Tucker Carlson on NBC’s Burgeoning Weinstein Scandal

September 6th, 2018

First came this story about NBC spiked Ronan Farrow’s story on Harvey Weinstein:

In February 2015, Farrow lost his daytime show on MSNBC and began working with NBC News’ investigative unit. In November 2016, Farrow and a producer named Rich McHugh decided they wanted to do a story about Hollywood’s “casting couch,” the longtime practice of producers and other powerful men exchanging sex with women for film roles, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. The story was timed to be released around the Academy Awards, these sources said.

They presented the idea to NBC News President Noah Oppenheim, who suggested the team look into a October 2016 tweet by actress Rose McGowan that she was raped by a Hollywood executive, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation.

Over the next several months, Farrow collected evidence that suggested Weinstein had a pattern of inappropriate behavior toward women, according to the sources and previous reporting by The Daily Beast, HuffPost, and The New York Times. Weinstein has repeatedly denied all allegations of non-consensual sex. Sources familiar with the matter previously told The Daily Beast that at least eight women accusing Weinstein had agreed to go on camera, including two alleged victims with their names and faces.

In an interview with The New York Times published Thursday night, McHugh accused “the very highest levels of NBC” of later stopping the reporting.

“There was not one single victim or witness to misconduct by Harvey Weinstein who was willing to go on the record. Not one,” the spokesperson told The Daily Beast.

By February, according to the sources, Farrow had secured an on-the-record interview with McGowan in which the actress said she had been sexually harassed by a powerful producer, though she did not name Weinstein. (McGowan subsequently named Weinstein during the NBC investigation, according to a source with knowledge of the story, but reportedly pulled her interview after being legally threatened by Weinstein, who had reached a $100,000 settlement with her in 1997 after she accused him of sexual assault.)

Farrow and McHugh also obtained a bombshell audio recording from a NYPD sting in which Weinstein admitted to groping Filipina-Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez in 2015. (The Battilana audio was subsequently published by The New Yorker.)

“The tape on its own was color, it added to an already known accusation,” an NBC spokesperson said. While it was “absolutely significant” to hear Battilana’s voice, the spokesperson said, the tape alone would not expose Weinstein as serial sexual predator, as has been alleged.

NBC’s reluctance stoked Farrow and McHugh’s concerns about NBC’s commitment to the story, the sources said. Farrow did not respond to a request for comment. Ari Wilkenfeld, McHugh’s attorney, told The Daily Beast that his client “has no comment.”

In spring 2017, according to the sources, Farrow played Oppenheim the audio of Weinstein with Battilana admitting that he was “used to” groping women’s breasts. At one point during their meeting, according to two sources, Oppenheim had asked if people still cared about Weinstein.

“That is absolutely false,” a NBC spokesperson said, “and it is clearly contradicted by the fact that Oppenheim assigned the story on Harvey Weinstein in the first place. Obviously he understood him to be and believed him to be a newsworthy figure.”

Farrow had begun to suspect that Oppenheim—who moonlighted as a Hollywood screenwriter—was potentially communicating with Weinstein directly about the story, according to the sources.

During a meeting in summer 2017, Oppenheim mentioned to Farrow that Weinstein had raised objections to Farrow’s reporting—even though Farrow had not yet asked Weinstein to comment on the allegations, according to individuals briefed on the meeting.

“Externally, I had Weinstein associates calling me repeatedly,” McHugh told the Times. “I knew that Weinstein was calling NBC executives directly. One time it even happened when we were in the room.”

Read the whole thing.

NBC news not only spiked the Weinstein story, but provided an ever-changing list of excuses why and made legal threats against Farrow.

Here’s Tucker Carlson on how NBC keeps changing their story, and how MS/NBC News honcho Chuck Todd has a lot of explaining to do:

(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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Posted in Crime, Media Watch, video | No Comments »

Man Crashes Truck Into Fox 4 Station in Dallas

September 5th, 2018

Fox Derangement Syndrome: Truckmageddon Edition:

A man was arrested Wednesday morning after crashing a truck into the side of the FOX4 building in downtown Dallas.

