MEDIA Comments turned off

Bullies in the White House Press Corps By Julie Kelly

Posted By on June 8th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/08/bullies-in-the-white-house-press

Of all the post-2016 credibility casualties—the Clintons, the FBI, Hollywood, professional athletes, late-night comedians—the American news media is the most bloodied.

After fluffing Barack Obama for a decade—so much so that the former president still claims with a straight face that his presidency was scandal-free—the press is going after the Trump White House with a level of malice and animus that borders on abuse.

In its servile, vainglorious attempt to score points with each other and feed an insatiable Trump-hating constituency, the media has participated in a shameful degradation of an institution that was once viewed as a critical American liberty. Newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post, and cable news outlets CNN and MSNBC, have done most of the heavy lifting—particularly in fueling one side of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, which includes reporting illegally leaked classified information to damage anyone in Trump’s orbit.

Not only has their collective political coverage been deemed overwhelmingly negative by objective observers (a study by Harvard University last year concluded, “Trump’s coverage during his first 100 days set a new standard for negativity”), the professional conduct of individual reporters and cable news hosts has been—to borrow a term they embrace for others—deplorable. Any pretense of objectivity is gone; professionalism and common courtesy is nowhere to be found. One only has to watch a White House press briefing for evidence.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Creepy and Creeping Power of Social Media By Ned Ryun

Posted By on June 8th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/08/the-creepy-and-creeping

With the recent revelations that “

Google allowed “Nazism” to be associated with the California Republican Party in searches, to YouTube removing purely mechanical gun content, to the news that Facebook allowed far greater access to private data than anyone realized, it’s time to have a conversation about what these social and tech giants really are.

We should acknowledge social media has had a positive effect over the years in breaking the monopoly on information flow. The traditional gatekeepers can no longer stop conversations they don’t approve because social media platforms have been an extraordinary means for people and groups to connect and communicate locally, regionally, and internationally. They’ve allowed upstarts, outsiders, and disrupters like Donald Trump, or movements like Brexit, to break through and actually win.

For almost 20 years, the federal communications and competitive regulatory environment that was in place allowed companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google (and their many competitors that either no longer exist or that have been subsumed into the victorious behemoths) to operate more freely and with fewer regulatory impediments compared to other traditional communications companies like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. For example, Facebook, Google and Amazon had far looser federal policies to adhere to related to the kind of personal data they could collect about their customers, how long they could store that data, and what they could sell or share with other entities. The “traditional” communications companies had to adhere to much more stringent rules.

That was then. Now we need a conversation about social media and tech giants in light of what they’ve become. They’re all grown up now and it’s time for the kids in Silicon Valley to start operating under the rules that govern the other adults. And by that, I mean media and telecommunications companies.

If entities are creating content, selling advertising, streaming both live and produced original content, publishing original content, deploying broadband and wireless internet, even offering voice and video communications services, haven’t they become publishers and telecommunications companies? Because that’s exactly what they’re doing and exactly what they are.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mulvaney Fires All 25 Members of CFPB Advisory Board By Rick Moran

Posted By on June 8th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/mulvaney-fires-all-25-members-of-cfpb-advisory-board/

Now this is what I call “draining the swamp”:

The Daily Caller:

Mick Mulvaney, acting director of a controversial consumer finance bureau, fired an advisory board after the members criticized the new leadership for not taking their advice.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced Wednesday that the 25 current Consumer Advisory Board members will be replaced, and will be ineligible to reapply to the board, the Washington Post reports.

Eleven advisory board members held a news conference Monday calling out Mulvaney for canceling several meetings — which are required to take place under the Dodd-Frank Act which created the agency.

“It appears the bureau does not want to engage with us,” Ann Baddour, chair of the Consumer Advisory Board and part of Texas Appleseed, a financial, non-profit, said in a conference call reported by The Intercept. “Staying silent would violate our ethical responsibility to the bureau and the American people.”

