'60 Minutes' star Scott Pelley fired from CBS News after blasting Bari Weiss in heated showdown . . . "Bilton further accused Pelley of staging a “performative display of hostility” and claimed he had “no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress.” “I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama,” Bilton wrote." . . .
. . . “What did he accomplish?” one CBS source said of Pelley’s explosive attack. “He embarrassed the company and the leadership.”
"'The insider added: “This was a set-up. This was Scott going off for show. This was just a show. He wants to stand up for journalism and maybe get fired but what does it change?”
"A second source agreed that Pelley’s tactics were “problematic,” noting that the correspondent should have met with Weiss or Bilton to at least hear them out.ing down a dictator or someone who has committed war crimes,” the source added. “You’re not interviewing Saddam Hussein. It was a little bit overkill.” . . .
Scott Pelley kicks himself out at 60 Minutes - Mike McDaniel . . . "According to Rhodes, the remaking of 60 Minutes—ignoring Pelley’s widely reported gross and serial insubordination—was the fault of—wait for it: Donald Trump. Trump didn’t like their reporting about him so he got them all fired.
"Unfortunately for Rhodes and other Democrats, there’s every reason to think the reshaping is financial. Supposed news outlets can only afford Democrat propaganda for so long. CBS ended Steven Colbert’s late-night anti-Trump fest entirely because it was grossly over-staffed and losing some $40 million per year. There might have been a hint for 60 Minutes there, but if so, they didn’t take it.
"Apparently, Pelly and the rest of the on-air “talent” suffered from “I’m so important you can’t tell me what to do” disease. That’s not uncommon in that industry, but particularly when a property isn’t profitable because it has purposely alienated half its potential audience, management tolerance for that sort of attitude is limited, and Pelly exceeded that limit in spectacular fashion.
"I’ve been an entertainer most of my life. I’ve made a pittance compared to people like Pelley, but I’ve often been asked back because I’ve never pissed off my audience, and I understood I always needed to make my employers think I had something valuable to offer. I knew insulting my employers and acting like an entitled twerp was not the path to success or longevity." . . .
Couric viewed Pelley's comments as tantamount to a 'tirade' and 'impolitic.'
"'I think that's also a massive understatement,' she told guest Oliver Darcy. Pelley was fired a day after the contents of his outburst were leaked to the press within hours.
"'I don't think that [CBS News Editor-in-Chief] Bari Weiss had any choice but to let Scott Pelley go,' Couric - a 60 Minutes correspondent from 2006 until 2011 - reacted.
"It is an especially galling dodge to hear that from the same people who will look you in the eye and talk about how whites are inherently racist. They have no problem making sweeping generalizations about white people; they are, as you saw with Senator Antonio, speaking over the question by calling it racist."
"When you are passing judgments on individuals regarding their character, it is not right to judge them based on their immutable characteristics as part of a group.
"We judge individuals based on who they are and what they do.
"On the other hand, when you are evaluating a group, it's just as wrong to disaggregate it into individual atoms and claim that there are no group characteristics that are relevant to making a judgment.
"That's why it is simultaneously true that individuals who are part of some group may be good, and the group as a whole is still harmful. When I meet a liberal, for instance, I do not immediately assume that they are degenerates who embrace demonic practices, while I feel perfectly comfortable saying that as a group the Democratic Party is degenerate and embraces demonic practices, like sterilizing and mutilating children, endorsing Nazis who become communists, and al Qaeda supporters.
"Both can be true. Some of my favorite people are Democrats; the Democratic Party is evil." . . . More...
California’s decline is no mystery: decades of one-party rule have turned America’s golden state into a warning about the costs of ideological governance.
"The recent California gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral elections—where, remarkably, Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt both appear to have advanced to the general election in November—offer a glimmer of hope.
"Could it be that some on the Left, along with a number of Independents, have finally realized that neither wealth nor an upscale ZIP code can protect them from the Left’s vindictive socialist madness?
"California gas prices, even prior to the Iran war, had reached the highest levels in the continental United States.
"The cause is self-evident: left-wing policies that forbid most new gas and oil exploration, impose radical green-fuel mandates and levy the highest gas taxes in the U.S. and drive out oil refineries.
"Illegal immigration has soared. Currently, some 11 million Californians—28 percent of the resident population—were not born in the U.S. This foreign-born demographic exploded at precisely the time that civic education and melting-pot assimilation and integration were denigrated in the public schools and replaced by ethnic chauvinism and pre-civilizational DEI tribalism.