The man, after repeatedly crashing his vehicle into a side of the building with floor to ceiling windows, got out of his vehicle and began ranting.

FOX4 photojournalists were able to film him placing numerous boxes next to a sidedoor filled with stacks of paper. The papers were also strewn across the sidewalk and street adjacent to the building.

He does not look like a well individual:

Update: The man was evidently ranting about a a 2012 police shooting where he was a passenger. So probably an individual nutcase than a political nutcase…

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Posted in Crime, Texas, video | No Comments »

Cruz and the Kavanaugh Circus

September 5th, 2018

I’m not going to detail the Democrat’s lunatic circus at the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation periods, except to marvel at how they’ve adopted the same crazy screaming strategies that didn’t work for the Wisconsin recall.

Instead, I want to focues on Ted Cruz’s rational, reasonable arguments for Kavanaugh:

First Cruz talks about “what this hearing is about and what it is not about,” proving that the Democrats have offered no substantive objections to Kavanaugh, as no such objections can plausibly exist, and so turn to “pounding the table” and making beef over silly procedural objections about how many documents they’ve received.

Snip.

When he asks, “So what is this hearing all about?” He says it’s all about the Democrats being unhappy about the voters’ considered choice in 2016, and wanting to overturn that. But he notes that this was the first election since Eisenhower which occurred with an open Supreme Court seat in play, and thus the next Supreme Court nominee indirectly on the ballot. And he notes that the issue of judicial appointments was vigorously contested by both Trump and Hillary Clinton, the issue being asked about in every single debate, and with both candidates stating the type of judge they would nominate.

Cruz points out that Trump took the “unprecedented” step of publishing a list of his likely Supreme Court picks. He implies without directly stating that Kavanaugh was on this list. (Kavanaugh was in fact on the short list.)

Therefore, Cruz concludes, Kavanaugh has something he calls “super-legitimacy” as a Supreme Court nominee, as the voters were already told that he might well be a Supreme Court choice by Trump and chose to elect Trump. Cruz calls this a de facto “referendum” on the acceptability of Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice.

Finally, Cruz points out that progressives use the courts to win policy fights they cannot win at the ballot, and points out that America has been debating big policy issues that the left would like to win via the courts. And in the face of that, they chose Trump, who promised to appoint constitutionalists. He specifically notes that every Democrat Senator voted to gut the First Amendment, and that many Democrat Senators voted to repeal the Religious Freedom Act signed into law by Bill Clinton, and that almost every Democrat wants to effectively repeal the Second Amendment.

Watch for yourself:

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Posted in Democrats, Supreme Court, video | No Comments »

Waco Biker Trial Update: No Prosecutions Under Abel Reyna

September 4th, 2018

The much-delayed Waco biker trials will be delayed again until defeated McLennan County DA Abel Reyna is out of office:

A judge, who said Friday he has been “troubled by the whole Twin Peaks matter from its inception,” put off the trials of bikers in his court until after the first of the year because he wants the new McLennan County district attorney to review how the remaining Twin Peaks cases will be handled.

Judge Ralph Strother, the morning after conducing a daylong pretrial hearing in Twin Peaks defendant Tom Modesto Mendez’s first-degree felony riot case, decided on his own to postpone Mendez’s trial, which was set to start Sept. 10.

Strother denied a motion Thursday by Mendez’s attorney to throw out the indictment after prosecutors agreed to amend language in the riot indictment that more closely tracks wording in the statute.

Both sides have been preparing for weeks for the Mendez case, and each side had scheduled witnesses, some from out of state, to be ready to go Sept. 10.

The sexual assault trial of former Baylor University football player Shawn Oakman had been set for Sept. 10 as a backup to the Mendez case, but it, too, was pushed back Friday. Strother granted the delay in that case, which Oakman’s attorney requested a few hours after Mendez’s delay, saying a character witness who is out of state cannot be subpoenaed in time for Sept. 10.

