Remember, Harry Truman had the Republicans' number almost 70 years ago.

"Republicans approve of the American farmer, but they are willing to help him go broke. They stand four-square for the American home — but not for housing. They are strong for labor — but they are stronger for restricting labor’s rights. They favor minimum wage — the smaller the minimum wage the better. They endorse educational opportunity for all — but they won’t spend money for teachers or for schools. They think modern medical care and hospitals are fine — for people who can afford them. They consider electrical power a great blessing — but only when the private power companies get their rake-off. They think American standard of living is a fine thing — so long as it doesn’t spread to all the people. And they admire of Government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it. Now, my friends, that is the Wall Street Republican way of life. But there is another way — there is another way — the Democratic way, the way of the Democratic Party." 

(Source.)

According to Snopes this is from a speech that President Truman gave back in 1948, but it could just as easily be given by a Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, or even Bernie Sanders today, and be just as timely.

The Democrats have had a powerful message for decades, and yet often we seem to be the worst people imaginable to actually deliver it to the American voters.

It is not so much our policies that need to change, but rather our ability to brag about how awesome they are for everyday people in this country.

Sarah Palin joins Info Wars and Russian media in spreading debunked conspiracy theory in order to distract attention away from Trump scandals. Update!

Palin's ghostwritten blog is just one of the many Right Wing outlets for fake news that are working together to spread this story.

Info Wars, the Washington Examiner, Breitbart, and Fox News are also doing their part.

This was the front page of Fox News for most of the day.

 And so is Russia Today.

This is a story that was promoted by the Right Wing during the election which states that this young, a DNC staffer working on getting out the vote, was killed by a Clinton hit team because he had incriminating information that could derail her campaign.

The story further states that the FBI has the young man's laptop with proof of thousands of e-mails he sent to Wikileaks.

Interestingly enough this story was first reported to have been circulating within the Kremlin, before finding it's way to the Right Wing blogs and news sites in America.

Nothing suspicious about that, right?

For the record Snopes debunked this story way back in July of last year.

And Seth Rich's family also came out today to deny the story's validity.

Here's full statement from Seth Rich's family: pic.twitter.com/qX52cHHQL6

— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) May 16, 2017

And just to top it off, this was what NBC News reported today:

Meanwhile, a current FBI official and a former one completely discount the Fox News claim that an FBI analysis of a computer belonging to Rich contained thousands of e-mails to and from WikiLeaks. 

Local police in Washington, D.C., never even gave the FBI Rich's laptop to analyze after his murder, according to the current FBI official. 

And a former law enforcement official with first-hand knowledge of Rich's laptop said the claim was incorrect. "It never contained any e-mails related to WikiLeaks, and the FBI never had it," the person said.

So this is who Sarah Palin is these days.

Just another Right Wing shit poster desperately trying to provide cover for a deeply flawed GOP president who is falling apart right before our eyes.

Believe it or not this is actually even several steps lower than I predicted she would fall oh those many years ago.

Update: Here is a report from CNN looking into the story and documenting how the whole thing fell apart under scrutiny.

Was there a 1958 western in which a character named Trump promised to build a wall to save people from the end of the world? Yep.

Courtesy of Snopes:  

The television series Trackdown really did produce an episode featuring a "Trump" character who came to town claiming that only he could prevent the end of the world by building a wall (and also sold special force propelling umbrellas to deflect meteorites). The episode (S1, E30) aired on CBS in 1958 and was titled "The End of the World," featuring actor Lawrence Dobkin playing the role of "Walter Trump." A synopsis of the episode from the Classic TV Archive reads as follows: 

Walter Trump, a confidence man, puts on a long robe and holds a tent meeting in the town of Talpa. He tells the townspeople that a cosmic explosion will rain fire on the town and that he is the only one that can save them from death. Ranger Hoby Gilman attempts to prove Trump is a fraud.

Every time I think this whole thing cannot get any more surreal, well you know the rest.

I am beginning to think that Donald Trump is nothing but a fictional character himself cobbled together from bits and pieces of television series, comic strips, and science fiction novels.

(BTW did you notice that the TV character was sporting Trump's actual hairline?)

Sarah Palin rails against fake news while citing an op-ed that she wrote herself. Update!

Courtesy of Simple Sarah's Facebook page: 

"If it's Monday, it's delete the press." 

As a victim of fake news for years now, I'm accustomed to waking up to headlines like these - false, fake & foolhardily written. Keep it up media! Really, please do. The more you attack, the more we win.

At this point Sarah Palin actually links to Snopes to prove that the story in the top right hand corner is fake. Snopes!

