Proof of Fox’s Hypocrisy, Update on Turkey

Fourteen months ago, the media reported how the picture Fox painted of “patriots” at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, didn’t match private texts about the event. Three Fox hosts—Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham—were frightened that the rioting, clearly shown all day on television, would hurt the legacy of Dictator Donald Trump (DDT). They begged his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to stop the riots causing deaths and injuries. Fox & Friends’ Brian Kilmeade texted pleas to stop the destruction of everything DDT “accomplished.” The news came out during the last public hearing of the House January 6 investigative committee when they voted to recommend charges against DDT. Fox didn’t air the hearing, and Hannity didn’t ask Meadows, his guest that night about the texts. So much for Fox’s “fair and balanced” claim.

Fast forward 26 months and the public is discovering much more from depositions for the Dominion defamation lawsuit admitting Fox knew their support of DDT’s conspiracies were lies. After DDT’s supporters attacked the Capitol, DDT tried to call Fox, but the network wouldn’t put him on air because “it would be irresponsible to put him on the air” and “could impact a lot of people in a negative way,” according to testimony by Fox Business Network President Lauren Petterson. On the evening of January 6, Carlson texted his producer calling Trump “a demonic force. A destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us.”

Privately, Fox’s most prominent stars and highest-ranking executives ridiculed MAGA’s claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, but on air the network publicly pushed the lies. In March 2021, Dominion filed a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox, stating that the network “recklessly disregarded the truth” during the election and pushed pro-DDT conspiracy theories about the election technology company because “the lies were good for Fox’s business.” Following is testimony from the depositions:

Tucker Carlson texted Ingraham that Sidney Powell, one of DDT’s attorneys, was “lying” and that he had “caught her” doing so. Carlson also called Powell an “unguided missile,” and “dangerous as hell.”

Ingraham responded, “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy [Giuliani].”

A week after the presidential election, Carlson told his producer that it had been a “mistake” to not present DDT’s voter fraud claims but acknowledged, “I just hate this shit.” Three days later, Carlson wrote that he wanted DDT to concede the election and that “there wasn’t enough fraud to change the outcome.”

Six days after Biden was inaugurated, Pillow guy Mike Lindell was on Carlson’s show to talk about “new machine election fraud” and claim that Dominion “hired hit groups of bots and trolls” to have him “cancelled.” Lindell added he “found” “the machine fraud” and had “all the evidence” about “Dominion” without Carlson disagreeing or asking questions; Carlson finished the show by saying “God Bless You.”

Sean Hannity said “that whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second.”

Just days after the election, Bret Baier, the network’s chief political anchor texted a friend, “[T]here is NO evidence of fraud. None. Allegations – stories. Twitter. Bulls—.”

Off the air, the network’s stars, producers and executives called the conspiracies “mind-blowingly nuts,” “totally off the rails,” and “completely bs”—or more graphic terms.

Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, did not believe Trump’s election lies and even floated the idea of having Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham appear together in prime time to declare Joe Biden as the rightful winner of the election. Murdoch said doing this “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen.” But Fox was in trouble with right-wing viewers because it had accurately called the election for Biden.

Weeks after the election, Murdoch emailed, “Really crazy stuff. And damaging” about the claims that DDT’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani was making on Fox.

Fox admitted Hannity and Lou Dobbs’ shows did not “challenge the narrative” that Dominion was responsible for rigging the election or producing inaccurate results. Soon after the insurrection, Fox cancelled Lou Dobbs’ show which he used to promote false conspiracies about the 2020 election. A month after the insurrection, Fox cancelled Dobbs’ show but said it had nothing to do with Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion lawsuit against him.  

The most recent filing from Dominion is a motion for summary judgment on liability. It asks the judge in Delaware to rule based on evidence and material facts that a trial is not needed but wouldn’t settle damages. Dominion sells electronic voting hardware and software. Fox both denied Dominion’s claims and insisted it is “proud” of its 2020 election coverage.

The judge ruled that he considers Dominion to be a public figure in the defamation claims, meaning the company must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Fox defendants acted with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth. Two weeks after the election, Carlson told Ingraham that he personally found MAGA lies “unbelievably offensive,” but added, “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.” Matt Gertz wrote:

“It establishes definitively that at least in some cases, Fox hosts are knowingly deceiving their viewers because they think that is what the viewers want.”

Sean Hannity tried to get a Fox employer fired for accurately fact-checking a false DDT tweet about Dominion changing the vote totals because, as Carlson said, such content was “measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down.” On his program Carlson did note that Powell hadn’t provided evidence for claiming Dominion stole the election for Joe Biden, but off screen, he called her claims “absurd” and insane.” With its role to confirm what its right-wing viewers already believe, Fox is a propaganda outlet, not a news outlet. Carlson supported the election fraud lies by asking how Biden received “15 million more votes than his former boss Obama.”

Twelve days—296 hours—after the disastrous 7.8 earthquake hitting Turkey and Syria, a couple was rescued alive from under a collapsed apartment building, but over 46,000 people have died. Many others are still missing, and 264,000 apartments in Turkey were destroyed. Although almost 6,000 of the dead were discovered in northwestern Syria, 95 percent of the rebel-held region has not yet been searched because search and rescue teams are not able to enter. The remaining five percent was searched by volunteers and local organizations. In the impacted region, relentlessly bombed by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, Russia, and Iran-backed militias, 90 percent of the 4.4 million people live on humanitarian aid, many of them displaced by the conflict.  

In neighboring Turkey, 15,000 or 19,000 collapsed buildings were inspected a week after the disaster. Government teams inspected 1.85 million homes and offices in 369,000 buildings in the earthquake’s epicenter.

The upcoming president election is less than three months away, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may struggle with relection after being in office for 20 years with emergence of damaging videos in which he is seen praising some of the housing projects that killed people when they crumbled. In the 2019 videos, Erdogan is seen bragging about solving housing problems “with zoning amnesty,” meaning that he allowed contractors to ignore safety codes designed to create apartments, housing, and other buildings resistant to earthquakes. According to experts, his “amnesty” caused the huge death toll. A senior Istanbul city official listed over 40,000 amnesty certificates in the hard-hit Gaziantep province. Builders might have to pay a fine for the certificates, but they could proceed without meeting code restrictions. In 2013, on the anniversary of the 1999 earthquake killing over 17,000 people, Erdogan tweeted:

“Buildings kill, not earthquakes. We need to learn to live with earthquakes and take measures accordingly.”

Rebuilding in Turkey may cost up to $100 billion to restore one million plus buildings. Half of the 3.4 million buildings in the affected region of southern Turkey may need to be demolished, said Eyüp Muhçu, head of the architects’ chamber at the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects. Infrastructure and public facilities must also be built, and 13 million people may be affected in Turkey’s hardest hit areas where residential properties, schools, hospitals, commercial buildings, airports, mosques, and other places of worship will all need to be either fixed or rebuilt. Vital infrastructure such as motorways and underground pipes has also been demolished.

Tiziana Rossetto, professor of earthquake engineering at University College London. said buildings damaged in natural disasters fit into one of three categories: totally ruined, fixable, and liveable. Erdogan promised “complete construction and recovery within a year,” but authorities disagree. Sara Shneiderman, a professor at the University of British Columbia who studied how Nepal recovered after its 2015 quake, called a timeline of 12-months “fanciful . . . reconstruction is a multiyear process” while Rossetto said it was “completely unrealistic.”

Erdogen’s big problem is where to get the money to rebuild because Turkey is short on funds. He will need foreign investors who are avoiding Turkey because Erdogen has failed to fight inflation by drastically cutting interest rates. At the time of the quake, the annual rate had dropped from 85 percent to 58 percent, and economists agree that Turkey’s economy will stall in the coming year.

Richardson Writes about Mulvaney, CBS

People say they watch Fox network because the mainstream media are too “liberal” for them. Now they can watch Mick Mulvaney on CBS, thanks to the co-president of its news division, Neeraj Khemlani. His goal is access to Republicans because they are going to win in the midterms. CBS “news” helped elected Donald Trump in 2016 and may move the GOP back into leadership this year. Following is the take on this move by scholar Heather Cox Richardson in her blog, “Letters from an American,” on March 30, 2022. You can subscribe to her posts here. 

CBS News has hired Mick Mulvaney as a paid on-air contributor. In his first official appearance on Tuesday morning to talk about President Joe Biden’s budget proposal, anchor Anne-Marie Green introduced Mulvaney as “a former Office of Management and Budget director,” and said, “So happy to have you here…. You’re the guy to ask about this.”

Mulvaney was a far-right U.S. representative from South Carolina from 2011 to 2017, when he went to work for then-president Trump as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. While in that position, he also took over as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the government organization organized by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) after the financial crisis of 2008. In its first five years, the CFPB recovered about $11.7 billion for about 27 million consumers, but in Congress, Mulvaney introduced legislation to abolish it. At its head, Mulvaney zeroed out the bureau’s budget and did his best to dismantle it.

