I was noticing yet again the whining and bitching about Trump vilifying the “News Media” and “The Press” and how it was just horrible that he was against a free press and on and on.
Then Trump told me directly that he was being misquoted as the “Lying Press” had edited out “Lying” from his statement. He had ‘vilified’ the “Lying Press”. (Some of us would assert that is a distinction without a difference… but I digress…) Yup, POTUS told me directly himself. (Me and about 50 Million of his closest friends… and maybe more who were not his supporters. It was some speech he was giving somewhere. At the Hangar perhaps? I forget. We talk so often it is hard to keep straight when we last had a “huddle”. I’m pretty sure I was on the couch and having a snack and it was in Florida at the airport…
So that got me thinking… Always a dangerous thing.
Now I’m a bit of a “news junkie”. I watch at least 4 different TV news sources per day, and cruise who knows how many online publications.
The Search Engine has really modified by reading habits. 20 years back, I got 3 newspapers. The local Murky News (“Mercury News”), the IBD (Investors Business Daily), and usually one from the set of [Barron’s, WSJ Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and occasional others). Now I get none. Why? Because you can’t search a 60 page newspaper for a topic with the click of a mouse and I really don’t need 2 lbs of bulk advertising I’m not going to read and editorials that are just stupid getting between me and what I want to know. Though the final death of the final paper was when they all went to Checkout Line Enquirer sized paper and microtype. If I must go searching for the glasses just to read the paper, well, what’s the point? For whatever reason, I can read screens fine. Likely the light causing a smaller pupil diameter, though if needed I can change the font size. But it seems to be bigger font than the “bird cage liners” use anyway.
So “print” media is substantially irrelevant and more so every day. Mostly used by doctor’s & lawyer’s offices and libraries to preserve the aroma of the past, and by those old folks who have not yet learned to embrace search engines. (Why, when the only demographic they were hanging onto was old folks, they would take an old-folks-hostile posture like shrinking type font size is beyond me.) My kids hardly know what a real newspaper is. I’ve gained hours more lifetime per week not tending to the refuse of the papers. At the same time, I’m now getting far more quality and variety of news. Sometimes it is India Today (or whatever the name is…). Occasionally things from Germany, Greece, Brazil, you name it. Oddly, not the Financial Times. I used to read some of it, then they went to this ‘reader hostile’ system of quote blocking and popup thrusting and a sample-only-then-nag. Since there are PLENTY of alternatives, I just blacklist sites that are user hostile and skip them. So far I’ve not missed F.T. at all.
So clearly it isn’t the print media that’s having a significant impact. If we look at the top papers, what kind of circulation do they have?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_States
Rank Newspaper Primary Locality State Circulation Owner 1 The Wall Street Journal Nationwide New York 2,378,827 News Corp 2 The New York Times Nationwide New York City New York 1,865,318 The New York Times Company 3 USA Today Nationwide None 1,674,306 Gannett Company 4 Los Angeles Times Los Angeles California 653,868 tronc 5 San Jose Mercury News San Jose California 527,568 Digital First Media 6 New York Daily News New York City New York 516,165 Daily News, L.P. 7 New York Post New York City New York 500,521 News Corp 8 The Washington Post Nationwide Washington D.C. 474,767 Nash Holdings 9 Chicago Sun-Times Chicago Illinois 470,548 Wrapports 10 The Denver Post Denver Colorado 416,676 Digital First Media
If we look at how many Twitter Followers Trump has:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?lang=en
Lists it as 25.7 Million at the moment. So let’s just think about this for a moment. The Donald has a “circulation” of 25 Million on just one platform. Then he is also carried on all the major news media for public events and on Right Side Broadcasting for folks who don’t want talking heads telling them what to think. See: http://rsbn.tv/ (Though they have taking to putting up an obnoxious “pop up” click me to proceed thing, so I’m no going to be watching them until it is gone. They have moved to the ‘grey list’ until it leaves, or stays long enough to go to the black list…)
I also note in passing that my favored papers of years gone by rank 1, 3 and 5 on the list. Guess I’m average ;-)
OK, so the “biggest” is WSJ at 2.4 Million (owned by Fox / News Corp) and the second is the NYT at 1.8 Million. Really? That’s IT for NYT? Heck, it is nearly mandatory at libraries globally and all the other papers get a copy so they know what to write the next day… Just the DNC Members, staff, and hangers-on ought to account for at least 1/2 that sales volume. Yet it isn’t even able to get closer than 3/4 of the Trump Supporting Fox Paper? (Worse if you add in the 1/2 Million News Crop N.Y. Post numbers to the batch).
