Long-Term Survival Lessons from a Disaster Zone

On The Wrong Track: This Is What An Imploding Economy Looks Like

These 12 Policies Need to Change If We Want True Health Freedom

What I saw in Western North Carolina

NYT/Siena a Gut Punch to Harris

It could be a way to combat antibiotic resistance, but it’s also the treatment you want tell your friends about.

There are quite a few out there that make diamonds look, well, common.

Make no bones about it.

According to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, former President Donald Trump was dismayed at the cost of the funeral of Army Private Vanessa Guillen, a child of Mexican immigrants who was brutally murdered at Fort Hood in 2020. As Goldberg tells it, Trump raged, “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” At 4:30 PM Eastern on Tuesday, Guillen’s sister Mayra tweeted the article was “hurtful & disrespectful,” that Trump showed the family nothing but respect, and that she voted for him. However, only 1 of 9 MSNBC stories on the article from the time off Mayra’s tweet through the end of Wednesday mentioned her rebuttal. CNN mentioned the rebuttal in more than half of their stories—6 of 10—but the amount of emphasis they put on it varied greatly.   Wow. I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics- hurtful & disrespectful to the important changes she made for service members. President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today. https://t.co/o8cDrKOKBV — Mayra Guillen (@mguilen_) October 22, 2024   MSNBC Deadline: White House host Nicolle Wallace quoted from the article before elaborating, “That's Donald Trump using the F word to describe a funeral that he had offered to pay for, for a member of the United States military. With 14 days to go, we apologize for the profanity but we want to quote Donald Trump accurately and be faithful to this extraordinary body of reporting.” On All In, Chris Hayes ridiculed the campaign’s denial, “His campaign denied he made those comments. You can make up your own mind as to whether or not that sounds like something Donald Trump would say and do.”  Morning Joe co-host Jonathan Lemire welcomed Goldberg and asked him to “tell us, if we will, a little more about this story and what else it tells you and can tell us about how Trump does view those who have, at times, put their lives on the line in military service for this country.” Goldberg claimed Trump’s public displays of empathy for the family were just for show “I mean, it's very typical in the sense that the story exhibits his racism because he had -- he used an expletive to describe this soldier who was a Mexican-American daughter of Mexican immigrants. It shows the parsimony. One of the triggering -- constantly triggering things in his life is the fear that he's being ripped off or robbed. So, in a meeting -- so he meets with the family on July 30th, 2020, and he performs fine, he performs well, he's very sympathetic or as sympathetic as he can evince be to the mother and sisters of this murdered soldier.” Jansing also told Independent Americans host Paul Rieckhoff, “She was horribly murdered. And it's reduced to ‘an F-ing Mexican.’ Do you think that, with the larger community, used to be the military was sacred if you were a politician, right? And maybe even just with people who are part of the military family, it makes a difference when they hear that.” Rieckhoff agreed, “To have Trump hit this story and this person in this way is especially egregious and outrageous and cuts to the core of who he is. This is outrageous and he has to be in charge of the most diverse military on the planet. How can we do that when he speaks about so many people in this country like that.” Later, Katy Tur thought that if it rings true, it must be true, “NBC News has not confirmed the reporting and Donald Trump's campaign flatly denies all of the allegations. Still, Goldberg's reporting underscores what John Kelly is arguing about Donald Trump's character, what John Kelly said he witnessed.” On his show, Jose-Diaz Balart was the only one to mention Mayra’s tweet and he only did so in the most casual way as he asked Alexi McCammond, “Guillen’s sister challenging that, Mark Meadows is denying the report. What do you see as the impact of this? McCammond didn’t care, “I mean, it's just abhorrent. It's disgusting language. It's a disgusting racist sentiment from someone who was the former president and wants to be the president again. It speaks to the way he views women, women of color, people who died in this country while serving our country.” CNN While CNN was better than MSNBC, it was still downplayed. For example, Scott Jennings had to bring it up because The Situation Room host Wolf Blitzer failed to do so, “Well, everybody involved in that, in that episode, people who were in the room, her family, I mean, everybody who was involved in this has said that didn't happen.” Other instances included hosts casually bringing it up, just so Goldberg could try to debunk it. During The Source, Kaitlin Collins asked him on Tuesday, “what do you make of those denials?”  Goldberg, as he did in the article itself, dismissed them, “I don't make much of them at all. The sister wasn't in the meeting. The lawyer for the family wasn't in the meeting.” On Wednesday’s The Lead with Jake Tapper, Goldberg claimed that “I understand why they're hurt by this story, and I obviously feel very sorry, as we all do for this family. But the fact remains when the family visited Donald Trump, as I note in the story, he said kind words and offered to pay for the funeral. Five months later when the subject came up, he had very unkind things to say about the funeral and I would note, he didn’t pay for the funeral.” Earlier in the day, Jim Acosta and Jeff Zeleny included quick little disclaimers as part of larger anti-Trump segments, the former’s including an interview with 2016 DNC speaker Khizr Khan. The worst CNN offender was Laura Coates, who, before welcoming Khan to her program, opined, “’it doesn't cost 60,000 bucks to bury an effing Mexican’ unquote. I mean, just hearing and reading those words it's unimaginable that we're talking about a former president of the United States.” *** It was common that stories that omitted Mayra did mention that the Trump campaign and Mark Meadows have fiercely denied the allegations, but in a credibility contest between Trump and Goldberg, MSNBC and CNN viewers are going to go with the latter. However, the Guillen family is hard to dismiss as a bunch of unprincipled Trump hacks, which is why the decision to omit Mayra’s tweet is journalistic malpractice.

