See AoSHQ, "It's the Democrats' own Holy Land Foundation."
Thursday, April 24, 2025
Monday, April 21, 2025
I Used to Hate Trump. Now I'm a MAGA Lefty
From Batya Ungar-Saargon, at The Free Press, "The president is giving the working class its best shot at the American Dream in 60 years. That’s why I support him":
My name is Batya, and I am a MAGA Lefty. The journey has been a long one. Initially, I had Trump Derangement Syndrome—and I had it bad. In 2016, I stopped going to my favorite local bar in Sheepshead Bay because everyone there had voted for Trump. How could they do that to me?! Like so many other Democrats, I took Trump’s victory personally. If you had told me that just eight years later, I would happily, proudly endorse Donald Trump to become the 47th president of the United States of America, I never would have believed you. People often ask me how I deprogrammed my TDS. The journey has been a long one. The cracks came one at a time. My rabbi, the best person I know, told me offhand early in 2016 that he loved Trump, and after that I could no longer sustain the fiction that every Trump voter was a racist. Later that year and the next, I did a lot of reporting in the South for a series of essays on polarization, which further dispelled the myth. Instead of the divisiveness of the elites, I saw Americans across the political aisle and from all races and ethnicities finding unity in their communities and churches. In 2018, I encountered a Yale study that uncovered a surprising phenomenon: White liberals dumb down their vocabulary when they talk to blacks and Hispanics—but white conservatives don’t. It was a shattering indictment of my entire worldview, which suddenly seemed based in the insulting and frankly racist view that minorities needed the largesse of white elites to thrive or even to feel human. When a fundamental belief of ours is challenged, we start to question other orthodoxies we hold dear. It took a little while—I voted for Joe Biden in 2020, albeit reluctantly—but I finally came to the realization that I hadn’t just been wrong about Trump supporters; I’d been wrong about Trump himself. If you get your news from the liberal mainstream media—The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and The Washington Post—you may think, as I once did, that Trump is a far-right extremist. These outlets cast Trump as a racist, a hater, a George Wallace for the 21st century. But, in fact, when viewed dispassionately, Trump is more like a 21st-century FDR: socially moderate, anti-interventionist, and committed to America’s blue-collar workers as the backbone of this country and the locus of our power and democracy. Think of Trump’s major convictions: He’s anti-war. He promised to veto a national abortion ban. He is respectful of religion but also pro-gay. And most importantly, he represents the working class’s best shot at achieving the American Dream that we’ve seen in 60 years. These are the views of the hundred or so working-class Americans I interviewed when I traveled the country for my book Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. Regardless of which party they voted for, they were intensely moderate, with a set of views that didn’t map neatly onto either party. They were pro-gay but opposed the trans agenda. They were pro-life but against abortion bans. They wanted much less immigration, and thought tariffs would put money in their pockets. They were deeply tolerant of ideological differences. In fact, they weren’t ideological at all. Many, like me, had been Democrats until they voted for Donald Trump. Ironically, if you look beyond the bluster, if you simply look at the policies Trump represents, it’s the kind of agenda that was viewed as solidly Democratic for 100 years, because it’s all about protecting labor—and Democrats were always the party of labor. Though it’s hard to remember now, in the 1990s, it was the Democrats who supported strict immigration, on the grounds that a tight labor market protects workers’ wages. Civil rights icon Barbara Jordan in 1996 insisted that there’s “no national interest in continuing to import lesser skilled and unskilled workers to compete in the most vulnerable parts of our labor force.” Mass migration was seen as especially punitive to black Americans, who have borne the lion’s share of the negative impact of importing millions of low-wage laborers. As recently as 2015, Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders called open borders a “Koch Brothers proposal.” The Democrats also opposed free trade on the grounds that it’s a race to the bottom in terms of wages. They were anti-war, and defended free speech, women’s rights, and gay rights. They believed abortions should be safe, legal, and rare. Meanwhile, the Republicans believed in American exceptionalism and nation building. They were pro-life and anti–gay marriage. They were the party of the country club, of free trade and corporations and big business and Wall Street and trickle-down economics. By now, it’s no secret that we’ve just witnessed a massive political realignment along class lines, as the Democrats abandoned labor to cater to the over-credentialed college elites and Donald Trump became the candidate for the multiracial working class...