I did not even know that she knew how to find Snopes on the internet.

And Palin's point is valid. She has indeed been the focus of a number of fake news stories over the years.

Why not? After all the true stories about her are only a tiny bit more believable than the fake stories about her.

However having said that did you notice the story at the bottom left?

That story was based on the op-ed that Palin and her ghostwriter posted on a Right Wing news site, that was reported on by just about every news outlet in the country.

So color me confused. Is she complaining that SHE wrote fake news, or is she suggesting that everybody who covered it wrote fake news?

Because I read it and she most certainly DID refer to Trump's deal with Carrier as "crony capitalism."

So is she upset that the MSM reported accurately on what she wrote, or is she upset that she wrote it, or perhaps is her wig just a little too snug this morning and is cutting of the blood flow to her brain?

I'm not sure but that last one sounds like a pretty good subject for a fake news story if anybody wants to run with it.

Update: Even Glen Beck thinks that Palin is suffering some kind of brain damage.

Courtesy of Right Wing Watch:

Beck said that Palin’s fawning endorsement and sycophantic defense of Donald Trump during the campaign was “crazy,” but it is even more bizarre that once it was reported that she was possibly under consideration for the position of secretary of veterans affairs in Trump’s administration, she turned around and attacked Trump over his plan to prevent Carrier from moving a thousand jobs to Mexico. 

“Sincerely, has she had a brain aneurysm?” Beck asked his staff during his weekly “Think Tank” television program. “Because I don’t know what has happened to her.” 

Palin attacking Trump over the Carrier deal is absurd, Beck said, because “you own it, Sarah. You brought it to the table. He said he would do that!” 

Eventually, Beck and his staff concluded that perhaps Palin is lashing out at Trump because she is just “butt-hurt” over the fact that she may not get the V.A. secretary position.

You know when even Glenn Beck is asking if your brain is broken,  you might want to check to see if your brain is broken.

Reports say that Sarah Palin is under consideration to join Trump's cabinet as the Secretary of Veteran's Affairs. Update!

A source close to Sarah Palin tells NBC News fmr gov is interested in VA Secretary post, has been in touch w/ Trump transition team

— Alex Moe (@AlexNBCNews) November 30, 2016

Courtesy of The Hill: 

Palin was a strong supporter of the president-elect throughout his campaign. 

She endorsed the billionaire in January during his primary campaign, ahead of the Iowa state caucuses. 

Reports surfaced earlier this month that Palin was a possibility to head the Interior Department. 

Some lawmakers, however, questioned whether she would be up to speed on policy.

So is Palin up to speed on policies concerning the VA?

Of course not.

However she has a faux combat veteran son and an actual Medal of Honor winner for a son-in-law, so if she wants it she's a shoe in.

And since Trump seems to be choosing his cabinet based on how much damage they can each do to their prospective agencies, I have little doubt that he would gladly stick Palin into this position.

Don't think that the confirmation process will weed her out either, I cannot imagine the Democrats wasting too much of their time fighting this appointment when there are so many more troubling appointments to contend with.

Speaking of ole Dakota Meyer it appears that he might have been disinvited from a Marine Corps ball due to his vocal opposition to the Obama Administration: 

On Nov. 12, the Tribunist website reported that Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer (who is also the son-in-law of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin) had been invited to the Marine Corps’ 241st birthday celebration at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, but his invitation was revoked by the Obama administration (or, at least, by a U.S. ambassador) at the last minute for political reasons, Snopes.com reported. Due to security issues inside Afghanistan, the ball was to be held inside the embassy itself. 

“As arrangements were being finalized, however, the Medal of Honor recipient was told that he would not be able to come. Why? Because Meyer has been an outspoken critic of the Obama administration. 

“Ambassador P. Michael McKinley ordered his chief of mission to “look into” the Medal of Honor recipient and, based on the report he was given about Meyer’s political views, decided he would not allow Meyer to attend the ball inside the embassy.” 

Meyer told Snopes.com in a phone interview that “I was told he [McKinley] doesn’t like my position and comments on the administration, but those views are my right. Blocking access to the American embassy is his right as the ambassador.”

By the way Snopes says that this remains unproven, and it really does not sound like something the Obama Administration would condone, but none of that really doesn't matter because we are now in a new fact free reality it seems.

Besides with Donald Trump in the White House, and Sarah Palin heading up the VA, I am sure that Dakota will be allowed to attend any damn military ball, Right Wing kegger, or conservative frat party that he wants to attend.

Hoohah! (Or something like that.)

