60 Minutes, Fake News, and the resentment of oversight

It's reported that Bill Owens, a veteran executive producer of CBS' 60 Minutes, has flounced from the studio in a huff. 

"Over the past months, it has also become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it. To make independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes, right for the audience,” he wrote in a memo obtained by the New York Post.

Scott Pelley, one host of that dreadful show (and a long-time President Trump backbiter) shared his snippy disquiet during a late-April broadcast.

"[CBS owner] Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways," Pelley kvetched. In another moment, he said Owens "felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires."

Breitbart noted on April 28 that “'60 Minutes' has done tough stories about the Trump administration almost every week since the inauguration in January, many of them reported by Pelley."

Likely a factor in the executive-level decision is Paramount Global's desire to receive Trump administration countenance for a proposed merger with Skydance.

Too, Trump has sued CBS for 60 Minutes' duplicitous editing of a Kamala Harris interview that ran during the campaign. Her response to an early-segment question was surgically extracted and replanted after a later inquiry. The underhanded ambition was to present innocent viewers with a cultivatedly flattering aspect.

(Reports are that the president's suit asks for $20 billion from CBS.)

Per New York Post coverage, Trump said the delusive editing constituted "unlawful and illegal behavior," given the licensing stipulation that the public-interest be served. 

The miserable Scott Pelleys of the Fake News Industry resent like hell anyone reminding them of ethical propriety. Someone's doing so conflicts with propagandists' chosen mission, which is not report what has happened, but instead broadcasting what they want the public to believe had happened. 

Among numerous Democrat-aiding hoaxes legacy media have spread in recent years, as recalled by Breitbart's John Nolte, are:

'Very fine people' praise of racists; Trump slurs U.S. soldiers; police killed on January 6; border agents whipping immigrants; Trump seizing steering-wheel of Beast; Hunter Biden's laptop actually Russian disinformation; Trump advised drinking bleach; 'Bloodbath' threat; and Biden 'sharp as a tack.'

Common when establishment media types spout disdain for alternative commentators is the contention that such voices are not credible, as no trained editor oversees their work.

Pelley's snit illustrates that establishment headline-hurlers do not truly want supervision. When oversight is seriously exercised, imperiling their intended biases, they screech as if scalded.

Florida Democrat Pizzo quits party, media portrayals warped

Crisp indication of legacy media's alliance with the woke Democrat Party was not requested, but appeared on America's doorstep, regardless. 

Last week, reportedly centrist Florida Democrat State Senate leader Jason Pizzo left that increasingly unpopular party. He was reportedly the third elected Florida Democrat to do so in recent weeks, and announced his decision on the senate floor.

Pizzo is now an independent.

The Florida Phoenix quoted him as aptly observing: "[T]he Democratic Party that his father volunteered for when John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960 was not the same party today."

Pizzo said the party "craves and screams anarchy and then demands amnesty, and that’s not okay. I’ve always been criticized by the far left and the far right, but you know what the small businesses and the hard-working families and the teachers and the cops and the firemen want us to do? Be public servants, not politicians."

The Hill quoted him as remarking: “I belong to, or have belonged to, a party that’s far more concerned at times about pronouns than about property taxes (and) that just wastes so much time and sucks the oxygen and capacity."

The state senator's caustic estimates were not without precedent.

"Pizzo previously criticized Democrats on social media for failing to applaud a 13 year-old boy with brain cancer, DJ Daniel, during President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address," News Nation wrote.

Notably, numerous established press venues did not quote the outgoing state senator's acidic assessment of his erstwhile party, but did made points of parading before their audiences nastiness targeted at Pizzo by Florida Democrat Party Chair Nikki Fried.

"Jason’s failure to build support within our party for a gubernatorial run has led to this final embarrassing temper tantrum. I’d be lying if I said I’m sad to see him go, but I wish him the best of luck in the political wilderness he’s created for himself," she reportedly snarked, in part.

