Posts Tagged ‘Colin Kaepernick’

Our Horrible, Incompetent Media: Coronavirus Edition

Saturday, April 11th, 2020

America’s mainstream media is lousy even in the best of times.

This is not the best of times.

All the bias, incompetence, mendacity and just plain manifest stupidity of national media has been on even sharper display than usual during the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak.

Consider this roundup just a small sampler of the many ways our media has failed to provide accurate, unbiased news during the crisis:

  • First up is NBC channeling the communist Chinese government:

    The mainstream media’s routine parroting of propaganda from China’s communist government as it relates to their Wuhan coronavirus cases has been well-documented here at RedState and elsewhere. But what continues to be shocking is how many national news media outlets keep doing so without any trace of shame whatsoever.

    Case in point, NBC News, who tweeted out this gem early this morning about the number of Wuhan coronavirus deaths reported in the U.S. in a 24 hour-plus time period in comparison to China in the same timeframe:

    U.S. reports 1,264 coronavirus deaths in over 24 hours.

    Meanwhile in China, where the pandemic broke out, not a single new coronavirus death was reported. https://t.co/ooXkR9X2L5

    — NBC News (@NBCNews) April 7, 2020

    Two things came to mind to me when I read that tweet:

    First, it came across as an unnecessary cheap shot “gotcha” similar to how the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler tried to dunk on President Trump by saying his comments about the low unemployment rate during the SOTU “did not age well” in light of the millions of jobs lost in recent weeks.

    The second thing was that it sounded like something you’d read on any one of the number of Chinese government-run “media” accounts on Twitter, bragging about how they were doing so much better at combating the virus than the United States.

  • Not only does CNN lie, but they lie about having lied:

    It’s pretty clear that there is a concerted effort by outlets like CNN to bury their erroneous reporting and downplaying of the Wuhan coronavirus threat by deflecting to Fox News, but the evidence shows CNN was among the worst offenders.

    Beyond that, CNN has also been a willing participant in the Chinese government’s propaganda war against the United States, slammed Fox News for covering New York’s response failures – even though CNN’s Jake Tapper covered them the very next day, has purposely and deceptively used the “per capita” label on a selective basis when reporting on US cases in a way that paints the U.S. in an unflattering light, and ran with the absurd “man dies from swallowing fish tank cleaner” story as a way to falsely blame Trump.

  • Why is the New York Times reporting that President Trump had a financial interest in hydroxychloroquine, a patent-expired drug that several different manufacturers produce? To ask the question is to answer it.

    The only conclusion to draw from this is that the paper’s report is another example on a long list of them on how the MSM actually seems to be rooting against the use of hydroxychloroquine as a promising treatment for suffering Wuhan Coronavirus patients because Orange Man Bad, so much so that they’re willing to deceive their readers as to the nature of Trump’s supposed “financial interest” in it.

    Further, this alleged link is that a company that makes a name-brand version is a small percentage of the holdings of a mutual fund President Trump has money in:

    By this standard, I evidently have a “financial interest” in every company in the Fortune 500…

  • There was yet another “sources say” (i.e., #JustTrustMeBro) report that the Pentagon knew about the Wuhan coronavirus in November promoted by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos (speaking of Democratic Party tools). It took all of twelve hours for the Pentagon to point out that Stephanopoulos was full of shit.
  • On the mendacity front, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes manages to lie on both sides of the same issue: “Chris Hayes, One Month Ago: Trump ‘Personally Pressured’ Health Officials to ‘Manipulate the Numbers Downward.’ Chris Hayes, Yesterday: Trump Inflated the Death Count So He Could Brag When The Numbers Came In Lower.”
  • On the “just plain stupid” front, a reporter asks President Trump why he doesn’t just shut down all grocery stores. Evidently the grocery fairy brings him all his food every week.
  • And stupidity isn’t just limited to the big things: Lots of media figures fell for a fake “Colin Kaepernick signed with the Jets” hoax on Twitter. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Our media even hates just the possibility of hope, as with noted CNN media tool Brian Stelter.

    • Once again, this is just a small sample of the horrible state of our current media. If I wanted to include every cornavirus screwup, I’d still be writing it…

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    Posted in Communism, Democrats, Media Watch | No Comments »

    Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti Indicted on Felony Charges

    Tuesday, March 26th, 2019

    It would take a man with a heart of stone not to dunk on creepy porn lawyer Michael Avenatti.

    After all, here was a man who swore he had the goods to take down President Donald Trump. Well, it looks like Avenatti will be the one taken down, as he was indicted not once, but twice on federal charges today:

    Michael Avenatti, the attorney who shot to national fame for representing adult film actress Stormy Daniels in her case against President Donald Trump, was arrested Monday in two separate cases of alleged financial crimes on both coasts.