Update: Yep it looks like Palin's all in alright.

This nightmare is really never going to stop is it?

The Washington Post interviews Paul Horner, impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire about how easy it is to fool people these days.

Remember this?

Courtesy of the Washington Post:

On why it is easier to get fake news passed around than it was several years ago:  

Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.

On whether or not he thinks his fake news helped get Trump elected:

My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.

 Here is that ad. If it looks familiar it's because several trolls tried to pass it off as real here on IM as well.

On how easy it is to dupe Trump supporters:

I thought they’d fact-check it, and it’d make them look worse. I mean that’s how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it’s false, then they look like idiots. But Trump supporters — they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now he’s in the White House. Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels [bad].

On how great a Trump presidency will be for his fake news sites:  

It’s great for anybody who does anything with satire — there’s nothing you can’t write about now that people won’t believe. I can write the craziest thing about Trump, and people will believe it. I wrote a lot of crazy anti-Muslim stuff — like about Trump wanting to put badges on Muslims, or not allowing them in the airport, or making them stand in their own line — and people went along with it!

On how lucrative all of this is for him right now:  

Right now I make like $10,000 a month from AdSense.

Must be nice. I don't make anything even close to that.

I guess these days real news is just not as lucrative as fake news.

WaPo also has another story, about two guys who proudly call themselves "the new yellow journalists," and who also make a ton of money writing inflammatory false stories and shopping them to Facebook.

After reading these two articles, and then adding the Russian hacks, the Wikileaks data dumps, and the FBI putting their thumb on the scale, it is really not that surprising that Trump won the electoral college.

After all this was a perfect storm of stupid.

We thought that having so much information at our fingertips would improve people's ability to access facts, but instead we find that their lack of intelligence combined with laziness just makes many folks easy targets for propagandists, hoaxers, and shit posters who fill their heads with nonsense and confuse them on the difference between fact and fiction.

For his part Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg now says that he has a plan for filtering out the BS and only allowing REAL news outlets to post their stories, but how long will it be before these "yellow journalists" find their way around those new filters?

And ultimately is it kind of too late now that the worst outcome has already been realized?

The managing editor of Snopes thinks that the damage is likely irreparable: 

But as managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, Brooke Binkowski believes Facebook’s perpetuation of phony news is not to blame for our epidemic of misinformation. “It’s not social media that’s the problem,” she says emphatically. “People are looking for somebody to pick on. The alt-rights have been empowered and that’s not going to go away anytime soon. But they also have always been around.” 

The misinformation crisis, according to Binkowski, stems from something more pernicious. In the past, the sources of accurate information were recognizable enough that phony news was relatively easy for a discerning reader to identify and discredit. The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly. “When you’re on your fifth story of the day and there’s no editor because the editor’s been fired and there’s no fact checker so you have to Google it yourself and you don’t have access to any academic journals or anything like that, you will screw stories up,” she says.

If she's right and journalism has been tainted beyond repair than what does that mean for all of us moving forward?

That's a question for which I am not sure I want to know the answer.

Rush Limbaugh warns that fact checking is a "vehicle for them (Liberals) to do opinion journalism under the guise of fairness."

Courtesy of Dead State:  

“There is no fact-checking,” he declared. 

“The fact that The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and USA Today, and all these other papers and networks now have fact-checkers is for one reason. It allows them to fool you into thinking they have an objective, nonpartisan staff or person analyzing everything the candidates are saying, and telling you what they’re saying is true, or what they’re saying is false.” 

Limbaugh then basically admitted that reality does indeed have a liberal bias. 

“When in fact the fact-checkers are no different than the biased left-leaning reporters and columnists at these papers and on networks. But the fact-check, the idea that it is a fact-check story is designed to say to you that it is objective and analytically fair, and all it is, is a vehicle for them to do opinion journalism under the guise of fairness. Which, if you fall for it, gives it even more power, because if you think that the fact-checkers like PolitiFact or Snopes, or whoever else, if you quote them constantly as the Bible, well then you’ve fallen for it.”

To be clear this is a naked attempt to undermine fact checkers who have been making Donald Trump's life, and let's face the lives of a lot of GOP types, a living hell lately.

If you can smear the fact checkers are left wing operatives then truth becomes a matter of faith rather than a matter of fact.

Now you might be tempted to simply dismiss this by saying 'Come on Gryphen you know they idiots are allergic to facts. Why even bother to care that they think fact checkers are on Hillary's payroll?"

That is a valid point, and I would almost agree with you.

Except for this.

Courtesy of The Hill: 

Voters who like Donald Trump have doubts about the legitimacy of November's election, a new poll finds. 

