Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America salute UN Ambassador Nikki Haley for her clear language and strong defense of American priorities on the world stage. After briefly condemning The Atlantic’s firing of Kevin Williamson, hey also groan as President Trump and China exchange threats of even more aggressive trade action against one another. And they scratch their heads as former two-term Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty runs for the job again.
Mainstream media are blasting Sinclair Broadcast Group for having anchors at its affiliates all record the same promotional video but a conservative media watchdog says there’s nothing nefarious about the message and the bigger outlets are exposing their hostility for any sources that are not blatantly liberal.
The controversy began when the liberal sports site Deadspin edited a mashup of all the affiliates stating the same commitment to check facts before going on the air with any news stories.
Comedian and HBO host John Oliver said the video showed Sinclair and its affiliates to be a “brainwashed cult.” CNN and MSNBC spent considerable air time denouncing the supposed group think, as did some of the broadcast networks. That’s a decision that has Media Research Center Vice President for Culture and Business Dan Gainor fuming.
“This is a story that particularly annoys me because the media are being so hypocritical.
“These are, in many cases, journalists representing syndicated outlets: ABC, CBS, and NBC syndicate every day three to four hours of morning news, a half hour of evening news and several hours of entertainment coverage every day to their member stations,” said Gainor.
He says the mainstream reporters are getting bent out of shape over a very minor difference from their own operations.
“The only difference between that content appearing in one location or another and what Sinclar did is that Sinclair had it read by multiple people using the same script. The broadcast networks just use the same show,” said Gainor.
So if the common promo is not worthy of such outrage, why are the big media outlets turning their guns against Sinclair?
“The broadcast networks and the lefty cable networks all think that Sinclair must be stopped. They’re out to stop Sinclair from buying Tribune. This is a blatant political play on behalf of the allegedly neutral journalists,” said Gainor.
Gainor also says Sinclair has a reputation for being in the tank for President Trump because it won’t cover him the way the liberal outlets do.
“Sinclair doesn’t lean as far to the left as they do. Sinclair has been accused of being pro-Trump, but in the land of liberal media…not attacking Trump every second of the day is to the networks, by comparison, pro-Trump,” said Gainor.
Gainor says the bias in the mainstream media is obvious. He points to CBS morning host Gayle King chiding Sinclair even though she has given “tens of thousands of dollars” to Democratic organizations. He also says the most virulent anti-Trump reporters get rewarded, including lesser known figures like April Ryan and Brian Karem.
“No one ever heard of them prior to (anti-Trump statements in the White House Briefing Room), then as soon as that happened, they were hired by CNN,” said Gainor.
He says it’s nothing new, pointing out that 50 years ago CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite declared the Vietnam War unwinnable and even media icons like Edward R. Murrow were “huge, die hard liberals.”
Gainor says independent journalism is facing rough waters right now.
“It’s very tough. Journalism in general hasn’t been doing well financially for many years,” said Gainor.
He says the industry took a big hit when the dot com bubble burst and suffered badly in the wake of the 2008 economic downturn. He says that crisis also deepened the bias.
“The 2008-2009 stock market collapse caused a nationwide recession. In journalism it caused a nationwide depression. Journalists lost their jobs by the thousands and they haven’t really come back. So the journalists all want to save their jobs and attack anyone who disagrees with them,” said Gainor.
Gainor says it is vital to our nation and our politics for independent and conservative media to have a place in the arena. He says there are two key ways for that to happen.
“We need top donors to get involved to fund more conservative outlets. There’s new outlets opening up all the time. That’s an opportunity. But outlets are only as good as the people who staff them. So I strongly encourage young conservatives to go into journalism,” said Gainor.
Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America welcome President Trump’s order sending National Guard personnel to the southern border. They explain why questions about whether Trump has such power are ridiculous but also hope the forces are not needed for long if lawmakers address the problem quickly and effectively. They also get a kick out of “moderate” Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner suddenly supporting some kind of “assault weapons” ban, proving once again Warner talks like a moderate but always ends up toeing the liberal line on virtually every issue. And they shake their heads as Steven Spielberg suggests Indiana Jones could be a female character in future installments of the series. Jim makes the point that it’s a bad idea to recast roles so closely identified with a certain actor, and they both vent about the unmitigated garbage heap that was the fourth film in the Indiana Jones franchise.
