NETWORK GOT THE ‘BIG’ STORY
Stop the presses
While President Trump was signing landmark legislation last week that gives terminally ill patients the right to try new health care alternatives, CNN posted the caption: “President Trump Going on a Diet.”
Their breathless story explained how the president “has acknowledged in private that he needs to lose weight,” reported Kevin Liptak.
“Prodded along by his White House physician and the knowledge he is approaching obesity,” the hard news story went on, “Trump agreed earlier this year to alter his diet and begin a new exercise plan. Five months into his regimen, people close to him say they’ve detected small changes, mostly in how he eats, that reflect a desire to follow doctor’s orders.”
The network, instead of the attempted hit piece, might have oohed and ahhed a little more about Duchenne muscular dystrophy patient Jordan McLinn hugging the president for signing the Right to Try Act, which allows patients the opportunity to access medications that have not gained approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
But this is the same network that thought it was important to report on Trump eating two scoops of ice cream, the president allegedly overfeeding fish in Japan and former White House spokesman Sean Spicer making a joke about salad dressing.
Hofstra OKs white supremacist icon
It took more than two months for a Long Island university to determine that even our Founding Fathers had “human and indefensible failings,” and that it should leave a bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson where it is.
It should have taken two seconds.
A Black Lives Matter activist released a petition on March 17, calling for the school to get rid of the statue because the third president and author of the Declaration of Independence was an “icon” of white supremacists.
Protests on both sides followed, with a counter-petition asking that the statue remain in place gaining about 600 signatures more than the original petition.
“We live in a world dominated by freedom and Democracy because Thomas Jefferson wrote the document that started it all,” the keep-the-statue petition’s author wrote. “To take down this statue of him would be a sad removal of a figure influential in the annals of history.”
Typical of the protesters on the remove-it side was one who complained that Jefferson “did not give me any rights,” and saying “he took them away from me a century before, when America stole Mexico’s land.”
The fact the Mexican-American War began 20 years after Jefferson’s death apparently was lost on the student.
Later, anti-statue protesters taped a piece of paper with the words “Black Lives Matter” over Jefferson’s face and defaced the statue with white spray paint.
Eventually, Hofstra President Stuart Rabinowitz revealed that he had decided the statue would stay.
“Few of our founding fathers were able to live out the dream they had sketched out, which was the unprecedented vision of a free and equal world,” he wrote. “Their words were, in many ways, far ahead of their time and certainly ahead of their actions. Yet in the documents most critical to our national character these men of their time laid out a vision of a world in which all people are created equal.”
In the end, Rabinowitz said, it “is this vision we celebrate and honor.”
Apple fell far from tree
Susan Rice, the national security advisor during the Obama administration who lied to various media about the cause of the 2012 Benghazi, Libya, terrorist attacks, doesn’t see eye to eye with her son, who is an outspoken supporter President Donald Trump.
John David Rice-Cameron, 20, is president of College Republicans at Stanford University and activism director for the California College Republicans. He said he was inspired years ago by the tea party movement and is trying to “Make Stanford Great Again,” according to Fox News.
“My mother and I have a great relationship, and my mother believes strongly in the free and respectful exchange of ideas,” he said. “We disagree on most of the standard Republican/Democrat [arguments]. However, we agree that America is the greatest nation the world has ever seen, and thus, we believe that America has an important role to play as a force for liberty and justice on the world stage.”
Essence of fake news
The New York Times, in what seems to be a relentless attempt to demean or embarrass President Donald Trump, wrote that only 1,000 people attended a rally he attended at Municipal Auditorium in Nashville last week on behalf of United States Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn.
Trump, as is his way, tweeted that the crowd was “many times that number — and the arena was rockin’. … They are very dishonest people who don’t ‘get’ me, and never did!”
The Trump campaign estimated the size of the crowd to be 7,500 to 8,000, and Breitbart News, which had a correspondent at the event, thought it to be more than 8,000.
Having been upbraided by the president, the Times issued a correction, saying it “cited an incorrect figure for the number of people attending President Trump’s rally.”
But the paper couldn’t bring itself to apologize and say the president was correct.
“While no exact figure is available,” it said, “the fire marshal’s office estimated that approximately 5,500 people attended the rally, not about 1,000 people.”
But, really, what’s 4,500 people, among friends?