Don Imus, TV and radio personality, dies at 79

 Article by Sam Dorman in "Fox News":

Don Imus, the legendary host of "Imus in the Morning," died on Friday morning, less than two years after retiring from decades of working as a broadcaster.

Imus' family reported that he was hospitalized in Texas on Christmas Eve. He was 79 years old and died at the Baylor Scott and White Medical Center in College Station, Texas, according to The Hollywood Reporter. A small service will reportedly take place within the next few days.

The veteran radio host had just retired in 2018. "March 29th, 2018, will be the last 'Imus in the Morning Program.' Turn out the lights...the party's over," he tweeted at the beginning of the year. The show lasted for nearly 50 years.

Imus' family commemorated him in a statement following his death: "Don loved and adored Deirdre, who unconditionally loved him back, loved spending his time watching Wyatt become a highly skilled, champion rodeo rider and calf roper, and loved and supported Zachary, who first met the Imus family at age 10 when he participated in the Imus Ranch program for kids with cancer, having battled and overcome leukemia, eventually becoming a member of the Imus family and Don and Deirdre’s second son."

He is survived by his wife, Deirdre, and six children. The family has requested that donations go toward the Imus Ranch Foundation.

Imus, who had stints at WNBC in New York and WHK in Cleveland, offered a stew of media and politics on his shows and often had key newsmakers calling in to weigh in on a day’s events.

In 2007, Imus was fired by CBS Radio and MSNBC for using a racial slur to talk about the Rutgers women’s basketball team. He later apologized and got a new gig a few months later.

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/don-imus-dead-79

Liberalism Is A Cancer

We live at a time when our society is literally falling apart all around us, and throwing even more money at our problems is not going to fix them.  

"The suicide rate is at an all-time high, we are fighting the worst drug crisis in our history, according to the CDC more than 110 million Americans have an STD, and we have the highest percentage of children living with a single parent of any nation in the entire world.”  

In other words, anyone that is attempting to argue that this is a golden era in America history is being more than just a little bit delusional.

This is what 50 years of unfetered Liberalism achieves.

Topics We Aren't Allowed to Talk About

 Article by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel in "Townhall":

Throughout the impeachment drama, the press repeatedly told you that the president was a liar. They said his lies are why he had to be impeached. Donald Trump is a salesman; he is a talker, a booster, a compulsive self-promoter. If Trump hadn't gotten rich in real estate, then he could've made a fortune selling cars. Most people know this.

So is lying really the reason the left despises Trump? Or could the problem be, as is so often the case, the exact opposite of what they claim? What drives them completely crazy are those moments when Trump dares to tell the truth. Think back over the last four years to when the CNN anchors have been angriest. Was it when Trump exaggerated his own accomplishments? No. They are used to that kind of lying from all politicians. What infuriates them is when Trump tells the truth. Truth is the real threat to their power.

There is an unspoken agreement among the people in charge of our country not to talk about what has happened to it. They are personally implicated in its decline. Often they are profiting from it. The last thing they want is a national conversation about what went wrong. So they maintain an increasingly strict policy of mandatory reality avoidance. Everything is fine, they shout. Voices rising in hysteria. Shut up or we will hurt you.

Trump won't shut up. That is his crime; that is why they hate him. It started with his very first speech as a presidential candidate: "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. ... They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

Trump could have worded his statement more clearly, but he never claimed that everyone coming over the border is a criminal. But acknowledging that not every illegal immigrant improves America raises uncomfortable questions. If illegal immigration has a downside, then why has Washington allowed so much of it? If the people in charge actually cared, they would have tried harder to protect our borders. But Washington, for decades, has let millions of foreigners with no screening come across the border to use our services, often lower wages and in some cases, commit crimes. That is all true, which by definition made it unacceptable to say. The news anchors pretended that by saying it, Trump was somehow attacking defenseless Mexicans. Actually, he was attacking the gatekeepers in our national media. The people who should have been sounding the alarm about all of this, but instead made common cause with the ruling class they were supposed to be covering. Our system is rotten and corrupt, and the news media are a major reason for why that is. That is what Trump pointed out, and, not surprisingly, they despised him for doing it.

