CNN’s Rampage Against Ted Nugent Leads to Disastrous Ratings (+video)

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Photo Credit: AFPBy John Nolte.

CNN is a cable news network in its death throes. As ratings return to near-historic lows, CNN chief Jeff Zucker is obviously making terrible decisions while in panic-mode. Just-released ratings show that CNN’s stupid, wildly hypocritical and hysterical rampage against Ted Nugent last week led to a disastrous Friday.

Narratives are all about momentum. You want to build interest as the viewer wonders where the story will go. Across almost every one of its shows, CNN’s stable of mostly left-wing anchors — especially Wolf Blitzer, Carol Costello, and Ashleigh Banfield — drove the phony Nugent story using every trick in the book. This story defined CNN last week and it can now go down as yet another dismal failure. I’ll explain why after the numbers:

Total Friday viewership at CNN averaged a paltry 254,000 viewers with only 70,000 in the 25-54 age group. Despite all the energy poured into CNN’s phony outrage over Nugent, this is actually down a little from last week. Zucker and his tribe didn’t make public fools of themselves for a full week in the hopes holding on to the dismal ratings from the prior week. The idea was to stoke an increase in ratings through ginned up national outrage.

In the 25-54 demo, here is how catastrophic Friday was for specific CNN programs:

New Day 77k
Wolf Blitzer 52k
Crossfire 25k-
Wolf Blitzer 49k
Erin Burnett 58k
Anderson Cooper 83k

Read more this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: CNNWatch: Ted Nugent Annoys CNN Host by Taking Credit for Getting Piers Morgan’s ‘A** Thrown Out’, Blasting Her Colleagues

By Jason Howerton.

Conservative rocker and NRA board member Ted Nugent took some credit for getting Piers Morgan’s CNN show cancelled during an interview with one of the network’s other anchors, Erin Burnett. His comments came after Burnett asked him if his apology for calling President Barack Obama a “sub-human mongrel” was sincere.

Nugent insisted his apology was serious and also defended himself against claims that his comments were racist in nature.

“We call bad people who are destroying our neighborhoods mongrels,” Nugent said, later adding, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body!”

Read more this story HERE.

Obama Mourns Passing of Harold Ramis, Not Shirley Temple Black

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Jason DeCrowThere are many things to criticize President Obama for — I won’t even list them since you know what they are — but give him credit when he issues a statement about a famous citizen who has passed.

Obama on Tuesday released a statement regarding the death of Harold Ramis, the actor, writer and director who was responsible for such classics as “Ghostbusters” and “Caddyshack.”

“Michelle and I were saddened to hear of the passing of Harold Ramis, one of America’s greatest satirists, and like so many other comedic geniuses, a proud product of Chicago’s Second City,” Obama said.

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Governors Erupt in Partisan Dispute at White House

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Photo Credit: AP Photo/Charles DharapakThe nation’s governors emerged from a meeting with President Barack Obama on Monday claiming harmony, only to immediately break into an on-camera partisan feud in front of the West Wing.

Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal lashed out first, saying if Obama were serious about growing the economy he would approve the Keystone XL pipeline project and take other executive actions.

Instead, Jindal said, Obama “seems to be waving the white flag of surrender” on the economy by focusing on raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10, up from $7.25. “The Obama economy is now the minimum wage economy. I think we can do better than that,” Jindal said.

Jindal’s statements were the kind that Republicans often make on television appearances or at partisan events, but don’t usually come from potential presidential candidates standing yards from the Oval Office. Other governors had been instead expressing wide agreement and appreciation for the president’s time. As Jindal spoke, some of his colleagues began shaking their heads, and Hawaii Democratic Gov. Neil Abercrombie began audibly mumbling to others around him.

Connecticut Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy took over the microphone from Jindal and responded sharply, “Wait a second, until a few moments ago we were going down a pretty cooperative road. So let me just say that we don’t all agree that moving Canadian oil through the United States is necessarily the best thing for the United States economy.”

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Heating Up: Climate Change Advocates Try to Silence Krauthammer

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Photo Credit: Fox News Charles Krauthammer says it right up front in his Washington Post column: “I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier.”

He does, however, challenge the notion that the science on climate change is settled and says those who insist otherwise are engaged in “a crude attempt to silence critics and delegitimize debate.”

How ironic, then, that some environmental activists launched a petition urging the Post not to publish Krauthammer’s column on Friday.

Their response to opinions they disagree with is to suppress the speech.

Brad Johnson (@ClimateBrad), the editor of HillHeat.com and a former Think Progress staffer, boasted on Twitter that 110,000 people had urged the newspaper “to stop publishing climate lies” like the Krauthammer piece.

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Apple’s Security Breach Should Scare You More Than Target’s Did

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Photo Credit: ShutterstockApple’s security protocol breach is nearly as bad as handing your credit card straight to a hacker rather than making them steal the information through the magnetic stripe readers.

The flaw in Apple’s iOs and OS X platforms essentially allows a hacker to get in between the initial verification “handshake” connection between the user and the destination server, enabling the adversary to masquerade as a trusted endpoint. This means the connection which is supposed to be encrypted between you and your bank, email server, healthcare provider and more is open to attack.