It was Strother, even more than Mendez’s attorney, Jaime Peña, who questioned prosecutors Thursday about the riot indictment and expressed concerns that they, in effect, had turned what normally is a Class B misdemeanor into a crime that possibly subjects the defendants to life in prison.

And remember that all this is after most of the original, overbroad charges against various bikers present at the Twin Peaks shootout were dismissed.

Snip.

“I think a fresh set of eyes re-evaluating how the state is pursuing these cases is warranted,” Peña said. “That is essentially what the judge is saying. He wants to push it into the new year and let the new DA look at this.”

Barry Johnson beat incumbent DA Abel Reyna by 20 percentage points in the March Republican primary and will run unopposed in November. Johnson, who takes office in January, said during the campaign that one of the first things he will do is assemble a team to review the remaining Twin Peaks cases.

Reyna has not attended any of the numerous hearings involving Twin Peaks defendants since he lost the primary.

The judge’s position is reasonable, but if I were a resident of McLennan County, I would be pissed not only that Reyna so badly screwed up prosecution with his unconstitutional “collective guilt” approach, but that he can’t even be arsed to do his damn job since voters handed him his walking papers…

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Posted in Crime, Texas | No Comments »

Antifa Lunch Break

September 3rd, 2018

Something light for Labor Day…

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Posted in Social Justice Warriors, Uncategorized, video | No Comments »

Village Voice Shuts Down

September 2nd, 2018

The “alternative weekly” finally had no alternative to shutting down:

Three years after buying The Village Voice, and a year after the paper shut down its print edition, owner Peter Barbey told the remaining staff today that the publication will no longer be posting any new stories.

“Today is kind of a sucky day,” Barbey told the staff, according to audio obtained by Gothamist. “Due to, basically, business realities, we’re going to stop publishing Village Voice new material [sic].”

Barbey said that half of the staff, which is around 15 to 20 people, will remain on to “wind things down,” and work on a project to archive the Voice’s material online.

The rest of the staff will be let go today.

Since they announced they were ending print publication a year ago, this is no surprise.

It’s like when some musician who was briefly important in the sixties dies, and you go “Oh, wait, he was still alive?”

Alternative weeklies were useful for carrying club, event and restaurant listings, all things the Internet does better now. As far as I can tell, their “carrier medium for liberal opinion” business model is only viable two ways: Carry tons of sex ads (something else the Internet does better now), or have the tabloid as an adjunct to a large, profitable music festival (the Austin Chronicle model). Since the most recent super-geniuses running the Village Voice eliminated sex ads, plus the tremendous BS involved in running any business in New York City, the graffiti was on the brownstone wall.

Plus it’s not like readers have a crying lack of far left-wing voices in the media today…

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Posted in Democrats, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors | 1 Comment »

Scott Adams on Kanye West on Rich People and Skill Stacks

September 1st, 2018

Scott Adams has an interesting periscope up on Kanye West talking about how black people need to “think more like rich people.”

Some of the points Adams covers about how Kanye West exhibits “rich people thinking” (especially compared to #BlackLivesMatter):

  • Think in systems rather than goals
  • Talk to everyone (networking)
  • Develop your skill stack
  • Take logical risks
  • Learn from mistakes
  • Make alliances
  • Be generous (do favors without asking for immediate returns)
  • Lead with love
  • Concentrate on the now, not the past

    • He ends with a discussion of the basic skills people in the inner city need to learn to be successful: How to keep your own books, how to find mentors, how to get your first job, how to dress for your first job. Even a boot camp on how to talk to the police.

    More interesting than I expected it to be…

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    Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for August 31, 2018

    August 31st, 2018

    Just when I think the Catholic Church can’t make itself look any worse in the wake of the burgeoning child rape scandal, they prove me wrong:

  • Papal spokesman on the Catholic Church’s spiraling child rape scandal:

    In an NBC News interview yesterday, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago insisted that it was more than acceptable for Pope Francis to refuse to discuss Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s shocking testimony, which implicates a host of Catholic Church leaders — including the pope — in covering up sexual abuse and immorality.