"A third of the nation’s welfare recipients and nearly a third of the homeless live in California. Almost a quarter of the state’s population lives below the poverty line.
"California has the highest electricity rates in the mainland United States and the steepest income taxes in the nation. And yet it annually runs the highest budget deficits of the 50 states.
"Despite massive unfunded pension debts of $265 billion, the state has spent billions of dollars on illegal-alien subsidies, from free health care to solar panels.
"The state has wasted between $15 billion and $20 billion on its Bakersfield-to-Merced high-speed rail line since the project was approved in 2008. Not a single foot of track has yet been laid in the past 18 years." . . . More...
"I am sick and tired of hearing Democrats talk about “our democracy.” They mean their democracy."
"So, a late-night ballot drop in Los Angeles appears to have changed the dynamics of the midterm election.
"But, hey, the state might be counting for days or weeks yet, so let’s not jump to conclusions, right?
"Sure, Florida can count 10 million ballots in one day and evening, as can many other states and nations, and Florida has mail balloting, too, but California Democrats say that the reason it takes the erstwhile Golden State so long to tally its votes is because they want to make sure every vote is counted.
"It’s about “our democracy,” you see.
"Well, they want to make sure every illegal ballot is counted, that is for sure. It is much easier to steal elections when you know how many votes you need to do so, when you are unencumbered by silly time constraints. And when others let you do it." . . .
. . . "And if you are against that-- against them-- they will call you sexist, racist, Islamophobic, transphobic, a Nazi, and every other epithet that they can think of to hurl at you. All while claiming to be the open-minded and tolerant good guys who simply and only wish to save our beloved democracy. They relish pushing us around and rubbing our noses in their superiority. And they relish their ability to push us around and rub our noses in their superiority. At this point, a rational, moral person of even the mildest courage would not be cowed by their attacks. In fact, would consider them a badge of bleeping honor considering from whence they sprang." . . .
"In a slate of horrifyingly bad leftwing candidates, the others ought to be thanking the Maine Kampf guy for running cover for the rest of them.
"We’ve got Texas Talirico Larping as a Christian Minister while spouting off more like a creepy cult leader. We’ve got Adam Hamawy in New Jersy whose got connections to not only the Blind Sheik, more commonly known as the mastermind behind 9/11, but he also served in a Bosnian front group for Al Qaeda.
"The more you look at the Democrat bench, the worse it gets.
"It’s anybody’s guess whether this was a deliberate play or just a crazy happenstance, but Platner has a new scandal every week, and it’s all anyone wants to talk about these days. Even the New York Times is in on it. But… they’re not sharing the negative press in exactly the same way that hostile news sources (from both the right AND the left) are sharing.
"It’s being alleged by the Daily Caller that the New York Times is working hard to run cover for the would-be senator with the Nazi Tattoo." . .
Toon added by TD
The Times’s goal here was not to fairly give hearing to allegations against Platner; it was to play Fifield for a sucker, give her story just enough air that the Democrat Party’s cretin media and consultant class could zero in on it and crus
. . . "But Graham Platner isn’t a NAZI, some might argue. He’s said it himself — he’s a Communist.
Let’s play along with that line of argument a little. What has the track record of the Times been with actual communists?
The New York Times is looking to add to its list of 132 Pulitzer Prizes — by far the most of any news organization — when the 2022 recipients for journalism are announced on Monday.
Yet the war in Ukraine has renewed questions of whether the Times should return a Pulitzer awarded 90 years ago for work by Walter Duranty, its charismatic chief correspondent in the Soviet Union.
. . . "“He is the personification of evil in journalism,” says Oksana Piaseckyj, a Ukrainian-American activist who came to the U.S. as a child refugee in 1950. She is among the advocates for the return of the award. “We think he was like the originator of fake news.” —NPR, May 2022More...
Cry Jim Crow too often, and the public starts hearing static. Then when a real injustice appears, the language has already been spent. There’s nothing left to cash in.
"Every time Democrats want to shut down a policy debate, they reach for the same emergency brake: Jim Crow. Voter ID? Jim Crow. Eligibility checks? Jim Crow. The SAVE America Act — which does nothing more than require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections — earned the “Jim Crow 2.0” label from Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer earlier this year. Asking whether taxpayers are financing fraud? Somehow, Jim Crow again.
"When a political party turns a genuine historical wound into a routine talking point, the public eventually stops listening. That’s the boy who cried wolf, except in modern Washington, the wolf is usually a pollster, and the villagers have smartphones.
