These adjectives all check out

The Stream: "Slanted: Our Dumb, Incompetent, Dangerous and Awful Media."  

In related news, CNN's Chris Cillizza is ready for his four-year nap.  

Sports will be offered with your wokeness sermon

It used to be a joke that General Motors became a pension and health care organization that occasionally makes cars.  The U.S. Woman's Soccer Team is now a SJW outfit that occasionally plays soccer.  

Thankful

John Stossel: "Be Grateful for Capitalism This Thanksgiving - If government controlled the production of turkeys and toilet paper, this would be a very unhappy holiday." 

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone

Enjoy the day as much as you safely can. 

That one time Bill Belichick smiled

I'm winding down the short work-week so let's have some football-related levity heading into the Thanksgiving weekend:

Par for the course at CNN

Ace: "Garbage Network CNN Pushes Yet Another Viral Fake News Story, This One About Covid Patients Saying "Covid Is a Hoax" with Their Dying Breaths; Story Falls Apart, With Zero Corroboration."

Zero corroboration?  Sounds like a step up for CNN.

Cover your knees up!

Fox News: "School tells girls not to show knees because it distracts male staff."

Newsom's fancy dinner: from tone-deaf to criminal?

In case you hadn't heard, California governor Gavin Newsom attended a dinner at a fancy French restaurant with a $400 prix fixe menu in the middle of the pandemic.  No masks, indoors, high living.  And now it's been revealed that the bar bill was, ahem, substantial: "Who Paid For the (Alleged) $15,000 Wine Bill Gavin Newsom and Friends Racked Up at French Laundry?"

Newsom can receive up to $500/year in gifts from someone who’s not a registered state lobbyist.

Could they get around that restriction by claiming it was Newsom’s wife who received the gift, and not the Governor? Nope. A gift to Jennifer Siebel Newsom is considered a gift to Gavin Newsom for the purposes of FPPC reporting.

If someone else paid for Newsom’s dinner, the only possible way that could be done without skirting required financial disclosure rules would be if his longtime friend, the birthday boy, paid for the dinner, and if none of the lobbyist birthday boy’s clients had business currently before the state.

Ah, yes, it's very common for the birthday boy to pick up the five-figure restaurant bill.

Related - Federalist: "Your Political Leaders Hate You And Think You’re Stupid."  

Our national narrative molders, beclowned again

Life comes at you pretty fast. pic.twitter.com/RfuIvJ67g6

— Alan RM Jones (@AlanRMJones) November 23, 2020

Bill de Blasio engineers a crime wave in NYC

Fox News: "Subway shoving, flamethrowers, shootings in NYC blamed on 'perfect storm' of police reform, pandemic" - "Shootings have almost doubled from last year following a long era of low crime rates."

Who would have guessed that no-cash bail while defunding and demonizing the police department would have led to this result?  Oh yeah, everybody.  Also, the Ferguson effect is in full swing:

"The City Council pretty much took away the ability of the NYPD to make arrests," SBA President Ed Mullins told Fox News. "We have cops out there right now that are hesitant to grab anybody simply out fear that if it goes bad we may get ourselves arrested."

What a completely predictable surprise.

Nighty-night

Time for the news media to take a four-year nap.  T. Becket Adams: "An obituary for the press in the post-Trump era."

Goodbye, all. It has been a crazy four years.

See you all back here the next time a Republican is president.

Just like they did when the Chosen One was tapping their phones.  

Listen to the science

No, not that much science.  City Journal: "Lockdown Addicts" - "New data from Sweden show it’s safe to keep schools open, but Joe Biden’s Covid-19 advisors seem more interested in shutting down."

Well, that's some consolation

Legal Insurrection: "While You Were Focused on The Kraken, the Senate Continued Confirming Trump Federal Judges" - "Long ago Mitch McConnell vowed to leave no federal judicial vacancy unfilled by the end of Trump’s first term. That promise is close to being kept despite Democrat and media outcry." 

Sinking into resignation

Axios: "COVID cases are spiking, but our attention isn’t"

Sociologists argue that one reason that the public has perhaps become more apathetic towards media coverage about the virus because it's become too redundant and often, alarmist.

Let's not undersell "useless" and "contradictory" also: "New Study On Wearing Cloth Face Masks: Protection Is “Statistically Insignificant”."  

ICYMI - Behind the Black: "New study: Lockdowns & masks are useless and might even increase COVID-19 spread."  Quoting results published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Listen to the scientists! 

Enchantment II: Lapdog media redux

Red State: "Media Gives Preview of State-Run TV During Biden 'Press Conference'."

Winter rules for Democrats:

Oh that's different

Hot Air: "CNN Panel: Here’s Why Stacey Abrams’ Refusal To Concede Was More Virtuous Than Trump’s."  It's CNN so take a wild guess.  

TFG

Twitchy: "Barack Obama’s allegations about Trump are a lock for induction to the Projection Hall of Fame."

American Thinker: "Obama attacks Trump — and reveals a lot about himself."  