(Under Fried's administration, Democrats already had only a "super-minority" in the state senate, reports hold.)

Marquee outlets that strategically omitted from their coverage Pizzo's enumeration of the Democrat Party's howling negatives, but instead  amplified ineffective party chair Fried's ad hominem broadside, were not acting as objective journalistic operations; rather, as unethical partisans.

Of course, no one needed more proof of their mendacity.

Democrats reveal true colors

The hush that followed President Kennedy's 1963 Dallas murder was a matter of universally shared basic decency. But today, if a conservative figure fell to a lunatic's bullets, progressive Democrats would freestyle on the coffin lid.

Recall that following the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump, ghoulish miscreants in political, entertainment, and media spheres immediately sprang, grinning maws a-drip.

Rather than accepting ballot-box defeats and cultivating better messages and candidates, many Democrats reflect Marxist Che Guevara's odious rantings, as recalled by historians:

"This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate!"

Online video coverage of anti-Trump/Musk events sometimes portrays participants expressly desirous of their opponents' deaths. It's terrible but true that Guevara's wretched spirit lives, in morally squalid pockets of 2025 America.

Open-borders and sanctuary state and city Democrat officials actively obstruct ICE efforts to safeguard citizens by deporting illegals, including ones guilty of violent crimes against children. The welfare of American citizens is without significance to Democrats whose only lodestar is sick ideology.

California news discloses a health care ballot measure there named for assassin Luigi Mangioni. Months ago, Mangioni stalked United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson and shot him from behind, killing the husband and father of two. The dastardly killer is frequently celebrated by leftists - not despite, but because of his depravity.

In recent months, America has seen a tsunami of politically prompted malicious acts that targeted Tesla owners and dealerships. Among these are vandalism, physical assaults, and large-scale arson. They are terroristic crimes that have as their implicit targets Elon Musk, President Trump, and the over 70 million Americans who buoyed Trump to his proper station at the Resolute Desk.

Upon hearing during a March 11 broadcast that President Trump rightly condemned demolishment and arson of Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism, MSNBC host Alicia Menendez grabbed up the propagandist's bullhorn: "So, just to be clear, you protest a private company, you are labeled by this administration a domestic terrorist."

Only mentally disheveled subversives and press charlatans would rank purposeful violence and destructiveness as legitimate protest actions. They are not speech manifestations that enjoy constitutional protection. You can express disagreement with others, but you cannot firebomb their businesses from within nightime's cloak.

(Yes, the Boston Tea Party included property destruction. But it challenged oppression by an unelected foreign sovereign; that pivotal circumstance does not exist in contemporary America. Throwing over the checkerboard and traducing laws are not civilized reactions to electoral thumping.)

During the often-savage George Floyd street riots of 2020, police were assaulted, cars were overturned and destroyed by fire, and innocent passersby fell victim to screamed epithets and physical attacks. Some 163 structures, including at least one law enforcement precinct, were destroyed by Molotov Cocktail-hurling thugs. 

Estimates of the cost of those nationwide left-wing rampages ranged from one to two billion tax-payer dollars. Regardless, official Democrat sanction of that lawlessness was illustrated by then-Vice President/presidential candidate Kamala Harris's organization of a donation page for vicious arrestees.

Harris is not the only elected Democrat guilty of countenancing evil. This writer is not aware of any prominent Democrat office-holder who has publicly condemned left-wing violence. As goes the axiom: Silence is complicity.

And that wicked body is again swelled obscenely, when one factors in partisans who do not perpetrate crimes themselves, but are cheered by news of others' violent rioting.

Left-wing agitators, many surely goaded by garbage-hearted professors enamored of Guevara's filth, feel that perpetrating destruction is a justifiable means for ideological promotion.

Hopefully, respect for law and order will return in this Trump era. A good start would be understanding that violence is not legitimate protest.

Truths finally told                                                                  

Set for May 20 issuance, Original Sin, by CNN's Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson of Axios, reportedly discloses how the Biden White House and legacy media quislings strove to conceal the 46th president's fast-ebbing intellectual capacity.

