“What’s Going On Here?” Oh, Just the Usual Biased and Slanted Journalism Making It Impossible to Know What’s Going On Here…

I cannot describe how sick I am of this phenomenon.

Here is the Conservative Brief’s report on the recent decision by a judge not to take further steps enforcing his order that the Trump White House cease discriminating against the Associated Press following its refusal to embrace the President’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. Headline: “Associated Press Loses Court Case To Regain Coveted White House Access.” But it didn’t “lose the case.” Still, the slanted analysis was reported as fact by the conservative news site PJ Media. Here’s the New York Times spin. [Let’s see if the Gift Link works this time…]. Headline: “Judge Rejects A.P.’s Challenge to New White House Press Policy, for Now.” For now. “The judge said that he needed more time to determine whether the new policy was discriminatory, but said that the elimination of rotating access for newswires was ‘facially neutral.’”

Here’s the Associated Press: “Judge won’t take further steps to enforce his order in AP case against Trump administration.” “U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden, who handed the AP a victory last week in its efforts to end the ban, said it’s too soon to say that President Donald Trump is violating his order — as the AP suggests. ‘We are not at the point where we can make much of a determination one way or another,’ said McFadden, ruling from the bench. ‘I don’t intend to micromanage the White House.’”

Having read these three reports and a couple more, what seems to be the story is that the judge who said that the White House couldn’t punish the AP for which name it chooses to call the Gulf by banning it from White House functions (thanks to the White House announcing publicly that this was its motivation, making the ban a government infringement on free speech), the Associate Press could not insist that it has special privileges due to its once-justifiable status as long-time trustworthy news source, and could be placed in rotation with other news services instead of keeping a regular, permanent spot in the press pool.

The judge made clear what his conclusion was: that the proverbial jury is still out on whether the White House is engaging in viewpoint discrimination, which it may not do, or simply treating the AP like any other news service. However, he did reject the idea that because the AP has been anointed with special deference by past Presidents, the Trump White House is constitutionally obligated to continue them.

Especially since the AP now sucks. (But the judge didn’t say that.)

From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files: Gee, What a Christian, Presidential, Sincere and Uniting Easter Message!

I know, I know…The Julie Principle.

Even so, as I said in brief summary of Rep. Mace’s uncivil and disrespecful treatment of a constituent who dared to imply criticism of her representational, “This doesn’t help.”

Once upon a time, Presidents chose their words carefully for their public pronouncements. I defy anyone to explain how the Truth Social rant above can accomplish anything positive. I place it in the same category as the Trump Hate outbursts by the likes of Maxine Waters, Adam Schiff or Jasmine Crockett, all of which are designed to inflame rather than to unite, except that a President should be held to higher standards than members of Congress.

The only question in my mind is whether exploiting the holiest of Christian holidays to barf out insults and declarations of personal pique is less revolting, more revolting, or about as revolting than President Biden’s use of the day last year to issue a pandering, celebratory proclamation about “Transgender Day of Visibility.” I score Trump’s message as worse, as in “more unethical,” because its language is, though typical of this President, still inappropriate for any resident of the White House. (Trump issued a similar message last Easter, but he wasn’t President them. That’s a material distinction, or should be.)

It is also, like Biden’s message, stupid and incompetent. Trump has a challenging agenda and a tough road ahead; his personal popularity is crucial to achieving that agenda, and there is no way these kinds of self-indulgent outbursts can do anything but alienate potential supporters.

Ethics Dunce: Rep. Nancy Mace (Res Ipsa Loquitur Division)

This doesn’t help. The Speaker of the House needs to insist that his party members adhere to basic standards of dignity, civility and decorum both in the House and in public. Mace is a repeat offender. She’s an embarrassment to her party, her district, Congress and the nation. Behold….

Ethics verdict: the Representative is 100% in the wrong in this confrontation. To say Mace was looking for a fight is an understatement. There was nothing inappropriate or uncivil in this constituent’s demeanor or rhetoric. For Mace to immediately stereotype him because he appeared to be gay was obnoxious; for her to resort to crude language, especially in a public setting, is indefensible.

Finally, for Mace to post this incident as if it is something to be proud of is profoundly disturbing. She appears to be seeking cognitive dissonance points with homophobics.

