Just before a holiday, Trump does something that amuses the rest of us but shocks the media into doing nothing but talk about it over and over again while he enjoys his time off.
Hmm.
When had he done that before?
Oh yes, just before Christmas 2015, Trump said Obama schlonged Hillary.
There was a time not so long ago when journalists were trusted and admired. We were generally seen as trying to report the news in a fair and straightforward manner. Today, all that has changed. For that, we can blame the 2016 election or, more accurately, how some news organizations chose to cover it. Among the many firsts, last year’s election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale — that most of what you read, watch and listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility. I have never seen anything like it. Not even close.
Snip.
The behavior of much of the media, but especially the New York Times, was a disgrace. I don’t believe it ever will recover the public trust it squandered.
Snip.
Here is a true story about how Abe Rosenthal resolved a conflict of interest. A young woman was hired by the Times from one of the Philadelphia newspapers. But soon after she arrived in New York, a story broke in Philly that she had had a romantic affair with a political figure she had covered, and that she had accepted a fur coat and other expensive gifts from him. When he saw the story, Abe called the woman into his office and asked her if it was true. When she said yes, he told her to clean out her desk — that she was finished at the Times and would never work there again. As word spread through the newsroom, some reporters took the woman’s side and rushed in to tell Abe that firing her was too harsh. He listened for about 30 seconds and said, in so many words, “I don’t care if you f–k an elephant on your personal time, but then you can’t cover the circus for the paper.”
A Pakistani family under criminal investigation by the U.S. Capitol Police for abusing their access to the House of Representatives information technology (IT) system may have engaged in myriad other questionable schemes besides allegedly placing “ghost employees” on the congressional payroll.
Imran Awan, his wife Hina, and brothers Abid and Jamal collectively netted more than $4 million in salary as IT administrators for House Democrats between 2009 and 2017. Yet the absence of signs of wealth displayed among them raise questions such as was the money sent overseas or did something other than paychecks motivate their actions?
Snip.
Official documents, court records and multiple interviews suggest the crew may have engaged in tax fraud, extortion, bankruptcy fraud and insurance fraud and the money could have been funneled overseas. Abid has hired high-profile attorney James Bacon who specializes in anti-money laundering litigation.
The Awans share modest homes, drive unremarkable cars and report little in the way of assets on congressional disclosures. The family owns significant amounts of Virginia rental properties, which are heavily financed, with second mortgages sometimes taken out. It’s unclear where the rental income goes because the Awans insist tenants pay in odd ways.
The Daily Caller News foundation interviewed multiple current and former tenants who said Imran insisted rent be paid in untraceable ways. Many of those TheDCNF interviewed about the Awans asked not to be identified for fear of suffering retaliation by the family, particularly renters to whose homes Imran has keys.
“He only wants cash — for the security deposit, everything. The mortgage is probably $600, we pay $1,800 a month,” one said.
“I would write the rent to all sorts of different people,” another claimed. While still another tenant said the family insisted on blank money orders.
Those interviewed also were puzzled that Congress kept the Awans on the payroll full-time when the family spent months of the year in Pakistan.
The four Awans were each making approximately $160,000 a year on Capitol Hill. Other House IT workers told TheDCNF that the Awans appeared to hold no-show jobs, with bare-bones services provided, and it appeared one person was doing the work for the rest of them.
Cristal Perpignan, a former Awan renter, said Imran instructed her to pay the rent to Imran’s friend, Rao Abbas, who lived in the basement of the home she occupied and was also on the House payroll as an IT worker. But Perpignan said Abbas spent his days at home.
Imran’s wife purchased the home in 2008 for $470,000. A second mortgage was taken out in 2012, and — at least on paper — it was sold to Imran’s 22-year old brother Jamal in November 2016 for $620,000 — $43,000 more than its assessed value.
“Phoenix dropped their sanctuary city status and started enforcing the law…and crime rates went down.”
“Migrant smugglers in Honduras say their business has dried up since [President] Trump took office.” Also this: “Give Trump critics credit: They predicted he would destroy jobs, and they were right; he appears to have destroyed a considerable number of positions in the previously vibrant and lucrative illicit people-smuggling industry.”
In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.
Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state.
Snip.
Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”
As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria.
