POLITICAL BEST-SELLER DRAWING PRAISE
Knowles knows
Late last week, the No. 1 best-seller on Amazon was a 266-page book titled “Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide.” All 266 pages were blank.
The book is flamboyantly billed as the “most exhaustively researched and coherently argued Democrat Party apologia to date” and “a political treatise sure to stand the test of time.”
“I’ve been observing the Democratic Party for at least 10 years now,” said Michael J. Knowles, managing editor for the Daily Wire and the book’s author, “and when I observed their record and reasons to vote for them — on reasons of economics or foreign policy or homeland security or civil rights and so on — I realized it was probably best to just leave all the pages blank.”
Knowles told Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” last week that “what’s really great about this book, you can go cover-to-cover in about 15, 20 seconds. It took a very long time to research this book.” The first blank chapter, he said, is about “values.” “When I started researching the book and going through this exhaustive study process, at first I turned to the 2012 Democratic National Convention, and it turned out they were deciding whether or not to include God in their party platform,” Knowles said. “And the Democrats booed God. That’s not good. So I decided probably if I’m going to make a good case to vote for Democrats, probably just leave that chapter blank.”
The critics are beginning to weigh in with their praise. Ben Shapiro, nationally syndicated columnist and New York Times best-selling author, praised the book as “thorough.”
Fact-Chucking Schumer
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., finds himself the U.S. upper house leader in having to kick sand on every promise President Donald Trump keeps, so his tweet in support of Planned Parenthood, which stands to be defunded for a year in a Republican health care plan, is no surprise.
The health care plan, he tweeted, cuts Planned Parenthood funds, “hurting millions of women who turn there for mammograms, maternity care, cancer screenings & more.”
Well, Schumer was only off by millions.
“In 2014, the most recent data,” The Washington Post reported, giving the senator “three Pinocchios” for his bogus claim, [Planned Parenthood] made about 11,000 referrals for mammograms — less than 1 percent of the total number of patients that Planned Parenthood served that year.”
Planned Parenthood, indeed, does not perform mammograms but only makes referrals for them and sometimes hosts mammography vans. The organization is not listed by the Food and Drug Administration on its list of certified mammography facilities. The far left Post called the far left Schumer’s claim “mostly false.”
Franken-sense
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., was one of the biggest critics of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in her confirmation process because she is a fan of school choice for students, but it turns out the senator is not only a product of school choice but also exercises school choice when it comes to his children.
Franken, himself, attended one of the most prestigious charter schools in his state. The Blake School, he said in an interview in Harvard Magazine “was a school chartered for Protestants.” When it began to “lose the ability to get enough kids into top colleges,” it sought out “kids who would score well.” Among those, Franken said, were Jews, of which he is one.
The comedian-turned-politician, meanwhile, sends his children to Dalton School — not in Minnesota but in New York City. The school, according to the Daily Beast, is “one of New York’s most exclusive and rigorous private schools and boasts an impressive roster of celebrity alumni.” The school’s application, according to the website, asks parents to list any prestigious titles they hold, such as princess, senator or ambassador.
Franken termed the school “a very high-powered, expensive New York City private high school.” Its annual tuition is $44,640.
An earnest Earnest
Former White House spokesman Josh Earnest accused the media of being “remarkably thin-skinned” about President Donald Trump and correctly said reporters too often make the story about themselves.
“Journalism, for an institution that is focused on critiquing people in power, is remarkably thin-skinned,” the former Obama spokesman said at a Harvard University forum last week, according to The Boston Globe. “And we’ve seen President Trump cynically use the tendency of the press to defend itself, and to bristle at criticism, to try to distract from the tough questions that the media is asking him.”
A new Quinnipiac University poll suggests 39 percent of all voters and 81 percent of Republican voters believe “certain news organizations are the enemy of the American people,” and in another survey, 44 percent of American voters believe journalists “make up” anonymous sources in their reporting.
Earnest said, though, he doesn’t believe Trump hates the media. His relationship with them is, well, complicated, he said.
“I don’t think President Trump has a grand ambition to erase the First Amendment from the copy of the Constitution in the National Archives,” he said. “I just think he often finds the First Amendment to be really, really inconvenient.”