Morality is not determined by the church you attend nor the faith you embrace. It is determined by the quality of your character and the positive impact you have on those you meet along your journey
After Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. drew widespread criticism for having anchors read a statement taking aim at the integrity of other U.S. media outlets, many wondered why some of the company’s journalists didn’t just quit.
The short answer is the cost may be too steep. According to copies of two employment contracts reviewed by Bloomberg, some Sinclair employees were subject to a liquidated damages clause for leaving before the term of their agreement was up: one that requires they pay as much as 40 percent of their annual compensation to the company.
While they were also subject to a six-month noncompete clause and forced arbitration, three current and former Sinclair employees said it was the potential financial penalty that had the greatest impact on those thinking of quitting. Under the clause, there’s a specific window of time during which employees can give notice. One current employee who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly said the clause’s limitations are the reason he hasn’t quit. A former employee who also requested anonymity said both the noncompete and the damages clause dissuaded her at first from looking for work elsewhere.
It's like they knew all along that their practices would inspire employees to run for the hills, so they shackled them to their desks.
David Smith, the executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, said he dislikes and fundamentally distrusts the print media, which he believes “serves no real purpose.” In emails to New York, Smith said that print — as in newspapers and magazines — is a reality-distorting tool of leftists. Print media, he said, has “no credibility” and no relevance.
“I must tell that in all the 45 plus years I have been in the media business I have never seen a single article about us that is reflective of reality especially in today’s world with the shameful political environment and generally complete lack of integrity. Facts and truth have been lost for a long time and likely to never return,” Smith said.
“The print media is so left wing as to be meaningless dribble which accounts for why the industry is and will fade away. Just no credibility.”
Yeah how can anybody trust the New York Times and the Washington Post with all their left leaning facts?
This statement is not one that a real newsman would ever make.
You might disagree with a story or two, but to discount ALL of print media as biased against your view of reality, really says more about your view of reality than on their reporting.
Keep in mind that Fox News was created by Roger Ailes as an alternative to the real journalism which he blamed for destroying the career of his former boss and hero Richard Nixon.
Right Wing new outlets are not about informing the public, they are about building mistrust for the media and pushing a conservative agenda that they realize is vulnerable to fact checking.
Here, let John Oliver explain it better than I can.
Oliver, as you might remember, was one of the very first to reveal to us just what Sinclair was up to way back in the summer of last year.
If this does not terrify you, well then you have lost the ability to be terrified.
Probably due to Right Wing brainwashing.
At least one political candidate is taking a stand against this obvious propaganda.
A Kentucky Democratic congressional candidate has pulled all of her campaign advertisements from her local, Sinclair Broadcasting-owned news channel after the controversy that exploded when anchors all over the country echoed the same script warning of fake news and biased reporting.
Amy McGrath is challenging incumbent Republican Andy Barr in Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District. “Today, I have instructed my campaign team to cease and pull all campaign advertising on WDKY-TV (Channel 56), the Sinclair-owned television station in our congressional district, as soon as possible,” she wrote in a Facebook post on Monday. “Sinclair’s corporate-mandated ‘must-read’ right-wing script on its nearly 200 television stations about ‘fake news’ is itself an extreme danger to our Democracy and eerily mimics the propaganda efforts that authoritarian regimes often use to control the media in their own country.”
Admirable. But let's face it she is a Democrat, so Sinclair Broadcasting would not even tap their brakes if they saw her laying unconscious in the middle of the street.
However if others join Amy McGrath, and not just politicians but businesses as well, that might be enough to force at least the semblance of fair and balanced reporting from this conservative propaganda machine.
Hey, maybe somebody can convince the Parkland students to tweet about them, that seems to work pretty good.
David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA...totally predictable given acceptance rates.) https://t.co/wflA4hWHXY
Laura Ingraham is taking avacation next week. Now the question is whether a controversy swirling around the host will go on hiatus as well.
The popular Fox News Channel host – her “Ingraham Angle” was the fourth most-watched cable-news program in February – told viewers Friday night she would not appear on air next week as she took what she described as a pre-planned break around the Easter holiday with her children. Substitute hosts are expected to fill in for her on the program.
She leaves in the midst of heightened scrutiny. Ingraham set off an imbroglio Wednesday with a Twitter post mocking Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student David Hogg, one of the students who has spoken out about gun control prominently since a February 14th shooting incident at the Parkland, Florida school left 17 people dead. Her tweet linked to a report noting Hogg had been rejected from four California colleges. Her tweet also said Hogg “whines about” the rejections.
That extremely immature attack resulted in a call for a boycott of Ingraham's advertisers and as of right now these are the businesses that have turned their backs on her:
Atlantis Bahamas
Expedia
Hulu
Jenny Craig
Johnson & Johnson
Liberty Mutual
Nestle
Nutrish
Stitch Fix
TripAdvisor
and Wayfair.
Okay THAT'S a hell of a list. And there will likely be even more by the end of the day.
Keep in mind that Ingraham is not the ONLY conservative who has been brought to their knees after attacking these Parkland students, and if I were a Right Wing asshole I would be thinking twice about getting on the wrong side of these kids.
They are moving us to the future, and woe be to those that try to stand in their way.
Right-wing media outlets amplified claims that Parkland survivor David Hogg made a Nazi salute after his speech at the March for Our Lives event in Washington, D.C. But the gesture Hogg made was clearly a raised fist, not the Seig Heil salute.
In a March 25 article, Breitbart writer AWR Hawkins positively highlighted several Twitter accounts that claimed Hogg made a Nazi salute, although the image used to illustrate the article debunked the claim.
Writing for conservative pundit Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, Ryan Saavedra wrote that Hogg “threw up a salute that sent Twitter into a frenzy.” Saavedra claimed it’s “not clear what Hogg meant by his hand gesture” but went on to include nine tweets that called the gesture, among other things, “Hitler-esque.”
In a March 24 blog post, Alex Jones’ pro-Trump outlet Infowars called the march “the ‘Hitler Youth” invasion of Washington D.C.” and referred to the speakers as “young fascists-in-training,” specifically calling Hogg “the propagandist-in-chief”.
Here, by the way, is the video from which that image on the left was taken, just in case there are any trolls here who want to argue that the one of the right is not photoshopped.
And as of this weekend, this group of idealistic young people have officially become the right’s leading hate figures.
The first and most repugnant strategy was to directly attack high-profile campaigners, especially students David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez.
Running short of reasoned arguments, many attempted to push conservative buttons with high impact visuals. Alt-right social media company Gab was one of many that disseminated a doctored animation of Gonzalez in which she falsely appeared to be tearing up the US constitution. Cartoonist and Trump sycophant Ben Garrison depicted Hogg as an assault rifle, wielded by CNN, and loaded with Marxism. Breitbart re-published a round of tweets accusing Hogg of throwing a Nazi salute.
On Front Page – an outlet led by David Horowitz, whose main stock in trade is virulent Islamophobia – Bruce Thornton decried Hogg’s “profanity laced tantrums” and reduced him and his fellow students to political “shock troops” being manipulated by a progressive “ideology of melodrama and moral exhibitionism”.
Though David and Emma have born the main brunt of the vicious attacks from the Right Wing, likely due to their effective messaging, other Parkland kids have also been targeted:
Along with Hogg and Gonzalez, the right found some new targets among the Parkland survivors. The one who got the most scrutiny was Marjory Stoneman Douglas student Delaney Tarr, who spoke at the Washington rally. In her speech, she suggested that bump stock bans could be expanded into further gun control. Many rightwing outlets drew the inference that the movement would not stop at an assault weapons ban, but would try to ban firearms altogether.
Fox News did not resort to calling the Parkland students Nazis, but they did call them sanctimonious pawns.
Children who just had their lives torn apart by gun violence, and many of whom lost friends to that same violence.
But to the Right Wing they are nothing more than adversaries who must be crushed under foot, and their suffering does not buy them any sympathy or empathy whatsoever.
This is what the two women wrote on their original post:
Had a wonderful time at Mar-a-Lago with the fabulous Governor Sarah Palin along with her beautiful daughter Ms. Piper. She did a magnificent job as the keynote speaker at The Republican Party of Palm Beach County Lincoln Day Dinner. Such a phenomenal woman.
Actually this Diamond and Silk duo has appeared on Fox News, and other Right Wing outlets, bad mouthing the BLM movement, speaking out against Barack Obama, and spouting conservative talking points which the racists eat up with a spoon.
As scripted, the promos decry "fake stories" from national news outlets -- echoing President Trump's inflammatory rhetoric about "fake news.
"The promos are supposed to start airing on local stations later this month. The instructions sent to station news directors say that the 60- and 75-second spots should run frequently "to create maximum reach and frequency."
The promo requirements are the latest reason why some Sinclair journalists are upset with the company's Maryland-based management. In recent years Sinclair's owners, the Smith family, have made several programming decisions that reflect a right-wing agenda.
Most noticeably, pro-Trump commentaries by former Trump aide Boris Epshteyn have cut into local news time. Local journalists have also bristled at so-called "must run" packages about subjects that aren't relevant to local audiences -- but are hot-button stories for conservatives. The "Terrorism Alert Desk" is a regular segment about security threats around the world.
The instructions to local stations say that the promos "should play using news time, not commercial time." Like the Epshteyn commentaries, this takes away from local news time.
"Please produce the attached scripts exactly as they are written," the instructions say. "This copy has been thoroughly tested and speaks to our Journalistic Responsibility as advocates to seek the truth on behalf of the audience."
The promos begin with one or two anchors introducing themselves and saying "I'm [we are] extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that [proper news brand name of local station] produces. But I'm [we are] concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country."
Then the media bashing begins.
"The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media," the script says. "More alarming, national media outlets are publishing these same fake stories without checking facts first. Unfortunately, some members of the national media are using their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control 'exactly what people think' ... This is extremely dangerous to our democracy."
Then the anchors are supposed to strike a more positive tone and say that their local station pursues the truth. "We understand Truth is neither politically 'left or right.' Our commitment to factual reporting is the foundation of our credibility, now more than ever."
If all of that sounds familiar it is because those are the talking points espoused by Fox News for decades now.
"All other news is false, and the truth can only be found here."
It used to be that you could avoif this kind of conservative propaganda simply by avoiding Fox News, and similar Right Wing news outlets.
But with his agenda now coming into your homes on your local stations, that now becomes almost impossible.
Sinclair is now in the process of trying to acquire Tribune Media which will expand its reach even further.
The FCC is yet to sign off on the deal, but with Trump's man Ajit Pai now in charge, it is likely going to go through with only minimal resistance.
As of this morning, the teenaged Florida mass-shooting survivors have variously been criticized as:
-Soros plants
-The biased children of FBI agents
-Too traumatized to have worthwhile opinions about an event that directly involved them https://t.co/YbZmsBGsuL
David Hogg, a senior at the school, was one of the first to appear on national television and demand action. “We’re children. You guys are the adults. You need to take some action and play a role. Work together. Come over your politics and get something done,” Hogg said, looking directly into the camera.
Hogg is now being targeted by Gateway Pundit, a far-right blog that has press credentials from the Trump White House. A post published on Monday by the site’s White House correspondent, Lucian Wintrich, features Hogg’s photo with the word “EXPOSED” stamped in red.
Wintrich says Hogg and other students throw up some “red flags.” The first “red flag” is that Hogg’s father is a retired FBI agent. (Hogg freely admitted this on national television.) The insinuation is that Hogg’s father, who does not even work for the FBI, has tasked his son with talking about gun control to take the heat off the agency.
Wintrich also uses an edited YouTube video of Hogg having some difficulty answering questions for a taped interview as evidence that Hogg is “heavily coached on lines and is merely reciting a script.” There is no evidence, in the video or elsewhere in the article, supporting this claim.
Wintrich then drops all pretenses and fully embraces the conspiracy:
Why would the child of an FBI agent be used as a pawn for anti-Trump rhetoric and anti-gun legislation? Because the FBI is only looking to curb YOUR Constitutional rights and INCREASE their power. We’ve seen similar moves by them many times over. This is just another disgusting example of it.
Is anybody else having a Sandy Hook deja vu?
Some version of this conspiracy theory has now spread across social media.
Pro-Trump media really reaching for attacks on Fla. shooting survivor David Hogg. The latest: True Pundit says Hogg going on a tour of CNN HQ, apparently years ago, is proof that he's up to something. pic.twitter.com/rMi114quJf
Don Jr. has liked at least two tweets pushing content that attempts to discredit one of the most vocal student survivors of the Parkland school shooting. pic.twitter.com/YI9ANh5dlL
Writer for Jim Hoft's The Gateway Pundit now saying student survivors of the Parkland school shooting are "are milking the deaths of their peers for careers" and "only care about their SJW agenda" pic.twitter.com/YAIgguU8tO
Trust me when I say that I have seen the conservatives go low before, but to attack these kids, or suggest that they are "milking the deaths of their peers for careers," is so incredibly disgusting that it literally makes me sick to my stomach.
I understand the fear that the Right is feeling right now, if I saw these kids coming after me and my party I might be wetting my tighty whiteys as well, but all that attacking them accomplishes is to make them even more determined and erase ANY hope of convincing them that the conservatives and Republican party are not their enemies.
To use perhaps too apt of a metaphor the conservatives are essentially shooting themselves in the foot right now.
And while all this is going on a critically clueless conservative journalist is suggesting that the gun control debate needs to wait until people start showing respect to gun owners:
So if you want to stop school shootings it’s not enough just to vent and march. It’s necessary to let people from Red America lead the way, and to show respect to gun owners at all points. There has to be trust and respect first. Then we can strike a compromise on guns as guns, and not some sacred cross in the culture war.
You know I have heard of "tone deaf" before, but this David Brooks guy is just "deaf deaf."
(Buzzfeed by the way has a rather expansive article
on the student's grass roots activism, that essentially drives a stake
through the heart of the whole "manipulated by the Left Wing"
narrative.)
Update: People are starting to lose their jobs over these smear campaigns.
As Democrats and Republicans continue brawling over the Russia probe, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes is gearing up to release a second memo as part of his investigation into perceived bias within the FBI and Department of Justice.
Nunes's much-hyped first memo, which was declassified last week, purports to show the FBI and DOJ abusing their surveillance authority by omitting "material and relevant" facts when submitting an application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Carter Page, a former adviser to President Donald Trump's campaign.
Much of the Republican document also questioned the FBI's decision to use the Steele dossier — an explosive collection of memos by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele alleging collusion between Trump and Russia — as a "roadmap" in the Russia investigation.
Nunes's next memo, meanwhile, will focus on alleged abuses at the Department of State and a second Trump-Russia dossier compiled by Cody Shearer, a controversial political activist with close ties to the Clinton family, according to a Republican familiar with the details.
Apparently Trump, and his attack poodle Nunes, will not be happy until they have undermined every government law enforcement or intelligence agency in the country.
The first memo by Nunes landed with a thud, and it is likely that this one will be just as pathetic.
Of course that doesn't mean Sean Hannity will not treat it like a smoking gun, and that Right Wing media will not go apoplectic over it. Because they will.
Already one of Nunes' newest allegations has failed the smell test.
“The truth is that they [Democrats] are covering up that Hillary Clinton colluded with the Russians to get dirt on Trump to feed it to the FBI to open up an investigation into the other campaign.”
—Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in an interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show, Feb. 7, 2018
The Post's fact checkers went to town on that statement, and this is what they ultimately came away with:
Was the dossier used to gin up media attention to Russia-Trump ties and bolster an existing FBI investigation? Perhaps. That’s certainly a question worth exploring.
But the media needed little prodding to investigate when candidate Trump appeared unexpectedly solicitous of Russian President Vladimir Putin as Russian-linked entities leaked emails stolen by Russian hackers in the middle of a campaign. Meanwhile, the initial FBI counterintelligence probe was prompted not by Steele’s reporting but by the loose lips of a Trump campaign staffer.
Finally, there is no evidence that Clinton was involved in Steele’s reports or worked with Russian entities to feed information to Steele. That’s where Nunes’s claim goes off the rails — and why he earns Four Pinocchios.
But those are facts, and facts have no impact on the Republican bubble, so this next memo is almost certainly going to cause yet another Right Wing freakout that will dominate conservative news outlets for several days.
And all of this is clearly designed to undermine and ultimately foil the Robert Mueller investigation.
Fake news published in the U.S. was overwhelmingly consumed and shared by right-wing social media users, a new study from the University of Oxford has revealed.
Research from Oxford's "computational propaganda project" investigated into the sources of "junk news" shared in the three months leading up to President Donald Trump's first State of the Union address last month.
On Facebook, they found that "extreme hard-right" conservatives shared more fake news stories than all other political groups combined, while on Twitter, Trump supporters consumed the most fake news.
"On Twitter, a network of Trump supporters consumes the largest volume of junk news, and junk news is the largest proportion of news links they share," they said.
They should just simply say that liberals are smarter.
Because let's face it, we are.
That is not to say that progressives cannot chase after fake stories as well.
It simply means that as a rule once we discover that they are fake, we do not then make excuses to continue believing them.
Let me remind you that this is a Twitter account owned by a man who tries to portray himself as a highly intelligent person.
However that is "highly intelligent" by conservative standards, so we are talking about an IQ in the mid to low 80's I would assume.
D'Souza is of course most famous for writing fact free books attacking the Clintons and President Obama, and for being an ex-con who served time after being convicted for violating federal election campaign laws in New York.
As for his suggestion that the skin school graduate is smarter than a woman who earned her undergraduate degree from Stanford University, and her master's degree from Oxford University, well that's actually too ridiculous to even address. (Oops sorry, Chelsea has a doctorate from Oxford. My bad.)
D'Souza does not care for facts, but if he did he might learn that any public remarks attributed to Bristol Palin, that are not sent in an angry text to one of her exes, is most definitely written FOR her by one of Sarah Palin's paid ghostwriters, who were hired to try and make Bristol appear intelligent.
Unfortunately that failed miserably after Bristol Palin decided to go all Wasilla-billy on some poor bastard during his birthday party in Anchorage back in 2014.
I am trying to remember that time Chelsea Clinton drunkenly attacked a man at his own birthday party,
Anybody remember that?
As for that attack on Chelsea's appearance, well this is picture of Dinesh D'Souza.
During a panel discussion on Trump’s comments about Haiti and African nations being “sh*tholes,” the AMJoy host turned first to conservative commentator Stephanie Hamill.
“Stephanie, I will start with you. when you heard what Donald Trump said about Haiti, about the African countries, really talking about El Salvador and any other countries that are nonwhite, how did you feel when you heard those comments?” Reid asked.
“Joy, we didn’t actually hear him say those words,” Hamill began only to have Reid clarify, “When you read them.”
“When I read them, yeah, and this is the biggest fake news story of the week,” Hamill replied. “It’s interesting to sit back and watch people are so angry about what that the president didn’t say, and they are more angry than they are at the Clinton’s for getting rich off the poor Haitians with the Clinton Foundation.”
As the panel expressed shock at Hamill bringing up the Clinton’s, Hamill pressed on.
“You can ask Klaus Eberwein, the former Haitian government official that has all the dirt on the Clinton Foundation– oh, wait, you can’t ask him because he mysteriously committed suicide the day he was supposed to testify,” Hamill blurted
“What are you talking about?” asked conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. “This is nuts.”
“Did you get talking points before you came here from the RNC or the White House?” host Reid cut in. “It’s interesting that yesterday Mark Burns, who was the surrogate we had on on the Trump side yesterday, tried to roll out the same Clinton stuff? Did you get talking points before you came here?”
“Joy, I didn’t get talking points,” Hamill shot back, attempting to get back to her story.
Host Reid then cut her off with a warning.
“I don’t know you, Stephanie, but let me explain this to you: this is not Fox News and we are not going to play the game of rolling out crazy conspiracy theories in answers to my questions and take us off track,” Reid lectured. “So I am going to put you pause for the minute, I’m going to put you to the side because they are more familiar with the way that we do things here.”
Oh yeah, she definitely got some talking points.
Joy Reid is rapidly becoming one of my favorite hosts on MSNBC.
Not only is she always well informed on the issues she presents on her show, but she simply does not tolerate any Right Wing bullshit.
Pretty soon the trolls may have to move away from criticizing Rachel Maddow's hand gestures and focus on some mannerism of Joy Reid's instead.
Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.
We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter. And we handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case.
Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators.
We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.
The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.
"Our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp."
I think that's the money quote right there.
Fusion GPS also says that they alerted investigators to look into Trump's dealings with Deutsche Bank, and told Congress that there was widespread evidence of Russian money laundering.
They also said this:
Yes, we hired Mr. Steele, a highly respected Russia expert. But we did so without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?
What came back shocked us. Mr. Steele’s sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive — and now confirmed — effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the F.B.I.
So to sum up the Russian sources were not paid, Christopher Steele was not working with a political agenda, his dossier was not the impetus for the FBI investigation, and what he uncovered indicated to him that Trump was involved in criminal behaviors, and that is why he notified the authorities in America.
Well that certainly crushes the life out of a number of Right Wing conspiracy theories.
A jury on Thursday found an undocumented immigrant not guilty in the July 2015 death of Kate Steinle, a decision that reignited the debate over immigration policy.
Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, 45, was acquitted of murder and involuntary manslaughter charges, as well as assault with a deadly weapon. Jurors convicted the Mexican citizen of being a felon in possession of a firearm, which could bring a three-year sentence.
Prosecutors had argued Garcia Zarate intentionally shot Steinle, 32, with a Sig Sauer .40-caliber handgun as she and her father walked on San Francisco's Pier 14. But Garcia Zarate's defense attorney said the shooting was accidental and the bullet ricocheted off the ground and traveled about 80 feet before hitting Steinle.
Federal immigration officials said they will try to deport Garcia Zarate. He had been deported from the United States five times prior to Steinle's death.
This woman's death became a rallying cry for conservatives, and a tool for Donald Trump to make his argument that we needed to build a "big, beautiful border wall."
She also was the inspiration for Kate's Law, which suggests harsher penalties for illegal immigrants who have repeatedly broken the law.
Of course as soon as Trump heard about this he was all over Twitter.
A disgraceful verdict in the Kate Steinle case! No wonder the people of our Country are so angry with Illegal Immigration.
The Kate Steinle killer came back and back over the weakly protected Obama border, always committing crimes and being violent, and yet this info was not used in court. His exoneration is a complete travesty of justice. BUILD THE WALL!
The jury was not told the killer of Kate was a 7 time felon. The Schumer/Pelosi Democrats are so weak on Crime that they will pay a big price in the 2018 and 2020 Elections.
Oh yeah, if only there had been a wall. Simple minded moron.
Even the Wasilla Wendigo contributed her two cents.
Such an insane recent news cycle, and now this?? Outrageous “not guilty” verdict in murder case of Kate Steinle. The illegal alien who shot her was just given more rights, grace and favor than the devastated Steinle family. San Francisco is NOT a safe place. - SP
Actually they were given the same rights, as both sides were represented and the jury delivered its verdict based on the evidence.
That is how justice works in this country.
It is indeed a tragedy that this young woman lost her life, but it is also just another among the thousands of deaths each year caused by gun violence.
The only reason the conservatives give two shits about this incident is that it involved an undocumented immigrant.
When you become a darling of the Right, and they make up the largest audience for your book, you really have to evaluate your priorities as a self described progressive.
I'm just saying.
Update: Now complaining about the Clinton Campaign on Fox News.
Right-wing writer Milo Yiannopoulos has been dropped from his op-ed deal with the Daily Caller after just one column, according to a post on his Facebook page.
Yiannopoulos wrote on his Facebook page Saturday afternoon that the Daily Caller had "caved to pressure and canceled my weekly column."
"Sad news: The Daily Caller has caved to pressure and cancelled my weekly column after a day, claiming, falsely, they never planned to run weekly contributions from me," Yiannopoulos wrote Saturday.
"Where will it end? So: no new MILO column for now. This sort of cowardice is why the Right in America loses and will keep losing the culture wars," he added.
Apparently Yiannopoulos wrote a single column on Saturday that essentially attacked Kevin Spacey and made a number of explosive allegations not backed up by any evidence.
Gee I wonder why he had to go?
Actually the only thing I really wonder is why would anybody hire him expecting a different outcome?
If you are inside the “alt-right” information bubble, you might be preparing yourself for a civil war to commence this Saturday.
Since late September, the idea has been circulating on Facebook groups, subreddit message boards, Twitter, and leading conspiracy media outlets that on 4 November, anti-fascist groups will begin a violent insurrection.
Some websites are telling their readers that antifa groups are “planning to kill every single Trump voter, Conservative and gun owner” this weekend. Hundreds of Facebook posts show how seriously consumers of such media are taking the news, and comments like “One more threat against white people and I swear to God I’m going to take a goddamn car and run over every fucking one of them” are not unrepresentative of the response.
But antifa groups have no plans to protest that day, and the small leftist groups who are planning protests have only dubious connections to the antifa movement. So what gives?
Beginning in late September, three things kicked it a into higher gear. First, Refuse Fascism, a small group linked to the Revolutionary Communist party, staged a visually spectacular protest in Los Angeles. They blocked the 101 freeway and held up signs that enigmatically spelled out “Nov 4 it begins”. This is the same group that is organizing a series of protests around the country against the “Trump-Pence regime” this weekend.
Second, a video posted on a Facebook page called Vets Before Illegals went viral. The video, entitled “Antifa sets a date for civil war”, claimed that “on their website, they are calling for an open civil war that will start in November”, and set out alleged plans for attacking police officers, then citizens and the government.
Last, but by no means least, the rumor was picked up and amplified by Alex Jones, the radio star with an audience of millions. As Sunshine explains, Jones “is a kind of meta-conspiracy theorist now” who “harvests other people’s theories” and repackages them to fit his narratives and his audience.
Good old Alex"I never met a conspiracy theory I didn't like" Jones.
So helpful isn't he?
There was also a report from Gateway Pundit based on a bad joke written on a Twitter account, with no actual connection to the antifa movement, which claimed that on November 4th a leader of that movement promised to "behead white parents."
Now my first thought is that this is much ado about nothing , and that there will likely be NO actual armed conflicts or violence today. Especially since there do not seem to be many protests actually available for these wingnuts to flip out over.
However this could also be a dry run just to see now many people can be agitated in anticipation for a REAL call for violence against a larger antifa, or progressive protest.
That could easily result in a number of fatalities, which I would assume is the whole goal here.
I would also like to know if the Russians are involved in promoting this thing, since it sounds like it is right up their alley.
The major message to take away from all of this, is that people are incredibly high strung right now, and in all honesty it would only take a small spark to ignite a very real, and very dangerous civil war in this country.
It behooves all of us to watch our rhetoric and to make sure that while we are expressing our very reasonable anger and outrage, that we are not also giving others an excuse to turn to violence.
Bill O'Reilly, the former Fox News anchor, has been negotiating for a position with the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the nation's largest television-station owner, according to two sources familiar with the talks.
Sinclair, known for its conservative commentary, is continuing with the talks despite the sexual harassment cases that cost O'Reilly his job at Fox this year, the sources said. Last week, The New York Times reported that O’Reilly had settled a $32 million sexual harassment claim against him by a former legal analyst, Lis Wiehl. The sources said the news does not appear to have sidelined the talks.
"They took a pause but it didn't really change anything for them," one of the sources said.
If this Sinclair Broadcasting Group actually hires O'Reilly that will pretty much tell us all we need to know about them, and where their priorities lie.
Yes O'Reilly is a big name in conservative circles but it would mean that Sinclair was willing to establish a hostile working environment for their female employees just to get a marquee name on their team.
