October 21, 2019 — Scott Johnson
The Daily Mail has devoted substantial resources to documenting Ilhan Omar’s tabloid life apart from her husband and children. In today’s installment the Daily Mail reports “EXCLUSIVE: ‘She’s not fooling anyone.’ Ilhan Omar lives a double life of secret hookups and romantic vacays to Jamaica with her married aide, as they live together ‘on and off’ and even talk of MARRIAGE (once their divorces are finalized).” To the tabloid version
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October 21, 2019 — Scott Johnson
In “The Chuck Todd Experience” I wrote about Todd’s manhandling of Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson and linked to the NewsBuster post “Call Him Spike? Chuck Todd Vows NOT to Show Trump Attacking Omar, Hunter Biden.” It was a “Purple Haze” kind of a deal. Now NewsBusters has posted two clips of Mark Levin’s fantastic interview of Senator Johnson on Levin’s FOX News show last night. I have posted the first
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October 21, 2019 — Scott Johnson
What really happened when the president met behind closed doors with congressional leaders in the White House last week and Nancy Pelosi wagged her finger at President Trump? In his remarks to the press immediately following the meeting, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy did not go into detail. McCarthy subsequently gave an account that contrasted with the one touted by the Democrats and faithfully disseminated by their media adjunct. In
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October 21, 2019 — Scott Johnson
If Republicans were conducting an “impeachment inquiry” of a Democratic president, we’d be hearing about the procedural anomalies employed in the production of a foreordained result. We would be instructed on the irregularity of committing such an inquiry to the House Intelligence Committee. We would also be hearing about the profound character defects of the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. As it is, we are left to pick up
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October 20, 2019 — Scott Johnson
President Trump abruptly backtracked late last night and announced he would scrap plans to hold next year’s G-7 gathering of world leaders at the Trump National Doral in Miami. “Based on both Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility, we will no longer consider Trump National Doral, Miami, as the Host Site for the G-7 in 2020,” he announced on Twitter late Saturday. “We will begin the search for another
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October 18, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Like many local newspapers, Minneapolis’s Star Tribune purports to present an institutional voice serving as something like the political conscience of the community. Its recent editorial disapproving of the year-old video depicting President Trump mowing down the media — with which President Trump himself had nothing to do — is a sort of classic of the genre. And yet they weren’t done with the subject. They returned to it a
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October 18, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday’s Washington Free Beacon Extra included this condensed report for the record: VIDEO GOES UP IN SMOKE… WFB’s ALEX GRISWOLD, “Elizabeth Warren Scrubs DNA Test Video From Twitter”: Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren deleted a video from her Twitter account that announced to the world that she had a fraction of Native American DNA … By Wednesday morning, the tweet was gone. The deletion comes after the Warren campaign scrubbed
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October 18, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Don’t tell Anderson Cooper, but Ammo Grrrll points out: THAT IS A WHEELBARROW FULL OF MONEY!! She writes: Okay. I stipulate to the fact that geezers are always comparing the cost of things today with the prices (and values) of things when we were young, and I identify as a geezer. We used to make fun of Mama. “Yes, Mother, we realize that bread was a nickel, but you had
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October 17, 2019 — Scott Johnson
I’m tied up on personal matters in Venice Beach and Santa Monica through this weekend. The scene has deteriorated considerably since I was here in 2011, when I filed this report: We spent the weekend at a family wedding in Santa Monica, California. Just after I started in the private practice of law in 1981, I was assigned to work on a major project that took me out to the
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October 16, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Why Not Minot? is the motto adopted by proponents of North Dakota’s fourth largest city (a/k/a “Magic City”). By the same token, Ilhan Omar’s overflowing campaign war chest seems to be operating under the motto Why Not Mynett? Tim Mynett is the principal in Omar’s extramarital affair and in the E Street Group firm that works for Omar’s campaign. Mynett is a partner in the firm. Having reviewed the Omar
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October 15, 2019 — Scott Johnson
In the adjacent post I discuss Vox’s coverage of the Trump rally in Minneapolis last week. Tim Graham chronicles Chuck Todd’s old-fashioned approach to the rally in the NewsBusters post “Call Him Spike? Chuck Todd Vows NOT to Show Trump Attacking Omar, Hunter Biden.” Citing Todd’s MSNBC show this past Friday, the day after the rally, Graham notes that “Todd offered a pompous commentary on how he was refusing to
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October 15, 2019 — Scott Johnson
It’s difficult to predicate a claim of defamation on a statement that can be characterized as opinion, but I think Vox’s Aaron Rupar crosses the line in his account of the Trump rally in Minneapolis last week. Referring to Power Line last week, Rupar wrote: “Citing articles from a fringe right-wing Minnesota-based blog, Trump called Omar ‘a disgrace to our country’ and pushed unfounded conspiracy theories about her marital history.”
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October 15, 2019 — Scott Johnson
If you’ve caught CNN at a random moment during the Trump administration — voluntarily or involuntarily — you know that the network has turned itself into a perpetual Trump hatefest in its political coverage. It is not exactly earth-shattering news that a whistleblower has stepped forward to reveal that the hatefest is run from the top of the executive ranks — CNN President Jeff Zucker — to the troops below.
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October 14, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Michael Goodwin served as executive editor and editorial page editor of the New York Daily News before taking up his current role of chief political columnist for the New York Post. At the Daily News, Goodwin led the editorial board to a Pulitzer Prize. He is not given to overstatement. In his New York Post column “Madness of left-wing zealots,” Goodwin observes: [S]ingling out Trump for the turmoil engulfing the
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October 14, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Sitting in the audience at the great Trump rally in Minneapolis on Thursday evening, I couldn’t help but watch the event in part through the eyes of my Somali sources. When he turned to the subject of immigration, the president singled out Minnesota’s Somali community. “For many years, leaders in Washington brought large numbers of refugees to your state from Somalia without considering the impact on schools and communities and
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October 13, 2019 — Scott Johnson
I have found Michael Doran to be one of our most insightful analysts of American foreign policy in the Middle East. See, for example, his 2015 Mosaic essay “Obama’s secret Iran strategy” or any of his many other Mosaic essays posted here. Doran does not find the choices available to President Trump in Syria as simple as does the chorus from whom we have heard over the past week. Perhaps
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October 13, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Shawn Colvin and Mary Chapin Carpenter are on a brutally arduous tour together celebrating their thirty-plus years of friendship. We saw them last night at St. Catherine College’s O’Shaughnessy Auditorium in St. Paul before an intensely appreciative audience. My purpose here, as usual, is to bring a song or two with which you may be unfamiliar to your attention for the sheer pleasure of the thing and to alert you
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