Now compare Trump’s 25.7 Million… Fourteen Times ( 14 x ) larger “circulation” than the NYT.
So the NYT and friends can bleat all they want about Trump, and in one Tweet he gets 14 times the coverage. I think this matters. (Frankly, I think POTUS Trump ought to have a blog and staff writers and just publish his own online news… I’d read it.)
BUT the NYT has that global following. What about papers that are not The Name Paper Of Record (due to having been important in the 19th Century…)? Let’s look at that thriving Megalopolis, the center of all things Future and Trendy: Los Angeles. Population:
• Total 12,828,837
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_metropolitan_area
So the L.A. Times manages to sell 654k papers into a 12.8m population? That’s about one paper per 20 people. A 5% market share. That’s horrible. They would have greater “circulation” with advertising on the sides of buses.
Do remember, this is The TOP TEN newspapers in the country.
OK, so folks have moved to TV for a lot of their media. How’s that doing?
http://www.westernjournalism.com/cnn-target-audience-shrinks-62-percent/
CNN Target Audience Shrinks By 62 Percent
CNN has apparently recognized its growing irrelevance, citing a desire to steer away from breaking news by featuring more documentaries on the network.by B. Christopher Agee November 29, 2013 at 2:47pm
Oh Dear. You don’t want phrases like “growing irrelevance” and “steer away from breaking news” in a network designed specifically for “breaking news”… So they are going to more un-real reality TV “documentaries” (really more like docu-dramas), news not so much… But hey, it’s only one network…
When determining a television network’s influence, no factor carries quite as much weight as its viewership numbers. For this reason, far left organizations CNN and MSNBC are in dire straits regarding their rapidly diminishing market share.
Comparing CNN’s audience to that of just one year ago, the steep drop in viewers is telling. During primetime, the network had 481,000 total viewers this month, with just 153,000 in the target demographic of viewers between the ages of 25 and 54. This marks a 62 percent decrease in viewership among that audience.
Oh, maybe not…
See, that’s something the Left Manipulators have just not been able to grasp. We, the people, have our own minds and make them up all by our lonesome, and as soon as we realize someone is feeding us a load of PC Infested propaganda crap, we literally “tune out” and move on.
Now CNN can easily drum up a core of True Believers to keep them in tea and cookies. Likely about 1/4 Million of them. (That would be about 1/10th of one percent of the USA Adult Population). Season with the 100,000 or so of us who find them biased and deceptive, but feel compelled to do Opposition Research, and you get darned close to 350,000 or about their prime time viewers.
So just whom do they think they are influencing? Those who are already True Believers and fully on board? Or those who find them despicable and are looking to see what porkies they are telling today?
OK, so lets compare that 250,000 to Trump’s 25,000,000 followers. Um, seems to be off by two zeros… or about 100 to 1. But to be fair, lets allow for the whole lot of CNN numbers, or 481,000. Then it is only a 50 : 1 ratio… But those numbers are old. Maybe CNN has gained market share (cough.. cough…) since they have gone full on jihad on the POTUS. So let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and call it 40 to 1 circulation ratio.
Now tell me again just why I ought to give a damn about what CNN (or MSNBC or NYT or LAT) says Trump said when POTUS Trump told me himself what he said?
That, in a nutshell, is The Media’s Problem. They have the tiny one and Trump has the Really Big One. (Megaphone that is…)
And it is their own damn fault. IF they would just do their job of recording What happened, Where it happened, Who did it, When, and go a bit light on the speculation about Why they did it (since nobody can really know the motivation of another) We The People might actually find them useful and watch their show. I’ve given up on ever having coverage of “How” from American media, as that has a tiny bit of ‘technical’ in it and TV / Papers never do anything that requires you to think… I’d love to have a paper that talks about the ‘How’ things were done. Look at what shows sell on TV. Things like NCIS and CSI and Bones and such that are all about the “How” of solving crimes.