South African is contemplating seizing the land of white farmers without compensation. Because Zimbabwe is such a sterling model of economic success to emulate…
Through four decades of communist rule, Poland and the other captive nations of Europe endured a brutal campaign to demolish freedom, your faith, your laws, your history, your identity — indeed the very essence of your culture and your humanity. Yet, through it all, you never lost that spirit. (Applause.) Your oppressors tried to break you, but Poland could not be broken. (Applause.)
And when the day came on June 2nd, 1979, and one million Poles gathered around Victory Square for their very first mass with their Polish Pope, that day, every communist in Warsaw must have known that their oppressive system would soon come crashing down. (Applause.) They must have known it at the exact moment during Pope John Paul II’s sermon when a million Polish men, women, and children suddenly raised their voices in a single prayer. A million Polish people did not ask for wealth. They did not ask for privilege. Instead, one million Poles sang three simple words: “We Want God.” (Applause.)
In those words, the Polish people recalled the promise of a better future. They found new courage to face down their oppressors, and they found the words to declare that Poland would be Poland once again.
Czech Republic to enshrine right to bear arms in their constitution. Gee, why on earth would a nation situated between Germany and Russia need its citizens to own guns?
“Yeah, Abdul, we’re going to need to tweak your resume for this position. Instead of ‘Beheading Infidels,’ let’s put ‘Contractor.'”
Vladimir Putin and President Trump meet at the G20 summit.
Speaking of the G20 Summit, mostly peaceful protestors there commit the mostly peaceful arson for which they’ve become so well-known. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments,that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming.
“Democratic lawmakers voted 71-42 to override Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner’s veto of a $5 billion tax hike on Thursday.” Can’t possibly imagine how Illinois’ Democrats plan to tax and spend their way out of a financial hole could possibly backfire… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“From its founding in 1919 in the wake of the Russian Revolution until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Communist Party of the United States of America was an instrument of Soviet foreign policy.” Not that anyone should be unclear on the topic after all these years, but I’m sure the piece was a shock to at least some of the New York Times dwindling readership…
Long, long, long article about video game maker Konami, where they actually get their money (fitness clubs and gambling machines), and how they came to treat their employees so poorly.
Yep. Another Project Veritas video dropped, this one featuring a different video with CNN producer Jimmy Carr.
The headline is about how CNN employees think Chris Cuomo is a dick who owes his position to the fact his brother is governor. This should not be shocking news to anyone.
More interesting I think is the arrogance and poor situational awareness of a CNN employee being caught on hidden camera talking about how CNN employees were recently caught on hidden camera. At this point, every CNN employee talking to someone outside the company should assume they’re on hidden camera. And yes, that means attractive women too, dummies.
In other news, CNN is claiming that the author of the “Trump bodyslams CNN” meme that they threatened to dox is actually a middle-aged man, not a teenager as first reported. Which makes their actions less reprehensible only in that they may have broken one less law than previously reported. Also, there’s evidence that the random guy CNN tried to blackmail is actually the wrong random guy. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Speaking of breaking laws, Ted Cruz cites Georgia criminal statutes CNN may have violated with their actions.
I wasn’t planning on doing Yet Another CNN Post. But CNN decided that repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot with a .38 wasn’t sufficient, got out a shotgun and took aim at their own torso.
And did I mention that the person CNN is evidently trying to unmask is reportedly a 15-year old kid?
Bonus: CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, who made himself the public face of the threatened doxing (“that will teach you to make fun of your awesome media betters, you puny peasant!”) evidently had a key role in a very early Twitter mobbing:
The kid CNN threatened to dox shouldn’t have apologized, he should have had his parents set up a Patron account to make more anti-CNN memes. By lunchtime he’d have been rich enough to retire.
Moreover, CNN’s bragging about they had threatened a random Internet user over a meme was their lead story for hours. Either they have no idea how distasteful the average Internet user would find this wildly disproportionate response, or else their collective egos have been so bruised by constantly losing to Trump that they feel an acute psychic need to celebrate swatting a fly with a howitzer.
And they seem to have no idea just what’s about to happen to them. They just went from “having a bad week” to “worst week for a media company since Hulk Hogan body slammed Gawker clear out of the Prime Material Plane.”
CNN picked a fight with the internet. This is not a fight they can win.