While retaining his role at the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Mulvaney took on the job of acting White House chief of staff on January 2, 2019. This unprecedented dual role put him in a key place to do an end run around official U.S. diplomats in Ukraine and to set up a back channel to put pressure on newly elected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce he was launching an investigation into the actions of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

As director of OMB, Mulvaney okayed the withholding of almost $400 million Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s protection against Russia. In May 2019, he set up “the three amigos,” Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, special envoy Kurt Volker, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, to pressure Zelensky. When the story came out, Mulvaney told the press that Trump had indeed withheld the money to pressure Zelensky to help him cheat in the 2020 election. “I have news for everybody,” he said. “Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.” He immediately walked the story back, but there it was.

This event was the basis for Trump’s first impeachment. While Republican senators refused to hold Trump accountable, the Government Accountability Office found that withholding the money was illegal. Ironically, the GAO report came out during Trump’s second impeachment.

And yet, CBS News hired Mulvaney and simply introduced him as a former director of the OMB, saying he was the guy to explain Biden’s budget. (After the episode, the CBS News standards department reminded staffers they should always identify people with their relevant biographical information.)

Jeremy Barr of the Washington Post tonight revealed that he had reviewed a recording of a phone call in which the co-president of CBS News, Neeraj Khemlani, suggested they had hired Mulvaney to guarantee access to Republican lawmakers. “If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” Khemlani told staff. “A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”

People on the right have talked about a “liberal media” now for a generation. It has come to represent the idea that the media is slanted toward the Democrats. But initially, the phrase meant media based in facts.

In the 1950s, those eager to get rid of the government system instituted by the Democrats during the Great Depression of the 1930s grew frustrated because people liked that system, with its business regulation, basic social safety net, and promotion of infrastructure. In 1951, in God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” William F. Buckley, Jr., rejected the Enlightenment idea that rigorous debate over facts would lead toward truth; the fondness of a majority of Republicans and Democrats for the newly active national government proved people could not be trusted to know what was best for them. Instead, he called for the exclusion of “bad” ideas like an active government, and for universities to push individualism and Christianity.

Three years later, Buckley and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, Jr., would divide the world into “Liberals,” by which they meant the majority of Americans from both parties who liked the New Deal government, and “Conservatives” like themselves, who were determined to overturn that government. Movement Conservatives lumped Soviet-style socialism and the New Deal government together.

With its focus on facts, the media, like the universities, was “liberal,” and Movement Conservatives wanted their ideology to be heard. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission killed the Fairness Doctrine, which had required public media to present issues fairly, and right-wing talk radio took off. In 1996, Australian-born Rupert Murdoch started the Fox News Channel, calling it “fair and balanced” because it presented the Movement Conservative ideology that fact-based media ignored.

Twenty-five years later, that ideology had become so powerful that true believers tried to stop a legitimately elected Democrat from becoming president, and in the year since, their conviction has only become stronger. Now CBS News has hired a member of the administration that urged the attack on our democracy.

“When, oh Lord, when will the elite political media treat the current Republican Party as the threat to the republic that it most obviously is?” asked Charlie Pierce in Esquire.

Here’s what’s at stake: On the one hand, Biden is trying to rebuild the old liberal consensus that used to be shared by people of both parties, instituted by Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt to protect workers from the overreach of their employers and expanded under Republican Dwight Eisenhower to protect civil rights. To this, Biden has focused on those previously marginalized and has added a focus on women and children.

Biden’s new budget, released earlier this week, calls for investment in U.S. families, communities, and infrastructure, the same principles on which the economy has boomed for the past year. The budget also promotes fiscal responsibility by rolling back Trump’s tax cuts on the very wealthy. Biden’s signature yesterday on the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making lynching a federal hate crime in the United States, is the culmination of more than 100 years of work. [Note: These GOP House members voted against the bill, may supporting lynching: Andrew Clyde (GA), Thomas Massie (KY), and Chip Roy (TX).]

Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken are defending democracy against authoritarianism, working to bring together allies around the globe to resist the aggression of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

On the other hand, the Republican Party is working to get rid of the New Deal government. While Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wanted to face the midterms without a platform, Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), who chairs the committee responsible for electing Republican senators, has produced an “11-point plan to rescue America.” It dramatically raises taxes on people who earn less than $100,000, and ends Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.

With a 6 to 3 majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans have also taken aim at abortion rights and are now talking about ending other civil rights protected by the federal government after 1950: the right to birth control, interracial marriage, and same-sex marriage.

The Republicans have sided with authoritarianism as they back former president Trump and his supporters, over 2,000 of whom stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. This week, federal judge David Carter wrote that it was “more likely than not” that Trump committed a federal crime when he encouraged the attack, and yesterday we learned that there are more than 7 hours of phone records missing from the official White House logs of that day. At The Guardian, Hugo Lowell today reported that Trump made at least one call from the White House that day that should have been on the logs and was not, opening up the possibility that Trump’s people tampered with the phone records.

And while Putin has launched a war of invasion on our democratic ally Ukraine, just yesterday, Trump asked Putin to help him dig up dirt on a political rival, just as he did in 2016.

Voters cannot choose wisely between these two paths unless their news is based in facts. Earlier this week, fact triumphed over ideology on the Fox News Channel, when anchor John Roberts noted that Senator Rick Scott’s 2022 Republican platform calls for raising taxes on most Americans and ending Social Security. Scott said that Roberts was using “a Democrat talking point.” But Roberts stood firm on facts: “It’s in the plan!” he said. “It’s not a Democratic talking point. It’s in the plan!”

 

 

 

‘We’ve Lost the War for Truth’

Yesterday at least 100 people died, 4.000 were injured, and 250,000 were left homeless in Beirut (Lebanon) from an explosion of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, primarily used as an agricultural fertilizer. Prime Minister Hassan Diab said the unsecured chemical storage had been unsupervised after it had been taken in 2014 from a leaky Russian ship making an unscheduled stop at Beirut where it was abandoned. At the beginning of his press briefing (aka campaign speech), Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) started a conspiracy theory by calling the tragedy a “terrible attack” with no evidence. DDT’s own officials won’t confirm DDT’s theory, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the explosion was likely an accident, and the U.S. is not increasing protections for U.S. troops in the region. A welder working nearby may have caused a fire behind the disaster that killed less than ten percent of the people who daily die in the U.S. from COVID-19.  [visual – Beirut]

That’s how conspiracy theories start: an irresponsible person makes a comment, and conservatives glom onto it for their personal advantage. Current conspiracy theories, especially those about COVID-19, are killing people. While other countries are closer to controlling COVID-19, the U.S. gets worse and worse as conservative media infect the nation with lies and lunacy. Former presidential candidate Herman Cain, who didn’t believe masks were of any use against COVID-19, was tested positive nine days after he attended DDT’s Tulsa (OK) campaign rally where he wore no mask and sat close to the people next to him. Before Cain announced his diagnosis on July 2, he praised DDT for not mandating masks at the July 3 Mt. Rushmore event. He tweeted, “PEOPLE ARE FED UP!” Cain spent most of July in a hospital and died on July 30 from COVID-19.

Just last week:

Saturday: Ultra far-right Sinclair Broadcasting, requiring its outlets to run pro-DDT commentary and reaching 40 percent of the U.S. through 200 stations including the ABC outlet in Portland (OR), interviewed conspiracy theorist Judy Mikovits about her belief that infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci had created COVID-19 in a lab from a monkey and “shipped the cell lines to Wuhan, China.” Social media banned a video featuring her because of its dangerously falsehoods such as keeping beaches open for the “healing microbes” in the water. Mikovits also accused Fauci of ordering a murder as “part of a cover-up burying Mikovits’ research.” Interviewer Eric Bolling made no attempt to refute her false assertions other than calling them “hefty.” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) has promoted her in a House hearing as an expert on the virus. Sinclair decided to “delay” the episode’s airing but received a great deal of attention on the interview with no correction, including on Bolling’s Facebook page where it was viewed thousands of times before being pulled.

Monday: DDT retweeted a video from so-called doctors asserting masks are unnecessary and pronouncing hydroxychloroquine a “cure for COVID.” It features Dr. Stella Immanuel who purports that “reptilians” and other aliens run the government as well as claiming that having sex with demons can cause illnesses like cysts and endometriosis. According to Immanuel, space alien DNA is used in medical treatments, and scientists are developing a vaccine to keep people from being religious. DDT retweeted Immanuel’s recommendation of using hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19.  [visual Misinformation]

Tuesday: Twitter temporarily suspended accounts of Donald Trump, Jr. and Kelli Ward, former doctor and the chair of the Arizona GOP, for sharing the Immanuel video, and DDT defended her at his press conference (aka campaign rally). Asked about his approval and recommendations of her, DDT said, “I thought she was very impressive … but I don’t know anything about her.”

Wednesday: Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), a Fox favorite who tested positive for the virus, is so doubtful about transmitting the disease that he insisted on telling his staffers in person inside the House’s office building had “berated” his staff for wearing masks, according to one of his aides. He blamed wearing a mask for his infection.

For the first time ever, Facebook has deleted DDT’s misinformation about COVID-19, a clip from an interview with Fox network in which DDT said that children have almost complete immunity to the virus. FB stated the post contained “harmful Covid misinformation,” and U.S. public health advice stated that children have no immunity. Twitter froze the @TeamTrump account until the same posting, “in violation of the Twitter Rules on COVID-19 misinformation,” was removed.