What did this Democrat (if he indeed is a Democrat) say that marked him as “nuts”? He was being civil, and it was Mace who acted like she was angry at the man’s very existence.

I challenge anyone to offer a justification or excuse for her conduct. (Hint: There isn’t any.)

“What’s Going On Here?” Is This Incident Just A Single Teenage Idiot In Love Or Does It Have Larger Cultural Significance?

The time is January 2024. A few minutes after a Carnival Sunrise cruise ship left the port of Miami, Florida for Jamaica, Carnival Cruise Lines received an anonymous email saying: “Hey, I think someone might have a bomb on your sunrise cruise ship.”  This triggered security protocols that involved both the US and Jamaican Coast Guard. More than 1,000 rooms on the ship had to be searched, and were. After a delay of many hours, the ship was ruled safe to sail and continued the cruise.

An investigation eventually traced the email to 19-year-old Joshua Darrell Lowe II of Bailey, Michigan. He confessed to making the false bomb threat, explaining that he was trying to prevent his girlfriend and her family from going on the cruise without him. Though Lowe could have been sentenced to five years in prison, U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney this month sentenced him to only eight months behind bars. The judge was apparently impressed by the teen’s letter to the Judge taking full responsibility for his actions, expressing remorse, and apologizing profusely.

There is no question that such an act is unethical as well as potentially dangerous. I am interested in whether our political and popular culture sends messages to the young, impressionable and stupid that this kind of extreme conduct in the name of love or other passionate feelings is admirable.

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CNN Issues Perhaps the Dumbest Factcheck Ever!

Wow. CNN senior justice correspondent Evan Perez appeared on last night’s episode of Wolf Blitzer’s “The Situation Room” and attempted to refute President Trump’s assessment of Harvard as a “cesspool of leftist thinking.” (Harvard is, in fact, a cesspool of leftist thinking.) Perez thought he had definitive proof that the representation was false.

“Now, what [the Trump administration] is asking for, Wolf, is for Harvard not only to comply with what they say are anti-Semitic, control of anti-Semitic issues on campus, but they want bigger changes. They want to oversee hiring and admissions standards. They want to make sure that conservative views are being represented on campus.”

Here comes Perez’s brilliant argument: wait for it….

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Ethics Dunces: The Breakthrough Prize Organizers

The lesson here: Even when speech is stupid and inconvenient it is unethical to censor it.

The 2025 Breakthrough Prize ceremony, sometimes called the “Oscars of Science,” was attended by many of Silicon Valley’s major players, including Jeff Bezos. The event had comic actor Seth Rogen as its host: that was ethics dunce move #1. Rogen is only slightly less Trump Deranged than Robert DeNiro, and, though a talented performer, is no more astute in political and governmental matters than the ladies of “The View,” and just as biased. What did organizers think Rogen was going to say while having an open mic all night during a full Trump-hate freakout?

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The Guardian’s Blue Origin Flight Critique: Into The Mind of America Haters, Where No One Rational Has Gone Before!

What a fascinating article from the British hard left tabloid “The Guardian!” Simultaneously taking aim at a legitimate target and exploding into a furious attack on the United States and Donald Trump, it is invaluable for plumbing the depths of how the extreme progressive Left takes in information, filtering it through a confirmation bias to reach false but—for them—comforting conclusions. Stephen Green nailed some of what’s wrong here, “writer Moira Donegan’s utter lack of self-awareness while decrying our lack of self-awareness.” She uses Blue Origin’s all-female passenger flight to as evidence of U.S. decline, but the too-obvious-to-mention reality is that the U.S. has more than one private company capable of putting humans into space, and the crumbling U.K. can’t come close to producing the same.