🚨🚨RETWEET🚨🚨 A partial list of CNN's advertisers and their phone numbers. More coming soon. Let them know what you think about #CNNBlackmail. pic.twitter.com/QkMeLzd5VU
CNN was unable to hit 900,000 viewers in any of its primetime timeslots on Tuesday. The closest it got was 886,000 during the 7 p.m. hour, and it spent nearly half the evening under 800,000.
The comparisons between CNN’s viewership and that of Fox News and MSNBC are truly eye-opening. Fox News tripled CNN’s viewership in nearly all of the primetime slots. Fellow left-wing network MSNBC dominated CNN in all primetime hours as well, doubling its viewership by average for most of the evening.
And these numbers are not outliers; CNN has been increasingly coming in last to Fox and MSNBC and often struggles to reach the million-viewer mark during its primetime programming. As Daily Wire’s John Nolte puts it, the network is in a full-blown ratings “death spiral” prompted by its credibility crisis.
Over the entire second quarter of 2017, looking at total viewers, only one CNN program placed in the top 20 of all cable news shows, and that was Anderson Cooper’s 360, which landed with a thud at number 20. For perspective, a repeat of Tucker Carlson’s Fox New hour attracted more viewers than any show on CNN.
Furthermore, throughout this same quarter, CNN lost to MSNBC in total and primetime demo viewers. This is the first time since 2014 that CNN has lost that demo crown to its leftwing rival. In total viewers last quarter, among all cable news channels, Fox News placed first, MSNBC third, and CNN is all alone in tenth place, just barely ahead of Investigative Discovery, a second-tier offshoot of the Discovery Network.
It’s obvious that no one trusts CNN to deliver straight news anymore, and their ratings nosedive suggests that an “All Trump Derangement Syndrome, All The Time” format doesn’t draw in enough viewers to make it economically viable.
We’re approaching half a year into the Trump presidency, and the media still won’t stop freaking out about Donald Trump’s tweets.
It’s like a guy going to the same magic show every night, and getting up and yelling “It’s fake! He’s not really sawing that woman in half!” every time.
Normal people see that as tweet as President Trump having fun tweaking the media. The media responded to it hysterically as “inciting violence” against their sacred bodies, because of course they did. Which, of course, sets off another round of normal people mocking the media for their continued arrogant cluelessness.
The same cluelessness the media have displayed every morning for, what, a year and a half now? Because they never read or understood Salena Zito’s “seriously, not literally” essay.
Shampoo. Rinse. Repeat.
Someday someone is going to write a book on the deceptive effectiveness of Trump’s Tweets. Trump uses his tweets in a variety of ways: As a cudgel, as a tool of persuasion, as a destroyer scattering depth charges into the media ocean. (Most won’t hit an enemy sub, but the ones that do…) Scott Adams has only been explaining how Trump uses persuasion techniques for over a year, and the media doesn’t seem to have picked up on that either.
Trump’s tweets let him dominate the news cycle, starving competing story lines of attention like the oxygen destroyer in the original Godzilla. And the media, either because they’re too stupid to know any better or too addicted to Trump bump ratings, keep falling for it.
While Trump does many things with his tweets, the latest controversy displays his masterful exploitation of the vast gulf between the borderline delusional self-regard of the media in general (and CNN in specific) and the public’s low opinion of same. It’s like watching Groucho Marx humiliate Margaret Dumont every morning. Normal people are laughing their asses off, while other stuffed shirt media pundits are aghast. “How dare he keep insulting that old rich lady!”
And here it is, a year and half or later, CNN is still declaring “Well, I never!” and wondering why everyone is laughing at them. Trump’s attacks are effective because average Americans hate the news media more, and trust them less, than they do Trump. And they feel that way because of the CNN and the media’s own self-inflicted wounds, and for obvious left-wing bias visible to pretty much any non-liberal observer.
The media keeps falling into Trump’s Twitter traps because their delusional self-love keeps leading them straight in. “Why surely fiend Trump’s latest attack on America’s sacred media outlets will finally rouse the populace to outrage!” Like Margaret Dumont’s characters, the media’s moral outrage never lets them realize they’re the butt of the joke.
Which, of course, always makes the joke that much funnier…
More lazy holiday weekend video blogging, with Reason extending liberals go-to argument on changing a single thing about ObamaCare to its logical conclusion:
Today’s a good day to talk about structural reform of the Export-Import Bank.*
Ha, just kidding! Here’s Shoe-On-Head on sexbots, or specifically feminism’s reaction to them. (NSFW, just in case you were unclear.)