I didn't watch.  Did "60 Minutes" push back when Obama stated that Trump targeted journalists? Flashback from the NY Times: 

Criticism of Mr. Obama’s stance on press freedom, government transparency and secrecy is hotly disputed by the White House, but many journalism groups say the record is clear. Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.

Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.

In short, there's not a single thing Obama accuses Trump of doing that the Chosen One didn't do, except Obama didn't have to suffer anywhere near the same level of criticism from the media.  

The end times are nigh

Glenn Greenwald: "The Ongoing Death of Free Speech: Prominent ACLU Lawyer Cheers Suppression of a New Book" - "Free speech has always been more than a Constitutional guarantee: it's also a crucial societal value. And it's more imperiled than ever."  

We always knew the ACLU was exactly what we thought it was.  Now we know it's true.

Bipartisanship returns to Washington

Everybody agrees this was a terrible, tone-deaf idea.  Fox News: "Pelosi scraps in-person dinner with new Democrat members of Congress after photo sparks backlash during COVID."  

Rules are for the little people: "The Chump Effect."  

Now it can be told

PJ Media: "New York Times Finally Admits the Black Lives Matter Riots Left 'Long-Term Economic Damage'." 

Sounds like one Senate runoff is in the bag

Hot Air: "More Warnock Oppo Drop: Arrested In 2002 For Obstructing A Child-Abuse Investigation?."

Far more interesting here is the fact that today is the first time we’re hearing about any of these Warnock issues. Did Democrats even bother to do any due diligence before lining up behind Warnock?

It's almost like the Democrats depended on the mainstream media to cover up these charges.  But there I go again, acting all conspiratorial.

Extra - Twitchy: "The hits keep coming."  

If a Republican helped run a camp for children that was investigated for child abuse—and then was arrested for trying to block the investigation—the media would be asking a lot of questions.

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) November 11, 2020

The (election) night Chicago died

H. L. Mencken said that "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."   In that spirit, I'm loving this story on the comeuppance of decades of mismanagement in Illinois from City Journal: "Are Democrats Cornered in Illinois? - The defeat of an amendment establishing a progressive income tax may force the state’s dominant party to pursue real reforms."

The opening paragraph explains the situation pretty well:

One of the most surprising results of the 2020 election was the defeat, in Illinois, of a state constitutional amendment to permit a progressive income tax. The Graduated Income Tax Amendment would have eliminated the Illinois constitutional requirement that tax rates remain flat across incomes. Its defeat is likely the most important political event for the state since I moved here 18 years ago. The proposed change in the state constitution was an effort by the dominant Democratic Party to continue its model of high taxes and high spending to support the base of its political muscle—public-sector unions. The party retains control of the legislature and the governor’s office, but it is politically cornered. Legislatively, it faces a choice between a reform agenda that would undermine its political base or a substantial tax increase on every working citizen.

So, as usual, the plan was to soak the rich but it was rejected in part because virtually none of the new money was going to be earmarked to pay down or otherwise reform a public pension system that has unfunded liabilities over $100 billion leading Illinois to have the worst bond rating in the country.

Now what?  Well, since Illinois can't tax "the other guy" to pay the bills, the Democrats in charge need to either raise taxes on all of Illinois equally or slash spending.  Neither is a recipe for future political victories but Illinois has run through all the other viable options.

Yes, we noticed

Hot Air: "NY Times’ Nate Cohn: ‘National Polls Were Even Worse Than They Were Four Years Ago’."

Shocking but not really

Fox News: "MSNBC reportedly lets Jon Meacham go as contributor after not disclosing he was a speechwriter for Biden."  

RIP "Wheel of Fortune" host Alex Trebek

Then there's this silver lining

Reason: "The 2020 Election Results Look Like a Massive Rebuke of Socialism. - A Biden presidency and a GOP Senate could keep the left out of power for years."  

The people have spoken

Here's wishing success for President Biden and our country. 

It's a mass movement

To work.  Babylon Bee: "69 Million Trump Supporters Take To Streets To Drive To Work And Go About Their Lives As Normal."

Maybe it's because I'm surrounded by apolitical engineers all day but nobody - and I mean nobody - said a word about the election.  

New York Times surprised they botched it again

Washington Free Beacon: "The New York Times Didn’t Learn Its Lesson - The 'paper of record' commits the same mistakes it apologized for four years ago."

Blindsided by Trump's surprise victory [in 2016], the Times pledged to examine whether it had underestimated the depth and breadth of his support, and to rededicate itself to understanding and reflecting "all political perspectives and life experiences."

As the kids say, LOL. The paper's coverage of the 2020 presidential election was not only as misleading as it was four years ago, it was misleading in the same way, overstating the odds of Democrats everywhere thanks, at least in part, to a belief in race and gender as the defining features of American politics. Identity politics has come to define the New York Times, but the country isn't so monolithic.

The Gray Lady did its best to seek out fresh points of view from midtown Manhattan to the Upper East Side.

In which I kick the media while it's down

This RedState article is essentially the same as what I wrote last night, so it must be good: "Our National Media Has Learned Nothing In Four Years."

