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Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

CBS News’ Journalistic Persecution

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I’ve heavily criticized journalists here and elsewhere when they show bias and misbehave ethically, but also, heavily supported them when their constitutional rights go under attack. This is a little different.

CBS, in the middle of a spate of layoffs common to their (and other news organizations’) failed business models, surprisingly included noted investigative reporter Catherine Herridge in the ranks of those unceremoniously shown the door. [She had dealt with unconstitutional governmental persecution before as well.] That’s not all. She was investigating the Hunter Biden laptop story, among other topics uncommon to a mainline network reporting operation. Topics that could bring heat upon a corporation from very high places in both government and advertisers…

Traditionally, when reporters leave a news outlet, they get to take their belongings, files, sources and information. It’s a time-honored journalistic tradition, and it makes sense. With CBS, she still had a lot of her confidentials from Fox (info, sources, etc.). CBS instead seized her belongings including files, computers and most importantly, information on privileged sources — including those not just from her CBS work, but Fox too.

According to legal analyst Jonathan Turley, who also used to work for CBS as a contractor and knows Herridge, “A former CBS manager, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said that he had ‘never heard of anything like this.’ He attested to the fact that, in past departures, journalists took all of their files and office contents. Indeed, the company would box up everything from cups to post-its for departing reporters. He said the holding of the material was ‘outrageous’ and clearly endangered confidential sources.”

The union representing the reporters stated, “CBS News’ decision to seize Catherine Herridge’s reporter notes and research … sets a dangerous precedent for all media professionals and threatens the very foundation of the First Amendment.” The House Judiciary Committee has launched a probe into the incident also, not that it will amount to anything, since most such probes are theatrical politics.

What is CBS trying to hide? Who are they trying to protect? These are valid questions in the face of unprecedented actions.

Scattershooting 200812

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Scattershooting while wondering where I can find evenhanded factual reporting in modern journalism…

FALL COLLEGE FOOTBALL and the PANDEMIC: Some conferences have cancelled college football for fall 2020 as of this writing, while others have decided to forge onward? What’s the right answer? We don’t know yet. It’s all a grand experiment. At the administrative level, what we’re seeing here is a struggle between angling for sports revenue by deciding to play (SEC, Big 12-3, ACC) and CYA-driven liability fear of losing money to lawsuits (Big 10+3, Pac-12, lower divisions). The common denominator for both sides? Money. Not health, money. Health for them simply is a PR topic to satiate the concerned masses.

There is no easy answer on the health side. This disease is going to infect ~90% of Americans before we’re done, regardless, based on epidemiology research at Gilead. That will include roughly that proportion of college athletes. Get it now or get it later? While I lean “get it later” to give science more time to come up with more-effective treatments and at least partially effective vaccines, the demographic playing college sports is the second least-vulnerable (behind children). Trevor Lawrence of Clemson has argued, intelligently and persuasively, that team discipline and oversight in that atmosphere can minimize spread compared to the athletes being willy-nilly in the populace at home. Yet we we know (from experience as well as the news every given fall) college students want to gather and party, which will spread this crap. In short, this really is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Which side you choose is based largely on which form of damnation you prefer.

KAMALA HARRIS VP CANDIDACY: I do admittedly find it amusing that the not-so-far Bernie left already is going after Kamala hard for being a “cop” (i.e., prosecutor). You can see this all over Twitter. And they are asking one quite valid question: why, after attacking Biden for praising segregationists and working with segregationist Senate colleagues like Herman Talmadge and James Eastland, and (rightly, IMO) making statements against his propensity to sniff/fondle women, does she sign on to being his VP? In this sense I do agree with Bernie “Progressive camp” (which really is the left’s mainstream anymore). Of course, she wasn’t a very effective nor evenhanded nor competent prosecutor (below), so perhaps the Bernie leftists who oppose her for “being a cop” don’t have a lot to worry about there — though they are on the mark when it comes to Biden’s (and by extension now, her) presence in the corporatist, Clintonian, military/industrial complex wing of the party. Even though I disagree with the “Bernie” crowd on so many things, at least I can understand them better than the so-called “moderate” Ds, because of their clearer positions and stronger ideological consistency. [I say “so-called” because today’s mainstream D party is so far left on many socioeconomic issues in particular that it would be utterly unrecognizable to the party of Truman and John Kennedy, who by today’s standards, were Tea Party: strong-military, lower-tax advocating, socially conservative Democrats.]

