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The Trump Nail in the Media Coffin

December 22, 2016

The Trump Nail in the Media Coffin, Town Hall, Victor Davis Hanson, December 22, 2016

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News outlets such as The New York Times and NBC have no more credibility than most websites or the National Enquirer.

Is it any surprise that we are witnessing the funeral for traditional journalism as we once knew it?

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President-elect Donald Trump probably will not often communicate with the nation via traditional press conferences. Nor will Trump likely field many questions from New York/Washington journalists.

What we know as “the media” never imagined a Trump victory. It has become unhinged at the reality of a Trump presidency.

No wonder the fading establishment media is now distrusted by a majority of the public, according to Gallup — and becoming irrelevant even among progressives.

Once upon a time in the 1960s, all the iconic news anchors, from Walter Cronkite to David Brinkley, were liberal. But they at least hid their inherent biases behind a professional veneer that allowed them to filter stories through left-wing lenses without much pushback.

When Cronkite returned from Vietnam after the 1968 Tet Offensive and declared the war stalemated and unwinnable, no one dared to offer the dissenting viewpoint that Tet was actually a decisive American victory.

The mainstream-media narrative in 1963 that Lee Harvey Oswald, the Castroite, communist assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was a product of right-wing Texas hatred was completely crazy — but largely unquestioned.

That old monopoly over the news, despite the advent of cable television and the internet, still lingered until 2016. Even in recent years, Ivy League journalism degrees and well-known media brand names seemed to suggest better reporting than what was offered by bloggers and websites.

Soft-spoken liberal hosts on public TV and radio superficially sounded more news-like than their gravelly-voiced populist counterparts on commercial radio and cable news.

Yet the thinning veneer of circumspection that had supposedly characterized the elite liberal successors to Cronkite and Brinkley was finally ripped off completely by a media meltdown over Trump.

Journalists such as Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times and Christiane Amanpour of CNN said that they could not — and should not — be neutral reporters, given their low opinion of Trump.

When the press is unashamedly slanted, even its benefactors want even more partiality — media heartthrob Barack Obama included.

In his last press conference as president, Obama attacked pet journalists for reporting on WikiLeaks’ release of John Podesta’s emails, supposedly at the expense of his own legacy and Hillary Clinton’s accomplishments.

The WikiLeaks trove certainly proved another disaster to the media — but only because it revealed that mainstream journalists conspired with the Clinton campaign.

CNN’s Donna Brazile leaked possible debate questions to Clinton. One op-ed columnist, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, even asked Clintonites for research to help him attack Trump.

Politico’s Glenn Thrush sent a story to the Clinton campaign team to be audited before publication. He begged to keep his collusion quiet and admitted that he had become a “hack” for such journalistic impropriety. Thrush may have been rewarded for his predictable left-wing bias, recently being hired by the New York Times as a White House correspondent.

Last week, New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman grotesquely suggested via Twitter that Trump might welcome another 9/11-like attack, given that such a human catastrophe supposedly helped win support for George W. Bush.

Recently, another Politico reporter, Julia Ioffe, used Twitter to relay a news story about the possibility that Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, would get an office at the White House. In her tweet, Joffe suggested that Trump was either having incestuous relations with his daughter or skirting nepotism laws.

Politico fired Ioffe — sort of. She had already announced that she was moving from Politico to the Atlantic.

Yet the Atlantic announced that it would not rescind her hire — suggesting that her political bias, despite the accompanying unprofessionalism and uncouthness, could almost be interpreted as a plus.

In today’s media, all of this progressive distortion serves as an insurance policy for lapses of personal integrity like those of Thrush and Joffe.

MSNBC anchor Brian Williams sermonized about the so-called “fake news” epidemic. Williams failed to remind us that he was removed as NBC’s evening news anchor for serving up all sorts of fake details about his supposedly brave trips abroad in search of edgy news stories.

After the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the co-hosts of the show “CNN Newsroom” collectively put up their hands in “hands up, don’t shoot” solidarity — echoing a narrative of police murder later proved to be completely false by a lengthy federal investigation.

Decades-long journalistic one-sidedness was apparently tolerable when there were no other news alternatives. Mainstream-media monopolies once were also highly profitable, and long-ago liberal news people were at least well-mannered.

All of those assumptions are no longer true. News outlets such as The New York Times and NBC have no more credibility than most websites or the National Enquirer.

Is it any surprise that we are witnessing the funeral for traditional journalism as we once knew it?

Categories: 2016 elections, Media and Democrats, Media and DNC, Media and Donald Trump, Media and Hillary Clinton, Media melt-down
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All the News the Editors See Fit to Print

December 18, 2016

All the News the Editors See Fit to Print, American Thinker, Clarice Feldman, December 18, 2016

Decades ago while in high school I read John Dos Passos’s USA. It was published in the 1930s before television or cable news. But it presaged well the strange mixture of important and ridiculous news we receive today. News today is largely fashioned into narratives by mostly young, unworldly reporters and biased news editors, repeated on TV by well-coiffed, fashionably garbed and cosmetically buffed up news readers, jazzed up by often highly biased photo editors and presented on a plate to passive consumers.

When I read USA, my hometown had — like most larger cities — two major newspapers, one liberal, the other conservative, and like most homes we got both and read both so we had a fairer picture of what was happening in the world. The reporters were often grizzled veterans of the world who drank hard, smoked a lot, and believed no one or nothing without evidence.

With the advent of television and the monopolization of print markets it seems to me we lost the ability to forensically analyze the news; we have become passive consumers and got what we deserved — propaganda, largely megaphoning the increasingly leftward tilt of the Democratic Party and various “nonprofit” organizations who promote scare stories about food, health, and the weather and challenge wars  only when a Republican is in office. To be sure, there are some fine people (operating largely online) who take the time to read the accounts with a critical eye. Among the best are James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, bloggers Don Surber, Glenn Reynolds, Sheryl Attkisson, and Tom Maguire. If you read them daily you may reacquire this lost, but important art.

