Fact-checking the fact-checkers
Posted By: Garnet, 5/27/2021 1:11:24 PM
It is time for the news business to admit that “fact-checking” is a tiresome, misleading, and dishonest blight on actual reporting. It hardly existed in Fleet Street when I left Britain in 1997. Checking facts was understood to be the core of a reporter’s job, not something sloughed off to someone else. Perhaps this was because British education was mostly essay writing, not checking multiple-choice boxes. Students quickly learn to write fluently when faced with blank sheets of foolscap and limited time to fill them. Quality obviously varied, but educated people were assumed to be capable of coherent composition.
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Garnet"
The Media Aggressively ‘Others’
Trump Voters 12 replies
Trump Voters 12 replies
While the Democrats continue to pursue their ongoing lawfare campaign against former President Trump, their confederates in the corporate media are calling for the excommunication of Republicans from American politics. Indeed, they insist that the party of Lincoln now consists primarily of delusional members of the “Trump cult” whose participation in American politics constitutes a danger to democracy. As MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell expressed it Wednesday evening, “53 percent of Republicans fail a basic mental competency test question, who is the president of the United States.” O’Donnell’s view is metastasizing in the media. As Jennifer Rubin puts it in the Washington Post: “There is no way to “understand” MAGA voters,
Senate passes bill requiring
the Biden administration to declassify
intelligence on COVID-19 origins 4 replies
the Biden administration to declassify
intelligence on COVID-19 origins 4 replies
The Senate approved a bill that would require the Biden administration and the director of national intelligence to declassify intelligence on the origins of COVID-19 by unanimous consent Wednesday evening.
"The American people deserve to know about the origins of COVID-19," Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley said on the Senate floor before the bill passed. "They deserve to know how this terrible pandemic that has ravaged the globe and our country, how it got started, and what China’s role was in starting it."
He said that voters deserved to see the evidence and judge for themselves, rather than different speculation from various administration officials on where the virus may have come from.
Fact-checking the fact-checkers
0 replies
It is time for the news business to admit that “fact-checking” is a tiresome, misleading, and dishonest blight on actual reporting.
It hardly existed in Fleet Street when I left Britain in 1997. Checking facts was understood to be the core of a reporter’s job, not something sloughed off to someone else. Perhaps this was because British education was mostly essay writing, not checking multiple-choice boxes. Students quickly learn to write fluently when faced with blank sheets of foolscap and limited time to fill them. Quality obviously varied, but educated people were assumed to be capable of coherent composition.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who lied about where she was on January 6 in order to ramp up a story of victimhood, is now arguing being on the U.S. Capitol grounds the day of the riot is equal to "serving in war."
"Speaking to the weekly public radio show Latino USA on Friday, Ms Ocasio-Cortez said members of Congress effectively 'served in war' during the traumatising event that had "deeply affected lawmaking" and impacted the legislative process," the Independent reports.
Former U.S. Army Green Beret and Congressman Michael Waltz has taken notice and is blasting his colleague for the comparison.
They know.
Virginia’s Democrats know a bad thing happened to them on May 8. They know more than 53,000 Republicans signed up for the unassembled convention to select candidates for statewide office when only 5,000 were expected.
They know that Republicans will have the more diverse ticket, Republicans who have the resources and momentum and Republicans who have on their side what are shaping up as the issues in this campaign.They know Republicans selected a transformational ticket, led by businessman Glenn Youngkin, who lives in Great Falls but grew up in Virginia Beach, giving him links to two of the state’s most voter-rich areas; lieutenant governor candidate Winsome Sears, a Black woman,
Refund The Police? Major Cities
Are Backtracking On Police Cuts
After Explosion Of Violent Crime 17 replies
Are Backtracking On Police Cuts
After Explosion Of Violent Crime 17 replies
A year after the death of George Floyd, elected officials of major cities are walking back commitments to cut police funding amid spiking crime rates.
Elected leaders in places such a Minneapolis, New York City, and Los Angeles are now pushing to increase funding to police departments after months of budget cuts and low morale have gutted law enforcement ranks. At the same time, major cities across the U.S. are suffering spikes in violent crime.“The violence needs to stop, its unacceptable. People deserve to feel safe in their neighborhood, they deserve to be able to send their kids out to the sidewalk to play and to recreate without bullets flying by.
Reporters joke that the easiest job in Washington is CIA spokesman. You need only listen carefully to questions, say, “No comment,” and head to happy hour. The joke, however, is on us. The reporters pretend to see only one side of the CIA, the passive hiding of information. They meanwhile profit from the other side of the equation, active information operations designed to influence events in America. It is 2021 and the CIA is running an op against the American people.
Leon Panetta, once director of CIA, explained bluntly that the agency influenced foreign media outlets ahead of elections in order to “change attitudes within the country.”
Americans can’t escape from blue states fast enough. Even before the COVID pandemic, they were fleeing Democrat-led states for red ones in droves.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 2010 and 2019, California, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Illinois lost a combined four million residents. Meanwhile, the top five states that saw the greatest influx of new residents were the Republican-led states of Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, and Arizona. It does not hurt that Florida, Texas, and Tennessee also have no income tax.
But the pandemic, in conjunction with disastrous Democrat policies, has only accelerated the blue-state exodus.
Jan. 6 Commission Will Be
DOA in Senate 9 replies
DOA in Senate 9 replies
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed a resolution authorizing a probe into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. All too predictably, the “National Commission to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol Complex Act” (HR 3233) would be neither bipartisan nor independent. The Democratic chairperson of the commission would enjoy unilateral power to appoint staff and set the investigation’s parameters without meaningful consultation with the Republican co-chair. Even worse, the “compromise” that created HR 3233 was cobbled together by Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and John Katko (R-N.Y.), both of whom already voted in January to impeach then-President Trump for inciting “insurrection.”
Opposing the commission, which is the closest we might get to a truly bipartisan account of the insurrection, is the wrong thing for the country but the right thing for the party.
So naturally Senate Republicans seem increasingly determined to oppose it, notwithstanding the surprising mini-revolt yesterday by the House GOP.
Any attempt to beat a filibuster and pass the House bill to create a commission begins with the seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump in February, but two of those seven sound like they’re voting no — and one of them might be unmovable.
My intention today was to write about the city of Portland’s decision to start cleaning up homeless camps after a year of doing next to nothing about them during the pandemic. But as I was looking at stories about that issue I kept seeing other stories about things happening recently in the city that were pretty shocking. It’s hard not to read this stuff and get the impression the city is really just dealing with a level of chaos it hasn’t seen in decades.
Let’s start with this. Monday a small group of four to five teenagers apparently woke up and decided to launch a brazen crime spree
The charge of apartheid is the new blood libel.
As Hamas rains rocket down on Israeli civilians, members of the Squad in the US Congress and other left-wing enemies of the Jewish state are using the occasion to amplify their accusation that Israel is an “apartheid state.”
This is a transparent attempt to delegitimize — and isolate and ultimately destroy — the Jewish state by associating it with a racist regime that the world united to squeeze out of existence.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) says that Israel is “promoting racism and dehumanization”
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Acknowledging that "conservatives find ourselves at a crossroads," former House Speaker Paul Ryan sought to map out a vision for the Republican Party in the post-Donald Trump era.
In an address Thursday night at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, Ryan credited Trump for bringing "many new voters into our party" but said Republicans have to face a reality.
"If the conservative cause depends on the populist appeal of one personality, or of second-rate imitations, then we're not going anywhere," Ryan said.
The Miami-Dade Police Department is honoring the LGBTQ community with a rainbow-themed patrol vehicle. The vehicle—which is decorated with the colors of the Pride flag and the words “hope,” “love,” “equality,” “inclusion,” “kindness,” “peace,” and also the phrase “strength through unity”—will be used “to establish a more trusting relationship within our communities,” MDPD Sergeant Orlando Lopez said during the unveiling ceremony on Thursday in Doral. “What better way to assist in educating the public about Pride and in promoting engagement between law enforcement and the community we serve?,” Lopez asked, when introducing the “MDPD Pride Vehicle.”(Snip) An anti-hate symbol
In Times Square, the most densely tourist-populated place in the United States, a mentally disturbed man known as Mr. Kim begs cops to kill him. 'I want to die. You have a gun? Shoot,' he pleads. After the officers demur, he picks up a plank of wood and starts smashing it against the Pele soccer shop.On Sutton Place, one of the most affluent residential areas in the city, a lone man squats on the sidewalk, intently reading a paperback novel next to a shopping cart that contains his worldly goods. He begs for cash with a sign saying he has lost everything. 'Trying to survive,' it adds.
Cynthia Nixon has been slammed for suggesting CVS should let people steal from stores rather than locking up goods like laundry detergent. The former actress and failed New York gubernatorial candidate tweeted on Thursday that she had noticed her local CVS in SoHo had 'started' locking up 'basic items like clothing detergent.' 'As so many families can’t make ends meet right now, I can’t imagine thinking that the way to solve the problem of people stealing basic necessities out of desperation is to prosecute them,' Nixon tweeted. She was slammed by people who said the solution was not to invite theft.
BLM founder Patrisse Cullors resigns
30 replies
The woman who sits atop 60 million dollars’ worth of donated funds, after the unexplained departure of her ostensibly charitable organization’s co-founders, failing to file legally required financial disclosures, and buying a multi-million dollar real estate portfolio, surprised everyone yesterday by announcing her resignation. Claiming that it has nothing to do with criticism of her multi-million-dollar real estate buying spree and complaints of financially stiff-arming other BLM groups, Patrisse Cullors:
“announced Thursday that she is stepping down as executive director of the movement’s foundation. She decried what she called a smear campaign from a far-right group
In his controversial new book on the 2020 election, Battle For The Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump. Edward-Isaac Dovere repeats a canard that has become something of a staple of Democratic mythology. (snip) Obama, writes Dovere, "would never forgive [Trump] for turning a fringe obsession with his birth certificate into an issue he'd had to address from the White House briefing room in 2011."
Dovere errs on several counts. Trump was not the one who turned the birth certificate into an issue. Obama was.
Patti Smith, Questlove among 600
musicians calling for 'solidarity with
the Palestinian people' 29 replies
musicians calling for 'solidarity with
the Palestinian people' 29 replies
On Thursday, more than 600 musicians from around the world issued a letter addressing the recent violence between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas and calling on musicians "to publicly assert their solidarity with the Palestinian people."
The letter, published by the organization Musicians for Palestine, was signed by artists including Patti Smith, Rage Against the Machine, Run the Jewels, Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, the Strokes' Julian Casablancas, System of a Down's Serj Tankian, Noname, the Roots' Questlove and Black Thought, Royce da 5’9" and Cypress Hill.
"As musicians, we cannot be silent. Today it is essential that we stand with Palestine."
This week, the Baltimore City Public Schools, attempting to avoid holding students back who have poor grades, announced a new grading policy that would enable students who failed one class to still proceed to the next grade.The school district said it was taking the new approach because of effects caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Chief Academic Officer Joan Dabrowski said the new approach is meant to “avoid the punitive approach of failing students,” according to CNN.“This is not about a failure, but it is about unfinished learning and giving multiple opportunities, multiple onramps for young people to complete that … learning,” Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Sonja Santelises added.
A bill to form a commission tasked with investigating the January 6 Capitol riot will not move forward after the measure failed to reach the 60 votes required to advance.
The legislation failed in a 54–35 vote as Senate Republicans used their filibuster power for the first time since President Biden took office. Just six Republicans voted to advance the bill: Senators Lisa Murkowksi of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Bill Cassidy of Lousiania, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mitt Romney of Utah and Rob Portman of Ohio.
The filibuster, once deployed, must garner the votes of 60 senators to end debate
On Thursday, President Joe Biden traveled to Ohio to make the case that the economy is headed in the right direction. “We’ve turned the tide,” he told the crowd in Cleveland. Shortly afterward, during an appearance on Yahoo Finance Live, one of his top economic advisers acknowledged that in areas like inflation and in the labor market, “there's going to be some bumps in the road” as the economy continues to right itself following the pandemic. However, National Economic Council Deputy Director Bharat Ramamurti also told Yahoo Finance that the recent inflation jump is actually a positive sign. “The faster
Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said Thursday on CNN’s “Don Lemon Tonight” that congressional Democrats wanted to investigate former President Donald Trump’s connection to the Capitol riot because Trump to be considered “an absolute pariah in America.” On the Senate voting on the House Capitol riot commission, Raskin said, “Well, they’ve elevated what they think is in their best political interests over what is clearly in the best interest of the country, which is to determine the truth of those events and the cause of those events.
Apparently, all would be paradise in crime-pit San Francisco if it weren't for all those lazy, racist cops who are persecuting poor, heroic Chesa Boudin, the city's leftist do-nothing district attorney.
That's the word from young Chesa, stepson of Bill Ayers, son of a terrorist convicted of killing a black cop, and former Hugo Chávez adviser, who's suddenly found himself unpopular in the city and facing a voter recall.
According to KPIX5 CBS of San Francisco (hat tip: LegalInsurrection.com):
District Attorney Chesa Boudin claimed Sunday that placing blame on his prosecutors for crime in San Francisco's