Facebook is likely to include DDT’s campaign misinformation: its fact-checker is Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller, which also works for GOP campaigns and publishes false stories and content written by white supremacists.

QAnon is one of the most dangerous conspiracy theory groups, and DDT has retweeted at least 90 times from 49 QAnon accounts in the few months since the beginning of the pandemic. He has moved his fringe base into the mainstream with their beliefs that he is trying to take down the Satanist, child-trafficking “deep state.” Desperate for voters, DDT panders to this group of extremists.

In Tuesday’s Arizona primary, Daniel Wood became the 16^th QAnon candidate for Congress, facing incumbent Rep. Raúl Grijalva in the 3rd Congressional District. The FBI has listed QAnon under “conspiracy theory-driven extremists.” Michael Flynn has started using QAnon slogans. Lauren Beobert, QAnon GOP candidate for Colorado’s the 3rd Congressional District, refused to shut down her bar to dine-in patrons until the courts forced her to do it. [Left: Boebert speaking at a watch-party on the night of her winning primary.] Other states have QAnon congressional candidates: Illinois (2); California (5), New Jersey (1); Florida (1); Oregon (1); Georgia (2); Ohio (1); and Texas (1).  Media Matters found almost 60 congressional candidates who follow some QAnon beliefs.

Jo Rae Perkins, running for the U.S. senate, wanted martial law in Oregon two months ago to fight the nonexistent antifa activists bused to rural towns such as Klamath Falls and Bend after the fake anti-Semitic news about George Soros paying them to destroy the towns. Only crowds of heavily armed white supremacists showed up. She also prayed to God for his “warring angels to protect the cities.”

People who get their news from social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are more likely to believe false theories about the virus and avoid remedial practices such as social distancing and mask wearing. They also tend to be more ignorant and misinformed than people who use sources of print, news websites, or network television.

DDT uses social media in his war on traditional media to sow confusion and chaos. In The Atlantic, McKay Coppins cites work from political theorist Hannah Arendt who warned “totalitarian leaders are able to instill in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” DDT is killing people with misinformation; with COVID-19, most Republicans have lost their grip on reality. 

A mid-July study shows Fox network spreading misinformation about COVID-19 253 times in five days. In 115 times, hosts and speakers challenged scientific consensus and undermined official government recommendations. Part of the misinformation was to push reopening businesses and schools—over 12 times per Laura Ingraham show on Primetime for a total of 63 times. Fox & Friends came in second place with 45 instances; Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight almost tied for third with 21 and 20 instances.  One-third came from “news” programs led by Martha MacCallum’s The Story with 20 claims. Remember this all happened in five days. The network politicized the pandemic with 51 claims that regulations requiring masks and closing businesses were rooted in politics.

According to studies, the wider the audience for Sean Hannity, the higher the rates of infections and deaths from COVID-19. Hannity watchers had 32 percent more cases on March 14 and 23 percent more on March 28 than Tucker Carlson watchers who warned about dangers of the virus in early February.

Margaret Sullivan writes about DDT’s promoting Stella Immanuel and hydroxychloroquine in “This was the week America lost the war on misinformation”:

“America has waved the white flag and surrendered… We’ve not only lost the public-health war, we’ve lost the war for truth. Misinformation and lies have captured the castle. And the bad guys’ most powerful weapon? Social media—in particular, Facebook…

“A low point, certainly, in a long series of them over the past few year—all happening even as congressional Republicans tried to turn Wednesday’s appearance by four titans of tech at a landmark antitrust hearing into a politicized rant about how social media doesn’t give conservatives a fair shot.

“This is patently untrue, also.”

Sullivan repeated Arendt’s quote in Coppins’ Atlantic article in her conclusion:

“People are conditioned to ‘believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.’ And then such leaders can do pretty much whatever they wish.

“We should be afraid.”

August 5: U.S. COVID-19 cases – 4,973,568; deaths – 161,601.

Take Press Briefings off the Air

Bored while you “shelter-in-place”? Start a blog. That’s what Margaret and Helen did 13 years ago, and they’re still going strong.

The Elephant in the Room is Donald J Trump: Stop asking him the questions. He doesn’t know the answers! #COVID19

“Margaret, I get it. I really do. We are in the middle of a pandemic. Everyone is scared and things are a bit crazy. Of course, the President should address the American people. Of course, he should. But just not this one. It’s not helping. It really isn’t.

“There is nothing decent about this man. He has cheated on all three of his wives. His career is filled with lawsuits, bankruptcies, claims of racism, tax evasion, discrimination, even rape. Nothing. Nothing about this man is honorable much less tolerable. His only claim to fame is taking joy in firing people on national television.

“How he became President I’ll never understand, but he did. And since becoming President over three years ago, he’s proven time and time again that he is pretty horrible at his job. In fact, if I were his boss, I’d fire him. I mean when he fabricated stories about the size of his inauguration, I would have just rolled my eyes and wondered if I had hired the wrong person. When he threw paper towels at hurricane victims, I probably would have at least sat him down. Told him he was out of line. Maybe written him up and given him a warning. But when he suggested that Nazi’s running over a woman with a car should be given some slack because they might be very fine people… well then… then, I would have fired his ass.

“But I’m not his boss… well technically I guess I am, but you know… Representative government and all. So, he’s still there and now there’s this pandemic and for some reason he insists on crawling out of his drug induced coma each day at 11:30 to address the American people. And even though he is surrounded by a bunch of experts, the media keeps asking him the questions. The fact that he constantly makes shit up doesn’t seem to stop them. They keep asking questions and he’s keeps making shit up.

“I’ve got a suggestion. How about we stop asking the elephant in the room questions and instead direct them to the experts standing behind him? What do they say, fool me once? Well he’s fooled them about 15,000 times and they just keep asking. Stop asking the asshat questions! Ask the experts. After all, millions of lives depend on the answers being correct.

“And let’s be clear. When I say expert, I don’t mean Mike Pence. His version of social distancing is to quarantine in Trump’s ass. And somehow from inside Trump’s ass he still manages to pat Trump on the back while simultaneously giving him a standing ovation. No. Mike Pence is the expert in one thing and one thing only – brown nosing. I’m talking Dr. Anthony Fauci or Dr. Deborah Birx or even that Chad guy. Who is Chad again?

“We need answers. We need them desperately. Millions of lives are depending on those answers. I am begging the White House Press Corps to stop asking Trump the fucking questions.

“We need answers. Not lies. Really. I mean it.”

Rachel Maddow goes farther than Margaret by asking that the media broadcast only truthful comments from Dictator Donald Trump (DDT). (It would be very brief.)  Even in past crises, Maddow provided a fact-based perspective on the news, but she expressed this opinion about the lethal covid-19 crisis:

“Even when [DDT is] talking about what he has done or what he will do, he’s consistently lying and giving you happy talk that is stuff that the federal government isn’t actually doing. And it’s making people around the country count on the fact the federal government is doing that stuff when they’re not. If it were up to me and it’s not, I would stop putting those briefings on live TV. Not out of spite but because it’s misinformation. If the president does end up saying anything true, you can run it as tape. But if he keeps lying like he has been every day on stuff this important, all of us should stop broadcasting it. Honestly, it’s going to cost lives. Honestly, it’s going to cost lives.”

DDT can no longer use rallies to attract followers so he uses the daily press briefings for this purpose. When he’s not spouting generalities with no statistics or other specifics, he’s lying and ranting against anyone who opposes him. The people he calls to speak also avoid any clear information such as number of people testing, amount of supplies, and any assistance for states.

In the WaPo, Margaret Sullivan echoed Maddow’s message.

“More and more each day, President Trump is using his daily briefings as a substitute for the campaign rallies that have been forced into extinction by the spread of the novel coronavirus.

“These White House sessions—ostensibly meant to give the public critical and truthful information about this frightening crisis—are in fact working against that end.

“Rather, they have become a daily stage for Trump to play his greatest hits to captive audience members. They come in search of life-or-death information, but here’s what they get from him instead:

“● Self-aggrandizement. When asked how he would grade his response to the crisis, the president said, “I’d rate it a 10.” Absurd on its face, of course, but effective enough as blatant propaganda

“● Media-bashing. When NBC News’s Peter Alexander lobbed him a softball question in Friday’s briefing — “What do you say to Americans who are scared?” — Trump went on a bizarre attack. “I say, you’re a terrible reporter,” the president said, launching into one of his trademark “fake news” rants bashing Alexander’s employer….

“● Exaggeration and outright lies. Trump has claimed that there are plenty of tests available (there aren’t); that Google is “very quickly” rolling out a nationwide website to help manage coronavirus treatment (the tech giant was blindsided by the premature claim); that the drug chloroquine, approved to treat malaria, is a promising cure for the virus and “we’re going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately.” (It hasn’t been approved for this use, and there is no evidence to demonstrate its effectiveness in fighting the virus.)

“Trump is doing harm and spreading misinformation while working for his own partisan political benefit—a naked attempt to portray himself as a wartime president bravely leading the nation through a tumultuous time, the FDR of the 21st century.

“The press—if it defines its purpose as getting truthful, useful, non-harmful information to the public, as opposed to merely juicing its own ratings and profits — must recognize what is happening and adjust accordingly. (And that, granted, is a very big “if.”)

“Business as usual simply doesn’t cut it. Minor accommodations, like fact-checking the president’s statements afterward, don’t go nearly far enough to counter the serious damage this man is doing to the public’s well-being.

“Radical change is necessary: The cable networks and other news organizations that are taking the president’s briefings as live feeds should stop doing so….

“’Rather than covering Trump live, [Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University] recommended, among other things, that the media should ‘attend carefully to what he says’ and subject it to verification before blasting it out to the public.

“It’s important to remember how much Trump’s tune has changed on the coronavirus, from blithely dismissive to self-importantly serious….

“This is what he was saying about the virus in public as recently as Feb. 27: ‘It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.’

“We know, without any doubt, that Trump was ignoring intelligence reports that warned about the likelihood of a pandemic at the same time he was cooing these baseless reassurances. But now he’s claiming that he knew the problem was a pandemic long before others did, and that he took every step possible….

“But Trump has proved, time after time, that he doesn’t care about truth, that he puts his financial and political self-interest above that of the public, and that he has no understanding of the role of the press in a democracy. And now lives are on the line.

“The news media, at this dangerous and unprecedented moment in world history, must put the highest priority on getting truthful information to the public. “Taking Trump’s press conferences as a live feed works against that core purpose.”

[Contrast Helen’s latest “elephant” with her post from ten years ago, “The Elephant in the Room Is a Kangaroo.”]

Today: United States (all 50 states and DC) confirmed covid-19 cases – 32,783 with 8,576 today; deaths – 416 with 114 today.

Country: 336,075 confirmed covid-19 cases; 14,613 deaths; the most deaths in China, Italy, and the U.S. 

 

 

To Chuck Todd: Don’t ‘Leave It There’

For over five years, Chris Todd, moderator of Meet the Press, has spread misinformation on the once-respected Sunday MSNBC news show, first about 2016 elections and then after the inauguration of Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) as Todd failed to push against Kellyanne Conway’s “alternate facts.” Since then, he has gulped down gob swallop and pushed it off on the public, much like Fox network does. Perhaps he has had an epiphany: in a Rollling Stone interview, Todd admitted he’s a failure at his job, and career, by confessing he was “just so absurdly naive” about how far Republican officials would go to spread DDT’s and Vladimir Putin’s lies and disinformation. Seemingly surprised, Todd said:

“[DDT’s] entire life has been spent using misinformation. His entire life. I’ve spent years studying him now on trying to figure out how did this guy even learn politics? Where did he learn? And the more you learn, you realize he learned at the feet of a master of deception in Roy Cohn. So I mean, look, if people want to read my answer to your question, ‘Boy, that Chuck Todd was hopelessly naive.’ Yeah, it looks pretty naive. I think we all made the mistake of not following Toni Morrison’s advice, which is when people tell you who they are, believe them.”

[The “advice” actually came from Maya Angelou.]

As an example of his “naiveté,” Todd said he was “genuinely shocked” when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) lied about Ukraine interfering with the 2016 election, the third senator to use Todd’s Sunday program to deliver Putin’s propaganda. On Meet the Press, “truth isn’t truth,” a statement Todd permitted DDT’s private lawyer Rudy Giuliani to claim without follow-up. NYU media professor described Todd’s acceptance of lies as “strategic blindness”:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Todd’s annual salary for ratings from disinformation is $750,000. In a coverup for buying into GOP propaganda, Todd claimed confusion about the motivations of GOP office holders spreading easily disproved lies:

“I don’t get why so many people are comfortable uttering stuff that they may know will look ridiculous in three or four years.”

Yet Todd has permitted Republicans to pass along the “ridiculous” stuff. Jay Rosen also wrote:

“Three years after Kellyanne Conway introduced the doctrine of ‘alternative facts’ on his own program, a light went on for Chuck Todd. Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists — even when you know it’s a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in — and then convert whatever controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen actions are reported as news.”

Another cover up was Todd’s attempt to change the Rolling Stone’s term “disinformation” to “misinformation,” pretending that U.S. senators are poorly informed instead of deliberately misleading the public through using Russian “disinformation.” Possibly to redeem his shredded reputation, Todd used “misinformation” as the theme for his year-end program. Ignoring the smear tactics of Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt for Communists and any other Republicans, Todd relied on two Democratic presidents, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton, to show that the lying isn’t new. His narrative twice used Clinton’s statement “it depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” to Rudy Giuliani’s saying, “Truth isn’t truth.” He also equated the GOP consistent lying, especially using Russian talking points, to a group of Democrats mistakenly using false evidence about Russian Twitter bots to elect Doug Jones in the Alabama Senate race.

Meet the Press supposedly works for a balance between the two major political parties, but under Chuck Todd it became a sounding board for the lies of the far right. When he started this gig, Todd said he couldn’t ask hard questions because guests might not come on the show. His posture was far different from ethical hosts preceding him.

In 2014, soon after he became Meet the Press host, Todd supported the campaign for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) during a segment on Morning Joe. In commenting on the refusal of Alison Lundergan Grimes, McConnell’s Democratic opponent, to answer questions about whether she voted for President Obama, Todd sneered:

“And Kentuckians expect her to cast a tough vote on anything? Is she ever gonna answer a tough question on anything? You wanna be a U.S. senator? If you can’t find a way to stand behind your party’s president … you can disagree with him but you can’t answer a basic question and you come across looking that ridiculous? I think she disqualified herself.”

McConnell used Todd and the word “disqualified” in a campaign video although Todd never specifically explained how Grimes “disqualified herself.” And Todd showed how Republicans should support DDT at any cost to the United States.

Before the same election when he was hosting Meet the Press, Todd praised Iowa’s GOP Senate candidate, Joni Ernst, for refusing to answer questions from any local newspaper boards and for her extreme position on “personhood.” Todd claimed the amendment would protect “unborn human beings.”

Earlier, Todd said that it’s not the media’s responsibility to correct lies, for example about the Affordable Care Act. Todd says that President Obama should have better messaging; on his program, Todd permitted then House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) deliver his “messaging” by accepting Boehner’s lies about the ACA. Todd accepted Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) lies about taxes and couldn’t understand how funding for infrastructure can save people’s lives. Todd also thought that Sen. Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) stunt with a snowball as proof against climate change was fun. 

Asked why 62 percent of his guests were white men, Todd said that it was because “you want to put the best, smartest people on.” After a white man killed nine black people in the Charleston (SC) church, Todd’s segment about convicted murderers showed only imprisoned black men. His book, The Stranger, blamed President Obama for income inequality, instability in the Middle East, and partisanship but ignored McConnell’s vow to block everything that Barack Obama did.

While Todd’s wife campaigned for presidential candidate Jim Webb in 2016, Todd asked Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) about the “trustworthiness” of Webb’s opponent Hillary Clinton and claimed that “there’s something just not quite right” about her campaign. In a hatchet job on candidate Sanders, Todd called him “pro-NRA” before saying that the U.S. had enough gun safety laws. Yet Todd let DDT waffle about his creating a controversy about whether Barack Obama was born in the United States. The list goes on about Todd’s agist, bigoted, racist complicity with far-right conspiracists and conspiracy theories.

Todd has not only been “naïve” while on Meet the Press; he was NBC’s political director for the previous seven years with influence over all coverage and supposedly the in-house expert on politics. Four years before DDT was elected, moderately conservatives Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein wrote:

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

The first principle of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics is “Seek Truth and Report It.” Todd fails on both these points. Todd not only allows smear campaigns against Democrats on his program but also joins in to the attacks. Now Todd says that he was hornswoggled by learning that his GOP guests lie, but where will he go from here? Back to playing dumb to disinformation? Back to allowing lies to keep his salary?  

Republican Jennifer Rubin wrote about “one party operating with an objective that is antagonistic toward any and all facts unfavorable to its leader and the other trying, however imperfectly, to adhere to the old, normal rules of politics in which spin and self-puffery are permissible but out-and-out lies (especially more than 15,000 of them) are not.” Her solutions:

Screen guests and panelists about their disinformation: This solution would result in “howls” because most Republicans couldn’t get on the air, “not of media bias but of a party determined to sublimate truth to power,” with explanations for not allowing Republicans to speak on specific topics is easier in print such as  “Cruz lied, again insisting Ukraine. …”

Stop interviews when guests insist on lying: The host could call a halt and ask guests to correct the record before ending the interviews if guests refuse and explain that the program doesn’t provide “a platform for misinformation.”

Prerecord interviews: This system permits refusal to air propaganda or fact-check in real time what the guests statements—a simple approach for Sunday “news” shows.

“Avoid equating liars with truth tellers and giving ‘equal time’ to fabrications”: This approach is vital with “one party … an echo chamber for Russian propaganda.”

The first principle of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics is “Seek Truth and Report It.” As “news program” host, Todd not only promotes smear campaigns but contributes to them. His standard response to GOP lies is “We’ll have to leave it there.” No, you don’t!

[Note: Three days from now, Todd will likely listen to Republicans praising DDT for starting World War III in the Middle East.]