This week the clash between fake and real news became even more obvious.

Sharyl Attkisson who has sued the Department of Justice and the U.S. Postal Service for matters relating to intrusions on her computer and who is known for her outstanding reportage, took aim this week at the Obama-Clinton suggestion that Clinton lost because of fake news reports. Obama called “fake news” a “dust cloud of nonsense” and Clinton dubbed it “an epidemic”.

My online friend Matt Holtzmann has some questions about this:

So the president lectured the media and the masses on fake news during his press conference today. Does that include the Journo-List? Does it include enlisting the National Endowment for the Arts to engage in a propaganda campaign for Obamacare? Does it include the video that Hillary Clinton broadcast on Pakistani network television blaming an obscure video? Does it include “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor’? Does it include his visits to the fake news shows? [ed: Like the Daily Show and Colbert]

Attkisson herself also weighed in on the issue:

Wednesday on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show,” while discussing the 2016 presidential election’s fake new controversy, “Full Measure” host Sharyl Attkisson said fake news is a “propaganda campaign” to censor truth started by politicians like President Barack Obama and Clinton ally the founder of Media Matters Democratic operative David Brock.

Attkisson said, “Before about September 13, if you searched the news you won’t find many or any mentions of fake news. But as soon as there was, in my view, a propaganda campaign to put this on the plate of the American public, the news media and politicians including President Obama went hog wild with the term and it started making headlines every day. It wasn’t a new invention.”

“And yes, fake news exists but the idea that there is this huge campaign behind it to controversialize certain reports and censor, in my view, certain views is a propaganda campaign,” she continued. “And I think when David Brock, Hillary Clinton’s ally from Media Matters, announced that he would be the arbitrator, or help be the arbitrator, of so called fake news, that sort of sealed the deal that the whole thing is a propaganda effort and a political effort, not really an honest effort to seek out facts, but more to determine for other people what truth they should hear.”

Right on cue, Facebook announced it was empaneling a group of outsiders, including Politifact, Snopes, ABC, AP, the Washington Post and Poynter’s IPCN to announce to readers which sites are fake and to jiggle with the news feed to spare the readers from seeing them often.

Obviously, this is intended to shield Facebook from liability for news posted on the site, but it appears ill considered. The far left manipulator George Soros, for example, funds Poynter. AP regularly shades its stories, as my editor friend in upstate New York, Steven Waters, keeps noting, and the Washington Post just admitted this week it had posted a fake list of fake news sites.

As for the news organization fact checkers, James Taranto has regularly exposed them as – well — fakes, the way he nailed Politifact years ago:

PolitiFact’s 2013 “Lie of the Year” was the central ObamaCare fraud: “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” As this column noted at the time, the site had previously certified the promise as “true” (2008), then equivocated and labeled it “half true” in both 2009 and 2012.

Everyone’s entitled to his own opinion, but “fact checkers” think they’re entitled to call their own opinions facts. As the president perpetrated a fraud on American consumers, journalists have often helped him along. They would never dream of doing the same for an unscrupulous CEO of, say, a beer company.

This week, he covered more of the “fact checkers” and reminded us of Politifact’s song and dance on ObamaCare:

To be sure, in 2008 and 2009 the claim was not yet a lie, merely a promise; and in 2012 it was not a demonstrable lie, or at least not as clearly demonstrable as it was when policyholders had in fact started losing their plans. But it is difficult to understand how a categorical promise could be “half” true at any stage. (Maybe ObamaCare should be renamed Schrödinger’s Care.) And a promise is not a factual claim at all, so its truth or falsity is purely a matter of opinion.

Others have noted that PolitiFact has often given different ratings to what were substantively the same statements from different sources, usually with Democrats getting the benefit of the doubt when compared with Republicans.

On FNC, Tucker Carlson has been exposing real fake news and newsmakers.

Take the concession he got from Matt Cooper, Newsweek’s editor, that the commemorative issue of Hillary’s electoral victory, accidentally shipped out before the returns came in, was ridiculous and had never been seen by Newsweek’s editors, and Carlson’s mind-boggling interview with the wacky Newsweek reporter who claimed out of thin air that Trump had once been institutionalized for mental illness.

Iowahawk could not contain himself at the news AP was going to be on the prowl for fake news and tweeted:

“In related news, Anthony Weiner announces he will be working with Ashley Madison to stop online adultery.”

The award for fake news purveyors of the year has to go to the Washington Post and New York Times for peddling the sore loser Democratic fable that the Russians hacked the Clinton and DNC emails, passed them off to Julian Assange who published them in Wikileaks to help Trump. Why the Russians would want to hurt “Reset” Clinton — who was certain to follow Obama’s ineffectual  –policies toward Russia and who, among other things, as Secretary of State in a clear pay-to-play move let them buy up 20% of the U.S. uranium supplies — is an obvious, unspoken flaw in that argument. But there is much more to discount this story.

In the first place, her email server was insecure; in March of 2015 Don Surber showed how anyone could hack into her system.

The RNC was not so clueless and stopped attempted hacks. So the suggestion that Russia hacked both sides but only slipped to Assange the Democrat’s is poppycock.

In the second place, the Washington Post and NYT accounts claim that all the intelligence agencies and the head of the FBI concur that the Russians did it.  These largely unverified and mostly anonymously sourced pieces conflict with earlier stories that the agencies are in disagreement.

Comey and Clapper have not responded to these latest accusations, whose only named source is the CIA’s  Director John Brennan, but prior to these accounts Comey had a conversation with president-elect Trump in which he discounted the theory that Russia had provided the information to Wikileaks:

In telephone conversations with Donald Trump, FBI Director James Comey assured the president-elect there was no credible evidence that Russia influenced the outcome of the recent U.S. presidential election by hacking the Democratic National Committee and the e-mails of John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

What’s more, Comey told Trump that James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, agreed with this FBI assessment.