The media blew this election in an even more extravagant fashion than the last one....

This election is as much a repudiation of the media as it is supposed to be a wake-up call for Democrats, but neither group will actually recognize that. The GOP made gains in the House and kept the Senate. The Democratic Party is about to enter its own civil war. But the media is going to focus on the defeat of Trump as the real victory and that everything else can be ignored.

And if Trump is really the loser here, that’s all they care about. They will stay inside their little bubbles and not come out for another four years… but in four years, the GOP will be on the rise again while Democrats struggle to figure out who their base is and what it wants.

Oh, I think the Democrats have some inkling how badly they screwed up even as stories like this are making the rounds: "Wait, Do Republicans Actually Have A Chance Of Winning The House?"  (Spoiler alert: they'd have to almost run the table of outstanding races.) 

But back to the corrupt media.  Here's Michael Goodwin:

We all make mistakes, and most of us try to avoid them. The problem with the unholy news-polling-social media-industrial complex is that the mistakes are so numerous and predictable that they begin to feel intentional.

Worse, all the mistakes run in one direction. What are the odds of that happening honestly?

The state polls were often ludicrous, hitting the nadir with the Washington Post/ABC News poll saying Biden would win Wisconsin by 17 points.  This was off by 16.3%.  

Media polls 2020: The Clown-en-ing

At this point, it's looking likely that Sleepy Joe will eke out a victory with the barest of margins in the electoral college.  This was a huge surprise among the A+ pollsters who consistently overestimated Biden's support in all the battleground states.

In the House, the Cook Political Report predicted:

We now view a Democratic net gain of 10 to 15 seats as the likeliest outcome, with anything from five to 20 seats well within the realm of possibility.

End result as of this writing?  The Republicans have picked up +5 seats in the House and moderate Democrats are talking about replacing Nancy Pelosi.

How about the Senate?

Democrats remain the clear favorites to take back the Senate with just days to go until Election Day.

Oh, do tell.  At this writing, the Democrats are at +1 and they might pick up another, to keep Chuck Schumer as minority leader.  But I understand: until a week before election day, Joni Ernst in Iowa was consistently trailing behind Theresa Greenfield.  In North Carolina, Thom Tillis had been trailing in every poll since October 22nd.  Then there's the Maine Senate race where incumbent Susan Collins hasn't been above water since February, has been trailing in fundraising, and has been left for dead...before winning by eight percentage points.

Pollster Frank Luntz had the decency to point out the obvious:

"The political polling profession is done," leading Republican pollster Frank Luntz tells Axios. "It is devastating for my industry."

How did we get to this state where polling is nearly meaningless?  Well, I would say it's because a large portion of America sees the inherent bias in the mainstream media and says "no thanks."

Now we're in a death spiral where nobody believes the media and therefore people hide their true feelings, resulting in completely bogus polls, which hurts the credibility of the media.  Rinse and repeat.

After Trump's surprising win in 2016, the media swore they would do better to understand the concerns of people who don't go to Zabar's for bagels.  Maybe find somebody who owns a pickup truck.  But no, they pour the contempt on middle America and middle America pours their contempt right back.  

Corrupt media pollsters never cared about getting the results right. They were paid to get the narrative right. https://t.co/nUPYHRHius

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) November 4, 2020

You go girl! No...not you.

Federalist: "Republican Women Dominating The 2020 Election Will Be Overlooked By Mainstream Media."  

Looks like Florida 2000 all over again

Here come the lawyers...

Getting tired

I don't know if I can stay up too much longer because I need to get a set of tires put on my car tomorrow.

That pun was unavoidable.

Suddenly a coin toss

Earlier today, the states of Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina were identified as "needle states" (I believe by Nate Silver) in that if Trump won all three states, this election goes from a 90% Biden win to a 50-50 proposition.

Guess what's happening.  

Let's rip this band-aid off

I voted, for what that's worth in The People's Republic of Massachusetts.

This is a crazy year, so who knows what's going to happen.  But the Real Clear Politics average shows that Biden has a +2.3% advantage in the battleground states.   Just for comparison, Hillary went into election day with a +1.1% advantage over Trump.  

In 2016, Hillary had a +6.5% aggregate lead in Wisconsin; Biden has a +6.7% lead.  Hillary led by +1.9% in Pennsylvania; Biden leads by 1.2%.

So if we see a repeat of the "shy Trump" voter surge, it could be deja vu all over again. 

It's almost over

I'm not going to make a prediction because it will probably be wrong.  All I'm going to say is this: if Trump wins Florida and Pennsylvania, we could be waiting for results from Arizona.  But if he loses either of those, it will be an early night. 

Does anybody really know what time it is?

Just a stray observation: I had no idea daylight savings time ended last night.  And, frankly, I might have kept on not-knowing except for the fact that the clocks on the wall were wrong.

Otherwise, all my modern devices adjust the time automatically: cell phone, Fitbit, cable box, Google Home, etc.  I might have gone on with my day with the vague impression I got an extra hour of sleep.