All editorials on this page were written by James E. Dustin and are protected by the copyright laws of the United States. They cannot be copied or reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.

Proper Forms of Address Today

I served as a volunteer greeter at a recent health screening event, and as part of my instructions I was given this advisory note:

“When addressing our participants, remember that not everyone’s gender presentation (i.e.: the way a person expresses his or her gender through gestures, dress, and grooming) matches their gender identity, and the medical services they select may not always correspond to their gender presentation. If you are unsure what their gender might be, ask them, ‘How should I refer to you?’ (e.g.: sir, madam, Mr., Ms., Mrs., or a gender neutral pronoun, i.e. participant.”

I’m not going to do that, unless I’m allowed to use the pronoun “it” when referring to someone who literally wants to make a federal case out of being offended as a result of their “gender presentation.”

The sponsors of this event are putting the burden of not being offensive on the person – me, in this case – who is not the source of this societal problem. The source of the problem is someone like Caitlyn Jenner who comes swishing into the room dressed to the nines as a female and requests a PSA test.

I, being a product of a more gender explicit generation, would immediately suggest, “You don’t need a PSA test, because being a woman and all, you don’t have a prostate.” That would be me being helpful, and at that point, one can only imagine what would follow.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen. This being a small rural town in the West, we were pretty much on firm ground differentiating between males and females. But I found it offensive that I would have to prepare for someone to be offended as a result of disguising their actual gender, which I define as what they were born as.

So can I sue them for forcing me into this awkward situation? If I call someone “Sir” when they are actually a badly masquerading drag queen whose disguise I have penetrated, and they respond angrily with insults and threats, can I file an assault charge against them?

The basic problem here is a tiny, miniscule, fraction of a percentage point of the population wants to force the vast, vast majority of the population to alter our behavior because of their behavior, and their behavior just isn’t normal.

We had this debate during progress and eventual failure of the Equal Rights Amendment. America eventually discovered that men and women are different. They have different plumbing, different body parts, different diseases, different nutritional requirements, different chemistry.

But modern medicine, when it should have been doing something more constructive, gave us the ability to change a woman into a man or vice-versa. Modern attitudes have given us – apparently – the ability to change a woman into a man or vice-versa absent any medical procedure at all. One may simply choose to “identify” with one or the other. What percentage of the population does that?

So naturally when confronted with one of these creatures, we normal folks don’t know how to react. And if we react wrongly, we can be vilified and persecuted and even taken to court. There are gender neutrality wardens out there waiting to pounce on any perceived misdeed, so many of us just go along to get along, and that leads us into some strange places.

In New Zealand, a male weightlifter – Gavin Hubbard – decided to “identify” as a woman named Laurel and was allowed to compete in the International Weightlifting Federation Championships as a woman. He won two sliver medals, which means he still lost twice to a girl. I couldn’t help adding that.

Maybe this is just a phase through which the human race is passing. But for those of us stuck in this particular time period, we need some gender-neutral forms of address. “Moron” is one example. “Fatso” can apply in certain situations. “Churl” is one of my favorites because so few people know what it means. Or any descriptive adjective or noun followed by “zilla” can work, as in “Date-zilla.”

Or don’t think about this subject at all. I used that health event advisory note to start a fire. I saw no reason to save it.

Riding the Blue Wave

If you don’t believe the press is biased in favor of Democrats, and if you don’t believe that the press is unashamedly promoting Democrats running this fall, look at these headlines about a recent election. While you’re reading the headlines, bear in mind that the Republican won:

• The Washington Post – “The Republican win in Arizona was another tough night for the GOP.”
• NPR – “Republicans avoid an upset in tight Arizona special election.”
• Bloomberg – “Arizona’s Democratic loss still looks like a win.”
• AZCEntral.com – “Debbie Lesko wins Arizona congressional race, leaves Republcans anxious about fall.”
• AFP – “Donald Trump’s Republicans won a closely-watch congressional election in Arizona, but by a single-digit margin.”

I was looking for, but did not find, a headline that said – “Republican Debbie Lesko wins Arizona congressional election.”

The narrative being promoted by the liberal media is that a “blue wave” is coming in the fall, Democrats will recapture the House and possibly the Senate, Donald Trump will then be impeached, and all will be right with the world. The Swamp will have reclaimed the government.

Except that doesn’t seem to be the way things are going. Of the six special elections for House seats since 2016, Republicans have won five. But I would wager that if you asked your neighbor how many Republicans have won in these special elections, they’d guess one or two. Because, you see, even when Republicans win these elections, the liberal media paints it like they lost.

In June of 2017, Republican Ralph Norman won New York’s 5^th Congressional District special election. The New York Times reported, “Mr. Norman was expected to have an advantage over Mr. (Archie) Parnell for the seat…. However, Mr. Parnell kept the race close, losing by only a few percentage points.” So this election was proof that a blue wave is coming.

In May of 2017, Republican Greg Gianforte won Montana’s only House seat, yet the lead in every liberal media report said that Gianforte won despite being charged with assault the night before the vote. Gianforte allegedly assaulted a liberal media reporter. So Republicans only elect thugs, and therefore the blue wave is coming.

In what many Democrats viewed as a harbinger of things to come, Republican Karan Handel defeated Democrat Jon Ossoff in Georgia for a House seat. The narrative there was that Handel should have won by a bigger margin, therefore a blue wave is coming.

(This election was interesting for another reason. Democrat Ossoff didn’t even live in the district he wanted to represent. Nevertheless, liberal money poured in from all over the U.S. to support him. That indicates to me that such support comes from people who do not care about the credentials of the candidate – only the “D” behind his name.)

That Republicans “should have won by more” is a persistent theme in these elections, and so therefore the blue wave is coming. The sole Democrat victory in a House race was won by Democrat Conor Lamb in a Pennsylvania district that President Trump “carried by nearly 20 percentage points,” said The Press.

Gianforte won by “slightly more” than 50 percent in a state, The Times noted, that Trump won by 20 percentage points.

Karen Handel won her election by 4 percentage points, despite the fact that her Republican predecessor – Tom Price – won by 20 percentage points. Therefore, a blue wave is coming. “After a deeply disappointing loss in Georgia’s special election, Democrats are hoping that Jon Ossoff’s narrow defeat in a staunchly conservative district is the harbinger of a shifting tide,” said Time magazine.

Three observations that readers should note when reading these stories. Karen Handel is not Tom Price, who was an incumbent and would have had a tremendous advantage if he had run again.

And none of these candidates are Donald Trump. We may disagree on a lot of things regarding President Trump, but I think we can all agree he is a unique individual. He proved he can garner support in areas – Wisconsin comes to mind – where no Republican presidential candidate has gotten support before.

And third, all Republicans are not Donald Trump supporters – the RINOs in Congress come to mind. And all people who vote in these elections are not Republicans or Democrats. A third of the voters in the U.S. are Independents and can’t be trusted to vote for candidates from either party.

These analyses of special elections by the Press just promote the greater narrative that President Trump is evil incarnate. The Washington Post on a daily basis slams the President for any number of perceived character deficiencies, and the national Press follows like sheep. Many just reprint the Washington Post or New York Times stories.

That’s the bigger battle – to unseat a duly elected President of the United States in a situation where impeachment won’t work. You should know that The Press has set aside its aura of unbiased respectability for the larger mission of running the nation from behind the Democrat screen. This gets proved on a daily basis.

Vote Against Everybody

You would think that Politico, a news agency that specializes in Washington politics would know better, but this is what they wrote in the wake of passage of that obscene omnibus spending bill on March 23: “Now the Republicans who control Congress have passed a $1.3 trillion spending bill,” and “Republicans now control both the legislative and executive branches.” Politico was trying to mock Republicans for allowing a most-unRepublican bill to pass.

Sigh.

Again we run up against the lack of civics education in the U.S., a lack now becoming so pervasive that not even adult professional journalists know how to correctly assess the actions of their own government.

Politico! Listen up. No party controls Congress unless that party has a 60-40 vote margin in the Senate and a majority in the House. Absent that, any single, solitary senator of the minority party can threaten a filibuster and stop any bill.

So if Chuck Schumer, D-New York, wants a $30 billion for a tunnel connecting New Jersey and New York, all he has to say is “I won’t vote for your increase in military spending unless you give me my tunnel.” It’s called tunnel vision, by the way.

And this is why such a barbaric group as Planned Parenthood continues to get $500 million every year from the U.S. taxpayers. How exactly did this happen, that an organization that kills unborn babies gets ten times more money from the government than the STOP School Violence Act? Same reason; voting margins are as thin as they can get in the Senate, so virtually any senator can get anything he or she wants.

Republicans hold a majority of 51-49 votes, and U.S. Sen. John McCain has been absent because of hospitalization for brain cancer. So the Republican “majority” must have ten Democrat votes to pass any bill (except for one budget reconciliation bill per year – that’s how the tax cut bill was passed, and also how ObamaCare was passed).

So Planned Parenthood gets funded so our war machine can get an extra $68 billion. That’s kind of it in a nutshell. And the members of Congress, despite Majority Leader Paul Ryan’s promise not to pass any bill without giving members, and just incidentally the people of the United States, at least three days to review the bill, Congress passed it, sent it over to the President, and went home. Members of Congress admitted they hadn’t read the bill, much less allowed anyone else time to read it.

President Trump could have vetoed it, but it instantly would have shut the government down (which never really happens; they just close the parks). As a result, members of Congress would have had to stop laboring on their re-election campaigns and returned to Washington to do some actual work, make some rational decisions.

I would have vetoed it. Our military gets more money than the next eight highest national military budgets combined. I’m not saying we’re not at war, but I think a $17.6 billion submarine will do little to deter Amed Bizzari from driving a truck into a crowd in France. I think our military needs to be less large and more focused.

Another threat to our national defense is our debt. Who would do this? Who would put their country in a position where it could not operate without foreign loans? How in the world do you negotiate with China when you can’t operate without their money?

So it was interesting to hear all the Democrats complain when the tax bill was passed that it would make the deficit so much worse. If we use Politico’s definition of who runs Congress, the Democrats sat there for six years and made the debt worse than it has ever been.

They’re just playing games up there in Washington, and the game on March 23 was to get as much lucre back to the home districts as possible, including a bailout for pecan farmers in the south, refunding for the TIGER highway program that just built a bridge that killed eight people in Florida, tax credits for low-income housing, more for a new launch pad than NASA said it needed, and a declaration that burning trees to generate electricity is carbon neutral. Yes, that is actually in the bill.

And who didn’t get anything out of the omnibus bill? About 800,000 beneficiaries of Obama’s unconstitutional DACA program for those aliens who were brought to America illegally as children by their parents. More than 70 percent of Americans want this fixed, and Congress couldn’t throw that into the pot? Well of course not; the DACA people can’t vote.

At the moment, I’m wishing that every member of Congress up for re-election this year gets defeated, no matter what party flag they carry.

Religious Freedom in Saudi Arabia?

I muse on the news.

• I was listening to a White House press conference last week conducted by Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The presser was being held shortly after President Donald Trump met with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

So this reporter asks an incredibly dumb question: Did the President bring up the subject of religious freedom in Saudi Arabia? Sanders neatly sidestepped the question by answering that she wasn’t there for the second half of the hour-long meeting, so she didn’t know. I know. The subject didn’t come up.

For the reporter’s edification, Saudi Arabia is a fundamentalist Islamic state that just recently granted some women the right to drive a car. It is the home of the two most sacred places for Muslims. Raising the issue of religious freedom there might result in getting your tongue cut out. So it really doesn’t come up much.

But here’s a more basic question: Does this reporter feel that it is the duty of our nation to impose its values on other nations? That hasn’t worked so well in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq. We might want to give up that element of foreign policy and be thankful that a guarantee of religious freedom is No. 1 in our Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

• I was kind of hoping there would be a high school student walkout and demonstration in recognition and thanks to Blaine Gaskill. If you don’t know who Blaine Gaskill is, shame on you. Gaskill is the school resource officer who rushed to the sound of gunfire in a Maryland high school. He arrived within seconds and shot and killed a shooter threatening the lives of students in the hallway. As a result, only two students were injured. Authorities said there was “no question” Gaskill’s bravery prevented a tragedy similar to the one in Florida.

So students across the nation are ditching class and marching to protest against gun violence in the U.S. What they hope to accomplish I don’t think even they know, but it really isn’t hard to get students to skip actual education to go out, carry signs and feel noble.

Every school ought to have a Blaine Gaskill. He is a trained SWAT officer who knew how and when to react. I’m certain taxpayers would foot the bill for their schools to hire or have available trained police officers such as him.

And here’s something for the protesting students to ponder: two similar situations, shooter in the high school, armed officers nearby. One officer goes to the sound of gunfire; the other stays outside. How is the NRA responsible for either situation?

• I keep reading about this stupid Russia collusion story because the nation’s largest newspapers think it is the most important news story in decades, but the story seems to rest on an absurd assumption.

The assumption is that if the Russians flooded Facebook and other social sites with memes, advertisements and posts favoring the election of Donald Trump for President, that somehow turned the tide of the election.

I think if you are so easily swayed, you should perhaps not vote in future elections. A good test to see how gullible you are is how many infomercial products you have in your home.

Dilbert, the office workplace cartoon character created by Scott Adams, once commented to a fellow employee, “You know, if marketing actually worked, it would be illegal.”

Advertising works to a certain extent, but it doesn’t take away your free will, or at least we’d better hope it never becomes quite that effective.

Lead on, McDumb!

We are so easily led away from using our own brains.

Let’s start with Kylie Jenner, 20-year-old member of the Kardashian clan with 26 million followers on twitter. That alone is alarming. This young lady’s resume includes being a Kardashian, starring in a reality show built around the Kardashians, and selling a line of jewelry named for herself, a Kardashian.

One night, possibly in a bemused state of self importance, she tweets, “sooo … does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me…. ugh this is so sad.” The next day, Snapchat stock falls 8 percent and the company loses over $1 billion in market valuation.

Are we really willing to let our investment decisions be made by a self-absorbed youngster who has decided she doesn’t like an app anymore?

Kylie also has a daughter named Stormi. One thing I’ve learned in my long dating career is never date someone who substitutes an “i” for a “y” at the end of their name. Never works out.

Then we have the case of the non-existent collusion investigation by Robert Mueller, who uncovered the fact that Russian operatives managed to create two demonstrations in New York on the same day – one a pro-Trump rally and another an anti-Trump rally.

They did this by putting provocative posts up on Facebook. One theme was “Trump is not My President,” which seems kind of ironic because that is absolutely true for the people – Russians – putting up the Facebook posts.

Russians have also been blamed for a rally against Muslims and a rally supporting Muslims rally at the same place and time in Houston, Texas.

Hundreds of people took to the streets just because of something they read on Facebook. What does that tell you about the cognitive power of these demonstrators? And doesn’t it make you suspicious now when you see any “spontaneous” demonstration in your city or town?

And also, Prevagen is still in business. Prevagen is advertised as a supplement that can increase your brain power. The advertisements say the supplement is derived from a substance found in jellyfish, a species renowned for its cerebral functions. Not.

Jellyfish aren’t exactly smart. They hunt by floating. They have poisonous tentacles that hang below them. When a fish swims in amongst those tentacles, it is poisoned and dies, then drawn up to the jellyfish proper to be eaten. In other words, a jellyfish relies on species dumber than it to survive. A smart fish would just swim around the hanging tentacles and hurl insults at the jellyfish.

Anyway, the Federal Trade Commission and the state of New York think Prevagen is a scam. They have charged the company with making false and unsubstantiated claims.

This stuff costs $24 to $68 for 30 pills. The two complainants say the Prevagen company has $165 million in sales, which tells me right there the stuff doesn’t work. A lot of that has to be repeat sales. If you were dumb enough to buy the stuff in the first place, it clearly didn’t make you any smarter because you bought it again.

It wasn’t all that long ago that some company is Michigan was selling oxygen pills. I don’t even know how that was supposed to work. But we buy this stuff. Prevagen is still being advertised, so I assume it’s still being bought.

Maybe Prevagen actually works in reverse and was produced by Russians, because it sure likes we’re all getting dumber and dumber.

Preventing School Shootings

The shootings at a school in Florida have reignited a national debate on how to prevent such tragedies in the future. Well maybe we should look back in time for a similar series of tragedies that have been largely eliminated.

Did you know that there have been no successful hijackings of American-flagged airliners since 9/11, 2001? This was a crime that reached its height in the 1970s when there were 51 such events in the whole world, with 19 involving American airliners. Some of these hijackings during the decade were horrific:

• On May 18, 1973, a hijacker’s bomb on a Soviet Aeroflot Tu-104 went off, killing all 82 on board.
• On Dec. 4, 1977, a hijacker on Malaysian Flight 653 shot both pilots and himself. All 100 aboard the plane died.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, you could carry a gun onto a plane. Of the 19 hijackings in the 1970s that involved American planes, and at least seven hijackings were accomplished by airline passengers carrying guns.

Then something happened. President Richard M. Nixon ordered radical changes in airline security, including the implementation of the sky marshal program that put armed officers on airliners. The program also tightened inspection and security measures on the ground. Other countries followed suit.

In the 1980s, the number of hijackings dropped to 30 in the world, and only three involving U.S. flagged airliners, and only one of those involved a gun. In the 1990s, there were only 16 in the whole world, and only one involving an American flagged plane.

In the next decade, there was only one hijacking incident involving American planes, and it was the worst – September 11, 2001. Four airliners were hijacked with the terrorists using not guns, but box cutters.

A greater tragedy was prevented during that event by passengers violently opposing the terrorists on their plane.

What followed that was even more stringent inspections and restrictions on what passengers could carry on to planes, the creation of the Transportation Security Administration and a beefed up Federal Air Marshal service – armed officers on planes looking like ordinary passengers. We have fortified the cockpits of planes and in some cases allowed pilots to have guns.

The U.S. doesn’t put armed officers on every flight. That would be impossible for the 80,000 flights originating in the country every day. But the mere possibility that an air marshal might be on a flight is a deterrent.

Can this experience with hijackers not be translated to the prevention of school shootings? Certainly communities can find the money to fund such improvements in entrance security and hire armed and trained officers to protect the kids.

This shouldn’t be a gun debate, or a mental health debate. There are 300 million guns in America and no way of knowing who is going to go insane tomorrow. And even in the absence of guns, the worst hijacking in world history in terms of fatalities was accomplished by terrorists without guns.

We have a methodology that is working now that protects airports and airplanes. It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to implement that methodology in the schools.

Last Week in Baseball

Dodger’s closer Kenley Jansen, on the heels of signing a contract that will give him $80 million over five years, suggested that a player boycott might be in order to force owners to spend more on free agents.

I think I’m coming to an understanding about income inequality: If you’re making more money than you’ll ever be able to spend – say $16 million per year – you are unequal to the task of explaining economics to us ordinary Joes out here.

What’s bugging Jansen and his agent is that are about 100 free agents who have not signed contracts with major league teams. Some players and some agents, who get a hefty percentage when large contracts are signed, allege collusion among team owners to keep free agent salaries down.

There’s that collusion thing again; alert Robert Mueller.

“Ten days before pitchers and catchers start reporting to spring training, dozens of legitimate major leaguers remain unemployed, dozens more players are staring at one-year deals worth well below what they figured free agency would bear and dozens still are coming to terms with the inevitability of signing a minor league deal with no money guaranteed,” says Yahoo Sprots, whatever that is.

Read that carefully. “Players are staring at one-year deals worth well below what they figured.” Well, they may have figured wrong. Maybe they’ll have to take $10 million this year rather than $13 million. Give me $10 million in one year, and I’m set for life.

And, “dozens of legitimate major leaguers remain unemployed.” Honestly? Does this writer believe that Jake Arrietta, one of the currently “unemployed,” won’t play baseball this year because no one will hire him?

And, “dozens still are coming to terms with the inevitability of signing a minor league deal with no money guaranteed.” How many of you ordinary Joes out there have had a contract that guaranteed you’d be paid n matter what?

I think it’s more a matter of common sense creeping into the baseball world. It isn’t so much that these big contracts give some players an inordinate amount of money. It’s that the contracts often are (a) multi-year, and (b) guaranteed, even if the player tanks for the entire season. It happens.

Have you ever heard of Rusney Castillo, and outfielder for the Boston Red Sox? That team signed Castillo for over $72 million yet Castillo is not yet on the 40-man roster for the start of next season. He’s still in the minors and not doing all that well.

There are lots of similar examples. Matt Cain got a new contract in 2012 worth $127.5 million over six years, which looked like an amazingly good deal for the San Francisco Giants. Cain pitched a perfect game in 2012 and finished the season with a .279 ERA.

After that, Cain’s ERA slumped to .400 and then 5.13. When he hasn’t been injured, he’s been one of the worst starting pitchers in baseball.

There are many other examples of huge contracts gone bad, or the reverse, but it is safe to say that long-term, guaranteed contracts are a crap shoot. What business owner wants to be stuck with paying someone millions of dollars a year who isn’t even working anymore?

So maybe owners have become cautious. In my opinion, they have a right to be. The base salary in Major League Baseball in $535,000 per year. A player becomes eligible for a pension if he plays one day in the majors. Free medical, obviously. It was only in recent years that players could be punished for drug abuse.

Players and agents argue that Major League Baseball teams take in $12 billion a year in revenues, but close to half of that goes to player salaries. And a portion of those salaries go to players who have retired. Some of those guaranteed contracts stretch out into the years after the player has retired, or worse, got injured and can’t play anymore.

Finally, the players can’t strike. Under the terms of their agreements with Major League Baseball, their contracts run until 2021.

So if I were a free agent, and I wasn’t getting any offers that seemed acceptable, I might take a couple quick courses in economics. Then I’d go to my agent and say, “I’m not getting what I want, so let’s get a contract that will put me on the field next season. I’ll take $10 million.”

The News Not Covered

Having been a journalist for 40 years, I find it interesting to watch the evolution of my profession in an increasingly polarized America. And it’s not all bad, as you may have expected me to say.

When I say increasingly polarized, I’m speaking of those who actually pay attention to what’s going on in this nation. There are those who don’t know who won the Civil War, or what foreign country borders California (and it’s not Oregon, as one college student answered).

When I was growing up, my parents had three sources of TV news – ABC, CBS and NBC. PBS came a little later, and then some local news outlets came along on UHF channels.

My dad preferred NBC, but he didn’t prefer NBC because he thought ABC and CBS were biased. He just liked Chet Huntley and David Brinkley.

Now, of course, the variety and choice available on TV news has expanded almost beyond belief. It is a natural response for almost anyone to read and watch news and commentary with which they agree, and today, we can all find our niche. We’re not shackled to the Big Three.

I believe the major networks and big newspapers – the so-called main-stream media – is trying desperately to hold on to that bygone era when they basically controlled public opinion. But it’s a lost cause, and their biases don’t help them. Alternative media exposes their biases almost on a daily basis, and we don’t like it.

Here’s a good example: Liz Wheeler is a 26-year-old conservative commentator on One America News, which I had never of until it popped up on Facebook. One of her favorite topics is what the main-stream media did not cover in the previous week.

This is from the week of Jan. 7, stories not covered:

• Three or four Muslim imans based in the U.S. and Canada called for the murder and destruction of all Jews. What was covered during the week was President Donald Trump reportedly referring to some third-world countries as s**tholes, which may be true, but you’re not supposed actually to say that.

The imam story was covered by Newsweek, The Daily Mail, and Canadian network news. The Daily Mail is a British newspaper. I like to apply hypothetical reversal to such stories. What would the main-stream media have done if a Baptist preacher in South Carolina had called for the murder and destruction of all Muslims?

• Britain’s vaunted (if you like socialized medicine) National Health Network cancelled 50,000 surgeries, allowing only “the most urgent” to proceed. The NHN didn’t have the money or hospital space to go forward with 50,000 treatments.

This story was covered in the U.S. by The Blaze, Town Hall News and The Washington Examiner. This last newspaper sprang up as an alternative to people tired of The Washington Post. The Blaze was created by conservative commentator Glenn Beck, and Town Hall is one of those upstart radio networks that saw space for conservative slanted news.

• A Democrat strategist – Jennifer Palmieri, a former aide to Hillary Clinton – wrote a memo saying that it was important for Democrats to save the “Dreamers” if they wanted to win elections in “2018 and beyond.” Dreamers are illegal aliens brought here by their parents. President Obama, in violation of federal law, gave them a pass with an executive order. Trump told Congress to either deal with the situation, or Obama’s executive order would be repealed in March. So, do Democrats feel sorry for 800,000 children brought to the U.S. and now facing deportation, or do they just need their votes (which, with the possible exception of California, would not be legal votes either).

Interesting story, I thought. So did Politico, Fox News and The Daily Caller. Politico is a somewhat left-leaning on-line news service, and The Daily Caller is a somewhat right leaning newspaper. Fox News came along as the alternative to NBC, ABC, CBS, and PBS. Thank God.

• Jane Sanders, the wife of socialist, one-time presidential candidate and darling of the millennials Bernie Sanders, is under investigation by a grand jury for bank fraud. If Trump were under investigation by a grand jury for bank fraud, you’d be reading and hearing about it every hour.

But was it on network news? Apparently not. It was reported by The Washington Examiner, Town Hall, and The Daily Wire, a news service founded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.

So you see what’s going on. If the story doesn’t fit the ideological viewpoint of one set of news agencies, they won’t cover it. But now in this modern era of cable and internet news, others will. Including a young lady named Liz Wheeler.

We can consume news the same way we consume food. We go out to our favorite restaurant, then come home and click on our favorite news source. I don’t like sushi, so I don’t go to a sushi restaurant. I don’t like NBC, so I don’t click on that channel.

This is not a bad development. Journalism is essential to a participatory democracy, so logic would tell us that we shouldn’t be getting our essential information from less than a dozen sources. This is a nation of 330 million people, and sometimes you might think we’re a nation of 330 million differing opinions. It’s about time the news services realized this.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced that his city is bringing a lawsuit against the five largest energy companies in the world seeking money for current and future damage caused by climate change.

New York has the time, money and personnel to devote to this effort because it has almost eliminated crime, has seen nearly 100 percent of its teens graduating from high school, achieved a balanced budget, possesses perfectly smooth streets and runs mass transit flawlessly and on time.

I have this problem with politicians like Bill de Blasio who seem to believe that once tax money gets into their hands, it is their money to spend as they please. New York is hardly the only city to have brought these ridiculous lawsuits. Boulder, Colorado, brought suit against the U.S. Export-Import Bank for having the gall to help finance fossil-fuel projects abroad.

Several California cities (big surprise here) joined the suit which took six years to litigate and was finally settled with the Export-Import Bank agreeing to consider climate concerns when funding energy projects. No word on how much of the taxpayers’ money went into that windmill tilting exercise.

But we do know the taxpayers weren’t asked how they felt about their money being spent that way. Boulder had no advisory referendum or bond issue on the question, nor did New York. Also no word on how the several lawyers traveled to and from the courthouse over those six years. One suspects the use of cars.

At a news conference announcing the lawsuit, de Blasio blamed the energy companies for the damage caused by Tropical Storm Sandy in 2012, “a tragedy wrought by the actions of the fossil fuel companies.” Curiously, the east coast of the United States has been struck by tropical storms and hurricanes long before the creation of Exxon-Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and the other corporations, possibly before even the creation of mankind.

De Blasio was interviewed about the case on NPR on Jan. 11, and interviewer asked a particularly astute question: Why pick on five oil companies. Why not include the countries that produce the oil in the first place, or the companies that transport the oil, or any of the hundreds of thousands of people involved in the industry. De Blasio’s answer was that the companies knew they were causing climate change and continued on regardless, much like the tobacco companies knew that their product caused cancer but continued to sell it.

Until someone explains to me why there was climate change before there were oil companies, or cars, or even people, anthropogenic global warming is still just a theory. Or if you are a believer, tell me what we’re going to do about these billions of humans who insist on breathing out carbon dioxide and water vapor all day, every day.

But I think we could all more or less agree that the courts are a poor place to debate scientific theory. And we could also agree that damage from rising seas would be mitigated if we’d stop building condominiums and hotels so near the ocean.

The other point about these lawsuits is that only about three quarters of all the oil produced is burned for fuel. It has a myriad of other uses, like paint, medicine, building material, carpet, plastic, clothing, shampoo and lots of other stuff. It is a very useful molecule.

New York is not only seeking recompense for damage done by Tropical Strom Sandy, but for all tropical storms and storm surges likely to occur in the future. So if they win, prepare for price increases not only for gasoline, but also paint, medicine, building material, carpet, plastic, clothing, shampoo and lots of other stuff.

Oh by the way, California uses more oil for transportation than any other state.