The only member of the U.S. intelligence community who was ready to assert that the Russians sanctioned the hacking was John Brennan, the director of the CIA, according to sources who were briefed on Comey’s conversations with Trump.

“And Brennan takes his marching orders from President Obama,” the sources quoted Comey as saying.

In Comey’s view, the leaks to the New York Times and the Washington Post alleging that the Russians tried — and perhaps even succeeded — in tilting the election to Trump were a Democratic Party effort to delegitimize Trump’s victory.

During their phone conversations, Comey informed Trump that the FBI had been alert for the past year to the danger that the Russians would try to cause mischief during the U.S. presidential election.

However, whether the Russians did so remains an open question, Comey said, adding that it was just as likely that the hacking was done by people who had no direct connection to the Russian government.

This account is in accord with those from members of Congress who had interviewed Comey and reported that he disagreed with Brennan, and with the New York Times‘ own account in October:

Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.

Hillary Clinton’s supporters, angry over what they regard as a lack of scrutiny of Mr. Trump by law enforcement officials, pushed for these investigations.

The most damaging of the leaks involved the DNC’s work to knock Bernie Sanders out of the running. Isn’t it more likely that someone inside the organization was angry and provided the damaging emails?

And then there’s Assange, who repeatedly, forcefully denied that his source was Russia.

Today, news organization, as the Nation notes, “do overtly what the CIA has paid it to do covertly: regurgitate the claims of the spy agency and attack the credibility of those who question it.”

When the Democrats lose a presidential election, they work harder at delegitimizing the winner than they do respecting the democratic process. When Gore lost, it was “selected not elected” and Bush “lied us into war” — all fake. This time — as a result of the fecklessness of Clinton-Obama and Kerry – president-elect Trump faces a far more dangerous world than they found. The Chinese just stole an underwater drone of ours in off of the Philippines, Russia is continuing to threaten Europe, the EU is crumbling, and the Democrats’ childish nonsense, fed by the big-time fake newsmakers, is an even greater threat to us all.

 

Categories: "Fake news", 2016 elections, Media and Democrats, Media and Donald Trump, Media and Hillary Clinton, Obama and fake news
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Fake News

December 17, 2016

Fake News, Bill Whittle.com Via YouTube, December 16, 2016

Categories: "Fake news", Media and "Fake News", Media and Hillary Clinton
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RIGHT ANGLE: “Like a F—ing Firing Squad!”

November 24, 2016

RIGHT ANGLE: “Like a F—ing Firing Squad!” Bill Whittle Channel via YouTube, November 23, 2016

Categories: Media and Democrats, Media and DNC, Media and Donald Trump, Media and Hillary Clinton, President Elect Trump, Trump and media
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Brazile Under Fire As More Emails Purport to Show Secret Leaks of Questions To Clinton

November 1, 2016

Brazile Under Fire As More Emails Purport to Show Secret Leaks of Questions To Clinton, Jonathan Turley’s Blog, Jonathan Turley, November 1, 2016

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It would seem of more than passing interest for the media to determine if the head of the DNC, let alone a former CNN contributor, is lying. Yet, there appears to be a minimal level of coverage of the story.

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We discussed earlier how Donna Brazile, the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, denied the legitimacy of emails that showed her leaking a question to Hillary Clinton that would be asked verbatim at the CNN downhill event. The media has largely declined to investigate the claim, including confirming the receipt of the earlier email from the Clinton staffer. Now additional emails allegedly show Brazile secretly feeding information to the Clinton campaign. Again, there has been relatively little media attention to the story and CNN issued a remarkably weak response that it was “uncomfortable” with the new disclosures on Brazile’s actions while a CNN commentator. “Uncomfortable”? How about words like “unethical”?

There are now three troubling levels to this story. First, CNN maintained throughout the primary that Brazile (who was well known as a supporter of Hillary Clinton) was a “neutral” commentator. It was a facially ridiculous claim for anyone familiar with Washington. Second, Brazile then alleged passed along questions to Clinton in what would be a deeply unethical act. Third, Brazile then said that the emails were not real and that she could prove it.

The easiest way to confirm the earlier story is to ask the recipient campaign adviser Jennifer Palmieri who is readily available to the media. However, reporters have not pressed Palmieri. In the meantime, Brazile gave a rambling denial of the story that would normally trigger a feeding frenzy. In addition, some techies have posted a research that they say strongly support claims of authenticity, but the response of the media has been crickets.

Now, the latest email show that Brazile revealed to the Clinton campaign the name of the person who provided her with a question that was asked of Clinton at a March 13 town hall co-hosted by CNN and TV One. Brazile also shared a question from a debate hosted by CNN a week earlier. She allegedly named Roland Martin, a TV One host who co-moderated a March 13 town hall with CNN’s Jake Tapper, as her source. The March 5th email shows Brazile sharing a question with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and communications director Jennifer Palmieri that was to be asked in a March 6 debate hosted by CNN in Flint, Mich.

In a March 12 exchange, Brazile again refers to Martin and offers to provide more than just the one town hall question: “I’ll send a few more. Though some questions Roland submitted,” Brazile wrote to Palmieri in the March 12 email thread, which is entitled “From time to time I get the questions in advance.”

Now the emails contradict the denials of other CNN figures about sharing questions with Brazile.

In a March 5 email, Brazile reportedly leaked a question that was to be asked the next day at a debate that was hosted by CNN’s Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper: “One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash . . . Her family has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the ppl of Flint.”

Then in the debate a woman named Lee-Anne Walters did ask the question of both Clinton and Sanders:

“After my family, the city of Flint and the children in D.C. were poisoned by lead, will you make a personal promise to me right now that, as president, in your first 100 days in office, you will make it a requirement that all public water systems must remove all lead service lines throughout the entire United States, and notification made to the – the citizens that have said service lines,”

In response, CNN again denied sharing questions and said “We are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor.” CNN has cut all ties with Brazile, but of course she remains the DNC head after replacing Debbie Wasserman Schultz (who ironically was viewed as working to rig the primary for Clinton).