Security experts across the web recommend updating iPhones and iPads with the available iOS patches now, and using browsers other than Safari for OS X systems without an available Apple fix.

Usually to achieve encrypted web traffic, a handshake is accomplished through a Secure Sockets Layer — SSL for short — or more recently, Transport Layer Security, or TLS; both are Internet protocols that provide a secure channel between two machines operating over the Internet or an internal network.

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Bible Stops Two Bullets to Save Life of Ohio Bus Driver

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A Bible saved the life of a Ohio bus driver after the man was shot twice in the chest early Monday, police said.

Rickey Waggoner, a Dayton RTA bus driver, was making a mechanical fix outside his bus when three assailants approached him and shot him in what appears to have been a gang initiation, the Dayton Daily News reported.

Waggoner was shot twice in the chest at close range, but a contemporary version of the Bible, titled “The Message,” absorbed the bullets that would otherwise have killed the 49-year-old bus driver, according to police documents obtained by the newspaper.

“I’ve heard stories about that happening during the second World War. I’m glad to be in the club.”

“There was obviously some kind of intervention involved in this incident because (Waggoner) should probably not be here,” Dayton Police Sgt. Michael Pauley told the paper at the scene.

Read more from this story HERE.

Piers Morgan Threatens National Rifle Association

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Photo Credit: Chris Pizzello/Invision/APAfter the National Rifle Association tweeted the news of Morgan’s departure on Twitter, he fired back a response.

“I wouldn’t get too excited @NRA – I’m not done with you yet,” he wrote using the hashtag #GunControlNow.

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DoD Budget Seeks Cuts in BAH, Commissary, Tricare Benefits

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Photo Credit: Military TimesThe Pentagon on Monday proposed the deepest and most far-reaching cuts to military compensation in the 40-year history of the all-volunteer force, explaining that such cuts are necessary in order to pay for more modern gear and high-tech weaponry.

Some highlights of the Defense Department’s budget proposal for fiscal 2015 include the first-ever rollback in Basic Allowance for Housing; a military pay raise that would match last year’s 1 percent hike, the lowest in the volunteer era; massive cuts to commissary subsidies; and potentially increased health care fees for both active-duty families and retirees.

Together, the proposals signal an end to a decade-plus wartime era of rising pay and benefits for troops. Even after the proposed cuts, military compensation would remain comparatively more generous than it was in the 1980s and ’90s. But the Pentagon has never before sought to pare back existing benefits in the all-volunteer era.

Moreover, personnel costs would be slashed further by significant reductions to the size of the force, including the smallest Army since the before the Second World War.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the changes are part of an overarching decision to protect big-ticket programs and research projects by saving money on people.

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Conservative Hollywood Activist to Challenge GOP Rep. Paul Cook

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Photo Credit: Newsmax With some Republican House members under fire from tea party-backed insurgents, one of the more intriguing primary contests is between freshman Rep. Paul Cook of California and Rodney Lee Conover, a writer and longtime conservative activist in the entertainment community.

Cook was elected in California’s Eighth Congressional District in 2012 with the backing of outgoing Republican Rep. Jerry Lewis. A former state assemblyman, Cook has generally voted a conservative line. His district encompasses much of California’s Inland Empire, the area east of Los Angeles that has been a Republican stronghold despite California’s trending blue.

By voting for the continuing House resolution that funded Obamacare, Cook, 70, opened himself up to dissatisfaction from the right and a challenge in the June primary.

“Along with the funding of Obamacare and voting to cut military pensions, the congressman also opposed [California Republican] Rep. Tom McClintock’s bill to rein in the excesses of the National Security Agency,” Conover, 54, told Newsmax.

“These are critical issues, and he’s on the wrong side of all of them,” Conover said.

Read more this story HERE.

Benghazi Justice Could Help Hillary Run

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesThe Obama administration is under growing pressure to make an arrest in the Benghazi attack to quash lingering criticism of its response and help clear the road for a possible Hillary Clinton presidential run in 2016.

Blame for the shortcomings that contributed to the deaths of four Americans has increasingly focused on the former secretary of State as she weighs her next move. That heat is only expected to intensify as the U.S. prepares to pass the 18-month mark since the attack on the U.S mission.

Republicans have revived their probes into the attack ahead of the 2014 mid-term elections, with the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees both releasing reports in recent weeks. Meanwhile, Republicans on the Senate Intelligence panel used their additional views on a recent bipartisan investigation to pin the blame on Clinton for embassy security failings and excoriate the slow pace of justice.

“There simply is no justification … for not doing more to capture and interrogate terrorists who caused the deaths of four Americans,” they wrote in the Jan. 15 report. “The United States can and should do better.”

This past week, the chairman of the House oversight committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), traveled to New Hampshire to “hopefully shape the debate for 2016.” He used the occasion to tear into Clinton, accusing her of preventing the Department of Defense from sending forces to relieve the besieged Americans, despite the Pentagon’s own conclusion that it had no forces in the area ready to be deployed.

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