"Jim Crow was real, brutal, and uniquely evil. It was the legal architecture of racial segregation and disenfranchisement enforced by Southern Democrats after Reconstruction — literacy tests, poll taxes, violence. Rep. Wesley Hunt, a Black Republican from Texas, laid out the distinction during a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week: “Jim Crow was a time when Black Americans could not sit in classrooms with white Americans. It was colored-only water fountains; it was beatings in the streets; it was lynchings.” His father had to enter a New Orleans restaurant through the back door because of the color of his skin. Comparing that to showing a photo ID at the polls is not just historically wrong — it’s an insult to everyone who endured the real thing.
"A Pew Research Center survey from August 2025 found that 83 percent of Americans support requiring photo ID to vote — including 71 percent of Democrats, 76 percent of black respondents, and 82 percent of Hispanic respondents. CNN’s Jake Tapper cited those numbers to Schumer on air. Schumer kept going. Even Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) broke ranks: “I would never refer to the SAVE Act as, like, Jim Crow 2.0 or some kind of mass conspiracy.” When your party’s most prominent dissenter won’t echo your line, the line has collapsed.
"The trouble with reflexive alarm-pulling is that credibility is a finite asset. The villagers in Aesop’s fable didn’t become cynics overnight. They just got tired of being fooled. Repetition killed the warning. That same dynamic plays out every time a serious civil-rights framework gets borrowed to describe a modest administrative requirement. Once the public senses the alarm is rung for effect — not because a real fire exists — trust starts to evaporate. And when trust goes, so does the capacity to mobilize people around anything that actually matters." . . .
"Los Angeles is at a tipping point. If there is a majority of such progressive voters, then Los Angeles will continue its descent into the abyss to which there is no bottom." Whitson G. Waldo, III
LA: Who’s Surprised? - American Thinker"The results of the Los Angeles mayoral primary are disappointing to the rest of America but unsurprising. It appears the voters of that great American city are satisfied with surpassing malgovernance as long as the mayor has a (D) behind his or her name.
"Karen Bass apparently won a plurality of the votes counted so far. Of course, this is a Blue City, so votes will continue to be counted until the correct result is achieved. Distress comes from realizing that if all the votes for the even more extreme progressive Nithya Raman were added to Bass’s then a majority results.
"The only good news is that Spencer Pratt looks likely to make it to the runoff with Bass. This despite voting irregularities already discovered. For example, almost 13,000 votes were counted containing nearly zero votes for Pratt. Considering that an early report had Pratt with a quarter of the vote, this is a statistically suspicious result. Don’t expect any further investigation by authorities suspecting criminal behavior.
"Karen Bass has presided over the decline of Los Angeles for almost four years. Fortunately, considering the apparent ignorance and stupidity of the voters, she can be re-elected only once. But, it would be best if she were single-termed." . . . More...
“The Dumocrats are at it again!” he posted Thursday on Truth Social. “They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES.”
"Which, of course, set off a frenzy of “Trump lies” responses from Democrats and the press.
"But even if Trump is wrong about fraud, he’s right to complain about this laughably inept process." . . .
From Pete Wilson’s California to One-Party Decline: Steve Hilton’s Poll Lead Gives Me Hope. . . "This decline did not happen by accident. It is the predictable result of expansive government, regulatory overload, and a refusal to hold individuals accountable. As someone with a career in financial services, I have seen firsthand how policies that punish success and reward dependency erode prosperity.
"Meanwhile, Governor Gavin Newsom has been jet-setting around the world like a rock star on a farewell tour, telling international audiences that President Trump is “temporary.” This is the same governor who lectured Californians on strict COVID lockdowns and masking rules while he attended a lavish, maskless dinner party at the exclusive French Laundry restaurant with lobbyists and donors during the height of the pandemic." . . .
"Carol Leonnig is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent 25 years at the Washington Post before joining MS Now – the network that spent four straight years telling you Trump was a Russian asset, that the Steele Dossier was credible, that collusion was real."
"MSNBC spent years running anonymous source stories that turned out to be lies.
Now they rebranded as MS Now – and apparently brought the playbook with them.
A federal judge in Nashville is about to find out exactly what Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian actually knew before they published this one.
The Story Had No Security Detail and No Drunk Friend Because Neither Existed
The December 5, 2025, MS Now article was titled "Kash Patel ordered FBI detail to give girlfriend's pal a lift home: sources."
Three anonymous sources told Leonnig and Dilanian that Patel – on multiple occasions – ordered agents from his girlfriend's security detail to drive her intoxicated friend home after nights of partying in Nashville.
There was one problem with this story.
Alexis Wilkins didn't have a security detail at the time." . .
None of it happened.
MS Now president Rebecca Kutler issued a statement saying she stands behind the reporting.
She stands behind a story whose reporters couldn't name a date, couldn't name a friend, and described a security detail that didn't exist yet." . . ".More...
A second victim, John Pena (also referred to as Jhon Rodriguez), 30, was shoved onto the tracks alongside Williams but heroically helped pull the veteran back onto the platform seconds before a train arrived. Chilling cellphone video captured Hernandez casually strolling along the platform afterward.
"In yet another preventable tragedy enabled by soft-on-crime policies in blue cities, a repeat offender walked out of a psychiatric ward and immediately murdered an innocent man in New York City.
"Ross Falzone, a 76-year-old retired teacher and social worker for children with special needs, is dead after being shoved down a flight of stairs in Manhattan by a career criminal who should never have been on the streets.
"According to the New York Post, the suspect had been detained earlier that afternoon as an “emotionally disturbed person” outside an NYPD station house.
The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. Prosecutors had earlier described Williams as “brain-dead.” His daughter, Debbie Williams, told The Post days after the incident that her father “was not likely to pull through.”
"This is the deadly update to the story we first reported here, when Williams was left in critical condition with multiple fractures and brain bleeding." . . .
"Still, it’s a great deal of fun watching Scott Pelley preen and inveigh against the new bosses as though he’s the last good man in the news business. If he took the whole show down with him, we still wouldn’t care."
"Long-time readers of this space surely know of my delight in the demise of CBS News and 60 Minutes; I give them far too much attention based on the merits. Of late, though, the misfortunes of the elite communists being slowly turned out of the newsroom at the organ Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather built (talk about two of the most overrated personages in the history of media) have become utterly fascinating.
"Last week, Sharyn Alfonsi was fired. She was a correspondent on 60 Minutes who utterly stunk at her job. If you don’t know anything about her but read this column often, you might remember that Alfonsi was the reporter who, two days after Vice President JD Vance went to Munich and delivered a landmark speech about the clear disconnect between the stated values of Western Civilization NATO is supposed to protect and the execution of those values by increasingly authoritarian socialist governments in Europe, delivered a decidedly favorable report on German efforts to suppress online speech the government doesn’t like. (RELATED: Margaret Brennan and the Good Germans at CBS News)
"It was one of the most bizarre bits of Trump Derangement Syndrome we’ve ever seen. Alfonsi voiced it like there was nothing particularly untoward in breaking down people’s doors and pilfering their phones and computers as a consequence of trolling stupid Green Party communist politicians on Facebook.
"Well, now she’s off to Podcast Land, fat severance check in tow. And the old bulls in the 60 Minutes newsroom are quite ornery. CBS News head Bari Weiss hired a veteran investigative journalist, Nick Bilton, as the new executive producer of 60 Minutes. Bilton’s curriculum vitae is more interesting than anybody else at that show, if for no other reason than Martin Scorsese has, to my knowledge, not asked any of them to write the screenplay for a movie." . . .More...
Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of and, more recently, , available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels , Perdition, Retribution and at Amazon.
NY Post "Two hundred ten years ago this summer, a 19-year-old woman named Mary Shelley, bored one stormy afternoon, decided to write the scariest story ever told.
"It was a tale of a brilliant and arrogant man who wanted to change the world but ended up creating a monster. She named him Barack Obama.
"All right, she named him Dr. Frankenstein. But had the great author been around to witness Adam Hamawy win the Democratic primary in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District, she would’ve understood right away that she was looking at a familiar tale of hubris, malice and ghouls on the loose.
"Like Shelley’s mad physician, Obama, too, had an appetite for reordering the natural world. He took Bill Clinton’s party — one that allowed candidates in some parts of the country to be pro-gun and pro-life and still consider themselves Democrats in good standing — strapped it to the slab and shocked it with a lightning bolt of radicalism.
"The creature that emerged from the experiment no longer talked about fiscal responsibility and government reform. It howled instead about opening our borders, legalizing gay marriage and redefining politics as the pursuit of identity by other means.
Antisemitic alliance
"Under Obama, the Democrats became a gorgeous mosaic of victimized minorities, encouraged to seek retribution for wrongs real or perceived by grabbing a pitchfork and going out in search of a conservative to blame.
"For a while, it all went swimmingly. Obama built a forever campaign that encouraged everyone to give to the party — not only their money but also their loyalty. Endless chatter about “the right side of history” was designed to make it clear that unless you wholeheartedly supported whatever the president and his aides told you was proper, good and desired, you’d be transgressing against history itself.
"Tech companies, universities and other institutions soon fell in line, giving us execrable phenomena like cancel culture.
"We all saw the might of Obama’s creation during Donald Trump’s disastrous first term in office: At the push of a button, a democratically elected president was made to appear to be the second coming of Mussolini.
"And we saw it even more clearly during Obama’s third term, conducted via another Frankenstein-like creation, the brain-dead Joe Biden." . . . More...
"Democrats in New Jersey just handed a primary win to Adam Hamawy, a candidate with actual ties to the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda, which is credited with carrying out the attacks of 9/11."
"This is in a district where Todd Beamer is buried. You may remember Todd Beamer as the airline passenger on Flight 93 who famously said “Let’s roll” as his last known words, referring to other passengers as they prepared to retake control of the plane, which crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania instead of somewhere in DC.
"This is what Democrats have come to. Utterly shameful." . . .
"Hamawy was a close associate and translator to Omar Abdel-Rahman, aka the ‘Blind Sheikh,’ an arch terrorist convicted of masterminding multiple plots against targets in NYC — including the World Trade Center. Hamawy testified at Adbel-Rahman’s trial, as a defense witness."
"His victory was bolstered by endorsements from prominent anti-Israel leftists like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), “Squad” members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), as well as Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), whom he treated as a combat surgeon in Iraq."
"Not only could Nolan have made a fortune with this new movie, he could have created something beautiful and enduring. Instead, he and his team seem primed to make an epic flop that few people will remember."
"When Christopher Nolan’s new The Odyssey film was announced, many people were understandably excited. Although composed nearly three millennia ago, the epic was tailor-made for today’s big screen, featuring exotic locations, tons of spectacle, strong men and beautiful women, and dealing with the enduring themes of home, heroism, and survival.
"And yet, for all this, the only relatively recent, large-scale adaptation for the screen was a made-for-TV film in 1997 with cheap production (just a small step above a typical episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys with Kevin Sorbo). Despite its shortcomings, the movie at least stayed faithful to the source material and maintained a brisk pace as well as a spirit of fun.
"Nevertheless, in an era of reboots, it only made sense for Hollywood to give the Odyssey the epic treatment it deserved under the direction of a guy like Christopher Nolan. He could enlist the necessary talent and apply the necessary cinematic techniques to do to Odysseus what he did for Batman.
"But every piece of news, particularly the new lengthy (4000+ words) puff piece from Time magazine, has quickly eroded any hope this movie is worth seeing. With his horrible casting, drab cinematography, and intent to explore Odysseus’ inner demons, Nolan seems committed to ruining his most ambitious film yet. Rather than save American cinema from its current death spiral, he has somehow brought all of its worst qualities together in this new project.
DEI Casting
"The most obvious offense has been his choice of actors. Outside of Matt Damon playing Odysseus, nearly every other person in this movie has little reason to be there. Starting from the top, Anne Hathaway is a mediocre actress with too little depth, range, or charisma to play Odysseus’ wife Penelope. The same should be said for Tom Holland, playing Odysseus’ son Telemachus. Although both of them have risen to fame playing likable young adults, they will be difficult to believe as a grief-stricken queen desperately waiting for her husband and an adult son growing up in his father’s shadow.
"Of course, what has elicited more outcry has been Nolan’s brazenly woke casting for the other characters. To play Athena, he cast Zendaya, an actress who suffers from incurable “resting bitch face,” can’t act, and is too young and unserious for the part. For Helen of Troy, the princess whose superlative beauty “launched a thousand ships,” he cast Lupita Nyong’o, a mostly forgettable actress who is known more for appearing in the Black Panther movies than being a paragon of female perfection. If one had to guess why exactly Nolan picked these actresses, it seems that being a woman of color had something to do with it.
"As for men of color, Nolan has this covered by casting the rapper Travis Scott as a bard in order to communicate “the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, which is analogous to rap.” Considering that the epic poem is an art form that celebrates the ideals of an ancient culture with larger-than-life characters in a larger-than-life setting while rap is a contemporary art form that glamorizes urban decay, vice, and criminality, this connection is a bit of a stretch."
"Nolan also made sure to represent the elderly" . . . More...
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