It would seem of more than passing interest for the media to determine if the head of the DNC, let alone a former CNN contributor, is lying. Yet, there appears to be a minimal level of coverage of the story.

Categories: Clinton advisers, Clinton campaign, Clinton e-mails, CNN, Donna Brazile, Media and Hillary Clinton
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Rigged? In What Way Is This Election NOT Rigged?

October 24, 2016

Rigged? In What Way Is This Election NOT Rigged?, PJ Media, Robert Spencer, October 24, 2016

(Please see also, Judicial Watch Will Monitor Virginia Polls on Election Day. — DM)

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The political and media elites are outraged beyond measure by Donald Trump’s charge that the election could be rigged. How dare he suggest such a thing, they say, for the system is as honest as the day is long!

It shows he knows he is going to lose, they say. It shows that he has no faith in the American system, and is really a fascist at heart.

In reality, it shows no such thing, but it does show that a conversation about whether this election — and the political system in general — is rigged is one that the elites most desperately do not want to have.

And that is why we must have it.

And, if we’re going to have it in an honest fashion, the question should be framed not as “Is the system rigged?” but as “In what way is the system not rigged?”

First, there is the media.

Richard Nixon complained of media bias as long ago as 1960, but even he never envisioned the state propaganda machine we have today. Even just a decade ago, conservative media watchdogs were tallying up mainstream media stories that were favorable and unfavorable to conservative politicians and issues, and finding that unfavorable ones vastly outnumbered favorable ones — which did, however, exist.

Now, even the idea that anything or anyone not left-of-center would get even the briefest fair hearing in the mainstream media seems quaint.

Recently, I stopped by the online portals of the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS — all the self-anointed guardians of acceptable opinion — and each one featured story after story showing Donald Trump to be evil, stupid, dangerous, and worse.

How many stories from those sources, and others like them, were favorable to Trump, or negative toward Hillary Clinton? Don’t kid yourself.

Anyone who still trusts those outlets as reliable sources of news — and they are legion — will be bombarded daily with the message presented in a thousand ways: Trump is an ignorant blowhard who got the Republican nomination because of the shocking reservoir of racism and bigotry in America. His plans to build a border wall and limit Muslim immigration are stupid, impracticable, evil and divisive.

Whatever the merits of Trump and his positions, they have never — not once — gotten a fair hearing in the mainstream media.

The mountains of evidence of Clinton’s flagrant corruption, meanwhile, merit barely a mention. Friday I saw, to my surprise, a feature on CNN on Wikileaks: the Podesta friendship with and censorship of supposedly objective reporters? The pay-for-play scandal?

No, not a word about those things: CNN was reporting on how a Wikileaks email revealed, in 2015, that Clinton campaign operatives were worried that Al Gore might not endorse their candidate.

And now we know why all this is happening. We now know that, despite their pretensions to the contrary (which are still believed by all too many people), mainstream media outlets are propaganda arms for the Left and the Democratic Party.

Leftist Soros-funded groups bought favorable coverage of the Iran deal and the Muslim migrant inundation, and also bought hit pieces on foes of jihad terror.

Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta is so chummy with some of the top reporters in the country that he cooks dinner for them; how many conservatives were there?

Politico’s Glenn Thrush ran his article on Hillary past Podesta for his correction and approval. How many conservative politicians are accorded that courtesy?

Nor is Thrush’s hackery anything new. Back in 2010, Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel lost his job — only to be rehired later, of course — after his emails denigrating the conservatives he was assigned to cover were leaked. (What mainstream media reporter has ever denigrated Leftists?) But what is new is that in 2016, the Post and other mainstream outlets don’t even bother to keep up a pretense of objectivity. Back in 2010, the Post had to pretend that Weigel’s Left partisanship was unacceptable. Now he is again a member of their staff in good standing, and no doubt is denigrating conservatives more energetically than ever.

What candidate who dares to depart too far from Leftist orthodoxy can stand a chance against this?

Never will his or her positions be presented fairly in mainstream news outlets. Never will he or she be anything but on the defensive when dealing with “journalists.” The opposition will always be presented as the voice of reason, sanity, and truth.

We see this playing out in innumerable ways. Here’s one: according to the latest Rasmussen poll, “Trump has the support of 78% of Republicans and 15% of Democrats and continues to hold a small lead among voters not affiliated with either major political party. Clinton has the backing of 77% of Democrats and 11% of GOP voters.”

Trump has more support among Republicans than Hillary has among Democrats, and more Democrats support Trump than Republicans support Clinton. Yet the newscasts are full of stories about Republicans jumping off the Trump train, and Republican operatives worrying about how much the coming Hillary landslide will hurt down-ticket candidates.

Then there is the voter fraud.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their bought-and-paid-for media propagandists feign shock and outrage that Trump would dare question the integrity of the very heart of the political process. Meanwhile, two Democratic Party operatives have now lost their jobs over the damning videos by James O’Keefe that show them cheerfully, openly, and even proudly discussing how to game the system, get innumerable fraudulent voters to the polls, and pull off a foolproof, prosecution-proof rigged election.

That there has been no call for any official investigation, no outcry, but only ridicule and scorn from our guardians of acceptable opinion only underscores the point of the O’Keefe videos, and shows how deeply the rot has set in.

Yet O’Keefe’s videos are compelling enough to have cost two of those featured in them their jobs (ironically, the Washington Post report on this was written by … Dave Weigel).

There’s no telling how many millions will vote for Hillary Clinton on November 8 because they have no idea of her deep, habitual, inveterate corruption. There is no telling how many people are convinced that to guard the border and to limit immigration are racist proposals because that is what they have been told, endlessly, by the most respected news outlets in the nation.

So is the system rigged?

We have more evidence that it is than we have ever had before, and what we know now is likely the tip of the iceberg.