Lost in the haze of this was any meaningful discussion of those policies. A cynic might say that was by design, the whole point of the tantrum. It's certainly a theme in Washington. For example, after the killing of Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Trump said that while he disapproved of the murder, Saudi Arabia remained a U.S. ally. The president cited the $450 billion worth of Saudi investments in the United States as well as agreements to buy American military equipment. If we broke our alliance with them, he said, the U.S. economy would suffer and China and Russia would benefit instead. Now, whatever you think of the Saudis, what he said is true. This is the arrangement we have had with the Saudi kingdom for generations. Everyone in Washington knows that because a lot of them are on the Saudi payroll. Trump's crime was saying it out loud.

The same is true with his comments on Baltimore. Baltimore may be the most depressing big city on the eastern seaboard. Have you been there? Everyone in Washington has. If you want to take a train from Washington to New York, you have to pass through Baltimore. This summer, the president told the rest of the world what it's like. Baltimore, he said, is "rodent infested, not to mention a corrupt mess." Why is Baltimore so bad? How did it get so poor and hopeless? Part of the answer is 50 years of uninterrupted Democratic Party rule. But saying that would be embarrassing to the Democratic Party, so the party's apologists don't want to have the conversation. Instead, they attacked the man who tried to start it.

Baltimore remained dangerous, the kind of place where a kid gets shot riding his bike. That is what life is like for the poor people stuck in Baltimore, a place where MSNBC contributors don't dare to tread. The people in charge want to make certain you never think or talk about Baltimore. They also don't want any debate about the war in Afghanistan, immigration or declining middle-class life expectancy. Thinking or talking about any of this might point out our leaders' egregious failures. Whatever we do, we can't bring that up because it is embarrassing. So instead, let's just agree that Trump is a racist liar and move on. My gosh, what a bad person he is. Unlike us.

https://townhall.com/columnists/tuckercarlsonandneilpatel/2019/12/27/topics-we-arent-allowed-to-talk-about-n2558586

 

Climate Doesn’t

Every Foreign Intelligence Service Knew Within 24 Hours Russia Collusion Was a Bogus Story

Elizabeth Vaughn reporting for RedState

Presidential historian Doug Wead joined Fox News‘ Molly Line on Thursday morning to discuss the upcoming impeachment trial. (Video below)

Line first asked Wead for his take on reports that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) is “disturbed” over Mitch McConnell’s approach to the trial, which frankly, I see as a non-story. Line asked specifically if Wead thought Murkowski’s position could throw a monkey wrench into McConnell’s plan for a quick trial.

The very amiable Wead replied, “I think this is Sen. Murkowski signaling who she is. She’s an establishment Republican…but I don’t think it’s going anywhere and it’s certainly not outrageous for Senator McConnell to press this as a Republican because the impeachment was 100% – 100% – Democratic. They didn’t even take a breath. Two years of Russian collusion, never apologized, said, sorry we were wrong about that. Two months of bribery. Never even took a breath or said we were wrong about that too. They go right into this impeachment on the obstruction of Congress which should be pretty easy to prove and what are the Republicans going to do? If they didn’t unite behind this President, there’d be a lot of angry Republicans. It’s clearly partisan.

Line tried to bring the conversation back to Murkowski, which Wead didn’t seem to think was much of a story either.

Then he said something extremely interesting.

So far as Russian collusion, I have to tell you in my book there’s a great story there. The kids, the Trump kids are traveling all over the world, heads of state are pulling them aside in 2017 and they’re saying, “Please tell your father how sorry we are about this Russian collusion nonsense.” So there you go. If you’re the president of China or president of France you can’t wait two years for the Mueller report. You have your own secret service, there’s 120 intelligence services in the world. Everyone of them checked this out. They knew within 24 hours that this was a bogus story. The future of their country depended on knowing that. So this has kind of lingered on a little too long.

The rest of the world knew within 24 hours the story that President Trump had colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election was bogus. Yet the FBI and then the Mueller investigation bogged down America for three years. Yes, Democrats kept the country mired in what they knew was a lie for years because of their hatred of Donald Trump.

Yet, even now, none of them will acknowledge it. Instead, they launched right into another fraudulent narrative which the rest of the world knows is bogus. I suppose Democrats have been pretending it’s real for so long, they may actually feel it’s true. Democrats have held the country hostage for so long with their fantasyland. It’s time to hit them with some reality.

The same goes for Murkowski. By now, Republicans are so used to her bucking the party on every important vote (Kavanaugh nomination, repeal of Obamacare), she’s lost her ability to shock and with it, her relevance.

The difference between now and three years ago is that most Americans know it’s untrue and now fall into one of three categories. The first group knows it was all a lie, but if it can be used to remove Trump from office, they’re all for it. The second group knows it was all a lie, and they’re angry. The third group knows it was all a lie, but they are completely bored with it.

