Category: Media

I have no idea what, but
WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!™©®

He’s no more ‘On the Mark’ than most two year olds are in the bathroom.

On the Mark: Gun violence can no longer be ignored
Team 12 Anchor Mark Curtis discusses gun control after recent shootings in San Jose.

The comments are always predictable.

“Bad guys will always find a way to get their guns.”

“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a bigger gun.”

In the wake of the latest mass shooting in San Jose, this pandemic of gun violence can no longer be ignored.

Now, let me be clear, I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in the rights of Americans to own a gun. But not if they are violent, or mentally ill, or have been convicted of a violent crime.

I wish I had the answer…but I don’t.

All I know is, doing nothing can no longer be acceptable.

Today’s Logical Fallacy is… “We Have to Do Something!”

A very dangerous contemporary fallacy, this one arises when tragedies and crises triggers the response: “We have to do something!” – regardless of whether or not that “something” is an overreaction, ineffective, or even makes things works. The logic, or lack thereof, usually flows like this:

1. We must do something.
2. This is something.
3. Therefore, we must do this.

Humans are empathetic, and when a tragedy strikes, our emotional response pushes us to do anything we can do prevent it from happening again. However, just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should, and just because the situation seems to warrant an immediate response doesn’t mean it actually needs one.

Sometimes the situation does call for action, but action should be carefully considered before it is undertaken. Doing something because it is “better than nothing” will often result in unintended consequences that often do more harm than good.

So, propaganda, right?

USA Today Prepares Fact-Challenged Hit Piece On Gun Industry Ahead Of ATF Director Nomination Hearing.

A USA Today reporter who has worked directly with a Bloomberg-funded anti-gun group is preparing an attack on a major gun industry trade group ahead of hearings for Biden’s ATF nominee.

USA Today is working with an anti-gun group funded by failed Democrat presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg to attack a major gun industry trade group ahead of a Wednesday Senate hearing for President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), The Federalist has learned.

Nick Penzenstadler, a USA Today reporter who has partnered with Bloomberg’s anti-gun publication The Trace, has peppered the National Shooting Sports Foundation with loaded questions and factually inaccurate assumptions about NSSF’s work, according to correspondence reviewed by The Federalist. NSSF is a Connecticut-based gun industry trade group that helps members navigate and comply with federal firearms laws and ATF rules and regulations.

The apparent premise of the still-in-progress USA Today attack is that NSSF, which works directly with ATF to advise federal firearms licensees (FFLs) on how to comply with the agency’s regulations, has never worked to help the ATF obtain the resources it needs to ensure compliance from gun manufacturers or dealers.

To support its narrative, USA Today interviewed Richard Marianos, a former ATF official who allegedly claimed NSSF had never sought additional resources for ATF.

“[Marianos] says, in short: The NSSF is like the [National Rifle Association], [NSSF] never once has said the ATF needs more money, help support, or resources,” Penzenstadler claimed in correspondence reviewed by The Federalist.

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Washington Post Frets That Iron Dome Means Not Enough Israeli Civilians Are Getting Killed for Hamas to Win

For the past week, Israel and Hamas have been engaged in an energetic exchange of ordnance. The catalyst for the current rejuvenation of Hamas’ terror campaign against Israel is unclear but the reason it is happening now and not one or two or three or four years ago is crystal clear. Unhappy at inheriting a quiescent Middle East where Israel and the Arab world are developing economic, security, and diplomatic ties and Iran is so cash-strapped that it is finding it difficult to fund its terrorist operations, the Biden bunch is, in a flashback from the Obama administration, attempting to bolster Iran as the regional superpower while limiting assistance and cooperation with our Arab allies and with Israel. The same sort of big-brain thinking that gave us the Arab Spring, a terrorist state in Libya, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Syria, and made Iraq into a de facto Iranian satrapy is now trying to encourage the Palestinians to engage in a new intifada.

Hamas continues to launch rockets from inside residential areas using Palestinian civilians as human shields.

They are conspicuously attacking civilian targets within Israel. Both actions are crimes against the law of armed conflict but they are shooting at Israelis so no one cares.

What has made this conflict less harrowing for Israeli civilians is a missile defense system called “Iron Dome.”

If you were alive during the Reagan era and can remember MIT physics professors yammering on and on about how the Strategic Defense initiative could never work because it required “hitting a bullet with a bullet,” you probably enjoy their repudiation as much as I do. Nearly every day we see video evidence that Iron Dome overmatches Hamas’ rocket inventory, see Israel Moves Armor Towards Gaza as Hundreds of Rockets Are Launched by Hamas — Iron Dome on Display Again and Remarkable Videos of Israel’s “Iron Dome” Stopping Rockets Fired From Gaza — Where Is the Biden Administration?

The success of Iron Dome and the astonishing lack of casualties on both sides should be a cause for hope and celebration among sane people but such folk are in short supply on the pages of the Washington Post. For instance, there is this from the Washington Post’s aptly named “Monkey Cage”  section that purports to provide “Analysis:” Israel’s Iron Dome defense system protects Israeli lives. It also perpetuates the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Here’s the ironic outcome: Even as Iron Dome enables devastating Israeli bombardment from the air, it protects Gazan civilians from potentially devastating outcomes of an Israeli ground offensive, which would be the likely alternative. The increasing legal scrutiny of Israel’s wars, from the U.N. investigations that followed the earlier operations and the current attention from the International Criminal Court, gives Israel an interest in diminishing global pressure for military restraint and a political resolution……..…

Iron Dome up to this point has saved Israeli lives from Gaza rocket attacks, while enabling air campaigns against Palestinian citizens. But the reduced pressure to resolve the conflict with Gaza also means Iron Dome gives Israelis a false sense of security, based on technological success — which isn’t guaranteed forever — rather than political solutions.

Consider this for a moment. You have a defensive system that protects Israelis from Hamas terrorism and because it is damned effective, there is no political pressure on the Israeli government to conduct a punitive expedition into the terrorist stronghold of Gaza. This saves the lives of Israeli soldiers and Gazan civilians. Yet, the system is bad because it saves lives, renders Hamas terrorism ineffective, and Israel is not bludgeoned into accepting a victory by the terrorists. This is an incredible admission that the Washington Post stands foursquare with Hamas terrorists and their methods and endorses the idea that the more people killed the better.

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NY Times Tells Huge Whopper About Gas Lines and Shortages After Cyber Attack

Remember once upon a time when people used to call the New York Times the “paper of record?” It was considered the standard of reporting.

That seems so long ago. Now, random people tweeting on the internet are more accurate than the Times and their bias is frequently stark.

Here’s the latest entry in the Unreality Olympics. The New York Times is claiming there have been “no long lines” as a result of the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack.

From NY Times:

Since the pipeline shutdown, there have been no long lines at gasoline stations, and because many traders expected the interruption to be brief, the market reaction was muted. Nationwide, the price of regular gasoline climbed by only half a cent to $2.97 on Monday from Sunday, even though the company could not set a timetable for restarting the pipeline. New York State prices remained stable at $3 a gallon, according to the AAA motor club.

“Potentially it will be inconvenient,” said Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston. “But it’s not a big deal because there is storage in the Northeast and all the big oil and gas companies can redirect seaborne cargoes of refined product when it is required.”

The problem with this? We can see all the videos of the long lines at the various gas stations around the East Coast, with some stations going dry and posting “out of gas signs,” as my colleague Jennifer Oliver O’Connell reported. We can also see the stories of the prices going up. Do they actually have any real reporters at the New York Times or are they just so invested in protecting Joe Biden and not covering anything negative that facts have no meaning for them?

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Media Continues Meltdown Over Gun Sale Surge

There has been a gun sales surge ever since the early days of the pandemic. From the moment we knew it was coming to our shores, people started buying guns. The buying hasn’t stopped either.

This has been good news for the firearm industry.

However, anti-gunners have been freaking out about this for some time now. That freak out isn’t slowing down, apparently, with news outlets proclaiming that “gun sales and a mental health crisis… are seen as risk factors in school shootings.”

Students in many US states are just returning to classrooms after months of remote learning due to the coronavirus pandemic – but the move back has come with an unfortunate uptick in gun violence.

From the first hours of Thursday, it felt like Groundhog Day –– at 7:00 am (1200 GMT) an Army trainee carrying a rifle hijacked a bus full of elementary school students near Fort Jackson, South Carolina for reasons unknown, before letting them go unharmed.

Arrested a short time later, the 23-year-old man was charged with 19 counts of kidnapping, carjacking and other crimes.

“Probably one of the scariest calls that we can get in law enforcement … is that a school bus has been hijacked with kids on it with someone with a gun. And that’s what we had this morning,” local sheriff Leon Lott told the ABC station.

Then, on the other side of the country in Idaho, at about 9:00 am (1500 GMT) a girl in sixth grade – meaning she is about 11 or 12 – took a gun out of her backpack and started shooting. Two students and a staff member were injured.

A teacher disarmed the girl and she was taken into custody. Her motive remains unknown.

…

The incidents are reported by local media, but they do not make national headlines.

Only a deadly shooting spree, like the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida in February 2018 (17 dead), sparks a shockwave.

“No other high income country experiences or tolerates constant school shootings,” tweeted Shannon Watts, the founder of the Moms Demand Action movement against gun violence.

Except at least one of those incidents involved the theft of a military rifle. The others mentioned were from firearms likely stolen from their parents.

The author tries to make a point that the mental health issues stemming from COVID-19 and the gun sales surge create a dangerous environment. However, they fail to show their work.

See, while gun sales are increasing, they failed to show that any of these incidents were newly purchased firearms. The gun sale surge exists, but were any of these firearms purchased as part of that surge?

Further, even if they were, the sale of these guns isn’t the issue and never has been because they were purchased lawfully by someone who still hasn’t broken the law. They’re the victims, really, because their guns were taken and then misused.

People are constantly going on and on about how we have too many guns, but then they say they don’t want to take our guns. They fail to address guns in criminal hands but instead focus on those firearms being sold lawfully.

With this story, desperate to try and link increased gun sales to school violence, it’s almost sad. You’d think that people would understand that correlation doesn’t equal causation, yet they don’t. Then again, they still think gun control works.

And just to make it clear.
She must believe that we’re stupid and that the internet isn’t forever.
Yes, that her; Paddling the canoe in ankle deep water.

Well; you can’t have them.

TBS’s Sam Bee Just Says It: I ‘Want to Take your Guns’

Samantha Bee recently admitted she lets politics invade her “comedy.”

It’s the worst kept secret in Hollywood, a rule that virtually every mainstream comic follows in our deeply divided culture.

It’s why Saturday Night Live won’t lay a glove on President Joe Biden and Stephen Colbert would rather take on the MyPillow guy than a president holding “kids in cages.” Now, Bee wants us to trust her on one of the more divisive topics of the modern era.

“Full Frontal Wants to Take Your Guns,” to air at 10:30 p.m. EST May 12, will allegedly explore ways to reduce gun violence now.

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The staggering stupidity of Don Lemón.

What the stupidest thing you will hear today?

Here’s one way to improve your odds at an accurate answer: who is the stupidest television commentator currently polluting the airwaves?

If you said ‘Don Lemón™’, you are hot on the trail.

But it soon became clear that Lemón (accent on the ‘o’) was something special.

It was partly the brittle touchiness, partly the steady emission of self-satisfied entitlement. Mostly, though, it was the stupidity, unwritten by ignorance and fired by adamantine self-certainty.

The latest instance is one of the best.

Responding to Rick Santorum’s appearance last night on Chris ‘Fredo’ Cuomo’s show, Lemón went on a tear about Santorum’s defense of his remarks about American Indian culture, remarks that had the moist PC-crowd in a tizzy. ‘There isn’t much Native American culture in American culture,’ Santorum said in a speech last month.

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Just consider them demoncrap propaganda organs

New York Times, WaPo, NBC forced to retract false claims about Giuliani

The New York Times, Washington Post and NBC News all issued retractions Saturday for their coverage of Rudy Giuliani following a raid of his Manhattan apartment by the FBI.

The Times appended their correction to a story about the role Giuliani may have played in the 2019 recall of ambassador Marie L. Yovanovitch and whether he received a warning from the FBI about Russian disinformation.

“An earlier version of this article misstated whether Rudolph W. Giuliani received a formal warning from the F.B.I. about Russian disinformation. Mr. Giuliani did not receive such a so-called defensive briefing,” The Times wrote Saturday in a note attached to the piece.