Whether or not Hillary wins on November 8, that knowledge cannot be unlearned. The best outcome we may be able to hope for in these dark days is that the election of 2016 will turn out to be the very last one that is rigged.

Let’s make sure that by 2020, the Leftist stranglehold on the political system and the media is definitively broken, with the revelations of this tumultuous campaign being the first cracks in the edifice.

Categories: 2016 elections, Election rigging, Media and Donald Trump, Media and Hillary Clinton, Vote fraud
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Eric Trump Full Interview with George Stephanopoulos

October 23, 2016

Eric Trump Full Interview with George Stephanopoulos (10/23/2016), ABC via YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zyu2iBd8Rk

Categories: 2016 elections, Clinton advisers, Clinton campaign, Clinton character, Clinton lies, Clinton supporters, Donald Trump, Eric Trump, Media and Donald Trump, Media and Hillary Clinton, Opinion polls, Project Veritas, Vote fraud
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WikiLeaks: Alliance of Hillary, Iran, Soros and left-wing Catholics

October 23, 2016

WikiLeaks: Alliance of Hillary, Iran, Soros and left-wing Catholics, Jihad Watch, , October 23, 2016

(Please see also, The Vatican Submits to Islam (2006-2016). Is the left trying to take over the Roman Catholic Church? — DM)

A leftist-jihadist alliance between the Clinton camp, Soros and the Catholic Church was exposed by WikiLeaks, followed by desperate attempts to try to explain away the leaks. Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta is said to have “responded favorably to an email forwarded to him from a leftwing ‘Catholic’ organization that said it was arranging meetings with Catholic prelates to urge them to press U.S. senators to vote for the Iran Treaty.”

The contents of the email:

I thought you might be interested in this report from the CACG [Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good] exec director Chris Hale on efforts to have the Catholic org community promote the Iran Treaty. There is a tremendous amount of potential in these inter Faith orgs including the ability to reach some working class voters…

But when Hale was confronted about the email that WikiLeaks claimed was sent by Podesta, all Hale could reply was this:

“What was communicated in that email is not the right way forward, but I also want to say that I know John Podesta. He’s a good man, he’s a good Catholic, he practices the faith seriously.”

Yet Podesta has stated:

We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this.

As exposed by WikiLeaks, Christopher Hale, Executive Director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, said this in an email with the subject heading “Catholic Efforts on Iran Update”:

I think the top-line goal is pretty clear: we need Archbishop William Lori and Cardinal Donald Wuerl to make direct appeals to Senators Cardin and Mikulski on this issue. While I don’t have any advance knowledge, I have a sense from the conversations setting up the meetings that there might be willingness for that to happen.

I’ll be taking some time off on both today and Monday to rejuvenate myself as my colleagues and I continue our grueling preparation for Pope Francis’s apostolic trip to the US. As you can imagine, Iran is just a portion of the work we’re doing in preparation for the Holy Father’s trip.

Meanwhile, Dr. William Donohue, president and CEO of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, stated that Podesta is “hell bent on creating mutiny in the Catholic Church.” Donohue further stated:

The evidence is indisputable: Both of these groups, Catholics in Alliance and Catholics United, were created by Podesta, and funded by Soros, for the express purpose of staging a revolt within the Catholic Church.

Together, they have sought to manipulate public opinion against the Catholic Church.

In 2012, Sandy Newman, founder of the left-wing group, Voices for Progress, asked Podesta for advice on how best to “plant the seeds of the revolution.” The revolution he sought was an attempt to sunder the Catholic Church.

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“Hillary Clinton Campaign Forwarded Plan to White House to Promote Iran Treaty Using Catholic Prelates’ Influence”, by Susan Berry, Breitbart, October 22, 2016:

An email from the account of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta reveals White House chief of staff Denis McDonough responding favorably to an email forwarded to him by Podesta from a leftwing “Catholic” organization that said it was arranging meetings with Catholic prelates to urge them to press U.S. senators to vote for the Iran Treaty.

The email, revealed by WikiLeaks, shows a message originally forwarded to Podesta by Fred Rotondaro, chairman of the dissident Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG), and a senior fellow with Podesta’s organization Center for American Progress.

Rotondaro wrote on August 21, 2015 to Podesta and other Clinton campaign staffers:

John,

I thought you might be interested in this report from the CACG exec director Chris Hale on efforts to have the Catholic org community promote the Iran Treaty. There is a tremendous amount of potential in these inter Faith orgs including the ability to reach some working class voters,

Fred

The forwarded message is from Ben Palumbo, a CACG board member, who wrote on the subject of “Catholic Efforts on Iran Update” to Diane Randall and members of the Quakers (Friends) political lobbying organization, CACG’s Hale, and James Salt of Catholics United, another leftwing dissident group that calls itself “Catholic.”

Palumbo wrote about plans to meet with several Democrat U.S. senators:

Hi Diane,

I wanted you to see this report from our Exec. Dir. Chris Hale.

We are going to seek a meeting with Warner, and requests are in the works for Coons and Casey.

Best wishes,

Ben

The report, from Hale, first announces CACG’s ad to support the Iran Treaty that is running on leftwing “Catholic” sites National Catholic Reporter and Commonweal.

Hale wrote:

Our advertisement began running on National Catholic Reporter andCommonweal yesterday. Right now, when you click the advertisement, the link takes you to MoveOn’s 60 Day to Stop A War Take Action website. From there, you are able to dial into your Member of Congress and request them to support the Iran Deal.

At some point today, that link will change to our own website, which will list all the groups’ names, simple talking points, and give people a chance to dial in three elected officials (their one US Representatives and two Senators). While the MoveOn site is very effective, ours will ensure that people calling into the offices identify as a person of faith, which is important in both our narrative creation (Catholics support the deal) and coalition building (the God Squad takes action).

Hale then pointed out that his organization is working on letters to Democrat U.S. Sens. Benjamin Cardin and Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, to urge them to vote for the Iran deal.

