“The good news for us, the people that are standing up here, is we started to become a team last week,” he said. “Have we arrived? No. No, not yet. We will continue to get better at this together, and sadly for all of you in this room, the better we get, the more boring we’re going to be.”
REP. TOM EMMER: Last week was historic. You know, most of those deals usually take place behind closed doors long before anybody gets to see how the sausage is really made. Remember that Nancy Pelosi did all kinds of things two years ago just to stay by the slimmest of margins as the Speaker.
Kevin McCarthy on the other hand, in our conference last week, which you saw, was democracy at work. What you saw were people representing the districts, coming to Washington, D.C. sitting down with each other in spite of differences, in spite of different perspectives, and being able to ultimately hammer out an agreement where they can work together.
And it was misreported, I believe yesterday, that all of this was one thing. The rules package last night was very basic. With the exception of some church language, which I think our leader said, there really were no changes. These were voted on before that and the motion to vacate that went from five members down to one.
The other agreement is in agreement that the entire conference is going to hold themselves to in their leadership. It has to do a single subject matter bills. It has to do with eliminating Christmas trees, and I think Morgan Griffith said it best, we are not going to see any longer if we enforce these agreements amongst ourselves, we’re not going to see what House sends over a coin bill to the Senate, which is the ceremonial type piece of legislation which they sit on and that ultimately they strip it and they fill it with I believe it was the Inflation Reduction Act, and to send it back, is the coin bill. That will no longer be acceptable in the House, which I would argue, again I think we heard this from one of our members this morning in conference Morgan Griffith, this will arguably not make Kevin McCarthy a weaker speaker. This will make Kevin McCarthy perhaps the strongest speaker in modern times, this agreement. There will be more about to come.
The good news for us, the people that are standing up here, is we started to become a team last week. There are 222 of us. This is a great time to be a Republican in Washington, D.C. in the House because you have a chance to make a difference and you have a chance to be part of a great team that is going to work together.
And I think you saw that starting to happen last week.
Have we arrived? No. No, not yet. We will continue to get better at this together, and sadly for all of you in this room, the better we get, the more boring we’re going to be. So thank you.
Some people make a name for themselves by building something — a business, a following, an audience.
Others try to make a name for themselves not by building anything but just by trying to tear down what others have built.
Steve Almond has set out to do the latter. For the past few years he has set out to tear down the National Football League through a book he wants to sell. The NFL is a millionaire-creating machine, responsible for making many young men very rich, and the majority of those young men it provides generational wealth are Black. The league also creates jobs for thousands of others, from franchise front offices to the vendors in the stands, the parking attendants outside, and retailers who sell NFL-branded clothing and other items. Wrecking the NFL would destroy all of that, plus take away one of the few rallying points our nation still has, because everyone thinks the Washington Commanders is a joke of a name.
After Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered a freak collapse against the Bengals, the nation rallied around him and prayed in unison. Everyone regardless of which team they support, which race they happened to be born to, wherever they live or even if they care about football or not, prayed for that young man to recover. We learned who he is and donated money to his charity for kids. They even prayed on woke ESPN and Disney didn’t fire them for it.
For an all-too-brief moment, America became a praying nation again. Hamlin says he has been overwhelmed by all the love Americans have poured out to him.
Steve Almond has been trying to tear all of that down for years, and he took advantage of Hamlin’s injury to appear on “Ingraham Angle” on Fox News to make his case. Ingraham doesn’t mince words with fools. Conflict can make for a great show even when it involves uninteresting opportunists and not worth the audience’s time. Steve Almond isn’t worth anyone’s time.
He appeared on Ingraham’s show with a dual agenda. The first was to push his book, in which he clownishly argues for doing away with football and all of the fun it provides and the jobs and millionaires it creates. Almond says it’s all too risky, but the fact is there are risky jobs everywhere and life is full of risk. One of the most dangerous things one can ever do is simply get into your car, turn the key, and drive. Even if you’re perfect behind the wheel, someone else’s mistake can kill you. That’s life. The only way to eliminate risk is to eliminate what it means to live.
It’s risky to sit in a chair all day. It’s risky to live and work in a city, and riskier after the anti-police movement took over the Democrats and the media. It’s risky to eat and drink some of the things that give us pleasure. Living entails risk.
Almond’s second agenda was to try to humiliate Ingraham by bringing up a controversial moment in her career. A few years ago Ingraham got into hot water for a tweet about Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg. She apologized for it. Almond brought that up specifically to put her on the defensive and make headlines for himself with the likes of the Young Turks.
The reason people change their behavior is because there is an economic incentive,” Almond said. “Couple of years ago when you taunted the survivor of the Parkland mass shooting, you apologized only because advertisers withdrew from your show.”
Failed pillow designer David Hogg, whom Almond didn’t name when he weaponized him against Ingraham, is one of the most obnoxious characters in politics these days. When he isn’t calling for the end of the Second Amendment, he’s trolling and generally being a leftist hack. Calling Hogg merely a “survivor of the Parkland mass shooting” was strategic and dishonest. But Ingraham was on to Almond’s game.
Ingraham cut him off and ended the interview. I know her and can tell you why she did this. Ingraham had sniffed out what Almond was really all about. He wanted to make a name for himself by opportunistically putting her on the defensive and hurting her as much as possible.
It wasn’t about Damar Hamlin, football, or any sort of principle at all. Almond planned this on-air ambush just to get himself into the headlines on the websites populated by Laura’s untalented haters.