The man who led the Trump transition’s landing team at the Environmental Protection Agency is hailing the administration for rolling back Obama-era fuel efficiency standards that he says would restrict consumer freedom, weaken vehicle safety, and have a much more limited impact on the environment than activists claim.
On Tuesday, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced the shelving of the standards which required all cars and light trucks to have a fleet-level fuel efficiency of 50 miles per gallon by 2025. Proponents of the rule say it would help the environment and speed up innovation in the auto industry in addition to lowering fuel bills.
But Myron Ebell, who spearheaded the Trump transition at EPA, says the real consequence of the rule would be the erosion of freedom.
“I think it’s a nightmare for consumers because what the government has done by vastly increasing the fuel economy standards is to tell consumers, ‘We don’t care what you want in a car and we don’t care how much it costs. We just care that it gets really good gas mileage. So that’s what you’re going to be able to buy,” said Ebell.
Ebell is also director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He says the mandate was already driving up auto prices.
“Since these new standards were adopted in the Obama administration in the last four or five years, cars have already gone up a lot, several thousand dollars for the same car,” said Ebell.
Improvements in engine manufacturing have already led to greater fuel efficiency in recent decades, but Ebell says it’s obvious how consumers are approaching those improvements.
“Engines have been getting more efficient right along but drivers have been buying cars that use that greater efficiency to buy a bigger car or a faster car,” said Ebell.
Bigger and faster is not what we’d get under the old Obama rules.
“If they wanted to buy a car they could afford (starting in 2025), they would be faced with buying a much smaller car, a much lighter car, a much less powerful engine. Consequently, it wouldn’t meet the needs of a lot of people. Moreover, a smaller and lighter car is much safe,” said Ebell.
Ebell suspects the Obama administration thought demand for such vehicles would be high if gas prices hadn’t come back down.
“The guess was in the Obama administration that, ‘We can make this work because we’re going to drive up the price of gasoline. And once gasoline gets to be six, seven, eight dollars a gallon, people will all want to buy much more fuel efficient cars and the additional cost of those cars they’ll be able to save in gas costs,'” said Ebell.
“But with gasoline under three dollars a gallon, people want the performance and they want the size. They’re willing to spend a certain amount each week on gasoline and they want a bigger and better car,” he added.
He is also skeptical of environmentalists’ claims that the Obama EPA rule would reduce greenhouse gases by the equivalent of 140 coal-fired power plants every year.
“All of these claims of savings of any type are always vastly exaggerated and in the end people find that they don’t get as good mileage and that the supposed environmental benefits are less,” said Ebell.
Ebell says the push for electric cars and even no cars by clustering the populace near mass transit options are other efforts to restrict freedom from the left. He lauds Pruitt for doing a “great job” advancing an “ambitious” Trump agenda in deregulating energy policy, especially for heavy industries.
However, he implores Trump to appoint more critical personnel to the EPA and for the Senate to act swiftly on the nominees that have been offered.
While Ebell and others cheer the scrapping of Obama’s fuel economy standards, California and other states plan to fight back. The Clean Air Act allows California to impose more stringent environmental standards than the federal government calls for and other states are attempting to follow suit.
Ebell says California can either toe the line on this or face a bruising court fight.
“The EPA can then move to revoke the waiver that California got from the EPA that allows them to be part of this process. Once the waiver is revoked, California, if they want to set their own standards, will have to go to court and win what would be a very major court victory and one that I doubt that they would win,” said Ebell.
Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America shake their heads as Democrats win another high-profile special election. By itself, it may not mean much, but Democrats have won a string of races where Republicans were expected to be competitive or heavily favored. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is openly concerned about a “Blue Wave” in 2018 and Jim and Greg discuss why he’s right to sound the alarm. They also sigh as the Trump administration and China swap tariffs, leading to stock market drops and higher prices. And they shake their heads as the media go wall-to-wall with coverage of the shootings at You Tube headquarters, only to drop the story when the shooter does not fit the media stereotype of a mass shooter.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud says that Israel has a right to its own land, and although there’s no immediate change in official Saudi policy, a former Clinton administration official says that position could lead to a tidal shift in the region and the quest for Middle East peace.
In an interview with “The Atlantic,” reporter Jeffrey Goldberg asked the crown prince, who is effectively running Saudi Arabia, whether he believes the “Jewish people have a right to a nation-state in at least part of their ancestral homeland?”
“I believe that each people, anywhere, has a right to live in their peaceful nation. I believe the Palestinians and the Israelis have the right to have their own land. But we have to have a peace agreement to assure the stability for everyone and to have normal relations,” said bin Salman.
When pressed about whether he has any religious objection to the existence of a Jewish state, the prince gave a more detailed answer.
“We have religious concerns about the fate of the holy mosque in Jerusalem and about the rights of the Palestinian people. This is what we have. We don’t have any objection against any other people,” said bin Salman.
Bin Salman also made it clear that the threat posed by a nuclear Iran is a critical factor in warmer relations with Israel, stating that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini “makes Hitler look good.”
The crown prince also gave some reasons for cooling the optimism. In the same interview, bin Salman also said there is not an anti-Semitism problem in Saudi Arabia and that “there is no Wahhabism. We don’t believe we have Wahhabism.” He also does not recognize Israeli territory gained since 1967
Nonetheless, American Foreign Policy Council Senior Fellow Lawrence J. Haas says the prince’s comments on Israel could be earthshaking.
“This statement is, potentially, monumentally important. It is, in essence, a recognition of the right of the Israeli state to exist,” said Haas, who served as communications director for Vice President Al Gore in the Clinton administration and staunchly opposed the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration.
After 70 years or Arab refusal to recognize the modern state of Israel, Haas says this kind of gesture by bin Salman provides at least a flicker of hope for that hostility to change.
“If this leads to a more formal recognition and peace deal between those two countries, this could really have tremendous effects that stretch across the entire region. So I think it’s terribly important,” said Haas.
Bin Salman has been cracking down on corruption, relaxing restrictions on women in Saudi society, and he permitted an Israeli flight to use Saudi airspace. Haas says the slow thaw has been happening for a while.
“This is part of a gradual warming of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia that has really taken place over the course of the last five to ten years. Lots of back channel communications, appearances by Saudi officials and Israeli officials at the same events. I believe there was even a handshake at one point,” said Haas.
While bin Salman is working to modernize Saudi Arabia, Haas says the obvious point of agreement between the two nations is the need to confront a massive, mutual threat from Iran.
“There’s no question that that’s the overwhelming driver for Saudi Arabia,” said Haas. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend and Israel and Saudi Arabia probably have the most to lose when it comes to the rise of Iran,” said Haas.
Iran has repeatedly threatened to wipe Israel of the face of the earth, while Saudi Arabia is the is leading Sunni Muslim power while Iran is the clear leader among Shia Muslims.
According to Haas, teaming up against Iran gives Israel and Saudi Arabia the opportunity to coordinate strategies, share intelligence, and rally more of the region to their side.
Haas believes Saudi Arabia warming towards Israel could have a major impact on other nations in the Middle East.
“It would be a pretty important signal to other countries that don’t have relations with Israel that at the end of the day, this is a long-running dispute we’ve had with Israel. Israel isn’t going anywhere. We’ve got bigger problems and maybe the rest of you need to get on board,” said Haas.
There is a major concern for Haas and others who hope there can be meaningful progress toward stability in the region. They fear bin Salman may not live to achieve his goals.
“Anytime you’re in a conversation about what the crown prince is doing in Saudi Arabia and how significant it may or may not be, you don’t have to be speaking very long before someone says, ‘If he survives,'” said Haas. “The threat being that he will suffer the same fate perhaps as (former Egyptian President) Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated by radical forces within his own country after making peace with Israel.”
