Here's Your A$$ Back Acosta, She's Through Kicking it.......

CNN’s Jim Acosta long ago established himself as a self-important, grandstanding asshole jerk. What Acosta tried to do in today's WH briefing under the guise of asking a question was basically demand that Sarah Sanders make a declaration on the media’s behalf,  in conflict with what the president had said. The only thing that would happen if she did is that the media would hyperventilate over her supposedly contradicting her boss, which I believe was Acosta’s whole objective in asking the question in the first place. 



Some in the media are enemies of the people, precisely because they are so willing to distort the truth (or hide it completely)  just to score the partisan points they’re after. Yes, their job is very important, which is why it’s such a big problem when they don’t do it responsibly or honestly. And no one is more guilty of that than lowly Jim Acosta, and once respected CNN.

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Bob Woodward Penning New Book About Trump’s ‘Harrowing’ Presidency

Watergate reporter and journalist Bob Woodward is reported to be putting the final touches on a new book about the inner workings of the DJT administration titled "Fear: Trump in the White House." The new tome is said to be based on hundreds of hours of interviews and insider info, and will detail "the harrowing life inside Donald Trump’s White House, and how the president makes decisions on major foreign and domestic policies."  According to a release announcing the upcoming book by publisher Simon & Schuster, Woodward's newest work will "bring to light the explosive debates that drive decision-making in the Oval Office, the Situation Room, Air Force One and the White House residence." 

The project has mostly been conducted under wraps, and as the HuffPost notes, the journalist has been “limiting cable news appearances and attempting to stay out of the public eye” while writing it: 

“Instead, the author has told friends, he’s gone back to some of the signature moves of his youthful reporting days,” the newspaper, where Woodward is still an associate editor, said Monday. “Late at night, he’s been prone to show up at important people’s houses unannounced to ask for interviews." 

"He’s told friends that it feels like a ‘rebirth. Fear is the most acute and penetrating portrait of a sitting president ever published during the first years of an administration,” Jonathan Karp, the president of Simon & Schuster, said in a statement Monday. “This is the inside story on President Trump as only Bob Woodward can tell it.....” 

Woodward's book will be the latest in a series of questionable insider tell-alls about Trump’s tumultuous first months in office following on the heels of the unindicted perjurer James Comey’s "A Higher Loyalty" and journalist author hack writer Michael Wolff’s mostly unsourced flight of fantasy / hit-job "Fire and Fury."

Due out in time to make the mid-term election talking-heads prognostication round-table discussions, it's not mentioned whether there is any intentional significance to the planned publication date.......September 11.

[Simon & Schuster Pub.]
[Publishers Weekly]

NYT Graciously Admits the 1st Amendment Applies to Conservatives

"The fact that conservatives benefit from the First Amendment is not something to bemoan. It is part of the constitutional bargain."- NYT

According to a new op-ed, folks on the left are “increasingly” making the claim that Republicans have “weaponized” the First Amendment. It seems the scary words are just too much for some to bear. Spoken or written ideas are simply too potent.

Fortunately, your political betters at The New York Times are bigger than that. They’ve just run an editorial written by David Cole. He’s the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. You may know them as the organization that occasionally cares about a subset of constitutional issues they agree with. Despite the allegedly-serious argument that “the First Amendment’s very neutrality is problematic, because in an unequal society, the amendment will favor the haves over the have-nots,” the ACLU (and the Times) has decided that free speech is important. That the Constitution applies to to all citizens is quiet a concept!

"Critics are increasingly making the claim that under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the First Amendment, once an important safeguard for progressive speech, has become a boon to corporations, conservatives and the powerful. But  the First Amendment doesn’t favor speech of the right or the left; it simply takes the government out of the business of controlling speakers by virtue of what they say.

The fact that conservatives benefit from the First Amendment is not something to bemoan. It is part of the constitutional bargain. 

It simply means the First Amendment is operating as it should, neutrally preserving the lifeblood of democracy. …these developments should not lead liberals or progressives to lose faith in the First Amendment. For starters, the amendment’s core requirement is that the government must remain neutral regarding the content and viewpoint of speech. As a result, a decision protecting conservative speech will equally support liberal speech."

The very fact that the New York Times felt this was worth printing suggests that even they recognize the left has drifted closer to the fascist black hole than most of us (who are already deeply jaded) have suspected. Think about it. This means that the left is so enamored with the idea of eliminating free speech that the New York Times – itself a leftist-statist standard bearer – felt it necessary to admonish them.

We’re glad you’ve finally noticed …and we’re deeply concerned that you had to.

Excerpts from Robert Laurie

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Wolf....I Really Don't Think They Like Me.

CNN puts Jimmy Acosta at Trump rallies the way 
Fox News puts Geraldo Rivera in hurricanes.

Another Night of Pillow Biting at Acosta's Crib

________________________

Thank You MJA for the Linkage!

A Nation of Meddlesome Ninnies We've Become

We have become a nation of meddlesome Americans. It was not always so. There was a time when Americans did not nark on their neighbors. They didn’t inform on their coworkers. They have not, historically, been the comrades in a communist regime whispering, seeking favor from the authorities, and sending hated enemies to the gulag for minor infractions just for spite. Something in the last generation has changed. Americans have turned into a nation of busybodies, harassing strangers on the web, calling the police or their places of business, and generally feeling entitled to destroy someone's life with whom they disagree. Who needs Big Brother when anonymous strangers will seek to silence, defame, shame, and ruin innocent people when their target violates their personal moral code, not the law and not good sense?

There are a couple forms of this destruction. Over the weekend, I read two articles, one from the New York Times,  another at Gizmo, both detailing the menacing behavior of people who should have just minded their own damn business. It is a lost American art, and it needs to come back now as innocent people are having their private lives unnecessarily upended. In both cases, complete strangers distorted innocent activities by their fellow Americans and decided to invade and disrupt someone else’s life. What happened to minding one’s own business?

When did American life so completely change? A few things have happened. In small towns, everyone knows the Town Gossip, the loose-lipped Guttersnipe, the Babbling Drunk. These folks were the exceptions to the rule of minding your own business. Either through overt meanness or carelessness, a gossip passed along their stories at the knitting circle or at the bar. And while these people were often disliked, they were a known quantity and could be avoided. Or, the person who heard a tall tale from these folks could filter the contents through the lens of knowing the character assassin’s tendencies. 

Now, with the flat interaction online, filtering for character of a person on a Facebook page or fact-checking the veracity of a character assassin is impossible. An anonymous tip to a cop?  Another change happened, too: More mothers are in the workforce, so fewer parents are at home. People don’t know their neighbors and they don’t know the kids and they don’t interact with anyone. It’s easy to call the cops on people one doesn’t know. It’s less effort to be tattletale than a good neighbor.

Public shaming private citizens is now high art to be praised. People go onto the internet, take a picture, and write a post about some heinous sin that must be stopped: Like the crime of the peanut butter sandwich. It’s not your business if someone wears a MAGA hat. It’s not your business if someone wears a Che shirt (though they do reveal themselves as morons and it’s okay to point and giggle). It’s not your business if a parent lets her kid play in the park across the street or take a walk. It’s not your business if a kid is in a car playing a video game on a mild fall day.

Keyboard vigilantes might well expend some effort to better their own lives rather than seek some benign social media user to destroy. Tend your own little catastrophe that’s called life. What a narcissistic, overly sensitive, bitchy culture America has become.

Excerpts from Melissa Mackenzie @ The American Spectator

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Irony Alert: The Godfather of Fake News Calls DJT 'Orwellian'

Disgraced 'Newsman Dan' Rather's face for some strange reason continues to appear on television screens. It's latest appearance was on Don Lemon's CNN basement rated talk feast in a deep intellectual discussion about outrage at the DJT presidency. At one point, Newsman Dan took the lead when he called the current administration “straight out of Orwell”, prompting Lemon to encourage Rather to expand on his comparisons of the Trump presidency and 1984, the classic dystopian Orwell tome. 

“Orwell, what he wrote it's practically a shooting script for Donald Trump. The point being here there is a method to this, and the method is to convince people that the only truth is the truth that comes from me, the ultimate power. I'm the man with the ultimate power. And he has made some way in that -- as several people have said before me he's not just attacking the truths, he wants to annihilate the truth. He wants to move us completely into the post-truth political era in which there's no such thing as objective facts. He is the only fact. He has all the facts, he has all the information, just listen to him.”  

Not only was The Godfather's TDS showing, but the hypocrisy just drips from his comments. Let me explain. 

Let's replace all references to Trump in Rather's above statement with references to "the Media" and see that Newsman Dan's comment demonstrates that he, like most in the media, have totally lost any sense of self awareness, or just a willing participant in a conspiracy of hate and propaganda. (my changes in bold)

“Orwell, what he wrote it's practically a shooting script for the anti-Trump Media. The point being here there is a method to this, and the method is to convince people that the only truth is the truth that comes from the media , the ultimate power. The Media is the ultimate power. And the media has made some way in that -- as several people have said before me they are not just attacking the truths, the media wants to annihilate the truth. The media wants to move us completely into the post-truth political era in which there's no such thing as objective facts. They are the only fact. They have all the facts, they have all the information, just listen to them.”

Watching the whole interview, other than the brilliant revelation that Trump was not descended from Sun Gods, the only real thing believable I heard coming from Newsman Dan was his statement "It is not an overstatement to say that what is going on now is a great and decisive battle for the soul of this country." Yes Dan, we know. And while you refuse to accept it, more and more Americans are coming to believe that in that 'decisive battle', we are led by the right man. Something your agenda driven opinion and blinding hate will never allow you to understand.

  
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A Good Monday Morning - Ansel Adams Style

And People Wondered Why Ansel Adams Wandered

 the Wilderness With His Camera for 50 Years.