Monday's Final Word

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Monday's tabs are fair of face ...

Ed: I don't think Democrats have lost MSNBC over this. They lost Morning Joe. The rest of the progressive activists on this channel will shrug this off, or at least that's how I'm betting until contrary evidence emerges. 

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Just the News: The Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Virginia worked for a Saudi government-controlled school just after 9/11, at a time when the Islamic academy was already controversial for being controlled by the Saudi royal family and for its extremist textbooks which taught hatred of non-Muslims.

Abigail Spanberger, a former Democratic congresswoman from Virginia, is currently the favorite to be the state’s next governor, according to polling averages. When it was revealed during her first congressional run in 2018 that she had worked for the Islamic Saudi Academy in northern Virginia during the 2002-2003 school year, Spanberger said that she was “proud” and “not ashamed” of her work history, despite the fact that, when she chose to work at the school, it was also already well known for its links to the terrorist group Hamas and for its recent graduates who had seemingly considered carrying out a jihad-inspired suicide attack in Israel.

The problematic nature of the Saudi academy — known as the ISA in shorthand — would be revealed even further in the years which followed.

Ed: What in the hell happened to Virginia Democrats? 

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Ed: Isn't this the Akin Standard? Shouldn't it apply regardless of partisan affiliation? 

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Daily Wire: For those who don’t spend their Sunday mornings glued to the television — and their Sunday afternoons attempting to dig through a week’s worth of network and cable news media spin — The Daily Wire has compiled a short summary of what you may have missed.

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This week, what was most notable about media coverage across the networks was not where the spin was so mush as where it wasn’t. Less than 48 hours had passed since the texts — sent by Jones in 2022 and containing overt statements advocating for the assassination of a political opponent — went viral, and in that time, not one national Democrat had publicly condemned Jones or called for him to step out of the race. Despite all that, not one host of one show — â€œThis Week” on ABC, “Face the Nation” on CBS, “Meet the Press” on NBC, or “State of the Union” on CNN â€” raised the question with their guests.

The topic did come up once — on “Meet the Press” — but it was one of the guests who mentioned it during a panel discussion. Marc Short, who served as former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, mentioned Jones in the context of the many Democrats who had spent days in a public group meltdown over a few memes featuring House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) with a fake mustache and a sombrero.

Ed: If a Republican candidate and/or officeholder had texted these kinds of messages, it would have been the only story the Protection Racket Media covered. It would have been a National Emergency, evidence of Right Wing Terrorism, and justification for all sorts of violent responses from the Left. Their silence speaks volumes. 

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Ed: Utter moral bankruptcy. Of course, that's hardly surprising from Tanden or the rest of the Biden Politburo. 

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Free Beacon: Harvard Law School describes visiting professor Carlos Portugal Gouvea as a "human rights activist" who founded a Brazilian think tank that "led the largest anti-violence campaign in the country, resulting in the enactment of the federal Gun Control Act of 2003." He's now on administrative leave from the Ivy League institution after he was arrested for firing a pellet gun near a Massachusetts synagogue on Yom Kippur.

Gouvea—who came to Harvard from the University of Sāo Paulo Law School, where he leads the Diversity and Inclusion Committee—fired the pellet gun around 9 p.m. Wednesday outside of Temple Beth Zion in Brookline, Mass., a short drive from Harvard's Cambridge campus. More than a dozen police officers descended upon the area and arrested Gouvea, but only after he escaped to his home near the synagogue following a "brief physical struggle."

Ed: Supposedly, local law enforcement is saying that Gouvea didn't intend this as an anti-Semitic attack, but that sounds more like they either can't prove it or don't want to try. Gouvea claims he was shooting rats, but he hit a car outside a synagogue -- on Yom Kippur. 

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Ed: Exactly. But just remember that when it comes to crime, it's not what you know but what you can prove. Of course, it helps if the police and/or prosecutors have an interest in finding evidence, too. 

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Bearing Arms: Neither the synagogue nor Brookline police have said anything to indicate GouvĂȘa was targeting the services or parishioners of Temple Beth Zion, so maybe the anti-gun professor really was doing a little bit of urban hunting last Wednesday. But given his advocacy for more restrictive gun laws in Brazil, why did he have a pellet gun at his home in Massachusetts? The New York Sun reports that the professor works for the think tank Sou da Paz Institute, which "seeks to reduce levels of violence in Brazil through strengthening control of guns and ammunition while promoting civil society engagement." 