The Washington Post’s correction, on a story about prominent Americans being targeted by Russian disinformation, was similar.

“An earlier version of this story, published Thursday, incorrectly reported that One America News was warned by the FBI that it was the target of a Russian influence operation,” the paper said.

“That version also said the FBI had provided a similar warning to Rudolph W. Giuliani, which he has since disputed. This version has been corrected to remove assertions that OAN and Giuliani received the warnings.”

NBC News also issued a mea culpa, claiming its reporting was based on a source but that a second source “now says the briefing was only prepared for Giuliani and not delivered to him, in part over concerns it might complicate the criminal investigation of Giuliani. As a result, the premise and headline of the article below have been changed to reflect the corrected information.”

Giuliani seized on the corrections, tweeting demands for the news organizations to reveal their sources.

“Where did the original false information come from? @MSNBC@CNN@nytimes I couldn’t quite hear your apology?” Giuilani tweeted Saturday.

He followed up with a second tweet slamming the Washington Post’s story as “defamatory.”

“The Washington Post and NYTNYT must reveal their sources who lied and targeted an American Citizen. #msnbc , #cnn forgot to mention the corrections today. #fakenews #badpeople,” he posted.

Don’t read too much into this. Washington State will almost undoubtedly request an en banc at the 9th Circus, and we all know how that usually ends up. Of course, how the state is actually able to stop internet distribution – of anything – is beyond me.

Ninth Circuit Panel Vacates State AGs’ Injunction Blocking Distribution of 3D Gun Files

 

(hint) The knife in the hands of the thugette

Caught Red-Handed: NBC News Busted for Editing Out a Crucial Detail in the 911 Call of the Ohio Shooting

They cannot be this stupid, right? After CBS News was caught editing the bodycam footage of the police shooting of Adam Toledo in Chicago, which has also sparked outrage, NBC News decides to edit the 911 call concerning the officer-involved shooting in Ohio, where a 16-year-old was shot and killed after she tried to stab another person (via Columbus Dispatch):

In an unprecedented move, Columbus police showed body camera footage of the shooting of a 16-year-old girl by a Columbus police officer just hours after the incident on the Southeast Side.

The shooting, which happened about 20 minutes before a guilty verdict was announced in the trial of Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd, prompted hundreds to protest at the shooting site and Downtown.

The video shows an officer approaching a driveway with a group of young people standing there. In the video, it appears that the 16-year-old, identified now as Ma’Khia Bryant, who was moments later shot by police, pushes or swings at a person, who falls to the ground.

Bryant then appears to swing a knife at a girl who is on the hood of a car, and the officer fires his weapon what sounds like four times, striking Bryant, who died a short time later.

“It’s a tragic day in the city of Columbus. It’s a horrible, heartbreaking situation,” Mayor Andrew J. Ginther. “We felt transparency in sharing this footage, as incomplete as it is at this time” was critical.

Yeah, this word “appears” keeps popping up. It’s just another exercise in the liberal media being unable or unwilling, to tell the truth. The video is quite clear

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THE TWO RULES OF MODERN JOURNALISM:

RULE # 1: Because journalists are required to be open-minded, exercise independence of spirit, and display a healthy amount of skepticism, the words and deeds of politicians, leaders, and the powerful — as well as those of regular citizens being interviewed — must constantly be questioned, second-guessed, doubted, fact-checked, challenged, and, more often than not, interrupted (more or less politely).

RULE # 2: Rule # 1 only applies to Republicans.

For Democrats and leftists, the typical query is more along the lines of “pray enlighten us to your glorious plans for fundamentally transforming the United States of America (we will be quiet now).” (Close second: “kindly tell us how much people have suffered, and are still suffering, in this dreadful country of ours.”)

Duuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Politico Poll On Gun Ownership: Majority of Respondents Not Gun Owners

Digging into a poll on gun ownership by Politico and Morning Consult that was reported in The Hill produced an interesting revelation: Just over two-thirds of the participants say nobody in their household owns a gun of any kind.

So, when The Hill reported the results of this survey showed “Approximately 2 in 3 Americans…said that they support greater restrictions on gun ownership,” should this be taken with a proverbial grain of salt? The Hill said the survey had a margin of error of 2 percentage points.

