It’s the week after the big news week and through Sunday the media stayed focused on Michael Cohen and pivoted on N. Korea to the President’s workds on Otto Warmbier.
The President for his part gave a two hour speech at the C-Pac conference and delighted his base.
So on we go to another week, which barring a surprise ,Mueller report release should be much tamer.
With That Let’s Catch Up On Some Stories:
In the house last week the Republicans won a rare vote when they won a vote to have authorities notify deportation officers any time an illegal immigrant tries to buy a gun. It seems to be a “no brainer” but the vote was 220-209 with 26 Democrats voting for the bill.
This led to Democrat anger and Nancy Pelosi had a meeting to warn the congressional members on loyalty, and believe it or not AOC was threatening primary challenges for them if they persisted in defying the party. Wow!
A new poll on the media said that confidence in their reporting had hit a new low. In fact over 50% said “they hardly had any confidence” in them at all. That was higher than congress (45%) got for no confidence. Pretty bad.
Only 25% said they had confidence in the media.
The group rating the media highest (42%), as fair and non biased were Democrats.
While on the media here are then numbers of coverage in primetime (7-10) on what they called “spilt screen day”.
CNN was 225 minutes on Cohen and 2 minutes on the summit.
MSNBC was at 203 minutes on Cohen and 10 on the summit.
FoxNews was spilt almost in the middle.
One more on the media. George Stephanopoulos who we often cite for his bias was interviewed and said this:
“We ensure that everything we do is accurate and fair”.
This from the person who worked in the White House for Bill Clinton. Who praised on the air and donated $75K to the Clinton Foundation in 2015 (while reporting on Hillary’s presidential run).
Check George’s coverage of Presidential debates and see who he declared the winner. And this week he said Michael Cohen’s testimony had a “ring of truth”.
On Taxes. Early last week there was major news that tax rebates were down (to $2,600) this year. Of c0urse it was week one, but why waste a chance to attack the tax cuts? No doubt you saw and heard the story.
Well guess what? As of last week the average tax refund so far this filing season is now more than $3,100, the Treasury Department reported. In fact,
the average refund is $3,143, topping last year’s $3,103.
Any coverage of this?
It was big news, lost last week in the hysteria of Michael Cohen but the administration dropped the 25% tariff plan on Chinese goods. This means we came to the deadline (end of February) and suddenly there was movement at the table with China. Expect a deal in the next four weeks.
One of the reasons the President had to walk in the Vietnam meeting (besides it being the right thing), was he had to show China he is unafraid to do so. No one covered this aspect, but it was big.
I know there were some funny things to come out of the Cohen hearings but the funniest to us was the tweet the President did the minute he got in Vietnam.
“I have now spent more time in Vietnam than Da Nang Dick Blumenthal, the third rate Senator from Connecticut (how is Connecticut doing?). His war stories of his heroism in Vietnam were a total fraud – he was never even there. We talked about it today with Vietnamese leaders!”
The President never misses a chance to tweak an opponent.
The other that amused me was when Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was questioning Cohen. She wanted to know if he tried to influence the campaign. Wait, weren’t you the head of the Democratic party who had to resign because you were feeding Hillary information to influence the primary?
Finally it was amusing to hear Democrats say to Republicans you are obsessed with asking questions about his character and not the issues at hand. Really, you are lecturing now? Hello Kavanaugh hearings. Remember?