fox Piven. The headline was “This 86-Year-Old Radical May Save (or Sink) the Democrats.”

Have you heard of Frances Fox Piven? She first came to my attention way back in the 1960s, when she had become one of the early enlistees in the “War on Poverty,” and went around leading loud welfare “rights” demonstrations. She’s been doing variations of the same ever since. But I can’t say that I have closely followed her career. This Times profile fills in many details, and in the process makes clear that Ms. Piven is a true archetype of the species sometimes known as the Upper West Side progressive radical. I thought that readers here might like an introduction.

Here is how the Times chooses to introduce its piece:

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/14/seth-meyers-useful-idiot/

After listening to Seth Meyers run interference for Rep. Ilhan Omar last week, an exasperated Meghan McCain asked him: “Are you her publicist? Are you her press person?” Perhaps the more pertinent question is, who else do you represent?

Because on the same day Rep. Rashida Tlaib was complaining (via her 500,000-follower Twitter account) that powerful forces were “trying to silence” her, the freshman representative also appeared on NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”

Tlaib’s presence on “Late Night” is unsurprising, whether it was booked earlier or not, as the show has become something of a safe haven for unaccomplished freshman reps with very specific opinions about a certain ethnicity. The fact that Meyers, like most of his colleagues, shills for Democrats isn’t particularly noteworthy. It’s more pertinent, however, when an alleged comedian not only provides someone like Tlaib a giant platform to spread a despicable historical lie, but helps her do it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/progressive-plans-change-senate-response-jamelle-bouie/

I n a provocative Sunday opinion piece for the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie takes aim at the United States Senate. It is “is highly undemocratic and strikingly unrepresentative” institution, dominated by a “Republican coalition of rural whites, exurban whites and anti-tax suburbanites.” This needs to be changed — because everybody knows it is un-American to oppose higher taxes!

Bouie offers an outside-the-box idea. Rather than change the Senate via constitutional amendment, progressives should look to increase the number of Democrats in the Senate by giving representation in the Senate to non-state units—“Washington, D.C., the Atlantic territories, the Pacific territories and the Native tribes.”

Normally, I do not write columns responding to other columns. But Bouie’s piece is typical of the progressive Left’s frustration with the Senate, as well as of an inability to reckon with its role in our constitutional regime. For these reasons, it merits a thorough examination.

For starters, full disclosure: I get it. The Senate is not democratic, and in a republic, that is problematic. All else being equal, I would agree with Bouie. But all else is not equal. This is in fact a very old debate, whose context demands some thoughtful appreciation before slashing changes are made. Why do you think the Constitutional Convention dragged on through the entire summer of 1787? James Madison, James Wilson, and other federalists from the large states insisted on a fully majoritarian system. But the small-state representatives, including John Dickinson and Roger Sherman, said, No dice — you want our assent to this Constitution, we need guarantees.