18 April—A BBC radio newsreader very early this morning warned listeners that the story he was about to read contained “disgusting details.” But it turned out not to be about politics or the royals.
* * * * * * *
The U.S. Senate yesterday, thanks to the Constitution and Majority Leader Charles Schumer’s determination to not let the Republicans have their way, was able to summarily dismiss the absolutely stupid impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that had been engineered by desperate House Republicans in another unsuccessful effort to embarrass the Biden administration.
The dumb-ass Republicans seem not to realize that the Biden administration is quite able to do that without any help from them, thank you.
* * * * * * *
Today we remember the death 69 years ago (that’s 18 April 1955, if you’ve forgotten how to do simple arithmetic without a calculator) of Albert Einstein. 2024-69=1955.
* * * * * * *
Today we also mention the 41st birthday of Katherine Maher, born and bred right down in Wilton. Who the hell is she? you may ask with some justification. Well, Katherine is the hot-shot snot who was hired away from the Wikipedia people to be president and CEO of National Public Radio last month. It’s she who suspended Uri Berliner last week—for a week without pay—for spilling the beans about NPR’s endemic and intransigent left-wing bias, leading Uri to resign yesterday.
Having thrown down the gauntlet in his online article—NPR had “lost America’s trust” because its news staff was almost entirely Democrat—Berliner laid it on the line yesterday: “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems I cite in my Free Press essay.”
Berliner recognized that other news outlets were just as biased; but they never claimed to be moderate or impartial—and, of course, they weren’t publicly funded and tax-exempt. What he didn’t say is that most of his former colleagues at NPR are firmly in support of their new boss politically if not managerially. And several are doing their best to disparage him.
In what’s essentially her own lame defense, Maher insisted that NPR was committed to “serving all of the American public” and that “questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.” Without a doubt. But Kathy or Kate didn’t say it wasn’t true.
Before proving Uri Berliner’s left-wing bias thesis, Katherine Maher was perhaps best known for her pro-censorship comments in a 2021 online panel discussion. Noting that the First Amendment provided a “fairly robust protection of rights . . . making it a little tricky to address some of the real challenges of where bad information comes from,” she went on to call it the “number one challenge” in American journalism, making it hard to censor “bad information” and “influence peddlers.” Is that censorship or is that censorship?
Fairly robust indeed.
Maher also excreted a number of incriminating tweets. Here’s one, from the Black Lives Matter riots: “I mean sure, looting is counterproductive. But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.”
Can that be why the NPR board hired Katherine Maher?
Elon Musk puts it in the simplest of terms: “This keeps getting crazier! The head of NPR hates the Constitution of the USA.” Right on, Elon!
And by the way: NPR is a private corporation, presumably independent of any level of government. So why should the First Amendment—which prohibits government from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”—bother Katherine Maher or any other advocate and practitioner of non-governmental censorship?