The media want to reward Almond for this because they don’t like Laura Ingraham. But he shouldn’t be rewarded. Opportunists like him should face the music they want to force on others. Cynically attempting to tear down someone else’s success should never be rewarded. This should be the end of what there ever was of anyone taking Steve Almond seriously about anything.
The Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor Fox News host Tucker Carlson for criticizing the Covid shots, according to newly released White House emails.
SHAWN FLEETWOOD
President Joe Biden’s administration actively pressured Facebook to censor Fox News host Tucker Carlson for criticizing the Covid shots, according to internal White House communication records obtained by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana.
In an email dated April 14, 2021, then-senior adviser to the president’s Covid response team, Andrew Slavitt, voiced dissatisfaction to a Facebook official that a video of Carlson questioning the left’s universal demand that people get the Covid jab was “Number one” on the platform, to which said official responded that they’d look into the matter. Later that same day, the Facebook representative informed the White House that while the “Tucker Carlson video does not qualify for removal under [Facebook’s] policies,” the company would label the clip with “a pointer to more authoritative COVID information” and work to limit its reach on the platform.
Facebook’s efforts did not meet the administration’s demands for greater censorship, however. In response to the representative, White House Director of Digital Strategy Robert Flaherty questioned how Carlson’s video didn’t violate Facebook’s existing policies and pressured the company to turn over information on the efficacy of its censorship practices.
“How was this not violative? The second half of the segment is raising conspiracy theories about the government hiding that all vaccines aren’t effective,” Flaherty claimed. “Moreover, you say reduced and demoted. What does that mean? There’s 40,000 shares on the video. Who is seeing it now? How many? How effective is that?”
“Not for nothing but last time we did this dance, it ended in an insurrection,” Flaherty added in an apparent reference to the platform’s handling of claims pertaining to the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and subsequent riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
But the Biden White House’s habit of using Big Tech to silence dissenting voices on Covid-related information didn’t just stop at Carlson. A separate batch of emails released by the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general reveals a concentrated endeavor between the administration and Facebook to reduce the “virality of vaccine hesitancy content,” even if such posts contained factually accurate information.
“As you know, in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation,” a Facebook representative told Slavitt in a March 21, 2021, email. “This is often-true content, which we allow at the post level … but it can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking. We’ll remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalized content.”
In addition to Facebook, Twitter was also a major player in the collusion efforts between the federal government and Big Tech to further squash free speech online. In an email dated August 11, 2022, Flaherty admonished Twitter for allowing posts contradicting White House claims to circulate on the platform, writing that “if your product is appending misinformation to our tweets[,] that seems like a pretty fundamental issue.”
Flaherty separately accused Twitter in a December 2021 email of “Total Calvinball” and “bending over backwards” to tolerate disfavored speech after the company refused to comply with demands from the administration to censor a video.
“This case is about the Biden Administration’s blatant disregard for the First Amendment and its collusion with social media companies [to] suppress speech it disagrees with,” said Missouri AG Andrew Bailey in a statement. “I will always fight back against unelected bureaucrats who seek to indoctrinate the people of this state by violating our constitutional right to free and open debate.”
The bombshell emails come as a result of an investigation launched last year by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and then-Missouri AG and now-U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt to uncover collusion efforts between the federal government and Big Tech companies to censor Covid-related posts they deemed misinformation. In addition to obtaining communication records unveiling such corruption, the investigation has scored numerous legal wins allowing Louisiana and Missouri to depose high-ranking administration officials such as Anthony Fauci under oath about their role in these efforts.
According to a transcript of Fauci’s November testimony, the man claiming to “represent science” somehow couldn’t recall relevant information about his role in the federal government’s disastrous Covid response “at least 174 times.” The deposition ranged from topics such as Fauci’s bid to smear authors of “The Great Barrington Declaration,” to his role in attempting to “discredit any theory” that Covid resulted from a lab leak in Wuhan, China.
That was quite a dramatic scene on the House floor Friday night when Kevin McCarthy walked up the aisle and confronted Matt Gaetz. I’m not a good enough lip reader to know what passed between them, but fortunately we have the experts at Bad Lip Reading on the job, and they have decoded it for us:
More seriously, it does seem that you can make out McCarthy opening with a direct question to Gaetz: “What will it take for you to vote for me? Just say it.” But as Gaetz is seen from the side it is difficult to make him out, and McCarthy’s sequels aren’t easy to guess at either.
Municipal authorities in El Paso did their best to protect Joe Biden from images of the disaster that has befallen their city thanks to the open border policies implemented by the Biden administration. It’s not that they didn’t want Biden to see what he has done. He knows perfectly well. They wanted to accommodate his desire to keep the underlying story under wraps from the media when they came to cover Biden’s stopover. He spent all of a couple hours at the port of entry. He walked along the border wall with CBP officers for the benefit of the media.
The border wall looked like it was doing what it was meant to do. What are we to make of that? Apparently nothing.
What a farce. The construction of fake villages by Grigory Potemkin to impress Empress Katherine comes to mind. As I say, however, the prettification of El Paso wasn’t for Biden’s benefit. It was to protect Biden. He didn’t need to be fooled (although he might have profited from Deroy Murdock’s briefing on the chaos he he has created).
Upon its announcement last week I wrote about Biden’s “parole” program. Biden presented it as a program to secure the border. I think it is intended to amplify and conceal the flow of illegal immigrants. Hey, now there’s an app for that. Again, what a farce.
Others such as Andrew McCarthy have in addition attacked the legality of the program. Byron York takes up both Biden’s El Paso visit and Biden’s “parole’ program while arguing that Biden has made things worse at the border. That’s what I’m saying.
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MN Prager Discussion Group 