Readers will recall Biden was customarily shielded from inquisitors. Rare contemporaneous remarks he did publicly offer frequently required "clean-up" statements penned by aides.

Footage of Biden's characteristic tumbles, shuffling, wandering, and inexplicable attempts to shake hands with bare air were dismissed as "cheap fakes" by protective newsroom allies.

As commentator Gent Goldstein recently wrote, Tapper himself has soiled hands. He had "spent years downplaying concerns, dismissing critics, and shielding Biden from scrutiny." Tapper repeatedly attributed the debilitated chief executive's verbal stumbles to a supposed "stutter," rather than admitting obvious descent into irrevocable bewilderment.

"The timing of Tapper’s book...suggests an opportunistic cash grab rather than real journalism," Goldstein wrote.

Ron Klain was Biden White House chief of staff, and helped the 46th president prepare for his debate with Trump. In Uncharted: How Trump beat Biden, Harris, and the odds in the wildest campaign in history, author Chris Whipple wrote : "Klain was startled. He'd never seen Biden so exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, Biden excused himself and went off to sit by the pool."

And only some 25 minutes had passed in one debate rehearsal, when Biden announced he was tired and turned in.

But in an Aug. 14 CNN appearance that followed Biden's howlingly execrable debate performance against Trump, Klain dutifully dissimulated to Anderson Cooper: "He's clearly up to the job. He's doing it everyday. He's doing it successfully."

At this writing, Americans still don't know who was operating the White House autopen and signing Biden's name on numerous critical documents.

Though I've never been behind the Washington curtain, I feel safe speculating that Biden's deterioration was for years an open secret, at least among sympathetic politicians and Tapper's fake media comrades.

No disrespect for those suffering mental diminishment is intended here. I do not broach this without personal familiarity.

Like millions of American families, mine was sadly touched by a parent's similar plight. My mother, Jean Russell Larson, authored numerous childrens' books as well as poetic and other writings for adult readers. She taught creative writing at various Iowa colleges.

And I owe her for what authorial skills I can summon.

My mother's eventual dire medical situation made this issue real for me in a torturous way. Because of that tragedy, I regard sufferers with compassion and understanding.

(And being 65, I am not unmindful that such beleaguerment might loom on my own doorstep, one day.) 

But the American presidency is the most powerful institution in the world. Those in that office wield tremendous authority. They conduct international affairs, enter into trade and other treaties, head our country's military, attend to the general welfare, request congressional authorization for warfare, and even have access to nuclear codes.

Such awesome responsibilty requires intellectual lucidity. It is a crime against the American people to entrust authority of that magnitude to a man clearly meandering in the mist of compromised capacity.

Immediately following the debate during which Biden performed so miserably against Trump, an event that illustrated the fact of Biden's lamentable, irreversible dilapidation, I prayed for him. Because, ideological differences aside, he was a fellow human being who was suffering. 

And I asked God to help him.

But not all were compassionate. Primary blame must be accorded Biden's own family members for permitting the abusive spectacle (and profiting from it), as well as Democrat Party operatives that manipulated the inarguably invalid wretch for contemptible purposes. 

Too, Biden supporters who were aware of his obvious handicap (or who at least had sound suspicions) share moral culpability for resultant devastation of America.

We won't know until the May release of Original Sin whether CNN Democrat shill Tapper concedes complicity in the cover-up. Smart money says he won't.

Puzzle posed by longtime Democrat voters           

It is foolish for Americans who've voted Democrat since the 1960s or '70s to persist in doing so, given that today's party bears nearly zero resemblance to the one that first attracted them.

Do they squander precious ballots for reasons of nostalgia, emotion, delusion, or uncritical brand loyalty to a party that has no use for them, save for as useful idiots?

Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen flew to El Salvador on the tax-payer dime, to lavish adoration on recently (rightly) deported illegal immigrant criminal Kilmar Abrego Garcia. 

