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.