    “The pope has a bigger agenda,” Cupich told interviewer Mary Anne Ahern when asked about the pope’s refusal to discuss Viganò’s claims. “He’s got to get on with other things, of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the Church.

  • Evidently Pope Francis and company were doing their darnedest to imitate the Babylon Bee.
  • Related: “Pope Starting To Suspect He Might Be Antichrist.”
  • How ObamaCare was designed to force independent doctors out of business. (Hat tip: Ian Murray at Instapundit.)
  • ICE arrests over 100 illegal alien workers at Load Trail LLC in Sumner, north Texas.
  • The U.S. share of mass shootings is actually lower than the global average.
  • President Trump’s Iran sanctions are working.
  • “There’s a widespread consensus that at no time in the past 40 years, since Saddam Hussein acquired absolute power and led Iraq into a series of ruinous wars, has Baghdad been as free and as fun as it is now.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Remember Russia’s new T-14 Armata tank? They were going to build 2,300 of them. Now? 132. And that number is split between the T-14 and the T-15 heavy infantry fighting vehicle, which shares the same chassis. Which means Russia will have to continue to rely on older T-72 and T-90 tanks as the mainstays of their armored forces for the foreseeable future. By comparison the United States has over 1,500 M1A2s and over 4,000 M1A1s, both of which proved capable of taking out T-72s in the Gulf War. As Stalin once put it, “Quantity has a quality all it’s own.” And the essential brokeness of Russia is why I’m not worried about their costly adventurism in Syria. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • John McCain was admired by liberals; that is, when they weren’t calling him a senile plutocrat warmonger.
  • How Chicago 68 destroyed the Democratic Party:

    Humphrey would be the last Democratic presidential nominee to represent the values of Truman and JFK: compassionate big government at home, and resolute anti-Communism abroad. Instead, a new Democratic party was born, one that increasingly reflected the radical views of the Chicago protesters: that America, not Communism, was the real force for evil that needed to be contained and transformed. That Democratic party would nominate George McGovern in its 1972 convention and become a party obsessed with social justice, identity politics, and America’s past sins — essentially the party it is today. Meanwhile mainstream Democratic voters began their flight to the Republican party, “Reagan Democrats” who would enable the GOP to win four of the next five presidential elections and who later became the foot soldiers of the Trump insurgency.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • The Missouri Democratic Party does not need any of you stinking moderates. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Biased liberal news sites hate being called biased liberal news sites. (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)
  • Philadelphia is bankrupt. So naturally the liberal mayor is trying to ignore the obvious. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Cahnman looks at gang rape in the Baylor football program. Add to this the news that Baylor planted moles in sexual assault survivor groups to report back on cases involving student athletes, and you start to wonder whether the NCAA out not to revive the “Death Penalty” for Baylor’s football program…or maybe their entire athletic department.
  • CNN lied, they know they lied, and they can’t stop lying.
  • Washington Post: “Russia hacked the election!” Also Washington Post: “We’re going to court to fight election transparency advertising law!” (Hat tip: Ace of Spaces HQ.)
  • Speaking of liberal mouthpiece newspapers, both the editor and the publisher for the Austin American Statesman are retiring.
  • This just in: Greece is still boned.
  • “If he’s cute, it’s flirting. If he’s ugly, it’s sexual harassment.”
  • “Abbas to close banks in Gaza, cut off all salaries.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Lancaster Independent School District violates state law with illegal electioneering.
  • Dick’s Sporting Goods move away from guns hurt their bottom line. “The anti-gun crowd must not buy a lot of sporting goods.​”
  • ESPN finally seems to understand that they should get out of politics and stick to sports. Took them long enough…
  • Chicanery at the Llano police department. Bad cop! No ribs!
  • “Eat Steak and Live Longer.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Snowflake Kansas professor cancels office hours because concealed carry is no legal. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • There can be only one…going to prison. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • How ballpoint pens killed cursive.