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
Monday, July 15, 2024
Mystery Around Trump Shooter Matthew Crooks Deepens
At the Wall Street Journal, "Mystery Around Trump Shooter Deepens":
FBI analyzed Thomas Matthew Crooks’s phone and found nothing to explain why he tried to assassinate former president.BETHEL PARK, Pa.—Two days after Thomas Matthew Crooks committed one of the most shocking acts of political violence in half a century, both investigators and people in his western Pennsylvania community are no closer to understanding why he did it.The FBI has analyzed Crooks’s cellphone and has found nothing that explains why he climbed onto a roof and shot at former President Trump, grazing his ear, law-enforcement officials said. Crooks’s parents have spoken to law enforcement, but they also seemed to have little insight, telling authorities he didn’t appear to have any strong political leanings and had few, if any, friends.The attempted assassination looked likely to drive the country to new levels of partisan distrust, but the initial mixed picture of the bespectacled young gunman of a quiet loner who wasn’t politically outspoken has instead left most of the American public scratching its head...
Amber Rose Address to the Republican National Convention 2024 (VIDEO)
I wish I had more motivation to blog. The RNC's convention gives me a little.
WATCH:
Friday, April 26, 2024
Stagflation?
The '70s are calling. They want their strong economy back, lol.
At the Wall Street Journal, "A GDP Warning as Signs of Stagflation Appear: Slower growth and persistent inflation explain why voters feel glum about the economy."
Thursday, August 3, 2023
Trump's Indictment and 2024
I can't see Trump winning the general in 2024. Voters will pick the least worst candidate if there's going to be a rematch of 2020, and while both Biden and Trump are very bad, respondents saw trump was the worst of the worst.
But if Trump is somehow --- only God knows --- reelected to the Oval Office, it will be both a political and legal victory. Team Trump has a plan to dismantle the deep state and streamline power in the hands of the executive. That would be really something to behold.
We'll see, of course.
Meanwhile, at the New York Times, "Trump’s 2024 Campaign Seeks to Make Voters the Ultimate Jury":
Donald J. Trump has long understood the stakes in the election: The courts may decide his cases, but only voters can decide whether to return him to power. The indictment of former President Donald J. Trump on charges of conspiring to overthrow the 2020 election ensures that a federal jury will determine whether he is held accountable for his elaborate, drawn-out and unprecedented attempt to negate a vote of the American people and cling to power. But it is tens of millions of voters who may deliver the ultimate verdict. For months now, as prosecutors pursued criminal charges against him in multiple jurisdictions, Mr. Trump has intertwined his legal defenses with his electoral arguments. He has called on Republicans to rally behind him to send a message to prosecutors. He has made clear that if he recaptures the White House, he will use his powers to ensure his personal freedom by shutting down prosecutions still underway. In effect, he is both running for president and trying to outrun the law enforcement officials seeking to convict him. That dynamic has transformed the stakes of this election in ways that may not always be clear. Behind the debates over inflation, “wokeness” and the border, the 2024 election is at its core about the fundamental tenets of American democracy: the peaceful transfer of power, the independence of the nation’s justice system, the meaning of political free speech and the principle that no one is above the law. Now, the voters become the jury. Mr. Trump has always understood this. When he ran for president the first time, he channeled the economic, racial and social resentments of his voters. But as his legal peril has grown, he has focused on his own grievances and projected them onto his supporters. “If these illegal persecutions succeed, if they’re allowed to set fire to the law, then it will not stop with me. Their grip will close even tighter around YOU,” Mr. Trump wrote to supporters on Tuesday night. “It’s not just my freedom on the line, but yours as well — and I will NEVER let them take it from you.” Mr. Trump’s arguments have so far been effective in his pursuit of his party’s nomination. After two previous indictments — over hush-money payments to a porn star and purloined classified documents — Republican voters rallied behind the former president with an outpouring of support and cash. A New York Times/Siena College poll released this week found that Mr. Trump has a commanding lead over all his Republican rivals combined, leading Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida by a two-to-one margin in a theoretical head-to-head matchup. Mr. Trump, even as America’s best-known criminal defendant, is in a dead heat with Mr. Biden among general election voters, the poll found. About 17 percent of voters who said they preferred him over Mr. Biden supported Mr. Trump despite believing that he