The senator never met with actual Maryland resident Patty Morin. Her daughter Rachel had tragically been raped and murdered by an illegal immigrant that Van Hollen and other Democrats had essentially given keys to the country.

Van Hollen joined with his Democrat comrades to oppose the Laken Riley bill, named for yet another victim of their brutal illegals. 

Democrats were wholly indifferent to testimony by Garcia's former girlfriend that he had savagely beaten her on numerous occasions. (The old Democrat Party opposed domestic violence. The new version does not.) She was sucessful in obtaining a restraining order against him. 

Liberals' ice-blooded contempt for women's safety did not surprise, given their eagerness to shoehorn biological men into female sports. 

Garcia had broken several other U.S. laws. But Democrats cared not. Nor were they given pause by his having having been found by two immigration judges to be an MS-13 gang-banger. (MS-13 was officially designated as a terrorist organization.)

ICE also determined Garcia was MS-13. As did local police and El Salvador, itself. But Democrats now cast their lots with criminals, not the lawful.

Decades ago, that party championed fine principles like racial unity, women's rights, peace, and the Constitution's guarantee to free speech. 

But today's party prioritizes those issues' diametrical opposites: DEI's poisonous messages of racial determinism and inherent group guilt; transgenderism's perils to girls and women; drowning out opposing speakers with contrived cacophonies; and blocking cameras, lest they capture unconstitutional wrongdoings. 

Are veteran Democrat lever-pullers' principles and ideals reflected by such loathsome phenomena? 

In earlier times, Democrats inveighed against wars. But today, bankrolled by the "industrial war complex" Republican Eisenhower cautioned of, they are mass-killings' loudest boosters and most enthusiastic funders.

In 2025, Democrats desperately seek the favor of wet-eared college subversives, themselves under the thrall of addle-pated professors, and scrambling for barricades to die upon - in the name of the glorious revolution.

Representatives of that party also once championed American pride, blue-collar interests, support for Jews, and the faith that Americans of all colors are unified by national patriotism, not divided by demographics. 

Today, though, such positions are anathema to Democrats. They sneer that America is inherently evil and focus on scant faults, rather than extolling our country's abundant brilliant positives - ones that rendered worldwide betterment. 

Democrats of the past clad themselves in working Americans' garb. Today, though, working-class voters increasingly mass under the Republican tarp (ask Teamster chief Sean O'Brien). They reject Democrat policies that have sent jobs overseas by the millions, devastated entire industries, and done dirt to our economy.

Elected Democrats cater to cash-bag globalist donors like Soros, Cuban, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Betos. (Too, there's the real possibility of foreign bigwigs' under-table Democrat donations.)

American campuses are a-crawl with masked, keffiyeh-wearing anti-semites whose physical attacks, filthy philosophy, and wanton destructiveness are winked at by tax-supported liberal administrators. 

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, never miss opportunities to vote against Israeli security and deny Jewish interests. The message they broadcast is ugly and requires no extended elucidation.

Longtime Democrat voters may not share such screaming diversions from their own past beliefs. Nevertheless, they do enable them with their ballots. Why are they unbothered by that?

