The Washington Post creates plug in that automatically fact checks Trump tweets.

Courtesy of Ars Technica:  

In an apparent first for any American news outlet, the Washington Post released a Chrome plug-in on Friday designed to fact-check posts from a single Twitter account. Can you guess which one? 

The new "RealDonaldContext" plug-in for the Google Chrome browser, released by WaPo reporter Philip Bump, adds fact-check summaries to selected posts by President-elect Donald Trump. Users will need to click a post in The Donald's Twitter feed to see any fact-check information from the Washington Post, which appears as a gray text box beneath the tweet. 

With the extension installed, Trump's Twitter account now includes dozens of fact-check notes on any post with a statement that WaPo's editors deem inaccurate or misleading. In these cases, the added gray box includes a simple headline, a few explanatory sentences, and a link to a longer WaPo article that offers fuller context. Samples of the extension at work have been posted in the above gallery. 

The extension does not appear to offer context or statements in the case of a post being accurate, and Bump tells Ars Technica that the fact-checking has only gone back to late November. His announcement post about the extension claims that "our goal is to provide additional context where needed for Trump's tweets moving forward (and a few golden oldies)." 

You know I will probably get this simply because I want to support ALL efforts to fact check Trump.

However I have to admit that my go to position on most Trump tweets is that they are bullshit until I hear otherwise from trusted news outlets. 

So far that has worked pretty damn well.

Actor Michael Sheen abandons his profession, and his life, to fight fascism full time. And in doing so shames us all.

Courtesy of the Independent:  

Michael Sheen is so disturbed by the rise of far-right populism he is quitting acting to become an activist, and says he does not know if his relationship with Sarah Silverman will survive. 

Sheen will leave Silverman, his partner of two years, and family in Los Angeles and move to Port Talbot in south Wales to combat the wave of “demagogic, fascistic” politics he believes has engulfed the West in the past decade. 

He told The Times: “In the same way as the Nazis had to be stopped in Germany in the Thirties, this thing that is on the rise has to be stopped. 

 “It’s not going to look like this in 10 years’ time. Everything has shifted. The dice are being rolled again.” 

His steel-making hometown, population 37,000, voted for Brexit and the Welsh actor says his frustration at this has formed, in part, the impetus for his decision to begin his activism back where he began. His fears were exacerbated by the ascension of Donald Trump and the tensions stoked by his divisive rhetoric. 

You know I would like to think that the hours that I put in on this blog have some meaning, and that I am doing my part to fight the good fight and push back on the fascism that we see invading our country. (And let's not bother lying to ourselves to say that fascism is not coming, because we are already seeing it in North Carolina.)

But truth be told I am not sacrificing nearly as much as I should, and neither are most of us.

Make no mistake, despite interference by James Comey, and hacking by the Russians, American voters are ultimately responsible for casting the votes that helped Trump win the electoral college.

Even if we assume that some voting machines were hacked the election still has to be close enough for that to matter.

So We the People are ultimately responsible for helping to usher in fascism and for defying the will of the Founding Fathers.

To rectify that, to save what is left of our republic, we need to rise up and fight.

No, I am not suggesting that we start shooting each other in the streets, or plan assaults against Washington, I am suggesting that we fight back with the same tools used to cripple us in the first place.

If fake news and Right Wing propaganda got us here in 2016 then real information and Left Wing fact checkers can steer us back to where we need to be in 2017.

For starters if you are a Facebook fan of this blog then promote it to all of your friends and family every single day. Or if you are more comfortable with Twitter than by all means use that.

And no not just this blog, but every blog and news site that is working to get information out to the masses.

If we want to make real change, if we want to rescue this nation that we love so much, we must be ready to irritate, frustrate, and ultimately educate the people we love until they see the reality of what is happening in the world.

We should present a deafening roar of facts and figures, a cacophony containing compilations of vital statistics, a constant drumbeat that shatters any illusion that this is business as usual and awakens people to the danger we face as a nation.

I know we cannot all just up and quit our jobs to make activism a full time occupation, but I also know we can always do more.

And truly what ultimately is more important than our future, the future of our families, and the future of this great country?

Google is going to cut off revenue streams to sites that promote fake news.

An example of a fake news item that showed up on Google.

Courtesy of The Verge: 

Today, Google announced that its advertising tools will soon be closed to websites that promote fake news, a policy that could cut off revenue streams for publications that peddle hoaxes on platforms like Facebook. The decision comes at a critical time for the tech industry, whose key players have come under fire for not taking necessary steps to prevent fake news from proliferating across the web during the 2016 US election. It’s thought that, given the viral aspects of fake news, social networks and search engines were gamed by partisan bad actors intending to influence the outcome of the race.

Gee ya think?

You may also remember that last month Google announced that it was going to try and help users filter out fake news stories.

Though apparently that has not really kicked in yet.

In other news it turns out that Facebook may have a way of filtering out fake news stories but is not using it for fear of upsetting its conservative users.

Courtesy of Gizmodo: 

Gizmodo has learned that the company is, in fact, concerned about the issue, and has been having a high-level internal debate since May about how the network approaches its role as the largest news distributor in the US. The debate includes questions over whether the social network has a duty to prevent misinformation from spreading to the 44 percent of Americans who get their news from the social network. 

According to two sources with direct knowledge of the company’s decision-making, Facebook executives conducted a wide-ranging review of products and policies earlier this year, with the goal of eliminating any appearance of political bias. One source said high-ranking officials were briefed on a planned News Feed update that would have identified fake or hoax news stories, but disproportionately impacted right-wing news sites by downgrading or removing that content from people’s feeds. According to the source, the update was shelved and never released to the public. It’s unclear if the update had other deficiencies that caused it to be scrubbed. 

“They absolutely have the tools to shut down fake news,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous citing fear of retribution from the company. The source added, “there was a lot of fear about upsetting conservatives after Trending Topics,” and that “a lot of product decisions got caught up in that.”

So in other words Facebook may have helped elect an unqualified megalomaniac because they feared offending thin skinned conservatives with the truth.

Jesus H. Christ!

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.

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.

So you just know this is how Fox News is feeling after Thursday night's finale.

I know that Roger Ailes is quoted as saying that the Daily Show "Never made a dent in us."

But I think that the evidence suggests that he did far more than simply make a dent.

He convinced his audience to look at Fox through a skeptical lens, and to fact check the snot out of them.

I actually think that Fox News played even more clips of Stewart on their programs than he played of the stupid things Fox News said on his. 

And it wasn't just that the Daily Show fearlessly attacked the conservative cable news giant, it was that Stephen Colbert followed suit, as did the Tonight Show, Conan, Jimmy Kimmel, other cable news programs, blogs, etc., etc., etc.

And just because Jon Stewart is no longer on the front lines leading the charge, does not mean that the war is over by any stretch of the imagination.