White House Threatens Freedom of the Press

Does DDT think that the media won’t find out about him if reporters can’t go to the increasingly rare press conferences? Yesterday, the White House eliminated passes for most of the press corps and then said they would take requests for “exceptions.” Columnist Dana Milbank was the only one of seven Washington Post pass holders who wasn’t granted an “exception.” No reason was given. Milbank wrote, “There’s something wrong with a president having the power to decide which journalists can cover him.”

“Exceptions” can be revoked at any time without justification. Last year, a judge described the revocation of Jim Acosta’s press pass as “shrouded in mystery.” New credential requirements include presence in the White House at least 90 out of the previous 180 days—seventy percent of the workdays. DDT may not even be there for that many days, and new policies prevent journalists from attending events—forcing them to miss the quota. The new guidelines also fail to recognize campaign-trail reporting or presidential trips abroad. Those possibly losing their livelihood are freelance camera operators and technicians. Those not granted “exceptions” receive a six-month pass which doesn’t necessary offer access.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) tweeted that DDT’s “curtailing a free press and undermining the public’s access to government is a hallmark of authoritarianism & has no place in America. This purge of reporters is un-American and needs to be reversed ASAP.” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) agreed, “This is what dictators do.”

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders may not listen to her words; she celebrated the release of two Reuters journalists jailed over 500 days in Myanmar, calling it a victory for the freedom of the press. She said:

“A free press, freedom of religion and the rule of law are fundamental principles for any democracy.”

DDT had ordered all his administrative officials to boycott the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, a fundraiser for scholarships. In the past, members have expressed great concern for the lack of free press throughout the world, but some statements this year focused on the United States. On April 27, 2019, Olivier Knox, the WHCA’s president and chief Washington correspondent for SiriusXM radio, said that his son was concerned about whether DDT would imprison his father. Knox said that the threats on his life as a foreign correspondent and to his career by former political administrations pale in comparison to DDT’s hostility toward reporters and the hostile environment DDT created. He said:

“And that’s because February 2017 is when the president of the United States called us the ‘enemies of the people. A few days later I was driving my then-11-year-old son somewhere, probably soccer practice, when he burst into tears and asked me, ‘Is Donald Trump going to put you in prison?’”

Knox said that later his son promised him that if Knox is ever thrown out of the U.S., one of the family’s relatives, who’s “a really good lawyer,” would be able to get him back into the country. Knox added:

“I’ve had to tell my family not to touch packages on our stoop. I’ve had death threats, including one this week. Too many of us have. It shouldn’t need to be said in a room full of people who understand the power of words, but ‘fake news’ and ‘enemies of the people’ are not pet names, punchlines, or presidential.”

Like at all his other rallies, DDT repeated the word “fake” to describe the press in Green Bay (WI) last week, and, like always, the hateful terminology brought cheers from the crowd. DDT complained about the harsh humor directed toward him and his administration by the comedian selected to entertain the audience at last year’s dinner so WHCA selected as keynote speaker an historian, a scholar who has written several books on powerful people in U.S. history. His 2004 of Alexander Hamilton inspired the Broadway musical hit Hamilton. In his speech, Chernow said:

“The thing that worries me most is the sustained assault on truth. What is happening today is … a relentless campaign against the very credibility of the news media.”

For credibility, the press needs to attend DDT’s press conferences, but the one today shows how useless these events are. Although the intended purpose was medical billing, DDT wandered away from its purpose:

He described his treatment of Puerto Rico as generous after the Hurricane Maria devastation, claiming that he gave them “91 billion.” Thus far, Puerto Rico has received about $11 billion. Hurricane Katrina cost $200 billion, most of it going to Louisiana.

He accused John Kerry of violating the Logan Act, which bans private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments without permission, and called for his prosecution. Last year, Kerry, a former Secretary of State, said he spoke with the Iranian foreign minister a few times since leaving office. Two people were indicted under the 1799 law, one in 1802 and the other in 1852, but no one was ever convicted

He deferred to Barr on Mueller testimony after he said that Mueller should not testify to Congress after he deferred to Barr about Mueller’s testimony.

He attacked Mueller, accusing him of a conflict of interest because Mueller had been considered a replacement for the fired former FBI director James Comey.

He claimed his son Donald Trump, Jr. was “exonerated” by Mueller.

He said he had been going easy on China and “gave China a break” on the tariffs. After tariffs are increased, DDT said, “We’re going to be taking in more money than we’ve ever taken in.”

About medical billing, not so much.

DDT attempts to hide the fact that U.S. consumers, not China, are paying for the fees and lies about the trade deficit size. DDT’s threat also caused his beloved stock market to drop the next day. Immediately before DDT tweeted his new tariffs, DDT met with Republicans who told him to end tariffs and not impose new ones. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) even tacitly held up the proposed North American trade deal as a bargaining chip. Earlier, GOP incumbents up for re-election argued against DDT’s efforts to overturn the Affordable Care Act.

Because of DDT’s tariffs, taxpayers have paid $900,000 for every job created in the steel/uranium industry—over 14 times a steelworker’s salary and an additional $11.5 billion cost to the economy per year. Steelworker jobs averaged 3,000 jobs per month this year. Consumers are paying $815,000 for every job created in making washing machines. Legally DDT can declare tariffs only for national defense, which makes his fist tariffs that were on washing machines questionable, and the World Trade Organization may stop him. No matter what DDT says, consumers are paying the taxes on the tariffs.

DDT’s steel and aluminum tariffs added 9 percent to the price of steel products sold in the U.S. last year, for a total of $5.6 billion in extra costs passed along to consumers. Tariffs added about $11.5 billion in annual costs to the U.S. economy. Yet the government isn’t making much more money. Additional tariffs should add about $32.5 billion a year, but the reality is less than half that amount at $15 billion. And that’s a small percentage of the $3 trillion annual revenue for the United States.

Sanders, who has held only two press conferences in the first four months of 2019, denied the guidelines. She said, “No one’s access is being limited.” Maybe it was just another one of those offensive trial balloons to see if anyone noticed.

Facebook Controlled by U.S. Government

Everything on Sue Hardesty’s Facebook page disappeared today, and she couldn’t post anything. Gone were all her writings and photos about marine life, dredging, a trip along the Oregon Coast, and much more. Disclaimer: I have never liked Facebook from its founding for misogynic cruelty through its formation via fraud and theft to the peak of aiding the election of a U.S. president. Now the ultra-wealthy Mark Zuckerberg, worth over $65 billion, has plans to take over the world by controlling everything that you do online—messaging, commerce, payments, etc. FB has destroyed self-esteem with the concept of “defriending” and eliminating privacy, especially for young people. Some people think it’s a nice way to make friends and keep in touch, but Facebook has a much darker side. Hardesty’s FB page may be back—temporarily—but my research shows how Zuckerberg’s company is controlling what you read.

Recently FB removed advertising information from Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren about breaking up Amazon, Google, and Facebook giants to unwind “anti-competitive” tech mergers, including Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram. Her ads read:

“Three companies have vast power over our economy and our democracy. Facebook, Amazon, and Google. We all use them. But in their rise to power, they’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field in their favor.”

The message on the ads read: “This ad was taken down because it goes against Facebook’s advertising policies.” FB claimed that it took down the ads because it used their “corporate logo” but returned them after public protest. Warren responded:

“Curious why I think FB has too much power? Let’s start with their ability to shut down a debate over whether FB has too much power. Thanks for restoring my posts. But I want a social media marketplace that isn’t dominated by a single censor.”

FB keeps material supporting Israel—including a page from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—while removing pages about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with “a strong bias in favor of Palestine.” In 2016, the Israeli Justice Ministry in 2016 bragged that FB removed 95 percent of content according to their requests and proposed a bill to allow government to remove content from the internet based on its preferences. Israel’s National Cyber Directorate announced that FB removed “thousands” of accounts ahead of municipal elections. The same thing could happen in the U.S.

Gone is the Hebrew @Polcartoons. Zuckerberg has partnered with the Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Lab (DFRLab) to decide what should be removed, and it claimed “curated cartoons from various Israeli news outlets that lampooned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and conservative Israeli political sentiment.” DFRLab told FB to remove @StopMEK for promoting views against the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK, an Iranian group opposed to the country’s clerical leader because it was “the largest and most active political opposition group against the Islamic Republic of Iran leadership.” Yet the FB of the Majlis, a coalition critical of President Hassan Rouhani much larger than the MEK, has 2.1 million followers, far more than the tiny MEK.

Atlantic Council, FB’s new partner to vet its content, has been described as a neoconservative “think tank,” directly funded and composed of groups connected to big pharma, the military complex, and government. Contributors include the United Arab Emirates, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and multinational giants like energy titan such as Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, weapon-makers Raytheon, and banks such as JPMorgan Chase. Many foreign countries supporting Atlantic Council lack a strong belief in human fights and press freedoms. FB gave Atlantic Council almost $1 million. Now, Atlantic dictates who is permitted on FB and who is “removed,” and the federal funding takes away FB as a “private” company classification.

Immediately before midterm elections, FB purged years of hard work and six million followers for The Free Thought Project (TFTP) that now follows the government involvement in FB. Under the leadership of Nathaniel Gleicher, FB removed another 800 “pages” with missions of “anti-corruption” or “protest” movements at the same time, many of them antiwar and pro-peace—immediately before last fall’s midterm elections. FB claimed that they were spam. Top adviser to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Jamie Fly, took credit for the massive purge of antiwar pages.

