CBS News was once one of the defining news outlets in the world. Whether it was Edward R. Murrow reporting live from London during the Blitz in World War II or Walter Cronkite’s coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, generations of Americans turned to CBS for fair, accurate reporting on the most important issues of the day. 

No longer.

CBS News now stands accused of deliberately distorting its news coverage for nakedly political purposes, to prop up Kamala Harris’ flailing presidential campaign by attempting to hide her inability to answer even simple questions about her policy positions and how she would act if elected president. 

How badly skewed was CBS’s coverage of its interview with Harris, broadcast to the world on “Face the Nation” and “60 Minutes?” Well, last week, the nonprofit group Center for American Rights (CAR) filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission alleging deliberate news distortion, a violation of FCC regulations and a half-century of precedent. 

In this complaint, CAR lawyer Daniel Suhr contends that the evidence of illegal news distortion by CBS could not be clearer: In two different news programs, CBS broadcast the same question, followed by two very different answers from Harris, resulting in a situation where “the general public no longer has any confidence as to what the Vice President actually said in response to the query.” This goes well beyond mere editorial oversight of an interview — picking what to include and what not to include — and

Abortion enthusiast Jessica Valenti “has spent the last two decades” writing in favor of all things abortion, which now includes a book titled Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win. As this is Valenti’s eighth book, her diatribe continues, but her “facts” come from curated collages of abortion advocacy and, in my case, outright falsehood. Journalism it’s not.  

In hawking her book, Valenti — like most abortion extremists — justifies all intentional abortion by highlighting the issue of rape. But in this book, she lies about not only my point of view but my record. Valenti cuts a sliver of a quote out of context to make a false and cruel accusation, taken from the context of a detailed discussion about how to understand sexual assault and abortion while skipping inconvenient facts that undercut the narrative.

This is a painful topic, but as the abortion lobby forces sexual assault survivors into the debate, it’s sadly often demanded of pro-life advocates who love them both — a hurting mother and a child in the womb.

In an excerpt of Valenti’s book that appeared in Rolling Stone, she writes:

Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists also claim that pregnancy after rape is rare — a claim designed to hide their utter cruelty, and to pivot when asked about abortion ban exceptions. Some even say that women can’t get pregnant from a rape at all. Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins — who has been celebrated as the future of the anti-abortion movement — says that “sexual assault actually helps prevent

The cliché holds that a picture is worth a thousand words. But a recent chart from the Congressional Budget Office is worth nearly 2,000,000,000,000 (that’s two trillion) words. It illustrates the size of the budget deficits Washington continues to run, year in, year out.

The downward trend of the chart, which shows budget deficits for 2023 and the fiscal year that ended on September 30, echoes the downward trend of our nation’s fiscal trajectory, as lawmakers’ unabated desire to spend money we don’t have jeopardizes our national security — and our future.

Little Budgetary Improvement

The chart comes from a CBO report summarizing the federal government’s budgetary status in the fiscal year just concluded. Excluding the effects of timing shifts (i.e., when payments get transferred from one fiscal year to another because the fiscal year ends during a weekend), the CBO calculated the deficit for fiscal year 2024 as $1.9 trillion.

As large and as incomprehensible as that amount sounds, it actually represents a (very small) improvement from fiscal year 2023. As previously explained last fall, taking out the accounting effects of student loan “forgiveness” — the CBO recorded the Biden administration’s proposal as spending over $300 billion in fiscal year 2022, then recorded the same amount as “savings” when the Supreme Court struck down the plan last year — the federal government ran a $2 trillion deficit in 2023.

But as the dashed pink line in the above chart demonstrates, the $110 billion change in the federal government’s