He continued that CACG was planning to meet with Baltimore Archbishop William Lori and Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., to encourage them to urge the Maryland senators to vote for the Iran Treaty as well:

The letters to both Senators Cardin and Mikulski have been e-mailed, faxed, and snail mailed to the appropriate parties. This morning, I will make follow up calls to the state chief of staffs and schedulers. I imagine we’ll know early next week if they plan on meeting with our groups’ representatives. If it appears that isn’t the case, I’m developing a grass-tops digital strategy and local media strategy to encourage them to change their minds…

I have phone calls early next week with senior advocacy staffers for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Archdiocese of Washington (which includes territory in Maryland), and the Maryland Catholic Conference.

While I think there should be many goals for these meetings, I think the top-line goal is pretty clear: we need Archbishop William Lori and Cardinal Donald Wuerl to make direct appeals to Senators Cardin and Mikulski on this issue. While I don’t have any advance knowledge, I have a sense from the conversations setting up the meetings that there might be willingness for that to happen.

I will be sending an additional e-mail to our C4 community on Tuesday to asking them to contact their Members of Congress. This was remarkably successful last week. Based on the digital metrics, we can safely assume thousands of our Catholic brothers and sisters are taking action on this issue. My colleagues will be working with our allies to scan the local newspapers this upcoming week to see if people are communicating faith values in supporting the deal to letters to the editors in newspapers across the nation. My initial sense is that they are. That would be something to be proud of for our group.

I’ll be taking some time off on both today and Monday to rejuvenate myself as my colleagues and I continue our grueling preparation for Pope Francis’s apostolic trip to the US. As you can imagine, Iran is just a portion of the work we’re doing in preparation for the Holy Father’s trip…

I spoke to the White House yesterday and they assure us the media’s moniker calling us “God Squad” isn’t just sweet nothings, but actually a fair assessment of the substantial difference we’re making in this conversation.

Christopher J. Hale

Executive Director

Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good

641 S Street Northwest, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20001

Rebuilding Our Nation, Renewing Our Society

Podesta forwarded the report to McDonough at the White House, who responded to him, “Terrific.”

In a prior email unveiled by WikiLeaks, dated February of 2012, Podesta assured Voices of Progress president Sandy Newman that a “Catholic Spring” which would “plant the seeds of revolution” in the Catholic Church would be realized with the help of his dissident “Catholic” groups.

“We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this,” wrote Podesta. “Likewise Catholics United.”

Categories: 2016 elections, Clinton advisers, Clinton campaign, Clinton character, George Soros, Iran scam, Leftists and the Roman Catholic Church, Media and Hillary Clinton, Obama's America, Pope Francis
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The Incestuous Left and Those Who Provide Cover for them

October 23, 2016

The Incestuous Left and Those Who Provide Cover for them, American Thinker, Clarice Feldman, October 23, 2016

As the election nears, the media hype, designed to affect the results, demoralize and demonize Trump and his supporters and confirm the bias of its elite coastal consumers, continues. Saturday’s opinion-posing-as-news lead in the Washington Post says the end is near for Trump — the polls have him down everywhere and he was booed for crass attacks at the Al Smith dinner in New York. What do you expect from media whose reporters are literally in bed with the administration?

Not only are reporters feeding debate questions to the Clinton campaign, we have a video of one of them, Andrea Mitchell, seemingly being fed what to ask by Hillary’s traveling press secretary.

Extensive evidence from Wikileaks, FOIA responses, and “human sources” of the incestuous and improper coordination between the media and the Democrats have been detailed by Sharyl Attkisson. She concludes:

It can be argued that some individual accounts can be rationalized and are not serious breaches of ethics. But taken as a whole, it’s easy to see how we as journalists have done a poor job protecting ourselves from being co-opted by organized interests, often ones that are paid and politically-motivated. Whether we realize it or not, they’ve figured out how to exploit the media and use us to publish their propaganda. It implies a broad and growing trend that has seriously undermined the credibility of the news industry.

Opinion reporters and those who work for obviously ideological news groups are entitled to publish party propaganda. It’s one matter to provide viewpoint journalism. But it’s quite another for us to act as a tool of any interest, publishing narratives or talking points upon suggestion or demand, without disclosing we’ve done just that.

Wikileaks promises to unleash even more insider accounts of the Clinton campaign and DNC shenanigans this coming week and has said it has even more current information — material respecting serious wrongdoing by the DNC head Donna Brazile and Clinton’s vice-presidential running mate Timothy Kaine coming up next. James O’Keefe of Project Veritas says that on Monday he is releasing a video of Robert Creamer, shown as a vote fixer in previous videos, coordinating with Clinton and Brazile. “Anything happens to me, there’s a deadman’s switch on Part III, which will be released Monday. @HillaryClinton and @donnabrazile implicated.”

The media has hardly reported these disclosures and when it has it has downplayed them, but it is no longer a gatekeeper deciding what we are allowed to know, although it tries hard to hide Hillary’s obvious physical disabilities from the public eye.

As for the polls, Democrat pollster Pat Caddell says we may be in for a shock election night:

“All of the tracking polls keep holding at Trump being ahead,” he continued. “And then all of these other polls that are one-off polls, or whatever… I don’t know how they’re doing some of these university polls. You just put the name of some university and apparently it becomes credible, whether they know what they’re doing, or not.

Caddell was pointing out the discrepancy between the different types of polls. “But in any event, polling is all over the place…. Something isn’t adding up,” said Caddell.

“Something is going to happen here, I just sense it,” he concluded. Either “Hillary will glide into the White House, or we’re headed for one of the greatest shocks in American politics. I think it’s a very close call. I think the shock potential is enormous.”