Matt Taibbi, a highly respected investigative journalist, reported on the FB purges in December. He began his piece on James Reader, San Diego resident whose pro-Democratic site, Reverb, was judged “high for factual reporting, as all news is sourced to credible media outlets.” With 30 contributing writers, four full-time editors, and an IT specialist, the site reached 13 million people a week on FB and social media. He paid $2,000 to $6,000 a month to FB and followed their suggestions to grow the page. Starting in 2016, Reader’s articles went to right-wing FB groups with negative comments and reports to FB that his stories were spam. Traffic dropped, sales declined, and his investments in FB’s boosting tools weren’t successful. He couldn’t find a human at FB so that he could address these problems. On October 11, 2018, Reverb was taken offline, as an example of “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” That day saw the first of two purges with no leading announcement. Twitter accounts also disappeared. All on the same day. Reader was never told why his site wasn’t published. Also gone were his Everlasting TOP Stoppers blog and his America Against Trump with 225,000 followers. He said, “Everything I’d worked for all these years was dead.”

Liberal America from Tiffany Willis Clark was removed on November 2, 2018. With 750,000 followers, the site is about “raising conscious kids who are aware of the suffering of others.” The most political she got was the list “87 Things Only Poor Kids Know and Conservatives Couldn’t Care Less About” including “We go to the doctor when we’re sick, but mom doesn’t.” She put her life savings into boosting readership on a platform that “seems to be redefining its mission minute to minute.”

By claiming to be a “private” company” FB can censor at will, but its connection with official or quasi-official groups creates a problem with “soft censorship,” according to Eric Goldman of the Santa Clara University School of Law. “We’re seeing removal of content that isn’t illegal but the government doesn’t like. It’s a backdoor form of censorship.”

When U.S. senators met with representatives of FB, Google, and Twitter, they supposedly answer outrage about the Russian” fake news” that had been influential for the 2016 presidential election. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) expressed concern about content “intended to worsen racial tensions” with stories about law enforcement abusing blacks. Google revised its search tools that resulted in deep drops for reputable alternative progressive news sources such as Common Dreams and Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now as they almost disappeared from the search sources. Traffic for a dozen anti-war, progressive-leaning sites dropped 67 percent, and Alternet went down 63 percent.

A major critic of FB, The Free Thought Project has suffered under fact-checking, but two of its four “false” ratings were later overturned. Yet the FB page was eliminated with no explanation. The methodology for removing pages is opaque. Many removals come from user complaints, another method of information suppression. As Taibbi wrote:

“We’ve empowered a small cadre of ex-spooks, tech executives, Senate advisers, autocratic foreign donors and mainstream-media panels to create an unaccountable system of star-chamber content reviews—which unsurprisingly seem so far to have mostly targeted their harshest critics.”

In the past day, FB apologized for banning content from Zero Hedge, a conservative anti-finance website that predicted the 2008 recession. Complaints have also come about censorship of cannabis content. FB blocks anything about sale or use of the product despite its legality in Canada and many states in the U.S.

After the “paranoia” about being removed from FB with no notice, people finally discovered—with no notice—that FB has been down for much of the day in both Americas and Europe. Nobody knows why, but it bodes ill for using FB for more than social media.

Hardesty has saved much of her beautiful FB posts, some of them in hard copy. Losing the record of her “friends,” many of them school classmates and other writers, would have been sad, but she could recreate some of the material on a new page. On the other hand, my eighth anniversary of writing posts for this blog is April 30, 2019. Publishing almost 400,000 words a year on Nels New Day, I have about 3 million words—far too many to copy. I sometimes use past posts for historical reference and illustrations that have been removed from the internet for political purposes. People like James Reader and Tiffany Willis Clark lost not only years of work but also hundreds of thousands of dollars.

We are all at risk; our history is being “removed.” I’ll subscribe to the saying, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get you.” The loss of FB for a day or two may not be a problem to most people, but it should have been a wake-up call about what would happen if FB decided to take you off its social media.

State TV Fox Tied to DDT, Vice Versa

For several years, people have noted the close relationship between Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) and Fox network as the faux news network has remained a combination of propagandist and feeder of falsities to the man inaugurated over two years ago. DDT has given Fox 44 exclusive interviews, with the number accelerating. In the past six months, DDT has tweeted over 200 Fox items to his 58 million followers. In the New Yorker, journalist and author Jane Mayer has detailed the relationship between DDT and Fox in an 11,000-word essay.

Instead of reflecting the news, Fox radicalizes the people with its fear-mongering. Conservative pundit Bill Kristol, employed by Fox as a contributor until 2012, said, “Before [Trump], it was conservative, but it wasn’t crazy. Now it’s just propaganda.” Sean Hannity has long been known as a confidant for DDT, often freely appearing at his dramatized events to toss him easy questions and one of the nightly triumvirate with Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham to scream over guest statements opposing DDT. Called the Shadow Chief of Staff, Hannity talks to DDT every night after his show. Fox Business hosts Pete Hegseth and Lou Dobbs offer DDT policy advice in the Oval Office. DDT thinks of hosts of Fox & Friends as his personal friends, and they pander to him with unvetted ideas.

Former Fox employees hired in the White House such as disgraced Bill Shine, former head of Fox News’ programming division, further burnish the Fox’s image with DDT devotees. Fox currently pays Shine while he collects his paycheck from taxpayers as part of the coordinated work between DDT and Fox. Former Fox contributors include HUD Secretary Ben Carson, national security adviser John Bolton, former deputy national-security adviser K.T. McFarland, and recently resigned UN Ambassador Heather Nauert. Donald Trump Jr., girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who also left Fox in disgrace works on DDT’s reelection campaign. Hope Hicks, DDT’s formers head of communications, went to Fox, and others such as Sebastian Gorka, are regularly on Fox. [Fox separated from Gorka as of this article’s publication.]

DDT’s political rise matched a shift in tone at Fox. Early on, CEO Roger Ailes opposed Fox being a shill for the Tea Party, but owner Rupert Murdoch created an audience that became the “party of Trump.” Before DDT, Fox ridiculed birtherism, Bill O’Reilly described its promoters as “unhinged,” and Glenn Beck, who hosted a Fox show until he went over the conspiracy edge, called them “idiots.” DDT made birtherism respectable, and Hannity got his way to promote the extremist far-right party. He described President Obama’s negotiations with North Korea “disturbing” but called DDT’s failed efforts a “huge foreign-policy win.” Fox built its audience by elevating Benghazi far above other embassy ambushes causing deaths in its constant attack on then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Hannity appeared on stage at a DDT rally with little objection from Fox. Murdoch went from correcting DDT by tweeting that “Mexican immigrants, as with all immigrants, have much lower crime rates than native born” to tolerating Fox’s frequent diatribes about hordes of “illegal aliens.” Murdoch and DDT are both about the bottom line and ratings.

Megyn Kelly asked DDT “tough” questions in the Fox-sponsored presidential debate, but insiders said that Ailes alerted DDT about the questions. Kelly wrote in Settle for More that DDT called Fox executives the day before the campaign to complain about her “very pointed question directed at him.” After the debate, DDT boycotted Fox, driving down until ratings until Ailes groveled.

During the summer when DDT became the GOP presidential candidate, Ailes’ sexual misconduct forced him out, and he joined DDT’s debate team. Fox gained two Ailes loyalists, Jack Abernethy and Bill Shine, as co-presidents who turned the network over to DDT propaganda, furthering empowering him and Hannity. At 85, Murdoch claimed the CEO position, but insiders reported that after his serious health issues, “the lunatics took over the asylum.” During DDT’s campaign, a Fox reporter confirmed the story about his affair in 2006 with Stormy Daniels, but Fox editors denied her going public. She told colleagues that Ken LaCorte, then head of FoxNews.com said, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.” The same reporter kept digging and discovered that the National Enquirer made a “catch and kill” deal with Daniels in which the tabloid bought the exclusive rights to story before it buried the information.

The story went public when the Wall Street Journal published the details about Daniels and the Enguirer, a year after DDT was inaugurated. The reporter was demoted, she sued the network, and her settlement includes a nondisclosure agreement banning her from talking about her work at Fox. LaCorte, still paid by Fox after he left, said that he squashed the story without talking to superiors because it hadn’t “passed muster.” Blogger Nik Richie called him out for being a “LIAR,” tweeting that he “was one of your sources.” Richie voted for DDT, but he thinks that the story would have swung the election.

Part of Shine’s job at Fox was to handle sexual misconduct complaints. Any woman who complained was gently treated unless she persevered, when Shine would warn her that her career would be destroyed. At least four civil lawsuits against Fox name Shine as defendant, and Fox settled on in 2017 for $90 million. That suit claims Fox spent $55 million to settle sexual harassment claims out of court. Shine was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in a Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s investigation into company funds for these payoffs, but Shine agreed to interviews by prosecutors. The investigation disappeared after Ailes death in May 2017, but Shine was his enabler as shown by payments he signed to accusers’ settlements.