Last night, NBC's Law & Order portrayed pro-lifers as terrorist bombers who target IVF (in-vitro fertilization) practitioners. In the episode, "The Meaning of Life," on Thursday, an IVF doctor named Sarah Heartwood (Erica Sweany) is left in an irreversible coma after receiving a bomb-laden package. Heartwood's husband is a well-known atheist author. Law enforcement initially suspects the bomber is a Muslim plumber who attacked her husband at a book lecture. When the plumber provides an alibi, NYPD next arrests a black man who delivered the package. Of course, neither the Muslim nor the black man are the killer. The real killer turns out to be a "random white guy," in the words of one of the detectives. Surprise! The black man who delivered the package tells Detectives Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) and Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) that a white guy paid him to drop it off at Heartland's house. The white man wore a bracelet with the words "Jeremy 15." Shaw and Riley discuss the "Jeremy" mystery with their Lieutenant, Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney). Brady: Was he able to give you a description of the bomber?  Shaw: One that fits half of New York City.  Brady: What about security cameras in the area where the bag was supposedly handed off? Shaw: We're not gonna have a lot of luck down there. Most of the cameras are busted. The one thing he did give us was that the so-called perp might go by the name Jeremy.  Riley: All right, what if Jeremy 15 is actually Jeremiah 1:5? "Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee." 13 years of Catholic school. But blue bag, pink box. Those are pro-life colors. Brady: And our vic's a fertility doctor, right?  Riley: Yeah. Brady: Well, that's close enough for some anti-choice people these days. Check it out. From this point onward, the episode morphs into a full-blown democrat propaganda piece. Detectives Shaw and Riley visit the IVF facility where Heartwood worked. While there, a female staff member rails against "the anti-choice, anti-science, anti-woman groups." Nurse: She was one of the top fertility doctors in the country. Riley: Did Dr. Heartwood ever perform abortions? Nurse: From time to time those are medically necessary, but they get referred out. Why? Shaw: She might have been targeted by somebody in the pro-life movement. Nurse: The anti-choice, anti-science, anti-woman groups, you mean? Riley: I'm guessing there's some issues there, huh? Nurse: Especially since the new fetal personhood movement came knocking. Shaw: I'm sorry, fetal personhood? Nurse: [Sighs] The largest embryo we ever freeze is a mere 100 cells, invisible to the human eye, but the Alabama Supreme Court just ruled those cells a human life. Shaw: And I bet the fetal personhood movement doesn't like you guys destroying unused embryos. Nurse: They think it's mass murder. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled in favor of grieving parents who filed a wrongful death suit against a clinic that negligently destroyed their human embryos. The Alabama legislature later passed an "IVF immunity law" for clinics. However, this episode's clunky dialogue has no interest in grappling with questions about the medical ethics of in-vitro fertilization. It instead spends most of the episode vilifying both right-to-lifers and religious believers. "Meaning of Life" has a brief moment of nuance when Detective Riley mentions the grief he and his wife experienced after losing a child from an early miscarriage. Riley's dialogue gives obligatory nods to pro-abortion rhetoric but rejects the view that the child was mere "cells." Riley: In the tri-state area alone, there's over three dozen pro-life organizations. Shaw: All affiliated with some religion, I presume. Riley: Yeah, mostly Catholic and Southern Baptist. Shaw: Yeah, well, way to make a stand, fellas. Riley: I mean, I get it, but it's complicated. Shaw: Oh, yeah. Forgot I'm talking to a nice Catholic boy over here. Riley: Not really. I mean, my wife had a miscarriage between our two kids. Shaw: Oh, sorry. Riley: Yeah. It was early on in the pregnancy. And my wife, she's the furthest thing from a churchgoer, let me tell you. She's never gonna tell another woman what to do with her body, but she grieved it, man. I mean, I felt that too. So I get it. I get the importance of choice and I get the science, but she was not grieving cells, let me tell you that.  Shaw: Sorry, brother. The episode soon returns to its in-your-face ideological agenda when Assistant District Attorney Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) comes on the scene. Week after week, Maroun is the voice of left-wing women everywhere. Her character has all the subtlety of a pussy-hat marcher. Since Heartland has been declared brain-dead but is still breathing, the district attorney's office wants to charge the bomber, Patrick Wayne (Chase Ramsey), with attempted murder. Maroun argues for a murder charge instead. "He killed a woman for giving other women reproductive choices. And Patrick Wayne is not some lone lunatic. He is part of a movement, a growing movement, who is mounting an attack on women's rights. We have to send a message," she cries when prosecutors are discussing charges.  Such dialogue slanders the entire pro-life movement as potential terrorists. This sort of accusation is very much in line with the extreme rhetoric and behavior of the Biden Administration. Biden's Department of Justice has targeted and imprisoned peaceful pro-lifers and portrayed them as a dangerous threat to the nation. Law and Order is just pushing Democratic fear-mongering right before election day. Heartwood's husband, who is still grieving after the bombing, is reluctant to shut off his wife's life support. Maroun wants to make sure Wayne gets life in prison for murder and knows the jury will not convict him for that charge if the victim is still breathing. She pressures Heartwood's husband to shut off the machines even though he does not yet feel ready to do so. Her character is so radical that she ultimately behaves in a coercive manner toward a grieving husband to ensure the verdict she wants. Law and Order regularly takes its cues from Democratic talking points. In the end, the character in "Meaning of Life" who most reflects the Democrats' ideology and intended audience is also the character who comes across as the most heartless.