had committed serious federal crimes or that he had threatened democracy after the 2020 election. The prevailing Republican view is that the charges against Mr. Trump are a political vendetta. Republicans have spent two years rewriting the narrative of the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, reimagining the violent attempt to disrupt the Electoral College vote count as a freedom fight against a Washington “deep state.” The result is that in many quarters of the Republican Party, Mr. Trump is more trusted than the prosecutors, special counsels and judges handling the cases against him. “Even those who were fence sitting or window shopping, many of them are of the belief that the justice system under President Biden is simply out to get the former president,” said Jimmy Centers, a former aide to former Gov. Terry Branstad of Iowa, a Republican who later served as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to China. “It has only strengthened his support in Iowa, to the point at which his floor is much more solid than what it was earlier this spring.” Whether Republicans continue to stand by Mr. Trump, as they have for months, remains to be seen in the wake of Tuesday’s indictment. “At a certain point, are you really going to hitch your whole party to a guy who is just trying to stay out of jail?” asked former Representative Barbara Comstock, a Virginia Republican who lost her seat when suburban voters turned against Mr. Trump in 2018. “There may be another strategy that Republicans could come up with. And if they can’t, I think they lose.” Strategists supporting rivals of Mr. Trump say that over time, the continued charges could hurt his standing with Republican voters, distract Mr. Trump from focusing on presenting his plans for the future and raise questions about his electability in the general election. “Even though people will rally around him in the moment, it starts to erode favorablity and his market share,” said Kristin Davison, chief operating officer of Never Back Down, the super PAC backing Mr. DeSantis. “More people will start to look forward.” Or they may not...
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
'Try That in a Small Town' (VIDEO)
I love country music.
Jason Aldean's a freakin' patriot. It's a certainty the left'd come after him. Democrats hate this country. Anyone who countermands that message must be destroyed.
At the New York Times, "Jason Aldean, Decrying ‘Cancel Culture,’ Has a No. 2 Hit": “Try That in a Small Town” went from overlooked to almost topping the charts after a week of controversy":
In May, the country star Jason Aldean released a single, “Try That in a Small Town,” with lyrics that paint contemporary urban life as a hellscape of crime and anarchy: “Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk/Carjack an old lady at a red light.”
“You think you’re tough,” Aldean sings. “Well, try that in a small town.” Initially, the track got relatively little notice, landing at No. 35 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. That changed last week, after the song’s music video became a culture-war battlefield, with some accusing Aldean — one of country’s biggest hitmakers for nearly two decades — of employing racist dog-whistle tactics and the singer defending himself as the latest victim of an out-of-control “cancel culture.” The controversy led to a rush on Aldean’s song, with both streams and downloads exploding over the course of last week. “Try That in a Small Town” makes its debut at No. 2 on the Hot 100, Aldean’s best showing ever on Billboard’s all-genre pop chart, beating current hits by Olivia Rodrigo and Morgan Wallen. Aldean was surpassed this week only by Jung Kook of the South Korean supergroup BTS, whose debut solo single, “Seven,” opens at No. 1. The video for “Try That,” released on July 14, opens with Aldean performing before a stately building draped with an American flag; the structure was quickly identified as Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tenn., where in 1927 a young Black man named Henry Choate was lynched by a vigilante mob after being accused — falsely, historians believe — of raping a white girl. The video features one montage after another of violent street protests, robberies and people antagonizing police officers in riot gear. Those scenes are juxtaposed with images of American flags being hoisted, children playing and what appears to be a television news segment about farmers helping out a neighbor. Three days after it was released, the video was pulled from rotation on Country Music Television, without explanation. But it has been widely criticized as a thinly veiled attack on the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Justin Jones, a Tennessee state representative, wrote on Twitter that lawmakers “have an obligation to condemn Jason Aldean’s heinous song calling for racist violence. What a shameful vision of gun extremism and vigilantism.” Aldean, 46, has denied that race plays any part in the lyrics, or that “Try That” is a “pro-lynching song,” saying on social media, “These references are not only meritless, but dangerous.” Some artists came to his defense...