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Military, ObamaCare, Texas | 2 Comments »

    Semiconductor Update: GlobalFoundries Gives Up On 7nm​

    August 30th, 2018

    GlobalFoundries has given up work on their 7nm process node. This is a direct result of AMD choosing TSMC over GlobalFoundries to fab their next generation microprocessor.

    GlobalFounderies was always something of an odd duck. It was spun out from AMD in 2009 to turn their manufacturing arm into a foundry because AMD itself could no longer afford the huge upfront capital investment state-of-the-art wafer fabrication plants demanded. As it exists today, GlobalFounderies​ is a Frankenstein’s monster of agglomeration, having gobbled up Singapore-based Chartered Semiconductor and what remained of IBM’s fab infrastructure (back in the day, IBM had some of the best semiconductor design capabilities in the world) in New York and Vermont. (SK Hynix, NXP and ON Semiconductor, all integrated device manufacturers rather than foundries, are similar merger-assembled aggregations.) GlobalFounderies actual owner is the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.

    With UMC screwing the pooch by letting Chinese spies walk out the door with Micron design IP, there was an opening for a (sorta, kinda) American chip foundry to provide a viable rival to TSMC, but GlobalFoundries evidently found it too difficult to do profitably.

    TSMC has already broken ground on a fab that will theoretically take them down to 5nm and is expected to cost $500 billion NT, which works out to over $16 billion US at current exchange rates. That’s more outlay than all the profit TSMC made all of last year.

    Some thoughts (partially based on scuttlebutt, gossip, etc.):

  • Right now there’s no non-TSMC foundry choice if a fabless chip company wants to attempt a sub 14nm design. It’s Taiwan or nothing.
  • To the best of my knowledge, no one outside TSMC, Intel and Samsung are even attempting 7nm. Word is that TSMC’s 7nm is actually closer to 10nm, and Intel is evidently in a world of hurt getting yields up on its 10nm process.
  • Samsung says they’re going to 7nm in 2019 using Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, a long, long awaited technological shift that will probably involve its own painful learning curve. Others have speculated that, despite those plans, Samsung seems pretty happy sitting at 14nm with high yields for most of its own chip needs (as opposed to its foundry customers).

    • What this means is that the cutting edge of wafer fabrication technology is probably going to be centered on the Pacific rim for the foreseeable future. China won’t be on that cutting edge, because they can’t steal technology fast enough or hire enough enough qualified process techs to get it done.

    We may finally have reached a point that building a cutting edge, state-of-the-art wafer fabrication plant is a money-losing proposition for everyone.

    That means fabless chip designers working at the cutting edge will be dependent on Taiwan and South Korea for the foreseeable future, a fact that has a lot of foreign policy relevance, especially in relation to China…

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    Posted in Economics, Foreign Policy | 1 Comment »

    The Texas Senate Race and the Case of the Ever-Shrinking Poll Sample

    August 29th, 2018

    Another week, another poll that shows Beto O’Rourke within striking distance of Ted Cruz. The entire sample size on the Emerson poll was only 550 registered voters. It seems that O’Rourke’s numbers go up as the size of the sample goes down.

    Let’s look at the crosstabs, shall we?

    First, this is among registered voters, not likely voters, as other polls have screened. That matters, because off-year elections have lower turnout than Presidential elections.

    Second, did they oversample Democrats? Why yes they did, albeit not as grossly as as some previous polls. Republicans checked in at 41%, Democrats at 35%, a six point difference as opposed to the nine point difference in party identification in 2016, much less the 16 points win Cruz enjoyed over Paul Sadler in 2012, or the 20 points Greg Abbott beat Wendy Davis by in 2014.

    Third, they’ve oversampled women 52.3% to 47.7% men. The last non-Presidential election poll show closer to a 51% women/49% men split.

    I’m guessing that the “closeness” of the race is heavily dependent on those factors.

    In other Texas senate race news:

  • O’Rourke blows off a debate with Cruz.
  • How to write the perfect fawning profile of Beto O’Rourke without having to do any of that annoying research.

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »

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