But since the media is now nearly 100% spew of “The Anointed Message” full of “Framing” and “Positioning” and emotional clap trap, well, it is the moral equivalent of Dr. Phil or Jerry Springer Does Daily Rushes. And I don’t like Dr. Phil and despise Jerry Springer’s show. By the time you dig out some kernel of actual information, well, “The Slime Is Strong In Them”… and you feel so dirty…
In Conclusion
Is there real news available?
Yes, there is. I increasingly find myself watching things from the other side of the planet and reading on-line papers from there as well. NHK News (Japan) is interesting in that they cover how well industries are doing, and sometimes how they do things. A local channel carries them for 1/2 hour in the evening. I’m fond of France24 via the internet, as it covers what is really happening in Europe (glossed over at best in USA media). Then there is RT Russia Today. Behind the lines video from their side of various wars. Political programs that actually discuss the How of things. (Though never will you see criticism of Putin… but great for getting the dirt on the USA / EU political animals). I also find myself reading more online newspapers from India. They seem to cover things that interest me. Like their space program and their lunar lander.
Kolkata is the more proper way to spell Calcutta.
Up, up & away: Kolkata joins the lunar journey
KOLKATA Updated: Dec 26, 2016 10:02 ISTJoydeep Thakur
Hindustan TimesFor the first time in the history of the country’s space programme, an instrument designed and built by a team of scientists from Kolkata would be landing on the moon’s surface in January 2018. It would be piggy-riding on the same mission that is planning to unfurl the Indian tricolor on the lunar surface on January 26, 2018 when the country celebrates its 69th Republic Day.
“The four-kg payload would be installed atop a lunar lander that a Bengaluru-based private company Team Indus is planning to send to the moon in December 2017. We have signed a deal with Team Indus. The country’s trusted Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) engineered by India’s space agency ISRO would be carrying the lander and at least two rovers to the moon,” said Sandip Kumar Chakrabarti, who also heads the Indian Centre for Space Physics in Kolkata.
Did you know that India can go to the moon but the USA can’t anymore? Just sayin’…
Or how about some un-PC action in Europe?
https://www.rt.com/news/378781-bern-protests-switzerland-squatters/
Teargas & water cannons: Police clash with activists protesting squatters eviction in Swiss city
Published time: 27 Feb, 2017 15:49
Edited time: 27 Feb, 2017 16:06Several hundred people gathered in the unauthorized protest in Bern over the weekend, which descended into violence as hooded youth set cars on fire. Police used teargas and deployed water cannons to disperse the crowd.
Hundreds of people took part in the protest organized by Bern-based group RaumRaub in the city’s Schutzenmatte area on Saturday, Bern police said in a statement.
Doesn’t fit the Approved Narrative of the Europeans and American Globalists of a dandy happy and peaceful integration of foreigners into a peaceful and serene Europe? Crickets… but RT has it.
How about Japan not seeing Putin and Russia as All Evil All The Time?
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20170228_02/
Japan mulls joint activities on Russian-held isles
Japan is considering including tourism and distance medicine in the proposed joint economic activities on 4 Russian-held islands.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed at their summit in December to begin negotiations for a special system to conduct joint activities on the islands.
Japan claims the 4 islands that are controlled by Russia.
The Japanese government maintains the islands are an inherent part of Japan’s territory. It says the islands were illegally occupied after World War Two.
Japan’s Deputy Foreign Minister Takeo Akiba and his Russian counterpart Igor Morgulov are scheduled to meet in Tokyo on March 18th to have the first official discussion on the matter.
Japanese government officials plan to study the feasibility of aquaculture and seafood processing projects, as requested by those living near the disputed islands.
That is just huge. Yet not a peep from CNN or MSNBC who are all Political Navel Gazing All The Time. How about more news and less reprocessed navel lint?
It would also seem that The French have much in common with the average American. Especially the farmers:
‘We no longer expect anything from politicians,’ say French farmers at agriculture fair
Text by Ségolène ALLEMANDOU
Latest update : 2017-02-27
French farmers criticised politicians for failing to do enough to resolve the country’s ongoing milk crisis at the opening of the 2017 International Agriculture Fair this weekend in Paris.Thousands of visitors wandered the narrow allies of the fairgrounds on Saturday, gaping at cows, pigs, goats and other livestock on display, and sampling an array of regional products.