Sunday, July 16, 2023
The 2024 Election Is a Fight Over America's Way of Life
Yeah. Isn't the next election always the one to save the American way of life? How's that been working out?
At WSJ, "GOP voters see a country corrupted by liberal ideals":
To win Jason Stewart’s vote, a presidential candidate should talk about stopping illegal immigration, taming inflation and keeping academic theories about race out of the classroom. But one overarching task is more important to the 51-year-old Republican than any single issue: rescuing American culture from liberals. “Democrats and liberals have invaded every aspect of culture for the past 40 or 50 years, and we’re at a line-in-the-sand moment for conservatives,” said Stewart, a sales executive and Army veteran who lives outside Philadelphia. “What I’m looking for in a candidate is someone who can put up a fight across multiple fronts.” The animating force in the Republican presidential primary, many voters and policy leaders say, is a feeling that American society—the government, the media, Hollywood, academia and big business—has been corrupted by liberal ideas about race, gender and other social matters. Democrats, in turn, feel that conservatives have used their political power in red states and in building a Supreme Court majority to undermine abortion rights and threaten decades of work to broaden equal rights for minority groups. That has turned the next race for the White House into an existential election, with voters on both sides fearing not just a loss of political influence but also the destruction of their way of life. “My biggest fear is about advancing that far-right agenda,” said Laurie Spezzano, 68, a Democrat and insurance agent in Louisville, Ky., who believes one of her own senators, Republican Mitch McConnell, subverted the legitimacy of the Supreme Court by using his leadership post to block a Democratic nominee to the court and to advance GOP nominees. Abortion rights have been diminished, she said, and gay rights in employment and marriage are at risk. “I’ve never been against all Republicans, but it’s gotten to where they’re really scary now,” she said. Republican Julie Duggan, by contrast, sees conservative values and traditional gender roles under attack amid social change that is moving too quickly. “It’s like half the country has lost their minds. People don’t even know what gender they are,” said Duggan, 31, a public safety worker in Chicago. If Republicans lose again, “it’s going to be the downfall of our society.” The Heritage Foundation, the conservative policy institute, has brought together 60 right-of-center organizations to compile a 900-page document of policy specifics to guide the next Republican president. But the group’s president, Kevin Roberts, says those specifics take a back seat to a broader goal. The next election, he says, “may be our last, best chance to rescue the nation from the woke, Socialist left.” “Their vision is to destroy everything that makes America America—our values, our history, our rights,” Roberts said recently at the group’s leadership summit. In an interview, he added, “We have lost our K-12 schools to radical-left activists. We’ve certainly lost our universities to the same, and other institutions,” including large businesses and even churches. “Everyday Americans,” he said, are being forced “to bend your knee to the rainbow flag.” Democrats and others say the GOP culture war is a backlash against greater acceptance of the nation’s growing diversity, which is long overdue in America, and that no one is being forced to bend a knee or otherwise get involved. Richard Blissett, 33, a Democrat and university staff member who lives in Baltimore, said that some Republican complaints are at odds with the party’s traditional faith in free markets. “There’s a big difference between government and Hollywood. If Republicans want more Republican movies, they can make them. No one is stopping them,” he said. The heightened feelings on both sides are reflected in a poll that found that about 80% of Republicans believe that the Democratic agenda, “if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.” About the same share of Democrats