Our own Jared E. Peterson fleshes out Caddell‘s point:

Here are some of the numbers available Friday, October 21, 2016:

Goebbels/Pravda: (with NBC and CBS as reported by RCP on the afternoon of Friday, October 21, 2016):

ABC/Washington Post: 47-43, Clinton

NBC: 51-43, Clinton

CBS:  51-40, Clinton

Non-Propaganda Machine-affiliated: (as reported on the afternoon of Friday October 21, 2016):

IBT/TIPP: 41-40, Trump

LA Times/USC Tracking: 44.5-43.8, Trump

Rasmussen: 43-41, Trump

To say there’s a huge difference between the current state of the race as depicted by Goebbels/Pravda versus that shown by major independent polling organizations, would be risible understatement.

The propaganda arm of the Democratic Party is showing a runaway race, while the independents present an extremely tight one, with Trump frequently leading by a nose.

We know that at least one — the NBC/WSJ poll which early showed Clinton with an improbable 11-point lead — was a barely disguised effort intended to manipulate public opinion using a small pool of voters, improbably weighted and produced by a firm with extensive ties to the Clinton camp.

As for the media account of the Al Smith dinner, it seems like the fake accounts of Trump encouraging violence at his rallies, it’s not a true account. Joe Concha reports that you weren’t being told that Hillary got just as mean and personal as Trump did and also received some boos even from such an elite Democrat supporting party — and Concha who quotes from their remarks is joined in this assessment by Piers Morgan.

It’s hard to disagree with Concha’s conclusion:

“Who would think the 2016 Al Smith Dinner would encapsulate the prism our media sees this campaign in so perfectly?

A prism where only one candidate exists.

Because as we’re seeing on television and in print today, it just somehow did.”

The dinner itself reflects how even the Catholic Archdiocese, which sponsors this dinner for the benefit of Catholic Charities, has been coopted by the left and vast sums of federal money. It looks as if it has lost its way. Catholic Charities receives hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal treasury as a refugee resettlement contractor. They accept thousands of unvetted Syrian Moslems and place them in communities already struggling to provide basic services, get them signed up for welfare benefits for which taxpayers then have to foot the bill and then lobby Congress for more funds to repeat this operation.

Catholic Charities/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops: These nominally Catholic organizations are the largest VOLAGs [voluntary organizations], with hundreds of offices spread throughout the country. They are prominent members of the open borders/amnesty movement. The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) is “the domestic anti-poverty program of the U.S. Catholic Bishops” and a grant-making vehicle of the USCCB. It was founded in Chicago in 1969 with the help of radical organizer Saul Alinsky, specifically to fund Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. CCHD has been a radical leftist funding vehicle ever since, giving millions to ACORN, the radical training school Midwest Academy, and others. The Industrial Areas Foundation, where a young Barack Obama was trained in “community organizing” with financial support from the Chicago Archdiocese, receives the largest percentage of CCHD grants of any CCHD grantee.

President Obama had this to say about CCHD:

I got my start as a community organizer working with mostly Catholic parishes on the Southside of Chicago that were struggling because the steel plants had closed. The Campaign for Human Development helped fund the project and so, very early on, my career was intertwined with the belief in social justice that is so strong in the Church.

USCCB founded the Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc., a $7 million subsidiary which assists illegal aliens based on “the Gospel value of welcoming the stranger.” It aggressively promotes amnesty, believing that “all goods of the earth belong to all people. When persons cannot find employment in their country of origin to support themselves and their families, they have a right to find work elsewhere in order to survive. Sovereign nations should provide ways to accommodate this right.” USCCB has 270 field offices in 47 states. Board members include Donald D. Taylor, president of the extreme-left union UNITE HERE!

Catholics are not alone in this three-card Monte game — there are nine other such nominally faith-based organization receiving vast sums to bring refugees here, pushing for amnesty and more money for their operations which are disrupting American communities and transforming them.

Most if not all started out as private charitable institutions providing financial and other aid out of their own funds for this work. Iowahawk describes the transformation of so many of our once fine institutions as these:

“Take a respected institution.

Kill it.

Gut it.

Wear its carcass as a skin suit.

And demand respect.”

I don’t recall Catholic Charities or any of the voluntary resettlement contractors lobbying on the hill for better vetting of refugees or for a change in the UN processing of them abroad to include truly persecuted groups like Christian refugees. (They may have; I just haven’t seen it.) It’s a scandal — your money funds these nominally Christian and Jewish groups to bring in ever more inassimilable, low educated, unskilled, and sometimes very ill and dangerous hordes to transform us from a Christian-Judeo nation which believes in religious tolerance into one in which a growing minority of immigrants which a supremacist fantasy encourages demands for special privileges and the right to live off our bounty as they undermine what has created it.

The more refugee cases a volag is assigned, the more money the federal government hands over to the private agency. In some ways, the model resembles those charities that spend inordinately on fund raising and administration instead of on actually helping needy people.

Clearly, refugee resettlement policy and programs, from top to bottom, are overdue for congressional scrutiny and reform. Those organizations, including religious ones, receiving federal monies deserve close assessment. It is morally incumbent on religious refugee bureaus to examine their own hearts. As Christ said, it is impossible to serve both God and money (Luke 16:13). Their efforts would be a lot more honest and effective and a lot less harmful to their fellow countrymen and communities if they returned to reliance on private funding alone.

Hundreds of Catholic institutions are involved, including Catholic Charities of NY. The $177.2 million in federal grants to Catholic charities in 2015 are from a single charity organization. — the Catholic Charities of Chicago. So it’s fair to assume that the NY branch (for whom the Al Smith dinner is the beneficiary) itself garnered at least that much that year.

But the Al Smith dinner reflects more than its being a cover for leftist money-grubbing at our expense — it reveals a shocking disregard for Catholic sensibilities to curry favor with New York’s leftist elites and Hillary.

Recent history reveals the shift. Writing in the NC Register, Thomas Mcardle questions whether this dinner for the glitterati has passed its expiration date.

The overall message the Al Smith Dinner now sends to Americans, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, is that Catholic teachings on human life and marriage can’t be allowed to muss relations between the Church and an increasingly anti-Catholic state. But in both 1996 and 2004, the abortion-friendly position of first Bill Clinton and then Catholic Democrat nominee John Kerry led to both parties’ candidates not being invited by the Archdiocese of New York.

