RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/4003066-americas-state-media-the-blackout-on-biden-corruption-is-truly-pulitzer-level-stuff/

This week, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) tried to do the impossible. After he and his colleagues presented a labyrinth of LLC shell companies and accounts used to funnel as much as $10 million to Biden family members, Donalds tried to induce the press to show some interest in the massive corruption scandal. “For those in the press, this easy pickings & Pulitzer-level stuff right here,” he pleaded.

The response was virtually immediate. Despite showing nine Biden family members allegedly receiving funds from corrupt figures in Romania, China and other countries, The New Republic quickly ran a story headlined “Republicans Finally Admit They Have No Incriminating Evidence on Joe Biden.”

For many of us, it was otherworldly. A decade ago, when then-Vice President Joe Biden was denouncing corruption in Romania and Ukraine and promising action by the United States, massive payments were flowing to his son Hunter Biden and a variety of family members, including Biden grandchildren.

Last year, I wrote a column about how the media were preparing a difficult “scandal implosion” to protect the Bidens and themselves from the backlash from disclosures of this influence peddling operation.

The brilliance of the Biden team was that it invested the media in this scandal at the outset by burying the laptop story as “Russian disinformation” before the election. That was, of course, false, but it took two years for most major media outlets to admit that the laptop was authentic.

But the media then ignored what was on that “authentic laptop.” Hundreds of emails detailed potentially criminal conduct and raw influence peddling in foreign countries.

When media outlets such as the New York Post confirmed the emails, the media then insisted that there was no corroboration of the influence peddling payments and no clear proof of criminal conduct. It entirely ignored the obvious corruption itself.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/a_few_thoughts_about_the_cnn_townhall_with_trump.html

Few of his supporters were surprised to learn that Trump was going to do a sit-down in New Hampshire for CNN.  The man does not shy away from potential political disasters; he thrives on them, runs straight at them, unafraid.  

Why?  Because he always comes out of these things having won bigly.  Not only is he quick thinking and knowledgeable when it comes to the facts on all the relevant issues, he is gloriously entertaining, verbally and visually.  His facial expressions and gestures say as much he does with words.  

The CNN sit-down Wednesday night was no exception.  Host Kaitlan Colllins clearly thought she would have the upper hand.  Coming from the bubble of leftist propaganda that is CNN’s principal reason for being, of course she believed she would be the hero of the event.  But she got her comeuppance within the first few minutes.  She acted the fool and Trump does not suffer fools, he eviscerates them with a smile on his face.  

He certainly got the better of Kaitlan Collins despite her rude, smug arrogance.  She set a new record for dismissive interviews.  She forgot that Trump has had years and years of experience with boorish and ignorant pretend journalists who hate, loathe and despise him. She clearly has no experience with an outlier with so many IQ points on her.

With each question she aimed to embarrass him, to humiliate him.  But she had no actual facts, not when it came to protecting schools, the Second Amendment, the documents stored at Mar-A-Lago,  the event of January 6, 2021, the border wall, school shootings (she exaggerated wildly), etc.  

She had what she thought were facts but were just Democrat talking points.  For example, Trump noted that the man who shot and killed Ashli Babbitt, Michael Byrd, bragged about having done it, which he did.  He said that killing her saved lives! Collins tried to deny that fact.  

She accused Trump of not keeping his promise to build the wall!  He did, despite the Democrats’ fevered attempts to stop it.  It stopped the day Biden took office, as did the new pipelines and drilling that had provided energy independence for us.  

In short, Collins was overconfident, prepared to crush the man, but he crushed her with some delightful facial mockery and without lifting his little finger.  Collins is the new Candy Crowley of CNN.  It was a very entertaining interview. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/05/10/media-scoffs-at-damning-evidence-against-the-biden-crime-family-n1694127

On Wednesday morning, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, led by Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), unveiled an impressively detailed case against the Biden Crime Family. The committee revealed evidence that the Bidens were selling access and influence to Joe Biden while he was vice president. And the mainstream media scoffed at it.

The Bidens are accused of intentionally concealing their involvement in influence-peddling schemes, but these accusations aren’t mere innuendo or rumor. Bank records reveal that they made millions of dollars from foreign nationals without providing any apparent services other than granting access to the family’s most powerful member: Joe Biden.