“Why are you so upset, Mam?”
The long-term objection to sexbots is that if they get too good, they lead to the extinction of the human race. But that’s not among the feminist objections to sexbots…
*The EXIM Bank shouldn’t be reformed, it should be eliminated…
The year is half over! Donald Trump has been the 45th President of the United States of America for over five months, and liberals still haven’t stopped freaking out about it.
“It’s Obamacare that’s killing people, and just two classes of states are showing any immunity. Deaths from opiate overdoses are on the rise across the country, except in states that either legalized marijuana or declined Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.”
President Trump this morning: Repeal ObamaCare now, replace it later. Which is pretty much what Republicans have been campaigning on for the last six years…
Lying with numbers: CBO estimates 18 million people will be covered by ObamaCare in 2017. Actual number enrolled at the end of 2016: 9.1 million. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Multiple members of Congress hired as their information technology (IT) administrator an individual whose most recent job experience was being fired from McDonald’s, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned.
Spokesmen for the members won’t say what their bosses knew at the time, but the hiring decisions highlight the role — witting or unwitting — the representatives played in what turned out to be an alleged multi-million-dollar IT scam in Congress with serious implications for national security.
Soon after Imran Awan joined the staff of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz in 2005, his brothers Abid and Jamal, his wife Hina, and his brother’s wife Natalia all appeared on other members’ payrolls, supposedly as IT administrators. His best friend Rao Abbas landed on the payroll too. Most of them made salaries ordinarily only chiefs of staff earn, but they were rarely seen or heard from in Hill IT circles.
The crew is now the target of a U.S. Capitol Police criminal information security probe with assistance from other law enforcement agencies as needed. Politico reported the “House staffers are accused of stealing equipment from members’ offices without their knowledge and committing serious, potentially illegal, violations on the House IT network.”
By my count, the unqualified members of Imran Awan’s circle (who frequently failed to even show up for work) could read the emails of the 31 different House Democrats…
Postscript on the Georgia 6th Congressional District special election: Jon Ossoff actually got fewer votes than the ghost candidate that ran in 2016:
One good reason why Tom Price beat his last opponent by 23 points was that his last opponent was functionally indistinguishable from a corpse or a bag of lettuce. [Democratic candidate Rodney] Stooksbury spent precisely $0 on his campaign and has never been seen in public. Jon Ossoff had the entire national Democratic Party pulling out the stops for him, and flooded Atlanta television with ten million dollars in advertising. Drastically improving on the Stooksbury numbers should be no dazzling feat. (Although, somewhat hilariously, Stooksbury actually got more total votes than Ossoff, 124,917 to Ossoff’s 124,893. Granted, special elections have lower turnout, but good grief.)
Ghost workers in the House, ghost candidates on the ballot. Your modern Democratic Party, ladies and gentlemen… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Speaking of the modern Democratic Party: Members of the all-Democratic City Council in White Plains, New York selected party chairwoman Elizabeth Shollenberger for a plum six-figure judicial seat. Tiny problem: She’s too morbidly obese to perform her duties. If ever there was a metaphor for Democratic-run government…
Democrat Seth Williams, former Philadelphia District Attorney, has resigned as part of a bribery plea deal. “In addition to accepting that he could face a maximum five-year term when he is sentenced, Williams agreed to forfeit $64,878.22.” Part of the plea deal was pleading guilty to one count of bribery so he could skate on the other 28…
Democrats and the national media sure put the Scalise shooting behind them quickly so they could get back to saying Republicans want to kill you:
Less than 48 hours after a multiple assassination attempt on members of Congress, there were no media vans or cameras at the Alexandria baseball field where it occurred. Just for perspective, when Republican staffer Elizabeth Lauten committed the offense of writing something critical of President Obama’s daughters on her private Facebook page, news cameras were camped on her parents’ lawn staking her out for the better part of a week.
Col. Ryan Dillon, the Baghdad-based spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, said that Iraqi forces on Thursday cut a wedge in the middle of the area held by Islamic State, seizing the Nouri mosque and cornering the few hundred remaining fighters in half of Mosul’s Old City on one side, and an area around a hospital that has been a stronghold for the group on the other side.
Col. Dillon predicted that the fighting would be over in a matter of days and that it would then take time to fully clear the areas the Islamic State holdouts.