When donkeys cry

Wife-beating El Salvadoran gangster Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was in America illegally, has code for "MS-13" tattooed on his knuckles. But his opportunistic Democrat advocates argue that signifies nothing. By that standard, an eye-mask, striped shirt, and bulging bag with a big dollar sign does not indicate criminality. Maryland Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen flew to El Salvador at taxpayer cost to commiserate with Abrego Garcia over margaritas. The liberal senator never met with, or even contacted, actual Maryland citizen Patty Morin; her daughter Rachel was assaulted and murdered by one of the illegals Van Hollen and other Democrats had effectively given the keys to our country. The Van Hollen publicity trek was quickly aped by additional Democrats thirsting for camera-time. Still more cynical sojourns may soon transpire. Representative Ayanna Pressley and four other congressional Democrats recently flew to a Louisiana prison, to clap arms about and be photographed with two Israel-hating agitators, including Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil's student Visa was revoked; he lied on his application, a deportable crime. During a 4/23 Hannity broadcast, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller noted acidically: "The Democrat Party has become the party of terrorists and illegal aliens. That is the party of today. Who does it sympathize with? Who does it fight for? Who does it move Heaven and Earth to protect? Illegal alien gang-members and foreign terrorists. "Let's talk just briefly about Tren de Aragua," Miller continued. "The vicious gang that drills holes in people's hands, chops off their fingers, murders them in cold blood. A gang, based on information that has been discovered by FBI, that is even plotting assassination attempts inside the United States of America." Lovely crowd with which liberals have chosen to keep company. Do not stagger back in shock if Democrats attempt construction of a time machine, which could enable them to pose for selfies with Charles Manson.

The Soros secret                                          

Hollywood's John Cusack, producer Larry David, and Harvard Law Professor emeritus Lawrence Tribe are only the latest leftists to deceitfully smear President Donald Trump as comparable to megalomanial National Socialist Adolf Hitler. 

Despite its groundlessness, the Nazi slur is a rhetorical gimcrack favored by loosely wrapped shriekers; they wield it to defame and intimidate ideological adversaries.

This writer submits there is a whale of a difference between the common-sense president and the 1930s genocidal madman Hitler - a vile monster with whose shadow the contemporary Left is tickled to align itself.

Multibillionaire George Soros is a gilded patron of hideous interests like Planned Parenthood, abolition of national borders and sovereignty, and the racial discord urged by scowling separatists. Too, he contributes mightily to Democrat candidates, and is alleged to be among major bankrollers of protests that target President Trump and Elon Musk, and that demand Israel's elimination and champion Hamas terrorists.

A dessicated Mr. Toad, Soros is said to manipulate the world's peoples and international permutations like a reptilian-blooded chess player. His amoral machinations are calculated in a mostly obscured shadowland in which he is safeguarded 24/7 by a kept mercenary army.

Left-wing activists who avail themselves of his largesse are connected, wittingly or not, to actual Nazis of the Third Reich era.

As a 14 year-old during that deplorable interval, Soros pretended to be Christian and accompanied Nazi death-camp guards as they confiscated doomed Jewish prisoners' valuables. Even decades after that shameful, loathsome reality, Soros expressed no compunction.

60 Minutes host Steve Kroft interviewed him for a December 29, 1998 profile.

KROFT: "My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted grandson. Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews."

SOROS: "Yes. That's right. Yes."

KROFT: "I mean, that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?"

SOROS: "No. Not at all, not at all. Maybe as a child, you don't see the connection. But it was - created no problem, at all."

KROFT: "No feeling of guilt?"

SOROS: "No."

KROFT: "For example, 'I'm Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.' None of that?"

SOROS: "Well, of course, I could be on the other side, or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was - well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in markets. That if I wasn't there - of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would be taking it away, anyhow. 

"And it was the - whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator. The property was being taken away. So I had no role in taking that property. So I had no guilt."

Today, unsurprisingly, the left-wing magnate's Open Societies webpage makes no mention of this despicable truth. Instead, it hails Soros' surviving that horrendous time and burbles about his subsequent determination to better world conditions.

No one can condemn a callow 14 year-old for acting out of self-interest when in a terrifying circumstance. But Soros was of greatly advanced age when speaking to 60 Minutes, and he still evidenced zero conscience.

Because he has long aimed a gushing dollar-hose into subversive Left pockets, though, progressive pretenders at moral scrupulousness never shrink from him.

When next you hear of office-ensconced politicos, entertainment industry quislings, media charlatans, or violent Democrat street-rioters falsely labeling President Trump, Elon Musk, or the millions of MAGA stalwarts as "Nazis," remember with whom those same morally fetid liars disgustingly choose to share bedspace.