NBC News shamelessly framed the story as a Republican attack. “The Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee mounted more attacks Wednesday against President Joe Biden and his family, alleging that relatives of the president engaged in business with foreign nationals,” the report began.

CNN similarly tried to cast doubt on the committee’s allegations. “The foreign payments raise questions about Hunter Biden’s business activities while his father was vice president,” the network conceded, “but the committee does not suggest any illegality about the payments from foreign sources.”

Really? It wasn’t all that long ago that the media was making a big reach by suggesting then-President Trump’s legitimate international business in Russia was some sort of influence-peddling scheme. Yet here, we have the Biden family getting rich while Joe Biden was Vice President, and they’re yawning like it’s no big deal.

“The bank records by themselves also do not indicate the purpose of the payments that were made,” CNN notes. No kidding, really? “The memo marks Comer’s most direct attempt to substantiate his allegations that Biden family members have enriched themselves off the family name.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/05/05/tucker-the-left-and-poor-old-canada-n1693033

It’s becoming abundantly clear that with Tucker Carlson being put out to digital pasture, Fox News is falling on hard times and may come to regret its decision. Its viewership and market share are plummeting while Tucker will find “fresh woods and pastures new” in which to pursue his career of incisive reporting and unabashed truth-telling. Tucker Carlson has become a first name, which indicates that he is not simply an internet commentator but something of an institution. To believe that he is no longer a force is merely wishful thinking.

Indeed, it has been said that Tucker is bigger than Fox, a plausible assumption the leftward media adamantly denies in gloating over Tucker’s presumed demotion. And why shouldn’t it? After all, with Tucker gone, Fox is no longer a threat to the left’s political and media establishment. Democracy goes to die not only in the darkness of the Washington Post and its media cohorts; its light is also extinguished in a meekly capitulating Fox News.

The political mafia in Canada is equally deluded. Bill C-11, an amendment to the Broadcasting Act, has just been passed into law, effectively providing for regulating online content (aka internet censorship), controlling what we can see and read online as well as depriving Canadian content producers of up to 90% of their international viewership. As Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien has said, “The bill would represent a step back overall for privacy protection.”

https://www.racket.news/p/report-on-the-censorship-industrial

Today you’ll find two new #TwitterFiles threads out, one by longtime Racket contributor Matt Orfalea, and another by Andrew Lowenthal, who worked for 18 years defending digital rights at EngageMedia and watched activists in his space slowly be absorbed by what we’re now calling “The Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

The two new threads collectively show the wide political range of revelations in the #TwitterFiles material, which have been slandered — absurdly — as a partisan exercise. Lowenthal, who in his “Insider’s Guide to ‘Anti-Disinformation’” describes himself as a “progressive-minded Australian,” printed a series of exchanges between journalists who attended a summer “tabletop exercise” at the Aspen Institute about a hack-and-leak operation involving Burisma and Hunter Biden, weeks before the actual event. When the actual scandal broke not long after, the existence of that tabletop exercise clearly become newsworthy, but none of the journalists present, who included David Sanger of the New York Times and current Rolling Stone editor Noah Schactman — said a word. Perhaps, as was common with anti-disinfo conferences, the event was off the record. (We asked, and none of the reporters commented). It doesn’t matter. Lowenthal showed how another “anti-disinformation” conference featured the headline speaker Anthony Blinken. He’s currently suspected of having “triggered” the infamous letter signed by 50 intelligence officers saying the Hunter Biden laptop story had the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

As Lowenthal writes: “See how it works? The people accusing others of “disinformation” run the biggest disinformation campaigns themselves.”