had the same fear of the Republican agenda, saying it would destroy the country, an NBC News survey found last fall. The GOP’s sense that U.S. culture has gone off-track snarled legislation in Congress this week, as House Republicans pushed through a set of contentious social-policy amendments to an annual defense bill. The measures stripped money for diversity initiatives in the military and added restrictions on abortion and transgender care for service members. GOP lawmakers said they acted because liberal ideology was weakening the military. But the amendments endanger the bill’s path in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Many Republican voters say the pace of social change has left them off-balance, with schools and businesses pushing for racial diversity and transgender Americans raising difficult questions for parents, schools and sports officials. In Wall Street Journal-NORC polling this year, three-quarters of Republicans said society had gone too far in accepting transgender people. More than half said society had overstepped in accepting gay and lesbian people, and that businesses and schools had gone too far in promoting racial and ethnic diversity. Far fewer Democrats held those views. In an Ipsos poll this March, about half of Republicans agreed with the statement, “These days I feel like a stranger in my own country.” Fewer than 30% of Democrats agreed. While past GOP primary races have turned in part on policy disputes, such as remaking Medicare or scrapping the current tax code for a flat tax, the differences among candidates this year over matters such as abortion policy and aid to Ukraine have been a more muted part of the discussion. “Very few people are talking about tax reform, and everybody is talking about the cultural issues,” said Jondavid Longo, a Republican and mayor of Slippery Rock, a borough outside of Pittsburgh. Within both parties, he said, “they see politics as almost a life-or-death situation. Many voters believe that if their candidate does not win, then doom will follow.” Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster who recently conducted focus groups with GOP voters, said the feeling of cultural alienation among Republicans stretches well beyond issues of race and gender to include the economy. “It’s all one and the same—there’s a cultural glue that goes from taxes and inflation to transgender policy,” he said. “Our base believes that we’re losing our country, and that the left has become radicalized to a point that they no longer believe in America and want to burn it all down and remake it in their image.” GOP voters, he said, are asking two main things of candidates: Do you understand that we’re on the verge of losing our country? And can we trust you to fight back? ormer President Donald Trump’s defining characteristic as a politician is his eagerness to both challenge the norms of Washington and fight culture-war battles. He regularly uses heightened rhetoric to emphasize what he sees as a threat from the left, warning of “pink-haired Communists teaching our kids” and promising to “keep foreign, Christian-hating Communists, Marxists and socialists out of America.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is also responding to the hunger among Republicans to take up cultural battles...
Wednesday, July 5, 2023
Cocaine Found in White House Library: The Big Mystery!
Apparently, Hunter Biden was at the White House over the weekend, though no one in the leftist media would dare mention the possible of the president's son blowing lines amid the presidential stacks.
At AoSHQ, "Secret Service Now Tasked with Solving the Mystery: Who Could Have Possibly Left a Bag of Cocaine in the White House?," and "Secret Service Promises We May Never Know Who Left the Cocaine in the White House; Karine Jean-Pierre Doubles Down on Blaming Anonymous Tourists."
Friday, June 16, 2023
Laura Ingraham Interviews Cornel West (VIDEO)
Brother Cornel's announced he's the Green Party candidate for the presidency in 2024.
An interesting exchange:
Groomer-In-Chief (VIDEO)
At MEDIAite, "DeSantis War Room Posts Bizarre Video Suggesting Biden Is a Groomer: ‘Keep Your Hands Off Our Kids’."
Keep your hands off our kids. pic.twitter.com/X7WqniRLO4
— DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) June 15, 2023
Thursday, June 15, 2023
The Radical Strategy Behind Trump's Promise to 'Go After' Biden
At the New York Times, "Conservatives with close ties to Donald J. Trump are laying out a “paradigm-shifting” legal rationale to erase the Justice Department’s independence from the president":
When Donald J. Trump responded to his latest indictment by promising to appoint a special prosecutor if he’s re-elected to “go after” President Biden and his family, he signaled that a second Trump term would fully jettison the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence. “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Mr. Trump said at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., on Tuesday night after his arraignment earlier that day in Miami. “I will totally obliterate the Deep State.” Mr. Trump’s message was that the Justice Department charged him only because he is Mr. Biden’s political opponent, so he would invert that supposed politicization. In reality, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, two Trump-appointed prosecutors are already investigating Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents and the financial dealings of his son, Hunter. But by suggesting the current prosecutors investigating the Bidens were not “real,” Mr. Trump appeared to be promising his supporters that he would appoint an ally who would bring charges against his political enemies regardless of the facts. The naked politics infusing Mr. Trump’s headline-generating threat underscored something significant. In his first term, Mr. Trump gradually ramped up pressure on the Justice Department, eroding its traditional independence from White House political control. He is now unabashedly saying he will throw that effort into overdrive if he returns to power. Mr. Trump’s promise fits into a larger movement on the right to gut the F.B.I., overhaul a Justice Department conservatives claim has been “weaponized” against them and abandon the norm — which many Republicans view as a facade — that the department should operate independently from the president. Two of the most important figures in this effort work at the same Washington-based organization, the Center for Renewing America: Jeffrey B. Clark and Russell T. Vought. During the Trump presidency, Mr. Vought served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Clark, who oversaw the Justice Department’s civil and environmental divisions, was the only senior official at the department who tried to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election. Mr. Trump wanted to make Mr. Clark attorney general during his final days in office but stopped after the senior leadership of the Justice Department threatened to resign en masse. Mr. Clark is now a figure in one of the Justice Department’s investigations into Mr. Trump’s attempts to stay in power. Mr. Clark and Mr. Vought are promoting a legal rationale that would fundamentally change the way presidents interact with the Justice Department. They argue that U.S. presidents should not keep federal law enforcement at arm’s length but instead should treat the Justice Department no differently than any other cabinet agency. They are condemning Mr. Biden and Democrats for what they claim is the politicization of the justice system, but at the same time pushing an intellectual framework that a future Republican president might use to justify directing individual law enforcement investigations. Mr. Clark, who is a favorite of Mr. Trump’s and is likely to be in contention for a senior Justice Department position if Mr. Trump wins re-election in 2024, wrote a constitutional analysis, titled “The U.S. Justice Department is not independent,” that will most likely serve as a blueprint for a second Trump administration. Like other conservatives, Mr. Clark adheres to the so-called unitary executive theory, which holds that the president of the United States has the power to directly control the entire federal bureaucracy and Congress cannot fracture that control by giving some officials independent decision-making authority. There are debates among conservatives about how far to push that doctrine — and whether some agencies should be allowed to operate independently — but Mr. Clark takes a maximalist view. Mr. Trump does, too, though he’s never been caught reading the Federalist Papers...
Friday, May 19, 2023
Civil War at CNN as "Journalist" Christina Amanapour Attacks CEO Chris Licht for Daring to 'Platform' the Front-Runner for the Republican Nomination for President -- My Conclusion: Licht is a Dead Man Walking
Saturday, April 29, 2023
As E. Jean Carroll Case Proceeds, Donald Trump Is Riding High in the Polls
Heh.
I love it.