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The non-governmental organization benefitted from almost $3 million in donations from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations between 2016 and 2023, as well as a quarter-million dollar grant from the Ford Foundation (which has also given money to groups like Everytown for Gun Safety) in 2022. ...

While Harvard has placed GouvĂȘa on administrative leave while it investigates last week's shooting, there's been no word about whether the visiting professor has faced any sanctions from Sou da Paz Institute.

Ed: Bans for thee but not for me ... typical progressive behavior.  

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Ed: Somehow, I don't think this will help Pritzker's argument in federal court that an insurrection/rebellion isn't taking place in Chicago. This is almost a definitional rebellion -- Johnson is declaring that the federal government has no jurisdiction in a city on US soil. 

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Mediaite: Right now, I imagine you have some questions. I do, too.

My goal in the coming days and weeks is to get to know you. I want to hear from you about what’s working, what isn’t, and your thoughts on how we can make CBS News the most trusted news organization in America and the world. I’ll approach it the way any reporter would—with an open mind, a fresh notebook, and an urgent deadline.

What I can tell you on day one is that I stand for the same core journalistic values that have defined this profession since the beginning, and I will continue to champion them alongside you...

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Ed: Mediaite needs a proofreader. Their transcript of Bari Weiss' memo contained a number of typos; her original memo did not. (I corrected them myself in the excerpt.) As to the pledge, Weiss may need to look around regularly to see how many of her new employees at CBS are actually "alongside" her on these values. I took a skeptical look at that question earlier today. 

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Ed: The Old Gray Lady ain't what she used to be. 

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Daily Caller: The Washington Post launched a sweeping round of layoffs Friday in its Opinion section, cutting veteran journalists and longtime staffers.

The Washington Post ignited a firestorm inside its own newsroom after reportedly axing more than a dozen editorial staffers, according to multiple reports. NBC News reporter Mark Segraves said that Marc Fisher — a 39-year veteran of the paper and one of its most recognized voices — was among those terminated.

“The @washingtonpost has fired writer & editor @mffisher along with 15 other columnists & editors. Marc Fisher spent 39 years at WaPo and is one of the greatest voices and reporters our city has. Democracy Dies In Darkness and the Washington Post is turning out the lights,” Segraves wrote.

Ed: Looks like Bezos and Lewis are going full steam ahead to revamp the Post. But will they be able to truly turn a corner and restore credibility and gravitas to what has become a progressive propaganda platform?

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WABC Radio: In a piece for his college newspaper about his time studying in Cairo, Mamdani wrote that at those protests, women “had to contend with the very real threat of sexual harassment and assault, especially at night.”

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He namechecked two groups of civilian volunteers engaged in blocking, stopping, and reporting rapes, and said he “thought of volunteering.”

However, Mamdani declined to intervene to stop rapes and sexual assaults not because of concerns about his own personal safety, or legalities, but rather because he concluded that “that the last thing Egyptians needed was a well-meaning foreigner’s assistance.”

The revelations could raise further questions about whether Mamdani is the right candidate to take on violent crime in New York City, and come in the wake of Mamdani attempting to walk back his 2020 comments that the New York Police Department was “a major threat to public safety.”

Ed: Good Lord. And this is the SECOND biggest embarrassment for Democrats in this election cycle. So it's only fitting that we finish up with their biggest embarrassment from the previous cycle ... 

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Ed: Er, no, it wasn't. The 2016 election was tighter and closer. Trump barely edged Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College. Eight years later, Trump coasted to victory in both the EC and popular vote by winning every swing state. Maybe Harris has been drunk since the first Tuesday in November?

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Power Line: You might think that engaging in live sex shows for money would disqualify a person from elective office, but no. The most remarkable thing about the Susanna Gibson story is that she almost won, losing her race by fewer than 1,000 votes. So hardly any Democrats mind being represented by paid sex performers.

Gibson is in the news again for a series of incidents between her and her soon to be ex-husband. (Shockingly, jointly running a Chaturbate channel did not prove to be a recipe for long-term marital bliss.)

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Ed: I'm oddly nostalgic for this kind of a Virginia scandal. 

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