How can an essay be simultaneously astute and idiotic at the same time? Easy. Donegan accurately writes that for the most part, the high visibility female celebrities taking this expensive joy ride embarrassed themselves and their sex by acting like sorority girls exclaiming, “Like, omigawd! Stars!” Leaving out the gratuitous political shots, Donegan writes in part,

Space used to be a frontier for human exploration, a fount of innovation, and a symbol of a bright, uncertain and expansive future. Now, it is a backdrop for the Instagram selfies of the rich and narcissistic….the flight, and its grim promotional cycle, might be most depressing for what it reveals about the utter defeat of American feminism. Sánchez, the organizer of the flight, has touted the all-female crew as a win for women. But she herself is a woman in a deeply antifeminist model. It is not her rocket company that took her and her friends to the edge of space; it’s her male fiance’s. And it is no virtue of her character that put her inside the rocket – not her capacity, not her intellect and not her hard work – but merely her relationship with a man….There are at least two women on the mission who can be credited as serious persons: Aisha Bowe, an aerospace engineer, and Amanda Nguyen, a civil rights entrepreneur…But most of the crew’s self-presentation and promotion of the flight has leaned heavily on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish silliness that insults women by cavalierly linking their gender with superficiality, vanity and unseriousness. In an interview with Elle, the crew members paid lip service to the importance of women…but mostly, they seemed interested in talking about their makeup and hair. “Space is going to finally be glam,” Katy Perry said…“Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.” “Who would not get glam before the flight?!” asked Sánchez, who evidently can’t imagine that women might prioritize anything else. “We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule.” Bowe, too, joined in, saying that she had gone to extreme lengths to make sure that she would be, of all things, well coiffed for the experience. “I skydived in Dubai with similar hair to make sure I would be good,” she said. “I took it for a dry run.”

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“War Is Peace”: Kareem Abdul Jabbar on D.E.I…

On the 78th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s breaking of Major League Baseball’s color barrier, the Los Angeles Dodgers, successors to the Brooklyn Dodger franchise that brought Robinson into the big leagues, hosted its traditional annual commemoration of the culture-altering event. For some reason Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, L.A. Lakers legend, was on hand to give a speech, and as a smart and articulate social commentator instantly proved that bias makes you stupid by saying,

“Trump wants to get rid of DEI. And I think it’s just a ruse to discriminate. So I’m glad that we do things like this, to let everybody in the country know what’s important. They also tried to get rid of Harriet Tubman. But that didn’t work. There was just uproar about that. But you have to take that into consideration when we think about what’s going on today.”

Oh.

A few points: D.E.I. is explicit discrimination, just of the anti-white male variety. How could banning clear discrimination be a “ruse to discriminate?” Would Kareem support DEI in the NBA when he was playing, which would have meant inferior white players taking the jobs of better black players in the interests of diversity? Why would a smart individual say something so self-evidently Orwellian?

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A Morning “Nelson”! Condign Justice For NY A.G. Letitia James

This story has so much delicious irony to it, I’m afraid to look in the mirror for fear that I have literally turned into Nelson Muntz, the “Simpsons” character who mocks everyone else’s misfortunes.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has referred New York Attorney General Letitia James to the Department of Justice for alleged mortgage fraud. Bill Pulte, director of FHFA alerted U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in part,“Based on media reports, Ms. Letitia James has, in multiple instances falsified bank documents and property records to acquire government backed assistance and loans and more favorable loan terms…This has potentially included 1) falsifying residence status for a Norfolk, Virginia-based home in order to secure a lower mortgage rate and 2) misrepresenting property descriptions to meet stringent requirements for government backed loans and government assistance.”

You can read the documents here and here. In one case, the Democratic Party hit-woman charged with executing the lawfare against Donald Trump so he couldn’t run for President received a lower mortgage rate by falsely swearing that a home in Norfolk, Virginia would be her “primary residence” when her job as New York’s Attorney General required her to live in that state. In the other, James misrepresented a five-unit property as a four-family unit to receive “a conforming loan through the Freddie Mae/Freddie Mac Form 3033,” which is only available for buildings with four or fewer units. Hilariously, this is the same woman who prosecuted Donald Trump for misleading financial statements, intoning that “No one is above the law.” Perfect!

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‘The Great Stupid’ Marches On: “Good Morning” Is Racist, Apparently

Here is woman beyond help, miserable because she sees racism in everything, and is actively searching for features of daily life to make her feel insecure, unsafe, and angry:

What can you say about such a poisoned individual? How did she get this way? Does she think Gene, Donald and Debbie are sending racist “dog whistles” to white supremacists in the audience? Oh probably. But now she can solemnly lecture anyone who greets her with “Good morning!” about their racial insensitivity.

There has to be a clinical name for this proclivity, but for now, “The Great Stupid” will just have to suffice.

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Pointer: Moonbattery