Half of those who view Trump favorably say they have little or no confidence in the integrity of the election, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released Saturday. 

Only about one-third of the respondents who identified as Republican said that they have confidence in the vote count. 

"Trump has finally said something that that I've been thinking for years," one Trump supporter from Columbia, Mo. told the AP. "I don't think the votes have been counted properly for years. There's voter fraud and attempts to game the system. I don't trust it at all."

Now this is really where the rubber hits the road.

Because if after Hillary wins this election Donald Trump openly questions its validity we could have an honest to goodness civil war on our hands.

But even if it does not go that far you can bet the farm that when the 2018 midterms roll around that every former Trump supporter, Right Wing fanatic, and frustrated Republican is going to come out in force to "right the wrong" of the 2016 election by voting in a whole bunch of Teabagger types to sabotage every single thing that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats try to accomplish.

It will be the obstructionism that faced President Obama on steroids, and it will be VERY effective.

If facts no longer matter, if there is not at least one news source trusted by all sides of the political spectrum, then our ability to negotiate, inform, and correct misinformation will be lost completely.

There will no longer be anything called "truth," there will only be opinion, and the crevasse that now separates the Right from the Left will widen until we have our own version of the cold war right here within the United States of America.

Things that should never have to be addressed, the so-called "Clinton Body Count." But Snopes did it anyhow.

Damn, y'all are stupid. 

Courtesy of Snopes:

Multiple versions of lengthy lists of deaths associated with Bill Clinton have been circulating online for about twenty years now. According to those lists, close to fifty colleagues, advisors, and citizens who were about to testify against the Clintons died in suspect circumstances, with the unstated implication being that Bill Clinton or his henchmen were behind each untimely demise. 

We shouldn't have to tell anyone not to believe this claptrap, but we will anyway. In a frenzied media climate where the Chief Executive couldn't boff a White House intern without the whole world finding out every niggling detail of each encounter and demanding his removal from office, are we seriously to believe the same man had been having double handfuls of detractors and former friends murdered with impunity? 

Don't be swayed by the number of names listed on screeds like this. Any public figure is bound to have a much wider circle of acquaintance than an ordinary citizen would. Moreover, the acquaintanceship is often one-sided: though many of the people enumerated on this list might properly claim to have "known" Clinton, he wouldn't know or remember having met a great number of them. 

"Body count" lists are not a new phenomenon. Lists documenting all the allegedly "suspicious" deaths of persons connected with the assassination of John F. Kennedy have been circulating for decades, and the same techniques used to create and spread the JFK lists have been employed in the Clinton version.

As many of you know this bullshit story has turned up a couple of times in the comments here at IM.

It was literally so fucking stupid that I could not imagine that anybody would be ignorant or crazy enough to believe it.

But guess what, they are.

All you have to keep in mind is that the Clinton's have been under almost constant scrutiny for four decades, and that includes opposition research during campaigns, GOP investigations of Bill while in office, and of Hillary just recently over Benghazi and her e-mail server, to realize that if there were any truth to these allegations we would have read all about them on the front pages of every newspaper in the country.

In my opinion this is just another example of just how incredibly desperate the Right Wing is in finding ANYTHING they can use to stop Hillary from winning the presidency.

But if this is all they have, they better start getting used to saying "Madame President."

Donald Trump under fire for claiming that he saw "thousands and thousands" of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the 9-11 attacks. Spoiler alert: He didn't!

Courtesy of Business Insider:  

Donald Trump claims that "thousands" of people in New Jersey were "cheering" amid the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on US soil. 

In an interview on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, Trump doubled down on his assertion that he saw people in New Jersey — where the real-estate mogul claims there are "large Arab populations" — cheering as the World Trade Center came down. 

"There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down," Trump said on Sunday. "I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down — as those buildings came down. And that tells you something. It was well-covered at the time."

Well if you watched cable news yesterday you saw this "fact" refuted multiple times, by multiple sources:

Despite Trump's insistence that he saw such celebrations, political fact-checkers across the board have found little to no evidence of any public celebrations after the attacks. 

PolitiFact noted that there were several media reports of police inquiries into individuals who were suspected of celebrating the attacks in Jersey City and nearby Paterson, but there is no evidence that these investigations revealed any actual celebrations or resulted in any convictions. 

"This defies basic logic," PolitiFact's Lauren Carroll wrote in a "Pants on Fire" ruling.

When I first heard the story I immediately went to Snopes where conspiracy theories and bullshit lies are usually laid to rest.