    New York prosecutors accused Avenatti of trying to extract more than $20 million from Nike Inc. by threatening to inflict financial and reputational harm on the company. Avenatti, a frequent attacker of Trump who flirted with a 2020 presidential bid, is also facing separate bank and wire fraud charges in Los Angeles, authorities said.

    On the Nike extortion scheme:

    The feds claim Avenatti told Nike’s lawyers if they didn’t pay him between $15 million and $25 million he would hold a news conference on the eve of Nike’s quarterly earnings call and the start of March Madness and announce allegations of misconduct by employees at the shoe company.

    According to the complaint, Avenatti demanded Nike hire him to conduct an internal investigation for the enormous salary.

    The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York says Avenatti was representing a client who was the coach of an AAU Youth Club basketball team.

    Prosecutors say Avenatti gave Nike an option … don’t hire him but pay $22.5 million to resolve the dispute and buy his silence.

    The complaint says Avenatti claimed the AAU coach had evidence that one or more Nike employees had funded payments to the families of top high school basketball players and attempted to conceal those payments.

    According to prosecutors, there was a call on March 20 between Avenatti and Nike during which Avenatti said, “I’m not f**king around with this, and I’m not continuing to play games … you guys know enough now to know you’ve got a serious problem … So if you guys think that you know, we’re gonna negotiate a million five, and you’re gonna hire us to do an internal investigation, but it’s gonna be capped at 3 or 5 or 7 million dollars, like let’s just be done.”

    Prosecutors say then Avenatti makes a threat … “I’ll go and I’ll go take 10 billion dollars off your client’s market cap. But I’m not f**king around.”

    The U.S. Attorney says the call was recorded and there’s video of a meeting between Avenatti and Nike attorneys on March 21. In that meeting, Avenatti allegedly said, “If [Nike] wants to have one confidential settlement and we’re done, they can buy that for $22.5 million and we’re done.”

    As for the wire fraud charge:

    Avenatti sought loans from The Peoples Bank on behalf of Global Baristas and his law firms. As Avenatti pursued the loans, the complaint states, he provided false financial documents, including fake IRS filings and incorrect corporate financial material.

    In or around December 2014, for example, Avenatti allegedly provided a 2012 IRS Form 1040 claiming that he made $4 million in 2013 and paid $1.3 million in taxes; according to IRS records, Avenatti did not file an IRS Form 1040 for 2013, nor did he pay any taxes to the IRS that year. Avenatti failed to file personal federal income taxes from 2011 to 2017, though he “generated substantial income and lived lavishly,” according to the complaint.

    Upon receiving the apparently fake IRS form, The Peoples Bank wired $494,500 to a bank account associated with Avenatti’s law firm.

    The complaint also alleges Avenatti defrauded a client of his law firm, using the client’s portion of a $1.6 million settlement toward his own purposes. According to the complaint, Avenatti used $1.6 million transferred into one of his accounts related to the settlement for payment such as to Tully’s vendors, a lawyer who represented Global Baristas, and a bank account under the name of “Michael Avenatti, Esq.”

    Wait, Avenatti “failed to file personal federal income taxes from 2011 to 2017?” No wonder Uncle Sam is pissed.

    Remember, this is the guy who made 108 appearances on CNN and MSNBC in a two month period.

    Also charged as a co-conspirator: CNN legal analyst Mark Geragos, attorney for Jussie Smollett and Colin Kaepernick. (If you tried to put this a novel, your editor would have rejected it as too heavy-handed.) Or I should say former CNN legal analyst, as the dwindling cable news network cut ties with him after the news broke.

    Remember when Senate Democrats believed that Avenatti’s wild, baseless charges against Brett Kavanaugh were somehow credible? Democrats let this grifter become one of the faces of #TheResistance™, and now he, not Trump, is one who is probably going to end up in prison. The only question is whether Democrats are even capable of feeling shame over how their Trump Derangement Syndrome led them to put even the tiniest amount of faith into this guy.

    Some day Avenatti’s life is going to be made into a great opera. (Tentative title: Basta!)