At the New York Times, "Rape Case Places Trump in Legal Jeopardy. Politically, He’s Thriving":
The former president’s new campaign is rolling unimpeded under the spotlights. In quiet courtrooms, he faces more serious threats. During E. Jean Carroll’s first day on the witness stand, her lawyer asked what had brought her to a federal courtroom in Manhattan. “I am here because Donald Trump raped me and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen,” Ms. Carroll replied. “He lied and shattered my reputation, and I am here to try to get my life back.” A day later, Mr. Trump, who has denied the attack and called Ms. Carroll a liar, campaigned in New Hampshire, joking to a crowd about his changing nicknames for Hillary Clinton and President Biden. He did not mention Ms. Carroll’s testimony, or the civil trial going on 250 miles away. But he remarked cheerfully on a poll released that day, which showed him far and away leading the 2024 Republican primary field. Since Mr. Trump was indicted last month in a criminal case brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, his legal travails and his third presidential campaign have played out on a split screen. The courtroom dramas have taken place without news cameras present, even as the race has returned Mr. Trump to the spotlight that briefly dimmed after he left the Oval Office. Mike Murphy, a Republican political strategist who advised John McCain and Jeb Bush, said that trials and investigations of Mr. Trump often create “a psychological roller coaster for Trump-hating Democrats,” giving them hope that he will be taken down, only to leave them disappointed. Mr. Trump’s legal problems have yet to create significant political problems given the unflinching loyalty of his core supporters. Since Mr. Trump was indicted, his poll numbers have risen. Criminal investigations against him, in Georgia and Washington, as well as Ms. Carroll’s trial and a civil fraud lawsuit brought by the New York attorney general’s office, have done little to hamper him with his supporters. The poll he mentioned Thursday predicted that he would receive 62 percent of the vote in the Republican primary. His closest opponent, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has not yet declared that he is running, was polling at 16 percent. But the investigations could cause Mr. Trump real harm. If he is convicted in Manhattan, where he pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges of falsifying business records, he could face up to four years in prison. Criminal charges in Georgia and Washington could come with steeper punishments. And the New York attorney general’s lawsuit against him — which accused him of deceiving lenders and insurers by fraudulently overvaluing his assets — could exact a heavy financial toll. No matter the outcome, any direct connection between Mr. Trump’s legal fate in the rape case and his political fortunes is tenuous. But Ms. Carroll’s lawyers have reshaped a political bombshell from 2016 into a potent legal weapon: They plan to use the “Access Hollywood” tape on which Mr. Trump boasts about grabbing women by the genitals as the basis for a compelling story about a self-styled playboy man-about-town whose modus operandi was assaulting women. Mr. Trump said on the tape that “when you’re a star, they let you do it.” When the comments became public during the 2016 election, Mr. Trump characterized them as “locker room banter” and after his victory, they became an example of his apparent immunity to scandal. In the courtroom, which Mr. Trump has avoided, Ms. Carroll’s team argued that his words were not to be dismissed, even years after they became public...
Newsmax Ratings Climb After Tucker Carlson’s Exit at Fox
I tried watching Newsmax last summer and I was bored out of my mind. I doubt they'll ever be a peer-competitor network to Fox, but if the latter keeps imploding, you never know.