House passes two border control bills. “One is known as Kate’s Law that increases penalties for illegal immigrants who keep trying to re-enter the United States, especially those who have criminal records. The second denies federal grants to sanctuary cities.”
Three gay Jews asked leave the “2017 Dyke March Chicago” because their Jewish pride flag bore the Star of David. “If the Star of David makes you feel unsafe, there’s a word for that …”
Intersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history. Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.
By that hierarchy, you might imagine that the Jewish people — enduring yet another wave of anti-Semitism here and abroad — should be registered as victims. Not quite.
Why? Largely because of Israel, the Jewish state, which today’s progressives see only as a vehicle for oppression of the Palestinians — no matter that Israel has repeatedly sought to meet Palestinian claims with peaceful compromise, and no matter that progressives hold no other country to the same standard. China may brutalize Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in Xinjiang, while denying basic rights to the rest of its 1.3 billion citizens, but “woke” activists pushing intersectionality keep mum on all that.
One of the women who was asked to leave the Dyke March, an Iranian Jew named Eleanor Shoshany-Anderson, couldn’t understand why she was kicked out of an event that billed itself as intersectional. “The Dyke March is supposed to be intersectional,” she said. “I don’t know why my identity is excluded from that. I felt that, as a Jew, I am not welcome here.”
She isn’t. Because though intersectionality cloaks itself in the garb of humanism, it takes a Manichaean view of life in which there can only be oppressors and oppressed. To be a Jewish dyke, let alone one who deigns to support Israel, is a categorical impossibility, oppressor and oppressed in the same person.
President Trump nominates former Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison as the next NATO ambassador. Not my favorite Texas Republican Senator by a long shot, but I fail to see how she would be unqualified for this role.
Lawyer who committed $600 million in Social Security fraud has evidently skipped the country, claims to be broke. Sure, sport…
Label drops Austin band Dream Machine for WrongThink. Including a legal immigrant who was critical of illegal aliens:
Doris Melton, who came to the United States from Bosnia told the website she was “glad they’re finally starting to work on deporting criminal illegal aliens too. It took ages for me to get my green card here legally and because there’s so many illegals coming in they make it hard for the people who do want to become part of American society the right way. They’re handing out free money to people who come here illegally, but when you want to work hard to become an American citizen to start a family they make it so hard on you, and expensive!”
Later in the interview, Doris Melton was asked to name something that bothers her about the music industry. She responded by saying “girls have mostly become lazy jellyfish and are starting these horrible feminist bands just to try and ‘show men what they got’.”
She went on to say, “The safe space mentality has made them weak. They don’t even know how to play their instruments! They’ll make songs about being ‘sexually assaulted’ or about how ’empowering’ abortions are or some (expletive) and it’s (expletive) retarded, they’re embarrassing themselves. If men did that they would be crucified! You see the longing for a gender supremacy under the guise of ‘equal rights.’ What happened to the incredible female singers from back in the day with real talent, singing about finding true love and wanting to be a good woman?”
New York Times staffers rebel against cutbacks. Hey, when you alienate half of your potential audience, a Mexican billionaire’s largess only goes so far…
I don’t recall getting into a Twitter tiff with John Cusack, and I’ve liked most of the Cusack films I’ve seen (Being John Malkovich, Grosse Pointe Blank, High Fidelity). I even had mostly kind things to say about him in 1408. I assume he must be using one of those autoblockbot things to avoid running into #WrongThink…
Methhead with nine prior felony convictions given life for evidence tampering. Previous convictions include manslaughter of an Arizona State Trooper and engaging in a “deviant sex act involving a squash.” And then there’s the creepy stuff…
Mexico’s drug war is one of those news stories that’s been crowded off America’s front pages by the tide of #FakeNews. How can the MSM find time to cover dead Mexicans if Donald Trump’s doorman might have once talked to a Russian?
I say “drug war” but that should probably be “drug wars,” in that each government crackdown on particular cartels, wars between rival cartels, and wars between different factions of the same cartel are all different events, and different parts of Mexico experience explosive violence and relative calm at different times. Juarez, the Mexican city just across the border from El Paso, experienced horrific drug violence between 2008 and 2012, peaking at 3,766 homicides in 2010, dropping back to 256 in 2015. (By contrast, in 2010 El Paso had a total of five murders.)
in 2017, a newly hot drug war is roiling Mexico just south of the border patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector. “The Reynosa faction of the Gulf Cartel lost its boss, Comandante Toro or Juan Manuel Loaiza Salinas aka Julian Loiza Salinas. The death sparked violent infighting and clashes with Mexican authorities. Residents in the area were forced to live under complete control of Toro, with even the news outlets having to answer to him.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
There are five border control sectors that cover Texas, from East to West: Rio Grande Valley, Laredo, Del Rio, Marfa, and El Paso. Reynosa is directly south of McAllen.
At least 36 people have been killed in drug violence in Reynosa alone this year. Just this week, they machine gunned to death a seven year old boy during a failed carjacking.
In other drug cartel news:
Just today, eight members of the La Familia drug cartel in Austin and San Antonio were sentenced to prison:
Oscar Maldonado, 32 of Austin, was sentenced to 78 months in prison.
Julio Rogel, 20 of Austin, was sentenced to 88 months in prison.
Jose Duenas, 35 of Austin, was sentenced to 60 months in prison.
Jorge Arellano, 36 of Austin, was sentenced to 88 months in prison.
Javier Jaimes, 28 of Austin, was sentenced to 72 months in prison.
Javier Alvarez, 26 of San Antonio, was sentenced to 57 months in prison.
Jaime Carbajal, 26 of Austin, was sentenced to 42 months in prison.
Hugo Rodriguez, 31 of Austin, was sentenced to 70 months in prison.
“Investigators found 75 kilograms of methamphetamine during their investigation, along with nine kilograms of cocaine and around $175,000 in cash.” Three more members await sentencing.
During the dawn of cable TV, CNN had real impact. No longer did you have to wait until 6 PM for updates on national stories. Crossfire, featuring Tom Braden on the left and Patrick Buchanan on the right, was hugely influential, though nobody realized it would degenerate into the “talking heads screaming at each other” format that infects so much of cable news today.
But as time went on, CNN drifted leftward, partially due to founder Ted Turner’s own leftward drift, partially due to the overall media trends. Bill Clinton’s personal friend Rick Kaplan ran the network from 1997-2000, during which time CNN attacked Clinton’s critics and defended Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In 2003, CNN news chief Eason Jordan admitted he had downplayed Iraqi atrocities in order to maintain access.
CNN’s increasing leftwing tilt was one of the reasons the upstart Fox News Network surpassed CNN’s ratings in 2002 and never looked back. But the 2016 Presidential Election was when CNN finally gave up even the pretense of objectivity, earning their Clinton News Network nickname and developing a full-blown case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
It didn’t help that CNN freely exchanged DNA with the Democratic Party: Chris Cuomo, Laura Jarrett, and Virginia Moseley (CNN Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief married to Obama Deputy Secretary of State Tom Nides) to name but three.
Given all that, it’s no great surprise that CNN has spent inordinate amounts of time pushing the Trump Russia conspiracy theory. CNN has probably mentioned Russia more in the last eight months than they did in eight years during the Obama Administration.
Three CNN employees “resigned” over another Trump Russia conspiracy theory story (this one about a Russian investment fund run by Anthony Scaramucci being under federal investigation) that was so bad CNN had to retract and delete it. Those “resigning” include Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Frank (not the What’s the Matter With Kansas guy), Eric Lichtblau, who CNN recently hired away from the New York Times, and Lex Haris, executive editor of CNN Investigates. (That, in turn, lead to one of the most CNN things ever: CNN refusing to comment to CNN reporter about CNN story retraction. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.))
Then CNN producer John Bonifield was caught on camera by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas admitting that there’s no smoking gun to the “Russia hacked the election” fantasy, and that CNN CEO Jeff Zucker is only pushing the Russia narrative for ratings.
At the end of the video, O’Keefe promises more videos to come on CNN.
Now the question becomes whether CNN wants to continue destroying what’s left of its reputation in pursuing its fantasy of a Russia Trump conspiracy, or whether it would like to return to actually reporting the news rather than trying to manufacture it.
(Note: I almost wrote “its white whale of a Russia Trump conspiracy,” but then I realized that was the wrong metaphor. After all, in Herman Melville’s novel, Moby Dick actually exists… )
Update: Just after I posted this, the second Project Veritas CNN video dropped, in which CNN on-air personality admitted that the Russia story was a “big nothingburger”:
