Month: October 2018

Civility will return if the dems regain power.

Via NJ Com:

The campaign for GOP candidate for Congress in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional district, Assemblyman Jay Webber, R-Morris, said Wednesday that a threat against him and his seven children was delivered to his office in Whippany yesterday.

A note sent to Webber’s office warned Webber “You better hope you don’t win! Or else.” and then asked, “How many kids do you have…7? Unlucky 7.”

Webber has frequently incorporated his wife Johanna and their seven children into his campaign, featuring them in campaign ads.

The threat, which arrived with a cut up Webber for Congress sign, has been referred to the state police for investigation, according to Ronica Cleary, a spokesperson for the campaign.

The race for New Jersey’s 11th congressional district, which includes Morris and Essex Counties, is hotly contested and closely watched. U.S. Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-11, held the seat for decades never winning by less than 19 points, but Hillary Clinton lost the district by a single point in 2016. National Democrats view it as a key district in their goal to gain control of the House of Representatives.

An Oct. 9th poll by Monmouth University has Webber’s rival, Democrat Mikie Sherrill, ahead in the race by four points, 48 percent to 44 percent, but within the margin of error.[…]

The threat arrived by US Mail at Webber’s Whippany law office a day after Webber’s campaign tweeted that his opposition on the political left was “unhinged” and posted a video showing torn up and defaced Webber campaign quotes intercut with renowned Democrats like former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton advocating direct action by voters.

Keep reading…

Anthrax terror mailings, NPR, and the Blame Righty crowd: A history lesson

Remember when @NPR baselessly smeared and blamed the Traditional Values Coalition for the 2001 anthrax mailings? I do. The Blame Righty crowd never learns and thrives on public amnesia ==> https://t.co/tR0BuEFZLL

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) October 25, 2018

“Democrats and CNN executives have wasted no time blaming President Trump, Republicans, and conservative media for the mail bombs or bomb-like devices received this week by high-profile liberals.”

Watch more @MichelleMalkin 👓:https://t.co/WI1yxKYb1e pic.twitter.com/JsRsuJAzhk

— CRTV (@CRTV) October 25, 2018

Democrats and CNN executives have wasted no time blaming President Trump, Republicans, and conservative media for the mail bombs or bomb-like devices received this week by high-profile liberals.

There’s no question these are acts of domestic terrorism. But to assume partisan political motivation is to forget several incidents where such assumptions made asses out of the assumers.

Do you remember what happened the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax mailing attacks – which are still unsolved?

Letters laced with anthrax were sent to the NYPost and NBC News a week after 9/11. Two more letters, postmarked October 9, 2001, were sent to Senators Tom Daschle and Pat Leahy with even more refined (“weaponized”) anthrax. Five people died, 22 were infected. Government scientist Steven Hatfill was unjustly defamed as a suspect by the New York Times and others. And National Public Radio recklessly and baselessly implied that the conservative Traditional Values Coalition might be under investigation for targeting Daschle and Leahy.

The NPR story suggested that the conservative Christian group “fit the profile” of groups that might have been responsible for those types of letters and targeted the group because it had complained about Daschle and Leahy’s efforts to remove the phrase “So help me God” from the senatorial oath. Only after public pressure from Christian activists did NPR acknowledge the slanderous story was “inappropriate.” NPR issued a hollow apology and urged critics to “move on.”

Liberal journalists have indeed moved on, refusing to learn their lesson. We have no idea what the motivations of the person or entity behind this week’s latest terror mailings are. Yet, Blame Righty is the knee-jerk impulse and non-stop message of the day by shameless opportunists who never let a crisis go to waste.

Liberal activist organizations seem to have plenty of leverage with social media and tech companies these days.

According to a letter sent from Breitbart’s attorney to lefty group Sleeping Giants, Google must have taken the liberal activist group’s complaints about Breitbart pretty seriously. Sleeping Giants, headed by Matt Rivitz, labelled Breitbart as an “anti-Semitic site” and pushed advertisers, networks, and Google to remove ads. In the letter, Breitbart threatened “potential legal action” and accused Sleeping Giants of “deceiving the public, and in particular, purchasers of online advertising.”