“He’s moving pretty aggressively and you do have to wonder how successful he will continue to be as he pushes the envelope more and more. We’ll have to see but people do worry about his fate,” said Haas.
Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America are pleasantly stunned to hear Saudi Arabia’s crown prince publicly state that Israel has a right to live in peace on its own land and wonder if things are truly changing in the Middle East or whether this is a temporary thaw in order to confront Iran. In the wake of the very public feud between Fox News host Laura Ingraham and gun control activist David Hogg, they also discuss how the rise of populism leads to political debates becoming a referendum on the people in the debate rather than the ideas involved in the debate. And they wonder why President Trump is spending so much time blasting Amazon and the rate it pays to mail packages, suspecting it might have something to do with another business venture headed by Jeff Bezos.
Hillary Clinton suggests two U.S. Supreme Court decisions contributed to her loss in the 2016 presidential race, but an election law expert says there is no merit to the former Democratic Party nominee’s allegations and believes she is “still operating in fantasy land.”
During a Thursday appearance at Rutgers University, Clinton said the Supreme Court’s decisions to allow more independent expenditures on campaigns (known as Citizens United) and it’s ruling to amend the Voting Rights Act both worked against her.
“I was the first person to run for president who had to deal with both Citizens United and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act,” said Clinton.
“With Citizens United it was all bets are off, more money than we’ve ever seen and being spent in ways we still to this day don’t know. I mean the NRA spent more money against me than they’ve ever spent against anybody, and all these other groups were just pumping it out because with the Citizens United decision, we can’t stop it and we can’t even follow it and we often don’t even know after the fact,” said Clinton.
“Then the Voting Rights Act, which was gutted, opened the door to voter suppression like we haven’t seen in 50 years. So people are being turned away from the polls because they don’t have the exact right ID, although they bring everything else they possibly can bring.
“And they’re being purged from voter rolls because maybe they haven’t voted in a year or two,” she added.
Hans von Spakovsky directs the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation and served on the President Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. He says Clinton’s assertions are baseless.
“Just about everything Hillary Clinton said is wrong and she’s apparently still operating in fantasy land,” said von Spakovsky.
Von Spakovsky says the Supreme Court only changed one aspect of the Voting Rights Act, and that was to no longer require southern states to get permission from the Justice Department before changing election laws. He says all the critical protections for all voters remain intact and there were no allegations of voter suppression in the wake of the election.
“If anything like that had occurred, you would have seen lawsuits filed by all kinds of groups under the Voting Rights Act because suppressing and intimidating voters is illegal under the Voting Rights Act. Not a single lawsuit like that was filed. No lawsuit was filed by the U.S. Justice Department either,” said von Spakovsky.
He also says no one was turned away over not having the proper identification.
“She obviously is not familiar with federal law, which says that no one can be turned away from a poll. If you show up and there’s some sort of problem, say you’re not on the voter registration lists, you are given a provisional ballot and you are allowed to vote.
“She also said that people were being purged (because) they hadn’t voted in a year or two. That is also completely and totally false. Federal law, through the Motor Voter Law, does not allow that to be done. So she is basically making up these claims,” said von Spakovsky.
But what about Clinton’s claim that shadowy, unaccountable money made it’s way into the campaign in amounts never seen before as a result of the Supreme Court broadening the definition of political speech in the Citizens United decision?
“The independent spending, and by independent spending we mean spending by groups that are not associated with the campaigns or the political parties – that’s something that’s been going on in our elections for a very long time and it’s a tiny, tiny percentage of the amount of money that was raised and spent by the presidential campaigns, including her campaign,” said von Spakovsky.
“By the way, most of that independent spending is entirely disclosed. Political groups – PAC’s and others that engage in that type of spending – have to include all of it including all of their donors to the Federal Election Commission,” said von Spakovsky.