Under Shine’s leadership in 2017, Fox and O’Reilly paid $13 million to five female employees accusing him of sexual misconduct with a sixth $32 million payment in negotiation. After advertiser boycotts and street demonstrations, Fox fired O’Reilly and then Shine. Hannity became Fox’s top-rated star and highest-profile DDT promoter and helped Shine get a job as White House communications director and deputy chief of staff.

DDT’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has always been close to Murdoch, but Murdoch made up with DDT after calling him “a f**king idiot” to benefit from specialized treatment for his business interests.

• DDT’s administration approved Fox’s sale of most of its entertainment assets to Disney for $71 billion, with the Murdoch family getting $2 billion and becoming a major stockholder in the combined company that accounts for half the box-office revenue in the United States.  DDT promised the creation of jobs from the deal that has resulted in thousands of layoffs.
• DDT’s FCC blocked Sinclair Broadcast Group, more conservative than Fox, from buying Tribune Media Company that would have given Sinclair access to 72 percent of the U.S. population.
• DDT’s DOJ stopped AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, owner of CNN, after Murdoch failed to buy Time Warner in 2014. A sweetener for DDT was retaliation against CNN, DDT’s most hated media source. Although DDT claimed that he was “not going to get involved,” he ordered Gary Cohn, then director of the National Economic Council, to pressure the DOJ to intervene in the sale although Cohn knew that DDT’s action was inappropriate for a sitting president and refused. A federal court has ruled against the DOJ and permitted the $85 billion merger—for the second time. [Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) said that a president has the right to punish the media by blocking this merger.]

The more DDT does for Murdoch, the more Fox does for DDT. Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor who co-directs the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, said, “Fox’s most important role since the election has been to keep Trump supporters in line.” According to Fox, the only collusion is between Clinton and Russia,  the special investigator is perpetrating a “coup” by the “deep state,” DDT and his associates aren’t corrupt, U.S. courts are corrupt, illegal immigration is an invasion and not at a 15-year low, and all news organizations offering perspectives different from these are “enemies of the American people.” Benkler, author with Robert Faris and Hal Robert of Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation and Radicalization in American Politics, said:

“It’s not the right versus the left. It’s the right versus the rest.”

Conservative media outlets focus on confirmation of the audience’s biases and provide propaganda and lies that spread uncorrected to Fox because viewers hate for falsehoods to be disclosed. Fox fired Glenn Beck for baseless conspiracy theories, but Hannity is rewarded for them. Only boycotts of Fox advertisers forced Hannity to drop his conspiracy accusations about murdered Democratic staffer Seth Rich.

Alisyn Camerota, former co-host of Fox & Friends, quit because of its lack of standards and wrote the novel Amanda Wakes Up about propaganda on a cable morning show. She said that the show’s producers would “cull far-right, crackpot Web sites” for content and never bothered with second sources. The primary standard was that “this is going to outrage the audience!” Guilfoyle got her information from an avid fan who sent her content for her topics such as “physically weak men” are “more likely to be socialists.”

Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, thinks that Fox drives DDT more than the reverse. A recent example how DDT caused the 35-day shutdown and declared a national emergency because of Fox ridicule.

“The President’s world view is being specifically shaped by what he sees on Fox News, but Fox’s goals are ratings and money, which they get by maximizing rage. It’s not a message that is going to serve the rest of the country.”

Fox’s problem comes from its one-pony show of DDT to make money, and ratings fall when he looks bad. Fox’s evening ratings have dropped by 20 percent since the midterms with only a spike for DDT’s interview after Michael Cohen’s testimony. A change may be in the wind: much smaller since the Disney sale, Fox will be supervised by conservative Lachlan Murdoch who might move to center right. The test could be the release of Robert Mueller’s findings. At this time, Fox’s hosts and guests are swearing war. The question is whether Fox wants to start the war.

The most frightening part of Jane Mayer’s detailed look at the authoritarian DDT and Fox network is that it’s not as shocking as it should be for a country that prides itself on being a democracy.

Tell Scholastic to Publish Accurate Educational Materials

When I was young, we celebrated the birthdays of two presidents born in February, Abraham Lincoln (2/12/1809) and George Washington (2/22/1731), the latter being a national holiday for the past 140 years. In the past few decades, Lincoln seems to have lost his popularity, and only seven states celebrate his birthday. Even “George Washington Day” has largely become “President’s” or “Presidents’” Day in the states—although three states don’t celebrate the holiday.

For over a century, children were taught the myth that Washington said he could not tell a lie. Washington’s storyteller went overboard with this tale, but Washington insisted on paying the new nation’s war debts, despite his colleagues suggesting that the U.S. renege on payments to both its new citizens and French investors in the Revolutionary War.

The man inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States Presidents Day, the current occupant of the White House, reportedly told 8,158 lies during the first two years after his inauguration—almost 6,000 during his second year. That’s almost 16.5 a day, nearly triple the pace.

Almost two years ago, Scholastic Books, well-known in the past for being a reputable publisher of books for youth, came out two books by Joanne Mattern, both called President Donald Trump. The first, for ages 6-7, is in the Rookie Biographies series, and the second in True Books series is for children ages 8-10.

The younger book begins with this poem:

His buildings reached into the sky.

His businesses just grew and grew.

Then Trump became our president–

People wanted something new.

The first prose text states:

“Meet Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a famous entrepreneur. He is also a television personality. In 2015, Trump surprised many people when he decided to run for president. In November 2016, he won the election. Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States.”

And continues:

“Donald Trump inspired his supporters to try something new. He promised them a better future. Millions of Americans are counting on him to help improve their lives.”

Trump supporters would say that this is all true. The book, however, just tells one part of the story, omitting how many children were frightened because of his promises to get rid of people of color (aka threats) and the hostile language that he used for everyone except white people. At least 1,000 people wrote Scholastic with their outrage about the book’s propaganda.

Scholastic responded to the negative comments by claiming “that discussing controversial aspects of any public figure’s life isn’t appropriate for our youngest readers” and that the True Books biography for older readers would “delve deeper into the controversial aspects of the Trump campaign and presidency” in their True Books biography of Trump for readers in grades 3-5. Scholastic failed in its promise to “delve deeper,” and they are wrong that Trump’s white supremacist statements aren’t “appropriate for our youngest readers.” Many children suffer from Trump’s push toward white supremacist because bullies—even ages 6 and 7—who listen to him.

The book failed to address how builders working for Trump being unfairly treated or how Trump discriminated against people of color who wanted to live in his buildings. Scholastic got around this by not mentioning people of color at all. Forty percent of people in the U.S. were ignored. The statement that “many people were happy” about the election silenced the dissent and resistance regarding the election except for one picture. Avoiding the hard issues about race—that most children of color know—supports the dominance of the ruling (aka white) class.

Kathleen Nganga and Sarah Cornelius wrote this review about the “True Biographies” version of Trump:

“The book dedicates 10 glowing pages to Trump’s business career, high rises, and casinos, but does not include a single detail about housing discrimination claims, his unfulfilled business contracts, and customer grievances such as the lawsuits against Trump University. In fact, the one time the book mentions Trump’s bankruptcies and alludes to organizational troubles, the book removes all responsibility from Trump by solely attributing these problems to the ‘weakened’ real estate market.

“There is a page dedicated to New York City’s Central Park where Trump is credited with rebuilding the Wollman ice-skating rink in 1986. No mention is made of another Central Park story, Trump’s crusade against the Central Park Five (all teenagers at the time), including spending $85,000 for full page ads in all four New York daily newspapers in 1989 calling for a reinstatement of the death penalty. This is a crucial story for understanding Trump’s use of racism and law and order rhetoric to garner support. There is also no mention of Trump’s lead role in the Birther Movement (questioning President Obama’s legitimacy as an American citizen). Both of these stories are relevant to his biography since they contributed to his base and eventual election as president. By dedicating most of the book to Trump’s fancy buildings and T.V. shows, the implication is that his business experience and stardom led to his election. While there are a couple of references to prejudice and discrimination, racism is not mentioned once.

“Regarding the election, Mattern writes: ‘[Trump] had no political experience. He had never held a public office or taken part in political activities. For this reason, some people thought he was not qualified to be president. Others loved the idea of an outsider coming in to shake up the way the government was run.’ In contrast, after detailing Hillary Clinton’s professional experiences the author states, ‘… many people did not like Clinton. They felt she was not trustworthy and would not bring enough changes to the government.’ While the book qualifies that “some people” were dissatisfied with Trump, dissatisfaction with Clinton is qualified with “many people.” This juxtaposition suggests that most people found Trump qualified and trustworthy….

“There is only one page dedicated to Trump’s campaign statements. It begins, ‘Trump made several statements during his campaign that were concerning to some people.’ That is an understatement. People were not only concerned, they were also demeaned, insulted, and threatened by these comments. It says, “For example, he promised to build a wall between the United States and Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants.” There is no reference to the language he used to describe women, Mexican immigrants, POWs, Muslims, people with disabilities, and more.

“This is also the only place in the 45-page book in which people of color are featured, and they are protesting. While protest imagery conveys important ideas of non-electoral forms of democratic engagement, it is significant that the book’s only visual reference of people of color is one of them engaging in disruptive protests and surrounded by police….”