    The last few days have been nonstop kicks in the teeth for “Russian Collusion truthers.” First the Mueller Report says no collusion or obstruction, now their favorite creepy porn lawyer is looking at serious prison time. If, as some technophilosophers believe, we are in fact living in a computer simulation, it would appear to be a computer simulation designed to allow Donald Trump to live his best possible life…

    (Caveat: Innocent until proven guilty, yadda yadda yadda. And even though it appears that Avenatti did indeed commit extortion, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the underlying charges against Nike turned out to be true…)

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Waste and Fraud | 2 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for June 23, 2017

    Friday, June 23rd, 2017

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! There’s so much news I’m going to punt “The Pelosi Question” to the weekend:

  • In case you hadn’t noticed, illinois is going bankrupt.
  • John Podesta to testify before the House Intelligence committee. Hopefully they’ll ask him about the allegations in Shattered that he and Robby Mook cooked up the entire “Russia hacked the election” fantasy within 24 hours of Hillary’s loss. And also about his and his brother’s documented financial ties to Russia.
  • Former state Department/CIA employee charged with espionage for China:

    A former State Department employee was arrested Thursday and charged with espionage for allegedly transmitting Top Secret and Secret documents to a Chinese government agent, according to an affidavit filed with the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, VA.

    Kevin Mallory, 60, of Leesburg is a self-employed consultant who speaks fluent Chinese. Court filings show that Mallory was an Army veteran who worked as a special agent for U.S. State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service from 1987 to 1990. Since then, Mallory has worked for various government agencies and defense contractors, maintaining a Top Secret security clearance. The Washington Post reports that Mallory was also an employee of the CIA.

  • A lot of hardcore Democrats are becoming increasingly uneasy about the way that Trump Derangement Syndrome has warped their party:

    We do know that Wednesday’s congressional attacker, James Hodgkinson, shared a conspiracy-tinged Change.org link on March 22, accompanied by the caption, “Trump is a traitor.” Once again, it has to be stressed that this information is woefully insufficient to conclude that the perpetrator was motivated by Russia-oriented conspiracy theories. Motivations are multifaceted, and often political beliefs “intersect” with mental distress, causing people to act violently. But the sharing of the link does indicate that Hodgkinson has been affected by the frenzied climate Democrats have stoked around the Russia issue.

    Once again, for extra emphasis: calling attention to the link Hodgkinson shared is not to say that Democrats are directly culpable for this shooting. That would be ridiculous. But the shared link does show that he was to some extent enmeshed in the conspiratorial paranoia that Democrats have knowingly fostered, at full-blast, for approaching an entire year. One ancillary consequence of fostering conspiratorial paranoia for a full year is that certain people with unstable mental predispositions may latch on and commit violent acts. But Democrats and liberals, in their self-assuredness, have been reticent to acknowledge this byproduct of their current political strategy. Proclaiming that the president engaged in treason — as many members of Congress and media figures have — is going to have an influence on the broader public, and included in that broader public are people who might be deranged and/or have violent inclinations.

    If you deny that the kind of overblown rhetoric that Democrats have specialized in over the past months — warning about traitorous subterfuge and foreign infiltration — can have any trickle-down effect on regular people, you’re deluding yourself.

  • It looks like Democrats are learning all the wrong lessons from Jon Ossoff’s loss:

    Democrats want a resistance. They want to impeach the President. They want full-blown socialism. They want to go further to the left than the tea party wanted to go right. A lot of activist Democrats are already interpreting Jon Ossoff’s loss as him not being aggressively anti-Trump enough.

    The Democrat base has moved way further left than where the American public is and at a time we seem to be in a pendulum swing back to the right, that could hurt them. As they start challenging Democrat incumbents with more liberal activists and start winning primaries in swing seats with radical progressives, they risk their ability to win.

    What makes this fun to watch is knowing they reject that idea and think the more radical and more militant the more likely their candidates will win. I cannot wait to watch their slate of moonbat crazy challengers.

  • All those “Ossoff’s loss was a moral victory” excuses? Vox says don’t believe it: “Don’t sugarcoat it — Ossoff’s loss is a big disappointment, and a bad sign, for Democrats. Democrats need to outperform Hillary Clinton to take back the House. Ossoff did worse than her.”
  • As bad as political violence is now, the 1960s and early 1970s were much worse.
  • Phil Montag, technology chairman for the Nebraska Democratic Party, was caught on audio saying he was glad Rep> Steve Scalise (R-LA) was shot and wishing he had died. Make that the ex-technology chairman for the Nebraska Democratic Party. Good. Pink slips seem to be the only thing these people pay attention to. (Hat tip: Gabriel Malor’s Twitter feed.)
  • “A professor at a Connecticut college said he was forced to flee the state after he received death threats for appearing to endorse the idea that first responders to last week’s congressional shooting should have let the victims ‘f**king die’ instead of treating them.” Step right up, Trinity College Professor Johnny Eric Williams! You’re the next contestant on “Trump Derangement Syndrome Ruined My Life!”
  • And speaking of Democrats losing it, “Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz accused ex-DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson of lying under oath when he said the DNC refused the help of the DHS in their hacking scandal.”
  • “This May was the Democratic National Committee’s worst May of fundraising since 2003. The DNC raised $4.29 million in May of this year, according to data recently released by the Federal Election Commission. It is the weakest take for national Democrats since May of 2003, when the party raised a paltry $2.7 million.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Did 5.7 million illegal aliens vote in 2008? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • President Trump follows through on his campaign promise to kill deferred action for illegal alien parents, AKA DAPA.
  • TPPF’s Chris Jacobs is not impressed with the Republican Senate ObamaCare replacement bill. TPPF’s Chip Roy said:

    Simply put, the bill doubles down on the fundamentally flawed architecture of Obamacare and if implemented, will neither increase the actual care available to the people nor drive down the cost of care or insurance. It maintains Obamacare’s subsidy regime, retains almost the entirety of the regulatory architecture driving up people’s premiums and deductibles, continues the previous Administration’s unconstitutional bailouts to insurers, and maintains the Medicaid expansion for five more years before slowly attempting to reform the program.

  • More on the same subject: “Top Ten Ways Senate Obamacare Bill Is #FakeRepeal.”
  • ObamaCare tweet:

  • Liberal lawyer Alan Dershowitz states that Presidnet Trump’s tape bluff is perfectly legal. “What President Trump did was no different from what prosecutors, defense attorneys, policemen, FBI agents and others do every day in an effort to elicit truthful testimony from mendacious witnesses.” Also: “We must declare an armistice against using our criminal justice system as a political weapon in what has become a zero-sum bloodsport.”
  • Saudi king replaces crown prince with his own son.
  • Saudis foil Iranian sabotage attack on their offshore oilfields.
  • “Trump Imposes New Sanctions on Russia Over Ukraine.” Insert record scratch sound over derailment of the “Trump is Putin’s stooge” narrative here. Oh, also, New York Times: When you invade, occupy and annex territory, it’s not an “incursion,” it’s an “invasion.”
  • Helmut Kohl, the chancellor who oversaw German reunification, dead at age 87. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Remember all those “refugees” Angela Merkel invited in? “Up to three quarters of Germany’s refugees will still be unemployed in five years’ time.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Trump Administration Begins to Dismantle Obama Campus Rape Tribunals.” Good.
  • “CENTCOM confirms Islamic State’s ‘Grand Mufti’ killed in airstrike…Turki al-Bin’ali was killed in a May 31 airstrike in Mayadin, Syria.”
  • Amazon buying Whole Foods ties into their overall strategy of high fixed costs and returns to scale.
  • Alternate view: Amazon buying Whole Foods is this cycle’s AOL/Time Warner merger.
  • East Lansing, Michigan punishes man for daring to express pro-Christian thoughtcrime on Facebook.
  • “The amount of labor that once bought 54 minutes of light now buys 52 years of light. The cost has fallen by a factor of 500,000 and the quality of that light has transformed from unstable and risky to clean, safe, and controllable.”
  • The year-by-year descent into airline hell. But: More people are flying than ever before, and airlines are actually profitable. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Man almost dies after getting swept away by a river while hiking, learns important survival lessons. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Harvard introduces segregated commencement ceremony for black students. next up: Their own water fountains.
  • “A mentally ill homeless woman in Florida is accused of vandalizing a policeman’s patrol car and smearing feces on a church where she left the walls defaced with nonsensical writings against ‘patriarchy.'”
  • F-35 puts on an impressive demonstration at the Paris Air Show. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • F-16 catches fire at Houston airport.
  • The meaning of Bill Cosby’s hung jury:

    The extraordinarily high prosecutorial burden of proof in any criminal trial is intentionally designed to heavily favor defendants, because we long ago embraced as a society Blackstone’s principle. Formulated in the seventeen-sixties by the English jurist William Blackstone, the presumption is that it is better to have ten guilty people go free than that one innocent person suffer. Hard as it is to stomach today, embracing that calculus means that we should even want ten rapists (not to mention terrorists and murderers) to go free in order to protect the one falsely accused. Unfortunately, Cosby is one of those to escape criminal punishment. And, to put a fine point on the over-all gendered impact of requiring proof “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the inevitable effect of the heavy tilt toward defendants is that in sexual-assault trials, which involve mostly male defendants and mostly female accusers, men are favored over women.

    What works in Bill Cosby’s favor also works in Bill Clinton’s favor… (Hat tip: Christina Hoff Summers’ Twitter feed.)

  • 15 companies that made great games that still went bust. Spoiler: The phrase “bought by EA” appears a lot.
  • Colin Kaepernick seems to have decided that his career is indeed over. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Whipped cream fatality.
  • And that gives me the thinnest of possible justifications to post this classic:

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, ObamaCare, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »