Newsbusters

Once again, the CBS Evening News has decided to shine a victim spotlight on fired federal workers. This time, the focus is cast on the plight of a fired USAID worker.

Watch as CBS correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns does her level best to elicit sympathy for the dismissed worker (click “expand” to view transcript: 

KATE SCAIFE: USAID saves lives.

CAITLIN HUEY-BURNS: That’s how you would have described your work?

SCAIFE: That’s right. We make America safer.

HUEY-BURNS: For the last two years, Kate Scaife’s job was to make thousands of humanitarian programs around the world run efficiently, a role she optimistically believed would match the priorities of the new administration.

SCAIFE: One of our senior leaders came up to me at one point, passed me in the hall and said, “be prepared to be the most popular girl in the room in a couple of weeks.”

HUEY-BURNS: Her illusions faded last month, when Musk tweeted about feeding USAID into the wood chipper. The next day, Scaife couldn’t log onto her work devices.

SCAIFE: I felt disappeared, right? All of our work was made invisible, too.

HUEY-BURNS: We rode with Scaife as she drove to the office.

SCAIFE: I’ve got my kids’ pictures… 

HUEY-BURNS: You leave it there thinking you’ll get it back.

SCAIFE: That it’ll be there on Monday. Hahaha, right.

HUEY-BURNS: She was allowed 15 minutes to clean out her desk.

SCAIFE: It just felt really demeaning to be treated like that.

HUEY-BURNS: Scaife had been the breadwinner in her family. How do you talk to your kids about this?

SCAIFE: It was so hard to tell them things like, “you know, we’ve made summer plans for these camps. And you know, I can’t afford that.”

HUEY-BURNS:  It feels like work was a big part of your identity.

SCAIFE: I feel like I am my best mom when I have this other part of me that helps me to feel engaged with the world. I don’t know how I’ll find something new that gives me that same joy.

HUEY-BURNS: A feeling now looming for hundreds of thousands of federal workers. For Eye on America I’m Caitlin Huey-Burns, in Silver Spring, Maryland.

In order to make the former USAID employee more sympathetic, there is some obscuring of her job role, which Huey-Burns describes as “to make thousands of humanitarian programs around the world run efficiently.” A ten-second search describes Kate Scaife’s position as “Senior Advisor for Localization”. Per a Grok search:

The Senior Advisor would serve as a high-level expert on strengthening local capacity, working to empower local organizations, governments, and communities to take the lead in development initiatives. This could include overseeing efforts to increase direct funding to local partners—such as nonprofits, businesses, or government entities—while reducing reliance on international intermediaries.

This is more involved than making programs run efficiently, but there is no probing, no delving into the position that was eliminated- no digging into what this USAID position supplied overseas- whether food and medicine or gender transitions. Huey Burns takes Scaife’s “we made America safer” at face value. 

This is because the purpose of this news report is not to inform, but to elicit viewer sympathy for the thousands of government workers whose positions are eliminated in furtherance of greater government efficiency. Hence the following of Scaife as she walks into the (former) USAID building and gathers her belongings, and the sympathetic telling of this story, which CBS has repeatedly told and re-told over these past few weeks.

Click “expand” to view the full transcript of the aforementioned report as aired on the CBS Evening News on Monday, March 3rd, 2025:

MAURICE DuBOIS: President Trump is giving the heads of federal agencies until next week to submit plans for eliminating more government jobs. The thousands being cut in the mass firings are much more than numbers on a payroll list, and every one of them has a story. Caitlin Huey-Burns has tonight’s Eye on America.

KATE SCAIFE: What do you want for lunch today?

CAITLIN HUEY-BURNS: We joined Kate Scaife Friday morning as she made her kids lunch, dropped them off at the bus stop, and headed to her office at USAID where she was a program analyst. Scaife was one of thousands of federal employees who received an email saying they’re being affected by a reduction in force, governmentspeak for “You’re fired.”

SCAIFE: It has been one of the hardest months of my life. To feel that I did something wrong when all we were ever trying to do was the right thing.

RUSSELL VOUGHT: They are increasingly viewed as the villains.

HUEY-BURNS: That’s top Trump official Russell Vought, talking to his right wing think tank in 2023. Vought has helped billionaire Elon Musk carry out the mass firings across the federal government. Last week, Vought sent this memo directing agencies to plan for a significant reduction in the number of full-time workers, an effort to shrink the government that could ultimately leave 700,000 federal employees across the country out of a job.

VOUGHT: We want to put them in trauma.

HUEY-BURNS: That trauma was on display Friday, as USAID workers left the building for the last time.

SCAIFE: USAID saves lives.

HUEY-BURNS: That’s how you would have described your work?

SCAIFE: That’s right. We make America safer.

HUEY-BURNS: For the last two years, Kate Scaife’s job was to make thousands of humanitarian programs around the world run efficiently, a role she optimistically believed would match the priorities of the new administration.

SCAIFE: One of our senior leaders came up to me at one point, passed me in the hall and said, “be prepared to be the most popular girl in the room in a couple of weeks.”

HUEY-BURNS: Her illusions faded last month, when Musk tweeted about feeding USAID into the wood chipper. The next day, Scaife couldn’t log onto her work devices.

SCAIFE: I felt disappeared, right? All of our work was made invisible, too.

HUEY-BURNS: We rode with Scaife as she drove to the office.

SCAIFE: I’ve got my kids’ pictures… 

HUEY-BURNS: You leave it there thinking you’ll get it back.

SCAIFE: That it’ll be there on Monday. Hahaha, right.

HUEY-BURNS: She was allowed 15 minutes to clean out her desk.

SCAIFE: It just felt really demeaning to be treated like that.

HUEY-BURNS: Scaife had been the breadwinner in her family. How do you talk to your kids about this?

SCAIFE: It was so hard to tell them things like, “you know, we’ve made summer plans for these camps. And you know, I can’t afford that.”

HUEY-BURNS:  It feels like work was a big part of your identity.

SCAIFE: I feel like I am my best mom when I have this other part of me that helps me to feel engaged with the world. I don’t know how I’ll find something new that gives me that same joy.

HUEY-BURNS: A feeling now looming for hundreds of thousands of federal workers. For Eye on America I’m Caitlin Huey-Burns, in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Who let this happen on Saturday Night Live? In his second gig as host of the show, comedian Shane Gillis uncorked a monologue that mocked Joe Biden’s cognitive fitness, liberal moral arrogance, and PBS documentary star Ken Burns as making dreadfully boring films.

After joking about Trump and the Gulf of America and Greenland, Gillis turned, to Biden, mocking how between teleprompters, Biden’s face would go dead. Then he added: “You guys are pretty liberal here. I understand being liberal. It feels good. It’s powerful. It’s too powerful, dude, it’s like the Sith! You lose yourself, dude. Somebody says something you don’t like at work, and it’s like [monster noise].”

Later, Gillis did a riff on Ken Burns, and the documentary series that made him famous, The Civil War. It’s 11 and a half hours long — 690 minutes. What I did not expect is that Gillis would suggest Burns documentaries put women to sleep…he called it a “little Cosby tip, actually. Who needs roofies when we have Ken Burns present the history of the buffalo on PBS?”

Ken Burns presents himself as a national treasure, so learned and somehow objective. But if you get away from the actual films, he’s insufferably progressive. For example, this sentence in 2016: “Like the amputated limb felt long after it has been cut off, I miss Trayvon Martin,” he said. An Exhibit A in white guilt.

I testified on a House panel with three others about PBS in 1999, and Burns was on the other end of the witness table. I wasn’t a fan of his when I came in, and I really loathed him when it was over. He was so incredibly pompous. I refrained from calling him an egocentric twig of a man. 

The PBS/NPR types hate Elon Musk. On my drive in to the office midway through Monday morning, the NPR talk show 1A devoted a whole hour to trashing Musk and his conflicts of interest, considering he’s had $38 billion in government contracts. They repeated that number from The Washington Post over and over again. They asked for listeners to send in emails to read on the air, so I sent in this one:

Hi guys!

It’s deeply weird for NPR to call out Elon Musk out for conflicts of interest because of his government conflicts. You have a daily conflict of interest reporting on the governments that fund you and your affiliate stations.  In addition, Musk has advocated defunding NPR, so you have an obvious interest in undermining DOGE.

Sincerely, Tim Graham, involuntary contributor to NPR propaganda

We were pleased as punch that Mark Levin mentioned our study of ABC/CBS/NBC coverage (well, lack of coverage) of DOGE announcements of taxpayer savings on his Fox News show Life, Liberty, & Levin. 

Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

The Associated Press is currently suing the Trump White House and claiming they’re a “global, independent, non-partisan news organization.”

Their latest attempt to prove support among the Ukrainian people for President Vladimir Zelenskyy over President Donald Trump was so laughably lame as to induce widespread mockery. In the wake of the contentious White House meeting between Zelensky and Trump, AP put together a video that was intended to show general support among Ukrainians for the stances taken by their president.

The problem for AP in making their case for Zelensky was that they used only two, count ’em, TWO Ukrainian interviewees. They were also two of the sources offering glowing praise for the Ukrainian leader in a story by AP’s Justin Spike headlined “Ukrainians rally around Zelenskyy as defender of national interest after Oval Office blowout.”

A “nonpartisan” news agency wouldn’t line up a parade of Ukrainians to praise Zelenskyy and rail against Trump. The two sources on video also gushed in the AP story: 

But many Ukrainians on Friday seemed unfazed by the blowout between Zelenskyy and Trump, expressing a sense that the Ukrainian leader had stood up for their country’s dignity and interests by firmly maintaining his stance in the face of chiding from some of the world’s most powerful men.

Nataliia Serhiienko, 67, a retiree in Kyiv, said she thinks Ukrainians approve of their president’s performance in Washington, “because Zelenskyy fought like a lion.”

…“We are striving for democracy, and we are met with total disrespect, toward our warriors, our soldiers, and the people of our country,” said [Artem] Vasyliev, a native of Russian-occupied Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.

Vasyliev criticized the U.S. president for what he said was a failure to recognize the human cost of Russia’s invasion, saying Trump “doesn’t understand that people are dying, that cities are being destroyed, people are suffering, mothers, children, soldiers.”

“He cannot understand this, he is just a businessman. For him, money is sacred,” he said.

That was it as you can see in this video:

 

This very lazy attempt by AP to create the idea of animosity in Ukraine towards Trump was so ridiculous as to provoke widespread mockery by YouTube commentators as you can see by these responses:

What was that? The AP interviews two people drinking in the middle of the night? Are they serious?

The AP interviewed 42 people and these 2 expressed the opinion the AP wanted to promote.

Two persons. You want two person to represent the whole country. Wow you really have lost your way AP

lol they could only find 2 people that agree with AP’s take that it’s Trump’s fault

My goodness the quality of Always Propaganda has really degraded the last month or so. Guess losing all that USAID money has had an affect.

It looks like AP needs to brush up on the devious art of creating effective fake news propaganda. Perhaps its time for them to conduct a refresher course on this topic. A good locale for AP students of such lessons can be found down by the Gulf Of America.

Scott Jennings, former special assistant to George W. Bush, provided his usual, much-needed touch of sanity to CNN Sunday morning, on State of the Union. As a panel hosted by Dana Bash railed against the Trump administration in a by now pretty true-to-form way, Jennings forced them to listen as he confronted them with actual facts about the current state of affairs, and the proper respective functions of the presidency and federal bureaucracy.

His words fell on deaf ears, though, and in the end Bash was still at ease jokingly comparing the administration and its supporters to Nazis.

Bash opened the discussion with President Trump’s meeting Friday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which ended in a heated exchange of words. She referred to the incident as “theater,” and asked “Is it kind of, ‘Apprentice 2.0,?’” suggesting it was a staged act of cheap showmanship on Trump’s part.

Jennings refused to buy into Bash’s premise, and instead systematically addressed the current media obsessions one by one, as he responded, “I think Donald Trump is doing an amazing job so far on the things that he ran on. Immigration- … the border is effectively shut down. The attitude change from the federal government effectively closed the border(…)”

Instead of playing along with the favored narrative, Jennings stuck to the reality of what the administration had done, and what had resulted in real life.

 

He then went on to the diplomatic blow-up:

Zelenskyy made a huge mistake on Friday. All he had to do was show up and sign this deal, and he just couldn’t do it. And, sometimes, these guys, when they put on the military uniform, they have trouble taking it off. He needs to… put on the garb of diplomacy, and understand that he’s got an honest new broker on the field who can actually help him end this war, maintain his sovereignty, maintain prosperity for the Ukrainians. 

On the liberal media’s number one bogeyman of all – Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency – he said:

[R]egarding Elon and the bureaucracy… there seems to be, when Republicans are president, this idea that the bureaucracy and the government should not be responsive to the political leadership of the executive branch. That is totally false. It has nothing to do with a loyalty test, but it does have to do with whether or not the unelected bureaucracy is responsive to the political oversight of the government.  Democrats right now do not seem to believe that the president should be able to be the president.

Upon returning from a commercial break, rather than actually answer any of what Jennings had said, Bash concluded with a series of political cartoons, including a World War II-era one by Dr. Seuss, depicting the “America First” isolationists of that time as Nazi sympathizers and fascists.

Thanks to Jennings’ courage and honesty, CNN was again forced to hear some actual facts spoken on their show. Instead of acknowledging those facts, though, they merely responded with cheap ridicule, and a flippant Nazi comparison.

To view full transcript, click “expand” to read:

CNN’s State of the Union 
03/02/2025
9:45 AM 

[ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: TRUMP ALLOWS MUSK AND VANCE TO SHARE HIS SPOTLIGHT]

BASH: Welcome back. My panel is here.

And one of the things I want to put on the table here is whether what we saw between Elon Musk, and the J.D. Vance- sort of- behavior, and the- theater, if you will, that went into a lot of the substance that really matters, is it kind of, ‘Apprentice 2.0.?’

(…)

SCOTT JENNINGS, FORMER SPECIAL ASSISTANT TO PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I think Donald Trump is doing an amazing job so far on the things that he ran on. Immigration- the border is- just his taking office, the border is effectively shut down. The attitude change from the federal government effectively closed the border. Look at the people coming across now. Look at the encounters today versus what was going on with Biden. I think, on March 4, you’re going to hear them talk a lot about the success on immigration.

As it relates to Ukraine, look, Zelenskyy made a huge mistake on Friday. All he had to do was show up and sign this deal, and he just couldn’t do it. 

[ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: PRESIDENT TRUMP TO ADDRESS JOINT SESSION OF CONGRESS]

And, sometimes, these guys, when they put on the military uniform, they have trouble taking it off. He needs to take off the military garb, put on the garb of diplomacy, and understand that he’s got an honest new broker on the field who can actually help him end this war, maintain his sovereignty, maintain prosperity for the Ukrainians.

And regarding- and regarding Elon and the bureaucracy, if I just may respond to something you said, about the bureaucracy, there seems to be, when Republicans are president, that this idea that the bureaucracy and the government should not be responsive to the political leadership of the executive branch. 

That is totally false. It has nothing to do with a loyalty test, but it does have to do with whether or not the unelected bureaucracy is responsive to the political oversight of the government- 

REP. SUBRAS SUBRAMANYAM (D-VA): Uh, now, I-

JENNINGS: Democrats right now do not seem to believe that the president should be able to be the president.

SUBRAMANYAM: You should come to my town halls. You should come and talk to some of these federal workers- many of them are veterans, in fact. But many of them are very competent. What we’re doing is we’re- we’re prioritizing loyalty over competence. 

JENNINGS: I don’t doubt it- 

SUBRAMANYAM: That’s bad for our country right now-

JENNINGS: But I prioritize the political leadership. Elections have consequences, and they need to understand.

(…)

[ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: NEW CNN POLL- TRUMP APPROVAL AT 48% AHEAD OF JOINT ADDRESS

We have elections for a reason in this country. We vest all executive authority in a president of the United States, not in an unelected bureaucracy, not in independent agencies, but in a president. The president’s agenda matters. When a Republican is president, the bureaucracy resists. It has to stop.

(…)

There’s two parties, Dana. One wants bigger government. One wants smaller government. I think I’ll take it to the midterms.

DANA BASH: All right, everybody, thank you so much for being here. And up next, we all want a laugh. We probably all need a laugh. This week’s best political cartoons. After a quick break.

(…)

[ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: POLITICAL CARTOONISTS WEIGH IN ON WILD WEEK]

BASH: Now some political cartoons we saw this week. Here’s one from Matt Davies showing foreign aid and the price of eggs in the United States. RJ Mattson shows the executive branch sawing off the other two branches. And check this one out. Going back- way back into the archives, we found this cartoon from doctor Seuss in 1941 on what ‘America first’ means, and what it meant back then.

(…)

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared Sunday on the Fox News Channel’s MediaBuzz and debated host Howard Kurtz on a slew of subjects over two segments, including the Associated Press hubbub over its ban from the press pool (the smaller, rotating group of journalists that follow the President to smaller events and on Air Force One) and the press shop taking over the pool’s make-up.

On the AP lawsuit and the Gulf of America/Gulf of Mexico name change, Kurtz framed the back-and-forth as “the White House trying to dictate the editorial stance of an independent media outlet,” but Leavitt countered this was keeping a promise she made in her first briefing that “we were going to hold news media outlets accountable if they were pushing lies.”

 

 

Leavitt pointed out the AP was who took this matter to court (thinking their lack of pool access was a danger to the First Amendment) and lost the first round with the judge ruling, in her summation, “it is not a right of any news organization to walk into the Oval Office[.]”

She also emphasized the AP is still welcome on White House grounds, including the Briefing Room and that covering the White House is a “privilege,” not a right:

The Associated Press still has their credentials. They are still loud — allowed to cover the White House. They are still in the brief room with me, I have taken questions from them. The only privilege that has been revoked is that privilege of going into the Oval Office, being part of that corps, 13 press pool members and not every outlet has the ability to go in there every single day like the Associated Press has for decades. It’s a privilege. We’re opening up that privilege to other outlets who deserve a seat at that table.

Kurtz made clear his feelings about the pool from the top of the show, explaining the press and White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) were right to be “up in arms about a major change to the White House pool” because “White House officials will grant this privilege mainly to friendly reporters who have sympathetic questions.”

He also argued the WHCA should remain in power of who gets access to the President because “the big media companies pay most of the charges for flying on Air Force One[.]”

 

 

At another point, Kurtz brought up the press pool and said she could be looking to bar “legacy media outlets as part of the pool, largely picking friendly reporters who will ask friendly question.”

Leavitt said she’d “have to fundamentally disagree” noted two of their more recent poolers were vehemently anti-Trump outlets in The Independent and the Los Angeles Times on the print side and CNN as a TV pooler (on both Friday and Saturday).

“This is not about revoking the right of — of biased news organizations to be in the Oval Office or to cover this President. It’s simply about ending the monetized monopoly that the White House Correspondents’ Association has had over press coverage at the White House…The [WHCA] began more than 100 years ago. Certainly, the media and digital age has changed since the nine — early nineteen hundreds and we are simply trying to reflect that change,” she added.

Kurtz then defended the WHCA against claims of being “an elite group” because “its members are elected by the press corps at large to represent their interests and also there’s the question of who pays for flights on Air Force One as “a lot of people don’t know that the reporters are charged for that.”

Leavitt addressed both plus whether she still believes legacy media outlets have a role in the press corps (click “expand”):

LEAVITT: They are, yes, and they will continue to be. In terms of the issues that the White House Correspondents’ Association has since raised, saying that the Trump White House won’t be able to handle the logistics of this is frankly laughable to us. Because many of us inside of the Trump White House were just on President Trump’s historic campaign. There was no White House Correspondents’ Association helping us with that press coverage.

KURTZ: Right.

LEAVITT: We were putting together seven rallies a day across the country in multiple locations, and the press were traveling with us everywhere we went, so our team is well-equipped to burden these logistical challenges and we’ve already been doing that for several days throughout this week and we’ve opened up that access up to new voices while also maintaining the respect for the legacy media who have invested resources and who have covered this White House for decades —

KURTZ: Yeah.

LEAVITT: — and we respect that.

KURTZ: You’ve rightly pointed out that the President provides endless access to the mainstream media. I mean, he makes news, you know, 10 times a day.

LEAVITT: Every second.

KURTZ: Okay, but he’s continued to do a number of podcasts as he did during the campaign. So, are the old-line news outlets much less important now from your point of view?

LEAVITT: I think that they have a different place in this digital landscape and I think we need to recognize that Americans are consuming their news in very different ways than just tuning in to cable television at night and President Trump recognizes that as well, but very much —

KURTZ: You don’t have a problem with tuning into cable, I hope.

LEAVITT: — no, no, trust me, I have cable on my office at the White House all day every day.

Kurtz closed by jokingly saying she “clearly [went] too far and cross[ed] the line in saying that you and the President are having fun, but the media don’t want you to have fun.”

 

 

Leavitt clapped back that “we are having fun” while “the media are having a hard time covering a President who is genuinely having fun when they do have an inherent bias against him” that’s “ingrained in their own personal opinions of the President.”

To see the relevant FNC transcript from March 2, click here.

Christiane Amanpour is first and foremost an international affairs correspondent, but for Friday’s PBS edition of Amanpour & Co., she interviewed playwright Joe Murphy and actor Stephen Kunken at the Soho Place theatre in London, where the climate change message play Kyoto, cowritten by Murphy and starring Kunken, is being performed.

Amanpour, who surely considers herself an intellectual, sounded like any other knee-jerk liberal when she again lauded the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale (also featuring Kunken), the source for all the red cloak-white bonnet uniform of hundreds of unimaginative feminist protests in the Trump era.

She called climate change “the existential crisis of our time.” There was praise for environmentalist and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who signed the Paris Climate Accords in 2016 as Secretary of State under President Barack Obama.

Murphy: The temptation is to feel exactly that kind of despair. And I won’t pretend I have not felt that at times, but I think it’s also important to remember that we would exist in a worse world if Kyoto had not happened. It feels like a slight cliche at the moment to say multilateralism is dead. Senator John Kerry was here the other day.

Amanpour: He’s still fighting the good fight.

Amanpour bluntly pushed simplistic U.S. partisan politics, taking advantage of actor Kunken’s presence to harp on The Handmaid’s Tale show.

Amanpour: ….This play might not have been a protest play had Kamala Harris won. The Jungle or the Handmaid’s Tale which you [Kunken] were in might not have been so incredibly difficult to bear had Hillary Clinton not lost when you are playing them and Trump had won with all of his misogyny and all the rest of it. The Jungle, which you [Murphy] did about refugees was also a protest play as to how the world was dealing with the most vulnerable amongst us.

After a brief dip into the ostensible subject of Kyoto — climate change talks — Amanpour steered the talk back to The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian feminist novel, and tied it to anti-Trump politics, even harking back to Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016. (Seriously, liberals, read another book, or in this case, watch another show.

Amanpour: ….Let’s just go back to Handmaid’s Tale. Because again it’s a real issue, the rights of women. And you can see with the new quote unquote manosphere, with the bros with all these people from Mark Zuckerberg and of course Donald Trump. I mean it’s what Margaret Atwood foretold. Tell me what it’s like to play that when you thought maybe Hillary was going to win and then when she didn’t and all of that progress was rolled back and is now being rolled back, a lot of it.

Actor Kunken provided lefty handwringing.

Kunken: Well, I had committed to do that part right before the election. And thought, and I think when I arrived we all believed that that was, we were making another cautionary tale and we arrived on the ground and it was a whole different reality. It’s hard. It’s invigorating to work on those things.

It’s interesting though, because we went through an entire cycle in the six years we made the show. We had the moment of protest. And then we came back out and we thought, “Wow, something was achieved here, these voices were heard.” We saw those red outfits crimson clothes appear outside of Congress, and we were making an effect. And then the show has just wrapped and we’re in a different world again. And I think one of the pieces of solace that we can take in this moment is that time is long. You hit a certain age I think where you look at the cycles. And things will change. There is hope….

After spending the first segment of Monday’s show talking about the Oscars and commending ABC moderator Whoopi Goldberg’s dress at the event, The View pivoted to talking about the confrontation between President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House last week. In leading the discussion, Goldberg came out in support in Ukraine but did so at the expense of America; equating the United States with imperial invaders like Russia.

“You know, that has to be one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever seen,” she proclaimed after playing an extended soundbite of the contentious exchange.

As if she had a clue about what Trump’s voters thought, she suggested they didn’t vote for him “to be the hard guy” and argued that he should have somehow “asked” everyone first:

This is a leader of a sovereign nation, and you are doing theater with him because you’re trying to show that you’re the hard guy. But I don’t think anybody wanted you to be the hard guy. I don’t think you asked anybody how they felt; how people who voted — voted for you. You didn’t ask them how they feel about what you’re doing.

“You didn’t ask them if they want to be operatives of Putin’s government. You haven’t asked that,” she Goldberg decried.

While forgetting Zelenskyy’s name, Goldberg said she was “sorry” and “I do stand with you…because you’ve been fighting, your country has been fighting and you have been doing it on your own.”

 

 

“I stand with y’all because nobody should ever be able to come into your country and say, ‘this is my country,’” she declared. It was then that she equated America with Russia. “We have a habit of doing that. Many countries in our world have a habit of going in and invading other countries,” she asserted.

“Who are we?” she asked the rest of the table. “What did you think when you watched this insanity?”

Near the end of the segment, Goldberg gave the audience and the viewers at home instructions for how to support Ukraine:

GOLDBERG: And here’s — Here’s the thing that everybody can do. If you support Ukraine, say it out loud. Say it out loud.

SUNNY HOSTIN: I support Ukraine.

AUDIENCE: I support Ukraine.

[Applause]

GOLDBERG: Okay. I support Ukraine.

“This is what’s going to change the tide. It’s us. We have to be vocal,” she added.

That demand to be vocal was then expanded to the media; with a dash of moral blackmail included:

Media outlets have to be vocal! Media outlets have to call it out! Even at threat of being sued! Call out the truth! Call it out because if you don’t, it looks like you’re joining them!

The transcript is below. Click “expand” to read:

ABC’s The View
March 3, 2025
11:16:14 a.m. Eastern

(…)

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: You know, that has to be one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever seen.

[Applause]

This is a leader of a sovereign nation, and you are doing theater with him because you’re trying to show that you’re the hard guy. But I don’t think anybody wanted you to be the hard guy. I don’t think you asked anybody how they felt; how people who voted — voted for you. You didn’t ask them how they feel about what you’re doing. You didn’t ask them if they want to be operatives of Putin’s government. You haven’t asked that.

And I’m sorry. I do stand with you —

ANA NAVARRO: Zelenskyy.

GOLDBERG: Zelenskyy, because you’ve been fighting, your country has been fighting and you have been doing it on your own. And you have been getting help, but I stand with y’all because nobody should ever be able to come into your country and say, ‘this is my country.’

[Applause]

We have a habit of doing that. Many countries in our world have a habit of going in and invading other countries, and we all have said — I thought for the past at least 100 years, we don’t like that. We don’t want to do that. We don’t want to be that, and here we are.

Who are we? What did you think when you watched this insanity?

(…)

11:27:37 a.m. Eastern

GOLDBERG: And here’s — Here’s the thing that everybody can do. If you support Ukraine, say it out loud. Say it out loud.

SUNNY HOSTIN: I support Ukraine.

AUDIENCE: I support Ukraine.

[Applause]

GOLDBERG: Okay. I support Ukraine. You know?

NAVARRO: Protesters – J.D. Vance was in Vermont skiing and protesters showed up in the coldest weather telling him to go ski in Russia.

GOLDBERG: Yeah.

NAVARRO: Maybe stay there while you’re at it.

GOLDBERG: This is what’s going to change the tide. It’s us. We have to be vocal. Media outlets have to be vocal!

[Applause]

Media outlets have to call it out! Even at threat of being sued! Call out the truth! Call it out because if you don’t, it looks like you’re joining them!

Wow, who knew that setting insane and arbitrary emission goals to “net zero” would be an exercise in utter futility, eh Reuters?

The climate-obsessed Reuters had somewhat of a red-pill moment in a February 28 item when it admitted that the “pursuit of net zero carbon emissions has been a resounding failure.” For an outlet that once advocated for the Nobel Peace Prize to be doled out to juvenile eco-delinquent Greta Thunberg, this must have been a hard pill to swallow.

Reuters conceded that “[d]espite trillions of dollars spent on renewable energy, hydrocarbons still account for over 80%, opens new tab of the world’s primary energy and a similar share of recent increases in energy consumption, according to The Energy Institute.” Coal, oil and natural gas production, reported Reuters, “are at record highs.”

Good for Reuters to come around to the obvious, er, finally. But the meaningless nature of such economy-crippling standards was already circulating in the ether long before Reuters did its about-face. As Climate Depot founder Marc Morano told MRC Business in June 2024, “Net zero in the climate agenda is really nothing short of Soviet-style central planning. Every sector of our economy is subject to long range planning to meet net zero goals.” 

Even by leftist standards, net zero emissions was already speculated to achieve next to nothing. Then-Secretary of State under President Barack Obama John Kerry conceded in 2015 during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21): “If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions – remember what I just said, all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions – it wouldn’t be enough.” 

No kidding. Reuters, of course, didn’t bother resurfacing Kerry’s comments in its latest piece. But the outlet did admit that the enormous push toward renewables hasn’t necessarily resulted in lower costs for consumers:

Solar and wind power have grown to a mere 3.5% of primary energy production. The levelised cost of renewable energy – which measures of the net present value of electricity produced over a plant’s lifetime – has declined sharply over the years. But this has not resulted into lower electricity prices. In fact, as the share of the energy mix provided by renewables has risen, electricity prices have tended to increase. That’s because wind and solar power are intermittent. Since storing energy in batteries is uneconomic, traditional sources of power are still needed as backup, which is expensive.

Thanks a lot, Captain Obvious!

Hoover Institution Visiting Fellow Bjorn Lomborg told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow in 2021 that even if all U.S. presidents for the next seventy years were to follow then-President Joe Biden’s extremist emissions-cutting policies, “it will reduce temperatures trivially.” Lomborg said the reduction would only be a meaningless “0.07° Fahrenheit. And this is through the UN climate model. So, it’s going to be very hard. It’s going to be very costly. It’ll have virtually no impact.” In fact, noted Lomborg, “[Y]ou’ve never solved a problem in history by telling people, ‘Could you live with less?’ You were just talking about that. ‘Could you please — you know — celebrate your Fourth of July in a way you’d hate?’”

Apparently Reuters couldn’t really grasp this concept totally until around now, given that it was pumping out net zero agitprop as recently as October 2024, such as the following item headlined: “Net zero target needs $3.5 trillion in annual green energy investment, Wood Mackenzie says.” 

It was Audie Cornish’s first day as host of CNN This Morning, replacing Kasie Hunt.

Cornish’s demeanor is temperate, just as she was taught as a National Public Radio host. No Don Lemon-Jim Sciutto ego-driven excesses. In opening the show, Cornish modestly didn’t even make mention of her debut.

Even so, for those hoping for more political balance from CNN, it was an inauspicious beginning when considering the panel Cornish chose to assemble for her first show.

The panel was comprised of Jonah Goldberg, co-founder of the generally Trump-critical site The Dispatch, and two New York Times journalists who double as CNNers: Astead Herndon and Lourdes “Lulu” Garcia-Navarro.

Cornish’s predecessor, Hunt, was no conservative. Even so, her panels almost always included a traditional Republican in the person of either Brad Todd or Matt Gorman. Cornish invited neither today–not to mention Republican home run hitter Scott Jennings!

Saying that “there are a lot of bets going around,” Garcia-Navarro promoted a betting pool on how long Marco Rubio “will last” as Secretary of State. Her notion being that, as the child of refugees from Castro’s Cuba [as is Garcia-Navarro herself], having to promote Trump’s foreign policy views is antithetical to Rubio’s hawkish policies on Russia and Putin. Earth to Lulu: It’s been a month. 

Speaking of Castro’s Cuba, don’t forget our 2016 blog on LGN when she was at NPR: Kiss from Fidel Castro’s Brother Felt Like ‘Blessing of the Holy Trinity’

Goldberg and Herndon said that they were not in the pool. Neither am I, but I wouldn’t bet on Rubio leaving Foggy Bottom any time soon. To date, Rubio has received widely positive reviews on his work.

Moreover, as someone who has been around Trump for at least a decade, going back to the beginning of the GOP primary in 2015, Rubio sought and accepted his appointment with eyes wide open. He was surely well aware of Trump’s views on Putin and Ukraine, and how they might have differed from his own.

Here’s the transcript.

CNN This Morning
3/3/25
6:03 am ET

AUDIE CORNISH: Joining me now to talk about all of this, Jonah Goldberg, CNN political commentator and co-founder of The Dispatch, Estead Herndon, CNN political analyst and national politics reporter at the New York Times, and Lulu Garcia, CNN contributor and New York Times journalist, also host of the podcast The Interview. 

. . .

Let me bring in Lulu for a second. I know you watch Marco Rubio carefully in terms of how he talks about this publicly. 

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO: My Florida senator. 

CORNISH: Yeah, what do you make of this? 

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I was pretty shocked. This is the son of Cuban political exiles. And the idea that he is having to be so deferential to Putin, so pushing a foreign policy that is upending everything that the United States has stood for is pretty shocking.

And I think that what we’re going to be seeing going forward, there’s been a lot of bets by people like me, like how long Rubio’s going to last in this cabinet, because —

CORNISH: Astead, are you in that pool? 

ASTEAD HERNDON: I mean, I get why the bets are going, because it does seem like a team of rivals.

CORNISH: — Wait, Jonah, are you in that pool?

JONAH GOLDBERG: I am not.

CORNISH: [Turning to Herndon] Are you in that pool?

HERNDON: No.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Maybe not. I mean, the bets are going, but, like, of everybody, he seemed to be the one that wasn’t going to last that long, right? 

Like, because, you know, he stood for something very different in terms of his foreign policy. He was very hawkish. He was very anti-Russia. He’s spoken very, you know, forcefully against Vladimir Putin. And so to have to be pushing this now seems very, very, kind of a complete about-face.

And so, you know, that’s the question. 

 

On Saturday night, MSNBC host Ayman Mohyeldin used his eponymous show to paint Republican efforts to roll back the liberal agenda on transgenders and gays as a new “McCarthyism” with guests pushing a conspiracy theory that recent actions are an “experiment” by Republicans to prepare to take rights away from a larger number of Americans later so they can stay in power.

The MSNBC host began with the tiresome historical comparison: “For about a decade in the late 1940’s and ’50s, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy spread fear and paranoia about this country by persecuting those on the left that he deemed, ‘un-American.’ Now, many of today’s Republicans are McCarthy’s ideological descendants. And one of their primary targets now appears to be the LGBTQ community.”

 

 

He continued: “In fact, just yesterday, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed a law removing gender identity as a protected class in that state. Now, trans and nonbinary Iowans are no longer shielded from discrimination in education, housing, employment, many other aspects of everyday life.”

After recalling moves by Republicans in Michigan and several other states to try to challenge the Obergell vs. Hodges decision and try to ban same-sex marriage, he concluded his introduction: “And with that foundation in place, Republicans have brought modern McCarthyism back into American life and placed a target squarely on the backs of those in the LGBTQ community.”

Mohyeldin brought on his liberal guests — Imara Jones of Translash Media and podcaster Francesca Fiorentini — for further discussion. Jones declared Republican actions are more akin to Jim Crow than McCarthyism:

[W]hat we saw during McCarthyism was a witchhunt based upon people’s supposed political beliefs and associations and I think what we’re seeing here is fundamental denial of people’s rights based upon who they are, which I think actually raises the level of concern here, right? Are we looking at something that has more in common with the worst of America’s past like Jim Crow, honestly, than McCarthyism?

Jones soon saw an ulterior motive by Republicans:

[S]o, I think what we’re looking at is an experimentation here on the part of the Republican Party and the administration for how you begin to remove people from public life an American if they’re going to hold power over time and all that’s happening is because trans people are such a small portion of the population, you know, less than one percent. It’s a great group of people from their perspective to see what you need to do in order to remove people from public life and to strip them of their rights, which is why this is not going to stop only with trans people. We now see it moving to gay people, and it’s going to move to ever larger groups of Americans

After Mohyeldin played a clip of State Rep. Josh Shriver (R-MI) announcing his push for a gay marriage ban in Michigan, he went to Fiorentini for the sarcastic retort: “[I]t’s weird that he’s a white guy. Weird. Weird one.”

She also voiced agreement with Jones’s conspiracy theory Republicans have an ulterior motive in their policies toward transgenders, leading to Mohyeldin to voice agreement, after which she added Republicans want to trap women in abusive marriages (click “expand”):

FIORENTINI: Well, I mean, there’s no question and answer during the Yale debate club. So, like, why should he have to answer any questions now? You know, it’s weird that he’s a white guy. Weird. Weird one. I think Imara is absolutely right. Let’s just underscore what she said, right? This is a trial balloon — it always has been. We are in the top line of, “First they came for the,” trans Americans.

MOHYELDIN: Right.

FIORENTINI: Right? And if we don’t stop it there, it festers. We know they’re also going after no-fault divorce. They want to trap women whether it’s by rescinding their rights to their own bodies, when and how they can have a child if they can be safe in so doing and then now trapping them into abusive marriages. I mean, they’re trying to roll back the clock.

Transcript follows:

MSNBC’s Ayman
March 1, 2025
8:32 p.m. Eastern

AYMAN MOHYELDIN: For about a decade in the late 1940’s and ’50s, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy spread fear and paranoia about this country by persecuting those on the left that he deemed “un-American.” Now, many of today’s Republicans are McCarthy’s ideological descendants and one of their primary targets now appears to be the LGBTQ community. In fact, just yesterday, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed a law removing gender identity as a protected class in that state. Now, trans and nonbinary Iowans are no longer shielded from discrimination in education, housing, employment, many other aspects of everyday life. But Iowa is not alone. In fact, lawmakers in at least nine states have instructed measures — or, rather, introduced measures — instructing the government to chip away some of the rights of same-sex couples’ right to marry. More than half of them, including the one in Michigan, have urged the Supreme Court to overturn the Obergefell vs. Hodges decision — the one they passed in 2015 that granted same-sex couples nationwide the right to marry. The Michigan resolution was introduced by State Representative Josh Shriver. It argues that the Obergefell ruling is, “at odds with the sanctity of marriage, the Michigan constitution, and principles upon which this country was established.” Similar measures have now been introduced in Montana, Idaho. and the Dakotas. The ones in North Dakota and Idaho already passed state houses dominated by Republicans. And, of course, this is not at all surprising. Justice Clarence Thomas argued in 2022, after all, that the court should reconsider the same-sex marriage ruling. And with that foundation in place, Republicans have brought modern McCarthyism back into American life and placed a target squarely on the backs of those in the LGBTQ community. My panel is back with me now. Imara, your thoughts on this? Republicans — they’re not even pretending to hide their desire to overturn Obergefell anymore. When you see these lawmakers in nine states try to undermine it, it’s clear they’re trying to do. They got the green light — they got the signal. We’ve seen this playbook before. A Supreme Court justice kind of signals out there, “Hey, you know, you can change this through lawfare,” somebody goes out, starts to bring case after case after case through the pipeline of the judiciary with the hopes that one of them gets to this specific Supreme Court. And, as we saw with Roe vs. Wade being overturned, we see Obergefell and Hodges overturned.

IMARA JONES, TRANSLASH MEDIA: Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, what we saw during McCarthyism was a witchhunt based upon people’s supposed political beliefs and associations and I think what we’re seeing here is fundamental denial of people’s rights based upon who they are, which I think actually raises the level of concern here, right? Are we looking at something that has more in common with the worst of America’s past like Jim Crow, honestly, than McCarthyism? Because what we are seeing in Iowa, for example, is the removal of trans people from civil rights protections that the state granted, you know, just a little over a decade ago, for example, and the rolling back of rights through a Supreme Court ruling and through a series of state laws, for example, that people have gained, so I think what we’re looking at is an experimentation here on the part of the Republican Party and the administration for how you begin to remove people from public life an American if they’re going to hold power over time and all that’s happening is because trans people are such a small portion of the population, you know, less than one percent. It’s a great group of people from their perspective to see what you need to do in order to remove people from public life and to strip them of their rights, which is why this is not going to stop only with trans people. We now see it moving to gay people, and it’s going to move to ever larger groups of Americans, and they’re doing it in plain view and largely getting away with it, which only emboldens people who wish to enact the worst. So I think that everybody needs to be deeply concerned about what’s happening

MOYHELDIN: Francesca, I want to talk about this. Michigan state Republican Josh Schriver, who hashed out his proposal to condemn same sex marriage. You know, he held a press conference to discuss his bill. You know, one that he, I assume is proud of and thinks is better for Americans. And yet he wasn’t brave enough to actually take any questions and bailed after a few minutes. If you’re going to go after people’s rights, why not have the courage, the moral courage to actually answer questions about it? Why run away?

FRANCESCA FIORENTINI, AMERICA UNHINGED PODCAST: Well, I mean, there’s no question and answer during the Yale debate club. So, like, why should he have to answer any questions now? You know, it’s weird that he’s a white guy. Weird. Weird one. I think Imara is absolutely right. Let’s just underscore what she said, right? This is a trial balloon — it always has been. We are in the top line of, “First they came for the,” trans Americans.

MOHYELDIN: Right.

FIORENTINI: Right? And if we don’t stop it there, it festers. We know they’re also going after no-fault divorce. They want to trap women whether it’s by rescinding their rights to their own bodies, when and how they can have a child if they can be safe in so doing and then now trapping them into abusive marriages. I mean, they’re trying to roll back the clock.