Scholastic may have muzzled Mattern in the book’s content. An earlier draft of the Scholastic book indicates its “changes” in the final edition. In a prepub draft, a page called “Troubling Statements read:

“Some of Trump’s biggest supporters were white nationalists. Their comments and actions during and after the campaign were racist and often dangerous. Trump did little to speak against them.”

In the finished book, the heading was changed to “Campaign Statements,” and the text read, “Some of Trump’s critics felt he did not speak out against prejudicial people and groups strongly enough.”

Penguin Young Readers has chosen to not publish any books about Trump at this time, and even conservative Regnery, which published the Pence picture book about the family’s pet rabbit has no plans for a young readers’ biography of Trump. In an update about First Ladies, Kathleen Krull found little information other than she was the third wife, a supermodel, and the wealthiest.

An example of using “bare facts” methodology that Scholastic used in its two children’s books about Trump:

“Hitler was a powerful leader. He promised to lead the German people out of their economic depression. He particularly wanted to help Aryan citizens. Many people were happy with his leadership style.”

The best advice for publishers, to paraphrase an old saying, might be: “If you can’t say anything accurate, don’t say anything at all.”

Scholastic has misled children in other books. Hurricane Harvey’s devastation of Houston made no mention of climate change, and Scholastic partnered with the American Coal Federation to distribute educational materials about the benefits of coal with no reference to the dangers. Scholastic finally pulled A Birthday Cake for George Washington after complaints about the happy depictions of his slaves.

People are growing more and more upset about the poor education in the United States. You can protest a major publisher for its misrepresentation that helps children grow up ignorant. Created almost 100 years ago, the huge publishing conglomerate of Scholastic wields great power over education for children in the U.S. The company needs to hear from people regarding this practice of promoting inaccuracies in educational materials that purport to be nonfiction.  You can contact them here. They need to know that you care about children.

Kavanaugh, Woodward, Plus More News

Democrats may not win the fight to keep Brett Kavanaugh out of the Supreme Court, but they’re putting up a good show. Only two nominees—Robert Bork and Harriet Miers—had lower poll ratings, and neither one was confirmed. Only 38 percent of people want Kavanaugh on the high court, and 39 percent think he should not be confirmed. Women in particular dislike him in their 46 percent opposition. One reason might be that he tried to imprison a 17-year-old immigrant pregnant from a rape although the Supreme Court has ruled that she had the right to one. Rachel Maddow has a 21-minute segment about Kavanaugh’s behavior on the bench that doesn’t match his assurance to gullible Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) that Roe v. Wade is “settled law.” In her opening statement at the hearing, Sen. Diane Feinstein explained how Kavanaugh has already ruled against Roe v. Wade. [visual]

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Kavanaugh started today, less than 15 hours after the White House finally released 42,000 pages of documents about him. In a fit of speed-reading, Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) claimed that he and his staff had reviewed all these documents in less than three hours. Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) still withholds 93 percent of the records from the time when Kavanaugh was White House counsel and staff secretary for George W. Bush by invoking presidential privilege although Bush cleared the records for release. Some of these may have had to do with Kavanaugh’s support for torture. The White House alerted reporters to the Democrats’ comments, perhaps to show their obstruction. But instead the message may have been that an unindicted co-conspirator has nominated a justice for the nation’s highest court, one who he hopes will exonerate him by ruling that the president is above the law and refuses to release the nominee’s records.

Kavanaugh may also face questions about his possible lying under oath in an earlier confirmation hearing.

In a bad photo op for Kavanaugh, he refused to shake hands with the father of Jamie Guttenberg who was murdered at the Parkland (FL) high school earlier this year. Feinstein had introduced Fred Guttenberg (left) in the committee chambers so Kavanaugh knew who he was. Kavanaugh stared at him for a short time before he turned and walked away. When Kavanaugh returned, he bragged about coaching his daughter’s basketball team. Footage of the interaction with Guttenberg shows that the White House lied to cover up for Kavanaugh’s rude behavior.

Just when people thought that DDT had stopped fighting with AG Jeff Sessions, DDT spent the last day of his Labor Day weekend lambasting Sessions for the indictments of Reps. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) and Chris Collins (R-NY) for misusing campaign funds/fraud and insider trading/securities fraud. DDT’s objection is that he wants the DOJ to hold off on prosecuting the charged congressional members so that they can win their districts. He is a loser in this argument; almost two-thirds of people oppose firing Sessions and back investigator Robert Mueller.

“So I have another bad book coming out. Big deal,” said DDT in a conversation with Bob Woodward about his new book, Fear: Trump in the White House, about DDT’s time in the White House. DDT spent most of the talk either claiming that he would have liked to talk to Woodward for the book, saying that no one had ever told him, and explaining what a wonderful job he was doing. Woodward told at least six people with access to DDT that he wanted to talk to DDT, but DDT claims that no one except maybe Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) had mentioned it to him. Kellyanne Conway admitted on the conversation that Woodward had talked with her about an interview with DDT.

Woodward writes that DDT’s closest aides, including Gary Cohn and Rob Porter, hid papers from his desk to keep him from signing them because they viewed DDT as a danger to national security. Woodward reported that Chief of staff John Kelly described Trump as an “idiot” and “unhinged,” Defense Secretary James Mattis said DDT has the understanding of “a fifth or sixth grader,” and former personal lawyer John Dowd called DDT “a fucking liar,” telling DDT he would end up in an “orange jump suit” if he testified to special counsel Robert Mueller. Dowd resigned the day after DDT told him that he would be a “real good witness.” DDT called AG Jeff Sessions “mentally retarded” and a “dumb Southerner”; DDT told Rudy Giuliani what he’s “like a little baby that needed to be changed.” Explaining his strategy in Afghanistan, DDT told his generals, “You should be killing guys.” Fortunately, Mattis didn’t kill Bashar al-Assad in April 2017 as DDT requested. The book portrays DDT as lonely and increasingly paranoid, obsessed with the media’s perception of him and with his base.

Fox analyst Howard Kurtz debunked Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ defense by pointing out that sources for Woodward’s book are current as well as past employees.

U.S.-backed Saudi Arabia forces are deliberately bombing dozens of Yemeni civilians—some of them at least 40 children riding on a school bus in Yemen when they were taking a rare field trip. On the day of the attack, the head of the coalition stated that the bus was a “legitimate military target.” Later the report indicated that the attack was “unjustified” but only because the suspect was not on the bus, not that they had killed children. The U.S. sold the bomb to Saudi Arabians after DDT lifted the ban on these sales. DDT has said nothing about the tragedies in Yemen.

Desperate for new headquarters, the FBI lost their chance to move out of downtown Washington, D.C. across DDT’s hotel to the suburbs. DDT likely scuttled the deal to keep another hotel from moving into the area. Federal employees were ordered to not discuss any of his comments. To keep the FBI headquarters in place, officials greatly underestimated the cost of not moving the facility.

The white man who murdered two people at a video game tournament in Jacksonville (FL) and then turned the gun on himself to commit suicide has been described as having a mental illness. His easy access to guns was not responsible for the tragedy according to the state AG Pam Bondi; she blames the gathering of people to play video games, for example the football video game Madden. Intent on wiping out any taint of domestic terrorism by white men in the United States, Politico joined the myth by exonerating Timothy McVeigh of any terrorism. In 1995, the 27-year-old white man bombed a government building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring over 680 others. Sam Anderson maintains that McVeigh was no terrorist—he was just depressed because his favorite football team, the Buffalo Bills, had started losing. Given his sad life, Anderson claims, “it is easy to imagine how this young man might have been lured into making a bad decision.” The article was abstracted from Anderson’s book Boom Town. Is it possible that the United States could reduce the murder and domestic terrorism rate by banning video games and football?

Pope Francis has a solution for the allegations that he covered up sex abuse by church leaders and lied about knowing nothing regarding his meeting with Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who went to jail for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-gender couples. He called for silence.

When he ran for president, DDT’s name was on 19 brands; now it’s on just one—furniture sold by a Turkish company selling Trump furniture.

DDT has reached 60 percent—in his disapproval rating. His approval rating is 36 percent, and 53 percent think that his interference with Mueller’s investigation is obstruction of justice. At 63 percent, an additional ten percent support the investigation. Mueller’s case against Manafort received 67 percent believing it was justified, and two-thirds oppose DDT’s pardoning Manafort. Sessions also gets 64 percent support from being fired, and 61 percent believe that DDT committed a crime if he told Cohen to make hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.

DDT makes up his own approval ratings. In a call to a radio talk show, he said that he adds “another 7 or eight points’ to the existing approval rating, and at a rally in North Dakota, he recommended adding 12 to any of his polls.

DDT has greatly helped ratings for MSNBC and Rachel Maddow in particular. In August, MSNBC was the second-most-watched network across all of basic cable, and The Rachel Maddow Show was number one for total viewers on cable TV for the last week of August and top the 25-54 demographic throughout August, beating Sean Hannity. While MSNBC’s ratings rose over that in 2017, both CNN and Fox went down. All the MSNBC shows—Chris Hayes, Laurence O’Donnell, Brian Williams, Ari Melber, Hallie Jackson, Nicolle Wallace, Katy Tur, and Ali Velshi—had substantial gains and record-breaking numbers. Kudos to genuine news instead of screaming people and fake propaganda.