At the New York Times, "The niche conservative news channel is still small compared with Fox News, but its viewership has doubled and in some time slots even tripled since Tucker Carlson was dismissed":
Newsmax, the niche conservative news channel that has long played David to Fox News’s Goliath, has seized on Tucker Carlson’s shock dismissal from its rival network and declared itself the true TV home for right-wing Americans. So far, the strategy is showing some promise. Viewership of Newsmax remains far below that of Fox News. But its audience at certain hours has doubled, and in some time slots tripled, in the immediate aftermath of Mr. Carlson’s exit — an abrupt spike that has turned heads in conservative circles and the cable news industry. On Monday evening, Eric Bolling’s 8 p.m. Newsmax program drew 531,000 viewers, according to Nielsen. One week earlier, it had 146,000. On Tuesday, Mr. Bolling’s audience grew to 562,000 viewers, equal to about 80 percent of Anderson Cooper’s CNN viewership that evening. Newsmax’s other prime-time shows also experienced big jumps. The sharp rise in viewership can be timed almost to the minute of Fox News’s announcement on Monday that it was parting ways with Mr. Carlson, in part because of private messages sent by the anchor that included offensive and crude remarks. Executives at Newsmax quickly sensed an opportunity. Starting on Monday, Newsmax programming has aggressively pushed a narrative that Mr. Carlson’s dismissal was a capitulation to the left by Fox News and the Murdoch family. One pundit mused on the air that Lachlan Murdoch, the executive chairman of the Fox Corporation, was “much more liberal” than his father, Rupert. Andrew Napolitano, a Newsmax pundit who was fired by Fox News in 2021 over a harassment allegation, said Fox News dismissing its top-rated anchor “is like the 1927 Yankees firing Babe Ruth for his table manners — I don’t get it.” Anchors and guests harped on a recent appearance by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, in which she called for Mr. Tucker’s firing. “A.O.C. speaks, and now Fox listens,” grumbled the Newsmax anchor Chris Salcedo. “These really are end times.” By Thursday morning, the network was inviting viewers to vote in a poll: “Is it right for Fox News to fire Tucker Carlson?” “Fox has been moving to embrace more of an establishment position,” Newsmax’s chief executive, Christopher Ruddy, said in an interview on Thursday. “They want to renounce some of the Trumpisms and populist MAGA stuff that Tucker was echoing.” Mr. Ruddy said he preferred to “embrace all sides of the Republican Party.” Over all, Newsmax remains a ratings minnow. On Tuesday evening, “Hannity” on Fox News drew 2.1 million viewers; “The Ingraham Angle” attracted 1.6 million. Fox News has pointed to Nielsen data showing that in the first three months of the year, it was the highest-rated network across all of cable TV. And the network has bounced back from losing stars like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck. But the absence of Mr. Carlson, its biggest prime-time star, has been felt. On Tuesday, Fox News lost to both CNN and MSNBC in the 8 p.m. hour among adults ages 25 to 54, an exceedingly rare defeat for the network in the key demographic for cable news advertisers. The “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade, sitting in for Mr. Carlson, fell short to Mr. Cooper on CNN and Chris Hayes on MSNBC in that coveted demographic, although he was first in total viewership. Newsmax is surging shortly after Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology firm. Evidence in that case showed that Fox News executives were deeply concerned by Newsmax’s growth after the 2020 election, when President Donald J. Trump denounced the Murdoch-owned network for its projection that Joseph R. Biden Jr. would win Arizona. At the time, Newsmax saw a burst in viewership, even recording higher ratings than the Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum one evening in December 2020. (Ms. MacCallum was switched to a different time slot not long afterward.) But its audience eventually shrank. And despite Mr. Trump’s complaints, Fox News continued as the undisputed ratings king of cable news, powered in part by Mr. Carlson’s increasingly provocative program. So would Mr. Ruddy consider hiring the now-former Fox anchor for Newsmax? ...
Still more.
Friday, April 28, 2023
Tuesday, April 25, 2023
Monday, April 24, 2023
Don Lemon Fired! (VIDEO)
Same day as Tucker Carlson, too. Makes for some intrigue.
Lemon's termination is hardly surprising. The fucker's both arrogant and stupid. It cost him.
Tucker? That's another story. That one hits me out of left field, though I can understand Rupert Murdoch's position. He's still on the hook for the Smartmatic lawsuit, which is supposed to be more blockbuster than Dominion's.
At the Wall Street Journal, "Don Lemon Is Out at CNN."
Tucker Carlson Out at Fox News (VIDEO)
Blockbuster! Absolutely blockbuster!
I was teaching when I happened to see that Carlson was fired --- and I stopped for a minute to mention to my class how big a piece of news this is. I'm just now back home and able to surf around for some news.
He's out not just because of Dominion, apparently. According to the Los Angeles Times, "Carlson’s exit is related to the discrimination lawsuit filed by Abby Grossberg, the producer fired by the network last month, the sources said."
And at CBS News: