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Former News Titan 60 Minutes Crashes and Burns Under Batty Bari

CBS News’ “60 Minutes” had its first fall premiere under conservative editor-in-chief Bari Weiss Sunday night, and it was an embarrassing ratings disaster.  According to the first round of ratings, “60 Minutes” saw an overall ratings decline of 21% from its last season premiere. Even more troubling for CBS, ratings were down 33% in the key demographic of 25- to 54-year olds—viewers most sought after by advertisers.  The premiere had a total estimated viewership of around 7.94 million viewers, despite a lead-in audience of more than 18 million viewers from the NFL broadcast that preceded.

The decline in the ratings was so severe that even the right-wing New York Post—which is owned by Rupert Murdoch—took notice of the weak performance, noting that “60 Minutes” ratings have not been this low since 2000.  Last year, the show had more than 9 million viewers—but that was before Weiss hired figures like conservative pundit Ross Douthat and purged a host of CBS News stalwarts.

The show’s poor performance echoes the ratings failure at “CBS Evening News” on the same network. That program, hosted by anchor Tony Dokoupil, had near-record lows in viewership after airing features like a “salute” to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Meanwhile, Weiss has dumped figures like Scott Pelley, who revealed that reporters, producers, and others involved in the newsmaking process have been pressured by Weiss and other management to produce content that’s more favorable to President Donald Trump and the GOP. The ratings debacle can ultimately be traced to CBS owner David Ellison, who took control when the Trump administration allowed his company Skydance to buy Paramount, CBS’ parent company. 

Ellis, GOP donor and Trump ally, installed Weiss and oversaw the right-wing drift. Ellison is now trying to get approval to merge CBS with Warner Bros., which owns CNN.   If he’s allowed to proceed, the weak ratings for CBS may soon be coming to CNN too. But at least Trump will enjoy the programming.

 

No One's Surprised About Nazis and the GOP

Surprise, surprise-- a new Nazi accusation in the Republican Party just dropped.  Over the weekend, Republican Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio had some cleaning up to do after it was discovered that one of his aides, Stephen Woytek, had publicly posted Nazi-linked content.  This past Friday, The Washington Post revealed that Woytek had used a photo of SS soldiers as his Facebook profile.   The Ohio senator, who is in a contentious race with Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown, decided to “part ways” with Woytek.

Does this sound familiar? It should. Nazi ties or support appear to be abundant across the right. From Elon Musk’s Nazi salute on stage at an inaugural event for President Donald Trump to retweeting images laden with Nazi propaganda, the signs are there. And leaders of GOP-aligned youth groups have had their chats exposed, filled with racist jokes and antisemitic remarks. 

The White House is also teeming with links to sympathetic Nazi sentiment. For example, the Trump administration hired a young man that Florida Gov. Ron Desantis, a Republican, had previously dropped due to the man sharing Nazi imagery. Now, he is a speechwriter for Secretary of State Marco Rubio and works as deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning office. 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has links—some permanently inked on his body—to antisemitic groups. And Trump’s choices inside his White House, including hiring the likes of Ed Martin and Paul Ingrassia, point toward a larger message: This bigoted sentiment isn’t only common, it’s accepted. 

 

Something's Going Down!

 

Texas Officials Trying to Cover Up Data on Maternal Deaths Ahead of Midterms

In a very convenient delay for GOP candidates, Texas says it won’t have its first maternal mortality study since the 2022 Dobbs decision ready before midterm elections. Maternal mortality reports show how many pregnant women die each year and from what causes.  Almost assuredly the real reason for the delay is to continue to obscure just how deadly Texas’s near-total abortion ban has been.  Texas definitely doesn’t need damning statistics floating around while anti-abortion extremists like GOP Senate nominee Ken Paxton are flailing.

Indeed, Texas has been dragging its feet on this data for a while. The data they got around to releasing in January 2025 was so old that it predated the state’s abortion ban.   The state has also announced that when they release the new report after the midterms, they’re just not going to analyze data from 2022 and 2023, because this is how we do things now: just a persistent and deadly lack of accountability.

Though Texas has tried to keep this on the down-low, we know from reporting that by late 2024, three women had died during miscarriages when care was delayed or denied. We know that sepsis, which is life-threatening, skyrocketed after Texas banned abortion. We know that more pregnant women have nearly bled to death than ever before.

Overall, women are nearly twice as likely to die in states with abortion bans versus states where abortion is legal, according to a 2025 study from the Gender Equity Policy Institute. And even before that, the United States already had a higher maternal mortality rate than its peer nations.

The Continuing Saga of Trump's Obsession With Men's Looks

Convicted felon Donald's Trump near-homorotic obsession with men's looks is well known.  This pattern of obsession with the personal appearance of men extends back decades-- but has become more pronounced in the past ten years. During his first term, Trump often waxed poetic about the pilots posted to Air Force One, likening them to taller versions of Tom Cruise. “These guys are specimens,” he said during a late October interview with Joe Rogan. “Like perfect specimens.”

In the last three months alone, Trump has praised the looks of a sheriff in Tempe, Ariz.; a Mexican government negotiator; Shinzo Abe, a former leader of Japan; Senator Eric Schmitt, Republican of Missouri; and Mike Pompeo, his former secretary of state, who he noted had lost weight. (“You look so handsome,” he said about Pompeo.) He also famously alluded to the size of genitalia of the deceased golfer Arnold Palmer, whose looks Trump has also apparently approved of.  “They look like Arnold Palmer,” Trump said about a group of gun-toting security officials at an event in October. “Can’t look better than Arnold.”

So it should come as no surprise that Trump's obsession with men's looks took front and center at his "midterm convention" this week when a photo of left-wing streamer Hasan Piker posing in his underwear was flashed on the big screen, prompting a flabbergasted reaction from Piker as he watched the moment unfold online.  The picture (pulled from Piker's instagram) was included in a narrated video shown on the stadium’s jumbotron.  The video was intended to stir GOP outrage on the so-called dangers of left-wing policies.  But the gratuitous thirst trap attracted attention for all the wrong reasons. Piker, who was live streaming at the time, pulled up the video in full, letting out a stunned “Ohhh!” into his microphone as the shot of him in his underwear appeared on screen.  “Nooo!” he continued. “They fucking posted the meat pic! Nooo! Yo! They posted the meat pic at the fucking Trumpapalooza!”  “They blurred my penis,” he concluded through laughter.

Not coincidentally, it should be noted that Grindr, the world's largest LGBTQ+ dating app, went down as the Republican National Convention's midterm event began on Wednesday. According to Downdetector, the app reported several outages just as the conservative event kicked off at the American Airlines Center in Dallas. The highest number of reported outages appeared to occur in and around the Dallas area.  A similar incident was reported during the 2024 RNC in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. "If that's the case, it aligns with Grindr activity during previous national conventions," the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.