Lane had spent that Friday morning as he did most mornings, on the internet. This day, like the others, Lane read and retweeted posts celebrating the Second Amendment, bemoaning diversity, and spreading conspiracy theories that alleged Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta was involved in a child sex ring and DNC staffer Seth Rich had been murdered. It was the end of a busy week during which he contributed to the Donald Trump subreddit, and over on The Ralph Retort, a fringe blog where he worked as a political editor, (unpaid, according to the site’s owner), he had celebrated the idea of a Kid Rock Senate run, claimed America was under threat of Sharia law, and wondered whether CNN was “literally ISIS.”
Lane’s parents, Catherine and Charles Davis—Charles was known as Chuck to his friends—were used to their 33-year-old son’s outbursts. They had become so frequent that Charles had started recording the tirades on his phone. But that afternoon, they were tired of Lane’s screaming, wanted him to leave, and told him as much. Instead, Lane chased his parents around their home, spitting in his father’s face while screaming that he wasn’t threatening to kill them, but “pedophiles who were taking over the country.”
The Daily Beast has a copy of the 911 call and on it Lane Davis can be heard becoming increasingly upset that his mother called the police, calling them Leftists and pedophiles, and then he makes this chilling remark:
“OK well, so here’s the deal. If I am going to go to prison for threatening to kill somebody, I mean...”
“Leave the knife alone,” Charles says while his mother tries to reassure him: No one wants to send him to prison, they just want some help.
Lane doesn’t seem to hear or believe his mother. “So, you are going to send me to prison?” he asks. “My life is over.”
Minutes later the mother can be heard shouting "He stabbed him," and "He's dead, he's dead, he's dead."
For his part Lane Davis just stood outside with his hands in the air and waited for the police to arrive, while his 73 year old father was lying dead on the back deck.
You know we often talk about how Donald Trump empowers the racists in this country.
But there are other folks who feel that he gives them a voice as well.
The mentally ill for instance.
You see the problem with having somebody who clearly suffers from a mental illness in the White House is that it empowers and excites other mentally ill people into thinking that their time has finally come, and that there cannot be anything wrong with them since someone with similarly erratic and anti-social behaviors as their own is now sitting in the most powerful position in the country.
This is not just finding a like minded group on the internet who support the idea of going off of your psychotropic medications, or think that homicidal or suicidal thoughts are perfectly normal.
No this is much, much bigger.
Clearly this kid was sick, and he desperately needed a mental health evaluation.
But with his current mindset how could he ever accept that there was anything wrong with the way he thinks?
How do you convince an individual with serious mental health problems to seek help, when they see Donald Trump on TV every day walking around freely while seemingly well adjusted people run around doing damage control for him and working to keep him in power?
A former Republican political candidate in Indiana who authored a right-wing blog was arrested this week for allegedly mailing a pipe bomb and a threatening letter containing a bullet to two of his political opponents. The pipe bomb exploded at a post office, leaving a pregnant postal worker with “cuts, abrasions and bruises to her head, legs, and feet.”
Eric Krieg, a 45-year-old resident of the city of Munster, was charged with knowing possession of a destructive device and transporting explosive materials. He was arrested on Thursday after the FBI executed search warrants at his residence, his work and on his vehicle. The Justice Department put out a straightforward press release about Krieg’s arrest, but a FBI agent’s affidavit offered a lot more of an interesting backstory.
The package containing a pipe bomb that exploded at a post office in East Chicago, Indiana, on Sept. 6 had been addressed to an attorney who the feds labeled “Victim 1.” The lawyer had represented a person who filed a defamation lawsuit against Krieg that was settled for around $60,000, which led Krieg to declare bankruptcy, according to the feds.
The feds say Krieg was a blogger who went by the nickname “buzzcut” and wrote a blog, “Blue County in a Red State,” which is no longer active. The blog’s tagline said it was about “Life in the most corrupt county in America: Lake County, Indiana.” But Krieg, who was described by a local columnist as “the unofficial mud-thrower of the Lake County Republican Party,” has run for county council and as country surveyor in Lake County.
Look at this guy trying to give bloggers a bad name.
As for his also being a GOP candidate, well this is actually the kind of behavior I expect from that crew these days.