On the flip side, Orfalea found a document showing that both the Wikileaks account and that of Dr. Jill Stein were algorithmically added by Twitter to a list given the creepy name is_russian. This was one of two buckets of “Russians” Twitter was collecting, one called “A Priori Russians” (usually, accounts identified as Russian by 3rd party researchers), the other “Inferred Russians” (accounts that had “strong,” “medium,” or “weak” “signals” of Russianness, involving language, type of email account, location of IP address, tweet time, etc). Even Twitter’s own analysts noted that any system that “captured” Jill Stein as “Russian” spoke to the “overly broad nature of is_russian.” It was just such a “signals” or “marker”-based methodology that Twitter and other researchers used to identify “Russians” on the Internet, a methodology Twitter internally called one of “educated guesses,” concealing a company secret about identifying accounts linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency: “We have no realistic way of knowing this on a Twitter-centric basis.”

Driving the news: Shocking news broke Monday that two top cable news anchors had been fired — less than a day after NBCU CEO Jeff Shell was unexpectedly fired for an inappropriate workplace relationship.

Fox News on Monday said the network and its star primetime host Tucker Carlson “have agreed to part ways,” after more than a decade. Carlson’s last program was Friday, April 21, per the network, meaning Carlson did not get a chance to sign off to his viewers.
CNN, shortly after, announced that Don Lemon had been fired. Lemon said in a Twitter post that he was “stunned.” He said he was informed by his agent Monday morning that he had been terminated.

Drama had been encircling both Carlson and Lemon for months.

Fox’s decision to part ways with Carlson occurred just days after Fox News reached a historic 11th hour settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for over $787 million. A trove of material uncovered during pre-trial discovery implicated Carlson.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/don-lemon-became-embarrassing-distraction-cnn-lost-newsroom-endless-antics-insiders

Don Lemon said he was shocked at his firing by CNN Monday, but insiders say it was a long time coming for the embattled host whose 17-year tenure came to an abrupt end after months of controversies.

Just hours after what ended up being his final broadcast on the network, Lemon announced on Twitter that he had been terminated and found out through his agent. To put a stamp on what was no longer a tenable relationship, CNN essentially called one of the faces of its network a liar, saying Lemon’s account was “inaccurate.”

“When you are demoted, reprimanded and sent to manner class – and still don’t learn your lesson, the logical next step is termination,” one CNN insider told Fox News Digital. 

While things hadn’t looked bright ratings-wise for Lemon over the past several years, the beginning of the end was in February when he made misogynistic comments about Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, saying she was past her “prime” at 51 years old. Lemon was forced to issue multiple apologies and CNN boss Chris Licht, in a rare public rebuke of an employee, ordered him to take “formal training.” 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-thomas-and-the-plague-of-bad-reporting-propublica-washington-post-disclosure-court-safety-def0a6a7?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

By James Taranto

ProPublica’s big scoop turned out to be a quarter-teaspoon. In an error-filled report last week, the opinionated news site got one point right: Justice Clarence Thomas didn’t disclose the 2014 sale of his one-third interest in three Savannah, Ga., properties to a company controlled by his friend Harlan Crow. He was legally required to do so. On these pages, in an article published online Sunday, I observed that he may have to amend his financial-disclosure form for that year.

On Monday, “a source close to Thomas” told CNN that the justice would do so. “The source said . . . it was an oversight not to report the real estate transaction. Thomas believed he didn’t have to disclose because he lost money on the deal, according to the source.” It is the justice’s share of the sale price ($1,000 or more), not a profit, that triggers the statutory obligation to report.

How big a deal is it to amend a form after missing a disclosure? Consider these examples, which reader Darin Bartram dug up:

• Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s 2012 disclosure amended her 2011 report, which “inadvertently omitted” the sale of shares in an exchange-traded fund that she had bought earlier the same year. “The Value Code should of [sic] been L and the Gain Code should of [sic] been A,” the amendment says.

• Ginsburg amended her 2017 disclosure to reflect that she had “inadvertently omitted” a gift of an opera costume worth $4,500.

• Justice Stephen Breyer reported in an amended 2018 disclosure that he had “inadvertently omitted” two stock sales by his wife, one in 2006 and one in 2018.

• In February 2022, three days after President Biden nominated her to the Supreme Court, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson amended her 2020 disclosure to note that in various years between 2011 and 2021 she had “inadvertently omitted” travel reimbursements for two speaking trips, a university teaching salary, four nonprofit board memberships, her husband’s consulting income and a 529 college savings plan. No senator mentioned these omissions at her confirmation hearings.