There’s a lot to unpack with this pick, but for kicks, I’d like to start here. During her 13 years as D.A. then attorney general, she failed to prosecute even one case of priest sexual abuse, though during that same period at least 50 major cities had brought charges against priests. Why? That requires explanation and investigation that a fawning, emotionally beholden leftist media will fail to provide. Wait and see if you do not believe me.

According to Peter Schweitzer’s investigation, “Harris had no particular ties to the Catholic Church or Catholic organizations, but the money still came in large, unprecedented sums. Lawyer Joseph Russoniello represented the church on a wide variety of issues, including the handling of the church abuse scandal. He served on the Catholic Church’s National Review Board (NRB) of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The purpose of the NRB was to review Catholic Church abuse cases. Russoniello was also a partner in the San Francisco law firm Cooley Godward. Russoniello donated the maximum amount by law to her campaign, $1,250, and his law firm added another $2,250. He also sat on Harris’s advisory council when she was San Francisco district attorney. Another law firm, Bingham McCutcheon, which handled legal matters for the archdiocese concerning Catholic Charities, donated $2,825, the maximum allowed. Curiously, Bingham McCutcheon had only donated to two other candidates running for office in San Francisco before, for a total of $650. As with Russoniello, their support was unusual. … board members of San Francisco Catholic archdiocese-related organizations and their family members donated another $50,950 to Harris’s campaign.”

Follow the money if you want explanations for why politicians do otherwise inexplicable things.

LEFTIST WEAPONIZING of DUNNING-KRUGER: This Dunning-Kruger effect is real. We all have seen or experienced some aspect of it. One of those I’ve seen is that the Left has been weaponizing the concept for a few years now to squash any dissent from its own “I know everything” status. I see it often from certain (not all!) climatologists, most radical social-agenda activists, and those especially on the “Christian Left” who try to sledgehammer their own cherry-picked, sanctimonious, wordly (as opposed to Biblical) version of “empathy” down others’ throats — a very ironic thing, eh?

Election 2016 Part 3: Conservatism and Conservatives in Danger

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Part 2 of this series covered the Electoral College and how important it is. Now we switch to the fallout for conservatives.

On several fronts, conservatism is in great danger from a Trump administration. Yes, you read right. First of all, this is an urgent and important message to fellow conservatives, especially those Christians who (unlike me) held their noses and voted for Trump despite his own egregious personal immorality and lack of bonafide conservative credentials.

Watch your back. Trump can turn on us! He could do this by wavering and waffling on issues, as he has done in the past, and changing back to (for example) being pro-abortion. He has favored and unfavored the slaughter of the unborn, and not having much of a moral underpinning, can flip back to the dark side at any given millisecond. He has championed the “rights” of sexual deviants. He has mocked the disabled and poor, who we are taught by the Lord to love and assist. He has made sexist and demeaning “locker room” comments at ladies — grotesque and crass utterances that I shall neither repeat nor link here, and that are decidedly unhelpful and unbecoming the dignity of the office he is about to hold. We cannot trust Trump to support us and to further conservatism when he has been so outwardly hostile to conservative causes (and personally vile toward conservative Christian people, such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) in the recent past.

Furthermore, cafeteria Christians wielding a rhetorically convenient mixture of true and false theologies (such as the so-called “Christian left”) will leverage this situation, and Trump’s violations of mores we all hold dear, in their heretical attempts to redefine Biblical truths to fit their Bolshevik agendas. “Love trumps hate” is a fine example, catering to the thoroughly ridiculous, ignorant and untrue notion that we “hate” those whose immoral sexual behavior or desire to strip us of our right to armed self-defense we simply and rightfully disapprove of. We know that disapproval is not the same as “hate” or “racism” or “bigotry” or “sexism”. But that means nothing to zealous foamers on the secular and “Christian” (yes, I put that in quotes, quite deliberately) left who seek every opportunity to divide and conquer, straight out of Satan’s playbook.

Trump may (likely will!) betray us through his own governmental naivete and ignorance-derived gullibilities, falling prey to advisers who convince him that, for security’s sake, NSA and CIA need to further ratchet up domestic spying on Americans, even beyond the horrifying levels that Obama did, which itself was a big uptick from Bush 43’s own violations of the Fourth Amendment.

