Tag Archives: mainstream media

That Was Then, This Is Now

Posted on by

I dread the 2024 presidential election. It will be nasty and full of lies told by both the candidates and the press. There is no way the campaigns will be covered fairly, and I don’t believe enough Americans are looking through the lies of the mainstream media to be informed voters. A recent article illustrating the level of misreporting accepted as news appeared in The Washington Free Beacon.

The article contrasts the reporting of President Trump slowing walking down a ramp with President Biden falling during a public appearance.

The article reminds us of the reports on President Trump’s slow walk down a ramp:

CNN: “Why the Donald Trump-West Point Ramp Story Actually Matters”

1) Trump is 74 …

2) Trump’s medical past is a total mystery …

3) Trump makes his opponents’ health a major issue …

So yes, of course, the president’s tentative and slow walk down a ramp is a story. Donald Trump made it one.

Washington Post: “Trump Tries To Explain His Slow and Unsteady Walk Down a Ramp at West Point”

In addition, Trump wrote that he “ran down” the final stretch of the ramp. Video footage of the episode shows the president picking up his pace slightly for the final two steps, but that would hardly be considered a run or a jog by any standard definition…

MSNBC: Unsteady Appearance Prompts New Scrutiny of Trump’s Health

Contrast that with the reporting of President Biden’s fall:

Reuters: “Biden Trips and Falls During Graduation Ceremony, Recovers Quickly”

President Joe Biden tripped and fell after handing out the last diploma at a graduation ceremony at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado on Thursday, but got up quickly and walked back to his seat.

The 80-year-old U.S. president fell forward, caught himself with his hands, then got up on one knee while helped by three people. He walked back to his seat unassisted.

After Biden was helped up, he pointed behind him, seeming to indicate that he had tripped over a sandbag used to hold the teleprompter in place. He mingled with other officials afterward, smiling and giving a “thumbs up” sign.

CNN: “White House Says Biden Is Fine After Tripping on Sandbag and Falling on Stage at Air Force Academy Commencement”

Just for the record, I don’t recall seeing a sandbag anywhere in the videos of the incident.

Please follow the link to the article to read the full reporting.

Things The Media Got Wrong During The Trump Administration

Posted on by

Anyone can make a mistake. However, when all of the mistakes go the same way, you begin to wonder. Somehow during the past five years, when the mainstream media made a mistake, the mistake always portrayed President Trump is a bad light. On Saturday, Trending Politics posted an article detailing some of the erroneous reporting in recent years. No one expects an apology, but it would be nice if some of the falsehoods were corrected.

The list of misreported stories includes:

Trump ordered his administration to forcibly clear Lafayette Park for a ‘photo op’ at St. John’s Church.

COVID-19 lab-leak was just a wild Trump conspiracy.

Trump didn’t do anything about ‘Russian bounties’ on U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Trump told Georgia election officials to ‘find evidence of fraud.’

Trump never said there were “fine people” on both sides at a deadly protest in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 in involving Antifa types and white supremacists/neo-Nazis;

He never called illegal immigrants “animals”;

He didn’t “flat-out lie” when he said Obama ‘wiretapped’ his 2016 campaign — Obama did do that or, at least, his administration did;

One of the very first media lies — Trump ‘removed a bust of Martin Luther King’ from the Oval Office — was, at least, quickly debunked.

Please follow the link to the article to read the details. The media worked very hard to paint a totally false picture of our 45th President. Unfortunately, many Americans failed to do their own research and believed that picture was accurate.

When Media Lies Are Exposed

Posted on by

Yesterday Red State posted an article about the media’s reaction to the Inspector General’s report which vindicated President Trump and former Attorney General Barr in the clearing of Lafayette Park.

The article reports:

To quickly recap, per the report, “the evidence we reviewed showed that the USPP cleared the park to allow the contractor to safely install the antiscale fencing in response to destruction of property and injury to officers occurring on May 30 and 31. Further, the evidence showed that the USPP (U.S. Park Police)did not know about the President’s potential movement until mid- to late afternoon on June 1—hours after it had begun developing its operational plan and the fencing contractor had arrived in the park.”

Among the reporters most heartbroken by the news were NBC News’ anchor Chuck Todd and network correspondent Ken Dilanian (known in some circles as “Fusion Ken” for reasons explained here), both of who appeared to be shell-shocked at the news and at times confused by the findings.

The article includes a few videos showing the disappointment of the newscasters that President Trump was not guilty of clearing the park for a ‘photo op,’ as they so enthusiastically reported. Please follow the link above to see the videos. They are enlightening.

This is a glaring example of the media trying to tell a story that is false. I wonder how many people believed the story, formed an opinion of President Trump based on the story, and then voted against President Trump i n 2020. An independent media would have had at least a few reporters telling a different story or questioning the story being told.

Definitely Heading Down The Wrong Path

Posted on by

The Epoch Times posted an article yesterday (updated today) about President Biden’s first 100 days in office. The article notes that the moderate, unifying President we were promised during the election campaign has not shown up yet.

The article reports:

President Donald Trump and conservative pundits warned for months during the 2020 campaign that behind then-candidate Joe Biden’s centrist, bipartisan façade lay a radical liberal agenda to transform the United States. Biden has proven them right in less than 100 days, earning praise from liberal observers who are drawing historical comparisons to the tenure of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill, written along the outline of Biden’s proposal, dwarfs FDR’s New Deal in terms of total cost to the American taxpayer. Democrats rammed the measure through Congress without any Republican support, proving Biden was the partisan that critics had warned about.

The Democratic president’s proposed infrastructure measures—the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan—would bring the total price tag to an estimated $5.4 trillion, while ushering in a wave of welfare programs unseen since the introduction of Medicare and food stamps. The cost splits up to more than $43,000 per household and more than the combined wealth of all the billionaires in America. Democrats could enact both plans without any Republican support, by using, for the first time ever, the reconciliation process more than once in a budget year.

The fiscal scale and radical nature of the agenda, coupled with the razor-thin House and Senate majorities the Democrats are using to implement it, are exerting pressure on an American system of governance that has historically demanded a measure of bipartisanship in order to enact transformative change.

The article concludes:

Though his cabinet wouldn’t admit it, Biden inherited a successful vaccine development and distribution program from Trump. This meant that Biden’s campaign promise of injecting 100 million Americans with the vaccine against the CCP virus in his first 100 days was on track to being fulfilled even before he took office on Jan. 20. After eluding questions about raising the target to a more ambitious figure, Biden doubled the goal to 200 million. The administration is now on pace to triple the initial goal by April 29, his 100th day in office.

That tangible highlight is offset by the crisis on the southern border, which some experts say was triggered by Biden’s revocation of Trump-era immigration policies. Illegal aliens are crossing the border in numbers unseen in decades, forcing immigration authorities to overload shelters for housing detained minors. After weeks of avoidance, Biden finally called the situation a crisis earlier this month.

The White House has signaled that it intends to solve the crisis by investing in the countries the illegal aliens are fleeing from. Over the past two decades, the United States has spent billions in foreign aid to the nations in question.

Biden’s approval ratings have fluctuated between the high-40s and mid-50s during his first three months in office, according to Rasmussen, the only pollster conducting daily presidential approval surveys. The media may be contributing to that outcome. A recent Media Research Center study showed that evening news coverage of Biden was 59 percent positive during his first three months in office, compared to just 11 percent positive coverage during the same period in Trump’s presidency.

A supportive media cannot cover up the negative impact of President Biden’s policies forever. As inflation increases (as a result of the runaway spending) and the influx of illegal immigrants further increases federal spending, Americans may begin to believe what they see rather than what they are being told.

The Price Of Fake News

Posted on by

Last summer we saw riots in looting in some American cities. Some of these riots were in response to ‘police brutality’ in America. The mainstream media has been working the ‘police brutality’ angle since the Obama administration (remember the ‘beer summit’?). But what do the actual numbers show?

On February 23rd, The Western Journal posted an article contrasting what liberals believe about police brutality with the truth.

The article reports:

Misinformation is an epidemic, and the liberal media is spreading it.

Forty-four percent of liberals believe 1,000 or more unarmed black men were murdered by police in 2019, according to a study released Saturday.

…The study, published by Skeptic Research Center, specifically details that about 27 percent of those who reported being “liberal” estimated about 1,000 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019, while about 31 percent of those who reported being “very liberal” estimated the same.

In contrast, about half of those who reported being “conservative” or “very conservative” estimated about 10 unarmed black men were killed in 2019.

The actual numbers are staggering; according to a Mapping Police Violence, a crowdsourced database cited in a USA Today fact-check, just 25 unarmed black men were killed.

The article concludes:

Balko (Radley Balko for the Washington Post) also writes that, according to a 2020 Austin Office of Police Oversight, Office of Innovation and Equity Office report, African-Americans and Latinos were “more likely than Whites to be stopped, searched and arrested,” even though there were reportedly similar “hit rates” for narcotics among those groups.

However, this paragraph doesn’t mention specific numbers or figures at all, only increasing the misleading nature of the article.

Of course, the obvious question always looms; which group of people commits more crime? Wouldn’t that solve the issue?

Yes, actually. According to Federal Bureau of Information statistics, more than half of homicide offenders are African-American.

When bringing up statistics like this one, unfortunately, those who use it are accused of racism. However, the math works out; if more African-Americans are committing violent crimes, it simply makes sense that police officers would use force against more African-Americans.

It’s about time conservatives stop accepting the liberal media agenda and start reporting the facts. Overexaggerations like the ones SRC’s study found are unacceptable and frankly dangerous to American politics. Rather than let these wade around and die down on their own, we ought to stomp the lies out now.

So why do have this major split in what Americans believe? Part of it is due to the mainstream media, but a lot of the responsibility falls on Americans themselves. All of us need to develop critical thinking skills that question everything the media is telling us. When people begin to tune out the mainstream media and stop believing their lies, it is possible that they might start telling the truth.

 

Looking The Other Way

Posted on by

The mainstream media shows its bias not only in how it reports things, but also by its choice of what to report. Something that should be a major story right now is the questionable international financial dealings of the son of one of the presidential candidates.

The Federalist posted an article today about the media’s failure to say anything about a Senate Intelligence Committee report that came out last week.

The article reports:

Last week, a Senate Intelligence Committee report detailed how the son of a major presidential candidate, who has an extensive history of shady foreign business dealings, received a $3.5-million wire transfer from the wife of a Russian politician. The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and most major media outlets didn’t cover the wire-transfer story at all. Four years ago, not reporting such a story was a possibility too absurd to even contemplate — but then again, no one would have predicted the candidate with the shady Russia ties is not Donald Trump, but Joe Biden.

People often talk about how Trump is responsible for destroying political norms, and that’s a valid concern. One of the truly frightening things about the Trump era, however, is how institutions have exploited a perceived crisis in truth-telling to justify abandoning their own standards by blaming it on Trump. Increasingly, we see major stories break where the media establishment decides on a collective omertà because the story undermines its own credibility or might sway voters in directions it doesn’t approve of. When that happens, no news is good news.

In case you have forgotten, this is the video posted at YouTube of Joe Biden bragging about withholding tax dollars until the investigation into his son’s company in Ukraine was halted:

It is embedded in case it magically disappears in the coming weeks. Corruption among members of the Biden family is not unusual. It is amazing how much wealth the family accumulated during the time Joe Biden held various political offices.

The article concludes:

Edicts need to come down from major media outlets about reporting the news when it happens, not when political circumstances necessitate or dictate how a story is covered. One way of preventing such obvious imbalances in coverage is to pursue ideological diversity in newsrooms along with actual diversity — if no one in your newsroom attends church weekly, owns a gun, or regularly votes Republican, you don’t have reporters who are going to raise objections about imbalanced coverage, much less understand half the country.

Right now, any understanding of half the country begins and ends with the fact that they loathe and distrust the media. Perhaps not all of that anger at the media is justified, but it’s righteous enough, especially after last week. For once, the media were handed a Russian influence-peddling scandal on a silver platter, and the vast majority of major outlets declined to even mention it. Such bad behavior makes the calculus for determining who’s a bigger threat pretty clear for a lot of Trump supporters. Even if the president does and says things that make them uncomfortable, he’ll be gone in four months or four years. A media that hides the truth this brazenly is going to be much harder to get rid of.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. You won’t find this information on the majority of your cable news channels.

Media Bias?

Posted on by

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally will be held from August 7th-16th this year. It is interesting to contrast the media’s coverage of this rally with the coverage of the violent protests in various cities across the country.

Townhall posted an article on Saturday about the Sturgis Rally noting:

About a quarter-million motorcycle riders are expected to descend upon the town of Sturgis, South Dakota, taking part in the 10-day annual rally that kicked off on Friday. The rally is not a left-wing protest, so the media is criticizing attendees for not wearing facemasks and participating in a large gathering amid the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. 

The mainstream media and even medical officials have decided that the best way to avoid contracting the Wuhan coronavirus is to participate in left-wing protests. Crossing back and forth over the border between Mexico and the United States is seemingly another harmless exercise. But when a large gathering doesn’t fit into the media’s list of liberal-approved activities, the press castigates participants for venturing outside during the pandemic. 

As expected, all the usual suspects are running hit pieces about the rally being a superspreader event. The double standard at this point must be apparent to even the most casual of media consumers. 

While many in the town favored postponing the rally this year due to the Wuhan coronavirus, many others in town, including local business owners, were glad to see rallygoers arrive on schedule. 

South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem was among those supportive of the rally.

“I trusted my people, they trusted me, and South Dakota is in a good spot in our fight against COVID-19. The #Sturgis motorcycle rally starts this weekend, and we’re excited for visitors to see what our great state has to offer!” Gov. Noem tweeted on Thursday.

Appearing on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle earlier this week, Gov. Noem pointed out how the media wrongly predicted a large surge in coronavirus cases following President Trump’s rally at Mount Rushmore for the Fourth of July holiday.  

The article at Townhall concludes:

The 250,000 expected attendees will be around half the size of last year’s turnout. If it was 250,000 people riding into town on Vespas and calling to defund the police, the media would be praising them for their courage.

The New York Times has a different viewpoint (as expressed in an article August 7):

Save for a few hard-to-spot hand-sanitizer stations, it could have been any other major festival in pre-pandemic times.

“Screw Covid I went to Sturgis,” read a black T-shirt amid a sea of Harley Davidson and Trump 2020 outfits sported by the throng of people walking along Main Street. Their gear did not include face masks, and social distancing guidelines were completely ignored.

South Dakota is among several states that did not put in place a lockdown, and state officials have not required residents to wear masks, giving attendees who rode in from outside the state fewer restrictions than they may have had back home.

…Still, Nelson Horsley, 26, of Rapid City, S.D., said he expects there will be a rise in coronavirus cases in the area once the rally concludes next weekend. But he said he didn’t feel the need to wear a mask while walking around downtown Friday afternoon. He compared the virus to getting the seasonal flu.

“I haven’t seen anyone out here wear a mask so it kind of feels like it defeats the purpose,” he said, to wear a mask himself.

What if there isn’t a rise in coronavirus cases after the rally? What does that tell us about what we have been doing to end the virus?

The article at Townhall notes:

“Not only do we have one of the lowest death rates, we’ve got about 40 people in the hospital today statewide, our infection rates are low, our job losses are low, our economy is doing better than virtually any other state, and I think it’s a real testimony to what could have been possible in other states, but those governors just made the wrong decisions,” Noem told Ingraham.

Experience tells us that if there are even two cases of coronavirus as a result of this rally, they will be shouted about by the mainstream media. We need to pay attention to see what actually happens.

When The News Doesn’t Report The News

Posted on by

Newsbusters posted an article today about the tech-heavy NASDAQ Composite stock index.

The article reports:

The Big Tech-heavy NASDAQ Composite stock index closed at a record 11,108.07 Thursday evening, well over the historic 11,000 milestone, according to Nasdaq August 7. “A big reason for the market’s second-half momentum today was this week’s better-than-expected jobless claims report,” Nasdaq reported. “[N]early 1.19 million” filed jobless claims, but that marks “the lowest level since the pandemic began.” CNBC reported that this was the NASDAQ’s “seventh straight gain.” 

Like a bad habit, ABC World News Tonight (Tom Llamas filling in), CBS Evening News (Margaret Brennan filling in) and NBC Nightly News all censored the Nasdaq’s historic performance. Other good market news censored by the Big Three yesterday included how “[b]oth the Dow and S&P 500 posted five-day winning streaks,” according to CNBC. [Emphasis added.] 

Fox News’s Special Report did report on the stock market news, putting the Big Three to shame.

This may be one of many reasons Fox New’s ratings are going up while other news media ratings are going down.

The article continues:

ABC World News Tonight and CBS Evening News did find the time to egregiously spin the jobless claims report without providing the context that it was “at the lowest level since the pandemic began.” CBS Evening News spent 115 seconds pushing propaganda on the topic without providing that important bit of context. 

According to comments to CNBC by Jefferies money market economist Thomas Simons on the jobless claims report:

‘The overall tone of the jobless claims data is the best it has been in 3 weeks or so. The decline is the biggest since the week of June 6, so the data does not have the same sort of ‘stalling out’ theme that we have seen in recent weeks.’

That context was apparently not worth reporting by ABC World News Tonight or CBS Evening News.

If you depend on the mainstream media to keep you informed, you might want to rethink that.

 

If You Watch The Mainstream Media, You Are Uninformed

Posted on by

Newsbusters posted an article today about some recent economic news reported by the major networks.

The article reports:

Another astounding market rally, another big chunk of good market news ABC’s, CBS’s and NBC’s evening news shows censor because it isn’t anti-Trump.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 27,000 Wednesday, “extending a market rally and returning the index to a level it first hit a year ago and last touched in early June,” according to The Hill. The new figure (27,006) put “the Dow within striking distance of erasing its losses for the year.” ABC World News Tonight with David Muir, CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell and NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt all censored the news last night.

By contrast, consider when the Dow dropped 1,000 points beneath 25,000 before rallying a bit later Feb. 28 to cap off Wall Street’s “worst week since the [2008] financial crisis.” On that day, the Big Three gave the negative market news a whopping 313 seconds of coverage collectively — or more than five minutes.

That’s 313 seconds for negative news versus 0 seconds for positive news. Seems like a pretty massive bias. 

Fox News’s Bret Baier did report the stock market news Wednesday during his 6:00 pm broadcast of Special Report. Maybe the Big Three should take notes from Baier.

The article also notes:

Both CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News in particular did find the time to boost presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s flat-out lie that President Donald Trump was a racist president.

But the Dow’s performance isn’t all the good market news yesterday had to offer last night. “Sales of previously owned homes rose 20.7% in June over the prior month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.72 million,” according to The Wall Street Journal July 22. This, according to The Journal, was “the biggest monthly increase on record going back to 1968.” [Emphasis added.]

It’s difficult to have a fair election when the news sources that many Americans depend on refuse to report the news in an unbiased manner. Hopefully, most Americans have learned to look beyond the propaganda and search for the facts.

Slowly The Truth Becomes Available To The Public

Posted on by

Based on the information that has already come out, many Americans (at least those who don’t depend on the mainstream media for their news) believe that there was a soft coup attempt on President Trump that began immediately after he was elected. As information is made public from various investigations, this is becoming more obvious.

The Daily Caller posted an article yesterday about some of the latest information to come out.

The article reports:

  • The Senate Judiciary Committee released a newly declassified FBI document Friday showing that a New York Times report about contacts between Trump associates and Russian intelligence was riddled with errors. 
  • Peter Strzok, who served as FBI deputy chief of counterintelligence, spotted 14 errors in the Times story, published on Feb. 14, 2017. 
  • Strzok also critiqued Christopher Steele, saying that the dossier author was unable to judge the reliability of his network of sources.

The article continues:

An FBI document released Friday details at least 14 inaccuracies in a New York Times report from early 2017 that leveled shocking allegations of Trump associates’ contacts with Russian intelligence officers.

The document shows then-FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok’s comments on a Feb. 14, 2017 article entitled “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.”

Written by journalists Michael Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, the story cited four current and former American officials who said that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies had intercepted call records showing that Trump associates had contacts with Russian intelligence in the year prior to the election.

Strzok, who was the lead investigator on the Trump investigation, spotted 14 errors in the article.

The article concludes:

Sen. Lindsey Graham, who released the FBI documents on Friday, said in a press release that Strzok’s annotations on the Times article “are devastating in that they are an admission that there was no reliable evidence that anyone from the Trump Campaign was working with Russian Intelligence Agencies in any form.”

James Comey, the former FBI director, criticized the Times report shortly after he was fired in May 2017. He told the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 7, 2017, that the story was “almost entirely” inaccurate.

The Times stood by the story despite the pushback from Comey.

“The original sources could not immediately be reached after Mr. Comey’s remarks, but in the months since the article was published, they have indicated that they believed the account was solid,” the paper said in a statement following Comey’s testimony.

The New York Times was driving the narrative that President Trump was a Russian agent. Their reporting was inaccurate from the beginning. Unfortunately, there are many Americans who still believe the fiction The New York Times was publishing. That is one of many causes for the divisiveness that we are currently seeing in America.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once stated, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”

Actually, It’s Just An Eagle

Posted on by

Townhall posted an article today about an eagle used on t-shirts by the Trump campaign. The eagle is an ‘imperial eagle.’ Some over-excited members of the press are describing the eagle as a “Nazi symbol.”

Before you get to concerned about that, you might want to examine the history.

The article includes the following:

The following is from the USA Today fact check on the matter:

The article also mentions that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi uses a similar symbol on her website. The Marine Corps also uses a similar symbol in their emblem. The bald eagle is America’s national bird. To liken the use of it to racism and Nazism is simply over the top.

The article concludes:

This is the very example of why the American people hate the mainstream media. Everyone has become obsessed with these “fact checks,” yet simple things like this are totally bogus. For whatever reason, anything and everything President Donald Trump and his campaign does has to be racist or stoke anti-Semitism. The term “Make America Great Again” has been labeled racist. These shirts are being compared to Nazi Germany propaganda.

Unfortunately this sort of reporting is why many ill-informed Americans believe that the President is a racist. Based on his history, this is simply untrue. To claim that President Trump is a racist simply divides Americans and creates an obstacle to our working together to better the country.

Then And Now

Posted on by

Yesterday Breitbart posted an article about ever-changing press coverage.

The article reports:

CNN described Mount Rushmore as a “monument of two slave owners” on “land wrestled [sic] away from Native Americans” ahead of President Donald Trump’s visit there on Friday.

But in 2008, CNN marveled at the landmark when then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) visited Rushmore on the campaign trail.

In 2008, CNN anchor Ron Marciano said: “Barack Obama is campaigning in South Dakota. That state’s primary is Tuesday. Obama arrived there late last night and got a good look around Mt. Rushmore — it’s quite a sight if you haven’t seen it.”

Fellow anchor Betty Nguyen added: “Barack Obama is in South Dakota today. He arrived there last night. Take a look at this. He got a good glimpse of the majestic Mount Rushmore. Well, South Dakota and Montana have closed out the primary season on Tuesday.”

But on Friday, CNN described Rushmore in less glowing terms.

Senior Washington correspondent Joe Johns said:

[A]t a time of racial unease, when protesters are tearing down statues of slaveholders and calling for the names of Confederate generals to be removed from army bases, the Rushmore event is a reminder that Trump is fighting to preserve these relics of heritage and history that some see as symbols of oppression. And to indigenous people, Mt. Rushmore, with four white presidents, two of whom were slave owners, is one of those symbols.

The article includes a screenshot of a recent Tweet that puts it all in perspective:

This sort of changing narrative might explain why many Americans have tuned out the mainstream media. They have become simply a publicity arm of the Democrat Party.

A Synopsis Of What Obamagate Was And How It Happened

Posted on by

Yesterday Andrew McCarthy posted an op-ed piece in The Washington Examiner detailing some of the highlights of Obamagate. Please follow the link to read the entire article. I am going to focus on a few highlights.

The op-ed notes:

The Trump-Russia inquiry was ingeniously designed. If the president demanded that his subordinates unveil the intelligence files that would reveal the prior administration’s political spying, he stood to be accused of obstructing investigators and seeking to distract the country from his own alleged criminality.

On that score, an underappreciated aspect of the saga is that Trump came to office as a novice. His unhinged Twitter outbursts obscure an abiding uncertainty about the extent of the president’s power to direct the intelligence bureaucracy. A more seasoned Beltway hand would have known what he could safely order reluctant bureaucrats and Obama holdovers to produce for him or disclose to the public. Trump, however, was at sea. That is why it was so vital for his antagonists to sideline Michael Flynn and Jeff Sessions, Trump loyalists with deep experience in intelligence and law enforcement, who could have put a stop to the farce if they’d remained, respectively, national security adviser and attorney general.

The article concludes:

There are two lessons to be drawn from all this.

First, Barr could not be more right that the malfeasance in our government today is the politicization of law enforcement and intelligence. The only way to fix that is to stop doing it. That cannot be accomplished by bringing what many would see as the most politicized prosecution of all time. The imperative to get the Justice Department and the FBI out of our politics discourages the filing of charges that would be portrayed as banana-republic stuff. Yet, even if Barr succeeds in this noble quest, there is no assurance that a future administration would not turn the clock back.

Second, when wayward officials are not called to account, the powers they have abused become the target of public and congressional ire. The problem is that the powers are essential. Without properly directed foreign counterintelligence, supplemented by legitimate law enforcement, the United States cannot be protected from those who would do her harm.

The Trump-Russia farce has destroyed the bipartisan consensus on counterterrorism, and on the need for aggressive policing against cyberintrusions and other provocations by America’s enemies. There is an implicit understanding: The public endows its national security officials with sweeping secret authorities, and those officials solemnly commit that these authorities will only be used to thwart our enemies, not to spy on Americans or undermine the political process.

That understanding has been fractured. In counterintelligence, government operatives have to be able to look us in the eye and say, “You can trust us.” Americans no longer do. The sentiment is justified. That will not make our consequent vulnerability any less perilous.

Consequences for the guilty parties would be appropriate. However, until the American public is educated on exactly what happened, any consequences are going to look political. What is needed at this time is a massive education campaign to bring the general public up to speed. Unfortunately, the mainstream media is not likely to participate in that campaign. I am concerned that because of the dishonesty of the mainstream media,  many Americans have no idea that there actually was an attempted soft coup against President Trump. Attorney General Barr and those working with him will need the wisdom of Solomon to navigate the maze that lies before them.

Distorting A Quote To Fit An Agenda

Posted on by

It’s no secret that the mainstream media does not like President Trump. It is no secret that they were hoping to celebrate the election of Hillary Clinton as President. Okay. They’re biased–but that is no excuse for totally distorting the truth to create the narrative that President Trump is a dictator controlling the Justice Department (his predecessor pretty much did that with the IRS, the New Black Panthers, the Russian Hoax, etc.). There is no evidence that President Trump has spied on political opponents or newsmen (James Rosen) or done any of the things the media has routinely accused him of. So why am I surprised when they take a quote totally out of context to make President Trump look bad? This is the story in an article posted at Just The News yesterday.

The article reports:

Meet the Press,” the signature news show hosted by Chuck Todd, apologized Sunday and admitted it had deceptively edited a video clip of Attorney General William Barr after the Justice Department cried foul.

I guess we should be grateful that they apologized.

The article explains:

The episode began when Todd aired a clip of CBS News’ Catherine Herridge asking how history would judge the DOJ’s decision to dismiss the Michael Flynn criminal case. The clip showed Barr initially laughing before saying,” History is written by the winners, so it largely depends on who’s writing the history.”

Todd immediately comments that he was “struck by the cynicism of the answer — it’s a correct answer, but he’s the attorney general. He didn’t make the case that he was upholding the rule of law. He was almost admitting that, yeah, this was a political job.”

But Barr did says in the CBS interview he felt the Flynn decision upheld the rule of law, which “Meet the Press” failed to air.

“I think a fair history would say it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law,” Barr said. “It upheld the standards of the Department of Justice, and it undid what was an injustice.”

A short while later, Barr’s spokeswoman went to Twitter to sharply criticize the NBC show.

Fortunately we currently have a Department of Justice that calls out fake news.

The article notes:

A short while later, Barr’s spokeswoman went to Twitter to sharply criticize the NBC show.

“Very disappointed by the deceptive editing/commentary by @ChuckTodd and @MeetThePress on AG Barr’s CBS interview,” Kerri Kupec tweeted. “Compare the two transcripts below. Not only did the AG make the case in the VERY answer Chuck says he didn’t, he also did so multiple times throughout the interview.”

A short while later, the official “Meet the Press” Twitter account posted an apology.

“You’re correct. Earlier today, we inadvertently and inaccurately cut short a video clip of an interview with AG Barr before offering commentary and analysis,” the tweet said. “The remaining clip included important remarks from the attorney general that we missed, and we regret the error.”

Excuse my cynicism, but they don’t regret the error–they regret being publicly called out for the error. Errors like that–because many people will not see the apology–are one of many reasons the country is divided.

Citing A Non-Existent Report In Order To Fuel The Narrative

Posted on by

It is no surprise that the mainstream media is trying to blame President Trump for any and all deaths associated with the coronavirus. Not to mention the fact that many deaths reported as caused by the virus have very little to do with the virus. However, one of their recent attempts has failed miserably. There has been a claim that President Trump was briefed on the coronavirus in November. The Washington Times posted an article on April 9, 2020, that corrects the claim.

The article reports:

The Pentagon says a supposed intelligence report cited by ABC News on an emerging COVID-19 pandemic doesn’t exist.

ABC said the report was issued in November by the National Center for Medical Intelligence, an arm of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). It supposedly warned of a pandemic of what would be later named COVID-19.

Relying on sources who said they saw the report, ABC News said the warning was briefed “multiple times” to the DIA, the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Trump White House.

I have learned in recent years that any claim made by unnamed sources tends to be proven wrong as events unfold.

The article continues:

The Pentagon said it did an exhaustive search and could find no such document.

Col. R. Shane Day, a physician who heads the medical intelligence unit, issued a flat denial.

“As a matter of practice, the National Center for Medical Intelligence does not comment publicly on specific intelligence matters,” Col. Day said. “However, in the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists.”

A defense official told The Washington Times, “The center is part of the broader Intelligence Community effort to provide intelligence, expert assessments, and pandemic warning to senior U.S. government leaders, with the critical mission of supporting defense policymakers and U.S. warfighters. NCMI and the Defense Intelligence Agency spent considerable time over the last 24 hours examining every possible product that could have been identified as related to this topic and have found no such product.”

November was the date of the first reported victim of the virus, but considering that our intelligence assets in China were severely compromised because of the Chinese hacking into Hillary Clinton’s private server, it it unlikely that we would have had information on the virus.

How Spin Works

Posted on by

The recent sexual assault charges against presidential candidate Joe Biden have created a problem for the candidate. If he were a Republican, there would be pressure for him to withdraw from the race, but he’s a Democrat, so the reaction from the mainstream media is very different.

Yesterday Townhall.com posted an article detailing how the Biden campaign is handling the allegations. It should be noted that investigative reporters (not in the mainstream media) have found corroborating evidence that indicates the charge of sexual assault may be valid. This makes it a little more challenging for the media to deal with the charges.

The article reports:

Buzzfeed originally published talking points for Democratic candidates that were drawn up by the Biden campaign. The memo instructs Democrats to categorically deny Reade’s claims and stand in solidarity with the former vice president if asked about the allegations:

“Biden believes that all women have the right to be heard and to have their claims thoroughly reviewed,” the talking points read, according to a copy sent to two Democratic operatives. “In this case, a thorough review by the New York Times has led to the truth: this incident did not happen.”

“Here’s the bottom line,” they read. “Vice President Joe Biden has spent over 40 years in public life: 36 years in the Senate; 7 Senate campaigns, 2 previous presidential runs, two vice presidential campaigns, and 8 years in the White House. There has never been a complaint, allegation, hint or rumor of any impropriety or inappropriate conduct like this regarding him — ever.”

That sounds good. Unfortunately it isn’t true.

The article at Townhall explains the problem with this defense:

Biden’s campaign also cites The New York Times’ story that exonerated the former vice president, claiming that NYT “investigated” Reade’s claims. The puff piece published in defense of Biden was not only unfair to Reade, but also did not actually investigate her claims. NYT cleared Biden of guilt purely on the word of his campaign and a few of his staffers from his tenure in the Senate. NYT’s exoneration occurred before new evidence and corroboration from Reade’s family and friends became public knowledge, but NYT has published no follow-ups thus far. The Times’ take on the allegations against Biden represents a 180-degree spin from their coverage of the claims against Brett Kavanaugh; this same newspaper ran with the claims of Dr. Ford, Julie Swetnick and Michael Avenatti on face value, while piling onto the character assassination against the future Supreme Court Justice and putting due process on the back burner. 

First of all, anyone who has watched Joe Biden’s behavior over the years could easily question his treatment of women. There are numerous videos of his inappropriately touching women and children around him.

The Gateway Pundit posted an article today with the following information about The New York Times ‘investigation’:

The New York Times has issued a statement slamming the talking points being sent around by Joe Biden’s campaign claiming that the newspaper cleared him of the sexual assault allegations by his former staffer.

…The New York Times article did not clear Biden or deem the allegation uncredible.

The article they have been referencing, “Examining Tara Reade’s Sexual Assault Allegation Against Joe Biden,” actually states that “a friend said that Ms. Reade told her the details of the allegation at the time. Another friend and a brother of Ms. Reade’s said she told them over the years about a traumatic sexual incident involving Mr. Biden.”

The mainstream media will do all it can to make this scandal go away without it being investigated. The people who pay attention to the media that actually reports things will have the information they need to make an informed decision on the matter. The coverage of these charges is only one example of things that cause division in America.

Countering Fake News

Posted on by

Unfortunately many in the media have decided to use the coronavirus pandemic to bash President Trump rather than to help deal with the problems created by the crisis. That has caused some government agencies to periodically make statements calling attention to the false reporting that is going on. Yesterday The Epoch Times posted an article about one such event.

The article reports:

The Department of Defense issued a rare denial to an anonymously sourced media report claiming that military intelligence allegedly warned about the CCP virus pandemic as early as November 2019.

ABC News cited anonymous officials on April 8 to claim that the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) released a report in November 2019 that detailed concerns about a potential outbreak. The NCMI issued a statement in response to the article saying the report doesn’t exist.

“As a matter of practice, the National Center for Medical Intelligence does not comment publicly on specific intelligence matters. However, in the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists,” Shane Day, director of the NCMI, said in a statement.

The article also notes:

Trump banned travel to China on Jan. 31, ten days after the United States confirmed its first case of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

Sam Faddis, a former CIA operations officer, told The Epoch Times that the idea that the highest levels of the U.S. government were repeatedly warned about a pandemic and “collectively” ignored it is “ridiculous.”

I wonder how many people who saw the initial charge saw the response from the Intelligence Community that it was false. Somehow I don’t think the mainstream media made that a major story. Therein lies the problem. The segment of our population that relies on the mainstream media has been fed a bunch of lies about how President Trump has handled this crisis. This makes them less likely to listen to him in the crisis. That seriously undermines our government and creates divisions which make it harder for Americans to work together. The mainstream media is largely responsible for knowingly tearing at the fabric of our society. It is truly a shame that they cannot be trusted to report events honestly.

 

A Guest Post From Mark Jones, Chairman, Surry County Republican Party

Posted on by

America Needs to Go Back to Work

We have to put America back to work, and we have to do it sooner rather than later! President Trump’s instincts on this issue were right when he suggested a gradual, careful, and measured shift in parts of the Country. Most areas are mildly impacted with little strain on hospitals (which was the stated reason for the lockdowns in the first place). Putting America back to work is critical for so much more than our economy as it impacts our LIBERTIES, FREEDOMS, and our VERY WAY OF LIFE. THE CURE OF A TOO LONG LOCKDOWN WILL BE WORSE THAN THE DISEASE.

I have written multiple e-mails trying to put COVID-19 into perspective. I agree we MUST DO EVERYTHING we can to fight the disease and protect the elderly and vulnerable. Any loss of life is tragic, but I have used unequivocal data and research from several respected Universities to demonstrate that the death rate from the disease is being over-stated by the mainstream Media. Articles in the New England Journal of Medicine and additional articles by Stanford University Doctors support this and have been e-mailed and posted on the Surry GOP Facebook site. I’ll make them available to anyone who missed them.

The Media has scared the American people into believing we must destroy our American way of life, our freedoms, and our economy to save humanity from COVID-19. This is a lie. The Democrats, with help from the Media, are exploiting this crisis in an attempt to fill every socialist wish list on the planet including free “stuff” for everyone, on-line voting (to help them cheat), and TIGHT GOVERNMENT CONTROL OF EVERY ASPECT OF OUR LIVES (a socialist’s dream). The Democrats also want to hurt Trump who is set to face a very weak Democrat candidate (whether Biden, Cuomo, or someone else) this Fall. While the President is doing a good job under impossible circumstances against a hostile Media, Democrats continually try to exploit this disease to advance their Agenda rather than help America recover and go back to work. The longer panic-driven lockdowns occur, the more it plays into the Democrats’ hands, and the more Americans become used to their totalitarian philosophies.

To be fair, Republicans seem to have been scared and forgotten any concept of smart spending or concern about National deficits and debt. Many objective analyses of the so-called “Historic” and “Bipartisan” $2.2 Trillion Bill show that MUCH LESS than half of the Bill actually helps businesses or impacts COVID-19. The Senate, supposedly a “deliberative body”, sent it over to the House in a panic-driven rush. We were assured “it had to be done immediately”. Leaders in the U.S. House were in such a rush to pass the Bill they refused to debate or even record votes for and against. Wasteful and non-COVID spending in the Bill includes money for tens of millions of people still working along with funding for the Kennedy Center, Planned Parenthood, Unions, and National Public Radio. NO SENATOR OR HOUSE MEMBER SHOULD BE PROUD OF THAT BILL. Americans deserve better from our leaders. Our children already face monumental debt and will face inflation worsened by the Bill. Economics 101 tells us bad things happen when you borrow and print money and infuse it into a system where people cannot make products. Congress talks about passing another and more massive Bill as if it must happen. Over the long-term, our very way of life and economic survival is at stake. Will leaders encourage spending sanity?

If you dare to speak out against the crackdown on freedoms and the massive spending, the Media trots out statistics from the misrepresented death toll of this disease. They will be quick to tell you about the latest tragic death as if to suggest that anyone who suggests we are on the wrong track just doesn’t care. If hyped death tolls don’t suffice, they film Italian Hospitals and present the video as coming from New York (CBS did this and publicly admitted it as reported in the New York Post). When lies are exposed, they bury the retraction. They fail to provide perspective. The first two deaths in North Carolina occurred on a day when five people died of the flu. Did the Media tell you? Do they talk about the 99% with mild reactions to the disease?

A commonly used and 65-year old anti-malarial drug (Hydroxychloroquine) shows promise for severe cases and as protection for Health Care workers, but the Media only criticizes the President for giving false hope and calls the drug “unsafe”. Multiple Doctors have reported that thousands of people have been successfully treated for COVID-19 with the drug. Millions of people have safely taken this drug for Malaria and Lupus for decades, yet the Media seems almost afraid that it might work and be safe for COVID-19. Ask yourself why the Media almost gleefully reports the worst news possible and why they refuse to focus on the fact that WELL OVER 99% (remember tens of thousands of people have gone untested) OF INFECTED PEOPLE HAVE MILD COMPLICATIONS from this illness. Multiple scientific papers support this, were provided in prior messages, and are available upon request.

The same people telling us we need to lock down for months and not worry about our economy are the same people who criticized the President for closing travel from China. They are the same people who complained when the President closed travel from Europe and the same people who encouraged large gatherings for Chinese New Year in New York and Mardi Gras in New Orleans. They are the same people who favor open borders to allow illegal immigrants to become undocumented voters.

The United Nations is now calling for a 10% tax on every Country in the World to “fight COVID-19”. Henry Kissinger called for a “New World Order” in the Wall Street Journal. Many nations, and some American Democrats, have called for GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER of everything from businesses to banks in order “to fight COVID-19”. This is a dream-come-true for Socialists determined to advance their Agenda and SHOULD SCARE ALL MAINSTREAM AMERICANS more than the latest misrepresented death tolls from the Media. Never let a crisis go to waste! Fear will compel people to comply!

What the experts are not telling you is that their own models show severe lockdowns only DELAY THE EFFECTS of the disease until round two comes next winter. Multiple scientific papers show it and have been provided. Do we shut down America for months or even years? Do Doctors decide? That seems to be what the Media and Democrats favor – especially if they can force shut down through the Elections and force electronic or mail-in voting. Every time the President talks of finding creative ways to go back to work, the Media becomes frantic. HOW MUCH OF OUR FREEDOM AND OUR WAY OF LIFE WILL WE SACRIFICE FOR A FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY? In addition to public health, we must also consider economic health and American Constitutional Liberties.

America must be smart enough to refuse to allow fear to rule our lives. Our Constitutional Rights and Liberties are what set us apart from the rest of the World. When President Trump suggested putting segments of our economy back to work, he was quickly attacked and told we could not do that. If “Essential Services” like grocery stores, gas stations, and hardware stores can remain open, can’t we figure out ways to open many other segments of our economy? How far will we allow the Media and fear to push us? As Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”.

If you have had enough of the fear and panic driven by the mainstream Media, I encourage you to speak up. Write and call elected officials including Republicans in our State and National Legislature. Write and call to support President Trump and Vice President Pence. They are doing a great job against impossible opposition from many Democrats and many Media outlets. Refuse to let fear deprive you of what made America special in the first place. Think for yourself. Ask yourself if this is the Country our forefathers fought to defend. It is time the American people let our leaders know we don’t want to see our American liberties and our economy destroyed out of fear and panic. How many of our rights and liberties will we sacrifice? When do we put segments of American Society back to work? When do sensible and courageous political leaders step up?

 

How To Navigate The Media Spin

Posted on by

The Epoch Times posted an article yesterday about the report of the Justice Department Inspector General. The report found that the FBI failed to document facts correctly in 29 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications that were reviewed. A rational person would take that as an indication that all was not well at the FBI and that Americans were being unlawfully surveilled. However, the mainstream media did not necessarily see it that way.

Eli Lake posted the following comments at Bloomberg News:

In the twisted politics of the Trump Era, some of bureau’s defenders might actually view this report as good news: It shows that the investigation of the Trump campaign was not necessarily politically motivated. The bureau made the same kinds of mistakes with suspects who were not connected to the Trump campaign.

That’s hardly reassuring — and the malpractice that the report uncovers is a much larger problem than the FBI and its defenders may wish to admit. So far, the response to Horowitz’s December report has been a series of administrative reforms, such as a requirement that FBI field offices preserve their “Woods files” and a mandate for new FISA training for FBI lawyers and agents. That’s all well and good. But one need not go back to the bad old days of J. Edgar Hoover to see that the bureau has been careless in its monitoring of U.S. citizens.

The Woods procedures were issued in 2001 after Congress obtained a memo from the FBI’s counterterrorism division detailing surveillance abuse in the late 1990s. One target’s cell phone remained tapped after he gave it up and the number was reassigned to a different person. Another FBI field office videotaped a meeting, despite a clear prohibition on that technique in its FISA warrant. In 2003, an interim report from the Senate Judiciary Committee concluded that the 2001 memo showed “the FBI was experiencing more systemic problems related to the implementation of FISA orders” than a problem with the surveillance law itself.

Very little has changed in the intervening 17 years. That’s why it’s foolish to expect new and better procedures will work this time. A better approach would be an aggressive policy to prosecute FBI agents and lawyers who submit falsehoods to the surveillance court. The best way to prevent future violations is to severely punish those who commit them in the present.

Scott Johnson posted an article today at Power Line Blog that included the following quote (follow the link to the article for the audio of the answer to the question):

The New York Times is illustrative of “the twisted politics of the Trump era.” Daniel Chaitin covers the Times angle in his Examiner article “‘Biased and out of control’: Devin Nunes rips New York Times reporting on FISA memo.” Chaitin reports on Rep. Devin Nunes’s interview with Larry O’Connor:

Radio host Larry O’Connor read a passage from the [Times’s] report [on the Horowitz memo] to Nunes during the Examining Politics podcast on Tuesday. It said DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report “helps the FBI politically because it undercuts the narrative among President Trump and his supporters that the bureau cut corners to surveil the adviser, Carter Page, as part of a politically motivated conspiracy.”

“So, the good news for the FBI is that they trampled on people’s rights all over the place, not just people who worked with Donald Trump’s campaign,” O’Connor said. “Is that the takeaway we should have here congressman?”

I agree with Eli Lake–severe punishment for those guilty of illegal spying on American citizens is the only way to prevent future abuse by the FBI.

 

Fake News Isn’t Helping Anyone

Posted on by

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted pictures that CBS News aired as pictures of New York City hospitals. The pictures were actually pictures of Italian hospitals.

These are the pictures:

Showing this picture while discussing the coronavirus in New York City was both irresponsible and misleading.

Unfortunately there is a lot of fake news being reported in the mainstream media right now. Be careful who you believe.

In The Long Run, This Would Not Have Mattered, But It Was Still Irresponsible

Posted on by

Yesterday The Daily Signal posted an article about the shortage of N95 protective respirator masks. Some of the media have stated that President Obama chose not to replenish the stockpile of these masks after the 2009 H1N1 virus epidemic. That is true, but there is more to the story. At this point I would like to note that the masks have a shelf life of five years–even if President Obama had replenished the stockpile, in order for the stockpile to be any good it would have had to have been replenished again in 2014 and 2019. The responsibility for the shortage of these masks rests of both the Obama and Trump administrations. However, I think that the blame actually rests on the bureaucrats running the CDC and other health agencies inside the government.

The article notes:

H1N1, also known as the swine flu, drew down about 100 million N95 protective respirator masks.

Afterward, an H1N1 task force recommended that the Obama administration replace the masks in the national stockpile, according to reporting by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg News.

“If the Obama administration didn’t respond to a request for additional masks, and if they did not communicate that need to the incoming [Trump] administration, that would certainly make the present situation more difficult,” Amy Anderson, a registered nurse and co-founder of the Global Nurse Consultants Alliance, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.

…The Los Angeles Times reported March 20 that the U.S. government ignored warnings in 2009, making no reference to Obama’s being president at the time. 

The CDC, under the George W. Bush administration, published a “National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza” in 2005. In that case, the government heeded the agency’s advice to stockpile medical supplies. 

…The International Safety Equipment Association and the federal H1N1 task force recommended replacing the N95 masks after the response to the swine flu drew down 100 million masks from the federal stockpile, the paper reported.

However, association President Charles Johnson told the Times: “Our association is unaware of any major effort to restore the stockpile to cover that drawdown.”

The problem with a medical emergency is that you generally don’t see it coming. Blaming any administration for current supply problems is not helpful. Finding a solution to those problems is helpful. It would be nice if the mainstream media would attempt to unite us rather than divide us. The reporting during the Wuhan Flu epidemic has been horrendous and very unhelpful.

This Is Not Helpful To Anyone

Posted on by

Breitbart reported the following yesterday:

A Democrat-aligned Super PAC announced on Tuesday that it will spend $5 million on negative ads targeting President Trump’s response to the coronavirus.

Why not spend $5 million on encouraging people to take precautions to avoid getting the virus or to help those most impacted by the financial distress caused by the virus?

The article continues:

Acronym owns the technology firm Shadow, Inc., which was responsible for developing the infamous app used in the chaotic Iowa caucuses. Notably, the firm’s founder and CEO, Tara McGowan, “worked for Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign and previously served as the digital director for NextGen America, a progressive organization founded by presidential candidate Tom Steyer,” as RealClearPolitics noted.

Acronym is funded by the “liberal dark money group” New Venture Fund, which is “part of a larger group called Arabella Advisors, which provides philanthropic guidance and manages four nonprofits,” according to the nonpartisan ethics watchdog group Americans for Public Trust. Those also include the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Windward Fund, and Hopewell Fund.

The financial web, however, goes far beyond those connections. The political group American Bridge, which was founded by David Brock — a close ally of the Clintons and founder of Media Matters for America — is also involved in the overarching efforts to spread misinformation on President Trump’s response to the coronavirus and further politicize the crisis.

“American Bridge’s network of nonprofits received funding in 2018 from New Venture Fund, as well as another Arabella group called Sixteen Thirty Fund,” Americans for Public Trust reports.

The Post notes that American Bridge has been running political advertisements on Trump’s response to the crisis in key swing states — Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. According to the Post, the group signaled that more was coming, including an ad focusing on “‘Trump’s incompetence,’ including ‘clips of Trump himself downplaying the crisis.’”

“Our job is to hold Donald Trump accountable, and we have no plans to let up, particularly with a focus on economic issues as we’ve done to date,” American Bridge President Bradley Beychok said, according to the outlet.

He added that the group is “not going to give him [Trump] a pass for bungling the government’s response to this pandemic.”

This PAC is not helping anyone. At a time when reliable information is critical, this group, along with their allies in the mainstream media, are spreading fake news. I posted three stories (here, here, and here) in the past week that cited misreporting by the media regarding the coronavirus. All three stories were inaccurate and framed in a way to make either the President or the Republicans look bad. At a time when Americans need to work together to get through a crisis, spending $5 million on a political hit-job is not constructive.

 

Are We Willing To Learn The Lessons Of History

Posted on by

Today The Washington Examiner posted an opinion piece about what can happen when the media refuses to report the obvious. The piece deals with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his health as he was running for his fourth term as President.

The opinion piece notes:

On August 18, 1944, Senator Harry S. Truman met President Franklin D. Roosevelt for lunch at the White House. Truman had just been nominated to be Roosevelt’s running mate that year, and the two men dined on the White House lawn and chatted about the upcoming campaign.

Truman had not seen the president for over a year and was shocked at Roosevelt’s haggard appearance. He noticed that FDR was so ill that he couldn’t even pour cream into his coffee. Despite seeing direct evidence of Roosevelt’s poor health, Truman told reporters afterwards that Roosevelt “Looked fine…He’s as keen as a briar.”

Truman was lying. Roosevelt was a dying man, which was evident to everyone who saw him. But during the 1944 campaign, a conspiracy of silence reigned about his health. Roosevelt had a physical in the summer that showed he had high blood pressure and was suffering from congestive heart failure, but the results were kept from the public.

With the assistance of a compliant media that was overwhelmingly sympathetic to FDR, the issue of Roosevelt’s ability to serve four more years never materialized as a serious campaign issue.

We know what happened as a result of Roosevelt serving as President while his health was failing and he was not at his best.

The piece notes:

In February 1945, a dangerously ill Roosevelt traveled to Yalta to meet with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin to discuss the future of post-war Europe. At Yalta, FDR effectively surrendered Poland and most of Eastern Europe to the Soviets. During the conference, Roosevelt lacked the stamina to keep up Stalin, and the agreements they reached reflected the poor state of FDR’s health.

No one knows how different the course of history would have been if America had elected a President who was in good health during these negotiations.

We now face a similar problem as former Vice-President Joe Biden is set to become the Democrat presidential nominee for 2020. The former Vice-President has always been known for questionable remarks, but we are watching him forget where he is and show unusual aggression toward voters who have come to hear him speak. Either one of these things could be an early sign of dementia. It is ironic that Bernie Sanders, after heart surgery, looks more energized than the former Vice-President.

We live in a complex world with complex problems. Many Americans rely on the mainstream media as a news source (I think that’s a mistake, but that is simply my opinion). If America is to continue as a republic, we need well-informed voters–we can’t afford to be lead by propaganda. Electing a President who is not physically or mentally capable of doing the job because the media refused to tell voters the truth would have major consequences. History tells us that. We can’t afford to repeat history.

Solving Problems Before They Arise

Posted on by

The mainstream media is in full spin blaming President Trump for any Americans who happen to get the coronavirus. Meanwhile The Conservative Treehouse is reminding us of the steps President Trump took early on the prevent the virus from spiraling out of control.

The article reports:

The level of media opposition and snark against President Trump is simply so ridiculous at this point there’s a desperation to it.  So let us consider…

From the outset of Donald Trump’s entry into the world of politics he espoused a series of key tenets around what he called his “America-First” objectives:

  1. The U.S. needed to have control over our borders, and a greater ability to control who was migrating to the United States.  A shift toward stopping ‘illegal’ migration.
  2. The U.S. needed to stop the manufacture of goods overseas and return critical manufacturing back to the United States.  A return to economic independence.
  3. The U.S. needed to decouple from an over-reliance on Chinese industrial and consumer products.  China viewed as a geopolitical and economic risk.

Donald Trump was alone on these issues.  No-one else was raising them; no-one else was so urgently pushing that discussion. In 2015, 2016 and even 2017, no-one other than Trump was talking about how close we were to the dependence point of no return.

Given the status of very consequential issues stemming from the Chinese Coronavirus threat; and the myriad of serious issues with critical supply chain dependencies; wasn’t President Trump correct in his warnings and proposals?

In early 2017 President Trump and his administration coined the phrase: “economic security is national security”, and the economic team set about starting a very complex process to ensure the past three decades of trade policy was reversed.

The article reminds us of how bad the reporting on the President’s handling of the threat of this virus has been:

On January 30th while Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler and Chuck Schumer were literally trying to impeach President Trump; on that very day President Trump was assembling a task force in advance of his authorization for HHS Secretary Alex Azar to declare a proactive national health emergency.

On the exact same day the Senate was debating whether to call more witnesses for the Senate impeachment trial, the newly assembled Coronavirus Task Force was holding a press conference to outline: in accordance with the national health emergency declaration, at 5:00 p.m. EST; Sunday, February 2nd, the U.S government would implement temporary measures to increase detection & containment of the coronavirus proactively:

Any U.S. citizen returning to the United States who was in Hubei Province in the previous 14 days was/is subject to up to 14 days of mandatory quarantine. Any U.S. citizen returning to the United States who was in the rest of Mainland China within the previous 14 days was put through proactive entry health screening at a select number of ports of entry, and up to 14 days of monitored self-quarantine. All foreign nationals, other than U.S. citizens and permanent residents, who traveled in China within the prior 14 days were denied entry into the United States.  (link)

Simultaneous to this joint HHS, CDC and NIH announcement, on the other side of Capitol Hill, the U.S. Senate voted on whether to add additional impeachment witnesses; and what the impeachment process would be moving forward.

Guess which event the media covered?….

The President has been on the case since before there was a case to be on. It’s a shame that the mainstream media is working against the interests of America instead of working with the President to protect Americans.