The decision to invite Hillary is even more inexplicable when the Archbishop had the same week demanded an apology from Hillary for the anti-Catholic material within her campaign disclosed by Wikileaks, and hasn’t received one.

Emails released last week by WikiLeaks showed Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta and Director of Communications Jennifer Palmieri, both Catholics, in conversations with activists from two left-wing organizations. In the emails, Catholics were debased, with their beliefs being called “severely backwards.” Conservative Catholics also were accused of “an amazing bastardization of the faith,” and Rupert Murdoch was mocked for baptizing his children as Catholics in the River Jordan.

The U.S. Church’s bishops were slammed in the emails as well, referred to as “a middle ages dictatorship.”

Palmieri said in one of the emails she thought conservatives that had come to Catholicism did so because “they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion,” and that “their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.”

Podesta admitted to helping launch a “progressive” infiltration of the Church in another email, and he took an active role in attempting to incite a liberal Catholic revolt against the U.S. bishops.

“We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this,” Podesta wrote. “But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up.”

The “Catholic Spring” Podesta referred to had been broached in the email by Center for Progress president Sandy Newman, who had pondered how one would “plant the seeds of the revolution,” or “who would plant them.”

With even more damaging Wikileaks and Project Veritas disclosures coming, the Clinton camp is now trying to question their credibility, source, and organizer. So far, the claims seem unpersuasive. Donna Brazile whose head seems to be moving next under the Wikileakd guillotine has suggested the emails were tampered with.  (You might remember that in 1988 she was fired from the DNC and Dukakis apologized for her conduct when she spread a lie that George H.W. Bush had a mistress.) Cryptographers debunk that.

Hillary has claimed that U.S. Security agencies told her the hacks were Russian, suggesting Putin is trying to influence our election. Like everything else she says, this, too, is false.  Rumors smearing Assange as a pedophile have been spread — doubtless by the trolls within the Clinton network.  Reddit sleuths trace them to the address of an intelligence agency that seems to share an address with an outfit on whose board sit Larry Summers and Neera Tanden, both major players in the Clinton shadow government Center for American Progress.

Whether this will pan out on further investigation, remains to be seen, but given what we know of how the Clintons operate I’d consider it a distinct possibility.

Former UK foreign minister Craig Murray hints the Wikileaks come from inside the Clinton camp itself.

“I can tell you with 100% certainty that it is not any Russian state actor or proxy that gave the Democratic National Committee and Podesta material to WikiLeaks. The claim is nonsense. Journalists are also publishing that these were obtained by “hacking” with no evidence that this was the method used to obtain them. [snip]

But the key point is that WikiLeaks is a publisher. It is a vehicle for publishing leaks, and is much more of a vehicle for whistleblowers than for hackers. It does not originate the material. I have often seen comments such as “Why has WikiLeaks not published material on Israel/Putin/Trump?” The answer is that they have not been given any. They publish good, verifiable material that they are given by whistleblowers.”

It would warm my cold heart to think there is an honest person or two somewhere on the vast Clinton payroll.

 

Categories: 2016 elections, Al Smith Dinner, Charitable organizations, Clinton character, Clinton cover ups, Clinton e-mails, Distractions, Hillary Clinton and immigration, Illegal immigration, Islamic refugees, Media and Donald Trump, Media and Hillary Clinton, Opinion polls, Project Veritas, Roman Catholic Church, Russia, Trump Hater's Club, WikiLeaks
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FBI and DoJ are ignoring evidence of crimes in Project Veritas Action videos

October 23, 2016

FBI and DoJ are ignoring evidence of crimes in Project Veritas Action videos, American Thinker, Thomas Lifson, October 3, 2016

Ahem, where is the criminal investigation of apparent crimes, conspiracies to violate the civil rights of Trump supporters, and possibly riot, for starters?  And where is the media clamor to get to the bottom of this frightening perversion of democracy?  People were hurt in the near-riot at the Trump rally in Chicago, and their right to assemble negated by a conspiracy. The media are completely uninterested in asking any questions.

J. Christian Adams is one of my heroes. He resigned his career at the Justice Department on principle and now is a crusader. On Fox & Friends, he spoke frankly:

 Look, if this was a tea party group coordinating with the Trump campaign to incite violence at Clinton rallies or NAACP events or whatever, we know exactly what would be happening. This would be Justice Department fully investigating this for civil rights violations and all sorts of things. This is a Justice Department and an FBI that is dolling out justice based on your politics. If you support Clinton, if you are Clinton, you can engage in all sorts of misbehavior without consequence. If you are the IRS commissioner or an attorney general who is held in criminal contempt, he would give you a pass. You don’t face justice under this administration. (snip)

It feels like a rigged system. So you have got this operative Bob Creamer who is clearly in with the White House, 300 visits. I have had none. And then he is on tape saying we’re inciting violence at rallies. No accountability. What in a perfect world, non-rigged world, what happens to Bob creamer?

Spare me the rhetoric about “doctored” tapes and James O’Keefe’s criminal conviction for entering a senator’s office under false pretenses in the course of his investigative journalism. If Hollywood were magically switched 180 degrees to pervasive conservatism, there would already be a caper movie deal starring a hot male lead, the shenanigans generating many a knowing chuckle as the real crooks, the politicians and their minions,  are brought to public light, and then retaliate with criminal prosecution of the hero.

The FBI can subpoena all 40 hours of the uncut recordings and examine them for evidence of these crimes, and already would be doing so were Trump supporters involved. All they need to do is ask for a grand jury. In the corrupt Obama/Lynch Justice Department, so it will never happen.

 

Categories: 2016 elections, Clinton advisers, Clinton campaign, Clinton corruption, Clinton supporters, Democrat National Committee, Department of Justice, FBI, Media and Hillary Clinton, Project Veritas
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