Truth has a way of prevailing in the end. And every day, we’re getting closer.

Senate Doesn’t Have to Wait While Pelosi Plays Games and Sits on Articles

Nick Arama reporting for RedState

In the wake of the impeachment vote by the House, there have been a lot of people weighing in on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to sit on the articles and what that means from here.

We reported how a Democratic witness during the impeachment hearings, Harvard professor Noah Feldman opined that because Pelosi hadn’t yet passed on the articles, President Donald Trump is not yet officially impeached.

Another professor, Bradley Blakeman, argued the Senate had a lot of options, including not holding a trial or moving for dismissal or adjournment. 

But one who has the constitutional bona fides to weigh in, Harvard Law professor emeritus, Alan Dershowitz, is saying the Senate doesn’t necessarily have to wait while Pelosi plays manipulative games.

According to Dershowitz: 

I believe that the Senate need not wait for articles of impeachment to be transmitted. Senators are empowered by the constitution to begin a trial now — with or without further action by the House. Just as the House has the “sole power of impeachment,” so too the Senate has the “sole power to try all impeachments.”

The current Senate rules from 1986 say that the Senate will act immediately to set a trial date once they are presented with the articles of impeachment.

But Dershowitz notes, that’s not in the Constitution and can change as the Senate decides. “The Senate can make its own rules (as long as they are consistent with the Constitution) and establish its own timetables.”

He saw fault in the opinions of both Laurence Tribe and Noah Feldman, both relied upon by the Democrats.

Tribe argues that the Democrats impeached Trump and that they can sit on the articles, denying Trump the opportunity of acquittal. It has been reported that Pelosi may have taken his opinion in deciding to sit on the articles.

Feldman said he doesn’t believe that Trump is officially impeached until the articles are passed to the Senate and he believes if Pelosi sits on the articles past a short reasonable delay that the would not be in accordance with the Constitution and she would be denying Trump his right to a trial.

While Dershowitz did agree that Trump was impeached, he said Tribe was more off because of his bias and he said that Pelosi’s actions were unconstitutional.

Sorry, but the Constitution does not permit that partisan, result-oriented ploy. Either Trump has been impeached and is entitled to a Senate trial; or he has not been impeached and is entitled to a clean slate.

My own view is that in the public eye, President Trump has been impeached by a partisan vote and he is now entitled to be acquitted, even if the Senate vote is as partisan as the House vote. The partisans who voted his impeachment along party lines in the House, have no principled argument against a party-line acquittal. The Democrats devised the partisan rules of engagement in the House. They can’t suddenly demand a change in those rules because they are a minority in the Senate.

So there are only two constitutionally viable alternatives: either Pelosi must announce that Trump has not been impeached; or the Senate must initiate a trial. Preserving the status quo indefinitely — Trump remaining impeached without having a trial —is unconstitutional and should not be tolerated by the American people.

Basically, if she doesn’t move and wants to hang the process, move without her, since the Senate has complete control of the trial. Then you could have a trial and immediately move to dismiss or call what witnesses you choose.

Dershowitz also wrote in May that the President could have a resolution to the Supreme Court if he were impeached without the Congress having evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” a situation one might argue we are at right now.

It is not too much of a stretch from the kind of constitutional crises imagined by these learned justices to a crisis caused by a Congress that impeached a president without evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The president is not above the law, but neither is Congress, whose members take an oath to support, not subvert, the Constitution. And that Constitution does not authorize impeachment for anything short of high crimes and misdemeanors. Were Congress to try to impeach and remove a president without alleging and proving any such crime, and were the president to refuse to leave office on the ground that Congress had acted unconstitutionally, there would indeed be such a constitutional crisis. And Supreme Court precedent going back to Marbury v. Madison empowers the justices to resolve conflicts between the executive and legislative branches by applying the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.

Left-wingnuts still believe the Dossier is viable and accurate...

A rare video has surfaced showing U.S. media reading the IG report on FISA manipulation,

outlining three years of false information around the Steele Dossier.

Wemple Skewers Maddow Over Dossier, Gullible Audience Jaw Agape w/ Denial, Dissonant Journalists Reap What They Sowed

Posted on December 26, 2019 by sundance

Holy cow, what an abject lesson in media-created nuttery this is.  Eric Wemple writes a column in the Washington Post skewering Rachel Maddow for selling her gullible audience on the credibility of the Steele Dossier for almost three years.  However, judging by the reaction to Wemple’s tweet, the left-wingnuts still believe the Dossier is viable and accurate despite the only source, Steele’s primary sub-source, saying the Dossier material was completely bunk; “mostly innuendo”, “bar-talk”, and “internet rumor/gossip”.

Then there’s this:

There’s a cognitive pathology that clings to denial as a survival mechanism at this level.  It’s called cognitive dissonance, or what David Mamet referred to as an inherent need for the collective left to pretend not to know things in order to retain their views.

Let there be no doubt the U.S. media created this.  It might seem odd in hindsight, but CTH wrote about where we would be today, two years ago.

January 2018:  What exactly do you think the American institutional media will do with a Justice department reality, within the real DOJ and FBI story, that factually ends up in a direction 180° divergent from their current years-long travel?

The media have fully invested themselves in eighteen months of narrative distribution in only one direction. Not a single MSM entity has questioned their travel as a result of false leaks and false sources in the totality of time they have covered the DOJ and FBI story.

Nothing within their collective need to will-an-outcome, will change the media’s proximity to facts when the truthful story behind the DOJ and FBI corruption is finally exposed. The media are so far away from the place where this story ends, they have no inherent capability to even begin to travel in the opposite direction, toward the truth.

The only way they could align with the truth is to admit that virtually every scintilla of their reportage over the past 1
8 months three years was inherently false. There’s not a single media outlet capable of doing that.

We shared a discussion thread two years ago about how the media are enmeshed within the story of the DOJ and FBI corruption. The media engagements with the parties swirling around the FBI, DOJ and Clinton-Steele Dossier are so pervasive they cannot reasonably report on any aspect of the story without exposing their own duplicity.

Michael Isikoff highlighted how enmeshed media is with the dossier story when he admitted his reporting was being used by the DOJ and FBI to advance the political objectives of the intelligence community. Additionally, FBI investigator Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page were shown in their text messages to be leaking stories from the Clinton Investigation, the Trump investigation and the Mueller investigation to journalists at Politico, The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. –SEE HERE–

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was busted by the Inspector General leaking stories to the media and then lying about it to INSD and IG investigators.

FBI Director James Comey admitted to leaking stories to the New York Times, and even hired his friend Andrew Richman (off-the-books), gave him access to FBI and NSA databases, and then leaked information to Richman along with another friend Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare blog.

Lest we forget, the IG report on how the FBI handled the Clinton investigation revealed that dozens of FBI officials were actually taking bribes from the media for information:

IG REPORT – We identified numerous FBI employees, at all levels of the organization and with no official reason to be in contact with the media, who were nevertheless in frequent contact with reporters. Attached to this report as Attachments E and F are two link charts that reflect the volume of communications that we identified between FBI employees and media representatives in April/May and October 2016. We have profound concerns about the volume and extent of unauthorized media contacts by FBI personnel that we have uncovered during our review.

[…] We do not believe the problem is with the FBI’s policy, which we found to be clear and unambiguous. Rather, we concluded that these leaks highlight the need to change what appears to be a cultural attitudeamong many in the organization. (link to pdf – page Xii of executive summary)

Madness.

This is an IG fact-based criticism of the institution of the FBI, not simply a few rogue officials within it.

But wait…. Perspective:

Later it was revealed that Andrew Weissman, Robert Mueller’s #1 special counsel prosecutor, was coordinating investigative efforts with the full support of four AP reporters who were giving Weissman tips. That’s information from journalists to use in his court filings and submitted search warrants. Make sure you grasp this: The AP journalists were feeding information to their ideological allies within the special counsel.

Nuts; simply, well, nuts.

And then there’s Devlin Barrett, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok:

(Source Link – pdf Page #5) 

Additionally, Christopher Steele has stated in U.K. court records the person in charge of the Clinton Campaign’s opposition research firm, Glenn Simpson from Fusion GPS, arranged and coordinated for Mr. Steele to talk to several journalists (CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo News and Mother Jones) while Mr. Steele was also the primary source of information for the FBI investigators (including Strzok and Page):

(Source – page #8)

Make sure you read that full response from Christopher Steele above to see the scope of the media engagements he was conducting.

As more evidence surfaced, the relationship between journalists, Fusion-GPS, Chris Steele and the media’s DOJ/FBI sources blended together. The FBI was using media reports, which were based on Fusion-GPS pitches, to bolster its investigative documents to the FISA court. It is an intelligence laundry operation:

According to the U.K records, Christopher Steele reports this September 2016 meeting with Isikoff was arranged by Glenn Simpson. According to Michael Isikoff on his February podcast, he met Christopher Steele at a Washington, D.C. hotel in Sept. 2016. They were joined by his “old friend” Glenn Simpson, the founder of opposition research firm Fusion GPS, who Isikoff now defines as a “private investigator.”

So Christopher Steele was meeting with journalists, the journalists were writing articles; the FBI was leaking to media and simultaneously citing those same articles as underlying evidence to support their counterintelligence investigations; and all of this was used to validate the investigative documents the FBI was receiving from Christopher Steele; who, along with the leaking FBI officials, was also the source of the media articles.

FUBAR! This is exponentially bonkers.

This is a circle of information, all coming from Glenn Simpson at Fusion GPS, who was the opposition research firm being financed by Hillary Clinton, along with FBI officials who were using their own strategic leaks to validate their own investigation.

Think about the scale of the reporting, and reporting on reporting, and reporting on reporting of reporting, of anonymous leaks, false leaks, lies from “people with knowledge of the matter”, “government officials involved in the matter”, “people familiar with the matter”, “government sources” etc. all going in one unified and semi-coordinated direction – against the aggregate Trump administration.

Now, it actually gets even more convoluted.

Christopher Steele has sworn under oath that he met with multiple journalists (at least eight organizations) in September, mid-October, and late-October 2016: “at Fusion’s instruction“. (pdf page #7)

Overlay upon that sworn admission with what Glenn Simpson (Fusion-GPS) told the House Intelligence Committee while also under oath about his involvement in sharing information derived from Christopher Steele:

(Testimony – pdf link, page #147)

…”without my knowledge and against my wishes”? 

Huh?

FBI Director James Comey admits to leaking his ‘memos’ to the New York Times. FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was busted for leaking and lying about it. FBI #2 Counterintelligence Agent Peter Strzok and FBI Attorney Lisa Page are caught in their text messages leaking to Politico, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

…. AND the FBI is caught, in at least one FISA application, using Yahoo media reports provided by them AND their investigative source Christopher Steele to establish a basis for FISA “Title I” surveillance; the most intrusive and wide-open search and surveillance authority possible.

The Clinton Campaign is paying Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research against Donald Trump. In addition to Glenn Simpson pushing that opposition research into the media, Fusion GPS is also providing that opposition research –including information from contacts with media– directly to the FBI:

(pdf link – page #4)

… In addition to using the Fusion-GPS opposition research to underpin their counterintelligence investigation, the FBI then turn around and leak the same opposition research information to the media to create secondary support for their counterintelligence investigation.

Tell me again how the media can possibly write about this now?

The problem is not just corruption with the U.S. Justice System, the DOJ and the FBI; the problem is corruption within the media.

We’re talking about thousands of hours of media TV pundits, thousands more columns written, and almost every scintilla of it based on originating intelligence sources -from the larger intelligence system- that are now being exposed as duplicitous and conspiratorial in the scale of their malicious intent.

This larger story-line has traveled in one direction. The narrative has onlytraveled in one direction. Each thread converging on codependent trails for collective stories all going in one direction. One big engineered narrative endlessly pushed. Think about how far the collective media have traveled with this story over the past eighteen months?

Hell, twenty-something-year-old “journalists” were so committed to the resistance narrative they were even sleeping with their sources to get any little engineering angle possible.

Over a period of several years it has become increasingly obvious the collective journey, using all that expended effort, was going in the wrong direction.

The media have fully invested themselves in three-years of narrative distribution in only one direction. Not a single MSM entity has questioned their travel as a result of false leaks or false sources in the totality of time they have covered the DOJ and FBI story.

Nothing within their collective need to will-an-outcome will change the media’s proximity to facts when the truthful story behind the DOJ and FBI corruption is finally exposed. The media are so far away from the place where this story ends, they have no inherent capability to even begin to travel in the opposite direction, toward the truth.

The only way they could align with the truth is to admit that virtually every scintilla of their reportage over the past three years was inherently false, wrong, skewed and manipulated by their “sources” distributing the material for their reporting.

There’s not a single media outlet capable of doing that.

Think about a New York Times, CNN, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, Yahoo News or Washington Post journalist now having to write an article deconstructing a foundation of three-years worth of lies they participated in creating.

Do we really think such a catastrophic level of corrupted journalism could reconstitute into genuine reporting of fact-based information?

EVER?

Impossible.