Yet behind the scenes, farmers struggled to hide the strain caused by two years of falling dairy prices, after the European Union decided in 2015 to eliminate milk quotas, which helped keep the market stable by preventing overproduction.
“It’s very hard to live off of my farm,” Simon (who did not give his last name), a 32-year-old dairy and grain farmer from the eastern Rhône region, told FRANCE 24.
Simon, who began working in agriculture in 2012, said he is determined to keep his farm of 70 cattle afloat, despite the ongoing milk crisis and a miserable grain harvest last year.
“I continue because the cows are there,” he explained.
To keep his farm running, Simon works an average of 80 hours per week without pay. He and his wife manage to get by living off of her salary as a teacher.
Now any one of those is a MUCH more interesting story than the latest “Peeing in the political punch bowl” by CNN or MSNBC. All Trump-Hate all the time makes Hillary a dull girl, and does the same for the media puppets of the DNC. Heck, I’m even happier with the Rural News Network RFDTV (they have GREAT weather reports – since income depends on it). Oh, and don’t forget the fashion show:
http://www.rfdtv.com/story/34476543/the-bleacher-babe-fashion-show
Local retailers will join western lifestyle and rodeo celebrities for a fashion show at RFD-TV’s THE AMERICAN FanZone in the historic Fort Worth Stockyards. The show begins at 3 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 17. Brianna Bigbee, aka “The Bleacher Babe,” a rodeo fashionista and western lifestyle blogger, has put the show together. The show will feature rodeo athletes and their families plus western celebrity models wearing FarmHer fashion and apparel from area and Stockyards City boutiques.
Lorinda Graham Van Newkirk, founder of “Gypsy Soule” and well-known local western fashion industry insider, will serve as emcee. 2015 World Champion Barrel Racer and western fashion trendsetter Fallon Taylor, high-demand western industry model Cameron Baldus, “Western Sports Weekly” host Amy Wilson and rodeo icon Pam Minick headline the participants’ list. Others include the stars of western and rural lifestyle programs on both RFD-TV and RURAL RADIO Channel 147 on SIRIUS XM.
Joshua Rush, President and CEO of Rush Auctioneers is serving as the Live Auctioneer. Annually, Rush Auctioneers has raised over $1,000,000 for over 50 benefit and fundraising events nationwide. New items from DFW boutiques and autographed memorabilia from western celebrities will benefit Phase Line Organization, a local charity. They specialize in providing tools, equipment, and finances necessary for the advancement of veterans’ basic living, education and well-being.
Spectators will receive discount cards from participating boutiques plus have a chance to enjoy The American FanZone which includes food trucks, beer vendors, live music, exhibits and the only 2017 DFW area appearance of The Wall That Heals, the traveling replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Frankly, with competition like The Bleacher Babe and a FanZone with food trucks and beer vendors, well, hell, CNN and MSNBC can just go shovel out the bull stalls… oh, wait, they are already shoveling the bull…
Musings from the Chiefio 
We arre witnessing the demise of the legacy media. Like the effete wastrel children of rich parents spending what is left of their parents money at an increasing rate. They do not even appear to realize that they are unimportant in the Internet world of instant news from cell phones. There they all were going to boycott the Whitehouse correspondents’ dinner; and Trump boycotted them. He is playing them like fish as they rush after froth and fail to report big stories just in case they may be seen as favorable to Trump. This is particularly true about the drop in the national debt, Washington post calls it a meaningless statistic, New York Times similar ‘nothing to see’ comment – what would they have said if the debt had jumped up? Yes totally different. So you cannot rely on the legacy media who interpose their bias in editorial decisions on what to publish and what slant to put on what they do publish.
I forecast that most of these ‘legacy’ media outlets will be gone before the end of Trump’s first term – like the video stores that used to be in every shopping center.