The criticisms didn’t sit well with the CFPB, and one spokesman suggested the board missed the perks of taxpayer-funded trips to the capital.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The End of Merit By David Solway *****

Posted By on June 8th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/the_end_of_merit.html

Everywhere we look, the principle of merit is compromised or regarded as the worst form of unfairness. Sanctioned mediocrity is now the order of the day. Standards of achievement are diluted, hard work goes unacknowledged, and the desire to excel in one’s field or to accept responsibility for one’s actions and even for one’s failures is in abeyance. Individual talent, intelligence, entrepreneurial success, and personal discipline are dismissed as unjust advantages deriving from the exploitation of the dispossessed. “You didn’t build that,” as Obama notoriously proclaimed. The inevitable result is the devitalizing of political, intellectual, and professional life to the point where a society finds itself in a state of “progressive” deterioration.

Examples abound.

The American (and Canadian) university system is in precipitous freefall, filled with students largely incapable of scholarly ability and civil decorum, professors who do not or cannot teach, gender studies mavens who pollute the curriculum with feminist groupthink, administrators infected by political correctness who propagate “hate speech” laws and shut down controversial debate, and so-called “diversity officers” inimical to diversity of ideas. In effect, the university has opened its doors, in the name of affirmative action, student empowerment, and equity hiring, to a cohort of self-righteous incompetents and mischief-makers. The consequence is predictable. The weak and the undeserving profit at the expense of the shrinking cadre of the committed and the qualified, and society is the worse for it.

Journalism, once a respected profession, has lost its reason for existence, having scrapped its mandate to report on events and to act as public watchdog. Instead, it devotes itself to dishing up propaganda, fake news, and outright lies. Media outlets hire not journalists in the established sense, but journolists, partisan peons poorly trained in linguistic proficiency and utterly devoid of ethical standards. Those who depend on the media for information are thus systematically deceived, leading to a further coarsening of public cognition.

Similarly, our various welfare organizations and government departments, originally conceived as a social safety net, have violated their founding impetus and have come instead to celebrate failure and ineptitude. The ambulance network in drug-infested Vancouver, for example, is too busy responding to its constituency of addicts to provide prompt service to tax-paying citizens. Municipal authorities are dedicated to saving those mired in the throes of self-abuse while ignoring the rightful claimants to paid for social services.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Tommy Robinson ‘Disappears’: Free Speech in England Is Dead By Justin O. Smith

Posted By on June 8th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/tommy_robinson_disappears_free_speech_in_england_is_dead.html

The arrest of British free speech activist Tommy Robinson has sent shockwaves across the Anglosphere. The United Kingdom, once dedicated to the values of freedom, has taken a path toward authoritarian government and away from freedom. The once great nation, which created the Magna Carta and once commanded an empire, is now the land of tyranny. Unless the British people love their freedom enough and fight this injustice in fierce fashion, it will remain a land silenced by intimidation and fear.

The authoritarian socialist government of the United Kingdom has been out to get Robinson for years on anything it can. It has harassed, intimidated, arrested, and incarcerated Robinson, as it did last May, since it is now apparently a “crime” to report on the decades-long systematic rape of hundreds of non-Muslim children by gangs of Muslim men, who are now apparently a protected class of people. Lizzie Dearden of the Independent reported that Robinson was arrested for “breaching the peace,” no doubt an absurd pretense by the British authorities in light of the documented film footage of his actions.

Robinson, a former member of the English Defense League whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is being unfairly persecuted by the U.K. government. Robinson’s “crime” was that he yelled questions outside Leeds Crown Court and named the alleged defendants, like any other reporter. So what? The state broadcaster, the BBC, and the mainstream media had already named them. Why was he arrested, and why were they not arrested?

If gangs of white men had spent decades torturing and raping little Muslim girls and a justly outraged Muslim reporter were covering the case, in a similar manner as Robinson, would he be arrested?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Goes on a Spending Diet He promised no more Obama-size deficits. Can he lean on GOP lawmakers to deliver?By Kimberley A. Strassel

Posted By on June 8th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-goes-on-a-spending-diet-1528413010

If the Trump White House has a congressional ally in its latest big objective, it’s Rep. Tom Graves. The Georgia Republican is an appropriator, though not a business-as-usual spender. That’s exactly the administration’s new message: We’re done with the usual.

With the economy reaping the fruits of tax cuts and regulatory reform, the Trump administration looks to be getting serious about a neglected campaign promise: spending restraint. Publicly, it’s laying out a strategy to roll back the bloat in last year’s omnibus. Privately, it’s letting Republicans know that the president won’t shy from taking his own party’s lawmakers to task for failure. He’ll have to, or risk flaming out on that crucial pledge.

Candidate Trump promised often to reduce the size of government. He vowed never to run an Obama-size deficit. His budgets have proposed dramatically slashing nondefense spending. Yet the tax cuts widened the deficit. And while Congress’s $1.3 trillion omnibus delivered on defense spending, Democrats demanded huge new outlays for domestic agencies. So Mr. Trump is presiding over trillion-dollar deficits after all.

Whether the president cares much about the economic consequences, he understands the optics. The shellacking the omnibus got from conservative media allies was behind his hesitation to sign the bill, and it inspired his public declaration that he’d “never sign another” like it. With tax cuts done, and his economic team gelling under spending hawk Larry Kudlow, the focus has turned to keeping the promise on spending.

Enter Mr. Graves, who has spent his three years on the House Appropriations Committee shaking up the system. His subcommittee on financial services two weeks ago passed a $23.4 billion fiscal 2019 spending bill—$585 million less than the set spending level. In order to prevent any other committee from swooping in to grab that money, he used the bill to create what he’s calling the Fund for America’s Kids and Grandkids. The $585 million goes in this fund and by law cannot be spent on any other government program until the U.S. is deficit-free. “Just because you can spend it, doesn’t mean you should,” Mr. Graves says. CONTINUE AT SITE

POLITICS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: Club for Growth Notches Another Win Tom Bevan

Posted By on June 7th, 2018

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/06/07/club_for_growth_notches_another_win_137218.html

In baseball, if you get one hit every three times at bat, you’re an All-Star. The odds in politics aren’t much different. But the Club for Growth PAC, the political action committee for the right-leaning free-market advocacy group, is on a bit of a hot streak.

Its most recent win came Tuesday night in Montana, where the group’s favored candidate, State Auditor Matt Rosendale, scored a hard-fought victory in the four-way Republican Senate primary. The Club for Growth PAC, which endorsed Rosendale last July, pumped more than $2 million into the race to help boost Rosendale over former Judge Russ Fagg by a 34 percent to 28 percent margin.

“Not only is Matt Rosendale a staunch fiscal conservative, he is a proven winner who stands an excellent chance of defeating liberal Sen. Jon Tester in the fall,” said Club for Growth President David McIntosh in a statement Tuesday night.

Montana, which President Trump won by 20 percentage points in 2016, is a top target of Republicans this fall. Until recently, however, when Trump ripped Tester on Twitter for statements he made about Dr. Ronnie Jackson, at the time Trump’s embattled nominee for secretary of Veterans Affairs, the race in Montana had largely taken a back seat to Senate battles in West Virginia, Indiana, and Missouri.

The Club for Growth’s success in backing Rosendale comes on the heels of a banner night in last month’s Texas primary runoffs, where three of the four CFG-backed candidates scored wins:

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Trump prefers energy dominance to Paris Myron Ebell

Posted By on June 7th, 2018

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7175/full
Myron Ebell is Director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, and Chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, which aims to dispel myths about global warming.

Donald J. Trump has made many decisions since becoming President of the United States that have offended the permanent political establishment in Washington; and in foreign policy, he has also shocked political elites in Britain and Europe by doing things that are simply not done. To take a recent notable example, in May Trump stopped pretending that payoffs to Iran would slow the ayatollahs from developing nuclear weapons. Before that, he angered pro-Arabists everywhere by moving the American embassy to Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. But perhaps the foreign policy decision most upsetting to politically correct sensibilities everywhere occurred on June 1, 2017 when the President announced that the US would withdraw from the Paris climate treaty.

In the months leading up to the announcement, intense pressure was put on Trump to stay in Paris from every direction — environmental pressure groups, Democrats in Congress, mainstream media, Hollywood celebrities, countless CEOs of international corporations, and several members of his own administration, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. The push by world leaders peaked at the G7 summit meeting in May 2017 in Sicily, but in the end all the cajoling and coaxing from Prime Minister May, Chancellor Merkel, President Macron, and EU Commission President Juncker did not convince Trump to break his campaign promise.

Although Trump made clear in his Rose Garden speech why undertaking international commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is not in America’s national interest, he created confusion when he added: “I’m willing to immediately work with Democratic leaders to either negotiate our way back into Paris, under terms that are fair to the United States and its workers, or to negotiate a new deal that protects our country and its taxpayers . . . And we’ll make it good, and we won’t be closing up our factories, and we won’t be losing our jobs.” He added to the confusion in January when, as the BBC reported, he said, “we could conceivably get back in”.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who leaked portions of the IG report, and why? By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on June 7th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/who_leaked_portions_of_ig_report_and_why.html

Coverage of the leaked portions of the long delayed and much anticipated report from the inspector general of the Department of Justice has generally focused on how damaging it is to James Comey. But I think the leakers had an entirely different agenda.

ABC News, which received the leaks and broke the news, headlined, “DOJ watchdog finds James Comey defied authority as FBI director, sources say.” Certainly, this conclusion is not complimentary toward Comey, but it seems to me that this is one of the most congenial to Comey of all the possible revelations that could be coming and may actually work to soften the coming blows when the report is released.

First of all, to whose authority was Comey insubordinate? That would be Loretta Lynch and Sally Yates, both of whom may well be subject to criticism in the final report. Neither woman is much admired by conservatives.

Second, who was harmed by Comey’s insubordination? ABC reports:

The draft of Horowitz’s wide-ranging report specifically called out Comey for ignoring objections from the Justice Department when he disclosed in a letter to Congress just days before the 2016 presidential election that FBI agents had reopened the Clinton probe, according to sources. Clinton has said that letter doomed her campaign.

This is exactly what Hillary partisans have complained about, even stating that this could have cost her the election. Now, who would have an interest in portraying Hillary as the victim?

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Tale of Two Commencement Addresses By Matthew Spalding

Posted By on June 7th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/hillary-clinton-harvard-speech-alexander-solzhenitsyn-was-better/Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard speech was infinitely wiser than Hillary Clinton’s recent remarks at Yale.

Most commencement addresses, truth be told, are neither memorable nor meaningful. Filled with platitudes and banalities about the unmatched accomplishments and unlimited promise of each year’s crop of new college graduates, the predictable speech thankfully fades away as quickly as the moment passes, pleasantly recalled but rarely recollected.

Yet every once in a while, a commencement address comes along that has something to say and deserves to be remembered and reread, again and again.

Consider Hillary Clinton’s address recently at Yale University’s annual Class Day. Between jokes about the 2016 election (she says she is still “not over” the loss), the former senator, secretary of state, and presidential nominee spoke intently of the “full-fledged crisis in our democracy” brought on by her unnamed former political opponent.

Clinton warned the enthralled graduates that “there are leaders in our country who blatantly incite people with hateful rhetoric, who fear change, who see the world in zero-sum terms.” The inexorable result is that our fundamental rights, civic virtue, freedom of the press, and even facts and reason are “under assault like never before.”

Following the Yale tradition of sporting silly headgear for Class Day, Clinton pulled out a Russian ushanka cap to underscore her point, surrendering subtlety along with any gravitas she had left. Then came the cliché: The Class of 2018 had “already demonstrated the character and courage that will help you navigate this tumultuous moment.”