Over a two month span in 2017, Breitbart lost 90% of its advertisers, who were being placed on the website by Google Ads. By pushing the concept that Breitbart was an “anti-Semitic site” that promotes “Neo-Nazism,” Sleeping Giants was successful in making most companies feel uncomfortable and lobby for the removal of their ads from the site. The letter points out that the accusation made by Sleeping Giants is ridiculous, since the site is “staunchly pro-Israel” and was “founded by two Jewish men.” Breitbart also argued that its site promoted “women and minorities.”

According to the Daily Beast, “hundreds of companies ended up “blacklisting” Breitbart from running their ads.” Breitbart fired back that the accusations from Sleeping Giants were not based in reality. Instead, the letter said, “As you well know, Breitbart News is none of those things. It is the 48th most trafficked website in the United States (according to Amazon-owned Alexa), the 3rd most trafficked news site,and the 15 highest engagement Facebook publisher in the World (according to NewsWhip). According to NPR, it is read every morning by the White house Chief of Staff.”

Google Ads must have worked with these companies as well as Sleeping Giants in some way, since the algorithm was putting the ads on Breitbart pages at random. Breitbart asked Sleeping Giants to preserve all its emails exchanged with Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon for a potential lawsuit.

In early 2017, Sleeping Giants made a complaint against Amazon, saying that the site was not taking down its ads from Breitbart. Amazon apparently was one of the few companies that kept ads on Breitbart’s site.

Getty Images

BY: Alex Griswold Follow
@HashtagGriswold

October 25, 2018 4:23 pm

A New York Times columnist went after President Donald Trump on Wednesday, accusing him of making a false statement that he didn’t actually make.

In her Wednesday column “Trump Gets Terrible,” Gail Collins voiced her hope that Trump would avoid violent or divisive rhetoric when he spoke at rallies ahead of the 2020 election. Instead, she wrote, “All we can do is hope he sticks to his less dangerous form of awfulness.”

“We want the Donald Trump who yowls about wildly overestimated crowd sizes and nonexistent achievements. For instance, on Monday in Houston he bragged about Brett Kavanaugh and gave the audience a primer on Supreme Court appointments…” she wrote.

Here’s how Collins summarized Trump’s remarks:

Who — who appointed the highest percentage of judges? No, no, no, it wasn’t Hillary Clinton. No, she didn’t make it, remember? She didn’t make it. No, you know who it is? You’ll never guess. It’s called George Washington. And we’re after George Washington. So, a very big thing, no, George Washington, why? Because he just started. He did 100 percent. Nobody’s ever going to break that record. Nobody’s ever going to break the record of George Washington.

Collins correctly pointed out that Trump is nowhere near the highest percentage of Supreme Court nominations. “In actual reality, Trump is not after George Washington. Franklin Delano Roosevelt placed eight justices on the Supreme Court and Ronald Reagan got four. Trump has gotten two, the same number as George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.”

But Collins left off part of Trump’s remarks that make it clear he wasn’t talking only about “Supreme Court appointments,” like she claimed. Trump prefaced his remarks with the following [emphasis added]:

I’ve been there less than two years and I already have two of them cause we also have a fantastic new justice in Neil Gorsuch. We had him just approved, he was just confirmed and we have a record number of circuit court judges for the time that we’ve been in office. And that we fully expect to go to the all-time record. Percentage-wise it’s right up there and we’ve only been here a short — okay ready, here’s a question: Percentage-wise, who has more justices, federal judges appointed percentage-wise than any other president? Who is it?

In context, Trump was clearly speaking about all federal judges, not just his two Supreme Court nominations. The Republican president has had a higher-than-average 84 judges confirmed 21 months into his presidency.

Collins would have been on solid ground if she followed in the steps of an Associated Press fact-check that ruled Trump “over-reached” in his remarks. While “we’re after George Washington” implies his administration had the second-highest percentage of judges confirmed, Trump also trails the percentages of Democrats John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton at this point in their presidencies.

Even Collins’ fact-check of the claim Trump didn’t make was initially incorrect. “A previous version of this article misstated the number of justices placed on the Supreme Court by President Franklin D. Roosevelt,” reads a Thursday correction. “He appointed eight justices, not nine.”