Snopes did a deep dive, and really tried to get to the source of Trump's misinformation, which seemed to stem from early rumors after the towers fell, that turned out to be false. 

However not only does Trump seem impervious to facts, he is also demanded in apology from those calling him out on his BS.

Via @washingtonpost 9/18/01. I want an apology! Many people have tweeted that I am right! https://t.co/CpsMxs54qv pic.twitter.com/wrDEhXJlvR

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 23, 2015

You might notice that the portion which is quoted in the tweet above says the words "allegedly." That is because their was nothing to the allegations.

At this point I think we have to take notice of the fact that according to polling the three top contenders for the GOP nomination, Trump, Carson, and Cruz, are all habitual liars who seem to have a specific allergy to facts.

Not exactly good news for the Republican party.

Was Ben Carson lying about being witness to a robbery at a Popeye's Chicken? Do we really even have to ask?

Courtesy of Daily News Bin: 

Ben Carson claimed this week that he was once held at gunpoint at a Popeye’s chicken restaurant in Baltimore, and that he survived by telling the gunman to go focus on the cashier instead of himself. If that story isn’t disturbing enough on its face, the idea that he acted so selfishly and is now bragging about it, Carson may have another problem: the Baltimore Police Department says it can find no record of the supposed incident. 

While numerous Americans have been robbed at gunpoint at some point in their lives, Ben Carson has had a difficult time getting mainstream Americans to believe his story. The primary reason: he’s made so many absurd statements about everything from slavery to the Holocaust to magic cancer cures to his disbelief in gravity, that many are unsure whether anything he says can be taken at face value. That prompted the media to try to confirm his story.

In response to numerous questions from the media the Boston Police tweeted this:

Based on the information that #BenCarson mentioned, there was not enough info to identify a police report in reference to the incident.

— Baltimore Police (@BaltimorePolice) October 8, 2015

Of course that is not enough to call the man a liar, however take a look at what the Daily Beast uncovered: 

When The Daily Beast reached out to Carson’s “business manager” and central advisor, Armstrong Williams, he said that Carson had personally told him the story, and that it also appeared in Carson’s 2006 book, Take the Risk. 

There is no story about a stickup at Popeyes in Take the Risk. 

Gregg Lewis, a co-author of Take the Risk, told The Daily Beast that he and Carson never discussed the incident during his work on three autobiographies with the neurosurgeon.

Three autobiographies and NO mention of having a gun stuck in his ribs?

You know I have had some fairly interesting events happen in my life (I am not sure three autobiographies worth however.), and I am pretty sure that being involved in a stickup would probably rate inclusion in a conversation about the highs and lows.

Now of course none of this matters as Republican voters have demonstrated time and time again that they place little value on the truth. However for the rest of us, this is yet another example of the type of deeply flawed candidate that seems to impress the average conservative.

(Snopes has even more for those who are still on the fence.)

Ted Nugent posts video of black man striking another man, and claims it depicts slain teenager Michael Brown in attempt to smear his name and the Black Lives Matter movement.

So on Nugent's Facebook page you can find this video of a black man, purported to be Michale Brown, striking another man from behind and then beating him and robbing him. It is quite terrible to be sure.

Nugent reposted the above video and then added his own comments as well:  

ALL LIVES MATTER but not to devilscum. If black lives matter then let us pray that blacks stop killing raping & destroying their own. Soulless pathetic punks. Here's the gentle giant of Ferguson in action. The world is clealy better off without such vicious devils.

The problem of course is that the man in the video is NOT Michael Brown. Which Snopes made clear back in December of 2014.

Several of Nugent's own visitors also pointed out that it was not Michale Brown as well: 

Eric Burchfield That's not Mike Brown.

Steven Krueger Ted, I love ya brother..but this is not Mike Brown Keep it real by keeping it true brother

To which Nugent responded as follows:

Ted Nugent doesnt have to be mikey. devilpunks are all the same

Many of Nugent's supporters also did not seem to care who it depicted, the fact was that black people were thugs and therefore their lives don't matter:

Kort Kelley Michael Brown got what he deserved! 

Leah Benyo-Bell He was and is Fucking scum! One less asshole to worry about!! 

Chip Morgan Michael Brown was a low life punk...not because he was black but because he was a low life punk....he got what he deserved. 

Jonah Dosher Why can't we just hunt these animals? I feel worse for Cecil, and I don't think that was wrong. Lol 

Yeah see to Nugent and his racist supporters it really doesn't matter that this is not Michael Brown.

What matters is that it shows a black man violently assaulting another man, ipso facto Micheal Brown deserved to die.