I have had the same experience, in my teens I read the Rocky Mountain News every day in depth (essential for background knowledge for high school debate and extemporaneous speaking competitions)
I dropped the “Rocky” in the 1990’s and gravitated to the TV news media until I discovered competent search engines (Inktomi (Hot bot search engine) — precursor to google)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inktomi
Now I do my primary news scanning by watching twitter, and follow leads with a good search engine, and in effect can read 30 or 40 news papers and watch 8 or 10 video news feeds every day only paying attention to the subset of news I care about.
Twitter acts like a collection of interest specific news aggregators as following various feeds pre-selects for certain types of news coverage. If you don’t follow Hollywood Today and People you don’t need to waste time seeing what the glitterati are up to and can spend your time doing more worth while news monitoring. I still see stuff in the Liberal press because my Lunatic Liberal friends bring it to my attention all the time, so I don’t have to read the totally useless crap and can just check out talking points of the day crap so I have a clue what their agenda/message of the day is.
The Major media struggled with the conversion to digital and got seduced by the body count mentality of counting clicks and follows rather than producing product that people went to because they wanted to see it rather than being suckered into clicking on an item because it mentioned “one weird trick” to do something or some other sensational lost leader to snag their attention, only to glance at the item for 2 seconds and move on because it was obviously total crap.
They never figured out that like in the old days you need to know your market and serve it rather than trying to make the entire world your market. Drudge picked a market and serves it effectively does not waste band width with glitz.
My current pet peeve is folks that insist on doing audio pod casts that last 30 minutes who could be condensed to a well written article I could read in 3 minutes or less, and video links where all the valuable data in the video is included in the summary you read to decide if you want to check out the video.
People are starting to manage their time and video with lots of filler content and fluff from the pretty talking heads is an incredibly poor way to communicate information effectively.
Concise audio narration of video works but almost no one does it.
Your 40:1 ratio would appear to assume some sort of communication equivalence between a few 140-character tweets and a 60-page newspaper. Maybe, for some voters, there is. I prefer good old fashioned newspapers. I can read a lot faster than I can listen, and I can skim when I want without scrolling. And the paper is good for starting wood fires in the winter (or else it get recycled). Bless the New York Times!
If a one 140 charcter piece makes a clear distinction between being against journalism, and being against yellow journalism, then it reaches 40 time as many people and saves them reading pages of lies.
The MSM (Main Stream Media) became as crooked as the NAS (National Academy of Sciences) before the public finally realized both were controlled by a totalitarian one-world government.
@Serioso:
The metric is “circulation”. It matters not if it is 8 daily tweets that ARE read vs 60 pages of pulp I recycled daily ftom my lobby, unread.
Yes. as Director of I.T. AND Facilities (it’s a long story about startups) I bought The Usual subscriptions for the lobby. Most days the papers were just put in the recycle bin unread….
BTW, I can skim read WHILE listening to news on radio or TV, and it doesn’t matter much if it is (decent size paper font) physical or a screen. Oddly, I’m doing that now with the blog while watching Voyager w/ the spouse…
Though, FWIW, I strongly prefer physical books and magazines. I’d still prefer paper “papers” were they actually reporting news instead of fabricating “frames” and had font sizes for 20-30 vision.. (I actually passed the 20-20 visual test for my Florida driver licence, but with eye strain required… they had the high tech machines that are harder than the California chart on the wall, too…)
It really does tick me off when I see an interesting reference on a blog and then the site wants me to subscribe. Some sites allow from 1 to 5 free reads per month, others none. We do get 2 papers: the small town local one, and the WSJ. That became a fixture when teaching and came with an educational discount. I like a printed page. The “local” brings coupons as well as the things of local interest we would not hear about otherwise. Many of the stories and some of the opinion pieces belong to the new school of journalism called “cut and paste.” These can be ignored.
Ian W. wrote “these ‘legacy’ media outlets will be gone before the end of Trump’s first term – ”
That seems a bit soon to me. These folks will want to stick around for the next election cycle, especially if Trump runs again. Even if he does not run, I think the MSM will continue doing badly. The image I have is of several people sliding down a pole and not trying very hard to figure out how to stop or get off.
I think the major media will go very much like the video stores and Red box and online streaming. They will just gradually wither away and become more and more irrelevant until one day you wonder where they all went.
Like the video stores they will just close down or morph into something else and dump the talking heads. Someone will come up with a useful on line model that they will gradually slide into.