The Republican Party, much of which has abandoned conservatism, has no room to gloat. It allowed this Trump takeover to happen through its own smug, ivory-tower, pseudo-intellectual, Goldman Sachs-sellout, globalist, “We know what’s best for you” arrogance that, at times, matched that of the left wing. The elevation of Trump as standard-bearer is an excessive and extreme backlash to the Dole-Bush-Romney axis of distant, detached elitism. Rightly or not, as a result, Republicans of all stripes will be tarred and feathered by the left as the Party of Trump, a curse it will carry for ever and ever. Be ready. While some temporary satisfaction may exist at the electoral triumph, like a hit of heroin, long-term damage is virtually certain and sure.

Fortunately the Democrat Party has been damaged heavily too, by their abject failure to muster a candidate competent, moderate, and ethically clean enough to defeat someone as loathsome as Trump. Republicans and Democrats alike: a pox on both your houses! We need either more robust alternative parties to better represent the spectrum of voter ideals than the horridly outdated and over-simplistic dichotomy presented to them today, or as I have advocated, an absolute end to political parties and a fresh start to voting strictly on candidates and issues.

Unfortunately, respect for morals and ethics has been damaged by both parties in this campaign, as I’ve enumerated ad nauseam in BLOG posts here already. Now that one of those parties has won the electoral vote, the lesson here to our children is, among others, that one can become President despite having egregious, deep and profound character flaws as manifest in:
* Extramarital affairs (and he’s not the first, I know);
* Promotion and operation of massive gambling operations;
* Support (whether currently or not, the record is there) for genocide of the unborn;
* Crass, crude, misogynistic public insults of women, whom God has decreed are to be loved, cherished and protected, not abused;
* Insulting name-calling directed at all manner of people opposing him;
* Stiffing creditors and contractors (theft, forbidden outright by one of our Commandments);
* Flaunting of wealth (ever heard of the allegory of the camel and the eye of the needle?)
* Abject ignorance of issues, which is abdication of moral and professional responsibility to be the most excellent possible at one’s work.

Will character and personal integrity ever matter again in the highest office of our nation and the most influential in the free world? If not, as it appears by the choices presented to us in this election, it is ridiculously easy to see how we are, as a “civilization”, hurtling at frightening velocity straight toward Biblical prophesies of the end times. And we as a nation and a civilization will deserve exactly what is coming to us, even as individuals who had nothing to do with putting such a depraved charlatan (either one, but we’ll refer to Trump as such, since he won) in office will suffer because of this.

You know what, though? So will we conservatives, because we all will be labeled as having “put him in office”–even though many of us did not vote for him precisely because of his unrepentant and open sinfulness. This is going to be a well-coordinated attack on all of our values held dear, whether in the next national election in four years, or in any impeachment proceedings he brings upon himself by his own nefariousness and corruption in the interim; so be prepared.

We conservatives also are at risk from a numerically small but disproportionately painful bur of stupidity within. Isolated but fanatically publicized incidents have occurred of election-related bullying, violence, and racism by Trump supporters, whether or not they claim to be conservatives, will tarnish us all with an unfair brush, and will continue to be propagandized by left-wing zealots hell-bent on discrediting all who do not think exactly like them on hot-button social issues that the left uses as a divide-and-conquer tactic. To the idiots on the right who are breaking stuff and being mean to individuals, I say, go home and dig boogers out of your noses, or some other endeavor more fitting of your ignorance. You are not welcome in the world of thinking conservatism.

Just as awful are false-flag hate crimes by left-wingers, which have taken place as well. More “hate crimes” under false pretense are likely to occur, because they succeed at fomenting left-wing rage. Emotional reactionaries on the left jump on these as rallying cries, without first taking due time to verify the nature and motivations of the criminals, then say, “See, Trump supporters need to speak out against these evils!” Fine. Many of them are. Now leftists also need to call out and police the false-flag crimes and hate originated in their own realm. I hold out little hope they will, because the false-flag leftists still are convenient to the cause for the ten seconds that most people pay attention. Rage sells — even if the rage is generated through duplicitous behavior.

The danger to conservatives here is tangible and physical, in terms of criminal retaliation for either real, or perceived or even falsely attributed, bad behavior by a very few.

This segues to the next installment of this series, where I’ll address the overly melodramatic, emotional, and sometimes violent reactions of the left wing to this election.