Washington Examiner.com

819 promote primary of trump popularity

820 tag WE

520 bak commercial-announcement

mofo on covid, evil pending

OUTLIER

Washington Examiner

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com › opinion › columnists › 3315099 › after-nih-move-doge-hysteria-spreads

After NIH move, DOGE hysteria spreads - Washington Examiner

Feb 8, 2025AFTER NIH MOVE, DOGE HYSTERIA SPREADS. There was an alarmist report in the Washington Post over the weekend about the Trump administration and the National Institutes of Health.Beneath the ...

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// liz C RR libr after J6 #5 beast

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/right-wing-news-site-delivers-blistering-op-ed-on-trump-admitting-he-doesn-t-need-to-be-anywhere-near-the-white-house-again/

word salad

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/trump-2656686160/

badash ncrm an

In an “exclusive” Fox News interview Donald Trump, the failed, disgraced, one-term twice impeachedformer president, suggests he’s read the legal filing from John Durham,a special counsel secretly installed in 2020 by then-Attorney General Bill Barr, who revealed the attorney’s status weeks before resigning from office, just before the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Trump referred to him as “Robert Durham”in a statement when the news of the filing broke, and now is suggesting that he has both read the legal filing and predicted its contents “a long time ago.”

The problem is Fox News and many other far-right-wing media outlets, have gotten it wrong, mostly wrong, or all wrong.

“Fox News inaccurately declared that Mr. Durham had said he had evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid a technology company to ‘infiltrate’ a White House server,” The New York Times reported Monday. “The Washington Examiner claimed that this all meant there had been spying on Mr. Trump’s White House office.”

On Tuesday Trump told Fox News: “It looks like this is just the beginning, because, if you read the filing and have any understanding of what took place, and I called this a long time ago, you’re going to see a lot of other things happening,having to do with what, really, just is a continuation of the crime of the century.”

“This is such a big event, nobody’s seen anything like this.”

Because it didn’t happen, at least, not as Trump and his right-wing smokescreen allies claim.

“Who would think a thing like this is even possible?” Trump also told Fox News. “Durham is also coming up withthings far bigger than anybody thought possible—Nobody ever thought a thinglike this would be even discussed, let alone an act like this committed.”

“You have experts that do this, but they used experts to do it, and to think they could even think about doing that is not believable and, think—if they do it, foreign countries can do it,” Trump said.

“It is no different than Watergate, except a much more important location,” Trump said. “It is the same theft—just modern day.”

And the “best” lines from his interview: “This is treason at the highest level,” and, “It is not even believable.”

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/some-republicans-finally-denounced-qanon-thats-great-but-its-too-little-too-late/

analysis

Some prominent Republicans and institutions are stepping up to denounce the QAnon conspiracy theory after Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has voiced support for the outlandish conspiracy movement, won her primary runoff this week and became Georgia’s all-but-certain next member of Congress.

Condemnations of Greene and the conspiracy theories she believes are a refreshing change of pace in a Republican party that has allowed the QAnon movement to fester and grow in its ranks with tacit silence and winking online engagement. But the unfortunate truth is that any condemnation, no matter how powerful and from what perch, is likely to be ineffective in halting its spread or dissuading believers. QAnon has existed for nearly three years and has grown into an alternative universe to be reckoned with. As I wrote in July: “GOP leaders could have stopped it, and now it may be too late.”

Greene is among the dozens of Republican candidates seeking office this year who have embraced QAnon, a conspiracy theory that at its core alleges a network of demonic child sex abusers is leading the world and plotting its destruction. The FBI considers QAnon a potential source of domestic terrorism; followers of QAnon have been linked to criminal activity, including kidnapping and murder.

Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger ​of Illinois denounced QAnon after Greene’s victory, calling it “a fabrication.”

“Could be Russian propaganda or a basement dweller,” Kinzinger tweeted. “Regardless, no place in Congress for these conspiracies.​"[twt rep k]

the editors of ​the National Review published a column yesterday urging Republicans to follow Kinzinger’s lead. They wrote:

House Republicans should go further and deny Greene committee assignments when she arrives in Congress in January. Stripping Iowa Republican Steve King of his committee seats in 2019 sent a message that there are boundaries of decency in the GOP that should not be crossed, and it signaled to GOP primary voters in Iowa that they should choose more wisely next time they had an opportunity. Thankfully, Iowans did just that in June.

Any such move would surely lead Greene to conclude there is a conspiracy against her, but some paranoids deserve enemies.

Managing editor of the Washington Examiner Jay Caruso admitted that his earlier doubt ​that QAnon believers ​could take power in Congress “was wrong and the GOP invited this mess.”

Politico reported that​ Republican Rep. Denver Riggleman of Virginia said the GOP would be in trouble i​f Greene was the face of its future. ​“QAnon is the mental gonorrhea of conspiracy theories. It’s disgusting and you want to get rid of it as fast as possible,” he said.

But for every condemnation​ of QAnon, there were congratulations​ directed at its followers that seemed to ring louder.

President Donald Trump congratulated Greene on her primary runoff win​, calling her a “future Republican Star.​”

“Congratulations to future Republican Star Marjorie Taylor Greene on a big Congressional primary win in Georgia against a very tough and smart opponent. Marjorie is strong on everything and never gives up – a real WINNER!” Trump tweeted[djt twt]

the Chicago Tribune reports that Greene maintained support from many of her fellow Georgia Republicans, including Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Rep. Doug Collins.“It’s clear that we need more outsiders with business sense in Washington,” Loeffler said. ​Rep. Matt Gaetz also offered his support to the QAnon candidate Thursday, tweeting, “Proud to be in your corner, Marjorie!​”

House Republicans denounced Greene earlier this year after Politico surfaced a trove of videos in which Greene espoused racist and bigoted views. Republicans began ​to​ distance themselves from her candidacy and some endorsed her primary opponent, but nearly all remained mum on QAnon.

QAnon conspiracy theories have also taken rootwithin conservative evangelicalism, an essential part of the GOP base.

Tags: Marjorie Taylor Greene Election 2020 QAnon

aha // WT?  not a real paper but key in escalator, cross-over from soc med to mainstream? fox?

escalator, activ meas

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/how-trump-is-once-again-colluding-with-russia/

no lnx twt

how  Trump is once again colluding with Russia

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 14, 2020

Almost two weeks ago, a story circulated that Portland protesters were burning Bibles and American flags. It spread via social media and was picked up by conservative outlets, such as the Washington Examiner. Of course, several Republican leaders joined the bandwagon.

tp kirk --> djt jr?]

ted cruzretweet: This is who they are.

Ian Miles Cheong

@stillgray

Left-wing activists bring a stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland.  https://twitter.com/Shelldrayk/status/1289481822414413827/video/1

don jr

Now we move to the book burning phase. I’m pretty sure ANTIFA doesn’t actually stand for what they say it stands for. Maybe just remove the anti part of them name and it’s perfect.

tpkirk

BLM inc arsonists just burned a stack of Bibles in Portland

The activist media won’t report on this because it’s likely they support it

Our faith is under attack. 

If you vote for Biden—you vote for Bible burnings

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Two reporters at the New York Times, Matthew Rosenberg and Julian Barnes, decided to look into the story and found Vladimir Putin’s fingerprints all over it. As is often the case with effective propaganda, this story contains a kernel of truth. Apparently, some group was handing out Bibles to protesters that night and one of them was used to start a fire. An American flag was also burned. But a local paper covering the protests that night devoted just one sentence to that story in a lengthy piece about what happened.

The video news agency connected to Russia Today (RT) was regularly streaming a live feed of the Portland protests. They edited the clip of the fire and made it the focal point of their protest coverage that night. Then, RT did an entire story about it. Social media took it from there and the next thing you know, outlets like the Washington Examiner were picking it up. Here is how Rosenberg and Barnes summarized the process:

The Russian technique is a kind of information laundering, akin to money laundering.Stories originate with Russian-backed news sites, some of them directly connected to Moscow’s spy agencies, officials and experts said. They are then picked up by Americans on social media or in domestic news outlets, and their origins quickly become obscured. Often, by the time a story reaches most of its American audience, there is little to indicate that it was created to fuel grievances and deepen political divisions.

Following Trump’s press briefing on Wednesday, Hunter Walker tracked down another example of Russia’s attempt to get their propaganda in the news. He wrote about the question OAN reporter Chanel Rion asked the president.

Rion: In the last hour or so, if you googled antifa.com. it would take you straight to Joe Biden’s website, his official campaign website. Odd situation. We don’t know who’s behind that. But it raises an interesting leadership question. Should Joe Biden, the Democrat party, Kamala Harris– should they publicly denounce the Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization?

Trump: They should. I think they’re afraid to. It’s– in my book it’s virtually a part of their campaign, Antifa. The Democrats act like, gee, I don’t know exactly what that is.

Take a look at Portland. Take a look at any place you want to take a look at, and they’re all over the place. They were here. [DC?]

Basically Rion gave Trump the opportunity to claim that Antifa is part of the Biden campaign—which is, of course, a blatant lie.

Walker looked into what actually happened with the antifa.com website. Once again, as Pelosi said, “all roads lead to Putin.”

:{

}:

Records for “antifa.com” in the domain name database Whoisology.com show the site was registered in the Russian Federation from 2013 through last July.Starting last November, the site’s registration was moved to Panama, The website has always been anonymously registered and its owners could not be reached for comment.

Russia set up the antifa.com website and eventually redirected it to Biden’s campaign page, allowing the president to claim that the group was involved politically with Democrats. Of course, this raises the old question of whether this was all coordinated with the president or if Trump is simply taking advantage of Putin’s efforts. The same questions are raised about the role of OAN in these kinds of Russian propaganda efforts.

So there you have two examples of how Russia is currently interfering in the 2020 election to support the reelection of Donald Trump. One thing worth noting is that if these examples are reflective of their efforts, Vladimir Putin has calculated that his best bet is to inflame the so-called “culture wars,” something that has been the bedrock of the Republican strategy for decades. The Bible burning story was especially useful for the Christian nationalists who want to scare their followers into thinking that, as Trump has suggested, Joe Biden is against God and the Bible.

It is important to keep in mind that the only reason we know about these Russian efforts is because some reporters put in the time to track down the story. Senator Richard Blumenthal, who has seen what our intelligence services know about Russian interference, said that the 2020 efforts “make Moscow’s past interference and nefarious actions look like child’s play.” But the Trump administration is keeping that information from the public, while the attorney general hypes the antifa story and puts all of his energy into accusing the Obama administration of “spying” into the Trump campaign. That strikes me as the definition of collusion.

==

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covid // partic holo

icn 820

...As Covid-19 cases and fatalities were escalating in the United States, the Trump administration took several actions on pollution that—in the researchers' view—lent urgency to their work. On March 26, EPA Administrator Wheeler took the extraordinary step of announcing a suspension of environmental law enforcement because of Covid-19—relief that had been sought by the oil and gas industry. Wheeler insisted that companies were only being relieved of reporting requirements, not their pollution limits.But in fact, without self-reporting by the companies EPA would not know whether they were violating pollution limits or not.

On March 30, the EPA finalized a rollback in vehicle fuel economy standards, a step the administration's own regulatory analysis concluded would increase adverse health impacts due to PM 2.5. Meanwhile, any day Wheeler was expected to open for public comment his decision not to strengthen the national air quality standard for PM 2.5.

"At the time of a pandemic that attacks the lungs, it's really inconceivable not to clean the air," Dominici said. "I wanted to put this study out there as soon as possible—considering all of the limitations, and being very open about discussing the limitations—to raise the urgency and the importance of this issue.

"We are in the middle of a pandemic, which honestly, we don't know how to fight, even without what I think are really unwise decisions by the Trump administration," she said.

Dominici checked with some of the major scientific journals, and was assured that they would still be eligible to submit their manuscript for peer review and publication if it was posted as a preprint first.

In New York, mobile morgues were set up outside strained hospitals. U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said that it would be the "hardest and the saddest" week for "most Americans' lives."

Shortly after 8 a.m. on April 7, New York City's deadliest day in the pandemic, with 597 coronavirus fatalities, the Harvard team's study was posted on MedRxiv. The paper didn't mention the Trump administration by name, but took its Covid enforcement policy to task.

"Despite the inherent limitations of the ecological study design, our results underscore the importance of continuing to enforce existing air pollution regulations to protect human health both during and after the COVID-19 crisis," the authors wrote.

By noon, The New York Timesposted a story about the new study, noting it could have "far-reaching implications" in regard to the Trump administration's environmental rollbacks.

Controversy, and a Revision of Findings

Reaction to the Harvard study was swift, and divided.

Joe Biden, then close to securing the Democratic presidential nomination (Bernie Sanders would drop out of the race the next day), shared the Times story on Twitter. "We're starting to see evidence that long-term exposure to air pollution—which disproportionately affects communities of color & low-income communities—is linked to COVID-19 death rates," he posted. "It's past time we treat pollution like the threat to our health it is."

Fifteen environmental groups cited the Harvard research in the lawsuit they filed the following week against the Trump administration over its pandemic-related rollback of environmental enforcement. "EPA's policy is especially dangerous in light of recent research showing that increased air pollution causes a statistically significant increase in the COVID-19 death rate," said the complaint led by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Meanwhile, former coal industry executive Steve Milloy, who served on Trump's EPA transition team and is a vocal supporter of the president's environmental rollbacks, blasted the study as "totally absurd" on his web site, junkscience.com. He repeated his oft-stated position, which conflicted with the consensus science and even the stance of Trump's EPA, that PM 2.5's link to premature death was not "biologically plausible."

For his part, EPA Administrator Wheeler dismissed the Harvard results as preliminary, then lit into the researchers.

"We look forward to reviewing the Harvard study once it's completed and peer reviewed, but at this point, it's not," he said on April 14, the day he announced his long-anticipated decision not to strengthen the air quality standard for PM 2.5.

"I have to say, at least in the press, that the scientists seem to have a bias," Wheeler added. "They are talking about our enforcement discretion memo, and either they didn't read it or they didn't understand it." Wheeler repeated that there would be no pollution increase due to the enforcement memo, an assertion impossible to document at that point. 

Dominici, in an interview, defended the rigor of the team's scientific results, given the limitations of the available data. But she bristled at the notion that concern over the health impacts of air pollution was an improper bias.

"I've worked with EPA and I've been funded by EPA," said Dominici. "My own bias is that I'm biased in favor of protecting the public. And I'm biased in favor of protecting the most vulnerable. So yes, you know, this is a bias I'm really proud to have."

But the Harvard researchers also faced criticism from within the scientific community.

Two scientists who have published extensively on the associations between air pollution and adverse health effects said the Harvard research had so many shortcomings they were not convinced of its results. In an essay on April 21 for The Conversation, Paul Villeneuve, an epidemiologist at Carleton University, and Mark Goldberg, a professor of medicine at McGill University, noted why county-level data was inadequate for drawing conclusions. They brought up a number of potentially problematic factors that the Harvard study had not taken into account, including varying physical distancing policies and the possible underreporting of deaths. Interactions among the factors were so complex, they argued, it was impossible to account for them without  information about individuals.

"Proper peer review must not be bypassed—and the onus for respecting its role falls not just on journalists but also on scientists to communicate the correct information accurately," Villeneuve and Goldberg wrote.

The following week, on April 27, the Harvard team updated and revised their results. They added three more weeks worth of coronavirus fatalities and nearly doubled the number of potentially confounding variables in the analysis—including, for example, the stage of the pandemic and the state stay-at-home orders. The result was a slightly weaker but still significant association between PM 2.5 and Covid-19 deaths:an 8 percent—instead of 15 percent—greater risk of death for every 1 microgram per cubic meter increase in PM 2.5.

"As soon as you get the preprint out, you can receive feedback from scientists all around the world," said Wu. "As a result we have much stronger models in the second version of the paper."

The American Petroleum Institute, however, argued that the revision was evidence of the study's underlying weakness. The update was "an action that suggests some fragility in the overall study results, and sets a precedent that the findings will likely continue to change due to the preliminary nature of the work," API said, inan analysisof the Harvard study that the industry trade group submitted to EPA's science advisory committee. 

Cox, chair of the EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, had harsher words, in an interviewwith The Washington Examiner.

"This whole thing is a bogus piece of analysis," he said. "It's technically unsound. It has sensational policy implications, none of which are trustworthy."

Views on the Harvard study—and on the connection between air pollution and Covid-19—were hardening along political fault lines.

"In his inaugural address, Trump spoke of 'American carnage.' He is delivering just that," said former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NRDC president Gina McCarthy, who served as EPA administrator under Obama, in an editorial on May 4. Citing the Harvard study, they blasted Trump for "his push to increase air pollution in the midst of an unprecedented respiratory pandemic—jeopardizing people's ability to survive it."

The reliably conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journalshot back the same day, lamentingthat "opponents of fossil fuels are flogging a sloppy study that ties pollutants to coronavirus deaths.

"It may be that long-term exposure to PM 2.5 modestly raises the coronavirus death risk, but more rigorous studies are needed to prove this, and shutting down fossil-fuel production now won't save lives," the Wall Street Journal said. "It will deny livelihoods to hundreds of thousands of people."

'A Bit of a Wild West Out There' ...

==

ref

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/bogus-analysis-trump-appointed-epa-advisers-criticize-study-linking-air-pollution-and-coronavirus-death

Bogus analysis': Trump-appointed EPA advisers criticize study linking air pollution and coronavirus deaths

by Abby Smith, Energy and Environment Reporter |   | April 27, 2020

Trump administration appointees to key panels that advise the Environmental Protection Agency on science are criticizing a study that concludes areas with higher levels of air pollution will experience higher death rates from the coronavirus.

The study, from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has led to increased public pressure on the EPA in recent weeks, threatening the agency's deregulatory agenda on air pollution rules.

The advisers to the Trump administration, including the chair of the committee advising the agency on air pollution, say they are skeptical of the Harvard study’s methodology and conclusions. Those same appointees have previously raised questions about the strength of connections between fine particle pollution and health effects.

The Harvard study hasn’t been peer reviewed yet, but it has been submitted to the New England Journal of Medicine for review.

“To me, this whole thing is a bogus piece of analysis,” said Tony Cox, who chairs the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee. "It was rushed out without being properly vetted. It’s technically unsound. It has sensational policy implications, none of which are trustworthy."

“I would have zero confidence in the published results of this study because its interpretation, design, and analysis are fundamentally flawed,” Cox, a risk analyst and president of Cox Associates, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.

Francesca Dominici, a senior author on the study, said the criticisms are inaccurate and invalid, and pointed to multiple other preliminary studies from researchers around the globe connecting long-term exposure to air pollution and increased risks from the virus.

The criticism comes as the EPA has convened a “rapid review” science advisory panel to inform the agency as it improves its ability to address the environmental and human health effects of COVID-19. The panel first meets Thursday.

One of the research questions they will consider deals directly with whether exposure to air pollution increases susceptibility to respiratory viruses or exacerbates existing COVID-19 infections.

The Harvard study concludes that just a small increase in long-term exposure to fine particulate matter, emitted primarily from fossil fuel combustion, leads to an 8% increase in the COVID-19 death rate. Thus, areas with higher levels of historical pollution are likely to experience higher death rates from the pandemic, according to the research.

Fine particulate matter has been linked to health effects such as nonfatal heart attacks, aggravated asthma, increased respiratory problems, and premature death in people with heart or lung disease, according to the EPA.

There is “definitely enough there to pose a red flag,” said Dominici, who co-directs Harvard’s Data Science Initiative. Several other preliminary studies in recent weeks have also linked higher levels of particle pollution with higher death rates in China and in Italy.

“We have a virus that is affecting our lungs, and I think it’s pretty undeniable that that’s happening,” Dominici told the Washington Examiner in an interview. Not prioritizing addressing air pollution “seems to me a very unwise decision."

The Harvard study has already made waves in policy discussions. It’s been cited by Democratic lawmakers in letters calling on the EPA to reverse policy decisions, by environmentalists in a lawsuit challenging the agency’s memo on enforcement flexibility during the virus, and by presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in an updated fact sheet on his climate plan.

The research has also received heightened attention as the Trump EPA has continued its deregulatory agenda amid the pandemic. Just in the last few weeks, the EPA relaxed Obama-era fuel economy standards, reversed the legal underpinning of mercury limits for power plants, and proposed to maintain current levels for national limits on fine particle pollution, despite recommendations from the agency’s career staff to strengthen them.

Trump administration allies say the study shouldn’t be used in policy making decisions given its preliminary nature.

“The study does not appear to be ready for prime time and, if misused by policymakers, could needlessly divert critical health care and regulatory resources from areas that need them most,” a former EPA official told the Washington Examiner.

Stanley Young, a member of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board appointed by Trump officials, raised concerns the report’s language suggests a causal link between fine particulate matter pollution and COVID-19 deaths. The study, though, only concludes an association, he said.

“This is the proverbial butterfly in China causing a tornado in Alabama, and generally the world doesn’t work that way,” Young, a statistician and CEO of CGStat,said in an interview. “The paper is written in a way that strongly implies cause and effect,” he said, adding the authors “could have been a lot more circumspect than that.”

Cox suggested the Harvard study doesn’t control for the “urban-rural continuum,” which takes into account local-level population density as opposed to county averages.

“Everything in the Harvard paper to me appears to be completely consistent with the hypothesis that crowding matters, but there’s nothing to suggest, other than wishful thinking perhaps, that [fine particulate matter] has any effect at all,” Cox said.

Dominici, however, said Cox’s claim isn’t true.The researchers adjusted for population density and conducted separate analyses for urban counties and rural counties, she said. Those separate analyses had “very similar” results in terms of how fine particulate matter pollution affected the COVID-19 death rate, she added.

The researchers also accounted for more than 20 other confounding variables, such as age, stage of the epidemic, date of first confirmed case, and behavioral conditions like obesity and smoking, Dominici said.

Young noted the coronavirus outbreak is an “incredibly fluid” situation. Scientists are learning more about how many people the virus has infected as testing becomes available. Tests might show the virus isn’t as deadly as previously thought, which would affect the data in the Harvard study, he said.

Dominici, though, said a change in the death rate from COVID-19 wouldn’t affect the conclusions of their study. That's because the researchers use whatever the death rate is as a baseline to examine whether long-term fine particulate matter exposure had an effect on it, she said.

Overall, Cox and Young both suggested the Harvard study doesn’t make a direct enough link between higher levels of fine particulate matter and deaths from the coronavirus to influence policy decisions.

“Now of all times is the time to really pay attention and be very responsible in distinguishing between associations that are quite trivial to produce and don’t necessarily have implications for sound policy, and real valid scientific information empirically backed by data showing how changing exposure changes health consequences,” Cox said.

Dominici, though, said it’s always possible to find a hole in research because no data will ever be perfect. “It’s much harder to provide rigorous science at the time of a pandemic than criticize the science,” she said.

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/conservative-journalist-caught-on-tape-pretending-to-board-up-a-business-for-instagram

an 620

As protests continue nationwide, some volunteers are coming together to clean up and rebuild areas affected by looting, arson, and vandalism. Worldwide, social media is being used to share images, resources, and views on the issues of racial injustice and the Black Lives Matter movement. Unfortunately, some people are using this time to gain social media popularity and pose as contributing to efforts to rebuild and care for the community.

A video of a woman in California pretending to help board up a store window went viral Monday after it was shared on Twitter. “This lady stopped someoneboarding up a store in Santa Monicaso she could hold the drill for a picture, then drove away. Please don’t do this,” the post read. Commenters including a staff member from The New York Times identified the woman as Fiona Moriarty-McLaughlin, a writer for the conservative Washington Examiner.

In the video, Moriarty-Mclaughlin can be seen taking a drill from a volunteer, posing with it to have her photo taken, then proceeding to run into her Mercedes-Benz. The video prompted extreme backlash, resulting in her deleting her social media account. Viewers are calling it an example of “performative activism,” a form of activism in which individuals post or pretend to support a cause in order to gain a following or make themselves look better to others. It’s a form of hypocrisy, because these people don’t actually care about the cause.

==

wow w exmr breaks ranks

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/conservative-publication-slams-trump-for-promoting-vile-and-illogical-conspiracy-theory/

alex h

Trump has never been shy about promoting absurd far-right conspiracy theories, including birtherism (the racist claim that President Barack Obama wasn’t really born in the United States). And recently, Trump has been floating the conspiracy theory that Never Trump conservative Joe Scarborough — who hosts “Morning Joe” on MSNBC with liberal Mika Brzezinski, his wife — murdered a former employee. And the editorial board of the right-wing Washington Examiner slams Trump for it in a scathing editorial published on May 27.

The former employee that conspiracy theorists have accused of killing was Lori Klausutis, who suffered from a heart condition and was only 28 when, on July 19, 2001, she fell and fatally hit her head. At the time, Scarborough was a Florida Republican serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. Scarborough, who is now one of Trump’s most vehement critics on the right, has since left the GOP because of his disdain for Trumpism.

An autopsy was performed on Klausutis after he death, and that autopsy showed no signs of foul play. Moreover, Klausutis’ widower, Timothy Klausutis, has been imploring Trump to quit claiming otherwise and let his wife rest in peace. He has also asked Twitter to remove tweets in which Trump has promoted the anti-Scarborough conspiracy theory.

The Washington Examiner’s editorial board explains that according to the anti-Scarborough conspiracy theory, the ex-congressman “must have been having an affair with the staffer in question, and he must have murdered her in order to cover it up. According to this tall tale, the controversy surrounding her death even forced Scarborough to leave Congress."

the editorial goes on to lay out some reasons why the conspiracy theory defies logic.

“This story is not just false, but verifiably so,” the Washington Examiner asserts. “It is also illogical and bizarre. For one thing, Scarborough wasn’t even in Florida when this incident occurred. He took six votes on the House floor the day Klausutis died — the first at 10:25 a.m. and the last at 7:09 p.m. The following morning, he participated in another vote at 10:10 a.m.”

The Examiner adds, “Second, Scarborough had already announced his retirement from Congress long before Klausutis died; so, there’s nothing to that part of the story, either. And even after his departure from Congress, Scarborough hardly shrunk into the background as if to avoid the spotlight. The first episode of his new evening MSNBC show, ‘Scarborough Country,’ broadcast three months after he left the House. It gave him a much higher profile than he’d ever had as an obscure congressman from North Florida.”

But even though “there was also never any indication that Scarborough had any sort of improper relationship with Klausutis,” the Examiner’s editorial board explains, Trump hasn’t hesitated to promote the conspiracy theory on Twitter.

“The latest person to trumpet and repeat this vile slander is the president supposedly leading this nation through a time of crisis,” the Examiner asserts. “Whatever his issues with Scarborough, President Trump’s crazed Twitter rant on this subject was vile and unworthy of his office. Some will undoubtedly shrug it off as Trump being Trump, but one could hardly be blamed for reading it and doubting his fitness to lead. To say Trump owes Scarborough an apology is to put it mildly.”

https://www.desmogblog.com/covideniers-anti-science-covid-19-denial-overlaps-climate-denial

The climate science denial machine created by the fossil fuel industry is now a major source of COVID-19 disinformation. Deniers have deployed many of the same tactics they have used to attack climate scientists and delay action to downplay the severity of the coronavirus outbreak and sow distrust in the response efforts of governments, scientists and the medical community — with deadly consequences that are now unfolding before our eyes.

Others have used the threat of COVID-19 to argue against action to address climate change, which would leave us all more vulnerable to the wide array of future catastrophes that scientists say will result from additional degrees of warming.

In the following series, DeSmog presents the #COVIDenial evidence our team has gathered revealing the overlapping cast of characters who have long attacked climate science and are now spreading COVID misinformation, touting false cures, ginning up conspiracy theories and fomenting attacks on public health experts. We began tracking this overlap in March 2020, when Sharon Kelly wrote Meet the Climate Science Deniers Who Downplayed COVID-19 Risks.

Many of these groups, including Koch network-funded entities such as Americans for Prosperity and State Policy Networkmembers have also attacked stay-at-home orders and orchestrated ‘Liberate’ movement protests nationwide, as Steve Horn wrote in COVID-19 'Liberate' Groups Are the Same Ones Pushing Climate Denial. And as DeSmog UK’s Zak Derler reported in Climate Science Deniers Use Coronavirus to Downplay Environmental Threats, notorious climate deniers around the world are even claiming that the novel coronavirus pandemic is a hoax, or that it’s an evil plot by “globalist elites” like Bill Gates and George Soros to alternately force vaccines or a “world population cull.”

These are dangerous operatives at work spreading all manner of doubt and delusion to confuse the public, and their actions and words will forever cement them on the wrong side of history.

Explore the report materials below, and please contact DeSmog with any other examples of COVID denial you come across

COVIDenial Executive Summary:

"Government should be doing little or next to nothing,” Richard Ebeling wrote in a postabout COVID-19 republished on March 24 by the Heartland Institute. “The problem is a social and medical one, and not a political one.”

“I just think we're going to be fine. I think everything is going to be fine,” Heartland editorial director and research fellow Justin Haskins said about COVID-19 during a March 1 of the podcast In the Tank. “I really don't think this is going to be a problem even two to three months from now.”

On Dec. 31, 2019, “a pneumonia of unknown cause” was first reported to the World Health Organization’s China Country Office — and in the months following that report, the disease now known as COVID-19 spread to infect millions of people worldwide and seems well on its way to killing hundreds of thousands — while experts warn that the presumed death toll may be significantly higher than we yet know.

:{

• COVID-19 Denial
• COVID-19 & Climate Comparisons
• Give Me Freedom or Give Me COVID
• Climate Deniers & the ‘China Virus’
• Climate Deniers & Coronavirus ‘Cures’
• COVID-19 & Fossil Fuel Promoters
• COVID-19 & Plastic Promoters
• COVID Deniers & Attacks on Renewables
• COVID-19 Denier Attacks on WHO
• COVID Denier Conspiracy Theories

}:

As the virus spread, so too did misinformation: baseless predictions that the disease would not cause significant harm, claims of miracle cures, and conspiracy theories about the virus’s origins. That misinformation was often circulated by white-collar professionals — including many who have a history of casting doubt on climate science or seeking to debate issues that were already laid to rest within the scientific community. The overlap was so striking that it caught the attention of both former PresidentBarack Obama and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel in March.

Some of that misinformation on COVID-19 came straight from President Trump. But a river of faulty information on the coronavirus also flowed from think tanks, experts (some self-proclaimed), academics, and professional right-wing activists who also have spurned climate science and sought to slow or stop action to respond to the climate crisis.

Some compared COVID-19 to the flu or other threats, suggesting that the flu was a larger threat and that action to slow the spread of the novel virus was an overreaction. As the toll from COVID-19 grew, others argued that the virus was the most important threat and that action to slow climate change was superfluous. Some circulated false or unproven cures and remedies while others touted the benefits of single-use plastics during the pandemic (without regard for the health of those living in places where plastics and petrochemicals are produced — like Saint John the Baptist parish, Louisiana, which on April 16, had the highest per-person COVID-19 death rate in the U.S.)

Some attacked renewable energy, some the Green New Deal, and others the World Health Organization (WHO). Some framed efforts to “flatten the curve” of infections as infringements on liberty or simply unnecessary while others persisted in using terms that the WHO has warned can lead to dangerous stigma and discrimination. And some climate science deniers have circulated conspiracy theories, like claims that the virus was a foreign “bioweapon,” that it’s linked to “electrosmog” and 5G networks, or alleged that “the World Health Organization has carried out the greatest fraud perhaps in modern history.”

The decades that fossil fuel companies spent funding organizations that sought to undermine the conclusions of credible climate scientists and building up doubt about science itself ultimately created a network of professional science deniers who are now deploying some of the same skills they honed on climate against the public health crisis at the center of our attention today.

Many of the operatives spreading COVID disinformation have influence because of the fossil fuel industry.

• People like Steve Milloy and Patrick Michaels and organizations like  the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), The Heartland and Manhattan Institutes gained influence in the early heyday of climate science denial when the fossil fuel industry made a broad and concerted effort to mislead the public about global warming.
• We’re now seeing many of the same people and organizations utilize the tactics they honed in the 1990s to foment doubt about the deadly coronavirus pandemic.
• Many of the organizations now spreading misinformation received funding from fossil fuel companies and/or trade groups for years or even decades, as DeSmog and others have previously documented (e.g. Reason Foundation, Independent Institute, Texas Public Policy Foundation, etc.)

COVID denial reveals the deadly threat that climate denial poses to all aspects of public health and science. 

• The :{American Petroleum Institute:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:’s 1998 “Victory Memo” outlined a broad roadmap to erode public confidence in climate change that went well beyond just the science. Their strategy included plans to “identify, recruit and train” messengers who could “participate in media outreach” on “the climate change debate.” It called for the use of both individuals and third-party organizations to assist in the industry’s efforts to stir doubt about climate science.
• To delay climate change-related regulation and policy-making, the oil and gas industry sought to mislead the public and Congress and create distrust of the media.
• Decades ago, an industry report drafted by a Mobil executive concluded that theories that had been advanced by climate “contrarians” didn’t hold water, but the industry nonetheless funded their work on climate change, and now some of those same professionals are speaking out about COVID-19. In 1995, Lenny Bernstein, a Mobil executive, examined the work of climate “contrarians” in a draft report for the Global Climate Coalition (later published omitting that assessment). Bernstein’s draft concluded that “The contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change.” One of the arguments that the report draft specifically labeled “not convincing” was credited to Prof. Patrick Michaels, then based at the University of Virginia. In 2010, Michaels — at that point based at the Cato Institute — estimated in a CNN interview that perhaps 40% of his funding came from oil and gas companies.
• In a March 9, 2020 article in the Washington Examiner,Michaels — now a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) — predicted that a proposed European Union law (one intended to slow climate change) would be far more damaging to the economy and to “environmental resilience” than COVID-19. “Make no mistake,” Michaels wrote. “The proposed EU climate law will reverse a lot more progress and a lot more economic and environmental resilience than any probable climate change or, for that matter, coronavirus.” (Another of the scientists whose work was discredited in the draft Global Climate Coalition report, Richard Lindzen, signed onto a March 23, 2020, open letter calling climate change a “non-problem” compared to COVID-19. “As a very first step, designated Green New Deal money must be redirected and invested in a significantly better global health system,” the letter argues. “The past 150 years also show that more CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth and increasing the yields of crops. Why do world leaders ignore these hard facts? Why do world leaders do the opposite with their Green New Deal and lower the quality of life by forcing high-cost, dubious low-carbon energy technologies upon their citizens?”)

==

an 320

major conservative paper slams Trump in brutal editorial blasting his coronavirus response

Tom Boggioni / Raw StoryMarch 8, 2020

In an absolutely scathing editorial in the conservative Washington Examiner, Executive Editor Philip Klein eviscerated Donald Trump for his handling of the growing coronavirus epidemic — saying the actions taken by his administration...

==

The Washington Examiner is a free daily newspaper published in Alexandria, Virginia, and distributed around Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Maryland, and their suburbs. owned by ANSCHUTZ

they have copyrighted the name in a bunch of cities, so clearly plan to colonize/franchise

it has radio, ads for weekly std, also a mag?

spawns diet ads

and of course blogs as platform for ideol entre eg rogan

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/roy-moore-sues-right-wing-publication-for-reporting-sexual-misconduct-allegations/

no lnx

Roy Moore sues right-wing publication for reporting sexual misconduct allegations

Written by Alex Henderson January 29, 2020

One of the most stunning political events of 2017 occurred when Republican Roy Moore — who was inundated with sexual misconduct allegations involving teenage girls — lost to Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama’s U.S. Senate race. Although Alabama is a deeply Republican state that President Donald Trump is almost certain to carry in November, Moore was a badly flawed candidate; regardless, Moore is hoping to run against Jones again this year. And his response to negative publicity from the Washington Examiner is filing a $40 million lawsuit against the right-wing publication.

The Washington Examiner, although clearly conservative, has published a series of articles discussing the sexual misconduct allegations against Moore. In the lawsuit, a 2019 article by journalist Tiana Lowe for the Examiner is described as “libelous” and lacking a “factual basis.”

Legal reporter Jerry Lambe, in a January 28 article for Law & Crime, describes Moore’s lawsuit against the Examiner as full of holes.

“Moore’s complaint appeared to falsely convey the publicly available facts and drastically misconstrue the legal threshold required to prove defamation against a public person in claiming that the story exhibited a ‘reckless disregard for the truth,’” Lambe explains, adding that Lowe’s reporting “was based on more than a dozen allegations and witness statements covered by every major news outlet in the nation.”

On May 28, 2019, the Examiner published a blistering op-ed by Lowe headlined “If Alabamans Vote for Roy Moore, They Deserve Doug Jones.”

Lowe, in her op-ed, stressed, “If Alabamans willfully choose Moore this time, kneecaping their odds of winning the election, they will deserve every insult lobbed their way — and they will deserve every left-wing progressive Democratic vote cast in the Senate on their behalf by Doug Jones.”

Lowe’s description of Jones as a “left-wing  progressive” is way off base; the Alabama senator is quite centrist, and philosophically, he has much more in common with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia than he does with staunch progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren. But Lowe speaks for many on the right when she says that nominating Moore to run against Jones a second time would be political suicide for the Republican Party, which may or may not lose control of the U.S. Senate in November.

Republican Bradley Byrne, who served in the Alabama State Senate in the 2000s, announced in February 2019 that he would be seeking the GOP nomination to run against Jones. Republican strategists have asserted that he would have an easier time defeating Jones than Moore.

Scott Wong

@scottwongDC

"I welcome [Judge Moore] to the race,” @BradleyByrne says, adding that Moore can't win the GOP nomination.

“I think people are very concerned that we Republicans lost a U.S. Senate seat because he was our nominee in 2017, and we don’t need to do that again." https://twitter.com/scottwongDC/status/1133431343734501377 …

Scott Wong

@scottwongDC

JUDGE ROY MOORE to announce Senate bid soon? GOP rival @BradleyByrne says Moore camp is telling him to expect a JUNE launch #ALSEN https://thehill.com/homenews/house/445781-gop-candidate-expects-roy-moore-to-announce-senate-bid-in-june#.XO11CeRwf1g.twitter …

defended ukraine platform change

https://www.mediamatters.org/trump-impeachment-inquiry/impeachment-inquiry-brings-out-byron-yorks-brand-dated-partisan-punditry

the Washington Examiner and Fox News fixture bends but doesn't break rank with his conservative colleagues

WRITTEN BY PARKER MOLLOY

PUBLISHED 11/25/19 9:32 AM EST

In the world of pundits, there are the bomb throwers, there are the professionally nonpartisan, and then there are the toadies, like Byron York. For the better part of two decades, York’s been a mainstay in American political media. Serious-faced and bespectacled, York -- and to some extent, people like The Washington Post's Hugh Hewitt -- are treated as more respectable conservative voices, an aesthetically welcome contrast to conspiracy-minded kings of bluster like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Even so, the work serves a nearly identical purpose: to protect and promote Republican ideals.

Throughout the Trump administration, much of York’s writings and media appearances could be best characterized as an attempt to run interference for the president. As the House impeachment inquiry began, his work took on even more of a singular focus.

York is determined that the real impeachment story is about the origin of the whistleblower complaint, not the largely corroborated substance of it. He suggested that the administration’s willingness to provide Ukraine with lethal weaponry was somehow exculpatory evidence against Trump's apparent attempt to push Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden under the threat of withholding aid. In another column, he employed the “Sideshow Bob defense,” saying it is “a fundamental problem with the Democratic case” that “they are accusing Trump of attempted crimes that never actually came to fruition.”

After acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney admitted that the administration engaged in a quid pro quo with the Ukrainian government (which he later retracted), York appeared on Fox News to defend Mulvaney by focusing on the portions of his statement unrelated to a quid pro quo. While congressional committees held closed-door depositions for the impeachment inquiry, York argued that the hearings should be held in public, repeatedly accusing Democrats of engaging in “secrecy.” The day the House was to finally vote on an impeachment resolution to begin public hearings, York dubbed it “The Adam Schiff Empowerment Act.” And he attacked the reputation of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council who testified before Congress during the impeachment hearings, and brushed him off as  “a witness whose testimony was filled with opinion, with impressions, who had little new to offer.”

Prior to the Ukraine scandal, York was on hand to defend the repeated stays of Air Force members at Trump’s Turnberry resort in Scotland. He scoffed at The New York Times’ 1619 Project marking the 400th anniversary of American slavery and argued that it was done in part to smear Trump ahead of an election. In York’s view, yes, Trump is the victim of “presidential harassment” by the Democrats and he was the victim of “spying” by the Obama administration. York also agreed with the president that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential elections “exonerated” him.

After a gunman massacred 22 people inside a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, York devoted a column to arguing that the shooter’s manifesto proves that he wasn’t motivated by Trump. During an appearance on Fox News, he remarked that the shooter “was actually very prescient” for his belief that media outlets would tie his anti-immigrant attack to Trump rhetoric. In June, he wrote an article linking “anti-Trump fever” to the assault of a right-wing activist.

York uses a couple simple tricks to appear less partisan than he actually is.

York seems far more willing than many other pro-Trump columnists to make small admissions critical of Trump that give the appearance of some sort of objectivity. For instance, in an article about E. Jean Carroll and her report that Trump sexually assaulted her, York conceded that Trump has a history of getting caught in lies, noting, “Trump has denied things in the past, such as the payoff to Stormy Daniels, that were, in fact, true.” In an October 20 piece, he rejected Trump’s “Crowdstrike” conspiracy theory as having “no basis in fact,” though he would later flirt with a watered-down version of the conspiracy that Ukraine conspired to harm Trump’s chances in the 2016 election. This strategy gives York a veneer of respectability, allowing  him to criticize the president without actually publishing anything that might be read as negative.

Another tactic York uses is hardly unique to his own writing, but it’s worth remarking on, anyway. He has a tendency to fudge the truth just enough to make it fit with the point he’s trying to make. In a June column clearly intended to justify Trump’s February declaration of a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, York argued that Democrats concerned about the well-being of detainees should admit they were wrong for opposing Trump’s proclamation. York highlighted quotes from Democratic leadership that called Trump’s declaration a “fake crisis.” The article was written with a clear goal of getting readers to conflate Trump’s belief that the number of border-crossings had become a crisis with Democrats’ concerns that the people being detained were being subjected to inhumane living conditions. The crisis York pointed to, about detainee living conditions, was wholly different from the one Trump used as a premise for his emergency declaration. Trump created that crisis.

The same goes for one of his most recent claims, that Democrats don’t want people looking into how the investigations into Ukraine or Russia started and are thus protecting the whistleblower’s identity. This is untrue, and it distorts the fact that Democrats are making their arguments on the substance of the whistleblower’s claims -- rather then focusing on the whistleblower him- or herself -- because they’re trying to hide some presumably shady and partisan origin story. But as Marcy Wheeler noted at Emptywheel, “It cannot be true that we need to learn about the whistleblower to understand how all this started and also be true that the whistleblower’s view is meaningless because he was operating exclusively from hearsay. The claim itself underscores that multiple people on the call itself objected when they heard the president extort a foreign leader.”

There’s not a lot of consistency in York’s arguments, and he’s shown himself more than willing to drop a talking point the moment it no longer works in his favor. 

Nowhere has this been as clear as in York’s ever-shifting defense of Trump throughout the Russia investigation. For instance, in May 2017, he claimed that a “confederation of Democrats, pundits, Obama holdovers, and NeverTrumpers” were trying to take Trump down for something he and his campaign didn’t do.

Throughout the Trump-Russia investigation, the core question -- the question that mattered above all others -- was whether President Trump or his associates colluded with Russia to try to influence the 2016 election. If there were proof of that, the effect on Trump's presidency would have been devastating, and possibly fatal.

The problem, for the confederation of Democrats, pundits, Obama holdovers, and NeverTrumpers who hoped to see that result, has been that so far, after a lot of investigating, no evidence has emerged that collusion actually occurred. Although they allowed that previously unknown proof could always emerge, last week some of the lawmakers most deeply involved in the investigation, and most closely in touch with the intelligence community and law enforcement working on the probe, conceded that there appeared to be no there there.

Just two months later, a New York Times report uncovered details of the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting in which Donald Trump Jr., presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Trump’s then-campaign chair Paul Manafort met with Russians with the goal of getting damaging information on Trump’s political opponent Hillary Clinton. York’s tune changed in the blink of an eye. Gone was “there appeared to be no there there,” replaced with the rhetorical question, “What campaign wouldn't seek motherlode of Clinton emails?”

As the Mueller report would later note, Trump Jr. wasn’t charged with a crime on the basis that he may not have known that he was breaking the law. From page 187:

On the facts here, the government would unlikely be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the June 9 meeting participants had general knowledge that their conduct was unlawful. The investigation has not developed evidence that the participants in the meeting were familiar with the foreign-contribution ban or the application of federal law to the relevant factual context.

York’s columns feel less like a part of some grand narrative and more like episodic works without consistent factual themes. At best, York’s political insights can be viewed as a misguided attempt at playing devil’s advocate for conservative voters, fueled by motivated reasoning. At worst, he’s just another layer of right-wing obfuscation in a time when truth and clarity is in demand.

==

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/right-wing-media-outlets-are-booming-in-the-trump-era-report/

no lnx

Right-wing media outlets are booming in the Trump era: report

Written by Alex Henderson August 26, 2019

Right-wing media outlets have traditionally experienced their biggest growth when a Democrat was in the White House. Many far-right outlets knew how to turn fear-mongering over President Bill Clinton in the 1990s or President Barack Obama in the late 2000s/early 2010s into major advertising revenue. But in a report for Axios, Sara Fischer explains that some right-wing outlets have been enjoying substantial growth under a Republican president: Donald Trump.

Citing a Columbia Journalism Review analysis of right-wing websites using Comscore data, Fischer reports that RedState, the Washington Times and the Washington Examiner are among the outlets that have been thriving during the Trump era. Those sites, Fischer notes, “are experiencing major growth by widening their coverage. Their goal is to cover whatever is capturing the world’s attention that day, from human interest stories to trending entertainmentdevelopments.”

Fischer notes that although the right-wing Weekly Standard folded in late 2018, other websites on the right continue to “rank high” in terms of “engagement on Facebook” — and Fox News, according to Fischer, remains “the #1 news site on Facebook” in 2019 “in terms of reader engagement,” according to the analytics company Newswhip.

Podcasts that have been thriving in the Trump era, Fischer reports, include “The Joe Rogan Experience” and “The Ben Shapiro Show.” Shapiro, she points out, has “built a megabrand aimed at targeting younger conservatives.”

Fischer stresses, however, that although “conservative media remains strong across most major media platforms,” some “left-leaning outlets” — including HuffPost— “rank highly” in the Trump era. But Trump’s presidency and the 2020 election, she writes, continue to benefit right-wing media.

“Typically, the opposition party has a media explosion in response to whichever political group is in power,” Fischer reports. “But the economic stress of the media industry, combined with the Trump-driven conservative strategy of broad messaging, has upended that dynamic.”

==

==

omg carrying water for dhs eco-terror

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/warnings-of-eco-terrorism-mass-casualties-at-new-okla-tenn-oil-pipeline

OPINION: WASHINGTON SECRETS

Warnings of eco-terrorism, 'mass casualties' at new Okla-Tenn oil pipeline

by Paul Bedard

| April 18, 2017 02:13 PM

[odd pix, scary? Dakota Access pipeline opponents burn structures in their main protest camp in southern North Dakota near Cannon Ball, N.D., on Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2017, as authorities prepare to shut down the camp in advance of spring flooding season. (AP Photo/James MacPherson)

Just months removed from the violence and attacks on police by environmental extremists fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline, state and federal officials are warning of similar, potentially catastrophic, attacks against another new pipeline between Oklahoma and Tennessee that enters service in the fall.

A report from the Department of Homeland Security, and Arkansas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma, warns of attacks from eco-terrorists to anti-government militia on the Diamond Pipeline project.

"Law enforcement are assessing what environmental extremists did to disrupt Dakota Access Pipeline – Molotov cocktails, rocks, arson, roadblocks, chaining themselves to equipment, improvised explosive devices, etc – and seeing many of the same activities potentially happening around Diamond pipeline," according to a police representative.

[map pipe route]

The 11-page "field analysis report," stamped "Unclassfied//For Official Use Only," said that there are no pending threats to the $900 million, 440-mile pipeline under construction, but that the potential is very real.

"While the Diamond Pipeline project has not seen the same level of disruption as the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), we are concerned that negative perceptions about enforcement efforts against DAPL opponents could inspire like-minded individuals to seek out reprisal violence against similar targets, including the Diamond Pipeline," said the report, provided to Secrets.

Some peaceful protests have already occurred.

The report revealed that five oil pipelines crossing the U.S.-Canada border were shutdown in October, and it provided photographic evidence of the arson and sabotage of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Police are keen consumers of the report because it was sheriffs and local cops that felt the brunt of the pressure at Dakota, sometimes getting in violent clashes with protesters.

According to the report, "Pipeline construction projects frequently arouse concerns about environmental and land-use issues. While most opposition activity related to pipeline construction remains nonviolent and lawful protest activity, some violent extremists may take advantage of lawful gatherings to attempt to threaten, incite, or commit violent acts against public safety officers or facility staff."

The biggest concerns cited in the report:

— "DHS and the authoring fusion centers assess the most likely potential domestic terrorist threat to the Diamond Pipeline construction project or associated entities is fromenvironmental rights extremists motivated by resentment over perceived environmental destruction."

— "We assess that the second most likely potential domestic terrorist threat to the Diamond Pipeline or associated entities—including law enforcement and private contract security guards—is from militia extremists opposed to government enforcement of eminent domain policies."

— "We assess that potential attacks against the Diamond Pipeline or related entities would most likely be simple and designed to damage physical infrastructure or equipment by sabotage or arson. Previous attacks against pipelines or related targets have included assaults on law enforcement, private contract security guards, or construction personnel."[where? Fallin gun?]

— "We assess the primary potential threat of violence against the Diamond Pipeline and related entities is from lone offenders who adhere to environmental rights extremist beliefs and believe violence is justified against such projects due to their perceived harm to the environment. Previous incidents involving lone offenders committing violent acts against targets associated with similar energy projects suggest that the pipeline and associated entities could be attractive targets for an attack by lone environmental rights extremists."

— "Militia extremists have engaged in armed standoffs, threats, and disrupted IED plots targeting law enforcement entities perceived to be enforcers of oppressive government land-use policies, according to media reporting. Although their capabilities vary, some militia extremists have well-rehearsed paramilitary skills, as well as access to and proficiency using firearms and explosives. As a result, successful violent attacks have the potential to cause mass casualties."

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com

==

off bs

o one knows Washington secrets like Paul Bedard. This longtime D.C. reporter joined the Washington Examiner in 2012 after penning U.S. News & World Report's premiere political column, "Washington Whispers," for more than a decade. In addition to his Washington Secrets column, check out his signature feature, "Mainstream Media Scream.

==

https://www.mediamatters.org/national-rifle-association/paul-bedards-wash-examiner-column-pr-front-national-rifle-association

An opinion column billed by the conservative Washington Examineras an insider look at Washington, D.C.’s “secrets” is actually a lazy and credulous public relations front for the gun lobby.

In his Examiner Washington Secrets column, “longtime D.C. reporter”Paul Bedard has written dozens of pieces advancing the agenda of the National Rifle Association, most often by amplifying the NRA’s attacks on others or by serving as a conduit for the NRA to put forward unsubstantiated talking points to defend itself from criticism.

The latter was the case in an April 1 column run under the headline “NRA is back, ‘highest ever’ membership.” In the column, Bedard claims that the NRA’s membership has increased to 5.5 million members -- the “highest levels ever in its history” -- and quotes an anonymous NRA official who told him, “Keeping our numbers so steady is a great sign for us in an off election year,” and “What’s important is that we have great potential for growth in the coming months.”Of course, Bedard does not mention reporting over the years showing that the NRA puffs itself up by overstating its active membership figures.

The column then gets to the PR point Bedard wants to push for the NRA: “The positive news for the NRA comes amid lingering concerns about a costly New York fight,” he wrote, a reference to litigation the NRA is involved in over fines given to insurance policies the group underwrote. The policies allowed policyholders to attempt to recoup legal fees and other expenses such as “clean-up costs” in the event that they shot someone while claiming to act in self-defense.

Overall, Bedard’s column paints a rosy picture of the NRA’s future -- “What’s more, there are expectations that membership in the NRA will continue to grow going into the 2020 elections” -- that is at serious odds with actual reporting on financial troubles at the NRAand its media operation NRATV.

The column is not a one-off shilling exercise by Bedard. In fact, he has written dozens of columns over the past six years that serve as free PR for the NRA, sometimes publishing more than one pro-NRA column per day. The columns typically do some sort of legwork for NRA PR, and they often feature one or more of the following approaches:heavy credulous quoting of NRA officials; write-ups of NRA ads with video and full transcript; and promotions of NRA fundraising, membership levels, events, petitions, election messaging, executive branch confirmation messaging, polling, legislative efforts, and disputes with other organizations, businesses, and people:

2/24/19:

[long list of headlines]

==

lulz?

https://www.alternet.org/twitter-account-right-wing-newspaper-owned-billionaire-christian-conservative-declares-trump-going

https://www.ecowatch.com/koch-fueled-attack-on-electric-buses-2598163369.html

 Koch-Fueled Attack on Electric Buses Picks Up Speed

By Dana Drugmand

Electric buses are replacing existing diesel-fueled fleets at an accelerating rate, and the transition to battery-powered buses is outpacing even the most optimistic projections. In this light, it should come as little surprise that commentators and organizations with ties to the Koch network and the oil industry are attacking a transportation option that yields fewer fossil fuel profits and cleaner, healthier air for people and planet.

A string of recent commentaries published in the conservative Washington Examiner have relied on a handful of critical reports about the rollout of electric buses in individual municipalities, which the commentators use to portray electric buses, as a class, as uneconomical and unreliable.

Despite these efforts by Koch affiliates and oil industry consultants, the electrification of bus transit is firmly underway. These high tech buses are already being widely deployed throughoutChina, which, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), is adding about 9,500 electric buses every five weeks. As China leads the way and North American and European municipalities follow suit, analysts expect this momentum to accelerate and predict 80 percent of the global municipal bus fleet to be electric by 2040.

That is bad news for the oil industry. Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecasts that switching from internal combustion engine transport to electric vehicles will displace 7.3 million barrels of oil a day.

According to Bloomberg, this year electric buses already will lower diesel consumption by 233,000 barrels a day.

Who's Behind a Series of Drive-by Attacks on Electric Buses in the Washington Examiner?

As more cities and states move toward this electrified mass transit option, it cuts into the demand for conventional diesel fuel—and into fossil fuel industry profits. A Washington Examiner article from Dec. 12, 2017 explores the rise of electric vehicles with a particularly telling headline: "Rise of electric vehicles threatens oil industry."

More recently, the Washington Examiner has run a series of opinion pieces criticizing electric buses. The main arguments are that they are expensive and unreliable, prone to breaking down. These pieces share arguments, and their authors share affiliations, with the Koch brothers and other oil industry funders.

For example, one commentaryby Philip Wegmann looks at a new electric bus fleet on Martha's Vineyard, pointing to the cost of the vehicles and the fact that they experienced technical problems early on. The piece neglects to mention any benefits of these buses to the environment or public health, nor does it reference the fact that the Vineyard Transit Authority's slow rollout of the buses was expected and that they plan on doubling the size of the electric fleet by next summer.

Wegmann has been closely tied to the Koch network since the beginning of his career. He started his writing career as a fellow of the Koch's America's Future Foundation writing program. Wegmann is currently a fellow at the Steamboat Institute, a right-wing think tank affiliated with the Koch-backed State Policy Network. This year, he was awarded the Steamboat Institute's Tony Blankley fellowship, which came with a $10,000 stipend and a host of other benefits.

Prior to joining the Examiner as a staff writer, Wegmann worked for conservative media outlet The Daily Signal, which is published by the Koch network-funded Heritage Foundation and which also features work by fellow America's Future Foundation alumnus Michael Bastasch.

Another Examiner piece by Wegmann slams electric buses in Los Angeles. "They don't run, they are expensive, and they're Chinese," Wegmann wrote. LA's neighbor Santa Monica is also converting its buses to electric, and Wegmann again attacks that move in another commentary. He again played the cost card, and claims, without statistical evidence, that "basically no one" rides the new buses.

Wegmann continues to rail against the electric bus in the Examiner, as recently as last week commenting on Atlanta, Georgia's purchase of a fleet from the Chinese company Build Your Dreams (BYD). "One expects cities like Albuquerque and Los Angeles to drop millions on the novelty environmental fleets, not a deep red state in the South that traditionally votes Republican and cares more for business than green pipe dreams," he writes.

Ross Marchand echoes this criticism in another Examiner opinion piece. Marchand is director of policy for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, which is basically a front group funded in part through Koch-connected channels. Previously Marchand interned for the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), both part of the Koch network.

Marchand's argument is primarily based on expense, but he even claims that electric buses could "prove dirtier than conventional fleet depending on which energy sources America relies on in the future." He backs that statement with a link to :{a piece by:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{ Jonathan Lesser:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, president of the consulting firm Continental Economics. Lesser has an antagonistic record towards clean energy policies, and he has "submitted expert testimony and reports on behalf of major utility and fossil fuel interests like Exelon, Occidental, Duke Energy, and FirstEnergy," according to the Energy and Policy Institute.

Lesser is also frequently contracted by the Manhattan Institute, a think tank that has received millions of dollars in funding from foundations in the Koch donor network.

Electric Bus Myths, Debunked

The claims laid out by electric bus antagonists use limited views and dog whistles of "communism" and "environmental zealotry" to attack the electric vehicles, especially when compared to "cleaner natural gas-burning buses." The unreliability argument is backed, for instance, by an investigative story in the LA Times from May that looks at problems with range and quality encountered by the Chinese e-bus manufacturing company BYD.

The Times article raises legitimate concerns about the products delivered by BYD, and the company responded with a statement saying that glitches are to be expected with "any groundbreaking technology." However, the article referred only to BYD buses, and not the electric bus industry as a whole.

"That was an article about a company, but the headline was about a category," Ryan Popple, CEO of electric bus maker Proterra, told GTM. "I hope that people don't paint a broad brush over the whole category." While the BYD buses struggled on hills—a major focus of the LA Times article—competitor Proterra's electric buses have been tested, for instance, in the mountains around Park City, Utah, to the satisfaction of local municipal transit planners, who ordered six units to serve the local bus routes.

Had he wanted, Wegmann could have looked even closer to find a counterpoint to the problematic BYD buses in Los Angeles. Foothill Transit, which serves 22 cities from downtown LA to the east, first tested Proterra buses in 2010 and is still using them.

"The technology is very robust," Doran Barnes, Foothill's executive director, told the Seattle Times. "We've had very few problems." Foothill Transit now operates 17 Proterra electric buses, and recently ordered 13 more, including a new set of all-electric double decker buses. Foothill Transit has pledged to serve its hilly region with an exclusively electric fleet by 2030.

So despite the early performance and mechanical issues from at least one manufacturer, as these issues are resolved and technology continues to improve, municipal transit authorities across the U.S. continue to order more of the buses from BYDand other major electric bus manufacturers like Proterra and New Flyer.

As for the cost argument, it is true that electric buses cost more up front than their diesel-powered counterparts. However, those costs are falling, and when considering the entire life cycle of the vehicle—purchase price, fuels, operational and maintenance expenses—electric buses prove to be cheaper than their diesel counterparts.

Moreover, according to BNEF, the projected decline in battery costs likely make electric buses cost-competitive with diesel at the point of purchase by 2026. By then, the number of electric buses on the road is expected to more than triple and make up nearly half of the worldwide city bus fleets.

There are solid reasons behind this trend.Electric buses are better for public health (reducing local air pollution from burning diesel), better for the climate (increasing efficiency and reducing reliance on fossil fuels), and make economic sense in terms of their full cost of moving passengers, when factoring in maintenance and fuel cost-savings. These various benefits are explained in a May 2018 report from U.S. PIRG and Environment America.

In terms of public health, there is no question that electric is better. Diesel exhaust is classified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a likely carcinogen, and it is internationally recognized as a cancer-causing agent that is also responsible for respiratory and other illnesses. Chicago estimates that its electric buses will result in $55,000 in healthcare savings annually per bus, while a Columbia University analysis for New York City pegs it at $150,000 per bus.

Another obvious benefit of shifting from diesel to electric buses is the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. In the U.S. alone, converting transit buses to electric could save over 2 million tons of emissions each year, a clear win for the climate.

Electric buses also have lower operating and maintenance costs. As with other electric vehicles, there is no fuel cost. Chicago Transit Authority estimates it saves $25,000 annually in net fuel costs for each bus.

Furthermore, the U.S. PIRG report states that:

"According to studies of electric buses currently in operation, electric buses save at least $0.19 per mile in lower maintenance costs. Over the lifetime of the bus, an electric transit bus can avoid hundreds of thousands of dollars in operating costs over an equivalent diesel or natural gas bus, from lower fuel and maintenance costs."

While the e-bus costs more upfront, the fuel and maintenance cost-savings make up the difference, usually within 10 years.

Improved models and better battery technology are moving toward solving reliability issues, too. The newer electric bus models apparently can travel up to 200 miles or more on a single charge. Proterra makes e-buses designed to go 200 to 350 miles, for example. Electric buses also have fewer parts than diesel buses, which would theoretically require less maintenance.

Given these considerations, many cities are now announcing transitions to electric bus fleets. New York City announced in April its plans to electrify its fleet by 2040. Los Angeles is committed to an entirely zero-emissions fleet by 2030. Seattle is purchasing 120 e-buses by 2020 and has committed to electrifying its entire fleet by 2040.

Electric buses are moving toward the mainstream, despite attacks from oil industry apologists.

==

==

818

The Washington Examiner is published by MediaDC, a subsidiary of Clarity Media Group.

Editorial Director

Hugo Gurdon is the editorial director of the Washington Examiner. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Hill and previously served as an editor and reporter at the Daily Telegraph of London and the National Post of Canada. His writing has also appeared in such publications as the Wall Street Journal (Europe), Financial Times and The Guardian.

pix wearing glasses so betsy must be smart/serous

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/dont-lower-standards-for-federally-subsidized-for-profit-colleges

==

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/brad-parscale-big-tech-is-becoming-big-brother

gotta be infowars, yup!

Big Tech has a big bias problem.

Social media platforms that once facilitated the free exchange of ideas and information are now actively seeking to silence and censor conservative opinions.

This new Orwellian impulse that is taking over Big Tech is particularly problematic because social media websites, which are supposed to be safe spaces for all free speech, get special legal perks.

Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, websites such as Facebook and Twitter are not treated as publishers of “information provided by another” — which would subject them to libel laws and other headaches publishers have to deal with — because they “offer a forum for a true diversity of political discourse.”

This means social media platforms are not merely private companies who can censor whomever they wish — They are considered, by law, to be public forums that allow free and open debate.

Yet, they’re doing the exact opposite. They are stifling online speech, warping the national discourse, and obstructing the free flow of ideas. Big Tech is not just biased against conservatives — it is actively trying to silence them and deprive them of online platforms.

Big Tech’s bias was on full display recently when conservative activist Candace Owens was suspended from Twitter for satirical tweets mimicking the racist, anti-white tweets of New York Times editorial board member Sarah Jeong — who has never been suspended from Twitter despite a history of racist comments.

The ban came just weeks after another controversy hit Twitter for anti-conservative bias, following revelations that the website had shadowbanned prominent Republican leaders.

Twitter isn’t the only major social media site with a demonstrated history of bias against conservatives. Facebook is infamous for its lopsided application of its “community standards.” Conservative content is regularly removed from the site while vile, often violent, radical left-wing content is left alone. Recently, a GOP congressional candidate’s ad was banned because it depicted images of the Cambodian genocide.

To make matters worse, the social media giant recently changed its feed algorithms — ostensibly to combat fake news — but the result has been a suspicious and significant drop in the reach of conservative pages and advertisements. A study found that while liberal publishers saw a roughly 2 percent increase in web traffic from Facebook following the algorithm changes, conservative ones saw a loss of traffic averaging around 14 percent.

Big Tech’s anti-conservative bias is positively institutional. Facebook, Google (YouTube), and Twitter all work with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left organization with a proven track record of anti-conservative bias, to decide what is and isn’t “hate speech.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Big Tech is set to return to its free speech roots anytime soon. The Left clearly no longer values free speech at all.

Controversial commentator Alex Jones and his website Infowars were deplatformed last week from Facebook, YouTube, and other sites. The act was met with relish by liberals and Democrats. They were excited by the establishment of a precedent that will inevitably lead to the silencing of those with far less controversial opinions than Jones.

What we are seeing in Big Tech is the inherent totalitarian impulse of the Left come into full focus. The Left is losing at the ballot box, and there are some signs it is starting to lose the culture war too. The free and open Internet has been indispensable in spreading conservative ideas, and it was indispensable in getting Donald Trump elected president — and now the Left wishes to destroy it.

The giants of Silicon Valley must be challenged and reminded of what made the Internet so great in the first place. They must be stopped from turning the Internet into Big Brother.

Bradley Parscale (@parscale) is campaign manager of Donald J. Trump for President Inc.

==

outed?!

mma

Right-wing media outlets The Daily Caller and the Washington Free Beacon have often acted as de facto press offices for Scott Pruitt's Environmental Protection Agency. Media Matters has documented how the two publications have defended Pruitt in the face of his many scandals and tried to discredit sources of information about his misdeeds. Now we learn from Washington Examiner reporter John Siciliano, who covers energy and environment for the conservative-leaning newspaper, that the EPA's press office tried to strong-arm him into writing flattering pieces about the agency and complained to his editors when he refused.

Speaking on June 11 on a panel about media coverage at a conference organized by Citizens' Climate Lobby, a nonpartisan climate activist group, Siciliano recounted the EPA’s attempts to coerce him and his paper to print favorable stories, which he described as “a really bizarre pressure play on their part that I’ve never experienced from an agency, a cabinet-level agency, to enforce an agenda on a journalist.” Siciliano also discussed how the agency referred to him in pejorative terms and pitted him against other journalists -- practices the agency has used against other environmental journalists.

From the June 11 panel titled “Covering Climate Change in the Current Political Landscape”:

....

==

==

nelson actually looks fair

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/noam-chomsky-antifa-is-a-major-gift-to-the-right/article/2631786

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==

seems to be taking lead on dapl eco-terror BS? nope, other  WT

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/27/authorities-begin-removal-dakota-access-protest-ca/

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/warnings-of-eco-terrorism-mass-casualties-at-new-okla-tenn-oil-pipeline/article/2620569

no link pix

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

WASHINGTON SECRETS

Warnings of eco-terrorism, 'mass casualties' at new Okla-Tenn oil pipeline

by Paul Bedard | Apr 18, 2017, 2:13 PM  Share on Twitter  Share on Facebook  Email this article  Share on LinkedIn

Dakota Access pipeline opponents burn structures in their main protest camp in southern North Dakota near Cannon Ball, N.D., on Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2017, as authorities prepare to shut down the camp in advance of spring flooding season. (AP Photo/James MacPherson)

Dakota Access pipeline opponents burn structures in their main protest camp in southern North Dakota near Cannon Ball, N.D., on Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2017, as authorities prepare to shut down the camp in advance of spring flooding season. (AP Photo/James MacPherson)

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Just months removed from the violence and attacks on police by environmental extremists fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline, state and federal officials are warning of similar, potentially catastrophic, attacks against another new pipeline between Oklahoma and Tennessee that enters service in the fall.

A report from the Department of Homeland Security, and Arkansas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma, warns of attacks from eco-terrorists to anti-government militia on the Diamond Pipeline project.

"Law enforcement are assessing what environmental extremists did to disrupt Dakota Access Pipeline – Molotov cocktails, rocks, arson, roadblocks, chaining themselves to equipment, improvised explosive devices, etc – and seeing many of the same activities potentially happening around Diamond pipeline," according to a police representative.

The 11-page "field analysis report," stamped "Unclassfied//For Official Use Only," said that there are no pending threats to the $900 million, 440-mile pipeline under construction, but that the potential is very real.

"While the Diamond Pipeline project has not seen the same level of disruption as the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), we are concerned that negative perceptions about enforcement efforts against DAPL opponents could inspire like-minded individuals to seek out reprisal violence against similar targets, including the Diamond Pipeline," said the report, provided to Secrets.

Some peaceful protests have already occurred.

The report revealed that five oil pipelines crossing the U.S.-Canada border were shutdown in October, and it provided photographic evidence of the arson and sabotage of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Police are keen consumers of the report because it was sheriffs and local cops that felt the brunt of the pressure at Dakota, sometimes getting in violent clashes with protesters.

According to the report, "Pipeline construction projects frequently arouse concerns about environmental and land-use issues. While most opposition activity related to pipeline construction remains nonviolent and lawful protest activity, some violent extremists may take advantage of lawful gatherings to attempt to threaten, incite, or commit violent acts against public safety officers or facility staff."

The biggest concerns cited in the report:

— "DHS and the authoring fusion centers assess the most likely potential domestic terrorist threat to the Diamond Pipeline construction project or associated entities is from environmental rights extremists motivated by resentment over perceived environmental destruction."

— "We assess that the second most likely potential domestic terrorist threat to the Diamond Pipeline or associated entities—including law enforcement and private contract security guards—is from militia extremists opposed to government enforcement of eminent domain policies."

— "We assess that potential attacks against the Diamond Pipeline or related entities would most likely be simple and designed to damage physical infrastructure or equipment by sabotage or arson. Previous attacks against pipelines or related targets have included assaults on law enforcement, private contract security guards, or construction personnel."

— "We assess the primary potential threat of violence against the Diamond Pipeline and related entities is from lone offenders who adhere to environmental rights extremist beliefs and believe violence is justified against such projects due to their perceived harm to the environment. Previous incidents involving lone offenders committing violent acts against targets associated with similar energy projects suggest that the pipeline and associated entities could be attractive targets for an attack by lone environmental rights extremists."

— "Militia extremists have engaged in armed standoffs, threats, and disrupted IED plots targeting law enforcement entitiesperceived to be enforcers of oppressive government land-use policies, according to media reporting. Although their capabilities vary, some militia extremists have well-rehearsed paramilitary skills, as well as access to and proficiency using firearms and explosives. As a result, successful violent attacks have the potential to cause mass casualties."

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedardATwashingtonexaminer.com

==

Who should be the next FBI Director? Jim Reese.

Never heard of him? In part, that’s why Reese is the right leader for the job. Unlike others now jockeying for the prestigious Pennsylvania Avenue position, Reese has spent his life outside the headlines.

Over the hills and far away — risking life, limb, and mind, in service of the United States.

A 25-year veteran of the Army, Lt. Col. Reese is a retired Delta Force operator. The military’s most elite special mission unit, Delta is tasked with the riskiest, most important missions. Reese has fought these battles on the ground and in the operations center.

During the Iraq War, he commanded a task force that hunted down al Qaeda and other terrorists. And within the special operations community, Reese’s reputation is legendary. Distinguished former Delta operator Dalton Fury once argued that Reese “quite possibly would have made Ulysses S. Grant appear wanting when it came to working through chaos, calming nerves, and demanding the best out of subordinates.”

I have the fortune of knowing Reese personally. And I fully concur with that tribute of his individual leadership skills. He is not just any mentor. Reese has no qualms issuing challenge alongside praise. He tells you when he believes you’re wrong. He believes that success requires a fidelity to introspection and durable outcomes.

That characteristic of fidelity offers the first reason why Reese would be a great pick for the FBI. He is a leader who would not buckle under political pressure, nor yield to public expectation. He would use his office to advance the FBI’s mission rather than his own persona.

He would not, for example, follow the tradition of some senior military and government leaders who spend their evenings attending lavish dinner parties at Washington embassies and hotels. And he would not waver in supporting FBI agents and analysts as they performed their necessary duties. Whether Trump or Pelosi, no politician could import political pressure onto a Director Reese.

But Reese would also innovate. Like any big organization, the FBI is ripe for reform. Establishing a successful global company after leaving the military, Reese would bring a blend of public and private sector thinking to bear. He could make the bureau more efficient and forward looking. That will be necessary in the years ahead.

For one, facing growing mistrust of our political system, the FBI should probably increase its staffing of political corruption details. The bureau might do well to transfer more lower-level counter-terrorism duties away from agents and towards local police-dominated Joint Terrorism Task Forces. Regardless, Reese despises static thinking. His is an open-door, if-in-doubt-innovate philosophy of two parts: “No. 1: Strive to be a good listener. You have to be a good listener and an active listener. No. 2, if in charge, take charge.”

The next FBI director needs to be able to inspire the trust of the organization and the American people. Reese is the man for the job. He might not be a political celebrity, but he is an intellectual warrior. He deserves an interview with the Department of Justice.

Tom Rogan (@TomRtweets) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a foreign policy columnist for National Review, a domestic policy columnist for Opportunity Lives, a former panelist on The McLaughlin Group and a senior fellow at the Steamboat Institute.

 ---

http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/stories/2014/hollingsworth.html

...

egurgitating global warming distortions

Hollingsworth proclaimed in a Jan. 28 CNS article:

Dr. Don Easterbrook – a climate scientist and glacier expert from Washington State who correctly predicted back in 2000 that the Earth was entering a cooling phase – says to expect colder temperatures for at least the next two decades.

Easterbrook’s predictions were “right on the money” seven years before Al Gore and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for warning that the Earth was facing catastrophic warming caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide, which Gore called a “planetary emergency.”

“When we check their projections against what actually happened in that time interval, they’re not even close. They’re off by a full degree in one decade, which is huge. That’s more than the entire amount of warming we’ve had in the past century. So their models have failed just miserably, nowhere near close. And maybe it’s luck, who knows, but mine have been right on the button,” Easterbrook told CNSNews.com.

“For the next 20 years, I predict global cooling of about 3/10ths of a degree Fahrenheit, as opposed to the one-degree warming predicted by the IPCC,” said Easterbrook, professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University and author of 150 scientific journal articles and 10 books, including “Evidence Based Climate Science,” which was published in 2011.

There's lots that Hollingsworth has gotten wrong here, starting with her presumption that Easterbrook is right about global cooling.

Skeptical Science has demonstrated how Easterbrook's predictions of cooling contradict he actual temperatures that have been observed.

Another thing Hollingsworth got wrong: uncritically repeating Easterbrook's claim that the IPCC predicted "one-degree warming." As Skeptical Science points out, the IPCC served up numerous analyses of temperature predictions, and Easterbrook cherry-picked one of them:

• He chose a figure which represented model simulations of temperature responses only to greenhouse gas changes, which neglects for example the temperature response to the cooling effects of aerosols.
• He chose a single model run with an anomalous temperature spike in 2011.
• He only presented the data from 2000 to 2011, which concealed the fact that the temperature spike in 2011 was a short-term anomaly.
• He exaggerated his distorted IPCC temperature rise by a factor of two.

Thus Easterbrook's claim that the IPCC TAR projected a 1°C global surface warming from 2000 to 2010 was not even remotely accurate.

As per usual, Hollingsworth couldn't be bothered to seek out any alternative views. Indeed, Hollingsworth even shared one fawning question she asked Easterbrook: “How does it feel to have been right?” If Hollingsworth had done any basic research before her interview, she would have known not to ask such a stupid question.

Hollingsworth served as stenographer for another right-wing activist group's global warming-denying claims in a July 22 CNS article. This time, she uncritically repeated attacks from the Institute for Energy Research that a new report warning of the dangers of climate change "is just another attempt by economic and political elites to impose a carbon tax on Americans."

Hollingsworth not only failed to obtain any response to IER's criticism, she failed to disclose that IER has strong ties to the energy industry, including donations fromExxonMobil and Koch-affilated interests.

Such ties and funding would seem to counter Hollingsworth's implication that IER's criticism is objective and not agenda-driven, but she doesn't want you to know about it.

Hollingsworth performed her stenography services once again in a Sept. 24 CNS article, repeating a claim by global warming denier Patrick Michael that this is the 18th year of “no significant warming trend in surface average temperature."

Since Hollingsworth is in stenography mode, she doesn't tell her readers that Michaels has a history of getting things wrong or that his central claim -- there has been no global warming for 18 years -- is misleading. Michael's claim relies on cherry-picked data and choosing an arbitrary starting point; meanwhile, the long-term trend demonstrates continued global warming.

Hollingsworth also gullibly swallowed Michaels' assertion of Arctic ice: “And if you take a close look at the Arctic data, it appears the decline stopped somewhere around 2005/2006, which means we’ve almost had ten years without any net loss in Arctic ice." In fact, Arctic ice remains near record lows.

Writing press releases...

==

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woodcock recycled by :

Bay Area Moderate Conservative ExaminerDwight L. Schwab Jr.

Dwight has 30 years of work experience in the publishing industry, including ABC/Cap Cities and International Thomson. He has a BS in journalism from the University of Oregon and minors in political science and American history. He is a native of Portland, Oregon and a resident of the SF Bay Area since 1977. Dwight has written over 800 articles, since 2009, regarding domestic politics and international affairs. Send any comments to dwight.schwab@gmail.com.

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LOS ANGELES, Jan. 23, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- AXS, AEG's digital ticketing and media platform, has acquiredExaminer.com, a top content destination, it was announced today by Bryan Perez, President of AEG Digital, Ticketing and Media.

Launched in 2008, Examiner.com is the leading content creation network, connecting consumers to effective online influencers, known as Examiners; and creating meaningful and authentic interactions through compelling stories. Garnering more than 40 million unique visitors every month, Examiner.com is the 37th largest website in the U.S. and the 10th largest mobile website according to Quantcast.

With the resources and content created by the thousands of affiliated, established writers, AXS.com will now have the ability to populate original content directly into the AXS.com platform. The end result will be a new immersive experience for AXS.com users around live events.  The experience will couple the power of the thousands of 'Examiners' writing each day about live events, with AXS.com's ticketing platform and AEG's insider access to events to create a one of a kind destination – uniquely focused on the live experience – both the content and the commerce.

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Existing content not related to live entertainment will continue to live on Examiner.com.

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Developed and operated by AEG, one of the leading sports and entertainment presenters in the world, and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Anschutz Company, AXS is a new entertainment platform that also serves as AEG's primary consumer brand. AXS provides fans the opportunity to purchase tickets directly from their favorite venues via a user-friendly ticketing interface.  AXS serves all phases of the event life-cycle beyond just ticketing, through its consumer facing website, AXS.com and the AXS App, as well as its portfolio of investment companies, including Carbonhouse, a leading website developer for venues, Frontgate Ticketing, a festival oriented ticketing platform owned in partnership with C3 Presents, and Bypass, the venue industry's leading supplier of cloud-based food and beverage point-of-sale systems.  For more information on AXS, please visit AXS.com.

About AEG

AEG is one of the leading sports and entertainment presenters in the world. AEG, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Anschutz Company, owns or is affiliated with a collection of companies including over 100 of the world's preeminent facilities such as STAPLES Center (Los Angeles, CA), StubHub Center (Carson, CA), Best Buy Theater (Times Square, New York), Sprint Center (Kansas City), Rose Garden Arena (Portland, OR), Target Center (Minneapolis, MN), Mercedes-Benz Arena (Shanghai, China), MasterCard Center (Beijing, China), Allphones Arena (Sydney, Australia), Stockholm Globe Arenas (Stockholm, Sweden), O2 World arena (Berlin, Germany), O2 World Hamburg, Indigo2 and The O2 arena and entertainment district (London, England) which are all part of the portfolio of AEG Facilities. Developed by AEG, L.A. LIVE is a 4 million square foot / multi-million dollar downtown Los Angelessports, residential & entertainment district featuring Nokia Theatre L.A. LIVE and Club Nokia, a 54-story, 1001-room convention "headquarters" destination along with entertainment, restaurant and office space that "officially" opened in 2010.  In addition to overseeing privately held management shares of the Los Angeles Lakers (NBA), assets of AEG Sports include franchises and properties such as the Los Angeles Kings (NHL), Los Angeles Galaxy and Houston Dynamo (MLS), two hockey franchises in Europe and the Amgen Tour of California cycling race.  AEG Live, the company's live-entertainment division, is the world's second largest concert promotion and touring companies and is comprised of touring, festival, exhibition, broadcast, merchandise and special event divisions with fifteen regional offices.  AEG Global Partnerships, a division responsible for worldwide sales and servicing of sponsorships naming rights and other strategic partnerships and AEG Merchandising, a multi-faceted merchandising company are also core business units of AEG.  In 2010, AEG launched its AEG 1EARTH environmental program with the announcement of 2020 environmental goals and the release of the industry's first sustainability report while in 2011, AEG introduced AXS Ticketing, the first phase of its new entertainment platform serving as the company's primary consumer brand. For additional information: aegworldwide.com 

==

cited in steyn amicus:

Thomas Richard has been writing about the environment for Examiner.com since 2010. He has always endeavored to enhance the national discussion of human-caused global warming, our ever-changing climate, and other environmental issues. Richard emphasizes sound science over green ideology.

SUBSCRIBE to this column and get notified when he publishes a new article! You can also read his most recent articles at http://www.examiner.com/environment-in-national/thomas-richard

Thomas's other topics: Environment Examiner

New study: Warming climate is "preferable" to most Americans April 21, 2016

A new studypublished in the Nature this week is drawing praise and criticism from both sides of the global warming divide. It says that the reason global warming is ranked as such a non-issue by most people...

Australia's Attorney General says global warming science is not settled April 21, 2016

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NOAA says March warmest on record ahead of climate accord signing April 20, 2016

Just days before President Obama is scheduled to sign the global climate accord at the United Nations, NOAA declared March the warmest month on record. This Friday, which is also Earth Day, about 150 countries will officially ink the climate...

NASA attacks Facebook users over Bill Nye's global warming post April 15, 2016

On any given day, you can turn on the Science channel and hear NASA scientists talk about all the possible ways the Earth may get destroyed: From Coronal Mass Ejections to gamma ray bursts to wandering black holes to our...

Bernie Sanders promises to ban fracking if elected president April 13, 2016

The Democratic-Socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders doubled down on Monday his commitment to ban fracking across the country at a New York rally. He renewed his focus to end hydraulic fracturing, a process to extract oil and gas from...

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Over 80 percent of China's wells is heavily polluted, according to new statistics reported by Chinese Media and the NY Times this week, raising new concerns about the world's most populated country. However, most Chinese cities...

Bill Nye the 'science guy' says energy revolution akin to human slavery April 12, 2016

The environmental website DeSmog Blog released a video yesterday showing Bill Nye the "science guy" comparing the fossil fuel energy revolution of the last 150 years to human slavery. According to journalist Marc Morano, who interviewed Nye for...

Fact check: White House says global warming is making billions sick April 8, 2016

As part of the president's second-term climate-legacy project, the Obama administration has issued an apocalyptic report this week saying climate change will make billions sick from famine, disease, and heat. In the 332-page report, it...

Study: No increase in extreme droughts, rainfall during 20th century April 7, 2016

A new study published yesterday shows there hasn't been an increase in extreme rainfall and droughts during the 20th century, even as humans ramped up burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil) in the late 1800s. It also shows...

EPA chief: Next administration must continue Obama's climate legacy April 6, 2016

EPA Chief Administrator Gina McCarthy had a message for voters yesterday: there's much more climate work to be done and it will be the next administration's duty to carry it out. This comes after the Supreme...

==

==

Wash. Examiner Duped By "Global Cooling" "Scam Artist" -- Even After We Warned Them

Blog››› August 6, 2013 1:39 PM EDT ››› SHAUNA THEEL

e Washington Examiner is promoting a press release from a man predicting "global cooling" who even a climate "skeptic" has called a "scam artist."

TheWashington Examiner's Paul Bedard writes that the "war between former Vice President Al Gore and his critics over global warming is about to hit the boiling point" with a "new claim" from John Casey that "global cooling" is coming. Who is John Casey? The Examiner says that Media Matterscalled Casey a scam artist "[b]ecause his predictions go against the mainstream." In fact, in 2010 Media Matters quoted blogger Tom Nelson -- who calls climate change a "hoax" -- warning that he thinks Casey is "a scam artist" trying to trick the "skeptic community" into bankrolling him.

Casey created the "Space and Science Research Corporation" (SSRC), which boasts that "it has a dedicated list of 'Supporting Researchers' who have committed their name and assistance to the mission of the SSRC." Four of these seven researchers are alsolisted as experts on Casey's other website, the "International Earthquake and Volcano Prediction Center," perhaps because they make no claim of expertise in climate change, instead stating that they study earthquakes and volcanoes.

Casey also has no background in climate science, possessing only an undergraduate degree in physics and math and a master's in management. Since we pointed that out in 2010, Casey has pumped up his biography, adding that he is "one of America's most successful climate change researchers and climate prediction experts," even though he does not appear to have ever published a single peer-reviewed paper on the subject.

Instead he wrote a self-published book on climate change "put together" with the help of an astrologer-cum-thoroughbred horse-racing advocate who claims to be the illegitimate daughter of Ernest Hemingway. He claimshis book, Cold Sun, is "internationally acclaimed," citing one of his own volcano-specialist "Supporting Researchers" and an anonymous Amazon.com review. In it, Casey predicts that there will be "catastrophic shortages in the world's food supplies" from "global cooling," and that the first indicators of this will "be felt at any time and certainly by December 2012" (2012 was actually one of the 10 warmest years on record globally and the warmest year on record in the U.S.). Despite his claims of international prominence, neither Skeptical Science nor DeSmogBlog -- which maintain extensive records on the industry of faux-experts sowing doubt on climate change -- have ever written a single word about him.

The actual press release from SSRC should have also set off alarm bells for the Examiner. It announces that SSRC will host a news conference "during which the end of global sea level rise will be formally declared," adding that this will be as "historic" as its 2008 news conference that no one has ever heard of:

The Space and Science Research Corporation (SSRC) announces today that a news conference has been scheduled for August 21, 2013, during which the end of global sea level rise will be formally declared and a specific timetable for sea level decline will be released.

[...]

Similar to the news conference of July 1, 2008, when the SSRC issued a declaration of the end of global warming, this next historic news event will be one of the final measures according to SSRC President John Casey that helps put to rest the theory of manmade climate change.

In unrelated news, a recent study found that consuming conservative media erodes public trust in scientists.

Conservative newspaper declares love for Obama’s fracker-friendly ways

By John Upton

Uber-conservative Beltway newspaper The Washington Examinerhas revealed its secret crush on Barack Obama and his administration’s fracker-friendly ways.

It’s not often that the newspaper says anything nice about the president. The Examiner is owned by Philip Anschutz, an oil-drilling magnate, and the newspaper sometimes seems to exist only to beam its owner’s conservative views into the brains of D.C. insiders.

In March, for example, the paper’s editorial writers likened the president to “a desperate gambler who doubles down on a losing bet” after he called for more green energy spending. In January, the editorial writers charged that “Obamacare threatens states’ fiscal autonomy.” And, famously, back in 2009, *Examiner* political correspondent Byron York argued that Obama’s “sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are” — as if the opinions of blacks shouldn’t count.

But when it comes to the Obama administration’s complicity in the nationwide fracking spree, the Examiner has nothing but love. Here are some excerpts from “Two cheers for Obama on fracking,” the newspaper’s May 5 editorial:

Two significant pieces of good news last week deserved more attention than they received. First, the U.S. Geological Survey reported that recoverable natural gas resources in the northern Plains states are three times greater than previously thought. Second, President Obama’s newest secretary of the interior, Sally Jewell, said “we must develop our domestic energy resources armed with the best available science, and this unbiased, objective information will help private, nonprofit and government decision makers at all levels make informed decisions about the responsible development of these resources.”

Jewell was referring to hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” the process by which a pressurized mixture of (mostly) water and chemicals is injected into shale rock formations deep underground. …

More recently, Obama’s pick for Secretary of Energy, MIT scientist Ernest Moniz, has described water and air pollution risks associated with fracking “challenging but manageable” with proper regulation and oversight. …

For all of its claims regarding fracking’s dangers, Big Green’s real concern is that natural gas is becoming so plentiful and cheap that it will undermine the case for more expensive renewable energy. The fact that a succession of federally subsidized green-energy companies has been going bust doesn’t help the critics’ cause.

With Moniz’s nomination, Obama appears willing to at least minimize regulatory obstacles to fracking and thereby reap the rewards of clean, cheap, abundant domestic energy. Good for him. With American economic growth dependent on energy, it’s time to get fracking.

The president appears to have reached so far across the aisle on this one that he has tumbled fully to the other side.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

http://grist.org/news/conservative-newspaper-declares-love-for-obamas-fracker-friendly-ways/

==

History

The newspaper was formerly distributed only in the suburbs of Washington, under the titles of Montgomery Journal, Prince George's Journal, and Northern Virginia Journal. Their parent company, Journal Newspapers Inc., was purchased by Philip F. Anschutz's Clarity Media Group in October 2004. On February 1, 2005, the paper's name changed to the Washington Examiner, and it adopted a logo and format similar to that of another newspaper owned by Anschutz, the San Francisco Examiner.

Political slant

The Examiner's editorial page is heavily conservative; it is headed by Mark Tapscott, with American Spectator senior editor Quin Hillyer serving as its associate editor. The paper's national political coverage, which also appears in Examiner papers in Baltimore and San Francisco, was previously headed by Bill Sammon, a former Washington Times reporter who has written several books praising George W. Bush. (Sammon is now the deputy managing editor for Fox News Channel's Washington bureau.^[1]) Chris Stirewalt, who has been described as "a true conservative voice"^[2], is the Examiner's political editor. Mary Katherine Ham, former managing editor of the conservative Townhall.com, briefly served as the Examiner's online editor for a few months in 2008 ^[3] before joining the Weekly Standard.^[4] Matthew Sheffield, executive editor of the Media Research Center blog NewsBusters, is in charge of the Examiner's website.^[5] Byron York, formerly of National Review, joined the paper in February 2009.^[6]

Contact information

1015 15th St. NW (the Examiner Building (Washington DC), home to numerous conservative organizations)

Suite 500

Washington, DC 20005

Phone: (202) 903-2000

Website: http://www.dcexaminer.com/

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

• Media
• Philip F. Anschutz

References

1. ↑ "Changes To FNC's DC Bureau," TV Newser, August 5, 2008.
2. ↑ "Stirewalt will be missed", Change West Virginia blog, October 18, 2007.
3. ↑ "MKH Relocation Efforts Underway", Mary Katherine Ham's blog, Townhall.com, May 23, 2008.
4. ↑ "Exodus from the Examiner?" Robert Stacy McCain, The Other McCain, September 24, 2008.
5. ↑ "Teaming Up With the Washington Examiner," NewsBusters, October 29, 2008.
6. ↑ "Byron York joins Examiner as chief political correspondent," Washington Examiner, February 3, 2009.

External resources

External articles

• "Right-wing slant for free in DC's new daily paper, the Washington Examiner", Media Matters for America, February 2, 2005.
• Terry Krepel, "Right-Wing Tilt Drives Washington Examiner," Huffington Post, April 25, 2009.
• Dirk Smillie, "The Stealth Media Mogul: Billionaire Philip Anschutz is quietly building a small empire of social-networking sites, newspapers and now a leading conservative weekly," Forbes.com, June 29, 2009.

Wikipedia also has an article on Washington Examiner. This article may use content from the Wikipedia article under the terms of the GFDL.

Categories: Media | Newspapers | United States | Stubs

.com

Examiner.com launched in April 2008, to provide freelancers across the United States with a platform to share their knowledge and expertise through informative and entertaining content. We have an in-house editorial team that provides guidance and mentorship to the contributors. Our network has grown to over 100,000 contributors, captivating our audience with interesting, entertaining, relevant content on a variety of topics. Examiner.com is a top 100 website, reaching over 37 million unique visitors a month.*

Examiner.com is wholly owned by The Anschutz Corporation, one of the largest sports and entertainment companies in the world. Headquartered in Denver, CO, Examiner.com is guided by an executive team comprised of veterans of numerous start-ups, established media outlets and online leaders including Gannett, Disney, AOL, Yahoo! among others.

==

POLICY: ENVIRONMENT & ENERGY

BY MARK TAPSCOTT | DECEMBER 27, 2012 | 12:00 AM

'Richard Windsor' departure from EPA is a victory for transparency

TOPICS: :{CAMPAIGN 2012:(style="background-attachment:scroll;background-size:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;background-position:initial;background-repeat:repeat"):}: :{EPA:(style="background-attachment:scroll;background-size:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;background-position:initial;background-repeat:repeat"):}: :{ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT:(style="background-attachment:scroll;background-size:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;background-position:initial;background-repeat:repeat"):}: :{TRANSPARENCY:(style="background-attachment:scroll;background-size:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;background-position:initial;background-repeat:repeat"):}:

Lisa Jackson's forthcoming departure from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is a major victory for transparency and accountability in Washington.

After years of whispers that EPA officials frequently used private email addresses, fake names and coded messages to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, Jackson admitted recently to using "Richard Windsor" as her chosen nom de plume on a government email account.

That was her choice because it reminded her of a much-beloved family pet, she claimed. (At least she didn't ask how anybody could suspect a puppy lover like her of any wrongdoing.) The EPA inspector general opened an investigation into the matter because it is against federal law to use nonofficial or secret email addresses to conduct official business.

The EPA IG could hardly do otherwise. The use of private or secret emails enables high government muckety-mucks like Jackson to hide things about which they don't want the rest of us to know. But we don't need an investigation to know officials have been hiding bad things within the EPA for a very long time.

During the Clinton years, Carol Browner (a former senatorial aide to Vice President Gore) headed the EPA. She ordered the hard drive on her government computer to be reformatted and all backup tapes destroyed, just hours after a federal judge ordered her agency to preserve all agency email records. Only hopelessly naive or blindly partisan folks took seriously Browner's doe-eyed claim that it was all just a big mistake and she certainly wasn't trying to cover up anything. Nothing to see here, so move along, folks.

But nothing was done.

Then, in the course of litigation initiated a few months ago by Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Christopher Horner, an internal memo from the EPA's IT department turned up. It described the process for establishing and using secret email accounts.

That revelation sparked trench warfare among Jackson's EPA, a federal court, at least two committees in Congress, Horner and the CEI over thousands of other internal emails and documents likely to shed additional light on the illegalities going on at the environmental agency.

The conflict is far from over, and the odds favor some ugly revelations before any cease-fire is declared. Jackson's defenders will claim her departure has nothing to do with these matters. But Horner well makes the obvious point to the contrary: "It is not only implausible that Lisa Jackson's resignation was unrelated to her false identity, which we revealed, given how the obvious outcome and apparent objective of such subversion of transparency laws was intolerable. But it became an inevitability when, last week, the Department of Justice agreed (as a result of our lawsuit) to begin producing 12,000 of her 'Richard Windsor' alias accounts related to the war on coal Jackson was orchestrating on behalf of President Obama outside of the appropriate democratic process."

There's also this: Having held dozens of Jackson's most costly and controversial proposed regulations until after the election, the Obama administration is now releasing those regulatory bombs. Still having "Richard Windsor" at the EPA would have immeasurably complicated the legal and political battles occasioned by each of the new Jackson regulations.

Maybe, as Horner jokes, Jackson just wants to spend more time with her dog, but it's impossible not to think Jackson'ssins against transparencyaccount at least in part for her departure from the EPA.

Here's why this is so significant if you believe the public's business ought to be conducted in public: Nobody in government has ever gone to jail for violating the FOIA.

Jackson isn't going to jail, either, but at least now she won't be running the EPA under an alias.

Mark Tapscott is executive editor of The Washington Examiner.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/richard-windsor-departure-from-epa-is-a-victory-for-transparency/article/2516944

jackson jihad:

==

Isn't it well past the time when democrats should at the least demand that those they voted for, oppose the agenda of our principle political enemies, the conservative media owning, and private army owning billionaire families of the christian evangelical right....things like lowering taxes of the wealthiest instead of raising them, specifically by, if necessary, allowing the sunsetting of all Bush era tax cuts set to expire at the end of this year? Wouldn't the comparatively modest increases wage earners would experience, be more than offset by the increased revenue from inheritance and top bracket income taxes, again set at Y2K levels? 

Aren't those sunset provisions in force now because of a compromise then, demanded by our progressive representatives? 

Just three CNP members, Philip Anschutz,

Edward Atsinger III, and his brother-in-law, Stuart W. Epperson, through the media they control, are responsible for the "Jesus flavored" political indoctrination of millions of voters. 

Through "the message" distributed by Anschutz's

http://www.sourcewatch.org/... 

Clarity Media Group is the holding company for media properties owned by Philip F. Anschutz. These include the San Francisco Examiner and the Washington Examiner. An Examiner newspaper in Baltimore was shut down in February 2009.[1]

Clarity Media has trademarked the name "Examiner" for possible future newspapers in dozens of other U.S. cities.[2] The company also operates news portal websites in numerous cities under the "examiner.com" name, and is seeking editors to oversee regional and local content for those websites.[3][4]

On June 17, 2009, Clarity Media Group acquired The Weekly Standard, a conservative opinion journal, from Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.[5]

...and by Atsinger III's and Epperson's

http://www.sourcewatch.org/... 

Salem Communications Corporation promotes itself as "the leading provider of radio programming, online resources and magazines targeted to the Christian and family themes audience."[2][3]

Salem Communications states that it currently "owns and operates 95 radio stations nation-wide, with 60 stations located in the top 25 most populated U.S. markets," with the majority of its stations operating "within clusters involving three strategic formats" and its "foundational format ... Christian teaching and talk, featuring well-known speakers such as James Dobson, Janet Parshall, Dr. Charles F. Stanley and Chuck Swindoll."[4]

In April 2006, Salem Communications purchased conservative website Townhall.com.[1] 

http://motherjones.com/... 

....The left—which for years dismissed evangelical activists as out-of-touch zealots—has nothing on the radio dial even close to Salem’s reach and influence. Air America is broadcast on 70 stations and owns none. Salem owns 103 stations in the nation’s largest markets and broadcasts to more than 1,900 affiliates. It owns radio stations in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, and Atlanta. In fact, it doesn’t own just one station in those markets. It owns two—sometimes more. In Los Angeles it owns four. In Honolulu it owns seven. It also owns 62 websites and a magazine publishing division.

Though the chain is not as large as Clear Channel Radio (which owns 1,200 stations) or Viacom’s Infinity Broadcasting (178), Salem’s programming is available to one-third of the U.S. population; its websites are read by some 3 million people. Salem Radio Network News division is, according to its website, "the only Christian-focused news organization with fully equipped broadcast facilities at the U.S. House, Senate, and White House manned by full-time correspondents—ensuring timely, on-the-spot coverage of breaking news...specifically created for Christian-formatted radio stations." In a move that mirrors the Republican Party’s objectives, Atsinger and Epperson have recently expanded Salem’s stable of Christian talk-show hosts—James Dobson, Randall Terry, Janet Parshall—to include conservative Jews like Prager and Michael Medved. The company is a leading outlet for Christian rock, one of the music industry’s fastest-growing segments, and is chasing after black and Latino listeners. The company was also quick to embrace iPod technology to do what evangelicals call "godcasting."

By melding business savvy, generous political giving, and an unshakable faith in their own moral righteousness, Epperson and Atsinger have built Salem into a blue-chip Wall Street company that has tapped into what Medved calls "a conservative religious counterculture" that is "far more powerful and far more significant than anything in the stupid counterculture of the 1960s." ...

Instead of opposing every important, right wing political stance espoused by Salem Radio's stooge, Michael Medved, who has declared that there should be shame associated with the unemployed's receipt of public aid, that subsidized school lunch programs should be eliminated, and that the Food Stamps program should be replaced by government warehouses distributing cheese to the hungry queued up in in waiting lines, congressman Adam Smith (D-WA), to name one democrat, regularly appears on Medved's show to either agree with his extreme points or to react to some democratic initiative, with the disclaimer, "I didn't vote for that."

As long as we stand aside while the right cons voters who sell their labor to feed and clothe their families, via the distraction of their alleged obligations associated with their devotion to "Jesus", into voting for the CNP billionaire sponsored agenda and candidates, they will continually compensate for the votes they naturally lack due to the shear numbers of subsistance level voters. 

(Continuing the theme in yesterday's diary...) 

We must work tirelessly to get out the message to our elected officials and to voters whose net worth and income is not in the top ten percent, that this is the consequence of class division we stand against and intend to reverse through our political organizing and fund raising activities, and not via the propaganda weapon that uses religion to hide the crisis of the gross inequity of security, wealth, and power.

http://www.pbs.org/... 

Middletown I 

....The rough egalitarianism of the farmland had been replaced by a two-class system 

in the city. The Lynds found a business class, which worked with people 

and symbols, and a working class, which worked with things. And the 

Lynds found that these two groups were as different as two different 

tribes. They had different values, different expectations and did not 

mingle. Among the differences between the two groups was financial 

security: the working class was subject to frequent layoffs with no 

notice, while the business class was almost never laid off.

http://online.wsj.com/... 

FEBRUARY 13, 2010 

From Deal Journal, MarketBeat and Wealth Report 

Unemployment? Not for the Rich 

Top Decile Earners' Rate Is 3%, New Study Says; Bottom 10th Is at 31%

==

Executive Editor

The Washington Examiner

April 2012 – Present (2 years 6 months)

Oversee special reporting team.

Editorial Page Editor

The Washington Examiner

April 2006 – April 2012 (6 years 1 month)

Managed staff of editors, editorial writers, bloggers and columnists producing two daily editorials and five daily pages of opinion commentary.

(Open)2 recommendations

Liz Barrett

Professional journalist, blogger, editor

Mark Tapscott taught the rest of us by example how to translate success in print to strength on the web. He was a pleasure...View

Lakhinder Jit Singh Vohra

Intelligent Home Specialist, Time Warner Cable

Mark was one of the first journalists I had a chance to work with when I started with The Washington Examiner newspapers. He...View

Director, Center for Media and Public Policy

The Heritage Foundation

2001 – 2006 (5 years)

Managed the foundation's new media development efforts in the political/media arena. Also started Heritage's Database 101 Computer-Assisted Research and Reporting (CARR) Boot Camps for Journalists that were co-hosted with the Sunlight Foundation and Center for Responsive Politics at the National Press Club from 2001 to 2011.

Managing Editor

The Journal Newspapers

November 1995 – October 1999 (4 years)

Managing Editor of The Prince William Journal until August 1996, then became Managing Editor of The Montgomery Journal until October 1999.

Assistant Managing Editor, National Editor, Business Editor, Assistant Business Editor, Reporter

Washington Times

1985 – 1989 (4 years)---:{

Whatever happened to the art of honorable compromise?:{(Link):(style="margin:0px 0px 0px 5px;padding:10px 0px 0px;border:0px;outline:0px;font-weight:inherit;font-style:inherit;vertical-align:middle;font-variant:inherit;display:inline-block;zoom:1;overflow:hidden;width:10px;height:0px;background:url("):}:

The Washington Examiner

December 20, 2012

Example of weekly opinion column.

Cato Institute's Jim Harper is on a quest as a digital Diogenes:{(Link):(style="margin:0px 0px 0px 5px;padding:10px 0px 0px;border:0px;outline:0px;font-weight:inherit;font-style:inherit;vertical-align:middle;font-variant:inherit;display:inline-block;zoom:1;overflow:hidden;width:10px;height:0px;background:url("):}:

The Washington Examiner

December 19, 2012

Profile for the Watchdog Team page on the Examiner's web site of of a significant Washington player on transparency and accountability issues.

House panel wants IG probe of secret emails at White House, EPA, other agencies:{(Link):(style="margin:0px 0px 0px 5px;padding:10px 0px 0px;border:0px;outline:0px;font-weight:inherit;font-style:inherit;vertical-align:middle;font-variant:inherit;display:inline-block;zoom:1;overflow:hidden;width:10px;height:0px;background:url("):}:

The Washington Examiner

November 16, 2012

Watchdog Team page news story.

}:

=

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==

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2009/08/11/204485/examiner-thomas-fuller-hubris-global-warming-denier-delayer-ca/

...ust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe — irreversible, that is, if we don’t stop it in the first place.

The typical reasons why people and societies have historically made such tragically catastrophic blunders don’t apply to a great many opinion makers today.  Sure some are malicious or ignorant, and some, like David Broder, sultan of the status quo, are fatally uninformed about global warming.

But how you explain people who have a fair amount of familiarity with the issue and actually write regularly on the subject — but just get it so wrong again and again?  Many of these are people I’ve called the climate action delayers (CADs) — the folks who claim to believe in the science of global warming but obviously don’t, the folks who substitute their own opinion for an understanding of the actual science.

Their tragic flaw is hubris, which, as Wikipedia notes is:

a term used in modern English to indicate overweening pride, superciliousness, or arrogance, often resulting in fatal retribution or Nemesis.

A perfect example of modern-day hubris can be seen in the work of one Thomas Fuller, a delayer who writes as an “environmental policy examiner” for the examiner.com named.  He has his own label, as he wrote August 1:

As a global warming ‘lukewarmer,’ I believe that manmade CO2 will cause about 2 degrees Celsius of warming as concentrations of CO2 double during the course of this century.

That, of course, doesn’t make him a lukewarmer.  It just makes him someone who doesn’t understand or care about what science actually says.  On our current emissions path, we’re going to double CO2 concentrations not “during the course of the century” but almost certainly halfway through it — and we’re going to warm more than 4°C by century’s end:

• U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm “¦ the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” “” 1000 ppm
• M.I.T. joins climate realists, doubles its projection of global warming by 2100 to 5.1°C
• Hadley Center: “Catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path.
• Study: Water-vapor feedback is “strong and positive,” so we face “warming of several degrees Celsius”

It is hubris to blithely assert that one’s beliefs supersede the work of thousands of scientists, including hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers on which we base our current understanding of the danger posed by unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases.

But that isn’t the most hubristic thing Fuller has written.  On August 5, he wrote a column, “The best of times for global warming skeptics“:

It seems as if almost every day brings news of information and discoveries that bolster the skeptical opposition to the theory that global warming is dangerous and due to human emissions of CO2.

Wow!

Now that sentence would be quite accurate if we replaced “boster” with, say, “fatally undermine,” but as written it might as well be a manifesto for the deniers themselves.  Scratch climate action delayer, and you usually get a climate science denier.

Again, it is hubris, plain and simple, to utterly ignore the information and discoveries that have been occurring almost every day for several years now, which make clear global warming is far more dire than we thought just a short time ago and that human emissions of CO2 are the predominant cause of recent warming (and obviously will become the overwhelming cause of climate change as we continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere).  You can find summaries of the peer-reviewed literature and observations and discoveries in the 2007 IPCC report — which every member government of the IPCC signed off on word-for-word — and in the recent NOAA-led 13-agency report on US climate impacts (see “Our hellish future: Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year “” and that isn’t the worst case, it’s business as usual!“).   You can also find many of the best recent studies here.

Fuller’s post claims “our obsession with CO2 has caused us to overlook the other things humans do to affect climate on this planet, such as deforestation….”  Yes, to Fuller, it’s those foolish, arrogant, hubristic climate scientists who are so obsessed with CO2 that they totally overlook deforestation — except of course for their urgent warnings to stop said deforestation because as they have told us repeatedly it is responsible for some 20% or more of all human emissions of CO2.  And except for the current desperate efforts by the overwhelming majority of nations in the world to develop a workable strategy to stop deforestation.

I hadn’t heard about this guy at all until I got pinged by Google for his latest piece, which attacks me with this astounding statement:

Romm says he wants to spend about 30 minutes on his posts, and it shows.

Huh?

How can something I say I want to do in the future [for maybe 1 or 2 of my 4 to 6 posts a day] “show” anything already — especially to a CAD like Fuller who spends at most 30 minutes on every single one of his once-every-day-or-two opinion pieces?

It just goes to show you that even the most innocuous statement I write can be misrepresented by the CADs.  In fact, as readers know, what I wrote was:

Normally, about 2/3 of my posts take me some 60 to 90 minutes to write and about 1/3 take 90 to 180 minutes.  I’ve been trying to do more 30-minute posts in the last few days, in case you hadn’t noticed, and I expect to continue that for another month.  If it proves successful, I’ll keep doing it.

Fact-free Fuller, it won’t surprise you, is an acolyte of Roger Pielke, Jr. and The Breakthrough Institute, which is an an organization that is dedicating all of its resources to killing any chance of either a national or international effort to avert catastrophic global warming and to spreading disinformation about Obama, Gore, Congressional Democrats, and the environmental movement.

Then again, Fuller writes of “the alarmist website Real Climate.”  I mean, if you think Real Climate is an alarmist website, then you really aren’t paying any attention whatsoever to what they or anyone else is actually writing on climate science.

I think it pure hubris — and utterly immoral — to regularly write on climate science and policy without having interviewed and/or seen the talks of a few dozen of the leading climate scientists in the world andwithout having read at least a hundred major climate studies in the past decade.

Since global warming isn’t a 3-hour Greek tragedy, this modern day hubris won’t result in fatal retribution for the CADs, only for their descendants and ours.  The best we can do today is hold their hubris out for all to see.  Small comfort that will be for those living through Hell and High Water.

peddled morano climategate bs: quit 2010

Tom Fuller has just returned to his home town of San Francisco following 10 years in Europe. He has written technology commentary for The International Herald Tribune's Italy Daily, and consulted on green technology for the UK government. About half of what he writes here will be a liberal skeptic's view of environmental issues.

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**Thomas Fuller** - National environmental policy Examiner - Policy**...** Tom Fuller has just returned to his home town of San Francisco following 10 years in ... has written a report on the various inquiries into the Climategatescandal. www.examiner.com/environmental-policy-in.../thomas-fuller

The real crime in **Climategate** - National environmental policy **...** Dec 1, 2009 ... Thomas FullerEnvironmental Policy Examiner ... to exclude unpopular opinions, I would like to say what I think the real crime is inClimategate. www.examiner.com/article/the-real-crime-climategate