Daily Kos
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neglected, via AN
see eric b
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kos 11 25
### Ukraine Invasion Day 1,365: RU uses cluster munitions against civilians
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2 24 ymail
bad news for anti-vaxx extremist and "Democrat"-turned-independent spoiler presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: A federal judge just threw one of his bogus lawsuits out of court!
A quick recap in case you're just tuning in:
- A pseudonymous Daily Kos community writer wrote about RFK Jr.'s appearance at a COVID conspiracy rally hosted by a group with links to neo-Nazis. He sued Daily Kos to expose the writer's identity. We fought him in court.
- RFK Jr. discovered the writer's identity through other means and sued him for defamation. He just lost that suit, though he could appeal the decision.
- Along the way, RFK Jr. decided to run against President Biden for the Democratic nomination, became a "star" witness for House Republicans, used his new platform to push his quack conspiracy theories to new heights, and then dropped out of the primary to run as an independent.
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mail in ballot BS fail
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/2/2139627/-Bannon-guest-freaks-out-MAGAs-by-saying-there-was-no-election-fraud-as-GOP-reconsiders-its-strategy
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12 22 dartagnan
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/25/2143776/-Trump-supporting-losers-double-down-on-alienating-the-rest-of-the-country
no lnx
you may have missed it, since it’s been percolating anew over the holidays, but there’s a word out there being wielded by the right to describe everyone who’s opposed to Trump and “Trumpism.” It’s a word increasingly in vogue on Fox News, and it’s been propagated by pro-Trump folks like Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz — and many others.
The word is “Uniparty.” And — wait for it — you are likely a member. Now an epithet being indiscriminately employed by the far-right to castigate not only Democrats, but anyone, including Republicans, who deviate from the extremist, nihilistic “Trumpian” philosophy, its origins are not particularly mysterious. Back in 2017, Wall Street Journal columnist Ben Zimmer, in an article for Politico, called it out after hearing it emitted from Steve Bannon’s mouth:
“The Uniparty” is the latest populist buzzword to seize the imagination of the drain-the-swamp crowd, those who see grand conspiracies in the machinations of the “deep state” and globalist-corporate forces. It has a crisp clarity, instantly conveying the idea of an establishment cabal, Democrat and Republican alike, arrayed against their outsider hero, Donald Trump.
(And yes, the assertion of a globalist “Uniparty” unmistakably echoes the same dog-whistle connotations as the “global elites” trope).
Somewhat ironically, and as Zimmer recounts, the word is a bastardization derived from terminology once used by the Green Party and its then-standard bearer, Ralph Nader, to attack what they perceived as an “unsavory” collaboration between Democrats and Republicans that operated to thwart their agenda. But its usage today by far-right Republicans has a new meaning. As most recently employed last week by Fox News personality and Putin apologist Tucker Carlson, it denotes a sinister, united purpose underlying the reaction of the U.S. “establishment” — be it Democratic or Republican — to Putin’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine:
“The uni-party is alive and well,” Carlson said, before flashing a photo of Republican leaders “in their orthopedic shoes” with Zelenskyy. Carlson then launched into Zelenskyy’s apparent “war against Christianity in the Ukraine” and Mitch McConnell’s assertion that “defeating Putin is the number one priority” for the senate – plus a laundry list of things that American politicians should be more worried about than Putin, including securing our borders and deaths by Fox’s recent favorite boogeyman, Fentanyl.
(emphasis supplied)
Right-wing Trump acolytes, seemingly flustered at recent Democratic successes (such as the bipartisan passage of the omnibus Budget bill) appear to have embraced the term as a type of rallying call to focus their base’s ire. Here’s Rep. Andy “Sweepstakes” Biggs, for example, writing for the Daily Caller, declaring “[T]he establishment is rather indifferent to the consequences of the Swamp’s policies on Americans, just so long as the Establishment, the uniparty remains in power.”
And here’s Rep. Matt Gaetz, “guest columnist” for the Florida Daily, railing this month against that same “uniparty:”
This is the uniparty in action and should let you know that McCarthy is not a threat to the system destroying America. How could he be? His closest adviser has represented Pfizer, Amazon, and a firm dedicated to giving out a path to American citizenship to wealthy Chinese. His roommate counts Google among his clients.
Just prior to the midterms, sad right-wing rag Breibart jumped on the “uniparty” bandwagon as well, with their headline supporting New Hampshire Senate hopeful (and loser) Dan Bolduc’s effort against Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan:
Republican Gen. Don Bolduc defied Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and the Washington, D.C., uniparty by deploying the Granite State’s motto – “Live Free or Die” – in his closing campaign ad before Tuesday’s election.
Not to be outdone, the public face of the Republican Party, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, has also (earlier this year) adopted this terminology:
Greene concluded by condemning lawmakers she dubbed members of the "Uniparty" – a term used by conservatives to describe bipartisan establishment figures they believe do not prioritize the people's will over their own.
She alluded to negotiations between a handful of members including Sens. Christopher Murphy, D-Conn., Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., – who engaged in discussions about a path forward on gun legislation, according to CBS.
"The members of the Uniparty slither in the Capitol and have been there too long," she said.
The prospect of right-wing Trumpers driving a wedge between themselves and the rest of the GOP — those who refused to endorse their less-than stellar effort in 2022 to “purify” the party by nominating a panoply of like-minded, unelectable losers — can’t do anything but help Democrats in 2024. As explained by reporters Charles Homans, Jazmine Ulloa and Blake Hounshell, writing for the New York Times, an analysis of the 2022 midterm elections showed:
[A] precariously narrow but consequential slice of the electorate that went against its own voting history this year in order to reject Republican candidates who sought control over elections, at least in part out of concern for the health of the political system and the future of democracy.
{****]
The election results suggest that a focus on Mr. Trump’s election lies did not merely galvanize Democrats but also alienated Republicans and independents. Final turnout figures show registered Republicans cast more ballots than registered Democrats in Arizona and Nevada, but election-denying candidates nevertheless lost important races in each of those states.
Republican candidates in statewide contests who embraced Mr. Trump’s election lies also significantly underperformed compared with Republicans who did not. This was true even in districts that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump in 2020,...[.]
Anything that drives “ordinary” Republicans from Trump helps us, because Trumpian Republicans continue to dominate their own primaries.
So, by all means, Trumpites, please proceed with demonizing your fellow Republicans, by calling them members of this sinister “uniparty” or anything else.
We’ll be here to reap the rewards.
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they have climate beat / col
12 21
a massive outbreak of tornadoes left scores dead across eight states this weekend, and given that this weather arose in a warmer, changed climate, President Biden, his FEMA Administrator, numerous news outlets:{, }
:{ }:scientists:{ and }:meteorologists:{ }:discussed:{ how such an extreme event could be influenced by climate change.}:
Despite all that qualified nuance, the right (predictably) went nuts. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and Fox News were very mad but didn’t exactly have anyone on hand who knew the science well enough to offer any science to the contrary
For their attempted refutation, Breitbart cited Steven Koonin, who in turn cited now-quite-outdated reports and their wishy-washy trend observations (which aren’t the point!). Town Hall cited Steve Milloy, as did the Daily Caller, because apparently defending Big Tobacco gives you climate expertise to answer questions actual scientists are still working out.
In an email to supporters, Climate Depot’s headline claimed a “Meteorologist calls Biden’s tornado climate link ‘utter bullsh*t,’” quoting and linking to Chris Martz, who is in fact not only not a meteorologist, but not even a college graduate, having just completed his first semester at Millersville University. (Though Chris did note that geophysics PhD and American Meteorological Fellow Michael Mann “oversimplifies the issue” and “isn’t a trained meteorologist.”)
Marc Morano’s email also cites an old post by climate satellite mistake-maker Roy Spencer, followed by a reference to Roger Pielke Jr., who is making good use of his cramped office by tweeting quotes from the IPCC as though the consensus view of tornado trends has a bearing on this specific event’s conditions. (Generous of Jr. to stop publicly airing his weird daddy issues long enough to give his opinion on tornadogenesis!)
After Pielke is our favorite climate-, covid-, Sandy Hook- and Obama birther-conspiracytheorist: Tony Heller. He excerpted a bunch of old newspaper clippings to prove that, since tornadoes happened in the past before climate change, that means climate change must not be changing the climate in which they form now. (Makes sense, right?)
But Pielke Jr.’s appearance in Morano’s email alongside his apparent peers Chris Martz (class of ‘25) and Tony Heller (no class at all) is just the warm-up, the paltering of what past trends may or may not mean for a current situation.
And others in conspiracy-land are offering their opinions and asking some “legitimate” questions, and it’s pretty entertaining, in the dark and depressing way this sort of thing is amusing.
As Media Matters reported, Alex Jones, fresh off his court losses regarding aforementioned Sandy Hook school shooting conspiracy theories, told his InfoWars audience that the Biden administration “officially” ordered Texas to turn off the power last February. Which means “the question is did [President Biden] use weather weapons to cause the tornadoes? That’s a legitimate question to ask.”
It’s not like this is the first time an InfoWarrior has offered some creative explanations for extreme weather. Remember back in 2018 when Jones’s co-conspiracy-theory-conspirator suggested thatJohn Kerry saved Hawaii from a hurricane with an energy beam fired from Antarctica? (Or is that not a legitimate question to ask? We’re unsure of the meaning of the phrase at this point.)
Even that’s not the craziest take though! Remember the Wobble prediction that aliens are controlling the Earth’s movement — the real cause of climate change — and are soon going to wobble us so hard it reveals the mystery planet Nibiru?
Well, since Tony Heller’s banned from Twitter he’s taken to Gab, and his fellow poster there ROGTruth1 has an update for us on The Wobble we discussed the other day: It’s what actually caused the tornadoes, and a bunch of other events!
“The temporary wobble in the earth’s axis has been superseded by a severe wobble. So, the regular disturbances which have been a true cause of climate change are now manifesting as more significant events.” From an earthquake in Peru on November 28th, to cold in Europe, earthquakes in Japan, windstorm in Turkey and tornadoes in the US, the wobble’s just getting started.
Apparently “soon” in December, a “Massive New Madrid Adjustment (unzipping) will occur over a period of 3 weeks” leading to the “entire region west of the Mississippi” to “sink” and “shift Southwest,” causing “major disruption through the Ohio valley and up through the St. Lawrence Seaway.” After that 3 week cataclysm but also still in “December soon” will be a 150 foot tsunami that “will hit the UK and Western Europe,” while “backwash of up to 50’ will hit the Eastern seaboard of the USA.”
If you’re as concerned as we are, rest assured that while there will be “no warnings from the elite that are fully briefed and aware,” the good news is that “half of humanity has been subliminally contacted.”
Those of you who have been contacted already, you know the plan. Those that haven’t? Sorry, we can’t say anything further, but you should consider listening to the “experts” cited here if you’re worried, they seem to have things pretty well figured out.
==
1 22 an
[media crit]
Donald Trump went into the 2020 election with some of the worst approval ratings on record for a sitting president. He made virtually no effort to appeal to those who didn’t vote for him. How was he able to remain standing, and how did he even potentially have a chance at a second term even if he lost the popular vote? One big reason is that he and his acolytes had convinced their base that the media can’t be trusted.
As we know by now, whenever the media aired even mildly critical coverage of Trump or those who were supposedly helping him make America great again, the response on the right was some variation of “(noun) (verb) fake news!” Indeed, it’s almost an article of faith among the Republican base that the media can’t be trusted.
If your news diet consists of the likes of Fox News, Newsmax, right-wing social media, and Christian conservative outlets, you probably think that when the mainstream media isn’t making things up, it’s crossing lines that should never be crossed in order. But there’s one problem—with few exceptions, it’s right-wing media that engages in that very behavior. And while some of those elements are finally answering for the worst of their sins, others are long overdue for a dose of accountability.
Contrary to what Trump and his diehards would have us think, whenever mainstream media outlets make a mistake, those mistakes are usually corrected fairly quickly once caught.A case in point was a 2017 editorial in *The New York Times* that held 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin partly responsible for a grisly 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona. The Old Grey Lady’s editorial board claimed that just days before the shooting, Palin’s political action committee circulated a map that placed stylized crosshairs on the districts of 19 Democratic House members. The implication was clear—that map was a big reason why one of those lawmakers, then-Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona, nearly died that day.
That claim was slammed on all sides of the aisle, prompting the Times to partly retract the editorial within five hours of it going online. All of the inaccurate information was retracted within two days.Despite this, Palin sued the Times for defamation. As near as can be determined, Palin is suing because she didn’t just want the Times to retract, but to grovel. The suit was due to go to trial in late January, but was pushed back to early February after the rabidly anti-vaccine Palin caught COVID-19.
Palin faces tough sledding under current precedent for libel and defamation suits. As a public figure, she would have to prove that when the editorial board greenlighted the initial version of the editorial, it did so acting with actual malice. That is, Palin would have to convince a jury that the editorial board either knew the story was false or published it with reckless disregard for whether it was true or false. Remember, the statements at issue were retracted in almost no time at all in modern media terms. Her onlychance of winning is to take this case all the way to the Supreme Court in hopes of making it easier for public figures to win libel suits.
As it currently stands, Palin’s suit betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how media outlets with actual standards work. Indeed, the Times’ quick retraction stands in marked contrast to the behavior of celebrity gossip blog Gawker. In March 2016, Gawker was effectively forced out of business when it was ordered tocough up $140 million in damages to pro wrestler Hulk Hogan for posting a clip of a sex tape of Hogan. While its sister sites (such as sports culture blog Deadspin, tech blog Gizmodo, and feminist blog Jezebel) were sold to Univision at a bankruptcy auction, Gawker itself wasshut down that August. Ultimately, Gawker settled with Hogan for $31 million that November.
A number of observers slammed the verdict for itspotential chilling effect on freedom of the press, especially after billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thielrevealed that he had bankrolled the suit. Thiel openly admitted that he wanted to punish Gawker after its now-defunct tech gossip sister, Valleywag, outed him as gay in 2007. Indeed, in a post-mortem about Gawker on its last day of business, NPR media reporter David Folkenflikobserved that Thiel’s involvement in Hogan’s suit against Gawker portended “ugly implications for press freedom in light of adversaries with nearly infinite resources.”
At its peak in 2015, Gawker hadover 23 million visits per month, making it one of the most visited sites in the world. With that level of popularity, it’s only fair to wonder—why was no one willing to ride to Gawker’s rescue? Granted, potential buyers might have beenskittish about having to deal with the massive legal headache of a lawsuit bankrolled by a billionaire. But surely someone with the wherewithal to withstand Thiel’s resources would have rescued Gawker solely on the principle of defending freedom of the press, right?
By then, however, Gawker had lost a lot of goodwill as a result of two instances where its disregard for standards dating back to the days of typewriters and leaflets was exposed for all to see. In 2015, Gawker ran an article that claimed Conde Nast Chief Financial Officer David Geithner, the brother of President Obama’s Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, was being extorted by a gay porn star and male escort. As the story goes, when Geithner reneged on a deal to meet up with the porn star on a trip to Chicago, the escort went to Gawker and offered to tell all. He supplied copies of text exchanges between himself and Geithner and a selfie that Geithner supposedly sent him.
When the story went live, the criticism came inhard,fast, and fromall directions.Most of the detractors argued that it served no public interest to even imply that Geithner was gay. For example, the University of Minnesota’s Jane Kirtley, a media law expert, told The Daily Beast that absent evidence that Geithner gave “preferential treatment to people in the hiring process” or was guilty of sexual harassment, she was “really hard-pressed” to see a legitimate reason for running the story.
But this story had a more fundamental problem than lack of public interest. It was sourced almost entirely from a guy who was extorting Geithner. Specifically, the bulk of the story came from texts provided to Gawker staff writer Jordan Sargent. Despite this, according to Mother Jones, Gawker took onlyone working day to research, vet, and fact-check the story before it went live.
A number of media experts found the rapid turnaround time for this story extremely problematic. Ken Paulson, former editor-in-chief of USA Today and current president of the First Amendment Center, told Mother Jones that stories that could even potentially wreck someone’s reputation “are typically vetted over a longer period.” Over that time, Paulson added, details could come up that “could give you pause about publishing.” First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams was interviewed in the same article, saying that when there is evidence of blackmail or extortion, it ought to be “a blinking yellow light, or even a blinking red light” to thoroughly vet it before you even consider publishing it.
Gawker’s defense, at the time, seemed to be that the story was true and nothing else mattered. In response to withering criticism—including from Gawker’s own readers—Natasha Vargas-Cooper of Jezebel harrumphed in a since-deleted tweet that in her mind, “if it’s true, you publish.”
The fact that Gawker seemed to justify this story simply because it was true appeared especially tone-deaf a mere four years after the News of the World wasforced out of existence due to rampant phone-hacking. Indeed, Gawker’s ethos appeared little different from that of WikiLeaks. By then, we’d known since at least 2010 that Julian Assange’s idea of transparency includedreleasing unredacted Social Security numbers—and dismissing any potential harm as “collateral damage.”
A mere 18 hours after the story went live, Gawker Media’s six-member managing partnershipvoted to remove it over thefurious objections of Gawker’s editorial staff. But when Gawker founder and CEO Nick Denton deliveredthe official explanation for removing the post, he proved that he still didn’t get it.
Denton said that the story about Geithner was “true and well reported,” which would have been enough to justify running it “in the early days of the Internet.” However, he said, “Gawker is no longer the insolent blog that began in 2003,” and this meant that potential stories “have to be true and interesting” in order to pass editorial muster. Denton went further in a memo to Gawker’s editorial team, saying that he was “ashamed” to have his name attached to the story, even if “we were within our legal right to publish.”
There are times when what was considered good reporting years ago is patently unacceptable now. For instance, the relentless coverage of Britney Spears in the early 2000swould never be tolerated today given greater awareness about mental health and sexism. But this didn’t even come close to being one of those times. By suggesting that an article that essentially amounted to aiding and abetting extortion would be even remotely acceptable in 2003, Denton made his statement announcing the article’s deletion amount to a non-apology apology. It also casts a pall on the good that Gawker actually did—like turning the hot lights on Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s substance abuse, or revealing that Bill O’Reilly used his influence to start an investigation of his ex-wife’s boyfriend.
Soon after the furor over the Geithner article died down, it became even clearer just how serious Gawker’s cultural problem was. In July 2015, Vanity Fair writer Richard Lawsontweeted a mea culpa about his days at Gawker. He admitted that he’d written, on orders from his boss, “baseless posts accusing an actor of raping an ex-boyfriend.” That actor wasJames Franco.
From 2008 to around 2014, Gawker churned out a series of articles that attempted to out Franco. The first of these articles, penned by Lawson, was a follow-up to ablind item in the New York Postin which an unidentified actor reportedly broke into his former boyfriend’s apartment and violently raped him. Inhis article, Lawson mused that the three likely suspects were Will Smith, Christian Bale—and Franco.
Soon afterward, Lawsonwrote another article suggesting that based on Gawker commenters’ sentiment, “the people” felt Franco was a gay rapist. He then followed that up witha third article suggesting that the “gay rapist” Franco had actually been mentioned by the person who tipped off the Post about the supposed violent attack. If there is any difference between that article and Trump’s penchant for spewing baseless garbage that’s supposedly based on what “many people are saying,” I don’t see it.
Later, other Gawker writerspenned articles suggesting that Franco was gay, based on the thinnest reeds of evidence. According to The Daily Beast, this was part of Gawker’s “creepy obsession with outing closeted men.” Granted, Franco is no angel. In 2021, he not only settled a lawsuit alleging that he harassed several students at the acting school he ran from 2014 to 2017, but admitted sleeping with some of his students.
Seen in this light, it’s no wonder that it took more than six years and at least one false start for Gawker to be revived. It returned in the summer of 2021 as a sister publication to women’s magazine Bustle, who bought Gawker’s remains in 2019. One would have thought that given Gawker’s popularity, it would have been revived sooner. However, NPR’s Folkenflik noted that when Univision bought Gawker’s sister sites, it concluded that Gawker itself was “too toxic to touch.”
Given how long it took for Gawker to be revived, any potential white knights must have reached the same conclusion. Who would want to take on an organization that not only believed there was a time where extortion was at all acceptable, but had no qualms about running libel?
Indeed, even as I write this, the articles libeling Franco are still available on Gawker’s website. That contrasts sharply with how the Times handled the initial version of its editorial attack on Palin. Contrary to what she and her fellow deplorables would have us believe, mainstream media outlets have standards—and those that lack standards get culled.
The same, however, can’t be said for some mainstays of right-wing media. For instance, when former Alabama chief justice Roy Moore made a bid for the U.S. Senateseat that came open when Jeff Sessions was tapped as Trump’s attorney general, Breitbart led a relentless smear campaign against the women who claimed Moore sexually assaulted them or pursued improper relationships with them. And it did so even though its editor-in-chief, Alex Marlow,believed at least one of the accusers was credible.
Marlow made this shocking assertion in an interview with CNN’s Oliver Darcy in December 2017, a month after Moore’s narrow loss to Democrat Doug Jones. He revealed that he believed that Moore’s initial accuser, Leigh Corfman, had “a lot of credibility.” Corfman, you may recall, claimed Moore sexually assaulted her when she was 14.
By admitting that he believed Moore’s accusers were credible even as Breitbart was smearing them, Marlow effectively put big, fat asterisks by every story Breitbart ran about the election. Victim shaming is bad enough, but doing so when you have reason to believe a victim is telling the truth is absolutely heinous. It’s even more so considering that Marlow admitted Breitbart went all-in for Moore to protect Trump.
Project Veritas also joined in on this disgraceful campaign. Its ringleader, James O’Keefe, even went as far as having one of his minions, Jaime Phillips, try to plant a bogus story in The Washington Postclaiming that Moore had impregnated her.But that story came apart when the Post did some actual journalism and discovered Phillips’ story had more red flags than a lifetime of Alabama football games. Most damningly, Phillips had created a GoFundMe page boasting about her goal to join “the conservative media movement” in exposing “the liberal MSM.”
To pile obscenity on top of insult, O’Keefe revealed in December 2017 that he believed Moore’s accusers were credible. And yet, he felt compelled to smear them because—wait for it—he felt their credibility was “not my subject matter,” and his real goal was exposing “bias in the media.” So the man whose stock in trade is targeting journalists for supposed bias admitted that doing so was so important that he felt compelled to shame victims that he believed were credible. Let that sink in.
To give you an idea how outrageous Breitbart and Project Veritas’ behavior was here, imagine if every news outlet that passed on the prospect of exposing Harvey Weinstein’s depravities had reason to believe Weinstein’s accusers were credible—and yet ran stories effectively calling them liars. It makes Palin’s squawking about theTimes’ failure to basically grovel before her look hypocritical as all hell.
Fortunately, at least two other members of the deplorable fever swamp are facing long-overdue accountability. Take InfoWars, for instance. Even after Alex Jones was kicked off mainstream social media and blackballed from smartphone app stores, it looked like he was going to continue his years-long promotion of conspiracy theories and hate speech—albeit with a much reduced audience.
But what may have been the beginning of the end for Jones came in 2018, not long after Facebook and YouTube gave him the boot. Several families of Sandy Hook victims, along with an FBI agent who responded to the shooting, sued Jones for defamation. Specifically, they wanted Jones held to account for his numerous claims that the Sandy Hook victims and survivors were “crisis actors.” These claims have resulted in the survivors being relentlessly harassed and trolled. The family of Noah Pozner, for instance, has had to move numerous times due to the harassment, and now live under high security in an undisclosed location. They have never been able to visit their son’s grave.
A series of legal reversals for Jones and InfoWars culminated in the fall of 2021. That September, a Texas judge issued three default judgments against Jones and InfoWars in two defamation suits filed by Sandy Hook families. The judge had lost patience with Jones’ refusal to turn over documents, and found it egregious enough to conclude that Jones had already lost. In November, a Connecticut judge issued a default judgment in a suit filed against Jones in another lawsuit. While damages will be determined at trial later this year, they are likely to add up to hundreds of millions of dollars—in all likelihood, enough to put InfoWars out of business.
Another fixture of the deplorable fever swamp, Gateway Pundit, may also face extinction after beingsued for orchestrating a vicious trolling campaign that falsely accused Georgia election workers of stealing their state for Joe Biden. The two workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, claim that Gateway Pundit started a flood of disinformation that reached all the way to Trump, who attacked Freeman by name in his now-infamous attempt to shake down Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Dozens of bogus stories about Freeman and Moss resulted in death threats, doxing, and kidnapping attempts, among other things. Rather than apologize, Gateway Pundit actually tried to raise money off the lawsuit, netting over $81,000. If there is any justice, though, that fundraising effort will be a futile exercise. Gateway Pundit and its impresarios, the Hoft brothers, ought to get a very hard lesson on why private citizens only need to prove negligence in order to win libel suits.
The Times moves in almost no time at all by current media standards to retract claims about Palin—and yet, Breitbart, Project Veritas, and Gateway Pundit refuse to even attempt to apologize for far worse. What’s wrong with this picture?
The answer to that question is simpler than you may think. For all the caterwauling we hear from the right about the media not having any standards, we have seen instance after instance where the media has shown it actually does. Moreover, whenever elements of the mainstream press show they don’t have standards, they are weeded out. The demise of Gawker is a stark example of what happens when you catapult your way into the mainstream, only to show you have little regard for basic standards of decency.
If we are to remove the tinder from our politics, we must subject the media to the same level of accountability that Gawker faced, and what InfoWars is more than likely to face. As Gawker learned in 2016, that standard ought to apply regardless of political shade. But if Palin and other right-wingers are willing to take off their blinders, they would see that their own side of the media divide is long overdue for a cleaning.
Poll 426 votes Show Results
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an hunter kos 10 21
Here's an entire New York Times story about a genuinely bad, malevolent person. It's not framed that way, of course, because Neutrality, but the Times tossed a reporter in the direction of Great Falls, Montana, to give us another report from the Trumpian underbelly of America and once again, it's a paranoid, conspiracy-obsessed, strategically dishonest sh-tshow that explains a lot about why the True Americans nesting comfortably in Trumpism have steadily been gravitating toward fascism as a matter of natural course.
The Times story is a long explainer about Rae Grulkowski and her quest to keep local civic-minded Montana residents from getting a token amount of federal funds by designating a chunk of the state a "national heritage area." It's a largely meaningless designation that provides minor federal funds to help preserve local points of interest and boost history-minded tourism.A bunch of Montana folks got a bee in their bonnets about it, part of the general True American suspicion that the federal government is evil and just out to trick people (thanks again, Ronald Jackass Reagan), and it became the local version of critical race theory, and hydrocorto-whateveritall, and ingesting horse dewormer because some friend of a friend of a cousin of an Online Influencer said horse paste cures gunshot wounds or whatever the latest version of that theory is.
But here's the thing: Rae Grulkowski—hero of the paranoid Montana class and partial impetus for Montana's reporter-attacking Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte's theatrical ban on the federal government from creating any such heritage designation in the state—attacked the civic-minded proposal by lying her ass off, constantly, inventing or perpetuating a web of fabricated claims that the tourism designation would, in the Times'telling, "forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells, or use fertilizers." It would ban septic systems! It would raise taxes!
And it was all utter bullshit. As the Times noted and gave evidence of, Grulkowski was lying about all of it.
It was a local campaign dependent on crafting outright propaganda against something she didn't personally like, disseminating it to people who didn't give a damn whether it was true or it was false, rallying a crowd of like-minded liars to attack the opposition with furious disinformation, and turning it into the nextFarm Bureau and Republican paranoia campaign in which allies compared the National Heritage Area program to Hitler and nobody involved can stammer their way through any plausible defense of the nonsensical claims they're making.
So then, what are we to make of this? Well, Grulkowski and her allies are flat-out liars, that's for sure. They have disseminated provably false information as a political strategy, and local Republican (Trump) voters snorted it all up like ideological cocaine.Team Lying Bullshit has done its level best to make the lives of those evil civic do-gooders miserable.
It's only in the very last quarter of the story that we get to the kicker that explains all the rest of it: Rae Grulkowski is apparently a "QAnon" devotee, according to The New York Times. She claims to believe in conspiracies about "child trafficking that leads to everything," and believes that Donald Trump won the November election even though he most demonstrably got flattened, and thinks Black Lives Matter supporters were the actual culprits behind the Jan. 6 insurrection, and there we go. She appears to be someone who read a lot of hoaxes on Facebook and turned them into a personality, just one of a new "movement" of Americans radicalized by a single company's eagerness to monetize the nation's most deep-seated paranoias.
Well of course someone who believes an assortment of the most malevolent, antisemitic, racist, pro-fascist conspiracy theories being passed around the internet is going to be similarly loose when inventing anti-government reasons to oppose whatever her neighbors are doing. But—and this is the crux of the Times story and the lesson to be taken from all of this—it worked.
It worked, because of course it did. The propaganda effort was overwhelmingly successful, enough to gain the support of conservative state lawmakers who did not give a damn whether the claims were true. Nobody involved appears to have given a damn whether they were promoting lies. The invention of propaganda was the core strategy: taking a minor civic issue and turning it, through lies, into a new conservative touchstone.
The lying part is the most consequential "value" at play here. "Heritage" designations have nothing to do with any of it. Nobody gives a flying damn whether or not local historic landmarks get new plaques or whether they don't. The important part is for local Republicanism to stick it to anyone who tries to do an inch of good by inventing whatever lies are necessary to do it.
In battling a largely meaningless recognition of the area's rich history, Grulkowski was following the playbook of Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump himself. It is the fascist playbook: If the facts are against your beliefs, ignore those facts and lie. Create new "facts" that will galvanize the movement despite their fraudulence; rather than seeking the consent of the governed by explaining why the movement's ideas will solve current problems, manufacture a new reality in which the "problems" are whatever hoaxes the movement needs to produce in order to justify taking whatever actions the movement wants to take.
We are in a world of danger when flagrant political lies can so swiftly result in success rather than condemnation. That is the endgame to all of this. If a government can be established that governs the nation through fraud—and it is happening, in each Republican-held state using provably false election hoaxes to justify new voting restrictions, and in the establishment of Facebook as the nation's new news source, one in which false information is treated by the company as marketable entertainment rather than a poison, and in the pre-disgraced thug of a Montana governor adopting ananti-government propaganda campaign to attack a federal government program instituted by Ronald Reagan himself as a supposed secret attack on True American rights—then elections are already irrelevant.
Central to battling all of it, however, is to recognize that Rae Grulkowski disseminated lies in order to attack an action she didn't like; she did so while wallowing in an absolute sea of other lies. She succeeded in mustering a populist revolt against better people and better ideas by lying, outright, about the thing she was fighting against.Now, says the Times, she has further political ambitions, given that her equally toxic and cowardly neighbors proved to be so furiously supportive of her campaign of lies.
This is a person who should be scorned. This is a person who should be shunned, boycotted, considered a crackpot, and treated with universal contempt. This is a person who is attacking democracy itself, by attacking it at its root premise: Whatever civic challenges are presented to the voters, they must be based on truth. Democracy is meaningless, is absolutely meaningless, if each election is a competition not of competing solutions to civic problems but of the inventiveness of each campaign in creating new hoaxes and convincing the governed to believe them.
Instead, we get national debates over whether some of the most infamously dishonest people in government have been treated too roughly if private restaurant owners do not want to serve them. The pressure is not to shun liars as anti-American, anti-democracy propagandists seeking to manipulate public opinion through rampant dishonesty, but whether we are allowed to direct any scorn their way at all.
How did it come to this?
The short answer might be Bernard Goldberg. Goldberg was one of those who made a name for himself insisting that American journalism was intrinsically "biased" against conservatives, a claim which is now taken as a central movement tenet because it fits pleasingly with every other movement theme of displacement and victimhood. The evidence for this "bias," even decades into the claims, was almost always an assertion that because conservative ideologues were not given exposure equal to actual issue experts, it amounted to oppressing the conservative "side" of an argument.
Ideological claims, in other words, were being shortchanged because journalists were looking to scientists, medical experts, historical data, and other providers of hard facts rather than letting lobbyists, think-tank heads, and other professional political provocateurs speak with equal authority and at equal volume.
From there conservatism moved to a very successful crusade to reformulate "news" so that facts were always debatable, so long as there was a single professional spinner who could be paid to claim they were. The cable networks, especially, transitioned from that into new forms that rarely gave scientists or other experts a voice at all, preferring instead to pit one pre-determined ideologue against another for orchestrated spats in which nobody could beproven to have lied because the segment would be over before any actual journalist or expert could even phone the studio.
We moved on to public bellowing about "the elites must respect my beliefs," where "beliefs" consisted of believing that climate scientists were sabotaging world government or, eventually, that livestock dewormer was a miracle cure for a pandemic hospitals themselves could not keep up with.
But it was the Goldberg camp that insisted that liars and propagandists should not just be heard from but also treated with respect.That if there was a conflict between facts and conservatism, then it was biased to highlight one over the other. It was treated as a given, from the beginning, that conservatism was a counter to scientific and policy expertise. It was treated as a given that conservatism was the rightful and just opposition to such expertise.
We have reached that conservative promised land. All of the news now follows the formula of pitting ideologue against ideologue, the facts wedged in somewhere—or not, depending on the journalist—but with no reproach given to those who insist that the facts are something else. The paid propagandists and crafters of outlandish, impossible lies are now treated with impeccable respect by the media. The American people are taught to treat professional liars as dignified combatants—nay, true Americans, speaking powerful emotions in the face of uncomfortable, irritating data.
And, after hounding media relentlessly into giving respect to professional fraudsters, the conservative movement itself has now shed from itself everything but the professional fraudsters. The lies are the movement; the movement is defined by the lies, and shifts as rapidly as required to adopt new ones. tucker 1/6 false flag]
You need not look at anything beyond the last election to see that. Respecting, or actively propagating, the anti-American hoax that claims Republicans secretly "won" the last election only to have it stolen by invisible forces, is now a requirement inside the so-called "conservative" movement.Trump lied constantly, about everything, in genuinely malevolent ways, and he was a product of both Bernard Goldberg's insistence that sneering know-nothings be given media respect and the shouter who finally erased all further attempts to pretend Republicanism was anything but a collection of spite-based antipathies and hoaxes.
But Rae Grulkowski is, genuinely, a bad person. Steve Bannon is a liar, a propagandist, and a hack. Stephen Miller is a white nationalist who crafts propaganda demonizing immigrants to justify brutality against them. Mitch McConnell is a relentless liar, one who flaunts his absolute contempt for whatever ideal he blustered about a month, a week, or a day beforehand in order to invent an entirely opposing one. Sarah Huckabee Sanders promoted fraudulent information as a professional, and ideological, career move. Donald Trump is quite possibly the most loathsome sack of malignant neuroses to ever have shuffled through Washington and that is saying something.
Creating hoaxes for the purpose of manipulating public opinion is contemptible, evil behavior. It deserves fury. It deserves the scorn of the entire nation; journalism, and political media especially, should have such seething contempt for the propagandists that exposure of each lie and value judgments about those that perpetrate them should be, as they once were, the profession's central ambition.
It is not enough to point out that this or that person is fabricating a hoax in order to deceive their fellow Americans into holding a new political position. Those that do so are enemies of democracy. They are, in the true sense of the word, anti-American. They are frauds. They are doing direct harm to their neighbors, their towns, their states, their nation. They are ideological soldiers seeking to do harm to the government by taking, from the public, the ability to use their vote as means of steering that government. They are anti-civil rights. Their propaganda is stealing democracy by stealing votes by stealing political debate itself so that voters simply cannot discern what government is doing, what the parties are doing, what the issues are, where the dangers are, and where the future catastrophes lie.
These are all bad, evil, rotten people who need to be shunned with ferocity. They do not warrant respect. They do not warrant civil treatment. They do not warrant malicious burbles about how dare Americans seek consequences for their fraud; newspaper editors should be devoting themselves to identifying each face and name and lie and treating them as public enemy, not both sides denizen.
These are the footsoldiers that will end democracy, if we cannot throw them from our civic spaces and treat them with the contempt that hoax promoters deserve. These are not the days of tar and feathers, but they can certainly be the days of belittlement, consequences, and public reproach. These are the vapid, self-serving cowards whose lies spur domestic terrorists to violence, and who kill Americans by the thousands by pushing fraudulent information about a deadly pandemic. These are not people who lie of happenstance or impulse, but people who specifically seek to bend government through a pattern of anti-American deceit.
There is no neutrality to be had in reporting like this. Someone who manipulates American politics by lying to the American public is acting with malevolence; reporters should feel a civic duty not just to expose them, but to strip them of the usual deference and pleasantries. Treat propagandists with more scorn than those who craft financial hoaxes to prey on the elderly, or those who hide the deadly effects of a product so that they may sell more of them. The propagandists are attacking the soul of our very democracy. To hell with them. Shun them and those who enable their plots out of greed, ideology, or apathy.
Conservatism has now reached Bernard Goldberg's promised land in which facts and malevolent fictions are treated as equals. The movement itself has become a mass of hoaxes cowering under a red hat. If it cannot be condemned as a fraud, it will grow in power until it strips all truth from around us.
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smot
aha note gop sez ppl lazy and moral hazard of soc safe net but at same time quash vax mask Mandate EVEN WHEN LOCAL PPL /REPS VOTE FOR THEM, THEN PPL QUIT CRAPPY LOW WAGE DANGEROUS JOBS
and
October 24, 2021
https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/unemployment-2655355131/
The business owners whose blood, sweat, and tears—or at least their fancy, high-priced educations, family connections and access to venture capital—built this country, dammitwere hellbent and determined to show American workers who was boss. This COVID-19 nonsense was not going to interfere with their profits any longer. It was time totake a stand.
So they all had their administrative assistants conference in their favorite state legislators, the same ones who helpfully passed legislation a few years back, keeping pesky unions out of their states. They called in their chits for all those campaign contributions to the governor. They called their Republican House reps and senators. Damn that Fauci, they complained. My business is hurting. No more lockdowns, no more of this "social distancing "crap. This state is going to open for business and I don't want to hear another word about body counts or stressed hospitals. I need workers and I need them now. I paid for your damn campaigns, so do something!
And those state representatives and senators leapt into action. In a matter of a few weeks we saw state after state brimming with self-appointed medical experts in their legislatures, railing about the tyrannical mask mandates and business lockdowns. CEOs and white-collar professionals cracked their whips—many still from the comfort of their fine second homes and pools. And thus the support staff, the retail clerks and the service workers, many of whom who had once been adoringly lionized as "essential" at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, were told it was time to return to work. And for added good measure, Republican governors in those statescut offtheir unemployment aid. That'll show them, they thought ...
But strangely enough, not all of those workers heeded the call. In fact, a good many of them quit.
As reported by Alyssa Fowers and Eli Rosenberg, writing for The Washington Post:
Kentucky, Idaho, South Dakota and Iowa reported the highest increases in the rates of workers who quit their jobs in August, according to a new glimpse of quit rates in the labor market released Friday.
The largest increase in the number of quitters happened in Georgia, with 35,000 more people leaving their jobs. Overall, the states with the highest rates of workers quitting their jobs were Georgia, Kentucky and Idaho.
As The Post points out, the interesting thing about this data is that service-sector jobs are most highly concentrated in urban areas. So why would people be quitting their jobs at such astronomical rates in such relatively rural states as Kentucky, South Dakota, Iowa and Idaho?
Fowers and Rosenberg offer a clue:
Employees quit or were hired at rates matching or exceeding the national average in the ten states with the highest rates of new infections that month: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee.
So the highest rate of turnover in August—employees quitting or getting hired—was found in the states which had the highest rate of COVID-19 infection for that month. Logically, that seems to make sense. Workers who live in one of those states were also likely to have a governor or, in the case of Kentucky, a Republican-dominated legislaturewho opposed business closures, even while the delta variant ravaged the state's population. Such workers were essentially forced by these states policies to return to work if they could not work from home.
Those people forced back to work in an unsafe environment simply decided to quit—many of them likely before ever venturing back into their workspace. After all, they saw a job the other day that was offering more money. Or their next-door neighbor's cousin got a job that pays more and allows them to work from home. The Post article quotes Nick Bunker, an economist for the job search portal Indeed, who notes that the high quit rate in these red and rural states "may be a sign there's more competition in those parts of the country than other parts."
The other interesting point aboutallof the states having both the highest level of turnover and the highest infection rates? They are all so-called"right to work" states,where legislatures passed legislation to disincentivize and discourage unions.So these workers have essentially no protection, no one to turn to for help remedying unsafe conditions, and no collective bargaining power; they can, for the most part, be terminated at will. That's what "right-to work"has always been about.
As one commenter to The Post story points out:
So, when you have a crappy job, for crappy wages, and a crappy employer who doesn't value you at all, and all of a sudden you find yourself in a labor market situation that actually encourages you to look for work elsewhere--what do you think is going to happen? The 'Great Resignation' is largely about working class people attempting to use what little leverage they have in order to make a moderately better wage for themselves in a mostly hostile, oppressive national work environment.
For employers, the downside of "right to work"— one they never saw coming—was the fact that workers in those states had little, if any, incentive to stay, especially when once-in-a lifetime opportunities arose for them to leave, while competition for higher wages and better working conditions further drove that exodus.
Some employers are responding by antagonizing would-be applicants.
In Missouri, a group of businesses, still frustrated by labor shortages more than three months after the state cut off the $300-a-week federal jobless checks, paid for billboards in Springfield that said: "Get Off Your Butt!" and "Get. To. Work."
The state has seen no growth in its workforce since ending emergency benefits.
"We don't know where people are," said Brad Parke, general manager of Greek Corner Screen Printing and Embroidery, who helped pay for the billboards. "Obviously, they're not at work. Apparently, they're at home."
The attempt to force workers back to dangerous, unsafe pandemic working conditions—brought on by short-sighted Republican policymakers for political ends—has collided with a culture where workplace protections and the ability to bargain have been completely devalued (also by Republican politicians), leaving workers as essentially dispensable commodities.
No wonder they're quitting for greener pastures in those states. Republican elected officials and their business donors in those same states have no one to blame but themselves. They created this environment, and now they're going to have to cope and adjust with workers who want more out of their jobs … and know they can get it. They have to keep up and do better, or see their businesses go under.
Funny how that worked out.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/steve-bannon/
dartagnon kos
on Wednesday evening
made an excellent point: While Democrats and the Biden administration focus on the mundane aspects of trying to do what's best for the American people—passing infrastructure legislation, preserving and protecting the right to vote against GOP measures to suppress it, combating the causes and effects of climate change, and trying to ensure that women retain autonomy over their own bodies, for example—for Republicans, even addressing or staking out a position on these issues has become, at most, a peripheral concern.[wedge issue cult war, own the libs]
You would expect a party that professes some legitimate relationship to the American people to at least set forth its policy views on these matters. But, as Maddow noted on Wednesday, that is not what Republicans are talking about. In reality, the Republicans have only one focus now: the negation of fair and lawful elections that don't go their way. That has been the crux of their entire collective effort since Trump lost the election last November. It is the focus in California, where the racist Fox News crackpot Larry Elder apparently received unpleasant news from his internal polling and is now playing the "fraud" card, in the apparent expectation that he will lose that state's recall election against Gavin Newsom. It is happening in Nevada, where Trump-endorsed candidate Adam Laxalt has preemptively suggestedthat if he fails to unseat Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in 2022, it will only be due to some unspecified "fraud."
The "stolen election/voter fraud" theme is now the official GOP talking point. As Maddow observed, Republicans everywhere are now using it and will continue to use it in 2022 and beyond. The tactic is being chiefly promoted and driven by Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's former chief of staff, and reinforced through his daily podcasts, which, like NBC News, ProPublica and others have pointed out, are now virtually required listening for most Republican officials, whether elected or intent on being elected. This is where their marching orders are coming from.
While Bannon's podcasts touch obliquely on current events (the latest fixation of their contrived outrage is Afghanistan, for example), the overwhelming emphasis is on conjuring up and amplifying the phony threat of "election fraud," urging on the nationwide bogus, partisan audits and investigations, and providing preordained conclusions to those investigations. As Pro Publica reported in their analysis of Bannon's efforts, this nationalization of Trump's Big Lie has been extraordinarily successful up to this point, prompting a massive surge in local election precinct membership among Trump's most delusional, violent, and white nationalist base of support:
The new movement is built entirely around Trump's insistence that the electoral system failed in 2020 and that Republicans can't let it happen again. The result is a nationwide groundswell of party activists whose central goal is not merely to win elections but to reshape their machinery.
Bannon's podcast is a disinformation megaphone the likes of which Josef Goebbels could have only dreamed of, and it is incredibly corrosive to this country's democratic institutions. It is the cynical product of a man who has exercised (or attempted to exercise) an insidious influencenot only on far-right, proto-fascist movements and political parties in Europe but now apparently in Brazil as well, on behalf of would-be dictator Jair Bolsonaro. And the fact that the entire GOP is currently operating in lockstep with—and at the bidding of—such a person tells you everything you need to know about how the 2022 election will be framed: Every contest in which a Republican loses will now be susceptible to an ongoing, malicious attack on that election's integrity, bar none.
And Democrats have every reason to be appalled by this Bannon takeover of the Republican party. (In reality, all Americans should be appalled, but as the listless reaction by the GOP faithful to the terrorist assault of Jan. 6 showed, we cannot expect any fealty to democracy from the vast majority of Republicans.)But there is a silver lining to this seditious perfidy by Bannon and others: it serves to make all forthcoming elections a referendum on Donald Trump, to the exclusion of all else.
Bannon himself has created this effect by tying his entire effort to the 2020 election. (In his podcasts, rather than refer to it directly, he calls it "3 November," as if the bare mention of the date has a mobilizing resonance similar to Jan. 6 or Sept. 11.) All of the invented, phony, and racially tinged rhetoric about voter fraud hawked in his podcasts stem from the given assumption that Trump was wrongfully denied reelection. And Trump himself has been more than eager to support it, as he showed this weekby injecting his assessment of the California recall election as tainted, even before any votes were tallied. Trump's anointed candidates, such as Laxalt and the countless others who will follow him, have all irrevocably signed onto this playbook. That is their sole roadmap.
So be it. Just a few weeks ago, plenty of political prognosticators weregleefully downplaying Democrats' chances in California (and, by implication, the 2022 midterms), touting the fact that Trump was no longer on the ballot. Republicans, by leaping onto the Bannon bandwagon, have now made it essential that he be implicitly on the ballot, even as they resolve to delegitimize any Democratic wins as the product of fraud. Seen in this perspective, every election from this point forward is a referendum on Trump and Trump-ism. Fascist-admirers like Bannon believe that this is a winning strategy, but to an electorate that has already rendered a decidedly negative verdict on Joe Biden's predecessor—a judgment which was amply reinforced by the horrific attacks by Trump supporters on Jan. 6—he may have inadvertently provided the single strongest motivation for Democrats to vote.
When Georgia held its special election on Jan. 5, pitting Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff against two GOP incumbents, it was in the wake of weeks of rhetoric from Trump attempting to delegitimize the electoral process. At that time, Trump's mob of white supremacist terrorists had yet to demonstrate their violent and utter contempt for our institutions by assaulting the Capitol. Many political observers concluded that Trump's efforts sabotaged the GOP's chances by depressing and demotivating the vote. But the converse effect, theconcerted mobilization of the Black vote by Stacey Abrams and others, was perhaps less remarked upon. Far from having its desired effect, the tactic of falsely crying voter fraud hurt GOP turnout.
The entire underlying premise of Bannon's podcast is the illegitimacy of the Democratic voter. But as the elections of Sens. Warnock and Ossoff showed, people react very negatively to attempts to delegitimize them. For many, it simply increases their resolve to vote. While every district is certainly different, if Republicans expect the tactic to work as a national strategy, they have to resign themselves to the fact that the election thereby becomes all about Trump, everything that Trump did in office and has done in the wake of his defeat. Gov. Terry McAuliffe, for example, isdoing just that in Virginia right now.
Trump is the most polarizing figure in American politics, and by and large, all Democrats viscerally despise him. By overtly basing their entire strategy on the petulant lies of a failed president, Republicans who choose to follow down the primrose path Bannon has laid for them may well be giving the Democrats a midterm opportunity of a lifetime.
Democrats should embrace that opportunity: make every election a referendum on Donald Trump, tying every Republican to his attempts to overturn the election. And pull out all the stops to get our voters to the polls.
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hunter kos
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/fill-the-swamp-team-trump-taps-an-infamous-oil-funded-climate-denier-for-noaa-role
although the election is almost upon us, Team Trump continues to fill the swamp to whatever new high-water mark they can possibly manage, putting the Absolute Least Competent People in charge of every government agency. It continues with the appointment of David Legates to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), where he will act as “deputy assistant secretary of commerce for observation and prediction.”
Have you heard of David Legates? You might have. He’s a notorious climate change denier. And now he’s evidently being given a key role in “observation and prediction.” Or in other words, a perfect perch from which todo to government climate science what Trump’s team is furiously doing to the nation’s pandemic science: deny that the bad things are happening while claiming that scientific evidence to the contrary is a dangerous plot against Dear Leader and Dear Leader’s rich, dumb friends.
There is literally nothing “conservative” rule cannot turn into a national disaster. And there doesn’t seem to be a single thing Trump’s Republican allies are content to not turn into a national disaster.
NPR speculates that Legates’ new position “suggests he reports directly” to acting NOAA head Neil Jacobs, putting him in a powerful position to sabotage whatever reports the agency’s climate scientists produce. NPR also reports that neither NOAA or Legates was willing to so much as comment on why he was hired or what he will be doing, which is always a near-certain sign that crookedness is afoot. If a government agency is going out of its way to hide what a new hire will be doing, and it’s not the CIA doing the hiring, you can bet it’s because nobody involved thinks the details will make them look good.
as for Legates’ qualifications, they are negative in nature. He is explicitly anti-qualified. Legates has been a climate crank for years, casting doubt on scientific findings with his own research funded by the oil industry and Koch Industries or, less ambitiously, simply by sniping from the sidelines. He is a Heartland Institute associate whose latest writing for the group was a scoffing Paul Driessen-cowritten attack on expert predictions that 100,000 Americans could die in the current pandemic—one that unironically parroted the “cure is worse than the disease” condemnation of shutdown orders,which smoothly segued into the claim that if pandemic experts were giving such outrageous predictions, then What If all of climate science was also similarly false and inflated.
Yeah. Whoops. Funny how that worked out.
Look, fuckers. If you got the pandemic numbers wrong by a factor of All Of Them a mere few months back, you don’t get to feign science-knowing on anything else. Sit your fraudulent asses down, Team Heartland. [Author’s note: It shall now be considered every American’s patriotic duty to use swear words when referencing any of the conservative charlatans whose “cure is worse than the disease” bullshit killed 200,000 Americans and counting. If you’re not calling them crooked fake-ass hoax-spewing shit-for-brains oilfuckers, I’m just saying you might not love America as much as you say you do.]
So that is presumably what we can expect from Legates in his new Trump-enabling role: ostentatiously written but bullshit-heavy feints against government scientists while ignoring his own incompetent death-producing wrongness from oh, say, Last Damn April. It is the climate denier schtick. It is the Heartland schtick on absolutely everything, all the time, and never varies in the slightest.
He and his Heartlandians thought predictions of 100,000 deaths were just crazy talk, in a nationwide pandemic, but don’t you worry: They’re even more paycheck-collectingly sure the climate change that we are currently seeing is a similar hoax, and doing similar unnecessary damage to the Great American Business Model of We Have Money, So You All Can Fuck Off. (Hilariously, Legates’ Heartland biography mentions that he was presented with the “Courage in Defense of Science Award,”without mentioning that the award is, and this is not a joke, issued by the Heartland Institute itself. The group is self-parodying.)
Anyhoo, if you’re looking for a more lengthy description of just how brazenly pigheaded Team Trump’s new “observation and prediction” swamp-creature is, when it comes to pooh-poohing the rest of science while claiming he alone has the Correct Answers, you can go elsewhere for the details. Even as some of the most notorious climate deniers have been forced to alter their stances, given the evidence, to recognize climate change as happening and as a product of human-caused atmospheric changes, Legates has through the years continued to claim that no evidence of human-based change exists at all.
This is less scientific courageousness than apparent ideological commitment. Indeed, his claims tip precariously on the conspiracy-mongering side of things, with pronouncements that carbon dioxide has become “that molecule by which [governments] can take control of our lives, of your efforts, and everything that goes on.” (How …Gohmertian?)
And in his Heartland role, he has certainly been willing to praise the “bold” Donald Trump—a place every one of these dishonest fake-conservative talking point-dispensing charlatans naturally ends up, after selling their soul to all comers for a decade or two.
An aside: It’s uncanny how every die-hard conservative hack has fallen into line behind Trump with no apparent effort, in their eagerness to wage war on the government no matter what methods are used or who the commanding general is. It’s uncanny how every conservative “science” guy slips into the same exact talking points as all the others, to the point where their speeches and claims are indistinguishable, from person to person and year to year. While, of course, claiming that they are the true free-thinkers of the world.
Whatever. Whether the Heartland crew in particular were initially drawn in by Trump’s devotion to tax fraud, racism, and rape or merely willing to overlook those flaws to embrace Trump’s “bold” stance of having whatever policy some random check-cashing hack appearing on the Sean Hannity show tells him to have isn’t known, so we are free to guess. Given the massive quantities of Actual Damn Crime among every category of Trump supporter from “government appointee” to “boat owner,” [guo?] though, we’re probably still underestimating just how closely Trump’s heart and motives resonate with conservatism’s most devoted adherents.
What we do know is that the conservatives surrounding Trump are now making an all-out effort to destroy as much of the nation’s government and expertise as they can manage, before they are each pried back out of the buildings again. The damage will last, at this point, literally forever.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/americans-have-become-human-guinea-pigs-in-the-gops-wild-experiment-to-retain-power/
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an 1/20
minimum wage has momentum in the states and the House — but Republicans stand in the way
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-press-finally-tried-and-failed-to-stand-up-to-trump
no lnx
The press finally tried—and failed—to stand up to Trump
Written by Eric Boehlert / Daily Kos December 31, 2019
With Donald Trump becoming the first American president to be impeached in his first term, while holed up in the White House tweeting endless attacks around the clock like some internet troll, 2019 should have been the year the Beltway media finally shed its signature timidity and forcefully stood up to him. This should have been the year the press worked up the courage to disband the pointless protocols newsroom had established for covering Trump (he’s not a “liar,” he’s not a “racist”), and simply started telling the hard truths about him. And while there were some welcome flashes of truth-telling, especially surrounding the Ukraine scandal and the impeachment, for the most part the D.C. press still hasn’t signaled that’s it’s ready, or willing, to take the necessary steps needed to cover Trump.
There continues to be a collective reluctance to grapple with today’s difficult reality. Unfamiliar with covering authoritarian regimes or how to respond to them, many news outlets remain committed to treating Trump’s spectacle as a reality TV show.
Trump remains the most deeply radical player in American politics, yet the press corps is still trying to cover him as a traditional political figure, which means if the president of the United States makes some sort of public statement on a pressing issue of the day, you quote him under the assumption that he’s telling the truth and not just making stuff up. But he’s not, and he is. Trump in 2019 continued to benefit from press coverage that obediently pretended that he’s an honest broker. Wash, rinse, repeat. This, while Trump maintains his dangerous campaign to paint the press as the “enemy of the people.”
Oddly committed tonormalizingTrump by scrubbing off his hateful and dangerous rough edges, many in the Beltway press continue to play a strange game in which they refuse to describe what they clearly see in front of them. Whether it’s the fear of Trump Twitter attacks or the nearly five-decade-long GOP campaign to demonize the “liberal media,” newsrooms today nearly uniformly refuse to address the mounting, obvious signs that Trump is a deeply unstable man. Journalists watch Trump hole up in the White House spamming Twitter on some weekends with hundreds of illogical posts and then politely look away.
Incredibly, as I noted in August, this represented one 48-hour period in 2019:
He quoted a rabid conspiracy theorist radio host who declared that Israeli Jews love Trump as if he were the “King of Israel” and “the second coming of God,” while Trump himself accused American Jews of “great disloyalty” if they voted for Democrats. He attacked the prime minister of Denmark (“nasty”) because she will not sell him Greenland and she mocked the very idea as “absurd.” He suggested he might serve more than two terms in office. He slurred his words while reading a speech off a teleprompter. He accused journalists of trying to ruin the U.S. economy. He claimed Google had “manipulated” millions of votes in Hillary Clinton’s favor during the 2016 election. He suggested giving himself a Medal of Honor. He said doctors in El Paso, Texas, left their operating rooms mid-surgery in order to greet him during his visit there following a local gun massacre. And he referred to the NRA as if it were a co-equal branch of the federal government.
Compared to all previous American presidents, that would have easily surpassed the irrational missteps they made during an entire time in office. For Trump, it was just his vacation week. Yet the press remains consistently timid in dealing with Trump’s blatantly unstable behavior. Newsrooms today nearly uniformly refuse to address the mounting, obvious signs that Trump remains a deeply troubled man.
What does it mean for the most powerful leader in the free world to be acting in a bizarre and often seemingly schizophrenic fashion?And how is every administration official who appears on television not immediately and repeatedly asked whether Trump is mentally fit to hold office, and whether he poses a danger to this country? If the same journalists watched a foreign leader behaving as erratically as Trump does, that would be the first question they posed to officials.
The fact that a sitting president has unleashed so many bizarre public performances, punctuated by so many incomprehensible non sequiturs, means his stability and capacity ought to be questioned—and it ought to be a constant news story. But it’s still not.
Of course, 2019 was the year that White House press briefings were officially canceled. In a move that once would have been considered an unthinkable act by any White House, the Trump team simply pulled the plug, leaving White House reporters with extremely limited access to officials who are willing to answer even the simplest questions about the administration’s policies and agenda. In the face of that drastic action, news outlets took no collective action in response. They could have used their clout to send a powerful message if they had pulled their reporters out and signaled they weren’t going to be used as props for the press charades the White House plays.
Instead, reporters dutifully gathered outside the White House to shout questions at Trump during his so-called “Chopper Talk” sessions as he approached the presidential helicopter on the White House grounds. The controlled chaos of those sessions, where reporters yell simplistic questions, allows Trump to pick and choose reporters at random, and to ignore questions he doesn’t like. He’s also immune from follow-up questions and is free once again to lie indiscriminately, without being held accountable. All of which cable news outlets air in its entirety under the guise of “news.”
And that’s when the press wasn’t being willingly duped in 2019 by Trump’s team, and especially his attorney general, William Barr. In a signature press failure for the year, reporters for days played along with Department of Justice propaganda about the Mueller report and how it had supposedly exonerated Trump. But the only person claiming that at the time was Barr, who wouldn’t allow reporters to see the full report. Undeterred, journalists simply took Barr’s untrustworthy four-page press release and treated that as the full report. The New York Times rushed to report that Trump had been exonerated and that Mueller’s conclusions had provided Trump with a “powerful boost” toward re-election. Reminder: Nobody at the Times had read a single page of the Mueller report. News outlets everywhere scrambled to produce pro-Trump headlines based on Barr’s propaganda: “Mueller finds no conspiracy” (The Washington Post), “Mueller finds no Trump-Russia conspiracy” (The New York Times), “Mueller finds no Trump-Russia conspiracy” (Politico), “Mueller doesn’t find Trump campaign conspired with Russia” (The Wall Street Journal), “Mueller finds no Trump collusion, leaves obstruction open” (Associated Press).
They all soon discovered the obvious reality: Trump and his team had simply lied about the contents of the Mueller report, hoping (knowing?) that the press would fall for the false spin, which too many outlets did.
The key to covering Trump isn’t some deep mystery for news organizations, and it doesn’t require much sacrifice. It simply demands honesty and a willingness to be clear about what’s happening in this country. Sadly, that was lacking in 2019.
Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.
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Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.
Written by Eric Boehlert / Daily Kos
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/corporate-press-doesnt-have-the-proper-language-to-describe-todays-radical-republican-party
no lnx
Corporate press doesn’t have the proper language to describe today’s radical Republican Party
Written by Eric Boehlert / Daily Kos December 8, 2019
Extreme times call for extreme measures, but the Beltway press just isn’t willing to make that move in the Trump era. As a consequence, the news media fail to accurately capture the radical changes now underway in the country, and how today’s Republican Party has become purposefully untethered from reality.
Donald Trump remains a resolutely radical player who has eviscerated decades of protocols and traditions. Yet so much of the press refuses to cover him that way, opting instead to cling to Beltway traditions for how presidents are normally covered (i.e. We can’t call him a liar!). But as the high-profile impeachment hearings confirm (along with Trump’s recent disastrous and embarrassing trip to the NATO summit), new and bolder language is needed to accurately describe what’s transpiring.
Under Trump, we’re all in uncharted territories, and that includes the press. We have never had a major political party in this country, for instance, that openly condones seeking help from foreign powers in order to win domestic elections, the way Republicans now do. We’ve never had a political party that essentially absolves the president of the United States of all crimes and misdemeanors, simply because he has an ‘R’ next to his name. Meaning: The press has never before faced the challenge of how to cover and describe what was once a mainstream political party but has since evolved into a deeply radical one. For now, much of the news media is simply pretending that historic GOP shift hasn’t taken place, and therefore there’s no need to dramatically adjust the coverage.
But it has, and there is.
The media’s stubborn failure to adjust is now advertised daily. For instance, last week CNN’s John King and a roundtable of Beltway pundits expressed complete shock at anew poll that found 53% of Republicans said that Donald Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln was. If those pundits had closely followed the radical evolution of the GOP in recent years and been honest with news consumers about its descent into cult worship, there’s simply no way they would be utterly bewildered at Republicans’ belief today that Trump’s a better president than Lincoln. But if you’ve strained mightily to pretend Democrats and Republicans are mirror opposites of each other and advocate equally mainstream, fact-based positions, than yes, you’d be shocked by the Lincoln finding.
It’s the same reason that the percentage share of Republicans who say presidents could operate more effectively if they didn’t have to worry about Congress and the courts increased 16 percentage points over the past year, according to the Pew Research Center.
And that’s the challenge for the press: How to describe this unprecedented political movement.
“The idea that one party has become so radically different from the other, despite mountains of evidence, is a tough sell. It’s a hard sell to make for one very simple reason: It doesn’t have a name, this thing the Republicans are trying to do,” notes Michael Tomasky. “It’s not true democracy that they want. But it’s also a bit much to call them outright authoritarians. And there’s nothing in between.”
The impeachment saga poses the most obvious challenge for the press as virtually the entire Republican Party now backs absurd lies about Ukraine.“The inchoate and unproved nature of the Republican case against Ukraine has not prevented several GOP leaders from taking up the cause,” The Washington Post recently reported, as the paper examined the Republican Party’s embrace of the “incendiary conspiracy” that Ukraine worked to try to get Hillary Clinton elected in 2016.
With “inchoate and unproven,” the paper clearly tried to convey the sense that Republicans were peddling untruths— without unequivocally stating that Republicans now lie about almost everything, including the garbage Ukraine claim, which has been pushed publicly by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Fact: No U.S. intelligence community report has ever accused Ukraine of interfering in the election. Trump, of course, is accused of using $400 million in United States military assistance to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden.
“Some Republican lawmakers continue to misleadingly say that the government of Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election on the same level as Russia, despite the GOP-led committee looking into the matter and finding little to support the allegation,” CNN’s Jake Tapper recently wrote. But again, we’re not talking about Republicans trying to artfully spin a story in their favor by being “misleading.” We’re talking about Republican making stuff up, plain and simple. And the press should say so.
To CNN’s credit, it recently documented all the “falsehoods” Trump spewed during one of his signature incoherent press events while he attended the NATO gathering of world leaders.“Speaking to reporters for more than two hours in total, Trump made at least 21 false claims. That’s our initial count. The total may well grow once we have time to do some deeper fact-checking,” reported CNN’s Daniel Dale. “Embarking on a dishonesty blitz while at a foreign summit would be strange behavior for any other president. For Trump, long impervious to norms of propriety and accuracy, it was just another Tuesday.”
And frankly that’s how much of the coverage portrayed Trump’s latest descent into madness: Just another day on the job. “Trump’s wild NATO display,” read a recent Post headline. But the “wild” merely referred to the political chaos Trump created by making public statements at the global summit that clearly contradicted U.S. policy. Completely omitted from the report was the fact that Trump trafficked in lies nearly nonstop during his bizarre world stage appearance.
Journalists covering Trump need to embrace new language to describe his dangers.
Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.
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Glenn Beck is accusing Daily Kos Staff Writer Shaun King of being one of "the two main guys" leading a network of "Islamicists, Communists and anti-Americans" as part of a national "anti-police" conspiracy.
You can read all of Shaun’s work covering police brutality for Daily Kos here. Shaun’s work is always supported by facts, often including videos of the violence people of color face at the hands of police every day. 3/15
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Last Tuesday, March 17, I received a text message from my friend DeRay McKesson with a YouTube link. Deray asked me to check out the video. I had no idea that I was about to be featured in it.
The video is of Glenn Beck and former NYPD officer John Cardillo uncovering what they purport to be a complex, well-funded conspiracy in Ferguson, Missouri, backed with $33 million from billionaire George Soros with ties to ISIS, communists, and other anti-Americans.By the time they introduced the video in this ridiculous and fanciful way, it already resembled a very bad SNL skit.
Then, my jaw dropped. Beyond the weird reality that a hateful show had the word "love" painted on the wall, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. ...
Glenn: Okay. So, tell me, take me through the chalkboard and show me what you found.
John: Okay, let’s walk through it.
Glenn: You started with the two main guys.
John: Started with two main guys, so the two main guys we started with was a guy named DeRay McKesson and a guy named Shaun King.
Watch the video for yourself and see my thoughts....he entire video is about as dumb and factually inaccurate as a presentation about Ferguson could ever be. In part, that's what's so scary about it. Let me break down some of the lies.
Lie #1:
Glenn: Can I start here? #BlackLivesMatter and #HandsUpDontShoot, those are the two things that everybody knows.
John: Everyone knows them, two most predominant hashtags, used quite often by both of these guys.
Rebuttal: I've almost never used either of those hashtags. I'm not really a hashtag guy. While I support both of them, starting a segment out by stating that I use them both, and often at that, clued me in right away that these guys were in no man's land.
Lie #2:
John: This guy, Shaun King, has become an absolute pro at using GoFundMe.
Rebuttal: I hate GoFundMe. They are the primary profiteers from Darren Wilson's fundraising and have allowed racists to profiteer off of the misery of black folk time after time. I actually helped lead a boycott against them. I've never started a campaign for anyone using GoFundMe.
Lie #3:
John: Unfortunately, there have been a lot of questions about where the money goes after he raises this money.
Glenn: Okay.
John: One lawyer consistently comes out and defends him.
Rebuttal: Not one family member or person associated with a family member who has been victimized by police has ever had a single question, privately or publicly, about any fundraising I've helped with. Only conservatives and racists who never really wanted these families to receive support in the first place have questioned it. Not only that, but I've never received a penny from the fundraising and never, for one second, held any funds for families in my possession—directly or indirectly. The funds raised for families have always gone straight to the families. Furthermore, the "one lawyer" that he is speaking about is Benjamin Crump, who is the the lawyer of the families I've helped raise funds for.
Lie #4:
John: It's funded by a guy we all know, George Soros.
Glenn: What a surprise.
John: To the tune of $33 million that we can find.
Rebuttal: So, Deray and I are the two main guys, right? Neither of us have received a dime from George Soros or his foundation. In fact, I can't find one single person who has received any of this $33 million that they speak of because it's a lie. To say that this man has funneled $33 million through us or any grassroots leaders on the ground in Ferguson is outrageous and dangerous. It suggests something nefarious that just isn't happening. Please tell me exactly what the $33 million has done. Who received it? When? This is messy, snopes-level conspiracy talk. Stop it.
Lie #5:
John: You’ve got Nation of Islam which appears to be acting as the muscle, because they’re also bringing in elements of the new Black Panther party.
Rebuttal: To call either the Nation of Islam or the new Black Panther party "the muscle" in Ferguson is another preposterous lie. These groups, at the very best, are an extremely rare presence and most protestors say that these groups are almost never present at protests or actions.
Lie #6:
Jesse Jackson is sort of hanging out the middle with the Rainbow Push Coalition. He’s … let’s call him a COO type for all of this right now.
Glenn: The elder statesman of radicals.
John: Exactly, the elder statesman.
Rebuttal: If Jesse Jackson is the COO of Ferguson activism then Spiderman is the COO of Disney or Marvel. This is comic-book level ridiculousness. Jesse Jackson isn't even the elder statesman of Ferguson protestors or activists. This is just pure fiction. Without being disrespectful to the man, he's almost a complete non-factor in Ferguson. Al Sharpton is not a primary or even secondary planner or voice in Ferguson. His organization is not active there. Nobody on the ground will tell you otherwise. To list him as a political puppeteer of some sort shows just how far off this entire debacle of a conversation really was.
Lie #7:
John: And you’ve got the SEIU handling all the organization.
Glenn: Holy cow.
Rebuttal: More foolishness. In the 7+ months since Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson, the SEIU assisted with planning one event. Because of the attention on Ferguson, dozens of organizations have helped plan events in and around Ferguson during this time. The SEIU is not an active player in Ferguson in protests and they never have been.
Lie #8:
John: Okay, so now here again for the sinister angle of it all, so we know all these players, all pretty bad guys in their own right. Enter the pro-Palestinian group. Now, you’ve got a journalist, Rania Khalek.
Glenn: From where?
John: She’s just a pro-Palestinian journalist about the world.
Glenn: Okay, freelancer.
Rebuttal: This is just ugly and racist. First off, to refer to the whole board as "pretty bad guys" is just lazy and wrong. Secondly, to introduce the word "sinister" into the conversation and then pivot to Rania Khalek suggests that she, a journalist, is somehow planning an attack on America or using the protests in Ferguson to plan something illegal. Plenty of very good people around the world are genuine advocates for the human rights of Palestinian people and it suggests nothing "sinister" about their intent. To even use that word with her is wrong.
Lie #9:
John: Yeah, and so she believes that the shots were actually aimed at the protesters, that this is all nonsense.
Glenn: Last week’s shots.
John: Last week’s shots, that those cops were hit by accident.
Rebuttal: The facts have shown that Rania was actually right. After a man was arrested in this shooting of two Ferguson police officers, the prosecutor admitted that the shots were fired from at least 125 yards away and that the man who fired them could've very well been aiming at protestors or people other than the police. Furthermore, all evidence has now settled that the police chief was dead wrong when he said the shooter was "embedded" with protestors. He wasn't.
Lie #10:
John: In reality, what appears to be happening, my law enforcement sources, intelligence sources, feel it’s information and intelligence sharing. They’re learning from what’s going on in Gaza and other places how to create more unrest here, and these guys are learning from them how to take tactics used in the Middle East and bring them to Ferguson.
Rebuttal: Wow. Just wow. The BS meter on this statement is off the charts high. Who on that board brought unrest tactics from Gaza to Ferguson? Which tactics? Describe them for me. Who taught them in Gaza? When did they teach them in Ferguson? To whom? When were those tactics used in Ferguson. Again, statements like this are being made just to raise fear in people and they are completely false.
Glenn and John even went so far as to put Wu-Tang rapper, Method Man, up on the board. It's just laughable. Is he the one teaching protestors strategies from Gaza?
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Ultimately, I welcome intelligent conversations and even debates about what is right or wrong for the future of this country. This, unfortunately, was not one of those moments. It was so miserably bad that it was actually difficult to find even a nugget of truth in the entire conversation.
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