Tag: MSNBC

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ideological culture media and media people

Indecent Exposure

Joy Reid, MSNBC, homophobia,

Next week, when Joy Reid begins hosting her new primetime MSNBC program, “The ReidOut,” I will not be watching.

But not because of her progressivism.

You see, those progressive bona fides “were called into question in 2017,” a New York Times feature on Reid’s promotion to cable TV’s evening lineup notes, “when homophobic posts and comments from ‘The Reid Report,’ a blog she wrote in the mid- to late 2000s, resurfaced on social media.”

When those writings were discovered, Reid publicly claimed her blog’s archive must have been hacked. 

“We have received confirmation the FBI has opened an investigation into potential criminal activities surrounding several online … blog accounts, belonging to Joy-​Ann Reid,” her attorney told CNN in 2018.

But the offending posts were captured by the Wayback Machine, an internet archive, and were obviously not the result of a hack. 

No one bought her dodge. 

“Later,” as The Times puts it, “she acknowledged that there was little evidence that the posts had been faked.” 

“Little” … meaning zero.

The Times also refers to Reid’s “lengthy apology” to viewers. “The person I am now is not the person I was then,” she offered. But she never owned up to writing the “hateful” posts. 

“I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things,” she argued, “because they are completely alien to me.” 

But she did write them. And lied to the FBI, apparently, to hide the truth.

In a time of unbridled shaming and social-​media-​mob recriminations for any lack of keeping up with the dominant wokeness, how is Reid able to insult gays and (to top it off) everyone’s intelligence with such bald-​faced lies?

And to be rewarded with a primetime cable TV gig. Lying works!

That’s indecent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies

An Ebola Education

Sen. Mark Pryor (D‑Ark.) faces a tough re-​election contest. Following his campaign, MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt inquired: “Do you think the Obama Administration has done an appropriate job handling the Ebola crisis?”

The senator responded with the universal politician distress call: “Uuuhhhhmmmmmm.”

Then Pryor stumbled ahead: “I would say that … it’s hard to know, ah, because, um … I haven’t heard the latest briefing on that to know all … [inaudible] can somehow read the paper and all. My impression is that we have people over there both from CDC and other medical-​type people and even some engineers to try to build … um, you know, medical facilities. That’s what they need over there; they need the medical infrastructure.”

When Hunt asked whether the Administration had been “aggressive enough,” the senator returned to: “Uuhhhmmmmm. Again, I’d have to see the latest numbers.”

“Oh my god,” uber-​liberal host Mika Brzezinski reacted to Pryor’s stumbling. “She asked a gentle question … and the guy just collapsed.”

“What was that, Kasie?” laughed Joe Scarborough. “Why were those questions so hard for the senator to answer?”

“I was a little surprised …” Kasie chuckled, noting that Sen. Pryor had earlier run a ludicrous TV spot accusing his Republican opponent, U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton, of voting “against preparing America for pandemics like Ebola.”

One might think the incumbent senator actually followed and cared about the effort to combat a horrible disease that could kill untold people. Instead, it appears he knows Ebola only as a brickbat with which to slug a political opponent in hopes of staying in power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people national politics & policies

Wacky Ways to MSNBC the World

Alex Wagner of MSNBC’s “Now with Alex Wagner” fame decided her fellow network hosts had fecklessly failed to exhaust the world’s reservoir of inane 30-​second political pronouncements. So, her vignette informs us:

Minimum wage was mentioned in the State of the Union earlier this year and then it wasn’t brought back up again. This should be something we think about and talk about every single week. This is one of those building-​block issues that should supersede almost anything else we have. Economic security is foundational to American success.

Where to start?

Perhaps, by wondering if any serious person really thinks the minimum wage is an issue so paramount in the economy that it “should supersede almost anything else we have.”

Er, “we have”? Who’s editing scripts over there?

But let’s cut to the chase: Ms. Wagner is arguing that “economic security” not only comes before “American success,” but is “foundational” to that success.

Hmmmm?

According to the great Wikipedia in cyberspace, “economic security” is “the condition of having stable income or other resources to support a standard of living now and in the foreseeable future.” So, does Wagner really mean to suggest that before Americans were able to achieve success, wealth, we already had guaranteed to us plenty of steady income to finance a fine and dandy standard of living for as far off into the future as we could foresee?

Americans worked hard for this wealth; it wasn’t legislated.

Economic “success” creates economic security, not the other way around.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling ideological culture

It Takes a Collectivist

First they told us that we didn’t build our businesses. Now we learn that our kids aren’t ours.

“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have,” TV talking head Melissa Harris-​Perry argues in the latest MSNBC “Lean Forward” propaganda spot, “because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”

Yeah, better investments. Like Solyndra. Or … the K‑12 public education system for which, since 1970, the federal government has increased per-​pupil spending by roughly 190 percent, only to flatline test scores in math, science and reading.

“When the flood of vitriolic responses to the ad began, my first reaction was relief,” Perry writes on her blog. “I had spent the entire day grading papers and was relieved that since these children were not my responsibility, I could simply mail the students’ papers to their moms and dads to grade!”

Doesn’t Tulane University pay her for grading those papers?

Claiming to “double down” in her defensive blog post, she actually admits that, “Of course, parents can and should raise their children with their own values.”

Of course.

What does Melissa Harris-​Perry not get? That children belong, not to the state or the collective, and not really to their parents, but to themselves.

Is that much individual freedom leaning too far forward?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.