We are already partly there with the online presence of most of the media, you scan their home page like we used to scan the front page of the paper, then like thumbing through the first 10 pages or so in the physical paper you scan down and hit “load more” until you realize you have seen all those features already and move on. Maybe click on your favorite personality to see their daily bit then click out to something else.
They are just in the tweaking phase trying to find a balance between enough content to draw viewers and being nothing but click bait or closed subscription features. Both those models don’t work for long too many get wise to click bait quickly and refuse to follow links with goofy teasers, and many like me and other will not click through obnoxious banners or subscribe just to look at one feature.
Give me some content I can depend on being useful and relevant to me and I will come back repeatedly and if you really impress me I might eventually subscribe but it will be on the 101st visit not the first.
If you think about the lamestream media as an extension of the democrat political party, then they will never go away as long as there is big financial backers who support the dems.
I read the WSJ from the 60’s to 2000’s. They keep trying to get me to subscribe again. Not hapening.
Now I mostly use QuiteRSS as an aggregator. I get news and blog served up fresh every day. The times they are a changing.
I do have Twitter and Facebook. I don’t spend much time on them, though. I did follow many of the mainstream news outlets on Twitter, but after the election, all they ever put out was garbage and inflammatory fake news about POTUS. I don’t follow them anymore. After 8 years of their rolling over and playing dead in response to the many scandals of the previous administration (O could never do anything wrong, while DJT is never acknowledged to have done anything right), I refuse to allow their obvious hateful prejudice to influence my thinking. I don’t feel like it’s a valuable use of my time to follow their nonsense. I still work full time and have a busy avocation in the arts. Their spewings aren’t worth the time and electrons it takes to check them out.
As I said before, I do take 3 actual newspapers. One is national, the second is statewide, and the third is local. I like being able to cut out articles that I want to keep in old-fashioned scrap books (I don’t keep so many that I would need to set up a system in a file cabinet), instead of having to fire up the printer and spend my own ink and paper to get hard copies. I also have been getting better with the puzzles. :-)
Every time I cut out an article, I remember what Winston Smith did for a living in the book “1984”. I feel like I’m keeping a handle on perspective by keeping old printed material. In fact, I bought a set of 1960s-era World Book Encyclopedias for $5 to be able to compare past “wisdom” against current thinking. For instance, I showed my kid the original 7 food groups that I was taught in grade school, and we compared it against current advice. Perspective. It can be fun!
I have been thinking that they should require the kiddos in school to take a marketing course, so they can get a clue when they’re being sold a bill of goods. They still require psychology, I guess, but marketing was more enlightening to me. I was in that line of work for almost 5 years. Being in the arts, as I said, I’m also aware of how they think when they put together music and visual works that will be used to sell and influence.
I also don’t like getting all my entertainment and news from online sources. I figure someone, somewhere is taking notes. ;-) When I take actual newspapers, yeah, they can tell which side of the aisle I probably fall on, but they can’t know what articles I read or cut out or share.
I’m not averse to being exposed to the ads in the papers. It’s really easy to avoid them, but on the other hand, if there’s something I never heard of that catches my eye, and it’s outside my usual area of interest, I can count on its not being something that would have been presented to me online. I especially like being able to flip past ads for drugs. :-D
On the other hand, if I turned the page past something that ends up being of interest anyway, it’s easy to go back and find it again. Or check my “archives” (if the issue hasn’t been recycled yet!) for it. You can count on online articles’ becoming unavailable before very much time has passed. I also buy actual books for that reason – especially if they have a point of view that is a bit unconventional.
I DO NOT want to watch videos or play podcasts to take in someone’s message. The only exception is if the message *is* the video. For instance, it was fun watching DJT’s entrance at the rally where they had the big “Les Deplorables” banner and song playing. That’s worth sitting through. More than once. Or the Oroville videos…they were fascinating! But even considering the daily videos that someone like Ben Davidson puts out, I’d rather read the commentary and have links to the space weather stuff. I’m sure he has a reason for doing it the way he does. I still get annoyed at the time it takes to assimilate the message. And I know I won’t remember diddly from a video if there is technical information being conveyed.
Finally, I like to think that when I recycle my newspapers, I’m contributing to the industry that produces the bath tissue that I use. :-)
Trump’s POTUS to Congress speech is like a Presidential version of his crowd pitch.
I like the way it is going…
I found that the Democratic former Governor sounded quite Republican in his opening remarks.
Very middle of the road good old boy. Then he closed with a very partisan attack on the president, filled with the Liberal Progressive talking points.
kind of ruined the effect of being FOR American values…pg
I was “glowing” enough from the POTUS Trump speech that I could not stomach the idea of ruining it with the “rebuttal” so just switched it all off. Good wine is best not followed by vinegar, nor pi…
I have been immersed in a research project – rabbit hole – (playing follow the link and I am a data vacuum) for the last few days, so completely missed the President’s speech. I will view it when I get the time on video but am sure I will get summaries from several of my friends online and at work in the next couple days.
E M, you appear to have missed this piece of great news.
http://joannenova.com.au/2017/03/trump-takes-away-epa-right-to-control-every-puddle-in-usa-wotus-order/
@A.C. Osborn:
Didn’t miss it (watched the signing of the executive orders where it was mentioned on some news show or other…). I’m glad he did it, but it is well covered and I was swamped with other things to get done. It will be great news if the next step is “block granting” the EPA budget to the States…
@Larry:
It was a polite and statesman like presentation of his stump speech, IMHO. Same topic list.
He did have salted in a variety of Knight Fork topics for the Loony Side Of Left to choke on. One example: He talked about how he and the Canadian Premier had made some agreement or other to promote Women in (something — STEM or businesses…) and how great that was for Women. Camera cut to Eliz. Warren who was clearly in a dilemma… mouthing something like “he did what? I didn’t know that” while trying to decide to applaud his good deeds or sit on her hands and join the Pouty Boo Brigade. She loses whichever one she does. P.O. the NeverTrump radicals in her ‘base’ or fail to support women’s advancement… Hands slowly flapping about trying to not clap in front of her…
I’m sure it is on YouTube.
CNN ran a poll (so heavily their audience). 78% approval rating. You can’t get 78% approval for a speech promising free beer and puppies… It was fun watching them try to dodge the implication. Saying things like ~”well, we know Republicans were watching the speech”… implying that all the Democrats had boycotted it thus not voting. (Gee, maybe dissing the POTUS by boycott ‘has issues’?)
I’ll see if I can find a good video and put it in the POTUS This Month posting coming soon ;-)
I liked the WSJ well enough, when Dow Jones owned it. As far as I can remember, though, the articles were often just as leftist as, say the New York Times (often sourced similarly and edited into a similar style). The Opinion Page, though, was where the WSJ was different. Over the years, even the Opinion page seemed to drift left. Once the WSJ was sold, I pretty much quit reading it. I want to say that I dropped the paid subscription a decade ago.
It starts with small nicks but pretty soon they are bleeding to death.
NCIS and CSI? Do they ever talk about crime lab problems? Falsifying evidence (for 10 or 20 years). Faulty statistics (probability of 1 in 10 million when it is really 1 in a thousand). Collusion with the police. Gun decking (making up numbers). No mention of margin of error (range). Unreliable evidence (hair matching) etc.
I don’t watch that stuff so I have no idea if those topics are covered.
An interesting bit on news leaks of classified information. A likely culprit has been named.
https://www.dangerandplay.com/2017/02/28/source-of-national-security-breach-identified-leaker-is-david-laufman-of-doj/
@Larry:
Looks about right to me. FBI as source never “clicked” for me. DOJ? Yeah. it was sent to the black hole of political under Obama…
From the article (just so if it goes away it is preserved… hit the link anyway…)
In the original that last paragraph has a link to the book:
with a kindle version…
Looks right to me. Laufman needs to be trapped, skinned, hung out and dried. Then shown the door… (of his new cubical with the decorative bar windows…)
Related seems a few people should be in jail or awaiting trial given this info.
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/nearly-40-leaks-classified-information-reported-2016/
Meanwhile the opposition sets up for the battle of wills. Obama move Valerie Jarrett into his Wash DC home. Nice to have your handler close by when you have no clue what to do.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4271412/Obama-confidante-Valerie-Jarrett-moves-Kaloroma-home.html
I just finished watching the State of the Union Speech by President Trump.
