Justice & Drew Friday Roundtable 11.12.21: Walz Cooking the Books on COVID Numbers, Tom Emmer, and the News Quiz
Today was a very memorable Friday Roundtable for me. While I didn’t win the Friday News Quiz, I had the privilege of sitting in with someone who I have greatly admired for years: Scott Johnson, Co-Founder of the legendary conservative blog site Powerline.
Powerline, as you may recall, was the blog site that exposed a fraudulent story regarding then President George W. Bush’s National Guard service. These efforts wound up forcing Dan Rather, then the anchor of the CBS Evening News, to apologize and resign.
My knowledge of Scott Johnson’s work along with his frequent Co-Author, John Hinderaker, dates back to 1995, when I was an intern at Center of the American Experiment, a conservative/free-market think tank in Minneapolis. Messrs. Johnson and Hinderaker authored an amazing paper for the Center called “The Truth About Income Inequality“, a work which destroyed the myths that President Ronald Reagan’s economic policies of the 1980s widened the gap between rich and poor. For the first week of my internship all I did was man the phones and take down names and addresses of people who wanted a copy of the paper.
Fast forward to today, when I joined Scott on the Friday Roundtable. In the 7 am hour we discussed the recent revelation that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has a secondary “non-public” state email address that has not been disclosed in response to prior Data Practices Act requests; also, we discussed recent revelations that Walz’ Chief of Staff asked the Minnesota Department of Health for “better data” regarding COVID to justify the Governor’s lockdowns in 2020. In the 8 am hour we heard from Congressman Tom Emmer and battled it out with Producer Extraordinaire Sam Sansevere in the News Quiz. Not surprisingly, Scott was victorious.
As we left the studio, Scott told me “I hope that our paths cross again in the future.” I could not agree more.