The Politico-Morning Consult poll was conducted April 9-12 and includes responses from 1,992 registered voters. But 1,327 of those respondents aren’t gun owners while only 665 said they live in a household where someone owns a firearm.

But could the imbalance between gun owners and non-gun owners have been at least partly responsible for the way the numbers and percentages on certain questions break down? Here are some results:

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If You’re Still Using Chrome, Google’s Latest Revelation Will Make You Stop

Earlier this year, Apple required developers to stick a “privacy nutritional label” on any applications they make available for download on the company’s massive App Store for iPhone and iPad.

There was just one catch: The label only had to be applied to new or newly updated apps.

Google, that great privacy-destroying machine, waited almost four months before updating their most popular app — the Chrome browser — and publishing the mandated privacy label along with it.

You knew it was going to be bad. You might not have known just how bad it was going to be.

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Everybody Here Hates the Media, and Everybody Owns a Gun

I’ve been writing a series for The Stream on the 2018 political hit job that tried to destroy me. No such retelling of that dark time would be complete without recalling the role played by my buddy “Rick.”

To recap: On September 16 2018, the Washington Post published a profile of Christine Blasey Ford. She claimed that Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when the two were in high school in 1982. She said that I was in the room where the assault allegedly took place. The allegation roiled the nation.

The media mostly acted as if they were Ford’s hired publicists. She leaned, in turn, on an opposition researcher named Keith Koegler. According to The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, Koegler had

spent many hours that summer poring over news coverage of the nomination process, biographical information about Kavanaugh, and writings and videos produced by Mark Judge. In combing through YouTube, articles, and social networks, Koegler had learned more about the house parties … and the lexicon of 1980s Georgetown Prep than he had ever thought he would care to know.

I will recount this entire Salem witch-trial nightmare in a book I’m writing.

 

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That which does not fit or support the narrative must be erased!

Facebook Quickly Scrubs Capitol Assailant Noah Green’s Facebook Page Praising Farrakhan As Jesus.

Facebook quickly removed self-described “follower of Farrakhan” Noah Green’s profile page shortly after media identified him Friday as the assailant who was shot dead after driving into U.S. Capitol Police officers and lunging at them with a knife.

Describing himself on the since-deleted page as a follower of the Nation of Islam, the 25-year-old Green effusively praised the radical Farrakhan and his predecessor, Elijah Muhammad, as incarnations of Jesus Christ whose teachings changed his life.

Explaining the social media’s company’s reason for the deletion, a spokesperson for Facebook told The Daily Wire: “After this horrific event, our thoughts are with the Capitol Police and their loved ones. We have designated the incident under our Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, which means we have removed the suspect’s accounts from Facebook and Instagram, and are removing any content that praises, supports, or represents the attack or the suspect. We are in contact with law enforcement as they conduct their investigation.”

According to the policy the spokesperson cited, Facebook does not allow anyone, living or dead, to maintain a presence on the platform if they are a mass murderer or if they attempt mass murder. “We consider an attempted mass murder to be one where an individual uses a weapon or vehicle to attempt mass harm in a public space or against more than one person,” the policy says.

As The Daily Wire noted, MSNBC’s Jesse Rodriguez tweeted reporting from NBC’s Pete Williams about Green’s identity at 3:43 p.m. Journalists Ian Miles Cheong and Andy Ngo scoured Green’s Facebook page almost immediately, taking screenshots and posting them to Twitter until 4:15 p.m., by which time Cheong reported that the page was gone. “Facebook just confirmed the identity of Noah Green by yeeting his page,” Cheong wrote. “It’s gone.”

It’s Important To Be Honest About What Today’s Media Actually Are.

“It’s time to stop acting like these political activists are professionals who do honest journalism. Continuing that pretense is not doing a favor to the public. It’s not true. With very few exceptions, these people are not there to do journalism, and we need to be honest about that with the public. Not everyone is as bad as everyone else, but nearly the entire press corps is somewhere on the Democrat activist scale, from lefty to fringe, from shrewd to clumsy and clownish.”

On Monday night, former President Donald Trump announced the launch of the official website of the 45th president of the United States, 45Office.com.