One item I seen anyone else make note of is his JFK like challenge to tackle problems by the year 2026. Like JFK and his go to the Moon challenge it has established a discrete and measurable goal for folks to use for motivation.
Like a football coach uses the next big game or some aspiring athlete uses the Olympics, it gives an anchor and target for their planning and motivation, when it would be easier to grab a slice of pizza and a beer and chill.
Did any of you get the same feel from that part of the speech?
@Larry:
Yes.
Well now they are going after Jeff Sessions with leaks implying he talked with Russian officials (intelligence agents — Uhhh is there any difference in an embassy?).
It appears to be another drip drip drip allegation with no foundation. Bloomberg had this on twitter:
And from a couple weeks ago:
http://nypost.com/2017/02/18/obama-linked-activists-have-a-training-manual-for-protesting-trump/
With his highly successful State of the Union Speech they will probably flip the switch on a bunch of these tactics to try to divert coverage to their outrage instead of Trump’s speech and what he told America he wanted to accomplish.
(measure – counter measure)
@Larry, re 2026 goals –
That one jumped out at me because it was beyond the two terms of a Presidency. It had me scratching my head for just a moment. Then I realized that what he laid out is that all Americans would have to work together for a long time to reach the goals. Hmmmm… President Trump really is trying to unite Americans.
Larry wrote:
“Meanwhile the opposition sets up for the battle of wills. Obama move Valerie Jarrett into his Wash DC home. Nice to have your handler close by when you have no clue what to do.”
Also, two wives wouldn’t seem odd to a Muslim.
We have the stereotype of the “ugly American”, which is not really ugly, just ego-centric. To most Americans, the world outside of America does not exist. They know there are other countries, they merely assume their news comes from us. I saw that first hand in California last week.
So for them, the “other” news sources consists of Breitbart and Daily Caller. They have no conception that what the American YSM does not report is more than what it does.
And that is a shame. It is a big reason for the stereotype. And it is being perpetuated by the YSM.
CNN & MSNBC are basically calling Sessions a liar and Russian Agent. One of the news shows (maybe CNN?) showed the actual quote of the question he was asked during the confirmation hearings and it had something like ~”Did you meet with Russians” blah blah “about the campaign” blah blah. To which he answered “No.”
So near as I can tell this whole thing is a flat out fabrication. He answered honestly and correctly that he wasn’t meeting Russians about the Campaign as he wasn’t part of the campaign.
It seems his two (Oh, Horrors! A Senator on the Armed Services Committee meeting an ambassador…) meetings with the Russian Ambassador were in one case a typical pro-forma meeting in his office in his official capacity as Senator, and (Oh My God!! This is Bad!!! /sarc;) he shook hands with the Ambassador in a receiving line somewhere…
So this horrible “conspiracy” with the Russians consists of shaking hands and saying hello at meet and greets? Sheesh…
The Republicans need to get a record of every single Democrat who has EVER met a Russian (or a Chinese) and start publishing it in response.
The wolf was two feet tall and weighed 50 lbs. – “So what?”
The wolf was 20 feet tall and weighed 5,000 lbs – “I don’t believe you.”
====
Which is kind of a schematic of what the MSM is doing to itself.
Nice summary of the legal issues with claiming Sessions committed perjury on the question of contact with the Russians.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445416/jeff-sessions-perjury-allegation-meritless-al-franken-congressional-testimony
Clearly a tempest in a tea pot, but opens the door to bring up events like Teddy Kennedy asking the Russians to interfere with our election or China and the Clintons and Gore:
http://dailysignal.com/2016/12/14/ted-kennedy-made-secret-overtures-to-russia-to-prevent-ronald-reagans-re-election/
Meanwhile this broohaha over Sessions hides this little item (magician waves cape and points as pretty assistant to distract you from noticing he is reaching up his sleeve).
http://dailycaller.com/2017/03/01/pakistani-suspects-in-house-it-probe-received-4-million-from-dem-reps/
@Larry 5 Pakistani paid $4m between 2009 and 2016 in D.C… very underpaid.
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The lie from Claire McCaskill was not exposed by the YSM, but by the alternate media. The YSM just never learns!