In addition, the spending from the 2016 campaign shows that the Clinton campaign vastly outspent the Trump campaign and the Democratic National Committee plus outside liberal groups easily outspent the Republican National Committee and right-leaning advocacy groups.
So why is Clinton blaming these court decisions for the results in 2016?
“She just can’t get over the fact that Donald Trump won the election,” said von Spakovsky.
Jim Geraghty is back! Today, he and Greg Corombos of Radio America agree that it was time for VA Secretary David Shulkin to leave after months of ethical woes – but also a year of some progress at one of government’s biggest and most important bureaucracies. They also take on the identical script recorded by dozens of anchors at Sinclair stations, noting that the commitment to reporting facts is good but making every station say exactly the same thing looks really bad. And they slam Hillary Clinton for adding the Supreme Court decisions on Citizens United and the Voting Rights Act to her endless excuses for losing in 2016.
After years of gun control advocates insisting they didn’t want to take away anyone’s guns, the March for Our Lives and a string of opinion columns headlined by former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens are making it clear that the movement is aimed at repealing the second amendment, and the head of one leading gun rights group welcomes the honesty.
“Obviously the mask is coming off. There is a radical agenda that we are fighting against. The anti-gun left wants to confiscate guns from law abiding Americans, but they’re not going to succeed,” said Gun Owners of America Executive Director Erich Pratt.
None of this comes as a surprise to Pratt. He says opponents of the second amendment have been wanting this for a long time, even pointing to a ’60 Minutes’ interview with Sen. Dianne Feinstein from decades ago.
“If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, Mr. and Mrs. America turn them all in, I would have done it,” Pratt recounted Feinstein as saying.
He notes Gov. Andrew Cuomo openly talked about gun confiscation in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary massacre.
Pratt went to the March For Our Lives on March 24. He says the overarching goal of the protesters was clear.
“It was all about, ‘Yes, we want to ban guns,’ or if they wanted to give us the privilege of keeping our guns, they would want to have the government go door-to-door and put trackers on the guns. This is the type of thing we’re actually seeing in the movement,”said Pratt.
In his op-ed for the New York Times, Stevens asserted that the second amendment does not grant the right to keep and bear arms unless it is in the context of a militia. Pratt begs to differ.
“That view lost at the Supreme Court,” he said, referring to a 2008 decision that affirmed an individual’s right to keep and bear arms. The decision was 5-4. Stevens wrote the dissent.
In addition to vigorously disagreeing with the effort to repeal the second amendment, Pratt says the logic of the protesters makes no sense.
“It’s almost like they don’t see the contradiction. They want to take away our guns so therefore they want the Trump administration to have all the guns? Wait, I thought they feared the Trump administration. It simply doesn’t make sense,” said Pratt.
Stevens also claims a rich legal history of the courts severely restricting gun rights and he quotes former Chief Justice Warren Burger as saying the National Rifle Association committed “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime,” by claiming the right to keep and bear arms could not be tampered with.
While Pratt admits the courts did clamp down on gun rights over the years, the second amendment was vital in the wake of the Civil War and during the tensions of the civil rights movement.
He says one of the purposes of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment was to make it possible for blacks in the South to be able to purchase weapons when southern states refused to allow it.
In the 1950’s and 60’s, when police in the South were looking the other way while the KKK targeted black neighborhoods, black citizens restored order by patrolling their neighborhoods with guns.
“This idea that we can now trust the government, that we only needed (the amendment) in the 1700’s or 1800’s but we don’t need it today, that’s just simply crazy,” said Pratt.
Pratt does not believe the second amendment is going anywhere anytime soon, given 70 percent support for the right to keep and bear arms and the major difficulty of amending the Constitution. He says the greater threat is the step by step erosion of gun rights that gun control proponents keep pushing.
For gun rights to survive long term, Pratt says parents need to educate their kids before the world gets to them.
“Use your sphere of influence. If you’re a parent, I would ask you this. Are you training your kids in your values and beliefs. Sadly, too often the kids from conservative households have been lost to the current culture,” said Pratt.
